Category Archives: Psychology & Human Nature

Consciousness is Faster than Light or Atoms

telepathCONSCIOUSNESS is at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.

Knowing very little of its spiritual essence, we define consciousness by names we give to its various ‘states’ — waking, sleeping, intuitive, meditating, angry, depressed, happy or sad.

We experience perhaps hundreds of such random mental and emotional states every day, no wiser in understanding the hidden matrix, or field of consciousness in which they are embedded.

Material Science approaches nature only “through her appearance,” H. P. Blavatsky writes in The Secret Doctrine (1:610), and “that appearance is always deceitful on the physical plane,” adding that Science:

“…refuses to blend physics with metaphysics, the body with its informing soul and spirit, which they prefer ignoring.”

Ω

Nevertheless, physics and metaphysics were once deeply entwined, resulting in the natural philosophy of the Greeks, but is given the cold shoulder now by a science that prefers computer simulations, and huge particle collider machines to the natural world.

Searching for the God Particle

Occult Science, on the other hand, rejecting the Cartesian system, describes the body-mind consciousness as the lower end of a universal, spiritual substrate referred to as “BE-NESS” in The Secret Doctrine—symbolized by two pre-manifested aspects cited as “abstract space” (bare subjectivity), and “abstract motion” (representing unconditioned consciousness.)

“Consciousness has long been one of the great mysteries of life, the universe and everything,” writes Linda Geddes in the 29 November 2011 NewScientist.

Ω

Lucid dreaming, being conscious of dreaming while dreaming, best exemplifies this multi-layered conscious now-presence. Perhaps H. P. Blavatsky expressed it best with a word she coined to describe absolute consciousness —”BE-NESS”— “the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine is this metaphysical One Absolute.” (Vol. 1:14)

Among all earthly creatures, who might most exemplify this enigmatic quality, if not our feline friends?

Ψ

Be-ness

One of Rupert Sheldrake’s experiments on the unexplained powers of animals is dramatized by the case of David Waithe’s cat Godzilla!

Biologist author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books, Sheldrake is a former Research Fellow of the Royal Society. In this clip Sheldrake discusses Godzilla, a cat that knows when his owner is calling. 🙂

Continue reading

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

Let America Be America Again

H. P. Blavatsky 1877

H. P. Blavatsky 1877

H. P. BLAVATSKY understood America because she loved America.

Confirming this in a letter delivered to the Second American Convention she wrote:

“Your great country which I love for its noble freedom . . . and of which country I myself am proud of being a citizen.”

This loving understanding of the American culture and temperament in the light of the marvelous knowledge which was hers, has graciously provided for the students of Theosophy everywhere in the world.

But more especially in America, hints, warnings, suggestions and, above all, inspiration for their labor on behalf of the Sacred Cause.

To the students of Theosophy in America, these Letters are of special value and significance at the present time.

In conducting their own lives and tasks as well as in helping their fellow men in all fields of activity, they will receive from these thoughtful and stirring words real help themselves, and that of an unique character. 

A Prayer Labyrinth

In these days of constant struggles of many and diverse kinds, when a myriad remedies are suggested and advocated for our ills physical and psychical, moral and mental . . . puzzled by the strange working of Mother Nature . . .

These wonderful Messages of one whose wisdom and compassion stirred her to point the finger of warning and at the same time to stretch out the hand of fellowship and sure guidance, ought to be read, studied; nay, meditated upon.

(Above excerpted from Theosophy Company, Los Angeles, CA)

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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.” 

 

Remembering Past Lives in Nature and our Spiritual Body

Lessons-from-light

Soul Memory

SOUL memory according to Theosophy is referred to as ‘reminiscence,’ and it is this kind memory that assures every human being, whether they know it or not, of their having lived before, and having to live again.

To fully grasp the idea, we first have to study the complex relationship between the human and transcendental aspects of mind (represented physiologically by the brain’s left and right hemispheres.)

Knowledge gained or not by soul-sourced transmission is described by W. Q. Judge in his Ocean of Theosophy, Ch.9:

“By living according to the dictates of the soul the brain may at last be made porous to the soul’s recollections; if the contrary sort of a life is led, then more and more will clouds obscure that reminiscence.”

H. P. Blavatsky in The Voice of the Silence, has an even simpler formula:

Self-Knowledge is of
loving deeds the child.

The differences were experienced directly by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor PhD, described in her book “My Stroke of Insight.” In a memorable TED Talk, she describes her experience in dramatic detail:

“Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.”

