Spiritual Magic

THE word magic is largely misunderstood, because there are various kinds of so-called magic, much of which is deception and trickery.

But there is a magic which might be called the unseen and hidden power to bring to pass certain desired results, without revealing its methods. It is called intention.

Its successful use requires a knowledge far beyond any kind of trickery, and is based on an innate spiritual force in man and nature.

Those who practiced it in ancient times were the initiates, the wise, called Magi — the source of the word magic.

It is relatively easy to learn tricks and spells, Mme. Blavatsky writes, “and the methods of using the subtler, but still material, forces of physical nature.”

The force of selfish human desire awakens darker powers, Theosophy says. Unless the motive is pure, destructive passions are often aroused, and even unconsciously will do harm to others and to nature.

In the article Practical Occultism, H. P. Blavatsky warns of this: “it is the motive alone which makes any exercise of power become black, malignant, or white, beneficent Magic,” she writes, “and unless the intention is entirely unalloyed…

“the spiritual will transform itself into the psychic, act on the astral plane, and dire results may be produced by it.”

“It is impossible to employ spiritual forces, she maintains, “if there is the slightest tinge of selfishness [or separateness] remaining in the operator.”

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Auguries of God

SCIENCE now realizes that mother nature was ahead of her time in understanding the quantum universe.

A red rose, the dance of honey bees, spiral galaxies, Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics, and Yogi Berra all get it right.

It’s back to the future all over again. Poetry, plants, religions, even materialists and atheists—all have a lot more in common as we’ll see.

Even celebrated artist and poet William Blake sensed he saw “a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower,” and how you could

“Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”

Children at play—left to their own instincts and intuitions unsmothered by parental intimidation—engage the delights of spontaneous imagination. Theirs is an unselfconscious, non-ideological purity of intent.

Genius of originality in the young child is  hardwired, and when not managed by disapproving, arbitrary rule makers, their creations are joyful and  unpretentious. “The true sign of intelligence,” Albert Einstein once said, “is not knowledge but imagination.”

Mme. Blavatsky’s closest colleague, William Q. Judge, wrote of imagination as “the King faculty,” (Ocean of Theosophy, 139), because “the Will cannot do its work if the Imagination be at all weak or untrained.”

All life forms, like kids at play, are inseparably intertwined — yet consist, as does the radio wave spectrum, of  infinite individual frequencies .

(The Secret Doctrine)

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“Would to goodness the men of science exercised their ‘scientific imagination’ a little more,” Blavatsky wrote in her article Kosmic Mind,  “and their dogmatic and cold negations a little less.” 

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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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Sacred Dawn

TODAY is the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, which means it’s the longest day of the year in 2011.

The exact moment of the solstice today will occur at 1:16 p.m. ET. In the Southern Hemisphere, today actually marks the 2011 winter solstice.

As with mythology, such traditions appeal to our imagination and are open to different interpretations.

“Although revolution and change often appear to be precipitated by things that happen to us from without,” theosophical astroblogger Lauren Coleman assures us:

“this process of revolution is also dependent on an inner evolution, an unfolding from within.”

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“Heralding the beginning of summer and the longest day of the year,” writes astrologer Elaine Kalantarian, “the June solstice was called Midsummer by the Celts.”

Many people believe that the summer crop circles in Wiltshire UK carry a symbolically encoded message. (Click here, or on the photo below to view the latest circles.)

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Symbology experts such as researcher Freddy Silva, imagine that the enigmatic designs in growing fields are sacred geometry, and may represent ‘mandalas of hope’ for our troubled world. 

Theosophical scholar, David Pratt, thinks so. In his engaging article “Crop Circles and their Message,” he theorizes: “The basic element of crop glyphs is the circle which can symbolize unity, boundless space, and the universal creative spirit or godforce.”

“Crop circles with rings and satellite circles sometimes resemble diagrams of the chemical elements, with their orbiting electrons.”

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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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The Still Small Voice

FOLLOWING H. P. Blavatsky’s death in 1891, an editorial was published in the New York Daily Tribune (founded by Horace Greeley) noting:

“Madame Blavatsky held that the regeneration of mankind must be based upon the development of altruism.

