Category Archives: Metaphysics & Philosophy

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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Lifting the Veil of Nature: Prophecies in The Secret Doctrine

Le_Ravissement_de_Psyche Adolphe-William Bouguereau

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

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

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

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

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

Hypothetical Atom

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

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

Butterfly Kids

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

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

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

Plato

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

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

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

-H. P. Blavatsky, Psychic and Noëtic Action

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

Butterflies

Proof of Heaven

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

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

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

Ω

The Emotional World of Animals

Best Friends

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.”

(H. P. Blavatsky, Have Animals Souls?)

Koko and Tabby

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!

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The Extraordinary Life and Influence of H. P. Blavatsky

blavatsky-1876-1878

H. P. Blavatsky

EVERY year on May 8th, on what they call ‘White Lotus Day,’ theosophists all over the world meet to commemorate the anniversary of the passing of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the principal founder, and inspiration of the Theosophical Society.

“A world-famous figure of mystery and controversy, and the leading intellect behind the occult revival in the western world, Mme. Blavatsky published The Secret Doctrine in 1888, her magnum opus.

“An unsolved mystery to the Victorian mind and a timeless challenge to our own, she plowed deep into the strata of archaic truth, and called for the restitution of spiritual values and the recognition of man’s divine heritage, Charles J. Ryan, an early student of Theosophy, wrote.

“H. P. Blavatsky had gained the attention of the public by her brilliant intelligence, the charm of her striking personality, and her slashing attacks on materialism and other evils. Her voice would now be listened to and recognized as speaking with authority.”

. . . some day, if not at once, the loftiness and purity of her aims, the wisdom and scope of her teachings, will be recognized more fully, and her memory will be accorded the honor to which it is justly entitled.

— Editorial, New York Daily Tribune, May 10, 1891

In her will, Blavatsky suggested that her friends might gather together on the anniversary of her passing (May 8, 1891) and read from poet Sir Edwin Arnold‘s The Light of Asia, and from the ancient Hindu scripture The Bhagavad-Gita.

Lotuses grew in unusual profusion in India on that day, and May 8th became known as White Lotus Day among Theosophists ever since.

White Lotus Day

“That which men call death is but a change of location for the Ego, a mere transformation, a forsaking for a time of the mortal frame,” her friend and colleague William Q. Judge wrote:

…a short period of rest before one reassumes another human frame in the world of mortals.

“The Lord of this body is nameless — dwelling in numerous tenements of clay, it appears to come and go. But neither death nor time can claim it, for it is deathless, unchangeable, and pure, beyond Time itself, and not to be measured.”

“So our old friend and fellow-worker has merely passed for a short time out of sight, but has not given up the work begun so many ages ago — the uplifting of humanity, the destruction of the shackles that enslave the human mind.”

— William Q. Judge
H. P. B. A LION-HEARTED COLLEAGUE PASSES.

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The Secret Gate of Reality

The Mystery of Water

“THE idea that things can cease to exist and still be, is a fundamental one in Eastern psychology.

“Under this apparent contradiction in terms,” wrote H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine, “there rests a fact of Nature to realize is the important thing.”

“A familiar instance of a similar paradox is afforded by chemical combination,” she pointed out.

“The question whether Hydrogen and Oxygen cease to exist, when they combine to form water, is still a moot one.”

“Some [argue] that since they are found again when the water is decomposed, they must be there all the while—others contending that as they actually turn into something totally different, they must cease to exist as themselves for the time being.”

Neither side is able to form the faintest conception of the real condition of a thing, which has become something else, and yet has not ceased to be itself.

“Existence as water may be said to be, for Oxygen and Hydrogen, a state of Non-being which is ‘more real being’ than their existence as gases. And it may faintly symbolize the condition of the Universe when it goes to sleep, or ceases to be — “to awaken or reappear again, when the dawn of the new [Universe] recalls it to what we call existence.”

Padma – Lotus

This masterful treatise on reality and illusion by Mme. Blavatsky might have been written by one of today’s  quantum physicists or frontier cosmologists.

Instead, they are her words, the ideas of a master Theosophical thought leader, excerpted from the Fundamentals of her magnum opus  The Secret Doctrine [1:54-5] — the  quintessence  of physics, metaphysics and ethics.

The Lotus Symbol

“There are no ancient symbols, without a deep and philosophical meaning attached to them; their importance and significance increasing with their antiquity. Such is the Lotus. It is the flower sacred to nature and her Gods, and represents the abstract and the Concrete Universes, standing as the emblem of the productive powers of both spiritual and physical nature.”

Vishnu and Padma, the lotus.

“The lotus flower, represented as growing out of Vishnu’s navel — that God resting on the waters of space and his Serpent of Infinity — is the most graphic allegory ever made: the Universe evolving from the central Sun, the point, the ever-concealed germ. Lakshmi, who is the female aspect of Vishnu, and who is also called Padma, the lotus, is likewise shown floating at “Creation,” on a lotus flower, and during the “churning of the ocean” of space, springing from the “sea of milk,” like Venus from the froth.”
– H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:379

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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)

Continue reading

The Spiritual Underpinnings of Space and Life

The Matrix

IS the apparent void of Space “an emptiness,” asks Deepak Chopra, “or could it be the womb of creation, the source of Life itself?”

This is clearly a rhetorical question by Dr. Chopra who knows well his Eastern metaphysics.

H. P. Blavatsky agreed asserting “there is not one finger’s breath of void Space in the whole Boundless Universe,” (The Secret Doctrine 1:289.)

