On my first break from the teaching, I drove to San Diego to stay with friends from my work days at Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation. At that time, the clinic gave health and wellness classes at Rancho la Puerto, a spa and retreat center near Tecaté, Baja California. My friends arranged for three days of rest and contemplation. I was exhausted, and confused about whether to continue my education in Yuma.
The resort was on the grounds of a previous Essene community established in the 1920s. The library still shelved many of the community’s books. I wandered in there one evening, not knowing the background of the ranch, and found a history of how the community was founded by Edmond Bordeau Szekely, an internationally known translator and student of world religions. The American Essene Community flourished for over fifty years, and gradually evolved into the present-day spa as more and more people wanted to experience the Essene quietude, exercise, vegetarian food, and spiritual practice.
Szekely is the scholar who translated the Essene Gospel of Peace from the original Aramaic, the native language of Jesus. He was given permission to translate the texts that were kept under lock and key in the Vatican. Szekely later discovered he followed on the path of St. Benedict and the monks of the Monte Cassino Monastery who protected these documents through the ages.
The texts had been originally translated by St. Jerome in the fourth century. He found fragments of the original texts in many small communities in the desert. Many of the residents who harbored the document fragments were descendents of the original Essenes.
These ancient documents precede the Dead Sea Scrolls of Qumran, and represent ancient teachings as old as eight thousand years B.C.E. (all the way back to Zarathrustra). They describe The Law. It is the same Law to which Moses referred. When St. Jerome was made the Secretary to Pope Damascus, who established a Papal Library, he was allowed to translate the ancient writings of the Essenes.
However, the translations caused a storm of criticism. The basic principles of the teaching emanated from natural law, not the laws of man. This body of knowledge made it impossible to follow while promoting the ownership of land and the suppression of women and children to the rule of men (i.e. patriarchal government). The Essene Gospel was the original ecological literature of the west, binding human beings to the Earth and her natural rhythms in a cosmology connecting Mother Earth and Father Sky, the feminine and masculine principles.
When Pope Damascus died, his successor St. Augustine made sure these documents were suppressed. Jerome fled for his life to the desert. There he continued to search for more fragments of the ancient knowledge. After his death, Jerome’s manuscripts were scattered, but eventually many found their way into the Secret Archives of the Vatican, where they remained under lock and key.
The Essenes were a peace-loving sect that believed in the sacredness of all life, practiced vegetarianism, and held that there are spiritual manifestations for all physical phenomena. In this, they were the first quantum physicists: all matter exists in two forms, particle and wave – flesh and spirit.
They understood all of life in the universe as the Ocean of Life, and all thought in the universe as constituting the Ocean of Consciousness. It was their experience that angels connected these two realities. The Essenes believed that Moses understood this through the vision of his ancestor, Jacob, who saw angels ascending and descending a ladder connecting Heaven and Earth.
Essenes practiced self-improvement, which they deemed a life-long process. Achievement of harmony required a balance between earthly and cosmic forces. The heavenly father (cosmic) and the earthly mother (earth) are balanced: eternal life with earth; creative work with life; peace with joy; power with sun; love with water; wisdom with air. These correlations remind us that whenever we contact earthly forces, we are in contact with heavenly forces.
I eagerly read these teachings, and I was encouraged to learn that the principles and cosmology taught to me in Yuma were the same described in the Essene teachings. Here was an Earth-based spirituality making the connection between the material world and the world of thought at a universal consciousness level.
The Teacher of Righteousness in the Essene texts is believed by some to be Jesus, when he was between eighteen and thirty years of age. During this time, his whereabouts are not mentioned in the Biblical texts we have today. Jesus and his family were Essenes, the ancient Jewish sect, existing from 250 B.C. to 60 A.D in Palestine. The community lived and taught a way of life consistent with Native American spirituality in which all things are imbued with the spirit of the Creator – rocks, water, air, plants, animals, and people. The philosophy of non-violence extended to animals, invoking a deep reverence for the living creatures of our planet. The last and most famous Essene-in-spirit was St. Francis. He lived and believed exactly as the Essenes, and his own writings are nearly identical to Essene texts.
So, I took this discovery of Szekely’s community, at the time I was questioning whether to stay with my Indian teachers, as an affirmation of the integrity of the work. I returned to Yuma.
Susan Feathers 