Consciousness is Faster than Light or Atoms

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

Knowing very little of its spiritual essence, we define consciousness by names we give to its various ‘states’ — waking, sleeping, intuitive, meditating, angry, depressed, happy or sad.

We experience perhaps hundreds of such random mental and emotional states every day, no wiser in understanding the hidden matrix, or field of consciousness in which they are embedded.

Material Science approaches nature only “through her appearance,” H. P. Blavatsky writes in The Secret Doctrine (1:610), and “that appearance is always deceitful on the physical plane,” adding that Science:

“…refuses to blend physics with metaphysics, the body with its informing soul and spirit, which they prefer ignoring.”

Ω

Nevertheless, physics and metaphysics were once deeply entwined, resulting in the natural philosophy of the Greeks, but is given the cold shoulder now by a science that prefers computer simulations, and huge particle collider machines to the natural world.

Searching for the God Particle

Occult Science, on the other hand, rejecting the Cartesian system, describes the body-mind consciousness as the lower end of a universal, spiritual substrate referred to as “BE-NESS” in The Secret Doctrine—symbolized by two pre-manifested aspects cited as “abstract space” (bare subjectivity), and “abstract motion” (representing unconditioned consciousness.)

“Consciousness has long been one of the great mysteries of life, the universe and everything,” writes Linda Geddes in the 29 November 2011 NewScientist.

Ω

Lucid dreaming, being conscious of dreaming while dreaming, best exemplifies this multi-layered conscious now-presence. Perhaps H. P. Blavatsky expressed it best with a word she coined to describe absolute consciousness —”BE-NESS”— “the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine is this metaphysical One Absolute.” (Vol. 1:14)

Among all earthly creatures, who might most exemplify this enigmatic quality, if not our feline friends?

Ψ

Be-ness

One of Rupert Sheldrake’s experiments on the unexplained powers of animals is dramatized by the case of David Waithe’s cat Godzilla!

Biologist author of more than 80 scientific papers and ten books, Sheldrake is a former Research Fellow of the Royal Society. In this clip Sheldrake discusses Godzilla, a cat that knows when his owner is calling. 🙂

LIFE: The Greatest Problem of Modern Science

Born Again

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

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

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

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

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

(The Secret Doctrine 1:238)

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

(“Moxon’s Master” – Ambrose Bierce)

What is Life?

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

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

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

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

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

The Anthropic Principle

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

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

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

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

Biocentrism

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

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

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

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

The Milky Way Galaxy

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

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

The Emotional World of Animals

Best Friends

ANIMALS are just instinctual robots, many modern scientists believe. But this is not the conclusion of some of their own controlled scientific studies.

Such studies suggest there are powerful spiritual and intellectual forces embedded in all the kingdoms of nature, as Theosophy maintains.

In the 17th Century, René Descartes, is dubbed “the father of modern Western philosophy.” And according to Wikipedia:  

“Much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day.”  But the determined intellectual founder of the “Cartesian Theory,” started his followers believing all the wrong way about consciousness, soul and spirit.

“Descartes held the living animal as being simply an automaton,” H. P. Blavatsky commented, “a ‘well wound up clock-work,’ according to Malebranche” — then she countered with this pointed bit of sarcasm:

One who adopts the Cartesian theory about the animal, would do as well to accept at once the views of the modern materialists.

“But if the animal is an ‘automaton,’ why not Man?” Blavatsky exclaimed. “Thus we find metaphysical Descartes as inconsistent as any one.”

René Descartes

“The animal may think and know it thinks, the more keenly that it cannot speak, and express its thoughts,” Blavatsky declared: “One thing is shown however by the exact observations of naturalists and that is, that the animal is endowed with intelligence; and once this is settled, we have but to repeat Thomas Aquinas’ definition of intelligence – ‘the prerogative of man’s immortal soul’ – to see that the same is due to the animal.”

(H. P. Blavatsky, Have Animals Souls?)

♥

Koko and Tabby

A woman who clearly did not subscribe to the Cartesian theory, found a young lion injured in the forest on the brink of death. In her compassion for the animal she took it home with her and nursed it back to health.

