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 form 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 broad 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. 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 the only position or the way to practice, you can study a certain chapter in The Mystery of The Golden Flower by Samael Aun Weor [The Sexual Paroxysm and The Golden Embryo]. There are different positions and postures that one can practice with in accordance with Hindu scripture and ancient text itself. 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 over do 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, 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, it creates suffering everywhere? Instructor: If you are referring to celibacy, as I mentioned earlier in the lecture, it 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. 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.
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Welcome everybody to this introductory lecture on Yoga for the Aquarian Era!
In this talk, we will discuss some important parameters for understanding and experiencing what many have called spiritual awakening. We are going to talk a lot about how to initiate and sustain such a state, how to work with our own psychology, our own bodies, our hearts, by harnessing the energies that we carry within, specifically through spiritual exercises that awaken our full potential. It can be good to examine what spiritual awakening is because there are many concepts and beliefs, many ideas, many theories, which conflict with each other, which compete with other perspectives, and even paradoxically contradict their own foundations. If you ask a person what is spirit, you will get many answers. People have varying opinions of what spirit is. If those accounts do not concur, they do not agree, they oppose one another, then we can arrive at some basic fundamental facts that such perspectives are flawed, primarily because genuine spiritual experience is real, factual, scientific. It is precise. Divine mystical spiritual experiences are based on facts, repeatable, verifiable, and consistent. The spirit is our own innate reality at our most hidden depths, in the synthesis of who and what we really are. But unfortunately, that knowledge tends to be very obscured within most people. We can have a lot of intellectual debates, arguments, assumptions, and concepts that seek to label and approach these realities, and yet those projections of our own idealism tend to miss a very important point. That point is that reality is, no matter what our beliefs, convictions, language, labels, culture, customs, and habits. People do not agree on what spirit is, and therefore we have to be very blunt and honest, that such conflicting perspectives do not approach the facts of what spirit is, because it is an objective, spiritual, and real state. We say in our studies that spirit is divinity, the divine, the truth within a person. But as I said, because we have many concepts, assumptions, desires, and more specifically, conditions of mind, we do not tend to see what is in front and within us. Some people think that spirituality is limited to intellectual study, as if reading books, listening to lectures, studying scriptures and accumulating knowledge, terminology, and wisdom in the mind, constitutes being a spiritual person. However, this type of predisposition fails to take into account that there are other forms of apprehending reality. There are people who approach spirituality from the heart, from emotions, from sentiments, believing that having a dogma―or a positive or whatever sentiment in the heart―qualifies as being spiritual, that devotion is spirituality. However, this is also very limited in its scope. It does not capture the full dynamic range of spiritual expression and our full human potential. There are those who also think spirituality is merely adhering to rituals, doing many practices, working with the body, performing austerities, physically. But also, this is only one part of a larger whole that should be addressed, that should be taken into context. The truth is that there are many valuable teachings in the world, different spiritual movements, teachings, and instructions that provide guidance in accordance with the dispositions or idiosyncrasies of the student, but also the teachers. While it is good to have intellectual knowledge and that it is wonderful to develop the heart, but also to engage with positive practices that exercise the body and keep it healthy, none of these dynamics in themselves should be isolated from the others. Therefore, a balanced human being incorporates every aspect of what we are because it is important to develop everything in our constitution. It is not enough to merely exercise the intellect with profound study, or cultivate the heart, or merely work on the body, because that implies a deficiency. It is like going to the gym and only working out your right bicep and ignoring the other muscles in your body. It would be absurd, obviously, in this example, but this is what we do spiritually. We approach spiritual topics, the mysteries of divinity, of life and death, of mysticism, with a particular idiosyncrasy or psychological crutch. We think that being spiritual is with the intellect, or the heart, or the body, typically at the exclusion of everything else. But in our studies, we like to be very holistic. We like to approach the study of the complete human being because a balanced human being is necessary in order to really express the divine, the spirit, what we in our studies call the Innermost Being, God, according to some traditions. We cannot be a temple of divinity, the divine cannot officiate within us, express, if we are not properly prepared, which is what the purpose of many spiritual traditions have been about, to train humanity in certain skills, habits, and practices that create a harmonious space within one's own psychology, so that we can realize what religion, what yoga, have taught, what mystical states are, what awakening is. 
What is Awakening?
It is good to also examine the term awakening because there are also many incongruent analyses of this truth, experience.
There are really many types of experiences one can have, but some people have traditionally associated spiritual awakening as some type of inclination towards a teaching, towards metaphysics, towards a religion or mysticism, due to an experience. Some of us might have had some type of vision within dreams, an awakening of consciousness within the dream state or even as simple as a sudden realization that we are more than our body, that we are alert, aware, and amplified within our consciousness. We have a magnified perception or perspective of life. But what these experiences indicate is not that we have reached some permanent state of enlightenment, but instead, these are states that are temporary and fleeting. So because we are inspired by such realizations, we seek religion. We seek out teachers and teachings to help guide us to understand what these experiences are. It is also important to reflect and remember that awakening occurs in levels and for most people who have had some type of realization or inclination to study religion or spirituality, to want to know the spirit, the divine, are not able to initiate and sustain such states at will. This is the fundamental difference between an aspirant and an initiate: someone who has begun and cultivated a new way of being. Now we mention that we tend to approach traditions based on our conditioning. Perhaps we are more intellectual. Perhaps we are more emotional. Perhaps we are more instinctive: we like to do things, to move, to act. But we have to remember and take into account that in order to really awaken our full potential, we have to be harmonious. We have to have equilibrium. We have to have balance. This is why we practice many types of exercises that we are going to touch upon today that can aid you in awakening your real capacities for qualities like divine compassion, conscious love, philanthropy, patience, perseverance, diligence, and endurance, purity of mind, heart and body, which are the requisites for really entering in a competent, efficient, expedient way, into these mysteries, into these realities, so that the spirit does not become merely a concept. It is something that we verify through scientific facts, and then when we study different traditions we can verify our own experiences within those teachings, and therefore we develop what we call genuine faith. It is confidence born from experience. It is not adhering to a concept in the mind, or a belief in the heart, or by merely performing by rote certain rituals that are at the forefront of our inherited religion, or perhaps adopted one. Instead, through awakening our real potential that is in a dormant, sleeping state, we come to actualize and really witness profound mysteries that escape people who never even attempt to approach these studies, who are not inspired. We also talk a lot about spiritual inquietudes: a longing and yearning in the heart. The founder of our tradition, Samael Aun Weor, wrote in The Great Rebellion, a chapter dedicated to this reality: how we go through life in a state of slumber. We can be physically active with our body. We can be engaged with our life. We can be thinking, memorizing, studying, engaging with others with our emotions, acting physically in the world, and yet we are not really aware of what we are doing. You can examine this in your own life. Why is it that people get into car accidents? They may be driving but they are thinking of something else, or you are on the train, and you are ruminating in your heart. You are stewing in negative emotions about an event that happened earlier in the day where you were suffering a lot, and then you miss your stop. You forget yourself. You are not present. You are not awake. You are not conscious of what you are doing, what you were thinking, feeling, doing, where you are at, what you were doing, basically. We are in a profound state of slumber, psychologically speaking. Any time we daydream, fantasize, memorize, or immerse ourselves in memory, ruminate while we are washing dishes, it means we are not present. We are not washing dishes. We are lost in the mind. We are distracted. There are many types of distractions within our own psychology, which is something that we address in these studies because our consciousness is not fully integrated. It is not directed at will, with intentionality and purpose, towards specific endeavors. We tend to do many things being in the era of multi-tasking, in which we do not really focus on one thing, but we are scattered in our attention. We are not really aware. Spiritual discipline in practice helps us to rectify this issue so that we are no longer sleeping as a consciousness. We are paying attention. We are developing our capacities for concentration, for comprehension, attention, diligence, real beauty and virtue of the soul. This is what we seek to awaken because the consciousness in its normal state, now, is not present. It is not developed to its full potential. I know that we do have some level of consciousness in our physical bodies when we are in the world, but what we perceive of life tends to be very filtered and obscured by many conditions of mind. It is this condition which we seek to transform, so that we can liberate consciousness, develop ourselves into enlightened beings, into a master of one's psychology, so that with those alert, intuitive senses, we can really apprehend the nature of our spirit, the divine, and no longer have any theories or beliefs about it. It is a reality and fact for us. 
The Definition of Yoga
What are some of the methods that we employ in order to achieve a state of being that is conducive to experiencing the spirit, the divine?
Many have heard of yoga, but there are many misconceptions of what it really constitutes in its full gamut, its complete range, its many methods. We like to often think of yoga as physical calisthenics, or twisting and distorting the body into different postures to gain flexibility and strength. These are very useful exercises and are helpful within the context of a larger spiritual work. Hatha Yoga is a type of yoga that people are already familiar with. It is appropriate within a specific endeavor, when we are practicing many other principles associated with the tradition, not merely just trying to have a young, healthy, and attractive body, because that by itself does not really produce change in a psychological sense. There are health benefits. It is useful. It is good to get those endorphins moving, but, it should be utilized with intelligence and remembrance with its overall context. In truth, according to Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras, you find the following: Yoga is the stilling of the modifications of consciousness. ―Patanjali, Yoga Sutras 1:2
The term योग yoga from Sanskrit, युज् yug, means “to reunite.” It means to unify the consciousness with the divine. This is the same meaning as the term religion from the Latin religare. Real yoga is stilling the modifications of the consciousness. As I mentioned, our consciousness is very conditioned. Examine a moment in your life perhaps in the morning when you get up. What is your routine? What are the thoughts, feelings, and habits that you engage with on a day-to-day basis?
As I said, we tend not to be very alert and aware of our surroundings. We go through life in a hypnotized state. Our consciousness is modified in accordance with the level of our own psychological conditioning. We have many elements that produce agitation or conditions, modifications of a pure perception, because the consciousness in its original form is clear, lucid, liberated, and pristine. It does not involve thought. It is not a churning of emotion. It is not necessarily needing to have to move the body and engage in countless activities in life. We can have a simple experience of free consciousness by simply being alert, perhaps in a moment while watching a sunrise, in which we apprehend the profound beauty of that moment without having to label it, without having to fit it into a box, a category, because that labeling, categorizing, and compartmentalizing kills the moment, destroys the beauty and the novelty of watching something as miraculous as that. Our consciousness is modified. We are conditioned by many elements like anger, pride, fear, anxiety, vanity, lust, desire, appetites. In life we tend to go through our routine, feeding our desires, giving ourselves what our body wants, seeking emotional security in our relationships and affirmation of our thoughts and ideas. These tend to be very subjective in their own states. They are not necessarily objective and real. But we have these psychological apparatuses of thought, feeling, and impulse. In truth they tend to be very limited. We go through life, again as we said, trying to saturate ourselves with the different impressions of life, without realizing that we are conditioning ourselves even further. By identifying with the problems and circumstances of life, we have a mind that is really churned and stirred up. If you do not believe me, try to sit to meditate for five minutes after a hectic day. You find that your thoughts are all over the place. Your feelings may be overpowering, debilitating. Maybe you have a trauma, maybe a difficult situation occurred in the day, at work or with a loved one, where the body cannot sit still. We have to scratch an itch. We have a pain in our leg. We feel like our shoulders are going to fall off. The beginning of real spiritual practice is learning how to still modify consciousness. We have to let the mind, heart, and body settle. It is like a container, or a jar filled with water and sediment. If the jar is shaken up, all the different mud and particles and debris will flow and scatter and obscure the water itself. It becomes cloudy. It becomes murky. It becomes distorted. However, if you allow the jar to sit still, you find that the water rises to the top and the sediment will begin to stratify into layers. This is the same principle that applies to our mind. If we can learn to take advantage of the challenges of life without identifying with those problems, without investing our psychological energy into them, without wasting energy through fear, paranoia, despair, uncertainty, and doubt, we will begin to find the contents of our mind, those conditioned, limiting factors, begin to calm. They rest. Therefore, when the water is clear of debris, you can see clearly in yourself. This is the beginning of yoga, of genuine spirituality, of religion. It is the stilling of the modifications of consciousness. When the waters are clear, calm, serene, and tranquil, you can begin to reflect images within their contents. This is the nature of water. It is a beautiful element and allegory. It is necessary for life. It is also necessary for spiritual life. The mind is like a lake. If it is distraught, turbulent, and violent, you cannot see the heavens reflected within the surface. Therefore, if you want to attain knowledge of spirituality, of the spirit, first we enter tranquility. This is why Swami Sivananda, a great yogi, a great master of spirituality, taught that real yoga is precisely this: how we work with the mind, how we understand how and why it functions, and the path and methods for alleviating its tensions, letting it acquiesce, to calm. He states in Practical Lessons of Yoga: Patanjali defines Yoga as the suspension of all the functions of the mind. As such, any book on Yoga, which does not deal with these three aspects of the subject, viz. (namely), mind, its functions and the method of suspending them, can be safely laid aside as unreliable and incomplete. ―Swami Sivananda, Practical Lessons In Yoga
There are different schools of yoga that teach exactly what Swami Sivananda provided. He opened many schools through his students. They opened many schools within the United States where there are hatha yoga classes, learning to work with posture and the body, and that is a kind of a fish hook to try and capture people, so to speak, to get people interested in the real, deeper mysteries and knowledge of yoga. It is good to have a healthy body because that helps to have a healthy mind, but merely working on the body, as a path in itself, is unreliable and incomplete. This is why we study forms of yoga that we are going to talk about today.
Yogic Traditions and the Dawn of Aquarius
Yoga has a very rich history and tradition. It comes from the Hindu pantheon, the Hindu mysteries. It will be interesting to examine and analyze its development within the West.
It is true that many great accomplished yogis like Vivekananda came to the United States in 1893 in order to plant the seeds of yoga, of spiritual discipline of mind. He spoke at the World Parliament of Religions at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1893, but it is interesting that those teachings did not really blossom in his era, because there were many other practitioners that came to provide spiritual teachings of an eastern type to a western disposition. 
For example, in 1920, Yogananda, who provided the Self-realization Fellowship Society, also taught. As well as in 1957, a disciple of Swami Sivananda, his name was Vishnudevananda Saraswati came in 1957 to teach. Those teachings only really came to fruition around February 4 of 1962, and it is interesting to examine why.
When we study yoga and spirituality, we also study many of the energetic and cosmic influences that penetrate the mind at a subconscious and unconscious level. There are many elements in nature that affect us psychologically, spiritually, and physically that we are not aware of, that we are not knowledgeable of from experience, in a deep, spiritual, objective sense. What is interesting about February 4, 1962, is that this was the moment, between 2 and 3 in the afternoon, in which our solar system entered within the astrological influence and dominion of the sign of Aquarius within the zodiac. It was around this time that many changes occurred, within diverse traditions, amongst religions, within politics, within sexual relationships, within many things. Pretty much every level of society has been affected, around the 60s, with a profound revolution. If you do not believe me, you can just look at history, the times before the 1960s and 1950s, in the way life subsisted at that time. Now people of a materialistic attitude do not really look deeper than what can be seen with physical senses. In fact, many people reject the influence of zodiacal energies and forces within nature, which enter within us psychologically and are transformed in accordance with the level of our conditioning or our developed spiritual consciousness. We might say that such influences are not real, but the truth is that we are affected by nature all the time. We are influenced by the weather. We can be in a really bad mood because it is raining and damp out, or we did not get enough sleep. Perhaps there is an influence of the weather, as I said, in which we get sick. We get a stomach ache. We feel nauseous, whatever it may be. We are heavily influenced by our environment. The same is true of levels that we do not readily perceive in a materialistic sense, but these forces are real and we can look at history to determine this fact from a zodiacal sense. Now we previously existed within the Era of Pisces, which is a very different flavor and force in a psychological and spiritual level, in terms of its influence and dimensionality. Pisces is traditionally associated with conservatism, with social hierarchies and structures, institutions that have lineages and bear deep, long, and extensive history. You find this in religion, politics, and in every aspect of human life. You find that in the way many spiritual traditions used to exist, in which it was required of a disciple, in order to learn these teachings, to submit to a guru, and after proving their candidacy, after many decades of trials, tests, experimentations, ordeals, challenges, and experiences, they are really given the most profound radical and transformative practices that are at the heart of all religions and yogas. Now that the Era of Aquarius is very different. Since the 60s, this stellar, celestial, or zodiacal influence is defined by its revolutionary character. It is a rebellion. It is a profound and intense energy that has entered, as I said, within every aspect of society in order to shake things up. It is about transformation. It is about rebelling against institutions and dogmas, against conditions. 
Aquarius is defined as the water barrier. It is the zodiacal sign in which knowledge of a spiritual type is being given openly for free, without demands, without coercion, without strict attendance or affiliation with one group, in the sense of having to adhere to a dogma, an unbreakable faith belief system. It is said that Aquarius is the knowledge given freely to all. This is why if we look at the 1960s, you find that there is an explosion of information, of knowledge that has been given openly to society, to all. It is a form of divine generosity and it is also revolutionary because it is the force that inspires independent thought, self-reliance, self-verification, personal experience of the truth without having to adhere to a lineage or a dogma.
This influence really reached its dawn on February 4, 1962, when you find that the planets of our solar systems were in almost perfect alignment. This was a true conglomeration of worlds, of celestial bodies and influences, that mark the beginning of a new age, in which the forces of Aquarius predominates. But that influence also came even earlier, maybe by a decade or two, because just in the same manner that you watch a sunrise, the light doesn't really peak at the horizon until the moment the sun appears. The light spreads gradually, such as in the 50s you find, and even earlier, the efforts of yogis and practitioners to spread spirituality in America. But that really did not come into fruition until the 50s and 60s.
On February 4, 1962, the real beginning of the influence emerged upon the horizon of our consciousness. So, we study this influence because it helps to explain different traditions in the past and also where we are at now, and what we can do and what we can become. There have been different periods of instruction for humanity, in accordance with Piscean influence, especially in the last age, which was marked by its conservatism, in which knowledge was not given openly, but had to be earned. Now, the knowledge is being given openly in Aquarius without needing to be earned. It is given for free because unfortunately humanity is not in a very good place. We find a lot of suffering and affliction on this planet, a lot of chaos, primarily because of our egotism, our conditions, our selfishness, which are accelerating. The influence of Aquarius is very revolutionary. That force is channeled in accordance with our level of being. If we are negative, angry, violent people, inside, then that energy is going to bring it. But without the proper tools or techniques to channel this force and harness it with intelligence and wisdom, we often will destroy ourselves, and we can see this happening simply by looking at the news. Many events are occurring in which this is a reality. This is a fact. The Aquarian Influence
By learning how to employ the instructions of mastering this influence, we in turn have a force and impetus that produces an expedient and radical change, very quickly, if we know the methods, the techniques of this era, to capitalize on that influence.
There is a saying by the author M., in The Dayspring of Youth, where he describes this Aquarian influence. He calls it the Dayspring of Youth. Samael Aun Weor referred to that influence as the Dionysian wave, the influence of Dionysus who is considered the god of wine and revelry. This is a very interesting symbol because since the 60s, which is known for its bacchanalias, or sexual revolutions, its free love initiatives and movements, we find that people have been indulging in that power, that potency, but through desires. However, there is another way. It does not necessarily have to be about engaging with and feeding one's desires, habits, and lust. Instead, one can take that energy and use it to create a different type of inebriation, a different type of wine, so to speak, since Bacchus or Dionysus, within the Greek and Roman traditions, is the same symbol. They represent how the force Aquarius can be harnessed in two ways, whether for our spiritual development or for our deepened conditioning and suffering. Of course, in accordance with each cosmic era, there are different periods of instruction. The author M. states the following in The Dayspring of Youth: At the beginning and end of each age there is a pouring forth of hierarchical cosmic streams of energy, and as they intermittently enter the earth’s atmosphere and unite we find in this radiation that instruction best fitted for the time. Thus there is brought to birth a new period of discovery for the world.
If we learn how to cultivate his energy, we develop clarity, perception, awakening, in a positive sense, in which we have greater understanding and intuition of how to solve the problems of our life. We do not have confusion. We don’t have pain, or despair. It is such a powerful force that any opposition within the atmosphere of the mind can no longer imprison them within its rebellious aura.
Right now, our mind is a prison, if we are honest. We tend to be afflicted by many sufferings, but there is a way to rebel against our own innate failures and incipience, our own defects, our own problems, so that we can gain real happiness, not only for ourselves, but for others. We do it through this practice of yoga, this Aquarian yoga. By attracting certain spiritual or atomic energies, which are very fine in nature, we transmute the consciousness. The term transmutation refers to the prefix trans, which is “to carry over,” “across,” to move, to redirect. Also, mutation to mutate, “to change one form to another.” So our conditioned consciousness can be transmuted through this energy. We can clarify our perceptions so that we develop a very rich spiritual life. 
Using Expedient Methods
It is important that to do so we work with expedient methods. The Piscean influence before the 1950s especially, as I said, is marked by its conservatism, lineages, and disciplines in that one had to earn the truly revolutionary methods that we are going to explain here in this course and lecture. They had to earn the right to learn those teachings, and because the Piscean influence is very much dedicated to that dispensation, different texts of yoga and spirituality were appropriate for that time.
The founder of the Gnostic tradition, Samael Aun Weor, explained in different texts, especially Kundalini Yoga, how the Piscean influence has been replaced by the Aquarian, and that many methods that apply to the Piscean Age, which are appropriate for the descending forces of Pisces into the earth, were beneficial in that context. Now what is interesting about the difference between Pisces and Aquarius is that in the Piscean influence, spiritual practitioners had to work and become more attuned to their body in terms of the spiritual involution or influx of forces down into more material states. So, Pisces is known by forces entering into our physical nature, and so that we can learn to master that aspect of ourselves, in terms of the overarching arc of cosmic evolution. But the influence of Aquarius is different. It is now a revolutionary return back towards a spiritual origins. There are many practices like the mudras, hand positions and postures, bandas, which were appropriate for the descending evolutionary arc or involuting forces into materiality, but now since we are returning back to a more subtle and etheric, energetic plane, those practices are no longer necessary. I know some people can be very attached to doing certain mudras or hand postures while meditating. It is still acceptable to use them, but it is good to remember that we have other practices that we can use that are appropriate for taking advantage of the current that is now influencing humanity. For example, there are many forms of yoga that are appropriate for teaching children how to walk. There are different skills, teachings, instructions, and techniques that are appropriate for helping beginners to learn how to crawl, to walk in a metaphorical, spiritual sense. But walking alone cannot take you across the ocean to Japan. Neither can it take you to other worlds in the solar system. Instead, you need a rocket or spacecraft to do so. You need the appropriate vehicle. This is what we are going to emphasize today. Samael Aun Weor mentioned in his book Kundalini Yoga that: Many books have been written about Oriental Yoga. Yoga means “union with God.” All the books that were written about Oriental Yoga before now are antiquated for the new era of Aquarius, which began the 4th of February 1962 between the hours of two and three in the afternoon. ―Samael Aun Weor, Kundalini Yoga
So those exercises in many schools in yoga are a kindergarten for entering a deeper knowledge. We can use them if that is our level of being. However, we need to learn deeper aspects about religion, since there is a greater and more profound application of these teachings, which are much more expedient and radical, if that is our wish to utilize them. It is good not to be attached to traditions, but to seriously examine and analyze what we have benefitted from a given practice and to see and analyze and evaluate whether we have arrived at what we have sought for.
This is what it states in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verse 11: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. ―1 Corinthians 13:11
So Samael Aun Weor in Kundalini Yoga corroborates this:
All Mudras and Bandhas are totally useless for the new Aquarian Era. ―Samael Aun Weor, Kundalini Yoga
So it is good to use specific tools in order to get specific results. If we want to achieve the real heights of divine knowledge, we can enter the Aquarian door. We no longer have to be constrained by conservative, Piscean dogma.
Aquarian Yogas
So let’s examine what some of these yogas are. There are many forms of yoga divided within different schools and we are touching upon a number of them that are very profound and beautiful, which have an Aquarian application and flavor.
We study mantra yoga, which is the work with sacred sounds, chakras, and powers. We work with raja yoga, which is the royal path of meditation. We work with jnana yoga, which is scriptural study. We work with bhakti yoga devotion, prayer, and worship. We work with karma yoga, which is selfless service. We also work with kundalini yoga, which is sacred sexuality, as well as yantra yoga, the sacred rites of rejuvenation. Lastly, we will talk about runic yoga, the Nordic runes. All these practices complement each other. Here we are breaking them down into different methods, but which really have one unified purpose. By working with these exercises, we can balance ourselves. If you notice some of the explanations here or the titles of these yogas, we find that these exercises develop specific aspects of our psychology. As I said before, some people may be more predisposed towards concepts and intellectualism. Therefore, they like jnana yoga, to study scriptures, or some people are more emotional. They like to develop emotion in the heart through prayer and worship, through bhakti yoga. Some people are more action-oriented, moving with the body and serving their communities, which is why we also study karmic yoga, which is selfless service. Now these yogas work together to, again, provide a synthesis, which is the expedient awakening of our conscious potential. So we are going to analyze what these are separately. 
Mantra Yoga
Mantra yoga is the work with sacred sounds. The term mantra comes from the Sanskrit मन्त्र Man, which is “to think,” and manas, which is “mind,” and trai, which is “to protect” or “to free.” Mantra literally means “mind protection,” or “to free the mind” through sacred sounds.
We see here an image of a man in full lotus with seven energetic centers that are lined up in accordance with his spinal column, which are the different chakras or centers of energy within the human body, physiology, and energetic constitution. These chakras from the Sanskrit refer to wheels or vortices of forces, which exist within our subtle interior physiology. There are many levels and aspects of our body, heart, and mind that is not accessible by the mere physical senses. There are instead energies that animate the physical body. There are certain channels or nadis, we say in the Hindu tradition, that circulate vital force and energy throughout our body and permeate every aspect of who we are. Energy is very important. We even know this by having enough energy when we get up from rest to subsist and to act in the day. There is a certain energy that is needed to be awake physically, in the conventional sense. Likewise, we learn to work with energies, within our subtle interior psychology and inner constitution, so that we can activate spiritual perception. These chakras or vortices are named in respective ways, in alignment with the spine, as I said. We have Muladhara chakra at the coccyx. We have Svadhisthana near the prostate or the uterus. We have Manipura, which is the solar plexus. We have Anahata relating to the heart. We have Vishudda, which is the throat. We have Ajna relating to the third eye between our eyebrows. Then we have Sahasrara, which is the crown. These are important chakras or the main seven that we really study and practice with. This does not mean there are no other chakras in the body. There are many others that are important in order to develop stability and homeostasis, equilibrium within our mind, heart, and body in order or us to function, because that energy has to circulate and flow in an unconditioned and pure way. Anytime a nadi or energetic current crosses another, it forms a chakra, because that is an intersection or crossroad in which those forces meet, and therefore they spin and create a type of vortice or wheel of spiritual energy, of psychic, psychological, and energetic forces. We study these main seven because they are important for really navigating our spirituality, the spiritual worlds, even our physical life. Each of these chakras have different qualities associated with them, different powers and abilities that grant us access towards spiritual reality. It is important to understand that each chakra vibrates in accordance with a certain sound or vibration because certain vowels relate to our chakras themselves. They activate those dormant centers because right now, as in most people, those chakras are like closed flowers. They are not open yet. Through spiritual discipline and working with certain mantras, sacred vibrations, and sounds, we open them. We activate them. We begin to circulate energy in accordance with those strata, those seven levels, so that we really actualize our full potential. Some people may be a little averse to mantras. Some people think it sounds really weird or unusual. It is important to reflect, to remember that mantra such as “O,” relating to the heart, is based on a very simple law of cause and effect, which we can verify and correlate with our own speech. We can say that there are certain words that are afflictive and harmful, which produce conflict with our relationships. Using vulgar speech or speaking hatefully towards them is directing a very powerful, negative energy towards others. But likewise, our speech can be harnessed to speak words of compassion, kindness, and love. This demonstrates to us that our speech and vocal cords have a tremendous utility. We can use speech for harm or for good. It depends on the quality of our mind. The same thing applies to mantra. Now sacred sounds help to protect our minds from negativity. They help us to defend our spirituality against corrosion, by negative qualities of mind like anger, pride, ambition, fear, or uncertainty, whatever it may be. If we feel negative in our mind and heart and bodies and we are agitated, we can work with sacred sounds. It is good to vocalize for an hour out loud, especially, because that sound or vibration activates physically in our bodies, those energy centers. When you perform mantras, you're entering a state of mental and psychic purity. You approach the mantra as a tool. This sound is meant to create a type of flow of energy and vitality and creativity within you. It is that energy that is going to give your consciousness the power, the force, in order to work against your own conditions like anger or resentment, etc. This is why we work with a mantra. We want to protect our spirituality from our own negative habits. This is the meaning of mantras or mantra. It is mind protection. So vocalizing these mantras out loud is really good. It helps to calm the body, and you are activating not only your energy centers and your body, your vitality, but also you are working with the glands of your endocrine system, which is very important for spiritual development. If you are interested in learning more about how the endocrine system complements our spiritual practice, you can read a book by Samael Aun Weor, Sexology: The Basis of Endocrinology and Criminology. His basic thesis is that by working with these glands and developing them, we gain greater insight into our problems. It is good to have energy. You can also vocalize mentally. Some say that saying a mantra in the mind alone is even more powerful than physically pronouncing it. But it is good to work with both techniques, because in one method, by vocalizing out loud, you are pronouncing sacred sounds and working from the outside in, the physical world into the internal worlds. But when you work with silent mantra or Japa (mantra recitation) in your mind, you are working from the inside out. So, both are really good. Personally, I like to do a lot of mantras out loud in the day, and when I am doing other activities, I also pronounce mantra in the mind. With enough training and skill, you learn to work with these sacred sounds―whether verbally or mentally, or even within the very core of our consciousness―we learn how to maintain a state of continual remembrance of our divinity, our own spiritual presence, and that gives us the strength to transform many difficult and negative situations. This is how we protect ourselves. We learn to have a calm and kind psychology, a heart and mind that are very alert, compassionate, and considerate, so that we do not create harmful situations for ourselves because “Mind precedes phenomena,” according to the Buddha. “We become what we think.” If you can confront the problem at its roots in its moment by using mantras, whether verbally or mentally, it is good. If you are at work, obviously, I would not go mantralizing out loud in your office, or wherever you may be, because people will think you are crazy. But you can do it mentally, and when you get home to your own sanctuary, temple, monastery, home, whatever you make of it, you can practice out loud, especially if you will not be disruptive towards neighbors. It is important to work with mantras because these energies will help us to stabilize our consciousness and perceptions. It is important to remember that having energy by itself is not the main point. It is good to have energy to awaken our faculties, our perceptions, our spiritual conscious powers and abilities. But merely having energy within one’s psychology is not enough because chakras are not the end all be all. They are a conduit and a method by which we can access higher states, but merely having active chakras is not going to guarantee a successful spiritually. Some people get really proud of having chakras awakened, abilities, and powers, but that is kind of unusual and funny because it is like a person getting really proud and self-conceited by having a lot of fuel in the tank of their car. It is good to have a lot of fuel in your car so you can drive places, but what matters is how you drive your car, which is your body, heart, and mind. So, ethics and compassion are the essential point. A Mantra for Protection
There are certain mantras you can use. I will introduce one of them for you that is very effective for counteracting negativity. There’s a video available by Glorian Publishing or Glorian.org. It is called Klim Krishnaya. This mantra is very potent for removing negative emotions. So if you find you are afflicted by very distraught and conflicted feelings, if you are saturated with a lot of sourness, if you are heavy with a lot of negativity, pronounce and sing this mantra in your mind. You can also do it verbally if you want, but obviously being in solitude is the best way to pronounce it verbally. But if you are in a place or you are dealing with people who are very challenging for you, you can use this mentally.
I use and continue to use this mantra many times in my daily life, and with enough training, you can pronounce this mentally and get the most powerful effects, so you cannot be tempted to act in a mistaken way. The mantra is sung, and you can click on the video. It is sung basically like this: 
Patanjali’s Ashtanga Yoga: The Eight Stages of Meditation
We also study meditation. We can say that this is probably the most important practice we engage with in our studies. Meditation is known by different names in different faiths and different religions, and all are valid. Here we are giving an excerpt from Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, or the path of royal raj yoga.
Meditation is the capacity of the consciousness to apprehend phenomena, to ascertain the nature or truth of a thing, its inherent reality. We do so by first restraining our mind. Harkening back to the previous slide, we can use mantras to help us restrain our negative reactions to life. Yama means “restraint,” “to yoke.” It means that in a moment in your day in which you are tested―perhaps you have a difficult client you are working with at your job or a family member who is producing a lot of negative emotions in you―you learn to restrain your mind. You do not act out of anger and pride. Instead, you learn how to fulfill ethical discipline or precepts, which is known as niyama. Yama means restraint. Niyama means “precept.” A precept is as simple as some like: love your neighbor as you love yourself. Do unto others as you would have done onto you; to be patient in trials and temptations or ordeals; to work diligently for the benefit of others; to be inspired and compassionate and to aid those are less fortunate than you. Thus if you are afflicted by anger, you can respond with love. This is precept. Once you have developed a very profound and rich ethical life, you can learn to really enter deeper states of meditation. It is important to reflect and understand that these are ethics. These are not morals. What is moral is acceptable in one country and time and place and not in others. Ethics are universal. There are certain habits and behaviors that produce happiness in any context when done with a compassionate state of mind. This is something to bear in mind. We are not here to follow rules that someone gave us and to do them because we have been told. That is a Piscean attitude. Here in the Aquarian knowledge and teachings, we learn to take what is useful and reject what is useless. In this sense, ethics is really the most important thing. It is knowing how to act consciously so we no longer suffer and no longer make other people suffer. This is the fundamental definition. When you are really mastering restraint and precepts within yourselves, your body gets calm. Some people approach meditation, and they cannot sit still. They cannot rest because their mind and heart are agitated from wrong behaviors. After you have cultivated a harmonious space in your mind and your heart, you can sit to practice an asana (a posture) and enter a profound state of relaxation at will, where it is not difficult to do. Without ethics it is really challenging to really have a calm state of being. That is the essential point. When you are in a posture you can begin to work with energy. We work with an exercise called pranayama, which we will also discuss in the sacred rites for rejuvenation, in which you work with your breath to circulate vital creative energy within your body, heart, and mind. Prana is energy and yama means “yoke” or “restraint,” “to harness.” Notice that yama or restraint is the first stage of raja yoga. Likewise, pranayama is learning to restrain and harness our creative, energetic volatility. All the energies of our mind, heart, and body we learn to conserve and circulate, and to harness with conscious intelligence and will. That is how we really enter deep states of calm and withdrawal, not in the sense of being off a drug or basically disassociating from the world in a psychological sense. Instead, pratyahara means “to suspend the senses.” Yes, it is a withdrawal in the same manner we do not pay attention to external stimuli. Instead, we enter our internal psychology, but not out of a negative type of mental dissociation, which is associated perhaps with mental health conditions. Instead, withdrawal in this sense is like a tortoise withdrawing its head within its shell. We go inside, and you cannot do that unless you have energy, to activate your consciousness so you can relax and go within and see what is there. So, energy helps to calm and silence the mind. It helps us to relax, so that like in the example with the jar of water and the sediment, the sediment stratifies into the bottom, so that you can see clearly what is inside of you. Without that basis, you cannot really develop serenity of mind, which is dharana or concentration: to be able to focus on one thing without being distracted. In that sense, when you are not distracted―you are able to focus on one thing with serene, clarified attention and directed will―you learn to access meditation which is dhyana. Meditation is learning to receive new information with spiritual, psychological senses. You understand through inner experiences what the essential nature of reality is for the given object of our focus, whatever you are meditating upon, whatever the goal is that you sit down to practice and do. In this way you enter samadhi, ecstasy. The word ecstasy comes from ecstatuo in Latin, which means “to stand outside oneself.” It is in this state you enter real bliss of a conscious and spiritual type. These are divine inner experiences in which you stand outside your normal range of perception in order to really witness and know the truth. Raja yoga is very deep and beautiful. There are different teachings available on Glorian.org, which address this path of meditation itself, specifically the lectures associated with Gnostic meditation. We talk about these eight steps of Ashtanga Yoga in depth, the eight-limbed yoga or the eight principles and levels of working with mediation. 
Jnana Yoga: Knowledge
We also have Jnana Yoga, which is the study of scripture. As I said, it is useful to study intellectual knowledge, lectures, to receive wisdom from books, but what is commonly neglected in our common culture, era, and ways of thinking, is the manner by which we read, study, and apprehend what a book or lecture is indicating to us.
Now what is interesting about the way that many disciples of past traditions have studied is that they would take a small passage of a book and really meditate deeply on its contents. Perhaps they would take a sentence and reflect only on that. Our habit nowadays is to read fifty books in two weeks. I know that this is an exaggeration, but there are probably people who spend a lot of time like that. Jnana yoga means “knowledge yoga.” It is what we apprehend from the written word. It has a very beautiful and useful place within our spiritual discipline because the teachings of the different masters of religion and spirituality have provided their personal inner experiences within diverse scriptural forms. If we learn to really read with an alert and awakened consciousness, with intuition, not relying so much on reasoning but with our heart, we gain access to inspiration, knowledge, and insights that are really transformative. In this way we learn to appreciate what these different masters taught, these different luminaries. Instead of reading book after book and compartmentalizing and categorizing what we have read in a certain label or box in our mind, instead we learn to look at things with a fresh view. The best way to study is again, like I said, to take a small passage and read a sentence or two that is really challenging for you, or really deep and inspirational, even if you don't know the meaning, then focus and meditate on that. This is how many spiritual schools have studies and are studying now in our institutions. We do not want to necessarily want to fill up our minds with knowledge, by memorizing what different teachers have said, and what terminology means, and what the language is indicating such as with commentaries. Instead, we want to really witness the realities of what is written from personal experience. This is why we have to meditate in combination with study. Now study can be very profound and deep. I recommend taking the time to really digest what you put into your mind, because the problem with many westerners, especially is that being very intellectual, is that we take a lot of knowledge into our intellect, yet we do not transform it. We do not understand what we read. This leads to psychological constipation, in which we do not digest what we put into our mind, and therefore it can become a great source of doubt, skepticism, or pessimism. This is a very unfortunate thing that has happened to many people. However, if you take the time to really practice and try to experience what you read, then you gain a lot of faith, and faith simply means confidence born from verification and experience. You see that your spiritual experiences are talked about in different books by certain masters. In this way, you really verify and understand that you are not alone in your experiences and that these are objective realities. This is also why it is important to study from pure sources. Study from those that really have been established, whose teachings resonate with your consciousness, and what we can really testify to from facts, such as the founders of many religions, but also in our tradition we study the works of Samael Aun Weor. Personally, I have had many blessings and been able to meditate on certain passages that he wrote, even having spiritual internal experiences that I later read about in his books, which confirmed and validated my own personal testimonies. That is really inspiring and a wonderful yoga to enact, the knowledge of spiritual teachings. 
Bhakti Yoga: Devotion
We also study Bhakti Yoga, which is the devotion of the heart. Perhaps the greatest bhakti yogi we have known in the West is Jesus. He demonstrated with his life the profound teachings of yoga, meditation, and prayer. He was so dedicated to his spiritual work that he allowed himself to be crucified physically, to be condemned and persecuted, to be spat upon, to be beaten, to be ridiculed, and yet he only responded with love. This is a profound devotion.
Now what is interesting about his example is that when we really know divinity from experience, our own inner spirit, we develop great love, great compassion, because we understand all beings have divinity inside, and not only do we respect our own innermost spirit, but we also respect the spirit in others, so that we tolerate their mistakes because all people are afflicted with anger, resentment, negativity, doubt, and hatred. By learning to access superior emotional qualities, which have nothing to do with sentimentalism or hallmark cards, we open the doors to genuine mysticism. We can say that the intellect in itself is very useful but tends to predominate in many western people. Instead, what we have is a very giant head stuffed with a lot of books and knowledge but a very deficient and weak in the heart. Bhakti Yoga is important for westerners especially, but it can be very difficult for beginners because some people find devotion very foreign to them, very alien, very confusing, very difficult, because how can you have devotion to something you have not experienced? The truth is we develop devotion in our innermost intuitive faculties when we learn to follow our conscience, our heart, the heart that says that a certain behavior and action is wrong. The whole world can agree with it and yet we know that for us that trajectory is harmful, that position, that direction. Personally, what led me to spirituality was following my heart. I did not have a school, a group, or a spiritual scripture, teaching, a lecture to guide me. Instead, what happened was that I was suffering a lot in life, and I was not willing to face at that time that my own behaviors were harming me. But eventually I began to follow my own innermost conscience, which is the voice that says, “This is right” and “this wrong,” even though our intellect and our reasoning can fight and argue and claw against us. It is a very painful process, but as in my example, I was very dedicated to understanding the nature of my own reality and my sufferings, so that I would find an answer. I dedicated myself with a lot of devotion to searching and looking for spiritual instruction until finally I did find Gnostic teachings, which helped to explain and confirm what I had been doing already, and that gave me faith, a lot of conviction. Sometimes Bhakti Yoga may be simple as again praying, in some people's eyes, towards a statue or to a divine figure, a painting, a master, a prophet, and our own innermost divinity, but again that can be foreign for some people, difficult to apprehend and to swallow, because we have inherited a very material culture, which has conditioned us. But the beginning is in following your heart, listening to your own conscience, what is right and what is wrong. As you verify more and more that your superior positive actions transcend negative states of suffering, you gain real faith, real verification, and conviction that these teachings work, that they are practical, that they are transformative. It is in this way that we begin to experience superior emotions, which for most people is very difficult to comprehend, like conscious love, really loving our neighbor, especially loving one's enemies. It is something we have to aspire to and to develop gradually because it is not easy, but the way we do it is by relying on our heart and consciousness, so that by accessing our intuition of knowing right action from wrong, without having to think about it, we open the doorway to real experience and witnessing of divine reality. The more you experience that divine principle in you, the greater your devotion and compassion for others, of serving others, and working for their benefit. 
Karma Yoga: Action
This is why we study Karma Yoga. Karma means “cause and effect” in Sanskrit. Some people think of karma as a punitive law of retribution: “You get what you deserve” according to Western philosophy. But this is a mistaken attitude because karma simply means causality. Every action has a consequence, and that there are superior actions and inferior actions. Therefore, they produce superior or inferior results.
Karma Yoga is based on helping others, helping our communities. We all have different qualifications and skills, different idiosyncrasies and talents that are necessary in this world. When we discover what our unique talents are, we can capitalize on them. In that way, we learn how to better help humanity with whatever level or qualification or skill set that we have. Karma Yoga is especially important within the study of Aquarian Yoga because if we really wish to overcome our own suffering, we have to alleviate the suffering of others. This is a universal, divine law. If you are sick, help the sick. If you are lacking knowledge, give knowledge to others. If you are lacking spiritual experience, teach others how to experience it. It is in giving that we receive, says St. Francis of Assisi from the Christian tradition. By learning how to serve others, especially those who are difficult and challenge us and create pain within our interior, we learn how to transform our own pain. We do not focus so much on ourselves. If we are really in a rut, we are suffering a lot, we do not know what to do, we are confused, it is important that we reflect on the needs of others because our own selfish desires keep us hypnotized. You want to break the shell of selfishness and despair? Learn to help those who are less fortunate than yourself. For some people it can be teaching, giving knowledge, giving instruction of a spiritual type. For some people it is supporting their school, communities, serving others, helping the poor, the homeless and sick, whatever it may be. If we want to not be so hypnotized by our own self concepts, anxieties, and needs, we should cater to the needs of others. This is a great, powerful tool that helps dispel a lot of the fogginess that can afflict us. This is a fundamental law of nature: by giving to others, we receive. So if we want to receive a certain object of spiritual benefit, we should give that in return, and not expect anything as a reward. This is selfless service. It is compassion. This is the reason why spiritual teachings exist, because by giving to others, we help ourselves, but not in a selfish sense. I know in the beginning it is easy to want to do good deeds so that we can benefit, but with training you begin to lose that selfish attitude and really give from an uncorrupted and genuine heart 
Kundalini Yoga: Sacred Sexuality
We also study Kundalini Yoga, which is a very popular science today or teaching, in which there are a lot of theories and beliefs, and unfortunately a lot of misconceptions.
Now we have in this image Padmasambhava with his consort Yeshe Tsogyal who are in the sexual act. What is important to reflect upon is that as an image of Tibetan Buddhism, it constitutes one of the highest teachings of that tradition, and pretty much any religion itself, at its core. It is how a married couple, man and woman, can combine their creative sexual forces in a state of ritual purity and conscious love, in order to harness those energies and to awaken divine, spiritual capacities. Some people have called it Kundalini. Some people have called it the fire of Pentecost. Some people have called it the Holy Spirit. Some people have called it the feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl within the Aztec mystical tradition, or Kukulcan among the Mayans. This is the energetic force of our divine feminine reality that awaken within practitioners who are properly prepared. It is important to not just look at the image with a lustful mind, although this is where people begin. Padmasambhava made a point about this essential practice of tantra, sexual union, or the harnessing of a continuous flow and influx of energy without ever releasing it. This is tantrism. The meaning of tantra is continuum, continuity. It is how we take those forces and conserve them. He said that in order to do that one cannot have any lust, any passion, any animal desire. He said, “Lustful people do not enter the path of liberation.” So some people get very confused when they study this aspect of religion. They say, “How is that Padmasambhava can be sexually united with his wife and yet he says that lustful people cannot enter the path of liberation?” The answer is really simple: Do not engage the sexual act out of lust, desire. Instead, enact it with love. Very different quality. Lust says, “I want to satisfy my desires,” and love only wants the happiness and spiritual edification of the other. When we learn to harness and conserve that creative potential and to activate it through sexual union between husband and wife, man and woman, by conserving that power and living an ethical life, we can awaken what is called Kundalini. It is the power of the divine feminine. It is the Divine Mother of all religions. You can study the lecture The Divine Mother in the course Beginning Self-Transformation. We talk about how the divine feminine is represented in many religions. The important thing to remember is that She is the power and the intelligence of love, of creation, of the universe. Therefore, She only rises up the spine of those practitioners that have proven their worth, who are really dedicated to their ethics and purifying their viewpoint, who perceive life with selflessness, with altruism, with compassion, understanding that life is transient and interdependent and that nothing is permanent and stable except for the reality of love. Now, there are many people who have attributed psychoses, addictions, or mental imbalances to Kundalini, and this is really fundamentally mistaken. We disagree with this, because the Divine Mother Kundalini can only empower those souls who have really upheld the highest ethics. It does not happen in people who are wasting their creative potential or squandering the sexual energy. It is a very specific science. It is really deep. We practice this if we are married. It is an important aspect of genuine Aquarian Yoga, and we are now giving this sexual teaching very openly to humanity because people need it. It is very easy to go on the internet to find sources that are very impure and that help to produce a lot of suffering for humanity. We are now being really explicit with this knowledge. You can learn more about this teaching in a book called The Perfect Matrimony by Samael Aun Weor, where we learn how to master the creative intelligence of God, so that our love blossoms from a state of ritual purity, of verification of spiritual states―very deep, very transformative. Yantra Yoga: Sacred Rites for Rejuvenation
We are going to explain a couple of exercises or what is known as Yantra Yoga. Now Yantra Yoga is commonly known as the Tibetan rites or sacred rites for rejuvenation. With these exercises, we harness the creative energies of our bodies, mind, and heart in a form of ritual. There are six rites in which we basically harness our conscious energies. We can ask for certain results or petition to divinity, our Divine Mother Kundalini, so that we can receive healing, insights, and understanding of our own defects, perhaps even to help us to eliminate certain faults that we have understood in our meditations.
Sacred rites for rejuvenation are very powerful. They can help us to heal sick organs and help us to gain flexibility, vitality, and health on a mental, emotional, and physical sense, but also spiritually speaking. When we work with the sacred rites for rejuvenation, we begin by crossing our hands over our heart, our right hand over our left, and we petition and pray to our Divine Mother Kundalini, the divine feminine within us, who basically can intercede for us on behalf of Her husband, the Divine Father, the Holy Spirit within certain traditions. We invoke the divine feminine because She is the intercessor, the reconciliator between our terrestrial personality and the severity of the divine. The Holy Spirit, as sometimes mentioned in many other traditions, has the power to heal but we have to know how to work with creative energy first, conserving and transforming it. We work with our Divine Mother, to beg Her, “Please intercede for me on behalf of your divine husband, the Holy Spirit, in order to accomplish this goal.” We can ask for healing of a sick organ or the awakening of a chakra, the understanding or intuition to a certain problem, the elimination of defects. There are many uses we can apply to the sacred rites. It is a form of ritual with our body, in which we take certain postures and positions in order to invoke the aid of our inner Being. 
Rite 1: Rotations
With the first rite after you made your petition, you begin to spin from left to right. You have to be very careful not to spin too fast so that you don’t become disorientated and lose balance.
You can place your right up, your left hand facing down. Extend out as in this image. Keep your eyes open when you spin, so you don't lose your equilibrium. When you spin from left to right―you want to do it twelve times―you spin in the same direction you turn a steering wheel to the right. We do this because this positively activates the chakras. In this position, posture, or movement, we are circulating the vital forces of our chakras themselves so that we awaken those powers. When we spin, we pray to our divinity. We can say either verbally or mentally: Be healed! Be healed! Be healed!
We are commanding our sick organs to work, to be healed by this divine Aquarian energy influence, the power of the Holy Spirit, so that we can gain happiness, balance, and health.
There is a mantra that goes along with this it is very popularized today: Open sesame!
