Trauma and Spiritual Healing

10/19/2019

In the Gnostic teachings, we talk a lot about suffering. In fact, if you are familiar at all with Buddhism, the first of the Four Noble Truths is that life is suffering. That in our existence, in our craving and desiring after different aspects and experiences of life, we are actually suffering intensely, but we are asleep to this. We are not aware of it.

Today, will be talking about trauma, and trauma is unique in that it is an experience that cannot be easily denied and that brings us directly into consciousness of suffering. If you have ever experienced something so traumatic, that the pain stuck with you even after the event had passed, or maybe now that pain has shaped your life in a very impactful way, then you understand that you have some consciousness of what suffering truly is. So you, in your own sense, have awakened some level of gnosis.

Gnosis γνῶσις is a Greek word that means knowledge, but not knowledge from a book. It is knowledge that is experiential. In this tradition, we often talk about striving for gnosis as direct experience of divinity. How do we have awakened experiences internally in the astral plane? How do we see and talk to God face-to-face and receive answers, not just pray but actually have that connection alive and awake within us?

So when we talk about cultivating gnosis, it is something that we really deeply know not just intellectually, but with all of our being. A trauma is interesting, because it is an experience of suffering that often manifests itself in the body. Even rationally we might say, "Well I should be over that, or that shouldn't have impacted me that much, or I don't want to act like this and respond with this much intensity to experiences anymore just because I was traumatized in the past.” Even with that rational resistance to it, we still tense up. We still feel the bodily sensations associated with the pain that we have gone through, and emotionally if you have known anyone who has been traumatized, or if you yourself have experienced trauma, it carries a heavy weight as well.

That is why I say it is a type of knowledge or gnosis that cannot be denied, no matter how much our rational mind tries to deny it and say, “This didn't happen to me! This wasn't a big deal. This shouldn't have affected me this much.” It really is a chance for us to wake up. In many ways, trauma can be a wake-up call: a chance for us to say, "There is something in life, in my life, that is fundamentally wrong. This suffering needs to be changed."

Trauma can be a chance for us to explore, to seek more answers, to try to find a way to change. For many people, they seek more existential routes to solve their problems. They seek to find a spiritual answer for why people have to suffer some horrible things such as rape, sexual assault, child abuse, even things like divorce: things that can be so painful emotionally, physically, etc.

So on the one hand, trauma presents us with an opportunity to radically change our lives, but for many people, it is very difficult to find answers or things that really work to make a change in their life, to really address their suffering. In those cases, trauma often becomes more of a burden, or an obstacle―something that only pushes us deeper into suffering. Perhaps a parent's problems with addiction, when we were a child, now causes us to struggle with addiction, as an example. How do we take the risks associated with trauma and try to transform them through a form of spiritual alchemy, into an opportunity for us to rise above suffering to become stronger, to become more wise, more aware of ourselves and of the mysteries of life?

Medical and Psychological Correlations of Trauma

When we talk about trauma, there are some interesting correlations between a medical or psychological, you know, mainstream definition of trauma, and the more esoteric or spiritual significance of trauma that I am going to discuss today.

Starting with a conventional understanding of trauma, we can look at the causes of trauma. In the field of psychology, it is often referred to as “Big-T” Trauma or “little-t” trauma. We acknowledge that sometimes events that seem not so significant to many people―for example a break up when someone is a teenager and feels very unloved―can often be dismissed as not a big deal by adults who don't really have that same perspective on life at that point. That would probably be considered a “little-t” trauma. It still has an impact on us. It still has an effect and many lasting effects often on the way that we would look for, in this example, at relationships in our future.

But it might not be considered a “Big T” Trauma. “Big T” trauma would be something like going to war and watching your best friend killed beside you, or experiencing a sexual assault, or perhaps being in a terrifying car accident. These types of long-term abuse or very traumatic incidents can be both considered trauma.

Now many times different people can go through the same event and have a different response to it. What this is frequently associated with is the characteristic of resilience. Resilience still remains a bit of a mystery for psychologists, but there is a lot of research pointing to the family structure and the early childhood environment as a major factor in terms of trauma, resilience. So if someone had a very stable and loving family environment, then they might experience traumatic events with more resilience, especially if they had at least one adult figure that was a stable caregiver in their life, versus people who had a lot more instability. Perhaps neglect or abuse in the home can make it much harder for victims to have resilience in a variety of different difficult situations.

Situational and Chronic Trauma

I also want to point out that trauma can be both situational and chronic. Now this impacts the brain in a very different way. Situational trauma is usually when someone is already an adult and they have an experience, that is a situation or maybe a few situations, that produce post-traumatic stress disorder. As given in the example, seeing someone's best friend die right beside them will be an example of situational trauma, and that this actually does damage the brain. It does have a psychological impact on the brain, but it is different from chronic trauma.

Chronic trauma is usually associated with childhood. It happens over a period of years. It could be years of childhood abuse, verbal abuse, sexual abuse, etc. This actually changes the whole structure of the brain and the way that the brain develops, so that that individual's personality now has a new structure, so the way that they even interface with the world will be very heavily impacted by the trauma that they went through over the course of those years.

Much of that has to do with the fight for survival. If you are coming home to an abusive home as a child, there is a feeling of helplessness. There is a feeling of never knowing what to expect, if today is going to be a good day or a bad day. So that puts tremendous stress on the body, on the nervous system. In that case, the brain has to reorient itself to find a way to survive―to find adaptive coping behaviors that, perhaps later on in life, will seem maladaptive to new situations where the threat isn't so real.

Commission versus Omission

Finally, there is trauma that happens via commission or via omission. Often we think of trauma as someone committing an act to me that makes me feel out of control. Being assaulted on the street would be an act of commission that could be traumatic for people. Give people a real sense of helplessness, and “I don't know if I have control over my life. How can I know that it is safe anywhere to go?”

Trauma of omission would be a lack of the needs that a person has. Omission could be childhood neglect or constant blame and that feeling of not being good enough. The absence of what someone needs also gets processed into the brain as a trauma and changes our brain structure.

As I mentioned here on the slide, trauma affects the nervous system and the neural structure. One good thing is that neuroscience now has so much evidence that even past the age of our mid-20s, we are still able to restructure our brain and meditation is a tremendous tool to be able to do so. So even though trauma codes itself and creates neural pathways that are very deeply ingrained through prolonged and continuous work, one is able to redirect and to kind of cut away those negative pathways, and produce new positive pathways that change your whole perception of reality, that also, by changing your outlook on reality, change the way that you respond to it.

Fight, Flight, and Freeze Responses to Reality

So perhaps you will not have one of these fight, flight, or freeze responses to situations. Take for example a woman who was in a domestic abusive partnership, where you know, continually, she had to be on her guard in order to defend herself from potential attacks from her partner. Now later on, she might enter into another relationship where the partner is loving and supportive, but little things may set this woman off to respond in a very aggressive way―that would be the fight response. To become completely withdrawn and cold towards her partner would be the flight response―or to freeze, to just totally dissociate, to become emotionally numb to the situation that she is in. So that is just one clear example of how that might manifest, but depending on the trauma, these responses can look a little bit different as you can imagine.

Given that those types of responses are what are programmed into the lower levels of the brain, the more instinctive levels of the brain, which is what becomes activated, it affects the entire nervous system and produces instinctive reactions without the ability to truly think consciously. To have that higher thinking process where you say “Hmm… maybe I'm overreacting about this situation; I should calm down; I should look at it more objectively”―when the amygdala, or the lower part of the brain gets activated, it is actually very, very difficult to be able to control oneself and to override that response, because it is such a deep primal part of the brain.

However, we do know that through meditation, as I mentioned before, we are able to gradually develop pathways and strengthen pathways that do allow us a bit of separation in those moments, and to repair the damaged parts of our brains so that we can respond in better ways.

For many people, trauma leads to what seemed to other people as irrational reactions. In that person's shoes, perhaps they don't even realize that they are traumatized. Perhaps they feel genuinely in this situation, “It is life or death for me. I need to defend myself. I need to survive,” and so they respond with an extreme reaction to the situation. But for someone else who standing around, who doesn't have that same experience of trauma, they may not understand why this person is freaking out about a certain situation.

The Spiritual Impact of Trauma

Now if we step into a more esoteric understanding drawing upon teachings from the Gnostic tradition―which we have many lectures about as well, if you'd like to learn more about these―we understand trauma and the way that trauma happens in a different way. So yes, it is true all the stuff that I just talked about―the biological impact of trauma―but more importantly for our concerns is the spiritual impact of trauma.

When we experience life as a consciousness, as a soul that is perceiving different aspects in nature, we experience a variety of sensations as impressions. Now you can live for certain amount of time without food, without water, and even without air, but you can't exist without impressions. Even if you go off to one of the sensory deprivation tanks, still in your mind, there are impressions. There is an impression of darkness where there are thoughts.