Later she made arrangements with an animal rescue group to take the lion.

Some time passed before the woman had a chance to visit. A video was taken when she walked up to the lion’s cage to see how he was doing. Watch the lion’s reaction when he sees her!

The World’s Greatest Secret: What is Life?

Soul reborn in a new body.

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

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

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

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

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

(The Secret Doctrine 1:238)

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

(“Moxon’s Master” – Ambrose Bierce)

What is Life?

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

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

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

The Anthropic Principle

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

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

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

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

Biocentric

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

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

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

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

The Milky Way Galaxy

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

Behind Your Brain, A Master Planner

Jill Bolte Taylor

BREAKING up is hard to do especially when it comes to ingrained scientific worldviews.

Even after they have betrayed us, dogmatic beliefs still cling like burrs to our psyche and brains, despite all logic.

Recall the insistent flat earth and geocentric crowd, and creationist belief that the Earth is only ten thousand years old.

The list is very long. Science is littered with the remains of once sacred cows.

Until only a few years ago, for example, it was asserted that the brain cannot grow new cells —

when they are gone they
are gone for good!

Challenging this cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, science now confirms that in fact adult brain cells keep growing after all! H. P. Blavatsky made short work of the errors of science in explaining the occult teachings:

“The brain is the instrument of waking consciousness and every conscious mental picture formed means change and destruction of the atoms [neurons?] of the brain.” Yet, “in ordinary intellectual activity, moves on well beaten paths in the brain, and does not compel sudden adjustments and destructions in its substance.”

Neurofeedback

She then noted that a “new kind of mental effort calls for something very different — the carving out of ‘new brain paths’, the ranking in different order of the little brain lives.”

•  The “Secret Doctrine” and its Study (P.G. Bowen) – Being extracts from the notes of personal teachings given by H.P. Blavatsky to private pupils.

“Memory has no seat, no special organ of its own in the human brain,” Blavatsky wrote in — it has seats in every organ of the body. The seat of memory, then, is assuredly neither here nor there, but “everywhere throughout the human body.”

•  H. P. Blavatsky, Psychic & Noetic Action

Neuroplasticity

Modern studies in people recovering from stroke also provided support for neuroplasticity, as regions of the brain remained healthy could sometimes take over, at least in part, functions that had been destroyed.”

The ideas she presented were no less than a startling preview of our modern science’s newly understood doctrine of neuroplasticity.

Especially the “brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.” This fact in occult science began to be recognized by modern science thanks to the findings of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, called “the father of sensory substitution and brain plasticity.” These “now commonly accepted concepts, [were]  novel ideas when [he] first conceived of them [70 years after Blavatsky] in the 1960’s.”

“In the 1960s, Paul Bach-y-Rita invented a device that was tested on a small number of people, and involved a person sitting in a chair, in which were embedded nubs that were made to vibrate in ways that translated images received in a camera, allowing a form of vision via sensory substitution.

(Wikipedia – Neuroplasticity)

Tree Bark

A musician needs his instrument, a painter her canvas. This requirement of a physical material vehicle is explained in The Secret Doctrine‘s first Fundamental Proposition: “…it is only through a vehicle of matter that consciousness wells up as ‘I am I,’

a physical basis being necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity.

A central nervous system connected to a physical brain and body are indispensable to complete our human evolutionary experience. Just as the invisible “zeros and ones” of a digital software program, for example, must be connected to a physical computer or they cannot be read or used.

The brain is such a complex thing, both physically and metaphysically, that it is like a tree whose bark you can remove layer by layer, each layer being different from all the others, and each having its own special work, function, and properties.

– H. P. Blavatsky
(Transactions, Appendix on Dreams)

Neurons

The world of brain science was forever changed. Yet, “the scale of change [in the brain] is much smaller than what goes on during the critical period of development,” said a study co-author Elly Nedivi, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) —

but the fact that it goes on at all,
is earth-shattering.

The truth is that neuroscientists today are completely baffled by how the brain is able to organize itself so perfectly.

Yet, the word “science” comes from the Latin word “scire” which means to know. “Science” is supposed to be a systematic, organized way of investigating the world. The catch is when specialized learning turns into a dogmatic worldview, it then becomes an end-in-itself — distorting what might have resulted in a more holistic truth.