Unfortunately, this saying has been abused today. It is actually a very powerful mantra. It comes from The Arabian Nights, the story of البابا Alibaba and the forty thieves. What is interesting about this myth is that البابا Alibaba goes to a cave and commands the stone that is blocking the entrance to move. He says, “Open sesame!” This mantra has the effect of opening the boulder, of pushing it aside, so that he could go into the cave to try and save treasure that was trapped there from forty thieves.
It is interesting if you ever studied the teachings of kabbalah, especially the number forty is very significant. These forty thieves relate to our own defects who try to steal the treasure of our soul, the energies of our consciousness. So البابا Alibaba goes into the cave in order to extract the treasures, which is a symbol of going into our own mind to extract the truth, into the subconscious caverns of our own occult behaviors, that which is not readily accessible to our senses. It is interesting that the term البابا Alibaba from the Arabic is translated into Hebrew as אלי אבא Eli Abba, which means “My God the father.” So this is a beautiful symbol of how we pray to God the Father and Mother within us in order to perform a magical healing, to work with the treasure of our creative energies. So we spin twelve times saying: Be healed! Be healed! Be healed!
When you are done spinning twelve times―0r you can do more if you like, but be careful not to fall over―you bend your knees. Keep your legs and feet shoulder length apart. Place your left hand on your thigh to try to get your balance, and then you bend your knees. Your thumb, index and middle finger―place these three fingers on your third eye, between your eyebrows. You put some pressure there because as you are somewhat bending down, you are helping to gain balance so that you do not collapse after spinning (which gets easier and better with practice), but you are also taking those circulated forces from your spinning and concentrating them upon your third eye and that way you basically awaken that chakra really deeply.
Rite 2: The Cross and Viparita Karani Mudra
The next part is by laying in the form of the cross. You continue to pray, identifying your supplication, whatever is you want to work on. You can imagine whatever sick organ in your body needs healing or imagine the desired result that you long, for comprehension. You can imagine above you, floating in your vicinity, a white dove of immaculate fire descending into you, giving you life and vitality and force. This is the power of the Holy Spirit. Pray deeply:
Be healed! Be healed! Be healed!
Command your consciousness to work for you, in whatever sick organ you are trying to heal, but whatever you are asking of the Holy Spirit to be giving, that gift, perhaps an awakened chakra, power, or faculty.
Afterward you perform what is known as the Viparita Karani Mudra. With the legs lifted up in the air, you can place your hands behind your knees. Engage in this posture and continue to pray out loud, verbally or mentally, if you wish. 
Rite 3: Pranayama and Lean
In the third rite, you kneel and perform pranayama. Going back to Raja Yoga, of working with energy, you are doing interchangeable nostril breathing, in which you are circulating the vital winds in your mind, body, and heart.
Close your left nostril with your right index finger. Keep your right thumb out and inhale through the right nostril. Concentrate on the forces that are entering into you. You can imagine that the energies are circulating down from the base of your spine up to your brain and then into your heart. Close your nostrils with your right thumb and index finger. Imagine this energy being retained within you, and then exhale through the left nostril, so that the forces are done circulating up into your heart. With inhaling through one nostril, you are sending the energy down through an energetic channel from your nose down into your coccyx, because there are two channels that intertwine the spine. We call them Ida and Pingala in yoga. When you work with each nostril, you are working with each separate cord in your spine. The left nostril relates to the right testicle or ovary, and the right nostril relates to the left testicle or ovary. So they are intertwined. They interchange. The forces of your creative sexual energy rise up from your coccyx in your sexual organs, into your brain and then into your heart through energetic nadis. When you work with the interchangeable nostril breathing, inhaling through your right nostril while closing your left with the index finger, you breathe in the vital forces. You hold them, closing your nostril with your right thumb and your right hand, retaining that force, and then exhaling through your left nostril so that energy flows in you. Then breathe through the left nostril. Inhale to repeat the same procedure. Close your nostrils with both your fingers, the thumb and index finger, and then exhale through your right nostril. That constitutes one pranayama. You want to perform three total. Pray to your Divine Mother to help you work with this force consciously. Afterward you perform a posture in which you lean back. You kind of let your abs do the work―great for keeping your physique up. Hands at your side. Arch your back. Keep your head up titled and continue to pray using the invocation: Be healed! Be healed! Be healed!
If you find that verbally pronouncing is difficult, you can do it mentally. Sometimes the posture can be difficult to perform.
With any of these exercises, you do not want to strain your body, buy do it gently. Do not force any of these postures on yourself if they are harming you. Instead, these are rites for rejuvenation. They are not meant to hurt you. So you need to be careful when you practice. 
Rite 4: The Table
For the next posture―as you are training your body―you extend your feet outward, close together, heels together, hands behind about shoulder length, and you arch your back in a backward direction. Keep your head tilted up and continue to pray:
Be healed! Be healed! Be healed!
You can visualize as well make sure you are praying from your heart.
The next posture is the table. You send your back upward. Make sure that your arms and legs are spread far apart so you are not straining your body too much. You do not want to lean too far backward or forward. Instead, keep a good balance. Continue to visualize and deepen your prayer. 
You then repeat the pranayama three times, breathing through your right nostril, closing both, exhaling through the left. Inhaling through the left, closing both nostrils, exhaling through the right. You want to do this process three times.
Rite 5: Lizard Pose
You are going to perform the fifth rite. You look like you are doing a push-up. Your head is extended upward, your torso is above the ground, your feet are shoulder length, and your hands are shoulder length. You alternate positions between bending your torso down towards the ground without touching, and moving your head slightly down to the chest, and then extend outward, with your head up and torso away from the ground. Do this for as many times as you like.
Afterward you make an arch. Continue to pray, visualize, supplicate, and deepen your prayer. The important thing to remember is that these positions are meant as a form of communing with divinity. Your prayer and conviction and dedication and devotion are what is most important in order for this to be effective. In this posture, you basically arch up upwards. You can lift your heels up towards you as you are moving, so you can arch far enough, but again, do not strain yourself too much. 
Viparita Karani Mudra
The last rite is mentioned in Sacred Rites for Rejuvenation by Samael Aun Weor. It is known as Viparita Karani Mudra, in which, like the previous postures you did before with your hands behind your knees, you can do this against a wall where you lay back with your feet up. You pray to your Divine Mother to beg the Holy Spirit to transfer the energies of your mind into your heart, your solar plexus, and the solar forces of your solar plexus to your mind. In a manner of speaking, we have forces that relate to our intellect, which are, we can say, lunar in nature. They tend to be more negative forces. Our mind tends to be very cold and conditioned.
We have a lot of forces in our solar plexus that we can transfer through the help and the intelligence of the Holy Spirit, by having them circulate in the form of the Holy Eight, or an infinite, from the solar plexus over to the head. The solar forces of the sun of the abdomen rise up to the head and the lunar silvery atoms or the moon-like lunar atoms of the mind go into the solar plexus.
The solar plexus is like a reservoir of energy that is like a battery. We carry a lot of force in our abdomen. This is where we get the source of many gut instincts and feelings that we tend to be very unconscious of or mechanical with. We can learn to take that reservoir of force from our abdomen and take it to our mind so that we have a spiritually illuminated intellect. The good thing about the Viparita Karani Mudra is that the blood flows towards the head so that we are more oxygenated in the brain. This helps to activate certain faculties and abilities. If you want to learn more about that you can study the Sacred Rites for Rejuvenation. Here we are just giving a summary. There is also a sixth rite known as the Vajroli Mudra, which we do not have the time to cover today. The book explains it extensively. 
Runic Yoga
Runes are the Nordic yoga, which we have some videos available online that you can study. These are postures in which we place our body while vocalizing certain mantras in prayer. In this way, we vibrate with the forces of nature. The Nordic language or Futhark relates to certain postures and positions that are conducive for accumulating solar divine energy from nature. It is good to perform these runes outside in a park, or in one’s backyard if you have one, in the forest, woods, or by the ocean, so that you can assimilate more divine energy and prana from your environment.
If you want to learn how to practice the runes, we have a book called Magic of the Runes but also a video on the seven vowels that you can study and apply to your daily life. The runes are very effective for charging yourself with divine force. There is a course on Runes on glorian.org. If you want to go more into depth, practicing daily is very helpful. Resourceful Books
I know we covered a lot, but I would now like to open up the floor to questions.
Questions and Answers
Question: You mentioned you need energy to withdraw and see from a clearer state of consciousness. Could you expound on this more because this is the first time I have heard of this idea? I have noticed in my own life that if I do not have enough energy, I do not feel like engaging in my spiritual practices. I am curious why there is a connection between our energy and withdrawing and approaching things from a higher consciousness. Is it just because our body is not relaxed and thus not receptive?
Instructor: Think of it like how a vehicle operates with better fuel. If you put the wrong type of fuel in a car, you can destroy it. Also, if you put the most fuel-efficient energy into your vehicle, it will operate better. It will drive better. The same thing with our consciousness. Our consciousness has a profound capacity to perceive life which is beyond any limitation of thought, feeling, and impulse. But in order to really enact that conscious state from experience, we need to save energy. We have to save emotional energy. We have to save mental energy. We have to save creative energy. It is impossible to light a lamp if you do not have the fuel or the wick there. In the same way that a light on a lamp has more clarity when the container it is in is washed and clean, likewise our consciousness can reflect greater light based on the purity of our mind. We need energy in order to awaken, first off, to be able to learn to experience and perceive our inner reality from an objective sense. But in order to do that it is important to not only have energy but to learn how to use it well. When you direct energy intelligently, consciously, and withdraw from distractions of the mind and external senses in meditation, you learn to fully engage in your own conscious interior. You can purify your vision, so to speak. Obviously, if you do not have energy like in physical life, you cannot live. You cannot work. Someone who has insomnia has a very difficult time being physically awake, but still not being able to sleep. It has a serious effect upon one's psychology when we do not have enough energy present. We even find that if we abuse our intellectual energy, we can develop illnesses like schizophrenia, mental illnesses, paranoia, delusions, because the mind, which can operate like a vehicle in its own respective orbit, is deficient in fuel. It has lost its vital values and therefore the engine breaks down and stops working. You find these people who are very engaged in the intellect without balancing the other parts of themselves. Likewise, the heart. If it is exhausted of its emotional and vital principles, it creates illnesses like depression, morbidity, bi-polar disorder, many emotional illnesses and diseases. Even the physical body can deteriorate and fall apart when it is not fueled by sufficient, creative, vital energy. People who abuse themselves through boxing, sports, and other difficult activities can become paraplegic or damaged in their body. In the same way we need energy to exist in life, we need those forces to harmonize and balance, to use the conscious well. As you said, if you do not have enough creative energy, you cannot engage in spiritual practices. You are just not inspired or will not be there. But saving energy, directing it well with consciousness, that begins to clarify perception, so that day by day, we perceive more and more. I invite you to study Meditation Essentials on glorian.org. It explains how when we use energy, we clarify our perceptions. Question: I am very curious to know what you think of Christianity. I relate to many values in the Bible, but most Christians seem quite mind-controlled to me. I feel Christianity needs to integrate to other broader religious ideas like yoga, reincarnation, and more. What are the merits and limits to Christianity even when people are striving to live a righteous selfless life? Instructor: We explained in other courses that there is a public tradition and an esoteric tradition. Every religion has a public, exoteric domain, which is followed by millions of people, and then there are hidden, secret, esoteric teachings within those teachings that were never given publicly. In relation to the Piscean era, that knowledge was underground, but now we are given in the Aquarian Era this esoteric knowledge freely for all. Christianity as a teaching is a very beautiful tradition. It has very deep symbolic roots, which many practitioners and adherents do not necessarily understand or follow. Just as many people of a religion may adhere to a faith out of dogma, they also contradict the values that are embedded in their faith. I have met many great Christians, many bad Christians; many great Muslims, some bad Muslims; many good Gnostics, but also many bad Gnostics. Just because you adhere to a tradition does not mean one is spiritual. In fact, what is spiritual about a person is that they are working to eliminate defects and work compassionately for others, to serve others. Christianity as a tradition has an esoteric dimension known as gnosticism, which we are giving a course on our website about The Gnostic Gospels. You can study that course if you want to learn more about Esoteric Christianity. But also Glorian.org has the course Esoteric Christianity that studies the heart doctrine of that faith. The esoteric version is very different from the public, where in Esoteric Christianity you find reincarnation and spiritual ideas are integrated very beautifully and are supported and sustained by scripture more importantly. Any religion like Christianity and faith can be limited when we only follow it blindly, when we use it as a paradigm and a dogma to interpret what we perceive without actually helping us to experience reality objectively. Morality is useful in its place, in the sense that having some values can help orientate certain people into living a more ethical or more kind and compassionate life, but merely sticking to an outward form but without experiencing its inward principles is not enough. It is deficient. Question: With Sacred Rites for Rejuvenation, if the petition choses does not heal an organ or awaken a chakra after a session, do we keep only asking for that particular healing until it heals with the practices or change the petitions? Should we? Instructor: I have known instructors practicing sacred rites who would perform one petition for two months, not changing it, because results come with time, practice, and consistency. I would recommend sticking to one petition for at least two months. If you really want to go deep into it, keep going with it, but this applies to many practices such as the elimination of egos as well, where we focus on one ego or defect over a long period of time until we gain results in comprehension. It is good to focus on one thing and to really practice it deeply, extensively. Question: If we keep only asking for one thing and nothing happens for a long time, what do we do then? How do we know what we are asking for is what we really need or can even be allowed to be granted? Instructor: There are many factors that go into play in terms of working with the sacred rites. Some people practice for a long time and do not get results. They can often become filled with morbidity and despair and doubt that this even works. It is important to take into account that the quality of our practice is not determined by merely sticking to a schedule, but it has to do with the quality of our heart, how sincere we are, how dedicated in our consciousness in terms of our attitude for approaching divinity. Sometimes we can approach divinity with ambition, and that is never rewarded. Some people get frustrated because they ask for something and they do not get it, and often become frustrated, confused, disoriented and doubtful. So what to do then? If you are not getting what you ask for, I would reflect on what you are asking and how. Our divinity knows what we need before we even ask or even know for ourselves. Sometimes it can be good to practice the rites to gain experiences and insights into what you need to work on, to help guide you and even initiating and sustaining a certain practice. Divinity grants unto us what we need, not what we want. But it is also difficult to ascertain in our own experiences, the difference between need and greed. What is it that we crave, like spiritual experiences, and what is it that we need to really to benefit in our daily life? I recommend that you focus on goals that will help you orient yourself in daily life, specifically, or even opening your heart and asking from divinity, praying, “Please show me what is that I need. Please help me!” and performing the rites in that way. Sometimes if we ask for a healing for a sickness that is not going away, we have to take into account certain contexts and karmic forces at play that we cannot necessarily alter or control, but with a lot of patient work. Be patient and persist. If you know that there is something that you need in your daily life that you have to aspire to, then keep asking for it. Do not give up. Do not flag, but be careful about what your attitude is and how you approach divinity, because the sacred rites are a ritual. They are very sacred. They are very divine. They are a way of communicating with the truth. We have to make a distinction between ambition and need. Pray for healing, be dedicated, and be consistent. Question: Otherwise, will not the practice become redundant if we find ourselves asking for something that can never be granted with the sacred rites? Instructor: This is why other practices are essential. We have to meditate deeply and investigate within our comprehension what our situation is. I know sometimes when we have difficult problems in life, it is very difficult to ascertain what reality is, the truth, the right way of acting. This is why we combine these different yogas together. We work with them in conjunction with one another. If you find that you are not getting the results you want, if you feel you are practicing in a redundant way, then analyze what you are doing―reevaluate. Some people need to practice sacred rites at certain periods in their life. They do not necessarily do it all the time. But we work with certain yogas in conjunction with the understanding that these practices fulfill a specific need. If it is not granted, be patient. Meditate upon what it is that you want. Comprehend what your desires are for that longed-for objective and ask divinity to show you in your meditation what is going on, and in that way, you can have some comfort and conviction about what it is divinity wants from you and what divinity has planned for you. Question: You said exhaling through the left nostril affects the heart. What does exhaling through the right nostril affect? What was the name of the video you mentioned about the runes? Instructor: In terms of exhaling and inhaling through the nostrils, just to clarify, when you are inhaling through either nostril, you are imagining the vital force and winds entering through that nostril and descending in a circuitous way, in a form of entwined serpent, moving across the spine in the form of the infinite, or like a curving line, like a light wave (if you’ve studied physics), a radio wave, down into your coccyx. When you retain that energy, when you close your nostrils, you are imagining that the energy is mixing within your sexual glands, is being retained and even rising up your spine to your head. When you exhale through the other nostril, you send the energy to your heart. That is one visualization you can do. That is not specified specifically in the book Sacred Rites for Rejuvenation. He just gives a very basic pranayama, so you do not have to go deeply with your visualization. The important thing is that you feel that energy circulating within you and that you interchange your breathing through your nostrils. Open your right nostril. Close the left nostril with the index finger of your right hand. Inhale, close with your thumb the right nostril, retain the energy, lift the index finger, and exhale through the other nostril. Do the same for the other nostril as well―inhaling, holding / retaining, and exhaling. Your prayer is what is going to be most efficacious or best. It is what is going to work and cause the energies to flow in you.
In terms of the video for the runes, specifically, you can access those videos on Glorian.org or go onto YouTube and look up Glorian Publishing for the Seven Runic Vowels.
We talk about seven vowels in relation to our spinal column, the seven chakras, because these seven sounds activate the seven main chakras of our spinal medulla. These vowels are explained in the video: I, E, O, U, A, M, S… seven vowels, which if you study the literature we provided as well, it goes very deep into that.
Any other questions? I know we covered a lot. We appreciate you for asking questions and listening in. We will definitely have a lot more practices and exercises to share with you in relation with course. So I thank you all for coming 
Welcome everybody! We have arrived at the seventeenth lecture, the final one of this course on the Sufi Principles of Meditation.
We have covered many exercises, many practices, so that we train and stabilize our consciousness. We have learned to withdraw our perception from distractions, and we also learned how to awaken the consciousness so that it can perceive without filters, without obscurations, so that it can understand what it sees. While we have spoken about spiritual insight and comprehending our experiences, we are now going to go a little bit deeper. We have to understand what consciousness is. Where does it come from? What is its ultimate root? What is the synthesis of a human being? In our studies we speak a lot about the Being, our Innermost. Some have called it spirit. Some have called it God, in accordance with the language, the culture, the scriptures, the customs of a given people, the idiosyncrasies of a given messenger. But what is the Being? What are its qualities? How do we recognize its states? More importantly, how do we subsist within it? Many people have approached spirituality from having some type of mystical or spiritual experience. They call it an awakening, but the reality is that such a state has often appeared or emerged seemingly by accident, and the beginning aspirant does not yet know how to activate that quality of being at will. God, divinity, reality, we can say, is our primordial root, fundamental nature, but what is and what are the qualities of divinity? Sufism explains this very beautifully. Perhaps the poet Rumi, the most notable Sufi initiate from both east and west, in terms of popularity, had characterized the nature of divinity very simply and very profoundly. That nature is love. That quality is bliss, is ecstasy, is conscious love and compassion, infinite joy. Some people argue that the real nature of a person is anger, pride, hatred, vanity, lust, but this is mistaken. When you really sift through and remove that which is extemporaneous, superficial, artificial, acquired, learned within a person, when you peel away the layers of conditioning, of misapprehensions, of half-truths, of assumptions and beliefs, ideas, religious values, culture, name, language, heritage, etc., you arrive at love. Love is truly a principle that escapes definition and even words, and yet it is the fundamental impulse that permeates everything, and which drives our actions, spiritually speaking, within its most obscure, mysterious currents. As I said, some people think our true nature is hatred, anger, or violence, because these are qualities that are very prevalent in humanity, and yet the question becomes: what do we value most? Is it coercion? Is it manipulation? Deceiving our neighbor? Lying to our family and friends, betraying our loved ones? The truth is that although a person can torture us, afflict us with great pain, they cannot compel us within our very being. There is a resistance in relation to qualities and states like pride, anger, violence, oppression. Persuasion, from conscious love for others, is a truly dynamic force. It motivates people to be inspired, to change, to be a part of communities, to want to listen to others, where its opposite, which is coercion―a type of violence upon the mind and body of others―produces a type of agitation, friction, conflict. Therefore, love is a truly penetrative and motivating force. It is the reason why there are communities, groups, schools, teachings. It is the reason why human beings commune and share and break bread. It is the reason why we have these teachings for how to change, how to overcome suffering, and how to become truly divine, to really strip away all that is wrong, illusory, false, and superficial, so that we can go into the depths of our own innate, true nature. Love is the fundamental reality of divinity, and yet people do not understand what it is, and more importantly how to develop it even further, with intentionality, with conscientiousness, with dedication. So, this quality of being―we have to make a very clear distinction―does not have an individual self. There is no “I,” no “me,” no “myself” within the Being, within the divine. This confuses people because we grasp at a sense of self, an identity, in accordance with our external customs, our name, language, culture, appearance. We say, “This is me. This is who I am. This is what I am,” and yet none of that exists within divinity. What we have are desires, cravings and attachments, impulses, نَفْس nafs according to the Sufi initiates, egos according to the Gnostic initiate Samael Aun Weor. Our desires are precisely that which keep us encaged, trapped, not seeing reality, not seeing what is there in front of us. If you have been following the sequence of exercises in this course, you would have begun to see with direct experience that the more you observe as a consciousness your psychology, the more you begin to understand that the consciousness, the Essence, the soul, does not have a sense of “I” or self there, but it is a distinct quality. It is perception, apprehension of reality, but without labels, without any type of projection or naming what is being seen, what is being experienced with our psychological senses. It is a state of selflessness, and when there is no self, when there is only the consciousness present, the Being can act within. It is those moments of pristine clarity, in which we are not identified with a self, whereby we are filled with the abundance, the plenitude of the Being, the presence of being here and now―not projecting our thoughts into the future or fearing the past. We are simply being here and awake, alert, as if we are watching a rain pouring upon a cobblestone street, in which we do not have to label what we are seeing, but are filled with that yearning and astonishment of the new. That state is selfless, and where there is no self, there is the plenitude of God. The Being is love, but the Being has no desire or self. Often, people read the poetry of the Sufis and can be confused by this because the Sufis speak of God’s desire for the soul and the soul’s desire for God. In Arabic you have مراد Murad, “the desired,” which is the Being or الله Allah, while مريد Murid, “the one who desires,” is the consciousness. The soul desires God, and God desires the soul. We are a little bit more specific in our language. This desire the Sufis speak of is yearning, longing, aspiration, intimate inquietudes within the heart. So, we use the term a little bit differently, as desire is an ego, because that is typically what constitutes our psychology: an attached sense of self or identification with external factors. Heaven is a state of being. It is a quality of consciousness in which there is no “I,” in which we are empty. There is a saying within Gnosis: God searches the nothingness in order to fill it. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Aquarian Message
But likewise, when our mind is filled and conditioned with multiple conflicting factors, divisions, contradictions, fragmentations, we suffer, and God cannot enter there. Divinity cannot subsist or be within us when our consciousness is shattered, and in this way we cut ourselves on the broken mirror of our soul. We do not reflect a perfect image of the peace, serenity, and beatitude of the divine.
Hell is our own mind. It is our defects, our نَفْس nafs, our psychological aggregates, and as long as we are attached to a sense of self, we are not perceiving heaven. Wherever the delusion of your selfhood appears―there’s hell. Wherever “you” aren’t―that’s heaven. ―Abū Sa’īd
The ego must not be present. It must be absent to the self so that we can experience divinity, which is selflessness, which is pure love. If you do not believe me that love is selfless, look at the life of Jesus. Look at the prophets, the great masters and luminaries of humanity who taught through their example how to serve others and to not expect a reward.
We state that love is the goal of our studies. However, it cannot blossom in us naturally, spontaneously, unsolicited, when our heart is not cultivated, when it is filled with weeds. Therefore, we have to simplify our psychology. We have to become simple. It does not mean that we have to become stupid. It means that we remove the complexities and the confusions and paradoxes of our nature: our egotistical, selfish nature. Right now, our mind is really complex. If you sit to meditate and you examine yourself, you will see that the mind is all over the place. Hopefully, it is not by now if you have been practicing these exercises, but when you meditate, you begin to perceive this in the beginning. Meditation reduces, it strips away, it removes everything about us that is illusory, unnecessary as Rumi taught: Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. ―Rumi
So, the soul has been referred to as a mirror by many Sufi initiates, including Ibn Arabi, who is Sheikh al-Akbar, “the greatest of Sufi Masters.” He wrote in a book called Kitab al-Ahadiyyah (Treatise on the One Alone) that only divinity can know Himself and that the soul is a mirror. It can reflect a perfect image, or it can be distorted. Unfortunately for us, our mirror, our consciousness, is polluted. It is contaminated. It is rusted with afflictions. We do not see what is really inside, our true nature, which is divine. We do not perceive divinity because we have obscured, have dirtied the mirror, which can truly reflect qualities like love in a unfiltered, unobstructed, unhindered way, because when we grasp at a self, we do not see reality. We do not see the truth.
Our sense of self is dependent upon many extemporaneous influences: the impressions of life which enter our psychology, such as a cup of coffee. Therefore, our defects emerge. They seek gratification of the senses through those impressions, from any type of food or drink. We may have gluttony or the food of lust, which is to look at sexual images and feed desire, degeneration. We have the food of pride, which are the sensations or impressions of being praised. We have anger, which is frustrated desire, which is an aversion to the impressions of life which it cannot control, and therefore it protests. The same dynamic applies to all our egos. Our sense of self craves its nourishment, its food: the impressions of life which enter the senses in our psychology and produce reactions, and because we are identified, we do not perceive this interchange or exchange of different selves. We are never the same in any given moment. We are conflicted. We are all over the place, as we mentioned many times in this course. Therefore, we have to annihilate the complications. We have to simplify ourselves, integrate the soul that is trapped―free it, liberate it. Stop feeding defects. Stop giving it food, and in this way, you tame the beast. Annihilation of the ego is the foundation and basis of religion. However, everybody avoids it. Nobody wants to polish the mirror and look at their own face, which is why Rumi taught: How can you become polished if you resist every rub? ―Rumi
These are different circumstances and ordeals in life. These are situations that produce a lot of friction in our life, in which we begin to perceive all the multiplicity of errors we carry within, all our faults. We need those challenges so that we can change, so that we can have real knowledge, γνῶσις gnosis or معرفة Ma’rifah of the truth in Arabic. You cannot give testimony of divine unity when you do not possess psychological unity, without integrating the soul, without performing an alchemy with the consciousness.
We have to take all of those conditioned selves and remove them: free the essence that is trapped, the soul. Take those multiplicity of desires and make them one. In the words of Rumi: I once had a thousand desires, but in my one desire to know you all else melted away. ―Rumi
This is transmutation in a psychological sense. It is a form of alchemy. We transform the density of our conditioning into the purity and light of divine perception.
So in this lecture, we are going to talk about a really essential point, that to know divinity we need expedient methods. We also need to understand selflessness, the emptiness of phenomena, that nothing is really intrinsically existing in of itself, but that everything depends on other factors, for everything is transient, in transit. It is changing. As we begin to understand the interdependent nature between all phenomena and understand our own attachments and desires, we begin to perceive that our sense of self really does not have true basis, that divinity, the plenitude of the Being, is compassion, is love born from this understanding, this perception, this wisdom. 
Conventional and Ultimate Views
We will also study the Tree of Life, the kabbalah, very deeply, because it is a map of love, of consciousness, of Being, in order to tie these principles together, so that we can subsist, to return to our innermost divinity.
The Tree of Life is a map of the self from the most dense and conditioned below to the most subtle, pure, rarified, and beautified above. The higher you ascend this glyph―which is not a map of vertical space, but of internal states―the more selfless and happy we become. The further we descend towards the shadow beneath the Tree of Life, beneath מלכות Malkuth, the physical body, the physical world, the greater one’s suffering and attachment to self. This is the Tree of Life within the book of Genesis, within the Abrahamic traditions. Beneath the Tree of Life we find the hell realms, the inverted סְפִירוֹת sephiroth or spheres of consciousness, which are trapped in conditions, egos, selves, نَفْس nafs. The Qur’an refers to this as the tree of زقوم Zaqqum, which in Arabia is an actual tree whose leaves are really bitter to taste. Therefore it is a symbol of inferior states of consciousness that are acquired and experienced by those who fail. We can refer to these spheres as dimensions, as aspects of consciousness. These are also places in nature to which we gravitate based upon our quality of being. If you remember the lecture on Stations of this course, we talked a lot about these spheres, these סְפִירוֹת sephiroth. In Hebrew, the term סְפִירוֹת sephiroth means “emanations.” These are states and qualities of being that emanate from the divine, from the Absolute, الله Allah, which in Arabic is the Nothing, the No. It means “the God” literally, but if you look at the syllable لا la in Arabic, it means “No,” negation. This is a term used for the abstract absolute space, which is the womb of cosmic potentiality, of being that is not yet realized. It is selflessness. It is pure, divine, supra-divine happiness without conditions, without self, and yet it is the true, legitimate, fundamental nature of reality, when you go to the very heart and core of any phenomena. The Absolute is known in Hebrew as אין Ain, אין סוף Ain Soph, אין סוף אור Ain Soph Aur, the Nothing, the Limitless, and the Limitless Light. From that nothingness, that cosmic space, emerges a profound, beautiful light, which is the sephirah כֶּתֶר Kether in Hebrew. That sephirah means crown. It is the supreme light of divinity that emerges from an eternal seity, the space. That light is pure consciousness within the material universe. Now, while I am using some Hebrew terms, the Sufis and the Muslim initiates referred to different qualities of being, these different סְפִירוֹת sephiroth, by Arabic names, because kabbalah as a map and science of being is within all religions. It is mapped out within Judaism, Jewish mysticism, Jewish spirituality, in a very deep way, and we can use this tool and glyph to help us understand what all religions are talking about in their fundamental synthesis. Now the light of the divine is known as الْحَقُّ Al-Haqq: The Truth: כֶּתֶר Kether, the crown, the supremacy of divinity, a profound, abstract, rarefied, pure being that is known in manifestation. That light, because it wants to create, expresses in multiple ways, and therefore that light emanates out and becomes חָכְמָה Chokmah, which is Hebrew for “wisdom.” In the Qur’an there are many references to ٱلْرَّحْمَـٰنُ Ar-Rahman: the Compassionate. Every Surah of the Qur’an except for Surah 9 begins: 
Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim
חָכְמָה Chokmah is the wisdom, the penetrative insight of divine consciousness. It is very elevated. It is a perception in which one or one’s experience is within all beings and there is not an individual self, but all beings are one within this state.
That light also wants to create something and therefore it expresses as الخالق Al-Khaliq: the Creator, which in Hebrew is בִּינָה Binah: Intelligence, that force of intelligent expression that knows how to manifest the universes, to create them with understanding. These three principles כֶּתֶר Kether, חָכְמָה Chokmah, בִּינָה Binah, the crown, the wisdom, and the intelligence of God, constitute one light that expresses in three ways. In terms of relating to previous religions such as Christianity, this glyph or principle of forces can be known as Father, Son, Holy Spirit. In Islam, they reject the Trinity as stated in the Qur’an. That is because the Christians had degenerated their tradition and have confused the Trinity as three people, anthropomorphizing God, and that is impossible and wrong. Instead, these are one force that expresses as three so that all the worlds and universes can be sustained, created, harmonized, equilibrated, manifested. الخالق Al-Khaliq: the Creator, is the force of בִּינָה Binah, and there are many names of God in Arabic, but these names that we are using in this glyph are some of the most obvious that can apply to the Tree of Life, because each sephirah has a sacred name of divinity within Judaism, within mystical kabbalah, but we can also apply the Arabic kabbalah as well. The Arabic, divine names represent the same principles, the same truths. These three principles are very divine, and most people know nothing of them from experience. Instead, we are down below in מלכות Malkuth, the physical body, and as we have learned the practices of meditation, we have discovered what the lower four סְפִירוֹת sephiroth are, especially the fifth from the bottom up. In meditation, we learn to take our physical body מלכות Malkuth―which is the “kingdom” that contains all the forces from above―willingly to relax that body. Adopt a posture, relax, and introspect. We learn to work with energy, יְסוֹד Yesod, the foundation of our spiritual discipline. That is through exercises like mantra, pranayama, prayer, runes, sacred rights of rejuvenation, sexual alchemy. We are learning to transform the subtle currents of our body so that we can gain control of our heart, which is הוד Hod, Hebrew for “splendor,” the splendor of the compassionate heart. We likewise put our mind in a state of suspension, relaxation and calm, נצח Netzach, and by doing so we obtain victory. The way that we do this is by willpower, תִּפְאֶרֶת Tiphereth: the human consciousness, human willpower, because our human will, the beauty of the soul, has to learn to control thoughts, feelings, sensations, and energy. By doing so we begin to learn to activate the consciousness with intuition, with wisdom, which is גְּבוּרָה Geburah: Justice in Hebrew, the religion and conscience of the soul, so that in dedication and practice we can begin to experience our own inner spirit חֶסֶד Chesed: Mercy in kabbalah. In Arabic the name of God for חֶסֶד Chesed in kabbalah is ٱلْرَّحِيْمُ Ar-Rahim: the Merciful, our innermost spirit, روح Ruh in Arabic, or רוּחַ Ruach in Hebrew. Notice that the further you ascend up this graphic in terms of conscious experience, we begin to become less selfish. Obviously, below we are identified with our own mind, emotions, instincts, and our physicality, and with willpower―which is much more subtle, refined, directed with will under the conscience, our divine soul―we can begin to access the spiritual realm, our spirituality, and perhaps even much higher than that. These are degradations and levels of nature. The forces of divinity express themselves within the סְפִירוֹת sephiroth. 
We have included some of some of the Arabic names as well. The physical body is the most manifest aspect of who we are. ٱلْظَّاهِرُ Az-Zahir: the Manifest, is a sacred name of الله Allah, divinity. In Hebrew it is אדוני הארץ Adonai Ha’aretz, Lord of the Earth, because our physical body must become sacred.
We do so by learning to contain the sexual creative potency of יְסוֹד Yesod. We do that through ٱلْوَدُودُ Al-Wadud: the Lover (the Loving). It is really interesting that in Arabic, the name ٱلْوَدُودُ Al-Wadud, is spelled و Waw د Dal و Waw د Dal, which its equivalence in Hebrew is ו Vav, ד Daleth, ו Vav, ד Daleth―two spinal columns from two dervishes, man and woman, male and female, Adam and Eve. Together they work by taming the creative energies within a marriage in order to establish their religion, to glorify divinity, ٱلْمَجِيدُ Al-Majid: the All Glorious, within the heart, to conquer the mind through ٱلْقَهَّـٰرُ Al-Qahhar: the Conqueror, in order to become an initiate, ٱلْمَـالِكُ Al-Malik: the King, in תִּפְאֶרֶת Tiphereth, the fifth initiation of Major Mysteries as we have explained in the lecture on Stations. We have to, of course, follow our conscience, ٱلْحَكَمُ Al-Hakam: the Judge, גְּבוּרָה Geburah. Another term for גְּבוּרָה Geburah is دين Din, which means “judgment” and “religion.” Our real religion and spirituality is based on how we judge our own defects, our own errors, in balance with the mercy and blessings of divinity, ٱلْرَّحِيْمُ Ar-Rahim. There are many names of God in Arabic. They apply in many ways in the Tree of Life. This is just one way of approaching it. It is really inexhaustible how profound these principles are, but this is the map. This is who we are in our full constitution, in our multidimensionality and being. If you have noticed from the Absolute, אין Ain, אין סוף Ain Soph, אין סוף אור Ain Soph Aur, emerges the Tree of Life, the universe, which is manifested reality and which emerges from unmanifested potentiality, الله Allah, the Nothing. It is interesting that in Islam, it is against the tradition to anthropomorphize divinity. There are no statues promulgated in that tradition, of divinity, because you can not anthropomorphize space. You can not characterize it through a statue. In reality, الله Allah, the Nothing, the Nothingness, the true Being, is only represented within Arabic calligraphy, which is a very beautiful and rich tradition that developed in the Muslim faith as a result of this distinction. From that nothingness emerges light and that light condenses in levels of matter, perception, and consciousness. We are in מלכות Malkuth, and we are learning to enter into states of meditation so that we can access reality, which is more accessible and real the further up this diagram you ascend―again, not in vertical space, but in states and levels of being. There are more elevated states of being and there are more inferior states of being based upon our actions. The Sufis refer to the experience of the divine, which is basically גְּבוּרָה Geburah, חֶסֶד Chesed, בִּינָה Binah, חָכְמָה Chokmah, כֶּתֶר Kether, and beyond, as witnessing, to witness the truth, to experience it, to know it. They call this contemplation, مشاهدة mushahada. When we really are in the outskirts of entering into this knowledge, we are in מלכות Malkuth listening to this lecture, hopefully with a calm body, a receptive heart, and an open mind, and with willpower, and full attention, so that we can comprehend with judgment, real understanding, the reality of what is being taught, and therefore to extract its spiritual nature. All of these phenomena are manifested. They are what can be experienced in the universe, but the heights of divine experience are not within this universe, really, at the heights of this tree, this trinity, of this Logoic Triangle: כֶּתֶר Kether, חָכְמָה Chokmah, בִּינָה Binah, the light of divine continuity and consciousness. As we meditate, we begin to gain glimpses of these realms. We can have access to them when we go to sleep. The body is at rest and the soul travels within the internal worlds, which are these different סְפִירוֹת sephiroth. If we are working seriously, we can access much higher states than we can normally perceive had we not practiced. These are the stations of the Sufi path, the degrees of development and initiation. There are a couple verses from the Sufis. Ibn Karbalā’ī stated something interesting relating this dynamic: manifested reality and ultimate reality. If you studied Buddhism, you will be familiar with how there is conventional and ultimate views. In the conventional sense, we know that we have a physical body. We have energy. We have emotions. We have mind and in a more subtle degree, we have will, to act. To experience the real nature of our inner spirit, our divine consciousness requires abandonment of self, attachments, our terrestrial identity, this conventional sense of “who I am,” “what I think,” “what I feel, my likes, dislikes, attachments, my cravings, my aversions, my ignorance,” etc. Ultimate view is when there is no “self” obstructing it, in which you perceive directly, from an unobstructed height in a spiritual sense, which is why the Sufis stated the following: When the seeker realizes the station of contemplation (mushāhida), which is witnessing God’s Essence comprehending and encompassing all phenomena (which is really all of the סְפִירוֹת sephiroth that emanate from that divine source, and as we experience the selfless nature of emptiness, the Being, Allah, we perceive that divinity has knowledge of all things, perceives all things, experiences all)―“Does not your Lord suffice, since He is witness over all things” (41:53)―he continually witnesses lights from the mundus invisibilis. From such a mystic’s perspective, this world and the hereafter are one and the same. This can only be realized by a vision that is all heart and spirit, not a view bound by mere mud and mire. ―Ibn Karbalā’ī, Rawdāt al-janān, II 164
These סְפִירוֹת sephiroth can emerge within our consciousness and can visit these different dimensions through perceptions, through experiences in meditation: the invisible world, the mundus invisibilis. It is from that direct witnessing of higher states in which, as a mystic, we perceive that this world and the hereafter are one in the same. In truth מלכות Malkuth, the physical body, the kingdom, the physical world, is merely the expression of internal principles and actions. Our physical body obeys its energies, יְסוֹד Yesod, how we react with our emotions, and how we think. However, we are clouded by these lower סְפִירוֹת sephiroth, these lower spheres of being, and in truth, we have to clarify our perception, so that we perceive with the spirit ٱلْرَّحْمَـٰنُ Ar-Rahman, the omniscient, objective, and real, the heart, which in this sense, we can say, it is ٱلْحَكَمُ Al-Hakam: the Judge, our divine soul, and not by mud and mire: egotism, selfishness, attachments. Reality is experienced when the mind is receptive, and the consciousness is active―not the other way around.
The Requirements of Gnosis
What does it mean to worship divinity? What does this worship involve? From an esoteric Gnostic, Sufi perspective, there is a saying in the Qur’an:
Worship God, and ascribe not partners unto Him. ―Al-Nisa 36
Unfortunately, in our times we have a lot of theories, a lot of terminology, a lot of labels for spiritual states in accordance with different theological structures and theories, ideas, and assumptions. We have many beliefs about religion. We have many ideas about spirit, and the truth is that if you ask many people what spirit is, what God is, they all have different definitions. Therefore, that indicates that they are wrong, because they are not agreeing on reality. They all have different opinions of what reality is. That is because they do not see it. They do not experience it. They do not know it. Instead, what we have are lineages based upon ascription, ascribing ideas unto divinity. We can think what we want. We can believe what we want. We can theorize, assume, and worship in accordance with our concepts, ideas, and convictions. We can ascribe to divinity many of our own ideas, and, again, assumptions, but in truth it must be experienced. This is the demarcation between Gnosticism and many exoteric traditions.
The Sufis and the Muslims have a very interesting term between this dynamic of projecting concepts onto divinity, ascribing partners unto divinity, holding equal certain things with divinity and that has to do with projecting our ideas. They call it شرك shirk. They call it idolatry. They call it polytheism, worshipping many gods, but how is this so? When we value our concepts over reality, we are idolaters. We are mistaking our desires and assumptions for what is actually there. We are not experiencing what is there. We can say that any concept and belief that we ascribe to with our conviction at heart, which is not based in direct perception of the truth, constitutes شرك shirk, polytheism. So, what is genuine worship? It means to practice without a self, without an identity, without labeling, but allowing the mind and heart to be in a tranquil state so that we can perceive clearly the Tree of Life, divinity. Tranquility allows us to have inner exploration of our psychological and spiritual unity. It might seem odd that we are relating conceptual beliefs and ideas with شرك shirk, with polytheism, idolatry. It is because we have many ideas that are all over the place, conflicting, paradoxical, unsubstantiated. We have many multiple ideas and assumptions, but are they really rooted in facts? If it is a fact of life and experience, we do not need have any beliefs about it, because we know. So, we need to integrate the consciousness. We do so through a state of tranquility, serenity, repose. There is a couple of statements from Al-Qushayri from the Principles of Sufism, which relate what is necessary in order to really worship divinity, to have knowledge (γνῶσις gnosis in Greek, معرفة Ma’rifah in Arabic) of one’s inner Lord, one’s inner divinity, which requires we abandon our ideas, our most cherished convictions, and theories. In general, it is to the measure of one’s alienation from one’s own ego that one attains direct knowledge of one’s Lord… I heard Abu Ali al-Daqqaq say, “One of the tokens of the gnosis of God is the achievement of deep awe and reverence for God. If someone’s realization increases, his awe increases.” And I heard him say, “Gnosis requires stillness of heart, just as learning requires outward quiet. If someone’s gnosis increases, his tranquility increases.” ―Al-Qushayri, Al-Risalah: Principles of Sufism
We have to be alienated from the ego to really treat our defects, our pride, our vanity, our hatred as our worst enemy, to let it go, to not invest so much energy into this self, because once you abandon the self, you really perceive the majesty of the Being and have reverence, deep awe, and respect for your inner God, because you know divinity is always present with you. It is stated many times in the Qur’an:
And We have already created man and know what his soul whispers to him, and We are closer to you than your jugular vein. ―Qur’an 50:16
The more we realize divinity, the more respect, awe, joy, inspiration, and happiness we experience. It increases, but this is based upon meditative practice requiring stillness of heart, in the same manner that learning requires outward quiet, and the more realization one acquires, the more peace and certainty one has.
The Definition of Love and Will
This is based upon an understanding of love and will. In synthesis, the Sufis taught about alchemy, الله Allah-χυμεία kimia from the Arabic and the Greek, which means “to fuse or cast a metal,” χυμεία kimia, with الله Allah: to fuse oneself with divinity. We do so by making a profound distinction between love and desire.
In synthesis, we can say selfish actions produce sorrow, whereas selfless actions produce happiness, because they emerge from love, which is not concerned with oneself, but the other. Conscious will is the soul’s capacity to focus attention upon an object and to perform deeds of love, compassion for others, even for one’s enemy. Samael Aun Weor referred to this as Christ’s Will, (he even wrote a book with that title), which is the perfect, heavenly expression of superior action, to really sacrifice oneself for others, to respond selflessly to any situation―not for our own benefit, but for the blessings of others, the benediction, the sacrifice for others. Desire is selfish will. It is the opposite of the consciousness, because the former is a mechanical reaction to life while the latter is a deliberate, intelligent response. The Sufis corroborate this point that our common, ordinary, selfish will has to be overcome. Al-Qushayri states the following: In scholarly usage, love, mahabbah, means will, iradah, but the Sufis do not mean will when they speak of love. For human will does not connect to the Eternal―unless one understands it as the will to draw close to Him and glorify Him. ―Al-Qushayri, Al-Risalah: Principles of Sufism
Genuine love is pure, and of course in Gnostic studies we have emphasized many times that pure love is chastity. Chastity is not the mere restraint of sexual energy, but refers to restraint and purity of the mind and heart as well, in which we do not act out of lust, ambition, adultery, pride, selfishness, vanity, extortion, etc. Selfish will is desire. We have to transmute our desires, our defects into love, from selfishness to selflessness.
Some say that hubb, love, is a name for purity of affection, because the Bedouins when speaking of the pure whiteness and regularity of someone’s teeth use the expression habab al-asnan. ―Al-Qushayri, Al-Risalah: Principles of Sufism
There are many sexual alchemical symbols in this paragraph. The mouth is always a symbol of secret knowledge, because דעת Daath in Hebrew, معرفة Ma’rifah in Arabic, γνῶσις gnosis in Greek, was once only given by mouth to ear. It was never written down explicitly because the science of alchemy or the perfect matrimony is extremely powerful and transformative. If you want to understand that principle, you can study the lecture given recently called the Gnostic Mysteries of Chastity.
This science or the transformation of the soul is how we purify and utilize our energies in order to expand our consciousness. We also find a lot of symbols relating to water here, which is a representation of the sexual energy that cleanses the mind and flows abundantly within those who know how to circulate it with intelligence, with understanding. The quote continues: Others say that since hubab is a word for the excess water that results from a heavy rain, mahabbah came to mean the heart’s boiling and stirring with the thirst and excitement of meeting the Beloved. Still others say the word is derived from habab al-ma, the greater part of a body of water, because love is the object of most of the heart’s concerns. ―Al-Qushayri, Al-Risalah: Principles of Sufism
As we explained in the lecture on renunciation, water is creative, symbolic, literal. Those creative waters are the seminal forces with which we become baptized and initiated. That body of water, the over-pouring of the soul, emerges from the Absolute, which is a great ocean. If you awaken your consciousness in meditation and approach the Absolute, you perceive the emptiness like a great, dark ocean, but there is a profound, dark light hidden there, a rippling, an abstract movement and repose, which is the full negation of all manifested things, but is the real state of Being. It is the ocean within which we must drown ourselves in love, to be fully immersed, encompassed, and inoculated by that.
Another derivation draws the word from necessity and fixity, for one says ahabba al-baghir of a camel that kneels and refuses to stand. In just this way the lover’s heart refuses to leave the remembrance of his Beloved. Hubb is also said to come from hibb, an earring. ―Al-Qushayri, Al-Risalah: Principles of Sufism
So, another symbol here. We are referring to a type of willpower in order to know divinity, to seek without faltering, without giving up, to advance out of necessity and fixity.
The poet says:
As I said, the mouth is a symbol of alchemical knowledge because we pronounce sacred sounds within a matrimony, in sexual union, to promote elevation of our creative force, but also the ear relates to this mystery of alchemy, معرفة Ma’rifah, divine knowledge, so that we can receive that teaching from mouth to ear, listening in to secrets which were never written down until as recently as 1950 with The Perfect Matrimony by Samael Aun Weor.
That serpent is a dual symbol. We have given many courses and explanations about this allegory, which represents basically this: How our sexual purity can grant us knowledge of our true nature, or our sexual impurity can eject us from Eden, from happiness, from bliss, from love. What matters is how to use this energy well, or we condemn ourselves because that force has to act. It can act in a polluted, selfish way, or it can be harnessed with intelligence, with wisdom, with patience, with understanding. 
The Three Gates of Gnosis
To access the heights of these mysteries, we work with that energy, with the science of alchemy, especially, الله Allah-Kimia: to fuse one’s self with the Being. We find that this direct knowledge is symbolized even in Islamic architecture. You see this image, which is the Mecca gate number thirty-seven from Al-Masjid an-Nabawī, the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia. This mosque is also known as Al-Haram, or Al-Haram al-Madani, and Al-Masjid an-Nabawī. It was built by the Prophet, and it constitutes one of the largest mosques in the world. It is the second holiest site in Islam after Masjid Al-Haram in Mecca.
The Arabic inscription shows the name of Prophet Muhammed followed by his title: Apostle of God. This door signifies the entrance to genuine wisdom, which we experience by living through the alchemical mysteries of the prophets. This is דעת Daath in Hebrew or معرفة Ma’rifah in Arabic, the doorway to the highest mysteries. It is because that force has the potential to transform us radically, to open the doorway into those higher states of being. If you are not working with the creative energies, you will not access selfless states. Instead, you will access the opposite, which is harmful. Let us examine what these three gates of this mosque represent. They represent the three gates of gnosis according to the Sufi master Abdullah Ansari of Heart, and it is very beautiful that this mosque contains this tradition and this teaching. We can learn a lot from its symbolism in terms of the kind of work that we need to perform if we really want to obtain the highest degrees of mystical experience. There is the Gate of Mercy: باب الرحمة Bab ar-Rahmah to the south, the Gate of Gabriel: باب جبريل Bab Jibril, to the west, and the Gate of Women: باب ٱلنساء Bab an-Nisa to the east. Let us read these quotes for a deeper understanding of this mosque, but also how it applies to our spiritual work. From the field of Wisdom the field of Gnosis is generated. ―Abdullah Ansari of Herat, Stations of the Sufi Path
Remember the word wisdom in Hebrew is חָכְמָה Chokmah, which is the kabbalistic symbol for Christ, Christic perception, selflessness, the power of Vis-dom: the power of divine vision. From this vision, the field of gnosis is generated.
