Was Madame Blavatsky right?

[aloha_gary]

aloha

Decided to re-post this as the original, although intended in jest could be considered OTT.

So Madame Blavatsky's books Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine, IMHO are very heavy duty esoteric tracts, which seem to have been heavily drawn upon by later groups such as the Golden Dawn and Dion Fortune.

Is there anyone out there who is familiar enough to answer these questions?

1) Her books seem to draw heavily on the Vedas and Bhagavad Gita and other Eastern texts, so are they simply a summary, or a westernised version for easy(!) consumption by westerners?

2) Do they add anything to Hindu, Taoist or Buddhist teachings etc, and if so what?

3) To get specific in only one area, Blavatsky asserts that Karma arises from our past lives.
a)In Hawaiian Huna (or at least the elders I've spoken to) say that all Karma arises in THIS lifetime only, and to blame past life times is to give yourself an easier ride. For example, I've heard people say they are fat in this lifetime because they starved in a previous one. Hawaiians would say, nope it's all down to you now. Hawaiians would also say ALL Karma is changeable by you right now in the moment, and that it is our purpose in this lifetime to clear up your past and by so doing raise your vibration, and to be fair, many other esoteric traditions also say this.
b) In Druidry, there is much focus on clearing our Ancestral karma or 'baggage', which from a scientific point of view makes sense as our DNA originates from our parents, and theirs from their parents and so on. Following Dr Bruce Lipton in 'The Biology of Belief' our DNA changes with our environment and life experiences, so perhaps 'karma' is simply genetic emotional baggage? E.g., a therapist friend was telling me she has recently cleared a lot of ancestral baggage arising out of world war 2, the people at the time being too traumatised to deal with it there and then, and so this passed down through genes for resolution!
Interesting idea, yes?

what do you think?

answers on a postcard, or failing that, write here would do...

aloha
Gary

[Nebankh]

Re your links Neo, who is Wm. Emmette Coleman? I like to research debunkers

[rafromca]

Gary:

I have been impressed with Rupert Sheldrake's work -- his hypothesis that all living creatures are within a morphic field and information comes to us within a field. He supports his hypothesis with research showing that there is telepathy and knowledge is gained within a field even when creatures have had no contact with each other. He supports all his ideas with verifiable studies. While information comes to us through verbal and written communications, it also comes to us in mysterious ways, and he is trying to document this with legitimate research. Of course people are resistant to his notions, but the research has held up! I have also been impressed with Bruce Lipton's talks but am less familiar with his research. Both men seem to be saying that all the answers to our behaviour are not to be found by decoding DNA.

[Nebankh]

Gary,
Some modern Gnostic groups teach that along with ancestral karma, there is also familial karma, and the Kennedys are given as an example.
They give the impression that the familial karma needs cleansing in addition to any personal karma, which - if one accepts the existence of karma - kind of makes sense but doesn't seem very fair!. Ancestral and familial karma is probably one and the same, but the familial karma seems to relate more to the recent and living family.
Jaq

[rafromca]

Karma has to be associated with reincarnation to seem fair, I suppose. Dr Weiss, the psychiatrist who deals in regressing people to their past lives says that a son in one lifetime may have been a father in a previous lifetime, and we stay connected to the same souls in each lifetime. It seems almost like a company of actors who change roles. While I remain skeptical, I read one of Weiss's books and his sincerity is very convincing.

[aloha_gary]

Karma has to be associated with reincarnation to seem fair

aloha rafromca & Jaq

who said karma had to be fair?

and rafromca, what evidence / principles are you using to say karma HAS TO be associated with reincarnation?
who/what are you quoting from? your own experience?
is life 'fair'? according to whom?

jaq, yes it sounds like this idea of familial karma and ancestral karma are one and the same thing

which works of rupert sheldrake would you specifically recommend on this topic?

I would recommend The Biology of Belief to find out about Lipton's research, although I'm not sure I've read anything where he says DNA drives behaviour, but from the ancestral stuff above, this seems to suggest it may?

aloha
Gary

aloha
Gary

[Nebankh]

Hi Gary,
You ask: who said Karma has to be fair?
Very good question and of course no one said so
One way Karma was explained to me in terms of a Bank. For example, you can be in credit, or you can be overdrawn, or you might have a decent bank balance At times we can even ask for an overdraft as long as we know we'll have to pay it back. It's a fairly cold way of looking at it, but ir's just one simple analogy, and fairly helpful at times when tough decisions have to be made - for example if we have to make a decision we know others aren't ging to like very much; that may even cause them to hurt deeply, but that are necessary.
By the same token, if we use the bank analogy, one of our family members may have gone hugely overdrawn, and not give a hoot about how much they owe the bank. It's affecting the whole family adversely, so the others in the family have to pay up. That's what I was referring to as being unfair, and I was joking a little for discussion's sake
We would no doubt pay off a family member's debts if we could, regardless of whether it was affecting the rest of the family adversely or not, and especially if we knew that it was.
It's all hyothetical of course, but makes sense all the same
Jaq

[Nebankh]

What evidence principles are you showing to say that karma and reincarnation exists?

Hi Neo,

No evidence principles, I'm just speculating on the possibility and on ideas related to those concepts.

