If lifetimes and universes are analogous to schools, then the classrooms are stages of consciousness, pushing us to ever greater self-awareness and self-development — only if we are wise enough to pursue the path offered.
Thus our lives are complex creations, a series of ‘progressive awakenings,’ advanced or retarded drop by drop, by our individual, family, racial, national and global karma.
Everyone, in this way, settles into his or her own unique rhythm in which a lifetime meditation empowers a mixture of past karma, and present choices.
We all must be then at slightly differing points on an ascending evolutionary arc, paying off old debts, making new ones — pushing forward or slipping back, and the mind thus ever awakens to newer realities.
Drop by Drop
The choices that shape our character each lifetime, are self-chosen—compounded of physical, sensory, emotional, mental, psychic and spiritual energies.
The ancient Egyptian after death judgement, weighed symbolically a person’s heart against the ‘feather of truth.’
The challenges of life, the occult doctrine notes, are the result of our being grounded in a personal level of consciousness, a limited world view. The Secret Doctrine 1:39-40 teaches that “whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities.”
Progressive Awakenings
Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities.
Weighing the Heart against the Feather of Truth
“Only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from delusions.”
“As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities.
and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached ‘reality’—
WHEN acting through the physical filter of our human brains and bodies, our minds clearly manifest a complex double nature.
This idea is a critical and pivotal tenet of Theosophical psychology.
Mind’s higher aspect gravitates toward its home spirit-self, while the tendency of its astral and physical projection on this plane is an almost irresistible attraction to desires and the material world.
Broadly considered, what is called ‘higher mind’ in Theosophy is really a soul faculty, our intuitional power source — it is the ‘god’ in us.
“The inner man is the only God we can have cognizance of. And how can this be otherwise? Grant us our postulate that God is a universally diffused, infinite principle, and how can man alone escape from being soaked through by, and in, the Deity?
“We call our ‘Father in heaven’ that deific essence of which we are cognizant within us, in our heart and spiritual consciousness, and which has nothing to do with the anthropomorphic conception we may form of it in our physical brain or its fancy.”
Jill Bolte Taylor, PH.D
“Yet, let no man anthropomorphise that essence in us … if he would hold to divine, not human truth, say that this ‘God in secret’ listens to, or is distinct from, either finite man or the infinite essence — for all are one.”
This is also Plato’s teaching about the ‘Nous.’ In her remarkable article Psychic and Noetic Action, H. P. Blavatsky wrote:
Occult physiology and psychology postulate within mortal man an immortal entity, ‘divine Mind,’ or Nous, whose pale and too often distorted reflection is that which we call ‘Mind’ and intellect in men.
“No physiologist, not even the cleverest, will ever be able to solve the mystery of the human mind, in its highest spiritual manifestation. Nor will they be able to understand the duality of the psychic and the noetic — or even to comprehend the intricacies of the former on the purely material plane.”
“Concerning the nous that is the source of understanding of individuals, Plato argued that relying on sense perception can never lead to true knowledge, only opinion. Plato’s more philosophical characters argue that nous must somehow perceive truth directly.” [Wikipedia]
The soul is the Perceiver is assuredly vision itself pure and simple, unmodified, and looks directly upon ideas.
These two we distinguish as the Higher Manas (Mind or Ego), and the Kama-Manas, i.e., the rational, but earthly or physical intellect of man, encased in, and bound by matter.
Harvard trained neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte Taylor, following her life-altering stroke, had a direct knowing of this powerful duality; what is known in Theosophy as our ‘personal’ and ‘impersonal’ selves.
The enigma is dramatized by Dr. Taylor in her New York Times bestselling book My Stroke of Insight. As a brain researcher Dr. Taylor’s focus is neuroanatomical, i.e. the brain’s left and right hemispheres. Below is an excerpt from the TED Talk about the details of her life-changing experience in which she experienced both sides.
Psychic vs Noëtic
“The all-conscious SELF, that which reincarnates periodically, [is] verily the WORD made flesh, and is always the same! Its reflected ‘Double,’ changing with every new incarnation and personality, is conscious but for a life-period. The Lower Self manifesting through our organic system, acting on this plane of illusion,
imagines itself the Ego Sum, and thus falls into the ‘heresy of separateness’.
“The former, we term INDIVIDUALITY, the latter PERSONALITY. From the first proceeds all the noetic element, from the second, the psychic, i.e., ‘terrestrial wisdom’ at best, as it is influenced by all the chaotic stimuli of the human or rather animal passions of the living body.
Dual Hemispheres
“The seat of memory is everywhere throughout the human body. To locate it in the brain is to limit and dwarf the Universal Mind and its countless Rays (the Manasaputra) — which inform every rational mortal. Materialists sniff contemptuously at the mention of ‘Universal Mind’ and the Higher noetic souls of men.”
