The Mysterious Power of Life

“Light is Life” – H. P. Blavatsky

OCCULTISM connotes by the word God, “the symbolic conception of the Life and Motion of the Universe.”

This is in stark contrast to the crude anthropomorphism, which is still the backbone of our current theology.

“The One Life is deity itself, immutable, omnipresent, eternal,” says the teaching of Theosophy.

And the distinction “between organic and inorganic matter is fallacious and nonexistent in nature.”

“Matter in all its phases, is merely a vehicle for the manifestation through it, of LIFE.

Therefore, “the whole secret of Life,” says The Secret Doctrine, can only be discovered “in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because if —

‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity…’ *

— yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity — for life alone can understand life.  It is the One Life, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end.”  (*Adonais, by Percy Bysshe Shelley)

“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the evangelist. Both are electricity — the life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things.

A Dome of many-colored glass.

“Light is the great Protean magician, and under the Divine Will of the architect, its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being.” (Isis Unveiled 1:258)

It is “periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being — unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness — unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality,” (The Secret Doctrine 1:2): — “truly, ‘a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.'”

The Mysterious Power

by H. P. Blavatsky
The Key to Theosophy, Section 5

“HPB”

“When we speak of the Deity and make it identical, hence coeval, with Nature, the eternal and uncreate nature is meant, and not your aggregate of flitting shadows and finite unrealities. We leave it to the hymn-makers to call the visible sky or heaven, God’s Throne, and our earth of mud His footstool.

Our DEITY is neither in a paradise, nor in a particular tree, building, or mountain: it is everywhere, in every atom of the visible as of the invisible Cosmos, in, over, and around every invisible atom and divisible molecule; for IT is the mysterious power of evolution and involution, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and even omniscient creative potentiality.

“In short, our Deity is the eternal, incessantly evolving, not creating, builder of the universe; that universe itself unfolding out of its own essence, not being made. It is a sphere, without circumference, in its symbolism, which has but one ever-acting attribute embracing all other existing or thinkable attributes — ITSELF. It is the one law, giving the impulse to manifested, eternal, and immutable laws, within that never-manifesting, because absolute LAW, which in its manifesting periods is The ever-Becoming.”

Waking Our Inner God, the Divine Imprisoned Spirit

Jennifer Stuczynski and Pole

HAVING the right tools for a job is essential, just ask any electrician, plumber or carpenter.

Equally important, is that the tools being used are dependable and in good working condition.

Just ask any parachutist, race car driver, mountain climber, or a pole vaulter.

On the spiritual level, the purity or impurity of our bodily instrument and senses determine, for better or worse, our soul’s ability to express its unique genius.

Krishna explains this very simply to his disciple, the soul warrior Arjuna, in the 2nd Chapter of The Bhagavad-Gita saying: “he who hath his senses and organs in control possesses spiritual knowledge.”

Likewise, the quality and adequacy of “the brain and body to transmit and give expression,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote in her article Genius, “is the result of Karma.” And offered an analogy:

… the physical is the musical instrument, and the Ego, the performing artist.

No skill of the soul she wrote, “can awaken faultless harmony out of a broken or badly made instrument.”  The physical “may be a priceless Stradivarius or a cheap and cracked fiddle.”

Zoe Bloomfield with her cracked $7000 violin. Photo: Nick Moir

But sometimes physical limitations can be successfully overridden. The genius of Paganini, for instance, even burdened by a “cracked fiddle,” would still produce more perfect music from a damaged instrument than could a lesser musician.

“We Come from God Who is Our Home”

Arjuna-Krishna

IN the ancient Hindu Bhagavad-Gita Krishna assures his disciple, an uncertain Arjuna, that both have lived many lives on Earth.

“Both I and thou have passed through many births,” the Master tells his disciple, adding: “mine are known unto me, but thou knowest not of thine.”

The Bhagavad-Gita, Ch. 4:31.

“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 disbelief around this teaching is that most people cannot remember having a past life. This is because, in strictly practical terms, the immortal soul enters and uses a new physical body, new astral body, new personality, and a new physical brain. A new brain, cannot be expected to ‘register’ a previous life it was never there to witness.  

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

Siddhartha-Buddha meditating under the Bo Tree

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.

“To our talpatic, or mole-like comprehension, [http://bit.ly/2YP74Sq], the human spirit is then lost in the One Spirit, as the drop of water thrown into the sea can no longer be traced out and recovered. But de facto it is not so.

