Hidden Reality: Seeing Things in Their True Colors

Alice in Wonderland

“WE assume our senses see reality as it is – but that could be just an evolved illusion,” the July 31, 2019 issue of NewScientist insisted.

“What is the relationship between the world out there and my internal experience of it – between objective and subjective reality?

“If I’m sober, and don’t suspect a prank, I’m inclined to believe that when I see a cherry, there is a real cherry whose shape and color match my experience, and which continues to exist when I look away. 

“This assumption is central to how we think about ourselves and the world. But is it valid? Experiments my collaborators and I have performed to test the form of sensory perception that evolution has given us suggest a startling conclusion: it isn’t.” 

The author of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, the pioneering cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman, believes that evolution designed our perceptions “to keep us alive.” Our perceptions, he says, are “interfaces constructed by natural selection,” in a word randomly.

Real Cherries?

There are no completely random forces in Theosophy. The reality illusion is wholly subjective and beholden to our faculties of perception, and states of consciousness unique to our complex sevenfold human construction, according to Theosophy. But agreeably with Professor Hoffman, the world is nothing like what we see through our eyes. But for much different reasons than the conjectures of modern science.

“Every one of us possesses the faculty, the interior sense, that is known by the name of intuition,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in her article The Beacon-Light of the Unknown, “but how rare are those who know how to develop it!

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

“It is an instinct of the soul, which grows in us in proportion to the employment we give it, and which helps us to perceive and understand the realities of things with far more certainty than can the simple use of our senses and exercise of our reason.”

Alice Through the Looking Glass

“What are called good sense and logic enable us to see only the appearances of things, that which is evident to every one.  The instinct of which I speak, being a projection of our perceptive consciousness,

a projection which acts from the subjective to the objective, and not vice versa, awakens in us spiritual senses and power to act.

These senses assimilate to themselves the essence of the object or of the action under examination, and represent it to us as it really is, not as it appears to our physical senses and to our cold reason.” 

• H. P. Blavatsky, Le Phare De L’Inconnu

Disappearing into an illusion.

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

In Chapter 11, Krishna challenges Arjuna to exercise his spiritual sight in a specially induced vision of “the Divine Form as including all forms.” To enforce the lesson, and in answer to Arjuna’s request, Krishna temporarily awakens his “Divine Eye.” The rest is occult history!

Read more online:

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

Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield.

Temporary Illusions

“Gautama, the Buddha, only remained in solitude long enough to enable him to arrive at the truth, which he devoted himself from that time on to promulgate, begging his bread, and living for humanity.”

If, in the words of the dying Buddha, ‘all compounds are perishable,’ then all collections of atoms must be considered but temporary ‘illusions.’

They are such, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:329), because they are the very personal creations “of the perceiving Ego.” But this must not be considered a solipsistic argument. If we only knew how to get past our five senses we might very well contact the underlying ‘reality’ of physical things.

My Universe

The term “Ego” here must ultimately refer to a personal state, and as such must always relate to specific ‘states’ of consciousness.  But this is only from our plane of perception. According to The Secret Doctrine (1:330), once we have gotten past that plane, and scaled the “peak of Omniscience,” the “knowledge of things-in-themselves” is immediately available to us.

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.

(The Secret Doctrine Dialogues p. 86)

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

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

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.

The Reality of the Illusion of Reality

Alice in Wonderland

“WE assume our senses see reality as it is – but that could be just an evolved illusion,” the July 31, 2019 issue of NewScientist insisted.

“What is the relationship between the world out there and my internal experience of it – between objective and subjective reality?

“If I’m sober, and don’t suspect a prank, I’m inclined to believe that when I see a cherry, there is a real cherry whose shape and color match my experience, and which continues to exist when I look away. 

“This assumption is central to how we think about ourselves and the world. But is it valid? Experiments my collaborators and I have performed to test the form of sensory perception that evolution has given us suggest a startling conclusion: it isn’t.” 

The author of The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes, the pioneering cognitive scientist Donald D. Hoffman, believes that evolution designed our perceptions “to keep us alive.” Our perceptions, he says, are “interfaces constructed by natural selection,” in a word randomly.

Real Cherries?

There are no completely random forces in Theosophy. The reality illusion is wholly subjective and beholden to our faculties of perception, and states of consciousness unique to our complex sevenfold human construction, according to Theosophy. But agreeably with Professor Hoffman, the world is nothing like what we see through our eyes. But for much different reasons than the conjectures of modern science.

“Every one of us possesses the faculty, the interior sense, that is known by the name of intuition,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in her article The Beacon-Light of the Unknown, “but how rare are those who know how to develop it!

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

“It is an instinct of the soul, which grows in us in proportion to the employment we give it, and which helps us to perceive and understand the realities of things with far more certainty than can the simple use of our senses and exercise of our reason.”

Alice Through the Looking Glass

“What are called good sense and logic enable us to see only the appearances of things, that which is evident to every one.  The instinct of which I speak, being a projection of our perceptive consciousness,

a projection which acts from the subjective to the objective, and not vice versa, awakens in us spiritual senses and power to act.

These senses assimilate to themselves the essence of the object or of the action under examination, and represent it to us as it really is, not as it appears to our physical senses and to our cold reason.” 

• H. P. Blavatsky, Le Phare De L’Inconnu

Disappearing into an illusion.

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

In Chapter 11, Krishna challenges Arjuna to exercise his spiritual sight in a specially induced vision of “the Divine Form as including all forms.” To enforce the lesson, and in answer to Arjuna’s request, Krishna temporarily awakens his “Divine Eye.” The rest is occult history!

Read more online:

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

Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield.

