The common definition of what a machine is: “an apparatus consisting of interrelated parts with separate functions used in the performance of some kind of work.” So in relationship to our spiritual studies, our esoteric studies, we know that there is a spiritual work that we have to perform. There is a work upon ourselves that we need to perform, and that the Great Cosmic Common Father, the Logos, wants to perform a work and is looking to acquire some result, and that’s the whole beginning of why this universe exists.
This universe, this whole reality, has some purpose. Sometimes Samael Aun Weor will state that the Solar Logos wants to perform an experiment. What he means by this is the Solar Logos, Christ, wants to know all of its inner parts completely. We are, as Monads, a part of the Universal Spirit of Life, but that Universal Spirit of Life wishes to always know itself more. In order to do that a certain process unfolds, and that process needs to unfold in a certain way in order for all these particles which are our spirits to know itself better. So the soul is a part of that, the abstract unmanifested God or Deity, or Siety as we say, purposefully manifests itself in different types of limited forms. It projects itself into limitations. It creates laws and submits itself to those very same laws. It, being a unity divides itself into different ways so it can relate to its own self, reflect upon its own self, and return back to that unity again. This is how the abstract reality can begin to know itself through some type of relationship.
So there are many different ways that we can talk about the unfolding of this universe and we have talked about it many lectures. Here we are going to view things from a simpler level in some respects. I have this slide here titled Solar Systems, that word in a common usage means, just as this picture represents, some star or sun and different planets rotating around it. There is a certain order to that, it is not chaotic, it seems to sustain itself at least for a very long period of time. That is a system which is ordered by a star. The star’s gravity from just a materialistic standpoint is the principle law which is causing these different planets to rotate around. When we use the word “solar” from a Gnostic or esoteric standpoint we are pointing towards something else at the same time. The word solar from a symbolic standpoint means something that is in alignment with God or Christ. So a solar system would be any type of system that is obeying the law or is functioning within the law of Christ.
Any solar system like this of a sun, that sun represents some spirit. In a similar sense we have a spirit, but our spirit isn’t like that sun’s spirit, and all those planets represent a spirit as well. All those planets represent some self-realized Monad or spirit, so those are the physical bodies related to some spirit. We have a physical body, but our spirit is not like those spirits, those physical bodies. And we have a system within ourselves, we have various systems, organs, nervous systems, and they operate and they relate to each other. They keep us alive, but the system that is going on inside of us even physically is not a solar system. We use another word, lunar, which indicates that there is some type of intelligence there but the intelligence is related to a lunar level of intelligence. Still related to God, there’s still something related to spirit but it’s not completed. There is only an aspect there.
If we were to transform not only our physical body, but our soul and our spirit, to incarnate all these laws and to manifest them, then we would be at the level where we could manage the energy of the whole planet, the whole physical planet. We, at our level of consciousness right now we cannot even manage this little body that we have. We constantly do things in ways that harm it, and we constantly do things that harm other people even, if it’s just in our mind, even if it is just a moment of having ill will towards another person. That is not a solar system, that is a lunar system, but even really below a lunar system, because it is just chaos.
So the soul has different parts. The soul begins by a projection out of the spirit. We speak about the septenary or the seven-fold aspect of our being and we relate that to the Tree of Life. So one thing is our spirit and another thing is our soul, and finally there’s the vitality in our physical body. So if we start at the very bottom of this seven fold nature of our inner constitution we start with our physical body. It is very easy to see our physical body. Just above that is the superior aspect of our physical body which is the energetic or vital aspect or vitality. It is the energy that sustains our life. Without the vitality then the physical body is just a corpse, it is just a bunch of material organized in a certain way but there is no vitality there is no life. So we have our physical body and we have our vital body.
Then we have a body related to emotions and desires, and then we have a body related to the mind. In an ordinary person this is what we would call the soul in a very basic sense. There is also something else called the causal body, or the human soul, but we don’t have that yet, we have to develop that. What we have is just a seed. You see we think that creation happens like that, in a snap, we think that we are already, just because we have this physical body, that our inner constitution is complete. That is a huge mistake, we need to clarify that. Actually creation happens in a process and we are not completed yet. We have the ability to choose whether we want to continue to work on ourselves or not. That is the work that we need to perform.
So we have emotions, we have reasoning, we have our willpower but none of these things are fully developed, none of these things are solar. These things are lunar. We were assisted to be at the place that we are right now. We didn’t manifest ourselves, we didn’t self-manifest our body or our soul or our spirit. We were placed here through a process. How did we get placed here? We got placed here by other intelligences; perhaps we can call them angels or archangels but those angels or archangels are those beings which have completed the process of self-realization and inside of them they have a solar system. A system of managing energy that is completely conscious, completely cognizant, there is no unconsciousness. There is no dreaming, there is no fascination. So, if our inner spirit wants to know about itself a great process has to unfold.
It needs to project an aspect of itself we call the Essence which is the seed of our soul, the seed of a human soul. It is not developed but it is the seed. In the same way that you can place a seed into the Earth it is only when that seed is placed into the Earth and given some certain materials and energy: water, and sun, nitrogen and other chemicals, that things start to develop and that seed develops into its full blossoming. So, us as a soul the most precious thing we have is this Essence that isn’t fully developed.
In order to develop that, in order to know ourselves we have to be able to work with the very fundamental primary forces of the universe. Now these are the three primary forces, this is where we find the trinity in various religions. In Christianity it is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, in the Tree of Life or Kabbalah it’s related to Kether, Chokmah, and Binah. We can list many different trinities but the point is the trinity represents a fundamental three-foldness of creation. Because creation is a process of what is formless becoming into form and the simplest geometric shape is a triangle. Those three forces are represented there.
We need to be conscious of those three forces, the only way that we can is to develop a type of apparatus, or series of apparatuses or machinery, that can relate to those three forces. So in the beginning the human soul, the Essence, has no knowledge of itself. It is ignorant in an innocent way, in a virginal way, innocent and that innocent type of elemental consciousness, that Essence, is the same principle that eventually could become the manager of a whole star or a constellation. It is the same principle, so how do we get from that seed of consciousness to a type of consciousness which can organize and be conscious of an entire planet, series of planets or constellation? We have to begin at the very absolute beginning, when the Essence gets deposited into the Earth, into the matter; the word matter and the word mother are related. So that seed, that essence gets put into the Earth, into a type of physical existence.