My Stroke of Insight

Jill Bolte Taylor

Duality

The contrast of Spirit (or consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object.

“Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two facets or aspects of the Absolute (Parabrahm), which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective.  . . .  Just as pre-Cosmic Ideation is the root of all individual consciousness, so pre-Cosmic Substance is the substratum of matter in the various grades of its differentiation.”

This fundamental double consciousness, Blavatsky explained, is termed first “the spiritual, or those which belong to the imperishable Ego,” (The Key to Theosophy, Section 8, On Individuality and Personality). Second, she describes the intellectual/rational, personal physical brain states:

which inhabit the ever-changing bodies, or the series of personalities of that Ego.

Notwithstanding, our higher mind knows and remembers all its lives, she insisted, “as well as you remember what you have done yesterday. The real Ego has not forgotten them, and the personal never experienced them. Shall the new boots on the feet of a boy who is flogged for stealing apples, be punished for that which they know nothing?” HPB asked.

oceanmeditate

“Duality Supervenes”

That which is called “the divine man,” is the “real Individuality,” who like the elegant elephant, never forgets.  But its vehicle the personality has no access to that history as it corresponds to “a new suit of clothes.” There are, however, importantly:

modes of communication between the Spiritual and human consciousness or memory.

Evidence for such modes of communication lies in our powers of intuition, conscience, premonitions etc. and, most powerfully, from investigations into the so-called NDE or Near Death Experience. But such states as this “have never been recognised by your scientific modern psychologists,” Blavatsky said of such communications.

That may be changing now.

Continue reading

What Really Happens When We Die

Flight of the Soul

“THERE is not a mental or physical suffering in the life of a mortal which is not the direct fruit and consequence of some sin in a preceding existence.”

“On the other hand, since he does not preserve the slightest recollection of it in his actual life, and feels himself not deserving of such punishment, and therefore thinks he suffers for no guilt of his own, this alone is sufficient to entitle the human soul to the fullest consolation, rest, and bliss in his post-mortem existence.

Death comes to our spiritual selves ever as a deliverer and friend.

Collective Karma

(The Wider Track of the Karmic Law)

Prayer Wheel

In her influential work The Key to Theosophy, H. P. Blavatsky presented the following clarifying principles on this critical subject:

“HPB. According to our teaching all these great social evils, the distinction of classes in Society, and of the sexes in the affairs of life, the unequal distribution of capital and of labour—all are due to what we tersely but truly denominate KARMA.

“ENQUIRER. But, surely, all these evils which seem to fall upon the masses somewhat indiscriminately are not actual merited and INDIVIDUAL Karma?

“HPB. No, they cannot be so strictly defined in their effects as to show that each individual environment, and the particular conditions of life in which each person finds himself, are nothing more than the retributive Karma which the individual generated in a previous life.

We must not lose sight of the fact that every atom is subject to the general law governing the whole body to which it belongs, and here we come upon the wider track of the Karmic law.

The Web of Life

“Do you not perceive that the aggregate of individual Karma becomes that of the nation to which those individuals belong, and further, that the sum total of National Karma is that of the World?

“The evils that you speak of are not peculiar to the individual or even to the Nation, they are more or less universal; and it is upon this broad line of Human interdependence that the law of Karma finds its legitimate and equable issue.”

“ENQUIRER. Do I, then, understand that the law of Karma is not necessarily an individual law?

“HPB. That is just what I mean. It is impossible that Karma could readjust the balance of power in the world’s life and progress, unless it had a broad and general line of action.

It is held as a truth among Theosophists that the interdependence of Humanity is the cause of what is called Distributive Karma, and it is this law which affords the solution to the great question of collective suffering and its relief.

“It is an occult law, moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings, without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way, no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as ‘Separateness’; and the nearest approach to that selfish state, which the laws of life permit, is in the intent or motive.”

Near-death experiences have been hypothesized in various medical journals in the past, as having the characteristics of hallucinations, but Dr Ackermann and his team, on the contrary, consider them as evidence for the existence of the afterlife and of a form of dualism between mind and body.

What Really Happens When You Die

by Peter Fenwick

Peter Fenwick (born 25 May 1935) is a neuropsychiatrist and neurophysiologist who is known for his pioneering studies of end-of-life phenomena. In this interview he talks about near-death-experiences (NDE), death-bed-visitors and how we can achieve a good death. NDE research is at the cutting edge of consciousness research and offers a convincing model for the understanding of what happens when we die.

