Consciousness is Faster than Light or Atoms

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

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

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

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

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

Ω

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

Searching for the God Particle

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

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

Ω

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

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

Ψ

Be-ness

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

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

Behind Your Brain, A Master Planner

Jill Bolte Taylor

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

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

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

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

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

when they are gone they
are gone for good!

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

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

Neurofeedback

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

•  The “Secret Doctrine” and its Study (P.G. Bowen) – Being extracts from the notes of personal teachings given by H.P. Blavatsky to private pupils.

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

•  H. P. Blavatsky, Psychic & Noetic Action

Neuroplasticity

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

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

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

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

(Wikipedia – Neuroplasticity)

Tree Bark

A musician needs his instrument, a painter her canvas. This requirement of a physical material vehicle is explained in The Secret Doctrine‘s first Fundamental Proposition: “…it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as ‘I am I,’

a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity.

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

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

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

Neurons

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

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

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

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

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

Neuroplasticity: Carving Out New Brain Paths

Jill Bolte Taylor

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

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

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

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

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

when they are gone they
are gone for good!

Challenging this cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, science now confirms that in fact adult brain cells keep growing after all!

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

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

Her idea was, unmistakably, a preemptive nod to our modern science’s newly understood doctrine of “neuroplasticity” —

“… the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.”(Wikipedia) This fact of occult science began to be recognized thanks to the findings of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, called “the father of sensory substitution and brain plasticity.”

These “now commonly accepted concepts, [were]  novel ideas when [he] first conceived of them [70 years after Blavatsky] in the 1960’s.” (Salus University)

Neurons

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

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

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

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

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

Occult Science vs the Top 10 Dogmas of Modern Science

Photograph: Alamy

“THREE decades ago, few scientists were courageous enough to break ranks and question their own belief system,” Deepak Chopra writes.

“Even calling science a belief system sounded outrageous – religion is a matter of belief, science a matter of facts.”

What follows are excerpts from Deepak Chopra’s recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle SFGate – Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s top 10 list on Scientific Ideology – and H. P. Blavatsky’s “Ten Items” of natural law in Isis Unveiled (Vol. 2:588), called “the fundamental propositions of the Oriental philosophy.”

“The most far-seeing scientist who was willing to break ranks then, as now, was Rupert Sheldrake, who risked his impeccable credentials as a Cambridge biochemist with real joy, like a man suddenly able to breathe.

“Thirty years after his first heretical books, Sheldrake’s new one, ‘Science Set Free’ is a landmark achievement. No science writing has inspired me more.”

“Sheldrake’s essential point is that science needs setting free from ten blind dogmas. These dogmas embrace a true belief system as much as Roman Catholicism or any other faith. Behind the daily activity of gathering data, science assumes certain things about reality that, according to Sheldrake, are unsupportable.

Science vs Religion

“The first dogma, for example, holds that the universe is mechanical,” he reasons. “If that is so, then everything in the universe is also mechanical, including human beings — or to use a phrase from the noted atheist Richard Dawkins, we are ‘lumbering robots.’

“From a scientist’s perspective, to understand everything that you need to know about human beings, you only have to tinker with all the mechanical parts of genes and the brain until there are no more secrets left.”

Jill Bolte Taylor

“The phenomena of divine consciousness have to be regarded as activities of our mind on another and a higher plane,” Mme. Blavatsky concurs, “working through something less substantial than the moving molecules of the brain.

“They cannot be explained as the simple resultant of the cerebral physiological processes, as indeed the latter only condition them or give them a final form for purposes of concrete manifestation.”

i Robot

“The seat of memory is assuredly neither here nor there, but everywhere throughout the human body. To locate its organ in the brain is to limit and dwarf the Universal Mind and its countless Rays which inform every rational mortal. As we write for Theosophists, first of all, we care little for the psychophobian prejudices of the Materialists who may read this and sniff contemptuously at the mention of ‘Universal Mind’ and the Higher noetic souls of men.”

(H. P. Blavatsky: Psychic and Noetic Action II)

The Non-Local Brain Field

No Place for The ‘I’

“Clearly such a view leaves no room for the soul,” Sheldrake agrees, “which becomes a wispy illusion that needs to be swept away. But then, so does the self, because there is no region of the brain that contains ‘I,’ a person.

