Theosophy Watch

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.”

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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.

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.

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Consciousness is Universal

“Even our increasingly sophisticated technology for peering inside the brain has, disappointingly,” Geddes writes, agreeably with Theosophy, “failed to reveal a structure that could be the seat of consciousness.

Yet the esoteric wisdom, ever a true and honest system, “checks the discoveries of modern exact science,” notes Blavatsky, and demonstrates

“…some of them to be necessarily correct, since they are found corroborated in the ancient records.”

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“To use a Metaphor from the Secret Books, which will convey the idea still more clearly,” Blavatsky establishes in The Secret Doctrine (1:4): “an out-breathing of the ‘unknown essence’ produces the world; and an inhalation causes it to disappear.”

“This process has been going on from all eternity, and our present universe is but one of an infinite series, which had no beginning and will have no end.”

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"The Big Bang was big, but it wasn't the beginning, Cambridge University mathematical physicist Neil Turok says. He theorizes that the universe is engaged in an eternal cycle of expansion and contraction: There have been many Big Bangs, and there will be many more." (Cambridge University)

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Some modern physicists like Cambridge University’s Neil Turok (above), in a radical new theory want to amend the standard big bang.

They are suggesting it is a cyclic event that consists of regularly repeating big bangs.

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The ancients recognized universal periodicity all along, the Second Fundamental Proposition of The Secret Doctrine, a universal law which is described in part:

“…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.”

All life is indeed suffused with so-called ‘god-stuff’ due to the ubiquity of that supra-physical One Absolute BE-NESS — the First Fundamental Proposition which is “inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point” throughout the universe, and every being in it.

“Say Cheese”

The Theosophical concept of the ‘expanding universe,’ analogous to a image gradually emerging from light through a negative in a photographer’s darkroom, according to Secret Doctrine cosmology (1:63). The s0-called ‘expansion’ was, Blavatsky asserts:

“…not an increase in size—for infinite extension admits of no enlargement—it was a change of condition.”

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And this periodical “Great Breath” of the universe, the great out-breathing and in-breathing, is the core of the occult teaching—

“…the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine.”

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“Its one absolute attribute, which is itself, eternal, ceaseless Motion, is called in esoteric parlance the ‘Great Breath,’ — which is the perpetual motion of the universe, in the sense of limitless, ever-present space.”

Beginning with this universal perspective, as does Plato ‘deductively’  (from universals to particulars), we will begin see how this process continues down the line to individual consciousness, in its various states, experienced at every moment in daily life in man and nature.

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