Mastery of the Cosmos

Play video below. You can read along with the transcript under the video.

In this talk, we look at how the subconscious controls our external reality and an esoteric perspective on the path that leads us to gain control of these subtle forces. This allows us through a serious discipline, to come out of victimhood and suffering and into a realm of true Mastery. Once we can master ourselves, this leads to a profound wisdom and command of the cosmos.

Mastery of the Cosmos

Series: Finding the Third Force - Class One

Transcript

Instructor:

I believe actually that's a profound reflection in the sense of, in a sense, right, the creative force, the life force that we're all connected to; what is beyond actual consciousness, that life force. We have Master Yoda up there, which is Star Wars. We talk about this energy, right? And in our reality, basically we perceive this as unconditional love; not conditional love and attachment that comes along with ego, but, we feel it as that when we really connect to that energy and beauty is another aspect of that unconditional love if we organize that into it and that beauty and that awareness.

So it's interesting that you say that because one of the main tenants of being connected to the Unity and cooperation and things of that nature is you familiar with Ram Das, right? So Ramdas’ guru Maharaji who was connected to the Unity and within others. What he would always tell Ram Das was whenever he was in the ego is just, “Tell the truth and love.” So, when you say that, that's what resonates with me on that because you said both the beauty of telling your truth and beauty to me is just another synonym for Divine Love.

Audience Member:

Truth is beauty. Beauty is truth. That's all is, that's all.

Instructor:

Really, we could say that a spiritual journey is kind of circular. We think that we are looking for something.

Yes. So as I was saying, we think that we are on a journey to go somewhere, but really it's more kind of unlearning to let go of all of the things that have hidden the fact that we've already arrived and the fact that we are whole, we are at peace, we are happy, we know what to do and we know ourself, but it's the programming and the conditioning, the pressures of society, our environment, our families, and the culture that make a kind of overlay that it's been called aggregates, the ego, a whole bunch of different names, but it's whatever obscures us from our inner light, our inner truth. So Gnosis is a system that allows us to have a kind of vernacular or didactic so that we can unlock that which is hidden inside of us. But as with any system, we don't want to necessarily attach to it or become obsessed with it or turn it into a kind of religion or dogma and things like that.

That's what all of the churches have done. So essentially Gnosis by its own definition tells you, “Don't do that.” The definition of gnosis is to have knowledge from our own experience, knowledge through direct experience. And that means we can study all of the different tools that have been put forward in a variety of systems and we can work with those tools and see what the outcome is for ourselves, see what we can discover for ourselves and whatever we learn and we find out internally, then that is knowledge that no one can argue with us about or take away. Yes,

Audience Member:

To share one of the, you said the word gnosis and knowledge after a lifetime, I learned what the **** the original meaning of wisdom is. And it's just what you said, wisdom is simply knowledge with experience.

Instructor:

Yes, that's absolutely right.

That's actually exactly what we were looking to achieve is not to know things intellectually, but to achieve wisdom. There's a Tree of Life over there—Kabbala, but the top sephira, Kether which is related to the Allfather or the first emanation of life, the morning star Kether in Hebrew means wisdom. So that's what the goal is to achieve.

Audience Member:

Can I just add one more thing? I happen to just rediscover, you've heard of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Thoreau and the third one, Margaret Fuller, actually at 24 Emerson asked to be his editor. She pulled the whole movement together behind the scenes, but they called literally the spiritual presence, the Oversoul.

Instructor:

Absolutely. Absolutely. You can call it whatever you want.

You could call the Multiple Perfect Unity or the Demiurge, or whatever you want to call it, the Supreme Oversoul.

You could also call (refer to an) oversoul as other unfoldments that come down, not to get too much into cosmology, but the one I AM the God, whatever you want to call that. It could also be called the Supreme Oversoul, because it's the Oversoul that contains everyone.

Audience Member:

When did Gnosis develop how old is it?

Instructor:

It's about 50 years old.

Audience Member:

Oh really.

Instructor:

Which is why we like to use the vernacular from it. What you'll find is most of the institutions now as predicted by the master himself—it's more than 50 years old. It's 50 years since, almost 50 years since the master disincarnated. But he said that “50 years after my death, Gnosis will just become another religion.” And sadly, that does seem to be the case, which is why we're trying to focus on individual groups and just not worry about what's going on with politics, with other people and things of that nature.

Or official gnostic organizations. They can be religious.

We said, any path that is valid to helping you find a way to your Internal Self if you understand the symbology. But, we do like to use this version because it's newer and in a sense it's a little bit more open and easy to understand. But if you prefer the terminology from other things, we can give very many examples.

For example, some of you guys are in Theosophy. Well, we can show examples of where this and this lines up with the same thing, like certain bodies. I personally like a lot of the Theosophical vernacular as well. So, when we're talking about, for example, the Tree of Life, I'll reference something like Chesed to also being Atman or Geburah is also Buddhi.

Audience Member:

Do you know the simple story of the Holy Grail?

Instructor:

We might have to push pause and just because we do have quite a bit of content to get through, then when we come to the end, we can have questions and when the talk finishes we'll have a…

Audience Member:

That whole thing is, you can’t follow somebody else's path. It's not yours. So when you're the deepest marker […unintelligible…], you don't know where you're going by necessity, you need to take a step forward. … actually open up to you.

Audience Member:

It's really interesting to me. I'm down with this stuff.

Instructor:

But this is actually what we're going to get into today. So, it's very synchronistic the things that you were saying.

Alright, so here we have the agenda for today. I'm going to try and move out of the way. Okay, so we're going to go through some of the creation principles because the title of the talk is Mastery of the Cosmos.

So of course the gnostic studies are very broad and extensive and the talk is going to be about 90 minutes. So we have a lot of things we want to cover off and we're going to give some basic principles so you guys can go away and start understanding how your inner world connects to your outer world, how the way that we think and feel is able to shift the external experience.

So, we're giving a few of very many tools and as was said in the beginning before some of you guys arrived, those who are interested would be welcome to sign up for a three month course that will go through a lot of these principles in-depth.

But we have three creation principles.

Then we have the psychology, because really spirituality is actually a kind of psychology. Psyche means the soul. So psychology is a study of the soul or we could say our inner world, our inner awareness and how that relates to our experience in everyday life.

Then we have some discussion on the elements, what that means practically and yes abilities.

We've seen those who are able to have visions or different kinds of experiences, occult experiences, and then finally the soul journey that ties it all together.

So before we get into it, is anyone familiar with these topics? Alright, so I guess no one here is familiar with those principles that we mentioned then.

Audience Member:

So psychic abilities, that was one of the main things that led me to Theosophy because I heard of astral projection before. So I mean I heard…not only astral projecting, they're astral meetups, they're chilling. Also people with severe autism, they're meeting up and chilling out. I'm like, that's crazy.

Instructor:

We'll talk about astral projection and other abilities as well.

Okay, so we'll start from the beginning.

We'll start from the beginning though.

Basically, the first principle is that as within, so without, as above, so below.

As within, so without or as above, so below.

Our external world is a reflection of our internal experience. This is because of the fact that as we were talking about before, that we are all fractals of one main thing at the most objective level.

So we are all one, but we have descended down into this reality for the purpose of having different experiences. In a sense, at a meta level, we literally are one Being existing all at once, teaching and learning from ourselves through each other. And we each have a different individual unique frequency back to that Reality, because of the fact that we all have each a unique individual subjective perspective.

So, if we were one with Unity or God or whatever you would like to call it, we would be aware of all perspectives. But while we're in this form, we have an individual perspective and then we have other people's perspectives that we don't understand.

And the thing is, is that when we first come down here, we forget what we are. Therefore, we're not aware of our control on the reality that surrounds us. One of the main tenets that we go through is speaking about the Force of Conciliation, and we'll talk about that a little bit more actually in the next slide because we'll talk about duality. But the fact that we learn and actually understand more of reality by comprehending and understanding others. The problem is because we're identified with our own opinions, our own beliefs and all these things that we spend so much time defending our reality, which—in a sense—is an illusion.

It is important to understand though that this illusion is created by us though, for us to come down here and to learn. So it's not something that we also should ignore completely. I know in a lot of New Age circles, people will connect to the Unity. People will say, “Well, everything's an illusion, so why should I work on my ego or why should I do any practices? That doesn't matter anyway.” But that's also in an extent a dualistic view that goes the opposite way. So, the point is to find balance and to understand as many perspectives as we possibly can.

And that's because when we look at something, if we were to zoom out, we talk about as above, so below—At all layers of reality, the same things are happening in a sense right now. We are thinking about the negative energies that are ramping up in the race on this planet and all that's going on.

But if you look out from say, the Pleiades Star System, our solar system is about to come into a point of light because of the fact that it's sort of the Central Star of that has, it's like the Solstice. We just went through a solstice, how our planet goes through solstices around the Sun. Well, our solar system is coming around to that and on a meta level, we're coming out of a Period of Darkness into a Period of Light.

Everything is always in balance, right? So, we're experiencing this and it feels like maybe a lot of negativity going on in the psychology of the planet and all of these things, but it's because really we're more mechanical at this point when we're not in touch with our Awareness.

So all of the negativity that's going on through the civilizations and the countries and the wars and all of this is a reflection of that negative energy that comes from above.

I want to ask, who here experiences suffering? Sometimes.

Right? And who here has ever felt frustrated with what's been going on? Sometimes.

Well as within, so without as above, so below principle teaches that there's a correlation with our external reality and our internal one

Audience Member:

Called Non-duality.

Instructor:

Yeah, we can give it a million different names.

The fact is that because we are not aware, because we are asleep, we don't recognize what is the link between what we are thinking and feeling and what we are experiencing externally. And because we don't recognize that link, we don't realize that we are a co-creator in our reality and we are creating our own dramas, our own suffering, our own barriers and our own blocks.

