Tag Archives: mind

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.”

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Kinship with God

EVERY organ and cell in the body has its own energetic biofield, and uses it to network wirelessly with all the other organs and cells.

The heart and the gut talk back and forth continually to the brain, whose neurons also converse with each other, day and night.

Researchers have recently discovered that both the heart and the gut, have substantial neuronal regions, showing they both have brains of their own.

The holographic network of the heart links, organizes and entrains, say the researchers at the Institute of Heartmath, the totality of signals from all the noetic webs, of all the cells and neurons of the body.

“These biosignals pass information over to the body’s chief superintendent, the brain.”


A unifying biofield is the underlying mechanism of healing, of thought transference, and gene behavior, the experimental evidence confirms. It is also the pathway by which the environment influences us.

The power of this invisible field is undoubtedly the unseen agent driving what many modern self-help gurus refer to as the ‘secret’ of intention, and thought. In Isis Unveiled (1:xxvii) H. P. Blavatsky wrote:

“The Hindu Vedas fifty centuries ago, ascribed to it the same properties as do the Tibetan lamas of the present day.”

“When one sees mortal man displaying tremendous capabilities, controlling the forces of nature and opening up to view the world of spirit,” she writes, “the reflective mind is overwhelmed.”

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The Aeolian Harp

JANUARY the 4th is the day of Mercury, or Hermes-Buddha, the ancients taught. They also taught the birth of the year signals a unique energy upgrade.

“The astral life of the earth is young and strong between Christmas and Easter,” Blavatsky wrote, and “those who form their wishes now, will have added strength to fulfill them consistently.”

And Truth, like the Life Force, springs eternal. What was taught 2,500 years ago by Buddha is still studied today.

And what the Master Krishna taught his disciple Arjuna in The Bhagavad-Gita, 2,500 years earlier, is a cautionary teaching humanity needs most now.

“The Self is the friend of self,” Krishna tells Arjuna, and added paradoxically: “also its enemy.”

In an article with the same title, theosophical teacher W. Q. Judge explains: “this sentence in the Bhagavad- Gita has been often passed over as being either meaningless or mysterious.”

But it is this powerful human duality which helps explain why so many religious sects, while publicly espousing harmony and peace, are at the same time

…so ready and willing to denounce, maim and kill non-believers.


The medieval Christian Crusades were replete with atrocities, just as are certain extremist religious sects today — priests, popes and kings all willing to kill for their God. Murder, intrigue, assassination and war, have disgraced our human history, and are still with us!

Krishna’s doctrine postulates two selves, each an enemy and friend of the other. The “push-me-pull-you” character of many modern sectarian religions, foster ethical and moral inconsistencies. These are no more visible than in modern-day fundamentalism.

“The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real,” say the ancient stanzas of the Book of the Golden Precepts —”let the disciple slay [purify] the Slayer.”

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2012

Looking forward, what of the coming year? “As the preparation for the new cycle proceeds,” H. P. Blavatsky foretells, “the latent psychic and occult powers in man are beginning to germinate and grow. Happily new tendencies,” she says, “are also springing up, working to change the basis of men’s daily lives from selfishness to altruism.”

“Learn, then, well the doctrines of Karma and Reincarnation, and teach, practice, promulgate that system of life and thought which alone can save the coming races.”

“May Theosophy grow more and more a living power in the lives of each one of our members,” H. P. Blavatsky wrote (Third Message:24),

“and may the coming year be yet more full of good work and healthy progress than the one just closing, is the wish of your humble co-worker and fellow-member.”  

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What better way to purify our faults, and elucidate the nobler side of our faculties, than the practice of altruism at every moment—in heavenly harmony with our Higher Self.

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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 …”

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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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Divine Breath

WE live on a planet constantly in motion, and except for the occasional natural catastrophe, it is usually a very slow, orderly motion.

The Earth is billions of years old and still in the making—glacial cycles come and go, continents move, mountains form and crumble. Yet Life persists.

Modern Science has, for decades, tried to sell us every soulless theory they could, from the ‘big bang,’ to the chemical origin of life, and a gravity-driven universe.

Our current dogmatic science ought to fear approaching the problem of life’s origins. Their hypothetical models always postulate random events, and chance mutations, in a hostile universe — a cosmos without conscience, consciousness or spiritual life.

