The Esoteric Teaching is open-source spirituality. What does this mean? The source code and algorithms of proprietary software are kept secret so that the developer can derive maximum financial gain from its exploitation. Open-source software projects like Linux and Firefox publish their source code so that other developers can learn from, improve and validate their functions. Here, the objective is not maximum profit, but maximum usefulness and benefit to the public good.
Similarly, the Esoteric Teaching is also software: software for your mind. The Esoteric Teaching is an ontology that tremendously expands and enriches the meaning of existence. When you enhance your ontology with the Esoteric Teaching, suddenly a great many things that formerly seemed random or senseless, seem orderly and make sense. A great many experiences that you previously missed now become available to your consciousness.The ontological knowledge of the Esoteric Teaching expands your consciousness, in every meaning of the term. The Esoteric Teaching is the science of consciousness, because it gives the background information one needs to experience oneself as a spiritual entity.
Everyone has spiritual experiences all the time; but without a spiritual ontology, you miss them, because they will be meaningless. By giving meaning to spiritual experiences, the Esoteric Teaching helps you register them and bring them into consciousness in an orderly way.
The original source code of the Esoteric Teaching is a collection of Sanskrit manuscripts written down between 5000 and about 500 years ago by the Master Teachers of the lineage of the Esoteric Teaching. They were translated into English and published for the first time in the West by my personal spiritual Master Teacher.
All these works are part of the Vedic spiritual literature, but they share one very important distinguishing characteristic: they are works of ontology, rather than ritual, philosophy or theology. Ontology defines the categories of existence so that categories of meaning based on them form a logical, orderly system suitable for reasoning. In fact, ontology makes logic possible.
Ontology is the meta-knowledge that supplies the meaning of the meaning of ordinary language. It is similar to a programming language for thinking. Once you know ontology, you can develop a language and a logic that allows logical reasoning on any subject. The ontological works of the Vedic tradition are special because they provide an ontological framework for reasoning about consciousness, the soul and spiritual experience.
Spiritual things are different from material things. Material objects and phenomena are objective, while spiritual objects and phenomena are completely subjective and self-referential. Spiritual beings are living, conscious and irreducibly personal; they are also eternal and inherently multidimensional.
Reasoning about spiritual beings using a language, logic and ontology optimized for material applications inevitably generates wrong results. For example, if one tries to calculate the results of an experiment on water using the equations and units of measure that model solids, the results will be not only wrong but meaningless.
Similarly, if we try to understand and reason about conscious spiritual living entities using reasoning and language developed for material objects, we will completely fail to arrive at meaningful results. This ontological conundrum is precisely what has stalled scientific research into consciousness and allied fields like psychology.
Spirit is completely different from matter. Spirit literally resides in a different world, a spiritual universe with its own laws, very different from the material universe. So if we try to understand spiritual entities with material language, concepts and reasoning, we will not only reach wrong results, our results will be meaningless: in a word, nonsense.
The Esoteric Teaching solves all this by introducing, for the first time, an orderly and completely scientific ontology of consciousness and spiritual experience. It makes the source code available in Sanskrit, English and even in computer-readable OWL ontology files.
Finally there is a truly scientific basis for logical reasoning and research into consciousness. Gradually we are presenting these concepts here and on the Esoteric Teaching website. They are not a secret, but those who want to benefit from them are given guidance how to approach them properly.
Just like if someone wants to understand an open-source computer program, we should make sure that he understands the programming language they are written in; otherwise, he may make some error. The Esoteric Teaching is much more than a computer program; it is an entire operating system for the human intelligence. Errors in life are much more serious than a computer crash, so by taking care to introduce readers to the Esoteric Teaching properly, we are protecting them from potentially serious errors in misunderstanding it.
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