The Finding of the Third Eye by Vera Stanley Adler
INTRODUCTION
Are human beings potential gods, as they have been told, or are they merely the least of worms?The world today is a seething mass of contradictions. Life does not become simpler with each new achievement, and the average man, kept busy with the urgent process of existing, has little time for thought.
Yet there are moments when, looking out upon a world which appears drab, cruel, confused, and very ugly in many ways, man wonders…….
If there are great heights for him to attain why does he seem to know so little about them? What has man been doing all these centuries? Why do disease, difficulties and dangers appear to have increased the more civilization ‘progresses’?
There comes a time in the lives of many people when they earnestly desire to find an answer to these questions. They would know why they are here, what it is all about, and if they can learn to master circumstances instead of continually being a prey to them. They begin to make an individual effort to find out for themselves if there is really any rhyme or reason, any justice in life, anything to hope for or to work for.
When a man arrives at this stage in his life it marks a very important crisis in his development. It is the moment at which he changes from a puppet into an individual and joins the honoured company of the seekers.
To his surprise he finds that the number of these seekers is increasing rapidly, and that, in fact, they are beginning to make their impact felt upon social consciousness.
He soon sees the significance of this. True socialism becomes possible when people recognize themselves as individual units of power, capability and thought; then there will inevitably follow a correspondingly important and congenial position in life for each one of them. There is an unfailing demand for either the competent worker or for those able to wield constructive influence, and all can fill one of these needs. There is no other way to individual happiness.
The general apathy and ignorance which has existed for so long has reduced living conditions to a chaos in which there has been undernourishment in the midst of plenty, barbaric wars and cruelties taking place under the wing of so-called religion, and a system of education which results neither in mental power, physical fitness, good looks nor happiness.
Now, however, humanity is waking up in a wonderful manner to a recognition of its own failures. Everywhere there is widespread effort and intensive seeking going on in manifold directions. This effort is to be found not only among the leaders and teachers of the people but among the people themselves. The public interest in health, diet, physical culture, spiritualism and hundreds of other cults and movements shows the beginning of a powerful wave of progress which may sweep humanity upwards to the peak of a new Renaissance of a kind the world has never known before.
There are many today already caught in the throes of the birth of this coming Renaissance. They are tormented by the desire to know more of the inner meaning of life and the hidden issues to which they are so swiftly moving. One after another they take up the challenge of Life’s Riddle, and join the ever-growing band of seekers.
It is significant that this seeking should press into the realms of ‘religious’, ‘psychic’, ‘spiritualistic’ and ‘occult’ thought – in other words, the inner unseen world of causes. Man realizes that ‘science’, which had dealt so successfully with physical phenomena, has not yet succeeded in giving humanity any measure of happiness or safety. So he is at last determined to try to find his happiness by getting in touch with causes instead of effects, by seeking for the laws or truths, if any, which may lie behind the reactions of living things. He begins to sense the difference between knowledge and wisdom.
Knowledge is the result of an accumulation of facts, and its tendency is, through specializing, to isolate subjects one from another.
Wisdom is the deduction from these facts of useful laws, a process which can only take place by comparing the facts in one compartment with those in all the others, thus giving a vision of the whole.
When man becomes an individual seeker his first effort is to discover what he can of ‘facts’ connected with the fundamental truths of life. He wants proofs.
There are many people ready to admit him into the world of inner research. He is faced with a long and complicated pilgrimage. Wonderful promises are held out to him, he is assured of becoming a superman, with health, happiness, and power hitherto undreamt-of and hard for him to comprehend. He asks himself if all this can be true. If so, why is humanity still wallowing in such helplessness? In bewilderment he hesitates on the threshold of philosophy, Spiritualism, Christian Science or a dozen other cults and ‘isms’!
His inexperienced eyes are unable to detect the true from the false, and he is at the mercy of many people who seek to enlist him for their own pet cult, or who wish to make profit for themselves by trading upon his virgin curiosity and yearning. If he has a tendency to emotionalism or a love of the sensational, he will be an easy prey.
How, then, is he going to escape the many pitfalls and manage to keep upon the true path to an understanding and mastery of life?
These chapters have been written in an effort to provide the seeker with a simple guide-book for his pilgrimage to Truth, a concise and bird’s-eye view of the new universe which he is about to explore. It endeavours to help him to place each new discovery into its relevant position so that he, while gathering his store of knowledge, may develop wisdom, also, and learn those few essential secrets through which he may attain the poise, power and creativeness which will ultimately develop him into a superman.
The seekers who acquire and use this knowledge will be the builders of the new and promised Golden Age.
In this book an effort will be made to sort out, summarize and compare the ancient knowledge with modern science. Most of the statements made are capable of world-wide and extensive corroboration by trustworthy authorities, and can be verified by any reader who will care to give the time to it. He can satisfy himself by as many proofs as he has the patience and energy to seek and the intelligence to judge and sift.
The quest after Truth opens up an unimagined and wonderful new world to the seeker, so thrilling and so full of reward and interest that it is not within the power of human speech to portray it. Only the fringe of this absorbing search has been touched in these few pages, but even so this book contains the recipe for turning an ordinary human being into a superman, one who commands the means of success, happiness or personal fulfilment always within himself, and irrespective of all circumstances.
1938
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