Author Archives: Theosophy Watch

Why Love Matters

VISIBLE light and shadow always appear together, and this is as it should be. Our perception of everyday objects is dependent on these ever-present 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 that “duality supervenes in the contrast of Spirit (or consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object.”

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,” 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.

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Masks of Reality

SEEN as the dependable Gaia, our Mother Earth is a beautiful and bountiful haven for life in the cosmos.

But day to day living here represents a wide variety of experiences, not all of them necessarily compatible.

For example, artists, writers, poets, mathematicians, shamans, homeless persons, business people, storm chasers.

Each of them experiences our shared planet through their own unique lens.

Each hears, sees, tastes and feels based upon their particular worldview, and these unique affectations manifest in an infinitude of variations.

“Why is it that one person sees poetry in a cabbage or a pig with her little ones,” H. P. Blavatsky asks:

“while another will perceive in the loftiest things only their lowest and most material aspect.”

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Some, she says, “will laugh at the ‘music of the spheres,’ and ridicule the most sublime conceptions and philosophies.”

Mme. Blavatsky’s contemporary, Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (née Hamilton), under the pseudonym ‘The Duchess,’ wrote many books. In Molly Bawn, 1878, she gave us the familiar phrase:

“Beauty is in the eye
of the beholder.”

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Mme. Blavatsky explained the inner significance of this phrase. Differences of perception, she says, “depend on the innate power of the mind to think on the higher or on the lower plane — with the astral or with the physical brain.

“Great intellectual powers are often no proof of, but are impediments to spiritual and right conceptions,” Blavatsky adds:

“…witness most of the great men of science. We must rather pity than blame them.”

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Body Electric 2

WE are surrounded today by untold numbers and varieties of energy-intensive, man-made machines and gadgets.

We are besieged by these machines all day, they rule our lives in the developed world.

These products range from the hardly necessary to the  indispensable. From TV’s and video games, to cardiac pacemakers, to our beloved cell phones and computers.

The electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) that spin off from these products, it turns out, are our developed society’s price-to-pay for its monster creation—an all pervasive, insidious, ever-throbbing, artificial world.

Many readers will recall Rachel Carson’s comfort-shattering Exposé, Silent Spring, which documented the world-wide destructive effects of pesticide use, notably DDT.

Her research launched what has now become our well-regulated and accepted organic food industry.

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Back to the pulsating sacred Earth: the toxic man-made EMF swimming pool, i.e. wireless cell towers, radar towers, and hundreds of Earth-circling satellites, must be exacting, like agricultural pesticides, a huge price on natural systems. The inevitable effects of this interference could prove unrecoverable.

Clearly, we are flawed space travelers ignorantly abusing an natural system that is no less than Life itself.

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The original pristine natural state of the world and the cosmos, is both electro-magnetic and spiritual — we co-exist with our fellow planetary travelers at every level, from cells to stars. So any crippling abuse is of critical concern.

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The Body Electric

Cirque du Soleil Dralion

RULING the Earth is not the god gravity, as taught by modern science, but something much more powerful, and even closer to home.

That something is the universal Tibetan god “Fohat”or electro-magnetism, defined by Theosophy as a conscious electro-spiritual power.

In defiance of science’s gravity, magnetism and electricity are actually the true universal twin forces underpinning nature and the infinite cosmos — from fireflies to huge galaxies, to the infinitesimal atom.

But mainstream physicists are still stuck on gravity to support their dubious ‘standard model,’ as noted in our last post. Science still insists, we pointed out, that gravity alone, a secondary force, runs the entire universe — yet, as with magnetism, science really understands very little about either.

“It seems that the Sun does not even ‘respect’ gravity,” the Thunderbolts site reports: “The mass of charged particles expelled by the Sun as the solar wind continues to accelerate beyond Mercury, Venus, and Earth.

Solar prominences and coronal mass ejections do not obey gravity either. Nor does sunspot migration.”

