Isis Unveiled Quotes

REALITY in an illusionary universe of ever-passing forms.

Man is a little world--a microcosm inside the great universe. Like a fetus, he is suspended, by all his three spirits, in the matrix of the macrocosmos; and while his terrestrial body is in constant sympathy with its parent earth, his astral soul lives in unison with the sidereal anima mundi. He is in it, as it is in him, for the world-pervading element fills all space, and is space itself, only shoreless and infinite. As to his third spirit, the divine, what is it but an infinitesimal ray, one of the countless radiations proceeding directly from the Highest Cause--the Spiritual Light of the World? This is the trinity of organic and inorganic nature--the spiritual and the physical, which are three in one, and of which Proclus says that 'The first monad is the Eternal God; the second, eternity; the third, the paradigm, or pattern of the universe;' the three constituting the Intelligible Triad.

In books such as Isis Unveiled (1877) or The Secret Doctrine (1888), Blavatsky covers everything from archaic mystery cults to modern paranormal research, giving one the sort of global perspective found in anthropology classics such as James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890).

The Kalmucks and some tribes of Siberia also describe in their legends earlier creations than our present race. These beings, they say, were possessed of almost boundless knowledge, and in their audacity even threatened rebellion against the Great Chief Spirit. To punish their presumption and humble them, he imprisoned them in bodies, and so shut in their senses. From these they can escape but through long repentance, self-purification, and development. Their Shamans, they think, occasionally enjoy the divine powers originally possessed by all human beings.

Apollonius and Iamblichus held that it was not "in the knowledge of things without, but in the perfection of the soul within, that lies the empire of man, aspiring to be more than men.

A flower blossoms; then withers and dies. It leaves a fragrance behind, which, long after its delicate petals are but a little dust, still lingers in the air. Our material sense may not be cognizant of it, but it nevertheless exists. Let a note be struck on an instrument, and the faintest sound produces an eternal echo. A disturbance is created on the invisible waves of the shoreless ocean of space, and the vibration is never wholly lost.

397] There are other cycles, of course, cycles within cycles -- and this is just that which creates such a difficulty in the calculations of racial events. The circuit of the ecliptic is completed in 25,868 years. And, with regard to our Earth, it is calculated that the equinoctial point falls back fifty minutes ten seconds, annually. But there is another cycle within this one. It is said that "as the apsis goes forward to meet it at the rate of eleven minutes twenty-four seconds, annually," (see the article on Astronomy in Encyclopaedia Britannica), "this would complete a revolution in one hundred and fifteen thousand three hundred and two years (115,302). The approximation of the equinox and the apsis is the sum of these motions, sixty-one minutes thirty-four seconds, and hence the equinox returns to the same position in relation to the apsis in 21,128 years." We have mentioned this cycle in Isis Unveiled, Vol. I., in relation to other cycles. Each has a marked influence on its contemporary race. [398] See at the end of this Stanza

his peers have expressed considerably more skepticism. “There is nothing Tesla [can] do that we cannot also do,” Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne said in June 2016. Two years earlier, he had asked customers not to buy the Fiat 500e electric car, because the company lost $14,000 on the sale of each one. Fiat would sell the minimum number of electric cars needed to meet government mandates and “not one more,” he said. In April 2016, Marchionne continued that theme in an interview on the sidelines of his company’s annual meeting, this time responding to the price of the Model 3. If Musk could show him that the car would be profitable at the $35,000 price tag, Marchionne said, “I will copy the formula, add the Italian design flair, and get it to the market within twelve months.” The German automakers have been even more dismissive. In November 2015, Edzard Reuter, the former CEO of Daimler, called Tesla a “joke” and Musk a “pretender,” suggesting in an interview with a German newspaper that Tesla didn’t stand up to serious comparison with “the great car companies of Germany.” Daimler, BMW, and Volkswagen were slow to accept that Tesla could one day challenge their market dominance. “German carmakers have been in denial that electric vehicles can create an emotional appeal to customers,” Arndt Ellinghorst, an automotive analyst at Evercore ISI, told the Los Angeles Times in April 2016. “Many still believe that Tesla is a sideshow catering to a niche product to some tree-hugging Californians and eccentric US hedge fund managers.” GM wasn’t quite so blasé. In 2013, then CEO Dan Akerson established a team within the company to study Tesla, based on the belief that it could be a big disrupter. GM’s Chevrolet Volt, a hybrid sedan that could drive about forty miles in full electric mode, had won Motor Trend’s 2011 Car of the Year, but GM was looking further into the future. At the 2015 Detroit auto show, it unveiled a concept of the Chevy Bolt, a two-hundred-mile electric car that would retail for $30,000 (after a $7,500 rebate from the US government). It was seen as a direct response to Tesla and new CEO Mary Barra’s biggest risk since she took over in 2014. Wired magazine celebrated the Bolt’s impending arrival with a February 2016 cover story about how GM had beaten Tesla “in the race to build a true electric car for the masses

The disputants are battling about mere words. Call the phenomena force, energy, electricity or magnetism, will, or spirit-power, it will ever be the partial manifestation of the soul, whether disembodied or imprisoned for a while in its body--of a portion of that intelligent, omnipotent, and individual WILL, pervading all nature, and known, through the insufficiency of human language to express correctly psychological images, as--GOD.

