Lifting the Veil of Nature: Prophecies in The Secret Doctrine

Le_Ravissement_de_Psyche Adolphe-William Bouguereau

LATE in the 19th Century W.Q. Judge, co-founder of the Theosophical Society published a series of articles in The Path entitled “Hidden Hints in The Secret Doctrine.”

Judge quoted from near the end of the first volume of The Secret Doctrine, where H. P. Blavatsky made the following prophecy:

We are at the very close of the cycle of 5,000 years of the present Aryan Kaliyuga; and between this time and 1897 there will be a large rent made in the Veil of Nature, and materialistic science will receive a death-blow. —(SD 1:612)

The Kali-yuga is a cycle mentioned in Indian philosophical works. Its duration is 432,000 years. The present Kali-yuga began in 3102 B.C.

Just on schedule, several important scientific discoveries were made. These include the discovery of x-rays by Roentgen (1895), radioactivity by Becquerel (1896), and the electron by Thomson (1897).

Hypothetical Atom

Two other very important events occurred during the period specified in this prophecy that resulted in a complete disruption of centuries of scientific and philosophical thought. The first event was an experiment conducted in 1887 (around the time this prophecy was written) by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, in the USA. It demonstrated that the speed of light was the same, regardless of whether the light traveled with, or at right angles to, the earth’s motion.

The second event occurred in 1897. The physicist Joseph J. Thomson demonstrated that the particles that flow through a vacuum tube can be deflected by electric charges. By this method, he determined that these particles were extremely light, having only about 1/2000 the mass of a hydrogen atom. They were later accepted as the ultimate particles of electricity, and called electrons. In 1906 Thomson was awarded a Nobel Prize for establishing the existence of electrons.

Butterfly Kids

“Reason and all the powers of intelligent waking man are used in dreams; and as emotion, reasoning, perception, and memory are all found to be even more active in dreams than in waking life, it must follow that the Hidden Self is the one who has and does all this.”

-W. Q. Judge, Proof of the Hidden Self Through Dreams

The word ‘Psyche’ is a Hellenistic personification of the soul as female, or sometimes as a butterfly. The allegory of Psyche’s love for Cupid is told in The Golden Ass by Apuleius.

Plato

The idea of the psyche is central to the philosophy of Plato.

In his Phaedo, Plato has Socrates give four arguments for the immortality of the soul and life after death following the separation of the soul from the body.^[4] 

“It was H.P. Blavatsky who … was the first to explain [to] the Spiritualist the difference there was between psyche and nous, nefesh and ruach — Soul and Spirit. She had to bring the whole arsenal of proofs with her, quotations from Paul and Plato, from Plutarch and James, etc. before the Spiritualists admitted that the Theosophists were right.” –Mahatma K.H.

-H. P. Blavatsky, Psychic and Noëtic Action

Plato’s Socrates also states that after death, the Psyche is better able to achieve wisdom and experience the Platonic forms since it is unhindered by the body.^[5 The Greek Philosopher Aristotle wrote an influential treatise on the psyche, called in Greek Περὶ Ψυχῆς (Peri Psyches), in Latin De Anima and in English On the Soul.

Butterflies

Proof of Heaven

IN this intimate and powerful re-examination of his best-selling book “Proof of Heaven,” Dr. Alexander looks at the past two and a half years of his life spent in trying to reconcile his rich spiritual experience with contemporary physics and cosmology.

He is convinced that his remarkable near-death journey is totally consistent with the leading edges of scientific understanding today.

This presentation was part of the 128th Summer Convention of the Theosophical Society in America. The theme for the conference was “Science and the Experience of Consciousness,” which brought together such distinguished scientists as physicist Amit Goswami, a consciousness researcher, and psychologist, Dean Radin, physicist, and psychic researcher Russell Targ, neurosurgeon Eben Alexander, and more.

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