LAWS OF WISDOM by Ralph Losey
Legal knowledge is useless unless it is applied.
With the Shamanic traditions and knowledge of the Sacred Directions we come to the edge of the known Laws. Our statement of the substantive laws is concluded. As this book has shown, there are many quiet, inexorable Laws which govern the order and disorder of the universe. These rules allow us to understand our place in the Universe. Some of these Laws have been discovered and are included in this book. Many more remain to be uncovered. We need to know and understand as many of these Laws as we can. For to just ignore the Law, and conduct our life without knowing them, or applying them, is foolish. In the words of Wilhelmine Keyserling, “These cosmic laws are the invisible root of our actions, our development and creation of life. We can ignore them, but we can also refer to them to correct our thinking or feeling”.
With knowledge now available to us from cultures all over the world, much is known today about the laws of human potential. But knowledge of the Law for its own sake does not lead to Wisdom. The only point in knowing the Laws is to use them, to refer to them as a guide to action. Real lawyers only research and study the law in order to apply it. Legal knowledge is useless unless it is applied. This requires another kind of knowledge, knowledge of procedure.
The importance of legal procedure cannot be over emphasized. Substantiative law alone, without procedural law, is hollow and empty. This knowledge must be used. We must move from legal theory, to legal practice. Then our knowledge of the Law can be used beneficially. We can modify our actions to conform with the Law. The only reason to know the rules of the game is to play it! A license to practice this kind of law is not required.
There are thousands of different procedures, methods and exercises for applying the many Laws discussed in this book. Some are better for certain people than others. New procedures are developed every day. A few of the new procedures are excellent. Some are not. Some of the methods and tools much touted today might not work for you at all. So be cautious and skeptical at first of all claims. Promises of instant enlightenment are always a sham, a come on, designed to dupe the gullible and “spiritually naive”. Even some of the older proven techniques may no longer be effective for the modern mentality. You need to find the ones which are right for you.
A few procedures have been referred to in this book, such as Individuation, Clear Thinking and Language, PrimaSounds, and the I Ching. PrimaSounds is the strongest and most effective all around procedural tool known to me. For this reason four volumes of the School of Wisdom Series are devoted to it. There are three audio CDs of music: Volume 5: Life Tuning, Volume 6: PrimaSounds, and Volume 7: GateKeeper; and one book – Volume 4: Chakra Music: the Story of PrimaSounds. One way to begin practicing the Laws studied here is to begin to work with PrimaSounds. Many ideas and practice suggestions are provided in the book, Chakra Music.
Still, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to effectively teach legal procedures in a book alone. The transmission of this knowledge requires personal contact. This is why the practice of the law has always had an element of apprenticeship to it. A young lawyer fresh out of law school, like a young doctor out of medical school, is not really qualified to practice law or medicine. They must first complete an apprenticeship program where they work with older lawyers and doctors. In the internship after school they learn what their profession is really all about. They start to apply the knowledge learned in school to solve real life problems.
In school you only learn knowledge, theories. But after school you learn by doing. You start to practice what you know. Then you go from knowledge to wisdom. Wisdom comes from living the laws, from using the procedures. It can only be transmitted by personal contact, by hand-on instruction. That is why the new type of educational centers which are now springing up around the world are so important. Well known places like Esalen, Findhorn and Omega are good examples. In these centers of spiritual learning classes, workshops and rituals are given where this kind of contact is provided.
This type of education is not the task of universities. They are oriented to research and instruction for young people. They are focused on knowledge, not wisdom. These alternative spiritual learning centers are concerned with the entirely different challenge of personal attainment of wisdom, practical know how, and the useful application of the Laws for personal and social growth.
The reader is urged to find such a center where this kind of contact is possible and enroll in a class or workshop program. This will help you to practice the laws in this and other books. There are many fine wisdom oriented educational centers active today. Some have become quite large and well established. Most communities today have one or more smaller alternative centers. The publisher of this book – the School of Wisdom – also has an ongoing schedule of classes and workshops. Our teaching programs combine the dissemination of useful information with the practice of physical, psychological and mental exercises. The practices – legal procedures – embody the ideas, give birth to them and make them real on all levels.