Peter Fenwick describes the different transitional phases of the dying process and highlights the importance of letting go at the end of ones life. He offers fascinating insights into common phenomena at the end of life, such as premonitions, seeing a light, death-bed-visions and coincidences. In his opinion everybody should know about death and the dying process, because it is a normal part of living.

Interviewer: Jens Rohrbeck Editor: Werner Huemer Director: Mehmet Yesilgöz © 2018 by thanatos.tv

The doctrine we promulgate being the only true one, must, supported by such evidence as we are preparing to give become ultimately triumphant as every other truth. Yet it is absolutely necessary to inculcate it gradually enforcing its theories, unimpeachable facts for those who know, with direct inferences deducted from and corroborated by the evidence furnished by modern exact science.

“As Above, So Below”

A complete treatise on authentic Theosophical Teachings of
“When We Die” will be found at:

blavatskytheosophy.com

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 Karma of the Soul: What Really Happens When We Die

Flight of the Soul

“THERE is not a mental or physical suffering in the life of a mortal which is not the direct fruit and consequence of some sin in a preceding existence.”

“On the other hand, since he does not preserve the slightest recollection of it in his actual life, and feels himself not deserving of such punishment, and therefore thinks he suffers for no guilt of his own, this alone is sufficient to entitle the human soul to the fullest consolation, rest, and bliss in his post-mortem existence.

Death comes to our spiritual selves ever as a deliverer and friend.

Collective Karma

(The Wider Track of the Karmic Law)

Prayer Wheel

In her influential work The Key to Theosophy, H. P. Blavatsky presented the following clarifying principles on this critical subject:

“HPB. According to our teaching all these great social evils, the distinction of classes in Society, and of the sexes in the affairs of life, the unequal distribution of capital and of labour—all are due to what we tersely but truly denominate KARMA.

“ENQUIRER. But, surely, all these evils which seem to fall upon the masses somewhat indiscriminately are not actual merited and INDIVIDUAL Karma?

“HPB. No, they cannot be so strictly defined in their effects as to show that each individual environment, and the particular conditions of life in which each person finds himself, are nothing more than the retributive Karma which the individual generated in a previous life.

We must not lose sight of the fact that every atom is subject to the general law governing the whole body to which it belongs, and here we come upon the wider track of the Karmic law.

The Web of Life

“Do you not perceive that the aggregate of individual Karma becomes that of the nation to which those individuals belong, and further, that the sum total of National Karma is that of the World?

“The evils that you speak of are not peculiar to the individual or even to the Nation, they are more or less universal; and it is upon this broad line of Human interdependence that the law of Karma finds its legitimate and equable issue.”

“ENQUIRER. Do I, then, understand that the law of Karma is not necessarily an individual law?

“HPB. That is just what I mean. It is impossible that Karma could readjust the balance of power in the world’s life and progress, unless it had a broad and general line of action.

It is held as a truth among Theosophists that the interdependence of Humanity is the cause of what is called Distributive Karma, and it is this law which affords the solution to the great question of collective suffering and its relief.

“It is an occult law, moreover, that no man can rise superior to his individual failings, without lifting, be it ever so little, the whole body of which he is an integral part. In the same way, no one can sin, nor suffer the effects of sin, alone. In reality, there is no such thing as ‘Separateness’; and the nearest approach to that selfish state, which the laws of life permit, is in the intent or motive.”

Near-death experiences have been hypothesized in various medical journals in the past, as having the characteristics of hallucinations, but Dr Ackermann and his team, on the contrary, consider them as evidence for the existence of the afterlife and of a form of dualism between mind and body.

What Really Happens When You Die

by Peter Fenwick

Peter Fenwick (born 25 May 1935) is a neuropsychiatrist and neurophysiologist who is known for his pioneering studies of end-of-life phenomena. In this interview he talks about near-death-experiences (NDE), death-bed-visitors and how we can achieve a good death. NDE research is at the cutting edge of consciousness research and offers a convincing model for the understanding of what happens when we die.

Peter Fenwick describes the different transitional phases of the dying process and highlights the importance of letting go at the end of ones life. He offers fascinating insights into common phenomena at the end of life, such as premonitions, seeing a light, death-bed-visions and coincidences. In his opinion everybody should know about death and the dying process, because it is a normal part of living.

Interviewer: Jens Rohrbeck Editor: Werner Huemer Director: Mehmet Yesilgöz © 2018 by thanatos.tv

The doctrine we promulgate being the only true one, must, supported by such evidence as we are preparing to give become ultimately triumphant as every other truth. Yet it is absolutely necessary to inculcate it gradually enforcing its theories, unimpeachable facts for those who know, with direct inferences deducted from and corroborated by the evidence furnished by modern exact science.

