Welcome everybody to our sixth lecture on Dream Yoga and Astral Travel. We spoke extensively about why we dream, the causes of oneiric experience, particularly in relation to our psychology—whether objective, clear, pure, selfless, factual, or subjective, based on the faults of our mind, our defects, our errors. We study our dreams because we have a very particular purpose, a very specific goal, which is to awaken our full potential, awaken to the reality of the divine.
Unfortunately, many approach the study of dreams with a mistaken attitude. There are many who wish to have lucidity, some type of intensity of experience related to the dream state, to have awareness of dreams. This has been called lucid dreaming, but we are different in these studies. We seek to eliminate dreams themselves, to no longer see through a lens or a glass darkly, but to see what is there within the reality of that dimension, the reality of that state, without any filter, any condition, any fault. Awareness of dreams can be good in the beginning: to have a type of depth, flavor, and expansion of perception. However, there is a fundamental problem. Dreams are but dreams. They are illusory. They are not real. They are not objective. They do not truly reflect the truth of the divine, the realities of the spirit, our innermost Being or God. Dreams, as we have mentioned, are projections of the mind. They are merely an expression of our psychological content, like a projector on a screen, and while we can have greater resolution of that imagery, more vividness, like watching an improved television screen, it is still a mirage, an illusion, a lie. The vividness and the intensity, the breadth and depth of imagination, to see what is there, that, in itself, is a quality of the consciousness, a quality of our true nature. While the capacity to perceive is wonderful, to have greater depth and breadth of one’s perception within the astral state, this, in itself, does not mean we are seeing reality, what is there. For that we need to turn off the projector, turn off the mind, and see with the soul, what we call the Essence, our true nature, our reality. Lucid dreaming, in itself, is a step. In these studies, we go further. We need to understand not only why we dream, but how. What are the mechanisms? What are the structures of the mind? What are the ways in which we do not see life as it is? How do we perceive? How do we see ourselves? This lecture is an expansion of the previous one where we talked about the cause of our psychological slumber, why we dream. But now we are going to explain the different dreams that manifest and what are the different types of dreams. By understanding the “how,” we can awaken. Our Focus
So, this is our focus. We are going to examine the expression of dreams—their manifestation within our psychology. In this process we learn that through the types of dreams that we experience, we understand how we use energy, how we use force of various modifications, densities, rarities, and subtleties.
In order to awaken consciousness, we need to save energy. To awaken within the dream state requires that we conserve our psychological, spiritual forces. We are going to examine how dreaming wastes energy and by learning to control the energy of our psyche, we have the potential to activate and drive our car—the astral, the mental vehicles—and even beyond. In this process we have to discriminate what we are seeing. What are we perceiving? How are we perceiving? In a sense, it is impossible to understand, or know how to liberate oneself from a cage, from a prison, if we do not know how we are locked up. What is the cell? What is the lock? When you understand how it all works together, you can free yourself—the same spiritually—free yourself and experience these higher realities. Dream Logic and Awakening
Unfortunately when we study ourselves, we often approach our spiritual life with the wrong tools.
We all understand that we have a form of dream logic. When we look at dreams, we find that there is a narrative, a thread, a story in which we are the actors, the participants, and the witnesses. We emphasize that by understanding the logic of dreams, we can fully know ourselves, because our dreaming life is a reflection of something deeper, psychologically speaking, which we fundamentally ignore. Anyone who has had a nightmare has directly perceived the reality of what religions call hell. Those are living manifestations of our deepest traumas, our deepest pains, our most unutterable fears. Likewise, dreams in themselves do not merely have to reflect our own inferior states of mind. There is a potential within the dream state to see something real. We call them visions, astral experiences. We call them samadhis. They too have a type of logic, a type of narrative, a type of thread, but distinct from the inferior type. It is a very different quality than a nightmare or an incoherent dream. This duality of dreams shows us that we are a true mystery. Our soul is an unexplored territory. Any person studying dream yoga and practicing it learns to experience and understand our real, inner worlds. While dreams in themselves may seem unsolvable, difficult to interpret—(this logic which escapes a type of analysis or interpretation)—the truth is that it is possible to understand what our dreams are communicating, whether they are from above or below, whether they are a vision or an illusion. It is possible to discriminate what is going on and to interpret with wisdom, so that we can make better decisions with our life. Visions from the divine teach us how to live. But for that we need to approach the logic of dreams with an entirely different apparatus. Many people approach the study of dreams with the intellect. They look to dream dictionaries, other people’s testimonies, symbols, to try and decipher what is going on. Many people rely upon the mind to solve the riddle of the soul. If you have been studying the course of this series, we have been discussing that difference. Consciousness and the Essence, the pure soul, is not the intellect. It is what perceives before thought. It does not require intellectual direction, analysis. It is merely looking at phenomena and them seeing for what they are. Thought is much slower. It comes later. The intellect is a useful tool, but it has its limited utility. People who study dreams with the intellect are like people trying to study the atom with a telescope, or study the stars with a microscope. The intellect has its place, but it must be used with understanding of its limitations. This implies that we are using the consciousness, the soul. Its distinct characteristic is comprehension, perception, and understanding—intuition. You know it without having to think. It is a quality of the heart. You perceive a phenomenon and you know what it means. It does not require comparison. The mind can only show A and B, good and bad, thesis and antithesis. This logic of dreams in itself can be