Comparatively speaking, the workshop and class program today of the School of Wisdom program is quite small and modest. However, the School of Wisdom program stands out by virtue of its history and tradition, and has already begun to serve as a model for many other groups around the world.
The School of Wisdom is more than a publishing house and workshop center, it is an idea and tradition. It carries on the timeless heritage of multi-cultural spirituality and individual empowerment Arnold Keyserling’s Introduction provided a broad perspective of the tradition of the School of Wisdom going back to the time of the Buddha. Here I’ll provide more of the details of what he called the 4th School of Wisdom, the one started by his father, Count Hermann Keyserling in 1920. I’ll also introduce the 6th School of Wisdom, the one my wife and I started with Arnold’s help in 1992.
The 4th School was formed in Darmstadt, Germany by Count Keyserling. The picture to the left is of Count Hermann Keyserling in the late 1920s. After the death of Count Keyserling in 1946, his son, Arnold Keyserling, took over this tradition and continued in its name until 1962. Thirty years later, in 1992, my wife and I renewed the tradition and activities in its name with the encouragement of the Keyserlings. Today most of the activities of the School of Wisdom are carried out in our home near Orlando, Florida, and in CyberSpace on the Internet.
The Count’s basic idea in founding the School of Wisdom was to create an institution that promoted multi-cultural values and self empowerment. Counter to almost all other thinkers in his day, he felt the non-Christian cultures of the third world possessed spiritual insights and wisdom of equal value to those of the West. He held multi-cultural values dear and opposed all ethnocentric nationalism. Instead he strove to incorporate all of the cultures of the world to create a new “ecumenic culture, a universal human culture”. He was the first to stand for a global, planetary culture which would include all of the seemingly divergent cultures and philosophies of the world, both East and West, North and South. He also felt that democracy should be expanded to the spiritual level, and no priest, guru or other authority should tell another what to think. He favored the empowerment of the individual so that each person could discover their own truth and dreams. This was quite a revolutionary thought at the time. It still is.
The Count implemented these ideas in his conduct of the School of Wisdom. In 1920 he was a world renowned writer and philosopher, and had recently married a daughter of Chancellor Bismark. His best-selling book, Travel Diary of a Philosopher, can be found in most public libraries. Count Keyserling’s other works that have been translated into English include: Europe, America Set Free, South American Meditations, Creative Understanding, Immortality, Book of Marriage, and The World in the Making. Hermann Keyserling could easily have set himself up as another Guru, propagating his own views over those of others. He choose not to do so. Following his own philosophy he instead acted as a facilitator with many other teachers whose ideas were given an equal place to his own.
Before the School of Wisdom was closed by the Nazis, it met annually in Darmstadt, Germany. People from around the world attended these meetings. The public sessions consisted of lectures by several speakers on a general theme, often with opposing points of view. This was all orchestrated by Count Keyserling who gave the opening and closing speeches. Hermann Keyserling referred to this as the “polyphonic style of thought.” It was a living embodiment of what his son nows calls “multi-cultural spiritual democracy”.
During its initial years, the school served as a spiritual beacon of a newly emerging multi-cultural world consciousness. There were many important students and teachers over the years including celebrities such as psychologist, Carl Jung; translator of the I Ching and sinologist, Richard Wilhelm; German poet, Hermann Hesse; and Indian Nobel Lauret poet, Rabindranath Tagore. The latter was the featured speaker at the school’s opening in 1920. His own Santiniketan University in Bengal (also known as Visva Bharati) enshrined the same goal – of the education of the universal human being.
After the unexpected death of Count Keyserling in 1946, his son, Arnold took over and protected this tradition and name. Arnold Keyserling’s primary teacher was the now famous mystic philosopher George Gurdjieff. In the late 1940s Arnold worked with Gurdjieff in Paris. Today, Keyserling, and his wife Wilhelmine, are two of the remaining students who worked directly with the mystic. The Keyserlings have developed their own version of the Enneagram which Gurdjieff brought to the West from the Sufis, and with the help of Ralph and others, have also continued Gurdjieff’s work with esoteric Music.
