Meditation without Exertion

Renunciation
Written by Gnostic Instructor In our previous lecture, we discussed the principles that we need to understand in order to develop a practical meditation technique so we can fully take advantage of our efforts to meditate and receive the benefits. Meditation is a state of consciousness that we have to gain experience with, and in order for us to reach that experience, we need to have a strong understanding of the factors that lead to it. Study Proven Knowledge The first step that we should undergo in order to develop that understanding is to study the teachings on meditation. We need to rely on sources that are proven, that can be tested and experienced, so we can have confidence that what we are relying on as a source of information can actually take us where we want to go. As an example, when we are born into this life, the only way that we can acquire the skill in order to survive is to learn from others. We need teachers who know how to teach us what we need to knowwe cannot rely on people who lack experiential knowledge. In order for us to thrive and do well in life, we need a mother who loves us and who puts her heart into providing to us the knowledge and techniques that we need. This is especially true when we look at spirituality in this way. We have to be very clear about this. Yet, it is an ironya very sad ironythat we usually spend a great deal of time and energy researching and investigating a purchase that we have to make, such as if we are going to buy a car, house, or a computer. We will spend months and months very carefully analyzing the available items, and talking to people who have bought the product we are considering in order to find out about their experience and recommendations, and we will do that with even insignificant purchases, but we do not do this with regard to our spiritual or psychological investments. With spirituality, we leap immediately into whatever we find, without any thought or prudence, without really investigating the teaching that we are taking into our mind. This is why so many people and groups are suffering. This is why so many people spend years and years being misled. This is a grave problem. To read books of occultism, or to skillfully theorize about it, can be done by anyone; yet, in order for our consciousness to acquire cognizance of the occult wisdom is something else, to do this one needs to study the true occult wisdom within the internal worlds. Again, whosoever does not know how to consciously project himself in the Astral Body, does not know occultism. - Samael Aun Weor, The Major Mysteries To investigate a teaching, teacher, book, or a technique is not something you can do from books or the internet. You have to acquire your own experience. You must have the ability to investigate something deeply, consciously, for yourself. This is a catch twenty-two because we are asleep and do not have the skills and techniques that we need. To investigate a spiritual teaching, you need to be capable of investigating it spirituallythat is, out of your body. Until we have that ability, we must exercise a lot of caution. Until we have the ability to investigate spiritually, it is recommended that we not rely on fly by night teachers, books, pop culture, the latest bestseller, but to go to the original sources, to study the scriptures. Gnosis is all about the study of the most ancient and proven techniques and philosophies in human history. We are not interested in studying the latest trends or fads. Gnosis is not a trend or a fad. The wisdom that we talk about in these lectures and that we study in the books is the most ancient wisdom on the planet. It is so long lasting because it works, because it is real and effective. I gave you this little preface because I want to continue in the theme of the lecture about meditation without exertion, and I want you to understand that what we are studying here is proven knowledge. It is not something invented by modern people who want to make money or become famous. In the first lecture we talked about principles, about a point of view. But, for us to reach that point of view we need to clarify a lot of things in our own mind. The reason that we cannot meditate properlyand have conscious experiences investigating whatever we need to knowis because of our mind. The obstacles to spiritual experience are not because of anything outside of us. The obstacle we face is ourselves. That is what we have to clarify, and the genuine teachings can help us with that clarification. So in order to aid us, I have selected a scripture that is very short, but is a miracle, in its content, in its structure. Tsong Khapa