With persistent reference to occult science Blavatsky insisted (The Secret Doctrine 1:14), that “consciousness is inconceivable to us apart from change,”  and, “motion best symbolises change, its essential characteristic.”

Love is Divine Magic: the Heart Rules

Mother and Child

LOVE in its most unselfish form was described by H. P. Blavatsky as the “absence of every ill-feeling, selfishness, charity, goodwill to all beings.”

The alchemy of such enlightened ethics unleashes the power of an un-stoppable universal force.

“The powers and forces of spirit,” Blavatsky declared in her article Practical Occultism, “lend themselves only to the perfectly pure in heart — and this is DIVINE MAGIC.”

Kamadeva, a Sanskrit word, is defined in The Theosophical Glossary as “the first conscious, all-embracing desire for universal good, love, and the first feeling of infinite compassion and mercy for all that lives and feels, needs help and kindness. Only later did kama become the power that gratifies desire on the animal plane.”

“Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind,” (Secret Doctrine 2:176) — “and which sages, searching with their intellect, discovered to be the bond which connects Entity with Non-Entity.” 

That power arose,” Blavatsky said, “in the consciousness of the creative One Force, as soon as it came into life and being as a ray from the Absolute.” It was also she who, in the article Love with an Object, fervently declared:

Love can exist without form, but no form can exist without Love.

♥

Reincarnation

Devotion arose out of a feeling she wrote, “and became the first and foremost motor in man’s nature — for it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us.”

In her first Letter to a Theosophical Convention in 1888, she wrote: “He who teaches Theosophy preaches the gospel of goodwill, and the converse of this is true also — he who preaches the gospel of goodwill, teaches Theosophy.”

Neuroplasticity: Carving Out New Brain Paths

Jill Bolte Taylor

BREAKING up is hard to do especially when it comes to ingrained scientific worldviews.

Even after they have betrayed us, dogmatic style beliefs still cling like burrs to our psyche, and our brains, despite all logic.

Recall the insistent flat earth and geocentric crowd, and creationist belief that the Earth is only ten thousand years old.

The list is very long. Science is littered with the remains of once sacred cows.

Until only a few years ago, for example, it was asserted that the brain cannot grow new cells —

when they are gone they
are gone for good!

Challenging this cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, science now confirms that in fact adult brain cells keep growing after all!

H. P. Blavatsky explained: “The brain is the instrument of waking consciousness and every conscious mental picture formed means change and destruction of the atoms [neurons?] of the brain.” Yet, “in ordinary intellectual activity, moves on well beaten paths in the brain, and does not compel sudden adjustments and destructions in its substance.”

She then noted that a “new kind of mental effort calls for something very different — the carving out of ‘new brain paths’, the ranking in different order of the little brain lives.”

Her idea was, unmistakably, a preemptive nod to our modern science’s newly understood doctrine of “neuroplasticity” —

“… the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.”(Wikipedia) This fact of occult science began to be recognized thanks to the findings of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, called “the father of sensory substitution and brain plasticity.”

These “now commonly accepted concepts, [were]  novel ideas when [he] first conceived of them [70 years after Blavatsky] in the 1960’s.” (Salus University)

Neurons

The world of brain science was forever changed. Yet, “the scale of change [in the brain] is much smaller than what goes on during the critical period of development,” said a study co-author Elly Nedivi, a neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) —

“but the fact that it goes on at all,
is earth-shattering.”

The truth is that neuroscientists today are completely baffled by how the brain is able to organize itself so perfectly.

Yet, the word “science” comes from the Latin word “scire” which means to know. “Science” is supposed to be a systematic, organized way of investigating the world. The catch is when specialized learning turns into a dogmatic worldview, it then becomes an end-in-itself — distorting what might have resulted in a more holistic truth.

With persistent reference to occult science Blavatsky insisted (SD 1:14), that “consciousness is inconceivable to us apart from change,”  and, “motion best symbolises change, its essential characteristic.”

“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.