The assumption that the mind is a real being, which can be acted upon by the brain, and which can act on the body through the brain, is the only one compatible with all the facts of experience.
— George T. Ladd,in the Elements of Physiological Psychology.
H. P. Blavatsky said in her article Kosmic Mind, also wrote: “Occultism tells us that every atom . . . is a little universe in itself; and
every organ and cell in the human body is endowed with a brain of its own, with memory, therefore, experience and discriminative powers. The idea of Universal Life composed of individual atomic lives is one of the oldest teachings of esoteric philosophy.
“If plants can be shown to have nerves and sensations and instinct (but another word for consciousness), why not allow the same in the cells of the human body? Science divides matter into organic and inorganic bodies, only because it rejects the idea of absolute life and a life-principle as an entity.”
Blavatsky later wrote that, thanks to physiology, modern science stands on the threshold of discovering that consciousness is universal.
RULING the universe is not gravity, the ‘god’ of modern science, but something much more powerful, and even closer to home.
According to Theosophy, that something is the universal Tibetan god “Fohat” or electromagnetism, but also much more — a conscious electro-spiritual power.
In The Theosophical Glossary Fohat is defined as “the essence of Cosmic Electricity, ‘Daiviprakriti’, Primordial Light, and in the manifested universe it is ‘the ever-present electrical energy and ceaseless destructive and formative power.'”
“Fohat is ever-present and active from the primordial beginnings of a manvantara to its last end, nor does it then actually pass out of existence, but becomes quiescent or latent as it were, sleeping or dormant during the cosmic pralaya.”
“Manvantara is a Sanskrit term that results from a combination of words manu and antara (manu-antara or manvantara), literally meaning the duration of a Manu, or his life span. [or Between Two Manus] — H. P. Blavatsky defines it as ‘a period of manifestation, as opposed to Pralaya (dissolution or rest); the term is applied to various cycles, especially to a Day of Brahma–4,320,000,000 Solar years–and to the reign of one Manu–308,448,000 Solar years.'” [1]
In defiance of modern science’s gravity god, magnetism and electricity are the real universal forces — twin ‘gods’ underpinning nature and the infinite cosmos — from fireflies to galaxies, to the omnipresent atom.
Mainstream physicists are still stuck on gravity to support their dubious ‘standard model.’
Modern Science still insists that gravity alone (a secondary force according to Theosophy) runs the whole universe.
— yet, as with magnetism, standard model science understands very little about either. A little known fact: Popular ideas about the Sun have not fared well under the tests of a scientific theory. The formulators of the standard Sun model worked with gravity, gas laws, and nuclear fusion. But closer observation of the Sun has shown that electrical and magnetic properties dominate solar behavior.” (The Thunderbolts Project)
Coronal Mass Ejection
“Like pearls on a string, stars and planetary bodies form deep in the heart of molecular clouds of gas. Modern science tells us that the minuscule forces of gravity pull these particles together until they ignite as stars, but it fails to explain why. Wallace Thornhill and Ev Cochrane forward a theory of electromagnetic currents, like cosmic lightning, that connect the cosmos and concentrate physical material.” (Gaia.com)
“It seems that the Sun does not even ‘respect’ gravity,” the Thunderbolts site reports: “The mass of charged particles expelled by the Sun as the solar wind continues to accelerate beyond Mercury, Venus, and Earth.
Solar prominence does not obey gravity either. Nor does sunspot migration.
“Nor does the movement of the atmosphere, since the upper layers rotate faster than the lower, reversing the situation predicted by theory,” Thunderbolts physicists demonstrate, “while the equatorial atmosphere completes its rotation more rapidly than the atmosphere at higher latitudes, another reversal of predicted motions.” (thunderbolts.info)
The Electric Sun
But back on Earth, a young Serbian schoolgirl amazed doctors with her astonishing magnetic hands, which, like our Sun — following the Hermetic axiom,”as above, so below” — possessed gravity-defying power. And, as to the Sun, we are dependent for life on the ‘little sun’ in our bodies — the heart.
Just as there is a regular circulation of the ‘blood’ or life fluid throughout our solar system, the Sun is the heart of the solar system.
It is “the same as the circulation of the blood in the human body or life,” says occult science — “the Sun contracting as rhythmically at every return of it, as the human heart does.”
“Everything in the universe follows the rule of analogy,” Blavatsky assures her readers in The Secret Doctrine (1:177). “Man is the microcosm of the Universe:
Concretion follows the lines of abstraction; corresponding to the highest must be the lowest; the material to the spiritual.
That which takes place on the spiritual plane repeats itself on the Cosmic plane:
MAINSTREAM science creates an almost insurmountable obstacle to understanding the real nature of life because of one persistent belief.
They steadfastly refuse to recognize that the Life Principle is a distinct force, and in so doing our modern science blocks all understanding of the nature of reality.
