ANCIENT SAGES taught that this physical world is interpenetrated by a series of increasingly ethereal worlds or fields, composed of energy-substances beyond our range of perception.
The fields closest to us are referred to as the “astral light.” It is already confirmed by science that the fundamental building block of matter is energy. And all physical life, from crystals to the atoms and cells of our body emit this energy in the form of photons—waves and particles of light.
The Magician
“Light is Life,” Helena Blavatsky wrote, “both are electricity — the life principle pervading the universe, the electric vivifier of all things.”
“Light is the great Protean magician, and under the divine will of the architect… its multifarious, omnipotent waves gave birth to every form as well as to every living being. From its swelling electric bosom, spring matter and spirit. Within its beams lie the beginnings of all physical and chemical action, and of all cosmic and spiritual phenomena.”
The vast majority of the energy potentially available for use on Earth arrives in the form of light from the Sun:
One Unity
Energy and substance are one and inseparable. Because, as everyone now understands, matter is really energy, made up of what science calls “atoms”— the immanent energy which ancient teachers understood as an aspect of spirit-force. The Theosophical wisdom tradition explains that:-
“Spirit and matter are one, being the two opposite poles of the universal manifested substance. …the opposite poles of subject and object, spirit and matter, are but aspects of the One Unity in which they are synthesized…”
Human Magnets
The Russian electrical engineer, Semyon Kirlian, with his famous photographs of the subtle light emissions of leaves, radiating even from inanimate objects, was the first modern to publicize the discovery.
- Thumb Field
Thousands of people have since had their astral photographs taken with so-called “aura cameras.” The technology makes for brisk business at psychic fairs and New Age conferences—but might there be something more significant about these fields than pretty pictures?
Stuck in The Field
Disease processes often get stuck in our field, explaining why energy healing techniques, like EFT, meditation and yoga—which help to reestablish a clear flow of information energy in our field—are so frequently beneficial.
“Great strides have been made in the arts and in cure of diseases, but in the future, as the flower of our civilization unfolds, new diseases will arise and more strange disorders will be known, springing from causes that lie deep in the minds of men and which can only be eradicated by spiritual living.” - H. P. Blavatsky
As this video explains, disease occurs first in the energy field around the body, long before it is detected in the physical.
Latticework Energy Patterns
Paracelsus
An impression of every thought, deed, and event is imprinted in this astral field, as taught in Theosophy, which therefore forms a sort of memory of nature. Likewise, within and around the physical body there is a series of subtler “bodies” composed of these more ethereal states of matter.
Paracelsus traced the second cause of disease to the astral, or sidereal body, which is the vehicle of the life-principle, or Archaeus.
“The Archaeus is of a magnetic nature, and attracts or repels other sympathetic or antipathetic forces belonging to the same plane. The less power of resistance for astral influence a person possesses, the more will he be subject to such influences.” (Paragranum)
- Energy fields of fingers
Rupert Sheldrake, as does Theosophy, proposes that memories are captured on etheric substances, on supra-physical planes. His scientific ideas, largely ignored by orthodox science, are gaining new ground. Thanks to a spiritual shift in consciousness today, it’s an idea whose time has come.
The Morphogenic Field 1
We gain access to astral or akasic records through vibrational synchrony or affinity, (what Sheldrake calls “morphic resonance”)–by vibrations transmitted through the ethereal medium. There is an analogy in the way that information is carried by electromagnetic impulses to cell phones, TVs, radios, and computers, or by light through fiber optic cables.
The Morphogenic Field 2
If information can be stored and transmitted in this way, it’s a puddle-jump to understanding how astral energy fields do the same thing. Memory is no more than archived information. David Pratt writes:
“Experiments have shown that memory is both everywhere and nowhere in particular. Sheldrake suggests that the reason for the recurrent failure to find memory-traces in brains is very simple: they do not exist there.”
Karma Fields
- Prayer Flags
If thoughts were not substantial entities, and could not be stored and retrieved, why would The Buddha have made so much of them?
The first words of the Dhammapada are:
“ALL that we are is the result of what we have thought: all that we are is founded on our thoughts and formed of our thoughts.”
Garbage In, Garbage Out
To esoteric students, concepts of synchrony and affinity seem a lot like the explanation of how a person’s karma is stored and delivered. We receive our karma, just as we tune into our favorite radio station or TV show — we only have to dial into the specific broadcast frequency delivering those programs.
But our relationship to our past can be complicated. We’ve set many of our favorite programs on auto-dial. Reruns from a previous life, we may not even be consciously aware they are running.
Sometimes we are conscious and purposeful in seeking enlightenment. Mostly we seem to live on auto-pilot. And as a result we can get hooked on specific images, repetitive thoughts and ideas, “hang-ups” which often act to block us from seeing impartially.
When this happens we are ruled by, instead of ruling our creations. We can miss learning opportunities when we are just reacting to old reruns and scripts hanging around in our psychic field.
