WHAT'S ON THIS PAGE NAVIGATION BOX
LEAD FEATURE: Culture of Consciousness Part One; In the Presence of the Gods (Main Text;
Side Boxes: Age d'Or; Cosmic Cognitions; Quotes: Jung; Hegel; Mundaka Upanishad; Brihadaranyaka Upanishad;
Pictures: Jesus; A dangerous cult; Buried too deep . . .; Mandala) | Go to Contents | Go To Next Page (14)
Vedic culture of consciousness --- sacred chanting, sacred rituals and, the key to the whole thing,
meditation. In the first part of his exploration of the sagacious Vedic culture, we are privileged
to join him as he attends a yagya, a timeless fire ritual designed to bring the Gods to earth for
the benefit of all mankind
READ THIS STORY IN
PRINTABLE PLAIN TEXT
material world, we stand on the brink of the future bereft of everything but our own
isolation. Heritage, history, heart -- all have disappeared in the headlong dash towards
spiritual poverty. With so little to believe in, where do we turn for advice and guidance
as we prepare to enter the new millennium? In a major reassessment of the
spiritual bankruptcy that afflicts the world, Mr Bliss leads us towards a culture based
on consciousness that just might provide the helping hand we are all looking for
READ THIS STORY IN
PRINTABLE PLAIN TEXT
AGE D'OR
The world was not always thus. In
the distant past, on the very
fringes of recorded history, there
was a perfect civilisation. A society
based on states of expanded
consciousness, in direct comm-
union with the Cosmic Will,
identifying with the most
elevated spiritual principles, its
effect upon the world was both
profound and lasting. When the
ancient Rishis delved into the
depths of their inner silence,
what they came back with was an
expansive and evolutionary system
of philosophy, ritual and belief
based around expanded conscious-
ness that provided a guide book to
a Golden Age. What was the
impulse that created this society?
Where did it come from and what
does it have to teach us? Join us
as we explore the Golden Age
of Enlightenment.
TOP OF PAGE
PRINTABLE PLAIN TEXT
AGE D'OR
The world was not always thus. In
the distant past, on the very
fringes of recorded history, there
was a perfect civilisation. A society
based on states of expanded
consciousness, in direct comm-
union with the Cosmic Will,
identifying with the most
elevated spiritual principles, its
effect upon the world was both
profound and lasting. When the
ancient Rishis delved into the
depths of their inner silence,
what they came back with was an
expansive and evolutionary system
of philosophy, ritual and belief
based around expanded conscious-
ness that provided a guide book to
a Golden Age. What was the
impulse that created this society?
Where did it come from and what
does it have to teach us? Join us
as we explore the Golden Age
of Enlightenment.
TOP OF PAGE
here is an ancient Chinese curse. Like many thingsChinese, it is subtle and enigmatic in its sentiments.
‘May you live in exciting times,’ it says. The full import
of this somewhat limp curse can only be appreciated
in the light of the exciting times in which we live. As the ever-
flowing tide of change sweeps us further and further from the
landmass of ancient knowledge and belief, we are lost at sea
with no lifeline to explain our existence, no craft to propel us
towards the terra firma of understanding, with no hope of ever
touching land again. Without the solid earth of belief, under-
standing and knowledge beneath our feet we are forever at the
mercy of the capricious seas, floundering among the rolling
waves with nothing on which to get a grip.
ThThus it is that we are preparing ourselves for the future. By
shrugging off our traditions, by ignoring our instincts, by
subscribing to the belief that life is an external experience, by
forgetting the source from which we all spring and to which we
all return. Never mind that the New Age offers us the only
suggestion of hope the world has seen for thousands of years.
Still, we approach it as ill-equipped as we could be. For those
of us who believe that the New Age represents an opportunity to
move towards a world system based on more balanced, mean-
ingful and unifying attitudes, the loss of our ability to access the
fundamental knowledge that underwrites life is a major catast-
rophe. Surely, at this time more than at any other, we should be
looking in every direction in an effort to come up with some
guidelines for the future? If, as some of us naive dreamers
believe, the hope for the New Age rests in increased cons-
ciousness, it would seem timely to see if there has ever been a
society run on the lines of higher consciousness. If there is a
model, however ancient or incomplete, of a society in which life
was lived in higher awareness, perhaps we can learn some
lessons for application in our own future.
ThSocieties and belief systemsbegin with individuals. In the
West, many of the great spiritual
beings who have reiterated the
timeless truths that bring mean-
ing to life, have lived their lives
on the edges of society, distan-
ced from the idiocies of those
who run the world of power, and
often persecuted by them. This
has been particularly the case
with the Semitic religions —
Judaism, Christianity and Islam
— all of which emphasise the
fact that there is a huge gap
between God and humanity, which is in some way ‘fallen’ or in a
state of sin’. God, the divine creative force in the universe, is
transcendent and ‘out there’, whereas the mystics of all religions
state unequivocally that God is also ‘in here’ and to be found at
the deepest depths of our experience through meditation and
prayer. So to proclaim the potential divinity of the human
experience has always been a dangerous business in the
Semitic societies — remember Jesus, crucified for his
declaration of Unity, or Al Hallaj, the great Sufi who was crucified
in Baghdad for proclaiming ‘I am the Real’, or Meister Eckhart,
the German Dominican excommunicated for teaching the
mystical unity with God, or . . .. the list goes on and on.
