Fortune Teller
THE proverbial phrase “time and tide wait for no man” is usually attributed to Geoffrey Chaucer, known as the Father of English literature.
Chaucer’s genius at understanding human nature made him a great poet yet probably would not claim to read ‘the grand clock of the Universe,’ as a deific time-keeper.
That grand timekeeper “points to another hour,” William Q. Judge provocatively wrote (A Year on the Path): “and now Man must seize the key in his hands and himself — as a whole — open the gate.”
“Let us then together enter upon another year, fearing nothing, assured of strength in the Union of Brotherhood. For how can we fear death, or life, or any horror or evil, at any place or time, when we well know that even death itself is a part of the dream which we are weaving before our eyes.”
And even recognizing the orderly process of seasons on Earth, most of us would not accept that any universal time-keeper like Karma exists. Yet
we observe these daily in our lives — the seasons, tides of the ocean, the biological clocks that pervade our bodies.
Thus it can be argued we do own a piece of the larger puzzle — in the sequential events of our personal lives. By diligent self-reflection, meditation and intuition, we ought to be able to see glimpses of their purpose, and gradually arrange the pieces of the karmic puzzle into a meaningful picture.
Karmic Waves
Such digging may be as close as we can get to knowing and managing our personal Karma, if not the World’s destiny. Esoteric Theosophical philosophy teaches that Past, Present, and Future represent a ‘compound’ time.
Indeed, Buddha’s dying words reportedly were: “all compounds are perishable,” (i.e. but temporary illusions.)
Thus we ought to seize every stray event in our lives, and attempt to extract their true meaning as Judge wrote: “Man must seize the key in his hands and himself — as a whole — open the gate.”
The great Sage Patanjali in his Aphorisms declared: “A great and most subtle knowledge springs from the discrimination that follows upon concentration of the mind performed with regard to the relation between moments and their order.” (The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali)
Patanjali
On this knowledge Mr. Judge commented:
“Patanjali speaks of ultimate divisions of time which cannot be further divided, and of the order in which they precede and succeed each other. It is asserted that a perception of these minute periods can be acquired, and the result will be that he who discriminates thus goes on to greater and wider perception of principles in nature which are so recondite that modern philosophy does not even know of their existence.”
Karma is not subject to time, and therefore he who knows what is the ultimate division of time in this Universe knows Karma. (6)
Aphorisms on Karma
by William Q. Judge
Wheels of Destiny
In the realm of ‘noumena (or the primary causal plane), H. P. Blavatsky noted these three aspects of time have no separate reality, and according to Mahayana Buddhism:
The Past time is the Present time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into existence, still is.
(The Secret Doctrine Vol. 1:43)
“The second assertion of the Secret Doctrine,” Blavatsky explained, “is the absolute universality of that law of periodicity, of flux and reflux, ebb and flow, which physical science has observed and recorded in all departments of nature.
“An alternation such as that of Day and Night, Life and Death, Sleeping and Waking, is a fact so common, so perfectly universal and without exception, that it is easy to comprehend that in it we see one of the absolutely fundamental laws of the universe.”
The Secret Doctrine: Three Fundamentals
All Seeing Eye of Karma
One of Mme. Blavatsky’s Teachers (Mahatma K.H.) wrote: “I feel even irritated at having to use these three clumsy words — past, present and future!” Adding they are:
Miserable concepts of the objective phases of the Subjective Whole, they are about as ill adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving.
Karmic Agent
Mme. Blavatsky wrote: “Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced; but ‘lies asleep.'”
“The real person or thing does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its appearance in the material form to its disappearance from the earth. It is these ‘sum-totals’ that exist from eternity in the “future,” and pass by degrees through matter, to exist for eternity in the ‘past.’”
(H. P. Blavatsky: The Secret Doctrine 1:37)
Seeing the Future
To the uninitiated concepts of duration and time Blavatsky points out, “are all derived from our sensations according to the laws of Association.” And because they are “inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge” they are superficial and only temporal tools.
Because rationalist views ignore psychic experience, they must eventually fall away in the face of thousands of reported cases such as the near-death experience. Today precognition is validated by new experimental research data in parapsychology.
Movie: Minority Report – (Precog)
Announcing the publication of a controversial work by Cornell researcher Daryl Bem in a 2003 article published in The New York Times, Dr. Bem purports to have demonstrated precognition in a series of experiments. Bem studied over 1000 people and looked for proof that future events affected past behavior, or retro causation.
