5.
The Sabian Philosophy

Philosophy is of great value to some aspirants, and little more than meaningless jargon to others, depending entirely on temperament and background. It is a useful tool of mind, but by no means a necessity of illumination.

The term was coined by Socrates, and its original meaning was love of wisdom. Now philosophy is the established systemization of the knowing process, or of thought and thinking, and on the practical side it is the analysis of the abstract or generalized realizations on which theology, science and all moral and aesthetic conception depend. In any ultimate sense it is the ordering of the mind's inreach to an understanding of man and its outreach to a parallel understanding of the world or the total complex of existence of which man finds himself a part.

Sabian philosophy classifies as a dynamic idealism, since it considers reality the actualization of a potential and never an existent in itself. It classifies also as an experientialism, since the real is accepted as that of which anything in question is ultimately the source rather than the product.

The Primary Statement

The world is ideal, but its ideality is expressed by its continuous maintenance of itself and not by an intellectual derivation of its existence from an idea or from any agent or source fundamentally or originally exterior to itself. At no point is it the end result of a process or of any mechanism.

Rather it is organic and both (1) material, as encountered by the senses or measured by the tools of science, and (2) rational, as ordered by law or principle when approached through the mind.

Man also is ideal, with his ideality revealed in his moral nature or inner life, and he no less is both a material and rational being in his everyday manifestation of a physiological and a psychological identity.

The world and man are directly complementary to each other, and experience is the actuality of the interaction involved. Experience is (1) inclusive, since it represents nothing other than itself, and (2) competent, since it is always a conjoining of cause and effect.

Anything whether tangible or intangible is known through its characteristic behavior, or as it presents itself in experience. The distinction between sensory and rational experience, or man's two modes of realization, is a functional division of labor and not the representation of an actual dichotomy in nature. Reality may be approached on the side either of the senses or of the reason, or on what the esoteric tradition knows as the heart or the head path of experience, as convenience may dictate.

The First Axiom

Knowledge already possessed, whether right or wrong, is the sole basis of further knowledge. This is the axiom of necessary prejudice, or of the inbuilt presuppositions on the basis of which behavior and judgment may become automatic.

Philosophy is the history of philosophy, that is, primarily an examination of the ideas by which men have ordered their lives in the past and a consequent determination of what may be expected when they seek to order them by the same or similar ideas in the present. Thus philosophy becomes a study of the mind's assumptions, or an analysis of what an individual may take for granted and thereby either facilitate or impede his progress toward the goals he sets for himself.

Since the mind of necessity is analyzing the content of its thinking with the thought habits and patterns of which it is constituted, that is, within a matrix of its assumptions collectively, it tends to rationalize everything into its own accustomed grooves and thus to defeat any attempt to break through its bondage to its own limiting ideas. The difficulty has been identified as the psychologist's fallacy, or assuming that thinking can be free of personal presuppositions. These are essential, and they must be left unquestioned if thought is to be possible. Consequently a disciplined intelligence must learn to make proper corrections in every conclusion to which it comes. To gain any impartiality the mind must function through the ordering of the thoughts or thinking capacities of minds of greater scope than itself. This ultimately becomes a participation in the community of mind on which modern science depends and of which the Eternal Wisdom consists.

Here is Newton's realization that the giants of understanding in human history are those who stand on the shoulders of giant intelligence before them. Thus philosophy of necessity builds on tradition. The philosopher, however, must be careful not to lose himself in an obsession with the past or with a supposed infinite wisdom of changeless aspect from the beginning, and destroy his competence because he forgets then that knowledge is valid only in its continual verification through experience. He must realize that he always stands at the center he creates for himself in the vast complex of man's ideas, and in this realization he becomes and remains a focus of thought for his fellows. As the thinking animal he is fundamentally a social creature, and he achieves for himself because he is achieving for more than himself. It is because of this that he can break through the ring of his lesser prejudices, and in doing so replace them with the greater ones that release rather than limit his efforts.

The process of breaking through limitation is known in the arcane tradition as initiation, or more simply as an expansion of consciousness, and the Sabian philosophy dramatizes the necessities involved by requiring the seeker to (1) know what he knows, (2) know what he doesn't know and (3) know what he doesn't know he doesn't know. This means that he begins to refine his knowledge by learning to define his terms or his knowing and thus be able to make accurate statement in any account of his outer experience and inner reactions. While doing this consciously and consistently, as he chooses to push his realization in any given direction, he discovers what more or less inevitably must follow in any given sequence of events. This is the way of knowledge through analogy and probability that actually leads to a knowing of the not-known. With this refinement of his reason he finds himself more and more in fellowship with the mind potential beyond his own, and in time he has access to the knowledge of which otherwise he would be totally unaware.

In such fashion he achieves a stage of seership, and he begins to find himself across the portal of the Solar Mysteries.

