Tag Archives: consciousness

Masks of Reality

SEEN 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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Body Electric 2

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 pulsating sacred Earth: the toxic man-made EMF swimming pool, i.e. wireless cell towers, radar towers, and hundreds of Earth-circling satellites, must be exacting, like agricultural pesticides, a huge price on natural systems. The inevitable effects of this interference could prove unrecoverable.

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 is of critical concern.

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Substance of the Unseen

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

Among them, however, would not be counted René Descartes, the widely heralded Father of Modern Philosophy.

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

This is not a concept that sits well with animal advocates, environmentalists, or Theosophists — who recognize that consciousness is inherent in all kingdoms of nature, not just the human.

Possessors of sentient consciousness include, Theosophy says, such unlikely candidates as bacteria, minerals — and even atoms!

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

One wonders if it doesn’t seem far more reasonable to assume in fact that the opposite is true, i.e. —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.)

In fact, the elusive, omnipersistent ‘mind’, is not a production of the brain at all, but an aspect of universal mind.

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

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Revelation in a Blink

SPIRITUAL development is usually the result of  long and toilsome discipline, cleaning up one’s mental, emotional, psychological, and physical defects.

Krishna urges on his disciple Arjuna, assuring him that “he who conquers himself is greater than the conquerors of worlds.”

But everyone agrees its no easy job. Entrenched habits notoriously put up a fuss when challenged. “If one directs himself to eliminating all old Karma,” wrote Mme. Blavatsky’s colleague W. Q. Judge, “the struggle very often becomes tremendous.”

 ”The whole load of ancient sin rushes to the front on a man,” Judge warns in Letters That Have Helped Me (p. 20), “and the events succeed each other rapidly.”

Is getting to the bottom things always so difficult? After all, some people experience sudden ‘aha’ moments, intuitive flash awakenings that reveal to them instantly all their karmic threads. And, an awakening, when profound, can often lead to permanent cures, even physical ones.

During the dying process, when natural, occult teachings describe a lengthy (twelve hours or more) internal review of the life last lived. Knowledge is also gained during natural sleep, and the ancient Brihad Aranyaka Upanishad warns that a person in a deep sleep state should not be violently disturbed: 

“Let none awake him that sleeps, for he is hard to heal if the soul returns not to him.”

Judge confirms that with karmic cleansing “the strain is terrific, and the whole life fabric groans and rocks,” but added: “it is said in the East, you may go through the appointed course in 700 births, in seven years, or in seven minutes.” If so, could enlightenment also occur for a person in the blink of an eye? Many near-death experiencers report that it does.

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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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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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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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Hidden Powers of Animals

THIS was such a popular post, we decided to republish it. Many people think that animals are just instinctual machines, but the assumption is false, and many controlled studies prove it.

Investigators discover that humans are not the only beings with self-aware minds, free will, and paranormal powers. There are powerful spiritual and intellectual forces hidden in animals.

Chimps, as will be shown, were found to be smarter than humans in computerized memory tests. But, in the 17th Century, René Descartes, dubbed the “Father of Modern Philosophy,” started everyone off on the wrong paw.

His materialism was not lost on H. P. Blavatsky. “Descartes held the living animal as being simply an automaton,” she noted in the article Have Animals Souls — “a ‘well wound up clock-work,’ according to Malebranche,” and 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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Miracle Mind

CONSCIOUSNESS is still considered, by most neuroscientists, to be located and created entirely in our physical brain tucked safely inside our skulls.

This persistent worldview is reinforced by our body language in describing having a thought, by people pointing upward to their heads.

But native cultures never engaged in such self-serving, skull-duggery. The Native American view, according to their traditions, always looked to the heart as the seat of the moving force of thought and spirituality.

Confusing matters more are the familiar ‘gut-feelings’ we often have. These  compelling instincts, recent studies show, are far more often than not accurate depictions of a situation, causes, a person’s character, or even foretelling of some future event.

Ritual divinations, mythical Norns, or crystal balls are not required.

Undeterred, many neuroscientists continue to diligently catalog what they insist are ‘the neural correlates of consciousness’ in our brain, and seem determined to prove those billions of correlates are the creators of our thoughts and feelings, located exclusively in the fatty workshop between our ears.

