LIFE: The Greatest Problem of Modern Science

Born Again

MAINSTREAM science creates an almost insurmountable obstacle to understanding the real nature of life because of one persistent belief.

They steadfastly refuse to recognize that the Life Principle is a distinct force, and in so doing our modern science blocks all understanding of the nature of reality.

“The greatest problem of philosophy, is the physical and substantial nature of life,” H. P. Blavatsky declared:

It is its independent nature, which is denied by modern science — because that science is unable to comprehend it.

“The reincarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive,” Blavatsky declared, “that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body.”

(The Secret Doctrine 1:238)

Nevermind: “modern science’s definition of life still rests on  Herbert Spencer’s old definition, one that describes the phenomenon, but gives no hint of its real cause.” 

(“Moxon’s Master” – Ambrose Bierce)

What is Life?

Spencer’s materialistic definition of Life was that “Life is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes,”

both simultaneous and successive in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.

Spencer’s assertion is still maintained as the scientific consensus view because “most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical,” says the biocentrist Dr. Robert Lanza, in  … concluding, crucially: “without the other side, the living.”

Robert Lanza is one of the most respected scientists in the world—a US News & World Report cover story called him a “genius” and a “renegade thinker,” even likening him to Einstein. Lanza has teamed with Bob Berman, the most widely read astronomer in the world, to produce the book:

Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.

The Anthropic Principle

He shows that his Biocentrism — an extension of the Anthropic Principle, described by the Einstein disciple physicist John Wheeler — asserts a view of life incompatible with modern materialism.

“The Anthropic Principle was proposed in Poland in 1973, during a special two-week series of synopsia commemorating Copernicus’ 500th birthday,” a physics website explains:

“It was proposed by Brandon Carter, who had the audacity to proclaim that humanity did indeed hold a special place in the Universe, an assertion that is the exact opposite of Copernicus’ now universally accepted theory.”

Biocentrism completes a revolutionary shift in worldview, turning the planet upside down with the revolutionary view that life creates the universe instead of the other way around.

Biocentrism

The premise of Biocentrism is, with important modifications, asserts an intelligent hierarchical structure to Nature, which is also the central premise of Theosophy.

The ancients held that the universe is created by life, and not the other way around.

“The point in the hitherto immaculate Disk, Space and Eternity … denotes the dawn of differentiation,” H. P. Blavatsky explains at the outset of The Secret Doctrine (Vol. 1, Pg. 1).

“It is the Point in the Mundane Egg [see Wikipedia “World Egg”] … the germ within the latter which will become the Universe, the all, the boundless, periodical Kosmos, this germ being latent and active, periodically and by turns.

The Milky Way Galaxy

“The one circle is divine Unity, from which all proceeds, whither all returns. Its circumference — a forcibly limited symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind — indicates the abstract, ever incognisable presence, and its plane, the Universal Soul, although the two are one.”

The Secret Doctrine (Vol. 1, Pg. 1).

The World’s Greatest Secret: What is Life?

Soul reborn in a new body.

STANDARD MODEL science creates an almost insurmountable obstacle to understanding the real nature of life because of one persistent belief.

The belief that life not a universal, independent force, and in so doing our modern science blocks all understanding of the nature of reality.

“The greatest problem of philosophy, is the physical and substantial nature of life,” H. P. Blavatsky declared:

its independent nature, which is denied by modern science — because that science is unable to comprehend it.

“The reincarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive,” she declared, “that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body.”

(The Secret Doctrine 1:238)

“Modern science’s definition of life still rests on  Herbert Spencer’s old definition, one that describes the phenomenon, but gives no hint of its real cause.” 

(“Moxon’s Master” – Ambrose Bierce)

What is Life?

Spencer wrote: “Life is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes,

both simultaneous and successive in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.

Spencer’s assertion is preserved as the consensus view today because “most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical,” says the biocentrist Dr. Robert Lanza … concluding, crucially: “without the other side, the living.”

The Anthropic Principle

Dr. Lanza details his frontier science view in his book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.

He shows that his Biocentrism — an extension of the Anthropic Principle, described by the Einstein disciple physicist John Wheeler — asserts a view of life incompatible with modern materialism.

“The Anthropic Principle was proposed in Poland in 1973, during a special two-week series of synopsia commemorating Copernicus’ 500th birthday,” a physics website explains:

It was proposed by Brandon Carter, who had the audacity to proclaim that humanity did indeed hold a special place in the Universe, an assertion that is the exact opposite of Copernicus’ now universally accepted theory.

Biocentric

The premise of Biocentrism is, with important modifications, asserts an intelligent hierarchical structure to nature, is also a central premise of Theosophy.

The ancients held that the universe is created by life, and not the other way around.

“The point in the hitherto immaculate Disk, Space and Eternity … denotes the dawn of differentiation,” H. P. Blavatsky explains at the outset of The Secret Doctrine (Vol. 1, Pg. 1).

“It is the Point in the Mundane Egg [see Wikipedia “World Egg”] … the germ within the latter which will become the Universe, the all, the boundless, periodical Kosmos, this germ being latent and active, periodically and by turns.”

