How To: Divine True Love

Spiritual communities, like all places, are full of people looking for love. Even those seeking fulfillment through other areas of life are often yearning for a special kind of wholeness that they cannot quite put their finger on. Many believe they have found love, yet still remain unhappy, imbalanced or anxious. What we call love is not always TRUE LOVE. True Love requires a Divine Inner Union and an alignment with the Great Reality. Anything short of this comprehension and internal energetic positioning will prevent true happiness in relation. Whether you are in a relationship or not, learning to recognize and Divine TRUE LOVE is fundamental for all. This talk explores the spiritual reality of love, wholeness and what it means to come into true alignment.

Instructor:

Welcome. Today's topic is called: How To: Divine True Love. And there is a very important punctuation mark here, which is after “How To”. There's a colon. So, for anyone who has perhaps investigated a little bit into spirituality, spiritual practices, energy work, the occult, the esoteric, you may have heard the word divine. So we understand that divine can mean to get information or to create, to manifest something. This is how it's typically used in an occult way, right? When someone divines information, they receive information through subtle ways that other people don't know about. So, the title says How To: Divine True Love, and it sounds like we're going to be waving a wand, and then love will appear.

And we could say metaphorically, yes. But if you're planning on using a spell or some kind of magical technique to find true love. If you're planning on using a shortcut, perhaps you should look up one of those movies where—I think there was a movie. I can't remember the name—a movie that came out recently of a man who did a love spell, and it went horribly wrong. I think it's called Obsess?

Audience Member:

Yes, obsession?

Instructor:

Yes. So don't do it. Yes, it's not going to go well. So we're not here to look at how to do that. We're not here to teach that. But it is a “How To” because many people don't know how to find love. We learn how to drive a car. We learn how to prepare for an interview. We learn how to participate in public speaking, if that's something we're going to do. But most people don't learn how to find love.

And so when they go out to look for it, of course, it's a lot of trial and error. they say, “Kiss so many frogs to find the prince or the princess,” right? And for some people, their whole life, they're just kissing more and more frogs, and they don't know why, and they think, “Well, if I just kiss one more, will the prince or the princess appear?” And that depends. That depends on the individual and what they've learned from the experiences. So don't worry, we're going to unpack all of these things, and look a little deeper into what is taking place in this journey. And how it is that we can find love.

Instructor:

At the last talk, actually, I was told I didn't describe enough Kabbalah. This talk isn't really too much about metaphysics, but I would to just speak a little bit on the subject, because this topic is in our series (as well as last week's topic—Initiatic Mastery) on Finding the Third Force or the Life Force that is Divinity, that's all the way up here on the Tree of Life. We say it's in the middle. And what is love? What is the sexual energy?—Which another thing that comes up a lot in Gnosis, which draws us to trying to find love externally, really quickly.

And then what we see is that these are relations to the same energy that is life itself, the force, right?—The Fohat, that energy, and it manifests in different levels of reality as different things. So, we could say that—and this is what we'll be talking about today—here in Tiphereth, which is related to our heart, or say the sun in the solar system, right? This is where true unconditional love remains. This is our soul, our human soul.—And that is what we seek when we seek the feeling of what we believe love to be. But it manifests in our layer of reality, when we move one down to the sphere of Yesod, below Tiphereth as our sexual energy.

And in the physical reality, this is where the creative energy manifests within us. Now, In the initiatic work, in Gnosis, it is known that the first thing that we need to balance, to move all the way up the middle—we need to balance everything before, to find the love—is to balance our own creative energy and to work with the sexual energy and to work with Yesod. This thus creates a problem when a lot of people come into the school and they'll learn about the mysteries of the sexual energy. And then immediately, we're looking for a partner. We “need someone” to do the work, right? We “need someone” to help us ascend the ladder. And that is mistaken.

While it is important that we learn to gain control over sexual energy. It is something that comes through balance. And that balance will lead us to the balance of the heart or Love, which is balancing not just the sexual energy at first, but everything that is within us, all of our energy, all of our life force, and balancing and connecting to the soul.

With that being said, the issue is that at balance, at Unity, everything is one and together. And we have this innate desire to return back to Spirit, especially during this time, during this period of Aquarius, this Age of Aquarius that we're in, where the energy has now descended to the bottom point into matter, the Spirit has descended all the way to the bottom.

The symbol of Jesus on the cross, for example, Spirit has died in the matrix, the cross is the Matrix, it's spacetime, right? And now we're going back up. It's the natural flow of this impersonal energy, this perpetual motion of the Reality, is for us to return back to Spirit. And we all feel that. But the thing is in our current state, we're still identified with the duality of illusion. So this innate, we could say pure inquietude to return the Spirit, and for union, in our state, at first we understand this by seeking it in someone else and seeking it an individual outside of us. So what we're actually trying to do by seeking union with someone outside of us, without the understanding of Spirit in union, is that we are trying to find something that needs to be internal within ourselves.

Now, the Work when we come into this is about finding the union within first in the present moment and unifying ourselves with the condition of the Unity of our true nature, which is the force that is expressed as unconditional love in our soul. And if we find that love within, if we find that Unity within, then thus we are able to truly love someone outside of us that's external from us, because we are ONE with them. And thus we love ourselves, so we love everyone else who is also us at the same time. And that's how we want to work. Everything should be inner to outer, but with the Reality the way it is, whether it's with love or anything else that we have, we are inverted right now in our perception.

So we always try to work from outside to inside, right? If we look at all our religions—all the religions from the last age of Pisces, it's all about, “You do this method and then it will awaken you,” rather than, “We need to do the work inside ourselves to connect to Divinity.” to become God rather than to experience God. So, that is what we're going to talk about today in this talk, which is how, when we say “How To: Divine True Love”, it's how to find that force within, and at that place, when we reach that point, through that point in the work, then, what we'll find out is that our magnetism will bring to us a partner that is at the same level of us that when we are at the point in the work where we need to do the work with the sexual alchemy.

Disclaimer, though, if we are in a relationship, that doesn't mean to break up with someone and become a renunciate. It is your karma. This is karma yoga, is what we normally focus on in Gnosis. So, If we are in a situation where we already have a partner, that's good. The partner is your mirror, but it's still the same kind of token, right? Our usual reasons for being with someone at the beginning, in our normal state in a societal state, is still usually some type of unhealthy attachments, not unconditional, it's conditional. We like them for desire, we like them maybe for finances. We like them for some other reason.

So to make the relationship better and stronger, and for the alchemy to be able to work, if we are working with a partner or even if we're the only one working, to improve our relationship and to improve the love that's within our relationship, it still comes from: we have to discover what love truly is internally, and thus once we discover that and have that comprehension, we will love everyone that's external, including our partner and every other being that exists on the planet.

So it's still the same process.

Instructor:

Yes, I think what Adonis said matches the slide. What is love? Right?

And the problem is that people don't know what love is. So they think that they can look for love in a way that's based on trying to find something they're confused about. The ego or our sense of separation—because we are truly all one—our sense of separation does not know what love is, and does not know how to love. Therefore, when it sets out to try to love, to try to find this thing it doesn't know about, it can only ever do something different.

So we see many cases where someone is trying to find a suitable partner, and either they have the case of settling, right?

They just accept someone that's probably not the best for them, but they just say, “Oh, well, it's too hard to find the right person…” So they settle. That's a common word that's used.

There's also the toxic relationship, where two people are just no good for each other, and they are drawn to one another, and they keep trying and trying to make it work, and it's very unhealthy. And then there are many other kinds of attachment and frustration that we will talk about later. But we can suffice it to say that none of these things are actually love. And one of the root problems, if you were to put it simply, is that all of the unsuccessful relationships died because of selfishness.

So, people say, “Oh, darling, I love you,” but it's not true, what they really are saying internally is, “I want you to do something for me to make me happy. And if you do the things that I imagine that I saw in the movies and that are in my fantasies, then my fantasies will come real, and you're just here to do that. You're here to make my fantasies come real.” Who wants that job, right? Who wants the job of, “I'm just here to make your fantasies come true.” Usually, people don't want that job, so then immediately, you're going to have a disharmonious relationship, right? Two people, each trying to make the other one do something that they fantasize about in order to satisfy them.

And both of them will be unhappy. They'll resent what's being asked of them, and they'll be frustrated that the other person isn't doing what they want.

So none of this is love. This is selfishness. And the energies that we work with will dictate the outcome. So a relationship that is built on selfishness can only lead to unhappiness. And either they will stay together and be very unhappy, or they will break up, right? But that's not love. So what Adonis was alluding to in the beginning, this love is a kind of inner wholeness. It's a kind of inner completion—Union. And this union only exists inside of us. It never can exist outside. You can have the physical manifestation of when you achieve this inner union, seen in a healthy partnership between a man and a woman, for example.

But that is not the fundamental cause. The fundamental cause is that both parties found something within themselves. They found a kind of completion, a kind of wholeness, a kind of inner balance, and once that was achieved, then slowly these people came together, through the magnetism that is created, by this inner harmony. So that is love. And until we can find love inside of ourselves, we will never manifest it outside.

Instructor:

It's important, what you said, is really, is that we mention all the time, especially with the teachings of Gnosticism and the Western occult is its focus on ego death, which scares the ego.

And to an extent then you have the New Age (saying), “You can't kill the ego.” Both things are true, depending on the perspective you're looking at. Of course, when we talk about ego death, we're talking about death as a form of rebirth. And what we do is we kill the lower ego or the (shadow) personality, and transform it, and it's reborn as the Solar Ego or our Soul, which eventually the Soul, too, must die, and then is reborn as a Celestial Ego, etc., etc.. The things that separate stars and galaxies aren't really that important. (to us in this moment)

But, what we have to understand is that the ego isn't necessarily an enemy and something that we need to fight or be against. It just simply (that) our relationship to it is skewed, and our perspective of it is what the issue is. So the ego, objectively, is our perception of the force of resistance that allows us to have an experience and to be here and to perceive. Existence is in between the force that pulls us back to the Spirit, which is gravity or the centripetal force and (then, the other force is) the force of resistance or the force of matter, the centrifugal force that pushes back against that. And in that sense, the alignment with separation in our psychology is what the real problem is, not the separation itself. The separation is a tool for us to experience, as long as we can see that there's both Unity and separation.

