The Mystery Schools Part 2: The Return - Jon Eden Khan
“The Mysteries, when restored, will make real—in a sense incomprehensible to you at present—the nature of religion, the purpose of science and the goal of education. These are not what you think today.” Alice Bailey
In the Mysteries Part 1, I explored the history of the ancient Mystery Schools. As I finished that piece by noting, in the Ageless Wisdom teachings of the Trans-Himalayan tradition, through the work of such writers as Helena Blavatsky, Alice Bailey, and Bruce Lyon, it is understood that today, as part of the major planetary crisis and evolutionary transition we are facing, the Mystery Schools are re-emerging. Furthermore, it is understood they will be able to be established in an updated form – one that incorporates the essence of the ancient Mystery Schools but at a higher level of the evolutionary spiral.
Updating the Mystery Schools: The Next Step
In the ancient Mystery Schools, the path of transformation that was engaged was one that focussed on an individual awakening to their sacred soul or sacred embodiment and then expressing that in their respective culture in service to the collective.
In the Mystery Schools that are to come, the above teachers have described that there will emerge preparatory and advanced sections of the different schools, corresponding to the Lesser and the Greater Mysteries described in Part 1.
The preparatory schools will focus on drawing on the energy of spirit to support the integration of soul and personality to emerge as a server of the collective. This will integrate the lunar and solar mysteries that figured in the ancient Schools.
In the advanced schools, the emphasis will be on deepening into the stable expression of spirit - the ray of the One that exists at the core of a being - through the fused soul and body.
Let’s unpack a bit what is specifically meant by these terms.
Spirit, Soul, Personality
The terms spirit, soul and personality are used a lot in spiritual and personal development circles. They are often not so clearly differentiated, but the difference between them is key to understanding the developmental stages of the path described in the Mystery Schools.
To break them down, throughout the ages the spiritual traditions have taught that the human being has three major levels to its being, described often in terms of spirit, soul and personality – all arising within the infinite presence of the Absolute One.
Spirit, the etymology of which comes from the Latin ‘spirare’ or ‘spiritus’, meaning breath, can be understood as the Breath of Life of God, the Absolute One. As the non-dual traditions have pointed to, the Absolute is an infinite field of Presence, Consciousness and Energy, and spirit represents the breath, power, or transcendental life principle of the Absolute One. All creative cycles, whether of the birth and death of an ant, a human being, a planet or a galaxy, are described as the out-breathing and in-breathing of the Absolute One, or the expansion and contraction of it’s beating Heart and the divine life that vibrates within it. Spirit is that life. In Ancient Egypt, the cycle of universal creation and dissolution was symbolised by the landing and taking off of the bennu bird, or phoenix, which represented the god Ra (the spirit or life-force of the Absolute) in the Tree of Life in the city of Heliopolis.
In a human being, spirit is the nucleus of divine life at their core. Matter corresponds to the body or bodies that provide the form – the mental, emotional and physical bodies that together form the personality. And soul is the consciousness between them. The spirit remains eternally identified with the Absolute Unity of the One. Matter multiplies to provide the bodies for the apparently separate Many. The soul is that which arises on the long journey of repeated human incarnation to bridge them. This is the Holy Trinity of Father (spirit), Mother (matter), and Child (the soul) that is so present in the mythology of the ancient Mystery Schools.
Nourishing the Earth with the Blood of Gods
The esoteric understanding of the path of awakening in ancient cultures was encoded in their mythology, which has been at the core of all the Mystery Schools. To understand the deeper mysteries of what the mythology is pointing to, one needs to be able to decode its esoteric meaning. That esoteric meaning almost universally related to the path of awakening and its tests and trials.
In the Ancient Egyptian mystery school, the Father or spirit principle, Osiris, is killed and dismembered by Set (which death represented divine spirit dying to its eternal freedom in the process of incarnation). From this point on Osiris is represented, as in the image above, in his mummified form (representing divine spirit entombed in the body). Then, Isis (the goddess that lives through all matter and nature) gathers together all the different pieces of his body (except the phallus, which is lost – representing the loss of the divine power and potency of spirit that happens with incarnation), which allows the birth of their son, Horus (the soul). Horus (the soul) then battles Set (the material self) until the watching gods eventually judge Horus as victor and bring him and Set into harmonious relation (the integration of soul and personality). This leaves Horus, the original model of the pharaoh, to rule on Earth as a representative of his father.
Another example is the Garden of Eden story. Here, Eve (the feminine aspect of the human soul) is tempted by the serpent (the life-force present in matter) to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (to enter into duality through incarnation), resulting in her and Adam (the masculine side of the human soul) being disconnected from the Father (spirit).
In the Ancient Greek mythology, Uranus (spirit – the Father), the original husband of Gaia (matter – the Mother), is castrated by Chronus (the law of material incarnation) – meaning he is severed from the divine life-force of spirit that remains ever awake to its true nature as one with the Absolute, with his severed testicles falling into the ocean to emerge as Venus (the soul).
