Category Archives: Psychology & Human Nature

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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Your Secret Karma

BECAUSE all organisms are related through similarities in DNA sequences, the whole of nature could be really one family.

New insights of epigenetics have lead to a revolutionary view of human biology. Theosophy concurs with many of these new findings.

“The failures of science and its arbitrary assumptions,” Blavatsky says in The Secret Doctrine (2:670), “are far greater on the whole than any ‘extravagant’ esoteric doctrine.”

The traditional geneticist’s view of evolution “is from the animal,” she reminds us, and “mind in its various phases” is viewed, erroneously, as completely separate from matter.

Theosophy holds that mind is the mystical glue insuring that the identical genes that were in our ancestor’s bodies, what Blavatsky calls The Life Atoms —”are transmitted through their descendants for generation after generation…

“…so that we are literally ‘flesh of the flesh’ of the primeval creature who has developed into man in the later period.”

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This human interdependence is a spiritual law, and as such was never on any geneticist’s radar. These scientists should be getting the message, but are still limited by the standard model of gene theory.

Epigenetics is the new biological game-changer. This revolutionary theory has relatively recently been revived, and promoted successfully by the likes of frontier biologist Bruce Lipton.  He is “an internationally recognized leader in bridging science and spirit.” Lipton discovered that environmental factors (which include mental and emotional states) –

…can alter the way the same genes are expressed, making even identical twins different.

This is only the beginning of an explosion in a new understanding of how biological systems really work. Transcending the standard mechanical gene theory, epigenetics proves the significance of thoughts and feelings, and how they imprint influences into physical life.

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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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Savior Fire

BUDDHA never had any intention of establishing a religion 2500 years ago, at least not our sectarian kind.

Nonetheless, followers across Asia and India soon split his teachings into separate branches and sects, ruled by numerous lamas and monks.

The same today in Hinduism, dominated by a priestly caste of Brahmins at the top, convinced of their right to rule.

Buddha’s life and teachings showed humanity the way to conscious enlightenment through personal merit and compassion sans intermediaries. Humans were inspired to rediscover their inner spiritual natures, without regard to caste or creed.

The Buddha’s teaching of individual responsibility, and primacy of personal will should have saved the world from priestly dogmatism, but it did not.

Similarly, Christian religious dogmatism, with its god and invented savior, cleverly situated beyond our mere earthly domain. The ‘only son of God’ dogma still has a very strong a hold on humanity.

“Shun ignorance, and likewise shun illusion. Avert thy face from world deceptions; mistrust thy senses, they are false,” declares The Voice of the Silence (Fragment 2). “But within thy body — the shrine of thy sensations,

“…seek in the Impersonal for the ‘eternal man,’ and having sought him out, look inward: thou art Buddha.”

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Timeline: PED, India, December 21, 2011. NY TIMES correspondent Lydia Polgreen writes about the ‘untouchable’ Ashok Khade who overcame his allowed future. The ancient origin of the [Upanishads], H. P. Blavatsky wrote in The Secret Doctrine [Summing Up]:

“…proves they were written, in some of their portions, before the caste system became the tyrannical institution which it still is…half of their contents have been eliminated, while some of them were rewritten and abridged.”

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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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The Future Jesus

EASTER week was always Christianity’s “Jesus week,” and usually finds the secular media waging its annual knee-jerk assault on Christian beliefs.

Neither the media nor Christianity seem to know anything about the real Jesus, so we decided to enter the fray as truth-seekers, backed by ancient mystical teachings.

An old cover of Newsweek features “The Decline and Fall of Christian America, ” and is subtitled “The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.”

So popular was the article, that runner-up news magazine, bloggers noted, was forced to disable comments on the Jon Meacham lead article.

Meachams’s controversial theme, The End of Christian America, received over 5,000 comments at the time, bloggers reported, “making the site wobbly.”

Also see columnist Colleen Raezler’s article, For the media, it’s un-Holy Week, if you want all the bloody details. Raezler notes that “The Washington Post/Newsweek ‘On Faith’ blog featured a post that belittled the significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

“The Discovery Channel aired a documentary that painted Jesus as little more than an opportunistic politician who caught a bad break in a trial.”

Even Theosophy’s H. P. Blavatsky frequently took no prisoners in attacking the faults of what she referred to as “Churchianity.”

Yet Blavatsky, nevertheless, sided with the “true Christians,” as she called them, whose “faith in their respective churches is pure and sincere.”

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They are those, she wrote, “whose sinless lives reflect the glorious example of that Prophet of Nazareth, by whose mouth the spirit of truth spake loudly to humanity. Such there have been at all times.” But, what of the future?

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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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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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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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The Secret of Astrology

ASTROLOGY is just unscientific superstition many skeptics insist. Real philosophy, Theosophy counters, seeks “rather to solve than to deny.”

“It is an axiom of the philosophic student,” Blavatsky affirms, “that truth generally lies between the extremes.”

This is what the ancients meant by Astrology she says.

“Mention the word ‘astrology’ and skeptics go into an epileptic fit,” natural health researcher Mike Adams says.

