Observe Your True Self

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Our modern culture is very much fixated on the nature of identity. There are many teachings, studies, and explanations for what the self is. This knowledge is as diverse as there are nations and cultures and traditions.
 
The purpose of our tradition is to explore the universality of consensus where these diverse perspectives align, to look for commonalities and to understand that which is practical. We use many techniques within the Gnostic tradition to better access our own understandings of reality, particularly the reality of our own psychology.
 
What people tend to get wrong in our modern era is the belief that knowledge of the intellect is precisely knowledge of our true identity. This is evident by the fact that, really, despite the amount of knowledge available and information on the internet, people are profoundly confused. We can use the state of suffering of humanity as a barometer for understanding how connected we really are with truth, with the divine, with the spiritual.
 
Rather than leave our understanding merely in the mind to accumulate some type of information that may sound interesting or novel, something in the intellect, we choose to follow a very different path in this tradition. We like to verify the truths and realities that have been discussed within religion, within psychology, within mysticism, no matter the tradition. We take what is useful and discard what is useless. Primarily, we use our own experience to verify what is real and what is not, and this applies to the nature of our own identity.
 
The purpose of this course is precisely to understand tools and techniques by which we deepen our relationship with the divine self.
 
One such technique that we are going to explore is self-observation. If you are familiar with the writings of Gurdjieff, he is an esoteric writer who taught [this method] primarily in Russia a long time ago. This technique is very practical and profound for achieving insight into what in us creates friction within our families, within our relationships, within our communities. We learn how to identify and overcome obstacles between ourselves and acquire direct access to these higher spiritual mysteries that many traditions teach.
 
All religions we teach that we need to awaken to the truth. But sadly, the techniques are often missing from those teachings. So, we are going to explain in a, hopefully, more secular way, what this is: self-observation, and how to apply it to our life.

​Our Focus

Primarily what we will do is identify experience and actualize the constituents of perception. What makes perception what it is in a practical sense, in our daily life?
 
We will also differentiate between passive and active perception, what it means to receive the impressions of life in a passive way, but also, how do we actively perceive life and what that entails? This is primarily because it is important to understand qualities of consciousness, what they are so that we can not only identify them, but distinguish between different types of perception, because the human being is a very complex entity. Our psyche is very complex. We have to understand different types of perceptions in us.
 
We also are going to learn how to utilize, expand, and strengthen the powers of consciousness. So, what are techniques that train that part of ourselves which can experience reality, divinity, the truth?
 
What are the abilities of consciousness? Also more importantly, how can we initiate, sustain, and master continuity of conscious being? So, not merely just to initiate a type of practice like this, but also how to sustain it in life, how do we make it a continual process, whereby we are acquiring new knowledge about ourselves for the betterment of ourselves and our community.

​The Nature, Purpose, and Means of Self-Discovery

​This brings us to the first point: the very nature of self-discovery.
 
If we approach a teaching like this, it is because we have understood, at least initially, that we do not have the full picture about who we are, and so we look for religions and teachings to show us ourselves, to explain who we are and how we can change the quality of our life.
 
We do not have full knowledge of ourselves in the most profound sense. Now, this is evident when we explore a particular problem. Perhaps in our career, we have a challenge that we do not know how to resolve, and yet, as we enter a state of engagement with life, perhaps we are trying to avoid the problem or trying to solve it, thinking and rationalizing what to do. In a moment of silence of mind, when we are not thinking, suddenly the insight enters into us. It comes from somewhere. We do not know, but it is a shocking experience that provides a shock to our consciousness. We suddenly realize the solution to a problem. We did not have to deliberate or think about it. It merely arrived when the proper causes and conditions were present, when we stopped struggling in the mud of fear and anxiety and anticipation. We let it happen.
 
In a sense, this insight emerges from the void, but it gives us a new inspiration and a joy. That type of insight and inspiration, which really is a part of us, but seemingly comes from nowhere, demonstrates to us that there is wisdom within the psyche that is not accessible to our contemporary senses, to our current ways of behaving in our modern life. Now, primarily what we want with this technique of self-observation as we are going to explain, is to cultivate that, that type of “Aha!” moment where we realize something profoundly about ourselves that we never saw before. Perhaps it is a type of emotion or elements in our own psyche, which is secretly causing many problems for ourselves. What we want is to cultivate that.
 
The purpose of self-discovery is primarily to enlighten our full potential, to access deeper parts of us that are not accessible to our material senses. Instead, we are going to activate a sense that is much more profound but is in us in a dormant state. It does not have full development or activity yet. 

​If you look in the image on the bottom right here, we have an island above the surface of water and we very well know from Freudian studies, Freudian psychology, that there is a subconscious. This is now a fact which is taken at face value. The purpose of self-observation, of insight, is precisely to explore the depths. We do so because we want to understand our own complexes, our own defects, our own tendencies that tend to work in the depths of our psyche without us even knowing it, and what we want is to explore our full potential so that by going into the depths, we learn to master ourselves. So, that is the purpose of self-observation: to explore the depths of who we are primarily to extract wisdom.

​Proper and Improper Tools for Self-Knowledge

​However, in life as in any type of institution, there are proper and improper tools of self-knowledge. As we mentioned earlier, there are many forms of knowledge and studies that teach us about who we are, and there is value and credence to different perspectives and different types of instructions about psychology. But unfortunately in our modern era, we lack practical tools for really knowing who we are.
 
There are parts of us that can only be explored by the right tools. If we use our intellect to explore ourselves, it will be very shallow. It is a very useful tool in life, the mind with its rationalizations and ability to categorize information, to store knowledge and use it for one's career or job. It in truth is the most superficial aspect of who we are. It is merely a machine that can store knowledge or data that can be recalled or used in certain instances in life.
 
People in our modern world tend to use the intellect at the expense of everything else, especially in North America, the West, and this is a huge problem, because we think that by getting an education, a career, studying at a university, that somehow with our intellectual knowledge, we know who we are.
 
Perhaps, going back to our earlier lecture [Know Your True Self], we talked about personality, especially, our name, our culture, our language, our race, our religion, our tastes, our habits, the masks we wear, the interface we use to navigate social circumstances in life. Personality is needed to subsist in this world, but it is not the full definition of who we are. As we explained about the Essence, the soul, the consciousness, that real part of us that can explore who we are in its full totality, is not active, is asleep. The consciousness, the spiritual part of us is not active.
 
The intellect in us tends to be most predominant in our current lifestyles, and so we want to emphasize that when we are exploring ourselves, we have to understand which tools we are using. In the same way that an astronomer would study the stars with a telescope, and a scientist or a biologist with the microscope, we have to use this the right tools. The intellect, while it has utility in life, is not the full means of exploring our full identity. It would be absurd for an astronomer to use a microscope to study the stars or a biologist to use a telescope to study microbes. It is the wrong apparatus, but unfortunately in the West, we think the intellect is the way to know ourselves. It is a very superficial layer.
 
But we are going to explore what self-observation is because, as a technique, it trains that part of us which can really know divinity, the Essence, the soul, the consciousness. This is a tool for the consciousness, not the personality, not the self, the ego, the mind. We will explain this.

