Spiritual Eyes: Piercing the Illusion of Reality

A musical thought image.

ALL of what we call ‘reality’ may actually be wholly 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 in her article 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 colors.”

“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.” 

• H. P. Blavatsky, Le Phare De L’Inconnu

Disappearing into an illusion.

The Hindu poem, a dialogue between Master Krishna and his disciple Arjuna, in the Bhagavad-Gita, is set metaphorically on a ‘battlefield.’ This chosen venue symbolizes “the war within,” which each of us continually faces, 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.

Real motion or the illusion of motion?

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 of 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.”

Dreaming and Prophecy

“Dreaming and Prophecy” written by Diane Hennacy Powell

SEVERAL years ago I awoke in a panic from a nightmare. I didn’t remember the nightmare, but the first thought that I had upon awakening was, What if it is melanoma? I’m not prone to nightmares, and I wasn’t worried about the new mole that I had seen on the back of my leg the week before. It looked perfectly normal. I had no history of sunburns. In fact, I never spent much time in the sun and barely remember having had tans. No one in my family ever had melanoma. Still, I showed it to my then husband, who was an oncologist.

“That’s not melanoma,” he said looking at my leg. “It’s perfectly round, has uniform color, and is less than a half centimeter.”

“I know,” I said feeling almost foolish for asking. “I went to the same medical school as you. It’s just unusual for me to wake up terrorized.”

I didn’t think about it again, that is until I awoke the following month in a panic. But what if it is melanoma? I sought reassurance from my husband a second time. After the third awakening, I scheduled an appointment.

“It’s not melanoma,” said my internist with certainty, “but if you want me to take it off I will.”

“Please do. At least it will help me sleep better.”

I returned the following week to have the suture removed and to receive the pathology report. My internist looked her usual serene self, so I felt relieved immediately. Upon opening my chart, her expression changed to concern. “Oh…….I’m sorry. I didn’t review this before you arrived. It is melanoma. Fortunately, it is in situ and can be cured by a wider excision. Good thing we caught it early.”

Reports of prophetic or precognitive dreams exist throughout the ages and across almost every culture. The first written record of dreams dates back to 2000 B.C.

About ten days ago, I retired very late. I had been up waiting for important dispatches from the front. I could not have been long in bed when I fell into a slumber, for I was weary. I soon began to dream. There seemed to be a death-like stillness about me. Then I heard subdued sobs, as if a number of people were weeping. I thought I left my bed and wandered downstairs. There the silence was broken by the same pitiful sobbing but the mourners were invisible. I went from room to room; no living person was in sight, but the same mournful sounds of distress met me as I passed along. I saw light in all the rooms; every object was familiar to me; but where were all the people who were grieving as if their hearts would break? I was puzzled and alarmed. What could be the meaning of all this? Determined to find the cause of such a state of things so mysterious and so shocking, I kept on until I arrived at the East room, which I entered. There I met with a sickening surprise. Before me was a catafalque, on which rested a corpse wrapped in funeral vestments. Around it were stationed soldiers who were acting as guards; and there was a throng of people, gazing mournfully upon the corpse, whose face was covered, others weeping pitifully. “Who is dead in the White House?” I demanded of one of the soldiers. “The President” was his answer; “he was killed by an assassin.” Then came a loud burst of grief from the crowd, which woke me from my dream. I slept no more that night; and although it was only a dream, I have been strangely annoyed by it ever since.

Abraham Lincoln, three days before his assassination, as relayed to his wife and a few friends. (Recollections of Abraham Lincoln 1847-1865 by Ward Hill Lamon)

Precognitive dreams have been well documented. For example, Stevenson reported ten cases of precognition of the sinking of the Titanic, eight of which involved dreams. (Morgan Robertson wrote a novel in 1898 called Futility about the wreck of a giant ship named Titan. The similarities between its details and the Titanic disaster 14 years later are striking. The Titan was considered unsinkable, displaced 70,000 tons, was 800 feet long, had 24 lifeboats, carried 3000 passengers, and sunk in April after hitting an iceberg at 25 knots. The Titanic displaced 66,000 tons, was 828 feet long, had 24 lifeboats, almost 3000 passengers, and sunk in April after hitting an iceberg at 23 knots.) Similarly, several Muslims came forth after 9/11 to say that they had precognitive dreams of the events of that day.

Another paranormal dream experience is dream telepathy. The first attempt at a theory to explain dream telepathy was made by Democritus (460-370 B.C.) who postulated that emotionally charged images could be transmitted to dreamers through their pores. It wasn’t until 1882, with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research that serious scientific study of the subject was done. In their historic work, Phantasms of the Living, they reported 149 cases of dream telepathy. A typical story is the following, which corresponded with the event in great detail:

My brother and I were on a journey…I dreamt….I saw father driving in a sledge, followed in another by my brother. They had to pass across-road on which another traveler was driving very fast, also in a sledge with one horse. Father seemed to drive on without observing the other fellow, who would…have driven over father if he had not made his horse rear, so that I saw my father drive under the hoofs of the horse. Every moment I expected the horse to fall down and crush him. I called out, “Father! Father!” and awoke in great fright.

The pattern noted by the researchers was that over half of the dreams concerned death. Another significant number concerned an emergency. In most cases the dreamer and subject of the dream were related or friends. The dreamers had no special psychic abilities before or after the dreams.

