Inititation in Everyday Life

If we want to make something of our life and we need ideas, we enter a crowded market of philosophies, world views, religions, sects, gurus, practical psychology, self-help, positive thinking, NLP and mental health. There are idealists and realists on that market of ideas, traditionalists and revolutionaries, romantics and cynics, more artistic and more scientific minds.

I myself grew up in a family with interest in the occult. I read about etheric bodies and astral worlds before I had any knowledge of more earthly matters.

After a long study of occult literature, I concluded that nearly everyone plagiarized from everyone else and that practically all claimed having uncovered a part of the fundamental truth. To bring some order in this bewildering array of occult writings, and to separate the chaff from the wheat, I found a good tool in semantics.

The overwhelming part of the occult literature is so fuzzy, that there is nothing to analyze or verify whatsoever. Of the remainder we can at least ascertain what is intrinsically consistent, i.e. does not collapse from inner inconsistencies. I found that most occult literature could be discarded.

While I was trying to carefully separate possible sense from sure nonsense, the many new converts to esotericism took everything for gospel. Recently, we have seen courses about chakras for business managers, pouring third-rate ‘knowledge’ over the participants. People babble about ‘centuries-old knowledge,’ fabricated by 19th century authors with ancient pseudonyms. Even authors who explicitly admitted that they used their imagination, are presented as sources of ancient knowledge.

Amateurish channelling is everywhere, full of starters mistakes that have already been exposed around 1860 by, of all people, the spirits themselves. Newfangled psychics babble away without a care in the world, and make fundamental mistakes that have been listed and analyzed already a century ago. My own development is clear: from esotericism to common sense. I found the roads of psychic research tortuous, but rewarding; while the esoteric roads were highways into quicksand. This traveller is a survivor.

In this book I try to put some aspects of the spiritual in an ordinary, day-to-day framework, and some seemingly ordinary aspects of daily life into a spiritual framework. Spirituality not as something that we should seek or find, but as something that finds us – anyway, anyhow.

The art of living, consecration and initiation are the three ways open to us to refine and elevate ourselves – if we want that. This book explores initiation and the art of living, and only touches upon consecration.