“As Above, So Below”

A complete treatise on authentic Theosophical Teachings of
“When We Die” will be found at:

blavatskytheosophy.com

Remembering Past Lives within The Celestial Body

Lessons-from-light

Soul Memory

SOUL memory according to Theosophy is referred to as ‘reminiscence,’ and it is this kind memory that assures every human being, whether they know it or not, of their having lived before, and having to live again.

To fully grasp the idea, we first have to study the complex relationship between the human and transcendental aspects of mind (represented physiologically by the brain’s left and right hemispheres.)

Knowledge gained or not by soul-sourced transmission is described by W. Q. Judge in his Ocean of Theosophy, Ch.9:

“By living according to the dictates of the soul the brain may at last be made porous to the soul’s recollections; if the contrary sort of a life is led, then more and more will clouds obscure that reminiscence.”

H. P. Blavatsky in The Voice of the Silence, has an even simpler formula:

Self-Knowledge is of
loving deeds the child.

The differences were experienced directly by neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor PhD, described in her book “My Stroke of Insight.” In a memorable TED Talk, she describes her experience in dramatic detail:

“Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.”

My Stroke of Insight

Jill Bolte Taylor

Duality

The contrast of Spirit (or consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object.

“Spirit (or Consciousness) and Matter are, however, to be regarded, not as independent realities, but as the two facets or aspects of the Absolute (Parabrahm), which constitute the basis of conditioned Being whether subjective or objective.  . . .  Just as pre-Cosmic Ideation is the root of all individual consciousness, so pre-Cosmic Substance is the substratum of matter in the various grades of its differentiation.”

This fundamental double consciousness, Blavatsky explained, is termed first “the spiritual, or those which belong to the imperishable Ego,” (The Key to Theosophy, Section 8, On Individuality and Personality). Second, she describes the intellectual/rational, personal physical brain states:

which inhabit the ever-changing bodies, or the series of personalities of that Ego.

Notwithstanding, our higher mind knows and remembers all its lives, she insisted, “as well as you remember what you have done yesterday. The real Ego has not forgotten them, and the personal never experienced them. Shall the new boots on the feet of a boy who is flogged for stealing apples, be punished for that which they know nothing?” HPB asked.

oceanmeditate

“Duality Supervenes”

That which is called “the divine man,” is the “real Individuality,” who like the elegant elephant, never forgets.  But its vehicle the personality has no access to that history as it corresponds to “a new suit of clothes.” There are, however, importantly:

modes of communication between the Spiritual and human consciousness or memory.

Evidence for such modes of communication lies in our powers of intuition, conscience, premonitions etc. and, most powerfully, from investigations into the so-called NDE or Near Death Experience. But such states as this “have never been recognised by your scientific modern psychologists,” Blavatsky said of such communications.

That may be changing now.

Continue reading

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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Esoteric Astrology: “Our Destiny is Written in the Stars”

Angelic

MOST modern scientists believe that astrology is merely superstition. Yet, true science and philosophy seeks “rather to solve than to deny,” says Theosophy.

In other words to solve using the scientific method of “checking, testing and verifying in every department of nature.”

(“Summing Up” in The Secret Doctrine, Volume 1, pages 272-278):

By means of “the independent visions of great adepts; i.e., men who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic and spiritual organisations to the utmost possible degree.

“No vision of one adept was accepted till it was checked and confirmed

by the visions — so obtained as to stand as independent evidence — of other adepts, and by centuries of experiences.

“It is the uninterrupted record covering thousands of generations of Seers whose respective experiences were made to test and to verify the traditions passed orally by one early race to another, of the teachings of higher and exalted beings, who watched over the childhood of Humanity.”

Initiated Seers

“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 complained.

“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.”

Indeed. H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine 1:272, agreed:

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.”

H. P. Blavatsky, referred often to astrology in her Theosophical writings, as in the following lines from “The Theosophist” in H.P Blavatsky’s Article: Astrology, Numbers and Destiny.

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

the clock indicates, it does not
influence the time.

Discovery

And, she wrote: “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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One Universal Family: The World United as One Being

Mother Gaia

My friend, the golden age hath passed
away, only the good have power to bring it back.

 – GOETHE

HUMANITY is divided into thousands of languages, hundreds of sects and cults, castes, creeds, religious sects, and political ideologies.

