Examining
the Influence of the
Environment
Over Mental and Spiritual Life
Helena
P. Blavatsky
In the East only,
and on the boundless tracts of unexplored Africa, will the student of
psychology find abundant food for his truth-hungering soul.
The reason is obvious. The atmosphere in populous
neighborhoods is badly vitiated by the smoke and fumes of manufactories,
steam-engines, railroads, and steamboats, and especially by the miasmatic
exhalations of the living and the dead.
Nature is as dependent as a human being upon
conditions before she can work, and her mighty breathing, so to say, can be as
easily interfered with, impeded, and arrested, and the correlation of her
forces destroyed in a given spot, as though she were a man.
Not only climate, but also occult influences daily
felt not only modify the physio-psychological nature of man, but even alter the
constitution of so-called inorganic matter in a degree not fairly realized by
European science. Thus the London Medical
and Surgical Journal advises surgeons not to carry lancets to Calcutta,
because it has been found by personal experience “that English steel could not
bear the atmosphere of India”; so a bunch of English or American keys will be
completely covered with rust twenty-four hours after having been brought to
Egypt; while objects made of native steel in those countries remain unoxidized.
So, too, it has been found that a Siberian Shaman who has given stupendous
proofs of his occult powers among his native Tschuktschen, is gradually and
often completely deprived of such powers when coming into smoky and foggy
London.
Is the inner organism of man less sensitive to
climatic influences than a bit of steel? If not, then why should we cast doubt
upon the testimony of travellers who may have seen the Shaman, day after day,
exhibit phenomena of the most astounding character in his native country, and
deny the possibility of such powers and such phenomena, only because he cannot
do as much in London or Paris?
In his lecture on the Lost Arts, Wendell Phillips proves that besides the psychological
nature of man being affected by a change of climate, Oriental people have
physical senses far more acute than the Europeans.
The French dyers of Lyons, whom no one can surpass in
skill, he says, “have a theory that there is a certain delicate shade of blue
that Europeans cannot see. …. And in Cashmere, where the girls make shawls
worth $30,000, they will show him (the dyer of Lyons) three hundred distinct
colors, which he not only cannot make, but cannot
even distinguish”.
If there is such a vast difference between the
acuteness of the external senses of two races, why should there not be the same
in their psychological powers? Moreover, the eye of a Cashmere girl is able to
see objectively a color which does
exist, but which being inappreciable by the European, is therefore non-existent
for him. Why then not concede, that some peculiarly-endowed organisms, which
are thought to be possessed of that mysterious faculty called second sight, see their pictures as
objectively as the girl sees the colors; and that therefore the former, instead
of mere objective hallucinations called forth by imagination are, on the
contrary, reflections of real things and persons impressed upon the astral
ether, as explained by the old philosophy of the Chaldean Oracles, and surmised by those modern discoverers,
Babbage, Jevons, and the authors of the Unseen
Universe?
“Three spirits live and actuate man”, teaches
Paracelsus; “three worlds pour their beams upon him; but all three only as the
image and echo of one and the same all-constructing and uniting principle of
production. The first is the spirit of the elements (terrestrial body and vital
force in its brute condition); the second, the spirit of the stars (sidereal or
astral body - the soul); the third is the Divine
spirit (Augoeides).”
Our human body being possessed of “primeval
earth-stuff”, as Paracelsus calls it, we may readily accept the tendency of
modern scientific research “to regard the processes of both animal and
vegetable life as simply physical and chemical”. This theory only the more
corroborates the assertions of old philosophers and the Mosaic Bible, that from the dust of the ground our bodies were
made, and to dust they will return.
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The above paragraphs
are part of the book “Isis Unveiled”, Helena P. Blavatsky, 1877,
volume I, pp. 211-212. Click to see the book in one of our associated websites. In order
to facilitate a contemplative reading, large paragraphs have been divided into
smaller ones in the present transcription. The text is also published at “The
Aquarian Theosophist”, November 2017, pp. 3-4.
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“The Ecology of Human Consciousness” was published in
our associated websites as an independent article on 01 February 2019.
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On 14 September 2016, after examining the
state of the esoteric movement worldwide, a group of students decided to found
the Independent Lodge of Theosophists. Two of the priorities
adopted by the ILT are learning from the past and building
a better future.
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