This is the second in our series of the Gospels of Judas. We’ve already explained how Judas is an archetype. He is a character in a drama. Historically these figures were real people, but more importantly in a narrative, they represent qualities in us.
We all have Judas inside. We all have the robes of an apostle, of a religious person, a spiritual person, if we are attracted to these studies. But yet, we still betray divinity in our mind, heart, and body. We explained that Judas historically, the master, is a great initiate who played a role given to him by Christ that he did not want. He did not want to play the role of Judas, the betrayer, the ego, our pride and lust, which sells Christ for money, for pleasure. Judas in us represents, really, a part of our divinity as well. There is a multidimensional relationship here. Symbols are very compact. There are levels of interpretation. Judas in us is a tempter, but also there is a quality of divinity in us who gives us the ordeals we need, to be tempted so that we can change. This divine aspect of Judas really teaches us to go beyond good and evil, to transcend the worst in us. 
The Subjectivity of Good and Evil
But obviously this is very controversial, because the terms good and evil are very subjective, in accordance with our philosophies, our religions, our beliefs, and even our personal lives, our morals.
Good and evil is often a label for phenomena that puts us to sleep. We say, “this is good, and this is bad,” meaning, “this is convenient, and this is inconvenient.” But the reality is that those things which are good for us spiritually are often always the actions which are most inconvenient, the things we have to push ourselves to do because we have many faults. We don’t like friction, psychologically, emotionally, socially. Most people do not like conflict, and yet someone who becomes a spiritual revolutionary has to face it all the time with equanimity, with peace. This path we study in our school is to become a being that is truly revolutionary, not in the political sense, but spiritually, psychologically, to go against the grain―not merely in our daily life, in our jobs and careers―but in our mind stream, to go against what is easy. So, Nietzsche wrote a book called Beyond Good and Evil, and his primary argument is that these two terms are often very subjective and keep us enslaved―enslaved to the past, not able to see the present, and not able to act for the future. The Gospel of Judas is precisely the path of going beyond good and evil, in the subjective sense of the term. The term “superhuman” comes from Nietzsche, which Samael Aun Weor uses a lot (Übermensch in German), not merely a person who does whatever they want, but somebody who has divinity inside and is able to act for the welfare of humanity. This is what we wish to become, a superhuman, a Christ, a rebel. This path is not easy, to become like Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Krishna, or the initiates. It is very difficult to climb the mountain of initiation. But this is what we want to study in our school, and what we practice and what we aspire to. Samael Aun Weor made some points about this in The Great Rebellion, how we have to look at our own values. What is really good and what is really evil? Because in us those principles tend to be mixed. What we think is good is actually evil, what we think is evil is actually good. To become a Superhuman being, a Superman, is not easy. There is no doubt that the road which leads to Superhuman is beyond good and evil. A thing is good when it suits us and bad when it does not. Within the rhythms of poetry, crime is also concealed. There is much virtue in the villain and much evil in the virtuous. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Great Rebellion
Nobody is ever just black and white. We are a mixture, and in fact, when we think we are praying, maybe for a car or for money or whatever it may be, in a superficial sense, as an example, we are really engaging in crime, because we desire things that are not good for us, or what we need, or what divinity knows we can get in accordance with the responsibilities of life.
Why Our Psychological Values Are Dangerous
Our psychological values can be dangerous in the sense that we take life for granted. We think that what we think and feel and do in life, in terms of our moment to moment awareness, we do not question our desires. We take life for a drama, comedy, tragedy, or whatever it may be, and we don’t question our agency in the midst of it.
What is really compelling us to behave in the ways we do? To think, feel, and act in life the way we are, not understanding that we can change and that we are merely a seed in potential, spiritually. The values of good and evil, as described by Samael Aun Weor and also the Gospel of Judas, are really roadblocks: the concepts, the values, the ideas. This is a thorny road, philosophically, but also psychologically and spiritually, because rather than accept that such and such a behavior is bad or good, we have to know it in ourselves and for ourselves. We have to judge in our mind what good and evil really is. What is good for a demon is bad for an angel. What is bad for an angel is good for a demon. Unfortunately, we are all demons, not merely with pitchfork, horns, and a certain physical appearance, a black magician, a sorcerer. Really, a demon is a being with lust, pride, hatred, fear, vanity, attachments―all that we carry within. These senses of self hypnotize us into a slumber where we do not question the process. Morality for most people is often based on this. What is often good is based on our pride and anger. Superficially, you look at culture today, American media: what do people worship? What do religions worship now? Perhaps a statue, something dead, because the ideals of the religion are there, but the living spark of faith is lost amongst the community and in the high priests. If we wish to transcend good and evil, we have to be willing to give up what we think in terms of morality, in the sense that rather than judge intellectually that “this is good or bad,” we have to follow our conscience, our heart, because some actions produce suffering and some don’t. Some actions, even though, if we are awake spiritually and we give to the community, there may be friction, but it may be the right thing. It’s not a black and white issue. There’s nuance in every interaction and relationship. Therefore we often have a moral sense of “I have to do this all of the time, and this none of the time,” meanwhile situations depend on the context too. In some cases its relative―maybe I have to behave in this way. Maybe I don’t. Obviously, there are certain behaviors that spiritually speaking can produce a lot of harm, but here we are talking about social domain, knowing how to act and live. This is why Samael Aun Weor said in The Great Rebellion: The road which leads to the Superhuman is the path of the razors edge (because it is a fine line to walk the path of conscience, knowing what to say and do and think and be, and respond to ordeals in life). This path is filled with perils from both within and without. Evil is dangerous and good is also dangerous. The frightening path is beyond good and evil. It is terribly cruel. Any moral code can detain us on our way toward the Superhuman. Attachments to such and such yesterdays, to such and such scenes, can halt us on the road that leads to the Superhuman. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Great Rebellion
So how can good be dangerous? If you study this tradition for some time, you hear about astral projections, dream yoga, jinn experiences, out of body experiences, meditative states. You may have that experience for some time and then we get attached. “Oh, I am spiritual because I have this experience,” and then we get stuck. We don’t change. We don’t grow. Attachments to yesterday is what keeps us asleep and in pain.
Discernment: The Power of Divine Justice
But a superhuman, a divine master, a master of oneself, is somebody who can distinguish good from evil and evil from good. Any circumstance, whether it is maybe appalling, challenging, or painful, there is good in evil and evil in good.
Perhaps we may encounter someone who is provoking our pride, maybe at work, our careers, our jobs, but yet we learn to take the opportunity of the challenge, the ordeal, and make something good of it. It’s a delicate process, knowing how to sift through the sands, the mud, and the dirt to find the gems. Discernment is like a sword. It cuts through illusion and arrives at truth. That sword is the Word, the Word of divinity, the superhuman whom we call the Christ-man, the Christ-human. Samael Aun Weor elaborates on these points, that our ideas, traditions, and attachments to such and such yesterdays can keep us in the past, but that we have to discern and extract what we need for our development. However wise norms and procedures may be, they can obstruct us in our progress towards becoming a Superhuman if they are bottled up in this or that fanaticism, and this or that prejudice, or in this or that idea. The Superhuman can distinguish good from evil and evil from good. He grasps the sword of cosmic justice and is beyond both good and evil. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Great Rebellion
It does not matter the group in terms of fanaticism. It could be in Gnosis. It could be in any religion―the idea that we know, but we don’t. So, we have to be constantly reevaluating ourselves.
Renunciation and Transcendence
We’ll now jump into the actual Gospel of Judas now that we know some of the principles behind it that can help us understand this scripture.
Judas, as we explained, the master, represents our ego who betrays us moment by moment, but here we see the historical Master Judas approaching the prophet, the Master Jesus, asking for guidance. He basically wants to attain the highest divinity, but for that he has to be willing to give up what he thinks is good. Now obviously from the Gospel of Judas and the story of Judas, we know he was the master, or the apostle who betrayed Christ. He played a role, not because he wanted to betray his lord, but because Jesus commanded it. What is interesting is that Master Judas asked for consolation, “I wish to go to the heights with you,” to the highest divinity, the absolute truth, which is beyond and transcendent, beyond any value, and yet Jesus says, basically, “You will suffer,” because “you need to give up what you think is good. You have to be willing to renounce things.” Honestly, this is the very high level of mastery. Judas represents a very high level of mastery because he must learn to transcend even his own sense of piety, righteousness, and goodness, his love for Jesus, and that this involves renunciation. Renunciation is the path towards transcendence, to give up what we are for something beyond our current attachments and values. Jesus understood that Judas was contemplating the rest of what is lofty, and he said to him, “Move away from the others and I shall explain to you the mysteries of the kingdom, not so that you can attain it, but you will go through a great deal of grief. For somebody else will take your place, so that the twelve disciples may be complete once again with their God. ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
So again, as the most controversial apostle, he actually is the highest, historically, because he played a role that no one else was willing to do, and yet here, he says as a type of initiate, “I want to go to the heights,” he says. “Well, you must be willing to give up everything, and you will suffer for it, because it is not easy.” Jesus also instructs him that what Judas thinks is the height of development is not everything there is. Judas will not attain what he wants, because he is destined for an even greater state of enlightenment, unbeknownst to him, but to achieve it requires doing what he thinks is wrong.
The Thirteenth Aeon
Judas is destined to reach the heights, what we call it in Gnostic terms the 13th Aeon. So, if you’ve studied the Tree of Life in the kabbalah, we have an image that we are going to go into great detail. Especially at the top of this mystical glyph, we find levels of divinity and abstraction, from the highest above down to the most material below.
The Absolute is above this Tree of Life, above Kether, the crown of divinity. Beyond Kether is the Ain, the Ain Soph, and the Ain Soph Aur. There are ten spheres and three levels of abstractions above, for a total of thirteen: the 13 Aeons. The thirteenth is precisely the very source of all being, the Absolute, from which Jesus emerged. The Gnostics referred to the heights of divinity as Barbelo, the region of fire and light. Jesus came from the 13th Aeon, and Judas wishes to return to the 13th Aeon. Some may reach the 12th, but not the 13th, because there are requirements for each degree, and to go beyond the 12th Aeon, the region of the 12 apostles, one has to renounce ones good. But that’s obviously a very high level, very, very subtle to comprehend, but also to reach. Jesus represents that light which emerged from that source. He explained to the disciples who question him, the apostles, “Where did you come from? Where have you gone?” Because if you meet Jesus, say in an astral projection, he basically can go from any dimension at will, from the very heights to the very Earth. He’s like light, a bolt of light that can go from any dimension anywhere. He has a level of mastery that is really incomprehensible. He sees all the dimensions of nature at once, level by level, and he is able to navigate them at will, and can show you levels of truth and mysteries in the dream state, but he comes from that region. The disciples mention this to him. They ask him in the scripture: The next day in the morning, [Jesus] appeared to his disciples. They said to him, “Master, where did you go and what did you do when you departed from us?” Jesus said to them, “I went to a different generation, one that is great and holy.” ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures 
Have you ever seen renaissance paintings of Jesus ascending, the clouds parting, and going in like a light to the origin, and all the apostles looking up in awe? They are not able to comprehend his majesty. That is something you can experience in the astral plane, where he goes up, and the clouds part, and that’s an accurate depiction of his level of mastery―showing that you can go from the earth to the heavens in an instant. Very powerful and divine!
אלהים Elohim and אאלהים Aelohim
He is teaching Judas that he came from this top unknown source. אין Ain means “nothing.” אין סוף Ain Soph means “limitless.” אין סוף אור Ain Soph Aur means “limitless light.”
We talk about kabbalah to explain levels of mastery and levels of divinity. אלהים Elohim is a [Hebrew] term used to name God in the Bible, and אאלהים Aelohim is the unknown divinity. So Elohim are all the angels, masters, prophets, buddhas, saints, gods, spirits, initiates who have mastered the Tree of Life, they’ve developed even the top Trinity in themselves, and yet they are still waiting to enter higher levels of mastery within the Absolute. TheTree of Life, you could say, is like a manifested glyph. It’s like a map of the manifested universe. It’s the levels of nature and divinity that we can access in this state of cosmic manifestation, but the source is unmanifested. It is a divine potential which is not yet actualized in the Being. There’s a bit of a threshold there in order to go from the manifested to the unmanifested. That’s the difference between Elohim and Aelohim, or to refer to the Gnostic Gospels, you have the Demiurge who governs the universe (Elohim), and then Ἀγνωστος Θεός Agnostos Theos, the unknown God (Aelohim). So that generation the Lord Jesus mentioned is the Ain, the nothing, the cosmic space from which all worlds emerge. The disciples said to him, “Lord, what is the great generation that is exalted over us and is holy, but is not present in these realms?” ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
Because, we have manifested reality / unmanifested reality. Remember that the apostles asked, “Where did you go?” because they can’t follow him, like a light that just goes to heaven, right? So, they can’t follow him because they are not at that level, but Judas seeks to follow in his footsteps in the Gnostic Gospel.
When Jesus heard these things, he laughed and said to them “Why are you reflecting in your minds about the generation that is powerful and holy?” ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
You may long for it but why are you theorizing about it? Why do you think about it? Do it. But that’s the challenge, right?
The Direct Path
The way to approach those heights is through the direct path. “Straight is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life and few there be that find it” from the Gospels (Matthew 7:14).
The direct path is the path taken by masters who seek to renounce all that they are to go beyond good and evil. We call them bodhisattvas in Buddhism. A bodhisattva, an initiate who is the light of bodhi, Christ incarnated, and now is perfecting themselves in their mastery. But to really go beyond that point, obtaining mastery, we can say (if we study the Tree of Life) a master is some initiate who has reached Tiphereth at some level of development. The middle of the tree, they’ve conquered these lower spheres: Malkuth, Yesod, Hod, Netzach, Tiphereth―levels of nature that they’ve worked with through the perfect matrimony, and they have a level of understanding of these regions. Yet if they wish to go to the top, that beyond, they have to be willing to go beyond good and evil, because Christ, the Intimate Christ, our inner divinity, our inner light, is beyond our concept of good and evil. That light is very radical, which is why in the lives of the prophets, they were so controversial. Nobody understands them. Nobody understood them, and yet they had the power to lead, because their source comes from Barbelo. The way to behold that generation, that sphere, that emanation, that sephirah (singular), or the sephiroth (plural, the emanations of the Tree of Life), one has to really die psychologically. Die to pride. Die to anger. Die to lust. Due to fear. “I tell you the truth, no one born of this realm will behold that generation, no angelic host of stars will rule over that generation, no human of mortal birth will be able to accompany it.” ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
Even the angels cannot go into the Absolute, unless it is the command of the highest. They have to work after many cosmic eras, after they’ve reached the level of self-realization to reach that point. But obviously they get to enter the heights when they have earned it, and that’s the path that Judas is taking to be able to reach that point.
“And no human of mortal birth will be able to accompany it.” We are all born through our parents, and really our parents gave birth to our body through lust. We may love our partner, or, our parents may have loved each other, but the act itself was not an immaculate conception (a pure act of procreation without organs,). In a sense they impurely used the sexual energy to create. Was it used just to satisfy passion? Or was it used to create the spirit? So, all of us, if we wish to go to the very heights, eventually our body must die, and that is a path that happens near the very end of the work as we are climbing the Tree of Life. Even our physical body needs to go the grave due to it being imperfect, born from fornication, so that we can, the soul after perfecting itself, can go up. No human of mortal birth can resurrect without death. We have to be giving birth spiritually. 
Liberation and Renunciation
To take the path of Judas, it begins, really, as I said, with mastery in Tiphereth, where upon reaching the middle of the Tree of Life, what is called the causal world, one has a choice, as depicted within the Mona Lisa of DaVinci.
The Mona Lisa is a representation of the Divine Mother. She appears before the initiate. “You’ve reached mastery. You are born again. You have created vehicles of the soul. You have the garments of the divine wedding, the wedding garments of the spirit, or in Arabic, in the Qur’an, libas al-taqwa, “the garments of reverence”―many names for the garments of love, according to Rumi. She, the Divine Mother, says, “You have two choices: stay in heaven (Tiphereth), or renounce heaven and go beyond. Go beyond good and evil.” Two paths behind Mona Lisa: one entering into the waters and one going beyond―spiral and straight paths. The spiral path is a slow path of development, staying within the heavenly regions, enjoying a beautiful vacation, which actually is much longed for, and it is very difficult to renounce that level of good where you’re happy. You have powers. You’re in heaven. You’re eating grapes all day, on couches of luxury in a spiritual sense, and even the Qur’an mentions many times that in the garden of bliss, you have women of divine origin, the Houris, and the Nirvanis, the gods, sitting with you on couches of silk, brocade, and much bliss (these are symbols, not literal). But to go beyond that is the next level. Two paths… the spiral path takes many cosmic eras to go to the source. Very little difficulty. But the straight path is to renounce everything we are, go beyond good and evil, deny ourselves and to go to the heights with expediency, very quickly. But it is very difficult because all of the past karma, the things that we owed, our spiritual debts come to us. That’s why you see the lives of the prophets are so challenging. They face one ordeal after the other after the other. With those challenges they gain mastery. 8. You are before two paths.
But that’s a choice that one makes when one is at that level. Obviously, this is very elevated, very, very profound, but it is good to know what will happen if we reach that point.
Death and Immortality: The Arcanum of Judas
The Gospel of Judas can also apply to us beginners and many elements in our current level. Judas is referred to as the 13th daemon in the Gospel of Judas―13th Aeon, 13th daemon, Arcanum 13 of the Tarot. The 13th Arcanum of the Tarot among the Gnostics in Immortality, death―death of lust to give birth to chastity, purity; death of pride to give birth to humility; the death of fear to give birth to confidence in God.
This initiate in the card reaps wheat. But to reap wheat we must use the scythe of death. Cut clean what needs to be cut clean, our defects. Judas in the Gospel basically asked, “I’ve had a vision. I wish to follow you to the very heights,” but the problem becomes, what needs to die? What do we need to renounce? What needs to change? So we see here that Judas represents the principle of death, the death of our defects. Judas said, “Master, just as you have listened to all of them, now also listen to me, for I have seen a powerful vision.” Jesus heard this, then laughed, and he said to him “Oh thirteenth daemon, why are you so excited? Speak your mind then and I will hear you out.” ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
The daemon in this sense means “spirit,” kind of like Socrates’ Daemon, you know, his voice of conscience in Plato’s Apologia that guided him moment by moment. That voice is what helps us follow the path of immortality. The death of the impure gives birth to the soul.
The Vision of Judas
What is this vision of Judas in the Gospels? Judas has a vision of life, really, beyond good and evil, of the heights, of the very highest degrees of mastery. I’ll relate this vision that he had and explain some points about it because it is very profound.
In synthesis, there are masters who achieve development of these top spheres of the Tree of Life, the Trinity of all religions, and even enter Ain Soph Aur, the “limitless light” of the Ain Soph, the origin―one more degree below the very heights. The Ain Soph, meaning “limitless,” in synthesis, is like a spark. It’s like a divine atom from the Absolute. So there’s the cosmic space, from which we all emerge, but all of us have a super divine atom, like a synthesis, a spark of light in Being, which is in the void, which emanates in the Eternal. It is called the Limitless because it is limitless joy, real being, real peace. So if you synthesize and extract everything that is superfluous from us, get rid of the fake and the artificial, layer by layer up the Tree of Life, you finally arrive at the light: the star of Bethlehem that guided the three Magi (Matthew 2:1-12). That star is the Ain Soph. There are masters who reach that level, and that’s very high and very beautiful. That is the level of an Elohim, of a real Angel. But even beyond that there is something more. Judas said unto him [Jesus], “ I have seen myself in the vision as the twelve disciples were stoning me and treating [me harshly]. And I also came to the place that… [some of the text has not been preserved] after you. I saw [a house]… and my eyes could not grasp its dimensions. ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
We know from kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, that the Ain Soph is ב Beth, the second Hebrew letter meaning “house.” בית לחם Beth-Lechem, “house of bread,” the bread of wisdom that gives spiritual life. The star of Bethlehem is the Ain Soph. That is our real house, our home from which we emerge. Even the Wizard of Oz correlates with this myth, symbolically, kabbalistically: “I wish I was home.” She comes from the divine origins, then goes through a whole journey, that folk tale. Bethlehem, House of Bread, and Judas wishes to go there. It’s really wonderful, beautiful, and peaceful.
I saw a house and my eyes could not grasp its dimensions. Important people moved around it. That house had a thatched roof, and within the house there was a crowd. Master, let me also come in with these people. ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
…because to return to our Ain Soph with wisdom and knowledge is beautiful, but Jesus warns him, “Don’t get stuck there. Go beyond.” This is the difference between Elohim and Aelohim. Elohim means “gods and goddesses,” the architect demiurge. Aelohim means “without, beyond” even the gods.
Jesus answered and said, “Your star has deceived you Judas.” ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
Not that the light in a sense betrays us, but that there is more for you if you are willing.
Beyond Good and Evil: The Way of Judas
The way of Judas is the way of going beyond good and evil. Obviously in our level, our current state as beginners, we really want to overcome evil, especially, because we may have a lot of anger, resentment, negative emotions, pride, and behaviors that are harmful. In a sense, Samael Aun Weor mentions that as we are eliminating certain defects in our work, we usually go for the bad ones first, right? This is because they are the most destructive, and then later upon becoming a master, one has to annihilate the egos of good, right? Even the egos that know how to be altruistic and kind, but they are not divine.
Jesus explains to Judas the requirement of entering the Ain Soph, and that it’s meant for the saints. It’s a level of sainthood, mastery, perfection. But, in reality, “Don’t get comfortable.” No person of mortal birth is worthy
Sun and moon are alchemical symbols, male-female, positive-negative, masculine-feminine, light and darkness. At the level of being at the Ain Soph, it’s approaching the heights, a level of equilibrium going beyond our ideas of good and evil, but, the perfection, the absolute perfection is involved when we transcend even angelhood. I believe in Rumi mentioned in a poem, “I must sacrifice even my angel-self, for unto Him shall all return.”
Some principles we can wrap things up with are from Igneous Rose by Samael Aun Weor. Here are the qualities of discernment, knowing to distinguish and discriminate between good and evil, positive and negative, as beginners. Learn to separate the smoke from the flames.
Evil can wear the robes of a martyr. Anger can wear the robes of a judge. “I was right to get angry,” pride will wash his hands clean, like Pilate, and Caiaphas out of religious piety can tear his vestures in anger and blasphemy over a seeming infraction. Flames are lights, smoke we have to separate and distinguish good from evil, and that only comes about by following the path of meditation.
The Solitude of the Revolutionary Path
This path, obviously, this fine refinement of who we are, is very difficult. It is very lonely because it doesn’t involve even if we are married. It doesn’t involve the other person doing the work for us. They help. A marriage can really bolster us and give us the necessary fire and energy to work, but that by itself is not enough. In the Gospel of Judas, they synthesize how, if you’ve studied the works of Samael Aun Weor, the creative energy itself that we’ve talked about again and again, working with the sexual force in a marriage. The seed, which can give birth to the soul, has to be used, transformed, with the conscience, the consciousness. So Judas, while going up the Tree of Life, wants to develop his soul, his seed, to that height.
Judas said, “Master, is it possible that my seed is subject to the rulers?” ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
If you’ve studied the Gnostic Gospels, the archons or rulers are all the different divinities that govern the different sephiroth, levels of nature with different laws. They enact the laws of being in those spaces, and Judas is asking “Will my energy, will my soul be subject to them, these laws of the demiurge architect?”
Jesus answered and said to him “Come that I may… (some versus are obviously from the original weren’t translated as the scroll itself). But you will go through a great deal of grief when you see the kingdom and its entire generation.” ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
Theres a myth in the Bible, when Moses sees the Promised Land and does not enter. It’s the same metaphor, where “You shall see that generation but you shall not go into it there at. You shall see the bliss of those higher regions, but you will not enjoy rest because as a bodhisattva you will sacrifice yourself for multiple humanities through great aeons of time, again and again, until finally earning the right to merge in the bosom of Aelohim, the supreme divinity.”
The Last Shall Be First and the First Last
This is why the last shall be first and the first last. Right? From the Gospels. Those who put others’ good ahead of them and not their own, those last persons shall be first, and the first, those who seek or maybe are attached to benefits and pride in the moment, will in turn not enter the heights.
So, Judas questions the whole utility of the highest, direct path, because “why should I follow this if it’s going to take such a long time…” Right? Or it’s going to be a difficult process. When Judas heard these things, he said to him, “What advantage is there for me since you have set me apart from that generation? (What will I benefit by being stoned, hated, and persecuted even by the masters who still have ego?) Jesus answered and said, “You will be thirteenth, and you will be cursed by the other generations but eventually you will rule over them. In the last days they will… up to the holy generation.” ―The Gospel of Judas, The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
So you obviously see from the historical Master Judas that he was really persecuted and hated, because he had to play the role that no one wanted to do, and yet, Samael Aun Weor mentions that historically, this master is preparing to enter the Ain. He is currently serving the Klipoth, the hell realms, teaching the lost souls, the demons. Samael Aun Weor said, “I am not even worth kissing the sandals of the feet of Judas for the work he does, or is doing, and if anyone has the right to enter the Ain, it’s him.”
Resources
In conclusion, there are some resources we have on our website that teach how to practically apply the path of Judas.
I know I talked some abstract things, like what does it mean to go beyond good and evil? What is good and evil in our own lives? The way that we learn it is through meditation, discernment. By meditating and comprehending our own thoughts, feelings, will, desires, impulses, behaviors, actions, ways of being, we can discern what’s true and what’s false, and then we learn to comprehend and learn to eliminate what needs to go. The main practice we use is meditation, especially an exercise called retrospection. Retrospection meditation basically involves reviewing your day and visualizing what defects you saw in yourself, and systematically meditating, comprehending them, going deep. I suggest if you wish to learn more about it, and just for the sake of time here today, you can reference the course. We have it available in a PDF and slides which will be available on our website too. So, at this point, I’ll open the floor up to questions. Questions and Answers
Question: You mentioned the demiurge?
Instructor: Yes. Question: And… its different than Yaldabaoth? Instructor: Yeah, Yaldabaoth is an interesting symbol too. I mean, that name Yaldabaoth is a composite. Question: Yaldabaoth is different than what created the world? Or the demiurge did? Instructor: Yaldabaoth literally means “children of the void.” In one sense, Yaldabaoth, above, the host above is the demiurge, the angels that created the heavens and the earth. But there’s also hell, and there’s a region of nature, the inversion of the Tree of Life. When all those forces go down into more levels of complexity, you have the hell realms, the inversion of the Tree of Life, which Islam calls the tree of Zaqqum, the tree of death. Yaldabaoth, when those forces of divinity are channeled through hell, you have the children of that void, which are all the demons or archons of the infernal worlds. It’s a dual symbol. Question: So Yaldabaoth is the son of Sophia? Instructor: Yaldabaoth is in some myths as the demiurge architect which created the universe, which is the Tree of Life. But the problem becomes when interpreted in the Gnostic Gospels, which Yaldabaoth are we referring to? Yaldabaoth is a composite symbol with dual meaning. Because some people conflate the two, like they look at the scriptures and see all the archons or the lord archons or the demiurge sounds evil because it is suppressing Sophia. Sophia is the soul, and the soul wants to return to the 13th Aeon. Sophia is the consciousness which must awaken. But Sophia is obviously troubled. But the problem is too, when Sophia is ascending up that journey of initiation, the archons exist, meaning the hierarchs, that relate to the higher world, say “no.” Meaning, the heavenly archons of these higher spheres of the Tree of Life are basically saying, “If you wish to enter those regions, you have to renounce yourself. You have to pay what you owe,” and they block the door. They resist. There’s that level of meaning. But sometimes when we see Sophia being oppressed by these lustful, degenerate archons, it is referring to the lower hell realms. So, it’s nuanced. You have to discern, which archons are we talking about? The archons of heaven? The hierarchs of heaven? The hierarchs of below? And Yaldabaoth is that symbol of all those beings, whether of heaven or of hell, in all levels of nature. It depends where we are at. Question: When you are talking about the great architect, or Elohim, are we considered at some level of ego, like, they have some percentage of ego pertaining to the Ain that doesn’t have anything? Instructor: Right. So, obviously there are masters who are at the beginning, and the beginning of mastery one still has a lot of ego―a lot of pride, a lot of fear, a lot of anger, a lot of lust―and what happens is that, those archons, maybe those masters of that level may have some purity, but they still have work to do. Obviously, at the higher levels, there is no ego, but in the beginnings of mastery there is. This is described in the Bible as the three kings or magi: black king, white king, yellow king. Or to use the Book of Kings: Saul, David, Solomon. Black psychologically refers to ego. A black king is a king of nature, a master, but still impure. You see in the bible that Saul had many problems in Israel. David maybe less so, because he conquers his enemies, his own ego. No defects, and then the perfected resurrected mater, Sholomah, solar man, Solomon. But yeah, I mean there’s levels of application. The higher you go, there is less ego to the point that there is none, but sometimes yeah, you hear in the Greek myths of the gods that go to battle with each other, who constantly fight. It is because they have pride. You see this in the gnostic movement, or in any religion, really, where people have some position where they are leading, and yet there is different egos and defects involved. Sometimes the gods fight among themselves, the masters fight among themselves, but the perfected masters, really, they’re beyond that, and they can guide effectively, because that’s why we have hierarchy, levels of development, and that’s mapped out by the Tree of Life. Question: So the Gospel of Judas was written from the original text. Now why was it revoked like this? Because this knowledge is very controversial for Christians who, lets say, they see Judas as the scape goat disciple. I’ve always wondered about this because how could Jesus choose someone who does not have a role to play? Instructor: That’s the difference between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. In the early Christian movement, there were many gnostic groups, many gnostic Christian groups, or many Gnosticisms. Even Martin Meyer in The Nag Hammadi Scriptures, his commentary, says its actually erroneous to say that there’s only one gnostic movement at the time. There were many groups with competing intentions, and it kind of reflects what’s going on today, you know, with any movement. What’s interesting that as Catholicism gained ground, or the orthodox Christian tradition, meaning, the more mainstream Christianity was forming, you found that you had a group of people who are not initiates who are selecting texts, who are discerning, “will this fit what we understand or believe about Christ?” and obviously with a level of interpretation comes a level of judgment. Dion Fortune explained very beautifully that the underground Christian movement, really the Gnostics, had to flee from the public life because as the orthodoxy formed, they were being persecuted, or were persecuting the Gnostics, which is why the Gnostics basically went underground. They kept their scriptures hidden, and only by the grace of God do we have them now. However, even then what we have is a minor fragment of what actually was available. I mean, Marvin Meyer mentions something like, really, what we have available is almost nothing compared to what existed. So people eliminate what doesn’t fit the narrative. So that is the problem. You have to think people obviously don’t accept Judas as a master because it requires basically one interpretive move that the Gospels themselves are a story, not merely literal history. Even though those figures existed, they taught through their life what we need to do. The problem is that, if you can’t disassociate Judas from the historical with what he represents in us, really, that’s the first hurdle from going from mainstream religion to initiation. It is understanding that these symbols represent our own life, but that’s the challenge. People like easy interpretations, they don’t like friction, you know. It’s not comfortable for people to be challenged. Right? Even in our beliefs, even in gnostic beliefs, no matter what religion, because it requires us to really reflect in ourselves, “what do we really know? What have we experienced?” Question: Is Judas and Jesus the only people that have reached the 13th level? Have there been other masters who have been able to get to that level? Instructor: Yeah, there are many, but, we know of Jesus and from Samael Aun Weor that Judas is on his way. I believe he even mentions in the end of the book The Narrow Way [the last chapter] about “The Passion of Mansur Al-Hallaj,” that he was marching on the diamond path, going to the Absolute. Yeah, beautiful story. He gives a whole excerpt in the end of that book The Narrow Way. He says Al-Hallaj is marching on the angelic path. He is ready to go. Great Sufi, and obviously there’s more, there’s many more. We don’t know their names. You look at the stars in the sky―do we have names for all that? It’s hard to put a finger on all that. But there’s a few that we know of. Question: Is there a way to recover the initial texts from the Akashic Records in a way that is credible? Instructor: Yeah, if you are a competent enough and capable enough meditator you can put your body to sleep, go into the astral plane, and ask your divinity, “Show me what I need to see about Judas,” or Buddha, Moses, or Muhammad, and you’ll see. You may even take on the role of those figures, because what happens is that you, even more so than the akashic records, can have that experience in Chokmah, which is the world of universal Being. In our terms, we call it Christ, the Second Logos. What happens in that level of nature is there is no individuality there―super-individuality. I remember one instructor mentioned, from Glorian, who was meditating, and he saw himself as Krishnamurti teaching students, and returned to his body, and said, “What was this? I’m not Krishnamurti! Let me go back again.” Did it again, found out he was the students―a different perspective. Then he realized he was having a vision in Chokmah where he was one in everyone. Also the Akashic Records too, in the astral plane you can literally see it play on like a movie, where you may even be a participant or a spectator at the same time―living out what happened in the Middle East. The Akashic Records are like an office, like a filing office, where you can ask that question… What are the Akashic Records? You can see it’s like going to an office. You want to extract a certain file? “Here’s what happened,” and you live it. You see it. Question: In the Akashic Records, does that mean that you can ask for a record of whatever you wish to inquire about or do you submit a request and a higher level of being gives you what you need at that time? Instructor: The term Akasha comes from Sanskrit. Akash is a substance that permeates the astral plane It’s like a light of some sort that gives the dream state its reality. It’s kind of has an oneiric or powerful emotional impact, like the light we perceive in dreams, or the kind of depth and color when our dreams are very vibrant. It is the astral light, Akasha. Akasha is like a film. Every action we perform physically, mentally, emotionally, psychologically, is imprinted. If you’ve ever done photography, you know basically you expose light to the film, it makes an imprint, and you can see it played out. So, what happens is the Akashic Records is like, you can experience it through a vision. Sometimes it can be facilitated by a master. They may come and tell you certain things but, more importantly, you suddenly… you ask to see life of Jesus, suddenly you might be in a room and Jesus is teaching. You can live it, see it, and you are face to face. So its better than going and reading a book because the book can be wrong. Historically there’s just so much gap between time and then, you know, materialistic scholarship is good as a baseline, but Akashic investigation is much more profound. You actually can see what things that were never written about, which are very deep. Samael Aun Weor gave some examples in his book The Major Mysteries, The Narrow Way as well. In The Narrow Way he mentioned what happened to Jesus in between the ages of his teenage years and when he was 33, described his life because he actually saw in the Akashic Records and documented it. Question: Where was this written? Instructor: The Narrow Way, formerly titled The Doomed Aryan Race [Christmas Message 1967-1968]. Question: We were talking about getting the Akashic Records. I have heard that it’s better to do it yourself then go with someone who can help you, provided by meditation, because sometimes you can, especially if you’re a beginner, you can face meditation with demons who they show you what they want you to do. So, I don’t know if its better to do it by you own or go with someone… because it doesn’t make sense to me because they charge for this. Instructor: Yeah, obviously that’s the red flag, and honestly, we want to encourage investigation for ourselves. We want to teach ourselves to be self-reliant. We don’t want to be dependent on anyone spiritually. We want to be independent investigators of this phenomenon. We don’t want to rely on other people, because we don’t know their qualifications or if they are telling the truth. So the only way to know is to do it oneself. Question: So this is done by mediation? Instructor: Yeah, dream yoga. You are meditating. You enter a meditative state. You fall asleep. You go into the dream world, and you ask divinity, “Show me what I need to see,” and that can help us to see the history even of Judas, which clarifies the path for us. In that way we don’t have to really rely on books. I mean books are good. They have their utility and purpose, but its better to become conscious investigators. Comment: Let your intuition be your guide. Instructor: Conscience, and going back to the lecture, intuition, conscience, knowing right from wrong in your heart. I mean, people can tell you, “believing in our church, our tradition, our school, is good, and if you don’t follow this you are evil.” I mean this [Judas] is a character, not just a person, but some people really do feel like this is just literal history. So, going beyond good and evil, how do you really know? Your heart.
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Every religion teaches that the soul has a decision to make. We have the opportunity in our lifetime, in our moment-to-moment experience, to either enter a new, superior way of being, a spiritual way of being, or to enter deeper states of suffering. This is determined by our actions, what we do, the conscious or unconscious motivations that drive us or the decisions that we make. This dichotomy had been represented especially in the Abrahamic traditions, but also within the East as the battle of the soul in the work of achieving its own full, conscious divine realization.
We have a choice. Two paths open up before those who sincerely wish to know the divine. If you have been studying the sequence of these lectures in this course, we have been talking a lot about the Gnostic mythology, especially Sophia (Greek: Σοφία). 
Sophia we see represented here. This image is Parsifal and Kundry, Medieval iconography that represents the same Gnostic myth of how the soul, the fallen Sophia, must be redeemed. She is our soul, our consciousness which, when it is elevated, purified, sanctified, becomes the receptacle of Christ, the Holy Grail, the divine chalice that receives superior knowledge and can express it selflessly to humanity.
Sophia in us is fallen. We do not know divinity at our current level, if we are honest, if we examine our mind and our heart and the daily problem of suffering, our psychological states. However, the soul, the consciousness can experience that which is known as redemption, which is a state of being free of suffering, in which the soul is fully unified with the divine. In that process, we must be like Percival, Parsifal, the knight, the warrior, the great hero which fights in the path of love, who goes to war against his own impurity, his own weaknesses, his own mistakes. These two figures we see represented here represent the marriage of the soul with the wisdom of Christ, the Christic energy, that cosmic and universal abstract potential, which can become human, particularized within any initiate who is properly prepared. This woman has been known by many names: Kundry, especially within Wagner’s opera Parsifal. Kundry, Sophia, must also redeem her lover. This warrior is, if we use the kabbalistic tradition, represents תפארת Tiphereth, the divine will, the will to do, to work for the spirit, to enact positive, superior action. We see here that while is drinking from a chalice, he is looking in contemplation deeply at the sword. The sword and the chalice are profoundly sexual symbols, and as we are going to elaborate in this lecture, the paths of temptation and redemption have a sexual trope. They also relate to the nature of our psychology, what behaviors in us produce happiness or sorrow. We are going to explain what temptation is, what redemption is, what the path is. It is also important to reflect on the nature of these two souls joined in sacred union. This woman is known in kabbalah as גבורה Geburah. The term means “justice,” the justice of divinity, the Martian, spiritual strength of the soul, the divine soul, and she is married to her knight, her husband, her hero. Together they must face great ordeals and challenges, and by overcoming their own innate weaknesses, their own desires, they can aspire towards higher ways of being, superior knowledge. 