“Nor does the movement of the atmosphere, since the upper layers rotate faster than the lower, reversing the situation predicted by theory,” Thunderbolts demonstrates, “while the equatorial atmosphere completes its rotation more rapidly than the atmosphere at higher latitudes, another reversal of predicted motions.”

And, back to Earth: a Serbian schoolgirl has amazed medics with her astonishing magnetic hands, which, like our Sun — following the Hermetic axiom,”as above, so below” — also possess the temerity to defy the law of gravity.  Each of us is dependent for life on the corresponding “sun” in our bodies — our heart.

Just as there is a regular circulation of the ‘blood’ or life fluid throughout our solar system, the Sun is the heart of the solar system.

It is “the same as the circulation of the blood in the human body or life,” says occult science (SD 1:541) — “the Sun contracting as rhythmically at every return of it, as the human heart does.”

“Everything in the universe follows the rule of analogy, Blavatsky assures her students in The Secret Doctrine (1:177). “Man is the microcosm of the Universe. That which takes place on the spiritual plane repeats itself on the Cosmic plane.

“Concretion follows the lines of abstraction; corresponding to the highest must be the lowest; the material to the spiritual.”

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The Cosmic Heart

“THERE are no isolated islands in an electric universe, from the smallest particle to the largest galactic formation.

A web of electrical circuitry connects and unifies all of nature, organizing galaxies, energizing stars, giving birth to planets.”

On our own world, agreeably with Theosophy, David Talbott and Wallace Thornhill also assert (Thunderbolts of the Gods): “this electric web is controlling weather and animating biological organisms.”

Astronomers like to believe the Sun is a glowing nuclear furnace. And, “that galaxies are clouds of hydrogen gas and intergalactic dust,” Stephen Smith notes in his article The Filamentary Firmament, and they “were assembled by gravity until they coalesced into swarms of glowing thermonuclear fires.”

“The Electric Universe theory,” Smith says, “is opposed to the idea of galaxies condensed from cold, inert hydrogen.”

“Strands of magnetically confined plasma can be seen throughout the cosmos,” Smith argues: “In an Electric Universe, every body in the Solar System, along with every star and galaxy, is charged with electricity and exists within a plasma environment.”

The Secret Doctrine, likewise, establishes an electric universe. And also that our Sun,  driven by electricity and magnetism like all Suns, is the true heart of the solar system.

Radically at odds with modern cosmologists, it also considers gravity a secondary terrestrial law, an effect of the former rather than a cause.

“The law of gravitation has no right to be referred to as an universal law,” Blavatsky wrote (1:490-498): “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.”

“Today, nothing is more important to the future and credibility of science than liberation from the gravity-driven universe,” say Talbott and Thornhill: “A mistaken supposition has not only prevented intelligent and sincere investigators from seeing what would otherwise be obvious, it has bred indifference to possibilities that could have inspired the sciences for decades.”

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The Mother Matrix

WHEN mother welcomed us back in the house after a long day outside at play, we knew there was caring and love waiting for us.

There would  be warm food, a soothing bath, a bedtime story. Clean pajamas and sheets were as much mother’s rule as her unconditional love.

There is a perfect analogy “between the processes of Nature, in the Kosmos, and in the individual man,” according to The Secret Doctrine (1:173.)

We learn that analogy “is the surest guide to the comprehension of the Occult teachings.” Thus, nature must also be a loving mother.

Hundreds of restorative forces are built-in to our physical bodies. Cuts and scrapes soon heal, the immune system fights off harmful invaders, and worn out parts are repaired with fresh new cells.  Nature knows how to care for her children, if only we obey a few basic rules, and don’t throw off the natural order. That’s the ideal.

But in these hectic and distracting times more of us are straying from nature’s ways. With increasing financial and psychological pressures on parents, early childhood is often less than ideal, and we’ve stop paying attention.

This is shown by an increasing separation anxiety in our children, a serious state leading to numerous mental, emotional and physical disorders.

