Tag Archives: Einstein

Why Love Matters

VISIBLE light and shadow always appear together, and this is as it should be. Our perception of everyday objects is dependent on these ever-present twins.

This point-counterpoint dance rules our everyday awareness. Shift one of the duo on life’s canvas, and the other balances with a corresponding change. Shadows lengthen as the sun sets, and stars shine as the heavens darken.

This phenomenon occurs because at the moment of manifestation the universe is pervaded by duality according to Theosophical cosmogenesis (SD1:15), which explains that “duality supervenes in the contrast of Spirit (or consciousness) and Matter, Subject and Object.”

Spirit on its own, like a horseless rider, is helpless on Earth say these metaphysical axioms, and a riderless horse similarly lacks purpose, direction, and love. “Though one and the same thing in their origin, Spirit and Matter,” say the teachings (SD 1:247), “begin each of them their evolutionary progress in contrary directions —

“Spirit falling gradually into matter, and the latter ascending to its original condition, that of a pure spiritual substance.”

“Both are inseparable, yet ever separated,” Blavatsky wrote. “Two like poles will always repel each other, while the negative and the positive are mutually attracted, so do Spirit and Matter stand to each other—the two poles of the same homogeneous substance, the root-principle of the universe.”

“On almost every page of the Bhagavad-Gita we are instructed only to direct our love to that which is eternal in every form,” Blavatsky wrote in Love with an Object,

“and let the form itself be a matter of secondary consideration.

We must rise above the pairs of opposites, seeking to unite with their essence, the Source. Love and compassion are the keys that extricate our minds and hearts from external forms, from the myriad illusions on the lower planes of consciousness.

Time and space are also paradoxical principles. Pain extends our perception of passing time, for example, and the invisible air, gravity, and electromagnetic radiations fill the seemingly empty space around us.

Because we see through it, we believe that space is empty. Yet a fundamental principle in The Secret Doctrine (1:289), states: “there is not one finger’s breath (angula) of void Space in the whole Boundless (Universe).”

For example, we couldn’t see the words without this background page, nor could we see them if the words and page were the same color.

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Revival of Faith

A COMMON sense critic of scientific pretensions, who has wit, sanity and elevated moral intelligence all wrapped up in one person, is difficult to ignore.

Such a person is Mary Midgley, dubbed by the Guardian, UK as “the most frightening philosopher in the country” — and today nearly 11 years later, at age 91, she is still receiving accolades, and taking no prisoners.

We discovered this totem-toppling English moral philosopher by chance through a brief, unassuming comment she posted in the “Letters” section of the January 3-9, 2009, NewScientist — signed simply “Mary Midgley, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.”

Her logic appeared seamless, and upon mulling her 257 insightful words over a week of lunch breaks, her ideas also felt convincingly Theosophical — indeed, strongly Blavatskian.

Midgley’s comments were aimed at Peter Millican’s on”Thinking Matter,” and her response goes to the essence of the issue:

“[T]he real trouble with the mind-body problem centres,” she writes, “on the word ‘materialism.’ This word is itself a relic of dualism.”

“It suggests that there are two rival stuffs — mind and matter — competing to be seen as basic to the world. It tells us to choose one of these and reduce the other to it.”

“Soul, the Self, or Ego, is studied by modem psychology as inductively as a piece of decayed matter by a physicist,” cries H. P. Blavatsky. “Psychology and its mother-plant metaphysics have fared worse than any other sciences.”

Continue reading

The Astral Virgin

EASTERN metaphysics proposes the existence of an astral substance, or matrix, patterning the physical world.

This active image-field  is the mystical progeny of the omnipresent, spiritual and dynamic substratum of the universe.

One outcome of this universal substratus, as psi researcher Dean Radin notes in his book Entangled Minds: “we occasionally have numinous feelings of connectedness with loved ones at a distance.”

“The idea of the universe as an interconnected whole is not new,” Radin says, “for millennia it’s been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. What is new is that Western science is slowly beginning to realize that some elements of that ancient lore might be correct.”  (see Into the Light)

The spiritual substance supporting universal inter-connectivity is called Ākāśa in Sanskrit, a word meaning “aether” (in both its elemental and metaphysical sense.) The Ākāśa, with its alter-ego the Astral Light, are the raison d’etre of ‘out-of-body’ experiences, and support the entire spectrum from the spiritual to mundane psychic experiences (PSI).

Astral Light is the primeval storehouse and reflector of all the thoughts, ideas, feelings and acts uploaded from the Earthly doings of self-conscious humanity.

ζ

The scientific experiments of the Global Consciousnesses Project have demonstrated that the simultaneous force of many minds focused on one event, produce measurable effects in scientific instruments—facilitated by, Theosophists believe, by this same ubiquitous, universal mediating astral substance.

