In the same way that the Mithraic Ladder consists of seven steps, so too can the life of a human being. From an alchemical perspective, the human life can be divided into seven distinct stages, each with its own metal and patron gods. These seven ages of man constitute a life ideally lived.
The first age, from zero to 12, is analogous to lead. At this level, base survival is the most important concern of all. Children aged between zero and 12 have to learn not to fall off cliffs, not to run out in front of traffic, not to provoke dangerous animals/people, not to eat poison or to stick a fork in an electrical socket.
This is the realm of Saturn. Being in the realm of Saturn, things are very serious. There is no room for levity when you’re trying to teach a child not to get hit by a bus. Historically speaking, most people died in the first 12 years of life, mostly from childhood diseases. Thus there is a connection between Saturn and the Grim Reaper.
From 12 to 24, the relevant alchemical metal is tin. This is the realm of Jupiter, where joy is the natural state. This second alchemical age is achieved by anyone who survives the age of Saturn, i.e. the age of basic physical survival. No longer being concerned with death or dying, teenagers become primarily concerned with overcoming boredom.
All play and all games occur under the auspices of Jupiter, whose jovial nature embodies the frequency of recreation. Tin is brighter than lead; this represents the overcoming of the saturnine seriousness of the first age and the transmutation of dullness into brightness.
The years 24 to 36 are spent under the auspices of Mars, the god of iron. These years are when a man masters fighting and martial prowess. The peak fighting ability of most men will be during this age. Usually a man learns how to fight as an individual at the beginning of the age of iron. By the end of the age of iron, he could lead a century of men into battle.
Iron can carry a sharper edge than any other metal, hence it represents the basic masculine action of dividing. For millennia, an iron sword was the very emblem of strength and virility. Successful transmutation of tin into iron means that a man learns how to impose order upon the material world. Being able to impose order, he is now a warrior.
Venus rules the years from 36 to 48. Here the relevant metal is copper, representing romance and lovemaking. Having proven himself on the battlefield, here the alchemist has to prove himself with the trophy of battle: a woman. Hence the peak sexual market value of a man who has lived well is between these two ages (the less well one lives, the earlier one peaks).
Copper is both softer and more colourful than iron. This represents the age when man realises there is more to life than battle. Here he must soften because he must engage with his children instead of foes on a battlefield. So he softens, becomes funnier and less serious. Transmutation of iron to copper is about the change from warrior to family man.
From the years 48 to 60 man labours under Athena, the goddess of civic participation. Having raised his children so that they have successfully survived the gauntlet of lead in the first alchemical age, a man moves beyond his family and moves into a position of social power. Silver is more brilliant than copper, representing man’s broadening of focus from family to society.
Plato wrote in Republic that a man is ready for a political life at age 50. By the fifth alchemical age a man should have exhibited enough mastery over his life so far that other people want to be like him. He is not yet capable of radiating divinity but, under the auspices of silver, he can reflect it (as does the Moon). As such he can play a role bringing people together.
Between 60 and 72 a man is in the realm of mercury. Mercury is also the name of the god of the sixth alchemical age. Silver is transmuted to mercury by a process of quickening, in other words, through the entry of the divine into the material world. This is a minor form of illumination compared to the seventh age, but it’s powerful enough to have major effects.
This is the age of greatest temporal power. At the completion of the age of mercury a man might be an emperor with control over all the known world. Compared to a man of silver, a man of mercury has more gravitas and inspires more awe. Some might even consider him a demigod.
From age 72 to age 84 – or until the end of life – a man is in the realm of gold. Here he ought to fashion himself after Apollo, who represents perfection and illumination. In this age a man ought to learn how to radiate divine truth. Learning to do this is the secret of transmuting mercury into gold.
Ideally, a man reaching this stage would retire from all material concerns and focus entirely on readying himself for death. Temporal power has little appeal to those in God’s waiting room. Those who can grow old and die with grace and dignity can be said to have apotheosised, as Socrates did. Dying with the highest possible frequency brings the best chance of taking one’s place among the gods after death.