The Three Principle Paths is a short scripture of only fourteen stanzas written in the 14th century by Tsong Khapa, who was born in Tibet in the 1350's. He took his first Buddhist vow at the age of one, and was quickly swept up into being educated in all of the open and secret teachings of Buddhism. He received all the highest degrees and empowerments of that tradition. He went on to become the single greatest philosopher, intellectual, and organizer of Buddhism that has ever existed. He wrote more than ten thousand pages of commentaries about Buddhism. He started the Gelugpa tradition of the Dalai Lamas. He revolutionized Tibet in many ways. He single handedly brought Tibet out of a very dark time into what we would call in the west a period of enlightenment, of great cultural advances. He built monasteries and temples. Yet, even with all of that, the primary gift that he bestowed upon the world was to clarify the teaching of the Buddha, which had become very fractured, and people had become very confused about how to practice. So, he took all of the teachingsthe Sutras, Tantras, and commentariesand showed how they worked together, how they are organized, and thus how to understand the teaching practically. He showed that the teachings are organized as a series of practical steps. When you have studied and understood what Tsong Khapa taught, you can go to any scrap heap and find a page out of any scripture or religion, and you can understand how that page fits into spiritual practice. This is remarkable because it is a precedent to what Samael Aun Weor did. Yet, Samael Aun Weor did it not just with Buddhism, but with all the scriptures in the world. When you study Samael Aun Weor, you gain the same thing that a Buddhist student gains from studying Tsong Khapa: the ability to understand the path comprehensively. People who have studied Samael Aun Weor for a long time tend to forget this fact: that comprehensive view is one of the most beautiful gifts you receive from him. After studying Samael Aun Weor deeply, you can go to any spiritual book, any spiritual teaching, any spiritual school, and see how it fits in to the big picture. This is a beautiful gift, and is very powerful. "The Three Principle Paths" by Tsong Khapa condenses all of Buddhism into fourteen lines. There are hundreds and hundreds of scriptures in Buddhism, but the basic meaning from the beginning to the end is in this short scripture. The three principle paths that he explains in this scripture are basic Buddhism; of course, Gnosis is the union or the expression of all religions, but most especially Buddhism and Christianity. As Gnostic students we need to know Buddhism and Christianity both in depth. Tsong Khapa took all the teachings and said here is how you organize them, how you practice them, this is the step by step progression, the three fundamentals. That organization as a graded path is called Lam Rim. The Three Principle Paths The Buddha gave teachings according to the levels of the listener. In Buddhism even though it degenerated soon after he leftthere are many different levels of teaching, just in all traditions. So, these three fundamentals as an concept or way of understanding religion comes from Buddhism, but as a point of view applies to every religion. The concept of the three principle paths is: to reach the highest spiritual goal safely, you need to work through three stages. This is not like something in mundane life where you go to kindergarten for a year, and then you go to grade school for a few years, and then you go to another school for a few years this is not like that. Do not think of the three paths as something you graduate from one to the next; it does not work like that. Some people think that way, but that is not the case. A better way of thinking of the three principle paths is as a stepped pyramid, a pyramid that has three levels, or three steps. In fact, you will see these three steps in all religions. There are three steps up, but notice something: if you are going to stand on the top stepwhich, of course, is where we all want to beyou first have to step on the steps leading up to it, and even once you are standing on the top, the only reason you can stand there is because the other two steps are supporting you. This is really, really important to remember. The three principle paths or steps are: Renunciation Compassion Christ Wisdom The three principle paths or steps relate closely to three levels of instruction in any spiritual tradition. In Tantric Buddhism, they are also called Yanas (vehicles). Foundational level Greater level Secret or expedient level

