The Imprisoned Spirit

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.

Save the Bees, Act Now

Honey Bee

TW is posting this special appeal from Iain, Antonia, Mia, Luis, Ricken, Stephanie, Pascal, Alice, Ari and the whole Avaaz team.

Avaaz staff state they “don’t set an agenda and try to convince members to go along with it. It’s closer to the opposite: staff listen to members and suggest actions they can take in order to affect the broader world. Small wonder, then, that many of our most successful campaigns are suggested first by Avaaz members themselves. And leadership is a critical part of member service: it takes vision and skill to find and communicate a way to build a better world.”

Avaaz

“Because Avaaz is wholly member-funded, democratic accountability is in our DNA. No corporate sponsor or government backer can insist that Avaaz shift its priorities to suit some external agenda—we simply don’t accept funds from governments or corporations. (Read more about why it’s worth donating to Avaaz here, and chip in here.)

“Avaaz—meaning “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages—launched in 2007 with a simple democratic mission: organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.”

The Future is Now

ESOTERIC philosophy views Past, Present and Future as compound time, and only from our waking, egoic state of consciousness.

Pointedly, Buddha’s dying words confirmed that indeed “all compounds are perishable,” i.e. illusions.

In the realm of “noumena” or the causal plane H. P. Blavatsky wrote (SD 1:43) the three have no validity, and according to Mahayana Buddhism: “The Past time is the Present time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into existence, still is.”

To the uninitiated concepts of duration and time Blavatsky points out, “are all derived from our sensations according to the laws of Association.” And because they are “inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge” they are superficial and only temporal tools.

Because rationalist views ignore psychic experience, they must eventually fall away in the face of thousands of reported cases such as the near-death experience. Today precognition is validated by new experimental research data in parapsychology.

Minority Report – Precog

Announcing the publication of a controversial work by Cornell researcher Daryl Bem in an article published in The New York Times, Bem purports to have demonstrated precognition in a series of experiments. Dr. Bem studied over 1000 people and looked for proof that future events affected past behavior, or retro causation.

His research was analyzed using standard statistical techniques. Using standard measures, Bem’s research indeed finds a causal link between future events and past behavior.

Senior scientist Dean Radin, of The Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), is a rigorous scientific explorer who boldly goes where the establishment won’t, methodically measuring the ‘immeasurable’. In this clip he explains his ongoing experiments showing evidence of “presentiment” or precognition.

Hannah’s Anecdote

CANCER is serious business. It is estimated that approximately 7.2 to 7.6 million people worldwide die from cancer each year.

Deaths from cancer are projected to continue to rise to over 11 million in 2030. That’s big business for the pharmaceutical companies who make chemotherapy and related drugs.

This is a film about Hannah Bradley who was diagnosed with an aggressive brain tumor in 2011, age 26.

Even after surgery and radiotherapy, Hannah’s future was still severely limited. Her partner Pete Cohen searched for a solution and found Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski.

Burzynski had been developing a treatment for cancer for over 40 years. Although very controversial and expensive, Hannah was accepted onto phase 2 of an FDA trial for the treatment in Texas.

This is their story.

Death of the Goddess

GAIA the goddess of Earth, was the primordial mother of all the Gods 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.

Python, Antaeus, Ceto, Charybdis, Echidna, Creusa, Erichthonius, Eurybia, Typhon were the main attractions.

Ancient mythology may well have personified the titanic formative and creative forces of Earth’s early history, forces well known to their seers and mystics.

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

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For them, nature was conscious, as she was in reality “an aggregate of forces manipulated by semi-intelligent beings guided by High Planetary Spirits,” a teaching the 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.”

Mahatma of the Himavat

ASANGA gave up. Twelve long years of meditation and spiritual practices, and still no vision of the future Buddha Maitreya.

He yearned to connect with Maitreya to receive teaching directly, which would accelerate his progress on the Bodhisattva path.

“Every new Bodhisattva or initiated great Adept is called the ‘liberator of mankind,’ Helena Blavatsky explains in footnote (20) in The Voice of the Silence:

“Now bend thy head and listen well, O Bodhisattva,” she wrote, “Compassion speaks and saith: ‘Can there be bliss when all that lives must suffer? Shalt thou be saved and hear the whole world cry?’”

Asanga

After the first three years of spiritual practices to no avail, Asanga left his solitary cave, disheartened. But then he saw a little bird pecking a hole in a rock to build a nest in it, and he felt ashamed at his lack of persistence. He went back up to his cave.

After the next three years, Asanga gave up again. As he descended the mountain, he met a man who was grinding down a thick rod of iron with a cloth to make needles. When the man showed him some needles he’d already made this way, Asanga hung his head and went back up the mountain.

Bud of the Lotus

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 groups encourage differences, foster criticism, opposition and attacks on 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 world united as One Being 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.”