Category Archives: Health, Healing, & Wholeness

Our Personal Karma: The Sticky Stuff

Child Playing on Monkey Bars, Karitane, Otago, South Island, New Zealand

Girl on the monkey bars.

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.

Continue reading

America and The Sacred Tribe of Heroes

torch-of-truth

The Torch of Truth

SYNESIUS of Cyrene was a Greek bishop of Ptolemais in ancient Libya. What could that Sage have to do with modern America one might ask?

While still a youth he went with his brother Euoptius to Alexandria, where he became an enthusiastic Neoplatonist and disciple of Hypatia.  (Wikipedia)

He once wrote: “you must not think that the gods are without employment.”

This idea was further developed by the Theosophical Society Co-Founder William Q. Judge in his Article “Cycles,” concerning the voluntary duty of the ancient gods to watch over humanity.

“Men’s minds are only preparing for an alteration into that state which will permit the human race to advance to the point suitable for the Elder Brothers to introduce their actual presence to our sight. They may be truly called the bearers of the torch of truth across the ages.”

– William Q. Judge, The Ocean of Theosophy, Ch. 1

Mind and Nature

“For this providence is divine and most ample, which frequently through one man pays attention to and affects countless multitudes of men. But this happens when they harmonize a kingdom and send to this earth for that purpose souls who are allied to themselves.

“For they descend according to orderly periods of time:

for the purpose of imparting a beneficent impulse in the republics of mankind.

Describing these descending Gods, Synesius continued: “For there is indeed in the terrestrial abode the sacred tribe of heroes who pay attention to mankind, and who are able to give them assistance even in the smallest concerns.”

Olympia Flame

“This heroic tribe is, as it were, a colony from the gods established here in order that this terrene abode may not be left destitute of a better nature.”

But when the harmony adapted in the beginning by the gods to all terrene things becomes old, they descend again to earth

“that they may call the harmony forth, energize and resuscitate it when it is expiring. . . . When, however, the whole order of mundane things, greatest and least, is corrupted, then it is necessary that the gods should descend for the purpose of imparting another orderly distribution of things.”

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The Unstoppable Force of Love

Mother and Child

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.

(The Two Paths)

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 acceptthat 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 . . .” 

(The Secret Doctrine 1:492)

“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.”

–Wallace Thornhill, Plasma Physicist (The Thunderbolts Project)

“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 —”

[The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, Letter 23b]

Modern Science and the
Message of H. P. Blavatsky

Sun Cycles

“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.” 

 

Zoning Out: Letting Your Brain Touch God

The Lucid Zone

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.

(The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, p. 15)

“As Above, So Below”

“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.

(The Secret Doctrine 1:2) 

Cosmic Substance

“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 its ex-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.

Or as H. P. Blavatsky puts it (The Secret Doctrine 1:638):

“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.

Taking his clue from Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, William Q. Judge wrote about this internecine war in his article: “The Self is the friend of SELF and also its enemy.”

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)

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How to Unstick Our Sticky Karma

Child Playing on Monkey Bars, Karitane, Otago, South Island, New Zealand

Girl on the monkey bars.

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.

Continue reading

Hidden Reality: Seeing Things in Their True Colors

Alice in Wonderland

“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.” 

Disappearing into an illusion.

The Hindu poem, a dialogue between Master Krishna and his disciple Arjuna, in the Bhagavad-Gita, is set metaphorically on a ‘battlefield.’ This chosen venue symbolizes “the war within,” which each of us continually faces, 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!

Read more online:

The Bhagavad-Gita, Chapter 11,
The Vision of the Divine Form as Including All Forms

Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield.

Temporary Illusions

“Gautama, the Buddha, only remained in solitude long enough to 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.

Illusions

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.

musical_synesthesia

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.

(The Secret Doctrine Dialogues p. 86)

Alexander Scriabin, a Russian pianist and composer who was deeply influenced by Theosophy, visualized a grand magnum opus which he titled Mysterium.