Impressions both come to us from our environment externally and are impressing upon our consciousness and our perception, but they also come internally. So it may be that we almost step into the road and a bus coming by scares us, and that is an impression that strikes the consciousness, but the result that is produced within us, the fear, the instinctive pull of the body back, you know, the thought of “Oh my gosh, I could have just died right there!”―all of those things are also impressions.

This shows us that the consciousness, that which perceives within us, is separate from the body, separate from the heart, and separate from the mind. It perceives these aspects of ourselves: thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, experiences in our external world, but it is separate from them. This is very important, because when we try to meditate, meditation is not just to sit on a cushion and to zone out, but to activate the consciousness that is beyond thought, feeling, and body.

We have to have that fundamental understanding that we are not our thoughts. We are not our emotions. We are not our bodies. We are perceiving them, but they are impressions, and we do have the conscious ability to take a step back from them and perceive them without being so identified with, “I am angry. This anger is me. I must act on it!” I have no other choice but to separate a little bit and to realize, “I am feeling anger. I am experiencing anger and right now I have the choice if I want to believe that this anger is worth doing these acts and maybe later on I'll regret, or if this anger is something I can let go of and choose a different path―using my free will.”

When we talk about the human machine, we understand that for most people, probably all of us here, we are much more mechanical than we are conscious. Like in the example I gave of the bus driving by―that happens in a split second and you react to it. There is no conscious choice in, “Am I going to jump back from that bus? Am I going to feel afraid? Am I going to think these thoughts afterwards?” It just happens. The impression comes in.

The brain, which we would call the intellectual center or the intellectual brain, is one part of us. We also have emotions, the heart, the emotional brain, emotional center in the body, and the motor-instinctive-sexual center of our body related with the spine. With those instincts in the lower brain, those three centers respond immediately, instantaneously to those reactions.

In most cases, the motor-instinctive-sexual center is the fastest brain, and we know that the nervous system is throughout the entire body and responds instinctively before your brain can even think or send a message. You touch a hot stove. Your hand pulls off before you can even think about it. That is the fastest brain.

The emotional brain is the second fastest. Emotions often come before we have time to process what is really happening to us and think about it rationally, and you know, there is a lot of research on how the heart is actually sending many more messages to the brain, and can actually have a bit of precognition. It can actually respond to something before it even happens.

Then finally, the intellectual center of the brain. So, most of us think, “Well, I am a rational person. I respond to life from logic and I am not going to act irrationally. I am not going to respond emotionally or instinctively, you know. I am an educated person” or whatever the case may be. But the truth is, given a certain experience, you will see that we are designed to survive―that we are designed like machines.

A stimulus comes in and we respond to it without thought. Why this is important is because the part of us, the consciousness, the part of us that is our soul, that is eternal, is the part we want to activate, because with the consciousness we can achieve that separation and we can respond to life with free will, with choice―not just according to our conditioning―not just “this happened to me when I was kid and this is the way I was raised and so I have no other choice but to respond in this pre-programmed way.”

We actually have a choice about “who do I want to be” and “how do I actually do that in the moment.” The consciousness, when it is awakened, is much, much faster than any of these three centers, but awakening the consciousness requires certain conditions that we are going to talk about in a few minutes.

The Transformation of Impressions and Psychological Disequilibrium

Now, when we receive impressions in the consciousness and it is not awake, this produces a disequilibrium in us, and especially over time, since most of us are running on autopilot much of the time. We are not even aware of this deep disequilibrium. We think, “Well, that's just the way that I am. If I perceive somebody to be disrespecting me, I am just going to respond like that because that's my character.”

But truly, it may be that throughout our life, we have received impressions and never transformed them. We have never looked within ourselves to say, “What is happening in me when I perceive that somebody is disrespecting me and what is causing me to respond? Do I have a choice to perhaps sink to their level and respond in kind, or to rise above it and be the type of person that maybe I'd prefer to be?”

That is why I say here, and we teach in our tradition, that untransformed impressions lead to conditioned behavior and thoughts. If we want to live as a free-willed individual, we cannot be living according to the program that has been conditioned into us. If we want to have the choice to pursue a path of enlightenment, just like Buddha or Krishna, Moses, Jesus, any of these great spiritual figures who at one point were just like us, then we need to begin to radically take control over our situation. We need to stop being who we are and open up the pathways of action that allow us to become someone new.

That is why meditation is essential spiritual practice.

Now, if you are not from an eastern religious tradition, meditation may take the form as contemplation or prayer, but regardless, we say that meditation is not about necessarily your posture, although posture, incense, those types of things of course can be helpful. Meditation is really about your state of consciousness. You may be walking about through the world and have the consciousness awake, and this can be meditation. If you have experienced a very intense situation where you suddenly felt extremely awake, that may be spontaneous experience of meditation, but we want to, of course, work with the science of meditation to learn the conditions to be able to produce it regularly.

So here, our problem of trauma is that we have we have impressions coming in all the time that aren't transformed and they are conditioning us to feel certain ways, to think certain thoughts, and to respond and behave in certain ways. If we don't want to spend our lives on repeat, feeling the same emotions day after day, thinking the same thoughts day after day, repeating the same reactions and behaviors day after day; if we really want to create a new life for ourselves, then we need to be able to wake up our consciousness.

The founder of our Gnostic tradition, Samael Aun Weor, makes a very powerful and simple statement about all of this. About receiving impressions in our life.

To change one's life is really to change one's own reactions towards it. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Revolution of the Dialectic

A lot of us have the mentality that life is just happening to me―and yes, it is true that our environment, our situation, the different systems in our world, do have an impact on our life, absolutely. But, what really determines the quality of our life is our response to it.

So if one impression strikes us in a certain way and produces negativity, then we are having a negative experience of life. If we can take that same impression and experience something more positive, like gratitude or understanding, then we have changed our experience of life. Fundamentally, life is not about what objectively happens to us out in the physical world. It is about the way that we experience it.

We see individuals who have been through intense hardship―war zones, like I said, trauma, childhood abuse―who have been able to transcend that and really have gratitude and experienced a lot of positive emotions in their lives.

Then we have individuals who have been, you know, born into wealth, and you can see that they are really miserable people. They can complain about a lot of things. Now, of course, there is every gray area in between. Not everybody who is rich is miserable. Of course, I am not going to say that, but we see that it really depends on the quality of the person in that experience, more than it depends on the situation. So, we have a habit of thinking, “Well, I am only going to be happy if this and this and this situation happens to me,” which is most of the time, out of our control.

The Gnostic Esoteric Work

In our spiritual work, we are trying very hard to flip that mentality into, “I am going to be happy if I can really come to understand my situation in life and consciously choose how I am going to respond to it.” This is a process. This is not just wishful thinking of, “Oh, okay I have been traumatized and I am just going to be happy about it.” It is not about belief. It is something much deeper.

So, to get into that, we are going to talk about: what is this work? I say it is a work because it requires a lot of effort, especially deep traumas that happened over the course of years. This is not something that is going to be erased overnight. Even, you know, from a materialistic psychological standpoint, to reverse the effects of trauma in the brain as you create new neural pathways takes a long time and a lot of work.

If we have experienced trauma and have a genuine longing to be free, we are willing to do the work. We want to be free from the suffering and we genuinely say, “This is a point in my life where I am turning it around. I am going to radically try to take control of my life and try something new.” Then we can begin to work with these methods.

The methods themselves are quite simple in theory, but to truly put our conscious effort into it is what depends on us. It is not about whether the method will work as much as it is about our willingness to continuously apply it and to give it, you know, give it the time it takes to work.

The Magic of the Roses

In Samael Aun Weor's book, Esoteric Medicine and Practical Magic―as you can see we have copies of the books over there―he teaches one remedy that is called the magic of the roses.

This is what I give as a precursor, because many people who are experiencing trauma, if they even begin to think about that trauma, or if some situation in their life comes and triggers the pain from the past, they are overwhelmed with emotion and pain. From that state, it is very difficult to cultivate the stability needed to be able to truly meditate and try to go deeper into changing ourselves.

So, this remedy is a natural remedy for us to heal spiritual and emotional pain and trauma: you know the loss of a loved one, a painful breakup, or even dealing with the after-effects of abuse, self-hatred, etc.

To work with the magic of the roses, one takes three glasses or water, pure water, of course, being better if you're able to, and then places one rose in each glass.

Position one glass facing the north, one glass facing the east, one glass facing the west.

Ideally if you have an altar or a spiritual place where you like to meditate or pray in your home, you would place these glasses there and you would sit and you would genuinely pray―reaching out to your inner divinity, whatever form that may take for you that is most powerful: Jesus or Buddha or the Divine Mother, Divine Father, whatever that may be, and pray for healing. Pray to bless these roses and to give you the healing.

