—

Man is born an unfinished creature. He cannot walk or talk or feed himself. Long years of care are required to bring him to even the most minimal levels of self-sufficiency.

And yet even after the typical person has reached the stage of functioning that we call adulthood, something still seems to be missing. In a sense, of course, something will always be missing; there are always new horizons to discover and new skills to attain. But the lack may go further. There is a sense in which even the mature human being is incomplete. The Freemasons allude to this when they speak of the candidate for initiation as a “rough ashlar.” An ashlar is a block of stone; in its rough state it fits only approximately into its intended setting. Some kind of process is needed to adjust and polish it so that it is perfectly suited to its function.

Some may balk at this description – are we, after all, nothing more than raw materials to be sent down some assembly line to be made into identical pieces of manufactured goods? That is the kind of transformation society as a whole seems to envisage. And we would do well to mistrust it. The process to which the Masonic initiations allude has something more than mere conformity as its goal; it is not a matter of circus horses trying to break themselves in. It is the opposite: it is a matter of having access to our own potential, developing it, and offering to the service of higher aims.

This process has been discussed often, sometimes (as in Masonry) allegorically, sometimes in more straightforward terms. But even so it has rarely been presented in a reasonably honest and lucid way. Most of the time, developing human potential is portrayed as a kind of hypertrophy – the exaggerated development of certain functions at the expense of others.

Recently I read a magazine profile of a prominent Oxford philosopher. He had written a fourteen-hundred-page treatise on moral philosophy, in which he had examined and refuted all possible criticisms and objections to his thesis. Yet the article said he wore the same clothes each day (white shirt, black trousers) and did not like to look at any building that was not adorned with columns. His capacity for human interaction sounded rather primitive. In the end I was left with the impression of a gigantic cerebrum attached to a vestigial body.

Is this what is meant by developing our human potential? For many people it is. The abstracted philosopher is only one specimen. Others are the athlete who is nothing more than his sport, the painter who can do nothing more than paint. Some of the greatest achievements of the human race have been attained by such people. But the overdevelopment of talents can and does turn into a Faustian bargain. Breakdowns, crises, and collapses seem to dog these individuals. We may envy their achievements, but their fragility warns us against imitating them.

The same holds true for abilities that are considered paranormal. Although science does not care to admit it, it is possible to develop psychic powers such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis. Indeed, in his forthcoming book The Reality of ESP: A Physicist’s Proof of Psychic Abilities, Russell Targ, one of the leading parapsychologists in the US, argues that anyone with a certain amount of (not very difficult) training can develop these skills. Nevertheless, overemphasis on these abilities, no matter how miraculous they may seem, creates problems as well. Psychics, clairvoyants, visionaries, and healers frequently seem imbalanced, having developed one skill or power at the expense of the whole.

That is why I would like to suggest a slightly different model of developing human potential, one that is not designed to serve the interests of society (or business or political powers) at the individual’s own expense, but also one that avoids the trap of hypertrophy of a single area. Hence it begins with the crucial need for balance.

There are many models of the human mind, all of them insightful to a certain degree and all of them to a certain degree incomplete. One of the oldest and simplest sees the human makeup in terms of the body, the emotions, and the mind. We have already seen how some people are underdeveloped in one way or another. Even if we set aside extreme cases, esoteric teachings suggest that this is basically true of everyone. While it’s often easy enough to see someone else’s imbalances, it may not be so easy to see one’s own.

Gurdjieff’s Three Types of Humanity

The great twentieth-century spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff (pictured below) divided the ordinary run of humanity into three types: man number 1, who is orientated toward the body; man number 2, who is centred in his emotions; and man number 3, who sees the world through the intellect. Moreover, Gurdjieff contended, human beings pass their lives in a kind of waking sleep – a low-grade trance populated by illusions and daydreams. These facts are all connected. Our sleep in ordinary life is characterised by the fact that we are overbalanced in one or another of these directions and fail to use the intelligence of the other parts of the mind.

This, then, is the first step toward awakening human potential: to see what type of individual you are, because this shapes how you conceive of the world. Man number 1 is often of a highly practical turn; he can fix anything but may not have the dimmest idea of how to express his emotions, and may not even know what emotions he is having. Man number 2, by contrast, sees everything through his feelings. Artistic types (whether or not they have any real artistic talent) are a prime example; everything is emotion, everything is drama. Man number 3 sees life as a series of intellectual problems. He may be able to discuss philosophical issues brilliantly or add up long rows of figures in his head, but may, as James Joyce remarked of one of his characters, live a short distance from his body. (The Oxford philosopher I have mentioned would be an example of man number 3.)

In all probability you are one of these three types. The first task in awakening human potential is, as the ancient motto said, to “know thyself,” and in a very fundamental sense this means knowing what type you are. One way of exploring this question is by looking at your leisure activities: what do you do with your free time? Are you compulsively active, running from sport to sport or task to task? Do you enjoy spending your time in pleasant fantasies of happier times past or present? Or would you rather curl up with a good book? Leisure activities are important cues because they are not compulsory; you are doing these things because you like them. Of course, work life offers its own share of data. Your profession is often based on type, even in cases where you are not doing the kind of work you want to do. You may think you are really an artist or writer but somehow you have found work as a plumber, and the work comes as second nature to you. You keep at it not because you like it but because it comes easily to you. Despite what he may think about himself, a person like this is probably man number 1.

Very few people are pure examples of any given type; we tend to be admixtures, with bundles of strengths and weaknesses, with skills and affinities that harmonise or conflict in any number of ways. Consequently it is not a matter of simply typing yourself as you might do when taking a test out of a magazine. Knowing yourself is a lifelong course of study.

Furthermore, self-knowledge is not a static process. There is a type of individual who is self-conscious to an extreme degree and can see her strengths and faults with remarkable clarity but is utterly unable to do anything about them. Consequently the next step in developing human potential is trying to consciously balance ourselves, strengthening the weaker aspects of our natures and making sure the stronger ones do not overpower the others. This is one meaning of Christ’s parable of the “evil servant,” who, when his master is away, “shall begin to smite his fellowservants, and to eat and drink with the drunken” (Matt. 24:45-49).

Balancing the Different Aspects of Yourself

Strengthening your weaker functions is never a pleasant task. Inevitably it involves giving time and energy to things you do not like. The intellectual must take up Tai Chi or learn carpentry; the artist must manage financial accounts; the athlete needs to paint pictures or write poetry. Because these are the things we do not like to do, we often find them unpleasant and humiliating, and it is a rare person who has the discipline to persist on his own.

Speaking personally, when I was a high-school student, I realised that my connection to my body was not all that it could be, so I took the somewhat extreme step of attempting ballet. But the rigorous discipline ballet demands of the body was too much for me; I lost interest in it and dropped it after two or three classes. Only years later, as a result of involvement with esoteric disciplines, was I able to work on a more conscious connection with the body through various movements and exercises. But I never took up ballet again.

Another one of my experiences, at an esoteric school in the north of England, casts further light on the sort of work required. The school was moving into a new centre, and a great deal of remodelling was needed. I was there for a residential course, and I was given the job of cutting wall-to-wall carpeting for one of the rooms. I was utterly hopeless at this task. I could not cut the carpet straight; I kept hacking at it and making a mess of it until I was relieved and someone was given the job who was able to carry it out in short order.

Why was the job given to me first? Not because anyone was under any illusions about my skills at laying carpet. Rather it was to show me something about myself, so that, by struggling with an unfamiliar task, I could see where some of my limitations lay. And in fact to this day as a homeowner, I find it a challenge to do the types of household repairs that other men do without trouble and sometimes with pleasure.

As this story suggests, it’s comparatively rare to even out one’s own imbalances completely. If you were really to do so, it would probably take a life’s work, and a life’s work cannot consist entirely of remedying imbalances. Nor is that the ultimate goal. Becoming a well-rounded person is a worthwhile aim, but from a spiritual point of view it still falls short of fulfilling the true potential that every human being possesses. What is this potential?

The student becomes aware of it little by little in the course of struggling with his imbalances. In the first place, he learns to become free from the roles he has identified with in the past. A man thinks, “I’m not a handyman,” but if he has to carry out some task of repair he learns that this is a limitation. His identification with whatever roles he has traditionally clung to – thinker or artist – impedes him in other areas of life. In this way he learns to become free of roles – or at any rate he is a little bit more suspicious of his own tendency to identify with them. This seemingly small step actually marks a crucial point of transition, because it frees up an initially tiny amount of will and attention that had been completely fixed in identification. In short, the student learns that there is an “I” that is separate from, and free from, all the things he has identified with up to this point.

I have spoken of this development taking place in the context of an esoteric school, and while there are not a huge number of these in the world, there are still a fair number. The ones I have encountered range across traditions: Gurdjieffian, Buddhist, Sufi, Qabalistic. Each has its own peculiar orientation, but the general type of training is the same – and in the beginning consists of the kind of work I have been talking about here. The question then arises, is a school necessary? Can you do this work all on your own?

Generally speaking, no. You did not learn how to speak English alone; you did not learn math or cooking or carpentry or whatever life skills you have on your own. Almost always there was some instruction, and usually some instructor, behind your training. You can teach yourself how to do some things, but these are the exceptions in life. Human beings need each other for many reasons, and one of them is learning. While it’s true that people can and do undergo spontaneous moments of awakening that illuminate their being past all previous limitations and preconceptions, these are rare cases, and you can’t count on being one of them. If it has happened to you, you are fortunate. Even so, such moments of awakening are, for many people, mere glimpses intended to motivate them to undertake the hard, slogging work that I have been talking about here.

In any event, at some point in one’s development, something starts to crystallise. And this something consists precisely of the small amount of will and attention that I spoke about earlier. An aspect of the mind begins to awaken and can see that it is not its roles, its tasks, or even its thoughts and feelings and emotions, but can step back and look at them almost as if they belonged to someone else. This is the true “I,” or at any rate the seed of the true “I.”

Ultimate Key to Human Potential: The True “I”

Remember that Christ in the Gospels often speaks of the kingdom of heaven as a seed. The metaphor is apt on more than one level. As the parable says, the sower sows seeds on all kinds of ground. That is, everyone has this seed of the true “I” – somewhere inside of you there is a Self that stands back and can witness, impartially but compassionately, all the doings of your life like a film. But most people take this for granted. They do not see it as important and they do not bother to develop it. To use the language of the parable again, the seeds fall on stony ground or the birds of the air eat them up.

But this Self, this true “I,” is the ultimate key to human potential. Almost all of the parables in the Gospels speak of it in one way or another. It is the pearl of great price; it is the treasure buried in a field that a man sells all he has to buy; it is the light “that lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” Everyone has this and can never lose it; it is immortal and indestructible; indeed it is the only thing about us that is genuinely immortal – everything else will pass away. But you can make contact with it and make it develop and grow or you can neglect it, as the majority of people do and have done throughout the course of history.

The choice is yours – now. Up to this point in your life you may not have been aware that you had this “I” within you or had the chance to develop it. You may have had the dim sense of something missing, or you may have had a vague longing of a journey that you have wanted to take without knowing where or why. This is the journey that you have wanted to take. If you were not aware of it before you read this article, you are aware of it now. And like the man in Christ’s parable of the treasure hidden in the field, you will either go out and sell all you have to buy it (figuratively speaking), or you will ignore it and return to the sleep of ordinary life.

“Seek ye first the kingdom of heaven, and all else will be added unto you.” This true “I” is what the Gospels call the “kingdom of heaven.” If you have it – that is, if you are aware that you have it – the rest of life begins to fall into place, naturally and as it were spontaneously. This does not, of course, mean that life automatically becomes easy. It does mean that you become increasingly able to value things rightly. Money, possessions, status become progressively less important. You don’t need to become an ascetic and cast all these things away. You do need to put them in perspective and see that while they have instrumental value, they do not have ultimate value.

This teaching of the true “I” extends far beyond even esoteric Christianity. The sacred Hindu texts known as the Upanishads speak of it frequently. Here is one example: “Verily… that Imperishable is the unseen Seer, the unheard Hearer, the unthought Thinker, the ununderstood Understander. Other than It there is naught that sees. Other than It there is naught that hears. Other than It there is naught that thinks. Other than It there is naught that understands. Across this Imperishable… is space woven, warp and woof” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 3.8.10).

The Gospels speak of this “unseen Seer,” also known as “the kingdom of heaven,” as a seed. A seed is not a fully developed plant. Similarly, this sense of “I” above and apart from our ordinary thoughts and feelings is also undeveloped when we first come across it. It is developed by further work, and even at a fairly early stage it becomes obvious what this work is. I’m tempted to use words here such as love and compassion, but what I am getting at goes far beyond even these characteristics. To put it as simply as possible, it involves a further insight: that this “I” that exists at the core of my being also exists at the core of all other beings, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate. It is very hard in ordinary language to express the idea that what is most essentially myself is precisely that which I have in common with all others, but this is exactly the case.

Most spiritual traditions speak of a dual path that they characterise as wisdom and compassion or of knowledge and love. While these two potencies may appear at first to be separate, in fact as a student progresses they seem more and more to converge. There is a first level of awakening – to become conscious of the true “I.” The second level is to understand how vast and all-pervasive it is and that so far from cutting us off from others, it is precisely what unites us with them. In this way individual consciousness becomes universal consciousness.

Earlier in this article I mentioned that psychic powers are comparatively easy to develop. So they are. But if they are developed independently of the greater growth that I am speaking of here, they risk becoming a trap. (Practically all the great spiritual traditions warn of this.) By contrast, if we work to grow the seed of the individual consciousness into the greater consciousness that embraces all of us, paranormal powers come more or less naturally. You will not necessarily find that you can read minds or predict the future at will, but you probably will find that you know what you need to know when you need to know it – sometimes in ordinary ways, sometimes in ways that are quite startling.

I have tried, in an extremely brief way, to sketch out some of the key aspects of developing human potential. Of necessity this description will seem somewhat linear. You start as a novice; you experience certain types of insight or awakening; and gradually these insights become more stable and present in your day-to-day life. In a sense this is all true. But the path – if it is right to call it a path – is more circuitous than this. Doubts come after awakening; fear closes in again after times of great opening. More than once it will seem as if all the gains of years of effort have suddenly evaporated. I do not know how to avoid this problem – if it can be avoided. I do know that when one picks up again, after however long a time, the knowledge and faith that one had before reasserts itself, and the long, laborious work of transformation can recommence. As one of Gurdjieff’s pupils once observed, “No conscious effort is ever lost.”

RICHARD SMOLEY has over thirty years of experience studying and practicing esoteric spirituality. His books include Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney); The Essential Nostradamus; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; and Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity. He is editor of Quest Books and Quest magazine, both published by the Theosophical Society in America. His website is www.innerchristianity.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 129 (November-December 2011).

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What is war? It is the result of planetary influence. Somewhere up there two or three planets have approached too near each other: tension results… here, on the Earth, people begin to slaughter one another… They fail to realise to what extent they are pawns in the game… it must be understood that neither… generals, nor ministers, nor parliaments, signify anything or can do anything.
– G. I. Gurdjieff

War may be understood in many ways. Materialists see it simply as an outgrowth of our animal instincts and the battle for survival while others may see a more conspiratorial hand at play. There is another view, one found at the heart of esotericism, especially that of the Fourth Way taught by the spiritual teacher G.I. Gurdjieff (1866?-1949). It is a view that argues war comes not from inside man or from governments, economics or politics, but from outside. It ultimately derives from various configurations and interactions of the planets, especially the Moon, and from the fact man exists in such an undeveloped state that he is totally unprotected from such influences. Unless we understand this and take full conscious control of our lives, we will be bounced back and forth by not only planetary forces but by the ebb and flow of everyday existence. Gurdjieff called this lack of control the influence of the Law of Accident.

The Ray of Creation

To fully appreciate this model we need to consider the esoteric cosmology of Gurdjieff. The Ray of Creation (see diagram) is similar to all traditionalist cosmologies that posit a “great chain” of being from the Absolute down to the physical. In the Fourth Way model this Ray includes increasing levels of laws and diminishing degrees of freedom. The Absolute has 1 law and represents the true freedom of the perfect Individual, while dead matter has 192 laws. The Earth has some 48 laws and the Moon 96, and there is a special relationship between the Earth and the Moon that we will examine in more detail later. The significance of this Ray is that it shows how the Earth with 48 laws is under the influence of both forces from above and below. And when planets align their influences increase, hence the power of the Law of Accident accelerates.

This may seem all rather cosmological but these forces have a direct relation to the nature of man and on human behaviour.

The Bodies of Man &the Ray of Creation

Each of the four human bodies relate to spheres in the Ray of Creation. The physical to “Earth,” the astral to “all planets,” the mental to “the Sun,” and the fourth body, which must be developed and exists only in potential, to “all Suns.” Each body is influenced by the related sphere and its equivalent laws. Since the astral body of the human organism is related to “all planets,” it is directly affected by alignments that help to mould and control the human unconscious. While we think we are aware and have a sense of independent will and autonomy, in the Fourth Way and other esoteric traditions it is argued this is an illusion. We are robots controlled by the influences of the planets on both an individual and collective level, unless we directly and wilfully take control.

The Kundabuffer

One of the primary ways these forces influence mankind is through that strange organ known as the Kundabuffer. The Kundabuffer is described by Gurdjieff as the creator of illusion – it causes us to daydream and believe we are awake when we are actually asleep. It creates buffers or denial mechanisms that stop us seeing the world as it really is, and allows us to be controlled by the ebb and flow of the planets (and other forces). The term Kundabuffer is seen by many as an adaptation of the Vedic concept of Kundalini. Kundalini is a psycho-physical force located at the base of the spine; it controls the organism on psychological, etheric and perhaps even physical levels through the seven Chakras. Kundalini and the Chakras operate like cosmic antennae receiving influences from the planets and beyond. Initiates can use these forces to great benefit, but in the average person they are simply mechanisms of control.

