Summary of Isis Study of 19th Aug. 2012

Summary of the study of Isis Unveiled carried out on

Sunday, Aug. 19, 2012, at the Bangalore ULT

 Pages covered : vol. I, p. 445, para 1 to p. 449 top.

Power of Words :

Wonderful cures effected by certain people by pronouncing certain words. Origen, one of the very learned Christian Church Father of the 3^rd century, spoke of Brahmans performing this feat. Orioli, a learned correspondent of the French Institute in the 19^th century, corroborated Origen of the 3^rd century.  Leonard de vair spoke of the same thing in 16^th century. The latter said that persons, by pronouncing certain words performed wonders, such as :

1. walk barefooted on red hot burning coal,


2. walked on points of a sharp knives stuck in the ground,


3. poised on them on one toe and lifted up  a heavy man in the air,


4. tamed wild horses, most furious bulls with a single word.

They are called MANTRA in India. Human evidence down the ages prove that such magic words do exists. (See Theosophical Glossary for the word Mantra and  Mantrika Shakti)

This is to be studied with reference to the item numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4 of the 10 propositions of Oriental psychology, given in Isis Unveiled, vol. II, pp. 587 and 588 or in the Home page of the website under ‘basic propositions.’)

These 10 propositions of psychology are ever to be kept in mind when studying Isis. The whole of Isis is an elaborate expositions and demonstrations of these 10 basic principles of ancient Oriental Psychology.

Mantrika Shakti is one of the branches of ancient Magic. There is White Magic and Black Magic (Proposition no. 5) It is said that some Jesuits picked up some of the tricks during their missionary travels from the native Sorcerers of East Indies. An instance is cited in which Jesuits demonstrated that they could bring red hot coal in their bare hands to warm their companions exposed to cold weather.

Some modern mediums also perform this feat after they are entranced. They are termed as fire-proof mediums. The condition is that they must be entranced for them to exercise the power of immunity against fire.

But in the Orient it is otherwise. Wide awake, in full glare of day light, “jugglers” can exhibit the power. They will dip their hands to the elbow in red hot coals. They need no prior preparations, nor do they need to go into trance, but wide awake, at any time, can handle red hot iron or molten lead or burning coal without injury. During religious ceremony of Siva Ratri (vigil-night of Siva) in India such phenomena take place. One instance is cited : One Tamil juggler did wonderful feats by summoning to his aid an Elemental Sprite he called Kutti Sattan, meaning, the little demon. Kablists say it was Elemental, called Gnome.

Such magical performances are done by certain groups of people who transmit their secret knowledge from generations to generations. (See item 8 of the 10 propositions – Isis, II p. 588)

Power of clairvoyance and prophecy :

Some Brahmans possess this power. They live in secluded places, mainly in the western coast of India. It is not caste compulsion which make them so seclude themselves. The real reason for their secrecy and seclusion may perhaps become known after many centuries have elapsed.

Ceremonial practices adopted by Hindus to drive away evil spirits (p. 447)

Christians believe in the “Devil” as an entity who lead man in to evil ways. It is one of the fundamental dogmas of the Church. Christian missionaries have been misrepresenting the ancient ceremonial practice of the Hindus to drive away evil spirits as worship of the devil. It suits their purpose in spreading such an impression in the west that Hindus are “devil worshippers.”

What is the real fact which underlie this custom of theirs ? It is said that it is merely a ceremonial precaution against “terrestrial” and human spirits, whom they dread far more than elemental sprites. These  “terrestrial spirits” are the Kama-rupas, the dregs of the passions and desires which every man leaves behind in the Astral World, after his physical death just as he leaves the physical body in the physical world; after leaving the physical, the disembodied Soul purges away his Body of Desires and Passions (Kama – Rupa) in the Astral World, In Kama-Looka, and thereafter, the pure Soul repairs to heavenly abode, suffused with the spiritual aroma of his life, his noble thoughts and aspirations, for rest and reward of happiness for the good he has done.

The Kama-rupa is what people in India dread. They are called Elementaries in Theosophical parlance. (See Theosophical Glossary for Elementary)  They are earth-bound “spirits” of people who have led sinful lives.  Very wicked people leave behind Kama-rupas which are dangerous to the living as they  haunt the sensitive living people and try to satisfy their lusts and evil desires through them. Hindus use all kinds of means, such as music, incense, perfumes etc. in their efforts to drive them away. They offer them cakes and fruits and various kinds of foods which they liked when living since many of them have experienced the wickedness of these returning “dead ones” whose persecutions are sometime dreadful. This is not worship of the Devil as the missionaries misrepresent, but a ceremony in an effort to ward off the earth-bound spirits—called in the West as Larvae.

