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. 🙂

Universal Consciousness: No Dead or Blind Matter Anywhere

The Greek Goddess Demeter

MOLECULAR biologist Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria “talk” to each other, and is studying how they communicate with one another.  But there is nothing new in this “revelation” for Theosophy. (How bacteria “talk”)

H. P. Blavatsky, author of The Secret Doctrine, her masterwork, summarized the underlying principle: “foremost of all, [is] the postulate that there is no such thing in Nature as inorganic substances or bodies.”

“Stones, minerals, rocks, and even chemical ‘atoms’ are simply organic units in profound lethargy.” (SD 1:626fn)

In her Summing Up section (The Secret Doctrine 1:269) she also had this fundamental covered, insisting that: “everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious,” and,”is endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

“We men must remember,” she said plainly, challenging modern materialistic science, “that because we do not perceive any signs — which we can recognize of consciousness, say, in stones — we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there.” (See: The Third Fundamental of The Secret Doctrine).

Healing Stones

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

“There exists a body of research poised to rend apart our modern paradigms — revealing consciousness in places we might not have expected it, and connections between life forms that seem startling and impossible.” So wrote Ben Bendig in an interview with Cleve Backster, of “The Secret Life of Plants” fame, (July 22, 2013 The Epoch Times), echoing H. P. Blavatsky’s Fundamental axiom of universal mind. 

Theosophy vs The Dogmas of Science

Chrystal Ball

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science vs Religion

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

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

•  Deepak Chopra, MD

The Dual Hemispheres of the Brain

Theosophy On Consciousness

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

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

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

•  H. P. Blavatsky, Psychic and Noetic Action I

i Robot

Universal Mind

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.”

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.”

Plants that Think and Speak

“EVERYTHING in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, “is endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

“We men must remember that because we do not perceive any signs — which we can recognize — of consciousness, say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there” (The Third Fundamental of The Secret Doctrine).

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

“There exists a body of research poised to rend apart our modern paradigms — revealing consciousness in places we might not have expected it, and connections between life forms that seem startling and impossible.” So wrote Ben Bendig in the July 22, 2013 Epoch Times echoing H. P. Blavatsky’s Fundamental axiom. 

Consciousness is at the core of even the simplest entities on earth, like fungi, and from cells, molecules to atoms, according to Theosophy. Cells at disparate locations in our bodies, for example, talk to one other. Trees are known to warn other trees of insect attacks over long distances.

No Such Thing as Either Dead or Blind Matter

The Greek Goddess Demeter

MOLECULAR biologist Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria “talk” to each other, and is studying how they communicate with one another.  But there is nothing new in this “revelation” for Theosophy. (How bacteria “talk”)

H. P. Blavatsky, author of The Secret Doctrine, her masterwork, summarized the underlying principle: “foremost of all, [is] the postulate that there is no such thing in Nature as inorganic substances or bodies.”

“Stones, minerals, rocks, and even chemical ‘atoms’ are simply organic units in profound lethargy.” (SD 1:626fn)

In her Summing Up section (The Secret Doctrine 1:269) she also had this fundamental covered, insisting that: “everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious,” and,”is endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

“We men must remember,” she said plainly, challenging modern materialistic science, “that because we do not perceive any signs — which we can recognize of consciousness, say, in stones — we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there.” (See: The Third Fundamental of The Secret Doctrine).

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

“There exists a body of research poised to rend apart our modern paradigms — revealing consciousness in places we might not have expected it, and connections between life forms that seem startling and impossible.” So wrote Ben Bendig in an interview with Cleve Backster, of “The Secret Life of Plants” fame, (July 22, 2013 The Epoch Times), echoing H. P. Blavatsky’s Fundamental axiom of universal mind. 

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.”

Soul Mates: an Irresistible Past Life Impulse

Blake: Reunion of Soul and Body

THEOSOPHY teaches the progressive development of everything, “worlds as well as atoms,” according to The Secret Doctrine.

This “stupendous development,” the Sages taught, “has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.”