God, the Most High, says, ‘[And when they listen to the revelation received by the Apostle] You will see their eyes overflowing with tears, for they recognize the truth’ (5:83) 
We have to study the Tree of Life in order to understand the three gates, in relation to four directions mapped out by the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life has many angles in which we can approach it. A lot of different mysticisms and teachings relate to four directions, north, south, east, and west, within scripture. Often times, those references are indicating certain aspects of this diagram in order to teach something very intuitive. So, while it might seem very complicated and difficult, when you have meditated on what these directions symbolize in relation to the Tree of Life, after study and practice, it will become much more clear to you.
Now specifically, the north relates the right pillar of the Tree of Life, which is the pillar of mercy, with qualities like חָכְמָה Chokmah: Wisdom, חֶסֶד Chesed: Mercy, and נצח Netzach: Victory. We have the south relating to the left pillar of the Tree of Life, which is בִּינָה Binah: Intelligence, גְּבוּרָה Geburah: the divine soul, Justice, and הוד Hod: the emotions, Glory. The middle pillar, towards מלכות Malkuth, is going towards the west, while the top of the Tree of Life towards כֶּתֶר Kether, the higher sphere or point to this glyph, is the east. What is significant about these directions is that they relate to qualities of being, tendencies, and manners of conscious expression, whether in conditioned states or unconditioned states. The east is where the sun rises especially. We can say that כֶּתֶר Kether is the Far East because that is the highest, at the top of the Tree of Life. We can say תִּפְאֶרֶת Tiphereth is the middle of this diagram and is governed astrologically by the sun and Venus, the star of love. We can call that the Middle East. It is interesting because many scriptures take place in the Middle East. It is midway between the top and the bottom of this diagram, but is also pointed towards the east because astrologically, the sun relates to תִּפְאֶרֶת Tiphereth, the beauty of the soul, the solar, divine, creative volition. The west is related to where the sun sets, to those principles of divinity that go down into the infernal worlds, that descend into darkness, because the further away we are from the light, symbolically, the less understanding and intuition we have. The north relates to spiritual forces, because the right pillar, Mercy, is divine, related to חָכְמָה Chokmah: Wisdom, חֶסֶד Chesed: Mercy, and נצח Netzach: Victory. The south, the left pillar, its forces descend down towards מלכות Malkuth, and down towards the infernal worlds, the negative states of consciousness. 
What is interesting is that as the right pillar, those forces descend into יְסוֹד Yesod in order to be harnessed by our spiritual practice. When we abuse of the creative forces of judgment, גְּבוּרָה Geburah: divine consciousness, it descends into the hell realms. If you have studied yoga, and pranayama especially, you know about the two energetic currents on the spine. The Tree of Life relates to your spinal column as well. The right pillar is precisely mercy, the solar creative force, Pingala in Sanskrit, and the left pillar of severity relates to Ida, the feminine creative polarity within our spine. We have a masculine polarity, which is Pingala, the solar force, but also a feminine, lunar, receptive force known as Ida, and that energetic current―Ida, in most people―is fallen. It does not rise up to the brain from the coccyx, but instead descends to the hell realms.
So, this relates to why, according to some mythologies, demons have tails, because that serpentine fire of Ida is descending. It has “gone south,” so to speak. If you have heard the term, when things go really bad, you are going south. It originates from this. There is some credence to that saying in a kabbalistic sense. If we want to understand the Tree of Life in relation to our spiritual work, we study these four directions. You can also learn more about the four directions in the kabbalah, especially by studying operas such as Turandot. We have a course The Secret Teachings of Opera where we talk about that specific composition by Puccini, which talks about the four directions in more detail. We can study the three gates, specifically, of the mosque we were talking about, Al-Masjid an-Nabawī: The Prophet’s Mosque in relation to this teaching by Abdullah Ansari of Herat. Gnosis of the first gate is the foundation of Islam; gnosis of the second gate is the foundation of faith, while gnosis of the third gate is the foundation of sincerity. ―Abdullah Ansari of Herat, Stations of the Sufi Path
We have explained previously that the first gate, which is the knowledge of being, of unity, of unique peerlessness, is the foundation of Islam: submission to divinity. This is related to the Gate of Mercy: باب الرحمة Bab ar-Rahmah, to the south. If we wish to access the unifications of our soul, the unique peerlessness of the Being, we have to control the left pillar in us. It is necessary to receive divine mercy and to enact that blessing in us by working to control that fallen current within us, Ida: the lunar, creative, serpentine fire in our spine. It is the Gate of Mercy related to the left pillar because with our fallen and mistaken actions, we create suffering. We create problems for ourselves, and therefore we have to submit to divinity by controlling the creative energies. There is no escape from this. It is fundamental in a kabbalistic, alchemical, initiatic, and Sufi sense.
We submit to divinity because our Being is merciful and wants us to change, and therefore directs his attention towards the south, which is the Gate of Mercy, because the left pillar of the Tree of Life, by learning to work and stabilize our consciousness with those forces, we attain equilibrium. The second gate, which relates to God’s power, His omniscience, His beneficence, is the foundation of faith. This is the Gate of Gabriel: باب جبريل Bab Jibril, to the west, relating to מלכות Malkuth, the physical body. So, the former left pillar really is governed by גְּבוּרָה Geburah, severity. Divinity can be very severe with us because of our wrong actions from the past, but we do receive many blessings and intercessions as a result of our sincerity, of submitting ourselves to divine law, and not selfish law. מלכות Malkuth relates to the west, the foundation of faith, the Gate of Jibril. 
We can say that God’s power, His omniscience, His blessings, come from جبريل Jibril, which in Hebrew is spelled גבריאל Gabriel, related to the Nordic runes, Gibur, and the Egyptian Ra and the Hebrew אל El. It is the power of sexuality, because the crossing of man and woman within the physical world is what forms the strength, Gibur, of God. In Hebrew we say אַתָּה גִּבּוֹר לְעוֹלָם אֲדֹנָי Attah Gibor Le’olam Adonai (AGLA אגלא): “You are Almighty Forever Oh Lord” as a mantra or sacred prayer within kabbalah. When you combine man and woman as a cross of forces and energies in מלכות Malkuth, they spin. They rotate like our chakras. They vibrate. They move. They flow. They form a swastika, which unfortunately was a symbol that was misappropriated by the Germans in World War II, even though that knowledge was applicable to all ancient traditions. The movement of the cross is the force of sexual power, which people like Hitler and his cronies abused, but the original meaning has to do with גְּבוּרָה Geburah, the forces of the strength of God, Gibur-Ra-El, גַבְרִיאֵל Gabriel, גְּבוּרָה Geburah in Hebrew. That sexual strength descends from the left pillar down into מלכות Malkuth to give us force, in order to perform alchemy.
It is the Gate of Gabriel because in the physical world is where we need to practice if we are married, if we are in a matrimony. By mastering the cross, we rise out of the west into the east, towards heaven, towards the Middle East, and beyond if we are serious. That force of the Gate of Gabriel is precisely in the west. Nobody can enter heaven without working through Gabriel. If you have remembered all the stories of the prophets in the Bible, they are all announced by Gabriel. Likewise, the Prophet Muhammed was announced a prophet because of جبريل Jibril. He received the first recitation of the Qur’an upon جبل النور Jabal Nur, the “mountain of light,” and that mountain is in תִּפְאֶרֶת Tiphereth. It is in the Middle East where the sun rises, where he would go meditate and receive divine teachings from جبريل Jibril, which are symbols, representations of alchemical knowledge, his sexual creative work within the perfect matrimony. The third gate, which relates to knowledge of charitable works, loving in close intimacy, is the foundation of sincerity. This is the Gate of Women: باب ٱلنساء Bab an-Nisa, the east. Personally, I find this the most compelling because as Samael Aun Weor mentioned in Practical Astrology, The Manual of Practical Magic: Humans came out of Paradise through the doors of Eden, and Eden is sex itself
She is the gate to Eden and man is gate to Eden for woman.
So, this sexual power of Eden, of bliss, is loving in close intimacy with divinity. We really show love for الله Allah when we really learn to be chaste in the sexual act, when we are transmuting diligently. Specifically, because if you look at the Arabic calligraphy in the name of الله Allah, you have four letters: أ Alif, ل Lam, ل Lam, ه Ha. The letter أ Alif is a straight line. It is phallic. It is the masculine, creative, projective, positive symbol of man. ل Lam is like a tongue upon which the Word is gestated, the Verb, the creative expression, in which, by mantras in the sexual act, we transform and transmute that fire. We have the ل Lam or ל Lamed in Hebrew, of a man or the ل Lam or ל Lamed of a woman. Then you have ه Ha, which is like a womb, the feminine, creative, negative, receptive, sexual organs. That is the power of الله Allah: when husband and wife work together in remembrance of divinity. That is the door to paradise to the east. We face the east, the rising sun, when we pray to Mecca, towards the Kaaba, the sacred stone of יְסוֹד Yesod towards the east, which is rising above מלכות Malkuth, the west. When we raise that sexual force of יְסוֹד Yesod up to our mind and to our heart, we are really sanctifying the Gate of Women: باب ٱلنساء Bab an-Nisa, to the east. We face the rising sun, which reminds us of the Germanic Easter, Eostre, as we mentioned in the previous lecture. Why is this the gate of sincerity? Because if we are not really honest with our sexual behavior, we are not going to be honest with ourselves or divinity. We cannot access profound knowledge without that humble basis: acknowledging where we are at, what are behaviors are, and what we must change. 
The Three Pillars of Gnosis
The three ways of gnosis also relate to the top of the Tree of Life. As we mentioned extensively, these are principles, energies, lights, forces―one intelligence, one divine unity that expresses and manifests as three. This is توحيد Tawhid: the unity of God. These three expressions of one light can be understood by the Sufis’ demarcation of three degrees or levels of school, of esoteric, Gnostic, Sufi instruction.
We have شَرِيعَة Shari’a, طريقة Tariqa, حقيقه Haqiqah. معرفة Ma’rifah is דעת Da’ath, the creative knowledge, which, when this image is placed upon a human being, relates to the throat―again, the mouth, the Verb, the Word, the secret knowledge that was only given through oral transmission to candidates that proved their discipleship, their worth. These three pillars, we can say, relate to what Al-Hujwiri said in Revelation of the Mystery, that the Essence of divinity is known as כֶּתֶר Kether in Hebrew, the crown. חָכְמָה Chokmah: Wisdom, are the Attributes of divinity, the divine qualities of the Being. Divinity’s Acts are בִּינָה Binah: intelligence. Here is what this Persian Sufi master had to say about this topic: The Knowledge of the Truth (Ḥaqíqat) has three pillars―
Who are those capable of knowing the Unity, the Essence of divinity, כֶּתֶר Kether? It is those who have reached puberty, whereby the sexual potential is developed and mature. This indicates how individuals whose sexual energy is activated can begin working with transmutation, so that such energy provides a basis for comprehension.
Divinity is not localized within one particular space, but is space itself, the absolute abstract space wherein any universe is gestated. In this way, the Sufis agree how divinity does not have wife nor child, which is a response to the degeneration of the Christian Trinity. The Father, Divine Mother Mary, and Christ child were taken to represent literal, anthropomorphized figures, which is missing the point regarding the symbology of scriptures. Biblical characters, while having literally lived in the past, more importantly represent principles that apply to our own inner work. As for our imagination and intellect, only those who possess the seed, the sexual essence or synthesis, can awaken genuine intelligence and perception. This is because, as we explained previously, the Qur'an refers to initiates as "possessors of seeds" or "kernels," ulu'l-al-bab, which is often translated as "possessors of intellect." In Sanskrit, intellect is बुद्धि Buddhi, or in Hebrew, גְּבוּרָה Geburah, the Arabic دين Din. Initiates possess the secret of sexual knowledge, the sexual seed, the kernel of life, and are therefore known as intuitive kabbalists, whereas the intellectuals, the intellectual kabbalists, only possess the shells, the appearance of diverse doctrines. Al-Hujwiri continues: Knowledge of Divine Attributes requires you to know that God has attributes existing in Himself, which are not He nor a part of Him, but exist in Him and subsist by Him, e.g. Knowledge, Power, Life, Will, Hearing, Sight, Speech, etc. ―Al-Hujwiri, Revelation of the Mystery
Samael Aun Weor explained that the best atoms belong to חָכְמָה Chokmah as the attributes of a universal consciousness. We can access such infinite states in deep meditation and learn to subsist within them through familiarity and training. While they "are not He nor a part of Him," such divine qualities or states of Being exist within His fundamental nature, which can be realized in us when we are properly prepared.
Al-Hujwiri continues: Knowledge of the Divine Actions is your knowledge that God is the Creator of mankind and of all their actions, that He brought the non-existent universe into being, that He predestines good and evil and creates all that is beneficial and injurious. ―Al-Hujwiri, Revelation of the Mystery
Again, בִּינָה Binah is the creator, the empowerment of all actions, especially our sexual behaviors. If we do not awaken consciousness through the positive use of the sexual force, it becomes channeled through ego, animal desire. However, בִּינָה Binah, divine action, allows for the emergence of uncreated things, the materialization and manifestation of the abstract within the concrete. He provides both good and evil because בִּינָה Binah is beyond good and evil, דעת Daath or معرفة Ma’rifah: the Tree of Knowledge beneath the Logoic Triangle on the Tree of Life.
Here we are using kabbalistic explanations for Sufi doctrine in order to clarify. شَرِيعَة Shari’a: the law, divine instruction, relates to how we act, how we receive the teaching, how we apply it with intelligence, with understanding, so that divinity can be cultivated within a space in our hearts, in our consciousness, so that we can walk the path of wisdom طريقة Tariqa, or חָכְמָה Chokmah, which is wisdom. In this way, we begin to experience and understand, from direct experience, what the attributes of divinity are: compassion, altruism, philanthropy, chastity, patience, humility, faith, wisdom, diligence, perseverance. Then we have حقيقه Haqiqah, the truth, relating to the Essence of divinity: the supreme qualities of the Being. الْحَقُّ Al-Haqq: The Truth. So, we accomplish that by working with معرفة Ma’rifah or דעת Da’ath in Hebrew, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which allows us to become pure, as the Qur’an teaches and emphasizes many times. The Three Ways of Gnosis
Let us relate some more quotes from Abdullah Ansari of Heart, which break down this structure for interpreting conscious experiences, mystical instruction, but also our direct experiences.
The way that leads one through the first gate is envisioning the Creator’s providence (בִּינָה Binah, the sexual force) in the opening and closing of (human) handiwork. ―Abdullah Ansari of Herat, Stations of the Sufi Path
So, what is the creator? As I said, الخالق Al-Khaliq relates to בִּינָה Binah, the intelligence of how divinity creates through sexual union with our partner, within alchemy. It is the opening and closing of human handiwork. This relates to knowledge of Being, of unity, of peerlessness.
There are a lot of references in the Qur’an, which refer to the handiwork of humanity that are symbols of divine expression. For example, the Qur’an mentions how God made the ships of the sea, iron, weaponry, vineyards, date palms, which are nourished by rain as signs and symbols for those with understanding, intelligence. These are all representations and symbols of how divinity creates in us, creates the soul through the iron of weaponry, which is willpower, and the ships of the sea. The sea, as I said, is a sexual symbol. We cross the sea of temptation through the great ark, so that we are not drowned in the flood of destructive passions. We perceive divinity's influence in our lives through our handiwork, our sexual path, our discipline, which has to be handled with intelligence, with בִּינָה Binah. We can experience בִּינָה Binah in a sense, in our level, as we are working through transmutation exercises. That is the power and energy that grants us understanding for interpreting what the diverse religious scriptures have to say in their synthesis, in their fundamental root. It also is the way and the gate that leads us towards experiencing who the creator is in us. Let us continue reading: The way that leads through the second gate is the contemplator’s own interior recognition of the wisdom (חָכְמָה Chokmah) of divine Providence within himself. ―Abdullah Ansari of Herat, Stations of the Sufi Path
So, these are inner states, inner qualities of the being. Divine providence is the manifestation of compassion, which is חָכְמָה Chokmah, wisdom, which we recognize in ourselves as we learn contemplation, selflessness. If you meditate deeply and penetrate within this sephirah, as Samael Aun Weor and others have mentioned, we can experience being multiple people, multiple individuals, experiencing a state of omniscience in which you are witnessing yourself. For example, there was one Gnostic instructor who mentioned that he perceived, in this sephirah, Krishnamurti teaching a group of students, and he saw himself, with a lot of love, providing beneficial knowledge for humanity. He returned to his body, and he was very alarmed, wondering if he was Krishnamurti, but the truth is that he penetrated in to the sephirah חָכְמָה Chokmah, which is wisdom, omniscience, divine consciousness. Let us continue:
The way that leads through the third gate is the perception of God’s Mercy (כֶּתֶר Kether, the Mercy of Mercies) that recognizes [the worth of] praiseworthy works and overlooks sins. This final and last gate is the field of the gnostics, the alchemy of lovers, and the way of the Elect; it is the way that beautifies the heart, increases one’s joy and expands the feeling of love. ―Abdullah Ansari of Herat, Stations of the Sufi Path
This also relates to knowledge of charitable works, loving in close intimacy, which is increased as we are intimate with our partner with divine love, with chaste love, with pure love. It beautifies the heart. It is the alchemy of lovers. It is the field of the Gnostics. In this state, we can really receive divine aid.
Subsistence in God
What is subsistence in divinity? We talked briefly about how some of these states can be experienced in meditation, can be mapped by this diagram, can relate to scripture, teachings, and systems of thought, but it would be good to understand what it means to subsist in divinity, which is baqā in Arabic.
As we mentioned, we can have fleeting experiences related to the סְפִירוֹת sephiroth of the Tree of Life, but knowing how to sustain them requires training, knowing how to subsist and to be in those states. What is subsistence specifically? To define it for you, it is: The state or fact of subsisting; the state or fact of existing; the providing of subsistence for support; the means for supporting life, such as a living or livelihood. It is the source from which food and other items needed to exist are obtained. ―Dictionary.com
For the meditator, divinity is our livelihood. It is our nourishment. It is our subsistence, our substance. In philosophy, subsistence relates to existence, specially of an independent entity. It is the quality of having timeless, abstract existence, which again relates to the trinity of the Tree of Life. It is abstract for us. It is very difficult for us to ascertain as concepts, but can be intuitive and known through experience. It is “a mode of existence by which a substance is individualized" (Dictionary.com). It is the meaning of subsistence.
We want to make our consciousness an individuality, as I said. Right now, we are a multiplicity. By integrating our consciousness from its multiple defects and eliminating those faults, we individualize ourselves. We integrate the soul so it can reflect the perfect unity within. There is no other way to return to divinity but to eliminate all that is false. It is the radical axis upon which Gnostic and Sufi teachings are based in their esoteric origin. This is why we talk a lot about the annihilation of the ego, which, of course, is a difficult topic for people, because we are all attached to ourselves. It is a fundamental quality of our experience, that we do not like to perceive our faults, to eliminate and change them, but this is the basis of religion. The Sufis referred to annihilation as fana. Without it, we cannot be within God. From the field of Annihilation the field of Subsistence in God comes. God, the Most High, says, ‘God is the Best, the most long-lasting and Subsisting’ (20:73).
These are reasons why we should really work seriously in ourselves to understand our own faults. Death will arrive. Our means of subsisting in life will vanish. The limits will be broken as we enter into the internal worlds after death and are forced to confront our past. Understandings will be eliminated. What we thought was factual, but was illusory, will have to be addressed.
As it is mentioned in the Qur’an, the unbelievers will be given their account within a book. It is a symbol of retrospecting one’s life after having deceased. History will fade away. Knowledge of the world will be useless. Allusions are transient. The information in our head will be wiped out because we do not remember how we came into this world, where we are going, and where we are now. So, all these things are transient, but God eternally exists, and he exists in His ultimate unity. Unification is the goal. Purification of the consciousness is our objective. 
The Day of Alast
I would like to relate a brief excerpt from the Qur’an, which teaches something very beautiful and profound about our relationship with divinity.
Before the soul had emanated from the Absolute into the manifested universe, in order to begin a specific spiritual work, the Sufis referred to this conversation between the soul and divinity as a type of profound revelatory moment that had to be reinitiated again by the soul that is learning to return to divinity. We emanated from the Absolute into the universe and now we must return to the Tree of Life with knowledge, with wisdom. The moment of communication with divinity, we can say, the moment we left the Absolute, is known by the Sufis as the Day of Alast. It is the covenant of divinity with the soul. When we talk about the Absolute, we pay close attention towards the אין סוף Ain Soph, which Samael Aun Weor clarified in his book Tarot and Kabbalah is our own particular synthesis, an atomic, super-divine force of Being which is like a point of light within the abstract absolute space from which we emanated. It does not have knowledge yet of its full, divine happiness and potential. Therefore, it sends down its knowledge towards the Tree of Life in order to enter מלכות Malkuth and hopefully to return upward and back towards the source. This is the meaning of the verse from Hadith Qudsi: Allah says, “I was a hidden treasure, and I wished to be known, so I created a creation (mankind and the Tree of Life), then made Myself known to them, and they recognized Me.” ―Hadith Qudsi
So, divinity is that beautiful treasure we seek to uncover within our meditations, to know divinity, to recognize divine intelligence, and divine expression within our dreams, within our meditations. The following verses from the Qur’an relate and apply, basically, how the power to witness divinity is born from our seed, our creative sexual matter. We will relate and explain this to you:
And when thy Lord took from the Children of Adam, from their loins, their progeny and made them bear witness concerning themselves, “Am I not your Lord?” they said, “Yea, we bear witness―lest you should say on the Day of Resurrection, “Truly of this we were heedless,” or lest you should say, “[It is] only that our fathers ascribed partners unto God beforehand, and we were their progeny after them. Wilt Thou destroy us for that which the falsifiers have done?” Thus do We expound the signs, that haply they may return. ―The Heights, Al-A’rāf 172-174
Samael Aun Weor mentions that we return to the Absolute by working with alchemy, within a marriage in מלכות Malkuth, and then rising up the סְפִירוֹת sephiroth to the heavens, back towards our אין סוף Ain Soph. It is interesting that this verse is found within Al-A’raf: The Heights within the Qur’an, because we have to return to the heights of this diagram, the superior states.
We bear witness through the sexual seed. This is the fundamental teaching that Samael Aun Weor gave in his books. It is the sexual seed that grants the energy, the capacity, the knowledge, the wisdom by which to access this reality within its multidimensional grandeur and splendor. It is interesting that in the Qur’an, the word progeny translates from ذرية dhurriyyāt, which derives from a root that literally denotes “small particles, atoms, seeds,” which are scattered, and this is very interesting. This word also means “progeny” or “offspring” in many other verses from the Qur’an. These atoms belong to יְסוֹד Yesod specifically, but all the different סְפִירוֹת sephiroth contain particles that are sexual energy in seed. Those forces and potentialities can grant us the capacity to return to divinity. In the path and process by which we return to the Absolute, we create the soul. We create vehicles that relate to each of these lower סְפִירוֹת sephiroth, so that we can have it and experience, know, and understand the forces of those levels of nature, becoming more rarefied and beatified as we ascend. In the end of the work, what is really interesting is that after having perfected ourselves within the ten סְפִירוֹת sephiroth, we can enter and emerge to return into the אין סוף Ain Soph, but at this point, as Samael Aun Weor mentions in Tarot and Kabbalah, we enter the אין סוף Ain Soph as our unity: that super-atomic point or star, that synthesis of our real Being, the real Being within, and we abandon all vehicles below. They dissolve. What is extracted as a type of synthesis or essence of those lower ten סְפִירוֹת sephiroth is a seed, a germ. Those ten סְפִירוֹת sephiroth are reduced to a single point, a single atom within each individual sephirah. You have ten, and they enter the Absolute, so that when the soul is united with the perfect plenitude of divinity, whenever the master that is self-realized wants to enter the universe, he can put those seeds, that progeny into activity, in order to manifest anywhere at will. Such a monad or unity, such an אין סוף Ain Soph, has knowledge of its own perfection. Therefore, those seeds have to be gathered. They are scattered in us. This is the meaning of “to bear witness from their loins,” or better said, the Lord took from the children of Adam, from their loins, their progeny, their seeds, those atomic spiritual essences that relate to the Tree of Life, and made them bear witness concerning themselves. You bear witness of reality through divinity, through working with those forces and mastering them, so that in the end, we dissolve, in a form of annihilation, in order to subsist within God, within the אין סוף Ain Soph Paranishpanna, an atomic, super-divine star of our Being that shines with great glory and splendor in the absolute abstract space. This is الله Allah, the root of all Being. In relation to the Tree of Life, if you have studied the books of Samael Aun Weor, he mentions creating solar bodies. We create vehicles through the sexual seed, which are solar, material vehicles or means of expressing the perfect light of divinity within the סְפִירוֹת sephiroth themselves. These solar bodies are known as the Wedding Garment of the soul in Christianity. You also have in Arabic, لباس التقوى libas al-taqwa, the garments of reverence within the Qur’an, the vehicles of the soul, the pure, energetic, divine, spiritual vehicles that we can have within the world of dreams, within the internal dimensions, so that we can navigate in those spheres consciously, with intentionality, with lucidity, with consistency, with continuity. These are vehicles that are created within a marriage. You can study The Perfect Matrimony for more elaboration on those points. Here we are only synthesizing how when you work with the sexual seed, you are using the energy that can grant you witnessing of the truth, as stated in the Qur’an, so that we can return to our divine origin. What is interesting about the solar bodies or these vehicles of the soul and spirit within Islam are mentioned again here: O children of Adam, We have bestowed upon you raiment to conceal your private parts and as adornment. But (the clothing of chastity) the raiment of reverence (libas al-taqwa)―that is best. That is from the signs of Allah that perhaps they will remember. ―Al-A'raf 26
The Arabic words لباس التقوى libas al-taqwa can be translated as “armor” due to the fact that reverence, which is the Arabic تقوى taqwa, comes from the word attaqa, which means “to shield oneself,” and it is a reference to, as mentioned many times in the Qur’an, how one has to defend oneself against the punishment of hell fire, against our animal passions. Likewise, this raiment of chastity guards one’s private parts, which we utilize the creative potential for divine will. Study The Perfect Matrimony for better understanding of alchemy, The Mystery of the Golden Flower, and also Tarot and Kabbalah by Samael Aun Weor. These dynamics are explained very deeply. Here we are relating this synthesis to the Qur’an.
Dissolution within Love
In the end, after you have extracted all the seed essences of all the different סְפִירוֹת sephiroth within you, you dissolve within the Absolute and achieve true, genuine liberation and subsistence.
We end this slide with Abdullah Ansari of Herat’s statements. We talked about the ten סְפִירוֹת sephiroth, the ten spheres, which can also be ten stations, which can also be signified as 100 stations or levels and degrees of initiation relating to the Tree of Life. Each of the סְפִירוֹת sephiroth is a station in itself. All these one hundred stations are dissolved in the field of love (mahabbat); the field of friendship is the field of love. God, the Most High, describes how He will produce a ‘people whom He loves and who love Him’ (5:54), and ‘Say: if you love God, follow me’ (3:31). But friendship has three stations: it begins with truthfulness, its middle is drunkenness, and it ends in non-existence. Praise be to God, the Beginning (al-awwal) and the End (al-ākhar). ―Abdullah Ansari of Herat, Stations of the Sufi Path
The אין סוף Ain Soph, our true divine Being, is real love, limitless being, divine expression and freedom.
We have some poetry from Rumi, I would like to relate to you in terms of these concepts. Now, while we have given explanations of a kabbalistic and abstract type, which can be very challenging and difficult, these principles become understood through deep meditation and a lot of experience. Rumi, the great Sufi poet, mentioned some of the principles relating to love, and really knowing this from factual experience is a matter of conscious awakening and not just mere study of the intellect. I invite you not to receive this knowledge in the intellect but to really grapple with it in your heart. We need to take a lot of time to meditate on its contexts, because this is a result of many years of study, experience, and work in relation to this topic. Rumi says it best: No matter what I say to explain and elucidate Love, shame overcomes me when I come to Love itself.
That Water of Life is our sexual creative force. Therefore, it is the seed, the kernel of love, that opens the mysteries that cannot be divulged by mere speech, because its expositions are beyond the written and spoken word. Often times those meanings become obscured from too much intellectualization.
One other thing that we want to remember or bear in mind is that our actions are really the best predicator of spiritual life. Our words, our concepts, can be very hypnotizing, such as “I hope,” “I promise,” “I will do this,” “I believe in this,” “I wish,” “I have faith in these teachings or concepts,” but without action they are really quite useless. We can live our whole life ascribing partners unto God, unto divinity, hoping that one day we will be spiritual, but the reality is that we fulfill these in us when we enact selfless, compassionate action. It is in this way that we really fulfill شَرِيعَة Shari’a in Arabic, divine law, the divine commandments, and that way we walk the path طريقة Tariqa, which is meditation, entering deeper states of tranquility, insight, and learning to focus and concentrate upon one goal. In this lecture, for this meditation specifically, we learn to enter inside the Being, to penetrate the world of the Being. We can have many words for these concepts, but what is important is the reality, the experience. This is only accomplished through actions, through daily consistent discipline, and by working with the three factors of the revolution of consciousness as we have explained before. 
Practice
For this final lecture in this course, there is a simple practice you can use in order experience what these principles are about.
Adopt a meditation posture and completely relax. Withdraw from the senses and enter a state of equanimity and internal silence. Pray to your Being to grant you illumination, wisdom, and inner experience. While falling asleep, maintain vigilance, مراقبة muraqaba, and attentiveness, concentrating upon the presence of your Innermost to grant you the comprehension you seek. You can utilize one of the following two powerful mantras:
There is the mantra from Prajnaparamita sutra: Gate Gate Paragate Parasamgate Bodhi Swaha!
The mantra known in Arabic as هو Hu, which is pronounced with an elongated breath. What is interesting is that Samael Aun Weor related the same mantra, but in the Chinese, Chan Buddhist way, in many of his books, specifically Magic of the Runes. It is the mantra Wu, pronounced like breath, the same sound prolonged like a hurricane:
It is the same mantra, the same teaching. The Sufis pronounce: الله هو Allah-Hu, repeatedly prolonging its vowel sounds, its syllables, and even going inside mentally, pronouncing it internally until falling asleep, entering through astral projections into higher dimensions to experience these for oneself.
At this point in time, I would like to open the floor to questions Questions and Answers
Question: Are the mantras pronounced mentally? Do you do the microcosmic star as well?
Instructor: You can pronounce them physically, and it is good to perform the microcosmic star before you physically sit to practice and to get yourself in the right state of mind, to enter into a state of serenity. You can pronounce the mantras verbally. Focus on the sounds. Let yourself recite these sounds first out loud, then dropping your volume and then enter doing it silently in the mind until you fall asleep, consciously letting that mantra totally engage you. The important thing is that we immerse ourselves within the mantra, in its vibration, internally. This is most powerful and most effective. In that way, like any other mantra from astral projection, you learn to separate from your physical body so that you can access those internal worlds, specifically in a deep, profound, and penetrative way. Question: How do Christian saints attain sainthood since they are mostly celibate? Instructor: So, as with any saint within the various religious traditions, they attained sainthood through a marriage, and of course, that knowledge was not given publicly. It had to be kept secret because it is controversial even now today, with the internet and openly teaching about these things. It is even difficult for people now to appreciate, understand, and to even want to practice and experiment with this science. Now, those saints from different traditions, whether they be from the Christian faith or from the Muslim and Sufi traditions, they all achieved initiation by working with the seed. Some masters had already worked with transmutation and alchemy in previous lives like the present Dalai Lama. He worked with alchemy, tantrism in his past existences. He reached sainthood, which we can say is the fifth initiation of Major Mysteries, the fifth initiation of fire or the peak of sainthood. Now, perfection, prophecy, and mastery are a very deep topic, which one acquires by entering the Venustic initiations as explained in the courses of kabbalah, Tarot and Kabbalah and The Three Mountains by Samael Aun Weor. We also gave an article called “Who is a Master” where we talked about specifically the different degrees within Sufi mysticism, sainthood, mastery, and prophethood. Saints, we can say, have acquired the fifth initiation of fire, but they do so through alchemy. In the case of the Dalai Lama, he already reached the fifth initiation of fire and was working as a single person in this existence. In order reach mastery, one has to be married, but it does not mean that those saints had done it in that current lifetime in which they became recognized for their sainthood. Question: What is the best way to die in your desire? I do not know if I have comprehended or not. It is my yearning for my Divine Mother to decapitate it. Do I have to break it down to my different desires? Instructor: The best way to die in desire is to comprehend. Our comprehension unfolds in layers, in levels. What we understand today, we will go deeper in tomorrow. This is a moment-to-moment work in which we examine our present state. If you really want to eliminate egos, we have to go deep inside and comprehend the root. If you eliminate the branches, the branches can grow back if you are not careful, but if you go for the roots, you can extract the tree of زقوم Zaqqum, the inverted tree of קְלִיפּוֹת Klipoth, the hell realms. If you are not sure if you have comprehended it, or not, it means that you have not comprehended it. If you comprehend it deeply, you understand where the ego originated, how it sustains, how it feeds, how it works, what its food is, what its triggers are, what other egos does it relate to, etc. If you comprehend it a little bit, it is good to ask for elimination, especially, to pray for our Divine Mother to give us strength to resist it, comprehend it, and to not feed and give it what it wants. If you really want lasting, deep change, you have to go into the profundities and that often means we face the very thing that we do not want to face. This could be very difficult and very challenging. It can also help you to break down certain events in your life: visualizing it in retrospection meditation, to perceive what moment you reacted or mistakenly behaved, whether physically, verbally, or just mentally. Whatever you comprehend, you can pray for annihilation, but to understand that to be radically free from those tendencies, our comprehension has to be very robust. Your Divine Mother will give you the challenges and experiences for that ego to come up. If you do not comprehend it, those ordeals are going to keep repeating. It is important to repeat them because if we do not learn our lesson, then we got to go through it again. The important thing is not to exacerbate the karma that is repeating itself in that situation, but to take advantage of it. Learn to suffer consciously. Be patient. Allow ourselves some space and time to grow, not to be shaking the fruit from the Tree of Life out of ambition, but to let it blossom and let the fruit ripe on its own so that it falls on your hand when the moment comes. That is what comprehension is like. When you are meditating and you are not expecting any answer, when you just silence yourself and do not think―not as a blank, foggy, amorphous state, but as a pristine, sharp, lucid clarity―suddenly understanding emerges. It can appear in a form of experience, an intuition, a vision, and that understanding is enough when it is really profound, when you finally have intuited it, discerned what is going on in that situation. You can cut out the root. Remember that the term Samsara in Sanskrit means “cycling.” It is repetition and repeated, egotistical, psychological patterns that we go through again and again. When you really understand the root of it, you cut through it. That is nirvana. It is cessation. It is peace. So, study yourself and be patient. Do not rush. Take the time to understand one ego at a time. Analyze it profoundly, and when you least expect it, the understandings will emerge on their own. Question: How can we gauge our current progress in Gnosis? Instructor: Some people think it is mystical experiences, but that is not a guarantee of real development and change. Instead, you know you are changing and progressing when you no longer repeat the same mistakes. For example, perhaps at work you may have colleagues that are very negative. They gossip a lot. Perhaps they may even speak badly about you, and you might overhear this. Suddenly, you feel rage, anger, despair, fear… different egos that might emerge in the moment. You find that you are progressing when those situations repeat as a form of testing you and you do not psychologically react at all. You do not repeat the same reactions to the situation. You are not selfish there. There is no “self” present in those moments. You can be criticized and condemned by the same people, for as before you felt great eversion and suffering, you do not feel that anymore. You understood those faults in you and what kept producing that pain. Yes, you can have internal experiences in the superior worlds, the astral dimension where divinity will show you the level of your work. To see yourself in a coffin going into the fire in the astral plane is a symbol of eliminating certain egos, being dead psychologically. Those experiences can emerge and give us some gage and guidance, which is really beautiful, but also you find that you are not repeating the same mechanical behaviors. You are more conscious, and you are not reacting with the same egos. In fact, you are responding with patience and love like the example that I provided. It is how we respond to life, not react. That is a strong measurement of what we are doing. Question: What is the purpose of the circle movement that we see in the Sufi dances? Or what is its significance in relation to meditation? Instructor: We have a very similar practice within gnosis. We call it the Sacred Rites for Rejuvenation, in which we spin from left to right in order to activate certain latent psychological, energetic centers known as chakras. The Sufis do not refer to them in the Hindu sense, but they refer to it as اللطائف الستة Lata’if-e-Sitta, which are relating to certain organs of perception within Sufi psychology. They are energetic centers that allow for deeply experiencing our internal worlds. Part of the spinning process is to activate those centers, those forces in a significant and dynamic way. We can perform those dances, which are very sacred and beautiful. They represent and replicate the movement of the planets and spheres around the sun as a form of divine love, divine conscious realization. When we perform the sacred rites of rejuvenation, we also spin left to right, the same direction as we are turning a steering wheel in front of us, in order to perform certain spiritual works. There are different ways we can approach this practice, such as comprehending egos, activating chakras, healing sick organs, praying for divine assistance, and the Sufi dances parallel this as well. They are deeply integrated. Thank you all for coming. Thank you for attending this course. I hope you enjoy and study it deeply and apply it to your life. We wish you many blessings. Inverential Peace! Or as we say in Sufism: ٱلسَّلَامُ عَلَيْكُمْ As-salamu Alaykum! 
Everything we have explained in this course of Beginning Self-Transformation is preliminary. The most essential principle for transforming and elevating our psyche is the divine feminine.
All religions bear a profound respect and veneration of the divine feminine, the Divine Mother. It is really the Abrahamic traditions that have lost sight of this and have adulterated the significance of Her presence in the spiritual work. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam reject any femininity in divinity as an effort to distance themselves, to define themselves against the so-called “pagan” religions. The reality is that God, the Being, is not entirely masculine, but feminine as well. This is a profound fact, which confounds and scandalizes religious fanatics, people who are accustomed to a patriarchal anthropomorphism, who fail to recognize that God, the Being, is not a person, but a force, an energy. Divinity is an intelligence. Divinity is within nature, and more importantly within our consciousness, with distinct qualities, principles, characteristics that can really be qualified, classified, and defined as masculine and feminine, yet, not in accordance with modern societal mores, beliefs, ideologies. The reality is that divinity has masculine and feminine polarities of expression. Yet these principles are not merely limited to just physical gender. They constitute archetypes, forces, blueprints for creation, the expression of the Spirit. We can say that the divine masculine is projectivity. It is symbolized by the positive polarity of electric charge. It is force, magnetism, assertion, willpower. It is the energy that initiates, which commands, that organizes and even impregnates, engenders, disciplines, and forces. On the other hand, the divine feminine is receptivity. It is the negative polarity of electric charge. It is the force of conception, gestation, of nurturing, the sustenance that develops a child, the development of youth under the auspices of maternity. All religions, every ancient tradition teaches, that the world's animals, human beings, and the Gods are the consequence of sexual union: the harmonization of masculine and feminine. Every single cosmogony teaches this: how masculine divinity cannot create, cannot develop, cannot manifest without the help of the feminine divine. Therefore, it is really ignorant to reject the divine feminine because of theological, theosophical, or vain beliefs. The divine feminine is a cosmological reality, which we the Gnostics experience, which we develop through our meditations. A masculine God cannot create anything without the feminine goddess, just as a man cannot have a child without a woman. As above, so below. The Father, our innermost God, unfolds Himself into the Divine Mother. She is the derivative expression of our innermost Being. Through Her, He is able to create life and create it in abundance. Through Her, divinity is able to sustain worlds, awaken the soul. As Gnostics, we never forget the worship and respect, the veneration of the Divine Mother, the divine feminine. Because just as we have a physical mother to whom we owe life, likewise, we must show respect and profound adoration for our Divine Mother Kundalini if we wish to change, because She is the force that awakens us. She is the one who elevates the soul, who brings us to spirituality, who provides us with astral experiences, profound samadhis, conscious experiences in the Tree of Life, the superior worlds of the Kabbalah. She is the one responsible for us because She is the one who raises us from suffering. Without Her, we would be lost in this work. She is the one who initiates, who develops, and who completes this work, especially in relation to the disintegration of the ego. So, today we are going to elaborate on who She is and Her unique role in the work, in this Gnostic path of self-transformation. Sacred Sexology
Yet, to do that, we need to comprehend and understand the principles of sacred sexology.
The reality is that just as a man and a woman are needed to create a physical child, both sexual polarities, material and energetic, are needed to create the soul. This is stipulated throughout the Gnostic writings of Samael Aun Weor. It is simple. It is not elaborate. God creates both physical and spiritual life through sex, but that depends upon our intention, our mental state, our behavior—whether it is pure or degenerate, conscious or egotistical. Sex creates. It engenders. It develops. These principles are within every religion: how man and woman, husband and wife, can use the creative sexual energy in order to give birth to their spirituality. That creative energy is the Divine Mother, and therefore, She creates in us when we know how to use the polarities of sex, male-female. As above, so below. It is a law. It is the Dharma, the sacred knowledge of alchemy. We can believe whatever we want. But if we wish to create a child, a man needs a woman and a woman needs a man. To create a solar awakened consciousness in its full capacity, to realize our full potential as a perfected divine being, an angel, a man needs a woman and a woman needs a man, through conscious love and sexual cooperation. This is because birth is a sexual problem. It is not a belief. And therefore, the birth of the angel, the inner human being, the second birth cited by Jesus, is no exception. Through what is known as tantra, alchemical union, the harmony of masculine and feminine sexes, that energy, which is usually expelled through desire, for procreation, can be converted, can be conserved, sublimated, transmuted, transformed, so that the charged sexual forces of man and woman create a synthesis. This is the child of God, the Son of Man in Christianity, the Christ child or Egyptian Horus, son of Osiris and Isis, the golden child of medieval alchemists, the Platonic Logos, the Kundalini Shakti power of the great yogis of Sahaja Maithuna, the Shekinah of the Kabbalists, the Brazen Serpent of Moses, which is a metallurgic amalgamation of copper—a symbol of Venus, the woman—and the metal tin, the planet Jupiter, or the man. Both polarities, physical genders, are needed to create physical and spiritual life. However, we need to clarify. Gender is not a construct. It is not a concept, a morality, and accepted code of expectations in society imposed by patriarchy, by institutions—something to be rejected or deconstructed by subversive logic. Gender is a material reality. It is based upon our generative organs and the secondary sexual characteristics they attribute to our personality and expression. While our physical sex bears specific characteristics to our terrestrial personality, the divine principles of the Father and Mother are archetypical. They are abstract. They are profound states of being. There are correlations between both sexes, but they are not rigid. We can say that the Divine Father is wisdom, instruction, paternity. The Divine Mother is love, elevation, subsistence. In a perfect matrimony, the man embodies the principles of the Divine Father and the woman embodies the principles of the Divine Mother in body, speech, and mind. So what is the purpose of transformation as we have been explaining throughout this course? We seek to realize the true self. Who is the Divine Father and the Divine Mother? They are within us. They are our true identity, our Being. But we can only reach them through the three factors we explained in the previous lecture on the revolution of the consciousness. While the Divine Father and Divine Mother are distinct in us, this is not to say that they don't share or embody the same principles, that there are rigid correlations here or correspondences. It is not the say that the Father does not characterize love, or the Divine Mother, wisdom. Knowing the nature of divine masculine and divine feminine is a profound matter of experience in the consciousness—to go beyond our culture's conceptions of sex, humanity’s subjective perceptions about gender, about gender roles in society.
What matters in these studies is that we appreciate and work with our sexual energy, whether it is masculine or it is feminine. We do so through complementarity, to complement ourselves: a man for a woman and a woman for a man. But why?
If you look in this graphic, you see husband and wife holding hands and their sexual organs symbolized by two triangles. There are the ovaries of the woman and the testicles of the man, as well as the vagina of the woman and the phallus of the man. The sexual organs are a battery. It is the most profound form of energy we carry within. One gonad has a positive electric spiritual charge and another gonad has a negative receptive feminine charge. In order for electricity to flow, you need both a positive and a negative. This is the essence of tantra. For these energies to flow perfectly, masculine and feminine must reconcile. Notice that when you join these two triangles together, when the sexual organs of male-female join, you create the Star of David: the Seal of Solomon, the seal, the perfection of the solar man, a true master who has conquered the creative energies and has perfected him or herself. The masculine and the feminine compliment. They help each other to arrive at a synthesis, to generate light of a spiritual conscious nature. So these principles are extremely beautiful. Ancient mythologies teach us very profound and beautiful truths, and to frame our discussion, we can find the principles and qualities of the Divine Father and the Divine Mother reflected in a beautiful poem by Victor Hugo. He is the author of Les Miserables, a very famous text, a humanist novel, relating to the French Revolution, and Samael Aun Weor quotes a poem of his in The Perfect Matrimony called “Man and Woman.” I will read it at length. Man is the most elevated of creatures,
We speak about both Divine father and Divine Mother together to preface our focus on the role of the divine feminine. She is essential to the birth of our soul, and that we would not have existence without our mother. The same goes for our spirituality.
The Divine Mother in Different Myths
The eternal feminine exists in every religion. Both aspects of our Being have been represented throughout every religious tradition, without exception.
