Theos-Talk Archives (April 2005 Message tt01023)

Apl 17 2005

Dear Friends:

When I capitalized NATURE I designated mentally the WHOLE UNIVERSE.

Look around you -- there is everywhere evident the operation of subtle yet
efficient laws -- all are supportive and cooperative.

Science studies them, we use them even if we have not logically analysed
them. They are the secret basis of all motives. 

The lead from the limitations of form (bodies) to the creativity of
intuition and finally they emerge, purified as a vibrant luminescence of
spiritual ONENESS with the UNIVERSE. 

Consider this for a moment: The Hubble telescope (as well as the electron
microscope) show us a GALAXY of galaxies -- a SPACE that includes all voids
and plenums -- a system of life that is meticulous and infinitely sensitive
to the needs of every one of its components, large or small, human or
non-human. 

It is easy to say "God created all that. It is not our concern." But than
how is God to be defined? It certainly is not solely related to our tiny
Earth?  

So how and what are we?  

Dallas

Consider this descripton:


Theosophy is that ocean of knowledge which spreads from shore to shore of
the evolution of sentient beings; unfathomable in its deepest parts, it
gives the greatest minds their fullest scope, yet, shallow enough at its
shores, it will not overwhelm the understanding of a child. It is wisdom
about God for those who believe that he is all things and in all, and wisdom
about nature for the man who accepts the statement found in the Christian
Bible that God cannot be measured or discovered, and that darkness is around
his pavilion. Although it contains by derivation the name God and thus may
seem at first sight to embrace religion alone, it does not neglect science,
for it is the science of sciences and therefore has been called the wisdom
religion. For no science is complete which leaves out any department of
nature, whether visible or invisible, and that religion which, depending
solely on an assumed revelation, turns away from things and the laws which
govern them is nothing but a delusion, a foe to progress, an obstacle in the
way of man's advancement toward happiness. Embracing both the scientific and
the religious, Theosophy is a scientific religion and a religious science. 

It is not a belief or dogma formulated or invented by man, but is a
knowledge of the laws which govern the evolution of the physical, astral,
psychical, and intellectual constituents of nature and of man. The religion
of the day is but a series of dogmas man-made and with no scientific
foundation for promulgated ethics; while our science as yet ignores the
unseen, and failing to admit the existence of a complete set of inner
faculties of perception in man, it is cut off from the immense and real
field of experience which lies within the visible and tangible worlds. But
Theosophy knows that the whole is constituted of the visible and the
invisible, and perceiving outer things and objects to be but transitory it
grasps the facts of nature, both without and within. It is therefore
complete in itself and sees no unsolvable mystery anywhere; it throws the
word coincidence out of its vocabulary and hails the reign of law in
everything and every circumstance. 

That man possesses an immortal soul is the common belief of humanity; to
this Theosophy adds that he is a soul; and further that all nature is
sentient, that the vast array of objects and men are not mere collections of
atoms fortuitously thrown together and thus without law evolving law, but
down to the smallest atom all is soul and spirit ever evolving under the
rule of law which is inherent in the whole. And just as the ancients taught,
so does Theosophy; that the course of evolution is the drama of the soul and
that nature exists for no other purpose than the soul's experience. The
Theosophist agrees with Prof. Huxley* in the assertion that there must be
beings in the universe whose intelligence is as much beyond ours as ours
exceeds that of the black beetle, and who take an active part in the
government of the natural order of things. Pushing further on by the light
of the confidence had in his teachers, the Theosophist adds that such
intelligences were once human and came like all of us from other and
previous worlds, where as varied experience had been gained as is possible
on this one. We are therefore not appearing for the first time when we come
upon this planet, but have pursued a long, an immeasurable course of
activity and intelligent perception on other systems of globes, some of
which were destroyed ages before the solar system condensed. This immense
reach of the evolutionary system means, then, that this planet on which we
now are is the result of the activity and the evolution of some other one
that died long ago, leaving its energy to be used in the bringing into
existence of the earth, and that the inhabitants of the latter in their turn
came from some older world to proceed here with the destined work in matter.
And the brighter planets, such as Venus, are the habitation of still more
progressed entities, once as low as ourselves, but now raised up to a pitch
of glory incomprehensible for our intellects
. 
The most intelligent being in the universe, man, has never, then, been
without a friend, but has a line of elder brothers who continually watch
over the progress of the less progressed, preserve the knowledge gained
through aeons of trial and experience, and continually seek for
opportunities of drawing the developing intelligence of the race on this or
other globes to consider the great truths concerning the destiny of the
soul. These elder brothers also keep the knowledge they have gained of the
laws of nature in all departments, and are ready when cyclic law permits to
use it for the benefit of mankind. They have always existed as a body, all
knowing each other, no matter in what part of the world they may be, and all
working for the race in many different ways. In some periods they are well
known to the people and move among ordinary men whenever the social
organization, the virtue, and the development of the nations permit it. For
if they were to come out openly and be heard of everywhere, they would be
worshipped as gods by some and hunted as devils by others. In those periods
when they do come out some of their number are rulers of men, some teachers,
a few great philosophers, while others remain still unknown except to the
most advanced of the body. 

