Historical Perspective to Laws of Wisdom

Epilogue written by Arnold Keyserling to Ralph Losey’s Laws of Wisdom.

Once as a young man I asked one of the greatest authorities on Renaissance painters, Bernard Berenson, what he thought of modern art in relation to his predilection. He answered with the following story. Behind his home there was a hill full of pine trees. During World War II the Germans cut down the forest. When he returned to his home years later he found that a new forest of chestnut trees was beginning to grow on the hill. It was a re-beginning because a chestnut forest had existed on the hill in the nineteenth century before someone had planted the pines. Thus, he explained to me, is the history of arts and sciences. Suddenly a completely new paradigm springs up; but not owing to progress, but to rediscovery. Such is the case of Ralph’s book, in it the long lost paradigm of Wisdom and Law is rediscovered.

The world today is undergoing tremendous changes in all areas. The changes are natural and follow known laws. We are living in a time of quantum jump from the Pisces Age of ideologies, religions and empires, to the Aquarian Age of global consciousness and technological civilization. Now, in all parts of the globe, science and mathematics, the computers, have for the first time in human history become the fundamental tools for a meaningful life. The so-called primitive cultures like the Australian aborigines, the Dogons and Dagara in Africa, or the Native Americans, never lost the ancient knowledge embedded in myths. But these ancient cultures are for the most part unable to bridge the gap to western civilization. Now, with the newest discoveries of mathematics – deterministic chaos and fractals – and with the discoveries of the Human Potential movement, new links with these ancient cultures have been created. The Laws of Wisdom, well known to the ancients, are being rediscovered in a modern context.

These new discoveries undercut the basis of the western traditions built on the scientific method. The scientific method, created in the 15th century by the Neapolitan philosopher, Telesius, the father of all the subservient academies of science, essentially means repeatable experiments, verified by logic and mathematics, and giving rise to “heuristic” theories replaced when necessary by new ones. This is an ideal paradigm for science, but the lack of a coherent theoretical frame of reference destroyed the basis of civilization which existed before the 15th century. In the last 300 years of critical rationalism, from Newton to Mandelbrot, the incomplete paradigm of science led to the colonialist destruction of countless archaic civilizations. An adequate theoretical paradigm cannot be found in religious traditions or sectarian ideology. The answer comes instead from the Common Law as described in Ralph’s book, a Law based on the twin pillars of Roman case law, and cosmic verification. The verification comes from the objective mathematics of outer and inner experience, not from subjective verbal formulas – exclusive, fundamentalist dogmas.

Let us now view the history of Cosmic Law which has been re-discovered, written, articulated, and conceived anew by Ralph in Laws of Wisdom. Up to 1200 B.C. Law was the basis of government. It was invented by culture heros, and mighty kings, or it followed divine revelations. Then Cosmic Laws started to be encoded in different cultures – Hammurabi in Babylonia, the I Ching in China, the Sanatana Dharma in India (meaning eternal destiny), and the Roman “Fatum”, a mixture of revelation and customs.

In the 5th century B.C. a third root of law appeared. It was born out of social disagreements arising in the Roman system. Roman law at the time was based on the myth of the body politic. The ruling patricians were the head of the body politic, and the plebeians were the stomach and the limbs which served the head. The plebeians rebelled, refusing to go back to work unless they obtained the security of basic rights embodied in a constitution. The Roman Senate decided to send a group of ten men, the famous “Decemvir”, to study the then most famous constitution of Athens of Solon. They returned and created the “Twelve Table Law”, based on astronomical and astrological meaning. For example, the eighth table concerned capital punishment (in astrology the eighth sign in the Zodiac is Scorpio, the house of death), the second table concerned property rights (in astrology the second sign is Taurus concerned with material things). A new “philosophical” law appeared called Jus, replacing the law of Fas, and the religious law reigning up till that time. The new law was concerned solely with actions which harmed other people, not with religious attitudes. Under the new Roman Law of Justice the following concepts were coined:

1. 1. Persona. We are a person insofar as we have a public status. A persona is that which is heard through the person, like a theater actor.
   2. Responsibilitas. We are responsible for the negative consequences of our actions.
   3. Causa. A process of law which still exists today in Italy to establish responsibility for something where no one is conscious of it and claims to be right.
   4. Process. The way for a humane society to require everyone to be responsible for their deeds by a legal procedure based on the triad of Judge, Accused and Defender.
   5. Casuistic. Case law – following precedent, thereby igniting a historical process.