In her day Science still believed in the existence of “Ether.” The substance, she noted, was “accepted by physical astronomy, in ordinary physics, and in chemistry. Astronomers, who first began by regarding it as a fluid of extreme tenuity and mobility — ‘its main function in modern astronomy has been to serve as a basis for hydrodynamical theories of gravitation.'”

What connects everything in this infinite boundlessness? The answer is described by ancient Seers as a “conscious spiritual quality” or “divine breath.”

It spreads as it issues from Laya throughout infinity as a colourless spiritual fluid.

Space is not Empty

In this important video, astrophysicist Dr. Michael Clarage explains the new views of “the interstellar medium,” the concept H. P. Blavatsky and her Teachers had asserted in the 19th Century. (See: A Web of Spiritual Substance Spans the Universe).

f

Ether was later rejected by science in favor of mathematical models and various models proposed by Einstein and others to bolster up gravity as the primary force in the universe.

New observations in deep space challenged those theories, and now “dark matter” and “dark energy” are proposed to fill the gap. But these seem to be merely iterations of the old ‘ether’ repackaged in gravity-speak.

It may be soon that the old hypothetical models will be replaced by scientists who favor observational, empirical evidence pointing to an  electrical universe, (Holoscience.com) — which is more in sync with ancient Theosophical teachings.

“Light is Life … both are electricity,” Mme. Blavatsky wrote in her first work Isis Unveiled (1:258): — it is “the life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things,” she wrote explaining the occult teachings.

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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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Astrology and Human Destiny

Angel Child

ASTROLOGY is only superstition, most modern scientists believe. Yet, true science and philosophy seeks “rather to solve than to deny,” says Theosophy.

“It is an axiom of the philosophic student,” H. P. Blavatsky affirmed, “that truth generally lies between the extremes.”

“Now it is a well-known principle of Occultism that the ONE LIFE, which pervades ALL, connects all the bodies in space. All heavenly bodies have thus mutual relation, which is blended with man’s existence, since he is but a microcosm in the macrocosm.

“Every thought, as much as action, is dynamic and is impressed in the imperishable Book of Nature – the Akasa, the objective aspect of the UNMANIFESTED LIFE.

All our thoughts and actions thus produce the vibrations in space, which mould our future career.

“And astrology is a science, which having determined the nature of the laws that govern these vibrations is able to state precisely a particular or a series of results, the causes of which have already been produced by the individual in his previous life.”

Return of Childhood

“Since the present incarnation is the child of the previous one, and since there is but that. ONE LIFE which holds together all the planets of the Solar system, the position of those planets at the time of the birth of an individual – which event is the aggregate result of the causes already produced – gives to the true Astrologer the data upon which to base his predictions.”

For more click H. P. Blavatsky’s article:

Astrology, Numbers, and Destiny

§

“Mention the word ‘astrology’ and skeptics go into an epileptic fit,” natural health researcher Mike Adams says.

“The idea that someone’s personality could be imprinted at birth according to the position of the sun, moon, and planets,” Adams notes, “has long been derided as ‘quackery’ by the so-called ‘scientific’ community which resists any notion based on holistic connections between individuals and the cosmos.

Our Genes

“According to the conventional view, your genes and your parenting determine your personality, and the position of planet Earth at the time of your birth has nothing to do with it.”

Yes, as H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine 1:272, explained:

modern science believes not in the ‘soul of things,’ and hence will reject the whole system of ancient cosmogony.

“Seasonal Biology”

“Then again, conventional scientists don’t believe the position of the moon has anything to do with life on Earth, either,” Adams writes. “They dismiss the wisdom that farmers have known for ages — that planting seeds or transplanting living plants in harmony with the moon cycles results in higher crop yields. Even the seeds inside humans are strongly influenced by the moon, as menstruation cycles and moon cycles are closely synchronized (28 days, roughly).”

“And recently, scientific studies showing planetary imprinting called ‘seasonal biology’ have confirmed the underlying principle of astrology. The scientific study shows that planetary positions do, surprisingly, influence our biological clocks. Why not our psychological and mental states as well?”

Biological Imprinting

Occult Influences

“The ancients always considered the ‘ambient’ – or entire heaven – at birth,” Blavatsky colleague William Q. Judge wrote in Astrological Influences, “as being that which affected man.”

New Age Guru, H. P. Blavatsky, referred often to astrology in her Theosophical writings, as in the following lines from “The Theosophist” in Blavatsky Collected Writings compiled by Boris de Zircoff.

Although a study of the science of astronomy may enable us “to determine what the course of events will be,” she maintained, adding: 

the clock indicates, it does not
influence the time.

Discovery

Thus, she said: “though the planets may have no hand in changing the destiny of man, still their position may indicate what that destiny is likely to be.”

And a distant traveler has often to put right his clock, so that it may indicate correctly the time of the place he visits.

Ω

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A Web of Spiritual Substance Spans the Universe

LOFAR Image

SPIRITUAL substance exists everywhere, say the Occult Sciences, “and forms the first Upadhi [foundation] on which our World [solar system] is built.”

“Matter is Eternal. It is the Upadhi (the physical basis) for the One infinite Universal Mind to build thereon its ideations. Therefore, the Esotericists maintain that there is no inorganic or dead matter in nature, the distinction between the two made by Science being as unfounded as it is arbitrary and devoid of reason.”

(The Secret Doctrine 1:280)

“Outside [our sysem] it is to be found in its pristine purity only between [the solar systems or] the Stars of the Universe. The worlds already formed or forming; those in Laya resting meanwhile in its bosom. As its substance is of a different kind from that known on earth, the inhabitants of the Earth, seeing through itbelieve in their illusion and ignorance that it is empty space.”

There is not one finger’s breath  (angula) of void Space in the whole Boundless (Universe).  

