First Written Philosophy and Spirituality

Humans started writing around 5,500 years ago in Mesopotamia, which is present-day Iraq. Writing was first used for keeping records of goods and transactions, and later for naming people and telling stories. Writing systems evolved from simple symbols and signs, to complex characters and alphabets. Through writing, humans could communicate across time and space and create and preserve knowledge and culture.

After millennia of being passed down through oral tradition, the primordial philosophy and spirituality of humankind was the first cultural wisdom to be recorded in writing.

The Wayist principles of cosmology and spirituality, as documented by the Sumerians, resonate with the earliest philosophy and spirituality of areas now known as India, Mesoamerica, and China.

The sages of old were acutely aware of the economy of words, and therefore shrouded deep wisdom in pithy sayings. They recorded a masterful delivery of cosmology and a philosophy of spirituality in a few lines of text. The Sumerians predominantly used clay tablets and made thousands of copies to send out to peers in other countries. Fortunately for us, the Sumerians also carved the early teachings of theWAY into rock slabs in ancient temples, some of which survive for us to read in the present time.

People of theWAY understand the simple lines of ancient text as a complete cosmology. The surviving text is of course, not complete, but the hints in the damaged text are more than enough to correlate it with our ancient teachings from other parts of the world. We understand the significance of the esoteric writings because we have the esoteric background to read the higher wisdom, as we will show in this treatise.

The nature of esoteric text is that is harbors multiple layers of truth. When junior souls on the Path read the text with their soul-minds, they receive interpretations that are relevant to soul-minds. Should a senior student of the Path read the same text, but with spirit-mind, we receive interpretations that are relevant to spirit-minds.

Junior students on the Path can use their soul-insight to make a religion of it. In terms of spirituality, we can only understand as much as we are ready for; and that is how it is, and cannot be otherwise. Therefore, the ancient texts gave rise to different religions that formed the early basis of today’s world religions. Each culture that received the teaching would add their deities and interpret the teaching in their culture — and that has been happening for millennia. Therefore, every now and again heaven will do something to re-establish the core teaching again — and the process of enculturation and misunderstanding will simply follow, as usual, until next time.

The advanced soul who read the ancient teaching with spirit-minds, seeking guidance to appreciate the spiritual teaching for self-craft and advancement on the Path toward immortality, received a different message — the message we described above and what we will show in the rest of the book.

Spiritual wisdom is therefore accessible to junior souls only insofar as their spirit-minds have evolved. All wisdom forms in layers. Wisdom does not become concrete unless put into practise. As with any school, juniors start with rudimentary layers of knowledge and, as they pass through the grades, more is added. In time, the knowledge is transformed to wisdom and as we continue on the Path, they add more and more layers of wisdom to the foundations of earlier grades.

That is why spiritual teaching, which is made public to all students, appears as moral teaching or self-help to teach to juniors, and as deeply profound spiritual wisdom to senior students. We see the same in the Upanishads and Taoist works, and even in Wayist works of the present century.

It is like this with the Sumerian cosmological teaching as well. It served the religious needs of the masses and the spiritual needs of higher-grade students. Because junior souls appreciated the teachings as material for religious use, they had no problem to make changes to the teaching and adding more characters to the story as time went by. The teaching was well received, cherished and preserved by neighboring nations and future cultures, but each syncretized with it their important deities and added more mythological stories to it. Some teachings are seen in the Bible and in the Quran. The influence of the first written language of Sumer can still be detected in certain expressions found in languages like Sanskrit, as well as in modern English.

Nevertheless, the concise teachings that were originally published, suffice for People of theWAY. Our focus lies solely on the essence, disregarding the excessive teachings added for religious purposes throughout the centuries. This treatise focuses on dissecting and analyzing the five lines of the original text.

As time goes on, the pure message from spiritual beings becomes muddled with unnecessary additions. That is why, every few centuries, celestial beings from our Heavenly realm must either take physical form here to restore the teachings, or motivate experienced souls to undertake that mission.

To illustrate. It was approximately 5,500 years ago when the sacred teachings of the WAY were officially documented after being passed down orally for generations. Believers attribute the invention of writing and the concise purity of the teaching to a direct influence from Heaven.