Then, drink in the morning before breakfast the glass facing the east, and in the afternoon before lunch, the glass facing the north, and before dinner the glass facing the west.

You can refill the glasses and repeat the process for as many days as needed, until you feel like you are feeling better.

Now, what is important to point out here is that this is the magic of the roses. So, if we are seriously trying to work with magic or a mystical practice, an esoteric practice, we need a certain type of energy. This is not just based on belief, but it is based on our own quality of consciousness. For one thing, it matters how much you are really conscious and sincere in your prayer to be healed. For another thing, you also will need to utilize a very powerful force.

Sexual Energy: The Most Powerful Force for Healing

When we think about the most powerful energy within our bodies, it is the sexual energy. What can move people to chase after a desire so passionately, with so much energy over such a prolonged period of time, as much as sexual desire, right?

Sexual energy is the synthesis of everything that we are physically, emotionally, mentally. The things that we have experienced, the things that we have seen and thought, all get coded genetically into the DNA of our sexual cells. This sexual energy is not just the synthesis of who we are in a physical level, but holds a very special spiritual power.

The spiritual power of our sexual energy is the power of God, the power to create life. And yes, we understand this on a basic level, physically. What many people are not aware of is the sexual energy's power to transform and give birth within the psyche to new states of consciousness, the ability to awaken in higher state of consciousness, or if used in a negative way, the sexual energy can be used to awaken in lower realms of consciousness.

That is why I put here in the slide about transmutation that we want to transmute the sexual energy with purity―not with lust, but with love. Sexual attraction for most of us is always associated with lust. "If I feel desire for someone, it's in a very lustful way and that's just the only way I can think about that person." But what we are trying to do is take lust, start where we are at―you know, we all have lust―and to transform it through different practices. These are called pranayama in yogic traditions, breathing practices where you consciously take that energy and raise it up the spine into the brain to awaken our consciousness.

To use that energy helps us to move from being a lustful person to a truly loving person. Lust is “all about me and what I want in this relationship” or in this exchange with another person. Love is about the concern that “I feel for my partner” or this other individual. Love is being willing to sacrifice “what I want in order to support the happiness of both of us.”

Being able to move from that is not an automatic process. It requires a lot of consciousness, and being able to do the work of really changing ourselves into a new type of being is not an automatic process and requires a lot of work. This type of energy gives us the ability to have the equivalent of rocket fuel in our spiritual practice and to awaken in that way.

These practices are talked about at length in the book The Perfect Matrimony by Samael Aun Weor. He talks a lot about sexual alchemy, sexual transmutation, sexual purity, and being able to be with one's partner in a way that is loving instead of a way that is lustful. I don't have time today to really dive into it, but we do have the book, or you can read it for free online at Glorian.org [formerly gnosticteachings.org]. I'm just going to take one quote from this book. He says:

Here, we are not dealing with a matter of believing or disbelieving, of considering oneself chosen, or of belonging to such-and-such sect. The question of salvation is very serious. One must work with the grain, with the sexual seed. […] Only from the sexual grain is the Inner Angel born. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony

We look at masters like Jesus, Buddha, Moses, people who had power over nature. This was not an accident. They worked to cultivate it, and from their sexual force was born a tremendous power.

All of us have this capacity within ourselves, and it is not a matter of whether or not we believe it's true. It's a matter of if we do the practice and we really work with it, we see the results. We see the changes in our physicality, in our emotional center, in our mind. We see the changes in our conscious experiences: being awakened in the astral plane or in dreams, etc.

And so, it is not a matter of belonging to any group. You can be in any type of religion that you want, but it is a matter of really working sincerely with this science.

I begin with this practice, transmutation, as the basis, because although much of the work is in the next two practices I am going to talk about when we are trying to resolve our trauma. Without this basis, we can only go so far. Meditation will be helpful, magic of the roses might be helpful, but in order to create a truly permanent change in our consciousness, not just in our mind, or in our mental pathways within our consciousness, in the part of us that will move on to another lifetime, we need something much more powerful. Sexual energy is the root of who we are spiritually and physically.

Meditation as Therapy

The real intense work of trying to overcome trauma is in meditation. It is only through meditation that we can deeply comprehend the causes of our suffering. If we have experienced any impression in life, and it seems to be stuck and we are going around and around and around in circles over it, maybe we are thinking about it or we can't stop feeling or reacting to it. Being in meditation―calming the three brains, the mind, the heart, and the body, sitting in relaxation, and achieving the awakening of that consciousness and separating enough from the experiences that we are having emotionally, mentally, or physically―allows us to see what is truly happening to us in a more objective way, to experience it with more consciousness.

There is a whole book about this as well, The Revolution of the Dialectic by Samael Aun Weor. He points out many different techniques for being able to meditate, because if you have ever tried to look at your mind, it is a very complex place, and for most of us when we begin meditating, it is a very chaotic experience.

It is like, “I can't pay attention for 5 seconds, how am I supposed to go deeply into comprehending the causes of suffering in my mind?” It takes time to develop relaxation, to find a posture, and you know, an ability to create relaxation within yourself in those three centers.

It also takes time to develop concentration, to be able to concentrate on our mind and our experience with such vividness and alertness that we can stay awake even as the body relaxes into sleepiness.

Countertransference: The Resistance of the Mind

But in addition to that, we have other challenges, and when it comes to trauma there are a lot of these challenges. The mind has infinite defense mechanisms to protect itself. If you are trying to work on trauma or something that is very painful for you―a wound that you have carried for a very long time―the mind will try to guard itself so that you can't go there.

There is a reason that many traumatic memories get repressed, or that we don't like to think about the past and the bad things that happened. It is because the mind is trying to protect itself from pain, you know, this instinct in us, to go automatically towards pleasure and to go away from pain.

Unfortunately, just by ignoring something, we don't resolve it. We don't fix it. Meditation, like I said, is really diving in to do the deep work, to create a lasting change in ourselves because our unconscious mind will respond and react to situations before we have time to think about it. So we go deep and we remove those unconscious structures and mechanisms within our consciousness, our psyche. Then we can respond with free will instead of as machines.

Samael Aun Weor writes in The Revolution of the Dialectic:

The difficulty of profound introspective analysis (of our mind) lies in counter-transference. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Revolution of the Dialectic

Countertransference, when we think about this in a therapeutic setting, a clinical setting, is about reflecting a past trauma on to someone or something outside of us. Let's say that that in that situation of the woman who was in an abusive partnership, in that case she might try to repress that and move on, but when she enters into a new relationship, even if it's a healthy partnership, that will transfer all of that trauma, will transfer onto the new person or transfer onto different traumatic situations and produce the same reactions.

So even though objectively, these are two very different people and these situations may be very different, subjectively, within that person's experience of life, it is the same experience.

They are not conscious of this. They say, "No, no,” that “it's this guy. He's treating me bad, just like my ex-husband,” or whatever, but really, it is within ourselves that is projected onto life. I want to go back again to that earlier statement about “to change one's life is really to change one's own reaction towards it.” That is the flip side. Even if we have been victimized―which many of us in life have been… there are bad people out there right?―it is to take responsibility for our life and how we are going to react to it anyway.

To say, “Even though these terrible things happen to me and these people did this to me, I am not going to sit around and blame other people and persist in my pain. I really want to be free. I really want to say that no matter what happened to me, I want to be free from this and I want to choose how I respond and not be conditioned.” That is why the difficulty is countertransference. Countertransference tries to look everywhere else, but at “me and my experience and how I am responding to this.” It does not want to look at the paint.

Samael Aun Weor goes on to say that:

This difficulty of countertransference is eliminated through structural and transactional analysis. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Revolution of the Dialectic

It sounds very technical, but if we are sitting in meditation and we have achieved enough relaxation, concentration and stability to separate consciously from our experience, from our thoughts, to observe our thoughts―this is not to have a completely silent mind, but to have a silence that observes the mind, observes those thoughts, and observes those emotions in the bodily sensations―then we are able to see that the mind has a certain structure. It has its defenses. It has its walls.

In an example, if a man experienced a break up and his partner did something to really hurt him, and then he responded by shutting this person out, trying to put it all in the past, then in that case, one of the structures is, “I don't think about that. That is over. That is in the past. I am over it―all right.” This is one defense. There is a certain structure, and if this person sits in meditation and he tries to look at that and he says, “Well, maybe there still is some pain there; maybe I am not as over it as I thought, because something reminded me today about it and maybe there is some pain there”―the mind will have a transaction.