The Republican law was watered down in the times of the Emperors and almost destroyed with Emperor Justinian’s elimination of the ancient religions in 520 A.D.. Weakened, these five principles of law nevertheless remained the backbone of the western civilization we know today.

The medieval structure established a synthesis between Roman law, Germanic traditions and local customs. It reigned until Dante’s “Divina Commedia”, the swan song of the ancient Europe created by Charlemagne. With the Renaissance and the end of Byzantium, the Greek scholars fled to Florence at the invitation of the Medicis. They brought the Platonic Dialogues, previously unknown to the Latin tradition, and therewith appeared the paradigm that normal language could better explain metaphysical truth than scholastic sophistication. The old order was destroyed by the Protestant revolution and by religious wars of unbelievable cruelty. As the authority of empire and church crumbled in the 17th century, people turned to ideological utopias, like Thomas Moore or Machiavelli. Britain remained apart from this history, but still had civil war with Cromwell.

In this situation three juridical philosophers undertook the establishment of a new legal foundation. (1) Jean Bodin. In France he created a positivistic structure: Law is what has been created by Parliament and the reigning belief system. Thus he justified the right to burn witches. (2) Johannes Althusius. In Germany he created the notion of the sovereignty of the people, a kind of mystical subject replicating the authority of emperor and pope. (3) Hugo Grotius. In Holland he created “Natural Law” based on human nature, replacing the so-called natural law based on the bible.

All subsequent historical developments in the west can be traced to these three origins. All lost their connection with the ancient Wisdom of the earth. The ancient Wisdom traditions after that were only maintained by the indigenous cultures. The history of the Wisdom traditions outside of the indigenous cultures has been underground, esoteric, and not a part of official history. The Wisdom traditions lacked standing and power, especially in Europe after Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire. But in order to understand the spiritual revolution of today, we have to unearth and understand the main historical stages of the little known Wisdom traditions.

In the pre-historical, Mythological Age – from around 9,000 to 3,000 B.C. – the Wisdom traditions lived in tune with heaven and the few remaining indigenous cultures. Then from around 3,000 to 100 B.C., owing to continuous war, the link to heaven was lost. Kings started to consider themselves to be the upholders of justice. For the common man loyalty to the Lord was the backbone of society. The old knowledge came back in Babylon in 2360 B.C.. The Chaldeans equated the geometry of the circle of 360 degrees with the zodiac. Before then only eleven constellations were known. They transformed the legs of the Scorpion into the sign of Balance. This meant that moral judgment was no longer dependent on a wilful and unpredictable God-King, but depended on personal morality, as we witness for example in the rituals of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. In modern terms Balance means that altruism should be stronger than egoism, in other words, you have to move from the instinct of survival to the instinct of the species. This change was incarnated in the Pharaoh impersonating Horus, during lifetime, and Osiris after death. In today’s world resurrection is not limited to the pharaohs and priests, but is open to every person who has enough leisure to study the structure of the world beyond life.

By 2140 B.C. the Chaldeans had established a peaceful government based on an astrological priesthood who knew the basic time cycles of life and death embedded in the movements of the stars, planets, moon and sun. The astronomical phenomena of the precession of the equinoxes, the great cycle of historical change, was now understood as something other than the will of the gods. The Chaldeans understood the zodiac as a scheme of personal integration, shown for instance in the “Mulapin Cuneiform of Babylon” now kept in the British Museum. The time cycles shown in the movements of the heavenly bodies, the visible planets, sun and moon in the field of the twelve zodiacal signs, were understood as keys to personal liberation. The zodiac structure also served as a pattern to transform the gods into time cycles. For instance, the Sun became the emperor, the Moon the prince, Saturn the official, Venus the artisan, Jupiter the priest, Mercury the merchant and teacher, and Mars the warrior. The correspondence between the zodiacal signs and the body organs were also rediscovered by the Chaldeans.