“As long as ‘I’ is a hallucination formed by complex neural circuitry, one can throw out – or reduce to mechanical operations – love, beauty, truth, compassion, honor, devotion, faith, and so on, the whole apparatus that makes a person’s life feel valuable. A random universe has no purpose; therefore, giving lumbering robots a purpose is dubious.”

Talking to Our Spiritual Dream Self

Touching our dreams.

THERE is a kind of “conscious telegraphic communication going on incessantly, day and night,” between our physical brain and our ever-awake inner consciousness.

“The brain is such a complex thing, both physically and metaphysically, that it is like a tree whose bark you can remove layer by layer.”

“Each layer is different from all the others,” H. P. Blavatsky explains, “and each having its own special work, function, and properties.”

All real dreams that are remembered, and “present a sequence of events,” she maintained, “are due to the vision of our higher [mind] Ego.”

“At a time when an apple was something Steve Jobs gave to his first grade teacher, Clancy McKenzie, M.D. happened upon a discovery that would forever change not just his life, but his patients’ as well,” writes a reviewer of Babies Need Mothers, McKenzie’s groundbreaking book. This would be the proof of principle of Blavatsky’s teaching.

“It hit him like a bolt of lightening,” the reviewer notes: “Without so much as a hand-held calculator, McKenzie unearthed the origin and mechanism of serious mental and emotional disorders.”

“Many of Dr. McKenzie’s most powerful insights were directed to him during his dreams, and experienced later as voices on awakening, and during the day at unexpected moments.”

Clancy D. McKenzie, M.D.

The Brihand Aranyaka Upanishad [p. 12], describes of this inner dream god: “Leaving the bodily world through the door of dream, the sleepless Spirit views the sleeping powers.”

Then clothed in radiance, returns to his own home, the gold-gleaming Genius, swan of everlasting.”

“You do not have to be a yogi and meditate for years in a cave to receive an enlightened answer,” says Dr. McKenzie. “When you fall asleep you reach just as deep a level of consciousness.

“All you must do is take one minute at bedtime to formulate your question, and one minute when you awaken to retrieve the answer.

“Practically anyone can do this the very first night.”

This is Your Brain, Infinitely Elastic

Jill Bolte Taylor

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

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

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

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

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

when they are gone they
are gone for good?

Challenging the cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, neuroscience now confirms that, in fact, adult brain cells can regrow after all — they can and do replace and even increase themselves as necessary!

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

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

Her idea was, unmistakably, a preemptive nod to our modern science’s newly understood doctrine of “neuroplasticity” —

“… the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.”(Wikipedia) This fact of occult science began to be recognized thanks to the findings of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, called “the father of sensory substitution and brain plasticity.”

When Spirit and Matter Hold Hands

DESPITE our seeming insanity H. P. Blavatsky foresaw a world ready for greater normalcy, and insisted she heard a more enlightened humanity “raising its voice.”

With an insight decades in advance of her time, her declaration clearly expected a kinder, gentler New Age.

The voice of the new humanity was described in her article The Tidal Wave saying “the Spirit in man has returned like King Lear, from seeming insanity to its senses.”

Humanity today is transitioning as she envisioned, with thousands of New Age movements speaking “in those authoritative tones to which the men of old listened in reverential silence through incalculable ages.”

She was not the first to acknowledge the arrival of a newly awakened humanity.

In the long past human kind had listened to their inner spiritual voice, she says, but failed because too “deafened by the din and roar of civilization and culture, they could hear it no longer.”

But now “look around you and behold,” writing as if she were living today, and “think of what you see and hear, and draw therefrom your conclusions.”

“If every 8 year old is taught meditation, we will eliminate violence from the world within one generation.” – Dalai Lama

What must have been a difficult sell in her time, Blavatsky nevertheless boldly maintained that “the age of crass materialism, of Soul insanity and blindness, is swiftly passing away” — an idea still not easy to see. More like:

“A death struggle between Mysticism and Materialism is no longer at hand, but is already raging.”

Ω

True knowledge, Plato’s Nous, comes slowly and is not easily acquired, says Theosophy.

Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home

Science Set Free

“THREE decades ago, few scientists were courageous enough to break ranks and question their own belief system,” Deepak Chopra writes.

“Even calling science a belief system sounded outrageous – religion is a matter of belief, science a matter of facts.”

