Animal Souls, the Heart of Good

Cow and Girl Bonding

BETWEEN humanity and Nature, in a perfect world, mutual peace and harmony ought to always reign.

Mutual respect and universal compassion would be an accepted norm between humans and all beings in nature.

To those most mistreated of all, our helpless farm animals, this principle most urgently applies.

To this point, the keynote of Mme. H. P. Blavatsky’s worldview was the just and moral treatment of all beings in nature.

This principle was and is the First Object of the Theosophical  Movement, Universal Brotherhood.

Agreeably with Emerson, the foundational teaching of Theosophy as expressed in The Secret Doctrine, is “the fundamental identity of all Souls with the Universal Over-Soul.”  An acclaimed essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson “The Oversoul” was first published in 1841. With the human soul as its overriding subject, several general themes are treated:

“(1) the existence and nature of the human soul; (2) the relationship between the soul and the personal ego; (3) the relationship of one human soul to another; and (4) the relationship of the human soul to God.

Emerson

“Influence of Eastern religions, including Vedantism, is plainly evident, but the essay also develops ideas long present in the Western tradition, e.g., in the works of Plato, Plutarch, and Neoplatonists like Plotinus and Proclus – all of whose writings Emerson read extensively throughout his career.” (Wikipedia)

Plus, in The Secret Doctrine (Summing Up #5), the teaching that “everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious,” and endowed

with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

Mme. Blavatsky was adamant in opposing animal cruelty. She spoke out forcefully against sport hunting of foxes, birds and big game, and most strongly against vivisection, animals tortured in biological experiments. 

Cruel Animal Testing

Mme. Blavatsky’s words were penned over 70 years before the widespread animal testing in universities and commercial laboratories. Yet now, animal testing has been cited in impartial studies as being scientifically unnecessary.

“By 1996, ‘cruelty-free’ shopping had become popular, but it was also confusing, sometimes misleading, and ultimately frustrating,” according to the Coalition for Consumer Information on Cosmetics (CCIC) — eight national animal protection groups banded together.

“If these humble lines could [also] make a few readers seriously turn their thoughts to all the horrors of vivisection,” Blavatsky pleaded, “the writer would be content.”

Animal Experiments

“Other permanent tortures, daily inflicted on the poor brutes, will” — Mme. Blavatsky predicted in her article Have Animals Souls? — “after calling forth an outburst from society generally, force all Governments to put an end to those barbarous and shameful practices.“

“Man is endowed with reason, the infant with instinct, and the young animal shows more of both than the child.”

♥

Healing Miracles of Mind, Intention and Belief

In the Matrix

MAINSTREAM science looking for the source of consciousness, insist its origin must be located in the physical brain.

They are certain that all cognition arises from the activity of neurons attached to specific structures, which have fixed locations.

Yet many credible scientific researchers today are unconvinced, and dispute these assumptions.

Such open minded investigators are willing to pursue truth wherever it leads, even to evidence that consciousness is a independent entity from the physical structures through which it manifests.

But because research findings on this question upset established assumptions, it is ignored by mainstream science.

We live in an age of prejudice, dissimulation and paradox, wherein, like dry leaves caught in a whirlpool, we are tossed helpless, hither and thither, ever struggling between our honest convictions and fear of that cruelest of tyrants—PUBLIC OPINION.

-H. P. Blavatsky, A Paradoxical World

Leaves in the wind.

Frontier investigators risk being minimized and shunned by their peers—and their careers stalled as funding sources dry up.

Ω

Yet, poised fearlessly at the cutting edge of psi research are scientific organizations such as the respected Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Petaluma, California, and the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek. These researchers, and others, like NES energy medicine, are willing to take a leap in pursuit of the fast-moving “soul of things.”

Such investigations were formerly the exclusive precinct of canny ancient intuitives and seers. Today there are numerous qualified, sincere scientific investigators on the hunt for answers to the puzzling questions of consciousness that stymie mainstream science.

Buddha under the Bo Tree

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

“The genuine texts of the Upanishads treat of and expound the secret and mystic meaning of the Vedic texts. They speak of the origin of the Universe, the nature of Deity, and of Spirit and Soul, as also of the metaphysical connection of mind and matter. In a few words: They contain the beginning and the end of all human knowledge, but they have now ceased to reveal it, since the day of Buddha. . . . One thing in them — and this in all the Upanishads — invariably and constantly points to their ancient origin.”

Materialistic science still “believes not in the ‘soul of things,'” Mme. Blavatsky declared forcefully in The Secret Doctrine 1:272.  

Now all this may be changing . . .

The Rise and Fall of the Third Eye

New Universe Awakening

THEOSOPHY teaches the progressive development of everything, “worlds as well as atoms,” according to The Secret Doctrine.

This “stupendous development,” say the ancient sages, “has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.”

To them, our ‘Universe’ is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes.”

In this view, each individual cosmos, or single human life, is the effect of its predecessor. Under karmic law, “a cause as regards its successor.” 