Inside that physical existence are all those nutrients, all those elements which have to come together, which can come together, in order to form certain things which we are going to talk about. We call them the Three Brains and it is through those three brains that we can begin to know ourselves. So on this slide it’s a picture of the evolving and devolving energies. This whole Earth, as we said before, is a living being. It is the physical body of some spirit of God, a Logos is the word that we use. That Logos is managing a whole Earth of forces and those forces need to be handled in such a way that it harmonizes with all the other planets of the solar system, because the solar system is also a system, a living being you could say. If one planet didn’t manage its own energy correctly, then it would affect the whole solar system and that solar system wouldn’t be able to be a part of a larger system of stars.
In the same way we have cells in our body, we have organs in our body, and if one of those organs don’t manage our energy correctly, if it gets sick, then it infects or causes the whole body to get sick so we need all of our organs to be managing the things that they need to manage correctly, right? If a single cell begins to act upon its own will, upon its own accord and begins to divide and multiply at its own rate under its own will we could say unchecked by any laws that cell would become cancer. That is what cancer is. All cancer is different ways, many thousands of different ways, a cell could begin to multiply without any regard to the bigger system, and that is representative of a part of the system not working correctly. So the Earth has to manage all the energies of this Earth. At the same time all of life, everything that’s alive, is connected to some Monad or some Spirit. Every living entity, not just animals, but plants and minerals as well. If you think about it, that is a lot, it is incomprehensible. And if you think of the gradations of life it starts at the most elementary type of existence and works itself up and that’s the process that it needs to go through.
In fact matter itself is directly related to energy and consciousness. In the modern world we see a relationship we know that matter and energy are two halves of the same thing, Einstein proved that. We forget about the third element which is consciousness. Every particle of matter relates to energy, matter and consciousness. So there is consciousness in every atom, that is the beginning level of material consciousness, that Essence being placed into what we call the mineral kingdom. That type of experience is very difficult for us to understand and to conceptualize. We have to meditate on that because it is very different there is not very much individuality but there’s a very small amount of energy that can be handled and manipulated on an atomic level to be kind of a supervisor of that energy. What do we mean by that? We mean that minerals can interact, they have properties, electricity can go through them, copper for example, different veins of copper or iron that can run through the Earth. Those veins are like our veins which carry energy. Those different types of metals and minerals they transmit energy related to the cosmos.
An elemental essence gets deposited at that level to just manage a certain type of energy to just begin to manage. A lot of experiences have to happen and it is managed by a superior intelligence so these innocent elemental consciousnesses are under the guidance of these great beings that are kind of supervising the different waves of energy that go through the Earth. Superior levels are acquired after enormous amounts of time, through a mechanical process, it is mechanical but it is also intelligent because the archangels are managing that with their intelligence. The archangels are causing this evolution to occur. The elementals are gaining some type of experience but they don’t have a choice, they are just gaining this experience kind of in a mechanical sense, but it is experience, and it allows for development. It is necessary for the second kingdom which is called the plant kingdom.
Those elementals that were first originally related to minerals now get deposited into very simple type of plant existences, and if you were to look and imagine all the variation of vegetation and life in that sense you have the most basic types of moss or fungus and it goes all the way up into a beautiful flowers, and such things as the venus flytrap that actually can move and things like that, so there is this evolution. When I say evolution I am talking about a mechanical process that the soul is undergoing to gain more experience. We should be very clear: this is different than the evolution of a species. Any physical species can change over time but the soul within that species is evolving on a different wave. The soul will evolve in a different wave than a physical manifestation of that species will evolve. Species are like anything, they can change in accordance with their environment, however this idea that evolution can reach a pinnacle of the human body without any direction, without any Deity or intelligent force, that can never happen.
That theory of evolution that through just pure mechanics that there is no intelligent force at all is a sophism, the intelligence exists first which is that God, or whatever you want to call it, that guides the evolutionary process. It guides the processes of different physical bodies, species changing, but it is also guiding the soul within those species to change. When the soul becomes developed at a certain level then it can graduate to a more complicated physical body and begins to manage a little bit more energy. With the plant kingdom, you begin to conceptualize that the plants have a physical existence, a physical body, but it is much more difficult to see how the minerals have a physical body. It exists in a more abstract sense. The plant kingdom is more complicated; it handles more energy. The Essence gains the experience to handle more complicated forms of energy.
It is necessary for the Earth to transform all these different types of energy. The Earth needs to transform energy related to the mineral kingdom. The Earth needs to transform energy related to the plant kingdom and also to the animal and humanoid kingdoms. Why is that? If you look at all the different organs of our physical body, there are a lot of different types of organ systems that handle different types of energy, and it is all necessary. Except the Earth exists in space, and there is a lot of invisible cosmic type of rays that we are not aware of that are going into the Earth and are related to the whole solar system. We might know that there are different types of radiation in space, cosmic radiation, x-rays and other types of rays, but materialistic science doesn’t understand what is really going on there.
That energy is similar to the different types of energy that are going to go through our body. We have energy in our blood, we have chemical processes going on in our blood all the time. Our life exists on a cellular level, and the exchange of energy happens within and between cells and breaking energetic bonds to liberate energy to run the human machine. The solar system outside in space is using magnetism and electricity to transmit that energy, and other types of energy that we are not aware of. It is electronic, it is operating in an electronic sense.
Talking about the plant kingdom, the evolving process of the plant kingdom form a biological membrane around the physical crust of the Earth. There is a thin layer of life that exists and that layer of life is receiving, transforming, and transmitting energy, energy within itself and energy going down into the Earth. This is why dense jungles and forests are necessary; this is why oceans are necessary because from a cosmic standpoint they all transform different types of energy. All the trees are transforming energy. We know from a physical standpoint we need those trees to preserve an ecological economy to preserve our nature but there is more going on than just the physical things we can identify.