Click the link here or the link below to listen to Nora Eccles, Harrison Museum of Art as three curators describe the exhibit, Painting Music: Enchanted Modernities, and who give us a personalized tour of the Theosophy promoted powers (click below the photo):

Elisabeth Sulser

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.

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The Evidence for Intelligent Design: Irreducible Complexity

Intelligent Design

BLIND chance could never on its own have produced a self aware and self-conscious thinking being. Certainly would never have evolved a world class athlete, prima ballerina, a Mozart or Shakespeare.

If there were only random forces ruling the world there would  be no progress or evolution needed because life would be inherently purposeless and pointless.

Instead, Theosophy postulates that the process of evolution is inherently purposeful, guided by three different aspects, or “schemes — inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point. It now becomes plain that there exists in Nature a triple evolutionary scheme . . . or rather three separate schemes of evolution.”

 These are the Monadic (or spiritual), the intellectual, and the physical evolutions. These three are the finite aspects or the reflections on the field of Cosmic Illusion of atma, the seventh, the one reality.

H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:181

[The word Theosophy} “comes to us from the Alexandrian philosophers, called lovers of truth, Philaletheians, from phil ‘loving,’ and aletheia ‘truth.’ The name Theosophy dates from the third century of our era, and began with Ammonius Saccas and his disciples, who started the Eclectic Theosophical system.”

“We can show the line of descent of every Christian religion, as of every, even the smallest, sect. The latter are the minor twigs or shoots grown on the larger branches; but shoots and branches spring from the same trunk — the WISDOM-RELIGION.

“To prove this was the aim of Ammonius, who endeavoured to induce Gentiles and Christians, Jews and Idolaters, to lay aside their contentions and strifes, remembering only that they were all in possession of the same truth under various vestments, and were all the children of a common mother. This is the aim of Theosophy likewise.”

Tree of Knowledge

Thinking or purpose of any sort it is not needed by the random blind productions of  a purposeless evolutionary. Put in reality: no intelligence required.

But even children understand that figuring anything out in life is a learning process seasoned by reason, healthy emotions, and aha moments.

A conscious, observant puzzle-solver undeniably exists in the background of thought. The numerous paradoxes inherent in human, and even animal intelligence, will remain ever an unsolvable puzzle to reductionist thinkers.

Not unlike the caterpillar’s irrepressible urge to grow wings and fly, truth finding and spiritual growth are guided by a built-in system H. P. Blavatsky calls in her Secret Doctrine ‘progressive awakenings’:

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’—

(The Secret Doctrine 1:40)

Intelligent Design

In her article Spiritual Progress,  H. P. Blavatsky made what seemed kind of obvious point (paraphrased):

The true Adept must become,
[she] cannot be made.

“The true Adept, the developed man,” Blavatsky wrote, “must, we are always told, become – he cannot be made. The process is therefore one of growth through evolution, and this must necessarily involve a certain amount of pain.

“Again, the idea of growth involves also the idea of disruption: the inner being must continually burst through its confining shell or encasement, and such a disruption must also be accompanied by pain, not physical but mental and intellectual.”

Professional Sprinters

The growing recognition of the intelligence underlying all life, she wrote, is one of ” growth through evolution, and this must necessarily involve a certain amount of pain” — (at least by our human perception.)

Even progressed disciples, aspiring Adepts, may yet experience psychological pain as described in The Voice of the Silence III:

That Secret Path leads the Arhan to mental woe unspeakable; woe for the living Dead, and helpless pity for the men of karmic sorrow; the fruit of Karma Sages dare not still.

Compassion

We may experience stress in the moment, a research study suggests, “but experience greater happiness on a daily basis and longer term.”

“No pain, no gain is the rule when it comes to gaining happiness from increasing our competence at something,” said Ryan Howell, assistant professor of psychology at San Francisco State University. “People often give up their goals because they are stressful, but we found that there is benefit at the end of the day from learning to do something well. And what’s striking is that you don’t have to reach your goal to see the benefits to your happiness and well-being.”

