The great period of revelation gave the world Pythagoras and Zarathustra and Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha, Krishna, all the great scholars and wisdom teachers of the past. Now why was that the way it is? Why were those days better for the development of wisdom than ours?

I think probably the answer to this is reasonably evident, namely an uncluttered existence. Our ancestors did not have the great ambitions that we have. Even our forbears in this country had no such vast ambitions as we are courting today.

In those days people lived close to nature, which was a great advantage. They lived in a simple natural environment that had not been spoiled completely. True, they lived in company with some unpleasant animals and things of this nature, and quite early began to develop feuds among themselves.

But generally speaking, primitive man lived in a natural world, and living in a natural world, when he tried to create a philosophy of life with very limited resources with which to work, and not really any understanding that there was a philosophy of life, he began to build his way of living by studying the life of the world around him.

There is an account, I don’t know whether it’s completely factual or traditional, to the effect that speech came from nature. That long before the individual was able to have words or created alphabets, he copied natural sounds. And having the proper structure in the throat to do so, he was able to imitate the sound of a waterfall, or a wind through trees, or the cries of birds and animals.

And this seemingly was the beginning of language. He found it possible to tell his neighbor, or communicate certain ideas, feelings, impulses, by accepting the sounds of the natural world. He knew sounds that frightened him and sounds that pleased him. He knew sounds of birth and sounds of death.

And from all these he began to develop a series of sounds which became gradually letters of a primitive alphabet. But these sounds came definitely from the natural world. So did everything else he had.

He had to come to the conclusion that if he was ever going to understand the invisible he must be able to find it in the visible. Almost all old theologies are abstractions of natural phenomena.

The gods were the powerful chieftain. All of the rules and laws attributed to deities were the result of human relationships testing the possibility of community existence.

So little by little we built a world in which nature provided the only available facts. These facts could be, by careful meditation perhaps, or constant reinvestigation, could become truths.

And this in a sense was the beginning of modern science in seventeenth century Europe, namely that there were truths that could be built upon facts, that these facts could become the basis of rules, that these facts by constant repetition and investigation showed nature’s way in a great many directions.

It made it possible to decide internally, or at least what nature expected us to do, on the basis that nature would penalize anything that was not within its own approval.

So little by little the science of nature began to take the form of a natural philosophy, a natural philosophy that was based upon the seasons, upon the climates, upon the various nature phenomena, from everything from the gently flowing stream to the volcanic eruption.

All these things had to be fitted into something supported by facts. And facts were things that you could see, that you could touch, or you could in some way have a direct contact.

Now from facts the problem of truths resulted in morality. Morality was really the moral interpretation of facts. It was a fact made alive and vivid through experience.

The individual taking the fact and working with it discovered finally that it had within itself a meaning, a moral value, that it produced good consequences, that it advanced causes, whereas error nearly always destroyed.

So little by little a truth factor came in, and after a long time, with truth, the mind and consciousness began to ascend to a higher level. And this was reality.

Reality is in a sense the higher octave of truth. It is something that is gradually built into our understanding as a complicated network of truths working together, and through their interaction producing what we call reality.

Reality is the final proof of the truth of a fact. And on this basis we have built most of the learning that we know today.

Now it also follows that from the beginning of time, individuals in a mysterious way began to question themselves. The caveman probably was among the first to ask why he was created in the first place. The answer has not yet been found.

Most people have the slightest idea why they’re here. They have no idea where they came from except biologically, and nowhere near any idea of where they’re going except in terms of the mortuary. All of the rest is a noble internal reaction to something the individual was not willing to accept. The fact alone was not enough. He had to build it into a moral value, which became his truth, and he finally had to accept it and live it and grow because of it, and in that way contact reality.

So we’re going to now question how the people of today, or of long ago, continued their search for reality, and what did they use to open the doors between the visible and the invisible. How did they expect to attain a concrete visual, audible reality?

Well, in the earliest days that we know of, there were in all tribes and nations certain mystics. These mystics were persons who were given to strange dreams, visions, curious experiences which did not limit their consciousness entirely to the common world. Somewhere along the line, dreams became a part of man’s structure of searching.

