Dear Gail:
Paul The subject is “Exoteric and Esoteric Knowledge.”
Definitions of these terms are: Exoteric — that knowledge which is exterior, external, that knowledge suitable to be imparted to the public. Esoteric — that knowledge which is designed for and understood by the specially initiated alone;
abstruse, also, belonging to the circle initiated in such teachings; that which is withheld from open avowal; private teachings with a purpose.
Paul I won’t concern you with exoteric knowledge, the knowledge gained from formal education, but with esoteric teachings. While exoteric teachings have a way of coming to an end eventually, sometimes when the mind has taken all it wants for a lifetime, and concerns itself with games, the esoteric knowledge abides in perpetual learning, always in equilibrium with life. The esoteric knowledge is never given in public lectures — usually in private — often they appear as public talks but the nature of their attraction will not bring many to the lecturer. Plato says, “A wise man is one capable of correctly estimating the extent not only of his own knowledge or ignorance but also of performing the same service for others.” No one is wise who is not as fully acquainted with the extent of ignorance as with the extent of wisdom; for in mortal concerns wisdom is an inconsequential area of rationality existing in an infinite expanse of ignorance.
Paul It is Socrates who infers that wisdom is not the knowledge of things but the knowledge of the condition of knowledge with respect to its absence or presence; an observation plainly intimating that wisdom deals with
generals and not particulars. Wisdom may therefore be considered as composed of universals of knowing and the sciences of the particulars of knowing, which as the practical are suspended from theory. Exoteric knowledge then is the knowledge of particulars, a familiarity with those arts and sciences arrived at through application and concentration on external natures. Esoteric knowledge is concerned with the inherent nature of knowledge itself, and is limited to those acquainted with the more profound issues of philosophy and the sublime mysteries of life.
The esoteric teachings are given through mystery schools or individual teachings. The latter you are receiving. Every orthodox religion has its esoteric teachings, which the orthodox ministry doesn’t want to be exposed to the congregation. First, because many priests do not know nor want to consider esoteric teachings as a part of the religious body. Second, because esoteric teachings do not fit man into the pattern of his society — it separates him from the masses and he becomes an outsider, a cliffhanger, an eccentric. Our society is a department store and supermarket society which has its chief creative center in the Great Lakes region — Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, etc. The salesman or shopkeeper who objects to the ruthlessness of the Russians is the person who sees no limit to enslaving poor people by selling them things on installment plan at outrageous rates of interest, which the poor person can’t understand.
Science, today, claims it has overthrown the false gods and dogmas of creed, but the mysteries of the divine spheres elude the grasp of corporeal learning since they belong to a more subtle and esoteric realm. The mysteries hold the true keys to wisdom. They are the custodians of the secrets more arcane. Who were the leaders in the mystery schools?
Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Sanchuniathon,
Porphyry, Cicero, Epictetus, Tulsi Das, Guru Nanak, Rumi, etc.
I named only the westerners and a couple of orientals. There are hundreds of others. The mystery schools are: Gnostics, Druids, White Brotherhood, Mithra, Cabala, Yoga Satsang, Magi, Zen Buddhism and Sufi, to name a few. The esoteric side of the orthodox religions are: Protestantism — Masons;
Catholicism — Knights of Columbus (I think — I don’t know any other group); Buddhism — Zen and Tibetan-type Buddhism; Hinduism — a large number like Sri Aurobindo, followers of Upanishads; Confucianism — Taoist; Islam — Sufi; Judaism — the Zoharists and Cabalists.
One note to point out: The western religions are theistic
— meaning a belief in one God; the Oriental, pantheistic, meaning several gods in one belief. Now when one begins to see behind the illusions of life, “veil after veil is torn away from the inner (spiritual) eye until at last it gazes upon the final mystery.” Thus the seeker comes to the goal of all life!
But when? I don’t know this answer. I could be very deft in giving a smug answer in that it is when the individual sets his determination. It is determination, will and employment of concentration, for these are faculties of the Jivatma, not the mind. The mind can carry itself only to a certain height within the world of divine spheres, no further.
The mystery schools have definite systems of discipline by which the whole nature of the individual can dissociate the elements of exoteric and esoteric knowledges through protracted effort to reach the level of supersensuous comprehension. Having reached this state, the principles of the higher knowledge are communicated to the neophyte by a method almost as arcane as the secrets themselves. This is a strange telepathic system developed so the findings of the subtler inner perceptions are communicated without passing through the place interval which exists between ordinary
intellects — an interval which must be filled with words or other symbolic forms in which the esoteric matter is necessarily lost.
So the esoteric knowledge which man is trying to find is
— the classification of those superessential elements of the pure intellect sphere where form, as man recognizes it, doesn’t exist. Now you can see why such information cannot be found in books, lectures, and words or symbolic forms.
This is why the reality scale has at top: Knowingness, Lookingness, Symbolism (as 3rd.). See? The esoteric knowledge must be communicated to the seeker by a method which, while it awakens no response in the sensory organisms, renders knowledge comprehensive to the inner perceptions. The subject of this inner knowledge and its method of communication has long confounded men of letters. Henri Bergson, French philosopher, has written extensively on the subject. His best work is “The Creative Mind!” In other words science and religion can’t conceive of the human mind functioning independent of matter; nor the possibility of mind thinking in terms independent of form.
The similitudes of phenomena is independent of rational processes and the laws of comparison which dominate the field of material thought.
A postulate set by early mankind established that the physical universe will permit no energy to exist within its domain unless that energy abides by the dictates of matter by being clothed in the substances and form of matter. When thoughts abide in the mind they are thus launched into generation through words — which are their bodies — dimming, like the mortal vehicles, the lucidity of the inner nature. Words, like the Jivatma, function poorly in this gross world of generating spheres. Thus the law of generation.
Thus words are exteriorized in trite and conventional forms.
Because of a lack of space and time, I cannot get enough down for you on this subject — but I will take up the individual parts of esoteric knowledge in the last twenty-five letters of this series!
One last word. While the mind is capable of receiving extrasensory perception it can’t communicate these attenuated impulses and still preserve their integrity.
Examples of this are: Havelock Ellis in his biography — also his “Dance of Life” — gives an example of the result of intense functioning in the reality of psychic idealism, which was so sensitized he couldn’t write about it for twenty-five years, for fear of losing the feeling. Similar experiences are recorded in the lives of Meister Eckhart, Swedenborg, Dante Alighieri, Martin Luther, St. John of the Cross, St. Theresa, to name a few.
You can in time familiarize yourself with the Egyptian mysteries, Persian mysteries, Hindu mysteries, Greek mysteries, Cabirian mysteries of Samothrace, (the latter had a communication system in the initiation similar to our present radio wave system, and the Greeks used an electrical system much like ours today.)
You can get a lot of information from “Lectures on Ancient Philosophy,” Manley Palmer Hall, and the books of Albert Pike.
More later.
Paul
63. Universes and Other Planes