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The "I" that has no flexibility to incorporate the many ideas surrounding an experience, isolates its self and its ideas from all other self's and their ideas.

There is a story about three blind men who would get together once a week when their families would travel into town to shop for their supplies. The families would gather in the center of town where they would leave their blind relatives to visit with each other as they went about their business.
The three would be busy chatting about whatever was of interest to them personally during the course of the previous week, sharing their experiences and catching up on the latest gossip.

One day a traveler passed through town on an elephant. The event was something to speak of since not many elephants passed through their part of the country.
The town instantly came alive with the excitement of the event. The three old men were wondering what all the excitement was about and asked some boys they heard passing by what was making everyone excited.
"“There’s an elephant passing thru the town,” one of the boys replied."

“"I'’ve never seen an elephant, nor do I know what it might look like",” said the blind man. "“Neither have we" said the other two together.”

The boys, somewhat amused that the three blind men didn’'t know what an elephant looked like immediately offered to take them to the elephant, to let them experience for themselves what an elephant might look like.
The boys being somewhat mischievous thought it might be fun to play a trick on the three men when they arrived, so when they came to the elephant they took them each to a different part of the elephant to feel the elephant and experience it.

The first was led to the Leg where he felt around the rough skin, and upward to what seemed a gigantic immovable object firmly planted in the ground.
He was then led back to his friends who listened to his description of a beast, “"So big and solid, it was like a Tree standing firmly in the ground."
”
The second man was then led up to the front of the elephant where he began exploring the long trunk of the beast, the elephant being uncomfortable with the grasping hands of the man twitched his trunk sending the man flying to the ground. When the boy led him back to his friend he gasped in exasperation, “"This elephant is a wild snake, most unpredictable and dangerous."” The first man said to them, “"This cannot be, you cannot have touched the same beast as I."
”
Finally the third man was led to climb upon some stacked crates at the side of the elephants head and his hands guided to the ear. As he explored the huge ear he exclaimed, "“Finally, I have solved this mystery, neither of my two friends have accurately described this elephant for it is like a giant living carpet."
”
The boys thoroughly amused with themselves led the men back to the square where they argued over which description and experience was the correct one.

For the next few weeks the men relentlessly argued over the differences in their experience of the elephant.

Then one day, a man who had a reputation of being a wise sage and a great healer happened to be passing thru town and caught wind of the arguing blind men.
He listened to their arguments of the elephant, each describing the different experiences and refusing to acknowledge any truth in either of their friend’s experience.

The sage then stepped into the conversation and introduced himself. The three friends having heard of the sage asked if he could settle this dispute once and for all.
He then said to them, "”Your blindness far exceeds your physical senses, it is not your eyes that do not see but your beliefs in the separation of your experiences. If you were to work together to discover the truth of the elephant I would heal your eyes that you may truly see this elephant for yourselves."
”
The sage promised to return the following month to see if they could come to any new conclusions regarding their experiences of the elephant.

Again in the weeks to follow, much to the irritation of their respective families, they talked incessantly about their experiences of the elephant, trying to solve the mystery of their differences.
Finally one of the three men remembering the snickering boys as they were each led to the elephant, suggested that maybe they had been misled to experience different parts of the elephant and neither had quite grasped the entirety of the elephant at all.
This started the men to thinking about incorporating their experiences, and to piece together the mystery of this beast.
The first man said, “Perhaps this tree that I had wrapped myself around was only a leg of this huge beast, and the snake one of many tentacles of this hideous creature, and the huge living carpet, a wing or some other appendage.”
And so the contemplation continued until the sage would arrive.

At the end of the month the sage returned with an elephant and to see if the three blind men had come to any conclusions in their quest for truth.
He went to the square where the men were waiting anxiously for his return and greeted them on his approach.

"Have you come to a conclusion regarding the argument of what the elephant looks like?" he asked.

"We have come to the conclusion that each of our experiences is valid. Even though our experiences and descriptions are different we have come to think that we have each a piece of the puzzle. We think we were misled by the boys who led us to different parts of this huge beast to deliberately set us apart in our experiences of the elephant. Together we think we can get closer to the truth rather than separately, but unfortunately we have only had one brief experience of the beast and without further examination would not be able to accurately solve the puzzle."”

“"Very good,"” said the sage, "“If you would please follow me I think we can put an end to this mystery.”" He then led the three blind me to the elephant.
There he stopped and produced a salve which he administered to the eyes of each of the three blind men.
Within a few short minutes they each exclaimed that they were beginning to see shadow and light. Following that, the vision of the elephant became clear to each of them and they saw for the first time the huge leg that the first man had described as a tree, the long twisting trunk which was first thought to be a snake, and the third man exclaimed, "“Look, look, the carpet is the beasts ear!"
”
The sage turned to each of them and said, "“Each man is born with the senses to experience life, yet we each will experience it as we wish to experience it. God and his creation are not set in any stone or single experience but lives in all experiences. To fully understand God's creation one must not exclude any part, or the experience of someone who does not see or experience the same as another, one must integrate all of the experiences or parts of the whole in everyone’s experience to see the whole more clearly."


