Kurt Leland: Invisible Worlds - Psychic and Spiritual Development

hello everyone it's a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak here after taking this talk around the country I think this is probably about the sixth or eighth time that I've done it and it's always enjoyable to present this Antibes essence writings on psychic and spiritual development which I feel very passionate about so who was Annie Besant here's a picture of her at about age 50 she started off life as the wife of a Church of England clergyman who was unfortunately a wife beater and to give you some idea of her rebellious spirit she defied him by refusing to take communion in his own church which of course led to divorce proceedings and then she was off on her own as a freethinker which is the alternative movement for people who were not believers in the Church of England which was practically at that time in England a state religion she became an atheist she was a socialist in the sense of advocating joint and common ownership of property and industry she joined the Theosophical Society in 1889 she became a personal student of HP blatsky in towards the end of Lovaas Kees life she was president of the Theosophical Society for about 25 years 1907 to 33 she also was involved in a great number of causes from the rights of women for example supporting the women who were working 1012 hours a day in a match Factory in London she organized the first strike for them which was a successful strike children she worked in the London school system to make sure that the children the poor children had school lunches because it was discovered that they couldn't stay awake and learn and that was actually a completely new concept at that time in the late 1880s and early 1890s the rights of animals vivisection the scientific experimentation on animals she was against that and then she worked tirelessly in the last years of her life to promote the concept of Indian Home Rule now the reason that I got so interested in Annie Besant was she wrote an enormous amount of really wonderful things up to 600 books and pamphlets and many many articles and in order to try to keep clear about what it was that I had read and hadn't read and where to find it I created an online bibliography of her work which I call the Annie Besant shrine this is the URL if anyone is interested if you can remember my name you can just go to my website and there's a button on the left-hand side that you can press to go into the auntie Besant shrine anywhere where her works are available online there's a link so that you can actually read many of her articles books and pamphlets just by clicking and finding the title so here's the cover of the book invisible worlds this was the the image that was sent to me by quest books when they were first creating the cover and they reserved a spot right next to her nose there for a blurb but of course I didn't know that no one told me and when they sent it to me with this idea of a foreword by Helena peeve a ski I sent an email inquiring whether there was something I should know about I was wondering in particular who over there was channeling her and but whether they were brave enough to actually publish something so to begin with Annie Besant was a passionate advocate of the third object of the Theosophical Society which is the one that involves exploring the latent abilities in humanity as well as the unexplained forces in nature and even during her lifetime there was some pushback in some resistance in the Theosophical society especially around this word psychism whenever you hear anybody say this word it's almost always the lower psychism and you're supposed to shudder as if it were something really terrible and she had some very intelligent things to say about this idea of psychism here's her definition psychism is the manifestation of the powers of consciousness through organized matter by which she means a body of some kind physical body subtle body what this means in essence is if you have the power to act in the physical body the power to feel in the astral body and the power to think in the mental body you are operating through psychism so she said it's completely inconsistent to blame people for astral experiences if they also use the astral body for feeling everyday all the time that's one of the quotes from invisible worlds but she contrasted psychism with spirituality especially the idea of spiritual unfoldment which I'll talk about in a moment here is her definition of spirituality and I want you to keep in mind as I read this she was one of the greatest orator x' in the English language during the time that she was traveling and speaking all over the world she was very well known she drew massive audiences to come listen anywhere from 1500 in an english-speaking country to close to 10,000 in India and she spoke without amplification and and almost everybody heard her it was astonishing but the important thing to understand is she never spoke with notes so what I'm about to read to you is what came out of her mouth just notice the beauty of it spirituality is the realization of unity the seeing of the oneness in all things the seeing of one life one consciousness one existence alike in the dust of the earth and in the highest Archangel in God himself unfortunately I couldn't include this quote it was from a lecture that was already duplicated in invisible worlds but Theosophical extra Chicago 1907 so as I mentioned psychism spirituality that's one polarity that she dealt with the other one is development versus unfoldment the difference between the words development and unfolding is a very important one when we are dealing with the spirit we cannot accurately speak of development a spirit neither develops nor evolves he only unfolds in the manifestation that which eternally lies within him this is an important thing to consider with respect to what I'll say later because the idea is that if you're going to pursue the development of psychic abilities it really should be done in what I call a patient organic way which is unfolding as opposed to pushing and developing that's from another piece that I was unfortunately not able to include in the book it was an article called psychic and spiritual development now the core of invisible worlds is a lecture of Annie Besant that she gave to a Federation conference in 1904 that was buried in the Proceedings of that conference and completely lost to view for over a hundred years called occultism and occult training and it just happened when I was doing some research at the Theosophical library in Seattle that the librarian there pointed it out to me she was looking for something else and she found this instead and what I believe is that really this article represents the core of her teaching and so as we progress through the talk I'll be demonstrating how that is so and also pointing out some of the other books of hers that you might want to explore once you've been exposed to this idea of a cult training as Annie Besant teaches it so it consists of several ass what she calls moral and unselfish training mastering the theory training the bodies generally speaking the physical astral and mental bodies developing the subtle senses the senses that