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The Lucid Zone

WHEN our thick brains get all heated up worrying life’s complexities, that’s often  the best time to kick off our shoes, and give it a rest.

“Ever drifting down the stream, lingering in the golden gleam,” Lewis Carroll wondered: “Life — what is it but a dream?”

At times, when we are faced with a critical decision, or stuck on a complex problem, sleeping or napping on it, researchers find, often leads to the right answer.

The notes of a song, the smell of burning leaves, the babbling of a mountain stream, a day-dream—all can open a door to the the non-rational, poetic mind. They can also arouse unexpected vistas when we are children.

In Wordsworth’s haunting poem “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” those reveries opened for him an unexpected awareness of past lives.

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“Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar …”

§

There is “a class of fancies of exquisite delicacy,” the poet Edgar Allan Poe wrote in Marginalia, “which are not thoughts, and to which, as yet, I have found it absolutely impossible to adapt language.”

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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.

φ

Continue reading

Dreaming the Future

WHEN our rational brains are all heated up, arguing life’s complexities, that’s usually the best time to kick off our shoes and give it a rest.

“Ever drifting down the stream, lingering in the golden gleam,” Lewis Carroll wondered: “Life — what is it but a dream?”

At times, when we are faced with a critical decision, or stuck on a complex problem, sleeping or napping on it, researchers find, often leads to the right answer.

The notes of a song, the smell of burning leaves, the babbling of a mountain stream, a day-dream—all can open a door to the the non-rational, poetic mind. They can also arouse unexpected vistas when we are children.

Continue reading

Mary and Goliath

A COMMON sense critic of scientific pretensions, who has wit, sanity and elevated moral intelligence all wrapped up in one person, is difficult to ignore.

Such a person is Mary Midgley, dubbed by the Guardian, UK as “the most frightening philosopher in the country” — and today nearly 11 years later, at age 91, she is still receiving accolades, and taking no prisoners.

We discovered this totem-toppling English moral philosopher by chance through a brief, unassuming comment she posted in the “Letters” section of the January 3-9, 2009, NewScientist — signed simply “Mary Midgley, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.”

Her logic appeared seamless, and upon mulling her 257 insightful words over a week of lunch breaks, her ideas also felt convincingly Theosophical — indeed, strongly Blavatskian.

Midgley’s comments were aimed at Peter Millican’s on”Thinking Matter,” and her response goes to the essence of the issue:

“[T]he real trouble with the mind-body problem centres,” she writes, “on the word ‘materialism.’ This word is itself a relic of dualism.”

“It suggests that there are two rival stuffs — mind and matter — competing to be seen as basic to the world. It tells us to choose one of these and reduce the other to it.”

“Soul, the Self, or Ego, is studied by modem psychology as inductively as a piece of decayed matter by a physicist,” cries H. P. Blavatsky. “Psychology and its mother-plant metaphysics have fared worse than any other sciences.”

Continue reading

The Body-Field

EASTERN metaphysics proposes the existence of an astral substance, or matrix, patterning the physical world.

This active image-field  is the mystical progeny of the omnipresent, spiritual and dynamic substratum of the universe.

It is a secret agent and, as noted psi researcher Dean Radin says in his book Entangled Minds“we occasionally have numinous feelings of connectedness with loved ones at a distance.”

“The idea of the universe as an interconnected whole is not new,” Radin says, “for millennia it’s been one of the core assumptions of Eastern philosophies. What is new is that Western science is slowly beginning to realize that some elements of that ancient lore might be correct.”  (see Into the Light)

This source of this immanent force is called Ākāśa, a Sanskrit word meaning “aether,” in both its elemental and metaphysical sense. The Ākāśa, with its alter-ego the Astral Light are the mechanism of ‘out-of-body’ experiences, and

…the primal storehouse and reflector of all the thoughts, ideas, feelings and acts uploaded from the Earthly doings of self-conscious humanity.

Continue reading

Travel Light

ANCIENT Chinese doctors discovered, 5000 years ago, over 100 energy meridians in the human body. When these meridian points were activated, people were healed.

Today that system of healing is called acupuncture. But now, people are tapping into this same power, literally, without using needles.

They are discovering how to master all the “mental changes” in themselves, as taught in The Voice of the Silence — and how to “harmless make” their own thought and emotional creations.

They are learning, as Albert Einstein famously said, that:

“We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

We have instead to rise above that old thinking, while fully recognizing our hand in the problems they caused. That’s called karmic acceptance.

Getting Unstuck

It is often difficult to get to the root cause of some issues — especially if those issues were created in a past life we cannot consciously recall now.

“These events, limiting beliefs and patterns are what make us feel stuck.” Continue reading

Never Ending I

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

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

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

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

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

ξ

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

Please note, this post has been updated and republished at:

The Unwrapped Soul

Buddha in Your Brain

BREAKING up is hard to do. Even after our worldviews have betrayed us, they still cling like burrs to our psyche, despite all reason.

