Changing Your Face: What It’s Like to Die

Changing Your Face

According to tradition, the Buddha’s dying words were (freely translated): “all compounds are perishable.”
It was not man’s immortal spirit he meant. Rather, Buddha was pointing to the temporary physical, passionate, personal and psychic parts of us.

Our deathless spirit uses sensory and physical vehicles merely as instruments of expression in every new ly minted life.

Functionally linked those parts are temporary and are separated from each other at death. They are reduced to their primal elements, like the fuel of a fire, recycled and returned back to Universal Nature, their primal state.

The process is entirely natural, the recycling of renewable substances of evolution, of the temporal forces and materials required for an earthly body:

“Dust thou art,” states Genesis (3:19), “and unto dust thou shalt return”— referring to those perishable parts of man’s complex construction.

By contrast, in a dream, “the Spirit of man is free,” as the occult teaching of the Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad (13) declared, “and naught adheres to the Spirit.”

Death is Sleep

Mme. Blavatsky agreed with the Upanishads, and explains in the Key to Theosophy (109) that “death ever comes to our spiritual selves as a deliverer and friend.” And for the average mortal, “it will be a dream as vivid as life, and full of realistic bliss and visions.”

Even for the materialist, who, “notwithstanding his materialism, was not a bad man, the interval between the two lives will be like the unbroken and placid sleep of a child,” Blavatsky wrote.

“As the man at the moment of death has a retrospective insight into the life he has led, so, at the moment he is reborn on to earth. He has a prospective vision of the life which awaits him and realizes all the causes that have led to it.

Chasing Dreams

“He realizes them and sees futurity, because it is between [the bliss filled after-death dream state called] Devachan and re-birth, that the Ego regains his full [spiritual mind] manasic consciousness, and re-becomes for a short time the god he was —before he first descended into matter and incarnated in flesh, in compliance with Karmic law.”

“The ‘golden thread’ sees all its ‘pearls’ and misses not one of them.” – H. P. Blavatsky

“I repeat it: death is sleep. After death, before the spiritual eyes of the soul begins a performance according to a programme learnt and very often unconsciously composed by ourselves: the practical carrying out of correct beliefs or of illusions which have been created by ourselves. The Methodist will be Methodist, the Mussulman a Mussulman, at least for some time — in a perfect fool’s paradise of each man’s creation and making.

Fools Paradise

“These are the post-mortem fruits of the tree of life. Naturally, our belief or unbelief in the fact of conscious immortality is unable to influence the unconditioned reality of the fact itself, once that it exists; but the belief or unbelief in that immortality as the property of independent or separate entities, cannot fail to give colour to that fact in its application to each of these entities. Now do you begin to understand it?”

(H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, Section 9,
“What is Really Meant by Annihilation)

This is Your Brain, Infinitely Elastic

Jill Bolte Taylor

BREAKING up is hard to do especially when it comes to ingrained scientific worldviews.

Even after they have betrayed us, dogmatic style beliefs still cling like burrs to our psyche, and our brains, despite all logic.

Recall the insistent flat earth and geocentric crowd, and creationist belief that the Earth is only ten thousand years old.

The list is very long. Science is littered with the remains of once sacred cows.

Until only a few years ago, for example, it was asserted that the brain cannot grow new cells —

when they are gone they
are gone for good?

Challenging the cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, neuroscience now confirms that, in fact, adult brain cells can regrow after all — they can and do replace and even increase themselves as necessary!

H. P. Blavatsky explained: “The brain is the instrument of waking consciousness and every conscious mental picture formed means change and destruction of the atoms [neurons?] of the brain.” Yet, “in ordinary intellectual activity, moves on well beaten paths in the brain, and does not compel sudden adjustments and destructions in its substance.”

She then noted that a “new kind of mental effort calls for something very different — the carving out of ‘new brain paths’, the ranking in different order of the little brain lives.”

Her idea was, unmistakably, a preemptive nod to our modern science’s newly understood doctrine of “neuroplasticity” —

“… the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.”(Wikipedia) This fact of occult science began to be recognized thanks to the findings of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, called “the father of sensory substitution and brain plasticity.”

Supernormal Science: Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities

Telepathic

COHERENT consciousness creates order in the world, and subtle interactions link us with each other and the Earth. 

According to H. P. Blavatsky, “the ‘separateness’ which we feel between ourselves and the world of living beings around us is an illusion, not a reality.”

“We intend to prove,” she wrote in her article Kosmic Mind, “that modern science … is itself on the eve of discovering that consciousness is universal.”

The Third Object of the Theosophical Movement “the Investigation of the unexplained laws of nature and the psychical powers latent in man,” intended to establish, according to the Founder H. P. Blavatsky, that “the ‘separateness’ which we feel between ourselves and the world of living beings around us is an illusion, not a reality.”

The mechanism of this underlying universal reality, W. Q. Judge wrote in The Ocean of Theosophy (Ch. 16), is the handiwork of a sensitive psychic matrix, called “the astral light,” which can transmit “pictures of events to come” — but only if the creations “are sufficiently well marked and made.”

Theosophy Company

Click here to order from Theosophy Company

Events for several years to come, “the producing and efficient causes,” Judge wrote, “are always laid down with enough definiteness to permit the seer to see them in advance, as if they were present.”

