Our previous lecture was on the topic of Bodhichitta. In that lecture we talked about various levels of Bodhichitta, the different ways to understand it.
At the most foundational level, Bodhichitta is associated with all the positive qualities of compassion and love. There are many teachings on how to generate a loving, compassionate attitude for the benefit of all beings. From that context we talked about The Four Immeasurables:
- Immeasurable Joy
- Immeasurable Love
- Immeasurable Compassion
- Immeasurable Equanimity
Each have associated meditation practices that are traditionally taught in relationship to those qualities. They are also related to meditative states of absorption if you are studying from those traditions.
Next, we spoke about another aspect of Bodhichitta, which is related to the wisdom of comprehending reality, as it actually is: Emptiness, direct perception, or cognizance of how things actually are.
Emptiness transcends the world of dualism and dialectics that we live in. It is beyond the machinery of relativity, as we call it. Authentic Emptiness is beyond the nominal ‘void’ of existence that someone can experience in deep samadhi, and beyond the Emptiness itself, is something called ‘Tality’ - which merges both the relative and the absolute.
That is a type of profound wisdom that transforms perception.
There is a third aspect of Bodhichitta which is traditionally secret, and not taught openly. That is the aspect related to our vital and sexual energies. Bodhichitta precisely refers to your sexual energy in relationship to tantra.
Only when you know all those aspects of Bodhichitta, can you be working with it completely, and fully developing it. In a foundational sense, in order to develop Bodhichitta you need to no longer waste your energy. Particularly and most importantly, your sexual energy. As it is more traditionally laid out, the most secret teaching would be showing you how to work with that energy, not just conserving it, but intelligently knowing how to work with that energy. All of this is related to Bodhichitta.
Today we are going to look in to developing Bodhichitta in relationship to the destruction of our ego. Samael Aun Weor states that “the degree that we de-egotize our self is the degree that Bodhichitta is developed in our soul.”
From the traditional (common) perspective of Bodhichitta, one works to cultivate or develop qualities of compassion. We see it is certainly very useful and beautiful.
From another perspective, which is more profound, we already have these qualities in potential. Such qualities blossom out of our soul if we know how to get rid of all those factors which are preventing their growth.
In potential, we have all the qualities of Bodhichitta ready to completely flourish. In the same way, if you have a plot of ground, and remove all the weeds, the poisons or bad elements of the soil, and replace them with good nutrients, the right conditions, the right qualities or type of food, those seeds that are planted will grow.
All the potential of that flower, vegetable, tree, or whatever it may be, is inside of a seed. It just needs the proper conditions in order to grow. In our perspective, when we talk about the Gnostic Psychological Work, it is a work of psychological death. Through such death, we make the room, and set up the conditions, for our consciousness to grow.
Bodhichitta is the objective, superlative, consciousness developed. Today, we of course have consciousness, but what we have is a seed of consciousness called the Essence. We do not have the developed consciousness. In order to develop our consciousness, it is imperative that we work on our ego, work on our psychology.
The Auric Embryo
Another term for Bodhichitta that Samael Aun Weor uses is the Auric Embryo. The Auric Embryo begins to develop from the Essence.
In the Pistis Sophia Unveiled, Samael Aun Weor writes,
“It is necessary for the Bodhichitta, which means the auric embryo, the awakened Consciousness, to fall into the Illuminated Void.” Pistis Sophia Unveiled
He is equating these two terms, bodhichitta and auric embryo.
The Auric Embryo (Bodhichitta) is the objective, awakened consciousness.
The Auric Embryo (Bodhichitta) is imperishable, immortal, eternal.
The Auric Embryo (Bodhichitta) is the result of terrible ordeals and conscious works.
The Auric Embryo (Bodhichitta) is the developed Essence which descended from Geburah.
The Auric Embryo (Bodhichitta) is the lotus flower upon which the Bodhisattva-Christ develops.
The Solar Bodies without the Auric Embryo (Bodhichitta) completely developed is an absurdity.
We, in this tradition, talk about the direct path. It is a very radical path. In order to be at that level, to have that choice and take the direct path, you first need to develop Bodhichitta, the Auric Embryo. The Solar Bodies without the Auric Embryo (Bodhichitta) completely developed is an absurdity.
The word Auric should remind us of Aur in its root. Aur means light. The Auric Embryo is an Embryo of Light. It is also called the Auric Flower. Samael Aun Weor referenced this in The Mystery of the Golden Flower. The golden blossom or flower comes from the essence developed from the same seminal pearl that blossoms into the Auric Flower. The Auric Embryo is the light which develops into Bodhichitta. We can say that they are the same thing. If we are developing the Auric Embryo, we are developing the Bodhichitta. That light is the light that is emanating from the Absolute.
