The Mysterious Power of Life

“Light is Life” – H. P. Blavatsky

OCCULTISM connotes by the word God, “the symbolic conception of the Life and Motion of the Universe.”

This is in stark contrast to the crude anthropomorphism, which is still the backbone of our current theology.

“The One Life is deity itself, immutable, omnipresent, eternal,” says the teaching of Theosophy.

And the distinction “between organic and inorganic matter is fallacious and nonexistent in nature.”

“Matter in all its phases, is merely a vehicle for the manifestation through it, of LIFE.

Therefore, “the whole secret of Life,” says The Secret Doctrine, can only be discovered “in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because if —

‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity…’ *

— yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity — for life alone can understand life.  It is the One Life, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end.”  (*Adonais, by Percy Bysshe Shelley)

“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the evangelist. Both are electricity — the life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things.

A Dome of many-colored glass.

“Light is the great Protean magician, and under the Divine Will of the architect, its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being.” (Isis Unveiled 1:258)

It is “periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being — unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness — unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality,” (The Secret Doctrine 1:2): — “truly, ‘a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.'”

The Mysterious Power

by H. P. Blavatsky
The Key to Theosophy, Section 5

“HPB”

“When we speak of the Deity and make it identical, hence coeval, with Nature, the eternal and uncreate nature is meant, and not your aggregate of flitting shadows and finite unrealities. We leave it to the hymn-makers to call the visible sky or heaven, God’s Throne, and our earth of mud His footstool.

Our DEITY is neither in a paradise, nor in a particular tree, building, or mountain: it is everywhere, in every atom of the visible as of the invisible Cosmos, in, over, and around every invisible atom and divisible molecule; for IT is the mysterious power of evolution and involution, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and even omniscient creative potentiality.

“In short, our Deity is the eternal, incessantly evolving, not creating, builder of the universe; that universe itself unfolding out of its own essence, not being made. It is a sphere, without circumference, in its symbolism, which has but one ever-acting attribute embracing all other existing or thinkable attributes — ITSELF. It is the one law, giving the impulse to manifested, eternal, and immutable laws, within that never-manifesting, because absolute LAW, which in its manifesting periods is The ever-Becoming.”

The Magic of Life, Light and Immortality

The One Life

OCCULTISM connotes by the word God “the symbolic conception of the Life and Motion of the Universe.”

“This is in stark contrast to the crude anthropomorphism, which is still the backbone of our current theology,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote.

(The Secret Doctrine, Proem, Vol. 1, Page 3, fn.)

“The One Life is deity itself, immutable, omnipresent, eternal,” says the teaching. And the distinction “between organic and inorganic matter is fallacious and nonexistent in nature.”

And “matter in all its phases being merely a vehicle for the manifestation through it of LIFE – The Parabrahmic Breath – in its physically pantheistic aspect it is a super-sensuous state of matter itself the vehicle of the ONE LIFE, the unconscious purposiveness of Parabrahm.”

 (H. P. Blavatsky, “The Life Principle”)

Therefore, says The Secret Doctrine, “the whole secret of Life” can only be discovered “in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in or apart from, the physical body. Because if —

‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity…’

NB. The above phrase is a verbatim quote from Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (LII), by Percy Bysshe Shelley – (Blavatsky had no physical library.)

Plaza Kukulcan Dome

“— yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity — for life alone can understand life.  It is the One Life, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end.”  

“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the evangelist. Both are electricity — the life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things.”

“Light is Life”

“Light is the great Protean magician, and under the Divine Will of the architect, its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being.” (Isis Unveiled 1:258)

It is “periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being — unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness — unrealizable, yet the one self-existing reality, truly, ‘a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.'” (The Secret Doctrine 1:2)

The Sacred Animal Souls in Nature

A Light at The Center

HALLOWEEN is an annual holiday observed on October 31, primarily in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

Known also as a harvest festival, called Samhain (“Summer’s End”), it is rooted in Celtic polytheism. The word is also the Irish and Scottish Gaelic name for November.

