Alexandra David-Neel explores the Mystery of Tibet

 

Magic and Mystery in Tibet – Alexandra David-Neel (1929)

            It is difficult to imagine that just 100 years ago the ancient land of Tibet located between China, India, and Mongolia was as little understood by the Western world as the surface of the Moon.  Its seclusion among the massive Himalayan mountain range led to many fantastic and seemingly supernatural stories regarding the people and gods that inhabited Tibet.  Rumors of forbidden cities, mystical monks, and ever-present deities could not be verified, or proven false, due to the inability of westerners to visit the country.  In the early 20^th century, one indefatigable woman, having studied esoteric religions in India and Japan, sought to visit the “Lamaists” as she calls them. These “Lamaists” are the Tibetan followers of Buddhism, a philosophy more than a religion, which was brought to Tibet from India.  Purely through her devotion to learning and her bravery in the face of the unknown, Alexandra David-Neel managed to not only visit Tibet, but also live and study among the monks and Lamas for years.  Amazingly, she did this in her mid-40’s. This book recounts her experience with the magical/mystical side of Tibet and is one of many she wrote on the subject.

            Before digging into the contents of this book, it is good to remember the context of its creation.  The late 1800’s to the early 1900’s saw a huge increase in “spiritualism” and the idea that the dead could be contacted by the living.  Thousands of scam artists and crooks used this to fleece good, although gullible, people out of their hard-earned money.  Many organizations, such as the Theosophists, were created to push the exploration of esoteric thought, and the attempt to gather ancient knowledge forgotten by the “western” world.  Alexandra David-Neel was one such woman.  She explored many facets of spiritualism, theosophy, freemasonry, Hinduism, and finally Buddhism.  As an educated woman, she also understood the role psychology and the workings of the human mind had in determining the experiences we have as we live our lives.  Ms. David-Neel, after traveling through northern India, felt drawn to visit forbidden Tibet, and she succeeded in doing so.  After years of travel in the Orient, she began to write about her experience.  These books, of which Magic and Mystery in Tibet is the second one, were the first non-sensational accounts of Tibet and its people that reached the Western world.  While initially the critics doubted her experiences in Tibet, these books and the ideas contained within helped shape much of the counterculture and metaphysical world that arose in the 20^th century.

            My favorite aspect of this book is that it reads not like a travelogue but more like a personal diary of Ms. David-Neel’s experiences and her reflections upon those experiences.  She shares the stories told to her by the many people she meets and explores the development of Tibetan Buddhism as a separate growth of Indian Buddhism.  Her acceptance of those she meets, and the respect and wisdom she brings to those meetings, make a large impression on the monks and Lamas she discourses with.  They accept her automatically as a student who wishes to learn.  This openness is not a result of Ms. David-Neel’s efforts, but instead comes directly from Tibetan Buddhist belief that anyone who wishes to can join a monastery and look for a spiritual teacher/guide. 

            David-Neel describes the ways a Buddhist monastery differs from the western idea of a monastery.  In a Catholic monastery, for instance, everyone is taught the same ideas, and are expected to accept them as literal truth solely because of the authority of “god.”  In Buddhist monasteries, it is up to the individual to determine if teachings have value to them, if they truly “believe” something, or whether they will proceed with the education.  Many regular people join monasteries but keep their esoteric learning to a minimum.  Others go deeper and deeper into the mystic truths of Buddhism, led only by their curiosity, and their master’s individual guidance.  It is truly an individual pursuit, attempting to accomplish a universal goal of oneness with existence.  As many Buddhists believe in the near-eternal cycle of death and rebirth, there is no pressing urgency to proceed with one’s education.  If a student spends all their life pondering basic ideas, it is because he needs to do so to prepare for a future life where larger ideas or more immersive theology will begin to make sense to the student.  The ultimate goal is to stop this round of death and re birth, and to successfully and completely dissolve one’s ego so that, upon death, you join the energy of the Universe, instead of being re-born.  This is called Nirvana.

