Ancient Wisdom for the 21st Century

By Burt Wilson

The Ancient Wisdom is a body of pure knowledge of Nature's God and Creation that has been in existence for thousands of years, long before the appearance of any of today’s major religions. Although ancient in source, it has a philosophical integrity that is as relevant in today’s life as it has been in every previous period of time. No irreconcilable leaps of faith are required. No submission to any priesthood. No self-elected spiritual leaders. It takes the position that everything in life is knowable and available to those who seek it.
The wisdom contained here is that which has always been previously communicated to interested spiritual aspirants who sought it out in the Mystery Schools of old. Although the schools themselves are gone from us today, the old curriculum can still be found amidst the many challenges of daily life and can be mastered through a consistent desire for a deeper knowledge of the Foundations of Existence. With that knowledge, the daily challenges of Life do not disappear, but become manageable through a deeper understanding of how the world was created, moves in cycles and how events repeat themselves.
There always has been an intelligence behind everything in the Universe, even behind the free will of humankind. This special wisdom remains generally obscure today because from the beginning, unlike conventional religions which began as cults of personality, its followers did not go out and build churches and temples (except for the great pyramids and a few giant observatories!) and they especially did not actively haul in converts. One had to first develop a strong need for this wisdom which then compelled one to search for it. You have sought and have now knocked on the door and it has been opened. The rest is up to you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Burt Wilson
• Release date: May 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9780615260051

Burt Wilson

Burt Wilson is a philosopher, political activist and jazz musician. he is a former member of the Board of Trustees of the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) of Los Angeles founded by renowned philosopher Manly Palmer Hall. Wilson was a lecturer on esoteric subjects there. He is also associated with the Teaching of Agni Yoga, founded by Nicholas and Helena Roerich. For a complete background of Mr. Wilson, please visit his Wikipedia page at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burt_Wilson

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Ancient Wisdom

for the

21st Century

The Secret Wisdom of the Ages

By

Burt Wilson

© Copyright Burt Wilson 2012

Published by Paloria Press at Smashwords

ISBN: 978-0-615-26005-1

All Rights Reserved: No Part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the copyright owner or his representatives or through direct purchase from an internet e-book publisher. Permission to quote freely is given. Contact publisher for details.

Permission to quote from the Agni Yoga Series of books is granted by The Nicholas Roerich Museum, 319 W. 107th St. New York City 10025. Painting of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on the cover is by the renowned artist and world culture benefactor Nicholas Roerich

DEDICATION

I dedicate this book with love and gratitude to my beloved guru, friend and teacher

RALPH HARRIS HOUSTON

CHAPTERS IN ORDER

INTRODUCTION

Ch. 1: Future Consciousness

Ch. 2: What was there before religion

Ch. 3: What is the Ancient Wisdom?

Ch. 4: Infinity and God

Ch. 5: The Divine Dialectic

Ch. 6: Creation according to the Ancient Wisdom

Ch. 7: The Creation of the Universes

Ch. 8: The Unfolding of our Universe

Ch. 9: How Divine Intelligence Enters Life

Ch. 10: The Doctrine of Emanations

Ch. 11: How Planets and Stars Evolve

Ch. 12: How Human Beings Evolve

Ch. 13: Cosmic Cycles

Ch. 14: Redemption and the Christ Principle

Ch. 15: Enlightenment and the Purpose of Life

Ch. 16: What the Ancient Wisdom expects from us

Ch. 17: About this book

INTRODUCTION

God is the only One, He who exists in essence, the only one living in substance, the sole generator in heaven and on earth, who is not Himself engendered. At once Father, Mother, and Son, He engenders, brings to birth and is perpetually, and these three persons, far from dividing divine nature, work together to His infinite perfection.