“Matter or Substance is septenary within our World, as it is so beyond it. Moreover, each of its states or principles is graduated into seven degrees of density. In the universe of manifestation the ever-present electrical energy and ceaseless destructive and formative power. Esoterically, it is Fohat the universal propelling Vital Force, at once the propeller and the resultant.”

– H. P. Blavatsky, Fohat: The Cosmic Electricity

Phlogiston

Space is not Empty

(What The Secret Doctrine says, by H. P. Blavatsky):

  1. A conscious, colorless spiritual fluid, no empty space.

Extracts from a Private Commentary, hitherto secret. (SD 1:289)

“The Initial Existence in the first twilight of the Maha-Manwantara (after the Maha-Pralaya that follows every age of Brahma) is a conscious spiritual quality. In the manifested worlds (solar systems) it is, in its objective subjectivity, like the film from a Divine Breath to the gaze of the entranced seer. It spreads as it issues from Laya throughout infinity as a colourless spiritual fluid. It is on the seventh plane, and in its seventh state in our planetary world.

“It is Substance to our spiritual sight. It cannot be called so by men in their waking state; therefore they have named it in their ignorance ‘God-Spirit.’

‘Phlogiston’

“We believe in the much laughed at phlogiston (see article “What is force and what is matter?“), and in what some natural philosophers would call nisus the incessant though perfectly imperceptible (to the ordinary senses) motion or efforts one body is making on another — the pulsations of inert matter — its life.”

“Matter (or nature) acting by her own peculiar energy,” writes a Master,

must have always existed — its materials ever changing form, combinations and properties, but its principles or elements being absolutely indestructible.

The connection between phlogiston and plasma can also be seen in another letter from Master K.H.:

What are those long white filaments twisted like so many ropes, of which the penumbra of the Sun is made up? What the central part that is seen like a huge flame ending in fiery spires, and the transparent clouds, or rather vapours formed of delicate threads of silvery light, that hangs over those flames — what — but magneto-electric aura — the phlogiston of the Sun?[5]

Plasma Ball

The Theosophist, September 1882, P. 319, “What is Force and What is Matter?”  For links click on: Universal Theosophy, Theosophical Periodicals.

“In other words we believe in MATTER alone, in matter as visible nature and matter in its invisibility as the invisible omnipresent omnipotent Proteus with its unceasing motion which is its life, and which nature draws from herself since she is the great whole outside of which nothing can exist.”

“Its motion is due to the force
which is inherent in itself.”

“The Theosophist who knows anything about life insists that Universal Brotherhood is not a mere theory. It is a fact, a living ever present fact, from which no nation can hope to escape; no man can escape from it, and every man who violates it violates a law, violates the greatest law of nature, which will react upon him and make him suffer.”

– W. Q. Judge, Universal Brotherhood a Fact in Nature

“As above so below.”

Deeper study on the subject: 

The Global Consciousness Project

The Early Teachings Of The Masters

New observation:

“We’ve had our best glimpse of a web of matter that spans the universe”

“A vast spider’s web of matter is thought to stretch across the whole universe and astronomers have just got the best view of it yet. Hideki Umehata at the RIKEN institute in Japan and his colleagues used the Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile to observe a young cluster of galaxies 12 billion light-years from Earth, called SSA22. Peering into the cluster, they spotted wispy filaments of hydrogen gas spanning the space between the galaxies. These seem to be filaments of the long-theorized cosmic web.”

Portal to the Universe

 

 

Psychic or Noëtic: Choosing the Mind We Want

Alex Ross, ‘Beauty and the Beast’

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 materialism and desires.

Broadly considered, what is called ‘higher mind’ in Theosophy is a really 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.”

“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.

Vulcan Mind Meld 🙂

“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.

(William Q. Judge, The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, Book 2.)

Plato from Raphael’s The School of Athens

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:

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.

Jill Bolte Taylor

“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.

(Quoted by H. P. Blavatsky in her Article, Psychic and Noetic Action)

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Pulsation of the Manifested God in Nature

ONE LIFE

“IT is the ONE LIFE, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end, yet periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being.

“. . . unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness; unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality; truly, ‘a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.

“Its one absolute attribute, which is ITSELF, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the ‘Great Breath,’ which is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present SPACE.

“That which is motionless cannot be Divine. But then there is nothing in fact and reality absolutely motionless within the universal soul.”

“From the beginning of man’s inheritance, from the first appearance of the architects of the globe he lives in, the unrevealed Deity was recognized and considered under its only philosophical aspect —

universal motion, the thrill of
the creative Breath in Nature.

“Occultism sums up the ‘One Existence’ thus:  ‘Deity is an arcane, living (or moving) fire, and the eternal witnesses to this unseen Presence are Light, Heat, Moisture,’ — this trinity including, and being the cause of, every phenomenon in Nature.”

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No Big Bang: A Kinder, Gentler Universe

Soul of the World

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

The “stupendous development,” the Sages taught, “has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.”

To Initiated Seers our universe, while full of important information, is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes,” Theosophy says.

[The Secret Doctrine 1:43]

In this view, each individual cosmos and corresponding single human life is the result and the effect of its predecessor. Under the never-erring law of Karma, every universe becomes “a cause as regards its successor.”

Instead of only one ‘Big Bang,’ as standard model science dogma describes the origin of the universe, Theosophy postulates an infinite number of recurring universes, each one an improvement on the last. Today a new view in modern theoretical physics suggests a similar idea.