The Milky Way Galaxy

“The one circle is divine Unity, from which all proceeds, whither all returns. Its circumference — a forcibly limited symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind — indicates the abstract, ever incognisable presence, and its plane, the Universal Soul, although the two are one.”

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.”

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)

♥

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

♥

God is Love, God is Life

Born Again

MAINSTREAM science creates an almost insurmountable obstacle to understanding the real nature of life because of one persistent belief.

They steadfastly refuse to recognize life as a distinct force, and in so doing our modern science blocks all understanding of the nature of reality.

“The greatest problem of philosophy, is the physical and substantial nature of life,” H. P. Blavatsky declared:

“It is its independent nature, which is denied by modern science — because that science is unable to comprehend it.”

“The reincarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive,” Blavatsky insisted, “that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body.”

(The Secret Doctrine 1:238)

Nevermind: “modern science’s definition of life still rests on  Herbert Spencer’s old definition, one that describes the phenomenon, but gives no hint of its real cause.” 

(“Moxon’s Master” – Ambrose Bierce)

What is Life?

“Life is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes,” Spencer insisted:

“both simultaneous and successive in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.”

Spencer’s assertion is maintained as the consensus view because “most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical,” says the biocentrist Dr. Robert Lanza … concluding, crucially: “without the other side, the living.”

The Anthropic Principle

Dr. Lanza details his frontier science view in his book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.

He shows that his Biocentrism — an extension of the Anthropic Principle, described by the Einstein disciple physicist John Wheeler — asserts a view of life incompatible with modern materialism.

“The Anthropic Principle was proposed in Poland in 1973, during a special two-week series of synopsia commemorating Copernicus’ 500th birthday,” a physics website explains:

“It was proposed by Brandon Carter, who had the audacity to proclaim that humanity did indeed hold a special place in the Universe, an assertion that is the exact opposite of Copernicus’ now universally accepted theory.”

Biocentric

The premise of Biocentrism is, with important modifications, asserts an intelligent hierarchical structure to nature, is also a central premise of Theosophy.

The ancients held that the universe is created by life, and not the other way around.

“The point in the hitherto immaculate Disk, Space and Eternity … denotes the dawn of differentiation,” H. P. Blavatsky explains at the outset of The Secret Doctrine (Vol. 1, Pg. 1).

“It is the Point in the Mundane Egg [see Wikipedia “World Egg”] … the germ within the latter which will become the Universe, the all, the boundless, periodical Kosmos, this germ being latent and active, periodically and by turns.”

The Milky Way Galaxy

“The one circle is divine Unity, from which all proceeds, whither all returns. Its circumference — a forcibly limited symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind — indicates the abstract, ever incognisable presence, and its plane, the Universal Soul, although the two are one.”

What Rules Everything: The Field Effect

Body Fields

THE spiritual winds of change are still blowing against materialistic dogmas, a storm evident throughout the 20th, and now 21st Century, were initiated in the 19th.

The ‘radical’ culprit of the revolution is the perennial wisdom teachings of Theosophy, that the new age Mother H. P. Blavatsky jump-started.

It would appear today we are still immersed in a spiritual sea change, opposing the usual reactionary materialism with her unstoppable worldview.

In her article The New Cycle, Mme. Blavatsky predicted:

“The battle will be fierce between brutal materialism and blind fanaticism on one hand, and philosophy and mysticism on the other.”

All ancient sages, in every civilization, taught that this physical world is interpenetrated by a series of graduated ethereal worlds or fields, composed of an energy-substance which is beyond ordinary measurement or perception.

The Astral Light

The fields of  this ‘substance-principle’ closest to us are referred to by Theosophy as the ‘astral light.’ It is already confirmed by science that the fundamental building blocks of matter is energy. And all physical life, from crystals to the atoms and cells of our body emit this energy in the form of photons — in both waves and particles of light.

One Unity

Energy and substance are one and inseparable. Because, as everyone now understands, matter is really energy, made up of what science calls ‘atoms’— the immanent energy which ancient teachers understood to be an aspect of spirit-force. The Theosophical wisdom tradition explains that:-

“Spirit and matter are one, being the two opposite poles of the universal manifested substance. …the opposite poles of subject and object, spirit and matter, are but aspects of the One Unity in which they are synthesized…”

Human Magnets

The Russian researcher, Semyon Kirlian, and his famous photographs of the subtle light emissions of leaves, radiating even from inanimate objects, was the first modern person to publicize the discovery.

Aura Fields

Thousands of people have since had their astral photographs taken with so-called “aura cameras.” The technology makes for brisk business at psychic fairs and New Age conferences—but might there be something more significant about these fields than pretty pictures?

Rooted in The Field

Disease processes often get stuck in our field, explaining why energy healing techniques, like EFT, meditation and yoga—which help to reestablish a clear flow of information energy in our field—are so frequently beneficial.

“Great strides have been made in the arts and in cure of diseases, but in the future, as the flower of our civilization unfolds, new diseases will arise and more strange disorders will be known, springing from causes that lie deep in the minds of men and which can only be eradicated by spiritual living.”

– H. P. Blavatsky, Kali Yuga, The Present Age

As this video documents, disease occurs first in the energy field around the body, long before it is detected in the physical.

