Astral Knowing

THE  surreal landscape of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass has Alice wondering what the world is like on the other side of a mirror.

To her surprise, Alice is able to pass into a fantastic astral world and experience an alternate existence.

A puzzled Alice discovers a book with looking-glass poetry called “Jabberwocky,” which she can read only by holding it up to a mirror.

To Theosophical students, Carroll’s imaginative invention is an unambiguous reminder of “the astral light” of occultism, a universal storage drive where original images of all things are seen in reverse of their visible projections on our terrestrial plane.

In 1871, mediumship and table-tipping were all the rage, detailed in Mitch Horowitz’s recent book Occult America. Understandably, Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland was wildly popular at the time.

Clairvoyance and psychic powers have always fascinated the public. But then, as now, they were considered nonsensical by mainstream scientists.

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“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the White Queen confides to Alice.

 

Once of interest only to ghost-hunters, and the derided science of parapsychology, “The Big 5”: Precognition, Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Psychokinesis and Healing (known collectively as “psi”), are now being noticed by the rank-and-file psychological and neuroscience community.

Seat of the Soul

THE Cheyenne say that “our first teacher is our own heart,” but mainstream science offers few apples to that master instructor.

To Western medical schools the heart is just a mechanical blood pump.

That view is beginning to change. The medical community is being challenged to expand its thinking about human biology, health, and wellness.

Leading-edge research in holistic medicine, biophysics, bioenergetics, and biocentrism all point in the same direction — showing our bodies are more than physical molecules and chemicals.

Explaining why and how we are more, H. P. Blavatsky asserted in The Secret Doctrine (2:149) that “The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences,”

“… depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.”

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The key is explained in today’s frontier science by the presence of the ‘biofield’ – a human body-field that is described as a structured web of information and energy that underlies and informs our physical body, and rules our state of health and well-being.

The heart is the primary contributor, regulator and overseer of a dynamic web of consciousness. “Electrically, the heart generates over 500 times more electricity than the brain,” writes BioCare Certified Neurofeedback Provider, Helena E. Kerekhazi, MS, NRNP. “It is the biggest generator in the body.”

“We have to subtract out the heart artifact from the brainwaves when we record, so strong is the signal.”

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Waves of Change

THEOSOPHY is that ocean of knowledge which spreads from shore to shore of the evolution of sentient beings.

Unfathomable in its deepest parts, it gives the greatest minds their fullest scope, yet, shallow enough at its shores, it will not overwhelm the understanding of a child.

It is wisdom about God for those who believe that he is all things and in all, and wisdom about nature for the man who accepts the statement found in the Christian Bible that God cannot be measured or discovered, and that darkness is around his pavilion.

Although it contains by derivation the name God and thus may seem at first sight to embrace religion alone, it does not neglect science, for it is the science of sciences, and therefore has been called the wisdom religion.

For no science is complete which leaves out any department of nature, whether visible or invisible.

That religion which, depending solely on an assumed revelation, turns away from things and the laws which govern them is nothing but a delusion, a foe to progress, an obstacle in the way of man’s advancement toward happiness. Embracing both the scientific and the religious, Theosophy is a scientific religion and a religious science.

It is not a belief or dogma formulated or invented by man, but is a knowledge of the laws which govern the evolution of the physical, astral, psychical, and intellectual constituents of nature and of man.

The religion of the day is but a series of dogmas man-made and with no scientific foundation for promulgated ethics.

The Breath of God

STUDENTS do not demand acceptance of Theosophy, pointing rather to its fundamental principles and their application.

Theosophy is not a ‘faith’ because faiths are changeable, and it is not dependent upon dogma or revelation as are modern science and religion.

The object of Theosophy is to show that all beings in nature are souls in evolution, and for humans the necessity of knowing ourselves — and becoming our own authority.

The “Wisdom-Religion” has existed from immemorial time. It offers a theory of nature and man which is founded upon knowledge acquired by the Sages of the past. It has been expressed in different ages by Krishna, Confucius and Buddha in the East, by Pythagoras, Plato and Jesus in the West.

Plato wrote about the quest for self-knowledge: “The light and spirit of the Divinity are the wings of the soul. They raise it to communion with the gods, above this earth — to become like the gods, is to become holy, just and wise.”

“That is the end for which man was created, and that ought to be his aim in the acquisition of knowledge.”

“Every one of us possesses the faculty, the interior sense, that is known by the name of intuition,” H. P. Blavatsky exclaims, “but how rare are those who know how to develop it! It is only by the aid of this faculty that men can ever see things in their true colours.”

This power is “an instinct of the soul, which grows in us in proportion to the employment we give it,” she wrote, “which helps us to perceive and understand the realities of things with far more certainty than the simple use of our senses and exercise of our reason.”

“The shell only of the spirit, soul and astral body of the Kosmos,” she comments in The Secret Doctrine (1:67), “has now fallen into the hands of Modern Science.”

Physicists now are busy studying that shell in the guise of hypothetical sub-atomic particles.

Using the atom-smashing power of The Large Hadron Collider, scientists hope to unmask the so-called “god particle,” their imagined ultimate substratum of the universe. The accumulation of large amounts of data from collisions, according to physicists, “is crucial to increasing the chances of a discovery.”

Physicists at CERN

Atoms live in a strange world dubbed quantum entanglement where they can be in two places at once. Everything changes at the sub-atomic level, though with science’s limited tools, atoms seem to be mostly ’empty’ space. It’s a seductive place, it seems, where one can free-fall into the unknown fields of an inexplicable universe.

Is there no room for ‘consciousness’ to exist in that “empty space?”

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If atoms or some exotic energetic field underpins all substance, what of something as omnipresent as water? Almost 90% of our body, like the planet we live on, is water. We are conscious like our blue planet Gaia. Many researchers are convinced that water is capable of ‘memory’ by storing information and retrieving it, and research into water is just beginning.

Universal and divine mind (Transactions 94) is “reflected in the waters of Space,” says ancient Cosmogenesis: “In Absolute Divine Thought “everything exists, and there has been no time when it did not so exist.”

Dance of Destiny

KARMA is a beneficent and merciful law, relentlessly just, for true mercy is not a free lunch but impartial justice.

“My brothers! Each man’s life the outcome of his former living is,” said The Buddha.

Is Karma then only fate under another name, an already fixed formula from which no escape is possible?

They are unwise, the chorus tells Prometheus, who believe that the goddess Nemesis may be propitiated by sacrifices and prayers, or have her wheels diverted from the paths she has taken.

“Those paths are of our own making,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, “for it is we, collectively or individually, who prepare them — an Occultist or a philosopher will not speak of the goodness or cruelty of Providence.”

“The only immutable decree of Karma,” she insisted, “is absolute Harmony in the world of matter as it is in the world of Spirit. It is not, therefore, Karma that rewards or punishes, but it is we, who reward or punish ourselves according to whether we work with, through and along with nature, abiding by the laws on which that Harmony depends, or break them.”

“Were no man to hurt his brother, two-thirds of the World’s evil would vanish into thin air. Karma-Nemesis would have neither cause to work for, nor weapons to act through. It is the constant presence in our midst of every element of strife and opposition, and

the division of races, nations, tribes, societies and individuals into Cains and Abels, wolves and lambs, that is the chief cause of the ‘ways of Providence.'”

“We cut these numerous windings in our destinies daily with our own hands, while we imagine that we are pursuing a track on the royal high road of respectability and duty, and then complain of those ways being so intricate and so dark.” Given this historical worldview, we need a fresh start. The roots of empathy and compassion must to be fostered in our children if there is to be any hope for the future of humanity.