(The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, p. 43)

If lifetimes and universes are analogous to schools, then the classrooms are stages of consciousness, pushing us to ever greater self-awareness and self-development — only if we are wise enough to pursue the path offered.

Thus our lives are complex creations, a series of “progressive awakenings,” advanced or retarded drop by drop, by our individual, family, racial, national and global karma.

Everyone, in this view, settles into his or her own unique rhythm in which a lifetime meditation reflects a mixture of past karma, and present choices.

We all must be then at slightly differing points on an ascending evolutionary arc, paying off old debts, making new ones — pushing forward or slipping back, and the mind thus ever awakens to newer realities.

Drop by Drop

The choices that shape our character each lifetime, are self-chosen—compounded of physical, sensory, emotional, mental, psychic and spiritual energies.

The ancient Egyptian after death judgement, weighed symbolically a person’s heart against the “feather of truth.”

The challenges of life, the occult doctrine notes, are the result of our being grounded in a personal level of consciousness, a limited world view. The Secret Doctrine 1:39-40 teaches that “whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities.”

Progressive Awakenings

“Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities.” 

Weighing the Heart against the Feather of Truth

“Only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from delusions.”

“As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities.

… 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’—”

(The Secret Doctrine 1:40)

The Web of Life: A Conscious Universe, Part 2

Paracelsus

PARACELSUS was an alchemist and practicing astrologer. For him, the Sun of our universe corresponded to its Heart — the visible and invisible life giver and sustainer of the world.

The human heart or of any being, according to Theosophy, directly corresponds to the Sun.

The heart emanates the largest and strongest field in the body, just as the Sun does in its “body” – our Universe.

“The real substance of the concealed (Sun) is a nucleus of Mother substance,” the secret commentary explains:- “It is the heart and the matrix of all the living and existing Forces in our solar universe. It is the Kernel from which proceed to spread on their cyclic journeys all the powers:

“…that set in action the atoms in their functional duties, and the focus within which they again meet in their SEVENTH ESSENCE every eleventh year.”

The Commentary further teaches that “the Sun is the store-house of Vital Force, which is the Noumenon of Electricity — and “it is from its mysterious, never-to-be-fathomed depths, “…that issue those life currents which thrill through Space, as through the organisms of every living thing on Earth.”

The Web of Life: A Conscious Universe, Part 1

My Conscious Universe

THE acceptance of new ideas in Science “follows a predictable, four-stage sequence,” says the Institute of Noetic Sciences chief scientist Dr. Dean Radin, PhD.

In an excerpt from Chapter 1 of his landmark work “The Conscious Universe,” Dr. Radin describes the four progressive stages of discovery and acceptance in science.

“In Stage 1 skeptics confidently proclaim that the idea is impossible because it violates the Laws of Science. This stage can last from years to centuries, depending on how much the idea challenges conventional wisdom.

“In Stage 2 skeptics reluctantly concede that the idea is possible, but it is not very interesting and the claimed effects are extremely weak.

“Stage 3 begins when the mainstream realizes that the idea is not only important, but its effects are much stronger and more pervasive than previously imagined.”

“Stage 4 is achieved when the same critics who used to disavow any interest in the idea begin to proclaim that they thought of it first. Eventually, no one remembers that the idea was once considered a dangerous heresy.”

“The Conscious Universe,” Dr. Dean Radin

• Dean Radin, PhD, Chief Scientist at the
  INSTITUTE OF NOETIC SCIENCES (IONS)

The Convergence of
Science and Spirituality

“The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form of Divine revelation and scientific authority.”  – H. P. Blavatsky, What is Truth?

“Truth” by Warner Highsmith, bronze door at main entrance of the Library of Congress.

“Where then is even relative truth to be found? If, so far back as the century of Democritus, she appeared to him under the form of a goddess lying at the very bottom of a well, so deep that it gave but little hope for her release.

“Under the present circumstances we have a certain right to believe her hidden, at least, as far off as the ever invisible dark side of the moon. This is why, perhaps, all the votaries of hidden truths are forthwith Set down as lunatics.” 

– H. P. Blavatsky, “What is Truth?”

The Third Eye

According to 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”

The renegade truth seeking cosmologists David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill,  protagonists of  the Electric Universe idea (The Thunderbolts Project) declare: “There are no isolated islands in an electric universe, from the smallest particle to the largest galactic formation.” They maintain further, agreeable to H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, thatThe Secret Doc, that

Web of Life

“A web of electrical circuitry connects and unifies all of nature, organizing galaxies, energizing stars, giving birth to planets.”

Talbott and Thornhill assert, controversially, that “this electric web is controlling weather and animating biological organisms.” 

Astronomers like to believe the Sun is no more than a glowing nuclear furnace. That “galaxies are clouds of hydrogen gas and intergalactic dust,” Thunderbolts Project scientist Stephen Smith says in his article The Filamentary Firmament.   That they were all “assembled by gravity until they coalesced into swarms of glowing thermonuclear fires.”