The chakric system has both positive and negative potential. While most New Agers see the Chakras and Kundalini in a positive light, both Traditional Tantra and Gurdjieff are more critical. Kundalini is the power of Kali, the goddess of gnosis and also illusion. She spins the web of Maya (illusion) and deceives mankind, inviting them to awaken and see through her game. As Maya she is the goddess of destruction and is depicted in either a four-armed or ten-armed form. Her skin is dark blue and she has red eyes filled with lust and rage. She has fangs and her tongue lolls. She wears a skirt of human arms and a garland of heads. Woe to those who approach her without gnosis, but to those who see through her illusion she becomes either a mother or a lover. The two forms of Kundalini are important as they represent the human condition, enslaved to illusion and controlled by the planets, or awakened and in a state of self-awareness.

Food for the Moon: The Lunar Path

The Moon plays a significant role in this process. It is ruled by 96 laws and is at the lowest ebb of the Ray of Creation save dead matter itself. It is a dead parasite planet feeding on the energies of Earth, recycling them back into the world sphere. In the Tantras we learn the secret of the Moon – it is the gateway of the unawakened dead. In the Fourth Way, Buddhism and many other esoteric schools, mankind does not naturally have a spirit or self – a true individual identity must be forged through action. When an unawakened being dies the karmic factors that make up their experiences are cycled through the lunar sphere and reincarnated on Earth. In the Vedas this is known as the “Path of the Ancestors.” It offers no true immortality, simply a constant repetition of the same conditions time and time again until the cycle of the ages end at the conclusion of the Kali Yuga or Ragnarok. At that stage if a “package of karmic” factors has not been forged into a discrete self, it will be dissolved into the cosmic night and cease to exist. In philosophical terms Friedrich Nietzsche described this process as eternal re-occurrence that can only be broken through the evocation of the “will to power.”

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’ … Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: ‘You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.’
– Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 341

Since mankind is “food for the Moon,” the role of the Moon and the planets is not passive, each emanates various forms of energy which can be helpful or inimical to man’s development. As we have no conscious control over them, they influence us is at their whim. In traditional magical practise each planet has a spirit and an intelligence. According to Francis Barrett in The Magus, the intelligence is an evolving force trying to awaken man while the spirit is an enslaving force trying to deceive. In many ways this model reflects the two modes of Kundalini (and Kali) on a much larger scale.

19 March & Lunar Influences

One of the most significant influences is the Moon. It feeds on human karmic factors and recycles them back to Earth endlessly, and has far greater effects. The Moon controls the tides, pulls on Earth’s gravity and supposedly agitates the psychological state of the mentally ill. Furthermore, its goal is to become a planet in its own right. According to the inner teachings of G.I Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, Rodney Collin and Boris Mouravieff, the spirit of the Moon absorbs some of the life force before it transmits the karmic factors back to Earth in a long and slow trek to once again become a living planet. Since it broke off from Earth, it is a bitter soul, lonely, barren and angry, feeding off the energy of others and attempting to reboot its lifecycle. As part of this process, certain unique alignments allow the Moon to increase its influence, causing disaster and suffering that helps accelerate its access to life energies and hence shorten its quest to once again become a living planet.

On 19 March the Moon came closest than it had to Earth in 18 years, making it a ‘Supermoon’. It was 20% brighter and 15% bigger than a normal Moon. The size of the Moon’s orbit varies slightly; the Supermoon was just 356,577 km away from Earth. Of course scientists argue this has a minimal physical effect on the Earth, and this may or may not be true, but the spiritual influence of this event cannot be underestimated. Not only did we have the huge earthquake and tsunami of 11 March and the ongoing Japanese nuclear crisis, but due to the Moon’s need to feed, war is also on the horizon. The role of violence and sacrifice to release life force has always been known since the earliest times, with the use of blood sacrifice and the manipulation of war by earthly leaders. What is less known is the cosmic use of war by the lunar sphere for its own ends.

While many pagans see the Moon as a symbol of the natural cycles of Earth, other older traditions see the Sun as the bringer of life and the Moon as a destructive force that must be kept under its submission. In such a system the Moon is seen as the bringer of war and pestilence when individuals and collectives do not control its baneful influence. The attack on Libya began on 19 March and certainly represents the irrationality of war. Reliable sources on the Libyan civil war are hard to find, yet it does seem that Muammar Qadhafi is fighting to protect his country from incursions by external sources such as al-Qaeda, and capitalists who just can’t wait to get their hands on his oil. Of course we do not hear about these factors in the news since the attack on Libya has been carefully media managed and has more in common with a psy-op than a civil war. As the Moon feeds war and destruction, delusion is spread individual to individual, mind to mind, and memes of collective madness take hold.

Magical Idealism and the Solar Way

Is it possible to escape the force of the Moon or are we just enslaved by cosmic influences? Whether we discuss the Fourth Way of G.I. Gurdjieff or the Magical Idealism of Julius Evola, both argue that only through creating a Self and taking full responsibility for our thoughts, emotions and actions can we remove ourselves from the influence of the planets and in Gurdjieff’s terms escape the Law of Accident.

For Gurdjieff this process involves aligning the various energy centres of the body and creating a higher sense of awareness from which evolves a new body (at the level of “all Suns”) which can survive death as a discrete and isolate form.

For Evola the Solar Way involves the philosophy of Magical Idealism whereby the subjective universe of the individual is harnessed to create a unique inner world from which a true Self can be forged. This process is uniquely personal, and while using the transmissions of the esoteric Tradition, is not limited to the moribund forms of religion or political philosophies. This I or Self is not forged simply through contemplation or knowledge but through action and deed. It is the true heroic path and it is only the hero who can overcome the power of the Moon, ascend the Ray of Creation and be reborn as an immortal through the power of the Sun.

ROBERT BLACK is the editor of Living Traditions, an esotericist, traditionalist and researcher in the perennial wisdom tradition. You can visit his website at www.livingtraditions-magazine.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 126 (May-June 2011).

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People who have spent time grazing in metaphysical bookshops may have come across a mysterious volume called The Kybalion, written by “Three Initiates” and first issued by the Yogi Publication Society of Chicago in 1908.

The most familiar edition is a plain volume bound in blue cloth and stamped with gold, in a format like those of other books from the same publisher, including various works on yoga by one Swami Ramacharaka.

The Kybalion claims to be a brief introduction to a mystical tradition that has survived from antiquity. The core of the work is a series of aphorisms that, the authors contend, go back to the “early days” and were “passed on from teacher to student,…the exact signification and meaning of the terms having been lost for several centuries.”

The word, taken at face value, looks vaguely Greek, but it has no meaning in this language (the closest Greek word to it, curiously, is kybeia, meaning “dice game” or “trickery”). It is also tempting to connect this work with the Jewish mystical tradition known as the Kabbalah, but as a matter of fact the Kabbalah is never mentioned in The Kybalion.

Rather it presents itself as the essence of the teaching of Hermes Trismegistus (“Thrice-Greatest Hermes”), a legendary, semidivine figure who is said to have brought learning to Egypt in the remotest past. Hermes Trismegistus (pictured at top, right side) is often identified both with the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth (pictured at top, left side).

The Kybalion is organised according to seven basic principles, which, it says, form the basis of occult philosophy:

1. Mentalism. “The All is Mind; the Universe is mental.”

2. Correspondence. “As above, so below; as below, so above.”

3. Vibration. “Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.”

4. Polarity. “Everything is Dual; everything has poles; everything has its pair of opposites.”

5. Rhythm. “Everything flows, out and in; everything has its tides; all things rise and fall.”

6. Cause and Effect. “Every Cause has its Effect; every Effect has its Cause; everything happens according to Law.”

7. Gender. “Gender is in everything; everything has its Masculine and Feminine Principles; Gender manifests on all planes.”

The origins of this book are difficult to trace. As I noted in the accompanying article, “The Secret Science of Mind,” it is believed to have been written by William Walker Atkinson, who operated the Yogi Publication Society in Chicago (he is generally acknowledged to be “Swami Ramacharaka”).

As the first principle – “Mentalism” – suggests, the ideas of The Kybalion bear some resemblance to New Thought, a movement to which Atkinson was closely connected.

The universe, The Kybalion tells us, is contained in “the Mind of the All”: “The All creates the Universe mentally, in a manner akin to the process whereby Man creates Mental Images.” This idea is central to practically all New Thought teachings.

Nevertheless, the book does echo a more remote past. The term “The All,” for example, resembles the Greek to pan – which also means “the all” and which appears in some Hermetic maxims, most famously Hen to pan: “All is one.”

Given the claims made for it, the most obvious source to examine for the roots of The Kybalion is the Corpus Hermeticum or “Hermetic body” of texts. These were composed in the early centuries CE and purport to expound the wisdom of Egypt as narrated in a series of discourses and dialogues including Hermes and his son Tat (a version of “Thoth”). And indeed there are intriguing resemblances between these works and The Kybalion.

The first text of the Corpus Hermeticum, the Poimandres (whose name is probably a Greek adaptation of the Egyptian p-eime-n-re or “mind of authority”), tells us that the source of the universe was nous – consciousness or mind – much as The Kybalion asserts the principle of “Mentalism.” Moreover, this divine mind is described as “being androgyne and existing as light and life” – which parallels the concept of “Gender” as set out in The Kybalion.

The Kybalion also speaks of the principle of correspondence. This idea appears in another ancient Hermetic text: the extremely brief and elliptical Emerald Tablet, which says, “Quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius, et quod est inferius est sicut quod est superius, ad perpetranda miracula rei unius”: “What is above is like what is below, and what is below is like what is above, to enact the wonders of the one thing.” (The Emerald Tablet is said to have originally been written in Syriac, a Semitic language spoken in antiquity in the eastern Mediterranean world, but it survives only in somewhat dissimilar translations in Latin and Arabic.)

Whether there really was a collection of aphorisms known as The Kybalion that was passed down from master to pupil from ancient times is hard to say. There are, to my knowledge, no copies of it in any form that predate the 1908 edition, but that does not mean there were none.

And there are claims of similarly hidden texts in other traditions. The Russian esotericist Boris Mouravieff claimed that esoteric Christianity has an unpublished set of aphorisms called The Golden Book, some of which he quotes in his three-volume work Gnosis: Study and Commentaries on the Esoteric Tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy (although these do not resemble the maxims of The Kybalion to any great degree).

In a blog posting, Tarot scholar Mary K. Greer suggests a plausible direct source for The Kybalion. In 1884, Anna Kingsford, an Englishwoman who founded an organisation called the Hermetic Society, published a book entitled The Virgin of the World of Hermes Trismegistus, which presents an adaptation of the Hermetic texts. As Greer points out, the introduction to this book bears a strong similarity to many of the ideas in The Kybalion. And in fact the introduction to The Virgin of the World, written by Kingsford’s associate Edward Maitland, does contain a number of things that are echoed in The Kybalion.

For example, Maitland asserts that consciousness is “the indispensable condition of existence,” and that matter “is a mode of consciousness,” which certainly resonates with The Kybalion’s doctrine of mentalism. Maitland also mentions “the law of correspondence between all planes, or spheres, of existence.” He also speaks of “the doctrine of Karma,” which dictates “the impossibility either of getting good by doing evil, or of escaping the penalty of the latter” – an obvious parallel to The Kybalion’s “law of cause and effect.” In light of these resemblances and The Kybalion’s insistence that it contains the essence of Hermetic teaching, it is very likely that Kingsford and Maitland’s work was at least one of The Kybalion’s sources.

Thus it is possible to trace out a lineage for The Kybalion: the original Hermetic texts, which have been known in the Western world since the fifteenth century and which have existed in English versions since at least the seventeenth; and the digest of these texts as presented by Kingsford and Maitland in Victorian London.

But there is a major difference between the original Hermetic teachings and the New Thought–flavoured doctrines of The Kybalion. The Corpus Hermeticum did not exist in a philosophical vacuum; its elevated and abstruse dialogues form only a part of the ancient Hermetic literature. Much of the rest consists of magical texts, and scholars have become increasingly aware that these cannot be so easily divorced in content or inspiration from the Hermetic writings.

What does this mean in short? It means that the ancient Hermetists probably did not use a type of New Thought-like mind power in their practice. Rather they probably made use of such things as magical rituals, divination, and invocations of the gods, just as we see in most ancient religions. The use of mind power as we find it in New Thought seems to be very much an innovation of the nineteenth century.

Hence the aphorisms in The Kybalion are very likely a pious fraud. Certainly their style and mode of thought are more evocative of twentieth-century America than of ancient Egypt or Greece. Even so, it would be mistaken to conclude that this work is unfaithful to the tradition it invokes. A spiritual tradition is based, certainly, on timeless and unchanging truths; but the application to which these truths are put will vary from age to age, in accordance with that age’s need. In this sense, The Kybalion can lay genuine claim to the Hermetic heritage.

Sources

Brian P. Copenhaver, Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius in a New English Translation with Notes and an Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Mary K. Greer,  “Sources of The Kybalion in Anna Kingsford’s Hermetic System,” http://marygreer.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/source-of-the-kybalion-in-anna-kingsford%E2%80%99s-hermetic-system (Accessed Nov. 11, 2010).

Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland, The Virgin of the World of Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, www.sacred-texts.com/eso/vow/index.htm (Accessed Nov. 11, 2010).

Walter Scott, Hermetica: The Ancient Greek and Latin Writings Which Contain Religious or Philosophic Teachings Ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus, Boston: Shambhala, 1985 [1924].

“Three Initiates,” The Kybalion, Clayton, Ga.: Tri-State Press, 1988 [1908].

Roelof Van den Broek, “Hermetic Literature I: Antiquity,” in Wouter J. Hanegraaff et al, eds., Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 1:487-99.

RICHARD SMOLEY has over thirty years of experience of studying and practicing esoteric spirituality. His latest book is The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. He is also the author of Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity; The Essential Nostradamus; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; and Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney). Smoley is also the former editor of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Inner Traditions. Currently he is editor of Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society in America and of Quest Books. His website is www.innerchristianity.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 124 (Jan-Feb 2011).

Read this article and much more on this subject by downloading
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—

What happens to us when we die? It’s a question everyone eventually asks themselves at some point in their life. It transcends racial, social, political, economic and gender lines, making it the one question common to all human beings whether we like it or not.

Yet ever since the first men and woman began pondering their mortality a hundred thousand years ago, the answer has eluded us. What does happen when we die? What becomes of our soul, our mind, our personality – our very essence? For that matter, do we even have such a thing as a soul, or is it all an illusion we have created to give ourselves a sense of permanence and the hope of immortality?

The rationalist answers this query by proclaiming that since we are nothing more than a collection of cells and our brains simply tissue encased within a mantle of bone, nothing can happen to us when we die. The essence, personality, mind – soul – or whatever we wish to call our consciousness, ceases to exist, endowing our time on this planet with no more meaning than that which we choose to give it during our brief sojourn here. This is, of course, the position of the atheist, which is what makes atheism, in my opinion, so easy. It requires nothing because it offers nothing, which strikes me as a fair trade.

To most people, however, this answer is unsatisfactory. It suggests that we are little more than some great cosmic accident and that, consequently, our life has no ultimate purpose, forcing us to contemplate an existence without meaning in a universe that, despite all its beauty and splendour, has no more significance – or ultimate permanence – than a flower that briefly blooms in the spring only to wither and die after a few short days of vibrant life.

I suppose there are people for whom such a prospect is acceptable. It does, after all, tidy things up and make life simply a little game we sentient beings like to play for no particularly good reason other than because we have no choice. Yet something deep within the human heart knows better. We instinctively understand that we are more than the sum of our parts, which is why most people believe their personalities will survive their physical demise in some form and will continue on long after their bones have turned to dust. This, of course, brings us to our second option, which is that the personality/ego/true self/whatever you want to call it does survive the demise of the body to exist – at least for a time – as a separate disembodied consciousness. If this is the case, however, the next question that logically follows is what happens next?

Some believe, for example, that we become ghosts – little more than disembodied spirits aimlessly wandering the Earth, capable of perceiving the physical realm but unable to interact with it in any meaningful way. They can even point to various evidences to support this contention, from reported hauntings to automatic writing, séances, and apparent disembodied spirits caught on film.

While I personally have no problem with the idea of ghosts, I don’t think existing as a disembodied consciousness is truly a viable long-term option for what happens to us. Ghosts always struck me as being transitory; beings stuck on the Earth plane for a time only to ultimately move on and so essentially vanish from our physical realm. As such, even if we are to become ghosts, it will be, at least for the vast majority of us, a brief experience and not our eternity. I suspect we all eventually move on to ‘greener pastures’, so to speak.

Now, however, is where things get more interesting. Most people, regardless of whether they believe in ghosts or not, believe that the essence of who we are – our “soul” if you will – goes some place. Heaven is the favoured destination for most; a place where our conscious personality, no longer shackled to the limitations and burdens of physical existence, survives within a perpetual state of bliss and joy throughout eternity. Some add to this by also embracing a belief in hell; a perpetual state of torment for those who turn to evil and so are doomed to exist forever within a conscious state of agony, regret, and fear.

Both positions, however, suffer from the same problem, and that is that they see our time here on this planet as but a blink of the eye of eternity, with the decisions we make – or fail to make – while in the body having profound and eternal ramifications. Unfortunately, this reduces the physical world to little more than a cosmic hatchery that exists only to birth new souls, each of which will spend a short time in it before winging – or, potentially, plunging – to their ultimate destiny.

While admittedly this idea does manage to make this single life of paramount importance, it also forces one to wonder why a physical realm is necessary at all. If the physical universe exists merely as a vehicle for our creation, why couldn’t the process be circumvented entirely and we be created directly into the spiritual realm – as was supposedly the case with God’s angels?