It was the beginning of a “darker” season on Earth, with less sunlight and shorter days. In place of the usual psychic horrors and scary costumes, we chose instead to consider the symbol of an inner spiritual sun, symbolized by a flaming candle placed inside the pumpkin.

The spiritual sun consciousness manifests, by degrees, and is the inheritance of all kingdoms of nature as befits the plan of their particular hierarchy — from an atom to a star — not humankind alone.

Samhain, origin of Halloween, is similar to the Gothic samana, and the Sanskrit sámana — the Hindu God Krishna, symbol of the Higher Self, who incarnates cyclically at mankind’s darkest times. The whole of nature, visible and invisible, benefits from these cyclic, wisely appointed spiritual impulses.

In the Bhagavad-Gita (IV:31), Krishna assures his disciple Arjuna that as a world benefactor he is reborn to nature and humanity. “I produce myself among creatures whenever there is a decline of virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the world,” says Krishna, “and thus

I incarnate from age to age for the preservation of the just, the destruction of the wicked, and the establishment of righteousness.”

Krishna-Arjuna

It is only those who are called selfish Buddhas, the “Pratyekas,” who remain in the their selfish state desiring only personal salvation, and who decline to reach out to help suffering humanity.  The Voice of the Silence, Fragment II, The Two Paths explains:

“He who becomes Pratyeka-Buddha makes his obeisance but to his Self. The Bodhisattva who has won the battle, who holds the prize within his palm, yet says in his divine compassion: ‘For others’ sake this great reward I yield’ — accomplishes the greater Renunciation. A Saviour of the World is he.”

Our daily sleeping and waking cycles are strengthened by the universal impulse of the Spiritual Sun which nightly transports us to our true home, the Higher Self. This is during Dreamless Sleep, a state “in which even criminals commune through the higher nature with spiritual beings, and enter into the spiritual plane,” wrote W. Q. Judge in his article: Three Planes of Human Life.

Animals have many dream states too, and dreamless states where they commune consciously or unconsciously in varying degrees, depending on the kingdom to which they belong, with the spiritual hierarchies of their particular degree. For human beings, W. Q. Judge wrote:

“It is the great spiritual reservoir by means of which the tremendous momentum toward evil living is held in check. And because it is involuntary with them, it is constantly salutary in its effect.” 

In an ideal world, perfect harmony and balance between man and nature would be the norm. Thus, the keynote of Mme. Blavatsky’s worldview was the just and moral treatment of all the beings in nature, the First Object of the Theosophical Society, Universal Brotherhood. (Our Three Objects)

This universal unconditional Principle of Theosophy is expressed in The Secret Doctrine, Summing Up #5, which states that “everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious,” and is

“endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

Consequently, Mme. Blavatsky was adamant in opposing animal cruelty. She spoke out forcefully against sport hunting, foxes, birds and big game, and most strongly against vivisection — animals in biological experiments.

“If these humble lines could make a few readers seriously turn their thoughts to all the horrors of vivisection,” she declared, “the writer would be content.”

How the Soul of Leopard Diabolo became Spirit

Diabolo

SOUL energy exists in both humans and animals, and when they communicate on the same level, magic happens.

This is the incredible story of how a dangerous leopard called Diabolo was tamed by an animal whisperer, and then renamed Spirit.

It’s true that animals always try to communicate with humans but we do not have the skills to listen, or more often, are  not listening.

This journey of a panther who was abused in the past is inspiring and touching, and reinforces an important teaching of Theosophy. (See HPB article Have Animals Souls).

The animal whisperer in this story proves humans can talk to animals and understand their needs and wants, including finding out about their past very accurately. It’s amazing what this panther told the animal whisperer was confirmed as true by everyone who knew the panther’s past.

