Theos-Talk Archives (April 2005 Message tt01370)

4 21 05

Dear Friends:

Can we consider:


"THEOSOPHY " or theos - sophia or [ Godlike wisdom ] or
all-inclusiveness to be our subject ?

Is it not everywhere?  	

A statement of facts in Nature?  

Cannot everyone or anyone discover the facts, rules and laws of life and of
the universal set-up?

Does it take a "great," or an attentive" (also a humble) mind to discover
it?

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

HPB wrote (in part) in an article -- her subject being the possible training
available in schools of occultism


INTRO-VERSION OF MENTAL VISION


She observed:  

"SOME interesting experiments have recently been tried by...the Psychic
Research Society of London, which, if properly examined, are capable of
yielding highly important results...it will suffice...to state for the
benefit of readers unacquainted with the experiments, that in a very large
majority of cases, too numerous to be the result of mere chance, it was
found that the thought-reading sensitive obtained but an inverted mental
picture of the object given him to read. 

A piece of paper, containing the representation of an arrow, was held before
a carefully blind-folded thought-reader and its position constantly changed,
the thought-reader being requested to mentally see the arrow at each turn. 

In these circumstances it was found that when the arrow-head pointed to the
right, it was read off as pointing to the left, and so on. This led some
sapient journalists to imagine that there was a mirage in the inner as well
as on the outer plane of optical sensation. 

But the real explanation of the phenomenon lies deeper. 

It is well known that an object as seen by us and its image on the retina of
the eye, are not exactly the same in position, but quite the reverse. How
the image of an object on the retina is inverted in sensation, is a mystery
which physical science is admittedly incapable of solving. 

Western metaphysics too, without regard to this point, hardly fares any
better; there are as many theories as there are metaphysicians... The only
philosopher who has obtained a glimpse of the truth is the idealist
Berkeley, who, to the extreme regret of all students of the true philosophy,
could not get beyond theological Christianity, in spite of all his brilliant
intuitions. 

A child, says Berkeley, does really see a thing inverted from our
stand-point; to touch its head it stretches out its hands in the same
direction of its body as we do of ours to reach our feet. Repeated failures
in this direction give experience and lead to the correction of the notions
born of one sense by those derived through another; the sensations of
distance and solidity are produced in the same way.
 
The application of this knowledge to the above mentioned experiments of the
Psychic Research Society will lead to very striking results. 

If the trained adept is a person who has developed all his interior
faculties, and is on the psychic plane in the full possession of his senses,
the individual, who accidentally, that is without occult training, gains the
inner sight, is in the position of a helpless child -- a sport of the freaks
of one isolated inner sense.

This will throw a flood of light on the untrustworthy character of the
ordinary untrained seer. Such was the case with the sensitives with whom Mr.
Meyers and his colleagues experimented. 


CORRECTION and the WILL

There are instances, however, when the correction of one sense by another
takes place involuntarily and accurate results are brought out. When the
sensitive reads the thoughts in a man's mind, this correction is not
required, for the will of the thinker shoots the thoughts, as it were,
straight into the mind of the sensitive. 

The introversion under notice will, moreover, be found to take place only in
the instance of such images which cannot be affected by the ordinary
sense-experience of the sensitive. 

To take the image of a dog for instance; when the sensitive perceives it as
existing in the mind of a person or on a piece of paper, it may appear
distorted to the inner perception of the sensitive, but his physical
experience would always correct it. 

But this introversion is sure to take place when the direction faced by the
dog is the subject of investigation. 

A difficulty may here suggest itself with regard to the names of persons or
the words, thought of for the sensitive's reading. But allowance must in
such cases be made for the operation of the thinker's will, which forces the
thought into the sensitive's mind, and thereby renders the process of
introversion unnecessary. 

It is abundantly clear from this that the best way of studying these
phenomena is when only one set of will-power, that of the sensitive, is in
play. This takes place always when the object the sensitive is to read, is
independent of the will of any other person, as in the case of its being
represented on paper or any other thing of the kind.

DREAMS
 
Applying the same law to dreams, we can find the rationale of the popular
superstition that facts are generally inverted in dreams. To dream of
something good is generally taken to be the precursor of something evil. 

In the exceptional cases in which dreams have been found to be prophetic,
the dreamer was either affected by another's will or under the operation of
some disturbing forces, which cannot be calculated except for each
particular case.


