Tag Archives: Buddha

The Mother Matrix

WHEN mother welcomed us back in the house after a long day outside at play, we knew there was caring and love waiting for us.

There would  be warm food, a soothing bath, a bedtime story. Clean pajamas and sheets were as much mother’s rule as her unconditional love.

There is a perfect analogy “between the processes of Nature, in the Kosmos, and in the individual man,” according to The Secret Doctrine (1:173.)

We learn that analogy “is the surest guide to the comprehension of the Occult teachings.” Thus, nature must also be a loving mother.

Hundreds of restorative forces are built-in to our physical bodies. Cuts and scrapes soon heal, the immune system fights off harmful invaders, and worn out parts are repaired with fresh new cells.  Nature knows how to care for her children, if only we obey a few basic rules, and don’t throw off the natural order. That’s the ideal.

But in these hectic and distracting times more of us are straying from nature’s ways. With increasing financial and psychological pressures on parents, early childhood is often less than ideal, and we’ve stop paying attention.

This is shown by an increasing separation anxiety in our children, a serious state leading to numerous mental, emotional and physical disorders.

But there are ways to heal. Click here to view a short, but ground-breaking talk by Clancy D. McKenzie, M.D describing these problems, and revealing the unexpected solution. Dr. McKenzie’s presentation, Babies Need Mothers“, was given at the 2011 Annual International Theosophical Conference.

Many of Dr. McKenzie’s most powerful insights were directed to him during his dreams, and experienced later as voices on awakening, and during the day at unexpected moments. “It hit him like a bolt of lightening. Without so much as a hand-held calculator, McKenzie unearthed the origin and mechanism of serious mental and emotional disorders.”

Is it because we forget that nature and humanity are really One Being, that we lose our way?

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Crossing Over

LOOKING past our relatively short physical lives on Earth, Theosophy views the soul as eternal. Further, we don’t just ‘have’ a soul, we are souls, the wisdom tradition says.

There are many human beings who live to a ripe old age, and according to Wikipedia, the United Nations estimated in 2009 there were 455,000 living centenarians worldwide.

Methuselah is mentioned in the Bible as living 969 years. “But I have never heard of mortal man, layman, or Adept,”  H. P. Blavatsky says in The Key to Theosophy, “who could live even half the years allotted to Methuselah.”

“Some Adepts do exceed, by a good deal, what you would call the ordinary age — yet there is nothing miraculous in it, and very few of them care to live very long.”

She refers here to the Earthly body, not the Spiritual Body that high adepts have learned to occupy and control, thereby achieving self-conscious immortality — albeit invisible to uninitiated mankind.

Gautama, the Buddha, after reaching the goal of enlightenment, refused its fruition and remained on earth as a Teacher-Reformer, it is explained, and esoteric tradition teaches that he still remains in the world, invisibly watching over and protecting mankind.

Not only Gautama, but a “Wall of Protection” is built by the “accumulated efforts of long generations of Yogis, Saints and Adepts,those Buddhas of Compassion

who have woven for themselves glorious bodies in which they remain invisibly in the world, contributing towards man’s salvation.”

They do this “by influencing him to follow the Good Law and to tread the Path of Righteousness. Silently they impress the invisible atmosphere of our earth with their Ideation, thus keeping the balance on the side of right.”

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Your Brain on God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Mind of Love

Paul Robertson, "Through a Glass Darkly"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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This means, she asserts, that psychologists will have to accept “a lower (animal), and a higher (or divine) mind in man, or what is known in Occultism as the ‘personal’ and the ‘impersonal’ Egos.”

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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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A Mother’s Heart

WHEN mother welcomed us back in the house after a long day outside at play, we knew there would be caring and love waiting for us within.

There would  be food, a soothing bath and a bedtime story. Clean pajamas and sheets were as much Mother’s rule as her unconditional love.

But if correspondence and analogy are the rule that points to spiritual knowledge, how does the universe work in the way of loving Mothers?

Nature knows how to care for her human children, but perhaps in these modern, distracting times modern humans have strayed too far from their offspring, self-interestedly allowed children to play too long outside.

The awesome Mother nature has always waited patiently for our return home, healing and assuaging the self-created darkness of separation and materialism, assaulting the tender soul.

Is it because we forget that nature and humanity are really One Being, that we lose our way?

