http://eternalawareness.ning.com/profiles/blogs/what-is-it

God Bless,
Hari Om

And Jim: I don’t mind long comments

I wonder whether you’ve read of Graham Hancock? He wrote an excellent, serious and scholarly book “Underworld” showing the mountain of evidence to support the thesis that human civilization extends alot further back than most Archeologist’s and Historian’s are willing to accept. He showed how all around the world there were cities off the coasts that were either 30 metres or 30 feet (I forget) below the surface. (Look up the Yonaguni Monument). He concluded that when the last Ice Age came to an end (I think around 10 – 7,000 BCE) the sea level rose and flooded all the major cities of the various civilizations. As today, we tend to build major cities at sea level close to the ocean for obvious practical reasons.

My personal feelings are that many ancient civilizations retained culture from this pre-deluge civilization, but that most of the histories of this have been destroyed, much of which due to the Christian madness of the Dark Ages. I suspect however, that the Vedic library is an unbroken tradition dating back way into pre-history. It’s not that they are the only civilization to have passed through these periods, only that their’s is the only library to have survived.

Thanks for the explanation of Blavatsky’s definition of Black Magic, I see the point. I have met quite a few people who have had natural psychic abilities but have not wanted to seriously study Spirituality. In EVERY case, things have gone badly as they have stepped into very dangerous ground. I think an essential part of Spiritual development is acknowledging that we need instruction from those that have gone before us.

However, due to the dogmatic acceptence of the masses in some regards, many people today are skeptical of any authority, and any orthodoxy, even an Occult orthodoxy.

Sorry about the length of my comment, I haven’t yet mastered the art of keeping it short (as anyone that has seen my blog would know! LOL).

Take care,
God Bless,
Hari Om,
Jim Clark

Thanks for replying though

So every Katrina, every Krakatoa, every Lisbon Earthquake in ancient times, even in pre-human times, is regarded by somebody as THE Atlantis, and then they start trying to look for evidence of THAT disaster in every world mythology.

Plato invented several myths for teaching purposes, usually saying “a friend of a friend” told him about it. The myth of Er and the myth of the –whatever the name of the spring was in the Phaedrus, I’ve forgotten– don’t seem to have captured our imagination like the Atlantis myth, though.

I say this as someone who wrote a 300+ page book about Atlantis as a child. Who loves the Atlantis Myth. Who went to Santorini and stood in the ruins of that ancient city which is my Atlantis, destroyed in a cataclysm in the Minoan period (just prior to Greece) which really must have left its imprint in the people around the Mediterranean, such that it would’ve been recorded in Egypt and remembered by word of mouth in Greece. It was four times the size of Krakatoa, and the Indonesian tsunami a few years back gives us some idea of the scale of the devastation it wrought.

I wrote at length on Atlantis on my own blog a while ago and should stop typing here… but anyway…

while I can’t believe anything Blavatsky says, I’m falling into the same trap: being too literal. Literally, no, that’s all bunk. Metaphorically, though, humans have a strange yearning for what’s lost, a sense that “We are not now that strength which in old days / Moved earth and heaven” — Tennyson, “Ulysses”. Every cataclysm speaks to us of a reason why things aren’t the way they used to be. And cataclysms, mighty civilizations laid low, fascinate us. We keep projecting farther back, all the way to Eden, this fall from grace, or this fall from a time when things are better than they are now. We keep looking for Atlantis. We want to know that magic once existed, which still lives in our imaginations and dreams, and which doesn’t seem to be in the world around us. We want wonders to be true. Rather than admitting that the mythic world we yearn for doesn’t literally exist (though again, that doesn’t mean it’s a lie… see Joseph Campbell on metaphor, the Sufis, and imaginal reality), we say it once existed, and is gone.

I always fall back on the wisdom of Tolkien, who understood this about myth, even while writing his own myths about a world that wasn’t but might-have-been: “In the cosmogony there is a fall: a fall of Angels we should say. Though quite different in form, of course, to that of Christian myth. These tales are ‘new’, they are not directly derived from other myths and legends, but they must inevitably contain a large measure of ancient wide-spread motives or elements. After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear. There cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall – all stories are ultimately about the fall – at least not for human minds as we know them and have them.” — JRR Tolkien Letters 131

And there, I’ve given you a reply longer than your post, when I meant to be working on my own lenses. I apologize for taking Blavatsky to task and exploding some of your post! But it just proves the ultimate truth: Plato may have (as I think) mostly invented the Atlantis legend, or else that it wasa very local episode nothing like what many “Atlantis experts” now say it is… yet in the imaginal world, Atlantis has taken root, and many of us are fired by it and gripped by its aura. We seek it. It holds some truth for us, the truth Tolkien describes, which can only be conveyed through myth, not literal facts and reason.