“The idea that someone’s personality could be imprinted at birth according to the position of the sun, moon and planets,” Adams comments, “has long been derided as ‘quackery’ by the so-called ‘scientific’ community

… which resists any notion based on holistic connections between individuals and the cosmos.”

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But wait a minute. Recently, scientific studies showing planetary imprinting called “seasonal biology” has confirmed the principle underlying astrology. The scientific study shows that planetary positions do, surprisingly, influence our biological clocks. Why not our psychological and mental states as well?

Occult Influences

“The ancients always considered the ‘ambient’ – or entire heaven – at birth,” Blavatsky colleague William Q. Judge wrote in Astrological Influences, “as being that which affected man.”

New Age Mother, Madame Blavatsky, referred often to astrology in her Theosophical writings, as in the following lines from “The Theosophist” in Blavatsky Collected Writings compiled by Boris de Zircoff.

Although a study of the science of astronomy may enable us “to determine what the course of events will be,” she insisted that:

“…the clock indicates,
it does not influence the time.”

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Thus, she says, “though the planets may have no hand in changing the destiny of man, still their position may indicate what that destiny is likely to be.”

“And a distant traveler has often to put right his clock, so that it may indicate correctly the time of the place he visits.”

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The Evening Star

“NO STAR among the countless myriads that twinkle over the sidereal fields of the night sky,” writes Helena Blavatsky, “shines so dazzlingly as the planet Venus.”

“Venus is the queen among our planets, the crown jewel of our solar system.”

“She is the inspirer of the poet, the guardian and companion of the lonely shepherd,” she writes, “the lovely morning and the evening star.”

“For, ‘Stars teach as well as shine,’ although their secrets are still untold and unrevealed to the majority of men, including astronomers.”

“They are ‘a beauty and a mystery,’ verily.”

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“This story shall now be told,” she says, “for the benefit of those who may have neglected their astral mythology.”

“Venus, characterised by Pythagoras as the sol alter, a second Sun, on account of her magnificent radiance – equalled by none other was the first to draw the attention of ancient Theogonists.”

“Before it began to be called Venus, it was known in pre-Hesiodic theogony as Eosphoros (or Phosphoros), and Hesperos, the children of the dawn and twilight.”

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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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The Watchers

YOU must not think that the gods are without employment, declared Synesius, the Greek bishop of Ptolemais.

The idea is developed by theosophist W. Q. Judge in his article “Cycles,” about the duty of the ancient gods to watch over humanity.

“For this providence is divine and most ample, which frequently through one man pays attention to and affects countless multitudes of men.”

“For they descend according to orderly periods of time,” Synesius wrote,

“… for the purpose of imparting a beneficent impulse in the republics of mankind.”

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Describing these descending Gods, Synesius writes: “For there is indeed in the terrestrial abode the sacred tribe of heroes who pay attention to mankind, and who are able to give them assistance even in the smallest concerns.”

“This heroic tribe is, as it were,” Judge quotes, “a colony from the gods established here

“…in order that this terrene abode may not be left destitute of a better nature.”

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Illusion of Reality

VIEWED 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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Healing Hands

MESMEROMANIA is how the Paris press reported it.

Parisians including the wife of King Louis XVI, Queen Marie Antoinette, were in love with a man by the name of Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer.

Dr. Mesmer was rich in part because he married a rich widow, but also because he became a successful Viennese physician.

He lived on a well-appointed estate and hosted the then young twelve-year-old musical prodigy, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Mozart was introduced to Benjamin Franklin’s invention, the “Armonica,” by Mesmer, (who used it to ‘mesmerize’ his patients.)

The young Mozart composed a musical piece for Mesmer’s “Glass Armonica,” and later wrote a solo armonica piece, and a larger quintet for armonica, flute, oboe, viola and cello.

Mesmer was the darling of Parisian Elite Society in the 1780’s, a confidant of the super rich and super powerful.

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All over Paris, people were throwing themselves under trees Mesmer had ‘mesmerized.’ They would flail, convulse, scream and claim healing. Mesmer said he had a healing power in his hands he called “Animal Magnetism.”

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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.

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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.

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The Wonderland Effect

IN the surreal landscape of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Alice wonders what the world is like on the other side of a mirror.

To her surprise, Alice is able to pass into it, as if into the astral world, and experience an alternate existence.

A puzzled Alice discovers a book with looking-glass poetry called “Jabberwocky,” which she can read only by holding it up to a mirror.

This is a clear reference to occultism’s ‘astral light,’ where the images of everything are stored in reverse to those on our normal terrestrial plane.

In 1871, mediumship and table-tipping were all the rage, detailed in Mitch Horowitz’s recent book Occult America. Understandably, Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland was wildly popular at the time.

Clairvoyance and psychic powers have always fascinated the public. But then, as now, they were considered nonsensical by mainstream scientists.

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“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” the White Queen confides to Alice.

Once of interest only to ghost-hunters, and the derided science of parapsychology, “The Big 5″: Precognition, Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Psychokinesis and Healing (known collectively as “psi”), are now being noticed by the rank-and-file psychological and neuroscience community.

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