Monthly Archives: September 2010

Ode to Past Lives 1

PARENTS know that most children are obsessive at play, and probably the most focused meditators on the planet.

Despite frozen fingers and icy noses, after a fresh snowfall the young snow angels must  be repeatedly called to supper, often after dark.

Sleds, snowballs, igloo making, coal-eyed snowmen, they are just too engrossing — kids can’t stop.

The poet Wordsworth applied memories of his early childhood to his adult philosophy of life, and his “Intimations of Immortality,” reports Wikipedia,

“was inspired in part
by Platonic philosophy.”

Teaching preexistence, Plato meant that the soul dwelt in an ideal alternate state prior to its present occupation of the body, and the soul will return to that ideal previous state after the body’s death.

Immortality for Wordsworth refers to the immortality of the soul, which he maintained “is felt or intimated during early childhood.”

Wordsworth’s lines inspired Gerald Finzi’s delightful Intimations of Immortality, Grande Fantasia & Toccata: Continue reading

Intentional Magic

THE word magic is largely misunderstood, because there are various kinds of so-called magic, much of which is deception and trickery.

But there is a magic which might be called the unseen and hidden power to bring to pass certain desired results, without revealing its methods. It is called intention.

Its successful use requires a knowledge far beyond any kind of trickery, and is based on an innate spiritual force in man and nature.

Those who practiced it in ancient times were the initiates, the wise, called Magi — the source of the word magic.

It is relatively easy to learn tricks and spells, Mme. Blavatsky says, “and the methods of using the subtler, but still material, forces of physical nature.”

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Emotions of Truth 2

HUNDREDS of facts and thousands details in a book can be understood by any average analytical and reasoning mind.

But intellectual understanding does not usually come with directions for living our life, or correctly reading the fine print.

Because, “the intellect alone,” as William Q. Judge wrote in the Ocean of Theosophy, “is cold, heartless and selfish.”

Backing this up, Blavatsky says in an article, that “Great intellectual powers are often no proof of, but are impediments to spiritual and right conceptions.”

Altruism, a power that is surely a blend of feelings and mind, exemplifies, Blavatsky wrote,  “real Theosophy.”

The core heart power of Devotion, which underlies the universe, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:210), “is innate in us, and which we find alike in human babe and the young of the animal.”

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Threads of Genius

UNDERSTANDING the how and why of human uniqueness, from the likes of Mozart to the fearless passion of Julia Butterfly Hill, will always be perplexing.

Lacking a seer’s knowingness, we’d be forced to trudge for clues into the far horizons of reincarnation, and sift the karmic sands of countless past lives.

Teilhard de Chardin’s idea that we are “spiritual beings immersed in a human experience,” hardly explains Mozart composing music at age three.

Or why Julia, at twenty-four years old, would opt to spend a dangerous two years alone atop a giant redwood, protecting it from angry, clear-cutting loggers.

We all sport a convincing sense of individual identity. This is the “I am I” consciousness, and is our immortal soul that hovers, hawk-like — silently and all-seeing — above the Salton Sea of each new personality.

Trauma patients with memory loss are convinced of their egoity, even if they don’t know exactly who they might be. Amnesiacs may forget their own name, family, email, and favorite movie — but their sense of ‘I’ persists.

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The Body-Field

EASTERN metaphysics proposes the existence of an astral substance, or matrix, patterning the physical world.

This active image-field  is the mystical progeny of the omnipresent, spiritual and dynamic substratum of the universe.

It is a secret agent and, as noted psi researcher Dean Radin says in his book Entangled Minds“we occasionally have numinous feelings of connectedness with loved ones at a distance.”

“The idea of the universe as an interconnected whole is not new,” Radin says, “for millennia it’s been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. What is new is that Western science is slowly beginning to realize that some elements of that ancient lore might be correct.”  (see Into the Light)

This source of this immanent force is called Ākāśa, a Sanskrit word meaning “aether,” in both its elemental and metaphysical sense. The Ākāśa, with its alter-ego the Astral Light are the mechanism of ‘out-of-body’ experiences, and

…the primal storehouse and reflector of all the thoughts, ideas, feelings and acts uploaded from the Earthly doings of self-conscious humanity.

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Emotions of Truth

STUDENTS of metaphysics and Theosophy are sometimes called to task for being too ‘intellectual.’

Some prefer the force of thought to hammer out truth, dismissing feelings and emotions as emanating from the ‘lower nature.’

But as W. Q. Judge wrote in the Ocean of Theosophy, “intellect alone is cold, heartless and selfish.” This is shown today by studies of neurological correlates in the brain.

Materialistic, intellectual data are stored in the brain, but do not stimulate areas such as the pineal gland — known by occultists to host spiritual impulses like feelings of compassion.

We are spiritual beings at our core, but our behaviors on this physical plane — just like the actions of rider and horse — are solely governed by how we have entrained our psychic and physical instrument.

“There are persons,” H. P. Blavatsky writes, “who never think with the higher faculties of their minds at all.”

“This is why it is so very difficult for a materialist — the metaphysical portion of whose brain is almost atrophied — to raise himself,”


“Or for one who is naturally spiritually-minded to descend to the level of the matter-of-fact vulgar thought,” she says. “Optimism and pessimism depend on it also in a great measure.”

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