Invisible Patterns

Paracelsus

An impression of every thought, deed, and event is imprinted in this astral field, as taught in Theosophy, which therefore forms a sort of memory of nature. Likewise, within and around the physical body there is a series of subtler “bodies” composed of these more ethereal states of matter.

Paracelsus traced the second cause of disease to the astral, or sidereal body, which is the vehicle of the life-principle, or Archaeus.

“The Archaeus is of a magnetic nature, and attracts or repels other sympathetic or antipathetic forces belonging to the same plane. The less power of resistance for astral influence a person possesses, the more will he be subject to such influences.” (Paragranum)

Energy fields of fingers

Rupert Sheldrake, as does Theosophy, proposes that memories are captured on etheric substances, on supra-physical planes. His scientific ideas, largely ignored by orthodox science, are gaining new ground. Thanks to a spiritual shift in consciousness today, it’s an idea whose time has come.

Morphogenic Fields

We gain access to astral or akasic records through vibrational synchrony or affinity, (what biologist Rupert Sheldrake calls “morphic resonance”) — by vibrations transmitted through the ethereal medium. There is an analogy in the way that information is carried by electromagnetic impulses to cell phones, TVs, radios, and computers, or by light through fiber optic cables.

If information can be stored and transmitted in this way, it’s a mere puddle-jump to understanding how astral energy fields do the same thing. Memory is no more than archived information. Theosophical writer David Pratt writes:

“Experiments have shown that memory is both everywhere and nowhere in particular. Sheldrake suggests that the reason for the recurrent failure to find memory-traces in brains is very simple: they do not exist there.”

How the Brain Works

“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)

A new understanding of how the brain works follows similar lines. The brain is a complex local network. It is also an “antenna” or “receiver” of images, memories, thoughts, and ideas from the surrounding energy-field. These are presented to the onstage consciousness of each person (or “actor”).

Brain Fields

According to Sheldrake, we are also influenced “by social and cultural fields contained within the overall field of the earth,” David Pratt maintains:

“In Theosophy we are said to contribute thoughts and ideas to the pooled memory of the astral light and attract from it those ideas and thoughts with which we resonate most strongly. The astral light may be considered to be the astral body of the earth, and plays a role similar to what Sheldrake calls the morphic field of Gaia.” 

(David Pratt, Exploring Theosophy)

The heart acts generally the same way, with the exception that the heart-field functions as the ‘seat’ of the soul, and also a thinking and feeling entity inside, and though its field, outside the body.

The Heart Field

Some frontier researchers, like Roland McCraty, say that all thoughts and feelings arise first in the heart field, and secondarily transmitted to the brain. The average heart-field is much larger than the brain, and has been measured to extend to twelve feet from the body.

From this we can understand why the Native American’s had a tradition of placing the hand over the heart, and saying ‘I think.’

Additionally, the heart communicates directly with the “little heart,” the pineal gland, hidden deeply in the brain. But the subtle psycho-physiological mechanism of this activity is not well understood, and will be explored in another post.

Earth’s Magnetic Field

An Independent Race of Thinkers: How Microbes Defend and Define Us

Microbiology Lab

NEUROSCIENTISTS  have been busy for years attempting to establish and finalize the proposed “neuronal correlates of consciousness” originating in the brain.

Modern science seems determined to prove that consciousness, our thoughts and awareness, must somehow originate in the gray matter between our ears.

This mechanistic view was assumed as fact by the Human Genome Project, established to catalog the complete human DNA and identify specific cures for all diseases, yet has failed to do so.

It is held that genes carry information about how we look, how well our bodies metabolize food or fight infection, and can determine even how we behave.

It was thought, therefore, that researchers would easily be able to identify specific genes underlying specific diseases, and then all diseases could be eliminated by manipulating the related genes.

But it was discovered that the seemingly simple concept was much more complex than expected.

Ö

Just as the origin of consciousness cannot be tagged to specific neurons in the brain, genes are not easily pigeonholed to one disorder. It was found that they function in complex, and frequently changing teams.

Now science is edging nearer to Theosophy, looking closer at a long-neglected area called the microbiome — researching how hundreds of different species of living microbes, inhabiting the human body and outside, are responsible for our health and behaviors. They even discovered a second brain, in our gut, known as the enteric nervous system!

Divine Light, the Great Protean Magician

Gaia, Mother Earth

THE 2018 Spring Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere occurred at 12:15 PM, Tuesday, March 20 according to astronomical reckoning.

But what exactly is the spring equinox or ‘vernal equinox,’ as it is also known, and why do so many Northern peoples like to celebrate it every year at this time?

The astronomical event marks the start of spring in the northern hemisphere, which means longer days are on the way and people around the world will celebrate fresh starts. 

The phenomenon is a solar event like the solstices that occur on the first days of summer and winter at dawn for two or three days.

Though the length of days are not equal, at solstices the sun seems to linger for several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to double back, another kind of beginning or rebirthing. 

In the northern hemisphere the solstices mark the annual return of an ancient solar festival. Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod and Homer. The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause,” (NY Times Op Ed): “Pleasing, that idea as though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”

Sunrise Meditation

But for Theosophy light has much deeper metaphysical even spiritual implications. Both the Sun and the human heart are the two greatest life-givers we know, both emit light and are indissolubly interconnected. According to occult teachings, both radiate a powerful aura of biological and regenerative energies continuously.