​The Sleep of Our Consciousness

​In life we tend to operate in very mechanical ways. Our consciousness, our Essence, our soul, which is like a seed, is in a dormant state. It is not predominant or active in life. This is evident by studying our lifestyle.
 
In our current times with cell phones or smartphones, better said, technology, people drive at the wheel of their car unaware of their surroundings, absorbed by this device, as you see in the center image here. Our attention tends to be dispersed and absorbed within superficial things. Our attention, our consciousness, is not active in its most full and profound sense.
 
If you do not believe me, examine people who get into car accidents. They are driving and they do not pay attention because they are on their phone, or they are thinking of someone else, or daydreaming about what they need to do, and like the cogs of a wheel, of machinery, we tend to operate in an autopilot. That type of attitude, going through the motions of life, but not fully present, not being here, not being now―our consciousness is not alert. It is not perceptive of what is really going on around us. But more importantly what is going on inside of us.
 
This is evidenced by the fact that we tend to react to situations in very specific ways. We have our habits, our behaviors, our tendencies. In life, we have situations that tend to provoke us in negative ways, seemingly without our control. In a sense, while we have awareness at some level that this is harmful for us or that our ways of reacting are negative, we still do it. This is evidence for us that we do not really have full mastery of ourselves.
 
Why do we react in certain ways? More importantly, why are we unaware of ourselves? Why do we lack a full grasp of what propels us in the moment? What in us is inattentive, and more importantly, why are we inattentive?
 
This is something that only you can answer for yourself, by observing the fact, by looking within, studying the mechanisms of your mind, of your emotional states, of your habits, your instincts, your desires.
 
We are machines, not merely as a human body, but psychologically we are very mechanical. So, we have the idiom or statement that someone could push our buttons, right? The reason why we study self-observation is so that we learn not to be machines, not to be mechanical in life, but to know how to respond with intelligence and wisdom. 

​The Passivity of Knowledge and Activity of Consciousness

​The way that we do it is by awakening the consciousness that could operate this human machine, in the same way that a person can drive a car. The soul needs to be driving the psyche.
 
We know basically that we are seated in a chair listening to this talk. We could be at work on our computer and know that we are there. However, this is a very passive form of understanding. It is not very deep, and in fact, knowledge is a passive state. It does not require much effort. In fact, in most in most cases, it requires none.
 
We know we are in a certain place. We have some knowledge of it and we go about our day. What is different about self-observation is the activity of consciousness. So, while we may be passively seated here in a chair, are we observing the fact? Are we watching? Are we looking or are we thinking of something else and just letting memories and associative thinking come to us in a hazy cloud, where we do not have much lucidity or perception of our environment?
 
This is the distinction we seek to emphasize with self-observation as a technique. It is not knowledge of the intellect. It is not passive. It is active. It is a form of perception that involves looking, not with our physical sight, merely, but with our psychological senses. This is something that we need to explore and to verify for ourselves. 

​Powers of Consciousness

​The way that we do so is through the powers of consciousness. There are three aspects of consciousness that need to be studied in order to understand self-observation, to practice it, to initiate it, to sustain it, and to master it. They are awareness, attention, and mindfulness.
Let's explain them. 

​Awareness

​Awareness is a broad spatial perception. In the same way that you bring a candle into a room and the light diffuses in your environment and dispels the shadows, it expands outward in its circumference to your home or your environment, the same way awareness is a spatial phenomenon.
 
It is light in which you perceive your surroundings. You see the detail. You see the walls, or in this case, an image of a woman carrying a candle looking within a vaulted ceiling or ancient chamber, is studying the details of the stone with a look of surprise and novelty. This is the type of perception we need to understand self-observation in its initial sense.
 
In the beginning we need to expand our awareness, to look outward, actually observe what is surrounding us, and to look with without labeling or marring that experience with thought. This is not an intellectual exercise. It is a perceptive one. It is spatial in that you you try to see the depth, the color, the hues, the details, the images or perhaps the paintings of your home.
 
Or if you are walking out in nature, you look at the forests, the trees and the leaves rustling with the wind. You want to see all of it, take it in with great detail, and to feel that yearning and humble aspiration, that joy of seeing something new for the first time. It is a crisp, detailed, and alert state. 

​Psychological Clarity and the Spatial Sense

Unfortunately, in us, we do not tend to see our environment. We lack psychological clarity of ourselves, but also the space we inhabit.
 
We have to examine, really, like in these two images, a beautiful forest with intense detail and an image of a silhouette woman standing in a forest, but clouded. You know the saying, “You can't see the forest for the trees”? Well, that tends to characterize our psychological state.
 
We have to ask ourselves: what are the qualities of awareness? What are they? It involves detail. It involves really that shock of an “Aha!” moment, like watching a rain fall on a cobblestone street in a European city or seeing a sunset rise with glory in Indescribable detail and beauty that cannot be imitated. That is the key. It is authentic. It is novel. It is original. You have never seen this before.
 
The same thing can apply to your room. We have to be able to look and see as if we have never seen our environment before, because oftentimes, we just have a memory and we interact with our intellectual projections of our home without seeing what is actually there. This explains why in many cases, people get into accidents even in their own home. These are the qualities of awareness.
 
We also need to clarify and expand awareness. We want to deepen that sense of that beauty of wherever we are so that we do not live in a haze.
 
This is a known as the spatial sense. The consciousness has the ability to look outward and to absorb information of everything around it. But it has to be intentional, and that is the key. We have to will it and not merely just passively go about our business. 

​An Exercise of Awareness

As an exercise of awareness, one thing you can do is to walk in the forest. If you are lucky, you know, have access to some forest trails, go out into nature, and when you are walking in your environment on the forest trails or whatever place of beauty, you can find, examine the sounds. Listen to the rivulets of water cascading in the open forest.
 
Or what sights do you see?
 
What do you smell? Like the bark of the trees or the dampness of a recent rainfall.
 
What can you taste in your mouth? You know, obviously if you are eating food you want to be conscious of what you eat, but also you can taste the air of a beautiful place.

Touch: what does your environment feel like as you walk? Whether it is a cobblestone path, street pavement.
 
You want to take in all of this, expand your consciousness outward. Look at everything with intensity.
 
Obviously, this is a conscious exercise. It does not mean we are doing this with our thoughts, because thought is not the point. Your mind will start to wander and try to think of other things, but rather than force your mind to be silent or to gag it violently, you merely direct your attention gently outward, again, to your environment. See outward. What is there? 

​As you see here with this image of the human machine, we have different centers of our psychology that we are going to explain in more detail today. But the first I talked about is the intellectual center. It is where we experience thought. This is our human machine, and this human machine is not only physical, but also psychological. When you are working with this awareness exercise, you are engaging your mind, in a sense, not by thinking, but by silence, stillness.
 
You are walking in the woods. You are engaging your motor center. You are not trying to engage with so much the senses of your body, but inwardly. But you are looking outward.
 
What emotions do you feel when you walk in this beautiful place?
 
What impulses do you sense and feel? This is something to think about. Obviously, the first step of awareness is observing outward, but we also talk about attention, which is more specific.

​Attention

​Attention is a focused, specific perception.
 
In the same way that you direct a direct a flashlight to look at one thing in the dark, that is attention.
 