It would be subversive of the ends they have in view were they to make
themselves public in the present civilization, which is based almost wholly
on money, fame, glory, and personality. For this age, as one of them has
already said, "is an age of transition," when every system of thought,
science, religion, government, and society is changing, and men's minds are
only preparing for an alteration into that state which will permit the race
to advance to the point suitable for these elder brothers to introduce their
actual presence to our sight. They may be truly called the bearers of the
torch of truth across the ages; they investigate all things and beings; they
know what man is in his innermost nature and what his powers and destiny,
his state before birth and the states into which he goes after the death of
his body; they have stood by the cradle of nations and seen the vast
achievements of the ancients, watched sadly the decay of those who had no
power to resist the cyclic law of rise and fall; and while cataclysms seemed
to show a universal destruction of art, architecture, religion, and
philosophy, they have preserved the records of it all in places secure from
the ravages of either men or time; they have made minute observations,
through trained psychics among their own order, into the unseen realms of
nature and of mind, recorded the observations and preserved the record; they
have mastered the mysteries of sound and color through which alone the
elemental beings behind the veil of matter can be communicated with, and
thus can tell why the rain falls and what it falls for, whether the earth is
hollow or not, what makes the wind to blow and light to shine, and greater
feat than all-one which implies a knowledge of the very foundations of
nature-they know what the ultimate divisions of time are and what are the
meaning and the times of the cycles. 
But, asks the busy man of the nineteenth century who reads the newspapers
and believes in "modern progress," if these elder brothers are all you claim
them to be, why have they left no mark on history nor gathered men around
them? Their own reply, published some time ago by Mr. A. P. Sinnett, is
better than any I could write. 

"We will first discuss, if you please, the one relating to the presumed
failure of the 'Fraternity' to 'leave any mark upon the history of the
world.' They ought, you think, to have been able, with their extraordinary
advantages, to have 'gathered into their schools a considerable portion of
the more enlightened minds of every race.' How do you know they have made no
such mark? Are you acquainted with their efforts, successes, and failures?
Have you any dock upon which to arraign them? How could your world collect
proofs of the doings of men who have sedulously kept closed every possible
door of approach by which the inquisitive could spy upon them? The prime
condition of their success was that they should never be supervised or
obstructed. What they have done they know; all that those outside their
circle could perceive was results, the causes of which were masked from
view. To account for these results, men have, in different ages, invented
theories of the interposition of gods, special providences, fates, the
benign or hostile influences of the stars. There never was a time within or
before the so-called historical period when our predecessors were not
moulding events and 'making history,' the facts of which were subsequently
and invariably distorted by historians to suit contemporary prejudices. Are
you quite sure that the visible heroic figures in the successive dramas were
not often but their puppets? We never pretended to be able to draw nations
in the mass to this or that crisis in spite of the general drift of the
world's cosmic relations. The cycles must run their rounds. Periods of
mental and moral light and darkness succeed each other as day does night.
The major and minor yugas must be accomplished according to the established
order of things. And we, borne along on the mighty tide, can only modify and
direct some of its minor currents."*
---------------------------------------------
* The Occult World London 1888.