If we see both perspectives, then we know what the right flow is, and we know what is against the flow of the energy, because we see both options. But in our current state, we are lost. We don't remember the state of Union, but we still have this unconscious drive to feel that force. Therefore, we search for all types of ways to find this Unity, to find God in external means. This talk will be about relationships, but, people will also search within alcohol or drugs or all of these things. We're always searching for the Spirit outside of us. And like I said, religions & cults and all these things, right? We search outside of us, but we don't realize that the kingdom of God is within, that was what Jesus said.

Right? All of the true teachers will tell you that the teaching is within and that we are the tool for the Being to be born. We are the temple.

Instructor:

So let's start a little bit with what is happening when we have an interaction. We meet someone and we think on a very simple level, “Oh, this is so nice. This is a nice person; this is their name, da da da. and then maybe we are going to hang out.” Right? Well, every interaction is actually a reflection of ourselves. When we are unconscious, we don't know that. So we think, “Oh, somebody said this thing to me. I didn't like it. This person was friendly to me. This person wasn't. This person is nice, and this person is not nice…”

We only think in terms of desire, in terms of likes and dislikes. But on a higher level, every interaction is bringing us information about ourselves, about our Soul. The soul is the psyche. So every interaction provides a way for us to understand our own psychology (the study of the soul). When you're caught up in blaming and saying, “Oh, you know, this person was bad to me,” then we never learn anything about ourselves. And if we don't learn, then we will have the same kinds of interactions again and again. And this is because of a law called Vibratory Affinity. So, whatever our vibration is, that will be what we draw to us. And if you are continuously finding yourself in unhappy relationships, there is a kind of energetic signature inside of yourself, that is drawing these circumstances to you, in order for you to discover something about yourself, that you could resolve, that you could heal, that you could transcend.

And the person that's bringing you all that unhappiness is just a messenger. When we learn the lesson, then, this cycle is going to go away. And usually that means you're going to break up too. If it's an unhealthy relationship, and a person comes to teach you a lesson, when you learn the lesson, there's no need to stay together.

And there's no need to say, “Oh, I learned my lesson. You can go now.” It will it will happen very naturally. It doesn't have to happen because you think you learned your lesson. It doesn't have to be related to that directly. But energetically, that is generally how it will go.

Instructor:

I think this is an important concept as well—the mirror—in the sense of every person that we meet, not even just in a relationship, is another you at a different perspective point that, when your blind spots clash or you have corresponding blind spots that are at the opposite poles, is an opportunity for you to learn and to grow.

But of course, with the relationship it is more important, because who are you around with the most? Who are you also exchanging energy with? Who do you spend your intimate moments with? This is your main mirror. So in that sense, a healthy relationship (is still an opportunity to learn and grow).

And I'm saying that we don't have to necessarily go through karmic ones and some that we will have to dissolve to learn our lessons the hard way as well, that are with trauma bonding and stuff.

But what we ideally want to do, once we become more aware of ourselves, once we start to observe, once we are starting to do spiritual work, is take more time to make the choice of a partner that we plan on working with, to both go through the ups and downs and actually grow and learn from ourselves. And hopefully, our partner is also doing the same, but it doesn't happen necessarily be the case.

But just using utilizing (the work with) them as that mirror that helps us to grow and learn to understand about ourselves and continue to become a better version of ourselves. And that's very important because this is literally will be the—your family's probably second after this—but the person you're going to spend the most time with, that your most important mirror is going to be a romantic partner in your relationship. And hopefully for the rest of your life, if there's not a reason for it (the relationship) to be dissolved.

Instructor:

And, we could talk a little bit more about this in the specifics. So whether it's a partner or a family member, they are going to have specific things that could bother you, right? And that you find so frustrating, so unpleasant, so unsavory, so difficult, so challenging. And it wasn't like that before you got close, right? Before they were “perfect”, right? They were like a rose-scented angel.

But after some time, all of those blinders disappeared, and then now they're just “annoying”, right? “They can do nothing right.”

“They don't take out the trash,” or “They don't open the mail.”

All these little things that bother us. They always ask us to get the remote control, and we say, “Ah, don't be so lazy.” We have these complaints.

Or maybe, “They don't say the things that we like,” right? And we'll talk a little bit about this later.

A common one is, “Oh, you know, they're not romantic,” right?

“They don't hold my hand.”

“They don't buy me gifts”

Or, “They don't say, ‘Darling, I care about you.’”

And this is a very ongoing, common kind of complaint between partners, right? So if we are taking the radical approach of The Mirror, then we're not going to be busy pointing our finger and saying, “Oh, they're so terrible. They didn't do ABC for me,” because we know that's not love, right?

We've established that is selfishness. That is trying to use someone to do something for us that we want.

So, when we have an interaction, and somebody does something that we don't like, in order for us to find the mirror, it is very good to reflect. To sit in contemplation and to consider, “What is it that is coming up inside of me? What is it that is reacting to this situation?” Right?

So this is something that we can do.

All right, the Cycle of Life (topic shown in the slide). So one thing that we talked about is that there are patterns that repeat on loop. And this is actually how all of Reality is built.

All of Reality is built on these wheels that go around and around. So, we couldn't say necessarily that there's something wrong with that. But over time, we want to be able to understand the patterns, when we have experienced a certain pattern enough, then we decide that we've had enough of that pattern. So we are going to go beyond it. We're going to transcend it, and we move, we can say, up into a different wheel. When the Buddhists talk about Samsara and transcending Samsara, they are talking about a particular wheel that the humans are caught in. But we could say that there are micro wheels that are the patterns of our behavior that we repeat on loop throughout our life.

And this is why, if someone is looking for love, and they find they keep failing at love, it's going to happen again and again and again, until they learn, what is it inside of myself that is drawing these circumstances to me? Okay?

So, let's take the case of someone who finds that their significant other is very cold, right? They say, “Oh, they're not doing the things that I wish they would do. They're not giving me attention.” And we will talk more about this later, but just to give an example of the cycles. The person who is demanding that thing is also giving rise to this pattern. Because the demand for it has with it a sense of lack, a sense of desire.

And because we are manifesting continuously, unconsciously—when we're not conscious—therefore, we're going to manifest this scenario where, “Oh, I just wish you would hold my hand and you won't!” Because then it can keep continuing. And so we find that all desire creates a kind of imbalanced scenario, which we will touch more on later when we come to talking about manifestation.

Instructor:

When I think of this, I think of also, if we look at the example of traumatic relationships, or situations that we might see, either that we've been through, or we see friends go through, we have to remember that all of these interactions are meant for us to learn and to then transcend these cycles as Ruth said.

But the sad truth is that most of the time many people aren't actually learning or growing. So, for example, a lot of us maybe have had to go through traumatic relationships and, if you learn from them, you might see that a recurrence comes around where another person with similar energy comes around and you know, “Okay, that person is not for me.” That would be learning and growing, and then your next relationship would not be the same. Maybe there's still an issue, but you don't find someone that's exactly the same.

However, when you look at a lot of your friends and maybe they’re constantly with the same type of partner over and over again. Then they keep being drawn to the same situation. They are not learning from it.

But not only that, remember, there's a corresponding mirror thing there, so not only it's because they're not growing, but they keep finding the same thing, because the patterns will keep repeating in these cycles, as Ruth said, over and over again, until we learn and we transcend it. So if we keep getting into an abusive relationship over and over and over again, and we're wondering, “Well, why am I seeming to be in a relationship with someone who's abusive towards me?” Well, perhaps it's also because you put out something that is either corresponding to that or maybe you also are abusive as well.

So you get into this case where, you're looking for drama, so you're finding drama. And then when you find someone, say, who isn’t drama, you're just not interested in them. “Oh, well, they're not that interesting.” And then meanwhile, they would be in a good a better match and would have treated you better. But internally, you secretly like the drama, so you keep correlating with someone who has the same exact principle on the other end.

You'll see that people seem to keep repeating the same patterns, same pattern, the same type of relationship, the same type of relationship. Ideally, even before spirituality, you should grow from moment-to-moment.

You at 21 should not be doing the same thing at 36, even if you have not found a spiritual path, just from your natural process, if you were observing, if you learned from your mistakes, you should be a more mature person at 36 than 21.

But what you'll see, especially in today's society, is most people are exactly the same in their late 30s and their early 40s as they were when they were a 20-year-old. And they haven't learned much at all. If anything, maybe they regressed into what we call “the role of an adult”, as Eckert Tolle said, where they become more mechanical and more jaded. And they're even less optimistic and they become more conservative and they're becoming bitter.

And still repeating the same mistakes. So if anything, they've gone down using the excuse of, “Oh, I had to let go of all the things I like. Now I'm an adult. I'm so much better.” So, we see that a lot, and that's because we're not taking advantage of what is being brought to us to learn from it. And of course, this is magnified when we actually then start to do the psychological work on ourselves because we start living under different rules and we actually start observing. We actually start looking for the egos. More things will then come and trigger us because we're actively asking the Reality—which is ourself—to test us on the things that we need to see to learn about ourselves.

So, everything becomes more magnified. We could say these are the trials that begin when you start doing the work on yourself or following the Boddhisatva path. In essence, the trials subjectively are you just doing the work on yourself and thus pulling out these things that you never saw in yourself before, that you would sleepwalk past. And of course, this will be the most magnified in the relationship.

Instructor:

So we're going to go a little bit deeper into the source of some of these issues, these common issues that cause us to fall into these patterns, right? Where we have these unhealthy relationships or these kinds of negative attachments, trauma bonding.

One big source is the influence of childhood. Now, if you're in spirituality, perhaps you also have a concept of reincarnation or rebirth. So, if that is also included in your spirituality, then we would say that the causes could have come from previous lives, previous existences, other existences that are related to you currently. And so these patterns could have started a very long time ago, and they've been getting bigger and bigger and bigger ever since. So when we find someone with very, very severe anxiety and we look to their childhood and we say, “Well, nothing happened in your childhood.” Maybe it was from a previous existence, and this is why, but there are common causes that are in childhood.