Recall the insistent flat earth and geocentric crowd, and creationist belief that the Earth is only ten-thousand years old. The list is long.

Ideas of new age healers and psychics, too, can be wildly exaggerated, and even the bibles of modern science are littered with the remains of failed sacred cows.

Until recently, for example, it was asserted that the brain cannot grow new cells — when they’re gone, they’re gone!

The cliché that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks may be obsolete because now, science confirms, adult brain cells keep growing after all! Continue reading

The Red Book

Reprinted from The Red Book by C. G. Jung (c) Foundation of the Works of C. G. Jung.

THOSE attracted to Theosophy and to Occultism are becoming every day more numerous. With every inquiry lies the potency and promise of genuine spiritual development.

The Masters of Wisdom in every age set up no barriers against any one’s approach. Their works and lives are not limited to adepts, saints, and the “purest of heart.”

The humblest searcher would not be made to feel discouraged by the sense of his own shortcomings, or by the perception of the difficulties at every step on his journey of self-realization.

This week we feature the work and life of one of the humblest and fearless of searchers, the renowned writer-artist-occultist-psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. The exhibit of his Red Book at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City ends January 25, 2010. Continue reading

Holy Heretics

crocus_snow1IN ANY age, when doctrine becomes dogma, and when fanaticism compels lip service to exclusive group beliefs, the ideas of Theosophy seem buried and forgotten.

We discover, however, that this is never entirely the case.

The insurgencies of dogma and prejudice are like the frozen snows which hide the promise of spring. But seeds survive beneath the snow — and even during the darkest centuries of Western history, there was heat and warmth enough under the surface to allow some of these seeds to germinate.

In a sense, then, the history of the relationship between “heretics” and the “renaissance” is the history of every age.

jung_alchemy

“We do not mean to take upon ourselves to defend the sects which inundated Europe at the eleventh century,” Helena Blavatsky wrote in Isis Unveiled (p. 326), “and which brought to light the most wonderful creeds. We limit our defense….

“…to those Christian sects whose theories were usually grouped under the generic name of Gnosticism. The Gnostics [who] appeared immediately after the alleged crucifixion, and lasted till they were nearly exterminated under the rigorous execution of the Constantinian law.”

Gnostic Mystery Schools
(overview)

“Had not the Christians burdened themselves with the Revelations of a little nation, and accepted the Jehovah of Moses, the Gnostic ideas would never have been termed heresies,” Blavatsky wrote.

“Once relieved of their dogmatic exaggerations the world would have had a religious system based on pure Platonic philosophy, and surely something would then have been gained.” – (Isis Unveiled, p. 155.)

Gnostic gospels of Nag Hamadi

Gnostic gospels of Nag Hamadi

The Lost Gnosis

(Prof. Elaine Pagels)

The Turning-Point

THE days of Constantine were the last turning-point in history, the period of the Supreme struggle that ended in the Western world throttling the old religions in favor of the new one, built on their bodies.

“This period, beginning with Buddha and Pythagoras at the one end and the Neo-Platonists and Gnostics at the other, is the only focus left in History wherein converge for the last time the bright rays of light streaming from the æons of time gone by, unobscured by the hand of bigotry and fanaticism.” (Secret Doctrine I, Introductory)

inquisition

The Suppression

THE history of the Albigenses may be said to be written in blood. At first the church was content to condemn their errors at various councils (1165, 1176, 1178, 1179), but as their practical opposition to Rome became stronger, more decided measures were taken. Innocent III had scarcely ascended the papal throne when he sent legates to Toulouse (1198) to endeavor to suppress the sect.

Under the Roman Empire

The bloody war of extermination which followed has scarcely a parallel in history. As town after town was taken, the inhabitants were put to the sword ecclesiastics who were in the army especially distinguished themselves by a bloodthirsty ferocity. without distinction of age or sex, and the numerous

Inquisition4

The establishment of an Inquisition at Languedoc in 1229 accelerated the exterminating process, and a few years later, according to some historians, the sect was all but extinct. (Britannica, 9th Ed., “Albigenses”)

The Inquisition

NOT only were all Christians made to feel that it was their highest duty to aid in the exterminations of heretics, but they were taught that they must denounce them to the authorities, regardless of all consideration, human or divine. No tie of kindred served as an excuse for concealing heresy.

inquisition5

The son must denounce the father, and the husband was guilty if he did not deliver his wife to a frightful death.

Every human bond was severed by the guilt of heresy — children were taught to desert their parents, and even the sacrament of matrimony could not unite an orthodox wife to a misbelieving husband.

