Theosophy vs The Dogmas of Science

Chrystal Ball

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science vs Religion

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

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

•  Deepak Chopra, MD

The Dual Hemispheres of the Brain

Theosophy On Consciousness

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

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

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

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

i Robot

Universal Mind

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

•  H. P. Blavatsky: Psychic and Noetic Action II

The Non-Local Brain Field

No Place for The ‘I’

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

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

The Spiritual Underpinnings of Space and Life

The Matrix

IS the apparent void of Space “an emptiness,” asks Deepak Chopra, “or could it be the womb of creation, the source of Life itself?”

This is clearly a rhetorical question by Dr. Chopra who knows well his Eastern metaphysics.

H. P. Blavatsky agreed asserting “there is not one finger’s breath of void Space in the whole Boundless Universe,” (The Secret Doctrine 1:289.)

In her day Science still believed in the existence of “Ether.” The substance, she noted, was “accepted by physical astronomy, in ordinary physics, and in chemistry. Astronomers, who first began by regarding it as a fluid of extreme tenuity and mobility — ‘its main function in modern astronomy has been to serve as a basis for hydrodynamical theories of gravitation.'”

What connects everything in this infinite boundlessness? The answer is described by ancient Seers as a “conscious spiritual quality” or “divine breath.”

It spreads as it issues from Laya throughout infinity as a colourless spiritual fluid.

Space is not Empty

In this important video, astrophysicist Dr. Michael Clarage explains the new views of “the interstellar medium,” the concept H. P. Blavatsky and her Teachers had asserted in the 19th Century. (See: A Web of Spiritual Substance Spans the Universe).

f

Ether was later rejected by science in favor of mathematical models and various models proposed by Einstein and others to bolster up gravity as the primary force in the universe.

New observations in deep space challenged those theories, and now “dark matter” and “dark energy” are proposed to fill the gap. But these seem to be merely iterations of the old ‘ether’ repackaged in gravity-speak.

It may be soon that the old hypothetical models will be replaced by scientists who favor observational, empirical evidence pointing to an  electrical universe, (Holoscience.com) — which is more in sync with ancient Theosophical teachings.

“Light is Life … both are electricity,” Mme. Blavatsky wrote in her first work Isis Unveiled (1:258): — it is “the life-principle, the anima mundi, pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things,” she wrote explaining the occult teachings.

Measuring the Immeasurable, the Intersection of Science and Spirit

Apparent Levitation of a Yogi

MAINSTREAM science looking for the source of our consciousness, argue its origin must be located in the neurons of our physical brains.

They are certain that all cognition arises from the activity of neurons attached to specific structures, which have fixed locations.

Yet many credible scientific minds today think otherwise and dispute the idea that our human consciousness arises solely from physical brain activity. 

Our brains are transmitters, just as TVs are, and not the creators of the programs and information they channel.

Open-minded science should always be willing to pursue truth wherever it leads, consider that consciousness may be an independent entity apart from the brain through which it manifests. This is only stating the obvious: automation takes us only so far – cars need drivers, and airplanes must have pilots who fly them. Television programs depend on writers, actors, and reporters.

But the standard model science insists the evidence pointing to an independent self is nothing but ‘junk science,’ no matter how rigorous the experiments. The results no matter how conclusive, are ignored. They are generally not accepted for publication in prestigious journals.

Parapsychologists risk being minimized and shunned — and their careers and livlihood can be stalled if funding is withdrawn.

“We live in an age of prejudice, dissimulation, and paradox,” Blavatsky opined in her article A Paradoxical World —”wherein, like dry leaves caught in a whirlpool, we are tossed helpless, hither and thither, ever struggling between our honest convictions and fear of that cruelest of tyrants — PUBLIC OPINION.”

A contemporary scientist spoke to physics and electrical engineering professor Willis Harman, and upon being told of successful remote-viewing [formerly known as “clairvoyance”] experiments, Harman said: “I wouldn’t believe it even if it were true!” 