But it is in the denial of the boundless and endless Entity, possessor of that invisible Will which we for lack of a better term call GOD, that lies the powerlessness of every materialistic science to explain the occult phenomena. It is in the rejection a priori of everything which might force them to cross the boundary of exact science and step into the domain of psychological, or, if we prefer, metaphysical physiology, that we find the secret cause of their discomfiture by the manifestations, and their absurd theories to account for them.

beliefs make us act, and our acts are directed by our beliefs.

disease is only the effect of our belief. The belief is of man and as Science sees through man’s belief it destroys the belief and sets the soul or wisdom free.

All disease is only the effect of our belief. The belief is of man and as Science sees through man’s belief it destroys the belief and sets the soul or wisdom free.

So, in the destruction there must be a change. This change must be like its father. So, if you had grief, it would produce grief for the present.

Remember that every error has its reaction, but an unravelling of error leads to life and happiness, while the winding it up leads to disease and misery.

All [so-called] religion is of this world and must give way to Science or Truth; for Truth is eternal and cannot be changed.

This Truth shall shine like the sun and burn up all these errors that affect the human race.

But it is the one who has encountered all the difficulties and found the way through, who knows the sorrow and sufferings because he has borne them in sympathy, who can tell us the whole story.

I remain your friend and protector till the storm is over and the waters of your belief are still.

There must then be a true Science, so he reasoned, which is indeed verifiable.

Knowledge, as I have said, is not wisdom, but it may be harmony and it may seem) like wisdom. Yet there is a discord. So, discord is harmony not understood.

We confound the error and truth together; we take an opinion for a truth. This is an error, for what we know we have no opinion of.

The mind being the matter under the control of the spirit, is capable of producing any phenomenon.

Shall the world lead you, or shall you lead the world?

Wisdom is always the same, it is the point of all attraction, and everything must come to this, it is harmony.

Love is a substance like food that comes from heaven to feed the soul.

Wisdom is not knowledge but the answer to our knowledge.

Truth works by laws, like mathematics; error like chance.

I am not dictated to by any living man, but am guided by the dictations of my own conscience,

when you have arrived at a truth, if you find it attached to a belief, you may know it is not a truth,

MIND IS SPIRITUAL MATTER Thought is also matter, but not the same matter, any more than the earth is the same matter as the seed which is put into it.

Christ was the Wisdom that knew matter was only an idea that could be formed into any shape, and the life that moved it came not from it but was outside of it.

Instead of your happiness being in the world, the world’s happiness is in you.

Weight like mind could never set itself in motion, but being set in motion it is called mechanical power. So is mind set in motion spiritual power.

flowing down upon his shoulders," and as "having

Haec murus aeneus esto: nil conscire sibi, nulla pallascere culpa.

In fact, the theory of correcting disease is the introduction of life.

Some ideas contain no intelligence because the author puts none in them.

What we believe, that we create.” What then shall we create that is worth while?

the cure is not in the medicine, but in the confidence of the doctor

For strength of will proves to be, not the power of a fluid or current, but concentration upon an interest or object that has engaged the attention.

The world is, then, through all its departments, a living arithmetic in its development, a realized geometry in its repose.

NO GOD, NO SOUL? Dreadful, annihilating thought! The maddening nightmare of a lunatic — Atheist; presenting before his fevered vision, a hideous, ceaseless procession of sparks of cosmic matter created by no one; self-appearing, self-existent, and self-developing; this Self no Self, for it is nothing and nobody; floating onward from nowhence, it is propelled by no Cause, for there is none, and it rushes nowhither. And this in a circle of Eternity blind, inert, and — CAUSELESS.

Men and parties, sects and schools are but the mere ephemera of the world's day. TRUTH, high-seated upon its rock of adamant, is alone eternal and supreme.

Man-spirit proves God-spirit, as the one drop of water proves a source from which it must have come.

The day of domineering over men with dogmas has reached its gloaming.

The mercenaries and parasites of the Press, who prostitute its more than royal power, and dishonor a noble profession, will find it easy to mock at things too wonderful for them to understand; for to them the price of a paragraph is more than the value of sincerity.

Paracelsus named it the sidereal light, taking the term from the Latin. He regarded the starry host (our earth included) as the condensed portions of the astral light which "fell down into generation and matter," but whose magnetic or spiritual emanations kept constantly a never-ceasing intercommunication between themselves and the parent-fount of all — the astral light.

Every nation had its Mysteries and hierophants. Even the Jews had their Peter — Tanaïm or Rabbin, like Hillel, Akiba, and other famous kabalists, who alone could impart the awful knowledge contained in the Merkaba. In India, there was in ancient times one, and now there are several hierophants scattered about the country, attached to the principal pagodas, who are known as the Brahma-âtmas. In Thibet the chief hierophant is the Dalay, or Taley-Lama of Lha-ssa. Among Christian nations, the Catholics alone have preserved this "heathen" custom, in the person of their Pope, albeit they have sadly disfigured its majesty and the dignity of the sacred office.