It is under cyclic law, during a dark period in the history of mind, that
the true philosophy disappears for a time, but the same law causes it to
reappear as surely as the sun rises and the human mind is present to see it.
But some works can only be performed by the Master, while other works
require the assistance of the companions. It is the Master's work to
preserve the true philosophy, but the help of the companions is needed to
rediscover and promulgate it. Once more the elder brothers have indicated
where the truth-Theosophy-could be found, and the companions all over the
world are engaged in bringing it forth for wider currency and propagation. 

The Elder Brothers of Humanity are men who were perfected in former
periods of evolution. These periods of manifestation are unknown to modern
evolutionists so far as their number are concerned, though long ago
understood by not only the older Hindus, but also by those great minds and
men who instituted and carried on the first pure and undebased form of the
Mysteries of Greece. The periods, when out of the Great Unknown there come
forth the visible universes, are eternal in their coming and going,
alternating with equal periods of silence and rest again in the Unknown. The
object of these mighty waves is the production of perfect man, the evolution
of soul, and they always witness the increase of the number of Elder
Brothers; the life of the least of men pictures them in day and night,
waking and sleeping, birth and death, "for these two, light and dark, day
and night, are the world's eternal ways." *

In every age and complete national history these men of power and
compassion are given different designations. They have been called
Initiates, Adepts, Magi, Hierophants, Kings of the East, Wise Men, Brothers,
and what not. But in the Sanskrit language there is a word which, being
applied to them, at once thoroughly identifies them with humanity. It is
---------------------------------------------
* Bhagavad- Gita, Chapter viii.


Mahatma. This is composed of Maha great, and Atma soul; so it means great
soul, and as all men are souls the distinction of the Mahatma lies in
greatness. The term Mahatma has come into wide use through the Theosophical
Society, as Mme. H. P. Blavatsky constantly referred to them as her Masters
who gave her the knowledge she possessed. They were at first known only as
the Brothers, but afterwards, when many Hindus flocked to the Theosophical
movement, the name Mahatma was brought into use, inasmuch as it has behind
it an immense body of Indian tradition and literature. At different times
unscrupulous enemies of the Theosophical Society have said that even this
name had been invented and that such beings are not known of among the
Indians or in their literature. But these assertions are made only to
discredit if possible a philosophical movement that threatens to completely
upset prevailing erroneous theological dogmas. For all through Hindu
literature Mahatmas are often spoken of, and in parts of the north of that
country the term is common. In the very old poem the Bhagavad-Gita, revered
by all Hindu sects and admitted by the western critics to be noble as well
as beautiful, there is a verse reading, "Such a Mahatma is difficult to
find." *

But irrespective of all disputes as to specific names, there is
sufficient argument and proof to show that a body of men having the
wonderful knowledge described above has always existed and probably exists
today. The older mysteries continually refer to them. Ancient Egypt had them
in her great king-Initiates, sons of the sun and friends of great gods.
There is a habit of belittling the ideas of the ancients which is in itself
belittling to the people of today. Even the Christian who reverently speaks
of Abraham as "the friend of God," will scornfully laugh at the idea of the
claims of Egyptian rulers to the same friendship being other than childish
assumption of dignity and title. But the truth is, these great Egyptians
were Initiates, members
---------------------------------------------
* Bhagavad-Gita, Chapter vii.


of the one great lodge which includes all others of whatever degree or
operation. The later and declining Egyptians, of course, must have imitated
their predecessors, but that was when the true doctrine was beginning once
more to be obscured upon the rise of dogma and priesthood. 

The story of Apollonius of Tyana is about a member of one of the same
ancient orders appearing among men at a descending cycle, and only for the
purpose of keeping a witness upon the scene for future generations. 

Abraham and Moses of the Jews are two other Initiates, Adepts who had
their work to do with a certain people; and in the history of Abraham we
meet with Melchizedek, who was so much beyond Abraham that he had the right
to confer upon the latter a dignity, a privilege, or a blessing. The same
chapter of human history which contains the names of Moses and Abraham is
illuminated also by that of Solomon. And thus these three make a great Triad
of Adepts, the record of whose deeds can not be brushed aside as folly and
devoid of basis. 