The Nature and Utility of Temptation
It is important to clarify what temptation is. Samael Aun Weor states the following maxim in many of his writings:
Temptation is fire. Triumph over temptation is light. ―Samael Aun Weor
What is fire? In a psychological sense, in a sexual sense, it is desire. It is wanting, attachment, craving: “What I want. What I need. What I crave.” Desire has many forms, whether for food, for drink, for alcohol, for sex, for drugs. For some people, their desires are for attention, praise, recognition, fame, titles, security, money.
Desire is a fire. It burns. It consumes one’s entire being, the wood of our soul from the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life, metaphorically, symbolically speaking. How many of us in our lifetime are driven precisely by desire? By the wanting for something more? Or accumulation? If you examine this metaphor, it directly represents something very profound, how in our striving to fulfill our desires in life, we in fact suffer. The word passion originally means “suffering.” In our Western culture, we tend to ignore this fact. We believe and are taught that by following our desires, we will be happy, and yet we ignore that fulfilling or seeking to fulfill these very drives are precisely what create confusion and pain. If we do not get what we want, we suffer. When we get what we want, we want more. Desire is a flame. It is never satiated. It is like a holocaust, which for many of us defines our very existence. It is also important to remember that by feeding desire, by giving into our appetites, our cravings, our longings for acceptance and praise, for security and money, that our desires will never be satisfied. Even if we had all the wealth―a materialism that could really gratify our greatest yearnings―we will not be happy. We will want more, and therefore, feeding desire will only make it stronger, like throwing clarified butter into a flame. It becomes more extreme, and this explains why many people who acquire more and more in life tend to acquire even greater things and yet they degenerate into great pain. Is it not true of this metaphor that when the fire dies, it becomes snuffed out? We are left with smoke, the aftermath, the taste, the bitterness, the emptiness. The same applies to sexual experience, most importantly. When sexual desire is satisfied, when the fire of sex is snuffed out through the orgasm, what happens is that the couple, seeking to return to that state, crave more and more sensations, and therefore they end up in greater sorrow. However, it is true that the very fire that animates our being, which can give us drive and impetus and direction in life, can also be transformed to do something superior and divine, something sacred. It is true that from fire comes light, wisdom, understanding. From the fire of the creative sexual potential emerges the potential of redemption, because that fire, that energy, that force to create, can be harnessed with intelligence. It is important to remember that our desires, our cravings, attachments, our wantings, our egotism, can also be transformed, can be transmuted from one substance into another, into one form and into another, from one state into a superior state. This is the mystery of alchemy: the transformation of a base substance into a divine and spiritual material, from lead, the denseness of personality and suffering, into the gold of the spirit. But the question becomes, how do we do it? 
The Necessity of Ordeals
We do so through ordeals. It is necessary to face sufferings and challenges in life. What is important is that as we are practicing the tools and techniques of this tradition. As we are learning to practice meditation, concentration, understanding, imagination exercises, runic practices, other forms of yoga, mantras, sacred sounds, we have to remember that we must face hardships with serenity. We must face them with calmness of mind. This is because when the waters of the mind are churning with despair, with morbidity, with passion, no image can reflect on its surface.
However, when the surface is calm, limpid, cool, translucent, it reflects the heavens. Also, the elements of the mind settle. You begin to see things with greater clarity, with greater wisdom, with intuition, with insight. When we have serenity of mind, we can better apprehend the source of our pain because we will have enough stability of mindfulness, of attention, by which to see clearly within our own psychological nature. However, this is a paradox. How is it that we must be serene and calm, perceiving directly within our own inner nature, and yet must face crises? It seems contradictory. How could we be in crisis or why do we need to be in certain ordeals, and yet we must be serene? This is because when you have a basis of understanding within the consciousness, when you are observing yourself throughout the day, as you are looking within at the secret motives of your impulses, your thoughts, your emotional states, you begin to see things. But you can not see the real, deep rooted problems and wrong mental states if we do not have situations that provoke them. We need to be provoked. For some people it might be their pride, being criticized, being ridiculed. For someone it could be betrayal, the feeling of self-esteem which emerges with great sorrow and pain in response to a friend, anyone in a relationship with us. For some people it is lust. Surrounded by potential partners, one, has the decision to make, whether to be faithful to one’s own work with this creative energy itself, with exercises of transmutation, or to enter adultery. Ordeals are necessary. If the water does not boil at one hundred degrees celsius, then that which must be disintegrated will not be disintegrated. When you are in a situation of opposition, you can really see what you are made of. Without great trials, we can not grow. Without temptation, without the possibility of failing, of making mistakes, we will not recognize that we are faulty. We will not see where we are mistaken, where we are weak, what we must change. Virtue is truly profound and strong when the roots dig deep into hell. When the roots are deep, then the tree can reach higher into heaven. Every ascent is preceded by a terrible and frightful descent. Every exaltation is preceded by a frightful and difficult humiliation. This is why Samael Aun Weor stated the following in Tarot and Kabbalah: The results speak for themselves. If there are no temptations, there are no virtues. Virtues are more grandiose when temptations are stronger. What is important is not to fall into temptation. That is why we have to pray to our Father saying, “Lead us not into temptation.” Only through the struggle, the contrast, the temptation, and rigorous esoteric discipline can the flowers of virtue sprout from us. ―Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah
The “Our Father” states, “Lead us not into temptation.” Everybody knows this, but who in us tries to lead us into temptation?
The Origin of Temptation
Many religions, especially the Abrahamic traditions but also in the East, you find many symbols related to demons, demonology, tempting figures or the famous Satan, Lucifer. People do not understand in conventional religion that the origin of temptation is inside, and that the figures we find represented amongst diverse religious traditions are in fact symbols of internal reality.
This figure Lucifer frightens many people. They hear the name, and they become scandalized not understanding that Lucifer is a part of us. This term comes from Latin: luci ferus, “carrier” or “bearer of light.” What light is this? It is the light of Christ, the wisdom of direct perception, intuition, conscious understanding of the truth. This figure is a representation of a part of our Being. Samael Aun Weor mentions many times that we have a part of our inner Being, our inner divinity, known as Lucifer. He is the light of Christ but mixed within us, within impurity, within desire. 
He has a great burden, as you see represented by the chains that wrap this figure. He is the fallen Prometheus who gives fire to man, a beautiful symbol of this sexual trope. Temptation is fire. Triumph over temptation is light. That fire provides light and understanding. It is the creative sexual potential. When we take that energy and use it well for the spirit, we overcome temptation. But if we give into desire, we fall.
This figure Lucifer is our psychological trainer. He is responsible for giving us tests and ordeals and temptations, to test whether or not we are serious. We can believe that we are spiritual, that we are compassionate, that we are kind, but the ordeals will teach us the reality. If we say, “I am kind,” we will be faced with situations in which our anger comes up. If we are chaste or think we are chaste, we will face situations of lust. If we are proud or think we are humble, we will be criticized; we will be laughed at, condemned, mocked to such an extent and degree that we will really see our true caliber. Therefore, this figure is something very enigmatic. It can not be brushed aside from vain superstition. The reality is that even in the Book of Job, Yah-Havah, יהוה Jehovah, the divine, allowed Satan, Lucifer, to tempt Job. He was given permission: “Tempt him and test him, but do not think that you can kill him. Let him suffer to the maximum and see whether or not he is a righteous man.” That is because this figure, Satan, or the Hebrew שָׂטָן Shaitan, is “the adversary.” Shaitan, “the adversary” in Hebrew, is precisely that part of divinity that mixes with our own defects. He is imperfect, as you see here in this image. He is in a deformed state because we made him that way. Remember in the myth, whether from Catholicism or Christianity, that Lucifer was once a divine angel, a divine being. However, he fell. That represents us. We were once in a primordial, blissful, Edenic, perfect state, but we fell from our own actions, our own desires. Now it is the job of the intimate Lucifer, the psychological trainer, to put us in necessary and difficult situations so that we can really define our character. We have to free him. He is enchained by our own lust, and therefore he will show you and provide circumstances in your experience that are going to bring out the worst in you, so that you can see them. You can comprehend them, and you can eliminate them. Therefore, we need temptation. We need challenges. This figure is also represented in the Gnostic Gospel of Judas of which we will talk about in a future lecture [Transcendent Betrayal in The Gospel of Judas and Beyond Good and Evil in The Gospel of Judas]. Judas Iscariot, a symbol of Lucifer, is the symbol of temptation. He represents how every initiate must enter their Passion by facing contrariety, opposition, pain, so that we can eliminate that which must be eliminated. 
Who Tempts? נפש Nephesh
Let us examine our psychology in relation to the kabbalah, because the path of redemption and temptation are represented here.
There are different aspects of the soul that we must understand and know so that we can be very clear about what in us must change and what actions we must take. We see here in the bottom of this glyph מלכות Malkuth, which is Hebrew for “Kingdom.” It is our physical body. Above that we have יסוד Yesod which is the vital, creative sexual energy. This in Hebrew is known as נפש Nephesh. נפש Nephesh literally means “blood, life force, vitality, appetite, soul,” or “that which breeds.” It is related to יסוד Yesod, the “Foundation” in Hebrew, the creative sexual energy, because this energy, נפש Nephesh, is what gives us life. It is the life force. We could not breathe physically if it were not for נפש Nephesh. It is the circulation of our blood. It is the vitality of our soul. It is the energy that allows one to procreate, to live, to digest, to eat, to consume. It even allows us to think in this physical body. We would not be able to be here if it were not for that impulse, this instinctive force which for most of us is raw. It is unrefined. It is undefined. If you examine the life of any animal like a cat or a dog, you see that they are driven by instinct. They have נפש Nephesh. They have animal soul. This level of consciousness relates to impulse, instinct, and desire. It is also the raw material by which we can create something divine and superior, but we have to take the animal and make it human. It is important to think and understand that נפש Nephesh amongst animals is in an elementary state. While animals like cats and dogs are driven by instinct, they are not as animal as we are. This might seem very paradoxical or contrary, but it is the truth. Many animals are still developing and evolving. They are learning to obey the forces of nature. They do not have intellect, but our humanity with our intellect, with our justifications, with our reasoning, take נפש Nephesh and make it more degenerated. We make it degenerated. Animals are therefore innocent, but because we have reason and we justify appetite, craving, anger, instinct, desire, we make ourselves sick. This is very evident if you examine our television shows, which are saturated with sarcasm, verbal violence, emotional and mental violence, physical violence, adultery, creative ways of killing one another, prostitution, slander, crime. This is not human. This is animal. This level of consciousness has no understanding or perception of God, and נפש Nephesh within us is the desire for more, to accumulate, to acquire, whether it is social positions or money, status, a partner, a spouse. נפש Nephesh is the instinctive drive to survive. It is self-preservation. It is base. It is basic. נפש Nephesh is never satisfied. This is what tempts within us. While we talk about defects and desires, animal tendencies, we label it with this term נפש Nephesh, because it is our soul that is trapped within defects. Part of the inner Lucifer is mixed with that. In fact, Lucifer is precisely the sexual impulse, deeply related, integrated, saturated by defect, desire, within יסוד Yesod, נפש Nephesh. We have to liberate soul. We have to make the animal human. We do so through training. Desire is never satisfied, which is why it states in Ecclesiastes, chapter six, verse seven: All the labor of אדם Adam is for his mouth and yet the נפש Nephesh is never filled. ―Ecclesiastes 6:7
Who is אדם Adam? It is us, the terrestrial personality or intellectual humanoid. This reference to a mouth does not mean literally a physical mouth, although food and consumption is one element of נפש Nephesh. At a more psychological level, our mental mouth consumes, eats, masticates, chews, and consumes. We consume images, media, television, books, ideas, lectures. We may consume with our psychological mouth different impressions, different images or media that are saturated with lust, with pride, with anger, and yet our נפש Nephesh is never filled.
It is this quality of mind which obscures our conscious potential to see the divine, which is why we study רוח Ruach. 
Who is Tempted? רוח Ruach
רוח Ruach in Hebrew means, “breath, wind, spirit, the thinking / emotional soul.” It can relate to חסד Chesed on the Tree of Life, relating to the inner spirit. It can also relate to תפארת Tiphereth, the human soul, as I mentioned earlier. This is the origin of ethical perception, insight, guidance.
רוח Ruach is that part of us that is truly human. It is the willpower and the spiritual potential to act. It is what can perceive directly any psychological or material phenomenon and understand them. It is the ability to know right from wrong, good from bad, states or actions that produce happiness or those that create pain. It is ethical, relating to the fact that there is a hierarchy, a divine law, that by following we produce great abundance, prosperity of the spirit, and by ignoring that voice in our heart, conscience that tells us, “This is right, this is wrong,” we suffer the consequences. This רוח Ruach, this soul that knows how to understand and to feel superior emotional states, the great happiness of the spirit, is what has the potential to go up or go down, which is why it states in Ecclesiastes, chapter three, verse twenty-one: Who knoweth the רוח Ruach of the Sons of Man that is going up on high and the רוח Ruach of the Behemah בהמה that is going down below to the earth? ―Ecclesiastes 3:21
בהמה Behemah means, “beast.” It is נפש Nephesh. It is animality. But who knoweth the רוח Ruach? The soul that knows how to ascend? To go on high?
However, רוח Ruach can not do it alone. רוח Ruach needs נשמה Neshamah. 
Who Redeems? נשמה Neshamah
נשמה Neshamah also means, “breath, wind, spirit.” It relates to גבורה Geburah and חכמה Chokmah. גבורה Geburah means, “Justice” in Hebrew. חכמה Chokmah means “Wisdom.” This is the discerning perception of divine reality, objectivity, and truth. נשמה Neshamah is a state of consciousness in which we directly perceive God, whether it is through dreams, through meditation, through out of body experiences. This is a concrete experience in which we are talking directly with our inner spirit, our inner Christ. נשמה Neshamah is the spiritual soul. נשמה Neshamah in some traditions is represented as a divine woman, like in the opening of this lecture: Kundry, Sophia, the divine feminine.
תפארת Tiphereth, our willpower, that is also related to רוח Ruach, is the ability to act. This sphere תפארת Tiphereth, meaning “Beauty,” is the beauty of the human soul that knows how to act for the will of God. He is sometimes depicted as masculine, as a knight, because he has a projective quality. Do not think of this in terms of literal, physical genders or sexes, man or woman. These are symbols. They represent abstract realities. נשמה Neshamah has to redeem. She must descend down this Tree of Life into our physical body. She must help רוח Ruach control נפש Nephesh. She must aid our consciousness in understanding our intimate impulses and desires. This is why in the Book of Proverbs, chapter twenty, verse twenty-seven, states: The נשמה Neshamah of Adam is a lamp of יהוה Iod-Havah. ―Proverbs 20:27
The נשמה Neshamah of man, of the human being, is a lamp of יהוה Iod-Havah, Jehovah.
Why a lamp? A lamp has a case of crystal, glass, translucence, clarity. This is a symbol, a metaphor of the clarity of the soul. This is a state of consciousness in which you directly perceive divinity, but also you have insight into your deepest defects. You see the roots of them. You have great lucidity, insight, understanding of where they come from, how they exist, how they operate. נשמה Neshamah must aid us. We work with נשמה Neshamah precisely with our spiritual exercises, especially alchemy, meditation, transmutation. But there is more. 
Who is Powerful? חיה Chaiah
We also have what is known as חיה Chaiah. חיה Chaiah in Hebrew means “Life.” It is a “living thing, animal, wild person.” That is because the power of life in us, the power of בינה Binah in Hebrew, the intelligence of God, is unfortunately misused. בינה Binah, the intelligence of the divine, the creative potential, enters down the Tree of Life and manifests even in יסוד Yesod. Our sexual creative power contains the intelligence of the divine. However, we must know how to use it intelligently and consciously. It can not be done without knowledge. It has to be intentional.
This force or this aspect of soul, חיה Chaiah, the Holy Spirit, the Divine Mother Kundalini, is related to בינה Binah and דעת Da’ath. דעת Da’ath in Hebrew is the mysterious sephirah located in the middle pillar of the Tree of Life. It means “Knowledge.” It is alchemy. It is the union of man and woman, husband and wife, in order to create the spirit. By working in The Perfect Matrimony, a husband and wife can transform the נפש Nephesh into נפש חיה Nephesh Chaiah. This is the real power of the soul, when נפש Nephesh no longer is animal, but is human. This is why it states in the Book of Genesis, chapter two, verse seven: And יהוה אלהים Iod-Havah Elohim formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the נשמת חיים Neshamah Chaim and man became a נפש חיה Nephesh Chaiah. ―Genesis 2:7
Who is יהוה אלהים Iod-Havah Elohim? That is a Hebrew sacred name of God within בינה Binah. יהוה Iod-Havah is Jehovah, but אלהים Elohim is a profound, deep word. אל El in Hebrew means “God.” אלה Eloah means “Goddess.” ים Iod-Mem, the masculine plural ending, means “Gods and Goddesses.”
When husband and wife unite sexually but restrain נפש Nephesh, animality from the act, they can form the true Adam, the real human being made from prime material, the dust of the ground. What is the dust of the ground? It is our physicality, our physical body, מלכות Malkuth. By breathing in the profound breath of life, by working with breathing exercises and mantra within the sexual act, we form נשמת חיים Neshamah Chaim, the spiritual living soul in man, the human soul became נפש חיה Nephesh Chaiah, perfect, divine. This is the path of redemption. 
Who is Real? יחודה Yechidah
More than that, there is a higher soul known as יחודה Yechidah. יחודה Yechidah means, “unit, unity, only one, solitary, unique.” It is the perfection and unity of the highest divinity, reality, experience, and being. יחודה Yechidah is listed in the Bible or mentioned in the Book of Judges, chapter eleven, verse thirty-four, in which יִפְתָּח Jephthah, who is a Hebrew initiate. He was entering battle against the Amorites and begged divinity to give him victory for the Israelites, and as a favor from divinity, if he would win the battle, he would offer the first thing that he saw when he returned home in מִצְפָּה Mitzpeh, in Hebrew, “the town of Gilead, in Gilead.”
Unfortunately, in the myth it is implied that he sees his daughter emerge from his house. She appears not knowing of his vow and it is implied that he sacrifices her for his victory, and this is the common interpretation for many people. יחודה Yechidah can mean “only,” and its reference in this scripture as “only child.” יחודה Yechidah is the top trinity of the Tree of Life. It is כתר Kether, חכמה Chokmah, בינה Binah―the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit―Christ, the highest divinity, the unity of the light. It is the perfected, absolutely divine and unified, integrated Being. It is perfect. That unity is when the soul has really mastered itself and returned to divinity. When the soul is integrated with the divine, you have יחודה Yechidah, the unity or the Perfect Matrimony between the soul and Christ. Even though some masters or individuals reach יחודה Yechidah, they are tempted, and they fall. You find that allegorized within the story of יִפְתָּח Jephthah, in this Book of Judges, chapter eleven, verse thirty-four: And יִפְתָּח Jephthah came to מִצְפָּה Mitzpeh unto his house, and behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she was his only יחודה Yechidah, his only child; beside her he had neither son nor daughter. ―Judges 11:34
It is interesting that מִצְפָּה Mitzpeh means “tower” in Hebrew.
What does it mean that “יִפְתָּח Jephthah came to his tower unto his house”? Our house, this house of the spirit, is the Tree of Life, and the tower is the peak, כתר Kether. When we return up the Tree of Life of our spine to the crown chakra Sahasrara or the Church of Laodicea in the Book of Apocalypse, we achieve union with the truth. However, even masters that reach that level can fall, as hinted at by this verse, that יִפְתָּח Jephthah sacrifices his יחודה Yechidah, “his only child.” What does it mean to become a child spiritually, esoterically speaking? If you study the writings of Samael Aun Weor, this will be very clear. A child is a symbol of the perfected master. This individual has returned to the primordial innocence of Eden. Many of these masters greet us internally when we overcome ordeals, particularly through the trials of this path. They come in the form of Cherubim, perfect angels, divine beings like children. Temptation exists even for high masters. This can confuse people. Why is it that if they have no lust or defects that they can still fall? They can become tempted by other things―not lust or desire―but love. Beings who have reached those heights have transcended even our normal conceptions of love. They are terribly divine, beyond good and evil. Even some of them decide to sacrifice their own יחודה Yechidah, their only child, because in the long term they know once they fall, they might return with greater knowledge, but obviously that is a very dangerous path. It is not recommended, and for most people anyways, we are nowhere near that, so that is not our problem. But it is a reality. There are angels who are tempted. They are tempted by love. They fall in love with a person in the physical world even though it is forbidden for them to engage in sexual union, because they have already perfected their נפש Nephesh. They have נפש חיה Nephesh Chaiah. Their נשמה Neshamah, their spiritual soul, is fully unified with them, and therefore they do not need sex to create. They already are perfected, and so it is unnecessary, but some masters, they choose to find a partner regardless. Therefore, they are tempted even at that level. 
The Reality of the Rulers
What we are going to do is explain some teachings related in a Gnostic Gospel called The Reality of the Rulers. I want to preface this series of verses by a teaching given by Samael Aun Weor. This is primarily because in The Reality of the Rulers, we find a interesting spin on the conventional story of Genesis, the Garden of Eden. He explains, Samael Aun Weor, that the reference in the Gnostic scriptures to archons or rulers has a very nuanced application to exegesis. We have to be very sophisticated, we can say, in our understanding of what these terms mean and how they apply to The Gnostic Gospels.
In the forthcoming Gospel we are going to read, The Reality of the Rulers, Jehovah is replaced, or better said, represented as the archons. Anyone who studied the Gnostic Gospels have approached this topic or have read about this many times, that there are archons who are controlling, better said, the different aeons or realities of existence, and that they are trying to keep Sophia from achieving enlightenment. It is important to understand that this symbol of the archons―which comes from archeus, the Ark, the Arcanum, the law―these rulers really represent two things. One, they can represent divine beings who are following the divine law. In the inferior sense there are archons who follow the law of hell, or better said, the laws of hell, because in the heavenly regions there are simple, divine, less restrictions and laws. There is more freedom there, but in the hell realms there is more complication, complexity, laws that one is subjected to, and therefore it is a state of suffering. Here is what Samael Aun Weor had to say about this in The Gnostic Bible: The Pistis Sophia Unveiled: The violent judgments of the evil Archons fall upon those who violate the law.
Who are these lords of karma? They are divine beings like Anubis. When you meet beings like Anubis in the internal planes, you see their divinity. They are united with the law, with the superior truth, with Glorian, with Christ, and because they are united with Christ, they are beyond good and evil. They see things that we do not. However, due to our limited mental states, our obscured perception of life, we do not see the full picture of things.
Unfortunately, when bad things happen in our current experience, when situations go wrong, we like to blame God. This is wrong, but this is the tendency of most people, and this explains why in the Gnostic Gospels, the archons are depicted as evil beings, in one sense. However, there will be some examples from verses that we will read that relate to evil archons, or better said, the black magicians, because there are beings within the internal worlds, within dreams, who operate within hell. They rule the inferior dimensions and, in a way, they, believing to be just and good, inflict suffering. Keeping this in mind, we have to be very delicate with our interpretations, because in some cases the archons could be referring to divine beings, but in some cases to demonic beings. There is a duality there. Keep this in mind as we continue forward. 
How We Delude Ourselves
We are going to open with a verse from The Reality of the Rulers. This is from another scripture, a collection of gnostic scriptures called The Gnostic Bible [edited by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer].
We have here an image of Narcissus looking at his own reflection in the water. We chose this image because in relation to this verse, we see that all the time we are tempted by our self-image. How we think we see ourselves, our identity, our presentation, our mannerisms, our self, really keep us hypnotized. We tend to go through a daily psychological state or series of states that may be defined by vanity. Whatever our self-image is, we tend to hold great fervor and attachment to that particular sense of self. We are tempted in many ways by our own self-image as I said. This is paralleled in The Reality of the Rulers in which the rulers or the archons, these archons in this excerpt, are really representations of our own inner negativities, trying to create a self that is really impermanent―made from mud, from delusion. We tend to create and sustain an identity to keep us, perhaps, in some limited degree and practical utility, sane, because we may have much suffering and confusion in our life. However, any attachment to self and oftentimes our very perceptions of life are limited by animal, bestial desires. Therefore, let us read this verse. The rulers laid plans and said, “Come, let us create a human that will be soil from the earth.” They model their creature as one holy of the earth. The rulers have bodies that are both female and male and faces that are faces of beasts (חיות Chaioth). They took some soil from the earth and modeled their man after their body and after their image of God that appeared to them in the waters. ―The Reality of the Rulers, The Gnostic Bible
What are those waters? It is the sexual creative potential. How we see sex determines our identity. If we are filled with lust, then we will look at the sexual act with desire and lust. If we are pure and chaste, we will see the sacred sexual act as something divine. For most of us our self is made from the earth, materialism, desire, relating to things of this world, מלכות Malkuth, the physical body.
These archons are female and male. They are really androgynous. They are qualities of both men and women, faces with the faces of beasts that are really representative of both sexes. Both men and women have innate, animal, instinctive, sexual impulses and desires, and it is from these desire in which we fool ourselves, in which we are soiled, impure, tainted, and fooled. The Futility of Desire
However, desire is futile. Desire can not create anything positive, despite what our modern American or Western propaganda would have us believe. Oftentimes we create and perform projects that do not have any fruit. We have a desire. We wish to attain something, reach a goal, and yet if it is driven by passion, we will not get the results we want, especially if we are working in the spiritual path.
Desire is actually contrary to our best efforts. One can learn to enact positive, superior action, the will of the spirit, but without desire, without attachment. The soul knows how to perform good works. Oftentimes desire wishes to create things that do not really come to much great results. This is allegorized within The Reality of the Rulers in relation to these three types of soul: נשמה Neshamah, נפש Nephesh, and רוח Ruach, especially―the spiritual soul, the animal soul, and the thinking / emotional soul. 
We have here an image of Typhon Baphomet [from Arcanum 15: Passion], which in The Eternal Tarot of Alchemy and Kabbalah represents Lucifer, the Devil. In us he is blackened because we are impure, and whenever we act from desire, we suffer. Whenever we conquer temptation and passion, enact superior will, we have spiritual potential and force.
Sometimes this image of the devil is associated with Samael, but unfortunately people do not have education in these matters, because when they hear of Samael Aun Weor, the writer whose tradition we teach, they confuse Samael the blind god with the Master Samael Aun Weor. The individual Samael Aun Weor was once a demon because he had fallen. However, he is risen through the spiritual work. Samael Aun Weor the master is perfected again. However, our inner Samael is very black, our passion, our inner Lucifer. Samael is the strength and Martian energy of sexual power. If we control that power, we become divine. If we let it drive us, we are powerless, as represented in these verses: They said, “Come let us hold, lay hold of it (the new Adam) by means of the form that we have modeled, so that it may see its male partner and we may seize it with the form that we have modeled,” not understanding the partner of God (נשמה Neshamah), because of their powerlessness. And Samael breathed into his face, and the man came to have a soul (נפש Nephesh and רוח Ruach), and remained on the ground for many days. But they could not make them rise because of their powerlessness. Like storm winds they persisted in blowing that they might try to capture that image that they might appear to them in the waters. And they did not know the identity of its power. ―The Reality of the Rulers, The Gnostic Bible
This is a very beautiful teaching. Through the waters of sex, we can see God. We can see the image of the divine within us, but if we are lustful, no matter how much we breathe, we perform mantras, sacred sounds, even within alchemy, we will be powerless. We will not have נשמה Neshamah active.
Sexual magic must be performed with consciousness and love. נשמה Neshamah must be active. נשמה Neshamah, the spiritual soul, the force of גבורה Geburah, is the force of Samael, because Mars relates to גבורה Geburah and Samael. That power is what really sanctifies the alchemist couple. We can try to create the solar bodies, working within a marriage to elevate the sexual creative energy to the mind and heart, but if we are lustful, if we do not understand the partner of God, if we do not have נשמה Neshamah present within our minds, hearts, and bodies, it will be fruitless. Desire can not perform alchemy. Only the soul can perform alchemy in remembrance of God. These evil archons, we can say, our own defects and desires, try to create law and order in us, but they fail. They can not lay hold of the divine self-image of the spirit, even though they try to model things in imitation of it with our own psychological states. We have to remove our own defects, which are images in the mind, so that there is only the translucence of the soul there. That is how we can really reflect divine power. 
Kundalini: The Power of Redemption
When we do this, we receive the power of redemption. This is the Kundalini.
Kundalini is the power of redemption. It is נשמה Neshamah. נשמה Neshamah is the feminine creative power of God. It is the fires of Mars that rise up in the spinal column. It is the positive spiritual potential of Samael, which raises the fallen initiates up to heaven. Samael is here not only represented as the master who came and taught in Mexico, but really our inner Samael, our own fires, our own strength. In the work, divinity has compassion for us. Divinity sees our suffering, and if we really, like the Apostles here, receive the fiery serpents upon their heads―the fires of Pentecost written in the Book of Acts, if they really aspire for the truth and maintain their chastity, but more importantly their love―in combination they can receive the favors of the divine. נשמה Neshamah raises the fallen. Samael, from the Hebrew ס Samech, beginning his name, means “support.” It is the support that raises the initiates, and גבורה Geburah, נשמה Neshamah, the spiritual soul, has that function. Here is what The Reality of the Rulers teaches. Now, all of these events came to pass by the will of the Father of all (יחודה Yechidah). Afterward the spirit (נשמה Neshamah) saw the man of soul (נפש Nephesh and רוח Ruach) on the ground. The spirit (נשמה Neshamah) came forth from the adamantine land. It descended and came to dwell in him, and that man became a living soul (נפש חיה Nephesh Chaiah), and the spirit (נשמה Neshamah) called his name Adam, since he was found moving upon the ground. ―The Reality of the Rulers, The Gnostic Bible
All of us, really, in a spiritual sense, are crippled. We writhe on the ground if we do not have the spirit inside to make us standing upright, to give us life.
How Are We Tempted?
This excerpt from The Reality of the Rulers references probably the most important aspect of the Genesiatic story in the Garden of Eden, eating from the Tree of Knowledge. This is a sexual symbol obviously. What happens in a garden between a naked man and a naked woman? However, what is important to understand is the nature of that sexual act, which is dual. It can be positive. It can be negative. It can be divine, or it can be demonic.
We have here an image of the Tree of Life transposed upon a human being. The Hebrew letters דעת Da’ath, ד Daleth, ע Ayn, ת Tav, read from right to left, represent “knowledge.” This sphere is located in the throat because from the throat, through mantra, through sacred sounds, we elevate the divine creative force and gain spiritual knowledge. It gives us insight and wisdom. This Tree of Knowledge is related to sex. The Tree of Life relates to the spine. These two trees share the same roots. Our spinal column is nourished through fire, through intentional knowledge, and working with the sexual force. However, the dilemma comes of “to eat or not to eat,” to consume or to abstain from the sexual force―better said―to indulge in the orgasm or to restrain the sexual force and to transform it. Here is what The Reality of the Rulers teaches. It is very interesting. The rulers took Adam and put him in the garden, that he might cultivate and keep watch over it. They issued a command to him saying, “From every tree in the garden you shall eat, but from the tree of knowledge of good and evil don’t eat nor touch it, for the day you eat from it you will surely die.”
This symbol represents the duality of sex. The rulers obviously take the place of יהוה אלהים Jehovah Elohim.
These archons, these rulers said this to him, but they did not understand what they said. Rather, by the Father’s will they said this in such a way that he may in fact eat. Really, there are two ways to consume or work with the sexual energy, to eat it in the animal way through orgasm, or to let the spirit consume the fires of sex so that from the mouth of divinity, He, the spirit, may be empowered. Even the rulers did not understand what they meant, because even those archons who are self-realized to a level or degree of knowledge even, they do not know the full extent, the depth of knowledge that could be attained, because there are levels of spiritual wisdom and knowledge known as objective reasoning. There are levels amongst the archons, the divine hierarchies, the אלהים Elohim, the gods, and so they inspire the initiates to eat chastely. “Let the spirit eat from that divine ambrosia, the food and nectar of the gods.” I believe even in Das Rheingold by Wagner, the opera within the tetralogy known as The Ring Cycle, you find that the gods eat the golden apples of Hesperides. These golden apples are precisely the sexual energy of יסוד Yesod nourished by Freya, גבורה Geburah, really the divine soul, נשמה Neshamah. We can either eat chastely without orgasm or we consume as beasts. That is our choice. 
How to Raise the Soul
The question becomes, how do we raise the soul? We have an image here of William Blake with the creation of חוה Eve. We know from the traditional story that חוה Eve was taken from a rib from Adam’s side and was raised up, was created. There are many layers of meaning of this myth. At a basic level it can represent our ancient humanity known in the times of Lemuria, in which there existed the division of sexes. There is a hermaphroditic individual symbolized by Adam, who became divided over the course of many millions of years into the two sexes, so both male and female individuals were gradually formed over a prolonged period of time, and that is one symbol of this myth.
There is also another alchemical application to this teaching. חוה Eve can represent נשמה Neshamah, the feminine sexual power. נשמה Neshamah, the spiritual soul, is represented by חוה Eve, Havah, the mother of the living. חוה Eve can represent our sexual organs from which rises the spiritual soul liberated from נפש Nephesh. In the undeveloped human being, we have נפש Nephesh, רוח Ruach, and נשמה Neshamah undeveloped. Predominantly we have נפש Nephesh active and רוח Ruach very weak and נשמה Neshamah very distant. However, through the spiritual path, we extract נשמה Neshamah, the spiritual soul. We liberate it. We free it. We purify it. We invoke it so that through purifying נפש Nephesh, by controlling נפש Nephesh, רוח Ruach, with our conscience, we in turn become sacred, elevated. Here is what The Reality of the Rulers teaches. The rulers took counsel with one another and said, “Come, let us cause a deep sleep to fall on Adam.” And he slept. Now, the deep sleep that they caused to fall on him, and he slept, is ignorance (lacking gnosis). They opened his side which was like a living woman (נשמת Neshamah). And they built up his side with some flesh in place of her, and Adam came to be only with soul (נפש Nephesh andרוח Ruach).
That sleep which the archons put upon us obviously has to do with our own defects making us unconscious and absurd. Our own ignorance is self-created by our own inner defects, which we take as law, authority, objective.
However, by working with the two energetic currents of our spine, which are also represented by אדם Adam and חוה Eve, known in the East as Ida and Pingala, we extract נשמה Neshamah. We raise the spiritual soul within us, the Kundalini. She is the one that raises the human consciousness to redemption. “It is you who have given me life,” he says. “You will be called Havah, Mother of the Living.” This also represents how נשמה Neshamah can relate to the Divine Mother Kundalini, the divine feminine. She is our mother. She is the physician, the one who heals us and the one who gives birth, because from the divine feminine, by the Kundalini sacred power of the divine, we are redeemed. We raise Her up the spine. We elevate Her. We sanctify Her. We do so through the remembrance of Christ, as you see represented in this image. 
The Duality of the Sacred Feminine
But the sacred feminine is dual. There is a positive and there is a negative, as we have been emphasizing again again. We included here the image of the Sixth Arcanum of the Tarot: Indecision. We see an initiate in a pool of water facing to his left towards the whore. That is his own lust, his own desires, his own cravings, his own נפש Nephesh, and you see that an archon, a hierarch of the law above in the top third of the card, is aiming an arrow to slay her, because she breaks the divine law. However, the initiate must turn to his right, towards נשמה Neshamah, the divine feminine, our Divine Mother. In one other sense, it can be our divine soul. There is a duality to that potential―sacred above, demonic below.
The archons of the black lodge obviously pursue that image of the divine. They are empowered by sexual force like any initiate, but they channel it through their lust, and they seek to satisfy their desires. Their own defects seek to gratify themselves through their stealing of the sacred potential. This is why in The Reality of the Rulers it stated: The authorities came up to their Adam. When they saw his female partner speaking with him, they became very excited and enamored of her. They said to one another, “Come, let us sow our seed in her,” and they pursued her. And she laughed at them for their foolishness and blindness. In their clutches she became a tree and left before them her shadowy reflection resembling herself, and they defiled it foully. And they defiled the seal of her voice, so that by the form they had modeled, together with their own image, they made themselves liable to condemnation. ―The Reality of the Rulers, The Gnostic Bible
Very deep symbol. Obviously the divine feminine, when channeled through lust, becomes passion, desire, prostitution, and so our own defects love sensations of lust, love that type of sensation or experience, but they are blind. They can not see reality. Desire never sees reality, only the soul. She becomes a tree, and her shadow is what they copulate with because the Tree of Life is the Tree of Being, our true human, divine, and complete potential. However, the shadow of the Tree of Life is Klipoth, or in the Qur’an known as the Tree of زقوم Zaqqum, the Tree of Pain, the infernal worlds. They defile the seal of her voice because really, the voice is דעת Da’ath, sexual knowledge. Without the voice, without the verb, we do not create anything sacred in the sexual act. We must transform with the creative verb, even if but mentally, and so they entered damnation.
The Wisdom of the Serpent
What is the wisdom of the serpent? It is dual. We find that נשמה Neshamah has a dual purpose. Really it is the spiritual manifestation of the spirit and manifests within the sexual energy when we are conscious.
This is why in The Reality of the Rulers teaches that נשמה Neshamah, the female spiritual presence, appears in the form of a snake. The serpent that tempts, however, we find that from this verse that the serpent tries to instruct in an enigmatic way, and if we read between the lines, we will be able to interpret and see that there are two ways to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, from sex itself, metaphorically, alchemically speaking. Here is what The Reality of the Rulers teaches. Then the female spiritual presence (נשמת Neshamah) came in the form of the snake, the instructor, and it taught them, saying, “What did he say to you? Was it ‘from every tree in the garden you shall eat, but from the tree of recognizing evil and good do not eat?’” The woman of flesh said, “Not only did he say, ‘Don’t eat,’ but even ‘Don’t touch it. For the day you eat from it, you will surely die.’” ―The Reality of the Rulers, The Gnostic Bible
That death is spiritual. It is when we become disconnected from divinity through lust and animality. The female spiritual presence, נשמה Neshamah, emerges in the sexual act when we are conscious. It is the instructor which teaches us in the alchemical moment how to proceed. However, does the woman of flesh obey? We may know these principles, but does our body operate with the act? That is the great question. We have to train ourselves. “Do not eat from the Tree of Knowledge,” meaning do not orgasm. Do not touch it, the sexual act with lust, such as through masturbation. “For the day you eat from it, you will die.” You will be disconnected from the truth.
