The Golden Laws

This book is the second in a trilogy including The Laws of Eternity and The Laws of the Sun, which I reviewed in the mid-1990s. The author may be unfamiliar to many readers. He is a remarkable teacher on a par with Rudolf Steiner in terms of the range of his thought and insight. He speaks about the eternal Buddha and the great guiding spirits of light who have been present on earth in East and West to help take humanity to the next stage of spiritual development. The Real World is the spiritual realm, which he divides into dimensions reaching up to the Ninth from the Third, which represents Earth. The object of life is to develop the light and love within, and the overall aim of the book is to present a spiritual history of mankind and prospects for the future. Okawa explains that his esoteric knowledge comes from the fact that 80% of his soul still resides in the ninth dimension, in a similar way to Steiner and Swedenborg, who could also travel inter-dimensionally.

His history of spiritual philosophy and corresponding reincarnations is fascinating: he claims that Plato became Hegel, Marcus Aurelius Rousseau, Augustine Heidegger, Seneca Schopenhauer, and that Sir Thomas More had been Solomon, Kant Daniel and Sir Francis Bacon Xenophon. At the very least, this is an interesting thought experiment, and is projected into the future when it is explained that Confucius will reincarnate in the 23rd century and Luther in the 24th. The fate of Karl Marx, who had been Epicurus, is claimed to be grim, and the reader is encouraged to remember the importance of spiritual development. Nor surprisingly, Japan is said to play a key role in the period after 2020. Overall, the book gives a remarkable spiritual history and prospect of mankind, and is authoritative in its tone in spite of the fact that some readers will find his views unpalatable in a permissive age.