What follows are excerpts from Deepak Chopra’s recent article in the San Francisco Chronicle SFGate – Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s top 10 list on Scientific Ideology – and H. P. Blavatsky’s “Ten Items” of natural law in Isis Unveiled (Vol. 2:588), called “the fundamental propositions of the Oriental philosophy.”

“The most far-seeing scientist who was willing to break ranks then, as now, was Rupert Sheldrake, who risked his impeccable credentials as a Cambridge biochemist with real joy, like a man suddenly able to breathe.

“Thirty years after his first heretical books, Sheldrake’s new one, ‘Science Set Free’ is a landmark achievement. No science writing has inspired me more.”

— Deepak Chopra, San Francisco Chronicle

“Sheldrake’s essential point is that science needs setting free from ten blind dogmas. These dogmas embrace a true belief system as much as Roman Catholicism or any other faith. Behind the daily activity of gathering data, science assumes certain things about reality that, according to Sheldrake, are unsupportable.

“The first dogma, for example, holds that the universe is mechanical. If that is so, then everything in the universe is also mechanical, including human beings – or to use a phrase from the noted atheist Richard Dawkins, we are ‘lumbering robots.’

“From a scientist’s perspective, to understand everything that you need to know about human beings, you only have to tinker with all the mechanical parts of genes and the brain until there are no more secrets left.”

“Clearly such a view leaves no room for the soul, which becomes a wispy illusion that needs to be swept away. But then, so does the self, because there is no region of the brain that contains ‘I,’ a person.

“As long as ‘I’ is a hallucination formed by complex neural circuitry, one can throw out – or reduce to mechanical operations – love, beauty, truth, compassion, honor, devotion, faith, and so on, the whole apparatus that makes a person’s life feel valuable. A random universe has no purpose; therefore, giving lumbering robots a purpose is dubious.”

Neuroplasticity: Carving Out New Pathways in The Brain

Jill Bolte Taylor

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

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

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

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

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

when they are gone they
are gone for good!

Challenging this cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, science now confirms that in fact adult brain cells keep growing after all!

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

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

Her idea was, unmistakably, a preemptive nod to our modern science’s newly understood doctrine of “neuroplasticity” —

“… the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.”(Wikipedia) This fact of occult science began to be recognized thanks to the findings of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, called “the father of sensory substitution and brain plasticity.”

These “now commonly accepted concepts, [were]  novel ideas when [he] first conceived of them [70 years after Blavatsky] in the 1960’s.” (Salus University)

Neurons

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

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

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

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

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

Proof of the Soul thru Dreams

WRESTING consciousness from the lords of scientific reductionism, where its mysteries have languished for decades, takes imaginative and fearless warriors.

Not surprisingly, the acclaimed Father of Modern Philosophy, René Descartes, cannot be authenticated as a combatant truth seeker.

Descartes held that non-human creatures must be reductively assumed to be nothing but mere automatons, signaling a tired materialism, not frontier science.

The Cartesian assumptions do not sit well with animal welfare advocates, environmentalists, especially not Theosophists who insist that consciousness is endemic to all kingdoms of nature, not just the human.

Possessors of sentient consciousness include, Theosophy says, such unlikely candidates as bacteria, minerals — and yes, even atoms!

Descartes held rigidly to the premise “I think therefore I am”— without ever explaining what a thought is, or explaining the ever-elusive, dogged persistence of consciousness. Whether awake or asleep, comatose or vegetative, its presence is in-dismissible.

One wonders if it doesn’t seem far more reasonable to assume in fact that the opposite is true, i.e. —“I AM, therefore I think?”

Adherents biassedly line up on one or the other side of the issue. (Actually, Theosophy could argue both sides are accounted for by its teaching of the mind’s dual nature.)

In fact, the elusive, omnipersistent ‘mind’, is not a production of the brain at all, but an aspect of universal mind.

Over one hundred years ago, unraveling the mystery of the existence of the ‘soul’ was attempted by physical science, employing of course the expected material, reductionist methods — using a mechanical device to weigh it!

The Science Delusion

WESTERN science is growing every year more intolerant, as H. P. Blavatsky once declared in the article Occult or Exact Science  

Yet “every new discovery made by modern science vindicates the truths of the archaic philosophy,” she admits — but only “if approached in the right direction.”

A century later, not much has changed. Last year around this time a public controversy arose over scientific research into the fundamentals of consciousness.

“It involves IONS scientists, as well as some of our colleagues,” an article on the IONS website titled Think Outside the Box revealed noting how the controversy “may reflect shifting attitudes about frontier research.”

