The Silent Center

THE Sanskrit word “Dharana” is defined as “the intense and perfect concentration of the mind upon some one interior object.”

This intense focus is “accompanied by complete abstraction from everything pertaining to the external Universe, or the world of the senses.”

Further, The Voice of the Silence instructs its aspiring students: “from the stronghold of your Soul, chase all your foes away—ambition, anger, hatred, e’en to the shadow of desire—when even you have failed.”

The devotional books Light on the Path, (“Kill out ambition…”), and The Voice of the Silence,  (“let the Disciple slay the Slayer”), are metaphors for self-control as we pursue a spiritual path.

Similarly, the setting of the Bhagavad-Gita is on the plain of a great battlefield called “Kurukshetra.” This plain is considered sacred, and is symbolic, W. Q. Judge says in his essay, “of the body which is acquired by karma.”

This metaphorical “killing” or “slaying,” is not contrary to the Buddhist and Hindu doctrine of “Ahimsa” (harmlessness). It refers rather to inner control over our physical senses, ambition, intellect, etc.—and to resolving our personal karmic challenges, including non-violence and non-separateness.

Dharana, or focused meditation, is all about slowing the ‘mental noise,’ or what is called the ‘monkey mind,’ and regaining our lost rulership.

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Our spiritual soul is the silent center, according to this old teaching, and for this True Self to always be in charge, it must be the ever-present decision maker in our lives.

Thus the Voice of the Silence teaches a paradoxical doctrine in which the intellectual, striving and desire-ridden mind, becomes its own savior through its higher counterpart, the light of intuition—the soul-mind—accompanied by occult sound vibrations:

“The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real.
Let the Disciple slay the Slayer.”

for…

“…when to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams–when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE  the inner sound which kills the outer.”

Afterlife is Real

WHEN a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife.

“Dr. Eben Alexander says he’s not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body,” notes Newsweek Magazine in its feature article headline.

“Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history.”

“Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided,” Dr. Alexander writes in the Newsweek October 15 cover story.

“Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference,” he says, “science tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.”

“In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe,” wrote David Bohm — legendary American quantum physicist known for his theory of an “Implicate Order,” a universe of undivided wholeness—”therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe.”

“We are enfolded in the universe,” Bohm says. Theosophy agrees. “We know of no eastern philosophy that teaches that ‘matter originated out of Spirit,’ Blavatsky wrote:

“Matter is as eternal and indestructible as Spirit and one cannot be made cognizant to our senses without the other—even to our, the highest, spiritual sense.”

Theosophy also asserts what neurologists and physicists are now beginning to verify — that there is no special location of consciousness in the brain. Consciousness exists throughout the brain, and the body.

The mind actually lives independently with its own energetic matrix interpenetrating the physical body, using the brain, heart and other organs and cells as its tool kit on this plane.

“Spirit got itself entangled with gross matter,” Blavatsky wrote in The Theosophist, “for the same reason that life gets entangled with the foetus matter. It followed a law, and therefore could not help the entanglement occurring.”

The Psychic You

EVERY organ and cell in the body has its own energetic biofield, and uses it to network wirelessly with all other organs and cells.

The heart and the gut talk back and forth continually to the brain, whose neurons also converse with each other, day and night.

Researchers have recently discovered that both the heart and the gut, have substantial neuronal regions, showing they both have brains of their own. The gut can even act independently when we have “gut feelings” for example.

The holographic network of the heart links, organizes and entrains, say the researchers at the Institute of Heartmath, the totality of signals from all the noetic webs, of all the cells and neurons of the body.

“These biosignals pass information over to the body’s chief superintendent, the brain.”

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This complex unifying biofield may well be the underlying mechanism of healing, of thought transference, and gene behavior, experimental evidence confirms. It is also the pathway by which the environment influences us.

The power of this invisible field is undoubtedly the unseen agent driving what many modern self-help gurus refer to as the ‘secret’ of intention, and thought. In Isis Unveiled (1:xxvii) H. P. Blavatsky wrote:

“The Hindu Vedas fifty centuries ago, ascribed to it the same properties as do the Tibetan lamas of the present day.”

“When one sees mortal man displaying tremendous capabilities, controlling the forces of nature and opening up to view the world of spirit,” she writes, “the reflective mind is overwhelmed.”

The Church of Scientism

ANCIENT teachings can be shown to be more scientific despite the attacks of sectarianism, or materialism miscalled Science.

In reality science and religion are responsible for numerous illogical theories offered to the world.

The general public, blindly accepting everything that emanates from these two accepted authorities as a proven fact, is taught to scoff at anything brought forward from spiritual or ancient occult sources.

But even great authorities, especially modern science, may often err, and their too frequent sophism of scientific dicta may be incorrect. They are against intuition and the experience of the ages, and assume that Truth is the property of their exclusive isolated world.

Theosophy consistently contrasts “the laboriously acquired knowledge of the senses with the intuitive omniscience of the Spiritual divine Soul.”

As Hermes believed so does Theosophy, says H. P. Blavatsky, that “knowledge differs from sense which is only of the physical world—”but Knowledge is the end of sense which is only the illusion of our physical brain and its intellect.” In “Is Theosophy a Religion” she wrote:

“Practical Theosophy is not one Science, but embraces every science in life, moral and physical.” 

Science Set Free

“THREE decades ago, few scientists were courageous enough to break ranks and question their own belief system,” Deepak Chopra writes.

“Even calling science a belief system sounded outrageous – religion is a matter of belief, science a matter of facts.”

What follows are excerpts from Deepak Chopra’s recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle SFGate – Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s top 10 list on Scientific Ideology – and H. P. Blavatsky’s “Ten Items” of natural law in Isis Unveiled (Vol. 2:588), called “the fundamental propositions of the Oriental philosophy.”

“The most far-seeing scientist who was willing to break ranks then, as now, was Rupert Sheldrake, who risked his impeccable credentials as a Cambridge biochemist with real joy, like a man suddenly able to breathe.

“Thirty years after his first heretical books, Sheldrake’s new one, ‘Science Set Free’ is a landmark achievement. No science writing has inspired me more.”

“Sheldrake’s essential point is that science needs setting free from ten blind dogmas. These dogmas embrace a true belief system as much as Roman Catholicism or any other faith. Behind the daily activity of gathering data, science assumes certain things about reality that, according to Sheldrake, are unsupportable.

“The first dogma, for example, holds that the universe is mechanical. If that is so, then everything in the universe is also mechanical, including human beings – or to use a phrase from the noted atheist Richard Dawkins, we are ‘lumbering robots.’

“From a scientist’s perspective, to understand everything that you need to know about human beings, you only have to tinker with all the mechanical parts of genes and the brain until there are no more secrets left.”

“Clearly such a view leaves no room for the soul, which becomes a wispy illusion that needs to be swept away. But then, so does the self, because there is no region of the brain that contains ‘I,’ a person.

“As long as ‘I’ is a hallucination formed by complex neural circuitry, one can throw out – or reduce to mechanical operations – love, beauty, truth, compassion, honor, devotion, faith, and so on, the whole apparatus that makes a person’s life feel valuable. A random universe has no purpose; therefore, giving lumbering robots a purpose is dubious.”