In this view when we die everything disappears forever — including our soul and our individual ‘I am I’ awareness. But this reductionist view of mind and consciousness is losing favor with many research scientists on the leading edge today, and is about to radically change.

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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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Thoughts are Things

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?

How can this happen? How is it possible for an immaterial thought or feeling produce a visible, physical effect?

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Science cannot answer. “Sow a thought, reap an act” is a familiar occult mantra and begs an explanation, what is the mysterious mechanism of how thought energy can speak to the nervous system, and just as quickly cause a visible response in the physical body?

“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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Heart is All

LOVE in its most unselfish form was described by H. P. Blavatsky as the “absence of every ill-feeling , selfishness, charity, goodwill to all beings.”

The alchemy of such enlightened ethics unleashes the power of an stoppable universal force.

“The powers and forces of spirit,” Blavatsky wrote, “lend themselves only to the perfectly pure in heart — and this is DIVINE MAGIC.”

Kamadeva, a Sanskrit word, is defined in The Theosophical Glossary as “the first conscious, all-embracing desire for universal good, love, and the first feeling of infinite compassion and mercy for all that lives and feels, needs help and kindness. Only later did kama become the power that gratifies desire on the animal plane.”

“Desire first arose in It, which was the primal germ of mind,” (Secret Doctrine 2:176) — “and which sages, searching with their intellect, discovered to be the bond which connects Entity with Non-Entity.” 

That power arose,” Blavatsky said, “in the consciousness of the creative One Force, as soon as it came into life and being as a ray from the Absolute.” It was also she who in the article Love with an Object, passionately declared:

“Love can exist without form, but no form can exist without Love.”

Devotion arose out of a feeling she wrote, “and became the first and foremost motor in man’s nature — for it is the only one which is natural in our heart, which is innate in us.”

In her first Letter to a Theosophical Convention in 1888, she wrote: “He who teaches Theosophy preaches the gospel of goodwill, and the converse of this is true also — he who preaches the gospel of goodwill, teaches Theosophy.”

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Love after Death

EVOLUTION as defined in the occultism of Theosophy, is a triple-faceted scheme — a blend of spirit, mind, and matter.

They are, Blavatsky wrote, “inextricably interwoven and interblended at every point.”

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

The key to spiritual development lies in recognizing the unity and continuity of life, Theosophy says — and that for the soul, there is really no such thing as death. We are first and foremost spiritual beings, and humanity is our field of experience.

But what happens to our human self after death? Does everything important, our consciousness and love, die with the body? Blavatsky, writing in The Key to Theosophy, assures her students that love and spirit are immortal. And further, that:

“Death comes to our spiritual selves ever as a deliverer and friend.”

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

Our afterlife, once the dissolution of the body and Earthly desire body 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, “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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Magic Mind

BREAKING up is hard to do, even when false truths have betrayed us, they still cling like cotton candy, resurrecting like the mythical Hydra. For each head cut off, it grew two more.

“By the early Middle Ages, it was widespread knowledge throughout Europe, that the Earth was a sphere,” Wikipedia reports.

Yet against all odds, The Flat Earth Society lives on, with buzzing bees of believers.

Not to forget the geocentric clan, and  creationists insisting the Earth must be only ten-thousand years old. Such beliefs persist in the face of hard evidence.

Linear thinkers are found in many fields: evolution, genetics, consciousness, physics, cosmology, biology, education, sociology, neuroscience–the list is long.

The history of sacred cows in science is littered with the heads of hundreds of once fiercely defended but failed theories, often wildly exaggerated, and stubbornly defended by their inventors.

Once brain cells die, the high priests of neuroscience insisted, they cannot be replaced, and the territory of the brain they served can never be repaired!

It was standard model neuroscience that the brain cannot grow new cells, and for a very long time this was an unquestioned scientific fact.

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You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, the saying goes, but surprisingly, science now must admit that our adult brain cells, by a process called neurogenesis, keep on growing after all! One can only conclude that the immortal mind of man knows what it is doing, and does it in an extraordinary way.

This is not your Father’s neuroscience. “The apocryphal tale that you can’t grow new brain cells just isn’t true,” LiveScience reported back in 2005. “Neurons continue to grow and change beyond the first years of development and well into adulthood, according to a new study.”

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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)

Δ

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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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!

Continue reading

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.”

Continue reading

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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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.

Ë

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.

Ψ

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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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.”

ζ

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.”

í

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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