Category Archives: consciousness

Invisible Hand

GOD concepts are in mainstream science’s opinion unscientific because they have no way to explain or measure the idea of deity.

In the debate on intelligent design, the Christian evangelist Randal Rauser properly complains about modern scientific methods.

Science shuns any concepts not based on established models. Intelligent design, Rauser says, can only be recognized as a valid ‘scientific’ explanation “if bound by the laws of physics.”

On this basis, he says, “if God is any part of the proposal, it is by definition unscientific,” —and all claims of legitimacy or illegitimacy of Intelligent Design or God must be disregarded, because science has an inherent bias.

“If therefore we don’t know the hidden or as yet undiscovered laws of science, then we don’t know whether an explanation conforms to them or not.

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Theosophists agree. Any honest analysis of the controversy by science should acknowledge merely that the concepts do not conform to the “laws of physics as presently understood,” or the laws “as they ultimately are”—not dismissed out of hand.

Mme. Blavatsky insisted that science was intentionally limited, because unwilling to follow the evidence wherever it leads—a  standard science admits, but does not follow.

She cited as an example the periodic table, purported to be a complete and accurate account of all chemical elements.

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Dance of Shiva

SELF-DEVELOPMENT is defined by the degree to which one is able to activate their inner, or ‘all-seeing’ intuitive eye.

Our ability to reawaken the dormant spiritual ‘third eye’ ancient Eastern Adepts say, is the measure of our spiritual development.

But this would be impossible without the assistance of Shiva to remove our personal illusions.

The deeper we are able to penetrate our inner, permanent Self, and peer unobstructed into the heart of Nature, the more we become aware of the inter-connectedness of life.

But, acquiring this insight requires not only wishful thinking, but a commitment to action of the Krishna-Arjuna kind. “He who remains inert, restraining the senses and organs,” Krishna taught in Bhagavad-Gita (Ch. 3), “…yet pondering with his heart upon objects of sense, is called a false pietist of bewildered soul.”

“But he who having subdued all his passions performeth with his active faculties all the duties of life, unconcerned as to their result,” he told Arjuna, “is to be esteemed. Do thou perform the proper actions: action is superior to inaction.”

“Whatever plane our consciousness may be acting in,” Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine (1:40),

“…both we and the things belonging to that plane are, for the time being, our only realities.”

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“As we rise in the scale of development 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.”

Click on the Lotus above for more detailed info on Siva and the Third Eye, and you can save to your computer (.pdf)

However, each furthering wake-up has its own corresponding illusion cautioned the teacher, “the idea that now, at last, we have reached ‘reality’ —

“…but only when we have reached the absolute Consciousness, and blended our own with it, shall we be free from delusions.”

Mme. Blavatsky also noted in The Secret Doctrine (2:475), that: “stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without a change.” This has many layers of meaning, not the least of which is the importance of achieving control over thoughts and feelings, noticeable most when we try to quiet the chattering ‘monkey mind,’ especially during meditation.

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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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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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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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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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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

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. The cost of this interference may be unrecoverable.

Clearly, we are flawed space travelers pitted against a universal, omnipresent, omnipotent electric system we call Life—a struggle we must certainly lose, if  we persist in our materialistic ways.

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Yet, paradoxically,  our natural state, and that of the world and the universe, is electrical—and we co-exist with fellow electrical beings at every level, from cells to stars.

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Reality Central

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 constant core, says Theosophy, and can be transformed, but never destroyed.

Man is, therefore, not a physical thing, says Theosophy, but a self-cognitive entity using a physical life form.

Our bodies makes it seem we are merely “carbon-based units,” as depicted in the sci-fi series StarTrek – (see “The Mysterious Builder.”)

But, the “consciousness which wells up within us,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, is essentially the same as

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

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Practically speaking, all forms in nature are constructs of consciousness. As humans, as the forward point of evolution, we are described by spiritual teachers as ‘Immortal Perceivers’ with unlimited potential.

