EVOLUTION, as defined in the teachings of Theosophy, is a multifaceted venture, a vast, complex dance of spirit, mind, and matter.
In recurring lifetimes our human experience runs the gamut of pain to pleasure, material to spiritual.
The Secret Doctrine asserts this inescapable dance is an individualized expression of life’s eternal “triple evolutionary scheme — three separate schemes of evolution, which are inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point.”
H. P. Blavatsky explains: “These are the Monadic (or spiritual), the intellectual, and the physical evolutions — the finite aspects or the reflections on the field of Cosmic Illusion of the ONE REALITY.”
“Each of these three systems has its own laws; each is represented in the constitution of man, and it is the union of these three streams in him which makes him the complex being he now is —’Nature,’ the physical evolutionary Power, could never evolve intelligence unaided.”
True and lasting self-knowledge is acquired gradually in both loving and often painful experiences, through a prolonged, yet ultimately finite series of reincarnations in human form, as we know it. Such transitions occur within the triple evolutionary plan and are, as Blavatsky maintained, “inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point.” Think of Ubuntu, an African Philosophy: ‘I Am Because We Are.’
Ubuntu: I Am Because We Are
The key to our spiritual development lies in recognizing the unity and continuity of life, Theosophy further teaches — and that for the soul, there is really no such thing as final heaven or hell. We are first and foremost spiritual beings, the mind, and its forms being our field of inexorable human experiences.
But what happens to our ‘human self’ after death? Does everything important, our consciousness, love, hopes, and dreams die with the body? Mme. Blavatsky, writing in The Key to Theosophy, assures her readers that love and spirit are immortal. And further, that:
Death comes to our spiritual selves ever as a deliverer and friend.
Self-knowledge evolves gradually out of the recognition, as the philosopher-mystic Teilhard de Chardin famously said, that we are “spiritual beings having a human experience,” not the other way around. And that “Self-Knowledge is of loving deeds the child,” as taught in The Voice of the Silence.
Our afterlife, once the dissolution of the body and Earthly desire body is complete, is blissful. That state “consists in our complete conviction that we never left the earth,” Blavatsky writes in the Key to Theosophy, “and that there is no such thing as death at all.”
“WHAT if there was no big bang and we live in an ever-cycling universe?” a recent issue of the NewScientist magazine asks, suggestive of ancient Eastern teachings.
“There is no good evidence that our universe even had a beginning,” the article further states, “a startling proposition that means the cosmos could collapse in about 100 billion years.”
Theosophy has a very similar teaching: the “progressive development” of the universe, “worlds as well as atoms,” according to H. P. Blavatsky from a The Secret Doctrine 1:43 quote:
“… the progressive development of everything, worlds as well as atoms; and this stupendous development has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end. Our ‘Universe’ is only one of an infinite number of Universes.”
Again, to Initiated Seers our universe, while full of important information, is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes,” she insisted. (The Secret Doctrine 1: 272-3):
“The system in question is no fancy of one or several isolated individuals,” she wrote: “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.
Those “Wise Men”, she explained, “had passed their lives in learning, not teaching. How did they do so?
Initiated Seers
“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 organizations 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.
In this view, each individual cosmos and corresponding single human life is the result and the effect of its predecessor. Under the never-erring law of Karma, every universe becomes “a cause as regards its successor.”
Instead of one ‘Big Bang,’ as recent standard model science describes the origin of the universe, Theosophy postulates conversely an infinite number of recurring universes, each one an improvement on the last based on lessons learned. Now, a newly held view in modern theoretical physics suggests a similar idea.
Cyclic Universes
“There was not just one bang,” assert theoretical physicists Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their book Endless Universe, postulating a groundbreaking “Cyclic Universe” theory. According to the theory, the Big Bang “was not the beginning of time but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution.” Very close to the Theosophical view, it turns out.
What these scientists seem to be proposing is the law of periodicity, the Second of Three Fundamental Propositions of The Secret Doctrine.
“In Endless Universe, Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, both distinguished theoretical physicists, present their bold new cosmology. Two world-renowned scientists present an audacious new vision of the cosmos that ‘steals the thunder from the Big Bang theory.'” —Wall Street Journal
The distinguished theoretical physicists propose that “the evolution of the universe is cyclic with big bangs occurring once every trillion or so.”
The Great Breath
Such a ‘periodicity’ is would be a new beginning for modern science. But unlike the speculation of an “infinite cycle of titanic collisions,” Theosophy offers a much kinder and gentler solution tied to the cosmology offered by numerous “generations of initiated seers.”
Those findings conclude that we exist in a living universe, where everything to its core is alive, sustained by an eternal, perpetual rhythmic breathing or pulsation.
(We may be asleep at night, but thankfully, we continue breathing.) The Universe, according to the occult dynamics of The Secret Doctrine, does the same.