I'll give some examples. Let's say there's someone who is in a particular company and they really want this promotion and secretly inside they have a lot of doubts. They don't believe that they can do it. They don't believe that they deserve that promotion. So on one hand they complain to their colleagues and they say, “Oh, I can't believe my boss passed me up again. That person doesn't deserve it. That person is a real rat-bag and it should have been me and these are the 10 reasons why I deserve it.”

And on the other hand, they don't behave in a way that will allow them to “deserve” this promotion will allow their boss to see their worthiness and to give them this opportunity because secretly they are harboring self-doubt, secretly they don't believe that they deserve it.

So, they perform a two-pronged attack on themselves. On the one hand, they sabotage their opportunities subconsciously so they don't receive that advancement. And on the other hand, in order to blind themselves so they don't see how they're doing it to themselves, they also complain and play the victim and point the finger and say, “It's this person's fault. It's my boss's fault. It's the company's fault, everyone except me!” And that is how we perpetuate our own illusion.

So as within, so without and as above, so below. It's just another way of describing the same thing. In Gnosis we talk about the subtler layers of reality, which is not necessarily something very woo woo and magical. It has a science to it.

We could call them our thoughts, our feelings, our emotions, these parts of the psyche, of the soul, these parts of the inner world. This above aspect has a control on the lower aspect.

So, let's say that we are full of desperation for a love interest and we are saying, “Oh, I just want somebody to love me.” And we're secretly complaining, “Oh, they always leave. Nobody loves me.” Whether that's directed romantically or even to friends, like, “All my friends always betray me. They always abandon me. Nobody sticks around, just wait, give it six months, give it a year. They're going to stab me in the back. They're going to do A, B, C.”

And we think that this is something that always happens because we're somehow unlucky. But because this program lives in our subconscious, we will secretly do things to make it come true. And we will behave in certain ways.

Maybe we will be slightly more antagonistic or we will put out a very repelling energy to make sure that it becomes true. So we perpetuate this illusion.

It's also the same for some people that have certain illnesses. There are some illnesses where the doctors run many tests and they can't find out what is the cause. This person appears that they should be healthy. And at some point, they didn't have this disease, but they really, really wanted attention. And one day when they got sick, they got this attention and people gathered around and said, “Oh, are you okay?” And suddenly this person felt very nice and then a program went into the subconscious that said, “If I get very sick, not too sick, I need to be able to enjoy the attention. Maybe some skin condition, maybe my skin will be itchy. And then I'll explain it to people, oh yes, I have this condition. I'll roll up my sleeves and they'll see it and they'll talk about me. It will hurt a little bit, but it will feel nice.”

So, this program goes into the subconscious and then suddenly this person develops some skin condition that can't be explained. And then friends come around and they offer them ointments and treatments. And it's in the interest of this program to keep the skin condition going because then the attention continues. And this goes on and on in many different ways.

Now we're going to move on to talking about duality, which because there was a comment about it being non-dualistic, but really that's incorrect in a sense as well because the thing is, at objective reality, we are Unity and there is Unity. But at the same time, we've created this reality so that we can have this experience. So relatively, we came here to work with duality. The truth is more multidimensional. It's both Unity and dualistic. And if we go too far to the one side, we lose balance. And this is a key important point when we talk about duality and the pendulum. So segueing over from the as above, so below that actually works in the opposite direction too.

So, within ourselves we're made up of atoms, right? Everything that's created is consciousness. We are consciousness. And everything in this illusion is also created from consciousness. If we look at what the atom is created of. There is a proton, an electron and a neutron. There are three forces, but we only see two of them.

That's how we see the illusion. It's a positive and a negative. And I'm not saying…good or bad is not a great way to look at it, but there's positive force and there's negative force. And then the force that we don't see is the neutral force or the Force of Conciliation, the creative energy, the fohat, whatever you want to call it. That's what binds together the positive and the negative. And that's what allows this reality to be created. This is also what allows us to connect back to the Unity in the present moment.

The third, fourth exists outside of time. Time is another dimension, and we do not perceive it as we are in this form. We're living in the third dimension, not the fourth dimension. We're aware of time, but we can't move through it or see through it. If we were a fourth dimensional being…

We can't time travel.

If we were fourth… beings of higher dimensions can move through time, we move through space. But to see the Third Force we have to be in the present moment because our perception of time in itself is an illusion. So when we're thinking about the future, we're thinking about the past, then we're not in the present and we're not within this Third Force. We're between one of these two poles and our mind, our lower intellect, our brain works in a dualistic setting.

So, whenever we move one way to the other, to the other, that's what we call the pendulum. And in a sense, when we talk about the pathway to awakening, we always talk—many masters talk about The Middle Way or the Path of the Razor's Edge. The Middle Path is the balance between these two energies. It's not to be overly righteous and good, obviously we don't want to be evil, but in a sense both paths lead to identification and being asleep.

We can be identified with things that are “good”, but it's really simply a perspective. What's good to me might be not good to someone else who's from a different culture. Even if something is subjectively good, if we chase pleasure too much, it leads to pain, things of this nature.

So the goal is to be balanced and in the middle, and that's how we see it as Third Force. And that's how we stay in this Third Force in a sense. This third force is the recapitulation down of that Life Force itself. And that's what we are really made of in a sense. We think of being drained of our energy and losing energy and relatively we do to the ego and other things or just being physically tired, all of these things. But all of that is due to also our perception of these things being our reality.

Because in an objective point of view, we literally are free energy. If you think of the Matrix where they use the humans as the batteries, there's some truth to that in the sense of if we were not identified with our false reality and our false sense of self, then we would have unlimited energy. So there's that aspect to that and that is what we're looking to connect with first and foremost. I really think even before we worry about dissolving the ego, even before we worry about working through all these things, the first thing we'll talk about is the Awakening. This class is about mastering the cosmos and mastery is the work that we do in this incarnation to develop maybe abilities to develop superior bodies. But before we can even do that, we have to have a stable baseline. And that comes from the Awakening.

If we work towards these powers in this mastery without actually awakening to reality, you can awaken through conditioning and you'll see a lot of masters that don't seem very conscious, but they might have clairvoyant abilities and they have their own institution and they have people following them and they're drawing for money. And also maybe internal favor from their followers. Those are human person things to do, right?

And that's not saying that they're not masters in their own way, which is why we like to stay away from the word mastery because what does it really mean? You could astral project and have clairvoyance and have telepathy and still be in ego. So, there's a difference between the Awakening and the mastery, and that's something that we really focus on here.

Also, the awakening can happen really at any level really early on. You don't have to have 20 years of working on ego death to perceive objective reality. The work itself takes a long time, but like I said, we could do that work and still be in ego. And when we do the work, we actually strengthen the ego because it takes the energy from The Work. So it's more important to just find ourself before we even worry about moving forward.

Yeah. If we go back to the first principle as within, so without everyone is here for a different reason. Maybe there there's something that you particularly want, something that has been very elusive. Usually when people see a class like this online and they decide to attend, there are thoughts of, “Oh, I want to use these tools to gain abilities, gain powers, or I want to be rich, I want to do a spell to gain love or I want a big house and all these things.”

And really what is required is a deeper understanding of how the universe functions. There is a famous line from Ram Das' guru, where this man in India, he was like a beggar on the street. He was completely free psychologically. They said he could make money appear out of an alligator's mouth and all kinds of crazy tales if you like the lore. But one of the things that he said was, “You can have everything in the universe, if there is no more, you left to have it.” And this statement illustrates one of the biggest principles in how the Cosmos works, that the more we grasp and try to run towards something, it behaves in an inverse way that we will automatically repel that thing. So, it's kind of like an irony in a way where you can get the thing but you can't want the thing.

And so when we look out the window and we see, “Oh the neighbors! They have the best marriage. They have the best job. They have the best income,” and we have all that envy, that inner clinging, “Oh, I just wish I could have that.”

They don't even appreciate it. That's the weird part. They don't even know that they have all these things.

There's also a price to pay if we get something we want through desire. So they've used law of attraction to some extent. Those lesser things can get you something like a car or something, but you're paying with your internal currency, so you're going to have to pay something. Nothing's free when you do something for desire.

So those who use say spells, whether they call them white magic spells or black magic spells, if they're coming from a place of desire, a place of ego, then if they do obtain the result, it is going to come back to them in a tainted way because the ego has gotten involved.

So we can look at this even in a very basic way, like someone who is a wealthy CEO and he has all these people that come to him. He has all this power. He has all this money, and maybe he never spends time at home with his wife and children. He has no time to have a happy social life. He's given away everything. He has power and money and respect, but he has no joy. He has no free time. He has no hobbies. So, he's used the ego and a very strong will and intention to chase a goal, but he's gotten a result that is somehow perverted.

So, it's not that we cannot move towards a particular objective, but when we are in Gnosis, we say conscious. When we are conscious of how the universe works, then we can make informed directions with our intention and understand exactly the mathematical consequence of what we are doing.

So we could say that the goal is not necessarily to become a good person in Gnosis because again, that's just one side of a pole, positive and negative. But the goal is to become a free person and free means free to be aware and to choose.

And that brings us to duality, right? You have people who are trying to be good or people who are trying to be evil. Today, somebody who is coming to the talk called us and we said, “Oh, are you guys Satanists?”

And I said, “No, we're not. We are just studying different kinds of spirituality, a synthesis of all the different systems.”

And yes, there are people that can use the same tools, and they can do something evil. There are also people that are very wrapped up in certain systems and views and do something that they think is good that from another perspective we could say is not good. If we think of the Holy War, those people thought they were championing the best thing in the universe and then they went out and they committed atrocious murders and all kinds of things.

So we see that everything is just a matter of the perspective that we hold. And this pendulum means that reality is constantly swinging between positive and negative and true mastery that can allow us to navigate this swinging aspect of the pendulum is to be in the middle. And if we learn to master remaining neutral to all of the events that come our way, then we become outside of these changing events, whether it's a “good” event or a “bad” event.