Re your links Neo, who is Wm. Emmette Coleman? I like to research debunkers

There are more works you can find. If you check out the secret doctrine, you will see the additional footnotes added by her worshipers to "cover up" the plagiarisms.

http://usminc.org/blavatsky.html

I've read many of the works but that wasn't my question. I was asking about Coleman's credentials. I've seen his claims and I've seen the rebuttals. He was a long term adversary of Blavatsky, but have you checked out his credentials and background?
And have you checked out those works that discredited his background about the organisations he claimed to belong to, and checked out the background of the person who discredited him, etc etc.
There's no point in trusting the claims of one person who discredits something, unless you check out all of the players involved. and there comes a point when you have checked out many of the players involved and then have to make a decision as to what was motivating them.
And firstly you have to thoroughly check out the motivation, background and essence of the original work.

I'm not a fan of Mme B but I don't dismiss everything she wrote as bunkum. I'm not a Christian but I take offence when people say that the Bible is either all historically accurate and true, or all rubbish. I don't see why it has to be one or the other, and similarly with Mme B.It's up to us to independently research the subject matter, then use our own intelligence to agree or disagree with them; not rely on another human being (especially moreso, one who's credentials we don't know) to do that for us.

Jaq

[rafromca]

Beautifully put, Jaq!

[Greywoolfe]

Is there anyone out there who is familiar enough to answer these questions?

I have quite a collection of books by members of the Theosophical Society, including The Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled (I have a rare copy signed by Alice Bailey when she was head of the society in 1919, and gifted to a member as a Christmas present.) so I'll give this a good stab, if you like.

1) Her books seem to draw heavily on the Vedas and Bhagavad Gita and other Eastern texts, so are they simply a summary, or a westernised version for easy(!) consumption by westerners?

Blavatsky (HPB) claimed that her primary source was an ancient Tibettan script called the Book Of Dzyan, which (According to the Secret Doctrine part 1) was written down some 10,000 years ago, having passed by word-of-mouth for some 300,000 years previously. Whether such a document actually exists is open to conjecture, but it was HPB's assertion that this provided the basis for the Rig Veda, Bhagavad Ghita and other texts, which in turn led to the Kabalah and Gnostic texts. It was her goal to provide a common linking motif between all the major world religions, by indicating that they have a common root. Although The Secret Doctrine is somewhat heavy going, it is worthwhile to the persistent, as in my case, this led to an interest in Buddhism, and reading her texts certainly helped me to understand some of the terminologies discussed in tracts such as the Dhammapadha, and the Suddharma Pundarikha, so in that context they do provide a ready guide to Eastern mysticism for the Western layman- especially considering that the mystically minded and more educated late Victorians the works were aimed at were, by and large, better read than the average person of the present day.

2) Do they add anything to Hindu, Taoist or Buddhist teachings etc, and if so what?

As I have mentioned in point 1, they do help in making some of these teachings easier to grasp for the Western mindset, mainly by direct comparison to the Western tracts that HPB claimed they were the direct predecessors of.

3) To get specific in only one area, Blavatsky asserts that Karma arises from our past lives.
a)In Hawaiian Huna (or at least the elders I've spoken to) say that all Karma arises in THIS lifetime only, and to blame past life times is to give yourself an easier ride. For example, I've heard people say they are fat in this lifetime because they starved in a previous one. Hawaiians would say, nope it's all down to you now. Hawaiians would also say ALL Karma is changeable by you right now in the moment, and that it is our purpose in this lifetime to clear up your past and by so doing raise your vibration, and to be fair, many other esoteric traditions also say this.
b) In Druidry, there is much focus on clearing our Ancestral karma or 'baggage', which from a scientific point of view makes sense as our DNA originates from our parents, and theirs from their parents and so on. Following Dr Bruce Lipton in 'The Biology of Belief' our DNA changes with our environment and life experiences, so perhaps 'karma' is simply genetic emotional baggage? E.g., a therapist friend was telling me she has recently cleared a lot of ancestral baggage arising out of world war 2, the people at the time being too traumatised to deal with it there and then, and so this passed down through genes for resolution!
Interesting idea, yes?

The one thing I began to notice when reading both Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine is that there were many passages that seemed to predate scientific discoveries by at least a century or so. For example, in The Secret Doctrine, HPB explains that the universe began as a single point of matter, which then expanded infinitessimally until it reached its' present size, and which continues to expand. While this doesn't much resemble the Big Bang theory, it does sound greatly like the theory of Universal Expansion that was posited about a year ago in New Scientist magazine. In this theory, (Which is over-simplified here) quantum fluctuations in the space-time continuum led to a particle of matter forming, which then caused instability in the continuum in the form of a bubble, which, by its' nature, then expanded exponentially, which in turn caused further fluctuations that caused more particles to form within this bubble, thus further accellerating the expansion and in turn creating our universe. In Isis Unveiled, HPB also mentions how priests in Egypt used to show very detailed images to initiates using light reflected and focussed through crystal lenses and mirrors. This greatly reminded me of laser holography, which uses rubies to focus laser beams, and which were unknown to us until we invented them in the 1960s.

Based on this and many other instances in her books, I began to take great interest, and often wondered if it was possible for any of the other articles in her books could be explained by quantum physics. It was with great fascination that I began to read Tony's book ITLAD, as I could see how some of these things could have come about. My own personal pet theory is that reincarnation can be explained by the CTF theorem, and that reincarnation actually refers to the CTF event, with the universal higher plane of consciousness being our Daemon. In this case, our karma would be the accumulated foreknowledge of our Daemon- attained during our Virgin Life- and that our Daemon, by precognition, deja-vu and other phenomena, can clue us in to forthcoming events and thus help us to make different decisions that will place us within another Everett Universe; thus enabling us to 'repay our karmic debt'. Elsewhere on this board, there is also the 'Bucket and Sea' theory, which has given me much food for thought on the whole issue of reincarnation, past-life experiences and karma.

In my humble opinion, and for what little it's worth.