The Psychic Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Great Breath

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

“It is ‘Be-ness’
rather than Being.”

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

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Goddess of Spring

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Pysanka

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

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

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Your Brain on God

STUDENTS of metaphysics and Theosophy are sometimes called to task for being too ‘intellectual.’

Some prefer the force of thought to hammer out truth, dismissing feelings and emotions as emanating from the ‘lower nature.’

But as W. Q. Judge wrote in the Ocean of Theosophy, “intellect alone is cold, heartless and selfish.” This is shown today by studies of neurological correlates in the brain.

Materialistic, intellectual data are stored in the brain, but do not stimulate areas such as the pineal gland — known by occultists to host spiritual impulses like feelings of compassion.

We are spiritual beings at our core, but our behaviors on this physical plane — just like the actions of rider and horse — are solely governed by how we have entrained our psychic and physical instrument.

“There are persons,” H. P. Blavatsky writes, “who never think with the higher faculties of their minds at all.”

“This is why it is so very difficult for a materialist — the metaphysical portion of whose brain is almost atrophied — to raise himself,”

“Or for one who is naturally spiritually-minded to descend to the level of the matter-of-fact vulgar thought,” she wrote. “Optimism and pessimism depend on it also in a great measure.”

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Mind of Love

Paul Robertson, "Through a Glass Darkly"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ω

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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Placebo’s Evil Twin

© Lois Greenfield

THE uplifting adage “attitude is altitude” aptly pinpoints how the power of positive thought and intention affects every aspect of our lives.

“For decades, scientists have tried to test the power of prayer and positive thinking, with mixed results,” writes NPR National Desk religion correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty about a study on the science of spirituality.

“Now some scientists,” she writes, “are fording new, and controversial territory.” In an area of esoteric inquiry which is sometimes called Mental Alchemy and/or Metaphysics, a lot of thinkers over the ages have stated the idea in various ways.

The conviction that the thoughts one thinks are the great determiners of the content of one’s life, inspires  many to forge on despite difficult life circumstances.

Ancient wisdom traditions maintain that thoughts are actual things, and that one’s thoughts are the result of an unalterable universal law called “Cause and Effect,” and will manifest themselves at some point in one’s life.

The law of Cause and Effect can also be described as a law that says, “For every action, there is a reaction.”  Since thoughts are actual things, and since thoughts are also actions, it means that the thoughts will invariably cause a reaction that will result in a manifestation of those thoughts.

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