Quest Magazine

Originally printed in the Fall 2011 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Smoley, Richard. "From the Editor's Desk." Quest 99.4 (FALL 2011):122

When you think about it, "initiate" is a peculiar word. In some occult literature, like the Initiate trilogy written in the 1920s and '30s by the Theosophist Cyril Scott, it denotes someone extremely advanced. And yet "initiate" means "beginner," someone who has just started something.

We might find a clue to this apparent contradiction in Buddhism, which speaks of the novice as a srotapanna, or "one who enters the stream." The image points to a key aspect of initiation: the fact that it opens one up to a stream of spiritual influence offered by a tradition.

What does initiation entail? To speak from my own reflection and experience, there are three basic levels. They may be conferred in formal rituals—of an organization known or unknown—although I suspect that at least in some cases no ritual, or only the most basic type of ritual, is involved.

The first could simply be called the initiation of responsibility. It marks a point at which the individual stands forward and freely agrees to accept the task of his or her own personal evolution—in Buddhist terms, entering the stream. Most people, however wise, educated, or successful, have not made any such commitment. They will develop and grow as the random circumstances of life permit. But the initiate at the first level makes this commitment to work upon self-development. In return he or she is (metaphorically) implanted with a kind of seed crystal that forms the core of the awakening self. Life starts to shape itself around this crystal and serves as a means of purging the initiate of the dross of his character.

This process of purification continues for a long time, years or more likely decades, and probably there are few initiates alive on earth who are not continuing to undergo it. But after the individual has reached some level of maturity, the time comes for a second initiation—the stage when he now takes on the additional responsibility of a task or line of work that he is uniquely able to pursue, such as healing, art, or social action. This is not necessarily a trade or profession in the ordinary sense, although it may well jibe with one's work in daily life. One could call this the initiation of vocation.

Having started on this line of work, the initiate then pursues it both for self-development and in service to a higher purpose. Inevitably the individual will make mistakes, will do some things well and others badly, and will suffer from lapses of judgment or even ethics. But they are part of the process of learning. If the initiate is made of good material (and the very fact of initiation suggests that he is), he will sort through his mistakes and learn the necessary lessons from them.

The third is the stage of mastery. This is not a matter of acquiring amazing mystical powers or superhuman capacities. But it does show that the individual has acted upon the responsibility he took on in the first initiation and developed the skills required in the second. He is not necessarily finished with these tasks, but he has acquired enough ability to work creatively and from his own initiative. He is now enabled to stake out new ground and expand humanity's range of knowledge.

While I am not a Freemason, these stages seem to correspond to the three levels of Blue Lodge Masonry: Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason. Some of those who have been raised to these levels (as Masons would put it) may be able to see the correspondences and could even explain some of the mysteries of these stages from details of the Masonic rites.

Theosophical literature (for example, The Secret Doctrine 1:206 and The Mahatma Letters, chronological edition, 189), speaks of seven stages of initiation, and you could spend a good deal of energy trying to figure out whether the additional four levels are superadded to these three or simply represent a finer subdivision of the same stages. (Another Theosophical scheme, discussed by Raul Branco in this issue, speaks of five initiations.) In any case, I myself suspect that there are many further levels that are not accessible or even comprehensible to someone living on earth. As Theosophy teaches, the process of evolution is virtually infinite, always with further to go and higher beings to learn from. Initiates, then, are well-named: however advanced they may be, they are still in a sense beginners.

Is self-initiation possible? The answer appears to be no. If you are entering a spiritual stream, it is a stream that already exists and there must be someone to introduce you to it. While many people have had spontaneous experiences of illumination, these are probably better described as moments of awakening or enlightenment than as initiation per se. And while some say they have received initiations on the inner planes, such cases seem highly prone to self-delusion, not to mention fraud. Even so, only a fool, I think, would state categorically that inner-plane initiation is impossible.

Finally, is initiation necessary for spiritual advancement? Again the answer seems to be no. The range of human experience is too vast, too well endowed with spontaneous awakenings and self-discovered insights, to suggest that formal initiation is always required for progress on the path. For some, it is not only valuable but necessary. Others do perfectly well without it. Why? The answer to this mystery no doubt lies in the uniqueness of the human individuality and the wide scope of circumstances that are needed to help it flourish.

—Richard Smoley

Originally printed in the Fall 2011 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Branco, Raul. "The Pistis Sophia: An Introduction." Quest 99.4 (FALL 2011):144-151

by Raul Branco

In recent years some authors have attempted to interpret the text, such as Jan van Rijckenborgh, with his book Les mystères gnostiques de la Pistis Sophia; J.J. Hurtak and his wife Desiree Hurtak; and Samael Aun Weor, a self-proclaimed Gnostic master and supposed member of the Great White Fraternity, who wrote Pistis Sophia develada ("Pistis Sophia Unveiled"), explaining all of the text's mysteries in terms of sexual magic.

In Brazil in 1997, the author of this article published a version of the Pistis Sophia with suggested interpretations of the text and a summary of the cosmology of the work, with the help of some little-known notes of Blavatsky (Blavatsky, "Pistis Sophia"). This article attempts to describe the text in terms of the expansion of consciousness attained by Jesus as part of his supreme initiation.

The Manuscript

The original text of the Pistis Sophia, written in Greek, has been lost; the earliest version we have is an ancient translation into Coptic. The codex containing it was brought to England around 1772 and was later sold to the British Museum. The complete text was translated into Latin in the mid-nineteenth century by M. G. Schwartze, but it was only half a century later that it was translated into modern European languages, such as French (Amalineau, 1895), German (Carl Schmidt, 1905) and English (G. R. S. Mead, 1921). A much more recent translation was made by Violet MacDermot and published in 1978.

The text is divided into three major parts. In the first, Jesus is with his disciples for eleven symbolic years (perhaps eleven months) after his return from the dead, at the Mount of Olives. (According to this and other Gnostic texts, the resurrected Jesus spent some time instructing his disciples before making his final ascension to heaven.) Suddenly, in the midst of thunder and lightning, he is elevated to the heights of heaven in the midst of intense, blinding light. After thirty hours, Jesus returns, surrounded by three robes of light, with a brighter glow than when he had ascended. Henceforth he starts to instruct his disciples about his experiences and other occult matters.

The other two components of the text are the narrative of the story of Pistis Sophia and additional instructions to the disciples in the form of a dialogue. This article will endeavor to provide the main features of the Sophia myth, which, like the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke's Gospel and the Hymn of the Pearl in the Gnostic Acts of Thomas, is a profound revelation of the pilgrimage of the soul.

A Summary of the Sophia Myth

Upon his return from his ascent, Jesus describes to the disciples the hierarchies of the various planes that he has passed through on his way up. This long enumeration of entities is at first quite confusing, since nowhere in the text is there any explanation of this terminology or of the cosmological system into which those entities fit. Nevertheless, it is possible to set out a picture of the cosmic hierarchy of the text (see diagram below).

After several incidents with the entities of the lower planes, Jesus finds Pistis Sophia (whose name means "Faith Wisdom") below the Thirteenth Aeon, her original home. (Aeons, from the Greek aion or "age," are, in this text, entities governing zones of existence, or planes of consciousness, between heaven and earth.) She was alone, without her consort or her brothers, sorrowful and grieving on account of the torments that an entity known as the Authades, the Self-Centered One, had inflicted on her with the help of his emanations and the Twelve Aeons.