When the light of our consciousness emerges, it emerges all the way from the Absolute itself. When we talk about where have we come from, and we go beyond the body, beyond the mind, beyond sentiment, beyond reasoning, beyond willpower… where is that seed, the Essence emanating from?
In many other lectures we have talked about how the light emerges from the unknown darkness, a type of uncreated light, what we consider a chaos because we do not know how to comprehend it nor perceive it. The light emanates from ‘there’. That is what we call the Ray of Creation. Through a process, which we have talked about in other lectures, that stream of light eventually descends, and we get a physical body, emotional body, mental body, with all these capacities. Yet, at our core we are a spiritual principle we call the Essence.
When we are developing Bodhichitta, we are developing the light of what we really are. It is our innermost Essence. When we develop that, we are transforming something about ourselves, which can never be taken away. Even if a person goes through the depths of hell, the Auric Embryo is never destroyed.
If you develop the Solar Bodies, it does not mean you have the Auric Embryo developed. These are two separate things. The Solar Bodies can still be created and destroyed. The Auric Embryo is something else.
We need to understand that when we are developing the superior existential bodies (Solar Bodies) related to the superior worlds, giving us capacity to perceive, move through other dimensions of space lucidly, they mean nothing if we do not have the Bodhichitta developed.
Samael Aun Weor has a quote:
The one who does not possess the Bodhichitta, even when he has created the superior existential bodies of the being, is still unconscious and absurd.
The Pistis Sophia Unveiled
The inevitable outcome of not having Bodhichitta, is a cosmic abortion, a monad that has a double center of gravity. So, we build the Solar Bodies to completely develop our purpose and reason for being, but they are not the end goal. They are just vehicles.
When we say The Machinery of the Soul, realize that even the Solar Bodies, which exist under the world of six laws, are something that are mechanical in relationship to the Absolute. Samael Aun Weor states that mechanicity begins in the world of six laws. The Solar Bodies, Solar Casual, Solar Mental, Solar Astral body, have at least six laws or more related to it. Even if those bodies are solar, there is something there that is still mechanical.
The marvelous reflex of the sexual energy in a form of a luminous whirlwind, like when a ray of light returns after crashing against a wall, comes to crystallize within ourselves as the Auric Flower. Thus, this establishes within the neophyte a permanent center of Consciousness.
Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah
The Auric Embryo is the ray of light that connects us all the way to the Absolute.
Bodhichitta, or the Auric Embryo, is related to Yesod. It is related to many things, but we always point towards Yesod. Why is that?
That is because this permanent center of consciousness that we develop must strike us, in the same way that ray of light crashes into the wall, in order see and experience that light. In that same way, the ray of creation crashes into us, and we see itself manifest in our three brains, our mind, related to our perceptions.
If I shine a light up into the dark sky, you do not really see the end point, because it just keeps going. There is nothing for that light to reflect back upon. If I take that light and shine it to a wall, normally you would not see the light until it hits the wall. We see the light on the wall because that is where the light crashes into matter.
In the same way as that light, the light of our consciousness comes down into us, and by our experience we know ourselves. The world is constantly coming into us and we are constantly having the capacity to see what is going on. We see our impulses responding in certain way, our mind, our dreams or fantasies, and projections; related to our mind, related to our heart, related to our actions; related to the four ethers in the vital body.
Remember, those superior ethers, the luminous and reflecting ethers is how we see things. Even our physical world comes in through the body, and using those superior ethers we make sense of the world. In the internal worlds we also use those ethers to have lucidity, to illuminate, and reflect those dimensions of space in order to have experiences.
When we know how to work with our energy, we create that point of reflection. If we live mechanically, then there is nothing for the light to reflect off. When we live with a superior discipline, we become that point in space which reflects our inner star. We need to become that: a constant point of reflection.
Today, that star shines down into us, but we have no formation, nothing to reflect that light. The light just diffuses. There is a star in heaven, but no structure here on earth to reflect and illuminate that light. In the same way you can take a stone or gem, polish it and cut it in certain ways, suddenly, that light is so much more beautiful shining through that gem. That is the same thing we need to do with our stone, which our whole soul.
Of course, we always relate the stone to our sexual energy. We must know how to perfect the movement of our sexual energy. It reflects all the light, and superior dimensions of space.