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The Force of Love: Making a Difference in the World

THE famous meditation of John Donne, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee,” highlights two Theosophical principles:

First, the affirmation that there is no isolation, that nature and all mankind are interconnected — and second, our karmic responsibility.

“It’s one thing to fashion a particular work of art, sculpture, painting, a worthy accomplishment,” Thoreau wrote, “but much greater is the creation of one’s life.” He believed that:

to exemplify the highest potential imagined, it is the highest of loving artistic accomplishments.

A compassionate Nature activist, Julia Butterfly Hill is a living example of Theosophy pure and simple. She took the decisive action taught in The Voice of the Silence — sacrificing  her comfort and well-being to “help Nature and work on with her.”

“Help Nature and Work On With Her”

H. P. Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence, Fragment 1:

“Desire nothing. Chafe not at Karma, nor at Nature’s changeless laws. But struggle only with the personal, the transitory, the evanescent and the perishable.

Help Nature and work on with her; and Nature will regard thee as one of her creators and make obeisance.

“And she will open wide before thee the portals of her secret chambers, lay bare before thy gaze the treasures hidden in the very depths of her pure virgin bosom. Unsullied by the hand of matter she shows her treasures only to the eye of Spirit — the eye which never closes, the eye for which there is no veil in all her kingdoms.”

Julia Butterfly Hill

It must have been a profound inner sense of the sacred that roused Julia to action as she climbed 18 stories up those long ropes, to begin a permanent encampment in the endangered redwood trees.

She doesn’t follow any organized religion but says she believes very strongly in the spirituality of the universe.

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The Spiritual Awakening of Humanity

The Lotus

THEOSOPHY teaches the progressive development of everything, “worlds as well as atoms,” according to The Secret Doctrine.

This “stupendous development,” say the ancient sages, “has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.”

To them, our ‘Universe’ is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes.”

In this view, each individual cosmos, or single human life, is the effect of its predecessor. Under karmic law, “a cause as regards its successor.” 

(The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, p. 43)

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.

Altruism

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’—

(The Secret Doctrine 1:40)

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Karmagenetics: The Spirit in Matter

“Adamo Eva”, Masaccio Masolino

BECAUSE all organisms are related through similarities in DNA sequences, the whole of nature could be really one family.

New insights of epigenetics have lead to a revolutionary view of human biology. Theosophical teachings may agree with many of these new findings.

“The failures of science and its arbitrary assumptions,” Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine (2:670), “are far greater on the whole than any ‘extravagant’ esoteric doctrine.”

The traditional geneticist’s view of evolution “is from the animal,” she reminds us, and “mind in its various phases” is viewed, erroneously, as completely separate from matter.

The First Fundamental of The Secret Doctrine (1:15) explains the doctrine: “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.”

Jill Bolte Taylor and Friend

Why you should listen

“One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness.”

Watch Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk

Theosophy teaches that mind is the mystical glue insuring that the identical genes that were in our ancestor’s bodies, what Blavatsky calls ‘The Life Atoms’ —”are transmitted through their descendants for generation after generation…

…so that we are literally ‘flesh of the flesh’ of the primeval creature who has developed into man in the later period.

“Occultism teaches that the life-atoms [DNA] of our (Prana) life-principle are never entirely lost when a man dies.” And Blavatsky explains how: “The atoms [in the genes?] impregnated with the life-principle (an independent, eternal, conscious factor) — are partially transmitted from father to son by heredity…“They are partially drawn once more together,” she says, “and become the animating principle of the new body in every new reincarnation…”

The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p.656

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A Drowning Man’s Vision of His Soul

 Le_Ravissement_de_Psyche -1895 Adolphe-William Bouguereau

Le Ravissement de Psyche -1895
Adolphe-William Bouguereau

THE Myth of Er is a legend that concludes Plato‘s Republic (10.614 – 10.621). The story includes an account of the cosmos and the afterlife, Wikipedia notes:

“that greatly influenced religious, philosophical, and scientific thought for many centuries.”

No one, however gross and material he might be in this life and thought, can avoid leading a double existence in reality. One life is lived in the visible universe, the other plays out in the invisible.