Why all the unnecessary pain and hardship of a physical existence – especially if there exists the very real danger that we might earn hell through our misdeeds – if the spirit realm is the only destination that awaits us? In such a context, physical existence seems not only pointless but, in many ways, even hazardous.

So where does that leave us? If no Heaven and if no Hell, then what’s left?

There is a third position to consider. It is one that until recently has been largely ignored in the West but has been embraced by literally billions of people around the world for thousands of years. It is the belief that this physical existence is neither insignificant nor transient, but instead is perpetually ongoing. It is the concept that our soul lives on not in some ethereal Eden – or Hades – somewhere, but realises perpetual existence through a process of continual rebirths into the physical realm, making our time on this planet not one single, brief experience, but a repetitive process realised through literally hundreds of lifetimes. It is a timeless belief – one that predates both Christianity and Islam by many centuries – and one that is known by many names in many cultures. It’s been called rebirth, regeneration, transmigration of the soul, even metempsychosis, but is perhaps best known to us today as reincarnation.

Upon first consideration, especially to those who haven’t given the idea great thought, reincarnation may seem to be a foreign or exotic concept, especially to the Western mind steeped in the scientific method and drenched in two thousand years of monotheistic religion. It is something for Hindu holy men to ponder, or New Agers to embrace, but nothing that seems particularly relevant to most Westerners today.

I can easily understand this perspective for it is one I held myself for the first forty years of my life. And the truth be told, it is an Eastern concept – one in vogue more than four millennia before Christ was born and a belief held to by nearly two billion of the world’s population today – making it one of the oldest and most enduring belief systems known to man. In fact, it may be the original post-mortem belief among early humans who probably considered the idea when they began noticing strong similarities between recently born offspring and their deceased ancestors. Perhaps the mannerisms or interests a child displayed reminded one of a deceased loved one or a birthmark mimicked that found on a long-dead grandparent, leading village elders to imagine that the dead ancestor had returned a second time – a not unreasonable assumption in cultures that naturally assumed the soul to be inherently immortal.

Unfortunately, Westerners have traditionally had a tendency to consider foreign or primordial religious concepts as primitive and so reject them out of hand. However, this perception appears to be slowly changing as reincarnationist beliefs have become more prevalent in the West, especially in the last fifty years, and is becoming increasingly popular to ever growing numbers of people.

A Lost Western Tradition of How the Soul Returns

Of course, unbeknownst to most people, reincarnation has always been a part of Western thought. The prospect that the soul repeatedly returns to the flesh flourished in ancient Greece almost three thousand years ago and may have played a far more important role in our development as a civilisation than traditional histories have led us to believe. Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, and Pythagoras all taught and believed in some form of rebirth, the foundations of which were later adopted by the great Roman philosophers Ovid, Virgil, and Cicero, along with a host of other great thinkers of antiquity.

In fact, reincarnationist concepts were so prevalent in the centuries immediately preceding the birth of Christ, that they played a major role in many of the “mystery” religions of the Mediterranean; religions which were themselves to become the template for other later mystical faith systems of the region. Reincarnation, then, far from being a purely foreign concept was, in fact, widespread and may have strongly influenced the shape and thrust of Greek and Roman philosophy.

Even more of a surprise to many people, however, is the fact that reincarnationist concepts were also part of some of the more mystical branches of traditional Western religion, from the Sufis of Islam to the Gnostics of the early centuries of Christianity, and even within the Hasidic and Kabbalist traditions in Judaism. In fact, at times it virtually flourished and, especially in the case of Christianity, almost became the predominant belief system during the first few centuries of the Church’s existence until it was forced underground by the more traditional, non-reincarnationist branches of Christianity. Its proponent’s writings declared heretical and burned, the concept was so successfully suppressed by the Church of Rome that few Christians today even realise it was ever a part of their own faith.

Why was it suppressed? The obvious answer is because it threatened authority. Western religion is largely dependent upon the belief that man is destined to “die once and then be judged” to maintain control. In promising multiple rebirths, however, reincarnation renders the proclamations of the Pope or the Grand Mufti or whomever was the ruling head at the time transitory and, the truth be told, irrelevant. As such, reincarnation threatened the Church’s very livelihood, making it a very dangerous idea that had to be either suppressed or labelled as heretical in order for the Church to maintain its power base. As a result, the concept remained largely unknown outside of Asia for probably seventeen of the last twenty-one centuries.

Its revival in the West was imminent, however, with the arrival of the Age of Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. Once the long forgotten writings of the ancient Greeks again became available and one could hold to previously forbidden ideas without forfeiting their lives, such once forbidden concepts as reincarnation became increasingly popular, especially among the intellectual elite of the era. Amongst those who held to some form of multiple rebirths are such notables as Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Shakespeare, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Voltaire, among others.

Interpreting What it Means to Reincarnate

However, since its reintroduction into the Western consciousness, reincarnation has undergone a transformation. It is no longer the unending “cycle of life” wheel taught by the Hindus and Buddhists, but has become a “school of higher education” designed to bring us to ever greater levels of spiritual enlightenment. This is why when a Hindu or a Buddhist and their fellow Western reincarnationist talk about the subject, it often appears as though they are speaking two different languages. This is because in some ways they are, which is where the confusion comes in.

To the Hindu, the soul is essentially stuck in a never ending cycle of rebirth which can never be broken due to the continual need to balance one’s karma. In effect, with each incarnation into the flesh, the human personality – a by-product of the underlying soul that birthed it – accumulates a degree of bad karma that must be worked off in order to restore balance to itself. Some of this karma can be worked off in life in the form of good works, but this is seldom sufficient to work off the entire debt, which must be accounted for in the next life by having the soul take on an incarnation that may be more difficult so the ongoing karmic debt can be worked off.

On rare occasions, a life may be so exemplary that the person might be born into a higher station (or caste in Hindu parlance) but as a rule, bad karma tends to outweigh good karma and, in being continually accumulated through each lifetime, adds to the growing debt that remains to be balanced and so perpetuating the rebirth cycle. (Of course, if one accumulates too much bad karma, they may not be reborn as a person at all, but could come back as an animal or even, in some teachings, an inanimate object such as a stone. This belief is called “transmigration of the soul” and is also a major element of Hindu teachings.)

Buddhism, on the other hand, while understanding the process of reincarnation in much the same way as does the Hindu, differs in that it teaches that the cycle of rebirth can be broken through achieving nirvana (literally, enlightenment), at which point the cycle is broken.

Enlightenment means essentially to be become aware of one’s true nature and to the realities contained within the Four Noble Truths as articulated by Gautama Buddha over two thousand years ago. These are: first, to be alive is to suffer due to the imperfection of human nature and the world around us; second, that the cause of suffering is attachment to transient things (in effect, craving or desiring things); third, that one can learn to let go of these attachments; and, finally, that the process of achieving enlightenment is progressive and may itself extend over many lifetimes.

In sharp contrast, to many Western reincarnationists, the purpose of rebirth is to learn the lessons we need to learn in each incarnation in order to advance to the next spiritual level which, while having some similarities to the Buddhist concept of slowly achieving enlightenment over a number of incarnations by practicing the Buddha’s Eightfold Path (right view, right intentions, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration), is actually quite different.

The Buddhist does not believe that one is “learning” new lessons with each lifetime, but simply applying the principles contained within the Eightfold Path until craving, ignorance, delusions and its effects gradually disappear as progress is made towards enlightenment. To the Western mindset, attachment is not seen as the source of the problem (though it does generally acknowledge that an obsessive attachment to things can be detrimental to spiritual growth).

Another significant difference between Eastern and Western concepts of reincarnation have to do with the perception of what it is, exactly, that is reincarnating. The Hindu sees the soul – the divine essence of God – as being the generator of each incarnation, with the individual personality or ego a transient expression of that soul.

In marked contrast, the Buddhist doesn’t believe in individualised souls at all, but believes the sense of self is merely an illusion created by our own perceptions – a conscious “memory” if you will, conceived by our assumption that we exist separately. To the Buddhist, we are all a part of a larger, divine consciousness that has simply taken on the very brief “illusion” that it is separate. The Buddhists compare our sense of existence to the waves upon the ocean; just as a wave is a temporary phenomena caused by wind and currents, our personality is equally as transient and is, upon death, absorbed back into the divine consciousness in the same way that a wave upon the ocean is eventually swallowed up by the ocean itself.

In the West, however, the personality – or ego – is more robust and generally considered immortal. To many, the soul and the personality are considered essentially synonymous, so as a result, when we die, our basic personality – complete with all its memories, life experiences, knowledge, and traits – returns in another body to continue its existence. It may not have a direct memory of its past life – though some people claim to be possess the ability to consciously remember their previous incarnations – but it is essentially the same personality starting life over again in another context.

The personality may experience dramatically new surroundings – for example, it may experience one incarnation as an Indian girl who lived and died in the nineteenth century and then return as a Spanish man in the twentieth century – but it is still the same “person” underlying each “role.” Of course, the experiences and environment it finds itself in through each subsequent incarnation will affect the base personality in both subtle and sometimes substantial ways, but this too is a part of the process. This is why the Westerner sees reincarnation in the context of “lessons.” After all, the Indian girl was able to experience and learn only so much in her short time on Earth, mandating that she return again – this time as a Spanish male – to learn those things she either neglected to learn or hadn’t the opportunity to learn in her previous incarnation.

This makes spiritual enlightenment a type of “to do” list that needs to be checked off in its entirety before we can cease the process of rebirth. (What happens after that is equally open to speculation among Westerners: some imagine we come back as avatars or spiritual teachers; others speculate that we start the process over again on another planet, while still others maintain that we move onto other dimensions. Apparently, the options available to the enlightened soul are extensive.)

I wonder, however, if the truth is not a conglomeration of each of these perceptions? Clearly the Eastern concepts of a parent soul that births each and every individual personality has merit, as does the Buddhist belief in the transient, temporary nature of the ego that is birthed. And the Western concept that we reincarnate until we learn what we need to know also has some validity and seems to parallel in some ways the Buddhist idea that the cycle of rebirth ends upon achieving enlightenment – however one chooses to define the term.

I often wonder if we aren’t all looking upon the same phenomena and not simply seeing only those parts of it that speak to us personally. I suspect our understanding of the purpose for reincarnation is lacking in many ways and may never be entirely complete, though I also believe we are making progress in coming to a fuller appreciation for its complexity and sophistication. Perhaps one day East and West will come together and merge their different perceptions and in so doing, form a complete whole that answers everyone’s questions.

Of course, I recognise that such may sound like a contradictory process. After all, how can there be a soul and yet not a soul, and how can the ego be immortal and yet transient? To combine both Western and Eastern concepts of reincarnation would seem to embrace paradox, but I have found it is often within the complexities of paradox that the truth exists. In fact, it is only our limited ability to understand that makes these apparent contradictions paradoxes in the first place.

I wonder if they would still appear as such were we to find the capacity within ourselves to truly understand on a level our current mental capacity does not permit. On the other hand, perhaps understanding these concepts is not done at a mind level, but on a spiritual level, which is a difficult place for many people to go.

Maybe in the end we were never meant to fully understand how reincarnation works, and that may be where the adventure really begins. Perhaps the question of what happens to us when we die was never meant to be answered but merely explored, for it is in seeking – not necessarily finding – the answer that growth can take place.

It may be, in fact, that it is only in abandoning our need to find the answers that we give them the ability to find us. In effect, we may be like the man who is so busy looking for treasure that he fails to realise he is searching for it within the bowels of a gold mine. Were he to but look up and see the treasure that shimmers all around him, he would realise how silly his fervent quest had been all along. Perhaps we need only do the same.

Jeff Allen Danelek’s latest book The Case for Reincarnation: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Soul (Llewellyn, 2010) is available from all good bookstores or via www.newdawnbooks.info.

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A native Minnesotan who currently resides in Colorado, JEFF ALLEN DANELEK has been working as a graphic artist and technical illustrator since leaving the Navy in 1984. He has been writing as a hobby for fifteen years, and enjoys presenting alternative theories on increasingly popular subjects dealing with the strange and inexplicable world around us. Danelek is regularly featured at seminars, conferences, and has been a frequent guest on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory and the X-Zone with Rob McConnell. His books include The Case for Ghosts, Atlantis: Lessons from a Prehistoric Civilization, UFOs: The Great Debate, and 2012: Extinction or Utopia: Doomsday Prophecies Explored. His latest book is The Case for Reincarnation: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Soul. Danelek is also a novelist and instructor at Colorado Free University. His website is www.ourcuriousworld.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 14.

Read this article with its extensive full colour illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn Special Issue 14 (PDF version) for only US$5.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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—

What happens when we die? This is the ultimate question and one that we still have no real answer. From the first few moments that man became a self-aware being he has pondered upon this mystery.

Every culture has attempted an explanation, and it is reasonable to conclude that all religions exist to give an account of what happens at that moment and, more importantly, where does the person go after their body dies.

One of the most enduring myths is that of the Ancient Greeks. They believed that the recently dead would find themselves at the banks of a vast river, the River Styx. Out of the mists would appear Charon, the Ferryman. It was his job to ferry the soul, termed a “Shade,” across to the other side…. To the Land of the Dead.

But he did not do this for free. He needed a payment. The relatives of the recently dead person made sure the Shade could pay the ferryman. This payment was usually a small coin called an obolus. Depending upon the tradition, either this would be placed under the tongue of the corpse or two oboli would be placed over each eye.

This well known myth still resonates over three thousand years later. “To Pay The Ferryman” can still be heard today. However, there is a lesser known myth that suggests a deeper truth: The myth of the River Lethe.

The Greeks believed that before getting to the banks of the Styx the Shade would encounter a much smaller tributary of the great river. This could be crossed with ease by wading from bank to bank. This small river was called the Lethe, and its waters contained a profoundly important quality.

If the Shade or newly deceased soul drank of this water all their memories would evaporate. They would forget who they are and the events of their life. Their memories would become like those of a new born baby. Of course by doing so the Shade also forgot all of the lessons learned during that life.

But before doing this the Shade had the option of drinking from a small pool next to the Lethe. This was the Spring of Mnemosyne. By drinking here the Shade’s past-life memories became sharp and distinct. Each action and its subsequent effects became crystal clear. Life’s lessons became precise and understood.

If the Shade drank of the Spring of Mnemosyne they were allowed to pay the ferryman, board the boat, and sail across the Styx to the Elysian Fields.

But if a drop of the waters of the Lethe was drunk by the Shade, then they were sent back to be reborn again with no memories of their previous life. Now this was not a form of reincarnation as it is understood by most people. It was a re-birth process in which the same life was lived again. The Shade found itself back in its mother’s womb waiting to start all over again.

This concept is called “The Eternal Recurrence” and has been a long held alternative belief to that of the linear life found in most religions, even those who have reincarnation as their central belief.

However, those who have long held this belief never shared it with the masses. Such a belief has always been found in the secret – esoteric – groups within most of the major religions. This is the great secret carried through the ages by the groups loosely termed as “Gnostics.”

The Gnostic tradition can be found behind the great mystery traditions of the Middle East and Europe. From the Manicheans of Persia to the Cathari of Southern France, and from the Cabbalists of Southern Spanish Judaism to the Sufi’s of Arabia, this hidden knowledge is the real Holy Grail in whose defence the Knights Templar and the Albigenesians died in their thousands to protect.

In my books I present evidence for this belief system, that at the moment of death we are catapulted back to our moment of birth. The theory is supported by a good deal of evidence from modern science, particularly quantum physics, neurology, psychiatry and consciousness studies.

I call this theory “Cheating the Ferryman” because I suggest many of us never make it across the River Styx. We never step into Charon’s boat and we never pay him his obolus. We cheat the ferryman out of his fare and return to live our lives again.

On what evidence do I base such a totally weird idea?

Dreams & Precognitive Déjà Vus

Well, for me, the whole theory started with one very peculiar dream. In this dream I experienced a déjà vu… yes a dream that contained the sensation that I was experiencing an event that I had dreamed before, if that makes sense.

In the dream I had an inner dialogue with another me and this being stated that a déjà vu is a memory of an event that you have lived before in a different life. I then woke up with this idea echoing round my mind.

I had for some time wanted to write a book and now it seemed that my dream self, or more accurately a part of my dream self, had given me both the theme and the incentive.

I was surprised to discover that déjà vu is not only the most common anomalous psychological perception (70% of people will experience the sensation at least once in their lives) but also that experts have no real idea what causes it. Various suggestions have been made but none have been shown to be correct.

As an example, for many years a proposal made by the psychiatrist Paul Efron was considered to have nailed the mystery. Efron suggested that one part of the brain processes information before the other. In this way we have the feeling of experiencing an event twice. This occurs because each hemisphere of the brain receives signals from the right and left visual fields of each eye. As such the non-dominant hemisphere processes the incoming images a split second before the dominant hemisphere. So, in effect, the consciousness receives the signal twice with a short time delay. As one signal is immediately, but not fully, over-written by another we feel as if we have experienced the images twice. But this curious message transferal only works for the eyes. It has recently been shown that congenitally blind individuals experience aural déjà vu sensations. As the brain processes sound in a totally different way to sight, the Efron thesis simply cannot explain this form of déjà vu.

I wondered if déjà vu may not be simply what it feels it is: a curious sensation that suggests the observer has lived this moment before. The Seattle based psychiatrist Dr. Vernon Neppe has defined déjà vu as, “any subjectively inappropriate impression of familiarity of the present experience with an undefined past.”

So the “undefined past” could be part of this life or a past life. However this ‘past life’ for me did not imply reincarnation for one simple reason: for a déjà vu sensation to be effective it has to be a memory of the exact circumstances, not a circumstance that is similar. For example, if my “subjectively inappropriate impression” consisted of me remembering being in this place in Victorian times, the two images would be quite different. The location may be the same but my clothing, my companions and the décor would be totally different. It would feel more like a time-slip than a doubling of consciousness. For a déjà vu to be a déjà vu the two impressions have to be identical, in all ways. My memory of the event is identical to my experiencing of the event. I am literally re-living an event from my own past, but a past that is, for the moment, the future.

