Let America Be America Again

H. P. Blavatsky 1877

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Prayer Labyrinth

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

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

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

The Unstoppable Force of Love

Mother and Child

LOVE in its most unselfish form was described by H. P. Blavatsky as the “absence of every ill-feeling , selfishness, charity, goodwill to all beings.”

The alchemy of such enlightened ethics unleashes the power of an stoppable universal force.

“The powers and forces of spirit,” Blavatsky declared in her article Practical Occultism, “lend themselves only to the perfectly pure in heart — and this is DIVINE MAGIC.”

‘Kamadeva’, a Sanskrit word, is defined in The Theosophical Glossary as “the first conscious, all-embracing desire for universal good, love, and the first feeling of infinite compassion and mercy for all that lives and feels, needs help and kindness. Only later did kama become the power that gratifies desire on the animal plane.”

“Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind,” (Secret Doctrine 2:176) — “and which sages, searching with their intellect, discovered to be the bond which connects Entity with Non-Entity.” 

Mother and Child, Tibet

That power arose,” Blavatsky said, “in the consciousness of the creative One Force, as soon as it came into life and being as a ray from the Absolute.” It was she also who, in the article Love with an Object, fervently declared:

“Love can exist without form, but no form can exist without Love.”

Devotion arose out of a feeling she explained, “and became the first and foremost motor in our nature — for it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us.”

Home From The War

The Heart Doctrine

In her first Letter to a Theosophical Convention in 1888, Blavatsky wrote: “He who teaches Theosophy preaches the gospel of goodwill, and the converse of this is true also — he who preaches the gospel of goodwill, teaches Theosophy.”

Compassion is no mere attribute of thinking or emotion, says the Book of the Golden Precepts. Like love, its companion force, compassion is “the Law of Laws” declares The Voice of the Silence (III). Genuine harmony of feeling and deed naturally resonate as the “fitness of all things.”

Compassion is also described in Theosophy as a “shoreless universal essence,” and “the light of everlasting Right.” Simply put, this ancient teaching asserts this power is nothing short of “the law of love eternal.”

The Law of Love Eternal

The more thou dost become at one with it, thy being melted in its BEING, the more thy Soul unites with that which IS, the more thou wilt become COMPASSION ABSOLUTE.  Such is the Arya Path, Path of the Buddhas of perfection.

(The Two Paths)

Of the heart’s  Blavatsky wrote in Isis Unveiled (Preface 1:v): “we believe in no Magic which transcends the scope and capacity of the human mind, nor in ‘miracle,’ whether divine or diabolical, if such imply a transgression of the laws of nature instituted from all eternity.”

Nevertheless, we accept…that the human heart has not yet fully uttered itself, and that we have never attained or even understood the extent of its powers.

The Heart Rules

“All the organs in our body generate their own specific fields. One organ in particular seems to generate significant fields which affect the entire body. The heart is the Emperor in the system. The liver and all the organs have other tasks. But the heart is overruling all.”




The Solar Heart

The Sun rhythmically expands and contracts like the human heart it is taught, and “there is a regular circulation of the vital fluid throughout our system,

of which the Sun is the heart — the same as the circulation of the blood in the human body.

The Sun Heart

Mme. Blavatsky devoted an entire section in The Secret Doctrine  to the teaching (“The Solar Theory“), comparing the Sun to a heart, calling it “the heart of the solar system.”

“Only, instead of performing the round in a second or so, it takes the solar blood ten of its years, and a whole year to pass through its auricles and ventricles before it washes the lungs and passes thence to the great veins and arteries of the system.”

The Electric Sun

“Foremost of all, they [the astronomers] would have to repudiate the ideas on the Sun’s solidity and incandescence; the Sun is ‘glowing’ most undeniably, but not burning . . .” 

(The Secret Doctrine 1:492)

“If the sun is connected to the rest of the galaxy in an electrical sense, it doesn’t require to burn itself at all. The energy that we receive is actually received from the galaxy [central sun?], and the sun is acting as a focus for that energy. . . . its puzzling characteristics with respect to conventional interpretations are most likely demonstrating the fluctuations in current arriving from the Milky Way’s electric generator.”

–Wallace Thornhill, Plasma Physicist (The Thunderbolts Project)

“The Sun is neither a solid nor a liquid, nor yet a gaseous glow; but a gigantic ball of electro-magnetic Forces, the store-house of universal life and motion, from which the latter pulsate in all directions . . . when your astronomers speaking of sun-matter, term those lights and flames as ‘clouds of vapour’ and ‘gases unknown to science’ . . . we know it to be simply magnetic matter in its usual state of activity —”

[The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett, Letter 23b]

Modern Science and the
Message of H. P. Blavatsky

Sun Cycles

“This, Science will not deny, since Astronomy knows of the fixed cycle of eleven years when the number of solar spots increases, which is due to the contraction of the Solar heart,” Blavatsky insisted.

Solar Heart

“The universe (our world in this case) breathes, just as man and every living creature, plant, and even mineral does upon the earth — and as our globe itself breathes every twenty-four hours.”

New Solar Images

Many Mysteries

“Could the human heart be made luminous, and the living and throbbing organ be made visible, so as to have it reflected upon a screen — then every one would see the Sun-spot phenomenon repeated every second — due to its contraction and the rushing of the blood.”

On the mystery of consciousness, Blavatsky wrote  in Psychic and Noetic Action, that “no physiologist, not even the cleverest, will ever be able to solve the mystery of the human mind, in its highest spiritual manifestation.”

Nor will they be able to understand the meaning of “the psychic and the noetic — or even to comprehend the intricacies of the former on the purely material plane.”

Organized Religion

Healing Humanity

by H. P. Blavatsky

“On the day when Theosophy will have accomplished its most holy and most important mission — namely, to unite firmly a body of men of all nations in brotherly love and bent on a pure altruistic work, not on a labor with selfish motives —

“…on that day only will Theosophy become higher than any nominal brotherhood of man.

“This will be a wonder and a miracle truly, for the realization of which Humanity is vainly waiting for the last 18 centuries, and which every association has hitherto failed to accomplish.” 

 

The Force of Love: Making a Difference in the World

THE famous meditation of John Donne, “never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee,” highlights two Theosophical principles:

First, the affirmation that there is no isolation, that nature and all mankind are interconnected — and second, our karmic responsibility.

“It’s one thing to fashion a particular work of art, sculpture, painting, a worthy accomplishment,” Thoreau wrote, “but much greater is the creation of one’s life.” He believed that:

to exemplify the highest potential imagined, it is the highest of loving artistic accomplishments.

A compassionate Nature activist, Julia Butterfly Hill is a living example of Theosophy pure and simple. She took the decisive action taught in The Voice of the Silence — sacrificing  her comfort and well-being to “help Nature and work on with her.”

“Help Nature and Work On With Her”

H. P. Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence, Fragment 1:

“Desire nothing. Chafe not at Karma, nor at Nature’s changeless laws. But struggle only with the personal, the transitory, the evanescent and the perishable.

Help Nature and work on with her; and Nature will regard thee as one of her creators and make obeisance.

“And she will open wide before thee the portals of her secret chambers, lay bare before thy gaze the treasures hidden in the very depths of her pure virgin bosom. Unsullied by the hand of matter she shows her treasures only to the eye of Spirit — the eye which never closes, the eye for which there is no veil in all her kingdoms.”

Julia Butterfly Hill

It must have been a profound inner sense of the sacred that roused Julia to action as she climbed 18 stories up those long ropes, to begin a permanent encampment in the endangered redwood trees.

She doesn’t follow any organized religion but says she believes very strongly in the spirituality of the universe.

‡

Love is Divine Magic: the Heart Rules

Mother and Child

LOVE in its most unselfish form was described by H. P. Blavatsky as the “absence of every ill-feeling, selfishness, charity, goodwill to all beings.”

The alchemy of such enlightened ethics unleashes the power of an un-stoppable universal force.

“The powers and forces of spirit,” Blavatsky declared in her article Practical Occultism, “lend themselves only to the perfectly pure in heart — and this is DIVINE MAGIC.”

Kamadeva, a Sanskrit word, is defined in The Theosophical Glossary as “the first conscious, all-embracing desire for universal good, love, and the first feeling of infinite compassion and mercy for all that lives and feels, needs help and kindness. Only later did kama become the power that gratifies desire on the animal plane.”

“Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind,” (Secret Doctrine 2:176) — “and which sages, searching with their intellect, discovered to be the bond which connects Entity with Non-Entity.” 

That power arose,” Blavatsky said, “in the consciousness of the creative One Force, as soon as it came into life and being as a ray from the Absolute.” It was also she who, in the article Love with an Object, fervently declared:

Love can exist without form, but no form can exist without Love.

♥

Reincarnation

Devotion arose out of a feeling she wrote, “and became the first and foremost motor in man’s nature — for it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us.”

In her first Letter to a Theosophical Convention in 1888, she wrote: “He who teaches Theosophy preaches the gospel of goodwill, and the converse of this is true also — he who preaches the gospel of goodwill, teaches Theosophy.”

