Theos-Talk Archives (July 2001 Message tt00388)

Dear Stacey:

Re: EVOLUTION

Perhaps the following will also be of some help.

It does not solve the problem of inaccurate information reproduced in
textbooks but it gives the Theosophical view on evolution as a whole. This
might interest you.

Best wishes,

Dallas


========================== COPY ======================

GENERAL

On the Evolution of Intelligence and of Form.


The theory of nature and of life which it (Theosophy) offers is not one that
was at first speculatively laid down and then proved by adjusting facts or
conclusions to fit it; but is an explanation of existence, cosmic and
individual, derived from knowledge reached by those who have acquired the
power to see behind the curtain that hides the operations of nature from the
ordinary mind.

Such Beings are called Sages, using the term in its highest sense. Of late
they have been called Mahatmas and Adepts. In ancient times they were known
as the Rishis and Maharishis—the last being a word that means Great Rishis.
[ These are like the Teaching Group of Professors at a University. The true
Professor is always seeking to extend his own knowledge of his specialties,
and trying to find out how they dovetail with the rest of Knowledge -- of
the laws and conditions in Nature. Nature is deemed to CONTAIN EVERYTHING.
Nature is also claimed to work entirely under Law and laws. Science is in
the process of uncovering those underlying laws and conditions that Nature
(the INTELLIGENT UNIVERSE and our Earth) has already established, and uses
to sustain LIFE in all beings, from the “atom” on up to the extreme limits
of the GALAXY.]

It is these “higher students” for whom the claim is asserted that their
knowledge is not mere inference, but that it concerns realities seen and
known by them. While some of them are connected with the Theosophical
Movement, they are yet above it.

The power to see and absolutely know such laws is surrounded by natural
inherent regulations which must be complied with as conditions precedent;
and it is, therefore, not possible to respond to the demand of the worldly
man for an immediate statement of this wisdom, insomuch as he could not
comprehend it until those conditions are fulfilled.

As this knowledge deals with laws and states of matter, and of consciousness
undreamed of by the "practical" Western world, it can only be grasped, piece
by piece, as the student pushes forward the demolition of his preconceived
notions, that are due either to inadequate or to erroneous theories.

It is claimed by these higher students that, in the Occident especially, a
false method of reasoning has for many centuries prevailed, resulting in a
universal habit of mind which causes men to look upon many effects as
causes, and to regard that which is real as the unreal, putting meanwhile
the unreal in the place of the real.

The following are some of the fundamental propositions of Theosophy:

The spirit in man is the only real and permanent part of his being; the rest
of his nature being variously compounded. And since decay is incident to all
composite things, everything in man but his Spirit is impermanent.

Further, the universe being one thing and not diverse, and everything within
it being connected with the whole and with every other thing therein, of
which upon the upper plane (below referred to ) there is a perfect
knowledge, no act or thought occurs without each portion of the great whole
perceiving and noting it. Hence all are inseparably bound together by the
tie of Brotherhood.

This first fundamental proposition of Theosophy postulates that the universe
is not an aggregation of diverse unities but that it is one whole.

This whole is what is denominated "Deity" by Western Philosophers, and
"Para-Brahm" by the Hindu Vedantins. It may be called the Unmanifested,
containing within itself the potency of every form of manifestation,
together with the laws governing those manifestations.

Further, it is taught that there is no creation of worlds in the theological
sense; but that their appearance is due strictly to evolution.

When the time comes for the Unmanifested to manifest as an objective
Universe, which it does periodically, it emanates a Power or "The First
Cause"—so called because it itself is the rootless root of that Cause, and
called in the East the "Causeless Cause." The first Cause we may call
Brahma, or Ormazd, or Osiris, or by any name we please. The projection into
time of the influence or so-called "breath of Brahma" causes all the worlds
and the beings upon them to gradually appear. They remain in manifestation
just as long as that influence continues to proceed forth in evolution.
After long aeons the outbreathing, evolutionary influence slackens, and the
universe begins to go into obscuration, or pralaya, until, the "breath"
being fully indrawn, no objects remain, because nothing is but Brahma.

