Theosophy

Charles Webster Leadbeater

[A lecture delivered through an interpreter to the Burmese Ladies at Moulmein, Burma (now Myanmar), in March,1914.]

You ask me to tell you the way to Nirvana; the way to Nirvana is to follow the teachings of our Lord Buddha. It is not enough only to talk about following the Precepts, it is not enough to go to the Temples, to take Pancha Sila and offer flowers. The great thing is to live your lives as the Lord Buddha wished you to live. He has given certain Precepts which we are to follow. Each morning many Buddhists repeat those Precepts, but often they immediately forget all about them, and do not think about them until next morning. That is useless, because the Lord Buddha when He gave these Precepts meant people to carry them out day by day. He gave you, for example, the Noble Eightfold Path. Now I suppose every one of you has heard from childhood all about the Noble Eightfold Path. You may repeat its steps in a moment, but the question is not to be able to repeat them, but to carry them out; because, unless you carry them out, they are useless to you. You know the first Step in that Noble Eightfold Path is Right Belief. Now what are the things that we ought to believe and those that we ought not to believe? The first thing is to believe in the Law of Karma. That is, that whatever you do brings corresponding results. If you do good things, good will come; if you do bad things, evil will come. We should all say that that was so, if anyone asked us, but the question is, do you live all the time as though it were true?  Sometimes people say they believe things, but they do not behave accordingly. In such cases their belief is only form. There are some things you do believe. You believe fire will burn you, so you are careful not to put your hand in the fire, lest it might get hurt. You know that if you fall from a height your arms or legs may be broken, so you are careful in walking up a dangerously steep hill. Also if you believe that for every evil thought or word or act, evil will come to you, you will be careful. But if you say that you believe in that, and still sometimes speak evil of another person, then you do not believe that really.

Annie Besant

[A lecture delivered at the Ananda College, Colombo, Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1907] 

Twenty-three hundred years have passed since the great Buddhist Emperor, Ashoka, sent to the Island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) his son and his daughter, to plant in this island not only the material slip from the sacred tree of Buddha Gaya, but also to plant here a slip of that Tree of Wisdom which, since that day, has spread abroad over the island, as it has spread far over the nations, over the world - that Tree of Wisdom which you call the faith of the Buddha. We are to take this afternoon one of His great teachings for our study. You remember how, when He had left His father's house, when He had left His wife and His infant son, when He had sought, by the help of instructors in the jungle, to win His way to life, when He had sought by asceticism to find the path which others had failed to teach Him, that He finally, sitting under that famous tree, having conquered every temptation, having thrown back all the illusions of Mara, when at last illumination reached Him, when He had entered into perfect knowledge - then He saw, for the first time in this life - the Four Noble Truths: sorrow, its roots, the cessation of sorrow, the path out of it - the Noble Eightfold Path. And it is that Noble Eightfold Path to which I ask your attention this afternoon.

This article appeared in the June 202w issue of The Theosophical Movement. For more articles published in this excellent magazine follow this link: https://www.ultindia.org/previous_issues.html 

We have expectations from others, ourselves and the world at large. When we have expectations not based on facts or analysis, then we are in for disappointment. “We live in a largely uncertain world, consequently this desire for certainty often sets us up for disappointment and pain. While some things might be in our control, many are not,” writes Marguerite Theophil. An old man used to sit outside the gates of a palace. One winter day the king noticed him shivering and promised to arrange for a warm coat and blanket to be sent out immediately. However, the king had to attend to some urgent business and could not keep his promise. The next day, the old man was found dead with a note that read: “For all these years I shivered and yet survived, but the expectation of warm clothes makes the cold unbearable, and will be the death of me.”

Sri Raghavan Iyer – USA

The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875 in New York with three objects, the first of which was the formation of a nucleus of Universal Brotherhood. The second object was the comparative study of religions, sciences and philosophies, ancient and modern, so that all men and women, including Americans, might come to salute every true witness in a long, largely unknown but unbroken history of accumulated wisdom. Isis Unveiled taught the perennial philosophy (Philosophia Perennis) and invited its true students to find Ariadne's thread, a golden thread hidden behind the veil of form and symbol, in every great tradition of thought, philosophy, religious aspiration and myth. It is the very basis of real science, and it is the forgotten inspiration behind the founding of the Royal Society as well as much of the significant work of men like Edison, a Fellow of the Theosophical Society, and some other scientists influenced by the wisdom of The Secret Doctrine.

Juliana Cesano – USA

Juliana Cesano 

I would like to reflect on the intrinsic and dynamic connection between challenge and the inner life, and how these two aspects play a major part in what we sometimes call “inner awakening”, or “inner unfoldment”.

