A treasury of wisdom on our world's mystical traditions.
In the depths of your own heart,
There is a hidden truth.
It reveals itself to you in moments of quiet,
In moments of peace,
When you feel even just for an instant that all is well.
Those moments aren't based on belief.
They aren't based on the knowledge of others.
Those moments are based on your own direct experience.
There's an inner knowing and a certainty about your experience that you cannot deny.
Wisdom is based on inner knowing.
It's not something that you learn in some sort of conceptual way,
Like a fact or certain information about a subject.
Wisdom is undeniable because you know it in your own heart to be true.
There are two major expressions of religion and spirituality today.
The exoteric and the esoteric.
The first,
The exoteric,
Is an expression of religion and spirituality based on belief.
It's based on what you've learned and what you've been told by others.
Sometimes these beliefs are inherited from family and culture,
And they become an unquestioned part of our own worldview.
Other times we take on these beliefs willingly.
We decide that we'll believe in Christianity or in Islam or in Buddhism.
The second expression of religion and spirituality is called the esoteric.
Esoteric spirituality is not based on belief.
Rather,
It's based on your own direct experience.
It's based on wisdom.
It relates to the practices and the methods that,
If put into action,
Have the power to disclose a deeper meaning or truth about life and existence itself.
These experiences and shifts in worldview naturally have transformative effects in your life.
As each of us matures to more rational forms of thinking,
We gain the capacity for critical reasoning and self-reflexive thought.
We can no longer base our life solely on belief or on the basis of some form of external authority.
Rather,
We turn our attention inward.
We trust our own experience.
We become our own authority.
We need proof,
Not only belief.
When this form of rational orientation comes online,
Many of us find that we abandon traditional forms of esoteric religion and spirituality.
We can no longer call ourselves Christian or Muslim or Buddhist based solely on our cultural inheritance or some unquestioned sense of identity.
Because so few of us have been exposed to anything else,
We often end up with an orientation in life devoid of deeper meaning and purpose.
Once the traditional forms of meaning-making vanish,
We aren't quite sure how to fill the void.
We try to fill it with science,
With the pursuit of money or power,
With the pursuit of pleasure or selfless service in the world.
But none of these really do the trick.
None of them really provide the type of salvation our heart longs for.
So we're stuck.
We can't go back to belief-based,
Exoteric religion and spirituality.
And we can't find meaning,
Purpose,
And salvation in our current frameworks.
The world population,
And I'm sure many of you included,
Are thirsty for esoteric expressions of religion and spirituality.
At the core of each of our world's great religious traditions,
There's a set of teachings and practices that disclose a deeper meaning and truth about reality.
At the very essence of our world's wisdom lineages,
There is an esoteric or mystical truth that can transform your life.
These teachings don't demand that you suspend your rational mind in service of blind faith.
They don't ask you to put aside your scientific worldview to believe in something without proof or evidence.
Rather these esoteric teachings give you practices to experiment with yourself.
They give you an opportunity to trust your own experience and to discover what is real,
What is meaningful,
And what is most important.
You are the final authority.
All of humanity has a single great tradition of spirituality.
When religion and spirituality are based on the exoteric,
That is,
When they're based on beliefs alone,
There's room for endless conflict and disagreement between traditions and lineages and practitioners.
When the Bible or the Quran is the final authority rather than one's own direct experience,
There's the potential for massive separation.
For when proof,
Evidence,
And direct experience are not at the core,
We are a divided humanity.
When the authority is reclaimed,
When sacred texts and teachings are used as reference points but one's own experience is the final judge,
There is the potential for massive synthesis of our world's great religious and spiritual traditions.
The controversial yet often brilliant spiritual teacher,
Adi Das Amraj,
Once said,
All of humanity is one great tradition.
If we can take a moment to zoom out,
To see beyond the belief-based systems of exoteric spirituality and religion,
We begin to see all of humanity as a whole.
When we start with the assumption of wholeness,
Of unity,
Of earnestness on the part of all,
We see an entirely different picture of the world's religious and spiritual systems emerge.
From the perspective of wholeness,
There aren't different religions,
But rather one single unified experiment that humanity has undergone to explore the depths of their own experience,
To understand reality,
The cosmos,
And themselves through direct practice.
There isn't Judaism and Christianity,
Islam and Hinduism.
There's a deep exploration of meaning and transformation of the esoteric by pioneering souls who have direct experiences.
God told Moses directly,
I am that I am.
Jesus had the direct experience of being both fully divine and fully human.
He was both the son and the father.
Muhammad made contact with the celestial being of light called Gabriel,
Who dictated teachings to him that were recorded in the Quran,
Appropriate for his time and place.
The great sages of India explored the depth of their own consciousness through meditation and yogic practices that revealed to them that the Atman or self and Brahman,
God and the world are not two.
The Buddha was not just another human who believed what the Hindu culture he was raised in dictated on some exoteric level.
He was an esoteric pioneer.
The Buddha wanted to find out for himself the truth of esoteric practice,
And he succeeded.
When we get trapped in the exoteric belief-based aspects of religion and spirituality,
We're lost in the Tower of Babel.
We're lost living in Plato's realm of shadows.
When we discover for ourselves what is true,
We face the light directly.
We become fluent in the original language of direct experience.
All of humanity is seen as one great lineage.
All of the mystical and esoteric teachings of the world are disclosing a different facet of one crystal that is our human life.
All of these paths bring a gift and illuminate a different dimension of what we all can enjoy as part of life.
Enlightenment is our destiny.
It's not the exception for the few elite.
It's all of our birthright.
We can enter into the crystal from any angle,
From any direction,
But what's most important is that we enter the crystal at all.
In our own crystal heart,
We can find our way back home.
We can find our way to the essence of what it means to be human.
The kingdom of heaven is within you.
I am that I am.
What is the kingdom of heaven?
What is the I am that you're feeling and sensing in your own direct experience right now?
Know thyself,
Read the inscription at the temple of Apollo at Delphi.
For even at the heart of our own Western civilization,
Embedded in the ancient Greeks,
Were great saints and sages who took the esoteric path all the way home.
You can too.