            Alexandra David-Neel explains that many in the West think that one must endure nearly endless cycles of birth and rebirth before one can achieve Nirvana.  However, learned Lamas do not think this.  They say that everyone, regardless of your spiritual training, has an opportunity after death to go into the light and enter Nirvana, dissolving one’s ego.  Most people, according to the Lamas, see the light and are faced with this decision after death but they experience only fear and doubt.  This drives them to avoid the light and instead head back to our “sphere” and be re-born again.  Part of the spiritual training given to these monks is how to be peaceful and calm so that, upon death, they can dissolve into Nirvana. 

            There is so much more explored in this book.  From describing the day-to-day lives of regular Tibetans, to sharing personal anecdotes of Ms. David-Neel’s psychic explorations, to the descriptions of the beautiful Tibetan countryside, this book has provided me with countless ideas to think about.  I will seek out Alexandra David-Neel’s other works, as I enjoyed this one immensely.  There is nothing quite like a first-hand account from a place strange to me to get my mind flowing.  I would love to visit Tibet one day.  For now, Ms. David-Neel’s books will be my travel.

(This book is available for download as a PDF here: https://www.theosophy.world/sites/default/files/ebooks/magic-and-mystery-in-tibet1931.pdf )

We may all need a New Model for the Universe...

A New Model of the Universe: Principles of the Psychological Method in Its Application to Problems of Science, Religion and Art – P.D. Ouspensky (1929)

SUN RA Reading List

            This is the second book off of Sun Ra’s Reading List that I have read so far. Both are profound, and complex works attempting to attack and explain vastly different subjects.  Whereas the first book, The Two Babylons, was one man’s exploration of the sources and roots of Roman Catholic ideology and imagery back through time to perhaps the most ancient human civilization we know of, this book is an attempt to explain what countless mystics, theologians, and schools of thought have been unable to.  In this text, P.D. Ouspensky sets out to provide us fellow humans a way into the ideas and knowledge that have been kept “Hidden” or as “Mysteries” throughout human existence.  It is a deep dive indeed.

            This is a long and complex work.  It contains various sections written by Ouspensky at various times in his life.  There are parts where the author discusses his own life, and the experiences and events that led him to explore what many ignore, or consider unknowable.  This led him to learn about religions, cults, esoteric groups, secret teachings, and the Mystery Schools, even going so far as traveling worldwide to learn from those they call Masters in remote lands.  Ouspensky is not your typical seeker, as he is very well-versed in science, human psychology, and the human mind’s neurological activity, at least as well-versed as a layman could be in the late 19^th/early 20^th century.  He is constantly questioning his experiences, and relates how many “seekers” latch onto the first realization/epiphany they experience, never pushing forward to deeper truths.

            Ouspensky begins the book by discussing what modern society (his world in the 1890-1920 period) believed or sought to understand about esotericism.  He details the various sidetracks that people slid into in their search for hidden knowledge, including the lies and chicanery practiced by the Spiritualists of that era.  He explains that the true esoteric knowledge is knowledge about the world we all share that is only suitable or understandable by a select few, who need to have prior training or study to even comprehend these things.  He details how modern society has no place for these mysteries, leaving many to believe ridiculous lies and dogma because they have no access to the actual truths. 

            He then proceeds to explore the concept of the 4^th dimension, time, and how it applies to our existence.  Much like Einstein did, Ouspensky seeks to understand the metaphysical implications of a four-dimensional world.  Similar to the tale Flatland, Ouspensky starts with a point in space (0 Dimension) and shows how that point moving in time creates a line (1 Dimension).  A line, being 1D can move in two ways in time.  Along its length, the line gets longer.  However, if the line moves in time perpendicularly equal to its length, then that line becomes a square (2 Dimensions).  If that square moves in time perpendicular to itself you end up with a cube (3 Dimensions).  We live in this seemingly 3 Dimensional world.  The trick part is, how do we conceive of a square, seemingly solid, moving perpendicular to itself to create a 4 Dimensional figure?  How does that figure then move perpendicular to itself to create a 6 Dimensional figure?  It is a very heady topic.