Dangerous Waters

Yet, poised fearlessly at the frontiers of Psi research are legitimate scientific groups such as the respected Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Petaluma, California, and the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek.

These researchers, and others, like NES Energy Medicine, are willing to take a leap in pursuit of the fast-moving hidden soul that other scientists prefer ignoring. Looking to the future, Mme. Blavatsky boldly asserted in her The Secret Doctrine 1:272 that:

Modern science believes not
in the ‘soul of things.’

Fearless investigations were the exclusive precinct of ancient, uncanny intuitives and seers as taught in The Secret Doctrine. But today there are numerous professional scientific investigators on the hunt for answers to the puzzling problems of evolution and consciousness.

A Cosmic Heartbeat: The Kinder, Gentler Universe

Kwan Yin

“WHAT if there was no big bang and we live in an ever-cycling universe?” a recent issue of the NewScientist magazine asks, suggestive of ancient Eastern teachings.

“There is no good evidence that our universe even had a beginning,” the article further states, “a startling proposition that means the cosmos could collapse in about 100 billion years.”

Theosophy has a very similar teaching: the “progressive development” of the universe, “worlds as well as atoms,” according to H. P. Blavatsky from a The Secret Doctrine 1:43 quote:

“… the progressive development of everything, worlds as well as atoms; and this stupendous development has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end. Our ‘Universe’ is only one of an infinite number of Universes.”

Again, to Initiated Seers our universe, while full of important information, is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes,” she insisted. (The Secret Doctrine 1: 272-3):

“The system in question is no fancy of one or several isolated individuals,” she wrote: “It is the uninterrupted record covering thousands of generations of Seers whose respective experiences were made to test and

to verify the traditions passed orally by one early race to another, of the teachings of higher and exalted beings, who watched over the childhood of Humanity.

Those “Wise Men”, she explained, “had passed their lives in learning, not teaching. How did they do so?

Initiated Seers

“It is answered: by checking, testing, and verifying in every department of nature the traditions of old by the independent visions of great adepts; i.e., men who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual organizations to the utmost possible degree.”

No vision of one adept was accepted till it was checked and confirmed by the visions — so obtained as to stand as independent evidence — of other adepts, and by centuries of experiences.

See more: [The Secret Doctrine 1:43]

In this view, each individual cosmos and corresponding single human life is the result and the effect of its predecessor. Under the never-erring law of Karma, every universe becomes “a cause as regards its successor.”

Instead of one ‘Big Bang,’ as recent standard model science describes the origin of the universe, Theosophy postulates conversely an infinite number of recurring universes, each one an improvement on the last based on lessons learned. Now, a newly held view in modern theoretical physics suggests a similar idea.

Cyclic Universes

“There was not just one bang,” assert theoretical physicists Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their book Endless Universe, postulating a groundbreaking “Cyclic Universe” theory. According to the theory, the Big Bang “was not the beginning of time but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution.” Very close to the Theosophical view, it turns out.

What these scientists seem to be proposing is the law of periodicity, the Second of Three Fundamental Propositions of The Secret Doctrine.

“In Endless Universe, Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, both distinguished theoretical physicists, present their bold new cosmology. Two world-renowned scientists present an audacious new vision of the cosmos that ‘steals the thunder from the Big Bang theory.'” —Wall Street Journal

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

The Great Breath

Such a ‘periodicity’ is would be a new beginning for modern science. But unlike the speculation of an “infinite cycle of titanic collisions,” Theosophy offers a much kinder and gentler solution tied to the cosmology offered by numerous “generations of initiated seers.”

Those findings conclude that we exist in a living universe, where everything to its core is alive, sustained by an eternal, perpetual rhythmic breathing or pulsation.

(We may be asleep at night, but thankfully, we continue breathing.) The Universe, according to the occult dynamics of The Secret Doctrine, does the same.

“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.

