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.

A Miracle of Miracles —The Great Inscrutable Mystery

Botticelli: Primavera

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

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

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

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

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

•  H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:35

Spirit-Matter

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

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

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

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

Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus

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

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

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

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

(The Secret Doctrine 1:211-12)

Intelligent Design

Quoting Thomas Carlyle:

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

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

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

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

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 Wonder of Life: The Great Inscrutable Mystery

Botticelli: Primavera

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

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

Sounding more like a student of Theosophy than a cultural and political commentator Brooks adds:

“The body is material but surpasses the material. It’s spiritualized matter.”

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

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

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

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

Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus

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

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

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

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

(The Secret Doctrine 1:211-12)

Intelligent Design?

Quoting Thomas Carlyle directly:

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

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

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

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

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.”

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.”

The Miracle of Miracles, the Great Inscrutable Mystery

Botticelli: Primavera

WE are repulsed by a report of a terrorist beheading, David Brooks writes in a recent NY Times Op-Ed, “because the body has a spiritual essence.”

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

“The body is material but surpasses the material. It’s spiritualized matter.”

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

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

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

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

Sandro Botticelli, Birth of Venus

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

“There is but one temple in the universe, and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than that high form . . . . We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!” (Secret Doctrine 1:211-12)

“If well meditated it will turn out to be a scientific fact — the expression of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles — the great inscrutable Mystery,” She continues. “The breath of heaven, or rather the breath of life, called in the bible Nephesh, is in every animal, in every animate speck as in every mineral atom.”

Intelligent Design

Worth repeating:

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

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

“If well meditated it will turn out to be a scientific fact — the expression of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles — the great inscrutable Mystery.”  (Thomas Carlyle, Ch. 1 Hero as Divinity)

Astrology, Numbers and Destiny

ASTROLOGY is just unscientific superstition many skeptics insist. Real philosophy, Theosophy counters, seeks “rather to solve than to deny.”

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

This is what the ancients meant by Astrology she says.

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

“The idea that someone’s personality could be imprinted at birth according to the position of the sun, moon and planets,” Adams comments, “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.”

ξ

But wait a minute. Recently, scientific studies showing planetary imprinting called “seasonal biology” has confirmed the principle underlying astrology. The scientific study shows that planetary positions do, surprisingly, influence our biological clocks. Why not our psychological and mental states as well?

Occult Influences

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

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

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

“…the clock indicates,
it does not influence the time.”

Å

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

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

Ω

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.”

♥

Genius of Emotion

HUNDREDS of facts and thousands details in a book can be understood by any average analytical and reasoning mind.

But intellectual understanding does not usually come with directions for living our life, or correctly understanding the fine print.

Because, “the intellect alone,” as William Q. Judge wrote in the Ocean of Theosophy, “is cold, heartless and selfish.”

Backing this up, Blavatsky says in an article, that “Great intellectual powers are often no proof of, but are impediments to spiritual and right conceptions.”

Altruism, a power that is surely a blend of feelings and mind, exemplifies, Blavatsky wrote,  “real Theosophy.”

♥

The core heart power of Devotion, which underlies the whole universe, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:210), “is innate in us, and which we find alike in human babe and the young of the animal.”

“All of the skills and abilities you need to create a wonderful life and smoothly functioning relationships lie waiting somewhere else inside you,” empath and researcher Karla McLaren claims in her article “Welcoming Your Emotional Genius.”

And in her book, “The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You,” explains:

“I share these empathic skills to help you access the gifts your emotions bring you.”

♥

That ‘somewhere else’ is your emotions, she says, and “if you learn their language, you’ll have all the energy, intelligence, intuition, empathy, integrity, and strength of character you need to create a healthy life for yourself, your loved ones, your colleagues, and the world.”

This may seem like a tall claim. Yet our emotional genius benefits our health through altruism, intention and intuition.

≥

Spiritual activity apparently drives a higher aspect of our minds, capable of connecting whatever dots the game of life can throw at us.

The Secret of Astrology

ASTROLOGY is just unscientific superstition many skeptics insist. Real philosophy, Theosophy counters, seeks “rather to solve than to deny.”

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

This is what the ancients meant by Astrology she says.

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

“The idea that someone’s personality could be imprinted at birth according to the position of the sun, moon and planets,” Adams comments, “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.”

ξ

But wait a minute. Recently, scientific studies showing planetary imprinting called “seasonal biology” has confirmed the principle underlying astrology. The scientific study shows that planetary positions do, surprisingly, influence our biological clocks. Why not our psychological and mental states as well?

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.

Auguries of God

SCIENCE now realizes that mother nature was ahead of her time in understanding the quantum universe.

A red rose, the dance of honey bees, spiral galaxies, Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, and Yogi Berra all get it right.

It’s back to the future all over again. Poetry, plants, religions, even materialists and atheists—all have a lot more in common as we’ll see.

Even celebrated artist and poet William Blake sensed he saw “a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower,” and how you could

“Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”

∞

Children at play—left to their own instincts and intuitions unsmothered by parental intimidation—engage the delights of spontaneous imagination. Theirs is an unselfconscious, non-ideological purity of intent.

Genius of originality in the young child is  hardwired, and when not managed by disapproving, arbitrary rule makers, their creations are joyful and  unpretentious. “The true sign of intelligence,” Albert Einstein once said, “is not knowledge but imagination.”

Mme. Blavatsky’s closest colleague, William Q. Judge, wrote of imagination as “the King faculty,” (Ocean of Theosophy, 139), because “the Will cannot do its work if the Imagination be at all weak or untrained.”

All life forms, like kids at play, are inseparably intertwined — yet consist, as does the radio wave spectrum, of  infinite individual frequencies .

(The Secret Doctrine)

Ω

“Would to goodness the men of science exercised their ‘scientific imagination’ a little more,” Blavatsky wrote in her article Kosmic Mind,  “and their dogmatic and cold negations a little less.” 

A Coherent World

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 only 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 we are more than just our bodies are more than physical molecules and chemicals.

Explaining why and how we are more, H. P. Blavatsky asserts 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.”

∑

Seeing and Believing

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?”

¿

Flesh of My Flesh

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. Theosophy concurs with many of these new findings.

“The failures of science and its arbitrary assumptions,” Blavatsky says 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.

It follows, then, that the identical genes that were in our ancestor’s bodies, that Blavatsky called “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.”

§

Written in The Stars

ASTROLOGY is just unscientific superstition many skeptics insist. Real philosophy, Theosophy counters, seeks “rather to solve than to deny.”

“It is an axiom of the philosophic student,” Blavatsky affirms, “that truth generally lies between the extremes.” This is what the ancients meant by Astrology she says.

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

“The idea that someone’s personality could be imprinted at birth according to the position of the sun, moon and planets,” Adams comments, “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.”

ξ