Psychic Articles

A Theosophical definition of Transmigration :

Transmigration

This word is grossly misunderstood in the modern Occident, as also is the doctrine comprised under the old Greek word metempsychosis, both being modernly supposed to mean, through the common misunderstanding of the ancient literatures, that the human soul at some time after death migrates into the beast realm and is reborn on earth in a beast body. The real meaning of this statement in ancient literature refers to the destiny of what theosophists call the life-atoms, but it has absolutely no reference to the destiny of the human soul, as an entity.

Theosophy accepts all aspects of the ancient teaching, but explains and interprets them. Our doctrine in this respect unless, indeed, we are treating of the case of a "lost soul,"is "once a man, always a man." The human soul can no more migrate over and incarnate in a beast body than can the psychical apparatus of a beast incarnate in human flesh. Why? Because in the former case, the beast vehicle offers to the human soul no opening at all for the expression of the spiritual and intellectual and psychical powers and faculties and tendencies which make a man human. Nor can the soul of the beast enter into a human body, because the impassable gulf of a psychical and intellectual nature, which separates the two kingdoms, prevents any such passage from the one up into another so much its superior in all respects. In the former case, there is no attraction for the man beastwards; and in the latter case there is the impossibility of the imperfectly developed beast mind and beast soul finding a proper lodgment in what to it is truly a godlike sphere which it simply cannot enter.

Transmigration, however, has a specific meaning when the word is applied to the human soul: the living entity migrates or passes over from one condition to another condition or state or plane, as the case may be, whether these latter be in the invisible realms of nature or in the visible realms, and whether the state or condition be high or low. The specific meaning of this word, therefore, implies nothing more than a change of state or of condition or of plane: a migrating of the living entity from one to the other, but always in conditions or estates or habitudes appropriate and pertaining to its human dignity.

In its application to the life-atoms, to which are to be referred the observations of the ancients with regard to the lower realms of nature, transmigration means briefly that the particular life-atoms, which in their aggregate compose man's lower principles, at and following the change that men call death migrate or transmigrate or pass into other bodies to which these life-atoms are attracted by similarity of development  - be these attractions high or low, and they are usually low, because their own evolutionary development is as a rule far from being advanced. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that these life-atoms compose man's inner  - and outer  - vehicles or bodies, and that in consequence there are various grades or classes of these life-atoms, from the physical upwards (or inwards if you please) to the astral, purely vital, emotional, mental, and psychical.

This is, in general terms, the meaning of transmigration. The word means no more than the specific senses just outlined, and stops there. But the teaching concerning the destiny of the entity is continued and developed in the doctrine pertaining to the word metempsychosis.

See also: Transmigration, Mysticism, Body Mind and Soul)

The term has survived in recent times in the vocabulary of modern occultists, particularly Chaotes, or practitioners of Chaos Magic. While beliefs differ wildly amongst various schools of occultism, most would agree on the definition of an egregore as a psychic group entity or meme made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of the group's individual members in a symbiotic relationship. One example, taken from Gaetan Delaforgem from a Gnosis (magazine) article, "The Templar Tradition: yesterday and today", shows that an egregore can be created (or an existing one reinforc ...

See also:

Egregore, Egregore - Egregore in Occultism, Egregore - Examples of Egregores

Read more here: » Egregore: Encyclopedia II - Egregore - Egregore in Occultism

A Theosophical definition of Medium :

Medium

A word of curiously ill-defined significance, and used mostly if not exclusively by modern Spiritists. The general sense of the word would seem to be a person of unstable psychical temperament, or constitution rather, who is supposed to act as a canal or channel of transmission, hence "medium," between human beings and the so-called spirits.

A medium actually in the theosophical teaching is one whose inner constitution is in unstable balance, or perhaps even dislocated, so that at different times the sheaths of the inner parts of the medium's constitution function irregularly and in magnetic sympathy with currents and entities in the astral light, more particularly in kama-loka. It is an exceedingly unfortunate and dangerous condition to be in, despite what the Spiritists claim for it.

Very different indeed from the medium is the mediator, a human being of relatively highly evolved spiritual and intellectual and psychical nature who serves as an intermediary or mediator between the members of the Great Brotherhood, the mahatmas, and ordinary humanity. There are also mediators of a still more lofty type who serve as channels of transmission for the passing down of divine and spiritual and highly intellectual powers to this sphere. Actually, every mahatma is such a mediator of this higher type, and so in even larger degree are the buddhas and the avataras. A mediator is one of highly evolved constitution, every portion of which is under the instant and direct control of the spiritual dominating will and the loftiest intelligence which the mediator is capable of exercising. Every human being should strive to be a mediator of this kind between his own inner god and his mere brain-mind. The more he succeeds, the grander he is as a man.

