Keys of Gnosis - Robert Bolton

"For a long time now, religion in the West has been polarized between a democratic kind of faith meant for simple believers, and divine mysteries so high that hardly anyone can claim to know much about them.  The vital connecting link between them, that of metaphysical religion, is all but lost..."  (From the Introduction.)

Many books try to answer the fundamental questions of life: Who am I? Does life have a purpose? How should I live? Keys of Gnosis brings to these universal questions an extraordinary degree of metaphysical insight. It contains in highly condensed form a veritable library of traditional wisdom, offering a systematic reconstruction of our understanding of the soul and its relation to archetypal reality. Its starting-point is the fact that increasing numbers of people seem to lack spiritual and material power over their own lives. Modern man feels like a victim. But true power, real freedom, is closer than we think. Our mistake lies in accepting a false view of the self, and neglecting the metaphysical dimension that gives access to eternity. The book offers nothing less than a crash-course in liberation from the profoundly false notion of reality that is hold us in unconscious servitude to time and appearance. It's profound philosophy of religion offers a radically enlarged idea of the self and its mediating role between God and the world. It shows how we can be agents of Providence, that our highest fulfillment lies in our archetypal status as the third member of the "Great Triad" together with God and Nature. It defends the capacity of our minds to gain objective insight despite the obfuscations of post-modernism. In doing so, it represents a bold development of the Platonist tradition associated with St Augustine, Plotinus, and Proclus.