“It’s hard to believe,” writes the Blavatsky Theosophy Group UK, in an article titled A Right Understanding of Reincarnation, that until 130 years ago hardly anyone in the Western world had heard of reincarnation or knew anything about it.”
One reason for the disbelief around this teaching is that most people cannot remember having a past life. This is because, in strictly practical terms, the immortal soul enters and uses a new physical body, new astral body, new personality, and a new physical brain. A new brain, cannot be expected to ‘register’ a previous life it was never there to witness.
Being thus handed an empty photo album by Nature has to be a challenge to the incoming soul by hindering it finding a connection to prior experiences and knowledge. “The new ‘personality,'” Blavatsky explained, “is no better than a fresh suit of clothes.” (The Key to Theosophy, Ch. 8)
Siddhartha-Buddha meditating under the Bo Tree
Even so, by a mysterious process, “the record or reflection of all the past lives must survive,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote: “for when Prince Siddhartha became Buddha the full sequence of His previous births were seen by Him.”
In such a state he was able, she says, “to retrospectively trace the lines of all his lives. This proves to you that the undying qualities of the personality — such as love, goodness, charity, etc., attach themselves to the immortal Ego,
photographing on it, so to speak, a permanent image of the divine aspect of the man who was.
“To our talpatic, or mole-like comprehension, [http://bit.ly/2YP74Sq], the human spirit is then lost in the One Spirit, as the drop of water thrown into the sea can no longer be traced out and recovered. But de facto it is not so.
Photographic Lab
“However long the ‘night of Brahma’ or even the Universal Pralaya [Sleep] – (not the local Pralaya affecting some one group of worlds) – yet, when it ends,
the same individual Divine Monad resumes its majestic path of evolution,
“though on a higher, hundredfold perfected and more pure chain of earths than before, and brings with it all the essence of compound spiritualities from its previous countless rebirths.”
Twin Flames Spiral Evolution
“Spiral evolution, it must be remembered, is dual, and the path of spirituality turns, corkscrew-like, within and around physical, semi-physical, and supra-physical evolution.”
The mind doesn’t fully incarnate until age seven, (Key to Theosophy Section 9). Thus, a child doesn’t feel the full weight of life and karma right away. As such, they are like karma-less little Buddhas.’
If not pressured to conform by parents and society, it is possible for them to express memories of their former lives, i.e. experience the ‘intimations of immortality’ for an extended period.
Dante And The River Of Lethe, by Gustave Dore
“Spirit got itself entangled with gross matter,” Blavatsky wrote in The Theosophist, “for the same reason that life gets entangled with the fetus matter. It followed a law, and therefore could not help the entanglement occurring.”
We know of no eastern philosophy that teaches that ‘matter originated out of Spirit.’ Matter is as eternal and indestructible as Spirit and one cannot be made cognizant to our senses without the other—even to our, the highest, spiritual sense.
“It was Plotinus who said that ‘our body is the true river of Lethe, for ‘souls plunged into it forget all’ — our terrestrial body is like Lethe” (the “river of forgetfulness” in the Hades of Greek mythology.)” Using a modern analogy, a new computer cannot be expected to recall the data stored on the discarded one, unless the old data is preserved and reinstalled in the new machine.
But this is what sometimes happens with children who die at an early age from accidents or illness if in their short lifetime they had created no basis for a prolonged after-death dream state. Nature is never wasteful, and the still viable astral body is not disintegrated as with normal death but reused by the reincarnation of the child.
“WE assume our senses see reality as it is – but that could be just an evolved illusion,” the July 31, 2019 issue of NewScientist declared.
“What is the relationship between the world out there and my internal experience of it – between objective and subjective reality?
“If I’m sober, and don’t suspect a prank, I’m inclined to believe that when I see a cherry, there is a real cherry whose shape and color match my experience, and which continues to exist when I look away.
“This assumption is central to how we think about ourselves and the world. But is it valid? Experiments my collaborators and I have performed to test the form of sensory perception that evolution has given us suggest a startling conclusion: it isn’t.”
The author of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, pioneering cognitive scientist Donald D Hoffman, believes that evolution designed our perceptions “to keep us alive.” Our perceptions, he says, are “interfaces constructed by natural selection,” in a word randomly.
Real Cherries?
There are no random forces in Theosophy. The reality illusion is wholly subjective and beholden to our faculties of perception, and states of consciousness unique to our complex sevenfold human construction, according to Theosophy. But agreeably with Professor Hoffman, the world is nothing like what we see through our eyes. But for much different reasons than the conjectures of modern science.
“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.”
Alice Through the Looking Glass
“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 Hindu poem, adialogue 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. (BlavatskyTheosophy.com)
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!
“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.
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 give us a personalized tour of the Theosophy promoted powers (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.
Exploring the mysteries of consciousness, the Institute of Noetic Sciences researches mind-matter interactions, psychic experience, premonitions and more. You can help the research, and get a free copy of Entangled Minds.
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