Awareness was a broad spatial perception. Attention is focused and directed at one thing at the exclusion of everything else.
 
Attention is profoundly significant. If you study any school of meditation or religion, they often teach concentration exercises where you direct your attention on one thing at the exclusion of everything else. This is a very fundamental skill to have, and which unfortunately is very much lacking in our modern era, especially in schools―kids who do not pay attention.
 
Attention is important. We know that it is the source of extracting new information or learning new things, in the same way that you could learn by paying attention in a superficial sense. Psychological attention directed inwardly at oneself is what opens light within the darkness.

​The Direction and Quality of Attention

​We have to emphasize that there are different types, qualities, and directions that attention can take.
 
One fundamental question we can ask ourselves in life is when we are walking down the street in some busy city: What draws our attention and why?
 
Perhaps we hear a car honking violently as a car speeds past a red light, and we sense that object coming at us. We draw our attention to the danger. I mean, that is one very basic example.
 
But, on a deeper level, not only is attention important for staying alive as you are walking down the street, but it is also essential in a spiritual sense to understanding where the dangers lie within our psychology. There are different ways that our attention gets drawn to things primarily. Our attention could be drawn by anger or by lust or by fear or by pride. 
 
We talked about the ego previously. Our different defects, desires, habits, egos, selves, tend to direct their attention towards the screen of our life in order to extract, or better said, to feed on the sensations or impressions of life. Anger is fed by wanting to harm out of frustrated desire for something, or fear looks outwardly to that car screeching in the distance coming at us blowing a red light. So, our attention is drawn in that egotistical sense.
 
But what we have to understand is that our attention can be something very intentional, controlled, and pure rather than driven by our own habits and instincts. This is evident by the distinction between passive and active attention. We all know, or perhaps kids or people who can sit in front of a television screen for three hours, or actually, better said, now with the advent of Netflix and all sorts of online digital platforms and shows, people can binge-watch six seasons of a television show straight and perfectly absorb all the plot, storyline, characters, events, conflicts, themes, music, etc., with great detail. People can pay attention to that very easily, but what people do not distinguish is that this is a form of passive attention. It does not require any effort.

​Like a child, as you see in this image in the center, is looking at some UFO movie, science fiction. People can become perfectly absorbed in front of a television screen and receiving that knowledge and information with their mind active, but their consciousness, their soul, their Essence is asleep. Those images on the television screen enter the mind, and unfortunately because the consciousness is not there, our attention is not transforming it, what happens is that that information or data, those impressions enter the psyche and are not digested. We will talk about that in more detail later on, but we do not tend to observe the fact that our mind is very active, and we just passively take things in, absorbed within a film.
 
Active attention is much more distinct and is precisely the skill we seek to master with self-observation. Passive attention does not lead to change, active attention does. Why is it that someone could sit in front of a movie for hours and yet, cannot focus on reading a book? It is a different skill, a different form of attention. 

A basic exercise to know the difference is to look at a candle. Observe it. Watch it, and as you are watching the flame and all its nuance and transformations and movement, look at the details of the fire, the scents, or examine smell of the candle itself. See how the light diffuses in the space of your home or altar, whatever it may be, and look at how your mind tries to wander.
 
As you are exercising active attention, there are parts of the mind that do not want to pay attention. This is something that we need to distinctly see in ourselves. This is the beginning of self-observation. It also shows us that the quality of our attention is very diversified and that we see that passive attention is just merely taking things in without discrimination or understanding, while active attention is directed and willful. This is the fundamental skill of self-observation. This shows us what the quality of our own mind is.

​Why We Need Energy to Sustain Attention

​Now, in order to do this, we need energy. So, the consciousness, the Essence that can observe our own psychological contents to see the depths of who we are with active perception, needs energy. We need fuel. Light cannot exist, in a sense, without fire, and fire cannot burn without oil, without force.
 
Our consciousness is a form of energy and a form of attention. Every time we direct our attention at one thing, we are expending energy. So, this is why in our studies, in the Gnostic tradition, especially, we place great emphasis on the nature of conserving our energy, not merely intellectual or emotional, but also physically, psychologically, creatively―everything. We conserve our energy so that we have a reservoir of force by which to empower our perception.
 
The reason why people struggle to pay attention in our modern world or to actively look with active attention is because people are depleted. We are empty in our tank. Our mind, our heart, and our bodies tend to be very depleted, because we have a lifestyle that is contrary to spiritual injunctions from diverse religious traditions. We tend to waste our energies in many things and negative things. So, the beginning of self-observation is we learn to save energy, and we will talk about all the aspects of this in more detail later on, but we need energy to direct our attention because as Samael Aun Weor, the founder of the modern Gnostic tradition stated:

Wherever we direct attention, we spend creative energy. ―Samael Aun Weor

​If we have no energy, we cannot explore ourselves. We cannot see who we are. We need energy to sustain our attention life. In the same way that you cannot work at a job without sufficient energy or with a good diet, the same way with the consciousness. We need to feed it with good food, good fuel. We have to provide the proper nourishment and environment for our soul to develop. This is why we practice self-observation, to train it, to give it the necessary practice that it needs to awaken.

​An Exercise of Attention

​One exercise of attention is to, building on the previous exercise, instead of becoming aware of everything at once (sight, sound, scent, taste, and touch), instead, examine one aspect of your senses at a time.
 
If you are walking in the forest, just pay attention to the sounds for 10 minutes and then move to sight.
 
Pay attention for 10 minutes to your visuals.
 
To be more creative, take 10 minutes to smell your environment.
 
If you are eating, take 10 minutes to observe what you are tasting. Be very conscious and deliberate about what you are chewing and how you are eating, because how conscious you are when you eat determines how much energy you really ingest and transform.
 
Also touch―if you are touching the trees in your environment, you are touching the pool of water in the forest, pay attention to your touch. What does the ground feel like on your feet? How does your circulation feel as your heart is pumping blood through your body? Are you really aware of your breathing? Pay attention to that. Focus on that exclusively and singularly at the expense of everything else.
 
Just take time to focus on one of your senses at a time. That is one practice.
 
Now, self-observation is going to build off of this because in the same way that you can direct attention to any of your senses, you also can direct your attention to your thoughts, even to your sensations of your body, your movement, your emotions, your instincts, even your sexual drives. We will build on that soon.

​Mindfulness

​But mindfulness―which is a term that people sadly toss around today with a lot of casualness, but without much understanding―really signifies continuity of perception. So, people often mistake awareness with mindfulness, like if you are mindful, you are really just aware of your body or your breath. This is one aspect, but really mindfulness, in its most technical sense, refers to continuity of perception. It refers to the continual vigilant state of watchfulness. So, if you are observing your environment or observing yourself in the moment, you maintain that throughout your whole day. This is mindfulness.
 
It is like a wheel. It continuously spins, or we try to spin it continuously because, obviously in the beginning, it is very hard to do. It is a new skill, but that is continuity of perception.

​Continuity of Perception

​Some questions we can ask ourselves as we are observing our environment or observing our own selves:
 
How long can we remain aware?
 
If you are walking in the woods, how long can you observe your environment without drifting off?
 
Or, if you are paying attention to one thing, how long can you sustain your attention?
 