Here is the Sabian conception of a pure philosophy. It is free, and consistently creative, and though in many respects it may seem beyond all immediate usefulness it yet forever opens limitless new areas of a potential experience.

By its canons all things must be brought to their center of reference at each given point of contemplation or issue. In direct experience the center of reference is self. When there is a manipulation in experience of factors other than the self the centering is in the idea representing them in the thought processes of the self or of other selves similarly, and any idea so used is considered at work and is identified as a concept. The Sabian philosophy is termed the philosophy of concepts, since its principal function is to organize ideas for intelligent employment, and the concepts that have the most important roles in the Sabian project are given the form of keywords.

The Sabian student is expected to recognize the integrity of his own experience, and in time to order each and every detail of it in terms of the concept patterns through which he approaches the Solar Mysteries.

The Second Axiom

Everything that purports to be true is true. This is the axiom of necessary faith.

If philosophy is man's experience with ideas, religion in parallel fashion is his experience with truth. Religion is man's rehearsal of those elements in experience through which he has created an expectation beyond his own unaided hopes and powers.

In this enlarged fulfillment of himself he has come to know God, and in his inspired outreach beyond familiar limitations he also has come to know himself as a personage. He has acquired a dignity greater than mere animal training and rational conventionality. In his expanded consciousness he is the initiate, if but for the moment of his devotions. As he uses the powers he has unlocked within himself, and as he employs the higher potentials he has created for himself, he is able to serve his fellows. He becomes the prophet or seer if he chooses to undertake the long and arduous pilgrimage to eternal stature. Alternately he may feel called more to the immediate fellowship of a spiritual service here and now, and thus may give himself to full-time religious work.

Through the ages there is always the transcendental influence of the few who have affirmed a truth, and given it a personal dramatization until the spreading impact of their effort has created a new facet in the spiritual tradition. The great sagas of these avatars, or perhaps the less universal pioneers of faith, have been preserved in sacred scriptures of myriad form and content. The agonies and exaltations of the Great Ones in particular have come to be recreated over and over again, and thus have established an infinite variety of rituals. The Christian Eucharist is a familiar example. The origin of Sabian ceremonies and methods in the lives and works of Jesus, Ezekiel and the Babylonian Isaiah has been explained in the greatest detail.

In such rituals of higher self-discovery the least of men may have healing and regeneration, since in the religious experience they have made their own they share a reality with the spiritual giants who have gone before. This is the outreaching to the periphery of possible self-orientation. It is an almost paradoxical self-centering that has its effectiveness in the universality of the self-extension. For the moment man is all-man, or the totality of his fellows as well as himself. What in the operation of mind ramifies out from center, and is ordered through philosophy, is conversely and by the heart pulled in towards center as it is ordered by the senses and comes to be known as a manifestation of faith rather than reason. Religion, as the companion of philosophy, creates sympathy and good will as the complementation of understanding and insight. The religious exaltation or sustainment that brings men to their transcendental self-fulfillment in a sharing of immortal experience is a vital and constant revelation of human nature in its universal potential. The achievement of the ecstasy, and the accompanying sublimation of lower appetites and instincts, requires an uncompromising respect for personality in conjunction with the recognition of the integrity of experience on which an effective philosophy depends.

The all-important corollary realization is that it is in the individual's religious experience with all men collectively, whether in one fashion or another, that his relationship with God becomes a personal one. Through his own centering of the whole he gains the essential intimacy of any truly divine revelation, and thereupon rises above all the hopeless divisions and needlessly bitter competitions of everyday living. He becomes the healer and the mystic and indeed steward of everything that man may embrace in his journey toward fulfillment under the Solar Mysteries.

Here is the Sabian conception of a pure religion. The aspirant who desires an immortal realization without the need of any buttressing through reason or emotion must accept the basic rightness of his own motives and impulses. He must do this because the kingdom of heaven is within him.

In achieving a religious life he must (1) recognize the extent to which he creates his own actual reality by living his days in the light of the truth he accepts for the centering of his effort and (2) see to it that this truth is an exalted one. He learns to establish and hold in consciousness whatever he would have as the over-all pattern of manifestation for himself and those around him. To his study of man's commerce with ideas through the ages he adds an interest and participation in a healing ministry, in order that everything may be brought as far as possible to the full of its potentials here and now. He is taught to make his rehearsal of the past a blessing of the present through the ritualization of his life under the Solar Mysteries.

The Third Axiom

All mastery of all things is possible to all men. This is the axiom of necessary initiative.

If philosophy is man's practical examination of his ideas, and religion his ritualization of his aspiration, science is his tireless and infinitely audacious multiplication and ramification of the skills with which he has endowed himself. Science affords the means whereby he has wrought the miracles of modern technology, and thus has seemed to place even the planet itself in complete subjugation to his whim. He has made a cosmic responsibility very largely his own, and current history is almost wholly the account of his struggle to achieve by the genius of his own effort.