go along with those bodies that are special for those bodies eventually developing the ability to communicate with the Masters or some form of higher inner teacher all of this is outlined in invisible worlds in this article or lecture I was talking about and then there are a number of developmental stages that go along with this these are not included in the article but people who are well aware of Theosophical teachings will recognize these words but putting them together here can help you see how her ideas of occult training actually work out so we start off with what I would call spiritual seekers then they become visible helpers which means working on the physical plane to better the well-being of humanity they become trained helpers which is a form of intelligent helping the idea is that you don't just go someplace and decide what you're going to do to help the people there they might have other ideas about what they really need and so you have to have a certain amount of training and sensitivity as opposed to going in and then just trying to fix things and actually making things worse then people move on to invisible helpers which means starting to work on the astral plane and sometimes higher planes for healing and for providing solace and training probationers who are the individuals who are talented as invisible helpers who come under the attention of the Masters or the high teachers and are then watched to see whether they are maybe able to go on to another step with further training sheyla's disciples these are the ones who are actually under training and from this point we're going to take a look at all of those different levels of development one by one and I'm going to present a flowchart here the idea is that on the far right-hand side of the picture that last bubble that will show up is the one that starts the next slide so if I had the opportunity to put this out on a really large screen what you would see is a cascade that goes down the right side and what happens to the individuals who are more on to the left side is they're at a certain level of development but they don't necessarily move on to the next step so we start off with the whole of humanity and we might divide this into several categories for example non-religious types a moral I don't mean necessarily immoral but people who don't really address the idea of ethics or morality within any of the traditional religions people who are atheists agnostics they're not sure what they want to believe I put philosophy here because I was thinking about the typical academic philosopher who is really only interested in the system and not so much living it then you have the religious types which also come in several flavors fundamentalists Orthodox conservatives liberals then you get the actual spiritual seekers also in several flavors what I mean by the word traditional here are the individuals who are coming from some religious tradition but want to explore the more mystical aspects of that tradition synthetic eclectic that's what I consider a good label for new-age types who pick a book take what they like from it pick another book from another tradition take what they like from that and eventually create for themselves a form of spirituality that feels right to them based on their own individual path in their reading then we've got the do traditional types those are the individuals who are seeking to bring back Druidism shamanism paganism and then finally the pan traditional types I would consider the Theosophical society to be a pan traditional type in that it tries to embrace and understand all of the different approaches to spiritual seeking now again what happens in that right corner is what goes on to the next slide so if we start with spiritual seekers we have several types of those and this pertains to what Annie Besant was talking about with respect to visible helpers we've got passive observers these are the types who consider themselves spiritual but mainly just want to go to lectures hear about it maybe not dig in and actually do some work on themselves or some work out in the world and they're absorbing so it's a valid aspect of the path but again they may not necessarily go on to the next step then we have active participants these are the ones who are engaged in true inner and outer work and then these also come in several divisions often you'll find spiritual seekers who are skeptical they want really badly to believe that these things exist but they may have a more mental or scientific approach and they're always looking for proof of some kind before they'll really sign up and then you've got the opposite of that which are the types that are credulous I think for example of people who are really fascinated by ghosts or UFOs or something of that nature they love to read about it as it's exciting it's thrilling but they're passive observers they're not recognizing that there's a much larger picture of spirituality that they could be participating in but those who are involved with some form of moral and unselfish training as visible helpers they're the ones who go on what Annie Besant meant by moral and unselfish training and the characteristics of visible helpers is listed here practice of virtue unselfish labor for human good intellectual effort turned to the service of humanity for example writing books things like that doing public speaking sincere devotion piety in purity we might have somewhat different ideas about those words piety is a word that we don't normally think of in terms of spiritual seeking it more goes along the the conservative religious side of things in most people's minds but any really one pointed mind about spirituality could be called piety that's from Annie Besant book the ancient wisdom which is a wonderful introduction to theosophy if you skip the first fifty pages which are almost completely unreadable she was she was trying to bring together quotations that demonstrated the universality of certain ideas and all religions and it just goes too fast so if you're interested in investigating the moral and unselfish training aspect of Annie Besant teachings the best book is in the outer Court and then this is a version brought out by quest that includes that same information from the outer Court to the inner sanctum most people didn't think Annie Besant had a sense of humor it was a dry sense of humor you have to be sensitive to it in order to pick it up but you also have to understand that in one year she traveled 45,000 miles talking about theosophy so she didn't have a lot of time for silliness you can imagine so here's what she had to say on visible helpers I have met many a man many a woman who is anxious to be an invisible helper that is a worker on the astral plane but I do not always find that those people are visible helpers as far as their present powers go and I do not understand why people should want to go about in astral slums when they keep carefully away from the physical slums which are already within their reach that's also in invisible worlds and you know she could say something like that and she knew what she was talking about when she was doing that London school board work she was literally in the slums of London so going on to this idea of