Universeinyourhands

Cyclic Universes

“There was not just one bang,” say theoretical physicists Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their book Endless Universe, postulating a groundbreaking “Cyclic Universe” theory. According to the theory, the Big Bang “was not the beginning of time but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution.” Very close to the Theosophical view, it turns out.

What these scientists seem to be proposing is the law of periodicity, the Second Fundamental Proposition of The Secret Doctrine

“In Endless Universe, Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, both distinguished theoretical physicists, present a bold new cosmology. Two world-renowned scientists present an audacious new vision of the cosmos that ‘steals the thunder from the Big Bang theory.'” —Wall Street Journal

The distinguished theoretical physicists propose that “the evolution of the universe is cyclic with big bangs occurring once every trillion or so.”

The Great Breath

To Theosophy, ‘periodicity’ is certainly an admirable start. But unlike the speculation of an “infinite cycle of titanic collisions,” Theosophy offers a much kinder and gentler solution tied to the cosmology offered by “generations of initiated seers.”

Those findings conclude that we exist in a living universe, where everything to its core is alive, sustained by an eternal, perpetual rhythmic breathing or pulsation.

(We may be asleep at night, but luckily, we continue breathing.) The Universe, according to the occult dynamics of The Secret Doctrine, does the same.

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White Lotus Day: The Extraordinary Life and Influence of H. P. Blavatsky

blavatsky-1876-1878

H. P. Blavatsky

EVERY year on May 8th, on what they call ‘White Lotus Day,’ theosophists all over the world meet to commemorate the anniversary of the passing of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, the principal founder, and inspiration of the Theosophical Society.

“A world-famous figure of mystery and controversy, and the leading intellect behind the occult revival in the western world, Mme. Blavatsky published The Secret Doctrine in 1888, her magnum opus.

“An unsolved mystery to the Victorian mind and a timeless challenge to our own, she plowed deep into the strata of archaic truth, and called for the restitution of spiritual values and the recognition of man’s divine heritage, Charles J. Ryan, an early student of Theosophy, wrote.

“H. P. Blavatsky had gained the attention of the public by her brilliant intelligence, the charm of her striking personality, and her slashing attacks on materialism and other evils. Her voice would now be listened to and recognized as speaking with authority.”

. . . some day, if not at once, the loftiness and purity of her aims, the wisdom and scope of her teachings, will be recognized more fully, and her memory will be accorded the honor to which it is justly entitled.

— Editorial, New York Daily Tribune, May 10, 1891

In her will, Blavatsky suggested that her friends might gather together on the anniversary of her passing (May 8, 1891) and read from poet Sir Edwin Arnold‘s The Light of Asia, and from the ancient Hindu scripture The Bhagavad-Gita.

Lotuses grew in unusual profusion in India on that day, and May 8th became known as White Lotus Day among Theosophists ever since.

White Lotus Day

“That which men call death is but a change of location for the Ego, a mere transformation, a forsaking for a time of the mortal frame,” her friend and colleague William Q. Judge wrote:

…a short period of rest before one reassumes another human frame in the world of mortals.

“The Lord of this body is nameless — dwelling in numerous tenements of clay, it appears to come and go. But neither death nor time can claim it, for it is deathless, unchangeable, and pure, beyond Time itself, and not to be measured.”

“So our old friend and fellow-worker has merely passed for a short time out of sight, but has not given up the work begun so many ages ago — the uplifting of humanity, the destruction of the shackles that enslave the human mind.”

— William Q. Judge
H. P. B. A LION-HEARTED COLLEAGUE PASSES.

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Our Queen Sister, the Morning and Evening Star

Hayley Westenra

“NO STAR among the countless myriads that twinkle over the sidereal fields of the night sky,” wrote Helena Blavatsky, “shines so dazzlingly as the planet Venus.”

“Venus is the queen among our planets, the crown jewel of our solar system.”

“She is the inspirer of the poet, the guardian and companion of the lonely shepherd,” she wrote, “the lovely morning and the evening star.”

“For, ‘Stars teach as well as shine,’ although their secrets are still untold and unrevealed to the majority of men, including astronomers.”

They are ‘a beauty
and a mystery,’ verily.

“This story shall now be told, for the benefit of those who may have neglected their astral mythology. Venus, characterized by Pythagoras as the sol alter, a second Sun, on account of her magnificent radiance – equaled by none other – was the first to draw the attention of ancient Theogonists.” 

Bright Stars

“Venus, characterized by Pythagoras as the sol alter, a second Sun, on account of her magnificent radiance – equaled by none other was the first to draw the attention of ancient Theogonists.

Before it began to be called Venus, it was known in pre-Hesiodic theogony as Eosphoros (or Phosphoros), and Hesperos, the children of the dawn and twilight.

ς

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Spiritual Seeing into a Hidden Reality

Illusion or Reality?

WHAT we usually call ‘reality’ may actually be completely subjective, as it is filtered through our ordinary physical senses, according to Theosophy.

Yet, “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 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.”

It is only by the aid of this faculty that men can ever see things in their true colors.

“What are called good sense and logic enable us to see only the appearances of things, that which is evident to everyone. 

Awakening.

“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.” 

Plato

Plato’s Cave

In a related article “The Subjective and the Objective,” William Q. Judge refers to the Plato’s Cave metaphor:

Socrates: “Imagine the enlightenment and ignorance of our nature in a figure: Behold! human beings living in a sort of underground den, which has a mouth opening towards the light, and reaching all across the den;

they have been here from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them;

“for the chains are arranged in such a manner as to prevent them from turning their heads. At a distance above and behind them the light of a fire is blazing, . . . There can be no question, that the truth would be to them just nothing but the shadows of the images.”