The example given in this article is idealistic. The actual life of any given alchemist will not progress this smoothly. Aspects of all seven ages are present in every age, and so a person can work the frequency of any stage at any time.
New Zealand is currently beset with the question of crime and punishment. The country appears torn between two failed approaches to justice: excessive softness and excessive hardness. Swinging back and forth between the two has led to great dissatisfaction with the Justice System and even talk of vigilante group formation.
Our attitude to justice reflects our moral confusion in the face of what has previously been called the Clown World Fork. Our basic morality is torn between two polar opposites: a wretched, pitiful, Christian doctrine of infinite forgiveness, and a sadistic, paranoid, bestial doctrine of utter destruction. Not having rational balance in our moral philosophy, we also don’t have it in our Justice System.
This has led us to a situation where gang member rapists get lighter sentences than people selling food without a licence. Outcomes like this are possible because we no longer have a shared sense of moral philosophy. There is no longer an agreed scale of heinousness, such that different crimes can be readily apportioned a length of punishment.
It’s time for a moral reset.
It’s time to admit that both Christianity and atheism are dead, and that neither are useful as moral philosophies any more. This means that it’s time to start experimenting with new philosophies. It’s obvious that some kind of new balance needs to be struck, between mercy and severity, for actual justice to be done.
In India there exists something that could be described as the sadhu system. In the sadhu system, criminals can repent by living a low-consumption lifestyle with a view to burning off accrued karmic debt, instead of going to prison. It’s a form of public repentance that New Zealand has no equivalent to. Perhaps we could benefit from one?
A New Zealand equivalent of the sadhu system would involve certain criminals, upon pleading guilty to a crime, to agree to forfeit the right to own property for a set period of time. In exchange, their basic food, clothing and shelter needs are met by the state, and they don’t go to prison or to home detention.
The logic is that many crimes, especially ones of property and violence, are ultimately motivated by egotism, and egotism is ultimately caused by a lack of spirituality. In other words, only a non-spiritual person would become so attached to the material world that they thought it was worth committing crimes to advance oneself here.
In the case of some criminals, dilemmas abound. Some are too dangerous to be allowed to roam the street, but at the same time there may be numerous downsides to sending them to prison. It’s apparent that a third approach is necessary.
This article suggests that certain criminals be offered the choice of prison or becoming part of a new, experimental sadhu system based on the Hindu model. This would entail that the criminal forfeit their right to own property or to accumulate wealth for a certain period of time, in exchange for agreeing to live as a spiritual penitent.
Indian sadhus use a lot of cannabis, which is known to be a spiritual sacrament that induces detachment from the material world. New Zealand sadhus could be given as much cannabis as they feel they need in order to develop beyond their innate clinging to the material world.
New Zealand doesn’t have many Hindu temples, so any introduction of a sadhu system might depend on the previous establishment of a national religion that can accommodate penitents. This might involve a new religion for the Age of Aquarius, such as Elementalism or similar. Perhaps funding could be directed to the construction of an Elementalist temple in every New Zealand town.
Elementalist temples in every town would mean that sadhus could travel as wandering ascetics from town to town, staying at the various temples and hanging out smoking cannabis with the Elementalist priests. These priests, trained in true psychology and not mere huckstering, will be able to help heal the souls of the various sadhus.
The advantages of such a system are many. For one, the Elementalist priests would serve as a kind of psychiatric service to the sadhus, helping them understand their place, and the place of humanity, in the grand scheme of creation. They would explain the laws of karma and the possible reasons for a lowly birth in this life.
The inevitable, knee-jerk reaction to this idea on the part of many is to bemoan the low productivity of the sadhus. But productivity and consumption go hand-in-hand. If we’re going to make a genuine effort to prevent the destruction of the Earth’s climate, we need to encourage people to live low-consumption lifestyles whenever possible.
