We are going to be talking about the concept of intelligence. It is a word that we use very often in our normal day-to-day world, but I am going to invite you to take a fresh look at what intelligence really is.
What is it – intelligence – in and of itself?
Can we perceive intelligence? Can we sense it? Can we take a moment, even at this moment right now and reflect on what intelligence is?
Take moment. Look into yourself - what is intelligence? What arises, when you put this word or this concept in your mind?
It is difficult. It is an abstract word. We say thing such as “so-and-so is intelligent, so-and-so has intelligence.” Usually the way this word is used today, is not the way that we are going to use it today, and, we would say that the way it is normally used is not correct, it is not right. We mistake intelligence for the intellect, for being intellectual. We mistake intelligence for having a good memory or being well educated, or being able to recall many facts, but none of those things actually point, or, direct one towards intelligence itself.
You may not have a lot of intelligence, but be very well learned and educated. Education does not mean that the intelligence is active, present, free, liberated. So it might sound strange, but you don't need a lot of this intelligence that I am pointing towards, in order to be very good in a trivia game show; you don't need a lot of intelligence, in its primordial aspect, in order to become a doctor, or researcher, or scientist. Of course, if you have that, then all the better, but just the bare minimum of what society wants, or, what society deems necessary is not true intelligence. All of that which called learning, having a good memory, it is being able to rationalize and compare, and to deduce through an intellectual process does not guarantee true intelligence . So the whole notion of the IQ or intelligence quotient is a bit wrong, because real intelligence is more than intellectual measurement.
As the title of our lecture suggests the second thing that we are going to talk about is mechanicity. So how do these two things relate to each other? Mechanicity is the other end-point, the opposite of intelligence. Mechanicity is something that is confined to a certain pattern, confined accordance to certain rules or laws, or other external pressures.
In these studies we relate a lot with Kabbalah, the Tree of Life, and this word “intelligence” is very important, it relates with one of the Sephiroth of the Tree of Life in Kabbalah. There are Ten Sephiroth of the Tree of Life. The third one is called Binah, which is often translated as “intelligence.” What does this mean? It is something to do with taking all the possibilities and making something out of it, something that is potential, possible, and making something concrete out of it. Creating something, creation itself. This is the sephirah – Binah – which is most heavily related to Genesis, to creation. All the Sephiroth are, but we talk about this one a lot, because a lot is going on here. This is where this potential is coming together and creating. This has to do with the whole Universe, the creation of the Universe. It also has to do with us, not just physically, but as a soul and as a spirit as well.
We have intelligence, we possess that, we arrive out of that, but what we find when we try to do something, when we try to act, we cannot seem to get to that pure intelligence, which has all the possibilities, to just “do” what we want to do. This is our current situation.
Maybe we have some problem in life, we want to accomplish the solution to that problem, we want to move forward, we want to do something with our life, and what happens? Immediately there are obstacles. Or, sometimes we achieve something and we get it, and it is not actually what we really wanted. We actually wanted something different, and we become jaded by the experience. We get what we want and then it is not actually what we want, because we were mistaken – we did not see the possibilities correctly.
Binah, or intelligence, is not just about creating, it is about the capacity to see into the possibilities and discern all the possibilities out of that potential. Because in the beginning, before anything is created, it is only the potential of that creation. The capacity, the Divine capacity, sees into that uncreated world, that uncreated energy, whatever you want to call it, and sees the possibility in it.
“It” has the intelligence; it does not have to rationalize. This is not the rational thing. Intelligence sees possibilities and creates realities, and, within us, it is a natural capacity that we have.
So what does that mean - a natural capacity or innate capacity? We have an innate capacity to perceive, to cognize, to apprehend, to see. And again, I do not just mean physically, I mean mentally, emotionally. To see something - we have that. We don't have to try to have it. We close our eyes, we get mental images; we fall asleep, we have dreams. So there is an innate capacity that we have as a soul to perceive, and, as a second part of that, there is a capacity to discern.
To perceive and to discern. These are two interwoven capacities that we have naturally. To perceive is one thing, but then to discern or cognize that two things are different. It makes sense, they are highly interrelated, because to perceive is the other side of that same coin of intelligence.
These three Sephiroth up here, these three atomic principles are within us, our core Essence, the Being of our own Being, they have very abstract qualities that are all inter-related with each other. We have the root luminosity, which is related to Chokmah, the basic capacity to see, and we have this root intelligence, which is the capacity to discern, and make out those possibilities into reality. That is what intelligence really is.
Here, in this three-dimensional world, what do we have? We have things that are the shadow of that - we have an intellect, which sort of has this capacity of choosing, of discerning, of making out the difference between two things. The intellect can be good or bad, but in the end, it is nothing more than the shadow of true intelligence.
Intelligence is related to the third sephiroth of the Tree of Life, so it is called the Third Logos. The Third Logos is the Holy Spirit. The First Logos is Father, and the Second Logos is Son. The Holy Spirit is that third aspect, and each of them contain the other two aspects within it. The Holy Spirit is unique in that it polarizes into a feminine and masculine aspects.
So, in Binah, there is a trinity of masculinity and the trinity of femininity that unites in order to create everything. These are abstract principles. What this relates to is something within us, this is not just something that happened a long time ago or something far away from us; it happens here and now, within us. Within us is our Inner Being, is our Spirit; and within us is that feminine principle as well, which we call the Divine Mother. We put a name on it - Divine Mother - and we can put a symbol, such as Durga or any of the feminine principles that you find in religion.
Durga, as a symbol, is very nice. This picture here exemplifies many aspects of her symbolism. When she is riding on a tiger, she is on top of that tiger; the tiger can mean different things, or the lion, can mean different things. That lion represents the power or the law of the Universe. It also represents a self-realized Being, a Master Soul, a Great Soul that unites with the Divine Mother. A soul that unites with their inner intelligence. So if we will self-realize ourselves, we can become a lion, a lion's cub, and we are directed by the intelligence, which is in this picture - the Divine Mother.
She has very many properties. Some of these properties are related to wisdom and to the Word, such as the shell, the conch shell, which represents the vibration, that core energy that irradiates out. We say the Word of the Logos, the sound, the great sound, the intelligent sound.
The trident represents the three forces, the trinity or trimurti.
She holds the sword. That sword she holds in her hand is how she cuts through – it represents the discriminating intelligence; it cuts through the fog. Imagine if we are presented with a problem in our lives, we are able to use a psychological tool (a tool of our soul) to cut straight through the fog, through the darkness and see exactly what we need to see. We have that, but we don't know how to use it, we don't know how to work with that. Such a power is what that sword really represents.
That lotus flower she holds – which has not fully blossomed yet - represents the potential. Every lotus arises from the mud. It is very poetic to say that every flower arise out of the dirty earth, out of the mud. Psychologically we are that: we have a lot of darkness within ourselves, but the mud, or the darkness within ourselves is actually the place where the flower finds the nutrients for life. That is how nature works. So we actually have fertile soil within ourselves. If you have ever worked with the Earth, with the gardening, you know that fertile soil often doesn't smell very good. It smells like rottenness sometimes, but that type of soil actually is sometimes the best for the growth of flower beds, or fruits. There is a great mystery there - even though we have darkness within ourselves, it doesn't mean that we are lost or hopeless necessarily. It means that that is what we have, we have the nutrients, we have the vitamins, the solar values that can cause that blossoming of our soul. That lotus flower represents the possibility of our soul to blossom.