So then finally we get to the animal kingdom. The animal kingdom is a part of this membrane too. We can look at all the different variation of animals: they go from very simple to very complex to animals that seem to be able to start to have some rationalization. The pinnacle of the animal kingdom is us what you call the humanoid kingdom. We don’t call it the human kingdom because the tre human kingdom is solar. The humanoid kingdom is something that looks like a human but has gotten there through a lunar, mechanical process. With animals, now we are really starting to handle a lot of complex energy. You have animals which are cold blooded and you have animals which are warm blooded and the warm blooded animals seem to be even more evolved and handling even more energy.
Eventually you see some of these animals which are quite complicated and have sophisticated types of communication and are able to figure things out and have social structure. That represents more and more types of complicated forms of energy. Finally, that process reaches its pinnacle with being put into a physical body like ours. Our physical body represents a pinnacle of evolution, so not only does the universe have to descend and create all this matter and energy, but then our essence has to be deposited into the mineral kingdom and evolve up to the current state we are at now. That is just to begin, that is just to have the capacity to do this work. All the other stuff was a prerequisite; you can’t even do the work of realizing those other forces within yourself because we don’t have the machinery to do it, until you are at that humanoid kingdom.
Where we are at now is extremely beneficial state and we will not have it forever. We will be born for a certain amount of time in this humanoid kingdom, but just as we didn’t have any of our own self will in the evolving curve, we were brought up into this state, if we don’t do anything, if we don’t do the work, that same current reaches a pinnacle and then begins to go down. What is at one moment evolving those same energies, those same forces, reach a pinnacle and they just keep going, they start to devolve and it is mechanical. Unless we do a work, a solar work, within ourselves, the lunar forces will just keep taking us. They took us up and they will take us down; they gave us this magnificent body and what we will talk about next which are internal lunar bodies as well. They gave us the capacity to have reasoning and emotions but it will also take it away unless we manifest something within ourselves. That is the whole point, and just as everything in nature is recycled so will our body be recycled. Our type of lunar mind that we have, our type of lunar reasoning, and our type of capacity to have emotions is all developed mechanically.
We didn’t do the work of evolution for ourselves, we were given that as a gift, and that represents a complication of energy, and that energy will begin to unwind, and it will have to be taken away from our Essence, and that is not a very pleasant process. It’s a difficult process for that energy to be taken out of that Essence. That energy has to be given to the next wave of evolving elementals because the energy is always conserved. The energy has to be taken away and that is why we call this descent, which is the descent into the inferior or the Inferno, we call it a recycling plant because it is very literally a recycling of energy.
We talked about the three forces vaguely so far. We can begin to work with these three forces within ourselves only in the humanoid kingdom because we have what are called the Three Brains, as opposed to having only two or one brains. The three brains might sound like a strange terminology, but what we are really saying is three nervous systems. We can identify intellectual brain as related to our cerebral spinal nervous system so our brain and our spine. This is the brain we commonly refer to as being “the brain” but there are other nervous systems. The emotional brain is related to our solar plexus which is related to superior emotion or inferior emotion. You can feel it in the middle of your body when you think of any powerful emotion such as grief. Where do you feel that grief? You feel it here (in the middle of the body, the chest and stomach). We almost keel over in grief. Or, if you feel pride, where do you feel pride in your body? You feel puffed up with pride in your shoulders, they lift up, and it related to your heart and to your solar plexus as well. The emotional center may be centered here in the chest but it exists throughout the whole body because it is a nervous system. It is related to the grand central nervous system.
There is a third brain which is a motor-instinctual-sexual brain and this is also related to our spinal cord, our spinal column, and is related to exactly what it says. The motor brain which is the top of our spine, our instincts, our instinctual reactions, and to our sexual impulses which is related to our sexual organs. We may point to those areas but all three of these brains exist throughout the entire body but those are the centers.
So we can see through this evolutionary process of being placed in more and more complicated types of bodies those are related to what we can call one, two, and three brained machines. I have a picture of an insect, a lion, and a business man. We can see that an insect has the ability to move, it has a motor sense, it has one brain. There may be an insect and you wouldn’t be able to see any emotions or intellect, so you can clearly see there is one type of brain there. As you get more complicated you might even have cold blooded animals, they are more complicated, but they still only have one brain. They may begin to have this second nervous system being developed, but there is not a clear emotional sense in a cold blooded animal.
When you get to a warm blooded animal, that warm bloodedness is very much related to that Second Force which is the emotional sense, which is Christ, as the Second Logos. So as the animal starts to get warm blooded you can clearly see that there is an emotional sense in those types of animals, maybe some with a greater emotional sense and some with less. Any type of complicated animal or most of the pets that we have, have two brains they have an emotional sense. They are not intellectual. They may be able to make a choice or have some very limited type of primitive reasoning but there not an intellectual center there.
It is not until we get to the intellectual animal, to the humanoid, that we finally have the third brain developed. Once we have the three brains developed now we have the proper apparatus to be cognizant of the three forces that manifest in our life, within ourselves and outside of ourselves. One way of understanding this is to look at the first brain that gets developed: it is related to actually the Third Force which is called the Third Logos. The first brain that gets developed is the motor-instinctual-sexual brain and you can see that first brain is a relationship to the external world and the surface of the body. There is movement in the external world, that dimension of life starts to open up. We say that those types of insects or primitive types of animals live one dimensionally because they live amongst this idea of an external world. The internal world isn’t really tangible, it remains abstract, until you get to that second brain.
That second brain, we are talking about emotions which are related to that second brain, our emotions are related to our interior world. Now we have a relationship between the exterior world and the interior world and that interior world is fueled by that warm bloodedness. The Second Logos is related to the sun, to Christ, related to the emotional center. That third brain which is the thinking brain finally provides some types of synthesis between that external world and the interior world. The thinking brain has the ability to conceptualize that relationship, to see it. That is important and necessary. These three brains then give us the capacity to become conscious of those three forces. When we feel and experience those three forces through primarily thinking, feeling, and our movement, instinct and sexual impulses so any experience we have in life we can relate to the three brains.