Wrote H. P. Blavatsky, ” the man of science, the most determined materialist, one who proceeds to vivisect a living animal with the utmost coolness, would yet shudder at the thought of laming or torturing to death his fellow man.”

This view of animals contrasts, Theosophy says, with the “adherents of both Hinduism and Buddhism, the oldest religions in the world, who regard the animal world as their ‘younger brothers.'”

A Life Does Not Have to be Human to be Great

SAVING LUNA is an award-winning documentary produced by Mountainside Films, and directed by Michael Parfit and Suzanne Chisholm.

It tells the true story of a lone baby orca named Luna, who was separated from his family and tried to befriend people on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

SAVING LUNA is narrated as a personal story by co-director Michael Parfit. You could call it the director’s cut. Another version of the film, narrated by film star Ryan Reynolds (The Proposal, Green Lantern, and others), was released in selected theaters in the United States in late 2011.

SAVING LUNA has been shown on television around the world, but has not yet been shown on TV in the United States. The film will be made available to public television stations soon. If you think it should be on US television, click here and look on the list for a station near you to write and request that it be shown.

What does Theosophy say about
intelligence in Nature?

In her re-presentation of Theosophy, H. P. Blavatsky was not at all abstract when it came to standing up for the planet. In writing “help Nature and work on with her,” she was especially concerned with what she witnessed as widespread animal abuse and cruelty in her time.

Though not a strict vegan, Mme. Blavatsky was in sync with today’s new age ideas and unreservedly supported the healthful practices and spiritual values of a non-meat diet.  In her lengthy article “Have Animals Souls?”, Madame Blavatsky went further into some aspects of the matter than she did in her book “The Key to Theosophy.”

Blavatsky’s radicalism reveals itself in her six-point “mission statement” in The Secret Doctrine (1:274), especially point number five in which she declared that “everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms is conscious:

… endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

Individual conscious awareness develops gradually throughout the kingdoms of nature, peaking in the human stage. Self-aware consciousness in some higher animals, Blavatsky writes in The Secret Doctrine (1:178), “comes almost to the point.”

ζ

Animal Souls: How Leopard Diabolo Became Spirit

Diabolo

SOUL energy exists in both humans and animals, and when they communicate on the same level, magic happens.

This is the incredible story of how a dangerous leopard called Diabolo was tamed by an animal whisperer, and then renamed Spirit.

It’s true that animals always try to communicate with humans but we do not have the skills to listen, or more often, are  not listening.

This journey of a panther who was abused in the past is inspiring and touching, and reinforces an important teaching of Theosophy. (See HPB article Have Animals Souls).

The animal whisperer in this story proves humans can talk to animals and understand their needs and wants, including finding out about their past very accurately. It’s amazing what this panther told the animal whisperer was confirmed as true by everyone who knew the panther’s past.

Wrote H. P. Blavatsky, ” the man of science, the most determined materialist, one who proceeds to vivisect a living animal with the utmost coolness, would yet shudder at the thought of laming or torturing to death his fellow man.”

This view of animals contrasts, Theosophy says, with the “adherents of both Hinduism and Buddhism, the oldest religions in the world, who regard the animal world as their ‘younger brothers.'”

Elephant Sanctuary: Stories of Joy and Sadness

FIRST is the story of Shirley and Jenny, two crippled elephants reunited at The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee after a 22-year separation.

The bonding was immediate, intense and unforgettable between the two former circus elephants.

Not a new story but worth watching again and again. So amazingly touching — but long after the cameras were turned off, the wondrous moments would continue…

∞

An Angry Panther Talks to a Human

Diabolo

SOUL energy exists in both humans and animals, and when they communicate on the same level, magic happens.

This is the incredible story of how a dangerous leopard called Diabolo was tamed by an animal whisperer, and then renamed Spirit.

It’s true that animals always try to communicate with humans but we do not have the skills to listen, or more often, are  not listening.

This journey of a panther who was abused in the past is inspiring and touching, and reinforces an important teaching of Theosophy. (See HPB article Have Animals Souls).

