Are recovered memories real? Richard McNally, Harvard psychologist, believes that people can and do make up powerful false memories that later take real form. Research in this direction has shown apparently sane people claiming to have memories of long repressed events, including sexual abuse, alien abduction, and past lives. Many of these cases of sexual abuse of children, of people being abducted by aliens with froglike eyes, and being dissected by them, etc., involve "supposedly recovered memory," says McNally. Many psychologists are now skeptical about Freud's concept of repression of distressing emotional events. "Researchers are at war because there is no definitive evidence that life-shattering events can actually be buried for years, as Freud suggested, then winched out of the deep waters of the subconscious like a long-lost corpse. Yet people who claim to have done exactly that are tremendously convincing," writes Jill Neimark (Discover, August 2004). Since the 1970s, a psychologist, Elizabeth Loftus, has been implanting false memories in individuals, in lab studies. She has shown that implanted memories can influence behaviour. For instance, she successfully led people to believe that they got sick eating either hard-boiled eggs or dill pickles. McNally attributes false memories to fantasy and absorption—vivid imagining capacities. What we cannot remember, we invent. Psychologist Marcia Johnson notes: "When the brain strives to re-create an event, it often grafts details of other memories onto it."

H.P.B. describes memory as "the most unreliable thing in us." Memory "is a recording machine, a register which very easily gets out of order." Further:

Memory—the despair of the materialist, the enigma of the psychologist, the sphinx of science—is to the student of old philosophies merely a name to express that power which man unconsciously exerts....to look with inner sight into the astral light, and there behold the images of past sensations and incidents. (Isis Unveiled, I, 178-79)

H.P.B. points out that brain is not the seat of memory. Brain cells "are the receivers and conveyers of all the pictures and impressions of the past, not their retainers. Under various conditions and stimuli, they can receive instantaneously the reflection of these astral images back again and this is called memory, recollection, remembrance; but they do not preserve them." (U.L.T. Pamphlet No. 25, Foreword)

During sleep, the astral body (soul) becomes free and travels round visible and invisible worlds. Pictures and images seen during astral travels are impressed on the brain, but we remember nothing upon waking up. However:

The impressions of scenes and landscapes which the astral body saw in its peregrinations are still there, though lying latent under the pressure of matter. They may be awakened at any moment, and then during such flashes of man's inner memory, there is an instantaneous interchange of energies between the visible and the invisible universes. Between the "micrographs" of the cerebral ganglia and the photo-scenographic galleries of the astral light, a current is established. And a man who knows that he has never visited in body, nor seen the landscape and person that he recognizes, may well assert that still has he seen and knows them, for the acquaintance was formed while travelling in "spirit." (Isis Unveiled, I, 180)

H.P.B. affirms that suggestions made by an adult during the childhood period or by a hypnotizer do not fade away but leave an impression that surfaces later. Thus:

Crying children frightened into silence by the suggestion of a monster, a devil standing in the corner, by a foolish nurse, have been known to become insane twenty or thirty years later on the same subject. There are mysterious, secret drawers, dark nooks and hiding places in the labyrinth of our memory, still unknown to physiologists, and which open only once, rarely twice, in man's lifetime, and that only under very abnormal and peculiar conditions. (Lucifer, Vol. VI, June 1890)

Mr. Judge suggests—in another context—that we carry pictures and images in our aura—which include pre-natal impressions—which are not always developed into memory, but await appropriate conditions. Thus:

These pictures are found in the aura of the person, and are due to pre-natal impressions. Each child emerges into life the possessor of pictures floating about and clinging to it, derived from the mother; and thus you can go back an enormous distance in time for these pictures, all through the long line of your descent....There would be no justification for going over a whole lifetime's small affairs in order to tell a person at what time or juncture an image was projected before his mind. Thousands of such impressions are made every year. That they are not developed into memory does not prove their non-existence. Like the unseen picture upon the photographer's sensitive plate, they lie awaiting the hour of development. (Vernal Blooms, p. 171)

Our sun is slow in giving up its secrets to the modern scientists. "The sun is the Rosetta stone of astrophysics....But it is a stone that we haven't been able to decrypt entirely," says Goran Scharmer, director of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences' Institute for Solar Physics. Even with latest equipment and technologies, scientists are unable to explain, satisfactorily, the phenomena connected with the sun, writes Curt Suplee (National Geographic, July 2004). What interior mechanisms produce the sun's mighty magnetic dynamo? Scientists have succeeded in looking beneath the surface (photosphere) of the sun using a technique called helioseismology—a sort of ultrasound scan of the sun's interior. Scientists believe that the sun's magnetic field could be produced by internal motion of plasma. Why do sunspots fluctuate in 11-year cycles, and what effect does this have on terrestrial climate? Scientists link sunspot arrangement with sun's reversal of overall magnetic polarity every 11 years. "Its north magnetic pole becomes a south pole, and vice versa." But, complete understanding of the process still eludes scientists. How is it possible that the corona—which is visible only during the total eclipse of the sun and is farthest from the surface of the sun—is typically hundreds of times hotter than the solar surface? The temperature of the corona is far higher than that of the photosphere (closest to the sun's surface). Where is that stupendous heat coming from?

