Reincarnation: How Rebirth Works

Soul Light

REINCARNATION is “one of the most important issues faced by philosophy, religion and science that have very significant implications to the understanding of human life,” says the Reincarnation Research website.

Theosophy agrees. “Reincarnation used to be a subject confined to religion. Since the 20th century, however, the inquiry has moved into the field of science.

This comes about “as a result of ground-breaking researches about people, particularly children, whose memories of previous lives have been validated by independent investigations,” the site reports.

“Many of these cases involved birthmarks or physical characteristics at birth that matched the manner of death of the claimed previous life. Some of them also could speak an unlearned language but which corresponded to the language learned in the claimed previous life.

“The concept of reincarnation, however, goes against the mainstream doctrines of a number of major religions. This has created conflicts and has led to raging debates on the pros and cons of reincarnation.”

Butterfly Girl

H. P. Blavatsky and her Adept Teachers, Founders  of the modern Theosophical Movement, were fully committed to the  prime directive of introducing Western civilization to the the twin Eastern doctrines of Reincarnation and Karma.

The importance of their directive can be seen in H. P. Blavatsky’s Letter 3 to the 4th Annual American Convention in April, 1890, where she declared:

We are outwardly creatures of but a day; within we are eternal. Learn, then, well the doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation, and teach, practice, promulgate that system of life and thought which alone can save the coming races. 

(H. P. Blavatsky, April 27-28, 1890)

Evidence of an Immortal Mind in Man and Nature

In the Matrix

MAINSTREAM science looking for the source of consciousness insists its origin has to be generated in the physical brain.

Most neuroscientists agree that all cognition arises from the activity of neurons attached to specific structures, which have fixed brain locations.

Yet many credible scientific researchers today are unconvinced and dispute these biased mainstream materialistic assumptions.

Open-minded investigators are willing to pursue truth wherever it leads, even exploring evidence that mind and its corresponding consciousness is a living entity independent of the physical structures through which it manifests.

But because research findings on this question upset established assumptions, it is frequently ignored by mainstream science. H. P. Blavatsky found the same evidence in her own era declaring:

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

Caught in a whirlpool of dry leaves. (Flickr)

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.”

Many frontier investigators risk being minimized and shunned by their peers—their careers stalled as funding dries up.

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

Buddha meditating under the Bo Tree

“The Secret Doctrine is the accumulated Wisdom of the Ages, and its cosmogony alone is the most stupendous and elaborate system,” Mme. Blavatsky wrote.

“The facts which have actually occupied countless generations of initiated seers and prophets to marshal, to set down and explain, in the bewildering series of evolutionary progress, are all recorded on a few pages of geometrical signs and glyphs.”

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.”

“But modern science believes not in the ‘soul of things,’ and hence will reject the whole system of ancient cosmogony.” 

The Secret Doctrine 1:272.  

Now all this may be changing . . .

Spiritual Seeing into a Hidden Reality

Illusion or Reality?

WHAT we usually call ‘reality’ may actually be completely subjective, as it is filtered through our ordinary physical senses, according to Theosophy.

Yet, “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 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.”

It is only by the aid of this faculty that men can ever see things in their true colors.

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

Awakening.

“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

Plato

Plato’s Cave

In a related article “The Subjective and the Objective,” William Q. Judge refers to the Plato’s Cave metaphor:

Socrates: “Imagine the enlightenment and ignorance of our nature in a figure: Behold! human beings living in a sort of underground den, which has a mouth opening towards the light, and reaching all across the den;

they have been here from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them;

“for the chains are arranged in such a manner as to prevent them from turning their heads. At a distance above and behind them the light of a fire is blazing, . . . There can be no question, that the truth would be to them just nothing but the shadows of the images.”

Plato’s Cave

W. Q. Judge: “Theosophy recognizes a continuous gradation of powers, faculties, states, principles — call them what you will — from the highest or most spiritual to the lowest or most material. In this whole gamut of states or conditions, no chasm is found; there is nothing to bridge; consciousness is the necessary substratum and presupposition of the most material, and consciousness is the noumenon or essential reality of the most spiritual.”

We know of nothing more material or external than the physical, material, visible body–the world of matter, so-called …. of the cave which Socrates describes in Plato’s dialogue — the wall upon which fall the shadows supposed by the prisoners to be the only realities.

THE SUBJECTIVE AND THE OBJECTIVE A LESSON FROM THE CAVE OF PLATO’S REPUBLIC, BOOK VII – William Q. Judge

Disappearing into an illusion.