            Subsequent chapters explore the idea of a “super” man as it has been handed down through time.  This is not an extra-powerful man, but a man that has transcended this 3^rd Dimension in his mind, and become a 4 Dimensional being, without the usual intellectual issues and emotional failures that humans naturally possess.  Per Ouspensky, history provides us with examples of these ascended humans, such as Gautama Buddha, and Jesus of Nazareth.  Due to this, Ouspensky spends a good amount of time on what the Christ story actually means, and why the New Testament is a radically different sort of text than the Old Testament.  His claim is that the Gospel stories are disguised metaphors for the journey a human must make to transcend this 3D existence or materiality, and gain a new existence (a rebirth/reincarnation) as an enlightened 4 Dimensional being.

            Ouspensky goes on to explore at depth that various systems that humans have used to understand, teach, and sometimes to disguise, sacred wisdom.  He analyzes the Tarot and its imagery, the four systems of Yoga, Dreams and the claims of Hypnotism.  The author then spends some time detailing his own personal journey into what he calls Experimental Mysticism, the active exploration of the mind, and his results are surprisingly lacking in gullibility.  This leads to what he titled the book, which is a New Model of the Universe.  This new model is intended as an exploration of what the new quantum and relativity sciences imply for our existence, hidden dimensions, and how we will evolve in the future.

For someone writing nearly 100 years ago, I found Mr. Ouspensky to have a very modern mind, cynical when it is needed, open when it is important, and willing to explore side streets and backwaters in search of truth.  This is a good example for others to follow.  I am confident that much of what P.D. Ouspensky has written is closer to the “truth”, if there is any truth to actually be found, than most any other work of esoteric wisdom I have come across.  It makes sense why this book resonated with Sun Ra enough for him to include it in his lesson plans.

(You can download and read this book in PDF form here: http://www.baytallaah.com/bookspdf/78.pdf )

Terence McKenna explores Mind-Expansion and the Human Condition

Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution – Terence McKenna (1992)

            I first read this book when it came out in 1992, around my sophomore year in college.  Much of the insight of this book was lost on me, as I had not yet had time to understand the very far-reaching socio-historical implications of Terence McKenna’s scholarship.  Picking it up again, after 25 years of growth and reading and experience, only served to impress me even more.  This is a highly important book, and should become a foundation for the changes that humanity must make as a whole in order to thrive, and in order to better live in harmony with the life-world that we take for granted.

            One of the most intriguing questions regarding the development of our species is when and how the roaming primates developed a higher level of consciousness from the other primates on Earth.  There are many proposed ideas, most of them based on theology/mythology and not actual grounded empirical knowledge.  Terence McKenna was one of the very first to propose that the naturally occurring hallucinogenic plants and fungi helped expand the minds of the hominids, who would ingest these items in their search for food.  In a sense, he proposes that these hallucinogenic properties created the first “shamans” who then had to figure out a way to explore the rich world that natural plant hallucinogens open up.  He has much evidence for this, and it does help explain the sudden rise of what we call modern humans (Homo Sapiens Sapiens) around 100,000-250,000 years ago, and their/our amazing ability to process information and solve problems.

            After discussing the origins of the human exploration of mind-altering substances, Terence McKenna goes into a very depressing but integral analysis of the role that substance addiction and use affected our human culture.  After the matriarchal, communal, tribal stages of life, where the shamans (initially female, as they were the ones gathering plants and mushrooms and testing them as food, and then both female and male) would open up their minds with these natural compounds, to better understand the needs of the tribe or the patient.  After several millennia, humanity began to live in larger aggregations, in locations that were fixed, and the access to the natural hallucinogens waned.  In this time, the fermented juices and grains began to be used for intoxication as wine and beers.  This new substance was then used much as the old hallucinogens were.