Moses was educated by the Egyptians and in Midian, from both of which he
gained much occult knowledge, and any clear-seeing student of the great
Universal Masonry can perceive all through his books the hand, the plan, and
the work of a master. Abraham again knew all the arts and much of the power
in psychical realms that were cultivated in his day, or else he could not
have consorted with kings nor have been "the friend of God"; and the
reference to his conversations with the Almighty in respect to the
destruction of cities alone shows him to have been an Adept who had long ago
passed beyond the need of ceremonial or other adventitious aids. Solomon
completes this triad and stands out in characters of fire. Around him is
clustered such a mass of legend and story about his dealings with the
elemental powers and of his magic possessions that one must condemn the
whole ancient world as a collection of fools who made lies for amusement if
a denial is made of his being a great character, a wonderful example of the
incarnation among men of a powerful Adept. We do not have to accept the name
Solomon nor the pretense that he reigned over the Jews, but we must admit
the fact that somewhere in the misty time to which the Jewish records refer
there lived and moved among the people of the earth one who was an Adept and
given that name afterwards. Peripatetics and microscopic critics may affect
to see in the prevalence of universal tradition naught but evidence of the
gullibility of men and their power to imitate, but the true student of human
nature and life knows that the universal tradition is true and arises from
the facts in the history of man. 

Turning to India, so long forgotten and ignored by the lusty and
egotistical, the fighting and the trading West, we find her full of the lore
relating to these wonderful men of whom Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Solomon
are only examples. There the people are fitted by temperament and climate to
be the preservers of the philosophical, ethical, and psychical jewels that
would have been forever lost to us had they been left to the ravages of such
Goths and Vandals as western nations were in the early days of their
struggle for education and civilization. If the men who wantonly burned up
vast masses of historical and ethnological treasures found by the minions of
the Catholic rulers of Spain, in Central and South America, could have known
of and put their hands upon the books and palm-leaf records of India before
the protecting shield of England was raised against them, they would have
destroyed them all as they did for the Americans, and as their predecessors
attempted to do for the Alexandrian library. Fortunately events worked
otherwise. 

All along the stream of Indian literature we can find the names by scores
of great adepts who were well known to the people and who all taught the
same story —the great epic of the human soul. Their names are unfamiliar to
western ears, but the records of their thoughts, their work and powers
remain. Still more, in the quiet unmoveable East there are today by the
hundred persons who know of their own knowledge that the Great Lodge still
exists and has its Mahatmas, Adepts, Initiates, Brothers. And yet further,
in that land are such a number of experts in the practical application of
minor though still very astonishing power over nature and her forces, that
we have an irresistible mass of human evidence to prove the proposition laid
down. 

And if Theosophy —the teaching of this Great Lodge —is as said, both
scientific and religious, then from the ethical side we have still more
proof. A mighty Triad acting on and through ethics is that composed of
Buddha, Confucius, and Jesus. The first, a Hindu, founds a religion which
today embraces many more people than Christianity, teaching centuries before
Jesus the ethics which he taught and which had been given out even centuries
before Buddha. Jesus coming to reform his people repeats these ancient
ethics, and Confucius does the same thing for ancient and honorable China. 

The Theosophist says that all these great names represent members of the
one single brotherhood, who all have a single doctrine. And the
extraordinary characters who now and again appear in western civilization,
such as St. Germain, Jacob Boehme, Cagliostro, Paracelsus, Mesmer, Count St.
Martin, and Madame H. P. Blavatsky, are agents for the doing of the work of
the Great Lodge at the proper time. It is true they are generally reviled
and classed as impostors-though no one can find out why they are when they
generally confer benefits and lay down propositions or make discoveries of
great value to science after they have died. But Jesus himself would be
called an impostor today if he appeared in some Fifth Avenue theatrical
church rebuking the professed Christians. Paracelsus was the originator of
valuable methods and treatments in medicine now universally used. Mesmer
taught hypnotism under another name. Madame Blavatsky brought once more to
the attention of the West the most important system, long known to the
Lodge, respecting man, his nature and destiny. But all are alike called
impostors by a people who have no original philosophy of their own and whose
mendicant and criminal classes exceed in misery and in number those of any
civilization on the earth. 