Challenges are normally seen as circumstances that come to us from the outside, an external force in the shape of an event that presents itself in our lives. But if we look closer, and especially if we look back into the moments in which we were challenged, we may be able to see that those challenges were not random, and instead, they were aligned with the next step we needed to take. There was something inside of us, still very tender, very new, sometimes not even conscious, that needed a catalyst to unfold, and as the experience or challenge arises, if we take it fully, without reservations, that part of us that was incipient and somewhat ready pushes through and finds expression.

David M. Grossman – USA

                                                                                     It is better to light a single candle than curse the darkness                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                                                          Old Proverb 

When our main view of human history only takes us back four or five thousand years, and here in the west it all fades away prior to the Greeks for the most part; it becomes difficult to entertain concepts of human cycles of development that could span hundreds of thousands more less millions of years. When we consider that relatively recently, a few centuries back, the world’s continents and countries for all practical purposes were like separate planets, the present situation is actually a very recent phenomenon. There was very little communication between countries and even regions within a single country; and for the “average person” working in mainly agrarian societies the main occupations were growing food, building shelters and most people never traveled much beyond a few miles from where they were born. If you add to that the fact that literacy for the majority is a relatively recent milestone it becomes apparent that there was not really a great deal of meaningful communication in the world.

Barbara Hebert – USA

The challenges we face in our world today seem almost impossible to overcome. We often look to our leaders—religious, political, and spiritual—to make a difference, but it doesn’t happen. Instead of looking outside of ourselves to make change happen, it is time to start looking within. Each of us has the power—as well as the responsibility—to change the world. We cannot wait for others to step up...each one of us needs to take matters into our own hands.

Cary Gardner – USA

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A beautifully and carefully designed "spiritual".garden

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It is astonishing what force, purity, and wisdom it requires for a human being to keep clear of falsehoods

                                                                                                                                              Quote Margaret Fuller

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them

                                                                                                                                      Quote Henry David Thoreau

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Freeing the mind.

There is a wonderful scene in The Matrix film when Morpheus, a teacher of secrets, is taking Neo out for one of his first training programs after being painfully liberated from the illusion of the “Matrix”. They have entered the “Jump Program” and find themselves standing on top of a high-rise building. Morpheus turns to Neo and poses this challenge, “Free your mind”, and then proceeds to leap impossibly several hundred yards to the nearest building, suggesting that Neo follow behind. Neo’s response: “Whoa.”

Philosophy rightly understood is about freeing the mind. It is about the “clarification of ideas and the removal of muddles”. Before we can grasp how we can free the mind, it is imperative to first understand how the mind is manacled in the first place. We are, all too often, strangely unaware of what ideas are coloring our perceptions. Like a set of colored glasses, our perceptions are all tinged with blue or red or green, depending upon the lens. These ideas we hold to be true are often adopted without inspection or evaluation.

Jan Nicolaas Kind – Brazil

Olga ...

Olga is my youngest student. She lives in Resende-Brazil, is a brilliant young world citizen of 16, plays the piano, loves The Beatles, Lennon’s  “In My Life” is her favorite, wants to become a pediatrician, is full of positive energy and has a fair idea  of what is going on in the world.

During one of our conversation sessions she mentioned that she just couldn’t get her head around the fact that old men, safely sitting behind desks or very long tables, mobilize young men, forcing them to fight their bizarre wars out on the battle fields.  “It doesn’t make any sense to me” she said, “it is utterly ridiculous, awful  and unfair”.

Tim Boyd –  USA, India

Tim Boyd, a passionate speaker, a profilic and profound author 

It is an understatement to say that we find ourselves living in challenging times. Right now any direction we look, there seems to be some looming crisis. In H. P. Blavatsky’s “The Golden Stairs” the person who aspires to wisdom is charged with “a valiant defense of those who are unjustly attacked”. But where do we begin with those who are unjustly attacked? Certainly there are human conditions of unjust attacks, person to person, nation against nation, but there is also the natural world, which is under an unrelenting and unjustifiable attack from humanity as a whole.

In these moments, not just within the Theosophical Society (TS), but in the world, it seems that many people are reaching out for some spiritual grounding — a sense of something more real than the turmoil they are experiencing. While there is such a thing as genuine spirituality, from my point of view an untested spirituality is somehow not real.

Boris de Zirkoff – USA

THEOSOPHIA
A Living Philosophy For Humanity

Volume X
No. 2 (56) - Fall 1953

[Original over photo: In the heart of the Redwoods, Northern California.]

Universal Life, in all its multimyriad forms and aspects, is in constant flux. Unalterable in its underlying essence, it is in perpetual outward change. As soon as any one of its temporary manifestations becomes rigid, decay sets in, which is but another aspect of Life, breaking up the outworn form, in order to build a new and more adequate one.

