Daily Theosophy

most people do not even regard them as life, and study only dead bodies called sand, stone, clay, water, etc. etc., and their properties for practical and industrial use.

(92)

(Geography)

GEOGRAPHY

Geography means ‘describing the earth’. Modern geography teaches were all the countries, cities, villages, rivers, seas, lakes and mountains are. Also where all different peoples live. Geographers make maps. Without geography we could not travel. Geography is something humanity has always wanted to know about. That is how people’s knew how to reach each other and to move to other places to have new adventures.

But if we look in very ancient scriptures, geography is very different from modern atlases or satellite pictures. Not only where their different countries and cities, but there were even different continents. Or the same continents on different places. Or parts of continents were joined while others sank under the sea. There were periods when land sunk, and their were periods when land rose. There were periods when the sea was larger than the land (like nowadays), but there may have been periods when there was more land than sea. Or when their were more islands than mainland, like Polynesia nowadays. Therefore the ‘maps’ in ancient wisdom scriptures are symbolic rather than actual. One can find ancient works, teaching ‘maps’ where the earth is flat and round like a disc and many heavens above it, and hells under it. Some of these maps show seven continents, and they are drawn parallel, separated by rivers, and with straight mountain ranges in the middle. And in the middle of the flat earth disk they drew one huge round or square mountain reaching thousands, or in their descriptions even millions of miles into space, above the earth, but also under the earth. Actually it was said to reach the sun and even the Pole Star, and that all other celestial bodies were turning around its top (as we ourselves can see at night that all heavenly bodies turn around the Pole Star, which is situated right above the North Pole). And that in some presentations these mountains were narrow at the bottom and wide at the top – just the opposite of any mountain you have ever seen. It is said that this mountain still exists today, at the same place. Didn’t these people know that the earth was a globe, and not a disk? And that continents and mountain chains and rivers were not parallel? Where these people that stupid, where they that primitive? Did they really think that there was an upside down mountain somewhere, thousands of miles high? ‘Primitive’ means literally that they were beginning, the first – long before us, that means closer to the time when Praja gave out her first teachings, and that there minds were a bit different from ours.

Ancient descriptions teach us that there is one original, imperishable continent (for as long as the Earth exists), called the White Island, which was near the North Pole, while the North Pole was in the middle of the earth disk, and which still exists today on another place – but nobody nowadays really dares to say for sure where on earth this continent is at present. Around the present North Pole there is only deep sea under the ice. In the ancient descriptions this White Island was around that huge upside down mountain, which was in the middle of it. The mountain had three stories. There were many lands in the continent on both sides of the North Pole, kingdoms and capitals. Some pictures and descriptions say that there are 32 such lands – but maybe that number refers to a later period of the history of that island. It is that island where the first humanity lived, we can read in ancient texts. But there came to be six other continents, but they continuously changed their locations on the planet, and sunk and rose – and that may be the reason why on symbolic maps in spiritual scriptures (which were for teaching philosophy and science rather than for travelling purposes). They were simply depicted as parallel lands, and they had many different civilizations. Very much about the history of these extremely ancient cultures is hidden in Indian scriptures, and in scriptures of other cultures, like the Popol Vuh of ancient Guatemala, and records and believes of other Native Americans – and more. It is said that the descendants of the very ancient peoples, even those from the first continent in the middle, and of all who came later, still live on earth. Even today there are people on earth, like the Nishads in India, who claim to be descendants of that first human race, and there are also people regarding themselves as remainders of three other main races. These ‘races’ have nothing to do with skin color, like negroes or white people – the races I mean here were rather periods of evolution, and they were of many different colors. But today they live in bodies like our own, I think, not in bodies of those days – which could not function under present circumstances on earth – and they live and die like modern people – which was different in the ancient days.

Surrounding that flat disk of the earth with its seven continents, the pictures show a round blue ocean, called the Ocean of Salt Water. So all the continents together formed a round island, embedded in a salt water ocean, just like the modern seven continents, which are usually enumerated as North and South America, Antarctica, Australia and the many Pacific islands, Asia, Europe, Africa. So these ancient maps really show a symbolic picture of the world of all times, not only our time. But then, outside and around the salt water ocean, came another island, surrounding the salt ocean like a ring, which was in its turn surrounded by an ocean, but not of salt water, and then more ring-islands and oceans of milk, curd, honey and other symbolical substances and there too were mountains and rivers on these islands, and animals and people on some of them. And they had their own circular mountain of the middle (though, because they where rings around the first earth, all these middle mountains must in a way have coincided. We can only conclude that these ancient people who made such maps were completely crazy, or had infinite fantasy – or that they knew much more than we today, and that their symbolic maps with its rings around our earth like those of Saturn, were symbolic drawings to convey deep teachings – closer to Praja’s teachings on geography – and that we nowadays have lost the key to understanding these symbols and what is behind them. Could that be so?