It is endless in effect as the force of love, according to the ancients. (SD 1:43)

To Initiated Seers our universe, while full of important information, is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes.”

In this view each individual cosmos and corresponding single human life is the effect of its predecessor.

Under the never-erring law of Karma, every universe becomes “a cause as regards its successor.” Instead of only one Big Bang, the usual dogma for the origin of the universe, there must have been multiple efforts this new theory suggests.

“There was not just one bang,” say Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their book Endless Universe.

Now science is being compelled to consider the importance nad necessity of the law of cycles.

The appearance of our universe, it is proposed, “was not the beginning of time, but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution.” A purely Theosophical doctrine.

The Great Breath

The distinguished theoretical physicists propose that “the evolution of the universe is cyclic with big bangs occurring once every trillion or so.”

Cycles may be a good start. But unlike an infinite cycle of titanic collisions, Theosophy offers a kinder, gentler solution tied to the cosmology of ancient seers. It declares that the universe and everything in it is alive, and sustained by a perpetual rhythmic breathing.

Childhood Memories of Having Lived Before

KRISHNA assures an uncertain Arjuna that he has lived many lives on Earth.

“Both I and thou have passed through many births,” the Master tells his disciple (Bhagavad-Gita, Ch. 4:31):

“Mine are known unto me, but thou knowest not of thine.”

The fact is most people don’t recall their past lives, because in every rebirth the immortal soul must endure a new body and astral body, a new personality and a new physical brain. 

Being handed an empty photo album is a challenge to the incoming soul, hindering it finding a conscious connection to prior experiences and knowledge. Thus “the new ‘personality,'” Blavatsky wrote (Key to Theosophy, Ch. 8), “is no better than a fresh suit of clothes.”

Being so, yet “the record or reflection of all the past lives must survive,” H. P. Blavatsky continues, “for when Prince Siddhartha became Buddha the full sequence of His previous births were seen by Him.” In such a state he was able, she says, “to retrospectively trace the lines of all his lives.”

“This proves to you that the undying qualities of the personality — such as love, goodness, charity, etc., attach themselves to the immortal Ego, photographing on it, so to speak, a permanent image of the divine aspect of the man who was.”

The mind doesn’t fully incarnate until age seven, (Key to Theosophy Section 9). Thus, a child doesn’t feel the full weight of life and karma right away. As such, they are like karma-less “little Buddhas.” If not pressured to conform by parents and society, it is possible for them to express memories of their former life (s), i.e. experience “intimations of immortality” for an extended period.

“Spirit got itself entangled with gross matter,” Blavatsky wrote in The Theosophist, “for the same reason that life gets entangled with the foetus matter. It followed a law, and therefore could not help the entanglement occurring.”

It was Plotinus who said that “our body is the true river of Lethe, for ‘souls plunged into it forget all’ — our terrestrial body is like Lethe” (the “river of forgetfulness” in the Hades of Greek mythology.) Using a modern analogy, a new computer cannot be expected to recall the data stored on the discarded one, unless the old data is preserved and reinstalled in the new machine.

But this is what sometimes happens with children who die at an early age from accidents or illness, if they had created no basis for a prolonged after-death dream state. Nature is never wasteful, and the still viable astral pattern body is not disintegrated as with normal death.

The still vital and alive astral matrix is attracted back into the soul’s new body, with all its memories preserved intact.Thus in many cases such children are said to be born with two astral bodies, one new, the other old.

From God Who is Our Home

KRISHNA assures an uncertain Arjuna that he has in fact lived many lives on Earth.

“Both I and thou have passed through many births,” the Master tells his disciple (The Bhagavad-Gita, Ch. 4:31). Adding: “mine are known unto me, but thou knowest not of thine.”

“It’s hard to believe,” writes the Blavatsky Theosophy Group UK, in an article titled “A Right Understanding of Reincarnation,” that until 130 years ago hardly anyone in the Western world had heard of reincarnation or knew anything about it.”