The Wisdom tradition, and its knowledge of the significance of the Zodiacal time cycles, continued in the West, but after Christianity became a state religion with Theodosius in 540, a council decided that everybody looking for personal redemption by his own capacity was to be excommunicated and killed. The ancient knowledge was outlawed, but did not die. It went underground and was handed down esoterically by small groups, or rediscovered by mystics like Meister Eckhart or Jakob Boehme. Since the condemnation of Eckehart, all followers of Wisdom were persecuted by the Catholics, as well as the Protestants, as belonging to the devil. This lasted up to the present century, when so-called scientific astrology linked up with causal determinism and astrology therewith lost its spiritual meaning.

Starting in 1962, all hidden and forbidden traditions surfaced, first in California, but quickly spreading to all parts of the world. But the common denominator of the night heaven and the great year – the 25,000 year movement of the ecliptic – was lost, and so many alternative groups had no real influence. The mainstream was taken over by ideologies: capitalism in the west, socialism in the east, technocracy in the north and fundamentalism in the south of the globe.

With the collapse of communism in 1989, the east-west antagonism vanished, leaving only the north-south creeds. Technology and business in the northern hemisphere of the earth against fundamentalism and nationalism in the southern hemisphere. The basic legal tenants of the emerging global civilization are now accepted virtually everywhere – human rights, freedom of speech, self determinism and democracy based on scientific understanding. However, knowledge of the meaning and sense of life is still missing. The Common Law today lacks the spiritual element present in Ralph’s book. There are enough religions or creeds to provide definite answers to all the great questions, but their answers don’t stand up to critical and scientific investigation. Furthermore, the northern powers threaten to destroy all life, and the real problems are no longer ideological, but ecological. We fail to act in the face of certain predictions, and thus all futurologists predict the inevitable end of civilization, even of all life on earth. The last tribal cultures still having access to the ancient Wisdom knowledge, like the Native Americans, the Africans, the Australian Aborigines and the Siberian Shamans seem doomed to extinction. The answer must come in a new form, tied to the material benefits of the existing computer civilization.

Only one tradition is in touch with both the ancient and the new, and can show us the critical means to re-establish our connections with heaven and the meaning of our existence – the Wisdom tradition. It has until now remained aloof from political problems, but must now reemerge in the context of Common Law and Science to allow every individual to make sense of their lives and the flood of information we all now live in. To understand the reemergence of the Wisdom tradition and its possible future, we must sketch its development through the ages up to the present moment.

The origin of the Wisdom tradition is found in the Eastern myths of the warrior king. All of the Mongolian tribes claimed such a king under the name Gesar Khan, in Tibet the name was Gesar Ling. Gesar means “indomitable”, Ling means the country of the wheel. Gesar was sent by the earth goddess Manene and her twelve zodiacal helpers to reinstall cosmic laws. In the Tibetan version Gesar was persecuted by a scheming bad uncle, but even though he was in poverty, he won the throne and the princess in a competition where he was faster than all others. Instead of then discovering a Mill, he discovered a Wheel in a mountain. The Wheel contained all of the sacred numbers: the eight space trigrams of the I Ching, the 12 signs of the lunar zodiac, the four stages of consciousness, the decimal system, and the sacred square of 9 numbers. Many Tibetans still carry this ancient Wheel attached to their belt.