deciphered when we learn how to use the consciousness, when we direct it at will, when we train it. But for most of us, that is very difficult, primarily because our soul is not active. It is not trained. It is not awake. Everything we have explained up to this point in this course is leading us to understand that the study of dreams requires the appropriate tools, the right methods. For that we need to abandon any type of assumptions, presuppositions, attachments, fears, desires, wanting these dreams to mean a certain thing, wanting a particular phenomenon to fit within a box. We need to expand our categories, and this is a type of logic that is not intellectual. It is profound. It is universal. It does not require thinking. Now this type of superior understanding does not mean that the intellect is not there. It is merely suspended. It ceases to be such an active force in our life, dominating our daily behaviors and making us dream. Instead, we activate a superior faculty of the mind, which is understanding: to receive knowledge, just like dreams are received or visions are received within the soul. For that we need to put behind our terrestrial self. Use it in its place. Use it appropriately. But be aware of being here and now. You are a soul within the body, like driving a car. You are not the car. You are not the engine, the organs, the mechanism. We will talk about all of that—how we are made up—so that we can understand our psyche deeply. For that we have to study our life, our moment-to-moment existence. As we stated, dreams at night are merely a reflection of our daily states. No one has known himself truly, who has not studied his dreams. The study of dreams at once shows what a great mystery our soul is, and that this mystery is not altogether insoluble, as some metaphysicians supposed. Dreams reveal to us that aspect of our nature which transcends rational knowledge. That in the most rational and moral man there is an aspect of his being which is absurd and immoral, one knows only through the study of one's dreams. All our pride of nationality and morality melts into nothingness as soon as we reflect upon our dreams. There is logic in our dreams or rather the logic of our waking consciousness is just like the dream logic. —Sivananda, Philosophy of Dreams
There are levels. We stated that we are 3% awake as a consciousness and 97% submerged as subconsciousness, unconsciousness, and infra-consciousness. We study the relationship between our dreams and our daily life to understand the connections.
Impressions
The way we do that is by studying our life, our impressions.
Life enters us all the time. We experience through our senses, sight, taste, touch, smell, hearing, all the different phenomena of life. We have a tendency in Western culture, especially, to go through existence without any awareness, thinking of something else, and yet we are not diligent. We are not present. Why is that? It is because we are not paying attention to our body and where we are at psychologically. Life enters us through our senses as impressions. An impression is basically data: sensory, visual, auditory, kinesthetic, tactile, olfactory, gustatory information. Our psyche, our consciousness while in the body, learns to perceive with the senses. Information enters the senses, and it strikes the mind. But unfortunately because we are not really driving our mind, our body with awareness, we just take the impressions of life unconsciously without awareness. Consider the mind and consciousness itself like a pool of water or like a film. For anyone who has done photography, you know that light imprints within a film strip in order to replicate an image. The psyche and the mind are no different. The mind receives the data of the world, and we ingest impressions within our psychology. It can be a food, conversation—really—there is an infinitude of impressions. But we have very distinct ways of recording those experiences. We call it memory. We call it images, imagination. You ever watch a TV show and later have a dream that you are acting with its characters? It is because you took in those impressions from the television. They entered the mind unconsciously, and they were not transformed. They imprinted within the psyche, and therefore that image comes to life within your dreams. This word impression comes From the Latin impressio, impress, “pressed in,” from the verb, imprimere, “to imprint.” We often relate the word impression “to an effect produced upon someone,” like “this person gave me a good impression,” or maybe a bad one. What is ironic is that, in example of the television show, we take in images and we don’t digest them. We ingest information. These images and experiences imprint within our mind, but we do not question what they are. We do not question the consequences of what we psychologically take in. The same applies to our relationships. For example, we meet a new person at work. They say something that offends us. We have a bad impression of them. That image entered our mind, our psyche, and we did not transform it. We did not understand it. That is because we are not awake. We are not conscious. We do not see, for example, that this person might have been having a bad day. Maybe their spouse is in the hospital. Maybe they are suffering from a terminal illness, and therefore, because we are ignorant of the situation, we may have anger, resentment, pride, fear and a conglomeration of different reactions which are based on fantasy. We are not seeing the reality of the person. We are merely interacting with the images that we have of them in our mind. This is dreaming. If we do this during the daytime, then when we go to bed at night physically, we repeat the same process, because what you are in your dreams is what you are in your daily life. There is no difference, except when you are in your physical body, you have limitations. Our mind is a film strip. We are constantly taking in data. But the question becomes: are we understanding what we perceive? Do we understand how we take in impressions and how we relate to them? It is not an intellectual exercise. It is a psychological sense that has to be intentionally activated. It has to be worked with. Otherwise these impressions enter us and leave a mark, as impressed upon a surface. The mind like water. When it is struck with a terrifying impression, a trauma, an ordeal, the mind is in chaos. It is a storm churning with emotion and pain. That typically defines the lives of most people. Perhaps a traumatic experience happened in our early years and because we have not trained ourselves to understand what we perceive and what have we perceived, we are living in disturbance, affliction. 
The Human Machine
There is a method to cease suffering and to understand how we live now, but also how we can live better, and how we can understand dreams themselves. How do we dream during the day? How do we dream at night? We study what is called the human machine.