No pledge was to remain unbroken. (Britannica, 11th Ed., “Heresy”)

One Mother-Trunk

GnosticSoul

“We can assert, with entire plausibility, that there is not one of all these sects — Kabalism, Judaism, and our present Christianity included,” writes H. P. Blavatsky (Isis Unveiled 2:123):

“— but sprung from the two main branches of that one mother-trunk, the once universal religion, which antedated the Vedic ages — we speak of that prehistoric Buddhism which later merged into Brahmanism.”

Cracking the Gnostic Code

gnostic1

Gnosis means spiritual knowledge while Gnosticism was an ancient pre-Christian form of esoteric wisdom. The speaker, John Algeo, refers to Gnostic texts translated by the 19th century Theosophist G. R. S. Mead, Mme. Blavatsky’s Secretary — and shows how the Gnostics coded their wisdom.

This is an hour-long video lecture. You may wish to make a note of the elapsed minutes, and return to this valuable information several times, by sliding the bottom bar to the right.

 

blavatsky

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky ….

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“The world is not prepared yet to understand

… the philosophy of Occult Science – let them assure themselves first of all that there are beings in an invisible world … and that there are hidden powers in man …” (HPB Letters)

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“Races of men differ in spiritual ‘gifts

… as in color, stature, or any other external quality — among some peoples seership naturally prevails, among others mediumship.” (Isis Unveiled)

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Psychism, with all its allurements and all its dangers

… is necessarily developing among you, and you must beware lest the Psychic outruns the [mental] and spiritual development. Psychic capacities held perfectly under control, checked and directed by the [mind] principle, are valuable aids in development. But these capacities running riot, controlling instead of being controlled, using instead of being used, lead the student into the most dangerous delusions and the certainty of moral destruction.”
(To the American Conventions)

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“The acquisition of the highest knowledge and power

… require not only many years of the severest study …. and an audacity bent by no peril, but also as many years of retreat in comparative solitude, and association with but students pursuing the same object, in a locality where nature itself preserves like the neophyte an absolute and unbroken stillness, if not silence!” -  (H. P. Blavatsky)

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Visceral Knowing

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.”

Continue reading

So Far So Near

Particle_detector

Particle detector - © CERN

ADULTS periodically have to remind their children “you can’t have your cake and eat it too”— it’s a parental stock-in-trade.

But for physicists studying quantum entanglement, it’s pig heaven—because for them electrons can be in two places at once.

Everything changes at the sub-atomic level where, to Science’s limited perception, atoms are mostly just “empty” space. It’s a seductive place, it seems, where one can free-fall into the unknown fields of an inexplicable universe.

Near-Death experiences (NDEs) can be seductive too, and life changing — but there’s more to come on this subject later. Continue reading

Future Seeing

eye2

“THE PAST, the Present, and the Future are, in the esoteric philosophy, a compound time,” wrote Helena Blavatsky, “for the three are a composite number only in relation to the phenomenal plane—but in the realm of noumena have no abstract validity.”

Our generally accepted worldview of duration and time “are all derived from our sensations according to the laws of Association,” explained Blavatsky.

And according to a precept in the Buddhist Prasanga-Madhyamika teaching:

“The Past time is the Present time, as also the Future, which, though it has not come into existence, still is.”

Because they are “inextricably bound up with the relativity of human knowledge,” as Blavatsky said, reductionist ideas are useful only for mechanical concerns—and because they ignore holistic experience, must eventually fall away in the face of man’s deeper spiritual understandings.

Senior scientist Dean Radin, of The Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), is a daring explorer who boldly goes where the establishment won’t, methodically measuring the immeasurable. In this clip he explains ongoing experiments demonstrating evidence of “presentiment” and “precognition”:

Clocks are useful for getting to meetings on time. Otherwise, time in this sense, being only the “panoramic succession of our [ordinary] states of consciousness,” it is therefore reductionist—and has only materialistic value.

Ground-level experience reveals only the outer edge of the rabbit hole, and keeps us blind to the mysteries hidden beneath — the experience which leads us to the sum-total of existence. The frontier consciousness sciences emerging today offer an exciting prospect.

In this new country, as the Red Queen told Alice:

“you must run fast just to stay in one place.”

rabbit

"I'm late for a very important date!"

The eye-popping series of progressive awakenings experienced by Alice, surely led her and her readers to a greater appreciation of the mysterious and paradoxical. “Stagnation and death is the future of all that vegetates without a change,” proclaimed Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine. Like couch-potatoes, standard-model science sits on a railway platform for a train that, for them, will never come.

A Forest for The Trees

In the words of a Theosophical Master:

“Three clumsy words — Past, Present, and Future — miserable concepts of the objective phases of the subjective whole, they are about as ill-adapted for the purpose as an axe for fine carving.”

Objective time and reality always appear in a linear frame. But even the legendary punster of the Yankee’s baseball team, Yogi Berra, sensed there was more when he took a playful swipe at the phenomenon of precognition and non-locality with:

“I knew I was going to take the wrong train, so I left early.”

