Esoteric Teaching Introductory Seminar

The Vedic Science of Consciousness

by David Bruce Hughes

Part 1-B: Everything You Know is Wrong

Hello, I'm David Hughes; and this is the Esoteric Teaching Introductory Seminar continued. Last time I gave you a mantra, the dvādaśākṣara-mantra, the twelve-syllable mantra, om namo bhagavate vāsudevāya. Now you have the most powerful mantra but what will you do with it? Will you chant it with complete intensity, with perfect faith, with total concentration and commitment? No! Why not? remember its an issue of faith. The good news is you now have the most powerful mantra, the means of total freedom and spiritual salvation. The bad news is you will almost certainly not use this mantra to its full potential. You will not get the full benefit from the mantra. 

Why? It’s a matter of faith, you do not have 100% faith in the mantra; instead your faith is divided, it's scattered, distributed amongst so many different things. You're hedging your bets; have a little faith in this, have a little faith in that, maybe one of them will pan out and be a big winner. But it doesn’t work that way. To attain spiritual life, and especially to attain the highest destination of spiritual life, one must have full and perfect faith in a bona fide means of deliverance, and this is the mantra that I gave you. So how do we have full faith in any one thing? Well it’s a slow process; it just doesn’t happen over night, it’s a step-by-step process. So now we're going to begin this process by withdrawing your faith from false things and reposing your faith in something true, the Esoteric Teaching.

So every one of you already has faith, the problem is our faith is reposed in the wrong things, things that will cheat us, things that will not give us the most highest benefit, things that will keep us bound and illusioned in this material world. So we first have to accept the bad news. What is the bad news? It’s that everything you think you know about yoga, meditation and spiritual life is wrong. Everything you think you know has come to you from a tainted source, it has not come from the original teachings of yoga but from somebody else’s concoction, of some new idea manufactured in some human mind. 

The original source teachings of yoga and meditation are perfect, and they lead to deliverance. But everything we know, everything we have encountered about yoga, and especially in the West, has been put through a filter. And as this Seminar goes on we’ll discuss exactly how that works, and you’ll come to see that everything you think you know about yoga, meditation, tantra and spiritual life is actually wrong; it's actually false, it’s actually a trap to confuse you and defeat you in spiritual life.

So let's get down to specifics. There are three reasons why I say that everything you think you know about yoga and spiritual life is wrong. 

• One is, you have an insufficient quantity of knowledge. 
• Two is, whatever knowledge you do possess is inaccurate. 
• Three is, the knowledge you do possess is the wrong quality of knowledge. 

And I'll explain all of these one by one. 

There are compelling reasons why I make these assertions, and after we get through the entire Seminar, I'm sure you’ll agree that what I say is correct. So bear with me and keep an open mind, and try to understand I'm saying these things for your benefit.

The first thing I said is that you have insufficient knowledge. Whatever is known in the West about yoga and tantra is perhaps one tenth of one percent of everything there is to know about the subject. The source literatures of yoga and tantra simply haven’t been translated into English. Most of them are still in the original Sanskrit. Especially in tantra; tantra is a huge subject, a vast subject. There are thousands and thousands of tantras on different things, everything from how to build a house to how to farm to how to make flower airplanes that fly through other space dimensions. You can't imagine the breadth and scope of tantra. 

Oh and by the way in one tiny little corner of the tantric literature there’s something about how to make love and how to make good quality children. So why is it that in the West all we know about the tantric teachings is about sex? Didn’t that ever strike you as strange? It's because only a tiny fraction of the tantras, yogas and other Vedic literatures have been translated into English and very few of those have been translated accurately. 

Therefore I say your knowledge is incomplete. Whatever you know about yoga and meditation is only a tiny fraction of what’s to be known. But the good news is now you're taking the Esoteric Teaching Seminar and we will introduce you to the original source material on yoga, tantra, meditation and so many other things. You won't have to guess anymore, and you wont have to rely on imperfect translations because we have perfect translations that are accurate. 

The other good news that I have for you is that as the Seminar unfolds I’m going to tell you a fantastic story, a story that spans thousands of years of civilization on this planet, a much greater span of time than the so-called history that we learn in school, but the real story, the actual story that happened on this planet over tens and thousands of years of history. So you’ll hear stories about gods and demons and interstellar wars, about government conspiracies and great wars that span the galaxy all to win the hearts of the living entities through to one spiritual or another. 

By the time were done with this Seminar, your current knowledge on yoga and meditation will be like looking through a knothole in a fence compared to seeing the entire vista of the entire actual teachings. This seminar will open up for you a new perspective on life, yoga and spiritual things, and you’ll wonder how you ever did without it. In the end you will be able to see the force of a powerful spiritual agency, the Esoteric Teaching, on human life over thousands of years of different civilizations coming and going. And all that time the Esoteric Teaching has remained the same, and it has remained the civilizing force that’s driving all human history. So hang in here with us and hear this story of how the Esoteric Teaching actually shapes the course of human evolution.

Finally I promise you that in this Seminar you will have at least one "Aha!" experience where the whole room lights up and you realize "Oh, that’s why things are the way they are; that’s why my life is the way it is!" Probably you will have several or many of these experiences as we go on, because the things you going to hear here are things you’ve never heard before from any source, because were giving the original and complete Esoteric Teaching of yoga and meditation.