The Healing Power of Reincarnation and Karma, Part 2

Scrooge

WHAT thousands of honest employees in that Enron scandal revealed back in 2001 is they paid by association dearly for the misdeeds at the top of their corporate leadership.

Maybe most of the non-managerial staff were ‘innocent’ hardworking employees — possibly others of them knew what was going on but chose to remain silent.

Either way, the lesson was clear: No one is ever secure working for a company whose administration has lost its moral compass. But, whether or not this is fair, is not the broader issue.

Such effects trigger larger questions: ‘whose Karma is it anyway?’ And: ‘how can such behaviors and unintended consequences be prevented in the future?’

But if Exodus (34:6-7)  is correct (karmically speaking): 

I do not excuse the guilty. I lay the sins of the parents upon their children and grandchildren; the entire family is affected— even children in the third and fourth generations.

Can events suffered by one generation really affect future generations? Is there no Karmic relief? Are we as humans to be forever haunted by the specter of an Ebeneezer Scrooge karmic revenger? Human genetic biology may hold the answer to this question in the form of potentiated memories, the consequential remainder of our former unremembered responsibilities.

Our Karmic Inheritance

“Occultism teaches that the life-atoms [DNA] of our (Prana) life-principle are never entirely lost when a [person] dies.” And Blavatsky explains how this occurs in The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p.656:

The atoms [in the genes?] impregnated with the life-principle (an independent, eternal, conscious factor) — are partially transmitted from father to son by heredity …

“They are partially drawn once more together,” she says, “and become the animating principle of the new body in every new incarnation…”

Riding the Waves of Karma: Past, Present and Future

Fortune Teller

THE proverbial phrase “time and tide wait for no man” is usually attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer, known as the Father of English literature. 

Chaucer’s genius at understanding human nature made him a great poet yet probably would not claim to read ‘the grand clock of the Universe,’ as a deific time-keeper.

That grand timekeeper “points to another hour,” William Q. Judge provocatively wrote (A Year on the Path): “and now Man must seize the key in his hands and himself — as a whole — open the gate.” 

“Let us then together enter upon another year, fearing nothing, assured of strength in the Union of Brotherhood. For how can we fear death, or life, or any horror or evil, at any place or time, when we well know that even death itself is a part of the dream which we are weaving before our eyes.”

And even recognizing the orderly process of seasons on Earth, most of us would not accept that any universal time-keeper like Karma exists. Yet

we observe these daily in our lives — the seasons, tides of the ocean, the biological clocks that pervade our bodies.

Thus it can be argued we do own a piece of the larger puzzle — in the sequential events of our personal lives. By diligent self-reflection, meditation and intuition, we ought to be able to see glimpses of their purpose, and gradually arrange the pieces of the karmic puzzle into a meaningful picture.

Karmic Waves

Such digging may be as close as we can get to knowing and managing our personal Karma, if not the World’s destiny. Esoteric Theosophical philosophy teaches that Past, Present, and Future represent a ‘compound’ time.

Indeed, Buddha’s dying words reportedly were: “all compounds are perishable,” (i.e. but temporary illusions.)

Thus we ought to seize every stray event in our lives, and attempt to extract their true meaning as Judge wrote: “Man must seize the key in his hands and himself — as a whole — open the gate.”  

The great Sage Patanjali in his Aphorisms declared: “A great and most subtle knowledge springs from the discrimination that follows upon concentration of the mind performed with regard to the relation between moments and their order.” (The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali)

Patanjali

On this knowledge Mr. Judge commented:

“Patanjali speaks of ultimate divisions of time which cannot be further divided, and of the order in which they precede and succeed each other. It is asserted that a perception of these minute periods can be acquired, and the result will be that he who discriminates thus goes on to greater and wider perception of principles in nature which are so recondite that modern philosophy does not even know of their existence.”

Karma is not subject to time, and therefore he who knows what is the ultimate division of time in this Universe knows Karma. (6)

Aphorisms on Karma
by William Q. Judge

Wheels of Destiny

In the realm of ‘noumena (or the primary causal plane), H. P. Blavatsky noted these three aspects of time have no separate reality, and according to Mahayana Buddhism:

The Past time is the Present time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into existence, still is.

(The Secret Doctrine Vol. 1:43)

“The second assertion of the Secret Doctrine,” Blavatsky explained, “is the absolute universality of that law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow, which physical science has observed and recorded in all departments of nature.

“An alternation such as that of Day and Night, Life and Death, Sleeping and Waking, is a fact so common, so perfectly universal and without exception, that it is easy to comprehend that in it we see one of the absolutely fundamental laws of the universe.”

The Secret Doctrine: Three Fundamentals

All Seeing Eye of Karma

One of Mme. Blavatsky’s Teachers (Mahatma K.H.) wrote: “I feel even irritated at having to use these three clumsy words — past, present and future!” Adding they are:

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

Karmic Agent

Mme. Blavatsky wrote: “Time is only 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; but ‘lies asleep.'”

“The real person or thing 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.’”

(H. P. Blavatsky: The Secret Doctrine 1:37)

Seeing the Future

To the uninitiated concepts of duration and time Blavatsky points out, “are all derived from our sensations according to the laws of Association.” And because they are “inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge” they are superficial and only temporal tools.

Because rationalist views ignore psychic experience, they must eventually fall away in the face of thousands of reported cases such as the near-death experience. Today precognition is validated by new experimental research data in parapsychology.

Movie: Minority Report – (Precog)

Announcing the publication of a controversial work by Cornell researcher Daryl Bem in a 2003 article published in The New York Times, Dr. Bem purports to have demonstrated precognition in a series of experiments. Bem studied over 1000 people and looked for proof that future events affected past behavior, or retro causation.

His research was analyzed using standard statistical techniques. Using standard measures, Bem’s research indeed finds a causal link between future events and past behavior (or thoughts?)

Buddha

“Esoterically, thought is more responsible and punishable than act. But exoterically it is the reverse. Therefore, in ordinary human law, an assault is more severely punished than the thought or intention, i.e., the threat, whereas Karmically it is the contrary.”  – (H. P. Blavatsky, Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge)

“But why should this be the case? It is because ‘thought is the real plane of action’ – as William Q. Judge and Robert Crosbie have often said – and that our physical and bodily actions are simply the eventual outworking on the physical plane of the real action, which has already been formed and formulated on the mental plane.”  – (Blavatsky Theosophy Group UK)

Down the Rabbit Hole

Clocks are useful for getting to meetings on time. Otherwise, time in this sense, being only the “panoramic succession of our [ordinary] states of consciousness,” is therefore reductionist—and has only materialistic value.

Ground-level experience reveals only the outer edge of the rabbit hole, and keeps us blind to the mysteries hidden beneath — the experience which leads us to the sum-total of existence. The frontier consciousness sciences emerging today offer an exciting prospect.

“I’m late for a very important date.” 1865 edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll), published by MacMillan and Co. Drawn by John Tenniel.

In Alice’s new and strange universe of the mind the Red Queen tells her:

“You must run fast just to
stay in one place.”

The eye-popping series of progressive awakenings experienced by Alice surely led her and her readers to a greater appreciation of the mysterious and the paradoxical. We find The Secret Doctrine [Vol. 1, p.40] mirroring the Alice experience:

“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 [illusion].”

Alice in Wonderland

H. P. Blavatsky declared: “Woe to those who live without suffering.

Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without a change.

“And how can there be any change for the better without proportionate suffering during the preceding stage? Is it not those only who have learnt the deceptive value of earthly hopes and the illusive allurements of external nature who are destined to solve the great problems of life, pain, and death?”

• The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 2, p. 475, On The Myth of the ‘Fallen Angel’

‘Presentiment’

Senior scientist Dean Radin, of The Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), is a rigorous scientific explorer who boldly goes where the establishment won’t, methodically measuring the ‘immeasurable’. In this clip he explains his ongoing experiments showing evidence of “presentiment” or precognition. With every thought we think, whether it is with the intent of future objective action or not, Theosophy says — we are emitting Karmic energy and setting causes in motion which, like all causes, will eventually have to have their corresponding due effect.

“Presentiment,” a term used by Dr. Dean Radin, senior scientist of IONS fame, is a feeling that something strange or unusual is about to happen. Radin got the idea “to monitor a person’s skin conductance before, during, and after viewing emotional and calm pictures, and then see if the autonomic nervous system responded appropriately before the picture appeared.”

Forest for the Trees

Objective time and reality always appear in a linear frame, and as the legendary punster of the Yankee’s baseball team, Yogi Berra, once quipped:

“I knew I was going to take the wrong train,
so I left early.”

🙂 !

Berra sensed there was more than meets the eye when he made that playful pun at the phenomenon of precognition!

Yogi Berra

The Mind’s Eye

The author and diarist Anais Nin famously remarked:

We don’t see things as they are,
we see things as we are.

Anaïs Nin

If what “we are” is determined solely by our five senses, then we see only what’s inside a closed box. For environmentalist woodsman John Muir stuffy boxes were anathema, he believed instead that

The clearest way to the Universe is through a forest wilderness.