But there are ways to heal. Click here to view a short, but ground-breaking talk by Clancy D. McKenzie, M.D describing these problems, and revealing the unexpected solution. Dr. McKenzie’s presentation, Babies Need Mothers“, was given at the 2011 Annual International Theosophical Conference.

Many of Dr. McKenzie’s most powerful insights were directed to him during his dreams, and experienced later as voices on awakening, and during the day at unexpected moments. “It hit him like a bolt of lightening. Without so much as a hand-held calculator, McKenzie unearthed the origin and mechanism of serious mental and emotional disorders.”

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

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White Lotus Day

EVERY year on what is called White Lotus Day, May 8th, theosophists all over the world celebrate the anniversary of the passing of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, founder of the Theosophical Society.

A world-famous figure of mystery and controversy and a leading intellect behind the occult revival in the West, Blavatsky published The Secret Doctrine in 1888 as her magnum opus.

“The time had now come when it was necessary to speak plainly about the real interpretation of the spiritualistic manifestations,” wrote Charles J. Ryan, an early student of Theosophy.

“H. P. Blavatsky had gained the attention of the public by her brilliant intelligence, the charm of her striking personality, and her slashing attacks on materialism and other evils. Her voice would now be listened to and recognized as speaking with authority.”

In her will, HPB suggested that her friends might gather together on the anniversary of her passing (May 8, 1891) and read from poet Sir Edwin Arnold‘s The Light of Asia, and from the ancient Hindu scripture The Bhagavad-Gita.

Lotuses grew in unusual profusion in India on that day. May 8th became known as White Lotus Day ever since.

“That which men call death is but a change of location for the Ego, a mere transformation, a forsaking for a time of the mortal frame,” wrote her friend and colleague William Q. Judge

“a short period of rest before one reassumes another human frame in the world of mortals.”

“The Lord of this body is nameless — dwelling in numerous tenements of clay, it appears to come and go. But neither death nor time can claim it, for it is deathless, unchangeable, and pure, beyond Time itself, and not to be measured.”

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Instant Healing

SPIRITUAL evolution is spiral, Theosophy teaches, and the path of spirituality turns “corkscrew-like, within and around physical, semi-physical, and supra-physical evolution.”

Cocooned, and preordained like a future butterfly, our soul potentials wait “inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point” before each new reincarnation.

It is a dynamic and transformative evolutionary journey we have undertaken on this resilient planet, and it is fraught with both peril and promise. But it doesn’t have to be a long and painful path, if we understand the secret.

Challenging religious and scientific dogmas, and wasting no time in her Preface to Isis Unveiled, her first Theosophical broadside, 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 those irrepressible soul insights.

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Crossing Over

LOOKING past our relatively short physical lives on Earth, Theosophy views the soul as eternal. Further, we don’t just ‘have’ a soul, we are souls, the wisdom tradition says.

There are many human beings who live to a ripe old age, and according to Wikipedia, the United Nations estimated in 2009 there were 455,000 living centenarians worldwide.

Methuselah is mentioned in the Bible as living 969 years. “But I have never heard of mortal man, layman, or Adept,”  H. P. Blavatsky says in The Key to Theosophy, “who could live even half the years allotted to Methuselah.”

“Some Adepts do exceed, by a good deal, what you would call the ordinary age — yet there is nothing miraculous in it, and very few of them care to live very long.”

She refers here to the Earthly body, not the Spiritual Body that high adepts have learned to occupy and control, thereby achieving self-conscious immortality — albeit invisible to uninitiated mankind.

Gautama, the Buddha, after reaching the goal of enlightenment, refused its fruition and remained on earth as a Teacher-Reformer, it is explained, and esoteric tradition teaches that he still remains in the world, invisibly watching over and protecting mankind.

Not only Gautama, but a “Wall of Protection” is built by the “accumulated efforts of long generations of Yogis, Saints and Adepts,those Buddhas of Compassion

who have woven for themselves glorious bodies in which they remain invisibly in the world, contributing towards man’s salvation.”