The Mind’s Eye – 1

The author and diarist Anais Nin famously remarked:

“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

Anaïs Nin

If what “we are” is determined solely by our five senses, then we see only what’s inside a sealed box.

John Muir, for whom stuffy boxes were anathema believed instead that “The clearest way to the Universe is through a forest wilderness.”

Blavatsky’s “Compound time” cannot be separated from the future which is an essential part of the mystery “wilderness” within us. The illusion occurs in separation, and then we are unable see the greater forest for the trees, though they are one.

julia.b.h

Julia Butterfly Hill

William Blake saw “a world in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wild flower,” that most of us would probably have passed unnoticed. (Heaven in a Wild Flower)

But even such sublime ethics “must give room to still further absolute perfection,” Blavatsky wrote, “to a higher standard of excellence — just as a perfect flower must cease to be a perfect flower and die, in order to grow into a perfect fruit.”

“All instruction is but a finger pointing to the moon, and those whose gaze is fixed upon the pointer will never see beyond. Even let him catch sight of the moon, and still he cannot see its beauty.” – Osho (Adhyatama Upanishads)

Bruce Lee – “Finger Pointing To The Moon”

“Optical Illusion of Separateness”

Albert Einstein’s main objection to quantum mechanics, as accepted then, was that it provided no reasonable explanation of the world, and in some sense denied what many believed it means to truly exist. While walking with his biographer physicist Abraham Pais, Pais reported Einstein in frustration asked “whether I really believed that the moon exists only when I look at it.”

Einstein also complained in a letter to friend and fellow physicist, Max Born who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics:

“You believe in the God that plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture.”

Uncertainty Principle

Uncertainty Principle

The complicated genius was, nevertheless, a universal and compassionate thinker, who said: “A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘the universe,’ a part limited in time and space.”

And Einstein wrote of the human being that:

“He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest – a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening the circle of understanding and compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”

The Mind’s Eye – 2

Non-Duality

Universal unity or non-duality is a popular topic of discussion today. There is a website devoted to it (nonduality.com), and a blog and even a conference October 21-25: titled Science And Non-Duality.

It’s the same concept that engaged Blavatsky in The Secret Doctrine. Everything is alive and conscious in “Esoteric philosophy,” she wrote, and “life we look upon as ‘the one form of existence, manifesting in what is called matter—or, as in man, what, incorrectly separating them, we name Spirit, Soul and Matter.” Further:-

“Matter is the vehicle for the manifestation of soul on this plane of existence, and soul is the vehicle on a higher plane for the manifestation of spirit, and these three are a trinity synthesized by Life, which pervades them all. The idea of universal life is one of those ancient conceptions which are returning to the human mind in this century, as a consequence of its liberation from anthropomorphic theology.”

Seeing The Future

Advaita

At Francis Lucille’s The Advaita Channel you’ll find an insightful article A Primer on Advaita.  We were inspired by a quote from Professor Lucille on Advaita philosophy, which tackles the problem of duality by first focusing our full attention on the ‘I’ at every moment.

Once the illusion or limitation becomes obvious, it falls away, and then begin to appreciate the ‘not-I’—by this practice, paradoxically, we are gradually compelled to attend to the greater wholeness within which the smaller ‘I’ exists. As Lao-Tze put it: “The Tao that can be expressed in words is not the eternal Tao.”

EYE

“Consciousness is defined as that, whatever that is, which is aware of these very words right here, right now. … The student who practices self inquiry keeps his attention focused onto the source of the I-thoughts and I-feelings, whenever they arise.

“Once enlightenment has taken place, the process of self inquiry continues effortlessly. The attention spontaneously reverts to the source at the end of each thought and feeling and there is no need to focus the attention any longer.”

“Sum-Totals”

by H. P. Blavatsky

The Secret Doctrine

“TIME is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration, and it does not exist where no consciousness exists in which the illusion can be produced — but ‘lies asleep.’

“The present is only a mathematical line which divides that part of eternal duration which we call the future, from that part which we call the past.

“Nothing on earth has real duration, for nothing remains without change—or the same—for the billionth part of a second.

“And the sensation we have of the actuality of the division of ‘time’ known as the present, comes from the blurring of that momentary glimpse, or succession of glimpses, of things that our senses give us, as those things pass from the region of ideals which we call the future, to the region of memories that we name the past.

auraplace

“In the same way we experience a sensation of duration in the case of the instantaneous electric spark, by reason of the blurred and continuing impression on the retina. The real person or thing does not consist solely of what is seen at any particular moment, but is composed of the sum of all its various and changing conditions from its appearance in the material form to its disappearance from the earth.

“It is these ‘sum-totals’ that exist from eternity in the ‘future,’ and pass by degrees through matter, to exist for eternity in the ‘past.’

