Religion and the Sacred Sciences – Dogma, Individuality, and Intuitive Creativity

Religion and Sacred Sciences have evolved over the years in such a way that they’ve come to mean different things. Religion is based primarily on embracing a belief system and accepting a literal interpretation of religious texts that are handed down to you by others, whereas Sacred Science is based on forming a fundamental understanding of scientific principles which are universal in nature. Religion tends to be group oriented and engaged in through a form of worship, whereas Sacred Sciences are something that’s usually individual and taken up through a form of private dedicated study and experimental application. Most religious doctrines are deciphered with an aim towards teaching the common person, who simply has to accept and adopt them as their own, forming a belief around them, whereas Spiritual Sciences requires constant study of various sacred doctrines while forming your own interpretations which you then dedicate yourself to applying and utilizing as a means of creating by using the higher capacities of your own mind. When an interpretation is made for us and given to us in place of knowledge derived from actual experience, it requires us to believe in it and have faith in something that exists outside of us. We have to look to others in order to know what’s true. It doesn’t require us to think for ourselves by forming our own interpretations through reasoning, which requires a general knowledge of several branches of science, philosophy, and the arts, only attained through constant study and inquiry.

In the spiritual realm, individuality and creativity are of the essence, and all true knowledge exists as laws and archetypal principles, all of which are universal in nature. Laws and archetypal principles are the basic creative processes and natural forces through which all things come into existence (are perceivable) by being conceived by the individual mind, where they’re developed into a unique variation as a reality that provides the means for experiencing it. What we call reality is formed through our ability to perceive it, and doesn’t exist independent of our mind. All Archetypes and creative forces are universal in nature, providing a dynamic template as a form of ideal or prototype for creating at the individual level as a personification. We’re always drawing on universal ideas and using them as the means for forming a personalized version of the same idea. All personal creations come as the result of a unique interpretation of what originates as a universal theme that’s naturally ingrained in the human psyche.

We have been led to believe that we’re not capable nor qualified to make accurate interpretations of spiritual doctrine because we lack the knowledge necessary to do so. This of course, is only partially true, because we’re not given the education that it requires through our formative conditioning or conventional schooling, and have to seek it out on our own through a deep desire for it. We form our own interpretations of universal ideas by filtering (reordering the information involved) and adapting them to our mental paradigm, forming them into a variation that makes them ideal for applying within our daily life as a means of creating. We always shape everything into an “image of ourselves” through our very perception of it, where we make it like us in terms of being of the same nature as we are, as a means of being able to perceive it in our outer world. Only what has been integrated into our mental paradigm through a fundamental and intuitive understanding of it can be utilized to create in the sense that it changes our very perception of reality and how we choose to conduct ourselves as a result.

There’s no absolute truth formed through a single interpretation or one way of looking at something. Absolute truth is only known through the universal laws and archetypal principles that are creatively at work in shaping how we experience the world around us. While the experience may vary significantly from person to person, the law shaping and animating it, remains the same. Spiritual knowledge is written in symbols, analogy, and allegory because it’s the universal language that’s ingrained in our subconscious mind, psyche, and genetic code. Spiritual wisdom is a living knowledge that’s always in a state of evolving into endless variations of itself as a creative flow of adaptation and modification. When we interpret things for ourselves, we adapt and modify the basic idea according to our age, maturity, stage of growth, level of education, culture, beliefs, values, preferences, memory of past experiences, and based on how and in what way we’re going to relate and apply the knowledge in our everyday life as a means of creating an experience of it. All ideas when translated by the individual to form a unique and personal version are ideal for that individual. There’s really no such thing as somebody else knowing and giving us our truth without any effort on our part. All truth, like all knowledge, is only known through a direct experience of it. All theory simply provides the basis for practice as experimentation designed to create an experience of it.