• Sierra Club biography of John Muir

The ‘Compound time’ cannot be separated from the future which is an essential part of the mystery wilderness within us. The illusion occurs we are separate from Nature, and then we are unable to see the greater forest for the trees, though they are one.

A Flower in a Crannied Wall

The poet/artist William Blake saw “a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower,” that most of us would probably have passed unnoticed. (Auguries of Innocence)

But even such sublime ethics “must give room to still further absolute perfection,” Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine, “to a higher standard of excellence — just as a perfect flower must cease to be a perfect flower and die, in order to grow into a perfect fruit.”

All instruction is but a finger pointing to the moon, and those whose gaze is fixed upon the pointer will never see beyond. Even let him catch sight of the moon, and still he cannot see its beauty. – Osho

Non-Separateness

Albert Einstein’s main objection to quantum mechanics, as understood then, was that it provided no reasonable explanation of the world, and in some sense denied what many believed it means to truly exist. While walking with his biographer physicist Abraham Pais, Pais reported Einstein in frustration asked: “whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it.”

Einstein also complained in a letter to friend and fellow physicist, Max Born, who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics:

You believe in the God that plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture.

Einstein’s complicated genius included, nevertheless, a universal and compassionate thinker, who said: “A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space.”

Small Slice of the Universe

And he wrote of a human being “that experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us,” he wrote, “restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be,” he wrote:A

to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

The Mind’s Eye

Non-Duality

Universal unity or non-duality is a popular topic of discussion today. There is a website devoted to it (nonduality.com), and a blog and even a conference October 21-25: titled Science And Non-Duality.

It’s the same concept that engaged Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine. Everything is alive and conscious in “Esoteric philosophy,” she wrote, and “life we look upon as ‘the one form of existence, manifesting in what is called matter—or, as in man, what, incorrectly separating them, we name Spirit, Soul and Matter.”

One Form of Existence

Further: “Matter is the vehicle for the manifestation of soul on this plane of existence,

and soul is the vehicle on a higher plane for the manifestation of spirit, and these three are a trinity synthesized by Life, which pervades them all.”

“The idea of universal life is one of those ancient conceptions which are returning to the human mind in this century, as a consequence of its liberation from anthropomorphic theology.”

Seeing the Future

The  mysterious science of “dowsing.” How does the unconscious know the answer to what you’re seeking?

The Paradoxical “I”

If we “are all one being” according to The Secret Doctrine. Yet our conscious mind often fails to recognize it.  We may solve the problem of duality, paradoxically, by first focusing our full attention on the “I” the center of the “I am I” consciousness, at every moment our attention permits.

Once the illusion separateness or limitation becomes obvious, it falls away, and then we begin to appreciate the ‘not-I’ — and by this practice, paradoxically, we are gradually compelled to attend to the greater wholeness within which the smaller ‘I’ exists. As Lao-Tze put it: “The Tao that can be expressed in words is not the eternal Tao.”

Fortune Teller

“Consciousness is defined as that, whatever that is, which is aware of these very words right here, right now. …

The student who practices self inquiry keeps his attention focused onto the source of the I-thoughts and I-feelings, whenever they arise.

“Once enlightenment has taken place, the process of self inquiry continues effortlessly. The attention spontaneously reverts to the source at the end of each thought and feeling and there is no need to focus the attention any longer.”

“Sum-Totals”

by H. P. Blavatsky

The Secret Doctrine

“TIME is only 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 — but ‘lies asleep.’

“The present is only a mathematical line which divides that part of eternal duration which we call the future, from that part which we call the past.

“Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains without change—or the same—for the billionth part of a second.”

“And the sensation we have of the actuality of the division of ‘time’ known as the present, comes from the blurring of that momentary glimpse, or succession of glimpses, of things that our senses give us, as those things pass from the region of ideals which we call the future, to the region of memories that we name the past.

Seeing Through the Illusion of Time

“In the same way we experience a sensation of duration in the case of the instantaneous electric spark, by reason of the blurred and continuing impression on the retina. The real person or thing 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.’

“No one could say that a bar of metal dropped into the sea came into existence as it left the air, and ceased to exist as it entered the water, and that the bar itself consisted only of that cross-section thereof which at any given moment coincided with the mathematical plane that separates, and, at the same time, joins, the atmosphere and the ocean.”

Touching the Future and Past

“Even so of persons and things, which, dropping out of the to-be into the has-been, out of the future into the past—[they]

present momentarily to our senses a cross-section, as it were, of their total selves,

as they pass through time and space (as matter) on their way from one eternity to another: and these two constitute that ‘duration‘ in which alone anything has true existence, were our senses but able to cognize it there.”

One With Nature

ζ

 

Tales of Enlightenment: Buddha’s Dog, and Mahatma of the Himavat

Buddha and His Dog

ASANGA gave up. Twelve long years of meditation and spiritual practices, and still no vision of the future Buddha Maitreya.

He yearned to connect with Maitreya to receive teaching directly, which would accelerate his progress on the Bodhisattva path.

Asaṅga was “one of the most important spiritual figures”of Mahayana Buddhism and the “founder of the Yogacara school” who promoted Mahayana teachings on the bodhisattva path. (Wikipedia)

“Every new Bodhisattva or initiated great Adept is called the ‘liberator of mankind,’ Helena Blavatsky explains in footnote (20) in The Voice of the Silence:

“Now bend thy head and listen well, O Bodhisattva,” she wrote, “Compassion speaks and saith: ‘Can there be bliss when all that lives must suffer? Shalt thou be saved and hear the whole world cry?’”

In footnote (34) on Gautama Buddha, Mme. Blavatsky declared:

“To be enabled to help humanity, an Adept who has won the right to Nirvâna, ‘renounces the Dharmakâya body’ in mystic parlance; keeps, of the Sambhogakâya, only the great and complete knowledge, and remains in his Nirmânakâya body. The esoteric school teaches that Gautama Buddha with several of his Arhats is such a Nirmânakâya, higher than whom, on account of the great renunciation and sacrifice to mankind there is none known.”

• H. P. Blavatsky, The Voice of the Silence, Fragment III, The Seven Portals

Asanga

After the first three years of spiritual practices to no avail, Asanga left his solitary cave, disheartened. But then he saw a little bird pecking a hole in a rock to build a nest in it, and he felt ashamed at his lack of persistence. He went back up to his cave.

A Rock Nest

After the next three years, Asanga gave up again. As he descended the mountain, he met a man who was grinding down a thick rod of iron with a cloth to make needles. When the man showed him some needles he’d already made this way, Asanga hung his head and went back up the mountain.

Mother’s Love, a Shoreless Universal Essence

Mother and Child

WHENEVER there is separateness and selfishness, Theosophy teaches, there will always be suffering.

This is why we need to continually try to practice Divine Compassion, “the law of laws,” as urged in The Voice of the Silence, and all that implies about our daily actions.

“Compassion is no attribute, it is the LAW of LAWS — eternal Harmony —

“… a shoreless universal essence, the light of everlasting Right, and fitness of all things — the law of love eternal.”

(The Voice of the Silence)

A feeling of true, universal compassion and caring for others can never dissolve into either separateness or selfish pride. Says the Voice of the Silence of The Buddha: “The esoteric school teaches that Gautama Buddha with several of his Arhats is such a Nirmânakâya, higher than whom, on account of the great renunciation and sacrifice to mankind there is none known.”

Dalai Lama xlv

According to the H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, “compassion is something really worthwhile.”

It is not just a religious or spiritual subject, not a matter of ideology. It is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.

Kangaroo Care and The Healing Heart

Kangaroo Care

STUDENTS of Theosophy are sometimes called to task by some for being overly metaphysical or ‘intellectual.’

It may be true that some students of Theosophy prefer to use the force of their intellect to hammer out meanings, and have a purely intellectual discussion.

That means not consulting their feelings or emotions which are deemed lesser powers from the human ‘lower nature’ and therefore unreliable.

But W. Q. Judge was not of that opinion. He wrote in the Ocean of Theosophy that “intellect alone is cold, heartless and selfish.” The truth of this is shown today by studies of neurological correlates in the physical brain. Similarly, Mr. Judge, back in the day, insisted that if we can live “according to the dictates of the soul

the brain may at least be made porous to the soul’s recollections — if the contrary sort of a life is led, then more and more will clouds obscure that reminiscence.

Materialistic and intellectual data are stored in the lower mind and desire body, and such grosser data does not stimulate higher areas as the pineal gland in the brain. The mysterious ‘third eye’ whose vehicle is the pineal gland, is known by occultists to transmit spiritual powers including intuition and compassion.

Pituitary and Pineal Glands

Our Dual Nature

We are spiritual beings at our core, but our behaviors on this physical plane — just like the actions of the horse guided by the rider — are determined solely by how we have entrained our psychic and physical instruments.

“No physiologist, not even the cleverest,” Blavatsky wrote, “will ever be able to solve the mystery of the human mind, in its highest spiritual manifestation, or in its dual aspect of the psychic and the noëtic or the manasic, or even to comprehend the intricacies of the former on the purely material plane – unless he knows something of, and is prepared to admit the presence of this dual element.” 

