Where We Are Now

Meditation

We did some training practices today during our meditation time. Those techniques are training tools that help you evaluate your practice and strengthen your skills. Those techniques are not meditation. They are preparation or training for meditation.  

Meditation (dhyana or samadhi) is not a technique, it is a state of consciousness. As such, it cannot be taught, it cannot be shown or demonstrated. It can not be seen or proven, except through your own experience. So, we provide you with training, with a theoretical or intellectual concept that gives you a framework to understand your experiences, that gives you a science that you can apply through your own experience, and it gives you a measure to compare with your own experience. But that is the limit of what you can learn in books, lectures, and schools. It does not matter who your teacher is, what school you go to, what group you belong to, how much money you give to some group or another; none of that can produce meditation. Meditation is a state of consciousness that depends on cause and effect. The causes are your own actions, so no one can produce that for you, except yourself.

The actions that we performed in the exercises today should have been actions of your consciousness. What you should have done is to place attention in the very specific ways we indicated, so that your consciousness could become liberated even briefly from the conditions that limit it. However, most of you probably did not liberate the consciousness today even briefly, but instead only experienced the obstacles that condition the consciousness. If that is so, then you need more study and practice, specifically in learning to recognize those obstacles for what they are.

The only reason we do not access the state of meditation is because our consciousness is conditioned. It is conditioned because of our previous actions. So, if we perform superior actions whose effects are to free the consciousness from those limits, from those conditions, then the state of meditation is the natural outcome.

The state of meditation happens spontaneously because of physics, because of laws of nature, because the necessary conditions have changed that allow the state of meditation to arise. So, if your meditation practice is not fruitful, if you are frustrated, if you are not accessing meditation, the only place to look for the cause is within yourself. The cause of that is in yourself, in how you are using your consciousness, how you are using your attention.

The practices that we did today show us (if we use them) how to use consciousness in specific ways to create specific results. For instance, we began with relaxing the body. Relaxation frees the consciousness from physical conditioning. When you take a nap, the physical body relaxes and releases the consciousness; thus, we dream. In our meditation practice, as long as we are paying attention to the body, we remain conditioned (limited) by the body. If the body is uncomfortable, thirsty, hungry, cold, hot, itchy, pained, and our attention is always in the body, we will never learn to meditate because our attention is focused on the physical world. Meditation does not happen in the physical world. Meditation happens when the consciousness becomes liberated from physicality, not conditioned by the body, where the consciousness can perform when it needs to perform no matter what the body is experiencing.

When you have developed the skill of meditation, your body can be sick, it can be dying, it can be afflicted by terrible suffering, yet you can meditate. And that, in fact, is our goal. Our goal, stated very specifically, is to be capable of taking the consciousness out of the body in the moment of death, consciously, without fear, without pain, without doubt, so that we can pass through the experience of death awakened, conscious, aware, in control, not driven by anger, fear, lust, pride, attachment, but liberated. We will never be able to do that if we cannot do it now when the body is healthy (relatively speaking) and not suffering as it will at the time of death. So, we need to develop the discipline now, the skills now, to be prepared for death.

Of course, we also need this skill so that we are capable of meditating on all the causes of suffering. As we are now, we are too weak to do so. We are easily frightened, angered, stimulated. We react mechanically to everything, and are influenced by a whole host of negative qualities: lust, pride, fear, etc. We always seek pleasure and always avoid pain, thus we are incapable of observing the causes of suffering, and since we cannot (in fact will not) observe those causes, we cannot fix them. Thus, suffering will continue. To truly deal with and change the causes of suffering, we need a very profound meditation skill. Fortunately, we can learn, but it takes patience and the willingness to let go of bad habits.

The practices that we did today utilized a whole range of abilities that are natural to the consciousness. Relaxation creates the environment that liberates tension, and frees us from the binding conditions of physicality. Then we used concentration, which is to direct attention, to concentrate attention. Then we used imagination, which is the root power of consciousness, which is the ability to perceive, not just physical things, but non-physical things. We already do that, we can perceive thoughts and feelings, those are not physical, and we can perceive them just fine. When we learn to use imagination consciously, we learn to access other senses that are also natural to the consciousness; those senses open the door to real meditation: the ability to concentrate and imagine any given thing and enter into the real meaning of that thing, the reality of it.

Meditation is not the way humanity thinks it is, as some monk, pandit or yogi sitting in the woods doing absolutely nothing for years. That is not meditation. That is an absurd joke, a very bad joke. Those meditators who dedicate their life to sitting in caves, sitting in temples, sitting in forests, are not sitting there doing nothing, staring at nothing, having nothing happen. Real meditators are incredibly engaged with reality, but not merely physical reality. They are seeing reality in a far deeper way that the physical senses can, and are learning things you cannot learn through the physical senses. In other words, they are using their imagination, not fantasy. When we use this word “imagination” we do not mean to imagine fantastical things that do not exist. We are talking about the opposite polarity of imagination which is the ability to see reality. In spiritual groups they call that “clairvoyance,” which in French it means “clear seeing.” It is a type of imagination, but pure. There are other types of clairvoyance that are not pure (such as what is seen by drug users or alcoholics); the clairvoyance of meditators is something else; it is the pure kind that is not conditioned by intoxicants, pride, lust, or envy.

To learn meditation as explained here, study these courses: Meditation Essentials and Practical Spirituality.

Real meditation is the ability to see reality for yourself. In that sense, it is a solitary path, a solitary work, that does not depend on anything or anyone other than yourself. You do not need to belong to a group or follow a master, except for the one that is in your heart. That is the one that we need to follow. The one who is within us. So that is what we are going to talk about today.

Concept and Reality

What is divinity? Humanity has a lot of theories about divinity, many beliefs, many traditions, and most of them are quite beautiful, but they are in reality the antechamber, the pre-school of the truth. Any belief we have, any theory we have is not the thing itself. Even the concept that we have of “my parent, my child, my spouse, my friends,” have very little relationship to the reality of those people.

We all have an idea of what a person is like and who they are, and perhaps through experience, some years, our concept of that person may be based on certain experiences that we have had with them, but it is not based upon all of our experiences with them (since we select only certain experiences to use in that concept), and it certainly is not based on all of their experiences since we have only seen a fraction of their experiences, and only been told a select few of their experiences. So our concept of each person is based only on a few select impressions, and from them we build an idea of that person. Eventually a day comes when they do something that does not fit our idea of that person, and we are shocked, overwhelmed, surprised. Perhaps we fight with them, or end the relationship. Yet, whose fault is that? It is ours, because we built an illusion in our mind of that person, someone we thought that we knew. But really, we only saw the lie we were telling ourselves about that person, we never saw the reality of that person, the truth.

If we are capable of that amount of self-deception with some tangible, perceptible phenomena in our immediate environment, how could we possibly have any idea about God… whom few if any of us have actually experienced? Yet everyone has the conviction of belief, the concept, the idea, that we have some notion of what God is, and we hold to that, thinking it is true… Meanwhile, the reality is that we do not see reality.

What I would suggest to you is that you adopt the modern scientific approach: gather facts until the truth becomes clear and undeniable. Learn to see as a scientist or a detective, and throw out beliefs; only study the facts, only study what you can confirm for yourself. Set aside your culture, tradition, beliefs, notions, theories, all those ideas that you have inherited from society, family. Consider, “What can I confirm for myself is real?” This is not to say anything bad about those beliefs, theories, or traditions, no, it is simply to set them aside and perform the experiment. “What can I confirm? What can I experience? What can I know?” If you need some comfort in that experiment, you can think, “I come from a certain religion, and it is all based on the experience of somebody else. The scriptures were written based on the experiences of prophets and saints and great masters or buddhas. If they, human beings of the past, were able to have those experiences with divinity, maybe I can too. Maybe there is a way for me to experience what they experienced, for me to know the truth of what they said, not to just accept it or reject it, but to know it…” To do that, you have to base yourself on facts that you can confirm for yourself.