It happened that while in the Thirteenth Aeon, Pistis Sophia saw the Light of the Height on the veil of the Treasury of the Light, and started singing praises to that Light. From then on the Self-Centered One started to hate her, as did the Twelve Aeons below him. The Self-Centered One conceived a ruse to trick her. Pistis Sophia was led to look below and there she saw the light of another entity called the Lion-Faced Power. Not knowing that it was an emanation of the Self-Centered One, she decided to go after it, without her consort, to take its light, thinking that it would enable her to go to the Light of the Height. Once she descended from her place of origin, she was dragged further and further down into chaos, with the emanations of the Self-Centered One and the Twelve Aeons constantly chasing after her, trying to take her light away. When she finally saw Jesus surrounded by light, she cried to the Light of Lights and uttered a series of metanoias, often translated as "repentances."

The Symbolism

In all esoteric traditions the most important inner instructions are always transmitted in symbolic language (Hodson, 85-99), thus veiling the sacred from the eyes of the profane. At the same time the unveiling of the instructions offers a method for training the disciple's understanding.

In Theosophical terms, Pistis Sophia represents the soul, or more specifically, the part of the soul that incarnates; namely, the monad of consciousness in the concrete mind. Her name is a key to her role: Pistis is the Greek word for "faith." Not blind faith, but faith arising from total conviction of inner knowledge. Sophia is Greek for "wisdom." Thus her compound name indicates the fundamental principle (faith in the Light—an aspect of God) that enables her to undertake her mission, namely, the development of wisdom in both worlds. Her consort is Jesus, the aspect of the soul that unfolds the triple-natured higher Self in line with Pistis Sophia's progress in the material world. Jesus remained behind in the higher planes when she descended into chaos. This separation expresses the split in consciousness between the higher and lower nature of man. Although man is really one with his divine Self, the usual level of his consciousness cannot reach the spiritual planes; thus in the myth Pistis Sophia and Jesus are presented as separate entities.

The villain of the story is the Self-Centered One, standing for the ego, an appropriate name for the vain and egotistic "I," which always demands to be the center of attention and strives for the gratification of the senses, thus causing great affliction for the soul. The regents or archons of the Aeons are the main allies of the Self-Centered One, and they stand for the emotions and passions of man. Leading them is the Lion-Faced Power, an emanation of the Self-Centered One, standing for egotism, the strongest force driving man away from God and into chaos. These evil and dark powers are not so much outer demons as they are inner aspects of man. Their role is to seize and fix the consciousness onto the strong, heavy vibrations of emotions, passions, and fantasies associated with sense gratification and mental delusions such as attachment, pride, and ambition. Thus they are described as actively engaged in trying to pull man down, or in the language of the text, in taking away Pistis Sophia's light. This goes on unremittingly until Pistis Sophia's final liberation from chaos.

While chaos, in the system of this text, is a region of the underworld, the term is mostly used to convey the image of a psychological state of disorder. Since Pistis Sophia is the monad of consciousness, when it is said that she falls into chaos, it means that she becomes prey to mental disorders resulting from emotions, desires, and passions. She becomes conditioned by names and forms, by cultural values and mores, by a whole gamut of conditions that represent a virtual prison to the incarnated soul—in short, the delusion of separateness. Thus Pistis Sophia's descent into chaos is a symbolic description of man's entrance into the cycle of incarnation, where he will remain until his mission is accomplished.

The Cosmology

The cosmological system of the Pistis Sophia is presented in summary form in the diagram. It should be kept in mind that an entity can be active in its own plane as well as in the regions below it. Thus Pistis Sophia and the Self-Centered One, whose region of origin is the Thirteenth Aeon (left of the Psychic Plane), are seen quite active in the Hylic Plane (the Astral Plane) just below. The same can be said of Jesus acting as the First Mystery Looking Without (buddhi), who is active all the way along the three planes below its original region.

One novel feature of the Pistis Sophia's cosmology is that each plane is divided into three regions: right, middle and left. The right is superior and the left is inferior. The entities of the right have the function of establishing ideals or archetypes; those of the middle, of sustaining or ensuring proper conditions; and those of the left, in implementing the functions set for that plane. Their roles could be seen as that of father, mother, and son, or alternatively, as the seed, the earth, and the fruit. Moreover, each plane is a reflection of the planes above it. Thus the entities of the right in every plane act as delegates of the Logos, unfolding the fundamental model or archetype for its own plane. From this model the process of manifestation takes place, from ideation to creation, at every ensuing plane.

The unmanifest Godhead is not called God, but simply the Ineffable, the One about whom nothing is known and who is infinitely beyond any characterization by man.

The highest entity on the Divine Plane is called the Mystery of the Ineffable or the Logos. He is the source of all that exists, visible and invisible, having established the archetype of the whole plan of manifestation. Immediately below him is found the First Mystery, in its double aspects as Looking Within and Looking Without. The First Mystery is the mystery of unity, and its aspect as First Mystery Looking Within is atma or spirit, which encompasses and interpenetrates all that exists, providing the divine characteristic of immanence. The First Mystery Looking Without is the vehicle of atma, namely buddhi, also known in the Western tradition as the Christ.

The plane below is the Spiritual Plane, the Pleroma (from the Greek word for "fullness") or Treasury of the Light, which corresponds to the plane of abstract or superior mind. It corresponds also to the orthodox concept of heaven, where souls finally liberated from the world find their bliss. The supreme entity of this plane is Ieu, referred to by the titles of Supervisor of the Light and First Man. Also in the right of the spiritual plane is Melchizedek, the Great Receiver of Light, the Manu of the fifth, present Root Race.

Interpretation

The myth is a highly esoteric account of the soul's pilgrimage to the distant land—the material world—and its eventual return to the Father's house. But it is far more. It reveals the process involved in the supreme initiation that turns a man into a Master of wisdom.

In the text, after Jesus returns from the height "shining most exceedingly," the disciples ask him to "withdraw his light-glory" and then ask, "Rabbi, where didst thou go, or what was thy ministry in which thou didst go?" And Jesus replies, "Rejoice and exult from this hour on, for I have gone to the regions from whence I came forth."

Jesus then recounts his entire journey, from region to region, starting from the moment that he saw Mary, his mother "according to the material body" and then going through the Firmament, the Sphere, the Providence, and the Twelve Aeons. He narrates that all the archons and the powers therein were agitated and afraid because of his exceeding light. And he went on bringing order into their regions until he came to the Thirteenth Aeon. At that point he finds Pistis Sophia alone, below her place of origin, without her brothers. And he describes how the Pistis Sophia worked her way out of chaos with his help. The narrative is, of course, atemporal. Present, past, and future unfold as the eternal now in which Jesus spins his tale.

While this story looks like a myth, Jesus actually seems to be recounting one aspect of his experience at the Great Initiation, which probably took place during the thirty hours that he remained at the height. His recollection of the incidents on his way up has a surprising parallel with the life review that takes place in the dying process of every human being. We learn that this rapid but thorough process at the end of each incarnation teaches us the implications of our actions in this world. If we recall that the law of correspondence tells us, "What is above is like that which is below and that which is below is like what is above," we can infer that the Pistis Sophia tale seems like a monumental review of the actions of the soul throughout its long journey in this world. This process is mentioned in the Mahatma Letters: "The full remembrance of our lives will return back at the end of all the seven Rounds" (Barker, 171). But it seems also to take place when the evolutionary process is speeded up, as in the case of adepts that reach the Fifth Initiation in advance of the majority of the race.