Photographic Lab

“However long the ‘night of Brahma’ or even the Universal Pralaya [Sleep] – (not the local Pralaya affecting some one group of worlds) – yet, when it ends,

the same individual Divine Monad resumes its majestic path of evolution,

“though on a higher, hundredfold perfected and more pure chain of earths than before, and brings with it all the essence of compound spiritualities from its previous countless rebirths.”

Twin Flames Spiral Evolution

“Spiral evolution, it must be remembered, is dual, and the path of spirituality turns, corkscrew-like, within and around physical, semi-physical, and supra-physical evolution.”

• H. P. Blavatsky,
  Isis Unveiled and the Vishishtadwaita

Spirit and Matter

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 lives, i.e. experience the ‘intimations of immortality’ for an extended period.

Dante And The River Of Lethe, by Gustave Dore

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

We know of no eastern philosophy that teaches that ‘matter originated out of Spirit.’ Matter is as eternal and indestructible as Spirit and one cannot be made cognizant to our senses without the other—even to our, the highest, spiritual sense.

“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 in their short lifetime they had created no basis for a prolonged after-death dream state. Nature is never wasteful, and the still viable astral body is not disintegrated as with normal death but reused by the reincarnation of the child.

The Magic of Life, Light and Immortality

The One Life

OCCULTISM connotes by the word God “the symbolic conception of the Life and Motion of the Universe.”

“This is in stark contrast to the crude anthropomorphism, which is still the backbone of our current theology,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote.

(The Secret Doctrine, Proem, Vol. 1, Page 3, fn.)

“The One Life is deity itself, immutable, omnipresent, eternal,” says the teaching. And the distinction “between organic and inorganic matter is fallacious and nonexistent in nature.”

And “matter in all its phases being merely a vehicle for the manifestation through it of LIFE – The Parabrahmic Breath – in its physically pantheistic aspect it is a super-sensuous state of matter itself the vehicle of the ONE LIFE, the unconscious purposiveness of Parabrahm.”

 (H. P. Blavatsky, “The Life Principle”)

Therefore, says The Secret Doctrine, “the whole secret of Life” can only be discovered “in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in or apart from, the physical body. Because if —

‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of Eternity…’

NB. The above phrase is a verbatim quote from Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats (LII), by Percy Bysshe Shelley – (Blavatsky had no physical library.)

Plaza Kukulcan Dome

“— yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity — for life alone can understand life.  It is the One Life, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end.”  

“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the evangelist. Both are electricity — the life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things.”

“Light is Life”

“Light is the great Protean magician, and under the Divine Will of the architect, its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being.” (Isis Unveiled 1:258)

It is “periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being — unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness — unrealizable, yet the one self-existing reality, truly, ‘a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.'” (The Secret Doctrine 1:2)

Immortality: Kinship of the Human Spirit with God Spirit

The Dance of Siva

SPIRITUAL evolution is spiral, as described by Theosophy, and the path of spirituality “turns corkscrew-like, within and around physical, semi-physical, and supra-physical evolution.” (H. P. Blavatsky)

Cocooned, and preordained like the butterfly to be, our Soul potential waits “inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point,” awaiting each new earthly reincarnation.

It is a dynamic and transformational soul evolution. A journey we have undertaken on this patient and resilient planet, a journey fraught with peril and promise. But this Path doesn’t have to be a long and painful one, if we understand and practice the secret.

Challenging religious and scientific dogmas, and wasting no time in her Preface to Isis Unveiled 1:vi, her first Theosophical book, Blavatsky immediately sets the bar to its highest level,  posing a key question:

“Who ever saw the Immortal Spirit of man, so as to be able to assure himself of man’s immortality?”

Man’s immortality and the existence of God, were the primary healing doctrines that H. P. Blavatsky, the acknowledged Mother of the New Age, was determined to explain and demonstrate to an often perplexed and confused humanity.

Usually it is the clear-eyed children, unfettered by man-made dogmas, who are the ones able to receive the soul of things, not their parents or teachers. The amazing story of James Leininger’s reincarnation offers dramatic proof of a child’s irrepressible soul insights.

Beyond Belief: Evidence of Reincarnation

AN ending is just a new beginning in disguise it’s been said. This perfectly describes the ancient belief in the soul’s immortality and continuity through reincarnation.