            Once humans managed to distill alcohol, to get purity and strength, it all went to shit.  The problems we face today of alcoholism, rage, violence, and neglect have been around ever since humans distilled the “spirit” of the wine into a potent and toxic drug.  The next drugs to overtake all of humanity, and to continue helping in the degradation of the tribal units, were caffeine, sugar, and tobacco.  Tea initially carried the caffeine addiction but it was not until the spread of coffee, and of the mass manufacture of refined sugar, that caffeine addiction and abuse became a very real thing, and just as deadly as any other drug out there.  Combine this with tobacco, and you have a large amount of the population living constantly in an “altered consciousness” state.  The high from sugar is just as euphoric and the crash just as brutal, as tobacco or caffeine.  The massive and mind boggling extent of the human slave trade was a direct result of the addiction to sugar and the rum that can be created from it.  The Dutch and the British set up a very neat system.  They would gather up slaves in Africa, sell them in the New World to coffee, sugar, and tobacco plantations, buy vast amounts of rum, sugar, and tobacco, sell it all for a massive profit in the UK and Europe, and then go right back to buying humans and selling them off.  This lasted for HUNDREDS of years.

            Once these substances were in use, the state and the merchants combined forces to create vast networks of distribution for these substances.  The British government controlled the tea trade much like drug cartels do so today.  They then decided to get into the opium trade, purposefully flooding China with opium in an effort to make a nation of subservient addicts.  They almost succeeded.  At every step of the way, these drugs were refined and made even more potent and deadly.  Opium was refined to morphine, and thought to be a cure for opium addiction.  Heroin was refined from morphine, and likewise was supposed to combat morphine addiction.  The power of heroin to destabilize and subsume a population is evident when McKenna describes the purposeful distribution by the CIA of an exceedingly pure heroin brought in from Vietnam and surrounding areas.  It was called China White and was released to only the black neighborhoods, creating generations of junkies, unable to stand up for their rights.  Our government and in fact, most governments, use these drug cartels to their own ends.  Most of them are propped up by our support.  Pathetic.

            Terence McKenna continues on to describe his plan for the elimination of what he calls “the Dominator Culture” that we all live in today.  Instead of human unity, our culture pushes and prizes division.  Instead of legalizing natural substances capable of helping people deal with addictions, trauma, and which open the mind to possibilities unknown, our Dominator Culture sets hallucinogens as CLASS 1 drugs, meaning they have absolutely no medicinal, social, scientific value, which is a flat out lie.  It is solely a means by which to control those who would study these amazing plants and fungi.  However, they easily allow the deadliest and most addictive of drugs to be widely marketed and sold in every corner.  Alcohol, tobacco, and sugar products are what keep people subservient, diseased, and mentally dull.  It suits their interests.  It does not suit our own individual rights.  This is why there was such a crackdown on the hippies.  Their drug taking did not lead to subservience and a drone-like ability to do meaningless 9-5 jobs.  They had to be broken and humiliated.  We must all remain robots.  That is what they want and they are succeeding.

(This book can be read here:  https://archive.org/stream/TerenceMckenna-FoodOfTheGods.pdf/TerenceMckenna-FoodOfTheGods_djvu.txt )

(This book can be purchased here:  AMAZON  )

The modern Ideas about consciousness began in ancient Egypt

The Spiritual Technology of Ancient Egypt: Sacred Science and the Mystery of Consciousness – Edward F. Malkowski (2007)

            The human race has a deep fascination with the relatively ancient Egyptian culture, especially the amazing technological and architectural wonders left behind by the Old and New Kingdoms of several thousand years ago.  To some researchers however, the blind obsession with the physical leftovers of the Egyptian culture blinds people into ignoring the other aspects of that culture that allowed it to survive and thrive for thousands of years.  The philosophical, theological, and cosmological ideas of the Egyptians, and their effect on the history of human thought, science, and religious belief, are what are explored by Mr. Malkowski in this cool book.