“Today I feel happy. I've partied with my friends, we had a lovely dinner, then I go home and I'm alone and I'm depressed.”

“Today I feel happy. Somebody has praised me. Tomorrow, my enemies attack me and criticize me and I'm down.”

Do you see how this pendulum goes from side to side? When we attach to it, as it moves, our emotions go like this, our thoughts go like this. And really that's what Adonis was saying, how we become like a machine. We are simply a victim, a leaf in the wind of all of these forces that we have no awareness of.

We lament our situation, our conditions, the people around us. We blame everyone. And we don't know how to come out of this pendulum, these swinging forces.

Audience Member:

What is the pendulum?

Instructor:

The pendulum is what we talked about here, how all of reality is made out of three forces.

Audience Member:

…fundamental forces …

Instructor:

We don't see the Third Force. Our mind cannot perceive the Third Force. You can only perceive it with the consciousness.

Audience Member:

What is the difference between the Patriarchy and the matriarchy?

Instructor:

That's just more duality. Yes.

Masculine and feminine is two dualities.

Audience Member:

During the matriarchy, the nomadic patriarchy came in and everything was, “I only know who I am by how I relate to the exterior. So, I got to have more of this bigger that! One winner. Everybody's a loser.”

The feminine nature, it's all about…

Instructor:

I'm going to cut you off there, now, Sir.

Look, if you want to look at why, if you look at prior root races—and this is not even proper for this lecture—but I give you why there was originally matriarchal society and matriarchal religions in say Atlantis or Lemuria, and now we're seeing more masculine geared forces is because of the fact that the planet itself is going through its own conscious curve.

We're at the lowest point. So, the planet itself was descending into the physical. That is a reflection. As the people, we’re part of this planet. So, before the energies were moving downwards, that's the feminine. The feminine is associated with the negative force, not that it's negative.

Audience Member:

Negative force?!

Instructor:

Yes, but it’s not that's that it's negative.

It's not bad, bad. It's just two opposites.

That's what we're trying to say. There is no good and bad.

Audience Member:

Like a battery.

Instructor:

Yes.

But the negative force being that the feminine force is the Maya is the illusion. So, it's the cosmic egg, right? The spirit comes down—masculine, think of it as an egg. The spirit fecundates the egg. So, the masculine force is Spirit that comes into matter. The feminine is Divine Matter, the masculine is Divine Spirit.

Instructor:

So where does a child come from? Out of a man's ears and nose?

Instructor:

No, it's a recapitulation of that cosmic principle in our physical bodies.

The planet itself was descending into the physical because everyone on the planet is unconscious. This was reflected as the spiritual movements were towards the feminine because the planet spiritually was moving towards the feminine.

Now that the planet is coming back up through the next races, the spiritual, not because it's masculine dominated, but there's an unconscious sense that there's a masculine movement of the spirit up. And that's what we're seeing reflected in that. So that's why you see the shift in that.

But people don't understand that in their unconsciousness. So then it becomes this whole thing that's in the public.

But anyway, as we move toward, we already spoke a little bit about balance and we're talking about this, and so we don't need to go into the metaphysics behind the Third Force.

We already talked about that. But how do we work with this balance and how do we find it? That's the most important thing. That's the goal. How do we begin to awaken the consciousness? And we have right here on this mantle piece, this is in ancient Greek, ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ (Gnothi Seauton). It's the maxim that is on the temple of Apollo in Delphi. And it means basically know thyself. But the full maxim is, “Know thyself…Man, know thyself, and you shall know the universe and its Gods.”

And this is—truly—know thyself is the work to awakening. So, when we go internally for us to dis-identify from our false sense of self, it takes bravery. It takes courage for, I mean, in rare circumstances there may be some people that are over their fears and are really attached to their arrogance. But for the most part, what holds us back from really in meditation to knowing ourselves and disidentifying from ourselves, it's our pains, it's our traumas and things of that nature. And it really takes bravery and courage to go within oneself and to face oneself. But through that is where we find this balance.

Yes. If I take my own spiritual journey as an example, looking back many, many years ago, there was relatively a lot more attachment, confusion, desire, and chasing. And even though my first introduction to metaphysics was way back, let's say 20 years ago or 15 years ago, when all of the things about setting intentions and writing affirmations, these were first coming out, and Brian Tracy and all of the other motivational speakers were teaching people how to get what you want, how to chase after that.

And by applying some of those tools, I found at the time relatively good success. So, I went out and chased all of these things, these objectives, and I used the tools that were given to me, and I achieved the things that I wanted. However, when I reached that stage, I found a kind of dissatisfaction that wasn't what my Innermost, what my soul, my inner light, my Inner Authenticity really longed for because I was chasing things that were programmed into me like, “Oh, you need to have a lot of money. You need to have a good job. You need to have respect.”

And even if we obtain these things, we find that it feels very hollow and we can chase after certain kinds of relationships, whether intimate or friendships. And when we supposedly “achieve” those things, again, there is an aspect where they don't seem to satisfy something internally. And that is simply because we don't understand the nature of reality.

And at one point, the philosophy of Buddhism was something that had a very big impact. And upon finding that, that was a big liberation for me personally. And that was the understanding that all of desire leads to suffering. We don't want to admit that. We don't like that.

Audience Member:

Yeah.

Instructor:

We don't like that. The ego doesn't like that. But in our own experience, every time we get what we want, we feel let down. We feel a kind of depression. Think of, so you were talking about ice cream before you came here.

Audience Member:

Oh dude, I'm going to get this ice cream. I desire the ice cream do. If I don't want to get ice cream…I'm like, you should get some ice cream.

Instructor:

Monitor the craving before the ice cream,

Audience Member:

The great rebellion! The great rebellion!

Instructor:

…and then consciously eat that ice cream and see how you feel and keep watching your internal state, your emotions, your thoughts, your stomach, and then see how you feel at the end of it. Nine out of 10, we feel a kind of, “Awww, it wasn't all I thought it was going to be,” but when that craving is satisfied, we pushed that program to one side. Because remember, we have thousands of these, and then another one comes up and we say, “Well, maybe this will be different. I'm going to binge watch this show.” And we're so excited. We go and buy a lot of chips and snacks, and then we sit down and we're eating and we're watching the show. And after some hours we feel a little bit hollow, a little bit rotten, like, “Oh, it was fun, but oh, it's so much the same.”

“And the plot's all the same, and the characters are all the same, and the bad guys are all the same. And I'm bored.” So we move from milking sensation to sensation to sensation, and we just end up feeling worse and worse. So we keep trying to apply other kinds of “chasings” in the hope to erase the dissatisfaction from the last one.

But when we have this that we're talking about balance, when we train for those who are here for the meditation at the beginning, we train the awareness to stand back and to observe all of these things that come and go, that arise inside of us. Then we start to go, “Aha, okay, I can see what is happening. I can see my own internal programs, my own internal loops, and I can see how I really, really want something. And then I get it, and then it means nothing to me. I don't even value it. I don't appreciate it.”

And we could say that one of the key reasons this happens is because of what we call in Gnosis identification. It's a feeling of a me, an I, the thing that just really, really wants. And the awareness actually sits behind that.

So, then we find something unusual because if we can become aware of the I, then what are we really? The I the thing that we see. And if we can see it, then we're not really that, but it's a very, very fine and delicate relationship to see how we get hooked by that I. And so, we have a lot of tools that we teach that can help.

Audience Member:

Bad, is it bad though?

Instructor:

Well, we don't say that anything is good or bad.

First of all, nothing is good or bad. The thing is, is that we created this reality and came into this reality, as I said before, to learn, to grow, to gain wisdom.

Audience Member:

I agree. But would you warn against it? Would you recommend it?

Audience Member:

She’s saying how it leads to suffering.

Instructor:

If you want to suffer…

The issue basically is more this…

Audience Member:

I don't want to suffer.

Instructor:

It's not so much that the ego is bad or the ego is good, it's that our relationship to it is skewed. So, we've—instead of seeing it as a tool for learning, that it is, we became attached to it. And we think that it is Us.

In a sense, it's not necessarily a bad thing, right? It's like in the Matrix they created these robots and then they are enslaved by the robots. But the thing is that we created them for that purpose to break free from it. The thing is, we became attached to it and now we want to keep it alive.

It's meant to be seen and then broken away from. And then through the experiences that we have with it, we learn and become wiser and then grow as a consciousness. Because while we're also a Unity, we also are individually at our own stages of development. Because every time that Unity comes within itself, descends and comes back out, it creates more. So there's this aspect of all of us, ourselves, the universe inside of a bigger universe, and we're all growing. How

Audience Member:

Do you know? It creates more, it keeps doing that. How do you see those cycles outside of your own life?

Instructor:

Because what happens is, is that at Unity, and I'll say this is a little subjective. This is from my understanding, because I obviously have not been at Pralaya “I'm interested,” but at some point, everything, even the universe expands and contracts, it comes back to a point of being everything's back in the unmanifested and we're chilling, right? And you know everything.

For some reason it creates another universe. My suspicion is probably at some point when knowing everything and not having anyone to talk to becomes lonely then you come again, I saw that. But every time you come again, because you have the wisdom from before, you create another layer to reality. So it's like there's another level. So it takes a little bit longer to go back to that stage before you have to come back down again, but it is a loop.

Audience Member:

No, this is is exactly what you're talking about. but simplified, I came across the original meaning of the word imagination. Imagination originally means to meld together the interior with the exterior. So, the imagination is the natural presence that is bringing the two opposites together. Did you ever hear that before?

Instructor:

Yes. Yes.

Audience Member:

So when you hear that, that it's your imagination, that is the energy that we are born with and have within us, that's doing that, does that, yes.

Do you guys know SpongeBob? “Imagination.”

Instructor:

Yes. So definitely, definitely. This is what we're talking about, that your inner world is connected to your outer world.