ThAnd in our own times of scientific materialism, when, until
very recently, anything smacking of higher consciousness was
dismissed as primitive superstition, those servants of the divine
process who come with the ancient message of the Truth are
often ridiculed or demonised as ‘cults’ by the media — the
biggest cult of the lot.
ThModern life has seen a great attempt to find freedom in the
outer world, the social world. The values of the New World —
itself an attempt to find freedom started in the seventeenth
century — have defeated that other great attempt at freedom,
Communism, and have resulted in our contemporary Global
Culture, led and fed by the United States, where material free-
dom is loudly held to be paramount. But that is merely a ‘phoney
freedom’. The real freedom we are talking about, spiritual
freedom, entails being consciously connected to the Cosmic
Whole, living in God, lovingly and patiently working to further the
evolution of the planet, not merely being an isolated individual
with no restraints, free to shop endlessly, and generally act
without regard for the consequences. In fact, the secular model,
or ‘phoney freedom’ contains the seeds of its own destruction.
For the more ‘freedom’ an isolated individual has, the more it
becomes aware of its own separation and the more it fears
death. One solution to this fear is to inflict death on others in the
natural and human world, in a skewed attempt to assure our
own immortality. History offers us a sorry catalogue of mad
despots — Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun, Hitler (Sorry Adolf,
you’re always in there), Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot and the
rest — who have brutally tried to submit humanity to some
abstract ideal of how to live and what to think. In a less spect-
acular but more widespread and increasingly pervasive way
this cult of the phoney individual orchestrates the extremes of
the USA: a country that worships market forces, the predatory
and anarchic ‘freedom’ of rampant capitalism, personal property
and instant litigation, an air conditioned nightmare in which
nationalism has been elevated into a sacred duty and the
freedom to own a gun into a sacred right. America, as a con-
sequence, despite (or because of) all its material excesses, is
a society riven by greed, anxiety, violence, and increasing
numbers of bizarre and dangerous cults.
ThSo, no solutions in the modern secular West. Could the
ancient societies offer a model and some practical spiritual
disciplines that might be of any use to us?
ThThe Egypt of the Pharaohs obviously had a high degree of
spirituality. It was well-ordered and run according to cosmic
The Absolute is
Spirit; this is
the highest
definition of the
Absolute. To find
this definition
and to understand
its content
was, one may
say, the final
motive of all
culture and
philosophy.
All religion and
all science have
striven to reach
this point.
Hegalng
TOP OF PAGE
PRINTABLE PLAIN TEXT
COSMIC
COGNITIONS
The heart and, indeed, soul of
the Vedas and the Vedic civil-
isation was meditation and
the increased consciousness
it develops. Said to have been
a society that functioned in
direct accord with Cosmic Law,
the Vedic civilisation was cent-
red around the cognitions (the
state that comes before re-
cognition) of a number of
Enlightened sages, called
Rishis. The Vedic texts, rituals
and many other aspects of
Vedic society were cognised
by the Rishis during their
meditations. Although the
Rishis were central to the
Vedic civilisation, their
message was not one of
centralised control but of
individual freedom. Thus it is
that much of the Vedas are
concerned with descriptions
of higher states of conscious-
ness and exhortations to
develop towards the state of
blissful unity with the Cosmos
that is described as
Enlightenment.
TOTOP OF PAGE
ogy of the ancient Babylonian
civilisation and the sacred
geometry that built the pyra-
mids in ways that we still
can’t figure out. Even more
remarkably, it was totally
peaceful — a highly organ-
ised and centralised state that
had no army whatsoever.
'I am the totality.'
Brihadaranyaka Upanhishad 1.4.10.6
TOP OF PAGE
ledge feels dead, buried too deep in the past to provide much
relevance for the present. And, if we look at modern Egypt, we
see a secular state riven by fanatical fundamentalist fringe
groups who like nothing better than to shoot up busloads of
tourists who have come to appreciate their ancient cultural
heritage.
ThAncient Greece gave us the philosophy and humanism that
shaped much of Christianity and Western civilisation; the mod-
ern world is partly a legacy of Greek thought. This legacy
excelled in reason, the thinking brain of the separate individual,
but not in higher, suprarational or spiritual knowledge, the intuit-
ive heart connected to the cosmos at large. The result is that
we have built a scientific society that is very clever but not very
wise. We all know the consequences of that.
ThThe Mayans, by all accounts, had a very high spiritual civil-
isation founded on esoteric knowledge — much of it encapsul-
ated in their sacred calendars but it all disappeared under the
jungle a long time ago and, whatever rediscoveries there have
been (sorry about this, Harrison Ford), are too partial and incon-
clusive to be of much benefit to our struggling planet today.
ThWhat then of the East? China had the legacy of both Taoism
and Buddhism, a spiritual cocktail that should have kept itself
and the world floating in nirvana for centuries, but a demon
ThContinued on next page (Page 14)...............................TOP OF PAGE
ON TO PAGE FOURTEEN | PREVIOUS PAGE | CONTENTS | MAIN HOME PAGE
GO TO PAGE: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21
Questions, comments or criticisms to: Webmaster@coffeehouseculture.com
The Coffeehouse Culture Site is produced by
Cheapo Cheapo Productions on behalf of
The Enlightenment Company
Design: It Is But a Dream (Digital) Enterprises; Words: The Maya (Entertain You) Company
Copyright © 1999/2000 The Enlightenment Company
THE ENLIGHTENMENT COMPANY IS A NON-PROFIT MAKING EDUCATIONAL TRUST
DEVOTED TO PROMOTING INCREASED CONSCIOUSNESS