The Theosophical Roots of a Spiritual Education

Growing Imagination

THE emergence of a new spiritual epoch in education may have dawned far back in the late 19^th century driven by Theosophical principles.

New educational reforms encompassing spiritual development are evident in the formation of new schools today, many of which embody the eternal principles championed by H. P. Blavatsky in The Key to Theosophy.

“In many countries, educational reforms are taking place to consider the changing needs of 21^st century learners,” writes Canadian theosophist Kathleen Hall in The Theosophical Roots of Spiritual Education, noting how:

“The old factory model of education that was mainly concerned with churning out obedient workers no longer suits the needs of today’s world.”

The principles defined by Madame Blavatsky in The Key to Theosophy, raised the educational bar, both then and now . “Children should above all be taught self-reliance,” she declared, “love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves.”

Adding: “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 …

Meditation

“Deal with each child as a unit and educate it so as to produce the most harmonious and equal unfoldment of its powers, in order that its special aptitudes should find their full natural development; Aim at creating free men and women, free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects, and above all things, unselfish.” (Theosophy and Education).

“The object of modern education is to pass examinations, a system [adapted] not to develop right emulation, but to generate and breed jealousy, envy, hatred almost, in young people for one another, and thus train them for a life of ferocious selfishness and struggle for honours and emoluments instead of kindly feeling.”

Talking to Our Spiritual Dream Self

Touching our dreams.

THERE is a kind of “conscious telegraphic communication going on incessantly, day and night,” between our physical brain and our ever-awake inner consciousness.

“The brain is such a complex thing, both physically and metaphysically, that it is like a tree whose bark you can remove layer by layer.”

“Each layer is different from all the others,” H. P. Blavatsky explains, “and each having its own special work, function, and properties.”

All real dreams that are remembered, and “present a sequence of events,” she maintained, “are due to the vision of our higher [mind] Ego.”

“At a time when an apple was something Steve Jobs gave to his first grade teacher, Clancy McKenzie, M.D. happened upon a discovery that would forever change not just his life, but his patients’ as well,” writes a reviewer of Babies Need Mothers, McKenzie’s groundbreaking book. This would be the proof of principle of Blavatsky’s teaching.

“It hit him like a bolt of lightening,” the reviewer notes: “Without so much as a hand-held calculator, McKenzie unearthed the origin and mechanism of serious mental and emotional disorders.”

“Many of Dr. McKenzie’s most powerful insights were directed to him during his dreams, and experienced later as voices on awakening, and during the day at unexpected moments.”

Clancy D. McKenzie, M.D.

The Brihand Aranyaka Upanishad [p. 12], describes of this inner dream god: “Leaving the bodily world through the door of dream, the sleepless Spirit views the sleeping powers.”

Then clothed in radiance, returns to his own home, the gold-gleaming Genius, swan of everlasting.”

“You do not have to be a yogi and meditate for years in a cave to receive an enlightened answer,” says Dr. McKenzie. “When you fall asleep you reach just as deep a level of consciousness.

“All you must do is take one minute at bedtime to formulate your question, and one minute when you awaken to retrieve the answer.

“Practically anyone can do this the very first night.”

The Invisible Physical: Proved by Seven Scientific Experiments

Helena Blavatsky

ALWAYS ready to argue for the existence of an invisible physical world, within the visible matter, the writer of The Secret Doctrine, Helena Blavatsky, was ever adamant.

She continually challenged the scientific materialistic beliefs of her day. About her monumental work, The Secret Doctrine, she wrote an introduction which included the following declaration:

“The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not ‘a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,’ and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe — to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring.

Finally, to show that the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization.”
(SD 1:vii Preface)

Madam Blavatsky frequently took up the cause of a universal, invisible and intelligent medium supporting the visible physical universe. This “invisible physical” was critical to understanding Occult Science as presented in The Secret Doctrine.

Establishing this occult doctrine in her seminal work,  Mme. Blavatsky asserted that: “The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences

“depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.” (The Secret Doctrine Vol 2, p. 149)

“The astral body is itself an aspect of the real inner body,” wrote Robert Crosbie, the Founder of the United Lodge of Theosophists, “which has lasted through the vast period of the past and must continue through the far distant future.”

“This astral body is the prototype, or design, around which the physical body is built, and which, considered from the point of view of the powers, is the real physical body. Without it the physical body would be nothing but a mass of matter — an aggregation of smaller lives.” 