clairvoyant power here's a question that was asked in a Chicago question answer session that actually was transcribed and published how I'm a clairvoyant power be safely developed and her answer is very interesting because it has to do with this idea of helping there is no safety in it except the constant effort to use every power you already have in the service of others then if you obituaries all you have to help more power will be gained gradually by you through the assistance of those who see that you are using well what you already have whenever you see a capital she's talking about the Masters and the high teachers as in that word those that's from a book called some American lectures which was a group of lectures that took place in Chicago in 1927 so going on with our flowchart let's look at trained helpers now we've not only got spiritual seekers at this point they're active spiritual seekers and they come in several types to the people who are uninformed for example I met someone on the plane when I was going out to speak in Seattle who was telling me about friends of hers who went down to work with some of the leftist groups in South America and when they got down there the people who were involved with the group said what are you doing here we don't need you go back we know we're doing we know our culture we know how to approach this work you've got work to do in your own country find out what it is and do it so that's what I mean by these uninformed helpers who don't really have the training to be discerning in that way you also also got individuals who are badly informed or their training is in some sense incomplete or faulty well for example I know any number of people who are going all over the world burying crystals and sacred spots to balance the earth energies and the funny thing is with the number of people that I know who are doing that you would think the earth entered would already be balanced and none of them know that they're doing it none of them know that each other is doing it and it keeps happening they keep signing themselves up for this work there's probably another way to do that that's my guess anyway and I would consider that these individuals might not be as informed as they probably should be although the airlines are definitely benefiting from their travels and then you've got the informed individuals these again are the ones who go on the ones who are well trained and they are involved in mastering the theory that next step of Antibes essence idea of a cult training and the great books for mastering the theory the secret doctrine by HP Blavatsky and the unscrambled version of the secret doctrine the divine plan I love the secret doctrine because it puts you in a state of mind where you cannot think linearly to absorb it and that's an important part of the process of reading the book and there are important ideas to understand and they're brought forward wonderfully by Jeffery Barr Borka and the divine plan so going on to invisible helpers now we've got spiritual seekers and they're active and they're informed and again we've got several types there's the cautious type I call them the abstain errs they're the ones who understand the theory but they don't necessarily want to have experiences that demonstrate it I call these oh there are the reluctant experiencers they may have had an out-of-body experience or two or they may have seen something a dream came true but they're not too interested in repeating the experience and then the other type is the theoreticians these are the ones who have brilliantly absorbed everything by Blavatsky the whole system they understand the sanskrit words they can pronounce them correctly they can quote chapter and verse and it's wonderful that they're so well informed they're an amazing resource but they don't necessarily become invisible helpers so may not take the next step then we've got the impatient types which I'll talk more about in a moment this is sometimes called the left-hand path or the blackmagic path I'm thinking for example of the people who advertise out-of-body experiences in 30 days when you know it might take several years before you can really ask develop your astral body and they're happy to take your money and they'll tell you to do something and it's your luck of the draw whether you'll survive or not and then there's what I believe Annie Besant promotes and the Theosophical Society in general I won't say promotes but many of the teachings indicate that it is a path is what I call patient organic or the right-hand path this is where as things develop you discover as you need to know it what part of the theory applies to it and then maybe something else opens but you're also using all of your powers and services and Annie Besant was talking about earlier and if you're operating along this patient organic path then the next step training the bodies may be open to you now keep in mind when Annie Besant talked about training the bodies the physical astral and mental bodies she wasn't necessarily talking about having astral projection experiences or mental body projection experiences she was talking about taking care of the physical body exercise right diet taking care of the emotional body so that you are operating with relative clarity not full of violent emotions she said you know if you go over to the astral plane all upset about something you're like a firecracker over there you'll explode and there'll be a big mess for you and everybody else to clean up and then training the mental body through meditation so that you can develop a one pointed mind so I want to bring in something by Blavatsky on spiritual progress that underlies this idea underlines this idea of a patient organic way of moving for forward the goal of the aspirant for spiritual wisdom is entrance upon a higher plane of existence he or she is to become a new person more perfect in every way than he or she is at present and if he or she succeeds his or her capabilities and faculties will receive a corresponding increase of range and power just as in the visible world we find that each stage in the evolutionary scale is marked by increase of capacity and then she goes on to say this is how it is that the adept becomes endowed with marvelous powers that have been so often described but the main point to be remembered is that these powers are the natural accompaniments of existence on a higher plane of evolution so if you're aiming for that higher plane you develop yourself spiritually and there's a natural organic unfolding of these abilities just as the ordinary human faculties are the natural accompaniments of existence on the ordinary human plane this is from a wonderful article spiritual progress in the collected writings vol 6 so what is exactly meant by these bodies that are trained this is a diagram from generated asses first principles of theosophy which it's a shame is no longer in print because there are a lot of people who are visual and graphic learners and there are many many wonderful charts like this the charge is meant to be read from the bottom up and you've got the planes on the far left hand side physical plane astral plane two divisions of the mental plane the corresponding body's physical astral