“No one could say that a bar of metal dropped into the sea came into existence as it left the air, and ceased to exist as it entered the water, and that the bar itself consisted only of that cross-section thereof which at any given moment coincided with the mathematical plane that separates, and, at the same time, joins, the atmosphere and the ocean.

nature5

“Even so of persons and things, which, dropping out of the to-be into the has-been, out of the future into the past—[they]

present momentarily to our senses a cross-section, as it were, of their total selves,

as they pass through time and space (as matter) on their way from one eternity to another: and these two constitute that ‘duration‘ in which alone anything has true existence, were our senses but able to cognize it there.”


The Inner Ruler

THE Cherokee say that “our first teacher is our own heart,” but  mainstream science has brought few apples to that ancient teacher.

Western medical school medicine still sees the heart as only a mechanical 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.”

Please note: This post has been updated and republished at:

A Coherent Life

Designing Mind

A COMMON sense critic of scientific pretensions, who has wit, sanity and elevated moral intelligence all wrapped up in one person, would likely be difficult to ignore.

Such a person is Mary Midgley, dubbed by the Guardian, UK as “the most frightening philosopher in the country” — and today nearly 10 years later, at age 91, she is still receiving accolades, and taking no prisoners.

We discovered this totem-toppling English moral philosopher by chance through a brief, unassuming comment she posted in the “Letters” section of the January 3-9, 2009, NewScientist — signed simply “Mary Midgley, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.”

Her logic appeared seamless, and upon mulling her 257 insightful words over a week of lunch breaks, her ideas also felt convincingly Theosophical — indeed, strongly Blavatskian.


Please Note: This post was updated and republished at:

Mary and Goliath


Fields of Dream

WHEN our rational brains are all heated up, arguing life’s complexities, that’s usually the best time to kick off our shoes and give it a rest.

“Ever drifting down the stream, lingering in the golden gleam,” Lewis Carroll wondered: “Life — what is it but a dream?”

At times, when we are faced with a critical decision, or stuck on a complex problem, sleeping or napping on it, researchers find, often leads to the right answer.

The notes of a song, the smell of burning leaves, the babbling of a mountain stream, a day-dream—all can open a door to the the non-rational, poetic mind. They can also arouse unexpected vistas when we are children.

In Wordsworth’s haunting poem “Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” those reveries opened for him an unexpected awareness of past lives.

This post was updated and republished at:

Dreaming the Future

Lofty Strangeness

Wiltshire UK, May 25, 2009 Photo: Steve Alexander

Wiltshire UK, May 25, 2009 Photo: Steve Alexander

“THE future ain’t what it used to be,” baseball’s Yogi Berra quipped, with trademark deadpan.

Indeed, the emerging “new science” can be as unreadable as a deftly pitched knuckle ball.

The frontier sciences today are one-hand-clapping Zen paradoxes, compared to the old standard models. And atheists worldwide are crying foul.

A spiritual worldview is still shaky as a new pitcher at a championship game. Yet many, layman and scientists alike, are celebrating the rebirth, and choosing to embrace The Shift it represents.

Fresh waves of strangeness are gaining momentum: new physics, new psychology, new biology, new cosmology, new archaeology, new consciousness—all are challenging the old reductionist models of how the universe works.

Everyone is putting their own spin on the pitch. Even religion is getting into the game.

The God Twist

Wiltshire UK, May 24, 2009 - Steve Alexander

Wiltshire UK, May 24, 2009 - Steve Alexander

In a review this week of Barbara Bradley Hagerty’s new book, Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality, Mark Galli, writing in Christianity Today, comments:

Fingerprints of God does reinforce the reality that the brain and spiritual experiences are connected.  … Materialists conclude that mystical experiences are nothing but the product of brain chemistry. But Hagerty rightly objects: “If there were an ‘Other’ who wanted to communicate with us, of course He or She or It would use the brain to do so. … Of course God would use the chemistry of our brains to create visions.”

Para Normal

Parapsychology is also gaining new adherents: reincarnation, karma, psi phenomena, meditation, yoga, meridian tapping, intentionality. Once described by Einstein as “spooky action at a distance,” quantum strangeness is wormholing its way into our everyday life.

More PhD’s are pitching books and cinema on sacred geometry, divine cosmos, electric universes, global unity, natural healing, than ever before.

Back in 1888, H. P. Blavatsky, flamboyant Foundress of the Theosophical Renaissance, saw all this coming.

Physics or Metaphysics?

Blavatsky

H. P. Blavatsky

Blavatsky, often referred to as “The Mother of the New Age,” predicted the immanent demise of both scientific and religious materialism—and their inevitable purification, and final synthesis.

She knew somehow—but we didn’t understand at the time—what a game-changer the discovery of the electron would become.