Temporary Illusions

“Gautama, the Buddha, only remained in solitude long enough to enable him to arrive at the truth, which he devoted himself from that time on to promulgate, begging his bread, and living for humanity.”

If, in the words of the dying Buddha, ‘all compounds are perishable,’ then all collections of atoms must be considered but temporary ‘illusions.’

They are such, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:329), because they are the very personal creations “of the perceiving Ego.” But this must not be considered a solipsistic argument. If we only knew how to get past our five senses we might very well contact the underlying ‘reality’ of physical things.

My Universe

The term “Ego” here must ultimately refer to a personal state, and as such must always relate to specific ‘states’ of consciousness.  But this is only from our plane of perception. According to The Secret Doctrine (1:330), once we have gotten past that plane, and scaled the “peak of Omniscience,” the “knowledge of things-in-themselves” is immediately available to us.

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.

(The Secret Doctrine Dialogues p. 86)

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

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

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.

Piercing the Illusion of Reality

Alice in Wonderland

“WE assume our senses see reality as it is – but that could be just an evolved illusion,” the July 31, 2019 issue of NewScientist declared.

“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, 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 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.” 

• H. P. Blavatsky, Le Phare De L’Inconnu

Disappearing into an illusion.

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

In Chapter 11, Krishna challenges Arjuna to exercise his spiritual sight in a specially induced vision of “the Divine Form as including all forms.” To enforce the lesson, and in answer to Arjuna’s request, Krishna temporarily awakens his “Divine Eye.” The rest is history!

Read online:

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

Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield.

Temporary Illusions

“Gautama, the Buddha, only remained in solitude long enough to enable him to arrive at the truth, which he devoted himself from that time on to promulgate, begging his bread, and living for humanity.”

If, in the words of the dying Buddha, ‘all compounds are perishable,’ then all collections of atoms must be considered but temporary ‘illusions.’

They are such, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:329), because they are the very personal creations “of the perceiving Ego.” But this must not be considered a solipsistic argument. If we only knew how to get past our five senses we might very well contact the underlying ‘reality’ of physical things.

My Universe

The term “Ego” here must ultimately refer to a personal state, and as such must always relate to specific ‘states’ of consciousness.  But this is only from our plane of perception. According to The Secret Doctrine (1:330), once we have gotten past that plane, and scaled the “peak of Omniscience,” the “knowledge of things-in-themselves” is immediately available to us.

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.

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.

(The Secret Doctrine Dialogues p. 86)

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

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

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.

The Pursuit of Consciousness and the Illusion of Time

EVER arguing for the existence of an invisible conscious world within the visible physical one, the writer of The Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky, was consistent and insistent. 

She continually challenged the scientific materialistic beliefs of her day. For her monumental work, The Secret Doctrine, she wrote an introduction which included the following challenging declaration:

“The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not ‘a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,’ and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe —

“To rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring.

Finally, to show that the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization.”
(The Secret Doctrine 1: vii Preface)

Underlying nature is a universal and intelligent medium, a matrix supporting the visible physical world. This “invisible physical” was critical to understanding The Secret Doctrine and the Occult Sciences it presented.

Recently a New Scientist article titled “We’ve Seen a Thought: The Secret Seven-Dimensional Life of Your Mind” proposed that “consciousness may itself be a shadow of a higher-dimensional structure” — i.e. the Theosophical principle of Universal Mind.

Mirroring Kosmic Mind

More intriguing in a recent post by journalist Kari Robinson in Hackspirit.net titled “Scientists Discover Biophotons In The Brain That Could Hint Our Consciousness is Directly Linked to Light!” she writes that “one of the most exciting implications the discovery that

our brains can produce light gives, is that maybe our consciousness and spirit are not contained within our bodies. This implication is completely overlooked by scientists.”

The Double Slit Mystery

“Quantum entanglement says that 2 entangled photons react if one of the photons is affected no matter where the other photon is in The Universe without any delay. This can explain the phenomenon of why the state of a photon is affected simply by consciously observing it, as it is proven in many quantum experiments.

“Maybe our observation communicates something through our biophotons with the photon that is being observed, in a similar fashion as quantum entanglement, like light is just one unified substance that is scattered throughout our Universe and affected through each light particle.”

Ancient Thought in Modern Dress

(H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:579)

“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life,” Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine 1:579, a critical teaching. “Both are electricity  — the life principle, the anima mundi  [The world soul] pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things.

“Light is the great Protean magician . . . and its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling electric bosom, spring matter and spirit. 

Entangled Photons

“Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its primordial point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies.

“It was at the ray of this First mother, one in three, that ‘God,’ according to Plato, lighted a fire which we now call the sun,” and which is not the cause of either light or heat, but merely the focus, or, as we might say, the lens, by which the rays of the primordial light become materialized, are concentrate upon our Solar System, and produce all the correlations of forces.” 

A structure of stars and light.

Establishing this occult doctrine in her seminal work,  Mme. Blavatsky asserted that: “The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences

depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.” 

(The Secret Doctrine Vol 2, p. 149)

“The astral body is itself an aspect of the real inner body,” wrote Robert Crosbie, the Founder of the United Lodge of Theosophists, “which has lasted through the vast period of the past and must continue through the far distant future.”

Magnetic Fields

“This astral body is the prototype, or design, around which the physical body is built, and which, considered from the point of view of the powers, is the real physical body. Without it the physical body would be nothing but a mass of matter — an aggregation of smaller lives.” 

Everything in Nature
is Conscious

“We men must remember 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.

Healing Stones

“There is no such thing as either ‘dead’ or ‘blind’ matter, as there is no ‘Blind’ or ‘Unconscious’ Law. These find no place among the conceptions of Occult philosophy. The latter never stops at surface appearances, and for it the noumenal essences have more reality than their objective counterparts.