In just one drop of our creative energies we can access the Absolute.
There is so much potential in just one atom of our creative energies. If we knew how to perfectly transform that, we can have an experience in any of the superior worlds. We just do not have that skill. It takes a lot of practice. When we have perfect transmutation of energy then those experiences are naturally simple. The difficulty is knowing how to work with that energy because our mind gets in the way.
We need to become scientific in our work. Surely, when we step into these teachings, we just start learning whatever we are interested in. Some things we learn, some things are over our head and we do not understand. That is all fine, but at some point, if you are serious and want to start to overcome more things in your life, you really need to establish a discipline to a certain degree.
You need logical thought and exact concept.
Many times, we talk about the intellect as something extremely negative. In todays world the intellect that is being used is extremely negative. It is combined skepticism, intellectualism, rationalism and you get very complicated theories that lead nowhere. They cause a lot of problems. You can rationalize and justify all sorts of crimes. There is a lot of terrible, wasteful, intellectual pursuits.
Yet, we are given an intellect for a reason. We need to have conceptual understanding and need to learn how to use concepts to aid ourselves. It is not enough to catch a good vibe from a teaching, or like the charisma of the teacher, or how good we feel when we read a book or listen to a lecture. That is good enough to get more interested, but not good enough to really work on yourself.
When you begin to really work on yourself, you will begin to confront your own misery. You will confront all those things that cause suffering inside of yourself, and it is not pleasant. That ‘good vibe’ will not be there. When you are confronted with a crisis, and you are just looking for a good feeling again, you are not going to progress. People looking for that are going to continue to take little mental vacations from your life.
There is nothing wrong with having a retreat, to work on your problems. You can to use it to help yourself along the path. However, to those who to just take a bunch of spiritual topics randomly, only listening to whatever feels good, and never really integrating the complete teachings into life, such a person will find him or herself exactly where they were before. They will repeat the same things.
Exact Thought and Logical Concept
Meditation must be correct. The mind must be exact. Logical thought and exact concept are needed for the purpose of developing the internal senses absolutely perfectly.
Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony
Clairvoyance demands logical thought and an exact concept. One needs to have perfect mental equilibrium in order to be an exerted clairvoyant.
Samael Aun Weor, Sexology, the Basis of Endocrinology and Criminology
Clairvoyant just means to be able to see in the internal worlds, and have that capacity well developed.
We can find a lot of people who want to have internal experiences, but how many people do we find that want to have logical thought and exact concept as something to strive for? And along with that, perfect mental equilibrium?
These are very demanding studies.
What prevents us from having mental equilibrium is all the continual demands of our consciousness. Life demands a continual response to everything we are experiencing. These are the impressions. The impressions of life.
We do not have the luxury to not respond to any of the impressions. You need to go to work, you need to take care of your children, you need to deal with your boss, you need to get something done in life. So, we can not just avoid everything in life, right? We need to try and transform our impressions.
I think that the transformation of impressions is something difficult to talk about with words. Exactly how do you know how to transform something, and why should we do it?
Let us talk about a few of statements that we can make, related to impressions.
- We must comprehend the necessity of changing. There exists a superior mode of living we have not yet acquired.
- Life is actually our impression of it.
- If impressions are not transformed, the ego continues to develop and cause suffering.
- As the ego is eliminated, bodhichitta develops, consciousness awakens.
- To transform life, the transformation of impressions is essential.
We must comprehend the necessity of changing.
If you are listening to this lecture you have probably accepted that fact. If you do not feel the need to change, then you will never want to transform the impressions. That is first and foremost. There exists a superior motive of living we have not yet acquired.
Number two, as Samael Aun Weor says: life is actually our impression of it.
What we experience is not the thing itself. That is called naïve realism (a philosophical term): to naively accept things exactly how they are perceive them to be. This is how most of us will inhabit this construct by default. Because we are unconscious, when things happen in front of us, we just take it as if it is the totality, and how it appears is what it truly is.
Well, to say that life is just to our impression of it… What does that actually mean? There is something extremely deep there. Samael Aun Weor hints at it, and talks about it in different ways, related to the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, in what is called “Transcendental Idealism.” Before we unwrap that one, we will continue with the subsequent statements.
If impressions are not transformed, the ego continues to develop and cause suffering.
