The Key To It All: Everything You Need To Know To Understand

By Guru Sri Shukla

What is enlightenment? What is the nature of the soul? Much confusion exists around these subjects, and practicality is all too often obscured by ill-defined, complex theory. When I decided to create this course I wanted to avoid these shortcomings so often found in religious teachings. To this end, impracticality and dogma have been minimized as much as possible. Since the subject of these lessons is the nature of the soul and how to care for it, I first had to be specific about how I am characterizing the soul. In Lesson One I show how throughout the history of religion, the life energy body and the mind have been considered two aspects of the soul. Once this is established, it is a relatively easy process to determine how to care for the soul, since religious teachers have taught for centuries how to care for the life energy body in systems such as Ayurveda, Buddhist forms of healing, and Traditional Chinese Medicine, while advances in modern psychology over the last 150 years have great practical application in caring for the mind. I've endeavored to keep the technical jargon to a minimum and the information of practical value to everyday life. I am certain that those who study and apply the information given in these teachings will undoubtedly improve the condition of their souls, and in doing so will have a positive impact on humanity as a whole.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781623092382

Book preview

Lesson One

OUTLINE:

Goals of the course

Qualifications of Guru Sri

Misperceptions about Enlightenment

Limitations of existing literature on the Process of Enlightenment

Splitters vs. Lumpers (Labels vs. Patterns)

The Corruption of Science

Non-linear nature of this information

Subjects to be covered in this course

Ancient perspectives of reality

The Vedas and Vedanta

Sat-Chit-Ananda, Brahman

Brahman vs. Brahma

Mind and Existence

Swami Sivananda--Mind, It's Mysteries and Control

Qabalah, Kabbalah, Cabala, QBLH, etc.

The Qabalistic Tree of Life

The Ten Spheres of the Tree of Life

Sephiroth, Sephira

The Ten Spheres and Sat-Chit-Ananda

The Three Negative Veils

Brahman, Atman, and the Soul

The Four Worlds

Qabalistic perspectives of the Soul

Nephesh, Ruach, Neshamah

Prana

Vatta, Pitta, Kapha

Psyche and Pneuma

Nous

Money, Work, and the Soul

Hello, I'm Guru Sri Shukla. Welcome to The Key To It All: Everything you need to know to Understand. The ultimate and overriding purpose of this series of talks is to teach, in a practical way, the process that is commonly referred to as enlightenment. By the end of these lessons the student will have the basic knowledge necessary to orient himself or herself with regards to this process called enlightenment and to make an informed decision as to how to proceed in life with regard to this process. What qualifies me to produce such a series of talks? Simply put, I have attained a state of enlightenment and have perceived an efficient way to communicate to others the factors involved in this process. I would hasten to add, though, that although I am enlightened, I am not perfect--far from it. Enlightenment does not make a person perfect. I am still a human being and have many flaws. This is one common misperception, one common misunderstanding when it comes to enlightenment, that it makes a person perfect. It does not. Another common misperception about enlightenment is that it is rare. Now, while enlightenment is certainly not present among the majority of people, it is still a fairly common occurrence. And by fairly common, I mean that the vast majority who sincerely strive for enlightenment do eventually attain it. The sad truth is, though, that most people who claim to be working toward enlightenment do not take the work seriously. They do not really want to know the rules governing the process, and if presented with this information in an accurate way, rage against it, since what they are really seeking is not enlightenment, but rather an affirmation that what they already believe is true. This course, then, is not for that category of person. It is not for the person who wants to have his pre-existing beliefs reinforced. This course is for the person who sincerely wants to know the truth about the process of enlightenment and wants to be able to make an intelligent, informed decision in his or her own life regarding that process.

So while I am enlightened, do not take that to mean that I am saying that I am some perfectly chaste, super-moral, supernatural, all-knowing being, because I am not. I am not claiming to be that at all. This is yet another misconception about enlightenment--that it somehow makes a person virtuous or righteous, or otherwise incapable of doing evil. This is simply not the case. There are plenty of enlightened people in this world who do great harm to others, but I'm getting ahead of myself. We'll discuss exactly what enlightenment is in much more detail in the fifth and sixth lessons of this course, but first we need to take a closer look at the origins behind this idea of enlightenment.

