Author: Éliphas Lévi, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Publisher: Philaletheians UK
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Author: Eliphas Levi
Publisher: Weiser Books
ISBN: 9780877289388
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
The Great Secret completes a trilogy of books by Eliphas Levi published in his "Studies in Hermetic Tradition" series, the two previous volumes being The Book of Splendours and The Mysteries of the Qabalah. Taken together these writings represent a fitting memorial to one who "has been both the keeper of the hermetic tradition and the absolute renovator of esoteric thinking in Europe in the 19th century". "You will be as gods, knowing good and evil". So concludes what Eliphas Levi considered to be his last testament, his most important and final treatise, and a summation of his esoteric philosophy. This volume is the conclusion of the work he started with Book One, The Hieratic Mystery or the Traditional Documents of High Initiation, published as The Book of Splendours (Weiser, 1984). The Great Secret contains his final two works: Book Two, The Royal Mystery or Art of Subduing the Powers, in which Levi discusses such topics as Evil, the Outer Darkness, the Great Secret, Magical Sacrifice, Evocations, the Arcana of Solomon's Ring, and the Terrible Secret. Book Three, The Sacerdotal Mystery or the Art of Being Served by Spirits, covers Aberrant Forces, the Chaining of the Devil, Sacred and Accursed Rites, Divination, Dark Intelligence, and the Great Arcanum.

Author: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Publisher: Philaletheians UK
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 19

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Long kalpas of mental sleep, during which humanity was permitted to think only by proxy, preceded today’s self-consciousness alternating between wakefulness and sleep. When asleep, the ordinary man has no experience of any state of consciousness other than those emerging from his brain and the ever-deceiving physical senses. In deep sleep, ideation ceases on the physical plane, and memory is in abeyance because the organ, through which the Ego manifests ideation and memory on the material plane, has temporarily ceased to function. Spiritual Consciousness never sleeps because she is always in the Light of Reality and acts independently of the sleeping man. Impressions projected upon the brain may survive as “conscience.” But the Occultist, who knows that his Divine Self never sleeps, and lives in the Light of the One Reality — the same Light that illuminates every man in the world of being — says that during the state of sleep his mind (seat of the physical and personal intelligence) may get glimpses of that Light revealed by the Divine Thought, which was hidden from it during his waking hours. The spiritual perceptions of the Higher Ego are beyond space and time. Space and time are the illusory perceptions of his worldly shadow, whether wakeful or asleep. To see in Nirvana annihilation amounts to saying of a man plunged in a sound dreamless sleep — one that leaves no impression on the physical memory and brain, because the sleeper’s Higher Self is in its original state of absolute consciousness during those hours — that he, too, is annihilated. Alas! the human mind, unable to transcend the limitations of its individualised consciousness, totters here on earth on the brink of incomprehensible Absoluteness and Eternity. What, then, is the process of going to sleep? As a man exhausted by one state of the life fluid seeks another — e.g., when exhausted by hot air he refreshes himself with cool water — so sleep is the shady nook in the sunlit valley of life. Somnolence is a compelling sign that waking life has become too strong for the physical organism, and that the force of the life current must be broken by changing the waking for the sleeping state. Pernicious is the influence of the moon. Only one with remarkably strong nerves can sit or sleep under the moonlight without injury to his health. Shall we sleep with the head towards the north, south, east, or west?

Author: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Publisher: Philaletheians UK
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 25

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Anger is one of three self-destructing states of mind; the other two are worldly love and delusion. Bhagavan Das posits Anger in the mid-point of the not-Self continuum: Hate towards Equals gives rise to Anger; towards Superiors, to Fear; towards Inferiors, to Scorn. Anger is the passion of fools; it becometh not a wise man. Socrates defines Anger as raging and seething of the soul. Aristotle, as boiling of the blood around the heart. Plato suggests that though pain, fear, anger, and other feelings are given to men by necessity, “if they conquered these they would live righteously, and if they were conquered by them, unrighteously.” In order to help men, the Gods protected the heart by surrounding it with the soft and cool thicket of lungs to chill out the heat of anger. “Dig not fire with a sword but by governing the tongue and being quiet, friendship is produced from strife, the fire of anger being extinguished, and you yourself will not appear to be destitute of intellect,” advises Pythagoras. If Love is the fever of the species, Anger is the self-consuming fire. Indeed it is life atoms that a man in a blind passion throws off, unconsciously, and he does it quite as effectively as a mesmeriser who transfers them from himself to any object consciously and under the guidance of his will. Anger is an insurmountable obstacle between reality and illusion. That is why abstinence from Anger is one of Duty’s ten virtues. “Act then, all ye who fail and suffer, act like him; and from the stronghold of your Soul, chase all your foes away — ambition, anger, hatred, e’en to the shadow of desire — when even you have failed” says the Voice of the Silence. To take the Kingdom of God by violence is Kabbalistic parlance for reaching Nirvana by artificially-induced conditions. To Dare, to Will, to Achieve, and to keep Silent, is the motto of the true Occultist. “The science of the gods is mastered by violence; it must be conquered, and does not give itself.” One key is the sacrifice of Prometheus who, by allowing men to proceed consciously on the path of spiritual evolution, transformed the most perfect of animals on earth into a potential god, making him free to “take the kingdom of heaven by violence.” We cannot attain Adeptship and Nirvana, Bliss and the “Kingdom of Heaven,” unless we link ourselves indissolubly with our Rex Lucis, the Lord of Splendour and of Light, our immortal God within us.