“The greatest problem of philosophy, is the physical and substantial nature of life,” H. P. Blavatsky declared:
It is its independent nature, which is denied by modern science — because that science is unable to comprehend it.
“The reincarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive,” Blavatsky declared, “that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body.”
Nevermind: “modern science’s definition of life still rests on Herbert Spencer’s old definition, one that describes the phenomenon, but gives no hint of its real cause.”
Spencer’s materialistic definition of Life was that “Life is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes,”
both simultaneous and successive in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.
Spencer’s assertion is still maintained as the scientific consensus view because “most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical,” says the biocentrist Dr. Robert Lanza, in … concluding, crucially: “without the other side, the living.”
Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world—a US News & World Report cover story called him a “genius” and a “renegade thinker,” even likening him to Einstein. Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce the book:
He shows that his Biocentrism — an extension of the Anthropic Principle, described by the Einstein disciple physicist John Wheeler — asserts a view of life incompatible with modern materialism.
“The Anthropic Principle was proposed in Poland in 1973, during a special two-week series of synopsia commemorating Copernicus’ 500th birthday,” a physics website explains:
“It was proposed by Brandon Carter, who had the audacity to proclaim that humanity did indeed hold a special place in the Universe, an assertion that is the exact opposite of Copernicus’ now universally accepted theory.”
Biocentrism completes a revolutionary shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.
Biocentrism
The premise of Biocentrism is, with important modifications, asserts an intelligent hierarchical structure to Nature, which is also the central premise of Theosophy.
The ancients held that the universe is created by life, and not the other way around.
“The point in the hitherto immaculate Disk, Space and Eternity … denotes the dawn of differentiation,” H. P. Blavatsky explains at the outset of The Secret Doctrine (Vol. 1, Pg. 1).
“It is the Point in the Mundane Egg [see Wikipedia “World Egg”] … the germ within the latter which will become the Universe, the all, the boundless, periodical Kosmos, this germ being latent and active, periodically and by turns.
The Milky Way Galaxy
“The one circle is divine Unity, from which all proceeds, whither all returns. Its circumference — a forcibly limited symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind — indicates the abstract, ever incognisable presence, and its plane, the Universal Soul, although the two are one.”
ANIMALS are just instinctual robots, many modern scientists believe. But this is not the conclusion of some of their own controlled scientific studies.
Such studies suggest there are powerful spiritual and intellectual forces embedded in all the kingdoms of nature, as Theosophy maintains.
In the 17th Century, René Descartes, is dubbed “the father of modern Western philosophy.” And according to Wikipedia:
“Much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day.” But the determined intellectual founder of the “Cartesian Theory,” started his followers believing all the wrong way about consciousness, soul and spirit.
“Descartes held the living animal as being simply an automaton,” H. P. Blavatsky commented, “a ‘well wound up clock-work,’ according to Malebranche” — then she countered with this pointed bit of sarcasm:
One who adopts the Cartesian theory about the animal, would do as well to accept at once the views of the modern materialists.
“But if the animal is an ‘automaton,’ why not Man?” Blavatsky exclaimed. “Thus we find metaphysical Descartes as inconsistent as any one.”
René Descartes
“The animal may think and know it thinks, the more keenly that it cannot speak, and express its thoughts,” Blavatsky declared: “One thing is shown however by the exact observations of naturalists and that is, that the animal is endowed with intelligence; and once this is settled, we have but to repeat Thomas Aquinas’ definition of intelligence – ‘the prerogative of man’s immortal soul’ – to see that the same is due to the animal.”
A woman who clearly did not subscribe to the Cartesian theory, found a young lion injured in the forest on the brink of death. In her compassion for the animal she took it home with her and nursed it back to health.
Later she made arrangements with an animal rescue group to take the lion.
Some time passed before the woman had a chance to visit. A video was taken when she walked up to the lion’s cage to see how he was doing. Watch the lion’s reaction when he sees her!
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.”
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.”
“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.”
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 AstrologicalInfluences, “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.
THE physical bodies of Man and those in Nature were “created” by beings called Dhyanis, similar to the Elohim of the Bible, says Theosophy:
“Besides the material which will be needed for its future human form, the monad requires
(a) a spiritual model, or prototype, for that material to shape itself into; and
(b) an intelligent consciousness to guide its evolution and progress, neither of which is possessed by the homogeneous monad, or by senseless though living matter.”
“The Occult teaching says, ‘Nothing is created, but is only transformed. Nothing can manifest itself in this universe — from a globe down to a vague, rapid thought — that was not in the universe already; everything on the subjective plane is an eternal IS; as everything on the objective plane is an ever becoming — because transitory.’”
THE famous meditation of John Donne, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee,” highlights two Theosophical principles:
First, the affirmation that there is no isolation, that nature and all mankind are interconnected — and second, our karmic responsibility.