“The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards. As above so it is below, as in heaven so on earth; and man — the microcosm and miniature copy of the macrocosm — is the living witness to this Universal Law, and to the mode of its action.”

The Secret Doctrine 1:274

Is The Sun Conscious?

“It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”

– Eugene Wigner, theoretical physicist  and mathematician. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.

“Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.” 

– H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:274

The Non-Physical is Real

Scientists have been urging the mainstream scientific community, which today is littered with scientific fraud and industry influence as well as invention secrecy, to open up to a broader view regarding the true nature of our reality.

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade that in all of the previous centuries of its existence.”

– Nikola Tesla

Physicists Say Consciousness Should be Considered a State of Matter: The “Non Physical” is Real. 

Read: Collective Evolution

The Astral Matrix

Our Real Senses

“It is the astral body which contains the organs, or centers, from which the organs have been evolved in accord with the needs of the thinker within,” he continued. “The real senses of man are not in the physical but in the astral body. The astral body lasts a little over one lifetime. It does not die when the physical body dies, but is used as a body in the immediate after-death states.” 

-Robert Crosbie, (Universal Theosophy)

After The Secret Doctrine was published it would not take long before modern frontier scientists would begin to take up Mme. Blavatsky’s assertions in earnest using established scientific methods of inquiry. Seven important experiments suggesting the existence of an invisible astral matrix were initiated during the initial decades of the 20th and 21st century.

The Secret Doctrine

Even Mme. Blavatsky admitted in the 19th century: “It is gratifying to see how scientific imagination approaches every year more closely to the borderland of our occult teachings.” (The Secret Doctrine 2:137 fn)

Hence the subtitle of this blog Theosophy Watch, i.e. “Ancient Thought in Modern Dress,” is the same title used by Mme. Blavatsky in the presentation found in Volume 1, page 572 of The Secret Doctrine.

The Occult Side of Nature: An Invisible Physical

Helena Blavatsky

ALWAYS ready to argue for the existence of an invisible physical world, within visible matter, the writer of The Secret Doctrine, Helena Blavatsky, was ever adamant.

She continually challenged the scientific materialistic beliefs of her day. In her monumental work, The Secret Doctrine, she wrote an introduction which included the following declaration:

“The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not ‘a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,’ and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe — to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring.

Finally, to show that the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization.

(The Secret Doctrine: Vol. 1:vii Preface)

Madam Blavatsky frequently took up the cause of a universal, invisible and intelligent medium supporting the visible physical universe. This “invisible physical” she maintained, is critical to understanding Occult Science detailed in The Secret Doctrine.

Universal Matrix

Establishing this occult science in her seminal work,  Mme. Blavatsky asserted that: “The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences

depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.

• (The Secret Doctrine Vol 2, p. 149)

“The astral body is itself an aspect of the real inner body,” Robert Crosbie, the Co-Founder of the United Lodge of Theosophists wrote: 

“… which has lasted through the vast period of the past and must continue through the far distant future. This astral body is the prototype, or design, around which the physical body is built, and which, considered from the point of view of the powers, is the real physical body. Without it the physical body would be nothing but a mass of matter — an aggregation of smaller lives.” 

Astral Medium

Our Real Senses

“It is the astral body which contains the organs, or centers, from which the organs have been evolved in accord with the needs of the thinker within,” he continued. “The real senses of man are not in the physical but in the astral body. The astral body lasts a little over one lifetime. It does not die when the physical body dies, but is used as a body in the immediate after-death states.” 

• Robert Crosbie, (Universal Theosophy)

After The Secret Doctrine was published it would not be long before modern frontier scientists would begin to take up Mme. Blavatsky’s assertions in earnest using established scientific methods of inquiry. Seven important experiments suggesting the existence of an invisible astral matrix were initiated during the initial decades of the 20th and 21st century.

Even Mme. Blavatsky admitted:

It is gratifying to see how scientific imagination approaches every year more closely to the borderland of our occult teachings.

• (The Secret Doctrine 2:137 fn)

Thus the subtitle of this blog, i.e. “Ancient Thought in Modern Dress,” is taken from a phrase used by Mme. Blavatsky in her Volume 1, page 572 of The Secret Doctrine.

Spiritual Seeing into a Hidden Reality

Illusion or Reality?

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

Yet, “every one of us possesses the faculty, the interior sense, that is known by the name of intuition,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in her article The Beacon-Light of the Unknown, “but how rare are those who know how to develop it!

“It is an instinct of the soul, which grows in us in proportion to the employment we give it, and which helps us to perceive and understand the realities of things with far more certainty than can the simple use of our senses and exercise of our reason.”

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

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

Awakening.

“The instinct of which I speak, being a projection of our perceptive consciousness, a projection

which acts from the subjective to the objective, and not vice versa, awakens in us spiritual senses and power to act.

These senses assimilate to themselves the essence of the object or of the action under examination, and represent it to us as it really is, not as it appears to our physical senses and to our cold reason.” 

• H. P. Blavatsky, Le Phare De L’Inconnu

Plato

Plato’s Cave

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

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

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

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

Plato’s Cave

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

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

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

Disappearing into an illusion.

The Bhagavad-Gita

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

(The Theosophy of the Bhagavad Gita)

In Chapter 11, Krishna challenges Arjuna to exercise his spiritual sight in a specially induced vision of “the Divine Form as including all forms.” To enforce the lesson, and in answer to Arjuna’s request, Krishna temporarily awakens his “Divine Eye.” The rest is the drama of the awakening soul.