H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine (1:290, xxi) reveals, (from a “Commentary hitherto secret”) that: “The real substance of the concealed (Sun) is a nucleus of Mother substance,

it is the heart and the matrix of all the living and existing Forces in our solar universe.”

The Heart-Sun

“As its substance is of a different kind from that known on earth, the inhabitants of the latter, seeing through it, believe in their illusion and ignorance that it is empty space,” she notes, “yet there is

not one finger’s breath (angula) of void Space in the whole Boundless Universe.”

Ancient astrology and astronomy identify many ancient temples and pyramids around the world were connected to solar symbology. Such sites and mounds are considered mere burial tombs by mainstream archaeologists, most of whom are disinterested in spiritual traditions.

Temple of Light

But at the time of their construction these sites were in fact intended, wrote H. P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled (1:270), to be sacred places of initiation. Describing the Spiritual Sun, called “Agni,” the ancient Rig-Veda declared: “His radiance is undecaying …

…the intensely-shining, all-pervading, unceasing, undecaying rays of Agni desist not, neither night nor day.”

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The Web of Life: A Conscious Universe, Part 2

Paracelsus

PARACELSUS was an alchemist and practicing astrologer. For him, the Sun of our universe corresponded to its Heart — the visible and invisible life giver and sustainer of the world.

The human heart or of any being, according to Theosophy, directly corresponds to the Sun.

The heart emanates the largest and strongest field in the body, just as the Sun does in its “body” – our Universe.

“The real substance of the concealed (Sun) is a nucleus of Mother substance,” the secret commentary explains:- “It is the heart and the matrix of all the living and existing Forces in our solar universe. It is the Kernel from which proceed to spread on their cyclic journeys all the powers:

“…that set in action the atoms in their functional duties, and the focus within which they again meet in their SEVENTH ESSENCE every eleventh year.”

The Commentary further teaches that “the Sun is the store-house of Vital Force, which is the Noumenon of Electricity — and “it is from its mysterious, never-to-be-fathomed depths, “…that issue those life currents which thrill through Space, as through the organisms of every living thing on Earth.”

The Web of Life: A Conscious Universe, Part 1

My Conscious Universe

THE acceptance of new ideas in Science “follows a predictable, four-stage sequence,” says the Institute of Noetic Sciences chief scientist Dr. Dean Radin, PhD.

In an excerpt from Chapter 1 of his landmark work “The Conscious Universe,” Dr. Radin describes the four progressive stages of discovery and acceptance in science.

“In Stage 1 skeptics confidently proclaim that the idea is impossible because it violates the Laws of Science. This stage can last from years to centuries, depending on how much the idea challenges conventional wisdom.

“In Stage 2 skeptics reluctantly concede that the idea is possible, but it is not very interesting and the claimed effects are extremely weak.

“Stage 3 begins when the mainstream realizes that the idea is not only important, but its effects are much stronger and more pervasive than previously imagined.”

“Stage 4 is achieved when the same critics who used to disavow any interest in the idea begin to proclaim that they thought of it first. Eventually, no one remembers that the idea was once considered a dangerous heresy.”

“The Conscious Universe,” Dr. Dean Radin

• Dean Radin, PhD, Chief Scientist at the
  INSTITUTE OF NOETIC SCIENCES (IONS)

The Convergence of
Science and Spirituality

“The possible truths, hazily perceived in the world of abstraction, like those inferred from observation and experiment in the world of matter, are forced upon the profane multitudes, too busy to think for themselves, under the form of Divine revelation and scientific authority.”  – H. P. Blavatsky, What is Truth?

“Truth” by Warner Highsmith, bronze door at main entrance of the Library of Congress.

“Where then is even relative truth to be found? If, so far back as the century of Democritus, she appeared to him under the form of a goddess lying at the very bottom of a well, so deep that it gave but little hope for her release.

“Under the present circumstances we have a certain right to believe her hidden, at least, as far off as the ever invisible dark side of the moon. This is why, perhaps, all the votaries of hidden truths are forthwith Set down as lunatics.” 

– H. P. Blavatsky, “What is Truth?”

The Third Eye

According to 19th century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, “All truth passes through three stages: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as self-evident.”

The renegade truth seeking cosmologists David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill,  protagonists of  the Electric Universe idea (The Thunderbolts Project) declare: “There are no isolated islands in an electric universe, from the smallest particle to the largest galactic formation.” They maintain further, agreeable to H. P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine, thatThe Secret Doc, that

Web of Life

“A web of electrical circuitry connects and unifies all of nature, organizing galaxies, energizing stars, giving birth to planets.”

Talbott and Thornhill assert, controversially, that “this electric web is controlling weather and animating biological organisms.” 

Astronomers like to believe the Sun is no more than a glowing nuclear furnace. That “galaxies are clouds of hydrogen gas and intergalactic dust,” Thunderbolts Project scientist Stephen Smith says in his article The Filamentary Firmament.   That they were all “assembled by gravity until they coalesced into swarms of glowing thermonuclear fires.”