They do this “by influencing him to follow the Good Law and to tread the Path of Righteousness. Silently they impress the invisible atmosphere of our earth with their Ideation, thus keeping the balance on the side of right.”

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Substance of the Unseen

WRESTING consciousness from the lords of scientific  reductionism, where it has languished for decades, takes an imaginative and fearless investigator.

Among them, however, would not be counted René Descartes, the widely heralded Father of Modern Philosophy.

Descartes held that non-human animals could be reductively explained as mere automatons.

This is not a concept that sits well with animal advocates, environmentalists, or Theosophists — who recognize that consciousness is inherent in all kingdoms of nature, not just the human.

Possessors of sentient consciousness include, Theosophy says, such unlikely candidates as bacteria, minerals — and even atoms!

Decartes held famously to the premise “I think therefore I am”— without ever explaining what a thought is, or explaining the persistence and presence of the ever-elusive nature of consciousness.

One wonders if it doesn’t seem far more reasonable to assume in fact that the opposite is true, i.e. —I AM, therefore I think?”

Adherents biassedly line up on one or the other side of the issue. (Actually, Theosophy could argue both sides are accounted for by its teaching of the mind’s dual nature.)

In fact, the elusive, omnipersistent ‘mind’, is not a production of the brain at all, but an aspect of universal mind.

Over one hundred years ago, unraveling the mystery of the existence of the ‘soul’ was attempted by physical science, employing of course the expected material, reductionist methods — using a mechanical device to weigh it!

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The Soul Center

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

This intense focus is “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 aspiring 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.”

The devotional books Light on the Path, (“Kill out ambition…”), and The Voice of the Silence,  (“let the Disciple slay the Slayer”), are metaphors for self-control as we pursue a spiritual path.

Similarly, the setting of the Bhagavad-Gita is on the plain of a great battlefield called “Kurukshetra.” This plain is considered sacred, and is symbolic, W. Q. Judge says in his essay, “of the body which is acquired by karma.”

This metaphorical “killing” or “slaying,” is not contrary to the Buddhist and Hindu doctrine of “Ahimsa” (harmlessness). It refers rather to inner control over our physical senses, ambition, intellect, etc.—and to resolving our personal karmic challenges, including non-violence and non-separateness.

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

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Our spiritual soul is the silent center, according to this old teaching, and for this True Self to always be in charge, it must be the ever-present decision maker in our lives.

Thus the Voice of the Silence teaches a paradoxical doctrine in which the intellectual, striving and desire-ridden mind, becomes its own savior through its higher counterpart, the light of intuition—the soul-mind—accompanied by occult sound vibrations:

“The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real.
Let the Disciple slay the Slayer.”

for…

“…when to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams–when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE  the inner sound which kills the outer.”

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Vanishing of the Bees

MANY millions of years ago, ancient sages taught, man and all the kingdoms of nature were in their early formative stages.

The living prototypes were held in an invisible astral matrix, a semi-physical energy field, the repository of Earth’s pre-evolutionary blueprints.

There was no ‘solid matter’ as we know it in those astral times, more than 300,000,000 years ago.

Nevertheless, there was an active hive-mind at work behind-the-scenes, busily retrofitting the numerous forms of nature and man —preparing them to be born on Earth, guided by immutable cyclic law.

Just as Earth mother nourished and birthed innumerable beings in the faraway past, the same grand evolutionary scheme is mirrored today in the differentiation of the human fetus— stages that traverse single-celled zygote, which becomes a mass of cells known as a blastocyst

Day by day mineral, plant, animal and human kingdoms are all represented sequentially over a relatively short period as the developing fetus takes shape from a tiny egg invisible to the naked eye.

Just 12 days after fertilization, the cells destined to become the fetus turn into something else first: the embryo. By month’s end, this embryo is about the size of a grain of rice, and it looks more tadpole than human, sporting a tail where legs should be.