Plato’s Cave

W. Q. Judge: “Theosophy recognizes a continuous gradation of powers, faculties, states, principles — call them what you will — from the highest or most spiritual to the lowest or most material. In this whole gamut of states or conditions, no chasm is found; there is nothing to bridge; consciousness is the necessary substratum and presupposition of the most material, and consciousness is the noumenon or essential reality of the most spiritual.”

We know of nothing more material or external than the physical, material, visible body–the world of matter, so-called …. of the cave which Socrates describes in Plato’s dialogue — the wall upon which fall the shadows supposed by the prisoners to be the only realities.

THE SUBJECTIVE AND THE OBJECTIVE A LESSON FROM THE CAVE OF PLATO’S REPUBLIC, BOOK VIIWilliam Q. Judge

Disappearing into an illusion.

The Bhagavad-Gita

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, an inner struggle we must eventually wage.

(The Theosophy of the Bhagavad Gita)

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 the drama of the awakening soul.

Read Chapter 11 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 achieve self-awareness, and enable him to arrive at the truth, to 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 material senses would be able to contact the underlying ‘reality’ of physical things. But never in an isolated ‘Me’ universe.

The Me 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?

Progressive Awakenings

“Whatever reality things possess must be looked for in them before or after they have passed like a flash through the material world; but we cannot cognise any such existence directly, so long as we have sense-instruments which bring only material existence into the field of our consciousness. 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.

“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;” but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya.”

THE SECRET DOCTRINE Vol. 1, Page 40

A Musical Thought Image

One of the best ways to describe what Theosophy is, arts reporter Ali Snow remarked on a Utah Public Radio show, “is to think of it as a kind of fusion of religion and science.”

A desire to prove or to explore some of the mystical forces that made religion work and make the spiritual world work.

A striking example of this kind of fusion is H. P. Blavatsky’s description of how “the sense of sound is the first thing that manifests itself in the universe … in  correspondence with colors or sight.”

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. You cannot hear at a distance, but you can see at a distance.”

“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.”

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 gives us a personalized tour of the Theosophy promoted power (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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Life Atoms — the Mysteries of Mind, Matter and Energy

intention

Yoga Pose

THE concept of spirituality is, in mainstream science’s opinion, unscientific because they are unable to explain or physically measure it.

In the modern ongoing debate about intelligent design, the Christian evangelist Randal Rauser complains about rigidly biassed scientific dogmas.

“Science shuns any concepts  not based on established and approved models.” Intelligent design, Rauser says, “can only be recognized as a valid ‘scientific’ explanation if bound by the laws of physics.”

On this basis, he writes: “if God is any part of the proposal, it is by definition unscientific —and all claims of legitimacy or illegitimacy of Intelligent Design or God must be disregarded because science has an inherent bias.”

If therefore we don’t know the hidden or as yet undiscovered laws of science, then we don’t know whether an explanation conforms to them or not.

A student of Theosophy would agree. Any honest analysis of a controversy raised by science should acknowledge merely that the concepts do not conform to the “laws of physics as presently understood,” or the laws “as they ultimately are” — but not ignored or dismissed out of hand.

The Mystery of Matter: Search for the Elements is a multimedia project about one of the great adventures in the history of science: the long (and continuing) quest to understand what the world is made of – to identify, understand and organize the basic building blocks of matter. In a nutshell, the project is about the human story behind the Periodic Table of the Elements.”

The Mystery of Matter

Mme. Blavatsky insisted that science was intentionally limited allowing only that one must follow the evidence wherever it leads — a  standard that modern science touts, but seldom follows.

She cited as an example the periodic table, developed by the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev purported to be a complete and accurate account of all known chemical elements.

Yet the number of possible elements is not known, and to this day more are being proposed and cataloged.

Mme. Blavatsky maintained that the chemist’s materialistic search for the missing elements in Mendeleev’s periodic table would be fruitless, as many were buried out of reach in states of matter unknown as yet on this physical plane. These elements are not all on the same plane of perception. H. P. Blavatsky explains in comparing degrees of substance to the planetary “globes”:

Planes of Substance

“The one eternal LAW unfolds everything in the (to be) manifested Nature on a sevenfold principle; among the rest, the countless circular chains of worlds, composed of seven globes, graduated on the four lower planes of the world of formation (the three others belonging to the Archetypal Universe).

“Out of these seven only one, the lowest and the most material of those globes is within our plane or means of perception,

the six others lying outside of it and being therefore invisible to the terrestrial eye. 

“Our Globe, as taught from the first is at the bottom of the arc of descent, where the matter of our perceptions exhibits itself in its grossest form.

The Third Eye

“Hence it only stands to reason that the globes which overshadow our Earth must be on different and superior planes. In short, as Globes,

they are in CO-ADUNITION but not IN CONSUBSTANTIALITY WITH OUR EARTH and thus pertain to quite another state of consciousness.

Two Systems Compared

The Link Between Science
and Spirituality

This short video debuted at IONS’ 40th-anniversary celebration at the EarthRise Center. This was the opening day of the new Environmental Education Center, which showcases plans to develop EarthRise into one of the most environmentally sustainable retreat, education, and research centers in the world. Science as it should be. (Institute of Noetic Sciences)

West Meets East

“The universe is not the meaningless object that Western science says that it is,” IONS senior scientist Dean Radin asserts, “but rather that the universe is permeated with meaning.”

In The Voice of the Silence, H. P. Blavatsky defines the difference between psychic and spiritual senses.

The Energy Field of Hands

The ‘Siddhis’

“There are two kinds of Siddhis,” she explained, “one group embraces the lower, coarse, psychic and mental energies;

the other is one which exacts the highest dstraining of Spiritual powers.