This diagram is a representation of us. We know that the physical body is marvelous machine. We have organs. We have different systems which regulate circulation, breathing, digestion, which are so miraculous primarily because we usually perform them without any intention, any awareness. These things often work without any need to regulate them consciously. But likewise, not only is our body a machine, but also our psychology. We were discussing impressions. We receive data from the world, which enters our senses and then our mind reacts, intaking these different elements, these experiences. Then we have a type of response. The human body needs its energy, needs fuel, from food, water, from air, in order to subsist. Likewise, the consciousness needs its food. What is that food? It is impressions, but not impressions taken in without awareness, but digested impressions, masticated, digested and processed nutrition. We call it understanding. We call it comprehension. As of now, we take in information from the world, but without any cognizance, and then we react in different ways. We dream in different ways, whether it is through our intellect with our thoughts, comparisons, our beliefs, or emotions like pleasure, pain, etc. Similarly, we have movement relating to motor aspect of our psychology, which is where we process movement: to do or not to do, to act. Or instinct: fight or flight, freeze, for example. Lastly, we have our sexual reactions to life, our sexuality: attractions and repulsions. These are five centers that constitute what we are not only physically, but also psychologically. We call them the five centers. We also call them the three brains within our studies. These are mechanisms that have a physical component in our body, but they also operate in a multidimensional level, psychologically, energetically and spiritually. We know that we have an intellectual brain. This is well known from science. We likewise have an emotional brain or heart with its nervous systems. Lastly, we have our spinal column which gives us life. It allows to interact with the world—to do. These last three centers relate to our motor-instinctual-sexual brain. They are really three centers, but we conglomerate them as one for the sake of synthesis. We dream through these centers all the time because we are not aware of this machine itself. Usually, we are not paying attention to our body. Who is driving our car? Have we ever observed this fact? We may know that we are seated, listening, perhaps with the intellect. We are taking in these impressions and comparing with what is said to what was said in the past. Maybe there is an emotional reaction, like or dislike, discomfort or enthusiasm. Maybe with our movement we feel we need to fidget. We are restless. Or the instinct perhaps of wanting to flee. Likewise, the sexual center has its form of functionalism related to attraction or repulsion, as I said. This machine has marvelous potential. The body has marvelous capacities, but only if we know how to use them, if we know how to drive our car. We need to remember that the consciousness is not the car. This body is merely a vehicle, and this vehicle has many parts. Psychologically speaking, the vehicle of the intellectual brain is to process thought. The vehicle of the heart is to process feeling. Likewise with action, with the motor-instinctual-sexual brain. These brains have a very particular usage, and we use them all the time in life, but usually without awareness because we do not really observe the fact. We may know that we are seated in this chair, but are we observing this fact? Are we seeing ourselves and paying attention? If we wish to know how to awaken consciousness, we need to understand how we dream. To understand how we dream through different psychological reactions to life, it is important to understand how these machines work. Relative Speed of the Five Centers
We all know that some computers have different processing speeds. Some are faster than others. The same thing with our human machine, our psychology. These different centers receive impressions from the external world, but also interiorly, processing or receiving them with different types of capacities.
The intellect is the slowest aspect of who we are. It is not the quickest. Thinking, daydreaming, memorizing, remembering, recollecting, these in themselves are not really quick, although because our consciousness is not really trained, we tend to get distracted by a memory or problem, something we are trying to solve with the mind. There is something quicker than the intellect, which is our center of movement. We see that it is 30,000 times faster than the intellect. This is easily provable. Perhaps we are driving a car. Someone walks out in front of us and without thinking, we turn the wheel. We react and avoid an accident. That is because our motor center is quicker. It is faster. Likewise, instinct is 30,000 times faster than the intellect, like movement. You put your hand on a hot stove. You feel the pain. Then you retract your hand, and then you think “That hurt.” Then you feel the emotional reaction, perhaps anger. Instinct is faster than the intellect, which explains why martial artists or boxers train the way they do by using the instinctual center in order to react and respond to danger. Emotions are 60,000 times faster than the intellect because emotions are much more volatile than thought. Many like to pride themselves as intellectual people, being reasonable. Yet having a negative emotion is difficult because it is so quick. Maybe we received an impression of a loved one giving us criticism and then we reacted, feeling anger. That anger can be very difficult to control because emotion is quick. It is overpowering. But even faster than the emotional center is the most profound, powerful, and influential aspect of our psychology, which is the sexual center. It is 120,000 times faster than the intellect. This explains why in a moment of introducing yourself to a new person, you can determine an immediate sexual affinity. It does not require thinking. It is just an immediate spark of attraction—love at first sight, is the phenomenon. These centers operate in different speeds, and most of the time we receive impressions that interact in different ways with those centers. Our reactions are precisely, usually, egotistical. We react because we have anger, because we have pride. We have lust, resentment, attachments, fears. We said earlier in the previous lecture that this is ego, multiple defects, different errors. We are studying the human machine in relation to how we dream because we dream through the five centers. An impression hits our consciousness, hits the senses, and the consciousness is not active. We are not driving our car. We are not paying attention psychologically to what is happening within us, and therefore that impression enters the psyche and it is not transformed. Maybe someone treats you with a lot of disrespect, saying something hurtful. Because we are not paying attention, that impression enters us and we receive it with the emotional center, which is very quick. Because we are not transforming it with the soul, immediately anger emerges. That anger has its own thoughts, its own will to do. Therefore, that emotional reaction, that emotional response is a dream. We do not think of it as a dream, as an illusion, but it is. Perhaps, as in the former example, we are not listening or understanding where that person is coming from, or why they are upset. We feel anger in that moment, but we do not really question what is going on with the other person, to feel love for that person—compassion, understanding. Instead, impressions enter us, and we react. Maybe, we meet another person and we are married, and there is a sexual attraction there, lust, with its own logic, its own ways of thinking, its own ways of feeling. Because that impression of meeting that person was not transformed, it could lead to problems. This is why divorces happen. It is because our ego is making us dream all the time. 