The animal whisperer in this story proves humans can talk to animals and understand their needs and wants, including finding out about their past very accurately. It’s amazing what this panther told the animal whisperer was confirmed as true by everyone who knew the panther’s past.

Wrote H. P. Blavatsky, ” the man of science, the most determined materialist, one who proceeds to vivisect a living animal with the utmost coolness, would yet shudder at the thought of laming or torturing to death his fellow man.”

This view of animals contrasts, Theosophy says, with the “adherents of both Hinduism and Buddhism, the oldest religions in the world, who regard the animal world as their ‘younger brothers.'”

Kids, Cows and Hens: a Common Core

WHAT is the real object of modern education, Mme. Blavatsky asked: “to cultivate and develop the mind in the right direction.

“To teach the disinherited and hapless to carry with fortitude the burdens of life?

“To strengthen their will — to inculcate in them the love of one’s neighbour and the feeling of mutual interdependence and brotherhood —  and thus to train and form the character for practical life? Not a bit of it.”

“And yet, these are undeniably the objects of all true education,” she insisted. “No one denies it — all your educationalists admit it, and talk very big indeed on the subject. But what is the practical result of their action? Every young man and boy, nay, every one of the younger generation of schoolmasters will answer:

“‘The object of modern education is to pass examinations’ … and thus train them for a life of ferocious selfishness and struggle for honours and emoluments instead of kindly feeling.

“And what are these examinations — the terror of modern youth? They are simply a method of classification by which the results of your school teaching are tabulated. In other words, they form the practical application of the modern science method to the genus homo, qua intellection.

“Now ‘science’ teaches that intellect is a result of the mechanical interaction of the brain-stuff — therefore it is only logical that modern education should be almost entirely mechanical — a sort of automatic machine for the fabrication of intellect by the ton.

“Very little experience of examinations is enough to show that the education they produce is simply a training of the physical memory, and, sooner or later,” Blavatsky warned, “all your schools will sink to this level. As to any real, sound cultivation of the thinking and reasoning power, it is simply impossible while everything has to be judged by the results as tested by competitive examinations.”

When Education Goes Wrong

Full Title: “When Education Goes Wrong: Taking Creativity and Play Out of Learning.” Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige, professor emerita of Lesley University, writes frequently about the impact of media and other social influences on children’s lives and development.

Education Gone Right

She is also co-founder of Defending the Early Years, a nonprofit project whose purpose is to encourage educators to speak out about current policies that are affecting the education of young children.

In this talk, Nancy speaks about how educational institutions, in their attempts to meet the bureaucratic limitations of “Race to the Top” and “No Child Left Behind” policies, have eliminated creative play from early childhood education — resulting in the loss of problem-solving and critical-thinking skills in later years.

Child’s Play?

“Again, school training is of the very greatest importance in forming character, especially in its moral bearing. Now, from first to last, your modern system is based on the so-called scientific revelations:

‘The struggle for existence’ and the ‘survival of the fittest.’ All through his early life, everyone has these driven into them by practical example and experience, as well as by direct teaching, till it is impossible to eradicate from his mind the idea that “self,” the lower, personal self, is the end-all, and be-all, of life.

“Here you get the great source of all the after-misery, crime, and heartless selfishness … which as said over and over again, is the curse of humanity, and the prolific parent of all the evils and crimes in this life; and it is your schools which are the hot-beds of such selfishness.

“The energies generated by the brain molecules of its adherents are all concentrated on one point, and are, therefore, to some extent, an organized army of educated and speculative intellects of the minority of men, trained against the … masses doomed to be vampirised, lived and sat upon by their intellectually stronger brethren.

“Result: The direct outcome of this branch of education is an overflooding of the market with money-making machines, with heartless selfish men — animals — who have been most carefully trained to prey on their fellows and take advantage of the ignorance of their weaker brethren!”