One reason for the ignorance around this teaching is that most people can’t remember every having a past life. This is because, in simple pragmatic terms, the immortal soul enters and uses a new body, new astral body, new personality, and a new physical brain. In the case of a new brain obviously it’s difficult to ‘remember’ a previous life never being there to witness it. 

Handed an empty photo album is a challenge to the incoming soul, hindering it finding a conscious connection to prior experiences and knowledge. “The new ‘personality,'” Blavatsky wrote (Key to Theosophy, Ch. 8), “is no better than a fresh suit of clothes.”

Even so, by a mysterious process, “the record or reflection of all the past lives must survive,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote: “for when Prince Siddhartha became Buddha the full sequence of His previous births were seen by Him.” In such a state he was able, she says, “to retrospectively trace the lines of all his lives.”

“This proves to you that the undying qualities of the personality — such as love, goodness, charity, etc., attach themselves to the immortal Ego, photographing on it, so to speak, a permanent image of the divine aspect of the man who was.”

The mind doesn’t fully incarnate until age seven, (Key to Theosophy Section 9). Thus, a child doesn’t feel the full weight of life and karma right away. As such, they are like karma-less “little Buddhas.” If not pressured to conform by parents and society, it is possible for them to express memories of their former life (s), i.e. experience “intimations of immortality” for an extended period.

“Spirit got itself entangled with gross matter,” Blavatsky wrote in The Theosophist, “for the same reason that life gets entangled with the foetus matter. It followed a law, and therefore could not help the entanglement occurring.”

It was Plotinus who said that “our body is the true river of Lethe, for ‘souls plunged into it forget all’ — our terrestrial body is like Lethe” (the “river of forgetfulness” in the Hades of Greek mythology.) Using a modern analogy, a new computer cannot be expected to recall the data stored on the discarded one, unless the old data is preserved and reinstalled in the new machine.

But this is what sometimes happens with children who die at an early age from accidents or illness, if they had created no basis for a prolonged after-death dream state. Nature is never wasteful, and the still viable astral pattern body is not disintegrated as with normal death.

The still vital and alive astral matrix is attracted back into the soul’s new body, with all its memories preserved intact.Thus in many cases such children are said to be born with two astral bodies, one new, the other old.

3.5-Billion Years, Happy Birthday

“EVERYTHING in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, “is endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

“We men must remember that because we do not perceive any signs — which we can recognize — of consciousness, say, in stones, we have no right to say that no consciousness exists there” (The Third Fundamental of The Secret Doctrine).

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

“There exists a body of research poised to rend apart our modern paradigms — revealing consciousness in places we might not have expected it, and connections between life forms that seem startling and impossible.” So wrote Ben Bendig in the July 22, 2013 Epoch Times echoing H. P. Blavatsky’s Fundamental axiom. 

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.”

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. 🙂

Love and the Cosmic Pulse

Pilobolus Dance Theatre

This “stupendous development,” the Sages taught, “has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.”

It is endless in effect as the force of love, according to the ancients. (SD 1:43)

To Initiated Seers our universe, while full of important choices, is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes.”

In this view each individual cosmos and corresponding single human life is the effect of its predecessor.

Under the never-erring law of Karma, every universe becomes “a cause as regards its successor.”

Instead of only one Big Bang, the usual dogma for the origin of the universe, there must have been multiple efforts.

“There was not just one bang,” say Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their book Endless Universe.

Now science is being compelled to consider the necessity of  the law of cycles.

The appearance of our universe, it is proposed, “was not the beginning of time, but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution.” A purely Theosophical doctrine.

The Great Breath

The distinguished theoretical physicists propose that “the evolution of the universe is cyclic with big bangs occurring once every trillion or so.”

Cycles may be a good start. But unlike an infinite cycle of titanic collisions, Theosophy offers a kinder, gentler solution tied to the cosmology of ancient seers. It declares that the universe and everything in it is alive, and sustained by a perpetual rhythmic breathing.

River of Lethe

KRISHNA assures an uncertain Arjuna that he has lived many lives on Earth.

