CONSCIOUSNESS is at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.
Knowing very little of its spiritual essence, we define consciousness by names we give to its various ‘states’ — waking, sleeping, intuitive, meditating, angry, depressed, happy or sad.
We experience perhaps hundreds of such random mental and emotional states every day, no wiser in understanding the hidden matrix, or field of consciousness in which they are embedded.
Material Science approaches nature only “through her appearance,” H. P. Blavatsky writes in The Secret Doctrine (1:610), and “that appearance is always deceitful on the physical plane,” adding that Science:
“…refuses to blend physics with metaphysics, the body with its informing soul and spirit, which they prefer ignoring.”
Ω
Nevertheless, physics and metaphysics were once deeply entwined, resulting in the natural philosophy of the Greeks, but is given the cold shoulder now by a science that prefers computer simulations, and huge particle collider machines to the natural world.
Searching for the God Particle
Occult Science, on the other hand, rejecting the Cartesian system, describes the body-mind consciousness as the lower end of a universal, spiritual substrate referred to as “BE-NESS” in The Secret Doctrine—symbolized by two pre-manifested aspects cited as “abstract space” (bare subjectivity), and “abstract motion” (representing unconditioned consciousness.)
“Consciousness has long been one of the great mysteries of life, the universe and everything,” writes Linda Geddes in the 29 November 2011 NewScientist.
Ω
Lucid dreaming, being conscious of dreaming while dreaming, best exemplifies this multi-layered conscious now-presence. Perhaps H. P. Blavatsky expressed it best with a word she coined to describe absolute consciousness —”BE-NESS”— “the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine is this metaphysical One Absolute.” (Vol. 1:14)
Among all earthly creatures, who might most exemplify this enigmatic quality, if not our feline friends?
Ψ
Be-ness
One of Rupert Sheldrake’s experiments on the unexplained powers of animals is dramatized by the case of David Waithe’s cat Godzilla!
Biologist author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books, Sheldrake is a former Research Fellow of the Royal Society. In this clip Sheldrake discusses Godzilla, a cat that knows when his owner is calling. 🙂
MORE than five-thousand years ago, ancient healers described hundreds of invisible energy meridians throughout the human body. When these pathways were unblocked and revitalized, people quickly healed.
This ancient system of healing we today describe in various ways. Emotional Freedom Techniques is a form of counseling intervention that draws on various theories of alternative medicine – including acupuncture, neuro-linguistic programming, energy medicine, and Thought Field Therapy.
Acupuncture often uses special sterilized needles. But many healers are literally tapping into this natural energy system of the body, without needles, using only their bare hands and fingers.
Using this new system ordinary people are learning how to master all the “mental changes” in themselves, as taught by The Voice of the Silence, and report healing almost instantly.
They learn how to “harmless make” the stubborn thought and emotional issues that have plagued them, often embedded in early childhood, causing numerous physical, emotional and psychological illnesses as adults. The success resulting from a healing memory recall is an object lesson of what Einstein famously wrote:
We can’t solve problems, by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Instead, the old thought forms blocking the flow of natural energies in our system have to be cleared away. As we free ourselves from old habits of thinking, we come to recognize our role as a causitive agent in the problems they caused.
Einstein
In psychological terms it means assuming personal karmic responsibility, and there’s nothing in the universe, even atomic energy, more powerful than the powers of gratitude and acceptance.
Getting Unstuck
It’s probably an understatement to say it’s difficult for most people to get to the root cause of difficult issues, especially if the causes were set up in a past life, a life they cannot consciously now recall.
It is the forgotten events, limiting beliefs, and fixed emotional patterns that glue us to our fate as flypaper does a fly.
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.”
To investigate the hidden mysteries of Nature under every aspect possible, and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man especially.
Intended, among other reasons, to establish, according to H. P. Blavatsky and her Adept Teachers, 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.”
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.” Clairvoyance, Judge wrote:
It is a faculty common to all men, though in the majority but slightly developed.
“Occultism asserts,” he continued, “that were it not for the germ of this power slightly active in every one, no man could convey to another any idea whatsoever.”
On the “astral” substance H. P. Blavatsky proclaimed in The Secret Doctrine (2:149): “The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences, depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.”
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 explained 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.
Seership
Those early wise men, she insisted, “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. Continue reading →
LOVE in its most unselfish form was described by H. P. Blavatsky as the “absence of every ill-feeling , selfishness, charity, goodwill to all beings.”
The alchemy of such enlightened ethics unleashes the power of an stoppable universal force.
“The powers and forces of spirit,” Blavatsky declared in her article Practical Occultism, “lend themselves only to the perfectly pure in heart — and this is DIVINE MAGIC.”
‘Kamadeva’, a Sanskrit word, is defined in The Theosophical Glossary as “the first conscious, all-embracing desire for universal good, love, and the first feeling of infinite compassion and mercy for all that lives and feels, needs help and kindness. Only later did kama become the power that gratifies desire on the animal plane.”
“Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind,” (Secret Doctrine 2:176) — “and which sages, searching with their intellect, discovered to be the bond which connects Entity with Non-Entity.”
Mother and Child, Tibet
That power arose,” Blavatsky said, “in the consciousness of the creative One Force, as soon as it came into life and being as a ray from the Absolute.” It was she also who, in the article Love with an Object, fervently declared:
“Love can exist without form, but no form can exist without Love.”
Devotion arose out of a feeling she explained, “and became the first and foremost motor in our nature — for it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us.”
Home From The War
The Heart Doctrine
In her first Letter to a Theosophical Convention in 1888, Blavatsky wrote: “He who teaches Theosophy preaches the gospel of goodwill, and the converse of this is true also — he who preaches the gospel of goodwill, teaches Theosophy.”
Compassion is no mere attribute of thinking or emotion, says the Book of the Golden Precepts. Like love, its companion force, compassion is “the Law of Laws” declares The Voice of the Silence (III). Genuine harmony of feeling and deed naturally resonate as the “fitness of all things.”
Compassion is also described in Theosophy as a “shoreless universal essence,” and “the light of everlasting Right.” Simply put, this ancient teaching asserts this power is nothing short of “the law of love eternal.”
The Law of Love Eternal
The more thou dost become at one with it, thy being melted in its BEING, the more thy Soul unites with that which IS, the more thou wilt become COMPASSION ABSOLUTE. Such is the Arya Path, Path of the Buddhas of perfection.
Of the heart’s Blavatsky wrote in Isis Unveiled (Preface 1:v): “we believe in no Magic which transcends the scope and capacity of the human mind, nor in ‘miracle,’ whether divine or diabolical, if such imply a transgression of the laws of nature instituted from all eternity.”
Nevertheless, we accept…that the human heart has not yet fully uttered itself, and that we have never attained or even understood the extent of its powers.
The Heart Rules
“All the organs in our body generate their own specific fields. One organ in particular seems to generate significant fields which affect the entire body. The heart is the Emperor in the system. The liver and all the organs have other tasks. But the heart is overruling all.”
The Solar Heart
The Sun rhythmically expands and contracts like the human heart it is taught, and “there is a regular circulation of the vital fluid throughout our system,
of which the Sun is the heart — the same as the circulation of the blood in the human body.
The Sun Heart
Mme. Blavatsky devoted an entire section in The Secret Doctrine to the teaching (“The Solar Theory“), comparing the Sun to a heart, calling it “the heart of the solar system.”
“Only, instead of performing the round in a second or so, it takes the solar blood ten of its years, and a whole year to pass through its auricles and ventricles before it washes the lungs and passes thence to the great veins and arteries of the system.”
The Electric Sun
“Foremost of all, they [the astronomers] would have to repudiate the ideas on the Sun’s solidity and incandescence; the Sun is ‘glowing’ most undeniably, but not burning . . .”
“If the sun is connected to the rest of the galaxy in an electrical sense, it doesn’t require to burn itself at all. The energy that we receive is actually received from the galaxy [central sun?], and the sun is acting as a focus for that energy. . . . its puzzling characteristics with respect to conventional interpretations are most likely demonstrating the fluctuations in current arriving from the Milky Way’s electric generator.”
“The Sun is neither a solid nor a liquid, nor yet a gaseous glow; but a gigantic ball of electro-magnetic Forces, the store-house of universal life and motion, from which the latter pulsate in all directions . . . when your astronomers speaking of sun-matter, term those lights and flames as ‘clouds of vapour’ and ‘gases unknown to science’ . . . we know it to be simply magnetic matter in its usual state of activity —”
“This, Science will not deny, since Astronomy knows of the fixed cycle of eleven years when the number of solar spots increases, which is due to the contraction of the Solar heart,” Blavatsky insisted.
Solar Heart
“The universe (our world in this case) breathes, just as man and every living creature, plant, and even mineral does upon the earth — and as our globe itself breathes every twenty-four hours.”
New Solar Images
Many Mysteries
“Could the human heart be made luminous, and the living and throbbing organ be made visible, so as to have it reflected upon a screen — then every one would see the Sun-spot phenomenon repeated every second — due to its contraction and the rushing of the blood.”
On the mystery of consciousness, Blavatsky wrote in Psychic and Noetic Action, that “no physiologist, not even the cleverest, will ever be able to solve the mystery of the human mind, in its highest spiritual manifestation.”
Nor will they be able to understand the meaning of “the psychic and the noetic — or even to comprehend the intricacies of the former on the purely material plane.”