She also has a club, which is a symbol of willpower, as well, to defeat enemies, to defeat our own psychological enemies, which is our self. The sword cuts through, and club is a more blunt force which is sometimes needed (psychologically).
So all these things show us that this is very highly symbolic, and, we could present lecture after a lecture just on this, and there are many lectures just on that. But the main point of this lecture is to explain how something so beautiful and so powerful, which at this level (the top triangle of the Tree of Life) of intelligence has a capacity of total freedom to create. That capacity gets mechanized, that capacity submits itself to what we call laws - more and more and more laws. Creation concretizes, creation crystallizes into denser and denser realities. Right?
The Divine Mother, an aspect of that Divine Mother, has to go down to create these denser realities, this world. A part of that Divine Mother is the intelligence which creates our physical body. Part of that Divine Mother's intelligence is encoded as our DNA, and as our molecular structures, and as the instructions that create our proteins, which cause all of the biological activities to occur in our body. All the basic, fundamental organic building blocks, the biological building blocks, this machine called the physical body is an encoded intelligence.
The Divine Intelligence has is directly related to our DNA, but there is more; such intelligence is not just a molecular string, it is not just the DNA, but a part of it is.
What happens when you eat some food and it goes into your stomach? The stomach digests it and a miraculous process occurs that transforms that into energy, into fuel for our body. Who is the one doing that? Are we doing it? Are we digesting our food? Are we pumping the blood in our heart? Who is operating this machine? Supposedly it is our body, but we do not have any cognizance of any of that, we do not know what is going on with that. We pay attention to ourselves, if we become mindful. We can learn how to listen to the intelligence in our body. We learn, “I shouldn't eat that type of food, even though I really want it. My desires actually lead me to be unhealthy. I shouldn't do that. I need to listen to my body.” If you become more aware of what your body needs, you know that you shouldn't just eat whatever your desires want, you should eat what your body needs - variety of different types of healthy foods. So She, this intelligence, is all at the very top of the Tree of Life and it is all the way down into even our physical body.
There are different aspects of our Divine Mother. But She is always an intelligence, She is this Primordial Beauty, but She – which is the total expression of freedom and potentiality – submits herself to becoming mechanized, becoming confined. She does this for a purpose - it is done for a purpose, but nevertheless, it is something very brutal. You can find symbols of this in various mythologies, different ways in which the Divine Mother or the Soul becomes trapped in Hell. That is related to different aspects, different ways in which something of that pure divine intelligence becomes trapped in the inferno, or in this heaviness, and the beauty of the Divine Mother becomes disfigured, because She is confined.
So there is this process, in which the Divine Intelligence becomes mechanized, and that is what we are going to talk about. How does this Divine Intelligence, which is all of the infinite possibilities, how does that process then end up with something that is mechanical: a mechanized world.
The Seven Cosmoses
Sometimes in Hermeticism or Occultism or in various esoteric philosophies they talk about the Microcosmos and the Macrocosmos. The Microcosmos being us, our physical reality, our Soul; and the Macrocosmos being the Universe, the large Cosmos, the large creation. And there is a relationship there: that what happens in the Infinite, something analogous transpires within us, and, things that transpire within us, within our soul, within our psychological struggle, also transpires within the Infinite.
This is true, but it is a little bit of an incomplete teaching. We can actually break up that into seven Cosmoses. So the question is - the first thing you might ask is, “Why? What does this have to do with any of my experience? Why should I even care about this?” Well, we talked about it in some prior lectures why it would be important. It is important because we have an opportunity, we are here right now in our physical body, alive, hopefully present. Something happened to put us in the space, not just here, listening to this lecture, but in this life. Some series of events occurred to put us in this life.
Now if you believe that you didn't exist before your physical body, then really, you shouldn't have any concern of what happens when you die either, because if you believe that you were created with this physical body, then when your physical body dies, that is it - you are done. Actually, I think, most people are trying to adopt this philosophy, if not totally adopting it. It is a very convenient way of gaining a reason to just doing whatever you want with your life - going to be tired of told what to do, or, a response to not finding any substance in a spiritual or religious teachings, so you just throw the whole thing out.
But if you are looking at these kind of teachings, probably you have some kind of yearning, and asking yourself, “What is going to happen? What is this? How do I get in this place? What is my situation?” The situation is: we have a connection to our Inner Divinity, but we are lost in the maze. We really do not know how to get out. But there is a way - there is a map. Part of this map we kind of outlined like this, The Tree of Life, with all these Sephiroth. This is really, on the slide the Seven Cosmoses, an outline of the whole Tree of Life, which is what we study in Kabbalah.
The Tree of Life is a map; it is a map of all the cosmoses. It is a map of us, as physical body, but is also a map of the various ways that this energy gets complicated and unfolds. Have you ever seen a waterfall, where a river falls, and there is another waterfall, and there is another waterfall, and the water keeps descending. Similarly, the energy has different levels and goes down, it descends downward.
In the beginning there is one law, which is this Divine Unified Law. It is abstract. It is not related to any reality that we have, any conception. It is totally an abstract absolute space. That is called one primordial law, the unifying universal law. A law unto itself, that wants to know itself. That is related to what Kabbalists call Ain Soph Aur.
We have these principles inside of us, but they are very far removed from our day-to-day experience, although they are right here. They are not far away, it is just that our condition that prevents us from directly experiencing it. But that one law creates. In order to create it, goes into manifested creation.
Creation, any type of movement, any activity, any phenomena that we have, we instantly have three aspects to it.
If I move my hand from left to right, there is a part of it which activated that hand which was a positive principle; there is a negation of where it was, to where it is going to. And the synthesis is the actual hand moving. Any phenomenon is instantly divided into at least three components, which are inter-related, and that is that trinity. These three forces.
In the beginning the abstract absolute space creates a pure Cosmos of Three laws. This is the three primary forces that it takes to create everything else. But this isn't really creation yet in any concrete way, because you need the three forces to create something; the three forces themselves are still a very abstract thing. The three forces are in creation.
If I want to do anything in the world, if I want to create anything, if I want to complete a project, the first thing that happens is that I have an impulse to do it. And then perhaps some mental pictures and thoughts. It doesn't mean it is created yet, but there is an impulse. Then we start planning it, laying things out and experiencing the resistance to its manifestation. And only if the impulse (First Law) overcomes the resistance (Second Law), all the obstacles that take to complete this project, then you actually get the creation (Third Law). If I want to buy a house, first you have to have the impulse to buy the house; then I have to overcome all the things that it takes to buy the house, in order to actually buy the house. Any project in life has that. So those are the three primary forces. Those three primary forces overcome together to put our Spirit and our Soul into creation.
We instantaneously go from one law to three. So in this world of Ayocosmos, which is the first Cosmos, it is complete freedom. We go from an abstract world, which is still complete freedom, to a more realized, concretized world, but it is only of three laws. There is still a lot of freedom. There is still freedom even though it is one step away from the Absolute. The world of three laws is a pure world. When all those three laws come together more successively to create more and more worlds. The Ayocosmos is related to Kether, Chokmah and Binah. From a three dimensional standpoint it is related to the combination of all of the Suns and planets in the whole of creation.