“Both I and thou have passed through many births,” the Master tells his disciple (Bhagavad-Gita, Ch. 4:31):

“Mine are known unto me, but thou knowest not of thine.”

The fact is most people don’t recall their past lives, because in every rebirth the immortal soul must endure a new body and astral body, a new personality and a new physical brain. 

Being handed an empty photo album is a challenge to the incoming soul, hindering it finding a conscious connection to prior experiences and knowledge. Thus “the new ‘personality,'” Blavatsky wrote (Key to Theosophy, Ch. 8), “is no better than a fresh suit of clothes.”

Being so, yet “the record or reflection of all the past lives must survive,” H. P. Blavatsky continues, “for when Prince Siddhartha became Buddha the full sequence of His previous births were seen by Him.” In such a state he was able, she says, “to retrospectively trace the lines of all his lives.”

“This proves to you that the undying qualities of the personality — such as love, goodness, charity, etc., attach themselves to the immortal Ego, photographing on it, so to speak, a permanent image of the divine aspect of the man who was.”

The mind doesn’t fully incarnate until age seven, (Key to Theosophy Section 9). Thus, a child doesn’t feel the full weight of life and karma right away. As such, they are like karma-less “little Buddhas.” If not pressured to conform by parents and society, it is possible for them to express memories of their former life (s), i.e. experience “intimations of immortality” for an extended period.

“Spirit got itself entangled with gross matter,” Blavatsky wrote in The Theosophist, “for the same reason that life gets entangled with the foetus matter. It followed a law, and therefore could not help the entanglement occurring.”

It was Plotinus who said that “our body is the true river of Lethe, for ‘souls plunged into it forget all’ — our terrestrial body is like Lethe” (the “river of forgetfulness” in the Hades of Greek mythology.) Using a modern analogy, a new computer cannot be expected to recall the data stored on the discarded one, unless the old data is preserved and reinstalled in the new machine.

But this is what sometimes happens with children who die at an early age from accidents or illness, if they had created no basis for a prolonged after-death dream state. Nature is never wasteful, and the still viable astral pattern body is not disintegrated as with normal death.

The still vital and alive astral matrix is attracted back into the soul’s new body, with all its memories preserved intact.Thus in many cases such children are said to be born with two astral bodies, one new, the other old.

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.”

“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.”

Faster than Light

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.

“Thought flies like lightning through the subtle matter of the mental plane,” writes a Master, “so the thought of the whole world on a certain subject may easily gather together in one spot, and yet be accessible and attractive to every thinker on that subject.”

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.

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

Consciousness is Universal

“Even our increasingly sophisticated technology for peering inside the brain has, disappointingly,” Geddes writes, agreeably with Theosophy, “failed to reveal a structure that could be the seat of consciousness.

Yet the esoteric wisdom, ever a true and honest system, “checks the discoveries of modern exact science,” notes Blavatsky, and demonstrates

“…some of them to be necessarily correct, since they are found corroborated in the ancient records.”

ξ

“To use a Metaphor from the Secret Books, which will convey the idea still more clearly,” Blavatsky establishes in The Secret Doctrine (1:4): “an out-breathing of the ‘unknown essence’ produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear.”

“This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series, which had no beginning and will have no end.”

∞

“The Big Bang was big, but it wasn’t the beginning, Cambridge University mathematical physicist Neil Turok says. He theorizes that the universe is engaged in an eternal cycle of expansion and contraction: There have been many Big Bangs, and there will be many more.” (Cambridge University)

Δ

Some modern physicists like Cambridge University’s Neil Turok (above), in a radical new theory want to amend the standard big bang.

They are suggesting it is a cyclic event that consists of regularly repeating big bangs.

∞

The ancients recognized universal periodicity all along, the Second Fundamental Proposition of The Secret Doctrine, a universal law which is described in part:

 

“…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.”

All life is indeed suffused with so-called ‘god-stuff’ due to the ubiquity of that supra-physical One Absolute BE-NESS — the First Fundamental Proposition which is “inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point” throughout the universe, and every being in it.