Now, we put here environment and response, because there's two pieces to the puzzle. The first is the environment. Either you had a home where the parents were very loving to one another and very attentive to the children, or you had a home where they weren't, right? One or both were absent, or one or both were not loving, not attentive to the children. That's one part of the puzzle. The second part is the response. So the response is how this environment becomes internalized within the psyche of the person. And funnily, it is not directly dependent on the environment.

As an example, if someone had an absent mother or father, this will create or could create, it's highly likely to create, some kind of trauma pattern, right? However, if the mother and father were both very available and attentive, but the child perceived that they weren't, or whatever they did wasn't “good” in the child's perception, then the trauma could still occur. So, it also has to do with the perception of the individual, how they process that. So for example, if a parent said to the child, “Okay, I'm going to be working from 4 o'clock to 5 o'clock.” It's a normal thing, right? And they go into their home office and they work. But then the little boy, the little girl says, “Oh, they don't love me.” So this is the response part.

And it's both parts together that create a kind of trauma that we'll talk about, which then becomes a pattern that's going to feature in our intimate relationships so we can understand and heal what has gotten stuck in us. Essentially, it's stuck energy. And these days there's a million and one different therapies to try to get it out. But we find that unless we find the root of this at the energetic level, the external methods become Band-Aids. So, the root keeps growing more plants, and then the person keeps going to many, many breathwork workshops, and sound baths, and ecstatic dance, and they have to keep going, right, because the root is still there, and the root is still growing the plant.

Okay, The Parent Trap (title on slide). So we mentioned parents. Now, if we take the case of an absent parent, it may be easy for most of you to imagine what that would do to someone in their adult relationships. So, if your mom or dad didn't give you enough attention, whether it was because you had a big family or because they were always working or because they were just not very nice—any of these cases; when we grow up, we have buried deep inside the psyche, this idea that that is love. So we talked about love as inner wholeness, right? If we think that that household scenario that felt so familiar that corresponds to our childhood, if we think that is love, then, unconsciously, we will go out and try to create it.

We will think, “Okay, (This is all happening in the subconscious, right?) My father or my mother always didn't have time for me. So I need to find a partner that doesn't have time for me because that is familiar. It feels safe.” And the deep, deep root at the bottom of this is fear. We have a fear of being alone. We have a fear of not being whole, and this fear comes from not having found wholeness inside of ourselves first.

So we're already on the back foot when we think we're going to go and find union externally. So we start on this journey and, for a lot of people these days, what do they do? Either they're swiping on the apps, or they're going to the clubs in the bar, and they want to find some stranger that they don't know anything about and say, “It could be you!” Right?

Well, with the energy inside of us, this is going to magnetize “magically” on the dance floor, the person that we think it could be you, is going to be the perfect person who's going to be just like our parents. So they're going to ignore us if our parents ignored us. They're going to have no time for us if that's how our parents were.

So, we are identifying the cause, right? We haven't yet come to a solution. This is the cause. Knowing about this intellectually, only helps to a certain extent, not that much, unfortunately. If it were the case, then, because most people have heard about these things, then they would all be in happy, perfect relationships, right or relatively healthy relationships. But they're not because knowing about this intellectually is not enough. Because the root is in our energy, it's in our Soul—our psyche—so we continue to manifest from this root.

If we had a mother or father who was smothering, you might think, “Oh, that's great. I’m going to have a partner who's going to give me a lot of care and attention,” right? But it may be the case that we—depending on the lesson we need to learn—either we attract someone who becomes just our mother or father, and then becomes someone who's always trying to parent us, always trying to tell us, “Oh, remember to take your lunch to work. Remember to pull your socks up and remember to wash and fold your clothes,” and they take on this role of the smothering parent.

And we think, “This is great. It's just like my mom or my dad.” Subconsciously, we think that, but it's not healthy for us. It's not good for us to grow up and mature. So those people might think they're very happy in such a relationship. And they're still not seeing what the mirror is trying to show them—that if we are balanced and complete internally, we are fully, whole, by ourselves, and when we are whole by ourselves, then we can be whole with another person who is also whole (in Gnosis we often call this personal definition), but if we are feeling like half a person, and we go find another half a person, and we put this together, unfortunately, it doesn't become 2 halves make a whole. It becomes 2 halves, keep saying, “Why am I a half? Why am I half? You're not completing me,” and they're mad at the other person, right?

So all of these parental traumas will play out until they're healed.

Instructor:

You said something else, too, about the dating culture, and just going to bars, or using the apps, and in this case, we could say it's a hookup culture, or people sleep with each other on the first date, or very soon after. And this is also can be an issue for the things that Ruth is mentioning here. In an esoteric sense, and the practice is to look for the Perfect Matrimony and all these things.

But we would say that as soon as the energy is exchanged in a union that's sexual, there's also an exchange of karma and ego and all of these things that are that are exchanged. It’s not just bodily fluids, but actually the vital energy. And all of these traumas and things that we tend to find people that have the corresponding traumas with us, we start also exchanging—at least at our level where we're at without doing the work—we take on stuff from the other partner energetically. So if we also keep attracting partners that aren't necessarily great for our psychology and that trigger us on where we're harmed, we're also then exchanging all of those bad traits back and forth with each other and then that becomes a cycle. Not to mention, if we're sleeping with many partners, then we also are exchanging energy with all of them and taking on all of that karma and all of that ego all at the same time. So, that's something that we need to be aware of, that we take on energy from others.

I mean, we could take on energy from others, even if it was being in a public place, but that's not to be scared to go out it’s New York City. But especially, obviously, at an intimate level, we're having intimate contact, we're taking on basically all of the other person's issues. So if we constantly keep finding people that causes us to have issues and we have issues with them, then we're taking on more and more of that energy and thus snowballing the effect of these traumas and these things.

Instructor:

So that way it will become worse.

All right, so we're going to talk about Four Kinds of Attachments. Now, this is a common psychological matrix where we have these 4 different scenarios and 3 of them are based on trauma, and fourth is the best that people can do without spirituality, right?

So, the anxious one is the clingy, the needy one, and usually it was because their parents didn't give them enough attention. And so they had this fear of abandonment. It's what's commonly called the abandonment wound. And the person can know about it, and try their best to suppress it, to not let it manifest, to not let it interfere, and try to intellectually manage the wound, right? And they're going to do a little bit better than someone who's not trying.

But because it's in their energy, it's going to be very, very difficult for them. So if we take the case of someone completely unconscious, they're the one that goes crazy, right? That steals all of their passwords and starts logging into their social media and texts them a million times a day, and then says, “Where are you at 9 p.m.?!”

They're so anxious and they say, “Are you talking to anybody?”

They get very, very nervous that the other person is either going to leave them or going to cheat on them. And the funny thing is, even if the other person wasn't going to (cheat, leave, etc.), they (the wounded one, the clingy one) can manifest it very quickly, right? Because their energy is so intense, then they could push the other person to leave them or to cheat on them, some of these things.

First of all, they might be saying it , “Oh, do you love me? Are you going to cheat on me?” And then they put the idea to the other person's head, and the other person says, “No, I'll never do that.” But now it goes down into their subconscious, and the other person is also unconscious, so that means when someone is unconscious, they don't have full control over their actions, over their emotions, over their thoughts, over their will. So they are a victim of these forces that come and go. “I have a desire; maybe I can control it, or maybe I can't,” which is a common thing we hear when somebody cheats, they say, “Oh, it just happened,” as if they're not in control of themselves, right? As if they're just a puppet.

Unfortunately, many people are puppets. In fact, in the Gnostic teachings or in esotericism, it's said that 93%—or 97% actually—of the population, is unconscious, or in another way, we would say 97% of you is your unconscious, right? These are figurative numbers. It's not like we can go inside your mind with a measuring stick, but the numbers are to help us grasp that most of the things we do, are not what our Essence—our true core—is even trying to do. It's simply the forces, the astrology, the “you saw an advertisement”, “somebody looked at you,” and then, “Okay, now I'm doing this, now I'm doing that.” No control; no one home in the vehicle.

So, the anxious person, when they’re unconscious, they're very, very clingy, if they are trying, say, with their intellect, then they are aware, and they may be suppressing it, they may be thinking very actively, intellectually, “Oh, this person, they canceled the date. Maybe they're bad for me,” but then, because they're in the intellect, the intellect can also spiral, because they have the same energy signature that's causing the problem. So they'll say, “Okay, let me give them one more chance because what if it was this? What if it was that?” So the intellect starts to make a plan. And it's maybe a little bit better, but it's not that much better.

Because then the person does it again, and maybe they're always canceling on date night, and they say, “Oh, but, but they told me they had to work late, so it, it could be true, right? I shouldn't assume that they're lying.” And so the intuition is ignored. And then this goes on. Maybe they found someone who is a serial cheater, but they found them not because they deserve to be unhappy or they deserve to be lied to. But because they have that energy signature. The Universe is not judging or punishing. It's all just an energy soup. And so when we have that energy signature, that's the situation we're attracting to us. So we can see that we have this energy signature inside of ourselves.

So that's the anxious partner or the anxious attachment, the one that's very, very clingy. And if we have this signature, the more we cling, the more the other person will run away. And guess what ego or what energetic imbalance, what trauma plugs into this one perfectly?

Audience Member:

Avoidant.

Instructor:

Avoidant. Yes, so the avoidant and anxious go together like that. And they're both going to trigger each other perfectly.

Now, both of them are longing for union and love. Both of them are afraid. It's just that one is the runner, and one is the chaser, the one who’s running is just as scared of love, and doesn't believe they can find love, in the same way that the anxious one doesn't believe they can find love, and they think, “If I just chase for it more and more externally, and just grab onto them really hard, then it's going to happen.”

And of course, the more they grab, the more the avoidant person runs. So these relationships start hot, with a lot of promise, and then they end with tears and sadness and breakup, right?

Instructor:

Also, they're also both of related to the same trauma, just a different response to it. So, for example, the runner-chaser is very common in the twin flames scenario, which we did a talk about twin flames before.

And almost always in that situation, both have abandonment issues from the parent, right? But it's just one person's way of dealing with abandonment is to be clingy, and the other person's way of dealing with abandonment is not letting anyone get close to them. And thus, they match up perfectly.

It's really a manifestation through the feminine, the masculine energy. Usually what will happen, which way you'll react to these type of childhood traumas. The avoidant is usually someone with a masculine proclivity and energy, whereas the anxious one is usually the one with a divine feminine layered energy.

