Future Science: Discovering the Soul of Things

Jelena Momcilov “Magnet Girl”

MANY scientists like to think that science already understands the ways of the natural world.

For them the fundamental questions are answered, leaving only the details to be filled in.

The numerous impressive achievements of modern science seem to support this confident attitude.

But in recent research, including his own studies, frontier biologist Rupert Sheldrake believes otherwise.

His experiments reveal jaw dropping problems at the heart of physics, cosmology, biology, medicine and psychology. Similar to H. P. Blavatsky’s complaints about 19th century modern science.  Not much has changed since then, it would appear. Science still refuses to acknowledge “the soul of things.”

See: Connecting the Worlds of Science and Spirituality

Resolutely dismissive of paranormal findings or brain-free consciousness, traditional science asserts that matter is the gold standard. But even great authorities especially in modern science may be found to err, and scientific dicta are frequently influenced more by personal prejudice than rigorous research.

A pure impartial science always weighs “the laboriously acquired knowledge of the senses with the intuitive omniscience of the Spiritual divine Soul,” said H. P. Blavatsky, world Theosophy teacher.

As Hermes believed so does Theosophy, she wrote in The Secret Doctrine 1:296,  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.”

It is “self-contradictory, and simply absurd — from a scientific point of view, as much and even more than from the occult aspect of the esoteric knowledge.”

When the high priests of material science, she wrote, “resolve consciousness into a secretion from the grey matter of the brain, and everything else in nature into a mode of motion, we protest against the doctrine as being un-philosophical.” [And unscientific]

In a formal, conclusive and hilarious experiment he calls “Telephone Telepathy,” Rupert Sheldrake demonstrates that consciousness can indeed fly away on its own from one mind into another!

The Karma of Intention, a Force in Nature

THE act of true intending is widely misunderstood, because there are hidden aspects of so-called intent consisting solely of desire for personal fulfillment.

Seducing the public to desire beauty, riches and power is the undisguised theme of thousands of self-help books written by so-called gurus seeking money and fame.

But there is a higher, purer and more unselfish level of intention in true occultism. It is the unseen power to bring to pass desired results without selfish, personal motives.

Success at this higher level requires a knowledge far beyond any kind of falsehood, and the evocation of a dynamic spiritual force inherent in man and universal nature. Those who practiced the art it in ancient times were the initiates, the wise ones called “Magi” — the source of the word “magic.”

The author of The Intention Experiment, Lynn McTaggart, is described in Dan Brown’s Book, The Lost Symbol, through the character of Katherine Solomon:  

… human consciousness, as Noetic author Lynne McTaggart described it, was a substance outside the confines of the body. A highly ordered energy capable of changing the physical world.

Katherine (Solomon) had been fascinated by McTaggart’s book ‘The Intention Experiment’, and her global, Web-based study – theintentionexperiment.com— aimed at discovering how human intention could affect the world.

— Dan Brown, “The Lost Symbol” (Random House, 2009)

A Force in Nature

It is relatively easy to learn tricks and spells, Mme. Blavatsky writes in her article Practical Occultism, “and the methods of using the subtler, but still material, forces of physical nature.”

But the force of selfish human desire only awakens darker powers, Theosophy says. Unless the motive is pure, and the intention unalloyed, destructive passions are often aroused, and even unconsciously will do harm to others and to nature.

In her article Practical Occultism, H. P. Blavatsky cautioned her readers about this development: “it is the motive alone which makes any exercise of power become black, malignant, or white, beneficent Magic, and unless the intention is entirely unalloyed…

the spiritual will transform itself into the psychic, act on the astral plane, and dire results may be produced by it.

“It is impossible to employ spiritual forces, she maintained, “if there is the slightest tinge of selfishness [or separateness] remaining in the operator.”

Zen Samurai

“Sow a Thought, Reap an Act;
Sow an Act, Reap a Habit;
Sow a Habit, Reap a Character;
Sow a Character, Reap a Destiny.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Spiritual Knowledge

“Cut asunder with the sword of spiritual knowledge,
this doubt which existeth in thy heart.”

 – Krishna, (Bhagavad-Gita, Ch. IV)

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Karma and Intent

Excerpts from Occultism
by H. P. Blavatsky

“The powers and forces of animal nature can equally be used by the selfish and revengeful, as by the unselfish and the all-forgiving.