“Say Cheese”

The Theosophical concept of the ‘expanding universe,’ analogous to a image gradually emerging from light through a negative in a photographer’s darkroom, according to Secret Doctrine cosmology (1:63). The s0-called ‘expansion’ was, Blavatsky asserts:

“…not an increase in size—for infinite extension admits of no enlargement—it was a change of condition.”

‡

And this periodical “Great Breath” of the universe, the great out-breathing and in-breathing, is the core of the occult teaching—

“…the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine.”

ζ

“Its one absolute attribute, which is itself, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the ‘Great Breath,’ — which is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present space.”

Beginning with this universal perspective, as does Plato ‘deductively’  (from universals to particulars), we will begin see how this process continues down the line to individual consciousness, in its various states, experienced at every moment in daily life in man and nature.

Living in Love

THEOSOPHY teaches the progressive development of everything, “worlds as well as atoms,” according to The Secret Doctrine.

This “stupendous development,” teach the Sages, “has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.” (SD 1:43) Endless as the power of love, according to the ancients.

To Initiated Seers our universe, full of independent choices, is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes.”

In their view, each individual cosmos and corresponding single human life is the effect of its predecessor. Under the overarching Law of Karma, “a cause as regards its successor.”

Over the last three decades even modern physics has been seriously considering a “cyclic theory” instead of only one Big Bang, the usual explanation for the origin of the universe.”There was not just one bang,” say Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok in Endless Universe.

Both distinguished theoretical physicists propose that “the evolution of the universe is cyclic with big bangs occurring once every trillion or so.” (It’s about ‘time’! say Electric Universe proponents, agreeably with Occult Physics.)

Spiritual Mind

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.

All One Being 2

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

Knowing nothing of its spiritual essence, we reduce consciousness to its various ‘states’ — waking, sleeping, intuitive, meditating, angry, depressed, happy or sad.

We experience perhaps hundreds of such random cognitive and emotional states every day.

But because nature is only judged by science “through her appearance,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, “that appearance is always deceitful on the physical plane.” And she adds 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 — now given the cold shoulder by a science that defers to computer simulations, and giant machines.

The Secret Doctrine, (Esoteric science), on the other hand, reconciles the body-mind being, establishing a substrate spiritual root that it calls collectively, BE-NESS. The esoteric wisdom “checks the discoveries of modern exact science, 

“and shows some of them to be necessarily correct, since they are found corroborated in the ancient records.”

ξ

The ancients recognized that all life is suffused with ‘god-particles’ due to the ubiquity of a metaphysical One Absolute BE-NESS — “the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine.”

A Spirit Undefeated

KERRYN McCANN won the hearts of all Australians in 2006 when she got gold at the Commonwealth Games in a down to the wire marathon win.

Media footage showed Kerryn crossing the finish line, as if that was her life’s main triumph.

Two years later the much loved athlete succumbed to breast cancer, her husband and three children at her bedside.

Kerryn told friend and fellow athlete Raelene Boyle just a week before that she was still hopeful. Then she was so ill in her final days, she could no longer talk — yet through it all, her spirit never dimmed.

Happily, the body, brain and personality is understood in Theosophy as only a vehicle for the immortal soul each lifetime.

ξ

But this necessary instrument presents us with special opportunities in each life to express our  potential. Yet, many are unable or unwilling to seize those gifts in the time allotted to them, as Karryn did.

The illness drew out her determined, deathless and compassionate spirit, an inspiration to those who might not have her inner strength. She knew the deadly disease had come back, but she competed anyway.

The soul’s capacity will be fully availed of, or not, according to individual karmic endurance, W. Q. Judge says. Their capacity and destiny is the result of their “desire and prior conduct.”

The person’s past choices and behavior, he says,”will have increased or diminished” their karmic resources.

θ

Our individual choices shape not only our own character and capacity, but inspires the emergence of character and capacity in others as well, because we are all connected at the core.

And, “the troubles of nations and families arise from want of capacity,” Judge says, “more than from any other cause.” So the choices we make will always carry a greater influence than just to us as separate individuals.