Instructor:

And then obviously the hot & cold is a combination. So that doesn't need too much explaining. They are at first saying, “Yes! Oh, this is great!”

And then, “No, no, no, I'm afraid maybe this is not good.”

And this is all happening subconsciously. So the person doesn't even know that they're doing this pattern.

They may think, Oh, I was just really busy. I randomly decided to work very late until 11 p.m. when I never do, but suddenly on the night that we had plans, now I just need to work late,” right? So consciously, they will rationalize, “Yes, because I have a lot of work…” and this is, this is what it means to be unconscious, is we don't know the source of our decisions. We think we are deciding something, but really it is the energetic signature, the trauma, the ego that is deciding it. So the hot and cold person is oscillating between these anxious and avoidant characters.

And then in the typical therapy, they'll say, “Well, you just need secure attachment. Just don't do any of that. And it will be secure.” And if it were that simple, then all of those people who have this problem would find love very quickly. But unfortunately, it's not that simple because knowing it intellectually, as we said, doesn't change it. We have to change the energy.

So typically, many meditations are offered now in therapy where the person will try to go back to their childhood. And they'll go to the child, and they'll give it lots of love and forgiveness, and they'll also meditate that, “I am the parent to both of them. I'm both parents to this child,” right? And they'll do this kind of a work. And that can be helpful to an extent.

If that practice works for you good, the inner child healing, the inner parenting, with many, many meditations. However, unless we are able to see the pattern happening real time, and then take the trauma and sit with it on a deep level as the potential to not unlock. Because we are still working from the outside. we’re saying to the wound, “There, there. You're okay. You're okay.” Meanwhile, the trauma's hiding inside a black box.

Instructor:

Yeah, the issue with the inner child, healing, which it's good for maybe, helping us to cope with some of our traumas is as a tool for the actual Union of the Divine within, which is what we're looking for. We need to actually find unconditional love. We need to find Union with our own Essence, our own Being.

And the problem with the inner child healing is that we could say that the inner child is another symbol or another idea of our Essence or the inner part of us that is Divine. Now, the problem with the inner child healing is, of course, we want to be nice to the inner Divinity part. It's not a bad thing, but it is a compartmentalization then of the part of us that is Divine. So we're still separate from the part of us that's Divine. So, while it can help us on the surface level in a reprogramming of our psychology to be more favorable, in the long run, it's still keeping us in separation from the exact thing that we're seeking union with, which is the Essence.

So if the Essence is, “Oh, this little child that needs to be taken care of,” then we're not realizing that it is actually us in the current reality in the present moment. It's actually our true Self. We're not the ego. So we just created an ego that's coddling or holding it in this box. You know, so it's useful for where it's at for the level that it’s at, for the general population, but as a spiritual tool, it could actually be very detrimental to truly finding our inner truth.

Instructor:

Yes, so we'll come to the method shortly. There are a few other things we could say about modern relationships, simply because there's so many misconceptions out there.

And one common thing that we hear is the Five Love Languages. And this is something that we like to call the Five Unhealthy Attachments, because when we are caught up in selfishness, we know that that is not the basis for a healthy, lasting relationship. We are looking at the other person saying, “What are you going to do for me to make me happy?” And as long as we're coming to them with a laundry list of, “Here are my requirements of what you should do for me to make me happy.” Then neither of us will ever be happy. What are you going to do if they refuse?

Instructor:

Well, it's not just that, too. We talked about that, the true feeling of love or the emotion of love, which is a higher emotion related to the soul, is actually a manifestation of the Divine Life Force itself, and it's unconditional. It's an energy, right?

It is energy as it manifests at the level of our higher emotions. So, there isn't a condition for that to happen. So what is this really then? This is the ego's idea of love because the [lower] ego doesn't exist at that layer of the Reality. So we can't experience that feeling. So the ego, then thus attributes it to some type of desire or pleasurable thing. We think of love as something pleasurable, and depending on our preferences, we align that with, “This type of pleasure is what I think love feels like. So now this is love.” But it's not love because love doesn't have a condition. It’s like we said, it is life itself.

So, whatever it is that we think about it, it's really the case that, these are just a desire. It's a desire that we want someone to do something for us. And this is our particular desire that we prefer over the other desires that someone else might prefer a different one.

Instructor:

And what we say in spiritual teachings is that all desire leads to suffering. If we want something, whether we get it or not, we will still be unhappy. And this is something that is very hard for most people to understand because we are caught up in the illusion. So we continuously chase, and chase, and chase, and we say, “Well, maybe just this desire; this desire is different,” right?

But as we begin to awaken, we begin to see clearly that all desire leads to suffering. That's not to say you can't have a lovely meal or some lovely company or any of these things. But when you're busy craving them, they will never satisfy.

You won't even be present when they're happening. And when they're gone, you won't know what happened either. And then you'll just continue seeking for the next lot of sensations. More positive sensations, less negative sensations, and you'll be caught in an endless loop, because it doesn't end.

So, all of these things here on the screen, they can be nice in a relationship. There's nothing wrong with them, right?

We're not saying don't tell your spouse or your partner that you love them, right? We're not saying don't make any time for them or never give them anything on their birthday. We're not saying that.

We're saying that when we approach a relationship with the demand of, “These are the things you need to do for me to make me happy,” first of all, the relationship is not going to go well. But secondly, whether they do or don't do those things, we will be caught in desire. And desire is never fulfilled. So, (if) we want to have a better relationship, we should surrender all these things. And when we surrender, we may have them, we may not have them, but either way, we'll be just fine.

Now, we were also talking about the kinds of unhealthy attachments, and I'm not sure what experiences you all have had, and those may be personal, so you don't have to tell everyone here in this room. But just in case, these are markers of when we are potentially about to fall into another trauma bond.

For example, inconsistency. So someone says one thing and they do another thing, right? “I'll be there,” and then last minute, “Oh, I can't make it.” Or emotional unavailability, right? They don't want to pay attention to anything.

Now, if we have an attention-seeking problem, that's a whole other thing in itself.

But if they're emotionally unavailable, then perhaps they don't really listen. Perhaps they are always not present in any kind of activity, right? Because they're occupied with something else. So they may not be cheating or trying to run away, but they're just not emotionally available. They're not fully present in all of centers of the human machine. And we will talk more about the human machine later on for those who want to continue. There will be a new course that's starting from next week. And so for those who continue, we'll explain what that means, the centers and the machine.

But for now, we can suffice it to say they're not available emotionally, right? They're not paying attention with their heart, maybe with their head, but not their heart. Poor communication. So they keep you out of the loop of a lot of things. And sometimes, it is because they are not that interested.

But when we have an anxious attachment, then the mind will say, “Oh, maybe it was because of this, maybe it was because of that,” and, and, if we are oscillating between hot and cold, then what I've seen commonly recommended, which is ridiculous, is they'll say, “Oh, you should just date five people at once, so you won't feel anxious,” right? “Date many people at once, so then if they ignore you, you're not going to feel nervous.”

And then you never heal the problem.

Instructor:

Which brings us also back to the energetic exchange problem as well. Which that will help more than likely increase your problem with anxiousness because you're taking on all this foreign energies.

Instructor:

Yes, yes, in a spiritual sense, we would say.

Audience Member:

This is my first time here, so I don't know if we're allowed to ask questions. So I'm looking at these red flags and I'm thinking about the last slide of the five unhealthy attachments, desires or...

Instructor:

They're basically the five love languages.

Audience Member:

So I, , how do you...Maybe, , differentiate between that and this? Because another way of looking at this is , “Oh, these are my desires, partners…”

Instructor:

Yes, exactly. So those are actually separate things because desire is always going to lead to unhappiness. And when we are in a relationship, instead of asking what you can give me, we should be looking to what we can give to them. Now, that's when we are in a healthy relationship.

But some relationships are unhealthy. And these are some markers of that. So it is a fine line because those two things could be accidentally blended together where we might say, say we are with someone who is a serial cheater and they're lying to us and we say, “Oh, it's just my desires,” you know? “I need to give up my desires.”

So we, we want to understand the nature of desire is a kind of tense imbalanced energy that has craving as its marker. And we still need to use the consciousness, which is our ability to discern and assess, if this relationship is healthy for us. Right? So let's say, a wife says, “Oh, my husband didn't buy me flowers.” Potentially, that's okay, you know, there's no rule that says he has to buy her flowers. It would be nice, but there's no problem. Now, if he doesn't come home every night for three weeks, then she can be free from desire, but also assess that maybe he's out doing something unfaithful, right? You don't have to have desire to be able to logically assess a scenario and understand if someone is betraying an agreement or there's some kind of unhealthy aspect.

So, we have to be able to discern between those things. Yes, we want to come out of desire so that we can both come into a relationship at the right time when our energy is balanced. If we are in a relationship, we want to remain balanced so that we can interact from a place of inner harmony. However, these red flags, if we attract someone like this to us it's highly likely, especially if we're catching it in the beginning, it's highly likely that this is about to become a trauma bond, and maybe we're dating at this stage.

So, if we notice these red flags and we're still working out our own inner psychology, our own inner anxieties, and these kinds of things, insecurities, then we need this kind of a list to help us until we can understand energetically what is happening inside of us. Does that make sense?

Audience Member:

Yes.

Instructor:

Do you want to add anything to that?

Instructor:

I would also say, too, that people aren't perfect, so obviously, when we look at all of these things, to try to have someone that has nothing, touches on nothing is impossible, but also at the same time, what we want, like we said, at the beginning, it's not so much the case of, “Does a person not have things that mirror you and that you see your own problems?” But we want someone that wants to grow with us and also change and learn so that, say, if we bring up something that we have an issue with, that we actually try to grow past the things that we trigger in each other, because we're meant to trigger each other, right?

It's only an issue if it becomes a repetitive problem, any one of these things because it's the case that, “All right, I've said something about this. I know this, or I do this and you do this, and this always makes us clash heads, and we're not doing anything about it, and it's just a pattern that's now repeating. And we've been together for 2 years and we still have the same arguments we had since day one.”

Or a lot of times if it starts right away too, right? Usually there's a honeymoon phase, as Ruth talked about all these things, right? If it's that case that you're already immediately arguing—the red flags—you are just pulling it out of each other right away. It's very likely that's a karmic relationship.