Jesus seems to be revealing to his disciples his own journey in consciousness throughout his many lives in this world until his final process of "death" as a human being. He tells us that he will make a revelation at the very point when he finds Pistis Sophia below her place of origin: "I will tell you the mystery of how these things happened."

Thus the Pistis Sophia myth is the story of the passage of Jesus's soul through the world from time immemorial until his final triumph. Jesus and Pistis Sophia are presented as a pair, the two aspects of the soul, just like the two sides of a coin. Each has its role in the mystery of life. The progressive expansion of consciousness that eventually turns Jesus into a Master of Wisdom was in fact a reflection, on a higher level, of Pistis Sophia's slow and relentless battle in this world against all agents of matter that have constantly strived to take away her light. No mention is made of the great number of incarnations that Jesus must have gone through until that historical one in Palestine. During all those lives, regardless of the names by which he may have been known, Pistis Sophia, his soul, was the loyal heroine doing battle in this world.

We can now return to the myth. Pistis Sophia "falls" from her original region, pursuing a mirage, a reflection of the Light of the Height seen down below in the region of the Aeons, which represents the power of matter. This fall, due to ignorance, was her "original sin," but later on the text says that Pistis Sophia fell at the command of the First Mystery, that is, following an inner urge to comply with the divine plan. This would require her to incarnate in order to fulfill the final objective of having Spirit manifest fully through matter.

As Pistis Sophia descends into chaos, she takes upon herself the necessary vehicles for manifestation in the material world. Thus both on the astral and the physical planes the soul is "wrapped" with appropriate bodies to function in those planes. It will be remembered that the entities of the middle region of each plane have the motherly role of providing appropriate conditions and giving sustenance. Thus, on the astral plane, Providence (in Greek, heimarmene, also translated as "fate") bestows all the tendencies from past lives that provide recurrent opportunities for the individual to learn the lessons that remain to be learned. On the physical plane, the middle region provides a physical body for the individual that is adequate for the type of life that karma has in store for him.

The story expresses the reality as seen from the Height, that is, from a spiritual vantage point. Thus when Pistis Sophia complains that the archons of the Aeons are oppressing her, trying to take her light away, this might mean that the personality has experienced a heavy, aggressive, or unpleasant vibration, such as a feeling of hatred, or has told a lie. But the "oppression of the archons" can also mean experiences of immoderate sense gratification that to a worldly individual mean "to enjoy life" and "to have fun," but to the soul, seeing reality from the vantage point of the inner light, are seen as an affliction for which she will pay dearly.

Here is enacted the classical struggle of the forces of darkness against those of the Light. Pistis Sophia, the soul, strives to go to the Height but has to fight every inch of the way against evil and darkness. These forces are entrenched within her own castle—her emotions, desires, and passions under the command of the self-serving personality.

In her process of ascent, Pistis Sophia experiences thirteen metanoias, followed by eleven songs of praise to the Light. The word metanoia, generally translated as "repentance," is central to the Christian tradition. But its original Greek meaning was much broader than "repentance," indicating a change in one's mental state. Thus each metanoia actually indicates that the individual is undertaking an inner change—of attitude, values, and behavior. Since Pistis Sophia's region is the Thirteenth Aeon, she must symbolically effect thirteen changes of consciousness or metanoias, one for each region or aspect of herself. The much-heralded Way or Path in all esoteric traditions in fact entails this very process of inner change. This is made clear in The Voice of the Silence in the statement "Thou canst not travel on the Path before thou hast become that Path itself" (The Voice of the Silence, 12).

Nowhere in the Pistis Sophia do we see Jesus preaching any moral code of behavior. What is made clear is that man must renounce the world and transform his mind if he hopes to receive the mysteries that will open for him the inheritance of the Light.

While Jesus's parables and other public teachings often castigate conventional wisdom as expressed by compliance with the Mosaic Law (Borg, 97–116), the Pistis Sophia clearly links Jesus's teachings with the prophetic tradition. This is done ingeniously by means of interpretations advanced by the disciples after each metanoia uttered by Pistis Sophia, which in fact are quotations from the biblical Psalms and the apocryphal Odes of Solomon.

The metanoias and invocations uttered by Pistis Sophia suggest the protracted process of transformation needed to turn a worldly individual into "a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ" (Eph. 4:13). On closer examination of these metanoias and songs of praise, we notice some turning points and fundamental changes in her situation as she is slowly freed from chaos. These turning points have a parallel with the five major initiations of the esoteric tradition.

The first turning point occurs when her insistent pleas for assistance from the Light of the Height are finally heard. These pleas have a parallel with the surrender of the mystic, implicit in Jesus's utterance "Thy will be done, Lord, not mine." In time a channel is opened up in the seeker's consciousness where the Light starts to be seen, or the Christ is born.

After Pistis Sophia's sixth metanoia, her sin of going down into chaos alone without her consort is forgiven, and Jesus leads Pistis Sophia "into a somewhat spacious region in the chaos." This more spacious "region" is actually an expansion of consciousness. Here the aspirant's interests in the coarser things of the outer world, with their heavy vibrations, begins to diminish. This relative respite from the oppressions of the archons, that is, of emotions and passions, expressed as an elevation into a more "spacious region in the chaos," seems to indicate what Theosophy calls the First Initiation.

Once the archons notice that Pistis Sophia has not been taken entirely away from chaos, they return with redoubled efforts to afflict her and she continues to utter her metanoias, thus continuing her inner transformation. After the ninth metanoia, her plea for help from the Light is partially accepted, and Jesus is sent by the First Mystery (the pure mind reinforced by the power of the inner Christ) to help her to secretly escape from chaos. From then on, Pistis Sophia, man's consciousness, perceives Jesus as a Light shining brightly, probably an indication of the opening of her spiritual vision, or of an expansion of consciousness arising from the Second Initiation. From then on, the man in the outer world has his mind progressively illumined by the Light of the Height, enabling him to carry out his work in the world as a light bearer, as Jesus did after his baptism in the Jordan, which represents the Second Initiation.

But the desires and emotions elicited by material things are still felt as the emanations of the Self-Centered One (the egotistic personality), and the powers of the archons (desires and passions) change form as the seeker conquers the grosser vibrations. After the thirteenth metanoia, Jesus sends a light-power to assist Pistis Sophia and to take her to higher regions of chaos. The initiation process continues with the fourteenth invocation, when a light-power is sent by the First Mystery (the power of Divine Spirit). These two powers meet together and become a great stream of light, forming a protecting crown over the head of Pistis Sophia. This seems to reflect the stage of illumination reached with the Third Initiation, in which periods of consciousness of unity with God and with all beings alternate with the usual dualistic consciousness of the world.

Now the joy of Pistis Sophia becomes the central theme of her songs of praise, in which she reiterates her determination to remain firm and never stray from the Light again. But the powers of darkness do not relent, and new and stronger emanations of the Self-Centered One are sent to join the others so as to oppress Pistis Sophia and take her back to chaos. After her sixteenth invocation, pleading for the help that had been promised, she is saved once again by the stream of Light, with the help of the Archangels Michael and Gabriel. Jesus also goes down into chaos to help Pistis Sophia. He enables her to step over the principal evil emanation of the Self-Centered One, a serpent with seven heads. This symbolizes the killing of the seeds of evil within man, namely the illusion of separateness.