If we do not continually transform the impressions of life, then something is happening in our psyche and we are developing something else. Think about nature. Nature is always growing, developing, and changing. It is never in stasis. The same thing happens with our mind and soul. There is energy always coming in. We are always experiencing, and if we are not transforming that experience, then what is happening? Something else is happening…
That experience is transforming us. Whatever the mechanicity or conditioning of our mind, it is only going to repeat itself. It is going to strengthen itself. We actually develop ego when we are not conscious. Sometimes people have an unclear understanding of where the ego comes from. The ego comes from taking the energy of the world in a way that builds up a residue that is conditioning our consciousness. As we are going through life, in particular those times when we get very emotional, where we feel a lot of psychological energy, and we do not transform those, that psychological energy creates something inside of ourselves. A lot of times we can see that when we have an ordeal or problem, we get very identified, or upset. Later, we try to go back and look at that and we are still very upset about it. There is still something there, like a trauma.
You can go back to your childhood and find stuff that happened a long time ago that you are still dealing with. I was joking with a friend of mine, saying that you spend the last eighty years of your life trying to figure out the first twenty years. Whether you are thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, or eighty… if you do not work on those traumatic experiences, they will still be there with you on your death bed. That is the way our mind works.
It is very complicated because we can begin to forget things. Even though we are conditioned by those factors, we actually forget where that conditioning came from. This is what can tend to happen as well. That is how they get buried deep in our subconscious and our unconscious. So, we are always adding layer after layer of conditioning and mechanicity whenever we are not conscious. Especially when we have an emotional outburst. We can almost guarantee that it is a process of solidifying something very mechanical inside of our self. It is like putting clay into an oven. As if you just took something to make another little vessel, you are taking that heat, that emotion, and you put the consciousness inside there. You just conditioned another part of your consciousness. We should understand that.You should not be afraid of it. Sometimes people hear that, and get very concerned of creating an ego in those moments. You need to observe. Become conscious and see what is happening to your mind.
As I said before, the opposite is: if the ego is eliminated, Bodhichitta is developed and consciousness awakens. Therefore, to transform life, the transformation of impressions is essential.
It takes a great deal of effort to honestly know what the impressions actually are. Yes, we do need to transform them.
From a conceptual standpoint, the qualities of the consciousness are related to all the qualities of the Bodhichitta: Joyfulness, Equanimity, Love, Serenity. If we do not have those factors, we are certainly not inhabiting liberated consciousness. If we are not joyful, if we do not have equanimity, if we do not have that compassion towards others, we are not inhabiting liberated consciousness. We are trapped.
Even if someone goes through a lot of psychological pain, if karma is being applied, perhaps going through an ordeal, there is still an inner equanimity that someone can possess. This is not to say that one is ignoring the issue, or just presenting to smile all the time. There is pain, there is suffering, but there is also an inner light, inner equanimity. When we forget the qualities of resentment, boredom, misery, irritation, when people bother us, that is our ego, for sure. It is surely not the Bodhichitta or liberated consciousness!
In life, we forget about our true nature, which is Bodhichitta. We forget about all of that. That is why we say we become identified. We become identified with our negative processes, with anxiety, with the hurt that we feel. This is not to say that we deny that we feel hurt. The point is to comprehend and answer to: “Where did this emotion come from?”
If you take your current psychological state and believe it is because someone else did something to you, you have surrendered your ability for happiness. You are a servant of someone else’s action. You are willingly saying, “it is because of the other person that I cannot be happy.”
On the contrary, when you take responsibility for everything that goes on inside of your mind, every process, you are giving yourself the capacity to have a choice, to have freedom. We need to experience that type of freedom. That is why we need to meditate.
It is important to have those experiences, little by little, of liberated consciousness. It is wonderful to have a great samadhi, but you do not need to have that wonderful samadhi to know what a superior level of consciousness is. You just need to know one level above of what you know today. If that is the only thing you know, that is enough. Today, know yourself better – tomorrow take another step – that is enough. Students sometimes think unless they have a profound samadhi, they do not know anything. No, we each know to our own degree.
You need to recognize when you are inhabiting more of your ego, through your practices of self-remembering, self-observation, and meditation. Even those tiny glimpses of seeing yourself are enough. That is why The Great Kabir Jesus states that we only need the faith of a mustard seed. All you need is that little bit of understanding to get to ‘there.’ Little by little you have those experiences. You need to follow that in the same way the warrior gets out of the labyrinth through the thread Ariadne.
Do you know about the thread of Ariadne? Ariadne fell in love with the hero Theseus, who was doomed to die in the labyrinth of the Minotaur. She provided Theseus a thread which he used to track his way through the labyrinth, kill the Minotaur, and escape.
