Customer Reviews

Esoteric Buddhism

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

The material contained in the book is an easy read for the most part. It contains many highlights of Occult knowledge in a single book, whereas most of these highlights are scattered throughout different books of other authors (with an exception of a few).

However, there are 2 major issues that I found about this book:

1) The author, being a novice learner of the knowledge, misinterprets or misunderstands several important concepts (Gautama being the Sixth Rounder, Mars & Venus being other globes of the Earth chain, etc) which may lead readers to make incorrect conclusions or assumptions. To correct these it is highly recommended to read The Secret Doctrine by Helen Blavatsky (Vol I, pp. 152-162) where it is specifically addressed.

2) Although being new, the actual book that was purchased through Amazon was of a poor quality print. Some pages could not be read at all being "photo-copied" from old books. Some pages contained pencil underlining and different marks on the sidelines as well as inside the content itself.

Despite the shortcomings the books is a must have for students of theosophy or for a mind looking for understanding of the world and our place in it.

As the first review said, the author is NOT an initiate into higher or esoteric knowledge himself and makes several mistakes as well as blatantly calling other religions wrong and incapable of offering any sort of true salvation or enlightenment. I feel that whoever entrusted these "esoteric" teachings to the author made a gross misjudgement, but the book is not all bad. For a non initiate however, who has not developed the inner ability to discern what is essential in spiritual literature from what is non essential, this book can be misleading. I will now refer you to Joseph Campbells works that teach how to "extract the elementary or universal" truths from all religions and mythologies. If you enjoy this kind of heavy esoteric/occult literature check out Rudolf Steiner's How to know higher worlds and his other works, they are equally as enlightening and much easier to understand and apply to everyday life and meditation.