DEATH VISION
 
In this connection another very important psychic phenomenon may be noticed.
Instances are too numerous and too well-authenticated to be amenable to
dispute, in which an occurrence at a distance, for instance the death of a
person, has pictured itself to the mental vision of one interested in the
occurrence. In such cases the double of the dying man appears even at a
great distance and becomes visible usually to his friend only, but instances
are not rare when the double is seen by a number of persons. 

The former case comes within the class of cases under consideration, as the
concentrated thought of the dying man is clairvoyantly seen by the friend
and the erect image is produced by the operation of the dying man's
will-energy, while the latter is the appearance of the genuine mayavirupa
(illusion-form), and therefore not governed by the law under discussion. 

THEOSOPHIST, February, 1884 

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

Another article by HPB has the following (in part)


MEMORY IN THE DYING


"We find in a very old letter from a MASTER, written years ago to a member
of the Theosophical Society, the following suggestive lines on the mental
state of a dying man: 

"At the last moment, the whole life is reflected in our memory and emerges
from all the forgotten nooks and corners, picture after picture, one event
after the other.

The dying brain dislodges memory with a strong, supreme impulse; and memory
restores faithfully every impression that has been entrusted to it during
the period of the brain's activity. That impression and thought which was
the strongest, naturally becomes the most vivid, and survives, so to say,
all the rest, which now vanish and disappear for ever, but to reappear in
Devachan. 

No man dies insane or unconscious, as some physiologists assert. Even a
madman or one in a fit of delirium tremens will have his instant of perfect
lucidity at the moment of death, though unable to say so to those present.
The man may often appear dead. Yet from the last pulsation, and between the
last throbbing of his heart and the moment when the last spark of animal
heat leaves the body, the brain thinks and the EGO lives, in these few brief
seconds, his whole life over again. 

Speak in whispers, ye who assist at a death-bed and find yourselves in the
solemn presence of Death. Especially have ye to keep quiet just after Death
has laid her clammy hand upon the body. Speak in whispers I say, lest you
disturb the quiet ripple of thought and hinder the busy work of the Past
casting its reflection upon the veil of the Future. . . ." [M L Barker,
pp 170-1]

The above statement has been more than once strenuously opposed by
materialists; Biology and (Scientific) Psychology, it was urged, were both
against the idea, and while the latter had no well demonstrated data to go
upon in such a hypothesis, the former dismissed the idea as an empty
"superstition." 

Meanwhile, even biology is bound to progress, and this is what we learn of
its latest achievements. Dr. Ferré has communicated quite recently to the
Biological Society of Paris a very curious note on the mental state of the
dying, which corroborates marvellously the above lines. For, it is to the
special phenomenon of life-reminiscences, and that sudden re-emerging on the
blank walls of memory, from all its long neglected and forgotten "nooks and
corners," of "picture after picture" that Dr. Ferré draws the special
attention of biologists.
 
We need notice but two among the numerous instances given by this Scientist
in his Rapport, to show how scientifically correct are the teachings we
receive from our Eastern Masters. 

The first instance is that of a moribund consumptive whose disease was
developed in consequence of a spinal affection. Already consciousness had
left the man, when, recalled to life by two successive injections of a
gramme of ether, the patient slightly lifted his head and began talking
rapidly in Flemish, a language no one around him, nor yet himself,
understood. 

Offered a pencil and a piece of white cardboard, he wrote with great
rapidity several lines in that language--very correctly, as was ascertained
later on--fell back, and died. 

When translated--the writing was found to refer to a very prosaic affair. He
had suddenly recollected, he wrote, that he owed a certain man a sum of
fifteen francs since 1868--hence more than twenty years--and desired it to
be paid.
 
But why write his last wish in Flemish? The defunct was a native of Antwerp,
but had left his country in childhood, without ever knowing the language,
and having passed all his life in Paris, could speak and write only in
French. 

Evidently his returning consciousness, that last flash of memory that
displayed before him, as in a retrospective panorama, all his life, even to
the trifling fact of his having borrowed twenty years back a few francs from
a friend, did not emanate from his physical brain alone, but rather from his
spiritual memory, that of the Higher Ego (Manas or the re-incarnating
individuality). The fact of his speaking and writing Flemish, a language
that he had heard at a time of life when he could not yet speak himself, is
an additional proof. 

The EGO is almost omniscient in its immortal nature. For indeed matter is
nothing more than "the last degree and as the shadow of existence," as
Ravaisson, member of the French Institute, tells us. 

But to our second case. 

Another patient, dying of pulmonary consumption and likewise reanimated by
an injection of ether, turned his head towards his wife and rapidly said to
her: "You cannot find that pin now; all the floor has been renewed since
then." 