We are all in a state of psychological disequilibrium. All of us are predisposed to use one of these three brains out of balance, or in synthesis we are always using them all out of balance. We have a particular psychological bias towards one or the other. For example, there are people who view life strictly through an intellectual sense they put the intellect or the rationality as primary above all other dimensions of their experience so they may be very cold to emotions, they may deny or reject the emotional dimension of life, because they ignore it or become ignorant of how they are causing problems for themselves. They can’t know themselves, they can’t figure out their problems or they cause problems for other people because they don’t have that center used well, they have no balance in it, they don’t know how to face life using that center.
Someone who is more unbalanced emotionally would be the opposite of that. They will see everything through an emotion and will discount reasoning or logic, they will ignore the facts, and that may also get them into problems or make bad mistakes.
Lots of emotions that feel pleasant and lots of emotions that feel unpleasant. If we were to simply say, “I am going to continue to do this because it feels pleasant emotionally” and “I am not going to do these things that are unpleasant”, we won’t be able to gain equilibrium because sometimes we need to go through emotions that are unpleasant and we have to face them, you have to be able to face that type of energy. Sometimes there are pleasant emotions sometimes there are unpleasant emotions. The way to work with that is you have to use your thinking brain to rationalize why you have you have to go through unpleasant emotions. Of course you must go beyond the intellect and work with the consciousness in meditation as well.
The motor-instinctual-sexual brain center might be related to somebody who is orientating their life towards traditions and customs and values that are just placed there because it is their culture, it’s their community, it’s their religion that they grew up in, the beliefs, the flag that they adhere to and there’s not even really an emotional sense towards it, and not even really an intellectual sense to it ...it is because it is. That is the way it has always been and that is the way it will be and for someone who identifies with that being a prime way of orientating their problems in life: “How am I going to figure out this problem? I will just go with what is traditionally done.”
Those are extreme examples and all of us are going to become unbalanced in one way or another when we are faced with any situation. When we face a problem in life, we can think about it, we can have feeling and we have impulses. Impulses are sometimes as simple as fight or flight, stay or go, this way or that way, and people may do something on impulse or on a whim and only later think about it, or only later feel about it, and realize later that it was an impulse. “Yes, I had that impulse but now that I am thinking about it the impulse wasn’t guided correctly, it wasn’t correct, it wasn’t good for me.”
You have to understand the brains are like a machine, like a computer, and they operate on three different qualities of energy. Any machine can’t do anything unless there is the energy inside of it, like if you have a car or engine but you have no gasoline, the engine is useless or you have a computer but you don’t have electricity or a battery then there is no use to it. That is what the three brains are like, they are a machine, they need to be animated. It is the consciousness or that soul that is animating them. These machines are attuned to different types of qualities of energy. Realize that the brains themselves are not the consciousness, the consciousness is what is animating those brains and those brains are able to process certain types of energy.
Every moment of our existence we are coming across perceptions, impressions, and they are entering through our sense organs, they get filtered through different levels, and we respond in a primary sense through an intellectual, emotional, or motor-instinctual-sexual way. When something hits us, when we are animated by life or when life activates us in what way do we respond? We will find or we will discover that sometimes we respond to a problem by thinking about it, ruminating, thinking, and thinking, and thinking. People might respond with their emotions become very dramatic, other people may respond in an instinctual or motor way; very impulsively. This is a way that we can begin to organize our experience. We should begin to reflect on how am I responding to life. How am I approaching life, how am I engaging in life? We have a tendency to only use one brain and ignore the other ones and that is a problem. That represents not knowing the three forces or we don’t know how to properly relate to them.
The brains themselves, these machines, they have three parts to them as well. Every part of our brain actually has the other two parts or three parts to itself. We know in the other slide we spoke about the three brains being representative of external, internal, and abstract relations, so within every one of our brains, sometimes we say that inside the intellectual brain exists the instinctive aspect, the emotional aspect and the intellectual aspect of the same intellectual brain. So those three aspects exist in all three brains. Another way we can use different words is that external, internal, abstract. For example, how do we use these different brains? For example, if I’m a dancer, or if you want to learn how to dance what brain do you have to be using? If a dancer went on stage and was using their intellectual center in order to do all the movements it wouldn’t look right, it would be very wrong and this is because these brains operate on different types of energy. If you want to dance you have to use your motor center, obviously, but you also have to use your emotional center because it is an expression of what’s internal. The dancing would be related to the motor center but also related to the internal aspect of the motor center, because it is an expression. As well you could say, the motor aspect of the emotional brain – but that aspect, the motor aspect of the emotional brain, is better seen when someone is sobbing in grief, for example. Imagine how the body moves when it is cries. There we see the emotional brain primary, but the motor aspect of the emotional brain is very active.
These three brains work at different speeds as well, and this also causes us to have a lot of problems. Our intellectual center is what we are able to kind of view probably the easiest, because we have thoughts, and we can relate them to words and our inner experience sometimes we relate very much to our intellect. It’s harder to realize what is going on emotionally. Emotions get more difficult; you might put some words to it but you also fail to put words to it. It’s a very difficult in that sense, it’s because in part that emotional center operates at a speed that’s much faster than the intellectual center. So the person who is trying to dance, if they are trying to intellectualize how to do the dance they are going to be doing it off pace, off speed and rigid, because it is going too slow. The motor-instinctual-sexual centers are progressively even faster.
The sexual center is the fastest, so instantaneous we barely even have the ability to be cognizant of it. That sexual impulse of attraction or repulsion just happens muvh faster than we are able to see. The slower the center the more it’s easy to work with that center, the more it’s easy to modulate the energy in that center. There are parts of ourselves which are unconscious and there is a little part of ourselves which is conscious, so when we respond in a certain center unconsciously we are just reacting to life, responding. With a little bit of consciousness we can modulate that, we can change that, instead of reacting, we can act with consciousness, so if we look at the intellectual center it is even difficult for us, for most of humanity, to control their intellectual center. Any one of us can do an exercise of telling yourself I don’t want to think about anything for the next five minutes; just to have that as a goal, it’s very difficult. That is a process, to learn how to do that, because the consciousness can operate in any of these centers and if you learn to work with your intellectual center, you can learn how to make that center obey. It is just a machine and if we are not conscious all of our unconscious elements (which we do not know about because we don’t have self-knowledge) operate that center mechanically and use up energy very wastefully, just waste all of our energy. Nevertheless, intellectual center being difficult, it is also the easiest center to begin and to have some control over, to manage.