Organized Religion
Healing Humanity
by H. P. Blavatsky
“On the day when Theosophy will have accomplished its most holy and most important mission — namely, to unite firmly a body of men of all nations in brotherly love and bent on a pure altruistic work, not on a labor with selfish motives —
“…on that day only will Theosophy become higher than any nominal brotherhood of man.
“This will be a wonder and a miracle truly, for the realization of which Humanity is vainly waiting for the last 18 centuries, and which every association has hitherto failed to accomplish.”
WHEN acting through our physical human brain and body, the mind displays a complex duality — a pivotal tenet of Theosophical psychology.
The reason for the contrast is simple: the entire manifested universe is pervaded by duality. Wherever we look we see that we are copies of universal paradigms. “As above, so below,” is the old Hermetic axiom.
“Each of us has a magnificent hive of billions of neurons in our head, joined to each other by trillions of connections. The human brain is arguably the most complex organ in the natural world,” writes Carl Zimmer in his Discover article titled: Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out is a Crucial Mental State.
As H. P. Blavatsky wrote: “Everything in the Universe follows analogy. ‘As above, so below’; Man is the microcosm of the Universe. That which takes place on the spiritual plane repeats itself on the Cosmic plane. Concretion follows the lines of abstraction; corresponding to the highest must be the lowest; the material to the spiritual.” (The Secret Doctrine I:177)
“Parabrahm (the One Reality, the Absolute) is the field of Absolute Consciousness,” but when manifested as a material universe “duality supervenes in the contrast of Spirit (or consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object.”
“Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two facets or aspects of the Absolute (Parabrahm), which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective.”
Not being separate from the universe, we experience the manifested physical (to us) universe as ruled by the contrasts of day and night, sleeping and waking, hot and cold, evil and good. This construct, says Theffffff Secret Doctrine 1:15, is “necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity.”
Sun Rays
“’Universal Mind,’ must not be regarded as even vaguely shadowing forth an intellectual process akin to that exhibited by man. The ‘Unconscious,’ according to von Hartmann, arrived at the vast creative, or rather Evolutionary Plan, ‘by a clairvoyant wisdom superior to all consciousness,’ which in the Vedantic language would mean absolute Wisdom.
Only those who realise how far Intuition soars above the tardy processes of ratiocinative thought can form the faintest conception of that absolute Wisdom which transcends the ideas of Time and Space.
“Apart from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual consciousness, since it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as ‘I am I,’ a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity.
“Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance would remain an empty abstraction, and no emergence of consciousness could ensue — and “the manifested universe is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of itsex-istence as ‘manifestation.'”
The every intense struggle between the dual channels of our mind is a challenge that few of us are able to successfully navigate and reconcile in one short lifetime.
But help is on the way. The solution has been taught by advanced masters of life such as Lao-tse, Patanjali, Krishna and Buddha. Each assured us that self-awakening is entirely possible — but a daily meditation, raja yoga practice, and above all else, altruistic service to family and humanity is required.
Clairvoyance
The struggle for control in meditation is caused by our split dual consciousness. The mind’s higher spiritual aspect gravitates toward altruism, says Theosophy, while the tides of its companion personal side is attached to outer forms, desires, survival and other material concerns.
The result is that all human minds are often blown by the winds of sense into the low lying eddies and currents of material thought. Like a balloon losing helium, we drift down from the god within us, and away from our kinship with the soul of things. Broadly considered, what is called higher mind is really a feature of our god-soul, our intuitional base: the manifestation all-knowingness in human beings.
Hamlet’s Soliloquy
Our all-seeing self and personal self are caught in a Hamlet-like to-be-or-not-to-be, we are alternately pitted by the gut and brain consciousness, against the knowing heart consciousness. This sets up an confusing conflict between the true god and the demigod in us. Yet, “peace is just a thought away” according to brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor.
“The closer the approach to one’s Prototype, ‘in Heaven,’ the better for the mortal whose personality was chosen, by his own personal deity (the seventh principle), as its terrestrial abode.”
For, with every effort of will toward purification and unity with that ‘Self-god,’ one of the lower rays breaks and the spiritual entity of man is drawn higher and ever higher to the ray that supersedes the first.
This struggle of selves is dramatized by neuroanatomist Bolte-Taylor in her New York Times bestseller “My Stroke of Insight.” As a brain researcher, Dr. Taylor’s professional focus is both anatomical and intuitional, the relationship between the brain’s left and right hemispheres. (See Video below)
SOUL memory according to Theosophy is referred to as ‘reminiscence,’ and it is this kind memory that assures every human being, whether they know it or not, of their having lived before, and having to live again.
To fully grasp the idea, we first have to study the complex relationship between the human and transcendental aspects of mind (represented physiologically by the brain’s left and right hemispheres.)
Knowledge gained or not by soul-sourced transmission is described by W. Q. Judge in his Ocean of Theosophy, Ch.9:
“By living according to the dictates of the soul the brain may at last be made porous to the soul’s recollections; if the contrary sort of a life is led, then more and more will clouds obscure that reminiscence.”