The Bhagavad-Gita

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, an inner struggle we must eventually wage.

(The Theosophy of the Bhagavad Gita)

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 the drama of the awakening soul.

Read Chapter 11 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 achieve self-awareness, and enable him to arrive at the truth, to 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 material senses would be able to contact the underlying ‘reality’ of physical things. But never in an isolated ‘Me’ universe.

The Me 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?

Progressive Awakenings

“Whatever reality things possess must be looked for in them before or after they have passed like a flash through the material world; but we cannot cognise any such existence directly, so long as we have sense-instruments which bring only material existence into the field of our consciousness. 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.

“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;” but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya.”

THE SECRET DOCTRINE Vol. 1, Page 40

A Musical Thought Image

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. You cannot hear at a distance, but you can see at a distance.”

“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.”

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.

The Mystery of Consciousness and the Soul of Things

The Souls of Atoms

ATOMS like their privacy as any physicist knows who tries to nail down their elusive face and place.

This effect is due to something dubbed the “measurement problem” in quantum physics.

Whether atoms are waves or particles, it was supposed, would be established simply by observing them. But it was not that easy.

So-called “observing” the fickle critters, actually changed their supposed appearance!

For decades this classic problem in quantum physics has been a mystery and shows no possibility of being resolved anytime soon, at least not with the use of conventional scientific methods.

In ancient times such mysteries were resolved by initiated seers whose “flashing gaze” could penetrate “into the very kernel of matter, and recorded the soul of things there,” H. P. Blavatsky declared: 

but modern science believes not in the ‘soul of things’ and hence will reject the whole system of ancient cosmogony.

A Living Cosmos

“It is useless to say that the system in question is no fancy of one or several isolated individuals. That it is the uninterrupted record covering thousands of generations of Seers 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.”

“The Pith and Marrow of Occultism” 
The Secret Doctrine, 1:272

The size, shape and location of these energetic illusions will likely never be resolved. To prove it, Mme. Blavatsky argues that the atoms and particles of modern science don’t really exist except in the exuberant imaginations of the scientists. And she famously insisted that atoms are merely “entified abstractions,” are not subject to physical laws and that no scientist will ever see one.

Life Atoms — the Mysteries of Mind, Matter and Energy

Yoga Pose

THE concept of spirituality is, in mainstream science’s opinion, unscientific because they are unable to explain or physically measure it.

In the modern ongoing debate about intelligent design, the Christian evangelist Randal Rauser complains about rigidly biassed scientific dogmas.

“Science shuns any concepts  not based on established and approved models.” Intelligent design, Rauser says, “can only be recognized as a valid ‘scientific’ explanation if bound by the laws of physics.”

On this basis, he writes: “if God is any part of the proposal, it is by definition unscientific —and all claims of legitimacy or illegitimacy of Intelligent Design or God must be disregarded because science has an inherent bias.”

If therefore we don’t know the hidden or as yet undiscovered laws of science, then we don’t know whether an explanation conforms to them or not.

A student of Theosophy would agree. Any honest analysis of a controversy raised by science should acknowledge merely that the concepts do not conform to the “laws of physics as presently understood,” or the laws “as they ultimately are” — but not ignored or dismissed out of hand.

“The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements is a multimedia project about one of the great adventures in the history of science: the long (and continuing) quest to understand what the world is made of – to identify, understand and organize the basic building blocks of matter. In a nutshell, the project is about the human story behind the Periodic Table of the Elements.”

The Mystery of Matter

Mme. Blavatsky insisted that science was intentionally limited allowing only that one must follow the evidence wherever it leads — a  standard that modern science touts, but seldom follows.

She cited as an example the periodic table, developed by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev purported to be a complete and accurate account of all known chemical elements.

Yet the number of possible elements is not known, and to this day more are being proposed and cataloged.

Mme. Blavatsky maintained that the chemist’s materialistic search for the missing elements in Mendeleev’s periodic table would be fruitless, as many were buried out of reach in states of matter unknown as yet on this physical plane. These elements are not all on the same plane of perception. H. P. Blavatsky explains in comparing degrees of substance to the planetary “globes”:

Planes of Substance

“The one eternal LAW unfolds everything in the (to be) manifested Nature on a sevenfold principle; among the rest, the countless circular chains of worlds, composed of seven globes, graduated on the four lower planes of the world of formation (the three others belonging to the Archetypal Universe).

“Out of these seven only one, the lowest and the most material of those globes is within our plane or means of perception,

the six others lying outside of it and being therefore invisible to the terrestrial eye. 