Mediator, therefore, and medium are the polar antitheses of each other. The medium is irregular, negative, often irresponsible or quasi-irresponsible, and uncertain, and is not infrequently the victim or plaything of evil and degenerate entities whom theosophists call elementaries, having their habitat in the astral light of the earth; whereas the mediator is one more or less fully insouled or inspirited with divine, spiritual, and intellectual powers and their corresponding faculties and organs.

See also: Medium, Mysticism, Body Mind and Soul)

Sadako has a variety of psychic powers throughout all the Ring cycle books and films. The most famous is her ability to create the "cursed" video tape. Sadako Yamamura - The videotape. Main articles: The Cursed Videotape, and [[{{{2}}}]], and ...

See also:

Sadako Yamamura, Sadako Yamamura - Character, Sadako Yamamura - Gender, Sadako Yamamura - Two Sadakos?, Sadako Yamamura - Sadako's powers, Sadako Yamamura - The videotape, Sadako Yamamura - Other powers, Sadako Yamamura - Influences and references, Sadako Yamamura - Portrayals, Sadako Yamamura - Sadako, Sadako Yamamura - Eun-Suh, Sadako Yamamura - Samara

Read more here: » Sadako Yamamura: Encyclopedia II - Sadako Yamamura - Sadako's powers

A Theosophical definition of Trishna :

Trishna

(Sanskrit) The meaning of this word is "thirst" or "longing," but it is a technical term imbodying the idea that it is this "thirst" for the things which the human ego formerly knew, and which it wills and desires to know again  - things familiar and akin to it from past experiences  - which draws the intermediate nature or human ego of man back again to incarnation in earth-life. It is attracted anew to what is to it old and familiar worlds and scenes; it thirsts for the manifested life comprising them, for the things which it formerly made akin to itself; and thus is it attracted back to those spheres which it left at some preceding period of its evolutionary journey through them, when death overtook it. Its attraction to return to earth is naught but an operation of a law of nature. Here the intermediate nature or human ego sowed the seeds of thought and of action in past lives, and here therefore must it of necessity reap their fruits. It cannot reap where it has not sown, as is obvious enough. It never goes whither it is not attracted or drawn.

After death has released the intermediate nature, and during long ages has given to it its period of bliss and rest and psychical recuperation  - much as a quiet and reposeful night's sleep is to the tired physical body  - then, just as a man reawakens by degrees, so does this intermediate nature or human ego by degrees recede or awaken from that state of rest and bliss called devachan. And the seeds of thoughts, the seeds of actions which it had done in former lives, are now laid by in the fabric of itself  - seeds whose natural energy is still unexpended and unexhausted  - and inhere in that inner psychical fabric, for they have nowhere else in which to inhere, since the man produced them there and they are a part of him. These seeds of former thoughts and acts, of former emotions, desires, loves, hates, yearnings, and aspirations, each one of such begins to make itself felt as an urge earthwards, towards the spheres and planes in which they are native, and where they naturally grow and expand and develop.

In this our present life, all of us are setting in motion causes in thought and in action which will bring us back to this earth in the distant future. We shall then reap the harvest of the seeds of thought and action that we are in this present life planting in the fields of our human nature.

In the Pali books of the Orient this word is called tanha.

See also: Trishna, Mysticism, Body Mind and Soul)

A Theosophical definition of Clairaudience :

Clairaudience

In its largest sense Clairaudience means simply "clear-hearing." True clairaudience is a spiritual faculty, the faculty of the inner spiritual ear, of which the psychical clairaudience is but a distorted and therefore deceptive reflection; neither is it hearing with the physical ear, so imperfect and undeveloped a sensory organ as the latter is. The power to hear with the inner ear enables you to hear anything you will, and at whatever distance, whether on Mars, or on the Sun, or on the Moon, or on Jupiter, or perhaps even on some distant star, or easily anywhere on Earth.

Having this spiritual clairaudience, you can hear the grass grow, and that hearing will be to you like a symphonic musical poem. You can hear the celestial orbs singing their songs as they advance along their orbits through space, because everything that is, is in movement, producing sound, simple or composite as the case may be.

Thus in very truth every tiny atom sings its own note, and every composite entity, therefore, is an imbodied musical poem, a musical symphony. (See also Music of the Spheres)

See also: Clairaudience, Mysticism, Body Mind and Soul)

A Theosophical definition of Elementaries :

Elementaries

"Properly, the disembodied souls of the depraved; these souls having at some time prior to death separated from themselves their divine spirits, and so lost their chance for immortality" (Theosophical Glossary, H. P. Blavatsky).

