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Do you want to know the truth—the whole truth about Yoga and Tantra? Are you sure? What if you don’t like what you hear? What if it challenges your preconceptions or bruises your ego? Will you accuse me of falsehood, even though I speak the truth? Don’t you know that the best and most powerful medicine is also the most bitter? My whole life has been dedicated to a search for the Absolute Truth, and it has been a very hard, long road. Are you really sure you want the Truth? I guarantee it will change your life and transform your consciousness. The whole, complete Absolute Truth? OK.

One of our predecessors in our lineage of spiritual Master Teachers of the Esoteric Teaching is named Madhavcarya. When Madhavcarya was an esoteric student, he was an up-and-coming young Candidate for World Teacher of the lineage. But first he had to pass a special final test. So he was called to the Grand Master’s ashram, and the Grand Master offered to initiate him into a secret mantra. This mantra is so powerful that anyone who chants it in the proper way attains liberation from material existence within six months. The only condition was that he had to agree to keep the mantra secret, because it was just too powerful. The Grand Master told Madhvacarya that if anyone who knew the mantra revealed the secret, he would go to hell.

So Madhavcarya agreed to the conditions and was duly initiated into the secret mantra. Then as soon as he left the Grand Master’s ashram, he called together all the people he could find, and initiated them into the mantra. Then he was going down the street, singing and shouting this secret mantra at the top of his lungs. As soon as the Grand Master heard about this, he called Madhavcarya back and asked him, “Why did you reveal the mantra? Don’t you know you’re going to hell?”

Madhavcarya replied, “It’s alright if I go to hell. I just couldn’t stand to see all these people suffering in material existence, and I wanted to give them liberation as soon as possible. So I initiated them into the mantra.” Then Madhavcarya was named the next World Teacher—he had passed the test.

So, do you want this most powerful, most secret mantra? OK, I will give it to you. Here it is. Ready?

om namo bhagavate väsudeväya

Now if you have faith, you don’t need to hear anything more. You have just been initiated into the dvädasäkñara-mantra, the highest mantra. You can all go home now; nothing more is necessary. Just walk out of here and go to a secluded place. Give up everything, remain in seclusion and chant this mantra nonstop for six months to a year, and I promise that you will attain the highest stage of self-realization. Is anyone ready to do that? No? Hmmm.

Well then—O ye of little faith—I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is: Now you know everything you need to perfect your spiritual life. If you go to the forest and do nothing but chant this mantra uninterruptedly with impeccably pure faith, in a few short months you can attain everything I have attained.

If you want the highest stage of spiritual realization, you will have to do this someday anyway. It took me almost 50 years to get around to doing it. Most of my fellow students still haven’t done it. It’s not that difficult, but it requires faith. You obtain faith by association with the faithful. Everything I teach you, everything I say here and in my classes, and everything I write in my books—indeed, the entire Esoteric Teaching—is just to convince you to develop the faith to give up everything and fully dedicate yourself to chanting this twelve-syllable mantra. How long you wait before you do it—and get the result—is entirely up to you.

This path—the Esoteric Teaching—is not a path of knowledge; it is a path of faith, a path of the heart. Yet, we find that without a certain quality of knowledge—not quantity, but quality of knowledge—transcendental knowledge, the required purification of the heart and the development of faith just does not take place. Unless and until the quality of our knowledge of spiritual life attains the transcendental stage, all our efforts in Yoga, Tantra or whatever spiritual path we pursue cannot bear the mature fruit of self-realization. In other words, our faith has to become pure. This workshop is designed to help you develop that faith.

So are you ready for the bad news? Are you sure? OK.

Every one of you has faith already. Faith is a natural quality of the soul. The problem is that your faith is impure; you have faith in something that is false, that will cheat you.

The bad news is that everything you think you know about Eastern spirituality—yoga, Tantra, meditation and so forth—everything you believe in—is wrong.

Of course, this is an outrageous pronouncement. I completely understand if your first response is to protest your disbelief. When I was where you are now, before I found the Esoteric Teaching, I also would have responded in exactly the same way. But the profound revelations of the Esoteric Teaching have convinced me that this statement is absolutely true, and I will prove it to you, beyond any doubt or uncertainty, today in this workshop.

There are three main reasons why I claim that everything you think you know about Eastern spirituality is wrong:

1. You have insufficient knowledge.
2. Whatever knowledge you do possess is inaccurate.
3. It is the wrong quality of knowledge.

There are compelling reasons for these assertions, and we will explore the most important of them in this workshop. By the time we’re done, I am certain that you will be thoroughly convinced that your present conception of Eastern spirituality is limited, inaccurate or just plain wrong.

Whatever has been taught in the West about Yoga and Tantra is perhaps one-tenth of one percent of what there is to know about the subject. And the commercialization of Yoga and Tantra has distorted the little that has been presented almost beyond recognition, especially when we consider the results.

But don’t worry, there’s more good news: this series of workshops and classes is also designed to introduce you to an authentic source of knowledge of Yoga and Tantra: the Esoteric Teaching of sanätana-dharma.

The other good news is that I have a spellbinding story to tell you, a fascinating story spanning tens of thousands of years of human history. An amazing true story of gods and demons, advanced alien technology, and government cover-ups going back before the time of Christ. This will almost certainly be the first time that you have ever heard the truth about the history of the world, or the real meaning and purpose of Yoga and Tantra.

Fascinating new vistas of unprecedented spiritual knowledge will open up along the way. By the time we’re done, your current perspective on spiritual life will seem like looking through a knothole in a fence. In the course of this workshop, the scope of your spiritual understanding will zoom out into a wide-angle aerial view, revealing the actions of a powerful, hitherto unknown spiritual force—the Esoteric Teaching—on the human world over the past 5,000 years. Are you ready for that?

Good! I promise that you will have at least one exhilarating moment of esoteric Self-revelation, an “Aha!” experience of spiritual discovery in this series. And by the end of this series, you will be able to conceptualize the higher hidden levels of the spiritual path clearly, perhaps for the first time. But first we need to go over some background and define some terms, so that when I tell my story you’ll know what I’m talking about, and you won’t get lost or confused during the presentation.

Next: Three Stages of the Teaching