We did a talk on twin flame relationships and soulmates and karmic soulmates. And one of the things that people usually get confused with the twin flame relationship, is a karmic relationship because they both start hot and heavy really fast. And usually it's a red flag if there's a lot of drama right off of the bat, because that's not that normal.

And there might be that there's something that you definitely need to learn and it's a pattern you keep repeating, especially if you've gone through a bunch of those. You keep attracting the same type of person, and you keep getting to these hot and heavy, drama-filled, quick relationships, and then you get trapped in them, and then you're on and off, the hot and cold that Ruth talked to before.

All of those things are usually actually a sign of a karmic relationship which means that there's a lesson that we need to learn. And until we learn that lesson, we're going to keep repeating that situation and going through a lot of pain and suffering. And that's actually very common for a lot who are going to be on a spiritual path to have a lot of those types of relationships, whether we learn from them or not is up to us. But, trauma usually is along the lines of, the path for a Being that's going to go into spirituality, both the rough childhood and the many rough relationships, until we learn our lesson, because it's a choice from the Being, from the higher principle when it incarnates into the body, since it's reincarnating rather than returning.

So, it's choosing to come in, and it's choosing that because there's a mission, right? It's not on the normal circle that we talk about of the normal development of the planet. So you're incarnating there and you've chosen to come down and you need to awaken, right? You need to awaken because you have a mission to do. And the best way to make sure that you awaken is to—from your whole young life—from your childhood to your young adult life—is to just give yourself a lot of pain and suffering until you wake up. And even then, some fallen Bodhisattvas or star seeds are hardheaded, and you'll see them, and they're still just going through the same problems over and over again.

But it is the choice of the of yourself. You chose it for yourself to try to help you, because the more pain and suffering you have, the more likely we are to say, “Something is wrong with this. Everything is an illusion,” and then we break out of it. So those patterns were programmed in by ourselves. So, it's something to look out for, but there is no good and bad, right? All of these things are—every time you come into contact with and with other individuals, it's a mirror and it's meant to teach you something you're supposed to learn from the experience, whether that is to learn when to put your foot down and not get into a toxic relationship or to learn where it's understanding, “All right, there's something that I'm doing that's keeping me from having a healthy relationship.”

And if I start changing things about myself, I'll grow and then it grows into something better. But all these things come from learning and going through the processes. And as we start to observe ourselves, we will understand how these things work better and our relationships with both other people and our family, especially, will be one at the very beginning, the family is always something that’ll test you at the beginning. But as we start to have a better relationship with our family and our other close friends, then we'll also find that eventually we'll end up in a healthy relationship or if we came into (the work in) a relationship with our partner, then the relationship—our relationship—with our partner should improve.

Now, unless they're just karmic and they're really going to be unsuitable and then we'll learn that it was meant to dissolve anyway. So, then it won't be a problem, but we'll go through the process of our growth, which should improve the relationships around us, or we will cut out the ones that we don't need anymore, that aren't serving us anymore in the present moment.

Instructor:

If you have someone in the home and they're going around smashing plates and they're violent, you can be free from desire and still tell them they've got to go, right? I saw one thing that could maybe be confused here is one of the red flags is “you repeatedly abandon yourself around them,” right?

And so when we talk about the five unhealthy attachments, “Oh, you've got to give me gifts, that's how I know that you love me,” then if we're crossing these two, then someone might say, “Oh no, I'm abandoning my requirements,” right? But we have to separate those, because those requirements are not the core of what it means to be in a healthy relationship. There's something that we desire because we have some kind of program that maybe we saw our father and mother, they exchanged gifts, and so we think, “Okay, you have to give me gifts just mom and dad.” Or maybe they didn't exchange gifts and then somehow we got it in our head that, “That's what I need because they didn't have it, so I'm going to have it,” right?

So, what does it mean to abandon yourself? It means in terms of principles, let's say that you are going to a spiritual center, right? And you are going to meditate and you're going to learn about how to better yourself. And then your wife says, “No, you can't go,” right? So if you were to say, “Okay, darling, whatever you want,” then that would be abandoning yourself because you are seeking to do the inner work. You're seeking to learn about yourself and to improve and to grow. And they're trying to stop you. So in that case, it's not about desire or no desire. It's that if you were too weak to stand up for your principles and your values, then you wouldn't be able to grow in that way. So that's the difference there.

Okay, so now we come to the healing process. Now, we wish that we could say that it was something you could just do in five minutes. We've talked about the problem and the causes. Really, it's more something that is ongoing, and it is a lifetime of work. However, in the beginning, we will find the biggest changes because we have the deepest, darkest parts of ourselves that we need to clear out first.

So, the first part we have here is safety. And a lot of those attachments, those desires, they come from not feeling safe. And we could also say that safety corresponds to a part of the ego that is fear. It's an instinctual animal ego or survival mechanism that served us a long time ago when we needed to be part of a tribe, where we needed to fight against a lion.

We needed more hunter gatherers together to collect the berries because one person couldn't collect all the food that they needed. And so this is buried inside of ourselves, inside of our DNA. And we mistakenly take these responses that had to do with wild animals and getting enough food in the tribe, and we apply them to modern life. So what happens is when these anxieties come up, the nervous system reacts as if I'm going to die. And this is one of the building blocks of the ego. The ego has fear in it. A lot of, in fact, almost all the scenarios that the ego gets involved in is because we're afraid of something.

We're afraid of failure. We're afraid to be judged, we're afraid to be alone. We're afraid of something.

So what we want to do is we want to take the scenarios that we're experiencing every evening into meditation. And this means to sit, to be quiet, and to review them, to look at them, and if we are more advanced—if we can—we want to look at them as if we are not those people. So to be able to shift our perspective, we have to go above them.

So say, there's John and Jessica. John and Jessica met each other, and then they had some dialogue, and then John felt certain emotions, whether it was fear, whether it was excitement, whatever it was, then John goes home, and he sits, and he sees the scene of John and Jessica talking, and he floats up above, and watches them as if he's not John.

This is what we call disidentification. Or observation. If we are able to see from outside of the characters, then we have the potential to see something more, to understand something that we didn't understand before. And the instruction is, we just want to sit. We just want to sit and watch. If we try to say, “Oh, what could it be?” And start talking, then we're not going to have that silent wisdom that can come to us from ourselves. We can say that each person has inside of their heart, their own inner Guru, their own inner Master, their own inner Being. But because we have limiting beliefs, we block that source of wisdom, and we think, “Oh, I don't know the answer. I can't heal, I can't solve this problem.”

But by sitting in silence and simply observing, and then we have here compassion, applying a lot of love, forgiveness, compassion, to the scenario. Then eventually some kind of understanding is going to unlock. And we call this in this tradition, we call this a comprehension, an understanding. In other traditions, they call it insight, right? So we're going to have a kind of insight. And we take that, and we integrate it. So we sit with it, and you can either visualize light coming and merging in your field, or just a knowing, a calm, quiet knowing that it's integrating.

Let's say you are meditating, “Okay, this person, they didn't text me back. I'm feeling nervous,” so I meditate, I go outside of the person, and I'm seeing, “Okay, there is the character, there is all of their nervousness,” and then suddenly, I remember, “Oh, when I was five years old, my mom said, ‘Stand there on the corner, and wait,’ and she was going to go over there, and then she didn't come back for a long time, and I got scared.” Okay, so some scene, some root has come up. Then we want to bring the awareness to the root, and sit with that. And what can potentially happen is that some very seemingly non-related events are going to rise up, and we want to sit with them (too). And in the moment when these childhood traumas come up, there is going to be the sense of, “Oh, no, if I just let go, then all of this pain is going to come out.”

And that's true. It's going to be a little bit uncomfortable because there is an energy that is locked up, that has been locked up for a long time. But the discomfort is going to be way less than the discomfort that you've been prolonging with all of these unsuccessful relationships, right?

So we sit, and when this comprehension, this unlocking of the energy is about to come up, then we need to have this step here: surrender, which is, “Okay, just let it,” and just open up, and you might feel a big release of energy. You might even cry. It's a very profound experience, especially in the beginning. And this is something that we do again, and again, with every single trigger, of our interactions, while we're dating, or if we're already in a relationship, we keep doing the same thing.

And these comprehensions are going to release understanding and wisdom from ourselves. And slowly, we will find that our energy will become balanced.

Instructor:

There are three stages. I think, from Buddhism—for the awakening of the consciousness is in the present moment. Which the awakening happens in the present moment.

In theory, if we were able to just sit and face ourselves and for about 90 seconds or so, and shine the light of the consciousness, on all of our traumas, and our attachments in meditation, then in this moment right now, we could embody the Spirit. But, of course, it doesn’t work that way or that easily. But there are three steps that could happen, whether they happen simultaneously to someone who's activated spontaneously, or we take time to go through the stages.

They're related to forgiveness, surrender, and acceptance. And, I would say, actually, for this lesson, because you have surrender here, but surrender is really the next stage.

It's something that also needs to happen, of course. Surrender is actually a very important step to if we're going to connect to the Spirit, and actually see past the illusion of duality. But for the sake of connecting to love or that Unity of everything, is really more about these first few stages you have here, which is the safety and the compassion. You say compassion is the experience of that unifying force of love, and that (fear for our) safety is what keeps us from feeling it.

So, when we combine that the experience of unconditional love comes from forgiveness of ourselves, right? So that we can experience this Unity. Because the thing is, there are a lot of teachings where you need to go and forgive all the people that harmed you and these are more of what we would call a kindergarten teaching. But the truth is that if we can forgive ourselves, and connect to the compassion within—this Unity—and realizing the unity of everything, which is one layer of truth, and then we will inherently then forgive others cause we realize that they are also us, so that their errors were errors made out of also being unconscious as we were.

So, what happens is a lot of our trauma situations is that, it's not just that we're angry with the person that did the thing, but we're also angry at ourselves or we're hurt ourselves because we feel—say—weak or we feel victimized; we could have done something different, “How could I allow that to happen to myself?” And in that way, when we're first able to forgive ourselves, since we all are one being, and we truly forgive all the aspects of the trauma that attaches us that we hold against ourselves, it will unlock this feeling of compassion. And that's not the full awakening of consciousness, but remember, we're just trying to connect to the soul and through the heart, and it will heal that aspect in the heart.