– H. P. Blavatsky, Psychic and Noëtic Action

Horse and Rider

“There are persons,” H. P. Blavatsky writes, “who never think with the higher faculties of their minds at all.” (Studies in Occultism)

This is why it is so very difficult for a materialist — the metaphysical portion of whose brain is almost atrophied — to raise himself,

“Or for one who is naturally spiritually-minded to descend to the level of the matter-of-fact vulgar thought,” she wrote. “Optimism and pessimism depend on it also in a great measure.”

Laws of Karma and the Sin of Separateness

Child King Canute?

MAY DAY, in medieval and modern Europe, holiday (May 1) is the celebration of the return of spring, an ancient Nature Festival.

Because the Puritans of New England considered the celebrations of May Day to be licentious and pagan, they forbade its observance, and the holiday never became an important part of American culture.

Thankfully, time and tide wait for no man according to Geoffrey Chaucer, nor do such Nature’s supreme powers submit to the dictates of modern despots, gods or saviors, or religious bigots.

The Laws of Karma rule always. No one is so all-powerful they can stop the march of time or turn back the ocean waves, as King Canute unsuccessfully tried. Or the relentless march of time and seasons.

Yet what he learned from the experience is that the best each of us can do is attempt to discover and live in harmony with nature’s immutable laws. Shakespeare dramatized karma as a force that ebbs and flows cyclically, and that one must go with the flow. As Brutus notoriously exclaims in Julius Caesar:

There’s a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune.

Procrastinating and obstruction waste precious moments allowing beneficial waves or tides to begin to recede. If a moral or environmental opportunity is neglected, individuals and humanity as a whole may suffer dire consequences.

A tide in the affairs of men.

“All the passing shows of life, whether fraught with disaster or full of fame and glory, are teachers; he who neglects them, neglects opportunities which seldom the gods repeat,” W. Q. Judge wrote in his Essay on Chapter 2 of  the Bhagavad-Gita. “And the only way to learn from them is through the heart’s resignation;

for when we become in heart completely poor, we at once are the treasurers and disbursers of enormous riches. Krishna then insists on the scrupulous performance of natural duty.

Ancient Atlantis, our former habitat, was destroyed by natural and human-caused climate change thousands of years before its time, and we are heading down a very similar, dangerous path — the result of pervasive collective selfishness. Just as Walt Kelly’s Pogo warned, as he stared at a trash filled swamp on Earth Day 1970:

“We have met the enemy,
and he is us.”

Atlantis

Sickness occurs when “a group of individual cells refuses to cooperate, and wherein is set up discordant action, using less or claiming more than their due share of food or energy,” wrote W. Q. Judge in The Synthesis of Occult Science, concluding:

Disease is nothing more or less than ‘the sin of separateness.’

So long as there is separateness and selfishness, Theosophy says, there will be suffering. And this is why we need to practice Divine Compassion, “the law of laws” as described in The Voice of the Silence.

“Compassion is something really worthwhile. It is not just a religious or spiritual subject, not a matter of ideology,” says the Dalai Lama: “It is not a luxury. It is a necessity.”

Mother Teresa

“It is an absolute fact that without good works the spirit of brotherhood would die in the world—and this can never be,” Blavatsky wrote in her article Let Every Man Prove His Own Work:

Therefore is the double activity of learning and doing most necessary; we have to do good, and we have to do it rightly, with knowledge.

The proverb about time and tide illustrates the complex interplay between fate and free will in human life. It has karmic beauty as well, suggesting that while we do not have total control over our lives, we do have a responsibility to take what few measures we can to live ethically and honorably.

Where Are We Going? -The Law of Love Eternal

Kwan-Yin (Chinese: 觀音, Guānyīn) is the female Bodhisattva of compassion.

COMPASSION has been compared to the innocent act of helping someone you don’t know. It cannot be forced.

When absent, like the power of love, life can not go on. “Love can exist without form,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, “but no form can exist without Love. The same for Compassion, the ‘Law of Laws’.

(Love With an Object)

Love is an immortal power which is beyond mere human creation. Nor can it be compared to one of the dogmas invented by religion, nor is it merely a causal neuronal attribute of thinking or emotion as in materialism.

As with Universal Compassion, Love is an inherent core force, a Universal Spiritual Law of Life as declared in the ancient scripture Book of the Golden Precepts, on which The Voice of the Silence is based — transcendent and beyond any man-made scientific or religious dogmas.

The phrase used in Theosophy to define Universal Compassion is found in The Voice of the Silence: “the Law of Laws.” It is the primary and most compelling of its spiritual Precepts. (Fragment III, The Seven Portals):

Canst thou destroy divine compassion? Compassion is no attribute. It is the LAW of laws — eternal Harmony, Alaya’s SELF; a shoreless universal essence, the light of everlasting Right, and fitness of all things, the law of love eternal.

“The more thou dost become at one with it, thy being melted in its BEING, the more thy Soul unites with that which IS, the more thou wilt become Compassion Absolute.”

Buddha of Compassion

When exercised purely and impersonally this power lies beyond the partisan beliefs of either atheist or religionist, and always exhibits itself by emanating “The light of everlasting Right, and fitness of all things—the law of love eternal.” Is this Law not something we most need today? 

Without love and compassion, the soul is missing. In the first volume of Isis Unveiled, p. 318, H. P. Blavatsky declared: “When one falls into a love of self [narcissism] and love of the world, with its pleasures, losing the divine love of God and of the neighbor, he falls from life to death.”

The higher principles which constitute the essential elements of his humanity perish, and he lives only on the natural plane of his faculties. Physically he exists, spiritually he is dead.

“To all that pertain to the higher and the only enduring phase of existence he is as much dead as his body becomes dead to all the activities, delights, and sensations of the world when the spirit has left it. This spiritual death results from disobedience of the laws of spiritual life, which is followed by the same penalty as the disobedience of the laws of the natural life.”

The opposite pole is represented by the great compassionate Adepts such as Buddha and Kwan-Yin. The Buddha in The Voice of the Silence, Fragment III as Mme. Blavatsky explained “The esoteric school teaches that Gautama Buddha with several of his Arhats is … higher than whom … on account of the great renunciation and sacrifice to mankind, there is none known.”

Kwan-Yin seated on a lotus flower.

The Kwan-Yin Pledge

Never will I seek nor receive private, individual salvation; never will I enter into final peace alone; but forever and everywhere will I live and strive for the redemption of every creature throughout the world.

The universal power of Compassion is also described as a “shoreless universal essence.” The idea refers to a spiritual substance called in Sanskrit the Ākāśa, defined as “The subtle, supersensuous spiritual essence which pervades all space; the primordial substance.”

Such is the understanding of modern theosophical students who study The Voice of the Silence, based on the ancient Golden Precepts as translated and arranged by H. P. Blavatsky.

The Charter for Compassion

Our higher mind or Higher Ego, H. P. Blavatsky wrote in her article Psychic and Noetic Action:

is part of the essence of the UNIVERSAL MIND, is unconditionally omniscient on its own plane, and only potentially so in our terrestrial sphere, as it has to act solely through its alter ego – the Personal Self.

The Charter for Compassion (Wikipedia) is a document that urges the peoples and religions of the world to embrace the core value of compassion. The charter currently is available in more than 30 languages and has been endorsed by more than two million individuals around the globe. (Author: Karen Armstrong)

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Divine Compassion

As such, divine consciousness has “to be regarded as activity of our mind on another and a higher plane, working through something less substantial than the moving molecules of the brain. It cannot be explained as the simple resultant of the cerebral physiological process [which] only condition them or give them a final form for purposes of concrete manifestation.”

No physiologist, not even the cleverest, will ever be able to solve the mystery of the human mind, in its highest spiritual manifestation.

(Psychic and Noëtic Action)

Atlantic Theater Company, “Through a Glass Darkly”

Nor will they be able to understand the duality “of the psychic and the noetic,” says Blavatsky, “or even comprehend the intricacies of the psychic on the purely material plane…

unless they know something of and are prepared to admit, the presence of this dual element.

This means, she asserts, that psychologists will have to accept “a lower (animal), and a higher (or divine) mind in man, or what is known in Occultism as the ‘personal’ and the ‘impersonal’ Egos.”

“There is no such thing as ‘righteous anger'”, wrote William Q. Judge in (Culture of Concentration Part 1). “Whether your ‘rights’ have been unjustly and flagrantly invaded or not does not matter.  Anger must be strictly avoided, and it cannot be avoided unless charity and love – absolute toleration – are cultivated.” 

No More Blame

“The personal element is one that ever has a tendency to delude us as it hides behind various walls and clothes itself in the faults, real or imaginary, of others.” (Letters That Have Helped Me, W. Q. Judge)

To Think, or Not

“Self-consciousness, which from the animal plane looking upward is the beginning of perfection, from the divine plane looking downward is the perfection of selfishness and the curse of separateness. It is the ‘world of illusion’ that man has created for himself.”

La Belle Sauvage

“The faculty of every Ego which considers itself a Unit, separate from and independent of the One Infinite and Eternal Sat or ‘be-ness,’ is an illusion. The ‘eternal pilgrim’ must, therefore, mount higher, and flee from the plane of self-consciousness it has struggled so hard to reach.”