So, in the examples we gave in the beginning, someone who cannot find love, they are subconsciously, continuously imagining scenarios where they cannot find love. And then externally, they create that reality to become like a display or a demonstration of what's happening in their internal world.

Audience Member:

What I'm trying to say is allowing your imagination to just operate and work naturally.

Instructor:

We could refer to imagination as unconscious clairvoyance, because if we had control over it, then we would actually be able to psychically project ourselves. Imagination is our clairvoyance that we're using all the time, but we just don't know that we're using it. We're using it for negative things.

Audience Member:

When you create, what do you call that?

Creation?

I know what do you do?

Instructor:

But when you're creating something unconsciously through your mind, because you're thinking and daydreaming and the unconscious,

Audience Member:

You’re on a tangent right now, bro.  We're trying to stay in the vector. We got to stay in the vector.

Instructor:

We're going to move on to the inner psychology, which is what we were talking about. So Ruth already was alluding to this as we're talking about the ego.

And when we look at the inner psychology and the ego in Gnosis, we call the ego something…

One, there is a false sense of self. We have our shadow self as they talk about a New Age. But in Gnosis, we like to look at the ego actually as a multiplicity because while we all do have a personal [Particular] psychological profile,(PPP) which is important to find and dis-identify from, which is our main, I guess, flavor of who we are as a person in this reality,

Our main inner darkness.

You can't just wave a wand and make that go away once you see it. So, when we do the work on the psychology, what we do is we do the work on all these little aspects and these things that spread from the ego. We could divide it down in the sense, for example, we may have many triggers that we have not processed, things that turn into pride for us or that they turn into greed for us. And when we observe ourselves, we start to see different perspectives where these certain emotions may come out from us, and through that, we're able to eliminate them.

So, as we mentioned before, working on the psychology is a kind of spirituality. There are one and the same. The modern psychologists and psychiatrists, they're kind of on the backfoot because they don't acknowledge the other dimensions. They don't acknowledge the existence of the ego as the energetic aggregates that are understood in all of the spiritual traditions. So when they go to treat people's inner ailments, their first port of call is drugs, and then they want to talk about it and they want to coddle and affirm the very thing that's causing someone pain and inner darkness, rather than give them a method that can help them to see it, to see its illusion, and to heal that wound and transcend it. They want to just keep it nice and decorate and keep it around and make it a kind of identity for the person so it becomes an eternal handicap.

And they consider that, well, the person is now cured.

And so you have people that say, are alcoholics, and now they identify as being an alcoholic. And as long as they maintain that identity and keep thinking about their recovery, then they can stop drinking alcohol, but they also can't do anything else. And you see this where someone will become consumed by PPPcertain activities, and it's fine for those people that need that, that is appropriate to their stage of understanding.

But for anyone that wants to go further and to become freer, to see what they could become, then they need to become free of those old limitations, those old wounds completely. And it's only by using a method that allows us to step fully outside of those wounds—that pain—and know how to completely let go of them, that we can then reinvent ourselves. We can then choose something, and we can become something different.

I would say we also look at it as a multiplicity in the sense of, the egos don't necessarily work together in tandem. Yeah sure we have our false sense of self, but if anyone who's ever been like, maybe you're really into something and now it's like, “Alright, I was super into this type of food and then all of a sudden now I'm tired of it and I want to eat something else all the time.” Those are two different egos.

And one is, in a sense, we have a vehicle that's mechanical, one is in control, and then it feeds on our energy or whatever, and then it moves on. And then another one comes in and now we're like a completely different person. Maybe now we want to go to the nightclub and have some drinks when two seconds ago we were hungry. So they don't necessarily work in tandem and sometimes they compete. Maybe we're feeling really tired, we also want to hang out with our friends, and then we have some type of struggle in our mind. But those are two different egos working against each other. Neither of them is what the Essence wants to do.

So, we say that the essence is the Awareness, the one that sits behind all of these impulses that come in and really should be the one in the driver's seat. But because we've fallen asleep at the wheel, now all of them come in at random and basically do whatever they want. And we become like a little puppet, going from thing to thing, desire to desire, conversation to conversation.

That's why you can see someone who says, “You know what? I just want to be a doctor.” And then they put all of this resource and attention and commitment into going to med school. And then halfway through they say, “I don't want to do this anymore.” They drop out and someone commits to a marriage, they're madly in love with someone and they say, “Yes, I'm going to love you till death do us part.” Some years later they say, “I hate you. I wish I never met you.”

What is going on? We are not a Unity. We are internally a multiplicity, a whole bunch of thousands of different conflicting desires and programs. And it's only if we can train the Awareness that we can, first of all see these programs as they come in, as these different desires bubble up inside of the subconscious. And once we train the awareness so we can see them, then we can go to work on, am I going to keep this program or am I going to find a way to dissolve it in my own method that I've chosen and then transcend it so that now when choices come to me, I'm truly free to choose?

Because before we do this work, we have the illusion of being free. We think we're doing all these things that we want, and, “I choose to travel to this place, and I choose to read this book, and I choose to talk to this person.”

But really, it's nothing but a series of consecutively arising programs. And we are watching them without any willpower to choose at all. But as soon as it arises, depending on our level of will to resist, we go with it. And the way that these programs work is they give a kind of illusory justification to justify the object of the program.

So, we are driven to do something and then we make up a story why we should do that thing. So let's say that someone, say your dad says, “Oh, you should go shovel the snow,” and then you promise him, “Yes, I'm going to do it.”

And then you say, “Oh, but you know what? I'm so tired right now and I just don't feel like it. And if someone slips, what are they going to sue us? I don't think they're going to sue us. So, it's perfectly fine to not shovel the snow.”

So, we've made up a story so that we now won't do this thing, and we want to convince ourselves why we shouldn't. And it happens with everything.

Someone goes on a diet the first day, they say, “I'm going to do keto for four weeks. And then they go, oh, you know what? Someone asked me to go eat ice cream and they're really friendly, so I should just go and eat the ice cream right now. And there's always tomorrow. Tomorrow I can start keto.” And oh, “my dad's just bought a whole bunch of carbs…”

That’s the ego's favorite excuse. It's always tomorrow. It's always something like that or something that happened in the past. The thing is that tomorrow doesn't actually exist objectively. Sure, there will be a tomorrow and then when we get to tomorrow, it'll be another now. But everything is now.

So whenever we're living in the future or putting things off, it's really just the ego using that, an excuse to push it away. Because, the work is done now and in the present, and it starts now. It doesn't really matter what happened in the past. It doesn't matter where you're going in the future. You just start from right now. That's where the work starts.

Audience Member:

Similar to the mindset, when people come up with an idea or a plan, they tell everybody about it, and then they realize, oh, that's not really quite right, but they're attached to being, right? So they'll keep talking about doing it a certain way, even though they know it's not right. Their ego is telling them, “I can't change my mind.”

I mean, I don't care if I realize something I'm doing it wrong. I'll just say, “Okay, I'm humble, I change my mind,” but I see people all the time. “I'm right, I'm right. And even they know they're not, right.”

Instructor:

Yes, exactly.

They don't have enough awareness to step back and cancel the program that's running. And that's the problem is that we can very easily see everyone else's hypnotic processes. We just can't see our own.

So, whenever you have that person in the room and everyone's going, “Oh my gosh, how could they right now. We can all see what you're doing. We can all see you're out of line. We can all see you're in ego,” but that person doesn't see it. They think they're standing up for something very, very important and that everybody should listen to them right now, otherwise everything is going to burn down. And their view is the best and most important correct view, and everyone else is wrong.

And then tomorrow it's us.

And at the time when we do it…

Audience Member:

But they'll probably go to sleep and they'll be like, “Oh, I shouldn't have done that.” You get moments of clarity. But then it's like when you're in the management of all the thousands of the little things. L. Ron Hubbard. What is it? The things. The thousand? But you're like, oh, executive order, I need to do this. And then it's like, nah, imagine you're an alcoholic. Oh, I'm going to stop drinking. Alcoholic as a, you're going to drink alcohol, but you can be like, give me a plane ticket to the, I don't know, Somalia right now, whatever. No Saudi Arabia. They'll shoot me if I drink alcohol. Boom.

Instructor:

Well, the problem is we never have enough willpower and awareness to

Audience Member:

Get to Saudi Arabia? You could potentially do it before it…

Instructor:

Without proper tools and training.

Audience Member:

It's not proper tools and training. But you could kick your, but you don't always have access to that kind of stuff, which is good that we're here. We're in the vector learning the tools of training.

Instructor:

Yes. Well, now we're going to move on to talk about mastery. So we talked about awakening first just because they aren't the same, but we're mainly trying to talk about what mastery entails and what comes along with that. Obviously, a higher level of awakening will help us do the work to master.. well, reality. And that's what we're talking about when we talk about a master spiritual master.

There's different grades of spiritual masters. There are those who are very awakened, probably have even better abilities that we can fathom comprehensively. And then there's also masters that are just able to have the bare minimum and usually the bare minimum in Gnosis what is thought of as when someone is considered a master is someone who has advanced enough that they can control the four elements. I'm sure everyone's aware four elements, fire, water, or air, pretty much in every spiritual form.

There's actually a fifth one that’s ether, yes. But a master is someone who well actually has control over the four elements and also has recreated their soul. So their six dimensional body, the Causal Body, for those of you in Theosophy, someone who has access to now access a Causal Body and control the elements.

Now, what are the elements, right? This in a sense, this lower reality that we're in is created from, I believe it's actually seven elements, but we can perceive four, and there's a fifth one that's coming through. It won't be until later races that we can perceive the other two, which is the Astral Light [and the Cosmic Mind]…

But everything that's created around us is created with these four elements. We think of when spirit descends into matter. They say, I think in The Secret Doctrine says that it’s the Trinity descending into the Quaternary. What is the Quaternary? It’s this physical reality made from these four elements.