“The path of spirituality turns, corkscrew-like, within and around physical, semi-physical, and supra-physical evolution.”

 - H. P. Blavatsky
Theosophist, January, 1886

There was also a critical cycling in Earth’s development, when a relatively rapid appearance of forms occurred, “seemingly abruptly and from nowhere.” Nearly all of the major phyla in the animal kingdom appeared in a sudden burst of evolution.

This was during the Cambrian explosion and is memorialized in the fossil record — a record which sorely vexed Charles Darwin with his slow, predictable, though random evolutionary theory, and still generates extensive scientific debate today.

The phenomenon represents for Theosophists, however, prima facie evidence of the universal gestation on invisible spheres, as is described by Occult evolutionary science in The Secret Doctrine. 

Passion Fruit Flower

But, according to The Secret Doctrine (2:52), “nature unaided fails,” and the long period of ancient evolution was neither random or blind. On the job at the same time were highly evolved intelligent beings who assisted in transferring and reorganizing the many root-types carried over from an older system.

The duties of those ancient hierarchies, called Dhyanis, consisted of “alteration and addition,” wrote W. Q. Judge in The Ocean of Theosophy (Ch.15),

“which resulted in the differentiation afterwards, on this gross plane, into the various families, species, and genera.”

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Healing Naturally

MAINSTREAM scientists looking for the source of consciousness, insist its origin must be located in 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 today are unconvinced, and dispute these assumptions.

Such open minded investigators are willing to pursue truth wherever it leads, even to evidence that consciousness is a independent entity from the physical structures through which it manifests.

Most so-called New Age science is still considered hocus pocus, and the researcher’s findings are not considered credible, no matter how rigorously the studies are done.

“We live in an age of prejudice, dissimulation and paradox,” Blavatsky wrote in A Paradoxical World, “wherein, like dry leaves caught in a whirlpool, we are tossed helpless, hither and thither, ever struggling between our honest convictions and fear of that cruelest of tyrants—PUBLIC OPINION.”

Poised fearlessly at frontier research are scientific organizations such as the respected Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) in Petaluma, California, and the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek.

These researchers, and others, like NES energy medicine, are willing to take a leap in pursuit of the fast-moving “soul of things.”

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Revelation in a Blink

SPIRITUAL development is usually the result of  long and toilsome discipline, cleaning up one’s mental, emotional, psychological, and physical defects.

Krishna urges on his disciple Arjuna, assuring him that “he who conquers himself is greater than the conquerors of worlds.”

But everyone agrees its no easy job. Entrenched habits notoriously put up a fuss when challenged. “If one directs himself to eliminating all old Karma,” wrote Mme. Blavatsky’s colleague W. Q. Judge, “the struggle very often becomes tremendous.”

 ”The whole load of ancient sin rushes to the front on a man,” Judge warns in Letters That Have Helped Me (p. 20), “and the events succeed each other rapidly.”

Is getting to the bottom things always so difficult? After all, some people experience sudden ‘aha’ moments, intuitive flash awakenings that reveal to them instantly all their karmic threads. And, an awakening, when profound, can often lead to permanent cures, even physical ones.

During the dying process, when natural, occult teachings describe a lengthy (twelve hours or more) internal review of the life last lived. Knowledge is also gained during natural sleep, and the ancient Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad warns that a person in a deep sleep state should not be violently disturbed: 

“Let none awake him that sleeps, for he is hard to heal if the soul returns not to him.”

Judge confirms that with karmic cleansing “the strain is terrific, and the whole life fabric groans and rocks,” but added: “it is said in the East, you may go through the appointed course in 700 births, in seven years, or in seven minutes.” If so, could enlightenment also occur for a person in the blink of an eye? Many near-death experiencers report that it does.

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The Psychic Life

ELECTRIC and magnetic affinities are generated, occult teachers say, whenever there is physical touch, the sound of a voice, or even a meaningful look.

