Revelations of Secret Things: Our Enemies Within

Inner enlightenment is a personal journey, unique to everyone, that cannot be rushed or imposed from the outside.

- Could I also receive the ineffable vision?

- It could be, but no one can know the inner ways of the other, not even himself, because only after a tireless search for yourself and your own spirit do you come to know yourself enough to begin to hope that you will be able to receive inner enlightenment. Through successive lives or in one life, through asceticism and the effort of meditation, we can, however, manage to get rid of our enemies within us, to drive away our tormentors.

- Can you tell me who I am?

Have you ever experienced an epiphany where you felt like you were beginning to understand an ineffable vision that guides your self to transcendence?

- Who are your enemies? I can only name them to you, but that does not mean that you will have the strength to drive them away, to purify your soul. The first enemy is ignorance. The second is injustice, opposite to that Maat, which is not only equity towards yourself and towards others, but also everything that is likely to brake the smooth running of the world, to destroy the balance of things. The third is envy, for it harms us more than others; it gnaws at our heart, driving away the serenity of the soul. The fourth is malice, for it pushes us to do harm to others and gives birth to injustice. The fifth is treachery, for it uses lies and deceit, which are condemned by Maat.

The sixth is avarice, for it makes you live only to possess goods, so that you are ready for all betrayals, all crimes to satisfy so fatal a passion. The seventh is sensuality, because you no longer live except for the satisfaction of the senses, you only think about the pleasure that the union of the body with another body brings, without caring about your own dignity, without avoiding the harm that -you could do to others. The eighth is anger, for it casts the soul into the greatest turmoil, banishing all dominion of our will: being seized with a fury unworthy of a divinity, the distant goddess laid waste the Earth, sowing death and terror.

Is your mind formed enough to be able to move forward on the path of knowledge, without being disturbed by feelings considered inferior or inappropriate to your nature?

- Can a god indulge in such human feelings, which seem unworthy of his nature?

- Of course, when this god is nothing but the creation of the human mind, when it has no reality outside of people's imagination. But perhaps you will discover for yourself that the gods that people worship are nothing but creations of their minds.

- Tell me more about this, because I was always told the opposite, that the gods created men.

- It is a great blasphemy and the fruit of an incredibly naive mind if you say that a god, whoever he may be, created man in his own image, for such a god cannot have a real existence, he usurps the attributes of the god, who is totally different from both humans and animals, these being, all of them, creatures that emerged from the mists of time, following long maturations, long transformations. But your mind is not yet formed enough to go further on this path of knowledge. Let's move on to the ninth executioner of the soul: intemperance. For, like sensuality, which is an exaggerated need for pleasure, intemperance is an abuse of fermented drinks that leads to drunkenness, which causes us to lose all sense of ourselves and all control of our body and mind.

How do you propose to continuously improve the understanding of the initial realities, overcoming the obstacles imposed by the subjective interpretation given to a limited knowledge?

The tenth is greed, because the abuse of food deforms the body and incites the soul to deepen even more in matter. The eleventh is temerity, for it inclines you to neglect all prudence - which is a great virtue - prompting you not only to risk the life of your body through criminal audacity, but also the life of your soul, through lack of measure and wisdom. It is a vice which any man destined to rule others must banish from his heart.

Finally, the twelfth is none other than error.

- I listened to you, said Neferu, but, while you brought a few brief details, regarding ten of these dangerous passions, you said nothing about ignorance, the first, and about error, the last.

- These, my son, you will find out later, down to the deepest realities. He learns, however, that ignorance is opposed to the knowledge of initial realities, the real essence of things, of the nature of the universe, and error is the false or flawed interpretation of this revelation of secret things. But for now I must confine myself to presenting these concepts to your understanding and meditation.

Wisdom consists in recognizing ignorance and striving to overcome it in order to avoid the mistakes of revelations undistorted by hidden truths.

Revelations of secret things refer to the enemies within us when we try to climb higher to the pinnacle of wisdom. Our guiding beacon is that bright sense of self-knowledge that lights our way in the darkness of doubt so that we can clearly distinguish between truth and illusion.

* Note: Rachet, Guy - Cheops and the conjuration of the Ibis, Lucman Publishing House, 2003.