“Our Globe, as taught from the first is at the bottom of the arc of descent, where the matter of our perceptions exhibits itself in its grossest form.

• H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:152

The Third Eye

“Hence it only stands to reason that the globes which overshadow our Earth must be on different and superior planes. In short, as Globes,

they are in CO-ADUNITION but not IN CONSUBSTANTIALITY WITH OUR EARTH and thus pertain to quite another state of consciousness.

Two Systems Compared

The Link Between Science
and Spirituality

This short video debuted at IONS’ 40th-anniversary celebration at the EarthRise Center. This was the opening day of the new Environmental Education Center, which showcases plans to develop EarthRise into one of the most environmentally sustainable retreat, education, and research centers in the world. Science as it should be. (Institute of Noetic Sciences)

West Meets East

“The universe is not the meaningless object that Western science says that it is,” IONS senior scientist Dean Radin asserts, “but rather that the universe is permeated with meaning.”

In The Voice of the Silence, H. P. Blavatsky defines the difference between psychic and spiritual senses.

The Energy Field of Hands

The ‘Siddhis’

“There are two kinds of Siddhis,” she explained, “one group embraces the lower, coarse, psychic and mental energies;

the other is one which exacts the highest dstraining of Spiritual powers.

In the next video clip, Dean Radin, Ph.D., refers to the Eastern ‘Siddhis.’ He explains the difference between Western matter-oriented science, and the Eastern spiritually-based science, that emphasizes consciousness as the primary driver.

Occult Chemistry

The Russian chemist and inventor Dimitri Mendeleev, the father of the original periodical table, included predictions for properties of elements he thought were yet to be discovered.

The missing elements, and there are countless numbers of them Blavatsky declared, are those hidden elements of occult chemistry, according to The Secret Doctrine.

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev[

“The (ancient and modern) Western American Zuni Indians seem to have entertained similar views,” Mme. Blavatsky also wrote:

But materialism rejects any possibility of such a veiled reality in nature.

The Zuni present-day customs, their traditions and records, she says, all point to the fact that, from time immemorial, their institutions—political, social and religious—”were (and still are) shaped according to the septenary principle.”

The Secret Doctrine 2:605

Zuni Dancers

An electromagnetic astral substratum of matter is still ignored by standard model modern science. Such a field was suggested in the early 20th century by the groundbreaking discoveries of the ‘mad scientist’ Nikola Tesla, a futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.

and by Semyon Kirlian’s corona discharge photography pictured below:

Kirlian photography is a collection of photographic techniques used to capture the phenomenon of electrical coronal discharges.

The Kirlians conducted experiments in which photographic film was placed on top of a conducting plate, and another conductor was attached to a hand, a leaf or other plant material. The conductors were energized by a high-frequency high-voltage power source, producing photographic images typically showing a silhouette of the object surrounded by an aura of light.

Kirlian photo of a Coleus leaf

The Body Matrix

The Design Body

“The whole quarrel between the esoteric and profane sciences,” Blavatsky wrote in her Secret Doctrine (2:149):

lies in the demonstration of the existence of an astral body within the physical.

For humanity to receive the whole truth, The Secret Doctrine points to the overarching need for a recognition of the electromagnetic design body in man and nature — a design field made of living plasma.

Zero Point Age

“Is there such a thing as a life force—an energy field that connects all living things across space and time? Could the existence of this living energy field provide a scientific explanation for supernatural phenomena?

The Field

After interviewing cutting-edge scientists in many disciplines, investigative journalist Lynne McTaggart presents a compelling and stunning argument for this theory in her groundbreaking masterpiece, The Field.”

Science & Spirituality

The ‘field’ is what Rupert Sheldrake calls the “morphic resonance.” It is a living life matrix, called “plastic potency” in Theosophical occult physics.

Studies in Occultism by H. P. Blavatsky

Rupert Sheldrake

Mind-Matter

By ignoring the implications of these and many similar discoveries of an underlying invisible, intelligent structure in nature, mainstream science dooms itself to fruitless speculations, centered on a soul-less and purposeless universe.

Mind and Matter

“If there is anything on earth like progress,” Blavatsky opined in The Secret Doctrine (1:506), “Science will someday have to give up such monstrous ideas as

her physical, self-guiding laws — void of soul and Spirit — and then turn to the occult teachings.

Kirlian Photography

Because of the eye-popping aura patterns revealed by technician Semyon Kirlian, and the vibrant fractal forms of Benoît Mandelbrot, the hidden energy designs of nature become patently obvious to our senses.