The snake, the instructor, said, “It is not the case that you will surely die, for out of jealousy he said this to you. Rather, your eyes will open, and you will be like gods, recognizing evil and good.” And the female instructing power was taken away from the snake, and she left it behind, merely a thing of the earth. ―The Reality of the Rulers, The Gnostic Bible
Another deep symbol.
In the astral plane divinity can take on concrete forms to teach us something, and often they will abandon those forms once the teaching or instruction has been given within dreams. The snake here is embodied by the spirit, the spiritual soul, to teach something alchemical to the disciple. “It is not the case that you will die,” meaning, if you are chaste in the sexual act, you will not die. “And out of jealousy he said this to you,” meaning, in a sense, by working in this path we will acquire a level of knowledge and perhaps even superior to that of many archons, especially if we have more egos to work with, defects, desires that we must eliminate. Really, from the greatest temptations arise the greatest virtues, as we said earlier, and through chastity, our eyes spiritually will be opened, and we will be like gods recognizing evil and good. But “The female instructing power was taken away from the snake,” meaning, if the spiritual soul abandons the sexual act, if we are not remembering God in the sexual act, then really the sexual act will be a thing of the earth. This is really when the moment of temptation comes. As we know from the Biblical story: And the woman of flesh took from the tree and ate, and she gave to her husband as well as herself, and those beings, who possessed only a soul (נפש Nephesh andרוח Ruach), ate. And their imperfection became apparent in their lack of knowledge. They recognized that they were naked of the spiritual (נשמת Neshamah), and they took fig leaves and bound them around themselves.
It is a beautiful teaching about alchemy, The Perfect Matrimony. If we are not remembering God and if we eat with desire, then the spiritual leaves us. We become naked, abandoned. Obviously the fig leaves are a symbol of sexuality, because the fig tree has many symbolic applications in other scriptures and relates to the Tree of Knowledge.
If the spiritual leaves the sexual act, then one is spiritually destitute. This is why the chief ruler, or the archons of the law of karma come to us and say, “Where are you?” Really, what are we doing? “And Adam said, ‘I heard your voice, and I was afraid because I was naked,’” because out of shame that is how we create more desire, egotism, more pain. That is the path of temptation. However, by remembering נשמה Neshamah, the spiritual within the act, by being conscious of God with our partner, we become divine. 
Resources
I know we have talked for quite a long time, but we see here we have some references and resources that you can rely on and study to go deeper into these topics, especially the basics of kabbalah and alchemy. Really, the way we have been interpreting these scriptures has been based on these two books: Alchemy and Kabbalah in the Tarot and Tarot and Kabbalah [see also the course: The Eternal Tarot of Alchemy and Kabbalah]. Study them deeply. They will help you give you basis for understanding the Gnostic Gospels themselves and for applying the practice of alchemy in your own work if you are married, but obviously if you are single you can work with the creative energies at your level.
At this time, I invite you to ask questions. Questions and Answers
Question: What to do if we continue to fail or fall for the same temptation?
Instructor: Meditate. Meditate on the egos or defects that make you fall, that make you fail. There is no other way. When we comprehend an ego or a defect, a desire, in its fundamental root, we can pray for its elimination and in that way, we can eliminate it completely. Therefore, when the temptations arise again, we are no longer tempted. We have no inclination to go along with the situation. We are just conscious of God. Obviously, this occurs in levels, and it takes a lot of meditation to go deep into certain defects, because some defects are very deep. Some defects require a lot of work, even more work than others, because there are the branches from the Tree of زقوم Zaqqum and there are roots which go deep into hell. We have to be very patient when we go into those deep roots, because those are where the worst temptations exist. So, be patient, meditate, comprehend and comprehend day by day what you can so that you make progress. Question: Can you elaborate some of the symbols discussed in the section of the Conjuration of the Seven relating to Adam and Eve? Instructor: Yes. It does tie very beautifully into this lecture too because as we state in the Conjuration of the Seven: By the divine and human name of אל שדי El Shaddai, by the sign of the pentagram which I hold in my right hand, in the name of the Angel Anael, by the power of אדם Adam and חוה Eve who are יהוה Iod-Havah, be gone Lilith! Let us rest in peace Nahemah! ―Conjuration of the Seve
Who is this שדי אל חי Shaddai El Chai? It is the Almighty Living God. That is the sacred name of divinity in the Tree of Life within יסוד Yesod. It is the power of divinity. The Almighty Living God אל שדי El Shaddai is a sexual symbol. “שָׂדֶה Shadeh” means, “demon.” I can also mean, “force,” or “strength of God, Chaiah, Life.” Really שָׂדֶה Shadeh is the term used for, “field,” within the Book of Genesis, and the serpent, the נשמה Neshamah, the spiritual potential of creative power is in the Garden of Eden or the field of the beasts. The serpent dwells within שָׂדֶה Shadeh. It is the power of Shaddai. It is the power of the almighty.
It is important too to remember that these names are very sacred. If you pronounce the name שדי אל חי Shaddai El Chai in the astral plane, you will see and hear thunder and lightning. It is the expression of the force of Christ. When we invoke that power, we are asking divinity basically to descend into us “by the divine and human name of אל שדי El Shaddai, by the sign of the pentagram which I hold in my right hand.”
The pentagram we hold up the symbol of our right hand, the pinky and ring finger closed, the middle finger, index finger, and thumb extended. The pentagram represents the perfect human being. That perfect human being, really, is what we aspire to. It is when our mind governs sex, not the other way around. So, when we are chaste, we have spiritual רוח Ruach, cognition governing נפש Nephesh within sex. The inverted pentagram is when נפש Nephesh is governing רוח Ruach. That is when really, the two polarities of אדם Adam and חוה Eve, עד Od and עבד Obd, to use other Hebrew terms, Ida, Pingala, the solar and lunar currents, are really misdirected, especially the lunar force of חוה Eve, because we have those two energetic currents that rise up our spine in the form of the Caduceus of Mercury, the Holy Eight. That is where the sexual energy rises through in the vital body to reach the mind and then the heart.
Eve can represent the lunar energetic feminine currents of our spine, which, when they are filled with lust, they are sent downward and form the tail of demons, Satan. The tail of the negative serpent is known as the Kundabuffer in the writings of Gurdjieff and also Samael Aun Weor. Also, in the Conjuration of the Seven, “In the name of the Angel Anael, by the power of אדם Adam and חוה Eve who are יהוה Iod-Havah, begone Lilith! Let us rest in peace Nahemah!” “אנאל Anael,” means, “the grace of God.” “חנאל Hanael,” in Hebrew. It is an angel but also represents the grace of divinity shows us when we are chaste. When אדם Adam and חוה Eve, when husband and wife, a couple, are practicing the grace of God, by transforming sex into something pure. “In the name of Adam and Eve, begone Lilith! Let us rest in peace Nahemah!” Lilith and Nahemah are demons. They are related to lust. Lilith is more extreme, related to perversions against nature, and Nahemah is relates to adultery and passion. We perform that prayer because we wish to reject lust from the sexual act. Especially when you are married, you work with this conjuration to prepare your home, your space, for the perfect matrimony. That is the power of אדם Adam and חוה Eve, the grace of God, חנאל Hanael, or אנאל Anael, is נשמה Neshamah. It is the spiritual soul that graces us when we remember Her. Very deep. There obviously will be many more nuances and interpretations there, but that is what comes to the top of my head. Question: Does going along with the flow of egos increase the possibility of a sexual fall? Instructor: Yes. Obviously, egos of lust or desires increase the possibility of a sexual fall. If you are thinking lustful thoughts and engaging with lustful emotions and even in your mind indulging in sexual fantasy, that will translate into your dreams especially. This is why people have nocturnal pollutions, because there are lustful elements that are manifesting in the daytime that the disciple is not aware of. The solution is to observe them in action and to meditate. Comprehend those egos. If we just go along with the flow of our mind, whatever it presents to us, whether it is anger or passion or lust, obviously that increases the likelihood of failing. Really, we have to have no mercy for our own ego. We have to be very militant, but also patient, because this is not easy. It is not easy to train נפש Nephesh into a spiritual soul, into רוח Ruach or נשמה Neshamah. If you identify with any ego, obviously you make yourself more vulnerable to failure, as an incorrect psychological state, according to Samael Aun Weor in the Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology, can, is enough, really any insignificant moment in which we fail to remember ourselves, is enough to really bring us disgrace. We have to be very conscious and vigilant all the time. Also, be patient, because especially if our body is used to fornication, it takes a long time to retrain it. But it can be done. Do not go along with the mind. Observe it. Be mindful of it. Understand it. Question: How would one meditate on lust without indulging in it? What is the best way to meditate on lust? Instructor: I say remember chastity. You will not understand lust if you do not understand the virtue that can come from it. We have to not only look at the mud, but we have to look at the lotus that emerges from it. In the process of comprehension, we start to see a duality. We see a duality in the sense that from passion, by comprehending it and seeing it for what it is, we can understand that there is a truth within it, that there is something trapped within that desire. There is something really profound and beautiful enmeshed within that element. When you are meditating on lust, the challenge becomes when you are imaging a scene in which an ego acted, or emerged in your mind. You have to be able to visualize it with enough stability so that you do not get identified. Now, for some people it can be very difficult, especially in the beginning when desire and lust is very big, especially if we have been feeding that element for many years and even many lifetimes. It is going to be very difficult to first hold in one’s imagination the scene of what happened in a day, in which lust was provoked, but more importantly, to concentrate on it with enough stability that we do not get distracted by the mind, because what happens is that lust will fight analysis. It tries to evade. It is a serpent. It slithers out of the way. It moves and is flexible. It is very quick, and you have to be very fast, consciously, to catch it. Observe it. If you find that you are imagining a scene in which lust acted or you are trying to understand an ego, train enough in your concentration so that you can focus on one thing without forgetting, but also train your imagination so that you can see objectively what is there without identifying with it. If you find that it is too much, your lust is making you fantasize and you are staring to daydream, take a break. Pause. Take a walk. Create some art. Do something creative. If you find that lust is really bothering you and it is very difficult to comprehend, it can be good to take a break. Try to relax especially. Relax your mind, because any agitation will make things unclear and come back after you have performed a conscious and creative or beautiful activity, such as sculpture or painting or art. Walking, you can do some transmutation exercises, pranayama, mantras, runes, are very good for that. It is good to have that energy present so that when you do sit to meditate that you have more integration of your perception. You are more stable. You are more relaxed. You are able to calmly recall the image without getting identified. You have more energy by which to perceive it. You have more strength in your consciousness. It is a delicate skill. This is really the difference between an angel or a demon, really, knowing good from evil and evil from good. You have to be able to acclimate yourself to recall the image, but if your find that lust has taken over, look at the lust. Turn your attention to that desire that wants to fantasize. Observe it. Look at it. It is good to perform some psychological judo on the ego in that moment if it is really bothering you, if it is preventing you from seeing clearly what is there. You have to be flexible in your attention. It can be good to redirect yourself in that way. Take a break if you need to, if it is too much, but eventually train yourself to get through it even if it is difficult and painful. But when you comprehend the lust itself, when you can look at that image or see your own lust and desire and understand it, you start to free yourself more and more from it, so little by little, it disintegrates. It gets weaker. It loses volume, so to speak. Basically, you want to have enough concentration to focus on that element, but you have to watch yourself. Watch your desires. See what they are doing. If you start to drift into fantasy, redirect yourself. I believe another element from Tibetan Buddhism too, which focuses on impermanence, if you see a lustful image, you can reflect on the nature of that element, that image. If it is of a beautiful person, you can imagine it as a corpse. Obviously, this lustful body, this body in which one has lust for, or desire for, is going to die. Does one have attraction or lust for a skeleton? For dead organs? For rotting flesh? You can train yourself to bring up that image when lust is very intense, and then balance that, look at that. That is the objective reality of this person one is lusting after, and when you see that, you can transform the impression. You can understand that it is the attachment, or the desire is impermanent, that really it is not real. Comment: I did not mean to say indulge but identify. It is hard for me not to identify, and I just end up avoiding meditation on lust because it is too tricky. Lust is very intense for me. It is really a big struggle. Instructor: Yes. It is very difficult. I understand what you mean. To identify is to, again, give it your energy. But be patient. Do small meditations. Build up to it, and obviously, do not avoid in the long term, because it is not good not to know what we are. Patiently, hack away at it little by little. If you are comprehending lust in the day and observing yourself and reflecting on the nature of chastity, you will have a better sense of what is real and what is true. That can help diffuse lust quite a lot. That is another method too besides the transformation of impressions. Reflect and remember your Divine Mother. Reflect on Her, what She is like, Her beauty. Do we really want to violate the most sacred and divine with our thoughts, with our words, with our emotional states, our impulses? When we remember more what the Divine Mother is within us, we are more more inclined to resist, or better said, comprehend lust and remove it from our lives. I recommend you can even meditate on the Divine Mother, especially a sacred image reflecting Her divine beauty, because She is what is real. She is נשמה Neshamah. She is also חיה Chaiah, the life of the divine. Question: How and why did Kundry help the knighthood despite her being under the control of Klingsor within Wagner’s opera Parsifal? Instructor: For those who have not seen the opera, it is by Richard Wagner. It is probably one of the greatest works of art ever created. It really depicts the drama of temptation within the Garden of Eden, and in a symbolic sense, the path of redemption, Klingsor represents, he is basically a black magician who steals the lance of Longinus from the knights of the grail. He wounds the side of their priest Amfortas who is in pain and trying to be healed. Kundry is the temptress who originally tempted Amfortas the priest, that made him fall. However, she serves the knighthood with great reverence and respect because that power of Kundry, the divine soul, is dual. Sophia wants to return to divinity, wishes to serve the knights of the Holy Grail, that Gnostic Church, with fidelity, because she understands the value of this work, this Path. However, she is still under the control of Klingsor, because like any one of us, as much as we love Gnosis and the teaching, and may practice it with a lot of faith and love, we have a lot of lust. We have a lot of negative elements and egos that belong to the black lodge, our own defects, really, which can access with hell. We are mixed. We are Hasnamussen. We are dual. We want to go to heaven, but we are stuck in hell, and as much as we try and fight against our defects, we have lust, and we lose battles because it is very difficult. I recommend if those who have not seen the opera that you watch it. Watch it or you can read the book by Samael Aun Weor [Parsifal Unveiled], then also watch the opera too. Very powerful. Question: Are there more meanings to the fire symbol such as depicted in the book Christ and the Virgin? Instructor: Fire is a symbol of Christ, the fire of life, the fire of Being. Obviously, fire has dual potential. It can give fire, heat, and life. It can cook our food. It can give us sustenance, or it can burn us. How the fire is used is dependent on us. Do we act with desire and ego? Are we tempted by our own desires to use the fire in the wrong way, or do we channel the spirit as נשמה Neshamah, the Holy Ghost, through chastity? That is the difference. That is the duality of fire. Fire can give life. Fire can destroy. It is Shiva-Shakti, the creative-destructive potential of the Holy Ghost. Those are the two paths, temptation and redemption. The fire can destroy, or it can purify our psychological house and give us light. It depends on us. Basically, the fire is the fire of the Holy Spirit. It is the fire of illumination that can give us life, spiritually speaking. Question: What is the meaning of the translation of Eve as, “farm,” and what is the relationship of אדם Adam and חוה Eve after the separation? Instructor: My initial assumption is that when you think of a farm, you think of crops, wheat, vegetation, the field, שָׂדֶה Shadeh, שדי Shaddai. From Eve, if we cultivate the earth, our physical body through the sexual transmutation of our energies, we become farmers of the spirit. 
I believe there is even an arcanum, from the minor arcana of the Tarot called, “The Plower,” cultivation of the earth. With alchemy, we are plowing the earth to plant the seed of the soul, the seed of the spirit.
What is the relationship of אדם Adam and חוה Eve after the separation? In one sense אדם Adam and חוה Eve were the ancient humanity of Lemuria where they divided into male and female sexes. Therefore, when the two sexes separated in that time, it was for the purpose of helping to amplify or magnify this sexual force. In the beginning sexual cooperation did not exist, because they were hermaphroditic beings, but in order to spiritually develop in a higher octave, there had to be a separation so that by coming together again, joining in marital union, the two forces, both male and female, masculine-feminine, man and woman, could join together to create something superior. That was a process in which humanity developed at that time through evolution, so that in a later time, humanity could enter higher stages of knowledge and being. At this point, I know we are running out of time, we are going to conclude. I thank you all for coming! 
Welcome to our continuation of the Gnostic Gospels. Today we will talk about the gnostic scripture of Philip, which emphasizes the nature of relationships.
We have here a famous Tibetan Buddhist painting of Padmasambhava who is considered the second Buddha in that tradition. He is with his wife, his consort Yeshe Tsogyal, and they represent the path of divine reunion. You find many types of representations within the Tibetan Buddhism, especially within their temples. They talk about the sexual nature of God, and that a couple, when properly trained, can take the power of life and create the spirit. But what is necessary is that both man and woman understand how to lovingly take that energy and how to harness it to empower the consciousness, our buddha nature. Buddha in Sanskrit means “awakened one,” to awaken, to know. The very same energy that animates a human being can be utilized with specific techniques. While we are going to talk about the Gnostic Gospels, we start with this image because Padmasambhava taught that the path of the spiritual realization, of knowledge of the divine, is possible when the couple overcomes desire. It might seem ironic that in this path of union, a marriage, that there must not be desire. In Buddhism, they teach that desire is the cause of suffering, pain, attachment, fears, worry. So when some people see this image, they become confused. How is it that a couple can be married and not have desire? It is because love is distinct, conscious love, the soul. Real love, divine connection, has no self, no attachment, no fear, no craving to mould the other person to “what we want.” It is tolerance, compassion united with objective knowledge about the nature of the soul. 
The Societal, Familial, and Spiritual Purposes of Marriage
In our lecture today we will talk about these principles, what we call alchemy in the West, or to break down the language: اللّٰه Allah-χημεία Khemia, “to fuse oneself with God.” On a basic level, there are many facets of a matrimony. Really, the couple is the bedrock of society. We see that with the breakdown of families, you have the breakdown of institutions. There is a degeneration, a collapse, and not only the family unit, but really there is a deeper purpose to a matrimony than merely to propagate the species or to create order in our culture.
Marriage has a potential that few really realize, understand, or acknowledge. There’s a spiritual truth to what Jesus called “being born again” (John 3). Birth is a sexual problem. It is not a matter of belief. It is a matter of taking an act, which is usually animal for most of us, and making it divine. But for now, as we commonly understand relationships, we tend to approach sexuality with a mind filled with desire, attachment, or egotism. This is why in the Gospel of Philip it states: Great is the mystery of marriage! Without it, the world would not be. The existence of the world depends on marriage. Think of sex. It possesses deep powers, though its image is filthy. ―The Gospel of Philip 
Marriage in the Private, Public, and Spiritual Spheres
It’s also good to talk about the nature of marriage today, because in the West, we see a revision of attitude toward a tradition that has been perhaps abused, adulterated, or corrupted. Religious institutions have a purpose, not merely to protect the wellbeing of a society, to integrate people, but more importantly to liberate the soul, and therefore this sacrament was always a private institution governed by religious authority. But with the breakdown of religion and institutions, people had lost faith.
Now, we go a little bit further than the common ordinary discussion of marriage, like it’s a document, paper. Really, when husband and wife unite, man and woman unite, they are married before God, before the divine, because that creative energy, when it is unified between a couple, is a power to create. Therefore it has always been kept within a private sphere because it is sacred, and because the power of divinity to create through love is sacred―not merely physical children, but the soul. The Gospel of Philip explains two types of marriage in its narrative: the defiled and the undefiled. We will be very clear on what that means. not merely from a moral standpoint, but from a psychological and a physical one. Defilement, according to Old Testament scripture, relates to orgasm. You find in the book of Leviticus, the Hebrew scripture, which states that any man who has an emission of semen must bathe himself in water and be unclean until even (Leviticus 15:16-18). That uncleanliness, that defilement, that act is, in itself, what creates suffering in the long term. That energy must be conserved, must be protected, must be transformed, must be harnessed. In tantra, in Buddhism, that power must never be let out. However, when the couple, with love, takes that power and conserves it, elevates up the spine, they produce illumination. We will talk a lot about this, the waters of life, the spiritual symbol of baptism, and how with that energy, we are reborn. Instead of giving birth to a child physically, we give birth to Christ. No one can know when the husband and the wife have intercourse with one another except the two of them. Indeed, marriage in the world is a mystery for those who have taken a wife. If there was a hidden quality to the marriage of defilement, how much more is the undefiled marriage to true mystery? It is not fleshly, but pure. It belongs not to desire, but to the will. It belongs not to the darkness or the night, but to the day and the light. ―The Gospel of Philip
That which is born of flesh is flesh, but that which is born of spirit is spirit (John 3:6). The same act, transformed, creates the soul, raises Sophia in the gnostic myth to pleroma, the heights, the truth. It is of the day and the light because that energy gives you experiences in meditation, in dreams, and even after death. It awakens you. It is the power of awakening. But we must be pure. We must have willpower. will to dominate the body, to train it, to make it work for us, and not the other way around.
Three Types of Marriage: Karmic, Dharmic, and Spiritual
So when we talk about marriage, we talk about types of matrimonies. There is a teaching given by Dion Fortune in the Western esoteric tradition where she speaks about in a book called Esoteric Philosophy of Love and Marriage about different types of union.
We show these three images to parallel karmic, dharmic, and spiritual matrimonies, going from left to right. If you studied Buddhism, you know about karma: cause and effect. Karma is usually used in a negative sense, meaning, if I do something bad, my bad action will come back to me. Dharma means benefit, “the law,” literally from Sanskrit, and dharma means good deeds, good actions, happiness, good results. Spirituality, or the spiritual marriage, is the most ideal, because it is when the spirit, when divinity, our inner Being, the truth is manifest within the couple. Karmic marriages are often relationships in which we see a lot of fighting, disagreements, pain. Instead of love, we see antagonism, and perhaps such relationships end in divorce because of incompatibility. If you look at our common, modern day life, we find a lot of people fall in this category. Karma, meaning cause and effect, can relate to relationships we have in life that are a recurrence from past lives. We often meet the very same people we knew from before. We just don't remember. But if you practice meditation, you can understand the connections. You can have an experience that shows you who in your life is a return from your past life, so that we don't repeat the same mistakes. Karmic relationships are repetitions. They are often unconscious; and because they are unconscious, they are often filled with affliction because we don’t understand or comprehend how our own mind reproduces the same dramas, comedies, and tragedies of life. 
We repeat! This is the wheel of Samsara, Bhavachakra in Buddhism. We just keep doing the same thing again and again expecting different results.
However, if we work on ourselves, psychologically, we transform our mind. We produce better circumstances. In this way, we have better relationships. We find a person perhaps who, or someone is in our lives who can help elevate our heart, elevate our spirituality. Dharmic marriage is when there is 20, 30, 40, 50 years―happiness, contentment. Things work. The couple sacrifices for each other. There is a balance, a give and take, a reciprocity. But even dharmic relationships can be transcended. There are spiritual marriages, and this is a very important point within gnosticism, our traditions, but also many other schools which talk about twin souls, or destiny, or the marriage of the soul with Christ according to the early church fathers. In our tradition, we study the writings of Samael Aun Weor, especially the book The Perfect Matrimony, where he talks about the spiritual marriage. He calls it the perfect matrimony, in which the couple is in alignment within body, soul, and spirit. The couple is together because both of their inner divinities agreed to work. Therefore they have an affinity within thoughts, feeling, and will. Attraction, physically and energetically, the heart and the emotions are in alignment. Both agree within thought, and the will does not clash. They work together, and therefore, divinity can work more effectively through them. It is important also to understand that we do not begin with the perfect matrimony. It is something that is developed. We earn it by eliminating, in ourselves, what creates conflicts, what creates incompatibility. It is the ego, our desires, our sense of self, which creates dissonance―not our zodiac sign, not merely our upbringing, not our belief, but our will. You transform your mind, your willpower. You create more beautiful, deep, profound, and lasting union. 
The Spiritual Integration of Sex with the Psyche
But in order to do that, we have to integrate Psyche with Eros.
We know from the Greek myth that Eros or Cupid awakens psyche; the soul. You can read about that myth in The Golden Ass of Apuleius, in the sacred text of Greek initiation. Sexuality and will cannot be at odds. Everything about us, in terms of how we think, feel and act have to be in alignment, and this most definitely includes the energy of sex. That teaching has always been taught symbolically, because people could not handle, in the past, the direct explanation of this teaching. It had to be taught in symbols, because the sacredness of the knowledge had to be transmitted to people who were mature, in order to escape judgments and persecution, such as from the Spanish Inquisition. But we are in a very different time. We explain the knowledge openly so that people can practice it. These principles are very profound, and also when they are been taught symbolically, they are taught in that way because symbols convey more meaning than literal words. They are very dynamic, multidimensional. Any symbol can convey meaning on multiple levels of experience, and that is why we study symbols and what they mean so that we can extract deep wisdom. In the process of this, we study ourselves. We study our psychological self-image, or we study our image. We do so that we understand our full potential, and the creative energy of sexuality is the most powerful source we possess. With that energy, we can be born again. We can be resurrected as a soul, and so we also study the symbol in the Gospel of Philip, which talks about the bridal chamber. That bridal chamber is precisely the Eastern Tantra, the perfect matrimony, divine union, and through this bridal chamber, which is respected with the most profound sacredness and love, we can become gods. Truth did not come into the world naked but in symbols and images. The world cannot receive truth in any other way. There is rebirth and an image of rebirth, and it is by means of this image that one must be reborn. What image is this? It is the resurrection. Image must arise through image. By means of this image, the bridal chamber must approach the truth. This is restoration. ―The Gospel of Philip
So there is rebirth and the image of rebirth. Rebirth occurs when you take the energy, whether you’re married or single. You elevate it. You conserve it. You illuminate your mind. You give life to your soul with that very power. The image of rebirth occurs when, not only when we conserve that power and use it well, we eliminate our inner defects. We are purifying the consciousness. We are eliminating pride, anger, and lust. That image of rebirth occurs when we remove the psychological impurities, illusions and mistakes, so that we can truly be born again. We become a new person. We are not the same individuals we were a year ago or ten years ago. By practicing this, we become a new being. We begin as an embryo, spiritually. We become a full perfect human individual, an angel.
“Image must arise through image.” As we’re meditating, and understanding all the different psychological contaminants of mind and rectifying them, we become perfect. Therefore by means of this image, the bridal chamber and this image must approach the truth, meaning, whenever we are with our spouse, we approach the truth, not our desires, not the animal, but the spirit. In this way, sexuality must be integrated. It is not something to be at odds with, or to be confused, or to be involved with pain, or affliction. It is restoration. The soul returns to the doorway it left in the Garden of Eden. The word עֵדֶן Eden means bliss, pleasure, sexual delight. In Hebrew, it is the voluptuousness of the perfect matrimony.
The Three Brains and the Two Witnesses
So we study in this process the three brains, or the two witnesses, as we see this famous Caduceus used by Hermes, or Mercury, in the Greek and Roman mythology. We also find this image representing medicine, two serpents upon the staff with the wings of the spirit open, to take one from, we can say, this fallen world up back to Sophia, to pleroma.
These two circuits are full of energy in our spines. They arise from the sexual organs up to the mind. In the Book of Revelation, they are called the two witnesses (Revelations 11). Even the term witnesses from Latin is testes. So where do we get the term “testimony”? The power of the stone, or the two stones, the ovaries, of the testicles, have energy that rises up if we use it intentionally. Those serpents, those two channels, in Hinduism, in Yoga, are called Ida and Pingala, or to use biblical language: Adam and Eve, positive and negative, sun and moon. It is like a circuitry that allows divinity to manifest in the spine, so that the fire of Pentecost in the Christian Church, the Holy Spirit, or Kundalini, rises―Shekinah amongst the Kabbalists, the force of the divine feminine, the spirit. In order to work with that energy, we study three brains. A brain in spiritual, esoteric language is a center of activity, physiologically, energetically, psychologically. We know we have an intellectual brain because we think, but our emotion is also a brain for feelings, and it’s very deep. It can register things that we don’t access or think about or are conscious of. You think of someone, you feel or sense in your heart that something is going to happen, and suddenly it does―intuition. Knowledge comes to us without having to think. But then you also have the brain of action, which is the spine, the sexual organs. It is how we process will or desire. In Christianity, there is a trinity because we have energy in those three brains. We have the Father in the head, Christ in the heart, the Holy Spirit in sex. Or to use Hindu language, you have Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva. The trinity is represented in all religions, in different ways, and those are energies, forces, potentials that we can actualize if we know how, if we meditate. This is why in the Bible it said, I think, they asked Jesus, “What is the greatest commandment?” He said to love thy God with all thy heart, with all thy mind, with all thy soul, with all thy strength, and thy neighbor as yourself. There are no greater commandments than these (Mark 12:30-32). Three brains, three centers, three energies, but a unity if we create that unification in us, because in our common day, we tend to be imbalanced. The mind is not working with the heart, or the heart is not working with sex. We have confusion. We have a Tower of Babel, esoterically speaking, and so we have to respect these energies in our heart, mind, body, so that the energies rise with clarity and wisdom. If we have impure mind, heart, or physicality, the energies do not flow well. We know this from eastern medicine especially, Tai Chi, Chi Gong, acupuncture. If the energies are flowing well, you have health. If they are impure, you get sick, mentally, emotionally, physically. So we work with the spine, these energies, these two channels, Ida and Pingala, Adam and Eve, in order to be anointed. The Gospel of Philips states: Those who receive the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit and have accepted them must do this. If someone does not accept them, the name will also be taken away from that person. The person receives them in the Chrism, with the oil of the power of the cross. The apostles call the power of the right (Pingala) and the left (Ida). This person is no longer a Christian but is Christ. ―The Gospel of Philip
To receive the name as the Father, Son, Holy Spirit means: purify your minds. Purify your heart. Purify your body. The three brains so not accept superior forces within our interior if they have their “name” taken from one. Their name in Hebrew means השם Hashem. In Judaism when you’re in the Synagogue, we say ברוך השם יהוה Baruch Hashem Adonai, “Blessed be the name of the Lord!” They use this as an appellation for יהוה Iod-Havah, Jehovah, as it is a sacred name not to be spoken in vain. Iod-Havah, male-female, brain in sex.
If you relate the Hebrew to the body, Iod means “head” or can mean the head. Havah, Eve, the “mother of the living” is the sexual organs, and when you unify all that you have the blessings of your inner Being.
You receive it through the Chrism, with the oil of the power of the cross. A cross is the symbol of the matrimony―the vertical phallus, the horizontal uterus―in which we crucify our passions, or egotism, so that we can be anointed―not to be a Christian, a believer, but to become Christ, perfect. 
Chrism
So the word Chrism is the oil that is used in our anointments, such as when confirming in the Catholic Church, or blessing a new soul who’s entering the spiritual path.
We have an image here of the Lingam Yoni within Hinduism. It is a symbol of the cross. You have the horizontal uterus and the vertical phallus. This is the power of Shiva-Shakti. Shiva-Shakti is the creative and destructive power of sex, because sexuality can ennoble or condemn depending on our usage. The word chrism even sounds like the Hindu slang जिस्म jism, which literally means “body” or the “female or male genitals,” “the vulva or penis,” “seminal fluid” (1899); earlier “energy or strength” (1842). Literally, the creative energy is what gives a person strength. We know from boxers or from Chinese medicine that they advise: do not go to your partner when you’re sick, or as in a case of a fighter before you fight, because the word virya (sexual potency) indicates virility, a “warrior.” That term refers to the strength that ennobles the hero. Even the word hero sounds like Eros, the power of the saints who conquered themselves, their eroticism. That oil, that energy, which in most people tends to be wasted, is instead used to conserve and transform, to become the light that illuminates the mind. 
Sexual Propriety and the Requirements of Chastity
We have an image here from an early lecture on the Gnostic Mysteries of Chastity, from this course, where angels attend to the bedroom of a couple. That is a beautiful symbol of the way that sexuality should be treated. It should be treated with great reverence in awe. I believe in the Acts of Thomas you find a myth in which Jesus of Nazareth, the twin of Thomas, attended to the bedside of a bride and groom in order to guide them in these mysteries. This mystery is―you are connected with your partner―when man and wife are united to remember God, not desire, not animality, but love.
Your inner divinity watches everything we do. Even the masters of the great hierarchy, within the divine kingdoms, these Elohim, or the Hebrew term for angels, watch to see what we will do, and we can ask for their help to raise the fire, awaken Kundalini, ascend. So the ancients were very respectful. They knew the sacredness in this act and had propriety. Their matrimony is obviously a private affair. We find that represented here in the Gospel of Philip where they talk about, in a conventional sense, what was considered ethical at the time. While it might seem outdated to a modern mind, in truth these are esoteric principles. They are symbolic. If a marriage is opened to the public it becomes prostitution, and the bride plays a harlot not only when she’s impregnated by another man, but even when she slipped out of her bedroom and is seen. Let her show herself only to her father, to her mother, and to the friend, to the bride and groom, to the son of the bride and groom. These are permitted everyday to enter into the bridal chamber. ―The Gospel of Philip
We’re not talking about literal people. Obviously there might be one level of meaning there. But when you enter the bridal chamber, you do so knowing your Divine Father and your Divine Mother, your Being, is watching.
We have that duality, Shiva-Shakti, Adam-Eve, male-female, the Holy Spirit, which is both the Divine Father the Divine Mother, or the Hebrew term in the Bible: יהוה אלהים Jehovah Elohim, which is the name of God that “created man in His image. Male-female He created them” (Genesis 1:27). “Show oneself only to the father and the mother,” meaning, we must not think of other things. We must only remember divinity. Who is the friend of the bridegroom? Amongst the Gnostics, Christos, Christ which is not a person, but an energy. That energy is what guides the couple like in the Acts of Thomas. Christ, the energy of life, is the one that is our deepest friend, and we must remember our own inner Christ, the light. That is the friend of the bridegroom who is permitted to enter the bed chamber―no one else―not pride, not anger, not laziness, not lust. They cannot enter, we have to put them aside. In the beginning, it is not easy. We cannot be perfect in the beginning, but we train little by little to make it perfect. Who are the sons of the bridegroom who are permitted to enter the bridal chamber? We call them solar bodies: the sons of Noah. Noah in the Old Testament, the book of Genesis, symbolizes the soul who has three sons. We call them, in esoteric language, a solar mind, a solar heart, and a solar will. 
These are vehicles that we activate and create as represented in this image, the Tree of Life, these lower spheres, הוד Hod (the astral body), נצח Netzach (the mental body), תפארת Tiphereth (the body of will), within the Jewish mystical tradition. Solar bodies are the wedding garment of the soul. These are vehicles that we can use when we dream. They are superior. They manifest the divine so that our dreams are not incoherent, but visionary. We can then navigate these higher worlds with competence, with skill.
We need a solar mind, solar emotion, and solar will, meaning: Christ is manifested there whenever we enter the sexual act. We do not need to have solar bodies already, these vehicles prepared, but we need to have these attitudes. We have to approach the act with utmost care. 
How Alchemists Are Defined, Made, and Recognized
This is how we are defined, made, and recognized according to the Gospel of Philip.
Alchemists are those who are precisely tantric initiates that work with the creative force. We have here, I believe, the anointment of the King Saul. I don't remember the biblical figure that was first anointed, but that is the symbol of how we take the oil, the שמן shemen in Hebrew, which is the literal term for ointment, and by preserving it, raise the energy up to our head to become crowned with glory. שמן Shemen means “oil.” This is where we get the term semen, and when we work with the energy, the chrism, the anointment, you are transforming yourself. It is important to remember that in many traditions, it is a symbol, not a literal fact, for most people. Many people can be anointed through catechism, that is, with the Catholic Church, and receive the type of baptism and ritual. These are symbols of a deeper reality. We are truly baptized and anointed when we’re working with sex daily, transforming the energy, so that we give birth to the soul, so that we become true queens and kings of our psychological and moral universe. This is why the Gospel of Philip states: But let the others yearn to enjoy listening to her voice and to enjoy her ointment (שמן shemen), and let them feed from the crumbs that fall from the table like the dogs. Bridegroom and bride belong to the bridal chamber. No one should be able to see the bridegroom with the bride unless they become such a one. ―The Gospel of Philip
When you experience your soul, such as through meditation, out of the body in dreams, like in the Tree of Life, and you have these mystical visions―seeing your God teaching you through symbols―you become inflamed, inspired, and driven to receive even the crumbs of the bread of knowledge. Even those little meditative states, which you may get, from time to time, produce spiritual hunger to the point that we are Tantalus, in the Greek myth, at the table of the Gods. So we strive to receive those experiences because we want to know the truth.
Bridegroom and bride belong to the bridal chamber, and no one should be able to see the bridegroom and the bride unless they become such a one, meaning: an alchemist. When you meet, perhaps, initiates of the white lodge in the superior dimensions, not physically, but internally, you recognize them. When you’re working with this science and you awaken in your dreams, you see these masters come to you and you recognize them immediately. You cannot recognize them if you are not working, if you are not awakening, because our dream is very incoherent and scattered in the beginning. They are not unified. They are not profound. But when you perform this, they come to you, and you immediately see them for who they are because you are awake. You are no longer dreaming. You are conscious. We gave a whole course on this called Dream Yoga and Astral Travel. You can listen to it on our podcast. It talks about a lot of these principles. 
Requisites for Alchemy
So what are the requisites for alchemy? We see a beautiful couple here in the sign of their honeymoon. There is a basic requisite according to the Gospel of Philip for this, but also we include a synonymous verse from The Perfect Matrimony by Samael Aun Weor:
A bridal chamber is not for the animals, nor is it for the slaves, nor for defiled women, but it is for free men and virgins. ―The Gospel of Philip
Obviously the language can be very dissonant, especially to our modern mind. However, it is symbolic, not literal. A bridal chamber is not for the animals. Who are the animals? Pride, anger, laziness, lust, appetite, desire―we all have animals within. We call them egos, defects, vices, errors, our craving and aversions. They can not enter the sexual act, or at least to a degree enough so that we can practice. Obviously, in the beginning we are swarmed with many elements that we see in ourselves as we try to practice the science. We have a lot of lust, a lot of internal adultery, prostitutions, defects which are very chaotic. In the beginning we see them, but little by little we eliminate them.