That is what we study here: gnosis, to know from experience. In Hebrew it is called “daath,” knowledge. It is not knowledge in the intellect, it is not knowledge of beliefs, it is knowledge of facts, especially of the facts that can be known only by the consciousness through direct perception, not merely physical phenomenon, but non-physical. For that, you must know how to meditate.

You cannot confirm the facts of anything non-physical unless you have non-physical senses active. If you cannot perceive anything non-physical, you cannot confirm that it is real. Similarly, you may be having thoughts and feelings right now, but you cannot prove it, because no one can see those but you. That very phenomenon, knowing that you can perceive non-physical things, thoughts, feelings and images demonstrates the possibility to expand that perception, to widen it, to deepen it, to train it. That is what meditation is: the training of consciousness to perceive more than it currently can perceive. All the scriptures and religions of the world say the same thing: that potential is infinite. If the prophets and saints and masters could perceive divinity, so can we. We have consciousness the same as them, ours is simply undeveloped. So, let us develop it.

Divinity… a beautiful concept, beautiful belief, but what is the truth? Let us start at the beginning.

The Basis of Western Religion

We are in the western world, so let us look at the basis of the modern western religions. Most of the western traditions are based on what we call the Bible or the Torah. So, we are only going to consider the first three words of the Bible. These are the very beginning of Judaism and Christianity. Everything in Christianity and Judaism begins with these first three words. Everything in Judaism and Christianity for thousands of years has been based on these words. If you come from a Jewish, Christian, protestant, catholic, those sorts of backgrounds, everything that you have inherited from society about religion and God and divinity started here in these three words. If you want to re-examine your religion with fresh eyes, this is a good place to start. But, you cannot look at these words in English, since they were not written in English. You cannot look at them in Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Arabic, no, because they were not written in those languages. The first three words of the Bible were written in ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, and that is very important because the Hebrew letters are not just letters, they are symbols with much deeper significance than Romanized Latin letters that we use now, the ABC’s of English and all the other languages of the west. The Hebrew letters are not like that; these letters are also numbers, they are also symbols, and they have an incredible flexibility and symbolic meaning on multiple levels at the same time thus they cannot be translated, because no other language does that. If you really want to know about Christianity or Judaism, you must know Hebrew. If you do not know Hebrew, you simply do not know those religions.

These first three Hebrew words of the Bible are translated to English as something like,

“In the beginning God created…”

In Hebrew those words are:

בראשית ברא אלהים

Hebrew is written from the right to the left.

It is ok to translate that as “In the beginning God created”, but it is like translating something for a two-year old child: it conveys so little of the meaning of the Hebrew.

In particular, the third word אלהים Elohim is translated in the English Bible and all the other modern languages as “God,” but Elohim does not mean “God.”

The Hebrew word אלהים “Elohim” is spelled Aleph, Lamed, Hei, Yod, Mem. The ending of the word ים indicates that the word Elohim is plural. So, being plural, Elohim does not mean “God,” singular, but is “gods,” plural. Yes: in Hebrew, the first passage of the Bible it does not say “In the beginning God created”, it actually says

“In the beginning gods created...”

The ending of the word Elohim (ים) indicates that Elohim is a plural word.

This passage was written by Moses (Moshe). If Moses had wanted to indicate “God,” singular masculine, which is how Judaism and Christianity conceptualize divinity, then he would have had written אל EL [Aleph, Lamed], which are the first two letters of the word Elohim. אל EL means “god,” singular masculine, for one male god. If Moses wanted to write goddess, he would have written the first three letters of the word: אלה Elah, [Aleph, Lamed, Hei]. Knowing this, it is then easy to see since the word Elohim is plural it can also be interpreted as “gods and goddesses.” Elohim has both words in it: El אל and אלה Elah together are אלהים  Elohim, “gods and goddesses.” So, the first passage of the Bible can more accurately be translated as:

“In the beginning the gods and goddesses created...”

Of course, modern Jews and Christians deny the existence of goddesses or gods. They have the belief or concept of a single masculine God, even though the first three words of their scriptures say something totally different. They do not study the deeper meanings that are right there in their scriptures.

The beauty of Hebrew is that it can convey multiple meanings at the same time. The word Elohim has other meanings. Instead of saying Elohim, you can say [EL-HAYAM?] exactly the same letters. Or [ELAh-YAM, exactly the same letters, with a totally different meaning. El Ha Yam אלוהים means “the god of the sea.” And Elah yam  means “the goddess of the sea.” So, that first passage of the Bible can also mean,

“In the beginning the sea gods and the sea goddesses created...”

When you study Judaism and Christianity in combination with the other beautiful traditions in the world like Hinduism and Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, the Aztec and the Mayan traditions, the Nordic traditions, you discover that in most of those traditions the primordial creators, the progenitors of all things were always related with the sea, the waters. Like this picture Vishnu and Lakshmi drifting on the ocean of Prakriti, the primordial ocean of potential existence...

That myth or old story from the ancient scriptures of India totally agrees with the beginning of the Bible, but nobody realizes it. There are many myths from the Hinduism that perfectly agree with how the Hebrew is written. That passage from the Bible shows very clearly that there is not just one masculine God, there is much more going on in the Bible that anybody has realized.

So, let’s go a little deeper...

The Perfection of Wisdom

This image is of a goddess whose name is Prajnaparamita, which means “the perfection of wisdom.”

In the Buddhist tradition this figure symbolizes the highest type of knowledge, the most profound type of knowledge. The word prajna relates to the type of knowing that is depicted at the very height on the Tree of Life, this image from Judaism and esoteric Christianity.

The tree of life maps existence and non-existence. That space at the top is called the Absolute, the abstract space, the unmanifested. It is the place of pure potential beyond measurement, beyond weight, beyond number, beyond anything that can be conceptualized. It is the potential for all things to be, that are not yet. And when they become, they radiate into existence like a lightning bolt and form a structure of condensing layers of nature, from the most subtle at the top to the densest at the bottom. In other words, form, matter, in layers and levels all the way down to the physical world where we reside.

At the very precipice of this structure that maps existence, there is a boundary between the manifested and the unmanifested, between what is perceptible and what is unperceptible, between matter and non-matter. And that boundary is the boundary of where existence emerges in and out of as cosmic days and nights on roll through the countless ages. So, we can say that what can be known, what can be perceived by the consciousness is the tree of life.

We in our physical bodies perceive the physical world, and with our non-physical senses we perceive thoughts and emotions, but these are more subtle. The physical world (third dimension) relates with the sephirah Malkuth at the bottom, then we have energy of that world (fourth dimension), then we have thoughts and emotions in the fifth dimension. But there are more subtle levels: will, intuition, spirit, and higher. All the way at the top we find this boundary between what is matter and what is not. The knowledge of that, the direct perception of that and the understanding of that is Prajnaparamita. It is a type of knowledge that is known by experience of very highly developed beings like buddhas, gods. She, this goddess, embodies that type of knowledge from experience.

In the example that I gave you before about the person you think you know, that you do not know, that same axiom Is true of yourself. We all think we know ourselves, but we absolutely do not. And we all think that we know the world, and we absolutely do not. We are mired in illusion, self-produced, and we suffer because we see wrongly; we do not see reality. We do not see the truth in ourselves or outside ourselves. Because of that we keep making mistakes and mistakes and mistakes and we suffer. We are like a blind person running in a place full of glass and sharp things. We do not know why we keep hurting ourselves, but we do. We do not know why we keep hurting others, but we do. Our eyes are closed. The eyes of the consciousness do not see.

