Dreaming the Future

WHEN our rational brains are all heated up, arguing life’s complexities, that’s usually the best time to kick off our shoes and give it a rest.

“Ever drifting down the stream, lingering in the golden gleam,” Lewis Carroll wondered: “Life — what is it but a dream?”

At times, when we are faced with a critical decision, or stuck on a complex problem, sleeping or napping on it, researchers find, often leads to the right answer.

The notes of a song, the smell of burning leaves, the babbling of a mountain stream, a day-dream—all can open a door to the the non-rational, poetic mind. They can also arouse unexpected vistas when we are children.

Wake-Up Time

WHAT is the winter solstice, and why do so many people around the world bother to celebrate it, as they do every year at this time?

“The word ‘solstice’ derives from the Latin sol (meaning sun) and statum (stand still),” explains the NY Times Op-Ed Contributor in the article”There Goes the Sun.”

The phenomenon reflects what we see on the first days of summer and winter at dawn for two or three days.

At that time the sun seems to linger for several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to double back.

Winter in the northern hemisphere marks the annual return of an ancient solar festival. Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod and Homer.

The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause,” recalls the NY Times Op Ed: “Pleasing, that idea. …

As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”

But the event has deeper, metaphysical implications. Both the Sun and the human heart are the two greatest life-givers we know. Indissolubly interconnected, according to occult teachings, both radiate continuously a powerful aura of biological and regenerative energies.

“The Sun has but one distinct function,” Blavatsky explains to her students (Transactions, 116) — “it gives the impulse of life to all that breathes and lives under its light. The sun is the throbbing heart of the system, each throb being an impulse. … This impulse is not mechanical but a purely spiritual, nervous impulse.”

Written in The Stars

ASTROLOGY is just unscientific superstition many skeptics insist. Real philosophy, Theosophy counters, seeks “rather to solve than to deny.”

“It is an axiom of the philosophic student,” Blavatsky affirms, “that truth generally lies between the extremes.” This is what the ancients meant by Astrology she says.

“Mention the word ‘astrology’ and skeptics go into an epileptic fit,” natural health researcher Mike Adams says.

“The idea that someone’s personality could be imprinted at birth according to the position of the sun, moon and planets,” Adams comments, “has long been derided as ‘quackery’ by the so-called ‘scientific’ community

… which resists any notion based on holistic connections between individuals and the cosmos.”

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The Flashing Gaze

The Pythia Oracle

MAINSTREAM scientists looking for the source of consciousness, expect it’s origin to be located in the physical brain.

They are certain that all cognition arises from the activity of neurons, attached to specific structures, which have fixed locations.

Yet many credible scientific researchers dispute these assumptions. They are not convinced, and are willing to investigate the anciently held belief that consciousness is a independent entity from the physical structures through which it may manifest.

Because their investigations are not considered credible, investigators risk being minimalized and shunned by their peers — and by their funding sources.

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Yet, always fearlessly at the frontiers of psi research, is the respected Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Petaluma, California.  Similarly, the Institute of HeartMath — each are in hot pursuit of the fast-moving “souls of things.”

A Spirit Undefeated

KERRYN McCANN won the hearts of all Australians in 2006 when she got gold at the Commonwealth Games in a down to the wire marathon win.

Media footage showed Kerryn crossing the finish line, as if that was her life’s main triumph.

Two years later the much loved athlete succumbed to breast cancer, her husband and three children at her bedside.

Kerryn told friend and fellow athlete Raelene Boyle just a week before that she was still hopeful. Then she was so ill in her final days, she could no longer talk — yet through it all, her spirit never dimmed.

Happily, the body, brain and personality is understood in Theosophy as only a vehicle for the immortal soul each lifetime.

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But this necessary instrument presents us with special opportunities in each life to express our  potential. Yet, many are unable or unwilling to seize those gifts in the time allotted to them, as Karryn did.

The illness drew out her determined, deathless and compassionate spirit, an inspiration to those who might not have her inner strength. She knew the deadly disease had come back, but she competed anyway.

The soul’s capacity will be fully availed of, or not, according to individual karmic endurance, W. Q. Judge says. Their capacity and destiny is the result of their “desire and prior conduct.”

The person’s past choices and behavior, he says,”will have increased or diminished” their karmic resources.

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Our individual choices shape not only our own character and capacity, but inspires the emergence of character and capacity in others as well, because we are all connected at the core.

And, “the troubles of nations and families arise from want of capacity,” Judge says, “more than from any other cause.” So the choices we make will always carry a greater influence than just to us as separate individuals.