mental causal and then you've got the actual functions of these bodies which are the things that you can do to train them how the physical body acts how the astral body feels how the mental body thinks and how the causal body or the soul evolved and then if you look at this column over here think about the lower one is being a more basic level of development and the higher one is being an aim that you could perhaps work with if you were training so actions we're all doing that since oriole reactions these need to be brought under control desires we all have desires if we can we convert them to emotions and then they fuel our spiritual growth same with concrete thoughts moving to ideas with the training of the mental body and then abstract thoughts moving to ideals with I don't know if we can really speak about training of the causal body but training the physical astral and mental may lead to this natural progression to the higher ideals now one thing that I love about theosophy is there are many gaps or holes that you are invited to fill in through your own thinking and meditative thought process so I thought what would happen this is speculative if I talked about the higher bodies in the plains that go beyond the ones that we just mentioned buddhic nirvanic monadic divine the bodies all have the same names what would be the function perhaps in the buddhic body it would be the one with up with all in the nirvanic body to develop the experience of being a master at the monadic body if that were even achievable by us to have the experience of being a god and then with the divine to have the experience of being one with God and then again a basic level we first learn to be one with humanity then we learn to be one with all beings which includes non-physical beings if we're a master there might be stages of how to be a master with a body and then how to be one without a bodies primarily working on the nirvanic plane if we were working on the monadic plane maybe the lower level would be actively building and realizing the plan maybe it would be receiving the plan on the higher levels directly from the divine and then within the divine plane we could have the experience of being one with God as a part and then the much broader experience of being one with God as the whole of God now as this is taught in theosophy many many cycles of evolution are required before humanity would achieve anything near to this experience but it's wonderful to speculate about it so books that involve training the bodies there are two wonderful books by any Besant on this subject man in his bodies which talks about all of the different bodies up to the buddhic level and then the Masters experience at the nirvanic level and then the power of thought which is her way of training individuals in meditation where she also talks about how to work with the physical body and the astral body to train them ok so now the juicy part the black magicians as I talked about them the ones who are on the left-hand path the impatient spiritual seekers I call this juicy because if you try to find out anything about the black magicians and Theosophical writings you'll find many many almost COI references it almost makes you think that some Theosophists were afraid that if they wrote too much they might draw the attention of these beings but Annie Besant has a really wonderful essay called the light and dark sides of nature which is published in invisible worlds that clarifies a lot of these things but there is something that we need to be aware of especially as I in my own life working with younger folks who are impatient about developing psychic or spiritual abilities so for example on the internet the idea of psychedelic drugs seems to be one way of unfolding powers and that has an effect on the physical and astral level of being but if you're trying to have the spiritual or psychic experiences in an impatient way you may not be thinking about the disastrous effects that it can have on the physical body or the astral body long term similarly the idea of sex magic is a way of increasing vibrations and getting up into the higher planes again it affects the physical and the astral but damage to relationships can develop from an obsession with that kind of thing then a higher version so to speak is the black magic and Satanism which operates on the astral and mental plane and the highest version is something most people don't think about I call it fanatical asceticism which affects all of these bodies there's something in the yoga teaching called tapas which is a Sanskrit word for extreme asceticism and the idea in that yogic tradition is that if you're able to maintain this asceticism you build up a reservoir of power which eventually allows you to have an influence of some kind on the physical world or on a higher world there are any number of teaching stories about the effects of tapas where a yogi will be meditating to the point where he develops enough power to go to the level that the gods live on and the gods get concerned about this because they're afraid they'll get pushed out of heaven and that this individual will set themselves up as a God in a sense that's the left-hand path ideal goal of a black magician is to set yourself up as God push God and everybody else out of heaven and what happens then is the the gods send their most tempting individuals to tried to present a boon of some kind to this individual and if you are weak in some way you say oh yes I would like a you know a harem or oh yes I would like all the money in the world or all the power in the world you may get it but that reservoir of power instantly goes down and the result is the gods don't have to worry about you anymore the really worrisome black magicians are the ones of that level and if people would remind me after I'm done with the presentation I can actually give an example from my own life of an encounter with somebody that I would say is on a path like that I won't mention any names but as an illustration it's helpful because you read the terms but you don't necessarily meet people like this thankfully in everyday life so let's see what Blavatsky has to say about psychic powers many persons seem to think that a depth ship is not so much the result of radical development as of additional construction now she means by the word radical from the root like a plant naturally growing and developing additional construction that's something like adding a meditation wing to your house or something like that your you're building it but it may not be an essential part of your spiritual bodies or your inner workings they seem to imagine that it adept is a man who by going through a certain plainly defined course of training consisting of minut attention to a set of arbitrary rules acquires first one power and then another and when he has attained a certain number of these powers is forthwith dubbed and adept you have to understand especially on the Internet this is extremely common as a way that people present their teachings here's a course you know there are levels you pay for a certain level you go on to the next level by the time you get to the end you're certified you can call yourself an intiative some kind there are also people not involved