For example, the website Ethnologue currently contains information about the world’s 7,111 known living human languages and their indigenous nationalities.

Such differences often divide rather than unite people. Instead of love and service to others, some groups encourage differences, foster criticism, opposition and attacks on others.

How, then, can we ever hope to achieve harmony and oneness, and become a new humanity that will unselfishly eschew all differences and personal enmities — promulgating the First Object of Theosophy, Universal Brotherhood? H. P. Blavatsky explained in The Secret Doctrine 2:760:

There was a time when the whole world, the totality of mankind, had one religion as they were of ‘one lip’.

A world united as One Being has been the hope of mankind for long ages. Poets, artists, philosophers, and statespersons idealize it. Self-interested politicians claim they have the grand solution to the problems of disease, hunger, poverty, homelessness.

World poverty and hunger.

But they have not succeeded, because of personal bias, and a failure to accept and value the spiritual unity of humanity as a whole.

“But what has the new cycle in store for humanity? Will it be merely a continuation of the present, only in darker and more terrible colours?

Or shall a new day dawn for mankind, a day of pure sunlight, of truth, of charity, of true happiness for all?

The answer depends mainly on the few Theosophists who, true to their colours through good repute and ill, still fight the battle of Truth against the powers of Darkness.”

In our obsession with the bitter roots of sectarian differences and selfish, materialist agendas, we remain blind to the reality of unified life. “Existence is ONE THING, not any collection of things linked together,” Blavatsky wrote: “Fundamentally there is ONE BEING.”

Global Consciousness

Many Lights, One Humanity  

“Real Theosophy IS ALTRUISM, and we cannot repeat it too often,” she insisted. “It is brotherly love, mutual help, unswerving devotion to Truth.” (Our Cycle and the Next)

If all men would realize that in these alone can true happiness be found, and never in wealth, possessions, or any selfish gratification.

“But the world, in our day, judges everything on appearance. Motives are held as of no account, and the materialistic tendency is foremost in condemning a priori that which clashes with skin-deep propriety and encrusted notions.  Nations, men, and ideas all are judged according to our preconceptions, and the lethal emanations of modern civilization kill all goodness and truth.”

cropped-lights-for-peace.jpg

Many Lights

“Then the dark clouds will roll away, and a new humanity will be born upon earth. Then, the GOLDEN AGE will be there, indeed. But if not, then the storm will burst, and our boasted western civilization and enlightenment will sink in such a sea of horror that its parallel History has never yet recorded.”

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The Unexplained laws of Nature and the Psychical Powers in Man

telepath

Telepathy

COHERENT consciousness creates order in the world, and numberless and continuous subtle connections link us with each other and Nature. 

Thus, according to H. P. Blavatsky, “the ‘separateness’ which we feel between ourselves and the world of living beings around us is an illusion, not a reality.” 

(From Blavatsky Collected Writings 11:104-6)

“We intend to prove,” she wrote in her article Kosmic Mind, “that modern science … is itself on the eve of discovering that consciousness is universal. But before we do this, we mean also to show that though many a man of science is soaked through and through with such belief, very few are brave enough to openly admit it.”

The original Third Object of The Theosophical Society is:

To investigate the hidden mysteries of Nature under every aspect possible, and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man especially. 

The mechanism of this underlying universal connectivity, W. Q. Judge wrote in The Ocean of Theosophy (Ch. 16), lies in the properties of a sensitive universal matrix called “the astral light,” which can transmit “pictures of events to come” — (but only if the creations “are sufficiently well marked and made.”)

Theosophy Company

Click here to order from Theosophy Company

Events for several years to come, “the producing and efficient causes,” Judge wrote, “are always laid down with enough definiteness to permit the seer to see them in advance, as if they were present.”

It is a faculty common to all men, though in the majority but slightly developed.

“Occultism asserts,” he wrote, “that were it not for the germ of this power slightly active in every one, no man could convey to another any idea whatsoever.”

Summoner by crimsonvermillion

Using the psi power, often called ‘clairvoyance,’ “all images stored in the Astral Light,” Judge wrote in The Ocean of Theosophy

pass before the inner vision and are reflected into the physical eye from within − they then appear objectively to the seer.

It was the “flashing gaze” of “countless generations” of initiated seers and prophets, H. P. Blavatsky declared in The Secret Doctrine (1:272), that penetrated “into the very kernel of matter, and recorded the soul of things there.” 

Those discoveries were made using the established methods of modern science, and were to become the perennial teachings furthered today by modern Theosophy.