In the next video clip, Dean Radin, Ph.D., refers to the Eastern ‘Siddhis.’ He explains the difference between Western matter-oriented science, and the Eastern spiritually-based science, that emphasizes consciousness as the primary driver.

Occult Chemistry

The Russian chemist and inventor Dimitri Mendeleev, the father of the original periodical table, included predictions for properties of elements he thought were yet to be discovered.

The missing elements, and there are countless numbers of them Blavatsky declared, are those hidden elements of occult chemistry, according to The Secret Doctrine.

Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev[

“The (ancient and modern) Western American Zuni Indians seem to have entertained similar views,” Mme. Blavatsky also wrote:

But materialism rejects any possibility of such a veiled reality in nature.

The Zuni present-day customs, their traditions and records, she says, all point to the fact that, from time immemorial, their institutions—political, social and religious—”were (and still are) shaped according to the septenary principle.”

The Secret Doctrine 2:605

Zuni Dancers

An electromagnetic astral substratum of matter is still ignored by standard model modern science. Such a field was suggested in the early 20th century by the groundbreaking discoveries of the ‘mad scientist’ Nikola Tesla, a futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.

and by Semyon Kirlian’s corona discharge photography pictured below:

Kirlian photography is a collection of photographic techniques used to capture the phenomenon of electrical coronal discharges.

The Kirlians conducted experiments in which photographic film was placed on top of a conducting plate, and another conductor was attached to a hand, a leaf or other plant material. The conductors were energized by a high-frequency high-voltage power source, producing photographic images typically showing a silhouette of the object surrounded by an aura of light.

Kirlian photo of a Coleus leaf

The Body Matrix

The Design Body

“The whole quarrel between the esoteric and profane sciences,” Blavatsky wrote in her Secret Doctrine (2:149):

lies in the demonstration of the existence of an astral body within the physical.

For humanity to receive the whole truth, The Secret Doctrine points to the overarching need for a recognition of the electromagnetic design body in man and nature — a design field made of living plasma.

Zero Point Age

“Is there such a thing as a life force—an energy field that connects all living things across space and time? Could the existence of this living energy field provide a scientific explanation for supernatural phenomena?

The Field

After interviewing cutting-edge scientists in many disciplines, investigative journalist Lynne McTaggart presents a compelling and stunning argument for this theory in her groundbreaking masterpiece, The Field.”

Science & Spirituality

The ‘field’ is what Rupert Sheldrake calls the “morphic resonance.” It is a living life matrix, called “plastic potency” in Theosophical occult physics.

Studies in Occultism by H. P. Blavatsky

Rupert Sheldrake

Mind-Matter

By ignoring the implications of these and many similar discoveries of an underlying invisible, intelligent structure in nature, mainstream science dooms itself to fruitless speculations, centered on a soul-less and purposeless universe.

Mind and Matter

“If there is anything on earth like progress,” Blavatsky opined in The Secret Doctrine (1:506), “Science will someday have to give up such monstrous ideas as

her physical, self-guiding laws — void of soul and Spirit — and then turn to the occult teachings.

Kirlian Photography

Because of the eye-popping aura patterns revealed by technician Semyon Kirlian, and the vibrant fractal forms of Benoît Mandelbrot, the hidden energy designs of nature become patently obvious to our senses.

Little Flower

Fortunately for humanity, ancient occult science is being restored to its legitimate place today by mind-matter researchers, notably the Institute of Noetic Sciences—and concepts promoted to the public through a host of films.

Among these are Renée Scheltema’s Something Unknown is Doing We Don’t Know What, and The Living Matrix which explores the science of subtle energy medicine.

Litter Flower

Alfred Tennyson was not just a poet laureate, but might also be considered a true scientist. He sensed the hidden side of nature and was unafraid to acknowledge its mystery. In the classic “Flower in the Crannied Wall” Tennyson wrote:

I pluck you out the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower – but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

Chain Links

Summoning to this theme the law of Analogy, which Blavatsky calls “the first key to the world-problem”— she goes on to picture the existence of forms as great chain “whose links are all connected.” These links, she wrote:

have to be studied co-ordinately in their occult relations to each other.

The Secret Doctrine 1:601

Global Links

The Chain

Summoning to this theme the law of Analogy, which Blavatsky calls “the first key to the world-problem”— she goes on to picture the existence of forms as great chain “whose links are all connected.”  And these links, she says:

have to be studied co-ordinately in their occult relations to each other.

§

The Chain of Life

Our Deity

“Every one of the higher, as of the lower worlds, is inter-blended with our own objective world,” The Secret Doctrine postulates, and “it is no metaphysical figure of speech, but a sober fact in Nature, however incomprehensible to our senses.”

“Our deity is neither in a paradise, nor in a particular tree, building, or mountain, ” H. P. Blavatsky declared in the Key to Theosophy — “it is everywhere…

— for IT is the mysterious power of evolution and involution, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and even omniscient creative potentiality.

“In every atom of the visible as of the invisible Cosmos, in, over, and around every invisible atom and divisible molecule.”

Deity Everywhere

Interblended

“Every one of the higher, as of the lower worlds, is interblended with our own objective world,” The Secret Doctrine postulates, therefore …

… it is no metaphysical figure of speech, but a sober fact in Nature, however incomprehensible to our senses.

“There is one absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested, conditioned, being. This Infinite and Eternal Cause — is ‘Be-ness’ rather than Being (in Sanskrit, Sat), and is beyond all thought or speculation.”