in teaching this kind of thing but who try to learn that way who are obsessed with following the rules there's only one way to do it here are the rules you know a fanatic about the way they go forward and what HPB is saying here is acting on this mistaken idea they fancy that the first thing to be done towards attaining a depth chip is to acquire powers clairvoyance and the power of leaving the physical body and traveling to a distance are among those which fascinate the most this is another wonderful thing from collected writings vol 6 so again I want to emphasize this is a mistaken idea it's it's the idea of psychic or astral development that is probably most common in our culture and it's very much something that I know the Theosophical society has couraged and rightly so especially if you understand that the idea of spiritual unfolding is a patient organic way where these experiences as a result of service show up but to help you serve on a higher level as opposed to help you gain control of some kind over other people so let's go on this is the level of probationers we've got not only spiritual seekers but they're also active informed and patient organic spiritual seekers now we've got another problem you'll encounter people who have achieved all of this but they're rather rigid or rule-bound and the problem here is well I'll get to that in a moment they're contrasted with individuals that I call resourceful who are adaptable and the problem is that the rigid rule-bound type is unable to transcend their personality the personality in Theosophical teaching is a specific aggregate of the physical body the astral body the mental body the feelings the thinking process it's almost as if they lock themselves in the mental body but the intuition that would guide them is available from the causal level of being and there's a barrier there that they're not necessarily able to get past I talk about this as flexibility of consciousness they don't have that experience and the idea is if they can soften that boundary then they may be more open to intuitions and other resources that come from a higher level and often the way that's developed is through adaptability and resourcefulness under all kinds of conditions in the Theosophical history you'll often find people say all the way back to levansky and Alcott that the Masters would say here's what we would like for you to do but they didn't say anything about how to do it and you were thrown in the deep end of the pool and then had to find your own way well that adapts develops this adaptability and resourcefulness which is really a key thing if you have this flexibility of consciousness then the process of developing the subtle senses may unfold and here we have another important philosophical word individuality which refers to the causal level the soul level of being if that is illuminating the personality the subtle senses provides some intuitive support for what you're doing and at that point you may come under the notice of the high teachers or the masters they'll put you on probation and then there may be some further training that comes your way as well as a number of challenges that test your resourcefulness so if you're interested in finding more about probation and developing the subtle senses the path of discipleship by Annie Besant is excellent and introduction to yoga also which is Annie Besant commentary on the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali although it's not really talked about as such she talks about the path of Raja yoga and there's quite a lot to study in that book about the meditative process and how it opens you to access to these inspirations and and teachings from on high also developing the subtle senses Leadbeater has some excellent writings the chakras which is a book that I helped to edit and annotate in its new release last year and a wonderful book called the hidden side of things where he talks about all kinds of ways in which in our ordinary lives we encounter situations that reflect these higher levels of being and you know we may not necessarily go to funerals where there's a hearse drawn by horses anymore but we we do still have experiences where we're in rooms of people who have different reasons for gathering and some of us may be sensitive in some ways to whether it's a well welcoming group or whether it's a group that would be hostile in some way whether it's supportive friendly open whether it's intimidating whether it's safe whether it's unsafe these are actual examples of the subtle senses starting to come online so then we have the Shayla disciple level of being when I was in Seattle I heard Edie Alden the president there wasn't there but someone commented when I got to this slide about a lecture that he had given where he made a distinction between shayla's and disciples that I think is important to keep in mind in Sanskrit the word kala comes from a root that means service whereas disciples comes from a Latin root which is the same as the one for discipline so if you think about it discipline like discipline for a monastic order it's much more self oriented where the idea of being a chela is much more service-oriented so here again we have the spiritual seekers but they're not only active informed patient organic and resourceful they also go on to the next step their consciousness becomes fully established in their individuality according to ideas in Theosophical literature about the evolution of humanity most people are pretty well developed at the astral level some development at the mental level some folks who are at the advanced guard of development through meditation and spiritual practices and service may actually have the experience of their consciousness being established at the causal or soul level the level of the individuality at that point it may be possible to have the experience of direct communication with the Masters and the discipleship that I mentioned earlier what's important to understand about this is it's a direct reflection of what HPB was saying earlier about how you have to raise your consciousness to a higher level of existence and then the teaching becomes available and then there's a differentiation at this point annie besant talks about it in one of the articles in invisible worlds between mystics and occultists the mystics pursue oneness through transcending the bodies and the plains the occultists pursue oneness through mastering the bodies and the planes and I'll say a little bit more and bring in something that Annie Besant says about this in just a moment so here's what she said in that essay occultists versus mystics the occultist and the mystic differ in their methods as well as in their object the occultist seeks knowledge of God the mystic seeks union with God the occultist uses intellect the mystic emotion and you need to understand that by emotion she means the higher emotions like devotion the occultist evolves the bodies which is essentially the process of psychic development and the mystic disregards and abandons the bodies and that's actually the process of spiritual unfoldment and yet each type ultimately includes the other there's an important reason underlying this distinction between mystics and occultists that