We have talked often about how these are described in Buddhism. The first level is Shravakayana (which commonly is called Hinayana, but that is not a good term, it is derogatory. Theravada, Sutrayana, or Shravakayana are proper terms). This is the foundational path, the entryway to religion. Every religion has a Shravakayana or public level. Shravaka means hearer or listener, while Yana means vehicle or vessel. We all enter religion through that level. In the Shravakayana level of teaching, we hear the basics, the foundation, the fundamentals. You know what a fundament or a foundation means? It is the strength upon which the temple dependsthat is, without that foundation, the temple cannot stand. Why is this important? Because the second level is what we call Mahayana, the greater vehicle, and this is when the teachings get deeper and go further. And on top of that is Tantrayana, which is also called Mantrayana, Vajrayana, and many other names. Every religion in the world in its original inception had these three degrees. In Masonry they are called Apprentices Craftsman or Journeyman Masters These levels or steps come from Egypt. These three levels correspond to degrees of teaching. Of course, in the West we think we are all so elevated and spiritually advanced that we believe we can leap right in to the highest level (Tantrayana) and be recognized as Masters, and forget about the introductory levelsthis is what people think. This is why we find thousands of people leaping into Tantric schools, or so-called esoteric schools, or so-called advanced schools, and when they come out of those places, they are spiritually traumatized, deranged, damaged, ruined. This happens in the Gnostic tradition also; many Gnostic groups believe themselves to be very advanced, spiritually elevated, and they ignore the principles of the foundational level and the Mahayana level. That why so many Gnostic groups are creating so much suffering. I will give you an example. In the first level (Shravakayana level) of teachings, one is taught to take certain vows, such as to cease harmful activities and to adopt beneficial ones. Simple examples include do not drink, do not smoke, do not do drugs, do not sleep around, do not steal, do not kill. These are the different types of vows or practices in every religion: the Ten Commandments, the Vinaya, Yama and Niyama, etcall religions have this. But once a practitioner is introduced to the secret heart teachings, the highest yoga tantra, then they start working with the forces of desire and temptation. So, many of them start to drink, smoke, and sleep around, while saying they can do these things because, "I am a tantric practitioner," when in fact all they are just fools who have succumbed to their desires. This is happening in many traditions, including Gnosis and Tibetan Buddhism. There are very well respected monasteries, retreat centers, and lamas who are leading their students to drink, do drugs, and have sex with each other. They will meditate for an hour and then all go to the bar and get drunk, then go back to the monastery and sleep with each other. That is not White Tantra. That is Black Tantra. White Tantra retains the foundation: the sutrayana level of teachings, which include the basic vows. White Tantra is defined by practices of purity, chastity, and charity, built upon the foundation of the Shravakayana. You cannot separate them. If you do, then you are off the white path, and are degenerating yourself. The ego is that strong; it convinces many well-meaning people. This is really critical to grasp. The ego is extremely clever and loves to play with these concepts in order to feed itself. The reason that we address this is because no matter how so-called "advanced" we are, we always need cognizance of a strong foundation. Samael Aun Weor is an excellent example of this; he is, in my mind, the perfect renunciate. He perfected renunciation in himself. Renunciation is the perfect expression of Shravakayana, the foundational level teaching. Many Gnostics like to proclaim Samael Aun Weor as the greatest Master of Tantra, and this is true, he is a great Master of tantra. But he could not be a Master of Tantra without being a Master of Mahayana and Shravakayana, the two levels that support Tantra it would be impossible. You cannot become a Master of Tantra if you ignore the foundations upon which it depends. Tantra (3) depends upon Compassion (2) and Renunciation (1). In synthesis, these three levels relate closely with the three fundamentals or three principles of the path. 1. Renunciation Tsong Khapa explains in this scripture that the first principle of the path is renunciation. When we study spirituality, we hear this word renunciation and we think it means we have to stop drinking or smoking; some people say to be a real renunciate you have to go live in the woods or a cave, or be a monk. This is not the real meaning of the word. Your physical circumstances have nothing to do with real renunciation. Real renunciation is a psychological state; it is a state of consciousness, not a state of physicality. You can prove it to yourself by visiting any monastery and trying to find a real renunciate. You can go and ask