The differences were experienced directly by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor PhD, described in her book “My Stroke of Insight.” In a memorable TED Talk, she describes her experience in dramatic detail:
“Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.”
“Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two facets or aspects of the Absolute (Parabrahm), which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective. . . . Just as pre-Cosmic Ideation is the root of all individual consciousness, so pre-Cosmic Substance is the substratum of matter in the various grades of its differentiation.”
This fundamental double consciousness, Blavatsky explained, is termed first “the spiritual, or those which belong to the imperishable Ego,” (The Key to Theosophy, Section 8, On Individuality and Personality). Second, she describes the intellectual/rational, personal physical brain states:
which inhabit the ever-changing bodies, or the series of personalities of that Ego.
Notwithstanding, our higher mind knows and remembers all its lives, she insisted, “as well as you remember what you have done yesterday.The real Ego has not forgotten them, and the personal never experienced them. Shall the new boots on the feet of a boy who is flogged for stealing apples, be punished for that which they know nothing?” HPB asked.
“Duality Supervenes”
That which is called “the divine man,” is the “real Individuality,” who like the elegant elephant, never forgets. But its vehicle the personality has no access to that history as it corresponds to “a new suit of clothes.” There are, however, importantly:
modes of communication between the Spiritual and human consciousness or memory.
Evidence for such modes of communication lies in our powers of intuition, conscience, premonitions etc. and, most powerfully, from investigations into the so-called NDE or Near Death Experience. But such states as this “have never been recognised by your scientific modern psychologists,” Blavatsky said of such communications.
MORE than five-thousand years ago, ancient healers described hundreds of invisible energy meridians throughout the human body. When these pathways were unblocked and revitalized, people quickly healed.
This ancient system of healing we today describe in various ways. Emotional Freedom Techniques is a form of counseling intervention that draws on various theories of alternative medicine – including acupuncture, neuro-linguistic programming, energy medicine, and Thought Field Therapy.
Acupuncture often uses special sterilized needles. But many healers are literally tapping into this natural energy system of the body, without needles, using only their bare hands and fingers.
Using this new system ordinary people are learning how to master all the “mental changes” in themselves, as taught by The Voice of the Silence, and report healing almost instantly.
They learn how to “harmless make” the stubborn thought and emotional issues that have plagued them, often embedded in early childhood, causing numerous physical, emotional and psychological illnesses as adults. The success resulting from a healing memory recall is an object lesson of what Einstein famously wrote:
We can’t solve problems, by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
Instead, the old thought forms blocking the flow of natural energies in our system have to be cleared away. As we free ourselves from old habits of thinking, we come to recognize our role as a causitive agent in the problems they caused.
Einstein
In psychological terms it means assuming personal karmic responsibility, and there’s nothing in the universe, even atomic energy, more powerful than the powers of gratitude and acceptance.
Getting Unstuck
It’s probably an understatement to say it’s difficult for most people to get to the root cause of difficult issues, especially if the causes were set up in a past life, a life they cannot consciously now recall.
It is the forgotten events, limiting beliefs, and fixed emotional patterns that glue us to our fate as flypaper does a fly.
“THE whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life. There is design in the action of the seemingly blindest forces. The whole process of evolution with its endless adaptations is a proof of this.”
Merlin Sheldrake talks about his new book The Entangled Life, mushrooms, ecology, consciousness and Our Relationship With Nature.
“Fungi throw our concepts of individuality and even intelligence into question. They can change our minds, heal our bodies, and even help us remediate environmental disaster. By examining fungi on their own terms, Sheldrake reveals how these extraordinary organisms – and our relationships with them – are changing our understanding of how life works.” –
You can order or pre-order Merlins transformative new book via http://www.merlinsheldrake.com Merlin is interviewed by EcoResolution co-founder Christabel Reed.
Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and a writer with a background in plant sciences, microbiology, ecology, and the history and philosophy of science. He received a Ph.D. in tropical ecology from Cambridge University for his work on underground fungal networks in tropical forests in Panama, where he was a predoctoral research fellow of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Merlin’s research ranges from fungal biology, to the history of Amazonian ethnobotany, to the relationship between sound and form in resonant systems. A keen brewer and fermenter, he is fascinated by the relationships that arise between humans and more-than-human organisms. He is a musician and performs on the piano and accordion. Entangled Life is his first book.
EcoResolution was created by Cara Delevingne and Advaya in 2019 with a mission to empower people around the world to take action, to step up rather than shut down in the face of our climate and ecological crisis! Come on a journey of climate action and stay connected via instagram: @MyEcoResolution • Visit us at http://www.EcoResolution.earth • Follow us on instagram at @MyEcoResolution • Sign up to our newsletter • Subscribe to our YouTube channel for more expert interviews
“WE assume our senses see reality as it is – but that could be just an evolved illusion,” the July 31, 2019 issue of NewScientist insisted.