Wherever there is flexibility, optimism, dynamic interest, vision, the search for the Unknown, the urge to grow and to become, the enthusiasm which scales new heights and attempts the seemingly impossible - there is youth and hope and the broad highway 'o all future yet unborn.

William Quan Judge – USA

William Quan Judge

The claim is made that an impartial study of history, religion and literature will show the existence from ancient times of a great body of philosophical, scientific and ethical doctrine forming the basis and origin of all similar thought in modern systems. It is at once religious and scientific, asserting that religion and science should never be separated. It puts forward sublime religious and ideal teachings, but at the same time shows that all of it can be demonstrated to reason, and that authority other than that has no place, thus preventing the hypocrisy which arises from asserting dogmas on authority which no one can show as resting on reason. This ancient body of doctrine is known as the "Wisdom Religion" and was always taught by adepts or initiates therein who preserve it through all time. Hence, and from other doctrines demonstrated, it is shown that man, being spirit and immortal, is able to perpetuate his real life and consciousness, and has done so during all time in the persons of those higher flowers of the human race who are members of an ancient and high brotherhood who concern themselves with the soul development of man, held by them to include every process of evolution on all planes. The initiates, being bound by the law of evolution, must work with humanity as its development permits. Therefore from time to time they give out again and again the same doctrine which from time to time grows obscured in various nations and places. This is the wisdom religion, and they are the keepers of it. At times they come to nations as great teachers and "saviours," who only re-promulgate the old truths and system of ethics. This therefore holds that humanity is capable of infinite perfection both in time and quality, the saviours and adepts being held up as examples of that possibility.

Anonymous

The object of this article is to show what light may be thrown from a Theosophical point of view upon the nature of music, its function, and the cultivation of the art. Theosophy illuminates all subjects upon which it sheds its light, and supplies the missing links so often needed to fill the gaps in the chain of our thoughts.

The nature, function, and influence of music have always been mysterious and hard to define. Both in its ultimate source and in the quality of its appeal, it pertains to a sphere of conscious existence that is not directly related to the reasoning brain. The creation of music is inspired by a faculty beyond the ordinary course, and its influence appeals to an equally recondite power of appreciation.

This article appeared in the March 2022 issue of The Theosophical Movement. For more articles published in this excellent magazine follow this link:  https://www.ultindia.org/current_issues.html

Scientific data suggests that life may actually flash before our eyes as we die. A team of doctors, based in Vancouver, Canada, were measuring the brainwaves of an 87-year-old patient who had developed epilepsy. He suffered a fatal heart attack during this neurological recording, revealing that in the thirty seconds before and after death, the brainwaves in the dying brain show the same pattern as seen when a person is dreaming or recalling memories, or concentrating. In other words, such pattern of the brainwaves was seen in the thirty seconds before the patient’s heart stopped supplying blood to the brain and continued thirty seconds after the patient’s heart stopped beating, when normally he is declared dead, says Dr. Ajmal Zemmer, who is now a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville.

Tim Boyd – USA, India

Tim Boyd

Many years ago in the United States I participated in one of the very large ceremonies that the Dalai Lama does, the Kalachakra. Around 10,000 people attended. When he would perform this ceremony in Asia more than 100,000 people gathered. In talking to some of the monks who were involved, they said that although everybody would receive something of value, the entire ceremony was intended for that one person who would fully get it, for whom this moment was the moment of awakening. From the Dalai Lama’s perspective, this was the whole point of the ceremony.

Ananya Sri Ram – USA

In 2006, I started research on the history of the Theosophical Order of Service (TOS) to publish a commemorative issue for the TOS in the USA. One area that interested me was the work done during WWII. Members in England sent the names of people in Europe who were starving and had no resources to the TOS US. In turn, boxes of canned food, blankets, clothes, and other items were shipped to them. During my months of research, Joy Mills was kind enough to send me a letter that recalled her being part of this TOS project. She wrote that many never thought twice about helping out because service is one of the tenets of living a theosophical life. Letters were also written to servicemen to encourage them, give them hope, and to let them know that others were thinking about them. It amazed me that letters even made it to the men fighting the war.

William Quan Judge – USA

[Note from the editor: William Judge was, and will always be a “Young” Theosophist as he was only 26 (!!), being one of the three principle founders of the Theosophical Society. He was a personal student of H,P.B. and in his writings he always  refers to the fact how much he  admired her. In the middle of all sorts of controversies, he unfortunately passed away, far too young at the age of only 45 in 1896.]