The literature on the subject of enlightenment is even more confusing than it is vast. Much of this literature is pure rubbish and does not help anyone attain enlightenment. It is my intention that these basic, foundational lessons will help make sense of this confusion and assist the student, or perhaps we should more properly say the aspirant, in discovering the pearls buried within that great trash heap of teachings on this subject.

When I was in college, I had a biology professor--he taught physiology-- who told us there were two kinds of scientists in the world. The first kind of scientist was called a splitter. This was the kind of scientist who enjoyed labeling everything and noticing the differences, even the minor, minute differences between things. For example, a splitter might categorize the patterns of the veins found on the leaf of a particular plant and contrast that with the pattern of veins found on the leaf of a closely related plant in order to make a distinction between those two similar plants, in order to be able to distinguish between those two particular plants. So the activity they are engaging in is splitting. They are pointing out differences between things that are relatively similar. The kind of scientists that we call splitters spend their time coming up with distinct labels for everything so as to be able to distinguish one thing from another by its label.

The other kind of scientist, he contended, was a lumper. A lumper, rather than look at the differences between things and come up with labels to describe those differences, would describe the patterns of similarity between things that were not necessarily similar. A lumper would examine the recurring patterns found in nature and take great delight in finding these same patterns in seemingly unrelated areas of the natural world. A lumper, then, would look for similarities in patterns in things that were clearly different rather than focus on labeling the differences between things. While both kinds of scientists are necessary for science to function properly--I mean we need labels to describe what we are examining, and we need to evaluate the patterns that we find in nature in order to increase our understanding of the natural laws behind those patterns--the kind of science that we will be going into here will be heavy on lumping and light on splitting. This does not mean we will be able to proceed without learning some new terminology--that will definitely be necessary--but we will attempt to keep the jargon to a minimum and emphasize the practical application of the patterns that we will be examining. I must caution you first, though, that what we are doing here cannot strictly be called science at all, because science, at least in my opinion, over the last one hundred to two hundred years--and really this is a trend that has been going on for at least four or five centuries, but especially over the last one to two centuries--science has become an extremely corrupt and really anti-scientific endeavor. It has become so separated from the principles of science that it's amazing we still call it science.

Most of us learned in school that many centuries ago religion was the focus of life, and science was looked down upon, and more than occasionally scientists were punished or even sometimes killed for pursuing scientific experiments and expounding scientific theories. I'm sure that school children are still taught how Galileo was hounded by the Catholic Church for his support of Copernicus, among other beliefs, and how religion all-too-often attacked and rejected scientific discoveries--to our detriment--or so we are taught. And there is some truth to this, that religion, in the past, has regarded science as an enemy, and some religions still today regard science as an enemy. It's also true that science has provided humanity with great advances that have led to improved living conditions for most of the world. But, more recently, science has begun to show a very intolerant and irrational side that had been previously attributed to religion.

Science, in this day and age, has become more ruled by corporations and politicians who are subservient to the ebb and flow of money rather than a sincere desire to expand knowledge and bring practical application of that knowledge to our species in general. So we are definitely not discussing science here. Scientists in the past certainly did discuss and debate the subjects that we will be discussing, and such debates were not necessarily immediately rejected as non-scientific, as they would be today. But science nowadays is defined differently and is practiced differently than it was five hundred years ago or even two hundred years ago. So the areas that we are discussing here with regard to enlightenment fall in the realm of religion rather than science, and I would argue, rather than even philosophy. Another warning I must give at the outset is that the areas we are going to go into in this course are vast. They have many, many differing, alternative interpretations, many of which are completely valid and correct. For example, when we discuss the Qabalistic tree of life in this lesson, we will see that there are varying interpretations about what makes up the so-called Four Worlds. There are varying layouts of the ten spheres of the Tree of Life, and there are different interpretations of the Qabalistic terms used for the soul. This does not mean that one interpretation is correct and the other is mistaken. It merely means that one interpretation is using the labels or the symbols of discussion in a slightly different manner than another. We'll get to more concrete examples on this in just a bit.