How long can you direct it for and hold it, like concentrating on a candle without your mind wandering at something else?
 
Also, if you are watching your own mind, your emotions, your feelings, your thoughts, your body, do you ever forget to do that?
 
Obviously in the beginning, we forget all the time, because this is something that was never taught to us in schools. Self-observation in the moment, directed, inward attention, can be prolonged, where, as you are walking in the woods or you are looking at a candle, you are observing not only your thoughts and feelings, but also the desires, impulses, and our own ego that emerge within the screen of our attention.
 
In a sense, self-observation really is when you are directing your attention into your mind, your heart, and your body, your psychology. What do you see emerge?
 
You are watching yourself like you are a director watching an actor in a movie. As you are observing yourself, how long can you maintain that state?
 
How long can you remember to do it? ― where we have a sense of separation of “I am my Essence, my soul, looking within these centers and exploring my own intellect (my thoughts, my egos, my selves that emerge in the moment).” Can we remember to do that? That is mindfulness. If you are doing it continually, that is continuity of perception. That is what we want.
 
It is like sustaining a musical note on a scale or going up in a musical scale like a bunch of notes, like 7 notes, and reaching a new octave. Just as it takes effort to initiate a musical scale, likewise, learning to pay attention, sustain attention, and refine it, requires conscious efforts. Each note is a psychological state, which is categorized by groups of conscious shocks. Each shock is a state of alert perception, attention, and mindfulness is when we are able to sustain those notes, or psychological states, where alert novelty and self-exploration occur. Playing on the musical scale is a metaphor for psychological awakening. As you are playing, in a sense, music of your own consciousness, you are observing and engaged with the beauty of life outside. But also, we are exploring what is inside, where we can learn to create more harmony within.

​The Simultaneity of Awareness and Attention

With self-observation, we talked about these two things: awareness and attention, and mindfulness is how we maintain that watchful state throughout our entire day.
 
I talked about the human machine or five centers. Sometimes we call them three brains, because not only do we have an intellectual brain where we think in our cranium, but also we have an emotional brain, which in a sense is a form of intelligence. We also have a motor-instinctive-sexual brain, a motor center related to our spinal medulla.
 
So these have physical correspondence, but more importantly than that, these are psychological. These are forms of intelligence. We referred to them as brains because in a more spiritual sense, a brain esoterically refers to a modus operandi of diverse physiological and psychological functions. Some of them are merely related to the body. It is also related to how our mind, our soul, our consciousness, our personality, our ego, works.
 
When we are observing ourselves, we need to know what is around us. We also need to know what is inside of us. Simultaneously, we have to observe what is going on in the world, but also pay attention to our reactions and this is where self-observation begins.
 
We need a division of attention.
 
The reason why we divide our attention in the same way that you fire an arrow from a bow, you retract the bow backwards towards yourself as you aim the arrow outward. We do this because psychologically, there is a form of tension involved. When you are aware of your situation, you also must carefully observe your psychology. The reason why we do this is to discover our own egos, and this is the key.
 
Previously we talked about, in Know Your True Self, personality, ego, and Essence. We explained the personality. We have explained the ego, and the Essence is the one who is observing, looking outward, but also looking within to secretly discover what defects or egos are active in these five centers.
 
Now, without fully comprehending the powers of consciousness, how awareness and attention and mindfulness work, we cannot see ourselves for who we are, and we cannot extract the data we need to study each of these defects, so that when we study them and understand them, we can eliminate them.
 
This is known as the Key of SOL. You are dividing your attention: subject, object, location. This Key of SOL is an acronym. It is also a word that means “sun” because it is a way that, metaphorically, we give light to our psyche.
 
Subject is our own selves, our five centers, our three brains, our own defects which emerge. We have to observe all that.
 
Object, our external environment, the things around us, what surrounds us. Who are we with? What do we see? Awareness and attention―you are dividing your attention between the two. You need to know to understand both.
 
Then L, Location. Where are you? Are you at home? Are you in the city? Are you walking down the street? In the same way that light magnifies with the mirror, in the same way with subject-object-location, the Key of SOL, we train our consciousness to perceive and to directly understand everything, our relationship to our environment.
 
You cannot explore your reactions to life if you are not aware of what is around you or what is going on inside of you. So, we need both faculties active and developed.
 
This is a form of training. We need to train ourselves with this new sense because if you have tried this or if you do try this, you will see that it is very difficult in the beginning. It is a new type of seeing, a way of seeing the world, seeing ourselves. 

In the same way that you see, in the bottom right image here of a woman looking at a mirror, she is seeing the invisible. That man standing behind her shoulder is the ego. It could be her pride, her anger, her lust, her fear, her defects. You cannot see them with your physical senses, but you can sense your mental states, your emotional states, your sexual-instinctual and motive states with your psychological senses. It is a new way of seeing.
 
You reflect the mirror within and expand it outward. There are great benefits to this because by expanding and contracting your attention, your perception, you understand what makes you tick and what makes your human machine malfunction, so that you can change it. This is how you discover yourself. These are the tools.

​An Exercise of Mindfulness

One exercise of mindfulness, and this is obviously more intensive, is you are observing your environment through all your senses, and then you are also dividing your attention to your intellectual, motor, emotional, instinctual, and sexual states. What defects are emerging in you in relation to circumstances in life? Obviously, this takes a lot more skill, but it is something that is very fundamental that we have to learn.
 
That is why we start initially with observing a candle or doing an awareness walk, paying attention to only one sense at a time, directing your attention only to your thoughts or to your movements or to your emotions, so that you can learn all the minutiae, skills, that really make up this entire sense.
 
These are different exercises to train your psychological muscles. In the same way that you do not go to the gym and only train your right bicep, you work with all these exercises to train the whole body, so that you become a holistic being, an integral being. The same thing with these techniques.
 
Mindfulness is maintaining self-observation of yourself, being aware of your environment at all times. It is a powerful skill that we can learn so that we can gain more knowledge about who we are and why we suffer. 

​Obstacles to Self-Observation

​But there are also obstacles to self-observation. Sometimes people can engage in this practice, but do it in a very mechanical way. This is unfortunately a great mistake among many gnostic students who have been in this teaching for some time. Anyone who has studied this path for a number of years experience has this problem. Or, by observing oneself and observing their environment, one gets habitual, and this is the key problem that has to be addressed.
 
One can observe one's environment mechanically or one can observe oneself mechanically. It means to not really see what is new. I mean you are looking at your environment, you are paying attention outwardly, or you think you are observing yourself, but you are not really gaining any inspiration or novelty. You are not really feeling inspiration or joy and discovery of yourself.

​Going back to the initial image earlier of a lightbulb above a man's head, a silhouetted figure, we have to feel joy when we explore ourselves. When you discover a defect in your three brains or your five centers and you really understand it, you feel great joy, because a discovered defect will be a dead defect. You have caught something. You have caught the thief in action, and now you can resort to meditation and other practices to further explore that aggregate, that fault, that different part of ourselves which is creating problems, that ego, so that it can die and you can free the soul that is trapped in it.
 
But unfortunately, many people tend to get very lazy. We think we are observing but we are not. If we are not changing with time, if we are not discovering ourselves, that means we are not doing it well. It has to be something novel and new. We are seeing life in a new way all the time, but obviously it takes a lot of force to begin it, but also momentum to keep it going.
 
