Our Astral Sight, Piercing the Reality of Illusion

Musical Thought Form

ALL of what we call ‘reality’ may actually be subjective, and beholden to our powers of perception, according to Theosophy.

“Every one of us possesses the faculty, the interior sense, that is known by the name of intuition,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote (The Beacon-Light of the Unknown), “but how rare are those who know how to develop it!

“It is, however, only by the aid of this faculty that men can ever see things in their true colours.”

“It is an instinct of the soul, which grows in us in proportion to the employment we give it, and which helps us to perceive and understand the realities of things with far more certainty than can the simple use of our senses and exercise of our reason.”

“What are called good sense and logic enable us to see only the appearances of things, that which is evident to every one.

“The instinct of which I speak, being a projection of our perceptive consciousness, a projection which acts from the subjective to the objective, and not vice versa, awakens in us spiritual senses and power to act; these senses assimilate to themselves the essence of the object or of the action under examination, and represent it to us as it really is, not as it appears to our physical senses and to our cold reason.” 

(The Beacon-Light of the Unknown)

Disappearing into the illusion.

The Hindu poem, a dialogue between the Master Krishna and his disciple Arjuna, the Bhagavad-Gita, is set metaphorically on a ‘battlefield.’ This venue symbolizes “the war within,” which each of us continually face, and must eventually wage. (Blavatsky Theosophy)

In Chapter 11, Krishna challenges Arjuna to exercise his spiritual sight in a specially induced vision of “the Divine Form as including all forms.” To enforce the lesson, and in answer to Arjuna’s request, Krishna temporarily awakens his “Divine Eye.” The rest is history!

Read online:

The Bhagavad-Gita, Chapter 11,
The Vision of the Divine Form as Including All Forms

Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield.

Temporary Illusions

“Gautama, the Buddha, only remained in solitude long enough to enable him to arrive at the truth, which he devoted himself from that time on to promulgate, begging his bread, and living for humanity.”

If, in the words of the dying Buddha, ‘all compounds are perishable,’ then all collections of atoms must be considered but temporary ‘illusions.’

They are such, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:329), because they are the very personal creations “of the perceiving Ego.” But this must not be considered a solipsistic argument. If we only knew how to get past our five senses we might very well contact the underlying ‘reality’ of physical things.

My Universe

The term “Ego” here must ultimately refer to a personal state, and as such must always relate to specific ‘states’ of consciousness.  But this is only from our plane of perception. According to The Secret Doctrine (1:330), once we have gotten past that plane, and scaled the “peak of Omniscience,” the “knowledge of things-in-themselves” is immediately available to us.

The appearance of Motion, real or illusion?

One of the best ways to describe what Theosophy is, arts reporter Ali Snow remarked on a Utah Public Radio show, “is to think of it as a kind of fusion of religion and science.”

“A desire to prove or to explore some of the mystical forces that made religion work and make the spiritual world work.”

A striking example of this kind of fusion is H. P. Blavatsky’s description how “the sense of sound is the first thing that manifests itself in the universe … in  correspondence with colors or sight.”

Colors and Sound

About this sensory synesthetic power Blavatsky wrote:

“If you could only see clairvoyantly a person playing a piano, you would see the sound as plainly as you hear it.”

“You can even put cotton in your ears—you will see the sound and every little note and modulation that you could not do otherwise.”

Synesthesia

Making reference to this sensory merging (known today as “synesthesia”) she explained: “One would merge into the other. You can taste sound, if you like, too. There sounds which are exceedingly acid, and there are sounds which are exceedingly sweet, and bitter, and all the scale of taste, in fact.” 

“There is no nonsense, I say it seriously, and you will find it so if you want to know about the super-physical senses.”

(The Secret Doctrine Dialogues p. 86)

Alexander Scriabin, a Russian pianist and composer who was deeply influenced by Theosophy, visualized a grand magnum opus which he titled “Mysterium.”

Click the link here or the link below to listen to Nora Eccles, Harrison Museum of Art as three curators describe the exhibit, Painting Music: Enchanted Modernities, and who gives us a personalized tour of the Theosophy promoted power (click below the photo):

Synesthete Elisabeth Sulser

Click to start below:

This interesting phenomenon is demonstrated practically by the multiple senses of a unique synesthete from Zurich, Switzerland named Elizabeth Sulser. A psi investigator writes:

“Her particular combination of senses is so unique that she is the only person in the world documented to have it.”

Seeing the Past, Present and Future Now

Psychic and Spiritual Visions

FUTURE time, according to Theosophy, is included in both past and present time. With this assertion The Secret Doctrine anticipated modern quantum theories and even what might come — modern Theosophy is still way ‘ahead of the curve.’