His research was analyzed using standard statistical techniques. Using standard measures, Bem’s research indeed finds a causal link between future events and past behavior (or thoughts?)
Buddha
“Esoterically, thought is more responsible and punishable than act. But exoterically it is the reverse. Therefore, in ordinary human law, an assault is more severely punished than the thought or intention, i.e., the threat, whereas Karmically it is the contrary.” – (H. P. Blavatsky, Transactions of the Blavatsky Lodge)
“But why should this be the case? It is because ‘thought is the real plane of action’ – as William Q. Judge and Robert Crosbie have often said – and that our physical and bodily actions are simply the eventual outworking on the physical plane of the real action, which has already been formed and formulated on the mental plane.” – (Blavatsky Theosophy Group UK)
Down the Rabbit Hole
Clocks are useful for getting to meetings on time. Otherwise, time in this sense, being only the “panoramic succession of our [ordinary] states of consciousness,” is therefore reductionist—and has only materialistic value.
Ground-level experience reveals only the outer edge of the rabbit hole, and keeps us blind to the mysteries hidden beneath — the experience which leads us to the sum-total of existence. The frontier consciousness sciences emerging today offer an exciting prospect.
“I’m late for a very important date.” 1865 edition of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Charles Dodgson (alias Lewis Carroll), published by MacMillan and Co. Drawn by John Tenniel.
In Alice’s new and strange universe of the mind the Red Queen tells her:
“You must run fast just to
stay in one place.”
The eye-popping series of progressive awakenings experienced by Alice surely led her and her readers to a greater appreciation of the mysterious and the paradoxical. We find The Secret Doctrine [Vol. 1, p.40] mirroring the Alice experience:
“As we rise in the scale of development we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities, and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached ‘reality;’ but only when we shall have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from the delusions produced by Maya [illusion].”
Alice in Wonderland
H. P. Blavatsky declared: “Woe to those who live without suffering.
Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without a change.
“And how can there be any change for the better without proportionate suffering during the preceding stage? Is it not those only who have learnt the deceptive value of earthly hopes and the illusive allurements of external nature who are destined to solve the great problems of life, pain, and death?”
‘Presentiment’
Senior scientist Dean Radin, of The Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), is a rigorous scientific explorer who boldly goes where the establishment won’t, methodically measuring the ‘immeasurable’. In this clip he explains his ongoing experiments showing evidence of “presentiment” or precognition. With every thought we think, whether it is with the intent of future objective action or not, Theosophy says — we are emitting Karmic energy and setting causes in motion which, like all causes, will eventually have to have their corresponding due effect.
“Presentiment,” a term used by Dr. Dean Radin, senior scientist of IONS fame, is a feeling that something strange or unusual is about to happen. Radin got the idea “to monitor a person’s skin conductance before, during, and after viewing emotional and calm pictures, and then see if the autonomic nervous system responded appropriately before the picture appeared.”
Forest for the Trees
Objective time and reality always appear in a linear frame, and as the legendary punster of the Yankee’s baseball team, Yogi Berra, once quipped:
“I knew I was going to take the wrong train,
so I left early.”
🙂 !
Berra sensed there was more than meets the eye when he made that playful pun at the phenomenon of precognition!
Yogi Berra
The Mind’s Eye
The author and diarist Anais Nin famously remarked:
We don’t see things as they are,
we see things as we are.
Anaïs Nin
If what “we are” is determined solely by our five senses, then we see only what’s inside a closed box. For environmentalist woodsman John Muir stuffy boxes were anathema, he believed instead that
The clearest way to the Universe is through a forest wilderness.
The ‘Compound time’ cannot be separated from the future which is an essential part of the mystery wilderness within us. The illusion occurs we are separate from Nature, and then we are unable to see the greater forest for the trees, though they are one.
A Flower in a Crannied Wall
The poet/artist William Blake saw “a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower,” that most of us would probably have passed unnoticed. (Auguries of Innocence)
But even such sublime ethics “must give room to still further absolute perfection,” Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine, “to a higher standard of excellence — just as a perfect flower must cease to be a perfect flower and die, in order to grow into a perfect fruit.”