“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, the 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 completely 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 occult 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.
“Is it possible to see music? Or hear a painting? The art exhibition “Enchanted Modernities: Mysticism, Landscape and the American West” answers these questions and more by exploring the impact of Theosophy, an esoteric-philosophical revolution, on visual artists, writers, and composers in the American West.”
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.
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.”
To investigate the hidden mysteries of Nature under every aspect possible, and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man especially.
Intended, among other reasons, to establish, according to H. P. Blavatsky and her Adept Teachers, 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.”
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.” Clairvoyance, Judge wrote:
It is a faculty common to all men, though in the majority but slightly developed.
“Occultism asserts,” he continued, “that were it not for the germ of this power slightly active in every one, no man could convey to another any idea whatsoever.”
On the “astral” substance H. P. Blavatsky proclaimed in The Secret Doctrine (2:149): “The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences, depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.”
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 explained 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.
Seership
Those early wise men, she insisted, “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. Continue reading →
SOUL memory according to Theosophy is referred to as ‘reminiscence,’ and it is this kind memory that assures every human being, whether they know it or not, of their having lived before, and having to live again.
To fully grasp the idea, we first have to study the complex relationship between the human and transcendental aspects of mind (represented physiologically by the brain’s left and right hemispheres.)
Knowledge gained or not by soul-sourced transmission is described by W. Q. Judge in his Ocean of Theosophy, Ch.9:
“By living according to the dictates of the soul the brain may at last be made porous to the soul’s recollections; if the contrary sort of a life is led, then more and more will clouds obscure that reminiscence.”
The differences were experienced directly by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor PhD, described in her book “My Stroke of Insight.” In a memorable TED Talk, she describes her experience in dramatic detail:
“Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.”
“Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two facets or aspects of the Absolute (Parabrahm), which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective. . . . Just as pre-Cosmic Ideation is the root of all individual consciousness, so pre-Cosmic Substance is the substratum of matter in the various grades of its differentiation.”
This fundamental double consciousness, Blavatsky explained, is termed first “the spiritual, or those which belong to the imperishable Ego,” (The Key to Theosophy, Section 8, On Individuality and Personality). Second, she describes the intellectual/rational, personal physical brain states:
which inhabit the ever-changing bodies, or the series of personalities of that Ego.
Notwithstanding, our higher mind knows and remembers all its lives, she insisted, “as well as you remember what you have done yesterday.The real Ego has not forgotten them, and the personal never experienced them. Shall the new boots on the feet of a boy who is flogged for stealing apples, be punished for that which they know nothing?” HPB asked.
“Duality Supervenes”
That which is called “the divine man,” is the “real Individuality,” who like the elegant elephant, never forgets. But its vehicle the personality has no access to that history as it corresponds to “a new suit of clothes.” There are, however, importantly:
modes of communication between the Spiritual and human consciousness or memory.
Evidence for such modes of communication lies in our powers of intuition, conscience, premonitions etc. and, most powerfully, from investigations into the so-called NDE or Near Death Experience. But such states as this “have never been recognised by your scientific modern psychologists,” Blavatsky said of such communications.
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.”
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.
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 LatinDe 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.
MOLECULAR biologist Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria “talk” to each other, and is studying how they communicate with one another. But there is nothing new in this “revelation” for Theosophy. (How bacteria “talk”)
H. P. Blavatsky, author of The Secret Doctrine, her masterwork, summarized the underlying principle: “foremost of all, [is] the postulate that there is no such thing in Nature as inorganic substances or bodies.”
“Stones, minerals, rocks, and even chemical ‘atoms’ are simply organic units in profound lethargy.” (SD 1:626fn)
In her Summing Up section (The Secret Doctrine 1:269) she also had this fundamental covered, insisting 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.”
“We men must remember,” she said plainly, challenging modern materialistic science, “that because we do not perceive any signs — which we can recognize of consciousness, say, in stones — we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there.” (See: The Third Fundamental of The Secret Doctrine).
Healing Stones
“There is no such thing as either ‘dead’ or ‘blind’ matter — these find no place among the conceptions of Occult philosophy,” she wrote. “The latter never stops at surface appearances, and for it the noumenal essences have more reality than their objective counterparts.”
“There exists a body of research poised to rend apart our modern paradigms — revealing consciousness in places we might not have expected it, and connections between life forms that seem startling and impossible.” So wrote Ben Bendig in an interview with Cleve Backster, of “The Secret Life of Plants” fame, (July 22, 2013 The Epoch Times), echoing H. P. Blavatsky’s Fundamental axiom of universal mind.
If lifetimes and universes are analogous to schools, then the classrooms are stages of consciousness, pushing us to ever greater self-awareness and self-development — only if we are wise enough to pursue the path offered.
