Spiritual Practicality: The Seven Keys to the Mysteries of the Ageless Wisdom
218
Spiritual Practicality: The Seven Keys to the Mysteries of the Ageless Wisdom
218eBook
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Overview
Energy follows thought. Creation on any level is the result of conscious choice, facilitated by mind and brought into physical reality through action, based on the desire to see the idea realized. The understanding of these concepts brings extraordinary power and responsibility into the life of the so-called average person. These are not impractical ideas ill-suited to modern life.
Spiritual Practicality is the integration of your spiritual life in its totality to practical living. You live spiritually through every experience, because your awareness is changed. When you truly live spiritually, you will find that every aspect of your inner life has a practical application in the modern world.
The so called Success Principals of our age are the Spiritual Principals of the ages and the Ageless Wisdom teachings. Equipped with the Seven Keys to the mysteries, we will reveal the beauty, unity, and yes, the practicality of the spiritual life.
There is something irresistible about this book. It is an unusual and masterful blend of common sense, clear writing, and advanced metaphysics in a style that is both mature and accessible. Wonderful for seekers of all ages and stages. Jonathan Ellerby PhD, bestselling author of Return to the Sacred
Take the 7 keys and open the door to a realm of knowledge and wisdom masterfully presented by Ageless Wisdom student of 30+ years, Douglas Fisichella. Prepare to embark on a journey that will inspire your own greatness! Liz Sterling - Author, Radio Personality, Motivational Speaker
A wonderfully broad survey of the universal wisdom teachings which lie at the heart of both eastern and western traditions. Rev. Fisichella displays an unusual knack for bringing the teachings alive, making them easily accessible and absorbing to both beginning and seasoned students. Kathryn Gann - Director, Theosophical Society in America
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504334174 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Balboa Press |
| Publication date: | 01/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 218 |
| File size: | 730 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Spiritual Practicality
The Seven Keys to the Mysteries of the Ageless Wisdom
By Douglas Fisichella
Balboa Press
Copyright © 2016 Douglas FisichellaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5043-3416-7
CHAPTER 1
The Keys
I must admit, I have questioned the form that this information should take and how to present these key ideas within the framework of this book. My first inclination was to weave the information into the chapters and require readers to ferret out for themselves what these keys really are. The other approach would be to just give them to you up front and risk having the simplistic summary given as a precursor being judged too quickly. In other words, you might not read the book if you thought you understood the Cliff 's Notes. The fact is that these keys are not the teaching, but rather they are a cipher with which the teachings are more readily understood. For this reason I have chosen to bring them out with a simple explanation and then refer back to them as we progress. In a sense the book will explain the keys, as the keys explain the book.
It is this approach that I believe will suit our purpose most efficiently. Like any cipher, having these keys facilitates the understanding of an encoded message. Without one another, they are almost equally useless - unless of course one is able to discern the meaning on one's own, in essence cracking the code for herself. This is really the job of every individual investigator on the path. Of course, a few hints along the way as to the deeper meaning of a multi-layered message can save an enormous amount of time. There is nothing wrong with solving a tedious mathematical problem with a simple formula, provided you understand what the formula does. That is the essence of what these more or less universal truths unlock in the wisdom stories that have been passed down through the ages. I intentionally qualified the idea of universal truth because the human consciousness can only comprehend relative truth. Within the consciousness of a human being, these threads of wisdom take on a very universal appearance. They can lead us to a state unlike normal waking consciousness and a little closer to the true awareness of unity. Kept in mind while reading scriptures, legends, and myths, we see them as the hidden threads tying all of these tales together. There comes to the reader a moment of recognition. The symbolic and holistic nature of the scriptures of the world comes in to focus and with that comes the revelation that they are all teaching us the same things. They simply grew out of, and were affected by, differing cultures and so carry the colorings and emotional sentiments of those cultures. The underlying message is the same. My hope is that through the reading of this simple work you will have opened before you the Path to Enlightenment in a way that makes it real and possible for you.
These "Keys" are basic, yet somewhat abstract ideas that you will see repeated as we explore the body of the Ageless Wisdom, which lies at the core of all of the major systems of religious philosophy. They are reflections of truths that have lost dimension, but still allude to their source. You will see them expressed over and over throughout the rest of our exploration, leading you to an understanding of the meaning and depth contained within these seemingly simple ideas. If they are in fact universal truths, at least as far as the human consciousness is capable of understanding truth, then we will see them expressed on all levels of manifestation. This is an expression of what is known as The Law of Correspondences, and with these keys we will be able to build a foundation upon which all of the rest of what I share with you will stand. Viewed through the lens of this simple hierarchy of ideas, the wisdom in the teachings that have pervaded every human culture comes into clear relief against the backdrop of noise that is created by their very misunderstanding. Initially I will be referencing them often and later leave the recognition to the reader so as not to be too repetitive.
Key One - There is but One Life.
