Theos-Talk Archives (August 2005 Message tt00006)

 It is difficult to see where karma would apply. The bill in the House and Senate concerns non-viable eggs that would be destroyed anyway. There is a concern that fertility clinics would make extra eggs for the harvesting of stems cells, but that objection could be addressed in the bill. Some people have an objection to any use of these cells, but it is difficult to see since the law allows the use of organ donations of brain dead people and same reasoning would seem to apply. Perhaps some one could explain it to the group.

David B.

-------------- Original message -------------- 

> Aug 1 2005 
> 
> Dear Jerry: 
> 
> As far as common sense says it is reasonable to use without taking undue 
> advantage of that which current technology provides. And of course Karma is 
> attached to that decision. 
> 
> The real question is: Why do we stay alive? What are we contributing 
> positively to the world and the rest of humanity? I agree with the saying 
> attributed to Jesus. 
> 
> If we live only for ourselves, or out of fear of death and the "great 
> unknown," then the resulting Karma is different. 
> 
> I cannot find for myself and ability to think, any good reason to deny the 
> continuity of the Monad (myself and others). 
> 
> As to the view that reality is the very narrow transaction of an evanescent 
> and fleeting present I cannot see that it is entirely logical. 
> 
> I find HPB saying in TRANSACTIONS OF THE BLAVATSKY LODGE , p. 30 of the U 
> L T Edn.: " Maya is the perceptive faculty of every Ego which considers 
> itself a Unit separate from, and independent of the ONE infinite and eternal 
> SAT, or "be-ness." 
> 
> What then is the Ego ? 
> 
> Again H P B writes: ISIS UNVEILED AND THE VISHISTADVAITA --HPB Articles 
> III, p. 265: 
> 
> "whether it be orthodox Adwaita or not, I maintain as an occultist, on the 
> authority of the Secret Doctrine, that though merged entirely into 
> Parabrahm, man's spirit while not individual per se, yet preserves its 
> distinct individuality in Paranirvana, owing to the accumulation in it of 
> the aggregates, or skandhas that have survived after each death, from the 
> highest faculties of the Manas. 
> 
> The most spiritual--i.e., the highest and divinest aspirations of every 
> personality follow Buddhi and the Seventh Principle into Devachan (Swarga) 
> after the death of each personality along the line of rebirths, and become 
> part and parcel of the Monad. The personality fades out, disappearing before 
> the occurrence of the evolution of the new personality (rebirth) out of 
> Devachan: but the individuality of the spirit-soul [dear, dear, what can be 
> made out of this English!] is preserved to the end of the great cycle 
> (Maha-Manwantara) when each Ego enters Paranirvana, or is merged in 
> Parabrahm. 
> 
> To our talpatic, or mole-like, comprehension the human spirit is then lost 
> in the One Spirit, as the drop of water thrown into the sea can no longerbe 
> traced out and recovered. But de facto it is not so in the world of 
> immaterial thought. 
> This latter stands in relation to the human dynamic thought, as, say, the 
> visual power through the strongest conceivable microscope would to the sight 
> of a half-blind man: and yet even this is a most insufficient simile--the 
> difference is "inexpressible in terms of foot-pounds." 
> 
> That such Parabrahmic and Paranirvanic "spirits," or units, have and must 
> preserve their divine (not human) individualities, is shown in the fact 
> that, however long the "night of Brahma" or even the Universal Pralaya (not 
> the local Pralaya affecting some one group of worlds) yet, when it ends, the 
> same individual Divine Monad resumes its majestic path of evolution, though 
> on a higher, hundredfold perfected and more pure chain of earths than 
> before, and brings with it all the essence of compound spiritualities from 
> its previous countless rebirths. 