Author: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Publisher: Philaletheians UK
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 10

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Author: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Publisher: Philaletheians UK
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Reincarnation is the serial and periodical rebirth of every individual monad, from pralaya to pralaya. Reincarnation is indissolubly linked with Karma, the Divine Law of Truth and Justice. Astral monad is the shell of the deceased personality, disintegrating together with the corpse. In Hinduism it is known as bhut; in Greek philosophy, as eidolon; in Theosophy, as elementary. That shell is the deceptive image of lingering desires (Kama-loka), the Limbus of the Catholics, the Hades of the Greeks. The evocation of the dead (necromancy) as well as the preservation of corpses is a violation of the laws of nature; it is an outrage on the modesty of death, which hides the works of destruction, as we should hide those of reproduction. Death is exhaled by death. The cemeteries poison the atmosphere of towns and the miasma of corpses blight the children even in the bosoms of their mothers. As spirit and matter run along parallel lines and are readily convertible to each other, so the spiritual evolution goes hand in hand with the physical. The immortal Ego is the root of every new incarnation, the string on which are threaded one after the other the ephemeral “personalities” of man. When the post-mortem period of lethargic stupor is over, and the last ante-mortem desire dissipated, the Spiritual Soul enters in full consciousness the blessed region of Devachan, where all earthly mists have been dispersed, and where the scenes of the past life come clearly before the spiritual sight. Thence one can neither be reborn before its appointed period, nor reappear on earth visibly or invisibly in the interim. Unless the spiritual fruition the Higher Ego merges into, and its aroma absorbed by the reincarnating Ego (Atma-Buddhi), the latter becomes non-existent — for it can only receive spiritual colouring from each lower ego during incarnation. All transient, non-reincarnating principles are left behind soulless and lifeless, firstly as a material residue, and later on as a reflection on the mirror of Astral light. Reincarnation is a cyclic necessity for the Eternal Pilgrim — the Protean differentiation in space and time of the One Absolute Unknowable. Nature never leaves her work unfinished; if baffled at the first attempt, she tries again. No one can progress beyond this world without becoming perfected physically, morally, and spiritually. And as Nature never proceeds backwards in her evolutionary progress, so man cannot regress physically to lower forms of life — but he can retrogress morally, yielding to the seductive influences which converge towards him. Selfishness is the single most important cause of all sin and suffering on earth. Its effects can only be counterbalanced on earth, hence the endless cycles of tears watering the parched soil of pain and sorrow until harmony is restored. Like the revolutions of a wheel, there is a regular succession of death and rebirth, the moral cause of which is clinging desperately to life on earth — while the instrumental cause is Karma, the law of merit and demerit. The entire bundle of egotism disappears after death, as the costume of the part he played disappears from the actor’s body after he leaves the theatre and goes to bed. Nothing remains of that bundle to go to the next incarnation, except the seed for future Karma. The soul of the wicked will go on wandering about in the earth’s sphere assuming at times the forms of human phantoms, and even those of animals. The ancient profane never seemed sure any more than the modern whether an apparition was that of a relative, or the genius of the locality. Man is a Unity only at his origin and at his end. In-between, spirits and souls, gods and dæmons emanate from the Soul of the Universe. But the rabble is the same in every age: superstitious, self-opinionated, materializing the most spiritual, noble, and idealistic conceptions, and dragging them down to its own low level. The earth conceals the flesh; the shade flits round the tomb. The underworld receives the image; the spirits seeks the stars. Abortion is much worse than foeticide, it is a crime against Nature. Abortion will also shorten the mother’s life on earth only to prolong it with dreary percentage in Kama-loka.

Author: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Publisher: Philaletheians UK
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 24

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Wheat is not a product of the Earth for it has never been found in the wild state. It was the first-born Lords of Wisdom, Regents over the seasons and cosmic cycles, who revealed to nascent mankind the arts of agriculture. Fruits and grain, unknown to Earth, were brought by divine men and women from other worlds, for the benefit of those they ruled. The humble wheat is pivotal to man’s Inner Principles and the Laws that govern the World of Being. Isis, the Virgin-Mother of Horus, was the first to reveal to mortals the mysteries of wheat and corn. And her priests placed the sacred wheat on the breast of their ven-erable defunct. The Wheat Fields of Egypt are the Elysian Fields of Greece and the Homeric Tartarus. Extra-terrestrial wheat is the link between the occult philosophy of the old Egyp-tians, and that now taught by the cis-Himalayan Adepts. Aaru is the subjective state of post-mortem existence, where the defunct’s soul receives wheat and corn, growing therein seven cubits high. What is meant by the three cubits of the ear and the four cubits of the stalk of the wheat that grows in the Fields of Aaru? The ear of three cubits is the immortal upper triad of man and aroma of Manas (Higher Ego), represented by the triangle. The four cubits is the mortal lower tetrad (stalk or straw), represented by the square. In Egyptian philosophy the Eyes of the Lord are interchangeable: the Sun is the eye of Osiris by day; and the Moon, the eye of Osiris by night. The Wheat Fields of Aaru are an allusion to Devachan. The wheat sown and reaped by the defunct during his life is his Karma.

Author: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Publisher: Philaletheians UK
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 8

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Author: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Publisher: Philaletheians UK
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 10

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Book Description

Author: Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
Publisher: Philaletheians UK
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 9

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Book Description
Périsprit is constituted of the ethereal substance that fills the universe, hence it is derived from the cosmic astral fluid, which is not spirit at all, because although intangible, impalpable, this astral fluid is objective matter as compared with spirit. Owing to its complex nature, the périsprit can ally itself intimately enough with the corporeal nature, to escape the moral influence of a higher life. In the same way it can unite closely enough with the spirit proper to partake of its potency, in which case its vehicle, the physical man, can appear as a God, even during his terrestrial lifetime. If such a union, of the spirit and the périsprit, does not take place, a man does not become immortal as an entity: the périsprit is sooner or later dissociated.