Every action we take carries information about us and the life around us, a kind of psychic body language. We also call them ‘vibes’ – and they can be ‘good’ or ‘bad.’

The invisible transfer of information between persons, animals, trees, bacteria and brain neurons, is still largely a mystery. Even birds and bees do it. The general term today is “psi,” coined from parapsychology, and usually refers to telepathy or other forms of extrasensory perception currently unexplained.

Mme. Blavatsky with her Adept Teachers authorized Three  Objects for the Theosophical Society, which included study of  this mysterious phenomena.

The First Object of the Society was “to form the nucleus of a Universal Brotherhood of Humanity,” and the Second “the study of Aryan and other Scriptures, of the World’s religion and sciences etc.,” and these are preserved by almost all Theosophical groups.

The original Third Object was also stated clearly by H. P. Blavatsky in The Key to Theosophy, Section 3, published in 1889, and reads:

“To investigate the hidden mysteries of Nature under every aspect possible, and the psychic and spiritual powers latent in man especially.”

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Despite the Founder’s unambiguous wording, some Theosophical revisionists have chosen to unilaterally remove both the words “‘psychic” and “spiritual” from the last Object. Others followed suit, and today a timid, unauthorized and watered-down version is all the public sees.  How could this happen with a subject that pervades every major textbook the Teachers wrote, and hundreds of their original articles?

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The Great Breath

CONSCIOUSNESS is a living force, and like the law of conservation of energy, it can neither be created or destroyed.

The consciousness that wells up within us is our eternal core, says Theosophy, and it can be transformed, but never destroyed, only degraded or enlightened.

Man, therefore, is not just a blindly evolved animal, says Theosophy, but rather a self-aware spiritual entity using an ingeniously designed, glorious physical life form.

The outer material covering makes it seem to many that we are merely “carbon-based units,” as depicted in the popular sci-fi series StarTrek – (see “The Mysterious Builder.”)

H. P. Blavatsky wrote in her summation: “The Universe is the periodical manifestation of  [an] unknown Absolute Essence; everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious,” finally that “the Universe is worked and guided from within outwards.” The “consciousness which wells up within us,” she said:

“..is the impersonal reality pervading the Kosmos — the pure noumenon of thought.”

 

This means in reality all forms in nature are constructs of consciousness. As humans — as the lead pack of runners in evolution — we are described by spiritual teachers as ‘immortal perceivers’ having unlimited potential. We must seek our true centers, as long distance athletes, to engage and develop our potential — physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. But in a world filled with distractions, it is never simple to stay focused on our goals.

Metaphysically, the conscious core of the universe is also the spiritual center of all manifested beings within it. It is the “symbolical circle of Pascal and the Kabalists,” says The Secret Doctrine [1:65], ‘whose centre is everywhere, and circumference nowhere.’” That center is “devoid of all attributes and is essentially without any relation to manifested, finite Being,” says Theosophy mystically:

“It is ‘Be-ness’
rather than Being.”

The “absolute Reality” of the universe, according to The Secret Doctrine, is also the central core of our ‘be-ness’ nature. That core which is “everywhere and nowhere,” is the universal source and witness, is unimaginably greater than anything we might mentally or emotionally feel, or think we know at any time.

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Goddess of Spring

OSTARA the Saxon goddess is the origin of the word Easter, symbolized the dawn, the warm Spring sun, and much more.

Without the cyclic journey of the sun there would be no glorious bursting forth of nature at Easter-time.

This Sun-cycle ushers spring-time into the world above the equator, and the ancients regarded this as the re-incarnation season of the year.

“Just as there is a real Christmas—the time of winter solstice, explains the Theosophy School text, The Eternal Verities—”so there is a real Easter, a Sun-cycle, the time of the Vernal Equinox, on March 21st.”

In the legend, when the beautiful Goddess saw all this wonderful work of hers, she said: “Hereafter, every year I will have one day called Easter, after me. That day, all shall celebrate the awakening of Life from its winter sleep.

