Girl with Autism Sings “Firework”

EVERY child is a spark of God and Higher Mind. The educational tradition put forward by Theosophy is in line with ancient philosophies and modern theories.

These place the emphasis on joy, serenity of mind, harmony with the laws of nature, and recognize reason and intuition as powers innate and educable in us all.

Creative talent is one of the spiritual powers in human beings, part of the spectrum of consciousness that includes the faculties of understanding, of discrimination, and of direct knowing.

Maximizing these, Mme. Blavatsky wrote in her Key to Theosophy (pp. 270-71), “children should above all be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves,” 

“We would reduce the purely mechanical work of the memory to an absolute minimum, and devote the time to the development and training of the inner senses, faculties and latent capacities.

“We would endeavour to deal with each child as a unit, and to educate it so as to produce the most harmonious and equal unfoldment of its powers,” she says, “so that its special aptitudes should find their full natural development. We should aim at creating free men and women, free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects, and above all things, unselfish.”

Supernormal: Science, Yoga, and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

BACK in the day, faraway and long, long ago, when occult science was the mainstream science, the scientific method ruled. It meant checking, testing and verifying every new finding.

But modern science today looks more like a dogmatic religion than honest science, a science which should go wherever the evidence leads, no matter what. Concerned about tenure, she usually doesn’t.

And comparing the two sciences, the occult and modern materialistic, we also must acknowledge that the instruments used in their research are very different.

The teachings of The Secret Doctrine H. P. Blavatsky calls “the accumulated Wisdom of the Ages.” Such teachings are sui generis, yet they were gathered in keeping with strict scientific methodology. 

Illustrating this, she notes in SD Volume 1:272, that accumulating such data “occupied countless generations of initiated seers and prophets to marshal, to set down and explain.” Adding: “The flashing gaze of those seers penetrated into the very kernel of matter, and recorded the soul of things there.”

Beyond the Mundane

But, “modern science believes not in the soul of things,” Blavatsky wrote, thus modern researchers will not add the subject of the soul to their research because they do not even accept the possibility there is one.

Ancient occult scientists on the other hand, determined to know. And their elaborate system is “no fancy of one or several isolated individuals,” says Blavatsky: “It is the uninterrupted record covering thousands of generations of Seers whose respective experiences were made to test and to verify the teachings of higher and exalted beings, who watched over the childhood of Humanity.”

15th International Theosophy Conference NYC, August 8 -11

EQUAL justice to all and love to every creature is not the highest standard in Theosophy, co-founder H. P. Blavatsky maintained.

The Author of The Key to Theosophy held to a “far higher” standard.

Mme Blavatsky described that standard as “the giving to others more than to oneself , i.e. self-sacrifice.”

She also noted: “such was the standard and abounding measure which marked so preeminently the greatest Teachers and Masters of Humanity — e. g., Gautama Buddha in History, and Jesus of Nazareth as in the Gospels.”

“This trait alone was enough to secure to them the perpetual reverence and gratitude of the generations of men that came after them,” she insisted, noting “there are many instances to illustrate it in history.”

“Self-sacrifice for practical good to save many, or several people, Theosophy holds, is far higher than self-abnegation for a sectarian idea, such as that of ‘saving the heathen from damnation,’ for instance.”

Eye of the Seer

Le Ravissement de Psyche -1895
Adolphe-William Bouguereau

SOCRATIC myths describe the ascent of the soul to true knowledge, its communion with divine realities, and its return to enlighten mankind.

The order of the Dialogues is important, as the myths in them, each representing a kind of initiation, progressively reveal new teaching and clarify the old.

Plato opens the Republic with a conversation between Socrates and his elderly friend Cephalus on the subject of death.

Cephalus wants to assure himself that, if there is an afterlife, he will be spared the sufferings of the underworld. He even quotes from one of Pindar’s odes to support his argument.

Plato ends the Republic with the Vision of Er, as Socrates describes the spiritual warrior who is slain in battle and returns to life, physically resurrected in order to transmit the message of all saviors, (W. T. S. Thackara in Plato’s Myths and the Mystery Tradition).

The message seems clear: we are all immortal beings, and our destiny is in our own hands.

“Music of The Spheres”

“Between Science and Theology is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of materialism,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in Isis Unveiled [2:593].

Yet, “from the remotest antiquity, mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity, within the personal physical man.”

“This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown—Chrestos [The Higher Self].”

“It is on the indestructible tablets of the astral light that is stamped the impression of every thought we think, and every act we perform. And future events — effects of long-forgotten causes,” Blavatsky also writes in Isis Unveiled [I:178],—”are already delineated as a vivid picture for the eye of the seer and prophet to follow. the vast repository where the records of every man’s life as well as every pulsation of the visible cosmos are stored up for all Eternity!”