I'll talk about in a moment so this is from invisible worlds but I want to take a moment to communicate what Blavatsky had to say about this idea of spiritual unfoldment this is not these are not her exact words this is a list of points that I drew from the preliminary memorandum for the establishment of the esoteric School of theosophy which is in vol 12 of the collected writings and specifically what I am trying to underline here is the process that she was teaching to her in her students about how to come to that higher level of existence where communication with the Masters may be possible first you establish a belief in the existence of the Masters you learn to understand their nature in their powers you reverence them in your heart which is a way of softening the boundaries of the personality so that you can actually have some direct experience of them you learn to draw near to them as much as you can learning to think as they might think when you're confronting a problem of some kind you open yourself up for conscious communication with them especially one to whom you might dedicate your life I could talk quite a long time about that I'll only mention that in some of bovitz keys teachings there's an idea called the seven rays which was developed much more in later Theosophical writings masters were associated with the rays and each ray had something to do with a different Department of Human Development and people might feel a resonance with one or another of those and that would be the master that you might want to open yourself up for communication with and then through the meditative process and through pure living and training the bodies you work to rise to the plane where the Masters are not attempting to draw them down to our plane which of course is the way that many mediums and channels try to do it and then in this process know that help instruction and enlightenment will be given when deserved so that's from the twelfth volume of collected writings as I mentioned if you're interested in the idea that she was talking about their two wonderful resources to go to or the mama letters one of the basic texts of the oesophagus but especially this commentary by Joy Mills reflections on an ageless wisdom all of those ideas of getting close to the masters trying to understand what they mean are incorporated there where she draws from the Mahatma letters the human side of who they are and what they were it's really a wonderful almost the devotional text I feel that brings through a great deal of the theoretical teaching as well but in a very human context now this is a little provocative Blavatsky on channeling she never used the word but this is a rather surprising quote that I found when I was working my way through the collected writings that I think applies to this idea of somehow learning to communicate with the Masters subjective purely spiritual quote-unquote mediumship is the only harmless kind and is often an elevating gift that might be cultivated by everyone now she puts mediumship in quotations because she was talking in particular about spiritualist mediumship which was trying to draw any kind of higher being or deceased being or who knows what down into the mediums body and her standpoint was that this was very unsafe but you also have to understand that during the time when she and Olcott were investigating mediumship there were some pretty astonishing things going on in the area of psychic powers one of them that I read about in old diary leaves is they went to check out a medium in Brooklyn New York who played the piano and while she was in trance and while she played the piano the piano levitated and when the spirits when she got louder they'd levitate it and tilt it to the right when the music got softer they tilt it to the left and at the climax of this display five people were in the audience were sitting on the piano and the piano was levitating and tilting so you have to keep in mind that that idea of physical mediumship I mean who knows how it was done with with steam power at that time it probably would have taken a city block to do what we can do with CGI now but of course CGI in the movies has no is no proof of mediumship or any kind of inspiration in any case whatever they were doing her claim was that it was destructive to the mediums and often also to the audience but this idea of subjective inner purely spiritual mediumship raising yourself to a higher plane it might be possible to get some useful inner guidance from some higher level and her claim is everyone going to have that experience if you remember what you said earlier which is you have to rise up to that higher plane where they are operating on so the final stage the path of mastery starts with the disciples and shayla's I'm not going to talk much about this they go through five stages of initiation until they become masters that's a whole evenings talk in and of itself they become masters as I mentioned but they I believe become masters of two types based on whether they were mystics or cultists and the path that they were following if they're mystics they become the reservoirs of strength which in Blavatsky's teachings are called the nirmanakaya and if they are cultists they become what are called workers in the hierarchy I've done a lot of thinking about this to try to figure out what that distinction really means and the conclusion that I've come to is that at a certain level of development on the higher planes if you are one of the Mystics you're able to create such a broad state of consciousness that it actually becomes a realm of its own on those higher planes and so you have the buddhas of meditation the great Buddha's creating a realm like the Western paradise of the Mahayana Buddhists which is a place that if you're devoted to Amitabha Buddha the wood of infinite light you may be able to be reincarnated into after you pass and you'll have this gradual lifting up enlightenment experience before you come back into your next lifetime so somehow this Amitabha Buddha were developed perhaps from a bodhisattva who developed from a master who developed from you know some of these earlier stages that we were talking about and was a mystic and learned to create these vast spaces but they're not so interested in the one-on-one work with spiritual growth and development that's the job of the occultists and the reason they pursue the development of the bodies is to have the experience of being able to meet anybody who's suffering or confused at any level of being because they have the appropriate body they can go there meet them know how to speak with them know how to be visible to them know the language that they need to be communicated with and then finally to conclude my talk well actually just a little bit about the path of mastery a wonderful book on the masters by Annie Besant I've been doing a sequel to invisible worlds that's made up of some other really wonderful but little-known writings of hers on the Masters and then the classic by Leadbeater the masters in the path and this is the final slide a famous painting by Theosophical artist Reginald Mikkel called the path from 1895 what I wanted to illustrate here is how he incorporated the idea of a high being that was able