Indeed, I have now interviewed many people who experience precognitive déjà vu’s. The ‘memory’ includes a remembrance of what happens/happened next. The subject suddenly has very short-term clairvoyance.

I found that these precognitive déjà vu sensations are usually reported by individuals who experience three brain-states: migraine, temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE) and schizophrenia. I was intrigued as to why this was the case and began researching what may link these three ‘illnesses’.

Much to my delight I found there is one common factor, a neurotransmitter called glutamate.

Perception and Time Distortion

In a curious coincidence that was to have great significance to me later, I learned that neurotransmitters were first discovered by an Austrian scientist called Otto Loewi. Just like me, Loewi had a dream guider. On Easter Sunday 1920 he awoke in the middle of the night having experienced a really vivid dream. He wrote down what he had experienced and went back to sleep. The next morning he excitedly looked at his notes to find them to be illegible scrawl. He knew that he had dreamed something of profound importance so he went to bed early the next night. The dream came again and when he awoke he reproduced his dream experiment exactly as he experienced it that night. In doing so he isolated a substance that was to eventually be called acetylcholine. Such was the importance of this discovery that in 1936 Dr. Loewi and his English associate Sir Henry Dale were awarded the Nobel Prize.

What Loewi’s dream had helped find was the first example of the chemicals that were later to be called neurotransmitters. These are internally-generated substances that facilitate the transmission of messages from cell to cell within the body. The most important group is found in the brain and glutamate is the most important of the brain neurotransmitters.

Glutamate is directly responsible for the peculiar feelings described by migrainers, temporal lobe epileptics and schizophrenics, specifically a sensation that is technically known as “the aura.”

The aura is a form of early warning system. It is triggered by over-production of glutamate and usually takes place a short time before an attack of migraine or a temporal-lobe seizure. (Glutamate’s role in schizophrenia is different but the overall outcome is similar). Experiencers report sensations of time slowing down, of hyper-sensitivity, of visual or aural hallucinations and profound déjà vu sensations. Déjà vu had been linked with both migraine and TLE for years before Loewi’s serendipitous discovery.

Here was the link I had been looking for. Déjà vu has, as one of its causes, a flood of glutamate in the brain. It was then that I made my first big step to “Cheating the Ferryman.”

Quite by chance I was reading an old book I had on Near-Death Experience (NDE). One of the more technical articles discussed the neurochemical causes of the NDE. Much to my surprise I found that glutamate was also connected to this well-reported experience. Another, and quite unrelated, article in the same book discussed one of the most commonly reported elements of the NDE, what is technically known as the “panoramic life review.”

“My life flashed before my eyes” is a quotation recorded time and time again by people who have close encounters with death. Some report the experience as being a series of snapshots, others that they literally re-live every experience of their life but in super-speed. One person reported that it was as if somebody had recorded a movie of his life and was running it in fast-forward.

I was fascinated by this link. Both déjà vu and the Panoramic Life-Review were linked by a specific brain-chemical, glutamate. After doing some subsequent research, I found that Dr. Karl Jansen of the Maudsley Hospital in London had been able to reproduce a full near-death experience in volunteers when he had them take small doses of the drug ketamine. Now ketamine is chemically almost identical to glutamate so here again we had an amazing link.

I was later to find that ketamine, and by implication glutamate, also brings about another curious subjective sensation in the brain: time slows down or almost stops for the experiencer.

In another fortuitous event I was to be given a first-hand description of a glutamate effect by a person who experienced TLE seizures.

Temporal Lobe Epilepsy Breakthrough

I received a phone call one afternoon. It was a lady from a recruitment agency who was wishing to discuss with me a vacancy she was handling. “Margaret” asked me whether I was working and I explained that I was driven to write a book. “What about?” she asked, “I don’t really know at the moment,” I truthfully responded. I then explained that I was reading a good deal about temporal lobe epilepsy and was making some fascinating links.

She went very quiet and suggested that we should meet up to discuss the vacancy. Three days later I met her at a coffee shop nearby. As soon as she had sat down she explained to me that she had to meet me because she wished to discuss with me something she could not mention in her office where she would have been overheard.

“Margaret” informed me that she had recently been diagnosed as a having temporal lobe epilepsy. She described to me how she had first discovered that something unusual was happening in her brain.

She had been having lunch with a work associate in a crowded café. As her associate started to pour a cup of tea from a teapot she suddenly felt a snap over her right ear. Surprised by this she looked at her associate assuming that she too would have heard the noise. One look told her that her lunch companion had heard nothing. This was because she had stopped moving. The stunned recruitment consultant looked round the café and every person was frozen in time and space. It was as if she had suddenly found herself in a three-dimensional photograph. She could hear a low humming sound that seemed all around her. She then looked back at her companion to notice that she was not frozen at all, she was moving incredibly slowly.

Margaret then realised that the low hum she could hear was, in fact, people’s voices! Her metabolic rate had increased to such an extent that time had slowed down to a crawl. She watched in amazement as the tea slowly appeared from the spout of the teapot and slowly fell into the cup. Margaret assured me that this took hours to take place in her mind.

At that point she made a fascinating comment. She said that she could have been in this state for days, months, years, “even a lifetime.” Then, after what seemed like many hours, Margaret felt another snap over her right ear and her associate finished pouring the tea and sat back. “Are you okay,” she asked. “I am not sure,” replied Margaret. Her friend then explained that Margaret had suddenly stopped moving and had stared into space… for about twenty seconds! As Margaret explained to me, those twenty seconds had been hours for her. She went on to tell me that she feared she had a brain tumour but after a series of scans she was told that she had TLE.

I was amazed at this story. Here was evidence that glutamate, when it floods the brain, does, indeed, slow subjective time to an absolute crawl. For some reason I then asked Margaret if she experienced déjà vu. “I get déjà vu’s to kill for” was her reply. “Not only that but when I am in this pre-seizure aura state I know what is going to happen next. I really do see the future!”

My meeting with Margaret presented me with the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle that I had not known, until that moment, I was trying to complete. I knew then what the book would be about – not an explanation for déjà vu but something much bigger, an explanation as to what happens to human consciousness at the point of death!

My theory was both simple but stunning. Déjà vu sensations are exactly what they seem to be: they are recollections of past events, otherwise known as lost memories.

So how can we “remember” the future? Simple, because the future is also the past. Confused? Well the best way to explain this is to give a fictitious example based upon an amalgamation of many NDE reports.

The Physics of the NDE – Cheating the Ferryman

Our hero is a skydiver. He is a very unlucky skydiver because his parachute has refused to open and he forgot to pack his back-up ‘shute’. As he plummets to the ground there will be a point where the stress levels will be so high that glutamate floods the brain. In doing so it brings about the subjective slowing down of time. Indeed, for the skydiver the duration of time slows down to a virtual standstill. But his brain remains completely active.

Just as he is about to hit the ground his motion through space is slowed by the fact that his motion through time has similarly been changed. As we know from the theories of Albert Einstein, time and space are the same thing and they are “relative” to the observer. This is where the word “Relativity” comes from.

So “relative” to the skydiver, time duration has slowed down to a crawl. For him a split second can last days, weeks, years, even a lifetime. This is exactly what Margaret experienced in the canteen.

What happens then? Well something very strange. Recall that many people who report Near-Death Experiences explain they see their lives “flash before my eyes.” This is a Near Death Experience. Our skydiver is in a Real Death Experience. There is no way he will survive the impact with the ground. In this case his life does not “flash” before his eyes but he experiences it in a literal, minute by minute, recreation of his life from the moment of his birth. In effect he lives his whole life again. And at the end of the second life it happens again, and again and again. It is like the movie “Groundhog Day,” but it is not a “day” but a “life” – and all this takes place in the split second before he hits the ground.

This is how he “Cheats The Ferryman.” In his subjective time-frame he never reaches the point of death because it is always in his future.

But there is more – and this where things get very interesting. I suggest each life-rerun is not like a pre-recorded movie that cannot be changed but more like a video game in which all consequences of all decisions are already programmed in. By applying the latest findings of quantum physics I present a model whereby the implications of something called the “Many-Worlds Interpretation” can be shown to allow such a scenario.

Put simply, according to the MWI hypothesis there are literally billions of versions of each person and each one of these versions have the capacity to live out – and lay down re-playable memories – the outcomes of every decision made in a lifetime. There is available to each person a recording of every possible life they could live. I call this recording the “Bohmian IMAX.” Others may recognise it as the “Akashic Record” or the “Akashic Field” of Professor Ervin Laszlo.

I further suggest that at the point of death consciousness splits into two elements. I term these the Eidolon and the Daemon. The Eidolon is the everyday being that calls itself “I” or “me” and it has no knowledge of its previous lives. The Daemon is different. It carries all the memories of the past life (or lives) and as such it acts as a form of “Higher Self” or “Guardian Angel.” In my books I present evidence from modern neurological research to suggest this may be the case.

The “changes” that bring about a new “life-path” are instigated by the Daemon when it warns the Eidolon of potential dangers lying waiting in the future. These can be conveyed through dreams, precognitions, inklings, voices and many other subtle methods – possibly even a deja sensation.

We don’t just “Cheat The Ferryman,” we are also given opportunities to change things and possibly put right the wrongs we do.

I agree that on first encountering this hypothesis it is both bizarre and incredible. But the science does seem to work. Could this be the paradigm changer that we have all been waiting for?

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ANTHONY PEAKE is the author of two books, Is There Life After Death – The Extraordinary Science of What Happens When You Die and The Daemon, A Guide To Your Extraordinary Self. NDE expert Professor Bruce Greyson calls Anthony’s theory “the most innovative and provocative argument I have ever seen.” He has a very active international forum at www.anthonypeake.com/forum

The above article appeared in New Dawn Special Issue 14.

Read this article with its extensive full colour illustrations by downloading
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—

The Muggle world is filled with symbols. From Coke cans to McDonald’s arches, IBM computers to Apple Macintoshs, from flags to emblems and medals, to the endless variety of product packaging, modern culture is brimming with images. Open the Yellow Pages of your phone book – with the emblematic pair of walking fingers – and you will find a myriad of professional logo designers and artists, many of whom have trained at colleges whose crests may date back a century or more.

Walk or Don’t Walk based on a traffic light flashing a message designed to prevent you from being run over by a car – whose distinctive hood ornament differentiates it from its competitors, and which is fuelled by different brands of gasoline whose identity may be apprehended from afar while travelling at high speed. Look at the dashboard and you can ascertain operational norms, be warned of engine trouble, and learn by iconic means about the vehicle and its amenities.

We live in a world filled with visual identifiers intended to convey meaningful information at a glance without the need for words.Heraldry, the distinctive symbols of noble warrior families, traces back to the Middle Ages, when grand tournaments were held with jousts between heavily-armoured knights wearing visors. Since individuals were unrecognisable in such gear, unique coats-of-arms were designed to identify the combatants to fans and foe alike. Taverns and inns, village blacksmiths, printers and publishers, all manner of craftsmen and merchants were as recognisable in villages and cities a thousand years ago, as they are in today’s hyper-illuminated metropolitan areas and quieter rural main streets.However, there is another level of symbolism that goes beyond the merely commercial, socially informative, or technologically useful.

And that is the universe of sacred symbols, whose resonance in the archetypal levels of the human psyche can cause spiritual change and expand consciousness beyond the confines of mundane reality. Symbols that serve as gateways to realms of knowledge, power, and understanding that inform and control life on earth, and, presumably, the after-death state of non-physical life as well. Symbols that can open the mind to communication with spiritual beings who welcome the opportunity to interact with human consciousness. Symbols that confirm to the aspiring student the nature of the truths he or she seeks.

Symbols are the alphabet of the Law of Correspondence. This universal principle acknowledges the inter-connection of all things with all other things, the existence of multiple relationships within Nature’s kaleidoscopic richness.

In The Mystery Traditions, I quoted the following statement by Titus Burckhardt from his book Alchemy, “True symbolism depends on the fact that things which may differ from one another in time, space, material nature, and many other limitative characteristics, can possess and exhibit the same essential quality.”

This article will briefly examine two symbols of great importance to human life. I hope the reader may gain an insight into the richness of the subject and an appreciation for the multiplicity of ideas involved in the study of symbolism. I also hope it may suggest a means by which other symbols may be explored.

The Circle

Let us then begin with the Circle, a symbol of unity, wholeness, and completeness – a figure that seems to contain all within itself. Yet, conversely, it defines and delineates space. Thus it is simultaneously an image of distinction, separation, and difference – setting boundaries between that which is within and that which is without. It is a barrier against intrusion, offering a cocoon of protection within which growth may occur in safety – the egg wherein the babe may take form and mature, the magical circle in which spiritual progress may be made.

The circle is traditionally a symbol of the Sun. To understand the derivation of this association, one need only look up at the sky. With a point in the centre, the circle is the glyph of the Sun in the alphabet of astrology. Its astrological zoomorph is the male lion, king of beasts, powerful, ravenous, swift, courageous, triumphant, regal. He is filled with a self-confidence that allows for the enjoyment of leisure, a kind of benign self-indulgence or laziness that springs from an understanding of his role in the aptly-named pride, or family of lions, over which he rules.

The Sun is a symbol of resurrection. Each day it rises from the depths of night to gradually illumine the world. Through the course of the day it waxes in power and pulses with life-giving heat. Its radiance sustains the growth of crops and the activities of all species on earth. As the day draws to a close and the light of the sun diminishes, it sends forth rays of magnificent colour that herald its decline and descent, its apparent death as it is about to be swallowed by the dragon of night. And yet on the morrow it comes forth again, bursting the chains of its imprisonment, rising to herald the new dawn. It is the embodiment of continuity and hope, of the possibility of life beyond death, and of triumph in adversity.

The Sun is a symbol of the self and of self-consciousness. It represents the unique individuality of each being. As he stands out among the luminaries of heaven, so is each of us the centre of our own universe. While it may not be quite politic to express it in words, each of us feels that he or she is the centre around which the world, as we know it, revolves. The Book of the Law expresses this image beautifully in the passage, “In the sphere I am everywhere the centre, as she, the circumference, is nowhere found.” While there are many who like to imagine themselves as amorphous ripples in a universal continuum, Nature herself rebels against this fantasy. The Sun is her proof.

In the world’s mythology, the Sun is the archetypal essence of numerous deities who span all cultures while sharing the same identity.

Ra in the Egyptian pantheon is hawk-headed. The hawk is far-seeing, inhabits the very heights of the celestial environment, is swift as a beam of light, able to penetrate all darkness and depths to snatch forth his nourishment from the myriad of creatures over whom he reigns. Ra is the creator god, both the spark that enlivens the world and the sustaining energy that keeps it alive. Ra was the first and most powerful of the gods; like the Sun, his role is that of prominence, leadership, and dominion.

The Sun subsumes the resurrection gods, the saviours who act as mythic intercessors between Deity and humanity. The Sun is the eye of God monitoring its creation – prominently, unavoidably, consistently omnipresent in our world that we may learn the lesson of our own essence. The Sun is the link, the representative, the prince, vice-regent, and son of God – visible representative of the Invisible Father of all. As such, he is Jesus, Adonis, Bacchus, Krishna, Apollo, even the Buddha. His death is suffered as an inspiration to us of a life beyond, offering the promise of victory over the chthonic states of non-existence.

The Tree of Life

In the diagram of the Tree of Life (page 16) – the traditional esoteric geometric representation of the mystic totality of existence – the Sun is the number six, the Sephira, or sphere, of Tiphareth, Beauty. Tiphareth stands in the balance, midway between the topmost sphere of Kether, the Crown – the Point, the first manifestation of the Infinite – and the bottom sphere of Malkuth, the Kingdom – the world of three-dimensional physical reality in which we live. Tiphareth occupies the central of the three pillars of the Tree of Life, the Middle Pillar, surrounded on either side by the Pillars of Mercy and Severity.

As the Sun is Tiphareth, the number six, its geometrical figure is the hexagram. The hexagram further exemplifies the nature of the Sun as intercessor or balance point between above and below, heaven and earth, God and man. The hexagram is formed by the union of the ascending male triangle of Fire, and the descending female triangle of Water. The number six, or hexad, was called “the Perfection of Parts” by Pythagoras. This reminds us that Tiphareth (Beauty) is the sphere of Harmony. And harmony is produced by the joining together of distinct, and, in some cases, discordant elements, to produce a unified and aesthetically pleasing whole. Pythagoras observed that the number six is the first mixture of odd and even, being the multiplication of two by three. The Pythagoreans designated odd numbers as male, and even numbers as female. Thus, we are reminded once again that the number six and the hexagram represent the union of male and female, the harmony upon which all creation relies.

The Sun’s metal is gold, the luminous and most beautiful of all, whose value has been an unchanging indicator of wealth and a medium of exchange for millennia. A visit to any fine Egyptian collection, in either a museum or the pages of a book, will show the prominence of gold as the chosen metal of pharaonic iconography and architecture. Similarly, gold was the metal chosen for most of the ritual implements in the Temple of Solomon. It was also used to cover the sacred Ark of the Covenant. Medieval and Renaissance Europe used gold liberally in churches, shrines, and palaces, as did the Aztec, Mayan, Indian, and Chinese royalty and priesthood. Gold is the ultimate symbol of the perfection reached by the alchemist – who removes in countless stages the myriad of impurities that make up lead, and allows for its transformation and refinement into the king of metals.

In the body, the Sun is the heart, symbolically the single most important organ. The heart is the central pumping station of the blood, the essence of life. All survival and health depend on its regular and consistent motion. Long regarded as the seat of courage, the heart was torn from the chest of enemies and eaten by ancient warriors, that they might increase their own strength by ingesting the essence of worthy opponents. Colloquially we speak of a person “with heart” to describe the motivation and self-discipline necessary to pursue a course of success in life. The heart denotes sincerity, the appreciation of the essence of the self in action. It is also the symbolic seat of love, the motivating force that sustains the world through generation.