The story of Moses, for example, and how he attained what became known as the Ten Commandments (of Christian faith), originated as the 10 primary Universal Laws that were given to him by God (represented by fire) through a direct experience. These Laws were not rules meant to be handed down in a mindless way, only requiring the people to accept and obey them without questioning, but were a dynamic mathematical and philosophical system that laid out the creative process necessary for us to grow and evolve ourselves. When properly understood, they provide us with the road map for the dissension of our spirit into matter as a means of experiencing ourselves, and the resolution of matter back into spirit that translated our experiences into our soul’s eternal memory. The first time Moses came down from the mountain (which is symbolic in itself), he had 10 Laws written on sapphire tablets, and when he saw the people partying, engraving and worshipping idols, feasting on slain animals and fornicating, realizing the people were to ignorant and unintelligent to be able to comprehend them, he became enraged, and broke the tablets before ascending back up to the mountain top (symbolic of higher knowledge), where he converted them into rules and commandments that were written on ordinary stone. He delivered them instead as a form of dogma that told the people what to do, instead of requiring them the impossible task of thinking for themselves and being able to intuitively discern the laws in a way that would allow them to redeem themselves by utilizing them. This story illustrates the mindset of what became organized religion which acted to interpret Laws as rules for those who weren’t imbued with a higher mind and couldn’t do it on their own. In this way, the masses were trained to behave as a unified whole or group mind, just like animals that are unconscious and instinctual in nature exist in a herd mentality.

The human soul sojourns through life as the means of self-creating and evolving itself through its own creations. We all have full, 100% responsibility for our own creation. Nobody else is responsible for us, and we can’t blame inaccurate perceptions, bad decisions and destructive actions on other people. The term sin means to “miss the mark”, or think, perceive, and act out of error. As humans, we have both a higher divine, and lower animal nature. Our lower nature is equivalent to the animal kingdom which lacks the creative ability to think, decide, and willfully act in an individual fashion. It lives out of a group mind as a herd mentality, and fails to think for itself, and instead passively accepts the will and thoughts of others as its own, and lives out of other peoples ideas which it perceives to be more correct than its own. Just accepting the thoughts and ideas of others in a passive manner, and using them as your own to create and align yourself with, also fails to provide the means for developing the higher faculty of reasoning and intuition, which is necessary in order to form interpretations through clarity of thought.

Intuition comes by focusing on an idea in its symbolic universal form as its inner character and essence, sensing and perceiving its spiritual, invisible nature, while allowing a chain of association to naturally transpire in your imagination. By sensing its inner essence through a dynamic series of correspondences as variations for the same idea, we can simultaneously understand how it changes its outer appearance based on what type of situation or set of circumstances it’s adapted. This knowledge also allows us to understand how it changes form based on how it adapted to the individual mind and reshaped to fit harmoniously within their paradigm. A universal idea, which is an archetype or general prototype, changes appearance as a correspondence every time its conceived, applied or used to create. The outer appearance or material concept of an idea, formed through perception, doesn’t represent an ultimate truth in an of itself, it merely acts as the mental form or passive astral shell for spirit as law to inhabit and express through. The inner qualities apparent and outwardly expressing in any idea or entity, simply act to show us it’s true nature in terms of the mode of consciousness it actively engages in and uses to express.

Conventional religion as we know it today doesn’t teach law as a higher form of knowledge that require individual interpretation, where someone is encouraged to think for ourselves, but instead forms a standard interpretation that each individual merely has to accept and believe in as being the truth. It’s based on God as a supreme human figure that resides over mankind with the same emotional (lower) nature, only requiring worship and obedience. It ultimately teaches that we don’t have a direct connection to God, and have to go through the clergy of the church instead, who advise and guide us on what to do. Its designed and set-up to rule over mankind through a set of golden rules and dogmatic interpretation of those rules that appeal to and train people to remain locked within their lower nature, acting ignorantly out of a lack of understanding, incapable of thinking for themselves, reasoning, and making up their own mind in regards to the true nature of things. It promises salvation through blind acceptance of superior men having authority over us, and ultimately lays the foundation for slavery and spiritual condemnation.