The Story of an Egg | PBS Online Film Festival 2013

“Eggs, as well as the chickens they come from, are both healthful sources of protein but ONLY if raised the way nature intended… Unfortunately, as illustrated in the video below, today’s agricultural model of factory farming has complicated what used to be a simple affair.” (Mercola.com)

Caging Kids

“All this is owing to the perniciousness of a system which turns out goods to order, irrespective of the natural proclivities and talents of the youth. The poor little candidate for this progressive paradise of learning, comes almost straight from the nursery to the treadmill…

“Here he is immediately seized upon by the workmen of the materio-intellectual factory … so that if he have any natural genius it is rapidly squeezed out of him… He will attain only sufficient knowledge of his own particular nation to fit him with a steel armour of prejudice against all other peoples [….]

“A proper and sane system of education should produce the most vigorous and liberal mind, strictly trained in logical and accurate thought, and not in blind faith.”

Happy Cowz

 

Inner Sensibility

“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
Edited excerpts from:
The Key to Theosophy, Section 13

♥

Animals – Our Younger Brothers

Siblings?

IN a perfect world there should be peace and harmony between humans and with the kingdoms of Nature.

The keynote of Theosophist H. P. Blavatsky’s worldview is the just and moral treatment of all beings in the world.

The First Object of the Theosophical Society she founded is Universal Brotherhood without distinctions.

The central teaching of Theosophy has added support in The Secret Doctrine, the Summing Up section (#5), which declares:

“Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious — endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

Consequently, Mme. Blavatsky was adamant in opposing animal exploitation and cruelty. She spoke out forcefully against sport hunting, foxes, birds and big game, and most strongly against vivisection — animals used in biological experiments:

“If these humble lines could make a few readers seriously turn their thoughts to all the horrors of vivisection, the writer would be content.”

“Permanent tortures, daily inflicted on the poor brutes” — in her article Have Animals Souls? Mme. Blavatsky wrote — “after calling forth an outburst from society generally, will force all Governments to put an end to those barbarous and shameful practices.“

“Man is endowed with reason, the infant with instinct, and the young animal shows more of both than the child.”

Animal Wonders – Stargazing Scarabs

OCCULTISM connotes by the word God, “the symbolic conception of the Life and Motion of the Universe.”

This is in stark contrast to the crude anthropomorphism, which is still the backbone of our current theology.

“The One Life is deity itself, immutable, omnipresent, eternal,” says the teaching. And the distinction “between organic and inorganic matter is fallacious and nonexistent in nature.”

“Matter in all its phases, is merely a vehicle for the manifestation through it, of LIFE.

Therefore, “the whole secret of Life,” says The Secret Doctrine, can only be discovered “in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because if —

‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity…’*

— yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity — for life alone can understand life.  It is the One Life, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end.”  (*Adonais, by Percy Bysshe Shelley)

“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the evangelist. Both are electricity — the life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things.

“Light is the great Protean magician, and under the Divine Will of the architect, its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being.” (Isis Unveiled 1:258)

It is “periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being — unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness — unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality,” (Secret Doctrine 1:2): — “truly, ‘a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.'”

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helpers prepared a 2012 annual report for Theosophy Watch.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. Theosophy Watch was viewed about 96,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Reincarnation of Pets

IN an ideal world, perfect harmony and balance between man and nature would be the norm.

Thus, the keynote of Mme. Blavatsky’s worldview was the just and moral treatment of all the beings in nature, the First Object of the Theosophical Society, Universal Brotherhood.

This foundational teaching of Theosophy is expressed in The Secret Doctrine, Summing Up #5, which states that “everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious,” and is “endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

Consequently, Mme. Blavatsky was adamant in opposing animal exploitation and cruelty. She spoke out forcefully against sport hunting, foxes, birds and big game, and most strongly against vivisection — animals used in biological experiments:

“If these humble lines could make a few readers seriously turn their thoughts to all the horrors of vivisection, the writer would be content.”