The Divine Mother is represented by a sacred cow. But why? We nourish our body with the milk of a female cow. In the same manner, we nourish our consciousness with the milk of wisdom, virtue, creative energy, transmutation, and the remembrance of our Divine Mother's presence. Even milk as a substance resembles semen. It is the seminal energy, which nourishes our infancy and helps us to become a spiritual man or woman. The Divine Mother's love is so pervasive and so vast, that she has been represented by the sacred cow of Hinduism, within the Greek, Roman, and Egyptian Taurine mysteries, and the life of Gautama Buddha Shakyamuni and Krishna, both cowherds. In Islam, the longest surah of the Quran is Al-Baqarah, “the Cow,” a symbol of divinity's power to resurrect the soul, because in that scripture Prophet Muhammad relates the magical and power, the influence of a cow whose leg can resurrect the dead. That is a symbol of the power of the divine feminine who raises us from the death of our spirit to the heights of realization. In Islam, the Qur’an is sung. The power of the Divine Mother Cow is in the verb and in sex: the stone or Kaaba of the Muslims. How we speak, as we stated in the lecture “The Spiritual Power of Sound,” determines how we spend energy, either for liberating the soul or enslaving it—whether we produce beneficial action or bring about our own damnation, our own suffering. To spell “the cow” in Spanish is La Baca. Baca backwards is Kaba. All of this synthesizes through the Kabbalah, the mysticism of Judaism, which we have been exploring: the Tree of Life. We worship our divinity, the sacred cow, through working with our creative energy, which is represented by the blackened stone of the Kaaba. We need to purify this stone to make it whitened, pure. We do this through eliminating the ego. So even in Islam, which in its exoteric form strictly denies any femininity in divinity, teaches an esoteric doctrine which is known and practiced secretly by the Sufis. Therefore, people who say that God is only masculine are really half atheist, because they reject the creative maternal feminine principle of divinity in themselves. We have Isis above. We have Miriam, Mary, holding the Christ child. We have Athena, great matron and defender of the solar Greek heroes. And we have Durga, slayer of demons within Hinduism. These images represent a few of the infinite forms of our Divine Mother Kundalini, because She takes on any form to teach us something practical in ourselves. Every religion and culture has expressed that principle in different artwork, paintings, statues, architecture, and forms. But why make these points? Why do we draw upon so many correlations in religion? We study all the mythologies and religions of the world out of love for Divine Mother. She is our own Being. She is the root of our most divine expression. She is the mediator for us between hell and heaven, the inferior worlds and the superior states of consciousness. She is the one responsible for elevating us out of suffering. Athena rescued Odysseus in the great poem of Homer. The Virgin Mary raised the Christ child so that he could perform his mission. And Durga brought balance to humanity, restored the kingdoms of the Gods when slaying the buffalo demon within the Hindu mythologies. And Isis restores the dead Osiris, the divine principle the Father in us, to bring back together his parts, which were quartered and drawn by the demons Seth. These are beautiful symbols about how the Divine Mother integrates the psyche, how she liberates us and performs religion, reunion. We have to learn to work with our Divine Mother, instant by instant, moment by moment. There is no progress without love for our Divine Mother, because She is the one who gives us strength, who gives us courage to face ourselves, to self-observe, and to not run away from what we see. She is compassion for all beings, even demons or people we do not like. She is virtue and all the most elevated qualities of the Soul and our Being. She is the superior aspect of us, and sadly, despite this fact, many of us do not know Her or recognize Her presence. The reality is that we forget who She is whenever we identify with anger, with pride, with lust, gluttony, laziness, greed, envy, the ego. We have to learn to restrain the mind, as we are emphasizing again and again, because when we restrain our mind with intelligence, with remorse, with comprehension, our Divine Mother is present with us. We are remembering Her because She is perfection. She is profound equanimity—deepens serenity—the resilience of virtue. She is virtuous action. She can only work through us when we establish an altar for Her in our heart. So examine your heart. What do you find inside there? Observe it. Look at yourself. Not with physical eyes, but with the sense of imagination, of perception. What do you see? Do you see love of humanity there? Do you see selflessness? Do you see conscious love for one's spouse, for one's family, for one's enemies? Or are we filled with hatred, with wrath, with violence, with despair? Many Gnostics write to us asking, “How do I experience my Divine Mother?” as if she is far away. The reality is that She is, to quote the Qur’an, “closer to you than your jugular vein” (50:16). She is within our psyche, but we do not recognize Her presence if we are not looking, if we are not awake, if we are not perceptive about what is going on externally and internally. Some people think that to experience the Divine Mother is only through an astral experience, in some tremendous samadhi in the clouds. There is a reality to this. But more importantly, the Divine Mother appears to us in dreams, in different forms, to teach us something about our life, about our physical behavior. For an example of this, I will relate my own experience. Very recently my wife and I went traveling out of the city of Chicago to go hiking. We wanted to get away from people and this situation with COVID-19. And we realized that we would have less exposure going out into nature than being in the city, so we arranged to travel a couple hours outside of Chicago, and in our trip we were driving to a Starbucks. There was a huge line of cars waiting to go to the drive-through, and I was driving and at that moment I had cut off a person who was in line, who was angry at me. And he said some things which were not pleasant. That morning before we left our home, I had an astral experience in which I was driving my car in the dark. It was 4 a.m. in the astral plane and I was driving along a major road in the city of Chicago. Suddenly I stopped, intuitively, in the middle of the street, because there were no cars present, and I saw my physical mother in the dream approach the driver's side window and with a lot of love, she gestured for me to step out of the car and to let her take the wheel. I did. I went into the passenger seat, and then she drove the car and that was the end of the dream. I knew when I woke up physically that this was something prophetic. Something would happen in relation with my Divine Mother. So physically, when we are in the Starbucks line and the person I cut off was angry and spoke negatively towards me, I suddenly felt egos of anger, self-esteem, pride and anger and violence emerge from my psyche. And I was really surprised, because I have been observing myself and I never knew that I had these defects in this situation. So my wife who was in the passenger side of the car said, “Let me take the wheel because I can see that this is getting dangerous for you.” So I got out of the car physically. She took the wheel and I sat in the passenger seat and started to breathe deeply, and pray to my Divine Mother. I was begging Her, “Please help me to comprehend this rage that is emerging in my psyche and is threatening to take over!” I breathed very profoundly, inhaling, with all my capacity in my lungs, holding the breath for 10 seconds and exhaling for 10 seconds, and just introspecting in me, asking my Divine Mother “Help me to have serenity, to understand the culprits in my mind!” And suddenly, I gained comprehension, and I realized and remembered the dream I had that morning. My Divine Mother figuratively was driving my car, which is my three brains. By relaxing and praying, going into my mind, going into my heart, I was able to relax and let my Divine Mother take control of my psychological car. After my meditation, I comprehended a lot. I understood those defects that emerged, which I later prayed for annihilation. This is a very beautiful teaching, very simple. I know we like to think of having experiences with our Divine Mother in the highest degrees of initiation, the highest sephiroth or spheres of the Tree of Life, but in reality, she comes down to us. She teaches us how to live so that we do not commit insanities, because I was really angry. I was really surprised by how angry I was and so I was begging my Being to help me control this animal and she gave me strength. But of course, remembrance of our Divine Mother is a learned skill. We have to work very hard. We have to recite mantras. We have to breathe deeply. We have to do pranayamas, transmutation, energy exercises, whether in our mind or out loud, so we can feel Her presence; so we can recognize Her. We do so by observing from our pineal gland and our heart. The pineal gland is the seat of perception within our brain. It is where our Essence sees from its energetic and conscious seat. It is the focal point of perception. We have to self-observe our three brains, looking into our intellect, our emotions, and our motor brain through this perspective, in a spiritual conscious way. But we must not only observe to see and gather data about the ego in the three brains, but we have to remember the presence of our Divine Mother within our pineal gland, within our heart: the seat of our soul. We also experience intuition, prescience, presentiment, premonitions in the heart: the altar and temple of the inner goddess Kundalini. In the example I provided, I was observing from my pineal gland into my three brains to understand the thoughts, the feelings, and the will of anger, of self-esteem, of pride, of wrath. Because each ego has three brains. It has its own ways of thinking, feeling, and doing. I was looking at that in myself and praying, “Help me to separate from this Divine Mother! Help me to comprehend so You can eliminate!” And I immediately, intuitively felt Her presence: a beautiful quality of serenity, of strength. 
She is a tremendous force. She does not use exertion of any kind. Instead, She opens the jaws of the beast with perfect equanimity, and equanimity is the most profound strength. So we have to feel Her in our mind and our heart. How can a child forget its mother? In the same way, we have to recognize Her presence, Her identity in us again and again. She is the voice of conscience. She is the voice of right action, such as in the experience I provided. I knew the right thing to do, but my mind was really trying to destroy my life, and I fought with my mind, and I would not have been able to relax if I did not have Her, my Divine Mother—and also, the Divine Mother of my wife, who expressed in that moment and saved me, helped me to rectify the situation.
So let your Divine Mother drive your car. Let her drive your soul, your Being—even if it means that you need to recollect yourself—whether you need to breathe deeply, do mantras, do prayer, walk out in nature. Take time to develop that stability of mind, to deepen your serenity. Because that is how you connect with Her, not through agitation, not through exertion, but through comprehension. 
The Divine Mother and the Tree of Life
As we explained, the Tree of Life is a map of the consciousness. It is a map of the Being. From the most elevated spheres or סְפִירוֹת sephiroth, the plural Hebrew term for “emanations,” to the most dense and material at the bottom.
This is a distinct and clear map for meditation and our internal experiences, which can clarify our understanding of where we are at in our work and where we must go. The sephiroth also reflect different expressions of the Divine Mother. So as I stated, the Divine Mother is universal. She is formless. She is an energy, and yet She can manifest within the different spheres or sephiroth in order to help us. And Samael Aun Weor, the founder of the modern Gnostic tradition, provided five distinct unfoldments or expressions of Devi Kundalini that we need to understand and which we can relate to the Tree of Life. At the top of the tree, above Kether, the Father, the Crown, you have the Absolute, which in Hebrew is אין Ain, אין סוף Ain Soph, אין סוף אוֹר Ain Soph Aur: the Nothing, the Limitless, and the Limitless Light. In the Absolute, in Ain Soph, the Divine Mother is the Unmanifested Prakriti. When the Divine Mother unfolds and expresses within the universe, within creation, we find that she manifests as Binah, intelligence, the Holy Spirit. She is the chaste Diana, Isis in Egypt, Tonantzin amongst the Aztecs, Maria, Miriam, Mary in Christianity, or better said, the mantra RAM-IO, a profound Mantra to invoke our Divine Mother Binah, intelligence. So these sephiroth are different qualities of consciousness. They are different modalities and expression of the divine. We also have something very important in relation to the death of the ego, which can relate to the sphere of Geburah, Justice, the severity of God. This is the Divine Mother Death. The Divine Mother Death relates to the justice of the Being, who punishes the ego and annihilates it. She is represented as the terrible Hecate amongst the Greeks, Persephone, Coatlicue, Queen of the infernos and death, the terror of love and law. She is the terror of the ego and the love of divine law, of order, of equilibrium, of karma. So in our former lectures on Karma, we explained how the divine hierarchies are managed by divine beings, with intelligence, with love. Knowing that law and loving that law is how we gain balance, and the Divine Mother Death removes the impurities so that we can be balanced, harmonious beings, integrated beings. We also have the special individual Mother Nature relating to Malkuth, the physical body, who is the originator and architect, the creator of our physical organism. Our body is an amalgamation of many elements. Mother Nature relates to our body as well as our environment and our body is dependent upon Mother Nature outside, but our internal Divine Mother Nature relates to our physicality, our body, which we need to sanctify. And lastly, the Elemental Enchantress to whom we owe every vital impulse, every instinct, relating to Yesod, the sexual creative energy, the foundation of our spirituality Let us explain each aspect of the Divine Mother in more depth. 
The Unmanifested Prakriti (Ain Soph)
The Unmanifested Prakriti, the Ain Soph, is the nothing, the limitless. Prakriti signifies nature. Mula in Sanskrit indicates “root,” as in the “root of something,” such as phenomena, consciousness, experiences.
We find mula in our root chakra, Muladhara, which signifies the “root place,” the root chakra. We use the term Mulaprakriti to refer to the Ain Soph, the abstract absolute space, the root nature of our consciousness, which is cosmic and eternal, a profound form of space. The Divine Mother has no form, but that energy takes on form within the astral plane in order to teach us, the Essence, important things. Samael Aun Weor also refers to the Divine Mother Prakriti as the Unmanifested Kundalini. This is understandable when we comprehend how the Divine Mother above and the heavenly cosmic space, the Mulaprakriti, is reflected in our Muladhara Chakra. So that cosmic space, that force, that energy, when it manifests into the universe, it becomes the Tree of Life, the different sephiroth, becoming more dense and material as it descends into different unfoldments or dimensions. The Ain Soph is beyond any universe. It is within the abstract space, the cosmic consciousness, the selflessness of perfect Seity. The Divine Mother above, Mulaprakriti, is the same energy that descends and becomes the serpent in our Muladhara Chakra. Even Ricard Wagner in his Ring Cycle [The Ring of the Nibelungen] which is an Opera tetralogy, depicts the Goddess Urda, the mysterious Ain Soph, or Devi Kundalini, with the same musical motif, the theme song, as the sword Nothung: the weapon of the great solar hero Sigmund, which is the Essence, the soul, who wields the Kundalini, the sword Nothung, in order to battle his enemy, Hunding, a symbol of the ego. Nothung, no-tung, reminds us of “nothing,” the Nothing, the space, the Abstract Absolute Space: Ain Soph. And we have explained in other lectures and courses that the Ain Soph is a star, a supra atomic point, the synthesis of our real Being. It is a light that shines within that space with perfection. It is known as the Glorian, the origin of universes. So this Mulaprakriti, is the womb of the Nothing, which is not understandable to the intellect, but is comprehended through experience. It is the origin of worlds, suns, galaxies, the infinites. All cosmic units are sustained, are born, are gestated, and they are destroyed and absorbed again throughout the great cosmic rhythms of activity and repose, known in Hinduism as Mahamanvantaras and Mahapralayas. These are “great” cosmic days and nights, respectively (for Maha signifies “great”): periods when universes emerged from the Ain Soph, and when it is time, those universes return back to the Nothing, to enter a period of absorption and repose. This is the significance of many Qur’anic verses. "You came from Him and unto Him you shall return." Even the Arabic name Allah hides many mysteries. The syllable “Al” means “the,” the indefinite article. And “La” can mean “No,” negation. Allah traditionally represents or translates as “The God,” but literally is “The No,” the Nothing—that which is not related to anything in existence, because it is unmanifested. This is why in Islam there are no statues or figures representing Allah, because you cannot anthropomorphize space. You cannot characterize the divine feminine in Her most abstract reality. The Unmanifested Divine Mother never enters the universe without taking form, so that we can comprehend and receive insight in our work. The universe emerges from her universality. She is absolute, cosmic, perfect. Her center is everywhere and Her periphery, Her circumference, is nowhere. She is the source that we aspire to. She is perfect liberty, a state of being that is so vast and expansive that it terrifies the ego. 
And so “the Nothing,” “the No,” the Unmanifested Divine Mother is the complete negation of our self, because in that selflessness, one becomes the universe, the stars, the planets, the gods. It is cosmic, absolute, eternal. She is the starry heavens or Egyptian Nut in that respective mythology, who shelters the heroes and the gods, those masters of meditation who have perfected themselves.
Involution: The Descent of Divine Force
In the universe, when the light of divinity manifests and expresses, that unitary light of the Ain Soph, descends and particularizes, individualizes. The top trinity of the Tree of Life relates to the trinitarian unfoldment: an expression of the Being in the most rarefied and subtle levels. Our unique consciousness, our divine Being, is a perfect unity. Yet to create life, She expresses, or that light expresses as three principles, since the law of three is how everything is created.
These are forces, qualities, principles, archetypes. They are blueprints of any universe. They are not three people that constitute one anthropomorphic God. These three creative forces are known as Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in Christianity. Every religion reflects these principles but in different ways. It is one light that can express as three, so as to gestate worlds and human beings. So going back to that description of the principles of sex, man is the affirming, positive force; woman is negating, receptive force. And together they provoke and promote the synthesis, reconciliation, which is the birth of the solar Christic consciousness. That synthesis is בִּינָה Binah, the intelligence of God in Hebrew. So our particular, individual Divine Mother is the intelligence of divinity, because She is the synthesis of all universal wisdom, which governs creation in every level. She is the spouse of Shiva in Hinduism, known as Shakti. Or, Brahma and Sarasvati in Hinduism—or to define its equivalent in the Bible, you have Abraham and Sarah. Brahma-Abraham and Sarasvati-Sarah in the Bible. These are all symbols that reflect truths that we need to experience. The reality is that in accordance with Gnostic Kabbalah, Binah is dual, because Binah is reflective of masculine and feminine principles. Because remember that when you have affirmation and negation, masculine-feminine, positive-negative, you produce the synthesis. And in the terms of having a child, the synthesis of a husband and wife, the child reflects the qualities and characteristics of its parents. So you find both principles there, but of course, manifested as a boy or a girl. But it takes the qualities of both male-female, father-mother, in order to create something beyond itself. Binah, the synthesis is dual. It is masculine-feminine, Father-Mother. In Hebrew, it is known as אב Abba and אם אלהים Aima Elohim in Hebrew. The sacred name of God, of Binah, is יהוה אלהים Jehovah Elohim. אלהים Elohim is a synthetic word. אל El in Hebrew is God. אלה Eloah in Hebrew is Goddess. ים Iod-Mem or the letters “-im” is a masculine plural ending. אלהים Elohim truly signifies “Gods and Goddesses.” 
Our particular, individual Divine Mother is Diana, the huntress, as we see in this image.
She is the Virgin Mary, Miriam or Mar-IO or Ram-IO, which is a powerful mantra, as I stated, of working with the divine feminine. מרים Miriam in Hebrew means to raise. She is the wife of the masculine aspect of the Holy Spirit, because the trinity is Father, Son, Holy Spirit—three forces as one light. We can receive profound instruction from our own intelligence, the Divine Mother in Binah. She takes on forms within the astral plane to teach us like in the example I provided. 
The Divine Mother Death (Geburah)
But let us also talk about the Divine Mother Death relating to Geburah, the justice and severity of God.
This aspect of the Divine Mother is perhaps the most important. It is referenced constantly throughout the writings of Samael Aun Weor. Divine Mother Death is responsible for annihilating the ego. She is Kali, as we see here. She dances upon those couples who know how to harness the sexual fire of alchemy. Meaning: man and wife use their sexual energy, conserve it, and direct it towards the death of desire to liberate the soul. So of course, this image is terrifying. She has a necklace of many heads, representative of all the egos she has slain in the initiate whom she stands upon. She is the power of the serpent Kundalini, which you find coiled around the left arm of the man whom she has conquered. Of course, that symbol relates to the left pillar of the Tree of Life or the serpent Ida, the energetic feminine current that rises from our sexual gonad up to our head, which is the contrast of pingala, the solar electric sexual serpent that rises from the other gonad to the brain within the vital body. The Divine Mother Death, despite her fearsome appearance, should not be feared. She is the liberator of our soul. She pulverizes the ego. She extracts the Essence through successive profound comprehensions. So She only decapitates those ego we have fully comprehended in our meditations. If we are single, we can pray to her using the mantra KRIM, prolonged such as this:
We imagine those defects we have comprehended and that She decapitates them, impales them, disintegrates the egos we wish to remove. If we are married, we can have more force by which to annihilate those egos. But if we are single, we can still work with the Divine Mother Death.
So this is very beautiful topic because Kali, the Divine Mother Death, is the power of sex, that which creates the soul and destroys the ego. She is the slayer of demons. She is Athena, who in the Greek myth of The Odyssey helps Odysseus return home in order to battle the many suitors who have tried to take his wife Penelope. In the Greek myth, Odysseus invented the Trojan horse during the Trojan War, conquered the city, and when trying to return home, he was lost for 20 years. And so, many men thought he was dead and tried to marry his wife, who remained faithful to him: a symbol of the soul waiting for the reunion of Odysseus, the solar man, the initiate. When he returns home finally, he finds that his whole island has been ransacked by suitors—all these figures and people trying to marry his wife and eat off his land. But Athena warns him saying, “You must disguise yourself and discover your enemies. You must find out who is your friend and who is your foe.” And so she disguised him with magic as a beggar that he, in this form, went around trying to investigate these people. Finally, in a great battle scene at the end, he reveals himself and with the help of Athena, with the help of Kali, kills all of those infidels. This is not a literal history. It is a symbol of working against the ego. And so Odysseus conquered and returned to his home, but only with the help of the Divine Mother Death. So She is very important in the work and we could talk about more of the practices involved in working with this force, this liberatory energy. 
Divine Mother Nature (Malkuth)
We have the Divine Mother Nature who is the creator, sustainer, and maintainer of our physicality. Divine Mother Nature helps us in jinn science, in magic, in theurgy, in the act of placing our physical body into the fourth dimension. This is jinn science.
She is the lever, Divine Mother Nature, or fulcrum of Archimedes who said, "Give me a lever of support and I will move the universe." So, jinn science, unlike astral projection, is when you, in a sleepy state, meditate upon your Divine Mother Nature, the originator of your physical body, so that she can take you in your physical body into the internal planes. So rather than leaving your body behind, you enter the fourth dimension, traveling in hyperspace. This is the significance of many myths in different world traditions where monks, priests, prophets, masters, were seen flying, traveling through the air, passing through walls, appearing and disappearing, levitating. Every world tradition and religion teaches these symbols or these truths, which are not in fact a symbol, but how through tremendous discipline and work with the Divine Mother Nature, one could conquer the fourth dimension, enter those states. 
The most memorable of them all that comes to mind, to my memory is the Prophet Muhammad, who was meditating at the stone of Kaaba, Mecca, in which he fell asleep and was taken with his physical body upon a mystical creature called Al-Buraq, which had the form or body of a donkey, the wings of a great bird, the tail of a peacock, and the face of a woman.
If you are familiar with the Egyptian sphinx, with the paws of a lion, the hooves of a bull, the wings of an eagle, and the face of a man, or a woman better said, you find that the Egyptian sphinx is paralleled in the ascension of Prophet Muhammad. And that is a symbol of Divine Mother Nature. She is the one who organizes the elements in our psyche and in our body. The fire of our heart, our emotions; the air of our thoughts; the waters of our sexuality; and the earth of our body. This is a feat that we can accomplish in ourselves if we work with jinn science. And we have practices that we are going to relate in some resources we have available online. 
Elemental Enchantress (Yesod)
We have the Elemental Enchantress relating to Yesod, our vital energies. She is known as the Eemental Instinctual Female Magi. She is our Divine Mother that works with Yesod. We can invoke Her and work with Her to perform sexual magic, which is alchemy, which is tantra, transmutation.
Samael Aun Weor mentioned in The Three Mountains how he saw his Elemental Enchantress in the form of a pygmy, the form of a fairy: a beautiful elemental soul. So all the elements have soul, including minerals, plants, animals, and the Divine Elemental Enchantress, our Divine Mother. This aspect of our Divine Mother works with the creatures of nature and She is the sexual force. She aids us in becoming elemental in nature: purified, simple. She also helps us to enter back into Eden. עֵדֶן Eden is a Hebrew word that means “bliss.” It is the state of the soul that we lost when we created desire, by disobeying the commandments of our Being. This female magi helps us return to Eden, which we do so through alchemy, sexual knowledge, transmutation. She helps us with different forms of magic such as ceremonial magic, relating to the astral body, Hod on the Tree of Life, the emotions. She also helps us with elemental magic relating to Netzach, the mind, the souls of plants. And She helps us with sexual magic, Yesod. Magic is the ability of the consciousness to exert will upon nature, to influence it. It doesn't mean that we pull rabbits out of hats. It means that we control all of the components of our psyche. The elementals of nature, in relating to the plant kingdom, never left Eden. Those souls that enter the animal kingdom eventually lose Eden in themselves because of desire, the animal method of procreation. This is why in Gnosis we work with plants. We work with plant magic. We command the souls of plants to vibrate with our level of being and to elevate ourselves, but also to help humanity, because every plant in nature is a mechanism that can reflect divine force. All plants have their purposes. This is very well known in different forms of medicine: Ayurveda, holistic forms of treatments. But in Gnosis, we study plant magic, because it is extremely effective for influencing humanity in a conscious and beneficial way. I invite you to reflect upon some of the resources we have available in order to learn to work with our Divine Mother. Pretty much all the books of Samael Aun Weor teach us how to work with Devi Kundalini. You can learn about jinn science, especially in The Yellow Book. But alchemy is covered extensively in The Perfect Matrimony, The Mystery of the Golden Flower. At this point in time, I would like to invite you to ask questions. Questions and Answers
Question: If we have had experiences when our Divine Mother will not see us in the astral plane, does that mean that we have too much lust?
Instructor: I think that might depend on the person, but in my experience when my Divine Mother has not been able to find me it is because I am too asleep. I had an experience, also a long time ago, in which my Divine Mother approached me with a radar in her hand, and She said with a lot of concern, pointing towards the screen, “I can't find you!” So usually in radar, you see a green line that goes around the circumference, the radius spins like a wheel, and there is a little blip that will appear when you find some kind of naval ship or aircraft or whatever. So my Divine Mother was showing me this symbol and saying, “I can't find you” because I wasn't being awake enough. So obviously it could be in relation to lust, because obviously any ego puts us to sleep. But most especially if we give in to lust, desire, fornication. It could mean that we are very asleep, because we waste the energies that are going to awaken us. Question: Is the word Devi relating to the word divine? Instructor: Yes, there is that their connotation. Devi also relates to deva, goddess, such as the devas of nature, the great elemental queens who govern the plant kingdoms, all those divine intelligences of the physical and internal worlds. Question: Is the Innermost, inner Being, both the Divine Mother and the Divine Father? Instructor: In Kabbalah, strictly speaking, the Innermost, our Being, is the Divine Father, known as חֶסֶד Chesed in Hebrew. Chesed is the seventh sephirah from the bottom to the middle of the diagram. Chesed means “Mercy” and he is the spirit, the immortal spark of divinity in us. The Innermost is a child of the Divine Mother, Binah, the Holy Spirit. So in very intuitive logic, we can say that Osiris and Isis in Egyptian mythology represent Father-Mother within Binah, masculine-feminine, and their synthesis or child is Horus—Horus, the light, because in Hebrew אוֺר Aur means “light.” Horus is the gold of the spirit, because even in spanish, oros means “gold.” So the Spirit, Chesed, emerges from Binah, the Holy Spirit. Question: Is it possible that our Divine Mother is guiding us, but we are unaware of it? Instructor: Absolutely! I would say in reality that, in our work, She is with us all the time, but we just don't see Her. We are not aware of Her because we are not paying attention. The way that you figure that out is by awakening in meditation and also learning to remember that presence in yourself, moment by moment. Obviously astral experiences can help us to have more clarity, because then we recognize the same intuitive principle or feeling. That premonition we have in dreams is the exact reflection of our daily life. That is something that gives us faith. We start to see more and more that our Divine Mother is really with us all the time, but we are just stubborn. We don't recognize Her presence because we don't pay attention. In the example I provided of my Divine Mother getting in my car, you know, I didn't even realize what was happening, even when physically I got out of my car and got into the passenger seat. And hen immediately afterward, I understood the symbolism of that experience, and the same quality that I had in the dream related to what I was going through in that ordeal physically. That gave me a lot of inspiration, a lot of joy, even when my mind was terrible. So She is with us all the time, but we have to learn to recognize Her. Question: Can you please elaborate on this prayer? “Be thou O Hadit, my secret, the Gnostic mystery of my Being, the central point of my connection, my heart itself, and bloom on my fertile lips made Verb!” Also, what is the significance and the best time to use this prayer? Instructor: So who is Hadit? Hadit in Egyptian mythology can relate to the Holy Spirit, who is our “secret,” the thread, the intelligent intuitive guidance of our conscience, “the Gnostic mystery of our Being,” who is infinitely profound and “the central point of our connection.” So remember that when you are self-remembering and self-observing, you have to remember the connection of your spirit within your pineal gland and your heart. Self-remembrance is a thread that you have to hold on to. It is the thread of Ariadne in the Greek mysteries, when I believe Theseus went into the labyrinth to fight the Minotaur, and it was a vast labyrinth in the caves of that underground kingdom, so that he could find his way back because the thread would point to him where he came from. That central thread or point is our Divine Mother, because we have to remember the thread of our experiences: the continuity of our self-remembrance, our mindfulness, the state of self-remembrance and being moment by moment. That is our heart. It is what gives us life, following our intuition, not our intellect, but our heart. In that way She can bloom our lips made fertile, made verb. To be fertile in lips is to be transmuting your sexual energy. Our speech is empowered by the sexual creative force, and She manifests in our words when we are intuitive, when we reflect on Her qualities in our daily life moment by moment. We can use this prayer anytime we meditate. It is especially wonderful in sexual alchemy when you remember the presence of your Divine Mother, when you approach the forge in which the Kundalini is tempered and awakened. Question: When we take a spouse, are we unifying the divine and masculine energies in a way that affects or breaks the heart of the Divine Mother, when we realize that we are not in the right marriage? Are we affecting these divine forces? Instructor: Obviously, adultery is a very painful thing, but also, being that we are asleep, we do make mistakes. Anytime we mix sexual energy with people of the opposite sex, we adulterate our consciousness and we weaken our conscience. So knowing who your partner should be or whom you should be with, the thing to remember is that we have to make good choices, to not get in those situations, to not jump into relationships without prudence, without testing our grounds. But also, the thing to remember is that if one is in a committed relationship and one feels that doubt, that pain, or that sentiment or feeling that one is in a wrong relationship, one should really meditate profoundly, because any type of sexual connection is very serious, is very profound. It creates a type of signature in the astral plane, a type of marriage of forces which we can't ignore, which is eternal. I would say, anytime we disobey our Divine Mother, especially in sex, yes, we make Her suffer a lot. We have made our Divine Mother suffer tremendously by having so many partners and not waiting for the one person to work with in accordance with our karma or with the law. So that is a very delicate thing to discriminate and understand and it is always going to be very personal. While I can't give you a thorough answer in terms of who is the right partner for you, obviously, that is something you have to spend a lot of time reflecting on. So yes, we do affect our divine forces when we enter a sexual relationship without love, because love is what regenerates the soul, not lust. Question: Why is Ram-IO such an important mantra? Especially in relation with masculine and feminine energies? Instructor: Mary in Hebrew is Miriam. You spell Mary backwards, you have RAM-IO. RAM or the RAM, is a symbol of Christ: the sexual creative fire that anoints the initiates, which particularizes and develops the pure unity of the soul. Mar or mer in French means “sea,” the sea of IO, or the ram of IO, the child of the Divine Mother. RAM-IO is an important Mantra because it works with Christ, the solar energies, and with our waters. It transmutes, we could say, or invokes very high forces in us, because mar or mer is the sea from which the solar gods emerge. And IO, if you studied Greek mythology, has many representations as a beautiful feminine figure, whom I believe Zeus pursued out of desire and love. Many kabbalistic symbols there, which you can study on our websites, but in synthesis RAM-IO is important because it is a seed mantra: IO, that works with the Divine Mother. Question: You said that our Divine Mother can manifest in other ways besides in our dreams. Does this mean that she can take form in other people from time to time when facing ordeals? Can you elaborate on that? Instructor: The answer is yes. Samael Aun Weor mentioned many times and asks this question: How many times has your Divine Mother appeared unto you, O disciple, without you even knowing it, even physically? In the example I provided where I was in the car at Starbucks, my wife was expressing her Divine Mother and even my Divine Mother too, because She is universal, in order to guide me and say, “Let me take the wheel.” My Divine Mother and the Divine Mother of my wife was acting physically, so she became the vehicle of expression of that, so that I could face the ordeal and pass it, to comprehend it. She can take form in other people and manifests anywhere, everywhere, at any time, because she is universal. She is space, but she can appear and manifest in any human being that is either prepared or has enough space to reflect that principle. Question: Is there any prayer to the Divine Mother that you prefer during sexual magic? Instructor: Well, that is obviously going to be personal to each one of us. Obviously if you are practicing in alchemy, you and your partner—or if your spouse is not into Gnosis—that is something that you will have to gauge in yourself; but obviously, if both partners are practicing in alchemy, they should work and could work with other mantras that help with different functions, such as Kandil Bandil Rrrrr: the mantra to awaken the Kundalini. Or, IAO to transmute the sexual energy.
Or to annihilate the ego, Krim, to invoke the Divine Mother Death. So I invite you to experiment if you are married. Try the different mantras to see what helps you most at a given time, because different mantras have different purposes.
Question: Please discuss the origin of the reference to Mother Nature. And what is your perspective on why certain religions dismiss the significance of the Divine Mother and or cast blame like the Adam and Eve story? Instructor: So, Mother Nature is the originator of our body. Even the word in Latin, mater, meaning mother, is the matter of our body. So the spirit, the divine masculine, impregnates matter in order to give birth to Christ; the pure virgin matter or mother who represents the body that is purified through transmutation, so as to give birth to a perfect soul, the Christ, the Son of Man. So these are symbols that represent different degrees and steps in the path of initiation, which you can read about in the course The Path of Initiation on Glorian.org, but also what you can study in our course called The Secret Path of Initiation. As for why religions dismiss the significance of the Divine Mother, it is because religions degenerate with time. And those who are in power were men. Therefore, those men decided to make religion reflect their tastes. So that is why many beautiful traditions, which are very rich and profound and even feminist, in a sense that the divine feminine is respected, those aspects of those traditions were gutted out, because it did not, or better said, it was a basis of interpretation for persecuting and discriminating against women, which is sad. But when you know Kabbalah, you don't get confused, and do not let any type of patriarchal narrative or dogmatic patriarchy influence our readings. Question: Could you elaborate on the Kali Ma? Is this an aspect of Kali? Instructor: Kali Ma, or better said Kali, is the goddess of death. And Kali is dual. In heaven above She is the Divine Mother Death who eliminates desire, the ego. But if we fornicate, if we adulterate, if we expel the creative energies, then that force of Kali produces the death the soul through Kali Ma, the queen of the infernos. She becomes the tail of the demons, the inverted serpent Kundabuffer. So there are two ways to die: through initiation or through the second death. The ego must be eliminated either way. But if you wish to acquire development in our spirit, we work with the Divine Mother Death in the positive sense, removing the ego here and now in meditation, through alchemy, so that we can ascend the Tree of Life. But those people who don't want to eliminate the ego on their own, let themselves be swallowed by nature, meaning by hell, so that they are recycled and disintegrated by the devolving serpent Kali Ma, the inverted aspect of the Divine Mother Death in hell. Question: What can we do to be good children to our Divine Mother? How do we take care of Her? Instructor: We are a good child when we perform the three factors with fidelity. Comprehend the ego, eliminate it, act virtuously, and serve humanity. That is how we earn graces from our Divine Mother Kundalini, and we take care of Her when we are chaste. If we are not saving our sexual energy, we are abusing the Divine Mother, committing a crime. So take care of Her by conserving your sexual energy, transmuting it through many beautiful exercises such as pranayama, runes, sacred rites of rejuvenation, meditation. Take care of Her by working on your mind, eliminating desire. Question: Is our personal Divine Mother or Father working in collaboration with other people's Divine Mothers and Fathers in order to put us in the situations we need for a development? Instructor: The answer is yes. Obviously divinity is at a level that is omniscient. All of the divine beings of the Absolute in the Tree of Life, those who have already done the work in past lives, obviously those monads are developed and know how to work in an intelligent manner. But our Divine Father and Divine Mother, even at a level of a beginner, works with the law, works with karma, negotiates karma for us and works with other solar divinities in order to help us. So all of that is determined with intelligence, because Binah is the intelligence of all the divinities in the universe. So that universal intelligence is pervasive, is cosmic. So, that wisdom is universal, not particular, within in one person only, but is manifested in many masters. Question: I have had experiences with my Divine Mother in lucid dreams. I have also had experiences in this three-dimensional world that reminded me of my Divine Mother. Can our personal Divine Mother work through others or precipitate in the three-dimensional world, or is this a different aspect of the Divine Mother? Instructor: So yes, the Divine Mother, our individual Being, Binah, can work through other people. Like in that example of being in the car at Starbucks, my wife, like in the dream I had that morning, said “Let me take the wheel.” So my Divine Mother and her Divine Mother were working together to help me get out of a mess, to help me not make a mistake. So I am deeply indebted to my Being. And the Divine Mother can manifest physically in a material form. But that is usually performed through certain exercises of invocation and high magic which you can read about in Esoteric Medicine and Practical Magic. Question: Do these personal Divine Parents have their Divine Mother and Father? Instructor: We can say that the Tree of Life describes the different hierarchies of being. Our inner Father is Chesed, the spirit, the Innermost In Kabbalah. His Divine Father and Mother is Binah, the Holy Spirit. And so, whether or not Binah has a father and mother, we could say in a very profound sense, yes, because the trinity of the top of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life emanates from the Ain Soph. Samael Aun Weor even mentions that the Ain Soph is Father and Mother, in profound synthesis. So there are levels of hierarchy of light, which is why the Qur’an states in Surah Al-Nur, "Light upon light!” Levels of Being—different unfoldments of one perfection. Question: Can you speak about the secret path of the heart? How can someone who is highly intellectual begin to open their heart? Is it essential to return to childhood trauma? As a man, I find it difficult to cry sometimes and show emotion. What can I do to heal? Is crying necessary? I am often encouraged to by my loved ones. What are your thoughts? Instructor: The secret path of the heart unfolds through sincerity. Usually with our intellect, we like to justify or repress our psychological state, to not look at the reality and the facts even if it is very traumatic. We know from counseling and trauma that early childhood trauma has an energetic impact, conditions the psyche. And because it is so painful to look at that event, the mind defends itself and represses or hides that experience within the subconsciousness. And I would say yes, in reality, to understand trauma and overcome it, one has to cry, because there is a tension in the psyche that is so painful and so enmeshed that it manipulates all of our actions in our conscious mind, usually without our awareness. But in order to really confront our defects and those traumas, we have to really be willing to break apart, whether it is from remorse, or whether from comprehension, because Samael Aun Weor mentions that in the work of the death of the ego and the work upon trauma, if we really understand our defects in depth, we will cry, because it is painful. So it's necessary. We have a course that is going to elaborate more and more upon how to work practically with trauma. It is called Spiritual and Mental Health. We have one lecture up there already where you can learn from some professional as well as spiritual advice, about how to work practically with facing these types of conditions and the ways to heal. So there are many practices that explain how to do that. Question: If we have an experience in nature particularly with animals, which aspect of the Divine Mother is that? Nature or Enchantress, or both? Instructor: I would say both, because animals belong to nature, but really, animal nature is defined by instinct: the Elemental Enchantress. So it is important not to think of the Divine Mother as separate from these different aspects. They are really expressions and unfoldments of one light, our divine feminine nature. So there are different principles that manifest in different ways in accordance with the sephiroth and the internal bodies, but all of it interrelates and connects with each other. Question: Are there specific practices or mantras that coincide with each vice? If so, can you list one routine for each one? Instructor: I wouldn't say that we have separate mantras or practices necessarily for different defects. Really the best practice to comprehend and eliminate our vices is retrospection meditation. But there are exercises that help to gain enough stability and concentration and serenity by which to work effectively in retrospection. For example, if your heart is afflicted with anger, it is good to work with the mantra O, to saturate the heart with positive force. Or if we are afflicted with lust, we can transmit our sexual energy so that we have enough control and stability by which to approach lust in our mind. So I wouldn't say there's a practice for each of the seven vices, we could say, but you do find throughout the literature of Samael Aun Weor different practices to help treat anger. For example, like I related about the Starbucks experience: I was doing deep breathing to control my anger. That is something that the master gives in the book Introduction to Gnosis: the lessons he provides there, so that you can let anger subside so that you can work on the mind, which is what I was doing in that experience. Question: If we experience the ordeal of Direne and failed, will this mistake cause our Divine Mother and Father to renounce us for the rest of this lifetime? Instructor: That really depends. That depends upon the magnitude of the fault. How much energy is invested in lust. Obviously, if one fails the ordeal of Direne and commits adultery, obviously, there is going to be a lot to repair, if that can be repaired at all, in terms of a relational standpoint with one's spouse. Because if divinity asks you to work with one partner and we betray our spouse, obviously, there is going to be a lot of karma involved that it is going to be more difficult to unfold. Whether or not that will be forgiven is something particular to each case, because karma is very intricate and particular to each person. That is something that only your Divine Mother and Divine Father could show you from experience. Question: I have had many experiences in my time on this path, often times when the experiences begin, my mind truly struggles to understand, how it is possible, or whether I am worthy to experience these things? What could be done to help this? Instructor: Well, the solution is: reflect on your heart and your sincerity. Sincerity is the virtue that opens the door to experience. When we truly repent of our errors, not because we want to have samadhis or experiences out of craving and desire, but because we want to change our behavior, when we change our ethical behavior and conduct, we start to see results in our daily life. That is when we become worthy to receive very high initiations or experiences. It is something that has to be earned. Now all of us without exception feel despair at times, where we feel the pain and realization that we are so afflicted with ego that we don't know what to do. And this is a trial and trauma of the soul, a great drama or path of difficulty every one of us has to face. All of us have our own cross to bear, but the reality is that there is forgiveness in the law and it is possible. But we have to really earn it, and that means suffering a lot to the extreme, if necessary. Because when we go through pain and hardship, and feel that this work may be beyond our reach, and we realize that if we don't change, that we are going to suffer more, then we work regardless of the result. We do it because of love, without attachment to the fruit of our deeds. It is when you act in this way, without expectation, and practice in this way without expectation, that is when we really start to receive help internally. We gain experiences. So it is possible. Personally, from my past lives, I do not deserve to be helped. I have committed terrible crimes, and I remember them with lucidity. So it is painful, and I have had to really weep a lot and pray for my Divine Mother to help, because without Her we are lost. But it is precisely at that breaking point in which she enters as light, and we have to be willing to receive that intelligence, primarily by facing extreme hardship. We face and overcome defeatism by meditating on those egos that complain that say, “I can't do this work. I am not good enough. I'm not worthy.” Your Divine Mother knows best, so rely on Her judgment, not on doubt. Doubt is one thing. Despair and morbidity is one thing, but remorse is something else. So all doors are closed to the unworthy except the door of repentance, and we show repentance by our deeds, our actions. Question: Can you speak about how to use the rune Yr and how that works with our Divine Mother when working in sexual alchemy? 
Instructor: So the rune Yr is the opposite of the rune Man, and if you are familiar with the hippie symbol of peace, it is the rune Yr. The rune Man is upright and Man is a representation of the masculine sexual force. So when you join those two runes together, Yr and Man, you form the rune Hagal, and Hagal is a swastika, the cross in motion. And that cross in motion works profoundly when we are married, working in alchemy.
So, about different prayers you can do, mantras associated with the rune Yr. I believe you mentioned some of them: "Terrifying king of the sea, thou who has the keys of the floodgates of heaven and who does, can find the subterranean waters within the cavern of the earth. " There are some beautiful prayers that relate to different teachings, but in simple forms, you work with the rune Yr and Man together when you are working in alchemy, because man and woman together form the six pointed star, the cross in motion. We do it by considering the sexual force and circulating it through mantra. Question: How is the mantra KRIM used for help with breaking down food? Does this transmute the sexual energy from the food? Instructor: The mantra KRIM is the force of destruction. It breaks down elements to extract the synthesis. So in the same way that you break down food when you masticate, eat the food and break down the material so that you can extract its nutrients, the mantra KRIM also helps us to annihilate the ego. So it takes the sexual power and directs it towards the annihilation of the self. Question: Hey, good evening. I wanted to ask you about that experience that you told us about at the Starbucks. And I understand like how you said, that you became aware of your anger, but I was kind of wondering, if you could or would share how or explain a little bit about how for you specifically, you had some comprehension? Because, a lot of times I am aware of a lot of things in myself, but I don't comprehend them and I don't understand, kind of, what it is to comprehend them. But I wish I could give you an example right now of what I mean, but I just was wondering if you could explain a little bit about how that felt to you, like to comprehend that moment? Instructor: Great question. Comprehension is a spark. It is really a profound state of being in which we say, “Aha!” in the sense, like, “I finally see something I never saw before!” It is alert novelty. Comprehension is a type of energy that is like a lightning bolt. It shocks the consciousness, not in a detrimental way, but in an elevating way. When we comprehend an ego, we are liberated in the moment, because we see how that fault operates and conditions us. When you comprehend an ego, you are extracting the essence trapped in it, and then through prayer, the Divine Mother can eliminate it. So in the example I gave you about being at Starbucks, what happened was that when my wife took the car, the wheel, when I got in the passenger seat, I suddenly understood in an instant, with a great shock, that I am going through exactly what I dreamed about this morning. And it was a really brilliant moment of lucidity, of clarity, and inspiration, because when we comprehend our dreams and how they relate to physical life, you feel inspired. So while I was struggling against my own mind to control it, I realized that I was being helped in this ordeal. And in that way, I felt enough peace and serenity to continue working on my mind in that instant because, you know, I knew that my Divine Mother was with me. That is an understanding and a confidence you develop through alert novelty: being aware of the instant, but also paying attention to your dreams and reflecting on their meaning. And sometimes, the comprehension emerges without thinking about it. You do not plan it or expect it. It just suddenly comes to you when your mind is clear, when you are observing. When your imaginative screen of awareness, your intellect is at peace, you can reflect the insight in your superior intellectual center. It just comes to you. But we have to be receptive as an intellect and active as a consciousness as we explained in our former lecture, if that makes sense. Question: Yeah, so comprehension doesn't necessarily mean that you understand why you are doing what you are doing. It's just more that you kind of are just very conscious of the moment and the choices and the ability to take control again or something like that? Or to make different choices? You know what I mean? Instructor: Yes, there are levels of comprehension. So in that moment, I understood that I needed to get into the passenger seat and to meditate right there, so that I can go deeper and understand those egos that acted. So I knew in the moment that I had to continue being serene and then, when I was really concentrated, I understood four egos that I needed to eliminate. So, light upon light, level upon level, if that answers your question. Audience: Yes. Thank you. Instructor: You're welcome. Question: Thank you for the lecture. I was wondering about... So I am looking at Deuteronomy 11. This is the part where Moses is recalling, asking the Israelites to recall everything that has happened as they go into the land of Canaan or into the new lands, and this happens many times. I am just going to use one verse. This happens many times throughout this whole section. “You must love the Lord your God and always obey his Commandments, decrees, regulations, and requirements to create regulations and commands.” When “you mentioned his requirements,” is this an interpretation of the Bible where “his” has been... that's not what the Hebrew meant, or is this referring to Chesed, which is a masculine aspect? Because of many “He” and “His” in this section. Instructor: Yeah. I am not entirely familiar about the Hebrew in that passage, but if you go into the actual Hebrew transliteration, you will find more answers. You know, this is the value of knowing Kabbalah, so that when you look at the original Hebrew script, you can interpret what names of God are being used. So obviously, אל El in Hebrew is Chesed, the spirit, and there are degrees of expression of divinity, which are mapped out by the different Hebrew sacred names of God, which we study in our courses of Kabbalah. So if you are familiar with that you can go through those verses and see what name of God is being used. So every time you see God mentioned in English, you should look towards the original language to see what sacred name of divinity is really being referenced here, to get more clarity. If that make sense. Audience: Here in a paragraph it's like "He" is mentioned like five, six times. In actuality this could be five different references that go beyond just the word "He." Instructor: Yeah, that is why we have to know what the Hebrew is telling us, because that original script is going to give us the most depth of understanding. So you have to really meditate and judge what you are reading from the original. Audience: Okay. Thank you. Instructor: You're welcome. 
Throughout history, divinity has expressed itself to humanity in a variety of forms. We see the world’s great religions. We also hear about many spiritual movements that have taken place across time. As humanity changes, as languages change, as people migrate to new places, we often lose touch with the old forms, but that light of divinity remains active and alive, and moving. At different points in time, this light of divinity can become more active in certain places, in certain cultures. Now, that is not to mean that it does not exist in other cultures. It just moves its activity depending on certain contexts.
What we know is that God or divinity, however we like to conceive it in our mind, is a very living force. It is a universal force. It is a force of life, and love, and wisdom, and truth. In our Gnostic teachings, we often use the commonly known word of Christ as the title of that universal force. Christ is not just one individual, Jesus Christ for example, but it is actually the wisdom, and the love, and the intelligence that can express itself through a human being who is properly prepared. We call these human beings masters or prophets, buddhas, Christs: these titles for an individual who has reached that level of self-realization—to be able to express more purely at their own degree the love and the wisdom of divinity, the teachings to help humanity. In the Gnostic teachings we have to understand that the light of divinity that touches each one of us and that reaches out to each one of us is beyond any one form, any school or doctrine. These schools, these movements and these spiritual groups and religions can be the vehicle through which God can express in multiple times and places. But if we just attend a school and we do not ourselves enter personally into contact with our own inner connection to divinity, we do not experience what we call initiation. The Definition of Initiation
Initiation is the beginning. To initiate means to start. When we enter into initiation, we enter into a new birth, a spiritual birth, a spiritual growth. This is something that does not have anything to do with schools, or titles that are given to you or sold by different movements. It is something that is deeply within ourselves. It is a profound growth and evolution of the human soul.
When we experience that, we change as a person. Not just externally, by acting in a different way or hanging out with different kinds of people, but actually by our quality of presence, by the wisdom and love that we are able to express, by the way that we encounter situations and respond to them. We will notice that we are deeply changing, because we do not force it, but naturally we are evolving, we are growing as a soul, as a being--in a deeper way than to just externally achieve a kind of social rank or spiritual title from a given community. Contacting and Experiencing Divinity
How do we come into contact with that universal light of divinity? All of us at one point in time have experienced this. Maybe it has been as simple as going outside to a beautiful, natural scene and feeling that awe and that beauty within that is spontaneous to the human soul. Or perhaps is when we truly loved someone, purely and from the deepest part of our heart. That is a form of experience that changes a person. Sometimes, this can be in little ways that we are changing. Sometimes, it can be a more profound spiritual awakening, an experience where we really feel that connection to our inner divinity. Maybe we have a mystical experience, an out-of-body experience, for example, a near-death experience, as we hear many people talk about. That will change people on a profound level.
When we experience that, we are actually using a type of sense unrelated to our physical senses. We have five physical senses through which we experience the world as gateways that energy can come through and be processed. But there is also a sense within us, a spiritual sense: our imagination, our soul, our intuition, our ability to perceive something divine. The more we awaken those spiritual faculties, the more that we are able to perceive things that are beyond just the physical level, that are beyond just physical nature, in more energetic, more spiritual, more subtle and refined levels of nature. These are still material in a sense, but not the gross, physical material that we are used to experiencing with our physical touch. As we awaken on deeper levels, we can even awaken out of our body. When we go to sleep physically, we can remain awake in the dream state with full consciousness, able to control what we do and where we go. All these kinds of spiritual gifts are often what people associate with initiation: to be able to awaken spiritual powers like telepathy or clairvoyance or prophecy, to be able to see the future, or to hear the word of divinity within us, so that we can share that light with others or to see what steps we need to take in our own life, to become better people. If we want these types of powers, we often go to different schools and different places that promise us that they will enroll us in a certain course, and we will advance through degree to degree to degree, and be initiated and become masters, or become self-realized. But as I mentioned previously, what we really want is not the external validation from any other person, but that inner experience, that inner knowledge, that connection with divinity through which we know we are really growing as a soul and that we are really understanding life in a more profound way that decreases our suffering, and decreases the suffering of people around us. Then, we have the ability to understand other people and to help them. Most importantly, we can begin by helping ourselves and understanding ourselves, to touch the truth of who we are. The Practicality of Aquarian Gnosis
In this time, we have these Gnostic teachings as taught by Samael Aun Weor and the instructors and students of his tradition, which we call the Fifth Gospel [which explains the significance and secret meanings of the Four Gospels from the conservative Piscean Era]. This is the same light that has expressed itself throughout humanity’s history through many religions and that is why in this teaching, we discuss various religions and we talk about how their essence is the same. Their essence is a practical teaching that each of us must strive to experience for ourselves—not merely to learn it intellectually, or to take it as a belief, but to actually, practically experience it by using those spiritual faculties which awaken when we feel love, or awe for nature, or that genuine intuition within our divinity.
That’s why this Fifth Gospel is a very practical teaching. If we really want to experience initiation, we have to be well-prepared. Throughout history, when the ancient mystery schools in Egypt or Greece, or all around the world, in ancient Tibet as well, were going to take an aspirant into the secret teachings, they would prepare them rigorously for decades, to make sure that this person had purity of heart. They had worked to eliminate their vices and to practice virtue and were skillful in meditation, awakening their concentration and awareness to be able to go deep within. Now, the Age of Aquarius has brought this new doctrine which openly gives the secret teachings (or at least a degree of them), so that anyone can enter into these practices immediately. That is because all of us are well aware that the state of our world is becoming more chaotic. The crises that are impacting humanity are greater than ever, and there is just not enough time for all of us to go off into the mountains for twenty or thirty years in order to become really prepared. But that puts the burden on all of us to decide if we are truly going to commit to our spiritual growth. If this is truly something that we want to take seriously, then we have to take serious steps. It is not a practice that can be entered into at a whim. It is a very serious commitment of the soul, which has ramifications whether for good or for bad. So, if we make this decision, we have to work at our own level in order to progress, but constantly be progressing in the direction of improvement of virtue, of getting closer to divinity, and further away from the selfishness and the vice which has characterized much of humanity, and as all of us are well aware, characterizes much of our own lives. The Conservation of Energy and Spiritual Awakening
When we talk about initiation, as I mentioned, we are talking about an essential change, a change in the quality of our soul, and the birth of our soul is only possible when we are working with our own energy.