Gesar Ling fought single-handedly against all of the Bramanic priests who jealously kept truth and medical care in their possession. Further, he fought against the kings of the east, the north, the south and the west, by magically multiplying his presence. After every victory he meditated for a period in order to help their spirits to understand the pure light and attain liberation. His work finished, he then left the country with four friends at the age of 50. Here the original myth has been modified to the Buddhist tradition. The Tibetans expect the return of Gesar Ling in order for the present civilization to start a new golden age. But the basis of the Wisdom tradition, of the Wheel, was the illumination of the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama in the 6th century B.C. Siddhartha started the way of prajna, of Wisdom, by setting the Wheel into its first motion. We will now leave myth and concentrate on historical facts.

Siddhartha grew up in great wealth in northern India (modern Nepal), the son of king Suddhodana and queen Maya. At age 16 he married a princess, Yasodhara, and lived a life of luxury and comfort in his father’s palace, sheltered from the harsh realities of the real world. At age 28, soon after the birth of his first child, he suddenly discovered the world beyond the palace, the reality of death, disease, old age and suffering. The world no longer made sense or had meaning to him. He resolved to find a solution to the universal suffering of mankind. He left his wife and child to search for an answer, becoming a religious ascetic according to the techniques of yoga. But after six years of study and mortification, he realized that none of the yoga techniques led to liberation from suffering. So he left the forest and at age 35 went to a certain tree on the banks of the river Neranjara at Buddha-Gaya, a tree still sacred to all Buddhists, which we now know as the “Tree of Wisdom” or Bodhi-Tree. He resolved not to move from underneath that tree until he had attained complete liberation.

Illumination came to him after the three nights of the new moon. In the first night he realized his existence back to the beginning of creation, through all forms of life. In the second night he saw his present task to preach all possible ways to attain liberation. In the third night he grasped that his own mission was a beginning and would last as a form of civilization for only a thousand years, to be superceded by more exact knowledge. He structured his message according to the “four noble truths”.

1. 1. All human life is suffering, dukha, meaning lack of freedom, dependence.
   2. The suffering has a cause which can be discovered.
   3. The cause is the thirst for rebirth, springing from false imagination due to associative consciousness, alternating between sleep, dream, reflection and waking with ever-changing subjects, identities.
   4. This consciousness can be replaced by awareness, the state of Samadhi, by embarking on the “Eightfold Path”: right belief, right convictions, right teaching, right actions, right living, right intentions, right thinking and right contemplation.

These eight steps give rise to all subsequent Wisdom traditions, in yoga, in the chakras, in alchemy, down to the contemporary understanding of physics and mathematics. The Buddha preached for forty years wandering through northern India. The main symbol of his teaching was an eight spoked Wheel of the Dharma, the eternal Law. After the Buddha’s death his pupils compiled all of the different aspects of his teaching and founded the first so-called School of Wisdom. Its aim was the attainment of the state of Awareness, or Arhat, open only to monks, since laymen did not have the time or opportunity to continuously meditate and practice mindfulness as required to complete the necessary steps of initiation.

Buddha invented the number zero, the emptiness basic to total awareness. But when Buddhism became a ritualized state religion with Emperor Ashoka in the third century B.C., the state of Arhat was confused with the Self. This type of search for Nirvana as established by the first School of Wisdom continues up to the present day with the adherents of Theravada Buddhism, called the small vehicle, now concentrated mainly in Sri Lanka and Burma.

Around the time of Christ, Nagarjuna started the second School of Wisdom based on Sunyata, the aim of emptiness, and replaced Arhat with the idea of the Bodhisattva: the way to liberation is attained through trying to help others to realize their Buddha nature. Wisdom is the knowledge behind the knowledge, but includes all possible experiences and all worlds. The teaching of the second school was called Mahayana, the great vehicle. Out of it the first Universities were formed in northern India, especially Lalanda in the ninth century. But by the seventh century the Zen patriarch Bodhi Dharma had already brought Buddhism out of India to China where it attained its greatest following, with Buddhist emperors, and furthermore started its development in Japan. The second School continues today with Mahayana Buddhism, including Tibetan Buddhism, and some forms of yoga, martial arts, and Zen.

Complications of University disputes turned the second School of Wisdom from illumination to knowledge. The conquest of northern India by Islam ended its political role there, laying the groundwork for the establishment of the third School of Wisdom. The third School was based on another aspect of Buddha’s teaching in his last sermon before his death.