This is a fundamental tenet of the Theosophical Philosophy as presented by H. P. Blavatsky.

“Socratic myths describe the ascent of the soul to true knowledge,” Theosophical scholar W. T. S. Thackera says, “its communion with divine realities, and its return to enlighten mankind.”

“The order of the Dialogues is important, as the myths in them,” Thackera explains, “each representing a kind of initiation, progressively reveal new teaching and clarify the old.”

Plato and Aristotle

“Plato opens the Republic with a conversation between Socrates and his elderly friend Cephalus on the subject of death,” Thackara writes. “Cephalus wants to assure himself that, if there is an afterlife, he will be spared the sufferings of the underworld. He even quotes from one of Pindar’s odes to support his argument.

The message is clear: we are all immortal beings, and our destiny is in our own hands.

“Plato ends the Republic with the Vision of Er, as Socrates describes the spiritual warrior who is slain in battle and returns to life, physically resurrected in order to transmit the message of all saviors. (W. T. S. Thackara in Plato’s Myths and the Mystery Tradition).

dreamuniverse

“Music of The Spheres”

“Between Science and Theology is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in Isis Unveiled [2:593], “and rapidly descending to the level of materialism.”

Yet, she adds, “from the remotest antiquity, mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity, within the personal physical man.”

“This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown — Chrestos [The Higher Self].”

Astral Body while Physical Sleeps

“It is on the indestructible tablets of the astral light that is stamped the impression of every thought we think, and every act we perform. And future events — effects of long-forgotten causes — are already delineated as a vivid picture for the eye of the seer and prophet to follow. the vast repository where the records of every man’s life as well as every pulsation of the visible cosmos are stored up for all Eternity!”

H. P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled [I:178]

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The Reality of the Illusion of Reality

Alice in Wonderland

“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.” 

Disappearing into an illusion.

The Hindu poem, a dialogue between Master Krishna and his disciple Arjuna, in the Bhagavad-Gita, is set metaphorically on a ‘battlefield.’ This chosen venue symbolizes “the war within,” which each of us continually faces, 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!

Read more online:

The Bhagavad-Gita, Chapter 11,
The Vision of the Divine Form as Including All Forms

Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield.

Temporary Illusions

“Gautama, the Buddha, only remained in solitude long enough to 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.

Illusions

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.

musical_synesthesia

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.

(The Secret Doctrine Dialogues p. 86)

Alexander Scriabin, a Russian pianist and composer who was deeply influenced by Theosophy, visualized a grand magnum opus which he titled Mysterium.

Click the link here or the link below to listen to Nora Eccles, Harrison Museum of Art as three curators describe the exhibit, Painting Music: Enchanted Modernities, and who give us a personalized tour of the Theosophy promoted powers (click below the photo):

Elisabeth Sulser

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.

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America and The Sacred Tribe of Heroes

torch-of-truth

The Torch of Truth

SYNESIUS of Cyrene was a Greek bishop of Ptolemais in ancient Libya. What could that Sage have to do with modern America one might ask?

While still a youth he went with his brother Euoptius to Alexandria, where he became an enthusiastic Neoplatonist and disciple of Hypatia.  (Wikipedia)

He once wrote: “you must not think that the gods are without employment.”

This idea was further developed by the Theosophical Society Co-Founder William Q. Judge in his Article “Cycles,” concerning the voluntary duty of the ancient gods to watch over humanity.

“Men’s minds are only preparing for an alteration into that state which will permit the human race to advance to the point suitable for the Elder Brothers to introduce their actual presence to our sight. They may be truly called the bearers of the torch of truth across the ages.”

– William Q. Judge, The Ocean of Theosophy, Ch. 1

Mind and Nature

“For this providence is divine and most ample, which frequently through one man pays attention to and affects countless multitudes of men. But this happens when they harmonize a kingdom and send to this earth for that purpose souls who are allied to themselves.

“For they descend according to orderly periods of time:

for the purpose of imparting a beneficent impulse in the republics of mankind.