> 
> Spiral evolution, it must be remembered, is dual, and the path of 
> spirituality turns, corkscrew-like, within and around physical, 
> semi-physical, and supra-physical evolution. But I am being tempted into 
> details which had best be left for the full consideration which their 
> importance merits to my forthcoming work, the Secret Doctrine. " 
> 
> H. P. BLAVATSKY 
> Theosophist, January, 1886- 
> -------------------------------------------------------- 
> 
> I recognize I am quoting doctrine, and the doctrine you have adopted (from 
> one of the Buddhistic Schools) uses other terms and concepts of expressing 
> them. But to me, while maya describes the eternal shifting of FORMS 
> (composed of Monads of lesser experience) under the laws of Karma, this does 
> not dispel or obviate the ETERNAL MONAD that is my egoic base (nor that of 
> any other ※Eternal Pilgrim.§ ) 
> 
> HPB continues on p. 30 of Transactions: 
> 
> ※Maya, illusion or ignorance ＃awakens Nidanas; and the cause orcauses 
> having been produced, the effects follow according to Karmic law. Having 
> then produced this cause, the whole discord of life follows immediately as 
> an effect; in reality it is the endeavour of nature to restore harmony and 
> maintain equilibrium.§ 
> 
> As to "replaceable parts: I would say that in view of ever acting maya and 
> due to the eternal exchange of atoms and molecules, such "parts" are son 
> altered into compatible bases for sustaining cooperative life in our gross 
> physical bodies. 
> 
> You speak of fear. True, the personality that has not reconciled the 
> eternal puzzle of its existence and relation with the Higher Self and the 
> Ego in man, has not logically provided itself with a reasonable basis for 
> understanding its continuity -- and it does have a continuity -- call it a 
> memory if you will, but he "good" that a man does ever remains as evidence 
> that he lived then!, and lives now. 
> 
> In The KEY TO THEOSOPHY, HPB writes: 
> 
> "...memory is one thing and mind or thought is another; one is a recording 
> machine, a register which very easily gets out of order; the other 
> (thoughts) are eternal and imperishable. Would you refuse to believe in the 
> existence of certain things or men only because your physical eyes have not 
> seen them? Would not the collective testimony of past generations who have 
> seen him be a sufficient guarantee that Julius Caesar once lived? Why should 
> not the same testimony of the psychic senses of the masses be taken into 
> consideration? 
> 
> ENQUIRER. But don't you think that these are too fine distinctions to be 
> accepted by the majority of mortals? 
> 
> THEOSOPHIST. Say rather by the majority of materialists. And to them we say, 
> behold: even in the short span of ordinary existence, memory is too weak to 
> register all the events of a lifetime. How frequently do even most important 
> events lie dormant in our memory until awakened by some association of 
> ideas, or aroused to function and activity by some other link. This is 
> especially the case with people of advanced age, who are always found 
> suffering from feebleness of recollection. When, therefore, we remember that 
> which we know about the physical and the spiritual principles in man, it is 
> not the fact that our memory has failed to record our precedent life and 
> lives that ought to surprise us, but the contrary, were it to happen. 
> 
> 
> WHY DO WE NOT REMEMBER OUR PAST LIVES? 
> 
> ENQUIRER. You have given me a bird's eye view of the seven principles; now 
> how do they account for our complete loss of any recollection of having 
> lived before? 
> 
> THEOSOPHIST. Very easily. Since those "principles" which we call physical, 
> and none of which is denied by science, though it calls them by other names, 
> * are disintegrated after death with their constituent elements, memory 
> along with its brain, this vanished memory of a vanished personality, can 
> neither remember nor record anything in the subsequent reincarnation of the 
> EGO. 
> 
> Reincarnation means that this Ego will be furnished with a new body, a new 
> brain, and a new memory. Therefore it would be as absurd to expect this 
> memory to remember that which it has never recorded as it would be idle to 
> examine under a microscope a shirt never worn by a murderer, and seek on it 
> for the stains of blood which are to be found only on the clothes he wore. 
> It is not the clean shirt that we have to question, but the clothes worn 
> during the perpetration of the crime; and if these are burnt and destroyed, 
> how can you get at them? 
> 
> ENQUIRER. Aye! how can you get at the certainty that the crime was ever 
> committed at all, or that the "man in the clean shirt" ever lived before? 
> 
> THEOSOPHIST. Not by physical processes, most assuredly; nor by relying on 
> the testimony of that which exists no longer. But there is such a thing as 
> circumstantial evidence, since our wise laws accept it, more, perhaps, even 
> than they should. To get convinced of the fact of re-incarnation and past 
> lives, one must put oneself in rapport with one's real permanent Ego, not 
> one's evanescent memory. ... 
> 
> ENQUIRER. But how can people believe in that which they do not know, nor 
> have ever seen, far less put themselves in rapport with it? 