Nothing exists in the visible and invisible worlds apart from one single power, without beginning and end, submitted to its own law. Do not try to grasp its infinity with words. He who asks falls into error, likewise he who answers. Don’t expect help from the gods. They are submitted to the same law of karma. They are born, get old and die, in order to be reborn. They cannot change their own fate. Expect everything only from your own initiative. Do not forget: each of you can attain this higher power.

What is this power? The Buddhist schools were destroyed in India, either by the Muslims or the Brahmans declaring Buddhism a heresy and returning to a ritualized way of life. However, one group of the Muslims, the Sufis, proclaimed a mystical Islam not based on the Sharyan, the fundamentalist moral and legal structure, but on the Hadith, the sayings of the Prophet. The Sufis cited especially the Hadith that “You should include all knowledge and wisdom, even if it found in China.” The Sufis, together with the Taoists, Buddhists and Confucians, formed the third School of Wisdom in Turkestan in the 9th century. They based their teaching on that power beyond name and form. For the Taoists it was well known as the Chi, the primordial life energy which can be attained by certain exercises, and which can open you to higher spiritual communion.

All members of the third School of Wisdom were artisans. Their teachings and practices with spiritual energy were kept secret. They formed fraternities, similar to the Free Masons in the west. The primary symbol of the third school, the Enneagram, became known to the west for the first time through G.I. Gurdjieff. All knowledge, according to Gurdjieff, was contained in the Enneagram. The Turkestan school was largely destroyed by the Mongols, and persecuted elsewhere for its clandestine independence of the feudal religious and political powers. Still a few philosophers and esoteric Wisdom groups, both east and west, continued the traditions in secret and disguised their work as a search for gold, longevity, or simply game playing. In the east and mid-east the Sufi fraternities and some of the Taoists, and Chi Kung adepts, continued the traditions of the third School up to the present time, where they became central to the Human Potential Movement of today.

In Europe, at the same time as the Buddha, the Ionian Greeks pursued Wisdom by the creation of mathematics as a science: Thales founded geometry, and his pupil and successor, Anaximander, founded arithmetics, based on the relation of the infinite and the finite. Anaximander’s successor, Anaximenes, postulated that we have to distinguish opinion from understanding and limit philosophical language to that which can be articulated by mathematical criteria. Pythagoras found that music is the experiential basis of mathematics. He created the whole geometric and arithmetic representation of the Wheel, however, he ignored the precession of the equinox and the origin of myth. All of the Greeks tried to overcome myth through logic. They took Cosmos as the basis of the Universe and negated the metaphysical existence of Chaos, which has only resurfaced in the last twenty years.

The Sophist philosophy that developed in Greece lost all connections with the Wisdom tradition. The Pythagorean school came close, but it was more of a monastery than a Wisdom school. Only Socrates opposed the Sophists by establishing the fundamental criteria of Wisdom. “Socrates, who knows that he knows nothing, is the wisest of the Greeks.” This utterance of the Oracle of Delphi was taken by Socrates as the maxim of his life. He discovered that all knowledge is only operational, that the key to awakened life lies in Wisdom, not knowledge. Wisdom is a state of being to be attained, a state of realization of nothingness, the knowledge of nothing, or inner silence, at the basis of all Wisdom traditions. Socrates found that there are two preconditions to attaining Wisdom:

1. Anamnesis. Discovering the unconscious knowledge of the body, just like the sculpture liberates the spiritual figure of the stone.
2. Maieutics. Getting this immortal being to live and to create, the art of spiritual midwifing.

However, Socrates’ focus on that attainment of Wisdom was diffused with Plato, and lost by Aristotle. The emphasis in Plato’s Wisdom school moved from formal ethics – never be conditioned by the past or uncontrolled belief systems – to knowledge, abstraction and classificatory science. Wisdom was eventually lost as the theme of the school, especially after the Platonic Academy, along with the Greek sanctuaries, were closed by the Christian government. Thereafter all Wisdom schools in the West became esoteric, handed down from master to pupil in small groups up to the 19th century. The story of this esoteric tradition remained outside of academic research until Pierre Riffard’s famous book History of Esotericism was published in Paris in 1991 and accepted by the Sorbonne as his professorial thesis.

