We take a scientific approach to the Way. If you look at science from the standpoint of its modern origins and starting in the 1700s and onward, it’s been geared towards prediction – always predicting something. Take the idea of a lever, for example. Someone realized that if they've got a boulder over here, shove a board under it, and put a rock right here next to the board; they can press down and get this mechanical advantage. They can predict the fact that the rock that they can't lift by themselves is going to rise. The same thing applies to gears. If you have a gear going one way and place another against it, the second gear will go opposite to the first. These are all predictable aspects. 

One of the things about the human condition, the human mind, is that we have a fear of the unknown. However, a certain aspect of life tries to achieve a balance between self-protection and pushing past your fears of the unknown, and this is where evolution happens.

Evolution happens when you push past your fears and ‘do it anyway.’ Here's where science has failed humanity: science isn't seeking the company and friendship of the unknown. Science always seeks to make the unknown known and predictable. Now, you might assert that science is about exploring the unknown. We don't know how something works, and we must investigate it. But the motive of science is different from that of esoteric work. The motive isn't to stand naked in the presence of the unknown; it's to make the unknown known. Yet, there is another aspect to the universe, to God and Creation – and that is that if you’re going to walk the way of an esoteric man or lady, you must learn to deal with the unknowable, and you're asked to stand in the presence of it. Do you see how much courage it takes to stand in something that you cannot fully know and can't predict the outcome of? You might feel safe in it but don't know what's next. You don't know what's coming around the corner with that.

By way of example, consider a circle with a point in the center. Science is going in one direction – from the center outward. Science wants to explain atoms and molecules, and it wants to explain levers and gears, and it wants to explain how the cosmos works and all of these sorts of things. It's constantly going outward, you see.

The Work we're involved in takes the opposite approach. It takes everything observable externally in our lives and tries to understand the core of it. And I'll tell you, I've been at this a long time, and the core, even though it's been possible to approach, is still an unknown, and that's the beauty of it because if you leave it as an unknown, then it leaves room for evolution. It leaves room for growth, and then there's a new unknown that you can approach and a new one. So, I would propose that any esoteric approach is from the outside, not vice versa.

And this is where we begin.

Pierce!