“It’s one thing to fashion a particular work of art, sculpture, painting, a worthy accomplishment,” Thoreau wrote, “but much greater is the creation of one’s life.” He believed that:
to exemplify the highest potential imagined, it is the highest of loving artistic accomplishments.
A compassionate Nature activist, Julia Butterfly Hill is a living example of Theosophy pure and simple. She took the decisive action taught in The Voice of the Silence — sacrificing her comfort and well-being to “help Nature and work on with her.”
“Desire nothing. Chafe not at Karma, nor at Nature’s changeless laws. But struggle only with the personal, the transitory, the evanescent and the perishable.
Help Nature and work on with her; and Nature will regard thee as one of her creators and make obeisance.
“And she will open wide before thee the portals of her secret chambers, lay bare before thy gaze the treasures hidden in the very depths of her pure virgin bosom. Unsullied by the hand of matter she shows her treasures only to the eye of Spirit — the eye which never closes, the eye for which there is no veil in all her kingdoms.”
Julia Butterfly Hill
It must have been a profound inner sense of the sacred that roused Julia to action as she climbed 18 stories up those long ropes, to begin a permanent encampment in the endangered redwood trees.
She doesn’t follow any organized religion but says she believes very strongly in the spirituality of the universe.
“THREE decades ago, few scientists were courageous enough to break ranks and question their own belief system,” Deepak Chopra, MD writes.
“Even calling science a belief system sounded outrageous – religion is a matter of belief, science a matter of facts.”
What follows are excerpts from Deepak Chopra’s recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle SFGate – Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s top 10 list on Scientific Ideology – and H. P. Blavatsky’s “Ten Items” of natural law in Isis Unveiled (Vol. 2:588), called “the fundamental propositions of the Oriental philosophy.”
“The most far-seeing scientist who was willing to break ranks then, as now, was Rupert Sheldrake,” Chopra continues, “who risked his impeccable credentials as a Cambridge biochemist with real joy, like a man suddenly able to breathe.”
Thirty years after his first heretical books, Sheldrake’s new one, ‘Science Set Free’ is a landmark achievement. No science writing has inspired me more.
“Sheldrake’s essential point is that science needs setting free from ten blind dogmas. These dogmas embrace a true belief system as much as Roman Catholicism or any other faith. Behind the daily activity of gathering data, science assumes certain things about reality that, according to Sheldrake, are unsupportable.”
Science vs Religion
“The first dogma, for example, holds that the universe is mechanical,” he reasons. “If that is so, then everything in the universe is also mechanical, including human beings — or to use a phrase from the noted atheist Richard Dawkins, we are ‘lumbering robots.’
“From a scientist’s perspective, to understand everything that you need to know about human beings, you only have to tinker with all the mechanical parts of genes and the brain until there are no more secrets left.”
Deepak Chopra, MD
The Dual Hemispheres of the Brain
Theosophy On Consciousness
“The phenomena of divine consciousness have to be regarded as activities of our mind on another and a higher plane,” Mme. Blavatsky insisted, “working through something less substantial than the moving molecules of the brain.
“They cannot be explained as the simple resultant of the cerebral physiological processes, as indeed the latter only condition them or give them a final form for purposes of concrete manifestation.”
“No physiologist, not even the cleverest, will ever be able to solve the mystery of the human mind, in its highest spiritual manifestation, or in its dual aspect of the psychic and the noetic (or the manasic), or even to comprehend the intricacies of the former on the purely material plane — unless he knows something of, and is prepared to admit the presence of this dual element.”
The seat of memory is assuredly neither here nor there, but everywhere throughout the human body. To locate its organ in the brain is to limit and dwarf the Universal Mind and its countless Rays which inform every rational mortal. As we write for Theosophists, first of all, we care little for the psychophobian prejudices of the Materialists who may read this and sniff contemptuously at the mention of ‘Universal Mind’ and the Higher noetic souls of men.
“Clearly such a view leaves no room for the soul,” Sheldrake agrees, “which becomes a wispy illusion that needs to be swept away. But then, so does the self, because there is no region of the brain that contains ‘I,’ a person.
“As long as ‘I’ is a hallucination formed by complex neural circuitry, one can throw out – or reduce to mechanical operations – love, beauty, truth, compassion, honor, devotion, faith, and so on, the whole apparatus that makes a person’s life feel valuable. A random universe has no purpose; therefore, giving lumbering robots a purpose is dubious.”
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.”
“Outside [our sysem] [spiritual substance] 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 it, believe 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 [it is] 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.”
“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.’
NEW VIEWS OF THE
INTERSTELLAR MEDIUM
Dr. Michael Clarage talks about his work with SAFIRE from a more philosophical perspective – what an empiricist might ponder outside the lab. He offers some intriguing if not startling observations about the astronomical and the biological, the dead and the living universe.
“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?”
“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.”