All instruction is but a finger pointing to the moon, and those whose gaze is fixed upon the pointer will never see beyond. Even let him catch sight of the moon, and still he cannot see its beauty. – Osho
Non-Separateness
Albert Einstein’s main objection to quantum mechanics, as understood then, was that it provided no reasonable explanation of the world, and in some sense denied what many believed it means to truly exist. While walking with his biographer physicist Abraham Pais, Pais reported Einstein in frustration asked: “whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it.”
Einstein also complained in a letter to friend and fellow physicist, Max Born, who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics:
You believe in the God that plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture.
Einstein’s complicated genius included, nevertheless, a universal and compassionate thinker, who said: “A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space.”
Small Slice of the Universe
And he wrote of a human being “that experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us,” he wrote, “restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be,” he wrote:A
to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
The Mind’s Eye
Non-Duality
Universal unity or non-duality is a popular topic of discussion today. There is a website devoted to it (nonduality.com), and a blog and even a conference October 21-25: titled Science And Non-Duality.
It’s the same concept that engaged Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine. Everything is alive and conscious in “Esoteric philosophy,” she wrote, and “life we look upon as ‘the one form of existence, manifesting in what is called matter—or, as in man, what, incorrectly separating them, we name Spirit, Soul and Matter.”
One Form of Existence
Further: “Matter is the vehicle for the manifestation of soul on this plane of existence,
and soul is the vehicle on a higher plane for the manifestation of spirit, and these three are a trinity synthesized by Life, which pervades them all.”
“The idea of universal life is one of those ancient conceptions which are returning to the human mind in this century, as a consequence of its liberation from anthropomorphic theology.”
Seeing the Future
The mysterious science of “dowsing.” How does the unconscious know the answer to what you’re seeking?
The Paradoxical “I”
If we “are all one being” according to The Secret Doctrine. Yet our conscious mind often fails to recognize it. We may solve the problem of duality, paradoxically, by first focusing our full attention on the “I” the center of the “I am I” consciousness, at every moment our attention permits.
Once the illusion separateness or limitation becomes obvious, it falls away, and then we begin to appreciate the ‘not-I’ — and by this practice, paradoxically, we are gradually compelled to attend to the greater wholeness within which the smaller ‘I’ exists. As Lao-Tze put it: “The Tao that can be expressed in words is not the eternal Tao.”
Fortune Teller
“Consciousness is defined as that, whatever that is, which is aware of these very words right here, right now. …
The student who practices self inquiry keeps his attention focused onto the source of the I-thoughts and I-feelings, whenever they arise.
“Once enlightenment has taken place, the process of self inquiry continues effortlessly. The attention spontaneously reverts to the source at the end of each thought and feeling and there is no need to focus the attention any longer.”
“Sum-Totals”
by H. P. Blavatsky
“TIME is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced — but ‘lies asleep.’
“The present is only a mathematical line which divides that part of eternal duration which we call the future, from that part which we call the past.
“Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains without change—or the same—for the billionth part of a second.”
“And the sensation we have of the actuality of the division of ‘time’ known as the present, comes from the blurring of that momentary glimpse, or succession of glimpses, of things that our senses give us, as those things pass from the region of ideals which we call the future, to the region of memories that we name the past.
Seeing Through the Illusion of Time
“In the same way we experience a sensation of duration in the case of the instantaneous electric spark, by reason of the blurred and continuing impression on the retina. The real person or thing does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its appearance in the material form to its disappearance from the earth.
It is these ‘sum-totals’ that exist from eternity in the ‘future,’ and pass by degrees through matter, to exist for eternity in the ‘past.’
“No one could say that a bar of metal dropped into the sea came into existence as it left the air, and ceased to exist as it entered the water, and that the bar itself consisted only of that cross-section thereof which at any given moment coincided with the mathematical plane that separates, and, at the same time, joins, the atmosphere and the ocean.”
Touching the Future and Past
“Even so of persons and things, which, dropping out of the to-be into the has-been, out of the future into the past—[they]
present momentarily to our senses a cross-section, as it were, of their total selves,
as they pass through time and space (as matter) on their way from one eternity to another: and these two constitute that ‘duration‘ in which alone anything has true existence, were our senses but able to cognize it there.”
One With Nature
ζ
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CONSCIOUSNESS is at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.
Ω
ASSUREDLY no ordinary human being could claim to read “the grand clock of the Universe,” and even recognizing the orderly process of seasons on Earth, most wouldn’t accept that a universal time-keeper even exists. 
Theosophy Watch 