What is important is that when we begin the practice that we do not let that define the act. We do not let that define our marriage or relationship. Now, we must not be a slave to passion, addicted to sensation. The union itself is beautiful. It is sacred. It is pleasurable, but that is not the point. It is not merely to have sensations. They are present, but we must not be attached to them, neither repress, hide from, or reject them. There are two extremes. The middle path is the Tao: white and black, black and white, yin and yang, opposites unify. “Nor for a defiled woman.” Really, this is referring to Eve, and Eve is a sexual symbol: הוה Havah, “mother of the living.” It is the sexual organs. Our sexual organs must not be defiled. We must not reach the orgasm. That is the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. When you smell the aroma, but do not transgress, its boundaries, we gain knowledge. We tame the serpent Kundalini up the spine. “It is for free men and virgins.” What does it mean to be free? Really? Are we free from pain, from addiction, from ego? And what does it mean to be virginal? It does not mean “to not have sex.” It means to be pure: transform the impure act into a pure act, so that you can give birth like an immaculate conception. Obviously that part of the Christian tradition became confused, where people believe that Mary gave birth without sex, because people thought and think of sex as something filthy. However, it can be immaculate, and this is how we give birth to the soul. “Free men and virgins” are people who have some form of stability, so that they can, little by little, gain more ground., make their marriage more and more perfect. This is why Samael Aun Weor said in The Perfect Matrimony: We understand people of normal sexuality to be those who have had no sexual conflict of any kind. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony, “Normal Sexuality"
This is the basis of alchemy. Obviously in our world, what we call normal is very different from what the Elohim, the Gods, consider normal. Our planet is very abnormal if you look very deeply.
Normal sexuality means, according to esoteric terminology, people who have conscious control of themselves to some degree, who are not overwhelmed or driven by so many dramas or perhaps psychological conflicts that they are not willing to practice or to change. Obviously, any person can perform this path, can approach the normal, angelic way of engaging in this act. But obviously in the beginning, we start with where we’re at. We gain balance little by little. We must not have enough contradictions in ourselves that will impede the work, and the way that we do it is by meditating on ourselves. 
Spiritual Conception, Awareness, and the Merits of the Heart
Here we see Jesus baptized by John in the River Jordan. These verses from the Gospel of Philip are very beautiful. They really emphasize the most important aspect of alchemy.
There are many people who read The Perfect Matrimony by Samael Aun Weor and become very inspired to want to enter this path. They hear about the love between husband and wife, and the spiritual potential they have. But some people get married and approach sex with ambition, pride, and desire, and there are some who enter relationships perhaps out of loneliness, fear, guilt, shame, or fear of being alone, and that it becomes the basis of their matrimony. There are, perhaps, spiritual ambitions between people, couples that may get together because they are gnostic, or they practice a certain faith, a certain religion, rather than love. Really, love is the defining principle of any union. It should be the most important thing, because there are people who seek a partner out of fear or ambition to be spiritual. They fail because they do not love their partner. Love is the requisite. We are born again through the Holy Spirit, and we are conceived through Christ in baptism with two elements. We are anointed through the Spirit, and when we were conceived, we were united. No one can see oneself in the water (מים mayim) or in a mirror without light (אור aur), nor can you see yourself in the light (אור) without water (מים) or a mirror. So it is necessary to baptize with two elements, light (אור), and water (מים), and light is chrism. ―The Gospel of Philip
We are born again through the Holy Spirit by working with the creative power. But the one who spiritually conceives the union is Christ in the heart. We are born again through the Holy Spirit and we are conceived through Christ in baptism with two elements. We are anointed through the spirit and we are conceived. We are reunited.
So spiritual conception is when two partners, two people meet and become filled with love. That spark, that unexplainable hunch, and that whisper in the interior of our being, calls us to know this person and to know ourselves. It is inexpressible, but for the one that has lived it knows it. That is the spiritual conception when Christ brings two souls together, our inner divinity, so that we can be perfect. This is why Samael Aun Weor stated in The Perfect Matrimony: Love begins with a flash of delectable sympathy. It is substantiated with infinite tenderness, and it is synthesized with supreme adoration.―Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony, “Love"
It begins with the flash, a spark. It is substantiated with tenderness, with getting to know the person. It is synthesized in a matrimony. When Christ, our inner divinity, unifies us with our partner, it is divinely ordained. It is sacred, and you will know that through experience. You will be given experiences, insights, which teach you about this. Obviously I am speaking for people who are not married, maybe who are looking for a partner, but also if we are married, we should consider, meditate, on this truth: how love is born, how it is substantiated, how it is inspired, how it is deepened, because that is the spiritual conception.
The two elements that baptize are water and light, or water and spirit. The Hebrew term for light is אור Aur: א Aleph, ו Vau, ר Resh (reading left from right), and then the water is מים Mayim, מ Mem, י Iod, and ם final Mem: water and light. Water is the creative energy, the sperm in a man and the ovum in a woman. The water of life is what we symbolically drink when we transmute. We take the energy and create light in ourselves. Light is born from the energy of life, as we see here. Also, as we are practicing with the energy of creation, we start to see things, and that is how we are really baptized spiritually. Water and light―we take the light out of the water, the fire out of the water, by extracting it through mantra, sacred sounds, prayer, meditation, and therefore you start to see things in your visions. No one can see oneself in the water or a mirror without light, אור Aur in the water, מים Mayim, nor can you see oneself in the light without water or a mirror. So it is necessary to baptize with two elements: light and water, and light is Chrism. Literally, the power to see spiritually is the sexual power. You must extract light from the darkness. יְהִי אֹור וַֽיְהִי־אֹֽור
I believe Rumi, in the Muslim / Sufi tradition, stated that “those who look at water in a cup will see their own faces in it if they’re filled with desires. For those who are in love with Allah, they will see Him.”
This approach to sex: what do we see in the act? Is it our own passion, or is it love? We have to meditate on that. 
Spiritual Liberation through Kabbalah and Alchemy
Here I briefly mentioned the Tree of Life, this image or glyph of the Jewish mystical tradition, which maps out the whole cosmos, from the more dense level of matter, energy, or experience up to the most spiritual―ten spheres, ten modes of being.
We are in מלכות Malkuth, which is the physical body. Above that we have יסוד Yesod , which is our vitality, the creative sexual energy. הוד Hod is the emotional body, our emotional experiences. נצח Netzach is our mind. תפארת Tiphereth is will. Above that we have the divine soul, which is the spiritual consciousness. To the right we have חסד Chesed, the spirit, our inner God. Above that we have the top trinity: Father, Son, Holy Spirit―כתר Kether, חכמה Chokmah, בינה Binah, the trinity, Christ. This glyph is very profound. We will explain it in relation to this scripture because the Gospel of Philip uses this abstract language of kabbalah to teach something very deep about the nature of sexual liberation and alchemy. Obviously, I’m using the term sexual liberation not in the conventional sense, because neither giving into passion or rejecting it is the way. Understanding it, comprehending it, is the middle path. They talk about three buildings that are used for sacrificing in Jerusalem. One of them is called “the holy,” another facing, I believe, the west, and the one facing the south: “the holy of the holy,” and then the one facing east is “the holiest of the holiest.” This is in relation with the four directions: north, south, east, west. It is a symbolic language. The north can relate to חסד Chesed, the spirit, and even in many mystical writings, you find that even Nietzsche talked about spiritual understanding as being up in the mountains, up in the cold, like you see here in the Three Mountains poster, which is a map of the whole path from beginning to end. The south can relate to גבורה Geburah, the divine soul, the source of spiritual strength, נשמה Neshamah in Hebrew, or the divine soul that knighted the hero תפארת Tiphereth, the warrior. תפארת Tiphereth is Lancelot, גבורה Geburah is Guinevere, and חסד Chesed is Arthur, symbolically. The east relates to דעת Da’ath, which is up toward the top Trinity. דעת Da’ath is the Tree of Knowledge. It means “knowledge” in Hebrew. It is sexual knowledge. It is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It is the wisdom we extract when we practice the perfect matrimony. 
You take this image of the Tree of Life and put it on a human being, the top trinity in the head, middle trinity in the heart, lower trinity toward sex. דעת Da’ath is in the throat, because in the sacred matrimony, you are praying in the act and using mantra to transform the creative force into light. That is the source of mystical knowledge.
The Gospel of Philip emphasizes all of this. I’ll read it for you: There were three buildings specifically for sacrifice in Jerusalem. The one facing the west was called "The Holy.” Another, facing south, was called "The Holy of the Holy.” The third, facing east, was called "The Holy of the Holies," the place where only the high priest enters. Baptism is "the Holy" building [מלכות Malkuth]. Redemption is the "Holy of the Holy.” [גבורה Geburah] "The Holy of the Holies" is the bridal chamber [דעת Da’ath]. Baptism includes the resurrection and the redemption. The redemption takes place in the bridal chamber. ―The Gospel of Philip
It’s very deep. I am going to unpack this to the best of my ability.
Sacrifice in this sense has nothing to do with the killing of animals for ritual. Better said, it is a symbol of sacrificing our ego, our animal desire. Facing the west is “the holy,” which is where baptism takes place. Interestingly enough, not only the physical ceremonies of ritual water are performed in מלכות Malkuth, the body, but that is where the water of life exists. We can baptize ourselves through this science. Facing the south is גבורה Geburah, “the holy of the holy.” We call it that because גבורה Geburah, the divine consciousness, is the spiritual soul. She never enters impurity. She is virtuous, as represented in Wagner’s operas, the Valkyries, who sing before going to battle in Act 3 of Die Walküre, the Valkyries in the Nordic Mythology. גבורה Geburah is like a glass of alabaster that contains the spirit, a pure translucent and divine state―very sacred. She never mixes with ego. Therefore, she's holy because she contains all the mystical attributes of Christ above. But you also find that redemption is “the holy of the holy.” We are redeemed through her. 
If you have ever seen picture, I believe The Accolade, a beautiful princess knights a warrior with a sword. It is a symbol. She is the one who decides whether we enter initiation or not. The hero, the soul, fights against the ego, has to be knighted by her. She is the redemption. She determines whether we pass or fail, and she is our own conscience. She is the root of that voice that says, “this is right” and “this is wrong.” “Do this” and “don't do that.” When we obey her we rise, and when we obey her, we kneel.
“The holies of holies,” the bridal chamber, is דעת Da’ath, because that is the sexual act. That is where real redemption takes place, like the myth of Parsifal. Within the Wagnerian opera with that name, the hero must face sexual temptation, to decide whether he would redeem the Gnostic Church from the fall of its main priest, Amfortas. It is my intention to show the opera at one point, give a lecture on it, but if you want to know more about that symbol, you can study the book Parsifal Unveiled by Samael Aun Weor where he talks about that opera and its esoteric symbol [see also The Secret Teachings of Opera course]. Baptism includes resurrection, because physically, the body must really purify itself, and redemption takes place in the sexual act itself, where we do decide our fates. That is where the real high priest enters. A real priest is a magician in control of four elements: fire (the emotions), air (thought), water (sex) and earth (the body). The high priest or a magician must officiate within his or her psychological temple. Just as there are priests, there are priestesses. Every husband is a priest who is performing this work, and every wife is a priestess, and that way we fulfill the sacraments of the Gnostic Church, as we were talking about in an earlier lecture: How to Be a Gnostic Priest. 
Blood, Semen, Solar Bodies, and the Sexual Organs
We included this image of a chalice, the Holy Grail, to represent a woman. The Holy Grail, while an artifact, represents for us woman, the spouse, the yoni, the feminine sexual organs, in which the blood of the redeemer is found. It is precisely in the sexual organ where we find the water, the blood, and the wine of redemption according to gnostic ritual (the Gnostic Mass made public by Samael Aun Weor in Secret Notes of a Guru).
Wine is an alchemical symbol. When you ferment or transform the sexual water, the semen into the wine of the spirit, you intoxicate the soul with bliss. Now again, semen does not refer literally to men. It is the water, the oil of creation, whether from man or woman. Both man and woman have sexual energy, potential that must be transformed, transmuted into wine, because the first miracle of Jesus was transforming water into wine in a marriage (John 2:1-11). We know that also the sperm or ovum―I believe one drop of sperm is the equivalent of eighty drops of blood. The quality of our blood determines the quality of our potency, the sexual force. It is from these waters that we create those solar bodies, so these are the vehicle of our soul as I mentioned. To do that we must be baptized. We have here in the Gospel of Philip: The cup of prayer contains (יין Ayyin) wine and (מים Mayim) water, since it is appointed as the type of the (Daleth, Mem: דם Dam) blood for which thanks is given. And it is full of the Holy Spirit, and it belongs to the wholly perfect man. When we drink this, we shall receive for ourselves the perfect man. The living (מים) water is a body. It is necessary that we put on the living man. Therefore, when he is about to go down into the (מים) water, he unclothes himself, in order that he may put on the living man. ―The Gospel of Philip
This is not referring to the literal, physical man, but sex. Man, even from Sanskrit, signifies manas, which means “mind.” Superior manas is תפארת Tiphereth. It is willpower, whether in man or a woman. The living man is not strictly limited to the male sex. It is the solar vehicles we create in a matrimony. It is from the blood and wine, it is from our heart and the sexual potential, in which we gave thanks, because it is full of the Holy Spirit, and the perfect man or the perfect woman, the perfect human being, arises from it.
So we must unclothe our egotistical garments, our lunar rags. If you studied dream yoga and astral travel, you know that we have lunar astral body, lunar mental body. These are vehicles given to us by nature. They are mechanical. We do not create them through a marriage. We just have them so that we can exist. But to go into the higher planes, you need to put on the living garment, the solar vehicles, so that we can go to higher states. Now you can access a temporary state of enlightenment, a vacation, but to become a citizen there, we must have a solar body. That is fundamental. Therefore, we must go down into the water, as in baptism (the sexual act). Initiation is the result of a descent. Every exultation is a result of humiliation as we must face trials or ordeals within the perfect matrimony, to see whether we qualify for the path. 
The Origin of Sexual Potency, Beauty, and Spiritual Potential
We also talk about three Hebrew letters: א Aleph, ש Shin, מ Mem. We found א Aleph in one of the Hebrew words אור Aur, “light,” as in א Aleph, ו Vau, ר Resh. ש Shin is fire. מ Mem is water. These letters represent principles, truths, and they are the essence of sexual potency. They are also the source of real beauty, not merely physical, but spiritual.
We see here that the Gospel of Philip emphasizes two elements: fire and water, and that within the water of sex is the fire of life. Therefore from the fire, temptation, by conquering lust, we gain light, wisdom, victory. Soul and spirit came into being from water (מ Mem) and fire (ש Shin). The attendant of the bridal chamber has come into being from water, fire, and light. Fire is Chrism. Light is fire. I do not mean ordinary fire which has no form, but other fire which is pure white in appearance, beautifully bright imparting beauty. ―The Gospel of Philip
Who is the attendant of the bridal chamber? It is any person who is working in the perfect matrimony, nd that. really, we come into being through the fire and light, through anointing ourselves. This is the astral light mentioned by Samael Aun Weor in The Perfect Matrimony―not literal fire―but spiritual fire. We meet masters like him in the astral plane who have beautiful golden appearances, shining the light of the Absolute, of all the Tree of Life through them, the Region of Barbelo amongst the Gnostics.
The Spine, Sexual Organs, Energy, and Source for Change
Here we see that we have the Tree of Life transposed on the human body. יסוד Yesod relates to the sexual organs. יסוד Yesod means “foundation,” and these Hebrew letters י Iod, ס Samech, ו Vav, ד Daleth, spell “foundation” in Hebrew. It is the foundation because it is the rock of our church, the stone of Peter, literally Patar or slang for “phallus.” You can also rearrange those Hebrew letters with י Iod at the end to make סודי Sodi, which means “secret.” This is the secret knowledge that was never taught publicly until the sixties, and it is the ninth sphere from the top to bottom. The number nine relates to alchemy, transmutation, the sacred work.
We want to raise the energy up the spine over our Tree of Life because the spine is a tree of life in itself. It is this energy which can help change us and catalyze our spiritual development. It is also the energy that helps us crucify our passions, as I said. Here is what the Gospel of Philip stated: Philip the apostle said, "Joseph the carpenter planted a garden because he needed wood for his trade. It was he who made the cross from the trees which he planted. His own offspring hung on that which he planted. His offspring was Jesus, and the planting was the cross." But the Tree of Life is in the middle of the Garden. However, it is from the olive tree that we got the chrism, and from the chrism, the resurrection. ―The Gospel of Philip
Very deep! What is a carpenter? It is any one of us who is working with the Tree of Knowledge or fashioning wood to build the house of the spirit. It is from the cross of the Tree of Knowledge in which we eliminate our passions, because Shiva-Shakti, the power that creates and destroys, creates spiritual life but destroys the ego.
The one that hangs on this is יהשוה Yeshua, the savior. The savior fire or INRI in Latin: Ignus Natura Renovatur Integra, is the esoteric translation of Iesu Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews,” the real initiate. He is the fire arising from the chrism. The Tree of Life is in the middle of the garden because the Garden of Eden is sex and the Tree of Life rises from it. We gain the chrism, the sacred oil of God, through the Tree of Knowledge, which shares its roots within יסוד Yesod. That is how we achieve spiritual resurrection. 
Is Abstinence Spiritual?
Now we will conclude with one more explanation about the nature of our sexuality. There are many people who think of the spirituality of sex as something contradictory. There are many people in different faiths and religions that feel that real spirituality is divorced from sex and that the sexual act does not have the potential to transform, only to condemn.
Now abstinence is obviously practiced by many priests of different faiths or maybe monks and nuns. What is important to remember is that these monks and nuns from different faiths are practicing their tradition if they are transmuting the energies. It is not enough to just, well, practice devotion in the heart or study in the mind, but to conquer the creative force. There are many traditions that lost the meaning of this. Monks and nuns used to practice as a single person to transmute their creative force so they would be trained for matrimony and be prepared. Obviously the conventional churches have lost the meaning of this. A real priest is, as I said, a magician who conquers the sexual act itself. It is not possible to renounce something we have not conquered. We can ignore sex and avoid it, but still that energy will act, usually in subversive ways. So it is important to take that power intentionally and use it for good things like creativity, art, painting, sculpture, being conscious, being a better person. One can only abstain from sex when one has conquered it. It is important to remember that sex is not merely the end in itself but is a door. It is a door of Eden that leads from יסוד Yesod to the heights. When the work is fully done, we perfect ourselves. There is no ego, no mistakes left. We paid all our debts. Sex is then forbidden. One does not need it anymore. That is when one can renounce sex itself. But we need the energy of the creative power to enter the work. Here’s what Samael Aun Weor said about this in The Major Mysteries: In the beginning, we must be intensely sexual [transmuting our sexual energy in sexual cooperation with our spouse]. Thereafter, we must renounce sex. In the beginning, we have to develop powers. Thereafter, we have to renounce them. Some people do not understand the former statements, and act awkwardly, as when someone wants to take part in a horse-race without having a horse, or if they have it, they want to begin the race facing towards the rear of the horse instead of its head. Yes, some wretched people understand everything in reverse; in other words, they want to renounce sex without first having awakened the sacred fire, or they want to renounce powers without first having acquired them. How foolish they are, renouncing something that they do not have, yet they are incapable of renouncing what they do have. Indeed, this path is very difficult. This is the path of the razor’s edge. Understand that only the one who has become christified (perfectly divine) can renounce sex, and only the one who is already prepared to enter into the Absolute can renounce his powers. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Major Mysteries
The Absolute is known as the region of Barbelo, on top the Tree of Life. It is the goal of the gnostics, the return.
Resources
To help you in your studies, we have two books which teach about alchemy in depth; The Perfect Matrimony, and The Mystery of The Golden Flower by Samael Aun Weor. They go very deep into the nature of pretty much everything related to this work. It can help you begin practicing especially if you are married, and even if you are single, obviously The Perfect Matrimony teaches everything about the gnostic path itself in great detail.
That is time! I invite you to ask questions. Questions and Answers
Question: So you talked a lot about, in the scripture, about the bride and bridegroom and I heard it said that esotericism that the bride can represent מלכות Malkuth, kabbalistically, in the physical body. In that case, if that’s true, would the bridegroom be Christ coming into the physical body?
Instructor: Yes, there is that level of meaning. Alchemically, the bride is the wife or the priestess, and the groom is the husband, the priest. On a deeper level, obviously bride and bridegroom activate Christ within themself, and then divinity can enter and manifest in them. There are multiple levels of applications. Question: I am still struggling to understand how to utilize the principle of the four elements and in general, what I meant to learn with the whole magician pieces. Does this control the self within the matrix and therefore releases us from it? Kind of like you were saying about understanding sex and then renouncing it. Instructor: Yes, so I would study a course given by Glorian Publishing called Meditation Essentials. When you learn to meditate, you control the four elements. You will learn to let the layers of the mind to stratify, to calm so that we can begin to receive understandings about our experiences and our psychology. 
In that course you will learn that image you see on the wall to your right. It is the nine stages of meditative concentration, stages of serenity, which begins with a monk chasing after a wild elephant ascending up a widening path up to a height, and finally equipoised in perfect peace. That is a symbol of how we must chase after our own mind with willpower, concentration, in order to calm the mind.
Now, what’s important to remember is that as we gain stability of consciousness, concentration, being able to focus on one thing without forgetting it, we start to get insight into that particular thing. That is how you can begin to understand any experience. Also, more importantly, it will teach you how to calm the four elements. Literally with Asana, posture, you calm your body, the earth. With energy work, you work with the waters. With meditation and concentrations, serenities, you calm the air (the mind) and the heart (the fire). When you control those four elements, you can enter, like you see monk on the very top of that image, the higher dimensions. That is dream yoga. When you meditate and fall asleep, your mind is in perfect equipoise, and suddenly you enter the astral dimension and see reality for what it is. It will give understanding about any particular experience you have had. You just concentrate. You can visualize the experience and wait for the answer. Suddenly, the insight comes. It hits you. Meditation Essentials is very deep. I would study that course. Comment: Thank you. Instructor: You’re welcome. Another Instructor: Can I speak on that, the four ordeals? Another part of the path of initiation (which is the path when we become initiates, or we try to become the magician) is that―especially in the beginning, but also various points again of the path―we experience the four ordeals of the four elements. By conquering these ordeals, we can develop that mastery of ourselves. So, if you are thinking of a matrix style world―that everything that happens in manifested reality, our relationship with other people, our experiences in life―is just there as a sort of spiritual test for us to learn something about ourselves, for us to master ourselves, then we associate the four ordeals with different types of experiences. You might experience an ordeal of fire in your physical life as someone you are close to criticizing you a lot and that brings up anger, that brings up shame, that brings up these fiery feelings within. When we learn to master that, to acknowledge the situation―which is to develop serenity and sweetness of character, to not get totally identified and upset about the situation, but rather to transform the situation in a positive way―then on that level, we master that ordeal. We develop some level of magic to transform our life in a positive direction. Briefly the ordeal of water would relate with overwhelming changes of circumstances where you feel like you are drowning in a new social situation. You must learn how to swim. You must learn how to adapt. Air can relate to loss: loss of a job, loss of a partner, loss of something that brought you stability before. Now you feel like you are falling with nothing to hold on to. So how do you develop the flexibility to be able to fly, even when you feel like you have nothing to hold on to? How do you have faith? With earth, we can feel the sort of pressure, pressing circumstances where you have to develop a lot of perseverance, really, to push through them, to not give up, but to keep developing strength of will to get through them. So briefly, I would say that is another good place to recognize, “what element this situation that I am struggling with in my life might be representing.” Also, you can see: “what do I need to master within myself to not be overwhelmed by this situation, but to recognize the situation for what it is?” This info “brings the quality out of my own soul, to transform it into a positive situation for the other people involved, and myself as well.” Question: Samael Aun Weor states that the perfect matrimony consists of two souls, one who loves more, and one who loves better. Could you elaborate on that? Instructor: Two pillars of the Tree of Life, wisdom and love. You see that kabbalah has three pillars: the right, the left, and the middle. On the right we have the pillar of mercy, on the left we have the pillar of severity, and in the middle we have the pillar of equilibrium. You can also say wisdom and love, from the right to the left. Now these relate to certain conventional norms, obviously with man and woman, in terms of psychological disposition. Or esoterically speaking, the one who loves more is a woman―more heart, more feeling, more love. But also, man has more wisdom, knowing better―more conceptual―rational, I mean, if we break it down in that sense. But that is not to say that paradigm defines every relationship, because couples are mixed. People are unique and different. But when we find wisdom, with knowing how to live on the right pillar, and love through the left pillar. It is interesting that on the left pillar on the Tree of Life, we have this severity relating to love, primarily because real love can be severe. Really, if you’re married and your wife loves you, she will be very severe with you when you deserve it, for your own good. As a husband, one has to try to be wise as well. But obviously, there’s wisdom and love in both couples. But, that’s a very profound and obviously enigmatic statement, which I think, if even by trying to define it, in a sense I butcher it, because when you love someone, you deeply find that in your soul there are principles that relate to the Divine Father, and the Divine Mother. Wisdom is the Divine Father. Love is the Divine Mother. Together they have the path of equilibrium, which is דעת Da’ath in Hebrew, real knowledge. Question: This might be a whole class, but I was kind of curious about the difference between, I guess, good desire and bad desire, and how will relates to desire? Instructor: Yeah, in esoteric language, we say that desire is ego―you know, “I want, I crave, I need”―ego. Obviously, there is another quality related to the soul, the longing, the yearning for divinity, the thirst of the consciousness for the truth. The Sufi way of describing those truths, it talks about desiring God. Obviously, they have a poetic way to talk about the same principle. You know, our soul, our willpower free of ego, aspires. We tend to break it down a little bit further because in the west, we tend to be very conditioned by language, in a sense like we have a certain interpretation on what desire means. Since we are, strictly speaking, about 97% desire, ego, we tend to go in accordance with our conditioning, interpreting anything, like seeing scripture, life, or spirituality in that way. We have 3% consciousness free, that can aspire to the heights, and we are trying to free the rest of our psyche from conditions. We do that by yearning for God, longing. Rumi, obviously, one of my favorite poets from the Sufi traditions, talks about desiring God. I believe there is an Arabic term, Murid and Murad, which means the seeker/desiree and the desired/sought-after, the longing for the truth. When they talk about desiring God, it is a sexual trope, alchemical teaching. If you want to know more about that topic, specifically, I would study the course we gave in our podcast. It is called Sufi Principles of Meditation, as well as The Sufi Path of Self Knowledge. Especially the last course, the lecture called Divine Love. It is all about that. Yeah, very profound. Another Instructor: But I wanted to add on to an early question about a distinction, or at least the relationship between desire and will. Because I hear a lot that question around that “If I have no desire, what am I going to do? I’m like, just go sit around?” A lot of us used to be motivated by the things that we want, our goal and aspiration by the things that we desire. When this instructor is saying “an ego,” we think of it in terms of “I.” There is a self there that we feel wants to attain things, that wants to accomplish things. When we live in a state where everything we do has some kind of selfish motive, some desire there, we cannot really conceptualize what it would be like to live without that. But I want to say that there is an quality to yourself, who we are here physically, and then there is a divine self. Until we can comprehend our self and restrain desire enough, which we can do through alchemy or pranayama, or meditation or reflection, until we restrain that self, we do not know much about the divine self. When we look at masters, beings like Moses, Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, they have the divine self fully incarnated enough to serve humanity, to give spiritual teachings, to perform spiritual miracles. Unfortunately, while there is so much of this selfish, false self active and moving through us, there is not enough space for divinity to come in. I think there is a phrase that God or the divine fills the vacuum, fills the void. So, we need to create enough emptiness within and remove desire so that divine will can come and act through us. Instructor: The Sufis even collaborate that one is only a Sufi when they renounce desire. But also one must have, or better said, the will to practice. But one must also be a Sufi in the sense of having the will at all, to the point that in your individual work, the more divinity manifests in the psyche, His will is active, not ours. Question: Do you have any tips or suggestions when meditating on an ego? Because I know the visages and the faces of these egos very well, but sometimes I still would have a great amount of difficulty holding an image in my mind for more than a few seconds. So could you, like, maybe give some guidance on how to increase that or get better? Instructor: Sure, practice visualization exercises. You can take a candle, view it, light it, observe it, and close your eyes and imagine it. Try to visualize it with as much color and depth as you can. You can even smell the candle internally, even if your body is falling asleep, because those are senses that will activate when you train. The ability to perceive more imagery in terms of the spectrum of consciousness depends on how active we work out that muscle. You can visualize an image, a candle, could be something very simple in the beginning. That is usually what is recommended by for many Tibetan Buddhist monks as they are trying to visualize very complex images like, say, the stages of serenity, or the murals that you see in many Tibetan monasteries. If you take a complex image, you can take one section, say like a chakra poster, and you can visualize maybe one aspect, maybe the hand to begin with. Or maybe the head, and then as you start to gain more sustainability of the image, you can hold it in your mind or consciousness without losing the quality or the state of it, you can expand your practice make it more robust. Picture the head, the shoulder, and then the body, until finally you can visualize an entire image with lucidity. But obviously, start small―five minutes, ten minutes, small objects so that you train your consciousness to have enough strength to first recall the image without it changing and adapting, because of the mind, and then kater, you can increase more depth, maintaining it with continuity. Yeah, there are some practices we gave in the Sufi Principle of Meditation course, especially the lecture called Awareness, Unveiling, and Witnessing. We give a practice where you can even take a plant, imagining its birth as a seed, as it grows into a sprout, finally a flower in its prime, and then its decay. As you are imagining that process of birth, death, evolution, devolution, and you fall asleep, you will enter the dreaming state with more awareness. You can even talk to, say, the physical plant, the soul of that plant. The same quality, the same ability to imagine or visualize, is the same quality that you have when you dream. If you can perceive more in your dreams, it means your imagination gets more robust or has more potential. But yeah, start with a small visualization practice.
All of us may remember a time when we were young in which we knew of a state of being that was truly blissful, one of peace, one of serenity, one of freedom. As we have become adults, developing our personality, our language, our customs, our skills, we have forgotten that origin, that quality of mind that was free from all of the complications that we know today.
You may have noticed from the meditation, that it could be difficult to remember. We practiced with the mantra Raom Gaom, mentally, to recall a state of being that was unsullied. But unfortunately for us, there are gaps and we do not remember. We do not recall primarily because our acculturation to life has us hypnotized, unaware, and asleep. We do not really know who we were, except by hearsay or reports by our parents or friends. But if we truly know ourselves fundamentally, in the very depths of our consciousness, we would remember everything. We would know who we were, where we came from, why we are what we are today, and why we suffer. But more importantly, we would know how to change, how to practically, fundamentally change our state of being from one of suffering to one of peace, understanding, wisdom, and real knowledge.
This is why the Greeks, as we see here in the Temple of Delphi, had a very famous maxim, Γνῶθι σαυτόν gnōthi sauton in Greek, or in Latin, Nosce Te Ipsum, “Know Thyself.” In the full sense of the word you could say, Homo Nosce Te Ipsum, “Human, know thyself, and you will know the universe and the gods.”
Transcendental Experiences
We seek to understand our life and also to realize what all the prophets and avatars experienced. Beings like Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Isaiah, and the prophets, relayed their direct experience of divinity. They were people like us. We have problems. They had problems. They had sufferings. They had weaknesses. They were not born with an innate, miraculous gift. They built it from the ground up.
They did so by primarily learning how to pay attention to themselves. What in our psychology or their psychology creates so much pain, not only for themselves, but for others? In this way, by understanding the limitations of the psyche and also our own faults, we can become like them: truly divine, beings connected with divinity. In the Gnostic tradition, we can become Χρίστος Christos or Christ. Christ is not only limited to Jesus of Nazareth. It is a universal and sacred identity which is within all beings, and that has been expressed by all of the avatars in diverse religions. These religions were not meant to be just codes of belief or convictions without evidence. They were inherently practical, accessible, and experiential. This is why in the Gospel of Thomas, we find the seventeenth verse: 17. Yeshua (in Hebrew, meaning the Savior Jesus, the Inner Christ) said, I shall give you what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand has touched, what has not risen in the human heart. ―The Gospel of Thomas
We can see from this that he is not talking about physical, sensorial experience. He is talking about mystical experience.
The Tree of Life: A Map of Our Universe
All of these stories of the masters ascending a mountain like Moses on Sinai to speak directly to divinity are represented here. They are symbols. We use a very profound symbol in our tradition, as you see here, to explain the map and levels and strata of being. We call it קבלה kabbalah. This is the Hebrew term קבל kabbel, meaning “to receive.” It is direct experience. It is not belief.
This tree, while it was mapped out by the thirteenth century kabbalists, whether from France or Spain, is merely an articulation of an eternal truth. Specifically, these principles have always existed. They are divine and universal, but the Jewish mystical tradition codified it. We know that all of the traditions teach the same thing. In Buddhism it is called the Bhavachakra, the Wheel of Becoming or the Wheel of Samsara, the Wheel of Return or Yggdrasil, which is the Tree of Life among the Nordics. Many names for the same truth. 
Experience belongs to any being who is properly prepared and who can awaken their full potential to know these things for themselves. Here we see Jesus surrounded by twelve apostles. He is the center of this marvelous diagram. They represent these spheres. We see ten, from the bottom to the top, followed by three unknowables. In total, there are thirteen aspects of being that we can experience practically for ourselves.
Jesus, being a very high master, embodies and represents the very heights. In Hebrew, these heights are represented by the אין Ain, אין סוף Ain Soph, and אין סוף אור Ain Soph Aur―the Nothingness, the Limitless, and the Limitless Light. Or to use Gnostic terms, the region of Barbelo, fire and light, which are the elements of real, conscious, divine experience. These are symbols, because with the fire of devotion and practice, we gain light. We see the experience. The gnostics also refer to these as aeons. An aeon in Greek means an age, a time that is very long, an eternity. These spheres ascend from more dense, more physical levels of matter and energy to more rarified, abstract, and spiritual. The Mayans depicted them as the thirteen katuns, the thirteen times, and in a sense when you experience these dimensions for yourself through meditation, through mystical experience, you begin to see and witness that they have a temporality of their own. They are different ways of being. Obviously, we are in מלכות Malkuth, the physical body, which in Hebrew means Kingdom. But above that we have levels related to the fourth dimension, time, and space. You also have the fifth dimension related to eternity, the world of dreams. This is where we go every night when we sleep. We go there through astral projection, whether consciously or unconsciously, whether intentionally or not. We go there every time we fall asleep. But beyond that, there are levels which are very sacred, inaccessible to people who do not fundamentally practice or change their psychology. 
Socrates’ Daemon
But how do we actually experience these states for ourselves? How do we actually achieve conscious astral projections, awakened states of knowing divinity?
While we gave an extensive course on Dream Yoga and Astral Travel, which is available on our website and podcast, we can boil it down to something very simple. We call it conscience, the voice of the heart, your intuition: knowing how to act, to do without having to think about it, without having to deliberate, to choose, or to learn how to be. Socrates is a great master who taught, with his life and his philosophy, this principle, which is the voice of the silence, the voice of the heart. It is this voice that we suffocate when we choose not to be, when we allow our mind to govern and dictate what we do. We suffocate this voice of the heart with our defects such as anger, pride, fear, laziness, lust, impatience, divisiveness, aggression, or whatever it may be. When we act on these negative elements, we do not act with intuition, which is that connection that we have to the divine, in our very being, our spirit, the truth, or God, for better lack of words, who is inside―our God inside our interior, psychologically speaking, whom we can access if we follow that voice, that silence. But if you have studied philosophy, you saw that because Socrates followed this voice very intently, he got himself into trouble. He was hated by everybody and the Athenians, because by following his conscience, he revealed that real wisdom is not knowing or assuming that we know. It is not the intellect or sophistry of the mind. The sophists were his enemies, who were very articulate intellectuals and great debaters, yet they lacked intuition. They lacked conscience. They were not ethical. Socrates was ethical, and because he chose to engage people in honest discussion, he was martyred. This is the fate of any prophet and master who truly does that which is ordered of them from divinity. But of course, it is difficult, especially as we did in our meditation. We have lost that thread when we were children, when we knew that state of being that was not so dense. Socrates called this inner voice his inner daemon. This is not to be confused with demons or black magic, but the voice of Christ, Χρήστος Christos, speaking through him and leading him to real knowledge. He stated in the Apology, documented by Plato, which was his trial, where he defended himself: I am subject to divine or supernatural experience, which Meletus (his prosecutor) saw fit to travesty in his indictment. It began in my early childhood―a sort of voice which comes to me, and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do, and never urges me on. It is this that debars me from entering public life (and politics). ―Plato’s Apology, 31d
When he knew something was wrong, he did not do it. He refused. He did not rely on other people to tell him what to do. But instead, he followed his heart.
Spiritual Inquietudes
It is this sense that leads us on the path, that leads to what is called initiation, to enter the superior worlds, to enter the temples of divine mysteries, and to know the truth for ourselves. But in our modern life, when the flame of inspiration arises, we tend to snuff it out. We do so by not feeding that aspiration, by distraction, by forgetting our divine presence, who we really are, the essence, the soul.
Obviously, anyone who attends a school, a spiritual group, has an immense yearning, who feels some kind of pain, who wants to understand why it is that we suffer so much in life, and why we continue to be ignorant. We may study all these traditions, teachings, and scriptures, but there is something fundamental that is lacking, which is that understanding of how our actions shape our life, whether we are conscious of it or not. What guides or drives us to pursue any study is precisely this inquietude. It is like a hunch. It is a yearning. It is a fire which consumes us when we cannot sleep, when we look for answers, when we want, by crying out in our pain, to know divinity, to find the balm of our Divine Mother, our Divine Father, our inner spirit, which can heal our affliction. Samael Aun Weor gave a whole chapter on this in his book, The Great Rebellion, which is an essential book. As the founder of the modern Gnostic tradition, he explained how to practically change. I personally find this chapter very poignant, very direct, and very relevant. I will read a few verses: There is no doubt that there is a big difference between thinking and feeling. This is indisputable.
We use the symbol of the moon to represent superficialness, mechanicity, and repeated habits. The cycles of the moon are predictable. Likewise, our behaviors, our psychology, how we act day by day, how we behave, and not only that, but our thoughts, our feelings and our actions are predictable.