Each day we expend a tremendous amount of energy: emotionally, intellectually, physically and even consciously, our willpower. So, when take the step to become aware of our actions each day and to meditate or reflect in the evenings on what we have done that day, we can evaluate how we are using our energy. How are we living our lives? Are we living ethically, or are we really getting caught up in superfluous things that will pass away and not have much value to us in the future? If we want to awaken spiritually, we have to really conserve our energy. The reason that all the great religions taught ethical principles, or commandments, or rules for us to follow, is not because, arbitrarily, we need to do what someone else tells us to do, but because these principles, these ways of living an upright life actually change our energetic quality of being. If you have ever been around an angry person, whether they are talking or not, you can feel that quality of their being. If you have ever been around somebody who is truly loving, maybe they are expressing love to you, you felt that power of their being. This is a spiritual energy that we are trying to cultivate. When we work with principles of honesty, selflessness, charity, chastity, and humility, we are actually cultivating a level of being that conserves energy and transforms it inwardly, to awaken our consciousness. But when we engage in anger and envy, and all these other vices that have to do with a false self--a false sense of self that we feel needs to be defended at any cost, but which is just a figment of our own mind--that is when we lose our energy. We compromise our inner values, and we in essence forfeit our soul and our integrity for temporary gains, for that false self. 
The Role of Kundalini, Initiation, and Spiritual Knowledge
Nāgārjuna was a Buddhist teacher and a great master, a great initiate. We can tell as we look at this image of Nāgārjuna here that he is an initiate. Does anyone know why we can see in this image he is a master? There is a symbolism to this image.
Yes, the serpents. Behind his head, we see seven serpents. I am going to talk a little bit later about the structure of initiation, but, simply put, these seven serpents represent that he has mastered the seven initiations of Major Mysteries. This is a very high level of development: raising the serpents. Has anyone heard about Kundalini before? Kundalini is symbolized as a serpent rising up our spine. This is because, as an initiate, we learn to work with that energy that we are conserving, to transform that energy up the spine into the brain, into the pineal gland, in particular, to awaken our consciousness. This awakens our spiritual faculties, which are innate in all of us, but for many of us have become a bit atrophied over time. This awakens our ability to become wiser, more compassionate to human beings, and to perceive our reality beyond the shell of our mind, and our false self. As Nāgārjuna points out to us here, he stated that: All philosophies are mental fabrications. There has never been a single doctrine by which one could enter the true essence of things. —Nāgārjuna
Sometimes people say that this type of statement means, “I don’t need any spiritual teachings. I don’t need to read any books. I can achieve awakening by myself.” Well, it is true that there are some masters who are illiterate, but for many of us we can actually benefit from practical teachings that guide us and that help us to realize where we may be imbalanced, or which techniques we may be able to use to gain some energy, to gain some strength, to then do our spiritual work, to then enter into the essence of things.
But if we just read books, or if we go to a church or a temple and we go through the motions of prayer or spiritual practice, but we ourselves never feel that connection, that power, that inner spark of divinity calling to us, then we are not truly growing internally. We may externally receive some amount of recognition, but when we go to the end of our life, and we evaluate the quality of our quality of being, we may feel empty. We may feel that we have created as Christ said, the "whited sepulcher," which on the outside looks beautiful and holy, but on the inside is dead. What we want is the spiritual birth. We want to enter into the true essence of things, the true essence of ourselves, the true essence of nature and reality, and the true essence of divinity—all of which are essentially one and the same. Conscience, Discernment and Internal Judgment of the Soul
Another great master, Swami Sivananda, gave us this practical teaching:
The intelligent or wise one has to discriminate within and advance by himself towards his own goal, his own self, while also searching for the emancipation of others. —Swami Sivananda
It is not about following anyone who claims to be a master, but truly studying in an effort to awaken your own inner discrimination, to find the teachings that resonate with you, that call to you and that awaken your own inner judgment.
Many of us have been in situations where we feel a pang of conscience, when we are about to tell a lie and a part of us says: “Mmm… maybe I should just tell the truth!” But then our mind begins to rationalize and to say: “Why? Well, but I’m lying for a good reason. I have a good intention for doing this unethical thing. In the end, I might be able to work things out and brush it over and get away with it.” For some of us, maybe it has been many years since we felt that pang of conscience, but we all have some direct experience of our inner judgment, that discernment. This is really important as we try to prepare ourselves for initiation, because, as I mentioned, it is not about any external master saying to you that you are ready. It is about your internal God, your own inner divinity teaching you, and awakening you, and helping you to grow, as a father and mother would a young child. As a soul, we need to be behaving in a certain kind of way through which we demonstrate the maturity within ourselves to our own inner divinity, that we are willing to learn, that we are humble enough to learn and to change as people. That is something that only each of us can know. We have guidelines, we have general principles in all the world religions that we are all familiar with and which we can use as a great starting place to gain our bearings, to begin living more ethically. But it is really when we are in a situation and we are observant of ourselves, in the quality of our action, and we act on a vice, that we see the effect of that. We see how that affects other people and affects us and create problems in our life—versus when we do something virtuous, and we see how that ripples towards other people and changes our own quality of being and gives us a sense of peace with ourselves. As we begin to evaluate ourselves, regardless of what other people’s judgments about us may be, we have to be very severe with ourselves, and very honest with ourselves. We have to really see in our life: “What are the places where I have compromised myself?” Maybe at that time, we did it for what we thought were good reasons, but now we realize that it was really a mistake and that we are missing something of value to us, part of our own soul that we want to reclaim. Then ask, “What steps can I begin to take to gradually put my life back in order, to get myself back to the place where I feel that I am a person that I can respect, an individual with character that is noble or virtuous?” At least we can be striving to that point, because of course, we know this is not something that just happens magically overnight, but it is an effort of the soul that takes tremendous super efforts, day to day, to be continually honest with ourselves and to see where we have shortcomings, where we have anger, greed, gluttony or lust, that is creating problems, that is actually creating suffering. Not because someone else tells us this is creating suffering for us, but because we repeated these behaviors again and again and again, and we know that they lead us to the same unfortunate places. When we truly begin to work towards ourselves and understand deeply our own suffering, we begin to see how other people that we love and cherish around us are also suffering. Many people are controlled by their anger or their greed, or their fear, their insecurity, and they live their lives completely controlled by these negative states of mind. They do not understand how to access the power within themselves, to begin to take control over their lives and to access a higher state of being: a state of being that is within the spirit, that has faith, not as a mere belief or good intention, but truly by directly knowing that what they are doing will produce peace and happiness for themselves. So this becomes even more crucial for us as we search for the emancipation of others from their suffering, that we really work to liberate ourselves from our own negativity and our own problematic behaviors and delusional states of mind. 
Identity, Illusion, and Conflicts with Reality
When I say a delusional state of mind, I mean the mental cage within which we often imprison ourselves. We hold to one belief so strongly; maybe it is a belief about ourselves--maybe we believe we are a certain type of person. Then, if someone comes across us who shows us otherwise, who disagrees with us, or who insults us, we cannot help but suffer and be upset and argue or fight, or react in some strong way to that situation. That is all because we have a belief. We have an idea in our mind about who we are, and when that is challenged, we do not want to see reality. We want to refute reality. We want to argue with reality and assert this idea that “What I believe is the truth and everyone else is wrong!”
We just do not have ideas about ourselves, but many ideas about how other people are. Maybe we have many grudges against other people that “Well, you’re always this way. This is just the way that you’re going to be.” We have ideas about life, and maybe some of them are more cynical ideas that really good people don’t make it out in the end. “Maybe it’s only the bad people that really get what they want in life.” Maybe we have nice beliefs, but that don’t actually produce fruit in our life. So, we have to evaluate our beliefs. We do not necessarily have to throw them all out right away, but we have to see them for what they are. We must have this discrimination. We must identify how beliefs in our life are a filter through which we are not able to perfectly perceive the reality beyond our mind. Meditation, Introspection, and Inner Discrimination
Anybody who has tried to meditate and silence the mind knows that in the beginning the mind is very chaotic and that is often hard to actually achieve that stability and that quiet of mind through which we can hear any inner voice of the silence as many call that spiritual wisdom.
Much of this has to do with how we behave in our physical life. If we are constantly distracted in our physical life for behaving unethically, we are producing imbalances energetically in our mind and in our consciousness. They make it nearly impossible for us to be able to meditate. And we may develop a high degree of concentration, but we may not feel that we are accessing that inner wisdom, because we do not have that balance. We are not vibrating at that level in which we can be in tune with that. It’s really essential for us that we try to not only meditate daily or regular—to an amount that is reasonable for us where we are at—but also that we try to behave ethically and become aware of the way that our mind acts during the day, ad how we become distracted. These are the beginning steps to develop inner discrimination. To be able to see, first of all, our own mind for what it is, and to question our own mind. To separate our own consciousness from the mind. To know that we are not these thoughts, but that we are the perceiver of these thoughts. We are not these emotions, but we are the perceiver of these emotions, and the perceiver of our physical life. And that we have the power to free ourselves from the negative thoughts, and negative emotions, even to have the power to free ourselves from the suffering of our negative life experiences by changing our conscious attitude towards it, and by behaving in new ways that are inspired by our inner wisdom, rather than inspired by our fear or our envy, or anger or greed. 
Exercise to Awaken Inner Judgment
When we need to awaken this type of judgment, when we realize that we lost the ability to discriminate within ourselves, we have a special practice in the Gnostic teachings that comes from The Magic of the Runes by Samael Aun Weor. But I wanted to read this excerpt for you about the Rune Rita which can you see pictured here, on the slide.
The present runic practice has the power of liberating internal judgment. We need to convert ourselves into judges of consciousness. To awaken the Buddhata (the seed of our own Buddha nature), the soul, is urgent. This rune has the power of awakening the consciousness of the judges. Let us remember what is called remorse, which certainly is the accusing voice of the consciousness. —Samael Aun Weor, The Magic of the Runes
So, a lot of us have an accusing voice of self-criticism or we are evaluating ourselves according to standards of how others may view us. But this is very different from the genuine remorse of the soul, and the conscience, which tell us right from wrong, which in the moment when we are about to lie tugs at us and say: “Can you behave in a better way? Can you just tell the truth and put this bad behavior aside?” Or whatever that might be. Maybe it is not a lie. Maybe it is something else.
But we know that in some cases, what is the right behavior would be the wrong behavior in another circumstance. And that is why is so important to just not blanket a code of conduct, but to really develop our awakened sense of what is right and wrong. To re-awaken it, I should say, because as children I think many of us are more in touch with this. But the more that we act on bad behaviors—and our mind justifies it or gives a really great reason for why we should continue in this route—the further away we get from our inner conscience. That is why we want to work with this runic practice, to work with this energy of nature, the energy of our own internal judge, our own inner divinity, which can help us to remember remorse. To remember the part of us that has a great spiritual value, and which suffers tremendously when we compromise it for things which, spiritually, are not of value. Whether that is money or recognition, or relationships, or social status, or a worldly success. It is not that these things are bad in themselves, but if we have to compromise what we believe as right in order to get these things, we are losing a part of our soul. And that part of our soul we may have to work much harder and later on to reclaim. Each of us has to make the decision for ourselves on where we strike that balance of meeting our worldly needs, but doing so in a way that we feel is contributing for something good or a value to the rest of humanity. Or in whatever way we have a particular talent. When we begin to steer off that course, and when we begin to take those steps into a different, which causes us suffering, that we feel that remorse, in order to re-evaluate: “Is this the path that I want to take or are there a variety of other responses that I can bring up, and think of, to this situation, some of which may help me to feel more peace with myself?” And Samael Aun Weor goes on to describe this rune: Those who never feel remorse are truly very far from their interior judge. Commonly, they are lost cases. People like that must work very intensely with the Rune Rita, thus they will liberate their interior judgement. We need with urgency to learn to be guided by the voice of the silence, that is to say, by the innermost judge. —Samael Aun Weor, The Magic of the Runes
Within each of us, we have an individualized connection to that universal force of divinity, which as I mentioned earlier, we call the universal consciousness of Christ in this particular tradition. Each of us has our inner spirit, our Innermost God that is our Father or our Mother that is helping us to grow as a soul.
When we hear the voice of the silence, we are hearing that powerful, direct experience of our own inner judgment, of our own inner wisdom, which is guiding us in our life. What we need to do next to continue to learn and grow and flourish as a soul, what we need to do is to perhaps make up for the error of our ways. And now, this particular rune, we are going to practice—as I mentioned, if you stick around from the meditation afterwards—we will just try it three times. But simply put, you will stand with your left hand on your hip, and your left leg out to make the shape of an “R.” And then you will repeat: Another Instructor: The mantras RA, RE, RI, RO, RU. Instructor: Each time you pronounce the mantras RA, RE, RI, RO, RU, each of those vowels you are going to hold them for one long breath. What is important is not so much to focus on the vocalization, but to feel that energy, that current within in us, in the spine vibrating throughout our whole body and awakening our consciousness, giving strength to the consciousness, to the soul. Working with this type of energy transforms the forces in nature, takes them into our own body and helps our consciousness to awaken and have more strength. So, we will talk more about his later, but I felt his very important in relationship to preparation for initiation because, frankly, if we do not have our conscience awake, if we do not have to ability to discriminate by ourselves, it is easy to become lost in the sea of life—and in the multitude of spiritual movements and masters, and to no longer have that sight of our inner compass that guide us in our own growth, in our inner development. So, that is why it is truly urgent to awaken that. Additionally, when we do awaken this, we have to act on it. We have to really follow our inner judge, our Inner God, because that will help us to achieve sanctity of our mind and heart. 
The Sanctity of Mind and Heart
The purity of the mind and heart is a prerequisite for spiritual initiation. Now, what we are talking about is an initiation in Christ, in which, degree by degree, we begin to incarnate our own inner spirit more and more, and to express according to our level of development, divinity as it manifests in us. And if we do not have a temple in mind, heart, and body in which divinity can rest, because we are vibrating at an antithetical level of being, then we cannot enter into initiation.
Many people are able to develop spiritual powers, to awaken out of their bodies, to work with energy or concentration and all these practices, but they are awakening in a very egotistical way. In a way that strengthens the mind and that strengthens our desires, and many of these desires are desires to overpower other people, to make other people see things the way we want them to be. To gain more influence, to make people like us more or to have more success in our worldly affairs, but not necessarily for good reasons—not to want to have success in our worldly affairs to truly help people, even if that is what we tell ourselves. But maybe our intention on a deeper level is more selfish. And so, that is why each one of us can really determine if we are awakening in a positive way towards God, if we are lessening the sense of our false self and we are really awakening more wisdom and compassion. Or if we are strengthening our sense of self and our sense of pride as an individual, and we are only wanting to accumulate more power and more knowledge in order to gain our selfish ends. And that is why Samael Aun Weor teaches in the book The Major Mysteries: We need to have the mind of a child in order to enter into the Major Mysteries. We need to be like children in our minds and hearts. We need to be perfect as our Father who is in the heaven is perfect. The great mysteries are not achievable through vain intellectualisms; the Major Mysteries are achievable with the heart of a child. —Samael Aun Weor, The Major Mysteries
I know a lot people, a lot spiritual friends who spend much time, whether on the internet or with books, reading and studying about these things. And I myself of course am a very curious person and have read quite a bit about these things, but what is really important is that we can set aside the mental concepts, the intellectual concepts, and we can approach reality as it is, as it presents to us.
In order to do that, we do need a purity of mind. As a child, they can see many things which adults have forgotten how to see. If a child is in a room where his or her parents are fighting, they can see that situation and the pain of that situation in a way in which the parents, who may be identified with their particular perspective, are not able to see anymore. Because now they are caught up in the mind, caught up in the sense of self in the tallies of who did what and “What you have done wrong to me,” and “What I deserve,” and all of these ideas about ourselves that we have developed and strengthened into adulthood. And so, we become more aware as adults of the many manipulations and complications of adult life, of our modern world, our society. But oftentimes, we are so caught up in this that we confuse them for reality. Unfortunately, we need to be aware of this in order to navigate society, but society does not have much to do with reality of nature and its existence, and divinity, which is a natural experience that the soul can witness. So, when I talk about simplicity of mind, we have to be able to not totally give up intellectualism, but to set it aside, to put it in his place. To have the mind become the servant of our spiritual goals, rather than to fortify the mind in order to serve the selfish goals of our desires. Really, initiation is achieved by the quality of our heart. It is through the merits of our heart that we raise the Kundalini up each vertebrae of the spinal column and it is through the merits of our heart that our own inner Divine Mother, and our Innermost Father and spirit, judge us and determine whether or not we are worthy of genuine spiritual wisdom, powers and abilities and those types of things. We cultivate this childlike quality the more that we are virtuous and act upon the genuine ideal that we have for ourselves, a spiritual ideal. If you remember as a child what you thought made up a good person, you may be interested in money or those types of things, but really there is a certain character that you might have strived for. And that is the ideal that we want to re-awaken: the best part of us from our childhood, but now with the wisdom of an adult, with the power of an adult, with the choice of an adult, to be able to actually give birth to that. 
Psychological Death: The Initiatic Path of Life
Also, we have to die in many ways in order to give birth to that inner child.
I mentioned about our false beliefs, our false ideas about ourselves, the mental prison in which we live and suffer which causes suffering for us, because we cannot understand reality, we cannot understand other people or ourselves. This is the part that we have to be willing to let go of. That we have to be willing to change. Maybe it is our addictions, which are not necessarily alcohol or drugs, but our addictions to certain behaviors or ways of thinking and living that we know create suffering for us, but that we just cannot seem to break out of. If we really want to come a more enlightened person, if we really want to work toward the level of development that saints and prophets and masters were able to achieve through their own direct efforts, and through the grace of divinity, then we have to be willing to die to who we are today. You cannot live in both heaven and hell at the same time. This is about our own psychological state of being. We have to be willing to let go of the way that we have lived, the person that we have been when our inner judgment tells us. That that is not taking us anywhere, but into pain. Then we have to be brave and to take those steps courageously into what we believe as right, in order to really have life. To have that inner power and inner life that gives us real meaning and peace. So, Samael Aun Weor writes: When one enters into gnosis (direct experience of divinity), one has to die in order to live; however, proud intellectual people who have the habit of thinking in accordance to their own whims, vanities and prejudices are not good for these gnostic studies; this is a very difficult enterprise for intellectual people because they only want to stuff their minds with these gnostic studies, and the reality is that gnosis is a very deep functionalism of the consciousness. What we have to do with the mind is to kill it, and thereafter to resurrect it, totally transformed. —Samael Aun Weor, The Major Mysteries
We want a new quality of mind. For many of us, mind is out of control. It is going in the same directions day after day, repeating the same thoughts, the same worries, the same problems, seeking the same desires day after day just on repeat.
We want to get rid of this old mind, to really fight against it in those moments when we feel that pain of conscience, to not let our mind continue to justify and hypnotize us, but to break free and to allow something new to be born. Because with this new quality of mind, this totally transformed quality of mind, we will have that bright awareness of our experience of life, the quality of mind that can see the best in other people. That can enjoy other people and love other people spontaneously and naturally. That has a wisdom to penetrate into the heart of a situation and to really see its spiritual value, not just its value according to society. Kundalini Yoga or Sexual Alchemy
In order to do this, we do need to work with a very powerful energy, in a very powerful practice. And in our tradition, we call this sexual alchemy.
Just as with the practice of the Rune Rita, we are working with our creative energies. We recognize that creativity is born of our sexual energy. And that is why the Kundalini rises from the bottom of the spine where our sexual organs are, and whether male or female, we have physical, sexual seed, sperm or ovum. But we also have an energy within that physical seed which can be transformed, which can be raised into the pineal gland, which will awaken the spiritual nature of our soul which will awaken consciousness, which is beyond the mind and beyond the body. 
Now, as a single person we have the practices which we can use to awaken sparks of that Kundalini energy. We call these pranayamas, generally speaking, and we can talk more about them [see Gnostic Meditation: Pranayama and Sexual Transmutation], but the one that I primarily teach is just to sit, to focus on that energy, to sit in a meditative comfortable pose, in which the spine is straight or you can lie down if that is more comfortable and to just breathe deeply in trough the nostrils and out through the mouth. And as you are breathing in, visualize that energy as light coming up through the spine into the head, saturating our mind and our pineal gland with that energy, that light, and then breathing out, visualizing that energy moving to the heart.
As simple as that, we can harness the breath, we can harness the energy that is within the breath, and within our body and within nature, and begin to strengthen our consciousness that way. But as Samael Aun Weor points out here in his quote, we need sexual alchemy in order to really create the bodies of the soul. This is because nothing in nature, whether physical or spiritual, is born without the union of masculine and feminine principles, the activity of masculine and feminine forces. He writes: The only objective of the [first] five initiations of Major Mysteries is the fabrication of the solar bodies [the vehicles of the soul]. In Gnosticism and esotericism, one understands that the fabrication of the solar bodies and the incarnation of the Being are known as the Second Birth. —Samael Aun Weor, Practical Astrology: The Esoteric Treatise of Hermetic Astrology
If we truly want to incarnate the force of our inner spirit, of our internal Christ, that is a frequency which is very, very powerful. We have within us currently astral bodies and mental bodies that can transform mental, emotional, and spiritual energies to a degree. But these are relatively weak and dirty vessels and through which the light of divinity struggles to shine.
Now through the cooperation of male and female, retaining that energy in the body, we are able to create spiritual bodies, spiritual vehicles: a solar physical body, a solar vital body, a solar astral body, a solar mental body, a solar causal body through which divinity can express on all levels. Now what is important is when we talk about sexual alchemy, we have to retain the sexual, so seed whether male or female, we have to refrain from orgasm, and to transmute that energy upwards. We know that when we let that physical energy out of the body, we produce a physical body. But to harness this energy and to move it inward into the soul, into the consciousness, we can create a spiritual body, a spiritual vessel which is talked about in the Bible as the terrestrial man and the celestial man. We want to create a new type of individual, and so we work with this very powerful energy. The warning here is that we talked about white initiations, which are initiations into divinity, into the light of Christ, and black initiations through which we awaken in ego. We become demons. Now, we may be convinced that we have good intentions, and that we are awakening power because we are really becoming great people. But we have to trust our inner judge to determine if we are walking on an egotistical path or the path of light. When we practice White Sexual Alchemy, we are trying to come into connection with our Inner Christ, our inner divinity. And we are working with a very powerful energy. The outcome of this type of practice is either an angel or demon. So, we will either awaken our own spiritual potential and give birth to our soul, or we will awaken powers, but powers that are demonic, that are entirely engaged in the prison of our false self which grows, and grows, and grows in intensity and increases the suffering of us as an individual and also in others. So we have to really be prepared and really establish our own ethical center before we step into initiation. So, we will be talking a lot more about sexual alchemy and what is involved with that in the rest of the course, which will be talked about by the other instructors. 
The Structure of Initiation
But simply put, to give you an outline, for what initiation is—as we teach it here—this outline is just a framework. Of course, the experience of it is something internal, which is experience in our daily life. In fact, Samael Aun Weor says that “Initiation is life itself intensely lived with rectitude and with love.” It is an inner experience, the development of the hero within our own heart, within our soul. But it is something that we create by the way that we face the ordeals presented to us in physical life.
Sometimes in astral experiences, in our dream state, we may experience ordeals, symbolic ordeals that strengthen us. But many times these are conflicts that we are having in our physical life, or problems which challenge us, exactly in the way that we talked about before, in which we are very tempted to go in a behavior, which we have repeated many times, but which we have the opportunity now to face ourselves, to understand ourselves, to understand why we have gone in wrong direction before, and to take a step in a more positive direction as we see fit. The Guardian of the Threshold
I separated this chart into four levels or four parts to enter the Major Mysteries. The first is the Guardian of the Threshold. Now, this is described in many traditions as a terrifying beast, which we know in our tradition is the form of our own inner defects. If we looked at ourselves as we truly are, we would see there is a monstrous beast in the mental plane or the astral plane, that we have many vices and many problems, and a lot of suffering within us that we cultivated in and fed our creative energy to throughout this lifetime and even previous lifetimes.
And so, when we face our own ego, we face the Guardian of the Threshold, we are actually breaking our ties with all of the vices that we carry within. Sometimes, this is described, as in Hinduism, as going to battle with our own beloved relatives. Because our vices and our defects are part of ourselves that we very much cling to. And that feels very comfortable for us that we like a lot. And in Hinduism, Arjuna has to go to battle with his own family members who are doing wrong behaviors. And Krishna, which is in Hinduism the representation of Christ, comes to him an says: “You must do your duty. You must go to battle here.”
When we face the Guardian of the Threshold, when we begin to enter into initiation, we begin by breaking all of our ties to the Black Lodge, the Black Lodge being a representation of the black path of initiation, which is the path of vice and selfishness. And we make a commitment to really go against ourselves because we are own worst enemy. So, this is about taking on and battling ourselves. And if we defeat the inner guardian, we have not fully destroyed, but if we defeat it, then we become the master of our energy. We begin to be able to have more power, more self-control in situations. But if we fail in this ordeal, then the Guardian of the Threshold becomes our master and our ego dictates how we will live our life, and creates more suffering for us. Of course, we can battle again, and again, and again. So, we have to be persistent if we fail. 
The Four Ordeals of the Elements
The next step is the four ordeals of the elements: air, fire, water and earth.
These elements come to us through many situations in our life. Air is often associated with instability, with the loss of what one loves, maybe the loss of the job, in which we face a total uncertainty in life and this forces us to develop a quality of consciousness which is unattached, which is able to continue on even in spite of losing stability. We have a lot of movement. And this develops and helps us to balance our consciousness in that area. And the next area in which we need to balance our consciousness or our state of being will be fire, which causes in the ordeals an emotional pain. Criticism from others is often a common ordeal of fire in which we have to respond with the right temperature. Sweetness in many cases is hard to develop in the face of criticism. And so, after we balance our nature to be firm when we must be firm. And to be soft, and gentle, and sweet when we must be. And to not be completely controlled by how other people behave or what the external situation is, but to really have a level of being in ourselves in which we have control over our response. The next area in which we balance the consciousness is water, which is often a very emotional ordeal in that we feel overwhelmed. We are thrown into social circumstances in life, which overwhelm us or force to adapt. Or radically adapt: maybe after moving to a new place, and really radically being able to adapt to a new situation. And finally earth, which helps us to develop the stability and the perseverance of the soul in response to obstacles and difficulties in our life. 
The Initiations of Minor Mysteries
After we have made the commitment to the path, and the Guardian of the Threshold in that battle, and then we balance our own consciousness in the four ordeals of the elements, then we begin the initiations of the Minor Mysteries.
Now, there are nine initiations of the Minor Mysteries which relate with nine spheres of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, if you are familiar with Judaic mysticism. But what is important is to understand that these Minor Mysteries are different ordeals in our physical life, which may have these qualities of the different elements, but which ultimately test our ability to persevere and to remain true to our spiritual goal, in spite of many temptations and challenges which call us off of the path. It is often called the probationary path because we must pass this before we truly enter into the initiations of the Major Mysteries in which we are giving birth to the soul. Now, a single person can progress through all of three of these parts of the initiatic path [the Guardian of the Threshold, the four ordeals of the elements, and the Minor Mysteries]: the entrance into the initiatic path. But in order to enter into the initiations of the Major Mysteries, in which we give birth to the solar bodies, the solar vehicles, we must be married. We must be working with our spouse in Sexual Alchemy. As I mentioned, we are going to talk a lot more about that, and all of these different faces of initiation in future lectures. Conclusion
What I really want to emphasize and summarize in this preparation for initiation is that is completely up to us to enter into initiation. Each person, regardless of their culture or their religious background, or their upbringing, or their current physical situation in life, has within the main connection to their inner divinity—has a spark of conscience which can be fed and strengthened. And each of us has within us an inner Father and Mother that want us to grow spiritually.
The whole purpose of our existence physically is for us to realize a certain spiritual truth about ourselves: to have an understanding of nature, and reality, and divinity, and ourselves. And oftentimes we are so distracted and hypnotized by the many things that we must keep up with in society, that we forget about the real reason why we are alive. So, to take the time to really assess our current situation in life in meditation, and to really evaluate the different areas of our life that we spend most of our time and energy and to see where we have compromised our values, and to begin to take steps back to where we really believe we are leaving our spiritual dignity and integrity as a person—that is the preparation for initiation. And when we couple that with preservation and the purity of our sexual energy through transmutation, then we are really knocking on the door to enter into initiation. And our inner divinity, and all of these masters—that we have talked about in religions, which still exist in the spiritual nature of our reality—will come. The masters of the White Lodge, the prophets, you know, whichever spiritual master that you resonate with can help you, can aid you in this journey because it is very difficult, but that will come from within. We can be in spiritual groups and we can be in spiritual schools, and we can read spiritual books. And these can be of help to us if we are awakening our own inner discernment. But we must be careful not to get caught up in the politics of many religions. And to not get caught up in problems that will distract us from the real growth of the soul, and from cultivating within us that type of being and spiritual potential that we are really capable of. Does anyone have questions? Questions and Answers
Question: How do we know when you have created solar bodies?
Instructor: Some people have created solar bodies in previous lifetimes, although this is pretty rare, speaking for humanity. And so, if that is the case you would know because you will be awakened in the astral plane, in the mental plane, in the causal plane, depending on which solar bodies were used, and not just a moment of awakening which every person can experience, but continuous awakening and being able to consciously project oneself out of the body and travel at will. Now, if one has created these bodies in past lives and but then fell, for example, lost their sexual energy or behaved very unethically and lost that level of development, the spirit still maintains that degree of initiation. The initiations never belong to the human person, but always belong to the inner spirit. And so, that spirit can never fall, but the soul can fall. So, the soul will have to recapitulate and re-go through all of these steps of initiation in order to re-gain access to those solar vehicles. Question: When the Kundalini rises according to degrees… Instructor: According to the vertebrae… Question: If it doesn’t do that, it just rises? Instructor: We can have sparks. We can have very vivid experiences in which all at once you now feel this fire, this illumination. But if that experience passes, and we’re back with the same problems that we always have in life, if we haven’t fundamentally shifted as a person in our quality of being, the essence of who we are hasn’t really grown and developed. That was just an experience meant to help us and to teach us that we actually have to do the hard work. Just as physical body is important in a day and develops over many months, so with our soul do we have to go through the pains of labor, so to speak, and develop those growing pains of the soul, in which we struggle against ourselves in order to become upright individuals. Question: So that’s almost better though? Instructor: Well, nature doesn’t take leaps. So, naturally speaking, there are certain people who say you can pay us twenty thousand dollars and we’ll awaken your Kundalini and they will produce some sort of energetic experience for you, but that’s very different from what we’re talking about initiations into the Christic Path, actually incarnating our own Being happens degree by degree. Question: Kind of going back to the topic of Kundalini. So, you’re saying that in the Minor Mysteries, the Probationary Path, that’s when you’re moving up the Tree of Life, correct? Instructor: You are actually cleaning out the parts of you that are submerged in the inferior Tree of Life. So the Tree of Life has a shadow in the hell realms. And we actually have each time to clean out the parts of us that are trapped there. Question: So at that point you’re starting off from Malkuth (the Kingdom)? Instructor: Sure, actually, I guess it would be the inverted Yesod. Not much is written about the Minor Mysteries. Experientially, you are experiencing parts of yourself that are very rigid, psychologically speaking, that are very hard to work against. Perhaps you have an answer to this if you start in the inverted Kether or if you start in the inverted Yesod. Another Instructor: So Dante talks about the nine inverted hell realms, spheres of Klipoth, which is the Hebrew term meaing, “shells” or the world of ego, which exists as they mentioned within the interior of the Earth. If you physically go into the terrestrial crust, you will find caves or caverns, but not people, because the infraconscious dimensions are in the astral plane, but inverted. And as part of the Minor Mysteries, we need to transform ourselves. So, we start to perceive internally experiences about our own inner hell. Because the White Lodge, the Christic Lodge is showing us what you need to work on in order to change. So, yes, to go up you first will go down. Every ascension is preceded by a descent. This is why in every cosmogony or epic the hero has to enter the hell realms first, which is why Aeneas, from The Aeneid by Virgil, has to descend in order to find the truth that is hidden in those realms. Because our soul is trapped. Part of our consciousness is conditioned in ego, which belongs to those dense regions of nature. 
Then, if you want to go up, to ascend the Tree of Life, you progressively must go down, to see and investigate parts of yourself: your anger, pride, lust, fear, laziness, ego. So that by working on those false and understanding them, we can extract light. So, first as Dante depicted in The Divine Comedy, you want to go to Paradiso, Paradise. He states that if you first descend Inferno, relating to initiation, because every type of exaltation in divinity, every type of progress is stipulated upon what we have worked on eliminate the Guardian. Maybe in that way, you get started into higher stages of the path, such as Purgatory, and then, at the end to experience all the bliss.
Unfortunately humanity, whenever people enter religion, or spiritual studies of this type, we all want to go the Paradise first. But the truth is, if you enter the Major Mysteries, you will have astral experiences where the masters of the White Lodge will come to you and will show you: “you need to descend first.” Personally, when I first started this teaching, I had an experience in which I was being attacked by a demon in the astral plane. And so, I was of course, in the beginning, terrified. Then, a master came up to me from the White Lodge and said, “Descend into the Earth!” He started to conjure this demon and kept him away from me. So, I obeyed these orders and went down through many layers within this internal dimension. 
Finally I came to a cavern where found sepulchers, tomb with the bones, debris. I intuitively got that I had to go out of that cave and in that experience I eventually found myself in Egypt in the astral plane, where I saw the temple of Giza, which physically is an ancient piece of architecture, which is a cadaver.
But in the internal planes the temple of Giza is active, and that temple was, I remember looking at the three pyramids and seeing the light of Christ there. The Egyptian masters opened the doorway and let me in. I remember having many other teachings they gave me related to this process. But the simple reality is that they were showing me: “You want to enter this temple, like the great masters before in antiquity, but first go into your Earth, descend down into your own mind. Confront yourself!” The term descent simply means to face the results of our previous actions, our mistakes. So, you can have experiences like that, that show you what the Minor Mysteries are. There are many other ways to verify where you are at through symbols, which is why we study the Kabbalah, which is Jewish mysticism, the language of the internal planes. Every religion has its symbolism. The cross of Christianity or Jainism, many traditions have the same symbols, which is why we balance the study the different religious traditions and accompany them with our meditation, so that we can verify and understand: “This is where I am at.” First, you have to face that which conditions us first, and when you free consciousness then, they say, “Enter our temple, and let us help you.” In the beginning we get a lot of help, because, as we are now, we need light. And sometimes those masters will come to you and awaken your consciousness with the [snaps fingers] spark, when you are working with energy exercises, such as pranayama, mantras, runes, sacred rites of rejuvenation, which we have available in books, but also on the websites. When you start to spark that energy in yourselves, the sexual energy, conserving it, transforming it, you start to have the fire that is going to empower your soul. And that is the beginning, to initiate. So, you can awaken sparks of Kundalini; it does not rise immediately, but you are, so to speak, fanning the flames. The coal is heated, so you have a spark, so you could have ecstasies, experiences, but to do that you need to descend, not only to the Earth, but literally into your physical life. Because Malkuth in Kabbalah, the bottom sphere of the Tree of Life, is our body. In the internal planes or in the cavern so to speak, you have to discriminate what is happening physically, in our jobs, in our homes, in our bedroom, looking at our behaviors. Because if we act egotistically, we are wasting energy. And then, if you have no energy, you cannot see. I mean if physically you waste energy or expend energies, you feel tired. The consciousness also goes to sleep if we have no force, which is why in the beginning of religion: ethics. If you want to enter the Minor Mysteries, train your mind. Save your energy. And when you build that up, and you are changing your physical life, your behaviors, and no longer performing actions that harm yourself or others, then you have a reservoir [of energy] which you can start to see. Instructor: So, as you can tell, that is why we will be continuing with this course because there is much to say on each of these different parts. And even more beyond this. This is just the beginning. There are initiations of fire and initiations of light. Many things are already written on the books, so this will be an ongoing course in which we have a lot more to say. 
The sincere student of Gnosis, of esotericism, studies and understands the nature and the functionalism of the mind, primarily with the purpose of controlling its impulses, its habits, its conditioning. We seek to understand the mind so that it can become a useful instrument of our Spirit, our Innermost God, our divinity. And a real esotericist, an occultist, someone who “cultivates the hidden,” precisely goes against him or herself, the mind itself, the intellect.
The intellect must serve the Spirit. It must not be of its own will. It must not act of its own will, and anyone who begins to meditate looks inside to see how the intellect is filled with thoughts, habits, desires, concepts, etc. These qualities are as the Book of Genesis teach, תהו ובהו Tohu Vay Bohu, “formless and void… for there is darkness upon the face of the deep” (Genesis 1:2), which is precisely our psyche. Our psychology is that darkness, filled with ignorance, delusion, suffering. So we seek to generate light, יהי אור ויהי־אור Yehi Aur Va-Yehi Aur: “Let there be light, and there was light” (Genesis 1:3), as we explained in Arcanum 3: The Empress of the Tarot. So we have to go against ourselves, to study ourselves, and to wage a very difficult battle against our defects, but more importantly, our instincts, desires, habits, etc., which in these studies we denominate ego, self, “I,” etc. Arcanum 7 teaches us precisely this path of warfare, which the Muslims refer to as jihad, or better said, the Arabic مجاهده Mujahidah, which means “striving,” to strive against, to make effort against oneself. For as the companions asked the Prophet Muhammad, after the Battle of Badr I believe, they asked him “Oh Muhammad, what is greater than the lesser holy war, that against others?” He said, “War against your desires, your impulses.” So the intellect in itself is a useful vehicle that can store information necessary for our development and our potential. But the intellect is merely a machine. It does not know how to do anything except through the impulses or guidance of our ego, or our divinity. 
Arcanum 7 teaches us how to strive, how to fight against our own inner iniquity, in order to develop the qualities of the Spirit. Precisely we do that by conquering the mind, and in this image we see a warrior, wielding a sword in his right hand, and a staff in his left.
As we have expressly stated in this course, the staff is the spinal medulla, the spinal column, through which the power of the sword, the Kundalini power, rises from the Chakra Muladhara to the brain. Or in Hebrew we use the letter ז Zayin. We talked previously about the letter ו Vav, the spine, but we need to work with ז Zayin as well. ו Vav is man, ז Zayin is woman, male-female―also referring to the two energetic channels that rise from the Chakra Muladhara to our brain. We have the solar current known as Adam אדם in the Bible, we have the lunar current known as חוה Chavah (Eve) in the bible. So they represent for us qualities or forces that we need to raise up our spine, from sex, the sexual organs, to the brain. We do that in a matrimony specifically, as we teach, but individually we can learn to harness those powers and potencies, through specific meditations. So this warrior is our own Inner Being, our own Spirit, who through the power of the Kundalini in his right hand, he dominates his enemies, who are precisely all of the defects we carry inside: anger, pride, resentment, fear, lust, anger, gluttony, egotism, degeneration, etc. So he is our Spirit who wants to conquer the mind, to control it, to use it for the purposes of the light, our own inner divinity. He drives in his chariot of war two sphinxes, one white, one black, referring to occult masonry, יכין Jachin, בעז Boaz. The pillar of the right, יכין Jachin, mercy, man. The pillar of the left, black, בעז Boaz, severity, woman. So he drives his chariot, which is precisely our body, our vehicles that we also use in dreams as well, in the dream state, precisely through his will and by working with those two forces, masculine-feminine. So the body is a chariot, which we have to learn how to channel forces inside, so that our divinity can manifest in us, can work through us specifically. The sphinx also reminds us of Arcanum 4. We talked about the four elements. The sphinx is a creature with four elemental qualities: the face of a man, representing water, the paws of a lion representing fire, the wings of an eagle representing air, and the tail or the hooves of a bull representing earth. That Spirit must conquer all of the elements that we carry inside. Our physical body is the earth. Our mind with its aerial qualities is thought, which fluctuates like clouds, according to Padmasambhava in his Buddhist scripture, The Tibetan Book of the Dead [Introduction to Awareness]. We also find that the heart is a fiery quality, igneous quality. We can burn with passion, with emotional sentiment, with anger or with love. So the fire of the heart is precisely what power we have to control as well. And the waters of our energies, our sexuality, our seminal matter literally, is the waters of life, which we can use to create Genesis inside, to create light through the process of alchemy. This warrior, our inner Spirit, which we explained is חסד Chesed in the Kabbalah, he drives his chariot with four pillars in the background, which remind us of the four pillars of Gnosis, which we gave a course previously a few months past [Fundamentals of Gnosticism]: the pillars of science, mysticism, art, philosophy. These are the pillars or traditions through which this knowledge has been taught, and our own inner Spirit teaches us through these four pillars. 
These four pillars can also refer to the four lower bodies of our inner psychology, but also the Tree of Life. To skip ahead to the next image we find this famous kabbalistic glyph with its ten spheres or Sephiroth. We are speaking about our own inner Spirit, חסד Chesed, who is the seventh sephirah from the bottom of the Tree of Life, referring to the warrior of Arcanum 7: Triumph, the chariot of war.
So we find that the Spirit must work through גבורה Geburah, his divine consciousness, represented in Hebrew as ז Zayin, the woman, the feminine soul. He exercises his willpower, תפארת Tiphereth, as we have explained previously, through ו Vav, the spine, which is the sixth sephirah on the Tree of Life, but also the sixth Hebrew letter. The four lower bodies are precisely נצח Netzach, which means “Victory,” and it is interesting that this Arcanum relates to victory, to control the mind―specifically since נצח Netzach is the seventh sephirah from the top to the bottom of the Tree of Life, whereas חסד Chesed is the seventh sephirah from מלכות Malkuth to the center of the Tree of Life. But the Spirit must learn to control נצח Netzach, the mind, thought, in order to obtain victory, to conquer him or herself. Likewise we have הוד Hod, the emotional qualities of our heart, the astral body, known as הוד Hod in Kabbalah, “Glory.” נצח Netzach of course is the mental vehicle, the mental body. We use these astral and mental mechanical vehicles in dreams, when we travel many places in the dream state, usually without any cognizance of our experiences, but this is what we act in the world of dreams. We have יסוד Yesod, our vitality, our vital energies, our sexual energy itself, which descends in order to manifest within מלכות Malkuth, our physical body. יסוד Yesod means “Foundation.” This is the cubic stone of the Kabbalists, the cubic stone of יסוד Yesod, the foundation of our temple. And then מלכות Malkuth is of course is the physical body, the earth. So our inner Spirit, this warrior who drives his chariot, precisely accomplishes his mission, his goal, by learning to control these vehicles, mind, heart, energy, physicality. We see that above his head there is a sun, reminding us of the God Osiris-Ra, which is a symbol of Christ, the Christic energy. And this Christic energy is precisely at the heart of every atom, every molecule, every particle of existence, but also importantly in our sexual energy, our sexual matter, which is the water of Genesis. When husband and wife work with their energies themselves, when they learn to love one another with purity, with divinity, with remembrance of God, that energy gives birth to the soul, gives birth to the full manifestation of our potential. This is the meaning of: בְּרֵאשִׁית בָּרָא אֱלֹהִים אֵת הַשָּׁמַיִם וְאֵת הָאָֽרֶץ
So the earth of course is our physical body, but also refers to higher vehicles we create in the perfect matrimony, where Genesis is precisely hidden within this act of striving. We talked very abundantly about, אלהים ברא בראשית Bereshit Bara Elohim, that meaning in Genesis in our former lectures.
But here the warrior Spirit is the one who must conquer the lower qualities of himself, and what is the purpose of that? The Being, our divinity, as we have explained in previous lectures, emerged from that unknowable source known as the Absolute. So we can study the Tree of Life as a map of our consciousness to help explain all the levels of existence, but also our consciousness in materiality. 
So we have explained some of these lower vehicles previously, but from the Absolute, known as אין Ain, אין סוף Ain Soph, אין סוף אור Ain Soph Aur―meaning the “Nothingness, the “Limitless,” and the “Limitless Light”―emerges our own inner כתר Kether, the Magician of the Tarot, the first card. From him unfolds חכמה Chokmah, which is “Wisdom.” כתר Kether means “Crown,” and then בינה Binah is representative of “Intelligence,” wisdom, “Understanding,” cognizance.
This is the famous trinity of Christianity: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. But it is not a reference to physical people, in an anthropomorphic sense. It refers specifically to forces in nature, energies, which we carry in our three brains. We have the powers of the Father in the intellectual brain, meaning our center that operates thought. When we use the term brain in esotericism, we mean functionalities of psychic and physical forces, a machine. So the physical brain is the vehicle of the intellectual brain, which is the way we process thought, ideas, concepts. We also have an emotional brain, because we have intelligences related to the heart, sentiments. It has been explored in science that the heart has certain qualities that can detect or intuit certain things that are very hard to explain by materialistic science, such as the capacity of intuition, specifically, to know something without thinking about it. So this is a very profound intelligence that we consciously develop in our studies. And then we have the motor-instinctive-sexual brain, which is our center of movement, impulse and desire, within our sexual organs, the top of our spine, but also at the base of our spine as well. The spine is the way that we act with willpower, and manifest the will of our inner divinity. So our motor-instinctive-sexual brain, the way we live, is precisely because of our spine, which is our Tree of Life, that which gives us life in our body. We could not exist if it were not for our spine. 
The motor-instinctive-sexual brain relates to the powers of בינה Binah, which is known as the Holy Spirit, which we will be talking about very extensively today. The image above, the sun of Ra, the Solar Logos, the Christ, whose wings of the Spirit unfold in us as we work in a matrimony.
We see an image of four points, and an image that looks like a maze. This is a symbol of נצח Netzach, the mind, and anyone who begins to meditate understands that the mind is a maze. It is a labyrinth, which in the Greek myths were symbolized by, I believe, Theseus, who sought to kill the Minotaur within the labyrinths of Crete.
So that labyrinth is precisely the winding pathways of our intellect, thoughts, ideas, concepts, which in meditation, we introspect. We see that we have really a chaos, a disorder, which needs to be organized. That element of air must be dominated by our inner divinity. We have to go inside of the mind itself to slay the beast, which is our own defects, desires, the Minotaur symbolizing our ego. This warrior wears precisely, according to Samael Aun Weor, armor, and the armor is the science that defends us against our own inner defects, but also the teachings that help to instruct us how to change, how to become super-divine individuals. That armor is represented by Achilles, who is the great warrior who battled at Troy, a symbol of how we as a warrior must go against all of our desires and defects, to strive against our own inner iniquity, our hatred, our anger, our fear, our resentment. All of those qualities need to die. We have to do it precisely by facing ourselves in meditation, and by working as husband and wife, working with Jachin-Boaz, the white sphinx and the black sphinx, the synthesis of those energies. We learn to dominate those elements to become magicians. Question: Those―you just talked about those―on the left and the right, those… what do you call them? Horses?... Instructor: Sphinxes. Question: Sphinxes... That’s what you’re talking about: Ida and Pingala… working with the spinal column? Instructor: Yes, and so the words Ida-Pingala, are Sanskrit terms for these two energetic serpents that rise up the spine, to form the caduceus of Mercury, and those energies rise from our Chakra Muladhara to our brain, as we have explained in previous lectures. But so this magician, this warrior, is precisely our Spirit, but also us, who needs to fight very hard against our animality, as we have explained previously. We have the Hebrew letter ז Zayin on the top right, which we will be talking about at the end of this lecture. Likewise some astrological symbols relating to Neptune and to Pisces, which we will be elaborating at the end. 
Egyptian Mysticism and Self-Realization
So we explained that the Spirit wants to gain knowledge of himself. He descends from the top of the Tree of Life, down into more complicated levels of matter, energy and perception, until reaching finally this body מלכות Malkuth, represented in the myth of Pistis Sophia, who descends from the Thirteenth Aeon, the unknowable divinity, and enters into levels of matter. But the purpose is that the soul must return inward and upward, back to the source, back to the origin, with knowledge.