“In this she was at one with the greatest thinkers, not alone of the present day, but of all time,” the Editorial acknowledged.

“And, it is becoming more and more apparent, at one with the strongest spiritual tendencies of the age.

“This alone would entitle her teachings to the candid and serious consideration of all who respect the influences that make for righteousness.

Some of  the clearest statements of Blavatsky’s ethical views, are in The Key to Theosophy with the keynote that “altruism is an integral part of self-development.”

Asked how a person could achieve such an elevated state, her reply focused on four overarching aspects: “By the use of our higher reason, spiritual intuition and moral sense, and by following the dictates of what we call ‘the still small voice’ of our conscience —

“…and which speaks louder in us than the earthquakes and the thunders of Jehovah.”

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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.”

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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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Love or Logic

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 precepts by H. P. Blavatsky.

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

But, writes 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.” Harvard-trained brain scientist, Jill Bolte Taylor, following her life-altering stroke, had a direct knowing of this duality.

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Weighing Consciousness

WRESTING consciousness from the lords of scientific  reductionism, where it had languished for decades, would take an imaginative and fearless investigator.

Among such, however, would not be counted René Descartes, the dubiously anointed “Father of Modern Philosophy.”

Descartes held that non-human animals could be reductively explained as mere automatons.

This is not a concept that would be endorsed by animal protectors, environmentalists, or Theosophists—who recognize that conscious awareness is present in all kingdoms of nature, not just humans.

Possessors of abiding consciousness includes, Theosophy maintains, such ubiquitous entities as atoms, minerals and bacteria.

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Decartes held famously to the premise “I think therefore I am”— without ever defining what a thought is, or explaining the ever-elusive, but persistent presence of consciousness.

One wonders if it doesn’t seem far more reasonable to assume the opposite is true, i.e. that—”I AM, therefore I think?”

Adherents biassedly line up on one or the other side of the issue. (Actually, Theosophy could argue both sides are accounted for by its teaching of the mind’s dual nature.)

And, in fact, the elusive, omnipersistent ‘mind’, is not a mere production of the brain.

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Over one hundred years ago, proving the existence of the ‘soul’ was attempted by physical science, employing of course the expected material, reductionist methods, using machinery—to weigh it!

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Christos Rising

 

EASTER week is 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.”

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Waking to God

HUMANITY is divided into thousands of  languages, hundreds of sects and cults, castes, creeds, religious sects and political ideologies.

Instead of being demonstrators of love and service, many encourage differences, foster criticism, opposition and attacking others.

How, then, can we ever hope to achieve harmony and oneness, and become a new humanity that selflessly eschews all differences and personal enmities?

A united world has been the hope of mankind for ages. Poets, artists, philosophers and statespersons have dreamed of it. Self-interested politicians claim they have the grand solution to the problems of disease, hunger, poverty, homelessness.

But they have not succeeded, because they are motivated by personal agendas, and a failure to accept and value the spiritual oneness of humanity.

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In our obsession with the bitter roots of sectarian differences and selfish, materialist agendas, we remain blind to the reality of life as One Being.

“Real Theosophy IS ALTRUISM,” Mme. Blavatsky once said — “and we cannot repeat it too often:

“It is brotherly love, mutual help, unswerving devotion to Truth.”

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Origins of Easter

THE  Saxon goddess Ostara, root 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.

“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.”

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

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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Superorganism

GAIA the Greek Goddess of the Earth, was mother to all the Gods according to the ancient Greeks.

In the beginning there was only Chaos, out of which there appeared Gaia they taught, and she gave birth to more than fifty symbolic deities.

In Gaia’s role as mother to the Gods, and employing many fathers, she gave birth to numerous entities, for example Python, Antaeus, Ceto, Charybdis, Echidna, Creusa, Erichthonius, Eurybia, Typhon.

They may have represented the titanic formative and creative forces of Earth’s early history.

The ancients were fond of personifying the natural forces in nature and man, and for good reason.