In these often dark times of spirit, we may have overlooked the Golden Rule, or resisted helping others, instead of living unselfishly and harmlessly for  humanity’s needy and down-trodden.

Disease, poverty, hunger and the rise of environmental blights are, it seems, the inevitable result of our separation from the natural, unified state.

The opening proposition of The Secret Doctrine reminds us of the most important Theosophical idea: the “fundamental One Existence, or Absolute Being, must be the REALITY in every form there is.”

“Existence is ONE THING, not any collection of things linked together. Fundamentally there is ONE BEING.”

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Inside the Now

“THE idea that things can cease to exist and still be, is a fundamental one in Eastern psychology.

“Under this apparent contradiction in terms, there rests a fact of Nature to realize is the important thing.

“A familiar instance of a similar paradox is afforded by chemical combination. The question whether Hydrogen and Oxygen cease to exist, when they combine to form water, is still a moot one.

“Some [argue] that since they are found again when the water is decomposed, they must be there all the while—others contending that as they actually turn into something totally different, they must cease to exist as themselves for the time being.

“Neither side is able to form the faintest conception of the real condition of a thing, which has become something else, and yet has not ceased to be itself.

“Existence as water may be said to be, for Oxygen and Hydrogen, a state of Non-being which is ‘more real being’ than their existence as gases. And it may faintly symbolize the condition of the Universe when it goes to sleep, or ceases to be —

“… to awaken or reappear again, when the dawn of the new [Universe] recalls it to what we call existence.”

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The above might have been written by one of today’s frontier physicists or cosmologist visionaries. Instead, they are the words of Theosophical thought leader H. P. Blavatsky, excerpted from her magnum opus The Secret Doctrine, containing the ultimate teachings of occult meta-metaphysics.

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Stepping Stones

Photo: barrywheeler.net

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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.”

Ψ

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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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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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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.”

Ψ

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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

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 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.”

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

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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.”

Continue reading

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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All One Being

WHEN mother welcomed us back in the house after a long day outside at play, we knew there would be caring and love waiting for us within.

There would be food, a soothing bath and a bedtime story. Clean pajamas and sheets were as much Mother’s rule as her unconditional love.

But if correspondence and analogy are the rule that points to spiritual knowledge, how does the universe work in the way of loving Mothers?

Nature knows how to care for her human children, but perhaps in these modern, distracting times modern humans have strayed too far from their offspring, self-interestedly allowed children to play too long outside.

The awesome Mother nature has always waited patiently for our return home, healing and assuaging the self-created darkness of separation and materialism, assaulting the tender soul.

Is it because we forget that nature and humanity are really One Being, that we lose our way?

In these often dark times of spirit, we may have overlooked the Golden Rule, or resisted helping others, instead of living unselfishly and harmlessly for humanity’s needy and down-trodden.

Disease, poverty, hunger and the rise of environmental blights are, it seems, the inevitable result of our separation from the natural, unified state.

The opening proposition of The Secret Doctrine reminds us of the most important Theosophical idea: the “fundamental One Existence, or Absolute Being, must be the REALITY in every form there is.”

“Existence is ONE THING, not any collection of things linked together. Fundamentally there is ONE BEING.”

Continue reading

Shift Happens

GROWING numbers of new thought leaders, and frontier scientists are ushering in a welcome upgrade to our western scientific and religious thought.

In addition to those we’ve featured here such as Bruce Lipton, Dean Radin, Acharya Sanning, and Rupert Sheldrake, there are hundreds of other thinkers and researchers of magnitude.

We are, it would appear, immersed in a revolutionary sea change of worldview.

The winds of this change blowing against reductionist thought, evident throughout the 20th and now the 21st Century, were initiated in the 19th. The radical culprits are the eternal ideas of the Theosophical Movement, jump-started by their new age mother, H. P. Blavatsky.

“The battle will be fierce between brutal materialism and blind fanaticism on one hand,” she writes in her article The New Cycle, “and philosophy and mysticism on the other.”

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“It is not materialism that will have the upper hand,” she asserts. Everyone clinging to material ideas, Blavatsky writes, “will find himself

“…separated like a rotten plank from the new ark called Humanity.”

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Progress on these New Frontiers is quickly generating momentum. We are discovering compelling new reasons for shifting away from our former morally purposeless, and materialist-based worldview — in nearly every area of life and society.

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