Thus our lives are complex creations, a series of ‘progressive awakenings,’ advanced or retarded drop by drop, by our individual, family, racial, national and global karma.
Everyone, in this way, settles into his or her own unique rhythm in which a lifetime meditation empowers a mixture of past karma, and present choices.
We all must be then at slightly differing points on an ascending evolutionary arc, paying off old debts, making new ones — pushing forward or slipping back, and the mind thus ever awakens to newer realities.
Drop by Drop
The choices that shape our character each lifetime, are self-chosen—compounded of physical, sensory, emotional, mental, psychic and spiritual energies.
The ancient Egyptian after death judgement, weighed symbolically a person’s heart against the ‘feather of truth.’
The challenges of life, the occult doctrine notes, are the result of our being grounded in a personal level of consciousness, a limited world view. The Secret Doctrine 1:39-40 teaches that “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.”
Progressive Awakenings
Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities.
Weighing the Heart against the Feather of Truth
“Only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from delusions.”
“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’—
WHEN acting through the physical filter of our human brains and bodies, our minds clearly manifest a complex double nature.
This idea is a critical and pivotal tenet of Theosophical psychology.
Mind’s higher aspect gravitates toward its home spirit-self, while the tendency of its astral and physical projection on this plane is an almost irresistible attraction to desires and the material world.
Broadly considered, what is called ‘higher mind’ in Theosophy is really a soul faculty, our intuitional power source — it is the ‘god’ in us.
“The inner man is the only God we can have cognizance of. And how can this be otherwise? Grant us our postulate that God is a universally diffused, infinite principle, and how can man alone escape from being soaked through by, and in, the Deity?
“We call our ‘Father in heaven’ that deific essence of which we are cognizant within us, in our heart and spiritual consciousness, and which has nothing to do with the anthropomorphic conception we may form of it in our physical brain or its fancy.”
Jill Bolte Taylor, PH.D
“Yet, let no man anthropomorphise that essence in us … if he would hold to divine, not human truth, say that this ‘God in secret’ listens to, or is distinct from, either finite man or the infinite essence — for all are one.”
This is also Plato’s teaching about the ‘Nous.’ In her remarkable article Psychic and Noetic Action, H. P. Blavatsky wrote:
Occult physiology and psychology postulate within mortal man an immortal entity, ‘divine Mind,’ or Nous, whose pale and too often distorted reflection is that which we call ‘Mind’ and intellect in men.
“No physiologist, not even the cleverest, will ever be able to solve the mystery of the human mind, in its highest spiritual manifestation. Nor will they be able to understand the duality of the psychic and the noetic — or even to comprehend the intricacies of the former on the purely material plane.”
“Concerning the nous that is the source of understanding of individuals, Plato argued that relying on sense perception can never lead to true knowledge, only opinion. Plato’s more philosophical characters argue that nous must somehow perceive truth directly.” [Wikipedia]
The soul is the Perceiver is assuredly vision itself pure and simple, unmodified, and looks directly upon ideas.
These two we distinguish as the Higher Manas (Mind or Ego), and the Kama-Manas, i.e., the rational, but earthly or physical intellect of man, encased in, and bound by matter.
Harvard trained neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte Taylor, following her life-altering stroke, had a direct knowing of this powerful duality; what is known in Theosophy as our ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ selves.
The enigma is dramatized by Dr. Taylor in her New York Times bestselling book My Stroke of Insight. As a brain researcher Dr. Taylor’s focus is neuroanatomical, i.e. the brain’s left and right hemispheres. Below is an excerpt from the TED Talk about the details of her life-changing experience in which she experienced both sides.
Psychic vs Noëtic
“The all-conscious SELF, that which reincarnates periodically, [is] verily the WORD made flesh, and is always the same! Its reflected ‘Double,’ changing with every new incarnation and personality, is conscious but for a life-period. The Lower Self manifesting through our organic system, acting on this plane of illusion,
imagines itself the Ego Sum, and thus falls into the ‘heresy of separateness’.
“The former, we term INDIVIDUALITY, the latter PERSONALITY. From the first proceeds all the noetic element, from the second, the psychic, i.e., ‘terrestrial wisdom’ at best, as it is influenced by all the chaotic stimuli of the human or rather animal passions of the living body.
Dual Hemispheres
“The seat of memory is everywhere throughout the human body. To locate it in the brain is to limit and dwarf the Universal Mind and its countless Rays (the Manasaputra) — which inform every rational mortal. Materialists sniff contemptuously at the mention of ‘Universal Mind’ and the Higher noetic souls of men.”
The assumption that the mind is a real being, which can be acted upon by the brain, and which can act on the body through the brain, is the only one compatible with all the facts of experience.
— George T. Ladd,in the Elements of Physiological Psychology.