Among the parts of the Soul in the Qabalah, the Sun is one of six of the ten Sephiroth that compose the intellect, known as the Ruach. Here again, the Sun acts as an intercessor between the higher levels of the soul (the Self, Life Force, and Intuition) and its lowest aspect (the Animal Soul of Nature). The Intellect weighs and analyses, decides on the appropriate response to stimulation from above and below. It acts as the mediator between “heaven” and “earth.”

On the level of spiritual experience, the Sun is a symbol of the magical virtue of Devotion to the Great Work, the path by which an aspirant may reach the heights of spiritual potential. The stage of initiation represented by Tiphareth, the sphere of the Sun, is known as the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel. This may loosely be understood as the point at which the upward motion of the soul is met with a profound response from the higher reaches of Divinity. A direct interaction occurs in the consciousness of the aspirant that allows for an understanding of one’s continuing mission, the reality of one’s faith in the quest, and the nature of the tasks and obligations under which one is to continue. Such an interaction is a perfect expression of the symbol set we began exploring with the Circle.

The Moon

In order to balance this Solar meditation, let us now turn to the Moon. She is represented by various glyphs in the astrological alphabet because of the several stages of her passage during the twenty-eight days of the lunar cycle from New to Full Moon. However the Crescent is the Moon’s standard astrological symbol.

The Moon is the unconscious self. It represents the hidden parts of the psyche from which spring moods, emotions, dreams, and intuition. The depths of the soul are the very realm of images. The unconscious mind is the wellspring of magic and witchcraft – in which the hidden forces of nature are brought into operation by direct appeal from the hidden forces of the self. (On a practical level, to access such deeper levels of consciousness, the rational intellect must be enlisted to help strategise a means to bypass itself.) The Moon is the symbol of universality, the collective unconscious, the pleroma, wherein the individual self is united with the universal life stream.

The Moon traditionally represents the Goddess, the complement of the solar male deity. In Egypt, she is Isis, the Enchantress. Isis is a complex deity who is identified as the mate of both Ra and Osiris, Lord of the Underworld. She is variously known as the daughter and mistress of Ra, and wife and sister of Osiris. (Osiris may be considered the nocturnal aspect of Ra – the Sun god beneath the horizon, Lord of the realm of death. Symbols, as the reader may have noticed, tend to run together. Their fluidity and tendency toward transmutation are among their lessons.)

The Moon is further identified with goddesses such as Persephone, whose tenure in the Underworld is balanced by her time on earth. Diana, the beautiful virgin goddess of the hunt, is another lunar archetype, as is Mary, Athene, Vesta, Kuan Yin, Astarte, Inanna, and Kali. The symbols of the Moon and Venus run in close parallel (as do those of the Sun and Mars), so one can easily include Hathor, Venus, and Aphrodite, as well as darker feminine archetypes such as Lilith, Ereshkigal, Hecate, and Ashtoreth.

Like the phases of the Moon, the Female archetype is intimately associated with time and the rhythms of life – from the tidal patterns of the ocean to the menstrual cycle. The natural threefold aspect of the feminine archetype is traditionally associated with menstruation: the virginal youth, wife and mother, and crone. Many calendars are lunar-based, among them the Jewish and Muslim calendars in use today.

The Moon is a symbol of fecundity in her identification with the Woman, the ark of life sailing through the seas of time. Moon cycles also regulate planting and harvesting, and thus she is identified with nourishment and sustenance.

On a physical level, the Moon reflects the light of the Sun at night. It is described as a “dead” planet, that is, one without a measurable active core. While these facts are aspects of the feminine archetype, particularly that of the Hag or Crone phase and the dark side of the witch power, there is a great deal more to consider. The Moon is the nocturnal complement of the Sun. How she illuminates the night may be of less immediate importance than the fact that she does. Walking through the countryside by the light of the Moon, it matters little whether the light that guides us is reflected or intrinsic.

On the Tree of Life, the Moon is Yesod, the Foundation, the ninth Sephira. Yesod is also located on the Middle Pillar, directly below Tiphareth, and directly above the physical world of Malkuth, the tenth Sephira. Yesod completes the geometric symmetry of the preceding Sephiroth, while Malkuth hangs like a pendant from the Tree.

Yesod is the world of images and ideas (angels) just prior to their incarnation in the matter and form of Malkuth. The Moon is of the Formative World, Yetzirah, the realm of causes behind the veil of physical life, the astral plane whose vibratory undulations inform the world of substance.

Yesod is the number nine, the number of months of pregnancy. Reducible to three, nine is the first square of an odd number. (Three is “the first and proper joining together of unities,” that is, it is the extension from Point, to Line, to Plane, self-contained in and of itself.) Nine was called “Ocean” or “Horizon” by the Pythagoreans because it is the height of numbers: to go further to ten is only a return to one. Nine is the natural limit of number.

The Moon’s metal is silver, the other traditional coin of the realm, defender of value, medium of exchange, and symbol of the beauty of the mineral world – shining and luminous, of pure composition.

In the body, the Moon is the genitals, the organs of generation, and the sensual, instinctive, insistent fire of those passions on which lives and kingdoms are both built and destroyed. An unruly world of excess which may be channelled through initiation to become the engine of manifestation and great power.

On the level of spiritual experience, the Moon is associated with the magical virtue of Independence. How interesting that after discussing her universality and identity with the unconscious mind – as well as the characterisation of the Moon as “the reflection” of the Sun – she would be identified with Independence. Perhaps the lesson here is that as Yesod is the Foundation, the Work can only take place within the individual. We must learn to separate the many strands of inherited and environmental tendencies in order to uncover our true and unique natures.

While we have explored several aspects of these two important symbols, we have only touched the surface. It would be possible to write volumes on the archetypal symbolism of the Sun and Moon. By looking at the teachings implicit in the Circle and Crescent, we have entered a world, nay a universe, of magic, astrology, mythology, religion, morality, psychology, astronomy, biology, physics, and history. Most importantly, we have glimpsed a path by which men and women may achieve the ultimate goals of our lives – spiritual attainment, universal consciousness, oneness with God, and the accomplishment of the Great Work.

Pedestrians may still safely cross the street in obedience to lights flashing with signs of upraised hands or stick figures in motion. Let us conduct our own ascent to the cosmic reaches of Eternity through the sacred symbols of Initiation.

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JAMES WASSERMAN is a lifelong student of esotericism. His writings include The Mystery Traditions: Secret Symbols and Sacred Art; Aleister Crowley and the Practice of the Magical Diary; An Illustrated History of the Knights Templar; Secret Societies: Illuminati, Freemasons, and the French Revolution; and The Secrets of Masonic Washington: Signs, Symbols, and Ceremonies at the Origin of America’s Capital. His Chronicle Books edition of The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day features the full-color Papyrus of Ani with integrated English translation. The Templars and the Assassins: The Militia of Heaven has thus far been published in six languages. His controversial The Slaves Shall Serve: Meditations on Liberty defines political freedom as a spiritual value. James and his wife Nancy launched The Weiser Concise Guides, a series of books on basic occultism. You can find him online at www.studio31.com or www.jameswassermanbooks.com. He lives in New York City with his wife Nancy.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 116 (Sept-Oct 2009).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
your copy of New Dawn 116 (PDF version) for only US$2.95

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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—

The intuitions reported by mystics, poets, artists, ordinary people, even scientists, often go beyond the range of sensory perception. In the reductionist culture inspired by classical science, they are dismissed as mere delusion – classical empiricism claims that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the eye. However, the classical tenet is not universally upheld. It is exceptional in the annals of history, and even in the context of contemporary cultures.In history intuitions were embedded in the conceptual framework through which a given culture interpreted the nature of reality. In indigenous societies shamans and medicine-men (and women) tuned themselves to spontaneous apprehension through rigorous initiation and training; they derived their mystical vision from them. In mythically oriented societies the world was seen as a cosmic realm of spirits, and in classical cultures it was believed to be governed by a panoply of unseen gods. The Abrahamic monotheistic religions recognised the intuitions of their prophets as conveying fundamental truths about God and the nature of His creation. Eastern cultures have always held that reality extends far beyond the domain of the senses.

On the other hand Western culture takes as real only that which is manifest – literally “to hand.” Because what people see is constrained by what they believe they can see, everything that is not conveyed to consciousness by eye and ear is dismissed from the modern view of the world. But are the intuitions that occasionally surface in consciousness mere delusion? Or can there be intuitions that are as real and fundamental as sensory perception? This question calls for a deeper look at the possibility that spontaneous insights and apprehensions may have a physical basis. There are findings at the cutting-edge of scientific research that affirm this possibility.

The Brain as a “macroscopic quantum system”

The crucial finding is the discovery that the brain is not merely a classical biochemical system; in some respects it is a “macroscopic quantum system.” Certain cerebral functions involve processes previously thought to be limited to the domain of the quantum. The pertinent functions concern the reception and transmission of information at the cellular and subcellular level: intercellular communication involves quantum-effects and processes. Neurons and neuronal and subneuronal networks form synchronised oscillators that receive and send information through quantum resonance. This information propagates quasi-instantly throughout the organism and does not require classical channels of signal transmission. The various forms and characteristics of information transmitted through quantum resonance are not fully understood, but their physical basis is clear. It is nonlocality, the process Einstein first said is “spooky” and then Erwin Schrödinger termed “entanglement.” Entanglement means that the states and functions of the entangled entities are correlated beyond the ordinary bounds of space and time. As a result the entities are intrinsically and fundamentally coherent. Such coherence obtains in the domain of the quantum: in pristine states quanta are coherent and mutually entangled. Only interaction in some form (measurement, and possibly certain acts of observation) renders them decoherent. Macroscale objects were said to be in a permanently decoherent state, yet certain objects also exhibit forms of quantum coherence. There is experimental evidence that the state of entire atoms can be entangled, and in recent years quantum-coherence has been discovered at the scale of living organisms. The divide between the microworld of the quantum and the world of macroscale objects has been breached. The heat of living organisms – even of warm-bodied species – does not necessarily destroy the coherence that is the precondition of entanglement. While classical quantum theory maintained that at ordinary temperatures Brownian movement made quanta, so-called “qubits,” decoherent and thus incapable of entanglement, recent research (inter alia by Kitaev, Pitkanen, and Frecska and Luna) indicates that the problem of “heat-decoherence” is not insuperable.1

There appear to be networks of quanta where the particles are “woven” or “braided” in a way that is sufficiently robust to maintain coherence at body temperatures. Whereas at such temperatures classically organised qubits become decoherent, networks of woven or braided qubits conserve coherence. As Parsons put it, “braiding is robust: just as a passing gust of wind may ruffle your shoelaces but won’t untie them, data stored on a quantum braid can survive all kinds of disturbance.”2 Quantum coherence in the brain and throughout the organism is not just theoretical speculation; it is entirely fundamental for coordinating the processes that make life possible. The staggering number of physical and chemical reactions taking place in the living organism is not likely to be coordinated by limited and relatively slow biochemical signal-transmission alone. Only the “entanglement” of the organism’s cellular and subcellular components can ensure a sufficiently rapid flow of multidimensional information to maintain the organism in its physically improbable state far from thermal and chemical equilibrium.

Cytoskeletal Structures

Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff suggest that cytoskeletal structures in the brain are responsible for the reception, computation, and transmission of multidimensional quantum-resonance-based information. Throughout the organism cytoskeletal proteins are organised into a network of microtubules, and the elements of these networks are connected to each other structurally by protein-links and functionally by gap junctions. However, the network of microtubules may be too coarse-grained to produce quantum-effects in the brain. The “infoplasm,” the basic substrate of living matter, may be the microtrabecular lattice, a web of microfilaments 7 to 9 nanometer in diameter. The periodic lattice of microtubules forms a network within the network of neurons, and the microtrabecular lattice is a network embedded in the network of microtubules. According to Ede Frecska, it is this lattice that is likely to be the structure responsible for quantum-effects in the brain. It appears physically possible that the quantum-scale components of the cytoskeletal lattice convey information from the world to the brain. The question is, what information? How does information originate in the world at large?

The Akashic Field

Until recently, asserting that information is objectively present in nature and not only in the human realm was considered metaphysical. This is no longer the case. It is now recognised that information is present in all things; as John Wheeler remarked, in some respects it the most fundamental feature of the universe. Experiments designed to test the Einstein-Podolski-Rosen hypothesis indicate that already quanta behave in an informed manner: they appear to make choices of their own, and respond to choices by other quanta. Either they have a form of consciousness (a thesis entertained by some physicists), or they are embedded in a complex informational environment. The latter is the minimally speculative assumption. It suggests that even in the absence of matter space is neither empty nor passive. As this writer among others has suggested, cosmic space is not a vacuum, but a plenum. In recognition of the prophetic insight of ancient Sanskrit and Hindu cosmology – where Akasha is the most fundamental of the five elements, the one from which the others arise – this writer calls the field that fills cosmic space the “Akashic Field.”3

The idea that space is active and filled with physically significant events is not unique to Sanskrit and Hindu cosmology; it has noteworthy antecedents also in the history of science. In the nineteenth century, mathematician William Clifford suggested that small portions of space are analogous to little hills on a surface that is flat on average; the geometry of the landscape does not hold for them. The property of space to be curved or distorted, he said, is continually being passed on from one portion of space to another after the manner of a wave. In the physical world there is nothing else but this wavelike variation.4

In a 1930 paper, “The concept of space,” Albert Einstein noted, “We have now come to the conclusion that space is the primary thing and matter only secondary; we may say that space, in revenge for its former inferior position, is now eating up matter.”5 A few years later Erwin Schrödinger restated the same thought: “What we observe as material bodies and forces are nothing but shapes and variations in the structure of space.”6 In physical cosmology cosmic space is seen as a ceaselessly fluctuating sea of emerging and vanishing virtual particles. In grand-unified and super-grand unified theories all the universal fields and forces of nature are traced to origins in the quantum vacuum, a fundamental hyperspace often viewed as a unified field. This fundamental field carries also zero-point energies – energies that remain present when at the absolute zero of temperature conventional forms of energy vanish. The concept of a complex unified field, effectively the Akashic Field, offers a basis for identifying the origins of the information that quantum processes transfer to the brain. It is known that as a consequence of their motion atoms, molecules and all material entities (i.e. structures composed of massive particles) produce electromagnetic waves that radiate into surrounding space. Space, however, is not empty and passive, and it is more than Maxwell’s extended electromagnetic field. It is the locus of the Akashic Field. The waves emitted by moving objects excite and modulate this field, creating wavefronts that propagate in the field and, upon meeting, interfere with each other. The interference patterns that result carry information at their nodes on the objects that created the waves. Because the Akashic Field is a seamless medium that extends throughout space, the information carried by the interference patterns produced by moving objects extends throughout space. This information corresponds to the physical properties of the objects.7

The process is similar to that which occurs in holography. The holograms created by interfering beams of light conserve information on the surface of the things and events that modulated the light beams. But the interference patterns responsible for quantum coherence are created by waves in the Akashic Field, and not by photons in the electromagnetic field. Thus they are not ordinary, but quantum holograms. Walter Schempp has shown that quantum holograms are coherent, mutually entangled, and carry nonlocal information on the things and events that produced the constituent waves. He has also shown that the brain’s object imagery is phase conjugate. Lending support to Karl Pribram’s “holonomic brain theory,” Schempp affirmed that “the conditions which make quantum holography possible are ideally suited to the hypothesis that the brain works… by quantum holography.”8

The answer to the question regarding the origin and nature of the information transferred by quantum-resonance to the brain can now be essayed. When the phase and frequency of a cerebral lattice corresponds to the phase and frequency of a quantum hologram, brain and hologram enter into phase-conjugate resonance. This allows the information conserved at the nodes of Akashic Field quantum holograms to be transferred to the cerebral receptors. Thus some of the intuitions that reach consciousness are not merely delusion: they are transmitted by phase-conjugate resonance from the Akashic Field to the cytoskeletal structures of the brain. Just which intuitions have this physical origin cannot be ascertained at this time merely by examining the pertinent cerebral processes. We need to resort to circumstantial evidence, examining the correspondence of the content of the intuitions with things and events known to exist in the real world through ordinary sensory perception. But we can affirm in good conscience that it is entirely plausible some intuitions have a bona fide physical basis. And that, in itself, goes a long way toward legitimating belief in the veridical nature of at least some of our intuitions.

A Concluding Note

Although widely reported and often meaningful, intuition is seldom the subject of sustained scientific research. The classical empirical tenet of mainstream science discourages attempts to investigate the phenomenon: it is physically implausible if not categorically impossible. Yet sustained research on intuition would be potentially fruitful and extremely important. In the positive case it would show that the human brain and nervous systems can access information in a spontaneous mode. While some varieties of experience viewed as intuition could well be delusion, there could also be spontaneous apprehension for which we can find an acceptable scientific explanation. This would lend support to the frequently voiced belief that human beings – and by implication all living things – are connected with each other and with nature in ways that are more subtle than those that stimulate the senses. This in turn would reinforce and legitimate empathy and solidarity among people and a closer sense of rapport with nature – vitally important attributes in our critical times when we face problems we can only resolve in cooperation with each other and harmony with our environment. This article is based on the author’s latest book The Akashic Experience: Science and the Cosmic Memory Field (Inner Traditions, Rochester, USA).

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Living in the world under your skin is a bustling metropolis of 50 trillion cells, each of which is biologically and functionally equivalent to a miniature human. Current popular opinion holds that the fate and behaviour of our internal cellular citizens are preprogrammed in their genes. Since Watson and Crick’s discovery of the genetic code, the public has been programmed with perception that DNA acquired from our parents at the moment of conception determines our traits and characters. This conventional view of genetics further has us believe that our inherited gene programs are apparently fixed, the equivalent of a computer’s “read-only” program.