The scripture related with this figure is called Prajnaparamita, “the perfection of wisdom” and it is also called “The Heart of WIsdom Sutra.” The most famous line from that scripture says

“Form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Emptiness is not other than form, form too is not other than emptiness.”

That scripture is not very long, but it is one of the most important scriptures in Buddhism. The most skillful and intelligent and dedicated and compassionate practitioners of Buddhism recite and meditate on that scripture every single day in hopes that one day in some future life time they will understand it. it is that profound. Your intellect can read that and say “Yeah, oh sure, form is emptiness, emptiness is form. Yeah, no problem.”  No. This is not an intellectual thought, it is not a game for the mind to play. This is something that has to do with perception, especially in meditation. It has to do with seeing the reality of matter, the tree of life, and the fundamental ground within which that matter hovers or floats, which is the emptiness, the Absolute Abstract Space.

We have this mistaken perception that we exist in a certain way, and we are alive and that what we perceive is reliable, and all of that is a lie. Nothing in our perception is reliable and nothing in what we perceive is true, because our perception is heavily filtered. A simple example is, we see with our physical eyes and we are seeing a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the light that is actually there. The visible light, the spectrum of light that we perceive is incredibly narrow, while there is a vast, incredible, huge range of light right now, right here, and many more levels to nature, right now, right here, that we do not see. But we can see that if we develop the consciousness, and the first part of that perception is recognizing that what we interpret as real, that what we see and interpret as being certain ways are not like that at all. We are so deeply mistaken in our perceptions.

So, this is what this aspect of Buddhism is attempting to convey, to point out to us that we do not see reality, and we need to understand that. The symbol for that is this goddess, this figure who represents the wisdom of knowing that reality, and she represents it in a very particular way.

That type of insight, that type of perception, is not an intellectual thing, it is an actual seeing. It is not only a seeing of the reality that understanding that life is not this concrete, hard and tangible thing that we think that it is, that it is actually terribly fragile, and that it is incredible suffering everywhere right now, but we are blind to it. The person who develops this type of insight sees that truth, but in combination with the most incredible compassion. That is why that type of human being is a “god.” That type of person sees that beings do not see the reality and are suffering because of that. That type of person becomes a flame of love giving light to help deluded beings see reality. That quality of compassion and understanding is called bodhichitta, which means “awakening mind,” and is a type of psychological quality that develops in a person who follows the science, the very specific science to develop this type of character within.

Now, all of that is condensed into those three words from the Bible, everything that I just explained to you, but it is deeply hidden.

בראשית ברא אלהים

Those three words have to do with creation, since the word ברא means “to create”, but in Hebrew, the original scripture, there are no spaces between the words, so actually these three words are written as one string of letters that can be disarranged a lot of different ways. Usually we say it is Bereshit bara Elohim. But it could also be accurately stated as Bereshit Bar Aelohim, whose meaning is completely different. Bereshit “In the beginning” bar “the son” Aelohim... Now this Aelohim is not the same as Elohim, because when there is another א aleph in front of it, it means “without,” or “before,” or “beyond” or “the first.” So Aelohim is before Elohim. Aelohim is the unmanifested Elohim, it is Prajnaparamita, it is the emptiness, it is that which is before Elohim. In synthesis, these words Elohim and Aelohim indicate there are levels of gods from the unmanifested to the manifested, from the absolute abstract space to manifested gods of different degrees.

That is why in this tradition we reject monotheism, especially that tendency to falsely apply human characteristics onto “god.” It is not logical to believe in a single, masculine God that has human characteristics. That is illogical, it is contrary to the facts, observable facts, the nature, but also to scripture. Throughout the Hebrew scriptures you do not find a masculine dominating single male God. That notion only exists in bad translations and wrong interpretations. In the actual scriptures,  you find many words for gods and goddesses that were not translated into English, many words that have many meanings.

To go deeper into this, because of the residue from karma from previous eras, that primordial empty space unfolds into manifestation at subtle levels; that unmanifested AElohim (Shunyata, emptiness) becomes the first manifestation, a trinity, commonly called Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, or the Son, Father and Holy Spirit, or Kether, Chokmah, Binah. In Christianity they are explained in the book of John and three aspects of the Logos (the Word). The trinity is well-known in every religion, and that trinity exists, but it is not three men in space. These three are primordial intelligences, divine, yes, pure, incomprehensible, but not like us, not vain and lustful and angry. Their defining characteristic is love, compassion, understanding. In Hebrew, they are the top triangle on the Tree of Life: Kether means the crown, Chokmah means wisdom, and Binah means intelligence, but these are not the wisdom and intelligence of common human beings, but the wisdom and intelligence of gods. They are Prajnaparamita, “the perfection of wisdom.” The perfection of wisdom is compassion, love, that emerges from understanding the nature of the Absolute Emptiness. There is no “self” in that, there is no “me,” there is only love for others, concern and care for others.

That is the nature of divinity: love for others. That impulse to love, to give, to help, is what unfolds nature at the highest levels.

The seventh dimension unfolds to a sixth, and then into a fifth, and then into a fourth, and then into a third, and here we are in the physical world. But unfortunately, because of our type of mind, very degenerated mind, very lustful angry mind, a mind full of pride and vanity, that energy that is unfolding into nature flows into us but our mind modifies that energy in the same way that a lens modifies light. When you wear dark sunglasses, the light is modified, and what you see is changed. Our mind does that to what we see through all of our senses, including our thoughts and emotions. So, we do not see reality: we see and inverted, modified impression. What we perceive is modified by our thoughts of anger, our thoughts of pride, our feelings of resentment. That is this fifth dimension inverted: thoughts and emotions, subconsciousness, ego, defects, vices, hell. “God” did not make any of that, we did. We made our anger. We made our lust. We made our pride. And every time we feed our anger, feed our lust, feed our envy, we fortify hell in our mind, we strengthen it. Every time we invest energy and act upon our resentment, our anger, our fear, we cause suffering, we fortify hell in our mind. Hell exists because we made it. God didn’t make our suffering, we did. That is the fundamental law of nature: cause and effect. We are experiencing the outcome of our previous actions.

As soon as energy becomes matter, it becomes what we call nature, the perceptible world, and in Hinduism that aspect of divinity is called Maya, the Divine Mother. Maya, the Divine Mother, is very beautiful, but that word Maya at the same moment it means a goddess, a divine mother, it also simultaneously means “illusion,” because she (nature) does not exist fundamentally, independently. This beautiful tapestry of existence, the world of phenomena, only exists because of cause and effect, because of karma. That is why when your karma is paid you leave, you are out, that is what liberation is, it is liberation from everything. From suffering, from karma, from illusion. Some who become liberated, leave and do not come back, they go into other realms of existence, other levels of existence. But the greatest ones who pay all their karma, who purify themselves completely of pride and lust and anger and envy, they become liberated from that whole chain of causality and when they reach that level of Prajnaparamita they perceive vast numbers of suffering beings and become so moved by compassion for them that they stay, they come back to help. And those are the being we know as Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Muhammed, Quetzalcoatl, Joan of Arc, Paracelsus, Milarepa, Moses, Padmasambhava... the list goes on. They are very beautiful beings who only came here to help us, but of course we only try to kill them.

There are many types of gods, angels, masters whatever you want to call them. These are the names in Kabbalah and esoteric Christianity.

There are many names, and we do not have time to go through all of them today. Their level of being, their level of development, corresponds to the tree of life.

Because of our own level of development, we live here in the physical world, we are bound by it, conditioned. It is very hard for us to leave the physical world at will. We can, we do it mechanically every night when we sleep, the body goes to sleep, the consciousness goes out, it goes into the astral world, the fifth dimension. But we are not conscious of that, we are completely unaware of it, we are dreaming. But if you awaken consciousness you can become aware of being in that world of dreams.