It will not be unusual for nearly all occidental readers to wonder how
men could possibly know so much and have such power over the operations of
natural law as I have ascribed to the Initiates, now so commonly spoken of
as the Mahatmas. In India, China, and other Oriental lands no wonder would
arise on these heads, because there, although everything of a material
civilization is just now in a backward state, they have never lost a belief
in the inner nature of man and in the power he may exercise if he will.
Consequently living examples of such powers and capacities have not been
absent from those people. But in the West a materialistic civilization
having arisen through a denial of the soul life and nature consequent upon a
reaction from illogical dogmatism, there has not been any investigation of
these subjects and, until lately, the general public has not believed in the
possibility of anyone save a supposed God having such power. 

A Mahatma endowed with power over space, time, mind, and matter, is a
possibility just because he is a perfected man. Every human being has the
germ of all the powers attributed to these great Initiates, the difference
lying solely in the fact that we have in general not developed what we
possess the germ of, while the Mahatma has gone through the training and
experience which have caused all the unseen human powers to develop in him,
and conferred gifts that look god-like to his struggling brother below.
Telepathy-mind-reading, and hypnotism, all long ago known to Theosophy, show
the existence in the human subject of planes of consciousness, functions,
and faculties hitherto undreamed of. Mind-reading and the influencing of the
mind of the hypnotized subject at a distance prove the existence of a mind
which is not wholly dependent upon a brain, and that a medium exists through
which the influencing thought may be sent. It is under this law that the
Initiates can communicate with each other at no matter what distance. Its
rationale, not yet admitted by the schools of the hypnotizers, is, that if
the two minds vibrate or change into the same state they will think alike,
or, in other words, the one who is to hear at a distance receives the
impression sent by the other. In the same way with all other powers, no
matter how extraordinary. They are all natural, although now unusual, just
as great musical ability is natural though not usual or common. If an
Initiate can make a solid object move without contact, it is because he
understands the two laws of attraction and repulsion of which "gravitation"
is but the name for one; if he is able to precipitate out of the viewless
air the carbon which we know is in it, forming the carbon into sentences
upon the paper, it is through his knowledge of the occult higher chemistry,
and the use of a trained and powerful image making faculty which every man
possesses; if he reads your thoughts with ease, that results from the use of
the inner and only real powers of sight, which require no retina to see the
fine-pictured web which the vibrating brain of man weaves about him. All
that the Mahatma may do is natural to the perfected man; but if those powers
are not at once revealed to us it is because the race is as yet selfish
altogether and still living for the present and the transitory. 

I repeat then, that though the true doctrine disappears for a time from
among men it is bound to reappear, because first, it is impacted in the
imperishable center of man's nature; and secondly, the Lodge forever
preserves it, not only in actual objective records, but also in the
intelligent and fully self-conscious men who, having successfully overpassed
the many periods of evolution which preceded the one we are now involved in,
cannot lose the precious possessions they have acquired. And because the
elder brothers are the highest product of evolution through whom alone, in
cooperation with the whole human family, the further regular and workmanlike
prosecution of the plans of the Great Architect of the Universe could be
carried on, I have thought it well to advert to them and their Universal
Lodge before going to other parts of the subject. 

-----------------------------------------

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Mauri 
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2005 7:43 AM
To: study@blavatsky.net
Subject <<What is your impression of the term Teacher and it's possible
intended meaning?>>



W.Dallas TenBroeck wrote partly:

<<However a teacher ought to be able to 
offer information that will stimulate
the mind of a researcher to secure or 
work out for themselves the facts and
truths in Nature that are being looked for.
Best wishes,
Dallas>>>>>>

Anyway, that cap "N" in that "Nature" 
seems kind of interesting and esoteric 
to me.

^:-) ...
Mauri

PS ^:-/ ...









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