The Bad Secretary: Psychological Mistranslation and Disequilibrium
We call our ego and the personality a bad secretary. If we are not paying attention to our car, or we do not know how to use it in the moment, we can get into accidents. While this is a physical example, it is also a metaphor for our spiritual life. A moment of inattention can bring disgrace. We can make a wrong decision, an error, because we are not seeing reality. We are not understanding how we are dreaming in the moment.
So, these impressions enter the psyche, and we mistranslate them. We do this all the time. Maybe a person approaches us who is speaking with the heart, is kind, is altruistic, generally concerned with, perhaps, our well-being. Maybe because we take in that impression without being conscious of it. We take it through the sexual center and think “This person likes me,” and therefore we ask, declare one’s attractions, even though that person had no intention. We often receive impressions through the wrong centers. When we should respond with our heart, sometimes we do it with our intellect. Maybe there is an argument between loved ones. One partner is dreaming through the intellect, having all these ideas: “I want to do this… and that. I think we should solve this problem with reason.” Meanwhile, the other partner is upset emotionally, responding with the heart, dreaming with that center and not seeing reality, not seeing the other partner, but seeing “what we want.” This produces disequilibrium. Disequilibrium means in a moment of crisis—or perhaps when receiving a difficult impression—the intellect thinks one thing, the heart feels another, and the body wants to leave or fight. There is conflict. There is no integration there. It is confusion. Our desires, our defects, create confusion, create discordance and problems. When we study our dreams, when we seek to understand how to awaken in dreams, we have to examine all these mechanical processes in ourselves during the day, because the way we react to life physically is a barometer of how we are going to act in the internal worlds, how we dream within the internal worlds. Our internal experiences are merely a deeper reflection of who we are all the time. But usually with our personality, our name, our language, our culture, our habits, our face, we do not tend to look in the depths or observe these mechanical actions in themselves. If we want to awaken the consciousness, we must learn to save energy, as I said, to cease dreaming, to be aware of our human machine. We must be aware of how we waste energy, whether it is through thoughts, whether it is through negative emotions, resentment, pride, etc. Or maybe we waste energy through the motor center, always hyperactive, and never resting. Perhaps we engage in sports, like martial arts, too much. We get into fights. That is the instinctual center. Or we waste energy sexually, which is the biggest problem for people. That energy has the potential to transform us completely psychologically. We know, even from Freud, how many of the unconscious drives of a person have a sexual root, the libido. This force often permeates the actions of our life: the way we dress, the way we talk, the way we try to impress others, our attitudes, our actions. Likewise, it is important to understand the energies of the psyche. How do we use intellectual energy? How do we expend emotional energy? Or movement? Or instinct? Or sexuality? — which we study in many other courses available on our website, particularly in relation to alchemy, which is another topic. 
Our Psychological Center of Gravity
It is important to ask ourselves a deep question: what is our psychological center of gravity? What center do we tend to use instead of others? Is it our mind, our heart, or is it our body?
The human machine needs energy to work. If we wish to use our conscious potential, it is necessary to save that energy and understand these processes in ourselves. It is because we waste energy in one of the centers that we get depleted. As just as an engine will not work without fuel, likewise, our psyche will not operate, to consciously investigate the higher dimensions, if we have wasted our mental, emotional, and vital force—whether through too much intellectual activity, or arguments and fights, sports, etc. When we waste energy through any of the centers—because there is disequilibrium, and if we keep trying to use that engine—it is going to steal energy from the other centers. Thus, there is an imbalance. It is like if you waste intellectual energy of the mind, that intellect will start to use the sexual force. Because the sexual energy is the most potent force we carry within, it will damage the mind. It does not belong there unless we know how to direct it with intelligence. That is why we study practices like alchemy, pranayama, runes, and many other exercises that we practice in this tradition. If the intellect runs out of energy and we steal from the sexual center it is like putting rocket fuel into a car. It will damage the mind. This is how people get mental illnesses. They become sick, whether through schizophrenia, paranoid delusions, many problems we see that are affecting humanity now. Those who abuse the emotional center through anger or self-directed hate, depression, develop emotional sicknesses. They become imbalanced in the heart. Those who waste the energy of the motor center become paraplegic, whether through excessive sports, violent sports, like UFC for example. That relates to the instinctive center as well. People who waste the instinctual forces of their body end up getting injured and sick. Likewise, with the sexual force. Prostitutes, people who abuse the sexual energy, get sick. We know that from news, or people we know that may have some kind of illness related to that abuse. 
Balancing the Five Centers
It is important to understand how to balance ourselves and that there are many ways to balance ourselves. By balancing ourselves, by having a reservoir of emotional energy, we can awaken consciousness in the astral world. Likewise, having a reservoir of mental energy, we can awaken within the mental world. Likewise, by saving our vital force, we can get access to all of it.