In the ancient Aztec Mystery Schools, Quetzacoatl (the soul) played the role of bridging earth (body) and sky (spirit). And in the Vedic mythology of Ancient India, Rama is one of a number of figures that played a similar role.
And then there is the Christ story, where the soul principle is crucified in its work of bridging the Father in heaven (spirit) and earth (embodied incarnation).
The Mystery Schools were all based on this spiritual narrative of the earth needing to be nourished by the blood, or death, of spirit, which fructifies matter to birth the soul whose role is to bridge the two together.
We see this in all of their myths. The story is of an essentially good and spiritual being (the soul) of royal/divine heritage (the spirit) sent into a harsh and painful scenario where they pass through great trials and/or death (incarnation in matter) to eventually rise again (to integrate and eventually fuse soul and personality), remember their essentially divine nature (awaken to spirit), bring online it’s power, and stand as pillar of good on earth (mastery).
Consider how well this narrative fits with the stories of Osiris/Horus, Christ and even Buddha. I would venture to say that the original forms of human sacrifice we find in the Mystery Schools of South America were symbolic, whether actually carried out or not, of just this narrative.
The Black Hole: A New Symbol at the Heart of the Mysteries
The Mystery Schools of the past focussed on awakening to sacred soul (the solar mysteries) and sacred embodiment (the lunar mysteries).
A key piece of the Trans-Himalayan teaching on the re-emergence of the Mystery Schools is that what is coming next is a focus on the integration of these two divisions to reveal and bring online spirit.
Cosmologically, this is the marriage of the sun and the moon to reveal the source of both - the black hole.
Around the year 2000, astrophysicists started to understand that at the centre of every galaxy there appears to be a supermassive black hole. Just as a supermassive black hole is able to hold a field for an entire galaxy of one hundred billion suns or more to be birthed, grow, shine radiantly and eventually die, simply through the power of its being, so also is the nucleus of spirit at our core supremely powerful.
In the Trans-Himalayan teachings, it is understood that the energy of spirit is qualified by the divine purpose of the One Life as it expresses through power, love or creativity. Purpose can here be considered the alpha and omega of any creative cycle, whether of a human being, a planet or a galaxy. Purpose as a quality of spirit is both the catalyzing spark and the final consummation of any cycle of manifestation. It is the seed of destiny at the heart of everything, waiting to be activated so as to power form and consciousness into increasingly transparent expressions to the One.
The Cosmological Symbolism of the Coming Mystery Schools
In the Mystery Schools that are to come, we understand that humanity’s emerging awareness of the structure of the kosmos will provide us with a collectively recognised set symbols for a new global spirituality. In the moon, the earth, the sun and black hole, we have cosmological symbols for the body, the personality, the soul and spirit. And in the infinite space that enfolds and is at the centre of them all (every atom of every structure in the universe is 99.9% space) we have a symbol for the Absolute Reality of the One in which all levels of creation arise. These are the major aspects of our being that unfold along the path.
In terms of how spirit expresses for an individual on the path, it is worth noting this energy doesn’t come online stably until they have integrated and fused soul and personality. This is the marriage of the sun and the moon in the mystic symbolism of the Mystery Schools. This process will be the focus of the coming preparatory schools, and will set the foundation for the full unfolding of the powers of spirit in the advanced schools.
Activating Planetary Purpose: The Core of the Coming Mystery Schools
“Revelation itself is a science—knowledge of the Mysteries is a fire that needs a sustained and progressive burning if it is to serve the society it enters into.” Alice Bailey
Spirit is infused with the divine purpose that vibrates at the heart of the whole Earth, and the fact that spirit will be the focus of the transformational work done in the advanced Mystery Schools means that their initiates will be working with the revelation of this. This will allow the initiates of these schools to start to experientially penetrate into, awaken to and reveal the divine purpose at the core of Earth’s whole 4.5 billion year journey of evolution.
As such, the advanced schools will be global centres that can anchor the revelation of our planetary purpose more and more fully in human culture. To put this in perspective, in the Trans-Himalayan teachings this planetary purpose is not simply equivalent to the emergence of an integrated, sustainable, global society rooted in love, compassion and support for all beings. Rather, just as spirit doesn’t come online on the path of an individual until soul and personality are fused, the power of our planetary purpose will only start to come online to reveal itself once a global integrated society rooted in love is in place on the physical plane.
These teachings prophecy that the Mystery Schools will then form a network of global centres that will support the emergence of a globally integrated spirituality. And it is understood they will serve as training grounds for global servers in all fields to establish an increasingly awake, universally compassionate, economically prosperous, technologically advanced, highly educated, systemically agile, and ecologically sustainable global culture.