The modern fakirs, as well as the ancient gymnosophists, unite themselves with their Âtman and the Deity by remaining motionless in contemplation and concentrating their whole thought on their navel.

According to the exoteric explanation the soma is a plant, but, at the same time it is an angel. It forcibly connects the inner, highest "spirit" of man, which spirit is an angel like the mystical soma, with his "irrational soul," or astral body, and thus united by the power of the magic drink, they soar together above physical nature, and participate during life in the beatitude and ineffable glories of Heaven.

Thus the Hindu soma is mystically, and in all respects the same that the Eucharistic supper is to the Christian.

When the arc attained a certain point which brought it parallel with the fixed line of our terrestrial plane, the man was furnished by nature with "coats of skin," and the Lord God "clothed them.

cooling causes contraction and contraction causes heat; therefore cooling causes heat,

Blavatsky’s new Scripture, Isis Unveiled (1877), was written by invisible Spirit hands. Half a million words long, it began by denouncing the scientific materialism of Darwin and Huxley, and went on to expound its key doctrine, namely that all wisdom is One, that science is not opposed to religion, and that religious differences are man-made. Anyone who has nursed the thought that ‘deep down all religions are saying the same thing’ is more than halfway towards Theosophy. It appealed, said Peter Washington somewhat dismissively in his Madame Blavatsky’s Baboon, to: the world of autodidacts, penny newspapers, weekly encyclopedias, evening classes, public lectures, workers’ educational institutes, debating unions, libraries of popular classics, socialist societies and art clubs – that bustling, earnest world where the readers of Ruskin and Edward Carpenter could improve themselves, where middle-class idealists could help them to do so, and where nudism and dietary reform linked arms with universal brotherhood and occult wisdom.7

If ancestry can be in aught believed, Descending spirits have conversed with man, And told him secrets of the world unknown.

There is an old saying, and a very good one that, when two rogues fall out an honest man gets his due; so, when error is at war, it develops some truth.

True prayer is the desire of the heart, and if the heart is right the prayer will be answered.

there is no truth in an opinion unless it can be put into practice

So true prayer is in our acts, false prayer is in our words,

a truth to a person who cannot understand it is a belief.

This spiritual body is what flows from, or comes from the natural body,

we deny what we profess to believe in almost all we say and do, thereby proving ourselves either hypocritical or ignorant.

Jesus judged them by their works, and told the people to do the same; for He said, “by their fruits ye shall know them.” March, 1860.

Beware of the doctrine of the Scribes and Pharisees, for they undertake to tell of what they know nothing about, and they bind burdens in the form of disease or opinion, and lay them on your shoulders, which are grievous to be borne, and which must lead to death, or the departure from life or health.

What is life? It is admitted that it is something. It is consciousness of existence, and death is the fear of the annihilation of that consciousness.

The natural man never sees anything beyond the idea of his belief.

Then Science will stand out from mind or matter and show how mind can be made the medium of any soul to bring about any belief.

The natural man is nothing but an idea which Science uses to illustrate some fact or problem that is for the development of Science. Then what does man gain or lose by death as it is called? Just as much as any matter that is always changing.

Science that teaches man that he can be moulded to any belief taking a form to suit its author, and that all misery is in ourselves arising from some idea that our soul is in like a prison. The destruction of the prison is the destruction of our belief, and the liberation of our soul from bondage is life eternal. This is God or Science. April, 1860.

Disease is the natural result of ignorance and error governed by discords of the mind.

Then what is it that is not Wisdom, God, or spirit, and not matter and yet can be changed? It is matter held in solution called mind, which the power of Wisdom can condense into a solid so dense as to become the substance called “matter.

Now can anyone tell me what there is that is not matter that can be changed? It cannot be Wisdom.

At death, all were laid in the grave together: the wise man and the fool, the rich and the poor all found their level in the grave.

I will not take man’s belief to guide my barque.

All sensation, when first made, contains no direction, but is simply a shock. Error puts a false construction or opinion upon it, and speaks disease into existence. The mind is then imprisoned in the idea, and all the evils that follow are what are called disease.

Nervous diseases are the effect of the regular’s opinion reduced to a belief, and so are all others.

when you have succeeded in making the person believe this, seeing him tormented and miserable you turn about and accuse him of being fidgety or nervous.

So as perfect velocity casts out weight, perfect knowledge casts out mind or ignorance, and truth reigns in all.

The sting of ignorance is death. But the wisdom of Science is life eternal.

The moon is a figure of the natural man. Its light is borrowed, or the light of the opinions of the sun. It thinks it has light of itself, but the sun’s light knows that it is the reflection of the sun’s light. The wise man in like manner knows that the light of the body or natural man is but the reflection of the scientific man.