the abbot in charge of that monastery, "Do you have any real renunciates here?" If that abbot is honest, he will say "No." A real renunciate is one who has completely eliminated the ego. Such a person is a Buddha. Until we reach that stage, we cannot abandon the teachings of renunciation. 2. Compassion The second fundamental is Bodhichitta. This is a Sanskrit word whose meaning is very deep, but for the purposes of today's lecture we'll synthesize it as saying that Bodhichitta relates to the wish to aid others to reach enlightenment. 3. Christ Wisdom The third fundamental of the path fundamental of the path in Sanskrit is called "Prajna. Loosely translated Prajna means wisdom, but wisdom specifically related with the Absolute, the Void, the Emptiness, Shunyata. These are the three principles: renunciation, Bodhichitta, Prajna (renunciation, compassion, wisdom). Wisdom is built upon compassion; you cannot have Prajna if you do not have compassion. And true compassion, true love for humanity, cannot be had unless you have renunciation. These are not just dogmatic statements; these are practical facts of this teaching, and they can be demonstrated in your own life and when you observe and learn from others. For us to proceed, we need to understand something really important about this teaching in relation with meditation. In the previous lecture we discussed how to truly meditate, to truly experience the truth, which is Prajna, you cannot make any exertion. In other words, the mind has to be in a perfect state of equanimity, silence. But how do you reach that state? Especially when you look the state that we have now where the mind is completely out of control, wild. When we sit to try to reflect on something or meditate we cannot, the mind goes everywhere, we fall asleep, we get frustrated, we get distracted, we get despondent, we give up. How do we get there? How do we reach a point in which the mind is silent, we have peace, we have serenity and then that explosion happens, that door opens and we experience the truth? How do we reach that from where we are? By making effort, not exertion, and this is the difference that we explained in the previous lecture. The effort that we need is a moment activity of consciousness, to be in a constant state of inner watchfulness, to be watching our mind. Mere observance does not transform the mind; it initiates the transformation, but it does not complete it. The continual observance of oneself directs your energy inward, your consciousness, upon your own psychological state. But what really empowers change is comprehension, understanding. So, for us to get there we need a technique called "Analytical Meditation." Many Techniques of Meditation In the teachings that we study from Samael Aun Weor, the Buddha, Raja Yoga, or from any tradition, there are many techniques of meditation, styles, and approaches, and all of them have effectiveness and usefulness if you can understand how they fit into the big picture, if you can understand when they should be applied. This is part of the confusion that we find in some schools, where you enter into the school and everybody in the whole school is subjected to the same practice. This would be like going to the doctor and, no matter what your ailment, they always give you the same medicine. That would not make any sense, right? Each of us has our need, each of us has our illness, and we need medicine specific to that, but to receive that medicine, you first need to diagnose the illness. If you do not know how you are sick and what you are suffering from, then how can you apply an antidote? Thus, the first thing we need is Analytical Meditation. Analytical Meditation First, this is how you apply it. To analyze something in meditation is quite simple: you relax, isolate yourself from all external phenomena, close your eyes, turn your attention inwards, and you bring that object into your imagination. If you need to understand a dream, a scripture, a pain, a doubt, this is what you imagine. Bring it to the screen of your imagination, relax, and analyze. For all of us who are beginners, this means that we are thinking about it, and this is okay, we are at the level where we are. So, if you have a situation in your life that troubles you, then sit and analyze that, contemplate that. If you cannot stop thinking, then think about it, but not thinking about it in the way you commonly do, not just letting the mind run and building more worry. Rather, think about it consciously, think about it in the presence of the remembrance of your Innermostthis is the distinct difference, you need to remember yourself. This is why when we perform a practice like this, it is always best to start with a prayer, to remember your Divine Mother, to remember your Inner Being, to pray, to chant a mantra, to do some pranayamas, to center yourself, to relax. Then you can begin to analyze the dream, the experience, the scripture, the lecture, the book, the situation, and take it apart. This approach is very effective and very