Untying the Knots of the Heart — a Spiritual Transforming

Transforming

THAT all humans possess an immortal soul is a common belief of humanity, but to this Theosophy adds we do not just ‘have’ souls, but each of us is a soul.

Further that we are an indivisible and indissoluble part of the consciousness of great nature which is also, by degrees, both conscious and intelligent.

And flowering into an Adept like Jesus or Buddha and manifesting those soul powers is perfectly possible to all human beings.

The driving power behind such development is what the ancients called the “Father which is in secret” (Matthew ch. vi. v. 6) in its esoteric meaning, and is not an extra-cosmic god.

“That ‘Father’ is in man himself,” Mme. Blavatsky wrote in the Key to Theosophy, unrestricted by age, social status or gender.

Our inner spiritual self “is the only God we can have cognizance of,” and she asks: “how can this be otherwise? — Grant us our postulate that God is a universally diffused, infinite principle, and how can man alone escape from being soaked through by, and in, the Deity?”

Spiritual Transformation

“We call our ‘Father in heaven’ that deific essence of which we are cognizant within us, in our heart and spiritual consciousness, and which has nothing to do with the anthropomorphic conception we may form of it in our physical brain or its fancy:”

“Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of (the absolute) God dwelleth in you?” Yet, let no man anthropomorphize that essence in us. Let no Theosophist, if he would hold to divine, not human truth, say that this ‘God in secret’ listens to, or is distinct from, either finite man or the infinite essence — for all are one.”

God is Love, God is Life

Born Again

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

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

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

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

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

(The Secret Doctrine 1:238)

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

(“Moxon’s Master” – Ambrose Bierce)

What is Life?

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

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

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

The Anthropic Principle

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

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

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

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

Biocentric

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

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

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

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

The Milky Way Galaxy

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

What Rules Everything: The Field Effect

Body Fields

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Astral Light

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

One Unity

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

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

Human Magnets

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

Aura Fields

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

Rooted in The Field

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

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

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

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

Invisible Patterns

Paracelsus

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

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

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

Energy fields of fingers

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

Morphogenic Fields

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

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

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

How the Brain Works

“The brain is such a complex thing, both physically and metaphysically, that it is like a tree whose bark you can remove layer by layer, each layer being different from all the others, and each having its own special work, function, and properties.”

– H. P. Blavatsky
(Transactions, Appendix on Dreams)

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

Brain Fields

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

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

(David Pratt, Exploring Theosophy)

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

The Heart Field

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

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

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

Earth’s Magnetic Field

Not Instinctual Machines: Animals Feel and Think

Best Friends

ANIMALS are just instinctual machines, many people believe. But this is not the conclusion of some new controlled scientific studies.

Such studies suggest there are powerful spiritual and intellectual forces embedded in all the kingdoms of nature, as Theosophy maintains.

In the 17th Century, René Descartes, is dubbed “the father of modern Western philosophy.” And according to Wikipedia:  “Much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day.”  But our errant intellectual patriarch, as will be shown, started us believing all the wrong way about consciousness. soul and spirit.

“Descartes held the living animal as being simply an automaton,” H. P. Blavatsky commented, “a ‘well wound up clock-work,’ according to Malebranche” — then countered with pointed sarcasm:

One who adopts the Cartesian theory about the animal, would do as well to accept at once the views of the modern materialists.

“But if the animal is an ‘automaton,’ why not Man?” Blavatsky argues. “Thus we find metaphysical Descartes as inconsistent as any one.”

René Descartes

“The animal may think and know it thinks, the more keenly that it cannot speak, and express its thoughts,” Blavatsky insisted. “One thing is shown however by the exact observations of naturalists and that is, that the animal is endowed with intelligence; and once this is settled, we have but to repeat Thomas Aquinas’ definition of intelligence – ‘the prerogative of man’s immortal soul’ – to see that the same is due to the animal.”

(H. P. Blavatsky, Have Animals Souls?)

♥

Koko and Tabby

A woman who clearly did not subscribe to the Cartesian theory, found a young lion injured in the forest on the brink of death. In her compassion for the animal she took it home with her and nursed it back to health.

Later she made arrangements with an animal rescue group to take the lion.