No Big Bang: A Kinder, Gentler Universe

Soul of the World

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

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

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

[The Secret Doctrine 1:43]

In this view, each individual cosmos and corresponding single human life is the result and the effect of its predecessor. Under the never-erring law of Karma, every universe becomes “a cause as regards its successor.”

Instead of only one ‘Big Bang,’ as standard model science dogma describes the origin of the universe, Theosophy postulates an infinite number of recurring universes, each one an improvement on the last. Today a new view in modern theoretical physics suggests a similar idea.

Cyclic Universes

“There was not just one bang,” say theoretical physicists Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their book Endless Universe, postulating a groundbreaking “Cyclic Universe” theory. According to the theory, the Big Bang “was not the beginning of time but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution.” Very close to the Theosophical view, it turns out.

What these scientists seem to be proposing is the law of periodicity, the Second Fundamental Proposition of The Secret Doctrine

“In Endless Universe, Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, both distinguished theoretical physicists, present a bold new cosmology. Two world-renowned scientists present an audacious new vision of the cosmos that ‘steals the thunder from the Big Bang theory.'” —Wall Street Journal

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

The Great Breath

To Theosophy, ‘periodicity’ is certainly an admirable start. But unlike the speculation of an “infinite cycle of titanic collisions,” Theosophy offers a much kinder and gentler solution tied to the cosmology offered by “generations of initiated seers.”

Those findings conclude that we exist in a living universe, where everything to its core is alive, sustained by an eternal, perpetual rhythmic breathing or pulsation.

(We may be asleep at night, but luckily, we continue breathing.) The Universe, according to the occult dynamics of The Secret Doctrine, does the same.

A Kinder, Gentler Universe

Soul of the World

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

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

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

[The Secret Doctrine 1:43]

In this view, each individual cosmos and corresponding single human life is the result and the effect of its predecessor. Under the never-erring law of Karma, every universe becomes “a cause as regards its successor.”

Instead of only one ‘Big Bang,’ as standard model science dogma describes the origin of the universe, Theosophy postulates an infinite number of recurring universes, each one an improvement on the last. Today a new view in modern theoretical physics suggests a similar idea.

Cyclic Universes

“There was not just one bang,” say theoretical physicists Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their book Endless Universe, postulating a groundbreaking “Cyclic Universe” theory. According to the theory, the Big Bang “was not the beginning of time but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution.” Very close to the Theosophical view, it turns out.

What these scientists seem to be proposing is the law of periodicity, the Second Fundamental Proposition of The Secret Doctrine

“In Endless Universe, Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok, both distinguished theoretical physicists, present a bold new cosmology. Two world-renowned scientists present an audacious new vision of the cosmos that ‘steals the thunder from the Big Bang theory.'” —Wall Street Journal

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

The Great Breath

To Theosophy, ‘periodicity’ is certainly an admirable start. But unlike the speculation of an “infinite cycle of titanic collisions,” Theosophy offers a much kinder and gentler solution tied to the cosmology offered by “generations of initiated seers.”

Those findings conclude that we exist in a living universe, where everything to its core is alive, sustained by an eternal, perpetual rhythmic breathing or pulsation.

(We may be asleep at night, but luckily, we continue breathing.) The Universe, according to the occult dynamics of The Secret Doctrine, does the same.

The Soul of Things: Connecting Science and Spirituality

Jelena Momcilov “Magnet Girl”

MANY scientists like to think that science already understands the ways of the natural world.

For them the fundamental questions are answered, leaving only the details to be filled in.

The numerous impressive achievements of modern science seem to support this confident attitude.

But in recent research, including his own studies, rebel biologist Rupert Sheldrake believes otherwise.

His experiments reveal jaw-dropping problems at the heart of physics, cosmology, biology, medicine, and psychology. Similar to H. P. Blavatsky’s complaints about 19th century modern science.  Not much has changed since then, it would appear. Science still refuses to acknowledge “the soul of things.”

Resolutely dismissive of paranormal findings or brain-free consciousness, traditional model science still asserts that matter is the gold standard. But even great authorities, especially in science, may be found to err, and scientific dicta are frequently influenced more by personal prejudice than rigorous research.