It will move on to some other defense. It will say, “Uh oh! He's getting through this wall.” So what is this other wall? Anger might come up and say, “Well, really I didn't do anything wrong in this situation. She did everything wrong and she was the bad person.” Again, we see the countertransference and the repression, or the ignorance gets transferred over to anger. We think, “Okay, well, I don't want to be this anger. I don't want to blame the other person. I want to be the better person,” then that transaction can move over to pride: “But really, I am a good person and I was so good to her,” and you know, whatever the case may be for any variety of situations.

We have to sit there and have gnosis of our own experience: to become deeply conscious of our experience of what happened, not by analyzing in the mind, but observing the structure of the mind and observing the transactions and the movements of the mind, until finally the mind has to stop deflecting and has to just let you look at the thing that you, perhaps, for a long time had not looked at.

That is why Samael Aun Weor goes on to say:

It is important to segregate and to dissolve certain undesirable psychic aggregates that are fixed in our mind in a traumatic matter. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Revolution of the Dialectic

The aggregates in our mind would be something like that structure of anger, or that structure of repression, or that structure of pride, and they work together like friends. That's the transaction. So we want to set segregate them, to say, “Ah! Okay, well it just deflects it over here, but I am going to go back and I am going to focus on that until I have been able to dissolve it,” to say “I see this for what it is. I recognize and understand why this is here and I can consciously choose to eliminate it; to let it go; to say it's just not true and it has no power over me anymore.”

So as I mentioned before, belief, and just pushing it down and thinking positive thoughts, is not enough. We need comprehension. We need to go deeply in meditation and really see it for what it is in order to achieve lasting change. That is why this is a work of months or years, because continually, in our daily life, trauma resurfaces, and continually we have to make that choice: that our work to change ourselves is a priority, and that we are willing, again and again, to go and eliminate the different unconscious mechanisms within ourselves―things that have been fixed there as part of “who I am” in a traumatic matter. We want to make a change to them.

Self-Observation and Comprehension of Trauma

Going hand-in-hand with meditation is self-observation, because as I just mentioned, traumas resurface in our daily life. It said in the psychological community that trauma forces someone to live, permanently, stuck in the past. So even if they are somewhat present to their daily life, a part of them is trapped in the past and still responding to the past, trying to prevent from happening what has already happened.

If I have already been assaulted, I live constantly trying to prevent getting assaulted rather than being able to go back and look at the pain that is there and heal it, and let the wound heal. Comprehend it for what it is. Truly grieve for “what I have been through” and be able to let it go, rather than living as if it is still a threat currently “happening to me.” And so when we go in meditation, this is based on our self-observation: on the things that we see come up in ourselves every day.

The Traumatic Causes of Karma in Past Lives

In Tarot and Kabbalah, Samael Aun Weor writes:

We need to make ourselves conscious of our own karma. This is only possible through the state of alert novelty. ―Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah

Alert novelty is being conscious and being awake to “what is happening to me,” not just externally, but “what am I feeling? What am I thinking? How is my body responding?” Becoming aware of your body in the chair and how you are feeling emotionally? And what thoughts are popping into your mind? Not just now, but in every moment. That takes tremendous energy, which again, is another reason why sexual transmutation gives us the fuel that we really need to be able to stay awake consciously throughout the day.

Now when he is talking about karma here, karma comes from the root karman, which means: “action and consequence, cause and effect.” So maybe our mainstream idea of karma is just, "Oh, you did something bad to somebody; something bad is going to happen to you!” But a much more scientific understanding of karma, for our terms, is that there is no action that does not produce a consequence.

You can't throw a rock into a pool of water without producing ripples. Now the shape of that consequence may take, or the time it may take for that consequence to fully bloom, that can be variable. But everything you do, everything you think, everything you feel has an effect. If you feel anger and you think angry thoughts, even if you don't act on it, it will change the way that you interact with the person you are angry with. At some point it might even bubble up and express itself fully, may be in a worse way for being repressed. Everything in our life produces some consequence, and that is why it is even more critical to be able to become conscious of our response to life, because we might not be able to change what we have done in this life up to now, or even in past lives, but we can change what we are doing now that will alter the future of this lifetime and future lifetimes.

He goes on to say that:

Every effect in life, every event, has its cause in a previous life; but we need to become conscious of this. ―Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah

If you are really working with meditation, and I say this from my own experience, and you meditate on a trauma, and you go deep enough, you will see causes in previous lifetimes. I can give an example of a painful relationship that I was in where, again and again, no matter how much I tried to change this person, this man and I would continually repeat the same types of behaviors towards each other. As much as we might have cared for each other, it continually remained a toxic relationship.

And so, you know, years after the fact when I am trying to go on and live my life, this keeps resurfacing for me. I am studying the Gnostic teachings. I am working with these practices, transmutation, meditations, etc., and I say “Okay, well, here is a perfect example. This is something I definitely want to change” by going deeply in meditation and understanding, on a regular basis, you know, really working on this day to day until I could get deeper and deeper.

First getting through the defense mechanisms, then getting into “Well, how am I really feeling?” Because I have pushed it down and denied it for so long, I haven't even objectively seen my experience, until finally going deeper into what caused this. Why would something like this happen? Why did I have to be stuck in so much pain for so long? And being able to see through astral experiences the exact actions that I had done in multiple previous lives, and that this person had done in multiple previous lives, that caught us in that pattern.

Now this was something that I didn't necessarily believe in or expect to happen. I totally felt like, “Well, this just happened to me, whether or not I believe in past lives. This happened because he was a bad person and I was young” or whatever. But to truly go and have an experience so vividly where I saw, instantaneously, those multiple past lives―with those multiple transgressions in different bodies and different times, but seeing the same energetic cycle―was shocking for me.

It produced a type of comprehension that really was so deep, I was able to fundamentally alter the way that I looked at myself, because I never saw myself really, deeply, as the aggressor. As much as I might have said, “Well, yeah, I did bad things… I really felt victimized,” it hurt. But when I saw “Oh my gosh! I did that in past lives” and I knew from the experience and how vivid it was, how true it was that I was really there, I wept with remorse, because I would have done anything I could to have changed that and to not have hurt this other person that I cared for.

But you know, we have to work from where we are at now.

So when we become deeply conscious through self-observation, through what is coming up in our current life, and also through meditation, through going deeply, day after day, into deeper states of meditation, deeper states of consciousness and comprehension, it can produce a fundamental shift. I say that, and I probably still have more work to do on that particular one, but I have profoundly changed, and in a permanent way, which wouldn't be possible for me to react in some of the ways that I had before.

He goes on in Tarot and Kabbalah, saying:

The law of action and consequence governs the course of our varied existences, and each life is the result of the previous one. ―Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah

Now we see repetition on a daily basis. We see that, “Yeah, you know, when I get in these types of situations, I tend to act the same way. Even if I am trying to change.” We see this in our current life, but even more fundamentally, in past lives, we followed very similar trajectories, because the same energy propelled us. The same desires, the same fears, the same vices, and even the same virtues, in some cases, provoked us to repeat the same patterns.

What we want to do is become conscious of what is propelling us in this lifetime, in this moment, and to have a conscious choice over “which direction do I want to go? Do I want to continue to get stuck in deeper and deeper suffering, to keep doing things that hurt others and hurt myself? Or do I want to change the trajectory of that energy so that the rest of my lifetime or future lifetimes is much improved from this one?”

Samael Aun Weor writes:

Karma is the law of compensation, not of vengeance. ―Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah

It is cause and effect. It is not some evil old man in the clouds trying to shoot down lightning bolts at you because he is mad at you, because you are a terrible sinner. It is cause and effect. You send an energy into motion to be angry at someone and to hurt someone, and that energy produced effects in that person, produce effects in the environment, and at some point in time, those effects come back. Because when you are angry at somebody and you hurt them, unless they are very awake and they can transform them, that unconscious effect on them produces effects that they want to respond to you with anger, with pain, to make you feel what they feel. This happens in all actions.

There are some who confuse this cosmic law with detriment and even with fatality, believing that everything that happens to the human being in life is inexorably determined beforehand. It is true that the acts of the human being are determined by inheritance, education, and the environment. Yet, it is also true that the human being has free will and can modify his actions to educate his character, to form superior habits, to fight against weaknesses, to fertilize virtues, etc. Karma is a medicine that is applied unto us for our own good. ―Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah

Karma is an opportunity that comes with risks. Karma provides us with the opportunity to see ourselves in a new way―to wake up to our suffering and to change. What did I do to produce this? Maybe not in this lifetime, but in previous lifetimes, and what can I do to change it, if I awake consciousness and respond in a new way? But it also comes with the risk of just getting more identified with that intense pain and going deeper and deeper into suffering, continuing the downward spiral.