Throughout the ages that followed, devoted human teachers diligently preserved the integrity of the original message. Maintaining it, is a challenge due to the constant creation of new world orders by junior souls, who enforce bans and censorship on “old-speak” to impose their new ideology and worldview, and delete the history of the old peoples — most of whom had already graduated from Butterfly Path. Think of this when next you wonder what happened to the high wisdom of what is known as Atlantis, the Angkor Empire, Petra, Egypt, the Andean and Meso-american societies, that were highly developed areas with huge libraries and deep learning — that are now run by people who don’t care, and know nothing, about the old wisdoms they had replaced with their new ideologies. It seems as if juniors will destroy what the elders had, only to go about rediscovering the same wisdom over the next few thousand years.

Approximately 2,500 years-ago, deities intervened directly to restore the teaching of theWAY. During the period 600 BCE to 1 CE, we see teachers all around the world moving to a new message of restoration of teaching of theWAY. In Mexico, we had the Mayan renewal, in India the Bhagavad Gita which spurred the later Bhakti Movement, in China, Laozi taught theWAY of ancient Daoism, Heraclitus and even Plato in the West, and the renewal in Buddhism which culminated in the schism which created Mahayana. All these reformations came about in a short period. Shortly after the schism of Mahayana in the East (70 CE), we see the founding of the Jewish reformation movement called the Christians, which too was built on Wayist foundations but to worship at the altar of the God of the Jews.

While all of the above happened in the religions and philosophies of the day, People of theWAY simply continued to hold to our simple, humble, and compassionate essence. Wayism lives inside us. We don’t need the temples and hierarchies of human leaders to hold our spiritual insight into what reality is, what the purpose of human life is, and what the meaning of life is.

For People of theWAY, there is a central theme in all the above renewals of the world’s spirituality during that time. Also, during this time, Wayists received the iconic book, The Authentia, which lived not only in our hearts and communities but also in esoteric enclaves among monks of Wayist and religious movements. The Essene and Gnostics also guarded it. If you wanted to know more about The Authentia, a basic text is available from retail partners and an in-depth course in our online community.

Cuneiform

Using the ancient cuneiform script, the masters of old carefully carved the Sumerian writings about our cosmology onto clay tablets, preserving the knowledge for future generations. These ancient texts, originating from around 4,500 years ago in the third millennium BCE, have been safeguarded (and expanded upon, not always preserving the original message) by successive Mesopotamian cultures such as the Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians.

This book deals with the writings in ancient Sumerian cuneiform. The term cuneiform means “wedge-shaped” and refers to the marks made by a reed stylus on clay tablets. Sumerian script was used to write the Sumerian language, which was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) from about 3500 BC to 2000 BC. The script comprised symbols that could represent syllables, words, or categories of words. Sumerian script was also adapted to write other languages, such as Akkadian, Hittite, and Elamite.

Clay Tablets

Five thousand years ago is a long time. Our technology, language, and cultures have changed a lot. Yet, it is amazing that we still retain some of the very ancient. The religions of the Quran, Hebrew Bible, and Christian Bible reflect a lot of ancient Mesopotamian teachings. Even in the English language, which developed more than 2,000 years after Sumerian writings, we still see remnants of ancient concepts.

To mention just a few, by way of example: the concept of “starting over on a clean slate” comes from how the Sumerian money lender will open a “tab” (short for tablet) for you — your clay tablet kept in his filing system. The money lender records your loan details, contract stipulations, and all payments you made by whetting the clay on the tablet to write an entry. When you have finished paying back the loan, the lender will “wipe your slate clean,” by whetting the clay and smudging it. So, next time you can start over on a clean tab. The old tablet is wetted and wiped down to delete your records, to clean your record. If the tablet was baked, it was ground into powder to be recycled. Spiritually speaking, it was considered ideal if you could deal with all your past karma in this life, so your slate can be cleaned at death; so for the next life, you come back to start with a clean slate. If your name was recorded (on a baked tablet) as a person of note, and that distinction falls away later, “your record is broken.” But if the message is considered to be of eternal importance, it is “carved in stone”, or “set in stone” so it cannot be amended.

The Sumerian writings about theWAY, which we discuss below, were set in stone.

A 3,000-year-old dress, known as the Tarkhan Dress, from the general area where our cuneiform writings circulated. The fine nylon material you see is a protective stiffening installed by the museum.