The next level is a world of six laws. So why is it six? This is something mathematical, because the world of six laws is another creation. So if you are building something, you have the foundation, and then you have different things that rest on top of that, so the Second Cosmos, which is a Cosmos related to any particular Galaxy, our whole Milky Way, we would say is an Ordering of Six Laws. The whole Galaxy - the six laws. So that is what we call the Macrocosmos. In order for that to occur, it has to be another application of those three forces to create another organization. That is where we get the three from the Ayocosmos plus another three to make the Macrocosmos, and we continually and successively go down this Tree of Life.
After the Macrocosmos is the Deuterocosmos, which is where we go from the whole Galaxy to the whole Solar System. Obviously, there are many solar systems in the Galaxy. So each one of those solar systems is a system into itself. There is another level of creation in there. That is related to 12 laws = 3 + 6 + 3. Three of the Ayocosmos, plus 6 of the Macrocosmos, plus another application of the 3 laws to make the Deuterocosmos.
But every Solar system has what? Planets. So you can see how the Solar System is an organization, but every planet is also another level of organization. Do you understand that? So, one thing is an organ of a body, like the heart. Another thing is the cells that make up the heart - they are two separate things. You can look at the heart, or just look at what is happening in the cell, there are all sorts of things in there. But the heart is made of cells, and the body is made up of organs. Right? These are different layers. So you can see what happens in the cellular level, it has relationship to the heart, and the heart has relationship to the body. So you see that cell, what influences that cell? Well, the heart, the nature of the heart itself. What influences the heart? Whole another set of conditions related to physical body. And what influences the physical body? Well, environment of the planet. And what conditions influence the planet? The relationship with the Solar System. So you see, the further down you go, you have these levels of organization that exists within the framework larger levels of organization. So as you create more, you are impacted by more laws.
This word “law” - don't get stuck on this, this is a philosophical term, it is a mathematical relationship. Just as that cell has more laws related to it, because there is more conditions; it is related to the heart, and heart relates to the body. So in the same way the planet is related to the Solar system. The planet has some level of autonomy in its own conditions in of itself, but it is also very heavily influenced by the Solar system itself - the nature of the Sun and the other planets.
So then of course on a planet, there is another level of creation, which we call the human organism, and by now, the Deuterocosmos has twelve laws and then in order to make another creation you have to go to twenty-four laws, and then make another creation you get to forty-eight laws.
We can say that us as a human organism, we are impelled by forty-eight laws, because we are physical body that lives on a planet, that exist in a Solar system, that exists in a Galaxy. This isn't something that you need to believe in, this is just a mathematical way of organizing, “What is my condition?”
Samael Aun Weor writes (in The Elimination of Satans Tail):
Mechanicity starts within the third cosmos, because these three primordial laws divide themselves in order to become six laws.
We talked about that - three laws becoming the six. This is mechanicity starts at six going down, because the three laws of those three primary forces, like I said - any action and repose, movement and negation of that movement in a synthesis of those things together - that creates a phenomenon. That is the pure movement, that is a pure reality. By pure, I am referring to a a type of abstract reality. The noumena behind the phenomenon. But then to organize that you put a "membrane" around that and you create something using those laws, you have just introduced mechanicity. Mechanicity in the Macrocosmos.
In the physical world, is related to a Galaxy. We just talked how the laws related to the physical, material world. But, these laws are related with all the dimensions – including the soul and the spirit. So Macrocosmos is related to Chesed and Geburah and Tiphereth, which from other lectures we know is related to our Spirit or Monad and to our Soul, the highest parts of our Soul.
Our Spirit, the center of gravity of our Spirit is Heaven or Nirvana, whatever you want to call it. If you understand that, you read this and say that mechanicity starts within Nirvana, so even in Nirvana there is the beginning of mechanicity, even within the Heaven there is some level of mechanicity. Of course, the difference between six laws of Nirvana, and forty-eight laws of our common experience is quite great. We experience a lot more mechanicity. So if we were to experience the world of six laws that would be like having a mystical experience - an experience in Nirvana, an experience in Heaven. And that is possible - we can liberate ourselves from the 48 laws and then have an experience in the world of six laws. We can have an experience in the world of three laws.
The world of six laws is where the first aspect of individuality occurs. As I said before, the intelligence has the capacity to see all the possibilities, and to differentiate the unity, to have the possibility of difference. Because the one law is universal unity, three laws is a pure and abstract expression of the one supreme law. Then, at six laws, there is the individuality of our own individual Spirit or Monad. Our Monad, our unique spirit, happens at six laws.
Nevertheless, you can have experience in the world of three laws. That is an experience beyond your individual Spirit; that would be an experience of Cosmic Consciousness, the consciousness which we all share. You would be cognizant and experiencing the very predicate of experience of itself. And since we all share that, that is a capacity to see into the experience of anyone. So in that world, because everybody is one in that world, if you are fully present and cognizant in that world, you can see into any Monad, into any Spirit, into anybody. Again, that is possible. Why would we do that? Not for playing games, or for power, but for own self-knowledge and compassion. The Beings of the highest level have that capacity easliy. These are the Christs, the resurrected ones, the Nirmanakayas, the Sambhogakayas, and the Dharmakayas. But we can have that experience too, if we know how to meditate and how to work with our vital energies.
Understand that the energy descends from one law into many laws. The world of our Spirit is related to six laws, the world of our Soul has relationship to six laws, 12laws, 24 laws and 48 laws. Our physical bodies are related to 48 laws. Our emotions are related to Hod, which is the world of 24 laws. Our intellect is related to Netzah, which is 12 laws. What does that mean? That means that we have more freedom with our emotions and our intellect that we do with our physical body.
We can think very profound abstract things that we can never see physically. Right? Great philosophers can peer into realities, which they never actually experienced, because they are using their intellect in a profound way. You can use your intellect for good or bad, it doesn't mean that just because you think something, that it is truth. But the intellect has that type of freedom. The same way with the emotional world of 24 laws - emotions can bring us to the heights of mystical experience. But mostly our emotions are not vibrating with 24 laws, and mostly, almost always, our intellect is not vibrating with 12 laws. It is actually vibrating between 96 and 864 laws.
In the beginning of this lecture when I talked about wanting to solve our problems and we have that heaviness. We often have a yearning to figure out a problem - we have a problem with our family, we have a problem at work, we have problem with the government, we have spiritual problem, we want to solve them. But our mind, our psyche, our Soul is trapped in a lot of laws. That is why it is so difficult to get out of it. If you studied any of the mythology (Greco-Roman mythology), you know about being in the labyrinth, the catacomb of the Minotaur, and being in a maze. Trying to get out of that maze, everywhere you turn is more maze, more confusion, not sure what is right or what is wrong, what is going on. It is because our Soul, our psyche is trapped within a lot of laws. That is called the Tritocosmos or the Inferno.
We have psychological elements, which are very heavy. You see that in our society. You just look at the news, look at any of the crumbling institutions that we have around the world - there is a lot of scary things and difficult things going on in the world, a lot of problems, which should be solvable, but they are just not, because we all possess this ego. It is one thing acknowledge that we have an ego, it is another thing to actually comprehend it and liberate oneself from those laws.
This slide here - the density of the atoms of the Cosmos - is just pictorial explanation of what I just spoke about. It is something relative, it is not something to take as absolute, like this is a way it looks literally. In reality, this is depiction what one law or one principle would look like in relationship to 48. From three, to six, to 24, to 48. So you can see that one law becomes the three, become very nice and enveloped, and then the three become six and six become 12and by time we get to 48, every activity, every movement of that intelligence is limited by forty-eight factors, we could say. So that intelligence works in a very mechanical way.