“TED, the popular conference organizer with the tag line ‘ideas worth spreading,’ recently removed videos of two TEDx talks from their official YouTube channel and then cancelled a TEDx event.

The censored talks and cancelled event had a common theme — exploring the possibility that consciousness extends beyond the brain.”

If “will has no special organ,” H. P. Blavatsky once argued, “how will the materialists connect it with ‘molecular’ motion at all?” Knowing they could not, she fueled the dispute quoting the prominent psychologist George T. Ladd: — ”The phenomena of human consciousness must be regarded as activities of some other form of Real Being than the moving molecules of the brain.'”

Yet TED’s justification for their actions “was that the contributors were promoting ‘pseudo-science.’ The videos were talks presented by Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock, and the event presenters included Russell Targ, Larry Dossey, and IONS’ Marilyn Schlitz.”

“TED’s actions, based on recommendations from its anonymous ‘Science Board,’ kicked off a heated Internet discussion and shed light on how some segments of the scientific mainstream tend to stifle conversation on the nature of consciousness, including the kind of cutting-edge research that IONS conducts.

The argument only confirms today what Mme. Blavatsky wrote in her Preface to The Secret Doctrine (1:viii):

“… the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization,”

“However, the enormous attention this controversy has received, and the discussion it generated,” the IONS article concludes, “may signal a shift towards more openness to including the possibility of non-local consciousness into scientific dialogues.”

Waking our Inner Dream God

THERE is a kind of conscious telegraphic communication going on incessantly, day and night, between our physical brain and our ever-awake inner consciousness.

“The brain is such a complex thing, both physically and metaphysically, that it is like a tree whose bark you can remove layer by layer.”

“Each layer is different from all the others,” H. P. Blavatsky explains, “and each having its own special work, function, and properties.”

All real dreams that are remembered, and “present a sequence of events,” she maintains,  “are due to the vision of our higher [mind] Ego.”

“At a time when an apple was something Steve Jobs gave to his first grade teacher, Clancy McKenzie, M.D. happened upon a discovery that would forever change not just his life, but his patients’ as well,” writes a reviewer of Babies Need Mothers, McKenzie’s new book.

“It hit him like a bolt of lightening. Without so much as a hand-held calculator, McKenzie unearthed the origin and mechanism of serious mental and emotional disorders.”

Many of Dr. McKenzie’s most powerful insights were directed to him during his dreams, and experienced later as voices on awakening, and during the day at unexpected moments.

Clancy D. McKenzie, M.D.

The Brihand Aranyaka Upanishad [p. 12], describes of this inner dream god: “Leaving the bodily world through the door of dream, the sleepless Spirit views the sleeping powers.”

Then clothed in radiance, returns to his own home, the gold-gleaming Genius, swan of everlasting.”

“You do not have to be a yogi and meditate for years in a cave to receive an enlightened answer,” says Dr. McKenzie. “When you fall asleep you reach just as deep a level of consciousness.

“All you must do is take one minute at bedtime to formulate your question, and one minute when you awaken to retrieve the answer.

“Practically anyone can do this the very first night.”

15th International Theosophy Conference NYC, August 8 -11

EQUAL justice to all and love to every creature is not the highest standard in Theosophy, co-founder H. P. Blavatsky maintained.

The Author of The Key to Theosophy held to a “far higher” standard.

Mme Blavatsky described that standard as “the giving to others more than to oneself , i.e. self-sacrifice.”

She also noted: “such was the standard and abounding measure which marked so preeminently the greatest Teachers and Masters of Humanity — e. g., Gautama Buddha in History, and Jesus of Nazareth as in the Gospels.”

“This trait alone was enough to secure to them the perpetual reverence and gratitude of the generations of men that came after them,” she insisted, noting “there are many instances to illustrate it in history.”

“Self-sacrifice for practical good to save many, or several people, Theosophy holds, is far higher than self-abnegation for a sectarian idea, such as that of ‘saving the heathen from damnation,’ for instance.”

Seeing is Deceiving

ATOMS like their privacy as any physicist knows who tries to nail down their elusive face and place.

This effect is due to something dubbed the “measurement problem” in quantum physics.

Whether atoms are waves or particles, it was supposed, would be established simply by observing them. But it was not that easy.

So-called “observing” the fickle critters, actually changed their supposed appearance!

