Category Archives: Brain, Mind, Consciousness, & Beyond

Heart is All

LOVE in its most unselfish form was described by H. P. Blavatsky as the “absence of every ill-feeling , selfishness, charity, goodwill to all beings.”

The alchemy of such enlightened ethics unleashes the power of an stoppable universal force.

“The powers and forces of spirit,” Blavatsky wrote, “lend themselves only to the perfectly pure in heart — and this is DIVINE MAGIC.”

Kamadeva, a Sanskrit word, is defined in The Theosophical Glossary as “the first conscious, all-embracing desire for universal good, love, and the first feeling of infinite compassion and mercy for all that lives and feels, needs help and kindness. Only later did kama become the power that gratifies desire on the animal plane.”

“Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind,” (Secret Doctrine 2:176) — “and which sages, searching with their intellect, discovered to be the bond which connects Entity with Non-Entity.” 

That power arose,” Blavatsky said, “in the consciousness of the creative One Force, as soon as it came into life and being as a ray from the Absolute.” It was also she who in the article Love with an Object, passionately declared:

“Love can exist without form, but no form can exist without Love.”

Devotion arose out of a feeling she wrote, “and became the first and foremost motor in man’s nature — for it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us.”

In her first Letter to a Theosophical Convention in 1888, she wrote: “He who teaches Theosophy preaches the gospel of goodwill, and the converse of this is true also — he who preaches the gospel of goodwill, teaches Theosophy.”

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Love after Death

EVOLUTION as defined in the occultism of Theosophy, is a triple-faceted scheme — a blend of spirit, mind, and matter.

They are, Blavatsky wrote, “inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point.”

True and lasting self-knowledge is acquired gradually and lovingly — and painfully unawares at first — through a long, yet finite series of reincarnations in human form.

The key to spiritual development lies in recognizing the unity and continuity of life, Theosophy says — and that for the soul, there is really no such thing as death. We are first and foremost spiritual beings, and humanity is our field of experience.

But what happens to our human self after death? Does everything important, our consciousness and love, die with the body? Blavatsky, writing in The Key to Theosophy, assures her students that love and spirit are immortal. And further, that:

“Death comes to our spiritual selves ever as a deliverer and friend.”

Self-knowledge evolves gradually out of the recognition, as the philosopher-mystic Teilhard de Chardin famously said, we are “spiritual beings having a human experience,” not the other way around.

Our afterlife, once the dissolution of the body and Earthly desire body is complete, is blissful. That state “consists in our complete conviction that we never left the earth,” Blavatsky writes in the Key to Theosophy, “and that there is no such thing as death at all.”

The “post-mortem spiritual consciousness of a mother,” she explains, “will represent to her that she lives surrounded by her children, and all those whom she loved.”

“…no gap, no link, will be missing to make her disembodied state the most perfect and absolute happiness.”

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Revival of Faith

A COMMON sense critic of scientific pretensions, who has wit, sanity and elevated moral intelligence all wrapped up in one person, is difficult to ignore.

Such a person is Mary Midgley, dubbed by the Guardian, UK as “the most frightening philosopher in the country” — and today nearly 11 years later, at age 91, she is still receiving accolades, and taking no prisoners.

We discovered this totem-toppling English moral philosopher by chance through a brief, unassuming comment she posted in the “Letters” section of the January 3-9, 2009, NewScientist — signed simply “Mary Midgley, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.”

Her logic appeared seamless, and upon mulling her 257 insightful words over a week of lunch breaks, her ideas also felt convincingly Theosophical — indeed, strongly Blavatskian.

Midgley’s comments were aimed at Peter Millican’s on”Thinking Matter,” and her response goes to the essence of the issue:

“[T]he real trouble with the mind-body problem centres,” she writes, “on the word ‘materialism.’ This word is itself a relic of dualism.”

“It suggests that there are two rival stuffs — mind and matter — competing to be seen as basic to the world. It tells us to choose one of these and reduce the other to it.”

“Soul, the Self, or Ego, is studied by modem psychology as inductively as a piece of decayed matter by a physicist,” cries H. P. Blavatsky. “Psychology and its mother-plant metaphysics have fared worse than any other sciences.”