So, some questions: Can there ever be too much self-observation? As we are talking about mechanical self-observation, the answer is yes, meaning, if we are mechanical with it, meaning, we are just going through the motions of it, we are not going to see the benefits.
 
In fact, some people believe that self-observation is straining the mind, and this is wrong. Now, what we want to think about with our human machine is that we have a substantial or predetermined sum of spiritual capital or money, in a sense, spiritual values, energetic forces deposited within our three brains. So, in the same way that a car engine can only work if it has fuel, the same way, our intellect, our emotions, and our motor-instinctive-sexual brains have a certain capital of energy or forces. It is like a bank and has a certain amount of money in it. Every time you act using those centers, those brains, you expend money (spiritual capital). If you use too much energy in one center over the others, you exhaust it and go bankrupt, and this is what results in illnesses, such as in the mind or emotions, or the body, because people who abuse their energies too much and in one particular center more than the others get sick.
 
In a sense, mechanical self-observation can lead to that, where it is like thinking that one is observing, but one is really just intellectual or emotional, preponderantly emotional or too instinctive. This can break down our human machine. We want to take care of ourselves. We obviously need proper nourishment and energy to sustain ourselves, but the way that we do it is by balancing our lifestyle.
 
The way that we help self-observation be more effective is that we balance our three brains, right? In the same way that you exercise all parts of yourself at the gym, you also want to take care of everything about you. If you are too intellectual, take some time to listen to some good music, like classical composers like Beethoven, Mozart, Wagner, Chopin, Liszt. Or, if you are too physical, too instinctive, take time to read good literature, spiritual literature, good books, scriptures especially. Likewise, if you are too emotional, maybe take the time to go swimming. Take a walk. Go out into nature. In that way, you get out of your habits. You make good habits. You balance yourself and then in that way, your self-observation can be more natural and relaxed. It is not like you are trying to force your three brains to work without balancing your centers. So, there is that component to it too.

​Can You Observe Your True Self?

​In synthesis, can we observe our true self? We talked about ego, Essence and personality previously. Today we talked about the fundamental skills of activating the Essence so that we can perceive our true, divine nature, in that we can also direct that attention and will towards understanding our egos and helping to make our personality passive.
 
Most of us have a personality: our name, our culture, our interface in life, our customs or behaviors outwardly, and our own egos too active. We want to make them passive so that the soul which can perceive like the galaxy, the divine within, must be awakened, directed and purposeful. The way that you can learn this is by studying and meditating deeply on the book Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology by Samael Aun Weor, the founder of our tradition. 
 
At this point in time, I invite you to ask questions. Feel free to write them in the chat and I'll read them off.

​Questions and Answers

Question: Where would you recommend someone start that has just started looking into the concept of self-sabotage?
 
Instructor: Observe yourself. We sabotage our best intent all the time. Observe your own ego. Which defects in your mind, heart, and body propel you to do things that you later regret or even regret in the moment? You have to catch it. When you observe an ego emerge in you that you know is wrong, you have a choice, and you can respond to the situation with intuition and compassion or love or whatever virtue is needed. You will know that in your heart in the moment.
 
You cannot get there and transform the impression of that circumstance if you are not observing yourself. So that is the first step. Observe yourself. Get data about what ego in you is causing your problem, and later, if you need in the moment to step aside from the situation, or if you have to respond, follow your intuition, not your mind―your intuition, your heart, and that is how you can comprehend the situation better, transform it, transform that impression, that situation. See it for what it is. But you cannot do it if you are not watching.
 
Later on you go home. You meditate, comprehend, and retrospect the defect, the ego that caused that problem so that you can go deep into it, so that your inner divinity can annihilate it. There is a lecture we gave in a previous course called Gnostic Meditation. The lecture is called Retrospection Meditation where we go into great detail about that. Also, what we are talking about today here builds up to that course. So, we will provide that for you.
 
Question: Can you please re-explain the Key of SOL? I have had trouble with it in the past. Could you give an example? 
 
Instructor: Yes. You are walking down the street in a city. You are observing yourself (subject). Observe your three brains: your thoughts, your feelings, and your impulses. Object, what is going on around you? What do you see in your vicinity? The people, people walking their pets, the streets, the streetlamps, the lights, whatever it may be; and location: Where in the city are you? Perhaps... I mean if you are in Chicago, for example, you look at all three aspects: yourself, your environment, your locale, and the objects around you and your situation. You expand your perception and direct it inwardly so that you know the relationship between them. That is the purpose of exercising these skills. By working with awareness and attention and mindfulness, you understand how your own mind reacts to problems. In that way, you have a full, very well-rounded psychological muscle by which to train in the gymnasium of life.
 
Question: What is the best way to silence chatter when trying to self-observe?
 
Instructor: That is the thing. Watch it. Listen to it. Observe it, but do not get caught up. This is the difficult, delicate thing about self-observation. We have to be able to pay attention to something without being absorbed by it. What often happens with us in the beginning is that if our mind is thinking, we tend to pay attention to it, but then we get sucked in. We get lost in a chain of associative thinking.
 
The way that you help your mind to shut up is not by forcing it, or not by hiding from it, or not repressing it, or just giving it what it wants. Just continue to watch it. Let it talk and talk and talk, and do not feed it your energy. Look at it. Try to understand it, and the better you get at this, the mind will become quieter because it has no outlet. Meanwhile, it is in your mind, but it is not controlling you and is not clouding your perception or distracting you.
 
It is a nuanced skill. It is the middle path of Buddha―neither running away from, averting, or justifying. Watch. Sustain your attention, and it will dissipate of its own accord, in the same way that a glass of water with sediment and stone will become still when you just let it be. If you just watch it, it will stratify into layers, and you can clearly see what is going on in the water itself. The same thing with the mind. But that stillness only occurs without force, but by gently bringing your attention back and just watching the fact.
 
Question: What happens when the obsession with self-observation turns into a disassociation with others in reality? It has happened to me and to other practitioners I know, that after some time a practicing self-observation, they could not get emotionally involved with almost anything.
 
Instructor: What happens is that they're doing it in the wrong way. In fact, like the example we gave of, when can self-observation be too much, or be wrong, or mechanical. This is precisely it. Real self-observation is a skill of consciousness. We know that we are doing it right when we feel alert novelty and inspiration and joy, insight, understanding.
 
Now, what happens with a lot of people is that because they obsess, fearing, they fear that “If I am not self-observing myself, I am not going to discover my defects or understand my situation or overcome my ego,” and they do it with a lot of paranoia. This is harmful, and this is not correct, but it is very common. It happens to a lot of people where they feel like self-observation means disassociating from life―not feeling like things are real. It is like a dysphoric feeling. So, what happens is that people, like in your case or in anyone's case with this, is that the consciousness is not doing the work. It is the intellect. It is an ego. It is an error.
 
If we are doing it right, it means that we have intuition and inspiration of how to act in diverse circumstances, and that gives us a kind of revitalization, a sense of invigoration, like jumping into cold water. It may be shocking at first, but also it can be very pleasant. It is like you are alert. You are in an attentive state. You are seeing novelty and new things, but what happens with people who become disassociated often is that they tend to be using the intellectual center, thinking that they are observing themselves.
 