            It seems odd that, for all the praise lavished on the Egyptians amazing technological achievements in architecture, writing, and fine arts, not too many people explore the deep roots that our modern religious thought has in the ideas of Egypt.  People forget that Moses was raised in the Pharaoh’s house, taught as any noble Egyptian would be, to read and write, and do mathematics, and analyze theology and philosophy.  The wisdom he learned there was what he later applied while leading the Hebrews to their “promised land.”  The ideas he shared with them, from Mosaic law to the Ten Commandments, all have precedent in the Egyptian philosophy and theology.  These ideas are what scholars refer to as the “Mysteries.” 

            These Egyptian “mysteries” were in fact esoteric knowledge about the biggest questions humans have.  Why are we here?  What created existence? How do we know we are real? What is time?  What is our purpose?  These and many other questions are explored by Mr. Malkowski from the vantage point of the Egyptians.   These ideas are big, shocking to those ruled by religious dogma, and because of this they have been kept “hidden,” taught only to those who actively seek out the information.  For example, there is no moment of creation, after which the world just existed.  We are all a part of creation at every point in our lives, for once creation begins, it does not end.  The entire Universe is in a constant state of self-creation, and consciousness is an integral part of the Universe understanding itself.  Because of this, we are all divine, due to our local consciousness being just a small sliver of the overall Universal consciousness, which many label as god. 

            The idea of “sin” is taken very literally by close-minded believers.  They want a set of rules.  This is good, and this is bad. Do only the good, and ask for forgiveness for the bad.  That is not the truth of sin.  That is how organized groups use the concept of sin to control the population.  The Egyptians, the Greeks after them, the early Christians and Gnostics, and many other groups since have understood sin to be a different thing.  Since humans are a combination of the material (physical body and brain) and the divine (non-local consciousness), a true life is led by those who see and accept both aspects of themselves.  This duality is a critical thing.  SIN, as it was viewed by the Egyptians and the mystics that followed, is the state where a human has become solely obsessed and focused on his physical self, whether that is as a denial of their own consciousness, or in partaking of what people call the Seven Deadly Sins, all of which deal with the obsession of the material self to the exclusion of the divine self.  This is what Jesus talked about when he said that everyone is with god if they so choose, and that being away from the divine is the true sin.
  

            Some groups of people, (the Zoroastrian faith for one) took this Egyptian mystery influence to the extreme and saw the material world as purely base and un-divine.  Instead of striking a balance between the physical and the divine, they sought to purge anything physical and focus solely on the divine.  Other religions, (organized Christianity for example) decided to do away with the “mysteries” and instead focus on dogma as societal control.  They ignored the teachings and words of Jesus, reading them literally (exoterically) instead of as allegory (esoterically).  Because of this, for the last thousand years, much of the Egyptian wisdom has been ignored, and their philosophy and theology treated as just an odd curiosity, a mish-mash of beliefs and gods and conflicting ideas.  This is a real delusion, causing us to think of the greatest civilization of humanity’s past as amazing in technology but ridiculous and laughable in their theology.  What an error we make.  When deep ideas are expressed, they must be expressed in story or allegory in order to make an actual impact on a human.  People do not like being told flat out what they should or should not do or believe.  It is better to share such information in a form that will allow for the receiver to explore the ideas.  This is why, when discussing the biggest issues, Jesus in the Bible spoke in pure allegory.  The problem with allegory is that, once the culture moves on, those symbols no longer mean what they used to.  We modern humans have no basis to understand an Egyptian allegory, much like an ancient Egyptian would not be able to comprehend an allegory containing modern symbols, such as the “mushroom cloud,” “Superman,” “Coca Cola,” etc.

            There is so much more in this book to explore, like the idea that the three great pyramids at Giza are far older than the Egyptian civilization, or that the language of the Egyptians is a hold-over from that previous civilization.  The world is an ever changing place and only our ego keeps us from accepting that the people of the past were not grunting savages, but instead exactly the same as you or I, seeking answers to the difficult questions, and working to help sustain their civilization.  

(This book is available for purchase here:  The Spiritual Technology of Ancient Egypt  )