Tag Archives: consciousness

Reality Central

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 constant core, says Theosophy, and can be transformed, but never destroyed.

Man is, therefore, not a physical thing, says Theosophy, but a self-cognitive entity using a physical life form.

Our bodies makes it seem we are merely “carbon-based units,” as depicted in the sci-fi series StarTrek – (see “The Mysterious Builder.”)

But, the “consciousness which wells up within us,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, is essentially the same as

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

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Practically speaking, all forms in nature are constructs of consciousness. As humans, as the forward point of evolution, we are described by spiritual teachers as ‘Immortal Perceivers’ with unlimited potential.

Metaphysically, the eternal conscious core of the universe, and therefore of all manifested beings within it, is “devoid of all attributes and is essentially without any relation to manifested, finite Being,” says mystical Theosophy:

“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. This nature of ours is always overarchingly superior to whatever we might mentally ‘know,’ or may have memorized at any particular time.

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Field of Mind

ABSOLUTE certainty requires you to read a person’s mind directly.

For example, no one can know for sure Garry Kasparov’s next move, solely by studying the patterns he sets up on the chess board.

Similarly, decoding brain patterns is frustrating the neuroscientists analyzing them.

Like weather forecasting, the available data it is too often unreliable. Locating memory in the brain, researchers admit, likewise remains elusive.

Simple logic says the brain’s activity itself cannot be the source of thought, but only thought’s result. Knowing what thoughts are by studying their patterns, has proven more difficult than knowing the perfect chess move.

Because the real ‘thinker’ is positioned behind the curtain of observed consciousness, Theosophy affirms.

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The invisible conscious entity who delivers the energetic thought signals which light up the cells and neurons of the physical brain, must logically be the active agent of consciousness — not the responding cells and neurons.

“What lies behind us and what lies before us,” as Emerson wrote memorably, “are small matters compared to what lies within us.” 

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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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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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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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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.”

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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 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.

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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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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.

They are, Blavatsky wrote, “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?

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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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The Mysterious Builder

MAINSTREAM science creates an insurmountable obstacle to understanding the real nature of life because of one belief issue.

The issue is, in attempting to unlock the nature of reality, science insists that life must be a distinct entity from matter.

This consensus is sustained because “most researchers still believe they can build from one side of nature, the physical,” says Biocentrist Dr. Robert Lanza,

… concluding crucially, “without the other side, the living.”


His opposing view is detailed by Dr. Lanza in his book Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe.

Dr. Lanza shows that Biocentrism, an extension of the Anthropic Principle, described by the Einstein disciple physicist John Wheeler, asserts a view of life incompatible with modern materialism.

The premise of Biocentrism is, with important modifications which assert an intelligent hierarchical structure to nature, a central premise of Theosophy.

The ancients too, held that the universe is created by life and not the other way around.

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All One Being 2

CONSCIOUSNESS is at once the most familiar and most mysterious aspect of our lives.

Knowing nothing of its spiritual essence, we reduce consciousness to its various ‘states’ — waking, sleeping, intuitive, meditating, angry, depressed, happy or sad.

We experience perhaps hundreds of such random cognitive and emotional states every day.

But because nature is only judged by science “through her appearance,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote, “that appearance is always deceitful on the physical plane.” And she adds 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 — now given the cold shoulder by a science that defers to computer simulations, and giant machines.

The Secret Doctrine, (Esoteric science), on the other hand, reconciles the body-mind being, establishing a substrate spiritual root that it calls collectively, BE-NESS. The esoteric wisdom “checks the discoveries of modern exact science, 

“and shows some of them to be necessarily correct, since they are found corroborated in the ancient records.”

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The ancients recognized that all life is suffused with ‘god-particles’ due to the ubiquity of a metaphysical One Absolute BE-NESS — “the first fundamental axiom of the Secret Doctrine.”

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Nature’s Human Magnets 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 life in the developed world.

These products range from the hardly necessary to the  indispensable, and all are actively in use. From automatic can openers to cardiac pacemakers, to video games, to our beloved cell phones and computers.

But the electromagnetic frequencies (EMFs) that spin off from them, it turns out, are our developed society’s price-to-pay for its ever-throbbing, artificial world.

Many readers will recall Rachel Carson’s comfort zone shattering expose Silent Spring, which documented the world-wide destructive effects of pesticide use, notably DDT.

Her research launched what has become finally the well regulated and thankfully popular  organic food industry.

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A Spirit Undefeated

KERRYN McCANN won the hearts of all Australians in 2006 when she got gold at the Commonwealth Games in a down to the wire marathon win.

Media footage showed Kerryn crossing the finish line, as if that was her life’s main triumph.

Two years later the much loved athlete succumbed to breast cancer, her husband and three children at her bedside.

Kerryn told friend and fellow athlete Raelene Boyle just a week before that she was still hopeful. Then she was so ill in her final days, she could no longer talk — yet through it all, her spirit never dimmed.

Happily, the body, brain and personality is understood in Theosophy as only a vehicle for the immortal soul each lifetime.

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But this necessary instrument presents us with special opportunities in each life to express our  potential. Yet, many are unable or unwilling to seize those gifts in the time allotted to them, as Karryn did.

The illness drew out her determined, deathless and compassionate spirit, an inspiration to those who might not have her inner strength. She knew the deadly disease had come back, but she competed anyway.