Dreams have also been credited with multiple discoveries and inventions. It has been in dreams that many have been able to solve problems that their awake minds could not. One of the most famous is the discovery of the molecular ring structure of benzene by Kekule. He had assumed it was linear until a dream. He described the discovery to a group of scientists as follows:

I turned my chair toward the fire place and sank into a doze. Again the atoms were flitting before my eyes. Smaller groups now kept modestly in the background. My mind’s eye sharpened by repeated visions of a similar sort, now distinguished larger structures of varying forms. Long rows frequently rose together, all in movement, winding and turning like serpents. And see! What was that? One of the serpents seized its own tail and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. I came awake like a flash of lightening. This time also I spent the remainder of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis.

A remarkable discovery by dream was the periodic table. Before 1869 there were only 60 plus elements known. Around thirty elements were still undiscovered, which made it hard to classify the known ones. Dmitri Mendeleev, a Russian chemist, struggled with the problem until one night.

I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into places as required. Awakening I immediately wrote it down on a piece of paper. Only in one place did a correction later seem necessary.

The resulting table was so accurate that it enabled prediction of the properties of elements that were yet to be discovered.

Otto Leowi had a hunch about the nature of nerve transmission in 1903, but forgot about it until a dream in 1920.

The night before Easter Sunday of that year, I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at six o’ clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at three o’ clock the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered seventeen years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the nocturnal design…If I had carefully considered it (the design) in daytime, I would undoubtedly have rejected the kind of experiment I performed…It was good fortune that at the time of the hunch I did not think but acted.

A dream also assisted the invention of the sewing machine. Elias Howe was trying to invent a lock-stitch sewing machine, but was stuck on how to thread the needle until a dream he had in 1844. He dreamt that he had been captured by dark-skinned painted savages who were taking him to a place for execution. As he shook with fear, he noticed that the spears had eye-shaped holes in their heads. He awoke excited with the idea of pointed needles with eye-shaped holes in the front.

Because people who otherwise report no psychic abilities have frequently reported paranormal dreams, looking at the neurocircuitry involved in dreaming may provide clues as to the neurocircuitry involved in the paranormal. Dreams have their source in the amygdala, hippocampus, and inferior temporal lobe. And although brainstem nuclei are involved, the amygdala may trigger the first phase of dreaming (REM or Rapid Eye Movement sleep). And thus, we see the same structures involved in dreaming as we do in mystical states. It would make sense for psychic abilities to be found here as well.

• Diane Hennacy Powell

Dreaming and Prophecy
Human consciousness, Spirituality, Telepathy

(Published with permission)

http://dianehennacypowell.com/

Diane Powell, M.D. is an author, public speaker, researcher and practicing psychiatrist. She has spoken in venues that vary from international scientific conferences to news and talk shows, including Dr. Phil. Her education has been both broad and deep. She feels honored to have trained and worked with some of the best minds of the century, including several Nobel laureates.

∞

 

God is Love, God is Life

Born Again

MAINSTREAM science creates an almost insurmountable obstacle to understanding the real nature of life because of one persistent belief.

They steadfastly refuse to recognize life as a distinct force, and in so doing our modern science blocks all understanding of the nature of reality.

“The greatest problem of philosophy, is the physical and substantial nature of life,” H. P. Blavatsky declared:

“It is its independent nature, which is denied by modern science — because that science is unable to comprehend it.”

“The reincarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive,” Blavatsky insisted, “that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body.”

(The Secret Doctrine 1:238)

Nevermind: “modern science’s definition of life still rests on  Herbert Spencer’s old definition, one that describes the phenomenon, but gives no hint of its real cause.” 

(“Moxon’s Master” – Ambrose Bierce)

What is Life?

“Life is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes,” Spencer insisted:

“both simultaneous and successive in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.”

Spencer’s assertion is maintained as the consensus view because “most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical,” says the biocentrist Dr. Robert Lanza … concluding, crucially: “without the other side, the living.”

The Anthropic Principle

Dr. Lanza details his frontier science view in his book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.

He shows that his Biocentrism — an extension of the Anthropic Principle, described by the Einstein disciple physicist John Wheeler — asserts a view of life incompatible with modern materialism.

“The Anthropic Principle was proposed in Poland in 1973, during a special two-week series of synopsia commemorating Copernicus’ 500th birthday,” a physics website explains:

“It was proposed by Brandon Carter, who had the audacity to proclaim that humanity did indeed hold a special place in the Universe, an assertion that is the exact opposite of Copernicus’ now universally accepted theory.”

Biocentric

The premise of Biocentrism is, with important modifications, asserts an intelligent hierarchical structure to nature, is also a central premise of Theosophy.

The ancients held that the universe is created by life, and not the other way around.

“The point in the hitherto immaculate Disk, Space and Eternity … denotes the dawn of differentiation,” H. P. Blavatsky explains at the outset of The Secret Doctrine (Vol. 1, Pg. 1).

“It is the Point in the Mundane Egg [see Wikipedia “World Egg”] … the germ within the latter which will become the Universe, the all, the boundless, periodical Kosmos, this germ being latent and active, periodically and by turns.”

The Milky Way Galaxy

“The one circle is divine Unity, from which all proceeds, whither all returns. Its circumference — a forcibly limited symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind — indicates the abstract, ever incognisable presence, and its plane, the Universal Soul, although the two are one.”

Psychic Abilities Common to Everyone

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.