Describing these descending Gods, Synesius continued: “For there is indeed in the terrestrial abode the sacred tribe of heroes who pay attention to mankind, and who are able to give them assistance even in the smallest concerns.”

Olympia Flame

“This heroic tribe is, as it were, a colony from the gods established here in order that this terrene abode may not be left destitute of a better nature.”

But when the harmony adapted in the beginning by the gods to all terrene things becomes old, they descend again to earth

“that they may call the harmony forth, energize and resuscitate it when it is expiring. . . . When, however, the whole order of mundane things, greatest and least, is corrupted, then it is necessary that the gods should descend for the purpose of imparting another orderly distribution of things.”

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Ostara the Goddess of Spring: The Real Story of Easter

“Ostara” by Helena Nelson-Reed

THERE would be no glorious bursting forth of nature at Easter-time without the cyclic journey of the Sun.

The Sun-cycle ushers springtime into the world above the equator, and the ancients regarded this as the reincarnation season of the year.

The celebration of Ēoestre or Ostara is an old pagan festival, and is the origin of the word Easter. She is the goddess who symbolized the dawn, the warm Spring sun, the resurrection of Spirit in Earth, and much more.

“There is a real Easter, a Sun-cycle—the time of Vernal Equinox, on March 21st, which brings spring-time to the world above the equator. The ancients regarded this as the re-incarnation season of the year. In the Northland, the goddess Ostara was worshipped as beautiful Queen of the Spring-time, and from Ostara, our word Easter comes.

“It is said that when Ostara first came to earth, at the very beginning of the world, she wondered what it was that she had been given to do as part of the world’s work. As she wondered, she noticed how dark and cold and dead everything seemed, though she knew, of course, that the Life in all things was only sleeping for awhile till it was time to waken again. Then it suddenly came to her that this was why she was on earth—to wake things up!”

In the legend, when the beautiful Goddess Ēoestre saw all this wonderful work of hers, she said: “Hereafter, every year I will have one day called Easter, after me. That day, all shall celebrate the awakening of Life from its winter sleep.”

Then shall all people be joyous and glad and give each other eggs as gifts, for the Egg shall be my symbol. So it is fitting, for all Life is first within the egg.

“All life in first within the egg.”

“Life laughs in bud and bloom
from out the bough,
‘Tis Easter now.
The Sun his golden journey makes
In circle wide across the sky.
O, Radiance, teach us how
To mirror in our eyes the gleam,
To let shine forth the Light we dream
This Easter now.”

The Eternal Verities,
The Easter Lesson, p. 251

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We Are All Connected, Bound Together for Good or Ill

© Lois Greenfield

THE uplifting adage ‘attitude is altitude’ pinpoints how the power of positive thinking can improve every aspect of our lives, using a simple but underutilized power we all possess.

“For decades, scientists have tried to test the power of prayer and positive thinking, with mixed results,” writes NPR National Desk religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty about a study on the science of spirituality.

“Now some scientists,” she writes, “are fording new, and controversial territory.” In an area of esoteric inquiry which is sometimes called Mental Alchemy and/or Metaphysics, a lot of thinkers over the ages have stated the idea in various ways.

The conviction that one’s thoughts are the great determiners of the content of one’s life, inspires  many to forge on despite difficult life circumstances.

Ancient wisdom traditions maintain that thoughts are actual things, and that one’s thoughts are the result of an unalterable universal law called “Cause and Effect,” and will manifest themselves at some point in one’s life.

Cause and Effect

“The lower world of effects is the sphere of … distorted Thoughts; of the most sensual conceptions, and pictures; of anthropomorphic deities, the out-creations of their creators, the sensual human minds of people who have never outgrown their brutehood on earth

Remembering thoughts are things — have tenacity, coherence, and life — that they are real entities — the rest will become plain.

“Disembodied — the creator is attracted naturally to its creation and creatures; sucked in — by the Maelstrom dug out by his own hands. . . . But I must pause, for volumes would hardly suffice to explain all that was said by me in this letter.”

