A few days ago I got a packet from Amazon.com: Boris Mouravieff’s Gnosis: Exoteric Cycle, the first of three volumes in his life work Gnosis. The next two, which I have not ordered (yet at least) are named Mesoteric Cycle and Esoteric Cycle. Exoteric refers to the outward form of religion, Esoteric to its inward and hidden meaning. I have not seen the word Mesoteric anywhere else, but it would presumably lie in between the two, as its name implies, as well as its number in the trilogy.
Even the 5 start reviews freely admit that Mouravieff is a bit apart from consensus reality, if you know what I mean – it can be hard for the casual observer to say whether the man was out and out crazy. So I expected a challenging read. To my pleasant surprise, the beginning was quite sane, or at least quite similar to my own understanding. Here’s from the start of the actual book (after several levels of introduction):
“Man is so caught up in the toils of mechanical life that that he has neither time to stop nor the power of attention needed to turn his mental vision upon himself. Man thus passes his days absorbed by external circumstances. The great machine that drags him along turns without stopping, and forbids him to stop under penalty of being crushed. Today like yesterday, and tomorrow like today, he quickly exhausts himself in the frantic race, impelled in a direction which in the end leads nowhere. Life passes away from him almost unseen, swift as a ray of light, and man falls engulfed and still absent from himself.”
Isn’t that the sad truth? It certainly fits my observations. Even people who are smarter than me are easily pulled along by this “machine”, or the maelstrom of physical life. By experience we know that various physical goods (like food and shelter) makes life a lot more comfortable very quickly. So it is oh so easy to assume that accumulating worldly goods is the fast lane to happiness. But the faster we run this race, the less time we have to check whether it really works. It doesn’t.
There is an article going the rounds over on Google+ from time to time, “Top five regrets of the dying” as recorded by a nurse doing palliative care. There is nothing new and surprising in this article, it is exactly what you would expect. Not more sex and bungee jumping, but less time in the office, more time with friends, and more honesty, courage and simple happiness.
Instead of getting terminal cancer, I recommend reading the article. Also, at least the first chapters of Gnosis. The effect is somewhat similar. In one word: Sobering.