During the Renaissance and the beginning of Rationalism with Galileo, Locke, Descartes, Leibnitz and Newton, Wisdom was only the aim of a few mystics, who were usually hiding from the ecclesiastical and state authorities. In the west the third School of Wisdom traditions could only continue secretly in small groups. This changed only in the 19th century with Papus, Alan Cardec, Eliphas Levy, Rudolf Steiner, and found a common denominator in Theosophy with Annie Besant, C.W. Leadbeater, and many others. The origins of the fourth School of Wisdom were laid at that time, however, with the exception of the English and American Societies of Psychical research, the occult and esoteric knowledge developing then seemed divorced from science. This ran counter to the prevailing trends which fostered an experimental attitude. Natural philosophy, having been abandoned by the British Royal Society with Robert Boyle, only served to deepen the abyss between the two cultures based on Cartesian dualism. Thus Wisdom was suppressed by the churches and states, and by the scientific and academic communities.

The next attempt to find the common root of spiritual and scientific endeavors was created by my father, Count Hermann Keyserling, in 1920 in Germany. Raised in the tradition of natural philosophy, coming from a family of geologists and biologists, he was not content with the then dominant European colonialist outlook of world culture. He journeyed around the world, taking as his motto the saying of St. Paul: the shortest way to oneself is around the world. He investigated the Wisdom traditions of the many lands he visited according to their own evaluations, and wrote a book about it called The Travel Diary of a Philosopher. In this and other books he described the different cultures as aspects of an emerging global consciousness, a world civilization beyond nationalities, that included and appreciated all of the many cultures of the world, not just the European one. Travel Diary became a best seller all over the world and led to an invitation by the Grand Duke of Hessen – the brother in law of the Russian Czar – to start a school in Darmstadt devoted to planetary philosophy.

Hermann Keyserling created his School of Wisdom in the spirit of the old ones, intentionally retaking the old Buddhist name. This was the official beginning of the fourth School of Wisdom. Hermann Keyserling was looking for the positive meaning of the old religions and cultural traditions, but unlike Hegel, Marx, Darwin, or the Theosophists, he was not searching for a common philosophical “Weltanschalung” (worldview or synthesis). Instead, he was trying to attain the level of awareness of Wisdom by listening to the great thinkers and pioneers of different traditions speak on given themes, such as Man and Earth, Worldview and Lifestyles, Order and Freedom, etc. People were invited to speak at the School of Wisdom who had in their own life achieved a synthesis of personal motivation and scientific endeavor. In the 1920s many great personalities took part in his enterprise, for example, Carl Jung, Richard Wilhelm, Leo Frobenius, Paul Tillich, Leo Baeck, Nicholas Berdajeff, Rabindranath Tagore, and others. Closed by the Nazis in 1933, this same line of research was continued under the auspices of Jung in the Eranos congresses in Ascona, from 1933 up to 1988 with scholars of world culture and myth such as Mircea Eliade and Joseph Campbell.

In 1946 the School of Wisdom was refounded in Tyrol in Austria with the help of the Austrian and French governments, however, my father died one month before the inaugurations. I took over the direction of the School, looking for the European roots of Wisdom and philosophy in the Pre-Socratic Greek traditions from Thales to Pythagoras. The official, government-sponsored school closed after a year, but in 1948 I got the chance through Gurdjieff and Hauer to discover the roots of the third School of Wisdom in Turkestan. In 1952 I moved to southern Italy to understand music in the spirit of Pythagoras, and then in 1957 moved to India to be a guest professor at the school created by Rabindranath Tagore, the University of Santiniketan in Bengal. There I studied modern science in relation to Indian metaphysics.