The spiritual eye of light,(represented in the human brain by the pineal gland), is more and more activated as we progress through spiritual evolution’s wisely appointed reincarnations.

Such stages are necessary to finally achieve “conscious god-hood,” in the words of Theosophical Pioneer W. Q. Judge, all the while living a human existence on Earth, Judge concluding:

“Getting back the memory of other lives is really the whole of the process…”

Mr.Judge in his Letter 5 also notes: “if some people don’t understand certain things, it is either because they have not got to that point in their other lives, or because no glimmer of memory has yet come.” Some people do have such glimmers, and as often such recalls have the power to heal, physically and emotionally.

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.

Dreams Solve Problems the Conscious Mind Cannot

WHEN our thick brains get all heated up worrying about life’s complexities, that’s often  the best time to kick off our shoes, and give it a rest.

Faced with a critical decision, or stuck on a complex problem, dream researchers have discovered, sleeping or napping on them often led to a right solution.

“In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die,” Lewis Carroll wrote of children: “Ever drifting down the stream–Lingering in the golden gleam–Life, what is it but a dream?”

As adults the notes of a song, the smell of burning leaves, the babbling of a mountain stream, a day-dream — all may open doors to another realm of poetic mind. They also arouse unexpected vistas.

In Wordsworth’s haunting poem “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” reveries opened for him an unexpected awareness of past lives.

§

“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar …”

§

There is “a class of fancies of exquisite delicacy,” the poet Edgar Allan Poe wrote in Marginalia, “which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language.”

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.

Mystery of the Afterlife

PSYCHE in occult Greek philosophy was the organ or vehicle of the nous, the higher ego or reembodying spirit.

The caterpillar lives its period, making for itself a chrysalis, which after a stage of dormancy is broken by the emerging butterfly.

As an analogy of spiritual evolution this implies the potentiality of soul growth for all beings, and of an earthbound humanity becoming aerial, uniting with spirit.

These thoughts led the ancient Greeks to use the butterfly as a symbol of the human soul (psyche); and in their mythology Psyche was in consequence represented in art with butterfly wings.

Seven year old Kristine loved to take her daydreams outside. One day during her dreamy wanderings she noticed a Monarch Butterfly who appeared to have a hurt wing and couldn’t fly.

“I decided I must help her!” Kristine wrote. “Putting her on my shoulder I took her home and announced I was going to heal her back to full health. My parents didn’t tell me I ‘couldn’t’ although I heard them discuss how heartbroken I would be if the Butterfly didn’t live.

“My Mom helped me gather up what we thought a Butterfly would eat and we made a grassy nest next to my pillow on my bed, and she stayed right there at night while I slept. During the day I would take her outside for fresh air and to see if she could fly yet…a week went by, my parents were seen shaking their heads.

“Then a few more days went by and while outside she suddenly flew off my shoulder…she flew up and away.

ζ

“And then I cried, happy that she could fly again, sad that she was gone. However as I turned for one last look in the last direction she flew in, I felt a brush across my cheek.

“Ms. Butterfly had come around the other side of me, to give me what my Mother always called ‘Butterfly Kisses.’ My tears turned into a grateful smile. My love for all of God’s miracles of being has never left me.” – Kristine Kamp-Adante, (Courtesy of Northwest Animal Healing & Intuitive Communication)

Across Time and Death: A Woman Reunites with Her Children from a Previous Lifetime

IT is not the fact that we have failed to remember our past life and lives that ought to surprise us, but the contrary, were it to happen.

Yet the Spiritual “I” in man is omniscient, Theosophy insists, and has every knowledge innate in it. 

By contrast, the personal “I” is the transient creature of its environment and the slave of brain memory.

“Could the Spiritual I manifest itself uninterruptedly, and without impediment,” H. P. Blavatsky declared, “there would be no longer ordinary humans on earth, but we should all be gods.”

Revealing the first principle of an occult spiritual technique, Mme. Blavatsky wrote (The Key to Theosophy, Section 8): “to get convinced of the fact of re-incarnation and past lives, one must put oneself in rapport with one’s real permanent Ego, not one’s evanescent [brain] memory.”

Jenny and Sonny

“The record or reflection of all past lives must survive,” she assures her readers, “for when Prince Siddhartha became Buddha the full sequence of His previous births were seen by Him — and anyone who attains to that spiritual state can retrospectively trace the line of their lives.”