--Histoire ancienne des peuples de l’Orient

The Ancient Wisdom is a body of pure knowledge of God and creation that has existed for millenniums, long before any of today’s major religions. Although ancient in source, it has a philosophical integrity that is as relevant in today’s life as it has been in every previous period of time. No irreconcilable leaps of faith are required. No mysteries. All is knowable. This special wisdom remains generally obscure today because from the beginning, unlike conventional religions which began as cults of personality, its followers did not go out and build churches and temples (except for the great pyramids and a few giant observatories!) and they especially did not actively haul in converts. One had to first develop a strong need for this wisdom which then compelled one to search for it. This book continues in that same tradition. You have sought, you have found, you have knocked, and now the door will be opened for you. You’ll not be disappointed because the wisdom contained herein is precisely that which was communicated to the spiritual aspirants who sought it out ages ago.

The main difference between the Ancient Wisdom and today’s religions is that the God of the Ancient Wisdom is not a Personal God or any kind of a Supreme Being, but an infinite uncreated Transcendental Principle–a complete abstract that exists in consummate Oneness with all creation. This is known as an intra-cosmic God as opposed to the extra-cosmic God of all the Monotheistic religions.

The modern conventional concept of a Personal God–a Monotheistic Supreme Being who is externalized and apart from His creations and has such physical attributes as talking, listening, acting and making decisions for people on earth–is actually a product of the superstitions of uneducated people of earlier times. Their simple-minded imaginings were encouraged by the early church fathers in order to establish the fear of retaliation by God in their consciousness, making them beholden to and dependent upon the church and the priesthood for their salvation.

This is still going on today in one form or another in religions all over the world. The false concept of a Personal-type, semi-anthropomorphic God who uses a cadre of ecclesiastical intercessors to tell people what to and what not to do, has now become so mired in the mass consciousness of the people of the world that they literally cannot conceive of anything else. Far from bringing people closer to the fact of God, this fictitious notion keeps them away from the truths of existence and therefore under the control of the priesthood. The ecclesiastics use this made-up God to dominate the spiritual life of people from the cradle to the grave. And they purposely maintain this fear through the constant addition of new rules of behavior, false dogmas and exotic liturgies which were never taught by their founding prophet.

If you’ve never heard of the Ancient Wisdom it’s because around the time when the Emperor Constantine was reorganizing the Catholic Church to be the Roman Empire’s preferred religion (320-330 C.E.) he had all the Pagan temples of the Ancient Wisdom demolished and burned to the ground. Then, in a brilliant move which made the bishops even more dependent upon his favor (and thus very likely to do his bidding), he turned over all Pagan lands, wealth and possessions to the church. Among articles which were confiscated were the sacred texts of the Ancient Wisdom which the church fathers (after keeping a copy for themselves) burned.

This was the fate of any doctrine which differed from Catholic Doctrine. The sacred teachings of Gnosticism, Mithraism, Marcionism, etc., all suffered the same fate. Thus the Ancient Wisdom had to go underground where it remained throughout the bloody dark ages when Christianity’s inquisitions and holy wars brought new inhumanities to humankind in their crusades against other beliefs. The Ancient Wisdom survived, but just barely.

So why now a book about the Ancient Wisdom? Because today’s psychology has finally brought you and many other people like you to the truth that we ourselves, not some church, temple or mosque, must take responsibility for what we think and do. No longer can we continue to blame evil on the Devil. No longer can we look to a priest to forgive us the mess we’ve made of things. Such rituals of absolution provide no development of our personal character and do not serve any positive purpose.

If we made the mess, we should be the ones to clean it up!

What we like to glorify as God’s work on one hand and demonize as the Devil’s work on the other amounts to simple buck-passing. We are the culprits, good or bad. We must take the responsibility for our actions. Neither are we born sinners. That is a fiction made-up by the church. It’s time now to put aside this false idea and recognize the Light within us, not the sin. It is also time to scrape away the layers of man-made dogma which have encrusted the golden precepts of the wisdom of the great prophets.

Literal interpretations of scriptures and fabricated rules have killed whatever life there may have been in conventional religions. Various dogmas have spread so much confusion in the minds of people that every day they wake up and see other people of different religious persuasions as enemies rather than friends. This is madness!