But for that, it is important to understand how to have equilibrium in our life, how to respond to different situations with intelligence, how to use our human machine. Some people may have to develop the intellect more. Perhaps when we find that we are in a sour mood, we feel emotional, we feel upset, it can be good to read scripture in order to balance ourselves, to give us orientation ethically. It can be any scripture from a tradition that resonates with our heart and give us inspiration. It gives us joy in order continue our spiritual discipline. Perhaps we are too intellectual, and we use the mind too much. We dream with the intellect too much. We analyze. We act through our head. It is good to put thought to rest when you feel like it is being drained and you cannot think anymore. Listen to classical music. Listen to great works of spiritual art that have a high vibration and help the consciousness resonate with superior forces. As we explained in the previous course called The Secret Teachings of Opera, there are art forms that teach about the path of the spirit and are direct reflections of higher truths. It is music like Beethoven, or Mozart especially, that have a type of emotional dynamism that help heal the heart and balance the mind. If your intellect is too active, balance it with activities relating to the heart. Listening to good music, lighting incense, aroma therapy, these things help calm the mind, help you be centered in yourself. Perhaps we are too emotional. Again, we are resonating with negative feelings. Sometimes it is good to get some exercise. Distract yourself from a problem. Put it aside for a moment and go jogging. Lift some weights, obviously, with some moderation. Extreme sports can drain the body, but everything in balance helps. Some people, in terms of the motor center as well, like to train in martial arts. Some people like to train in Tai Chi, Aikido, these help train the instinctual center—how to react to stressful situations and problems with equanimity. These could be useful too in order to balance the other centers as well, especially when they are performed consciously. Again, these activities are useful when we are using them with the soul, when we give those activities our full attention. Lastly, in order to balance all the centers—and probably the most profound activity—is working with the sexual energy. It is a very deep topic. We do exercises like pranayama, whether from yoga or Buddhism. We practice transmutation, which through deep breathing and visualization, prayer, we take the creative force and raise it up the spine, to the mind and then to the heart. This is very different from abusing the intellect and the intellect stealing energy from that center because it is unmodified. It must be modified. It must be worked with consciously and with intelligence. When you take that energy and you transmute it, you take it from one form of base matter into a spiritual force. It learns to elevate your heart, your mind. This is why you have all the saints with a halo above their heads. That is because they are illuminated by that force. It is a deep discipline. 
Sleeping, Subjective, and Objective Consciousness
It is also important to understand—in relation to how we dream and how to cease dreaming—how to understand different states of consciousness.
Most of the time we are not aware of our human machine, and unfortunately, we have the misconception in our modern society that just because we are active with the mind, heart, and body, this means that we are conscious. That is not true, not necessarily. We can be receiving the impressions of life, but, like I said, we are not transforming them. We are not even aware of our surroundings perhaps, observing actively where we are at, what we are doing, where we are going. Maybe we are speaking with someone, or they are talking to us, and because we are thinking of something or feeling in remembrance of a problem we have, or filled with fear, with a trauma, we have to ask, “What did you say?” The impressions were coming in, but we were not aware of what is going on. It is because we are very asleep. Now, what is important to also understand is that awakening has different qualities. Awakening consciousness physically, but also in dreams, has very distinct qualities. We all know about lucid dreaming, becoming aware in a dream, or seeing with greater lucidity. But just because we are aware of a dream does not mean that we are not identified with it. This is the subtle key that many people fail to grasp. You can be involved in a dream, have some type of intense experience. You may know it is a dream at first, but then you get sucked into it. You do not have control. It takes you. This is what dreams are like. It is mechanical. It is a machine. The human machine which has the potential to be fully lucid, clear, awake, spontaneous, perceptive, and in tune with the divine, in most cases, is stuck within its own mechanical reactions. That is what a dream is. Perhaps you go to sleep at night and you have dreamed of something really crazy. Maybe it has its own narrative: “Why is it that I thought I was some superhero in some other country fighting extraterrestrials?” But in the dream, it makes sense. Why is it that it makes sense? It is because we are not questioning how we are dreaming during the daytime. We do not have the same type of inquiry into what is going on in our daily states. Now, in our daily life, as I said, perhaps, you could of probably be invested in a very intense emotion. You have a selfish desire in reaction to a problem or conflict. You may be very aware that it is happening, but that is not good. It is not positive, not constructive. Awareness is not everything. A lot of schools push this idea that awareness is somehow this brilliant key to everything. But being aware of yourself does not mean you are in control. Someone can be very aware of murdering a person. In fact, that is worse than being asleep, because there is more energy invested into that act. What is necessary is that instead of being subjective or perceiving through our own selfish desires, we in turn have that type of lucidity and awakening with objective perception: no self there; no ego; no fear; no preference; no assumptions; no presuppositions; no attachments; no filter. We see reality, whether physically in our daily states or even in our dreams. We see clearly what is there and we do not dream. We do not interpret with a false sense of self, because any ego, vice, defect, error, is a false sense of self which misinterprets everything. We are dreaming like that all the time. The way to stop dreaming is to know how that error functions in you, to observe it in yourself. 
Self-Observation and Filial Love: The Superior Centers of the Being
This is why we study two superior centers in relation to what we call self-observation and filial love.
