A Thought on Occult Sciences
A major mistake by our culture is that we think that the way we approach things – our scientific approach – is the only legitimate approach. Often we regard our intellectual accomplishments as the acme and summum bonum of a linear process of evolution of the mind (and even of ethics), and our sense organs with its technological extensions as a benefit humanity never possessed before. This has led to extreme arrogance towards ancient, occult and non-occidental teachings in general. Though we may have these technical helps, there is no reason to suppose that the human mind has recently evolved in a big jump; more probably the process of development of the brain and of intellectual capacity has taken millions of years, and the difference between now and some thousands of years in the past or the future can only be marginal. Moreover many cultures have stressed that evolution is cyclic and repetitive, purposeful and goal-oriented. This would imply that our present culture and state of evolution represents only one particular phase in the complex cyclic processes through which the soul acquires the essence of knowledge and wisdom from each “corner” of the universe, each element of space and time, both physically and occult, i.e. hidden for the narrow-minded.
Genuine philosophers and scientists of other cultures were at least equally serious and truth-oriented as we are today. We should do everything, firstly to completely respect, and secondly to try to understand their conclusions and teachings through their eyes, through their purity of mind.
Almost all cultures have believed – or rather knew – that humankind has always been, and still is, guided by greater souls who openly taught or gave hints to guide our thought, our mental and our spiritually intuitive evolution. The result was that deductive knowledge (i.e. from the general to the particular, from teacher to pupil) for them was at least as important and reliable as our (would-be) exclusively inductive approach, which is but trial-and-error through thesis-antithesis-synthesis.
Therefore, in our approach towards archeology, anthropology, chemistry, and medical sciences and so on, in fact towards every discipline we recognize in modern science, it will prove very useful to study all ideas in depth, even if they seem “weird” at our first look.
Taken from: Culture Transcending Education from a Theosophical Viewpoint