helpful because it helps us to start to grasp and understand things, but again it has to be done consciously, attentive, with attention inside. Anything that emerges in the mind, we have to become cognizant of. Samael Aun Weor states many times in his books and lectures, Anything that appears in the screen of the mind has to be analyzed. This is what we are talking about: a kind of analysis. I am giving you this explanation because in order to understand the first level, you need this technique. Commonly we associate the preliminary levels of spirituality, what we call Shravakayana or foundational teachings, with techniques such as mantra repetition, yantra or yogic exorcises, runic practices in the Gnostic tradition, preliminary concentration exercises which are present in every religion, Japa or prayer repetition, like saying the Hail Mary again and again, or saying Om Namah Shivaya again and again, whatever the practice happens to be. These are all typical Shravakayana level techniques. What is their purpose? The vast majority of spiritual people think those techniques take you to God and that is the only technique you need. They think that way because they have only been educated in that level. They do not know what those techniques are actually for, they do not know where they actually lead to, because they have not been educated further, and because in most cases they still have no authentic spiritual experience. In fact, we find this in the Gnostic tradition as well, where instructors or students insist upon certain techniques over others, and the curious thing is a lot of these people in different traditions really believe themselves to be experts and sincerely want to help others, and yet they have no experience of the results of the practice they are promotingconscious experience, internal development, spiritual awakening. This is why we can go to Kundalini Yoga schools, Tantric schools, Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, etc, and find people who are very sincere and very enthusiastic, maybe sometimes aggressive in pushing their technique or their approach, and yet if you questioned them, if you ask them, Have you experienced God? Have you talked to your Innermost? Have you spoken with an angel? Have you eliminated an ego? Most will think you are crazy to ask because they have never had such an experience and even believe it is not possible. Yet, if they are honest, they will tell you they have not had such experiences. Why? This is important! How can we put our trust and faith into a group, teaching, or school who promotes religion but whose followers have not even experienced the first level of religion? All of the techniques of the Shravakayana level exist in order to prepare oneself for the next level, which is Mahayana. The distinguishing characteristic of any Mahayana level teaching is compassion for others. But how does that compassion emerge? Genuine, true compassion for another person, or for all of humanity, is not just to say, May all beings be happy, or as we always say at Christmas time, Peace and goodwill to all mankind. Every foundational level religion teaches compassion for others, but that compassion is not Mahayana level Bodhichitta. We all respect the virtue of compassion for others, but when have we felt a flame in our heart, a flame of love for others that so strong we could die? Who among us has felt that? That living fire in the heart is Bodhichitta. Bodhichitta is not a concept. It is not an intention or affirmation. Cognizant love, compassion, is not conceptual, it is a conscious emotion, a superior emotion. It is one of the most powerful emotions you will ever experience, but it does not come from reading books or taking vows or attending temples. It comes through comprehension. The reason that we learn to practice techniques such as the mantra repetition, runic practices, pranayamas, concentration exercises, is to begin to prepare our mind, to begin to clarify our state of consciousness so that we can apply analytical meditation. The analytical meditation where we sit at the end of the day and observe ourselves and look at our experience of the day and we say, "Wow I had a lot of anger today, I need to analyze that." We do all those practices to prepare us for that moment, and then when you are really serious about analyzing life, the ego, suffering, how much pain we create for ourselves and how much pain we create for others, when you really comprehend that and understand that, you start to really feel what suffering is and what causes it. In the previous lecture, I explained a little bit about the Four Noble Truths, and that all suffering comes from desire. Intellectually, this is an interesting concept to analyze, but when you comprehend it in your heart, it is deeply painful. This heartfelt type of understanding is what leads to real renunciation. So let me read a little bit from this scripture to put this in perspective. Scripture Analysis There have been hundreds of books written about this one short page. Each line, each word, has been commented upon by hundreds, maybe thousands of Lamas in the Tibetan tradition that is how important this scripture is. They analyze in depth each phrase because of how much potency is in it. Do not take the words at face value. There is great value hidden here. "I bow to all the high and holy Lamas."

