Introduction to Beezone
“There was a secret work school that existed in Afghanistan for thousands of years called “Sarmoun Darq,” which means “The Beehive” or the “Collectors of Honey.”
Welcome to Beezone
Beezone is a nonprofit (501(c)(3)) public charity, educational foundation and digital library which I founded in January 1998. Its purpose has always been rather simple: to gather, preserve, study and make available spiritual, philosophical and psychological teachings that I have found important in trying to understand some of the deeper questions of human life.
The name Beezone was not chosen accidentally. The image is that of the beehive. Bees go out, gather nectar from many different places and bring it back to the hive where, through a mysterious process of transformation, it becomes honey. That image has always represented something of what I understood Beezone to be doing.
There is also a more particular source for the name. Beezone draws its inspiration from the “Sarmoun Darq,” a legendary esoteric school sometimes referred to as “The Beehive” or the “Collectors of Honey.”
And that is very much the idea behind Beezone—gathering from many sources, but not simply collecting information for the sake of collecting it. The question is: What is the “honey”? What can actually be understood, learned or discovered from what has been gathered?
Over the years Beezone has grown to nearly 5,000 pages. There are essays, historical texts, excerpts from books, talks, interviews, commentary and other materials drawn from both Eastern and Western traditions. Some of the people and traditions represented here may be familiar to you; others probably will not be.
I have also tried to bring forward matters that are easily overlooked when spiritual and philosophical teachings become reduced to doctrines, beliefs, historical categories or simply something else to read. There are subtleties in these traditions. There are also contradictions, questions and sometimes very different ways of understanding what human existence is all about. Beezone does not try to resolve all of these differences by giving you a final answer.
In fact, that is not its purpose.
Beezone is non-sectarian and non-commercial. It does not ask you to adopt a particular belief or become a follower of anyone represented in the archive. It asks something much simpler, and perhaps more difficult: look, read, consider, question—and come to your own understanding.
How to Use the Beezone Archive
Now, there is a practical problem!
After more than two decades Beezone has become very large. With thousands of pages, you can wander around in it for quite some time—and perhaps that isn’t always a bad thing!—but if you are looking for something in particular, there is a much easier way.
Use the Search function.
Search for an author, a teacher, a subject, a phrase or even a question that interests you. Very often you will find not simply one page but a number of related pages that will take you into other areas of the archive.
You can, of course, also browse through the directories and topical collections. But if you are new to Beezone and wondering, “Where do I begin?” I would begin with Search.
And then follow what interests you.
That, in many ways, is how Beezone itself came into being.
I invite you to explore it in that same spirit. Beezone is an archive, yes, but I have never understood it to be merely a repository of information. It is a place for study, consideration and discovery—a “zone,” if you will, where you can spend some time with questions that may not have quick or easy answers.
Founder and Director
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