Some time passed before the woman had a chance to visit. A video was taken when she walked up to the lion’s cage to see how he was doing. Watch the lion’s reaction when he sees her!

This is Your Brain, Infinitely Elastic

Jill Bolte Taylor

BREAKING up is hard to do especially when it comes to ingrained scientific worldviews.

Even after they have betrayed us, dogmatic style beliefs still cling like burrs to our psyche, and our brains, despite all logic.

Recall the insistent flat earth and geocentric crowd, and creationist belief that the Earth is only ten thousand years old.

The list is very long. Science is littered with the remains of once sacred cows.

Until only a few years ago, for example, it was asserted that the brain cannot grow new cells —

when they are gone they
are gone for good?

Challenging the cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, neuroscience now confirms that, in fact, adult brain cells can regrow after all — they can and do replace and even increase themselves as necessary!

H. P. Blavatsky explained: “The brain is the instrument of waking consciousness and every conscious mental picture formed means change and destruction of the atoms [neurons?] of the brain.” Yet, “in ordinary intellectual activity, moves on well beaten paths in the brain, and does not compel sudden adjustments and destructions in its substance.”

She then noted that a “new kind of mental effort calls for something very different — the carving out of ‘new brain paths’, the ranking in different order of the little brain lives.”

Her idea was, unmistakably, a preemptive nod to our modern science’s newly understood doctrine of “neuroplasticity” —

“… the brain’s ability to reorganize itself by forming new neural connections throughout life.”(Wikipedia) This fact of occult science began to be recognized thanks to the findings of Dr. Paul Bach-y-Rita, called “the father of sensory substitution and brain plasticity.”

How the Soul of Leopard Diabolo became Spirit

Diabolo

SOUL energy exists in both humans and animals, and when they communicate on the same level, magic happens.

This is the incredible story of how a dangerous leopard called Diabolo was tamed by an animal whisperer, and then renamed Spirit.

It’s true that animals always try to communicate with humans but we do not have the skills to listen, or more often, are  not listening.

This journey of a panther who was abused in the past is inspiring and touching, and reinforces an important teaching of Theosophy. (See HPB article Have Animals Souls).

The animal whisperer in this story proves humans can talk to animals and understand their needs and wants, including finding out about their past very accurately. It’s amazing what this panther told the animal whisperer was confirmed as true by everyone who knew the panther’s past.

Wrote H. P. Blavatsky, ” the man of science, the most determined materialist, one who proceeds to vivisect a living animal with the utmost coolness, would yet shudder at the thought of laming or torturing to death his fellow man.”

This view of animals contrasts, Theosophy says, with the “adherents of both Hinduism and Buddhism, the oldest religions in the world, who regard the animal world as their ‘younger brothers.'”

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.”

God in a Box, a Hundred Versions of It

CHRISTOS is the Greek word from which the term Christ is derived. It is an archaic term that was applied to every Initiate of a certain degree within the Mystery Temples of old.

St. Paul, echoing the Gnostic belief in the saving grace of the indwelling spiritual essence in man, refers to “the Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Colossians 1:27).

The Christos principle is never some thing or person outside or separate from us. Isis-Osiris is the symbolic image of spirit guarding the good and holy mind of humankind.

Every human being is a potential Christ, the unfolding of the Christ-life a major feature of the Gospels, esoterically understood. Christos is called “the WAY,” the glorified Spirit of Truth, and the reunion which makes the soul (the Son) One with the (Father) Spirit. But in truth, gender as we understand it plays no part in this drama of spiritual awakening.

“There is only one religion, though
there are a hundred versions of it.”

 – George Bernard Shaw

Christ is confirmed, by H. P. Blavatsky, as “the divine principle in every human being.” She also wrote in her article The Esoteric Character of the Gospels: “He who strives to resurrect the Spirit crucified in him by his own terrestrial passions, and buried deep in the ‘sepulchre’ of his sinful flesh; he who has the strength to roll back the stone of matter from the door of his own inner sanctuary, he has the risen Christ in him.”

Kristas

As with the Christos, the Father Spirit, God, is never a separate being, but exists everywhere. “Our DEITY is neither in a paradise, nor in a particular tree, building, or mountain,” Blavatsky wrote, “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.”