And these four elements both affect our psychology and the reality around us. So on the Path of Initiation, which is something that we'll talk about in Gnosis, we go through trials where as we grow, we learn to master these elements first inner psychologically.

So for example, fire psychologically is related to things like anger and things of that nature. We find a balance to be able to control that energy within us. Water can be related to lust, air, the mind, things of that nature.

And then further on, as we advance and go through more trials, we'll have trials with the elements that increase in intensity because everything really recapitulates. If you pass a trial, eventually you'll get it again at a higher level of the degree. And eventually as we go through these trials, we're able to actually master the ability to use the elements externally. This is both working with elementals in other beings such as plants, animals, things of that nature, but also being able to harness the beings that live within the elements themselves.

Because the elements themselves have beings that live within them—Subjectively— we could say, but these energies can be controlled because again, we create the reality that's around us. So we can start to control these to an even more extent at a higher level of mastery. That's way further beyond everyone.

But the higher dimensions that are related to the Causal Plane, the Buddhic Plane, these are managed by seven cosmic, I guess “being groups” we could say, because they're not necessarily one being; a hive-like me. We think of them as angels, archangels, devas and aliens, whatever you want to call them, right? Their subjective names for beings of the higher dimensions. And they go under seven rays, cosmic rays of creation. They're responsible for different layers of creation.

At that layer of reality and at a certain level of mastery, we can also begin to work with those forces as well. But that's way far beyond. At first, we just want to focus on being able to control the elements within and then again, without.

Has anyone ever felt like they were drowning?

Audience Member:

Yes.

Instructor:

Or felt like you were under so much pressure, you were being crushed, or you felt like your mind was spinning out of control and you couldn't stop thinking?

Or you felt so angry that maybe you wanted to do something illegal? Yes.

So, when we use the term, the elements, it's really just a kind of a subjective system to refer to these different internal flavors that we experience in relation to our external surroundings.

And it's a traditional set of terms that we see in all of the different systems. You see it in even Japanese anime, Airbender, those samurai, the demon slayers like this one, which is a very fun show by the way, where they harness the breath, they harness the elements, and that allows them to overcome the situations.

It's actually a very symbolic trope that we see in all of the mythology. The reason we see this expressed in the artwork, in the culture is because we are trying to express something internal. Something within that is common to humanity. And that is our own inner struggle. Our own struggle with our darkness.

And when you have someone that is completely unconscious, that's the kind of person that I mentioned that blames everyone that says, “It's all their fault. It's the fault of my parents. It's the fault of my teacher. It's the fault of my bosses. It's the fault of my friends. It's the fault of my partner, my dog, my neighbors, the government, the president, everyone except for me. It's just I didn't do anything. I couldn't ever do anything wrong, but everyone else can.”

Which of course when we put it like that, it's ludicrous. How can everyone else do something wrong? And we are not capable of doing something wrong?

So as an example, let's say that there is someone who just really wants to have friends and they keep finding themselves to be a loner and they put themselves out there, they make an effort, and maybe they have some small friend groups and then they're often fighting and then eventually everyone leaves them after 20 years and they go, “What is wrong?”

Audience Member:

After 20 whole years?

Instructor:

As an example.

Audience Member:

That's crazy. Wouldn't that kind of be successful? Kind of. That's crazy.

Instructor:

Okay, let's say every three months. Alright, so every three months,

Audience Member:

The older you get, 20 years is not so long.

Instructor:

That's true. That's true. That's for someone young, let's say every month, right?

You meet a friend, you hang out, you have coffee, the friendship goes through a really quick cycle and then you burn them, they're gone, and you don't even know what you did. And you go, “Why? Why is this happening?”

Audience Member:

Wait, go to the 20 years again though, because that’s…

Instructor:

Let's just get to the point. The point is that it keeps happening and the person doesn't realize what is the pattern and they don't realize what they are doing internally to make the pattern repeat. It's exactly the same scenario.

If it's someone who's trying to get a certain job of a certain status, a certain level, and they keep trying and trying and trying and then they keep getting passed up and they become more and more bitter, more and more angry.

And it could be the same with someone having money problems where they keep thinking that they're going to get ahead and then they end up on the back foot and then they get ahead and they end up on the back foot and they go, “Why am I stuck in this cycle?” And really…

That's a good point in a sense. They only becomes trials and we become aware of it and we actually try to pass them. But in essence, we're always under the influence of these elements all the time. Even a regular person, it happens all the time not going on our whole life because it is the nature of the reality itself. If the pendulum is in between the duality, then there's also a sense where these elements also cycle through on another layer.

So, we know those who have worked with the occult, who have worked with these systems, they can reach a certain level where there's the term “master”, and this can be very varied in that they reach a level where they have certain abilities, maybe they have clairvoyance, maybe they can do certain things.

However, in order for one to get to a certain stage of being able to command the reality around them, they have to master the elements and to master the elements is to first master them inside of ourselves. And once we can master them inside of ourselves, inside of the microcosmos, then we are able to move to begin to master the macrocosmos.

If we can't master them within ourselves, then we can't master them externally because they're entangled, they're entwined. So, to start to work with the inner elements, we have to learn to manage the things that arise within us.

So, let's say if the mind is spinning out of control, that's the element of air—we can say—and can we move back so that that spinning now is something we are able to observe and then slowly we can fall away from it and cause it to be quiet, which is that image.

If you look up there, you'll see this monk that's slowly chasing an elephant and a monkey. And as he goes up this path, sorry, it's really far up, but as he goes up this path, at the very end, he's able to sit on the elephant and master the monkey, which is the chattering of the mind and the elephant, which is the movement of the mind or its will that seems to work against us. Because if it's your mind, why can't you control it? It behaves like someone else's mind, right? And we become a victim.

We can control it. But as you see with that path, it's a long path to be able to master the mind and to master the mind is to master the element of air.

It's the same for water. That fluidity. We want to start crying and we want to get mad at everyone, the fire, the anger. So, if we work with these tools that we present in the three month course, then these are things that we can take with us for life and slowly begin to master the elements within us. And the more we can clean up our internal psychology, the more we can begin to use these other kinds of abilities, which are clairvoyance, the ability to see something internally related to the subconscious.

This is not something that's magical or made up. If you go to the Monroe Institute and you train with them certain abilities to do with the consciousness. It’s exactly the same. When we look internally, we have the ability to perceive.

It comes from the consciousness, and the more we can awaken the consciousness, the more we can perceive. And that's how you have things like remote viewing, astral protection, all these things come by this kind of development.

And these abilities relate to the seven chakras. I'm sure pretty much everyone's familiar with that, right? Everybody knows the chakras are, okay, so.

No? Seven chakras.

The seven centers in the spine that are related to the energy that moves up their spine? No.

Okay.

So, we have seven centers, and this actually relates to the organization of seven that we were talking about before. But there are points on our spine that start from here (points to base of spine) moving all the way up to the crown of our head that our natural energy moves through in our current state. Because while we're unconscious, the energy is not moving properly. So one of the first things that we do with the practices is to awaken that energy pathway, which is really our natural state is to have that energy cycling. But most of us don't. Most people are more than likely stuck in either the root, which is related to being really identified with reality or the sacral center, which is the one right above it because it's emotions.

And if they are somehow a little bit more pulled away from the reality, the emotions tend to get them because as we all say, we all have, that's why the traumas and the fears and the things are what holds us back right away from the beginning.

But these seven centers are directly related to these abilities that we have latently. Some people may be born with the ability to use one or the other based on their karma-dharma, but truly to be able to be able to use these abilities freely and objectively really takes creating a Path to our higher self that's more permanent.

So even when we work with these abilities at our stage now as the beginners or at the beginning, what we'll see is that a lot of people come into this work to chase abilities and chase powers. The thing is, is that when we're at the state that we have not incarnated the Master we'll say, but the master being everyone has an Atman, it's our higher body, it's part of ourselves, but we don't have a link to that.

Then really we're being given experiences from that higher self that's trying to get us to learn. So the whole idea of chasing these abilities when we don't really have control over it ourselves is a mistake because that's an ego in itself. And then what happens is it gets taken away from you if you make it all about like. “I'm trying to do this or trying that,” or you strengthen them through the ego, which then you're not seeing objectively, you're seeing subjectively.

For example, we talked about how imagination is unconscious clairvoyance. Well, if I develop my clairvoyance and I'm unconscious, then the things I'm seeing is the things that I want to see and it'll be skewed and not objective. And it's very dangerous to get too wrapped up in these things outside of using them symbolically to help us on our journey when the things are given to us.

But these abilities include all the claires that you could think of, clairaudience, clairvoyance, polyvoyance, telepathy, intuition, all of these things. These are available to us. But as we said, because they also are related to that, those higher bodies of ours, the Buddhi, Manas, Atman or Chesed, Geburah, Tiphereth, that higher self, until we create a link to that that's more permanent, which we do through creating higher subtle bodies and things of that nature and working with the creative energy, which is something we'll talk about in the course.

That's the second factor of the three factors that we talked about—birth—until that is there, we truly don't have mastery of those abilities, but hey, if we have a natural proclivity to it, we're meant to have it. You're not given anything by accident.

So, if you for say, get visions in meditation, if we don't use it to go say spy on other people and use it to investigate our internal worlds, or if we are able to be more conscious when we sleep and we astral project, then great. That's more tools to investigate our own inner psychology.

But it's also something that if we come in at the beginning and we struggle to have a lot of internal experiences at first, it's nothing to beat ourselves up over because it could all just be related to karma. I think you actually have a story about that.

Yeah, there was a true account of two masters, so they worked with the system and these tools generally, if we work in a way that is very conducive that we discover internally, things are changing for me then to reach the stage that is called in this system “mastery” can take around 20 to 30 years. So a lot of mystery schools end up after some time to have people that reach this certain stage where they can astral project very easily, they can have these internal visions, they can use things like theurgy and so on with success.