Ariadne is our inner beauty, our spiritual impulse. Theseus is our consciousness. The labyrinth is our own mind, and the Minotaur is the ego.
The thread is the continuity of consciousness to get you out of the maze of your mind. If you can at least center yourself in your consciousness, no matter how much your mind assaults you with those resentments, reasonings, doubts, and emotional afflictions, then everything else should proceed. It just might take a lot more effort than we would like.
We need to transform the impressions. We need to recognize when we are not living correctly, not transforming the impressions. That is basic. If you can comprehend what the nature of impressions are, in of themselves, you hold the key of transforming those impressions.
One very simple way of transforming impressions is through your intellect. As we say, the intellect is the very first layer of our mind. It is ok to transform some impressions with our intellect. It might be helpful. Very often, the way that is done is you reason with yourself and realize that your first impulse was based on some desire, and a misinterpretation of the event occurred. It is like when someone says something, and you get very offended. Maybe they did not intend to offend you, they were just talking from their own perspective and did not realize that was a trigger, or ‘button-issue’ for you. You overacted. You can intellectually go through that. It is simple. That type of analysis only brings you so far though. It is not enough to make a profound change in your life.
Nature of Impressions
To understand the nature of your impressions, you need to comprehend the nature of your own mind.
Where does the impression exist?
We say that life is nothing more than the impression of it.
The world is happening, and the life is always demanding some response.
The impression is an occurring relationship that happens between the outer and inner. Something is happening outside (of the mind), and something is happening inside.
Well, where exactly is this impression? Can we locate where the impression is? Where is this experience? You should meditate upon that.
Every impression is a relationship between your consciousness and everything outside of your consciousness.
As we said before, visually, things are happening in this exterior space, light is bouncing off everything, light is going into our eyes, that information gets transformed into an electrical signal that goes into our brain. Then, something happens with my brain, the chakras, and the glands that transmit all of this to the ethers of the superior body, so we have the capacity to see. But nothing we see is what it appears to be. Even physically, we know that everything, we experience is mostly empty space. Everything appears to be solid, but where is that notion coming from?
The reason why I cannot put my hand through this table is not what it appears. We usually think it is like two billiard balls slamming against each other, it is not like that. People think that atoms are like these billiard balls that clash against each other. Actually, what we call atoms are tiny points in space that have an energy field around it. The energy is so strong that other atoms with an energy field around it cannot merge. They bounce off each other because of the energy field.
If you extrapolate that and there you have two physical objects resisting each other. That culminates in us as the sense of touch and ‘physical objects.’ So, yes, there is a relative truth to it, but when you peel it apart, there is a no ‘physical’ thing anywhere.
In the same way that you can peel apart physical phenomena, you can peel apart all mental phenomena. The very basic level of that is noticing, for example, what your thoughts and emotions are, and do you possess those emotions, or are those emotions possessing you? Are those emotions flowing from your soul? Where are they coming from? Are they permeating your existence? Are they telling you what to do? Are they really you?
If you are feeling them so intensely, inquire if there is ‘self’ inside of there. If you are thinking a lot, notice if there is ‘self’ inside of those thoughts. Is there a self that you find inside of the thought?
In the beginning, it appears as if your self is inside of those thoughts and it appears as if the self is inside of those emotions. It appears that it is really you. ‘You’ are suffering, ‘you’ have a pain, ‘you’ are hurt, but where exactly is the ‘self’ amongst all the jumble of ideas?
Yes, at first glance, there is the impression of a ‘self’; and let us say that self feels hurt. Something is going on there… have you understood what is going on?
The nature of impressions is always empty, and you will never find an essential ‘self’ inside of any impression.
We constantly have impressions of the external world, and they change as the exterior circumstance change. But, what is even more fundamental, is the impression of self. The impression of self remains even when we close our eyes and remove all exterior impressions.
There is always a relationship going on. So, when we say that life is nothing more than the impression of it, it is just a series of relationships between the sense organs, the physical world, emotions, mind, and consciousness. ‘It’, experience itself, is always some type of relationship coming out of these factors.
In the same way that we see something because there are two things that are crashing into each other, the impressions are a continual wave of things coming together in our line of experience.
When you take all those ‘things’ apart, all of the parts of the impression, you find that there is no essential nature to any impression.
When do you know the power of a wave in the ocean? It is when it crashes against the shore. In the same way, we know about our inner powers when they crash against our cognizance. The problem is, our inner powers have been taken over by our ego, which misuses them.