> 
> THEOSOPHIST. If people, and the most learned, will believe in the Gravity, 
> Ether, Force, and what not of Science, abstractions "and working hypotheses, 
> " which they have neither seen, touched, smelt, heard, nor tasted求 why 
> should not other people believe, on the same principle, in one's permanent 
> Ego, a far more logical and important "working hypothesis" than any other? 
> 
> ENQUIRER. What is, finally, this mysterious eternal principle? Can you 
> explain its nature so as to make it comprehensible to all? 
> 
> THEOSOPHIST. The EGO which re-incarnates, the individual and immortal 求not 
> personal求 "I"; the vehicle, in short, of the Atma-Buddhic MONAD, that which 
> is rewarded in Devachan and punished on earth, and that, finally, to which 
> the reflection only of the Skandhas, or attributes, of every incarnation 
> attaches itself. [There are five Skandhas or attributes in the Buddhist 
> teachings: "Rupa (form or body), material qualities; Vedana, sensation; 
> Sanna, abstract ideas; Samkhara, tendencies of mind; Vinnana, mental powers. 
> Of these we are formed; by them we are conscious of existence; and through 
> them communicate with the world about us."] 
> 
> ENQUIRER. What do you mean by Skandhas? 
> 
> THEOSOPHIST. Just what I said: "attributes," among which is memory, all of 
> which perish like a flower, leaving behind them only a feeble perfume. Here 
> is another paragraph from H. S. Olcott's "Buddhist Catechism"矣 which bears 
> directly upon the subject. It deals with the question as follows:求 
> 
> "The aged man remembers the incidents of his youth, despite his being 
> physically and mentally changed. Why, then, is not the recollection of past 
> lives brought over by us from our last birth into the present birth? Because 
> memory is included within the Skandhas, and the Skandhas having changed with 
> the new existence, a memory, the record of that particular existence, 
> develops. Yet the record or reflection of all the past lives must survive, 
> for when Prince Siddhartha became Buddha, the full sequence of His previous 
> births were seen by Him. . . . and any one who attains to the state of Jhana 
> can thus retrospectively trace the line of his lives." 
> 
> This proves to you that while the undying qualities of the personality求 
> such as love, goodness, charity, etc.求 attach themselves to the immortal 
> Ego, photographing on it, so to speak, a permanent image of the divine 
> aspect of the man who was, his material Skandhas (those which generate the 
> most marked Karmic effects) are as evanescent as a flash of lightning, and 
> cannot impress the new brain of the new personality; yet their failing todo 
> so impairs in no way the identity of the re-incarnating Ego. 
> 
> ENQUIRER. Do you mean to infer that that which survives is only the 
> Soul-memory, as you call it, that Soul or Ego being one and the same, while 
> nothing of the personality remains? 
> 
> THEOSOPHIST. Not quite; something of each personality, unless the latter was 
> an absolute materialist with not even a chink in his nature for a spiritual 
> ray to pass through, must survive, as it leaves its eternal impress on the 
> incarnating permanent Self or Spiritual Ego. [ Or the Spiritual, in 
> contradistinction to the personal Self. The student must not confuse this 
> Spiritual Ego with the "HIGHER SELF" which is Atma, the God within us, and 
> inseparable from the Universal Spirit.] ... 
> 
> The personality with its Skandhas is ever changing with every new birth. It 
> is, as said before, only the part played by the actor (the true Ego) for one 
> night. This is why we preserve no memory on the physical plane of our past 
> lives, though the real "Ego" has lived them over and knows them all. 
> 
> ENQUIRER. Then how does it happen that the real or Spiritual man does not 
> impress his new personal "I" with this knowledge? 
> 
> THEOSOPHIST. How is it that the servant-girls in a poor farm-house could 
> speak Hebrew and play the violin in their trance or somnambulic state, and 
> knew neither when in their normal condition? Because, as every genuine 
> psychologist of the old, not your modern, school, will tell you, the 
> Spiritual Ego can act only when the personal Ego is paralysed. The Spiritual 
> "I" in man is omniscient and has every knowledge innate in it; while the 
> personal self is the creature of its environment and the slave of the 
> physical memory. Could the former manifest itself uninterruptedly, and 
> without impediment, there would be no longer men on earth, but we should all 
> be gods. 