All of the keys to the understanding of this universal wisdom can be boiled back down to this one simple statement. It is the unifying principal in all of creation. All is alive, and all of the varied forms of manifestation are drawn from this one infinite pool of life to create the universe we see - and all that escapes our grasp as well. It is you and me, and the space between us, teeming with life and energy. Science tells us that there is enough energy within a cubic centimeter of empty space to boil away the oceans of the earth if we could truly harness it. Empty space is far from empty. Our perception is far from complete.
Key Two - The One Life expresses itself through matter, in order to experience and master form.
There are only two discernible reasons for this infinite sea of divine awareness to create on any material plane (and they are all material). They are (1) to experience the world of form, and (2) to express its awareness in that world. This is the Evolutionary Impulse and is an expression of what is called The Law of Necessity. Deity must create.
Key Three - All manifestation is cyclical; it is the result of, and conditioned by, vibration.
The world around you is vibrating from every corner of existence. These vibrations sometimes harmonize, and sometimes they do not, but patterns emerge out of chaos like the autogenic effects we see in fluid dynamics. This is impersonal and factual, as it is in all of the keys. Science defines heat, and therefore energy itself, by molecular movement. There is perpetual motion in the universe at scales that we cannot imagine. The microwave background radiation famously and accidentally discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Woodrow Wilson are reverberations of the big bang. This is science's version of Genesis, and since that moment when time, space, and matter began, it has all been vibrating.
Key Four - Consciousness is the result of the interaction of spirit and matter, and evolves through it.
The majority of the religious traditions of the world are based on the same trinity of creation. We will go into this idea in great depth later, but in all cases there is a male principal related to will and seen as spirit, and a female principal related to matter, and encompassing activity and expression. The third is the result of that interaction, which is the principal of consciousness, represented in Christianity as the "Son." Spirit pervades matter with a fragment of itself resulting in consciousness. Not in life, for all is alive, but in sentience or awareness. Consciousness requires form. It evolves through the progressive mastery of its medium of expression.
Key Five - As it is above, so it is below.
Vibrations manifest in repeating patterns and harmonics. Through these patterns of vibration we see the emergence of mathematical relationships. The doubling of an audio frequency results in the first harmonic or, in the most common form of musical notation, the octave note. There are relationships between the various planes of existence we will study. Just as every note necessarily has its counterpart in every octave, there are things that we will see repeatedly expressed on varied levels of physical manifestation - and consciousness as well. Cycles repeat within cycles; worlds within worlds.
Key Six - All forms of life embrace lesser forms and are in turn embraced by greater forms.
Now we see that in addition to worlds within worlds, we have lives within lives, embraced by the One Life. In this context the idea of a "greater" form of life simply means a more complex and encompassing one that, as we will see, is the result of a higher level of consciousness. The earth is a living organism; it is an assemblage and community of the differing life forms that make up its totality. It is the macrocosm (big universe) to our microcosm (little universe). It embraces us on our journey as we embrace the billions of varied cellular level lives, as well as the hitch hikers and stowaways we take along for the ride within our own smaller system. There are many organisms within your body thast are decidedly not human, such as the over one hundred trillion microbes of over four hundred different types in your digestive tract alone. From the perspective of those lives, you are the macrocosm. These are separate little creatures living within you who are as crucial to your survival as you are to theirs. I hope you are beginning to see how these ideas are all couched within one another.
Key Seven - Spiritual teachings are necessarily given in symbolism.
Spiritual realities can only be experienced firsthand. For this reason we cannot do anything but to use symbols to point at these abstract truths from a number of differing perspectives. The level of comprehension is dependent on the level of conscious awareness of the perceiver. I cannot overstress this idea, and it can be the most helpful way of looking at spiritual and philosophical teachings.
With these concepts in mind, we will now take a look at the way spiritual truth has been communicated over the course of ages, and what it is that these teachings are trying to show us.
Remember that when we talk and think in symbols we are placing something between ourselves and reality – something protective, interpretive and significant, but something nevertheless veiling and hiding.
The Master Djwahl Kuhl
CHAPTER 2Hidden Meaning
Where we begin really has more to do with our seventh key than with the first, or even with the first few. The fact is that we need to establish the reasoning behind how I will present this information. I have the same issues to contend with that have been the obstacle to spiritual truth for every teacher. That is, describing the indescribable through loose allegory and parable - or in a word, through symbolism.
With the birth of scientific materialism and the overwhelming acceptance the scientific community enjoys, the universe has been reduced to a random mechanism governed by impersonal laws. They did get half of that right, incidentally. The laws are completely impersonal. In this system of thought, matter is seen as the font of all being. If something cannot be proven to exist materially, it is not real. This artificially firm stance is far from being seated in unimpeachable evidence and theoretical physics posits some very contrary and even counter intuitive ideas. There are things going on within our world that defy our senses. We have to be able to conceptualize these ideas in a space that is abstracted from what we see as the material world.