Read Chapter 11 online:

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

Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield.

Temporary Illusions

“Gautama, the Buddha, only remained in solitude long enough to achieve self-awareness, and enable him to arrive at the truth, to which he devoted himself from that time on to promulgate, begging his bread, and living for humanity.”

If, in the words of the dying Buddha, ‘all compounds are perishable,’ then all collections of atoms must be considered but temporary ‘illusions.’

They are such, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:329), because they are the very personal creations “of the perceiving Ego.” But this must not be considered a solipsistic argument. If we only knew how to get past our five material senses would be able to contact the underlying ‘reality’ of physical things. But never in an isolated ‘Me’ universe.

The Me Universe

The term “Ego” here must ultimately refer to a personal state, and as such must always relate to specific ‘states’ of consciousness.  But this is only from our plane of perception. According to The Secret Doctrine (1:330), once we have gotten past that plane, and scaled the “peak of Omniscience,” the “knowledge of things-in-themselves” is immediately available to us.

Real motion or the illusion of motion?

Progressive Awakenings

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

“As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached “reality;” but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya.”

THE SECRET DOCTRINE Vol. 1, Page 40

A Musical Thought Image

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

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

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

Colors and Sound

About this sensory synesthetic power Blavatsky wrote:

If you could only see clairvoyantly a person playing a piano, you would see the sound as plainly as you hear it.

“You can even put cotton in your ears—you will see the sound and every little note and modulation that you could not do otherwise. You cannot hear at a distance, but you can see at a distance.”

“You can taste sound, if you like, too. There sounds which are exceedingly acid, and there are sounds which are exceedingly sweet, and bitter, and all the scale of taste, in fact. There is no nonsense, I say it seriously, and you will find it so if you want to know about the super-physical senses.”

Synesthesia

Making reference to this sensory merging (known today as “synesthesia”) she explained: “One would merge into the other. You can taste sound, if you like, too. There sounds which are exceedingly acid, and there are sounds which are exceedingly sweet, and bitter, and all the scale of taste, in fact.” 

There is no nonsense, I say it seriously, and you will find it so if you want to know about the super-physical senses.

(The Secret Doctrine Dialogues p. 86)

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

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

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.

Spiritual Eyes: Piercing the Illusion of Reality

A musical thought image.

ALL of what we call ‘reality’ may actually be wholly subjective, and beholden to our powers of perception, according to Theosophy.

“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.”

“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.” 

• H. P. Blavatsky, Le Phare De L’Inconnu

Disappearing into an illusion.

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

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 history!

Read online:

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

Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield.

Temporary Illusions

“Gautama, the Buddha, only remained in solitude long enough to enable him to arrive at the truth, which he devoted himself from that time on to promulgate, begging his bread, and living for humanity.”

If, in the words of the dying Buddha, ‘all compounds are perishable,’ then all collections of atoms must be considered but temporary ‘illusions.’

They are such, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:329), because they are the very personal creations “of the perceiving Ego.” But this must not be considered a solipsistic argument. If we only knew how to get past our five senses we might very well contact the underlying ‘reality’ of physical things.

My Universe

The term “Ego” here must ultimately refer to a personal state, and as such must always relate to specific ‘states’ of consciousness.  But this is only from our plane of perception. According to The Secret Doctrine (1:330), once we have gotten past that plane, and scaled the “peak of Omniscience,” the “knowledge of things-in-themselves” is immediately available to us.

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.”

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.”

(The Secret Doctrine Dialogues p. 86)

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

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

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.”

Our Astral Sight, Piercing the Reality of Illusion

Musical Thought Form

ALL of what we call ‘reality’ may actually be subjective, and beholden to our powers of perception, according to Theosophy.

“Every one of us possesses the faculty, the interior sense, that is known by the name of intuition,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote (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 colours.”

“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.”

“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 Beacon-Light of the Unknown)

Disappearing into the illusion.

The Hindu poem, a dialogue between the Master Krishna and his disciple Arjuna, the Bhagavad-Gita, is set metaphorically on a ‘battlefield.’ This venue symbolizes “the war within,” which each of us continually face, and must eventually wage. (Blavatsky Theosophy)

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 history!

Read online:

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

Krishna and Arjuna on the battlefield.

Temporary Illusions

“Gautama, the Buddha, only remained in solitude long enough to enable him to arrive at the truth, which he devoted himself from that time on to promulgate, begging his bread, and living for humanity.”

If, in the words of the dying Buddha, ‘all compounds are perishable,’ then all collections of atoms must be considered but temporary ‘illusions.’

They are such, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:329), because they are the very personal creations “of the perceiving Ego.” But this must not be considered a solipsistic argument. If we only knew how to get past our five senses we might very well contact the underlying ‘reality’ of physical things.

My Universe

The term “Ego” here must ultimately refer to a personal state, and as such must always relate to specific ‘states’ of consciousness.  But this is only from our plane of perception. According to The Secret Doctrine (1:330), once we have gotten past that plane, and scaled the “peak of Omniscience,” the “knowledge of things-in-themselves” is immediately available to us.

The appearance of Motion, real or illusion?

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

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

A striking example of this kind of fusion is H. P. Blavatsky’s description 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.”

(The Secret Doctrine Dialogues p. 86)

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

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

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.”

Seeing the Past, Present and Future Now

Psychic and Spiritual Visions

FUTURE time, according to Theosophy, is included in both past and present time. With this assertion The Secret Doctrine anticipated modern quantum theories and even what might come — modern Theosophy is still way ‘ahead of the curve.’

An article in New Scientist this month is titled “Why now doesn’t exist, and other strange facts about time” takes us closer to Mme. Blavatsky’s assertions.