Most of the solar phenomena must remain a mystery to modern science, as the visible physical sun is only a reflection, a shell or cosmic veil that conceals the true Sun—an invisible orb. The Adepts assert that no spectroscope or telescope that man invented has been able to reflect the true Sun—the body. Adepts deny emphatically that the sun is in combustion or that he is either incandescent or burning, though he is glowing. They maintain that scientists must "look to the 6th state of matter, for divulging to them the true nature of their photospheres, chromospheres, appendages, prominences, projections and horns." The elements known to the chemists are not present in the sun itself but in the outward robes, which contain all the elements present on our earth and many others not yet discovered on our globe. Chromosphere, described as the radiant zone of "red-matter," symbolizes the vital principle in the sun. Regarding the constituents of the sun and the nature of the chromosphere, the Adept writes:

The true Sun...has in him the spirit of every element that exists in the solar system; and his "Chromosphere,"...has the same, only in a far more developed condition though still in a state unknown on earth; our planet having to await its further growth and development before any of its elements can be reduced to the condition they are in within that chromosphere. Nor can the substance producing the coloured light in the latter be properly called solid, liquid, or even "gaseous," as now supposed, for it is neither. (The Theosophist, Vol. IV, September 1883)

The real sun is the head and heart of our system, hidden behind the "robes," the nature of which is not matter, "but vital electricity, condensed and made visible." Further:

The Nasmyth willow leaves, mistaken by Sir J. Herschell for "Solar inhabitants," are the reservoirs of solar vital energy, "the vital electricity" that feeds the whole system....The Sun in abscondito being thus the storehouse of our little Kosmos, self-generating its vital fluid and ever receiving as much as it gives out....(S.D., I, 541)

Just as the blood circulates through the physical body, the vital fluid circulates throughout our solar system, pumped by the Solar heart. Sun contracts rhythmically at every return of the fluid, as does the human heart. The sunspot cycle is explained thus:

Astronomy knows of the fixed cycle of eleven years when the number of solar spots increases, which is due to the contraction of the SOLAR HEART....It is similar to the regular and healthy pulsation of the heart, as the life fluid passes through its hollow muscles. Could the human heart be made luminous and the living and throbbing organ be made visible, so as to have it reflected upon a screen...then everyone would see the Sun-spot phenomenon repeated every second—due to its contraction and rushing of the blood. (S.D., I, 541-42)

Are militancy and terrorism the result of cultural differences, clashes of civilization and discontents of globalization? People often view global culture as a threat to their traditional ways. Samuel P. Huntington, a professor at Harvard University, believes that the processes of social, economic and cultural modernization are responsible for loss of personal identity and group instability, because the collapse of traditional systems of authoritty tends to separate prople from their roots. Organized religious groups, both mainstream and fundamentalist, he says, are growing today to provide people with new sets of moral precepts, new sources of identity, and a sense of meaning and purpose. However, Wendell Bell, a professor emeritus of sociology and senior research scientist at Yale University's Center for Comparative Research, is of the opinion that "Religious revival movements are reactionary, not progressive" (The Futurist, September-October 2004). He believes that universal human values do exist. It is by building a "generally accepted ethical system based on the many similar and overlapping moralities contained in the major religions" that welfare of the future generations can be assured. He writes:

I believe the path toward harmonious global society is well marked by widely shared human values, including patience, truthfulness, responsibility, respect for life, granting dignity to all people, empathy for others, kindliness and generosity, compassion, and forgiveness. To be comprehensive, this list must be extended to include equality between men and women, respect for human rights, nonviolence....encouragement of healthy and nature-friendly lifestyles, and acceptance of freedom as an ideal limited by the need to avoid harming others. These value judgements are not distinctively Islamic, Judeo-Christian, or Hindu, or Asian, Western, or African. They are human values that have emerged, often independently, in many different places based on the cumulative life experience of generations.

However, given similar human values, we must bear in mind the principle of "inclusion." People often limit their ethical treatment to their own groups—people who are of their own race, religion, nationality or social class. "Today, our individual lives...are so closely tied to the rest of humanity that our identities ought to include a sense of kinship with the whole human race and our circle of caring ought to embrace the welfare of people everywhere."

Each one has to make the beginning and set an example. We can begin by accepting responsibility for our own life choices, being more generous towards the behaviour of others. We can widen our circle of concern. "All of us must realize that the human community is inescapably bound together. More and more, as Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, whatever affects one, sooner of later affects all."

All religions are false on the surface—covered over with cobwebs of dogmatism and rituals—and true at the base. The second object of the Theosophical Society [and of the United Lodge of Theosophists today] was comparative study of religions to draw therefrom universal ethics. Mr. Crosbie describes the function of true religion thus:

True Religion must give us a basis for thinking, and consequently, a basis for acting; it must give us an understanding of nature, of ourselves and of other beings. Religion is a bond uniting men together—not a particular set of dogmas or beliefs—binding not only all Men, but also all Beings and all things in the entire Universe, into one grand whole. (The Friendly Philosopher, p. 211)

H.P.B. writes that human solidarity is a logical outcome of the common divine origin of man. Thus:

In sociology, as in all branches of true science, the law of universal causation holds good. But this causation necessarily implies, as its logical outcome, that human solidarity on which Theosophy so strongly insists. If the action of one reacts on the lives of all, and this is true scientific idea, then it is only by all men becoming brothers and all women sisters, and by all practising in their daily lives true brotherhood and true sisterhood, that the real human solidarity, which lies at the root of the elevation of the race, can ever be attained. It is this action and interaction, this true brotherhood and sisterhood, in which each shall live for all and all for each, which is one of the fundamental Theosophical principles that every Theosophist should be bound, not only to teach, but to carry out in his or her individual life....

In every conceivable case he himself must be a centre of spiritual action, and from him and his own daily individual life must radiate those higher spiritual forces which alone can regenerate his fellow-men. (The Key to Theosophy, pp. 232 and 243)