end of the sixteenth century, after Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi, prophets were only able to see into the lowest levels of the heavens and then only in a heavily shrouded way.
The last words in the Old Testament are the ringing words of Malachi, prophesying Elijah’s return, and today this is still looked forward to every year at Passover, when a place is laid for him at dinner, with a cup of wine and the door left open.
BUT IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE WORLD other remarkable initiates were opening up other new dimensions in the human condition. A great spirit of enlightenment was weaving through several different minds and several different cultures at the same time.
Prince Siddhartha was born into a time and place characterized by small warring states in Lumbini in modern-day Nepal.
Until the age of twenty-nine he lived in pampered luxury. His every need was met before it began to tug on him and his every vista was a delight. Then one day he left the royal palace and saw something he had never been allowed to see — an old man. He was horrified, but he looked further, discovering that his own people were ill and dying.
He decided to leave the palace — and his wife and child — in order to try to make sense of this suffering. Living among ascetics for seven years, he failed to find what he was looking for in the yoga sutras of Pantanjali and the teachings of the descendants of the Rishis.
Then, finally, when he was thirty-five he went and sat under a Bohdi tree on the banks of the River Neranjara, determined not to move until he understood.
After three days and three nights he realized that life is suffering, that suffering is caused by desire for earthly things, but that you can achieve freedom from all desire. Indeed, you can achieve such freedom, and such affinity for the spirit world, that you need never reincarnate again — and so you may become, as Siddhartha did, a Buddha.
The path to understanding — or enlightenment — was called by the Buddha ‘the Eightfold Path’, which involved right belief, right conviction, teaching, action, living, intention, thinking, contemplation.
The Eightfold Path may seem impossibly high-minded moralizing to modern Western sensibility. It may also seem a bit abstract, even impractical. But the teachings of the Buddha have an esoteric side, and like all esoteric teachings they have a layer of meaning which is eminently practical. Esoteric philosophy teaches its initiates how to achieve psychological transformation using practical techniques to manipulate human physiology. In the case of the Buddha’s Eightfold Path, these eight practices are exercises for enlivening eight of the sixteen petals of the throat chakra.
This represents a historic change in initiatic practice. In the initiation rituals practiced in the Great Pyramid, for example, the candidate had been sent into a deep, death-like trance, then a circle of — five — initiates had raised his vegetable body out of his physical body. They had worked on it, moulding it, coaxing it into forms capable of perceiving higher worlds, so that when the vegetable body sank again into the physical body and the candidate reawoke, he was born into a new, higher form of life. The point is that the candidate was unconscious throughout this process.
Now the followers of Buddha consciously participated in their own initiation, consciously working on their own chakras. Part of this work was living a new, more moral way of life, based on compassion for all living things.
Because people were growing increasingly independent of the spirit worlds, there was a danger that an individual’s powers would outstrip his desire to do the right thing and use them wisely. There was also a danger that the evil-minded might gain the supernatural powers that initiation confers.
It has also always been possible for people to gain these powers even though they have not been initiated. Sometimes it happens as a result of extreme childhood trauma. This can cause a rent in the psyche through which spirits rush in an uncontrolled way. Some modern mediums have suffered great childhood traumas. Sometimes people acquire powers through the practice of a magic which is either black or at least not attuned to the highest spiritual aims, as it is in the venerable secret schools which keep alive a genuine, ancient tradition. The danger in all this is that a non-initiate, even a well-intentioned one, may have difficulty recognizing the spirits he or she is communicating with.
The aim of the Eightfold Path is initiation as part of a controlled and protecting moral development. If you are able to control the world, you must first be able to exercise control over yourself.
The throat chakra is the organ of the formulation of spiritual wisdom. It connects the heart chakra with the brow chakra. In the physiology of an initiate currents of love stream up from the heart chakra through the throat chakra to light up the brow chakra. When this light streams up on to the brow chakra, it opens up like a flower in the sun.
We may all catch an echo — or foretaste — of this in our own lives. If we look at someone with the eyes of love, we see good qualities not perceptible to others. Just the act of looking at someone lovingly may also bring out these qualities and help them to blossom. If you meet someone with an extremely refined spiritual nature, he or she will probably be happy, smiling, laughing, almost childlike. This is because they look at the whole of humanity with the eye of love.
When the Buddha died he had achieved his aim. He would not be required to reincarnate.
But this is not to say he is no longer a part of this history, as we see when we come to look at the Italian Renaissance.
PYTHAGORAS WAS BORN ON THE PROSPEROUS Greek island of Samos in about 575 BC, as the first blocks of marble were being placed one on top of the other on the Acropolis in Athens.
No individual has had a greater influence on the evolution of Western esoteric thought. Pythagoras was regarded as a demi-god during his lifetime. Like Jesus Christ, nothing he wrote has come down to us, only a few collected sayings and commentaries and stories written by disciples.
It was said that he had the power of being in two places at the same time, that a white eagle had permitted him to stroke it, that he once addressed a river god and a voice called out to him from the water, ‘I greet thee Pythagoras!’ It is also said that he once told some fishermen who had been having an unproductive day to cast their nets into the sea one last time, whereupon their catch almost burst their nets. He was a great healer, sometimes reciting particular verses from Homer he believed had great power, just as Christian mystics will recite verses from the Psalms and John’s Gospel. He used music for healing purposes, too. The early Greek philosopher Empedocles said Pythagoras could heal the sick and rejuvenate the old. Like the Buddha he could remember his past incarnations and it was even said that he could recall the entire history of the world from the beginning.
His wisdom was the result of years of research and multiple initiations into Mystery schools. He spent twenty-two years learning the secrets of the Egyptian initiate priests. He also studied with the Magi in Babylon and the descendants of the Rishis in India, where a memory was preserved of the great wonder-worker they called Yaivancharya.
Pythagoras was seeking to synthesize esoteric thought from all around the world into a comprehensive cosmo-conception — what Leibniz, the seventeenth-century mathematician and Cabalist, would later call the Perennial Philosophy.
At this point in the history of the world according to idealism, we have reached a turning point. The great ideas or thoughts emanating from the cosmic mind are now almost hidden by the matter they have worked together