It's our heart that's black and that's keeping us from connecting to the soul. So that aspect is where we then feel that metta or the compassion. And that first stage is forgiveness. We could say surrender is the next stage, which is the surrender or the disidentification to the fact that we do not exist as a separate entity.

So in that sense, we can say the TRUTH or the Absolute has three layers. The outside is the Unity of everything, then the inside is the Buddhist emptiness, or the nothing, or the Divine I. So we said, it surrender is connecting to that Divine I or the Unity of all Mind. So it's not just everything, we're all everything, but there's nothing except for this one “I”. So it's the other opposite side of that.

And then the last thing, once we experience that experience inside, something we call acceptance; which is, we end up now in the situation such that we've seen this truth of Unity, but we are stuck between the two poles still. The person is still there that we know is not real, and we also have this Divine Purpose that we've now experienced. And at that point, there's nothing left to comprehend, but it does take a leap of faith and to push the ego to the side and to come into alignment permanently with the perspective of the Divine Flow or the Divine Purpose of the Reality.

Instructor:

It's also called the Tao in Chinese tradition.

Instructor:

But for the sake of finding the Unity or that love feeling, I think it's really more just the forgiveness aspect that we're focusing on at the beginning. And surrender will come later. Early on, still pretty quick, but once we get into our childhoods, (once) we start doing the psychological work, we'll work our way towards being able to detach from the false sense of self. But if we don't even have the forgiveness ourselves, if we still have the pain and the trauma, we can't forgive ourselves and connect to that Unity, we’ll fail at the part of surrender. And the thing that happens is that once the wheels start turning, if we start doing the work and we start working with the initiatic philosophy, is that we will be heading towards a trial where a surrender has to happen.

So, we need to work through the forgiveness and finding that compassion before that. Otherwise when we get to that trial, we'll just choose the ego. And then we may even stay in esotericism, but we'll veer to either a right or a left-handed path, depending on what we have within our Soul.

So here we have an esoteric symbol. Those of you who, maybe play video games might recognize this, they use this in the Legend of Zelda. But it actually is an esoteric symbol of the Trinity or the Holy Trinity, and as well as the four aspects of manifestation in the Reality, that you may know as the Four Elements esoterically.

And basically, how this symbol works is we could say that at rest, when there is no manifestation, there would just be one triangle, the external outside triangle. You could also use for this a circle, but this is, in this symbol, basically what you're seeing is that there's just the one thing at rest and there is no manifestation. And because the reason we use a triangle in this graphic is that the triangle still has the three forces even when it's at rest. So even at Absolute Zero, the three forces are there; they're just not manifested. Now, when the manifestation begins, Divinity goes within itself or without itself, however you want to look at it.

But to create a secondary pole, Before it can manifest, it needs to create the duality. So that triangle going within, even though it's still at one, creates what we consider the Three Forces of creation or the Holy Trinity. And In that, you still have the one aspect that's still in the unmanifested. So the three are one and the one are three, and thus there are Four Elements. This then leads to the fact that for the manifestation to reach its completion, there are Four Elements that need to manifest at the lowest layer of the reality. So in that sense, we could say that this shape or this symbol, even though we're looking at it in two dimensions, is actually three-dimensional, and that is the equilateral three-dimensional triangle known as the tetrahedron.

The tetrahedron, we could say, is the aspect of everything that exists within this three-dimensional reality that is Divine. So if we use the symbol of a cube, for example, as something manifested in the physical, because that's the symbol esoterically for a three-dimensional manifestation. If you put a tetrahedron inside that cube, that's the aspect of the manifestation that's Divine, and then the parts that you could cut out around that would be the unconscious, the subconscious, etc.. So you could say that the tetrahedron is the representation of our Being or our Essence. And then the rest of the cube that it's within, the Trinity that has descended into the Quaternary—in Theosophical terms—is the unconscious and the subconscious that we need to fasten and shape and understand so that we can find the Divine Essence within.

Instructor:

Okay, so we talked about the building blocks of Reality because we wanted to demonstrate that everything comes from an original point. Once the manifestation has unfolded, then here we have all of the manifestation, right? We have all of these characters that all came from one point, that are all us, but now we can interact and talk to each other, even though we are all the same Being. Now, in the same way that we have emanated or unfolded out of this original point, each of us is also a mini creator, a mini god, and we are continuously manifesting, creating our reality. When we are unconscious, then we are sending out vibrations, intentions, but we don't know what we're doing and then we get back something random and we say, “Oh, why do I have this?” Because we were doing it unconsciously.

So, we are always manifesting, and we are always reaping the results of what we manifested, meaning our karma. Whether we know about it or not, we still get karma, right? We get dharma, we get karma. And depending on how we are manifesting, or depending on our inner balance, that will dictate what comes to us. So, this is very important because this shows how the practice that we talked about to meditate and contemplate the ego, the scenarios daily, is going to assist us to comprehend, to understand the roots of our traumas, of our imbalances, so we can eventually, gradually find balance, and then continuously work to maintain balance.

What happens when we are imbalanced? So all of those traumas and the trauma bonding that we talked about in a metaphysical way, in another way, we could explain it like this.

So, this circle here is the manifestation, the Unity, the everything, and we have here a cross, which symbolizes that we have two forces or we have duality, to manifest. And to help us understand an imbalanced manifestation, we can take an example some of you have heard before, that's a plate of water or a container of water. If I tap the center point, then see this image here, the ripples, they'll come out from the center point. Perfectly, just radiating out to the outside, like when you throw a pebble into a string, and then it will be finished.

But what happens if I tap the right or the left or one of the sides, if I tap a side that's not in the center? What actually happens is that I tap this part and another drop appears on the other side, and then radiates back to the original point. This is a demonstration, a metaphysical demonstration of karmic creation or creating from imbalance. So when I create from desire, which is an imbalance, from trauma, which is also desire, then I have this reverb effect, meaning I create, right? I can still create a relationship, but it's not going to be a good one. It's going to be one that's karmic. It going to be one that has a lot of drama, a lot of unhappiness, and then it's…(to audience:) yes.

Audience Member:

When I created this very same image, without the cross, I was playing around in Aftereffects, which is a motion graphics program. And they have those or whatever you call it, radio waves. And it sends out from the point concentric circles, and you can make them start to reflect and bounce off. If you started from the center and they start crossing over each other, they make that cross.

Instructor:

That's very cool. Yeah, so this is where these symbols come from. They're part of the Reality, right? So if we want to create without karma, then we have to create from perfect balance, meaning from no desire, meaning from the Center Point of the Cross of Light, so they say.

Instructor:

This is the Gnostic Cross. It's another symbol, similar to the Hebrew Star of David, which on the Tree of Life, there. I don't even need to grab it, but we showed it before. But the point of manifestation between the unmanifested and then the lower seven Sephira on the tree, that are in the Reality, is called the sphere of Da’ath, or it's the hidden sphere, the Matrix, right? And that's where you have the Star of David, which is where the feminine and the masculine start manifesting, but they're still perfectly within balance. We could say that's the same symbol of this cross. Instead of having the Trinity of the feminine and the masculine, the Hebrew Star, what you have here is you have the circle, which we already said esoterically is infinity or the Spirit.

And then within that, you have lined up the cross, which we already established at the cross by itself, outside of this circle, is the matrix, the masculine into the feminism, space and time, right? So this symbol of having both at the same time shows the balance between the Spirit and the matter. And that's why it is the center point or the balance or equilibrium, that the master would have achieved that has both awakened the consciousness and also developed the solar bodies, the Merkaba.

Instructor:

We have a small quote here at the bottom that says, “What you seek runs away.” And this is related to how the more we chase something or desire it, the more it's going to escape us. Now, you can get the physical thing, but you won't get the actual thing you're seeking, right?

So when someone is seeking a relationship from an ego of,

“Oh, I just want somebody to make me happy,” or,

“No one ever loves me.”

What are they really seeking? They're seeking Inner Union. And so the thing that they're really seeking is going to escape them. So they could get a physical partner, but it's not going to be a physical manifestation of Inner Union, because we have to find that Center Point of the Cross of Light or our own unique frequency, our own inner balance, our own Inner Union with our own Inner Divinity, in order to be complete inside of ourselves.

And then when the time is right, without seeking, if it is supposed to be, then a relationship will manifest, without seeking. So all of those people that are busy swiping on the apps, are not creating from the center point. So, very rarely, maybe something “good” could come out of it, but for the most part, they're going to be finding something that is going to have a certain kind of imbalance, and those relationships will mirror that to them. So if they start to become conscious, they would be able to see what it is that they've created. This is also really important.

Audience Member:

According to the Persian Poet…Rumi... The Western interpretation of what he says is incorrect. The Western interpretation is “what you're seeking is seeking you.” And he didn't say that. He says, “What you’re seeking IS you.”

Instructor:

Yes. That's exactly right. Sufism is...

Audience Member:

I'm a Sufi, by the way.

Instructor:

Okay. Sufism is what we would say is also Gnosis because we don't look at Gnosis in sense of how it's associated nowadays with Esoteric Christianity. The word itself, though, comes from the ancient mystery schools in Greece, and maybe possibly even before that. But Gnosis comes from the maxim that's on the temple of Apollo. “ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΑΥΤΟΝ” “Man, know thyself, and you shall know the universe and its gods.”

And it is knowledge through direct experiences, which is what we teach in the first class of the course when we start next week. And we would say that Sufism is the esoteric arm of Islam, or the true interpretation of Islam, when it's understood correctly. And it would be equivalent of Gnosis. Just like Vajrayana Buddhism or, you go to all the ancient mythologies, the mysteries of Eleusis, the Sumerian rites, the Egyptian mystery schools. They are all the same thing. And that's what we're looking for, that Universal Thread, that shows that, we are the temple and that you're a vessel for the Spirit itself, and we've just forgotten how to connect back to our own true nature, which is above us.

Audience Member:

Yeah, but we have to remind ourselves... with Gnosis, in Arabic, Talhid, there's that part where you have to be humbled, where it says, “You is an you aint.”

Instructor:

Yes.

Audience Member:

You is, and you ain't.