When you know how to transform every impression you are a master. Only a master can transform every impression. That is what Samael Aun Weor states.
To be a master is to be fully conscious! To be a master of your mind, a master of your emotions. If you are not, then you forget about yourself and these factors come into play and condition your perception and experience.
When we know how to transform the impressions, we are transforming them to see the reality inside them. The reality is that light inside of our self.
For example, in the Pistis Sophia, Sophia is looking at the light and she believes she sees the Treasury of the Light inside that light. She goes into it, but she does not realize that she is going into a different light, which is a counterfeit light. She sees the Treasury of Light but it is actually a mirage. Because she mistakes it, she ends up creating something she did not want to. Her own creation subjugates her to suffering. This is our experience every moment.
We see the world in a way we believe to be true, but our view is mistaken, and so we walk right into a thicket. We walk right into a bush of thorns, and we get stuck. For example, we see someone, they just light up our heart and we get into a relationship with that person. Turns out that person is not exactly what we thought they were. That other person made the same mistake and had the same vision of us. A heartbreak is the result. The story of heartbreak is a simple way to illustrate this point. We always see something ‘in there’ – in the impressions. What we see is often mistaken.
The key is that through the work that Sophia goes through, she does receive the Treasury of the Light, but she had to go through all her repentances. In a certain way she did see correctly, because in the end she does receive the Treasury of the Light, but she had to do the work.
For example, those things that you are intensely attracted to is related to powerful unconscious currents of energy within. There is something inside of you that needs to come out, so that you can see it, so that it can come crashing against your three brains, crashing against your soul. In that essence of suffering is the same sapience of sin. There is the wisdom that you extract from that. From a certain perspective, we are attracted to things which we have a misperception about. We think we see the heavenly light, but really, we see only a projection related to our own ignorance.
All the nature of impressions is the nature of our consciousness, because the consciousness is always the one seeing. Our consciousness is always seeing. To know the nature of the impressions is to know the consciousness.
To transform all the impressions, you need to know your consciousness. As we said before, life is continually demanding a response from us and the degree that we have cognizance, see the light properly, is the degree to which we can transform those impressions, and transform our life.
For someone who has that cognizance, they have no problem with all kinds of impressions. There is no psychological issue and there is perfect equilibrium. Those same impressions, for someone else, it would be a big problem with a lot of stress, difficulty, doubts and all sorts of difficulties. It has to do with the quality of your being, the whole Tree of Life. Most importantly, the ego (or lack of) and consciousness. What is difficult for us is precisely those things that we need to work on and not run away from them.
We will end with some quotes from Samael Aun Weor.
One has to receive with gladness the unpleasant manifestations of our fellow men.
It is so easy to become resentful. It is easy to see major resentments that we might have, but subtle resentments exist as well. Subtle ways that you can have negative feeling towards someone. If you are working on this path, you need to confront all of that. When you feel you are being used by someone, or that they are taking advantage of you, there is something to be learned there.
The feeling of being taken advantage of very well could be the way you are positioning yourself in that relationship with that person. You do not see exactly how things are unfolding. Other times you are just feeling full of yourself. You need to comprehend why is it that you feel that someone is taking advantage of you. For example, taking advantage of your good will towards them, trying to be a “nice person.” In this way, you may feel that you are trying to do good by helping this person, but they are just always taking advantage of you. Recognize that is an impression. How do you transform that impression?
According to our Gnostic Teachings, we should receive the unpleasant manifestations of our fellow men with gladness. This is only possible if you are transforming the impressions. First you must recognize the impression.
As soon as you put a timeline on your compassion, you are not developing Bodhichitta. As soon as you put a limit on some quality of compassion or patience, you are not developing Bodhichitta. Our foolish ego thinks once enough time has elapsed, then one can justify resentment against another.
It is not to say that you let someone harm themselves or harm you. That is not what I am talking about. Certainly, there are many times where people are harming themselves or harming someone else, and you need to do something that they are not going to like. Maybe, you need to remove yourself from a situation. This is not about allowing yourself to be harmed. You need to recognize whether it is your ego that is being hurt or not. It is a very difficult thing. There is a place for being strict in order to help someone to see what they need to see and there is a certain place where not to involve yourself with a certain type of people. You cannot help drowning people if you are also drowning.