These Larvae are called by many names : spook, puttum in Tamil, Pisaca in Sanscrit, “haunting spooks,” ghosts. They are believed to visit the places where their bodies were buried or cremated.

But “Elementals’ are different (See Theosophical Glossary). They are Nature Spirits, the noumenal powers of the visible Elements—Fire, Air, Water and Earth. The Fire elementals are the Rosicrucian gnomes and salamanders; they are pictured as dwarfs of a fiery appearance living in earth and fire.

Are ‘Vampires,’ in which  there is universal belief, mere fiction? That will the topic of study in the next study class.

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Summary of study - Sunday, August 12, 2012

 

A summary of 

The Study of the text ISIS UNVELIED, vol. I.

Carried out on

Sunday, August 12, 2012, at ULT, Bangalore, India.

Portions covered  : Pages  438, para 2 to 445, para 2

Chapter xii of vol. I , entitled :  The “ Impassable chasm.”

Background note :

Chapter xii of vol. I of Isis continues the discussion, initiated in the previous chapters, on the wide chasm that exists between the modern science and ancient Wisdom-Science. Many an eminent Scientists is shown to have confessed to the limitation of empirical approach of the modern science based on Inductive logic inaugurated by Aristotle. The psychological and spiritual dimensions of the universe and man lie so much beyond the reach and the scope of modern science that the hiatus is confessedly is impassable.

Ancient Wisdom, on the other hand, represented in the Hermetic Science of ancient Egypt, and the Pythagorean and Platonic system, began with the Universal Principles and descended into numerous particulars, through training and development of latent divine faculty in man of apprehending directly truth of things, comprehended the whole of the Truth. This superior knowledge is shown to be recorded partly in the symbolism of sacred scriptures and philosophical systems  of ancient peoples. The sacred and secret knowledge is transmitted by great Adepts from remotest antiquity in oral teachings. Old Testament, for instance, is compiled from the oral tradition and is written in figurative allegory. The great Jewish scholar of 12^th century and still earlier scholar, Josephus, of the first century, are cited that this hidden wisdom is not to be revealed to public but only to such as are found morally and spiritually fit.

The Christian Church, ignorant of the hidden sense of the bible, has enforced its own dogmatic creed fashioned from the dead-letter meaning of the Bible, and has ever shut its eyes to the truth, and even persecuted those who dared to unravel the mystery, lest it should lose its hold on the minds of the ignorant masses.

Science, on the other hand, ignores to investigate psychological and spiritual phenomena, whenever and wherever these may occur, with its typical sceptical attitude and prejudice.

Thus sceptical materialism, and religious bigotry and superstition, thrive in the world, holding the mind of the race prisoner in the thraldom of ignorance and blotting out the Voice of the Spirit that speaks silently in the human heart.

It is to educate both religion and modern science out of their respective narrow grooves of thought and open the mind of the race to universal truths that Isis Unveiled is written by Madam H.P. Blavatsky.

Summary of portion studied

An account of the reincarnation of Buddha in a child in Tibetan temple in the 19^th century is given. The ceremonial event was allowed by the Buddhists to be witnessed by a correspondent of the French Institute, who relates what he witnessed : “An altar is prepared in the temple to receive the resuscitated Buddha, found by the initiated priesthood, and recognized by certain secret signs to have reincarnated himself in a new born infant.” (p. 437) The child suddenly rises into a sitting posture and proclaims in a clear loud voice : “I am Buddha, I am his spirit; and I, Buddha, your Dalai Lama, have left my old, decrepit body, at the temple of…..and selected the body of this young babe as my next earthly dwelling.” (ibid.)

The scientist was allowed by the priests to take the baby in his arms to a distant to ascertain for himself whether there was any ventriloquism or other fraud. He reports that looks gravely with eyes that made his flesh creep, and repeated the words he spoke as above.

The scientist made a detail report with signatures of eye-witnesses to the science academy of France at Paris. Members of the Institute received with the usual scepticism of scientists in general and dismissed it as a delusion of the reporter as either due to a sunstroke or have been duped. The attitude of the French academy is a typical instance of prejudice of scientists against such psychological marvels which they cannot explain, and dismiss them all as delusion of witnesses.