For decades this classic problem in quantum physics has been a mystery, and shows no possibility of being resolved anytime soon, at least not with the use of conventional scientific methods.

In ancient times such mysteries were resolved by initiated seers whose “flashing gaze” could penetrate “into the very kernel of matter, and recorded the soul of things there,” H. P. Blavatsky recounts. [SD 1:272]

“…but modern science believes not in the ‘soul of things,'” she wrote.

The size, shape and location of these energetic illusions will likely never be resolved. To prove it, Mme. Blavatsky argues that the atoms and particles of modern science don’t really exist except in the exuberant imaginations of the scientists. And she famously insisted that atoms are merely “entified abstractions,” are not subject to physical laws, and that no scientist will ever see one.

Ten Dogmas of Science

WESTERN science is growing every year more intolerant, wrote Mme. Blavatsky in her 19th Century article Occult or Exact Science.

Yet “every new discovery made by modern science vindicates the truths of the archaic philosophy…if approached in the right direction,” she wrote.

Not much has changed. In recent months a public controversy arose over scientific research into the fundamentals of consciousness.

“It involves IONS scientists, as well as some of our colleagues,” notes an article on IONS website titled Think Outside the Box, “and may reflect shifting attitudes about frontier research.”

The article continues: “TED, the popular conference organizer with the tag line ‘ideas worth spreading,’ recently removed videos of two TEDx talks from their official YouTube channel and then cancelled a TEDx event. The censored talks and cancelled event had a common theme—exploring the possibility that consciousness extends beyond the brain.

If “will has no special organ,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, “how will the materialists connect it with ‘molecular’ motion at all? As Professor George T. Ladd says: — ‘The phenomena of human consciousness must be regarded as activities of some other form of Real Being than the moving molecules of the brain.'”

Yet TED’s justification for their actions “was that the contributors were promoting ‘pseudo-science.’ The videos were talks presented by Rupert Sheldrake and Graham Hancock, and the event presenters included Russell Targ, Larry Dossey, and IONS’ Marilyn Schlitz.”

“TED’s actions, based on recommendations from its anonymous ‘Science Board,’ kicked off a heated Internet discussion and shed light on how some segments of the scientific mainstream tend to stifle conversation on the nature of consciousness, including the kind of cutting-edge research that IONS conducts.

“However, the enormous attention this controversy has received, and the discussion it generated, may signal a shift towards more openness to including the possibility of non-local consciousness into scientific dialogues.”

A Telepathic Cat

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

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

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

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

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

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

Searching for the God Particle

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

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

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

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

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Be-ness

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

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

Soul and the Juggernaut of Science

OUR modern objective science “is the hallmark of society today, and “it has an unrivaled power base.”

“Its description of reality has molded the modern world,” write Deepak Chopra, MD and Jim Walsh in their July 1, 2013 article in Huffington Post.

And, “its worldview holds sway over universities, governments and the public at large.”

“Everyone who participates in the consensus view of reality has been touched by it. But the role of the observer has puzzled and intrigued physics since the quantum revolution a century ago.,” say the Authors of the article The Consciousness Project – Hopeful Solutions for Epic Problems.

“We feel that this issue offers a crucial opening for expanding the role of science.”

“As a counterpoint to the science juggernaut, there is another view of reality supported by loosely aligned groups in religion, philosophy, and a minority in science,” they write. “Their worldview is consciousness-based. Whatever their differences, supporters of consciousness place mind first in Nature and matter second.”

“Flying” – Lois Greenfield

“Such a worldview has no significant financial backing comparable to mainstream science,” writes Dr. Chopra. “It has been excluded from experimentation in major universities and all but banished from respectability, depending on the rich heritage, East and West, of saints, sages, and seers who fall outside the scientific method.”

Wresting the domain of consciousness from the lords of scientific  reductionism, where it has been abused and minimized for decades, takes imaginative and fearless investigators.

Such would not have been included the proclaimed “Father of Modern Philosophy” René Descartes, who held that non-human animals could be reductively explained as mere automatons.

This is not a concept that sits well with consciousness-based views of reality, nor with animal advocates, environmentalists, including most Theosophists — who recognize that consciousness is inherent in all kingdoms of nature, not just the human. In their view, possessors of sentient consciousness include such unlikely candidates as bacteria, minerals — and atoms!