“The one Reality is also symbolised by the term ‘The Great Breath,’ a symbol sufficiently graphic to need no further elucidation. Thus, then, the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine is this metaphysical ONE ABSOLUTE — BE-NESS —”

The Secret Doctrine PROEM 1:14

One Absolute Reality

It doesn’t require any leap to understand why science and religion are compelled to join hands. They co-exist, because of the inseparability of energy (spirit or consciousness) and matter.  

…and, if the two are once divorced, the whole Kosmos would fall back into chaos and non-being.

 Liberation

“I think what we need today is an integration of our scientific understanding of the world,

with the wisdom that is held in the world’s spiritual traditions.

Peter Russell

yoga-class

Natural Laws of Health

 Spirit & Matter

All systems, small and large, are “inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point,” (SD1:181), said Helena Blavatsky over a century ago.  And further (SD 1:640): “It is a fundamental principle of the Occult philosophy

— this same homogeneity of matter and immutability of natural laws, which are so much insisted upon by materialism — but that unity rests upon the inseparability of Spirit from matter.

From the mountain top.

Ancient metaphysical postulates of Theosophy have now begun to visibly flower. For over one-hundred years, untold numbers of trailblazing researchers, thinkers,

… writers and reformers leading to the present day, have sparked a rekindling of the torch of Truth.

Science & Religion 

Preeminent among the torch-bearers are organizations is notably The Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). This would very likely be welcome music to the ears of Helena Blavatsky, writer of The Secret Doctrine, boldly subtitled “The Synthesis of Science, Religion, and Philosophy.”

Can they really co-exist? “Loretta Haskell, a board member of the Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry, is also a church musician,” Laurie Goodstein, in the New York Times: April 26, 2009.

I am not one of the humanists who feel that religion is a bad thing.

Loretta Haskell

Thanks to such fearless investigators, and to the multitudes of enthusiastic Theosophical students worldwide, the seeds of the perennial wisdom— sown long ago—have become, as summarized by senior scientist Dean Radin of IONS:

… the paradigm-shattering roots of an emerging, 21st-century worldview.

ξ

Imagine

Of the sincere religious believers, Blavatsky wrote: “Their charity,  and simple, child-like faith in the infallibility of their Bible, their dogmas, and their clergy,

bring into full activity all the virtues that are implanted in our common nature.

 ♥

 

Just Being Yourself: Proof of Reincarnation

Julia Butterfly Hill up a Redwood

REDWOOD trees live in families. “They have very shallow roots, but redwood trees are connected to each other through their root system,” says pioneer nature defender Julia Butterfly Hill.

When you see a group of redwood trees, often they are all part of the same roots, and they feed one another that way.

Similarly, we are all connected not only to many others but also to our higher self in a spiritual sense.

It’s a kind of multimedia group of former lives and personalities to which we intimately belong.  We, ordinary humans, are paradoxical often reveal our hidden genius founded on the collective experience of many lifetimes.

From Mozart’s soaring music to the fearless passion of a Julia Butterfly Hill, we are each drawn to a karmic destiny created by ourselves over many lifetimes. That’s our personal family, and we still know each other, though most may not remember the connection consciously.

Most of us lack a Seer’s knowing, are forced to dive for clues of our history into the far horizons of reincarnation, and sift the karmic sands of countless past lives to uncover the source of our collective powerful talents, dreams, failures, and successes.

juliabutterflyhill

Julia, very high up!

Teilhard de Chardin’s idea that we are “spiritual beings immersed in a human experience,” barely begins to explain the genius of a Mozart who composed musical score at the age of five.

Or why Julia Butterfly Hill, a determined twenty-four-year-old, would choose to spend a very dangerous two years alone 200 feet atop a thousand-year-old redwood tree. Alone to save the tree, and others like it, from destruction by a logging company supporting an army of determined clear-cutters.

She climbed up and lived 200 feet atop the giant tree, on a 6-by-6-foot plywood platform, for over two years!  Just to save a stand of ancient redwood trees in California from being cut down by Pacific Lumber Company. (For more info Click Here)

Protecting Luna

Just as Amadeus and Julia, every one of us is born with a destiny and an individual soul identity, and engaging intelligence and experience from former lives to this one.

“To a greater or lesser degree, we remember and act out the memory of them. By standing together in unity and solidarity and love, writes Julia:

we will heal the wounds in the earth and in each other. We can make a positive difference through our actions

Read more of Julia’s compelling story here.

Memory can develop slowly or quickly, but as is often the case, has little opportunity to emerge. All depends upon our karmic circumstances, merit and demerit. Yet within the outer circumstances remains an unshakable awareness of an ‘I am I’ consciousness. We are ourselves and none other, whether we remember all the details or not. 

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Wings of the Soul: the Light and Spirit of Divinity

Sensing The Soul of Things

THEOSOPHY does not demand acceptance but points to fundamental principles, and how they can be verified and practically applied.

Theosophy is not only a ‘faith’ because faiths are changeable. It is not dependent upon dogma or revelation either, as are modern science and religion, but on verifiable occult records.

The object of Theosophy is to show that all things and beings in nature are intelligent souls in evolution and for human beings the necessity of knowing ourselves — and becoming our own authority, and that of the world, by that realized knowledge.

Theosophy the “Wisdom-Religion” as presented by H. P. Blavatsky and her Masters, has existed from immemorial time. It offers a theory of nature and man which is founded upon knowledge acquired by the wise Sages of the past. It has been expressed in different ages by Krishna, Confucius, and Buddha in the East, by Pythagoras, Plato, and Jesus in the West. Plato wrote about the quest for self-knowledge H. P. Blavatsky wrote: “Plato has expressed the same idea in two lines:

“The light and spirit of the Divinity are the wings of the soul, they raise it to communion with the gods, above this earth — to become like the gods, is to become holy, just and wise. That is the end for which man was created, and that out to be his aim in the acquisition of knowledge.”  