If you meditate, reviewing your daily life, you will find that your thoughts were the same thoughts yesterday, your feelings are the same feelings that you had yesterday, and your state of being, and your actions are the same. They are repetitions. This is Samsara in Buddhism, cycling and repetition. But we tend not to ever ask, “Why do we repeat, and how can we act in a revolutionary way?” We do that by first observing the fact, by looking at ourselves to see what in us is going to repeat the same problems. Because when you look, you can separate and then you can decide. That is the Essence, the soul looking directly within, separating from the mind, the personality, and all those things which keep us extinguished and spiritually expired. There is no one who at some point in his or her life has not felt an impulse, a strange disquietude. Unfortunately, anything from the personality, however stupid it may seem, is sufficient to reduce to cosmic dust that which, in the silence of the night, disturbs us for a moment.
When we study the Gnostic doctrine, we speak abundantly about the Christ, the Sun and the Son. Christ is an energy, a potential, a force, that we need to activate through practice, through meditation, the runes, through the sacred rites of rejuvenation. These exercises help to inspire us so that with that energy active and the solar divinity activating our consciousness, we have fuel by which to drive our spiritual car.
Seek, Ask, and Find
It is this energy that helps us to seek and to find. We have the opening verses of the Gospel of Thomas whereby we see verses reflected in the canonical Gospels:
Seek and you shall find. Knock and the door shall be opened unto you. ―Matthew 7:7
While this has a literal significance of finding a physical institution, the truth is that this is psychological, fundamentally. It is a symbol of internally verifying the doctrine and not merely having some adherence to an institution, which obviously there is an application there.
You really find the teachings when you live it. You find it when you experience it. You may not have a physical group, but you can find the doctrine. Fortunately for us, we have the internet, and we have podcasts so people can access more knowledge openly, but the truth is that even with these resources, we don’t find the teaching until we witness it for ourselves. 
When we witness it for ourselves, we are filled with doubt, especially in the beginning like Thomas, poking his finger into the wound of the resurrected Jesus. This is a beautiful symbol, not of cynicism or skepticism, but of seeking to verify the truth. So, after Christ resurrected, the apostles told Thomas, “He is back,” but he said, “I will not believe it until I see it for myself.”
This is not pessimism. It is prudence: to not accept anything unless we have experienced it, because you may seek and find knowledge, but not know it for yourself. As we find here in this Gospel:
Real spirituality is uncomfortable. It is not pleasant when we personally see in ourselves our own agency and our suffering. But when you are troubled, you will marvel and rule over all. Meaning, if you overcome the ordeals of the spiritual path, you in turn can enter initiation.
Where is Heaven?
The Gospel also speaks about the nature of heaven, which is a state of being, not only a place of nature or dimensionality, but our psychology. It is easy to externalize, obviously. This is why:
3. Yeshua said, If your leaders tell you, “Look, the Kingdom is in Heaven” then the birds of heaven will precede you. If they say, ‘“It is in the sea,” then the fish will precede you. For the kingdom is inside you and it is outside of you. When you know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will understand that you are children of the living father. But if you do not know yourselves, then you dwell in poverty and you are poverty.” ―The Gospel of Thomas
When you know yourselves, then you will be known. This is a very direct statement. When you awaken consciousness in the physical and internal planes, you will know, and you will be known. Those initiates of the White Lodges watch everything we do. When you awaken in the dream state and are exploring that dimension, you may have and will have many experiences where masters from different pantheons come to you. They know our seriousness, our sincerity, if we are really working in this path. Magically they come to our aid. They inspire us. They teach us. They guide us.
Obviously there are levels among those masters. Whatever our level, we have to learn to give and to receive. In this way, you will understand that you are “children of the living father,” meaning, when we are awake. When you are awake in the astral plane or beyond, you are like a child. You are the Essence, the soul that is learning to discover the truth, and then we no longer believe in a dead father, a dogma. We speak directly face to face with the Being, with God. But if we do not know ourselves, we dwell in poverty. That poverty is not material, it is spiritual, psychological. 
Divine Children
We gain riches spiritually speaking, by transforming our mind, by becoming children again. Here we see the Master Jesus or Aberamentho, his sacred name, as cited in The Pistis Sophia, with a group of children he is instructing. In the Gospel of Thomas, we find a very powerful verse about what an initiate is like.
Initiates are like children. They are innocent. They are pure. They are not complicated. If you overcome ordeals in the astral plane, these masters often appear as children. If you conquer certain tests that they give you when you enter their temples, related to the four elements which are related to your life, after having conquered them, they come to you as cherubim, children. They are divine beings, and the beauty they exude is indescribable, because they are the innocence of Eden, the primeval state from which we come from and from which we seek to return. This is why it states in the Gospel of Thomas: 4. Yeshua said, “A person old in days will not hesitate to ask a little child seven days old, about the place of life, and the person will live. For many of the first will be last and become a single one.” ―The Gospel of Thomas
Days are kabbalistic. They are symbols. A day of the seven days of Genesis are symbols of how the soul becomes perfected. It is not a literal history. A person who is old does not refer to physical age. It is psychological age. Whether we are young or old physically is not relevant. Psychologically, we are very old. We are heavy, dense, and complicated. We inherit many elements psychologically that do not originate from this physical life, but from previous existences. So, all of us are very old. We are jaded.
But we can become like Abraham in the Old Testament, who at ninety-nine years old, eventually found the path. It is a beautiful symbol of how we enter the spiritual path itself. We seek to gain wisdom from these children, these masters that become innocent, who seek to teach us how to do the same. This is the essence of spiritual life, to really live, to be, truthfully, a human being in the full sense of the word. Many of those who will be first, will be last and become a single one. Who are those first and the last? The first are those who are approaching any spiritual study that may feel that they know. They think because they have read that they know about astral travel or divine experiences, who become inflated or pharisaical and egotistical. But those people have to become innocent. They have to reduce that pride into dust, to become nothing so that the Being can express. That is how we become a single one, a perfected master, a unitary, divine creature. 
The Hidden and Revealed
In the process, we learn to explore the hidden and revealed.
The beginning of the path is self-observation, to know how to pay attention, to know how to examine our thoughts, our feelings, and our desires, to separate, like the director watching an actor. You are the film maker, the consciousness who is watching. The actor is the different faults or conditions of mind that we possess. This is the sense that opens up the invisible world for us, not only physically, but also in dreams. This is why the Gospel of Thomas states: 5. Yeshua said, “Know what is in front of your face and what is hidden from you will be disclosed. There is nothing hidden that will not be revealed.” ―The Gospel of Thomas
Our unconsciousness is the hidden, the unrevealed, the unknown. But when you look with light, with your consciousness, into your mind, you start to see what is actually there, what is present. This is how the path of ethics, within spiritual studies, begins.
As you are observing your mind and paying attention, you learn that it is not only necessary to be mindful, but to know how to transform. You can see your anger in a moment of clarity, but you may still act on it, and you do not transform it. But if you are paying attention, observing yourself, you learn how to follow that voice of the conscience: to know how to behave when we are being criticized, gossiped about, or lied to. We should transform the situation. This is why the Gospel continues: 6. His disciples asked him and said to him, ‘“Do you want us to fast? How should we pray? Should we give to charity? What diet should we observe?” ―The Gospel of Thomas
Many people ask these questions when they approach a school, or any tradition, whether it is Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism or whatever it may be. People want to know external things: “What physical austerity should I perform? What practices should I do? How should I pray? What mantras should I recite? What food should I eat?”
6. Yeshua said, “Do not lie, do not do what you hate, because all things are disclosed before heaven. There is nothing that is hidden that will not be revealed and there is nothing covered that will remain undisclosed.” ―The Gospel of Thomas
Do not lie and do not do what you hate. When you are following your conscience, you discover that you do things that you do not like. It is very uncomfortable. It is very unpleasant when you see in yourself how you have defects or egos or behaviors which are complicated and create problems. To see that division in yourself can be very alarming, to say the least.
This is why real spirituality is difficult. You see that as much as you aspire to be noble and holy, you have a demon inside, or better said, multiple demons inside. But the beginning is, do not lie. When you see something in yourself that is unpleasant, meditate on it. Comprehend it and so do not act on it. Do not do what you hate, because everything we do is registered in a record. It is internal. You find even in Islam, they speak abundantly in the Qur’an about how our very deeds are written in a book. It is a symbol. Even on the Day of Judgment, our very skin will speak out for what we have done. 
Knowledge and Comprehension
This is why we have to study ourselves. We have to comprehend a very distinct difference between knowledge and comprehension. Samael Aun Weor stated in the Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology:
Knowledge and comprehension are different. Knowledge is of the mind; comprehension is of the heart. ―Samael Aun Weor, Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology
Intellectual knowledge is insufficient. Even having some basic knowledge of our personality, our language, or our customs and who we are, is not enough. We may have knowledge in our mind that alcohol is bad, and yet when you observe the life of the alcoholic, they continue.
What changes is comprehension. What changes our psychology is understanding, because it comes from the voice of the silence. When you understand in your very soul what behaviors and actions are harmful, you stop. We do not repeat. Samsara ends. Therefore, we experience, in the Buddhist sense, Nirvana, cessation and stillness. As we are studying ourselves and gaining self-knowledge, moment by moment, we approach death. Instant by instant from our birth to our present moment, we accumulate experiences, knowledge, our understanding, our language, and our personality. These things are born in time and will eventually die. We will not take them with us in the grave. What we will take with us is our psychology, our state of mind. If we are filled with pride, anger, fear, and lust, these things will not end when we physically die. They continue. They are matter, they are energy, and they are perception. They have life in a negative sense. We call them egos, selves, defects, I’s, or vices. Those psychological states determine our trajectory for the negative. In a sense we make decisions, moment to moment, if we are paying attention to ourselves. If we identify with ego, we enter into suffering. We descend to lower levels of being. But if we pay attention and observe, if we consciously choose to follow the voice of our heart and learn to navigate our own internal world, to act for the benefit of others, we ascend. It is always a choice that we focus on in this moment, what we do due to spiritual inquietudes, because we feel a yearning to want to change the situation and to do something about it. 
The Level of Being
We call this the level of being. We always ask ourselves this question again and again, “What is our level of being? Do we want to stay where we are at, or do we want to change? Do we want to transcend?”
Our level of being determines our life. This is why Samael Aun Weor stated in the Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology: Nobody can deny the fact that there are different social levels. There are church going people, people in brothels, farmers, businessmen, etc. In a like manner, there are different levels of being. Whatever we are internally, magnificent or mean, generous or miserly, violent or peaceful, chaste or lustful, attract the very circumstances of life. ―Samael Aun Weor, Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology
This is something you can verify if you practice this teaching. If you are practicing transmutation exercises like pranayama, prayer, alchemy, meditation, you see the result.
What is your quality of life? In the beginning, we work in this path because we want to cease suffering for ourselves. But to ascend to a more refined degree, we must work for the spirituality of others. The only way to do that is by psychologically establishing that foundation. 
Sincerity with Oneself
This is why we have to be sincere. We must be brutally honest. When you observe yourself, you find you are a universe in a microcosm. You have within good and bad, angelic and demonic, and sometimes indifferent. It is important in society that we cultivate certain habits, follow certain norms, have a certain job, and that we maintain our appearance. While these things have a certain practical utility for a job or whatever it may be, these things are really superficial.
We do not register the full character of a person because, psychologically, we have to wash the inside of our mind. Here we find a verse from the Gospel of Thomas which emphasizes a very important point which is repeated in the canonical Gospels: 89. Yeshua said, “Why do you wash the inside of the cup? Don’t you understand that the one who made the inside is also the one who made the outside?” ―The Gospel of Thomas
This is the basic tenet. We can be very cultured and refined, knowledgeable, having mannerisms of spirituality and spiritual personality, etc., but what matters is our mind.
What is our quality of being? What is our state? We all try to some degree to make a certain impression on others, to have a certain result. Usually, it is because of a desire. Maybe we feel that we want to be liked, respected, admired, or welcomed. This is obviously a very natural tendency. But as we begin to know ourselves through self-observation, we have to let it go. Whatever people will think, they will think. What matters is whether we are connected to our Being, because divinity is the source of integrity, a real unity. Divinity is the one who makes a real impact on our communities. That only comes about if we wash the inside of our mind, if we are meditating, observing ourselves, and changing day by day, because if we do not, we get worse. Personally, I am relating this verse especially because this is something that I have experienced. It has given me a lot of faith. 
Psychological Work
Here we see the Master Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane. He is praying before his Passion. You have seen other depictions or other films where you see that he is in great turmoil, in a lot of pain. He says, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup of bitterness pass from me. But not my will be done, but thine will be done” (Matthew 26:39).
Here we see something similar in the Gospel of Thomas: 70. Yeshua said, “If you bring forth that which is in you, what you have will save you. If you have nothing within you, what you don’t have then will kill you.” ―The Gospel of Thomas
This again is psychological. Personally, I remember at one point in my life when I first started this teaching, I was given a very heavy ordeal. I almost physically died. I remember at that time, being in the hospital, praying and meditating, and internally in the astral plane, I was being assisted. What they basically said was this, “If you are virtuous, if you want to change, and if you do it, you will not die.”
Obviously, we have karma. We call it the consequences of our former deeds. All of us have debts, because we made a lot of mistakes. So, at this point in my life, when I found the doctrine, they told me that “If you do not change, we cannot help you. You will have to go.” I prayed. I fought psychologically, internally, through certain ordeals, and fortunately with the help of God, that did not happen. “If you bring forth what you have in you, what you have will save you.” But if we have nothing, what option is there? It seemed very dark and dismal and very scary but, in those moments, if you are very sincere, like in the Muslim oral tradition, in the Hadith, Allah, the divine, says: “If you turn to me, I will come walking to you. If you come running, I come flying to you.” Allah says, “I am just as My slave thinks I am, and I am with him if He remembers Me. If he remembers Me in himself, I too, remember him in Myself; and if he remembers Me in a group of people, I remember him in a group that is better than them; and if he comes one span nearer to Me, I go one cubit nearer to him; and if he comes one cubit nearer to Me, I go a distance of two outstretched arms nearer to him; and if he comes to Me walking, I go to him running. If he comes to me with sins that will fill the world without associating partners with Me, I will welcome him with pardoning as big as that." ―Bukhari, Tawhid 16, 35; Muslim, Dhikr 2, (2675), Tawba 1, (2675)
“If you come running, I come flying to you.” Divinity makes sacrifices and has tremendous mercy, but obviously we have to do our part. We have to be willing to do what is truly right, even if it is difficult.
Internal States and Their Consequences
This is why our internal state determines our consequences in our life. Here we see the Archangel Michael, which in Hebrew means, “He who is like God,” or “Who is like God?”
He is holding a sword and a scale of justice. We chose this image because he represents an archetype, something we should follow in ourselves. To be like divinity, we need to have balance, and the sword of insight to cut through illusion. You may see the same in Catholic paintings of Michael slaying demons or rejecting demons. It is the same principle as when you have insight on your own pride, and eventually with meditation, you eliminate it. With the scales, you first have to have psychological equilibrium. Mind and heart, thought and feeling, have to be in perfect balance. We learn that through meditation, through serenity. It is in this way that we are armored for the worst ordeals that we can face, the inevitable. This is why Samael Aun Weor states the following in the Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology: The best weapon that a human being can use in life is a correct psychological state.
So, if you are paying attention, observing your heart, following your intuition, you learn to act moment by moment in the right way. That right way is not something that is dictated by anyone to anyone. It is something you know in the particular karma in your life, your circumstances, your job, your career, your marriage, your family life, your friendships, your relationships with co-workers―in whatever sphere of life. That is how we navigate ourselves.
The Tendency to Externalize
As we are self-observing, we tend to have a resistance. When you are looking in the mirror of your mind, at yourself, and you are looking at your ego, your defects, the ego fights back. It resists. You are directing attention within, and as you are self-observing, you find that it can become cloudy, like we see in this image. The mind always rejects our efforts because the subconscious ego knows that it will die through this work. So, we have a battle in a sense.
But obviously, in a moment of life where we have an ordeal―maybe it is at our job, something challenging happens that tests our psychological caliber―you find that the tendency is to act outwardly. If we are looking inside, observing ourselves, our anger, pride, fear, these things externalize. They like to blame others. That attitude has to change. To know ourselves, we have to take full responsibility of what we have inside. This is why Jesus stated in the Gospel of Thomas: 91. They said to him, “Tell us who you are so that we may believe in you.” He said to them, “You examine the face of heaven and earth and yet you have not come to know the one who is in your presence and you do not know how to examine this moment.” ―The Gospel of Thomas
This is the key. If you want to know your Inner Christ, examine your mind. Examine the moment, instant by instant. Be mindful, state by state, whatever occurs, whatever emerges, whatever happens. Observe it, and with time and practice, you begin to recognize that continuity as it becomes more consistent, such as we find in the nine stages of concentration in Buddhism, as we have here on the wall.
Here the monk is ascending this winding path to the heights of perfect serenity, perfect self-observation, perfect remembrance [Learn more by studying Calm Abiding: The Stages of Serenity].
Who Takes Advantage of Wisdom?
We have to ask ourselves, who takes advantage of wisdom? This is an interesting verse. I reflected on this in relation to this talk because there are some interesting circumstances with growing up with a spiritual group. Maybe our parents had a teaching or spiritual tradition. Maybe we grew up in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, or whatever it may be.
Despite the plethora and access to wisdom of all continents, from all times, that we have recorded, we still find that people suffer. It is an unprecedented age where we can open up our phone and find the Gnostic Gospels, or any scripture. There are Buddhist tantras that are now being published for the first time that have been physically inaccessible to people. But they have been accessible to initiates like Samael Aun Weor who even commented on scriptures that had not been published yet, but he knew them internally. This is a very profound thing. But for us we now have the knowledge. We have the internet, books, lectures, scriptures, instruction, workshops, meditation practices, and things that can help. But in the end, they are not going to guarantee that we know ourselves. We have to bring that to our own practice. Now, in this verse you find that there is a treasure that is hidden in a field that was left as an inheritance to a son. This is a beautiful symbol of inheriting traditions. I will read the verse for you. 109. Yeshua said, “The kingdom is like a person who had a treasure hidden in his field. He did not know it and when he died, he left it to his son. The son did not know about it. He took over the field and sold it. The buyer was plowing and found the treasure and began to lend money at interest to whomever he wished.” ―The Gospel of Thomas
All of us inherit traditions. If we are from a secular family, even our North American ideals and attitudes are very much rooted in a Judeo-Christian basis, whether people are conscious of it or not. But if we have grown up in a family, being Jewish, Christian, Muslim or Buddhist, we inherit profound wisdom. These scriptures are so deep, from all religions and traditions, and they are very practical if we know how to apply them.
But unfortunately, these things tend to be buried. You have to excavate them. You have to extract it from your own practice and experience to know what these teachings are providing, because with time, people inherit religions and traditions, but they do not unearth the real meaning. But then there is a buyer that takes over the field, who comes to Gnosticism or Judaism, etc., and by plowing in the field, by working practically in the earth, מלכות Malkuth, the physical world, applying its teachings, you find wisdom and inherit it. Then one can begin to lend money at interest to whomever he wishes. Obviously, this is not physical money. It is spiritual money. Symbolically in dreams, if you get money, it is because you are performing good deeds and you get paid with experiences. That is called dharma, the divine blessings. We may have been born into a gnostic family. I know plenty of missionaries and students who were born into a household that practices the gnostic teachings of Samael Aun Weor, and some of the kids do not take advantage of it. Obviously, we respect the will of others. That is the important thing. The parents should do the same. Some people have to fight, to suffer, and to bleed to find the teaching, but also, they appreciate it too. 
Renunciation and Spiritual Freedom
This is how and why we enter into renunciation.
We chose an image of Buddha Gautama Shakyamuni when he renounced his princely life by cutting off his hair. This is when he became a renunciate, an ascetic. He went to the wilderness to meditate, day by day living off of a grain of rice. People interpret this literally, but it is a symbol, how psychologically or physically he renounced his own attachments. This is why Yeshua stated in the Gospel of Thomas: 110. You who have found the world and have become wealthy, renounce the world. ―The Gospel of Thomas
This wealth, again, is not material. There are many people among spiritual groups who are not attached, who do not care about status, or about bank accounts. The truth is that as we are renouncing our attachments to things in life, divinity provides whatever we need on whatever fundamental level. What matters is that no matter what our circumstances, as we are learning to know ourselves, we renounce those psychological states which make us very weak and worldly. It is good to know how to navigate the world. But there are many people who know how to do that without integrity. The truth is that if we are changing inside, our physical circumstances do change. Our level of being determines our life.
Resources
In conclusion, if you want to study more about this topic, you can study two books from Glorian Publishing by Samael Aun Weor and on the Glorian.org website. I quoted some of their excerpts at length. They are Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology and The Great Rebellion. Very powerful texts to study altogether. If you meditate on them, they will provide great insights.
Lastly, we have resources on meditation. These two courses above are from Glorian: Meditation Essentials and Meditation without Exertion. We also have our courses on Gnostic Meditation and Sufi Principles of Meditation. If you really want to know, at the fundamental level of who you are or who we are, we learn to meditate. That is the primary way. At this point in time, I invite you to ask questions. Questions and Answers
Question: You mentioned on earlier slides about avoiding death or that we shouldn’t have to go through adverse stuff. It wasn’t referring to physical death, but you were referring to something else?
Instructor: More importantly it is the second death that Samael talks about. All of us have ego, which is our connection to the infernal worlds or the hell realms. If we do not consciously eliminate those defects willingly, then nature follows with this process. We eventually are recycled, Samsara. This is the negative turn of the wheel called devolution, meaning, the soul enters more inferior states until entering the submerged mineral kingdom. The ego is eventually purified. Then the Essence that was trapped becomes free. The problem is that, that path does not result in mastery. You do not gain self-knowledge to a very high degree going that way. Also, it is very painful, very distressing. If you look at all the cosmologies of the world, or scriptures that talk about the infernal planes, they are truly terrifying―not only so just by reading it, but when you experience it, when you see in the dream state those dimensions and what they are like. It is good to have that experience because you get to see what will happen if we do not change. So, you will not taste death by following the Word, meaning, that this is the way to consciously eliminate the ego and not be swallowed by nature, by the Moon. There are two ways. Moses said: I call heaven and earth to record this day against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live... ―Deuteronomy 30:19
The seed of your Essence, the seed of your creative energy too. Our work with the energies of our sexuality is what determines everything.
Comment: I am reading a book called, In Love with the World by Rinpoche. He talks about how he went through this experience of death, almost physical death, and he was able to get what he calls “luminous.” It is a period of time in the middle of dying, that you have an opportunity, if you are conscious, if you haven’t passed out, to experience enlightenment or bliss or that connection to oneness. He was describing how that is the ultimate teacher, death. So, I was thinking of how we can use death as a way to reconnect with our inner divinity. Instructor: Yes, physical death is obviously a significant moment. Samael Aun Weor said that there are three moments in life that are the most important: birth, marriage, and death―birth, life, and our physical conclusion. In Buddhism, they teach how to consciously take advantage of death, that moment by moment, we live, knowing that we will die, and we prepare for it. The fact is that if we do not prepare now, when we die, we will not know where we will go. So, if we train ourselves, if we awaken within dreams, we awaken within death. Birth and death, or better said, birth and sleep, in Greek mythology, are the brothers Thanatos and Hypnos. We do talk about it in the course Dream Yoga and Astral Travel, but again, if you are asleep here, you will be asleep when you die. If you want to know what will happen when you die, if you are conscious when you die, you have much more agency than if you were not conscious. You can speak face to face with the hierarch of law, Anubis, in Egyptian mythology, the gods of judgment, and you can talk about your trajectory, what you want and what you need to do. Your Being will help you because if you are helping other people, divinity will give you insights like that. I believe they talk about that in The Tibetan Book of the Dead, especially the Bardos. If you are gaining light here and now, then the transition will be very easy, or easier. It depends on karma and what we do. Question: We talk about death in a lot of different ways in this tradition. Can you clarify the difference between the second death that you mentioned earlier and ego death or psychological death which we see as a positive thing? Instructor: Yes. Psychological death of the ego is good because you eliminate pride, hatred, fear, lust. You extract the soul that is trapped in those elements and you awaken. You develop mastery. The second death occurs when we choose not to get rid of our pride, our ego, our fear, our laziness, our defects. Then we have no choice but to be taken down to a very specific type of processing plant, the recycling plant of nature, and we call that hell. In that state, the ego gets disintegrated against our will. But that process is very painful, because it takes a long time depending on the magnitude of our actions, our defects, how dense they are, to be eliminated. Psychological death is preferred, even though it is unpleasant, because you do so willingly and you gain knowledge. You gain wisdom. Then you integrate all the parts of your soul that were trapped, and because you are doing it intentionally, you gain self-knowledge, mastery. So, that is the difference. Question: You also referenced some of the higher levels of the Tree of Life, those states of being. If we are able through meditation to achieve a moment of ego death, where we can extract our soul, our consciousness, out of those egotistical, vicious states, will we enter into those higher states, or where will we go? Are we going to enter the illuminated void and achieve enlightenment in that moment, or what happens? Instructor: It depends. Our Being is the one who manages those experiences. Obviously, greater results occur when we make great efforts. Divinity rewards us according to our deeds. You could be working on an ego here in מלכות Malkuth, the physical body, and you could enter through astral projection into הוד Hod, the Astral World. Then from that state, you can go higher. You can pray to your Divine Mother and ask, “Show me the truth. Take me to the Absolute.” In some cases, she will take you without even asking. She knows, before we even act, what we will do, and that is a blessing. It is a blessing to receive that guidance and that is managed by divinity. What experiences we reach according to the Tree of Life is always negotiated by our Innermost, our spirit, our Inner Christ. If we have the dharma, we go. There are levels of experiences and dreams and internal states and that always occurs when we have earned it and when we are ready. Fortunately, we have divinity to manage that. Sometimes having an experience, even though it is very positive, could have consequences for us if we identify too much. In Buddhism, there is talk about being drunk on Nirvana―maybe having a beautiful experience, even approaching the illuminated void and being proud as in “Look what I have experienced!” We have to watch out for that and be very careful, because that pride will take us out and will keep us down here. Question: Along with that comment on the illuminating void, is that what a person experiences when everything becomes very bright and there is a high vibrational sensation? Instructor: The Absolute is what we call the eternal abstract space. The void is like an ocean, a dark abyss, but which is truly light. It is a form of illumination, but to our eyes it is black. It almost appears like the rippling of water with some luminosity, but eternal, just space. You may experience it if you are meditation. In the astral plane, your Divine Mother can take you to that state. So, it is not sensation. Sensation relates to יסוד Yesod, which is our vital body. Our vital body is the energetic vehicle that allows us to experience sensation. Our physical body would not have life if it were not for our vital body. Truly, to go to the Absolute, we have to rely on our Divine Mother, and that transcends even the Tree of Life. All the vehicles, all of the spheres represent vehicles of Being. 
In synthesis, we have מלכות Malkuth, the physical body.
הוד Hod which is our astral body, where we experience emotion. נצח Netzach, the mental body where we experience thought. Beyond that is Nirvana and here the ego cannot enter. This is תפארת Tiphereth. תפארת Tiphereth is the beauty of the human soul. In that state of Nirvana, you see many masters there, with their tunics of luminosity. You see the flow of life, cause and effect, movement of the wind in the trees, the ripples, cause and effects. But this is beyond the ego. The ego cannot go there. Beyond that, you have גבורה Geburah which is the divine soul, consciousness, which is really the root of conscience. So, everything we talked about today relates to גבורה Geburah because she, the divine soul, our conscience, is the one who organizes the scales of justice in ourselves. She is the source of intuition. She is the vehicle by which the spirit acts, חסד Chesed, which is mercy in Kabbalah. Beyond that, we have the top trinity, which is כתר Kether, חכמה Chokmah, and בינה Binah: the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in Christianity. In Hebrew, this is the Crown, Wisdom, and Intelligence, the Intelligence of God. בינה Binah is the Divine Mother, but also the Divine Father too. They are masculine and feminine, which are the אלוהים Elohim in Hebrew. חכמה Chokmah is Christ. כתר Kether is the Father, the Supreme. The Absolute is beyond the Tree of Life. In a sense, we can say that כתר Kether is like מלכות Malkuth to the אין סוף Ain Soph, the Limitless, but you can go there if you pray to your Divine Mother, and say, “Take me to the Absolute.” If we are serious, we will go. In that state, when you are faced with the void, you feel like your whole identity is being annihilated. The ego, on that threshold of the astral plane, when it enters into a portal or into the void, with ego it is like you are entering into an abyss, when your self is being reduced to nothing. The ego becomes terrified, and that fear can knock you out of that experience. You come back, you fall back into the astral plane and then you may return into your body. Samael Aun Weor had that experience three times when he was eighteen. He meditated, he prayed, he approached the threshold of the void and he always stumbled. He got identified or attached or afraid. Eventually, for his last time, he did what he called the great jump, and he leaped right in. In the annihilation of his self, his singular identity, he became the true identity of the universe, the cosmos, beyond the universe even. He became a forest, a butterfly, a planet, a galaxy, a star. When you lose your identity as a self, you gain the true identity which is universal, and therefore you become a drop in the ocean of universal life, free in its movement. That is exactly it. This universe is governed by duality, even though you have three pillars. The right and the left balanced with the scales only in equilibrium, through this middle pillar, you go up to the source. If you have that experience but you fail, just be patient. Keep working, because it is not easy to let go. It would be terrifying to the mind. Samael even said that “Satan took me out,” his own ego, his own mind. In trying to know himself, he eventually had to let go. If you notice the sephiroth going from the bottom up, you find that you abandon more dense materialism and sense of self. Obviously, the physical body is very apparent, and people think they are the body. Energy or vitality, emotions and even thoughts, when you go up, you find that these qualities in the psyche become more rarified. They are harder to pinpoint. It is easy to point out our thoughts and emotions generally, but our will is more subtle. The willpower to do. You can sense it by your willpower to do something, like a project, or planning to come to class. We use our willpower to a degree. But beyond that, more rarified levels until you reach the top and enter the beyond, there is no self―no singular identity, just universal perception, cosmic. That is Christ: the Limitless Light, the Limitless, and the Nothing. Question: So, you say in the lecture that we need to know our unconscious self, our egotistical defects, such as pride, fear, etc. And yet, if we want to enter this illuminating void, we have to let go of our self. So, it seems like a contradiction. We want to know our conscious self. Can you clarify that? Instructor: Good question. The self we identify with is Klipoth, ego. קליפות Klipoth in Hebrew means, “shells.” These are our defects, because our pride, our anger, our vanity, and our lust are shells that capture and trap our soul, the Essence, the light. We have to abandon the ego, but to abandon it, you need to know it. You cannot get out of a prison cell if you do not have the key or if you do not know you are in a cage. When you know that you are trapped in an ego like anger, you can find your way out. When you get out of it, you experience freedom. But there are levels of the self. The ego inhabits מלכות Malkuth, יסוד Yesod, הוד Hod and נצח Netzach. These are the physical body, the vital body, or the emotions and the mind. This is the realm of the ego, our terrestrial self. To go higher, you have to know your limitations―to look at them, to understand them, and eliminate them, because you can experience the void, like you could have a vacation, but it does not mean that we are a citizen there. We learn to do that by becoming conscious citizens of the cosmos by getting rid of all the baggage. The ego keeps us weighed down. They are more dense, and if you experience the higher regions, you feel less self in the egotistical sense. But there is a real and legitimate identity there, the Being, which is not what we think of here. It is something much more beautiful, profound, and real. Comment: There are so many examples in our culture like in the eighties fantasy movies where they are always describing the same concept of duality becoming one. You have two different races. One is like the ego that desires oneness and then you have the ones that are in line with nature, one with nature. At the great conjunction, the two become one. It is amazing to me that in the eighties, it talks about this, which is what you are describing. Instructor: The collective unconsciousness of humanity has been expressing more of these ideas, but often without an intentional [or coherent] way. Now, the best thing is when we study art, or any cultural phenomena and we look at the intentionality behind it. For example, there are stories, old folklore and fantasy or tales that teach this, such as Pinocchio. It is a very objective initiatic story written by an initiate. Carlo Collodi was describing how a wooden puppet, who is a slave of the forces of nature, becomes a true human being, and escapes Klipoth in order to go to the heights. In the story, he was even swallowed biblically by a whale. This was a resurrection. He becomes a true human being because of the blue fairy, his Divine Mother, and because of his good deeds, he accomplishes it. So, there are a lot of symbols. The myths are very profound, and we explain them through Kabbalah. Kabbalah teaches everything. Since there are no more questions, we will conclude. In the next lecture, we will continue with the Gnostic Gospels. We will talk about Our Divine Potential. It will be the focus of the three sciences of the Gnostic tradition: Kabbalah, Alchemy, and Psychology. Thank you all for coming! 
Congratulations to the chaste saints. Their souls never condemn them. Having won them, they are never separated from themselves. Congratulations to the spirits of the chaste saints. They have received the perfect heavenly crown from the heavenly sphere assigned to them. Congratulations to the bodies of the chaste saints. They have been deemed worthy to become temples of God, so that Christ may dwell in them. ―Acts of Thomas What is Chastity?
For many people, we associate chastity with celibacy, which is the total avoidance of sex. For centuries, many religious organizations have taught us that sex is shameful, that sex should be avoided except in the cases of marriage or to procreate children. For many centuries, this teaching has been propagated that sex is something shameful or dangerous, precisely because of its tremendous power and the sacred nature of the sexual act. It is in sex that we have the power to create life, and God, divinity, also has that power to create life, and has given us the ability to do that through the unity of a man and a woman in sex.
We see in sex the principles of creation. There are always three factors involved whenever life is created. There is a masculine principle that is projected. There is a feminine principle that is receptive. Uniting them, there is the holy conciliation, sex, through the Holy Spirit if you are familiar with the Christian teachings. Today’s lecture will be an introduction to the Gnostic mysteries of chastity, and we will be studying a gnostic text, a scripture from almost two thousand years ago called Acts of Thomas in India. This scripture is generally considered to be a teaching of celibacy by many mainstream scholars, and that is because at that time, the true teaching of chastity―how to harness our sexual energy and how to work in the sexual act in accordance with God’s highest commandments―was not taught publicly. For many centuries, sex has been relegated to the private sphere, and what happened in people’s private, sexual lives was not talked about openly. Perhaps it is for this reason that many people have associated sex with shame and fear, but the reality is that sex has a dual potential. It has a potential to bring us into greater suffering, to create pain, for who could deny that sexual abuse, sexual crimes that are committed, are among the most horrible abominable acts that we see today? Sex also has a beautiful potential, a spiritual potential. Chastity is the teaching about how we can use sex and our sexual force in accordance with God’s commandments. Those familiar with Christianity know that two commandments directly concern sex. One of them is that “Thou shall not commit adultery.” We should not have sex with multiple people. That is a commandment from God. The other commandment is “Thou shall not fornicate.” Fornication is the misuse of sex, whether outside of a marriage or within a marriage―if sex is used with impurity, with lust, with desire, for selfish pleasures, in forgetfulness of divinity, which is always present with us―especially in the sexual act when we have that power of creation illuminated. The Duality of Sex
There are two doors related to sex. When we go through the act of sex in one direction―which is what we know about today in our public media, in our television shows, in music―we experience all of the sexual sensations with a tremendous desire. We go around seeking more and more of those sensations. We watch videos. We read articles. We find partners and go to places intending to find sexual partners, and that is the modern idea of sex, that sex is something to be enjoyed.
Ever since the sexual liberation movement around the 1960s and 1970s, we had so much public content shared about sex. There has been medical research, lots of movies, television shows, in which, in the very first few moments, you see very graphic content that several decades ago or even just a few years ago would not have been permissible. Sex is unavoidable in our modern culture, and that is why in this teaching of chastity, we have finally been granted access to how to use sex in accordance with God’s law, knowledge that was not given publicly before the 1950s, knowledge that was preserved for centuries and millennia by true initiates of mystery schools, of genuine temples, of religion. Only those who were properly prepared, who had purity of mind and heart, who had willpower and self-control, were able to understand and learn the true secret of chastity: how to perform the sexual act with purity. That is why when we study ancient gospels like Acts of Thomas, we see that sex can be veiled, can be a hidden mystery, something that must be discovered. Anyone who remembers being a child, before they had exposure or had much understanding about sex, it was a great mystery. It was something that, when encountered for the first time, it produced a tremendous reaction and tremendous effect in all of us. Anyone who has experienced some form of sexual trauma can tell you that sex is much more than of mere physical act, that sex is psychological, and has tremendous power to shape our life. Each of us, if we are sincere and examine our psychological relationship with sex, can see that this is an important aspect of life, and sex is a natural part of life. But if that act produces pain or produces joy is truly dependent on the psychological state that we bring to that act. That is why we seek to understand, through scriptures, the mysteries of how to become pure, how to become chaste, and gain all of those rewards that are spoken of regarding the chaste saints that I read earlier from this scripture, Acts of Thomas. How to Approach Sacred Sexuality
In order to properly approach this teaching today, we have to set aside the concepts, the ideas, even the experiences or preferences that we may have regarding sex, to encounter this teaching with an open mind, for it is a mystery to most of us, a very new teaching to many of us, that has not been heard about before. For those who have never heard of chastity before, it may be surprising. It may be offensive to your ideas about what sex is, and since we have been exposed to a large amount of propaganda in our culture regarding sex, it is difficult to approach it with humility and open-mindedness when we already have strongly held positions and opinions about our sexuality.
So, I encourage you to take the mindset of a child, and if you are able to, return to that state of innocence before you had much knowledge of sex, what it really signified, and to have an open mind as you hear this teaching today. For Jesus taught us in the Gospel of Matthew that we must be changed and become as children. Through chastity, we are able to become again like children, like virgins, new to sex. And [Jesus] said, “Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” ―Matthew 18:3-4
If we really want to enter into heaven to know the mysteries of divinity, to experience the bliss of Eden from which we have been cast out by our abuse of sexuality, we must have that innocence, that purity, that humility and reverence of a child when we approach the topic of sex.
Kabbalah and Alchemy: The Heart of Gnostic Christianity
We also need the two esoteric sciences of Gnostic Christianity that allow us to interpret scripture according to the principles of the initiates. People who are initiated into the mystery schools or the highest levels and temples of genuine religion were taught Kabbalah and Alchemy.