So, two particular masters understood internally that they had reached this stage and had these particular abilities. And one of them, as he was moving along with the practices over this time, he began to have many experiences. So astral projection, clairvoyance, clairaudience, and he had these the whole way through.

Whereas the other master who was diligently working with the system, he came to the stage of mastery and it was only then that all of his abilities turned on.

He had nothing the whole time, he just believed.

They talked to each other and they were trying to figure out what was the difference. And they understood that we can say your psychology or your certain set of egos or we could say you're karma, your mathematical equation. In his case, it was such that he had a big mathematical equation or a karmic debt, something to clear before he was able to reach the stage where those abilities would come online for him. So in that way, everyone is different.

What is very, very common for those new to a mystery school is the system and the practices begin to be introduced. And as long as you're not afraid and you diligently work, maybe some people will have quite a few astral projections or at least one in the beginning and then they'll go, “Oh, it's real. Okay, I know it's real. I know that I was able to go out of my body and I saw these things.”

And then after that, then they try again and they find they come to a kind of block, and there's two different reasons for this.

One reason can be that they created their own kind of psychological block because they got so excited that it happened that now they've got a kind of desperation and that pushes the experiences away. The other more common reason is that our higher aspect, our higher self, gave us a freebie so that we know that the thing that we are doing works. And then it says, “Okay, but you don't deserve anything else right now. You've got a lot in your inner psychology that needs to be cleaned up. So unless you can clean it up, how can your awareness be free to just travel out of your body at will?”

Right? It can't, because you have so many blocks that you don't naturally perceive the higher dimensions. Because truly if our consciousness were fully awakened, we would have interdimensional perception like say Mattias De Stefano, if you know that Theosophist who gave a bunch of talks called Initiation on Gaia, and he discusses the nature of consciousness and how it is manifested to have these experiences.

And according to him, he was born with interdimensional perception. (A small correction, his interdimensional perception was said to be activated in his childhood.) So, when we move along through life and we have different experiences when we don't have the perception of the higher dimensions, we don't perceive how it is that we are creating and how it is that our reality is coming to us. But the more we can perceive the subtler aspects of reality, the more we understand cause and effect, the more we understand how things come to us, how we come to have our different experiences. So the goal, the thing that we're working towards is actually the awakening of the consciousness, the awakening of the awareness and its ability to perceive and understand.

Lastly, as we go through this, as we've mentioned through this as towards the abilities, well it’s the soul journey. But in a sense, in Gnosis we call it the Essence because in Gnosis, we say that we have a fractal of the Soul or a fractal of the Spirit. And then actually through doing the work, we build these higher bodies and we create the Merkaba or the Causal Body, which is what we call the Soul in Gnosis, which allows us to then bring down the higher self—Spirit into our physical body.

So, I can grab this Tree of Life here and we can sort of talk about this in a second. Yeah.

Objectively we're all familiar with the Spiral of Life, I assume—The Spiral of Life?

Alright, well, so the awakening of consciousness is sort of a spiral motion. So they start us as the rocks and the minerals, and then you move up to being a plant and then an animal, and then we come up to being a human.

Then for those that are on a spiral path, you would go then through lives as astral beings, and then mental beings until you eventually first create the Merkaba. Then because of this pattern that we still come down to descend down, you would still come down here, but what we call in Gnosis, the “Direct Path” is really, I like to think of it—it's still a spiral, but you get a level skip like in Mario Bros and you skip through a little bit.

 So most of us that come here to Gnosis and they're drawn to this type of thing, have already done the work once. If you hadn't done the work once, if it was your first time through that spiral, it could take for example, many lifetimes just to build an astral body. So, in that sense, it's more than likely that the Spirit being drawn to this type of esoteric wisdom has at least done this work once in…

In a past life.

In past existences. It would be just a past life. It would be in past existences.

And now we're going through and there's another spiral and there's a spiral that goes up through here where there's different types of angels. Think about species like that.

And then eventually the goal is to come back through this hidden sephira. ( Points to Da’ath)

I don't know if you guys are familiar with Kabbalah at all?

Kabbalah is usually 10, but this 11th sphere is hidden in the sense of this is the point of manifestation of the morning star. And if you go back through this doorway objectively, the top three are really one, this is the ray of creation. It's the three aspects, these three forces of that one ray, and that's the Unity.

So just for our solar system, we are not even going to talk about the universe. This would be like the sun. And then the seven below are the seven bodies that we talk about, and that is in “the matrix”, let's say that we're in. So, you have a third dimension, fourth dimension, fifth dimension, sixth dimension, seventh dimension, and all of that is actually the phenomenal universe.

We really can only even perceive here (points to Malkuth). We know time exists because we're moving through it, but we don't actually move. So, our dreams occur here in the fifth dimension (points to Hod & Netzach), which is where we have our emotions and our mental body, so our mind, our emotions, and our mind.

And then above that (points to Tiphereth, Geburah & Chesed) is where our Soul is and our individual consciousness and our Spirit.

So, the goal in Gnosis, as we said, is it could be different for different beings—different spiritual path—but to first create this body (Tiphereth) and the path goes like this, there's trials going like this, but it's to create this so that we can connect to this or this depending on, you can't really control what spirit one has and the teachings don't really necessarily change.

We may have different levels of comprehension, but the point is to create this (Tiphereth) so we can incarnate down our spirit at whatever level that is. And that's what we talk about, this spiral. And the spiral keeps going. We could say it could go as this Tree of Life starts, another one over here, if you really wanted to talk about that, if anybody has seen like a Kathara Grid or some of the alien people have those that just go on and on and on.

But in that sense is we slowly want to working with the creative energy start to raise our energy up the spine, the Kundalini awakening that people talk about to first through our physical body, our vital body, which is just the energy that surrounds us right now. It's the vital body is part of this body. We just don't see it. We don't perceive it.

Maybe if anybody's done psychedelics or something, you see the energy that surrounds you with, we do have an energy encasing around us. And then like I said, then there's the body, the astral body, which is related to our emotions. There's a mental body which related to our mind, and then we have the causal body, which is related to cause and effect and the willpower of the being. We have the Buddhic body, which is related to our own individual internal consciousness. So, there's a collective consciousness, but the piece of that that we have or the divine soul as well. So it's our two souls. And we'll actually talk about that in the next talk because a lot of people have been asking us to talk about twin flames, and there's an internally there's that.

There's an external event as well, but there's internally we have two souls that do have to be reunited to connect back to the Atman or Chesed right there, which is our being or monad. And then the father of that is, well, the Trinity or whatever you want call that. I mean the Trinity is within everything, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, and their wives too. To which actually Hindi is great for that because it shows both that the Trinity has a masculine aspect and a feminine aspect.

So, you also have Sarasvarti, Parvati, and Lakshmi, which is the cross itself, the vertical line and the horizontal line and that masculine that comes down into the feminine line. And in the Hindi tradition, the older mythologies had more symbolism and to show more of the aspects of the cosmologies, a lot of that started to get taken out as we go into later religions. They simplified it probably because the collective [Consciousness} had gone down.

They couldn't understand it.

They just wanted people to get to a certain point. So by the time you get to the Judeo-Christian religions, it's a little bit more of a grounded, and they took out a lot of the cosmology you see and say Sumerian or Hindi religions, but it's still, it's… the same… threads.

So, this could be a lot, whether information wise or intellectually, and especially if you haven't ever looked at the occult or Kabbalah, it could just seem like a whole bunch of gibberish. And you might be saying, well, “What is the soul journey and what does that mean for me? I came here, I want to make some money, or I want to manifest a boyfriend or girlfriend or a business or do well in school or whatever it was that crossed your mind, why you signed up for this talk.”

But if we wanted to put it in simple terms, we could say that the soul journey is that we are simply here to learn. The consciousness created this experience to have a subjective view, to move through a series of events. And to from that extract wisdom. And when we apply these tools, it allows us to extract more wisdom because we become aware of what it is we are doing and what it is we are here to learn.

So, the soul journey can look different for different people. Some people come to study Gnosis because they want to do a general kind of self-help, a general kind of work on themselves. Others, maybe they have some kind of secret ambition. But you'll quickly find, as with any spiritual school, that when it is a genuine teaching that is going to lead us to change, one of the biggest things we need to do is have a kind of surrender.

We have to let go of our clinging, our grasping and all of the things that we are using subconsciously to cause ourselves pain. And as we work with these tools and we begin to unlock those inner cosmic knots, then we find a kind of freedom. And that is to extract the wisdom that the soul came here to learn. And that journey is unique for everyone because we have our own unique darkness.

But the one thing that will be the same for everyone is that it will require a kind of fortitude, a kind of bravery. If we're not ready to face ourselves internally, then we can't unlock that wisdom and we'll go on remaining in the dark, being like that leaf in the wind that is simply subject to moving forces that come and go, the egos, the aggregates, and being pulled along from suffering to suffering.

When we say, “I'm ready, I'm ready to come out of my suffering,” then we're ready to begin to wake up, wake up the awareness, allow the awareness to come online so we can see what is happening within us and start to understand how that connects to what is happening outside of us.

And it really comes down to mission and purpose. And this is why also when you meet different people and they have different goals and practices and stuff, it's not good to judge people unless you really have the ability to see what they're experiencing internally. If you reach a certain level, you can investigate them in the internal worlds.

But what you'll find is that we have three layers of how teachings are described, and when we said that Gnosis is the universal thread behind everything we're talking about actually what comes from here (points to the top Trinity) and that universal thread is in everything. Then what you have is from a master, you'll have that inner, sorry, you have the inner mind which is related to the Unity. You have the intermediate mind which is related to a person's monad or their being. And then you have the sensory mind, which is related to our person.

And the thing is, whenever someone is diffusing the teachings, even if they are a very, very, very high master, there's a reflection of all three of these levels. And depending on our level of understanding, that's where we see things.

