Monthly Archives: August 2009

Visions or Illusions

THE Sanskrit word “Dharana” is defined as “the intense and perfect concentration of the mind upon some one interior object.”

This intense focus should “be accompanied by complete abstraction from everything pertaining to the external Universe, or the world of the senses.”

Further, The Voice of the Silence instructs its students: “from the stronghold of your Soul, chase all your foes away—ambition, anger, hatred, e’en to the shadow of desire—when even you have failed.”

Whenever the Voice of the Silence, or the Bhagavad-Gita, refer to “killing” or “slaying,” this is to be understood a primarily metaphors for control over our physical senses and intellect—and resolving past karma.

Dharana, or focused meditation, is all about slowing the ‘mental noise,’ or what is called the ‘monkey mind,’ and to regain our lost rulership.

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Journey to The Heart

WHEN our Mothers welcomed us back in the house after a long day outside at play, we knew there would be a loving meal waiting for us.

There would also be a soothing bath and a bedtime story. Clean pajamas and sheets were as much Mother’s rule as her unconditional love.

Nature also knows how to care for her human children, but perhaps in these modern, distracting times we have stayed away, and played outside too long.

Enduring our self-created darkness of separation and materialism, Great Nature has always waited patiently for our return home.

Is it because we forget that nature and humanity are really One Being, that we lose our way?

In these often dark times of spirit, we may have overlooked the Golden Rule, or resisted helping others, instead of living unselfishly and harmlessly.

Disease, poverty, hunger and the rise of environmental blights are, it seems, the inevitable result of separation from humanity’s natural, unified state.

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Somewhere Out There

MAINSTREAM scientists looking for the source of consciousness, usually expect it’s origin to be the physical brain.

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

Yet many credible scientific researchers dispute these assumptions. They are not convinced, and are willing to investigate the theory that consciousness is a separate entity from physical structures.

Because their assumptions are often not considered credible, advocates risk being minimalized and shunned by their peers — and what is worse, by their funding sources.

Please note this post was revised, updated and republished. Please click on the following link:

The Flashing Gaze

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The Inner Ruler

THE Cherokee say that “our first teacher is our own heart,” but  mainstream science has brought few apples to that ancient teacher.

Western medical school medicine still sees the heart as only a mechanical pump.

That view is beginning to change. The Medical Community is being challenged to expand its thinking about human biology, health, and wellness.

Leading-edge research in holistic medicine, biophysics, bioenergetics, and biocentrism all point in the same direction – telling us that we are more than just our physical body.

Explaining how we are more, H. P. Blavatsky aserts in The Secret Doctrine that “The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences,”

“… depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.”

Please note: This post has been updated and republished at:

A Coherent Life

New Hands of Healing

hand_pranaThere are many new healing modalities coming into notice today. Scientific research in these areas is challenging the standard model medical establishment, gradually bringing on a shift in the mechanical worldview.

Instead of heaping illness upon incurable illness, this new shift in medicine is reducing our suffering by pulling away the curtain that has been hiding our body’s own internal physician.

There’s a long litany of debilitating uncurables today: arthritis, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, mental illness, diabetes, cystic fibrosis, dementia, AIDS, leukemia, Parkinson’s disease, emphysema, asthma, Alzheimer’s, to name just a few.

What has caused this upsurge? To understand how we got to this critical stage, we call to account the adoption of a mechanical model of the universe. Exposing this mistaken view was H. P. Blavatsky’s great mission.

Speaking to this in the Secret Doctrine she wrote:

Isaac Newton

Isaac Newton

“What is finally that invisible and intangible God in whom we should believe on blind faith? Astronomers who see in gravitation an easy-going solution for many things, and a universal force which allows them to calculate thereby planetary motions, care little about the Cause of Attraction. They call Gravity a law, a cause in itself. We call the forces acting under that name effects, and very secondary effects, too. One day it will be found that the scientific hypothesis does not answer after all –”

That day has finally arrived….

Do We Live in a Mechanical Universe?

The luminaries and thought leaders of the new shift today blame “Newtonian Physics” for the problem. But to be fair to the great man, as Blavatsky was, we should recognize that science took only the husk of what Newton proposed, and left behind the kernel. “Even Newton’s contemporaries got frightened,” she wrote, “at the apparent return of occult causes into the domain of physics.”