Checking the Field

The ‘Scientific Method’

Those early wise men, she noted, “had passed their lives in learningnot teaching. How did they do so? It is answered:

by checking, testing, and verifying in every department of nature the traditions of old by the independent visions of great adepts — 

“… who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual organisations to the utmost possible degree.

“No vision of one adept was accepted till it was checked and confirmed by the visions — so obtained as to stand as independent evidence — of other adepts, and by centuries of experiences.” This checking, testing, verifying and confirming is the method supposed to be used by modern Science. Seeking the facts wherever such may be found.

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The Healing Memories of Past Lives

Astral Travel

THE twin doctrines of Karma (responsibility) and Reincarnation (hope) are keys to freeing us from the dark jungle of ignorance.

These doctrines make sense out of two of humanity’s most persistent puzzles — the purpose of life, and the meaning of death.

Theosophical world messenger H. P. Blavatsky made it clear that the ultimate salvation of humanity lay in a true understanding of these doctrines.

In her Third Letter to the 4th Annual Convention of the American Section of the Theosophical Society Blavatsky counseled: “Learn well the doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation:

and teach, practice, promulgate that system of life and thought which alone can save the coming races.

The effect of a new popularization of near death experiences (NDEs), and the reality of the spiritual world they point to, is to understand better Blavatsky’s insistence on the overarching importance of these twin doctrines.

Astral Body rises up

The metaphysical teachings underlying cosmogenesis and anthropogenesis were presented after Isis Unveiled with Blavatsky’s magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine — a universal springboard for the New Age.

Some 130 years later, Theosophy’s light is still brightening the end of the tunnel.

Those who have had a near-death experience have already seen the light — including children, as the noted researcher P.M.H. Atwater reports.

Dreams and the Dreamer

Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) are still the most compelling evidence for the existence of a cognitive self that exists independently from the physical body, and a convincing argument for reincarnation of the same soul from life to life.

Compelling scientific documentation was not available in the early days of Theosophy. But in recent years Scientists have begun to study ‘out of body experiences.’ See the blog post: Scientists Study Out of Body Experiences.

“Scientists will see if consciousness continues after brain death. People who report seeing bright lights or tunnels as they leave their bodies in near-death experiences are having their claims treated seriously in a hospital study.”

Dr Sam Parnia, an intensive care doctor who is heading the study, said: “If you can demonstrate that consciousness continues after the brain switches off,

it allows for the possibility that the consciousness is a separate entity.

ξ

Edward Austrian

The Past Life Memory that Healed Him

“Getting back the memory of other lives is really the whole of the process, and if some people don’t understand certain things it is either because they have not got to that point in their other lives, or because no glimmer of memory has yet come.”

– William Q. Judge
(Letters That Have Helped Me, Vol. 2, Letter 5)

Memory in Every Organ

“There is no special organ of will, any more than there is a physical basis for the activities of self-consciousness.  …  memory has no seat, no special organ of its own in the human brain, but that it has seats in every organ of the body. The phenomena of divine consciousness have to be regarded as activities of our mind on another and a higher plane, working through something less substantial than the moving molecules of the brain.”

The Human Brain

Today’s frontier sciences are providing more and more experimental results demonstrating the existence of a mind-soul existing beyond the boundaries of physical matter. Organizations like the Institute of Noetic Sciences are transforming contemporary worldviews on the relationship between consciousness and matter:

“At the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), we are inspired by the power of science to explain phenomena not previously understood, harnessing the best of the rational mind to make advances that further our knowledge and enhance our human experience.”

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Occult America: Through The Looking Glass

Through the Looking Glass

THE  surreal landscape of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass has Alice wondering what the world is like on the other side of a mirror.

To her surprise, Alice is able to pass into a fantastic astral world and experience an alternate existence.

A puzzled Alice discovers a book with looking-glass poetry called “Jabberwocky,” which she can read only by holding it up to a mirror.

To Theosophical students, Carroll’s imaginative invention is an unambiguous reminder of “the astral light” of occultism, a universal storage drive where original images of all things are seen in reverse of their visible projections on our terrestrial plane.

In 1871, mediumship and table-tipping were all the rage, detailed in Mitch Horowitz’s popular book Occult America. “Understandably, Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland was wildly popular at the time,” he writes:

Clairvoyance and psychic powers have always fascinated the public. But then, as now, they were considered nonsensical by mainstream scientists.

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the White Queen confides to Alice.

Alice through the looking glass.