“The Electric Universe theory” disagrees with this standard model, Smith says, and “is opposed to the idea of galaxies condensed from cold, inert hydrogen.”

Plasma Globe

Is The Sun Conscious?

“When a medieval person looked at the sky they looked at a living universe, filled with the presence of God, every star was a living, intelligent being. The mechanistic revolution replaced that with the idea that everything is a machine. 

“What if these electrical patterns in the Sun are an interface with the Sun’s mind? What if the Sun thinks? As soon as you raise that question you realize it is an utterly taboo subject. You’re not allowed to ask that question.  It’s simply off limits.”  – Rupert Sheldrake, PhD

Electric Sun

“When you look into the blue sky on a sunny day do you glimpse a ball of nuclear fire or, as the London poet and mystic, William Blake, reported, the heavenly host singing God’s praises?

“It’s an old question, revived today by the notion of panpsychism which suggests that the sun might in some way be considered conscious.”  

– Rupert Sheldrake, (Is Consciousness Fundamental?)

“Matter, after all, is nothing else than the sequence of our own states of consciousness, and Spirit an idea of psychic intuition.”

– H. P. Blavatsky, (The Secret Doctrine 1:542)

Consciousness is Universal

Plasma is not Gravity

“Strands of magnetically confined plasma can be seen throughout the cosmos,” Smith argues: “In an Electric Universe, every body in the Solar System, along with every star and galaxy, is charged with electricity and exists within a plasma environment.”

Electric Universe

Likewise, The Secret Doctrine establishes an electric universe. And that our Sun,  driven by electricity and magnetism and other mysterious conscious forces,  like all Suns, is the true heart of the solar system.

Radically at odds with modern cosmologists, Blavatsky  also considered gravity a secondary terrestrial law, an effect of the former rather than a cause.

“The law of gravitation has no right
to be referred to as an universal law.” 

“They call Gravity a law, a cause in itself. We call the forces acting under that name effects, and very secondary effects, too. One day it will be found that the scientific hypothesis does not answer after all.”

The Secret Doctrine  (1:490-498)

Plasma in Space

“Today, nothing is more important to the future and credibility of science than liberation from the gravity-driven universe,” say Talbott and Thornhill: “A mistaken supposition has not only prevented intelligent and sincere investigators from seeing what would otherwise be obvious, it has bred indifference to possibilities that could have inspired the sciences for decades.”

My Three Brains

Laurence Olivier in “Hamlet”

THOUGHT and consciousness itself is assumed by most neuroanatomists to be created by and located entirely in the physical brain, neatly tucked away inside our skulls.

This insistent worldview is only reinforced by our body language when we always describe thinking by pointing to our heads.

But native cultures never engaged in such assumptions. The traditional Native American view always considered the heart to be the center of thought and motive, pointing to it when referring to thinking.

Then there are those familiar ‘gut-feelings’ we often have. Those compelling instincts, studies show, are more often than not, intuitional signals, even so far as foretelling of some future event. “Two brains may seem like the stuff of science fiction, but they make literal and evolutionary sense,” NY Times writer Harriet Brown says. But three brains? That does seem a stretch.

Yet in Theosophy brains can number into the billions. Every cell and organ has a consciousness of its own. The physical heart  also functions as a powerful “brain.”

As stated in The Secret Doctrine (1:274): “Everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious: i.e., endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”

Universal Atom

And in her article “Kosmic Mind” H. P. Blavatsky wrote:  There is “consciousness in every universal atom . . . every atom is a little universe in itself; and every organ and cell in the human body is endowed with a brain of its own, with memory, therefore, experience and discriminative powers.”

“Groundbreaking research in the field of neurocardiology has established that the heart is a sensory organ and a sophisticated information encoding and processing center, with an extensive intrinsic nervous system sufficiently sophisticated to qualify as a “heart brain.” (Neurocardiology-Anatomical and Functional Principles, by J. Andrew Armour, M.D., Ph.D.)

“Heart-Brain”

Confirming this triune constitution Mme. Blavatsky explained “there exists in Nature a triple evolutionary scheme . . . or rather three separate schemes of evolution, which in our system are inextricably interwoven and inter-blended at every point. These are the Monadic (or spiritual), the intellectual, and the physical evolutions. . . . Each of these three systems has its own laws.” [Corresponding to heart, brain and gut] (The Secret Doctrine 1:181).

[Like the heart], “the enteric nervous system [the gut] must assess conditions, decide on a course of action and initiate a reflex.  And does all this on its own, with little help from the central nervous system.”

Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung

Undeterred, most neuroscientists continue to diligently barrel along cataloging what they insist are ‘the neural correlates of consciousness’ in the brain, and seem determined to prove that these neurons are the sole authors of our thoughts and feelings, isolated exclusively in the fatty workshop between our ears.

This consensus view dictates that when we die everything we are or learned disappears forever — including our soul and our individual ‘I am I’ consciousness. But this reductionist view of mind and consciousness is losing favor with many research scientists on the leading edge today, and may be about to radically change.

Our Three Brains, a Mind of their Own

Microbiology Lab

NEUROSCIENTISTS  have been busy for years attempting to establish and finalize the proposed “neuronal correlates of consciousness” originating in the brain.