And he concludes with quite a bit of severity:

Disgracefully, instead of bowing with reverence before the internal living God, people protest, blaspheme, they justify themselves, they stubbornly excuse themselves and wash their hands like Pilate. Karma is not modified with such protests; on the contrary, it becomes harder and more severe. ―Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah

No matter how much we might resist karma or be mad about our situation or say, “Well, I was a good person and I didn't deserve this,” and “Why is this happening?” and yell at our inner God―it won't change cause and effect. It is not going to change the energies in nature that are coming to manifest for us. We will reap what we sow. If we do good deeds that produce harmony in our environment, that produces happiness and other people, they will respond to us with that happiness.

Now, maybe not immediately, but it is a given that any energy you put into motion has an effect. A lot of times, it takes months or years for the good effects to manifest. So, we have to really stick with it and be tenacious because, we have done, you know, all of us have done bad things in our life; thought bad things about bad things; acted in harmful ways; hurt people. So, you know, unfortunately, I said, we can't undo the past, but we can choose right now to respond to our present life in a new way to change our future.

Selfless Service and Sacrifice: The Transformation of Suffering

Finally, the last force that we work with, to truly transform our trauma, is sacrifice for others, particularly those who suffer similarly to us.

We have talked about how we need transmutation to have the energy and the spiritual power to become someone new, to become conscious in new ways.

We need meditation to go deeply to get rid of the conditioning that makes us the same old person, on repeat, all the time.

And finally, we need the power of sacrifice, because these are the actions that help us to create those new energies in motion, so that we don't encounter those same negative experiences that re-traumatize us, but so that we can get the healing that we want.

As you sow you will also reap. So, if we want to heal from our trauma, we need to begin by healing others.

I want to preface this with a bit of caution, in that if you are in a very traumatized state and you are feeling overwhelmed, be careful what types of situations you put yourself into until you have some healing. If you have healthy and stable relationships in your life, you can begin to really do this work and go deeply in yourself, but if not, it can be unsettling especially early on.

It is very difficult to manage unless we have a real strength of consciousness in our meditation practice. If you don't have anyone you feel is a stable and healthy support in your life, it can be helpful to see a therapist, or to see someone that specializes in trauma, who understands the process and can be there to support you. You have to do the work, and every therapist will agree that you only get out of therapy the amount of effort you are willing to put into it.

But it is really necessary to have some source of stability, because as a consciousness, most of us, are very weak, and there are a lot of Impressions coming in our lives, so we want to keep ourselves, in the beginning, in situations that are positive impressions: healthy places to go; good people to be around; healthy types of music or activities or yoga, things like that, that bring us stability, rather than, you know, going into bars, or places where you know it is dangerous, if you are able to.

Not all of us have that luxury, I understand, so doing what we can to produce stability before we really deeply dive into working on our trauma, sacrificing for others, it depends on us and our situation and our willingness. What am I willing to really do to serve other people ? If we have the strength and we start to work on ourselves and we get to a good place, what am I really willing to do to not just serve other people, but to sacrifice for other people? To go above and beyond what is expected of me as a good citizen and to really expend something of my heart, or my time, or my talents, in the benefit of other people―this is what is the true power that produces great change.

However, as stated in Tarot and Kabbalah:

Many people who suffer only remember their bitterness and wish to find a remedy. But, they do not remember the suffering of others; neither do they remotely think of remedying the needs of their neighbors. ―Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah

When we are in intense pain, that is usually all we can think about: how much I am suffering as a self. Now, if you get into some of the more esoteric teachings of Buddhism and Eastern teachings, you come to understand that there is no such thing as a self, and yet we deeply believe ourselves to be an individual who has such and such experiences, who reacts in such and such a way.

The psyche itself is egotistical. It maintains an illusion of “This is who I am” and “this is how I feel” and “this is what I think.” The consciousness is beyond that, but when the consciousness is asleep, it is fused with the psyche in such a way that it feels very strongly that “This is who I am. That is my existence.” And again, that is why it's important to be able to separate the consciousness a little bit in meditation, to observe the self, not as me, but as a structure or as an entity that can be separated from me. That can be observed as its own individual person with its own feelings and wills, and to be able to do that requires a good deal of stability, concentration, relaxation, and meditation.

So when we are trapped in that egotistical prison, a feeling like, “Oh my gosh, everything bad is happening to me! This happened and then years later this happened, and this keeps happening!”―that pain is so intense it is nearly impossible to think about anybody else and anybody else who is suffering. Yet, we should take the time to really think about how much other people are suffering, not as a way of comparing: “Oh, well, I have got it worse than those people or they are worse than me” and making ourselves feel guilty, but to just truly comprehend it and feel it deeply in ourselves. This is to feel the pain of other people, empathize with that, and wish, “I wish things on this planet were better and not so many people were suffering.” We see that we have the power in our limited free time or with our limited gifts to be able to go and help someone else, to say, “Man, if all of us have to suffer this much, I at least want to produce something good for someone else!” Then we are able to break out of our prison of egotism a little bit, and it actually lessens our sorrow. It actually lessens our experience of being so enmeshed and ingrained in our in our own individual pain.

The Cessation of Karmic Suffering

I will conclude with a final point from the same book Tarot and Kabbalah:

If those people would think of others, serve their neighbors, feed the hungry, give a drink to the thirsty, dress the naked, teach those who are ignorant, etc., then it would be clear, they are putting good deeds on the plate of the cosmic scale [of karma]. The scale would incline toward their favor. Thus, they would alter their destiny, and good luck would come in their favor. In other words, all of their necessities would be remedied. But people are very selfish; this is the reason for their suffering. No one remembers God nor their fellowmen except when they are in desperation. ―Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah

Again, I want to emphasize that this is not a matter of belief and believing, “Oh well, if I just superficially do a couple nice things and superficially wish good things for others, then all of a sudden my life is going to be perfect and great things are going to happen.”

It is a matter of action. You don't have to believe in this cosmic law of karma and cause and effect for it to have an impact on you. You don't have to believe that you are going to get wet when it is raining in order for you to step outside and get wet. This is the same way. We have a big obstacle in American society and that is cynicism. People genuinely don't believe that if you do good things, then good things are going to happen to you. They think “Well, the only people it works out for are the ones who get ahead and step on everybody else.”

This is an obstacle. This is a belief that changes the way we perceive reality, that changes the way we respond to reality. If we are deeply a cynic, we respond to reality with that conditioning and with that negativity and we act in negative ways as a response to it: hopelessness―you know―nihilism. So for us to really change that, we need to be open to trying new things, open to genuinely saying, “Okay, for the next month, I'll go volunteer someplace and I'll do something good in my free time that otherwise I wouldn't do.”

We have the free will to choose that, but do we have enough conscious will power to actually do it and stick with it even when it gets ugly, and we are really seeing the suffering, the intense suffering of other people? Are we really willing to stick with it and to see the impact it makes on us? Because that action will not be without consequence. It will change you. It will change your emotional state, your thoughts. You will see the world in a new way if you go into that type of environment, if you do that type of work, if you give of yourself, even when you are tired, or you don't feel like it, etc.

As I mentioned, it is a way that we can change things, but to have true faith in karma doesn't come from belief. That faith in karma comes from being awake: observing our life; observing the effects of our actions; the effects of our thoughts, emotions, etc. And that is how we produce a lasting change. It is by deeply knowing that. If I do this, it will produce this result. Then we won't want to produce negative results for ourselves, not just because we believe and we are scared it is going to produce something negative, but because we have seen it happen multiple times in our lives we have experienced it. We have gnosis of those consequences, and so we are not going to do it. You are not going to stick your hand in the fire if you know that the fire burns.

Questions and Answers

Question: I found it interesting when you were talking about the cycles that we repeat in as far as our defense mechanisms or past lives. So how does that, in this tradition, rectify with attachment theory? The big thing in psychology now is attachment theory: that a lot of your personality, all these defense mechanisms that you are talking about come from age zero to seven, things that have happened to you: how your parents dealt with you, whatever happened. How much of that is what you are dealing with now as an adult, compared to all the past lives and stuff, or is that an aggregation of all that?

Instructor: Attachment theory, for those who are unfamiliar, is that if we have stable attachment, a healthy safe environment in which we grow up, we experience relationships in a different way, and are much more easily able to have healthy relationships later on in life. If we have an unhealthy or unstable, dysfunctional family or environment as a child, it changes the way our brain is wired, and we have much more anxiety and fear and withdrawal and relationships later in life.

Those formative years, not just for attachment, but for all kinds of things in our personality, have a tremendous effect on us, and science has shown us this. How much of those formative years is causing the problems we have now in life versus past lives? And yes, you kind of answered your question. The formative years are the compressed aggregate of many previous lifetimes. So, the formative years is where we see not just lifetimes, you know, like, “Okay, my past ten lifetimes,” but very ancient lifetimes, things that go back to previous civilizations.

