• Explores the significance of light in spiritual life-drawing on the esoteric tradition of alchemy-to transcend materialism and seed new cultures rooted in perennial wisdom
• Examines ideas from Western mysticism, Tibetan Buddhism, and other traditions to show how spiritual alchemy is a path to transformation and regeneration
• By working with spiritual images, shows how to advance spiritual evolution and heal from artificial culture by learning to separate illusion from reality
This book weds contemporary lightwork and classical, transformative alchemy to offer a path to achieving spiritual evolution. Examining the contradictions of modern times through the concept of the "end of an age," Arthur Versluis reveals how to transcend materialism and create new cultures of light rooted in perennial wisdom.
Versluis considers the ramifications of the materialism that separates us from nature. Modern technology may seem to point toward endless progress but, without a spiritual orientation, this progress is an illusion. While some may fall into pessimism, Versluis shows that seeds of light are present in the darkness.
Exploring the tradition of alchemy through the Emerald Tablet of Hermes Trismegistus, the Grail tradition, and other esoteric works, Versluis shows how we can achieve psychological and spiritual transformation. He explains how lightwork is at the heart of how to wake up and experience a regeneration of self and a reconnection to the Earth. He includes alchemical images for visualization practices to help us awaken to deeper truths, see beyond the veil of illusion, and transcend an illusory sense of self.
Alchemical Lightwork provides the perennial wisdom that shows how we can seed new cultures to recover our humanity, achieve self-realization, and improve the world at large. Dr. Arthur Versluis, Ph.D., is president of the Hieros Institute, a nonprofit devoted to realizing the sacred in contemporary life. The former chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Michigan State University, he has written numerous books, including Sacred Earth and The Secret History of Western Sexual Mysticism. INTRODUCTION
The Emerald Tablet and the Path of Light
I speak not fictitious things, but what is true and most
certain.
Emerald Tablet
In a dream, many years ago, I was given a numinous book-one bound in ancient leather and wood covers bearing many enigmatic luminous alchemical glyphs, and held together with a special clasp-to convey into the future. To this day, I can still see it clearly in my mind's eye. In the dream, I accepted that responsibility-or to put it more exactly, the dream described what I was actually doing. Already by that time, I had spent many years engaged in working with little-known traditions in inner alchemy, meaning ways of visualizing and working with spiritual images in a process of inner transformation and awakening. So when I shared the dream with a close friend working in the tradition of inner alchemy, he replied that it made perfect sense. The dream reflected something very real, and he understood that intuitively. This book is one manifestation of that dream.
What is this book about? Ultimately, it is about our individual and shared future. Someone reading this book likely has come to recognize cracks in what was once our familiar world. Outwardly, there appear to be many reasons for pessimism. Materialistic progress exists, of course, but anyone can see that inherent in our outward technological power, for all its apparent magic, is also the destruction of nature, of cultures, indeed, of what it means to be human and to flourish with nature. Outwardly, our world is ailing, and inwardly, we know something is deeply wrong.
What is wrong will not be fixed by technology. Artificial pseudo-worlds might divert some people for a time and might be lucrative for those who produce and control them, but artificial intelligence along with artificial "reality