Quoting the American Theoretical Physicist John Wheeler’s statement ‘Time is what prevents everything happening at once,’ “… is as fair a summary of what time does as any other – especially given that our hunt for the most basic ingredients of reality (see “Essence of reality: Hunting the universe’s most basic ingredient”) has left us a trifle muddled about its status.”

“One culprit was Einstein, whose theory of general relativity merged time with space. But even before him, out understanding of the laws of physics worked the same regardless of whether you travel forwards or backwards in time. That just doesn’t tally with our experience. So what is time really?”

Albert Einstein

“Einstein’s relativity tells us that time results from gravity warping the fabric of reality – resulting in a picture that is weirdly at odds with our experience.”

With her usual stunning clarity H. P. Blavatsky asserted (The Secret Doctrine 1:37) that “Time is only an illusion,” and even endowing atoms with consciousness. Yet she insisted that Time as we know it is only “produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration —

and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced.”  

H. P. Blavatsky

“The real person or thing,” she maintained, “does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its appearance in the material form to its disappearance from the earth.

“It is these ‘sum-totals’ that exist from eternity in the ‘future’, and pass by degrees through matter, to exist for eternity in the ‘past’.” 

Seeing the Past, Present and Future

One of Mme. Blavatsky’s occult teachers, one of the two adept co-authors of The Secret Doctrine declared: “I feel even irritated at having to use these three clumsy words — past, present and future!  Miserable concepts of the objective phases of the Subjective Whole, they are about as ill adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving.”

(Letter 8, The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett)

Time Traveler

Electric and magnetic affinities are generated, occult teachers say, whenever there is physical touch, the sound of a voice, or even seeing or looking. Every action we take carries information about us and the life around us, a kind of psychic body language. We also call them ‘vibes’ – and clearly they can be ‘good’ or ‘bad.’

The invisible transfer of information between persons, animals, trees, bacteria and brain neurons, is still largely a mystery. Even birds and bees do it. The general term today is “psi,” coined from parapsychology, and usually refers to telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception currently unexplained. It is important to point out that

Sister and Brother

Mme. Blavatsky with her Adept Teachers authorized Three Objects of the Theosophical Society, of which the Third included study of  this mysterious phenomena.

Most importantly, The First Object of the Theosophical Society was “to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity.” This first fundamental idea was further explored in The Key to Theosophy as including universal “Sisterhood:”

“… it is only by all men becoming brothers and all women sisters, and by all practising in their daily lives true brotherhood and true sisterhood, that the real human solidarity, which lies at the root of the elevation of the race, can ever be attained.

“It is this action and interaction, this true brotherhood and sisterhood, in which each shall live for all and all for each, which is one of the fundamental Theosophical principles that every Theosophist should be bound, not only to teach, but to carry out in his or her individual life.”

The Second Object is stated as “the study of Aryan and other Scriptures, of the World’s religion and sciences etc.” These two have been preserved intact by almost all Theosophical groups.

“Buffy” Sarah Michelle Gellar

The original Third Object was clearly stated by H. P. Blavatsky in The Key to Theosophy, Section 3, published in 1889, and reads:

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

Despite the Founder’s unambiguous wording, some theosophical revisionists have chosen to unilaterally remove both the words ‘psychic” and “spiritual” from this Third Object. As a result of this unauthorized tinkering only a timid, and watered-down version of the original Third Object is all the public sees today.  How could this happen with a subject that pervades every major textbook the Teachers wrote, and hundreds of original articles?

Life, Light and the Pursuit of Consciousness

ALWAYS poised to advocate for the existence of an invisible conscious world within the visible physical world, the writer of The Secret Doctrine, H. P. Blavatsky, was clearly adamant.

She continually challenged the scientific materialistic beliefs of her day. For her monumental work, The Secret Doctrine, she wrote an introduction which included the following challenging declaration:

“The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not ‘a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,’ and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe —

“To rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring.

Finally, to show that the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization.”
(SD 1:vii Preface)

Underlying nature is a universal and intelligent medium, a matrix supporting the visible physical world. This “invisible physical” was critical to understanding the The Secret Doctrine and the Occult Sciences it presented.

Recently a New Scientist article titled “We’ve Seen a Thought: The Secret Seven-Dimensional Life of Your Mind” proposed that “consciousness may itself be a shadow of a higher-dimensional structure” — i.e. the Theosophical principle of Universal Mind.

Mirroring Kosmic Mind

More intriguing in a recent post by journalist Kari Robinson in Hackspirit.net titled “Scientists Discover Biophotons In The Brain That Could Hint Our Consciousness is Directly Linked to Light!” she writes that “one of the most exciting implications the discovery that

our brains can produce light gives, is that maybe our consciousness and spirit are not contained within our bodies. This implication is completely overlooked by scientists.”

The Double Slit Mystery

“Quantum entanglement says that 2 entangled photons react if one of the photons is affected no matter where the other photon is in The Universe without any delay. This can explain the phenomenon of why the state of a photon is affected simply by consciously observing it, as it is proven in many quantum experiments.

“Maybe our observation communicates something through our biophotons with the photon that is being observed, in a similar fashion as quantum entanglement, like light is just one unified substance that is scattered throughout our Universe and affected through each light particle.”

Ancient Thought in Modern Dress

(H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:579)

“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life,” Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine 1:579, a critical teaching. “Both are electricity  — the life principle, the anima mundi  [The world soul] pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things.

“Light is the great Protean magician . . . and its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling electric bosom, spring matter and spirit. 