The human machine has its limitations, but also has tremendous potential. Fortunately for us, there are superior qualities of being which can exist within us when we train. We call them the superior intellectual and the superior emotional centers. These have a very different functionalism than what we are accustomed to. They allow us to receive divine data, the messages of God, the teachings of our inner buddha, our Being, our reality. These centers are like an antenna. They receive data from the heavens, the signals and messages from our Innermost, our spiritual potential. Dreams are projected. The intellect projects. It is hyperactive. But with the superior intellectual center, you receive knowledge. So, this happen often in a form of a vision in which you see a symbol acting out in front of you and you are engaging with it. Usually, you are the witness and the participant. The superior intellectual center is understanding. It is comprehension. Going back earlier to the beginning of this lecture, we were talking about the superior faculties of the mind, which is precisely this: the ability to perceive, but more importantly, to understand. It is possible in a dream to know what it means, if you are awake enough, and your intuition, your heart, is active. The superior emotional center is filial love. It is love for our inner divinity. It is love for our real identity, who it is like this image. It is infinite. It can not be conceptualized or limited by a culture, by a theory. It is only something you can understand by living it. However, that infinite abstraction expresses within dreams through a type of symbolism or narrative, in order to teach us what we must do in our daily life, our spiritual life. When we have those experiences, when we are directly communicating with the divine, we experience tremendous love and awe for the power of divinity, for knowing what to do and how to change. This also relates to self-observation, being aware, not just being aware with anger, or with pride. This means to be aware without a self. This can confuse people, because our contemporary ideas of identity, religion, and self are exclusive. We think of ourselves as “who I am”—these negative emotions typically associated with “me.” It is possible to be awake and aware without any “I,” to perceive without thought, without any reaction, without any perturbation. In that sense, you can receive impressions. They enter the lake of the mind and there is no ripple. If you want to know what that is like, again, look at a lake. It receives impressions and there is no reaction. It does not mean that there is no consciousness there. It means that the consciousness is super active. The way that the consciousness is active is like a reflection on that surface. You can see beautiful images of the heavens upon that screen. It receives, reflects, refracts within you, and therefore you have direct knowledge. You have direct understanding. So, the Being, our real identity, wants to teach us and often will give us hunches in our daily life. Perhaps we are doing something we know is wrong and we justify with our intellect. We dream that “I want to do this because I am going to get this result.” “I want this benefit in my life” even though we feel a sting of conscience that knows “Do not do this. It is wrong.” That comes from divinity. Most of the time we snuff it out. We try to justify ourselves, and we wash our hands clean like Pontius Pilate in the Gospels. We betray our divinity all the time. But intuition is precisely this filial love. You know what is right without having to think, and likewise when you receive superior symbolism from the higher worlds, you do so with understanding of their meaning. 
Visions and Astral Experiences
This is an image we come back to again and again. It is the Tree of Life. It is a map of our multidimensional reality, which we explained in one of our previous lectures of this course: Where Do We Dream? It is a map of our current perception, but also our potential, from the higher levels of energy, consciousness and perception to the densest materiality.
These ten spheres show us aspects of ourselves, and many times when we receive visions, superior dream, real prophetic, direct knowledge, it comes with this. This will teach us how to interpret what we are seeing, what we are perceiving within ourselves. Real visions and astral experiences come to us when our human machine is clean. It is good to take care of the body. Some of us were discussing earlier that our physiology relates to our internal psychology. For example, there are cleanses you can do to clean out your liver, such as drinking half a glass of olive oil with half a glass of lemon juice. It purifies the toxins of the liver, and when that aspect of the machine relating to that motor-instinctual-sexual brain, connected to the liver, when that is clean, sometimes you will have very vivid experiences in the astral world. That is one example of how to clean our human machine. But to be more specific to what I am talking about, in a deeper psychological sense, is cleaning out the ego, because the ego, our sense of self, the “I,” pollutes these five centers. These engines rust out and they work with less efficiency and less ability with time. If we abuse the intellect with too much thought, it rusts. It decays. It degenerates, likewise with the other centers. When you are a pure vehicle, when you are conscious, when you understand the mechanisms of dreams, you start to irradiate and vibrate with a superior emotional quality and a superior mind. Exercises
We always end these classes with practices. Every day, develop your self-observation from moment to moment. Observe the energy it takes to pay attention. Also, extend your mindfulness, the length of time that you are aware of yourself. At the end of each day reflect on how conscious you were that day. Everyday do this preliminary meditation exercise:
One reason we do mantras or sacred sounds, is because they vibrate the human machine. The vowel “O” is a very sacred syllable within Hinduism and all religions, Buddhism especially. It teaches the emotional center how to vibrate with superior sentiment and feeling. In that way, that sound, when you sing it, when you vocalize it, it charges the heart with tremendous force. That mantra can help you go out of your body. It can help you be aware in your dreams, to be awake. Likewise, we imagine, because imagination, as explained previously, is the capacity to perceive. You want to deepen the ability to be conscious while you dream? Develop your imagination: the ability to perceive images of a non-physical type. How well you are able to visualize in your mind, within your third eye, so to speak, can help you go a long way to acquire greater depth of perceptions within dreams. The point is to concentrate on the mantra so that you do not forget what you are doing. Do not let the mind wander. Do not think of something else while singing the mantra. Sing the mantra and immerse yourself into it like you are a bee making honey. Let it be your labor. Let it be your sole focus. Lastly, write the facts of your day in a spiritual diary. You can document your dreams by writing about what you perceive, but also what your spiritual work is about. You can study how to perform a spiritual diary within this link. At this point in time, I would like to open the floor to questions. Questions and Answers
Question: You mentioned that we should not be abusing the energy of the different brains or centers. Especially, you mentioned, sports. What is a good way to know that I am using the right amount of energy for each brain? How do I know when I have gone too far?