“It is a faculty common to all men,” Judge comments, “though in the majority but slightly developed.”

“Occultism asserts,” he wrote, “that were it not for the germ of this power slightly active in every one, no man could convey to another any idea whatsoever.”

Summoner by crimsonvermillion

Using the psi power, often called ‘clairvoyance,’ “all images stored in the Astral Light,” Judge wrote in The Ocean of Theosophy: 

“pass before the inner vision and are reflected into the physical eye from within. They then appear objectively to the seer.”

It was the “flashing gaze” of “countless generations” of initiated seers and prophets, H. P. Blavatsky declared in The Secret Doctrine (1:272), that penetrated “into the very kernel of matter, and recorded the soul of things there.” Those facts, established using the same method of modern science, were to become the perennial teachings furthered by modern Theosophy.

Those early wise men, she noted, “had passed their lives in learning, not teaching. How did they do so? It is answered: by checking, testing, and verifying in every department of nature the traditions of old by the independent visions of great adepts; i.e., men who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual organisations to the utmost possible degree.

“No vision of one adept was accepted till it was checked and confirmed by the visions — so obtained as to stand as independent evidence — of other adepts, and by centuries of experiences.” This checking, testing, verifying and confirming is the method supposed to be used by modern Science. Seeking the facts wherever they may be found.

Global Consciousness, a New Humanity

Mother Gaia

HUMANITY is divided into thousands of  languages, hundreds of sects and cults, castes, creeds, religious sects and political ideologies.

As an example the website Ethnologue currently contains information about the world’s 7,099 known living human languages and their indigenous nationalities.

Such differences often divide rather than unite people. Instead of love and service to others, some 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 will unselfishly eschew all differences and personal enmities — promulgating the First Object of Theosophy, Universal Brotherhood?  H. P. Blavatsky explained in The Secret Doctrine 2:760:

“There was a time when the whole world, the totality of mankind, had one religion as they were of ‘one lip’.”

A world united as One Being has been the hope of mankind for ages. Poets, artists, philosophers and statespersons idealize it. Self-interested politicians claim they have the grand solution to the problems of disease, hunger, poverty, homelessness.

But they have not succeeded, because of  personal bias, and a failure to accept and value the spiritual unity of humanity as a whole.

In our obsession with the bitter roots of sectarian differences and selfish, materialist agendas, we remain blind to the reality of unified life. “Existence is ONE THING, not any collection of things linked together,” Blavatsky wrote. “Fundamentally there is ONE BEING.”

Global Consciousness

Many Lights, One Humanity  

“Real Theosophy IS ALTRUISM, and we cannot repeat it too often,” she insisted. “It is brotherly love, mutual help, unswerving devotion to Truth.” (Our Cycle and the Next)

“If all men would realize that in these alone can true happiness be found, and never in wealth, possessions, or any selfish gratification.”

“But the world, in our day, judges everything on appearance. Motives are held as of no account, and the materialistic tendency is foremost in condemning a priori that which clashes with skin-deep propriety and encrusted notions.  Nations, men, and ideas all are judged according to our preconceptions, and the lethal emanations of modern civilization kill all goodness and truth.”

Many Lights

“Then the dark clouds will roll away, and a new humanity will be born upon earth. Then, the GOLDEN AGE will be there, indeed. But if not, then the storm will burst, and our boasted western civilization and enlightenment will sink in such a sea of horror that its parallel History has never yet recorded.”

Modern Science and Our Moral Sense

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,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote.  Yet, Science will be driven out of their materialist positions.

“Not by spiritual, theosophical, or any other physical or even mental phenomena, but simply by the enormous gaps and chasms that open daily — and will still be opening before them.”

“One discovery follows the other,” she noted, “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.”

“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.”

“Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption,” writes controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake — one of the world’s most innovative biologists and writers, who is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance —”they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview.

“They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis.”

July 4th: Theosophy, the Gospel of Goodwill

H. P. Blavatsky 1877

H. P. BLAVATSKY understood America because she loved America.

Confirming this in a letter delivered to the Second American Convention she wrote:

“Your great country which I love for its noble freedom . . . and of which country I myself am proud of being a citizen.”

This loving understanding of the American culture and temperament in the light of the marvelous knowledge which was hers, has graciously provided for the students of Theosophy everywhere in the world.

But more especially in America, hints, warnings, suggestions and, above all, inspiration for their labor on behalf of the Sacred Cause.

To the students of Theosophy in America, these Letters are of special value and significance at the present time.

In conducting their own lives and tasks as well as in helping their fellow men in all fields of activity, they will receive from these thoughtful and stirring words real help themselves, and that of an unique character. 

A Prayer Labyrinth

In these days of constant struggles of many and diverse kinds, when a myriad remedies are suggested and advocated for our ills physical and psychical, moral and mental . . . puzzled by the strange working of Mother Nature . . .

These wonderful Messages of one whose wisdom and compassion stirred her to point the finger of warning and at the same time to stretch out the hand of fellowship and sure guidance, ought to be read, studied; nay, meditated upon.

(Above excerpted from Theosophy Company, Los Angeles, CA)