We have in the middle of this image, this glyph, Horus, Osiris and Isis. So to talk about the Seventh Arcanum of the Tarot, the law of seven itself, we talk about the meaning or the myth of Horus, Osiris and Isis. Horus is precisely our own inner Spirit, חסד Chesed, whom we have been talking about extensively. He is Horus, אור Aur, the “Light”, for when the book of Genesis states: יהי אור ויהי אור Yehi Aur Va-Yehi Aur: “Let there be light, and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). אור Aur is precisely our own inner Spirit, חסד Chesed, “Mercy” in Kabbalah, to translate directly from Hebrew. Horus is the son of Osiris and Isis, and again Osiris-Isis is a reference to the polarity of בינה Binah, which is masculine and feminine. This is the Holy Spirit. That Holy Spirit is male-female, or if we look at the original Hebrew language, יהוה אלהים Jehovah Elohim, represents masculine-feminine, and as we talk about the creation of חוה Eve at the end of this lecture, we will see that יהוה אלהים Jehovah Elohim is masculine-feminine, male-female, represented by אלהים אב Abba Elohim and אלהים אם Aima Elohim, meaning male-female, Father-Mother. So it is the mistake of certain Kabbalists who associate חכמה Chokmah, Christ, as the father, and בינה Binah, as חוה Eve the mother. We find both polarities of אלהים Elohim, יהוה Jehovah, in בינה Binah. אל El means God in Hebrew, אלה Eloah means Goddess, אלהים Elohim means Gods and Goddesses, and as we have talked previously, when a husband and wife unites sexually, they are a divine אלהים Elohim, who can generate light, inside. אל El, אלה Eloah, אלהים Elohim―they are unified within that act. So Osiris-Isis is precisely above, representing the Holy Spirit, the Divine Father and the Divine Mother, whom we can experience in meditation, and through the practices of transmutation that we teach. And from that union of Father-Mother in בינה Binah, through the teachings of דעת Da’ath, sexual alchemy, we give birth to our Spirit, Horus, and our own inner Spirit Horus is the one who has to fight in us, to strive, to go against the grain of our habits. We talk about this trinity, we say, in relation to the Seventh Arcanum. Horus has to go against, in the Egyptian mythology, against Seth, who are the red demons who oppose his mission. So going back to the image of the, or picturing the image of the Tarot of the Seventh Arcanum, this Spirit has to fight against Seth, a representation of ego, egotism, our own individual defects, so that by destroying those defects we liberate consciousness, we free consciousness, and generate more light, so that all of those parts of the soul that have been dispersed in animality and defects can be unified, so that light is pure, individual, integral. That is the meaning of religion, religare, “reunion” with divinity. Osiris and Isis and Horus precisely want us to work, so the inspiration to want to study spirituality, precisely comes from the light, that wants us to study some type of knowledge that is going to help him to reunite all of the parts of the soul, or as Moses was accomplishing in the Middle East, to unite all of the people of Israel, Isis-Ra-El, all of the parts of Isis (the Divine Mother), Ra (the Divine Father), and El (which is Horus). So Moses represents our willpower, as we have taught previously, the spinal column, the sixth letter of Kabbalah. And so Moses was teaching a very profound Egyptian knowledge, about how Horus must fight against Seth, all the egos we carry within. Question: I kind of got mixed up here. Okay, חסד Chesed, the “light,” is that, did you say Horus, or is it… Instructor: Horus Question: H-O-R-U-S? Instructor: Yes Question: “The light”? Instructor: Yes, Horus is our inner Spirit, who is a spark of light that emanates from Isis-Osiris, Father-Mother. The Law of Seven
The number seven is interesting because it is the number of battles. Also, it is the number of organization, in principle. So we have the seven notes of the lyre of Orpheus, the seven chakras of the spinal medulla. We have seven colors of the solar prism, seven planets, seven Archangels, seven dimensions, seven bodies that we have to elaborate and create, represented by that Tree of Life on the left. We also have seven serpents of fire, Kundalini, rising up those seven bodies. We also have the seven sacred utterances of Jesus on the cross, relating to the lower seven sephiroth of the Tree of Life: 
מלכות Malkuth: “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.”
יסוד Yesod: “I thirst.” הוד Hod: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” נצח Netzach: relating to, truly this day, the thief, speaking to the thief: “You will be with me in Paradise.” And then speaking to John and Mary in תפארת Tiphereth, “Mother behold thy son! Son, behold thy mother!” גבורה Geburah: relating to “It is finished.” And of course, חסד Chesed: “Into thy hands I commend my Spirit,” because the Spirit is חסד Chesed. So the path of Jesus was represented by Kabbalah, and if we do not study Kabbalah we cannot interpret his teaching. But that is something we will talk about in future courses, the seven utterances of Christ. But I just want to emphasize for you that the number seven is permeated within all religion, in every tradition. It is the law that organizes, which Gurdjieff taught is known as the law of the Heptaparaparshinokh, a very interesting language from the internal planes that is used to denominate that law of organization. Why does seven relate to the law of the Spirit, this battle against oneself? Precisely because the Spirit wants to organize the psyche, because if we look inside, as I mentioned to you, we are תהו ובהו Tohu Vay Bohu, formless and void. We do not have light. We are ignorant. We lack insight. We suffer a lot and we want to know how to change our problems, to solve them. We do that precisely by working with the law of seven, the law of the musical scale. So notice that we have seven notes, and on the right we have these notes listed in detail, in association with different types of human beings. So we can also organize all human beings in accordance with seven categories, relating to the seven notes, Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si. We talked about the three brains: the intellectual brain, the emotional brain and the brain of movement. Those brains, we tend to use one or another more than the others. We have a dispensation or crutch, based on our habits, that make us use one brain more than another. It is easy to see that some people are more intellectual, some are more emotional, some are more instinctual. So these lower three types of people, we could say, inferior types of people who are not spiritual, they either think too much, they feel too much or they waste their energy. They are disorganized. They are chaotic. So we have to look in ourselves and see, “Which person am I? Am I intellectual, more so, or am I more emotional, or do I abuse my energies, my brain of movement?”―such as people who play sports, emotional people who are actors and actresses, and academics who are intellectual. But these types of people do not really have light inside. To be brilliant intellectually does not mean to have divine intelligence. Neither to have strong sentiment, does it indicate that one is intuitional or divine. Because someone can control the body, physically, dominate the senses, such as with Fakirism, yet this does not signify spiritual willpower. Those austerities that monks or yogis in the East, such as, there was a yogi that raised his hand for ten years and never let it down, as a testament of his willpower, to show that he could dominate his body. To have that type of willpower does not indicate that one is spiritual, because we need to learn to use the three brains in balance, and when we learn to control our psyche, we work with the fourth type of human being, which is related to the note Fa.
So the previous notes, Do-Re-Mi, and then there is a shock here in this image, transitioning from the intellectual type of person to the fourth type, which is a human being who is balanced, who has harmonized all three brains, who is in control of his thoughts, or her thoughts, feeling and action.
We also have exercises such as the runes in which we face the East and we pronounce certain prayers in a yogic posture. “Marvelous forces of love, revive my sacred fires, so that my consciousness will awaken!” We pronounce mantras, “Fa, Fe, Fi, Fo, Fu,” to activate the chakras, working with the seven notes, the seven mantras, to activate our spinal column and those energies. So we find that with the Rune Fah, is what it is called, you make yourself in the position of the letter F, the Nordic letter F, which is the basis of many alphabets in the world. We do those type of exercises in order to spark [snaps fingers] our consciousness. We work with creative energy so that our mind and our psyche become balanced. We awaken our perception. We begin to understand the source of our mental problems, our emotional anguish, and even heal many diseases of the body. Above that we have an individual who has created a solar astral body, someone who has a vehicle that they created in a matrimony. So most of us go in the astral plane at night. We fall asleep and dream at night that we are traveling in that dimension. We may have certain memories of experiences, but not really much cognizance. We tend to travel in those dimensions with lunar vehicles, as I have previously mentioned, vehicles that we receive from nature, which is why they are mechanical. They belong to nature. They are a type of matter or energy that is egotistical, not divine. So they look like phantoms: very black or dark, vaporous, not substantial. But if you meet a master who worked in a matrimony, who has created the solar astral body, they have light. A vehicle is like a light bulb that can transmit the light of divinity, as we have mentioned previously. So the solar astral body is a luxury that few people have, because one has to create that body in a marriage with certain procedures. The solar mental body is likewise a mind, a Christic mind that knows how to follow the concepts or the understanding of divinity, that does not rationalize, but is better said, intuitive. It can understand concepts instantaneously without having to deliberate or form a thesis and antithesis, good-bad, yes-no―mechanical type of thinking. And so the mental body is much more dynamic. Above that we have a solar causal body, a body of willpower, in the world of Nirvana. So we have to be born in those higher dimensions, to be “born again of water and spirit,” as Jesus taught (John 3:5). So the solar astral body is הוד Hod, the solar mental body is נצח Netzach, the solar causal body is תפארת Tiphereth, our willpower, a body, that a soul, that has reached mastery, can incarnate and manifest, a very divine body, very holy and sacred, made from a marriage, as we have said. So I do not want to go further into detail about this, but the law of seven organizes our psyche, our chakras, our bodies, who we are as an individual. We also see that there are seven lower sephiroth on the Tree of Life, and there is a trinity above. So the law of seven that organizes emerges from the law of three, the law of creation as we have mentioned. 
Evolution, Devolution, and Spiritual Revolution
So as I said to you, the law of seven relates to struggle and battles against the ego, but also against sorcerers and demons who try to attempt to stop us in our work. When we talk about the musical scale and how to enter those higher worlds, those higher levels of being, it requires a certain effort, because nature does not automatically guarantee this process through the cycle of evolution.
Many people believe that through evolution we will develop spiritually, mechanically, without any type of willpower. We just go with the flow, but people confuse evolution with the force of devolution, which means to degenerate, to be destroyed. If we have evolution, birth, life, sustenance, growth, you also have destruction, decay, degeneration, devolution. Most human beings are now in a state of devolution, entering to destruction, which is something we want to fight against very hard. Devolution relates to ego, anger, pride, resentment, vanity, all of those elements. 
So we have to go into a type of revolution, to make a war against ourselves, in order to ascend that musical scale. It requires effort through meditation and practice, learning these exercises that we teach in this tradition, so that we learn to maintain the notes of the musical scale, because you may find that it is difficult to practice. We may try to meditate, day by day, and lose the interest or the impulse, the inspiration to do so. So there is a type of willpower needed, represented by the Hebrew letter ו Vav, the spine, the Sixth Arcanum.
So we must learn how to fortify our Spirit. It may surprise some people to think that we have to empower God. It may sound like a blasphemy. If the Being is the Being, why does he need us? Because we are מלכות Malkuth, the physical body, the soul in the physical body, and we are part of the divine. We have to cooperate as the head tells the foot to walk, to obey, to act. And so the Spirit needs us. We have to do our part so that we can help develop the Being inside. So the Being is the Being, and is perfect, but we are part of him, and we have to learn to reunite with him, or her. This is the meaning of religion, as I said. So the number seven is ordeals, difficulties, challenges, struggles, but it always ends in victory, in success. To receive the number seven in a dream is very good. It indicates you are facing certain challenges, but will overcome them. Paul of Tarsus, I believe stated in, 1 Corinthians, Chapter 10 verse 13, about the nature of temptation and trial, and that you will face certain ordeals but with victory in the end. But you can trust God. He will not let you be tempted more than you can bear, but when you are tempted God will also give you a way to escape that temptation, then you will be able to endure it. ―1 Corinthians 10:13
So you can refer to Arcanum 6, as we spoke previously.
Thou art giving me labor, O Lord, and fortitude with it. ―Transcendental Axiom of Arcanum 6 
Conquering the Elements
So the elements I said must be conquered in us. We study five elements, very famously we know, from alchemical tradition, which speaks about fire, air, water and earth, but also Akash. So these elements are known as:
These are Sanskrit terms. The Hindus, the yogis of the East, study this science very deeply, and use these Sanskrit terms to refer to the energies or modalities of forces within nature, which materialize into our physical elements. But more importantly for us, these elements are inside. We are composed of water, of fire, of air, of earth, and also most especially, the synthesis from which all of that emerges: Akash, the Ether. We have different elemental creatures that dwell within the elements themselves, which are studied in certain European traditions and folk tales. We have the Salamanders of the fire, we have the Undines, Nereids, Mermaids of the waters, very well cited within, or the Sirens mentioned in The Odyssey, the book of Homer. You also have the Sylphs and Sylphids of the air, and the Gnomes and Pygmies of the earth. These are elemental creatures or souls that are innocent, that have not reached the humanoid state yet through a process of transmigration. You can speak to the elementals in your meditations and have a face to face conversation in the astral plane, with plants or animals or elemental creatures themselves. They are innocent beings. They have not left עדן Eden yet, we can say. But of course in the Akash, which is the fiery Ether, permeates all of space, a substance that is divine, and which we also carry in the Chakra Muladhara, which we also call Kundalini, or the Alchemists call הזאת Hazoth. So we must learn to work with these elements. We do so by keeping the Sabbath holy. The Jews practice the Sabbath, observances on Saturday to worship divinity through certain rituals and prayers. But if we go deeper, we find that שבת Shabbat related to בת-ש Shin-Beth. ב Beth we talked about in Arcanum 2 and relates to “house,” the house that you inhabit. We also talked about the solar bodies that the soul must learn to create, so that God can inhabit us, to manifest in us. ש Shin as we said is “fire,” so שבת Shabbat is “house of fire.” So the fire that we carry in our house, our physical body, is our sexual energy, the fire which enlivens us to fulfill that act with one’s partner. That fire is the creative energy of the Holy Spirit, the power of Christ, the power of life, or חיה “Chaiah,” as the Jews say, “L’chaim,” “to life,” referring to that energy that can result in procreation or the development of the soul, the Spirit. The Salamanders are precisely also within our creative fires, and we learn to work with these elementals in sexual magic, alchemy. We have the fire within the sexual energy, the Salamanders, who help to burn and incinerate our defects, which are like cages or shells which trap our consciousness, which condition us. The Undines, Mermaids or Nymphs, the Nereids are within our seminal waters. They help to calm the waters of lust, to produce the equanimity of the soul. And of course the elements interact with one another. The breath, our mantras that we pronounce in a matrimony, in the sexual act itself, help to harness those fires and transform them, to raise them up the spine. We pronounce sacred sounds between husband and wife in a marriage, so as to create energy and awaken the chakras themselves, those centers of energy and consciousness that we carry within. And the Gnomes and Pygmies are precisely those elementals who are within the physical matter of our body, who help to extract that golden sustenance, those golden qualities of virtues, which are within the waters themselves, like jewels and gems. To have a dream about pulling out jewels and gems from the waters is very significant. It refers to virtue, truth, and developing the soul. So we work with those elements. Husband and wife must learn to control their breathing in the sexual connection itself, so as not to overstimulate too much fire, because they will end up getting burned, losing those energies, resulting in the orgasm, which in these studies we avoid. Instead we learn to conserve that power, so that the waters, the fire, the air and the earth become rejuvenated, because if you conserve that power and raise it up the spine, it will be like a fountain that flows to eternal life, according to Jesus (John 4). He was with a woman at the well, a Samaritan woman, I do not remember what specific verse or chapter it is, but, the woman was speaking to Jesus and confessing that she had slept with many men, and Jesus had said to her “Truly I can give you a water that will give you eternal life,” and she said “What is this water?” and he says, seemingly to interrupt her: “Go, call thy husband.” But that is the answer, “Call thy husband.” If you work in a marriage, you can work with those waters of divine love and create the soul. So we work with those elements in synthesis, in harmony. All of this is found precisely within our body. The mysteries of alchemy are within us. The mysteries of Kabbalah are inside of us, not outside. The mistake of many people in the past of Europe, of trying to find how to transform lead into gold, physically, is ludicrous, because the real meaning is that we transform the lead of our personality into the gold of our spirituality. Question: This is what Christ meant when said “the kingdom of God is within you”? Instructor: Yes, and the Gnostic Gospels speak abundantly about this too. 
Vitriol
We have a very famous axiom in the kabbalistic tradition, as explained by Samael Aun Weor, the founder of the modern Gnostic tradition. He says that, in relation to this image, an alchemical drawing, we have a famous acrostic, which relates to the process and science of alchemy as we are explaining, which are seven letters, Arcanum 7:
Vitriol is one of the clues of the Gnostic Alchemist. The word signifies: Visitam Interiore Terras Rectificatur Invenias Ocultum Lapidum. Visit the interior of the earth, which through rectifying you will find the occult stone. ―Samael Aun Weor, The Revolution of Beelzebub
So we see that this image comes from Viridarium Chymicum. It is an anthology of alchemical art by Daniel Stolz von Stolzenberg. It is from the 1600s. So the images of alchemy were symbolic teachings about how to work practically, which were given in a manner that was undetected by the fanatics, the orthodoxy, so that they, the initiates, would not be persecuted or killed.
This image details for us a star of seven points, referring to the seven planets of alchemy, which we will be talking about. We also find here the three brains, represented by the manifestation of “Corpus, Anima, Spiritus,” meaning, body-soul-spirit. The sign of Saturn in this bottom arrow points towards Corpus, referring to the שבת Shabbat, the Sabbath, Saturday, Saturn-day, the Seventh day, because by working with Saturn, the Holy Spirit, which that planet relates to the Holy Ghost itself, is how we rectify the earth. We transform our earth. We give sustenance to the stone, which is the cubic stone of the Masons, but also the sacred Kaaba of the Middle East, the sacred stone of Kabbalah itself. By working with that acrostic, “Visit the interior of the earth, which through rectifying you will find the occult stone,” signifies how we, in meditation, go inside, and discover how to use our energies wisely, the stone of יסוד Yesod, which is the sexual energy. So going inside you learn to navigate the darkness of your own chaos, your cavernous mind, your defects, and see that there is an energy that can help liberate you, if you learn to use it appropriately. I had this experience in the astral plane many years ago where, when I was first studying this knowledge, I was directed by a master near my home in the astral plane, to “descend into the earth,” he told me. So I dove into the earth, and my Being transported me to the center, where I entered a cavern with many sepulchers, and of course, they were teaching me that you have to descend into your own chaos, your mind, to face all of the ugliness that you have inside, all of your defects, represented by all of the skeletons and bones and ghouls and remains that were there. In that experience they were telling me the mysteries of Vitriol. By visiting the interior of the earth and by facing yourself in meditation, your defects, you begin to see that, really, the work of the stone is essential, is our foundation―daily practice in mantra or transmutation of that sexual energy. We also, in this tradition, talk about the flaming sword. So Vitriol, the work of the body, the שבת Shabbat, the Saturday, the Seventh day, relates to the mysteries of ז Zayin, the Hebrew letter of the sword. And so ז Zayin is a sword of the Kundalini that rises and aids the warrior against himself. Remember that Achilles went to war against the Trojans, again a symbol of the ego, the war that we face inside, and that sword, and the armor he wears of course protects him, but the sword he uses is that Kundalini power, to face all of his aggregates, his psychological defects. Remember that when Adam אדם and חוה Eve were expelled from עדן Eden, the angels used a sword of fire to push them out, expel them. So it is a symbol of how, any master has that sword developed in their spinal column, perfectly and fully. I would like to relate to you an explanation by a certain alchemist by the name Estolsio, who talked about the meaning of this image specifically, and about the secrecy of the alchemical tradition that we are now unveiling: That which was enclosed within many forms, now you see it included in one thing: the beginning is our Elder (represented by the face of Saturn in the center of this image, the center of the seven pointed star) and he has the key… ―Estolsio
Remember that we talked about the meaning of the key of alchemy in Arcanum 6, how that key represents, that key that we use to unlock the door, ד Daleth, that leads to דעת Daath, sexual knowledge. That is the mysteries of Saturn, the Elder.
…sulfur with salt and mercury give wealth… ―Estolsio
Sulfur is the sexual fire. Salt is the semen itself. Mercury is the energy that we transmute by certain breathing exercises so as to enliven the brain. So mercury gives you wealth.
If you do not see anything here, there is no reason for you to keep searching, for you will be blind even in the midst of the light. ―Estolsio
So many people look to this image and of course did not know the meaning of it, had many interpretations, but now we are giving you the explanation of what they were teaching here.
Alchemically, there are many symbols and images relating to the mysteries of a matrimony. Samael Aun Weor explains in his book Alchemy and Kabbalah, how the Sun is a symbol of the phallus; the Moon is a symbol of the uterus. So male-female together, working with the wind, the breath, as we have said previously―the רוח Ruach, the spirit of God that hover over the face of the waters, רוח אלהים Ruach Elohim, that hovers over the face of the deep, that was filled with darkness, in בראשית Bereshit, Genesis―we work with the wind. And the earth is formed from the void and chaos, which of course represents not only the mind, but also those higher vehicles we talked about, the solar bodies. All of these elements, the sun, the moon, fire, water, wind, air and all of the elements emerge from what we call Akash. Those are different gradations of energy and matter that manifest physically. So we have to work with the chalice of the mind. We do so by working with our energies. We talked about the caduceus of Mercury, a very famous symbol of medicine, how the spinal column is surrounded by two serpents, and those two serpents are precisely Adam-Eve, ו Vav-ז Zayin, male-female. We raise those energies up the spine so that we can awaken the wings of the Spirit, specifically. The Seven Archangels, Planets, Metals, Vices, and Virtues
Let us talk more about the seven planets themselves. There are many correlations that are very interesting and practical, more importantly, to use these for our development. So we have the seven planets, referring to the law of seven, organization.
The alchemists did not strictly believe that there were only seven planets. They knew about all of the other planets of our solar system, but they talk about seven to teach the law of order, of organization, of all the elements that we have to work with. We have the Moon, governed by Gabriel, the metal is Silver. We have Mercury, governed by Raphael, which is Quicksilver or Mercury as a metal. Venus, Oriel, Copper. The Sun, Michael, Gold. Samael, Mars, Iron. Jupiter, Zachariel, Tin. And Saturn, Orifiel, Lead. The planets relate to metals or materials that we can use to fashion pentagrams. So we have certain talismans we create with the seven metals to help charge them with certain energies, to protect us. The seven metals relate to the seven archangels. These metals are like the nervous system of any planet, and those archangels are the intelligences of those planets themselves, and govern those worlds intimately. Practically for us, we also work with the transformation of certain vices and errors into virtues. So we have seven deadly sins, very common in Christianity. We must transform the seven vices into virtues. We must comprehend our defects in order to destroy them, and liberate consciousness, so that we develop those divine qualities within. Lunar avarice is turned into altruism: happiness for others. Mercurial laziness is transformed into diligence, effort, work ethic, willpower. Venusian lust is transformed into chastity, sexual purity, and as we have explained many times, chastity does not mean sexual abstention. It means purity in sex. We have solar pride, which is transformed into humility, humbleness, and faith in divinity. Martian anger is transformed into divine love, conscious love, sweetness, empathy, compassion. Jupiterian envy is transformed into philanthropy, work for others, sacrifice for others. Saturnian gluttony is transformed into temperance, moderation in diet. We have to look inside and examine: what do we carry within? What are our defects?―so that we can learn to develop the virtues that relate to their opposite. These seven planets also relate to kabbalistic symbols, which we will not go into too much detail, but if you want to explore this a little but further, you can access this material on our website. We will say that these symbols have profound meaning. I will mention a few. 
With mercury, we have the caduceus as we have been explaining, the spinal column with the two serpents and the wings of the Spirit, which flourish when we raise the Mercury of our seminal energy to our brain.
The cynocephalus is a creature with the head of a dog, which of course is a symbol of the sexual instinct. The dog in internal language or symbology refers to the sexual energy, which is why we have myths such as Cerberus, who would allow people to enter into the hell realms, but if they wanted to escape, he would fight against them. That is the nature of lust, sexual desire. It will coax you into wanting to enjoy the delights, the pleasures of sex, but if you try to transform lust, it fights against you. It is an animal.
So these symbols are very profound. Venus relates to the sexual lingam, the Hindu symbol of an alchemical marriage (Note the phallic, vertical beam, the Lingam, united with the horizontal, feminine chalice or Yoni).
Related to the Sun, the serpent with a lion’s head. We talked abundantly about the serpent, and the lion is a symbol of the solar divinities, the Lion of Judah, specifically.
The Hebrew Letter ז Zayin
Let us talk about ז Zayin. So ז Zayin is precisely the feminine sexual energy, which is the spiritual soul, known as נשמת Neshamah. We talked about three types of souls previously: נפש Nephesh, רוח Ruach, נשמת Neshamah. נפש Nephesh is animal soul. רוח Ruach is the blaming or introspective soul. נשמת Neshamah is the spiritual divine soul.
So we are נפש Nephesh. We are animalistic with our habits, our defects, our desires. We work with רוח Ruach, which is the spiritual forces in us, in order to control נפש Nephesh. רוח Ruach is known as thinking-emotional soul, the consciousness, our conscience, that tells us “This is right―this is wrong.” “I should do this―I should not do this.” But of course, we are helped by נשמת Neshamah, which is precisely known as the Kundalini power, and in the spirit of this course we have been talking about excerpts from the Hebrew teachings, specifically the Psalms, which in this, verses 49 through 56 all begin with the letter ז Zayin. Previous verses also began with א Aleph, some with ב Beth, some with ג Gimel, ד Daleth, ה Hei, ו Vav, and now we are in ז Zayin. From the Psalms of David: 49. Remember the Word to your servant on which you make me hope;
All this relates to Arcanum 7, war against the ego, and against the black lodge, which is that organization of demons who seek to divert students from Christ, the solar path.
So “it is my comfort in my affliction: For your Word has given me life.” The “Word” comes from דָּבָר Dabar, speech, the Logos―“In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, the Word was God” (John 1:1). This is a symbolic representation of Father, Son, Holy Spirit. ז Zayin begins all these verses, and it is interesting that “Hot zeal has seized me, because of the wicked forsaking your law,” meaning: not fanaticism for one’s religion, but concern and despair when seeing how degenerate humanity is, and the desire to change it, the longing to change it―the works of “the wicked,” the black magicians who seek to persuade one from entering the path, from pursuing the path. 
The Creation of Eve
So the Hebrew letter ז Zayin is precisely the Kundalini power itself, which we have to raise from the sexual organs to the brain, so as to be crowned. And as we will see in our excerpt from the Zohar, Arcanum 7 relates intimately to crowning, as we see in this image, or both images.
On the left we have William Blake’s Creation of Eve, ז Zayin, the feminine sexual power, the Kundalini force, arising from the androgynous Adam אדם, or אדם יהוה Adam Iod-Havah, who is a representation of many things. There are are many levels to read and interpret Genesis. It is not literally a history, but also a psychological, alchemical, kabbalistic teaching. In the past there was a race known as the Lemurians. They were an ancient humanity that existed many ages before ours, physically. That race was androgynous, and the Bible depicts and explains how the sexes split over the process of many millennia, in order to aid those souls to developing their mind, their brain, and also the sexual organs, and those respective sexes, so as to help generate more power. When they would reunite as male-female, they would have certain qualities that they could develop further, that they could not while being androgynous. That is one level of meaning, but Genesis also talks about how we, whether as a man, we need a wife, and if a woman, a husband, because as above so below. As we talked about the Holy Spirit being male-female, to unite with that we need male-female, both forces. So I will read for you a few excerpts from Genesis, and we will talk about some of the kabbalistic meaning of this, how ז Zayin, Kundalini force, emerges within husband and wife, a matrimony: And יהוה אלהים Jehovah Elohim said, it is not good that Adam אדם should be without help. ―Genesis 2:18
In order so that he could obtain knowledge of himself. Adam אדם can also represent the brain as I have mentioned previously. חוה Chavah can also represent the sexual organs, Adam-Eve, Brain-Sex. So חוה Eve is the sexual organs whether a man or woman, that is one level to interpret it, because Adam אדם has to control חוה Eve. So those millennia of patriarchal discourse that derides woman as being the inferior in the household is wrong because they interpret literally that Ada אדם has to control חוה Eve, but the meaning is that Adam אדם the mind has to control sex, instinct.
So יהוה אלהים Jehovah Elohim said that Adam אדם, the brain, should not be without help. I will make חוה Havah, Eve, for him [the female sex], a help mate for him. ―Genesis 2:18
So that he can enliven his brain in order to provide it with the sexual energy.
And יהוה אלהים Iod-Havah-Elohim caused a deep sleep to fall upon [the androgynous] Adam אדם. ―Genesis 2:21
Or Adam-Iod-Havah, the former human being that was male-female.
And he slept, and he took חוה Havah [Eve] from one of those ribs, and closed up the flesh thereof. ―Genesis 2:21
And the rib which יהוה Iod-Havah had taken from Adam אדם and made into woman, and the Hebrew word for woman is אשה Ishah. And so he brought woman unto Adam אדם.
And Adam אדם said, This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, and shall be called woman, because out of man she was taken from. ―Genesis 2:23
It sounds very derogatory to say, when he is referring to his wife, “this is now bone of my bones.” “This”―that is the literal translation, but there is a deeper meaning to this. The Hebrew word is זאת Zoth, ז Zayin-א Aleph-ת Tav. “זאת This shall be called אשה Ishah.” Better said, if we look at the Hebrew, אדם Adam said, “זאת Zoth is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. זאת Zoth shall be called אשה Ishah, because הזאת Hazoth was taken out of איש Ish.” This is the literal meaning of the Hebrew.
איש Ish is fire, that is a masculine energy. אשה Ishah is feminine fire, because if you look at the Hebrew letters, א Aleph again is the wind, the breath. If you look at איש Ish for man, א Aleph-י Iod-ש Shin, א Aleph is the wind, the breath, the prana, the spirit we talked about in Arcanum 1. י Iod is a dot, representing the ovum or sperm, of a man or woman, in this case it is the sperm itself. ש Shin as I said is fire. With woman it is א Aleph-ש Shin-ה Hei, again the breath, the fire, and ה Hei which is the Yoni, the feminine sexual organs. So man-woman, two fires were developed in that ancient epoch of Lemuria, a masculine fire and a feminine fire. But likewise in our psyche we have a masculine energy and a feminine energy, within the two serpents, ו Vav- ז Zayin, the two channels called Ida-Pingala, the solar and lunar currents of energy. But Adam אדם said, “this is now bone of my bones,” “זאת Zoth is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called הזאת Hazoth, because she was taken from out of man.” Again, what is that power that is taken out of the fire of sexual magic? It is the Kundalini. הזאת Hazoth alchemically speaking is a term we use, or the alchemists have used to describe that Kundalini power. As Samael Aun Weor states: The four elements of alchemy are Salt, Mercury, Sulfur and הזאת Azoth. The Salt is the physical matter of the sperm, the Mercury is the Ens Seminis (the energy that we extract from it) and הזאת Azoth is the mysterious ray of Kundalini. ―Samael Aun Weor, Alchemy and Kabbalah in the Tarot
So the sword is precisely that power that we awaken in a marriage, and that through אשה Ishah, so we have איש Ish and אשה Ishah, man-woman, together they become אישים Ishim.
One of our prayers in the Gnostic tradition is: “אישים Ishim assist me in the name of שדי אל חי Shaddai El Chai!” Meaning, “the fires of man and woman, help defend me through the power of שׁדי Shaddai,” and we talked in Arcanum 4 that שדי אל חי Shaddai El Chai is the sacred name of god in יסוד Yesod, the sexual energy itself, the power of almighty God itself. 
The Purity of the Sabbath: Sexual Alchemy
So I have other things to talk about. I want to refer you to the Zohar specifically, but the thing to remember is that we have to keep the Sabbath holy, the body holy, the fires of our body, our ב Beth, by practicing the mysteries of Saturn, which when we work with a marriage, ז Zayin, we become initiated into the higher dimensions. As we see that נשמת Neshamah in this image on the right, of a woman knighting the hero, the warrior, the soul. We have here גבורה Geburah and תפארת Tiphereth, גבורה Geburah the divine soul, the feminine soul in the Kabbalah, on the middle trinity of the Tree of Life.
Likewise we have תפארת Tiphereth, the human soul, who really is our willpower, of which we are a fraction at this point, that must develop in order to enter into the path of initiation. So she is the one who knights the hero, who crowns him, who glorifies him for the struggles he faces against lust and temptation. This is represented in the book of Genesis by the temptation of Adam אדם and חוה Eve. So I will not go into too much detail. We will give some courses explicitly about that scripture, but in synthesis we find that חוה Chavah was tempted by the serpent. People think there was a literal man and woman in a garden (in Mesopotamia) that ate an apple from a tree and everything went bad. That type of reading is very superficial and very funny, but the meaning is much more deep. It is profound. חוה Chavah is the sexual organs, the “mother of the living.” Adam אדם is your brain. The serpent that is “the most subtle in the field” (Genesis 3:1) is precisely the sexual energy, because the word for “field” is שדה Shadeh, which is where you get the word שׁדי Shaddai, Almighty Living God, שדי אל חי Shaddai El Chai, the Amighty Lving God. The power of life that God creates through any initiate is sex, and the serpent is that power that, between husband and wife, tempts husband and wife, whether to control the serpent, raise it up the spine, or to be bitten by the serpent by eating the forbidden fruit, which is the orgasm, to waste that energy, to expel it, because when you expel the powers of עדן Eden, which in Hebrew means “bliss,” “voluptuousness,” you cast yourself out. So Adam אדם and חוה Eve did not get kicked out of עדן Eden. They kicked themselves out, and we do this everyday when ever someone engages in lust. So that is a very simple way to look at it, but Adam אדם and חוה Eve are precisely brain-sex. Comment: Christ, there again said something like “be as wise as serpents.” Somebody in the lodge that I belong to… Jewish-American man… he said “I have a problem.” He said, “Because Christ spoke in parables to the masses, and to his disciples he spoke in the esoteric way.” More and more people today I think are starting to realize, “Wait, there is something even behind this, what Christ said,” and they want to go into that… Instructor: Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves. Be wise as the Kundalini power, to raise it up the spine, but be innocent as a dove. Be chaste. Be humble. Do not engage in the sexual act as an animal, because you must sanctify the שבת Sabbath, the body, ש Shin-ב Beth, the “house of fire.” To be innocent as a dove is precisely to not cause harm, and we harm ourselves when we ejaculate the energy. We get burned. That is where we get the word “furnace, fornication.” “Thou shalt not commit fornication,” the Sixth Arcanum of the Tarot. But let us talk about the Zohar. Question: I am sorry. So the original sin… does that exist? Instructor: The original sin that originates all of our defects is lust, because when you eat that, when you consummate the sexual act with expelling the energy, you get kicked out of עדן Eden, because that energy is what gives a husband and wife bliss, beauty, harmony, and so we have to control the serpent. Comment: When it is withheld. Instructor: When it is withheld and transformed, because to be abstinent does not help. You have to learn to circulate the energy, which we do through certain exercises. But husband and wife have that dilemma―whenever they connect sexually, if they know this teaching―is to spill or not to spill, to be chaste, harmless as a dove, and wise as a serpent―or not, because you see that in the myth humanity was expelled, and Adam אדם and חוה Eve represent all of humanity who were expelled from that primordial bliss. So the original sin of course is lust, desire. And so by conquering lust, desire, we are crowned, initiated into a higher way of life, represented by נשמת Neshamah knighting the hero. ז Zayin and Initiation in the Zohar
And to talk about the meaning of ז Zayin more in depth, I would like to read for you in synthesis some teachings from the Zohar, which help to explain these principles very well:
Rabbi Shim’on opened: “I have put my words in your mouth (Isaiah 51:16). How vital it is for a human being to engage in תורה Torah day and night! For the blessed Holy One listens to the voice of those who occupy themselves with תורה Torah, and every word innovated in תורה Torah by one engaged in תורה Torah fashions one heaven.” ―Zohar (Pritzker Vol. 1, p. 25)
They explain elsewhere that to work with תורה Torah is to work with water, Genesis, which we find in this section of בראשית Bereshit, an explanation of the opening verse of the book of Genesis, that talks about how to work with the creative waters of sex.
So what does it mean “to engage in תורה Torah day and night”? People literally read and think it means to read from the Old Testament, but to engage in תורה Torah is to practice it its principles. So, such as through certain exercises we practice: runes, meditation, mantras, pranayama, sacred exercises of rejuvenation etc. We occupy ourselves in the day, and at night when we are married, we work as husband and wife in the darkness, because from the darkness emerges light. It is how you create the solar bodies, the solar vehicles, in a marriage. So those who innovate תורה Torah, “every word innovated by one engaged in תורה Torah,” the law, the great Arcanum, sexual magic, “fashions one heaven.” You create the heavens in yourself, precisely through working with that sacred Arcanum. We have learned: The moment a new word of תורה Torah originates from the mouth of a human being, that word ascends and presents herself before the blessed Holy One, who lifts that word, kisses her, and adorns her with seventy crowns–engraved and inscribed. ―Zohar (Pritzker Vol. 1, p. 25)
So someone who innovates a new word of תורה Torah, meaning: to mantralize, to pray, to speak, to connect with divinity in meditation. That prayer, that mantra is acknowledged by divinity and is empowered. As I said to you previously, we have to empower our Being. We have to work with certain exercises so that we help our divinity manifest in us, inside.
This word ascends and presents herself before the blessed Holy One, and again, the word is sexual, that the lord kisses that word. When husband and wife are united and they are pronouncing sacred mantras in the sexual act, their mantras are empowered, because the sexual energy relates to דעת Da’ath, and דעת Da’ath, as we explained, is sexual magic, alchemy, knowledge. It relates to the throat. The throat is the womb, or the uterus of the verb. “In the beginning was the Word, the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (John 1:1). בראשית Bereshit means, when husband and wife unite, they create the heavens within themselves. So we have to lift that word up in alchemy so that He can “adorn her with seventy crowns, engraved and inscribed.” So seventy crowns relates to initiation, seven initiations of fire mentioned in The Perfect Matrimony. That sword that the woman is knighting this man with is precisely ז Zayin, the seventh letter. We have to face seven initiations of fire, which are engraved and inscribed, and as I mentioned to you in Arcanum 2, we have to inscribe in the stone of יסוד Yesod our energies, this work. We have to perfect them, chisel them, so that perfect stone is the foundation of our temple. But an innovated word of wisdom ascends and settles on the head of Tsaddiq, the Righteous One―Vitality of the Worlds. ―Zohar (Pritzker Vol. 1, p. 25)
So by working with chastity is how we ascend and become Tsaddiqim, the Righteous Ones, Holy Ones, Holy Beings. And that is the “Vitality of the Worlds.” We are referring to יסוד Yesod, the creative energies.
From there, it flies and soars through 70,000 worlds, ascending to the Ancient of Days. ―Zohar (Pritzker Vol. 1, p. 25)
70,000 refers to the seven lower sephiroth of the Tree of Life, ascending up to the top Trinity, to the sphere known as כתר Kether, which is the Ancient of Days, our Father who is in heaven.
So our mantras help to ascend and reach influence from that sephirah itself. All the words of the Ancient of Days are words of wisdom, conveying supernal, concealed mysteries. When that secret word of wisdom, innovated here, ascends, it joins those words of the Ancient of Days. Along with them, it ascends and descends, entering eighteen hidden worlds, which no eye has seen, O God, but You (Isaiah 64:3) ―Zohar (Pritzker Vol. 1, p. 25-26)
So what are these eighteen hidden worlds? We have nine heavens above מלכות Malkuth, and we also have nine hells below מלכות Malkuth, so these are the eighteen worlds. Nine heavens, nine hells.
Emerging from there, they roam until they arrive, full and complete, presenting themselves before the Ancient of Days. At that moment, the Ancient of Days inhales the aroma of that word and it pleases Him more than anything. ―Zohar (Pritzker Vol. 1, p. 26)
What is that aroma that divinity is most pleased with? It is chastity, sexual purity. When husband and wife know how to connect but not to waste the energies themselves, the divine inhales that aroma, and of course perfume in the ancient temples was very symbolic of working with chastity itself.
Lifting that word, He adorns her with 370,000 crowns. The word flies, ascending and descending, and is transformed into a heaven (because when husband and wife are mantralizing in alchemy, they give birth to the heavens inside themselves, the virtues of the soul).
What are these earths of the living? It is precisely the solar vehicles we talk about: solar astral body, solar mental body, solar causal body―vehicles that we can give birth to so that God can inhabit our house, our psyche. So that is what it means to be a living being. Adam אדם was made into a נפש חיה Nephesh Chaiah, “a living soul,” because the spirit of אלהים Elohim, יהוה אלהים Jehovah Elohim, entered into him.
People think it refers to just some physical man being created from the dust, but it is a symbol of how we create the soul, perfected, inside. That is what it means to be an earth of the living. Then they descend, crowning themselves upon one earth (one initiation we could say, of fire, depending on the sephiroth) which is renewed and transformed into a new earth through that renewed word of תורה Torah. ―Zohar (Pritzker Vol. 1, p. 26)
So the earth is a new earth. Your body ceases to become sick, full of diseases, old or with problems, because we regenerate through the power of חיה Chaiah, the Holy Spirit, in order to be healed. And when a husband and wife learn to practice alchemy, they conserve their vitality for decades. They become young, healthy.
Concerning this is written: As the new heavens and the new earth that I am making endure before Me… (Isaiah 66:22). The verse does not read I have made, but rather I am making, for He makes them continually out of those innovations and mysteries of תורה Torah. ―Zohar (Pritzker Vol. 1, p. 26-27)
“I have made,” you could say, relates to אהיה Eheieh, “I Am that I Am, אהיה אשר אהיה Eheieh Asher Eheieh”―“I will become who I will become.” “I will be within the soul who learns how to be.” So אהיה אשר אהיה Eheieh Asher Eheieh, “I Am that I Am” is the acrostic there. “I have made or I will make,” that divinity will make the soul within us if we cooperate, if we work with our ז Zayin and our ו Vav, our spine and the sexual power of Kundalini.
Of this is written: I have put My words in your mouth and covered you with the shadow of My hand, to plant heavens and establish earth (Isaiah 51:16). The verse does not read the heavens, but rather heavens (plural). ―Zohar (Pritzker Vol. 1, p. 27)
There is an alchemical teaching here that is very profound, because when we work with husband and wife, and work with sacred sounds, we are initiated. We are crowned when we learn to create the soul and eliminate defects.
Conclusion: Battles of the Seventh Arcanum
And to conclude this lecture I will mention to you an experience that I had that helps to clarify some of the principles of Arcanum 7 with the Zohar. I mentioned to you that Arcanum 7 is struggle, ordeals, battles that you have to face against your own desires, but also against the influences of witches and sorcerers.
I remember many years ago I had an experience where I overcame a certain ordeal in the astral plane, and my Spirit showed me an instructional video. He was teaching me about Arcanum 7, and about certain people who enter these type of studies. He said that, “Out of 70% of those who masturbate, 5% of them have gender problems.” Of course it is not a literal statistic. It is something symbolic. Arcanum 7 means people who are learning to strive against their defects. Those who enter these studies but still struggle with the vice of masturbation, out of karma, Arcanum 5, many of them will develop gender problems, meaning: that is how you become homosexual. That is how you lose your sexual attraction for the opposite sex, is by copulating with one’s own sexual organs, copulating with the same sex. Masturbation we strictly speak against. Really, the word is from the Latin “manstuprare,” coming from “manus,” hand, and “stuprare,” meaning “defilement.” And as the Book of Leviticus teaches us, if you have an emission of semen, you must bathe yourself in water and be unclean until even (Leviticus 15:16)―evening, Lailah. You have to face the demon לילית Lilith, your own lust in those infernal dimensions, and until you are clean of that element you will continue to have that desire for masturbation, or lust. “Stuprare” also means, not only defilement, but “dishonor; to be dishonored by ones own hand.” Likewise “stupere” which means “to be stupid.” So we said that the power of the Holy Spirit, intelligence, בינה Binah, gives one divine cognizance. It illuminates the brain. But if we expel the semen then we are impoverishing our brain. The brain languishes for want of that energy. There are many people, many demons with very sharp intellects. They develop the intellect in that way, but it is really, in the spiritual sense, very stupid, because that is intelligence within hell, not in heaven. We have to learn to overcome those habits [See "How to Overcome Masturbation"], and so my Being was teaching me in order to teach other people that, out of 70% of those who are masturbators, 5% become homosexual, become gay. And by this we do not speak with hatred towards gays, but we are pointing out that, if you want to create spiritually, you need husband and wife, both polarities. You need them both (See “Is Gnosis Anti-LGBTQ?”) In this experience, later I was warned. I intuitively knew that I was going to be attacked. So I was walking up to my bedroom, and it was very dark. It was around four in the morning in the astral plane, and I sensed that there were some sorcerers outside my window who wanted to get in, who were about to attack me.
In that moment I grabbed my solar plexus, and I reached out my hand, and started reciting the Conjurations of the Four:
Caput mortum, imperet tibi dominus per vivum et devotum serpentem!
These prayers that we pronounce in Latin to reject negative forces. So this is a big battle that happened in the astral plane, but I was helped. I was conjuring these seven or twelve men that were coming into my home. I do not know how many there were in detail, but there were many. So my Being was giving me power to reject those demons, because I was overcoming certain ordeals. That is why divinity helped me to fight back. And there were bombs and explosions going on as a result of the conjurations that my Being was using through me to reject these entities.
So it was a very violent experience, and afterward I remember, I returned to my bedroom and my Being was there, who kept crowing me with laurels. So going back to the Zohar, “you will be crowned with 370,000 crowns,” so overcoming those ordeals against the black magicians, you get adulated. The Being praises you, but I do not take credit, because only the Being is powerful. So 370,000 crowns, again and again and again and again. So I was being knighted. It is something that you would experience when you learn to first be chaste, and then as you are working in yourself, the demons will come after you, because if you are fornicating then, they say, “Well, you are just one of us, so it does not matter.” So again, referring back to the Zohar, they quoted Isaiah 51:16: “I have put My words in your mouth.” The word of יהוה Jehovah says, “I put My words in your mouth.” So God was speaking through me, and I was, really, fighting these entities, rejecting them. So again, Arcanum 7 relates to the 370,000 crowns. Three relates to the Trinity, the power of the Holy Ghost, the three pointed trident of Neptune, which is the power of the waters. And seven of course relates to the ordeals and battles we have to face against the black lodge. So to conclude this lecture we will give you a few practices that you can use, so that you can develop your potential. We have the seven vowels that we use in our runic exercises, which are the vowels, I E O U A M S. So with the mantras you prolong the vowels so that you awaken the chakras of the seven centers in the spinal column.
The vowel I relates to the chakra of the crown, and the third eye, to give you the names out loud, Chakra Sahasrara in the crown, Chakra Ajna in the third eye.
The vowel E relates to the throat, the Chakra Vishuddha. The vowel O relating to intuition, the heart, relates to the Chakra Anahata. We have the Chakra Manipura in the solar plexus, the vowel U. And the vowel M relating to the prostate or the uterus in a woman, the Chakra Svadhisthana. And the vowel S, the sexual fire, relates to the base of the spine, the Chakra Muladhara. So you can pronounce those seven vowels:
Those are the seven vowels you can pronounce before you meditate, so that you will awaken the powers of the seven chakras themselves, because those mantras help to awaken those centers.
You can also pray the Pater Noster very deeply, and with a lot of cognizance. So this is a prayer that many people recite, and it is a beautiful prayer, but it is more important to do it consciously in meditation. Samael Aun Weor states that we should pronounce these seven petitions of the Our Father, for an hour long, so it should be very deep and prolonged, very concentrated. Seven verses: 1 – Our Father, Who art in heaven
You can also say: “For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever.”
Or you can even do the Latin, even more powerful, “PATER NOSTER, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.” Latin as a mantric language is very powerful. You can invoke very divine forces that way. So you can pray that for an hour long if you want. Any questions? Questions and Answers
Question: Just something I might add when you talked before about retaining the semen. Max Heindel again said, “Keep the seed within.” I’ll never forget that. The other thing is, as far as technique to help raise Kundalini, can you pronounce a mantram together with pranayama?
Instructor: Some pranayamas are structured that way, like Christic Egyptian Pranayama in The Yellow Book, that Samael Aun Weor wrote. You pronounce certain mantras mentally when you are inhaling the air through the nostrils. TON, inhaling through the left nostril. You close the right with your thumb, inhale through the left nostril, inhale, mentally pronouncing the mantra TON. Question: Mentally? Instructor: Mentally. Hold both nostrils closed, send the prana down, the energy to your coccyx. Do the mantra SAH. Exhale through the right nostril, and pronounce the mantra HAM. And you can read more about the specifics of that. You inhale again through the right nostril. TON, close your nostrils and pronounce the mantra RAH as you send the energy down to the coccyx, and then exhale through the left nostril, HAM. Question: I thought it was just alternating, going back and forth. You are mentioning now about holding both nostrils? Instructor: Yes, because when you do the pranayama, you inhale the energy. You hold it. The retention is very important, because when you inhale you are sending the energy into your body. You close the nostrils and then you mentally pronounce that mantra, SAH or RAH, depending on which current you are working with. Question: While you are holding it? Instructor: While you are holding it. So TON, inhale. Hold: SAH. Send the energy down to the coccyx while mentally pronouncing the mantra SAH. Exhale through the right nostril, HAM, as you mentally pronounce that. And then inhale, TON, RAH, HAM. Question: This is in The Yellow Book? Instructor: Yes So pranayama is very excellent for transmuting energy, which we will be giving a lecture about that too. Do you have any other questions? Question: Why do you think, symbolic numbers and symbols and allegories used throughout all these ancient texts, instead of just coming out and just saying it? Are we here to just figure this out like a game? Is this what this all is, is to figure this out? Instructor: Well, divinity speaks in the language of parables. Like I gave you that experience, he said “Out of 70% of those who masturbate, 5% have gender problems.” So he was not giving a literal statistic, but symbolic. So the symbolism there, God speaks in symbols because you can get a lot more accomplished that way, rather than talking plain English. In past ages those scriptures that were given in that language for those initiates who already knew the science, who could interpret it correctly, and those who did not know, who were degenerate, would just be lost in the wayside. Like that image of the Viridarium Chymicum. I cannot remember the name of that, but it was the alchemical image I showed you previously of the seven pointed star, in where the man said, Estolsio said “If you do not know what any of this means, it does not even matter,” is what he was saying at that time. But the thing is we are in a different age now. We are in the age of Aquarius, the age of the dissemination of knowledge. So now this teaching has to be made explicit, for people to benefit, because the white lodge is opening the doors and saying, you know, “There really is not much time for humanity, but we want to help.” Comment: Yeah, the word apocalypse actually means the unveiling of truth, in Greek. Instructor: And we face our own inner apocalypse through going through Arcanum 7. So like that experience I gave you, you have to fight against yourself, because in that experience in the dream I had to overcome certain ordeals in the astral plane, and that is why divinity, my Being, my Spirit came to me and said, “Here is an experience to teach you more.” And then you have to fight against the demons who are against you, to try to stop you from changing. Question: So, like these religions that do not teach what you are teaching, do they just not know or?… Instructor: In most cases they do not know. Question: Are people purposely putting that out there, where it is like, it is kind of disinformation? Instructor: Well, there is a lot of ignorance, but there are people who are trying to cause a lot of confusion intentionally. Question: And then as far as symbols, if you noticed like, I learned this in the past, the symbol for the money symbol, are they mocking, you know, because the money symbol is the snake and the pillars, are they mocking it? The same with the number 7 they put in casinos. Are they mocking this? The dark occultists, they know this knowledge. Are they saying, and they use the word ISIS for different factions in the Middle East and all that? 