So they threw out the baby with the bathwater. The misappropriation of Newton’s idea persists to this day, and should rather be called “Neo-Newtonian Physics.” We present this wonderful video excerpt from “The Living Matrix” with that important disclaimer attached:

Effects vs Causes

Healing, understood physically in science, is the process by which the cells in the body regenerate and repair to reduce the size of a damaged or necrotic area, according to Wikipedia. “Healing incorporates both the removal of necrotic tissue (demolition), and the replacement of this tissue.”

What are the causes of these physical results? It might be a chemical drug, or a vitamin. But it might also include something as yet unknown or unaccepted by modern medical savants. If we are going to find any real and lasting cures, perhaps it is time to look deeper into the causes of dis-ease and not just at the surface effects we see.

In the tradition of Mesmer and Paracelsus, this Living Matrix video clip is an example of one of simplest, yet most effective ancient healing techniques paving the way for a new science of healing:

Healing Demetri

(Excerpted from The Living Matrix)

The Karma Connection

The light of compassion and sincerity is more needed today in the healing professions. Symptom based materialistic medicine does not provide access or answers to the deeper questions of root causes.

“The Ego is the wick and Karma the oil” wrote one of Blavatsky’s adept teachers, noting that the more “oil” in one’s lamp, the longer lasting are the lessons one has to learn in that life.

With a profounder understanding of reincarnation and the laws of karma, we begin to accept responsibility for our own healing as the first step. The root causes and solutions of our painful karma are to be found not in Neo-Newtonian physics, but in Newton’s original spiritual metaphysics. With a karma-based assessment of disease, stagnant emotional, mental and spiritual blocks to healing can in time be cleared away.

In this video, EFT master Carol Look leads a group healing lesson.

Is Karma Only Fatalism?

Karma, according to H. P. Blavatsky, is “the unerring law which adjusts effect to cause, on the physical, mental and spiritual planes of being” (The Key to Theosophy p.201). This is commonly referred to as the law of action and reaction, cause and effect, or sowing and reaping — it is assuredly a law of balance.

During each successive life we exhaust some past karma and accumulate new. Events in lives past and present succeed one another, related by a karmic thread of causation. So one can truthfully say that each of us reflects a continuum of our own creation. To understand how karma works we must bring reincarnation into the picture through insight and intuition — for it is only through reincarnation that our own healing lessons manifest to us in each life.

Arielle Essex

Arielle Essex

Arielle Essex, featured in our last post — diagnosed in the prime of life with a brain tumor — at first personally resented her affliction as “unfair,” and wanted only to “escape the nightmare.” Gradually, though, she began to shift her attention within instead of without. She realized the disease was in fact her friend and teacher, and in so doing discovered a path to healing at the same time.

Disclaimer: We are not medical doctors, so please don’t throw away your prescribed meds and treatments quite yet. Many of us are not at the point of Arielle’s level of commitment to spiritual self-healing. But her experience is powerful testimony to the efficacy of acceptance, and enlightened self-awareness.

“Self-Knowledge is of loving deeds the child.”

-Voice of the Silence

Why Should We Help Others?

Helping-Hands

Far from standing aside from others, and taking the view “it’s their karma” — Theosophy teaches that the root of karmic law is Compassion, the “law of laws.” Helping others is a duty, which Blavatsky says, “is due to Humanity” and

“… to our fellow-men, neighbours, family, and especially that which we owe to all those who are poorer and more helpless than we are ourselves. This is a debt which, if left unpaid during life, leaves us spiritually insolvent and moral bankrupts in our next incarnation. Theosophy is the quintessence of duty.”

There is, she says “greater power and effectiveness by our personal contact and sympathy with those who need it.” This action should take the form of “personal exertion for others

“… personal mercy and kindness; personal interest in the welfare of those who suffer; personal sympathy, forethought and assistance in their troubles or needs.”

The Mayan Calendar and
The Transformation of Consciousness

Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp - Rembrandt Van Rijn

Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp - Rembrandt Van Rijn

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Dueling Egos, Part 2

Karma Dodging

We often feature at TheosophyWatch stories and films, such as “The Living Matrix” or “Something Unknown is Doing Something We Don’t Know What,” about seemingly miraculous healings of people.

The theme of the latent healing power within ourselves weaves through many of the stories.

The osteopath, Arielle Essex, with the brain tumor, for example, allowed the tumor to be her teacher which led her to various facets of self-discovery and freedom, and ultimately the tumor resolved.

It’s clear in her example that her healing was holistic—psychological, emotional, spiritual, physical. And, presumably, karmic, too, though we’ll never really know.