Now, obviously we know from our studies that the intellectual center is the slowest aspect of the human machine. It is a very cumbersome and almost inefficient machine. It is useful when we know how to use it consciously, but it cannot do the work for us. What happens is that you are disassociating from reality. It is like a breakdown. It could be a breakdown of the intellectual brain but also the emotional brain, and we do not want to do that.
 
My suggestion is if you find that you are in that state, step back from that and take a minute to re-engage your other brains. So, if you find that it's intellectual, listen to some good music. Feel the superior motions of that good music like listening to a symphony of Beethoven, something to distract, in a sense, self-distraction. I know we talked about paying attention, but sometimes we need to use a different brain in the moment or to re-engage ourselves in a different way, sometimes a drastic way to get us to reconfigure ourselves. That is what I suggest, because sometimes what will happen is that the intellectual brain will break down and the emotional brain will start to break down. It will start to corrode, because it is being performed with tension and fear rather than serenity and relaxation.
 
It is a hard thing to master. I know it is challenging especially. You can learn. It just takes time. If you find that you are really struggling with that, if you are disassociated, take a minute to perform activities that you enjoy―healthy activities like taking a walk or writing poetry, listening to good music. Engage in some aspect of yourself that brings you inspiration, so that you can engage yourself, because self-observation is a is a profound activity―real deep engagement and love of experiencing the novelty of life, the freshness and “Aha!” moment of existence. So, I hope that clarifies.
 
Question: What is the relationship between tests and ordeals and earthly world conditions? Is everything we see a reflection of the interior/internal?
 
Instructor: Some philosophies state that really the external world is merely a reflection of our internal world, and more importantly, what we are psychologically tends to shape what happens outside of us. If we are angry or upset, that tends to cloud our vision and make us fixate and obsess over things in accordance with the state of our condition, the anger that we are experiencing. In that sense, yes, the internal does reflect the external. More importantly, you will discover how your own mind will influence your situation, your reality, or how you perceive it by observing yourself. By observing yourself is how you really reflect and understand not only the interior or the internal, but the external and the relationship between the two. Only you can discover that reality for yourself through this technique.
 
Question: How is self-remembering different from self-observation?
 
Instructor: Great question. Self-observation is like the skill of riding a bike. It is a technique. Self-remembering is the joy you feel when you ride.
 
You have to know the skills of how to ride a bike, but self-remembering is when you are enraptured in the enjoyment of the state of your inner divinity, your Being. This can come about through virtuous states like compassion, unsolicited kindness, a moment of joy in which you give to your neighbor or to some stranger, serving the people around you. You remember the virtues, the qualities of your inner God, and that spontaneously manifests in you when you learn to ride.
 
First, you need the skills of how to observe, but to know how to enjoy and to be in the moment and to be a vehicle of your divinity, we need really the skills of observing but we also need to recall what virtue is and that can come about in many ways. The way that we discover that is by entering the psychological gymnasium of life.
 
We will have a whole lecture on this too: what self-remembering is [Remember Your True Self]. What are the qualities of God in us? How do you become a vehicle of that? How do we continue to be inspired by the insights of our own intuition so that they guide our heart and our way of being in the world?
 
Question: We have a question, kind of continuation of an earlier one. What remedy or recommendations could you give me for stages of skepticism and spiritual disconnection?
 
Instructor: Skepticism is healed by faith, not belief. My suggestion is that if your mind is very skeptical, meditate on what you really know. What have you verified in yourself? What do you know was real? Even if that may be minor or small, reflect on your foundation, and also reflect on the qualities of those initiates, those spiritual masters or teachers who embodied what we want to become.
 
You look at the lifestyle of someone like Jesus or Buddha or Moses or Krishna, you see that their character was brilliant, and they resolved and entered situations with great delicacy and skill. They manifested only the most ideal and profound, even in the worst situations.
 
I think that sometimes we get skeptical. People get skeptical thinking about supernatural phenomena and wonderful experiences in the stars but forget how to walk on their two feet. That is why we study self-observation, to understand how to walk. Skepticism is healed by experiential reality, experiential truth, what we have verified.
 
In the past when I was skeptical about certain things or have had doubts, I studied Samael Aun Weor's writings. I go back to the basics. I go look at what the scriptures have taught and corroborated, the consensus between the two, and I meditate on what I have experienced in my own past works. I look at the psychological photography of who I was compared to who I am now, because who I was in the past was not good. I do not want to go back to that. So, that is what has inspired me to continue forward.
 
Spiritual disconnection, I think, it is good to find, again, activities that are going to heal you. Some people think that by being gnostic that they have no joy in life. They become very morbid. They feel disconnected. They do not feel like they belong in a community or around other people, and this is wrong. It is ego. It is a defect. It is not the reality, and if we feel disconnected from divinity, we have to pray and aspire to deepen that connection for ourselves and to try. It may seem foreign or distant from us, but the reality is that it is distant from us because we tend not to look in the right places.
 
Self-observation is what helps, and self-remembrance is, again, reflecting on those virtues of your inner Being, which come to us when we do not expect them or even crave them. They come when they are needed. 

So, if you feel disconnected, especially spiritually, I recommend work with a mantra O or Om Masi Padme Hum, which means in the esoteric language, "Oh my inner God, the blessings of my inner divinity." So, prayer is good, too.
 
Question: Will sensing, feeling our physical body, be part of self-remembering?
 
Instructor: It is part of it. You have to be aware that you are in your body at all. If you are not aware of yourself physically, you are not going to also be aware of your inner divinity too, because we start here in this physical body. Obviously, for more advanced practitioners as mentioned in some Sufi writings and even the life of Samael Aun Weor, there are masters like him who were able to be talking to you physically, but at the same time be in the internal worlds and talking with the gods. To have that simultaneity of perception in multiple dimensions at once is a skill of a great master, even a resurrected master. So, we are not at that point. We start where we are at. We are at the bottom, so we begin here. Become aware of your body. Remember yourself in the body and later you will elevate more and more.
 
Question: One of the biggest obstacles I faced is losing mindfulness of myself. It is most difficult when going throughout daily life as I have tasks and duties I have to attend to. My question is, how does one remain mindful while in the gymnasium of life?
 
Instructor: Some people in the beginning like to practice using a watch, maybe even a timer, like a timer that goes off every hour. If you are more ambitious, you can do it every 15 minutes, you know, remind you, “Hey, pay attention. Be awake!” Something to remind you. I have known one person, one missionary who would use the computer a lot, who would have a particular image on her wallpaper, her screen, reminding her, “Did you remember yourself?” It could be cute and fun like that, but you can time yourself or find things or find ways to remind yourself frequently throughout the day. That is one basic technique, a timer.
 
But, later on with skill, personally, I found that the best way in my case to remember is to be in a very difficult job, because while strenuous and difficult, it does force you to be awake, to be mindful, especially if you are dealing with difficult clients. Situations can be very novel and require a lot of nuance and intuition to resolve. That is obviously very intense. It takes a lot of intensity to be engaged in that state in an effective way, in a compassionate way for the betterment of your community. A job can be like that.
 