Instructor: There is a lot of correlation that is going on. Samael Aun Weor says that the number of the black lodge is 777, which if you add those numbers together you get 21, Arcanum 21, which is the Fool of the Tarot. We call it transmutation, but also it is the fool who is walking over an alligator in the card, who is being threatened to be swallowed. So that is his own lust and his own defects threatening to devour him in the abyss.
And the Hebrew letter associated with the fool is ש Shin, fire. So a Fool of the Tarot is one who gets burned by lust, symbolized by the bohemian, or La Bohème by Puccini. So in that opera, Puccini was teaching how, there were these poor artists who were in the cold freezing in winter time in Paris, or wherever they were, and they said “Oh, let’s get a few moments of warmth...” Rodolfo was working on a poem that he composed for many hours, and they said, “Let’s burn it for a few moments so we can stay warm.” So this is the idiot who takes his livelihood and is burning it away, and that is a symbol of how we kill ourselves with lust. Through ש Shin, you get burned. You become a fool, a bohemian. So in the end, if you watch that opera, it does not have a good ending. People love it. It is a beautiful opera but, they do not see the tremendous warning that it has for individuals. And we will watch that opera here too, and talk about it. It is very beautiful. Comment: Most people are not aware of the occult implications of these operas. Instructor: So we will be giving, we will be watching those here and talking about them. Puccini was a Freemason (See The Secret Teachings of Opera). Question: You speak of desire. There are some good desires right? Altruistic, and you wish good for people? But… Instructor: We could say it is a semantic thing really. We say, technically, desire is ego, because desire says, “I want. I crave. I want this. I want to have this,” but many poets like Rumi use the word, when they translate from Arabic, they use desire, or love, مَحَبَّة maḥabba in Arabic, which is where you get the word hubb, or you can get words for water. There are many correlations between love and water specifically. But desire is egotism, in strict technical language, but there are many people who say, “I desire, I long to know divinity.” So longing―we change the words, we say longing, yearning―is a conscious quality. But strictly speaking, desire is when you say that “I really want something. I need this. I want this.” Ego is desire. Comment: But you are talking about, you mentioned there is right and wrong desire… Instructor: Yeah, well the real, you could say, better desire is longing. You long in your soul to change. That is a yearning or aspiration in the heart. It is a very divine quality. We need that. That is how you work with your ז Zayin, face the temptations, and yearn to change, to keep your Sabbath holy. Question: So all of those teachings... “I am that I am”… and then you pronounce what you want to be so that you can get exactly that, that is not true? That is not accurate? Instructor: They can get what they want, for sure, but usually doing what the ego wants. Better said: “What I want… what I desire”―we call egotism. “What I want” is, or “what my ego wants,” is negative, is “I go against my soul.” For Gnostics, we “go against our own defects, our desires.” To say that “I want this, I want that, and then I am going to do this practice to get what I want,” we say is negative. We should instead work for other people. Let us help others with what they want. Let us help “us” instead of “I, me, myself,” because we have a lot of ego in these times. So those teachings that say “I am,” are negative―like Joel Olsteen or a few other people who say: “become a better you.” I am sorry Joel, I have to politely disagree. “I Am” only can be said by divinity. אהיה Eheieh, the Being, says, “I Am that I Am.” We are not the Being. We are just the soul who has to work. So “I am not, because my Being is,” and “I am filled with ego, therefore I am not.” “But when I die to all my desires, it is not what I want, but the Being will be manifest in me.” So I would not say, get lost in the language, but, those teachings that say, “get what you want” is really marketing to our desires, our defects. So “become a better you,” is mistaken, since you cannot get better, meaning: your egotism cannot get any better. You have to eliminate that. So if you as a soul want to be purified, be content with becoming nothing, so that your Being can manifest in you fully. That is the teaching of the Sufis. Sufis teach you that you must fulfill fana, annihilation of the ego, so that you can have baqa, subsistence in God. You cannot be in God if you are filled with ego, if you have desires that say: “I want this, I want that.” Comment: It is interesting you say that because I think Steiner said when you are doing that, emptying yourself of that ego, you are creating a space for divine force to come into you. Instructor: Great, because Samael Aun Weor says, “God searches the nothingness in order to fill it.” So your mind has to be empty so that the plenitude of divinity can manifest, and then there will not be “you” anymore. There will only be “Him,” and that is really the beauty and the bliss that we seek. Question: So you use that in the context of, for example, in meditation saying “I am blessed. I am full. I am content.” Is that also wrong? Instructor: Well, we have certain prayers that we use that are similar to that, except we say “We are strong. We are rich. We are full of luck and harmony.” Because Samael our teacher says, “I” has little force, but “we” has a lot. So you gain more power that way. “We” is a universal consciousness: “We are strong, we are rich, we are full of luck and harmony,” so that principle is the same thing. You are seeking to empower your consciousness, but, one is “I, myself,” but another is “we,” and to consider others is really the highest form of consciousness we can have. So that is an exercise you can look at in a book called Introduction to Gnosis… Question: Should we try not to, in conversation, try not to say “I”… Instructor: No, you do not want to be unnatural. You do not want to be unnatural. Just say, “Yeah, I feel this, I feel that,” but when you need to interact with people, and you are working with your meditations and you are working on your ego, you learn to see other people’s minds very clearly. And you learn to see how you interact with people. More importantly, you see how you interact with other people, and you find that there is a struggle there, because you will find that certain thoughts want to emerge to say something at the time, which you can sense are wrong. Therefore you are working with Arcanum 7. You are struggling against negativity. So you have to observe in yourself, what elements are pushing you to act in certain ways, and when you see them, when you sense that intuitively, “this is right, this is wrong,” then you know how to navigate the labyrinth of other people’s minds so that you can earn your daily bread. Do what you need to do, because we need to learn how to work in this physical plane and with conscience, with the wisdom of a serpent and the innocence of a dove. Comment: A lot of the new age books they say, only focus on happy thoughts, but you know, I think it is only, it is really, do not focus on thoughts at all, because a happy thought is going to come and then go, and then a negative thought is going to come in, and a happy thought. Just erase all thought! Instructor: Well, here is the thing, the Sufis have very interesting ways of analyzing this. They talk about different types of thought. There is some, I do not remember the Arabic that they use, but, khatir is the word for thought. There is thoughts that belong to the ego, and there are types of insights or intuitions that come from God―some that come from your consciousness, some that come from an Angel, some negative influences that come from demons, and you will sense that as you awaken your consciousness. But most of the thoughts we have are ourselves, 97% of what we go through is just our own mind churning garbage in the intellect, but that is why we say in meditation, stop thinking. Do not force your mind to not think, but just observe your mind, and as it is doing its thing, it is going to exhaust itself, like a person talking to a wall. The mind is like that. It just talks and talks and talks and talks. It does not stop. The thing is, do not repress it. Do not push it, but you strive against it by comprehending it. That is the meaning of Jihad, holy war. It does not mean to repress your mind or be violent, but in a state of equanimity and dispassion, you learn to see the root causes of your defects, and look in them, and see them, where it is coming from, and then as you comprehend more and more the mind settles of its own. Comment: Yeah, through my own experience I could say this, if you just take that drive out to nature, you will see your thoughts plummet. It is amazing. I went to a friend’s cottage in Wisconsin and it was like, “Wow, where did all my thoughts go?” Instructor: And when you are out in nature too, learn to do the runic exercises as we teach. So the yogic postures, sacred rites of rejuvenation, mantras in open nature, that is how you assimilate the power of the Undines, the Nereids, the Gnomes, the elementals. And that is how you can learn to empower and strengthen yourself, so when you come back to the city, back to the abyss, you could say, you can face all the chaos again. That is how you wage war with ז Zayin, working with your spine. Single people can work, awaken sparks of that Kundalini power, sparks of ז Zayin you could say. Only a husband and wife can fully develop that. Comment: You mentioned also intuition, like you are in these scenarios, like everyday, someone is saying something negative, and you know, you can rise above it. In other words―and I am going to explain it―you do not have to go into a dialectic. These things happen. If something is going on, an argument, a negative situation, you know, for way too long, you might go into a dialectic or something… Instructor: Well yeah, arguing. Question: Intuition helps, you know right away what to do, what to avoid, when to keep quiet, so we can avoid a negative situation, if you develop that intuition, right? Instructor: Yeah, and that is how you are successful in battle, by not fighting. So a real warrior of a spiritual type is one who has a mind that is fully in equanimity, because when your mind is calm and you are working with your intuition, then you can disarm certain situations very well. 
One can hardly attain to this degree [of vigilance and comprehension of divinity] until one has emptied oneself through muhasabah, self-observation and inner accounting. The person who has taken account of what he has done in the past and improved his state in the present has attached himself to the path of the Truth. In this relationship with God Most High, he has learned how to keep a heedful heart. He has guarded his breaths for God [through pranayama] and turned his attention to God in all his states. So he knows that God is watchful over him―close to his heart, knowing his states, seeing his acts, hearing his words. Whoever is neglectful of all this is far from the beginning of contact―how far, then, from the realities of nearness to Him? ―Al Qushayri, Al-Risalah: Principles of Sufism
We’re continuing our course on the science of meditation, specifically outlined within the eightfold steps of yoga as described by Patanjali.
So far we have discussed Yama and Niyama, restraint and observances, as well as asana, posture. Yama, known as restraint or ethics, signifies “to yoke, harness, or control” the mind. Niyama means precepts, ethical discipline, trainings or observances by which the consciousness controls the mind and develops serenity. Stability of mind is achieved when we learn to stop performing harmful actions, which produce disturbances in the mind with all its negative consequences. To have a body that is suitable for meditation, we must cease agitating the body, and to have a body that is receptive and pliant, suitable for our meditative discipline, we must cease agitating the mind. Our physicality manifests the conditions and influences of the mind, the psyche. If our mind is filled with desire, with egotism, with negativity, it will be impossible to learn meditation, since the body will be tense along with our intellectual and emotional centers. To engage in fruitless activities, to commit theft, murder, acts of violence and anger within our consciousness, disturbs the mind and body. Hence the need for restraint of mind, to stop harmful mental, emotional, and physical actions. Many people do not believe that they kill, but it is very true that when one is consumed by anger, by malice, one is killing one’s neighbor through the emotional center. Likewise, people may not steal physical things, but energy, attention, to feed one’s vanity. While many devotees believe that the different commandments of religions focus on outward behavior, such instructions more importantly relate to the consciousness, to psychological states of being, which we must work upon to achieve true change. Hence the need for precepts, codes of spiritual conduct that help to develop the virtues and positive qualities of the consciousness. Ethics is developed by comprehending and working with the law of karma: cause and effect. Negative actions from the ego produce suffering, while positive actions from the consciousness produce equanimity. It is impossible to meditate with a chaotic mind, and it is impossible to develop serenity if you are feeding your egos every moment of the day through identification. What does it mean to identify? It means that you, as a free consciousness, give your energy to whatever defect takes over the five centers of your human machine: intellect, emotions, movement, instincts, and sex. When anger emerges, you as a consciousness think and feel that you are that anger. You invest it with energy and power. You fortify and empower it by thinking and saying whatever that sense of “I” wants in a given moment, until another ego emerges in reaction to fluctuating external circumstances. Feeding the ego produces pain, since the “I,” desire, is a condition, a conglomeration of shells, a state of suffering that traps our full conscious potential. To restrain our mind from doing what it wants every second of the day is the work with ethics. It is knowing how to consciously work with the law of cause and effect. As we explained in the previous lecture on “Ethics, Karma, and Interdependence,” how you behave in body, speech, and mind determines the quality of your life. Disciplining the lower self, the ego, desires, or nafs within Sufism, is the definition of the spiritual path: The lower soul (nafs, which etymologically signifies ‘breath’) is always engaged in inspiring your imagination to pursue evil acts or thoughts, every moment striving to cast you down into the abyss of pride, hypocrisy, and egotism. Each moment thus demands that you overcome and repulse such evil thoughts and false conceptions, constantly regaining your faith afresh and reaffirming your belief, and never imagining yourself safe from the lower soul’s deceit even for a second. ―Lāhījī, Mafātīḥ
Nafs in Arabic means “breath, vitality, vigor, or soul.” The egos, nafs, or desires within us have trapped or conditioned our essence, our consciousness. Every ego, defect, or desire, traps the energy of the consciousness within states of suffering. Every naf, like anger, pride, fear, laziness, gluttony, etc., squanders the energies of the psyche in atomic explosions of hatred, lust, and desire.
Meditation begins when we learn how to stop wasting energy: mental, emotional, volitional, sexual. You enact the initial stages of ethical discipline when you, as a consciousness, are observing your mind, heart, and body, your egos, seeing them as something inferior and separate from your consciousness. The deeper part comes through transformation, when you consciously choose not to give your ego what it wants. It is essential to develop the sense of self-observation in a very clear and strong manner, to be able to separate from the “I” in all its tenebrous multiplicity, to see and watch our defects in action, and to not act upon their impulses no matter how strong. Each ego is a false identity, a false sense of self, which has nothing to do with our spiritual nature. The “I” has nothing to do with the Being, as well as the unconditioned, free consciousness. Each ego or false sense of self has trapped our consciousness, and now it is our work to extract the consciousness trapped in those errors by comprehending our defects and eliminating them. The nafs, lower selves, or different “I’s” within us are the infidels mentioned throughout the Qur’an, Islam, and Sufism. 
There are two types of warfare (jihad): outward and inward. The outer battle is against the infidel (kāfar, or black magicians in the astral and mental planes) while the inner war is waged aggressively against the lower soul (nafs). Warriors of the sword are threefold: the slayer who is rewarded, the battle-weary vouchsafed forgiveness of sins, and the martyr who is slain. Likewise, the warriors of the soul are threefold: one who exerts himself who belongs to the just and the pious (abrār), one who excels in struggle who sustains the spiritual hierarchy (awtād), and one who is victorious, who is numbered amongst the apostolic saints (abdāl). One who wages war against the unbelievers (fornicating black magicians, the infidels) obtains wealth, but one who wages war against the soul is enriched with the wealth of the heart… The Prophet called the war against the lower soul (nafs) the “greater war” because, while one may avoid conflict with an external foe, none is exempt from the struggle against, and combat with, the lower soul. Peace can be secured from all enemies through negotiation or conciliation, but if one attempts to negotiate and reconcile the [lower] soul, one is doomed to perdition. ―Maybudī, Kashf al-asrār, IV 60
Samael Aun Weor wrote that we must be compassionate to all beings, even towards the sorcerers and demons of the black lodge, but merciless to our ego. If you ever give what your ego wants, you deepen your suffering. When you do not give your ego what it wants, you experience happiness. This is karma in action.
When you don’t give your anger what it wants by identifying yourself with its thoughts, desires, and impulses, you save energy; you become hermetically sealed. Remember that in any moment, a sense of self, a false identity emerges within your mind, heart, and body that wants to push you to think, feel and act a certain way. If you as a free consciousness are vigilant, watchful, you perceive these false, multifarious identities within you. The more you, as a consciousness, restrain the mind from acting in harmful ways, by learning to see the egos in action, the more psychic energy you save. Likewise, the less you identify with any ego or defect, the more energy you save, and the more serene your mind becomes. Energy is essential for spiritual life. If you are wasting your energy through negative behaviors, thinking, and sentiments, you will never learn to meditate. But when you restrain the mind and follow the precepts of meditative discipline, you enter the doorway into genuine self-knowledge, because you have energy available to empower the consciousness and relax the body and mind. Our asana, meditative posture, is based on how we fulfill Yama and Niyama, restraint of mind or ego, and observances. Swami Sivananda wrote that our asana should be like a mountain, immovable, firm. If your mind is restless and agitated from desire, your body will not be able to sit still. If you are constantly moving during your practice, then you are not practicing at all, because any physical movement agitates the mind and its energies, preventing you from going deep into the consciousness to receive the imagery of the internal worlds. And if you have no energy with which to meditate, you will fall asleep in your posture if you are too comfortable. Your posture should help you relax, but to the point that you maintain conscious remembrance of what you are doing at all times. If your posture is too comfortable but your consciousness not alert enough, then laziness kicks in and you fall asleep, such as when you lie down to practice. This is not meditation, and this is why we recommend that students in the beginning practice sitting up, either in the Western style, in a chair, or on a meditation cushion in a half-lotus or full lotus, if your body is flexible enough. The point is that your posture should be relaxed and firm to the point that you are perfectly at ease and can remember what you are doing consciously, that you maintain your ability to focus and remain attentive. Your asana needs to be comfortable to the point that you can forget the body and work with the subtle energies of the mind and heart. By fulfilling the restraints and observances of meditative discipline, and to aid in the relaxation of body and mind, we work with pranayama. By conserving our energies and transforming them, we harness the power of the soul with our breath, since the Arabic word nafs means “soul” as well as “breath,” and is modified into different types of expression in accordance with Kabbalah. Inspiration, nafas―literally “breath,” also “breathing space” or ample room―is the refreshment of hearts by the subtleties from the Unseen. A person who receives inspiration [from learning to aspire, or inspire, to inhale the vital breath through pranayama] is finer and clearer than a person who is open to mystical states [who is intuitive to a degree, but who does not practice this technique]. The person of the momentary inner experience is the beginning [meaning: the one who practices mindfulness, self-observation, and self-remembering], the inspired person is at the conclusion, and the person of [internal, psychological and spiritual states born from practice] is between the two. The states are means and inspirations are the end of progressive development. Moments belong to those who have hearts, states belong to those who possess spirit (ruh) [or Ruach], and inspirations belong to the people of inner being (sirr) [the Innermost Self / Atman]. The Sufis have said, "The best act of worship is the count the breaths along with God Glorified and Exalted.” ―Al Qushayri, Al-Risalah: Principles of Sufism
This lecture will explain the purpose of pranayama, how to practice it, and how it is taught within the teachings of Sufism, the writings of Swami Sivananda, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and the doctrine of Samael Aun Weor.
Prana, Transmutation, and Brahmacharya
To control the mind, we work with its energies, which constitute different modifications of prana. Prana, in Sanskrit and hatha yoga, relates to the breath, to breathing, the air. Pranayama etymologically signifies, “to harness the wind” or “yoke” the life forces of the body.
Prana is much more profound than just breath. It is the force of “life, spirit, energy, and vitality” within air and our physical body. Prana is the life-force of divinity that we assimilate through our breathing, and which we find condensed and modified within the different elements of the cosmos and of nature.
Pranayama also is described within the gnostic tradition by the term transmutation, which is “The action of changing or the state of being changed into another form.”
Within our body is the most potent force of the universe, the sexual energy, the capacity to create life, which is found in a germinal state within the physical semen. This physical matter or semen can be used to create a physical child, but in spiritual sadhana, spiritual practice, we conserve the semen and transform this matter into energy, precisely through the exercise of controlling our breath, being fully concentrated, prayerful, and attentive, with the mind restrained. As described in the book of Genesis, the spirit or breath of God hovered over the face of the waters. What spirit? The Ruach Elohim in Hebrew or ruh in Arabic, otherwise known as prana in Sanskrit, the divine forces that generate life. The prana, the energies of divinity, can be directed to yoke the sexual waters in our body, to transform that water into light. For as Genesis teaches us, “God said, ‘Let there be light!’ And there was light.” That light is consciousness and comprehension in meditation. The word trans is a prefix used with the meanings such as “across,” “beyond,” “through,” and “changing thoroughly.” Mutation comes from mutate, “to change or cause to change in form or nature.” Transmutation is the science of changing the sexual water into light, carrying it up within our spine to the brain, mutating that semen into energy. This is accomplished through yoking the vital winds, the energies of our breath, mind, body, heart, and semen. Prana is not only in the air, but in all the elements of nature and our body, within the aerial nature of our thoughts, the fires of our emotions, and solidity of our physical earth or body, and most importantly within the waters of our sexual organs. Prana condenses into multiple forms of matter and energy, most importantly sexual, which we transmute from the physical, brute semen, to feed our consciousness with light. It’s important to remember that it is impossible to develop the consciousness without energy, and that the most important form of energy is sexual. Sexual energy is prana, the “vitality, power, vigour, and life” that can awaken our full potential. The word prana bears similar etymological meaning as the Arabic word for soul, nafs, which can be lower [egotistical] or higher [conscious] depending on our work. How we harness energy is determined by the quality of practicing pranayama. It’s interesting that the term prana can signify the sexual organs, which demonstrates that to work with pranayama is to control the creative energy and use it for our spiritual development. This is why chastity is emphasized by Patanjali, the yogis, and all genuine practitioners of every spiritual tradition. Chasity means restraint and transmutation of the sexual energy, the prana. This science has been known by the term Brahmacharya in the East, which is a Sanskrit word composed from:
Everyone in these times want to know how to meditate, but when instructed to restrain and control the sexual energy, to restrain the lower selves, egos, nafs, or desires, they run away. This is sad, because without harnessing the vital winds, the sexual energy, without going against the grain of one’s habits, one cannot learn meditation. To feed desire, our egos, lust, through identification, produces suffering. By expelling the very energies that can give life, we hinder our spiritual life. Meditation is impossible for individuals who have no prana, no energy, in their body that can empower the consciousness. Brahmacharya literally means Achara or conduct that leads to the realization of Brahman or one’s own Self. It means the control of semen [the sexual matter within both men and women], the study of the Vedas (scriptures, as well as the sexual teachings of any religion) and contemplation on God. The technical meaning of Brahmacharya is self-restraint, particularly mastery of perfect control over the sexual organ or freedom from lust in thought, word and deed. ―Swami Sivananda
The beginning of the path of meditation is to restrain the sexual energy, to not expel it in any form whatsoever. This energy must be conserved and transformed to give us spiritual life. Lustful people who ejaculate the sexual energy have no energy with which to calm the mind and learn meditation.
The scripture Siva Samhita describes seminal retention and transmutation as the basis of all meditative realization: Ejaculation of semen [orgasm] brings death, preserving it within brings life. Therefore, one should make sure to retain the semen within. One is born and dies through semen; in this there is no doubt. Knowing this, the Yogi must always preserve his semen. When the precious jewel of semen is mastered, anything on earth can be mastered. Through the grace of its preservation, one becomes as great as me [Shiva]. The use of semen determines the happiness or pain of all beings living in the world, who are deluded [by desire] and are subject to death and decay. ―Siva Samhita
Feeding desire, lust, only agitates the mind and psyche, for as Padmasambhava explained to Lady Tsogyal:
Lustful people do not enter the path of liberation. ―Padmasambhava to Lady Tsogyal
This is of course the difficult thing, but fundamental to any progress.
Junayd was asked: "What is union with God [religion, religare, Yoga]?" He replied: "To renounce passion [fornication: the animal orgasm]," for of all of the acts of devotion by which God's favor is sought none has greater value than resistance to passion, because it is easier for a man to destroy a mountain with his nails than to resist passion [fornication]. ―Al-Hujwiri, Kashf al-Mahjub, Revelation of the Mystery
The next steps include controlling lust in the heart and mind, which is of course more difficult. Students must fight against adulterous and lustful tendencies, the desire to look at the opposite sex with desire. As Jesus taught:
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart. ―Matthew 5:27-28
First we conserve the sexual energy, learn to transform it in our body. With further discipline we no longer entertain lustful thoughts and desires in the heart. Pranayama is especially important for controlling lust, because if the consciousness has no energy, it has no strength by which to work against the monsters of desire. Pranayama will help you to acquire energy by which you can comprehend and annihilate the ego. As described by the ancient teachings of Manu:
Let the defects be burnt up by Pranayama. ―Manu
Students are therefore taught, within ethical discipline, not to fornicate, and why Buddha taught his disciples that one is no longer a disciple if they do not fulfill the observances and restraints of chastity. Pranayama and sexual purity, therefore are essential in the eightfold steps of meditation and yoga, since the subsequent principles of meditation are founded on this. Attempting to perform pranayama without fuel, without sexual energy present, is like trying to pump fuel from a gas station when there is none. No water, no fuel, no light. Yet by practicing sexual purity, one can enter very rapidly into the science of meditation.
With the practice of Pranayama, the mind of the student is prepared for Dharana, Dhyana, and Samadhi. ―Samael Aun Weor 
Energy and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life
The nature of prana must be analyzed, by gnostic students, through the Kabbalah, the Tree of Life. This Tree of Life maps out for us the varying modalities and condensations of matter, consciousness, energy or prana, the Christic force, which is manifest throughout the entire cosmos, as Swami Sivananda and Samael Aun Weor have explained very well.
This map has ten spheres or Sephiroth, translated from Hebrew as “emanations,” which are organized into three trinities with a single sephirah or sphere at the bottom, named Malkuth, the physical body or kingdom. Our body is a kingdom with many elements, forces and principles, that we must harness if we want to ascend this graphic, to perceive more refined and profound levels of consciousness, indicated by the higher spheres of this tree. Don’t think about this glyph as something outside of you, but within. This image maps out states of perception, in more refined or gross levels, from the most subtle above to the most dense below. This has nothing to do with vertical space, in the true application of this graphic. The Tree of Life emerges from the Abstract Absolute Space, the Unknowable Seity or Ain. From within the Ain, the Nothingness of cosmic, abstract space, is our own particular supra-divine star, the Ain Soph, the Limitless. And from the Ain Soph emerges the Ain Soph Aur, the Limitless Light, the Cosmic Khrestos or Christ. This light manifests into the universe as the top trinity of this graphic. This undifferentiated light of the Ain Soph Aur is the Prana in its most rarified state, which, in order to be developed, needs to enter into the universe to create its diverse regions and forms, unfolding into more material states of matter, energy, and experience. The top trinity is known as the Logoic triangle, the Christic forces of Kether, Chokmah, and Binah, or Father, Son and Holy Spirit in Christian terms. These three spheres are not people, but energies. This trinity is the power of creation, genesis, which are three aspects of one light or force; prana, in other words. Because this power is in a refined state, it is elevated, superior, rarified, yet for that power to develop, it must materialize, condense, descend to the lower regions of this tree, to be worked upon consciously. 
Prana condenses into other forms of matter, energy and perception, represented by the Sephiroth below. To work with prana above, we must work with that energy below, within the lower aspects of our being. We can analyze the nature and modifications of prana in different ways, especially in accordance with the septenary constitution of the human being, which is:
7. Atman: the Innermost Being, our Inner Buddha or God [Chesed]
Atman, Buddhi, and Superior Manas constitute the middle trinity, the Ethical triangle of the Tree of Life, relating to our genuine humanity and the spiritual principles of our inner divinity that guide us in the work. This trinity is the real Being or inner spirit [Chesed], divine soul [Geburah], and human soul [Tiphereth], the latter sometimes referred to superior manas, superior mind in Sanskrit.
Our consciousness is a fraction of the human soul, known as Tiphereth in Kabbalah. This middle sephirah in the very center of the Tree of Life is known by the term superior manas in Theosophy. This term mind can be very vague in esoteric and spiritual circles. Superior manas, Tiphereth, is abstract, not concrete. It is our willpower. We know it’s there, but it is not materialized, visible. We can say that a person has tremendous will, because they have internal drive and a means of working, making a living, being disciplined in a specific type of endeavor, etc. Willpower is very real for us, but hard to pinpoint or concretize. It relates to a type of abstraction of the psyche, one relating to volition or will. Our consciousness emanated from Atman-Buddhi-Manas, Chesed-Geburah-Tiphereth, and has entered the lower sephiroth: mind, heart, vitality, and physicality. This is in order to acquire knowledge and experience. Our inner Being, spirit, Buddha, Atman, gives the consciousness intuitions and hunches, as well as inspiration to practice spirituality through learning to control the lower aspects of ourselves, the lower trinity in this glyph. Tiphereth, superior manas or willpower, must control the lower aspects of the psyche. This is essential in pranayama, because to harness the prana, we must control our thoughts, feelings, and impulses, which are the vehicles of our ego. The Inferior Manas is our mind [Netzach], which is more concrete. People have an easier time acknowledging thoughts than they do with comprehending will. The Kama Rupa or desire / astral body [Hod] is the seat of emotions, which everybody acknowledges to a degree. The Linga-sarira, or vital body [Yesod], is our vital energies that give life to our physicality. This vital body is the body of prana. It is the storehouse of all the prana that descends from the top trinity, descending through the Sephiroth and finally coalescing in our vital body, which exists in the fourth dimension. This vehicle sustains the chemical, biological, catabolic, metabolic, etheric, and vital processes of our physical body: the Sthula-sarira, Malkuth. Without the vital body and its circulation of prana throughout the physical body, we would not be alive. These three lower spheres: Inferior Manas, Kama Rupa, and Linga-sarira, or Netzach, Hod, and Yesod, constitute the triangle of Priesthood. This triangle is the work with magic, from the Indo-European root word mag, meaning “priest” or “magician.” Magic is not pulling rabbits out of hats, or impressing people with clever tricks. Magic is knowing how to consciously manipulate matter and energy, prana, within our tree of life, through willpower and visualization. Pranayama is a form of magic, whereby we manipulate creative forces within our mind, heart, and body. To control the mind, with its racing, uncontrolled thoughts, the heart, with its surging emotions, and the impulses and instincts of the body, constitute the beginning of our meditative discipline. When you experience a calm mind through pranayama, you come to realize how magical this science really is, since it produces the serenity and clarity of the soul. The prerequisites of meditation involve stilling the body, the vital energies, the heart, the mind, and our willpower, the lower five Sephiroth of the Kabbalah. Let us be very clear: stilling the mind is not meditation; it is the beginning. Genuine meditation is about receiving internal information about ourselves and the cosmos, the science of comprehension and understanding. This is an important distinction to make, because pranayama aids the practitioner in calming the psyche so that the waters of the mind can reflect internal principles. See here the lower five spheres of the Tree of Life? These are all different aspects of our psyche, which need to be controlled and calmed through yoking prana. Mind is a form of prana. Emotions are a form of prana. And the sexual energy is condensed prana that serves as the foundation for meditation, since prana, the Linga-sarira or vital body, is the foundation of this graphic. The mind or body of desires are controlled using vital energy, the vital body or Linga-sarira. Notice how this vital body, Linga-sarira or sphere of Yesod is the very center of the Tree of Life, as well as at its base or foundation. Yesod literally means “foundation.” Yesod is the basis of spiritual and physical life. The word Lingam refers to the sexual organs, specifically the phallus, hence the strong correlation between prana or Linga-sarira and the sexual glands. The yoni in Hinduism symbolizes the uterus, and its union with the lingam represents the highest consubstantiation of divine love. Prana literally means “vital organs,” and refers to semen, since in certain rituals like the puja, the Hindus pour milk over the symbol of the Lingam-Yoni as an offering to divinity. That milk is semen, transmuted sexual energy, prana, which are found within the union of the lingam-yoni. Our physical semen is condensed prana. It is vital energy in a material state. Through the science of pranayama, we yoke, transmute, and elevate the energies of sex, so that the body, mind, heart, and will become balanced and prepared for actual meditation. While prana means “life,” yama means “restraint” or “death.” Yama is the deity of death in esoteric Buddhism. This is very interesting linguistically. Samael Aun Weor wrote that if the seed does not die, the plant cannot be born. If you want to experience the entirety of the Tree of Life in meditation, you must give birth to that tree through the sexual seed. When the seed dies and is transmuted, it becomes a Tree of Life. This is well known by initiates in the science of alchemy or Da’ath. Pranayama, therefore, helps to transform the seed, by destroying the matter, to convert it into energy. By this we do not mean that one can give birth to the entirety of the soul through pranayama. The solar bodies can only be created in a marriage. Instead, pranayama aids single practitioners in circulating the energies of sexuality, to a certain degree, to stabilize one’s concentration and mind in preparation for dhyana, meditation The mind must be united with its Divine Triad, together with the psychic extractions of the astral, vital and physical vehicles.
We reinforce the powers of the Being by working with prana. The inferior manas or mind, the emotions or body of desires, and the prana or Linga-sarira, reinforce the middle Triad through the work with sexual fire. Mind, emotions, and sexuality help to support the principles above through pranayama. Atman-Buddhi-Manas are strengthened through yoking the fires of sexuality below, which are contained within the waters of genesis, the sexual matter.
People who do not work with the creative energies have a weak connection with their inner Being. People who fornicate lose their connection with divinity. However, this connection can be re-established the more we work with transmutation. This becomes evident through internal experiences in meditation. While pranayama works with sparks of fire, the sexual fire must be harnessed or yoked in a matrimony to fully develop the creative energies. All this work of transmutation is performed with willpower, our human soul, the superior manas or Tiphereth. Our will must exert itself to control the sexual energy through spiritual inspiration, emanating from Atman-Buddhi. Prana then produces a profound calming effect on the mind, heart, and body below. Pranayama, interchanging nostril breathing, requires a form of effort or will to perform. It also involves imagining the circulation of forces in your body and mind. This is the superior manas or willpower in action, in combination with our capacities for perception and imagination, known as Geburah in Kabbalah, the sphere of Buddhi, the divine consciousness. We must perceive what we are doing in every practice, especially Pranayama and sexual transmutation. As we are going to elaborate upon in our discussion of “Spiritual Insight,” the capacity to perceive is imagination, to see internal, psychic things, the movement of energies. Pranayama involves willpower to control the energies, through our breath, serenity, and composure. We also need perception of those forces inside. These are abilities that the practitioner develops gradually through consistent discipline. Energy, Nadis, and the Nervous Systems
We have an image here of the nervous systems of the body, which become charged with vitality when we learn how to circulate those forces with our willpower and imagination. Hinduism refers to energetic channels in the vital depth, the etheric body of Yesod, as nadis. There exist millions of nadis in our vital body, which are intimately related with the chakras of our ultra-biology, the latter composed of the internal chemistry of forces and energies that interdependently flow through our physicality and internal vehicles.
A nadi is a line or current of vital energy, and when two nadis intersect, you form a vortex, a wheel of energy, a chakra. People believe there are only seven chakras, which is wrong, because wherever two nadis join, you form a vortex or wheel of forces. While there are seven main chakras connected with the spinal medulla, we really possess hundreds of thousands of chakras throughout our body, each with their own purpose, role, and influence. The cerebrospinal, grand sympathetic, and other nervous systems are physical conduits for etheric energies. Therefore, the nadis of the internal bodies, the vital depth, correspond to the physical, vital, and fluidic matter that circulates in our body. The nervous systems function because of the gelatinous and delicate fluids of the nerves, and it is well known in physical science that most of our body is composed of water. When we learn to conserve the vital waters of our body, the seminal matter and its concomitant energies, we can transmute those waters into another substance, into cognizance, conscious energy, and light. Remember that we stated that our sexual waters, our semen, is a gelatinous substance or condensed prana. Prana, in its unmodified form, is light. That light descends the Tree of Life and enters Yesod, materializing to form the entity of semen. Now the work we need to do is to transform or transmute the sexual substance into cognizance, fire, and light with the sacred breath. This light saturates the brain and nervous systems, flowing within and upward to the brain up the different energetic channels. Because the brain and spine are surrounded by nerves, it follows logically that the nadis condense and unite in innumerable spaces throughout the vital body, which penetrates within the material brain, spine, and nervous systems. Do not make the mistake of thinking that the vital body is separate from your physical body, because the vital depth gives life to your physicality, and is a biological vehicle that penetrates and co-penetrates every atom of the physical body, like a mirror image. It is made of etheric matter in the fourth dimension, matter which is pliable, elastic, and fluidic, relating intimately with the health of your brain and nervous systems. Without the vital body, we would not be able to physically exist, since it is the fourth-dimensional aspect of your material, physical, third-dimensional body, since every atom of your etheric body penetrates every atom of your physical body, giving you life. The day your vital depth disconnects from the physical body is the day you die physically, since without ether, prana, we would not have life. Prana and the etheric body have been well documented by the Kirlian camera, a device developed by a Russian scientist that photographs the vital aura of people, plants, and even minerals. All living things have prana, even supposedly inorganic matter like metals and earth. This type of science demonstrates how the vital body of any living thing is inseparable from its material, physical form. The Tree of Life in our physical body is our spine, so while there is a macrocosmic implication to studying the universe, our spine is how we have physical and spiritual life, especially when we learn how to circulate prana in our secondary or sexual system, as described by Master Morya in his Dayspring of Youth. The two main energetic channels we focus on with pranayama are Ida and Pingala, or the lunar and solar currents. By the term “lunar,” what we mean are feminine, negative, or receptive forces in the body, whether we are male or female, and by “solar,” we mean the masculine, positive, or projective forces of the body, whether we are male or female. These forces originate within our gonads, the testicles or ovaries. In the same manner that an electrical current has a positive, negative, and neutral current, our sexual system likewise has masculine, feminine, and neutral forces and nadis. Through controlling and directing prana, we circulate vital force through the nadis Ida and Pingala up the spine in the form of an eight, the caduceus of mercury with its two entwining serpents, a representation of the solar and lunar energetic currents. While Ida is feminine and Pingala is masculine, the spinal column is the neutral, grounding current by which masculine and feminine cohabit, unify, and reconcile. The energetic nadi of the spine is known as Sushumna nadi. When we learn to harness the energies contained within our waters with our breathing, with pranayama, we can raise and circulate such vital forces from the gonads up the spine, through Ida and Pingala, to awaken sparks of a third force in the base of the spine through the Sushumna nadi. This third force is known in the East as Kundalini and the West as the fire of Pentecost. As Samael Aun Weor indicated in his writings: The yogi/yogini works with the Great Breath or Cosmic Chrestos that is deposited within the Christonic semen when they are practicing Pranayama. Pranayama (a practice that consists of making profound inhalations of air, and retaining the inhaled air as much as possible, and afterwards exhaling the air until emptying the lungs), also teaches about the poles of the energy: one masculine pole located in the brain (cerebrospinal nervous system) and the feminine pole in the heart (grand sympathetic nervous system). Thus, as when we form two poles in the space through a magneto, we create new energies and these forcedly are giving birth to a third pole; likewise, we affirm that the third pole is Devi Kundalini, which, from the union of the solar and lunar atoms, is born within the Triveni, situated in the coccyx. These two polarities, masculine and feminine―from the Great Breath―prove the sexuality of Prana and Kundalini. Kundalini is absolutely sexual. ―Samael Aun Weor, Kundalini Yoga: The Mysteries of the Fire 
Kundalini and Pranayama
Pranayama is absolutely sexual, in the same manner that Kundalini is the sexual potency. By working with pranayama, single persons yoke their creative energies to a certain, limited degree, while prana is fully activated throughout the spine and nervous systems through sexual magic between man and woman, husband and wife, who are simultaneously working to eliminate their defects through profound comprehension in meditation.
The Kundalini is the sacred sexual fire of the Holy Spirit. Individuals can awaken sparks of Kundalini within the base of the coccyx up the spine through the exercise of pranayama. To fully awaken Kundalini, one needs to be working in a matrimony. Let us be clear about the nature of the Kundalini. Kundalini is the power of the Divine Mother, the enlightenment of God. Many people believe that the Divine Mother, the Kundalini, is a mechanical force, one that can awaken randomly and cause numerous psychological and spiritual problems, such as rising in the wrong way, causing delusions or mental imbalances, etc. People who attribute these phenomena with Kundalini awakening ignore their own destructive habits, ignore the law of karma, cause and effect, because Devi Kundalini harms no one. What is sad is that such people ignore that the Divine Mother is the wisdom of the universe, the cosmos, which is structured and maintained by divine intelligence. The Divine Mother does not harm Her child. People hurt themselves, not because of the Divine Mother Kundalini. Our inner goddess only rewards virtues, chastity, purity, and ethical discipline. People develop imbalances and psychological problems due to fornication, which the Divine Mother does not reward. She can only awaken within a couple that is meditating and comprehending the ego daily, working on their defects and praying for their elimination; She emerges within people who develop virtue. She awakens within a couple that not only conserves and transmutes the sexual energy, but who are following the precepts (Niyama) and ethical restraints (Yama) of religion. The Kundalini is very demanding, since She only rises within the spine of the couple in accordance with the merits and qualities of the heart. As Paul of Tarsus stated in Corinthians: Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God. ―1 Corinthians 6:9-10
Observe your mind. Are you not filled with desire, with fornication, the lustful eye that craves sexual satisfaction with many women, with many men? Are you truly free from the adulterous eye that wants to copulate with others constantly, even if it is just in your imagination or fantasies? Are you sure that your mind is pure and filled with virtues, rather than vices? Do you abstain from alcohol, thievery of stealing of other people’s ideas, energy, belongings, money? Are you sure that you do not extort others to do what you want, even under the guise of sanctity, kindness, and generosity? Are you positive that you have never betrayed anyone, including your inner divinity?
Be sure that if you are filled with these qualities, and even when you practice sexual magic, the Divine Mother will not reward you. She only rises within the spine of the couple who are meditating every day on the ego, those who are working to eliminate the “I” first through discovery of defects in self-observation, then their judgment in meditation, followed by their execution through prayer. This is the fundamental law of action and consequence. People have a lot of theories about the Kundalini, but none of it is factual or based on evidence, observed facts in one’s daily life. We mention this because in relation to the teachings of pranayama, ethical discipline is the same: if you want to transmute your energies through pranayama, you must be ethical, practicing restraint (Yama) and following specific observances (Niyama). While many religions have a lot of explanations about virtues and vices, the best of it all is synthesized in one simple principle: do not give the ego what it wants. Deny thyself, bear up your alchemical cross of sacrifice, and follow the example of your Intimate Christ, your real Being within you. You learn to control prana by controlling your mind, by not feeding your egos from moment to moment. By controlling prana in its diverse modifications, we control the mind and the vital flow of energies in our etheric body. Kundalini is intimately related with the Prana that circulates throughout the 72,000 nadis or Astral conduits that nourish the chakras. The chakras are connected with the mind. Yogi and yogini have to christify their mind. Prana is life, and it circulates throughout all of our organs. Prana circulates throughout all of our nadis and vital canals. All the 72,000 nadis of our organism have their fundamental base in the nadi Kanda. The nadi Kanda is situated between the sexual organs and the anus. The Kanda collects all of the sexual energy that circulates throughout the 72,000 canals of our organism. The sexual energy is Prana, life. […] …The nadis Ida and Pingala are found side to side of the spinal medulla. These nadis entwine around the spinal medulla in similar shape to the number eight. The heavenly path is inside the nadi Sushumna. The Kundalini ascends throughout the Brahmanadi. The Brahmanadi is found situated inside another very subtle canal that runs throughout the length of the spinal medulla and is known with the name of Chitra. The seven chakras known with the names of Muladhara, Svadhisthana, Manipura, Anahata, Vishudda, Ajna, and Sahasrara are over this nadi Chitra. ―Samael Aun Weor, Kundalini Yoga: The Mysteries of the Fire
When the Kundalini awakens, it rises within the Sushumna canal within the spinal column and awakens the main chakras of the spine. Likewise, the 72,000 nadis or circuits of the astral body, as well as the vital body, circulate. 72,000 is a symbolic number, because there exist many more nadis. 72 reminds us of the 72 sacred names of God in Kabbalah. Likewise, making the kabbalistic addition of 7+2 makes 9, the number of Yesod of Kabbalah. The ninth sephirah from the top to the bottom of the Tree of Life relates to the vital / etheric body, the linga-sarira.
Given the sexual nature of prana, it is logical that single disciples possess limited capacities for elevating the creative energies, prana, or fires of sex. A single person can awaken sparks of Kundalini through pranayama, producing certain mystical experiences, whereas married couples can awaken their full potential. It’s important to reflect on these things and to clarify some misconceptions regarding this subject. Swami Sivananda once wrote: No Samadhi is possible unless Kundalini is awakened. ―Swami Sivananda, The Science of Pranayama
Samadhi is conscious experience, in meditation, devoid of the “me,” “myself,” the ego. Many students have misinterpreted this statement of Sivananda to indicate that one cannot have any spiritual experiences without working in the perfect matrimony, which is not true. What Sivananda explained is that whether single or married, the fire of Kundalini produces ecstasy in different degrees.
Many practitioners of yoga have also mistakenly attributed their work with pranayama to the full awakening of the Kundalini, because such disciples have many intense, spiritual, conscious experiences resulting from their practice, which they do not know how to explain except that their Kundalini has fully awakened. Having such experiences is valuable and necessary, but it is not the end goal, nor is it an indicator that one is finished in the work. Single persons can awaken sparks of that fire, but the full manifestation of the Divine Mother is only developed amongst couples working in chastity, meditation, and selfless service for humanity. Remember that a man has one sexual polarity dominant and a woman has the other sexual polarity dominant. If an individual wants to awaken the full potential forces of their respective sex, he or she needs a sexual compliment, the opposite sex, to awaken the reconciliating force. Man and woman, husband and wife, when sexually united and harnessing the creative energy, awaken a third power, the serpent Kundalini, which typically lies dormant in the base of the spine, in the Chakra Muladhara, coiled three and a half times and awaiting the moment of its awakening through the science of love. This does not undervalue the work of pranayama, but puts it in context. Single disciples can work with pranayama, can maintain their chastity, through these breathing exercises. When disciples are married they can take their practice further, applying the same principles of Yama, Niyama, and Pranayama but with the tremendously added force of sexual union, which is known in the East as tantrism. Single people can light a candle up their spine, but husband and wife can awaken the power of millions of suns. This is the literal difference. Single disciples must learn to prepare for a matrimony through pranayama, which is why in ancient schools of yoga, many masters would train their disciples in Brahmacharya before giving them the ultimate secret of sexual alchemy, tantrism, marital union. This was obviously done in secret to avoid scandals and the fears of sexually degenerate people. Once disciples have demonstrated their sincerity, prudence, and dedication to their spiritual exercises, to pranayama, then the master would unveil the higher mysteries. 
Breath, Mind, Chakras, and the Circulation of Prana
So why all this explanation about the creative energies in the context of this course of meditation? If you want to still the mind, naturally and without force, you must practice pranayama and transmutation. Your mind or mental states are determined by how you use energy. If you use energy to feed desire, then the mind becomes provoked, stimulated, and distracted. Harnessing prana helps to calm the mind, and prana is intimately related with your virya or virility. Virya simply means sexual potency, which is the root word for virile (to possess sexual potency and strength) and well as virtue, since the virtues of the soul are born through the intentional use and practice of pranayama.
Prana, mind, and virya (sexual energy) are under one sambhanda [connection]. If you can control prana, then mind and virya and controlled by themselves. If you control the virya by remaining as an akhanda bramachari without emission of even a single drop of semen (sexual energy, whether male or female) for twelve years, then mind and prana are controlled by themselves. ―Swami Sivananda, The Science of Pranayama
By controlling the breath with willpower, by consciously visualizing the circulation of energies, the prana circulates throughout our nervous systems, stimulating the chakras, in the same manner that electricity flows through a circuit. These energies stabilize the lake of the mind in preparation for meditation. As Swami Sivananda explains in The Science of Pranayama:
Breath is external manifestation of Prana, the vital force. Breath like electricity, is gross Prana. Breath is Sthula, gross. Prana is Sukshma, subtle. By exercising control over this breathing you can control the subtle Prana inside. Control of Prana means control of mind. Mind cannot operate without the help of Prana. The vibrations of Prana only produce thoughts in the mind. It is Prana that moves the mind. It is Prana that sets the mind in motion. It is the Sukshma Prana or Psychic Prana that is intimately connected with the mind. This breath represents the important fly-wheel of an engine. Just as the other wheels stop when the driver stops the fly-wheel, so also other organs cease working, when the Yogi stops the breath. If you can control the fly-wheel, you can easily control the other wheels. Likewise, if you can control the external breath, you can easily control the inner vital force, Prana. The process by which the Prana is controlled by regulation of external breath, is termed Pranayama. Just as a goldsmith removes the impurities of gold by heating it in the hot furnace, by strongly blowing the blow-pipe, so also the Yogic student removes the impurities of the body and the Indriyas by blowing his lungs, i.e., by practising Pranayama. The chief aim of Pranayama is to unite the Prana with the Apana and take the united Pranapana slowly towards the head. The effect or fruit of Pranayama is Udghata or awakening of the sleeping Kundalini. ―Swami Sivananda, The Science of Pranayama
The energetic channels or nadis are typically filthy, blocked and closed in us, which is the source of many illnesses and conditions that make us suffer physically, sexually, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. The circuitry of our vital body tends to be clogged with many negative psychic elements and riddled with impurities caused by unhealthy food, negative environmental influences, and most importantly, degenerated habits in the mind, heart, and body. Many students experience problems in controlling the sexual energy because the nadis are blocked and polluted. Such blockages stimulate the creative energies in a way that force them to flow from inside out, from within to outside the body, problems exemplified as nocturnal pollutions and unwilled seminal ejaculation during the sexual act. Many practitioners, when beginning sexual magic, have difficulty controlling the creative force. This is due to the poor circulation of vital energies.