There is something that we get out of that though. There is something that we must leverage out of the experience of being in a heavier world. Why is it necessary to create such a mechanistic world? Why does the Divine create like this? Why have a Heaven and then an Earth, so to speak? And the reality is that the different laws provide a capacity for this one united intelligence to see itself in different ways. If the one united intelligence separates itself and divides itself into many ways, it interacts with itself in many ways.
If you look into yourself, you will find your own inner contradictions. You will find where you are contradicting yourself, you will find your own inner hypocrisy. Right? That inner conflict is what breeds external conflict. For example: I am frustrated with myself and I end up of having an argument with someone else. It is a very simple type of thing. If we were to look at that in a very lazy way, we would say: “Well, that person was just being a jerk that day,” or we could even say, “Well, I was just in a bad mood that day.” But there is something a lot deeper. That conflict, any problem that we are having, you can almost think of it as anvil hitting the iron, or, some phenomenon creating a sound. A quality emerges out of the conflict. If you observe it, if see the way that you interact with the world, that gives a spark of light. In the same way that hammer comes down, hits the iron anvil - what happens? A spark. Why does the spark appear? Do you know why? Because there are impurities in the iron, and the blacksmith is working to get the impurities out. You hit that iron again and again, you hammer out the impurities.
We have to take advantage of that, we must not just repudiate, and not want to look at our conflict, we actually go into it. Not to justify it, not to condemn it, but to actually understand, “Why am I doing it? Why is this happening to me?” If you don't, you will repeat it. And you do that for many decades, you won't get anywhere by the time your body runs out of energy.
We have talked about all the way up to 48 laws, but as I said before, there is up to 864 laws. Why is that? Well, there is a final cosmos, which is when we are going from external world, down to the planet, and then the human being, and then we have the atomic inferno. There is a relationship with the interior of this world, but not the physical interior of this world - another dimension. In the same way that superior dimensions are related to Heaven or to Nirvana, there is inferior dimensions as well. We experience those inferior dimensions all the time - when we are seeing red with anger, when we have a bad dream, when we have a nightmare, when you are being chased by someone in a dream, you are experiencing very heavy energy, and it is frightening. Our own ego is that.
In this final cosmos - the Tritocosmos - we have the entire Tree of Life inverted as a shadow. So we have that within ourselves, every creation has that shadow within ourselves. It is one thing to have it, it is another thing to be full of that heavy energy. And we are full of all this heavy energy. So in that final condensation of energy every one of these Sephiroth becomes more mechanical. It starts after the 48 laws of the physical body, to the first level of the Tritocosmos at 96 laws. Then 96 gets multiplied by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, where 9 × 96 = 864. From an Alchemical standpoint, we can relate to different planetary influences, we can get very Kabbalistic too about that and talk quite a bit. We are not going to get in to that; we are just going to say that there is a relationship there and those planetary symbols or Arcana (we could say) have a relationship to our psyche as well.
So mechanicity gets quite complicated. We are vibrating with very heavy energy and that is why we are having problems; not just us personally, but I am talking about this world, this society. We are vibrating with so much heavy energy that we are actually pulling up this heavy energy and it is kind of manifesting physically. In the same way that I said before, when you have a conflict psychologically, the inner conflict breeds outer conflict. In a very naive sense we like to think “other people are causing us problems,” but what is a problem for one person, with the set of circumstances is not a problem for another person. So, it is not the external circumstances, it is our nature within our self.
Our nature within ourselves is very complicated, so we find problems with everything. As we just individually cause problems in our life because of the state of our mind, as a society, because of all the problems that we have, we start making a whole society and cultures that are causing problems. So it is not just some other group or some other person that is causing problems and we need to point our finger at them and get rid of them. That it is a very dangerous and unuseful way of dealing with our problems. We can see that is happening, unfortunately.
We have to know, how do we get out of this mess, how do we get out of the maze that we are in? How does our mechanicity relates to our Divine intelligence? We have a physical body, we have emotions and intellect, we have willpower; have the capacity or desire to act as well. And when we get to that level then we also have what I have also said before, our discernment and our capacity to perceive. So you have your perception, your discernment, and your desire or your willpower to act. These are the very core principles of what we are. If we could get to that, we would know what it would be, to have an experience of liberated consciousness. How do we get to that? That is what we call the science of awakening.
There are factors that put us into our current state and factors which can liberate us from this state. There are a lot of ways that we talk about in many different lectures: “How do we awaken? How do we transform ourselves?” In two prior lectures that were part of this series, we talked about the transformation of impressions, we talked about self-observation. Where the word mindfulness is becoming quite popular to that, and that is good, it is very good; we need that, we need to become mindful; we need to learn how to be present from moment to moment.
This is a foundational level of teaching - mindfulness. You can't skip it, but it also is foundational. By this I am saying that only using mindfulness as the only means to an end is very limited. To be very mindful of your life is a starting point, but you must also have a direction, a path to change yourself. Mindfulness itself will give you the facts, will give you some reality, and also train your consciousness, train yourself to be able to be present, because without mindfulness we are just sleep, we are not paying attention. However, it is not enough to become mindful that we are in the labyrinth of the mind. We must also know how to liberate ourselves from that labyrinth.
It is a very common experience of reflecting on the last five or ten years, and the experience arrives with the statement: “I can't believe how fast the time is gone by.” What is that? What does that mean? What is the source of that? “I can't believe how fast this time has gone by, I can't believe that was ten years ago…” And then unfortunately that experience repeats itself and it is: “I can't believe that was twenty years ago. I can't believe that was thirty years ago.” That is not because time is going faster, it is because our mind is becoming more mechanized, it is because we are finding ourselves with less perception, we are less mindful. As our life becomes more and more mechanized, we become more and more asleep, and the routine just repeats itself, and it feels like it repeats itself faster and faster and faster and faster. And it is almost as if time is speeding up the most when we want to slow down the most. When you are young, you cannot wait to get older, and when you are old, you wish you were so much younger.
Such experience is the outcome of not being mindful, not being present, not being aware, not being here and now, and always waiting for the next thing. Another experience is always waiting for the next thing, that could be the next project at work to complete, another deadline, working hard to achieve the next level of success, wealth, or respect. Because we are fascinated with that, because we want to prove ourselves, or because we want to prove something to the boss, or because we want to prove something to our family, we want to achieve, achieve, achieve… and waiting for the next thing, and next thing, and next thing. We might climb to the top of that ladder, but then we have that feeling, “Where did all time go?” You weren't present, you were never present, you were always waiting for the future. That is what it is.
When we get in the car and we can't wait to be out of the car, we want to get to our destination; we get to the destination, well what does the program in our mind say? “I can't wait for the next thing.” We have plethora of entertainment, we just put ourselves in front of the screen, and then the show ends. “I can't wait for the next one.” Weekend ends. “I can't wait for the next weekend.” Vacation ends. “Oh, I can't believe vacation is over already. I can't wait for the next one.” There is the poison in there; there is a disease in there. It is our disease: we are not being present; we are losing out on our life. Why?