A sadhu system could provide a neat and voluntary alternative path to rehabilitate criminals. We’re tried breaking them into submission and we’ve tried treating them like children – both approaches failed. Let’s try the spiritual approach, wherein we incentivise the criminally-minded to abandon the material world and to work on eliminating karmic debt.
This article is about how to engage pain appearing at a physical or emotional level. Fortunately, the process is much the same. I will maintain a focus on the inside view of pain, and what we can do about it. I would ask that the reader at least temporarily suspend their beliefs and views about anything theoretical regarding what pain is or where it comes from. It can be easy to rationalise or intellectualise our suffering, and in so doing, we can miss the opportunity to simply meet it on its own terms.
I have had a lot of experience with pain, mostly the emotional variety. I have never broken bones, but I have been through overwhelming grief and trauma. I have found this to be one of the most oppressive forms of pain. Since physical pain can often have a sense of being implacable once we see it is not moving anywhere, we can come to accept it to a certain degree.
Mental or emotional pain is different in that it can be very difficult to accept. We often feel very strongly that it simply shouldn’t be there, or that if we could only just think the right thought or occupy the right philosophical perspective then it could be cast out like a phantom, banished with a perfectly recited magic spell.
I have found that this kind of ongoing vacillation in non-physical suffering is precisely what keeps me tethered to it. It is not only the view that perhaps it should not be happening, that things ought to have developed differently in my life, but also the desperate hope that there may be some kind of salvation by way of a previously unconsidered solution.
We do everything we can think of to try to manage or subdue mental and emotional pain. One person’s meditation practice may be used in the same way that another person uses alcohol. In this case, are the means of escape necessarily better or worse, from an inner perspective? In frustration, we beg to be relieved or numbed in any way possible. I have watched myself go through these cycles of torment many thousands of times, frequently tempting me to at least consider taking the most extreme of measures.
However, I continue to have faith in the value – not of pain, not even of endurance or stoicism – but of our innate capacity to simply wakefully meet what is actually here. I don’t just mean here with me, but also the ‘here’ which you are assigned to experience indefinitely. I would contend that nothing is as important as where you are, here and now. This moment offers every tool for meeting that which it contains. Allow me to unpack this a little further.
We have a bevy of helpful perspectives, and many of them may be quite true, such as ‘pain is temporary’, or ‘we are more than just this form or our experiences’. Relatively true though these things may be, we must examine what the immediate value of such a position is relative to our immediate experience of pain.
Are we employing our confidence in the truth these things point to in order to make what appears here and now seem more bearable, for hopes of a brighter future?
As a seasoned sufferer, I have discovered that the most meaningful invitation in all of this is the invitation to simply stop and stand back. This includes weighing up whether you are a victim, whether there is justice in your suffering, and whether anything will ever get better or worse. I would like people to really take a look for themselves at how all of the psychological methods we have at our disposal for negotiating with this pain are actually ingeniously devised to draw our attention away from experiencing what is present to us emotionally here and now.
This can be a sobering discovery. I have watched myself and others suffer for a very long time, with an intensely keen interest in how and why we experience such pain. I had not learned a single thing of value until I stopped running from this pain it and met it where it sat within me, on its own terms. Easier said than done, to be sure, but here is what I have learned about the process this far.
Every instance of pain has an inside and an outside, and at least a potential narrative attached to it. If it doesn’t have one, the mind is extremely quick in manufacturing one. So, we have a story attached, often an angry story, or maybe a melancholic ‘woe is me’ tale. I don’t want to talk about whether the story is true, but what I do want to address is the simple fact that the application of the story is significant. This application is dysfunctional whether the story being told has a basis in fact or not – it is false in its foundational assumption.
The effect of this is to upgrade pain to what we call suffering. This is sustained pain in its unexamined and therefore potentiated form. The story allows it to breath like a fire, drawing in more oxygen making itself larger and more powerful.
