The Ageless Wisdom handed down from remote times has been compared in symbol to a golden thread, a spiritual lifeline waxing and waning in clarity from century to century.
Robert: Welcome to Inner Sight. Inner sight is simply seeing that which is always present, but not yet fully recognized. You have within you the ability to see yourself and the world around you in a new way with new eyes, so stay with us and together we’ll look at the world and ourselves with inner sight. Our topic for today is the Ageless Wisdom and before we go forward with that topic we have to give credit to Alice Bailey, who is the founder of the Lucis Trust organization. All of the dialogue that you’ll hear on this show is inspired by her, and much of it comes from the twenty-four volumes of literature that she wrote. The following thought is from a student of Alice Bailey and from a book called The Golden Thread by Natalie Banks: “The constant reappearance of the Ageless Wisdom handed down from remote times has been compared in symbol to a golden thread, a spiritual lifeline waxing and waning in clarity from century to century.” What is the meaning of the term golden thread?
Sarah: It’s a term that comes actually from Greek mythology. It’s another expression for the Ageless Wisdom. But in Greek mythology, the golden thread was a ball of thread that Ariadne gave to Theseus as he made his journey into the depths of the labyrinth. It was to enable him to survive that terrific and frightening journey and to find his way out of the labyrinth and back into the light. So, the golden thread is the body of spiritual wisdom called the Ageless Wisdom, which was given to Theseus, who symbolizes the human incarnated soul as it makes its way in the darkness of life on earth. You can see that the golden thread or the Ageless Wisdom is the spiritual teaching that each human being brings with him into incarnation on earth and enables him to find his way back into the light. I think that defines what the golden thread is. It’s a path back into the light. There are other terms for the Ageless Wisdom as well as the golden thread. It’s called the Perennial Philosophy, which is the title of a wonderful book by Aldous Huxley. It’s called the “mystery teaching.” It’s sometimes referred to as the “secret doctrine.” There, I’m not referring to the book by H.P. Blavatsky, but to the generic term, small s, small d, the secret doctrine. Those are all terms for a body of teaching that is said to have been with humanity literally from the dawn of time, passed down for eons of time in oral tradition, and we could talk about why some of the deepest spiritual teaching is still passed down, only verbally, not in writing. But the first written version of the Ageless Wisdom, I think, was the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, wouldn’t you say?
Dale: Well, that would be one of the earliest ones, I would think, because no one really is sure of the exact date when Patanjali lived and did his work, but it was thousands of years ago, even preceding the Buddha.
Sarah: Well, Hinduism apparently says that he lived perhaps 10,000 years ago.
Dale: Right, so it’s very ancient teachings. He was one of the first great initiates to write down these sutras that we still have and use today. In fact, it’s involved in one of the Alice Bailey books, The Light of the Soul.
Sarah: But there are many other verbal expressions of the Ageless Wisdom; they permeate human culture, really. They’re found in the early Greek teaching of Pythagoras and Plato. It’s found in early Christianity in the teachings of the Essenes and the Gnostics. I think gnosis means literally wisdom. It’s the wisdom teaching. It’s found in the Jewish Kabbalah, in the Sufi teachings of Islam. It’s found in all the great world religions. Again, this metaphor of a golden thread: it’s a strain of wisdom that runs through and permeates many different cultural and religious traditions and yet it’s kind of buried within or hidden like a thread running through a tapestry; you have to look for it.
Dale: It’s also the basis for the prodigal son story in the Bible where the prodigal son leaves the father’s home and he goes into the depths of the netherworld and experiences all the horrors of that world and finally becomes dissatisfied with all the husks of life as it says and he turns around and makes his way back to the father’s house. So, as you say, it’s in most of the world religions, this same returning, this cyclic movement of the individual into the world and then to return again.
