Waking to God

HUMANITY is divided into thousands of  languages, hundreds of sects and cults, castes, creeds, religious sects and political ideologies.

Instead of being demonstrators of love and service, many encourage differences, foster criticism, opposition and attacking others.

How, then, can we ever hope to achieve harmony and oneness, and become a new humanity that selflessly eschews all differences and personal enmities?

A united world has been the hope of mankind for ages. Poets, artists, philosophers and statespersons have dreamed of it. Self-interested politicians claim they have the grand solution to the problems of disease, hunger, poverty, homelessness.

But they have not succeeded, because they are motivated by personal agendas, and a failure to accept and value the spiritual oneness of humanity.

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In our obsession with the bitter roots of sectarian differences and selfish, materialist agendas, we remain blind to the reality of life as One Being.

“Real Theosophy IS ALTRUISM,” Mme. Blavatsky once said — “and we cannot repeat it too often:

“It is brotherly love, mutual help, unswerving devotion to Truth.”

Origins of Easter

THE  Saxon goddess Ostara, root of the word Easter, symbolized the dawn, the warm Spring sun, and much more.

Without the cyclic journey of the sun there would be no glorious bursting forth of nature at Easter-time.

“Just as there is a real Christmas—the time of winter solstice, explains the Theosophy School text, The Eternal Verities—”so there is a real Easter, a Sun-cycle, the time of the Vernal Equinox, on March 21st.”

The Sun-cycle ushers spring-time into the world above the equator, and the ancients regarded this as the re-incarnation season of the year.

When the beautiful Goddess saw all this wonderful work of hers, she said: “Hereafter, every year I will have one day called Easter, after me. That day, all shall celebrate the awakening of Life from its winter sleep.

“Then shall all people be joyous and glad and give each other eggs as gifts, for the Egg shall be my symbol. So it is fitting, for all Life is first within the egg.”

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Pysanka

Similar Goddesses were known in ancient cultures around the Mediterranean, and were celebrated in the springtime: Aphrodite from Cyprus, Astarte, from Phoenicia, Demeter, from Mycenae, Hathor from Egypt, Ishtar from Assyria, and Kali, from India.

Perhaps some of the most impressive egg designs of Easter are known as Pysanka. These Ukrainian treasures (examples here) are hollowed-out eggs decorated with traditional Ukrainian folk designs.

Superorganism

GAIA the Greek Goddess of the Earth, was mother to all the Gods according to the ancient Greeks.

In the beginning there was only Chaos, out of which there appeared Gaia they taught, and she gave birth to more than fifty symbolic deities.

In Gaia’s role as mother to the Gods, and employing many fathers, she gave birth to numerous entities, for example Python, Antaeus, Ceto, Charybdis, Echidna, Creusa, Erichthonius, Eurybia, Typhon.

They may have represented the titanic formative and creative forces of Earth’s early history.

The ancients were fond of personifying the natural forces in nature and man, and for good reason.

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For them, nature was conscious, and she is, “in reality an aggregate of forces manipulated by semi-intelligent beings guided by High Planetary Spirits,” a fundamental axiom of The Secret Doctrine.

“‘Entity’ may be thought a strange term to use in the case of a globe,” wrote H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine.

“But the ancient philosophers, who saw in the earth a huge ‘animal,'” she writes,  “were wiser in their generation than our modern geologists are in theirs.”

Masquerade

WE live on a planet constantly in motion, and except for the occasional natural catastrophe, a usually very slow, orderly motion.

The Earth is billions of years old and still in the making, where glacial cycles come and go, continents move, mountains form and erode.

Scientists investigate everything from the hypothetical big bang to the smallest geologic and biologic forces. But where Earth came from, how evolution works,

…and why and how life itself arose, is still the most profound mystery in science.

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Of course, a materialistic science would be perplexed. Their hypothetical models always start and develop through random events, and chance mutations that drive a soulless stew of blind matter, having neither intelligent design or purpose.

Of Two Minds

TRUTH like hope springs eternal, and what was taught 5,000 years ago by Krishna in Bhagavad-Gita, still works today.

“The Self is the friend of self,” Arjuna’s instructor asserts paradoxically, “and also its enemy.”

In his article of the same title, the theosophical teacher W. Q. Judge noted that “this sentence in the Bhagavad- Gita has been often passed over as being either meaningless or mysterious.”

But why else would religions, touting harmony and peace, be so ready and willing to denounce and harm non-believers?

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The medieval Crusades were replete with atrocities under this mind set, just as are some extremist religious sects still today — priests, popes and kings all willing to kill for their God. Murder, intrigue, assassination and war have despoiled our human history, and are still with us!

Krishna’s doctrine postulates two selves, each an enemy and friend of the other. The “pushmi-pullyu” character of religions results in the ethical and moral inconsistencies evident in modern-day fundamentalism.

“The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real,” say the ancient stanzas of the Book of the Golden Precepts —”let the disciple slay [purify] the Slayer.”

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“For two thousand years India groaned under the weight of caste,” writes one of Mme. Blavatsky’s teachers about priestly craft, “brahmins alone feeding on the fat of the land.”