This is because “the undying qualities of the personality — such as love, goodness, charity, etc. — attach themselves to the Immortal Ego.

“They imprint on it, so to speak,
a permanent image of the divine qualities
of the human who was.”

♥

Therefore, she says plainly: “something of each personality must survive, (unless the latter was an absolute materialist with not even a chink in his nature for a spiritual ray to pass through.) It leaves its eternal impress on the incarnating permanent Self or Spiritual Ego — and that real ‘Ego’ has lived them, and thus knows them all.”

As Mme. Blavatsky’s colleague William Q. Judge wrote in the article Theosophical Study and Work: “There is a mysterious power in these doctrines of karma and reincarnation … It is due to the fact that the ego is itself the experiencer of rebirth and karma, and has within a clear recollection of both.”

On fostering a greater spiritual development, Judge, in The Ocean of Theosophy, Chapter 8 titled “Of Reincarnation” wrote simply:

“Getting back the memory of other lives is really the whole of the process…”

≈

“For as long as she could remember, Jenny Cockell had felt she had lived a former life as Mary Sutton,” an Amazon reviewer wrote. “Finally, Jenny acted on her intense need to find her lost family. After years of painstaking searching, she finally reunited with family members from her previous lifetime. This is her startling, true story.”

Animal Wonders – Stargazing Scarabs

OCCULTISM connotes by the word God, “the symbolic conception of the Life and Motion of the Universe.”

This is in stark contrast to the crude anthropomorphism, which is still the backbone of our current theology.

“The One Life is deity itself, immutable, omnipresent, eternal,” says the teaching. And the distinction “between organic and inorganic matter is fallacious and nonexistent in nature.”

“Matter in all its phases, is merely a vehicle for the manifestation through it, of LIFE.

Therefore, “the whole secret of Life,” says The Secret Doctrine, can only be discovered “in the unbroken series of its manifestations: whether in, or apart from, the physical body. Because if —

‘Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity…’*

— yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity — for life alone can understand life.  It is the One Life, eternal, invisible, yet Omnipresent, without beginning or end.”  (*Adonais, by Percy Bysshe Shelley)

“Light is the first begotten, and the first emanation of the Supreme, and Light is Life, says the evangelist. Both are electricity — the life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things.

“Light is the great Protean magician, and under the Divine Will of the architect, its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being.” (Isis Unveiled 1:258)

It is “periodical in its regular manifestations, between which periods reigns the dark mystery of non-Being — unconscious, yet absolute Consciousness — unrealisable, yet the one self-existing reality,” (Secret Doctrine 1:2): — “truly, ‘a chaos to the sense, a Kosmos to the reason.'”

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.

Life without Limits

Jennifer Stuczynski and Pole

HAVING the right tools for a job is essential, just ask any electrician, plumber or carpenter.

Equally important, is that the tools being used are dependable and in good working condition.

Just ask any parachutist, race car driver, mountain climber, or pole vaulter.

On the spiritual level, the purity or impurity of our bodily instrument and senses determine, for better or worse, our soul’s ability to express its unique genius.

Krishna explains this very simply to his disciple, the soul warrior Arjuna, in the 2nd Chapter of The Bhagavad-Gita where he says: “he who hath his senses and organs in control possesses spiritual knowledge.”

Likewise, the quality and adequacy of “the brain and body to transmit and give expression” to the immortal spirit, H. P. Blavatsky wrote in her article Genius, is “the result of Karma.” And offers an analogy:

“… the physical is the musical instrument, and the Ego, the performing artist.”

No skill of the soul she wrote, “can awaken faultless harmony out of a broken or badly made instrument.”  The physical “may be a priceless Stradivarius or a cheap and cracked fiddle,” she says.

Zoe Bloomfield with her cracked $7000 violin. Photo: Nick Moir

But sometimes physical limitations can be successfully overridden. The genius of Paganini, for instance, even burdened by a “cracked fiddle,” would still produce more perfect music from a damaged instrument, than could a lesser musician.

Death Makes Life Possible

TRUTH and fiction are like oil and water: they will never mix.

We must probe for truth often by plunging beneath the slippery surface of illusion to the life-saving waters below.

Trying to understand the life of Buddha, or any advanced Adept, we confront a mystery — since they do walk the Earth with the rest of us.

We must dig beneath this mystery of  immortality, which is not unlike the puzzle of our own existence in many ways.