When I sat down to write this book I asked myself: people have been indoctrinated for so long in spurious religious dogmas that they have come to believe them to be true, so how can they accept another Teaching of Life even if it has more integrity and truth? Then I remembered an observation of the Ancient Wisdom that states, You cannot defeat evil in disguise; you must unmask it first. Thus I have taken great pains to root out the fallacious elements of Christian Doctrine which have been cleverly devised to sound valid when they are really intended to hold people in spiritual bondage.

The first five chapters of this book unmask many of these false doctrines. Others are exposed in the last three chapters. You can’t imagine, until it is shown to you, how much the Bible has been altered and misinterpreted. You have no idea how our precious religious doctrines have been cobbled together from ancient Egyptian and Pagan theologies. The most heinous crime has been the transformation of the study and exploration of Spirit into the worship of physical form.

Whereas the Ancient Wisdom honored Spiritual Essence over physical form, certain monotheistic religions simply reversed it, bringing all sacred spiritual concepts down to the physical and personal level. Why? Because Spirit is as free as the wind, so the good fathers did away with what they couldn’t control.

From the sixth chapter on, you will learn how the universe works and how you can find your own place in it. You’ll be given a graphic presentation of Creation According to the Ancient Wisdom, i.e., how the universe came to be and how human life appeared on earth–ending once and for all the old man descended from the apes myth.

The last three chapters will show you how to integrate all this learning into your life as you discover and follow your own spiritual path–that which was originally intended for you in this life. You’ll learn what The Christ really is and what power it gives you to redeem your own karma on earth. You’ll discover that Spiritual Light is everywhere and is yours for the asking!

I believe that now is the perfect time for the information in this book to come out because we all need to rediscover, re-think and synthesize the concepts of God, the universe, our solar system, our planet and its humanity. Such inner exploration is essential today because institutionalized religious beliefs easily become prejudices over time and these prejudices will inevitably obscure the truth. Also, the deep meanings and intent, which were clear to the early writers of scripture, may now be lost to current thinking, obliterated by layers of a changing psychology.

I hope this book also serves as an instrument to bring a needed unity to religion and science by relentlessly exposing the prejudices and fallacies which now separate them. I do not claim any special truth here. Neither do I claim to reveal any new truth. My biggest contribution has been to synthesize aspects of the esoteric doctrines of the Ancient Wisdom into a unified whole. I believe the information in this book will change your life–not just part of your life, but all of your life.

Burt Wilson

Sacramento, CA

CHAPTER I

FUTURE CONSCIOUSNESS

We cannot consider God as being a particular incarnation, or as incarnate at all. God is Uncompounded Spiritual Nature, excluding all complexes.

–Origen, Catholic Saint

But the ultimate mystical goal is to be united with one’s God. With that, duality is transcended and forms disappear.

–Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

There comes a time in each of our lives, usually early on, when we look up into the night sky and try to comprehend the nature of the universe. We gaze in awe at the vast expanse before our eyes, the brightly shining stars studding the black mysteriousness, and try to make sense of it. To a certain extent we do, because space exploration has made it more comprehendible for us. But there’s still a good chance we’ll get a kind of queasy feeling when we see there is apparently no end to all that black space beyond the visible stars.

The natural bent of the human mind is to first try to find a way to organize observations and feelings into a synthesized whole. The starry cosmos, however, stymies such comprehension because what we are viewing is actually a paradox – a bright, visible universe co-existing alongside an apparently unending invisible expanse. We see the grandeur of space, but at the same time we are also seeing through space and, because there is no distinguishable end to it, no hint of any kind of resolution for this experience, we have a hard time fitting it into a proper niche in our consciousness. Thus we are confronted with our first abstract – Infinity.

In 1655, after looking up at the nighttime sky, Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, wrote, The eternal silence of that infinite space terrifies me. Not long afterwards, John Milton wrote in his poem, Paradise Lost:

"Before his eyes in sudden view appear

The secrets of the hoary Deep -- a dark

Illimitable ocean, without Bound

Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, And time and place are lost... "

Philosophers and poets have certainly been able to cognize the immensity of space and describe their feelings, but for the rest of us comprehension of this contradictory condition called Infinity does not come easily. Few go joyously into the realm of abstract thought and, not surprisingly, most people avoid it. There are valid reasons why. Psychological research has shown that as we experience life we develop a schema, or theory about the world in which we live, based on our perceptions. Throughout this life-long process, we mentally institutionalize this schema in our minds by a process psychologists call belief perseverance. This becomes our belief system or mind set and it exerts an extraordinary control over the drama of our daily life, continually directing our thoughts into comfortable, well-worn ruts.

The influence of a well-managed belief system on our daily life is so strong and subtle we hardly ever realize we are in its clutches. Thus we are apt to go to great lengths to maintain our cognitive status quo because it would be too confusing and disorienting for us to have to alter our entrenched view of things. Most of us, therefore, develop a system of automatic responses which psychologists call availability-mediated influences which ward off any deep thinking. In other words, we tend to deal with the world only in terms of that which is familiar to us.

What this all adds up to is something called prejudiced thinking. We are all guilty of it, some to more of an extant than others. Prejudiced thinking is like filling the brain with cement. All the cell activity becomes solidified and the brain becomes programmed to automatically reject anything that appears to be menacing or upsetting in any way. In time, we come to nurture this condition because it provides us with a convenient psychological crutch in helping us feel comfortable with who we are and how we relate to the world around us. Since our sense of place in the world directly affects our emotional happiness, we thus tend to program ourselves to consciously avoid unsettling new ideas and virtually all abstract thought – anything, in fact, that represents a direct threat to our tranquil psyche.

The concept of Infinity is certainly the largest psychic threat to our consciousness. The idea that we, our planet earth, our galaxy and the whole cosmos are floating around somewhere in an endless space simply boggles the mind. While scientific calculations about how this is physically accomplished give some comfort, science runs up against a metaphysical wall when it tries to figure out why it’s this way.

In the recent book The New Physics for the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006), editor Gordon Fraser, a physicist and science writer says, Despite all our efforts so far, we do not even know what, or even where, most of the universe is! This may be partly due to science’s own form of prejudicial thinking in that it doesn’t even recognize the concept of Infinity simply because it can’t be measured. Thus we are left to our own devices when our psyches are confronted by this lingering why so we tend to build a permanent grave for the concept of Infinity in our subconscious minds – there where we have also, very adroitly, buried our ability to think abstractly.

The denial of the abstract is especially evident in our quest for knowledge about God. The Bible makes it plain that God is a Spirit and must be worshiped in Spirit and truth. Spirit equates to consciousness and, of course, is an abstract, therefore to worship God in truth is to worship an abstract God! This means that instead of some kind of Personal God who acts, we should be thinking of an infinite, transcendental abstract principle – God Consciousness. Yet the God reverenced today by most of the monotheistic religions is purely anthropomorphic. These religions want their God to be infinite and eternal, but they keep adorning their cosmic deity with all kinds of finite attributes such as hearing, seeing, and acting. Thus religion itself is the cause of a full-blown philosophical consciousness gap as to the actual nature of God.

The blame for this gap is not wholly at the feet of religion, however. Science also must share the guilt, not for what it has proclaimed, but for what it has left out. Had Charles Darwin gone a bit farther in his precedent-setting study of the evolution of the species and included the fact that we humans have a sentient consciousness in addition to a biological mind he would have really been on to something. However, he ignored metaphysics – casting aside all the brilliant works of the Greek and Roman philosophers of old – and instead focused solely on the biology of life. This is the scientific equivalent of fundamentalist Christianity’s insistence that each Bible verse be taken literally! And science fell for it, grandly adopted it and, faced with a vast universe it is so far unequipped to completely understand, has been fumbling around ever since.

Because of Darwin, science believes that our brains – including the ability to think of what to do next – simply randomly evolved. Science is so convinced of this that in 1998 it began a study to find out if moral behavior was a product of one’s genes! In The Origin of the Species Darwin wrote, Natural selection will never produce in a being any structure more injurious than beneficial to that being, for natural selection acts solely by and for the good of each. Well, what about human thought? Isn’t it human thought that has launched war after war? Hasn’t this been injurious to the species? Darwin didn’t think these things through far enough and