Things that happened not just as an individual, but as people, as a collective, are encoded into even the way that a fetus forms. If you have ever looked at a human fetus, you know, it goes through phases of evolution, almost looking like a lizard at certain points, and then becoming more human.

All of our biology, our DNA, our physical existence, is a code based on our spiritual existence. It is the physical manifestation of the internal existence. So, when we see early childhood traumas and pain like that, it is often from an ancient past of being caught in a cycle with that person's family, with those other souls or individuals that are in that family of harming one another. It is very sad.

But you bring up a good point. We shouldn't get too caught up with past lives right off the bat. It is actually more important in the beginning to look at your life and to look at previous experiences in this current lifetime: to just look at what you can observe. You don't want to get caught up in a fantasy of trying to imagine your past lives and then producing more delusion for yourselves. Really, focus in the beginning on just observing this lifetime and what I can remember from this lifetime, and sitting in meditation and allowing those memories to naturally come up spontaneously.

You may be sitting, meditating on something, and some seemingly unrelated memory pops up from when you were six years old in kindergarten, and then you are like, “How is that related? That doesn't make any sense.!” So then you can choose: “Okay, maybe I take a break and I'll meditate on that experience in kindergarten and try to comprehend what that was all about.” Then as you meditate on that, you may have an inspiration of, “Oh, now I see, it's not in the mind. It's in the consciousness!” This understanding. This comprehension is much deeper than an intellectual, “Oh, A plus B equals C.” It is a very deep knowledge, like I gave in my example of knowing, vividly, in the experience of seeing my past lives that they were real and that that had been me.

Even though I was in different bodies, I knew exactly which one was me, and that is something that is not an intellectual, “Oh, that must be me because she looks like such and such.” It is knowing. In the same way when a memory comes up and you sit with it, and you sink into it, you are praying for guidance from your inner divinity, that can come through. It might not happen in the meditation session. It might happen three hours later when you are washing the dishes. It suddenly clicks. This is the way it is. When our mind takes a break, consciousness can bring us results.

Other questions?

Question: You mentioned a tradition that correlates with the Buddhist tradition... What tradition was that?

Instructor: Vajrayana tradition: the most esoteric levels Buddhism. If you go into the essence of those scriptures, you see they are very similar to ours.

Buddhism, in general, has many sects, but in general, it has three levels of traditions. Shravakayana would be the lowest level, the most fundamental based on just the literal teachings of the Buddha. That is a very introductory level for people who are just coming into Buddhism. It is where they usually start.

Mahayana, known as the greater vehicle, has more of these mystical elements into it, and at the heart of Mahayana is the service, the sacrifice for others―trying to strive for a lifetime of becoming an enlightened being in order to help humanity, which is suffering so much. So we build on that root of: life is suffering, and I want to escape my suffering by transcending that and going into, “I want to transcend my suffering because I want to help other beings transcend their suffering.”

Then Vajrayana, or sometimes called Tantrayana, from Tantra, is the highest level of the teaching, the most esoteric. It has traditionally been the most hidden, although in recent years, a lot of this has come to life because of the internet. It is about expedient methods in which to achieve that enlightenment for the benefit of all beings. So, it builds on the other two, and Tantrayana talks a lot about working with sexual energy and transmuting sexual energy. So that is the direct correlation with our tradition.

Another Instructor: The Dalai Lama, in relation to this topic of trauma, related an experience in which he interviewed a Buddhist monk, who was exiled from Tibet after the Chinese had invaded. He was put into prison for 18 years. He was abused and experienced many of the traumas and difficulties of that particular region. And to tie into this discussion of trauma, there was an interesting comment the man made to the Dalai Lama, who asked him, “What was your greatest danger when being in prison?” And the monk said, “Losing my compassion for the Chinese.” So a question we can reflect upon is: how does the force of compassion help to overcome trauma? (especially tying into this need to serve, to sacrifice for humanity and what that does for the individual psyche). As you said, if we are focusing on trauma, if we are focused on our pain, you don't really think about other people, but how is it that compassion unlocks, unties that Gordian knot of suffering?

Instructor: You remind me of another quote that is quite popular: “To forgive is to set a prisoner free and to realize that the prisoner is you.”

When we let go of our grudges against other people, even if we feel totally justified in them, and even if those people did very evil things, we free ourselves in a very deep way. It can't be expressed in words. It can only be experienced. If you have ever had a time where you were so angry at somebody and you held on to it for so long, and then finally, somehow, you were able to forgive them, the weight was lifted and you were able to perceive life, even that person, without so much pain. Then you have experienced it and you know it's true.

Compassion for others is a way of liberating ourselves from suffering. It works with this principle: sacrifice for others. When we do good things for others, we forgive others, so we can be forgiven. It puts into effect powerful causes that transcend previous causes.

But when we hold on to anger, when we hold onto pain, we are poisoning our ourselves. It is not pleasant to feel anger. As justified as we may be in being angry, it is suffering to feel that anger and it is freedom to feel good will towards other people, no matter what they have done to you, to keep your distance from people if you need to, absolutely.

Keep yourself safe. Don't stay in a situation where you are being abused, but with that prudence, to also be able to not let not let that pain linger with you―to do this type of work and go deep into healing the pain.

It doesn't happen overnight, but through that process we say that the law of karma, of action and consequence, is the second law. It is the law of nature, and there is a first law, a superior law which can transcend karma. So, all these bad actions we may have done, which we may be freaking out of like, “Oh man, I know I did bad things in this lifetime, who can imagine past lifetimes!” There is a much more powerful law that we can work with in order to create effects and causes that are even more powerful than those that can, in many cases, overcome the effects of those laws. They can't erase it, but they can be more powerful than the effects of those other actions. It is the law of sacrifice.

To do good things for others is a law. It is an intelligent law, is that divine law. It is a law that works with superior principles. The laws of nature are mechanical, karma. Karma has an intelligence, or I should say, it is managed intelligently, but it is like physics. It happens. You can believe whatever you want, and it is still going to happen to you, but sacrifice is a very special divine law.

Again, it is something that you can only truly experience the effects if you have done it, if you have given it a try. Like I said, going for a month and really sacrificing, then you experience for yourself, when you sit at the end of that month and you reflect back on it, you know from your experience the effects of that. You don't have to believe in it. Many times, we have in our imagination or in our fantasies, “Well, if I go do that, it's just going to be like this.” And we never actually do something. We just have our projection of the future, a projection of what a situation will be like.

Without having experienced it, we think we already know. We need to question our mind because the mind and the imagination are very powerful and condition us, producing the effects it wants us to do, but an action, actually, is much more powerful.

Question: So trauma, not properly addressed and not transformed, would you say that it would carry over into another life?

Instructor: Absolutely. Yeah, because trauma itself, even if it's something good that happens to us, can carry over to future lives. So good things that happen to us that we become very attached to, like having a loving relationship with a child, you know, even in a future lifetime again, we are going to find that same individual and whatever new relationship and have a strong attachment. So even good things, good attachments, which carry over to lifetime to lifetime, are still unconscious and mechanical.

We want free will, both from the traumas and the pains that have conditioned us to respond to people or certain people or certain situations, and in the same way, we want to separate from that and free ourselves and also from any kind of unconsciousness. It doesn't mean we stop doing good things or loving people or having kind relationships, but it means we have a conscious choice about it.

So trauma, as I mentioned before, is just a really powerful experience of gnosis that prevents us from denying suffering. But other experiences, good experiences, can have that same kind of un-transformed or un-digested impressions, that same effect on our structure of our psyche.

And even though the physical body doesn't carry on from lifetime to lifetime, what we call the astral body, which is made up of our emotions, or the mental body which is made up of, you know, more finer mental substances, they carry on from lifetime to lifetime in the form of the ego. It is a type of matter that is more protoplasmic, that is more malleable than physical matter, and it can exist outside of the physical world. That is why with astral projection, you can go outside of your physical body and you can still have experiences. You can still walk around and talk, but it's not with your physicality.

After death, those different aggregates of ourselves can move on lifetime to lifetime. What is important is that if we wake up, we can become very conscious of that experience, not just when we go to sleep, but also after death. We can have more power and more choice in our future lifetimes.

Also, we can become a different type of being in higher planes of reality, planes that are more ethereal or subtler planes of nature. They are just as real as the physical plane; in fact, in some way, very much more real, but we are not conscious of them because we are so asleep and so hypnotized by our physical nature.

We want to be aware of our physical nature, but also aware of these other aspects of ourselves. So this can be both higher aspects of our emotional and mental nature, but also lower aspects, because we have a lot of unconsciousness, subconsciousness, infraconsciousness trapped in negativity. And that, for us, is hell. If we are trapped in the negative states: anger, pride, greed, lust, etc., we are continually tortured by those desires and pulled in different ways from one minute to the next. It can be completely contradictory desires. This is a state of confusion and suffering.