If you insist on boxing the universe up into definitions, or if you insist on taking the infinite possibilities of discovery and isolate them from you because you don't like what others see or say. You will miss something that might show you the way.

There is a another story a Doctor once told me.
Years ago there was a medical convention. A large group of doctors got together to discuss new discoveries from all around the world. One man spoke up and said he had some ideas regarding the prevention of cervical cancer. By taking cell samples and applying a certain process one might recognize characteristics within the cells that would eventually develop into cancer.
The man was laughed out of the convention by his peers.
That man was George Papanicolaou (1883-1962), a Greek-born physician and scientist who moved to the U.S. In 1923. He developed the pap smear which is used by doctors all over the world today to detect cancerous cells in the uterus.

Just 'cause you don't like the name or idea someone else comes up with, don't mean it's not gonna fit into your experiences or answer your questions.
Prejudice deludes the greatest of thinkers.

. Scientific Research Demonstrates the Supremacy of the Mind.

How does our mind make us sick? There has been some fascinating research over the past fifteen years which shows just how closely connected our minds are to our bodies: our habitual thoughts determine the state of our health and even our longevity.

One of the earliest and most interesting studies was performed on some rabbits at Ohio University in the seventies.
The scientists were attempting to prove the relationship between a toxic, high cholesterol diet and hardening of the arteries.
They thought that if they fed the rabbits' high cholesterol food, they should logically develop high blood pressure, hardening of the arteries and the other symptoms we have learned to associate with heart disease, which is still the largest killer in the Western world.
The experiment was going along very well, with most of the bunnies developing the expected symptoms, except for one group of rabbits that were not having the expected results. The scientists just couldn't understand it -- they were feeding the rabbits in this group the same high cholesterol food, but the rabbits just weren't developing any of the predicted symptoms. No high blood pressure. No hardening of the arteries. No hypertension. Nothing.
Fortunately for the study, and unfortunately for the rabbits, the technician who was feeding that particular group of rabbits fell ill. Almost immediately, her rabbits started developing the expected symptoms! Naturally the scientists were curious as to why and asked her what she had done differently.
"Why nothing," she said, "I fed the rabbits the food as you told me to. I took them out of their cages, held them, stroked them, and sang to them, fed them. Wasn't this right?"
It was the same food, but the rabbits' minds turned the high cholesterol food into other channels, which protected their health! The scientists were amazed. They thought they were studying hardening of the arteries; they were really studying the effects of love. They tried this over and over again and found that rabbits that were loved simply wouldn't fall ill as readily.
Isn't this amazing? And this was just rabbits, not even people! How can love change the effect of food?

So the moral is: if you're going to eat Big Macs, sit on your boyfriend's lap or if you are a boy, have your girlfriend sit on your lap while you're eating it.

Our minds control affect our bodies. You've probably heard of the placebo effect? 30% of patients can be given a chalk tablet and told that they will get well and they do get well. There is also a nocebo effect. A physician tells a patient, "I'm very sorry to tell you, Mrs. Jones, but your breast cancer has metastasized throughout your internal organs; you'll be dead in six weeks." If Mrs. Jones believes her doctor, her body will respond and kill her.

For decades, surgeons assumed that if you were unconscious during surgery, it didn't matter what was said in the operating room. But it was found that what is said affects the likelihood of recovery! If they open you up and say, "Oh, look at that, it's worse than we thought -- " then your chance of recovery goes way down. The more positive the surgeon's remarks, the greater the chance of recovery. The power of the mind is awesome.

In a study of four hundred spontaneous remissions of cancer interpreted by Elmer and Alyce Green of the Menninger Clinic there was only one factor in common -- every person changed his or her attitude before the remission occurred, fundamentally changed his or her way of thinking, became more hopeful, courageous, positive. They somehow broke through the collective consciousness, through their self-destructive beliefs and programs and changed their minds on a fundamental level, deep inside. And so they were "miraculously" cured.

The collective belief system extends deeply into our minds. Did you know that our society has even given us a standard time to die? I'm not kidding! There is a day and a time when it is more likely you will die than any other? Do you know when that is?
9 AM on Monday morning. Why is that? It just seems easier to die than face another week of this horrible job! This is a truly remarkable achievement of our species. Presumably no other species recognizes which day Monday is. The power of the mind is everything.