The notion that our fate is indelibly inscribed in our genes was directly derived from the now dated scientific concept known as genetic determinism. It is still a conventional belief that genes “control” the many wonderful attributes passed down through a family’s lineage, as well as dysfunctional familial traits such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes and depression, among scores of others. As “victims” of heredity, genetic forces outside of our control, we naturally perceive of ourselves as being powerless in regard to the unfolding of our lives. Unfortunately, the assumption of being powerless is the road to personal irresponsibility. “Since I can’t do anything about it anyway… why should I care?”

Shattering Illusions

Just as the Human Genome Project got off the ground in the late 1980’s, scientists began to acquire a paradigm-shattering new view of how life works. Their revolutionary research has become the foundation for a new branch of science known as epigenetic control. The world of epigenetics has shaken the foundations of biology and medicine for it reveals that we are not “victims” of our genes, but are in fact “masters” of our genes.

The conventional version of heredity still being taught in schools emphasises genetic control, which literally reads as “control by genes.” However, newly revealed epigenetic control mechanisms provide a profoundly different view of how life is managed. The Greek-derived prefix epi- means “over or above.” Consequently, the literal translation of epigenetic control reads as “control above the genes.” Genes do NOT control life – life is controlled by something above the genes. Knowledge is power and this knowledge of how life works provides the most important element in our quest for self-empowerment. Epigenetics leads us from our perception of victim to our proper role as a participatory creator.

The new science of epigenetics recognises that environmental signals are the primary regulators of gene activity. As described in the Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter and Miracles, cells read and respond to the conditions of their environment using membrane protein perception switches. Activated switches send signals into the cytoplasm to control behaviour and regulate the activity of the genes, the hereditary blueprints used to make the body. Proteins are the cell’s molecular building blocks and their characters provide for our physical and behavioural traits.

Amazingly, epigenetic information can modify or edit the readout of a gene blueprint to create over 30,000 different variations of proteins from the same gene. This editing process can provide for normal functional protein products as well as dysfunctional proteins from the same gene. One can be born with healthy genes and through epigenetic processes express mutant behaviours such as cancer. Similarly, one can be born with defective mutant genes and through epigenetic mechanisms create normal healthy proteins and functions.

The conventional belief that the genome represents “read-only” programs is now proven to be false. Epigenetic mechanisms modify the readout of genetic code, therefore genes actually represent “read-write” programs wherein life experiences actively redefine an individual’s genetic expression. As organisms experience the environment, their perception mechanisms fine-tune genetic expression so as to enhance their opportunities for survival. The environment’s influence over the genome is dramatically revealed in studies on identical twins. When first born, these siblings express almost the same gene activity from their identical genomes. However, as they begin to experience life, their personal individualised experiences and perceptions lead to the activation of profoundly different sets of genes.

The “new” biology is based upon the fact that perception controls behaviour AND gene activity! This revised version of science emphasises the reality that we actively control our genetic expression moment by moment throughout our lives. Rather than seeing ourselves as victims of our genes, we must come to own the responsibility that our perceptions are dynamically shaping our biology and behaviour. The expression of a healthy or dis-eased biology is directly influenced by the accuracy of an individual’s interpretation or perception of their environment. Misperceptions rewrite genetic expression just as effectively as accurate perceptions, yet with far graver, perhaps even life threatening consequences.

From the Microcosm of the Cell to the Macrocosm of the Mind

For the first three and a half billion years of life on this planet, the biosphere consisted of a massive population of individual single-celled organisms, such as bacteria, yeast, algae, and protozoa like the familiar amoeba and paramecium. About 700 million years ago, individual cells started to assemble into multicellular colonies. The collective awareness afforded in a community of cells was far greater than an individual cell’s awareness. Since awareness is a primary factor in organismal survival, the communal experience offered its citizens a far greater opportunity to stay alive and reproduce.

The first cellular communities, like the earliest human communities, were basic hunter-gatherer clans wherein each member of the society offered the same services to support the survival of the community. However, as the population densities of both cellular and human communities reached greater numbers, it was no longer efficient or effective for all individuals to do the same job. In both types of communities, evolution led to individuals taking on specialised functions. For example, in human communities some members focused upon hunting, others upon domestic chores and some upon child rearing. In cellular communities specialisation meant that some cells began to differentiate as digestive cells, others as heart cells, and still others as muscle cells.

Most of the trillions of cells forming bodies such as ours have no direct perception of the external environment. Liver cells “see” what’s going on in the liver, but don’t directly know what’s going on in the world outside of the skin. The function of the brain and nervous system is to interpret environmental stimuli and send out signals to the cells that integrate and regulate the life-sustaining functions of the body’s organ systems.

The successful nature of multicellular communities allowed evolving brains to dedicate vast numbers of cells for use in the cataloguing, memorising and integrating complex perceptions. The ability to remember and select among the millions of experienced perceptions in life provides the brain with a powerful creative database from which it can create complex behavioural repertoires. When put into play, these behavioural programs endow the organism with the characteristic trait of consciousness. In this presentation, the term consciousness is used in its most fundamental context… the state of being awake and aware of what is going on around you.

Many scientists prefer to think of consciousness in terms of a digital quality, an organism either has it or not. However, an assessment of the evolution of biological properties suggests consciousness, like any other quality, evolved over time. Consequently, the character of consciousness would likely express itself as a gradient of awareness from its simpler roots in primitive organisms to the unique character of self-consciousness manifest in humans and other higher vertebrates.

The expression of self-consciousness is specifically associated with a small evolutionary adaptation in the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex is the neurological platform that enables us to realise our personal identity and experience the quality of “thinking.” Monkeys and lower organisms do not express self-consciousness. When looking into a mirror, monkeys will never recognise that they are looking at them selves; they will always perceive the image to be that of another monkey. In contrast, neurologically more advanced chimps looking in the mirror perceive the mirror’s reflection as an image of themselves.

An important difference between the brain’s consciousness and the prefrontal cortex’s self-consciousness is that consciousness enables an organism to assess and respond to the immediate conditions of its environment that are relevant at that moment. In contrast, self-consciousness enables the individual to factor in the consequences of their actions in regard to not only how they impact the present moment but also as to how they will influence the individual’s future.

Self-consciousness is an evolutionary adjunct to consciousness in that it provided another behaviour-creating platform that included the role of a “self” in the decision-making process. While conventional consciousness enables organisms to be participatory members in the dynamics of life’s “play,” the quality of self-consciousness offers an opportunity to simultaneously be an observer in the “audience.” From the perspective of our being able to observe the role of “self” in the unfolding of the “play,” self-consciousness provides the individual with the option for self-reflection, reviewing and editing their character’s performance. The conscious and self-conscious functions of the brain may be collectively referred to as the mind.

In conventional parlance, the brain’s conscious mechanism associated with automated stimulus-response behaviours is referred to as the subconscious or unconscious mind, for the reason that its functions require neither observation nor attention from the self-conscious mind. Subconscious mind functions evolved long before the prefrontal cortex, consequently it historically was able to successfully operate a body and its behaviour without any contribution from, or involvement with, the more evolved self-conscious mind.

The subconscious mind is an astonishingly powerful information processor that can record perceptual experiences (programs) and forever play them back at the push of a button. Interestingly, many people only become aware of their subconscious mind’s automated programmed behaviours when they realise they’re engaged in an undesirable behaviour as a result of someone “pushing their buttons.”

The power of the subconscious mind lies in its ability to process massive amounts of data acquired from direct and indirect learning experiences at extraordinarily high rates of speed. It has been estimated that the disproportionately larger brain mass providing the subconscious mind’s function has the ability to interpret and respond to over 40 million nerve impulses per second. In contrast, it is estimated that the diminutive self-conscious mind’s prefrontal cortex can only process about 40 nerve impulses per second. As an information processor, the subconscious mind is one million times more powerful than the self-conscious mind.

As a tradeoff in acquiring its computational bravado, the subconscious mind expresses a marginal creative ability, one that may be best compared to that of a precocious five year old. In contrast to the freewill offered by the conscious mind, the subconscious mind primarily expresses prerecorded stimulus-response “habits.” Once a behaviour pattern is learned, such as walking, getting dressed or driving a car, those programs are processed as habits in the subconscious mind… meaning you can carry out these complex functions without paying any attention to them.

In contrast to the massive information processing by the subconscious mind, the smaller prefrontal cortex responsible for self-consciousness is limited to juggling only a small number of tasks at the same time. Though its ability for multitasking is physically constrained, the self-conscious mind can focus upon and control any function in the human body. It was once thought that some body’s functions were beyond the control of the self-conscious mind, such involuntary functions included the regulation of heartbeat, blood pressure and body temperature, behaviours controlled by the unconscious autonomic nervous system. However, it is now recognised that yogis and other practitioners that train their conscious minds can absolutely control functions formerly defined as involuntary behaviours.

The subconscious and self-conscious components of the mind work in tandem. The subconscious mind controls every behaviour that is not attended to by the self-conscious mind. For most people, their self-conscious minds are rarely focused upon the current moment since their mental processing continuously flits from one thought to another. The self-conscious mind is so preoccupied with thoughts about the future, the past or resolving some imaginary problem, that most of our lives are actually controlled by programs in the subconscious mind.

Cognitive neuroscientists conclude that the self-conscious mind contributes only about 5% of our cognitive activity. Consequently, 95% of our decisions, actions, emotions and behaviours are derived from the unobserved processing of the subconscious mind.

Simple Insights… Profound Consequences!

Through the management of “programmed” perceptions, the mind controls our biology, behaviour and gene activity. The seat of thinking, freewill, personal identity, and our wants, desires and intentions is a small 40 “bit” self-conscious processor that controls our lives only 5% of the day or less. The million times more powerful subconscious mind controls 95% or more of our lives using “habits” derived from instincts and the perceptions acquired in our life experiences.

This data reveals that our lives are not controlled by our personal intentions and desires as we may inherently believe. Do the math! Our fate is actually under the control of the preprogrammed experiences managed by the subconscious mind. The most powerful and influential programs in the subconscious mind were downloaded into consciousness in the profoundly important formative period between gestation and six years of age. Now here’s the catch – these life-shaping subconscious programs are direct downloads derived from observing our primary teachers… our parents, siblings and local community. Unfortunately, as psychiatrists, psychologists and counsellors are keenly aware, many of the perceptions acquired about ourselves in the formative period are expressed as limiting and self-sabotaging beliefs.

Unbeknownst to most parents is the fact that their words and actions are being continuously recorded by their children’s minds. Consequently, when they inform their child that he or she does not deserve things, or that they are not good enough, or smart enough, or that they are sickly, these pronouncements are directly downloaded into their child’s subconscious. Since the role of the mind is to make coherence between its programs and real life, the brain generates appropriate behavioural responses to life’s stimuli to assure the “truth” of the programmed perceptions.

Let’s apply this understanding to the behaviour in one’s life. Consider that you were a 5-year-old child throwing a tantrum in Walmart over your desire to have a particular toy. In silencing your outburst, your father yelled, “YOU don’t deserve things!” You are now an adult and in your self-conscious mind you are considering the idea that you have the qualities and power to assume a position of leadership at your job. While in the process of entertaining this positive thought in the self-conscious mind, all of your behaviours are now being automatically managed by the programs in your more powerful subconscious mind. Since your fundamental behavioural programs are those derived in your formative years, your father’s admonition that “you do not deserve things” may become the subconscious mind’s automated directive. So while you are entertaining wonderful thoughts of a positive future and not paying attention, your subconscious mind is automatically engaging self-sabotaging behaviour to assure that your reality matches your program of not-deserving.

Now here’s the catch – Behaviour is automatically controlled by subconscious mind’s programs when the self-conscious mind is not focused on the present moment. When the reflective self-conscious mind is preoccupied in thought and not paying attention, it does not observe the automatic behaviours derived from subconscious mind. Since 95% or more of our behaviour is derived from the subconscious mind… then most of our own behaviour is invisible to us!

For example, consider you intimately know someone and you also know his or her parent. From your perspective you see that your friend’s behaviour closely resembles their parent. Then one day you casually remark to your friend something like, “You know Mary, you’re just like your mom.” Back away! In disbelief and perhaps shock, Mary will likely respond with, “How can you say that!” The cosmic joke is that everyone else can see that Mary’s behaviour resembles her mom’s except Mary. Why? Simply because when Mary is engaging the subconscious behavioural programs she downloaded in her youth from observing her mom, it’s because her self-conscious mind is not paying attention. At those moments, her automatic subconscious programs operate without observation.

Another familiar example of how “invisible” behaviour operates: You are driving your car while having an intense conversation with a friend in the passenger’s seat. You become so involved in the discussion that only later, when your gaze returns to the road, do you realise that you haven’t paid attention to the driving for the last ten minutes. Since the self-conscious mind was preoccupied with the conversation, the car was being driven by the subconscious mind’s “autopilot” mode. However, if you were asked to describe your driving behaviour during that ten-minute hiatus, you would be forced to say, “I don’t know… I wasn’t paying attention.” Aha! That’s the point – when the conscious mind is busy, we do not observe our own programmed subconscious behaviours.

Consequently, when life does not work out as planned, we rarely recognise that we were very likely contributing to our own disappointments. Since we are generally unaware of the influence of our own subconscious behaviours, we naturally perceive of our selves as victims of forces outside of us when things don’t work out as desired. Unfortunately, assuming the role of victim means that we assume we are powerless in manifesting our intentions. Nothing is further from the truth! The primary determinant in shaping the fate of our lives is the database of perceptions and beliefs programmed in our minds.

Where Did That Behaviour Come From?

There are three sources of perceptions that control our biology and behaviour. The most primitive perceptions are those we acquire with our genome. Built into our genes are programs that provide fundamental reflex behaviours referred to as instincts. Pulling your hand out of an open flame is a genetically derived behaviour that does not have to be learned. More complex instincts include the ability of newborn babies to swim like a dolphin or the activation of innate healing mechanisms to repair a damaged system or eliminate a cancerous growth. Genetically inherited instincts are perceptions acquired from nature.

The second source of life-controlling perceptions represents memories derived from life experiences downloaded into the subconscious mind. These profoundly powerful learned perceptions represent the contribution from nurture. Among the earliest perceptions of life to be downloaded are the emotions and sensations experienced by the mother as she responds to her world. Along with nutrition, the emotional chemistry, hormones, and stress factors controlling the mother’s responses to life experiences cross the placental barrier and influence fetal physiology and development. When the mother is happy, so is the fetus. When the mother is in fear, so is the fetus. When the mother “rejects” her fetus as a potential threat to family survival, the fetal nervous system is preprogrammed with the emotion of being rejected. Sue Gearhardt’s very valuable book Why Love Matters reveals that the fetal nervous system records memories of womb experiences. By the time the baby is born, emotional information downloaded from the life experiences in womb have already shaped half of that individual’s personality.

However, the most influential perceptual programming of the subconscious mind occurs in the time period spanning from the birth process through the first six years of life. During this time the child’s brain is recording all sensory experiences as well as learning complex motor programs for speech, and for learning first how to crawl and then how to stand and ultimately run and jump. Simultaneously, the subconscious mind acquires perceptions in regard to parents, who are they and what they do. Then by observing behavioural patterns of people in their immediate environment (usually parents, siblings and relatives), a child learns perceptions of acceptable and unacceptable social behaviours that become the subconscious programs that establish the “rules” of life.

Nature facilitates the enculturation process by developmentally enhancing the subconscious mind’s ability to download massive amounts of information. EEG readings from adult brains reveal that neural electrical activity is correlated with different states of awareness. Adult EEG readings show that the human brain operates on at least five different frequency levels, each associated with a different brain state:

EEG vibrations continuously shift from state to state over the whole range of frequencies during normal brain processing in adults. However, brain frequencies in developing children display a radically different behaviour. EEG vibration rates and their corresponding states evolve in incremental stages over time. The predominant brain activity during the child’s first two years of life is delta, the lowest EEG frequency range. In the adult brain, delta is associated with sleeping or unconsciousness.

Between two and six years of age, the child’s brain activity state ramps up and it operates primarily in the range of theta. In the adult, theta activity is associated with states of reverie or imagination. While in the theta state, children spend much of their time mixing the imaginary world with the real world. Calm consciousness associated with emerging alpha activity only becomes a predominant brain state after six years of age. By twelve years, the brain expresses all frequency ranges although its primary activity is in beta’s state of focused consciousness. Children leave elementary education behind at this age and enter into the more intense academic programs of junior high.

A profoundly important fact in the above timeline that may have missed your attention is that children do not express the alpha EEG frequencies of conscious processing as a predominant brain state until after they are six years old. The predominant delta and theta activity of children under six signifies that their brains are operating at levels below consciousness. Delta and theta brain frequencies define a brain state known as a hypnogogic trance, the same neural state that hypnotherapists use to download new behaviours directly into the subconscious mind of their clients.

The first six years of a child’s life is spent in a hypnotic trance. Its perceptions of the world are directly downloaded into the subconscious during this time, without the discrimination of the, as yet, dormant self-conscious mind. Consequently, our fundamental perceptions about life and our role in it are learned before we express the capacity to choose or reject those beliefs. We were simply “programmed.” The Jesuits were aware of this programmable state and proudly boasted, “Give us a child until it is six or seven years old and it will belong to the Church for the rest of its life.” They knew that once the dogma of the Church was implanted into the child’s subconscious mind, that information would inevitably influence 95% of that individual’s behaviour for the rest of their life.