I should also point out here at the beginning that we will be reviewing a large amount of information with many interconnected concepts. These concepts, this material that we will be reviewing does not follow a linear framework. Therefore, it's practically impossible to present this information in the standard way that so many people have become accustomed to over the last couple of centuries, and especially over the last few decades. This method, involving starting with the very simple concepts first and gradually increasing the complexity of the ideas presented and building one idea upon another--that method with this material will not work. Since these ideas in and of themselves are complex and interconnected it will be impossible to accomplish a linear progression of these ideas. They simply don't fit together that way. I will try as best I can, though, to present this information in that manner as much as I can, but the nature of the information itself is going to limit my ability to succeed at that task. The student may be very confused by something I mention in the first lesson, for example, only to get a flash of comprehension when I discuss something that is interrelated in the fifth or the sixth lesson. So if something seems confusing in the first or the second lesson, as the student continues to learn more of the information and see the ways that the information is connected, the level of confusion should drastically go down by the fifth and the sixth lessons, and I hope that by the end of the course the clarity of what I'm presenting will be obvious.

I will, as best I can, attempt to present this information in as clear a fashion as possible, and I will take great pains to define my terms as the lessons proceed. So what exactly, then, are we going to be studying? Well, the simplest way to put is might be that we will be studying the religious perspective of ancient man with a focus on their view of the soul and of the enlightenment process. From India, from the eastern world, we will be discussing the Vedas. The Vedas are the oldest literary works known to our species, and we will be discussing the derivative works, the derivative disciplines of the Vedas, namely Vedanta, Yoga, and Ayurveda, and we'll be going into each of these areas more deeply as we proceed. From the west, this ancient knowledge has been passed down primarily through Qabalah, which is a body of knowledge that predates religion and has been incorporated extensively into various fields such as Hermetica, ancient Greek philosophy, and Freemasonry. In order to show the practical application of what these ancient priests and philosophers taught, we'll also be studying more recent advances in modern psychology, such as the study of hypnosis and the nature of trance, as well as how the body and mind interact with one another. We will also show very clearly how these more recent scientific discoveries in the area of psychology tie in brilliantly with the knowledge put forth by the ancients.

Let's start, then by examining the ancients' concept of reality, of existence. How did they define reality? How did they describe the totality of existence? Let's examine the ancient texts. The Vedas, as many of you probably already know, are the oldest known books or series of books known to our species. They were originally a series of hymns passed down for many thousands of years--we don't know exactly how many thousands of years--but they were passed down orally from father to son, and in some instances the sons and the fathers had no idea what information they were transmitting as they did not speak Sanskrit, and the hymns were created in Sanskrit. The people passing on the information often spoke a different language and yet transferred these hymns phonetically from generation to generation. For many centuries in India it was forbidden, it was illegal to write down the contents of these Vedic hymns. Eventually of course, they were written down, although there are still parts of the Vedas that have not yet been written down and are still passed on only orally. And then came Vedanta. Vedanta essentially means the end of the Vedas or the conclusion of the Vedas. In other words, Vedanta is a word generally applied to the interpretation of what is contained in the Vedas by those who extensively studied the Vedas. I will, in this course, use those words more or less interchangeably, the Vedas and Vedanta, although strictly speaking the Vedantic literature and the Vedic literature are different.

Now, in the Vedantic literature, or the Vedic literature existence is spoken of in terms of something called Sat-Chit-Ananda. Sat is spelled S-A-T, Chit is C-H-I-T, and Ananda is A-N-A-N-D-A. This Sat-Chit-Ananda term is sometimes referenced by the term Brahman, B-R-A-H-M-A-N, which is a word representing ultimate reality. While the word Brahman is a reference to a sacred formula, or to a pattern that reveals supreme reality or ultimate reality, in the Vedantic literature you will often see it referred to as the supreme god. This can be a confusing point, since the term that is used for the creator god of the Vedas is Brahma, B-R-A-H-M-A. And these Sanskrit words for Brahman and Brahma are really two different words, two different roots of the words, and are not really linguistically related, although I have seen some authors use the words interchangeably, and that can lead to confusion, so I do want to clarify that point that Brahman and Brahma are really two different concepts, although you may see sometimes in the Vedantic literature a blurring of that distinction. Brahman is more a reference to a sacred formula revealing supreme reality. Brahma is the creator god of the Vedas.

So what exactly is Sat-Chit-Ananda? Well, the view, the perspective, of these ancient priests was that the entire universe, the entirety of existence, including anything that might not be in the physical universe, was still included under this Sat-Chit-Ananda formula. Sat is often translated as truth or existence. In actuality, Sat is a reference to the here-and-now, the physical universe--the entire physical universe. It is therefore dependent upon time, because