As a leader, a specialist in making people feel good from the inside out, a master of the Taoist martial arts, medicine and meditation systems and the author of 14 previous books, I've been living by and teaching the Taoist system for 40 years and have helped millions transform using these techniques and philosophies. Among the collection of august teachers and gurus I trained with was the eminent maverick psychiatrist R.D. Laing, to whose memory this book is dedicated and with whom I studied comparative religion (spiritual paths) as well as the machinery of consciousness, with a bias towards the Western perspective. The Bible was at the top of the reading list he gave me.
According to our own Western, pagan-infused, Judeo-Christian mythology, Moses, described as liberator and leader of the Israelites, but probably an initiate of the Egyptian mysteries, went up on Mount Sinai, had a conference with God and came down with a set of stone tablets inscribed with ten commandments, adherence to which would enable society to function optimally and thus bring it to the so-called Promised Land.
This is allegory, including even the commandments themselves.
The liberation of a people from slavery alludes to the liberation of the self from delusion-born suffering. The character of Moses alludes to the guiding spirit within or, in modern terminology, the subconscious.
The promised land alludes, if not to a full-blown utopia, which is unrealistic in any case, then at least to an enlightened global society governed more by wisdom and trust than foolishness or suspicion, inclined more towards collaboration and cooperation than domination or oppression, in which love, honor and respect comprise the currency and the economy it drives is booming, enabling an unprecedented flowering of the human spirit benefiting everyone on Earth and ensuring we not only survive this most challenging transitional passage but actually thrive by it.
The Ten Commandments themselves allude to the ten ethical principles of natural grace, arising endogenously, spontaneously and automatically once the individual is internally aligned and centered, and thus in command of themselves. The 'thou shalt not' and 'thou shalt' approach to influencing people doesn't even work with children, let alone adults. Treating the Ten Commandments as actual commandments is evidently nonsensical, as the very establishment which claims to follow them itself ordains and partakes of murder (at times of war), robbery (colonizing territories) and lying (disinformation and hypocrisy) on a grand scale.
And Moses represents that aspect of your psyche that yearns to lead you home, to oneness with all that is - the enlightened, transcendent state.
We are obliged now to stop pretending to be irresponsible children with a set of commandments to break and to rise up collectively to the magnificent fullness of who we really all are: ineffable presences in human form - fallen angels nearing the end of a long journey home.
Doing so, learning to follow these ten precepts for enlightenment, we will indeed, circumstances permitting, enter the Promised Land. We will collectively meet the challenge, come through the crisis and move as one to the next evolutionary stage, potentially the most exciting step the human race has ever taken.
This is the message and the time has come to spread it far and wide to every corner of the Earth.
On the ride this book facilitates, we take the Ten Commandments and reposition them in light of the above, from a Taoism-informed, humanism-based perspective and so derive a feasible, effective and necessary template for a new world.