Our Real Senses

“It is the astral body which contains the organs, or centers, from which the organs have been evolved in accord with the needs of the thinker within,” he continued. “The real senses of man are not in the physical but in the astral body. The astral body lasts a little over one lifetime. It does not die when the physical body dies, but is used as a body in the immediate after-death states.” -Robert Crosbie, (Universal Theosophy)

After The Secret Doctrine was published it would not take long before modern frontier scientists would begin to take up Mme. Blavatsky’s assertions in earnest using established scientific methods of inquiry. Seven important experiments suggesting the existence of an invisible astral matrix were initiated during the initial decades of the 20th and 21st century.

Even Mme. Blavatsky admitted in the 19th century: “It is gratifying to see how scientific imagination approaches every year more closely to the borderland of our occult teachings.” (Secret Doctrine 2:137 fn)

Hence the subtitle of this blog Theosophy Watch, i.e. “Ancient Thought in Modern Dress,” is the same title used by Mme. Blavatsky in the presentation found in Volume 1, page 572 of The Secret Doctrine.

Life After Death, the Persistence of Consciousness

The invisible physical.

ANYONE who believes in reincarnation accepts that life can continue to exist without a visible physical form. And that consciousness can exist without a neuron filled physical brain.

Both concepts are still a challenge for the standard model of modern science which “believes not in the soul of things,” as H. P. Blavatsky declared in her monumental work The Secret Doctrine, (1:272)

The problem is directly related to the controversial “hard problem of consciousness,” formulated by the philosopher David Chalmers.

Mme. Blavatsky had already unveiled the problem by declaring that “the whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences, depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.” (The Secret Doctrine 2:149)

“This astral body is the prototype, or design, around which the physical body is built, and which, considered from the point of view of the powers, is the real physical body. Without it the physical body would be nothing but a mass of matter—” 

Our Real Senses

“It is the astral body which contains the organs, or centers from which the organs have been evolved in accord with the needs of the thinker within. The real senses of man are not in the physical but in the astral body. The astral body lasts a little over one lifetime. It does not die when the physical body dies, but is used as a body in the immediate after-death states.”  – Robert Crosbie, (Universal Theosophy)

Thus, most mainstream scientists will not even approach the possibility that consciousness might exist as a separate entity from the physical brain and body, because they believe that mind and thoughts can only arise from activity within the visible physical. A kind of dogmatic religious belief.

Nobel Prize-winning physicist Brian Josephson refers to this position as a “pathological disbelief” within the scientific establishment. Cell biologist Bruce Lipton in his “The Biology of Belief,” describes their position as:

“I wouldn’t believe it
even if it were true!”  

In contrast Theosophy teaches that life and consciousness cannot be created or destroyed. And further that the duration between lifetimes of the same individual immortal consciousness is not just the 15 or 20  minutes of some near-death studies.

Reincarnation into a new physical body varies from a few hours or weeks, up to 1, 500 years or more (or less), depending on the spiritual, mental and emotional development of the Soul, and also especially the age of the person.

“If our physiologists find the cause of dreams and visions in an unconscious preparation for them during the waking hours,” Mme. Blavatsky asks in The Key to Theosophy p. 165, Section 9, “why cannot the same be admitted for the post-mortem dreams? I repeat it: death is sleep.”

Children who have died early, as a rule tend to be reborn quickly, Blavatsky says, as they do not have many current life experiences that would hold them in the after-death dream state. 

The after-death dream lasts, according to the Master K.H. (Notes on Devachan, 249), only “until Karma is satisfied” and  “is proportionate to the unexhausted psychic impulses originating in earth life.” (W. Q. Judge, How Soon do we Reincarnate?)

But, who knows for certain, and how to they know? According to The Secret Doctrine, Summing Up, knowing hidden truths is acquired using the power exercised by initiated Seers, which includes all the great Masters of Life such as Buddha, Krishna, Jesus,Lao Tsu, etc. Blavatsky explained:

“The flashing gaze of those seers has penetrated
into the very kernel of matter, and recorded
the soul of things there.”

Further: “It is the uninterrupted record covering thousands of generations of Seers,” (The Secret Doctrine 1:272), “whose respective experiences were made to test and to verify the traditions passed orally by one early race to another, of the teachings of higher and exalted beings, who watched over the childhood of Humanity.”

(For more info see: How Soon do we Reincarnate?)

Line of many Buddhas.

Now a team of psychologists and medical doctors associated with the Technische University of Berlin announced they had proven, by clinical experimentation, the existence of some form of life after death.

“This astonishing announcement is based on the conclusions of a study using a new type of medically supervised near-death experiences, that allow patients to be clinically dead for almost 20 minutes before being brought back to life.

The Lucid Zone: Everyone Has Their Own

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.”