“We hold to Hermes and his ‘Wisdom’ — in its universal character; they [hold] to Aristotle as against intuition and the experience of the ages, fancying that Truth is the exclusive property of the Western world. Hence the disagreement. As

Hermes says, ‘Knowledge differs much from sense; for sense is of things that surmount it, but Knowledge (gyi) is the end of sense’ — i.e., of the illusion of our physical brain and its intellect.

An honest, impartial science would always weigh “the laboriously acquired knowledge of the senses with the intuitive omniscience of the Spiritual divine Soul,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote.

The Secret Doctrine — Vol. 1, p. 269

Different Perspectives

“The Theosophists, therefore, are the first to recognize the intrinsic value of science. But when its high priests resolve consciousness into a secretion from the grey matter of the brain, and everything else in nature into a mode of motion, we protest against the doctrine as being

unphilosophical, self-contradictory, and simply absurd — from a scientific point of view, as much and even more than from the occult aspect of the esoteric knowledge.

The Definition of “Life” Revealed

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

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

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

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

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

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

∞

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

Spirit, Mind and Matter

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

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

§

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

Occult Science vs the Top 10 Dogmas of Modern Science

Photograph: Alamy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Science vs Religion

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

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

Jill Bolte Taylor

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

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

i Robot

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

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

The Non-Local Brain Field

No Place for The ‘I’

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

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

Modern Science and Our Moral Sense

PRACTICAL Theosophy is not one Science, but embraces every science in life, moral and physical.

It is clear that modern science “believes not in the ‘soul of things,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote.  Yet, Science will be driven out of their materialist positions.

“Not by spiritual, theosophical, or any other physical or even mental phenomena, but simply by the enormous gaps and chasms that open daily — and will still be opening before them.”

“One discovery follows the other,” she noted, “until they are finally knocked off their feet by the ninth wave of simple common sense.

“If science is too ahead of its time, it must bide its time until the minds of men are ripe for its reception. Every science, every creed has had its martyrs.”

“Three decades ago, few scientists were courageous enough to break ranks and question their own belief system,” Deepak Chopra writes. “Even calling science a belief system sounded outrageous – religion is a matter of belief, science a matter of facts.”

“Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption,” writes controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake — one of the world’s most innovative biologists and writers, who is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance —”they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview.

“They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis.”

Evidence of an Afterlife, the Science of Near-Death Experiences

WHEN a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, the medical doctor experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife.

“Dr. Eben Alexander says he’s not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body,” notes Newsweek Magazine in a feature article.

“Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history.”

“Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided,” Dr. Alexander wrote in the Newsweek October 15 2012 cover story.

“Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference,” he writes, “science tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.”

“In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe,” wrote David Bohm — legendary American quantum physicist known for his theory of an “Implicate Order,” a universe of undivided wholeness—”therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe.”

“We are enfolded in the universe,” Bohm says. Theosophy agrees. “We know of no eastern philosophy that teaches that ‘matter originated out of Spirit,’ Blavatsky wrote:

“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.”

Theosophy also asserts what neurologists and physicists are now beginning to verify — that there is no special location of consciousness in the brain. Consciousness exists throughout the brain, and the body.

The mind actually lives independently with its own energetic matrix interpenetrating the physical body, using the brain, heart and other organs and cells as its toolkit on this plane.

“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.”

Future Science: Discovering the Soul of Things

Jelena Momcilov “Magnet Girl”

MANY scientists like to think that science already understands the ways of the natural world.

For them the fundamental questions are answered, leaving only the details to be filled in.

The numerous impressive achievements of modern science seem to support this confident attitude.

But in recent research, including his own studies, frontier biologist Rupert Sheldrake believes otherwise.

His experiments reveal jaw dropping problems at the heart of physics, cosmology, biology, medicine and psychology. Similar to H. P. Blavatsky’s complaints about 19th century modern science.  Not much has changed since then, it would appear. Science still refuses to acknowledge “the soul of things.”