So if you look at it for example, even something that is black magic, like Alistair Crowley in a sense has Gnosis, but the person is using it for something else. You'll see masters that have paths that are more religious that bring you back to the Atman. You'll see masters that paths that have you descend down into your psychology and strengthen the ego. But they all sound very similar. And that's the danger in these things is if we don't have the discernment to see through the subjectivity, then the objectivity behind all these teachings is actually the same. And in a sense it comes down to mission and purpose.

Purpose is the same for all of us. Mission is unique to all of us. So, we say everything is not dualistic. That includes a path, right? There's only one path, but there's everyone also has their own path. Both of these things are true. And how are these things true?

Because the divine purpose is we awaken the consciousness and help others awaken. And in a sense, everyone is doing that when they follow their mission, someone who's a black magician or something or doing something that's Satanic, they're creating negative energy for the Construct that gives other people energy that goes up. So in that way, their role in the whole system is actually still helping others awaken.

And the mission is where it comes down to our unique expression of that Divine Purpose. So whether that is for us to be unconscious or if that is for us to be the leader of an institution or to actually connect back to the Unity that has to do with our Spirit that's inside.

So, it is important to remember if something resonates with you, it goes through, to follow of the teachings as they are, but also not to judge others who maybe interpret things differently. And it comes back to that force of understanding.

Sometimes the most profound lessons can be from, instead of judging someone and getting mad or wanting to argue with someone who is “incorrect” subjectively, to actually try to put ourselves into the shoes of another and actually just try to understand what perspective they would feel that way. And in that way we can gain more wisdom of the reality around us.

We don't have to agree with them, but by understanding them, we'll understand reality more because our objective is to have experience all perspectives. If we're at this point, it's only because we've probably in other lives, already lived those other perspectives and don't need to do them again.

Once you get back to Unity, you've experienced all those experiences including being an “evil person” subjectively already [have done] that. So, if someone else is living that experience, they're doing that at that point. It's another part of the journey, but it still is part of the journey.

Audience Member:

How is community engaged and involved in this? You have a community, right?

Instructor:

Yes.

Audience Member:

Because it takes a village as they say, you cannot do this…

Instructor:

Well, everyone is responsible for their own work, but to an extent as well, there are group practices that are powerful energy work and when we approach them, we can support others that are like-minded and have like energy and we could do more powerful practices that bring us together eventually.

Audience Member:

Do you have a regular group?

Instructor:

We do. So, as we said in the beginning, we have a regular group that has been here for a while, and as with any mystery school, we need a foundation so we can get on the same page and have a common vernacular. And we've chosen this system simply because it's a complete system and it has words that we can share to use to discuss the things that we're discussing. But essentially all of it is energy. You could take a different system and say, we agree that this word means this, but really what we're working to do is to perceive and work with different kinds of energies.

Ideally if you get to the point where you awaken, actually what Gnosis is a study of all religions, and then you can look at other things and other perspectives, but usually at the beginning we suggest even if it wasn't Gnosis for you, let's say you wanted to do Sufism, you pick something that helps you get to the point internally where you can see the universal thread. And then when you see the universal thread, then everything fits together and sometimes other perspectives…

For example, like we mentioned, Blavatsky has more cosmic knowledge. So if you're interested in learning something like that, she would be a better master to look into that than Master Samael. But it’s the same thing it is the same teaching, but you have to be able to see that it's the same teaching and not get caught up on, “Oh, well she said Monad, he said Being, they don't agree with each other.” You have to be able to understand that aspect of it.

So, as we mentioned in the beginning, we're going to do a series of different public talks and once we build up a regular group from these talks, then those who would like to and have been passed to the next stage, will then feed into a course a three month course, and those who complete the course would then be invited into the regular group. So that's generally how it works.

For the classes, we’d probably meet on Mondays. We may do talk sometimes on Wednesdays where we don't go to theosophy, but once we start the actual group, it probably will be these days when we have enough people interested in starting a class and there's no pressure on time.

It's really just if we have enough people that are interested that we think it's fair to not waste everyone's time moving forward, then we'll start. We could start, if everybody here wanted to start First Chamber, we could start probably in a week or two, but there's no pressure on that either. We probably will do another talk in, I dunno, two or three weeks.

Did you guys have any questions? I know I want to give a chance to the others who haven't had a chance to say anything yet.

Audience Member:

So yes, when you're talking about the thread, what does that look like or how would you describe it? I don't know, it has some weird experiences, kind of similar to that.

Instructor:

Yeah, so in a sense, everything is objectively this creative energy.

So, behind everything, no matter how much ego is in or how much subjectivity, there's always some type of divine thread to the creative energy.

I like to use music as an example because right now music is really in the toilet in the sense that there's a lot of ego being used to be put out in popular music. But even if we look at paint by numbers, popular music, where they use AI to do certain types of chord progressions that are copying say famous artists of the past, like three, I think a 3, 5, 3, 7 or whatever that they use in every single song, that chord progression comes back from ancient classical music and there is a Divineness to that. Now they're mimicking it and then putting ego on top. But if you peel back all of the things and all of the terrible lyrics and all that at its baseline, we still like that—for example—musical sequence because that does come from objective creativity.

And you could say the same thing about anything. We look at scripture, like we said with when you read a master, if you peel back what his person's opinion was, what the opinion of his Being was—or the culture—then it's the same message. So when we're looking for the universal thread, whether it's in scripture, it's in art, or it's in philosophy, all of these things, it's that essence where everything comes from just that one true creative.

For the most part, Unconditional Love is the best way to, I think really look at it from our perspective in this reality it is more of a creative energy, but we perceive it usually as love or virtuous. So the seven virtues, is that organized in seven, things of that nature.

Audience Member:

From my personal experience, what I'm talking about is I had a dream where I saw it was kind of weird. It was from a perspective that's hard to describe, but I saw the earth kind of and all the organisms at once, all the plants, the animals and people, and then it kind of saw three of them and I saw it like golden thread and then everything kind of flattened out and there was the golden thread connecting everything. I just found it to be interesting. I did not know about any of this kind of stuff before when I had that experience.

Instructor:

Yeah and that's exactly the type of experience that we can have internally. So, what you're seeing is the connectivity between everything in a sense, as we said earlier, everything on this planet, the planet itself is living and then the beings down on it. There may be beings from off planet during this specific time, but the majority of the population is a reflection down, a recapitulation down of the planet itself.

That's why when we say the planet itself is becoming conscious, so you're seeing that as a reflection on the population. It's all of that it's as above, so below.

We could even look out into the solar system. And I mentioned even further out cosmic events, all of these things are just repeating down, down, down, down, down. Because at the most objective level, an experience similar to the one you had, when you experience objective reality, everything is united as one.

And our perception of it, depending on our level of consciousness can change. We call that Samadhi, but really we could go into objective reality at any point. You don't need to be like a master to have experiences like that. How we perceive it will change in grade.

So, for example, now you see it as a planet and all the animals together, if you raise consciousness, you might start seeing more of the cosmos. But when you're still connecting to that Unity and that feeling, that is what we're talking about that thread, that cosmic energy that is us. It's like I said, the life force.

I think we used Star Wars (as an example) instead of actual spirituality, but the idea behind that, that there's this force that flows through everything and binds everything, it's actually beyond consciousness. It's what consciousness allows it [This Energy] to experience things. Because consciousness is an I in itself.

The energy is just energy, but that energy binds Spirit to matter. It binds spirit to this body. And that's why we say it's the Third Force. The spirit is the positive force. The body, the matter is the negative force. And then that energy that keeps us together and allows us to have this experience is that energy. And then all of us are made up of it and everything around us is made up of it as well.

Audience Member:

I think that experience you have, the more you study these things that they're talking about, the more you understand it. He answered your question really brilliantly and that probably helped you. But the more you really get into it, then you really understand it.

Instructor:

Yes, absolutely. Because it's all, like we said, it's knowledge through direct experience. And you may come across other instructors of Gnosis that say, “Oh, you have to follow this master. If you follow these rules, it's how you get there.” But truly the actual teaching is, the original master who wrote this teaching. He said, “You're not supposed to follow me. You're supposed to awaken enough to where you start having internal experiences,” like the one that you had and you get taught internally by yourself because your higher self is you, is already a master.

We don't have connection to it, but right now we have a higher body that is for, and even that is an illusion at a level, but at that level it's for this universe, omnipresent, omnipotent. You know what I mean? So, we already know all the things that we need to know about our reality, we just need to connect to it and that we need to remove the filters that block us from it, and that's how we have more experiences.

But it is great that you've had that. A lot of people searching for their experience that come into these things and it becomes something that actually keeps them from advancing.

Someone actually commented that on Instagram today. We put a post about astral projection or the astral bodies and he said, “I've been desperately trying desperately, desperately trying to astral project and I just can't please help me.”

And I said, “Well, the desperation is going to keep you from having those experiences because it's an energy that pushes things away.”

Audience Member:

I have a question. You guys are familiar with Taoism, right?

Okay, so yeah, so Yin (points to negative) Yang (points to positive) Yuan (points to conciliatory force) 10,000 things (points to the elements).

Instructor:

Absolutely. The Tao actually works very well with a lot of the practices that we do in Gnosis, a lot of eastern wisdom does, because it maintains a lot more things. The issue is really with the eastern philosophies, mostly in today's day and age, it's just misinterpretation because people don't know the secrets.

It's a lot easier to look at an eastern religion like Tao or Buddhism and see Gnosis in it than it is say to look at Christianity or Islam because it's so coded. It is the same thing, but you have to understand the code, and that's a reflection of the era that those religions were created during the Age of Pisces. Everything went underground, it went hermetic because people would get killed if they talked about these things.

So, the older religions are a little bit more obvious. Sure, it's still a little bit symbolic. You go to ancient mythology and stuff, but the further back you go, the more it's like, I mean, Buddha talks about psychological aggregates and stuff like that. It's not like demons, right? Demons are the ego, you know what I mean? But the thing is they say it's the ego and you get much easier to understand that you read the Upanishads in the Rigveda, they talk about the Immortal Self and that we have to die to ourselves, but it's all that thread (it) is everywhere. Okay, anyone else?