Entangled Photons

“Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena; it vitalizes and disorganizes; it gives life and produces death, and from its primordial point gradually emerged into existence the myriads of worlds, visible and invisible celestial bodies.

“It was at the ray of this First mother, one in three, that ‘God,’ according to Plato, lighted a fire which we now call the sun,” and which is not the cause of either light or heat, but merely the focus, or, as we might say, the lens, by which the rays of the primordial light become materialized, are concentrate upon our Solar System, and produce all the correlations of forces.” 

A structure of stars and light.

Establishing this occult doctrine in her seminal work,  Mme. Blavatsky asserted that: “The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences

depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.” 

(The Secret Doctrine Vol 2, p. 149)

“The astral body is itself an aspect of the real inner body,” wrote Robert Crosbie, the Founder of the United Lodge of Theosophists, “which has lasted through the vast period of the past and must continue through the far distant future.”

Magnetic Fields

“This astral body is the prototype, or design, around which the physical body is built, and which, considered from the point of view of the powers, is the real physical body. Without it the physical body would be nothing but a mass of matter — an aggregation of smaller lives.” 

Everything in Nature
is Conscious

“We men must remember 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.

Healing Stones

“There is no such thing as either ‘dead’ or ‘blind’ matter, as there is no ‘Blind’ or ‘Unconscious’ Law. These find no place among the conceptions of Occult philosophy. The latter never stops at surface appearances, and for it the noumenal essences have more reality than their objective counterparts.

“The Universe is worked and guided from within outwards. As above so it is below, as in heaven so on earth; and man — the microcosm and miniature copy of the macrocosm — is the living witness to this Universal Law, and to the mode of its action.”

The Secret Doctrine 1:274

Is The Sun Conscious?

“It was not possible to formulate the laws of quantum mechanics in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.”

– Eugene Wigner, theoretical physicist  and mathematician. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963.

“Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.” 

– H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:274

The Non-Physical is Real

Scientists have been urging the mainstream scientific community, which today is littered with scientific fraud and industry influence as well as invention secrecy, to open up to a broader view regarding the true nature of our reality.

“The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade that in all of the previous centuries of its existence.”

– Nikola Tesla

Physicists Say Consciousness Should be Considered a State of Matter: The “Non Physical” is Real. 

Read: Collective Evolution

The Astral Matrix

Our Real Senses

“It is the astral body which contains the organs, or centers, from which the organs have been evolved in accord with the needs of the thinker within,” he continued. “The real senses of man are not in the physical but in the astral body. The astral body lasts a little over one lifetime. It does not die when the physical body dies, but is used as a body in the immediate after-death states.” -Robert Crosbie, (Universal Theosophy)

After The Secret Doctrine was published it would not take long before modern frontier scientists would begin to take up Mme. Blavatsky’s assertions in earnest using established scientific methods of inquiry. Seven important experiments suggesting the existence of an invisible astral matrix were initiated during the initial decades of the 20th and 21st century.

The Secret Doctrine

Even Mme. Blavatsky admitted in the 19th century: “It is gratifying to see how scientific imagination approaches every year more closely to the borderland of our occult teachings.” (Secret Doctrine 2:137 fn)

Hence the subtitle of this blog Theosophy Watch, i.e. “Ancient Thought in Modern Dress,” is the same title used by Mme. Blavatsky in the presentation found in Volume 1, page 572 of The Secret Doctrine.

The Invisible Physical: Proved by Seven Scientific Experiments

Helena Blavatsky

ALWAYS ready to argue for the existence of an invisible physical world, within the visible matter, the writer of The Secret Doctrine, Helena Blavatsky, was ever adamant.

She continually challenged the scientific materialistic beliefs of her day. About her monumental work, The Secret Doctrine, she wrote an introduction which included the following declaration:

“The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not ‘a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,’ and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe — to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring.

Finally, to show that the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization.”
(SD 1:vii Preface)

Madam Blavatsky frequently took up the cause of a universal, invisible and intelligent medium supporting the visible physical universe. This “invisible physical” was critical to understanding Occult Science as presented in The Secret Doctrine.

Establishing this occult doctrine in her seminal work,  Mme. Blavatsky asserted that: “The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences

“depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.” (The Secret Doctrine Vol 2, p. 149)

“The astral body is itself an aspect of the real inner body,” wrote Robert Crosbie, the Founder of the United Lodge of Theosophists, “which has lasted through the vast period of the past and must continue through the far distant future.”

“This astral body is the prototype, or design, around which the physical body is built, and which, considered from the point of view of the powers, is the real physical body. Without it the physical body would be nothing but a mass of matter — an aggregation of smaller lives.” 

Our Real Senses

“It is the astral body which contains the organs, or centers, from which the organs have been evolved in accord with the needs of the thinker within,” he continued. “The real senses of man are not in the physical but in the astral body. The astral body lasts a little over one lifetime. It does not die when the physical body dies, but is used as a body in the immediate after-death states.” -Robert Crosbie, (Universal Theosophy)

After The Secret Doctrine was published it would not take long before modern frontier scientists would begin to take up Mme. Blavatsky’s assertions in earnest using established scientific methods of inquiry. Seven important experiments suggesting the existence of an invisible astral matrix were initiated during the initial decades of the 20th and 21st century.

Even Mme. Blavatsky admitted in the 19th century: “It is gratifying to see how scientific imagination approaches every year more closely to the borderland of our occult teachings.” (Secret Doctrine 2:137 fn)

Hence the subtitle of this blog Theosophy Watch, i.e. “Ancient Thought in Modern Dress,” is the same title used by Mme. Blavatsky in the presentation found in Volume 1, page 572 of The Secret Doctrine.