See: Connecting the Worlds of Science and Spirituality

Resolutely dismissive of paranormal findings or brain-free consciousness, traditional science asserts that matter is the gold standard. But even great authorities especially in modern science may be found to err, and scientific dicta are frequently influenced more by personal prejudice than rigorous research.

A pure impartial science always weighs “the laboriously acquired knowledge of the senses with the intuitive omniscience of the Spiritual divine Soul,” said H. P. Blavatsky, world Theosophy teacher.

As Hermes believed so does Theosophy, she wrote in The Secret Doctrine 1:296,  that “knowledge differs from sense which is only of the physical world — but Knowledge is the end of sense which is only the illusion of our physical brain and its intellect.”

It is “self-contradictory, and simply absurd — from a scientific point of view, as much and even more than from the occult aspect of the esoteric knowledge.”

When the high priests of material science, she wrote, “resolve consciousness into a secretion from the grey matter of the brain, and everything else in nature into a mode of motion, we protest against the doctrine as being un-philosophical.” [And unscientific]

In a formal, conclusive and hilarious experiment he calls “Telephone Telepathy,” Rupert Sheldrake demonstrates that consciousness can indeed fly away on its own from one mind into another!

Baring the Soul of Science

PRACTICAL Theosophy is not one Science, but embraces every science in life, moral and physical.

It is clear that modern science “believes not in the ‘soul of things,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote.  Yet, Science will be driven out of their materialist positions.

“Not by spiritual, theosophical, or any other physical or even mental phenomena, but simply by the enormous gaps and chasms that open daily — and will still be opening before them.”

“One discovery follows the other,” she noted, “until they are finally knocked off their feet by the ninth wave of simple common sense.

“If science is too ahead of its time, it must bide its time until the minds of men are ripe for its reception. Every science, every creed has had its martyrs.”

“Three decades ago, few scientists were courageous enough to break ranks and question their own belief system,” Deepak Chopra writes. “Even calling science a belief system sounded outrageous – religion is a matter of belief, science a matter of facts.”

“Many scientists are unaware that materialism is an assumption,” writes controversial biologist Rupert Sheldrake — one of the world’s most innovative biologists and writers, who is best known for his theory of morphic fields and morphic resonance —”they simply think of it as science, or the scientific view of reality, or the scientific worldview.

“They are not actually taught about it, or given a chance to discuss it. They absorb it by a kind of intellectual osmosis.”

Protecting our Noble Freedoms: The Truth about Vaccines, Big Pharma and Our Food

“YOUR great country I love so much for its noble freedom,” wrote the principal founder of modern Theosophy Mme. H. P. Blavatsky in addressing The Theosophical Society  Second Annual Convention in 1888.

“A large part of my heart and much of my hope for Theosophy lie with you in the United States, where the Theosophical Society was founded, and of which country I myself am proud of being a citizen.”

“You must remember that,” she added, “although there must be local Branches of the Theosophical Society there can be no local Theosophists; and just as you all belong to the Society, so do I belong to you all.” (H. P. Blavatsky Letter I — Second Annual Convention)

But not so fast. What would Mme. Blavatsky have said about this country if she lived today? Today at every level government interference in our individual freedoms has become epidemic. Does the government have the right, for example,  to force it’s citizens to choose between educating their children and vaccinating them?

Mme. Blavatsky’s Adept Teachers made clear Their views on “evil”  (Letter 10). The ills of humanity fall into two main categories, they said. And the effects of such evils plays out every day in our individual and collective lives.

“Evil is the exaggeration of good, the progeny of human selfishness and greediness [are] nearly two thirds of the evils that pursue humanity ever since that cause became a power.”

In The Secret Doctrine  Mme. Blavatsky declares: “Practical Theosophy is not one Science, but embraces every science in life, moral and physical.” (Summing Up section of  The Secret Doctrine 1:269): but ….. “it is clear that modern science believes not in the ‘soul of things.”