Gregg Braden: The Matrix of Life
Gregg Braden explains there is a living field between the particles of atoms that gives matter its form — this is the matrix of all matter. Ancient civilizations already knew this, and the Western world is only beginning to wake up to it he says:
Who Rules: Heart or Brain?
A new understanding of how the brain works follows similar lines. The brain is a complex local network. It is also an “antenna” or “receiver” of images, memories, thoughts, and ideas from the surrounding energy-field. These are presented to the onstage consciousness of each person (or “actor”).
According to Sheldrake, we are also influenced “by social and cultural fields contained within the overall field of the earth,” writes David Pratt:
“In Theosophy we are said to contribute thoughts and ideas to the pooled memory of the astral light and attract from it those ideas and thoughts with which we resonate most strongly. The astral light may be considered to be the astral body of the earth, and plays a role similar to what Sheldrake calls the morphic field of Gaia.”
The heart acts generally the same way, with the exception that the heart-field functions as the seat of the soul or thinking entity in the body.
Rollin McCraty: Science of the Heart
Some frontier researchers, like Roland McCraty, say that all thoughts and feelings arise first in the heart field, and secondarily transmitted to the brain. The average heart-field is much larger than the brain, and has been measured to extend to twelve feet from the body.
From this we can understand the Native American tradition of placing the hand over the heart when saying “I think.”
Additionally, the heart communicates directly with the “little heart,” the pineal gland, hidden deeply in the brain. But the subtle psycho-physiological mechanism of this activity is not well understood, and will be explored in another post.
The Substance of GOD
“The infinite and uncreated spirit that we usually call GOD, a substance of the highest virtue and excellency,” Blavatsky writes in Isis Unveiled 1:206, “produced everything else by emanative causality.”
“God thus is the primary substance, the rest, the secondary — he, the primary substance, is the cause of motion as well as of the matter, and yet we rightly say that it is matter which moves itself. … ‘a substance indiscernible, that can move itself, that can penetrate, contract, and dilate itself, and can also penetrate, move, and alter matter’”…
Field Who Art in Heaven
Humanity has placed responsibility for healing on appeals to a “God” or “Gods” outside. But in fact, healing has always been directly accessible to us by that aspect of the God field that surrounds us intimately every moment, awake or asleep. Like fish in the ocean, that substance is our lifeline. More than merely surviving, however, real health seems to involve obeying its primordial rules, through spiritual living.
“The evolution of the God-idea proceeds apace with man’s own intellectual evolution,” Blavatsky wrote. “So true it is that the noblest ideal to which the religious Spirit of one age can soar, will appear but a gross caricature to the philosophic mind in a succeeding epoch!”
The Temple of GOD
“Grant us our postulate that God is a universally diffused, infinite principle, and how can man alone escape from being soaked through by, and in, the Deity?”
“We call our ‘Father in heaven,’ she wrote, “that deific essence of which we are cognizant within us, in our heart and spiritual consciousness, and which has nothing to do with the anthropomorphic conception we may form of it in our physical brain or its fancy…
‘Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of (the absolute) God dwelleth in you?’” (1 Corinthians 3:16)
As Above, So Below
We have been looking primarily at the personal-individual ways we interact with the spiritual, mental, psychic and body fields. But to expand the discussion we must reverse our vision, in light of the Kabala tenet “As Above so Below.”
Karma acts individually — but there is also family, racial, national and world Karma. All of these are intertwined and interblended at every point in any given person’s lifetime.
Example: if we don’t raise our voice to oppose an unjust war, we become to that extent participants — the karma is attached to us. With many occult hints on Karma in his Aphorisms on Karma, William Q. Judge notes: “the effect is wrapped up in and is not succedent to the cause.”
“Whatever action he performs, whether good or bad, every thing done in a former body must necessarily be enjoyed or suffered.” –Anugita, Cp. III.
Fields in Space
For the big picture—the universal origin of personal and Nature fields—we turn to science and cosmology. Fundamental to the makeup of the cosmos is what the Hindu philosophers called The Akasa, and may be related to what frontier scientists are recognizing as “plasma”— we live in an “electric universe.”
In her first work, Isis Unveiled, Helena Blavatsky confirmed the teaching:
“…the first motion was communicated to the whole universe, and the electric thrill was instantaneously felt throughout the boundless space. Spirit begat force, and force matter — and thus the latent deity manifested itself as a creative energy.”
The Electric Universe
“Esoteric philosophers held that everything in nature is but a materialization of spirit. The Eternal First Cause is latent spirit, they said, and matter from the beginning.
“While conceding the idea of God to be an unthinkable abstraction to human reason, they claimed that the unerring human instinct grasped it as a reminiscence of something concrete to it, though intangible to our physical senses.”
H. P. Blavatsky, ISIS UNVEILED 1:428.
Ouroboros
The Cosmology Quest
Plasma, like our more familiar electromagnetism, is the manifestation of a still greater field. Just as the “ether,” Blavatsky explains, “is one of the lower ‘principles’ of what we call primordial substance (Akasa, in Sanskrit) — one of the dreams of old, and which has now become again the dream of modern science.”
“For the Occultists,” she continues, “both ether and the Primordial Substance are a reality.”