Spiritual Vision: Piercing the Illusions of Sense

Musical Thought Form

ALL of what we call ‘reality’ may actually be subjective, that is beholden to our powers of perception, according to Theosophy.

If, as in the words of the dying Buddha, “all compounds are perishable” then all collections of atoms are to be considered ‘illusions.’

They are, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:329), because they are the “creation 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 could contact the underlying ‘reality’ of physical things.

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.

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.”

A striking example of this kind of fusion is H. P. Blavatsky’s description 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.”

(Secret Doctrine Dialogues p. 86)

Alexander Scriabin, a Russian pianist and composer who was deeply influenced by Theosophy, visualized a grand magnum opus which he titled “Mysterium.” Click the link here to listen to Nora Eccles, Harrison Museum of Art as the three curators describe the exhibit, Painting Music: Enchanted Modernities, who gives us a personalized tour of the Theosophy promoted  power (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.”

Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for the Illusion of Time

FUTURE time, according to Theosophy, is included in both past and present time. With this assertion The Secret Doctrine anticipated modern quantum theories.

Even the great Einstein disliked the idea that atoms might be able to simultaneously mimic each over huge distances, proclaiming it to be “spooky action at a distance.”

“Time is only an illusion,” H. P. Blavatsky insisted even endowing atoms with consciousness. Time yet an illusion “produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration — and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced.” (The Secret Doctrine 1:37)

“The real person or thing does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment,” she insisted, “but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its appearance in the material form to its disappearance from the earth. It is these ‘sum-totals’ that exist from eternity in the ‘future’, and pass by degrees through matter, to exist for eternity in the ‘past’.”

One of Mme. Blavatsky’s occult teachers, one of two adept co-authors of The Secret Doctrine delcared “I feel even irritated at having to use these three clumsy words — past, present and future!  Miserable concepts of the objective phases of the Subjective Whole, they are about as ill adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving.” (Letter 8, The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett)

Electric and magnetic affinities are generated, occult teachers say, whenever there is physical touch, the sound of a voice, or even looking. Every action we take carries information about us and the life around us, a kind of psychic body language. We also call them ‘vibes’ – and they can be ‘good’ or ‘bad.’

The invisible transfer of information between persons, animals, trees, bacteria and brain neurons, is still largely a mystery. Even birds and bees do it. The general term today is “psi,” coined from parapsychology, and usually refers to telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception currently unexplained.

Mme. Blavatsky with her Adept Teachers authorized Three  Objects for the Theosophical Society, which included study of  this mysterious phenomena.

The First Object of the Society was “to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity,” and the Second “the study of Aryan and other Scriptures, of the World’s religion and sciences etc.,” and these are preserved by almost all Theosophical groups.

Buffy Sarah Michelle Gellar

The original Third Object was also stated clearly by H. P. Blavatsky in The Key to Theosophy, Section 3, published in 1889, and reads:

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

Ξ

Despite the Founder’s unambiguous wording, some revisionists have chosen to unilaterally remove both the words “‘psychic” and “spiritual” from the Third Object. As a result of this revisionist tinkering only a timid, unauthorized and watered-down version of the original Third Object is all the public sees today.  How could this happen with a subject that pervades every major textbook the Teachers wrote, and hundreds of original articles?

Buddhism, Science, and Scientism Exposed

ELECTRIC and magnetic affinities are generated, occult teachers say, whenever there is physical touch, the sound of a voice, or even looking.

Every action we take carries information about us and the life around us, a kind of psychic body language. We also call them ‘vibes’ – and they can be ‘good’ or ‘bad.’

The invisible transfer of information between persons, animals, trees, bacteria and brain neurons, is still largely a mystery. Even birds and bees do it. The general term today is “psi,” coined from parapsychology, and usually refers to telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception currently unexplained.

Mme. Blavatsky with her Adept Teachers authorized Three  Objects for the Theosophical Society, which included study of  this mysterious phenomena.

The First Object of the Society was “to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity,” and the Second “the study of Aryan and other Scriptures, of the World’s religion and sciences etc.,” and these are preserved by almost all Theosophical groups.

The original Third Object was also stated clearly by H. P. Blavatsky in The Key to Theosophy, Section 3, published in 1889, and reads:

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

Ξ

Despite the Founder’s unambiguous wording, some revisionists have chosen to unilaterally remove both the words “‘psychic” and “spiritual” from the Third Object. As a result of this tinkering today only a timid, unauthorized and watered-down version of the original Third Object is all the public sees.  How could this happen with a subject that pervades every major textbook the Teachers wrote, and hundreds of original articles?

Seeing Into the Future: Humans May do it Naturally

ELECTRIC and magnetic affinities are generated, occult teachers say, whenever there is physical touch, the sound of a voice, or even looking.

Every action we take carries information about us and the life around us, a kind of psychic body language. We also call them ‘vibes’ – and they can be ‘good’ or ‘bad.’

The invisible transfer of information between persons, animals, trees, bacteria and brain neurons, is still largely a mystery. Even birds and bees do it. The general term today is “psi,” coined from parapsychology, and usually refers to telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception currently unexplained.

Mme. Blavatsky with her Adept Teachers authorized Three  Objects for the Theosophical Society, which included study of  this mysterious phenomena.

The First Object of the Society was “to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity,” and the Second “the study of Aryan and other Scriptures, of the World’s religion and sciences etc.,” and these are preserved by almost all Theosophical groups.