Little Flower

Fortunately for humanity, ancient occult science is being restored to its legitimate place today by mind-matter researchers, notably the Institute of Noetic Sciences—and concepts promoted to the public through a host of films.

Among these are Renée Scheltema’s Something Unknown is Doing We Don’t Know What, and The Living Matrix which explores the science of subtle energy medicine.

Litter Flower

Alfred Tennyson was not just a poet laureate, but might also be considered a true scientist. He sensed the hidden side of nature and was unafraid to acknowledge its mystery. In the classic “Flower in the Crannied Wall” Tennyson wrote:

I pluck you out the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower – but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

♥

Chain Links

Summoning to this theme the law of Analogy, which Blavatsky calls “the first key to the world-problem”— she goes on to picture the existence of forms as great chain “whose links are all connected.” These links, she wrote:

have to be studied co-ordinately in their occult relations to each other.

The Secret Doctrine 1:601

Global Links

The Chain

Summoning to this theme the law of Analogy, which Blavatsky calls “the first key to the world-problem”— she goes on to picture the existence of forms as great chain “whose links are all connected.”  And these links, she says:

have to be studied co-ordinately in their occult relations to each other.

§

The Chain of Life

Our Deity

“Every one of the higher, as of the lower worlds, is inter-blended with our own objective world,” The Secret Doctrine postulates, and “it is no metaphysical figure of speech, but a sober fact in Nature, however incomprehensible to our senses.”

“Our deity is neither in a paradise, nor in a particular tree, building, or mountain, ” H. P. Blavatsky declared in the Key to Theosophy — “it is everywhere…

— for IT is the mysterious power of evolution and involution, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and even omniscient creative potentiality.

“In every atom of the visible as of the invisible Cosmos, in, over, and around every invisible atom and divisible molecule.”

Deity Everywhere

Interblended

“Every one of the higher, as of the lower worlds, is interblended with our own objective world,” The Secret Doctrine postulates, therefore …

… it is no metaphysical figure of speech, but a sober fact in Nature, however incomprehensible to our senses.

“There is one absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested, conditioned, being. This Infinite and Eternal Cause — is ‘Be-ness’ rather than Being (in Sanskrit, Sat), and is beyond all thought or speculation.”

“The one Reality is also symbolised by the term ‘The Great Breath,’ a symbol sufficiently graphic to need no further elucidation. Thus, then, the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine is this metaphysical ONE ABSOLUTE — BE-NESS —”

The Secret Doctrine PROEM 1:14

One Absolute Reality

It doesn’t require any leap to understand why science and religion are compelled to join hands. They co-exist, because of the inseparability of energy (spirit or consciousness) and matter.  

…and, if the two are once divorced, the whole Kosmos would fall back into chaos and non-being.

 Liberation

“I think what we need today is an integration of our scientific understanding of the world,

with the wisdom that is held in the world’s spiritual traditions.

– Peter Russell

Natural Laws of Health

 Spirit & Matter

All systems, small and large, are “inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point,” (SD1:181), said Helena Blavatsky over a century ago.  And further (SD 1:640): “It is a fundamental principle of the Occult philosophy

— this same homogeneity of matter and immutability of natural laws, which are so much insisted upon by materialism — but that unity rests upon the inseparability of Spirit from matter.

From the mountain top.

Ancient metaphysical postulates of Theosophy have now begun to visibly flower. For over one-hundred years, untold numbers of trailblazing researchers, thinkers,

… writers and reformers leading to the present day, have sparked a rekindling of the torch of Truth.

Science & Religion 

Preeminent among the torch-bearers are organizations is notably The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). This would very likely be welcome music to the ears of Helena Blavatsky, writer of The Secret Doctrine, boldly subtitled “The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy.”

Can they really co-exist? “Loretta Haskell, a board member of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, is also a church musician,” Laurie Goodstein, in the New York Times: April 26, 2009.

I am not one of the humanists who feel that religion is a bad thing.

♣

Loretta Haskell

Thanks to such fearless investigators, and to the multitudes of enthusiastic Theosophical students worldwide, the seeds of the perennial wisdom— sown long ago—have become, as summarized by senior scientist Dean Radin of IONS:

… the paradigm-shattering roots of an emerging, 21st-century worldview.

ξ

Imagine

Of the sincere religious believers, Blavatsky wrote: “Their charity,  and simple, child-like faith in the infallibility of their Bible, their dogmas, and their clergy,

bring into full activity all the virtues that are implanted in our common nature.

 ♥