Once the illusion of separateness is overcome, the initiate is entitled to enter nirvana. Thus, at this point, Jesus takes Pistis Sophia to a region just below the Thirteenth Aeon, her original station (probably a reference to the Fourth Initiation, which turns the seeker into an Arhat or enlightened one). The Initiate is very close to the other shore, his final destination.

Nevertheless, in spite of her high accomplishments, the soul is still subject to the affliction of the subtle material powers, and Pistis Sophia continues her invocations. Jesus warns her that the Self-Centered One is furious with her and will try a last attack by means of two dark and violent emanations in order to take her back into chaos. She is left alone, but Jesus promises to come back to help her if she feels oppressed and invokes his help. As indicated, the two dark and chaotic emanations (probably depression and despair) attack in earnest. This seems to refer to the period sometimes called as the Dark Night of the Soul (Underhill, 380–412), when the individual feels alone and abandoned by all and sundry, sinking into a period of depression that might lead to despair, until he is able to renounce his last remaining attachments to the world—namely, his feeling of being a separate "I"—prior to final and permanent union with God or the Light.

With the twenty-fourth invocation finally arrives the moment to take Pistis Sophia permanently out of chaos and into the Thirteenth Aeon. This might look like an anticlimax, a mere return to her original region. But at this point a touching surprise awaits the reader. It is said that Pistis Sophia reaches her final liberation at the exact moment that Jesus is at the Mount of Olives with his disciples in the process of being elevated to the Height in the midst of the Light. Thus we have an indication of the Fifth Initiation, both from the point of view of the glorified individuality, Jesus or the Higher Self, and of the soul, which is finally freed from the prison of the world. At that moment Pistis Sophia is finally reunited with her consort, Jesus, a parallel with the sacrament of the wedding chamber mentioned in the Gnostic Gospel of Philip and with the experience of the great mystics at the last stage of theosis—"deification" or union with God.

This mysterious initiation, which is said to be conferred by the initiate upon himself, is the end of the soul's pilgrimage. The man has learned all there is to be learned as a man, and embarks on another journey beyond the realm of humanity in the endless spiral of eternal evolution. The symbolic image of being elevated to the Height conveys the idea of a monumental expansion of consciousness to the adept, encompassing all planes from "earth" to "heaven."

Notice that at each of the five major turning points in the story of Pistis Sophia, her consort, Jesus, goes down into chaos to help her. This seems an indication that an integration of the two aspects of the soul, Jesus and the Pistis Sophia, occurs as part of the initiation process. The first four such integrations are partial or perhaps temporary. It is only with the final initiation that total and permanent integration of the higher and lower natures of man is finally accomplished.

We could conclude that the Pistis Sophia, like all sacred scriptures, is an encoded map to a precious treasure hoard. If we are able to interpret its symbols, we will be able to tread the Path and find the precious pearl of gnosis, the key that admits us to the kingdom of heaven.

The cosmology of the Pistis Sophia is extremely intricate. Although the diagram may seem complicated, it is actually a simplified version of the system presented in the text. Not all of the entities listed in the diagram are discussed in the article. 

References

Barker, A. T., ed. The Mahatma Letters to A. P. Sinnett. Pasadena, Calif.: Theosophical University Press, 1975.

Blavatsky, H. P. "Pistis Sophia: Commentary and Notes." Collected Writings, vol. 13. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1982, 1-81.

 The Voice of the Silence. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1992.

Borg, Marcus J. Jesus: A New Vision. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991.

Doresse, Jean. The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics. New York: Viking, 1960.

Hodson, Geoffrey. The Hidden Wisdom in the Holy Bible, vol. 1. Adyar: Theosophical Publishing House, 1963.

Hurtak, J. J., and Desiree Hurtak. Pistis Sophia: A Coptic Gnostic Text with Commentary. Los Gatos, Calif.: Academy for Future Science, 1999.

MacDermot, Violet. The Fall of Sophia: A Gnostic Text on the Redemption of Universal Consciousness. Great Barrington, Mass.: Lindisfarne, 2001.

Mead, G. R. S. Pistis Sophia: A Gnostic Miscellany. London: Watkins, 1921.

Robinson, James, ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. New York: Harper Collins, 1990.

Rudolph, Kurt. Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1987.

Schneemelcher, Wilhelm. New Testament Apocrypha. Two volumes. Philadelphia: Westminster/John Knox, 1991.

Underhill, Evelyn. Mysticism: The Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness. Oxford: One World, 1993.

Raul Branco, an economist, has taught at the University of Texas, City College of New York, and Columbia University and has worked for the United Nations and the Brazilian government. Now retired, he lives in Brasília, Brazil, where he dedicates himself to the study of comparative religion, the Christian tradition, and Gnosticism. He published a version of Pistis Sophia in Portuguese (Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, 1997); and a second enlarged edition (Brasa­lia, Editora Teosafica, 2009). He has published two books in Portuguese: their English titles are The Teachings of Jesus and the Esoteric Christian Tradition, (Sao Paulo: Pensamento, 1999) and The Transforming Power of Early Christianity (Editora Teosafica, 2004). His e-mail address is raulbranco38@gmail.com.

Originally printed in theFall 2011 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Ginsburg, Seymour B. "The Task of Becoming Sixth-Race Man." Quest 99.4 (FALL 2011):139-143

by Seymour B. Ginsburg

Theosophy speaks of the doctrine of the races (or root races). These are not the races known to modern ethnography; rather they are whole epochs of history in which the whole of humanity partakes. According to H. P. Blavatsky's magnum opus The Secret Doctrine, we are presently in the fourth round of our planetary chain, and we are in the fifth race of that round. It is our task, and the task of coming generations, to build the sixth, coming race. About this enterprise, Sri Madhava Ashish (born Alexander Phipps, 1920-97), a Scottish engineer turned Hindu monk, wrote: 

The task of becoming sixth-race man, oriented towards the Spirit, is by no means easy. The leap we have to take to the sixth cannot be made without intentional effort. Unlike our arrival at manhood, we are subject to no inescapable compulsion to grow. Against our will we can neither be thrust upwards from below nor pulled upwards from above. Having achieved an instrument of its own will [man], it is through that instrument that the divine Will achieves its purpose. It is as if the divine Will cannot compel itself by itself, and we, who are essentially moments in or of that Will, must give ourselves to the fulfillment of its purpose if that purpose is at all to be fulfilled. (Ashish, Man, 284)

These words give the central theme of Ashish's 1970 book, Man, Son of Man. It was this book that led me to India in 1978 to meet him. Previously, in the spring of that year, my personal quest for meaning had led me to H. P. Blavatsky's writings, and I joined the Theosophical Society. I eagerly attacked The Secret Doctrine, hoping that an understanding of her thought would provide a key to life's meaning. But I could not understand her 1400-page commentary on the mystical poem that she called the Stanzas of Dzyan. At the same time I sensed something important in what she was attempting to say. In the effort to understand, I was led to two additional books of commentary on these stanzas, the first being Man, The Measure of All Things (1966), coauthored by Ashish and his teacher, Sri Krishna Prem (Ronald Nixon, 1898—1965), an Englishman who had come to India in 1921 and who had also become a Hindu monk. This book describes the nature of the cosmos as described by the Stanzas of Dzyan. The second book, Man, Son of Man, written by Ashish alone, describes what man is and the intentional effort required of him.