H. P. Blavatsky said in her article Kosmic Mind, also wrote: “Occultism tells us that every atom . . . is a little universe in itself; and
every organ and cell in the human body is endowed with a brain of its own, with memory, therefore, experience and discriminative powers. The idea of Universal Life composed of individual atomic lives is one of the oldest teachings of esoteric philosophy.
“If plants can be shown to have nerves and sensations and instinct (but another word for consciousness), why not allow the same in the cells of the human body? Science divides matter into organic and inorganic bodies, only because it rejects the idea of absolute life and a life-principle as an entity.”
Blavatsky later wrote that, thanks to physiology, modern science stands on the threshold of discovering that consciousness is universal.
MAINSTREAM science creates an almost insurmountable obstacle to understanding the real nature of life because of one persistent belief.
They steadfastly refuse to recognize that the Life Principle is 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 declared, “that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body.”
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.”
Spencer’s materialistic definition of Life was that “Life is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes,”
both simultaneous and successive in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.
Spencer’s assertion is still maintained as the scientific consensus view because “most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical,” says the biocentrist Dr. Robert Lanza, in … concluding, crucially: “without the other side, the living.”
Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world—a US News & World Report cover story called him a “genius” and a “renegade thinker,” even likening him to Einstein. Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce the book:
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.”
Biocentrism completes a revolutionary shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.
Biocentrism
The premise of Biocentrism is, with important modifications, asserts an intelligent hierarchical structure to Nature, which is also the 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.”
ANIMALS are just instinctual robots, many modern scientists believe. But this is not the conclusion of some of their own controlled scientific studies.
Such studies suggest there are powerful spiritual and intellectual forces embedded in all the kingdoms of nature, as Theosophy maintains.
In the 17th Century, René Descartes, is dubbed “the father of modern Western philosophy.” And according to Wikipedia:
“Much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day.” But the determined intellectual founder of the “Cartesian Theory,” started his followers believing all the wrong way about consciousness, soul and spirit.
“Descartes held the living animal as being simply an automaton,” H. P. Blavatsky commented, “a ‘well wound up clock-work,’ according to Malebranche” — then she countered with this pointed bit of sarcasm:
One who adopts the Cartesian theory about the animal, would do as well to accept at once the views of the modern materialists.
“But if the animal is an ‘automaton,’ why not Man?” Blavatsky exclaimed. “Thus we find metaphysical Descartes as inconsistent as any one.”
René Descartes
“The animal may think and know it thinks, the more keenly that it cannot speak, and express its thoughts,” Blavatsky declared: “One thing is shown however by the exact observations of naturalists and that is, that the animal is endowed with intelligence; and once this is settled, we have but to repeat Thomas Aquinas’ definition of intelligence – ‘the prerogative of man’s immortal soul’ – to see that the same is due to the animal.”
A woman who clearly did not subscribe to the Cartesian theory, found a young lion injured in the forest on the brink of death. In her compassion for the animal she took it home with her and nursed it back to health.
Later she made arrangements with an animal rescue group to take the lion.
Some time passed before the woman had a chance to visit. A video was taken when she walked up to the lion’s cage to see how he was doing. Watch the lion’s reaction when he sees her!
“THREE decades ago, few scientists were courageous enough to break ranks and question their own belief system,” Deepak Chopra, MD writes.
“Even calling science a belief system sounded outrageous – religion is a matter of belief, science a matter of facts.”
What follows are excerpts from Deepak Chopra’s recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle SFGate – Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s top 10 list on Scientific Ideology – and H. P. Blavatsky’s “Ten Items” of natural law in Isis Unveiled (Vol. 2:588), called “the fundamental propositions of the Oriental philosophy.”
“The most far-seeing scientist who was willing to break ranks then, as now, was Rupert Sheldrake,” Chopra continues, “who risked his impeccable credentials as a Cambridge biochemist with real joy, like a man suddenly able to breathe.”
Thirty years after his first heretical books, Sheldrake’s new one, ‘Science Set Free’ is a landmark achievement. No science writing has inspired me more.
“Sheldrake’s essential point is that science needs setting free from ten blind dogmas. These dogmas embrace a true belief system as much as Roman Catholicism or any other faith. Behind the daily activity of gathering data, science assumes certain things about reality that, according to Sheldrake, are unsupportable.”
Science vs Religion
“The first dogma, for example, holds that the universe is mechanical,” he reasons. “If that is so, then everything in the universe is also mechanical, including human beings — or to use a phrase from the noted atheist Richard Dawkins, we are ‘lumbering robots.’
“From a scientist’s perspective, to understand everything that you need to know about human beings, you only have to tinker with all the mechanical parts of genes and the brain until there are no more secrets left.”
Deepak Chopra, MD
The Dual Hemispheres of the Brain
Theosophy On Consciousness
“The phenomena of divine consciousness have to be regarded as activities of our mind on another and a higher plane,” Mme. Blavatsky insisted, “working through something less substantial than the moving molecules of the brain.