Until we become conscious of it and liberate the consciousness out of that, then we can't really move fully up. We might have parts of ourselves that are up in higher states of consciousness and parts of ourselves trapped in lower states of consciousness, but generally speaking, for most of us, the majority of us are trapped in negativity and lower states of consciousness.

That is the work of meditation, not just with trauma, but with everything. It is to enter in meditation into the lower states of our mind, to perceive them not as real and “that is who I am,” but to perceive them as structures in our mind that project images, that project emotions, or fantasies, or plans for the future, and to just perceive it without becoming hypnotized and identified with it. We must comprehend it for what it is, to turn and look at what is the source of this fantasy that is playing, or this fear that is playing, and to be able to comprehend that source and eliminate it through the power of transmutation, which can give birth to something new.

Question: Based on the answer it sounds like as far as trauma goes… does the work to transform that energy, that experience prior to death so that you are not going into the next life with that baggage, so to speak. What would be the complete set of things that you need to be looking to do by death so that you are in the best space for the next life?

Instructor: Great work, that is, a truly deep work. We do as much as we can, as much as we have the willpower to do. But, it's these three things:

Transmutation (which we actually call birth)
Death (which is meditation)
Sacrifice

These are the three factors for the revolution of the consciousness.

So on a daily basis, doing good deeds, performing good actions, meditating on the unconscious parts of ourselves, whether seemingly positive, negative, or neutral, meditating on them and comprehending them―becoming awake and aware of what is controlling us beneath the surface.

Birth is working in transmutation to give birth to new elements in your consciousness and to eliminate those negative structures. Primarily, if we are not working with transmutation, we do not have very much of the substance which can destroy the roots of trauma and of karma. When I act in a certain way, I fuel energy into it, and a lot of times, even if this isn't a lustful situation, even if it's for example, pride or anger, that takes my creative energy, that takes my life force, the essence of who I am, and invests my energy into that.

That is being born in me as a living type of substance, a living entity, almost of itself, and that entity is anger, and that anger has a will of its own―a will to speak a certain way, to think a certain way, to act a certain way. And so, until I take that same force, draw it out of the anger―through comprehension and use my own life force to say, “I am eliminating this”―then nothing can be changed on a permanent level.

We might be able to do some superficial change, but to really achieve a deep and lasting change, we can't do that. And if you read the book, you'll see that that work with the sexual energy is the work with the Divine Mother.

I didn't want to get too much into it today, but we are working with the power of the Divine Mother, or the power of the Holy Spirit. The Third Logos is that power of creation and destruction, of birth and death. And so, that is the power we work with when we utilize that energy. Doing as much as we can before death will radically change us.

It is like an exponential curve. The more that you are able to do, then the more that you will be able to do. “If I do this much, then exponentially I'll be able to do that much more, and from that point, I'll be able to do so much more.” Karma really restricts us, and the more unconscious we are and the more karma we have weighing us down that hasn't been transformed, our actions become very limited by our circumstances, by the types of people around us, by our environment, etc. The more that we work with the little three percent of free will that we have to break that karma, to transform that karma, to work with sacrifice and conscious actions, then we get five percent free will. Then ten percent free will, and you know, exponentially the more free will you have, suddenly you have a lot more control over your situation.

We see people in the world who have way more freedom than many of us. We also see people in this world who have very difficult situations. You know, to have mental illness, for example, is a type of karma. It is a structure that conditions your ability to act and feel, and you know, there are medications and things we can do that can help, but the very conditioning of our psychology is a part of our matter, a part of our experience of life, and is formed by previous actions and karma.

Another Instructor: I would also say that the more we awaken our consciousness, physically and in the internal planes, the more prepared for death we are. In Buddhism, they teach to prepare for death by meditating daily on that inevitability, and by becoming more conscious and working on our traumas, those negative states of anger or pride, the more we will remember and be awake. Because for most people, especially in the West, who have never had any type of training, they don't remember where they came from―their past lives. So, as we were talking about the theory, or what people think is a theory, is not a theory for people who can experience that for themselves. The more we awaken, as we were saying, and the more freedom of perception, and then if we take another body, we will remember where we came from or the level of work we obtained, and in that way we have more opportunities to continue to go deeper and to resolve those traumas that trap us.

Instructor: The capacities of our consciousness are practically infinite, but we are not aware of that because we utilize the consciousness so very little, as compared to our intellect, or our physical body.

Question: There are so many versions of meditation and different physical ways of experiencing meditation or practicing meditation. Would you say that they are all innately trying to achieve the same thing or are they based on different types of practices that you do or trying to awaken a certain level of consciousness or area?

Instructor: That is a good question. Do all different forms and techniques of meditation produce the same results, or strive for the same results? No. I do believe that there are a variety of genuine meditation techniques that can, regardless of which one you work with, if you work with a diligently enough, it can help you along the way to achieve the awakening of consciousness, but much of that is determined upon your own conscious effort.

Even if you use the genuine meditation technique from a given tradition, that has helped lots of people to awaken, to become enlightened, if you are not active in consciousness, it is not going to work for you.

As the internet proliferates all kinds of things, there are some meditation techniques which could be harmful from a psychological perspective. Meditation techniques that say, “Okay, go and fantasize about your ideal life and really invest in that,” is not going to awaken your consciousness, but it is going to further hypnotize your consciousness, and could even inhibit your ability to see reality, or make you more dissatisfied with reality. We should be careful.

Also, different techniques produce different effects. So when I talked about pranayamas as an example, we have a variety of different pranayama techniques from different traditions. Many of which are genuine pranayama techniques, and each of which would achieve this transmutation of sexual energy, but also with slight variations. I believe that meditation is much the same way, you know. When I work with different mantras or different meditation techniques, I can achieve different results, but all of which if they are a good technique, awaken my consciousness. But perhaps one awakens my consciousness so that I am more aware of my heart and activate my heart and feel more compassion, whereas another awakens my consciousness and helps me to astral project. Or, another awakens, you know my ability to try to perceive a past life.

So we have hundreds or thousands of techniques in our tradition that you know, many of which also come from other traditions, religions around the world, all in the books. So, we are happy to refer you to books that have those practices if it's helpful.

Another Instructor: Another point too is that, as we are mentioning, in Buddhism, there are three schools, and every religion has its systems. In Buddhism, Shravakayana, the introductory level; Mahayana, the greater vehicle; and the most expedient Tantrayana.

So meditation, as taught within the introductory levels, are geared with a specific focus. They teach the beginning practitioner how to concentrate, work with ethics, upright action, upright thoughts, and feelings and deeds so that the mind becomes stable. If you think of the mind like a lake, if we keep throwing stones, negative thinking, impressions into the lake, it is going to be churning, unstable.

From that point of view, we can't address any trauma, because in order to see clearly, your mind has to be perfectly still. So in the introductory levels of Buddhism or any tradition, we teach ethics, karma, serenity. To develop a serene mind, the meditative practices of that tradition, or any introductory level, will teach you how to develop stability. As it was explained in the lecture, we have to balance our three brains and a brain in esoterism has to do with any type of machine that processes matter, energy, and consciousness.

Our intellect is not just the only brain, because we have many forms of intelligence in the heart and in sex. In fact our entire physiology is a marvelous machine that can transform energy, but if we don't use or balance those centers through ethics, upright thought, feeling, action, we can't really enter a state of meditation. We need to really go to the heart of our problems.

Once we have that type of serenity developed, then you can start to develop more compassion for others, because you see that other people, who don't have that training, are in tremendous suffering and affliction. That is the Mahayana level, the middle ground, the greater vehicle, and the meditations taught in that tradition are more profound and demand a type of diligence and foundation.

So in all the meditations, they lead towards the highest stages, in which we are meditating not just for ourselves, but for humanity. That is when we can do practices like Tantra, or as we say in this tradition, the perfect matrimony: to utilize energy in the highest way, to transform not only yourself, but others, and that is what we are leaning towards.

It is important that when we approached meditation, we, in our tradition, have many practices. Work with where we are at and, in most case,s we have to start at the very bottom. Because if you sit to reflect on your mind, you can see that it is difficult to concentrate, or we have no serenity in the beginning. So in our school, we teach all three levels of Buddhism at once, because students are at different levels and have different needs. If you look at other traditions, you may find some schools will only focus on the basics. Some very high, but the problem becomes not having a practical foundation in the steps, because they help to build off one another.

Instructor: A great explanation, because everybody wants to jump right to Tantra, and right to the most advanced practices, like “Oh, I want to get out of my body and speak to the Lord of Karma, Anubis or whatever the case may be,” but if we don't have the ability to relax physically, emotionally, and mentally, to separate our consciousness from it, to awaken our consciousness from those three brains, and to have concentration, to maintain our attention and our awareness on the object of our meditation, then we're not able to even work with those more advanced techniques. We are going to try them, and they are not going to work, or if they do work by chance, it could end up being a harmful situation.

