Who can benefit from reading HIDDEN TREASURE

F. Aster Barnwell reflects on the category of readers most likely to derive the greatest benefit from HIDDEN TREASURE—Jesus’s Message of Transformation

Those who’re experiencing spiritual hunger…

• I believe there are vast and growing, unmet spiritual needs in our Western culture. Some of this spiritual hunger is being addressed at an unconscious level, but we’ve yet to acknowledge and address these needs consciously. On one hand, more and more people are participating in practices such as Hatha Yoga. When I did yoga thirty or so years ago, there were only three or four places in the entire city of Toronto where one could sign up for yoga classes. Today, there are at least a dozen venues offering  yoga not more than a ten-minute walk from my house. And whereas thirty years ago, the places offering yoga were dedicated yoga schools, nowadays even the most conventional of gyms offer high quality yoga classes. Yet , the progress we’re seeing in the spread of disciplines such as yoga, exist side-by-side with growing religious fundamentalism. It’s simply heart wrenching, even tragic,  to see the number of otherwise intelligent and well-intentioned people who are incapable of relating to their religious myths as anything but literal history.  In many respects, I see these two disparate strands—those individuals exploring  through yoga, and those falling into the embrace of fundamentalism—as responses to a deep, unarticulated spiritual hunger.

• For many spiritual seekers with a Christian upbringing who’ve not succumbed to the lure of fundamentalism, they may harbour misgivings about the way Christianity has been presented to them as their spiritual needs go unmet and their many questions unanswered.  They’ve had enough of  speculative philosophy and theology, and want to touch into and experience Truth for themselves. They don’t want to hear about Reality, they want to taste it. This is a tremendously positive sign, for it speaks to a spiritual hunger that is  authentic and intensifying.

Those who seek clarity about their spiritual search and practice

• Hidden Treasure is written to help seekers clarify their understanding about spiritual life and spiritual seeking, especially in the context of  the various forms of religious expression prevalent today.  People want to be engaged spiritually, but do not want to be bogged down with all the “baggage” that can come with organized religion. The book achieves its aim  by uncovering a transformational psychology structured around an Eastern model of human consciousness embedded in the Gospels. This model is built around the idea that  we humans can experience life at seven different levels of consciousness. Three of these levels comprise the range of ordinary consciousness and an additional four become attainable by conscious spiritual practice.  Our ordinary consciousness— characterized by habitual ways of thinking, feeling and acting — is transformed as we tap into the higher levels through our spiritual practice.

• Hidden Treasure is for spiritual seekers of every religious or non-religious inclination who seek clarity about what they should make the aim and target of their spiritual search and practice.  Because spiritual seeking can be a spontaneous process, responding to the maturation of human consciousness,  most spiritual seekers often have both formulated and unarticulated questions about how they figure in the scheme of the Universe. Many of these seekers  are already listening to their own intuition, but need outer confirmation that they’re on the right track. For these seekers, it’s my hope that they will find confirmation for their deepest intuitions in my writings. For others, they’re on the threshold of finding answers to their deepest questions.

Those who seek spiritual experience but without the cultural biases and bigotry that can accompany religious discourse

• Hidden Treasure offers to take readers further and deeper in their spiritual understanding, not by offering a new theory, or philosophy, but by unveiling and describing the transformational psychology at the foundation of  the Christian Gospels. Though embedded in the New Testament Gospels, this psychology of transformation transcends Christianity, as it’s not about a religion, or a church, or even about beliefs. It’s about the steps we can take to advance our consciousness and progress to a higher level in our evolution, individually and collectively. As such, this psychology is applicable to each of us, irrespective of cultural background, race, religious disposition or lack of one. The choice is up to each individual to apply, or not apply, the psychology. It all depends on how much we want to experience a change in consciousness to a higher level.

Those who need full access to Truth while they’re still in the flesh and are not content to wait until they “get to the other side”

• Although Hidden Treasure brings together strands of spiritual knowledge that have been traditionally regarded as esoteric, or occult, I’ve never been part of an esoteric group. My discoveries could have been made by anyone with the same degree of spiritual curiosity, open-mindedness and perseverance to uncover life’s mysteries in the face of personal setbacks.

• I credit the “Spirit of Truth” for guiding me to the knowledge which I’m able to reveal in Hidden Treasure. For me, the “Spirit of Truth” as the principle of synthesis and eclecticism which enables us to see connections and relatedness between apparently diverse systems of knowledge. To take advantage of all that the Spirit of Truth has to offer, we must retain our God-given curiosity, as well as cultivate and maintain an open mind and a pure heart.