What Makes a Master?

From the time of our initial meeting in 1978, I knew that there was something special about Ashish, but exactly what that was, I could not put my finger on. I soon learned that he was among the shrewdest of men, capable of penetrating into the truth of a person's character in a very short time. In this first meeting he advised me that when I returned home to America, I should begin to study the teachings of the Greco-Armenian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff (1866?-1949). In a letter some ten years later, Ashish would point out that Gurdjieff's teaching was a continuation of the impulse that had given rise to Theosophy: "The particular characteristic of the TS is its direct inspiration by the Masters or Bodhisattvas. They fielded HPB and stood behind her all her life. G [Gurdjieff] was one of them, which is why his teaching is in the same tradition" (Ginsburg, Masters, 129). Ashish also told me to begin to pay attention to my dreams.

I decided to return to India to see Ashish the following spring, 1979, writing him to request this. Thus began our extensive correspondence, in which I asked him all manner of questions concerning Theosophy, including how to approach the study of dreams as well as the subject of the Masters, the men whom HPB called her teachers and who presumably had transmitted the Stanzas of Dzyan to her psychically. Many of Ashish's responses in his letters to me on this and other subjects were published in my book The Masters Speak: An American Businessman Encounters Ashish and Gurdjieff.

Sensing my confusion about the subject of Masters, Ashish suggested that if I were to return to India to see him, I should first visit another man, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, who lived in Mumbai (Bombay) and taught Advaita Vedanta, in order to help me understand just what makes a Master. One reason Ashish sent me to meet him was that Nisargadatta was a living example of what we should and can become here and now. Unlike Ashish and Sri Krishna Prem, both of whom lived ascetic lives in the remote Himalayas, Nisargadatta was an ordinary middle-class Indian shopkeeper with a wife and four children, living in the midst of the craziness that is Mumbai. In that sense his attainment is something to which any of us can aspire.

My 1979 visit to meet Nisargadatta and to see Ashish again would become the second in an annual pilgrimage that continued for nineteen years until Ashish's passing in 1997. I wanted to know what makes a Master in the context of Theosophical teaching.

Of particular interest is Ashish's remark in a 1989 letter: "The Master is one with the Spirit. He exemplifies the final attainment. He is what is as yet only a partially realized potential in your own being. You can 'recognize' him only to the extent that you can feel the responses in your essence when like answers to like. G [Gurdjieff] is a Master" (Ginsburg, Masters, 138). In another letter Ashish had this to say about Masters: "It may be a fact that some of the Masters derive their being from other worlds than this one. But too much attention given to this speculation can lead to the false view that they are so special as to have no relevance to the lives of ordinary mortals like us. In fact, so many of them have arisen from the ordinary mortals of this planet, and from so many different races and cultures on this planet, that they provide us with examples of what we should and can become here and now" (Ginsburg, Masters, 137). Gurdjieff says something similar: "Each one of us must set for his chief aim to become in the process of our collective life a master" (Gurdjieff, 1236).

Gurdjieff described this circle of Masters to P. D. Ouspensky, calling them the conscious circle of humanity. He said to Ouspensky, "The inner circle is called the 'esoteric'; this circle consists of people who have attained the highest development possible for man, each one of whom possesses individuality in the fullest degree, that is to say, an indivisible 'I,' all forms of consciousness possible for man, full control over these states of consciousness, the whole of knowledge possible for man, and a free and independent will." Gurdjieff went on to explain that this esoteric circle is surrounded by a "mesoteric" circle, which is in turn surrounded by an "exoteric" circle. These three levels represent different degrees of understanding but are all part of the conscious circle of humanity, as distinguished from an outer circle of "mechanical" humanity to which the vast majority of people belong (Ouspensky, 310-12).

Much arrant nonsense has been published about Masters, attributing to them all sorts of supposedly miraculous powers in order to tantalize a gullible public. These powers are not at all relevant to the teaching brought to us by these Masters, and whether any of them had such powers is highly problematic. But it is verifiable that certain seemingly unusual capacities can be developed in human beings. HPB's adept Masters were a succession of incarnated human beings rather than a cosmic hierarchy of supermen. The actual "miraculous" power that they did have in common was the ability to communicate with HPB and others at a distance, a power sometimes known as telepathy, of which there are many verified accounts in human experience. Ouspensky, for example, wrote in amazement of Gurdjieff's telepathic powers, telling of a time when he began to hear Gurdjieff's unspoken thoughts (Ouspensky, 262—64).

What we call telepathy is a natural function of our connectedness with each other at levels of the psyche that are more interior than the lower mind, with its endlessly turning thoughts. The Masters, being at one with the Spirit but having followed the bodhisattva path of compassion toward their less evolved brethren, continue to guide humanity with telepathically transmitted wisdom both while they are incarnate and after they have left the physical body. We usually experience this received wisdom as our own insight. Such insight often comes during silent meditation and through dreams. This is why Ashish placed such importance on sitting quietly in meditation for long periods of time and on paying attention to dreams and the symbolic language in which they speak.

I first wrote of the connection between Gurdjieff and HPB's teachers for an article, "HPB, Gurdjieff and The Secret Doctrine," that appeared in The American Theosophist in the spring of 1988. In that article I mentioned HPB's prediction in The Secret Doctrine: "In Century the Twentieth some disciple more informed and far better fitted [than HPB] may be sent by the Masters of Wisdom to give final and irrefutable proofs that there exists a Science called Gupta-Vidy? [esoteric knowledge]; and that, like the once-mysterious sources of the Nile, the source of all religions and philosophies now known to the world has been for many ages forgotten and lost to men, but is at last found" (Secret Doctrine, 1:xxxviii). She went on to write about the two published volumes of The Secret Doctrine: "These two volumes should form for the student a fitting prelude for Volumes III and IV. Until the rubbish of the ages is cleared away from the minds of the Theosophists to whom these volumes are dedicated, it is impossible that the more practical teaching contained in the Third Volume should be understood" (Secret Doctrine, 2:797—98).

Blavatsky did not complete her projected third and fourth volumes, but Gurdjieff brought the practical teaching in oral form, and he gave it out piecemeal to Ouspensky and others in his early Russian groups beginning about 1912. Eventually Ouspensky outlined the teaching and wrote it down as he understood it. This written account, published as In Search of the Miraculous, constitutes the most widely known and authoritative exposition of Gurdjieff's oral teaching.

Gurdjieff's connections with Theosophy ran wide and deep, despite his critical comments about the fantasizings of naïve early Theosophists. Two of his closest students, Ouspensky and A. R. Orage, both of literary prominence in the first half of the twentieth century, were well-known speakers for the Theosophical movement. Two lesser known figures in the Theosophical movement of the 1920s, Maud Hoffman and A. Trevor Barker, became pupils of Gurdjieff in 1922. They went with him to Fontainebleau in France to help prepare his occult school, known as the Prieura, to receive students. Maud Hoffman, an American Shakespearean actress residing in England with her close friend, the Theosophist Mabel Collins, became executrix of the estate of A. P. Sinnett and inherited a series of letters written by HPB's Masters to British correspondents in India in the late nineteenth century; most of these were addressed to Sinnett. Hoffman appointed A. Trevor Barker to edit the letters for publication. While studying at the Prieura, these two pupils of Gurdjieff were working on the transcription, editing, compilation, and publication of what became known as the Mahatma Letters.