We know that we might identify with this, and see that it is very true, but it is so easy to get lost and just return to waiting for the next thing; it is because we are fascinated with something; fascinated with that next step, goal, accomplishment, etc. Like I said, that fascination may be because we want to prove something to ourselves, or because we want more money or something. There is something else that is driving us. We are fascinated with whatever that drive is. We don't reflect and look: “Well, if I continue to follow this drive - the last time I completed something, it didn't make me happy. I got some kind of contentment, but it went away.” We never reflect on that, we just repeat it, and we go on into our grave. It is not to say that you need to abandon everything, but we need to know why we are doing what we are doing. Right? Because sometimes the first reaction to the statements that I am making is: “Well then, I should try to achieve anything, I should just abandon everything. I shouldn't have a career and I shouldn't do this, I shouldn't do that.” That is not understanding, that is just reacting the opposite way. That is mechanicity. Instead of going this way, you just revert and turn away. You don't actually understand why you are driven to do the things that you do every day.
If you don't go into that, you are not liberating yourself from your own mechanicity. And it is very, very subtle, and it is difficult. It is wrong to simply say: “Well, I shouldn't be doing that, some negative thing, but I see myself doing that anyway…”, and then you recriminate yourself for doing it: “It is worthless, hopeless, the path of awakening consciousness is too hard!” All of that is an evasion from actually understanding your inner process. If you find yourself doing it (something negative), don't recriminate yourself, don't justify it, don't repress it, don't hide from it, don't ignore it - contemplate, reflect. Reflect.
Reflection - what is that? I see my reflection in a mirror, it is a phenomenon of luminosity, it is a phenomenon of light, and internally, there is something very similar. Like I said before - the Microcosmos and Macrocosmos. There is a capacity for us to reflect the light within ourselves, to see ourselves, that is how you get to know yourself. You get to know yourself, then you can liberate yourself from those laws, psychological laws.
How to Perform Our Cosmic Duty
There is something called our cosmic duty, which has this very esoteric sounding word, the Being-Partkdolg-Duty. It means our cosmic duty. What are we here for? What are we here to do? I can tell you, you are not here to just make money. I am telling you, you are not here just to experience every possible sensation that you can, as if to say “I am just going to do everything I possibly can, I am going to experience everything and then I will die.” If that suits you, I am not going to say that you are not going to do it, but I am saying that is not your cosmic duty.
Our cosmic duty is to return with consciousness back to those three laws, back to that one law. First is from 48 to 24, then from 24 to 12, from 12 to six, from six to three. That is the work of self-realization, that is our cosmic duty - to know ourselves.
We relate that duty with how we practically experience from moment to moment and again, in previous lectures we talked about what we called our Three Brains or three nervous systems: intellectual, emotional, and motor-instinctive-sexual brains. The word brain sounds weird to people, but the brain is just a nervous system. So we relate to the world in intellectual ways, we have written here:
“Do not allow intellectual concepts to pass through our mind in a mechanical manner; in other words, we become cognizant of all the intellectual data that come to the mind. How do we become cognizant of that data? It is done by means of Meditation. So, if we read a book, we should meditate on it, try to comprehend it.”
We have bad habit related to our intellectual center: we think and think and think, we worry; there is a word, rumination. The word rumination has a relationship with chewing on something, like a cow ruminates the cud that it eats, it just goes around and around and around and around. Our mind ruminates, our intellectual center ruminates, we don't know how to handle our thoughts, we don't know how to put that down sometimes, especially if you lay your head on the pillow, what happens? The mind starts to think and you cannot stop thinking, we often don't have the capacity to make it stop, it is acting mechanically.
Likewise, we have all these impressions, all this information, we are in the world, an era of information, instantaneous information on just about anything. We need to become cognizant of all the things that we are taking in. If it is not conscious then it just kind of being randomly deposited into our subconsciousness in a disorderly fashion. If we are trying to change yourselves, if we are trying to achieve a spiritual work, we need to do more than just haphazardly read things. Look here, read there, etc. You can get somewhere by doing that, but if you are serious, you have to start to meditate. You have to actually study, you have to actually put work in and understand the things that you are putting into your intellect. If you leave things in the intellect, you forget them. They don't become a part of your Soul, they don't become conscious. So have to make sure that we are using our intellectual center appropriately. Don't waste energy through the intellect. There is a lot of ways we can waste energy through the intellect: you come up with gossip, we can think about things that we know we shouldn't really be thinking about, we shouldn't be making some assumption about another, it is sort of we don't know if it is true or not, but we are kind of creating stories and create a lot of problems. That is an abuse of the intellectual center. It is also abuse of the emotional center, because the emotion wants to feel that - feel the gossip and the drama, it is fascinated with it.
We also have the emotional center, and the advice here is:
“We must become cognizant of all the activities of our Emotional Center. It is unfortunate to see how people move under the impulse of emotions, in a completely mechanical manner, without any control whatsoever. So, we must become self-cognizant of all emotions.”
We can easily see the emotional state of other people many times, easy to see someone in a very grumpy mood, but we have a lot of difficulties noticing that within ourselves. A way that we can do that is when we notice that somebody else is acting through an emotional impulse, which is negative, we should remind ourselves - I might be in that mood right now too, especially if you find yourself annoyed with someone else. Mechanically we want to just see that other person as being a problem for us. We fail to want to understand the question “what is it about me that has this resistance, or this agitation that is in within me.” That agitation within you, no one gave it to you. The other person is the other person. They can be polite, or they can be unpolite, or they can be in a bad mood. But fundamentally no one can give you emotions. When someone else is being in a bad mood, it doesn't mean you should feel agitated or feel hatred or jealous, whatever that emotion is. We naively think they gave it to us: “Well, they were acting like that, I am justified.” Sure, you can justify your emotions, but you will not understand them if you justify them. If you are happy with where you are at emotionally, then you can justify them or you can ignore them. If you want to change, you have to look how you mechanically react to the world. You can't just say: “Well, he or she did this to me.” That is another way of saying: “I am justified to feel this way.” That is not the point. The point of our cosmic duty isn't to at the end of the day to say: “I was justified in everything I did.” That is not the point. It is about why did I do it? Why did I have that impulse? Not even why did I go and do something physically. Why did I have that impulse even emotionally, which I, perhaps, hide from everyone else?
You will not hide it from your inner intelligence; your inner Divine Mother of course knows. She is the only reason you can manifest thoughts in the first place.
Emotions - we experience a lot of negative emotions. Many people would agree that something like anger, hatred, jealousy, are negative emotions. There are also a lot of emotions, which we may not perceive as being negative, but which are very mechanical within us. Such things related to pride, mystical pride, being proud of not being proud; they can kind of involve and revolve into itself. With emotional center, and the intellectual center, it is not always feeling that negativity. If we know we don't want to be a hateful person, but we find ourselves with hate, then is easy to say: “Well, I want to understand that,” but there are many other times, when it is much more difficult to see what is wrong, because we don't have a problem with the way that we are acting. We are just totally ignorant to what is really going on. We don't feel bad about the way we are, because we don't see how it comes around back and hurts us; we see it something as good, but actually it is bad. That is the one that is much more difficult to understand. It is easier to understand the things that we know we did wrong: “I know I shouldn't done that, but I keep doing it. I just want to know why. I am going to meditate and reflect on that and pray to my inner Divine Mother, I am going to seek understanding.” But then there is another level, which is much more difficult, which is: you didn't realize you are doing anything wrong. Why do we not realize? The connection that was further away from our inner intelligence – the action arrived from a more mechanical area of our psyche. A psychological space of more laws and more mechanicity. The light that directs understanding is even further away and it is harder to understand it; it is much deeper. Those are the ones that really keep us suffering.