All life must involve some degree of pain, but we have a massive influence over the degree to which pain becomes suffering. If you allow the pain to filter through your mind, it seems as if your entire field, your ‘am-ness’, your Self, is flooded with pain. Everything in the value of being in this moment is then hidden from view, occluded like a total lunar eclipse.
So, you do not allow it to filter through the mind. Instead, you occupy the witness state.
The story isn’t always easy to drop. What I would recommend you focus upon, again, based on my own experience, is not trying to drop the story. This effort can result in very little headway, and tends to also accompany frustration and self-punitive thoughts. Rather, direct your effort of attention to understanding the story.
By understanding, I also mean seeing through the story. To understand it means to step back and see where your pain fits in. Illusion is always transparent from some angle; it is usually just a case of rotating the object of our attention enough to get a clear view of its insubstantial nature. Why is this human pain there, what are the conditions of it? Do other people also have it? For what reasons? What was misunderstood?
So, I put it that it is critical to understand, not to renounce or revoke. You will not progress by renouncing or avoiding your feelings, no matter how upset you are, and no matter how justified or unjustified you think those feelings are. We are so used to meeting things we don’t want in the world with push-back – what happens inside us has a totally different dynamic that you will begin to see after a while if you spend enough time in there. Resistance will trap you, but acceptance and understanding will free you.
I will give an example of how a story can be sustained by ignorance and then challenged through inquiry. Remember that this story, being a narrative as accompanying the pain, while not necessarily causing the entirety of the pain, is what nonetheless promotes and sustains it, thereby elevating the pain to the status of suffering.
Here is an important inquiry rule which i have found indispensable. If there is suffering within you, then there is always something false that has been invested with your belief. In my thousands of hours of self-inquiry, this rule has proven true. I invite you to test this for yourself. The discovery, if you happen upon it, will possibly spark an inner revolution, but this cannot have value as a second-hand insight, you really need to see it for yourself in order for it to yield any effect. This gives you an important method for distinguishing pain from suffering and truth from falsehood.
I will provide some examples.
Say you value a relationship, and that relationship ends for whatever reason. There will in most instances be some form of pain, to a greater or lesser degree. Suffering may take root in a pronounced way when stories about this break-up begin to play in repeat. Common examples of the kinds of thoughts you may find yourself investing and believing in: I was not good enough to love. I was not worthy. No one will ever love me. I am a failure. I am not worthy of love from anyone else. I am ugly.
These can go on as far as the imagination will allow.
This tendency to problematise our pain must be present very early on. I remember being a child and doing this myself from as soon as I was capable of thought. I remember having arguments with my parents and wanting the pain to escalate into bittersweet suffering. Although it was completely uncalled for and totally unnecessary, I would take simple situations of not being permitted to do something, and then berating my mother with accusations such as “You wish you had an abortion”, “You wish you never had me”, and “You wish you gave me away for adoption”.
It is relatively easy to see as an adult how immature and baseless these reactive forms of lashing out are. It is a far more demanding task to see how the very same energies behind those immature reactions have insinuated themselves into our long-term thoughts and behaviours. The same energy feeds various manifestations of spite, resentment and acts of microaggression. In my adult life, I found that same energy translated into throttling my emotional availability to people based on whether I was in a good mood, or whether they were acceptable to me based on their looks, their behaviour, attitude towards me or what they could do for me. This is no way to live.
I didn’t know it at the time of childhood, because it was shrouded in darkness, but what I was really doing in this exercise was worshipping pain in order to allow it to become suffering, like someone thirsty for destruction throwing petrol onto a fire. It was of course completely unnecessary, because if I had known the fundamentals of experiencing human energy, I could have simply dealt with the pain of having my wants and desires thwarted without complicating the process and creating further turmoil for my family.