My studies showed that February 4, 1962 was the beginning of a new ecliptic cycle, known in the west as the Aquarian Age. Most of Calcutta where I lived celebrated the historical change with feasts and all night drumming. The 25,000-year progression of the equinoxes against the star field was observed by all cultures of the earth. This is shown for instance in Hamlet’s Mill by M.I.T. historian Giorgio Di Santillana. This 2,500-year cycle marked by the change in the orientation of the equinoxes indicates the beginning of a new spiritual epoch, the beginning of global consciousness. It was shown by three social initiatives:

1. 1. The founding of the Findhorn community in Ireland, rediscovering the Celtic link with Nature Spirits, in accordance with Native American and African traditions.
   2. The creation of Esalen in 1962, and in 1964 the creation of the Human Potential movement by George Leonard and Mike Murphy.
   3. The “Hippy Movement” and the student revolution spreading in 1968 to Paris and all of Europe.

1962 began the time of the fifth School of Wisdom, and later that year I returned to Austria to teach world history and the Wheel. The fifth School was never really an organized institution, and the name School of Wisdom was never used by me or anyone else. Instead this was a multi-faceted renaissance of Wisdom with many revolutionary ideas and leaders, such as Marylin Ferguson, Fritz Capra, Jean Houston, Charles Tart, Carlos Castenada, and hundreds of pioneers in the fields of Religion and Mythology, holistic medicine, Humanistic Psychology, Transpersonal Psychology, and new education. This was a time of the discovery of yoga, martial arts and body techniques like Feldenkrais and Rolfing, the linking up with new science through Wheeler, Prigogine, Arthur Young, David Bohm, the British Wrekin Trust, and many others. In the 1980s it included the Native American traditions with Wallace Black Elk, Swift Deer, Sun Bear and many others. Our study group in Vienna and other places participated with these and many other traditions from around the world.

I became the President of the European Humanistic Psychology Association in the 1980s and introduced many of the American leaders of the Human Potential Movement to Europe, and also the first Native American medicine men. The many-sided, fifth School of Wisdom as we understood it, had its main focus in the Human Potential Movement. Up until the collapse of communism in 1989 and the end of the cold war, the Human Potential Movement, much like the “New Age Movement” which is related and similar, but even less disciplined and focused, remained essentially anti-establishment, outside of the scientific community, and frequently in open hostility to it. This began to change in 1989. I opened centers in many places of the world, such as Kazakhstan, Estonia, Greece, Italy, France, Holland, England, although I did not call them Schools of Wisdom, but used other local names.

It wasn’t until 1992 that the name School of Wisdom came into use again by my former student, Ralph. With my help he and his wife, Molly, opened a center in Orlando, Florida, and later on the Internet. This reopening of the School of Wisdom followed another historical shift according to the Chinese tradition which occurred on February 10, 1992. At that time a new 60-year and 300-year cycle began called the time of the Wooden Dog. This marked the political end of the last great 2,500-year cycle of the ecliptic, the Piscean Age, which had spiritually terminated in 1962. The 300-year cycle represents a total paradigm shift from Newtonian mechanics, to fractals, deterministic chaos and PrimaSounds. The 60 cycle represents a political shift, a change from the cycle of political terror begun in the 1930s. The old Piscean authorities now slowly begin to lose their power.

Thus according to the Chinese understanding of time, as of February 10, 1994, the time was ripe for new public authorities to come into the foreground who are trying to clarify the meaning of science for human self actualization. For this reason in February 1992 the sixth School of Wisdom was intentionally founded in Orlando, Florida. The new school moves beyond affiliation with the Human Potential Movement, and starts a new direction. In alliance with New Science and the Common Law, the School of Wisdom now fully arises from its underground position of the past millennium, and transcends the anti-establishment orientation of the Human Potential and New Age Movements. It now begins to fill its role in society, to use technology, science, math and law to help every individual find their own meaning and sense in life.