After a severe automobile accident in 1924, which made it necessary to close his school, Gurdjieff dedicated himself to writing. He wrote the intentionally mythological Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, which includes "a brief history of all the great adepts known to the ancients and the moderns in their chronological order," as HPB predicted in The Secret Doctrine (2:437), along with other clues linking the two books.

"A Certain Very Great Purpose"

At the end of Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, Gurdjieff tells us: "There is in our life a certain very great purpose and we must all serve this Great Common Purpose'in this lies the whole sense and predestination of our life." Gurdjieff goes on to tell us that although everyone is equally a slave to this great purpose, the man or woman who has developed his own "I" is conscious, and "acquires the possibility, simultaneously with serving the all-universal Actualizing, of applying part of his manifestations according to the providence of Great Nature for the purpose of acquiring for himself 'Imperishable Being.'" (Gurdjieff, 1226—27).

Although Ashish told me to study Gurdjieff's teaching and he himself was a great fan of the mythological Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, in another letter he made the following comment about what he called the Man books (Man, The Measure of All Things and Man, Son of Man): "G's system is tantalizing, but mythological in form. G did not intend to provide a rational framework. As he says at the beginning of the book, he aims to destroy preconceived notions. Frankly, you will get a clearer approximation of the facts from the Man books. I think you will find G's ideas making more sense against the framework those books sketch" (Ginsburg, Masters, 227—28).

Ashish wrote this to me in 1993, but it would take another fifteen years before I picked up on his hint and began to reexamine these books, and especially Man, Son of Man.

Ashish authored another book explaining the spiritual significance of dreams. He showed it to me in manuscript form in 1979, but continued to work on it almost until his passing in 1997. In his preface to that book, An Open Window: Dream as Everyman's Guide to the Spirit, he makes an extraordinary disclosure about the source of the wisdom contained in the Man books. This was published posthumously in 2007:

We [Prem and Ashish] went through a high period [in the 1950s] when a night without a dream was a wasted opportunity, a forgotten dream was a breach of trust. We hurried through our many chores to be free to pace up and down in the morning light, seeking meanings and their ramifications.

Then as the mind began to come under control, little visions began to appear in meditation whose content was more direct, less concealed by symbols, than in ordinary dream.

There was direct, personal instruction. And there were dreams which threw light on the Cosmogenesis and Anthropogenesis of the Stanzas of Dzyan on which we were writing a commentary. Yet there was never direct dictation. One always had to struggle to understand what the symbols were saying, so that one was personally responsible for the form in which the general scheme was presented. (Ashish, Dreams, xviii)

Ashish further disclosed the source of the wisdom in the Man books in a 1988 letter: "We [Prem and Ashish] wrote that the commentary has to stand on its own. Saying that inspiration and instruction was given by D. K. [Djwhal Kool] and others would add nothing to the validity of the work. We know to whom we owe it, but we are not going to make him answer for our misunderstandings and mistakes" (Ginsburg, Masters, 129).

Ashish's disclosure of how the wisdom in Man, Son of Man was received through visions in meditation and attention to dreams echoes HPB's description of how she received the knowledge that enabled her to write The Secret Doctrine:

Knowledge comes in visions, first in dreams and then in pictures presented to the inner eye during meditation. Thus have I been taught the whole system of evolution, the laws of being and all else that I know'the mysteries of life and death, the workings of karma. Not a word was spoken to me of all this in the ordinary way, except, perhaps, by way of confirmation of what was thus given me'nothing taught me in writing. And knowledge so obtained is so clear, so convincing, so indelible in the impression it makes upon the mind, that all other sources of information, all other methods of teaching with which we are familiar dwindle into insignificance in comparison with this. One of the reasons why I hesitate to answer offhand some questions put to me is the difficulty of expressing in sufficiently accurate language things given to me in pictures, and comprehended by me by the pure Reason, as Kant would call it. Theirs is a synthetic method of teaching: the most general outlines are given first, then an insight into the method of working, next the broad principles and notions are brought into view, and lastly begins the revelation of the minuter points. (Blavatsky, Collected Writings, 13:285)

How are we to understand the nature of the wisdom that communicates with us through the psychic insights of people like HPB, Prem, and Ashish? In another letter, Ashish explained it this way:

Any one of those beings (if it has any meaning to speak of these being more than one essential being) can look out through the eyes of any existing form that has eyes. There is a series of masks, shaped in the familiar forms of Gurdjieff, Jesus, the Buddha, Maurya, etc., so that idiots like us can recognize them, through which the one power can communicate with us. Yet there is a sense in which "The Great Russian Bodhisattva" whom we last knew as Gurdjieff, at a certain level, is distinguishable from other bodhisattvas. (Ginsburg, Masters, 138)

Among the most important statements in Man, Son of Man are the following, which answers the question, what is this "very great common purpose" of which Gurdjieff wrote and in which lies the whole sense of our lives?

The primary creative impulse arising in absolute, undifferentiated Being can be described as a desire within Being to know itself, a desire which begins by producing a distinction between the subjective Knower and the desired object of knowledge, both separated and linked by the desirous act of knowing, and which ends by a multitude of knowing units being clothed in the objective garments of apparent form. There is, in other words, a purposeful striving within the unmanifest source of all things to make its inherent qualities apparent to itself'a necessary effort, because the diffused consciousness of Absolute Being cannot become aware of its own qualities until both a separation has been made between Knower and Known, and its qualities have been objectively represented. . . . The urge to travel the path of spiritual endeavour springs from the Cosmic Being's urge towards its own fulfillment, an urge that is implanted in our hearts as it is implanted in the hearts of all creatures of the divine will. The inner goal towards which we are urged to turn is the goal of the cosmic cycle, and the purpose to gain that goal through man is the purpose of the whole process of evolution. (Ashish, Man, 5, 36)

Inner versus Biological Man

Ashish emphasizes the distinction between inner man, the Adam Kadmon of the Kabbalah, and biological man, which is the vehicle evolved through natural selection. Inner man, according to Ashish, inhabits a middle region between the unmanifest transcendent as described in The Secret Doctrine and the materialized universe inhabited by biological man. He speaks of "the strange, shifting, uneasy 'waters' of the Matrix'the mid-region of magical effects, ghosts, astral bodies, and other occult phenomena. . . . Those who reject this strange, magical area of experience as 'old wives' tales' and 'superstitious nonsense' are rejecting the key to the secret of life along with it" (Ashish, Man, 85).

He adds that this realm is extremely difficult to describe:

It has neither the relatively stable definition of the sensible universe, nor the intellectual clarity of the unmanifest Transcendent. So difficult is its nature to grasp that nearly all academic scientists prefer to ignore its presence, and so treacherous are its paths that most spiritual teachers seek to decry its importance. Yet we live constantly in its "watery" atmosphere, our life and our very existence depend upon it, and every physical form in the universe has arisen through its mediacy, for it is the subtle, impressionable link between mental concept and physical form. In effect, it is the same energy-filled space out of which this universe has grown and in which it stands, but only at this outermost edge of the manifestation do those energies reach a sufficient intensity to become visible to us . . .

