The Secret Teachings of All Ages: A Modern Rendering of the 1928 Edition

What do the lofty concepts of the world's illumined saviors and sages have in common with these stunted, distorted products of the "realism" of this century?

All over the world, men and women ground down by the soulless cultural systems of today are crying out for the return of the banished age of beauty and enlightenment--for something practical in the highest sense of the word. A few are beginning to realize that so-called civilization in its present form is at the vanishing point; that coldness, heartlessness, commercialism, and material efficiency are impractical, and only that which offers opportunity for the expression of love and ideality is truly worth while. All the world is seeking happiness, but knows not in what direction to search. Men must learn that happiness crowns the soul's quest for understanding. Only through the realization of infinite goodness and infinite accomplishment can the peace of the inner self be assured. In spite of man's geocentricism, there is something in the human mind that is reaching out to philosophy--not to this or that philosophic code, but simply to philosophy in the broadest and fullest sense.

The great philosophic institutions of the past must rise again, for these alone can tend the veil which divides the world of causes from that of effects. Only the mysteries--those sacred Colleges of Wisdom--can reveal to struggling humanity that greater and more glorious universe which is the true home of the spiritual being called man.