This was in reference to the loss of a scarf pin eighteen years before, a
fact so trifling that it had almost been forgotten, but which had not failed
to be revived in the last thought of the dying man, who having expressed
what he saw in words, suddenly stopped and breathed his last. Thus any one
of the thousand little daily events, and accidents of a long life would seem
capable of being recalled to the flickering consciousness, at the supreme
moment of dissolution. A long life, perhaps, lived over again in the space
of one short second!
 
A third case may be noticed, which corroborates still more strongly that
assertion of Occultism which traces all such remembrances to the
thought-power of the individual, instead of to that of the personal (lower)
Ego. 

A young girl, who had been a sleepwalker up to her twenty-second year,
performed during her hours of somnambulic sleep the most varied functions of
domestic life, of which she had no remembrance upon awakening.
 
Among other psychic impulses that manifested themselves only during her
sleep, was a secretive tendency quite alien to her waking state. During the
latter she was open and frank to a degree, and very careless of her personal
property; but in the somnambulic state she would take articles belonging to
herself or within her reach and hide them away with ingenious cunning. This
habit being known to her friends and relatives, and two nurses, having been
in attendance to watch her actions during her night rambles for years,
nothing disappeared but what could be easily restored to its usual place. 

But on one sultry night, the nurse falling asleep, the young girl got up and
went to her father's study. The latter, a notary of fame, had been working
till a late hour that night. It was during a momentary absence from his room
that the somnambule entered, and deliberately possessed herself of a will
left open upon the desk, as also of a sum of several thousand pounds in
bonds and notes. 

These she proceeded to hide in the hollow of two dummy pillars set up in the
library to match the solid ones, and stealing from the room before her
father's return, she regained her chamber and bed without awakening the
nurse who was still asleep in the armchair.
 
The result was, that, as the nurse stoutly denied that her young mistress
had left the room, suspicion was diverted from the real culprit and the
money could not be recovered. The loss of the will involved a law-suit which
almost beggared her father and entirely ruined his reputation, and the
family were reduced to great straits. 

About nine years later the young girl who, during the previous seven years
had not been somnambulic, fell into a consumption of which she ultimately
died. Upon her death-bed. the veil which had hung before her physical memory
was raised; her divine insight awakened; the pictures of her life came
streaming back before her inner eye; and among others she saw the scene of
her somnambulic robbery. Suddenly arousing herself from the lethargy in
which she had lain for several hours, her face showed signs of some terrible
emotion working within, and she cried out 

"Ah! what have I done? . . . It was I who took the will and the money . . .
Go search the dummy pillars in the library, I have . . ." 

She never finished her sentence for her very emotion killed her. But the
search was made and the will and money found within the oaken pillars as she
had said. 

What makes the case more strange is, that these pillars were so high, that
even by standing upon a chair and with plenty of time at her disposal
instead of only a few moments, the somnambulist could not have reached up
and dropped the objects into the hollow columns. It is to be noted, however,
that ecstatics and convulsionists (Vide the Convulsionnaires de St. Médard
et de Morizine) seem to possess an abnormal facility for climbing blank
walls and leaping even to the tops of trees. [see ISIS UNVEILED, Vol. I
217, 221, 369-378; II 626]
 
Taking the facts as stated, would they not induce one to believe that the
somnambulic personage possesses an intelligence and memory of its own apart
from the physical memory of the waking lower Self; and that it is the former
which remembers in articulo mortis, the body and physical senses in the
latter case ceasing to function, and the intelligence gradually making its
final escape through the avenue of psychic, and last of all of spiritual
consciousness? 

And why not? 

Even materialistic science begins now to concede to psychology more than one
fact that would have vainly begged of it recognition twenty years ago. 

The SOUL

"The real existence" Ravaisson tells us, "the life of which every other life
is but an imperfect outline, a faint sketch, is that of the Soul." That
which the public in general calls "soul," we speak of as the "reincarnating
Ego." "To be, is to live, and to live is to will and think," says the French
Scientist. 1 


LIMITS OF THE BRAIN

But, if indeed the physical brain is of only a limited area, the field for
the containment of rapid flashes of unlimited and infinite thought, neither
will nor thought can be said to be generated within it, even according to
materialistic Science, the impassable chasm between matter and mind having
been confessed both by Tyndall and many others. 

The fact is that the human brain is simply the canal between two planes--the
psycho-spiritual and the material--through which every abstract and
metaphysical idea filters from the Manasic down to the lower human
consciousness. 