An article in New Scientist this month is titled “Why now doesn’t exist, and other strange facts about time” takes us closer to Mme. Blavatsky’s assertions.

Quoting the American Theoretical Physicist John Wheeler’s statement ‘Time is what prevents everything happening at once,’ “… is as fair a summary of what time does as any other – especially given that our hunt for the most basic ingredients of reality (see “Essence of reality: Hunting the universe’s most basic ingredient”) has left us a trifle muddled about its status.”

“One culprit was Einstein, whose theory of general relativity merged time with space. But even before him, out understanding of the laws of physics worked the same regardless of whether you travel forwards or backwards in time. That just doesn’t tally with our experience. So what is time really?”

Albert Einstein

“Einstein’s relativity tells us that time results from gravity warping the fabric of reality – resulting in a picture that is weirdly at odds with our experience.”

With her usual stunning clarity H. P. Blavatsky asserted (The Secret Doctrine 1:37) that “Time is only an illusion,” and even endowing atoms with consciousness. Yet she insisted that Time as we know it is only “produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration —

and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced.”  

H. P. Blavatsky

“The real person or thing,” she maintained, “does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its appearance in the material form to its disappearance from the earth.

“It is these ‘sum-totals’ that exist from eternity in the ‘future’, and pass by degrees through matter, to exist for eternity in the ‘past’.” 

Seeing the Past, Present and Future

One of Mme. Blavatsky’s occult teachers, one of the two adept co-authors of The Secret Doctrine declared: “I feel even irritated at having to use these three clumsy words — past, present and future!  Miserable concepts of the objective phases of the Subjective Whole, they are about as ill adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving.”

(Letter 8, The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett)

Time Traveler

Electric and magnetic affinities are generated, occult teachers say, whenever there is physical touch, the sound of a voice, or even seeing or looking. Every action we take carries information about us and the life around us, a kind of psychic body language. We also call them ‘vibes’ – and clearly they can be ‘good’ or ‘bad.’

The invisible transfer of information between persons, animals, trees, bacteria and brain neurons, is still largely a mystery. Even birds and bees do it. The general term today is “psi,” coined from parapsychology, and usually refers to telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception currently unexplained. It is important to point out that

Sister and Brother

Mme. Blavatsky with her Adept Teachers authorized Three Objects of the Theosophical Society, of which the Third included study of  this mysterious phenomena.

Most importantly, The First Object of the Theosophical Society was “to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity.” This first fundamental idea was further explored in The Key to Theosophy as including universal “Sisterhood:”

“… it is only by all men becoming brothers and all women sisters, and by all practising in their daily lives true brotherhood and true sisterhood, that the real human solidarity, which lies at the root of the elevation of the race, can ever be attained.

“It is this action and interaction, this true brotherhood and sisterhood, in which each shall live for all and all for each, which is one of the fundamental Theosophical principles that every Theosophist should be bound, not only to teach, but to carry out in his or her individual life.”

The Second Object is stated as “the study of Aryan and other Scriptures, of the World’s religion and sciences etc.” These two have been preserved intact by almost all Theosophical groups.

“Buffy” Sarah Michelle Gellar

The original Third Object was clearly stated by H. P. Blavatsky in The Key to Theosophy, Section 3, published in 1889, and reads:

“To investigate the hidden mysteries of Nature under every aspect possible, and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man especially.”

Despite the Founder’s unambiguous wording, some theosophical revisionists have chosen to unilaterally remove both the words ‘psychic” and “spiritual” from this Third Object. As a result of this unauthorized tinkering only a timid, and watered-down version of the original Third Object is all the public sees today.  How could this happen with a subject that pervades every major textbook the Teachers wrote, and hundreds of original articles?

Synesthesia: The Boy with the Incredible Brain

Daniel Tammet

THERE is an incredible story of an out of the ordinary human being Daniel Tammet.  A thirty-something with extraordinary mental abilities!

Tammet is one of fewer than a hundred “prodigious savants” according to Dr. Darold Treffert, the world’s leading researcher in the study of savant syndrome. (See:Wikipedia)

He can do calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and learn a language in a week. Tammet holds the European record for reciting pi from memory to 22,514 digits in five hours and nine minutes on 14 March 2004.

Tammet has reportedly learned ten languages, including Romanian, Gaelic, Welsh, and Icelandic that he learned in a week for a TV documentary.

He also met with the world famous  “megasavant,” Kim Peek (November 11, 1951 – December 19, 2009), the man who inspired Dustin Hoffman’s character in the Oscar winning film “Rain Man”.