The first, Kabbalah, is related with the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, because Kabbalah can unveil to us the mysteries of the universe, of nature, of ourselves. Kabbalah is like a map of divinity, and for those who have not studied it before, I strongly encourage you to study the course on Glorian.org. This course on Kabbalah relates to the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet and has a corresponding course related to the twenty-two arcana of Tarot. These twenty-two letters and twenty-two arcana of tarot are one in the same, and that each one encodes a spiritual principle, a mystery about our universe, our existence, our spiritual journey, and how we can return to divinity. That code is very deep, and it requires much more study than what I can provide to you today, but we will apply it in a basic way through kabbalistic numerology, to give you an introduction on how we must apply this science to spiritual scriptures. Similarly, Alchemy is essential for understanding scripture and we would be remiss not to apply Alchemy to this particular scripture, Acts of Thomas, for it is an extremely sexual and alchemical text. Alchemy comes from two roots, Al, El, God. אל El is God in Hebrew and Al-, the + ilah, God, الله Allah, “The God” relates to the Arabic name of God. Chem, or Khem is from χυμεία Kimia (Greek), this means “to fuse or to cast metal.” Those of us who are familiar with the tradition of Alchemy from medieval times will understand why they encoded Alchemy through symbols of converting lead into gold, that one must take a very heavy, dense, and dark material and transform it through a scientific procedure into gold, the most pure and rarified and noble of the metals. That science encodes how we can use sex, as a procedure, through which we can convert the base lead of our personality, of our corrupted psychology, into the pure gold of the spirit, and give birth to Christ within our own physical body. It is very important to understand Alchemy was written in code and that the masters who wrote about it, just like the great masters of all religions, kept the sexual teaching hidden, so it would not be abused by people who approached it with ambition, with pride, with lust, with little spiritual understanding. Only now, because our society has become so open, because we have entered the era of Aquarius where sexual liberation is abundant, we are able to speak publicly about mysteries which were never revealed to the profane. Though Alchemy, sexual Alchemy, we are able to fuse ourselves with divinity. Alchemy is the science to fuse the human soul with Christ, God, divinity. Christ is a principle, a force, an energy, an intelligence that is permeating every atom of life in our universe. Christ is far beyond one terrestrial person, but Christ has the ability to manifest physically in our world through a properly prepared individual. That is why Jesus Christ, the greatest master this planet has ever known, is given that title of Christ, because he was incarnating Christ into the physical world, so that infinite force of love, compassion, and wisdom could teach humanity how to live in accordance with the laws that divinity has set into our nature―laws like chastity, which forbid fornication and forbid adultery, so that sex can only be used in purity, in accordance with divinity, in mindfulness of the divine nature of that sacrament. 
Mystical Geography in the Acts of Thomas
So, in order to understand the basics of these two sciences―Kabbalah relating to the Tree of Life and Alchemy relating to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden―we will study the location of this scripture.
Acts of Thomas in India is about an apostle, Judas Thomas, who is sent on a mission to India. While scholars generally accept that this was truly a real man who traveled to the actual location of India around the Indus river, in that region at that time, establishing Christian churches, we must also know that this text is symbolic. It encodes a greater truth, a spiritual truth, a secret, a mystery, hidden in its symbols. The first symbol is India because India is far more than a literal place in this scripture. India indicates the setting or the environment in which this apostle is going to bring his teaching, the teaching of Christ, the teaching of chastity. This is why we need to analyze India in accordance with Kabbalah, this divine science that can help us to understand the nature of God and also the path to return to divinity. In Hebrew the word for India is הֹדּוּ Hodu. הֹדּוּ Hodu is written with three Hebrew letters. The first is ה Hei, the second is ד Daleth, the third is ו Vav. Just observing the shape of the symbols of these letters, we can see already a hint of their spiritual significance. In the letter ה Hei, we see a shape of a womb, a uterus. That is because ה Hei represents femininity, the divine feminine, and also the physical feminine body and sexual organs. At the end of this word, we see ו Vav. ו Vav is a phallic symbol resembling an erect penis. For that reason, we can understand that on either side of this word, we have the man and the woman present. Uniting this man and woman is ד Daleth, which has the shape of a door. ד Daleth means “door” in Hebrew. Sex can be referred to as the door to Eden, and it is also the door out of Eden through the abuse of sex. We lose the ability to remain in union with Christ, with God. We lose our bliss, for עֵדֶן Eden means “bliss” in Hebrew. That is why initially in this gospel, Acts of Thomas, the apostle is a bit reluctant to travel to the place where he is assigned, because India is not literally a place he is reluctant to go, but symbolically it signifies sex, that door which is so treacherous and can lead us back to God, but it can also expel us away from God and separate us from God if sex is abused. That is why we see this quote from Samael Aun Weor in his book Tarot and Kabbalah: …within sex is a major force that can liberate the human being, but also a major force that can enslave the human being.” ―Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah 
Tarot, Kabbalah, and the Hebrew Letters
For those familiar with Tarot, you can see the symbol of the fifteenth arcanum, Passion, commonly referred to as the devil. The fifteenth arcanum relates to the Hebrew letter ס Samech, the serpent biting its tail.
That cycle of passion is what can enslave us and convert us unto devils. If we see an attractive person walking by, we may be compelled to act a certain way around them and talk a certain way around them. We may obsess about that person, or conversely, we may try to repress that force and avoid that person, avoid thinking about them. But either way we know that sexual potency is a major force that has an impact on us psychologically, regardless of if we try to indulge it or repress it. It shapes us, and very few are those human beings who can truly master and command their sexual force. Sex is also the key to liberating us, and that is what Thomas will teach us in this Gospel. The reason why we can relate the Arcanum 15 with India, esoterically speaking, is because the kabbalistic addition of the three letters in the word India: ה Hei, being the fifth letter in the Hebrew alphabet, corresponds with the number five; ד Daleth, being the fourth, corresponds with the number four; and ו Vav corresponds with six as the sixth letter in the Hebrew alphabet. In Kabbalah we know that there is an esoteric significance to the sum total of any number given in a scripture. When we add 5 + 4 + 6, we receive the kabbalistic sum of 15, the devil. Judas Thomas of Acts of Thomas has the challenging task of going to the realm of the devil in order to convert the people there, who are confused about sex and sexuality, through many interesting parables about sex, back to chastity, so they can become chaste saints, disciples of Christ. 
Alchemical Symbolism of the Indus River and Date Palm Tree
Through the study of Alchemy, we can also examine the symbol of India, which relates to the Indus River, a river which gave tremendous life to that region and continues to give tremendous life to that region.
The Indus River in Sanskrit: सिन्धु Sindhu, “a large body of water; river, ocean,” derived from Cintu: date palm tree. For those who have studied the course on Kabbalah and Alchemy, they will know immediately that water, especially bodies of water like rivers and oceans, correspond with the sexual force, especially the sexual force in relationship with the Divine Mother, for it is the waters of the womb which create life. The sexual waters of the woman bring life and also the sexual waters of the man, semen, also give life. That is the alchemical significance of water when we see it mentioned in the scriptures, the waters of life. However, it is important to know that water can also bring destruction, and that is why through the floods of Noah, humanity was destroyed for their crimes, for their vices. This is a dual symbol. Sex can bring life and it can destroy life, depending on how it is used. 
This teaching is seen very clearly in the Qur’an. The word Sindhu is derived from “Cintu,” date palm tree and date palms, which were abundant in the Middle Eastern region. They are sometimes considered to be the true tree in the Garden of Eden―not an apple tree, but a date palm from which Adam and Eve ate, and that is a very sexual symbol. That is why that is the tree related with Alchemy, the science of fusing oneself with God through sacred sexuality.
In Surah 16:67 in the Qur’an, we see that the date palm is mentioned along with grapevines. Grapes are another sexual symbol, which is why Jesus performed his first miracle at a wedding, and that miracle was to convert water into wine. We see the relationship here, that water is our potential, and if that water is transformed, it can become the spiritual wine of the soul at a wedding, where two are married. That is the same symbol as converting the lead―the impure sexuality, slowly through a process of gentle heat, through a scientific method―into the gold of the purified spirit and soul. And from the fruits of date palm trees and grapevines you derive intoxicants as well as wholesome provision. Surely in this is a sign for those who understand. ―Quran 16:67
Who are the people with spiritual understanding? They are the initiates: the ones with spiritual ears and eyes who can hear and see the mysteries that are hidden behind in the scripture. In this mystery, so beautifully presented to us in the Holy Qur’an, is that from sex, we can see intoxication, obsession, addiction, lust, desire, that has no satiation. We can also see wholesome provision: the ability to bring life, not only physical life of a child, but also spiritual life to regenerate ourselves.
The date palm, interestingly, the date resembles the testes, the male sexual organ. The date is considered a sacred food in Islam. We can see why that is sacred, just as our sexual seed is sacred. The sexual water must be conserved, transformed, transmuted through the science of Alchemy.
Harnessing the Sexual Force
That is precisely the science that Samael Aun Weor, the founder of the Gnostic tradition, unveiled in the 1950s in his book, The Perfect Matrimony. As today’s lecture is only an introduction into the Gnostic mystery of chastity, I strongly encourage you to read this book, which can be read for free online on Glorian.org or purchased from any bookseller. In this book, Samael Aun Weor extensively teaches us the science of sexual Alchemy, chastity, and also pranayama or transmutation for single persons, who are not yet married and need the science by which they can still harness that sexual force for themselves.
For single people, it is important to note that they can conserve their sexual energy and must transmute it every day through practices like pranayama, which you can read about in the book The Perfect Matrimony. If one conserves their sexual energy but represses it, does not transform that energy, one could become a very troubled person. We have seen that the celibacy, the total avoidance of sex, is harmful. It produces psychological imbalances, and in some cases has led to sexual crimes. We do not advocate celibacy in this teaching, but chastity does require that an unmarried person abstain from sex. Until we are married, we should be transmuting that energy, working with prayer, mantra, pranayama, so that force is continually flowing through our body and allowing us to unite with divinity. If we lose that force through vices such as masturbation, we lose our connection to divinity. That is why many feel shame after orgasm, for they know that they have lost something valuable. Yes, on a physical level we can lose thousands of sperm, but for men and women orgasm is harmful, more importantly on a spiritual and energetic level, because the orgasm produces a short circuit in the physical and energetic bodies and destroys those bodies. The orgasm not only affects us energetically and physically, but also spiritually, in that when we expel that sacred substance from our bodies, we are losing the very force of God, the creator within us. That is why we become blind, deaf, and lame, spiritually speaking. That is why when most of us sit to meditate or pray, we see black. We hear nothing because we are dead inside, spiritually speaking, because we have lost the very force of life and creation within our own body. 
Spiritual Creation is Sexual
Samael Aun Weor states:
The sexual act is the real consubstantiation of love in the tremendous psycho-physical reality of our Nature. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony
Consubstantiation in Christian terms relates to the teaching that the bread and wine of the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Communion, is simultaneously one with the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Con represents “together,” substantiation: substance―they are one substance together, simultaneously. That is the teaching in mainstream Christianity, but Samael Aun Weor taught from an esoteric standpoint and is pointing out that in a psychological and physical reality, sex unites us with divinity.
Psychologically and physically, we must be pure. We must maintain that sexual energy within our body and transform it in accordance with God’s guidance, the teachings of chastity. That is the real consubstantiation in which we are simultaneously human and divine. Something is created when a man and a woman unite sexually. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony
In the sexual act when man and woman unite, something is created. What is created? Of course, we know that a physical child can be created when a man and woman unite sexually, and there is a mystery in which one sperm and one egg are needed to create a pure physical child. That is a mystery for another lecture, the mystery of Immaculate Conception, but you can read about it in The Yellow Book by Samael Aun Weor if you are interested in learning more about it.
What else is created when we unite sexually? Well, if we reflect on our lives, what have we seen created through sex? We may see some happy marriages, although these are becoming fewer. We have seen much pain created by sex, suffering. That is because mankind has not been taught how to use sex appropriately. Mankind has been taught how to abuse sex, how to indulge in sex, how to go around seeking the next sensations or have multiple partners and masturbate―all kinds of sexual vices which corrupt our psychology. These vices do not just harm our physical body. They harm us psychologically. They create imbalances. They create addictions. They create lunacy. Some of the worst sexual crimes are committed by lunatics who have zero control over their sexual force. Sexuality must be properly understood so that we can use it in balance with divinity. This is a great mystery that can only be known through experience. Anyone who has experienced the suffering, the heartbreak, the loss and sorrow of lust, can understand that there is one doorway that we can pass through with sex that brings an emptiness, a longing that is never fulfilled. Many people believe in the promise of love, of sex as love, but do not know how to bring real love into the sexual act. Love must be brought not only for our spouse and our partner—with selflessness, sacrificing our own selfish desires for that act—but out of love, union with our partner. Love must also involve divinity. Where divinity is not present, there is no love. Christ, God, divinity is love. If you are performing the sexual act or sexual behaviors without divinity, there is no love present there. We need to understand that the very potential for our own heart to love our spouse, to love humanity, to love our children, the potential in our own heart is the spark of divinity. The one who loses their sexual forces, their sexual energies, and their sexual substance, loses that ability to love. That is why lust for the pleasure it can bring, in the short term, never materializes with that eternal happiness that it seems to promise. People spend their whole lives believing that chasing sex will somehow bring them that happiness, will bring them to love. But it is not sex alone which brings us to love. We must bring love to sex, through our inner union with divinity. That is why chastity does not begin just in the sexual union with a partner. Alchemy begins with us, with our willingness to purify our minds and hearts, to become as children, to go sincerely and humbly unto God, and to learn these mysteries from our inner divinity. Divinity will teach you much about chastity and sexual Alchemy if you are open in your heart, in your mind, if you are pure, if you have set aside your pride which thinks it already understands sexuality, that it already knows what sex is about. You allow God to teach you God’s divine mystery of sex. You will see that on the other side of that door that there is a tremendous abundance of sacred mystery that we have barely begun to understand through our modern, contemporary notions about sex. The Prerequisites of Sexual Alchemy
So, how does one practice sexual Alchemy with their partner? For those of us who are married, what is the practice of chastity? How do we engage in this sexual act, but do it with purity and do it with full meditative awareness of the presence of divinity?
Samael Aun Weor gives the full teaching about that in The Perfect Matrimony, but just to read a little bit for you today from that book―in relationship to a man and a woman, sexually united and experiencing all the bliss of that union―he states the following: If man and woman would know how to withdraw without the spasm, if in those moments of delightful enjoyment they would have the willpower to control the animal ego, and if at that point they would retire from the sexual act without ejaculating the semen (neither inside the womb, nor outside of it or to the side of it, nor in any other place) they would have then performed an act of Sexual Magic. This is what is called in occultism the Arcanum A. Z. F.
God has created a door for us, a door in physical nature through which we can enter Eden, into bliss, or through which we can leave it. Meditate on your experiences with sex. Become prayerful and sincere and see if sex has really brought you lasting happiness, or if you have been abusing that act, forgetting divinity, forgetting love, and if that is the case, then you will understand when he states Cupid leaves crying. Cupid relates to the god Eros, the god of love, one in the same mystery of Christ in the Greek mysteries.
Eros leaves us when we orgasm, men and women. Although women may not lose any physical substance through the orgasm, they are losing tremendous substance energetically and spiritually, and that can be seeing through clairvoyance. Orgasm separates us from love and locks us out of heaven. We must become pure like children, like chaste virgins, as we enter into the sexual act every time remaining pure, bringing love for our spouse and love for divinity. If we break this law of nature and we fornicate through orgasm―orgasm and fornication are one in the same, regardless if we are in a marriage or not―we will in the long run experience tremendous suffering because we are losing our connection to divinity. Divinity is what really brings us happiness. Through sex, we strengthen our union with divinity if it is performed with purity, prayer, and love. Before we can perform sacred sexuality, sexual Alchemy with a partner, we have to establish that covenant with our own inner divinity by establishing purity within ourselves. We begin this practice as animals, filled with animal lust and desire, but through willpower, through constant application, we are refining this act and refining our own psychology, meditating on the evils that exist within our own heart, the selfishness, the pride, the greed, the lust, the desires that are never happy, that are never satisfied. How do we free ourselves from that? How do we liberate ourselves from that? It is through sex, working with Kundalini, which is the mystery of the Divine Mother who controls those sexual waters and allows us to become free, to become washed and purified by those waters, if we keep those waters within our body. When we lose that spiritual water, we become inhabited. We open that doorway for evil forces to come into our body. Sex is the original sin, because sex with fornication opened the gates of Eden and expelled us out of union with divinity. Sex is called the original sin, but sex with purity is salvation and redemption of mankind. Acts of Thomas is about many, many individuals who are suffering from the misuse of sex. Today we are only going to talk a little bit about Act I, “The Wedding Feast of the King’s Daughter,” but if you read this scripture, you will see again and again that people are committing sexual crimes, that people are being tormented by sexual demons, that sex is prevalent throughout this act. That is why Kabbalistically and esoterically speaking, India symbolizes sex, the perilous nation in which people are afflicted by sexual impurities, just like each one of us. Whether we have had sex or not, each of us should examine our relationship to sex, our sexual behaviors, our psychological relationship to sex, and ask ourselves if it is pure. Many who fear sex just want to avoid it, never want to think about it, want to repress it, want to be celibate. But that is a false door, because the celibate person never goes anywhere. They never grow. The chaste person, even if they are single, is growing through their own sexual force or through the union of masculine and feminine forces in the sexual act. But the celibate person who refuses to transform that energy, who tries to ignore it and runs away from it, is lying to themselves. Sex is an essential part of nature and human experience. Sex is an essential aspect of our spiritual journey, because without sex, we have no power to get out of the current state that we are in and we have no power to reunite with divinity. 
Building the Temple of God
So, we need to preserve those sexual energies, which are continually coming into our body from above, from our Divine Father and our Divine Mother. We need to preserve those energies, transform them, and use them to build the temple of God in our own bodies. That is why Thomas goes to India, to build a palace for a King. The true king is God. The palace is the temple. The temple of our body can become a palace, a temple of God, but only if we meet God’s requirements, just as divinity demands that there is purity of heart and spirit in the sexual act. That is what we need to understand. If we do not meet the prerequisite, this is the law of nature that states that sex expels you from Eden, or it brings you back into Eden. Abusing sex separates you from God. Sex performed with purity and chastity reunites you with God. That is the law of nature. That is not an idea that someone just made up. That is a law written into nature, and we can experience it, work with it, and verify it directly through our experience.
Judas Thomas unwillingly gets sold by Jesus, his master, as a slave, so that he is forced to go to India, sold as a slave who will build a palace for a King in India. Before he is able to build this palace, he is compelled to attend a wedding feast for the local king’s daughter. Why does he have to attend a wedding feast before he can build a palace? Spiritually speaking, this is symbolic. The wedding feast, the consummation of marriage, the sexual act, is the prerequisite through which the temple of God can be built, truly, to create a vessel into which Christ, that profound, tremendous power of wisdom and love, can actually incarnate within a human body. Those vessels are created through sex. That is the only way that anything in nature is created. That is why Thomas and Jesus as his twin teach the mystery of chastity in the bridal chamber. 
The Teaching in the Bridal Chamber
When they are teaching this, Jesus appears to the young couple in the form of Judas Thomas, and they are surprised because Judas Thomas has just left the room after blessing them and praying for them. They asked, “How is it possible that you are still in the room?” and Jesus explains to them that he is not the physical man Judas Thomas, that he is Christ.
This again is symbolic. Thoma means “twin.” Thomas is “twin,” the twin of Christ. The physical apostle is the vessel in which Christ manifests and gives that gospel to humanity. Jesus was a literal person, but symbolically, looking at this symbol, we see that Jesus is representing the force of Christ because this gospel takes place after Jesus had died and resurrected. His spirit comes through the vessel of Thomas, his physical apostle, to teach the mystery of chastity. So, what does Jesus teach in the bridal chamber? Acts of Thomas says that Jesus taught the following to the young couple: Remember, my children, what my brother spake unto you and what he delivered before you: and know this, that if ye abstain from this foul intercourse, ye become holy temples, pure, being quit of impulses and pains, seen and unseen, and ye will acquire no cares of life or of children, whose end is destruction… But if ye be persuaded and keep your souls chaste before God, there will come unto you living children whom these blemishes touch not, and ye shall be without care, leading a tranquil life without grief or anxiety, looking to receive that incorruptible and true marriage, and ye shall be therein groomsmen entering into that bride-chamber which is full of immortality and light. ―Acts of Thomas
Modern scholars who know nothing, who have never been initiated into the deepest genuine mysteries of spiritual teachings, always interpret this scripture as advocating for celibacy, total abstinence from sex. In reality, this scripture very obviously indicates that sex is important, and Jesus spends the whole night there in that bridal chamber with the couple. What happens in that bridal chamber is not explicitly stated in this gospel, for at that time it was forbidden to give this knowledge publicly to the profane, to people who were not properly prepared, who could not handle working with sex in this way.
We see that Jesus is talking about two marriages here. One marriage is of foul intercourse, the lustful marriage which brings impulses and pains, seen and unseen. Physical pain, yes, it can bring physical illnesses to us, karmically speaking, in the long term, but also unseen impulses and pain, those addictions, psychological imbalances, the madness that comes when sex is out of control and abused. The other marriage that he mentions is the incorruptible and true marriage, the bride chamber, which is full of immortality and light. When we practice chastity and we are meditating and we are awakening our spiritual senses, our spiritual eyes, we can see the light penetrating around and through our physical bodies. We can see that divinity is present. Angels are present, observing and guiding that sacred sexual act. It is a holy sacrament, and for those who work with it, they can verify this in their experience, but the prerequisite is purity. You will never reach the heights of this chastity of this teaching if you are orgasming. If you are losing that sacred energy, even just now and then, you will never be able to build the temple of God, because it is a law of nature that is required. That is the substance through which the Divine Mother can build a vessel for God within us. Only a fool would spend so much time, effort, and discipline to build a beautiful temple and go in with a sledgehammer and start breaking down the walls, destroying it, and then decide to go back and rebuild it again. We will never get anywhere if we are going back and forth. We must obey the law. We must work with sex. It is absolutely essential, but we must work in accordance with God’s commandments, which forbid fornication. They forbid orgasm and forbid adultery. The person who tries to practice this with many partners will also get nowhere. Love must be present, genuine love that grows and grows and grows as we continue to practice with our spouse, love for our spouse and love for divinity. Love is the substance of divinity and divinity leaves the adulterer. The Response of the Bride
Although the sexual act is not explicitly discussed or written down in this scripture, it is clear to us that a marriage has taken place, that Jesus spent an evening with the young couple teaching them and guiding them in the sexual act. We know that something has happened, because the next day the bride and groom are radically transformed. In fact, when the king and queen come down to see their daughter and her new husband, they are shocked, very surprised to see that she has removed her veil, which is called the “garment of shame” in those times, which the woman would wear to hide her shame after having sex. They come down and they ask her and her husband, “Why do you look so happy? Why are you not ashamed? Is it because that you are in such great love with each other that you are not ashamed?” They are shocked because they have never seen a couple come out of the sexual act with a happiness and joy that pervades them in this way, in this level of transformation. So, the bride, the daughter, responds to her parents and says this:
Verily, father, I am in great love, and I pray my Lord that the love which I have perceived this night may abide with me, and I will ask for that husband of whom I have learned today: and therefore I will no more veil myself, because the mirror (veil) of shame is removed from me; and therefore am I no more ashamed or abashed, because the deed of shame and confusion is departed far from me; and that I am not confounded, it is because my astonishment hath not continued with me; and that I am in cheerfulness and joy, it is because the day of my joy hath not been troubled; and that I have set at naught this husband and this marriage that passes away from before mine eyes, it is because I am joined in another marriage; and that I have had no intercourse with a husband that is temporal, whereof the end is with lasciviousness and bitterness of soul, it is because I am yoked unto a true husband [Christ]. ―Response of the Bride, Acts of Thomas
There are many symbols of Alchemy in the bride’s response in this scripture, but even to the uninitiated we can see very clearly that she has experienced, through this teaching, joy, happiness, and is beginning to enter into the true marriage, the marriage of Christ.
Many of us are seeking for temporary pleasure when we are lustful. We are seeking after physical sensations, physical experiences. That is temporal and passes away. That leads to lasciviousness and bitterness of soul. But chastity, chaste sexual union, is actually uniting the husband and wife with their inner divinity. The divinity of the wife, the divinity of the husband become one, and that is why it is not a marriage with a spouse that is temporal―not just a union of the physical bodies, but really the union of the immortal souls. That is why there are two marriages: one marriage that is temporary and passes away when the physical body dies, and another marriage through which the souls of the husband and wife become one with the spirit, with Christ. They are re-establishing, rebuilding that bridge, that connection that guides us back to God. That is what gives us conscience. That is what gives us insight, intuition, guidance, visions, dreams that are prophetic. All of that is established through working with our sexual potential, because sex is what can reunite us with God, just as it has separated us from our inner divinity through its abuse. The Response of the Groom
Personally, I prefer the response of the groom even more because the groom, as we can see in his response, is someone like many of us who has been confused, who has been taught many ideas, corruption, impurity, and suffering. We can hear in this response from the groom so much gratitude for how sex has guided him back to his true nature, his soul, reunion with divinity and real love for Christ. In Acts of Thomas, the groom states:
I give thee thanks, O Lord, that hast been proclaimed by the stranger [Judas Thomas], and found in us [Christ within us]; O Lord who hast removed me far from corruption and sown life in me; who hast rid me of this disease that is hard to be healed and cured and abides forever, and hast implanted sober health in me [chastity]; who hast shown me thyself and revealed unto me all my state wherein I am; who hast redeemed me from falling and led me to that which is better, and set me free from temporal things and made me worthy of those that are immortal and everlasting; that hast made thyself lowly even down to me and my littleness, that thou mayest present me unto thy greatness and unite me unto thyself; […] hast shown me how to seek myself and know who I was, and who and in what manner I now am, that I may again become that which I was: whom I knew not, but thyself did seek me out: of whom I was not aware, but thyself hast taken me to thee: whom I have perceived, and now am not able to be unmindful of him: whose love burns within me… ―Response of the Groom, Acts of Thomas
That is Christ. The disease that is hard to be healed and cured is lust, abuse of sex. We see that there is so much addiction, especially to pornography that is extremely hard to be healed. It leads people to lunacy, suffering, pain, to have affairs, to throw away their marriage. That disease can be healed by Christ. That is a tremendous source of hope. This teaching allows us to change no matter how fallen we are. Even if we are a prostitute, we can be saved through chastity, through being purified and washed by the waters of our Divine Mother. It is an incredible power, a sacrament that should be approached with tremendous respect and humility. Most of us approach sex with impurity, selfishness, disgusting desires, and that is why we hurt ourselves, other people, and that is why we see so much pain and suffering in our society, so much abuse of sex, abuse of children, sexual assault, and rape. Mankind has not been taught how to control his sexual force, and that is because sexuality is so powerful that only the properly prepared have been taught this teaching.
Now, frankly speaking, we are in a society, in a time, in which the abuse of sex has become so great that there is really no other option than to give this openly with the hope that maybe a few people will have enough willpower, sincerity, humility, and genuine love for divinity to be able to accomplish this very difficult feat of chastity and sexual Alchemy. It is not easy. It is very demanding, but the rewards are infinite, eternal rewards, the ability to know your God again. We see here that the groom says he knew not God, he knew not Christ, but Christ sought him out. He was not aware of Christ, but Christ took him back to divinity through sex, sacred sexuality. This is just an introduction today to a really deep mystery, and for those who really want to experience this, I encourage you to study a lot, to prepare yourself through meditation, meditating on lust everyday, because with this sexual force, you will have the power of the Divine Mother working within you, and that power can destroy your lust, your greed, your anger, your envy, your hatred, your pride. That is the power of chastity, to regenerate the human being, to purify the human being, to restore the spiritual senses of the soul, so that we can see and hear divinity again, and always be mindful of divinity because divinity will burn like love within us. If we abuse this teaching, if we abuse sex, those waters will drown us. If we pollute those waters with impurity, and we try to work this practice, it will create nothing but extreme suffering for us and the people around us. So, prepare yourself properly, because the groom you are seeking to unite with is Christ. 
Christ: The Groom and the Church
Christ is an infinite beauty, power wisdom, and love. Christ is the force that animates and gives life to every atom in this universe. That is why in Acts of Thomas, the apostle states:
If man loved God as much as they love one another, they would ask of him all things and receive them, and there would be nothing which would not obey them. ―Acts of Thomas, 128:9
If we love God, if we love Christ, that force of divinity, as much as we love our spouse―which hopefully we love our spouse, because nowadays mankind does not seem to love each other as much as we have the potential to―if we loved God, with the strongest intensity, with which we loved another person, then we would have the power to reunite with God through this sexual practice. Love is sexual. Eros, the god of love through the Greek mysteries, representing the force of Christ, is erotic love. Those two are intertwined. That is why the teaching was given to us in the Bible by Paul of Tarsus―relating to Christ and the church, the church being the Ecclesia―the ones called forth to the assembly, the congregation. The church is not as the physical building, but the church as the community of the followers of Christ who become the physical vessels in which Christ acts and performs his miracles, manifests, and gives his teachings to humanity―through his apostles, through those who work with this science to purify themselves, to create a vessel that can withstand that tremendous energy of Christ within it. That is why in this teaching in Ephesians, Paul of Tarsus directly relates the love of Christ, the union with Christ, to the relationship between husband and wife. It is one in the same mystery. If engage in the sexual act, we renounce orgasm, and we bring the presence of divinity, prayer, and love into that act, that is the path to God. Paul wrote:
Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her, that He might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word, that He might present her to Himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but that she should be holy and without blemish. So husbands ought to love their own wives as their own bodies; he who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as the Lord does the church. For we are members of His body, of His flesh and of His bones. “For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” This is a great mystery, but I speak concerning Christ and the church. ―Paul of Tarsus, Ephesians 5:25-32
So, we see here that when a man and a woman unite, they become one flesh, one flesh with each other, one flesh with divinity, if we are without blemish, if we have been washed by those waters, if we are holy. The church are the true apostles, the true followers of Christ.
There are many people, many organizations that claim to be the true church of Christ, but we should examine ourselves: are we a temple of God? Are we the physical body through which God can perform his will? Or are we filled with selfish desires, self-will, egotism? Are we motivated by the guidance we are receiving internally from divinity and acting in ways that help humanity, that heal humanity, that brings happiness unto us and others, and that help us to reunite with God? Are we giving that teaching of Christ? Or are we teaching spiritual things out of vanity, out of pride, out of ambition and seeking for power? Or are we just totally living a life divorced from God, totally about me, myself, and what I want? Maybe we say spiritual things when we are in public streets, and then when we go into the bedroom and whatever happens there, well, that is not of God’s business, we think. We are fools if we think that God does not see especially that which has happened when we are working with the force of creation, with the power to give life in our own bodies. That is the moment when God is most present and our Divine Mother weeps when we lose and abuse that force. If you work with this teaching, if you work with this practice, I promise you that you will begin awakening consciousness. Then you will see, with tremendous shame, the pain that we have brought to divinity and to other people through lust. So much of the suffering in this world has been the direct result of uncontrolled lust, a lack of willpower, indulgence in lust. That is it. There are many other problems, but lust is the root because in lust we have lost the connection with divinity. We have lost our conscience, which guides us to perform what is right in God’s eyes. You know we truly learn from within, from our conscience, what is good and what is evil, what is constructive and what is destructive. We can read it in a book, in the commandments. The ethical precepts of all great religions are wonderful starting places, and are necessary. We should be following those to purify our psychology, but the real teaching of right and wrong comes in each moment, in the presence of Christ, of divinity within us. But we have to be awakened. We have to have spiritual sight and hearing to interpret those messages. It is one thing to receive a message, to have a powerful dream for example, but if we are foolish and our mind is out of balance, if we are totally controlled by selfish wishes, then we are going to interpret that dream according to our ego, according to our egotism, “What do I want that dream to mean?” Then that spiritual value, that gift that has been given to us, is lost. So, if we want to become the bride of Christ, we have to work very hard with ourselves. Sexual Alchemy is important. Union with a spouse is important. But merely doing this practice with a spouse without any purity, without any love of divinity, without any love of our spouse, is not going to be enough. We should be the bride of Christ, because our physical body can be that receptive vehicle which can receive that projective force of Christ. The spirit can come down into the womb of our physical body and grow, be developed, and channel light here in this physical world, which needs the light of Christ, the teachings, and the presence of Christ more than ever. Because so few people are capable of this, each of us should hold this duty, this obligation to work on ourselves, to purify ourselves, to work with this practice with respect, with humility, to follow the will of our inner God. Humanity needs it now more than ever. We see again Paul of Tarsus teaching us this mystery, that we as the souls of men can become betrothed or married to Christ, that divine spirit. Paul wrote: For I have betrothed you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ. ―Paul of Tarsus, 2 Corinthians 11:2
How does one become a virgin? Through virility, through virtue, through chastity. Humanity has fallen, but we can be redeemed. We can be purified. We can become again virginal, virginal bodies, virginal minds, virginal hearts, virginal souls, through chastity, through working with Christ, reading those scriptures, learning Kabbalah, learning Alchemy, studying this, doing these practices, transmuting every day, whether single or in a marriage, finding a way to work with that energy and meditating on our defects to destroy them, and performing good works and sacrifices that help humanity, even in small ways, helping people around us, not for our benefit, not for our pride, not for our ambition, but out of love, because Christ is love.
If you think of the moment in your life, or the time when you felt the strongest love for another human being, that is Christ―a small taste of Christ. As we work with chastity, we enliven that force. We bring that fire to life in our hearts, the fire of love. The sexual fire becomes pure and it brings us power, but the power of God, power that can only be granted if we are obeying the laws of God. Again, I recommend for those who want to learn more about this sacred mystery of chastity and are interested in applying it as a way to regenerate their souls, return to God, and receive that inner guidance within, to read the book The Perfect Matrimony by Samael Aun Weor. Study Alchemy. Study Kabbalah. We have a tremendous gift that this teaching is being given publicly for humanity. People for centuries would risk their lives, would dedicate years, decades, in preparation in the temples to receive this mystery, and it is being given to us because we so desperately need it, and because without it, well, we already know the direction that our society is going. We are not progressing. We are crumbling. If that is the outcome we are already headed for, then we have nothing to lose by working with chastity, by applying it, by dedicating ourselves to it. If your sexual behavior has brought you nothing but pain in life, then sacrifice it. Give it up and try this practice. Work with chastity, and see directly, in your experience, the tremendous results that you can receive through consistent, dedicated practice. You will be transformed. You can be purified. You can become converted like a child. There is tremendous power in sexual Alchemy. So, let us conclude from one final verse from Acts of Thomas: It is particularly fitting for you to live in holy chastity, for that is favored in God’s eyes and it leads to eternal life. It is the capital city of all good things in the eyes of God. Those who don’t compete in Christ’s stadium won’t receive the prize of holy chastity. Holy chastity was revealed by God: it destroys sexual immorality, overturns the enemy and pleases God, for it is an unconquered athlete, having honor from God and esteemed by many. It is the ambassador of peace, proclaiming peace; if anyone acquires it, that person remains carefree, pleasing the Lord, expecting the time of redemption. It does nothing improper but affords life, rest, and joy to all who acquire it. ―Acts of Thomas 85:3-8
If you have any questions, please write them in the chat box.
Questions and Answers
Question: How can a single person before marriage identify if a partner would commit to a sex life without orgasm?