When we return to our own earth, the central circle limited by the salt ocean on such maps, we see that on each of the six parallel continents (three on each side of the land where the North Pole was) is an equally long mountain chain in the middle, and just in the middle of each chain is a very clear lake, and in the middle of each of these lakes was an island in the form of a lotus flower, and on that lotus flower was seated a goddess. So all the continents had their own central place, with a central lake with a central island and a goddess radiating good energies to all sides. From each of these divine lakes flew two great rivers, one two the east and one to the west, serving all living beings living on all continents. So the goodness of the goddess of each continent flowed to all living beings on these continents.

This story is just a part of ancient geography. The White Island or Continent gave birth to the people of the next continent, we are told on basis of ancient scriptures, and these to those of the third, the fourth, and finally the earth was populated all over, as we of the fifth race of people know it now, with all its smaller peoples or tribes and cultures which are again and again transmigrating and mixing and giving rise to new peoples and sub-races, and we all belong to them. There will always be seven continents they say, all derived form and subdivisions of the first continent. But some will rise, while others will sink or burn, sometimes violently, sometimes smoothly over time, and peoples will mix and transmigrate and experience and die and be reborn and grow within their immortal essence.

PHYSICS AND CHEMISTRY.

In modern western eyes physics, chemistry and even astronomy are regarded as the sciences of lifeless matter. Scientists study their properties as if atoms and molecules and stars are no living beings. They regard all of these as unconscious, lifeless, joyless – they just are there – and for some mysterious reason science can not understand they have specific conscious properties, like attraction and repulsion, and all combinations of subatomic particles, atoms and molecules. Knowing the properties of physical matter pretty well, we can make new combinations, and arrange them in such ways that they together form instruments, machines, computers, aircraft and plastics and innumerable other things. Modern science has spent more than a century trying to unravel what atoms and molecules are, and has accomplished very much. That is how we developed technology. We have cars and planes and telephones and internet, whereas in the many thousands of years before about 200 years ago, people knew nothing about such things, they couldn’t ever form ideas about these things in their minds. Even the simplest motor or means of distance communication did not exist. Two hundred years ago we used horses, cows, elephants and carrier pigeons for communication, but nothing we had created ourselves. Nature invented electricity, magnetism, nuclear energy and electromagnetic waves and cable networks millions of years ago, or rather they always existed – but we didn’t even know of their existence. Of course Adi and Praja knew, and perhaps some very advanced people or people from prehistoric times of which we have no records, who kept their knowledge secret. Nevertheless all the discoveries we made in the last few centuries and the techniques we invented are based on Praja’s teachings about nature. In ancient scriptures the duality of plus and minus forces like electricity was mentioned prominently. Some people even knew how to counteract gravity, and thus could move through the sky. All this knowledge was forgotten through time, but now comes back in a new form, called technology. Why did Praja not give us these scientific hints we use now one thousand or two thousand or a hundred thousand years ago? If we think about all the wars and jealousies and hatred of the past millennia, we can easily understand that humanity would have destroyed itself. Imaging Julius Caesar or Genghis Khan having fighter plains and nuclear weapons! I think that we in our century would not even have existed, because everybody would have been killed already a long time ago. Even we are constantly at risk, and we need the utmost of our self-control not to destroy the world!

As said before, physical matter is only one type of matter. There exists types of matter which are more subtle than physical matter. They begin where physical matter ends. These different matters have evolved from each other, but have their own characteristics, and they exchange information through interfaces. That is why thoughts influence emotions, and emotions influence what we think (if we allow them), and why thoughts and fine feelings can go together, but can also exist independently. It is also the reason why invisible influences can cause diseases of our physical body, because the physical body, through its etheric body (its model), be influenced by emotions of our astral bodies, which are influenced by thoughts of our mental body, which find a cause in a causal body – where old tendencies are stored. This applies not only to ourselves, it applies to everything in nature. Apart from a visible universe, including those parts which radiate in frequencies which are only perceptible with modern instruments, there are finer universes, planets, solar systems, atoms, molecules which interrelate with ours, and they are all alive.

The deeper properties and knowledge of chemistry and physics will probably not be discovered in our time, because we don’t have the keys to that knowledge – it’s just too dangerous for us (at least for some among us).

(93)

(Psychology)

 PSYCHOLOGY

Psychology comes from the Greek word psyche, which means soul. The word ‘soul’ is used in many ways in modern literature, but here we mean with psyche or soul