Where it becomes suffering, at least psychologically, I have discovered that it always relates to what is illusory, that which is false. What is false can always be subjected to the scrutiny of self-inquiry. In my childhood, I didn’t need to go to war with my ignorance and my false belief. If anything, I needed to see through the falsity of my claims, to make the falsehood transparent before my psyche. That would have resulted in understanding, and therefore relief of suffering.
I had no discipline at this stage of life, of course, but even so, occasionally there would be merciful spontaneous insights that resulted in the occasional relief of suffering. The availability of the promise of wisdom was never far away, even when all seemed encompassed in a pall of darkness.
These lessons of childhood are repeated for us in many similar ways in our adult lives with all of our relationships. I expected to grow into an adult one day and magically become a functional human being, but this isn’t how it works, as anyone with an interior life will have discovered for themselves. It usually takes a will, directed attention and a desire to understand our encounters that leads to wisdom.
It is possible to face the same situations over and over and react in precisely the same dysfunctional way indefinitely. This would lead to misery, because the failure to embrace understanding and wisdom is therefore, by the same movement, the welcoming of illusion and falsehood and therefore suffering.
As a child, in my situation, ideally, I could have applied a simple measure of self-inquiry in the following manner: why is it so important that I always get what I think I want? Does that rest on some universal truth, or is it something about my mind that is making demands of the world? Who else should be in pain because I do not get what I want? These are always relevant questions.
If we look again at the situation in which a person may have experienced grief from a relationship break up, the very same sobering questions can lead to understanding, even if it is only seeing how were stuck in the same patterns that repeat over and over. Remember, it is always falsehood that leads us to believe anything that causes us undue psychological torment. You will see this is if you look close enough. Bringing the power of this inquiry to bear is then like a healing balm to our pain.
For example, instead of berating myself for how dysfunctional or ugly or unworthy I am that may have led me to being abandoned by a partner, I could ask the following questions honestly of myself: under what conditions would I leave a partner? Does that mean that this other person is never capable of change? Does it mean that just because I have my own reasons for leaving them that they are inherently unlovable, unworthy, or permanently incapable of change? What is the part of me that needs to be loved or approved of by another in order to feel loved and worthy? If I really messed things up and I am indeed personally responsible, is there any universal law that forbids me from not only learning from my mistakes, but forgiving myself for the pain I caused myself and others? Was my love for that person the one thing that gave them value, or is there something else of value in them? So what about me?
There are many other forms of inquiry possible, but these are simply a few that strike at the heart of how and why suffering may be experienced, and introducing a sense of calm, honest objectivity to what can very often be emotionally reactive, volatile and subjective. This is impossible without your will. As we know, you can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make him drink. The wisest teachers in all of history can do nothing for a person who does not have the will to look for themselves.
When you are experiencing pain, as we all do, it is important to remember that we do not need to banish the pain. We do not need to get rid of our feelings, however painful they happen to be in the moment. What does benefit us is the wisdom inquiry brings. The expectation that our spiritual practice will banish our pain I have found to not be a reasonable or mature expectation. Oddly enough, we don’t even need to arrive at answers most of the time. Often simply asking the pertinent questions can be enough to bring a sober sense of wakefulness to a pattern of reactivity or entrenched self-involvement.
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Simon P Murphy is a Nelson-based esotericist and philosopher, and author of His Master’s Wretched Organ, an astonishing and surreal collection of weird fiction stories.
If one divides the world’s major religious traditions into Dharmic, a Taoic and an Abrahamic blocs, some patterns start to appear. If one defines the Dharmic religions as Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, and the Abrahamic religions as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, then differences from across the Mithraic Ladder become evident.
Some of the differences are entirely physical, such as the fact that the Dharmic religions originated in the Indian subcontinent, while the Abrahamic religions originated in the Middle East.
Another mundane difference exists when it comes to rituals. The Dharmic religions have many rituals, including bathing in holy rivers, prayer cycles, meditation, yoga, festivals, and pilgrimage. The Abrahamic religions also have specific practices like prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage, but not as many or complex as in Dharmic religions.
