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What and Why is a Sadguru –The Tradition of the Nath Yogis

There is a tremendous amount of mythology current in the world (including India) as to what constitutes a true guru. In the view of the original yogic tradition of the Nath Panth, the definition is very simple. A sadguru is someone who knows the way to the Real, the Sat, and can teach and guide seekers.

A Root of Many Evils: The Source of “The Age of Emerging Plagues”

Why the Age of Emerging Plagues?

In the sea of information and opinions about COVID-19 in which we are all floundering, we recently discovered a harbor of sanity. Dr. Michael Greger, author of How Not to Die and founder of NutritionFacts.org, recently posted a video and transcript of a presentation “Pandemics: History and Prevention” that he gave over ten years ago, when the bird flu was in full swing. In it he presents the history of infectious diseases, and the treatment of it by preventing their emergence.

Three ages of disease

Medical anthropologists identify three major periods of disease, beginning about 10,000 years ago when human beings began the domestication of animals. “When we brought animals into the barnyard, they brought their diseases with them” – measles from cows and sheep, smallpox from camels, whooping cough from pigs, typhoid fever from chickens, and the common cold from horses.

“The next great period of human disease started just a few hundred years ago with the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries, leading to an epidemic of  the so-called diseases of civilization: diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer, etc. But by the mid-twentieth century, the age of infectious disease at least was thought to be over… But then, something changed. Starting around 1975, new diseases started to emerge and reemerge at a rate unheard of in the annals of medicine. More than 30 new diseases in 30 years––mostly newly discovered viruses.

“We may soon be facing, according to the US Institute of Medicine, what they call a catastrophic storm of microbial threats. We are now smack dab in the third era of human disease, which seems to only have started about 30 years ago. Medical historians have called this time in which we live the Age of Emerging Plagues, almost all of which come from animals.

“But we domesticated animals 10,000 years ago. What has changed in recent decades to bring us to this current situation? Well, we are changing the way animals live.”

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The Odes of Solomon, the Oldest Christian Hymns

Today we are introducing a new commentary on some of the earliest Christian writings, the mystical Odes of Solomon, written in Apostolic times. We plan on publishing the commentary later this year.

Notes on the Odes
by Hierodeacon Simeon Goldstein, the
Translator of the Odes

Odes of Solomon-oldest Christian HymnsDiscovery of the Odes

This great work of mystical depth, divine insight, and spiritual illumination is, like the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the truly great spiritual and literary discoveries of the Twentieth Century. But unlike the Dead Sea Scrolls which were dramatically discovered by shepherds in a desert cave, the Odes were prosaically found in neglected manuscripts gathering dust on the shelves of London libraries. Before 1785 the Odes were only known by references in lists of apocryphal books, and from a Latin quotation by Lactantius. Then in 1785 a manuscript containing selections from five of the Odes was bought by the British Museum from the heirs of a London physician, Dr. Anthony Askew. This was the Codex Askewianus which contains the only known version of the Pistis Sophia, itself a great work of spiritual wisdom. The Pistis Sophia contains selections from five of the Odes of Solomon: Ode 1 (in chapter 59), Ode 5: 1-11 (in chapter 58), Ode 6: 8-18 (in chapter 65), Ode 25 (complete, in chapter 69), and 22 (complete, in chapter 71). The Pistis Sophia designates these specifically as “Odes of Solomon.”

Then, on January 4, 1909, J. Rendel Harris was sorting through some Syriac leaves which had been lying for nearly two years on some bookshelves in his office. Soon his attention was riveted by Syriac passages which were identical with those quoted in the Pistis Sophia and the passage quoted by Lactantius. This was indeed the lost book of the Odes of Solomon. It was published that same year as The Odes and Psalms of Solomon: Now First Published from the Syriac Version (Cambridge: University Press, 1909).

Nothing at all was known of the previous history of the manuscript, except that it had been on Harris’ shelves for as long as two years, and had come from “the neighborhood of the Tigris.” Unfortunately, the opening leaves which contained all of the first and second Odes and the beginning of the third, are missing. As already mentioned, the first Ode is found in the Coptic of the Pistis Sophia, but the second and beginning of the third are regrettably still lost to us.

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