Child Play
THE occultist and spiritual co-founder of the Theosophical Movement, Helena Blavatsky, was a tireless advocate of a wide range of social justice issues that are still conflicting society today.
Women’s rights, early childhood education, animal cruelty, environmentalism, industrial materialism, were some of the many concerns close to her heart.
Critical of early childhood education, and of the”infusion of (useless) intelligence,” Blavatsky declared:
“You have opened a subject on which we Theosophists feel deeply.”
A Washington Post article: “Report debunks ‘earlier is better’ academic instruction for young children,” confirms Mme. Blavatsky’s strong position on early childhood academics.
The report, written by Lilian G. Katz, professor emerita of early childhood education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, titled “Lively Minds: Distinctions between academic versus intellectual goals for young children,” offers a new way to look at what is appropriate in early childhood education.
Happy Laughing Kids
Professor Katz, sounding like a modern Helena Blavatsky, says that “intellectual dispositions” of young children may actually be “weakened or even damaged by excessive and premature formal instruction.”
They are “not likely to be strengthened by many of the mindless, trivial if not banal activities frequently offered in child care, preschool and kindergarten programs.”
Mme. Blavatsky insisted in her Key to Theosophy that children should be “placed daily in a bright, clean school-room hung with pictures, and often gay with flowers.”
© The Washington Post
“They should be taught ‘to be clean, gentle, orderly … learn to sing and to play; have toys that awaken its intelligence; learn to use its fingers deftly; is spoken to with a smile instead of a frown’ …
“All this humanises the children,” she wrote, “arouses their brains, and renders them susceptible to intellectual and moral influences. The schools are not all they might be and ought to be …”
And of the schools she complained: “your system deserves the worst one can say of it.” (Nothing much has changed!) 😦
A Manifesto for Play
“We have an antiquated education system that has little changed for 100 years, that values rote learning, memorization and standardization, and devalues self-expression, self-exploration, questioning, creativity and play. It’s a crap system.”
An Aquarian Humanity
“The 5,000 years of the Kaliyug cycle; again the Messianic cycle of the Samaritan (also Kabalistic) Jews of the man connected with Pisces (Ichthys or ‘Fish-man’ Dag). It is a cycle, historic and not very long, but very occult, lasting about 2,155 solar years, but having a true significance only when computed by lunar months.
“It occurred 2410 and 255 B.C., or when the equinox entered into the sign of the Ram, and again into that of Pisces. When it enters, in a few years, the sign of Aquarius, psychologists will have some extra work to do, and the psychic idiosyncrasies of humanity will enter on a great change.”
– H. P. Blavatsky, The Esoteric Character of the Gospels
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A Child’s Insight
Jaime Primak Sullivan uploaded a new video this month about her daughter ‘Charlie.’ “I am freaking out – I can’t even find words. I don’t know what to think or say or do – there is no way Charlie could know this. My grandmother called me this name growing up – there is NO WAY Charlie could know. I am shaking. Trying to make sense of what happened last night. … Guys – this is crazy!”
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Training the Inner Senses
“Children should above all be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves. 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.
“We would endeavour to deal with each child as a unit, and to 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. We should aim at creating free men and women, free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects, and above all things, unselfish. And we believe that much if not all of this could be obtained by proper and truly theosophical education.”
– H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, Section 13, Theosophy and Education
You raise me up.
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Life, Death & Love
“We are with those whom we have lost in material form, and far, far nearer to them now, than when they were alive. And it is not only in fancy […] as some may imagine, but in reality. For pure divine love is not merely the blossom of a human heart, but has its roots in eternity.
Spiritual Love
“Spiritual holy love is immortal, and Karma brings sooner or later all those who loved each other with such a spiritual affection to incarnate once more in the same family group. Again we say that
“love beyond the grave, illusion though you may call it, has a magic and divine potency which reacts on the living.”
“A mother’s Ego filled with love for [her] . . . children [she] sees . . . living a life of happiness, as real to it as when on earth – that love will always be felt by the children in flesh.
Family Ties
It will manifest in their dreams, and often in various events – in providential protections and escapes,
“for love is a strong shield, and is not
limited by space or time.”
“As with this [heaven resting] “mother,” so with the rest of human relationships and attachments, save the purely selfish or material. Analogy will suggest to you the rest.”
– H. P. Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy, p. 150
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