Arielle Cures Her Brain Tumor

(Her story excerpted from the film “The Living Matrix: Inside the Revolution in Alternative Healing”):

Compounding Traumas

In Life Between Life, psychiatrist Dr. Joel Whitton provides case studies of patients with chronic illness/mental illness who, after confronting traumatic scenarios of previous lifetimes through regression, are healed.

A number of theories profess that our current aches and pains and other ills have antecedents in previous lives that build and rebuild upon the previous trauma wounds.

And the vulnerabilities — psychological and otherwise, that originally created the chink in the armor — are compounded with each subsequent trauma, making that chink a bigger and bigger hole.


A Patient’s Tumor Disappears Using Qigong

(Courtesy of  the film Something Unknown is Doing We Don’t Know What):

Untitled

Untitled

This movie requires Adobe Flash for playback.

Curing or Healing?

Then we have the renowned Brazilian healer John of God curing people of various severe conditions–through a type of psychic and physical surgery in which he uses ordinary kitchen knives, no anesthesia, and miraculously heals people.

I wonder what kind of journey and personal growth was involved for people who receive this healing. Is this merciful intercession the capstone of one’s personal efforts and deep self-reflection and searching or is it only karma dodging? Is this type of healing true and lasting?

John of God – Etheric Healing

The idea of pursuing healing so that we can increasingly embody spirit and truly serve the Earth is a foundation of a number of individuals dedicated to the healing arts these days.

“Hypnotic suggestion may cure for ever, and it may not,” Helena Blavatsky explains,

“All depends on the degree of magnetic relations between the operator and the patient. If Karmic, they will be only postponed, and return in some other form, not necessarily of disease, but as a punitive evil of another sort….

“Imagination is a potent help in every event of our lives. Imagination acts on Faith, and both are the draughtsmen who prepare the sketches for Will to engrave, more or less deeply, on the rocks of obstacles and opposition with which the path of life is strewn….”

“Half, if not two-thirds of our ailings and diseases are the fruit of our imagination and fears, Blavatsky continues. “Destroy the latter and give another bent to the former, and nature will do the rest. There is nothing sinful or injurious in the methods per se.”

“They turn to harm only when belief in his power becomes too arrogant and marked in the faith-healer, and when he thinks he can will away such diseases as need, if they are not to be fatal, the immediate help of expert surgeons and physicians.” (Lucifer, December, 1890.)

In the same passage she clarifies that “it is the human will – whether conscious or otherwise – of the operator himself, that acts upon the nervous system of the patient.

Good Guy, Bad Guy

But it takes discernment, or viveka, to know whether a healer will infuse you with their own toxic consciousness or a stream of true healing light. Or even a mix of the two.

Viveka, William Judge explains, literally means “a separating apart.” It is “discrimination, good judgment; [and] in Vedanta philosophy,” he says, it is

Years ago, I was rear-ended in a hit-and-run car accident and had to undergo different healing therapies. It was quite a trial to find good healers amongst the woo-woo.

One massage therapist in Boulder, Colorado chidingly told me that the pain in my neck from the car accident was really coming from my ex-husband and that he’s trying to get into my “aura” but I wasn’t letting him! I reported her to the insurance company.

But that experience made me wonder what psychic and lower astral detours would be thrust upon me by being exposed to such “healers” and their “energies,” and what price have I paid in compromising my path? And how would you know that you are detoured and sinking quickly in the quicksand of the lower astral? The road to hell, the Irish say, is paved with good intentions.

“Beware, Lanoo [aspirant], lest dazzled by illusive radiance thy Soul should linger and be caught in its deceptive light,”

warns Madame Blavatsky in The Voice of the Silence.” Or, as Jesus put it,

“If the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness?” (Matthew 6:23)

Etherealize Yourself—Will is The Way

The idea of pursuing healing so that we can increasingly embody spirit and truly serve the Earth is a foundation of a number of bona fide individuals dedicated to the healing arts these days.

Damodar

Damodar

In a September 6, 1881 letter to his friend William Quan Judge, Theosophist pioneer Damodar K. Mavalankar shares the key to etherealizing one’s self.

“The action of the Centripetal Force keeps us to our gross forms,” he says, “ And if we have to etherealise ourselves we must supply the Centrifugal Force, which is our WILL.

“And this is the first principle of OCCULTISM. Just as the etherealisation of our Souls is the result of the action of our Will, so is everything else the result of something else. The action of the working of the Circle of Matter is regulated by the Law of Cause and Effect. Nothing can be without it.”

prayerwheel

Prayer Wheels

“And everything is at the same time in itself a Cause and an Effect. Take, for instance, heat. It is the cause of the melting of ice into water and at the same time it is the result of some other force. It did not come out of nothing.