Once of interest only to ghost-hunters, and the derided science of parapsychology, “The Big 5”: Precognition, Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Psychokinesis and Healing (known collectively as “psi”), are now being noticed by the rank-and-file psychological and neuroscience community.

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A Miracle of Miracles —The Great Inscrutable Mystery

Botticelli: Primavera

Botticelli: Primavera

WE were repulsed by a report of a terrorist beheading. David Brooks wrote about it in a NY Times Opinion, “The Body and the Spirit” in which he concludes that “the body has a spiritual essence.”

“The human head and body don’t just live and pass along genes,” Brooks writes: “They paint, make ethical judgments, savor the beauty of a sunset and experience the transcendent.”

Sounding more like a student of Theosophy than a cultural and political commentator Brooks adds: “The body is material but surpasses the material. It’s spiritualized matter.”

This is very close to what H. P. Blavatsky declared in The Secret Doctrine: “Spirit is the first differentiation from That, the causeless cause of both Spirit and Matter. It is, as taught in the esoteric catechism, neither limitless void, nor conditioned fulness, but both. It was and ever will be. . . .

“It is not matter as we know it, but the spiritual essence of matter.”

Spirit-Matter

“Most of us, religious or secular,” Brooks wrote: “have some instinctive sense that there is a ghost infused in the machine. And because the human body is a transcendent temple it is worthy of respect. It is offensive to treat it the way you would treat an inanimate object.”

Even after a person is dead, the body still carries the residue of this presence and deserves dignified handling.

Similarly, H. P. Blavatsky quoted Thomas Carlyle: “‘we touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!'” … “How does our physical body come to the state of perfection it is found in now?,” she asks, and answers: “Through millions of years of evolution, of course, yet never through, or from, animals, as taught by materialism.”

Further quoting Carlyle: — ‘The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself  ‘I,’ — what words have we for such things? — it is a breath of Heaven, the highest Being reveals himself in man. This body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for the unnamed?'”

Botticelli, Birth of Venus

Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus

“The breath of heaven, or rather the breath of life is, as Novalis said, and no one since has said it better, as repeated by Carlyle: —

There is but one temple in the universe, and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than that high form . . . . We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!

‘If well meditated it will turn out to be a scientific fact — the expression of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles — the great inscrutable Mystery.’ 

(Blavatsky adds): “The breath of heaven, or rather the breath of life, called in the bible Nephesh, is in every animal, in every animate speck as in every mineral atom.”

(The Secret Doctrine 1:211-12)

human-anatomy-07

Intelligent Design

Quoting Thomas Carlyle:

“But none of these has, like man, the consciousness of the nature of that highest Being, as none has that divine harmony in its form which man possesses. There is but one temple in the universe, says the devout Novalis, and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than that high form.”

We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body! This sounds like a mere flourish of rhetoric but it is not so.

“If well meditated it will turn out to be a scientific fact; the expression in such words as can be had, of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles,— the great inscrutable Mystery of God. We cannot understand it, we know not how to speak of it; but we may feel and know, if we like, that it is verily so.”

(Thomas Carlyle, Ch. 1, Hero as Divinity)

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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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Behind Your Brain, A Master Planner

Jill Bolte Taylor

Jill Bolte Taylor

BREAKING up is hard to do especially when it comes to ingrained scientific worldviews.

Even after they have betrayed us, dogmatic beliefs still cling like burrs to our psyche and brains, despite all logic.

Recall the insistent flat earth and geocentric crowd, and creationist belief that the Earth is only ten thousand years old.

The list is very long. Science is littered with the remains of once sacred cows.

Until only a few years ago, for example, it was asserted that the brain cannot grow new cells —

when they are gone they
are gone for good!

Challenging this cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, science now confirms that in fact adult brain cells keep growing after all! H. P. Blavatsky made short work of the errors of science in explaining the occult teachings:

“The brain is the instrument of waking consciousness and every conscious mental picture formed means change and destruction of the atoms [neurons?] of the brain.” Yet, “in ordinary intellectual activity, moves on well beaten paths in the brain, and does not compel sudden adjustments and destructions in its substance.”

neurofeedback

Neurofeedback

She then noted that a “new kind of mental effort calls for something very different — the carving out of ‘new brain paths’, the ranking in different order of the little brain lives.”

“Memory has no seat, no special organ of its own in the human brain,” Blavatsky wrote in — it has seats in every organ of the body. The seat of memory, then, is assuredly neither here nor there, but “everywhere throughout the human body.”