Instructor: That is a good question. It is good to gauge yourself. You have to learn and listen to your body. Your body will tell you, “This is too much.” But the problem becomes often because of too much desire or ambition, “I need to get thinner. I need to work out more. I need to train myself more.” That desire can indicate that this is too much. If you feel like you are pushing yourself too much—it is good to get exercise—but if you find that you are over fatigued, or that you are drained, give it a break. Question: What about the other brains? Instructor: Same thing with the intellect. For example, anyone that has gone to a university, you perhaps read, read, and read to the point that you cannot even understand what you have read. You have lost the thread. You read a page, and then you have to say to yourself, “I do not even know what I just read!” Take a break. Emotionally, when you find that there is simply too much emotion going on there, you are too invested in a problem, it is literally driving the other centers to act within imbalance, take a break. Try to do something else. Do another activity. One thing I did not mention was that even though the centers operate at different speeds, the ego always manifests in each of these centers. So, the ego of pride, for example, which is very emotional, may emerge in the heart immediately, overpowering perhaps, because its emotions are very quick. Then there is logic, thoughts that justify what is going on here and the will to act. So, in terms of finding balance, because the centers operate at different speeds, it is because the human machine, in a sense, balances itself out. If all the centers operate at the same speed, then there is no way to equilibrate the others, because everything is on the same wavelength, so to speak, in terms of the centers compensating for each other in different ways, so that if you overuse one center, take a break. Relax. Move to another. Question: So what is the sign then that the mind is stealing from the sexual center? Instructor: When the mind is stealing from the sexual center, you get a second wind. You ever hear that statement… a second wind? It is like you initially feel exhausted, whether intellectually or physically, and then suddenly you get a boost of energy here, operating like the white rabbit of Alice in Wonderland. It is a sudden reemergence of energy in which, if you are observing it carefully, you will see that it comes suddenly. You have the energy to do it again even though before you were too tired. Another thing to think about, if the intellect is stealing energy from the sexual center, that produces many problems intellectually. That mind cannot concentrate. It gets more distracted. The mind corrodes. This can lead to illnesses, in some people, like schizophrenia, mental imbalances, delusions. The mind just does not work anymore because it is operating on unmodified fuel. That person can start seeing things in a way that is not real. It can be different in terms of intensities depending on the person. Question: I have one more question. You have this lecture that also relates to today’s topic. It is the transformations of emotions [impressions]. Gurdjieff also talks about this. So every day we have to sit and observe. But it doesn’t always work. Which is the real work? I mean, which is the real way to do it? Instructor: Both are necessary, in a sense that it is not enough to perceive something, but you must comprehend it. Gurdjieff was excellent about teaching beginners to first observe what is going on, because most of us do not even pay attention to where we are at. We are not looking actively. We have the intellectual knowledge that “We know we are here,” but it is a passive state. Gurdjieff was teaching to activate the consciousness, meaning, first, observe what is going on. But the next step is to comprehend, transform, perhaps the impression that we received, and receive it in the right centers. Sometimes we take in information with the wrong centers, and that is one the way that we dream. As I said, maybe you are having an argument with someone, and they are trying to solve it with the intellect. But maybe what they need is just validation within the heart. It is like using the right tool for the right situation. That only comes about after comprehension: knowing intuitively what to do. It is one thing to, again, be aware, but it is a totally different thing to discriminate what you see. Comment: But sometimes intuition can get confusing because of egotistical desires. Instructor: That’s the big problem. Comment: People say I have an intuition, but in reality, it is not. It is my ego wanting this. Instructor: That is the big problem with many spiritual people. They attribute what they call intuitive impulse, when really it is a demon. It is why people have committed many crimes in many spiritual groups. They do things that are not ethical. The thing to understand about that is, if you really want to understand, if you really want to receive intuition from divinity, examine your precepts. Does it fit or coincide with compassion, with the laws given by the different spiritual teachers of humanity, like the prophets? We can study different scriptures and texts which teach about ethics, about how to be a true human being. Usually, this is from sources that are very pure, like Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Krishna, masters that have proven their caliber. Study what they taught, and perhaps see if this impulse that we may have. Is it contradicting that? People do not question what they are doing. They think, “Oh, this feeling is coming from God,” wreally it is not. Another Instructor: Another thing to consider is sometimes we say it does not work when we look at our emotions. At the beginning, when we are just observing our emotions or any of these three brains, what often happens is that the intellect starts to interfere and interpret, “What am I looking at?” There is this pressure of attention we have to exert. In the same way that we are sitting in a chair right now, if we think about it intellectually, we might imagine the chair or know that “I am sitting in this chair,” but if we actually feel it, we expand our attention. We feel our body. We feel the chair. The pressure of attention is the consciousness. So, what happens is that people are not familiar with distinguishing from, “I think this is an intuition!” but really it is just the emotional center or the intellect coming up with what it feels right to that egotistical self that we believe in, versus the attention, expanding, opening, and receiving something new, which is the comprehension that we are talking about. Instructor: In order to understand your intuitions, the mind needs to be passive, and the consciousness needs to be active. The only way to discriminate and really know is to taste it. Comment: I read The Yellow Book. I am fascinated with Jinn science and how to get to the lodges. It fascinates me! Instructor: Jinn science has a parallel with astral projection. In astral projection, you are leaving your physical body behind to enter with your soul in the fifth dimension. Jinn science, for one thing, you can take your physical body into the internal worlds. This is exemplified in stories like the ascension of the Prophet Muhammad in Islam. According to Muslim theology, he was meditating with his head against the stone of Mecca, the Kaaba. In a Jinn state, divinity took him, symbolically riding on this mystical creature, al-Buraq, “the lighting” in Arabic, from Mecca to Jerusalem and to the seven heavens. It is a symbol of Jinn science. That science is practiced similarly to astral projection but with a different objective. There are different exercises that you can use to train your body to vibrate with those forces, the superior energy of the hyperspace, the fourth dimension, which is related to spatiality and time. So, in a sense you are entering with your body into that state. Because of prayer and drowsiness you start to assimilate and accumulate forces that can help transport you. Similarly, that happens with astral projection. With astral projection, there is something magical that happens when we fall asleep, particularly if we are awake as a consciousness when it is happening. You might have experiences where you are falling asleep and you start to hear voices. You see start to see scenes of landscape and places just flash within your awareness. Often, we return to our body suddenly, awake, because we realize that we were seeing something internally with our imagination. That happens when we get drowsy, because when we are falling asleep, you start to open that doorway to the inner worlds. In training, especially for astral projection, you learn to take advantage of that state so that when you fall asleep with that awareness and attention, you enter that doorway with cognizance. Now, with Jinn science, you are asking divinity, “Take me into the internal worlds” — in order to experience something like Prophet Muhammad. The thing to remember is that it is not something that we can necessarily will for ourselves entirely. There must be divine help. Divinity does that magic. I believe it was one of the uncles of Prophet Muhammad who was against him. He said, “I do not believe you what you did,” about this ascension called الإسراء والمعراج al-'Isrā' wal-Miʿrāj. “Lift up your right foot,” and he did. “Lift up your left foot.” He said, “I cannot.” The man said, “How is it that you can travel from Mecca to Jerusalem and into the seven heavens, but not lift both feet?” The Prophet said, “I did not say that I went. I said that I was taken.” God does that work, and there are many exercises in The Yellow Book that can teach you how to do that. They are very powerful, and they work.