Modern science seems determined to prove that consciousness, our thoughts and awareness, must somehow originate in the gray matter between our ears.

This mechanistic view was assumed as fact by the Human Genome Project, established to catalog the complete human DNA and identify specific cures for all diseases, yet has failed to do so.

It is held that genes carry information about how we look, how well our bodies metabolize food or fight infection, and can determine even how we behave.

It was thought, therefore, that researchers would easily be able to identify specific genes underlying specific diseases, and then all diseases could be eliminated by manipulating the related genes.

But it was discovered that the seemingly simple concept was much more complex than expected.

Ö

Just as the origin of consciousness cannot be tagged to specific neurons in the brain, genes are not easily pigeonholed to one disorder. It was found that they function in complex, and frequently changing teams.

Now science is edging nearer to Theosophy, looking closer at a long-neglected area called the microbiome — researching how hundreds of different species of living microbes, inhabiting the human body and outside, are responsible for our health and behaviors. They even discovered a second brain, in our gut, known as the enteric nervous system!

The Goddess in the Well, Source of Spiritual Truth and Wisdom

© Johanna Siegmann

SIMILAR to an internet-connected smart phone, our hearts invisibly and wirelessly connect us to an infinite network of spiritual information.

Through the unseen energy the heart emits, humans are subtlety yet profoundly networked to each other and to all living things.

“O fearless Aspirant, look deep within the well of thine own heart,” urges The Voice of the Silence, warning the would-be disciple:

“Knowest thou of Self the powers, O thou perceiver of external shadows? If thou dost not, then art thou lost.”

The energy of this deep heart-well literally binds us to each another. Additionally, every person’s heart vibration, positive or negative, contributes to what is called a single ‘collective field environment.’

But the more we advance in the direction of harmony, the more “pitfalls” we encounter, says The Voice of the Silence: “The path that leadeth on, is lighted by one fire — the light of daring, burning in the heart. The more one dares, the more he shall obtain. The more he fears, the more that light shall pale — and that alone can guide.”

“For as the lingering sunbeam, that on the top of some tall mountain shines, is followed by black night when out it fades, so is heart-light. When out it goes, a dark and threatening shade will fall from thine own heart upon the path…”, which seems an unusual and very potent insight.

A short video explains the importance and how to increase the true heart light or energy, and how we each add to the collective field. The energetic field of the heart even connects us with the earth itself.

God is Life: Immutable, Omnipresent, Eternal

MAINSTREAM science creates an insurmountable obstacle to understanding the real nature of life because of one persistent belief.

They steadfastly refuse to recognize life as a distinct force, and in so doing our modern science blocks all understanding of the nature of reality.

Yet, “the greatest problem of philosophy, is the physical and substantial nature of life,” H. P. Blavatsky declared:

“It is its independent nature, which is denied by modern science — because that science is unable to comprehend it.”

“The reincarnationists and believers in Karma alone dimly perceive,” Blavatsky insisted, “that the whole secret of Life is in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body.” (The Secret Doctrine 1:238)

Nevermind, “modern science’s definition of life still rests on  Herbert Spencer’s old definition, one that describes the phenomenon, but gives no hint of its real cause.”  (“Moxon’s Master” – Ambrose Bierce)

“Life is a definite combination of heterogeneous changes,” Spencer hypothesized:

“both simultaneous and successive in correspondence with external coexistences and sequences.”

Spencer’s assertion is maintained as the consensus view because “most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical,” says Biocentrist Dr. Robert Lanza … concluding, crucially: “without the other side, the living.”

Dr. Lanza details his frontier science view in his book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.

He shows that his Biocentrism — an extension of the Anthropic Principle, described by the Einstein disciple physicist John Wheeler — asserts a view of life incompatible with modern materialism.

“The Anthropic Principle was proposed in Poland in 1973, during a special two-week series of synopsia commemorating Copernicus’ 500th birthday,” a physics website explains:

“It was proposed by Brandon Carter, who had the audacity to proclaim that humanity did indeed hold a special place in the Universe, an assertion that is the exact opposite of Copernicus’ now universally accepted theory.”

The premise of Biocentrism is, with important modifications, asserts an intelligent hierarchical structure to nature, is also a central premise of Theosophy.

The ancients held that the universe is created by life, and not the other way around.

φ

“The point in the hitherto immaculate Disk, Space and Eternity … denotes the dawn of differentiation,” H. P. Blavatsky explains at the outset of The Secret Doctrine (Vol. 1, Pg. 1).

“It is the Point in the Mundane Egg [see Wikipedia “World Egg”] … the germ within the latter which will become the Universe, the all, the boundless, periodical Kosmos, this germ being latent and active, periodically and by turns.”

“The one circle is divine Unity, from which all proceeds, whither all returns. Its circumference — a forcibly limited symbol, in view of the limitation of the human mind — indicates the abstract, ever incognisable presence, and its plane, the Universal Soul, although the two are one.”

Awakening to the Cosmic Heart

“THERE are no isolated islands in an electric universe, from the smallest particle to the largest galactic formation.

“A web of electrical circuitry connects and unifies all of nature, organizing galaxies, energizing stars, giving birth to planets.”