“The Electric Universe theory” disagrees with this standard model, Smith says, and “is opposed to the idea of galaxies condensed from cold, inert hydrogen.”

Plasma Globe

Is The Sun Conscious?

“When a medieval person looked at the sky they looked at a living universe, filled with the presence of God, every star was a living, intelligent being. The mechanistic revolution replaced that with the idea that everything is a machine. 

“What if these electrical patterns in the Sun are an interface with the Sun’s mind? What if the Sun thinks? As soon as you raise that question you realize it is an utterly taboo subject. You’re not allowed to ask that question.  It’s simply off limits.”  – Rupert Sheldrake, PhD

Electric Sun

“When you look into the blue sky on a sunny day do you glimpse a ball of nuclear fire or, as the London poet and mystic, William Blake, reported, the heavenly host singing God’s praises?

“It’s an old question, revived today by the notion of panpsychism which suggests that the sun might in some way be considered conscious.”  

– Rupert Sheldrake, (Is Consciousness Fundamental?)

“Matter, after all, is nothing else than the sequence of our own states of consciousness, and Spirit an idea of psychic intuition.”

– H. P. Blavatsky, (The Secret Doctrine 1:542)

Consciousness is Universal

Plasma is not Gravity

“Strands of magnetically confined plasma can be seen throughout the cosmos,” Smith argues: “In an Electric Universe, every body in the Solar System, along with every star and galaxy, is charged with electricity and exists within a plasma environment.”

Electric Universe

Likewise, The Secret Doctrine establishes an electric universe. And that our Sun,  driven by electricity and magnetism and other mysterious conscious forces,  like all Suns, is the true heart of the solar system.

Radically at odds with modern cosmologists, Blavatsky  also considered gravity a secondary terrestrial law, an effect of the former rather than a cause.

“The law of gravitation has no right
to be referred to as an universal law.” 

“They call Gravity a law, a cause in itself. We call the forces acting under that name effects, and very secondary effects, too. One day it will be found that the scientific hypothesis does not answer after all.”

The Secret Doctrine  (1:490-498)

Plasma in Space

“Today, nothing is more important to the future and credibility of science than liberation from the gravity-driven universe,” say Talbott and Thornhill: “A mistaken supposition has not only prevented intelligent and sincere investigators from seeing what would otherwise be obvious, it has bred indifference to possibilities that could have inspired the sciences for decades.”

My Three Brains

Laurence Olivier in “Hamlet”

THOUGHT and consciousness itself is assumed by most neuroanatomists to be created by and located entirely in the physical brain, neatly tucked away inside our skulls.

This insistent worldview is only reinforced by our body language when we always describe thinking by pointing to our heads.

But native cultures never engaged in such assumptions. The traditional Native American view always considered the heart to be the center of thought and motive, pointing to it when referring to thinking.

Then there are those familiar ‘gut-feelings’ we often have. Those compelling instincts, studies show, are more often than not, intuitional signals, even so far as foretelling of some future event. “Two brains may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but they make literal and evolutionary sense,” NY Times writer Harriet Brown says. But three brains? That does seem a stretch.

Yet in Theosophy brains can number into the billions. Every cell and organ has a consciousness of its own. The physical heart  also functions as a powerful “brain.”

As stated in The Secret Doctrine (1:274): “Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

Universal Atom

And in her article “Kosmic Mind” H. P. Blavatsky wrote:  There is “consciousness in every universal atom . . . every atom is a little universe in itself; and every organ and cell in the human body is endowed with a brain of its own, with memory, therefore, experience and discriminative powers.”

“Groundbreaking research in the field of neurocardiology has established that the heart is a sensory organ and a sophisticated information encoding and processing center, with an extensive intrinsic nervous system sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a “heart brain.” (Neurocardiology-Anatomical and Functional Principles, by J. Andrew Armour, M.D., Ph.D.)

“Heart-Brain”

Confirming this triune constitution Mme. Blavatsky explained “there exists in Nature a triple evolutionary scheme . . . or rather three separate schemes of evolution, which in our system are inextricably interwoven and inter-blended at every point. These are the Monadic (or spiritual), the intellectual, and the physical evolutions. . . . Each of these three systems has its own laws.” [Corresponding to heart, brain and gut] (The Secret Doctrine 1:181).

[Like the heart], “the enteric nervous system [the gut] must assess conditions, decide on a course of action and initiate a reflex.  And does all this on its own, with little help from the central nervous system.”

Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung

Undeterred, most neuroscientists continue to diligently barrel along cataloging what they insist are ‘the neural correlates of consciousness’ in the brain, and seem determined to prove that these neurons are the sole authors of our thoughts and feelings, isolated exclusively in the fatty workshop between our ears.

This consensus view dictates that when we die everything we are or learned disappears forever — including our soul and our individual ‘I am I’ consciousness. But this reductionist view of mind and consciousness is losing favor with many research scientists on the leading edge today, and may be about to radically change.