Strictly speaking, the word "elementaries" should be used as H. P. Blavatsky defines it in this quotation from her. But in modern theosophical literature the word has come to signify more particularly the phantoms or eidola of disembodied persons, these phantoms or eidola really being the kama-rupic shades, with especial application to the cases of grossly materialistic ex-humans whose evil impulses and appetites still inhering in the kama-rupic phantom draw these phantoms to physical spheres congenial to them. They are a real danger to psychical health and sanity, and literally haunt living human beings possessing tendencies akin to their own. They are soulless shells, but still filled with energies of a depraved and ignoble type.

Their destiny of course is like that of all other pretas or bhutas  - ultimate disintegration; for the gross astral atoms composing them slowly dissolve through the years after the manner of a dissolving column of smoke or a wisp of dark cloud on a mountainside.

See also: Elementaries, Mysticism, Body Mind and Soul)

A Theosophical definition of Psychology :

Psychology

This word is ordinarily used to signify in our days, and in the seats of learning in the Occident, a study mostly beclouded with doubts and hypotheses, and often actual guesswork, meaning little more than a kind of mental physiology, practically nothing more than the working of the brain-mind in the lowest astral-psychical apparatus of the human constitution.

But in the theosophical philosophy, the word psychology is used to mean something very different and of a far nobler character: we might call it pneumatology, or the science or the study of spirit and its rays, because all the inner faculties and powers of man ultimately spring from his spiritual nature. The term psychology ought really to connote the study of the inner intermediate economy of man, and the interconnection of his principles and elements or centers of energy or force  - what the man really is inwardly.

In days of the far bygone past, psychology was indeed what the word signifies: "the science of soul"; and upon this science was securely based the collateral and subordinate science of genuine physiology. Today, however, it is physiology which serves as the basis for psychology because of a mistaken view of man's constitution. It is a case of hysteron proteron  - putting the cart before the horse.

See also: Psychology, Mysticism, Body Mind and Soul)

SYNCHRONICITY

Jung's word. An acausal connecting principle. Meaningful, psychic coincidence. Roberts says it is the connection between the psychic and the mundane (inner and outer).

Ancient patterns of reality such as astrology or the I Ching depended originally upon socially agreed-upon qualities that linked things. Many of those qualities have now been lost or forgotten, so that only the links remain. Such links, in turn, may extend no further than the names of the objects involved. Our modern systems, though governed by science and reason, are no less the products of social consensus. They no more necessarily reflect the true nature of the universe than the old systems did.

(See also: SYNCHRONICITY, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )

INFLATION

Psychic inflation is much worse than economic inflation. It refers to believing that an idealized image is actually one's real self. Sometimes this can be an archetypal image. Jung describes it as a morbid condition in which the ego becomes exaggerated and, together with the unconscious, invades the self. A real prophet, says Jung, does not identify with god, but says, "a spirit has spoken to me." By keeping the spirit outside we can try to measure up to it. But in inflation, the ego projects its own hatreds, flaws, wekanesses, evils and ugliness onto others (while simultaneously denying their presence in itself) and it grows increasingly unconcerned with the world's reaction. Whereas in the Middle Ages people developed religious inflation (thought they were God), in modern society the affliction is more likely to be political and rationalistic and, in the name of reason, we like to deny the reality of the unconscious altogether. Psychically inflated ego is also pernicious because it generates further ego inflation in others.

An inflated person is a neurotic with whom nobody can deal because no one ever knows which is the real person. Inflation can only be overcome by a balance of patience and humility, and self-analysis of the ego at all times.

(See also: INFLATION, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )

ENANTIODROMIA

Things turning into their opposites. The tendency towards psychic balance (prostitute wanting to become a nun, clown wanting to be a tragedian actor, etc.). Enantiodromia has been called "The Law of reverse effect". Colin Wilson points out in Lord of the Underground that enantiodromia isn't really some deep psychic resistance, as Jung says it is, but is merely the result of the fact that when we are too anxious to do something well, we do it badly.

(See also: ENANTIODROMIA, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )

SCHIZOPHRENIA

It has been defined as a cognitive handicap in which reason is limited to purely concrete processes and neither symbol nor abstraction can be used or understood. What we see, however, is not necessarily impairment, but misplacement. The schizophrenic demands exactitude because he needs firm guidelines in a world that is arbitrary, hostile and irrational. The world, however, believing itself to be sane, views such allergy as a disease, rather than as the simple, psychic defense that it obviously is.

Far from being despised as socially undesirable, schizophrenia should be hailed as one of mankind's invaluable resources. Functional schizophrenia is not madness but a focussing of consciousness that is simply not sanctioned by ordinary society, except in sleep. Animals also inhabit worlds of their own -- the elephant world, the eagle world, the rattlesnake world, etc. which society misunderstands and condemns. Both "incurable" schizophrenics and "untameable" wild animals, therefore, are systematically crowded out to make room for the breeding, conforming multitudes of homo sap.