If you enter the path of initiation and develop the soul you can become a cognizant resident in that level of nature which corresponds with the fifth dimension. Such a person becomes an angel, a buddha. Their level of being is different. They have a physical body, they look like regular a human being, but their consciousness is at a higher level, more developed, they have a more insight, more understanding, you could say powers. They can experience other dimensions, access ancient knowledge, visit other worlds… But they are not done, they have work to do, since there are levels and levels and levels. The more pure we become, the higher our level of Being, meaning that our center of gravity moves upwards through the heavens (nirvanas), so we are accessing greater and greater levels of happiness. In other words, rather than being jailed in the physical world, we become conscious citizens of higher, more developed regions.

By eliminating a lot of defects (lust, pride, envy) we can reach very high levels of development. We can become cosmocreators, with the knowledge and ability to create worlds. Such beings have tremendous power and happiness, with insight into so much of reality.

When the ego is completely destroyed, and when the consciousness is completely liberated, we can pass through what is called resurrection, in which all that is terrestrial is destroyed, and we are born anew with an immortal body called the body of liberation. From there, we enter into levels of development related to the trinity. In Buddhism, these are called Nirmanakayas, Sambogakayas and Dharmakayas. These are the greatest human beings, with wisdom and compassion that dazzles the mind. Their goal is to embody Prajnaparamita: to become “the perfection of wisdom.” They want to become fully conscious of the Absolute, the uncreated light from which everything emerges, and which in itself is the ultimate happiness, the ultimate purpose, the ultimate knowledge, the ultimate love. The beings who succeed in that embodiment are the greatest gods ever known, pure expressions or manifestations of radiant compassion and wisdom.

The beings of that level are very pure beings, but even from there, there is more to know, more to develop...

Those types of beings are very highly developed. The thing is we do not really understand any of this because of our conditioning. We understand pain, we understand pride, we understand anger and lust and we like those things. We armor ourselves with our anger and pride and lust, we use them as our defense mechanism against the world and we follow the trend of society which is to celebrate degeneration, to encourage lust, and to congratulate people on being degenerated. We celebrate pride and anger, enjoy violence and lust, which is what we do through our “entertainment.” So, most of the people in this world will never know anything of all of this, even though they all follow religions that promise entry into heaven. Nature is not like that. Nature guarantees you one thing: death, nothing else. No scripture in the world guarantees that any soul will go to heaven, not the Bible, not the Vedas, not the Torah, not the Gospels, none of them. They all state universally that only the pure gain entrance into heaven. So, if we want that we must become pure. It is not a complicated thing to understand, but we do not get told that because the truth does not fill churches and temples. No one wants the truth. Everyone wants to be told what they want to hear.

The reality is easy to see when we study nature, the facts of nature. Study any fruit tree. In the course of its life a fruit tree it will produce hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of seeds. But how many of those seeds will truthfully become another robust fruit tree like the parent tree? That is very rare. The vast majority of the seeds are lost; nature destroys them. Only a few seeds in very specific circumstances will have the opportunity to become another beautiful, bountiful tree. Humanity is exactly the same: each human being is a seed that has the potential to become an angel, a buddha, a master. Nature does not guarantee that development for anyone. Nature does not care. Nature is only a process of cause and effect, relentless, unstoppable: causes and effects, causes and effects. There is no force in nature that promises liberation for anything or anyone, it is just a vast machine processing matter and energy, and in the midst of it consciousness is trapped. That is why it is called the wheel of Samsara, wheel of suffering, wheel of rebirth. It is a recycling plant in nature. In the midst of it, trapped in it, is our consciousness.

Evolution of Consciousness

When our spark of soul or consciousness entered nature in the ancient, ancient past, it was simple, an undeveloped spark, a mind as a seed. When it entered into primordial nature it entered as the most simple type of element: a mineral.

Each mineral is a trinity:

• matter
• energy
• consciousness

The consciousness of a mineral is very, very simple. It is undeveloped, raw, like a tiny seed.

Over the course of millions of years, our own conscious spark slowly developed experience as it lived and died as a mineral: it gathered a little bit of understanding about life in that level. It learned to create in the mineral way: sex as chemistry.

As that spark of consciousness developed and became more complicated, it eventually became a simple plant. That spark lived and died as millions of plants, and through that experience that little spark became more sophisticated, a little more developed, a little more perceptive. It learned how to create in the plant way, whether asexually or sexually. Over the course of millions of years, and millions of lifetimes as different plants, it evolves. Being born, growing, being consumed, dying. Being born, growing, being consumed and dying. Gradually, slowly, little by little, for millions of years, it became more complex until eventually it graduated into the level of becoming an simple, tiny animal.

So, in the animal kingdom, that spark of consciousness had a different type of mind, a type of mind that is more sophisticated than a plant, and much more sophisticated than a mineral. And correspondingly, it also learned animal sexuality: how to create new animal bodies through sex.

Through mechanical evolution, the three aspects of the creature become more sophisticated:

• matter
• energy
• consciousness

Furthermore, as the consciousness reaches more development, it also depends more on the other kingdoms. The animals depend on the plant kingdom or other animals to survive, while those in the plant kingdom depend on other plants or minerals to survive. So, these kingdoms are interdependent, none exist independently, they are deeply interconnected.

That interdependence is also psychological: throughout this evolutionary process the mind is developing, but not independently. Minerals have collective mind. Plants have collective mind. Animals have collective mind. The very first signs of independence, individuality, only appear in the highest creatures of each kingdom, but even then it is not real independence or individuality, since they only imitate and act on instinct. To develop real individuality requires a new evolutionary leap.

That spark of consciousness becomes more complex through evolution under long ages, the mind becoming richer, more complex, more sophisticated, a little more developed until it reaches the degree of those types of animals that no longer move in herds or as groups. In all lower kingdoms they always move as groups, minerals are vast fields of minerals, plants are vast families of plants, the animal moves in herds and schools, until you get to the most evolved animals which are starting to break out as individuals. The lone hunters, the most developed sophisticated animals. And that type of consciousness, when the next wave of development occurs, can have the opportunity to enter the humanoid kingdom and become humanoids.

When the consciousness graduates into the humanoid level, it is an animal mind that acquires reasoning: intellect. It begins to perceive itself itself as “individual.” However, it is still an animal, it is just an animal with an intellect. It is an animal that thinks it is separate from the others, but it does not realize it is still an animal with collective mind. That is us. Observe humanity: look at the facts of this humanity. What are the drivers of our behavior? We fight over territory, we fight over sex, we fight over food and water, we fight for power, we are driven by instinct. We have a lot of lofty ideas, but the hard facts of our behavior are driven by instinct.

Furthermore, we are not really individuals: we have collective mind. We do what others do. We want what others want. We imitate. Those very few who truly become individual do not fit in. They are not understood. They are rejected from the herd. As animals with collective mind, we think, feel, and act with the herd. We do not stray from what the herd allows. Sometimes, our “herd” thinks it is “rebellious,” like the political revolutionaries, the hippies, the punks, the “independents,” but all of those are just smaller herds reacting against bigger herds. When you join one of those “non-conformists” you have to act, think, and feel just like them or they will reject you. Thus, they are also a collective mind, a herd. There are no individuals there. This humanity is just herds of animals with intellect, animals that reason and justify.

We may think that we are the most beautiful creation in the universe, but that is a lie. The truth is humanity is only the pinnacle of the development of mechanical nature. The evolution of mechanical nature is developed over countless eons to take those sparks of consciousness and develop them into a type of seed, which is us. But the seed is only the beginning. The seed only has value if it creates a new life form.