Karma: The Law of Empathy and Ethical Causation

Harold Copping, “The Widows Mite”

EVER mounting research reveals that you cannot separate your health from your emotions, explains Dr. Joseph Mercola, a prominent alternative medicine advocate.

“Numerous studies support the idea that having an upbeat and positive perspective,” he says, “can translate into living a longer healthier life.” This view aligns exactly with that of Theosophy.

Manifesting positive emotions and happiness “is perhaps one of the greatest gifts you have been given as a human being,” Mercola writes, “but to some extent, being happy is a choice you need to make.”

“Much like choosing to exercise or eat right. Happiness comes from within — it’s not meted out by circumstance alone.”

The Sanskrit word Karma has many meanings, and has a special aspect for almost every one of its manifestations according to Theosophy. As a synonym of sin, an action for the attainment of personal selfish desire, “it cannot fail to be hurtful” to almost everyone. 

Yet karma is also “the law of ethical causation,” Theosophical Pioneer William Q. Judge wrote. The effect of an act produced egotistically, against the great law of harmony, as opposed to that initiated by altruism instead of selfishness, cannot fail to be destructive.

In reality the condition is not inevitable. “No one has a right to say that he can do nothing for others, on any pretext whatever,” Theosophical pioneer H. P. Blavatsky explains in her Key to Theosophy. The poor widow in the Synoptic Gospels gives everything she had, she points out, while others give only a small portion of their own wealth: “A cup of cold water given in time to a thirsty wayfarer

“is a nobler duty and more worth than a dozen dinners given away, out of season, to men who can afford to pay for them.”

♥

Cold Water

Following Mme. Blavatsky’s death in 1891, an editorial published in the New York Daily Tribune (founded by Horace Greeley) said of her life and work: “Madame Blavatsky held that the regeneration of mankind must be based upon the development of altruism.”

“In this she was at one with the greatest thinkers, not alone of the present day, but of all time,” the Editorial acknowledged.

“And, it is becoming more and more apparent, at one with the strongest spiritual tendencies of the age. This alone would entitle her teachings to the candid and serious consideration of all who respect the influences that make for righteousness.”

Dogs that Know When Their Owners are Coming Home

Science Set Free

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

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

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

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

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

— Deepak Chopra, San Francisco Chronicle

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

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

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

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

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

Science was Spiritual, and Religion was Scientific

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

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

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

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

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

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

∞

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

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

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

§

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

Near Death Journeys into the Afterlife

WHEN a neurosurgeon found himself in a coma, he experienced things he never thought possible—a journey to the afterlife.

“Dr. Eben Alexander says he’s not the first person to have discovered evidence that consciousness exists beyond the body,” notes Newsweek Magazine in a feature article.

“Brief, wonderful glimpses of this realm are as old as human history.”

“Modern physics tells us that the universe is a unity—that it is undivided,” Dr. Alexander wrote in the Newsweek October 15 2012 cover story.

“Though we seem to live in a world of separation and difference,” he writes, “science tells us that beneath the surface, every object and event in the universe is completely woven up with every other object and event. There is no true separation.”

“In some sense man is a microcosm of the universe,” wrote David Bohm — legendary American quantum physicist known for his theory of an “Implicate Order,” a universe of undivided wholeness—”therefore what man is, is a clue to the universe.”

“We are enfolded in the universe,” Bohm says. Theosophy agrees. “We know of no eastern philosophy that teaches that ‘matter originated out of Spirit,’ Blavatsky wrote:

“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.”

Theosophy also asserts what neurologists and physicists are now beginning to verify — that there is no special location of consciousness in the brain. Consciousness exists throughout the brain, and the body.

The mind actually lives independently with its own energetic matrix interpenetrating the physical body, using the brain, heart and other organs and cells as its toolkit on this plane.

“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.”

Soul Mates: an Irresistible Past Life Impulse

Blake: Reunion of Soul and Body

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Breath

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

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