As Swami Sivananda indicated: Just as a goldsmith removes the impurities of gold by heating it in the hot furnace, by strongly blowing the blow-pipe, so also the Yogic student removes the impurities of the body and the Indriyas [the energetic roots of sensation] by blowing his lungs, i.e., by practising Pranayama. ―Sivananda, The Science of Pranayama
As we explained, many practitioners in the ancient traditions of yoga would work with Pranayama for many years before working in a matrimony, precisely because to work with sexual magic, the practitioners should be firmly grounded and knowledgeable about how to transmute their energies as bachelors. It would be absurd for people who know nothing of transmuting their energies, practicing daily meditation, and working on the ego to begin sexual magic all at once. It is best if such persons learn pranayama in preparation for the greater mysteries of the fire, because pranayama helps to cleanse the impurities of the body and help the energy circulate properly. When the nadis are clean through the exercise of pranayama, the vital forces flow and rejuvenate the body and mind. In this manner, the sexual act is easier to take advantage of without risk of spilling the semen.
The word for wind in Sanskrit is Vayu. Vayu is a term for the element air in the body. Vayu apana relates to the bodily winds that help with the processes of excretion, urination, and menstruation, associated with the functions of the lower pelvis, the intestines, and the anus. Apana also relates to this part of the body, the energy associated with the abdomen, as well as the elimination of waste products from the body. Sivananda explained that with pranayama, we are uniting the prana from without with the apana within, mixing the vital energies in our breath with the vital energies of our coccyx and lower abdomen to slowly raise it to the mind. This process awakens sparks of the sleeping Kundalini. We’ve included in this graphic an image of the main chakras of the body. Chakra literally means “wheel,” and the fly-wheels that Swami Sivananda references are the chakras. The chakras are vortexes of forces that flow by the power of prana, the vital breath or seminal energies. Chakras literally spin, like a water mill, when there is energy available, which is why Rumi, the great Sufi poet, stated: From the heart of the lovers, blood flows like a vast river. Our body is the windmill, and love, the water. Without water the mill cannot turn. ―Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, Hidden Music
What waters make it possible for the chakras to spin? The sexual waters, the seminal energy. When yoked through pranayama, the chakras turn like a water mill, but if the seminal waters are ejaculated through lust, then the chakras remain dormant, asleep, incapacitated, without energy to circulate within them.
Prana, Christic energy, modifies into the tattvas, which are different condensations of this energy in the form of the main elements composing physical and spiritual nature. Through alternated breathing of our nostrils, we assimilate these modifications of energy in order to awaken consciousness. The respiration through the right nasal cavity is called Suria or Pingala. We cause through this respiration the ascension of the solar atoms from our seminal system.
These tattvas relate to the seven chakras in the following manner:
There is also the chakra of the lungs as well, but the seven main chakras of the spine are the ones I just listed. The four elements relate to our mind, heart, vitality, and body, or air, fire, water, and earth, respectively. Pranayama aids us in controlling the aerial nature of thought, the igneous powers of the heart, the aqueous nature of our vital energies, and the materiality of our earth, our physicality. While the four elements relate to our three brains and body in this way, the chakras have slightly different correlations as you see in this graphic. Akasha is the primordial fire hidden within the cosmic space. Akasha is a force in nature that is divine, and can be designated by sound, light, and cognition. The power of the Akasha manifests in the throat, the Verb, through the alchemical knowledge of Da’ath. Adi means light, relating to the prana, the Christic energy, which condenses and accumulates in the third eye chakra, Ajna, to develop spiritual insight, the subject of a future lecture. Samadhi tattva also relates to prana, since this is the power that grants omniscience and cosmic consciousness at the top of the head. Conscious breathing, within Sufi schools, is synonymous with light, with illuminating the mind, the creation of the true human being. Regarding the intrinsic relationship of breath with light, Al-Qushayri wrote the following in his Risalah: Principles of Sufism: 
Abu-l-Hasan al-Nuri was asked, “What is the origin of spiritual insight in the one who has it?” He answered, “It comes from the saying of the Most High, ‘And I breathed into him (Adam) of My Spirit’ (15:29).
The sexual energy creates insight, spiritual life. We create the soul through the sexual energy, a power that can produce experiences of astral projection, awakening within dreams, feats of jinn science, clarified perception, developed intuition and comprehension of problems, detachment from egotistical desires and worldliness, egotism, hatred, lightness of body and mind, health, vigor, etc. These are the different “lights” implied within Sufi language.
Pranayama and Sexual Magic in the Upanishads
The sacred Hindu scriptures, the Upanishads, also teach all this in synthesis. We are going to provide a commentary for the chapter 2, verses 6 and 8-17 from the Śvetāśvataropaniṣad, to emphasize the points we’ve previously made and to show some of the traditional basis for which this practice is elaborated.
We’ve included an image of Christ’s crucifixion in relation to this topic, because the cross is the sexual union of husband and wife through the vertical, phallic beam and the horizontal, uterine beam. Through union of masculine and feminine forces, the ego dies through the fire of the Kundalini and gives birth to the resurrected soul. Where the fire is rubbed, where the wind is checked, where the soma flows over, there the mind is born. ―Śvetāśvataropaniṣad
When husband and wife sexually unite, their private parts rub and produce erotic fire. When their breathing is in check, controlled, when the prana is harnessed consciously, the seminal energies are transmuted.
The word soma means many things, such as body or plant juice, the latter being traditionally used as Vedic offerings during rituals. Soma is sometimes referred to as the drink or nectar of immortality, an ambrosia or milk of the gods. This is none other than the prana, the seminal energies. The bodies of the soul are created through the alchemical cross, when the soma is flowing within the nadis or Sushumna canal. Soma literally means body in Greek and can refer to the solar bodies of tantrism. If a wise man holds his body steady with its three parts (chest, neck, and head) even, turns his senses with the mind inward to enter the heart, he will then in the boat of brahman [om] cross all the fearful torrents. ―Śvetāśvataropaniṣad
Rubbing the fire of sexuality applies more so to a matrimony, but can refer to how individual yogis, who practice pranayama, awaken sparks of that fire in their spine through profound concentration and deep, unwavering prayer. In the same manner that a couple controls the breath and transmutes the soma, the prana, a bachelor or bachelorette performs transmutation on their own.
Pranayama must be performed with the chest, neck, and head steady, in a good posture. You cannot circulate the prana appropriately if your body is not firm, stable, and relaxed, with your head even with your torso and your spine straight. What are the fearful torrents we must cross through pranayama? The assaults of lust, which have polluted our nadis and sexual waters. The boat of brahman is the ark of the covenant, the ark of Noah that carries us above the waters of degeneration in the mind. Compressing his breathings let him, who has subdued all motions, breathe forth through the nose with gentle breath. Let the wise man successfully restrain his mind, that chariot yoked with vicious horses [senses]. ―Śvetāśvataropaniṣad
The Upanishads refer to the mind, emotions, vitality, and physical body as horses which the real Self, Atman, the Inner Buddha or charioteer, must control. He does this through the reins, his divine and human souls, through willpower. The senses also relate to the lower Sephiroth as well as how our sensual, material consciousness apprehends life.
Let him perform his exercises in a place which is level, pure, free from pebbles, fire, and filth, delightful by its sounds, its water, and bowers, not painful to the eye, and is full of shelters and caves. ―Śvetāśvataropaniṣad
I have known people who want to begin meditation while living in a filthy and dirty home. This is very difficult. The tidiness of our home reflects what we psychologically carry within. Your home should be your temple where you sit to practice, to devote yourself to God, your Being. Our practices are amplified when we dedicate a special room for our exercises of pranayama and meditation, since the energies we attract help to produce serenity and peace in our home. Pranayama cleans the mind and nadis, so to live in squalor will hinder our spiritual work, because the environment affects our practice, and vice versa.
When yoga is being performed, the forms which come first, producing apparitions in brahman, are those of misty smoke, sun, fire, wind, fire-flies, lightnings, and a crystal moon. ―Śvetāśvataropaniṣad
Students go through many experiences when pranayama is consistently practiced, frequently, every day, for prolonged periods of time. Remember the Sufi scripture I just read, that breathing is synonymous with lights? Smoke can refer to the cloudiness of the mind, which students apprehend when they initiate pranayama. They receive experiences from the internal planes that their skies, the mind, is filled with darkness. This is a crucial step to make, because it shows us what work must be done, and that we must persist in our discipline.
Sun, fire, wind, fire-flies, lightnings, and crystal moons represent different forms of light or insights we achieve through working with the creative energy. When, as earth, water, light, heat, and space arise, the fivefold quality of yoga takes place, then there is no longer illness, old age, or pain for him who has obtained a body, produced by the fire of yoga. ―Śvetāśvataropaniṣad
Remember the chakras, the four elements, and the tattvas? These become amplified through pranayama, which produce longevity, health, youth, and life. The fire of yoga can relate to Tummo Yoga or inner heat yoga in Tibetan, representative of the work with the Kundalini.
The first results of yoga they call lightness, healthiness, steadiness, good complexion, an easy pronunciations, sweet odor, and slight excretions. As a metal disc [mirror], tarnished by dust, shines bright again after it has been cleaned, so is the one incarnate person fulfilled and free from grief, after he has seen the real nature of the self [Atman]. ―Śvetāśvataropaniṣad
Is your mind dull, torpid, dark, hard to control or perceive? Work with pranayama. The mind and heart are a mirror that need to be polished and cleansed through prana. In the words of Prophet Muhammad:
There is an organ in the body that, if it is righteous, ensures that the whole system will be righteous; and if it is corrupt, the whole body will become corrupt. This organ is the heart.
“Guard your breaths against God Most High,” state the Sufis. When the mirror is clean, it reflects the genuine image of Atman, the Self, our Innermost God, so that we are free from pain and sorrow. Pranayama will help you with this.
Practical Applications and Benefits
Learning to control our breath aids in the yoking of the vital forces, but while I mentioned to you that prana is in the air and in our semen, our physical breath is only a vehicle for the forces we seek to manipulate.
Pranayama is not, as many think, concerned solely with the breath; breath indeed has very little to do with it. Breathing is only one of the many exercises through which we get to the real pranayama. ―Vivekananda, Raja Yoga
Circulating prana occurs through our willpower and imagination. Breathing is the vehicle through which we obtain the transmutation of our energies. While breath is a powerful and necessary component for our moment to moment existence, even more so are the faculties of perception, concentration, consciousness, attention, and prayer.
If you are performing pranayama but are not mindful of what you are doing, then you will not be successful. Pranayama involves working with each of the three brains of gnostic psychology, directing the energies consciously. “Wherever we direct attention, we expend creative energy” stated Samael Aun Weor. This is essential, since no practice is useful if we are not attentive of what we are doing. Your mind, heart, and body must be relaxed and in control, which is not a state of rigidity, but calmness, composure, flexibility, and firmness. You must resolve to yourself to not needlessly move your body around during pranayama, nor let the mind wander to other things. You also must resolve to not let your heart distract you, but to devote yourself to profound prayer during your exercise. If you are thinking of other things while you are practicing, then you are not practicing. Likewise, if your heart is not at peace, if you are not praying to divinity to aid you, if your emotional center is filled with wrath, anger, or sentiment, ignoring the presence of divinity, you will find it very difficult to focus and have a good practice. Lastly, if your body can’t sit still, if it is agitated and nervous like an animal, constantly moving about, then you will not obtain stillness and the circulation of prana in your system, because the circulation of forces occurs when the waters of the body, heart, and mind are still. Notice that when you cease throwing stones in a lake, the water gradually achieves stability and equilibrium; the surface becomes calm, whereby it can reflect the heavens above in a limpid, calm, and tranquil way. The same with pranayama and the mind. Your mind achieves stillness when you cease agitating it, by not feeding your desires. Pranayama also works to calm the mind when there is enough concentration and cognizance of what you are doing. And they have said, "God created the hearts and made them mines of understanding of Him. After that He created the secret inner awarenesses and made them a place for declaring the Unity [which occurs once the multiplicity of egos are dead and the consciousness is unified in the Beloved, the Innermost]. Every breath that occurs without the guide of knowledge of God and the sign of Unity emerges from blind compulsion, and is a dead thing. The one to whom it belongs is accountable for it.” ―Al Qushayri, Al-Risalah: Principles of Sufism
Here is how to perform a simple pranayama. Seated comfortably with your spine straight and neck and head relaxed, close your eyes and pray to your Divine Mother. Pray that she may help you transmute your energies to your mind and heart, to help you visualize and concentrate.
Imagine in your spine the two nadis Ida (Eve) and Pingala (Adam), connecting your gonads, testicles, or ovaries with your nostrils.
These nadis are polarized differently in men and women, as you can see in the following graphic. In men: • The lunar current, Ida (represented by Eve in the Bible), connects to the left nostril, characterized by lunar or silver atoms. • The solar current, Pingala (represented by Adam in the Bible), connects to the right nostril, characterized by solar or bright, fiery yellow or golden atoms In women this is reversed: • The lunar current, Ida, Eve, connects to the right nostril • The solar current, Pingala, Adam, connects to the left nostril These polarities are switched in the different sexes because husband and wife, like positive and negative electrical currents, compliment and compensate for each other. 
With your right hand, extend your forefinger and thumb while closing your other fingers into your palm. Close your right nostril with your thumb and inhale air through your left nostril. Take in as much air as you can without forcing your lungs or straining yourself. Breath naturally and relaxed.
Now close your left nostril with your forefinger, still holding the right nostril closed with your thumb. Retain the air as long as possible, again without straining your breath. Imagine the energy or prana of the air ascending to the brain through the respective nadi you are breathing through, which connects your nostril with the coccyx and gonads. After retaining the air as long as possible, remove your thumb from your right nostril and exhale slowly, imagining the prana descending through the nadis connecting your head to your heart, with one nadi on each side of your face leading down to your chest. Close your left nostril with your forefinger and inhale through your right nostril. Repeat the process of raising the prana to the brain through your inhalation, raising the energies of that nostril and nadi to the head. Retain the breath as long as possible by closing both nostrils with thumb and forefinger. Finally, lift your forefinger from your left nostril and exhale, imagining the prana descending against to your heart through the two nadis connecting your head to your heart, which descend from the face, down the throat, to your chest. This process constitutes one pranayama. Perform seven pranayamas total. You can do more in accordance with your needs. Here is some more practical advice for performing pranayama at home by the Master Sivananda: Pranayama can also be performed as soon as you get up from bed and just before Japa [mantra recitation] and meditation. It will make your body light and you will enjoy the meditation. You must have a routine according to your convenience and time.
When you perform pranayama, the important aspect of your breathing is retention. With inhalation, you want your lungs to take in a profound amount of air, in a relaxed and calm way, without forcing the lungs to expand beyond its limits. Your breathing should not be forced and loud, but silent and peaceful. I’ve known many people who make a lot of noise when performing pranayama, as if they were some kind of hydraulic engine. But nowhere in the teachings of yoga do we find any support for this tendency.
Pranayama is meant to relax the mind, heart, and body. Straining oneself is counterproductive and inhibits the free circulation of energy. With exhalation, your breathing should flow through your nostrils without noise. I know some people like to perform pranayama in a loud way, which is wrong. Breathing should be calm and natural, without force. There is more strength in relaxation than there is in bodily and mental exertion. This might seem counterintuitive for people in a culture that believe that one must conquer things with force. The opposite is most true for this practice: if you want to be effective in transmutation, tranquility and control is the key.
After your inhalations, you must retain the air as long as possible, again without forcing your lungs. Retention is the most important part of Pranayama, since this is how we internalize and accumulate energy within our etheric-physical laboratory in combination with willpower and imagination, visualization. Your life is measured by how you control your breath, and breathing relates to how we modify and use sexual energy, the source of life. Regulation of breath is the stoppage of inhalation and exhalation. ―Patanjali
To conclude, we will end with comments by Swami Sivananda, who expressed some of the benefits of pranayama. After having explained the technique, which we will practice together today at the end of this lecture, I will conclude with some explanations for why this is beneficial, since many students often write to us asking about some tangible, concrete results for working daily in this exercise.
This body becomes lean, strong and healthy. Too much fat is reduced. There is lustre in the face. Eyes sparkle like diamonds. The practitioner becomes very handsome. Voice becomes sweet and melodious. The inner Anahata sounds are distinctly heard. The student is free from all sorts of diseases. He gets established in Brahmacharya. Semen gets firm and steady. The Jatharagni (gastric fire) is augmented. The student becomes so perfected in Brahmacharya that his mind will not be shaken even if a fairy tries to embrace him. Appetite becomes keen. Nadis are purified. Vikshepa is removed and the mind becomes one-pointed. Rajas and Tamas are destroyed. The mind is prepared for Dharana and Dhyana. The excretions become scanty. Steady practice arouses the inner spiritual force and brings in spiritual light, happiness and peace of mind. It makes him an Oordhvareto-Yogi. All psychic powers are obtained. Advanced students only will get all the benefits. ―Swami Sivananda, Kundalini Yoga 
The reason why many people approach spirituality often comes from the results of organized religion. We often find in popular institutions teachings that, while they resonate with our heart, they are lacking something critical, something profound, and something fulfilling. It might seem unusual that the very thing missing in organized religion is an understanding of sexuality.
People often, on the news and on television, show the results of monastic life, such as in the Catholic Church, which profoundly ignores how sexuality can be used for a divine purpose. In organized religion, they do not know how to utilize the natural expression of the human being, because sexuality is a part of life, and despite what people think, sexuality is also a part of religion, in a genuine sense, not from an institutional dogma. The reason why there are cases of abuse, violence, is because priests do not understand how sexuality should be used and understood, and not repressed. People look at sexuality as something filthy, something perverse, or something to gratify the pleasures of a couple. There are extremes in our culture. In religion, we are taught to reject sex, which has its problems, because as you have seen with institutionalization and the rejection of sexuality, that quality of the human being has to be controlled or understood or worked with, and when people try to repress sexuality, it ends up in forms of perversion, such as molestation of children, deviant sexuality, abuse and degeneration. But we have this other extreme in our culture, where in America, or all throughout the world, people feel that we should indulge in sex. We should acquire as many sensations as we can, pleasant experiences, relationships, and yet, we look at the results in humanity: divorce, suffering, marital conflicts, pain. So it is very clear that when we look at society, people and religion do not understand what the role of sexuality is, from a spiritual perspective, from a divine perspective. Some people think that sexuality is simply a means to procreate, to create children. That is a very noble aspiration, to be a father or a mother, to have a family, but, we do state that that is not the entire gamut of what sexuality is. To procreate the species, that is one part. People don't really understand that sexual expression, as the natural birth right of the human being, can be something divine, heavenly, sacred: not from the Christian perspective, that we are going to use this act as something to create a child, to create a family, but there is another purpose that has been taught in all the ancient schools of religion and mysteries that, unfortunately, have been gutted out, removed―primarily because people face a difficult problem when addressing this issue of sexuality. Sexuality in itself, the creative energy itself, has marvelous potential. It can empower our most divine attributes. It can ennoble the soul, our most divine qualities, because the sexual energy is the ability to create. It always acts. It always has to move, to flow, to work. But the question is how? In what way do we use this energy which resides in our glands, whether male, female? Unfortunately because people have not been educated, we think that sexuality is simply indulging in desire, pornography, prostitution, adultery, and our society worships these qualities and believes that you can indulge in all these actions and think that there are no consequences. But you see the result of what happens to people, the life of prostitutes or adultery. Sexual action is the most profound action a human being can perform. If we push it away, it churns in the subconsciousness and becomes desire that is never satiated, and then it becomes a monster, which is why priests who don't understand how to consciously work with this energy in a divine way―with practices, with exercises, to transform that energy into something creative, into something expressive―that energy then ferments. It rots. It becomes putrid. This is why you see priests committing such horrible crimes against young people. It is really disastrous. So we have to look beyond just the beliefs about what our culture wants us to think. It is better if we can analyze and investigate what this energy is, and the purpose of this lecture is to talk about how the creative energy, in itself, has the potential to develop our spirituality, our true nature, which is the soul. Consciousness and Desire
You might have listened in to previous lectures. We talked a lot about the soul, consciousness, our true nature. Sometimes people think of Buddha nature in Buddhism. It is the pure element of consciousness that can reflect divinity, who is inside, in our hearts and our very qualities of being, qualities like compassion, happiness, serenity, faith, understanding, patience, love.
These are qualities that we have deep down, but unfortunately we have mixed it with impurities: anger, hatred, lust, envy, greed, which religion calls the seven deadly sins. Every tradition has its names for what we call ego, defects, desires. And all that, according to a real meditative tradition, has to be removed. All those negative qualities have to be eliminated. But first we have to comprehend them, understand how our own anger makes us suffer and makes other people suffer, how our own pride injures our neighbor and ourselves at the same time. We don't really understand how our own egotism creates problems for ourselves, and because people do not understand how to work with the mind in an effective way, they take the most powerful energy available to them―the sexual energy―and they channel it through anger, through violence, through perversity. This is how you have all the monsters of today that are very abundant. 
Divine Eroticism and Awakening
So this is a very serious topic and we'll talk about how the soul, known as Psyche in the Greek myth, can be awakened to her true nature through Eros. Eros is the god of love, Cupid, in the Greek myth, which is a symbol. It teaches how our own divine spiritual nature, how through divine love, a divine marriage, the force of Eros, eroticism, awakens our full potential, which is pure, divine.
Different traditions symbolize that work in many ways, but of course, in this lecture we will be very explicit about what these traditions are. You may have heard of alchemy in the Middle East or medieval Europe, Middle Ages. They talk a lot about how we must transform lead into gold. But of course, that is symbolic. It teaches something spiritual, and even psychological. Our egotism, our defects are like lead. They weigh us down. But if we learn to work with energy, the creative sexual energy and learn to direct it with our consciousness, our soul, that energy is going to empower us radically, and with that force we can transmute, transform, elevate, make our egotistical consciousness become a divine consciousness―lead into gold. 
In this image, we have Padmasambhava with his consort, his wife. They are in sexual union, but there are many misunderstandings about what this tradition teaches called Tantric Buddhism. A couple, man and woman, who embody masculine and feminine principles, can combine their energies to work in a very transformative way, and these ancient traditions teach us, whether from the East or the West, how a man and a woman, using the energy that is available to them, and the power and ability to procreate, can take that energy that they awaken within sexual union and transform it, use it to empower and create the soul.
As Jesus taught in the gospel, “that which is born of flesh is flesh” through the common sexual act. But the same sexual act or the sexual act transformed can be utilized for the Spirit, since “that which is born of the Spirit is Spirit.” So many Christians ignore what this teaching is about. They have no clue, because people haven't been educated. The physical sexual act can create a physical child. Anybody knows this. But with certain procedures, if the couple retains the sexual energy in their union and uses that energy with the soul, it can transform their marriage and make it a sacrament, a holy union. This is the meaning of religion, from the Latin religare, “to reunite.” This is the highest yoga, from the Sanskrit yug, “to reunite.” It is also known as tantra, which is where this image comes from. The medieval alchemists, whom people denigrate today, knew this secret science. It was never taught publicly because it has tremendous power. The sexual energy can create anything, a child. It perpetuates the species. Sexual drive motivates every aspect of society, every aspect of life. Even chemicals, compounds, molecules, electrons, atoms, are driven by sexual propulsion, energy―attraction, rejection, repulsion, combinations of energies, a form of marriage. That energy is everywhere, and in the human being, that most profound force, the ability to create, is in our sexual glands. This energy is so powerful that it can develop a human being to their highest potential. So for many centuries, this knowledge was kept secret, because unfortunately many people would abuse it. But we are living in a very different age now, where this type of knowledge and spirituality, information, is given openly. The doors have been opened by divinity for people to understand this kind of knowledge, so that people who want to transform themselves and have a method to help them attain that goal, can. 
The Symbolism of Alchemy
But of course, the alchemical science was taught in symbols in medieval Europe to prevent persecution, such as with the Inquisition in the Catholic Church, which had completely extirpated the sexual teachings of esoteric Christianity.
Alchemy comes from Allah in Arabic, meaning the God, the name of divinity in Islam. And khemia, the Greek word for chemistry. It is the chemistry of God. It is how a couple, man and woman, using their sexualized polarities, can take their energy, combine them, and restraining the sexual energy, circulate that force, learning to control their egotistical desires, and unite out of love, to dominate their subconscious passions. Those individuals, those couples, can unite with God or divinity, whatever name we wish to give to that impersonal energy or force. 
In Greek, the word khemia can also mean “to fuse or cast a metal.” There are many symbols in the Bible that retained this knowledge. Moses lifted up a brazen serpent on a staff to heal the Israelites wounded by divinity for having disobeyed Him. If you study alchemy, the science of metals, bronze is an amalgamation of copper and tin. Copper in alchemical science relates to femininity, woman, love, Venus. Tin relates to Jupiter, masculinity, man. When husband and wife unite their energies, they can awaken the brazen serpent known as kundalini amongst the Gnostics and the Yogis of the East. That serpent can be raised upon a staff, the spinal column, so as to heal our soul from the afflictions of our daily life.
In the Bible, Moses represents willpower, the power and the will to dominate temptation and desire. It doesn't mean to run away from sex, but to approach the sexual act with respect and veneration, with love, to remove passion and desire and connect out of divine love. So this couple, Padmasambhava and his consort, are not united out of lust, to fulfill their animal desires. Unfortunately, people look at these kinds of images and only think with animality, with satisfying and having pleasant sensations. Pleasure is natural to the sexual act, but it should not be the only basis for which a couple unites. It should be for the couple to really develop their love, their consciousness, to take that energy and, through certain exercises, controlling the breath, even performing sacred sounds like mantras, we learn to circulate the energy. Instead of making go from in to out, to expel it, one makes the energy to go out to in, to circulate it, to control it, to elevate it. 
This is the mysteries of Jesus being baptized in the river Jordan. The word ירדן Jordan in Hebrew means “descender.” That energy that is deposited in our sexual glands is divine. It can create life. It is the power of life. The Jews say לחיים L’Chaim, to life, and the Christians call it the Holy Spirit, even if they don't understand what that energy is.
So that power of life can create spiritual life. The couple needs to learn to take that energy, which usually descends down into us and we expel it through a moment of pleasure or a few seconds of pleasure, which are fleeting―that energy instead of descending, we can learn to make it reascend, to make the river turn its course, which instead of going out, it goes in. It circulates as energy. You have the actual matter or entity of semen, which is physical in either men or women. Sexual fluid, those waters which are symbolized in the Bible as the waters of Genesis, the waters of generation, we can learn to be baptized with that energy, transform it, the substance into divine power through very specific procedures. This is very well documented in every religious scripture in the world, but in allegory. 
Jesus performed his first miracle at a wedding, the marriage of Cana. He turned water into wine. People think it is a literal story of Jesus getting people drunk, and they can believe that. But more profoundly, he is teaching a couple who knew this science, to transform the water or entity of semen, into energy, into the wine or ecstasy of the spirit, circulating it. And that is how you are baptized with water. He turned water into wine.
The mystics of Islam, the Sufis speak very beautifully about this too. Very abundantly, they talk about love of God. “Muhammad was in love with God,” and they make it an erotic teaching, which scandalizes many people because people like to separate religion from sex, and don't understand that you show true religion by loving your wife if you are a man, and as a woman, loving your husband. This is a science from Egypt, from Al-Khem. This is a very ancient science that was studied in all the primeval cultures of the world before they degenerated, before people, instead of respecting these types of teachings or laws in themselves, decided to indulge in desire, because sexuality can be for animal pleasure or lust. Or it can be for the soul. It depends, and you have the judge in yourself how that is. This is why we study meditation too. So this is a very deep topic. We are introducing some of the basics, because to really practice like Padmasambhava without lust, united sexually with his wife, takes a lot of work. Because of course, in the beginning we are full of animality, desire. But with training, we can ride upon desire, like a donkey, as Jesus rode up on a donkey into Jerusalem, the heavenly city. Symbols, but not explained for many years. The Sufis also mention that, I believe the poet Rumi, who is the most popular poet in the West today, said that when you look at a cup full of water and you have your own desires, you only see your own face in it. But if you are looking as a result of love of God, you will see God in those waters. He is talking about this. If you are married or husband and wife, male-female, in a relationship that is sexually active, we show our love for divinity in the sexual act. But of course, with training. One has to be educated how to do that. It takes time, but it can be done. Or if one is filled with desire, we look at the sexual act and see just the gratification of pleasure. That is one extreme. Tantra
So this teaching is known as tantra in the East. In Sanskrit, it is a word for “continuum” or “unbroken stream.” It comes from the Sanskrit “tantrum, literally loom, warp.” Hence, it is a “groundwork, a system, a doctrine.”
What is this continuum? When the sexual energy is retained and transformed, it circulates in our body. We have certain energetic channels in our spine, in our body, that can take that energy and circulate it. And we will talk about what that particular aspect of our physiology relates to. But the energy has to be controlled. It has to be contained. That is the only way for energy to circulate. If the energy is released through the orgasm, there is a short circuit. That continuum is broken. So we are very explicit about how tantra works, because there are people who think that tantrism is just about sexually uniting with one's partner, enjoying pleasure, and then reaching the orgasm. There are many people who teach that kind of doctrine, but unfortunately, that type of action feeds desire. In these studies, we are working to remove our imperfections like lust or desire itself. We want to empower the soul but in order for Psyche to waken, we have to work with Eros and retain that power. Even the 14th Dalai Lama explained that in tantra, the seminal force is never let out. We can contain it, conserve it, and make it circulate through mantras or prayer, through breath work. That is how it becomes an unbroken stream. That is how we perform the loom of God. A loom is where we create clothes. When we work with the energy, we create something. If that energy is conserved and worked with for many years, internally we create vehicles of expressing divinity in us. We talk a lot about this in the studies of alchemy as the vehicles of God, the wedding garment of the soul. In the Gospels, it is stated that one cannot attend the marriage of divinity without the wedding garment. So that is the loom. We have to create a type of vehicle in which our soul can act. It is not physical, but it is internal, vehicles that relate to different aspects of our psyche within different dimensions. We will be explaining about what these vehicles are in-depth, but I just want to introduce to you that the energy has to create something. It can create a physical child, or it can create the vehicles of the soul, the soul itself, which is like a wedding garment. Isn't there a saying that you are what you wear? Or “the apparel oft’ proclaims the man,” states Polonius in the play Hamlet. So we weave the soul through this energy. It is a groundwork. It is a system. It is a doctrine, from the word tan, “to stretch or extend.” Of course, this has a sexual significance, as represented by the erection of the male phallus. Tantra refers to “that continuum of vital energy that sustains all things.” So I stated, the creative energy is within our sexual glands, but we find it within everything, from down to the atom, to the galaxy. It is also “the class of knowledge and practices that help us harness that vital energy which can transform us radically, thereby transforming the practitioner.” 
Transmutation
Some people also call this transmutation. You may hear this term a lot within the books of Samael Aun Weor and throughout different lectures on this topic. Tantra, alchemy, and transmutation are the same thing. So transmutation is broken down from trans, which is a prefix we find in words like transcend or transfix. It means to take something “across, beyond or through; to change something thoroughly; to move.”
The word mutate we find relates to “causing something to change in form or nature.” So what is transmutation or sexual transmutation? It means, through practice, to take the actual entity of the semen retained within our body, our receptacle, and with certain prayers, mantras, exercises of breath, we can take that actual matter and transform it into energy, mutate it. I know we are probably familiar with X-Men, mutants, people with power, but people don't want to recognize that Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Moses, and many prophets were mutants. They took that energy of sex and created, or recreated themselves spiritually. They became such great beings because they were married. They had that energy available to them, and through love, they changed themselves. So all those qualities that we admire and beings like the prophets, Jesus, their selflessness, their compassion, they did that because they became mutants. They mutated that matter and became an energy. They carried over that force within themselves, raising it from the sexual glands to the brain, and then to the heart. 
If you are familiar with the shepherd's staff so popular with in Biblical allegory, it refers to that image, the serpent of Kundalini rising from the coccyx to the head and then down to the heart. That is how one leads flocks, spiritually speaking, because they have that energy manifest, at least true teachers, with true prophets or gurus. Therefore, transmutation is “the act of changing, or the state of being changed into another form.”
It is logical that that energy which can create a child can create something inside of us. It has tremendous force. It is power of divinity. Divinity creates through the sexual act, through the sexual energy, but it depends on the quality of our mind. What are we doing with that energy? Are we expelling it out? You can more radically take that force, conserve it, transmute it, make it into something more powerful, because as it is now, it is in a very rudimentary state, but that energy can really grant us access to many things. 
Animal Desire and Divine Sex
So as I said, Krishna was a great mutant. He changed his spiritual form, and he had many powers that are documented in the Bhagavad-Gita, which of course, there was a master in the Hindu Pantheon who actually came many thousands of years ago to represent this principle known as Krishna. He is what is known as the Hindu Christ.
As I said Christ, divinity, is not a person, but an energy. It is impersonal. It is universal. And that energy is synonymous with sex. The power of life, the power of Christ, the power of the Holy Spirit, the power of divinity, is here. Krishna, who is a beautiful symbol of that force, had power to act precisely because the soul or the person was working with that energy very beautifully, very profoundly. As I mentioned, divinity is the sexual energy. It is a sacred force, which is why even in the Qur’an, the doctrine of the Muslims, some of the sacred names of divinity is Al-Khaliq, “the Creator,” and Al-Wadud, meaning: “the Loving.” And that scripture mentions how, “Did we not create you from a sperm-drop…” which of course can be a literal thing. We are created from the sperm and the ovum, but more profoundly, if you know the science of alchemy, Allah-Khemia, divinity creates in us by taking that very same matter and transforming it, transmuting it, creating the soul, creating life. "And truly it is easy for us if you are but believers." Meaning: people who are not fanatic or dogmatic, but who learn to be through the power of love. Be-lieve. That was the original meaning of the term. Now belief is something just to accept a doctrine with the intellect or to feel something is true, but to not know. So there are a lot of parallels in different scriptures, but I would like to quote from the Bhagavad-Gita, which is a very powerful statement of how Krishna, Christ, is that creative energy. I am the strength of the strong, devoid of काम kama and राग raga. I am धमम kama which is not contrary to धमम Dharma. ―Bhagavad-Gita 7:11
There are a lot of words from the Sanskrit that have a lot of different meanings depending on the context of the phrase. So the same word काम kama in some context can mean, “sex life.” It can mean “lust.” It could be “desire,” or just “pleasure.” On the contrary, it can be “chastity.”
Chastity is an interesting term. People have been miseducated to think that chastity means abstention from sex. It is logical that people came up with this definition, because when people think of sexuality, they think of animal gratification. So what does it mean to be chaste? It means not to engage in the sexual act with the orgasm. Chasity simply means “purity, immaculateness.” And it refers to a couple learning to use their energies. They can be sexually connected, but chaste. No confusion there. People get hung up on the idea of immaculate conception. Was Jesus really born from Mary when she did not have sex with anyone? Obviously, that is a very ludicrous interpretation, because the only way to create is through the sexual act. But the question is: what is the definition of chastity? Obviously, Jesus was born from his parents, and through an immaculate conception, which means through a union that did not involve orgasm. It is not necessary to expel millions of spermatozoon to create a one child, because only one sperm is going to fertilize an egg. It is not necessary. If the couple is working seriously and is working with divinity, if they want to have a child and they are praying to divinity to give them a son or a daughter or a girl, they can concentrate on their divinity and pray and work with the creative energy. If it is accordance with the law of divinity, they can take one sperm out from the man and it can fertilize the egg. That is an immaculate conception. Obviously, it is very magical, you could say, because the sperm that is utilized in that instance is going to be very superior than one ejaculated out of lust. Obviously, there is a psychological quality embedded in the energy, depending on how we use it. If we are chaste and are pure in our minds and hearts, really loving our spouse and being divine or loving divinity, that energy becomes superior, elevated, for concentration and prayer. So: I am the strength of the strong, devoid of काम kama and राग raga. ―Bhagavad-Gita 7:11
Devoid of lust, and the word for raga is “attachment, grasping; to clutch and to pull; to hold.” Pretty sure we can look at our own lives to see how much of our sexual activity was based on attachment, clinging, holding, grasping. We want those experiences. We chase after them. We change our appearance. We model our behaviors so that we can find a partner. We are grasping at sexual pleasure and sensations and being in a relationship and satisfying those desires. That is raga.
Love is something very different, something divine, which is born in the soul when the time is ripe and the appropriate partner is met. But raga is sexual attachment: wanting to indulge in animal pleasure, the sensations of sex, and grasping at those experiences at the expense of our soul. Desire is one thing, but the soul is another. The soul knows how to love, to respect the partner. Desire only wants to satisfy itself. That is the distinction between an angel and a demon. An angel has love, Eros towards Psyche, but desire only wants to fulfill itself at any cost. So: I am the strength of the strong devoid of lust and attachment. ―Bhagavad-Gita 7:11
But then he uses something very interesting here.
I am काम kama which is not contrary to धमम dharma. ―Bhagavad-Gita 7:11
So many people get confused about this statement. How is it that he says I am not kama and yet he says I am kama? Because the word kama is dual. It's dualistic. It can mean lust. It can mean love. It can mean desire. It can mean chastity. So he is sexual drive that is not contrary to Dharma, and Dharma means “religious principles, law, truth, reality, virtue.”
So contrary to popular belief, there is a type of sexuality that is divine. It doesn't have to be animal. And in fact, Krishna is saying that “I am a sexual union of husband and wife, male-female, that is not contrary to the divine law.” It is respected by the gods, because the buddhas or angels or masters or prophets became what they were because of certain causes and conditions, spiritual laws. Like, if you wish to create a physical child, there is a procedure through the common way, through lust. But there is also a divine law that says if you want to create the soul, to be born of the spirit, one can use certain procedures or the science of alchemy. So “I am sex that is not contrary to spirituality.” When we think of laws, we tend to think of laws given by society, by governments. When I mentioned husband and wife, I don't mean marriage papers. People are not married because of a paper or a ritual. Real marriage occurs between a couple when they sexually unite, and that is all that divinity really cares about, because when a couple unites, they are sharing all their mind, their energies, their emotions, their forces. It's a marriage. It is a type of union, but unfortunately, many of us have engaged in relationships or entered the sexual act with many partners without knowing about the Dharma, which is, you know, our situation. But of course, that can be changed and rectified. This is why we give classes on this type of knowledge. So what I mean by law, Dharma, truth, reality, has to do with the causes and conditions that produce our happiness in the soul, our spiritual development, to help us become like Jesus or Buddha or Moses or the prophets. 
Liberation from Desire
So again, I show Padmasambhava with his consort. He stated very interestingly that:
Lustful people do not enter the path of liberation. ―Padmasambhava
Marriage, sexual union, the sexual act, can produce one's greatest happiness and one's greatest damnation, suffering. Look at humanity today, as I mentioned―people engaging in sexual behaviors that produce pain. Of course, people being hypnotized by kama and raga, desire and attachment, always go towards those experiences, grasping at pleasant experiences, and don't recognize that that very same act of lust and desire produces pain. Because once lust is fed, sex has culminated with animal pleasure, it can result in disillusionment pain, suffering.
The sexual act itself, tantra, alchemy, is the narrow way mentioned by Jesus in the Gospels. Straight is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life and few there be that find it. ―Matthew 7:14 
Of course, people think of this path of liberation as something devoid of a sexual flavor, but literally, the narrow way is when husband and wife unite, male-female. This is the symbol of the cross. Vertical phallus. Horizontal uterus. They unite so that those energies accumulate, and when directed by the couple, it can crucify our defects. It is a symbol of Jesus going on His Passion. He lived it literally, physically, but he was showing something symbolic and allegorical and sexual.
That energy which can create life can also destroy impurity. That is the nature of the Kundalini. It is the nature of Shiva-Shakti amongst the Hindus, the creator and destroyer. Shiva is the power of the Holy Spirit or the sexual energy, which in tantra. That energy can be directed at any defect, any fault that we have, that we have understood profoundly through meditation, and to remove it so that the soul is liberated and the soul is united with divinity. That is the path of liberation, the secret path that Jesus taught that few find. It is obvious that humanity does not know the path, because you look at the state that it is in. Lustful people do not enter that path, meaning: they may be married and they may know this teaching and may know about conserving sexual energy and working on the mind, but if they don't actually work on themselves, they don't enter the path from experience. On our websites we talk a lot about Gnosis, from the Greek, meaning “knowledge,” to have experience born from spiritual practice. We cannot have genuine spiritual knowledge, experience of divinity, if our soul is asleep, if Psyche is dormant, but we can awaken the soul by learning to use this energy. Of course, married couples have much more power to work with, but individual practitioners can learn through pranayama, spiritual exercises, how to work with that energy as an individual until, with work and patience, that person may find their partner in accordance with divinity. They may be helped. They may find their marriage. This was originally the meaning of monastic life, which of course lost its true purpose. Monks and nuns would practice individually at their monasteries for many years, learning to circulate and work with that energy individually. When the time came, they would be brought their partner and they would learn to practice alchemy. Unfortunately, the Catholic Church and many groups didn't like the sexual flavor of this type of teaching, because, of course, it scandalizes many people, unfortunately. This is the stone of Peter: the rock of offense upon which we should build our church. “Is it not marvelous?” it says in the gospels (1 Peter 2:7-8). Many teachings hidden there. 
The Caduceus of Mercury
Lastly, we will talk about how that energy can circulate. The Bible calls the circuitry of tantra, those energetic channels that rise from our coccyx to our brain and then to our heart, the two witnesses in the Book of Revelation. It is known as Ida and Pingala in Sanskrit amongst the Hindu yogis. These are the two serpents that entwine a staff on the symbol of medicine, because we heal our soul like the bronze serpent healed the Israelites in the wilderness by working with these two energetic channels in us.
These two serpents are two forms of energy: masculine-feminine, solar-lunar, copper-tin. So whether we are male or female, we have those two energy circuits in our spine. But of course, men will tend to polarize more of the masculine energy and woman the feminine energy in their physicality, which is why it is important that if one is going to work with this energy in a marriage, you need both polarities to create. Physical man, physical woman. Together, just as they can create a child, they can create something more. But we also have those circuits in our spine. As you notice, Adam-Eve in the Bible, male-female, Ida-Pingala, Solar and lunar. We can do certain exercises like in books called Kundalini Yoga, The Yellow Book, even some practices in The Perfect Matrimony by Samael Aun Weor, to work with mantras and prayer and breath work. If we are single, we can take that energy on our own and circulate it, and train ourselves so that we can use that energy to empower meditation. That is the primary purpose of working with that energy, to empower our soul. 
But if one is married, of course, it is more energy, more fire, but more difficulty, because the difficulty that couples face is that they are trying not to eat the forbidden fruit. In the Bible, Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It is a symbol of how they didn't respect the law of divinity, of conserving the energies of God in themselves. They expelled it, or better said: they expelled themselves from Eden, which is a symbol of the state of bliss in spirituality that our humanity once knew before it indulged in desire. This is eating the forbidden fruit, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, of positive and negative, Ida-Pingala: the two witnesses.
That forbidden fruit is, of course, the orgasm. Divinity said, “You shall not eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Do not take that energy and expel it out of yourselves because the day that you do, you will surely die, spiritually speaking.” This is the foundation of the Judeo-Christian Bible. Of course, the one that tempted them was a serpent, because that serpent above is Kundalini. But if we are filled with egotism and desire, it is the tail of the demons, the tail of temptation We have many practices that can teach you how to work with energy. To really understand how all the different symbols and traditions teach this science takes many years. It is very extensive studying the Bible or the Qur’an or the Bhagavad-Gita and many scriptures. I just wanted to introduce some of these elements for you to see that is very vast. It is a very profound teaching, which you can verify not only through reading books by Samael Aun Weor or other authors, but really examining the original root scriptures of tantra, of alchemy. It takes a lot of time to learn and understand how this science was taught and also more importantly, how we practice it in ourselves. Do you have any questions? Questions and Answers
Question: You were talking about how we can use this energy, how we can eliminate imperfections. Is that only for married couples or is that for single people?
Instructor: Good question. For both. Obviously, a single practitioner is going to have energy to a degree. They can learn to direct that energy through pranayama, mantras, prayer, so that they can eliminate certain defects that they have to a very minor extent. When a person is married, they have available to them the fire of a sun. More power. So when they are sexually united as a couple, they can have more force by which to eliminate defects. So compare a single person to the light of a candle. Compare a married couple to the light of the sun. You can't compare the magnitude of that force. It is truly tremendous. So obviously, individuals can eliminate ego, defect, desires, but married couples can eliminate much more. They can do the totality of the work. So eventually people who are single, if they really want to pursue this type of path, they have to eventually get married. But of course, that is a delicate thing, a long process, and depends on the unique situations of the individual. Question: What is the Buddhist root tantric script? I studied online, and I guess many teach adultery and black tantra in the scriptures. Are there any tantra scriptures that are still in tact that the Dalai Lama uses or any in other tradition? Instructor: Sure. Just to be clear, as I mentioned, there are different forms of tantra. There is positive tantra. There is negative tantra. We call them white and black. White tantra refers to purity in sex, meaning: never expelling the sexual energy in any form or way, whether physically, mentally, emotionally, to orgasm, or through desire. You have black tantra, which is exclusively focused on expelling the energies and even taking that energy and directing it into desire, which of course is not what we teach here. That is something different. That's called black tantra because it is impure. It is the science of demons. People who really feed their lust and desire direct that energy into anger and pride and fear, laziness, to fortify those elements. So obviously in the end, that produces a lot of suffering for individuals and other people. There is also gray tantra, which sometimes a couple unites periodically. Sometimes they conserve the energy. Sometimes they expel it. Gray is in the middle, but eventually gray tantra degenerates into black tantra, because obviously these desires accumulated from indulging in lust. It becomes comes bigger. The Dalai Lama talks a lot about Padmasambhava. He wrote a book called The Tibetan Book of the Dead: Bardo Thodol. A lot is about consciousness and dreams, but is one of the most seminal tantric texts available, which you can read about. It talks a lot about states of consciousness and dream yoga, dream science, which you can learn to take the energies of tantra, transmutation, prayer, pranayama, so that your consciousness can awaken from dreams, which is partially one of the symbols of Psyche and Eros. She awakens from her sleep, meaning internally, even when being in the dream state. She awakens our consciousness so that she can investigate those regions, those realms called heavens, different dimensions, which is where we gravitate to when our physical body sleeps. We go out in the dream state usually hypnotized by our own projections of mind, dreams, but we can awaken from dreams by using that energy. So that is a key text that the Dalai Lama introduces, and I believe one of the most recent publications of that book, The Tibetan Book of the Dead and the works of Padmasambhava especially are powerful. Tsong Khapa too. It has more Mahayana Buddhism, but you know, he teaches the foundations by which to understand tantra, especially. And of course the study of tantra is very deep. [See also Tsong Khapa’s The Great Exposition of Secret Mantra in three volumes, also a key tantric text]. I just want to just give you a bit of the gamut of what that tradition is like, because people were never introduced to tantra right off the bat. This is a very different lecture than what has been done traditionally for thousands of years, because they would make the student study under a guru or sheikh or teacher or prophet, or whatever, for 10, 20, 30, 40 years, before they taught them, “Now that you know how to work with your energy as an individual, now, I am going to teach you the science of how to practice in a marriage.” So there are tantric texts out there and I can give you some references too to write them down. Question: A lot of tantra from the Dalai Lama, they speak about visualization a lot. To visualize yourself as an enlightened being and visualize a mandala... How does Gnosis combine that visualization? Instructor: You can read The Mystery of the Golden Flower as one book that we have available, where Samael Aun Weor explains how when a couple is united and after they have meditated profoundly, they can work together, and when they are sexually united, they can imagine an event and their day in which a certain defect that they observed in themselves popped up. Imagine that defect. If it's the husband's defect, he explains to his wife, “This is the defect I saw in myself earlier in this day at this moment. This is what I have comprehended. I noticed I saw lust in myself,” as an example. The partner, the wife imagines with him. They both develop their imagination and visualize that defect that they want to eliminate together. They pray. They do mantras, and they work to eliminate that defect through concentrating upon what we call the Divine Mother. The Divine Mother Kundalini is Her name. She can eliminate defects when the couple is working together. Of course, that is a very powerful practice. It just takes a lot of communication and work and support, you know. You can read about that in The Mystery of the Golden Flower specifically. The whole book just talks about how to do that. You imagine the defect you want to eliminate, and because the couple is united, they are like God. They can create. Male-female. Adam-Eve. Or in the Hebrew name: יהוה Jehovah, Iod-Havah. י Iod is masculine, Adam. A הוה Havah is Eve, because the word for Eve in the Bible is חַוָה Chavah. Iod-Havah is our divinity. So the couple has to work together, unite their polarities, and they can visualize together what they want to eliminate in the husband. And then, after the husband and eliminates that defect, together they eliminate that fault because they are sharing that power to create and destroy. They take turns and the wife can present a defect she observed in herself, understood, and meditated upon. They work on that defect together. That is the procedure. Of course, it takes a lot of time to learn that. Actually, you can read about it, but when you are practicing, it is another thing. Question: Can single people do the visualization? Instructor: Yeah, they can visualize whatever defect they have understood in themselves and ask for annihilation through certain mantras like Krim, is one mantra.
The vowel S is another.
We have explained this process of meditation in our course Gnostic Meditation if you want to know how to practice that type of meditation. You can study the last lecture in that course that is called Retrospection Meditation. Any final comments or questions? So I invite you to study, because I know we talked about a lot of different things, but the main purpose is to present the breadth of this science. It is very deep and extensive. It takes a lot of study and practice and understanding. So if you are interested, you can see some of the books we have available that talk about these things. But also, if you want to read these books and scriptures online, you can go to Glorian.org, which has everything available electronically too. |
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