Daily Archives: February 6, 2022

Essene Wisdom #9

Peace With Humanity

This is the fourth of the Sevenfold Peace that the Essenes taught to overcome all limitations and contact the universal Source, the same Source with which the great masters throughout the ages have united their consciousness when they gave forth their intuitive teaching showing man how to become conscious of the Law, understand it, work with it, and manifest it in action.

The fourth peace of the Essenes referred to harmony between groups of people, to social and economic peace.

Mankind has never enjoyed social peace in any age in history. Man has always exploited man economically, oppressed him politically, and suppressed him by military force. The Essenes knew these injustices were caused by deviations from the law. The very same deviations that produce inharmony in man’s personal life, in his acting, thinking and feeling bodies, produce wealth and poverty, masters and slaves, social unrest.

The Essenes regarded both riches and poverty to be the result of deviations from the law.

Great wealth, they considered, is concentrated into the hands of the few because man’s exploitation of man, in one way or another has caused misery for both suppressor and suppressed. The many feel hatred and its kindred destructive emotions. Thus produces fear in the hearts of the exploiters, fear of revolt, fear of losing their possessions, even their lives.

Poverty was held to be an equal deviation from the law. A man is poor because of wrong attitudes of thinking feeling and acting. He is ignorant of the law and fails to work with the law. The Essenes showed that there is abundance for everyone; of all that a man needs for his use and happiness.

Limitations and over-abundance are both artificial states, deviations from the law. They produce the vicious circle of fear and revolt, a permanent atmosphere of inharmony, affecting the thinking, feeling and acting bodies of both rich and poor, continually creating a state of unrest, war and chaos. This has been the condition throughout recorded history.

The rich and the poor alike suffer the consequences of their deviations.

The Essenes knew there was no escape from this cycle of oppression, hatred and violence, wars and revolutions, except through changing the ignorance of the individuals in the world. They know it takes a long time for an individual to change his ideas, thinking and habits and learn to cooperate with the law. The individual himself has to do the changing; nobody else can do it for him.

But a higher and higher understanding of the law can be brought about gradually, the Essenes believed through teaching and example. They taught a quite opposite way of existence from either poverty or great wealth. They demonstrated in their daily lives; if man lives according to the law, seeks to understand the law and consciously cooperate with it he will know no lack. He will be able to maintain an all-sided harmony in every act, and thought and feeling and he would find his every need fulfilled.

The solution that the Essenes offered for social and economic harmony can be applied in every age, the present as well as the past. It contained four factors:

  • Separating from the chaotic conditions of the mass of mankind that refers to obey natural and cosmic law.
  • Demonstrating a practical social system based on natural and cosmic law.
  • Communicating these ideas to the outside world through teaching, healing and helping others according to their needs.
  • Attracting to their communities other individuals who are sufficiently evolved to be willing to cooperate with the law.

The Essenes withdrew from the inharmony of cities and towns and formed brotherhoods on the shores of lakes and rivers where they could live and work in obedience to the law. They established there economic and social systems based wholly on the law. No rich and no poor were in their brotherhoods. No one had need of anything he did not have; and no one had an excess of things he could not use. They considered one condition as deteriorating as the other.

They demonstrated to humanity that man’s daily bread, his food and all his material needs can be acquired without struggle through the knowledge of the law.

Strict rules and regulations were unnecessary for all lived in accord with the law. Order, efficiency and individual freedom existed side by side. The Essenes were extremely practical as well as highly spiritual and intellectual.

They took no part in politics and adhered to no political factions, knowing that neither political nor military means could change man’s chaotic condition. They showed by concrete example that exploitation and oppression of others were completely unnecessary.

Many economic and social historians have considered the Essenes the world’s first social reformers on a comprehensive scale.

Their brotherhoods were partly cooperative. Each member of the group had his own small house and a garden large enough for him to grow whatever he especially desired. But he also took part in communal activities wherever his service might be needed, such as in the pasturing of animals, planting and harvesting of crops most economically grown on an extensive basis.

They had great agricultural proficiency, a thorough knowledge of plant life, soil and climatic conditions. In comparatively desert areas they produced a large variety of fruits and vegetables of the highest quality and in such abundance they periodically had a surplus to distribute to the needy. Their scientific knowledge was such that they could do all of this in a comparatively few hours each day, leaving ample time for their studies and spiritual practices.

Nature was their Bible. They considered gardening educational, a key to the understanding of the whole universe, revealing all its laws, even as does the acting body. They read and studied the great book of nature throughout their lives, in all their brotherhoods, as an inexhaustible source of knowledge, as well as of energy and harmony. When they dug in their gardens and tended their plantings they held communion with the growing things, the trees, the sun, soil, rain, from this forces they received their education, their pleasure and their recreation.

One of the reasons for their great success was this attitude towards their work. They did not considered it as work but as a means of studying the forces and laws of nature. It was in this that their economic system differed from all others.

The vegetables and fruits they produced were only the incidental results of their activities; their real reward was in the knowledge, harmony and vitality that they gained to enrich their lives. Gardening was a ritual with them; a great and impressive silence reigned as they worked in harmony with nature creating veritable kingdoms of heaven in their brotherhoods.

Their economic and social organizations was only one phase of their whole system of life and teaching. It was considered a means to an end and not an end in itself. There was thus a dynamic unity and harmony in all their activity, their thoughts and feelings and deeds. All gave freely of their time and energy without mathematical measuring of one another’s contribution.through this harmony within each individual, the individual’s evolution progressed steadily.

The Essenes knew it takes many generations to effect any change in people or in mankind as a whole, but they sent out teachers and healers from their brotherhoods whose lives and accomplishments would manifest the truths they taught and little by little increase mankind’s understanding and desire to live in accord with the law. The Essene Brotherhood at the Dead Sea for many centuries sent out teachers as John the Baptist, Jesus and John the Beloved. They warned again and again of the consequence of man’s social and economic deviations from the law. Prophet after prophet was sent forth to warn of the dangers incurred by the social injustices that existed then even as they exist today. Not only were individuals and groups warned but also it was shown that all who aided or in any way collaborated with the deviators were also in danger.

The mass of mankind failed to listen, failed to gain any understanding of social and economic peace. Only the few more evolved individuals heeded. Of those some were selected to work in the brotherhood as examples of peace and harmony in all aspects of existence.

The Essenes knew that through the cumulative effect of example and teaching, the minority who understand and obey the law would some day grow through the generations to become, finally the majority of mankind.

Then and then only will mankind learn this fourth peace of the Essenes, peace with humanity.

*From Enoch to the Dead Sea Scrolls, by Edmond Bordeaux Szekely

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May God bless and protect you and…

May you always be

Healthy, Happy

Safe and Comfortable

Seth Kelly Curtis

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