“The powers and forces of spirit lend themselves only to the perfectly pure in heart, and this is DIVINE MAGIC.”

“In reality, there is no such thing as ‘Separateness’ — and the nearest approach to that selfish state, which the laws of life permit, is in the intent or motive.”

“It is an occult law, moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings, without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way, no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone.”

“True occultism or theosophy is the ‘great renunciation of SELF,’ unconditionally and absolutely, in thought as in action.”

“And, although it is the intention that decides primarily whether white or black magic is exercised, yet the results even of involuntary, unconscious sorcery cannot fail to be productive of bad karma.”

“It is altruism, not egoism even in its most legal and noble conception, that can lead the unit to merge its little self in the universal selves.

“It is to these needs and to this work that the true disciple of true occultism has to devote himself, if he would obtain theo-sophy, divine wisdom and knowledge.”

Mind Control

As with any spiritual work, controlling the thought-producing mind is the first step. The necessity of discerning reality from illusion, is taught in the Voice of the Silence.

And recognizing the false superiority of matter and form, sensing instead the energy and reality of consciousness.

“Having become indifferent to objects of perception,

the pupil must seek out the rajah of the senses, the Thought-Producer, he who awakes illusion.”

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“The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real,” repeats the Voice: “Let the Disciple slay the Slayer”— because it is our minds that create our illusions.

Awakenings

Gradual awakenings are a hallmark of H. P. Blavatsky’s teachings in The Secret Doctrine. “As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed,” she writes, “we mistook shadows for realities.”

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“… and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached ‘reality.'”

“But only when we shall have reached the Absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by illusion.”

Healing Intention

Centers of Attraction

But what practical measures can we take to achieve freedom from delusion? An example of the popular idiom “be careful what you ask for” is the law of attraction, described first in the article Karma, by William Q. Judge:

Directing our mind to the physical world and desires, he warns, “a ‘fire’ or centre of attraction, is set up there, in order to feed and fatten it.”

“The energies of the whole upper plane [intentions] are drawn down and exhausted in supplying the need of energy which exists below due to the indulgence of sense gratification.”

If 0ur energy is centered instead in our highest intentions, “then all the needed energy goes there,” he says, “to result in increase of spirituality.”

“It must be remembered that Nature is all bountiful and withholds not her hand. The demand is made, and the supply will come.”

“Resolve to be tender with the young,
compassionate with the aged,
sympathetic with the striving
and tolerant with the weak and wrong.
Sometime in your life,
you will have been all of these.”

~ Gautama Buddha

The Perpetual Motion of the Universe

“IT is the one life, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being.

“. . . unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness; unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality; truly, ‘a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.

“Its one absolute attribute, which is ITSELF, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the ‘Great Breath,’ which is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present SPACE.

“That which is motionless cannot be Divine. But then there is nothing in fact and reality absolutely motionless within the universal soul.”

“From the beginning of man’s inheritance, from the first appearance of the architects of the globe he lives in, the unrevealed Deity was recognized and considered under its only philosophical aspect —

“universal motion, the thrill of
the creative Breath in Nature.”

“Occultism sums up the ‘One Existence’ thus:  ‘Deity is an arcane, living (or moving) fire, and the eternal witnesses to this unseen Presence are Light, Heat, Moisture,’ — this trinity including, and being the cause of, every phenomenon in Nature.”

Compassion Absolute, or Sin of Separateness?

TIME and tide wait for no man according to Geoffrey Chaucer, nor do such supreme powers submit to the dictates of  modern despots, gods or saviors.

The Laws of Karma rule always. No one is so all-powerful they can stop the march of time or turn back the ocean waves, as King Canute unsuccessfully tried.

Yet what he learned from the experience is that the best each of us can do is attempt to discover and live in harmony with nature’s immutable laws.

Shakespeare dramatized karma as a force that ebbs and flows cyclically, and that one must go with the flow. As Brutus notoriously exclaims in Julius Caesar:

“There’s a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.”

Procrastinating wastes precious moments allowing beneficial waves or tides to begin to recede. If a moral or environmental opportunity is neglected, individuals and humanity as a whole may suffer dire consequences.