This breathing-forth is known as a Manvantara, or the Manifestation of the
world between two Manus ( Sanskrit: meaning “Men”) and the completion of
the inbreathing brings with it Pralaya, or destruction. It is from these
facts that the erroneous doctrines of "creation" and the "last judgment"
have sprung. Such Manvantaras and Pralayas have eternally occurred, and will
continue to take place periodically and forever. All the beings that
participate in this natural and progressive development are surrounding us,
and they include you and me and the whole of humanity.

For the purpose of a Manvantara two eternal principles are postulated, that
is, SPIRIT and MATTER (or in Sanskrit: Purusha and Prakriti). Because both
are ever present and conjoined in each manifestation. Those terms are used
here because no equivalent for them exists in English. “Purusha” is called
"spirit," and “Prakriti” "matter," but this Purusha is not the unmanifested,
nor is Prakriti matter as known to science; the Aryan Sages therefore
declare that there is a higher spirit still, called Purushottama. The reason
for this is that at the night of Brahma, or the so-called indrawing of his
breath, both Purusha and Prakriti are absorbed in the Unmanifested.

This brings us to the doctrine of Universal Evolution as expounded by the
Sages of the Wisdom-Religion. The Spirit, or Purusha, they say, proceeds
from Brahma through the various forms of matter evolved at the same time,
beginning in the world of the spiritual from the highest and in the material
world from the lowest form. The lowest form is one unknown as yet to modern
science. Thus, therefore, the mineral, vegetable and animal forms each
imprison a spark of the Divine, a portion of the indivisible Purusha.

These sparks struggle to "return to the ONE SPIRIT," or in other words, to
secure self-consciousness and at last come into the highest form, on Earth,
that of man, where alone self-conscious-ness is possible to them.

The period, calculated in human time, during which this evolution goes on
embraces millions of ages. Each spark of divinity has, therefore, millions
of ages in which to accomplish its mission—that of obtaining complete
self-consciousness while in the form of man. But by this is not meant that
the mere act of coming into human form of itself confers self-consciousness
upon this divine spark.

That great work may be accomplished during the Manvantara in which a Divine
spark reaches the human form, or it may not; all depends upon the
individual's own will and efforts. Each particular spirit thus goes through
the Manvantara, or enters into manifestation for its own enrichment and for
that of the Whole.

Great Sages: Mahatmas and Rishis are thus gradually evolved during a
Manvantara, and become, after its expiration, planetary spirits, who guide
the evolutions of other future planets. The planetary spirits of our globe
are those who in previous Manvantaras—-or days of Brahma—-made the efforts,
and became in the course of that long period Mahatmas.

Each Manvantara is for the same end and purpose, so that the Mahatmas who
have now attained those heights, or those who may become such in the
succeeding years of the present Manvantara, will probably be the planetary
spirits of the next Manvantara for this or other planets. This system is
thus seen to be based upon the identity of Spiritual Being, and, under the
name of "Universal Brotherhood," constitutes the main idea of the
Theosophical Movement whose object is the realization of that Brotherhood
among men.

The Sages say that this Purusha (Spirit) is the basis of all manifested
objects and of all the Laws that govern physical matter. Without it nothing
could exist or cohere. It interpenetrates everything everywhere. It is the
reality of which, or upon which, those things called real by us are mere
images. As Purusha (spirit) reaches to and embraces all beings, they are all
connected together; and in or on the plane where that Purusha is, there is a
perfect consciousness of every act, thought, object, and circumstance,
whether supposed to occur there, or on this plane, or any other. For below
the spirit and above the intellect is a plane of consciousness in which
experiences are noted, commonly called man's "spiritual nature;" this is
frequently said to be as susceptible of culture as his body or his
intellect.

This upper plane (of Nature) is the real register of all sensations and
experiences, although there are other registering planes. It is sometimes
called the "subconscious mind."