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.” Click below for more information:
My friend, the golden age hath passed away, only the good have power to bring it back.
– GOETHE
HUMANITY is divided into thousands of languages, hundreds of sects and cults, castes, creeds, religious sects, and political ideologies.
For example, the website Ethnologue currently contains information about the world’s 7,111 known living human languages and their indigenous nationalities.
Such differences often divide rather than unite people. Instead of love and service to others, some groups encourage differences, foster criticism, opposition and attacks on others.
How, then, can we ever hope to achieve harmony and oneness, and become a new humanity that will unselfishly eschew all differences and personal enmities — promulgating the First Object of Theosophy, Universal Brotherhood? H. P. Blavatsky explained in The Secret Doctrine 2:760:
There was a time when the whole world, the totality of mankind, had one religion as they were of ‘one lip’.
A world united as One Being has been the hope of mankind for long ages. Poets, artists, philosophers, and statespersons idealize it. Self-interested politicians claim they have the grand solution to the problems of disease, hunger, poverty, homelessness.
World poverty and hunger.
But they have not succeeded, because of personal bias, and a failure to accept and value the spiritual unity of humanity as a whole.
“But what has the new cycle in store for humanity? Will it be merely a continuation of the present, only in darker and more terrible colours?
Or shall a new day dawn for mankind, a day of pure sunlight, of truth, of charity, of true happiness for all?
The answer depends mainly on the few Theosophists who, true to their colours through good repute and ill, still fight the battle of Truth against the powers of Darkness.”
In our obsession with the bitter roots of sectarian differences and selfish, materialist agendas, we remain blind to the reality of unified life. “Existence is ONE THING, not any collection of things linked together,” Blavatsky wrote: “Fundamentally there is ONE BEING.”
“Real Theosophy IS ALTRUISM, and we cannot repeat it too often,” she insisted. “It is brotherly love, mutual help, unswerving devotion to Truth.” (Our Cycle and the Next)
If all men would realize that in these alone can true happiness be found, and never in wealth, possessions, or any selfish gratification.
“But the world, in our day, judges everything on appearance. Motives are held as of no account, and the materialistic tendency is foremost in condemning a priori that which clashes with skin-deep propriety and encrusted notions. Nations, men, and ideas all are judged according to our preconceptions, and the lethal emanations of modern civilization kill all goodness and truth.”
Many Lights
“Then the dark clouds will roll away, and a new humanity will be born upon earth. Then, the GOLDEN AGE will be there, indeed. But if not, then the storm will burst, and our boasted western civilization and enlightenment will sink in such a sea of horror that its parallel History has never yet recorded.”
COHERENT consciousness creates order in the world, and numberless and continuous subtle connections link us with each other and Nature.
Thus, according to H. P. Blavatsky, “the ‘separateness’ which we feel between ourselves and the world of living beings around us is an illusion, not a reality.”
“We intend to prove,” she wrote in her article Kosmic Mind, “that modern science … is itself on the eve of discovering that consciousness is universal. But before we do this, we mean also to show that though many a man of science is soaked through and through with such belief, very few are brave enough to openly admit it.”
The original Third Object of The Theosophical Society is:
To investigate the hidden mysteries of Nature under every aspect possible, and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man especially.
The mechanism of this underlying universal connectivity, W. Q. Judge wrote in The Ocean of Theosophy (Ch. 16), lies in the properties of a sensitive universal matrix called “the astral light,” which can transmit “pictures of events to come” — (but only if the creations “are sufficiently well marked and made.”)
Events for several years to come, “the producing and efficient causes,” Judge wrote, “are always laid down with enough definiteness to permit the seer to see them in advance, as if they were present.”
It is a faculty common to all men, though in the majority but slightly developed.
“Occultism asserts,” he wrote, “that were it not for the germ of this power slightly active in every one, no man could convey to another any idea whatsoever.”
pass before the inner vision and are reflected into the physical eye from within − they then appear objectively to the seer.
It was the “flashing gaze” of “countless generations” of initiated seers and prophets, H. P. Blavatsky declared in The Secret Doctrine (1:272), that penetrated “into the very kernel of matter, and recorded the soul of things there.”
Those discoveries were made using the established methods of modern science, and were to become the perennial teachings furthered today by modern Theosophy.
Checking the Field
The ‘Scientific Method’
Those early wise men, she noted, “had passed their lives in learning, not teaching. How did they do so? It is answered:
by checking, testing, and verifying in every department of nature the traditions of old by the independent visions of great adepts —
“… who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual organisations to the utmost possible degree.
“No vision of one adept was accepted till it was checked and confirmed by the visions — so obtained as to stand as independent evidence — of other adepts, and by centuries of experiences.” This checking, testing, verifying and confirming is the method supposed to be used by modern Science. Seeking the facts wherever such may be found.
MOLECULAR biologist Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria “talk” to each other, and is studying how they communicate with one another (How bacteria “talk”).