On our own world, agreeing with Theosophy, David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill assert”this electric web is controlling weather and animating biological organisms.” (Thunderbolts of the Gods)

Astronomers like to believe the Sun is a glowing nuclear furnace. And, “that galaxies are clouds of hydrogen gas and intergalactic dust,” Stephen Smith notes in his article The Filamentary Firmament, and they “were assembled by gravity until they coalesced into swarms of glowing thermonuclear fires.”

“The Electric Universe theory,” Smith says, “is opposed to the idea of galaxies condensed from cold, inert hydrogen.”

“Strands of magnetically confined plasma can be seen throughout the cosmos,” Smith argues: “In an Electric Universe, every body in the Solar System, along with every star and galaxy, is charged with electricity and exists within a plasma environment.”

The Secret Doctrine, likewise, establishes an electric universe. And also that our Sun,  driven by electricity and magnetism like all Suns, is the true heart of the solar system.

Radically at odds with modern cosmologists, it also considers gravity a secondary terrestrial law, an effect of the former rather than a cause.

“The law of gravitation has no right to be referred to as an universal law,” Blavatsky wrote (1:490-498): “They call Gravity a law, a cause in itself. We call the forces acting under that name effects, and very secondary effects, too. One day it will be found that the scientific hypothesis does not answer after all.”

“Today, nothing is more important to the future and credibility of science than liberation from the gravity-driven universe,” say Talbott and Thornhill: “A mistaken supposition has not only prevented intelligent and sincere investigators from seeing what would otherwise be obvious, it has bred indifference to possibilities that could have inspired the sciences for decades.”

The Secret of Spiritual Power

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 compelled but without it, like Mother’s love, life could not go on.

It is a great power which is beyond human creation. Nor is it a dogma invented by religion, or merely an attribute of thinking or emotion.

It is rather a Universal Law, declares the ancient scripture Book of the Golden Precepts, and is above and beyond man made dogmas.

The phrase used to describe Universal Compassion found in this ancient scripture is “the Law of Laws,” and is the primary and most compellingly spiritual of its Precepts.

When exercised purely and impersonally this power lies beyond the partisan beliefs of either atheist or religionist, and always exhibits itself, as “The light of everlasting Right, and fitness of all things—the law of love eternal.”

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.”

This universal power is also described as a “shoreless universal essence.” This term also refers to a spiritual substance called in Sanskrit the Ākāśa: “The subtle, supersensuous spiritual essence which pervades all space.”

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

Our higher mind or Higher Ego, says Blavatsky 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.”

Our Earth’s Secret Sun

OCCULT philosophy denies that the Sun is a globe in combustion, and defines it simply as a world, a glowing sphere.

The real Sun is hidden behind, it says, and the visible one is only its reflection, its shell. 

The Nasmyth willow leaves (sunspots), mistaken by Sir J. Herschel for ‘Solar inhabitants,’ are really the reservoirs of solar vital energy — the vital electricity that feeds the whole system.

The ancients understood the real Sun is the storehouse of our little island in space, ever self-generating its vital electric fluid, and ever receiving as much as it gives out.

There is a regular circulation of the vital fluid throughout our planetary system, of which the Sun is the heart —the same as the circulation of the blood in the human body sustains our life. And the Sun contracts as rhythmically at every ebb and flow of fluid as the human heart does.

“The visible Sun is only a window cut into the real Solar palace and presence, which reflects, however, faithfully the interior work.”

Instead of the rhythmic pulse taking 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 whole the solar system,” according to this ancient wisdom. “As Above so Below” is a key concept in the old Hermetic teachings with which Theosophy agrees.

Photo of a Sunspot

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

“In the same manner as a man approaches a mirror placed upon a stand, beholds in it his own image, so the energy or reflection of Vishnu (the Sun) is never disjoined, but remains in the Sun as in a mirror that is there stationed” [Vishnu Purana, Ch. XI]

“The dark region of sun spots is not due “to the absorption exerted by the vapours issuing from the bosom of the sun and interposed between the observer and the photosphere,” as Father Secchi would have it (“Le Soleil“ II., 184), nor are the spots formed “by the matter (heated gaseous matter) which the irruption projects upon the solar disc” (ibid), Blavatsky says.

Kids, Cows and Hens: a Common Core

WHAT is the real object of modern education, Mme. Blavatsky asked: “to cultivate and develop the mind in the right direction.

“To teach the disinherited and hapless to carry with fortitude the burdens of life?

“To strengthen their will — to inculcate in them the love of one’s neighbour and the feeling of mutual interdependence and brotherhood —  and thus to train and form the character for practical life? Not a bit of it.”

“And yet, these are undeniably the objects of all true education,” she insisted. “No one denies it — all your educationalists admit it, and talk very big indeed on the subject. But what is the practical result of their action? Every young man and boy, nay, every one of the younger generation of schoolmasters will answer:

“‘The object of modern education is to pass examinations’ … and thus train them for a life of ferocious selfishness and struggle for honours and emoluments instead of kindly feeling.

“And what are these examinations — the terror of modern youth? They are simply a method of classification by which the results of your school teaching are tabulated. In other words, they form the practical application of the modern science method to the genus homo, qua intellection.