The sexual center is the most difficult. In order to illustrate the different speeds or frequencies of these machines, I have an example: when I was doing the dishes one day and I didn’t realize that the water was scalding hot, I just didn’t realize it, so I put my hands under there and immediately, I don’t even know why, my knee kicked forward, and obviously I pulled my hands back too, but my knee kicked forward and slammed into the cabinet under the sink. So the instinctive and motor center immediately acted, and then I felt “I am in pain.” I felt an emotional sense of fear or surprise, and then I begin to be able to think about it. To reflect intellectually on the thoughts that bubble out from an emotional sense.
So you can see how the motor center is the fastest, my knee kicked forward. The emotional is next, and it is still faster than the intellectual center. The intellectual center is the last thing that starts churning and churns out those thoughts, and even though the thoughts come so fast, they are the slowest. We think thoughts are so powerful but they are the ones with the least power, it is not to say that thoughts correctly managed aren’t powerful; they are but it’s the slowest center.
Another example, we give this example a lot, if you are typing on a keyboard or playing the piano or something like that. When you are typing on a keyboard that movement of energy, if you are trying to think where to type every letter, it gets very slow and doesn’t work very well. You only get this if you know how to type instinctually through the motor center. If you are just typing and you are not thinking about where you are putting every finger it operates very smoothly, you are not using your intellectual center to move your fingers for each key, it is happening through the motor center. So we have to learn how to use the right centers. When we are driving, driving should actually be more of a motor center; it doesn’t mean that we should turn off our intellect and emotion but if you are using your intellectual center and someone jumps out in front of the road if you are truly just in your intellectual center you would be too slow, you wouldn’t be able to react fast enough. Your motor center and your instinctual center could react much faster. Sometimes we use our emotional center to drive, and that is where you usually get into accidents because we speed, we are speeding because we are in some type of relationship with emotion. We are afraid of being late so we speed, or we just like that rush related to an emotional sense. That emotional center is there looking for that emotional experience or is acting out of some type of fear or ambition in the emotional center, and that causes us to get into an accident. We need to acknowledge and realize, become conscious of how these centers are operating with each other.
Someone once asked me about driving, he said, “I can’t drive being conscious because then I’ll be too slow, I will get into an accident...” but that person was mistaking consciousness for the intellect. They thought to be conscious and to be present, to be aware was to sit up here in your brain and to think and have an intellectual kind of dialog with yourself, and that is actually not it, consciousness is different. We have an idea when we meditate, some of us when we meditate it is very cerebral, this is very much a Western thing, most people in the West see meditation as a cerebral activity, maybe because of all the brain scans we see today. That science, using brain scan is good, there is nothing wrong with that study, obviously there are things going on in the brain, but in the East meditation is about the heart. This is the center of intelligence, if you were to talk about meditation and start pointing to your head some people in the Eastern cultures would go like what are you doing? Meditation is in the heart. Of course it is related to all the centers but it is not an intellectual thing.
There is a lot that we can say about the centers. I wanted to talk about this term here Bobbin-Kandelnosts which is a term Gurdjieff used. All it means is there is a certain number of values or a certain amount of gas in the tank that each of our brains have. Gurdjieff made the analogy of a spring inside a watch, a mechanical watch, and each spring is twisted or calibrated to perfectly count a day or an hour or a minute, whatever it would be, and once that spring is done that spring is done, it needs to be rewound. We can relate this as gas in a tank or a certain amount of battery life that you have on your cell phone. We are given a certain amount of this energy for each brain and when those values are exhausted the brain begins to die.
There is this term here, death happens in thirds, and if we have the fortune to grow older we can see sometimes somebody’s physical body begins to fail before their emotional or their reasoning do. Other times you may see someone who physically relatively healthy but their mind begins to go. Other people you may see that physically there are okay, intellectually they are okay but emotionally they are dead, there is something not right there. So we have to be careful to conserve our values.
Extreme cases would be, for an example, an athlete, someone who plays football or something like that, a very extreme motor brain existence or working in a very physical manual labor. You have to be careful because we only have a certain amount and then the body begins to break down and you can have a lot of problems with your physical body later on. An emotional center depletion might be somebody as a profession might be an actor or an artist and they are so invested emotionally expending their emotional center repeatedly that they lose that, or, they become unbalanced. There are two sides to that, one could be just emotional dead, and another could be really just extreme unbalance of emotions, and this is related to some mental illnesses, and could be related to some people who develop psychosis. Not just from a professional standpoint, but just an emotional person, someone who has a lot of relationships or they are getting into emotional arguments a lot it is the same type of thing.
Finally, the intellectual center, a lot of business and commerce is related to the intellectual center. If you are constantly living just through the intellectual center, you can begin to lose your intellect, you can over extend yourself. A lot of things can happen, there are two sides to this because there is the overall amount of values we have for our whole life but there is also a frequency at which those values are doled out to the brains in a cycle. For example, in a particular day you need to know if you overextending yourself intellectually, when you begin to get weak, like if you have a day or a job where you have to think a lot, doing analysis or working with numbers or that type of thing, where you have to think a lot or reason, you have to begin to be aware that you need to shut down your intellectual center, to be done with that center and take a pause. If you have a job that is constantly overextending your intellect, or if you are using your job in that way because you are identified and are extending yourself too much, you have to figure out how to rebalance your life. When the fuel for the intellectual brain is depleted but you continue to use it you will begin to damage yourself. When depleted, a brain will pull from other brains, you will pull the fuel out of the other brains. This fuel will run the intellectual brain, but they won’t run it in the right way and they will begin to disequilibrate yourself.
