© fra Nefastos 2006
One can’t live a whole-hearted life without an ideology, without emphasizing some kind of an idealism. Everyone has values according to which one lives, and even those people who are not conscious of their true values, carry them out in practice. Only a completely soulless man has no idealism whatsoever, everybody else has some principles – although they would not be altogether unbreakable – to give them guidelines for life.
Certain values are by habit and convention been connected to spirituality, but all of them won’t necessarily hold with deep, neutral analysis. On the other hand there are many which do. As the theosophical mentality tells us in theory and practice, comparative theology gives to a philosopher’s hand the keys of universal, ethical doctrine – the moral side of occultism. The very basis of all religions is the same spiritual world, and they all present with different words and differently pressed insctructions the laws of the one invisible reality. Even non-religious philosophies, science for example, carry out different aspects and interpretations of the one and only reality. Truth can be only one, and we either know it or not – usually know unilaterally its one side and do not know the other, of course. Still, relativity is not true at all. The goal for every being is the one comprehensive truth, whether one recognises this goal or not.
Man does not usually know of spiritual truth. In his school of life he may have learned to acknowledge some principles – to become an idealist in some way – but the whole truth he can not know; otherwise he would have already grown to be greater than man. Dedication to one’s life leads to knowledge, the true path leads to love, and the true love will eventually make man a superior being – however naïve this may sound before we truly understand how lofty and practically powerful things such as “truth” and “love” are, when raised above their their cheap and superficial everyday meanings.
Man who has attained great knowledge on some subject agrees with other people who have attained knowledge on the same subject, be they of any culture or religion; and even with those whose thoughts he does not accept as the final truth, he knows what in their thinking is true and adequate – for there is no such thought that would be wholly and altogether wrong. World views and ideologies gone wrong are simply not ready, they are one-sided versions of some certain aspect of truth.
The world functions on the foundation of paradox, which means that things which are seen by us as in opposition are both equally true. That man is a seer and a sage who understands the WHOLE truth and with it that how seemingly contradictory aspects of it must be applied to use in different times, and how they should be adapted to each other. Because he has attained this complete knowledge by the triple awakening – of knowledge, love and will – he is unavoidably an ethically perfect being. He understands the world to be made of love and empathy, but he understands the place of the flaw, “evil,” in the system as well. It is an illusion that people project for themselves by their own erroneous actions and which therefore takes an apparently objective shape. When man attains good wisdom, evil ceases to exist, for its true essence is illusory.
These facts – or let us call them hypotheses – are some of those, which will help us to see the real secret doctrine and divide it apart from partial truths. And because certain philosophies and certain people have expressed truth as it is, and not tinted or in a half-form, we naturally and by our own will follow these self-chosen authorities, teachers, who help us to understand the truth. No blind faith is needed here, it is all about the discriminating power in man, made possible by deep dedication, founded not only on the base of intellect but of both intellect and the experience of life.