“Now ‘science’ teaches that intellect is a result of the mechanical interaction of the brain-stuff — therefore it is only logical that modern education should be almost entirely mechanical — a sort of automatic machine for the fabrication of intellect by the ton.

“Very little experience of examinations is enough to show that the education they produce is simply a training of the physical memory, and, sooner or later,” Blavatsky warned, “all your schools will sink to this level. As to any real, sound cultivation of the thinking and reasoning power, it is simply impossible while everything has to be judged by the results as tested by competitive examinations.”

When Education Goes Wrong

Full Title: “When Education Goes Wrong: Taking Creativity and Play Out of Learning.” Dr. Nancy Carlsson-Paige, professor emerita of Lesley University, writes frequently about the impact of media and other social influences on children’s lives and development.

Education Gone Right

She is also co-founder of Defending the Early Years, a nonprofit project whose purpose is to encourage educators to speak out about current policies that are affecting the education of young children.

In this talk, Nancy speaks about how educational institutions, in their attempts to meet the bureaucratic limitations of “Race to the Top” and “No Child Left Behind” policies, have eliminated creative play from early childhood education — resulting in the loss of problem-solving and critical-thinking skills in later years.

Child’s Play?

“Again, school training is of the very greatest importance in forming character, especially in its moral bearing. Now, from first to last, your modern system is based on the so-called scientific revelations:

‘The struggle for existence’ and the ‘survival of the fittest.’ All through his early life, everyone has these driven into them by practical example and experience, as well as by direct teaching, till it is impossible to eradicate from his mind the idea that “self,” the lower, personal self, is the end-all, and be-all, of life.

“Here you get the great source of all the after-misery, crime, and heartless selfishness … which as said over and over again, is the curse of humanity, and the prolific parent of all the evils and crimes in this life; and it is your schools which are the hot-beds of such selfishness.

“The energies generated by the brain molecules of its adherents are all concentrated on one point, and are, therefore, to some extent, an organized army of educated and speculative intellects of the minority of men, trained against the … masses doomed to be vampirised, lived and sat upon by their intellectually stronger brethren.

“Result: The direct outcome of this branch of education is an overflooding of the market with money-making machines, with heartless selfish men — animals — who have been most carefully trained to prey on their fellows and take advantage of the ignorance of their weaker brethren!”

The Story of an Egg | PBS Online Film Festival 2013

“Eggs, as well as the chickens they come from, are both healthful sources of protein but ONLY if raised the way nature intended… Unfortunately, as illustrated in the video below, today’s agricultural model of factory farming has complicated what used to be a simple affair.” (Mercola.com)

Caging Kids

“All this is owing to the perniciousness of a system which turns out goods to order, irrespective of the natural proclivities and talents of the youth. The poor little candidate for this progressive paradise of learning, comes almost straight from the nursery to the treadmill…

“Here he is immediately seized upon by the workmen of the materio-intellectual factory … so that if he have any natural genius it is rapidly squeezed out of him… He will attain only sufficient knowledge of his own particular nation to fit him with a steel armour of prejudice against all other peoples [….]

“A proper and sane system of education should produce the most vigorous and liberal mind, strictly trained in logical and accurate thought, and not in blind faith.”

Happy Cowz

 

Inner Sensibility

“Children should above all be taught self-reliance, love for all men, altruism, mutual charity, and more than anything else, to think and reason for themselves. We would reduce the purely mechanical work of the memory to an absolute minimum, and devote the time to the development and training of the inner senses, faculties and latent capacities.

“We would endeavour to deal with each child as a unit, and to educate it so as to produce the most harmonious and equal unfoldment of its powers, in order that its special aptitudes should find their full natural development.

“We should aim at creating free men and women, free intellectually, free morally, unprejudiced in all respects, and above all things, unselfish. And we believe that much if not all of this could be obtained by proper and truly theosophical education.

– H. P. Blavatsky
Edited excerpts from:
The Key to Theosophy, Section 13

♥

Dawn of the Sun

WINTER in the northern hemisphere marks the annual return of an ancient solar festival.

Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod and Homer.

The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause,” recalls the NY Times Op Ed: “Pleasing, that idea…

… as though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”

“The real substance of the concealed (Sun) is a nucleus of Mother substance,” H. P. Blavatsky writes in The Secret Doctrine. It is the heart and the matrix of all the living and existing Forces in our solar universe.

“It is the Kernel from which proceed to spread on their cyclic journeys all the Powers that set in action the atoms in their functional duties, and the focus within which they again meet in their SEVENTH ESSENCE every eleventh year.”

Thinking with Your Heart

ATHEISTS and agnostics are more driven by compassion to help others than are highly religious people, a new study finds.  (Live Science)

Indeed, compassion is not a religious dogma, or mere attribute of thinking or emotion, declares the Book of the Golden Precepts, an ancient spiritual scripture. 

It is a universal law not a dogma. True compassion is called “the Law of Laws.” When sincere it manifests as “the light of everlasting Right, and fitness of all things, the law of love eternal.”

This universal power is described as a “shoreless universal essence.” Such teachings are discovered by modern students who connect with The Voice of the Silence, the ancient Golden Precepts translated and arranged by H. P. Blavatsky.

Our higher mind or Higher Ego, says Blavatsky 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.”