Major differences also exist when it comes to holy books. The Dharmic religions have multiple holy books like the Vedas, Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, Tripitaka, Guru Granth Sahib, etc. The Abrahamic religions have one primary holy book, which is the Torah for Judaism, the Bible (Old and New Testaments) for Christianity, and the Quran for Islam.
The content of those holy books is also different. Abrahamic books tend to focus on hatred of outsiders, emphasising how non-believers need to be destroyed. They exalt their followers and emphasise the supremacy of Yahweh. Dharmic books tend to reveal spiritual and philosophical secrets.
Furthermore, the attitude towards those books is different. In the Dharmic religions, it’s acknowledged that wisdom can be found outside of any one particular book. In the Abrahamic religions, the one primary holy book is frequently declared to be the only valid source of wisdom. Wisdom from other books is usually dismissed as worthless.
Related to the above is the differing historical example. The Abrahamic religions spread by violence and trickery, and destroyed all other religious or spiritual traditions by murdering their priests and desecrating their holy sites. Dharmic religions were different – they tended to spread by word of mouth.
Yet another difference relates to prophets and messengers. The Dharmic religions do not necessarily believe in the concept of prophets and messengers like the Abrahamic religions. However, Buddhism acknowledges Buddha as an enlightened teacher, and the Jains have 24 Tirthankaras who are not prophets per se but rather role models.
The main reason for this difference is that the Dharmic religions believe that it’s possible for any person, being an expression of the divine, to reconnect with the divine. Therefore, no prophets or messengers are necessary. The Abrahamic religions, being political in nature, believe that people must go through an intermediary in order to make such a reconnection. Truth is outside of oneself and therefore one needs guidance from religious authorities.
As such, the Abrahamic religions have numerous prophets and messengers such as Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Their teachings are considered superior to anything any one person could come up with themselves. As with holy books, anyone who questions any of these prophets is considered evil and fit to be destroyed.
The theological differences between Dharmic religions and Abrahamic religions are numerous, but there are two major ones.
The first relates to the belief in God. The Dharmic religions do not necessarily require belief in one supreme God but acknowledge multiple gods and goddesses or non-theistic philosophies like Buddhism and Jainism. Some, like Hinduism, are henotheistic, meaning that the multiple gods are both considered real and considered expressions of God (this is also similar to the Elementalists beliefs described in Elemental Elementalism).
The Abrahamic religions, on the other hand, believe in one supreme God. Anyone believing in gods is a heretic and must be destroyed. This has the ultimate effect of reducing conceptions of God down to the crudest, lowest-resolution savagery. People become afraid to even speak of God lest they attract punishment.
The second major theological difference relates to the concept of an afterlife. The Dharmic religions believe in reincarnation and karma, where one’s actions in this life determine their future lives. The Abrahamic religions believe in a judgment day when God will judge humankind based on their deeds and grant Heaven or Hell accordingly.
The doctrine that a person might have only one incarnation on this Earth – after which one earns either eternal Heaven or eternal Hell – creates an enormous amount of fear in those who believe it. But that fear is precisely the purpose. Like other Abrahamic doctrines, the purpose is to induce submission, to reduce the population to spiritual slavery.
All of these differences reflect the single largest and profoundest difference between the two religious families: the Dharmic religions are natural, while the Abrahamic religions are unnatural.
The Dharmic religions are those spiritual practices that arise naturally, inspired by the connections that people inherently have with their own souls. Being natural, they involve the use of any and all spiritual sacraments found in the nearby physical environment. This is why cannabis has been used by the Vedic and Hindu traditions, and magic mushrooms by several mystery schools, of which the Eleusinian Mysteries are the foremost.
The Abrahamic religions, by contrast, are a form of spiritual terrorism that originated in ancient Babylon, or perhaps even before then, and which have sought to separate people from their own souls. They are unnatural creations, which is why Abrahamic cultists have to put so much effort into forcing them on other people and winning converts from the spiritually lost.