We are the fruit of evolution in mechanical nature, and within us is a precious seed, but we do not realize it. That seed within us is called tathagatagarbha, which literally means “the embryo of suchness,” the embryo of the Absolute. Tathagata is the absolute, the suchness. We have a seed in us that can become that.

The spark of consciousness in us was deposited into nature so that a seed could develop. The humanoid body is the ripe fruit that contains that seed. Within that seed is the potential to become an embodiment of Prajnaparamita, a being who comprehends the Absolute and everything that emerges from it, the whole vast of knowledge of nature, has the power to create worlds, and whose psychological nature is love. But in us, it is just a seed, it is undeveloped, latent.

For that seed to develop it needs exact conditions, otherwise it is lost like any seed in nature. It needs extremely precise conditions. It is wonderful to garden, to grow plants, and many of us like to. We depend on plants to eat, to live, to survive, but plants are grown with a very specific set of conditions and if we do not match those conditions we do not get good plants. Observe how far down that is in the mechanical kingdoms. Minerals develop and survive easily. They do not need much to develop and to survive. Plants need more than minerals do, but develop and survive more easily than animals. Animals are more fragile in a certain way, their food sources are more specific, more narrow, more limited. Their life span is different, the quality of life is different, the quality of mind is different. And the same is true, especially true in the human kingdom. In all the mechanical kingdoms, we are the most fragile, and we need very specific conditions to develop and to survive, whereas the creatures in the other kingdoms are far more likely to develop and survive than we are. So, the higher up you are on the mechanical wheel of nature, the harder it is to develop and to survive. This is why the seed that is within us develops so rarely: it is the most difficult seed to grow. Its needs are the most specific, the most demanding. The method to do that is what has been encoded in all of our religions, but people have not understood it. 

So, all of our religions were provided primarily to guide us towards a new kind of sexual creation: something beyond the animal level, something that requires individuality, willpower, love, devotion, the emergence of a new kind of mind, and new kind of being... Hidden in the world's religions are the instructions for human sexuality, not animal. But we failed to listen, to learn, to apply it. That is what is explained in all our myths: Adam and Eve, Pandora, Persephone, Eros and Psyche, Noah and the flood, etc. Because we did not learn humanity sexuality to advance our development into a new level of conscious evolution, we have not escaped the lower mechanical evolution. We remain trapped, like animals, in a cage of our own making.

Humanity in this era is now reaping the consequences of that. Our dedicated to animal lust is the root cause of the degeneration of civilization, and it is taking us further and further into degeneration. The facts of this are obvious and everywhere. Humanity has the very mistaken belief that sex is entertainment, solely for the pursuit of pleasure, power, and fun. But nothing in nature is free. Every single action, not matter how small, has consequences. Cause and effect is the basic law of nature. We are deeply ignorant of the effects of lust, but the evidence is everywhere now if we open our eyes to see it.  

We also have not understood that time is also a factor in our development. Seeds do not last forever.

Evolution is not a line, it is a circle. Nothing in existence continually improves. Everything that evolves will also enter into decay: into devolution.

The idea that people have nowadays that all the people of humanity will one day have a golden age, and all go to heaven, is a fantasy. Not in the entire universe is there anything that develops in that way. Even universes are born, evolve, become more specialized, more beautiful, more developed, and then they decay, degenerate, and die. Our sun had a birth, it has a life, it will sustain for a while and then it will decay and die. That is the nature of those three forces at the top of the tree of life. Birth, preservation, dissolution: it is the law of nature. Mechanical nature is a reflection of that.

Everything that is born in mechanical nature sustains for a while, is preserved for a while, and then it decays and dies. This is the law for every mineral, every plant, every animal, every human being, and humanity itself.

Every civilization in history has passed through evolution and devolution. Our civilization will be no different, our planet will be no different.

There is no guarantee of going to heaven. Such an inevitable outcome does not exist.

Our physical bodies are the pinnacle of mechanical evolution. From here, mechanical evolution only goes back down the wheel. If we want to rise higher, to reach the superior worlds, the heavens, nirvanas, you have to fight, and not to fight against the world, to fight against yourself. Your animal mind is what binds you to mechanical nature. That inherited mind of instinct, of passion, of violence is what binds you to this wheel. To liberate yourself from that is to develop that seed that is in your heart, and let it flourish so that it can be born again. That’s what Jesus was talking about, not to be born of flesh, but spirit.

Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.

Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born?

Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water [sex] and of the [Holy] Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.

That which is born of the flesh [through common sex] is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit [through immaculate sexuality] is spirit.” —John 3

To be born again is to be born as a human being, a soul, so that we move out of the mechanical kingdom into the conscious kingdoms of nature.

All of these beings named on this graphic are working their way through the conscious kingdoms of nature. You see, this perceptible world of humanity, and all of its wars and all of its violence, is only a tiny fraction of what exists. Our world is so insignificant compared to what is possible for us. There are worlds upon worlds, we just do not see them. If we develop the consciousness, which is here in us, we can become part of that, we can become a conscious citizen of this solar system, of this galaxy, of this universe, meaning not conditioned and bound by this world. This is not a fantasy, this is something that you can know for yourself through your own experience, if you work to awaken consciousness. But to do that we have to develop ourselves. We have incredible potential. All of that on this graphic is in us; the tree of life maps the whole of our consciousness.

This next graphic shows us how our psychology relates to the subtle levels of nature.

We know about the physical body of course, and we know about our ego because we suffer from anger, lust, and envy. But sadly we do not really know much about the astral body, the mental body, the causal body. They are there in potentiality as archetypes in that seed within us. If we learn how to nourish it we can grow those bodies. Then, instead of being a theory or belief, as the consciousness awakens, it starts to develop the capacity to see the levels they correspond to. We can awaken in the world of dreams and perceive it consciously. We can become conscious in the world of dreams, and see that it is real, and is just a different aspect of nature. We can be awake there and can move around do things. We have that capability, but right now we do not have the training, and we certainly do not have the energy. To have those experienced requires development. That’s why we learn firstly to work with consciousness.

Qualities of Consciousness

We have to learn to train the consciousness to perceive and understand what it perceives. These are the basic capabilities of consciousness: Perception and comprehension of that perception.

A mineral perceives and understands at the level of a mineral. It cannot do more. Plants and animals perceive and understand at their levels. However, a humanoid like us has a distinct advantage: we are positioned to develop the consciousness to its full potential, which is truly infinite. We can develop the consciousness into a god. But to do so requires knowing the exact method, and providing the exact conditions.

That is why we study this science, and why we learn meditation.

We start with knowing ourselves, knowing who we are, seeing the truth of our lives. Starting with where we are now and studying that. Here we are in the physical world. Sure, we want to go to heaven, but as we are we cannot. Instead of dreaming about it, instead of fantasizing about it, change the facts of the conditioning that limit you from it. What limits you from heaven? The qualities that do not belong in heaven, it is that simple. We are not in heaven because we do not belong there. If you purify yourself of the qualities that keep you out, then you will go naturally. Everything that is heavy sinks and everything that is light rises. So, if we develop more compassion, more patience, more tolerance, if we act on behalf of others, we sacrifice for others, we do more charity, more good deeds, we change, we become better. We start to taste something of bodhichitta, compassion, instead of acting in a selfish way all the time.

But to really do that effectively we have to know how to meditate. it is through meditation that we perceive reality and understand reality. The thing about consciousness that we need to grasp is that it has degrees. In fact, the whole tree of life is just a map of consciousness, levels and levels. If we can perceive this physical world, then we certainly can develop the ability to perceive all the other worlds, but what keeps us here is our current conditioning.