The inhibition of conscious processing (alpha EEG activity) and the simultaneous engagement of a hypnogogic trance during the formative stages of a child’s life are a logical necessity. The thinking processes associated with the self-conscious mind’s processing cannot operate from a blank slate. Self-conscious behaviour requires a working database of learned perceptions. Consequently, before self-consciousness is expressed, the brain’s primary task is to acquire a working awareness of the world by directly downloading experiences and observations into the subconscious mind.

HOWEVER, there is a very, very serious downside to acquiring awareness by this method. The consequence is so profound that it not only impacts the life of the individual, it can also alter an entire civilisation. The issue concerns the fact that we download our perceptions and beliefs about life long before we acquire the ability for critical thinking. Our primary perceptions are literally written in stone as unequivocal truths in the subconscious mind, where they habitually operate for life, unless there is an active effort to reprogram them. When as young children we download limiting or sabotaging beliefs about ourselves, these perceptions become our truths and our subconscious processing will invisibly generate behaviours that are coherent with those truths.

As an important point for personal reference, it should be noted that acquired perceptions in the subconscious mind could even override genetically endowed instincts. For example, every human can instinctually swim like a dolphin the moment they emerge from the birth canal. This might prompt you to ask, “Why is it that we have to work so hard at teaching our children how to swim?” The answer lies in the fact that every time the infant encounters open water, such as a pool, a river, a bathtub, the parents freak out in concern for the safety of their child. However, in the baby’s mind, the parent’s behaviour causes the child to equate water as something to be feared. The acquired perception of water as dangerous and life threatening, overrides the instinctual ability to swim and makes the formerly proficient child susceptible to drowning.

The following is further reference to the fact that our unconsciously acquired cultural beliefs control biology and behaviour. Through our developmental experiences we acquire the perception that we are frail, vulnerable organisms subject to the ravages of contagious germs and disease. The belief of being frail actually leads to frailty since the mind’s limiting perceptions inhibit the body’s innate ability to heal itself. This influence of the mind on healing processes is the focus of psychoneuroimmunology, the field that describes the mechanism by which our thoughts change brain chemistry, which in turn regulates the function of the immune system. While negative beliefs can precipitate illness (nocebo effect), the resulting dis-ease state can be alleviated through the healing effects of positive thoughts (placebo effect).

Finally, the third source of perceptions that shape our lives is derived from the self-conscious mind. Unlike the reflexive programming of subconscious mind, the self-conscious mind is a creative platform that provides for the mixing and morphing a variety of perceptions with the infusion of imagination, a process that generates an unlimited number of beliefs and behavioural variations. The quality of the self-conscious mind endows organisms with one of the most powerful forces in the Universe, the opportunity to express freewill.

Taking Personal Responsibility

The conclusions of the “new” biology provide a radical departure from our conventional beliefs of how life works. In contrast to the notion that we are biochemical automatons driven by genes, the new insights reveal that it is the mind that controls genes, which in turn shape our biology and behaviour. The self-conscious mind, associated with our individual identity and the manifestation of thoughts, is guided by our own personal desires and intentions.

While we generally perceive that our self-conscious mind is “controlling” the show, neuroscience has established the fact that 95% of our behaviour is under the control of the more powerful subconscious mind. As most of our personal and cultural problems arise from the fact that behaviours derived from the subconscious mind are essentially invisible to us, we rarely observe our automated behaviour.

Compounding the problem is the fact that fundamental programs in the subconscious mind are derived from others, people who generally do not share your personal goals and aspirations. While our conscious minds are trying to move us toward our dreams, unbeknownst to us our subconscious programs are simultaneously shooting ourselves in the foot and impeding our progress.

The subconscious mind is simply a “record-playback” mechanism that downloads experiences into “behavioural tapes.” While the self-conscious mind is associated with creativity, the subconscious mind’s function is to engage previously recorded programs. Unlike self-consciousness that is overseen by an entity (you), the subconscious mind is more closely related to a machine, meaning there is no thinking, conscious entity controlling the subconscious programs.

We have all been shackled with emotional chains wrought by dysfunctional behaviours programmed by the stories of the past. However, the next time you are talking to “yourself” with the hope of changing sabotaging subconscious programs, it is important to realise the following information. Using reason to communicate with your subconscious in an effort to change its behaviour would essentially have the same influence as trying to change a program on a cassette tape by talking to the tape player. In neither case is there an entity in the mechanism that will respond to your dialogue.

Subconscious programs are not fixed, unchangeable behaviours. We have the ability to rewrite our limiting beliefs and in the process take control of our lives. However, to change subconscious programs requires the activation of a process other than just engaging in a running dialogue with the subconscious mind. There are a large variety of effective processes to reprogram limiting beliefs, which include clinical hypnotherapy, Buddhist mindfulness and a number of newly developed and very powerful modalities collectively referred to as energy psychology.

For a list of resources, visit: www.brucelipton.com.

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BRUCE H. LIPTON, Ph.D. is an internationally recognised cellular biologist who taught cell biology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and later performed pioneering studies at Stanford University’s School of Medicine. His breakthrough research on the cell membrane in 1977 made him a pioneer in the new science of epigenetics. He is author of The Biology of Belief and a sought after keynote speaker and workshop presenter. He also created a full-length audio course The Wisdom of Your Cells: How Your Beliefs Control Your Biology.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 106 (Jan-Feb 2008).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
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Phineas Parkhurst Quimby

By RICHARD SMOLEY

—

The latest in the blockbusters of alternative spirituality is The Secret, now both a film and a book. Both have been huge successes. The film version has sold 1.5 million copies in DVD format, while at this writing in early June 2007, the book version of The Secret has been on The New York Times’s best-seller list in the US for “advice nonfiction” for twenty weeks, and currently sits on the top.

No wonder. In breathless, gee-whiz language, The Secret’s Web site promises the key to human existence: “The Secret has existed throughout the history of humankind. It has been discovered, coveted, suppressed, hidden, lost and recovered. It has been hunted down, stolen, and bought for vast sums of money. Now for the first time in history, The Secret is being revealed to the world over two breathtaking hours.”

Well, then, what is the Secret? Was it the source of the success of great men throughout history, including Plato, Aristotle, Galileo, Napoleon, and Einstein, as its promoters claim?

The Secret as a film is the brainchild of Australian documentary producer Rhonda Byrne, who began reading self-help literature while going through a rough patch in her life in 2004. Through such books as The Secret of Getting Rich, The Master Key System, and The Secret of the Ages, Byrne was exposed to an idea that has long fascinated seekers and self-promoters alike: your health, wealth, and success in love, work, and life depend not on what you do but what you think. “That principle can be summed up in three simple words: thoughts become things,” proclaims Mike Dooley, one of the ‘teachers’ featured in The Secret.

That, in essence, is the Secret. Whether it was “hunted down, stolen,” or “bought for vast sums of money” and whether Plato, Aristotle, and other great men had any knowledge of it remains highly open to question, but there’s nothing particularly astonishing about the Secret itself. As the film’s promoters concede, the idea has been a part of occult philosophy for centuries, although it entered the mainstream only about 150 years ago.

The seminal figure in promoting the Secret was a now little-known American healer named Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–66). Quimby, like many men of his time, was a jack of all trades. He started as a clockmaker but eventually became a healer. Eventually he realised that it didn’t matter what remedy he prescribed; it was the faith of the patient that made the difference. By simply convincing the individual that he or she was already well, Quimby became a tremendous success. His office filled with patients, many of whom went away feeling completely healed. He often treated people for free when they could not pay.

Around 1859, Quimby began to write down his ideas. Believing he had discovered the secret by which Christ had performed his miracles, he wanted to make his discoveries known to all. “My philosophy,” he said, “will make man free and independent of all creeds and laws of man, and subject him to his own agreement, he being free from the laws of sin, sickness, and death.” The cardinal tenet of this philosophy was this: “Every phenomenon in the natural world has its birth in the spiritual world…. Instead of your happiness being in the world, the world’s happiness is in you. Here is your true position, and this is the struggle you will have to go through. Shall the world lead you, or shall you lead the world? This is the point that is to be settled in your mind.”

Quimby, like his most famous pupil, Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science (a term coined by Quimby), focused mostly on health and healing. “Disease,” wrote Quimby, “is false reasoning. True scientific wisdom is health and happiness. False reasoning is sickness and death.” But as these ideas – which came to pervade nineteenth century American religion under the rubric of New Thought – grew more widespread, practitioners began to use ‘the Secret’ for prosperity and success. One of the most famous promoters of this idea was Napoleon Hill, who, in his 1937 book Think and Grow Rich, contended, “TRULY, THOUGHTS ARE THINGS – and powerful things that when they are mixed with definiteness and purpose, persistence, and a BURNING DESIRE for their translation into riches and other material objects.”

The idea proved irresistible to the success-crazed American public, and Hill’s book became a perennial best-seller. In the 1960s it attracted a reader named Jerry Hicks, who would claim that the ideas in Hill’s book helped him succeed in business. Hicks would become responsible for the latest flowering of this perennial of American spirituality.

In 1980, Hicks married. His wife, Esther, was at first indifferent to his interests in spirituality, but soon both of them became fascinated with the Seth books by Jane Roberts, which described Roberts’ activity as a channel for an entity named Seth. (‘Channelling’ is a term used to describe a situation in which the speaker believes he or she is serving as a mouthpiece for a invisible, spiritual being.) Later the Hickses began to meditate on their own, and in 1986 Esther began to channel a collective entity (that is, a number of related spiritual beings) called Abraham.

“I have no real way of understanding how it is that Esther is able to allow Abraham to speak through her,” Jerry writes in the Hickses’ latest book The Law of Attraction. “From my point of view, Esther closes her eyes and breathes a few very deep, soft breaths. Her head gently nods for a few moments, and then her eyes open and Abraham addresses me directly.” The voice that speaks is slightly different from Esther’s own; a New York Times reporter characterises it as “rounder, quicker and more computerlike than Ms. Hicks’s natural voice,” and from the one Abraham session I attended, I would say it has a quality that I can only describe, somewhat imperfectly, as metallic.

The Hickses first began publicising the Abraham material in 1988 with a series of recorded cassettes, and in the years since, the output has blossomed to include books, radio and television interviews, calendars, and even decks of cards. The Hickses regularly offer week-long ‘Well-Being Adventure Cruises’ and ‘Art of Allowing’ workshops, in which participants can ask their own questions of Abraham. At US$195 for a single day, the workshops aren’t cheap, particularly since they can include hundreds of people, making it fairly unlikely that you’ll be able to chat with Abraham yourself.

At any rate, the Abraham material forms the core of The Secret’s teachings. Early versions of the film featured Esther and Abraham, although after disputes with Rhonda Byrne over revenues and distribution, the Hickses asked to be removed from the film entirely. “I’ve got to give Rhonda credit,” Esther has said. “I’ve never seen anybody do that like she’s doing it. And never mind honesty, and never mind doing what you said you were going to do, and never mind anything. Just stay in alignment.”

Do what? Stay in alignment with what? Here lies the Secret. In The Law of Attraction, Jerry Hicks spells out the three “Eternal Universal Laws” that lie at the centre of the teaching.

The first is the Law of Attraction. It says that “That which is like unto itself, is drawn [sic]” – or, less clumsily, like attracts like.

The second is the Science of Deliberate Creation: “That which I give thought to and that which I believe or expect – is.” In short, you get what you are thinking about, whether you want it or not.

The third is the Art of Allowing: “I am that which I am, and I am willing to allow all others to be that which they are.”

From this it’s easy to see how Abraham’s teachings resemble those of New Thought. What you create in your mind manifests in physical reality. If you have positive thoughts, you’ll have positive results in your life. The same is true if you hold negative thoughts.

But, you may reply, how many people go around wanting bad things to happen to them? What about all the people who are constantly saying, “I don’t want this to happen,” but have it happen anyway?

According to Abraham, the Law of Attraction is working in any case. To focus on something that you don’t want is still to think about it – and thus to bring it into your life. The book version of The Secret explains:

The law of attraction doesn’t compute ‘don’t’ or ‘not’ or ‘no,’ or any other words of negation. As you speak words of negation this is what the law of attraction is receiving:

“I don’t want to spill something on this outfit.”

“I want to spill something on this outfit and I want to spill more things.”

“I don’t want a bad haircut.”

“I want bad haircuts.”

This, in essence, is the Secret. As we’ve seen, it’s surfaced in many books and articles over the years, and it has become a central component of what one might call the American Religion. Does it really work?

Yes and no. The ideas in The Secret do work, but the information it presents is incomplete in some serious ways, and incomplete information is wrong information.

In the first place, it’s true that, as esoteric doctrine has always held, thought is creative. The world of thoughts and images – what the Kabbalists call Yetzirah and which Theosophy calls the astral realm – exists prior to the physical world and underlies it. What comes into being in physical form manifests first in the realm of images. This explains not only the ideas behind The Secret but the possibility of such things as precognition: under certain (highly limited) circumstances, you may be able to tap into the astral realm and see the future. (For more on this, see my article “Prophecy: Does It Work?” in New Dawn, Jan-Feb 2007.) Much of occult magic also involves forming a particular thought-form, infusing it with vital energy so that it makes its way into actuality, sometimes in odd and even quasi-miraculous ways.

But there are some major caveats. Both The Secret and Abraham tell us to focus very specifically and precisely on what we want. Joe Vitale, one of the ‘teachers’ featured in The Secret, says, “Your job is to declare what you would like to have from the catalogue of the Universe. If cash is one of them, say how much you would like to have. ‘I would like to have twenty-five thousand dollars, unexpected income, within the next thirty days’.” Abraham also recommends having a ‘Magical Creation Box’ in which you put pictures of anything you want to manifest in your life – “furniture, clothing, landscaping, buildings, travel destinations, vehicles…. if it feels appealing to you in any way, clip it, and drop it into your Creation Box. And say, as you drop it in, ‘whatever is contained in this box – IS!’”

The problem with these procedures is not that they don’t work, but that they do. The subconscious – the part of the mind that is involved in shaping the image and giving it energy – is slavishly literal-minded. As we’ve seen, it doesn’t understand negative commands terribly well, so if you ask it not to do something, it may end up doing that very thing. But the problem doesn’t stop there. You could have your wish fulfilled in a way that you don’t want. A friend of mine once used Secret-like techniques to get $10,000 to help her boyfriend start a business. Her car was robbed on the day she was moving, with all her belongings in it. The insurance settlement amounted to $10,000. As the proverb says, “Be careful what you wish for. You might just get it.”

Sophisticated practitioners avoid this problem by making sure to leave the request more open-ended, and also to specify that no harm come to anyone through the wish. Florence Scovel Shinn, an American New Thought teacher of the early twentieth century, taught her students to say, for example, “Perfect work with perfect pay comes to me now under grace in a perfect way.” Adding the rider “under grace in a perfect way” should – at least theoretically – prevent any harm from resulting from one’s wish.

Another equally serious omission in The Secret lies in its exclusive emphasis on thought. To read The Secret, and much of New Thought literature, you might conclude that it is thought alone that makes the difference. This is not really true. A small detail here has been overlooked because it (quite accurately) makes the process look like far more work than the best-sellers would have us believe. To sit around and visualise enormous cheques arriving in the mail is not much trouble; in fact, it’s a great deal like daydreaming. Sometimes the cheques do come. But sometimes they don’t. In what are, I would say, by far the most common cases, what really works is thought combined with action – a process that requires will, concentration, and effort. If you’re looking for the perfect job, the visualisation and affirmation techniques of various New Thought teachings may be helpful, but in all likelihood they will be far more so if you combine them with your own best efforts in finding the job – even if, in the end, the job seems to manifest in a completely unexpected way. This is not as breezily simple as The Secret and its kin like to make out, but it is so.

A crucial issue is lying under the surface here. What you wish for comes true: that is the Secret. But it’s what you wish for with all your being – and much of your being is concerned with action, with doing. If you are thinking with your mind that you want the perfect job while your body is sitting on the couch all day watching cartoons, you may not get anywhere. What’s still worse is that you will tend to induce an inner dissociation that lies behind much of today’s mental illness: one part of your mind is doing one thing while another part is doing quite the opposite. This, in fact, is one of the dangers of simplistic applications of The Secret.

Another difficulty with The Secret has to do with its ethical component. From The Secret’s point of view, you create your own reality. Which means that other people create theirs as well. Which means that you are not responsible for them. Which means that you are not your brother’s keeper. The Secret does, of course, talk about love (“There is no greater power in the Universe than the power of love. The feeling of love is the highest frequency you can emit”) and the Law of Allowing does teach a tolerance that can be helpful in enabling certain types of people to be less compulsive and controlling. But the emphasis in The Secret and in the Abraham teachings is on feeling love: “The greater the love you feel and emit, the greater the power you are harnessing.” And yet ‘feeling’ and ‘emitting’ love are not necessarily the same as doing loving things. The Secret does not leave much room for compassion. If everyone is creating their own reality, ultimately, it would seem, that is their business, and all one can do is cultivate one’s own garden.

We can see this problem echoed in Esther Hicks’ comment about Rhonda Byrne’s behaviour: “Never mind honesty, and never mind doing what you said you were going to do, and never mind anything. Just stay in alignment.” Fortunately or unfortunately, “staying in alignment” is more than feeling good or thinking nice thoughts. The universe has a profoundly moral dimension, and you can’t “stay in alignment” with it by acting dishonestly or deceitfully. While I personally have no idea of the rights and wrongs in the Hickses’ differences with Byrne, I can see how they might directly result from Abraham’s ideas. The Hickses may have gotten a taste of their own medicine.

This leads to another inaccuracy in The Secret. It is not only our thoughts that create reality, it’s also what Hindus and Buddhists call samskaras – a word that can be roughly translated as ‘karmic dispositions’ or ‘seeds of karma’. Put extremely simply, these are imprints left by one’s past actions on the mind at its deepest and most inaccessible level. These samskaras are a key component in creating our current reality. They can be eradicated by a persistent process of cleansing and release (one aspect of which is The Secret’s own “letting go of the past”), but they also require what the Twelve-Step programs call “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of oneself and “making direct amends” to those we have harmed. If you ignore these facts, your mightiest efforts at visualisation might go for nothing. No one is perfect, but if you’re to “be in alignment” with the universe, you are going to have to hold yourself to moral standards that are at least as high as those of ordinary decency and kindness.