Decartes held famously to the premise “I think therefore I am”— without ever explaining what a thought is, or explaining the persistence and presence of the ever-elusive nature of consciousness. One wonders if it doesn’t seem far more reasonable to assume in fact that the opposite is true, i.e. —“I AM, therefore I think?”

Adherents biassedly line up on one or the other side of the issue. (Actually, Theosophy would argue both sides are accounted for by the ancient teaching of the mind’s dual nature.)

In fact, the elusive, omnipersistent ‘mind’, is not a production of the brain at all, but an aspect of universal mind.

Over one hundred years ago, unraveling the mystery of the existence of the ‘soul’ was attempted by physical science, employing of course the expected material, reductionist methods — using a mechanical device to weigh it!

The Power of Compassion

EQUAL justice to all and love to every creature is not the highest standard in Theosophy, co-founder H. P. Blavatsky maintained.

The Author of the Key to Theosophy said she held to a “far higher” standard.

Mme Blavatsky described that standard as “the giving to others more than to oneself , i.e. self-sacrifice.”

She also noted: “such was the standard and abounding measure which marked so preeminently the greatest Teachers and Masters of Humanity — e. g., Gautama Buddha in History, and Jesus of Nazareth as in the Gospels.”

“This trait alone was enough to secure to them the perpetual reverence and gratitude of the generations of men that came after them,” she insisted, noting “there are many instances to illustrate it in history.”

“Self-sacrifice for practical good to save many, or several people, Theosophy holds, is far higher than self-abnegation for a sectarian idea, such as that of ‘saving the heathen from damnation,’ for instance.”

Dream Discovery: No Wrong Answers

THERE is a kind of conscious telegraphic communication going on incessantly, day and night, between our physical brain and our ever-awake inner consciousness.

“The brain is such a complex thing, both physically and metaphysically, that it is like a tree whose bark you can remove layer by layer.”

“Each layer is different from all the others,” says H. P. Blavatsky, “and each having its own special work, function, and properties.”

All real dreams that are remembered, and “present a sequence of events,” she maintained,  “are due to the vision of our higher [mind] Ego.”

“At a time when an apple was something Steve Jobs gave to his first grade teacher,” writes a reviewer, “Clancy McKenzie, M.D. happened upon a discovery that would forever change not just his life, but his patients’ as well.

“It hit him like a bolt of lightening. Without so much as a hand-held calculator, McKenzie unearthed the origin and mechanism of serious mental and emotional disorders.”

Many of Dr. McKenzie’s most powerful insights were directed to him during his dreams, and experienced later as voices on awakening, and during the day at unexpected moments.

Clancy D. McKenzie, M.D.

The Brihand Aranyaka Upanishad [p. 12], describes of this inner dream god: “Leaving the bodily world through the door of dream, the sleepless Spirit views the sleeping powers.”

Then clothed in radiance, returns to his own home, the gold-gleaming Genius, swan of everlasting.”

“You do not have to be a yogi and meditate for years in a cave to receive an enlightened answer,” says Dr. McKenzie. “When you fall asleep you reach just as deep a level of consciousness.

“All you must do is take one minute at bedtime to formulate your question, and one minute when you awaken to retrieve the answer.

“Practically anyone can do this the very first night.”

The Rise of Modern Mysticism

THEOSOPHY was not brought back to the world solely for the advancement of an elite few. The ancient wisdom aims to help re-catalyze the spiritual progress of the whole of humanity.

The Theosophical Society’s most important mission according to the American Section founder William Q. Judge (Letters, p. 71), was to uplift the hearts and minds of all, free from dogma.

“The dance between change and continuity has been at play throughout history,” notes the Journal of Consciousness Studies. “Today, we see a rapid rate of change that is calling on people to consider their worldview, and to develop different identities and ways of engaging with the world.”

“Among those skills most essential for success in this new era of global connectivity will be greater cognitive flexibility [….] and a capacity for discernment that relies equally on intellect and intuition.”

“These skills don’t spring as much from what we know, but instead from how we know it, and how we view the world.”

“It is clear that navigating life in the twenty-first century will require not simply the acquisition of new skills, but also the intentional cultivation of novel states of mind.”

“The pupil must regain the child-state he has lost.”

But there are powerful barriers to inner change, all of our own making. They are our physical senses, habits, emotions, thought sensations, embedded worldviews. They compete for our time and attention, keeping us glued to the outer surface of an ever-whirling wheel.