All new theories lead up blind alleys. How Earth formed, how life arose. All we are offered is endless speculation, and the stunningly unscientific approach that, instead of welcoming new ideas, refuses to follow where the evidence leads.

And what life is in its most essential essence, continues to be the most ignored problem in science.

The mainstream theorists have so far been content with a soulless stew of blind matter, which has neither intelligent design or purpose. But these have led nowhere in explaining the many mysteries hidden in everyday life.

In stark contrast, Theosophy teaches that ‘life’ did not have to be created, but is a universal principle, and underlies the universe both macro and micro. Life only ‘arises’ to our attention according to science under rigid conditions.

“Life must conform to a chance based material worldview, measurable by laboratory instruments, and judged by our human physical senses.”

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But life is really a dynamic interaction between the forces of spirit, mind and matter, Theosophy says, and develops its forms via patterns embedded in an indwelling, divine evolutionary plan.  A great mystery recently was discovered challenging the foundations of modern scientific principles.

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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)

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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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Genius of Emotion

HUNDREDS of facts and thousands details in a book can be understood by any average analytical and reasoning mind.

But intellectual understanding does not usually come with directions for living our life, or correctly understanding the fine print.

Because, “the intellect alone,” as William Q. Judge wrote in the Ocean of Theosophy, “is cold, heartless and selfish.”

Backing this up, Blavatsky says in an article, that “Great intellectual powers are often no proof of, but are impediments to spiritual and right conceptions.”

Altruism, a power that is surely a blend of feelings and mind, exemplifies, Blavatsky wrote,  “real Theosophy.”

The core heart power of Devotion, which underlies the whole universe, according to The Secret Doctrine (1:210), “is innate in us, and which we find alike in human babe and the young of the animal.”

“All of the skills and abilities you need to create a wonderful life and smoothly functioning relationships lie waiting somewhere else inside you,” empath and researcher Karla McLaren claims in her article “Welcoming Your Emotional Genius.”

And in her book, “The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You,” explains:

“I share these empathic skills to help you access the gifts your emotions bring you.”

That ‘somewhere else’ is your emotions, she says, and “if you learn their language, you’ll have all the energy, intelligence, intuition, empathy, integrity, and strength of character you need to create a healthy life for yourself, your loved ones, your colleagues, and the world.”

This may seem like a tall claim. Yet our emotional genius benefits our health through altruism, intention and intuition.

Spiritual activity apparently drives a higher aspect of our minds, capable of connecting whatever dots the game of life can throw at us. Continue reading

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!

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Jnana Yoga

THE Sanskrit word “Dharana” is defined as “the intense and perfect concentration of the mind upon some one interior object.”

This intense focus is “accompanied by complete abstraction from everything pertaining to the external Universe, or the world of the senses.”

Further, The Voice of the Silence instructs its aspiring students: “from the stronghold of your Soul, chase all your foes away—ambition, anger, hatred, e’en to the shadow of desire—when even you have failed.”

The devotional books Light on the Path, (“Kill out ambition…”), and The Voice of the Silence,  (“let the Disciple slay the Slayer”), are metaphors for self-control as we pursue a spiritual path.

Similarly, the setting of the Bhagavad-Gita is on the plain of a great battlefield called “Kurukshetra.” This plain is considered sacred, and is symbolic, W. Q. Judge says in his essay, “of the body which is acquired by karma.”

This metaphorical “killing” or “slaying,” is not contrary to the Buddhist and Hindu doctrine of “Ahimsa” (harmlessness). It refers rather to inner control over our physical senses, ambition, intellect, etc.—and to resolving our personal karmic challenges, including non-violence and non-separateness.

Dharana, or focused meditation, is all about slowing the ‘mental noise,’ or what is called the ‘monkey mind,’ and regaining our lost rulership.

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Our spiritual soul is the silent center, according to this old teaching, and for this True Self to always be in charge, it must be the ever-present decision maker in our lives.

Thus the Voice of the Silence teaches a paradoxical doctrine in which the intellectual, striving and desire-ridden mind, becomes its own savior through its higher counterpart, the light of intuition—the soul-mind—accompanied by occult sound vibrations:

“The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real.
Let the Disciple slay the Slayer.”

for…

“…when to himself his form appears unreal, as do on waking all the forms he sees in dreams–when he has ceased to hear the many, he may discern the ONE  the inner sound which kills the outer.”