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Kinship with God

EVERY organ and cell in the body has its own energetic biofield, and uses it to network wirelessly with all the other organs and cells.

The heart and the gut talk back and forth continually to the brain, whose neurons also converse with each other, day and night.

Researchers have recently discovered that both the heart and the gut, have substantial neuronal regions, showing they both have brains of their own.

The holographic network of the heart links, organizes and entrains, say the researchers at the Institute of Heartmath, the totality of signals from all the noetic webs, of all the cells and neurons of the body.

“These biosignals pass information over to the body’s chief superintendent, the brain.”


A unifying biofield is the underlying mechanism of healing, of thought transference, and gene behavior, the experimental evidence confirms. It is also the pathway by which the environment influences us.

The power of this invisible field is undoubtedly the unseen agent driving what many modern self-help gurus refer to as the ‘secret’ of intention, and thought. In Isis Unveiled (1:xxvii) H. P. Blavatsky wrote:

“The Hindu Vedas fifty centuries ago, ascribed to it the same properties as do the Tibetan lamas of the present day.”

“When one sees mortal man displaying tremendous capabilities, controlling the forces of nature and opening up to view the world of spirit,” she writes, “the reflective mind is overwhelmed.”

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Life Goes On

BETWEEN Science and Theology is a bewildered public, fast losing all belief in man’s personal immortality, in a deity of any kind, and rapidly descending to the level of materialism.

From the remotest antiquity, mankind as a whole have always been convinced of the existence of a personal spiritual entity, within the personal physical man

This inner entity was more or less divine, according to its proximity to the crown—Chrestos [Christos, The Higher Self].

The closer the union, the more serene man’s destiny, and the less dangerous the external conditions. This belief is neither bigotry nor superstition, only an ever-present, instinctive feeling of the proximity of another spiritual and invisible world.

This world, though it be subjective to the senses of the outward man, is perfectly objective to the inner ego.

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The foregoing words were written in Isis Unveiled, (Ch. 12) by H. P. Blavatsky her first first major work on Theosophy—examining religion and science in the light of Western and Oriental ancient wisdom, and occult and spiritualistic phenomena.

“There is a mysterious power in these doctrines of karma and reincarnation,” Theosophical Society co-founder W. Q. Judge wrote, “which at last forces them upon the belief of those who take them up for study.”

“Each person is the concentration and result of karma, and is compelled from within to believe.”

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Magic Mind

BREAKING up is hard to do, even when false truths have betrayed us, they still cling like cotton candy, resurrecting like the mythical Hydra. For each head cut off, it grew two more.

“By the early Middle Ages, it was widespread knowledge throughout Europe, that the Earth was a sphere,” Wikipedia reports.

Yet against all odds, The Flat Earth Society lives on, with buzzing bees of believers.

Not to forget the geocentric clan, and  creationists insisting the Earth must be only ten-thousand years old. Such beliefs persist in the face of hard evidence.

Linear thinkers are found in many fields: evolution, genetics, consciousness, physics, cosmology, biology, education, sociology, neuroscience–the list is long.

The history of sacred cows in science is littered with the heads of hundreds of once fiercely defended but failed theories, often wildly exaggerated, and stubbornly defended by their inventors.

Once brain cells die, the high priests of neuroscience insisted, they cannot be replaced, and the territory of the brain they served can never be repaired!

It was standard model neuroscience that the brain cannot grow new cells, and for a very long time this was an unquestioned scientific fact.

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You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, the saying goes, but surprisingly, science now must admit that our adult brain cells, by a process called neurogenesis, keep on growing after all! One can only conclude that the immortal mind of man knows what it is doing, and does it in an extraordinary way.

This is not your Father’s neuroscience. “The apocryphal tale that you can’t grow new brain cells just isn’t true,” LiveScience reported back in 2005. “Neurons continue to grow and change beyond the first years of development and well into adulthood, according to a new study.”

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The Aeolian Harp

JANUARY the 4th is the day of Mercury, or Hermes-Buddha, the ancients taught. They also taught the birth of the year signals a unique energy upgrade.