– William Q. Judge, The Synthesis of Occult Science I

Taking Sides

The right hemisphere of the brain is the organ to express compassion and feelings. It is “big picture” oriented and where imagination rules, symbols and images, present and future, philosophy and religion—can “get it” (i.e. meaning).

Beliefs, appreciation, spatial perception, knowing an object’s function, also find activity in the right side of the brain.

Duality Rules

Based on fantasy, the right hemisphere also reflects possibilities and is active during impetuous, risk-taking.

The left hemisphere activates with the use of logic, is detail oriented and facts, words, and language, present and past, math and science rule. It is activated when reasoned knowing is present.

Arjuna

It allows for the acknowledgment of order and patterns, knows object names, is reality-based, and forms practical strategies.

A Parable of Sowing and Reaping 

Sow a Thought
Reap an Act,
Sow an Act
Reap a Habit,
Sow a Habit
Reap a Character,
Sow a Character
Reap a Destiny.

On the significance of Karma and Reincarnation In The Key to Theosophy, we are warned that “Karma, with its army of Skandhas [personal tendencies], waits at the threshold of Devachan [Heaven], whence the Ego [Soul] re-emerges to assume a new incarnation. It is at this moment that the future destiny of the now-rested Ego trembles in the scales of just Retribution, as it now falls once again under the sway of active Karmic law.”

Psychic and Noetic

“Between the psychic and the noetic,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote:

between the personality and the individuality, there exists the same abyss as between a ‘Jack the Ripper,’ and a holy Buddha.

Macbeth

“Unless the physiologist accepts all this, we say, he will ever be led into a quagmire,” she writes. “We intend to prove it.”

(Psychic and Noëtic Action)

The Network of Destiny

“Yes; ‘our destiny is written in the stars!’, Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine 1:639. “Only, the closer the union between the mortal reflection man and his celestial prototype [Higher Self], the less dangerous the external conditions and subsequent reincarnations — which neither Buddhas nor Christs can escape.”

And in Her Five Messages to American Theosophists, she delivered a stern warning the everyone would do well to heed: 

Ethics sink into and take hold of the real person—the reincarnating Ego. We are outwardly creatures of but a day—within we are eternal. Learn, then, well the doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation, and teach, practice, promulgate that system of life and thought which alone can save the coming races.

Dueling Minds

W. Q. Judge, The Ocean Of Theosophy, Ch VII.

“Manas [Sanskrit], or the Thinker, is the reincarnating being, the immortal who carries the results and values of all the different lives lived on earth or elsewhere.

“Its nature becomes dual
as soon as it is attached to a body.”

≈

“For the human brain is a superior organism and Manas [Sk. the mind] uses it to reason from premises to conclusions.”

Many Faces

“The lower, and purely intellectual, is nearest to the principle of Desire,” writes Judge, “and is thus distinguished from its other side which has affinity for the spiritual principles above.”

“If the Thinker, then, becomes wholly intellectual, the entire nature begins to tend downward — for intellect alone is cold, heartless, selfish …”

The Three Faces of Eve

The intellect, W. Q. Judge says, “is the lower aspect of the Thinker or Manas, and not, as some have supposed, the highest and best gift belonging to man.”

Its other, and in theosophy higher, aspect is the intuitional, which knows, and does not depend on reason.

Chapter 7, The Ocean of Theosophy
by William Q. Judge

Life in Stages

by H. P. Blavatsky

“One night the actor, or ‘Ego,’ appears as ‘Macbeth,’ the next as ‘Shylock,’ the third as ‘Romeo,’ the fourth as ‘Hamlet’ or ‘King Lear,’ and so on, until he has run through the whole cycle of incarnations.

King Lear

“The Ego begins his life-pilgrimage as a sprite, an ‘Ariel,’ or a ‘Puck’— he plays the part of a super, is a soldier, a servant, one of the chorus — rises then to ‘speaking parts,’ plays leading roles, interspersed with insignificant parts — till he finally retires from the stage as ‘Prospero,’ the magician.” 

The Personas

The physical body and brain are new in each life, and can have no memory of the past life of the True Ego.

Personas

In Theosophy, one’s True Ego or permanent individuality can be also thought of as one’s ‘character’…

The character is a continuous, collective reminiscence, often unconscious, the fruit of numberless and varied experiences over many lifetimes.

Character, the “Master Soul,” may have thousands of struggling apprentices over as many lifetimes.

Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.

“All is impermanent in man except the pure bright essence of Alaya [Master Soul],” says the Book of the Golden Precepts.

Man is its crystal ray; a beam of light immaculate within, a form of clay material upon the lower surface.

“That beam is thy life-guide and thy true Self, the Watcher and the silent Thinker, the victim of thy lower Self. Thy Soul cannot be hurt but through thy erring body; control and master both, and thou art safe when crossing to the nearing ‘Gate of Balance.'”

– The Voice of the Silence, Fragment III

Who Are We?

Buddha’s favorite disciple, Ananda, and Krishna’s Arjuna were exceptional, in that they were able to assimilate their essence to the Master. Thus they added to the powers of the Master, and by that means strengthened their own immortality. That would be a win-win for humanity and the planet if were achieved.

The Buddha-Nature

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Lao Tzu’s New Year Resolutions

The Snow Maiden

LAO TZU is classed by H. P. Blavatsky as an awakened Master, a God-like being similar to Krishna, Buddha, and Jesus, who “united themselves with their Spirits permanently,” and “became Gods on earth.”

Such Personages are rare and superior to Moses, Pythagoras, and Confucius, who “have taken rank in history as demi-gods and leaders of mankind” (Isis 2:159).

Lao Tzu was the resuscitator of Taoism, the practical philosophy and religion of The Way.

Taoism is the ancient Wisdom-Religion of Theosophy. The Great Ones of old, described as Original Teachers, and They, as all Theosophists know, exist today and always will.

Lao Tzu was the most famous philosopher, mystic and alchemist in China. He is the author of the Tao Te Ching or the Way.  He is regarded as one of the foundation stones of Taoism.

Originally, the word Tao meant a specific line of action, probably a military one, because the ideograms that compose this word mean “feet” and “leader.”

Olivia Bouler, an animal rights activist.

Lao Tzu interpreted the Tao as a way, the essence of the Universe. In a written poem Lao Tzu described “the Way” as the emptiness that cannot be filled, but from which everything manifests.

“I have three treasures. Guard and keep them,” Lao Tzu said. “The first is deep love, the second is frugality, and the third is not to dare to be ahead of the world. Because of deep love, one is courageous. Because of frugality, one is generous.”

Because of not daring to be ahead of the world, one becomes the leader of the world.”

In his most famous image, Lao Tzu is portrayed as riding a buffalo, because the domestication of this animal is associated with the Path of Enlightenment in Zen Buddhist traditions.

Lao Tzu on an Ox

“Don’t think you can attain total awareness and whole enlightenment without proper discipline and practice,” Lao Tzu warned. “This is egomania.” 

Appropriate rituals channel your emotions and life energy toward the light. Without the discipline to practice them, you will tumble constantly backward into darkness.

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Our Soul Destiny and the Bearers of Truth

The Watchers

NEW YORK CITY is the birthplace of modern Theosophy, launched on November 17, 1875, by H. P. Blavatsky, William Q. Judge, and Colonel Henry S. Olcott.

Theosophy Hall NYC is the home of  The United Lodge of Theosophists an association of students independently devoted to original Theosophy, unattached to any Theosophical organization.

Although unaffiliated formally ULT adheres to the motto: 

“The true Theosophist belongs to no cult or sect, yet belongs to each and all.”

ULT Meetings are free and open to all without distinction of race, creed, gender ID or organization. Free classes in H. P. Blavatsky’s monumental work The Secret Doctrine are offered every week, as are all original teachings of Theosophy recorded in the writings of H.P. Blavatsky and William Quan Judge. 

Also offered at Theosophy Hall are recurring studies in The Bhagavad-Gita, Patanjali’s Yoga Aphorisms, The Dhammapada, The Light of Asia, and other original works of perennial Theosophy.

Theosophy Hall NYC’s free weekly meeting schedules can be found online by clicking here: Meetup.com

The following excerpt is from William Q. Judge’s The Ocean of Theosophy:

“The most intelligent being in the universe, man, has never been without a friend but has a line of elder brothers who continually watch over the progress of the less progressed. The term Mahatma has come into wide use as Mme. H. P. Blavatsky constantly referred to them as her Masters who gave her all the knowledge she possessed.

Mahatma M.

“They were at first known only as the Brothers, but afterward, when many Hindus flocked to the Theosophical movement, the name Mahatma was brought into use, inasmuch as it has behind it an immense body of Indian tradition and literature. The ancients taught that the course of evolution is the drama of the soul and that nature exists for no other purpose than the soul’s experience.

There must be beings in the universe whose intelligence is as much beyond ours as ours exceeds that of the black beetle, and who take an active part in the government of the natural order of things.