What I am talking about, is we often put a timeline on someone else’s change, and we get tired of them. We get resentful because we have tried so hard, perhaps, in the effort to get someone else to behave differently. That is the type of thing that we should be very careful about because Bodhichitta does not have a timeline. That is why they are called ‘The Four Immeasurables’ because they are infinite. It is a resource of infinite plentitude. If you are getting tired of being compassionate then you are not being compassionate. You are just working with your ego, mind, and rationality. That is when you need to go into meditation and contemplate this notion that you are getting tired or the thought of not wanting to give any more, to help, or be compassionate towards someone. It is a serious type of meditation.
We will close with this quote,
“As I have stated in my Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology, experience teaches us that if our Gnostic esoteric work is negative, it is due to our own fault. It is from our sensorial point of view that we say that this or that person of the external world (whom one sees and hears through the eyes and ears) has to be blamed. This person in turn will say that we are the ones to blame. However, the fault, indeed, is in the impressions that we might have about people. Many times, we think that a person is perverse when in reality the person is just a humble lamb. It is very opportune to learn how to transform all the impressions which we may have of life. We have to learn to receive with gladness the unpleasant manifestations of our fellowmen.”
Questions and Answers
Instructor: Do you any questions?
Audience: Inaudible
Instructor: We need to learn how to transform the positive impressions just as much as we need to learn how to transform the unpleasant impressions. The pleasantness and unpleasantness are completely subject to our state of mind. Certain things that are pleasant to some people are very unpleasant for other people. So, even the notion of what is unpleasant and pleasant is subjective.
Generally, If I were to praise you and give you congratulatory words, it is very easy to receive those impressions without transforming them. If you really believe it to be true, you will build pride. Meanwhile, that is just an ego that you are developing, a mental factor that feels ‘good’ to have. What is good or bad, pleasant, unpleasant depends on the circumstance because if you do ‘build up’ a self, it is only feeling good under certain limited circumstances or conditions. When those things are removed, you then feel the opposite.
For example, if a person needs to be congratulated and then does not receive it, they would say, “They could have at least said thank you. I did something good and they did not say thank you.” That is the type of ego that feels pain. It is more difficult to look at from that angle because we question, “What is wrong with that?” But it is conditioning. That is a condition. If you need something externally that provides you with that happiness, that is just an external condition.
We need to transform all of the impressions. One of the most difficult types of impressions to transform is the blissful experiences of meditation. If you learn how to relax and concentrate even a moderate amount, you may start to have a very pleasant experience. From there, to very profound mystical experiences. If you get attached to that, you may start a group and claim that you are this or that person, and not know what you are talking about. You end up causing a lot of suffering towards others. You think you are so great, but it is just the ego, the mind. You did not possess those experiences, those experiences happened to the consciousness, to experience the glory of God. So, you can become attached to mystical experiences, you can become attached to traveling outside of your body, or whatever it may be.
It is not that we should avoid those experiences, we need to transform them. We just need to transform them.
Audience: Inaudible
Instructor: That is a great question. You are having a meditation and you access something from your past, for example, and an outburst of emotion occurs. I would say it is probably a positive thing. That is a classical definition of catharsis. Catharsis is the release of emotion and that is usually a positive thing. It does not mean that the entire ego, or trauma is completely transformed. It is like a wound overflowing with puss and when you touch it there is so much pain in there. There first thing is to access that pain. On top of that pain are all sorts of factors that you did not want to go towards. Finally, you get relaxed enough to un-defend your heart to feel that and to genuinely access that. That is positive. I would say the meditation brought you there. From there you need to keep going.
Someone asked me once if it was ok to cry during meditation. I said, “If you are not crying sometimes during a meditation, I am not sure what you are doing.” Meditation is not about a blissful experience. That only arrives as a natural consequence of dealing with your suffering. So, go into that. Do not go further than you might be prepared for. When you are sitting in meditation and you are close to your Being, close to that light, that light gives you the armor to pierce into those painful experiences. Little by little, you might need to return to that truama to comprehend it, to be able to talk about it, to have the mental equilibrium.
In your case, you accessed something, but you did not have perfect equilibrium. Through effort, you digest it, transform it, you extract the solar nutrients from it. You learn something about your consciousness, yourself, about reality and at some point, by working on it, it will become a memory. You still have perfect equilibrium when you go back to that memory. You are completely at peace with it.
Audience: (Inaudible question about intellect.)
Instructor: The intellect is a very difficult thing to wield. There are some people who do not really think things out. They do not use their intellect that much and it gets them into problems. They do not think logically. People like that need to learn to take a pause from their emotions and think things out. There are many other people who are in that intellectual train ride forever and it never stops. The more the intellect thinks, it starts ruminating about a painful experience; the pain is there so they think about it and they do not find a resolution, so they think about it again. They go around, and around on the merry-go-round, meanwhile the emotional deep pain is still there. Meditation is about not using the intellect.