Theosophy, however, holds that it is a misuse of terms to say that the
spiritual nature can be cultivated. The real object to be kept in view is to
so open up or make porous the lower nature that the spiritual nature may
shine through it and become the guide and ruler. It is only "cultivated" in
the sense of having a vehicle prepared for its use, into which it may
descend. In other words, it is held that the real man, who is the higher
self—being the spark of the Divine before alluded to—overshadows the visible
being, which has the possibility of becoming united to that spark.

Thus it is said that the higher Spirit is not in the man, but above him. It
is always peaceful, unconcerned, blissful, and full of absolute knowledge.
It continually partakes of the Divine state (so to say), being continually
that state itself. The object of the student who is here and now developing
his knowledge of the material side of Nature (Prakriti) is to let the light
of that spirit shine through the “lower coverings.”

This "spiritual culture" is only attainable as the grosser interests,
passions, and demands of the flesh are subordinated to the interests,
aspirations and needs of the higher nature; and this is a matter of both
system and established law.

This spirit can only become the ruler when the firm intellectual
acknowledgment or admission is first made that IT alone is. And, as stated
above, it being not only the person concerned but also the whole, all
selfishness must be eliminated from the lower nature before its divine state
can be reached.

So long as the smallest personal or selfish desire— even for spiritual
attainment for our own sake— remains, so long is the desired end put off.
Hence the above term "demands of the flesh" really covers also demands that
are not of the flesh, and its proper rendering would be "desires of the
personal nature, including those of the individual soul. "

When systematically trained in accordance with the aforesaid system and law,
men attain to clear insight into the immaterial, spiritual world, and their
interior faculties apprehend truth as immediately and readily as physical
faculties grasp the things of sense, or mental faculties those of reason.
Or, in the words used by some of them, "They are able to look directly upon
ideas;" and hence their testimony to such truth is as trustworthy as is that
of scientists or philosophers to truth in their respective fields.

In the course of this spiritual training such men acquire perception of, and
control over, various forces in Nature unknown to others, and thus are able
to perform works usually called "miraculous," though really but the result
of larger knowledge of natural law.

Their testimony as to super-sensuous truth, verified by their possession of
such powers, challenges candid examination from every scientific,
philosophical and religious mind. They say, based on their observations
over millions of years:

Our earth is one of a chain of seven planets, it alone being on the visible
physical plane, while the six others are on different planes, and therefore
invisible. (The other visible planets of our solar system belong each to a
chain of seven. A cycling of these seven is called a “Round.”)

And the life-wave passes from the higher to the lower in the chain until it
reaches our earth (the physical and lowest of the seven), and then ascends
and passes to the three others on the opposite arc, and thus seven times.

The evolution of forms is coincident with this progress, the tide of life
bearing with it the mineral and vegetable forms, until each “globe” in turn
is ready to receive the human life wave. Of these globes our earth is the
fourth.

Humanity passes from globe to globe in a series of Rounds, first circling
about each globe, and reincarnating upon it a number of times.

Concerning the human evolution on the concealed planets or globes little is
permitted to be said. (But read The SECRET DOCTRINE). We have to concern
ourselves with our Earth alone. The latter, when the wave of humanity has
reached it for the last time (in this, our Fourth Round), began to evolute
man, subdividing him into “races.” Each of these races when it has, through
evolution, reached the period known as "the moment of choice" and decided
its future destiny as an individual race, begins to disappear.

The races are separated, moreover, from each other by catastrophes of
nature, such as the subsidence of continents and great natural convulsions.
Coincidentally with the development of races the development of specialized
senses takes place; thus our fifth race has so far developed five senses.

The Sages further tell us that the affairs of this world and its people are
subject to cyclic laws, and during any one cycle the rate or quality of
progress appertaining to a different cycle is not possible. These cyclic
laws operate in each age. As the ages grow darker the same laws prevail,
only the cycles are shorter; that is, they are the same length in the
absolute sense, but go over the given evolutionary program in a shorter
period of time. These laws impose restrictions on the progress of the race.
In a cycle, where all is ascending and descending, the Adepts must wait
until the time comes before they can aid the race to ascend. They cannot,
and must not, interfere with Karmic law. Thus they begin to work actively
again in the spiritual sense, when the cycle is known by them to be
approaching its turning point.