Instructor: That is a wonderful question. I will let you know that I know many Gnostic practitioners in this teaching who work with chastity with a spouse who does not practice chastity. So, it is possible that we can purify ourselves and unite with divinity by working in the sexual act if there is love in that marriage. Obviously, that has its challenges, right? So, be mindful of it, but if you are performing the law of God, if you are obeying and are chaste, then you will be able to achieve union with your inner divinity, with Christ through sexual Alchemy. The forces are present there. The masculine, the feminine, the Holy Spirit of sex is present there. God can come to you if you are prepared. Of course, your spouse might not like that. That is your karma. That is your situation. That is what God has given you, and so you have to consider very carefully before marriage, is love really present there in that relationship? Or is it desire? Many people have been fooled by desire and ended up in very unhappy marriages. If your spouse is not open to this and you are already married, if there is love present in that marriage, you should not run away from that marriage. Love is the prerequisite for chastity, and those who choose to only marry another Gnostic, only with another person who agrees with what “I” believe, and do so only out of ambition, will get nowhere, because there is no love in that marriage. Of course, if you meet another person that is open to this and wants to practice with you, that is ideal. That is perfect. That is wonderful and beautiful, but only if love is present. So, do not get married out of ambition. Meditate and pray. Let God guide you to the spouse who you are destined for, the one whom you can love, and who can love you, the one who will bring you closer to Christ through that love, through the force of Christ within your hearts. Question: What are the characteristics of chastity in woman versus in men? To be more specific, how does chastity manifest itself in men and women? Instructor: Well, the spiritual work for men and women is the same. So, as a woman, I am required to fulfill all the same requisites of purity, of chastity, abstaining from orgasm, transforming that energy in my body through pranayama, or through sexual Alchemy, meditation, working on my vices every day. It is really no different. One thing I will say for women who practice this though, who transmute, whether married or single: we do not work with our sexual energy when we are on our period. If you are in your menstrual cycle, abstain from working with sexual energy for that time. That is a time of cleansing in which the body is flushing out impurities, and energetically as well. It is a great benefit that women have, that nature purifies our bodies every month, but it means that we should not be transmuting those energies, because that is a time when impurities are being cleansed from us by nature. So, what does chastity look like for a woman versus a man? It is the same. As a woman, you should not be orgasming. Many women say, “Well, I am not losing any seed when I orgasm.” You do not see what you are losing spiritually and energetically in that orgasm. You are losing your vitality, that sexual energy that connects you with divinity, that power of creation in your own body. So, men, woman, it is very similar. I cannot speak too much on the man’s point of view, but at least as a woman I can share that. Question: What is the name of the bronze statue shown in this lecture with a quote of Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony, and is that position the only way to practice? Can you provide terms on what one should do, or how to perform sexual magic in simple terms with detail on the procedure? Instructor: So, that is not the only position which one can practice sexual magic. Generally speaking, the position is really not so important. You can perform this with the man on top of the woman, or the woman on top of the man. What is important is that you are awake. If you are meditative, if you are prayerful, you feel love for your spouse. You feel love for divinity. You are not allowing animal passion to overcome your willpower. You are allowing the heat, the fire, and the bliss of those pleasant sensations to awaken your consciousness, to nourish you, but you are not losing that force through orgasm. I am not familiar with the name of that specific statue, but I have seen many like it. That comes from Tantric Buddhism. Maybe the other instructor might know. Another Instructor: I am not familiar with that specific statue. There are many symbols throughout the Tibetan Buddhist tradition that describe and show this union. There are many buddhas or many spiritual masters, enlightened ones who are showing that particular act, such as Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyal, or his consort, as an example. There are many examples of that practice within that religion specifically. In terms of being the only position or the way to practice, you can study the chapter called The Pancatattva Ritual in The Mystery of the Golden Flower by Samael Aun Weor [see also The Sexual Paroxysm and The Golden Embryo] in accordance with Hindu scripture and ancient text itself. Instructor: Definitely, in these texts you will learn a variety of mantras as well. Mantra is an important part of sexual Alchemy because it allows us to move that energy more effectively in our body. One of the main mantras that is taught in The Perfect Matrimony is IAO, which is pronounced as in Latin: I: (as the ee in “tree”): A: (as the ah in “father”) O: (as the oh in “holy”) Take a breath when you are united with your partner and vocalize the vowel sound:
Iiiiiiiiii…
Then again… Aaaaaaaaaa… Then again… Oooooooooo… That is just one practice to give as an example, but before you enter into this practice you should study the book and you will learn a lot more mantras and much more about how to engage in that practice effectively. Question: As a single person I have verified that these teachings are true through my own experiences with pranayama, prayer, self-observation, meditation, etc. I am totally dedicated to this path. It has given my life the most beautiful meaning and purpose. I know these teachings are true in my heart and are the purpose of life. Ever since I started sincerely practicing these teachings and transmuting my sexual energies daily, about a year ago, I had been experiencing nocturnal pollutions about every two to three months. These are very painful experiences as I observe my consciousness is weakened and I lose my psychic energies. My question is, what is the cause of these experiences? Is it karmic debt from past sexual misconduct? Are these tests in the internal worlds? Is it a lack of comprehension of lust? A combination of all these? Obviously, the goal is eventually find a spouse and enter into the Major Mysteries of sexual Alchemy. Is physical chastity possible like Sivananda and Yogananda? Instructor: What an important question! Thank you for asking. For those who are not familiar with the term nocturnal pollutions, it refers to wet dreams, where―most notably for men, this is obvious―men might wake up and realize that he has orgasmed in his sleep. Women may wake up and realize that their body is orgasming. This can happen for men and women. There are a variety of reasons why this may happen, and we also have a remedy for this: the remedy of the melon drink, which can help you. So, if you are suffering from nocturnal pollutions, I encourage you to drink that remedy frequently until you see that the problem has been lessened. But we need a permanent solution to this problem. The cause of the problem is lust. On one hand, I think that many single people are not transmuting enough, at minimum ten to fifteen minutes a day, but you can practice pranayama as long as you need. If you are a particularly fiery person, if that is your sexual temperament, you might need to perform a lot of pranayama every day. Also, work with runes―another sacred science that we teach in this tradition and you can find a whole course about the runes on Glorian.org. There are also videos of these runes that allows you to transform more energy. So, one cause can be that you have too much sexual energy pent up, and since it is not being transformed, it is leading to that nocturnal pollution. That is a big problem, because you do not want to lose that energy. The other is that we are tempted and tested in dreams. Often our own egos come out in dreams and take the shapes of many attractive people or situations that tempt us, and if we have not developed enough willpower through meditation, then when we are less awake, when we are more hypnotized in the dream state, we are more likely to fail and to engage in some kind of sexual activity in the dream state that causes our physical body to orgasm and to lose that energy. So, do the best that you can. It takes time to train the body. It takes time also to train our psyche. But we should be vigilant. We should meditate on lust everyday, to understand our lust. How does it manifest? What does it want? How does it control us? What provokes it? What tempts it? Some people try to avoid temptation all together, but when we see something in our life, we should not be looking at pornography. We should not try to find ways to test ourselves. That would be foolish. We are not at that level. But things happen in our life. We see people that we feel some attraction to. Do not avoid that. Go home and meditate. Meditate, meditate, meditate. What in you is impure? Sometimes we think we may love a person, but that love is mixed with a lot of impurity. So, even if you are married you still need to be meditating on lust. Lust is always selfish and divinity is selfless. The karmic debt from past sexual misconduct is the creation of lust in our own psychology. So, whenever we commit abuse of sex, we generate a psychological consequence, and that strengthens lust in our psyche, which then causes us to have less control over sexual force in both our physical life and in our dream life in the astral plane. So, the karma is psychological. But we do have the power to overcome that. We do have the power to meditate on that. What did you dream about? Meditate on it. Understand it. Do not just feel like, “I failed. I should be ashamed!” and then not learn anything from that. It is a very humbling experience, and it is a very painful experience. We should learn from that, because when that happens to us, it is an opportunity to understand something about ourselves that we do not understand. Otherwise, it would not happen. As a single person, we can achieve up to 50% of the elimination of the ego. Right now, in this teaching, we know that most of us in this planet have about 97% ego. That means we are 97% selfish and blind to divinity. We have 3% consciousness free that can perceive things in a new way, that can perceive divinity, that can act spontaneously, and the other 97% of us is conditioned to habitual behaviors, conditioned psychology, that wants to repeat habits again and again―repeat the same anger, repeat the same envy in a new situation, repeat the same lustful sensations. So, as a single person, it is possible to become truly pure. Yogananda is a beautiful example. He made the mistake of believing that he could be married within to his Divine Mother without a spouse, and so he was only able to achieve half of that work, but what a tremendously beautiful soul, like an elemental, very pure, that brought wonderful teachings to humanity! Yes, that is possible for the single person. We should not have such a strong desire for a spouse that we forget about how to live in happiness with what we have. God has put you in that situation for a reason. It is possible that if you found a spouse, but you weren’t properly prepared, that you could generate a lot of pain for you and that person, that it could harm your future lifetimes, that it could create a karmic consequence that could be much more terrible. So, there are worse things than being single. We could use that time as a single person to master our sexuality, to become very comfortable with moving those forces in our body, with transforming, to awaken with purity like a child, to become virginal. Then when the time is right, God will bring a spouse to you and you will know it because you will feel love, real love, not just sexual attraction, but real love. Question: Usually we find “You shall not commit adultery” in the Ten Commandments, yet we do not see, “We shall not fornicate.” Is that a part of the former commandment or is it a hidden commandment that was not taught before the Age of Aquarius openly? Instructor: That is a good question. “Thou shall not fornicate” is not part of one of the Ten Commandments, but we see it repeatedly in the Bible, so I might of misspoke a little bit there. Fornication is frequently talked about in the Bible as a sin against God. Fornicate comes from the same root as furnace, that sexual fire. Is that fire working in a positive way or is that fire destroying us? Fornication is destructive. Chastity is regenerative, revitalizing. Whenever we are expelling the sexual energy, we are adulterating the power of the Divine Mother. In terms of the tradition itself, the commandments, those have been interpreted and even modified in different ways throughout religious tradition, but specifically there is a distinction between “You shall not fornicate” or expel the sexual energy, but also “You shall not commit adultery” or misuse that force in multiple relationships, as the lecturer had said. Question: Could you explain the connection between sexuality and the original sin? Can we say that sexual sin, lust, is the fundamental vice and the source of all other vices? Instructor: Yes, we can. That is the original sin because lust, the orgasm, is what kicked us out of Eden, brought us separation from divinity. When we feed lust, when we orgasm, we become hypnotized. We become confused. A little piece of us or a big piece of us starts to become deluded, and through that delusion, humanity can wander further away from God. The more that that action is repeated, the more delusion humanity enters into, and that delusion can include all other kinds of crimes: anger murder, hatred, theft, greed, pride. So, it is from lust over many centuries, over many lifetimes that we have been committing lustful acts, that all of these other crimes have been able to occur. Now these vices can occur separate from lust as well. Even the gods are said to have spiritual pride, which is a vice, but those gods know how to work with sex in the appropriate way through sexual chastity, using sex with purity. So, while it is the root of all sins, those sins can be manifold. We usually say that there are seven deadly sins, but even within those seven there are so many unique manifestations of those seven deadly sins, and lust is like that. Sometimes lust can be proud. Sometimes lust can be angry. Sometimes lust can be greedy. So, they are all interrelated. If you really want to understand the fall of humanity, the sexual fall of humanity, then I encourage you to read the book The Elimination of Satan’s Tail, which tells the history behind why humanity originally fell out of the Garden of Eden. Really interesting story by Samael Aun Weor. Question: Taoist and other traditions distinguish between orgasm and ejaculation for men. Is this distinction made in Gnosticism? Is the key for men to restrict ejaculation, what many people are calling today semen retention? Instructor: That is a great question and one that comes up often when we give this teaching. Orgasm and the loss of semen are both considered not permitted in the sacred sexual act. So, no. You cannot just retain the semen but indulge in the energetic orgasm. As I mentioned earlier for men or for women, the short circuit of the orgasm is destructive for the physical body and for the vital body, which is the energetic body that animates us, that gives the power to move around, that enlivens our heart and allows it to keep beating. That vital body gets destroyed and that is why illnesses can develop. It is harmful. But spiritually speaking, as I just mentioned in the previous answer, when we indulge in that orgasm, in that sensation, our psychology changes. Our consciousness becomes conditioned, becomes addicted, becomes hypnotized by and wants more, more, and more. So, even if you are only performing the orgasm now and then, or you are only performing the orgasm to have a child, it is harmful for this practice. You should renounce orgasm one hundred percent if you are going to work in chastity and perform the perfect matrimony. That is what we teach, because that law of nature indicates that through that door, we can leave heaven. We can go into hell, into the lower states of consciousness, and that door is directly related with sex, with orgasm. Orgasm opens the door to the lower states of consciousness and allows devilish qualities, evil energies, to enter into us psychologically and spiritually. When we go up through that door, when we transmute that energy from the sexual organs up the spine into the brain, to enliven the pineal gland, the seat of the soul, where our inner divinity can give us guidance, we are going back up to divinity. Orgasm will bring us down. The law dictates that chastity is a prerequisite to go up unto the heavenly realms. Question: Is it possible to overdo pranayama if single? Sometimes if I do Ham-Sah too much it seems to build up too much fire, or is it because I am not doing the pranayama correctly? It does not produce much fire with runic vowels, etc. Instructor: It is not possible to harm yourself by doing too much. So, you can do three hours of it a day. You can do five hours of it a day. It will not hurt you. If you say that you are feeling a lot of fire as a result, it is because that sexual fire which was latent has become active, and you need to apply that fire in your meditation. When we feel sexual fire, we are very awake. Our consciousness becomes vigilant. Now when we are conditioned by lust, yes, that lust drives us to become vigilant, seeking sexual sensations, but when we meditate on that lust and seek to understand it, as we are enlivened by that same fire, that fire gives us the ability to be very awake and very aware and go deep into comprehension of that ego of lust. Fire, also transmuted, gives your Divine Mother the power. That fire is Her power to destroy those egos of lust. So, if you are feeling overly stimulated by the practice, yes, you can do some other practice instead to balance it out, but meditate on what is coming up for you psychologically. If you become overwhelmed in your meditation, and the impression is too powerful, you cannot transform it, you are being tempted too much, go outside. Go for a walk. Read a scripture. Do something to calm yourself down, and then meditate again when you are feeling calmer. Question: You have mentioned ambition in spouse selection as an impediment in progressing in the path. You have also said that we should not submit to animal passion in the act. If one is in a loving marriage where the couple is disinterested in Alchemy in one evening, is it best to practice pranayama? Instructor: If I understand the question correctly, you are asking if we have to practice the sexual act every night? No. The most that sexual Alchemy should be practiced is once per day, and again, women should not be performing this act on their menstrual cycle, so there is a magnetic pause during that time. You do not need to practice it every day. It depends on the temperament of the couple. If the couple has a cooler temperament around sexuality, then they might practice this once a month, once a week. That is ok. A very fiery couple will probably practice once per day. If you are not feeling interested in sex, then it is ok to practice pranayama. If you feel particularly lustful one day and you are afraid that you are going to enter into that sexual act and potentially lose your energy, then I would encourage you to practice pranayama first. Meditate first. Wait until you are not feeling that lustful anymore to enter into that act, because it is very difficult in the beginning. We have an animal mind that seeks sensation and that wants more, more, more of that desire, and that is difficult to overcome. So, in the beginning, we usually encourage couples to only connect very briefly, or just to maybe touch, hold each other, kiss, but not to physically connect right away, just to get used to conquering that sensation, and then to connect, just for a few minutes, and to take a break. It depends on your temperament. It depends on how much discipline you have with your mind and pranayama before marriage. If you practiced with pranayama for many years, you might be able to adapt to the sexual Alchemy practice more quickly, but it really varies by individual. Each of us has our own karma which has shaped our psychology. So some of us are more strongly addicted to lust than others, but all of us have lust and all of us need to meditate on it. Question: If the couple is ambitious and decides to engage in the Arcanum A.Z.F., do those creative energies give life to ambition and potentially related to desire? Instructor: Thank you for clarifying. So, just like lust, we should not bring ambition into the act. In the act we should really meditate on our love for our spouse. We should not just be saying, “Ok, let us practice today because I want to have more spiritual experiences and experience divinity!” and that is the motivation for our practice. We should practice because we love God and we love our spouse, and so if you are going to the act with ambition, you are not going to get very far. You are actually going to channel that energy into your ambition, so that desire for more and more spiritual sensations will become stronger. Meditate before Alchemy. Meditate on ambition, or lust, or whatever defect you see coming up in the act to corrupt it, to separate you from divinity. Then pray before that act to your Divine Mother. Use the sexual energy. Use the sacred power to eliminate this ego of ambition, this ego of lust or whatever it may be for you. That will really help your practice. Question: Is it only suitable to engage in sex when both parties are in a state of innocent love for one another? Instructor: As I mentioned before, we might have a partner, a spouse who is not interested in chastity and who is engaging in orgasm. That is a painful situation, but it happens, and we should not leave that person because of that. However, we are going to need to have those hard conversations and discuss to find a way, which out of love, that person can respect your choice to be chaste. That is really specific to the case of the couple. If you have a spouse that is practicing chastity with you and feels particularly lustful one day and says, “I do not want to engage,” then respect them. Have love for them. Support them. Also, if you and your spouse find that lust is coming for you in sex, meditate. In the beginning, there is going to be a lot of lust there. As much as we try to start with an innocent mind, with purity, with love, there will be lust there. So, in that case, again, we should meditate after sex. Meditate on what we saw. In the beginning it is very difficult. That fire is big. It is out of control. It takes time and willpower to learn, so engage for a few moments until you realize that you are starting to get distracted. You are starting to get hypnotized by the sensations and losing your wakefulness, your vigilance, your awareness of God. Love is a very beautiful sensation that comes out in sex. I do not want to encourage people to be afraid, so afraid that they are not able to do this practice. Let your heart guide you, and let divinity guide you. There will be lust present in the beginning and that is why we need this practice to purify ourselves. Eventually, if we are successful, we can become saints free from that torment of lust. We can become masters of our sexuality, and then we command the sexual force to work when we want it to work rather than that sexual force commanding us to be slaves, to be servants of its sensations. It takes time. Question: I am curious on what you mean by orgasm exactly. My experience of raising the sexual energy up the spine and into the brain centers is actually highly orgasmic. The body pulsates in just the way it does during orgasm and a feeling of joy is generated. The same goes for all chakras and dantians. Do you mean that this whole body energetic experience should be avoided in Gnosticism? Instructor: Good question. There are sensations in Alchemy. There is sexual pleasure. There is bliss, the bliss of love, the bliss of Alchemy. So you really have to examine for yourself. But yes, if there is an orgasm in your sexual organs and you feel that, then that is not sexual Alchemy. So, in black magic, they teach you how to perform the sexual act with orgasm and channel that energy in the way that has just been described in the question in order to awaken consciousness. But what happens because of the orgasm and those negative demonic influences that come in, you might experience bliss, but you are also awakening consciousness and developing within the ego, which is separate from God. So, you really have to meditate on yourself, on what is happening there, because there is spiritual bliss, energy, moving in the body in Alchemy, but there is not the orgasm in the sexual organs. It is white Alchemy. White Tantra that we teach here in this school does not permit orgasm because that orgasm short circuits the body, loses the energy. While the sensations of bliss that you might feel in a orgasm―even outside of any spiritual context, of course, orgasm is “blissful” and people feel that sensation of bliss―that is actually not positive, because it is the bliss of that energy, but then that energy is lost and expelled from the body. So we want to keep that bliss, calm and consistent, throughout our practice. Question: Is it true that cardiovascular exercise, running while breathing through the nostrils and out through the mouth, helps to transmute the sexual energies? 
Instructor: Yes. Some exercise, some sports, some martial arts like Aikido, or some that are not too violent, that can be one form of transmutation of sexual energy. However, I caution you not to use that as your only form, because without pranayama, your body naturally is not going to move those energies back up the spine. Pranayama done everyday is cleaning out the two cords which go around the spine, the two channels of Ida and Pingala, and allowing that energy to become accustomed to moving up the spine into the brain and heart. If you are not doing that every day, those channels are going to be very dirty, and they are blocked. If you are just playing soccer with your friends, but you are not performing pranayama, then no, you are probably not transmuting very much energy. So, it can be good to walk and to breathe, but breathe with transmutation, with that visualization coming up through your spine. You can use the Ham-Sah pranayama, if you are familiar with it, throughout the day. I have used it at work silently, just to keep myself awake and vigilant if I notice that I am starting to get unaware of what is happening spiritually, lose my self-observation.
Work with some form of pranayama every day if you are a single person, and if you are married, you can also work with pranayama. It is an option for married people so that you do not have to feel the pressure to work in sexual Alchemy every day. Generally speaking, married people are moving more energy in that sexual connection, so they may not need pranayama on the days that they are not united. It really depends on the couple. You have to investigate, meditate, pray, and watch the answers that you receive in your dreams from divinity. Divinity will tell you if you are going off of the correct path, then guide you on how to get back. Question: Isn’t chastity a cruel repression of the self? Sometimes like a punishment or a sadistic behavior, then when it is released in different ways, creates suffering everywhere? Instructor: Well I wonder if you have really practiced chastity, because if you are referring to celibacy, as I mentioned earlier in the lecture, does produce suffering if that energy is not worked with through prayer, through transmutation. Celibacy creates imbalances in the psychology in the same way that lust and orgasm create imbalances in the psychology. In celibacy, that energy sits there like a pool of water that becomes stagnant, and that energy becomes putrid and poisons the mind, and that creates suffering. Chastity is not celibacy. Chastity is learning how to work with sex in a positive way and so it is not a repression of one’s self. It is connecting directly with ones sexuality in a very powerful way, in a very conscious way, and working with that energy in the body. The result of real chastity, if you are practicing this without orgasm consistently, then you will have positive benefits. You will feel more love for your neighbor. You will feel more subtle emotions. You will feel more peace and happiness. You will feel more awake, and more spiritual senses developed, spiritual vision, more powerful dreams. So, no, I would disagree with that idea. Question: I am getting more confused about orgasm and ejaculation. I always felt through experience that they are one in the same or happen at the same time in my past. How are they different? Instructor: I am not too familiar with semen retention, although I have heard of it. It is the practice by which some retain the semen instead of ejaculating semen, but still experience the orgasm and allow those sensations to move through the body. So, with the orgasm without ejaculation, you are not losing the physical substance, but you are losing the energetic, spiritual substance, because its that short circuit that occurs in the orgasm. That energy moves quickly through the body, then it is lost. So, those moments of bliss, which may be prolonged and may last for certain time, ultimately leave and are depleted. It is the feeling of bliss that the sexual energy is being depleted, which is very different from the feeling of bliss that we have when the sexual energy is being activated and conserved and moved through the body. Both might be considered blissful but have different flavors, but when you work with both those practices you will understand the difference. It is quite popular and a lot of people like that, they can still have the orgasm and feel like they are getting the benefits of non-ejaculating, but it is black magic. Semen retention is black magic, and if you read the book The Perfect Matrimony, you will understand why we consider it black magic in this tradition, because it breaks the law that God has put in nature, and it hypnotizes the psyche. Your psychology becomes imbalanced and addicted to sensations, and while you may feel spiritual doing it, you are actually strengthening ego and you are giving that energy into egoic states, desire, lust, pride. So, you will not experience the benefits of chastity that I have described. Question: If you are doing pranayama with alternate nostril breathing, what is the best mantra to use? Is it acceptable to use an abbreviated Egyptian mantra: Ton Sa Ham? Instructor: We recommend that when you choose one of the practices, you can use the mantras specifically denoted in that practice. So, if you have read the practice in the book about the Egyptian pranayama, you should use the mantras in the way that they are taught in the book. There is a pranayama of alternate nostril breathing that does not require any mantra. That is just focusing, bringing your awareness, breathing in through one nostril as you visualize the energy moving up one side of the spine, up one of those cords, and then through the other one, visualizing that energy moving up the other column up the spine (Ida and Pingala). If you are too burdened by the mantras, then begin with alternate nostril breathing that does not require a mantra. 
There have existed alternative forms of Christianity, which have very recently gained recognition amongst scholars, although much of that criticism applies only to the past. What many are not willing to recognize is the existence of a modern esoteric Christianity. This term “esoteric” or “esotericism” implies that which is hidden, secret, obscured from the public. The roots of this esoteric Christianity are very ancient. They are even older than Christianity itself, the first Christian sects.
The reason for our studies is to approach the science by which we can experience the truths contained within religion. However, for modern scholasticism, the tendency amongst many spiritual groups is to compartmentalize knowledge, to label things within easy categories, within labels, within a structure, and there is credence and value to this. But the reality is that individuals, groups, and systems are complex. They are subtle. They are nuanced. The tendency to approach religion with our assumptions, our preconceptions of what is there, really demonstrates for us the fundamental nature of belief, which really constitute a set of values, philosophical approaches, for making sense of life. Beliefs can create a sense of order in a world that is falling apart. However, we have to recognize that beliefs have a very limited utility when it comes to practical spirituality. Due to this tendency, many have approached modern Gnosticism as another such system of belief, but I would like to present something different, and to ask us to reflect on a very important principle, as is demonstrated by the Gnostic scriptures themselves, their mere existence, the Gnostic teachings. We find that this wisdom strikes at the heart of what it means to believe, but more importantly, what does it mean to possess knowledge from experience, to know divinity? ― not from a theory, not from an idea, or what we have read, or a conviction without evidence. Instead, it has to do with facts. Gnosis is a living tradition. It was made, and is made of many mystery schools, which had gone underground primarily to avoid persecution, and corruption when exposed to humanity. It is a natural law. When the divine provides exceptional and expedient knowledge for transformation, eventually when exposed to humanity, to degeneration, to vices, traditions become adulterated. They fall apart when the adherents of those disciplines no longer enact and fulfil their requisite values upon which such traditions are based. While this occurred even with early Christianity, this dynamic persists even today. This is why the real keys for unlocking such knowledge, such enigmatic writings, were never giving to the public for millennia, and there is a very good reason for this. Humanity with its prejudices, its biases, its assumptions, translates and interprets according to the conditioning of our psychology. Therefore such wisdom was only given to those who had earned it, not to the uneducated, the inexperienced, or we could say, the uninitiated, because these scriptures lose their essential message when we lack the key, and more importantly when we are not willing to reflect upon their significance within our own life, with full objectivity and self-criticism, with analyisis, with investigation. This knowledge is now being given openly out of compassion. Before, to really receive these kinds of teachings and instructions, scriptures and knowledge, one had to be part of a group in the physical world for a very long period of time, but now we are in a very different era where scriptures that were once hidden, and unavailable to the public, are now immediately present. You can pick up your iPhone and find the Gnostic Gospels. You can find teachings that were obscured for thousands of years―for a long time―with ease. This kind of reality is unprecedented in our history, but it is also important to remember that while we have a bunch of scriptural knowledge, the task is incumbent upon us to know how to interpret. When approaching these studies, it is also important to examine our motives. Do we sincerely seek to understand the causes of our suffering, and more importantly, the suffering of others? Are we willing to sacrifice behaviors and views that produce conflict, discord? Or do we approach spirituality with ambition, with vanity, with selfishness, to impress others with obscure knowledge, or to acquire power? The Esoteric Gnostic Christian tradition has methods and practices, procedures by which we can comprehend all of this, how to become better people, to change, to help others, and in that process of embodying the most elevated ideals of humanity, we approach divinity from experience. We investigate these divine truths through experimentation, through analysis, through inquiry, through investigation, but first in order to do this, one must understand that which conditions our psychological states, so that by understanding them, we can remove them. In the process of self-transformation, Gnostic scriptures become very useful. But when isolated from the core teachings that inform their being, their genesis, their secrecy, these texts become elusive at best, and even useless. Understanding gnosis, the Gnostic Gospels―without exception―requires initiation into the codes by which such scriptures were written, which specifically are known as Kabbalah and Alchemy. We are going to elaborate on what these two sciences are today, because without an understanding of what these principles are, it is impossible to understand what the Gnostics were referring to, because those were the codes in which those scriptures were communicated. Just as appreciating Shakespeare requires a strong knowledge of English, likewise interpreting the Gnostic scriptures requires facility with the symbols, the methods, the allegories, the parables, the mystical language in which they were written, in which they were disseminated. We will examine today the necessity for evaluating our concepts, especially regarding the Gnostic traditions, in what manner the Gnostic Gospels were composed and why. We are also going to examine why the Esoteric Christian tradition was forced underground only to remerge to the public in the 1950’s. I cannot emphasis enough―the Gnostic Gospels are truly compelling. They are practical writings for those who are initiated into its systems. We will take some time to elaborate on the practical roots of Gnostic scriptures, because they challenge our millennia-old beliefs, our assumptions, our theories, as well as the limitations of such beliefs. 
Who Were the Gnostics?
The term γνῶσις gnosis is not well understood today. While literally indicating “knowledge,” gnosis is not limited to a particular geography, or history, or denomination. Just as water has many names, but is prevalent throughout all cultures, likewise gnosis, which is the experience and the knowledge of divine truth from personal testimony, is eternal. Many messengers, many prophets, many luminaries, taught humanity about the origin of spiritual life, but their languages are different. The symbols and codes they use are unique to a given culture. However, the essence of what they taught is the same.
As a tradition, Gnosticism constitutes the secret doctrines of Christianity, which precisely stipulate the following, as stated in the Gospel of John: Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free. ―John 8:32
Many modern scholars and students of religion are really fascinated by the early Christians, the Gnostics, because their teachings differ greatly in terms of their content, and especially their pedagogy, in relation to modern Christian dogma. Rather than exclusively believe in the personality of Jesus, the Gnostics taught, and teach, how Christ is an internal principle, something that must be developed, and that salvation does not depend upon following a system of belief. It is found by awakening to our true nature, by comprehending and eliminating the obstacles to our own redemption.
Gnostic Christianity teaches a personal, experiential relationship with the divine. It does not require mediation from a priest, from a rabbi, from an imam, from any theology, from any idea or group. Gnosis is what we know from our own investigations based on facts. Some have argued traditionally that Gnostic Christianity interpreted their mysteries through pagan symbolism, and there is some credence to this. However, Gnosticism extends very far beyond any particular geography, including the Middle East, the Holy Land, any particular language, any individual messenger, any historized or localized group. Through studying and applying these principles, we can verify this truth for ourselves, the universality of diverse spiritual traditions. We begin to see the essential thread that unites them, which is direct experience of the truth. The Gnostic tradition, like many other mystical traditions, was maintained within secret societies, or esoteric schools, which was only accessible by certain candidates who had demonstrated their maturity, their ethics, their dedication, specifically to transforming themselves so that they can benefit humanity. Therefore much scholarship and modern interpretations surrounding the essential nature of Gnostic doctrine is wrong. Most scholars of Gnosticism even admit this. What little history we have, acquired regarding the first Christian groups and their teachings, has some problems. First, it is obscured by a lack of material. We cannot really construct a comprehensive picture of their faith. We have ideas. We have assumptions. We have correlations. We have studious analyses of different texts by scholars and renowned academics, but the truth is that there is a lot that is missing, and because universities and scholars do not have access to methods and means for investigating these on a deeper level, in a spiritual sense, their judgments are incipient, insufficient. They have not received training within the mystery schools that are living the teaching. Therefore they cannot comment. It is beyond their scope. Secondly, the knowledge that we have is filtered. We have many biases and assumptions, many ideas as I said, but we have to remember that what little that we possess of Gnostic treasures have been pieced together. The essential knowledge of the Gnostics was never written down. It was written in code, what little we have. Most of that knowledge was transmitted orally through a secretive chain of transmission between master and disciple. Therefore what remains of their doctrine is very limited. It is like a door without a key, since a lot of their teachings were destroyed, as evidenced by this statement by Manly P. Hall in The Secret Teachings of All Ages: The entire history of Christian and pagan Gnosticism is shrouded in the deepest mystery and obscurity; for, while the Gnostics were undoubtedly prolific writers, little of their literature has survived. They brought down upon themselves the animosity of the early Christian Church, and when this institution reached its position of world power it destroyed all available records of the Gnostic cultus. ―Manly P. Hall, The Secret Teachings of All Ages
Therefore to truly understand the Gnostics, one has to be an initiate. One has to be a member of the initiatic, living mystery school. Now this statement can seem problematic. We are not referring necessarily to a physical group or school, because there are many Gnostic institutions that teach what we are teaching. When I refer to the living mystery school, I am specifically referring to states of consciousness that are beyond mere physicality. We practice the science of meditation, so that we can withdraw the senses and enter into profound introspection, and learn to experience our internal reality.
Some people may be familiar with dreams. Some people call it astral projections, astral experiences, lucid dreaming. We are going to be giving a course very soon on this topic [Dream Yoga and Astral Travel], but I just like to synthesize for you that there is knowledge accessible to us beyond the physical body, and that the consciousness can learn to gain lucidity, clarity, confidence, familiarity, skill, efficacy, abilities within the dream state, so that we are no longer dreaming there, and we can learn to access knowledge that is far beyond which is conceivable with our materialistic theories. The living mystery schools and the Gnostic Church are within these internal realities, these internal worlds. It is something that we can verify and experiment with, to test, to know, to witness. It is important we learn to approach this knowledge without believing or disbelieving, but merely experimenting with it, testing its principles, its hypotheses, so that we can learn from facts what is the reality here, because physical senses are very limited. Intellectual knowledge that we gather from books does not really gives us the full picture of the reality of a thing. Intellectual knowledge is useful in its place, but it is not the core purpose of why we approach this type of spirituality. Comprehension and understanding is born from experience. It is not acquired by merely reading a book, or attending a lecture. It is something much deeper than that. So we have many practices that we provide so that you can verify these things if that is your wish. Now in relation to the Gnostic Gospels, some have referred to them as the Apocrypha, from the Greek apokryptein, “to hide away.” We can hear within this etymology the word “cryptic,” that which is indecipherable, archaic, obscure. This term includes religious scriptures not included within the standard canon. It can apply to biblical books from early Christianity, such as the Greek version of the Old Testament, which is not included in the Hebrew Bible. Apocrypha can also signify texts which are considered of doubtful authenticity, which despite their prevalence, may be questionable, even if they are accepted commonly. For the purpose of our studies, we are examining these apocryphal texts, because they challenge us. They challenge well-established assumptions about the essential nature of Christianity, of Christian dispensation, about faith, about reality, about experience, about investigation, about knowing. Many have tried to prove these scriptures false because it is truly frightening, if you think about it, to conceive that we in the West, our Western culture which prides itself on its magnificence, its worldly materialism and glories, really stands on mistaken foundations. This is why we study meditation very deeply and practice it, so that we can verify and test these truths, to discriminate with knowledge, with insight, with intelligence. 
The Nag Hammadi Scriptures
The Nag Hammadi scriptures are Coptic texts. They were discovered in 1945 by a group of Egyptian peasants in upper Egypt. They were digging for fertiliser near a boulder when they discovered a sealed jar. Thinking that they might have found gold, and overcoming the fear of unleashing a Jinn—which is a bottled spirit—they broke the jar and found the codices written in Coptic. Coptic, which was influenced by Greek, originally descended from ancient Egyptian language, the former having been superseded by Egyptian Arabic. Coptic is a form of the Egyptian language that was used, I believe, from the Roman period up until more recent times.
The Nag Hammadi scriptures are approximately 50 different gnostic texts, constituted by 13 leather-bound papyri, bound books which are not scrolls. A lot of supposition has been spread and focused upon the origins of these texts. They were most likely buried in the second half of the 4th century CE, and while originally written in Greek during the early centuries of the Christian movement, such texts were translated into Coptic, possibly by early Christian monks. This is what scholars like Marvin Meyer and Elaine Pagels believe. Supposedly these monks translated these texts despite the accusations in Spring of 367 by Athanasius, the archbishop of Alexandria, who was calling for believers to reject what he called heretical, “illegitimate and secret books.” Instead the texts were conserved in a jar. They were buried, and then they were miraculously found 1600 years later. 
The Dead Sea Scrolls
The Dead Sea Scrolls were surrounded in mystery as well, a deep history that you can read about especially on Deadseacrolls.org.il. They were initially discovered by a treasure seeker group of Bedouins in Qumran, by a nomadic group of people near the northern end of the Dead Sea. They were excavations of various documents, papyri, which were written on goat and sheep skin scrolls. Many of these were mostly written in Hebrew, but also in Aramaic. I am going to present to you most of the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls, so that you can have a sense of what exactly was found before we go in to a deep analysis of the Gnostic Gospels themselves.
There were biblical scriptures, all except the Book of Esther. These are the oldest existing copies of these texts, so you can imagine that this is a huge find for archaeologists. There were translations of scripture in Greek and Aramaic, which was a language commonly spoken in the Holy Land 2000 years ago. 
There were תפילין tefillin, which are prayer parchment slips. If you are familiar with the Jewish tradition, when praying in a synagogue, one wears תפילין tefillin, which are phylacteries, black leather straps around one’s arm, and a black box with prayer parchment slips as you see in the word תפילין tefillin themselves, which a placed in the black box that you wear on your forehead between your eyebrows, a representation of how we have to wrap ourselves within prayer, deep devotion, especially of our mind, controlling our mind, devotion to divinity.
There are מזוזה Mezuzot, prayers that are placed on the door post of houses. Usually you find a cylindrical object that has the Hebrew letter ש Shin, representative of שדי אל חי Shaddai El Chai, the Almighty Living God within Hebrew, a sacred name. מזוזה Mezuzot are prayers written by rabbis that are placed within these מזוזה Mezuzot, which are situated on the door posts of Jewish homes. We also have אפוקריפה Apocrypha. These are Catholic and Eastern orthodox canons, not a part of Hebrew and the Protestant Bible. This includes Ben Sira, the Book of Tobit and the Epistle of Jeremiah. We also have calendrical texts, which are solar rather than lunar calculations, which document the festivals, the ceremonies, and the priestly courses of those communities, sometimes written in cryptic script. There are exegetical texts, which are explicit analyses and interpretations of biblical works. If you have gone on our website you find we talk about many scriptures. We provide exegeses, which are commentary on different obscure verses within various traditions. Here in the Dead Sea Scrolls you find that they were many exegetical texts about the Bible, including פשר Pesher, relating to biblical prophecies that are applied to historical moments. You also have historical texts, which are numerous historical events with theological and moral commentary, and there are also legal texts as well, rabbinical Halakah, which means the Jewish laws and customs of those communities relating to the Bible. If you have read the Old Testament you are probably familiar with Leviticus, and Deuteronomy especially, which outline a lot of the Jewish law, which mystical texts like the Zohar comment upon. There are parabiblical texts retelling expansions and embelishments of biblical stories, or legal texts. There is poetical and liturgical texts: hymns and prayers that people use in synagogue, or in many ceremonies relating to biblical poetry. There is sapiential texts relating to wisdom or knowledge. It is a continuation of the wisdom tradition of Proverbs, the Book of Job, Ecclesiastes, some Psalms, Ben Sera, and the Wisdom of Solomon. There are also sectarian texts which interest a lot of scholars, which are the unique theology, world view, and history of the Essenes, or Yahad, “the community.” There is a lot of obscurity about who the Essenes were. Their history is very hidden from materialistic science and archaeology, but this is something that we can investigate within our meditations, to go deep into learning the history of these groups, if that is our wish. What is at Stake?
Now, the question becomes: “What is at stake by studying the Gnostic Gospels?”
