Daily Theosophy

She had to teach outlines and general principles, but had to leave out some crucial keys – so that people could ponder and meditate over the general outlines and apply them to serve their needs, but not use the full powers of Nature for destruction and harming each other. Not a simple task for Praja.

(85)

(astronomy and astrology)

Looking at the skies and into space, she invented the sciences of astronomy and astrology. Astrology is about the souls and characters and the influence on other souls, human souls in particular, by the gods of heavenly bodies, especially planets, and also the Sun and the Moon and particular regions of the sky, now known as the signs of the zodiac (zodiac means the chain of animated beings in the sky). Astronomy is about the bodies of planets and stars, galaxies and all other phenomena outside the atmosphere of the earth, where they are, how they move, of what they consist, how they develop, and what types of energies their bodies radiate – for example visible light waves, infrared and ultraviolet light waves, X-rays, radio waves, i.e. electromagnetic waves with all different kinds of frequencies or wavelengths – extremely long to extremely fast and short. Astrology described not the radiations of the bodies, but the character of the radiations of the souls and the ruling divine beings of the planets. Astrology and astronomy alone, without the other, are rather useless, though often very entertaining. You understand that, if we would really know the forces and divine intelligences playing in the universe, we would be extremely powerful and very, very dangerous. Therefore we know just enough to become aware of the greatness of the universe, and to apply our little knowledge for understanding a little bit of the cycles of Nature, but never the precise details. The real knowledge of it would give us the power to cure as well as the power to kill. And what would you think people would do? Still, Praja taught much more than we know. Most of that knowledge is simply forgotten, because after some time we didn’t realize the importance of it any more.

In the European Middle Ages, for example, the people with their limited minds and knowledge and their vision curtailed by dogmatic ideas – even though among these minds were the greatest scholars and thinkers of these days – thought that the earth was flat like a saucer, and that the whole universe was just like a kind dome placed over it by God. Nobody thought that the earth was round as a ball and turned around the sun. If you would say such things, people would say you were crazy, or they would even kill you. The Europeans of those days and even before, had long forgotten the original teachings of Praja – which we can still partly find in the ancient books of India and some other cultures. Thousands of years ago, people knew that the earth was round, like the other planets, and that they all turned around the Sun. Thousands of years old, in a book called Surya Siddhanta, we see that the people in those days knew the astronomy of our solar system in great detail, and made very precise measurements of the positions and movements of the planets of our solar system.

But even these detailed astronomical calculations where no aim in themselves. They were not only for amazement and intellectual challenge. All these calculations were only there to serve the science of the soul of life in the universe, and of the birth and evolution of our own planet and the development of humans (and all other beings) and their cultural history, and even their future; and how to live in harmony with the varying forces streaming in from the surrounding universe. This was astrology. The astrology of our age is only a very faint and often nonsensical shadow of the astrology of ancient days and of the future.

In these ancient days, science, art, ethics, religion and philosophy and practical applications went together, they supported each other, they were not separate, because all these are but various approaches of the development of mind.

So the best thing Praja can do is to inspire education – to learn to think in the right way, ‘vertically’ and to explore every question that you can feel or where you can think of. Real teachers don’t tell you exactly how things are, but stimulate you to find the answer yourself – so that you train your mind. Good teachers never tell you what to feel or how to feel, or that you are bad or good. They just present you things that have fine, subtle feelings, like kindness, intelligence, patience, good thoughts to think about, beautiful music, art, architecture, Nature. So does Praja. But still there will always be people who do not listen, because they think they know already, or because they like to be stubborn, or because they are not intelligent enough to understand. In the case of having fear, such people can not be helped. They are fearful, and the only thing one can do is to make the environment as safe as possible. Therefore technology should be as reliable as possible, and health care as good as possible (though finally you can never avoid dying, because dying is part of life), and security as strong as possible. But better of course is to think wisely, live healthy, think not falsely or with hate, because then terrorists would not be necessary – they just wouldn’t exist. That they are there is our own fault: we have created the history lines which they only follow. And they create new and terrible history lines for themselves.

She initiated more sciences than astronomy and astrology. There should come a science for every possible line of inquiry, she thought.

(86)

(Biology)

Bios means life, and logos means science or word, in Greek. So biology is the science of life.