The first type, where you know you are doing something wrong and you want not stop doing it - a lot of people can figure out some of that stuff just by talking it out. Talking through it, having someone to listen to you. That is fine, there is nothing wrong with that, but there is a very limited area to that, because the next layer is: you don't even suspect that your actions are causing a problem for you, you just don't see it, you can't see the way you behaved caused the reaction at someone else, which now caused them to act in a way that is always getting in your way. There is a real limitation to talking psychotherapy. Therapy can help with lots of problems in life, and is very beneficial for those who use it, but there is not much it can do to cause the awakening of consciousness and the self-realization of the being.
The only way to get to into deep levels of understanding is through meditation. You are just not going to see it, unless you cultivate or access a special quality of mind. Unless you get access to a special quality of mind, you will not be able to get to that mechanicity with consciousness. That is what meditation is for. We have many lectures on meditation, and really go into that in depth. With meditation you are settling the physical body, which is our 48 laws, you are settling the emotions of 24 laws, you are settling the intellect of 12 laws. So all of these things, you think like pools of water that are ravenous and they finally settle down. There is no more energy in the physical body that is in movement, very subtle, very slight activity of the body. Then the emotional center - perfectly peaceful. Intellectual center - perfectly peaceful.
What is left? You have the six laws, your consciousness, which now that everything is very calm and relaxed, and you are still awake, now you can see. But to do that takes practice, you have to actually sit down and learn how to meditate, it doesn't happen just because you want it to happen.
Then we have three more centers - motor, instinctual and sexual centers.
“We must become self-cognizant of all our activities, of all our movements, of all our habits, and not do anything in a mechanical manner.”
So if you read that sentence: "Do not do anything in a mechanical manner.” Very challenging actually. Do you know how you brush your teeth? What are you doing when you are brushing your teeth? Are you doing that mechanically? Can you do that every day with total mindfulness? Every action, every step that you take, can you do with a total mindfulness? We should endeavor to do it. It is incredibly transformative. There is psychology even in our motor center, even in our instinctual center, there is something that we relate to; the way that we even move has something related to our psyche, something related to our soul.
For example, what would it mean if someone is tapping their foot? It means that they are probably agitated. What does it mean if I am tapping my foot? It probably means that I am agitated. What does it mean if I am picking up my nails, or what if I am granting my teeth? How do you know you are doing those things, if you are not even mindful? Become mindful and then you notice that you are doing something like you are ringing your hands. Why am I doing that? If you are present in a moment, you have that little thread that can pull you into the subconscious element that was active. But if you just ignore your motor center and you don't look at the way you are behaving, that moment, it gets lost in the subconsciousness. So you can be at your desk at work, or you could be in the line at the super-market, or you could be driving your car, or walking down the street, and you notice something about the way that you are moving and that is a clue into your state of mind.
“We must become lords of our instincts and subdue them. We must comprehend them in-depth, integrally. We must transmute the sexual energy. We transmute our creative energies by means of certain alchemical procedures.”
Our instincts are something that we also work with. That type of work is very difficult to talk about. We reflect on our instincts while in meditation, on how our instincts are working, and also related to how are we instinctually responding. There is not a lot of intellect or even emotion in such moments. It is a very blunt reaction, such as a “fight or flight” response. If you are in a car accident or something sudden happens, you don't think about it, you don't have feelings about it, you just instinctually respond. There are a lot of types of instinctual fear, that when you experience, you have to work with as well. Instinctual fears related to death, security, and the end of the ego.
Finally, with the sexual center, we must transmute the sexual energy. “We transmute creative energies by certain alchemical procedures.” Sexual energy is related with one of the sephiroth at the bottom, related to 48 laws, related in Kabbalah to Yesod, which is the word that means “foundation.” This is the foundation stone. This is the stone that people stumble over.
Sexual energy is the 48 laws deposited within ourselves that has a direct connection to our spiritual energy. People don't want to hear this, but this is the truth. Sexual energy is very creative. It is where we have a moment to act as a creator. Our root creativity comes from our sexual energy, but we don't know how to use it. We just envelope it, or it is enveloped in all our desires, and we just express it haphazardly. We feel an agitation sexually, and we wish want to get rid of agitation. So, we find someone else or something else to get rid of the agitation by getting rid of the energy.
Again, this is not something to believe in or to reject. I am telling you, if you work with that energy, it will transform you, and it will transform your mind. It is a direct connection to that intelligence. It is a very type of blunt and blind energy. It will express itself and go out in whatever is the path of least resistance. So instinctually and sexually we find ourselves directly attracted towards certain things, or we have very heavy influences sexually, in our psychology to do certain things. If we do that, if we just follow that, we are subservient to it, we are blind to it, we are asleep to it. But inside that sexual energy, the reason why it is so strong, because it has a direct connection towards the spirit, of our spiritual energy.
We have to know how to liberate the energy, we have to practice sexual transmutation. We have a lot of lectures about that. It is not something that we believe in, it is something that you do. That is why we call it a science. There is as a science to it in the sense that: if you place certian factors in motion, it will transform your state of mind. You can take the experiment for yourself. We know that our sexual energy has certain glands related to it; we know that those glands are related to other glands. If we learn how to transform that energy, not just to waste it randomly, then our psyche will transform. The problem is, a lot of people don't know how to do that, or they have a lot of misinformation. If we just expel that energy whenever we have agitation, you are wasting the greatest resource you have for spiritual experience, because sexual energy is the root fuel.
It is the same way that oil is the root fuel for gasoline. You have to go to an oil refinery and you refine it. Refine it into gasoline, kerosene, different types of chains of molecules form in the refinement process which give it the ability to power machines. Same way sexual energy has the power of our spiritual experience in it. And that is why you will find all that - the sexual type of protocol in religions. The problem is - they don't know what they are doing, they forgot about it, they do not have, really, any idea what they are doing. That is why there is also a lot of problems in traditional religions, when it comes to sex. That is a topic of another lecture that we will have probably next time.
Now, there are two more centers. We talked about intellectual, emotional and motor-instinctive-sexual center. The intellectual and emotional centers have a superior component to them. We have the superior intellectual center and the superior emotional center. These are centers which our ego can never have access to; only our liberated consciousness. If we have a dream that is very profound and we know it means something. It is like a mystical experience. That would be an experience related to our superior emotional center. The superior intellectual center is a type of objective reasoning that is not influenced by our subjective ego. It is very highly mystical and profound and direct. We can have some experiences with those centers if we are living correctly, if we are not wasting our energy, if we are not indulging in our ego all the time, if we are meditating. We can have some activity related to 24 laws, and to the 12, because superior emotions are related to 24 laws and superior intellectual is related to 12 laws. We can have those experiences. Those are experiences of that Divine Intelligence coming down into our centers, and in such times we can have a really profound, true experience.
However if we are sitting in our ego all day, and we are asleep, and we just are doing whatever we want, and we are just acting mechanically, we won't have the ability to have those experiences.
