Placebo’s Evil Twin

© Lois Greenfield

THE uplifting adage “attitude is altitude” aptly pinpoints how the power of positive thought and intention affects every aspect of our lives.

“For decades, scientists have tried to test the power of prayer and positive thinking, with mixed results,” writes NPR National Desk religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty about a study on the science of spirituality.

“Now some scientists,” she writes, “are fording new, and controversial territory.” In an area of esoteric inquiry which is sometimes called Mental Alchemy and/or Metaphysics, a lot of thinkers over the ages have stated the idea in various ways.

The conviction that the thoughts one thinks are the great determiners of the content of one’s life, inspires  many to forge on despite difficult life circumstances.

Hidden Powers of Animals

THIS was such a popular post, we decided to republish it. Many people think that animals are just instinctual machines, but the assumption is false, and many controlled studies prove it.

Investigators discover that humans are not the only beings with self-aware minds, free will, and paranormal powers. There are powerful spiritual and intellectual forces hidden in animals.

Chimps, as will be shown, were found to be smarter than humans in computerized memory tests. But, in the 17th Century, René Descartes, dubbed the “Father of Modern Philosophy,” started everyone off on the wrong paw.

His materialism was not lost on H. P. Blavatsky. “Descartes held the living animal as being simply an automaton,” she noted in the article Have Animals Souls — “a ‘well wound up clock-work,’ according to Malebranche,” and she countered:

“One who adopts the Cartesian theory about the animal, would do as well to accept at once the views of the modern materialists.”

♥

Koko and Tabby

A woman who clearly did not subscribe to the Cartesian theory, found a young lion injured in the forest on the brink of death. She took it home with her and nursed it back to health.

Later she made arrangements with an animal rescue group to take the lion.

Some time passed before the woman had a chance to visit. A video was taken when she walked up to the lion’s cage to see how he was doing. Watch the lion’s reaction when he sees her!

Miracle Mind

CONSCIOUSNESS is still considered, by most neuroscientists, to be located and created entirely in our physical brain tucked safely inside our skulls.

This persistent worldview is only reinforced by our body language: we always describe thinking by pointing to our heads.

But native cultures never engaged in such ignorant skullduggery. The traditional Native American view always considered the heart to be the center of thought and motive.

Confusing matters more are those familiar ‘gut-feelings’ we often have. These  compelling instincts, studies show, are more often than not signal accurate intuitions, even foretelling of some future event.

A Mother’s Heart

WHEN mother welcomed us back in the house after a long day outside at play, we knew there would be caring and love waiting for us within.

There would  be food, a soothing bath and a bedtime story. Clean pajamas and sheets were as much Mother’s rule as her unconditional love.

But if correspondence and analogy are the rule that points to spiritual knowledge, how does the universe work in the way of loving Mothers?

Nature knows how to care for her human children, but perhaps in these modern, distracting times modern humans have strayed too far from their offspring, self-interestedly allowed children to play too long outside.

The awesome Mother nature has always waited patiently for our return home, healing and assuaging the self-created darkness of separation and materialism, assaulting the tender soul.

Is it because we forget that nature and humanity are really One Being, that we lose our way?

In these often dark times of spirit, we may have overlooked the Golden Rule, or resisted helping others, instead of living unselfishly and harmlessly for  humanity’s needy and down-trodden.

Disease, poverty, hunger and the rise of environmental blights are, it seems, the inevitable result of our separation from the natural, unified state.

The opening proposition of The Secret Doctrine reminds us of the most important Theosophical idea: the “fundamental One Existence, or Absolute Being, must be the REALITY in every form there is.”

“Existence is ONE THING, not any collection of things linked together. Fundamentally there is ONE BEING.”

Silence of Love

THE famous meditation of John Donne, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee,” highlights two Theosophical principles:

First, the affirmation that there is no isolation, that nature and all mankind are interconnected — and second, karmic responsibility.

“It’s one thing to fashion a particular work of art, sculpture, painting, a worthy accomplishment,” Thoreau once wrote, “but much greater is the creation of one’s life.”

A compassionate activist tree-sitter Julia Butterfly Hill, took action as taught in The Voice of the Silence, and is surely a living example of Theosophy pure and simple. Julia willingly sacrificed her comfort and well-being, as the Voice counsels, to “help Nature and work on with her.”

“…to exemplify the highest potential imagined, it is the highest of loving artistic accomplishments,” Thoreau believed.

“The divine oneness of life, the just and unerring operations of karma, and our cyclic rebirths here on earth,” Ingrid Van Mater writes in Reflections on the Voice of the Silence, “form the broad canvas on which aspects of human conflicts and possibilities are presented.” 

One of the primary keynotes of the Voice, Van Mater notes, is the “illusion stemming from the ‘heresy of separateness,’ and the discipline and exercise of the paramitas or virtues required of a genuine adept or teacher. These include charity, harmony in word and act, patience, fortitude, and indifference to pleasure and pain.”

“She doesn’t follow any organized religion but says she believes very strongly in the spirituality of the universe.”

Redwoods and Rododendrons

It must have been some inner, instinctual sense of harmony that roused Julia, as she climbed up those ropes into Luna, a 20-story Redwood, to begin her precarious encampment as a human shield in the endangered redwood trees. 

“Such is the quality of commitment, the degree of self-sacrifice of a bodhisattva or Buddha of Compassion,” Van Mater wrote, “who gives himself totally to join those, ‘unthanked and unperceived by man,’ who build and sustain the Guardian Wall protecting mankind, to shield us and this planet ‘invisibly from still worse evils.'”

Dreaming with God

THE principles of occult science and psychology were so unfamiliar, that Mme. Blavatsky often added the term “meta” to distinguish them from the mainstream.”Meta-chemistry,” for example, was frequently used.

“Theosophy, or rather the occult sciences it studies,” she explained in her article Le Phare De L’Inconnu, “is something more than simple metaphysics.”

“It is, if I may be allowed to use the double terms, meta-metaphysics, meta-geometry, etc., etc., or a universal transcendentalism. Theosophy rejects the testimony of the physical senses entirely, if the latter be not based upon that afforded by the psychic and spiritual perceptions.”

This post might have been titled “Meta-psychology,” but the editors confess to prefer instead to mass media popular topics. This video blog is being published simultaneously to our subscribers, plus adding a permanent link titled “Science and Spirituality” to the site header.

That link will be updated periodically with important findings, so feel free to check by clicking the header link “Science & Spirituality.” As new materials are added, links to the posts will also be emailed immediately to Theosophy Watch subscribers.

Publicizing new discoveries in psychology and consciousness are ideas that drive the editorship of Theosophy Watch. Such are relevant to its declared focus “ancient thought in modern dress” — a phrase coined by H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine.