Beyond Homo Sapiens: Blind Faith

By Mariu Suárez

The author of this universal saga, Mari Suarez, is a surrealist visionary painter who has devoted herself to painting the images of the unconscious since 1969. Ariadne, the main character of Beyond Homo Sapiens, is a surrealist painter who explains her work in light of the creation of the surrealist movement of 1917.

The movement was formed because the artists are closer to the unconscious than most people. Therefore, their work and experience could be used as fertile ground for understanding the psychological theories of Freud, Jung, Adler and Otto Rank. The psychological investigations of these scientists had led psychology to the realization of the fundamental spiritual nature in man; the seed of the Self in personality that unfolds psychologically in each person; the force of the Archetypes dressing themselves in symbols that reach the individual mind. Artists have the advantage that they can freeze these images in sculpture or canvas.

Ariadne worked faithfully as a surrealist artist, freezing on canvas the images that reached her conscious mind from the depths of her unconscious. She felt driven to gain the tools to understand the images rooted in the metaphysical foundation of life that is the foundation of the psyche. She immersed herself in books about symbolism, mythologyall the teachings of the great Truth tellerswith the goal of understanding her own work.

Slowly, she understood that the images were trying to show her a new view of men and women; they were trying to take her beyond the characteristic separation and limitation of the Homo Sapiens. Through her work, her life became a great challenge and a great hope. Beyond Homo Sapiens is the sum of that challenge and hope.

Beyond Homo Sapiens is a historical, philosophical and mystical analysis of the historical events of 5,000 years. It depicts a woman's struggle to understand the chaos she witnesses all around her, hoping to help bring order to the world her daughter will inherit. In the process she formulates radically new ideas, but they are so solidly and clearly explained, readers are left wondering why this wasn't all explained to them in elementary school.

In this modern odyssey, Ariadne takes readers through the labyrinth of discovery she has navigated for over thirty years and leads them to a new landscape rich with possibilities. In a manner understandable to all, Beyond Homo Sapiens summarizes the evolution of man towards spiritual awareness. The never-ending struggle of good (anything that helps that evolution) versus evil (anything that thwarts it) becomes apparent in the narrative. Ariadnes fresh perspective gives readers new insights to help them distinguish Spiritual truth from the lies by which we are constantly bombarded.

One feels like the author is holding one's hand as she guides one through the past and the present. With compassionate wisdom and insight she describes the necessary ingredients to understand our journey. With masterful perspicuity, she illustrates, by spiritual and intuitive example, the steps we should be taking to make man's relationship to man a thing of beauty and love, rather than one of destruction and hate. Readers will be exhilarated to realize the unity of thought and vision that unites them with the Greek philosophers, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, Engels, and all the great thinkers throughout history.

Beyond Homo Sapiens reminds us that the present is the fruit of the past, and the future is the fruit of the present. Time, therefore, is a wheel of continuous movement. Any hope for a better future requires that we understand the past and change the present. Beyond Homo Sapiens, describes the reasons why men and women continue to be demeaning to themselves, the world and its inhabitants.

This trilogy, finally available in English, is recommended for public and academic libraries.
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 11, 2007
• ISBN: 9781462816453

Mariu Suárez

Mariú was born in Colombia, S.A. In 1966 she attained her degree in Fine Arts, Decoration, and Architectural Design from Javeriana University in Bogota. Since that time Mariú has painted at the same time that she has studied mysticism, symbolism, and philosophy to extract the meaning of her Visionary Surrealist work.

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Copyright © 2007 by Mariú Suárez.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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To my daughter Monica Sanchez for without her editorial advice this book would not have seen the light. To my sister, Patricia Suarez Weiss, for the use of her poem, Women’s Struggle Transforming the World. To Emile Mann for his help with the English translation. To Research Advisory Inc. for the funds to publish the book.

Most of all, thanks to the generous humanists who through the ages have struggled to liberate our minds and hearts.

To all who aspire to see the best of humanity expressed in the world and who want to put an end to the dominion of inhumanity.

In memory of my father, Carlos F. Suarez, my mother Stella Baquero and my nephew, Aron Alexander Weiss.

Contents

Book I

PREFACE

BOOK I

CHAPTER 1

RENOVATION

CHAPTER 2

UNCONSCIOUSNESS-CONSCIENCE

CHAPTER 3

SALVATION

CHAPTER 4

IGNORANCE AND KNOWLEDGE

CHAPTER 5

ADVENTURE IN THE DARK FOREST

CHAPTER 6

INTELLECT AND EMOTION

CHAPTER 7

INSTINCT AND HEROIC WARRIOR

CHAPTER 8

REFLECTION AND REASON

CHAPTER 9

HUMANIST FERMENT

CHAPTER 10

NASCENT HUMANISM

CHAPTER 11

THE HUMANIST CHALLENGE

CHAPTER 12

PLANETARY FERMENTATION

BOOK I

Book I

Blind Faith

The Wheel of Necessity

The only new thing in the world is the history we don’t know.

—Harry S. Truman

Dawn, Day, Dusk, and Night said, "Life is to be suffered . . . A continuous chain of living flesh, binding the burden of one generation to another."

—Irving Stone, The Agony and the Ecstasy

PREFACE

BOOK I

The history of a man begins long before his birth.

—Dan Levin Spinoza

Dear daughter:

I just received the guidelines I asked you for to start writing this book. It is wonderful that you became a writer and a journalist, and that with your help I will be able to start this task. I welcome what you call: a few tips to help me write the story.

I will begin with the basics, by starting the skeleton for the book as you told me, with the five Ws of writing:

Who?

My name is Ariadne and I am a surrealist artist. I was born in Colombia, South America, in 1946. I was a pink-diaper baby, one of the many children that the radicals of the thirties and forties brought to the world. I was born to an artist mother and a father who was an accountant by day and a lover of philosophy and science by night. She gave me love for the world of beauty; he gave me zest and enthusiasm for the world of ideas.

As a young adult, your birth, my beloved daughter Alexiara, gave me a sense of responsibility that spurred my need to make sense of the madness we all witness in the world. Following in my mother’s footsteps, I became an artist, a veristic, surrealist painter who faithfully represented on the canvas the images emerging from my subconscious. That was how I began the exploration of my own psyche and its symbolic language, which is an expression of Universal Archetypes. I used the canvas to freeze the symbolic images that reached my consciousness in order to remember them and follow their thread wherever it led. Through my work I embarked on the adventure of self-discovery, confronting in myself what is human (the lamb) and what is inhuman (the wolf) in all of us. To help guide my journey I studied psychology and realized that Jung was right: the images that automatically flowed into my personal consciousness from the collective unconscious were telling me a story. Thus, I began the process that Jung calls Individuation, which is the integration of the unconscious and the conscious. This activates the Transcendent faculty of the psyche, which can help us walk toward Self, which corresponds to the mystical idea of the Spiritual Center.

I wanted to understand my feelings of alienation from the Catholic feudal society to which I had been born. To overcome the barrier of early conditioning, I emigrated with you and my younger sister Selene from Bogota to New York where I found myself equally alienated in the new capitalist Protestant environment. I had to understand why I didn’t seem to fit anywhere.

Who? Will also be you, my darling girl; you are a woman of twenty-seven, an accomplished editor and health writer in New York, but in my mind, I embrace you with all the images recorded in my heart. I still see the baby that they handed me in the hospital, and that looked to me like the most beautiful being in all of creation. They didn’t bring you to my side or put you in my arms; instead, they left the transparent plastic crib next to me, while still in the recovery room—I recuperated from an easy labor only two hours long, despite the fact that you were my first. You arrived with a minimum of pain for me and your little face didn’t show the normal trauma of swollen eyes and nose. Your eyes were wide open as you looked at me through the crib. I will never forget those dark eyes, the enormous curiosity that emanated from them as they followed my every movement. I had been told children couldn’t see when they were first born. Not mine, I thought to myself, she sees it all.

The nurses then asked me to breast-feed you, although only a yellow liquid would come out at first, because it is very nutritious; and only by suckling you immediately would milk production begin. I laughed when I put you next to my breast because you got cross-eyed and started drinking with the impetus of a super healthy baby whose hunger was obviously as intense as your desire to see it all.

An instinct to protect the life I had been given took hold of me, and the contrast between the tender little body I was hugging and the steel world into which I had brought you made me cry. I felt guilty without knowing why. You had been born in 1967 within a society that had evil greed as its advisor. Since my birth in 1946, after the explosion of the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I had witnessed the suicidal arms race of the two superpowers. I had understood the menace posed by all the industrial garbage and smoke; acid rain and radioactive waste contaminating the earth, the water, the oceans and the atmosphere. The ozone layer was being extinguished just as Spirit is extinguished from a society that fixes its eyes on material values. As always, those who held power had exchanged the common good for their personal gain.

One of the nuns at the Catholic hospital where I gave birth to you came into my room and found me crying.

What is wrong, my child? she asked.

I couldn’t answer. I only looked at you, your sweet little body, your mouth as red as a flower, your eyes closed as you slept peacefully breathing with tranquility after eating your fill. In contrast, I saw the universe as an unmerciful machine, eating everything in existence, witnessing the misery and tragedy of history without compassion for its fragile beings. If I had previously felt the claws of man’s inhumanity to man digging into my heart at the sight of so much misery, so much death and destruction, now, in your presence I felt that I had to do something about it. I could not stay with my arms crossed, waiting for a miracle to save us. We had to save ourselves, and having you for my daughter inspired me to think about what our path to salvation might be.

The nun continued looking at me, but I couldn’t answer her. She hugged me and said, This is normal my child. After giving birth many women get depressed, but you will see how much joy this beautiful baby will bring you.

I smiled, looked at you and told myself that instead of worrying I would do something so that you could inherit a better world. You had been born to a world in crisis and, out of love for you, I accepted the mission of every cold-war mother: to save our children.

Who? Also includes our immediate family, my sister Selene, my nephew Alexander, my baby twin nieces, my mother and father, and the earthlings with whom we share the planet. You have told me that it is important to give the physical characteristics of Ariadne, Selene, and yours, my dear Alexiara. You said this is the only way people will be interested in the story, if I give life to the characters. How do we look? Like the majority of Hispanic women, I have more indigenous, Arab, and black features than you. Your father, white, and green eyed, gave you a whiter tint in the chromatic scale than mine. All the family—parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, uncles, cousins, you, my sister and I—represent the chromatic spectrum of the Hispanic mix.

Where?

The action won’t be one of outer exploration but an inner excursion into the Homo sapiens’ mind—individual and collective—and the planet as we study its history in relation to the development of the human mind.

When?

We will retrace the memories of all eras and ages as we try to recognize the psychological archeology that lives below the conscious mind of our time.

Why?

Your birth sparked in me a desire for Truth that has moved me to an unrelenting inner exploration. Truth is Whole and with your life you have kept that fire burning, not allowing me to stop exploring the Light.

How?

This is the major part of this book, as I analyze the pieces of the puzzle formed by events in history to make sense of what would otherwise be only a tale told by an idiot. The images on my canvases have helped me understand the mystic teachers of all times and places. I have explored Truth by turning within, and I have seen that Truth is an abstract Force. It enters our brains as an Archetype, helping us to craft our own temporal creations that will serve us according to our social and individual needs. Truth is needed to transform our individual and institutional life and must be rescued from the mire of our first misinterpretations of Reality, which were legion. Each generation rescues some truthful ideas, which break with the lying opinions that opposed them; but the rest of the mire of lies is carried into the next generation and the next. By ancient habit we continue to act out wrong opinions; changing the old habits in accordance to truthful Ideas is very difficult. This is how the chasm between the ideals we proclaim and the reality we create was first carved out and why it continues deepening. I wanted to know how we could free ourselves from the yoke of ancient misinterpretations. Searching for an answer I ravenously devoured history and philosophy books, and I began to see the same old history with new eyes. I realized that the Homo sapiens have not ended his evolutionary process because he has not ended his adaptations to Truth.

I saw that history is the process of freeing the Universal and Eternal in us from the personal and temporary in us. The purpose of the process is to free our selves from the erroneous interpretations of Reality we have made since humankind first stood on the planet.

This book is about objectivity. Objects are not only things of the outside world; they are also things of the inner world. However, we cannot explore the inner objects with our senses since they have evolved to perceive the material world around us. Sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch cannot follow us into the inner world. We have no names for every ripple in its landscape. It lays bare its hills and valleys only through metaphors. These metaphors come to us as reflections of our Higher Consciousness. This book is, therefore, also a glimpse into that Higher Consciousness.

Years ago I came across an old Jewish diagram, a graphic about the two spheres in which Consciousness moves: the outer and material and the inner and immaterial. At this point in time we are able to understand this map, because subatomic physics has taught us about energy processes; and the young science of analytical psychology has given us a new scientific understanding of the meaning of myths, metaphors, and symbols. It became obvious to me that we can do now with the inner world of the psyche what the revolutionary thinkers and philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did with the knowledge of the outside world: divesting it from centuries of misinterpretation and superstition.

It would have been very difficult for me to understand the Tree of Life without the latest breakthroughs of physics, which have taken us from the atomic world to the subatomic world and most recently, to a world made up of strings of energy. Physicists have gone beyond the chaos they had observed at the subatomic particle level and have delved into the strings of vibratory frequency whose perpetual movement is the building block of what we perceive as matter. These strings were already known to the Kabbalah masters, who called them the threads that link matter and consciousness to the Causal World. Physicists believe these vibratory strings suggest other dimensions exist. How many dimensions there are, they do not know yet. However, they are working on the equations. When they perfect their equations, they will probably find that the dimensions they identify match the Four Worlds, the Ten Sephirot and the twenty-two paths of descending vibratory influence that shape matter.

Newton worked all his life with Alchemy and the Kabbalah Tree of Life, trying to understand its connection with physics. He died still unable to complete the mathematics, but in working with the equations he discovered Differential Calculus. He did it at the same time with Leibniz, who on his own was engaged in the same search.

In the end, physics and mysticism are going to come together in our understanding of how the world works. Physics will focus on the mathematical and geometrical formulas that will help us better understand how these vibratory patterns affect and manipulate matter. Mysticism will continue to contemplate how they relate to our own individual and social consciousness and its growth.

There are many dimensions beyond matter; and physicists are on the verge of finding them, giving us the science behind the Real World that the Kabbalah Tree of Life has been illustrating for centuries.

The map of descending Consciousness, which was given to us by the Kabbalah masters centuries ago, is the Tree of Life. It showed me how each individual is made up of a multitude of levels of vibratory patterns of consciousness.

The Tree of Life (see illustration) represents the process by which Cosmic Vibratory Consciousness becomes matter. That means that all these levels live within matter. However, only humankind has the potential to develop an awareness of them, because only humankind has the gift of awareness.

The Tree is divided into four planes: the Supra-Conscious, which is represented by the triangle at the top of the Tree; the Conscious, represented by the triangle in the middle; the subconscious, diagramed in the lower triangle; and matter as the last level.

The Four descending Worlds are each assigned to an element. The first and highest world are assigned to fire, the second to water, the third to air, and the fourth to earth. Within those Four Worlds are also ten Energy Reservoirs. They were called Sephirot by the old Hebrew teachers, and they are represented in the map by the circles. Twenty-two paths unite them always, going from right to left and from left to right, zigzagging down the Tree. These are the Thirty-two Paths of Wisdom, which represent the descent of vibratory patterns. Mysticism has called the highest polarities Father and Mother, and Kabbalah assigned to them the level of Supra-Consciousness.

All levels of consciousness depicted by the Tree of Life live within matter. The work of the conscious evolution we have to begin is to bring all the levels of consciousness to vibrate at the frequency of the One pattern of Higher Consciousness.

The Tree of Life, being a Jewish invention, is read from right to left. This old map, understood with new eyes, gave me a whole new meaning to the old question: Who am I?

1. Has been called the Absolute, the Great Unity or Source, also the Primal Point (kether in Hebrew). This Point is, as mystics say, the beginning of the whirling or as physicists say, the Big Bang. The old Kabbalah masters used to say that as the Primal Point appears out of No-thing—it’s the true reality—it sees the whole universe with its Four Worlds and multiple dimensions at once. This represents the highest Energy-Consciousness reservoir called by mystics the Eternal Oneness of the Universe. Within all creation rests this Fountain of Life and Consciousness, which creates, develops, and maintains the universe permanently. This has been also called the Supreme Force. In the map, that is the Spiritual Plane.

The process that follows is one of separation. Oneness sacrifices itself into duality to bring the universe into Being.

2. Wisdom (chokmah in Hebrew) represents the Father Archetype, the Masculine side of the universe. It is the projective Energy level from which Ideas come. An Idea is a perfect model to start a creative process. It can be compared to an architectural blueprint.

3. Understanding (biynah in Hebrew) represents the Mother Archetype, the Feminine side of the universe. She is the matrix that creates the mold in which the Idea can become patterned. She can be compared to a three-dimensional model of the blueprint. The workings of Wisdom and Understanding represent the Causal Plane. All Causation has to be attributed to these two planes: the Spiritual and the Causal. The Triangle formed by Unity, Wisdom, and Understanding is symbolized by Fire. This is the level of Supra-Consciousness, called Atzilutic Plane in Hebrew.

4. Memory (chesed in Hebrew) represents the Memory patterns of Wisdom, which are express in the rhythm and equilibrium of descending energy. This is the universal dance of Life, which is the basis of Automatic Spiritual Consciousness.

5. Will (geburah in Hebrew) represents the Spiritual Will or Action that activates the Will to Good or equilibrium in the universe. The interactive workings of Memory and Will form the Superior Mental Plane.

6. Beauty (tipahareth in Hebrew) represents establish balance and proportion. It is the Eternal Son or Spiritual Consciousness and Spiritual Imagination. It has been referred to as the Son by the mystics of all ages. This is the True Human Spirit. This is the Force or Archetype that begins the humanization of the animal once the animal level is perfected enough to receive it into its bosom. This is the Plane of Consciousness, called Briyahtic Plane in Hebrew. We are not defining the paths that unite the reservoirs, but this Consciousness is continuously united to Unity or the Point of Creation, through the Central path of the Virgin Waters that emanate from that Source. This second triangle formed by Memory, Will, and Beauty is the Triangle of Consciousness; and it is symbolized by Water. Beauty could be called the Middle Energy Reservoir.

These two Triangles are universal and Cosmic in Nature. Make a Triangle between Unity, Memory, and Will, and then between Beauty, Wisdom, and Understanding and you have the Star of David or the Seal of Salomon, which represents the union of the Heavenly Forces. The Star is Heaven.

At this point the map leaves the universal to enter into the personal. What happens at that point is that the Universal molds of Heaven are going to be differentiated into particular forms. These forms will still be abstract and not yet materialized.

7. Emotion (netzac in Hebrew) represents the personalized emotional nature. What happens at this point of the process is that the Sun of Consciousness extends its rays, and those rays become shaped into particular applications. Emotion represents our capacity to receive from Heavenly Will. This forms our desire nature. If it looks down for material satisfaction, it will always be forming images of what gives it pleasure and what gives it displeasure.

The Tree of Life

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Heaven and Earth

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8. Intellect (hod in Hebrew) represents the intellectual nature. It is our capacity to focus awareness. We can focus in the inner level of Spirit and psyche, or in the level of matter. The intellect will always be serving the desire nature, looking for ways to satisfy it. Intellect becomes receptive to the Heavenly level of Memory once the emotions begin to want to perceive beyond the material reality. At the same time the intellect can transmit higher Ideals to the emotional nature. Emotion and Intellect form the inferior mental plane.

9. Subconscious (yesod in Hebrew) is the lower energy reservoir. It is through this reservoir that the Higher Energy levels should take shape in the lower planes. However due to our mineral, plant, and animal evolution, the impressions received by these levels have misshapen the Image of Divinity in which we were generated. Our work at this point in our evolutionary path is to reshape them according to the Heavenly Star. The triangle formed by Emotion, Intellect, and the subconscious is all subconscious to Consciousness. Their union is symbolized in mysticism as the marriage of the Sun and the Moon. This last triangle represents the element of Air and called Yetziratic Plane in Hebrew.

10. Matter (malkut in Hebrew) represents the physical plane. This reservoir is divided into the Four Elements because the Four Higher Elements live in it. The left quarter is assigned to Water, the right to Fire, the upper to Air, and the lower to Earth. The material plane is called Isaiah in Hebrew.

The map therefore represents not only the Macrocosm, but also the microcosms that are men and women. If you trace a line from Beauty to Matter, and another one from Intellect to Emotion, you have the cross. This cross is pending from the Star of David. The Real Earth hangs from Heaven.

According to mysticism, our physical bodies kept the laws and processes involved in the mineral kingdom. Our etheric bodies kept the generative life processes of the vegetable evolution. Our vital bodies kept the desire impulses—likes and dislikes, pleasure and pain of the animal—which are at the bottom of our basic psychic nature. Our physical bodies and its mineral processes are related to earth. Our etheric body and generative processes are related to air. Our psychic bodies are related to water. After incarnating into the animal level, the Conscious Human Spirit endeavors to redeem the physical, etheric, and vital bodies from all acquired and exclusive dependence on the physical senses and the material level by implanting the fire of Spirit wihin the human heart. It undertakes to turn the levels below Beauty from attention to the material to attention to the Spiritual.

Unicellular life with its protoplasm as the basic brick of life first learned to fight for survival over two million years ago. A mere forty thousand years ago, the modern Homo sapiens achieved the apex of his biological evolution. Fifty trillion cells compose a Homo sapiens. Fifty trillion cells whose protoplasm is still ingrained with the instincts of sex reproduction, survival, and immediate gratification inherited from our animal evolutionary process. That animal instinct, combined with our self-awareness and our mental ability to search for ways to satisfy our senses, makes man a beast more dangerous than any animal.

Since prehistoric times, men and women concluded that we are weak in relation to the surrounding world of nature. Everything seemed to be an enemy that we had to flee from, or fight. This is why we needed our warrior hero. Our own feeling of weakness led to the glorification of the heroic warrior and later to the vilification of the Spiritual Hero, who taught us that there is nothing to fear because the Universe is a Unity.

To understand how to go beyond the Homo sapiens’ wrong opinions I had to recognize and unlearn my basic animal instinct and desire for sense gratification. History had pushed me and all my contemporaries to the brink. Mankind had to find the means to mediate its power with Spiritual understanding. That was the only way we could use it for our betterment instead of our destruction. The race following the warrior hero archetype is walking a path without an exit. Historically, we, as Homo sapiens, have been able to survive our animal instinct because we did not have much scientific and technological capabilities. But since the industrial revolution, and mainly in the twentieth century, we became a menace to ourselves. With our bestial head, and our extended bionic body, we are destroying the ecosystem that gives us life and nourishes us. We are poisoning the waters, destroying the ozone layer, and escalating the genocide against our brothers and sisters with new and improved war toys.

This is why I saw the need to reinvent myself and also why I saw that this approach required a completely new perspective. I had to enter dimensions more real than the temporal, navigate the cosmos nude and alone, caress the nebula, go up stairs of atoms, escape unending and unbearable labyrinths. I had to find the answers to the age-old questions that few individuals in each generation have ever tried to answer: Who am I? What am I doing here? Why does evil happen?

I understood that the problem of the world in relation to society is the small number of thinking individuals in each generation. Not many people ask questions because certainty is more comfortable than doubt. Through my search I came to the realization that Ideas do not originate in people, but are patterns that emanate from the Point of Creation and eventually are expressed through people. He or she, who thinks, is not the individual; thinking is to align oneself with the Eternal meditation of the universe. To reach Eternal meditation, we must ask a question; this is the fishhook, which will fish an Idea. The formulation of Ideas that clearly arrive to consciousness has been expressed through different languages. The languages of Reason are philosophy, mathematics, and geometry. The languages of emotion are literature, poetry, painting, sculpture, and music. There is also the language of wisdom, which unites the two—Mysticism. Therefore, our shared history has a lot to teach us if we extract the essence of what is the Truth and timeless in it. Individuals in each generation have sifted these kernels of truth from the erroneous conceptions of the time. History consists of these truths threaded together like a pearl necklace. I realized this was the thread that could bring us out of the labyrinth. I also saw that our history has been clearly divided into Three Acts in the drama of psychological and social becoming: Blind Faith, Doubt, and Enlightened Faith. We are beginning the third act.

Classical mythology linked my own name with the Greek myth of the Labyrinth. The Minotaur was born to the queen of Crete after she mated with a sacred bull. To hide his shame, the King had a Labyrinth constructed in which to hide the monster. He then forced the Athenians to send as tribute fourteen young men and women to be locked in the Labyrinth for the Minotaur to eat. To stop the slaughter, the hero Theseus volunteered to enter the Labyrinth and fight the monster. On the advice of the king’s daughter, Ariadne, Theseus brought a ball of thread, which he unwound as he went through. He found the Minotaur, killed it, and then used the thread to find his way out of the maze.

Through this myth I understood that I was here to live consciously the adventure of self-discovery. In the myth, Ariadne was a virgin, symbolizing how we must purify our emotions. She must help Theseus, who represents our intellect, to come out from the labyrinth of form where the Minotaur lives. The labyrinth symbolizes how easy it is to get lost amidst so many wrong opinions in relation to what we perceive as the divisions of nature. The Minotaur represents the false consciousness of mankind, which is erroneous because our senses fool us. Just as we once believed the Earth was flat and the Sun revolved around it, we continue to hold erroneous beliefs based on what we see or feel with our senses and our animal instincts. We feel more comfortable believing things as we know them than trying to expand our knowledge. That is why Moses, Socrates, Galileo, and Marx were persecuted for bringing us radical changes with new knowledge. In the same way, our reactions today, are not very different from our prehistoric reactions to life. We have a series of comfortable beliefs, or taboos, that only a minority in each generation dare to challenge. Truth is universal and Eternal. It is not the revelation of one person or one age, but as Ernest Holmes said, the result of the aspiration and the effort of many individuals in consecutive ages, whose Ideas have benefited humanity. The Voice of Truth is One Voice, and if any error of behavior is found in the individual through whom the Voice comes out, it is to be attached to the limited personality, not to the Eternal Thinker. This is why my emphasis in this book is not on the individuals who carried the Voice, but in the Ideas that came to them by the magnet of the questions they asked. Their Ideas and contributions can help us realize that we are not what we think we are. We are not the limitations of our bodies, of our intellects, of our emotions. The way we have interpreted who we are is wrong, as wrong as how we once perceived the nature of the Earth and the universe to be.

I am writing to you, my daughter, to show you a way to emancipate yourself from our erroneous interpretations. I was helped in my search by the golden thread of humanist thinkers who have told us time and time again that our problem lies in our exclusive identification with what we can see and touch. I have tried to follow the idealistic radical thought that began with the Egyptian Hermetic movement and came out of Egypt with Moses. Century after century, this ever-expanding movement has tried to change our erroneous interpretations for correct ones. It recounts those things we must know to be able to separate the gold of history from the fool’s gold of our misconceptions, the humanist ideas from the inhuman opinions, the Spiritual in us from the untamed animal automatism that still rules our psyche.

History represents the task of reversing all the misinterpretations of prehistory. Through science we have already achieved the reversal of the misconceptions of the material world. We now need to do the same with those of the subjective world. First, we must clear our psyche. Kabbalah, Alchemy, Yoga, and Sufism know that the psyche consists of three levels: intellect, feelings, energy. We must clear them from all wrong opinions and feelings to liberate the energy encased in those wrong molds. Only in this way, our brains will be able to become more receptive to Spirit, establishing a permanent connection between the individual and Spirit. This task cannot be realized by one individual in one lifetime. It can only be accomplished by the race as it enters the phase of conscious evolution.

Those of my generation, born after the Second World War, grew up in atomic shock, between an iron wall and a sword, facing the greatest emergency in history. We matured facing the threat of nuclear suicide and the menace of ecological disaster. Did my generation need to witness the agony of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to unleash the energy of the atom and reverse the creative force of Spirit—before we could turn our power toward constructive goals? Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the wake-up call for all of those in my generation who wanted to save ourselves from imminent destruction. The past, with its inhumane precedent, could not give us the creative power we needed to imagine a new man, woman, and society. Our common history is bathed in blood. My generation did not have to look too far back to conclude, as the philosophers had, that we did not have to ask what the source of evil is because it is in us. We can easily see that we have not taken the first step toward real Love or the Resurrection of the Human Spirit.

All through my life I have learned to discriminate between the actions and opinions that throughout history have belonged to our wrong beliefs, as well as the Ideas that belong to the Human Spirit in all of us. The whole of our evolutionary process and history affects us today. We have not ended the struggle between Spirit’s will for the redemption of the individual and the masses and the elite’s will to usurp the power of Spirit by imposing their own. Blind masses follow blind leaders because both have the same inverted value system that puts matter and material things before Spirit.

I hope my experiences and conclusions help you, my daughter, and those people who are tying to find their way out of the labyrinth, out of the confusion in our psyche and our society. Homo sapiens is the missing link between the animal and the human. The human is the link between Homo sapiens and Homo spiritus, who represents our evolutionary destiny.

Mankind’s contradictory nature has brought us to this pivotal moment in time. Part of mankind has striven for Truth, while our wrong opinions keep us in the shadows of our misconceptions, greed, and fear. We can see clearly how the progressive Ideas of Truth manage to inch their way forward despite always being pushed back by the prehistoric taboos that live in us all. The triumph of the Human Spirit can bring us out of the labyrinth of confusion, making us able to embrace wholeness.

Philosophical, scientific, psychological, or historical theories are limited in scope and incomplete by themselves. To enhance their value they have to be pieced together as parts of a puzzle, and then, and only then, their real value appear as important parts of a whole. We have innumerable great theories, which, as pieces of a puzzle, gather in the libraries of the world, all of them in want of being taken out and revived into a comprehensible whole. Even the wonders of invention become valueless as we use them detached from a real understanding of their place within the whole picture. There is an essential unity behind the apparent separation of different things in the world. Our minds and bodies are inextricably bound with the total activity of the nature around us, the cycles of seasons, the ecology of the planet, our solar system, our Milky Way, and the Cosmic Universe. We have to be loving and respectful to all spiritual traditions in the world, all culture, all science. We have to unite the languages of culture: mysticism, philosophy, science, literature, and the plastic arts; we have to end their divorce in our minds; we must look at them as the whole expression of the Human Spirit. A holistic view of history will emerge this way because the different disciplines are expressions of the race yearning to become whole. This way history will finally feed us its honey instead of poisoning us with its bitterness. This will begin the stage of Conscious Evolution beyond Homo sapiens.

CHAPTER 1

RENOVATION

And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.

—Romans 12:2

The Tree of Life, or the idea of the vibratory threads, which unite the Four Dimensions, will be the backdrop against which I will remember my own life, my childhood and my growing up. Slowly, I will try to reconstruct for you, my dear daughter, my personal awareness of things, linking memory upon memory as we all do when we remember. We are conscious only of those things we remember, and we don’t remember much of our own experiences. Even things we experience will be forgotten if we don’t pay attention to them, while things we did not experience but we read or study with attention, will be vivid in our minds.

Let’s unite together in an expedition to renew our minds, to see things as they are, not as we have been taught to see them. To renew our minds we need to borrow from what philosophers of old have named the World of Innate Ideas. That world is the one symbolized by the Star of David in the Tree of Life. Our separation from that world and its Forces, have resulted in the miseries, sorrows, and atrocities, which are the lot of focusing our awareness on the material world exclusively. We are slaves to the outer form, not because there is anything wrong with outer form, but because we have reversed the order of things in our minds. Now, this reversal did not occur in the twentieth century—the most materialistic historical time; it began since the first organic cell appeared upon the mineral rock.

I am going to begin with myself, because to understand the world, we must understand ourselves. Also because no matter how different our experiences are, the need is to go beyond the conditionings through which each of us develops to grasp the principles behind them. The first principle we will take into consideration is that the SELF does not mean persona. The persona, you, and I and the extensions of the persona, like our social life and institutions, are only vehicles of the SELF, which is ONE. This is true not only for us earthlings, but for all the companions we may have in this incommensurable universe.

All of us, and our institutional life, express in forms of action, which no matter how right they are at a particular time and place become small and narrow to our growth if we don’t let them go when the time has come to shed skin. We need always to create new forms of expression because we need to allow the free flow of Cosmic Evolution to work through us.

It is only logical that when I was a child, an adolescent, and a young woman, I could not formulate what has taken me so many years of dedicated study, analysis, and understanding. I will try to replay my own confusion for you and for those who have had the gift of doubt—the ugly ducklings that dream to create a new and loving world and who never were able to conform to the experiences of history and the hateful competition for material things. Ancient race errors are interwoven in the constitution of our family and institutional life; they become our own errors because it is difficult for us not to believe what everybody else believes. There is, however, a remedy, which is to stop! And think!

Our desire nature is the first one we need to study as we stop and think, because she is the first one to receive Supra-Conscious intuition. The first desire for something beyond our daily sense-bound routines sets the intellectual nature into a mode of curiosity. For the first time, as the desire nature goes beyond material satisfaction, the intellect has trouble, because it really does not know what the desire nature wants. Therefore it sets within us that divine dissatisfaction as Dali used to express it. The intellect, which for millennia has been used to supply the wants of the desire nature, is accustomed to always receiving an exact command: I want a house. I want this dress. We want to make a bridge here. As long as the desire is objective, it is relatively easy to satisfy it by work or by crook. This is not to say that the persona always knows what he or she wants. Many times the persona has so many wants it is impossible for the intellect to even start working toward the satisfaction of one. This is even more problematic in society because we unite in groups of interest, which collide with other groups of interest. However, at the beginning of dissatisfaction with objective desires, the intellect becomes puzzled because it does not know what the desire nature wants. It has to start figuring it out. As I said before, the desire nature is the feminine part of our mind. She offers the fruit of desire, and the intellectual nature eats it up and begins a quest to satisfy the desire through spontaneous imagination.

Look again at the Tree of Life. The highest triangle, the Supra-Conscious, is the originator of Will Ideas. The second, who represent the Conscious, is the originator of images, or the dresses for those will Ideas. Those dresses are cut to specifications of need at the moment. Desires beyond what we can see and touch open the desire nature to the Water of Life. Remember that the Conscious is the Triangle of Water and the Supra-Conscious of Fire. Spiritual images begin to be perceived by the desire nature, which she communicates to the intellect that studies them to know what the desire nature wants. If we are happy with the satisfaction of material wants, we never take a step beyond our concrete life. In order to perceive Spiritual Reality as a want, the personality has to become satiated with the material, has to realize that the satisfaction of material wants do not satisfy a hunger of another kind, which burns in the heart; that want is really for Being, for a truthful definition of ourselves. In order to achieve a true definition we must destroy the illusionary ones. Only with this want we can begin questioning our most dear beliefs, submitting them to the fire of analysis, to see if they stand the test of Truth.

To be receptive to something, we must love it, want it, seek it, and cultivate it. As we have the first willing desire to look inward, we work to strengthen and stabilize the soul level; we can only gradually divorce ourselves from the imaginary sense of causality of the outer forms. When our persistent thought and meditation is based on learned knowledge that we gather with love, care, and a sincere desire for Truth, our identification and affinity to the Ideas formulated by great thinkers serves us as plowed land upon which the seed of the Divine Star can be planted. The brain actually changes its physical structure in response to spiritually oriented learning and meditation, preparing itself to withstand spiritual experience. Only that attitude can help us see beyond what we can see and touch, can let us gather Truth that the intellect can formulate into words, and the emotions can embrace.

The work we must do to formulate and then become our real Selves is that of uniting the cross, which is the personal, with the Star, which is the Universal. We have to equilibrate the limited with the unlimited, the lower with the Higher. The gift of conscious awareness, which we have been developing through eons of time, has to be married with the goal of knowing that we earthlings are one body. Each one of us is an