At the Center of the Circle

© 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.

Ancient wisdom traditions maintain that thoughts are actual things, and that one’s thoughts are the result of an unalterable universal law called “Cause and Effect,” and will manifest themselves at some point in one’s life.

The law of Cause and Effect can also be described as a law that says, “For every action, there is a reaction.”  Since thoughts are actual things, and since thoughts are also actions, it means that the thoughts will invariably cause a reaction that will result in a manifestation of those thoughts.

Across Time and Death: A Woman Reunites with Her Children from a Previous Lifetime

IT is not the fact that we have failed to remember our past life and lives that ought to surprise us, but the contrary, were it to happen.

Yet the Spiritual “I” in man is omniscient, Theosophy insists, and has every knowledge innate in it. 

By contrast, the personal “I” is the transient creature of its environment and the slave of brain memory.

“Could the Spiritual I manifest itself uninterruptedly, and without impediment,” H. P. Blavatsky declared, “there would be no longer ordinary humans on earth, but we should all be gods.”

Revealing the first principle of an occult spiritual technique, Mme. Blavatsky wrote (The Key to Theosophy, Section 8): “to get convinced of the fact of re-incarnation and past lives, one must put oneself in rapport with one’s real permanent Ego, not one’s evanescent [brain] memory.”

Jenny and Sonny

“The record or reflection of all past lives must survive,” she assures her readers, “for when Prince Siddhartha became Buddha the full sequence of His previous births were seen by Him — and anyone who attains to that spiritual state can retrospectively trace the line of their lives.”

This is because “the undying qualities of the personality — such as love, goodness, charity, etc. — attach themselves to the Immortal Ego.

“They imprint on it, so to speak,
a permanent image of the divine qualities
of the human who was.”

♥

Therefore, she says plainly: “something of each personality must survive, (unless the latter was an absolute materialist with not even a chink in his nature for a spiritual ray to pass through.) It leaves its eternal impress on the incarnating permanent Self or Spiritual Ego — and that real ‘Ego’ has lived them, and thus knows them all.”

As Mme. Blavatsky’s colleague William Q. Judge wrote in the article Theosophical Study and Work: “There is a mysterious power in these doctrines of karma and reincarnation … It is due to the fact that the ego is itself the experiencer of rebirth and karma, and has within a clear recollection of both.”

On fostering a greater spiritual development, Judge, in The Ocean of Theosophy, Chapter 8 titled “Of Reincarnation” wrote simply:

“Getting back the memory of other lives is really the whole of the process…”

≈

“For as long as she could remember, Jenny Cockell had felt she had lived a former life as Mary Sutton,” an Amazon reviewer wrote. “Finally, Jenny acted on her intense need to find her lost family. After years of painstaking searching, she finally reunited with family members from her previous lifetime. This is her startling, true story.”

Scientism is the New Religion

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

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

The masses, blindly accepting everything that emanates from either as the final truth, is taught to scoff at anything brought forward from spiritual or ancient occult sources.

Authorities in religion and science often err, and their too frequent sophism and dicta incorrect. They are the enemies of intuition and the experience of the ancients, and assume that Truth is the exclusive property of their dogmatic world views.

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 her article Is Theosophy a Religion Mme. Blavatsky wrote:

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

It is clear that modern science “believes not in the ‘soul of things,” Blavatsky notes in The Secret Doctrine (1:269).

“Science will be driven out of their position, not by spiritual, theosophical, or any other physical or even mental phenomena,” she says, “but simply by the enormous gaps and chasms that open daily — and will still be opening before them.”

“One discovery follows the other,” she predicted, “until they are finally knocked off their feet by the ninth wave of simple common sense. If science is too ahead of its time it “must bide its time until the minds of men are ripe for its reception. Every science, every creed has had its martyrs.”

3.5-Billion Years, Happy Birthday

“EVERYTHING in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, “is endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

“We men must remember that because we do not perceive any signs — which we can recognize — of consciousness, say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there” (The Third Fundamental of The Secret Doctrine).

“There is no such thing as either ‘dead’ or ‘blind’ matter — these find no place among the conceptions of Occult philosophy,” Blavatsky wrote. “The latter never stops at surface appearances, and for it the noumenal essences have more reality than their objective counterparts.”

“There exists a body of research poised to rend apart our modern paradigms — revealing consciousness in places we might not have expected it, and connections between life forms that seem startling and impossible.” So wrote Ben Bendig in the July 22, 2013 Epoch Times echoing H. P. Blavatsky’s Fundamental axiom. 

Your Own Worst Enemy

Jill BolteTaylor

LORD Krishna the famed deity of Hinduism, pegged the complex duality of our human minds more than five thousand years ago.

In the Bhagavad-Gita Krishna instructs his disciple Arjuna on the paradoxical nature of the mind and senses — all while the pair were in the middle of a battlefield with arrows flying.

The “Self is the friend of self, and in like manner, self is its own enemy” Krishna cautions the reluctant warrior Arjuna in Chapter Six.

The ancient wisdom-teaching of dueling human selves was much more than a symbolic morality play. And the unavoidable reality is preserved in our own living flesh, dynamically channeling through the dual hemispheres of our physical brain.

One of Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in The World,” neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD, describes the phenomenon in what she calls her “Stroke of Genius,” her book with that title. The story of her life-and-death ordeal dramatizes the paradoxical psycho-physiological puzzle of spirit, mind and physical brain.

As Jill recounts her experience, in a brief interview, we get a picture of the two physical halves of the brain, and how each is called to be a unique vehicle  expressing the Yin-Yang of “self.”