Instructor:

That's right.

Audience Member:

You think you got it, but you ain't got it. There’s a humbling aspect. Surrender. You is and you ain't. Remember that.

Instructor:

Yes. That's absolutely true, because humility—we could say—is the absence of pride, but the trappings of the right and left-handed paths, which come before the middle path, are misunderstandings of what humility truly is, whether it's the path of worship and it's a right-handed path, right?

And we think we're so low and we have to worship something outside of us. And we see it only as being meek and being little and insecure and worthless. Well, that's still a false sense of self. You shifted your false self onto an angel, which is your higher self, but you see it as something else or a master, right?

On the flip side of it, you have the left-handed path where they realize, “Okay, well, those beings are also our higher principle,” but in the same aspect, they have the intellectual understanding then of, “Okay, yes, we are God,” but we are God in the sense of our higher principle, as we are one with the Spirit that is in everyone.

And it's not you, the lower person. If you haven't actually surrendered to that fact, and you haven't actually accepted the Divine Purpose and experienced it, then you are not God yet, subjectively. God is dormant within you.

So the left-handed path says that they're God before actually having experienced God or becoming God. We say there's a difference between experiencing God, which is having a Samadhi and seeing truth, and then actually becoming and embodying the Spirit, and accepting it into your vessel, and that being truth.

Audience Member:

Yes. I have a question on that. What you seek is runs away from you.

Instructor:

Yes, what you seek runs away. Yes.

Audience Member:

Runs away. I guess I'm trying to reconcile that idea with just, the idea of ambition or the idea of just kind of moving in any direction in life. How do you…?

Instructor:

The transition is a little bit rocky because we were so used to being driven by egoic will, by desire, that when we start to come into spirituality, and we understand that desire is the source of our pain, then a lot of people go through a phase where they fall into apathy and disillusionment, and just go, “I'm just going to do nothing then.” And they just want to sit around and be depressed, right? Where there is a reason for your incarnation. There is a kind of expression that is seeking to come through. But it's not in the way of imbalance that imbalance is craving.

So we do have to take action as the lower person in the 3D. But with the action we take, we should not be attached to the outcome, right? So let's say that the Reality is guiding you to go in a certain path. You need to follow a certain course. You would KNOW that you're being guided to do that generally because there's the absence of desire. If you have desire, it may not be that you are being guided Divinely. It could just be your desire, right? But if you're completely clean and you don't have any desire, you don't care about the outcome, but you have an intuitive sense of, “This is where I'm supposed to go.” then you are proceeding cleanly.

And when we go through this transition, it is a little bit uncomfortable when we've been so used to chasing the desires of our ego. And we have to understand that the apathy and that just wanting to do nothing is another ego. It's another false sense of self, another shadow that is also trying to fight against Spirit or the Divine Flow, the way the Reality is going, and it says, “Well, I just want to do nothing,” right? And that's still doing something. It's just being sulky. So we have to give that up as well, and that's the surrender and acceptance.

“I surrender to the Divine.”

“This is the way that I'm supposed to go.”

Once we get onto a spiritual path, after some time, some kind of doorways or opportunities, certain things will come to us. And generally, it's easy to know that the Divine is asking us to do it because we (the lower person, or the personality, and the lower ego) don't want to do it. So something's going to come, and it's going to be right before you: “Here! You need to do this, will you?”

And you're going to feel like, “No, I don't want to.” And then when you surrender and you accept, you'll find, “Oh yes, I was supposed to do this.” So, that can be one way that can help us to find this kind of guidance to make that transition. Later on, we will find that it is a joy—we can say—to do God's will, or to follow the Tao, to follow the flow of Spirit, because everything the ego wants leads to pain. So, eventually, we find that this way is better.

Instructor:

Yeah, and it's not even that the ego is bad. It's like we said at the beginning of the lecture, the ego is the manifestation of the force of matter, which resists the Spirit so that we can exist in between the two. So it's just our perspective on it. Of course, it always wants to do the opposite of what the flow of the Reality is, because that's how reality exists. We just have to understand that and then just know that when there's resistance, until we are in alignment until we make that change, until we shift our perspective permanently, then we know that resistance is the pushback against what we're supposed to do.

So the things that come to us, this is where we talk about the aspect of sacrifice and a lot of the religions talk about it. In the exoteric sense, sacrifice has become this external sacrifice for humanity. It's been misinterpreted. Sacrifice is sacrificing your false sense of self. But when you give up the ego and you use the destructive force of creation to transmute that ego into a higher subtle matter, and you regain the Dharma that's locked within it. This is really important too, we're talking about this aspect of what we seek as well and how we need to create from a centerpoint of balance. And you brought up, for example, things ambition and all these things being bad, right?

Well, the thing is that for the average person, yes, it will keep us from creating and push it away because if we look at the people that actually control the systems on this planet—we could say—they're almost certainly black esotericists and fallen bodhisattvas, and that you don't get to those positions without understanding how the Reality works and how to manifest. Now, to an extent, we can create from balance by being fully in alignment with the lower ego, and that's what black esotericists do. You can use these forces to strengthen the ego and awaken consciousness through an egoic way rather than a pure way. But it still takes effort.

So the average person, even if we are in alignment with our egoic desires on the surface, we still are of connection to the soul. We still have morals. So if you notice, most of the people that run things that are positioned to power tend to be the people with the least amount of morals. That's also because it's very likely in those situations that they've done things to disconnect themselves from their morals. And there's that path that you go. We can call it the left-handed path and that where you use the knowledge of the Reality for power. It's the opposite of the religious path, the right-handed path where we do it for worship of the Divine.

Well, you think that you're God and you use it for power and to, gain advantage for yourself and the ego. But they're not just born that way, right? they, Well, to an extent they are; they're connected to an aspect of Divinity that has them doing that mission from their Soul or whatever. But the thing is that they get into a black esoteric school. They're pushed through their whatever, their own inner desires are to end up getting into a school and then working with these forces and then developing. It takes work. Jesus said, right? “Either be hot or be cold. I have no use for the lukewarm.” And that's what he's talking about.

You could go be a black magician and go be a white magician, but if you stay in the middle and you just stay ignorant, then you can't do anything. And they're talking about working with the mysteries, understanding the Reality. And that comes to the idea of the working with the energy, which is that inherently at the foot of all mystery schools there is the transmutation of the sexual energy, the retaining of the sexual energy, and using that creative force to well, do whatever you want. That’s how the Reality works.

But in our case, we're using it to awaken the consciousness. But this... Is imperative when we look at what we seek, because this becomes a problem that when the new student finds out about the mysteries of working with sexual transmutation, working with sexual alchemy, then there's desire to find a partner to use for their work.

And the thing is that, like we talked about with the aspects of the exchange of the ego and the karma with partners, it's not necessarily something that needs to be worked with immediately. The energy can be worked with as a single at the beginning. And to be fair, depending on someone's past existences and things like that, if depending on if they're a recapitulating master, maybe they don't even need to work with alchemy. They don't know until they get connected to their mission. But the point is that there is a stage usually that if you're recapitulating or you're doing the work to create the solar bodies, that you then need to start working with the alchemy.

If you reach that point after working as a single practitioner and you've already reached through the areas of working with the work on the psychological “I” and raising the consciousness to the natural level that it will raise to by the time you reach that point in the path; guaranteed fact, that partner will appear for you and be brought to you by your magnetism of your raised level of being, and they’ll be someone that's actually working at the same level as you are. And it won't be a romantic thing. It will be that you have an experience internally, “You supposed to work with that person.”

In the ancient schools, it used to be, you'd work with a guru, because it would be external, and they would say, “Oh, you've done these 30 years of work with the transmutation as a single. Now you're going to marry that woman and you're going to work together and do the work.”

Audience Member:

What’s wrong with that?

Instructor:

There is nothing wrong with it. Now it's internal. That’s all I'm saying.

So we want to work with that in that sense, right? So we don't want to rush into looking for something out of ego because like we said, if we're seeking to attain something for spiritual attainment, then we will cause ourselves more karma, make the work harder on ourselves, rather than being patient, doing the work where we're at. And then it's provided to us by Divinity, by our own inner master that we connect with. Right?

And it will happen. That has been our experience, that has been the experience of others who have worked deep on the path. The partner will appear when you need it. It's very important to not rush into things with ego.

Now, of course, if we come in with a partner, let's say we come in as a couple, there's that's different. That is our karma and we work together with our partner and we work to improve the relationship and even better if both of us want to do the work, although if you're in a relationship and your partner doesn't want to do the work, the work is single and individual. So, either way, we do the work where we're at and we still work on the psychological work and we focus on ourselves as an individual.

But the ego that comes with spirituality, seeking a partner for spiritual attainment, if you seek out of desire for spiritual attainment, then you will get back what you sow, right? We reap what we sow. So we don't want to create a scenario out of desire and ego because I know it will bring us more karma, which will just make the work harder on ourselves.

So there's no rush. Patience is always better when we're doing the work on the spiritual path and working towards the awakening of the consciousness. And like I said, when we reach the level where we're at that we've connected to our Being, we will know what is the right thing to do and what we need to do for our path to continue forward.

Audience Member:

I have a question.

Instructor:

Yes.

Audience Member:

I think in, AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, they say ego means there go god.

Instructor:

Hmm?

Audience Member:

There go, God. And now your desire is just running. There go God, ego. So my question is, how do you find God?

Instructor:

Well, as we said, the process goes through a few stages that relate to connecting to the different layers of Truth, but it starts with the forgiveness of ourselves and facing ourselves internally and facing our traumas and our pains, or it could be the reverse, it could be desires, but usually that's a more left-handed pathway of looking at it. Usually what's keeping us attached is that we don't want to face our deepest pain.

So that's why we start with the Buddhist aspect of the forgiveness. And we forgive and connect to that Unity of everything, that love, then the next step is the surrender is the surrendering to the fact that we do not exist at a separate entity or that the humility, the seeing the truth, which is the absence of pride. It's not being meek, it's not having a super self-confidence in oneself and having mythomania, but it's literally the absence of a false sense of self.

“I'm not something.”

“My Being is not something.”

“I don't run around calling myself a master,” because that's also a false sense of self, right?

“I’m not a genie of a planet.”