Some scientists at the University of Miami a few years ago heard of the rabbit study in Ohio and decided to do an experiment to see if this effect might also hold true for humans. They decided to do a study on preemies -- premature babies -- because in intensive care, they are very expensive and the rate of survival is not that high. What are we, seventeenth in the world for infant mortality? Not so hot. So three times a day for fifteen minutes, wearing rubber gloves, the technicians stroked the tiny babies inside their intensive care units. They didn't call it "stroking," of course; they called it "tactile kinesthetic stimulation," which is the Orwellian term for stroking. God forbid we should call it love!
These scientists concluded that tactile kinesthetic stimulation is cost effective, for these preemies gained an average of 49% more weight per day, which meant that they were discharged from intensive care an average of five days earlier for a saving of $3,000 per admission. The amazing thing to me about this study is that it ever had to be done! How could our doctors and scientists have become so absurdly divorced from common sense to have to do a study to prove this, a fact that any mother knows? My heart especially grieves for the preemies in the control group at the University of Miami who didn't have the good fortune to experience tactile kinesthetic stimulation. But the good news is that most hospitals are embracing this information and are permitting more contact with newborns. Physical contact for newborns is vital to ensure proper development and growth.

Dr. Herbert Specter at the National Institute performed another study that illustrates this mind-body connection even more graphically for Health -- this one on some mice. Dr. Specter divided the mice into two groups. One group was the control group; he gave a potent immune-system-stimulating drug called Poly I-C to the other. Poly I-C increases the number of killer T-cells in the immune system. When he gave the drug to the mice, he also exposed them to the smell of camphor. It is a pungent-smelling material that most drug stores sell in the form of little white cubes. People think it helps with congestion and breathing problems. It is impossible to forget the scent once you've smelled it. It's the active ingredient in Campho-Phenique. Dr. Specter treated the mice for a few weeks with the Poly I-C and the camphor, and then took the drug away and just let them smell the camphor. Do you know what happened? Their immune systems were still stimulated -- they had become mighty mice -- no bacteria could make them sick, no tumors would develop if they were exposed to cancer- causing agents.
Another group tried this the opposite way at the University of Rochester. They took rats and administered a potent immune-system-destroying drug, cyclophosphamide -- cyclophosphamide is used in organ transplants, it keeps the body from rejecting the new organ -- and at the same time gave them a taste of saccharine-sweetened water, substituting this for camphor as a neutral agent. After doing this, a number of times, they took the drug away and just allowed the rats to taste the water. With just the smallest taste of the sweetened water, they would fall sick, develop tuberculosis or pneumonia from the slightest intrusion of bacteria or develop cancer from a very slight exposure to a carcinogen. Do you see what's going on here? The two groups were interpreting a completely neutral agent differently.
This shows how much our interpretation of reality influences our experience of reality. If we have learned to associate bad health or unhappiness with our experience of life, it becomes a very difficult habit to break.

Think of a set of twins. Both have identical backgrounds, both have the same parents, the same heredity, the same environment; they are treated virtually the same. What happens? One grows up to be successful and happy, has a wonderful family, lives to a ripe old age. The other becomes an alcoholic and is dead by thirty-six. What causes the difference? The interpretation of reality. Our society may have deeply programmed condemnation and judgment into us, and we may have learned to look at all of life and say, "Oh, bad, the glass is half empty." But it is just as easy to say, "Oh, good, the glass is half full." And that is completely within our power.

It is the mind that is dominant. In Massachusetts, a group of scientists were studying the risk factors for heart disease because about 50% of those who contract this fatal killer didn't fit any of the known profiles: they didn't smoke, they didn't have a high cholesterol diet, they didn't even have hypertension, and yet they had a myocardial infarction, a heart attack, and died. Why?

These scientists found that they could ask two very simple questions to determine whether a person was likely to have heart problems. Do you know what these two questions were? First, "Do you like your job?" If you could say, "Yes," to this, your risk of heart attack falls by 50%. And second, "Are you happy?" And again a, "Yes," answer drops your risk of heart attack by another 50%. What is the difference between health and disease? It seems more and more it is determined by our thoughts, our beliefs, the way we use our minds.
Another study showed that if you do happen to have a heart attack, your chance of recovery is virtually 100% if you are happily married. This was found much more important than diet, exercise or smoking. The mind controls the body, not the other way around. The old thinking was that the body was dominant and the mind was a ghost in the machine, a fantasy. But if you take the body away, the mind remains! This was confirmed by Karl Lashley, a pioneer in neurophysiology. He trained rats to run in a maze, and then began to systematically remove their brain tissue. He kept taking out more and more and found that their brains worked just fine. He took out as much as 90% and the rats still could run the maze!

The average lifespan of a Doctor is about 57 years, yet we have given these doctors the authority over our health.

Theosophy has been called many things. Within those many things are known the above basics of the influence of belief, opinion and idealism of the ego.
Science is responsible for every mechanical and medical advancement within civilization that has contributed to the poisoning of the mind and the earth. With every question that is answered so does it also create a dozen more questions.

Science without a heart is like a mind without conscience. Science without religion is the same thing.
There is dogma in religion and science.

Examples of self proclaimed deities and generalization regarding theosophy are all based on prejudice and small thinking. People taste a bad apple once and give up apples for life because of the limited perceptions of one idea they follow.
It is good to be wise about the choices we make to avoid stamping prejudice and narrow mindedness into our belief systems.