Category Archives: Psychology & Human Nature

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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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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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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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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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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Hidden Powers of Animals

THIS was such a popular post, we decided to republish it. Many people think that animals are just instinctual machines, but the assumption is false, and many controlled studies prove it.

Investigators discover that humans are not the only beings with self-aware minds, free will, and paranormal powers. There are powerful spiritual and intellectual forces hidden in animals.

Chimps, as will be shown, were found to be smarter than humans in computerized memory tests. But, in the 17th Century, René Descartes, dubbed the “Father of Modern Philosophy,” started everyone off on the wrong paw.

His materialism was not lost on H. P. Blavatsky. “Descartes held the living animal as being simply an automaton,” she noted in the article Have Animals Souls — “a ‘well wound up clock-work,’ according to Malebranche,” and 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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Dreaming with God

THE principles of occult science and psychology were so unfamiliar, that Mme. Blavatsky often added the term “meta” to distinguish them from the mainstream.”Meta-chemistry,” for example, was frequently used.

“Theosophy, or rather the occult sciences it studies,” she explained in her article Le Phare De L’Inconnu, “is something more than simple metaphysics.”

“It is, if I may be allowed to use the double terms, meta-metaphysics, meta-geometry, etc., etc., or a universal transcendentalism. Theosophy rejects the testimony of the physical senses entirely, if the latter be not based upon that afforded by the psychic and spiritual perceptions.”

This post might have been titled “Meta-psychology,” but the editors confess to prefer instead to mass media popular topics. This video blog is being published simultaneously to our subscribers, plus adding a permanent link titled “Science and Spirituality” to the site header.

That link will be updated periodically with important findings, so feel free to check by clicking the header link “Science & Spirituality.” As new materials are added, links to the posts will also be emailed immediately to Theosophy Watch subscribers.

Publicizing new discoveries in psychology and consciousness are ideas that drive the editorship of Theosophy Watch. Such are relevant to its declared focus “ancient thought in modern dress” — a phrase coined by H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine.

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Altered State

THEOSOPHY isn’t in the world solely for the spiritual benefit of its member groups. It aims to reach far more than helping a few individuals.

The Theosophical Society’s most important aim, William Q. Judge head of the American Section wrote (Letters, p. 71), is to “change the buddhi and manas [Sk.] of the human race,” – i.e, its heart and mind.

But there are powerful, unavoidable barriers to inner change, all of our own making. They are our physical senses, habits, emotions, thought sensations, embedded worldviews. They compete for our time and attention, keeping us glued to the outer surface of an ever-whirling wheel.

It’s a puzzle for the brain mind, because like an iceberg, the bulk of our nature lies below the surface, and only the tip is visible — just as an actor’s outer image, her costume, makeup, tone of voice, etc., sets our opinion of her.

But, in spiritual terms, the merry-go-round of personality is a trap.

The word personality itself derives from “persona,” a Latin word meaning “mask,” the appearance we present to the world — a marketing device also used by artists and musicians. Persona is also a the Jungian psychological term. 

But, if true spiritual wisdom is kept alive in the world, Mme. Blavatsky wrote, “man’s mental and psychic growth will proceed in harmony with his moral improvement.”

In her conclusion to The Key to Theosophy, Blavatsky notes that if humanity’s spiritual progress is successful, our material surroundings “will reflect the peace and fraternal goodwill which will reign in the mind

— instead of the discord and strife which is everywhere around us apparent today.”

The original aims of Theosophy seem to have indeed survived worldly snares, and just as foreseen, the new cycle is witnessing the rise of many dedicated new age thought leaders and frontier scientists, infusing a radical new theosophical paradigm into science, religion, philosophy and society.

Click to view or save this paper published by luminaries at the Institute of Noetic Sciences to your computer: Worldview Transformation and the Development of Social Consciousness (.pdf)

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In addition to many of the new age leaders we’ve often featured here: Bruce Lipton, Dean Radin, Acharya Sanning, Rupert Sheldrake, etc., there are hundreds of thinkers, scientists and researchers with spiritual convictions today.

It would appear we are immersed in a sea change of worldviews, a Western spiritual movement influenced by transforming, theosophical ideas.

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Thoughts are Things

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?

How can this happen? How is it possible for an immaterial thought or feeling produce a visible, physical effect?

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Science cannot answer. “Sow a thought, reap an act” is a familiar occult mantra and begs an explanation, what is the mysterious mechanism of how thought energy can speak to the nervous system, and just as quickly cause a visible response in the physical body?

“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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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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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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Stepping Stones

Photo: barrywheeler.net

DEDICATED repetition is the foundation of all accomplishment in true art, science, and even spiritual development.

Yet success may entail much more than just ‘practice, practice’ to get to Carnegie Hall, as the saying goes.

Sweat, talent and technical skill are of course required. But the intuitive musician has a growing sense of  how a composition ought to be performed.

Because, through an inner  transformation, she can embrace the intent of the composer, and transform the music into an exhilarating inspiration of her own.

The accomplished performer is not tied to notes on paper, becoming what is called ‘free of the keyboard.’ That shift signals an musician who not only has the required technical mastery, but is also ready to shape a performance in her own inspired way.

Yet in large orchestras, the conductor communicates directions to musicians during a performance, becoming the authoritative guide, interpreter, and dedicated amanuensis of the composer.

Not unlike the Buddha following his enlightenment, an orchestra conductor, or music instructor, has transformed herself into a guru to the searchers, coaxing them through their envelope of inexperience, to ever increasing emancipation.

They say that when a student is ready, the teacher will appear. Spiritual knowledge and development does require commitment and dedication to an ideal, but on a grander scale. The stakes are higher than any one art or science.

“Practical Theosophy is not one Science,” Blavatsky explained, “but it embraces every science in life, moral and physical. It may, in short, be justly regarded as the universal ‘coach,’ — a tutor of world-wide knowledge and experience.”

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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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