IDEAS on INFINITY and the ABSOLUTE

Therefore, the ideas about the infinite and the absolute are not, nor can
they be, within our brain capacities. They can be faithfully mirrored only
by our Spiritual consciousness, thence to be more or less faintly projected
on to the tables of our perceptions on this plane. 

Thus while the records of even important events are often obliterated from
our memory, not the most trifling action of our lives can disappear from the
"Soul's" memory, because it is no MEMORY for it, but an ever present reality
on the plane which lies outside our conceptions of space and time. "Man is
the measure of all things," said Aristotle; and surely he did not mean by
man, the form of flesh, bones and muscles! 


THOUGHT AND MEMORY

Of all the deep thinkers Edgard Quinet, the author of "Creation," expressed
this idea the best. Speaking of man, full of feelings and thoughts of which
he has either no consciousness at all, or which he feels only as dim and
hazy impressions, he shows that man realizes quite a small portion only of
his moral being. 

"The thoughts we think, but are unable to define and formulate, once
repelled, seek refuge in the very root of our being." . . . When chased by
the persistent efforts of our will "they retreat before it, still further,
still deeper into--who knows what--fibres, but wherein they remain to reign
and impress us unbidden and unknown to ourselves. . . ." 

Yes; they become as imperceptible and as unreachable as the vibrations of
sound and colour when these surpass the normal range. Unseen and eluding
grasp, they yet work, and thus lay the foundations of our future actions and
thoughts, and obtain mastery over us, though we may never think of them and
are often ignorant of their very being and presence. Nowhere does Quinet,
the great student of Nature, seem more right in his observations than when
speaking of the mysteries with which we are all surrounded: 

"The mysteries of neither earth nor heaven but those present in the marrow
of our bones, in our-brain cells, our nerves and fibres. No need," he adds,
"in order to search for the unknown, to lose ourselves in the realm of the
stars, when here, near us and in us, rests the unreachable. As our world is
mostly formed of imperceptible beings which are the real constructors of its
continents, so likewise is man."
 
Verily so; since man is a bundle of obscure, and to himself unconscious
perceptions, of indefinite feelings and misunderstood emotions, of
ever-forgotten memories and knowledge that becomes on the surface of his
plane--ignorance. 


TWO MEMORIES ?

Yet, while physical memory in a healthy living man is often obscured, one
fact crowding out another weaker one, at the moment of the great change that
man calls death--that which we call "memory" seems to return to us in all
its vigour and freshness. 

May this not be due as just said, simply to the fact that, for a few seconds
at least, our two memories (or rather the two states, the highest and the
lowest state, of consciousness) blend together, thus forming one, and that
the dying being finds himself on a plane wherein there is neither past nor
future, but all is one present? 

Memory, as we all know, is strongest with regard to its early associations,
then when the future man is only a child, and more of a soul than of a body;
and if memory is a part of our Soul, then, as Thackeray has somewhere said,
it must be of necessity eternal. 

AN ETERNAL MIND ?

Scientists deny this; we, Theosophists, affirm that it is so. They have for
what they hold but negative proofs; we have, to support us, innumerable
facts of the kind just instanced, in the three cases described by us. The
links of the chain of cause and effect with relation to mind are, and must
ever remain a terra-incognita to the materialist. For if they have already
acquired a deep conviction that as Pope says-- 

Lulled in the
countless chambers of the brain
Our thoughts are link'd by many a hidden chain. . . .

--and that they are still unable to discover these chains, how can they hope
to unravel the mysteries of the higher, Spiritual, Mind! 

H. P. B.
LUCIFER, October, 1889 
 
1 Rapport sur la Philosophie en France au XIXme. Siècle.

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



Dallas
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Perry Coles
Sent: Wednesday, April 20, 2005 11:44 PM
To: 
Subject: Re: theosophical books in disguise?

Hello All,

Perhaps it maybe the problem is in what context this word 'theosophy' 
is used.

The tradition of HPB's Adept teachers had/has particular teachings, 
and these teachings may match with some other traditions in some 
areas but not in other areas.

Maybe the simple clarification of which tradition we are referring to 
can help get over this what is and what isn't "theosophy" bump.
.....
Surely the work of the theosophist is generating a thought atmosphere 
of open minded and free investigation that takes the mind deeper and 
expands our vision of who and what we are and our inter-connectedness 
with the ALL.

Maybe the classification 'theosophy' can only really be applied to a 
way of being and interacting with life. Rather than a set of specific books
or quotations.

'Theosophical teachings' are more correctly those that lead into an 
awareness of oneness. 

An aspect of that journey for some is a study and comparison of 
writings.

All books and writings have there flaws and none are infallible.

Perry