A dream had certain technical advantages. It could be described. It could also be experienced. And it could, in a sense, be fitted into the social pattern. A dream might therefore pertain to a world or vision or place beyond this life. A vision could be an experience of that which is beyond conscious contemplation.

Now of course, for a long time dreams were considered as symbolic of mystical values. Dreams were the basis of healing in ancient Greece. Dreams were the basis of social growth among the American Indians. Dreams were always something a little beyond, a little intangible, but sufficiently substantial to be recalled, to be remembered, and to be shared with other people.

Now dreams also gave another proportion to consciousness. Dreams often were centered in some other place than the one that we are familiarly acquainted with. While we lived in our comparatively modest dwellings, we had dreams of temples and palaces and shrines and great mountains, hierarchies of celestial beings, and all the mysterious mechanism of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

All of these things could be experienced. And we might add, to be practical, they were perhaps best experienced after reading Dante’s Divine Comedy, because that type of reading placed certain attitudes or ideas in the subconscious of the human being.

Gradually, as intellectualism increased and improved, the individual not only began to downgrade his dreams, but also to change them to meet the changing social conditions of his times. But dreams were a sleep phenomenon that has played a part in man’s evolution from the very earliest time.

Now there have always been natural mystics. These natural mystics were not necessarily psychics. They had experiences, and these experiences were inward revelations. The true mystic was not telling his neighbor what was going to happen to him. The true mystic was exploring a realm or a vista far greater than the material world in which he lived.

Perhaps among the great mystics we should mention Jakob Böhme, Jacob Tauler, and Emanuel Swedenborg. These persons came from different areas of life, different levels of culture, but also had similar experiences. Swedenborg was a scientist of high standing. Böhme was a shoemaker. Tauler was a monk.

These different people all had mystical experiences, and these experiences resulted largely from a great longing, or a great yearning, or as in the case of several of them, a great tragedy in their personal lives. There comes a time, and it is always a time, when an individual who becomes sorry for himself, perhaps quite legitimately, not simply an emotional state of affairs but a frustration of the real values of living, that individuals of this type may retire into themselves and live in a world of constructive and idealistic fantasies.

But are they fantasies? This is also a question that has never been satisfactorily solved to meet everyone’s requirements.

But we also know that the mind has become a powerful factor in the effort to make the invisible real to us. And the mind has developed all kinds of experimental processes. The mind has borrowed heavily from outside sources for the information intended to reform the inner life of the person to whom that mind belongs.

So the mind almost always builds an invisible upon the visible through a certain intellectual, mental approach. And today we have all kinds of such approaches. They are found in practically every religious system of the world, and they are opposed by every agnostic system. They have become the basis of moral philosophy, and have also resulted, unfortunately, in the rise of a great many competitive institutions.

But the mind, becoming more and more enmeshed in the obvious or the external, and the external becoming less and less soundly founded, so that it is based today very heavily upon mistakes and misfortunes, the mind becomes a dangerous instrument.

Now the mind was not such a dangerous instrument long ago, when society was a comparatively simple structure. Probably really the mind’s domination of the situation began with the dawn of ambition. And when the ambition reached a certain degree, where it was willing to accomplish its end by destructive means, then ambition became a mental liability.

And we have several such liabilities today, in which the mind is really no longer capable of direct thinking. It is no longer capable of truth-seeking in the real sense of the word. The term “truth” has come into bad times and has now been applied to so many different mistakes that it is practically impossible to classify them.

But the fact seemingly remains that the mind, which might possibly have opened the doors to the internal, has only become another gatekeeper for preventing us from entering. The mind therefore guards the gate of the superior as a watchman, to make sure that the individual does not outgrow the level of thinking which is common to his society.

It is assumed that if he does this, he will be an outlaw, impoverished, and probably disgraced. So the mind guards his outer reputation at the expense of his inner life.

Now with this problem more or less obvious, what have we left as ways of finding the inner?