“Then, how can we etherealise ourselves? By studying the action of Causes and Effects and acting accordingly. Or, in other words, by obtaining knowledge of the Forces of Nature — in one word, by studying occultism. You might ask, Can we not rise higher and higher without being Occultists?

“I reply, decidedly not to that extent to which an Occultist will rise.”

© Kara LeBeau 2009. All rights reserved

The_Serpent_of_Wisdom

Nicholas Roerich - "The Serpent of Wisdom"

Breath of Heaven

Birth of Venus ~ Sandro Botticelli

Birth of Venus ~ Sandro Botticelli

How comes our physical body to the state of perfection it is found in now? Through millions of years of evolution, of course, yet never through, or from, animals, as taught by materialism.

For, as Carlyle says: — “The essence of our being, the mystery in us that calls itself  ‘I,’ — what words have we for such things? — it is a breath of Heaven, the highest Being reveals himself in man. This body, these faculties, this life of ours, is it not all as a vesture for the unnamed?”

Miracle of Miracles

So wrote Helena Blavatsky in her The Secret Doctrine in 1888, and continues:- “The breath of heaven, or rather the breath of life, called in the bible Nephesh, is in every animal, in every animate speck as in every mineral atom. But none of these has, like man, the consciousness of the nature of that highest Being, as none has that divine harmony in its form which man possesses.” human-anatomy-03

The breath of heaven, or rather the breath of life is, as Novalis said, and no one since has said it better, as repeated by Carlyle:

“There is but one temple in the universe, and that is the body of man. Nothing is holier than that high form . . . . We touch heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!” “This sounds like a mere flourish of rhetoric,” adds Carlyle, “but it is not so.

“If well meditated it will turn out to be a scientific fact — the expression of the actual truth of the thing. We are the miracle of miracles — the great inscrutable Mystery.”  (SD 1:211-12)

Mysterious Complexity

What says Science today?

The August 5, 2009 NewScientist features 10 things about humans that science can’t yet explain. “We belong to a remarkably quirky species,” the article says, and “despite our best efforts, some of our strangest foibles still defy explanation.” Among these flaws are flippantly listed: blushing, laughter, teenagers, dreams, altruism, art, superstition—even kissing and nose-picking are on the list.

At one point the writer demands: “what are they for?” On “altruism”: if it is really true that we are altruistic by nature, “most agree it doesn’t make evolutionary sense.”

DNA_thmb

Second Guessing Nature

The appendix never made any sense either to physiologists and doctors, until recently, who once thought of the little worm-shaped organ as some long-ago evolutionary vestigial appendage, and therefore dismissed it as expendable. Like the tonsils, there was little at stake, “because we can survive without it.”

Recently, researchers published a new explanation in The Journal of Theoretical Biology. “The appendix, they suggest, is a ‘safe house’ for commensal bacteria, the symbiotic germs that aid digestion and help protect against disease-causing germs,” reported the New York Times in June of last year.

“It has even been suggested that the term vestigial is obsolete, useful only as a reflection of the anatomical knowledge of the day. In fact, these days many biologists are extremely wary of talking about vestigial organs at all,” wrote Laura Spinney in the May 14, 2008 NewScientist.

No Evidence for Randomness

“Why didn’t anyone check this before?”

Now the New York Times, August 4, 2009, reports that the human spleen may serve a function after all. No longer just a familiar literary device for irritability, the article Finally, the Spleen Gets Some Respect notes, and reports that “Scientists have discovered that the spleen, long consigned to the B-list of abdominal organs and known as much for its metaphoric as its physiological value, plays a more important role in the body’s defense system than anyone suspected.”

human-anatomy-02“Reporting in the current issue of the journal Science, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School describe studies showing that the spleen is a reservoir for huge numbers of immune cells called monocytes, and that in the event of a serious trauma to the body like a heart attack, gashing wound or microbial invasion, the spleen will disgorge those monocyte multitudes into the bloodstream to tackle the crisis.”

The parallel in military terms is a standing army,” said Matthias Nahrendorf, an author of the report. “You don’t want to have to recruit an entire fighting force from the ground up every time you need it.”

That researchers are only now discovering a major feature of a rather large organ they have been studying for at least 2,000 years demonstrates yet again that there is nothing so foreign as the place we call home.

“Often, if you come across something in the body that seems like a big deal, you think, ‘Why didn’t anybody check this before?’ ” Dr. Nahrendorf said.