We belong to those worlds more importantly than we do here, for from them we come and to them we return, and there, in some measure, both the memory of our source and the memories of our prior lives return to us. (Ashish, Man, 86, 123)

It is this middle region that explains telepathic communication from the Masters to HPB, Prem, and Ashish, and the power demonstrated by Gurdjieff and recounted by Ouspensky. It is this middle region through which we receive insight when the ordinary mind is quieted in meditation and in dreams.

The Effort Required

Although in our current state we are transitional beings, we need not denigrate our status as fifth-race men. About this Ashish writes:

In general, the fifth race cannot help being what it is any more than an animal can help being an animal. It represents man in the making. . . . The fifth-race man honestly believes that he is the prime mover of his world. . . . He places the satisfaction of his desires in external objects, which means . . . that the divine desire is externalized through him. In effect, this externalization of desire has produced not only the highly complex organizations of society and artifacts of technology, but also the strongly organized integrations of psychic function that in some sense "are" our human selves . . . [But] it is only when we begin to challenge the validity of our out-turned, self-gratifying, instinctual drives that we begin to grow in the new dimension of the sixth race. (Ashish, Man, 285—86)

The intentional effort necessary for becoming sixth-race man requires what Gurdjieff, throughout Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, has called "conscious labor and intentional suffering," and this requires continual self-remembering, the centerpiece of Gurdjieff's practical teaching.

Ashish was more explicit, and in a 1989 letter he listed aspects of the intentional effort that one must make:

1. Keep up the self-remembering exercises all the time.

2. Give your mind food for thought which stimulates your aim [i.e., read spiritual literature].

3. Increase the periods and frequencies of meditation.

4. Record dreams and visions and work on their meanings.

5. Try to get inner sanction for even simple daily actions. The point is that the whole of your life has to be integrated around the center, and not just the spiritual bit of it.

6. Open yourself to the psychic contents of events, from perceiving the flow of life in plants to noting synchronicities. See/feel the "magic" of the world.

7. There is a connection between self-remembering and meditation. Keeping yourself centered at all times makes it easier to get into meditation at special times. (Ashish, Man, 151)

Ashish also stressed that few individuals have ever experienced the essential unity of being. "Yet," he adds, "that he is able to achieve such experience is the key to man's significance in relation to the whole range of manifest and transcendent being, for of all the forms evolved by the divine outpouring, in man alone the bright mirror of Mind relates the field of content to the focus of consciousness in the act of understanding. From this act both the Self of Man and the universal Self accumulate their store of experience. Then, when the long process of evolution comes to fruition, the Man-Plant flowers, the cycle of the evolution is complete, man is God and God is man, not only in principle but in full knowledge of the fact" (Ashish, Man, 37).

For Ashish, our task is to rediscover the unity in which subject and object are fused. "To do this we have to sift every sensation, emotion, and thought, always reserving the more subtle or inner component of its content, until we come to know that sensations are the caresses of the cosmic Woman in whose embrace we live" (Ashish, Man, 213).

In one of his last letters, Ashish wrote of the mystery of being: "The root of the mystery of being lies at the root of the awareness which perceives the universe. Every human being is human by virtue of that awareness. Every human being is or can be aware that he is aware. When that self-awareness is traced to its inner source, then only can the identity of individual with the universal be found, then only can the mystery of being be solved" (Ginsburg, Masters, 281).

References

Ashish, Sri Madhava. Man, Son of Man. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1970.

 An Open Window: Dream as Everyman's Guide to the Spirit. Delhi: Penguin, 2007.

Blavatsky, H. P. The Secret Doctrine. Two volumes. London: Theosophy Co., 1888.

Ginsburg, Seymour B. The Masters Speak: An American Businessman Encounters Ashish and Gurdjieff. Wheaton: Quest, 2010.

. "HPB, Gurdjieff, and the Secret Doctrine." The American Theosophist, 76:5 (1988).

Gurdjieff, G. I. All and Everything: Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. New York: Dutton, 1950.

Moore, James. "A Footnote on Maud Hoffman and A. T. Barker." Theosophical History 3:3 (July 1990).

Ouspensky, P. D. In Search of the Miraculous. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1950.

Seymour B. Ginsburg was the first president of the Toys "R" Us chain. Cofounder of the Gurdjieff Institute of Florida, he is the former president of the Theosophical Society in south Florida and is the author of Gurdjieff Unveiled and The Masters Speak: An American Businessman Encounters Ashish and Gurdjieff (Quest, 2010.)

Originally printed in the Fall 2011 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: McLaughlin, Corinne and Davidson, Gordon. "How to Evaluate Inner Guidance." Quest  99.4 (FALL 2011):136-138.
 

by Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson

How can you be sure that you are receiving reliable inner guidance about your life and your part in helping create a better world? How can you evaluate the messages or visions you receive in meditation or prayer? These questions are crucial, because many good people have been led astray and good projects have been harmed through false or misleading guidance.  

Some people believe that anything received in meditation must be truth from on high. They mistake what may be a distorted vision or message for true spiritual wisdom and may even let their ego become inflated about it.  

Receiving spiritual messages can be compared to receiving signals on a radio. While a good radio can easily pick up clear signals from both distant and nearby radio stations, a cheap or old radio can only pick up nearby stations and will receive a lot of distortion and static. Likewise, a relatively pure and developed spiritual person will pick up clear messages coming from a distance—the higher spiritual planes and the soul—although this happens less frequently than one would hope. A more self-centered or emotionally unbalanced person will pick up a great deal of distortion and will get messages only from nearby sources—the psychic or astral planes, where there is more static from the lower thoughts and emotions of humanity.  

It is important to learn how to objectively evaluate any spiritual messages or guidance that you or others receive. Here are some guidelines that might be helpful.  

First, remember that your most reliable source of information is your soul, sometimes also known as the spirit or higher self. This is the highest source of guidance for most people. It's best to consult someone else for spiritual guidance only if you're feeling totally stuck and are not getting any clear answers from within. Guidance from another person is not meant to take the place of your relationship to your soul, and it should never create dependency. It is merely meant to provide guideposts along the path and to help you develop your inner guidance. Do not depend on someone else's guidance or become passive and surrender your will. Your most precious gifts are your intelligence and your will—and your ability to make your own decisions.  

Nor is it healthy to take an attitude of "just following orders" when your inner guidance tells you to do something with which you don't agree. It's wiser to take responsibility for your life and challenge the guidance, especially if you suspect that it may be coming from an emotional or astral level that's not as clear as your soul.  

Remember that the relative purity of your life will attract guidance of similar vibration through the law of attraction or resonance. An emotionally uncentered person who's motivated by ego and a need to control others could attract a harmful or distorted message in meditation, as could someone who's feeling anger, fear, greed, or boredom. Negative emotions, wrong motivations, and confused thinking will distort any guidance received. So will drug or alcohol abuse.  

Ask yourself whether the information you've received in guidance is being applied in your daily life and whether it is helping you live a more spiritual life. "By their fruits you shall know them," the Bible says. Unless you work on purifying yourself, use your discrimination, and accept full responsibility for what comes through you, you can easily become deluded and harm others. This has happened many times and is why most spiritual traditions caution against lower psychism, where someone is open to any kind of message coming through him or her.  

