The following 25 principles of spiritual freedom are by an unknown author:

1: Life does not work through indecision. Indecision promotes blocks, confusion and stress. Make a decision and allow life to find movement through you. Trust yourself.

2: The 3 C’s of life are Courage, Capacity and Commitment. It takes Courage and a commitment to make many of life’s decisions, and capacity to follow them through. The 3 C’s of a successful relationship are Caring, Consideration and Communication. Communication opens the door between us, consideration allows us to pass through it and our ability to care for each other unites us.

3: Truth is not truth out of timing- yet it remains truth. We are the timing to recognize truth.

4: The mind recoils from the unknown, so we seek to make everything known, and, thus sage. Imagination is the key to the unknown- positive, uplifting imagination.

5: For as long as we search for Our God Self, we deny that we are it. Loving your self reveals your truth.

6: Becoming free is not changing yourself into someone you think you should be. Becoming free is falling in love with who you are- right now.

7: Imagine a room of pitch dark and a room of bright light connected by a door. When you open the door what happens? Light floods into the dark room, illuminating it. Live accordingly, think thoughts of light.

8: F.E.A.R- False Evidence Appearing Real

9: Anything of the past that is unresolved is unresolved now. Living NOW resolves the past.

10: Life flows from the inside out, never the reverse. Understand this and you cease to be a victim.

11: Love responds- fear reacts. Love connects- fear separates. Love uplifts- fear deflates. Love creates- fear destroys.

12: There is no such thing as a mistake- only experience. There is no such thing as failure- only people’s condemnation. There is no such thing as success- only people’s approval. Let life live through you.

13: Do not get caught up in modifying your life, allow life to change YOU. Modification is a superficial exterior veneer, change is an inner shift in consciousness.

14: Pain is a measure of your resistance to change.

15: Decide whether you want to be an onlooker of life or a participant. This is the birthplace of choice.

16: You hear with your ears- but you listen with your mind. You look with your eyes- but you see from the heart.

17: Consciousness is not contained in your body- you are the consciousness that contains the body. Consciousness draws to itself form through which to express

18: Your mind cannot exist in the moment. You cannot think your way into the moment, you can only think your way out of it. This indicates that your mind/intellect cannot set you free. Only your consciousness is aware of NOW. True freedom is a state of consciousness.

19: We each live in our own universe, a universe of our making. It is designed to support our beliefs and our focus. Our thoughts are our focus, so observe your thoughts, focus on your blessings, and trust. This is how you become a participant.

20: Practise seeing all life around you as an aspect of yourself. In this way you shatter the illusion of separation.

21: Your mind does now know the difference between what you do want or what you don’t want, it only knows what you focus on. Many people focus on what they don’t have, what they are incapable of doing and their sicknesses.

22: If you focus on what you do have, it increases. If you focus on what you don’t have, you will have even less. If you focus on your capabilities, they grow, if you focus on your health, it improves.

23: Your mind does not know the difference between a powerfully imagined reality and a physical happening reality. Why? Because there is no difference.

24: You only have a problem if you believe you have a problem.

25: Live these principles and you will be practising reality. Practise reality until you overcome the illusion. It is only an illusion that you are not free, now!

The author of the following 14 rules for being human is unknown. They represent the condensed wisdom of ages and remind us of things we already know, but have a habit of forgetting:

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it’s the only thing you are sure to keep for the rest of your life.

2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called “Life on Planet Earth”. Every person or incident is the Universal Teacher.

3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of experimentation. “Failures” are as much a part of the process as “success.”

4. A lesson is repeated until learned. It is presented to you in various forms until you learn it: then you can go on to the next lesson.

5. If you don’t learn easy lessons, they get harder. External problems are a precise reflection of your internal state. When you clear inner obstructions, your outside world changes. Pain is how the universe gets your attention.

6. You will know you’ve learned a lesson when your actions change. Wisdom is practice. A little of something is better than a lot of nothing.

7. “There” is no better than “here”. When your “there” becomes a “here” you will simply obtain another “there” that again looks better than “here.”

8. Others are only mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another unless it reflects something you love or hate in yourself.

9. Your life is up to you. Life provides the canvas; you do the painting. Take charge of your life, or someone else will.

10. You always get what you want. Your subconscious rightfully determines what energies, experiences, and people you attract; therefore, the only foolproof way to know what you want is to see what you have. There are no victims, only students.

11. There is no right or wrong, but there are consequences. Moralizing doesn’t help. Judgments only hold the patterns in place. Just do your best.

12. Your answers lie inside you. Children need guidance from others; as we mature, we trust our hearts, where the Laws of Spirit are written. You know more than you have heard or read or been told. All you need to do is to look, listen, and trust.