Below is the complete original 47 min. documentary which follows Daniel Tammet as he travels to America to meet the scientists who are convinced he may hold the key to unlocking similar abilities in others.

“The brain is only the focus through which the forces and thoughts are centralised that are continually coming in through the solar plexus of the heart. Many such thoughts, therefore, are lost, just as millions of seeds in nature are lost. It behooves to study them and to guard them when there…”

 – William Q. Judge
Letters That Have Helped Me II, Letter 8.

Life, Light and the Pursuit of Consciousness

ALWAYS poised to advocate for the existence of an invisible conscious world within the visible physical world, the writer of The Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky, was clearly adamant.

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

Underlying nature is a universal and intelligent medium, a matrix supporting the visible physical world. This “invisible physical” was critical to understanding the The Secret Doctrine and the Occult Sciences it presented.

Recently a New Scientist article titled “We’ve Seen a Thought: The Secret Seven-Dimensional Life of Your Mind” proposed that “consciousness may itself be a shadow of a higher-dimensional structure” — i.e. the Theosophical principle of Universal Mind.

Mirroring Kosmic Mind

More intriguing in a recent post by journalist Kari Robinson in Hackspirit.net titled “Scientists Discover Biophotons In The Brain That Could Hint Our Consciousness is Directly Linked to Light!” she writes that “one of the most exciting implications the discovery that

our brains can produce light gives, is that maybe our consciousness and spirit are not contained within our bodies. This implication is completely overlooked by scientists.”

The Double Slit Mystery

“Quantum entanglement says that 2 entangled photons react if one of the photons is affected no matter where the other photon is in The Universe without any delay. This can explain the phenomenon of why the state of a photon is affected simply by consciously observing it, as it is proven in many quantum experiments.

“Maybe our observation communicates something through our biophotons with the photon that is being observed, in a similar fashion as quantum entanglement, like light is just one unified substance that is scattered throughout our Universe and affected through each light particle.”

Ancient Thought in Modern Dress

(H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:579)

“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life,” Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine 1:579, a critical teaching. “Both are electricity  — the life principle, the anima mundi  [The world soul] pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things.

“Light is the great Protean magician . . . and its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling electric bosom, spring matter and spirit. 

Entangled Photons

“Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its primordial point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies.

“It was at the ray of this First mother, one in three, that ‘God,’ according to Plato, lighted a fire which we now call the sun,” and which is not the cause of either light or heat, but merely the focus, or, as we might say, the lens, by which the rays of the primordial light become materialized, are concentrate upon our Solar System, and produce all the correlations of forces.” 

A structure of stars and light.

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.”

Magnetic Fields

“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.” 

Everything in Nature
is Conscious

“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.

Healing Stones

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

“The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards. As above so it is below, as in heaven so on earth; and man — the microcosm and miniature copy of the macrocosm — is the living witness to this Universal Law, and to the mode of its action.”

The Secret Doctrine 1:274

Is The Sun Conscious?

“It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”

– Eugene Wigner, theoretical physicist  and mathematician. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.

“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.” 

– H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:274

The Non-Physical is Real

Scientists have been urging the mainstream scientific community, which today is littered with scientific fraud and industry influence as well as invention secrecy, to open up to a broader view regarding the true nature of our reality.

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade that in all of the previous centuries of its existence.”

– Nikola Tesla

Physicists Say Consciousness Should be Considered a State of Matter: The “Non Physical” is Real. 

Read: Collective Evolution

The Astral Matrix

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.

The Secret Doctrine

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.

Easter Equinox: Secrets of the Christ Sun

“Ostara” by Helena Nelson-Reed

THERE would be no glorious bursting forth of nature at Easter-time without the cyclic journey of the Sun.

The Sun-cycle ushers springtime into the world above the equator, and the ancients regarded this as the reincarnation season of the year.

The celebration of Ēoestre or Ostara is an old pagan festival, and is the origin of the word Easter.

She is the goddess who symbolized the dawn, the warm Spring sun, the resurrection of Spirit in Earth, and much more.

“Just as there is a real Christmas—the time of winter solstice, explains the Theosophy School text, The Eternal Verities, The Easter Lesson (251):—

“there is a real Easter, a Sun-cycle, the time of the Vernal Equinox.”

Illumination of Earth by the Sun on the day of an equinox.

In the legend, when the beautiful Goddess Ēoestre saw all this wonderful work of hers, she said: “Hereafter, every year I will have one day called Easter, after me. That day, all shall celebrate the awakening of Life from its winter sleep. Then shall all people be joyous and glad, and give each other eggs as gifts,

for the Egg shall be my symbol. So it is fitting, for all Life is first within the egg.”

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