After Gurdijeff’s death, Arnold and Wilhelmine lived and traveled throughout the world in a quest for knowledge including a five-year stay in India, where as mentioned, Arnold taught language and both were trained in Yoga.
After their return to Austria in 1962, Arnold Keyserling was appointed a Professor of Religious Philosophy at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he is still serving and giving lectures. His work has focused on discovery of the underlying structure which unites the many diverse cultures and spiritual traditions of the world. As explained in this book, he refers to this unifying structure as The Wheel. Due to Keyserling’s work with the Wheel, it is now possible to understand the many cultures of the world and see how they complement each other in a holistic fashion. This overcomes the dangers of relativism, and allows each individual to create their own synthesis, their own philosophy of life in harmony with all others.
In the 1960s the Keyserlings no longer used the name “School of Wisdom” but taught their private students under the name “Criterion” and later, the “School of the Wheel.” It was an open community of friends with ongoing educational programs and workshops. This is the time period which Arnold refers to in the Introduction as the 5th School of Wisdom.
The Keyserlings continued the traditions of the School of Wisdom and global culture, but their focus was on the Wheel, and they rarely used the name. Arnold and Wilhelmine introduced to Europe many of the aspects of the Aquarian Age which we now find indispensable. For instance, they helped start the Yoga movement in the early 60’s. In the early 70’s, when Ralph was among his students in Vienna, Arnold invented the musical scale tuned to the chakras. In the late seventies and eighties, their focus changed again as they became leaders of the Human Potential Movement in Western and Central Europe. Arnold Keyserling was elected President of the European Humanistic Psychology Association. The School of the Wheel, as they then called it, also became one of the first groups to introduce Native American shamans and shamanism to Europe in the 1980s.
In the early 90’s, after 20 years of trial, error, struggle and research, I accomplished my goal of creating a new type of music called PrimaSounds based on Keyserling’s chakra scale. This story is described in Chakra Music. By that time, I was ready to carry on the Wisdom tradition in the USA and in cyber-space and other new technologies. In February 1992, the 30th birthday of the Aquarian Age, and the beginning of the new 30 year and 600 year Chinese cycles described by Arnold in the Introduction, my wife Molly, and I, and a few friends, re-founded the School of Wisdom. We had the help and encouragement of Arnold and Willy Keyserling who were no longer using the name. We legally registered the School of Wisdom as a trademark in the U.S. and began what Arnold calls the 6th phase of the School of Wisdom.
Molly and I have tried to preserve the fundamental goals of the School of Wisdom predecessors. Our activities focus on Multiculturality, Self Empowerment, Meditation Music, New Science, Law, the Wheel, Technology and Cyberspace. The School of Wisdom is concerned with teaching the laws, methods and tools from many cultures of the world which individual can use to heal themselves. The goal is to empower the individual with these tools so they can find and carry out their unique task or service for Humanity and the Earth. PrimaSounds and the Wheel are used in this endeavor as master tools. The Wheel is especially valuable to help in the understanding and use of all other tools.
Today the School of Wisdom enlarges upon the old theme of the human potential movement – “Think Global and Act Local” – to a theme of “Think Universal and Act Global.” We are trying to establish a global network of friends fulfilling their potential on all levels: physical, social and spiritual. The “laws” we teach are universal and generic to many world cultures and spiritual traditions. The local actions include the whole Earth, including all of nature. The school’s publications on the Internet is one example of this new global activity.