The first five Schools were necessary preparation for the sixth, which should now carry for centuries, and fill the void of the collapsing Piscean structures of religion, ideologies and nationalism. The Wisdom knowledge and psychological technologies developed by the fifth School, especially the development of PrimaSounds, now provide a reliable means for the sixth School to shift the subject from consciousness to Awareness, to Buddhist Satori. The sixth School uses common mathematical denominators set forth in Ralph’s Laws of Wisdom to unite the body and the spirit. Mathematics in the Central Asian Sufi and Pythagorean traditions, buttressed with the latest insights in fractals and chaos math, can now serve as a matrix for the humanization of the emerging global mentality.

The new global consciousness – embodied by the Sixth School of Wisdom – will be based on spiritual democracy and friendship, where every individual thinks for them self with tolerance for the differences of others. The common man will now make sense of his own life, and not depend on others to do so for him. With knowledge of the Laws of Wisdom, as shown by the Wheel which summarizes my own work, every man will be able to do this, to think for them self, make sense of their life, and create their own meaning in life.

The cosmic laws embedded in the Wheel will complete the Common Law of society with its guarantee of basic human rights. The sixth School of Wisdom will teach the Cosmic Laws, the mathematical basis by which day and night, waking and dreaming life can be united. Based on friendship and non-hierarchical organizations, School of Wisdom teachers will help others find their own “medicine” in the Native American sense. The Schools will create a living bridge between heaven and earth, helping participants to find and create their own life, being co-creators with God. Every person will then fashion their own work for humanity in tune with the spirit of the times, and their own inner spirit.

To accomplish these goals the sixth School of Wisdom must incorporate the insights of the five prior Schools, it must be based on the rhythm of its own history. For this reason its basic structure will be fivefold, uniting the knowledge and disciplines of the prior Schools. Its emblem is thus the pentagram, the ancient symbol of the Chinese cycles of time and flow of energy – Chi, also in the west the traditional symbol of the Pythagorean order and other esoteric groups.

1. 1. 1st School – Buddhism THE WHEEL
   2. School – Yoga/Zen BODY WORK
   3. School – Sufi-Artisans, Socrates/Esoterics SPIRITUAL ENERGY
   4. School – Count Keyserling, Eranos/Eliade/Campbell/Theosophists WORLD CULTURE
   5. School – Human-Potential/Shamanic EARTH WORK

From the first School of Wisdom there is the knowledge and disciplines pertaining to the awakening of the Buddha nature, Awareness, and the structure of the Wheel. Here we are concerned with both meditation and the Mathematics of the Wheel. We obtain a holistic understanding of the Universe and how we can fully awaken to the Universe and attain liberation, Awareness.

From the second School comes the importance of the inherent wisdom of the body in yoga, martial arts, meditative dance, massage, and many other disciplines. The body grounds all spiritual efforts in direct experience, transcending doctrinal differences. From the third School comes teachings pertaining to spiritual energy – Chi – and the creation of the dream body in communion with all other life in the Universe, including higher beings. This follows the Chinese, Sufi, Kundalini, Native American and African traditions, where you use the opening to higher power, the flow of Chi, to break through into cosmic consciousness, and there communicate with a unified, living Universe, either directly or through omens, signs, and mantic practices of all kinds.

From the fourth School comes the importance of understanding all cultures and myths of the world as equally valid human expressions of beauty and truth. This allows us to escape from the cultural consensus into which we were born, and synthesize our personal myth from the grand and diverse heritage of the whole planet, including both religion and science.

From the fifth school we incorporate all of the methods and systems of the Human Potential Movement, excellently explained in Michael Murphy’s compendium The Future of the Body. This is the maieutics process of Socrates where people are awakened to total awareness and find “selfish fulfillment” by work in service to humanity and the earth.

The fivefold activities of the new School of Wisdom start a new work of global consciousness. The transcendental Cosmical Law can now blend with the Common Law. The instinct of survival and the instinct of the species finally meet, as both ego and self, day and night, become the two poles of human development. Ralph’s book gives an introduction to this new mentality and can serve as a guide for the sixth School of Wisdom.