Sources of Spiritual Guidance 

According to reliable spiritual researchers, there are several different levels that guidance can be coming from—and some levels are much clearer and more reliable than others. Most comes from a person's subconscious wish life or from what he or she has read in traditional religious sources. Thoughts can also be picked up telepathically from a teacher or others on the physical plane. A great deal of guidance also comes from the lower psychic plane, which is full of confusion, distortion, glamour, and flattery.  

The clearest guidance comes from your soul or inner divinity. Once a link with that source is firmly established, guidance can eventually be received from a more advanced teacher on the inner planes or from a true spiritual Master, such as Jesus, although this is rare.  

You can evaluate guidance by examining its content. True spiritual guidance never flatters or chastises the receiver and never demands obedience. It merely recommends a choice or course of action and leaves the person free to decide whether to follow it. It is intelligent and inspirational, and usually it is short and to the point. Guidance from the soul is often described as a still, small voice.  

On the other hand, guidance from the lower psychic levels is often long and flowery and/or confusing and contradictory, with many voices competing for attention. Such guidance can be harmful to others. It often flatters the ego of the receiver, creates a sense of glamour, specialness, and separa­tion and appeals to greed and desire for power. It can create fear, negativity, or feel­ings of unworthiness. It often demands obedience and surrender of your will and can conflict with your personal ethics. It may claim ultimate authority for itself and may not recognize any higher power.  

Lower psychic guidance is received through the solar plexus chakra rather than through the higher chakras, and is often unconscious, mediumistic, and received in a trance state. It usually presents a rehash of platitudes that can be found anywhere, and it may contradict the essential teachings of the major religions.  

Another tip-off that guidance is from a lower psychic plane is that it disparages the physical plane and practical living, claims that spiritual growth happens with no personal effort, or proclaims the half-truth that we are gods and perfect just as we are.

It helps to get a reality check and honest feedback from trusted friends about guidance you're receiving. Practical visionaries maintain a balanced life of involvement in the inner, visionary worlds and in the everyday physical world. They don't try to live totally in the inner worlds as an escape. Whatever wisdom is gained from the spiritual worlds must be applied in daily life, or it's useless. If guidance is not integrated in a practical way, it can lead to living in fantasy worlds and ultimately to psychological breakdown. We are in this world to learn the lessons that physical life has to teach.  

It's also important to recognize that the spiritual worlds are different from the physical world and that time and space are experienced differently there. Messages can be misinterpreted, especially if they predict the future and if the interpretations are made too literally, rather than symbolically or psychologically. For example, a message about a tidal wave could refer to being overwhelmed by a wave of emotions rather than warning about an actual tidal wave.  

How to Download Reliable Guidance 

If you are concerned about getting reliable guidance about your life, you can prepare for it by asking from your heart for the highest good and by making sure that your motivations are pure.  

Which techniques are most useful in seeking guidance from your soul? The most effective technique is a regular meditation practice. Although there are many types of meditation, it's always good to focus in your higher centers, your heart and head chakras rather than in your solar plexus center. If your energy stays focused at your solar plexus level and you become too passive, opening yourself to anything that comes into your awareness, you may pick up the feelings and thoughts of others. Or you may pick up an astral spirit who wants to influence you and who may not intend your highest good.  

It's best to stay alert and aware and to consciously seek contact with your soul. This can be done through prayer, visualization, invocation, or the focused attention of your higher mind. The important thing is to have the intention of contacting your soul for guidance, and not being open to just anything that wants to communicate with you.  

Regular meditation, study, and service will help purify your body, emotions, and mind of negativity. You can work on strengthening your mind and developing your will to consciously cooperate with God's will. Practice releasing your preferences and opinions, and then ask your soul for guidance. It is also important to purify your motivations so that you release any need for recognition and popularity.  

On the other hand, if you're concerned that you never receive guidance—no words or visions, even when you ask a question in your meditation—don't worry. Many spiritually evolved people don't receive guidance in this way. Rather they are guided in the moment, in action. The true goal is to be the guidance, to embody it moment to moment.  

In the end, the most important thing about guidance is learning how to think as wisely and broadly as more enlightened spiritual beings do. The more you ask yourself, "How would a higher being or master answer this question? What would Jesus or Moses or Buddha do?", the more you are developing wisdom within yourself and becoming enlightened.  

Strengthening Intuition in Daily Life

Practical visionaries often have a well-developed intuition to guide them. You can receive guidance not only while meditating but also through dreams and intuition during the course of your day. Guidance can be received in both ordinary and unusual ways.  

You can develop your intuition first by setting your intention to be more open to insights and by meditating regularly. You have to practice setting aside your rational, linear mind to listen inwardly. You can test your intuitive ability on small things, when there's no pressure to perform, and monitor how your body feels when your intuition is accurate versus when it is wrong.  

It's helpful to write down any insights that appear in your meditations or dreams. Keep a journal of intuitive experiences, and record daily hits and misses in order to see patterns and notice what affects accuracy. Verify your intuitive experiences with objective facts. Continually practicing truthfulness will help you be true to your inner experience.  

You might also want to notice unusual coincidences that pop up in your life and see if they offer any messages for you. Whom do you happen to run into on the street? What book falls off the shelf as you browse? You can also be guided by ordinary signs in your environment like highway ads and bumper stickers, by a random line in a book or magazine that grabs your attention, or by the conversations of complete strangers that you may overhear. You might even be guided by seeing light around the correct answers in a multiple-choice exam.  

There are many inspirational and useful messages for us that we miss because we're not paying attention. So while practicing regular meditation is helpful for receiving guidance for your life and clarifying your part in creating a better world, don't miss the guidance available all around you in your everyday life!

Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson are coauthors of Spiritual Politics and Builders of the Dawn, and Gordon is author of the newly released Joyful Evolution. They are cofounders of the Center for Visionary Leadership, based in California and North Carolina, and of Sirius, a spiritual and ecological community in Massachusetts. Corinne coordinated a national task force for the President's Council on Sustainable Development. Gordon was the founding director of the Social Investment Forum and of Ceres, the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies. Both are fellows of the World Business Academy and the Findhorn Foundation. http://www.visionarylead.org/. This article is adapted from their book The Practical Visionary: A New World Guide to Spiritual Growth and Social Change.

 Meditative Techniques for Receiving Clear Inner Guidance 

• Clarify and affirm your intention before you begin.  
• Purify your motives for receiving guidance.  
• Release ego needs, such as pride, greed, fear, anger, and any doubts that you can receive clear guidance.  
• Relax, and take a few deep breaths to calm your body, emotions, and mind.  
• Align yourself with the highest source within you (God, Spirit, Universal Mind, etc.).  
• Invoke your soul, or higher self, and ask your question(s).  
• Listen quietly for the answer from your soul, and write it down to remember it.  
• Avoid becoming too passive. Stay conscious and aware.  
• Be aware that the answer may come in many forms: direct knowing, words, pictures, symbols, inner light, energy sensation in the body, synchronistic events, a message from a friend or a passage in a book.  
• Challenge your guidance regarding its spiritual source and authenticity. Make sure that it is coming from your soul, not from the lower psychic or astral planes.  
• Make a commitment to follow through on the guidance you've received (use it or lose it), and take full responsibility for it.  

·         Dedicate yourself to living a life of service to others, because this will help create a field that attracts clearer guidance.