The quote here from Samael Aun Weor is:
“The “I” exerts control upon the five inferior centers of the human machine; these five centers are the: intellectual, emotional, motor (movement), instinctual, and sexual. The “I” cannot control the two superior centers of the human being, which are the Superior Mind and Superior Emotion. If we want to dissolve the “I,” we must study it through the inferior centers; we need comprehension.”
That is what I have been speaking about: studying ourselves, acquiring comprehension. So normally we are vibrating with at least 96 laws, which is that inferior world. Very rarely we are even experiencing the 48, the 24 or the 12, but we can and we should, that is our right, that is our cosmic duty as well.
If we can learn how to live in balance here physically, meaning: we are not becoming identified with this world, we stop wasting energy related to this inferior world. So by not being identified, meaning: you are becoming present and you are becoming you are acknowledging your own mechanicity, how you are repeating things and you are seeing the patterns in your own life, how they are repeating. Patterns year by year, patterns day by day. Look at your day: that day is your life in miniature. So you look at your day, “Did I practice something spiritual today? Did I remember my dream, the dream I had last night? How do I act today?” Take that day and extend it, that is what your life will be if you don't change. We want to change, I mean, hopefully we want to change, because day by day we are living in haziness and fog.
If we do that change and we become balanced, so that we can now learn how to solve the equation of this physical life, meaning we have a profession, or we have some way of having money, we have roof over our head. If we are not constantly assaulted by so many problems, that we can't even get our feet on the ground, and maintain consciousness, how can we move forward spirituality? We have to learn how to put our feet on the ground, and not be overtaken by all the waves, the temptations and tempests of life.
What often happens is something stressful occurs and we are totally identified with our latest problem, and then some other thing happens, and we are totally identified with that next problem. Like I said, then, the year goes on, and the decade goes onward, and there is a tendency to be totally identified with the problem of the moment, thus we are not mindful what our cosmic scenario is. But if you become mindful, you learn how to take on all these problems in the physical world, you become able to keep your feet on the ground, and keep your psychological balance, then you have the energy to devote time to spiritual practices.
If you have a situation in your life where you have zero time to do spiritual practices, that says something. In such a case, you need to work on re-orientating your life. You need to work psychologically to orientate your life, so that you have opportunity and time to practice. Because then when you are able to practice, you go into more levels. However, if you have a lifestyle constantly so many problems, you will have to work very hard, very hard, it is not simple. It does not take one day or one week. You may have to work and orientate your life constantly, always, year after year so that you have more and more time to devote yourself to practices that will liberate your consciousness. You must use your life as a great teacher. You must view your experience as your state of mind.
What turns out to be the case, is that part of us wants that, but other part of us just want to live exactly how we are. We are very fascinated with our life the way it is, the story that we have in our mind. We are all a little protagonist in the big drama. We like to live that drama as a type of internal movie. We don't want to just get rid of it. We hold too much of ourselves in this drama. If the drama didn't happen in life who would I be? If I don’t have someone to complain about - what would I do with myself? It sounds ridiculous, but if you reflect, it wouldn't sound so ridiculous. Having all the problems in life is a convenient way to never be present with yourself. If you are constantly having dramas in life, how convenient it is, because you never have time to look at yourself, because really, subconsciously, some of us have that factor of, “I don't want to know who I am.” You may say that you want to, but there is another factor within yourself, which is completely afraid to know that. “I don't want to know if I can achieve liberation, because what if I can’t?” That is a reality that is too scary for some to hold. You might find this. “I don't want to open up that door.” So even though the facade is “I am so spiritual,” the reality can be too terrifying to actually look into it. But of course, that seals the fate, because we don't look into it - what happened yesterday? The same thing over and over.
There is a lot of factors here, but in synthesis, you need to learn to meditate, you need to transform the impressions , you need to have spiritual practice. Yes – but there are the obstacles which prevent us from just clicking our heals and snapping our fingers to re-orientate our lives, and living the best way, to happily start ascending through these higher levels of consciousness. The reason is because we have all this complication, mechanicity, in our psyche. We have one impulse to be spiritual, but we don't realize that there is another impulse that is very fascinated with living the way that “I” want to today. “I want to gossip about that other person when they do something, because they always are doing that stupid thing. It feels really good to gossip about. Why shouldn't I do that? I want to do that and it feels good.” This is the rhetoric of the ego. In that moment, it feels really good, it (the ego) just to continue the mechanicity, but we do that our own peril, and we can only do that if we ignore what the consequence is. Because later we feel empty inside, we have no spiritual experience, we feel lost, and we want wonder why. We beg and we plead and we pray, “Show me something.” We ignore our prior decisions to act within our ego saying, "Oh, I want to do what I want to do." That is a waste of energy.
When you waste your energy, God says: “There is no energy here, I can't be experienced inside of you. There is no energy in you. You wasted. It is gone. I gave you the energy and you wasted it.”
God comes into us through fluidic and molecular processes of our nervous system. Our cerebral-spinal fluid our whole brain in spinal column is floating in the cerebral-spinal fluid. That fluidity has these properties, which, in this doctrine, we know how to work with, to work with the energy, to work with transmutation. We have this molecular and fluid aspect of our nervous system that can bring the experience of God into the nervous system, but when you waste your energy however you want, acting egotistically, it is not there. This is why we say that this is more than just a belief. Like, “You need to believe in doing this, you need to believe in doing that.” Instead, look at the facts and consequences; you need to use your energy correctly.
To conclude, we can sat the following things about our cosmic duty: The cost of self-realization is life itself. We have to sit with ourselves and decide what do I want out of my own experience, out of my own life. What do I want? Do I want to know myself? Do I want to have that experience? It costs life itself. The cost of self-realization is life itself. That is why we are here.
As a spirit, we descended, as a soul we descended, put in to this world to know ourselves, to self-realize ourselves. It cost life itself. That is the reason why we are here.
Secondly, superior laws overcome inferior laws through sacrifice. In the previous lecture we talked about sacrifice and transformation. We sacrifice that desire of the ego (to want to do something, we know we really shouldn't), we sacrifice that and we liberate energy. We liberate energy, we have more activity in those superior worlds, we experience new things. You can not acquire a new state of consciousness without leaving behind some other state of consciousness. Our mind is hugely complicated thing. So certain parts of our mind, if you want that part of your mind to be more liberated, there is a process of death, there is a process of letting go.
Finally, perform your sacred duty, because that is the point. What that means in general is to transform the energy and to know yourself, and to know your Inner Being, but for every one of us individually that duty is different. Everybody has their own qualities and that duty, when you are performing your sacred duty, you become a very brilliant individual, who shines with beautiful qualities. A person, who does what they do, and you can see that what is what they do. Great artists, great geniuses, spiritual giants, you can see flashes of thier beauty and glory. No one else did what that person did, they didn't copycat, they didn't try to be someone else, they didn't try to impress; they did what they did. So we have that capacity, but if we want to come and contact with that, we have to perform our sacred duty.
Questions and Answers:
Audience: You talked about the being present in the moment. We get lost in the moment a lot, this is fantasy of the moment. So it is one thing being in the moment, with your senses all around you. When watching TV or a movie or when watching the dishes, we may not be in a negative mood but we are just lost in the moment.
