THE TEACHER
VOLUME 1: THE DAWNING EPOCH
BEINSA DOUNO
(Peter Deunov)
Peter Deunov (1864 — 1944), who is also known as Beinsa Douno, was a spiritual teacher in Bulgaria. He said that a new epoch has begun in which human beings will come to live in love and freedom. His mission was to prepare us for this new life. To those who followed him he was simply 'the Teacher'. Using simple language, he taught profound and practical Christianity, guiding his disciples to establish direct contact with the Spirit, and holding that true knowledge is only that which is personally tested and verified.
After he passed away, his teaching was suppressed for forty-five years, during the communist rule in Bulgaria. With the arrival of democracy in 1989 his voice began to emerge from obscurity. While Peter Deunov again became a known figure in his homeland, he remained almost invisible to the wider world. Gradually this began to change, and in recent years there has been a growing international recognition of the value of his work.
The Teacher encouraged his disciples to think of themselves as brothers and sisters, and he worked for the idea of Brotherhood to inform all levels of human relations, from the personal to that between nations. As part of this process, he developed the Paneurhythmy, a communal dance set to music to promote social harmony, spiritual development, energetic balance and physical health. According to Peter Deunov, the inner side of all religions is the same, there being one great truth, that of the relationship between the human soul and God.
This edition presents the lectures of the Teacher, Peter Deunov, Beinsa Douno, along with relevant passages from the Bible, in a suitable form for readers of the English language.
THE TEACHER is intended as a series of which THE DAWNING EPOCH is the first. It is available in both flapped paperback and hardback.
ISBN 978-1-905398-35-5
£19.95 (flapped paperback)
ISBN 978-1-905398-36-2
£29.95 (hardback)
Published February 2016 by Shining Word Press
Buy The Teacher GBP
Buy The Teacher USD
Review
Book Review
The hundred year period starting from around the middle of the nineteenth century was especially momentous for a new wave of spirituality that affirmed the Immortal and Timeless verities of all ages, but in a manner and form to suit the prevailing times, particularly in the West, which was then ultra-materialistic. The fertile period of spiritual effulgence was privy to such luminaries as Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant in the Theosophical Society, William James, Manly Hall and Emerson in America, Ramana Maharshi and Krishnamurti in India, Rudolf Steiner in Europe – and Beinsa Douno the Bulgarian sage of whom Einstein said ‘All the world renders homage to me and I render homage to the Master Peter Deunov [Beinsa Douno] from Bulgaria’.
The book presents the lectures of Beinsa Douno based on passages from the Bible with the aim of preparing humanity for a new epoch by imparting an understanding of the practical guidance from the scriptures that, at a profound level, can only be attained by direct contact with its source. Whereas it would naturally be profitable to read sequentially, there is no indispensable need to do so. Why? Because in the manner of any spiritual book on eternal truths about the inner life of Man, the material is organic, so to speak like a hologram or a fractal. An harassed reader may therefore 'dip into' any chapter at random since each one mirrors the whole purpose of the book. And that purpose is to assist the earnest disciple (hopefully, you the reader) to acquire spiritual enrichment gained through the practical wisdom and application of the Christ’s Teachings.
However it is no hyperbole that there are countless books purporting to sort out our lives by providing guidance based on the Christ’s words. Does this book stand out from the crowd, and if so, how and why? But first, who is Beinsa Douno? Do we know him? Of course there are the historical facts about his life and literary output, but can we claim to know the soul nature of the sage? The writer makes no such claims. Nonetheless, there are facts to consider and signs to read. A slight diversion is needed.
We have just had the EU Referendum. Notwithstanding all the ill-feeling and personal invectives on both sides of the debate, the sole criterion for both the exit and remain factions has been economics, brutal materialism to put it bluntly, as if a material utopia were the sole yardstick of human happiness. But now look to any religion and culture from ancient antiquity to modern times, whether to the East or to the West. What do we find? Not a single one of the sages and philosophers ever allowed the self-realization of truth to be sullied by the lure of establishing any earthly Utopia, or his life-energy to be wasted in inventing techniques and technologies or social schemes and economic models for dealing with the turmoil and malice of the world’s politics, economics and physical conditions at their own level. Each one of them saw with unerring insight that it was unregenerate man the world over – spiritually impoverished man – who was himself the prolific spawner of the ubiquitous cruelty and suffering around him; and so it was through man himself, his character, not his possessions, that the way must be found to redeem the world situation: the way of truth, wisdom and love – the transformed man. However, none of the saints and prophets of old like Buddha, Zarathustra or Christ, or the sage-philosophers such as Plato and Pythagoras of ancient times and Krishnamurti, Brunton and Emerson in recent years, ever preached a diet of material poverty or self-mortification as the highway to truth. Supremely practical men, they understood the value of the material existence and its enjoyment; but their counsel was ever the same – the evils resulting from ignorance of our true spiritual nature and the healing hand of the divine physician.