So really establishing ourselves in the basics allows us to then gradually work our way up to those more advanced practices. Like the example I gave about going deeper and deeper and deeper in meditation, and finally into, you know, a past life experience―that was built on months and years of really working with meditation and basics, working with concentration and relaxation. If you stay for the optional meditation after this lecture, you will be able to try out a basic technique with us in which we're going to meditate exactly on balancing those three brains and working with relaxation and concentration.

Another Instructor: Maybe to finish on how the magic of the roses work, because I know especially in North America and the West, when we hear of magic, we think of right circus tricks, or all sorts of people who perform illusions. But how do roses or the magic, the soul of the plant, go with the practice?

With that practice, in our tradition, we use a lot of exercises that work with nature. Magic, in its true sense, is how we as a consciousness can communicate with divinity and interact with the soul of nature. All the vegetable kingdom, the mineral kingdom, the animal kingdom, has this type of soul, in different gradations of complexity. So, minerals are obviously very simple. Plants more involved. They process and channel energy in nature. Animals, of course, are more developed. They are collectively developing a type of will, which is different than plants, until finally we have humanoids, or the intellectual animal. The human being, the soul, anima, with intellect.

We work with plants primarily because the souls of those types of creatures have power. We learn to work and communicate to command the souls of plants to help, because every plant and nature has its type of properties, which can heal. It can perform medicine. We know this very extensively from indigenous cultures, which still retain a type of wisdom that our modern orthodoxy and medicine does not support.

The rose is a very elevated plant. It is the queen of flowers. If you know astrology, each plant relates to different planets, because each plant channels the forces of the cosmos. It transmits. So, as you see that the human being is a machine that transmits forces, likewise, minerals, plants, animals. That is why you have such diversity in nature, because each living entity channels force.

It is interesting that the rose is especially powerful for healing the heart. Even conventionally, we may give roses to our loved ones in order to show love, especially, romantic love, because the rose, we know instinctually, has a marvelous presence. Even within the internal planes, the soul of that plant is very elevated. We can command the soul of the rose to work with the divided hierarchies of the angels, related to the planet Venus, the star of love, to invoke that intelligence, bring it to our home and deposit medicine within the glasses.

So you notice that you have a glass facing the East; you drink this before breakfast; the glass towards the North, before lunch; then the glass towards the West, before dinner. That sequence parallels the trajectory of the Sun, and we know that Venus is the star of the dawn. It channels the forces of the divinity we call Christ, which is a force, particularized in any person who is prepared.

So, you pray to your inner Being, “My God, my Divine Mother, command the elemental of the rose to work and deposit healing within these glasses,” by invoking the angels of that force, that bring the particular influence of love, so that we can heal trauma―to at least gain stability to the point that we can meditate further. And you drink in that sequence. Very simple. Healing is very simple. Prayer, relaxation, concentration, faith. Not belief.

We have experiences we know, if you awaken in the dream state, you can personally converse with the elementals of nature. Personally, I have been in the habit over the years to meditate on certain elementals, the plants that I have in my home, in which I have been able to communicate with those entities, those beings who are still in Eden. They are innocent. They haven't entered into all the complex problems that we have in the humanoid kingdom through the process of evolution. So they are very simple. They are like angels, but in a very small degree.

You can pray and with faith, you have the experience. You know that these elements exist and that the rose can heal pain. Personally, I have used the roses when I have had traumas, in certain betrayals and conflicts that I could not reconcile, and by working with the glasses, you drink, over a sequence of a few days. When the roses wither, you can remove them. Then your pain is alleviated, at least at the surface, to the point that we have enough stability where we can meditate and then look at the problem, because in the moment when we are afflicted, we can't think. You can't concentrate.

Those elementals or souls of nature are very powerful. They work and obey divinity. The rose is, of course, held in very high regard in certain traditions, such as the Rosicrucians, the first Gnostics, the Rosicrucian Gnostic Church. The rose is a symbol of the transformation of the soul into the beauty of God. Of course, the rose is very effective for that. You can work with it however much you need.

It’s simple. Pray, relax, and concentrate. You drink it like medicine. The good thing is that there are no side effects. Of course, some people in this day and age have traumas and illnesses in the mind, of the heart, that, because that karma is crystallized in the body, some people need to take a drug to be able to find balance. But the wonderful property of this practice is that there are no side effects. Water. Roses. Magic. Because those substances that divinity places are not physical. They are etheric, astral, mental, spiritual, internal.

In conjunction with whatever people may have to do to find balance, whether it be medication and therapy, the roses are exceptional. Simple, but profound. That ritual is as effective as your prayer. Prayer is something simple. You don't need formulas when you talk to your inner divinity. You say, “My Father, my God, help me!” Use your words and just ask for that healing and experiment. That practice is of course effective when we are working in transmutation. Work with your creative energy, because your prayer will be empowered when you use that force, and that way it opens the doorway into the internal planes.

2 Comments

4/10/2020 01:45:24 am

Isn't it awkward that Gnosis creates the biggest traumas in people's lives?
How many people enter into these studies to liberate from suffering, to awaken in higher realms and to communicate with Divinity directly? Yet, how many of them really experience it? Most of them do not experience anything like that even remotely – they leave disappointed, frustrated and traumatized for the rest of their lives, disillusioned with Gnosis and these spiritual teachings in general.

4/12/2020 12:26:27 pm

Unfortunately, many of us have arrived at Gnostic studies, because we were already traumatized. Therefore, we must first develop the proper foundation for our spiritual development, which can be very difficult. We know that in order to enter the sacred mysteries, we must have a degree of psychological balance and strong ethics. The prerequisite for initiation is to be a good householder, spouse, son/daughter, brother/sister, employee, citizen, etc. That prerequisite is not easy for most of us to accomplish, and rather than make the necessary sacrifices to develop compassion and service toward others, we instead isolate into our spiritual practices in hopes of escape into the higher dimensions. This method is not the way to God and, in fact, only deepens our egotistical suffering and frustration with our situation.

Samael Aun Weor taught: "Those who only preoccupy themselves with their own spiritual progress and do not work for others achieve absolutely nothing. Whosoever wants to progress must sacrifice the self for others."

If we do not have stability in our own lives, how can we sacrifice "the self" for others (especially when they criticize or reject us)? Before entering into the higher realms of consciousness, we must build our foundation here, in the physical plane, by becoming responsible people and performing our duties. That level of responsibility creates enough stability for our psychological states to become balanced, for our relationships with others to become more harmonious. We do not need 100% balance to begin awakening internally, sometimes free of ego, but we need a significant degree.

The students of Gnosis who seem to struggle the most to progress in this work tend to be the ones who do not know how to live well in this physical world. Thus, they cannot go very far into the internal worlds, because their lives are full of problems or bitterness. Firstly, we must seriously address the problems in our lives, and apply the remedy of ethics. If our family belittles or rejects us, we must become humble and find ways to serve them anyway. If our friends hate Gnosis, we must find other ways to help and connect with them, without trying to force them to see our point of view. If our boss or coworkers do not behave the way we believe that they should, then we must not judge them or become resentful--rather we must be the model of ethics without expecting anything in return. You see, creating this foundation for our spiritual development is not easy. Many people prefer to quit their spiritual work, projecting the blame on Gnostic teachings and deepening their disillusionment with existence in general.

Even when we have this foundation of worldly stability, the entrance into the sacred mysteries of divinity requires "super-efforts." The greater one wishes to rise, the more profound must be one's sacrifices for humanity. We must be willing to give our lives, our last drop of blood, to alleviate the suffering of those around us... and not only willing to do it, but actually doing it in our daily life.

Samael Aun Weor also wrote: "The golden door of wisdom can transform itself into the wide door and broad path that leads to destruction, the door of magical arts practiced with egotistical ends. We are in the Age of Kali Yuga, the Iron Age, the Black Age, and all the students of occultism are predisposed to becoming lost in the black path. It is astonishing to see the mistaken concept held by the 'younger brothers' regarding occultism and the ease with which they believe they can reach the door and cross the threshold of mystery without a great sacrifice."

What is that great sacrifice? Firstly, it is to die psychologically. It is not pleasant to die. It is not pleasant to accept humiliation and suffering so that others may benefit at our expense. It is not pleasant to look our lust, hatred, and laziness directly in the face, and to take responsibility for them. That is why some people prefer to blame God, and it is our free will to do so if we wish. However, it would serve us much better to take up our cross of suffering and to walk the path with the intention of helping others--rather than seeking to benefit ourselves with magical powers and mystical experiences than we are not yet mature enough to handle responsibly.

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