Andrew Rooke – Australia

There is an old saying which says: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” But looking around at the state of the world today, if we want a better world in the future, we are definitely going to have to learn a whole new ‘barrel of tricks’ at every level of human behavior and endeavor.

Ananya Sri Ram – USA

Ananya, the author, is the Director of the Krotona School of Theosophy 

Through the centuries, stories and fables have been used to teach us lessons about the many facets of life. Our spiritual life is no different. Religions around the world each have their own version of a particular lesson that is taught through the lens of that faith. The concept of the relativity and absoluteness of reality or the unreal and real is one such lesson. We can easily say “all is maya,” or “to know the Way, is not the Way,” and so on, but if we truly were able to grasp living according to the rhythms and laws of the One life, our world would be very different. We feel we know that which is considered Real, but the illusion we follow called life is so insidious, we often find ourselves caught in the raging waters of a river heading out to sea, struggling to hang on to anything that may “save” us.

David M. Grossman – USA

 Two Souls, One Heart - One Vision 

The story of HP Blavatsky leading up to her coming to New York in July 1873 and launching the Modern Theosophical Movement is a kind of epic story all by itself. But once she arrived in Manhattan, already a multicultural city of immigrants of over a million people,  almost immediately she settled into the work of preparation for what was to come. She connected up with the Spiritualist Movement which was receiving some notoriety at the time and becoming an annoying adversary to the then utterly materialistic mainstream scientific views dominating the “Halls of Learning.”

 It was while interfacing with the spiritualists by writing articles for the secular press and for “Spiritualist” journals and observing demonstrations of Spiritualistic phenomena, most famously at the Eddy Farm in Chittenden, Vermont that HPB first met Col. H. S. Olcott. He was covering the Spiritualists as a journalist, but we are told his real interest was to satisfy a curiosity that arose within him, checking for the authenticity or fraud concerning such phenomena. He wrote articles  in the NY Graphic and in 1875 published the book People from the Other World. Olcott was also captivated by a hidden side of nature (the occult world) that he was being made aware exists. And when he met Helena Petrovna Blavatsky at the Eddy farm this man of many talents had his life  redirected forever.

Antti Savinainen – Finland

My presentation is based on the teachings of Finnish theosophist Pekka Ervast (1875–1934) on the afterlife in Hades, which is a limited and protected part of a much larger astral plane. Typically, Hades is referred to as kamaloka in Theosophical sources. Ervast used the Finnish term ‘tuonela’, which best corresponds to Hades in Greek mythology.