Today, many authors try to explain the structure of the Universe, the place and role of man in the Universe, promote non-traditional methods of treatment, refer to esoteric teachings. Esotericism is another new concept that has firmly entered our language. But what does it mean?
Great Faith Architecture
Someone very successfully compared religions with buildings of different architectural styles. Indeed, an Orthodox church, a church, a mosque are outwardly different from each other, but the main parts of these buildings are similar. Every house of God, despite the difference of faith, has a foundation, supporting structures and a roof. Similarly, the religions themselves: they amaze us with the difference between gods, rituals, sacred books, shrines and temples. But at the same time they have a single foundation - esotericism, similar supporting structures - the basic laws of beliefs. And even a common roof - magic rituals, spiritual practices, healing methods.
While the gaze slides only over the "facade" of different religions, it seems that this is impossible. Indeed, the gods are different, and rituals, and sacred texts. What is recognized as a virtue in one teaching is considered a grave sin in another. For the Orthodox, the mother cow is dairy products and tasty meat, and for the Hindu it is a sacred animal, to slaughter which is a more serious sin than to kill a person. It is forbidden to enter the mosque and synagogue bareheaded; in the Orthodox Church, on the contrary, men are required to take off their caps, hats and hats. For a Muslim, drinking wine is a sin, and Christians partake of it in church.
And there are thousands of such examples. Behind all these rules and numerous different rituals, it is difficult to discern something in common that unites the religions of the Earth. However, this common principle exists, and it is hidden in the worldview - views of the supernatural, otherworldly. These views are in every teaching and are its most important part.
If we remove from each religion what distinguishes it from others, the essence, the “core,” will remain, which is practically the same for all religions. This essence suggests that the Universe is more complicated than it seems at first glance: in addition to the surrounding world, familiar to everyone, there is another, invisible world that affects what is happening around. And a person must take this into account, correlating his behavior with certain patterns. It was this knowledge that came from people who later began to be called prophets, messiahs, avatars, teachers, and served as the cause of the emergence of all world religions.
It is important to emphasize that the founders of any religion spoke only of what was reality for them, the result of their own experience. They did not have faith in what they were talking about, but direct knowledge of this … Similarly, a sighted person knows about the existence of the sun because he sees it, while a blind person can only believe in its existence from the words of a sighted person.
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So all the followers of different religions could and can only believe in what the prophets and modern preachers say to them. There is no other way - only to believe and worship, through prayers and rituals strengthening your faith in God (or gods). We all know: this path is very difficult - it is one thing to know for sure, and another thing to hope that religion speaks the truth, teaches the truth, indicates the road that is worth taking. And not only to enter, 'BUT and spend your life to walk this road and find out what awaits a person at the end of the path.
For many, for this reason, the path of the believer is extraordinarily difficult. And yet, in the past and in the present, there have always been and are people who want to get knowledge of the truth at first hand. That is why they developed various methods of work on themselves, which allowed them to rise to the level of their teachers and experience for themselves what made the prophets prophets.
People who succeeded in revealing the innermost secrets of life did not advertise their achievements for two reasons. Firstly, in order to "digest" the knowledge that was revealed, one had to have a certain level of preparation, that is, to go all the way that the Teacher overcame. An ordinary person will either not understand at all what is dictated to him from above, or will understand only part of the truth and therefore distort it.
Secondly, as it turned out, travel to other worlds is not safe. Again, only a trained person who knows the laws by which these worlds live can look into them. It is not surprising that the methods of self-improvement were passed on and are passed down from teacher to students, without leaving the secret schools.
What is the main conclusion that can be drawn from the above? Every religion, since its inception, has developed in two directions. The first is an open-ended, mass teaching based on faith and adherence to certain prescriptions. Everyone can see, hear, understand this teaching without any restrictions. The second direction is secret and few in number. It is called esoteric (from the Greek "ezos" - internal, hidden). The goal of esotericists is to change themselves in such a way as to achieve the ideal drawn by the founders of their teachings. On this path, they discover the deepest truths of the Universe, and they receive them not from books, but through their own experiences, spiritual insights. The experience that the people of the inner circle gain greatly changes themselves and their outlook on life, so much so that there is no return to the previous existence - the lot of billions.
Searching for the pure truth
A common worldview and goals have become the reason for the impossible for "external" religions: for 7-10 thousand years of existence between various esoteric schools there have never been serious disagreements! And this at a time when the official churches for centuries experienced severe crises and schisms, leading to the beginning of the so-called religious wars. Some of the esoteric (or, as they are also called, mystical) schools still continue to exist in Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There are mystics in esotericism who acted independently, outside the known religions: - Empedocles, Pythagoras, Paracelsus, Jacob Boehme, George Gurdjieff, Osho Rajneesh, Carlos Castaneda.
