Three Doorways to
Mystical Transcendence
In this FREE 3-lesson course, you’ll discover the secret Western path to enlightenment. Here’s what makes it different: Eastern meditative paths seek to quiet the intellect. The Western path, by contrast, is grounded in our unique strength as Westerners, namely thinking, but not the abstract kind taught at colleges. Rather, we teach existential thinking, also known as thinking with one’s gut. It powerfully illuminates the darkness within.
Furthermore, we’ll teach you to decipher the symbolic and mythic meaning of your everyday, desires, conflicts, and anxieties, which is something you won’t learn at a Zen center or at a yoga retreat. The clarity you’ll gain at our Academy of Mystical Illumination—about who you really are and what life is all about—will help you to achieve a profound level of Self-realization and inner-peace.
The scariest part isn't the seeing. Rather, it’s the
being seen.
The Three Lessons:
Each lesson will include readings, video interviews, occasionally questions for you to contemplate, and more. Dr. Mark Dillof, founder and president of our academy, teaches the courses. As with any enterprise, whether spiritual or secular, there’s no guarantee how far you’ll travel along the road to mastery. But if you put your heart and soul into these courses, there’s an excellent chance that you’ll make great strides. Why not begin today? Here’s a summary of each weeks’ lesson…
Lesson 1: Transforming a Blasé Life into a Transcendent Mystery:
Is that all there is?
A life devoted solely to the pursuit of happiness has a certain shelf life, beyond which it begins to rot, producing the stench of boredom and meaninglessness. The pursuit of transcendence, by contrast, can transform your everyday life into what it truly is — an astonishing, mysterious, and wondrous affair, a detective adventure full of clues to who you are and what life is all about. This lesson, then, is about how to journey into the depths so as to find those amazing clues.
This journey is an intensely passionate mode of inquiry, involving what might be called “existential thinking,” the type of thinking when one’s life is on the line and the fate of one’s soul hangs in the balance, is akin to what the Zen Buddhists call, “the Great Doubt,” and has the potential to lead to “the Great Awakening.”
Lesson 2: The Conservation of Suffering Principle:
There must be something intrinsic to life’s pleasures, joys and satisfactions that makes them evanescent, thus bringing us back to the state of dissatisfaction. Their evanescent quality is not due to the fact that things fade and then vanish, like flowers with the coming of the winter frost. Time is not the real culprit, because even when life is in full bloom, life disappoints us — especially then. What is it about happiness that makes it evanescent?
The Conservation of Suffering Principle contends that try though we may, we can’t have the good without the bad, the positive without the negative, and life without adversity. Consequently, any enhancements that we make to our life merely change the form that the negative takes, without eradicating the negative itself. Might there be a road beyond the Conservation of Suffering Principle? There certainly is, but mystical insight is required, which we’ll help you to gain.
Something is always missing. What could it be?
Lesson 3: Illuminating Dark Emotions:
A lack of emotional clarity can create a doppelganger that can destroy your life.
In the previous essays, we explored the origin of life’s negativities and the various efforts to overcome them. That’s prepared us for Lesson 3. Here we’ll investigate what our emotions can reveal to us about who we are, as well as the subconscious narratives that give birth to those emotions. How are we to gain insight into our obscure emotions? As the psychologist Theodore Reik recommended, we must learn to listen with the "third ear."
Does all this seem to be a rather circuitous route to the mystical? Not at all, for as C.G. Jung observed, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
Sign up for this free course:
Sign up below and each week you’ll receive a mystical philosophy lesson via email, from The Academy of Mystical Illumination. Each lesson will include a reading, questions for you to think about, occasionally spiritual practices, as well as recommended readings.
*None of our courses are for college credit. They’re simply for your edification and enlightenment.
Multimedia? Yes!
In each essay, I refer to quite a few films, as well as novels, plays, and other literature. I also reference scholarly books. Most of the films can be viewed for free on the Internet. That’s what makes these essentially a multimedia courses. The essays don’t contain links because too many expire. We’re sure, though, that you won’t have much trouble finding the films. We recommend that you view as many as you can, as they’ll enrich your understanding of each lesson’s key concepts.
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