“The worship of the dead-letter in the Bible,” Mme. Blavatsky wrote in the Key to Theosophy, “is but one more form of idolatry, nothing better. Hence, the Bible is not the ‘Word of God,’ but contains at best the words of fallible men, and imperfect teachers. Yet read esoterically, it does contain, if not the whole truth, still, ‘nothing but the truth,’ under whatever allegorical garb. Only: Quot homines tot sententiœ.”

Why Love Matters, and Why it Should

Shadow and Light

LIGHT and shadow always appear together, and this is clearly as it must be. Our perception of everyday objects is dependent on those ubiquitously persistent, often paradoxical twins.

This point-counterpoint dance rules our everyday awareness. Shift one of the duo on life’s canvas, and the other balances with a corresponding change. Shadows lengthen as the sun sets, and stars shine as the heavens darken.

This phenomenon occurs because at the moment of manifestation the universe is pervaded by duality according to Theosophical cosmogenesis (SD1:15) — which explains why “duality supervenes in the contrast of Spirit (or consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object,” as H. P. Blavatsky wrote.

Spirit on its own, like a horseless rider, is helpless on Earth say these metaphysical axioms, and a riderless horse similarly lacks purpose, direction, and love. “Though one and the same thing in their origin, Spirit and Matter,” say the teachings (SD 1:247), “begin each of them their evolutionary progress in contrary directions —

“Spirit falling gradually into matter, and the latter ascending to its original condition, that of a pure spiritual substance.”

“Both are inseparable, yet ever separated,” Blavatsky wrote. “Two like poles will always repel each other, while the negative and the positive are mutually attracted, so do Spirit and Matter stand to each other — the two poles of the same homogeneous substance, the root-principle of the universe.”

“On almost every page of the Bhagavad-Gita we are instructed only to direct our love to that which is eternal in every form,” as Blavatsky wrote in LOVE WITH AN OBJECT:

“… and let the form itself be a matter of secondary consideration.“

We must rise above the pairs of opposites, seeking to unite with their essence, the Source. Love and compassion are the keys that extricate our minds and hearts from external forms, from the myriad illusions on the lower planes of consciousness.

Time and space are also paradoxical principles. Pain extends our perception of passing time, for example, and the invisible air, gravity, and electromagnetic radiations fill the seemingly empty space around us.

Because we see through it, we believe that space is empty. Yet a fundamental principle in The Secret Doctrine (1:289), states: “there is not one finger’s breath (angula) of void Space in the whole Boundless (Universe).”

For example, we couldn’t see the words without this background page, nor could we see them if the words and page were the same color.

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.

Spiritual Transmutation: Untying the Knots of the Heart

THAT all humans possess an immortal soul is a common belief of humanity, but to this Theosophy adds we do not just ‘have’ souls, but each of us is a soul.

Further that we are an indivisible and indissoluble part of the consciousness of great nature which is also, by degrees, both conscious and intelligent.

And flowering into an Adept like Jesus or Buddha and manifesting those soul powers, is perfectly possible to all human beings.

The driving power behind such development is what the ancients called the “Father which is in secret” (Matthew ch. vi. v. 6) in its esoteric meaning, and is not an extra-cosmic god.

“That ‘Father’ is in man himself,” Mme. Blavatsky wrote in the Key to Theosophy, unrestricted by age, social status or gender.

Our inner spiritual self “is the only God we can have cognizance of,” and she asks: “how can this be otherwise? — Grant us our postulate that God is a universally diffused, infinite principle, and how can man alone escape from being soaked through by, and in, the Deity?”

“We call our ‘Father in heaven’ that deific essence of which we are cognizant within us, in our heart and spiritual consciousness, and which has nothing to do with the anthropomorphic conception we may form of it in our physical brain or its fancy:”

“Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of (the absolute) God dwelleth in you?” Yet, let no man anthropomorphize that essence in us. Let no Theosophist, if he would hold to divine, not human truth, say that this ‘God in secret’ listens to, or is distinct from, either finite man or the infinite essence — for all are one.”

God is Life: Immutable, Omnipresent, Eternal

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

φ

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

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

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