Instructor: So mindfulness is something that is tricky. We are in the physical body, we are doing something here in the physical body, we should be mindful sensually of our senses, of our experience, but when we go to meditate, we rest the physical body and we actually just want to forget about it, become mindful of our own interior process. So mindfulness is just a capacity to not forget what you don't want to forget. When we are in the physical body, we don't want to forget that we are here and now, because when you are going to meditation you can actually become extremely mindful of a stream of thought, of an experience and you are following very acutely, with a lot of clarity, and nothing is distracting you. But you have no mindfulness of your physical body, it is gone. You don't want to put any of your mindfulness in the physical body, you want it totally in your mind.
Now, when you are mindful of yourself and then you start to daydream, you are not being mindful of your physical body, you are just becoming fascinated. You did not intend to have the daydream, the daydream starts happening. Why does the daydream happen? Why does it happen? Why do you start daydreaming about something? I have used this word multiple times in this lecture – fascination. The very simple level of being fascinated towards the shiny object, but the fascination is conceptual or emotional. There is something about that concept or that emotion, which fascinates us, so it pulls our attention or our mindfulness away, and then we just start this mechanical process of daydreaming about that thing. And sometimes the daydream isn't even pleasant. It is one thing if the daydream is pleasant, but how strange it is to have a daydream of anxiety or fear? We daydream about things that are extremely unpleasant, things that we are worried about, people that are worried about; it is not even fun, it is not even nice.
If you are really worried about something, your heart goes there. The fact is, we need to become mindful of that process. When you are doing the dishes, we say you should be mindful just in that moment doing the dishes, but then your mind or your heart wanders towards that person you are worried about. But don't recriminate yourself and just say: “Well, that is bad, I should be mindful.” There is a piece of something there, you need to acknowledge: “I am still worried about that person, I need to figure out why I can't just put it down.”
Audience: We have a lot of fantasy animation and comic book movies these days. It seems like everyone is fascinated with these characters.
Instructor: In response to all of the media that we have today, yes, it seems everybody is fascinated with certain characters. There is a lot of emotional investment. It used to be that creative expression was done teach us something. The old dramas in the ancient cultures, they were trying to teach cosmic truths in drama, in a play, in an opera, in a ritual. And this was very fertile and beautiful way of teaching the Soul cosmic truths. We rarely ever see of that in a modern media, we just see things that are fun. I don't want to say we should not have fun, that is not really what I want to say, but things that are just fascinating to us, but they do not provide any lasting contentment. They are just things that can distract us from our moment.
Reflect on this, if you are living in Nirvana or living in the superior worlds, you think that is a boring experience? Or is it full of beauty? Why are we bored with our experience, and why do we have an incessant desire to distract ourselves from our experience? It is not so much about trying to just not become fascinated with all of our media. That is a regressive method. It will not work. We need comprehension and profound reflection. It is better to look at the impulse, “Why do I have such impulse just to distract myself repeatedly? Over and over again. What is going on in my life that this is the best thing I want to do for myself? Is it just to distract myself all the time.” But there is a lot of people, who get very involved in this type of media, or sports, or anything else. It provides a distraction. Everybody has their own impulses that they want to follow. These teachings are for those who want to liberate themselves, which is not a very popular statement all the time.
Audience: Can you talk a little bit about some types of modern media that seem to have a spiritual message?
Instructor: Well, there is still reverberations or echos of cosmic principles in our fairy tales. Today we are creating, or re-creating, a modern mythos based on superhero characters. The original Super-Man is the man who is superior, which is the enlightened man – the Buddha, the Christ man, but we take that, which is an authentic cosmic principle and we distill it and add filler. We modify it again and again, and then we are left with something that part of ourselves or our psyche still identifies with, that drama, the drama of the hero, the drama of the redemption. Our psyche responds to that. However, the message is distorted. A whole a bunch of violence, or, just ways of behaving, engaging in lust, anger, jealously, violence, etc., that will not actually help someone achieve spiritual experience. We are attracted to these stories because the drama of the hero failing, and then redeeming themselves, that is a cosmic drama. That is the drama of the intelligence going down into the matter, becoming brutalized, becoming distorted and being trapped in hell, and then liberating itself. When we see that, some representation of that in media, we respond to that, but there are beautiful ways of presenting it, and there are ways that are distorted to make money. The story is co-opted to market things. So you have this beautiful story that has some kind of principle, but then we market all these things, and then we fall in love with these characters, and we are replacing these divine principles with stuffed animals and logos on our t-shirt. It is our soul yearning for that some kind of cosmic connection, some grand story, but we don't know where the real story is.
They may be certain principles, but they are distorted, it has been reconfigured and distorted repeated, and there are still some basic principles, but there is often no good content for us spiritually. It is just something for our ego to munch on, to be distracted. Something like Star Wars, that came out thirty years ago, that actually hit upon things very profound in people, because intentionally that was based on Joseph Campbell's work, and Joseph Campbell had some connection to Krishnamurti. Campbell’s basic idea of the the drama of the hero: the hero experiences the inferior world, the middle world, and superior world, and George Lucas kind of took some of those things and he put it all together and it connected with people. I am not saying there is anything good or bad, I am not making a comment whether it is good or bad, I am just saying that in modern media, we have stories that connect with us because our soul wishes to reunite with our Being. We must discern. “I have this connection with a story; I am identified with it – but is it healthy for me? Is the content really healthy for me?” Just like modern foods, like when an apple looks beautiful, but you bite into it, and it tastes like cardboard. Where is the actual taste? It is gone. So modern media can be like that; it can actually be very beautiful, but the taste is not. And there might be some things here and there, that might be a positive principle somewhere, but generally speaking, it is very far a few between.
Audience: Marketing is a very powerful influence in us.
Instructor: We definitely can say it is very obvious that marketing is prevalent and it works. It works very well, and all of our media is marketed to ourselves. So we actually have to work very hard to know what are the impulses to buy something. Ask yourself, why do I want that thing? Why is it good for me to get that? Why should I spend more money on that again? I am getting messages that say that I should buy all the time, but if we naïvely just follow it, we really think: “If I get all those things I will be happy. That other person got the new phone…” If we don’t question ourselves then we just follow that kind of thing.
Certainly, it has been proven, we know that when PR and marketing started to evolve, it evolved straight from psychoanalytic theory of the drives of sexuality, and the need for more things, and there was a very conscious activity of people, who were producing things: “Well, if we sell them it like this, we can actually make them buy more things.” And it works; there is no question, it works. It is actually the most widely used form of psychology today, to make us buy things and to market things. That shows you, that is an evidence of how sick our society is, because we could be studying the mind to improve ourselves. We have that as a facade, but really, the real application of the psychoanalytic theory (the most prevalent application) was to help our economy grow, to produce more widgets, or something like that. But that is not what our duty is. Our duty isn't to help this society make more things and by more things. Let us be careful in our statements, because inevitably some of us are going to find ourselves in the fields of marketing or advertising, or, you are working at some place that is making some product and your job is dependent on selling that product or something like that. Let everyone, with consciousness, discern what is useful and what is not. Each of us must decide on our own what is the right thing to do. That is the whole point, don't just listen to me and say “…because so-and-so says I shouldn't do this and I should do that, I have to stop”, because then you just mechanize that in your mind and then become a new robot. That is not the point. The point is you have to question, analyze and comprehend yourself. But yes, if you are staring at a screen a lot, you have been marketed too a lot; become conscious of it, become aware of it. Then make the choice, moment by moment, on how to handle your mind. Liberate the intelligence from the mechanicity.