But there is nothing new in this “scientific revelation” for Theosophists to learn.
“The organs and the whole body of man are composed of cells,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in Kosmic Mind, “and these cells are now being recognised as individual organisms and – quien sabe – will come perhaps to be recognized someday as
an independent race of thinkers inhabiting the globe, called man! It really looks like it.
The Summing Up section (The Secret Doctrine 1:269) had this prime fundamental covered declaring that “everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious, is endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”
Stones, minerals, rocks, and even chemical ‘atoms’ are simply organic units in profound lethargy.
The Secret Doctrine also summarizes an underlying principle declaring how: “foremost of all, [is] the postulate that there is no such thing in Nature as inorganic substances or bodies.”
Conscious?
“We men must remember,” H. P. Blavatsky said plainly challenging modern materialistic science, “that because we do not perceive any signs — which we can recognize of consciousness, say, in stones — we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there.”
The human soul “acquires individuality, first by natural impulse, and then by self-induced and self-devised efforts (checked by its Karma), thus ascending through all the degrees of intelligence, from the lowest to the highest Manas, from mineral and plant, up to the holiest archangel (Dhyani-Buddha).
“There is no such thing as either ‘dead’ or ‘blind’ matter — these find no place among the conceptions of Occult philosophy,” Blavatsky wrote. “The latter never stops at surface appearances, and for it, the noumenal essences have more reality than their objective counterparts.”
“There exists a body of research poised to rend apart our modern paradigms — revealing consciousness in places we might not have expected it, and connections between life forms that seem startling and impossible.” So wrote Ben Bendig in an interview with Cleve Backster, of “The Secret Life of Plants” fame, (July 22, 2013, The Epoch Times), echoing H. P. Blavatsky’s Fundamental axiom of a universal mind.
If lifetimes and universes are analogous to schools, then the classrooms are stages of consciousness, pushing us to ever greater self-awareness and self-development — only if we are wise enough to pursue the path offered.
Thus our lives are complex creations, a series of ‘progressive awakenings,’ advanced or retarded drop by drop, by our individual, family, racial, national and global karma.
Everyone, in this way, settles into his or her own unique rhythm in which a lifetime meditation empowers a mixture of past karma, and present choices.
We all must be then at slightly differing points on an ascending evolutionary arc, paying off old debts, making new ones — pushing forward or slipping back, and the mind thus ever awakens to newer realities.
Altruism
The choices that shape our character each lifetime, are self-chosen—compounded of physical, sensory, emotional, mental, psychic and spiritual energies.
The ancient Egyptian after death judgement, weighed symbolically a person’s heart against the ‘feather of truth.’
The challenges of life, the occult doctrine notes, are the result of our being grounded in a personal level of consciousness, a limited world view. The Secret Doctrine 1:39-40 teaches that “whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in, both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities.”
Progressive Awakenings
Nothing is permanent except the one hidden absolute existence which contains in itself the noumena of all realities.
Weighing the Heart against the Feather of Truth
“Only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from delusions.”
“As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities.
and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached ‘reality’—
OCCULTISM connotes by the word God, “the symbolic conception of the Life and Motion of the Universe.”
This is in stark contrast to the crude anthropomorphism, which is still the backbone of our current theology.
“The One Life is deity itself, immutable, omnipresent, eternal,” says the teaching of Theosophy.
And the distinction “between organic and inorganic matter is fallacious and nonexistent in nature.”
“Matter in all its phases, is merely a vehicle for the manifestation through it, of LIFE.
Therefore, “the whole secret of Life,” says The Secret Doctrine, can only be discovered “in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because if —
‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity…’ *
— yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity — for life alone can understand life. It is the One Life, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end.” (*Adonais, by Percy Bysshe Shelley)
“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the evangelist. Both are electricity — the life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things.
A Dome of many-colored glass.
“Light is the great Protean magician, and under the Divine Will of the architect, its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being.” (Isis Unveiled 1:258)
It is “periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being — unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness — unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality,” (The Secret Doctrine 1:2): — “truly, ‘a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.'”
“When we speak of the Deity and make it identical, hence coeval, with Nature, the eternal and uncreate nature is meant, and not your aggregate of flitting shadows and finite unrealities. We leave it to the hymn-makers to call the visible sky or heaven, God’s Throne, and our earth of mud His footstool.
Our DEITY is neither in a paradise, nor in a particular tree, building, or mountain: it is everywhere, in every atom of the visible as of the invisible Cosmos, in, over, and around every invisible atom and divisible molecule; for IT is the mysterious power of evolution and involution, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and even omniscient creative potentiality.