“But the more you learn, the more you realize that we’re just scratching on the surface of life. We don’t know the whole story about anything.”

Evidence of Design

The Synthesis of Occult Science

The ancients had knowledge passed on to them from ancient master scientists, and understood that a higher, wiser consciousness is “king in the domain of man’s bodily life,” writes William Q. Judge in his article The Synthesis of Occult Science. The prototypical designs for all forms “descended into matter in the cosmic process, till it reached the mineral plane,” then

“journeyed upward through the ‘three kingdoms’ till it reached the human plane. The elements of its being, like the cells and molecules of human-anatomy-07man’s body, are groupings of structures accessory or subordinate to it. The human monad or Ego is therefore akin to all below it and heir to all above it, linked by indissoluble bonds to spirit and matter, ‘God’ and ‘Nature.’”

A Grand Plan

The order of the body’s cells is part of the Grand Plan he says, and the “order in which they are arranged, the principle upon which they are grouped, constituting the human form, is not simply an evolved shape from the lower animal plane, but an involved principle from a higher plane, an older world ….

cell_collection_web_thumb

“How could man epitomize Cosmos if he did not touch it at every point and involve it in every principle? If man’s being is woven in the web of destiny, his potencies and possibilities take hold of divinity as the woof and pattern of his boundless life. Why, then, should he grow weary or disheartened? Alas! Why should he be degraded, this heir of all things!”  The fundamental point is that there is:

“but one indivisible and absolute Omniscience and Intelligence in the Universe, and this thrills throughout every atom and infinitesimal point of the whole finite Kosmos ….

Unlocking the Mystery of Life

The Inherent Design of Life

Of the occult evolutionary scheme, Helena Blavatsky writes (Secret Doctrine 1:277):-

“The whole order of nature evinces a progressive march towards a higher life. There is design in the action of the seemingly blindest forces. The whole process of evolution with its endless adaptations is a proof of this. The immutable laws that weed out the weak and feeble species, to make room for the strong, and which ensure the ‘survival of the fittest,’ though so cruel in their immediate action — all are working toward the grand end.

Everything is Conscious

“The very fact that adaptations do occur, that the fittest do survive in the struggle for existence, shows that what is called ‘unconscious Nature’ is in reality an aggregate of [intelligent] forces.”

“Nature…cannot be ‘unconscious,’ as it is the emanation from, and thus an aspect (on the manifested plane) of the absolute consciousness. Where is that daring man who would presume to deny to vegetation and even to minerals a consciousness of their own. All he can say is, that this consciousness is beyond his comprehension.”

design1

Humanity’s Spiritual Creators

All the ancient adept luminaries taught that the human we know today is the product of a triple evolutionary scheme: physical, mental and spiritual. “When, moved by the law of Evolution,” say these teachers, “the Lords of Wisdom infused into him the spark of consciousness” —and “the first feeling it awoke to life and activity was a sense of solidarity, of one-ness with his spiritual creators:”

“As the child’s first feeling is for its mother and nurse, so the first aspirations of the awakening consciousness in primitive man were for those whose element he felt within himself, and who yet were outside, and independent of him. Devotion arose out of that feeling, and became the first and foremost motor in his nature — for it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us, and which we find alike in human babe and the young of the animal.”

design

“All a kind of worship”

“This feeling of irrepressible, instinctive aspiration in primitive man,” Blavatsky writes (SD 1:210), “is beautifully, and one may say intuitionally, described by Carlyle:”

“The great antique heart, how like a child’s in its simplicity, like a man’s in its earnest solemnity and depth! heaven lies over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the earth; making all the earth a mystic temple to him, the earth’s business all a kind of worship.

“Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common sunlight; angels yet hover, doing God’s messages among men. Wonder, miracle, encompass the man — he lives in an element of miracle. The essence of it lives through all times and all eternity!”

nature-1

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Neti Neti

THE idea that things can cease to exist and still be, is a fundamental one in Eastern psychology.

Under this apparent contradiction in terms, there rests a fact of Nature to realize is the important thing.

A familiar instance of a similar paradox is afforded by chemical combination. The question whether Hydrogen and Oxygen cease to exist, when they combine to form water, is still a moot one.

Some [argue] that since they are found again when the water is decomposed, they must be there all the while—others contending that as they actually turn into something totally different, they must cease to exist as themselves for the time being.

“Neither side is able to form the faintest conception of the real condition of a thing, which has become something else, and yet has not ceased to be itself.”

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