At the same time these cycles have no hard lines or points of departure or
inception, inasmuch as one may be ending or drawing to a close for sometime
after another has already begun. They thus overlap and shade into one
another, as day does into night; and it is only when the one has completely
ended and the other has really begun by bringing out its blossoms, that we
can say we are in a new cycle.

The progress of each human being as well as the mass of such which forms a
race evolves through the use of the Mind and of thought. Theosophy teaches
each thought as it is evolved by a man coalesces instantly with an elemental
being on a subtle plane of matter (an electro-magnetic field) called the
“astral Light by some, and is then beyond the man’s power to alter or to
recall. This becomes the basis for his “karma.” The thought will return
bearing with it the power and effect of the cause that created it.

It can be easily seen that this process is going on every instant.
Therefore, each thought is held to exist as an entity. Its length of life
depends on two things: (a) The original force of the person’s will and
thought; (b) The power of the elemental which coalesced with it, the
latter being determined by the class to which the elemental belongs.

This is the case with good and bad thoughts alike, and as the will beneath
the generality of wicked thoughts is usually powerful, we can see that the
result is very important, because the elemental has no conscience and
obtains its constitution and direction from the thought it may from time to
time carry. This is the process whereby evolution proceeds -- we build our
own and share in those of all others.


===================================================


-----Original Message-----
From: S----y R-----

Sent: July 29, 2001 2:28 PM
To:
Subject: Re: fraudulent books on evolution!

Reed-
OH this is so interesting! I wish I could read the rest of the article now!!
Just recently (and it is still going on) I was having an evolution "debate"
with a friend and a few others that decided to join in, in a hockey chat
room- no less.
When I was younger I believed in evolution 100% how they taught us, as I got
older it changed somewhat but still was there because of what science says
about it. It never really mattered much to me because I basically have 2
choices in front of me: evolution or creation (the Christian version). I
knew that the Christian version could not be correct, so I assumed that
science's evolution was closer to the truth. In the hockey chat room
evolution debate, it was evolution vs. creationism. I started to think about
points that the creationists were making. All we "evolutionists" had were
most of the points that this article pointed out. The main one that I clung
on to was the building blocks of life (amino acids and sugars) produced in a
glass apparatus in the 50's simulating early earth environment. I got that
from my sophomore-level college biology textbook. But as I started to think
more.. .it became damn apparent evolution was not possible either. My whole
contention in! that debate was that evolution was at least shown to be
possible no matter how highly improbable.
I wondered, well if not creation, if not evolution, how did we come about?
Is there another choice (asides from tribal beliefs such as the earth was
made from ant droppings)?
Right now I am stuck- I have no idea where to go. Still I do not just
believe what this article says. One thing I have learned in the past few
years is not to trust what the media sells you. As there is usually a hidden
agenda behind whatever point someone is selling-no matter how well hid it
is. Right now I am thinking how did the author come to know that all of this
was faked? wrong? I hope later on in the article he does go on about that.
Without those reasons, I have nothing to go on.

However, each and everyday I am getting closer to completely dropping the
whole evolution idea. Which is pretty darn hard for a Biology major to do. I
was hard-headed about it for a long time, and I feel relieved almost to hear
that those things were faked or whatever. Still I do need to be shown
where/how he found out.
My mind has been telling me for some time that evolution-even in it's most
basic form-cannot be the truth. So now I'm stuck. What is the truth?
Rujuta

*~~~~~~~~~~~~*~~~~~~~~~~~~~*~~~~~~~~~~~~*~~~~~~~~~~~*~~~~~~~~*
In my last letter I gave one analysis of the Time Magazine 7/23 cover story
on evolutionary theory of man and ape. If you have any opinions, pro or
con, we would be glad to hear them.

That analysis was essentially one of looking at the manipulative techniques
of the authors. You may well ask if there are active "positive" facts that
argue against Darwinism or against the Darwinian evidence. Indeed there
are. And it is interesting that we need not do anything more than continue
our recent theme of looking at relatively current news to find that
material.
Last winter there was a copy of the Dec. 2000/ Jan. 2001 "The American
Spectator", available on the newsstand in my local major bookstore. I was
attracted to it by the drawing on its cover of a chimpanzee holding a book
in its hands. Unfortunately the book was upside down and entitled "origin
of the species".