Admittedly, the "afflicted" have little or no control over their mental state and often feel themselves to be drowning in raging psychic seas, but that is generally in reaction to the insanity of the consensual world and lack of special training in how to use these precious, divine talents. At any rate, our society's longing to "medicate" it totally out of existence is stupid. We can only wish that schizophrenes were better provided for, even pampered -- and very carefully educated -- so as to help them cast off the miserable and crippling paranoia which is its natural enough accompaniment, given the hostility of our world for anything it fails to understand. Most schizophrenes are as abysmally ill-educated as the rest of our society and so can't take advantage of their talent or defend themselves. Their "madness" is, more often than not, no more than the quite "logical" result of ignorance, confusion and fear. If anything, schizophrenics are superrational beings coping with enormous burdens of logic.

Marijuana produces a similar panic which has to be overcome. It too removes the filter that normally keeps us from experiencing the underlying, fundamental chaos of the world. From a functional (i.e., not physically diseased) standpoint, the paranoia resulting from schizophrenia is a normal and successfully adaptive reaction to an extreme and untenable situation, e.g., contemporary society in its habitually evil and mindless mode. And society, in failing to provide a place for these people, is doing all of us a great disservice.

It is as if we forced athletes to run in lead-soled, lumberjack boots and to keep their hands in their pockets at all times. It is as if we expected Rembrandt to content himself with a monochromatic spray-paint gun and an untagged bus.

Since schizophrenia bypasses the psychic censor, it affords tremendous insight into many metaphysical mysteries and considerably increases the level of extrasensory perception. Moreover, it is out of the same matrix that art, discovery, invention and genius evolve. Even "chemical" schizophrenia (whether naturally or artificially induced), can, to a moderate degree be a positive condition. But it is logic and reason, unhampered by any fawning to authority or family values, that most often lead the schizophrenic person into trouble. That is hardly an "illness" to be "cured." It's a line of inner resourcefulness, originality and survival.

Oddly enough, talk like that doesn't, as you might think, go right over my shrink's head. We both realize that he only nods to the establishment flakes in order to survive professionally.

(See also: SCHIZOPHRENIA, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )

siddhi: (Sanskrit) "Power, accomplishment; perfection."

Extraordinary powers of the soul, developed through consistent meditation and deliberate, grueling, often uncomfortable tapas, or awakened naturally through spiritual maturity and yogic sadhana.

Through the repeated experience of Self Realization, siddhis naturally unfold according to the needs of the individual. Before Self Realization, the use or development of siddhis is among the greatest obstacles on the path because it cultivates ahamkara, I-ness, and militates against the attainment of prapatti, complete submission to the will of God, Gods and guru. Six siddhis in particular are considered primary obstacles to samadhi:

-       clairvoyance (adarsha siddhi or divya siddhi),

-       clairaudience (shravana siddhi or divyashravana),

-       divination (pratibha siddhi),

-       super-feeling (vedana siddhi) and

-       super-taste (asvadana siddhi),

-       supersmell (varta siddhi).

The eight classical siddhis are:

1)    anima: to be as small as an atom;

2)    mahima: to become infinitely large;

3)    laghima: super-lightness, levitation;

4)    prapti: pervasiveness, extension, to be anywhere at will;

5)    prakamya: fulfillment of desires;

6)    vashitva: control of natural forces;

7)    ishititva: supremacy over nature;

8)    kama-avasayitva: complete satisfaction.

The supreme siddhi (parasiddhi) is realization of the Self, Parasiva.

See: ahamkara, prapatti, siddha yoga, psychic ability.

(See also: Siddhi, Hinduism, Body Mind and Soul)

THERIOMORPH

Household icons of animals. Deer antlers store psychic energies and keep out negative spirits. Owl ornaments are supposed to guard against fire. Other taxidermic figures serve a multitude of functions.

(See also: THERIOMORPH, Magick, Mysticism, Mysticism Dictionary, Body Mind and Soul, )

Most religions and cultures view dreams and sleep as mechanisms to connect the present physical world to that of the supernatural. Before Buddha's birth, his mother Queen Maya dreamt that a white elephant has entered her body. Similarly, Ramakrishna's mother dreamt that a small green figure, whom she identified as God, was telling her that He will be born in her house. Mother Mary, too, learnt through a dream about the impending birth of Christ. There are innumerable such instances of prophetic dreams.

Read more here: » Prophetic Dreams: Dream Up Solutions With A Focussed Mind