> 
> ENQUIRER. Still there ought to be exceptions, and some ought to remember. 
> 
> THEOSOPHIST. And so there are. But who believes in their report? Such 
> sensitives are generally regarded as hallucinated hysteriacs, as 
> crack-brained enthusiasts, or humbugs, by modern materialism. Let them read, 
> however, works on this subject pre-eminently "Reincarnation, a Study of 
> Forgotten Truth" by E. D. Walker, F. T. S., and see in it the mass of proofs 
> which the able author brings to bear on this vexed question. 
> 
> One speaks to people of soul, and some ask "What is Soul?" "Have you ever 
> proved its existence?" Of course it is useless to argue with those who are 
> materialists. But even to them I would put the question: "Can you remember 
> what you were or did when a baby? Have you preserved the smallest 
> recollection of your life, thoughts, or deeds, or that you lived at all 
> during the first eighteen months or two years of your existence? Then why 
> not deny that you have ever lived as a babe, on the same principle?" Whento 
> all this we add that the reincarnating Ego, or individuality, retains during 
> the Devachanic period merely the essence of the experience of its past 
> earth-life or personality, the whole physical experience involving into a 
> state of in potentia, or being, so to speak, translated into spiritual 
> formulae; when we remember further that the term between two rebirths is 
> said to extend from ten to fifteen centuries, during which time the physical 
> consciousness is totally and absolutely inactive, having no organs to act 
> through, and therefore no existence, the reason for the absence of all 
> remembrance in the purely physical memory is apparent. 
> 
> ENQUIRER. You just said that the SPIRITUAL EGO was omniscient. Where, then, 
> is that vaunted omniscience during his Devachanic life, as you call it? 
> 
> THEOSOPHIST. During that time it is latent and potential, because, first of 
> all, the Spiritual Ego (the compound of Buddhi-Manas) is not the HIGHER 
> SELF, which being one with the Universal Soul or Mind is alone omniscient; 
> and, secondly, because Devachan is the idealized continuation of the 
> terrestrial life just left behind, a period of retributive adjustment, and a 
> reward for unmerited wrongs and sufferings undergone in that special life. 
> 
> It is omniscient only potentially in Devachan, and de facto exclusively in 
> Nirvana, when the Ego is merged in the Universal Mind-Soul. Yet it rebecomes 
> quasi omniscient during those hours on earth when certain abnormal 
> conditions and physiological changes in the body make the Ego free from the 
> trammels of matter. 
> 
> Thus the examples cited above of somnambulists, a poor servant speaking 
> Hebrew, and another playing the violin, give you an illustration of the case 
> in point. This does not mean that the explanations of these two facts 
> offered us by medical science have no truth in them, for one girl had, years 
> before, heard her master, a clergyman, read Hebrew works aloud, and the 
> other had heard an artist playing a violin at their farm. 
> 
> But neither could have done so as perfectly as they did had they not been 
> ensouled by THAT which, owing to the sameness of its nature with the 
> Universal Mind, is omniscient. Here the higher principle acted on the 
> Skandhas and moved them; in the other, the personality being paralysed, the 
> individuality manifested itself. Pray do not confuse the two. 
> 
> 
> ON INDIVIDUALITY AND PERSONALITY * 
> 
> ENQUIRER. But what is the difference between the two? I confess that I am 
> still in the dark. Indeed it is just that difference, then, that you cannot 
> impress too much on our minds. 