Neuroplasticity

Modern studies in people recovering from stroke also provided support for neuroplasticity, as regions of the brain remained healthy could sometimes take over, at least in part, functions that had been destroyed.”

The ideas she presented were no less than a startling preview of our modern science’s newly understood doctrine of neuroplasticity.

Especially the “brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.” This fact in occult science began to be recognized by modern science thanks to the findings of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, called “the father of sensory substitution and brain plasticity.” These “now commonly accepted concepts, [were]  novel ideas when [he] first conceived of them [70 years after Blavatsky] in the 1960’s.”

“In the 1960s, Paul Bach-y-Rita invented a device that was tested on a small number of people, and involved a person sitting in a chair, in which were embedded nubs that were made to vibrate in ways that translated images received in a camera, allowing a form of vision via sensory substitution.

(Wikipedia – Neuroplasticity)

Tree Bark

A musician needs his instrument, a painter her canvas. This requirement of a physical material vehicle is explained in The Secret Doctrine‘s first Fundamental Proposition: “…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.

A central nervous system connected to a physical brain and body are indispensable to complete our human evolutionary experience. Just as the invisible “zeros and ones” of a digital software program, for example, must be connected to a physical computer or they cannot be read or used.

The brain is such a complex thing, both physically and metaphysically, that it is like a tree whose bark you can remove layer by layer, each layer being different from all the others, and each having its own special work, function, and properties.

– H. P. Blavatsky
(Transactions, Appendix on Dreams)

Neurons

The world of brain science was forever changed. Yet, “the scale of change [in the brain] is much smaller than what goes on during the critical period of development,” said a study co-author Elly Nedivi, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) —

but the fact that it goes on at all,
is earth-shattering.

The truth is that neuroscientists today are completely baffled by how the brain is able to organize itself so perfectly.

Yet, the word “science” comes from the Latin word “scire” which means to know. “Science” is supposed to be a systematic, organized way of investigating the world. The catch is when specialized learning turns into a dogmatic worldview, it then becomes an end-in-itself — distorting what might have resulted in a more holistic truth.

With persistent reference to occult science Blavatsky insisted (The Secret Doctrine 1:14), that “consciousness is inconceivable to us apart from change,”  and, “motion best symbolises change, its essential characteristic.”

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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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Measuring the Immeasurable, the Intersection of Science and Spirit

levitation

Apparent Levitation of a Yogi

MAINSTREAM science looking for the source of our consciousness, argue its origin must be located in the neurons of our physical brains.

They are certain that all cognition arises from the activity of neurons attached to specific structures, which have fixed locations.

Yet many credible scientific minds today think otherwise and dispute the idea that our human consciousness arises solely from physical brain activity. 

Our brains are transmitters, just as TVs are, and not the creators of the programs and information they channel.

Open-minded science should always be willing to pursue truth wherever it leads, consider that consciousness may be an independent entity apart from the brain through which it manifests. This is only stating the obvious: automation takes us only so far – cars need drivers, and airplanes must have pilots who fly them. Television programs depend on writers, actors, and reporters.

But the standard model science insists the evidence pointing to an independent self is nothing but ‘junk science,’ no matter how rigorous the experiments. The results no matter how conclusive, are ignored. They are generally not accepted for publication in prestigious journals.

Parapsychologists risk being minimized and shunned — and their careers and livlihood can be stalled if funding is withdrawn.

“We live in an age of prejudice, dissimulation, and paradox,” Blavatsky opined in her article A Paradoxical World —”wherein, like dry leaves caught in a whirlpool, we are tossed helpless, hither and thither, ever struggling between our honest convictions and fear of that cruelest of tyrants — PUBLIC OPINION.”

A contemporary scientist spoke to physics and electrical engineering professor Willis Harman, and upon being told of successful remote-viewing [formerly known as “clairvoyance”] experiments, Harman said: “I wouldn’t believe it even if it were true!” 

Dangerous Waters

Yet, poised fearlessly at the frontiers of Psi research are legitimate scientific groups such as the respected Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Petaluma, California, and the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek.

These researchers, and others, like NES Energy Medicine, are willing to take a leap in pursuit of the fast-moving hidden soul that other scientists prefer ignoring. Looking to the future, Mme. Blavatsky boldly asserted in her The Secret Doctrine 1:272 that:

Modern science believes not
in the ‘soul of things.’

Fearless investigations were the exclusive precinct of ancient, uncanny intuitives and seers as taught in The Secret Doctrine. But today there are numerous professional scientific investigators on the hunt for answers to the puzzling problems of evolution and consciousness.

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