Pilobolus Dance Theatre

This “stupendous development,” the Sages taught, “has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.”

It is endless in effect as the force of love, according to the ancients. (SD 1:43)

To Initiated Seers our universe, while full of important choices, is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes.”

In this view each individual cosmos and corresponding single human life is the effect of its predecessor.

Under the never-erring law of Karma, every universe becomes “a cause as regards its successor.”

Instead of only one Big Bang, the usual dogma for the origin of the universe, there must have been multiple efforts.

“There was not just one bang,” say Paul J. Steinhardt and Neil Turok in their book Endless Universe.

Now science is being compelled to consider the necessity of  the law of cycles.

The appearance of our universe, it is proposed, “was not the beginning of time, but the bridge to a past filled with endlessly repeating cycles of evolution.” A purely Theosophical doctrine.

The Great Breath

The distinguished theoretical physicists propose that “the evolution of the universe is cyclic with big bangs occurring once every trillion or so.”

Cycles may be a good start. But unlike an infinite cycle of titanic collisions, Theosophy offers a kinder, gentler solution tied to the cosmology of ancient seers. It declares that the universe and everything in it is alive, and sustained by a perpetual rhythmic breathing.

Cosmic Heart

“The Absolute is characterized as the Supreme Eternal Heart of all existence because, although it is ever present, it is at the same time never fathomable by thought or word. It is closer to us than anything we can ever say or think, just as there is nothing more fundamental than the beating of the heart, and there is nothing around us that is more palpable, if only we would listen, than the beating of the cosmic heart. Great beings have always shown us how to tune ourselves to the great heart of the cosmos.” – Hermes

Meta-Physical

Every ‘new’ universe is a recapitulation of preexisting universal prototypes or ‘negatives’ (the hypothetical dark matter?) — records of prior systems stored in an ever- existing and ever-present Astral Light. Such prototypes are the building blocks of every new iteration of the cosmos.

Clearly an infinite universe cannot get ‘larger’ thus any ‘big bang’ is a contradiction. Any expansion in Theosophical terms refers simply to a “change of condition,” (The Secret Doctrine 1:63) — similar we could say to an image appearing on the sensitized paper in a darkroom of the old film school of photography.

It’s time for a more sensible alternative to explosion cosmology, and the proponents of the Electric Universe theory would agree. The core of the Cosmos or One Reality, called “Be-ness,” is symbolized in The Secret Doctrine (1:14) by the term “The Great Breath” — “a symbol sufficiently graphic,” Blavatsky said, “to need no further elucidation.”

The universe manifests by ‘breathing’ out, and after long cycles sleeps, called ‘breathing in.’

“It is impossible to conceive anything without a cause,” H. P. Blavatsky also  wrote (Secret Doctrine (1:44), and “the attempt to do so makes the mind a blank.” Invisible images as “metaphysical abstractions, are the only conceivable cause of physical concretions.”

“They phenomenalise in the form of the material Universe, by a process of conversion of metaphysics into physics.” Unexpressed thoughts and emotions are immaterial, i.e. ‘meta-physical,’ yet they underlie all our actions.

Roses

By choreographer Paul Taylor, a tribute to love and relationships, Roses was first created in 1985 and is set to music by Richard Wagner and Heinrich Baermann. First performed by Paul Taylor Dance Company, 10 April 1995, City Center, New York City. Revival première by Rambert Dance Company below, 24 May 2011, Sadler’s Wells, London.

Dance of Life

If lifetimes of individuals and universes can be thought of as dance productions, then every new scene is an adventure in consciousness, pushing us to ever greater self-awareness and spiritual harmony— if only we become wise enough to embody the wisdom of the adept choreographers of humanity down the ages.

Thus our lives ought to be a series of “progressive awakenings,” driven by the lessons of our individual, family, racial, national and global experiences.

Every person settles into his or her own unique rhythm in which what is called by W. Q. Judge in his Notes on the The Bhagavad-Gita, the “mysterious power of meditation” (66) and “a lifetime’s meditation” (148), a dynamic mix of past karma, and present motives and actions.

Each person finds her/himself challenged at unique points on an ascending evolutionary spiral-like rhythm, paying off old debts, making new ones — pushing upward or slipping back as our minds and hearts awaken, or not, to new opportunities.

It is a creative power we hold in our own hands that is not dictated by any external god or church.

“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined,” Thoreau wrote (Walden), “he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

The choices that shape our character each lifetime, are self-chosen—compounded of physical, sensory, emotional, mental, psychic and spiritual energies.

The ancient Egyptian judgement after death, symbolically weighed the individual’s heart against the “feather of truth.”

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The challenges of life, the occult doctrine notes, are the result of our being stuck in a personal plane of consciousness, a world view. Whatever that may be, “both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities.”

Weighing the Heart

Then, as our spiritual insight grows, “we perceive that during the stages through which we have passed we mistook shadows for realities.”

“…and the upward progress of the Ego is a series of progressive awakenings, each advance bringing with it the idea that now, at last, we have reached ‘reality’—”

Soul Mates

As taught for thousands of years, reincarnation is the process of living through a series of lifetimes, for the purpose of soul development. Edgar Cayce discussed this process in nearly two-thousand of his life readings. According to Cayce, our lives do not begin at the moment of our physical birth. Our natural state is Spirit — and in this state, we have existed for many millenia.

Changes

“The great psychic and spiritual change now taking place in the realm of the human Soul,” wrote H. P. Blavatsky in The Tidal Wave, “is quite remarkable.” This sea change “asserts itself,” Blavatsky says

“…amid a loud din of busy, boisterous tongues, a clash of public opinion.”

This signal event began towards the beginning of the last quarter of the 19th century, she wrote, “and will end — so says a mystic prophecy— either for the weal or the woe of civilized humanity.”

Awakening

“But the great change is not effected in solemn silence, nor is it perceived only by the few,” she wrote in The Tidal Wave. “By comparison, the roar even of the noisiest political agitation seems like the rustling of the young forest foliage, on a warm spring day.”

“Verily the Spirit in man, so long hidden out of public sight, so carefully concealed and so far exiled from the arena of modern learning, has at last awakened.”

“It now asserts itself and is loudly re-demanding its unrecognized yet ever legitimate rights. It refuses to be any longer trampled under the brutal foot of Materialism — speculated upon by the Churches — and made a fathomless source of income by those who have self-constituted themselves its universal custodians.”

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