The soul’s capacity will be fully availed of, or not, according to individual karmic endurance, W. Q. Judge says. Their capacity and destiny is the result of their “desire and prior conduct.”

The person’s past choices and behavior, he says,”will have increased or diminished” their karmic resources.

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Our individual choices shape not only our own character and capacity, but inspires the emergence of character and capacity in others as well, because we are all connected at the core.

And, “the troubles of nations and families arise from want of capacity,” Judge says, “more than from any other cause.” So the choices we make will always carry a greater influence than just to us as separate individuals. Continue reading

Lighted from Within

HALLOWEEN is an annual holiday observed on October 31, primarily in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and the United Kingdom.

Known also as a harvest festival, called Samhain (“Summer’s End”), it is rooted in Celtic polytheism. The word is also the Irish and Scottish Gaelic name for November.

It was the beginning of a “darker” season on Earth, with less sunlight and shorter days. In place of the usual psychic horrors and scary costumes, we chose instead to consider the symbol of an inner or spiritual sun, represented by a flaming candle placed inside the pumpkin.

Samhain is similar to the Gothic samana, and the Sanskrit sámana. The Hindu God Krishna, symbol of the Higher Self, notably incarnates cyclically at mankind’s darkest times.

In the Bhagavad-Gita (IV:31), Krishna affirms to Arjuna that he reincarnates

“… from age to age for the preservation of the just, the destruction of the wicked, and the establishment of righteousness.”

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In an ideal world, perfect harmony and balance between man and nature would be the norm. Thus, the keynote of Mme. Blavatsky’s worldview was the just and moral treatment of all the beings in nature, the First Object of the Theosophical Society, Universal Brotherhood.

This foundational teaching of Theosophy is expressed in The Secret Doctrine, Summing Up #5, which states that “everything in the Universe, throughout all its kingdoms, is conscious,” and

“…endowed with a consciousness of its own kind and on its own plane of perception.”


Consequently, Mme. Blavatsky was adamant in opposing animal cruelty. She spoke out forcefully against sport hunting, foxes, birds and big game, and most strongly against vivisection — animals in biological experiments.

“If these humble lines could make a few readers seriously turn their thoughts to all the horrors of vivisection,” Blavatsky wished, “the writer would be content.”

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The Fires of Mind

ANIMALS are only instinctual machines, most people believe. But its 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—”a ‘well wound up clock-work,’ according to Malebranche“—to which she countered:

 

“One, therefore, who adopts the Cartesian theory about the animal, would do as well to accept at once the views of the modern materialists.”

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Koko and Tabby

A woman 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 a animal rescue group to take the lion. Some time passed before the woman had a chance to visit. This 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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The Resolute Spirit

Jennifer Stuczynski and Pole

HAVING the right tools for a job is essential, just ask any electrician, plumber or carpenter.

Equally important, is that the tools being used are dependable and in good working condition.

Just ask any parachutist, race car driver, mountain climber, or pole vaulter.

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Similarly, the tenor of our body and senses often determine, for better or worse, our spirit’s ability to express its unique genius.

The quality and adequacy of “the brain and body to transmit and give expression” to the immortal spirit, Blavatsky writes, is “the result of Karma.” She offers an analogy:

“… the physical is the musical instrument, and the Ego, the performing artist.”

No skill of the soul she wrote, “can awaken faultless harmony out of a broken or badly made instrument.”  The physical “may be a priceless Stradivarius or a cheap and cracked fiddle,” she notes.

Zoe Bloomfield with her cracked $7000 violin. Photo: Nick Moir

But sometimes physical limitations can be successfully overridden. The genius of Paganini, for instance, even burdened by a “cracked fiddle,” would still produce more perfect music from a damaged instrument, than could a lesser musician.

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New Spiritual Patterns 2

DURING critical awakening moments in our spiritual development, we sometimes receive timely messages in our personal consciousness.

More often than not they arrive in symbolic form, and in dreams or visions, challenging our brain dominated mind.

This is because, Theosophy says, our inner, reincarnating self is not here alone. It was chosen by the Higher Self to be its “terrestrial abode.”

In the crop formation above, discovered in Northdowns, Wiltshire, UK on August 13, 2010, we can clearly imagine the rays from the Spiritual Sun interacting with the mortal human beings below.

This occult process is described by The Secret Doctrine in metaphysical terms, how our inner child

“is drawn into the one and highest beam of the Parent-Sun.”

It is this spiritual evolution of the inner, immortal — now semi-awakened aspect of our nature, the teaching says — which is the “fundamental tenet in the Occult Sciences.”

The closer our personal self gets to our Higher Self, true occultism says, the more harmonious outcome in life for a human selves.

A direct effect of an increased harmony between the Arjuna and Krishna in us, that altruism eventually becomes the ruling factor in our life. This altruism or unselfishness is an “integral part of self-development,” as described in a previous post, when acceptance is willing and unforced. Continue reading

Intentional 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 says, “and the methods of using the subtler, but still material, forces of physical nature.”

Continue reading

Spiritual Beings 2

THEOSOPHY teaches the progressive development of everything, “worlds as well as atoms,” according to The Secret Doctrine.

This “stupendous development,” say these 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, and “a cause as regards its successor.”

If these lifetimes and universes are like schools, then the classrooms are stages of consciousness, urging us to greater self-awareness and spiritual development, if we are wise enough to choose that path.

Thus our lives are complex creations, a series of “progressive awakenings,” drop by drop, of individual, family, racial, national karma.

ζ

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