“The astral life of the earth is young and strong between Christmas and Easter,” Blavatsky wrote, and “those who form their wishes now, will have added strength to fulfill them consistently.”

And Truth, like the Life Force, springs eternal. What was taught 2,500 years ago by Buddha is still studied today.

And what the Master Krishna taught his disciple Arjuna in The Bhagavad-Gita, 2,500 years earlier, is a cautionary teaching humanity needs most now.

“The Self is the friend of self,” Krishna tells Arjuna, and added paradoxically: “also its enemy.”

In an article with the same title, theosophical teacher W. Q. Judge explains: “this sentence in the Bhagavad- Gita has been often passed over as being either meaningless or mysterious.”

But it is this powerful human duality which helps explain why so many religious sects, while publicly espousing harmony and peace, are at the same time

…so ready and willing to denounce, maim and kill non-believers.


The medieval Christian Crusades were replete with atrocities, just as are certain extremist religious sects today — priests, popes and kings all willing to kill for their God. Murder, intrigue, assassination and war, have disgraced our human history, and are still with us!

Krishna’s doctrine postulates two selves, each an enemy and friend of the other. The “push-me-pull-you” character of many modern sectarian religions, foster ethical and moral inconsistencies. These are no more visible than in modern-day fundamentalism.

“The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real,” say the ancient stanzas of the Book of the Golden Precepts —”let the disciple slay [purify] the Slayer.”

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2012

Looking forward, what of the coming year? “As the preparation for the new cycle proceeds,” H. P. Blavatsky foretells, “the latent psychic and occult powers in man are beginning to germinate and grow. Happily new tendencies,” she says, “are also springing up, working to change the basis of men’s daily lives from selfishness to altruism.”

“Learn, then, well the doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation, and teach, practice, promulgate that system of life and thought which alone can save the coming races.”

“May Theosophy grow more and more a living power in the lives of each one of our members,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote (Third Message:24),

“and may the coming year be yet more full of good work and healthy progress than the one just closing, is the wish of your humble co-worker and fellow-member.”  

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What better way to purify our faults, and elucidate the nobler side of our faculties, than the practice of altruism at every moment—in heavenly harmony with our Higher Self.

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Into the Light

THE astral light is a storehouse and reflector of all the images of every event, feeling and thought, created by anyone on Earth.

The sensitive universal astral matrix can transmit “those pictures of events to come,” wrote W. Q. Judge in The Ocean of Theosophy (Ch. 16), if the creations “are sufficiently well marked and made.”

Events for several years to come, “the producing and efficient causes,” Judge wrote, “are always laid down with enough definiteness to permit the seer to see them in advance, as if present.”

“It is a faculty common to all men,” Judge comments, “though in the majority but slightly developed.”

“Occultism asserts that were it not for the germ of this power slightly active in every one, no man could convey to another any idea whatsoever.”

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Using this psi power, often referred to as ‘clairvoyance,’ all images stored in the Astral Light, according to Judge, “pass before the inner vision and are reflected into the physical eye from within. They then appear objectively to the seer.”

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The Lucid Zone

WHEN our thick brains get all heated up worrying life’s complexities, that’s often  the best time to kick off our shoes, and give it a rest.

“Ever drifting down the stream, lingering in the golden gleam,” Lewis Carroll wondered: “Life — what is it but a dream?”

At times, when we are faced with a critical decision, or stuck on a complex problem, sleeping or napping on it, researchers find, often leads to the right answer.

The notes of a song, the smell of burning leaves, the babbling of a mountain stream, a day-dream—all can open a door to the the non-rational, poetic mind. They can also arouse unexpected vistas when we are children.

In Wordsworth’s haunting poem “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” those reveries opened for him an unexpected awareness of past lives.

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“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar …”

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There is “a class of fancies of exquisite delicacy,” the poet Edgar Allan Poe wrote in Marginalia, “which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language.”

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Wired Minds

Mnemosyne mother of the Muses

THOUGH often burdened by  irreconcilable differences and conflicts, human beings live, like a forest of giant redwoods,  entwined together at the roots.