to create a space within which others could evolve in all of the different stages and if you see imagining that the person in the center is on this path rising and rising notice how there's somebody at every stage to meet that's what I envision as the distinction between the mystics who enclose and the occultists who are in the middle who are there to meet and help people pass on so that's my talk on invisible worlds I'd be happy happy to answer people's questions at this point who would not to be first maybe I should tell my story about the black position federal get is going yes so I went to a conference and went to a presenter who was a somebody who works with altered states of consciousness developed through sound and I went there because my mother had a cousin who got involved in this individuals organization which had some cult-like ideas and she wanted me to check him out and so the first thing I noticed was an extremely handsome charismatic man dressed very well very polite very kind looks you directly in the eye but there was something very chilling very cold about being in his atmosphere if you got close so when he started his talk the speaker started playing some of these sounds that alter conscious this but he never announced to the group that he was doing that so he was actually starting to affect our consciousness before he even informed us what he was doing then he was speaking very very quickly in a monotone using as many five syllable words as he can while he's playing these sounds and the result is of course everybody starting to doze off then because he was a musician he played some really high spiritual music I mean I was surprised it was it was really it had the vibration of inviting people to come back to God or higher consciousness but it was really more like come to me I'll show you the way it was very seductive so afterwards I found that his voice was almost permanently engraved in my mind and was talking to me and I remembered that in some spiritual traditions in India it said that if you hear the voice of the Guru in your head that is your teacher so you can see how he was actually going about recruiting people but I was convinced the next morning that he was a black magician when I had a dream where I was being tied to the railroad tracks and there was a train bearing down on me and guess who was driving the Train so anyway I just wanted to point out they do exist and and in some cases of course they are heads of cults of various kinds just seems like the next question is how did you get that out of your brain we have no ways of doing that meditation I think the dream actually served very well you know to help me process it integrate it and clear it but the thing is when I realized what he was doing I put up barriers to make sure that I wasn't hypnotized but he got through the barriers so that made it even a little scarier there were other people who were really dozing off and I have no idea what the statistics were on how many people signed up for his organization after that so yes could you talk a little bit about thank you about training and what what that involves the training you've been talking about called training okay there's not a lot in Theosophical literature that specifically outlines tasks or if it is it's veiled in a certain way for example Annie Besant does a lot of talking about the meditative process in Raja yoga and you think that she's just helping you understand yoga better but she's really laying out the path of development that will open you to some of these higher abilities if you are patient enough to work along those lines in my research for a book that I'm working on now about the chakras I made an interesting discovery Rudolf Steiner who's the founder of the anthroposophical movement was a theosophist for about 10 years and the head of the German section at that time before he disagreed with Annie Besant and broke away and while he was with the Theosophical Society he published a couple of books on initiation initiation and its results I'm not sure if I'll remember the title of the other one I'm bringing it up because it's a lost Theosophical work it was republished as how to no higher powers under the anthroposophical press and all references to Theosophical vocabulary were retranslated and removed so that it was more in line with the anthroposophical system but i found the original version online and you actually have it in the library the second of the two volumes has a really beautiful outline of meditative practices for developing petals of the lotuses of the chakras along the lines of some of the teachings on probation that you'll find in annie besant it's nowhere else in Theosophical literature but you'll only really get it if you read the original version because in the the later version Steiner says the soul body but he'll say the astral body in the original Theosophical version and it just lights up if you know anything about the Theosophical teachings on the astral body I think that it dovetails very nicely with some of LED beaters later teachings about the chakras some of the things that Annie Besant was teaching here the article occultism and occult training was presented a couple of years earlier than these books by Steiner so there's some synergy there and I think it's important for us to understand as Theosophists that despite what happened later there were some contributions of Steiner to the Theosophical literature that we shouldn't lose I was wondering if you could speak to some of your personal experiences and in an astral body traveling or projecting or however you would term it and then also how that resonates with the Asafa chol writings that you've come in touch with okay I started reading theosophy in 2005 and the reason was I had been working on an internet forum our mostly young people would write about their experiences they would have questions I would coach them a little bit I would try to help them understand what they were talking about and somebody wrote in mentioning man in his bodies and I started reading it and went from there to the Arthur Powell books there's one for each body if the athira double the astral body the mental body the causal body and the ego and I highlighted everything that I had personally experienced in most of those books and maybe half the books were highlighted by the time I got to the end of it because there was such a resonance between things that I had experienced over 30 or 35 years of not knowing theosophy but having to deal with those realms that was reflected in the Theosophical teachings for me it was very affirming of my own personal experience but it was also affirming of the validity of those teachings in theosophy and one of the reasons why it's been so interesting to me to bring forward some of Annie Besant Schloss teachings is you know the third object is an important part of of the Theosophical worldview I guess I'll call it and it had sort of fallen into disuse I think over many many decades and so I was thinking well if I can talk about these things in a way that people can understand how it might be useful I would be doing some service but how I got started in a way as a demonstration of everything I was talking about here so when I was