“Then shall all people be joyous and glad and give each other eggs as gifts, for the Egg shall be my symbol. So it is fitting, for all Life is first within the egg.”

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Pysanka

Similar Goddesses were known in ancient cultures around the Mediterranean, and were celebrated in the springtime: Aphrodite from Cyprus, Astarte, from Phoenicia, Demeter, from Mycenae, Hathor from Egypt, Ishtar from Assyria, and Kali, from India.

Perhaps some of the most impressive egg designs of Easter are known as Pysanka. These Ukrainian treasures (examples here) are hollowed-out eggs decorated with traditional Ukrainian folk designs.

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Your Brain on God

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 wrote. “Optimism and pessimism depend on it also in a great measure.”

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Mind of Love

Paul Robertson, "Through a Glass Darkly"

COMPASSION is no mere attribute of thinking or emotion, says the revered ancient spiritual guide, the Book of the Golden Precepts.

Calling it “the Law of Laws,” one of its precepts on universal compassion declares that true harmony lies in recognizing the “fitness of all things.”

Additionally, this power is described as a “shoreless universal essence,” and “the light of everlasting Right,” in the book known to students as The Voice of the Silence, a translation of the ancient precepts by H. P. Blavatsky.

Simply put, the master guidebook maintains this power is nothing less than “the law of love eternal.”

But, wrote Blavatsky in Psychic and Noetic Action, “no physiologist, not even the cleverest, will ever be able to solve the mystery of the human mind, in its highest spiritual manifestation.”

Nor will they be able to understand the duality “of the psychic and the noetic,” says Blavatsky, “or even comprehend the intricacies of the psychic on the purely material plane…

…unless they know something of, and are prepared to admit, the presence of this dual element.”

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This means, she asserts, that psychologists will have to accept “a lower (animal), and a higher (or divine) mind in man, or what is known in Occultism as the ‘personal’ and the ‘impersonal’ Egos.”

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Dialogue with God

WHEN acting through our physical human brain and body, the mind displays a complex dualism—the pivotal tenet of Theosophical psychology.

The reason for it is simple. We are not separate from the universe. The manifested universe itself is ruled by duality: day and night, sleeping and waking, hot and cold.

Physical substance is “necessary to focus a ray of the Universal Mind at a certain stage of complexity,” says The Secret Doctrine (1:15)and the “manifested universe is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its ex-istence as ‘manifestation.’”

The struggle between the dual channels of our mind is a challenge that few of us are able to successfully navigate, and reconcile, in one short lifetime. But help was always on the way.

For centuries the solution had been taught by advanced masters of life such as Lao-tse, Patanjali, Krishna and Buddha. Each assured us that self-awakening is entirely possible—by daily ‘now’ meditation, raja yoga practice, and above all else, by altruistic service to family and humanity.

The struggle for control in meditation is caused by our split consciousness. The mind’s higher spiritual aspect gravitates toward altruism, says Theosophy, while the tides of its companion personal side is attached to outer forms, desires, survival and other material concerns.

The result is that all human minds are often blown by the winds of sense into the low lying eddies and currents of material thought. Like a balloon losing helium, we drift down from the god within us, and away from our kinship with the soul of things.

Broadly considered, what is called higher mind is really a faulty of our god-soul, our intuitional power base — the manifestation all-knowingness in human beings.

Our all-seeing self and personal self are caught in a Hamlet-like to-be-or-not-to-be, we are alternately pitted by the gut and brain consciousness, against the heart feeling. This sets up an confusing conflict between the true god and the demigod in us. Yet, “peace is just a thought away” according to Jill Bolte Taylor.

This struggle of selves is dramatized by neuroanatomist Bolte-Taylor in her New York Times bestseller “My Stroke of Insight.” As a brain researcher Dr. Taylor’s professional focus is anatomical, the relationship between the brain’s left and right hemispheres. 

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