Some people do not have that luxury. Some people have a very lackadaisical job, you know, in front of a computer all day and it is easy to zone out. Or, if you have a lot of tasks that you kind of get dispersed and stuck doing because they have to be done. That could be a challenge too.
 
We can be very active in life physically, but also psychologically spiritually be very asleep. We can be very diligent in our daily life, but also our consciousness can be very inert at the same time.
 
The way to do it is planning some time in your day. It may not be perfect. Having some plan is better than none. Having some schedule, a basic foundation of having times in your day where you check yourself, even if it means just 5 minutes, if you can manage the time. It could be 5 minutes where you have an alarm set where you tell yourself, “I am going to sit here for five minutes, relax and just focus on my breath, and reground myself.” That could be useful, but if we do not build in that time in our schedules then, unfortunately, life will devour us.
 
Samael Aun Weor mentions that we need to be able to consistently relax and to observe. Find time in your day. Make the time to remember. How that is going to play out in your life is going to be particular to you in accordance with your karma. So, be patient and if you have that structure in place, it will help.
 
Question: What is the best way to deal with the pain at the base of the spine and would this be Kundalini buildup? Also, can you explain the path of Kundalini specifically mind to heart? Is the energy going to the crown and back down to the heart?
 
Instructor: So, I know it is a bit off topic, you know, with talking about the Kundalini. We will mention briefly that people often associate awakenings of a spiritual type with their body and the body is not a reliable indicator of spiritual progress, because it is a different phenomenon in general. So, I wouldn't rely on the physical body as predicator of a spiritual awakening of that type. If you want to study more about what is this particular energy of Kundalini, how it rises to the mind from the base of the spine and then to the heart, you can study a book called The Perfect Matrimony by Samael Aun Weor. In many of his books he talks about this process, even in books like Igneous Rose, especially. But, yes, that energy has to rise from the base of the spine to the mind and then go to the heart.
 
Now, in the context of this lecture, if we are talking about self observation, we can emphasize that having that energy present in the spine working within the alchemist can give a lot of energy for being awake, paying attention. That is why we emphasize save your energies, your creative forces, so that you can have a reservoir, a well of profound force by which to work. But it has to be managed intelligently.
 
Question: Master Samael states that gnostic students self-observe themselves but do not feel themselves. Can you help clarify about this?
 
Instructor: It is going back to the mechanicity of the practice. You might think we are seeing ourselves, maybe watching our thoughts, watching our environment, but we do not feel connected with our Divine Mother. For those who are not familiar, the Divine Mother is an aspect of our inner divinity who is very close to us. To not feel oneself is not to feel that connection with that virtue.
 
It is easy to learn these skills of, again, like riding a bike, but do you feel the joy of it? Self-observation is a tool that leads and helps with self-remembering, but self-remembering is precisely a distinct quality in which, as we are using these skills of observing ourselves, we also feel that love in our heart for divinity in ourselves. To feel oneself in the heart is to be enriched and inspired by the qualities of our own inner Being. That can happen spontaneously, but it has to be cultivated here and now. It is not a mechanical process.
 
When we talk about certain skills of the consciousness, remembrance is a very distinct, even superior emotional flavor, in which we feel that quality of being a child of divinity. That cannot be defined with words, although it has been given many names. People do not feel the presence of their Divine Mother because we are not looking. We tend not to look. That is a quality of the heart, a quality of the emotions, a quality of the soul which feels that connection with conscience and intuition: knowing how to act in life in the right way, in the right circumstances, before the right people, with wisdom. To feel that is to have that inspiration and joy and that longing to know more. We will build on this too, a very deep topic. We will talk about more in the upcoming lecture on Remember Your True Self. It is not an intellectual faculty. It is a quality that a child feels when running to its mother when in pain and to receive that warmth and embrace from our own God to heal us and to give us strength.
 
Question:  In chapter 11 of In Search of the Miraculous by Ouspensky, he says that it is impossible for one person to wake up by themselves. Alone, we cannot awaken the consciousness. He says that one man can do nothing. Do you believe that we cannot awaken without a group? Must we have a Sangha or be participating in a gnostic group physically all of the time? Some of us are working alone, except for book studies and these lectures.
 
Instructor: Groups can help, but there is no guarantee that they will be the most effective. Groups are only as effective as the individual practitioners are working on themselves. We can get a lot of joy and strength from our community, but it does not mean that by belonging to a group that you are going to be saved. In fact, there are many people who enter and leave the Gnostic Movement, who join groups or stick with a group for 20, 30, or 40 years, but who do not change. Samael Aun Weor made a distinct commentary about this in some public lectures, where he says that people who have been studying this for a long time, but are not changing, are wasting their time. These are people who are part of distinct organizations but are getting lazy, and that is the danger.
 
But there is also great beauty and benefit we can get, great strength we get from our community. If you are studying with us online through book studies and listening to lectures, there are opportunities to visit and attend retreats where we can build deeper on these topics and also join together as a community, especially if you are studying online at a distance. A sangha is a great and rare opportunity and is very useful. We can acquire great strength and encouragement and growth from it, but it is important not to get stuck on the idea that we must have a group to succeed. There are many practitioners in gnosis who are individually working alone and in silence, who are making great progress, even more than some people who are attending groups. What matters is our willpower.
 
However, if you join a school that establishes the three-chamber system established by Samael Aun Weor, that can be a great benefit and give you a lot of force in your heart to continue. Those opportunities do exist. The way that you will get there if you need that help and if you will get it is depending on your inner God, your inner Being who organizes the whole process.
 
Question: I’m having a body condition in a very sensitive place that wants to dominate attention. It is confusing to place attention on something despite the condition, while acknowledging and accepting the condition. This confusion prods many egos. Do you have any suggestions for division of attention within a sensitive condition? 
 
Instructor: Sometimes we might suffer a very severe injury. Our body may be very sick. We may have a lot of pain. Pain can be a great obstacle, but also, it can be a great incentive and a great impetus to change. If you have a physical injury, obviously, trauma to the body is hard to heal and there are parts of the body that might be difficult to recuperate with modern medicine and the state of one's karma. Oftentimes, that pain can be a distraction if it is intense. Oftentimes, pain is exacerbated by identifying with it.
 
If you find that you have a part of your body or condition that is making you very obsessed, what could be even more dangerous than physical pain itself is the state of your mind. Now, obviously having a trauma or injury is very painful. It is a very terrible thing to go through and we always have a lot of compassion for that, but what will make that 10 million times worse is a state of mind that goes along with it.
 
This is not to disassociate from oneself or one's body, but to develop the necessary willpower in one's situation to transform it. So, if your body is constantly trying to pull your attention to the pain, you have to learn to look at that pain, but without identifying with it.
 
It may be that in some situations, if your pain is acting up, you also have to learn to distract yourself, not in a superficial way, but engage in activities that can help to redirect your attention if it is too much. But there have been cases of initiates who have suffered great traumas who were able to meditate even with dysentery. If you are not familiar, for those of you who are listening, that is a very crippling illness and very painful, but this person learned to meditate even despite the fact. Despite the terrible nature of a particular illness, one can transform it if the will is there, if the intent is there, if the consciousness is developed sufficiently.
 