The School of Wisdom continues its long tradition of multiculturalism and the introduction of new ideas and methods from previously unknown cultures. In the past the School of Wisdom helped introduce the spiritual values of China, India, Native Americans and Humanistic Psychology. Today the focus is on the traditions and Wisdom of Africa. The school is actively supporting the work of Malidoma and Sobonfu Somé of the Dagara Tribe of West Central Africa. They are frequent facilitators and participants in the school, both in Florida with Ralph, and in Austria with the Keyserlings. The Dagara for the first time bring to the West a cornucopia of valuable new information pertaining to community and ritual. The School of Wisdom also actively supports the charitable organization established by the Somés to help fight drought and starvation in West Central Africa, Echoes of the Ancestors.You can learn more at Malidoma.com
Psychology and the substantive laws of the other great spiritual traditions of the world are still important components of the School of Wisdom. We try to fulfill this information gathering, analysis and distribution function in our publishing activities. But in our classes and workshops we emphasize the procedures – the pragmatic methods and tools – with which each person can create their own answers to the great questions of life. This wisdom is based on nature and the body. It requires the development of an Awareness with which our many states of consciousness (Subtle Sybil Effect) can be unified into a coherent whole. Wisdom is not based on different beliefs or ideologies, but on the common enominators of nature, the human body, language and geometry.
The goal of the School of Wisdom is integration of this knowledge into practical “know how,” into Wisdom. This is a process of learning about wisdom tools and using them to make sense of the world. The methods, disciplines, exercises, practices, rituals and other tools from traditions around the world allow us to find out who we are, to heal ourselves and fulfill our potential. The basic publications of the School of Wisdom for these tools are: (1) New Age Visions; (2) Chance and Choice; (3) Laws of Wisdom (this book); and, (3) Chakra Music: the Story of PrimaSounds.
School of Wisdom classes in the U.S. are informal with a “hands on” atmosphere of friendship, dialogue, drumming and joyful trance. Facilitators at the School of Wisdom do not hold themselves out as wise or superior, but as seekers of wisdom, on a common quest with the students. The groups are open, based on friendship and honesty, not authoritarianism, secrecy or “intellectual one-up-man-ship.”
Although spiritual values from many traditions are at the heart of the program, it is not identified with any one tradition or set of values and procedures. Instead the school stresses the importance of each individual finding their own meaning and way. We look to all cultures of the world for inspiration. The great questions of life are raised and discussed, but one-size-fits-all answers are avoided. Everyone is encouraged to tailor their own! The school merely provides the needle and thread – the language, laws, tools and procedures with which a student can weave their own answers.
One of the important purposes of the school today is to help participants discover their meaningful work – the special “right-livelihood” for them. This is one reason the School of Wisdom has become a publisher in its sixth incarnation and is now also a federal trademark. The School of Wisdom® publishes the seven volume School of Wisdom series and has other commercial products and services, including a rapidly expanding grass roots distribution network with small dealers all over the world. Its publications include three audio CDs of PrimaSounds® Music (Life Tuning, PrimaSounds, GateKeeper) sold over the Internet and elsewhere; and four books by Keyserling and Ralph (New Age Visions; Chance and Choice; Laws of Wisdom; and Chakra Music); plus over thirty cassette and video tapes of past SOW classes and workshops. Many new products are now under development, including multi-media CDs and other unique consciousness technology tools.
The School of Wisdom is an idea and tradition that is beginning to resonate in the hearts and minds of more and more people each day. Everyone is invited to be a part of its full re-emergence in the Twenty First Century. For more information on the School of Wisdom see its Internet webs at: http://www.schoolofwisdom/.
The School of Wisdom is just one of many grass roots movements now growing around the world to serve as alternative centers for spiritual culture and continuing education. Try to locate a center like that near you, but watch out for narrow dogmatic ones with hidden agendas, and commercial exploitations or religions in disguise. Strong mono-cultural groups tend to hierarchical authoritarianism. Self empowerment and spiritual democracy entail diversity and tolerance of differences. Look for groups that are multi-cultural, yet holistic. Of course, look also for quality in the materials and the people associated with the group. With good centers you should be able to find a variety of disciplines and teachers who can assist you with some of the many legal procedures referred to in this book. The support and encouragement from friends in such places is invaluable.
Visit the School of Wisdom websites for more information on upcoming workshops. School of Wisdom events or PrimaSounds Take action now and move from study to practice. It is not enough to gain an intellectual understanding of the Law, you have to apply it, live it, become a Lawyer yourself!
School of Wisdom® 