It is exactly the same with Beinsa Douno. On page 144 we find the sage counselling about wealth: ‘I am not recommending poverty. I recommend three types of wealth: physical, mental and spiritual wealth. But it is the spiritual wealth – 'Collect treasures' – in the Christ’s words (Matthew 6: 19-21) that is by far the most important, and the most neglected, that obviously constitutes the theme of this book, which provides practical guidance on life-challenging situations, along with instructions on surmounting obstacles in the path of the neophyte. Douno considers a whole host of subjects like hope, faith and love, good and evil, sin, mastering destiny, moral character, service and sacrifice, correct thought and prayer.
At this juncture we must issue a warning of utmost significance. And it is this.
There are at three principal ways of reading any sacred texts, such as the Upanishads, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or the Bible: 1. the dead-letter literal and intellectual; 2. the symbolical and intuitional; and 3. the Spiritual. These three modes correspond to: 1. reading with the brain, forming concepts; 2. reading through the mind, invoking percepts; and 3. reading with a quiescent brain in order to sense the soft intimations of the Soul1. If the reader cannot (or chooses not to) raise his consciousness beyond the literal and intellectual then he had better put away this book (or any other spiritual and religious book) for good; for this kind of level 1. reading is the modus operandi of the sort of dry, academic pedagogy that indulges in interminable, dead-ended debates in the gymnasium of the left brain that get nowhere, other than polarizing opinions, in turn generating the toxic cocktail of confusion, ill-feeling, and the scorn shown towards religion by the vast majority of scientists, plus the calumny heaped upon religious teachers by those very scientists who presumptuously think that they know better.
Deep truths about Man’s inner nature cannot be written down in words to be taken at face value. They can only impart their meaning in words through symbols, allegories and metaphors; and this is where the strength of the book lies and why its value rises way above the rabble of materialists who seek to denounce religion without having a clue about the allegorical nature of the teachings. The historical authenticity of the characters in the New Testament is of minor concern. What is of major significance is that these characters – men and women – are really the personifications of forces and processes which take place in the body and psyche of each human being. Needless to point out then, that words like God, the Lord and the devil, frequently used by Beinsa Douno, must always be understood in their universal meaning and never be taken in an anthropomorphic sense.
The chapters follow a general pattern: a pithy quote from the Bible (with an expanded version in footnotes), followed by a brief account of its essential meaning, which is then fully amplified by way of stories to illuminate the meaning further, then an exposition on the practical import for the everyday life of the ordinary man. I chuckled no end about the story (p. 109) of the two inquisitive frogs who fell into a pail of milk and swam round in circles. One frog got fed up (don’t we all when faced with a boring task), lay down at the bottom to rest and then died; but his companion continued swimming until the constant churning of the milk turned it into butter, which then provided a firm foundation for him to hop out of the pail. The moral: ‘Constancy in Life’, the message of Ecclesiastes 6:12, Who knoweth what is good for a man in his life? But I can just imagine all the arguments of the literalists (in their droves) taking the story at face value: surely the milk couldn’t suddenly just turn to butter; wouldn’t his legs get stuck when the milk started congealing, how does a frog know that churning milk would turn it into butter, how high can a frog jump, etc.? Apropos, it is comforting to know that when we are winging or suffering, it means that there is something in our souls that God must chip off, and when we sin, ‘a sinner is a stone out of which the divine chisel will form a graceful statue’ (p. 111).
One of the most revealing chapters (for me) is ‘The Grain of Wheat, the Emblem of the Human Soul’ based on John 12:24 (pp. 137-149). It is an eloquent exposition of how a grain of wheat metaphorically depicts the history of nature’s development and the human soul passing through the cyclical stages of death, sprouting, growth, and seeds. Then there are carefully worded comments on topics such as the future of our planet, the beginning of a new epoch, divine providence and the White Brotherhood (Douno's School of Esoteric Christianity is called 'School of the Universal White Brotherhood'). I was fascinated by a section on ‘The Testament of the Colour Rays of Light’ correlating the spectrum of light with that of spiritual qualities and also the days of the week. This is in line with the occult teachings on the mystical nature of colour from Douno’s contemporaries like Blavatsky, Bailey and Steiner.
In conclusion then, we have been bequeathed a book that that adds new meaning to the Christian scriptures and given us the practical and usable tools and techniques to apply the teachings in the course of our daily lives. It fulfills a desperate need to inject the living vitality of esoteric Christianity into what can only be referred to as the moribund shell of institionalized 'Churchianity'. The book is replete with Appendixes, a Bibliography, and References, the latter include an enumeration in both Bulgarian and English of the lectures constituting the book chapters, all painstakingly and lovingly assembled by the two translators Maria Mitovska and Harry Carr.
Edi Bil
Scientific and Medical Network
1. These three modes correspond very broadly with William James's account of brain function: productive, permissive or releasing, and transmissive. See William James, 'Human Immortality (1898)', http://www.uky.edu/~eushe2/Pajares/jimmortal.html.