Consciousness is a really mystical phenomenon, and it has very specific qualities. You are able to listen to me, to see me, to comprehend what I am saying, because your consciousness is engaged with the radiations that I am giving through my voice, the sound. And that sound is interpreted through the different layers or the conditioning of your psyche. That shows that consciousness perceives and can understand. But did you become distracted while I was talking at any point? Did you find that your mind wandered away and then suddenly you realize, “Oh he is still talking, but what is he talking about? Now I lost the thread of what he was saying.” Everyone did, right? Yes.  You know why? Because the consciousness is weak, conditioned, not trained, and easily distracted. It is asleep, in other words. It is not here and now continually. That shows that consciousness can either be awake or asleep. What we mean by awake is fully engaged with what it is perceiving. One hundred percent, fully engaged, not distracted. You want a good example of that? Study any animal who hunts. You have a cat? When that cat Is hunting a bird or a mouse, it is one hundred percent focused on that, or chasing a toy that you play with it. That is awake consciousness, one hundred percent aware of what it is doing, not distracted. Attention is very focused.

So, we learn to use attention in that way. Attention is awake focused on one thing, but at the same time there is also awareness, which is spatial, which is broad. So, while that cat is watching that bird, it is also aware that you are watching it. And it is aware that there might be other birds. But it has picked one target. So, that particular type of perception is what we mean by awake, to be here and now fully aware of being here and now, aware of oneself. And when you get distracted, when your mind suddenly takes you back to work, and in your mind, you are back at work and you are thinking about work and what you have to do. Yes, your body is here in the room, but your consciousness is not. That means that you are asleep, your body is here, but you are not. That is to be asleep. Now most of us are asleep most of the time. Nobody likes to hear that, we all like to hear “Oh I am awake! I am awakening. I’m on the spiritual path.” Let’s not lie to ourselves.

This state of sleeping consciousness produces suffering for ourselves and others. If we want to change that we need to be honest. Face the reality. The truth is, most of the time we are asleep. We are in our psychological world, not here and now in the physical world, not really doing what we are doing. We have a little bit of attention driving the car. Just enough to keep the car going straight. That’s it. But the rest of our mind is thinking about that romance we had that was wonderful back in the past, or we are at work, or at the grocery store psychologically. The body is in the car driving, but the mind is not there. Meaning we are asleep, meaning that we are a danger to ourselves and everyone else on the road. And throughout life we are like that. And that is a state of distraction, that state of sleep. Not only are we not living our life, we are a phantom. We are dreaming, because what we are dreaming is not real. It is not real. It is a lie that we are telling ourselves. We are dreaming about having sex, we are dreaming about having money, we are dreaming about having success, we are dreaming about our resentment, we are dreaming about this situation that made us angry or made us proud. Dreaming, lying, not here and now, not alive, we are asleep. We are entranced by illusions.

So, to have the consciousness in one of those two states is very obvious, but at the same time the consciousness can be conditioned or unconditioned. A criminal can be fully cognizant and aware of committing the crime. Bank robber goes to the bank to rob them bank, they are fully completely aware of what they are doing, they are very attentive, very awake, but that’s not good. They are being driven by what? Their craving, their desire, their fear, their anger, their sense of entitlement that they deserve the thing they are stealing.  So, their consciousness may be awake, or may be asleep, but their consciousness is definitely conditioned. A Buddha, master or angel would never do that. We have to understand this about ourselves. it is one thing to be awake and it is another thing to be unconditioned. To have the consciousness unconditioned means, even If it only just for a moment, it is not bound by desire. Pride is a desire, anger is desire, so is lust and envy and fear, avarice and greed and gluttony. Those all condition the consciousness and push it to behave in harmful ways, the ways that we feel would help us, and that is why we cause suffering. To put this state of consciousness in a state of being unconditioned is what we learn through meditation. The process of learning meditation is to learn have to take the consciousness out of its conditioning, even if it is only briefly, because once you have had that experience of tasting how the consciousness feels, when it is unconditioned, it is only then that you can ever understand what religion is, what divinity is, what God is, what you are, what reality is. When the consciousness is unconditioned and awake it sees the reality, it experiences its true nature, which is happy, content, joyful, patient, compassionate, wise. It has insight into the truth. Even our level as simple undeveloped embryos, that consciousness is connected to divinity.

Your consciousness is just a seed with enormous potential, but it is still connected to the divine in you. And if you can awaken it and take it out of it is conditioning, it can experience that. In meditation tradition that is called Samadhi, the eighth step of Ashtanga, the ultimate goal of yoga. It is the union, yoga that happens, when the consciousness is out of its cage. That is why we learn to meditate, that is why it is so important. If you do not learn to meditate you will never understand anything that we are talking about. But if you have had that experience even one time, all of this comes together. So simple. I know it sounds complicated to the mind, it isn’t. it is really simple. When you have the tree of life, it makes it very simple to understand. That’s why we study the states of consciousness.

States of Consciousness

Sanskrit / Greek:

• 4. Turiya / Noesis or Nous: “perfect”
• 3. Jagrata / Dianoia: “awake”
• 2. Svapna / Pistis: “asleep,” sensory
• 1. Susupti / Eikasia: “deeply asleep,” fantasy

The first most basic state is Susupti (Sanskrit) / Eikasia (Greek). It means to be deeply asleep. Most of the time when people study the scriptures that describe these states they relate this to the physical body is deeply asleep and oblivious to the world, and there is some accuracy in that. But the real meaning of these words, whether Greek or Sanskrit, is indicating the state of the consciousness, not the body. When the consciousness is deeply asleep, it is completely unaware of itself. This means most of humanity is in that state. This is characterized by a high degree of fantasy (illusion accepted as real). We build a beautiful world view, a beautiful self-image in our mind that is based on lies. We tell ourselves many lies about ourselves. “I was wronged, I was betrayed, I was treated badly, my parents did this to me, my spouse did this to me…” all of the ways that we sing our psychological song about our suffering. And all the ways that we convince ourselves that we are the great martyr, the great wronged one that never harmed a fly, is all a lie, it is all a fantasy. None of it is true. it is selectively chosen bits of information we have crafted into a mask, that we use to tell ourselves, in order to justify our situation and our actions. All it does is make us suffer. People live their whole life pursuing things that do not really exist, like social status, wealth, attention, respect, all of those things do not mean anything. None of them are reliable, none of them last. But people spend life times chasing them. Waste an entire life chasing to be respected by others, to be loved by others, to be envied by others, to be lusted after. Think about that. The things that people do every day, why the people beautify themselves, why do they get surgeries, why do they obsess over their clothing and their appearance. Because they want attention, they want to be lusted after, they want to be respected, they want to be envied, they want to be admired. But none of those things last, none of those things are reliable, none of them give satisfaction, none of them give real security, none of them give anything at all of substance, especially to the soul. So that person is living in a fantasy land in their mind. They are not seeing the real world. They are not seeing the suffering in the world. All around them. How their family is suffering, their friends, their co-workers, their neighbors, the entire planet. So much pain. All that we are thinking about is our image in the mirror. That is Susupti (Sanskrit) / Eikasia (Greek).

Svapna / Pistis is the second level, which means literally “to be asleep,” but it is slightly more aware, it is where you have a little bit more awareness of others, slight awareness of what is going on. You can relate that to the vigil state where you are out doing things, engaging with people, and you have a slight degree of awareness. For example, maybe you will not intentionally try to hurt somebody. In Svapna / Pistis you will be just aware enough that when you are driving your car you do not want to run over a person. But if you are driving your car and you are completely drunk, high, and really angry (which correspond to Susupti / Eikasia), you won’t care. You won’t have any awareness of that at all. You’ll be so in your fantasy land that you will hurt somebody. That’s the difference between the first and second states. It is a very small difference.