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For them, nature was conscious, and she is, “in reality an aggregate of forces manipulated by semi-intelligent beings guided by High Planetary Spirits,” a fundamental axiom of The Secret Doctrine.

“‘Entity’ may be thought a strange term to use in the case of a globe,” wrote H. P. Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine.

“But the ancient philosophers, who saw in the earth a huge ‘animal,’” she writes,  “were wiser in their generation than our modern geologists are in theirs.”

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Masquerade

WE live on a planet constantly in motion, and except for the occasional natural catastrophe, a usually very slow, orderly motion.

The Earth is billions of years old and still in the making, where glacial cycles come and go, continents move, mountains form and erode.

Scientists investigate everything from the hypothetical big bang to the smallest geologic and biologic forces. But where Earth came from, how evolution works,

…and why and how life itself arose, is still the most profound mystery in science.

Of course, a materialistic science would be perplexed. Their hypothetical models always start and develop through random events, and chance mutations that drive a soulless stew of blind matter, having neither intelligent design or purpose.

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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.”

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“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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The Unwrapped Soul

EVOLUTION is spiral, Theosophy teaches and the path of spirituality turns “corkscrew-like.”

Soul experiences are layered securely “within and around the physical, semi-physical, and supra-physical.”

Man’s immortality and the existence of God, are the two primary doctrines that H. P. Blavatsky determined to prove.

Analogizing in her Preface to Isis Unveiled, her first Theosophical opus, she sets the bar to its highest level,  posing immediately the keynote question:

Who ever saw the Immortal Spirit of man, so as to be able to assure himself of man’s immortality?”

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Often it is clear-eyed children, unfettered by dogmas, who are the ones able to perceive spirit, not their parents or teachers.

In an attempt to answer this ageless question, Mme. Blavatsky narrates that it was while traveling in the East, that she and her entourage encountered certain wise sages.  That “We came into contact with certain men:

“…endowed with such mysterious powers and such profound knowledge … that to their instructions we lent a ready ear.”

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These Eastern sages possessed an unshakable  wisdom, and first-hand knowledge of Man’s immortal self. They assured Mme. Blavatsky and her traveling companions, that it was only “by combining science with religion” that

“…the existence of God and immortality of man’s spirit may be demonstrated like a problem of Euclid.”

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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 Deathless Self

EVOLUTION as defined in the occultism of Theosophy, is a triple-faceted scheme — a blend of spirit, mind, and matter — “inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point.”

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

A major factor in our self-development lies in recognizing the continuity of life, Theosophy says — and that for the soul, there is really no such thing as death.

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

We are first and foremost spiritual beings, and humanity is our field of experience. But what happens to our human self after death? Does our consciousness die with the body?

Our afterlife, once the dissolution of the body and Earthly desires 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 as an example, “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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A Coherent World

THE Cheyenne say that “our first teacher is our own heart,” but  mainstream science offers few apples to our inner instructor.

Western medical school medicine still views the heart only as a mechanical blood pump.

That view is beginning to change. The Medical Community is being challenged to expand its thinking about human biology, health, and wellness.

Leading-edge research in holistic medicine, biophysics, bioenergetics, and biocentrism all point in the same direction – telling us that we are more than just our physical body.

Explaining how we are more, H. P. Blavatsky aserts in The Secret Doctrine that “The whole issue of the quarrel between the profane and the esoteric sciences,”

“… depends upon the belief in, and demonstration of, the existence of an astral body within the physical, the former independent of the latter.”


The key is explained in today’s frontier science by the presence of the ‘biofield’ – a human body-field that is described as a structured web of information and energy that underlies and informs our physical body, and rules our state of health and well-being.

The heart is the primary contributor, regulator and overseer of this web. “Electrically, the heart generates over 500 times more electricity than the brain,” writes BioCare Certified Neurofeedback Provider, Helena E. Kerekhazi, MS, NRNP. “It is the biggest generator in the body.”

“We have to subtract out the heart artifact from the brainwaves when we record, so strong is the signal.”


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