13. You will forget all this.

14. You can remember any time you wish.

Here is an extract from the Preface to my book, The Nirvaneans, which is being published by Humdrumming some months hence:

An American study showed that a majority of people claimed to have had spiritual experiences, but that a significant number did not want to repeat them. Even just a glimpse of our real self-nature overturns every canon of the materialist world-view, and that can be deeply challenging to some.

Reality is clearly multi-layered, at least in texture. Quantum physics recognized the fact when it built in an infinite number of dimensions to its mathematical equations. The danger of this particular approach, though, is that the further we stray from direct experience, the less our speculations are worth in any practical sense. Many of our religious woes are caused by misreading texts which sought to hide the secrets of our nature from the uninitiated. A simple adherence to phenomenology would make a difference to our understanding of many of the inscrutable mysteries of life.

Alan Watts once wrote : “It is especially important for Westerners to understand that high lamas, Zen masters, and Hindu gurus…are human beings, not supermen. We must not put them, as we have put Jesus Christ, on pedestals of reverence so high that we automatically exclude ourselves from their state of consciousness.”

In trying to make these pages accessible to readers of all religions and none, I have risked a sprinkling of revised terms, mainly to avoid some of the coinage of religious discourse. Words like Cosmosity, nirvanean, and nirvanoception appear from time to time. The context should explain their meaning: for example, a Nirvanean is someone who has achieved the nirvanic viewpoint, while Cosmosity is “supreme spiritual enlightenment”—“divinization” to Christians and others. Similarly, just as we exercise perception (of the bodily senses) and conception (of the mind) in our everyday affairs, so we utilize nirvanoception when we experience Nirvana. The difference between it and our physical knowing, is that body-mind uses a “point consciousness” while nirvanoception is “space consciousness”.

I believe these states are equally valid from all religious points of view. Differences appear, as always, because of competing terminologies.

This subject has received sustained psychological analysis and research over three millennia in the East. If we are to understand our Western traditions better—and Christianity is in dire need of that, I believe—we should not hesitate to study the proto-scientific techniques of Gautama Buddha and others, and freely import their ideas, especially if they cast useful light on our own tangled mystical insights.

The method I have used throughout is to investigate the lives of nirvaneans, in addition to their words. Actions speak more compellingly than language ever does, and Nirvana shapes its children in special ways for specific endeavours.

Part One looks at Nirvana in all its aspects. The first chapter seeks a comprehensive definition of the word. Readers shy of long definitions may skip all but the first page or two. Chapter 2 probes the state of Nirvana and nirvanic experiences, citing actual descriptions of them.

Part Two gets to grips with the lives, works and words of the nirvaneans themselves. The selection covers Japan and China, 20th-century India and modern Europe.

The objective of this volume is to demystify Nirvana, not in any reductive sense, but simply to cast a fresh light and, dare one hope, ease our progress towards it.

With the publication of the National Geographic translation of the newly-discovered Gospel of Judas, plus the issues developed in Dan Brown’s novel , don’t conventional Christians feel under pressure these days? No, not everyone does.

The Revend Robin Griffith-Jones, a 49-year-old Anglican cleric, is the present Master of the Temple, a 12th-century church near Fleet Street in London named after its founders, the Order of the Knights Templar. Readers of Dan Brown’s novel will know that the Master of the Temple plays a role in the book.

The Times (London) today interviews the Master about Da Vinci, the Temple, his own book about Brown’s novel and the role played in it by his small church. Griffith-Jones has some remarkable and, to some, quite surprising things to say.

On John’s Gospel, for example:

Griffith-Jones seems agnostic on the issue. He claims that John, rather than giving an eye-witness account, was trying to bring the story alive to early Christians as a series of faith-affirming surprises, the last and greatest experienced by Mary in the garden on Easter Day. In that case, I say, aren’t Brown and St John both really novelists? “No! Good heavens, they don’t read like novels! … Like [Dan] Brown, then, Griffith-Jones is trying to rescue Mary Magdalene from centuries of error and fear. His next book will be about her and the role of women in the early Church.

But is he “glad Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code“. “Yes, in the larger setting of the responses that it’s made possible from churches. In itself, it just sort of hangs there and can mislead people, but it does give an astonishing opportunity for churches to respond and clarify things in an open and upbeat way, and for that I’m very glad.”

So what are the gospels? “We must rediscover them as forms of mystagogic texts.” Mystagogic? “Initiating the reader into a mystery. Once you recognise that this is what the texts are, they come alive in a most humane way.”

Indeed. That’s the secret that the Gnostics knew, but the early church, founded as it was on political imperatives, did not. We suffer from that missing element to this day.

The Da Vinci Code and the Secrets of The Temple, by Robin Griffith-Jones is published by the Canterbury Press in the UK.

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