You can divide your attention. If your body is pulling you in, observe your environment. If your attention is trying to pull yourself to the pain, observe what is going on around you. Redirect it. Try redirecting your attention. See what that does and play with it. See what happens. That is one skill or one technique you can dry and perhaps we can talk later about how effective that is for you.
 
Question: I can observe an object by directing my attention to it, meaning that I am placing my attention in an object, but I also have to direct the attention to the subject, mind, the five centers, the ego, etc. Simultaneously that will imply self-observation. My question is, will self-remembering be that I am aware that I am aware?
 
Instructor: Yes, it also means that you are aware that divinity is with you. It is a very different state. You are aware that you are watching, but also you are aware of the source of awareness itself. That is something that cannot be quantified or labeled. Although, certain schools have made great efforts to teach that. I mean, one valuable source of knowledge comes from the Sufis. Samael Aun Weor mentioned that the beauty of Sufism is that it teaches about our interior state of life and God, the remembrance of God. If you want to know about different states of being, different qualities and virtues of the soul that are accessed when we remember divinity, study Al-Risalah: Principles of Sufism by Al-Qushayri. We give a whole series of courses on that scripture itself. It is from Persia, and Samael Aun Weor says the best of Sufism comes from Persia. So, two courses: Sufi Path of Self-Knowledge and Sufi Principles of Meditation teach all about that.
 
Question: To be clear, there is no talking in the head in true self-observation, right? For example, if I am cooking and I self-observe, the internal voice says, “I am chopping the onion now. The sauce smells good. I feel tired from work.” This is an ego, right? Any talking in the head is an ego, right? Is the goal to get rid of that internal talking in the head?
 
Instructor: There are levels of stillness, levels of serenity in which there is greater or less absence of thought. Self-observation in the beginning obviously shows us that our mind tends to be hyperactive. It talks a lot. It tends to predominate everything we do, labeling in the beginning all our experiences like cooking, washing dishes, etc. With self-observation and self-remembering, we naturally learn to quiet the mind―not by force, not by will, like we are forcing the intellect to shut up, like we are strangling it. Istead, we are watching and letting it be.
 
As you naturally watch the mind and observe that fact, in the beginning it is going to be talking, but the more that it exhausts itself like a child going on and on in a conversation about nothing, what happens is that the child becomes tired and goes to sleep. The same thing with the ego if you are really diligent and watching. Self-observation does not mean that you are not going to think in the beginning, especially.
 
There are degrees of self-observation. There are degrees of serenity, of insight, of clarity. As you are letting the water still within a cup filled with rock and dust, the dirt will go to the bottom eventually if you just let it be and just watch and do not shake it. Let it be still. The same thing with the intellect, and eventually the mind will shut up. It will stop talking, but you have to let it be and you have to watch. You cannot force it. If you force it, your mind is going to be gagged and violent in the deeper levels of the subconsciousness, or it is going to be very agitated even if in the surface it may seem fine. So, yeah, it will become quiet eventually.
 
Question: Is self-observation relative to other people? For example, I will be having a conversation with someone and see correlations between what goes on inside of me and the person I am talking to almost as if I am sensing their psychology. 
 
Instructor: There is that relationship. Samael Aun Weor mentions in Igneous Rose that the state of inspiration is when we are talking with a person and we sense their internal psychological being, their content, what they are feeling and thinking, and we may feel a certain insight or inspiration, an intuition about what to say and do.
 
We are deeply interconnected with people. We do not exist in a bubble. So, self-observation, while it involves exploring our own psyche, it also has to involve understanding our external environment and the people we relate to. You may find that there are correlations between your own mind and what the person is doing or what they are saying, because there is a connection. We do influence people with our emotional states. We do not live in a bubble. We have this illusion that we can think and feel and do whatever we want in our mind and that there are no consequences. This is a fundamental state of ignorance. There is a connection, but I would not get so fixated or obsessed that “I can't think this thought or feel this because it's going to influence someone negatively.” That can lead to paranoia. It is not the key of self-observation, really.
 
You want to notice what is there and do not force it, but watch, and you may find that you know intuitively the right thing to do, that the right virtuous state of action in your mind and your heart can guide you into how to appropriately help this person. We do sense the psychological feelings and states of other people, even if physically we do not have any data. Even if their face or their expressions may not indicate it, we can sense when someone is sad or angry or lustful. It is not a physical sense. It is psychological. So, that does relate to self-observation. You are sensing not only yourself but also your environment.
 
Question: There are many forms of global folk music that I feel very good to me. Although I love many kinds of classical music, I love all kinds of global folk indigenous music, Celtic, Ukrainian, African, Nordic, North American, Appalachian, etc. Does this kind of music feed the body, personality, and ego, or can it also feed the soul?
 
Instructor: There are many traditions in humanity that have conserved conscious values, but that tends to be very insufficient in most cases. It is getting much more difficult now in our modern area to find traditions that still maintain the conscious principles of music. So, if you are not familiar for those who are listening, to the nature of spiritual music, there have been composers and works of art from the past, especially, that conveyed through their art principles of divinity. The music reflects really the most heavenly states of being that we can imagine. You can listen to Beethoven's 9th Symphony, and you see clearly a reference to the highest heavens, the ninth. If you look at the mystical Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, especially. We talk about this in our course called The Secret Teachings of Opera.
 
My suggestion is, rather than tell you what is good or bad to listen to, or tell you what to think, I would suggest that you do listen to some of this music and examine your heart. There is a Sufi saying we mentioned in that course, we mentioned that art and conscious music is really for the life of the initiates, and that it doesn't compel one to egotistical acts. 

The spiritual concert is forbidden to ordinary people because of the continued maintenance of their egos. It is permissible for renunciates because of their pursuit of inner struggle.  It is recommended for our companions (initiates), for the sake of the life of their hearts. ―Abu Ali al-Daqqaq in Al-Risalah: Principles of Sufism by Al-Qushayri

​So, if you are listening to music and you are really self-observing yourself, you can see which music is inspiring your ego and maybe your lust or desire or anger. It depends. You have to watch your mind. This is not something that you can verify by accepting what someone else has said. You have to really taste it. Investigate the difference between water and wine. You have to watch your personality and watch your ego when you hear this music. What do you perceive? What is inspired in you? Is it good or bad? It is hard.
 
I know in the beginning it is difficult to self-observe and distinguish the difference, but we have to learn how to be independent in this. Verify and listen. Experiment. Watch your emotional center. What comes up? What emotions? What feelings? What impulses? What desires? Or is it something different? Is there something superior there?
 
As a general rule of thumb, we reference that the classical music of the great initiates like the European tradition: Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt. Those were a very highly concentrated group of initiates who worked over the course of a couple centuries to provide humanity with divine teachings, but they are not the only ones. There are many throughout the world. I personally like listening to some indigenous music like from some Sufis and even Tibetan monks chanting. Some of those traditions are very deep and have preserved a lot of their knowledge from the past. The only way you can verify it is by meditating on the music and even investigating in the internal worlds.
 
Okay, so I know we ran over. I thank you all for coming! I really appreciate the questions. I appreciate the turnout and will be trying to schedule some more lecture soon online for people to attend. So, I greatly appreciate it. Thank you. Have a wonderful evening!