> 
> * Even in his Buddhist Catechism, Col. Olcott, forced to it by the logic of 
> Esoteric philosophy, found himself obliged to correct the mistakes of 
> previous Orientalists who made no such distinction, and gives the reader his 
> reasons for it. Thus he says: "The successive appearances upon the earth,or 
> 'descents into generation,' of the tanhaically coherent parts (Skandhas) of 
> a certain being, are a succession of personalities. In each birth the 
> PERSONALITY differs from that of a previous or next succeeding birth. Karma, 
> the DEUS EX MACHINA, masks (or shall we say reflects?) itself now in the 
> personality of a sage, again as an artisan, and so on throughout the string 
> of births. But though personalities ever shift, the one line of life along 
> which they are strung, like beads, runs unbroken; it is ever that particular 
> line, never any other. It is therefore individual, an individual vital 
> undulation, which began in Nirvana, or the subjective side of nature, as the 
> light or heat undulation through aether began at its dynamic source; is 
> careering through the objective side of nature under the impulse of Karma 
> and the creative direction of Tanha (the unsatisfied desire for existence); 
> and leads through many cyclic changes back to Nirvana. Mr. Rhys-Davids calls 
> that which passes from personality to personality along the individual chain 
> 'character,' or 'doing.' Since 'character' is not a mere metaphysical 
> abstraction, but the sum of one's mental qualities and moral propensities, 
> would it not help to dispel what Mr. Rhys-Davids calls 'the desperate 
> expedient of a mystery' (Buddhism, p. 101) if we regarded the 
> life-undulation as individuality, and each of its series of natal 
> manifestations as a separate personality? The perfect individual, 
> Buddhistically speaking, is a Buddha, I should say; for Buddha is but the 
> rare flower of humanity, without the least supernatural admixture. And as 
> countless generations ('four asankheyyas and a hundred thousand cycles,' 
> Fausboll and Rhys-Davids' BUDDHIST BIRTH STORIES, p. 13) are required to 
> develop a man into a Buddha, and the iron will to become one runs throughout 
> all the successive births, what shall we call that which thus wills and 
> perseveres? Character? One's individuality: an individuality but partly 
> manifested in any one birth, but built up of fragments from all the births?" 
> (Bud. Cat., Appendix A. 137.) [Key pp. 126 - 134] 
> 
> Now this is long enough, I hope it puts my points clearer. 
> 
> Best wishes, 
> 
> Dallas 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message----- 
> From: Gerald 
> Sent: Monday, August 01, 2005 1:19 PM 
> To: 
> Subject: About The Use Of Stem Cells / Reincarnation / Ethics 
> 
> Well I suppose I might as well put in my two cents here. 
> 
> DTB Modern physiology is using the physical visible cells and their 
> contents 
> to try to effect regeneration of failing cell structures, or to bring on by 
> physiological means conceptions where Karmically -- under the normal 
> process of bodily self-restoration -- it may not be possible for the body 
> to 
> achieve the healing or the reproduction desires. 
> 
> GS 
> Dal, in my own opinion I don't see any difference in using stem cells or 
> aspirin. I have heart failure. My life is currently being sustained by 
> heart medications that I take each day. My wife has a laundry list of 
> physical problems and her life is also being sustained by daily pills. If 
> left alone, we would have both died some years ago. So viv la medicine. I 
> like modern medicine., but I do not care much for the medical model which 
> is a one-size-fits-all model. 
> 
> 
> DTB It all starts with DESIRE and with the TANHAIC FEELING that a long 
> life is desirable, and death is to be deferred for as long as possible, 
> using any 
> and every means. 
> 
> GS 
> Why do we eat food? Is it not to sustain life? Why bother to breath? Is it 
> not to sustain life? What is the difference between eating a salad and 
> eating a pill? Both are chemicals that combine in the body and do things to 
> sustain the body. We avoid meat if we think that it is bad for us, and we 
> eat salads if we think that they are good for us. It is all a matter of 
> belief. Jesus said that what comes out of our mouth is more important that 
> what goes into it. I think that he was right. 
> 
> 
> DTB Karma, reincarnation, individual effects for deeds in past lives 
> now 
> manifesting at least 3 causes. These relate to the Monads of lesser 
> experience who aggregate around a Monad to provide it with its personality 
> in this life through which it progresses morally, ethically and 
> intellectually. 
> 
> GS 
> If you want to believe in past lives and so on, then you are free to do so. 
> Your "monads of lesser experience" are mayavic illusions, but if you want 
> to worry about them and so on, you are free to do so. I see no difference 
> between bodies, organs, cells, atoms, and monads. Any differences are 
> purely intellectual hair-splitting. 
> 
> 
> DTB Modern medicine knows little of this. >> 
> 
> GS 
> To which I wonder, so what? 
> 
> 
> DTB Students of THEOSOPHY are generally ignorant of medicine. And they 
> do not know the ins and outs of the Astral or of Karma. 
> 
> GS 
> Ignorance is no excuse. Or is it? 
> 
> CUT 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Yahoo! Groups Links 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 

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