Spiritual Sciences, often called Secret or Scared Sciences, teaches spiritual knowledge as or of God as being consciousness Itself in all its natural forms, and the laws and archetypal principles that govern and act to produce the entire material and subtle realms. It teaches the principles that can only be known by intuitively imagining them as an inner experience necessary to comprehend them in material form and provide the basis for practicing them. Knowledge as Laws and Principles are written in the universal language of symbolic imagery and dynamic systems that require individual interpretation in order to be understood and thereby applied as a practice of some kind. It honors and works by way of every interpretation, just like every individual, being a unique (evolving) variable (personal creation) of the same universal (archetypal) idea. It doesn’t imply a general lack of intelligence in terms of corralling the mass population into the same school of thought by telling them what to think and training them to a concept, but rather requires an extensive level of knowledge and intelligence in order to intuitively form your own interpretation of it.

The higher spiritual realms exist in polarity with the lower material realm, which is created and maintained by it through the laws that govern it. This is the realm of the higher conscious mind (Christ consciousness), which functions through rational thought, reasoning, judgment, and discrimination in being able to make it’s own decisions and then willfully bring them into fruition as a reality. This is the part of us that’s self-creating, self-perpetuating, and self-sustaining, also known as our higher self. This is the personal god that we’re always praying and talking to who is always with us, guides us, teaches us, and comforts us. We know it as our own inner voice, spiritual source, and inner visions that come as a form of premonition or prophecy. We have a direct inner connection that’s felt in our heart, and this is the part of us that’s our true and constant companion who never leaves us and that we turn to in our darkest moments for help and guidance. Whereas our lower subconscious, animal mind is dominant on the material plane of the Earth , and, lacking the capacities of the higher mind, doesn’t have the ability to reason, problem solve, think for itself, or make decisions that contradict or go outside of instinctual impulses. This is the part of us that lives out of the drama created through eradicate emotional states, which are usually nonsensical and a blatant misuse of the imagination, and exists as a part of the group mind of the collective unconscious. We only step into and embody our divine nature when we form a love and deep sense of connection with the spiritual realm over the material realm, and we use the higher capacities of our mind to think, evaluate, reason, decide, and act, and create ourselves as unique individuals, apart from and complementary to (of the same essence) other unique individuals.

When lower intelligence pursues spiritual knowledge, it does so through a system that has been laid out for it by another that it merely adopts as its own. It attracts to the higher spiritual ideal while still contained within and employing the instinct driven mind and lower level of consciousness. They don’t seek true knowledge by studying laws and philosophy, but rather grab onto someone else’s idea as an interpretation and claim it as their own. They’re not concerned with finding the truth inherent in all things, but rather being accepted by a group of their peers. They bring a sense of ignorance into the intellectual realms and argue that their interpretation, which is really someone else’s, is the correct one, and create an idea of themselves as being enlightened and therefore superior somehow. They fail almost entirely to realize and appreciate the value of diversity in terms of perception and unique ways of looking at the same idea. They’re not willing to devote themselves to pursuing higher knowledge through constant study and developing their own ideas about things, which is what’s required in order to attain it.

All symbolic imagery represents laws and principles as a dynamic composition of interrelated qualities and corresponding characteristics of the same nature, type or kind. Allegory is a story that serves as a metaphor for understanding how laws plays out as thematic patterns as a life experience. As children, this used to be expressed when after reading a story, we were asked what the ‘moral of the story was’. The moral contains the principle as a lesson taught through the nature and conclusion of the story. All stories have a dynamic cast of characters, all of whom form complementary relationships with each other in playing out a coordinated pattern that has a form of theme inherent in it. Each person in the story has a unique perspective, attitude, and reason for being in it, that drives and determines what type of experience they have based on their role. We only learn through experience, and so all stories have a lesson inherent in them that are metaphorical and different for each person participating in the same activities. The moral of a story isn’t necessarily what you should or shouldn’t do, but more about understanding what results from a series of decisions made for different reasons. A story that conveys a real life experience, is formed through the constant decisions and complementary interactions formed by each person in the story. The general dynamic as a greater pattern that connects everyone in forming the same type of experience, is a law or archetypal principle which is formed as a universal theme. The only value, meaning, or significance of a story is to identify the moral of the story as the principles operating to create it. Likewise, all metaphors merely represent laws as archetypes or scenarios that represent and are the active expression of a set of laws and principles.