In her Secret Doctrine she wrote:

“Between this time and 1897 there will be a large rent made in the Veil of Nature, and materialistic science will receive a death-blow.”

electron2The death-blow was the “electron,” demonstrated in the year 1896, by physicist Joseph J. Thomson. He received a Nobel Prize for his discovery! But, as it turned out, the electron was a can of worms in disguise:

“The discovery of the electron suggested that it may be a subparticle of the atom. But such an idea resisted serious consideration, because it would lay in ruin the idea of the indivisibility of the atom, held since the time of Democritus.” (Sunrise Magazine)

Yet, for all the wriggliness, Blavatsky would not be content to sit back and cut bait. She immediately chased the big fish, announcing in The Secret Doctrine (I:520):

“It is on the doctrine of the illusive nature of matter, and the infinite divisibility of the atom, that the whole science of Occultism is built.

Redux: The Aim of The Secret Doctrine

The aim of this work may be thus stated: to show that Nature is not “a fortuitous concurrence of atoms,” and to assign to man his rightful place in the scheme of the Universe; to rescue from degradation the archaic truths which are the basis of all religions; and to uncover, to some extent, the fundamental unity from which they all spring; finally, to show that the occult side of Nature has never been approached by the Science of modern civilization. (SD 1:viii)

Pyramid

Matter, The Shadow of Consciousness

Throughout recorded history, intelligent designs of humans are seen everywhere—art, architecture, computers, and labor-saving gadgets of all kinds. Many of our modern inventions were, and are, more self-serving and resource depleting, than intelligent.

Unlike ancient cultures, our boasted science materializes explanations of everything. Its first, and often only response to the strange and mysterious, is to attempt to “recreate” and reproduce them in a laboratory, to explain them away as only “man-made.” They would struggle to replicate a believable bird’s nest.

Neo-Nonsense

It is the current vogue of Neo-Darwinism, to refer all strangeness to a designer-less universe—to accidental, undirected, randomly selected mutations.

Yet, Einstein, who evidently didn’t get the same memo, famously declared “god does not throw dice.”

The Nazca Lines

The Nazca Lines, Peru

Archaeoastronomical creations, like Stonehenge and the Pyramids; and the enigmatic Nazca Lines are down-to-earth evidence of design.

Numerous hieroglyphs, mounds, dolmens, geoglyphs, petrographs found around the world—all suggest there is more beneath the surface of reductionist reality than is admitted, or understood.

great serpent mound_ohio

Great Serpent Mound, Ohio, USA

For the mysterious master artists and scientists, the Circle Makers, like their ancient forebears, use Nature as their canvas—creating forms of unrivaled beauty, symmetry and symbology.

Design rules the ground and skies, from the tiny cell to the “music of the spheres,” and beyond—to billions of far-off galactic masterpieces.

Swirling News

On the ground today, as we update this post, a new formation appeared in an English barley field.

Temporary Temples‘ photographers and archivists, Steve and Karen Alexander, describe it as “An absolutely stunning new circle … Located at a place called Kingstone Coombes, it is close to Waylan’s Smithy on the Wiltshire-Oxfordshire border, site of many formations over the past few years.”

"Oannes"

"Oannes"

“By our approximations it is 500-600ft in length and the jelly-fish-like design is one of the most breathtaking circles we have ever seen. Note the seven circles in the tail and the seven tentacles. Seven in a very prodigious and numinous number.”

“2009 is turning out to be an very special season…”

A Theosophical Explanation

Amphibios – Annedoti – Oannes

The Greek word amphibios means simply “life on two planes,” from amphi, “on both sides,” and bios, “life.” The word was often applied in antiquity to those men who, though still wearing a human form, had made themselves almost divine through knowledge, and lived as much in the spiritual supersensuous regions as on earth.

One sees why Occultism places Oannes and the other Annedoti in the group of those ancient “adepts” who were called “marine” or “water dragons”Nagas.

Water typified their human origin (as it is a symbol of earth and matter and also of purification), in distinction to the “fire Nagas” or the immaterial spiritual Beings, whether celestial Bodhisattvas or Planetary Dhyanis, also regarded as the instructors of mankind.

The hidden meaning becomes clear to the Occultist, once he is told that this being (Oannes) was accustomed to pass the day among men, teaching; and when the sun was set, he retired again into the sea, passing the night in the deep, “for he was amphibious,“i.e., he belonged to two planes; the spiritual and the physical.

See Related:

Matsya

Human Gods & Divine Men, SD 1:369

Waylands Smithy, UK, May 30, 2009

Waylands Smithy, UK, May 30, 2009

Bold Nous World

Even “Nature cannot be ‘unconscious,’” Helena Blavatsky wrote, rather “it is the emanation from, and thus an aspect (on the manifested plane) of the absolute consciousness.” And, as she often did, hurled the gauntlet to materialism:

“Where is that daring man who would presume to deny to vegetation and even to minerals a consciousness of their own. All he can say is, that this consciousness is beyond his comprehension.”