Everyone of us has the potential, more or less developed, to peer into the ‘soul of things,’ experiencing their hidden essence.

Often appearing as ‘gut feelings’ we clearly don’t pay enough heed to that ability, favoring reason instead.

And, it is taught that the power of prescience lies ready to spring at the core of even the simplest entities, from atoms to ants.

Cells at disparate locations in our bodies, for example, will talk to one other, and trees are known to warn other trees of insect attacks over long distances.

Many animals can sense earthquakes and volcanic eruptions in advance, and it is demonstrated that dogs know when their owners are coming home.

These phenomena are of the fundamental teachings in Theosophy, i.e. consciousness is universal, and necessary to the survival of life. 

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Billions of bacteria, called the human microbiome, are distributed over the entire human body. Except for gut bacteria, why these communities of bacteria exist, and what they may all do, is still a mystery to science, and the subject of extensive investigation.

One of the single most important factors to maintaining good health lives in the human gut. Our nano-wired gut bacteria even dictate our mood and mental health, and out-number the human cells in our body by ten to one!

“Every atom, is a little universe in itself,” Blavatsky taught, and not surprisingly, she also insisted that:

“…every organ and cell in the human body is endowed with a brain of its own, with memory, therefore, experience and discriminative powers.”

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Spiritual Mind

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.”

"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.

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.”

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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Out There

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. But because their investigations are considered hocus pocus, their results are not considered credible.

“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.”

Investigators risk being minimalized and shunned by their peers—and their careers stalled as funding sources dry up.

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Yet, poised fearlessly at the frontiers of psi 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.”

Such investigations were formerly the exclusive precinct of uncanny ancient intuitives and seers. Today there are numerous qualified, sincere scientific investigators on the hunt for answers to the puzzling questions of consciousness that stymie mainstream science.

“The flashing gaze of those seers has penetrated into the very kernel of matter, and recorded the soul of things there.”

Still material science “believes not in the ‘soul of things,’” Blavatsky complained. Now, all that may be changing.

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Genius of Emotion

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 understanding 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 whole 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.”

“All of the skills and abilities you need to create a wonderful life and smoothly functioning relationships lie waiting somewhere else inside you,” empath and researcher Karla McLaren claims in her article “Welcoming Your Emotional Genius.”

And in her book, “The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You,” explains:

“I share these empathic skills to help you access the gifts your emotions bring you.”

That ‘somewhere else’ is your emotions, she says, and “if you learn their language, you’ll have all the energy, intelligence, intuition, empathy, integrity, and strength of character you need to create a healthy life for yourself, your loved ones, your colleagues, and the world.”

This may seem like a tall claim. Yet our emotional genius benefits our health through altruism, intention and intuition.

Spiritual activity apparently drives a higher aspect of our minds, capable of connecting whatever dots the game of life can throw at us. Continue reading

What Animals Feel

ANIMALS are just instinctual machines, most people believe. But it’s not true.

 Controlled scientific studies suggest there are powerful spiritual and intellectual forces embedded in the kingdoms of nature.

In the 17th Century, René Descartes, dubbed the “Father of Modern Philosophy,” started us thinking the wrong way.

“Descartes held the living animal as being simply an automaton,” H. P. Blavatsky comments in her article Have Animals Souls — “a ‘well wound up clock-work,’ according to Malebranche” — to which she countered:

“One who adopts the Cartesian theory about the animal, would do as well to accept at once the views of the modern materialists.”

Koko and Tabby

A woman who clearly did not subscribe to the Cartesian theory, found a young lion injured in the forest on the brink of death. She took it home with her and nursed it back to health.

Later she made arrangements with an animal rescue group to take the lion.

Some time passed before the woman had a chance to visit. A video was taken when she walked up to the lion’s cage to see how he was doing. Watch the lion’s reaction when he sees her!

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Jnana Yoga

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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The Hard Problem

EMBARRASSMENT can be, well, embarrassing — especially if you tend to blush in public. We recognize in this, in ourselves and others, a real yet scientifically inexplicable effect.