To the head and the heart must be added the hands, or the works of everyday responsibility as a basis for the individual's perspective on his well-being. Differing from thoughts that must always be brought to center in his own mind, or from emotional experiences that carry him to the periphery of his concern over his relationship with his fellows, the genius of his creative contributions is that they can be stood on their own foundation in a cancellation of all dependence on himself and thus and in a curious fashion be given a life of their own.

The construct set up by God, or by the man created in His image, is as much an organic entity as the organism endowed with life by nature. It has its own center as the gift of its creator, and its effectiveness is furthered by a proper respect for the independent frame of reference in which it operates. This is the commonplace accomplishment that in primitive times or to untutored minds seems to be the sheerest magic. Here the divinatory techniques on which occultism builds so largely in present days are of the greatest value through the training they give in establishing these constructs of reality, and in manipulating the time-and-space lattice so that the results of effort may be anticipated with confidence.

The seer becomes a counselor, and the dedicated individual a partner in worthy achievement. The present moment, whenever there is a clear view of the potential in all things, provides an unlimited and continuing opportunity. The seeker comes into his own through an initiative that owes nothing to anything other than itself, once he understands that he can be said to be ultimately and solely whatever he may find himself to be in the essence of his own existence. His fulfillment comprehends and so at will may actualize the absolute illimitability of which in potential he now is ever conscious in the depths of himself. Infinity and universality do not comprise limitations that he must accept but rather reveal the limitless transcendence of time and space within which his self-expression creates the concepts for its own ordering.

Here is the Sabian conception of a pure science, or of human consciousness released to the full manifestation of its own creative genius.

All things are seen as related to all other things, and in consequence they afford continuous signatures of a potentiality inherent in the immediateness of every time-and-space relationship. The mind may be guided and the heart stimulated at every point of effort and progress, but the initiative is of its own order and its own making and therefore invariable in its roots and branches. Outwardly and in material things this determination to action affords an evidence of itself in the extent and form of its mastery of the physical world.

Man in his works, no less than in his insights and in his innermost and actually inarticulate faith, may find himself forever both indomitable in his ongoing and infallible in his realization. It is through the honesty of his self-expression that he is able to resist the infinite regression away from the immediate union of himself and the universe for which and in which he acts. It is then that his life in its contribution to his world and his fellows becomes a living of all-life under the Solar Mysteries.

Summary

Man must make allowances for his presuppositions in every thought and action, but it is within his power to select whatever assumption best sustains him in his expression of himself. Philosophy is the means by which he orders life to his liking, through the functions of mind.

Man creates the actual reality in which he finds himself through the fundamental truth he accepts for the centering of his aspiration, and he reaches his spiritual fulfillment through a realization of the basic rightness of his motives and impulses. Religion is the means by which he rehearses his spiritual insights and thereby effects his ultimate reconciliation with his highest desire for himself.

Man exists most fundamentally in his works, or in his acts or reactions of being, and his arrival at any worthy stature is entirely a question of his creative accomplishment or of his service to his fellows and his world at large. Science is the means whereby he harnesses his skills in order to employ them in genuine creative fashion, and thereby achieve his ultimate potentiality.

The basis for any self-unfoldment under the Solar Mysteries is (1) an acceptance of the complete integrity of experience, (2) the culture of a genuine respect for all personality and (3) the development of an individual gift for utilizing the creative powers of consciousness.

All things are related to all other things, and the realization of any relationship in any or all of its pertinent details is through philosophy, religion and science, that is, by means of thought, feeling and expended effort. Thinking provides experience with a center of reference, emotion gives experience a complementary periphery of reference and skill maintains the frame of reference for any particular detail of experience.

Knowledge is valid only through its continual verification in experience, and the verification is accomplished through an awareness of consequences and a recognition of analogy and probability. Knowledge has a reliable expansion only as single minds project it through the thinking of many minds. Precise definition of terms and accurate statement of fact and reaction constitute the underlying basis of dependable knowledge. Knowledge is defeated or limited only in (1) the acceptance of delimitations for the self as irrevocable and (2) the pursuit of infinite regressions of relationship away from the immediateness of actual experience.

Man manipulates the factors of experience in degrees of remove from himself by a use of ideas, and as these are brought into leash by the mind they are known as concepts.

The Sabian project in consequence is sometimes identified as the philosophy of concepts.

Man comes to know God through the fulfillment of himself in religious experience, and when this becomes personal he is able to serve his fellows as the avatar-to-be or as a healing presence in everyday affairs.

In his creative initiative, and its immortal centering within his own potentials, the aspirant becomes the initiate and the glory of his kind.