What happening today, which is extremely sad in this world, is that we are depleting ourselves sexually, which is the finest and most powerful energy that we have. People continue to expel and exhaust themselves sexually, and consequently they are pulling from the emotional center and pulling from the intellectual center. We already do not know how to use our sexual energy, but going further we are actually damaging the other centers by exhausting the sexual center. We need to learn how to transmute our sexual energy, but at least as a humanity we could find some balance and not pull from the other centers. Over extension of the sexual center causes grave mental illness in many people. They do not know how to use their sexual center, they become identified with the sexual impulse and through pornography, masturbation, or just many types of random sexual encounters. Living a life like that – and this is not an ethical thing, I am not saying you are a bad person because you are doing this or that – what I am saying is if you use abuse the sexual center it will pull from the other centers, you will become depleted, and you won’t have the energy to remain balanced. We get this life as a predetermined sum of values that we use until it is gone. Unless perhaps you do a really serious spiritual work you might get some extensions, you might get some additional time, that can happen but we don’t need to put ourselves in that situation. When we put the other energy to the sexual centers because we are depleting ourselves we will become very unbalanced emotionally and we will become extremely subjective in our thinking.
The rational center becomes more subjective, the thinking center it becomes less and less able to find any value of the higher truths in life and it becomes more sensual. The intellect only operates in terms of sensations and materialistic values and become more and more sub–jective. Sub means down. The intellect become infected because it is depleted more and more, and then we develop theories which reinforce the type of sexual behavior that we feel like having.
So, anyway that is the origin of the quote “death happens in thirds”. Death is a part of life and we were born and we will die but we have to do our best to live our life in the most harmonious way possible. I want to end by just telling you about the Three Traitors going back to this image. This lecture is only an introduction to the ideas that can be further elaborated in other lectures. The first primary goal of this work is to acquire psychological equilibrium, and what that means is to have a balanced response in the three brains at all times.
So when any type of impression hits us: let us say when we get a bill in the mail and don’t have the money to pay it, what happens? Do we react from the emotional center, and react by going to fear? Every single reaction, we have to look at it, ask where is it going into my three brains, and how am I responding to this? We need to learn how to walk on this path with balance. Life is trying to hit us from every angle and we are getting unbalanced when becoming identified, or using the energy in the wrong way in one of these three brains. We have to learn how to become aware, to self-observe, and to find that balance, to restore that balance. When we do the work to restore that balance we are becoming conscious of how the mechanics in our body and in our soul work. So that is what psychological equilibrium means, it is a lot of work to reach that spot but it is completely possible. It is a work of becoming conscious, it is a conscious work. You cannot get there by thinking about it, you can’t get there by having extreme emotions, you can’t get there by using your motor brain to just physically be here in a classroom or something like that. All those things might be necessary but the consciousness is what needs to be worked and there is no replacement for conscious efforts, but conscious efforts is not something intellectual.
People say “what does that mean to be conscious?” You can try to describe it but it is a different dimension. It is not intellect, it’s not emotions, it is not instinct or a sexual impulse, the consciousness is behind that or within that already. It is a stream of energy within that.
We have this capacity to be basically present, to basically perceive and we can perceive our three brains, we can see what is going on. Am I feeling emotionally distraught? Am I carrying this emotional weight or depression with me for a long time? Am I worried about something when my intellectual brain says I shouldn’t be? Are you worried about something? How easy it is in response to repress your intellectual brain (trying not think about it), and then something happens, suddenly you are having a little crisis, and get hysterical or something happens because, finally, you can’t suppress that emotion anymore, and then it explodes? It is because we weren’t being conscious of the three brains. Well, it is very complicated because we may have the ideal of being a spiritual person, “well I am going to have this conscious response to life” and intellectually we hold on to that ideal very heavily, so it is easy to deny the fact that in reality our emotional brain is sick, or we are feeling emotionally sick. Or that we may justify our behaviors and rationalize like, “I can do this because I know better, I am just doing this because I want to and it conscious.” Somehow we end up doing things we know we shouldn’t do. We can hide from ourselves. The different brains just work mechanically and our unconsciousness will just take hold of them and use them as they wish.
Samael Aun Weor states that there are two primary forces that work themselves through the human machine and one of those forces is our egos or unconsciousness but that is actually the secondary force, the primary force that works through the human machine, Samael Aun Weor states is the cosmic influences that we have, those cosmic rays that I was telling you about. They influence us and we don’t even realize it. An example he gives is the Bolshevik Revolution which is a revolution related to communism. All of those individuals thought that they were having this grand idea to have a revolution but that idea was only thrusted into their consciousness because their machine was influenced at a cosmic level related to the organization of stars. You could see today in a lot of war and revolutionary type of movements in the Middle East, where things are getting difficult... How does a whole population of people change, or for example, the whole hippie movement and the sexual revolution? Everybody thought, oh perhaps they all had the same idea at the same time, but the reality was it was a cosmic influence that caused certain elements to rise up. Those psychologal elements already existed but those elements rise up into the emotional brain, or into the intellectual brain and act. We have all these influences within ourselves that we don’t even know about. We have no conception of it because we have so little amount of consciousness.
It is the cosmic rays which are first and foremost influencing us because they influence a whole world, a whole society at a time, but then the other layer of influence is our ego. Those cosmic rays bring those egos into the light to take hold of our three brains. The three brains are like three vehicles. As you can get into a car and drive the car, but, who is driving the car? Who is driving the emotional center? It depends, it can change from moment to moment. Why do we change our mind? Why do we feel one thing today and another thing tomorrow? It is a different part of our self, an unconscious part of our self, an ego. One ego gets out of our emotional center and another ego enters in, so one day we are very into one thing and the next day we don’t want that anymore, we are into this. We can have one ego in our emotional center and a different ego in our intellectual center and have great conflict between what “I think I should do” and what “I feel I should do” and another thing about whether “I should stay here” or “should I run away.” You could see how a single response could have three contradictory things or even more.
This is an introductory way of looking at how these three brains operate. Our ego, or multiple egos, go into these centers, operate and then another ego comes in and pushes that one out and feels differently. Those egos are influenced by the cosmic rays and influenced by the impressions coming in.