You can think about things and have a journal. Writing things down can work to organize your thoughts, but you also need to have the skill in meditation; sit down, learn to withdraw the senses, calm down the mind, reach some level of basic concentration and then proceed into those deeper aspects. That is a skill. Samatha is having that basic peace in meditation – equanimity, tranquility. The obstacles you need to get over to get there are the afflictions themselves; not to comprehend them, but to just lay them down, get them out of the way. You need to learn how to concentrate so you can get to this base camp.
A lot of times, you go into meditation and immediately the mind is assaulting us by fantasizing, or daydreaming, and we cannot get to the base camp of meditation. From the base camp of meditation, your intellect is laid to rest, your external senses are minimized, your consciousness is not hazy or perceiving the outside. From base camp, you have ability to concentrate on something. That only happens when all the ruminating factors and all this noisy stuff has calmed down a little.
Audience: (inaudible)
Instructor: Well, sometimes we get the intuitive impulse and we grab it with the intellect and elaborate on it a little bit. That is ok. In meditation you take that abstract concept, take that notion of abandonment (or any other ego), and everything that’s coming into your Being, you point your consciousness towards that. It might be a lot of emotional pain, a lot of things, and we become tempted to think. We need to resist the temptation to think sometimes. Especially, if we are big thinkers. More so when we get a lot of information and we feel the need to think it through, but that is a temptation like seeing candy on the table and you have a sweet tooth. The thinking itself becomes a temptation. It is literally a skill of learning how to tame the animal mind. It is a discipline.
Instructor: any other questions?
Audience: (Inaudible) Samael’s comment on Emmanuel Kant’s, Transcendental Idealism… (inaudible).
Instructor: Samael Aun Weor mentions the great philosopher from Konigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia), Emmanuel Kant in Revolution of the Dialectic and a couple of other places. One of Kant’s various philosophies is related to idealism. That is to say, that everything is in the mind. That is idealism. We all have our private minds and there is no way of knowing what is really out there because everything is in our own mind. Idea, Ideal-ism: everything is in the mind.
Then there is empiricism, which says, the only thing that matters, and that is real is what I can touch, see, etc. Things like that. Along with that there is the idea that the world is a physical thing that exists independent of any perceiver. In Newton’s time, they were coming up with the laws of physics. There was a romantic idea that we can have knowledge from the mind of God through mathematics. By knowing the right laws, we can predict anything that is going to happen. So, predicting the movement of the starts, of the firmament through superior mathematical analysis; figuring out how orbits work. Before we figured out those laws of gravity etc., we did not know why the planets moved as they do. So, there is this contrasting idea that everything is actually outside in an objective reality that we experience accurately.
There are these two types of conflictual world views. Kant was very perturbed by others believing that everything can be understood through mathematical analysis. If I know the force, properties etc. of a thrown baseball, I can predict where exactly it is going, through a mathematical equation. I know exactly where it is going to go because I know gravity, etc. It is how we send a rocket into space, because we know all those laws. If you are a real empiricist and real materialist, then you would say everything in the universe is like that. That means that there is no agency, no free will, because everything is just forces colliding into each other, and these forces can be described mathematically.
Kant was very perturbed by that. He wanted to resolve how the external world and internal world reacted with each other. He realized that what we see about the world is fundamentally a property of the apparatus through which we perceive the world.
Time and space for example, exist within our mind. Our consciousness organizes that raw data of the world through time and space. From there, as Gnostics we say that to be able to perceive the superior space, you need to organize your consciousness in a superior sense. As you organize your consciousness, your perception of the world transforms because of that.
Samael Aun Weor boiled all that down to how it is related to the transformation of impressions. He does not fully explain it; he just mentions Kant’s philosophies and that they are the pinnacle of western philosophy. If you are interested in philosophy then you should read the book The Critique of Pure Reasoning, because it is fundamentally related to epistemology, how the nature of knowledge is received by us. In Buddhism, that same constellation of ideas is related to Madhyamika philosophy. That is how they relate all that to the emptiness and other things, with the additional soteriological emphasis in Madhyamika. Kant does not connect his Transcendental Idealism with religion, but in Madhyamika, it is stated that the realization of emptiness is the crux of salvation.
There is a lot of common ground between Transcendental Idealism and Madhyamika. It is a very fertile meeting ground of east and west.