“All the passing shows of life, whether fraught with disaster or full of fame and glory, are teachers; he who neglects them, neglects opportunities which seldom the gods repeat,” W. Q. Judge wrote in his Essay on Chapter 2 of  the Bhagavad-Gita. “And the only way to learn from them is through the heart’s resignation;

“for when we become in heart completely poor, we at once are the treasurers and disbursers of enormous riches. Krishna then insists on the scrupulous performance of natural duty.”

Ancient Atlantis, our former habitat, was destroyed by natural and human caused climate change thousands of years before its time, and we are heading down a very similar, dangerous path — the result of a pervasive collective selfishness. Just as Walt Kelly’s Pogo warned, as he stared at a trash filled swamp on Earth Day 1970:

“We have met the enemy,
and he is us.”

Atlantis

Sickness occurs when “a group of individual cells refuse to cooperate, and wherein is set up discordant action, using less or claiming more than their due share of food or energy,” wrote W. Q. Judge in The Synthesis of Occult Science, concluding:

“Disease is nothing more or less than ‘the sin of separateness.'”

So long as there is separateness and selfishness, Theosophy says, there will be suffering. And this is why we need to practice Divine Compassion, “the law of laws” as described in The Voice of the Silence.

“Compassion is something really worthwhile. It is not just a religious or spiritual subject, not a matter of ideology,” says the Dalai Lama: “It is not a luxury. It is a necessity.”

“It is an absolute fact that without good works the spirit of brotherhood would die in the world—and this can never be,” Blavatsky wrote in her article Let Every Man Prove His Own Work:

“Therefore is the double activity of learning and doing most necessary; we have to do good, and we have to do it rightly, with knowledge.”

The proverb about time and tide illustrates the complex interplay between fate and free will in human life. It has karmic beauty as well, suggesting that while we do not have total control over our lives, we do have a responsibility to take what few measures we can to live ethically and honorably.

H. P. Blavatsky: Her Extraordinary Life and Influence

EVERY year on May 8th, on what they call White Lotus Day, theosophists all over the world celebrate the anniversary of the passing of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society.

A world-famous figure of mystery and controversy, and the leading intellect behind the occult revival in the western world, Blavatsky published The Secret Doctrine in 1888, her magnum opus.

“The time had now come when it was necessary to speak plainly about the real interpretation of the spiritualistic manifestations,” wrote Charles J. Ryan, an early student of Theosophy.

“H. P. Blavatsky had gained the attention of the public by her brilliant intelligence, the charm of her striking personality, and her slashing attacks on materialism and other evils. Her voice would now be listened to and recognized as speaking with authority.”

In her will, HPB suggested that her friends might gather together on the anniversary of her passing (May 8, 1891) and read from poet Sir Edwin Arnold‘s The Light of Asia, and from the ancient Hindu scripture The Bhagavad-Gita.

Lotuses grew in unusual profusion in India on that day. May 8th became known as White Lotus Day ever since.

“That which men call death is but a change of location for the Ego, a mere transformation, a forsaking for a time of the mortal frame,” wrote her friend and colleague William Q. Judge —

“…a short period of rest before one reassumes another human frame in the world of mortals.”

“The Lord of this body is nameless — dwelling in numerous tenements of clay, it appears to come and go. But neither death nor time can claim it, for it is deathless, unchangeable, and pure, beyond Time itself, and not to be measured.”

Dreaming is a Crucial Mental State

WHEN our thick brains get all heated up worrying about life’s complexities, that’s often  the best time to kick off our shoes, and give it a rest.

Faced with a critical decision, or stuck on a complex problem, researchers have discovered that sleeping or napping on them often lead to a right direction or decision.

“In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die,” Lewis Carroll wrote of children:

“Ever drifting down the stream— Lingering in the golden gleam — Life, what is it but a dream?”

As adults the notes of a song, the smell of burning leaves, the babbling of a mountain brook, a day-dream — all may open doors to another realm of poetic mind. They also arouse unexpected emotions and reminiscences.

In Wordsworth’s haunting poem “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” reveries opened for him an unexpected awareness of past lives, the realization he had lived before.

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“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar …”

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There is “a class of fancies of exquisite delicacy,” the poet Edgar Allan Poe wrote in Marginalia, “which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language.”