Like every human being, Gautama was an incarnation of pure spirit, H. P. Blavatsky wrote, yet he had to experience and learn in a human body, “and to be initiated into the world’s secrets like any other mortal.”

After his enlightenment, she says, “He emerged from His secret recess in the Himâlayas, and preached for the first time in the grove of Benares. The same with Jesus: from the age of twelve to thirty years, when He is found preaching the sermon on the Mount — yet nothing is positively said or known of Him.”

Later, an active aspect of his subtle body with all his hard-won wisdom intact and fully awakened, was attached to the soul of Samkarâchârya, says Blavatsky, “the greatest Vedântic teacher of India.”

But what of ourselves, the great masses of uninitiated humanity? Do we also survive as spirits and gain rebirth in a new human form again, however unenlightened our life might be?

Such is the teaching confirmed by ancient adepts. Knowledge of and a life lived by the tenets of Karma and Reincarnation are critical to our survival, and the future of the planet, Theosophy maintains.

“We are outwardly creatures of but a day — within we are eternal,” Blavatsky wrote:  “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.”

Dreaming the Future

WHEN our rational brains are all heated up, arguing life’s complexities, that’s usually the best time to kick off our shoes and give it a rest.

“Ever drifting down the stream, lingering in the golden gleam,” Lewis Carroll wondered: “Life — what is it but a dream?”

At times, when we are faced with a critical decision, or stuck on a complex problem, sleeping or napping on it, researchers find, often leads to the right answer.

The notes of a song, the smell of burning leaves, the babbling of a mountain stream, a day-dream—all can open a door to the the non-rational, poetic mind. They can also arouse unexpected vistas when we are children.

New Spiritual Patterns 1

Kids in the first Dutch cropcircle of 2010

ACTIONS that call upon our nobler mind and innate spirituality, will surely spark the growth of true self-knowledge within us.

Old intellect-driven habits of thinking and acting do not work, and naturally fade away of their own accord.

Spiritual motifs become more deeply ingrained in us as we serve others, Theosophy says, and practice genuine compassion for  humanity, and the planet.

“Help Nature and work on with her,” is one important way, says the Voice of the Silence, “and Nature will regard thee as one of her creators and make obeisance — she will open wide before thee the portals of her secret chambers, and

... lay bare before thy gaze the treasures hidden in the very depths of her pure virgin bosom.”

“Unsullied by the hand of matter she shows her treasures only to the eye of Spirit,” says the Voice — “the eye which never closes, the eye for which there is no veil in all her kingdoms.”

Fosbury nr Vernham Dean, Wiltshire, UK, July 17, 2010

“Self-knowledge of this kind is unattainable by what men usually call ‘self-analysis,’ Helena Blavatsky affirms, “it is not reached by reasoning or any brain process:

…it is the awakening to consciousness of the Divine nature of man.”

And “to obtain this knowledge is a greater achievement than to command the elements or to know the future,” she adds …

Ode to Past Lives

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.”

Never Ending I

EVOLUTION is spiral, Theosophy teaches and the path of spirituality turns “corkscrew-like.”

Soul experiences are layered securely “within and around the physical, semi-physical, and supra-physical.”

Man’s immortality and the existence of God, are the two primary doctrines that H. P. Blavatsky determined to prove.

Analogizing in her Preface to Isis Unveiled, her first Theosophical opus, she sets the bar to its highest level,  posing immediately the keynote question:

“Who ever saw the Immortal Spirit of man, so as to be able to assure himself of man’s immortality?”

ξ

Often it is only the clear-eyed children, unfettered by dogmas, who are the ones able to perceive spirit, not their parents or teachers.

Please note, this post has been updated and republished at:

The Unwrapped Soul

Fields of Dream

WHEN our rational brains are all heated up, arguing life’s complexities, that’s usually the best time to kick off our shoes and give it a rest.

“Ever drifting down the stream, lingering in the golden gleam,” Lewis Carroll wondered: “Life — what is it but a dream?”

At times, when we are faced with a critical decision, or stuck on a complex problem, sleeping or napping on it, researchers find, often leads to the right answer.

The notes of a song, the smell of burning leaves, the babbling of a mountain stream, a day-dream—all can open a door to the the non-rational, poetic mind. They can also arouse unexpected vistas when we are children.

In Wordsworth’s haunting poem “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” those reveries opened for him an unexpected awareness of past lives.

This post was updated and republished at:

Dreaming the Future