So as a whole, attempting to do this work, these three brains represent the three forces because those three forces are the basic manifestation of how creation exists. Those three forces multiply and become more and more complicated. Finally, when we reach a three brained machine like us we can have the ability, the capacity to become conscious to all three of those forces. That is why only a humanoid, only a rational person like ourselves can do this spiritual work. An animal has a spirit and a soul but they cannot do this spiritual work. A plant has a spirit and a soul and a physical body but it can’t do this spiritual work. Only the three brained being can do the spiritual work, so we should reflect on that and notice how precious the time is to do the work because we have the capacity, we have the machinery, but we won’t have it forever.
If we don’t perform a conscious work and create internal developed solar body, a solar soul to be born again, then this physical body will go away. Our sense of emotions, our lunar astral body will go away, our mental body will go away and we will be reduced to that elemental again. All of these things we think that are ours, we think this mind is my mind, but that mind, that mechanical process, is given to us as a complication of energy. I think it is my emotions but in reality it is an emotional center we didn’t develop; it was given to us. So we have to do our work consciously, to create something of our own self. It’s a conscious work.
The consciousness conserves the energy flowing through the three brains. If we are mechanical all day, we are just thinking and thinking, at the end of the day we will be exhausted, or, having a lot of emotions at the end of the day, we are exhausted, because we are identified our sense of self within that caged up ego, and the ego always wastes all that energy. Becoming conscious we can start to conserve that energy, becoming conscious we don’t waste it anymore. When we begin to conserve that energy that energy can nourish ourselves in a certain way that allows us to be present and awakened outside of our physical body.
Outside the physical body we need a certain type of energy to be conscious in that presence. We can only be conscious outside the physical body if we have the energy to do it. If you are emotionally sick or intellectually drained or not using your sexual center correctly you won’t be able to have an experience, there will be no energy for it.
Our ego when it manifests in those three brains, we call it the three traitors, because it is those three traitors that are betraying those three forces which we call Christ. We betray the Christ intellectually, we betray the Christ emotionally and we betray the Christ through our own behaviors and actions and sexual behaviors. You can see in the very gospel Jesus is betrayed in different ways. Jesus is betrayed by Pilate, and Pilate washes his hands of any wrong doing and says this isn’t my fault. Literally in the Bible he washes his hands, because we justify our behaviors. That is a symbol placed there intentionally to symbolize the mind.
We may do something wrong but we find an intellectual reason that we can find a safe haven from, that it was okay I did such and such thing, “they deserved it”, etc. We all have a very complex set of reasoning, but the reasoning hides us from the fact that we are actually not doing the right thing.
In a sexual way, instinctual way, we just go with some random impulse that we have that betrays the Lord. That is represented by Judas, Judas who betrays the Christ for thirty pieces of silver and in synthesis any type of drunkenness or fornication or just wasting energy for pleasures.
Then the Elder or the Chief Priest Caiaphas betrays the Lord emotionally and through evil will. Through doing evil in the name of God. It is the worst thing of them all. We have that kind of impulse and we attribute it to the Lord.
So these three traitors are working through us all the time in very little ways and very significant ways at the same time. In the end, it is a long process, but eventually you can destroy those three traitors, and eventually the culmination of the path will perfectly incarnate those three forces not just physically but through the soul and spiritually as well. When you have those three forces incarnated that type of Spirit or Monad can manage a planet, or manage a solar system, or greater and greater systems, and eventually get lost in the bosom of the Cosmic Father, the Absolute Abstract Space.
Questions and Answers
Q: Are the Bobbin-Kandelnosts, the values, determined by karma? Does everyone have the same amount?
A: Well everything is karma, so does everyone have the same amount? No, I think certain people have varying amounts. People who have more values in their motor-instinctual-sexual brain are able to last as an athlete much longer, for example. Everything is related to karma, but we have enough to do the work, so you don’t have to worry about whether we have enough or not. And plus if we are doing the work we can have an extension. Just like this world you can file for an extension on submitting documents to the government, there is mercy in the cosmos. If we lived out of balance in previous lives, that will impact our current existence, and the Bobbin-Kandelnosts are a part of that. In general, we are living shorter and shorter lives. This, I know contradicts what modern science think about life span, but in truth, very ancient civilizations lived much longer than us. They had much more time to do the work. We, all of us, have lived many lives, many lives which were out of balance. But we still have the ability to do the work.
Q: You spoke about conserving energy. That almost sounds like I should conserve my energy by not going out and doing things.
A: The conservation of energy is important. However, let us not confuse it with laziness or something like that. Emotional energy for example, we have to have the right balance. There are forces that are already existing - an emotional impulse is constantly arriving within us. What do we have to do, if we did not wish to feel that? You have to put some other type of energy into it, some additional energy to repress it or not feel it, and that’s another energy in and of itself. So you can sit on the couch and waste energy because you are ignoring what you really should be doing in that moment. It takes energy to ignore. So that is a waste, but what is the opposite? We have these two polls, where some people may react to this idea of conserving or not becoming totally identified. The opposite theory is something like: If you have an emotional impulse you should completely express it, you should “own it,” be yourself, that is “you,” because otherwise you are repressing it. So what is correct here? Is it always right to express everything? Or should we be repressing? Well if we blindly express something we become identified with it and we waste energy, but if we blindly repress it we actually waste energy as well. Both ways leave us in the dark, blind. Beyond repression and expression is comprehension.
Q: So it is more about being aware of whatever is coming out, arriving in our perception?
A: Yes. We must endeavor to become more conscious of our state, and, how to respond to it, how to work with it. It sounds almost strange but we can have control over our emotional center, to know how to open it up, to feel more intensely, and to know how to constrict it and how to match our brains with what is appropriate. For example, if you go to a funeral, most people are very identified emotionally, but you can have the understanding of needing to open up the emotional center, and feel the grief, but the grief is not my totality, and that is okay. I need to observe its action and activity within myself, but not become lost in it, and not to repress it either. We need to know it. It wouldn’t be good to go to a funeral of someone you knew and someone you loved and not feel anything, that wouldn’t make any sense. It would not be good to become lost in the emotion either. There is a myriad of examples, in essence we need to learn how to live; everything is a little bit different.