THEOSOPHISTS! let us consult together. Let us survey the army, the field of battle, and the fighters. Let us examine our ways and our speech, so that we may know what we are doing in this great affray which may last for ages and in which every act has a future. What do we see? A Theosophical Society struggling as a whole against the world. A few devoted members struggling against the world and some opponents within its ranks. A Society grown to its eighteenth year, after the expenditure of much time and energy and fame by those who have been with it in infancy, those who have come in from time to time, those who worked and left it for this generation. It has its karma like any other body, for it is a living thing and not a mere paper organization; and with that karma is also woven the karma of the units composing it.

Henry Travers Edge – USA 

This is a question that none can escape; it must often suggest itself even to the most thoughtless. It cannot be indefinitely evaded, for man cannot indefinitely remain in an irresponsible state, refusing to face facts, or trying to live superficially and in the moment. Yet why should it be evaded? Man has the power to answer any question that he has the power to propound. Those who reject religion and authority, from a motive of self-reliance, should surely have self-reliance enough to tackle this question. We cannot consistently stand on a pinnacle of pride and self-sufficiency in order to proclaim therefrom our own incompetence and inability to know.

Sri Raghavan Iyer – USA

If we feel not our spiritual death, how should we dream of invoking life?

                                                                                                                                   Claude de St.-Martin

The sure test that individuals have begun to ascend to higher planes of consciousness is that they find an increasing fusion of their ideas and their sympathies. Breadth of mental vision is supported by the depth of inmost feeling. Words are inadequate to convey these modes of awareness. Mystics cannot readily communicate the ineffable union of head and heart which has sometimes been called a mystic marriage. Such veiled metaphorical language may often refer to specific centres of consciousness in the human body. If the body is the living temple of an imprisoned divine intelligence, the metaphorical language of the mystics points to a tuning and activation of interrelated centres in the body. There is a mystical heart that is different in location and function from the physical heart. There is also a seed of higher intellection, "the place between thine eyes", which is distinct from those centres of the brain that are involved in ordinary cerebration. The more a person is able to hold consciousness on a plane that is vaster in relation to time and space, subtler in relation to cause and motion, than normal sensory awareness, the more these higher centres are activated. Since this cannot take place without also arousing deeper feelings, the original meaning of the term 'philosophy' – 'love of wisdom' – is suggestive and significant. There is a level of energy released by love that is conjoined with a profound reverence for truth per Se. This energy releases a greater capacity to experience self-conscious attunement to what is behind the visible phantasmagoria of the whole of life, drawing one closer to what is gestating under the soil in the hidden roots of being, and closer to the unarticulated longings of all other human beings. Everyone senses this kinship at critical moments. Sometimes, in the context of a shared tragedy or at a time of crisis caused by a sudden catastrophe, many people experience an authentic oneness with each other despite the absence of any tokens of tangible expression.

Barbara Hebert – USA

According to Heidi Zak in her article in Inc., adults make more than 35,000 decisions per day. These decisions range from deciding what to wear, what route to take when driving to work, what to eat for meals to more complex decisions that involve one’s career and family. Dr. Eva Krockow in her article in Psychology Today writes: “Assuming that most people spend around seven hours per day sleeping and thus blissfully choice-free, that makes roughly 2,000 decisions per hour or one decision every two seconds.” Dr. Krockow questions these numbers, but clearly, we are making far more decisions on a daily basis than we realize. Krockow does, however, point out that sometimes small decisions can lead to major consequences, and she encourages increased awareness of the decisions we are making.

Henry Travers Edge – England and USA

The Mind is the great Slayer of the Real.

                                                                                                                     The Voice of the Silence

The mind of man is, in the present age, chiefly under the dominion of the senses; hence it cannot be accepted as a true guide to right conduct. If the senses rule the mind, and the mind rules the man, then the man is obviously a sensualist.

It is useless, therefore, for any man who is still a slave to his senses, to attempt to attain wisdom or arrive at truth. His mind is full of illusions, produced by those senses, and the truth will be obscured. As well might an astronomer scan the heavens with a bent reflector or a cracked lens.

So long as the mind of man is impure and the senses uncontrolled, it is impossible for him to obtain true premises from which to reason; hence his conclusions will be equally false. This is sufficient to account for the impotence of so many of our scientific theories and metaphysical systems when we seek a beacon- light by which to guide our daily steps in life.

Linda Oliveira – Australia

Linda Oliveira

Throughout  history esoteric groups have existed within a number of spiritual traditions, each with its own emphasis in relation to deeper aspects of life, and appropriate to its time, place, and milieu. H. P. Blavatsky (HPB) observed:

Whatever differences are to be found in the various presentations of the Esoteric Doctrine, as in every age it donned a fresh garment, different both in hue and texture to that which preceded; yet in every one of them we find the fullest agreement upon one point — the road to spiritual development.(1)