The ultimate problem with The Secret and the Abraham teachings may, however, be what they focus on. It’s almost entirely a matter of attracting abundance, of finding love, success, money, nice things. In fact, if you believe Abraham, that is what we’re here to do. The universe is an enormous vending machine that operates using the coinage of our thoughts.

What’s striking about this advice is how directly it contradicts practically all of the great spiritual teachings. These teachings, as I’ve suggested, have no quarrel with the fundamental concepts of The Secret: mind does create its own reality. But they differ very much with The Secret about what we’re supposed to create. Most of the great spiritual traditions insist that the ‘abundance’ The Secret urges us to generate is nothing more than a distraction from discovering the truth of our own nature. You can call this enlightenment, liberation, gnosis, or whatever you like, but the goal is the same. Material wealth is nothing more than an impediment to this goal.

While it would be possible to find examples of this truth in practically all the world’s spiritual traditions, I can cite only a very small number in this space. The Hindu master Ram Chandra has said, “Sit in loneliness for some time, and think of God with at least as much power as you have bestowed to your own difficulties. What then? It is as easy to realise your own God as it is to realise the worldly things in crude form.” There’s also the advice of A Course in Miracles, another extraordinarily popular channeled text, supposedly dictated by Jesus Christ to a New York psychologist named Helen Schucman in the 1960s. The Course has this to say about material wealth:

The world you see holds nothing that you need to offer you; nothing that you can use in any way, nor anything at all that serves to give you joy. Believe this thought, and you are saved from years of misery, from countless disappointments, and from hopes that turn to bitter ashes of despair. No one but must accept this thought as true, if he would leave the world behind and soar beyond its petty scope and little ways.

Each thing you value here is but a chain that binds you to the world, and it will serve no other end but this. For everything must serve the purpose you have given it, until you see a different purpose there. The only purpose worthy of your mind this world contains is that you pass it by, without delaying to perceive some hope where there is none. Be you deceived no more. The world you see holds nothing that you want.

Passages like this one explain why, in my view, a single page of the Course is worth The Secret and all the utterances of Abraham put together.

What, then, are we to want? The Course explains this in a lesson entitled “I want the peace of God,” adding:

To say these words is nothing. But to mean these words is everything. If you could but mean them for just an instant, there would be no further sorrow possible for you in any form; in any place or time. Heaven would be completely given back to full awareness, memory of God entirely restored, the resurrection of all creation fully recognised.

The Course, like much channeled material (including Abraham’s pronouncements), makes the process sound easier than it often is in practice; perhaps channeled entities don’t understand how difficult life can feel to those of us on earth. Nonetheless, a goal of manifesting inner peace strikes me as far superior to manifesting lovers and cheques and SUVs.

On the other hand, it requires a certain amount of illumination even to see through the deception of appearances. Up to a point, we are going to desire the solid satisfactions of life because they are all we can trust in. A time will come, however, when disillusion sets in, when the desirable things of the world start to seem not so desirable after all, and one realises that there is something more to life. This recognition will come to each of us according to his or her own readiness. Until then, I suspect, many will use the ideas of The Secret and similar teachings as elementary lessons in the truth that the world is more than we can see with our physical eyes, and also as a mild but helpful form of cognitive therapy. After all, it’s better to focus the mind on good things than on bad.

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RICHARD SMOLEY has over thirty years of experience studying and practicing the Western esoteric traditions. His latest book is The Dice Game of Shiva: How Consciousness Creates the Universe. His other works include Hidden Wisdom: A Guide to the Western Inner Traditions (with Jay Kinney); Inner Christianity: A Guide to the Esoteric Tradition; The Essential Nostradamus; Forbidden Faith: The Secret History of Gnosticism; and Conscious Love: Insights from Mystical Christianity. He is editor of Quest Books and executive editor of Quest magazine, both published by the Theosophical Society in America. His website is www.innerchristianity.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 103 (July-August 2007).

Read this article with its illustrations by downloading
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© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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—

Enlightened people are like spiritual dynamos: they have a very strong presence which touches the people they come into contact with, transmitting something of their enlightenment to them. Even people who aren’t at all “spiritual” usually feel a sense of well-being in their presence, and so feel attracted to them without knowing why. And for people who have made some spiritual progress already, the effect can be extremely powerful.

Contact with an enlightened person may enable them to make the final “jump” to permanent enlightenment themselves. This is one of the reasons why many spiritual traditions place so much emphasis on the role of a guru. The guru is so important not just because of the advice and guidance he can give you, but because he can transmit his spiritual power to you, giving you a taste of enlightenment and speeding up your spiritual development. (In Sanskrit, this is called satsang, literally “good company.”)

Paul Brunton and Ramana Maharishi

The early 20th century author and spiritual teacher Paul Brunton became aware of this when he visited the ashram of the great sage Ramana Maharishi, while travelling around India in search of spiritual wisdom (as described in his book A Search in Secret India). Brunton knew that Ramana was a truly enlightened man the first time he met him, someone who had completely transcended his ego and become one with ultimate reality. He felt the spiritual effect of his satsang straight away. He sensed that “a steady river of quietness seems to be flowing near me, that a great peace is penetrating the inner reaches of my being.” While sitting near him, he realised that his mind was becoming more still, and suddenly all of the intellectual questions he’d had about spiritual matters no longer seemed important. The only question in his head now was, “Does this man, the Maharishee, emanate the perfume of spiritual peace as the flower emanates fragrance from its petals?”1

At the end of his first visit to the Ashram, Brunton was sitting quietly while the sage was meditating. He felt a sense of awe building up inside him, as a powerful force started to fill the room, emanating from Ramana. Ramana opened his eyes and gazed at him and he felt that he was aware of his every thought and feeling. He felt that a telepathic current was passing between them, that Ramana was transmitting his deep serenity to him, and began to feel a sense of euphoria and lightness. He felt that his own being became one with Ramana’s, and that he had transcended all problems and all desires.

After this, Brunton resumed his travels around India, meeting magicians and miracle workers and self-proclaimed gurus who are less enlightened than they claimed to be, and eventually returned to the Maharashi’s ashram. Again he experienced an “ineffable tranquillity” when sitting close to him, and again he experienced revelations which he was sure were “nothing else than a spreading ripple of telepathic radiation from this mysterious and imperturbable man.”2 And finally, after a period of wrestling with his own thoughts and his intellect, he had an experience of genuine enlightenment which changed him forever:

I find myself outside the rim of world consciousness. The planet which has so far harboured me disappears. I am in the midst of an ocean of blazing light. The latter, I feel rather than think, is the primeval stuff out of which worlds are created, the first state of matter. It stretches away into untellable infinite space, incredibly alive.3

Andrew Cohen and H.W.L. Poonja

The American spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen had a similar experience when he first met the Indian teacher who became his guru, H.W.L. Poonja – who was, coincidentally (or perhaps not!), a direct disciple of Ramana. Cohen had had profound spiritual experiences before, but had spent many years feeling frustrated and disillusioned, yearning for spiritual liberation but being disappointed by a series of other teachers. Cohen asked Poonja whether it was important to make an effort in spiritual practice, and he replied, “You don’t have to make any effort to be free.” And at that moment Cohen experienced enlightenment:

His words penetrated very deeply, I turned and looked out into the courtyard outside his room and inside myself all I saw was a river – in that instant I realised that I had always been Free. I saw clearly that I never could have been other than Free and that any idea or concept of bondage had always been and could only ever be completely illusory.4

After this, Cohen spent three weeks with Poonja and found the liberation he’d been yearning for. After a week or so, he “surrendered” to his guru, let go of his own identity and everything which made up his life. He felt himself become one with Poonja, and began to experience “waves of bliss and love that at times were so strong that I felt my body wouldn’t be able to contain it.” And from that point on, although his initial euphoria faded a little, he had a constant sense of “being always in the present with much contentment and calm. I feel no desire for other than what IS.”5

And now that he had attained moksha (freedom) himself, Cohen realised that other people were affected by his presence in the same way that he had been by Poonja’s. Friends who spent time with him found that they experienced a powerful sense of bliss and freedom too. He became a spiritual teacher, giving talks and holding retreats, and found that people were naturally drawn to him, and that around him they would “easily and often instantly… have profound realisations, insights into their true nature and powerful feelings of love, joy and bliss.”6

My wife and I went to one of Andrew’s talks several years ago in Manchester, England, and for days afterwards Pam – my wife – felt like a different person. There was a feeling of freedom inside her, a sense that – in her words – “nothing mattered, that I didn’t have any problems. I didn’t want anything because I was happy as I was. My life was quite stressful at that point but suddenly none of the stress could affect me.” And she’s sure that this wasn’t so much because of what Andrew actually said but the effect of simply being there, in his presence.

Russell Williams

I was a little jealous because I didn’t have any of those feelings – at that time I was taking a more intellectual approach to spiritual matters, and was so busy trying to understand what Andrew was saying conceptually that I must have been shut off from the feeling dimension.

A couple of years before then, I’d started to visit a spiritual teacher called Russell Williams, and also took a largely conceptual approach to his teachings. Russell – who I still go to see now – is 85 years old, and has been the president of the Manchester Buddhist Society for over 50 years, even though he’s not specifically a Buddhist. He doesn’t chant or meditate or read Buddhist scriptures, and doesn’t adhere to or promote any particular set of teachings. He’s a humble self-realised man, who talks about the most profound spiritual truths and the most intense spiritual states as if they’re the most simple and natural things.

In my first years of going along to Russell’s twice weekly meetings, I used to wonder why most people didn’t seem to be paying attention to him. He was saying some of the most profound things I’d ever heard and people didn’t seem to be listening – they were just staring into space, or sitting with their eyes closed. They rarely asked questions, seeming content to let Russell be silent, when as far as I was concerned he was full of wisdom which I wanted to absorb.

But about three years ago I began to realise why this was. Perhaps I’d changed, become less interested in the conceptual side of spirituality, or perhaps I’d finally completed a long process of getting attuned to the atmosphere at the meetings, but when I went there I started to experience very strange, pleasurable states of consciousness. Even when I’d been taking a conceptual approach, I’d often experienced feelings of peacefulness and well-being, which sometimes lasted for a couple of days afterwards. But this was something stronger.

The first time it happened, I was staring at Russell while he was speaking to me, and began to feel very relaxed and calm, as if the flow of my life-energies was becoming smoother and lighter. And then, all of a sudden, everything became unfamiliar – the light became brighter, the colours began to merge and the distinctions between people and objects began to fade away. My main feeling, however, was of a powerful sense of strangeness – the scene was completely alien, as if I was suddenly on a different planet. Even though it was accompanied with a sense of exhilaration, I was a little scared and pulled away from it.

Over the following months I had the same experience several times again, and I learned to relax and trust it. I let the sense of strangeness overcome me, as the light in the room became brighter and all objects began to shimmer and merge into one another. The light seemed to be flowing out and immersing everything in its brightness. The room was filled with this beautiful shimmering haze of golden light, and I was filled with a deep serenity, a glow of intense well-being filling my whole body. I could feel it flowing through my legs and my feet, as if I’d taken a sedative of some kind. And even when I didn’t have this particular experience at the meetings, I usually had a very powerful feeling of calmness and serenity inside. I was often aware that my breathing had slowed down dramatically, and when I left I found myself doing everything very slowly, with a natural mindfulness. My mind was still and quiet, and outside everything looked beautiful and alive.

After a few months I was talking to one of the members of the group, and said to him, “I’ve been having really very strange experiences here over the past few months.” I tried to describe them, and he laughed and said, “So now you know why we’ve all been coming here for so long! Now you’re really a member of the society.”

I still have these experiences now, and I’m certain that they’re the result of satsang, of being in the presence of an enlightened person. The experience of the scene becoming unfamiliar and the light becoming brighter usually only happens when Russell is talking directly to me. In these moments I can almost feel spiritual power radiating from him and flowing into me, feel my own life-energy being affected by his.

The Sources of Satsang

The big question is: why do enlightened people have this strange ability to generate spiritual experiences in others, this power to “transmit” their enlightenment to the people around them?

Spiritual experiences induced by satsang strongly suggest that the esoteric concept of an “aura” has a basis in fact. They suggest that our being or life-energy isn’t just confined to our own mind or body – it radiates out from us, creating an atmosphere (or aura) which can affect the people we come into contact with. The auras of most people don’t appear to be particularly strong, or at least don’t have particularly strong negative or positive qualities, so that we don’t usually feel anything palpable from them. But we’ve all met certain people who we instinctively recoil from. We might not even exchange any words with them but they still fill us with a sense of unease or even fear or dread. These are people who have a strong “bad aura” around them, perhaps because their life-energy is heavily poisoned with negative emotions and egotism. But with enlightened people, of course, the exact opposite happens. Their life-energy is so intensified and stilled, and has such powerful positive qualities, that they “transmit” waves of calm and bliss to everyone around them.

But spiritual experiences are more than just feelings – they are also experiences of vision, insight and revelation. And one of the most important aspects of satsang experiences, I believe, is that they show that spiritual illumination is also communicable. Feelings of bliss can certainly spread from person to person – and so can the vision of the oneness of the universe, the awareness that the essential reality of the universe is a limitless ocean of Spirit, and the experience of transcending the ego and being reborn as a deeper and higher Self. These experiences are completely transferable – under the right circumstances, they can be passed from an enlightened person to others without any loss of intensity.

There are two basic types of spiritual experiences (in the sense I’m using the term). The first are ecstatic experiences caused by a disruption of the homeostasis of the human organism. These can occur as a result of fasting, sleep deprivation, drugs, breathing exercises, pain, dancing, and so on. All of these activities can put us “out of homeostasis” – by changing our body temperature, blood pressure or metabolic rate, causing dehydration and exhaustion or chemical changes – and when this happens there’s a chance that we’ll experience a higher state of consciousness. (Although this certainly doesn’t always happen, of course. Most of the time the only effect that depriving yourself of sleep and food often has is to make you feel miserably tired and hungry.)

The second type of spiritual experiences are more serene and calm states which occur when there is an intensification and stillness of life-energy (or vitality) inside us. This can happen in any situation when we’re very relaxed, when there’s peacefulness around us, and when the mental chatter inside our heads fades away. In meditation, we make a conscious effort to intensify and still our life-energy by being inactive, by withdrawing our attention from the world around us, and by focusing on a mantra (or a candle flame or on our breathing or any other object) to slow down and quieten our mental chatter. As a result, meditation is probably the most effective way of generating spiritual experiences.

However, they can also happen more spontaneously – in natural surroundings, for example, when there’s peacefulness around you and the beauty of nature has a similar effect to a mantra in meditation, focusing your attention and quietening your mental chatter. They often occur when people are listening to music or contemplating works of art. Certain sports are also very conducive to spiritual experiences, such as long-distance running or swimming. This is also probably part of the reason why spiritual experiences can occur during or after sex. The sheer pleasure of sex can have the effect of shifting our attention away from our ego-minds, which may fall silent as a result.

Spiritual experiences caused by satsang clearly belong to this second type. Contact with an enlightened person has the effect of intensifying and stilling our life-energy. He or she gives us an extra input of energy – the “current” or “telepathic radiation” which Paul Brunton was aware of. At the same time, the sheer power of an enlightened person’s presence stuns the ego-mind into silence and brings our chattering thoughts to a halt. As a result, we attain the same state of inner stillness and intensified life-energy which we reach after periods of intense and very focused meditation.

However, satsang isn’t just a phenomenon which can affect us as individuals; it also has an important bearing upon the concept of collective spiritual awakening. It’s now almost a cliché to state the human race as a whole may be on the threshold of an evolutionary jump, a collective shift to a higher level of consciousness which will give rise to a new era of true spirituality and harmony. Some people find this idea far-fetched – perhaps understandably so when you look at the state of the world today – but satsang experiences show us a process by which this transformation could occur. They show us that enlightenment is highly contagious.

After all, it’s surely not just wholly enlightened individuals who affect the people around them. Anybody who has become spiritually developed to a degree will have some power to affect the people around them. And so it’s possible that a kind of positive cycle might take place – as more people become spiritually developed, they will “transmit” their insight and well-being to the people around them, who will in turn transmit their spirituality to the people around them, and so on. It may be that once a certain critical threshold has been reached – once a certain number of people have become enlightened, or once the collective spiritual power of the human race has built up to a certain degree – a great wave of spiritual illumination will spread through the world like a forest fire; a process of “spiritual transmission” building up power and intensity, and eventually leading to an Omega point of permanent change.

This may still sound like wishful thinking – but then again, the experience of satsang itself is miraculous, showing that our apparent individuality is an illusion, and that we are parts of an indivisible ocean of consciousness.

Footnotes:

1. Paul Brunton, A Search in Secret India, London: Rider, 1934/1972, p. 141.

2. Ibid., p.280.

3. Ibid., p. 305.

4. Andrew Cohen, Autobiography of an Awakening, Corte Madera, CA: Moksha Press, p. 30.

5. Ibid., pp.34-5.

6. Ibid., p.35.

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STEVE TAYLOR is an author and lecturer who lives in Manchester, England. He is the author of Making Time: Why Time Seems to Pass at Different Speeds and How to Control It, described by Dr. Stanley Krippner as “a major landmark in our understanding of how human beings experience time.” Steve is also the author of The Fall: The Evidence for a Golden Age and the Dawning of a New Era, described as “astonishing work” by Colin Wilson. Steve can be contacted at essytaylor@yahoo.com. His website is www.stevenmtaylor.com.

The above article appeared in New Dawn No. 101 (Mar-Apr 2007).

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