It will happen if the conditions are right. Question: How do the 49 levels of the mind correspond to the centers? Instructor: So, we talk about 49 levels of the mind because there are depths to our being that we are not aware of. In Kabbalah, we talk about the seven bodies, the seven lower spheres of the Tree of Life relating to different vehicles we operate with, the lowest being the physical body. There are seven levels of the mind within those seven bodies, making a total of 49. The most superficial level of the human machine is the intellect. It is the first level of the 49 levels of the subconsciousness. The intellect, as we said, is the slowest aspect of the human machine, but if we want to understand the deeper levels of the mind, you need to be aware of your human machine: how are you dreaming in those centers all the time? Again, you go into more complexity and depth of your psyche relating to the centers themselves. Some of the centers are easier to control, like the intellect, because it is the slowest. Motion is difficult, but sexuality is the most difficult. If you become conscious of those levels in yourself physically and you start to train in astral projection, you can go into those other bodies on the Tree of Life, those other dimensions, and learn to explore those regions within yourself. Question: Going back to Jinn science. I like to have actual hardcore evidence to research. Besides the prophets, is there anything to research about Jinn science and teachers you recommend? Instructor: Samael Aun Weor is a big one. He does not please the scholars too much. He has a very different style. First off, his writings are very comprehensive. He studied all religions really deeply. He did have a scholasticism about him, but he was not intellectual. He was not based in theory. His writing, especially, is really the most explicit of what Jinn science is. If you look at what he wrote compared to the Bible or any world mythologies, where you see heroes flying through space, like Perseus saving Andromeda with the boots of Hermes, that is a symbol of that. When you work with the energies of Hermes, which is the science of creative energy, the sexual energy, you can fly not only in the physical world, but enter with your physical body in those regions. Samael Aun Weor’s writings specifically are the most direct. Question: In The Yellow Book, it is not clear when he says, “as soon as you feel like you are falling asleep, you have to jump.” Are you doing an imaginary jump or are we doing a physical jump? Instructor: It is a real jump. One of the things he said about that: when you are in Jinn state, he said, you should test yourself. If you have some space, you can do this. By taking a marker of some kind to mark how far you have jumped, jump a certain distance as far as you can. Mark where you landed. If you keep repeating the experiment, you may find that your jumps are getting much further than before. Another clue that Jinn states are happening is, the main description that Samael Aun Weor gave—because the physical body is penetrated by the vital vehicle—you will feel this kind of expansion, like your feet to your ankles are bloated. It is similar to an astral experience. Your body is vibrating with that level of nature. You will find that you will be levitating. That is one of the main clues that he gives. This is obviously very difficult for skeptics. We have trained ourselves, the mind, to be very materialistic. A lot of the times, that is an obstacle to experiencing that for oneself. But if you simply practice with it and give it as much energy and time as you need to do it, the moment may come when suddenly, you will find that your feet are bloated and you are floating in the air. It is a very powerful practice. In Samael Aun Weor’s writings, you will find it allegorized in many different writings and scriptures. I am not too familiar if there are other more contemporary esoteric authors who talked about that. Primarily because, my assumption is that the level of being of certain modern esoteric writers are not high in comparison to prophets. Obviously, prophets, in terms of hierarchy, are something different, very distinct. Question: How does pranayama relate to the mind stealing energy from the sexual center? Instructor: If the mind is stealing from the sexual center, you are going to have less battery power to charge yourself in the appropriate way. Pranayama, which is the transmutation of the sexual energy, is the conscious control and direction of that energy to awaken spirituality, consciousness, awaken to Jinn states, awaken to astral projections. We say that, in a sense, pranayama is the opposite of stealing energy from the centers. When you steal energy from the other centers, there is an imbalance. You are putting fuel that does not belong in the intellect and you are going to have problems in the future. Pranayama is learning to transform and modify the sexual energy. This is the key: unmodified sexual energy can harm a person if it is not transformed or processed. What matters is that the consciousness must be present so that by processing that energy, it learns to circulate in a constructive way. Another Instructor: When we are performing pranayama and we are performing sexual transmutation, that energy is feeding the consciousness and the superior centers and not necessarily feeding the intellectual brain. Whereas, when we are just depleting the intellectual brain, then the sexual energy is unconsciously being rerouted to a lower center. Instructor: Thank you all for coming.
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