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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Wisdom is not knowledge but the answer to our knowledge.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

flowing down upon his shoulders," and as "having

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

ALCHEMISTS — From Al and Chemi, fire, or the god and patriarch, Kham, also, the name of Egypt. The Rosicrucians of the middle ages, such as Robertus de Fluctibus (Robert Fludd), Paracelsus, Thomas Vaughan (Eugenius Philalethes), Van Helmont, and others, were all alchemists, who sought for the hidden spirit in every inorganic matter.

anima mundi,

The will,” says Van Helmont, “is the first of all powers. For through the will of the Creator all things were made and put in motion.

What is this something which thinks and even speaks but yet is not human; that is impalpable and yet not a disembodied spirit; that simulates affection, passion, remorse, fear, joy, but yet feels neither? What is this canting creature which rejoices in cheating the truthful inquirer and mocking at sacred human feeling?

Schopenhauer’s doctrine is that the universe is but the manifestation of the will.

Two people may look at an image of a beautiful woman dressed in blue and disagree: one sees the Christian Mary, while the other recognizes the same image as the Vodou lwa Ezili Freda Dahomey. If they bring over a third person to look at the same image and decide between them, that person may see the Yoruba orisha Yemaya. Similarly, someone viewing a statue of a mother with babe in arms carved from black wood will recognize the Egyptian goddess Isis and her son, baby Horus. Someone else sees that same statue and recognizes Mary and baby Jesus. Yet another person will recognize the Vodou matriarch, Ezili Dantor, with her daughter, Anaïs.

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

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.

The clearer the mirror, the brighter will be the divine image.

If you choose to apply the word strength to machinery, then I have no fault to find with the definition, but if it is applied to man also the definition is wrong; for man’s strength is in his will, and that is independent of the thing you call “strong.

Strength is intelligence; it embraces all man’s wisdom, and if his wisdom is of God or Science his strength is not in himself, and to be wise is to be strong.

Let both be wild and you see a bold race.

Wisdom has no laws, it is the true light.

My theory disproves the assertion, for I have seen that the word strength is a mere word with no more meaning than to lead man astray.

Disease is the effect of a wrong direction given to the mind. Unhappiness is its handmaid.

In order that a disease shall be created, a shock must first be produced. You cannot move anything unless you first start it. There must be a shock, be it ever so slight, a little excitement, fright, pleasure, anything which would produce a disturbance in the system.

You will see religion in its purest state under the most despotic form of government, and you will always find disease under some despotic power of religion, and those who undertake to rid the world of this evil are like demagogues in a despotism. Such is the essence of hypocrisy intended to keep the masses weak so they can be ruled. Starve the masses and you destroy their energy and make them desperate, then the more enlightened will submit to the leaders for their own safety.

What is disease? It is false reasoning. True scientific wisdom is health and happiness. False reasoning is sickness and death; and on these two modes of reasoning hang all of our happiness and misery.

Truth never binds or separates one truth from another and all belief that has a tendency to separate us is error and makes unhappiness. Error always tries to separate one from another.

I came to the conclusion; that ignorance begets error, error begets fear, fear begets courage, and Wisdom destroys them all.

Man’s profession, not his wisdom, is the standard of his popularity.

I assert that disease is the offspring of opinion.

Fear is error, Wisdom casts out fear, for it knows no fear.

Belief in an idea that cannot be seen by the natural eye is as real as belief in the natural world.

Everything that does not come within the natural senses is a belief.

Science suffers long before it becomes a fact.

Dr. Quimby did not deny the existence of matter as an expression of mind. But he did say that there is “no matter in God.” Hence it is legitimate to say in that connection: “all is mind, there is no matter.

Science embraces something spiritual or a revelation from a higher state of being.

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.

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.

Magic is the philosophy of alchemy,

Ought not one who undertakes to edit another’s works at least understand what his author means?

ex nihilo nihil fit.

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

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.

How often you hear this expression used, “such a person murders the King’s English.” This I admit may be the case, if language is applied to the things of this natural world, but if it is to be applied to the spiritual world, or to ideas that cannot be seen by the natural man, then I beg leave to differ from the knowledge of this world, for I know that in such a case the world cannot judge of the correctness of language. In the first place, a healthy person is not a judge of a sick person’s feelings. Therefore, if anyone gives a name to a feeling which a sick person has he names a sensation that he knows nothing of except as described by the sick. In this there is no standard of right or wrong that the people can agree upon. So, everyone sets up his own standard of right and wrong, and if a person is ever so sensitive to another’s feelings, he must use such terms as the world admits, or he is ignorant of the King’s English. So, the invisible things must be judged by the visible.

Perfect wisdom embraces every idea in existence,

The Wisdom that is superior is that which sees and knows the principle of the game.

The wise of this world who base their theory on opinions steal all they can from their neighbors,

Science or Christ enters the cities or towns, and pleads the case of the senses that are imprisoned, and if he gets the case, the prisoner is set at liberty, or the senses detached from the idea, and the error in the mind explained.

Our next world is here where we are and always must be. This teaches us to do to others as we would have others do to us, because we are all a part of each other. When we injure one part the whole feels it.

So, matter to God or Science is a medium of communication with the natural man in his own language or semblance.

The minds of individuals mingle like atmospheres, and every person’s identity exists in this atmosphere.

To know that you exist is a truth, but to prove that you always will exist is a science.

Men and parties, sects and schools are but the mere ephemera of the world’s day.

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.

Ex nihilo nihil fit; prove the soul of man by its wondrous powers

Ex nihilo nihil fit; prove the soul of man by its wondrous powers — you have proved God!

All that is seen by the natural man is mind reduced to a state called matter.

This world is the shadow of Wisdom’s amusements.