A Conscious Universe
The Akasa is also, she says, the “Upadhi” [or foundation] “of divine thought.” Which means that consciousness or mind is embedded in all fields, which makes perfect sense when one considers the power they are proven to wield over all forms of life. Both, she says:-
“… the Alpha and the Omega of Being, are but the two facets of the one Absolute Existence.
From this perspective both God, and ‘his’ effects, are The Field. It is compelling testimony for a legitimate marriage between science and religion, and if true, objectors are advised to “forever hold your peace…”
Opposites Attract
“Science without religion is lame,
religion without science is blind.”
(Albert Einstein, “Science, Philosophy and Religion: a Symposium”, 1941)
In his article, Breaking the Cease-Fire Between Science and Religion, BeliefNet blogger David Klinghoffer writes:
“What is portrayed as the debate between religion and science feels increasingly like watching the very bitter dissolution of a doomed marriage. The relationship started out all roses and kisses, proceeded to doubts and regrets, then fights and silences, a mutually agreed separation, and finally to curses and maledictions: ‘I wish you were dead!’”
“Watered-down Deism”
Klinghoffer reflects on Biologist Jerry Coyne: “who lashes out at the accommodationists because, as he wrote in an essay in The New Republic, ‘a true harmony between science and religion requires either doing away with most people’s religion and replacing it with a watered-down deism, or polluting science with unnecessary, untestable, and unreasonable spiritual claims.’”
The synthesis of science, religion and philosophy proposed in H. P. Blavatky’s The Secret Doctrine, is no “watered-down deism.” On the contrary, its ancient occult teachings about man, nature and the universe are just what the world needs now — a love affair with Truth — not more of the same conflict and despair.
Deepak Chopra: “The Wonder of You”
Klinghoffer’s closing paragraph sums it all up exquisitely:
“But remember — alongside the secular Enlightenment view of science, there runs a parallel tradition, seeking to explain nature without preconceptions, secular or otherwise. That way of thinking still exists among individual scientists, though it is in need of a good revival.
With that tradition — older, grander, more open-minded, even more enlightened, you could say — there is no need for a truce with faith, no need for a separation, no need for a divorce.”
The obstacles to reconciliation are numerous. Yet Theosophy offers a loftier ground where both camps will recognize that portion of The God Effect that each of them covets. What is ultimately required on both sides, is less materialism and more spiritual intuition.
No Initiation Fee
Blavatsky explains that “Outside of initiation, the ideals of contemporary religious thought must always have their wings clipped and remain unable to soar higher.” And concludes:-
“Idealistic as well as realistic thinkers, and even free-thinkers, are but the outcome and the natural product of their respective environments and periods.”
Eleusinian Mysteries
Our ideals and ideas, she says, “are only the necessary results of [our] temperaments, and the outcome of that phase of intellectual progress to which a nation, in its collectivity, has attained.”
What seems needed is the willingness and humility to train our intellects to become sensitive to the higher synthesizing power of spiritual insight. More sincere meditation and awe of the mystery and majesty of The God Effect, in every area of life, could go a long way to resolving these disputes.
The Sacred Balance
“It’s dark, there are no familiar landmarks. It’s easy to feel lost. Since time began, humans have looked up into the night sky and wondered: where did it all come from? Where do WE fit in?”
The Matter of Religion
Yes, perhaps even us Blavatsky students are not quite ready for the Great Reconciliation, and our final note, admittedly, may be somewhat off-message. But although Theosophy entered the arena in 1875 with the object of saving the sacred from desecration by materialistic science, organized religions have undeniably consistently hardened around many untenable dogmas.
Which is why people today are abandoning churches, surveys reveal, and formulating their own personal vision of the sacred — many finding inspiration from a living God within themselves and their fellows instead.
One of H. P. Blavatsky’s occult teachers wrote about the danger of materialism in religion. In closing this trilogy, it may not be overly cautionary to refer to those wise words, however painful to some of us.
A Master’s Letter
The Master (Letter No. 10.) begins by stating that one-third of all suffering and misery are due to human selfishness and greed. The other two-thirds, he says, is due to something far more sinister.
“And now after making due allowance for evils that are natural and cannot be avoided . . . I will point out the greatest, the chief cause of nearly two-thirds of the evils that pursue humanity ever since that cause became a power. It is religion under whatever form and in whatsoever nation.
“It is the sacerdotal caste, the priesthood and the Churches; it is in those illusions that man looks upon as sacred, that he has to search out the source of that multitude of evils which is the great curse of humanity, and that almost overwhelms mankind.”
“Ignorance created Gods, and cunning took advantage of the opportunity.”
- Bullet-riddled Bamiyan Buddha
And lastly, from the Master’s Letter No. 87, a cautionary takeaway message that all Theosophy Groups, Spiritual Shift Leaders, or aspiring Theosophist bloggers like us, might take to heart:
“Far from our thoughts may it ever be to erect a new hierarchy for the future oppression of a priestridden world.”
The inference and the message of these words in our turbulent times, seems sufficiently clear.
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