A variety of spiritual systems have be set-up that are symbolic and analogous in nature, all of which form direct correspondences with each other, and provide us with the means for learning how to interpret all forms of symbolic imagery and archetypes. Some of the major systems, all of which represent the same group of fundamental universal laws and dynamically correspond to each other, providing keys for decoding them are: the Qabalah (Tree of Life); The Tarot (Book of Hermes); Astrology (Archetypes of the zodiac); Mythology (gods of human nature); subtle energy system of the body (microcosm); musical theory; color theory and the vibratory spectrum of light; Angels and Demons (natural forces); Architecture; Sacred Geometry (philosophical mathematics); the Hebrew alphabet; Numbers and mathematical equations; all of which represent qualities of consciousness as mental states and natural ways of being that have natural behaviors and distinct operations inherent in them. All of these systems are interrelated and form direct correspondences with each other, providing the keys necessary for intuitively interpreting the symbolic meaning they represent.

For example, the Major Arcane of the Tarot, based on 22 fundamental archetypal principles that symbolically illustrate the spiritual process involved in descending down a series of parallel planes, and then ascending back up the same planes, provides the key for decoding and interpreting the Qabalah. The Tarot lays out the same fundamental laws and principles using archetypes that represent mental states as a mode of consciousness, each of which play a necessary role in performing a greater process as an overall operation. The Hebrew alphabet and numbers associated with each archetype, directly correlate with astrological equations and planetary influences, geometric equations, colors, sounds, herbs, and aspects of the soul, mind, and subtle body, while also providing a rich array of other symbols related to each archetype that are also correlated with all other systems. Sacred Geometry is a philosophical mathematical system that represents the primary laws of form, function, and order that are the essential building blocks inherent in every aspect of life throughout the cosmos. These all form parts of a larger scientific system that’s universal in nature and always keeps the subtle and gross realms in a unified and holistic state.

In Spiritual Sciences each individual forms their own interpretation of universal ideas as the means of forming a personal variation of the same idea. We borrow from a universal source to create our own world of ideas. Even though our idea is unique in the sense of being by our own mind and therefor different from everyone else’s, it still holds true to the basic idea as a form of theme. The interpretation produced by the individual, is ideal for that individual based on their current level of understanding, which is necessary in order to utilize it in a beneficial manner. All knowledge is of Laws and Principles that can be perceived intuitively because they’re the invisible component that acts to organize the form, imbuing it with a distinct set of attributes, qualities, and characteristics, which determines how it behaves and what creative processes it naturally acts out as a means of expression. Intuition is systematically developed by learning how to perceive and interpret the invisible and unknown aspects of life through the relationship they form with the visible, known aspects. It develops the ability to intuitively perceive the inner nature of things, while connecting the dots of seemingly unrelated systems by forming a chain of association to other ideas of the same nature. It teaches you how to think, reason, evaluate, problem solve, calculate, strategize, make clear decisions, and use your will in applying what you learn. We only truly attain knowledge of any kind by applying it within our daily life to form an experience of it, and through the direct experience formed, we gain knowledge of it. Once we form an experience of it, we translate our experience into memory and it becomes a permanent part of us.

Our vibration as a quality and level of consciousness only changes by integrating new forms of knowledge as experiences, which serves to evolve our soul’s memory to a new level of understanding. It’s only through devoted daily practice maintained consistently over an extended period of time that we raise our vibratory frequency. Theory that’s not applied doesn’t alter or evolve us or our minds ability to perceive and comprehend higher forms of knowledge. It’s only by becoming one with divine knowledge as the nature of the spiritual realm that we increase our ability to resonate and be drawn up into higher dimensions. Whatever we equate ourselves with, we become like. Through experience, we associate with our experiences, shaping ourselves by how we relate and identify with them, and become by way of our associations. We are always the sole creator of our own experiences. By acquiring spiritual knowledge in theory, and using the theory as the means of applying it, we create an experience of it and absorb the knowledge as wisdom, becoming it in habit and memory, and as a consequence, we acquire the secret of ascension.

Dr. Linda Gadbois

Transpersonal Psychologist, Personal Transformation Coach, and Spiritual Teacher