“They preserve the knowledge gained through aeons of trial and experience and continually seek for opportunities of drawing the developing intelligence of the human race on this or other globes to consider the great truths concerning the destiny of the soul.

Compassion, the Law of Laws

For this age, as one of them has already said, ‘is an age of transition.’

“Every system of thought, science, religion, government, and society is changing, and man’s mind is only preparing for an alteration into that state which will permit the human race to advance to the point suitable for these elder brothers to introduce their actual presence to our sight.

Ancient Greece, the Torch of Truth.

“They may be truly called the bearers of the torch of truth across the ages. They investigate all things and beings.

They know what man is in his innermost nature and what his powers and destiny, his state before birth and the states into which he goes after the death of his body.

“They have stood by the cradle of nations and seen the vast achievements of the ancients, watched sadly the decay of those who had no power to resist the cyclic law of rise and fall. While cataclysms seemed to show a universal destruction of art, architecture, religion, and philosophy, they have preserved the records of it all in places secure from the ravages of either men or time.

Hypatia at the Alexandrian Library

“But, asks the busy man of the nineteenth century who reads the newspapers and believes in “modern progress,”  if these elder brothers are all you claim them to be, why have they left no mark on history nor gathered men around them? Their own reply, was published some time ago (First Letter):

“We never pretended to be able to draw nations in the mass to this or that crisis in spite of the general drift of the world’s cosmic relations. The cycles must run their rounds. Periods of mental and moral light and darkness succeed each other as day does night.

“The major and minor yugas [cycles] must be accomplished according to the established order of things. And we, borne along on the mighty tide, can only modify and direct some of its minor currents.”

When the Eye is Single

ASSUREDLY no ordinary human being could claim to read “the grand clock of the Universe,” and even recognizing the orderly process of seasons on Earth, most wouldn’t accept that a universal time-keeper even exists.

Yet, it can be argued that we do own a piece of the puzzle, as may be discovered by examining the many personal events of our lives. Diligent self-reflection and intuition will lead us to discern the purpose and meaning of those events.

“In the Astral Light are pictures of all things whatsoever that happened to any person, and as well also pictures of those events to come the causes for which are sufficiently well marked and made,” W. Q. Judge wrote in The Ocean of Theosophy, Ch. 16:

“The highest order of clairvoyance — that of spiritual vision — is very rare. … Spiritual sight comes only to those who are pure, devoted, and firm.” 

Such digging may be as close as we can get to knowing and managing our personal Karma, let alone the World’s destiny. Esoteric Theosophical philosophy makes the task more difficult in teaching that Past, Present, and Future represent a “compound” time. Indeed, Buddha’s dying words were, purportedly, “all compounds are perishable,” i.e. temporary illusions.

Inner Peace

Accordingly, we ought to “seize” every stray event in our lives, and attempt to extract their true meaning, according to Judge:

“Man must seize the key in his hands and himself — as a whole — open the gate.”

(“A Year on the Path” William Q. Judge)

The great Sage Patanjali in his Yoga Aphorisms said:

“A great and most subtle knowledge springs from the discrimination that follows upon concentration of the mind performed with regard to the relation between moments and their order.”

“If we do all our acts, small and great, every moment, for the sake of the whole human race, as representing the Supreme Self, then every cell and fibre of the body and inner man will be turned in one direction, resulting in perfect concentration.”

W. Q. Judge – A Single Eye

“Let us hit the mark, O friend! and that mark is the indestructible, the highest spiritual life we are at any time capable of.”

• William Brehon (William Q. Judge) “Hit The Mark”

“This is expressed in the New Testament in the statement that if the eye is single the whole body will be full of light, and in the Bhagavad Gita, it is still more clearly and comprehensively given through the different chapters. In one it is beautifully put as the lighting up in us of the Supreme One, who then becomes visible. Let us meditate on that which is in us as the Highest Self, concentrate upon it, and will to work for it as dwelling in every human heart.”

W. Q. Judge, “Meditation, Concentration, Will”

Child Meditating

“The Sage Patanjali speaks of ultimate divisions of time which cannot be further divided, and of the order in which they precede and succeed each other. It is asserted that a perception of these minute periods can be acquired, and the result will be that he who discriminates thus goes on to greater and wider perception of principles in nature which are so recondite that modern philosophy does not even know of their existence.”

“Karma is not subject to time, and therefore he who knows what is the ultimate division of time in this Universe knows Karma.”

(Aphorisms On Karma)

The Circadian Clock

“Nearly every cell in your body has its own circadian clock, which regulates the activation and deactivation of genes,” Dr. Joseph Mercola explains. “To optimize your health, it’s important to pay attention to and honor ancient patterns of waking, sleeping, and eating.”

PATANJALI

THE YOGA APHORISMS OF PATANJALI
An Interpretation by William Q. Judge
Assisted by James Henderson Connelly

Lotus Flowers

In the realm of “noumena” (or the primary causal plane) H. P. Blavatsky wrote that these three aspects of time have no separate validity, and according to Mahayana Buddhism:

“The Past time is the Present time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into existence, still is.”

(The Secret Doctrine 1:43)

In The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett (Letter 8),
the Master ‘K. H.’ wrote:

“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.”

A Single Eye

To the uninitiated concepts of duration and time Blavatsky points out, “are all derived from our sensations according to the laws of Association.” And because they are “inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge” they are superficial and only temporal tools.

Because rationalist views ignore psychic experience, they must eventually fall away in the face of thousands of reported cases such as the near-death experience. Today precognition is validated by new experimental research data in parapsychology.

Minority Report – Precog

Announcing the publication of a controversial work by Cornell researcher Daryl Bem in a 2003 article published in The New York Times, Dr. Bem purports to have demonstrated precognition in a series of experiments. Dr. Bem studied over 1000 people and looked for proof that future events affected past behavior or retro-causation.

“[Bem] describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.”

His research was analyzed using standard statistical techniques. Using standard measures, Bem’s research indeed finds a causal link between future events and past behavior (past thoughts or intention?)

Ancient Thought in Modern Dress: “How Trees Talk to Each Other”

Redwoods

THE “Recapitulation” is a portion of the “Summing Up” section in The Secret Doctrine, published in pages 272-278 of the first volume of the work.

In the “Notes” recorded by Commander Robert Bowen, he wrote that H. P. Blavatsky  recommended the study of the recapitulation as part of the essential preliminary exploration of The Secret Doctrine:

“Reading the SD page by page as one reads any other book (she says) will only end in confusion. The first thing to do, even if it takes years, is to get some grasp of the ‘Three Fundamental Principles’ given in Proem.

“Follow that up by study of the Recapitulation – the numbered items in the Summing Up to Vol. I (Part 1). Then take the Preliminary Notes (Vol. II) and the Conclusion (Vol. II).”

TheosophyWiki: https://theosophy.wiki/en/Recapitulation

In The Secret Doctrine H. P. Blavatsky further revealed:

“As a whole, neither the foregoing nor what follows can be found in full anywhere. It is not taught in any of the six Indian schools of philosophy, for it pertains to their synthesis — the seventh, which is the Occult doctrine.”

 

“The whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life. There is design in the action of the seemingly blindest forces. The whole process of evolution with its endless adaptations is a proof of this.”

Trees Are Social Beings

“The immutable laws that weed out the weak and feeble species, to make room for the strong, and which ensure the “survival of the fittest,” though so cruel in their immediate action — all are working toward the grand end.”

Concluding:

The very fact that adaptations do occur, that the fittest do survive in the struggle for existence, shows that what is called ‘unconscious Nature’ is in reality an aggregate of forces manipulated by semi-intelligent beings (Elementals) guided by High Planetary Spirits, (Dhyan Chohans), whose collective aggregate forms the manifested verbum of the unmanifested logos, and constitutes at one and the same time the mind of the Universe and its immutable law.

 

– H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine 1:277  

 ♣

(CNN): Nature might not be all about a ruthless “survival of the fittest”. Research suggests that trees don’t just compete for survival, but also cooperate and share resources using underground fungi networks.

CNN: https://www.cnn.com/2017/02/07/world/secret-life-of-trees/index.html

How trees talk to each other | Suzanne Simard

The Definition of “Life” Revealed

WE live on a planet constantly in motion, and except for the occasional natural catastrophe, it is usually a very slow, orderly motion.

The Earth is billions of years old and still in the making—glacial cycles come and go, continents move, mountains form and crumble. Yet Life persists.

Modern Science has, for decades, tried to sell us every soulless theory they could, from the ‘big bang,’ to the chemical origin of life, and a gravity-driven universe.

Our current dogmatic science ought to fear approaching the problem of life’s origins. Their hypothetical models always postulate random events, and chance mutations, in a hostile universe — a cosmos without conscience, consciousness or spiritual life.

All new theories lead up blind alleys. How Earth formed, how life arose. All we are offered is endless speculation, and the stunningly unscientific approach that, instead of welcoming new ideas, refuses to follow where the evidence leads.

And what life is in its most essential essence, continues to be the most ignored problem in science.

∞

The mainstream theorists have so far been content with a soulless stew of blind matter, which has neither intelligent design or purpose. But these have led nowhere in explaining the many mysteries hidden in everyday life.