Sarah: What’s interesting to me is that the Ageless Wisdom concerns the inner side of life, regardless of its presentation or of the particular cultural tradition in which it is modified. It always works to establish a connection or a relation between the outer visible world and the inner conditioning causal realm of life. The Ageless Wisdom always points to the real inner energizing factor. You can see this at work in the mythologies of what we would, I suppose, being politically incorrect, call the primitive peoples. In the inner esoteric religious traditions, in some of the arts and sciences like alchemy and so on, it always concerns this inner hidden side of life which it seeks to reveal and illuminate.
Dale: Yes, even Christianity has its esoteric side. We don’t hear too much about that, but it’s there.
Sarah: You mean the Essenes and the Gnostics, or are you referring to something else?
Dale: Yes, at that time, but even later on, the Christian teachings of the mystics.
Sarah: St. John of the Cross.
Dale: Right, and a lot of that has been kind of buried, I think, probably buried away in the Vatican somewhere.
Sarah: Well, it’s buried in their writings, if you’re referring to people like Saint Teresa and Meister Eckhardt and Jacob Boehme. They wrote books that you can read, but you won’t understand them unless you have the consciousness to follow them. I don’t know if you are referring to those particular teachers.
Dale: Yeah, those and many others. Later writers like Annie Besant, who was a theosophical writer. She wrote a book on the esoteric traditions of Christianity.
Sarah: As I mentioned, Judaism has this strain of Ageless Wisdom in the Kabbalah. What I find very interesting about the Ageless Wisdom is that it’s always been with humanity—this teaching—and it’s always presented in a form or a style that is appropriate for the period. So, you have to have a kind of an elastic consciousness to be able to identify similarities of teaching—for example, the opening comment about the golden thread, which related the Ageless Wisdom to the Greek myth of Theseus and his journey into the labyrinth. The Greek myths are full of symbolism, and you can get a headache trying to follow them. I can remember when I was in college studying Greek myth, it requires a real understanding of metaphor and simile. This was appropriate for that period. It takes on a different guise in the Kabbalah, still another in alchemy, yet another in the Sufi tradition of Islam, in mathematics. Pythagoras, for example, one of the great teachers of the Ageless Wisdom who lived around the time of the Buddha, 600 BC or so and there was a real flowering of spiritual brilliance in the world in the person of the Buddha and in Pythagoras, who established one of the first mystery schools. Pythagoras was fascinated with numbers and mathematics, and he believed that mathematics contained the mystery of the universe.
Dale: And he also coupled the teachings of mathematics with a religious training. I think we’ve mentioned before that in the school he established that every neophyte should spend the first two years of this training in silence and that learning silence is a way to adapt to the inner silence. That was a very valuable part of the training and he also thought that religious training was for a moral reformation of society rather than a philosophical reformation. He sought by rights and by the abstaining from certain practices to purify the believer’s soul, thus enabling it to escape from the wheel of birth.
Sarah: What is the difference between a moral and a philosophical reformation, would you say?
Dale: The moral would be certain behaviors that we just don’t engage in, certain attitudes, I think. We just don’t practice certain kinds of thought.
Sarah: And the philosophical would have to do with one’s ideas, one’s mind. So, a moral reformation would imply a change within the real character.
Dale: Yes, it’s more or less character building, I would think, to straighten out one’s moral life right at the beginning. That’s why it was necessary for all neophytes to undergo this training in his particular school. He also established a practice of what we now call an “evening review.” He suggested that at the end of every day, each neophyte would answer three questions: one would be, in what have I failed? The second question would be, what good have I done today? And then the third was, what have I not done that I ought to have done? So, it involves a questioning for these students at the end of the day and we have this even in the Arcane School, what we call an “evening review” which is a very ancient practice that we still carry on.
Robert: Why is the Ageless Wisdom hidden and not made plain for everyone to see and know?
Sarah: Why not just hand it to people and they would then live their lives much more correctly and happily? It doesn’t work that way. You can hand people the wisdom of the universe, and if they don’t have the inner resources to know what to do with it or to recognize it for what it is, they won’t value it. There is that parable in the Bible about not casting your pearls before swine, which is probably relevant. It sounds kind of harsh, but it’s a fact that until we are ready to appreciate the value of something, it doesn’t really have any meaning for us. I think another aspect to that law—that the Ageless Wisdom cannot be broadcast to the mass of humanity—is that we have to prepare ourselves to receive it, and we have to seek it out. “The pearl of great value is won at a great price,” I think it’s said. You have to search for it and prepare yourself and do your own purification and discipline before you can receive such knowledge. Do you have other ideas on that?