Despite their novelty within the context of Christianity’s evolution in the public sense, the presence of Gnostic scriptures asks us to revise our assumptions, our convictions, our beliefs, which for many obviously can be source of discomfort. There is a lot at stake for mainstream Christianity when studying their origins and the significance of their tradition. This is why many people simply dismiss the Gnostic Gospels as heresy, as inauthentic, as satanic, but regardless or not whether they are true, their presence asks us and compels us to present an uncomfortable question: “What do we really know? What do we know about Jesus? What do we know about ourselves and divinity?” We are basically asked to question what it means to believe, and what it means to know. While it is difficult even to believe in a tradition today, as evidenced by the prevalence of Atheism in the West, especially North America, it is even more difficult to experience religion, simply because for the modern mind, which is conditioned by its own scepticism, such possibilities do not exist for it. It is incompatible with the materialistic dogma that has perpetuated, and conditioned our Western world view, but the reality is even if we are in a religion, we may be very materialistic, primarily because we deny that it is even possible to experience these things. When someone says they have experienced divinity, we look at them like they are crazy, but it is sad that this is the general outlook and attitude, because all religions are teachings from individuals who experienced divinity. If you look at scriptures such as the Qur’an, there are really many Surahs that simply are of the Prophet Muhammad contesting with the unbelievers who reject his testimony, much like the ancient Christian prophets and masters, or the Hebrew rabbis, the enlightened ones, who constantly had to contend with very doubtful people. So there is nothing new under the Sun here. But rather than dismiss the Gnostic Gospels, it is better to really examine the situation, rather than follow the easy, dismissive, and unscientific path of just rejecting what does not fit our world view, that which is not palatable for us. We can really come to the conclusion that there must be reasons why we do not have this knowledge. I am not talking about from a book, or from a scripture, but from experience, from verification, from meditation. Part of why we do not know these things is due to our inherent tendencies, such as mechanically taking in information. We always like to compare data that we receive with our memories, with our knowledge. Perhaps you are listening to this lecture and comparing what I am saying with what somebody else said, or to a book you have read, or to a lecture you heard, or to a scripture you are studying. The mind can only compare thesis and antithesis, point A and point B. It can only look at the corelations between them. It can store data. It is useful for basically storing information, but when it comes to trying to experience what these scriptures entail, the mind, with its overdependence on rationalization, tends to become the obstacle, a very chatty, distracted, and disorientated mind. We tend to project our thoughts onto the reality before us, and therefore we do not really see what is new. We also like to compartmentalize information we have heard, so that it will fit a certain box, an a priori assumption, and most people get stuck there. They do not go any further, and it is unfortunate, because there is really more to life and experience, as evidenced by the Gnostic Gospels, than is merely assumed, or lived, or believed. Rather than see a phenomenon for what it is, we tend to just merely interact with our concepts, and we can say that this is really a profound state of sleep, spiritually speaking, unconsciousness, not really knowing ourselves, not really knowing our full potential or what we could do. The reason why this happens is that there is comfort within structures. There is complacency within belief systems. They provide us with a sense of order. They give us cohesion when we approach a world that is really afflicted, and afflictive, with a society that is really backwards, upside down. You just simply have to look at the news to see what is happening, even in the Middle East right now, or in different cities. It is distressful, and the truth is that if you look at the conflict going on in Israel right now, you find that people have their firm convictions and beliefs why the enemy is wrong. Beliefs do not change anybody. Our religion, our attitudes, our beliefs do not really affect a lasting, profound, and deep spiritual realization. If you do not believe me, you can simply examine your own life. We can think and feel one day that something is true, and yet that changes. Our ideas change. Our political parties change. Our religions change, and yet we continue to suffer. People change religion and political parties, ideas, like changing clothes. These tend to be very superficial, and worn like regalia, or a costume, in order to fit in with a specific group. But unfortunately that does not really penetrate the depth of the consciousness, of really altering the fundamental trajectory of our life, of examining what behaviors we enact that really produce problems for ourselves and for others, and learning to change them. We can change our political affiliations and ideologies, and yet we can continue to be unhappy, to be burdened with problems, with pain. Therefore if these are impermanent, the question becomes: what is not? What is permanent? What is real? Is it not facts born from experience the most real thing that we can come close to, that we can approximate, that we can agree upon? But unfortunately when it comes to spirituality, we have many assumptions and vague notions about what spirit, what divinity, what Christ is, because if people’s basic terminologies and definitions completely differ from one another, then it is not factual. It is a belief. It is not based in evidence. It is not the raw experience of a thing. So this is why knowledge, when it is divorced from practice, is really useless. Studying and accumulating information in the intellect, but not deeply changing our daily states, is a waste of time. We can use scriptures, and these teachings, and the Gnostic Gospels to inform the basis of an ethical lifestyle, but without the effort and the will to work, it will not get us anywhere, unfortunately. If our knowledge does not rectify our suffering, then it is necessary to revise our method. What is the common saying? It’s the definition of madness is to keep repeating the same thing expecting a different result. This is why Gnosis exists. But traditionally this knowledge has been so revolutionary that it had to go underground, because most people cannot accept it. Whether you are new, or have studied these teachings for some time, you can simply go on the internet to realize this fact, how many people do not get it, but that is ok. People are at their level. They have their beliefs and we respect them. As for our personal life, we work with what is effective, and try to provide clarity for those who need it, who want it. Some people merely hear this knowledge, about this type of instruction, and then they dismiss it because it does not fit preconceptions, and there is some truth to that. It is a natural sentiment to not want to feel challenged in one’s beliefs, our identity. We feel offended when someone criticizes perhaps even our taste in music, or our religion. It is a natural reaction or instinct, but if we want to go deeper in our understanding of these principles, it is important to question that reaction. This is why this wisdom traditionally was only given to people or candidates who proved their willingness, their maturity. To understand who the Gnostics were really requires initiation, meaning, entering the discipline, into the tradition that they practice, which has to do with our inner experiences, by practicing meditation, by verifying these truths within oneself. Now contrary to popular assumption, this tradition has indeed thrived throughout many centuries in very different ways―sometimes subversive, always hidden, but always adapting to the social, the cultural, the religious climate of different periods in history. There have been many figures throughout history who have known and practiced Gnosticism, yet many of them never announced their allegiance, because it was risky. We now live in an era of information, as I said, that is unprecedented. We have access to knowledge that was veiled for millennia. However, since there is so much confusion surrounding it, humanity has been granted access to this knowledge so that they can gain clarity, orientation. This is the purpose of the Gnostic Gospels and the Gnostic teachings. These are the teachings of a mystery school, but as I mentioned, what is a mystery school? Some people only like to think that they are groups far removed from the past, but the truth is that they are a living entity that sustain, emerge, and last in accordance with the work of the individual practitioners who belong to those groups. So there are physical groups as I said, but more importantly, the Gnostic Church is within the superior, internal worlds, which we access when we physically go to sleep. We enter deep meditation and we awaken in those states. This is not a theory. It is not a belief. Personally for me, this is not what I believe. This is something I practice, and so I invite you to study and enter that discipline yourself. So as we said, scholars often have not been initiated into gnosis, specifically the practices that allow aspirants to really acquire this knowledge for themselves. What we are providing here is verifiable through experience, through study and practice. It is not a belief. If some people wish to make Gnosticism into another belief system, that is ok. That is their path. They can do that, but that is personally not why we at this school are providing these lectures. That is not a reflection of the reality and purpose of this teaching. We can only really understand this through study, and looking at some of the historical trends, but more importantly living this esoteric knowledge. 
Esoteric and Public Christianity
But in order to kind of emphasize and provide a distinction between the different forms of Christianity that emerged, I am going to relay to you some quotes from Dion Fortune who wrote in her book The Training and Work of an Initiate about some of the history of the early Gnostic Christians, because her analysis is very eloquent and very deep.
She emphasizes that there is a great tendency in humanity. People want to adhere to an outer religious form without really understanding its inherent mysteries. So there has always been a division between two spheres―outward religious forms and inner mystical meaning. This is a binary that has been studied and documented by many scholars, some very renowned individuals like Gershom Scholem, who was a German Israeli philosopher. He made Kabbalah very popular for academics, some valuable history that one can learn, but obviously one has to discriminate what the scholars assume, but also what we have known from experience, because they are different. These domains constitute the esoteric and public religious forms―the secret meaning of a tradition and its outward symbols. So classes of people have developed in relation to this binary, one which is made up of dogma and the other from direct experience. In other words, one group has been initiated into these mysteries, and the majority merely adhere to a structure, a code, a ritual system, a belief system without verification. I will read for you her quote at length: There naturally sprang up a keen rivalry between the two types of Christians; those who had accepted the teaching of Our Lord without any previous Mystery-training depended entirely upon spiritual intuition and good works; those who were already accustomed to the methods of the Mysteries sought to express the Christian truths in the language of the esoteric philosophy of their day. The first chapter of the Gospel according to John is an excellent example of the process whereby men already highly trained in mystical knowledge correlated the new teaching with that which was already familiar to them. In this Gospel we see the influence of the Greek Schools of initiation, but in the Apocalypse we see the influence of Qabalistic thought.
For those who are not familiar, Kabbalah constitutes the mystical teachings of esoteric Judaism, which can inform our understanding of Gnostic Christianity, its inception, its meaning. This is because Christianity has Jewish roots. Jesus was a rabbi. He was an Essene, as we are going to examine in later quotes. Therefore, if we want to understand the Gnostics, the esoteric Christian tradition, we need to know the esoteric Jewish tradition from which it sprung, without exception.
Likewise, Dion Fortune also emphasised something very interesting, that Gnostic Christianity was formed by initiates from different esoteric groups. These are people who already possessed knowledge. They had spiritual development. Therefore they recognized within the newly emerging esoteric Christian traditions their inherent mysteries. These were encoded, these were conveyed, and they were taught within the new religious movement. As is the tendency of modern humanity, many new adherents to Christianity did not want to engage with the difficult task of learning Kabbalah: the Jewish mystical science which informs esoteric Christianity. The study of Kabbalah consists of the archetypal nature of the Hebrew letters, their symbology, what they represent, divine numerology, and many intuitive symbols. Instead, certain followers of public Christianity either ignored or they removed such roots. They wanted to make their tradition more acceptable, and as a result, they sterilized Christianity. I will read for you Dion Fortune again: In the struggle between the two types of Christians, the initiates and the non-initiates, the latter eventually gained the day, and forthwith the order for persecution and abolition went forth against the Mysteries of Jesus. The orthodox element then gradually developed, as was inevitable, something of a Mystery System of their own in the sacraments, which are ritual magic pure and simple, as is agreed even by such an authority as Evelyn Underhill.
Christianity, as with all religions, is composed and conveyed through the language of symbols, abstractions within philosophy, within allegory, within archetypes. If you do not believe me, look at the verses of the Bible, in the New Testament, where Jesus says he speaks in parables for those who understand, for those who are initiated. Modern Christians interpret their scriptures literally, and they perform and observe rituals without really comprehending the deeper reality, the significance, what their teachings and rituals communicate in a spiritual level, on a psychological level, more importantly.
For Gnostics, rituals are really powerful. They are a medium for developing and awakening our full potential. We have ceremonies that we practice, which encode, empower, and which represent the path itself, within its mystical allegory. Now what some have denominated magic is the capacity of the consciousness to exert divine influence upon humanity. This term magic is often denigrated today. People do not understand its original roots. It comes from the Indo-European root word mag or magush, meaning “priest.” A real magician is a priest, and there are also in the Gnostic Church priestesses, because men are not the only source of authority, of spiritual guidance, of wisdom. In fact, a real priest needs his priestess in order to be a priest. This has to do with the Gnostic Mysteries of Chastity, which is the next lecture in this course. Now real magic is learning how to influence others through divinity for a positive purpose, to elevate the soul of others. Through training of spiritual practices, we can develop this capacity. We can develop the intuitive capacity for comprehending scripture, and we can also strengthen our ability to express a superior way of being―real compassion―not the hallmark cards of holidays, gifts, and sentimentalism, but loving so much that we even forgive our worst enemies, like Jesus on the cross. We can really express states of compassion and love, which are facilitated through Gnostic ritual, ceremonies and practices that we have in our tradition. But unfortunately for many Christians, their tradition has been sterilized, as I said. They are really infertile. Many Christians like to say that they are born again, but really if you look at their teaching, which is divorced from its Jewish roots, there is really is not much fertility there, especially in relation to sexual aspects of this knowledge, which are studied in relation to Alchemy, as we are going to explain. Their traditions no longer convey effective methods for bridging the divine and the personal worlds. Many who find intellectual, emotional, or practical deficiencies in Christianity flee to other religions. They run away, and this is really sad, because there is something within Christian dispensation for Westerners which is valuable, but when that teaching no longer reflects its original patrimony, its essence, then people become disillusioned. They leave. Now rather than abandon one’s Christian heritage if one grew up Christian, one can learn to appreciate it deeply. One can find sustenance through the rich intellectual and spiritual sciences of Kabbalah and Alchemy which inform its heart. As Dion Fortune states: Consequently there is an unbridged gulf in our modern Christianity between the mysticism of its deep spiritual truths and the symbolic and magical ceremonial of its ritual. This gulf it is the task of the modern Mystery Schools to bridge. These, however, have in many cases re-illumined their fires at an Eastern altar, so that the bridge they build does not lead to the Christian contacts of the West. Those of their followers who seek initiation, instead of having revealed to them the deeper issues of their own faith, have to change their religion and follow other Masters. 
The Tree of Life: Christian Kabbalah
Kabbalah is one of the primary codes in which the Gnostic Gospels were written, represented in the Book of Genesis and the Gnostic Gospels as the Tree of Life in Eden.
It is a map of our internal and external universe. It is the structure of consciousness within every dimension. This knowledge flourished secretly within Jewish mystical circles, but Judaism is not its sole patrimony. Each spiritual tradition contains the same elements. Some of these predominate within a specific culture, within a given time or place or language. The Jewish tradition delved very deeply within the Kabbalistic teachings, just as Buddhism flourished with its analytical insights into meditation. However this does not mean that Buddhism is devoid of Kabbalah, or Kabbalah is devoid of meditation. Each tradition encompasses the other. They embody the same principles, much in the same way as water changes shape within different cups. The water is the same. Christianity has its roots in Judaism, but since its roots were removed from it, Christianity has lost its soil. Kabbalah is the practical tool for navigating spiritual experience. It is a way to understand our reality and our relationship with divinity. Dion Fortune states in her book The Mystical Qabalah: It [the Tree of Life] is a glyph, that is to say a composite symbol, which is intended to represent the cosmos in its entirety and the soul of man as related thereto; and the more we study it, the more we see that it is an amazingly adequate representation; we use it as the engineer or the mathematician uses his sliding-rule, to scan and calculate the intricacies of existence, visible and invisible, in external nature or the hidden depth of the soul. […]
This map depicts ten spheres. These are known as סְפִירוֹת sephiroth in Hebrew, “emanations,” which emerge from the transcendent divinity, or as the Gnostics denominate, Agnostos Theos: the Unknowable God, from the most rarefied states of being to the most condensed and conditioned, material states.
The Gnostics refer to the origin of spiritual life and light as Barbelo, from the Aramaic language. Bar means “son,” while Bel signifies “sun.” Christ, represented by Jesus of Nazareth, the son of the solar divinity, is therefore the embodiment of heavenly light, of compassion, which permeates all the spheres, the eternal realms, the סְפִירוֹת sephiroth or the aeons, and the later which can also signify any inhabitant of such dimensions, those who have mastered those realms. Barbelo can also be referenced as the Solar Absolute: the אין סוף אור Ain Soph Aur above this Tree of Life, which means the Limitless Light, the Uncreated, the Unmanifested potentiality to be. It is the source and origin of all existing, manifested things, represented by these ten סְפִירוֹת sephiroth, or spheres, these heavens. All of this emerges because of the essential and eternal compassion of Christ, which is that light, the אין סוף אור Ain Soph Aur, Barbelo. Gnostics have referenced the Absolute, above this diagram, as Pronoia: the “forethought of God,” which is a pure, cosmic abstraction which is not yet materialized. It is not yet in manifestation. The Jewish mystics have referred to the unmanifested divine as אאלהים Aelohim, and the creator demiurge as אלהים Elohim. This duality between the unmanifested cosmic potential and an intelligent but often denigrated creative host or demiurge, is very often depicted in the Gnostic Gospels. Each sphere relates to different dimensions of nature, in accordance with the densities and the materiality of them. The most subtle and rarefied are at the top, and the most dense are below, as you can see with מלכות Malkuth in Hebrew, the “kingdom,” the physical world, our physical body. Above that we have different realms and spheres which are more subtle to perceive, but are able to be verified through meditation. I will not go through the meaning of all of these סְפִירוֹת sephiroth, because that will be the purpose of this course. We will be unpacking Gnostic scripture in relation with Kabbalah and Alchemy. So we can access these higher realms when the physical body is asleep, when we experience dreams. But rather than enter such states with a fragmentary awareness or just complete unconsciousness, the Gnostics learn to enter those realms with lucidity, with full awareness, with complete intentionality, with development, so that we can take advantage of those states, of such perceptions, in order to receive divine wisdom. We can learn to speak with the divine, including all of the masters of these celestial realms, the aeons, the divine hierarchies, who can grant us the capacity for transcendence, or make us pay what we owe before the archons, the hierarchs of the Law, which in eastern traditions are known as the Lords of Karma. They work with the creative demiurge, the host of gods and goddesses that manage and manifest all of the laws of nature, whether for good or for ill. Just as there are physical and societal laws, divinity also enforces superior laws that we have to learn to comprehend and follow if what we want is to achieve liberation, like Sophia in the Gnostic myth ascending up thirteen repentances, towards the source, which is the אין Ain, the Nothingness in Hebrew. Notice that you have ten spheres, and you have three realms above that, so that makes a total of thirteen―the thirteen repentances of Pistis Sophia if you have read The Gnostic Bible. So all of that relates to the Tree of Life. It is very deep, very important, and all of it is mapped. To really become skilled meditators, we use this graphic to help us understand our experiences and to know what to do in our path. 
Alchemy: The Tree of Knowledge
Kabbalah has its twin sister. This is Alchemy. It is the other tree of the Garden of Eden.
The Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge―Kabbalah, and Alchemy―are not specific, literal trees in Mesopotamia. These are symbols. In scripture, geography has often served as a code for deeper spiritual realities, in order to escape detection, persecution, and death, as we saw with the Spanish Inquisition. Alchemy is a rich tradition that encodes a lot of knowledge, but it is not a literal science of transforming lead in to gold. It is a symbol of how we use energy, how we transform the densities of our suffering personality into the lightness and gold of a liberated Essence, a pure consciousness. There are some interesting correlations between the Tree of Life and the Nag Hammadi scriptures, which we are going to examine some of the etymologies here. The term nag or naga reminds us of a serpent, from the Sanskrit नाग Naga, which in Buddhism are renown as elemental beings of nature who live within and empower nature itself. They are depicted as having a lower body of a snake and a humanoid torso. They often dwell in bodies of water and lakes, rivers especially. My wife, who before coming to Chicago, she was often praying to the Nagas by the rivers where she lived, in order to receive internal assistance. They have a very concrete reality. They are very beautiful souls that can help us. But importantly for us in this lecture, we are talking about the serpentine form of these elemental creatures, and the serpent is an ancient symbol. They can refer to our creative energy, which has the power to enliven our spirituality or to damn it, to destroy it. We find this evident in the duality of the tempting serpent, and the serpent of bronze that healed the Israelites in the wilderness. Nag spelt backwards is גן Gan, ג Gimel- נ Nun, which is a garden. Such a garden of Eden, the Hebrew term for bliss, is not a literal place. It is a psychological and spiritual state of being. حمادي Hammadi in Arabic means: “praiseworthy,” “one who praises God,” with roots in أحمد ahmad orمحمد Muhammad, the “praised, commendable, laudable.” Therefore, the Nag Hammadi scriptures are the esoteric knowledge of the serpent, of “the praiseworthy serpent,” the bronze serpent of Moses that can heal the soul. These are symbols. That energy, which is very subtle and terrifying for many, can be trained and elevated within our physiology in order to empower our consciousness. Rather than exclusively represent an evil tendency to be shunned, which is done by many superstitious people, the serpentine creative energies, when harnessed and controlled with love, provides happiness and a genuine awakening. What matters is that we utilize, symbolically, the metals of bronze. This is an amalgamation of copper and tin. Copper is feminine and tin is masculine, Venus and Jupiter when corresponding astrologically to those planets related to those metals. This demonstrates how a woman and a man within the Edenic bliss of sexual union, within a marriage, can overcome temptation. They can perform actions, sexual behaviors, that are praiseworthy before God. This is the original meaning of Adam and Eve in the garden. A man and a woman naked in a garden before God―obviously this is very sexual. But it is emphasizing that there are two paths that open up for the primordial couple, the archetypical man and woman. This is science has been designated at sexual alchemy, known as sexual magic within our tradition, where a couple, who are married, can utilize their union to achieve genuine religion. They can achieve return, reunion with divinity. 
Water into Wine
Now Gnosticism is a specific doctrine of the initiates, primarily Kabbalah and Alchemy as I stated. All religions contain the science of these two trees, although they are in code. These sciences are the absolute synthesis of religion. When you really reduce a religion to its core, you arrive at a sexual trope. Everything else is extemporaneous.
This spiritual knowledge is represented by water, and knowledge (water) is fluidic. It flows like a river, and often times in history, especially in the past ages, this esoteric, secret Christianity was often flowing like a ripple, often still, unperturbed, like in a reservoir underground. But now this knowledge is being given openly like a torrent, very fierce, which we find in writings by the author Samael Aun Weor. He wrote about Gnosticism since the 1950’s and was really the first to explicitly discuss teachings about early Christianity, about Buddhism, about all religions, that were previously prohibited to discuss. His most prevalent thesis is that all religions have a sexual basis, a sexual essence, which is the most expedient method for intense spiritual transformation. It is found precisely in the relationship between husband and wife. This is known as sexual alchemy, how a martial union grounded in divine love, with an ethical fulfilment, within the highest spiritual ideals, within discipline, within purity, within compassion for suffering, this results in the creation of an angel, a master, a prophet. Some have qualified Samael Aun Weor’s work as neo-Gnostic, in that his writings are an innovation, yet this is a pleonasm. His teachings regarding the essential practices of the Gnostics are not new. They have been presented throughout all religions without exception. To recognize this fact merely takes study, but unfortunately people do not want to. It is even more evident when you really practice and experience this science for yourself, and then, really, a lot of clarity emerges in relation to abstract symbols and religious allegories, which might seem very superficial and dumb in a literal sense, but really is the spirit of the letter that vivifies. Some people reject Samael Aun Weor because his work is not just isolated to the first Christians, but is extensive to all religions. Many people do not except the universal religion at the heart of all faiths, which Samael Aun Weor denominated as Gnosis. It is the experience and knowledge of divine truths from witnessing for oneself. He explains the following in his lecture “The Gnostic Institutions”: There is Gnosis in the Buddhist doctrine, in the Tantric Buddhism from Tibet, in the Zen Buddhism from Japan, in the Chan Buddhism of China, in Sufism, in the Whirling Dervishes, in the Egyptian, Persian, Chaldean, Pythagorean, Greek, Aztec, Mayan, Inca, etc., wisdom. If we carefully study the Christian Gospels, we will find in them Pythagorean mathematics, the Chaldean and Babylonian parable, and the formidable Buddhist moral. ―Samael Aun Weor, “The Gnostic Institutions”
The highest form of spiritual knowledge is Alchemy. This was conserved in secret. This knowledge was kept hidden, was maintained secretly amongst the early Christian groups, because it is volatile. It is powerful. It is controversial. It is a practice that requires the renunciation of our deepest, egotistical, and sexual drives, transforming sexual instinct into something divine, into something pure, into something sacred, creative, divine. We now have the opportunity to explain and learn knowledge that was reserved for the most developed and earnest of practitioners.
This knowledge was represented in the Bible in symbols, in relation to Alchemy. Was not Christ’s first miracle, in transforming water into wine, at a marriage? Christ taught sexual alchemy―to be born again. “That which is born of the flesh is flesh.” Everybody knows this. But the same sexual act, but transformed, elevated, “that which born of the spirit,” through that transformed act, “is spirit.” This is how common intercourse can become spiritual, how lust, which is contrary to love, is transmuted and transformed into divine compassion, conscious love, our soul. This is the basis of Gnosticism in all religions. Some people might ask, “How is it that Gnosis is in all religions, yet should not be adulterated?” We can say that the sexual teachings constitute the synthesis of all religions. The religious forms have died, but if we have the synthesis, the key, we can unlock these traditions and give them vibrancy, give them life. Religious authorities have expunged this synthesis as best it could, not knowing the full import of certain religious symbols that were retained within the Bible, within scripture. They passed censorship, especially in books like the Book of Revelations, which is so Kabbalistic and symbolic that the censors just did not get it. But because they did not want to remove the teachings of the Lord, they kept it in the Bible even though it is very difficult and impossible to understand without this key. Therefore to approach traditions without this basis is mistaken. Samael Aun Weor continues: The system of teaching which was adopted by Jesus was the system of the Essenes. Certainly, the Essenes were one hundred percent Gnostic.
So Gnosis is within all religious forms, but not all forms have retained their essence. All religions have degenerated, unfortunately. Therefore it can be difficult to discern their original teachings if we lack an education in this studies, and especially with practical training in its methods.
Gnostic Controversies
So despite the fact that Gnosticism is flourishing again, there have been many disagreements among and about Gnostic groups since the times of Jesus, including today in Samael Aun Weor’s movement. For example, the Nazarenes were, according to Blavatsky:
The same as the St. John Christians; called the Mendaeans or Sabeans. They designate Christ “a false Messiah” and only recognize John the Baptist, whom they call the “great Nazar.” ―H.P. Blavatsky
You also find the following from The Three Mountains by Samael Aun Weor:
The Nazarenes were known as Baptists, Sabians, and Christians of Saint John. Their belief was that the Messiah was not the Son of God, but simply a prophet who wanted to follow John. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Three Mountains
And also from the lecture “Alchemical Symbolism of the Nativity of Christ”:
In those days, there were disputes among the Baptists, the Essenes, and others. ―Samael Aun Weor, Alchemical Symbolism of the Nativity of Christ
There is great diversity even today in so called Gnostic groups, whether from Samael Aun Weor or not. Many of them fight with each other. They denominate the others as heretics, much like Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Athanasius, and other heresiologists towards Christians whose doctrinal purity they questioned. For example, Irenaeus and Hippolytus were heresy hunters. They wrote against the Gnostics, yet what is interesting is that Samael Aun Weor refers to them as Gnostics. This can get confusing, right? But rather than becoming confused by this apparent or glaring discrepancy, or merely reject Samael Aun Weor, it would be better to really re-evaluate our definitions, our lexicon, our knowledge about what a Gnostic is.
Scholars had even argued whether to really call the Nag Hammadi scriptures Gnostic, since they do not reflect one ideology or group, but different Gnosticisms or movements. The traditions from which ancient Gnostic texts emerged were highly varied and unfamiliar to modern scholars, because certain bishops really sought to dismiss and erase any viewpoint that conflicted with their own. Although the term Gnosticism was appropriated to refer to heretically-designated sects, the term gnosis is different for others. Whether elements of teachings or truths were throughout different schools, it really is disingenuous to assume that there is a homogeneous world view to a constellation of very nuanced groups and systems. For example, many believed Gnostics were dualists, who thought the world was created by an evil power, with a very fatalistic view of its god or demiurge. However, this philosophy is only a small range of knowledge within the spectrum of Gnosis, and it does not really constitute the entirety of its teachings. This is because every religion possesses gnosis, direct personal testimony of divine reality. Even within any given religion there is a tremendous range of knowledge, a tremendous range of practice, let alone varying messengers who all founded different schools. This had occurred even with early Christianity, which was composed of various doctrines or Christianities (plural), many of whom were competing with one another, like basically all religions today, and especially Samael Aun Weor’s Gnostic movement. Many groups are competing with one another. Now this does not mean that we should condemn, that we should shun, that we should ignore those with whom we disagree. But we should not go to the other extreme as well. We should not elevate Gnostic initiates on a pedestal, on a palanquin, on a throne where we can admire those who are really riddled with flaws. Likewise, we should not reject these people, these individuals, because they still were vehicles, however imperfect, of divine teachings. This might mean disassociating with certain schools that are not maintaining ethical discipline, and finding a Gnostic institution that resonates with us. But sadly, some potential students perceive the hypocrisy of certain groups and thereafter they leave. They often associate Samael Aun Weor with the failures of his students. This has happened with every religion, without exception, to the point that now many individuals have traumas that are associated with the prophets. We can say that this is really a tremendous crime against the soul. Therefore, if we are instructors or missionaries providing guidance to others, we have a tremendous responsibility to maintain in our body, in our speech, in our mind. Also there is the need to remove the psychological tendency to think that only one group is real or authentic and that the rest are wrong, as if instructors, or people, as if aspirants are not complicated, as if we are not struggling, as if we are not afflicted despite our best intentions, our most noble ideals. Until we overcome our own karma, our delusions, our assumptions, our egotism, our beliefs, even to a minor degree, we cannot even begin to understand or appreciate reality. Since we have ego, we are all susceptible to liability. We make misinterpretations. We make mistakes, no matter how authentic our teachers may be, because we are fascinated by desires, and we cannot see the truth in that way. So there is value to be taken from many Gnostics instructors and scriptures, even though there are going to be different nuanced interpretations, often open disagreements between them. We have to remove the fanaticism that dictates, within a rigid, false dichotomy, that only one organization has it right and the rest are condemned. Now we have to avoid extremes. Neither blind adherence to a dogma, nor its vehement rejection, means that we have arrived at wisdom. In fact, it is the opposite. If we are not examining our position, if we are not scientifically investigating these things through personal inquiry, then we are not making any ground. There is a saying amongst the Sufis that was documented in Al-Qushayri’s Al-Risalah: The Principles of Sufism, that when the Sufis disagree with one another, the harmony and the unity of the group is maintained, since each believer helps the other. As mentioned in the Hadith: A believer to another believer is like two hands. One washes the other, correcting each other. ―Hadith
However, when the Sufis all agree, then there is a problem. Often this occurs in the form of a dogmatic conformity. So a balance has to be reached. You have to follow your heart, your intuition. What matters is that you rely on your conscious experiences, your knowledge, your meditations to discern and guide you.
Initiation is deeply personal. It is not found in a group. It is found within yourself. It is necessary to study from proven and pure sources, but for that, you need to awaken, to personally verify their efficacy, whether or not they are expedient or effective, whether or not they are worthy. Study from those masters who are proven, the founders of different religions. We have to be very careful with what we ingest, spiritually speaking. Now even if we tell you that certain scriptures are pure or not, only you can really evaluate and understand these truths from experience. As Samael Aun Weor rightly indicated: The Gnostic must not be a fanatic. We must study everything in order to reject the useless and accept the useful. Gnosis is not against any religion, school, order, or sect. We have fought for the moral purification of many religions, schools, orders and sects. We have never been against any religion, school, or sect. We know that humanity is divided into groups and that each group needs its own system of particular instruction. All religions, schools, orders, and sects are precious pearls that are strung on the golden thread of divinity. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Yellow Book: "Order and Esoteric Discipline" 
Conclusion
We will conclude with a reference to the book The Major Mysteries, which we invite you to study if you wish to learn more about esoteric Christianity, the path of initiation, and a foundation for approaching the Gnostic Gospels. We conclude with this statement by Samael Aun Weor:
If the Lord had not been crucified, the destiny of the Western world would have been another. We would now have sublime enlightened rabbis everywhere, preaching Christic esotericism. The union of Christic esotericism, secret Jewish Kabbalah, and holy alchemy would have completely illuminated and transformed the entire world. Yes, the mysteries of Levi would have shone with the light of Christ. Gnosis (Da’ath) would have magnificently shone everywhere. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Major Mysteries
If you have any questions, I invite you to ask them.
Questions and Answers
Question: Do you hold events on specific sexual transmutation practices? I have been practicing for several years and I am looking to go deeper. Thank you!
Instructor: If you go on to Glorian.org there is a course called the Distance Learning Course, which if you have not registered with that, you should. We have practices and exercises that we do as a group online right now due to the pandemic, but also for the students that are long distance, where you can participate in different sexual transmutation practices. There was recently one given by my wife for Ham-Sah Pranayama. So you could study that exercise that was uploaded to our website under Guided Practices specifically. But yes, we do have online practices that we do where you can participate and ask questions of instructors in case you want to go deeper into the exercises themselves. Question: Can you expound on the meaning of the demiurge and the archons? Instructor: I was hoping someone would ask that. I have intended to really talk about this topic in future lectures especially, but I can relate to you some basic understandings of the demiurge and the archons. Now the term demiurge is from the Greek language. It means “worker” or “craftsman.” The demiurgos or “the artificer” is an architect who supposedly, in accordance with Gnostic Gospels, built the universe. Even the Freemasons derive the meaning of “Supreme Architect” from this word. Plato even talked about it in the Timaeus, about the creator God. The Gnostic Gospels speak very negatively about the demiurge, and this has produced some confusion for people, because in our tradition we talk very highly about the demiurge. Now in order to explain how our Gnostic tradition refers to the demiurge, or creative architect of the universe, in contradistinction with the transcendent unmanifested deity as we explained, I will relate to you some excerpts from Samael Aun Weor in his writings. This is from The Three Mountains: Esotericism admits the existence of a Logos, or a collective Creator of the universe, a Demiurge architect. It is unquestionable that such a Demiurge is not a personal deity as many mistakenly suppose, but rather a host of Dhyan Chohans, Angels, Archangels, and other forces. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Three Mountains
He also states in The Gnostic Bible: The Pistis Sophia Unveiled:
It is impossible to symbolize or allegorize the Unknowable One (or in Gnostic terms, Agnostos Theos, the Unmanifested or the Absolute within Kabbalah, the Ain, Ain Soph, and Ain Soph Aur). Nevertheless, the Manifested One, the Knowable Elohim, can be allegorized or symbolized. The Manifested Elohim is constituted by the Demiurge Creator of the Universe. [...] The great invisible Forefather is Aelohim, the Unknowable Divinity. The great Triple-Powered God is the Demiurge Creator of the Universe: Multiple Perfect Unity. The Creator Logos is the Holy Triamatzikamno. The Verb, the Great Word. The three spaces of the First Mystery are the regions of the Demiurge Creator. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Pistis Sophia Unveiled 
So if you studied the Kabbalah, you know that the creator is precisely the top three סְפִירוֹת sephiroth of the Tree of Life: כֶּ֫תֶר Kether, חָכְמָה Chokmah, בִּינָה Binah―Crown, Wisdom, and Intelligence. These are the Trinity of Christianity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, which are not people, but forces within divinity. All of the masters and angels who have perfected themselves are the demiurge. They created the universes, the solar systems, the planets, the stars, the galaxies, the infinites. Those are divine beings who are perfect. They are beyond good and evil. They are a perfect, multiple unity. They are individual masters who are in charge of governing the mechanical laws of nature.
Now what confuses people when Samael Aun Weor mentions this is that the Gnostic Gospels, such as the Nag Hammadi or the Dead Sea Scrolls, refer to the demiurge as a tyrant God, as negative, as oppressive, and this is really interesting. It reveals something very nuanced that we have to examine in ourselves. People, in truth, do not like divinity. In fact, we all like to blame God to some degree. Our egos and our defects, and our vices and errors, do not want to take responsibility for their culpability, for their errors, and so we like to externalize. There are many people―I am sure from our own experience, whom we know, whether in social circles―who blame God for everything, or blame divinity. There are people in the Gnostic movement who blame Archangel Sakaki for the fall of humanity, and many other things. People blame God for everything, for the state of the world, for humanity’s failure, for its degeneration, without willing to accept one’s own responsibility for our own situation. We have our own agency. Yes, there are other influences in nature which are detrimental, that are mechanical, that are oppressive, but at the same time, those can only influence us so long as we subject to them. Now the Elohim or the demiurge, the gods, the divine, the angels, the masters, the prophets, they are beyond good and evil. They are beyond the mechanical forces of nature, which are represented by the lower סְפִירוֹת sephiroth on the Tree of Life, and because we are subjected to those laws, such as evolution and devolution, mechanical ways of being, we suffer. We are oppressed. Now the demiurge, or the creative host of the Elohim, they manage those forces, whether for good or for evil. They are beyond good and evil, so to speak. Now what is interesting is that the demiurge, the creative host of Elohim, manage everything. Even the hell realms are governed by the angels and the gods. So it is interesting that the Gnostic Gospels, they blame the demiurge for the fall of humanity, and there is some credence to that, but in the sense that they are only mangers of forces that we choose to fulfil in ourselves. So we are fully responsible for our own errors. We cannot blame anyone else, but the tendency of people in spiritual circles is to blame divinity. This is why the Gnostic Gospels sometimes depict the demiurge as a very negative and oppressive figure. As someone mentioned in the chat box, it is like a judge. But it is true that as we are judged by the divine, he also teaches, trains, and tests us, so that we can grow spiritually. Now the archons is a different term. It comes from archeus, the Law (arcanum), laws (plural: arcana), the word like archangel have this prefix which relate to the rulers, the different habitants, judges, or lords of the different aeons: the different סְפִירוֹת sephiroth of the Tree of Life. In our tradition, we refer to them as the Lords of Karma. Now in the myths of the Gnostics scriptures such as the Pistis Sophia, which Samael Aun Weor commented upon, explains the path of the soul ascending back to the origin, to the Absolute, to the divine, and in that process one has to answer and repent before the different archons, who are the different Lords of Karma who basically help us to be accountable for our deeds. So for many people, it is a very painful situation spiritually when you want to enter the higher realms of divinity but you are obstructed by the Law, which is cause and effect. We reap what we sow, and as we repent and change, we learn to transform our situation and receive the blessings of those different beings. So they are kind of like the guards of the different gates, or the different spheres of this diagram of the Kabbalah. Archons are the Lords of Karma, but there is also a dual significance to this too, which we have to be very careful about. Now, there are some beings that call themselves archons, which are not divine. Instead of being heavenly divinities, cosmic hierarchs, angels or gods within the pure sense, they are beings who are hierarchs of the hell realms and infernal states. We call them, in our studies, black magicians, and personally I have even met many beings like that who refer to themselves are archons. So that term can be dual. When you read the Gnostic scriptures, it is very important to be very flexible and intuitive, because different gnostic authors, or originators of those scriptures wrote in accordance within a specific context, and many layers and dimensions of meaning, so it is very deep. One of the essential themes of Gnostic scriptures is that there is a duality. There is the unmanifested divinity and the manifested divinity, and that the reason why we are in this big mess is because we are struggling to reconcile the manifested with the unmanifested. So if you want to learn more about some of the philosophical nuances of that teaching, which of course will take a very long time because it is very profound and difficult, study The Gnostic Bible: The Pistis Sophia Unveiled, which was commented upon by Samael Aun Weor. We have that available at Glorian.org. Question: Are the archons considered evil or just misunderstood by our limited human understanding? Instructor: Again, it is both. We often confuse our helper with our enemy. When life gives us difficult situations or circumstances, karma, challenging ordeals, the most instinctual reaction is to complain and to resist it, even though we are just receiving a situation or ordeal to help us, often given to us by the Lords of Karma, the archons, the heavenly beings. But because they are difficult situations which are meant to test us, to help us grow, we should learn to appreciate karma and not to blaspheme, because if we complain, suffer, and blame others, we exacerbate the issue. The karma is deepened instead of being rectified. So the archons in that sense are really divine beings, but also we misunderstand them, those heavenly angels, because of our conditioned state. We do not recognize that they are helping us. But there are also beings that call themselves archons but they are really of the lower realms, the inverted Tree of Life of the Kabbalah. We are going to go very deeply within these nuances with different scriptures in this course, but I invite you to study again the works of Samal Aun Weor, especially The Gnostic Bible. One other point to make in relation to this duality, we have to remember that nature is dual. There is good and evil in nature: “Eat or be eaten.” “Conquer or be conquered.” There is an oppressor and opportunity. If you study the opera The Magic Flute by Mozart, you find this exemplified in the Queen of the Night. She provides the flute and the magic bells for Tamino and Papageno, the heroes of the opera, in order to save the daughter of the Queen of the Night. She is representative of the forces of nature, which nourish and support us in the beginning. But if we are not comprehending and conquering those forces within ourselves, we are in danger of becoming its slave. So I invite you to study especially that opera that eventually we are going to have on our website, as well in the course: The Secret Teachings of Opera. It deeply relates to this topic. Thank you all for coming! |
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