Spirit, Mind and Matter

In stark contrast, Theosophy teaches that ‘life’ did not have to be created, but is a universal principle, and underlies the universe both macro and micro. Life only ‘arises’ to our attention according to science under rigid conditions.

“Life must conform to a chance based material worldview, measurable by laboratory instruments, and judged by our human physical senses.”

§

But life is really a dynamic interaction between the forces of spirit, mind and matter, Theosophy says, and develops its forms via patterns embedded in an indwelling, divine evolutionary plan.  A great mystery recently was discovered challenging the foundations of modern scientific principles.

Seeing the Future – Riding the Waves of Karma

Fortune Teller

THE proverbial phrase “time and tide wait for no man” is usually attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer, known as the Father of English literature. 

Chaucer’s genius at understanding human nature made him the great poet he was, yet not even he would claim to read “the grand clock of the Universe,” as a sort of deific time-keeper.

That grand time keeper “points to another hour,” William Q. Judge provocatively wrote (A Year on the Path): “and now Man must seize the key in his hands and himself — as a whole — open the gate. 

“Let us then together enter upon another year, fearing nothing, assured of strength in the Union of Brotherhood. For how can we fear death, or life, or any horror or evil, at any place or time, when we well know that even death itself is a part of the dream which we are weaving before our eyes.”

And even recognizing the orderly process of seasons on Earth, most wouldn’t accept that any universal time-keeper like Karma exists. Yet

we observe them daily in our lives — the seasons, tides of the ocean, the biological clocks in our bodies.

Thus it can be argued we do own a piece of the larger puzzle — in the sequential events of our personal lives. By diligent self-reflection, meditation and intuition, we ought to be able to see glimpses of their purpose, and gradually arrange the pieces into a meaningful picture.

Karmic Waves

Such digging may be as close as we can get to knowing and managing our personal Karma, if not the World’s destiny. Esoteric Theosophical philosophy teaches that Past, Present and Future represent a “compound” time.

Indeed, Buddha’s dying words reportedly were: “all compounds are perishable,” (i.e. but temporary illusions.)

Thus we ought to “seize” every stray event in our lives, and attempt to extract their true meaning as Judge wrote “Man must seize the key in his hands and himself — as a whole — open the gate.”  

The great Sage Patanjali in his Aphorisms declared “A great and most subtle knowledge springs from the discrimination that follows upon concentration of the mind performed with regard to the relation between moments and their order.” (The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali)

Patanjali

On this Mr. Judge commented:

“Patanjali speaks of ultimate divisions of time which cannot be further divided, and of the order in which they precede and succeed each other. It is asserted that a perception of these minute periods can be acquired, and the result will be that he who discriminates thus goes on to greater and wider perception of principles in nature which are so recondite that modern philosophy does not even know of their existence.”

“Karma is not subject to time, and therefore he who knows what is the ultimate division of time in this Universe knows Karma.” (6)

Aphorisms on Karma
by William Q. Judge

Wheels of Destiny

In the realm of “noumena” (or the primary causal plane) H. P. Blavatsky wrote that these three aspects of time have no separate reality, and according to Mahayana Buddhism she wrote:

“The Past time is the Present time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into existence, still is.”

(The Secret Doctrine Vol. 1:43)

“The second assertion of the Secret Doctrine,” Blavatsky explained, “is the absolute universality of that law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow, which physical science has observed and recorded in all departments of nature.

“An alternation such as that of Day and Night, Life and Death, Sleeping and Waking, is a fact so common, so perfectly universal and without exception, that it is easy to comprehend that in it we see one of the absolutely fundamental laws of the universe.”

The Secret Doctrine: Three Fundamentals

Past, Present and Future

One of Mme. Blavatsky’s Teachers (Mahatma K.H.) wrote: “I feel even irritated at having to use these three clumsy words — past, present and future!” Adding they are:

“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)

Karmic Agent?

“Time is only 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; but “lies asleep.”

(H. P. Blavatsky: The Secret Doctrine 1:37)

Seeing the Future

To the uninitiated concepts of duration and time Blavatsky points out, “are all derived from our sensations according to the laws of Association.” And because they are “inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge” they are superficial and only temporal tools.

Because rationalist views ignore psychic experience, they must eventually fall away in the face of thousands of reported cases such as the near-death experience. Today precognition is validated by new experimental research data in parapsychology.

Movie: Minority Report – (Precog)

Announcing the publication of a controversial work by Cornell researcher Daryl Bem in a 2003 article published in The New York Times, Dr. Bem purports to have demonstrated precognition in a series of experiments. Bem studied over 1000 people and looked for proof that future events affected past behavior, or retro causation.

His research was analyzed using standard statistical techniques. Using standard measures, Bem’s research indeed finds a causal link between future events and past behavior (or thoughts?)

Buddha

“Esoterically, thought is more responsible and punishable than act. But exoterically it is the reverse. Therefore, in ordinary human law, an assault is more severely punished than the thought or intention, i.e., the threat, whereas Karmically it is the contrary.”  – (H. P. Blavatsky, Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge)

“But why should this be the case? It is because ‘thought is the real plane of action’ – as William Q. Judge and Robert Crosbie have often said – and that our physical and bodily actions are simply the eventual outworking on the physical plane of the real action, which has already been formed and formulated on the mental plane.”  – (Blavatsky Theosophy Group UK)

Down the Rabbit Hole

Clocks are useful for getting to meetings on time. Otherwise, time in this sense, being only the “panoramic succession of our [ordinary] states of consciousness,” is therefore reductionist—and has only materialistic value.

Ground-level experience reveals only the outer edge of the rabbit hole, and keeps us blind to the mysteries hidden beneath — the experience which leads us to the sum-total of existence. The frontier consciousness sciences emerging today offer an exciting prospect.

In this new mind country, as the Red Queen told Alice:

“You must run fast just to
stay in one place.”

The eye-popping series of progressive awakenings experienced by Alice, surely led her and her readers to a greater appreciation of the mysterious and paradoxical.

“Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without a change,” H. P. Blavatsky maintained in The Secret Doctrine.  Like couch-potatoes, standard-model science sits on a railway platform waiting for a train that, for them, will never come.

“I’m late for a very important date.” 1865 edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll), published by MacMillan and Co. Drawn by John Tenniel.

“Presentiment”

Senior scientist Dean Radin, of The Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), is a rigorous scientific explorer who boldly goes where the establishment won’t, methodically measuring the ‘immeasurable’. In this clip he explains his ongoing experiments showing evidence of “presentiment” or precognition. With every thought we think, whether it is with the intent of a future objective action or not, Theosophy says — we are emitting Karmic energy and setting causes in motion which, like all causes, will eventually have to have their due corresponding effect.

“Presentiment,” a term used by Dr. Dean Radin of IONS fame, is a feeling that something strange or unusual is about to happen. Radin got the idea “to monitor a person’s skin conductance before, during, and after viewing emotional and calm pictures, and then see if the autonomic nervous system responded appropriately before the picture appeared.”

Forest for the Trees

Objective time and reality always appear in a linear frame, and as the legendary punster of the Yankee’s baseball team, Yogi Berra, once quipped:

“I knew I was going to take the wrong train,
so I left early.”

🙂 !

Berra sensed there was more than meets the eye when he made that playful pun at the phenomenon of precognition!

Yogi Berra

The Mind’s Eye

The author and diarist Anais Nin famously remarked:

“We don’t see things as they are,
we see things as we are.”

Anaïs Nin

If what “we are” is determined solely by our five senses, then we see only what’s inside a sealed box.

For John Muir stuffy boxes were anathema, he believed instead that

“The clearest way to the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

(Sierra Club biography of John Muir)

The “Compound time” cannot be separated from the future which is an essential part of the mystery “wilderness” within us. The illusion occurs in separation, and then we are unable see the greater forest for the trees, though they are one.

A Flower in a Crannied Wall

The poet/artist William Blake saw “a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower,” that most of us would probably have passed unnoticed. (Auguries of Innocence)

But even such sublime ethics “must give room to still further absolute perfection,” Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine, “to a higher standard of excellence — just as a perfect flower must cease to be a perfect flower and die, in order to grow into a perfect fruit.”

“All instruction is but a finger pointing to the moon, and those whose gaze is fixed upon the pointer will never see beyond. Even let him catch sight of the moon, and still he cannot see its beauty.” – Osho

On Separatelessness

Albert Einstein’s main objection to quantum mechanics, as accepted then, was that it provided no reasonable explanation of the world, and in some sense denied what many believed it means to truly exist. While walking with his biographer physicist Abraham Pais, Pais reported Einstein in frustration asked “whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it.”

Einstein also complained in a letter to friend and fellow physicist, Max Born, who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics:

“You believe in the God that plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture.” 

Einstein’s complicated genius included, nevertheless, a universal and compassionate thinker, who said: “A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space.”

Small Slice of the Universe

And he wrote of a human being “that experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us,” he wrote, “restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us.”

“Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

The Mind’s Eye

Non-Duality

Universal unity or non-duality is a popular topic of discussion today. There is a website devoted to it (nonduality.com), and a blog and even a conference October 21-25: titled Science And Non-Duality.

It’s the same concept that engaged Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine. Everything is alive and conscious in “Esoteric philosophy,” she wrote, and “life we look upon as ‘the one form of existence, manifesting in what is called matter—or, as in man, what, incorrectly separating them, we name Spirit, Soul and Matter.”

One Form of Existence

Further: “Matter is the vehicle for the manifestation of soul on this plane of existence,

and soul is the vehicle on a higher plane for the manifestation of spirit, and these three are a trinity synthesized by Life, which pervades them all.”

“The idea of universal life is one of those ancient conceptions which are returning to the human mind in this century, as a consequence of its liberation from anthropomorphic theology.”

Seeing the Future

The  mysterious science of “dowsing.” How does the unconscious know the answer to what you’re seeking?

The Paradoxical “I”

If we “are all one being” according to The Secret Doctrine. Yet our conscious mind often fails to recognize it.  We may solve the problem of duality, paradoxically, by first focusing our full attention on the “I” the center of the “I am I” consciousness, at every moment our attention permits.

Once the illusion separateness or limitation becomes obvious, it falls away, and then we begin to appreciate the ‘not-I’ — and by this practice, paradoxically, we are gradually compelled to attend to the greater wholeness within which the smaller ‘I’ exists. As Lao-Tze put it: “The Tao that can be expressed in words is not the eternal Tao.”

Fortune Teller

“Consciousness is defined as that, whatever that is, which is aware of these very words right here, right now. …

“The student who practices self inquiry keeps his attention focused onto the source of the I-thoughts and I-feelings, whenever they arise.”

“Once enlightenment has taken place, the process of self inquiry continues effortlessly. The attention spontaneously reverts to the source at the end of each thought and feeling and there is no need to focus the attention any longer.”

“Sum-Totals”

by H. P. Blavatsky

The Secret Doctrine

“TIME is only 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 — but ‘lies asleep.’

“The present is only a mathematical line which divides that part of eternal duration which we call the future, from that part which we call the past.

“Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains without change—or the same—for the billionth part of a second.”

“And the sensation we have of the actuality of the division of ‘time’ known as the present, comes from the blurring of that momentary glimpse, or succession of glimpses, of things that our senses give us, as those things pass from the region of ideals which we call the future, to the region of memories that we name the past.

Seeing Through the Illusion of Time

“In the same way we experience a sensation of duration in the case of the instantaneous electric spark, by reason of the blurred and continuing impression on the retina. The real person or thing 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.’

“No one could say that a bar of metal dropped into the sea came into existence as it left the air, and ceased to exist as it entered the water, and that the bar itself consisted only of that cross-section thereof which at any given moment coincided with the mathematical plane that separates, and, at the same time, joins, the atmosphere and the ocean.”

Touching the Future and Past

“Even so of persons and things, which, dropping out of the to-be into the has-been, out of the future into the past—[they]

present momentarily to our senses a cross-section, as it were, of their total selves,

as they pass through time and space (as matter) on their way from one eternity to another: and these two constitute that ‘duration‘ in which alone anything has true existence, were our senses but able to cognize it there.”

One With Nature

ζ

 

Our Heart’s Field Effect: Spiritual, Psychic and Physical

The Heart Field

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

To our Western medical mainstream the heart is no more than a mechanical blood pumping device.

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

Leading-edge research in holistic medicine, biophysics, bioenergetics, and biocentrism all point in the same direction — showing that 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.”

H. P. Blavatsky

“Apart from Cosmic Substance, Cosmic Ideation could not manifest as individual consciousness,” Blavatsky wrote, “since it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as ‘I am I,’ a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity.”

[A physical candle would never be confused for the light, nor for the flame which energizes it — but clearly, without the physical candle no light would happen!]

One candle lighting another.

“Again, apart from Cosmic Ideation, Cosmic Substance would remain an empty abstraction, and no emergence of consciousness could ensue. The ‘Manifested Universe,’ therefore, is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its ex-istence as ‘manifestation.'”

“The Hindus say that the Universe is Brahma and Brahma, for Brahma is in every atom of the universe, the six principles in Nature being all the outcome — the variously differentiated aspects — of the seventh and one, the only reality in the Universe whether Cosmical or micro-cosmical.”

Individual and Cosmic

“And also why the permutations (psychic, spiritual and physical), on the plane of manifestation and form, are viewed by metaphysical antiphrasis as illusive and Mayavic. For although the root of every atom individually and of every form collectively, is that seventh principle, or the one Reality, still, in its manifested phenomenal and temporary appearance, it is no better than an evanescent illusion of our senses.”

The Secret Doctrine 1:15-21

The Astral Body

A comparable concept to the occult teaching is explained by today’s frontier science in the ‘biofield’ concept – 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 astral body is made of matter of very fine texture as compared with the visible body, and has a great tensile strength, so that it changes but little during a lifetime, while the physical alters every moment.”

“And not only has it this immense strength, but at the same time possesses an elasticity permitting its extension to a considerable distance. It is flexible, plastic, extensible, and strong. The matter of which it is composed is electrical and magnetic in its essence.”

The surrounding astral matrix.

“The astral body has in it the real organs of the outer sense organs. In it are the sight, hearing, power to smell, and the sense of touch. It has a complete system of nerves and arteries of its own for the conveyance of the astral fluid which is to that body as our blood is to the physical. It is the real personal man.”

“There are located the subconscious perception and the latent memory, which the hypnotizers of the day are dealing with and being baffled by.

The astral body is the guiding model for the physical one, and all the other kingdoms have the same astral model.” 

“This term comes near to the real fact, since the substance of this form is derived from cosmic matter or star matter, roughly speaking. But the old Sanskrit word describes it exactly — Linga Sarira, the design body — because it is the design or model for the physical body.”

William Q. Judge, The Ocean of Theosophy, Ch. 5

Astral Projection

Mainstream Science is still myopic to the emerging cognitive evidence that consciousness may not be dependent solely on the physical brain.

Opening the Spiritual Eye: Piercing the Illusion of Reality

Fortune Teller

STUDENTS of Theosophy are sometimes called to task by some for being overly metaphysical or ‘intellectual.’

It may be true that some students of Theosophy prefer to use the force of their intellect to hammer out meanings, and have a purely intellectual discussion.

That means not  consulting their feelings or emotions which are deemed lesser powers from the human ‘lower nature’ and therefore unreliable.

But W. Q. Judge was not of that opinion. He wrote in the Ocean of Theosophy that “intellect alone is cold, heartless and selfish.” The truth of this is shown today by studies of neurological correlates in the physical brain. Similarly, Mr. Judge, back in the day, insisted that if we can live “according to the dictates of the soul

the brain may at least be made porous to the soul’s recollections — if the contrary sort of a life is led, then more and more will clouds obscure that reminiscence.”

Materialistic  and intellectual data are stored in the lower mind and desire body, and such grosser data does not stimulate higher areas as the pineal gland in the brain. The mysterious ‘third eye’ whose vehicle is the pineal gland, is known by occultists to transmit spiritual powers including intuition and compassion.

Pituitary and Pineal Glands

Our Dual Nature

We are spiritual beings at our core, but our behaviors on this physical plane — just like the actions of rider and horse — are determined solely by how we have entrained our psychic and physical instruments.

“No physiologist, not even the cleverest,” Blavatsky wrote, “will ever be able to solve the mystery of the human mind, in its highest spiritual manifestation, or in its dual aspect of the psychic and the noëtic or the manasic, or even to comprehend the intricacies of the former on the purely material plane – unless he knows something of, and is prepared to admit the presence of this dual element.” 

– H. P. Blavatsky, Psychic and Noëtic Action

Horse and Rider

“There are persons,” H. P. Blavatsky writes, “who never think with the higher faculties of their minds at all.” (Studies in Occultism)

“This is why it is so very difficult for a materialist — the metaphysical portion of whose brain is almost atrophied — to raise himself,”

“Or for one who is naturally spiritually-minded to descend to the level of the matter-of-fact vulgar thought,” she says. “Optimism and pessimism depend on it also in a great measure.”

A Mother’s Love, The Law of Life

Mother and Child

WHENEVER there is separateness and selfishness, Theosophy teaches, there will always be suffering.

This is why we need to continually try to practice Divine Compassion, “the law of laws,” as urged in The Voice of the Silence, and all that implies about our daily actions.

“Compassion is no attribute, it is the LAW of LAWS — eternal Harmony —

“… a shoreless universal essence, the light of everlasting Right, and fitness of all things — the law of love eternal.”

(The Voice of the Silence)

A feeling of true, universal compassion and caring for others can never dissolve into either separateness or selfish pride. Says the Voice of the Silence of The Buddha: “The esoteric school teaches that Gautama Buddha with several of his Arhats is such a Nirmânakâya, higher than whom, on account of the great renunciation and sacrifice to mankind there is none known.”

Dalai Lama xlv

According to the H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, “compassion is something really worthwhile.”

It is not just a religious or spiritual subject, not a matter of ideology. It is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.