about 12 years old I was elected to cut my grandmother's lawn after her husband died he was an engineer she told me that I had the run of the house any books that I found in the library I was welcome to take home and in a back closet was a Rosicrucian book about Lemuria that she'd hidden from him so that he wouldn't know she was reading such things so I took it home and read it and I learned about a lost civilization that was living under Mount Shasta and California who were perfectly telepathic and I started praying to them every night to come take me away now I really had a happy childhood but it seemed to me I'd have a happier one if I was with so the interesting thing is a couple of years later I had my first out-of-body experience I didn't know what it was it was very afraid but somebody who I couldn't see came to get me and while I don't necessarily believe it was a Lemurian from under Mount Shasta somebody noticed me and in between those two experiences I had read a book that one of my aunts had given me called the late great planet Earth by Hal Lindsey who was one of these bible-thumping fundamentalists talking about when the rapture was going to occur and when he would talk about the wonderful things in heaven and the awful things that would happen to the people who were left behind I said I want to be left behind and help those people who are you know still on the earth so somehow I think the combination of you know praying to go to Mount Shasta and offering myself to help in case there was a rapture somebody noticed and started you know helping me have these out-of-body experiences as I mentioned it was very scary it took me about six years before I found someone who could tell me what they were and then point me to some literature that helped me understand it and I'm really very glad that the Theosophical literature came so much later because as I mentioned it really just lit up for me as a comprehensive system for talking about these things I'm teaching a workshop on astral projection on Saturday and it's called do you know what body are in the idea behind the first part the morning part of the talk is to help people understand how the Theosophical notion of multiple bodies can explain across the board many many different kinds of consciousness experiences and I'll be giving some examples and I hope people in the audience will maybe talk a little bit about their own experiences and then we can link these things to the Theosophical literature so did that answer your question marina you're welcome in your book the unanswered question you talked about obsolete afterlife zones specifically the Egyptian afterlife and what was fascinating was you mentioned that it sort of folded in on itself and since there were no new ancient Egyptians coming in it was sort of tucked away in a corner and your interest in it created the unfolding of it so my question is have you explored any other obsolete afterlife zones like the Atlantean ones that was something that I experienced in conjunction with I think it was 20 plus years ago I had a what I call a grand tour of the afterlife and part of it was going to the Egyptian there was some exploration of Buddhist beliefs but that's not an obsolete one more recently I had an experience where somebody in the 20th century tried to found a religion and what I learned was in the afterlife he was required to hang out in the temple that he created on the astral plane for the his co-religionists until all of them got bored enough because nothing was happening that they had moved on because he in starting his religion he apparently wasn't himself able to generate the information that they needed to keep the religion going and he brought in some channels and so on and so I don't know whether that would be an astral punishment or not but he was going to be parked there for quite some time before everybody moved on so that's a becoming obsolete religious realm I guess he could say I would like you if you if you have the time to elaborate a little bit more on the idea of invisible helpers maybe I just escaped that part of your presentation but you spoke about visible helpers some steps in between then invisible helpers and you know can you you know bring us some ideas or some pictures of what this realm is about and who are these invisible helpers and how do they get there so I have met people I've had some experiences like this myself but I've met people who without having any real spiritual training of any kind have dreams about car accidents or train wrecks and things of this nature where they travel and they are in some way helping people make a transition if the body is too damaged and the individual can't return to it and they're disoriented they don't know where they are and that would be a form of being an invisible helper and the interesting thing is I I personally believe that people who have these experiences spontaneously and are often ambivalent about them would feel a lot more relaxed about the experience more allowing of having it happening if they knew there was a word for what they were doing and that word in the philosophical literature is invisible helper in LED beaters book on on invisible helpers you have stories about people helping out with ships sinking and it's the same thing but updated so there are other forms of working coming into the dreams of people who need some form of comforting or need some guidance in a dream I have experiences occasionally where I check in on people to see how they're doing one time I was in Germany for an extended period and visited a friend in Boston and saw a lot of smoke in her building coming from the first floor and I called her to warn her that there was a problem it wasn't it didn't turn out that it was a fire and I didn't really think that it would be but the man on the first floor was becoming increasingly angry towards her and eventually started persecuting her in a way that looked like it could lead to an assault and that happened maybe a week or two after the visit that I made to her so she was you know aware of it people tell me that I show up in their dreams sometimes but I don't necessarily remember it and I don't claim that if I don't remember it I do think though many many people who are very service oriented on the physical plane have experiences as invisible helpers but they may not remember those experiences until they're ready to deal with it and one of the important aspects of dealing with it is not making a big deal out of it you know not letting your ego get too big not bragging about it knowing who you can talk to about it who might be supportive there are a number of things that have to be considered before you talk about these experiences personally when I share these things I primarily do it just to increase people's knowledge base and hopefully people will recognize if they've had an experience of that kind of their own you

Channel: Theosophical Society

Views: 74,351

Rating: 4.8791285 out of 5

Keywords: Spirituality (Media Genre), Psychism, Annie Besant (Author), Kurt Leland (Author), Consciousness (Quotation Subject), Psychic Powers, Spiritual Unfoldment

Id: uA12Xd3Zq0I

Length: 69min 26sec (4166 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 17 2014