The famous historical French Friar, Abbe Huc, also narrates in detail psychological and magical marvels he witnessed in Tibet, and reported the facts to the Church of Rome. He was criticized and punished by ‘defrocking’ him. The Church ever received such events with severe disapproval, and when such was forced on her attention, they were all attributed to the handiwork of the ‘Devil.’

Is the Tibetan phenomenon of child prodigy the only one, far from European academies? By no means.

A 15 moth old baby at Camisard, France, spoke and prophesied in 1875 of a coming calamity in 1876, and it happened as predicted.

There was another well authenticated Spiritual Mediumship of a 15 moth old child which wrote a 20 word message.

But scientists, as usual, with their typical attitude of scepticism cared little to investigate the phenomenon

Abbe Huc gives wonderful accounts of his travels in Tibet in 19^th century much to the discomfiture of  the Roman Catholic Church. An account the gives of the wonderful tree, Koumboum, the Tree of ten thousand images, is one of the marvels of the orient. The tree is believed to have grown from the hair of Tsang Ka Pa, a reincarnation of Buddha. Every pasrt oof the tree bears letters or sentences in sacred characters, containing in extenso the whole history of creation, and in substance the sacred books of Buddhism.

Similar phenomena is found in the temple of Dandera in Egypt which described by Professor W.B.  Carpenter, the President of the Britiish Association, in his lecture on Egypt in Manchestor. The monuments bear pictures which symbolically describe the history of creation. Prof. Carpenter shows that the Jewish book of Genesis is an expression of early Jewish ideas, based on the  pictorial records of Egyptians among whom they lived. But the Professor did not suspect that the account of creation given pictorially in Dandera was an allegorical account. He concluded that the Egyptian account dovetailed with the 6 days creation of the Bible, little suspecting that the 6 days is an allegorical representation of vast cycles of time. They may ell mean six successive epochs or aeaons or eternities. Egyptian cosmogony viewed man as the result of evolution and his progress to be marked by immensely lengthy cycles.

Abbe Huc in his travelogue gives a wonderful account of magic screen he witnessed in a certain Tibetan Lamasery in which a canvas hanging in there depicted the picture of the live moon moving in the sky amidst clouds, each change of its phased being faithfully represented, an exact Fac simile of the celestial event taking place outside.

H.P.B. says that in other parts of the world too such phenomena are exhibited. She says in Tibet and Japan there are live pictures which depict movement of the Sun.

When Abbe Huc reported this, the Church forthwith defrocked him and even suspended him from his office. The same fate would be met by an scientist were he to report his witnessing of such a phenomenon.

Hidden wisdom is to be found in the land of Brahmans and Goutama Buddha. It is for the future ages to discover the grand truths.

Max Muller expressed his exasperation at the incomprehensible verbiage and mythical language of the sacred scriptures he set our to translate, but after years of painstaking work he found that they began to make some sense : “we perceived a glimmer of light, where all was darkness at first.” (p. 442)

That which is now termed the superstitious  verbiage and gibberish of mere heathens and savages (as western scholars termed them in the last century) may be found to contain the master-key to all religious system.

“There is no false religion which does not contain some element of truth” (St. Augustine)

Ammonius Saccas, the ‘God-taught,’ the founder of the Neo-platonic school in 2^nd century A.D. said that Jesus was a most excellent man whose mission was to purify ancient religion, which become corrupted over centuries, and demonstrate the vibrant philosophic principles underlying them, and restore them to their original purity. He taught that all religions were based on one and the same truth which was universally diffused in all climes from remotest antiquity.

Books of Thoth Hermes was the source from which Pythagoras and Plato got their wisdom, which is identical with that which forms the contents of the Vedas of India. The Secret Doctrine was and is identical in every country.

Alexander Wilder shows that the name Thoth means a collge or an assembly, and the books under that name were collected oracles and doctrines of the Initiated Priests of Memphis, Egypt.

Who are the Hebrews or the Judeans ? A historical account of heir origins has to be found in the sacred books of India. It is there mentioned that during the reign of Kansa (during Krishna’s time, which should be about 3000 B.C.)  Yadus (Judeans ?) or sacred tribe of India left India and migrated to the west carrying with them the Vedas. Resemblance between the philosophical doctrines and religious customs of Egyptians and Eastern Buddhists is evident.

One thing is certain. Secret Doctrine is one and universal, found underlying in the religion of every country, and that in the oldest texts which are least polluted by subsequent forgeries that we have to look for the truth.