Theosophical philosophy points to Plato’s “Nous,” a godlike kind of force, that Kingstone Coombes, Wayland's Smithy, Oxon2is “the animating Soul, immanent in every atom, manifested in man, latent in the stone.” And, it “has different degrees of power.”

Occult Symbols and Glyphs

These different degrees are often referred to as “hierarchies.” Entities, like the Circle Makers, have evidently been commissioned to work directly with Earth’s humanity, through symbols. The Secret Doctrine (1:274):

The whole Kosmos is guided, controlled, and animated by almost endless series of Hierarchies of sentient Beings, each having a mission to perform…”

“.. such is the mysterious power of Occult symbolism, that the facts which have actually occupied countless generations of initiated seers and prophets to marshal, to set down and explain, in the bewildering series of evolutionary progress, are all recorded on a few pages of geometrical signs and glyphs.”

Barbury Castle formation, May 24, 2009

Barbury Castle, UK - May 24, 2009

“This pantheistic idea of a general Spirit-Soul pervading all Nature,” Blavatsky reminded us, “is the oldest of all the philosophical notions.”

These are the same “innate, eternal, and self-existing Ideas” of Plato.

The “Absolute Consciousness,” … “behind” phenomena, which is only termed unconsciousness in the absence of any element of personality, transcends human conception. Man, unable to form one concept except in terms of empirical phenomena, is powerless from the very constitution of his being to raise the veil that shrouds the majesty of the Absolute.

Quite conveniently, now, we can point to the scientifically documented, and publicized, Crop Circle phenomena. How much more “empirical” evidence do you need? Complex, and mathematically exact geometrical formations, embedded in a remote farmer’s field in less than a minute—with no footprints or broken stems—all in the dark of night?

Where’s the Belief?

If Nature is sentient, and evinces intelligent design at every turn, who or what is she? And even if she is not blind after all, how is the matter, of which she is composed, assembled and arranged?

Is evolution still a blind, self-directed process, as neo-nonsense claims? Or is there a real Neo, who shapes the matrix, hiding somewhere off-camera?

The answers to these questions remains inferential. The “who” or “what” hasn’t revealed itself directly yet. But the phenomenon of crop circles, dropping out of nowhere into something, is substantial evidence of design, one that is neither random or blind.

Crop Circles – Definitive Evidence (Fox News)

Noetic thinking, a synthesis of right-left brain activity, is a method of using the mind in which truths are immediately known—without depending solely on preliminary premises or rationale. You are invited to conjure this compilation of photographs, of the most sophisticated agroglyphs.

Sky Sent – Anael

(Words & Music by Bradfield)

Et miratur omnis terra
Benedictus qui venit
De celeste armonia

Lights Forming Crop Circles

Mathematics Codes and Geometric Patterns

The most complex, “mind-boggling” crop circle ever to be seen in Britain was been discovered in a barley field in Wiltshire.

The circle is a coded representation of pi to the 10th significant figure The formation, measuring 150ft in diameter, is apparently a coded image representing the first 10 digits, 3.141592654, of pi.

Photo: APEX PICTURES

Barbury Castle 19 Jun 2008

Barbury Castle 19 Jun 2008

The formation, measuring 150ft in diameter, is apparently a coded image representing the first 10 digits, 3.141592654, of pi.

It is has appeared in a field near Barbury Castle, an iron-age hill fort above Wroughton, Wilts, and has been described by astrophysicists as “mind-boggling.”

Michael Reed, an astrophysicist, said:

“The tenth digit has even been correctly rounded up. The little dot near the centre is the decimal point.

“The code is based on 10 angular segments with the radial jumps being the indicator of each segment.

“Starting at the centre and counting the number of one-tenth segments in each section contained by the change in radius clearly shows the values of the first 10 digits in the value of pi.”

Lucy Pringle, a researcher of crop formations, said: “This is an astounding development – it is a seminal event.”

Mathematics codes and geometric patterns have long been an important factor in crop circle formations. One of the best known formations showed the image of a highly complex set of shapes known as The Julia Set, 13 years ago.

juliaset

“I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.” -Albert Einstein

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New Swirled Order

Science or Spirituality

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View the trailer:

Something Unknown is Doing We Don’t Know What…

By Renée Scheltema

3rd_eye

“Something Unknown…is frankly one of the most artistic, comprehensive, beautiful, clear, fair and visionary documentaries on parapsychology and spirituality I have ever seen…”

-Dr Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D.
Professor of Psychology at The University of Arizona

Where is the boundary between real magical powers and fraud? Find out what scientists have to say, as these and more questions will be answered in this amazing documentary feature!

“There are only two ways to live your life:
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as if everything is–
I believe in the latter.”

-Albert Einstein