Even a hint of a reprove by another, or admiring glance, likewise causes our skin to redden— or it might signal our getting caught sneaking a candy from a store display.

But it begs a real question of how does an invisible, seemingly intangible, subjective activity as a thought or feeling, manifest into a physical system, and affect that system biologically and visibly?

“It’s well known that the human body depends upon homeostasis,” writes Deepak Chopra, and asks: Memories and Emotions: All in The Mind or the Brain? And answers: “it is the ability to keep very complex systems in balance and to return to a state of balance when it is disturbed—

”Yet words [or images] cause us to deliberately go out of balance,” says Chopra, “and there’s no physical mechanism to explain it.”

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Mind of Its Own

NEUROSCIENTISTS  have been busy for years trying to catalog the “neuronal correlates of consciousness” in the brain,

They are determined to prove that consciousness somehow originates in the gray matter between our ears.

This mechanistic view was assumed by the Human Genome Project, established to catalog the complete human DNA.

It is held that genes carry information about how we look, how well our bodies metabolize food or fight infection, and can determine even how we behave.

It was thought, therefore, that researchers would easily be able to identify specific genes underlying specific diseases, and then all diseases could be eliminated by manipulating the related genes.

But it was discovered that the seemingly simple concept was much more complex than expected.

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Just as the origin of consciousness cannot be tagged to specific neurons in the brain, genes are not easily pigeonholed to one disorder. It was found that they function in complex, and frequently changing teams.

Now science is edging nearer to Theosophy, looking closer at a long-neglected area called the microbiome — researching how hundreds of different species of living microbes, inhabiting the human body and outside, are responsible for our health and behaviors. They even discovered a second brain, in our gut, known as the enteric nervous system!

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Heaven Waits

ALTHOUGH reincarnation is the law of nature, the complete trinity of Spirit, Soul and Mind, says Theosophy, does not yet fully incarnate in average humanity.

“They use and occupy the body by means of the entrance of Mind, the lowest of the three,” writes W. Q. Judge, “and the other two shine upon it from above, constituting the God in Heaven.”

“This was symbolized in the old Jewish teaching about the Heavenly Man” writes William Q. Judge, “who stands with his head in heaven and his feet in hell. That is, the head Spirit and Soul are yet in heaven, and the feet, Mind, walk in hell, which is the body and physical life.”

But even with such a limited degree of Mind (‘Manas’ in Sanskrit), even that is not fully acquired by the growing child “until seven years old,” Blavatsky maintains in The Key to Theosophy (Section 9)

“…and becomes a morally responsible being capable of generating Karma.”

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Human beings in general are not yet fully conscious, Judge says, “and reincarnations are needed to at last complete the incarnation of the whole trinity in the body. When that has been accomplished the race will have become as gods, and the godlike trinity being in full possession the entire mass of matter will be perfected and raised up for the next step.”

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Through the Veil

MOST of us are so preoccupied with future expectations, we fail to see what’s right in front of us.

A famous attention experiment at Harvard showed that many people missed seeing a 200-pound gorilla walking through a small group of basketball players.

Not so for a clinically blind man, who clearly saw what he should not have seen. Surprised science writer, Andrea Gawrylewski, reporting in The Scientist, described the experiment, and wondered:

“How much can you see with a non-functioning visual cortex?”

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“With lesions on both sides of his visual cortex,” reports a paper published in Current Biology, “he was able to flawlessly navigate an obstacle course.”

Biologists and neurologists are still searching for the hardware (neurons) responsible for this seeming impossibility.

“It remains to be determined which of the several extra-striate pathways,” the article comments, “account for this patient’s intact navigation skills.”

“It is not fully understood how this is possible,” according to the paper.

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This may be one of  modern science’s many stubborn puzzles, but Theosophy easily sees the answer, through the use of a certain hidden sense.

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Life Electric

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 throbbing, man-made EMF swimming pool: the use of wireless cell towers, radar towers, and hundreds of Earth-circling satellites, is again exacting, as pesticides did, and still do, a huge price from nature. We may not be able to recover from the effects of this interference.

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 of this system is of critical concern.

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