“In short, our Deity is the eternal, incessantly evolving, not creating, builder of the universe; that universe itselfunfolding out of its own essence, not being made. It is a sphere, without circumference, in its symbolism, which has but one ever-acting attribute embracing all other existing or thinkable attributes — ITSELF. It is the one law, giving the impulse to manifested, eternal, and immutable laws, within that never-manifesting, because absolute LAW, which in its manifesting periods is The ever-Becoming.”
BECAUSE all organisms are related through similarities in DNA sequences, the whole of nature could be really one family.
New insights of epigenetics have lead to a revolutionary view of human biology. Theosophical teachings may agree with many of these new findings.
“The failures of science and its arbitrary assumptions,” Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine (2:670), “are far greater on the whole than any ‘extravagant’ esoteric doctrine.”
The traditional geneticist’s view of evolution “is from the animal,” she reminds us, and “mind in its various phases” is viewed, erroneously, as completely separate from matter.
The First Fundamental of The Secret Doctrine (1:15) explains the doctrine: “Apart from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual consciousness, since
it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as ‘I am I,’ a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity.
“Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance would remain an empty abstraction, and no emergence of consciousness could ensue.”
“One morning, a blood vessel in Jill Bolte Taylor’s brain exploded. As a brain scientist, she realized she had a ringside seat to her own stroke. She watched as her brain functions shut down one by one: motion, speech, memory, self-awareness.”
Theosophy teaches that mind is the mystical glue insuring that the identical genes that were in our ancestor’s bodies, what Blavatsky calls ‘The Life Atoms’ —”are transmitted through their descendants for generation after generation…
…so that we are literally ‘flesh of the flesh’ of the primeval creature who has developed into man in the later period.
“Occultism teaches that the life-atoms [DNA] of our (Prana) life-principle are never entirely lost when a man dies.” And Blavatsky explains how: “The atoms [in the genes?] impregnated with the life-principle (an independent, eternal, conscious factor) — are partially transmitted from father to son by heredity…“They are partially drawn once more together,” she says, “and become the animating principle of the new body in every new reincarnation…”
Le Ravissement de Psyche -1895 Adolphe-William Bouguereau
THE Myth of Er is a legend that concludes Plato‘s Republic (10.614 – 10.621). The story includes an account of the cosmos and the afterlife, Wikipedia notes:
“that greatly influenced religious, philosophical, and scientific thought for many centuries.”
No one, however gross and material he might be in this life and thought, can avoid leading a double existence in reality. One life is lived in the visible universe, the other plays out in the invisible.
This is a fundamental tenet of the Theosophical Philosophy as presented by H. P. Blavatsky.
“Socratic myths describe the ascent of the soul to true knowledge,” Theosophical scholar W. T. S. Thackera says, “its communion with divine realities, and its return to enlighten mankind.”
“The order of the Dialogues is important, as the myths in them,” Thackera explains, “each representing a kind of initiation, progressively reveal new teaching and clarify the old.”
Plato and Aristotle
“Plato opens the Republic with a conversation between Socrates and his elderly friend Cephalus on the subject of death,” Thackara writes. “Cephalus wants to assure himself that, if there is an afterlife, he will be spared the sufferings of the underworld. He even quotes from one of Pindar’s odes to support his argument.
The message is clear: we are all immortal beings, and our destiny is in our own hands.
“Plato ends the Republic with the Vision of Er, as Socrates describes the spiritual warrior who is slain in battle and returns to life, physically resurrected in order to transmit the message of all saviors. (W. T. S. Thackara in Plato’s Myths and the Mystery Tradition).
“Music of The Spheres”
“Between Science and Theology is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in Isis Unveiled [2:593], “and rapidly descending to the level of materialism.”
Yet, she adds, “from the remotest antiquity, mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity, within the personal physical man.”
“This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown — Chrestos [The Higher Self].”
Astral Body while Physical Sleeps
“It is on the indestructible tablets of the astral light that is stamped the impression of every thought we think, and every act we perform. And future events — effects of long-forgotten causes — are already delineated as a vivid picture for the eye of the seer and prophet to follow. the vast repository where the records of every man’s life as well as every pulsation of the visible cosmos are stored up for all Eternity!”
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
EdwardAustrian
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.”
“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.”
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.”
“WE assume our senses see reality as it is – but that could be just an evolved illusion,” the July 31, 2019 issue of NewScientist insisted.
“What is the relationship between the world out there and my internal experience of it – between objective and subjective reality?
“If I’m sober, and don’t suspect a prank, I’m inclined to believe that when I see a cherry, there is a real cherry whose shape and color match my experience, and which continues to exist when I look away.
“This assumption is central to how we think about ourselves and the world. But is it valid? Experiments my collaborators and I have performed to test the form of sensory perception that evolution has given us suggest a startling conclusion: it isn’t.”
The author of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, the pioneering cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman, believes that evolution designed our perceptions “to keep us alive.” Our perceptions, he says, are “interfaces constructed by natural selection,” in a word randomly.
Real Cherries?