And not all of these types of things that we've seen in various spiritual schools, right?

And then the third and final step is once we've actually experienced Divinity is to become Divinity. And that last step comes from the acceptance of our role of the divine purpose. We've experienced the divine purpose, and now we're still between the person and God, right? We know that the person's not real, but we still kind of like our person. And there's nothing else left to experience or to know. There's nothing more, you have Gnosis, right? You have to make the choice to make your life about the vertical path, to make your life about the purpose, and to accept your role as a co-creator and in that mission.

And that part, is a leap of faith, we would say, because like I said, there's another more left to know. Just, are you going to say no to your person?

It's different, though, for everyone, and everybody has their own unique frequencies, and it starts with the fact that we all have our own unique traumas and our own unique pains and things that keep us attached. So, we can have a method, and, “I know all the religions,” and everything, they all say, this is the way to find it, but the truth is, they're only a vehicle to get you close enough to bring yourself into balance to get yourself close enough to where you're prepared to face yourself.

And that last step, you can only be guided to. You could lead the horse to water. You can't make it drink. The last part has to be done by ourselves. We have to have the courage and the bravery to go through it. And many will be turned away. They'll either be turned away because they're scared. Maybe they'll get past being scared and they'll have the experience, but they can't get past their mystical pride. They can't get past the spiritual pride. We talk about this and specifically really harp on this because we see this all the time in esoteric schools, especially in today's day and age, where a lot of people have a natural ability. The biggest enemy to the work is spiritual pride and complacency.

You think you know everything, and you think you're a master, you think you don't need anything, you figured it out. You found your inner master and now you're God. Great. Here's the thing. The truth or God, or whatever you want to call it, is an impersonal energy that's expanding into infinity. So if you had any actual Gnosis of that actual truth, You would realize that it's impossible to know everything, and that literally your purpose in an existence is to be here and to experience more perspectives, to grow in wisdom.

And when you figure out all the patterns you created for yourself and you connect all the way back up to your maximum limit at the time, you're going to decide to come back down here again and go back to sleep. And create more patterns and create a longer game, and it's just an infinite pattern of initiation that goes on into infinity because we are growing into infinity. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it goes on forever, in a macro sense, with periods of descent and ascent within.

So, from that point, initiation is infinite. Right? So how could you ever know everything? How could you ever be a master? What's a master? I know esoterically in a sense, a master of someone who has the solar bodies. Because it's mastery is related to the horizontal line, and it's the work we do to create the bodies, to receive more Spirit. But that's just the term, and that's why people get confused.

You have a whole bunch of people walking around with solar bodies. They haven't awakened consciousness and they're running around and they're not lying. They incarnated an angel or a demon, like Alister Crowley, right? They incarnate something, right? Master Therion, the Beast. But they're not awake. So what's the worth of being a master? A true being of Unity Consciousness would never call themselves a master. Jesus doesn't call himself a master. Krishna doesn't call himself a master. Blavatsky didn't call herself a master. You don't call yourself a master, because that's an identification. And to reach that level of being, you have to understand that all separation is illusion.

Yes, we're here working with separation. Yes, it's our tool. Vehicle for us to be. But It's also not real, so how could I be identified with being a master? I mean, there's rare cases maybe somebody has a mission that's to do something where they're not necessarily, giving the teachings of awakening, and that you might see a being of Unity Consciousness secretly posing, for example, as a Luciferic figure or something, and they'll take the name master. We've seen this. But, In general, usually, you wouldn't. The person that calls themselves a master is trying to trick you. And even in that case, that being was trying to create a school, to create beings that were unconscious.

So the school was for creating a religion. And he was there to create a religion. And he said he was here to create a religion. If you listen to his teachings, he says, “This school is not for you, if you're conscious. If you are an initiate, you should not be at the school.” And that's the first line of the teaching. And of course, all the people in that school that don't hear it, because they're unconscious. And that's the point. You supposed to go there. It's actually a pretty brilliant test for the initiate, to come to a place like that. And you're hearing one thing, but everyone around you is telling you that you're wrong and that you should be pressured to fit in.

Instructor:

So, we've talked about what to do if you're single or if you're in a partnership. And so generally, we would say that if you are already married or with someone, that you shouldn't say, “Oh, now that I'm coming to learn about the mysteries, we should immediately break up.”

We would never tell you what to do with well, with any of your life, actually. But, certainly, we wouldn't want you to say I broke up with you because of Gnosis or because of spirituality. Let it be for a different reason because it doesn't have to be because of this.

If we begin to work on ourselves, we begin to gather what we call a permanent center of gravity, or an actual beingness where we have the power to choose, to see, to understand, and to know what is the right way to go. And as we gather up this permanent center of gravity, then we're going to know how best to proceed in our relationship.

And if anything, if we stay with them, it could become more harmonious, more pleasant, because the partner or the spouse will see that we are changing, as we are committed to the inner work, as we are working on our own inner psychology, through meditation, through spiritual practice, then we are going to grow and evolve, and that can only be a good thing for the relationship.

And for some people, it's their karma to be in that relationship for their whole life. If we try to run away from the spouse or partner, before we've learned our lesson, then what will happen is we will find another relationship just like that one, or even worse, because the whole reason we came into a karmic relationship was to do the karma yoga, to transform that karma. And wherever we go, there we are. The whole world or all of our experiences are that 360-degree mirror.

So we take our karma with us. And if we think that we can run from the karma by terminating the relationship, then we have to keep going through many cycles of the experience in order to understand that we can't run from the karma. We only transcend it by transforming our own soul, our own psyche. So that is for those in a partnership.

And if we are single, as Adonis said, we should not be seeking because if we are seeking, then we're going to find something imbalanced. So instead, we take all of our energy and we turn it inwards to work on ourselves. And the more we work on ourselves, the more we'll come into balance. And if it's something that's right for this incarnation, with our commitment to the inner work, then at the right time, this partner will appear. Now later in the course, we will give an initiatic path that's going to show certain markers of the journey.

And in the beginning part of the path, there is a long period of time where we don't need to have a partner for our spiritual work. Adonis mentioned alchemy and transmutation. These are things that we'll talk about more later as the course continues. But we can say that in the same way that those Sufi schools, the guru schools, would allow the practitioner to take many years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, before saying, “Okay, now you go work with this Dakkini,” for example. In that same way, there is a large portion of the early path where we don't need to be with a partner. And in fact, it would be even better for our work if we were alone.

Because we have a lot of demons inside of us or a lot of darkness, a lot of unconsciousness to transform. And we can transform that by allowing the people around us the events around us to mirror these to us. If you have an intimate partner to mirror that for you, it's just going to be more of a rocky road. It's going to be more difficult, more drama, and those tense situations that could have been spread out across lots of different friends and bosses and family members. They'll now all potentially be happening with this one person. It can be not that pleasant of a relationship. It's not impossible, but certainly don't try to rush into that.

If we just commit to the inner work to working with meditation and working with the practices that we will give more of as the course continues for those who continue from next Monday. Then we will slowly begin to have the transformation. So that we are ready for the other person who will also be ready at the right time. When we have that inner balance, then we'll meet someone who is also balanced. If we still have inner trauma, we're going to meet somebody else in trauma. And then it becomes a trauma-bond. So the most important thing we can do for finding love is to find love within. Through a steady, daily inner work.

Audience Member:

I've seen takes online suggesting that loneliness could be the other side of the coin where you're avoiding people and becoming a bit of a recluse. And I've also heard that healing relational wounds happens in community, connection, and relationships. So, what do you make of that—the idea that relationships can heal you?

Instructor:

They can. They can. So to clarify on "don't seek," we are not saying that if a relationship comes to you, that you should run away from it. That would be avoidant attachment. If you run away from love, then it's because you're running away from love inside of yourself. We are saying don't seek as in trying to find them. If something finds you, then explore it.

Instructor:

It's very common with the ego that once people learn about the work with transmutation and tantra, they start looking—especially men—thinking, "Who's going to be my alchemical partner?" They aren't looking because they genuinely like someone; they say “I just want to do the work with alchemy” “I need to become more powerful, quicker.” It's all driven by ambition. If you're seeking someone else to use for your own spiritual ambition, how well is that going to work out anyway?

On top of that, At the beginning there are trials that come on when we start working with psychology and if you’re taking on somebody else's psychology as well energetically—because at that level we definitely would—then your trials are going to be harder, because you also are going to have the energetic exchange. So it's better not to do that. Now, if it’s something that just happens because it happens, then nothing is ever a coincidence. It's the same reason some people come in already with a partner; that doesn't mean they're supposed to break up with their partner and run away just because they have a partner. We try not to move with desire and allow the construct to bring us what we need.

A good example of this too—if we are not even looking at relationships, just to show another example—we say a lot about doing karma yoga, meaning we try not to chase our desires all the time. We try to pull back on that to focus on our practice. But that can lead us to become a bit reclusive, where we start saying no to everything they don’t want to go out.

Actually, in the sense of karma yoga, if we aren't seeking or desiring to say go to events or to go do things, then the things that come up from the construct—because we need data—say a family event, or our friends invite us out, [“or you get free tickets to something”]—something like that actually then is an aspect of something that we should usually do, we usually would want to say yes to it. Because we’re not looking for something, something was brought to us, if something was brought to us it’s probably because there’s something we can learn from the experience. So we don't want to avoid experience altogether; we just want to make sure it's clean and not driven by chasing it.

Another example for something like that, You say: "I need to be conscious when I go to the club, so now I'm going to go to the nightclub every day until I work on it." But ok, are you really going to the nightclub to do the work, or are you going to the nightclub because you just want to still go clubbing; and you are just rationalizing it? Rather then you don’t go out ever and your friends invite you out for the night, but your ego says "I can't go out to someplace where there’s alcohol, I'm too spiritual," now your missing the opportunity to pay karma.

It's a balance, and it's something that we learn and it comes along with the way of working with the initiatic philosophy. We'll talk about all of these things when we have the first class next week, we’ll talk about the main basic fundamentals of the practice. Which are the same truths at the beginning for a new student as they would be for a master just how it manifests for you will be different, but the actual main essence of the teaching is very simple, and from there we'll talk about all the things about how working with each of those aspects of the practice, plus also how to interact with the world, as we move through it.