Letter 9, The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett

All Connected

The law of Cause and Effect can also be described as a law that says, “For every action, there is a reaction.”  Since thoughts are actual things, and since thoughts are also actions, it means that the thoughts will invariably cause a reaction that will result in the manifestation of those thoughts.

“No act is performed without a thought at its root either at the time of performance or as leading to it. These thoughts are lodged in that part of man which we have called Manas — the mind — and there remain as subtle but powerful links with magnetic threads that enmesh the solar system.” 

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The Rise and Fall of the Third Eye

New Universe Awakening

THEOSOPHY teaches the progressive development of everything, “worlds as well as atoms,” according to The Secret Doctrine.

This “stupendous development,” say the ancient sages, “has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.”

To them, our ‘Universe’ is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes.”

In this view, each individual cosmos, or single human life, is the effect of its predecessor. Under karmic law, “a cause as regards its successor.” 

(The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, p. 43)

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’—

(The Secret Doctrine 1:40)

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The Non-Local Mind: Your Brain on God

The Lucid Zone

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 quite simple: the entire manifested universe is pervaded by duality. We are mere copies. “As above, so below,” is the old Hermetic axiom.

“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.

(The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1, p. 15)

“As Above, So Below”

“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.

(The Secret Doctrine 1:2) 

Cosmic Substance

“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 its ex-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.

Or as H. P. Blavatsky puts it (The Secret Doctrine 1:638):

“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.

Taking his clue from Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, William Q. Judge wrote about this internecine war in his article: “The Self is the friend of SELF and also its enemy.”

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)

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Life Currents in Space: Surprising Secrets about The Sun

solargoddess

Solar Goddess

WINTER in the northern hemisphere marks the annual return of an ancient solar festival.

Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod and Homer.

The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause,” recalls the NY Times Op Ed:Pleasing, that idea…

… as though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”

“The real substance of the concealed (Sun) is a nucleus of Mother substance,” H. P. Blavatsky writes in The Secret Doctrine. It is the heart and the matrix of all the living and existing Forces in our solar universe.

“It is the Kernel from which proceed to spread on their cyclic journeys all the Powers that set in action the atoms in their functional duties, and the focus within which they again meet in their SEVENTH ESSENCE every eleventh year.”

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Love is Divine Magic: the Heart Rules

Mother and Child

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 un-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.” 

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 also she who, in the article Love with an Object, fervently declared:

Love can exist without form, but no form can exist without Love.

Reincarnation

Devotion arose out of a feeling she wrote, “and became the first and foremost motor in man’s nature — for it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us.”

In her first Letter to a Theosophical Convention in 1888, she 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.”

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We Always Color the Day for Others

girl_with_sunflower

Life Divine

“THOREAU pointed out that there are artists in life, persons who can change the colour of a day and make it beautiful to those with whom they come in contact,” H. P. Blavatsky once wrote:

“We claim that there are adepts, masters in life who make it divine, as in all other arts.

“Is it not the greatest art of all, this which affects the very atmosphere in which we live?

“That it is the most important is seen at once, when we remember that every person who draws the breath of life

…affects the mental and moral atmosphere of the world,
and helps to colour the day for those about him.”

“If all our readers … endeavored to learn the art of making life not only beautiful but divine, and vowed no longer to be hampered by disbelief in the possibility of this miracle, but to commence the Herculean task at once, then [2019] would have been fitly ushered in…

cropped-yoga-woman.jpg

“Man’s life is in his own hands, his fate is ordered by himself. Why then should not [2019] be a year of greater spiritual development than any we have lived through?

“It depends on ourselves to make it so. This is an actual fact, not a religious sentiment. In a garden of sunflowers every flower turns towards the light. Why not so with us?

sunflower-girl

“And let no one imagine that it is a mere fancy, the attaching of importance to the birth of the year. The earth passes through its definite phases and man with it — and as a day can be coloured so can a year.”

(Excerpted from H. P. Blavatsky, “1888”)

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