There are no completely random forces in Theosophy. The reality illusion is wholly subjective and beholden to our faculties of perception, and states of consciousness unique to our complex sevenfold human construction, according to Theosophy. But agreeably with Professor Hoffman, the world is nothing like what we see through our eyes. But for much different reasons than the conjectures of modern science.
“Every one of us possesses the faculty, the interior sense, that is known by the name of intuition,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in her article The Beacon-Light of the Unknown, “but how rare are those who know how to develop it!
It is, however, only by the aid of this faculty that men can ever see things in their true colors.
“It is an instinct of the soul, which grows in us in proportion to the employment we give it, and which helps us to perceive and understand the realities of things with far more certainty than can the simple use of our senses and exercise of our reason.”
Alice Through the Looking Glass
“What are called good sense and logic enable us to see only the appearances of things, that which is evident to every one. The instinct of which I speak, being a projection of our perceptive consciousness,
a projection which acts from the subjective to the objective, and not vice versa, awakens in us spiritual senses and power to act.
These senses assimilate to themselves the essence of the object or of the action under examination, and represent it to us as it really is, not as it appears to our physical senses and to our cold reason.”
The Hindu poem, adialogue between Master Krishna and his disciple Arjuna, in the Bhagavad-Gita, is set metaphorically on a ‘battlefield.’ This chosen venue symbolizes “the war within,” which each of us continually faces, and must eventually wage. (BlavatskyTheosophy.com)
In Chapter 11, Krishna challenges Arjuna to exercise his spiritual sight in a specially induced vision of “the Divine Form as including all forms.” To enforce the lesson, and in answer to Arjuna’s request, Krishna temporarily awakens his “Divine Eye.” The rest is occult history!
“Gautama, the Buddha, only remained in solitude long enough to enable him to arrive at the truth, which he devoted himself from that time on to promulgate, begging his bread, and living for humanity.”
If, in the words of the dying Buddha, ‘all compounds are perishable,’ then all collections of atoms must be considered but temporary ‘illusions.’
They are such, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:329), because they are the very personal creations “of the perceiving Ego.” But this must not be considered a solipsistic argument. If we only knew how to get past our five senses we might very well contact the underlying ‘reality’ of physical things.
My Universe
The term “Ego” here must ultimately refer to a personal state, and as such must always relate to specific ‘states’ of consciousness. But this is only from our plane of perception. According to The Secret Doctrine (1:330), once we have gotten past that plane, and scaled the “peak of Omniscience,” the “knowledge of things-in-themselves” is immediately available to us.
Real motion or the illusion of motion?
One of the best ways to describe what Theosophy is, arts reporter Ali Snow remarked on a Utah Public Radio show, “is to think of it as a kind of fusion of religion and science.”
A desire to prove or to explore some of the mystical forces that made religion work and make the spiritual world work.
“Is it possible to see music? Or hear a painting? The art exhibition “Enchanted Modernities: Mysticism, Landscape and the American West” answers these questions and more by exploring the impact of Theosophy, an esoteric-philosophical revolution, on visual artists, writers, and composers in the American West.”
A striking example of this kind of fusion is H. P. Blavatsky’s description of how
the sense of sound is the first thing that manifests itself in the universe … in correspondence with colors or sight.
Colors and Sound
About this sensory synesthetic power Blavatsky wrote:
If you could only see clairvoyantly a person playing a piano, you would see the sound as plainly as you hear it.
“You can even put cotton in your ears—you will see the sound and every little note and modulation that you could not do otherwise.”
Synesthesia
Making reference to this sensory merging (known today as “synesthesia”) she explained: “One would merge into the other. You can taste sound, if you like, too. There sounds which are exceedingly acid, and there are sounds which are exceedingly sweet, and bitter, and all the scale of taste, in fact.”
There is no nonsense, I say it seriously, and you will find it so if you want to know about the super-physical senses.
Alexander Scriabin, a Russian pianist and composer who was deeply influenced by Theosophy, visualized a grand magnum opus which he titled Mysterium.
Click the link here or the link below to listen to Nora Eccles, Harrison Museum of Art as three curators describe the exhibit, Painting Music: Enchanted Modernities, and who give us a personalized tour of the Theosophy promoted powers (click below the photo):
Synesthete Elisabeth Sulser
Click to start below:
This interesting phenomenon is demonstrated practically by the multiple senses of a unique synesthete from Zurich, Switzerland named Elizabeth Sulser. A psi investigator writes:
Her particular combination of senses is so unique that she is the only person in the world documented to have it.
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.”
Exploring the mysteries of consciousness, the Institute of Noetic Sciences researches mind-matter interactions, psychic experience, premonitions and more. You can help the research, and get a free copy of Entangled Minds.
Ver Teosofia
Bienvenido a la Teosofía Watch en español, un sitio web actualmente en desarrollo.
Theosophy Watch 