Q: I ask because when you say to conserve something, we can think of money, to conserve money would be to not spend any money.
A: Right, so the main difference here is that our whole experience is a continuum of energy. The energy never stops, it is always flowing, in multiple dimensions at once. That is our experience, it is a flow of energy. So there is no way to “not spend” it. But there is a way to use it wisely, to not waste energy. This is what I mean by conservation. Energy is naturally not wasted when we are not overly identified because when the ego takes control it runs rampant and just wastes energy on everything.
Q: Are the vital values related to the cosmic rays? When do we get the values?
A: They are two different things. The vital values that I mentioned are deposited in the physical-vital body from birth. The vital values get developed, the three brains get developed through adolescence and puberty and finally the intellectual brain isn’t fully developed until you are 20 to 25. The motor brain gets developed first, first the instinctual brain the child learns body functions and then they learn how to walk and run; little kids are running around because their motor brain is being developed, then intellectual and emotional brains are getting developed later. They start asking "why, why, why this and why that," then they start falling in love. So the brains are developing and maturing until 20 – 25 years old. Those values are determined for that physical body.
Q: Do you get a different set with each life?
A: Yes. The next life that you have you will have a new set of values. To be clear, the values I am speaking of, Bobbin-Kandelnosts, are a quantity of energy, like the amount of energy in your mobile phone’s battery. There are another thing, we call psychological values, which are different – the psychological values are the mixture of the consciousness and the ego. Of course everything is related to karma so if you wasted them (Bobbin-Kandelnosts) in one life you might have a different amount or something like that in the next life, nothing escapes karma, but I don’t have any specific knowledge or information about how or why one specific brain might have a different amount of values or not.
The cosmic rays are just a level of influence, for example if I shine an ultraviolet light (a black light) onto different things it makes certain types of materials fluoresce or glow. So the material was already there, it just become activated by a certain principle of energy that now makes it fluorescent. In the same way these radioactive rays cause a fluorescence of our psychology, so these different cosmic influences cause fluorescence within our own psychology, and those are the parts of the consciousness, which are often within egos, that become active. This is how an entire nation can all of a sudden become overwhelmed and affected with a negative type of emotion, a negative impulse. Not that the cosmic ray is negative, it is that the principle within the psychology which is a duality, and we are captured by the lunar part of it, so we are just pulled in the direction. For example, if the Earth needs to pull a lot of energy back into itself, and we as an Essence happened to be connected to that energy (though our ego), we as an essence are going down into the hell realms, Inferno. That is the way it is.
If we liberate ourselves out of that, then we can go up. So we have to take advantage of that fluorescence, that radioactivity that is happening in our psychology, because those are the elements that we need to become liberated of. They can provide a lot knowledge, it is that same duality if we overcome the ordeal we can acquire knowledge, if we don’t overcome the ordeal then we get carried down.
Q: So the fact that we are in the cosmic scenario of the Kali Yuga, it provides heavy forces for us to push against?
A: Yeah, so if we go to the gym and we use heavier weights then we gain bigger muscles, or if we have a container of rocket fuel we can either get to the moon or we will end up killing ourselves. It is a lot of fuel so it is that kind of duality. We have to take advantage of this fact that society might be becoming very materialistic, it is a double edged sword - it might be a lot of weight but we actually can train our consciousness a lot more effectively.
Q: When you are talking about the cosmic rays, is that the astrological influences?
A: They are astrological influences yes, so they are related to the zodiacal houses. Everything is related to that, because Christ manifests as 12 and 24 (Arcanum 12 and Arcanum 24), so those stars that we externalize as the zodiac, are the physical vehicles of those 12 principles. So a zodiacal house may be a certain number of stars – a house may be the energy coming from not one star but from a whole constellation of stars. It is a bit difficult for us to comprehend but we have to meditate on that.
Q: Why are they called the three traitors?
A: So the three traitors betray our inner Lord. The drama of Christ happens within ourselves at different levels. The very first level its related to these spiritual impulses that we have, which will bring us back to the light, but we have this ego, this subjective intelligence and emotions and impulses that betray those laws and cause the Christ to suffer and be crucified. Then through a process of resurrection we can be redeemed. Those three traitors are three principle ways in which we have wrong thinking, wrong feeling, and wrong actions. The demon of desire, the demon of intellect and the demon of evil will. We have those things within us. They are there - we have to acknowledge there is a battle going on inside of us something that most people don’t want to see. Many want to say “this is who I am, these are my impulses and how I should behave, why should I deny that?” If you want to liberate yourself from those impulses, if you want to have full consciousness, you have to fight against it. This is why Christ states to “deny yourself.” This is why we are teaching all these things, it is a complicated work but we do all the things necessary; meditation, sexual transmutation, development of compassion and good will, doing good things for others.
We have to become psychologically balanced. What that means is that our consciousness is the one directing our behaviors as opposed to our sub-consciousness or our egos doing things. We have will power, we have a lot of will power to sit in front of some television screen for hours, mentally asleep, watching the screen and becoming identified. The character’s emotions become the viewer’s emotions and we even want the manipulation of our emotions just to feel something, but we have very little willpower just to sit down and look at the screen of our own mind. It is abstract or boring or difficult because our willpower is locked up in all of these egos. Each of those egos wants to be fed by certain types of impressions and when we sit to meditate it is not the impressions that the egos want, so we have very little will power to do our spiritual practices. We start where we start with our little willpower, a little bit of imagination and an emotional capacity and we begin to comprehend and liberate our consciousness, little by little. We slowly eliminate those three traitors. When we achieve psychological equilibrium then we can really be working on our ego, if we are being swayed back and forth and we don’t have equilibrium emotionally or intellectually or sexually then we don’t have the equilibrium to stay and to view. If the ego is this moving entity, we have to do the things to be focused to see it, but what happens is we get trapped by that movement and become identified and become one with that ego, then we are dreaming and swaying and just mechanically behaving in life.