“They cannot be explained as the simple resultant of the cerebral physiological processes, as indeed the latter only condition them or give them a final form for purposes of concrete manifestation.”
“No physiologist, not even the cleverest, will ever be able to solve the mystery of the human mind, in its highest spiritual manifestation, or in its dual aspect of the psychic and the noetic (or the manasic), or even to comprehend the intricacies of the former on the purely material plane — unless he knows something of, and is prepared to admit the presence of this dual element.”
The seat of memory is assuredly neither here nor there, but everywhere throughout the human body. To locate its organ in the brain is to limit and dwarf the Universal Mind and its countless Rays which inform every rational mortal. As we write for Theosophists, first of all, we care little for the psychophobian prejudices of the Materialists who may read this and sniff contemptuously at the mention of ‘Universal Mind’ and the Higher noetic souls of men.
“Clearly such a view leaves no room for the soul,” Sheldrake agrees, “which becomes a wispy illusion that needs to be swept away. But then, so does the self, because there is no region of the brain that contains ‘I,’ a person.
“As long as ‘I’ is a hallucination formed by complex neural circuitry, one can throw out – or reduce to mechanical operations – love, beauty, truth, compassion, honor, devotion, faith, and so on, the whole apparatus that makes a person’s life feel valuable. A random universe has no purpose; therefore, giving lumbering robots a purpose is dubious.”
My friend, the golden age hath passed away, only the good have power to bring it back.
– GOETHE
HUMANITY is divided into thousands of languages, hundreds of sects and cults, castes, creeds, religious sects, and political ideologies.
For example, the website Ethnologue currently contains information about the world’s 7,111 known living human languages and their indigenous nationalities.
Such differences often divide rather than unite people. Instead of love and service to others, some groups encourage differences, foster criticism, opposition and attacks on others.
How, then, can we ever hope to achieve harmony and oneness, and become a new humanity that will unselfishly eschew all differences and personal enmities — promulgating the First Object of Theosophy, Universal Brotherhood? H. P. Blavatsky explained in The Secret Doctrine 2:760:
There was a time when the whole world, the totality of mankind, had one religion as they were of ‘one lip’.
A world united as One Being has been the hope of mankind for long ages. Poets, artists, philosophers, and statespersons idealize it. Self-interested politicians claim they have the grand solution to the problems of disease, hunger, poverty, homelessness.
World poverty and hunger.
But they have not succeeded, because of personal bias, and a failure to accept and value the spiritual unity of humanity as a whole.
“But what has the new cycle in store for humanity? Will it be merely a continuation of the present, only in darker and more terrible colours?
Or shall a new day dawn for mankind, a day of pure sunlight, of truth, of charity, of true happiness for all?
The answer depends mainly on the few Theosophists who, true to their colours through good repute and ill, still fight the battle of Truth against the powers of Darkness.”
In our obsession with the bitter roots of sectarian differences and selfish, materialist agendas, we remain blind to the reality of unified life. “Existence is ONE THING, not any collection of things linked together,” Blavatsky wrote: “Fundamentally there is ONE BEING.”
“Real Theosophy IS ALTRUISM, and we cannot repeat it too often,” she insisted. “It is brotherly love, mutual help, unswerving devotion to Truth.” (Our Cycle and the Next)
If all men would realize that in these alone can true happiness be found, and never in wealth, possessions, or any selfish gratification.
“But the world, in our day, judges everything on appearance. Motives are held as of no account, and the materialistic tendency is foremost in condemning a priori that which clashes with skin-deep propriety and encrusted notions. Nations, men, and ideas all are judged according to our preconceptions, and the lethal emanations of modern civilization kill all goodness and truth.”
Many Lights
“Then the dark clouds will roll away, and a new humanity will be born upon earth. Then, the GOLDEN AGE will be there, indeed. But if not, then the storm will burst, and our boasted western civilization and enlightenment will sink in such a sea of horror that its parallel History has never yet recorded.”
COHERENT consciousness creates order in the world, and numberless and continuous subtle connections link us with each other and Nature.
Thus, 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. But before we do this, we mean also to show that though many a man of science is soaked through and through with such belief, very few are brave enough to openly admit it.”
The original Third Object of The Theosophical Society is:
To investigate the hidden mysteries of Nature under every aspect possible, and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man especially.
The mechanism of this underlying universal connectivity, W. Q. Judge wrote in The Ocean of Theosophy (Ch. 16), lies in the properties of a sensitive universal matrix called “the astral light,” which can transmit “pictures of events to come” — (but only if the creations “are sufficiently well marked and made.”)
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, 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.”
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 discoveries were made using the established methods of modern science, and were to become the perennial teachings furthered today by modern Theosophy.
Checking the Field
The ‘Scientific Method’
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 —
“… 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 such may be found.
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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