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This book, The Origins and Attributes of Being, is a declaration and clarification of my own very personal experiences in what has been a humbling and awe inspiring process of identifying five/six basic characteristics or attributes of the human psyche that seem to be necessary for a sense of personal fulfillment and of finding these attributes referred to in certain ancient relics and symbols, and the myths or stories that accompanied them.
Since my childhood I can remember being inspired by the stars and by what I might describe today as the “philosophy of values.” Early on, I was enthralled by the biblical story of the creation of the universe. And, as the years have gone by, I have been enticed by the seeming convergences and divergences between world religions and astronomy and physics, always noticing the sense of symmetry even in their contradictions.
By the 199’s I found myself on a path of “healing” and “self awareness” directed by the unsettlement of my own “mid-life crisis.” In these times I had correlated to a set of five/six specific characteristics of the human psyche that I have found essential to my own personal experience of “being human,” and what’s more, to my experience of “personal fulfillment.” So essential are these characteristics, I refer to them as the “Attributes of Being,”
While developing these Attributes in my own mind, and while sharing them with others in help groups and seminars, I would often refer to certain world traditions or scientific or religious beliefs here or there as ways to demonstrate or validate one particular Attribute or another. Then, one day while sharing in a small group, I “discovered,” to my utter amazement, that each of these traditions correlated intimately with each other -- not just in part, but in whole. In summary, I came to an awareness of the possibility that each Tradition gave its contemporaries/peoples the same invitations to acknowledge and experience the very same human Attributesas essential elements or stages of Being human, of personal development, and ultimately of personal fulfillment.
My goal is to share these Attributes and the correlations that lead to my “discovery” with you.
The relics, symbols and traditions I will identify in this book are found in six different world “cosmologies” or “religions” which I will refer to as the “Traditions.” While each of the sited Traditions originate from vastly different cultures and geographies – from continents and subcontinents apart -- each Tradition, when seen as a “metaphor,” seems to define, and at times even prescribe, each of the Five Attributes of Being as parts of its philosophy.
A metaphor is …
The first of the Traditions to be described is the tradition of Hermes. Considered traditionally as the “Father of the Egyptian Sciences,” Hermes describes separate “worlds” or “spheres of existence,” each of which correlate to a one of the five Attributes. Hermes’s cosmology is a beautifully “All-encompassing” metaphor which describes all energy and matter evolve and progress through the Worlds of Existence, each world as an essential stage or phase in the evolution of “energy into consciousness.” This whole process and each of these Worlds might be described as steps in the evolution of “Being.”
The other Traditions described in the book are: (list) …
In these Traditions, each of the “worlds” or “Attributes” are described in different ways, usually as characteristics or elements of a journey or a state of awareness or consciousness for at least the human Beings that inhabit Earth. While one particular Tradition may give more detail about this or that Attribute than another (perhaps due to cultural or linguistic affinities or aversions), I will show how each and every one of these Traditions offered in its time and to its peoples teachings through metaphor that are parallel descriptions of, if not a definitive prescriptions to fulfill, specific human characteristics – the referenced Attributes.
I describe them as “parallel” descriptions because the Attributes are – in every Tradition – described in virtually identical qualities if not in the exact same order of occurrence or “progression,” to use the Hermetic terminology. So parallel are these Attributes or Worlds, I have come to describe – no, to “celebrate” – these Traditions in an immaculate combined metaphor I have called the “Five Worlds Metaphor.” (“W”)
I became nothing less than awestruck as I “discovered” of the parallel natures of each of the Traditions as invitations to personal fulfillment. I had previously thought these Traditions to be particularly exclusive and foreign to each other. After all, they each developed separately, continents, subcontinents and cultures apart. Yet, I believe that once these Traditions are seen in this new light as the “combined” traditions of the Five Worlds Metaphor, readers can give themselves a more meaningful, more focused invitation to identify and test the Attributes as personal guides to answer the question, “Are these Attributes keys for my coming to a complete sense of my fulfilled self?” And, if so, the Five Attributes and the respective Five Worlds can be personal guides to the questions: “Who am I?” “Where did I come from?” “What am I to do here?”