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Introductory remarks

Introductory remarks :

Isis Unveiled is the first magnum opus of Madam H.P. Blavatsky, written in 1877. As the author proclaims on the title page of the text, it is

A MASTER KEY TO THE MYSTERIES OF ANCIENT AND MODERN SCIENCE AND THEOLOGY.

 In the pages of isis the author brings forward extensive proofs with corroborative evidence—historical, scientific and philosophical—of the existence from remotest antiquity of WISDOM-RELIGION which is the accumulated knowledge gained through aeons of spiritual and intellectual evolution of the human race; that there are men who stand far in advance of the average human being in evolutionary perfection, who have mastered this knowledge; that this body of knowledge is the fount and source of all religions and sciences, which reconciles them all; that it was universally diffused in antiquity, given rise to high civilization in prehistoric past and in the historical period, and that it has been lost to the Western nations as they descended into spiritual darkness with the demise of Gnosis of the Neo-platonic tradition at the commencement of the Christian era.

Modern science and religions are reviewed and shown that the former has ever neglected the psychic and spiritual dimensions of man and nature, and, as such, can never arrive at truth, limited as she is by her own choice, to Inductive and empirical methods; and the latter have deviated so far from the original spirit of the Universal Wisdom-Science which inspired them that they have degenerated into blind beliefs and superstitions, based on dead-letter interpretation of ancient sacred texts, and priestly imposture.

The net result of the loss of spirituality is that mankind at large has been fast losing all faith in the reality of the Soul-life, of Immortality, and all interest in everything other than material existence and material well-being. If this materialistic trend, say the Teacher, is not arrested and the mind of the west turned to the lost truths of the Archaic Science of the Soul and given the intellectual stimulus to comprehend and seek great spiritual truths, it will lapse into mere material luxury to putrefy and decay with all its horrific consequences, the signs of which we are witnessing.

Isis Unveiled is the first literary effort of Madam H.P. Blavatsky to aid the west in Self-discovery and Self-reform. Isis Unveiled, she says “is an attempt to aid the student to detect the vital principles which underlie the philosophic system of old.” (Preface)

The plan of the work, Isis Unveiled :

 To give a brief summary of the religions and philosophies, and universal traditions of human kind, and exegesis of the same.

1. The exposition of the ancient system is given in the spirit of the Secret Doctrines of the ancient Schools of Wisdom-Tradition.


2. Show how these have got perverted in the public organized religions in their theological dogmas.


3. Ecclesiastical religion has ever shunned truth and persecuted those who dared to investigate truth if it but clashed with the official proclaimed dogmas. Yet the Popish authority have arrogated to itself infallibility, and ever in the way of true progress and scientific spirit.


4.  In her eagerness to discount and reject religious authority which enslaved human thought, Science has neglected to investigated into the psychic and the spiritual aspects of the cosmos and man, and  fallen into a strong materialistic bias and scepticism. Yet scientific authorities have claimed infallibility in their methods in spite of innumerable instances of the limitations of her methods, and failures.

The Aim of the work

 1.       To aid the spiritual aspirations of mankind, engulfed as it is in its death struggle with scientific materialism on the one hand, and the  false theologies of the dogmatic creeds on the other

2.       To show the mistaken notions of theological dogmas, to demonstrate how these have been manufactured by distorting the philosophical and the mystical doctrines of antiquity and imposed as new revelation, and to resuscitate the smothered spirit concealed in exoteric creeds to bring out the hidden truths in them.

3.       To demonstrate the insufficiency of methods of modern science, the strong materialistic bias of men of science in general, and show them that only in the true Science of the Wisdom-Tradition of antiquity and its methods can the modern science can ever hope to unravel universe and man, and thus make true progress.

 “Our voice is raised for spiritual freedom, and our plea made for enfranchisement from all tyranny, whether of SCIENCE or THEOLOGY.” (p. xiv)

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Study of Isis Unveiled

Regular systematic study of the text, Isis Unveiled, by Madam Blavatsky, is being carried out at the ULT Bangalore since 2007, every Sunday morning, at 10 A.M. local time, for an hour and quarter.

Schedule of study of the text in the coming week and a brief summary of the portion studied in the previous week will be put out on the blog for interested viewers.

Comments / questions are welcome. ULT will respond to the same.

Participation in the study of Isis Unveiled via Skype by interested people is welcome. Details for Skype call are available here.