Because of the mystery surrounding esotericism, numerous charlatans who call themselves mystics, it is often confused with occultism and black magic. However, in reality, it has nothing to do with witchcraft and summoning spirits. The matter becomes even more confusing for the reason that most ordinary people sometimes cannot figure out who is esoteric, who is a magician, and who is also someone else. But the third actually exist. These are the representatives of mesotericism, the middle teaching lying between ordinary knowledge (exotericism) and esotericism.
Today, many have learned from their own experience what a strong psychic and a weak one is. The same goes for clairvoyants, healers, hypnologists, and other people with abnormal abilities. To many of them, only part of the knowledge possessed by the mystics is open. Naturally, a person who sees only part of the truth supplements it with his own thoughts in accordance with how this truth as a whole appears to him. The most famous representatives of mesoterics are E. P. Blavatskaya (the founder of Theosophy), R. Steiner (the founder of anthroposophy), N. K. and E. I. Roerichs (founders of Agni Yoga), and the Russian religious philosopher D. L. Andreev. Although the question of such a classification is controversial and far from simple.
So truth is not only preserved by members of the inner circle. It is actively confused, deliberately distorted by magicians, occultists and, unwittingly, by mesoterics. Well, what, according to the mystics, does Truth actually consist of?
Return to Divine Source
Since antiquity, esoterics have described the picture of the structure of the Universe, its life and development in approximately the same way. The universe is multidimensional: in addition to the physical world, there are many others that are not at all similar to it. First of all, they differ in the degree of density of matter (or energy) of which they are composed. Among them there are more dense, and there are more subtle worlds (or, as they are also called, plans). The densest is our material plane, the most subtle is the highest world, or the divine plane.
The highest, divine plan is filled only with consciousness, which mystics call the Divine Consciousness of the Universe. It is the soul of the entire Universe, and many worlds are its body. The life of the universal consciousness resembles human life - it also has its own cycles of birth, development and death. First, the worlds are created, then they live and develop for billions of years. At the end of the period measured by him, the worlds disappear, "die". For some time nothing remains in the Universe except the Divine Consciousness. But the night here is always replaced by dawn: the creation of new worlds begins, a new Universe, not similar to the one that existed before it.
Why does the Divine Consciousness create worlds? If you don't really know what a person exists for, it is extremely difficult to answer such a deep question. One can only suppose: let's say, in a similar way, the Divine Consciousness cognizes itself and improves itself. It looks into thousands of worlds, as if through thousands of mirrors - it sees itself through the eyes of a myriad of living beings, it thinks about itself with countless minds.
We will not delve into this puzzling question, let's talk about what seems more or less clear - about the creation of the Universe. In the encyclopedia “Religions of the World” we read: “The process of creation is as follows. Some part of the Divine Consciousness is condensed so that it consistently forms from itself all the worlds up to the material. The other part of Consciousness is scattered in the created Universe for the subsequent formation of individual souls. Most of the Divine Consciousness remains unchanged and abides in the highest spatial dimension.
After creation, the process of evolution of consciousness begins in the Universe. Esotericists have noticed that the entire Universe is like a "field for the cultivation of consciousness." It looks like this. On planets like our Earth, the scattered energy of Divine Consciousness settles in the form of clots in stones and minerals, forming … the beginnings of future souls …"
Millions of years pass, and the stones collapse. But their tiny souls do not die with them; they incarnate into plants that live and wither with them, repeat thousands and millions of cycles of rebirth until they exhaust all the possible development provided by the plant kingdom. Then their souls pass into animals, gradually moving from primitive organisms to more and more complex ones. This is how the soul finally "gets" to the person and becomes what we are used to calling the soul. In order to “enter the people”, she needs to overcome a certain barrier - to reach a certain level of development.
Do you think this is the end? No, just the beginning of the next big stage. The goal of the evolution of the soul is to merge it with the Divine Consciousness, to return to its source, but not in the form of an embryo of consciousness, but as a perfect consciousness, similar to the Divine.
To reach this level of development, the soul has to go through many lifetimes, to do a tremendous job. This is the hidden meaning of all these incarnations (reincarnations).
Esotericists believe that the soul develops its qualities in a certain sequence. Sometimes it can take a lifetime or even several to develop one of them. At first, the soul is only a student and performer - at this stage it learns to live in the material world. For her, he is the only reality. Everything outside the physical plane is abstract and doubtful for a young soul. Time passes, and she grows up, learns to love and compassion, to distinguish good from evil, to act independently, etc.
And from a certain moment a person begins to feel that, besides the material, there are other plans of the Universe. Religious truths for him are becoming more real and important. And, finally, there comes a period of maturity of the soul, when a person devotes himself to conscious self-improvement.
Having fulfilled its destiny, the eternal wanderer - the soul - strides into Eternity, forever parting with the familiar world. Whether it retains its individuality, whether it becomes a faceless drop in the endless ocean of Divine Consciousness or a member of a gigantic collective mind - this is not known to anyone …
Source: “Interesting newspaper. Magic and mysticism"