Audience Member:

Well, I had another time. I had a weird kind of experience. I went through a really rough period for a year where just had a lot of bad stuff going on in my life, and so I stopped talking to people and I kind of became more in my head. But then after a while, I think a month of really not talking to people as much as I could, it really changed the way I think. And then I started thinking in pictures and stuff and my vision looked kind of weird even farther away. And I don't know, it was just a really bizarre experience. I don't know how to explain it.

Do you have a dream journal?

And I didn't desire anything at all during that period.

Instructor:

Yeah, we can go through periods that we call it Dark Night of the Soul, and a lot of times with immense suffering, we can have moments of awakening and they're geared to eventually then bring us to something like this and we start working on it so that we can maintain that state. But it's a very common thing for us to have these experiences attached after some type of period of immense suffering.

I wouldn't say it was my initial awakening, but what brought me to Gnosis. So I had a second, a dark night of soul that was related to something of a twin flame separation. And it was through that pain that the construct finally brought me these things on YouTube and stuff, which at the time, now that I look back at it, it's kind of silly because for 15 years I've been having direct experience with this stuff and I wasn't someone that was shying away from the occult.

So the chance of me not finding these teachings were probably more astronomically rare than me actually, but it was kept away from it on purpose and there's probably karmic reasons for that, but it was during a an immense period of suffering and I was doing meditations and then all of a sudden we could shuffle to you and you have through that pain, you're able to withdraw from it and then have an awakening moment.

And the next step though is that I said I had experiences like that in the past, many years before that, and I never got serious about working through spirituality is that you can only grow so much without eventually starting to work on the conditioning. You can have all the experiences that you want, but like I said, if you reach Samadhi and you reach objective reality and you bring it back and you keep attaching the ego to it, then the only way to actually grow, there's nothing else that you can experience beyond that.

All you can do is now to experience it from a more clear objective point by removing your filters so you can only grow so much without eventually having to remove the filters because you're not actually experiencing something different anymore, now. You're experiencing the same thing, but you understand it better because you have more understanding.

Audience Member:

Lemme just the thing that was life-changing for me, this is very simple, but it kind of connects with everything we've been talking about, the higher levels of creative problem solving. It's that wonderful word called “analysis”, and we're taught that you've got to look at things in very minute detail, which is effectively just to make you more confused than you were before. So the 1% can even control you more.

But the simple thing you remember when you're nine or 10 years old, you just looked up the etymology, the origins of the syllables of a word. If you do that with analysis, these are two of the most beautiful words that you may have ever heard in your life that can make you feel relaxed. It's Anna, like a woman's name, Anna, and then Lices. She's got lice coming out of her head.

But when you hear these words, you're going to be, it's like John Keatts romantic poetry. It's still astounds Anna-Lices. The simple original sense of analysis, how to find relative value between a number of different things means to loosen and soften up.

Instructor:

Actually for analysis as a tool, we tend to only really suggest using it for maybe scanning and trying to find something to work on. But we understand it to be that the lower intellect can't achieve a comprehension. Comprehension comes from the consciousness and being in the present moment and having understanding comprehension is instantaneous.

It is actually the lower intellect in the analysis which keeps us from being able to connect and comprehend. So we do use analysis as a tool early on when we're, for example, retrospecting a day and trying to find the ego, but we try to actually remind everyone that to connect to the higher intellect and the higher intellect is not the mind, but the Akashic records or whatever you want to call it, the ether, we have to first be in balance in the heart center because the emotional plane is lower than the mental plane.

And if we get too into the head, what happens, is we actually then are out of balance in the heart, so we can't connect to there. And what happens a lot is that if we've had experiences in the past and we've had mystical experiences, but we don't work on controlling the mind, the mind takes credit for what came from Spirit and then it actually keeps us from going back to that state again because our heart is out of balance. So, we try to actually encourage to first find balance through the heart and not be too intellectual.

Audience Member:

So I was wondering when you talk about the pendulum and living in neutrality and how, I guess people kind of live passively when they're in this black and white thinking or they're living from one desire to the next looking for fulfillment, but it's never really going to come full circle.

I've attempted to take a very, very objective stance and kind of separate myself from pleasure seeking, and I find that every single time I slip into this very nihilistic type of thinking, I get super nihilistic. And I don't even necessarily mean that negatively because it is nihilistic thinking. It can be objective. It does sometimes feel like clarity even though it burdens me. So, it technically is kind of I'm thinking in black and white, but I just can't figure out how to not resort to that every time.

Instructor:

Well, first of all, it sounds like you have a decent observation of the situation, and you're right that it is still a thought form and that's the point of the pendulum. We're going back and forth. The hardest thing with seeing the Third Force and finding that balance is that that's the one thing that while we can say, yeah, this is something that you should do, there's also no way to tell you how to exactly do that. Anyone who tells anyone that there's an exact path to follow this way and you follow their way, that will actually take you into dogma and religion.

The best advice that we can give—and we stress this all the time—but it is to know thyself, like we said, so like the ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ (Gnothi Seauton), and it's to go into meditation and use the tools that we'll talk about here and to really try to find that unique conditioning that entraps us and we have to face ourselves because we all eventually would know.

For me, it was feeling misunderstood, not feeling heard, abandonment, all these things that came up in this big thing. And it's painful and sometimes it takes sitting with it and crying it out, being angry because you have to first feel it and go through the thoughts without identifying with it, but just being in it to be able to step back and say, “That's not me.” But through that disidentification, then we truly have that. Equanimity is a better word than neutrality even, because sometimes the right thing to do is to say something.

So neutrality.—It is the neutral force, but it doesn't always mean being neutral either. When we're in the awareness, we just know right thinking and right speech and we know the right things to do, but it just comes from…That's the hardest part. It's really the earliest part in the work that is the hardest part, because if we can get to that stage and we face ourselves and we can pull away from ourselves, then sure there's a lot more work to be done.

There's years and decades of worth of work to be done, but it's no longer difficult anymore because we free ourselves from suffering and that allows us to just be, and when we're just being in the moment, then the work will happen. There's no rush anymore. You don't want to know everything. You understand how it is and that we just have to keep listening to our Inner Guidance.

But the best advice with that is really is there's no set time, how long it could take or whatever. But to really go within, and actually right now is a good time for this.

I don't know how everybody's meditation skills are yet because you're a new group, but it's a really good period working with energies of Capricorn astrologically that a lot of stuff comes up.

Sits may take longer because there's a lot of stuff comes up, so you have to sit longer to quiet the mind and the emotions, but there's a lot of reward during this astrological period to work with the ego or the shadow, whatever you prefer to call it.

Yeah, it's not easy, but it's bravery, courage to face ourselves internally and to really figure out what it is that makes us tick. Truly, we know ourselves better than anybody else. So just we have to stop making the excuses for ourselves that disconnect us from calling ourselves out on our own BS.

A lot of people who first experience a kind of disidentification or the first step of disidentification, the ego is obviously still there and it has a kind of mourning to it as well, because as we begin to awaken and we begin to realize what we are and what we are not, we see that we are the awareness, the observer, the viewer behind everything. And we secretly wish we could become identified again. We wish that we could go back to being fully in the ego, fully asleep, and thinking that we were all of those programs because they have a kind of satisfaction to them. And in a way, when we're fully identified, we accept the pain with the enjoyment, but at some point the jig is up and it runs out. At some point, we naturally start to question. We feel like it doesn't satisfy us anymore.

Usually for a lot of people when they decide that that milking of experiences or extracting sensation doesn't cut it, that's when they go in search of spirituality and start to work with these tools. And when they discover non-dualism or equanimity, that awareness, that calm abiding behind all the arising phenomena, you still have ego.

You still have a lot of ego at that point, and the ego tries to pull you back and it makes a kind of numbness or sadness that says, “Oh, why can't you just come back to chasing desire? You don't really like this, do you? There's no enjoyment.”

But the more that we awaken the consciousness and start to weaken the ego and dissolve it, the more we experience this freedom and we come to find it as actually this is our natural state. And naturally the ability to perceive the virtues, these things arise as innate qualities. And when we settle in this calm abiding, then not only are we able to continue with the spiritual work, but we come to a place of acceptance with the reality because we see that it has to be okay because it's the truth.

That's a good point. I was going to say, everyone's different obviously, but there tends to be the stages when we're going through facing ourselves and our traumas and our pain, and there's something to look for. So you're doing the right thing.

Usually the first thing is forgiveness. Even if somebody else has done something to us, usually we hold pain and we feel like we should have done something else to get away. We have to forgive ourselves because ourselves is everyone else. It is ourselves. We have to be able to forgive ourselves.

Then comes to surrender, which is what Ruth talked about, which is surrendering to the fact that we don't actually exist—as our person. Relatively sure, but as an individual being we don't exist and we are the Unity. And then the last part that comes through is the acceptance that, alright, we don't really exist and this is truth and this is that energy.

Usually, you create (this) energy at the surrender and then we have to accept that this is just to be, {and this is what} it is because what happens is we get to the surrender aspect and then some people will be like, “Ah, well it doesn't matter anymore. I don't have to do anything. It's an illusion.”

Or you have the other aspect, “I need to figure out what the truth is and then chase it.” And the ego could take over there too.

So, the last stage is that acceptance that it just is just to be, “BE-ness”. Like Blavatsky said, “It's the isness.”

And that's going to allow us to be able to work with these practices but not have an attachment to try to achieve anything. We are just having different kinds of experiences so that we can learn and gain wisdom from the reality that we've created, but we're not necessarily attaching to trying to get somewhere, but we want to realize that we've already arrived.

Audience Member:

Thank you.

Instructor:

You're welcome.

So, we will end the talk there and whoever is pressed for time is welcome to leave and for anyone who is interested in future talks, I have a form here. I'm going to pass around on this iPad...