The original Third Object was also stated clearly by H. P. Blavatsky in The Key to Theosophy, Section 3, published in 1889, and reads:

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

Ξ

Despite the Founder’s unambiguous wording, some revisionists have chosen to unilaterally remove both the words “‘psychic” and “spiritual” from the Third Object. As a result of this tinkering today only a timid, unauthorized and watered-down version of the original Third Object is all the public sees.  How could this happen with a subject that pervades every major textbook the Teachers wrote, and hundreds of original articles?

The Temple of God

ABSOLUTE certainty about someone’s motive and intention requires that one be able to read that person’s mind and heart directly.

No one could be absolutely sure of Garry Kasparov’s next move, for example, or any chess player solely by studying the patterns of pieces on the chess board they create.

Decoding brain patterns is even more frustrating for neuroscientists who attempt to analyze and interpret them.

Like weather forecasting, the available data it is too often unreliable. For brain researchers the precise location of memory, it is shown, remains elusive. And for good reason—there are more addresses than all the world’s email.

Simple logic would tell us brain activity, like chess moves, cannot be the source of thought, but only thought’s result. Knowing what thoughts are by studying their patterns, has proven more difficult than discovering the perfect chess strategy.

This is because the real ‘thinker’ is positioned behind the curtain of observed consciousness, occultism explains.

Ω

The invisible conscious entity who delivers the energetic thought signals which light up the cells and neurons of the physical brain, must logically be the active agent of consciousness — not the responding cells and neurons.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us,” as Emerson wrote memorably, “are small matters compared to what lies within us.” 

Seat of the Soul

THE Cheyenne say that “our first teacher is our own heart,” but mainstream science offers few apples to that master instructor.

To Western medical schools the heart is just a mechanical blood pump.

That view is beginning to change. The medical community is being challenged to expand its thinking about human biology, health, and wellness.

Leading-edge research in holistic medicine, biophysics, bioenergetics, and biocentrism all point in the same direction — showing our bodies are more than physical molecules and chemicals.

Explaining why and how we are more, H. P. Blavatsky asserted in The Secret Doctrine (2:149) that “The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences,”

“… depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.”

∑

The key is explained in today’s frontier science by the presence of the ‘biofield’ – a human body-field that is described as a structured web of information and energy that underlies and informs our physical body, and rules our state of health and well-being.

The heart is the primary contributor, regulator and overseer of a dynamic web of consciousness. “Electrically, the heart generates over 500 times more electricity than the brain,” writes BioCare Certified Neurofeedback Provider, Helena E. Kerekhazi, MS, NRNP. “It is the biggest generator in the body.”

“We have to subtract out the heart artifact from the brainwaves when we record, so strong is the signal.”

♥

The Psychic Life

ELECTRIC and magnetic affinities are generated, occult teachers say, whenever there is physical touch, the sound of a voice, or even a meaningful look.

Every action we take carries information about us and the life around us, a kind of psychic body language. We also call them ‘vibes’ – and they can be ‘good’ or ‘bad.’

The invisible transfer of information between persons, animals, trees, bacteria and brain neurons, is still largely a mystery. Even birds and bees do it. The general term today is “psi,” coined from parapsychology, and usually refers to telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception currently unexplained.

Mme. Blavatsky with her Adept Teachers authorized Three  Objects for the Theosophical Society, which included study of  this mysterious phenomena.

The First Object of the Society was “to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity,” and the Second “the study of Aryan and other Scriptures, of the World’s religion and sciences etc.,” and these are preserved by almost all Theosophical groups.

The original Third Object was also stated clearly by H. P. Blavatsky in The Key to Theosophy, Section 3, published in 1889, and reads:

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

Ξ

Despite the Founder’s unambiguous wording, some Theosophical revisionists have chosen to unilaterally remove both the words “‘psychic” and “spiritual” from the last Object. Others followed suit, and today a timid, unauthorized and watered-down version is all the public sees.  How could this happen with a subject that pervades every major textbook the Teachers wrote, and hundreds of their original articles?

Through the Veil

MOST of us are so preoccupied with future expectations, we fail to see what’s right in front of us.

A famous attention experiment at Harvard showed that many people missed seeing a 200-pound gorilla walking through a small group of basketball players.

Not so for a clinically blind man, who clearly saw what he should not have seen. Surprised science writer, Andrea Gawrylewski, reporting in The Scientist, described the experiment and wondered:

“How much can you see with a non-functioning visual cortex?”

¿

“With lesions on both sides of his visual cortex,” reports a paper published in Current Biology, “he was able to flawlessly navigate an obstacle course.”

Biologists and neurologists are still searching for the hardware (neurons) responsible for this seeming impossibility.

“It remains to be determined which of the several extra-striate pathways,” the article comments, “account for this patient’s intact navigation skills.”

“It is not fully understood how this is possible,” according to the paper.

δ

This may be one of modern science’s many stubborn puzzles, but Theosophy easily sees the answer, through the use of a certain hidden sense.

Field of Mind

ABSOLUTE certainty requires you to read a person’s mind directly.

For example, no one can know for sure Garry Kasparov’s next move, solely by studying the patterns he sets up on the chess board.

Similarly, decoding brain patterns is frustrating the neuroscientists analyzing them.

Like weather forecasting, the available data it is too often unreliable. Locating memory in the brain, researchers admit, likewise remains elusive.

Simple logic says the brain’s activity itself cannot be the source of thought, but only thought’s result. Knowing what thoughts are by studying their patterns, has proven more difficult than knowing the perfect chess move.

Because the real ‘thinker’ is positioned behind the curtain of observed consciousness, Theosophy affirms.

Ω

The invisible conscious entity who delivers the energetic thought signals which light up the cells and neurons of the physical brain, must logically be the active agent of consciousness — not the responding cells and neurons.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us,” as Emerson wrote memorably, “are small matters compared to what lies within us.”