Dale: Well, there’s a certain fragileness about these teachings. I think that they can be stepped on and denigrated and shattered if they are handed out indiscriminately to those who are not ready to accept it. They tend to bring more light into the world, and therefore, I think there tends to be a reaction to these teachings if they’re not understood. So, I think that’s one reason why they have to be a little guarded in the way they are given out.
Sarah: There was a mention in the opening quotation about how this Ageless Wisdom throughout history has waxed and waned. What you say reminds me of the fact that there was a period called the Dark Ages when there was very little enlightenment of any sort, and that was a period in which the Ageless Wisdom was really out of sight. As I mentioned, in about 600 BC, there was a tremendous flowering of spiritual consciousness in the work of the Greek teachers; the Buddha lived then. Why there are these ups and downs in human consciousness, I don’t know.
Dale: You mentioned the Dark Ages, and that’s a good example of what can happen if one is not careful, because in those days, you could be prosecuted. People like Galileo were prosecuted for speaking out and presenting a new theory, and he was prosecuted by the church. The church was all-powerful at that time, and the hierarchy had a say over what could be taught and what could not be taught. So, they had to be very careful in those days.
Sarah: Aldous Huxley makes an interesting comment in the Perennial Philosophy. He says that the nature of this reality is such that it cannot be directly grasped except by those who have chosen to fulfill certain conditions, which are: making oneself loving, pure in heart, and poor in spirit. That’s interesting: to be poor in spirit. What that suggests to me is to make oneself open and needy and receptive to new understanding. It’s a kind of spiritual humility that says in essence, “I know nothing; teach me,” and in that kind of open receptivity new light can pour in. So, to be poor in spirit, loving, and pure in heart, prepares one to receive the Ageless Wisdom. There’s another interesting comment that Huxley makes about the Ageless Wisdom that helps us and it gives credence to the existence of the Ageless Wisdom. He points out that there is nothing in our everyday experience that would make us believe that combining oxygen and hydrogen would make water, and yet we know scientifically and can verify that it does. He says there’s nothing in our everyday experience that would give us much reason to suppose that the average human being’s mind contains within it something resembling the inner reality with a capital R, the substantial reality that lies behind the manifested world. I think this is the most central premise of the Ageless Wisdom: that behind all the outer manifestation of the world of form there is one cause, one source, one creator. There is One. This was affirmed by Pythagoras—I mentioned that he believed numbers contain spiritual mystery—who taught the overwhelming significance of “the One,” as did Plato, “the One” and “the three” and that all manifestation derives from this central Source.
Dale: Yes, and I think that’s the essence of all the spiritual, Ageless Wisdom teachings.
Sarah: It starts from that.
Dale: It all leads to a sense of wholeness, and that’s really where we are heading in the world today, to the development of this universal sense of wholeness and oneness. That’s where all these traditions are gradually leading. We’ve come to this point today because of what happened in the past and all the teachings of light that have come down through the ages. We are now at the point, I think, in human consciousness where we can really begin to understand and appreciate the sense of wholeness and oneness.
Robert: “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” How does that relate to what we talked about with Ageless Wisdom?
Sarah: Well, maybe we can talk about that on a future program.
Robert: Okay. You’ve been listening to Inner Sight. Now we would like to close with a world prayer called The Great Invocation. It’s a call for light and love and goodwill to flow into the world and into our hearts. Let’s listen for a moment to these powerful words.
Sarah: Closes the program by reciting the adapted version of the Great Invocation.
(This is an edited transcript of a recorded radio program called “Inner Sight.” This conversation was recorded between the host, Robert Anderson, and the then President and Vice-President of Lucis Trust, Sarah and Dale McKechnie.)
(Transcribed and edited by Carla McLeod)
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