The article inside is quite amazing and instructive. It is a little on the
long side so I will be sharing it with you piece by piece. Here is its
beginning:
____


Survival of the Fakest

Science now knows that many of the Pillars of Darwinian Theory are either
false or misleading. Yet biology texts continue to present them as factual
evidence of evolution. What does this imply about their scientific
standards? by Jonathan Wells.

If you had asked me during my years studying science at Berkeley whether or
not I believed what I read in my science textbooks, I would have responded
much as any of my fellow students: puzzled that such a question would be
asked in the first place. One might find tiny errors, of course, typos and
misprints. And science is always discovering new things. But I believed -
took it as a given - that my science textbooks represented the best
scientific knowledge available at that time.

It was only when I was finishing my Ph.D. in cell and development biology,
however, that I noticed what at first I took to be a strange anomaly. The
textbook I was using prominently featured drawings of vertebrate embryos -
fish, chickens, humans, etc. - where similarities were presented as
evidence for descent from a common ancestor. Indeed, the drawings did
appear very similar. But I'd been studying embryos for some time, looking
at them under a microscope. And I knew that the drawings were just plain
wrong.

I re-checked all my other textbooks. They all had similar drawings, and
they were all obviously wrong. Not only did they distort the embryos they
pictured; they omitted earlier stages in which the embryos look very
different from one another.

Like most other science students, like most scientists themselves, I let i
pass, It didn't immediately affect my work, and I assumed that while the
texts had somehow gotten this particular issue wrong, it was the exception
to the rule . In 1997, however, my interest in the embryo drawings was
revived when British embryologist Michael Richardson and his colleagues
published the result of their study comparing the textbook drawings with
actual embryos. As Richardson himself was quoted in the prestigious
journal Science: "It looks like it's turning out to be on of the most
famous fakes in biology."

Worse, this was no recent fraud. Nor was its discovery recent. The embryo
drawings that appear in most every high school and college textbook are
either reproductions of, or base on, a famous series of drawing by the 19th
century German biologist and fervent Darwinian, Ernst Haeckel, and they
have been known to scholars of Darwin and evolutionary theory to be
forgeries for over a hundred years. But non of them, apparently, have seen
fit to correct this almost ubiquitous misinformation.

Still thinking this an exceptional circumstance, I became curious to see if
I could find other mistakes in the standard biology texts dealing with
evolution. My search revealed a startling fact however: Far from being
exceptions, such blatant misrepresentations are more often the rule. In my
recent book I call them "Icons of Evolution," because so many of them are
represented by classic oft- repeated illustrations which, like the Haeckel
drawings, have served their pedagogical purpose only too well -
fixing basic misinformation about evolutionary theory in the public's mind.
We all remember them from biology class: the experiment that created the
"building blocks of life" in a tube; the evolutionary "tree," rooted in the
primordial slime and branching out into animal and plant life. Then there
were the similar bone structures, of say, a bird's wind and a man's hand,
the peppered moths, and Darwin's finches. And, of course, the Haeckel
embryos.

As it happens, all of these examples, as well as many others purportedly
standing as evidence of evolution, turn out to be incorrect. Not just
slightly off. Not just slightly mistaken.

On the subject of Darwinian evolution, the text contained massive
distortions and even some faked evidence. Nor are we only talking about
high-school textbooks that some might excuse (but shouldn't ) for adhering
to a lower standard. Also
guilty are some of the most prestigious and widely used college texts, such
as Douglas Futuyma's *Evolutionary Biology*, and the latest edition of the
graduate-level textbook *Molecular Biology of the Cell*, co-authored by the
president of the national academy of Science, Bruce Alberts. In fact, when
the false "evidence" is taken away, the case for Darwinian evolution, in
the textbooks at least, is so thin it's almost invisible.

[To be continued... ]

What do you say??
Reed




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