Enigmatically, the eternal conscious core of the universe, and therefore of all manifested beings within it, 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. This nature of ours is always overarchingly superior to whatever we might mentally ‘know,’ or may have memorized at any particular time.

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Veils of Science

GOD is by modern science’s definition unscientific because it has as no way to explain or measure the idea of deity.

In the debate on intelligent design, the Christian evangelist Randal Rauser properly complains about modern scientific methods.

Science shuns any concepts not based on established models. Intelligent design, Rauser says, can only be recognized as a valid ‘scientific’ explanation “if bound by the laws of physics.”

On this basis, he says, “if God is any part of the proposal, it is by definition unscientific,” —and all claims of legitimacy or illegitimacy of Intelligent Design or God must be disregarded, because science has an inherent bias.

“If therefore we don’t know the hidden or as yet undiscovered laws of science, then we don’t know whether an explanation conforms to them or not.

ζ

Theosophists agree. Any honest analysis of the controversy by science should acknowledge merely that the concepts do not conform to the “laws of physics as presently understood,” or the laws “as they ultimately are”—not dismissed out of hand.

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The Psychic and Noetic

The Pythia Oracle

MAINSTREAM scientists looking for the source of consciousness, expect it’s origin to 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 dispute these assumptions. They are not convinced, and are willing to investigate the anciently held belief that consciousness is a independent entity from the physical structures through which it may manifest.

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

Ω

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Waking Up

THEOSOPHY teaches the progressive development of everything, “worlds as well as atoms,” according to The Secret Doctrine.

This “stupendous development,” say the ancient sages, “has neither conceivable beginning nor imaginable end.”

To them, our ‘Universe’ is “only one of an infinite number of Universes, all links in the great Cosmic chain of Universes.”

In this view, each individual cosmos, or single human life, is the effect of its predecessor. Under karmic law, “a cause as regards its successor.”

If lifetimes and universes are like schools, then the classrooms are stages of consciousness, pushing us to ever greater self-awareness and spiritual development—only if we are wise enough to pursue that path.

Thus our lives are complex creations, a series of “progressive awakenings,” enhanced drop by drop, by our individual, family, racial, national and global karmas.

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Every person settles into his or her own unique rhythm in which a lifetime meditation reflects a mix of past karma, and present choices.

We are all at slightly differing points on an ascending evolutionary arc, paying off old debts, making new ones—pushing forward or slipping back, and the mind awakens to new realities.

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.”

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’—”

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The Best Medicine

FACED with a life-threatening illness, journalist-editor Norman Cousins famously laughed his is way out of the hospital, and healed himself.

His book Anatomy of an Illness, about the the healing effects of laughter and positive emotions, jump-started the era of mind-body medicine.

That was more than 30 years ago. But Gautama Buddha had taught the power of happiness 2,500 years earlier.

Thousands of candles can be lighted from a single candle, Buddha said, and the flame will not be diminished.

“Happiness never decreases by being shared,” he taught.

Western cognitive sciences are only now beginning to understand the subtle psycho-physiological flames of thought, intention and feeling that ancient sages understood the importance of, ages ago.

Respect life as those do who desire it,” declares the ancient spiritual psychology of Light on the Path, challenging the student to remain unselfish, and yet to

“…be happy as those are
who live for happiness.”

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Out of this World

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.”

Ω

The foregoing words were written by H. P. Blavatsky in Isis Unveiled, 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.

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The Overview Effect

THE epiphany for astronaut Edgar Mitchell occurred when he looked out the window of his spacecraft at the Earth, Moon and Sun, and at the infinitely vast star systems.

Suddenly it came to him that the molecules and cells of our bodies must have had their origin in those faraway stars.

It was at that moment an overwhelming realization of the interconnectedness of all life dawned on him. It was a life-altering flash of intuition resulting not in “intellectual knowledge,” he says, but in a “visceral knowing.”

“It was accompanied by a very blissful feeling that I had never experienced before.”

Dr. Mitchell describes being completely engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness, in this excerpt from Renée Scheltema’s visionary film, Something Unknown is Doing We Don’t Know What.