We are going to explore the Esoteric Principals which reside within, and form the core of some very spiritual concepts, as well as their corollaries in the quantum world. That leads to the first real question. What is Esotericism? This is going to be a tough one right out of the gate. This word is relatively meaningless to most people but maybe we can actually turn that to our advantage. We can define it for them, and perhaps refine the meaning for those who have been familiarized with the term. When you define something, you define what it is, as well as what it is not. Something that is light is known not to be dark. Something that is green is obviously not red or blue. The more that goes into the column of what it is not, the better we make the definition. When the opposite of something is fairly clear, it can be easier to define that and then work backwards.
In the case of the word esoteric it might be useful to define it in contradistinction to its opposite "exoteric." Even though there may be fewer people who have heard that word, it is easier to define and understand. The prefix "exo" means outer (as in exterior) and "eso" means inner. The exoteric nature is the outer appearance of something and the esoteric is its inner essence. That's the surface of it but let's go a bit deeper. It is going to be the subject of extensive analysis throughout this work but we need to get a handle on it up front so we are all on the same page as we go.
Exoteric is: measurable by the senses, or by some extension of the senses, like a microscope. It has form, height, depth, and width. It is manifested, tangible and a part of the physical world that science has always acknowledged. This is covered by the physical sciences or physics as pioneered by Sir Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon.
Esoteric is: hidden, beneath - not plain to the senses or measurable. Albert Einstein tells us in his laws of the conservation of matter and energy that all is truly of one essence and this essence moves in and out of physical expression. If matter is formed from energy then energy is the underlying cause of the physical or material world. If we release the energy as we do when we burn something, we can easily see that matter is the source of the energy being released and we see that much of the material is lost with the release of the energy. Matter cannot be both the cause and result of the physical world, so we have to look at the energies that are its precursor. We will be exploring those energies and so, the world of causes or what is known as metaphysics. This term was coined by the students of Aristotle when they were arranging his writings and placed his papers on the underlying causes of the universe after his papers on Physical Science. Meta (beyond or after) and phusika (physical). He himself never used the word. He referred to these teachings as "First Philosophy."
We are actually talking about the world of quantum physics; which to this day is still considered theoretical physics, although direct experimentation has proven much of the early theory. The quantum field is an interesting term and for science a really strange pursuit, if you think about the rules of the hypothesis. The interesting part is that they see the evidence of something like an electron in the mathematics. This is in some cases, decades before they are actually able to detect it with their equipment. They foray into the intangible. This is where science and spirituality begin to merge and science becomes very uncomfortable. The current pursuit is for evidence of the existence of dark matter, which is supposed to be more than five times as abundant within the universe as what we call matter. With the inclusion of dark energy, it represents up to 95% of the substance of the universe, and is one possible explanation for its accelerating expansion. The scientific community has reduced the physical world to the relationships of four forces and a handful of particles.
The last of these to be theorized is that elusive particle of dark matter, the Higgs Boson. Again, based upon relationships leaving holes in what is called mathematical symmetry, they know it is there and have been looking for empirical evidence of it. On March 13th 2013 research at the CERN large hadron collider revealed the existence of this long sought after Higgs Boson that is thought to give mass to all matter in the Universe. It has been nicknamed the "God Particle" because it is thus responsible for all material manifestation. All matter has mass, which is actually a measure of its gravitational influence.
So in a sense we have two dimensions, one within the other, coexisting. There are actually many but for the moment we can stick with this over simplification until we have some other concepts developed. We know about the physical or exoteric world. The esoteric world we will have to deal with like we do with quantum physics; theoretically. Christ said "The Kingdom of God is within you." (Luke 17:21) This is the esoteric world. It will not be discovered outside of ourselves. The Oracle of Delphi advised man "Know thyself and thou hast read the world."
Reality or Actuality?
There are as many realities as there are units of consciousness. Each person has his or her own reality. There is only one actuality. Reality is how we perceive the world, actuality is what truly is. So reality can be seen as exoteric and actuality as esoteric.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Spiritual Practicality by Douglas Fisichella. Copyright © 2016 Douglas Fisichella. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements, ix,Introduction to the Esoteric Sciences, xi,
The Keys to the Mysteries of "The Ageless Wisdom", xxv,
Chapter 1 – The Keys, 1,
Chapter 2 – Hidden Meaning, 6,
Chapter 3 – The Ageless Wisdom, 11,
Chapter 4 – The Evolution of Consciousness, 25,
Chapter 5 – Reincarnation and Karma, 46,
Chapter 6 – The Anatomy of Consciousness, 69,
Chapter 7 – The Soul, 91,
Chapter 8 – Meditation, Mystical and Occult, 99,
Chapter 9 – The Fifth Kingdom, 109,
Chapter 10 – The Enigma of the Trinity, 123,
Chapter 11 – Esoteric Psychology – The Study of the Seven Rays, 133,
Chapter 12 – The Rays, The Logoi and the Hierarchy, 144,
Chapter 13 – The Seven Planes, 150,
Chapter 14 – The Creative Process in Man, 170,
Appendix A, 177,
The Master in the Heart, 181,
Bibliography, 189,