Le Phare De L’Inconnu (Beacon Light of the Unknown

Plato

“Every one of us possesses the faculty, the interior spiritual sense, known by the name of intuition,H. P. Blavatsky explains in her The Theosophist article Le Phare De L’Inconnu (Beacon Light of the Unknown):

but how rare are those who know how to develop it! It is only by the aid of this faculty that men can ever see things in their true colours.

Awesome Fishy Colors

The One Absolute Reality

This power is, Blavatsky wrote, is an “instinct of the soul, which grows in us in proportion to the employment we give it — which helps us to perceive and understand the realities of things with far more certainty than the simple use of our senses and exercise of our reason. there is one absolute Reality which antecedes all manifested, conditioned, being. It is ‘Be-ness’ rather than Being (in Sanskrit, Sat), and is beyond all thought or speculation.

This Infinite and Eternal Cause — is the rootless root of  ‘all that was, is, or ever shall be.’

“… the one Reality, is also symbolized by the term ‘The Great Breath,’ a symbol sufficiently graphic to need no further elucidation. Thus, then, the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine is this metaphysical One Absolute — Be-ness …

The Origin of Consciousness

“Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities,” Blavatsky insists, “but as the two facets or aspects of the Absolute (Parabrahm), which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective.

“Considering this metaphysical triad as the Root from which proceeds all manifestation, the great Breath assumes the character of precosmic Ideation. It is the fons et origo of force and of all individual consciousness, and supplies the guiding intelligence in the vast scheme of cosmic Evolution.”

Intelligent Design and Function

“On the other hand, precosmic root-substance (Mulaprakriti) is that aspect of the Absolute which underlies all the objective planes of Nature.” [The Secret Doctrine Vol.1:14-15]

The shell only of the spirit, soul and astral body of the Kosmos,” she comments in The Secret Doctrine (1:67), “has now fallen into the hands of Modern Science.”

Physicists now are busy studying that shell in the guise of hypothetical sub-atomic particles.

Example: In their August 3, 2017 article, Scientific American reports “A new technology for detecting neutrinos represents a ‘monumental’ advance for science.”

The Spallation Neutron Source

The “elusive ‘ghost particles’ were detected bouncing off an atom.”  Following decades of ‘research’, it seems science is still stuck inside their shell of hypothetical muck.

After more than a hundred years of  ‘research’, it seems modern science is still stuck in a shell of hypothetical silly putty.

Using the atom-smashing power of The Large Hadron Collider, scientists hope to unmask the so-called “God particle,” their imagined ultimate substratum of the universe. The accumulation of large amounts of data from collisions, according to physicists, “is crucial to increasing the chances of a discovery.” (!)

Physicists at CERN

Space is not Empty

ATOMS live in a strange world dubbed quantum entanglement where they can be in two places at once. Everything changes at the sub-atomic level, though with science’s limited tools, atoms seem to be mostly ’empty’ space. It’s a seductive place, it seems, where one can free-fall into the unknown fields of an inexplicable universe.

Is there no room for ‘consciousness’ to exist in all that so-called “empty space?”

If atoms or some exotic energetic field underpins all substance, what about something as all-pervasive as water? Almost 90% of our body, like the planet we live on, is water. We are conscious and intelligent like our blue planet Gaia. Many researchers are convinced that water is capable of ‘memory’ by storing information and retrieving it, and research into water is just beginning.

BLAVATSKY: Universal and divine mind  is “reflected in the waters of Space,” says ancient Cosmogenesis: “In Absolute Divine Thought,” she wrote, “everything exists, and there has been no time when it did not so exist.”

(Transactions p. 94)

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The Soul of Things: Connecting Science and Spirituality

Jelena Momcilov

Jelena Momcilov “Magnet Girl”

MANY scientists like to think that science already understands the ways of the natural world.

For them the fundamental questions are answered, leaving only the details to be filled in.

The numerous impressive achievements of modern science seem to support this confident attitude.

But in recent research, including his own studies, rebel biologist Rupert Sheldrake believes otherwise.

His experiments reveal jaw-dropping problems at the heart of physics, cosmology, biology, medicine, and psychology. Similar to H. P. Blavatsky’s complaints about 19th century modern science.  Not much has changed since then, it would appear. Science still refuses to acknowledge “the soul of things.”

Resolutely dismissive of paranormal findings or brain-free consciousness, traditional model science still asserts that matter is the gold standard. But even great authorities, especially in science, may be found to err, and scientific dicta are frequently influenced more by personal prejudice than rigorous research.

“We hold to Hermes and his ‘Wisdom’ — in its universal character; they [hold] to Aristotle as against intuition and the experience of the ages, fancying that Truth is the exclusive property of the Western world. Hence the disagreement. As

Hermes says, ‘Knowledge differs much from sense; for sense is of things that surmount it, but Knowledge (gyi) is the end of sense’ — i.e., of the illusion of our physical brain and its intellect.

An honest, impartial science would always weigh “the laboriously acquired knowledge of the senses with the intuitive omniscience of the Spiritual divine Soul,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote.

The Secret Doctrine — Vol. 1, p. 269
Perspectives

Different Perspectives

“The Theosophists, therefore, are the first to recognize the intrinsic value of science. But when its high priests resolve consciousness into a secretion from the grey matter of the brain, and everything else in nature into a mode of motion, we protest against the doctrine as being

unphilosophical, self-contradictory, and simply absurd — from a scientific point of view, as much and even more than from the occult aspect of the esoteric knowledge.

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