Having had such a life-changing experience, sometimes called the Overview Effect, the former astronaut, along with parapsychologist Charles Tart, attempt to interpret the non-linear feelings and insights for the rest of us.

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Of Two Minds

TRUTH like hope springs eternal, and what was taught 5,000 years ago by Krishna in Bhagavad-Gita, still works today.

“The Self is the friend of self,” Arjuna’s instructor asserts paradoxically, “and also its enemy.”

In his article of the same title, the theosophical teacher W. Q. Judge noted that “this sentence in the Bhagavad- Gita has been often passed over as being either meaningless or mysterious.”

But why else would religions, touting harmony and peace, be so ready and willing to denounce and harm non-believers?


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

Krishna’s doctrine postulates two selves, each an enemy and friend of the other. The “pushmi-pullyu” character of religions results in the ethical and moral inconsistencies evident 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.”

δ

“For two thousand years India groaned under the weight of caste,” writes one of Mme. Blavatsky’s teachers about priestly craft, “brahmins alone feeding on the fat of the land.”

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A New Humanity

COMING to its senses from seeming insanity, a new humanity is “raising its voice.”

These words signaled H. P. Blavatsky’s welcoming the New Age, as publicized by her over a hundred years ago.

Humanity today speaks, as she hoped, “in those authoritative tones to which the men of old listened in reverential silence through incalculable ages.”

Emerging into this ‘new age’ the spirit in man “has returned like King Lear,” Blavatsky wrote in her article ‘The Tidal Wave.’

She was not the first to acknowledge and dramatize the arrival of a newly awakened humanity.

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Humanity had in the long past listened to a higher voice, she says, but they were so “deafened by the din and roar of civilization and culture, they could hear it no longer.”

But “look around you and behold,” exulting as if writing today, and “think of what you see and hear, and draw therefrom your conclusions.”

What must have been a hard sell in her time, Blavatsky nevertheless boldly maintained that “the age of crass materialism, of Soul insanity and blindness, is swiftly passing away” — an idea, easily acknowledged today — and that:

“… a death struggle between Mysticism and Materialism is no longer at hand, but is already raging.”

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True knowledge, Plato’s Nous, comes slowly and is not easily acquired, says Theosophy.

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The Mysterious Builder

MAINSTREAM science creates an insurmountable obstacle to understanding the real nature of life because of one belief issue.

The issue is, in attempting to unlock the nature of reality, science insists that life must be a distinct entity from matter.

This consensus is sustained because “most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical,” says Biocentrist Dr. Robert Lanza,

… concluding crucially, “without the other side, the living.”


His opposing view is detailed by Dr. Lanza in his book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.

Dr. Lanza shows that Biocentrism, an extension of the Anthropic Principle, described by the Einstein disciple physicist John Wheeler, asserts a view of life incompatible with modern materialism.

The premise of Biocentrism is, with important modifications which assert an intelligent hierarchical structure to nature, a central premise of Theosophy.

The ancients too, held that the universe is created by life and not the other way around.

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All One Being 3

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

Every action we take in fact carries information about us, a kind of psychic body language.

The transfer of information from one person to another without the mediation of any known channel of sensory communication, called telepathy, is the most noticeable effect of this transfer.

Mme. Blavatsky and her Teachers authorized three plainly stated Objects for the Theosophical Society— the Third referred to psychic and spiritual powers.

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Despite this fact, revisionists in some major theosophical groups unilaterally removed both the words psychic and spiritual from that original Third Object. Many smaller groups have, unfortunately, timidly followed suit.

Yet, in H. P. Blavatsky’s The Key to Theosophy, Section 3, published in 1889, the original Third Object of the Theosophical Society is stated unambiguously:

“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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The watered-down version quoted below, adopted by some Theosophical groups, might just as well refer to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s forearms:

“To investigate unexplained laws of Nature and the powers latent in Man.”

Removing the word psychic may be politically expedient, but in this writer’s opinion disrespects the wisdom and foresight of the original Teachers. True, the word “psychic” has accumulated some pretty bad press over the years—but that may soon be ending.

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