Svapna / Pistis is a state of consciousness that we occasionally experience during our waking life, when we have those moments of connection with each other, little moments where we feel something real about life, some beauty, we see a sunset or we see a child at play, and we feel a spontaneous beautiful compassion or love. But it is only a spark, and it does not last. That’s Svapna / Pistis, little moments, little sparks, but the rest of time we are just thinking, daydreaming, fantasizing. We are in Susupti / Eikasia.

The third state Jagrata / Dianoia is an awake, aware state produced by will, to be here and now from moment to moment. It is to have the consciousness actively aware, observing. Now with development and training, that state becomes the normal state of living. A being without conditioning of the ego would be in that state of consciousness Jagrata / Dianoia. For example, very young children before the ego is fully incorporated into the personality, they are awake at the very small level of a child. Some animals are also awake. Their consciousness is not conditioned by fantasies. They see what they see, they see reality, but they only understand it at the level of an animal, not with intellect. But they are awake at the level of an animal. But sadly, because the ego is so strong in us, we rarely experience Jagrata / Dianoia. Instead, we remain lifetimes in the two lower states.

For us to develop Jagrata / Dianoia requires training, it requires knowing how to use the consciousness from moment to moment, to be present here and now and to sustain that. And if you want to sustain the state of consciousness in the present moment here and now it needs energy. And that is why most of us cannot do it. We have those brief moments “My instructor told me that I need to be aware of myself. I need to remember myself. I need to be here and now.” Or you are in meditation “I need to be aware of what I am meditating on,” and it may last a few seconds, if you are lucky a few minutes, but then the dreaming starts again, and the mind is just floating in its dream state, fantasizing, imagining, dreaming and only briefly tastes of the present moment.

Someone who is entering into initiation studying the science of this path and activating it in themselves can make the third state permanent, but that requires a lot of development, a lot of energy. It also means that a lot of bad habits have to be discarded completely. For that, they can no longer waste energy, attention, time, but have their feet flat on the ground in reality, firmly, rejecting fantasy, being here and now.

With development, with perfection of that third state, a person can reach this state of Turiya / Noesis or Nous in Greek, and those words means “perfect.” The state of Turiya is the state of consciousness of a master like Jesus, Krishna, Buddha: fully awake, fully developed and one hundred percent an embodiment of suchness, the Absolute, compassion, and insight into reality. Such a person sees everything about you that you think no one can see, and they love you. No judgment, no condemnation, but they only want to help. That is a very rare state of consciousness, held only by very highly developed beings. But that is our goal and it is possible for any of us to develop it. To reach that we need to really know the other three.

In meditation we learn to develop the third state and sustain it. The problem is that we always drift back to the first. For example, when we come to class the instructor gives you the instruction: “Visualize a fire in your heart and hold it.” Then you will start, “Ok. I am going to do it!”, and the fire will be there in your imagination for one second, two seconds, three seconds, and then your mind starts chattering “oh… what about this... I heard this... and that...” and your mind just wanders away. You dream. Your attention wanders through your problems, your desires, your memories…. Soon fifteen minutes goes by, twenty minutes goes by, and then you realize, “Oh wait a minute, I am supposed to be meditating.” What was your state of consciousness for that twenty minutes? You were not in Jagrata / Dianoia (the third state), because you were not awake, aware, in the present moment. You were not even in Svapna / Pistis, with a little bit of awareness or what you were supposed to be doing. You were asleep, dreaming. You see, meditation practice teaches us the facts of our spiritual level. That is why most people abandon meditation practice, because we do not like to see the truth.

To change our degree of consciousness requires very specific, factual knowledge. We need to be using our attention constantly, by will; we call this self-observation: to be here and now, aware of ourselves, observing the tendencies and impulses that we feel. The mind wants to be distracted. It wants to make us fantasize. We have to fight that. That’s not easy, especially in the beginning. It is necessary to be constantly bringing ourselves back to the present moment, and rejecting fantasy.

If you want spiritual powers, if you want to awaken consciousness, if you want to be awake in the astral world out of your body, then be awake here in the physical world first. If you awaken your consciousness here in the physical world you will inevitably awaken it in the astral world, in your dreams. You are asleep here. You are asleep now. So, awaken, be present, be conscious, be consistent. Extend the times where you can be awake and aware of yourself. Work on that; it takes a lot of discipline, but if you train yourself rigorously, consistently, you will get there. Self-observation and self-remembering work together. Self-observation is directed attention. Self-remembering is a spatial awareness of oneself. Self-observation is the directed attention at things and oneself. Self-remembering is to continue doing it, it is to remember to be present. The observation looks, the remembering keeps it going.

Third, we need energy. We need to preserve and elevate energy. This has many implications. The most important is to conquer lust. Stop wasting energy through lust. Not just physically, but psychologically. That is the greatest waste of energy that we have. We have an animal mind that is deeply diseased with lust. It is a disease. People think lust is normal, it isn’t. If you go into an insane asylum everybody in there thinks it is normal. But it is not normal, and our planet is like that. This planet is a mad house. One of the causes of that insanity is lust. It makes people crazy. That is the chief cause of our psychological conditioning, lust. It affects everything. That is the most difficult aspect, for most people, it is to deal with lust, because it is so pervasive. But by fighting that, taking the energy away from lust and using it instead for your spiritual life, you have access then to the greatest power in your body. And that is why all the traditions start with sexual purity.

Anyone who wants to become a monk or a nun or a priest, they take vows to retain their sexual energy so that they can learn to transform it. By preserving that energy, transforming it, it nourishes the consciousness, it changes the consciousness, it changes the body, it changes the mind, it changes everything within us. That energy flows through all the glands of the endocrine system. It is most rooted in the sexual organs, but it flows throughout the endocrine system and is controlled by the pineal and pituitary glands in the brain. Reflect on your life, the quality of your psyche, the quality of your mind that you had as a child and then compare how that changed when puberty hit, and how all your problems really started then. All the suffering, the worst problem starts with puberty. As soon as you start to get involved with sex that’s when the problems really get intense. That energy is enmeshed in that, it is enmeshed in our karma. it is lust that causes all that.

So, when we harness the sexual force we train it, we change our endocrine system, we change our nervous system, we change our mind. And all of this is symbolized in every religion and mythology in the world. So, through the harnessing of that force, we harness the consciousness. That is the food that fuels the development of the soul and that was why the first miracle of Jesus was at a wedding. He attended the wedding at Cana. That word Cana means “cane, reed,” which symbolizes your spinal column. The cane or staff that every priest and priestess carries in their hand represent the spinal column. If you study those canes, they are usually topped with a pinecone, even the pope carries one. The pinecone is a symbol of the pineal (pine-al) gland in the brain. You know what that gland does? it is your power of imagination. it is what lets you see. So, when you take the sexual energy and you drive it up your spinal column to the brain you are restoring your imagination, your clairvoyance, your capability to perceive non-physical things. We do not have spiritual vision because we waste the sexual energy. Conserve that energy and your sight will begin to return.

If we save that energy and re-direct it, it is transformed into spiritual energy which in Sanskrit is called ojas. That is an energy that totally changes the character of a person, that awakens the consciousness. This is the basis of alchemy, it is the basis of tantra: the transmutation of the sexual energy, the elevation of that energy. At that wedding at Cana, Jesus transformed water into wine. What is the water? In Hebrew it is called mayim, the waters of genesis, generation, are here in the sexual organs. And when we transform that into wine it is a symbol of transmutation, alchemy, the process of converting mercury into the spiritual gold that nourishes the soul. That’s why the apostles in the book of Acts had flames of fire appear on their heads. The Pentecost is that fire that is emerging from the one who is transmuting the sexual energy.

In Hebrew, the word for fire is esh, spelled אשי. That word is hidden in the first word of the bible: בראשית. Thus, that word can be read as Bar esh: “child of fire,” plus the letter tav which means “ completion, fulfillment.”