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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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Heaven Waits

ALTHOUGH reincarnation is the law of nature, the complete trinity of Spirit, Soul and Mind, says Theosophy, does not yet fully incarnate in average humanity.

“They use and occupy the body by means of the entrance of Mind, the lowest of the three,” writes W. Q. Judge, “and the other two shine upon it from above, constituting the God in Heaven.”

“This was symbolized in the old Jewish teaching about the Heavenly Man” writes William Q. Judge, “who stands with his head in heaven and his feet in hell. That is, the head Spirit and Soul are yet in heaven, and the feet, Mind, walk in hell, which is the body and physical life.”

But even with such a limited degree of Mind (‘Manas’ in Sanskrit), even that is not fully acquired by the growing child “until seven years old,” Blavatsky maintains in The Key to Theosophy (Section 9)

“…and becomes a morally responsible being capable of generating Karma.”

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Human beings in general are not yet fully conscious, Judge says, “and reincarnations are needed to at last complete the incarnation of the whole trinity in the body. When that has been accomplished the race will have become as gods, and the godlike trinity being in full possession the entire mass of matter will be perfected and raised up for the next step.”

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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.”

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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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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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Veils of Science

GOD is by modern science’s definition unscientific because it has as no way to explain or measure the idea of deity.

In the debate on intelligent design, the Christian evangelist Randal Rauser properly complains about modern scientific methods.

Science shuns any concepts not based on established models. Intelligent design, Rauser says, can only be recognized as a valid ‘scientific’ explanation “if bound by the laws of physics.”

On this basis, he says, “if God is any part of the proposal, it is by definition unscientific,” —and all claims of legitimacy or illegitimacy of Intelligent Design or God must be disregarded, because science has an inherent bias.

“If therefore we don’t know the hidden or as yet undiscovered laws of science, then we don’t know whether an explanation conforms to them or not.

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Theosophists agree. Any honest analysis of the controversy by science should acknowledge merely that the concepts do not conform to the “laws of physics as presently understood,” or the laws “as they ultimately are”—not dismissed out of hand.

"Talk to the Hand"

Mme. Blavatsky insisted that science was intentionally limited, because unwilling to follow the evidence wherever it leads—a  standard science admits, but does not follow.

She cited as an example the periodic table, purported to be a complete and accurate account of all chemical elements.

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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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Love or Logic

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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Masquerade

WE live on a planet constantly in motion, and except for the occasional natural catastrophe, a usually very slow, orderly motion.

The Earth is billions of years old and still in the making, where glacial cycles come and go, continents move, mountains form and erode.

Scientists investigate everything from the hypothetical big bang to the smallest geologic and biologic forces. But where Earth came from, how evolution works,

…and why and how life itself arose, is still the most profound mystery in science.

Of course, a materialistic science would be perplexed. Their hypothetical models always start and develop through random events, and chance mutations that drive a soulless stew of blind matter, having neither intelligent design or purpose.

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Of Two Minds

TRUTH like hope springs eternal, and what was taught 5,000 years ago by Krishna in Bhagavad-Gita, still works today.

“The Self is the friend of self,” Arjuna’s instructor asserts paradoxically, “and also its enemy.”

In his article of the same title, the theosophical teacher W. Q. Judge noted that “this sentence in the Bhagavad- Gita has been often passed over as being either meaningless or mysterious.”

But why else would religions, touting harmony and peace, be so ready and willing to denounce and harm non-believers?


The medieval Crusades were replete with atrocities under this mind set, just as are some extremist religious sects still today — priests, popes and kings all willing to kill for their God. Murder, intrigue, assassination and war have despoiled our human history, and are still with us!

Krishna’s doctrine postulates two selves, each an enemy and friend of the other. The “pushmi-pullyu” character of religions results in the ethical and moral inconsistencies evident in modern-day fundamentalism.

“The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real,” say the ancient stanzas of the Book of the Golden Precepts —”let the disciple slay [purify] the Slayer.”

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“For two thousand years India groaned under the weight of caste,” writes one of Mme. Blavatsky’s teachers about priestly craft, “brahmins alone feeding on the fat of the land.”

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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 — “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?

Our afterlife, once the dissolution of the body and Earthly desires 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 as an example, “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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