Questions and Answers

Audience: Why would anyone have sex if there is no lust? I do not think I understand sex.

Instructor: Lust and sex are two different things.

Sex is how life is created.

Lust is a selfish, animal desire.

Angels, buddhas, have sex without lust. They create sexually, but there is no lust there, only love. That is what we need to learn.

Everything that has life was made through sex. Everything: every mineral, plant, animal, human being, but at each level there are different types of sexuality. The sexuality at the mineral level is chemistry. In the plant kingdom there are different types of sexuality: asexual and sexual reproduction. In the animal kingdom, you have one basic kind, and that is what we learn there. When we migrate into the human kingdom, we are tasked with transcending animal sexuality so we can practice another type of sexuality, a conscious, human sexuality that has no fornication, instinct, or lust. The superior sexuality is a conscious, divine one, not animal. That is the difference. That is why we do not understand it, because we have never experienced it.

We have been given the instructions for superior sexuality in every religion. All the religions had the instruction inherent in the teaching, but only given to those who were prepared to receive it. Throughout history that sexual knowledge was withheld until the practitioners were ready to learn it, because once you got access to that knowledge you had a tremendous power in your hands. So, in some traditions it was only given to priests or initiates of a certain caliber. Because of the situation of this planet now, we are giving it openly, because things are so bad. This is the last chance to try to change before this planet, nature clean it, wipes it out.

Sexuality is a function in nature, but there are many levels. The sexuality of angels and buddhas is at a different level from the sexuality of lower beings, like us. If you study all the religions of the world you find that the Elohim create. Elohim means Gods and Goddesses, but the way they create is different from the way that humanoids, the intellectual animals create and animals and plants and everything else. And Jesus explained that in the Gospels. He said, “You have to be born again, not of the flesh, but of the spirit”. And he also explained that the way to life is through the water that rises in your belly. When the women at the well says “where is this water?” and he tells her “Go get your husband and I’ll tell you.”. So, he is telling her the way to liberation is through your sexual waters in a marriage, but not with lust. Not with fornication, not with adultery. So, there is a specific type of science that lets the human organism at our level perform the sexual act and resist the lust, fight that devil, and take that energy from that devil in order to transcend.

We are humanoids with animal mind, with animal lust, so we start where we are. As we work on ourselves, we change, we rise out of that situation, lust becomes weaker and weaker and weaker. When lust is removed, love remains.

Audience: [inaudible]

Instructor: Because the energy is trapped in lust we have so much energy trapped there. And when we have the sexual heat and we build that heat to a certain point and we do not waste it through the orgasm, we retain the forces. And that energy then is absorbed back into the consciousness. it is absorbed by the body through the nervous system and nourishes the consciousness.

Audience:  Is that also called transmutation?

Instructor: Transmutation literally means “to change thoroughly.” So, it is to take the raw matter which is the brute mercury, in alchemy, and convert that, take the mercury through different levels. That’s what sexual alchemy does. It is a transmutation to take the animal lust, purified through heat and pressure of the sexual act, but with the environment of love and prayer instead of lust. When there is an environment of love and prayer, real love between the couple, then that conditioned fire, the esh (Hebrew) becomes liberated. When that fire becomes liberated it becomes what was lost from the temple.

If you have studied Kabbalah you have heard about the word Shekinah. That word refers to the divine presence that was in the temple when it was pure. But when we commit fornication, the Shekinah leaves the temple. Our body is the temple. The Sekinah is the divine presence of God, that is why we feel spiritually empty, we do not feel the divine presence of God because the Shekinah is gone, and it is gone because of fornication (orgasm). But, when we store that fire in our inner temple with purity, with love, then that fire is restored and the Shekinah returns little by little and we start to feel that presence of divinity within us.

These are the old mysteries that were hidden in all ancient religions, even amongst the Jews. That fire, this esh is a creative intelligence in nature and it is in our bodies, it is in the sexual energy, it is what allows us to have children. But as Jesus said, “We need to be born again not by flesh, but by spirit.” So that fire, the creative power, when it is retained in the body and transformed, transmuted that energy becomes what’s called in Sanskrit ojas or in the Bible Pentecost. It is a fire that arises in a person and it is the presence of God within us, the Shekinah. In Sanskrit it is called KUNDALINI, and that fire is what develops all the bodies of the soul, it rises up. So, that purifies everything within us, it creates the soul in levels in us.

Now that fire is not a fire of mechanical nature, it is a living intelligence, it Is that letter ש shin, this trinity of divinity in us. So, that fire can not awaken in anyone unless the exact conditions are met.

Moreover, that fire is the very presence of God, it is the Shekinah. It does not awaken in someone unless they deserve it. You cannot force it, you cannot trick it, you cannot buy it. It does not happen for any mechanical reason. There are people who say, “If you chant this mantra a hundred thousand times or if you come to our workshop for two weeks or six months or you pay this much money, you will awaken your Kundalini.” Those are all lies. No one can trick God, or tempt God with money or membership. The presence of God goes where there is purity, love, devotion, not lust, not impurity. That fire is the power of God in us that awakens. And that is the fire that gives powers to the prophets and the initiates. When the prophets and initiates like Moses performed miracles it is because that fire was acting through them. So, it is a very mystical and magical process that happens. That awakens a person steadily in levels as they purify themselves. So, the sexual act is the crucible, the oven of alchemy where all that happens. We create a new birth spiritually, not physically. So, that’s this son of fire, bar esh. It is how eventually, that force becomes Christ, born in us.

Audience: Does that mean that both partners need to have the same level of consciousness?

Instructor: The prerequisite for a couple to engage in this level of work is that they love each other. It is often the case that only one member of the couple is practicing these teachings, and that’s ok. The main thing is the fidelity of the couple, that they are committed to each other, that they love each other, and that the relationship is based in love. They are together because of love, not because of  spiritual ambition or terrestrial ambition, but because they love each other. That is the atmosphere that allows this process to happen. If there is no love in a couple, this will never happen. Love is the environment in which the divine mother Kundalini emerges. If there is no love it won’t happen. A lot of people make that mistake; they hear about this teaching and they become very interested and ambitious, so they go out to find someone to have sex with. All they are doing is making problems. It will never happen that way. That fire descends from above. The letter shin with the three flames on it is the presence of this trinity in us. What is the essence of that fire? it is love. It is a selfless, pure, divine love. As human beings we have so few places we can access that type of love from someone. We can access it through our love for our children, our love for family, but only in a certain aspect. Where we really find it is in love with a spouse, because it is there where the male and female forces can be joined in a chemical bond that creates an atmosphere within, that fire can emerge, spiritually speaking. So, it is only in that context that Kundalini can awaken.

Audience: What are the chances that while meditating that you can feel warmth in your head?

Instructor: Of course, it is possible. Your consciousness can produce consequences and result, there is no question. You can sense when someone is looking at you. We are not isolated from each other. We are very much integrated with each other and the consciousness is that bond. it is the fabric of all things, it is consciousness. When you learn to meditate you realize that. We are not isolated from each other, or from nature, or from God. Consciousness is the binding agent for all things. The whole tree of life is just a web of consciousness, but we are in a dream state and do not realize it. But when you place your attention consciously on things you can change them. That’s the whole basis of that thing with mystical powers, people saying that you can move things with your mind and all of that. There is truth to that, there are people who can do it, so what? The bigger power is to be able to direct your attention in a way that reduces suffering. That’s a much greater power.

Audience:  You mean suffering in the entire world?

Instructor: For anyone. When you place your attention on a person and you help alleviate their pain, what better way to use your life, or your time, or your energy? If you are in great pain and someone can come and alleviate that pain, wouldn’t that be the most valuable thing for you? We all have that capability, but we are so deep in a dream state that we do not use it.