This first line is important. In this line, Tsong Khapa is indicating all of those who have accomplished what the scripture will explain, that this is something alive, it is not theoretical, it is real. The first stanza says 1 As far as I am able I will explain The essence of all high teachings of the Victors, The path that their holy sons commend, The entry point for the fortunate seeking freedom. 2 Listen with a pure mind, fortunate ones Who have no craving for the pleasures of life, And who to make leisure and fortune meaningful strive To turn their minds to the path which pleases the Victors. These first two stanzas describe for us the conditions within which we need to establish ourselves, the point of view, the mindset that we need. This line says, "Listen with a pure mind fortunate ones." I do not necessarily know who among us would consider ourselves fortunate; I think it depends on our point of view. It is probable that if someone had asked us before the lecture if we considered ourselves fortunate, our mind would have immediately analyzed our financial situation. Right? That would be the first thing, "How much money do I have?", "Am I wealthy?", "Am I doing well?", "Am I eating well?", "Do I have a lot of clothes?", "Do people love me?", "Do people respect me?", "Do they talk about me? These are the things that would have emerged in our mind at that moment. Now that we are in the lecture, our answer might be a little different, we might think, "Oh yeah, yeah I am studying these teachings, I am fortunate." That is good, it is true; that is the intended meaning here, but we are fortunate for another reason, not merely to receive the dharma, which is a great blessing, but what this other line says, "And who to make leisure and fortune meaningful." What does that mean? Again, before the lecture if we had been asked, "Do you have leisure and fortune?" None of us would say yes, we would all say, "No, no, I am poor, I am broke, I do not have any money and I am so stressed out, I do not have any leisure. That is all a lie. These are lies we tell ourselves. The truth is that we are extremely fortunate and we have a lot of leisure, especially in the West, especially in North America, we are spoiled rotten. We have no concept of the true fortune that we have, yet if anyone of us were to be teleported immediately into the streets of Tibet, or the Middle East, or Africa, we would get a big awakening, a big awakening. And yet, that is the most superficial level of the meaning in this passage. What is meant by to have leisure and fortune is really the unique characteristic of any humanoid, any person that has a humanoid body, what we in Gnosis call intellectual animals. Why? Because it is at this level of evolution in which we first have freedom, relatively speaking, individual will: we can do what we want to do. We are given that right because we need to develop it in order to advance and become Buddhas, Angels, yet we squander it. What do we do with our individual freedom? Our ability to choose our action? We feed desire. We behave like animals; our only concerns are food, sex, and money. What is the result? The situation on this planet: billions of people suffering for lack of money, food, and because of the abuse of sex. To enter into a humanoid body is to be given the opportunity to study the dharma, to learn Gnosis, to become a Master of oneself, and then later to become a Master above, to start to take responsibilities in the cosmic hierarchy. That is the fortune and leisure that we have, and how fleeting it is, how brief. Thus the line says, "Listen with a pure mind fortunate ones who have no craving for the pleasures of life and who to make leisure and fortune meaningful strive to turn their minds to the path." The Foundation of the Path The next stanza says, 3 Without pure renunciation, there is no way to end This striving for pleasant results in the ocean of life. It is because of their hankering life as well that beings Are fettered, so seek renunciation first. This is a very powerful line, and it underlines the entire range of the introductory levels of every religion in the world. So let me read it again. Think on this deeply, "Without pure renunciation there is no way to end this striving for pleasant results." The mind hears this and says, "What? Whats wrong with striving for pleasant results? Aren't we who are on the path striving for pleasant results?" We are, but there is a difference between the mind striving for that and the soul striving for it. The mind striving for pleasant

results is striving for desire, to satisfy the ego. The consciousness who has the pure mind, who is striving to turn the mind towards the path that pleases the victors, is seeking Bodhichitta, not pleasure for one's self. The next part of that stanza says, It is because of their hankering life as well that beings are fettered, so seek renunciation first." This stanza describes in a nutshell, in a brief synthesis, the entire Shravakayana teaching, which is simply those four noble truths that we talked about in the previous lecture. So long as you are pursuing craving, you are creating pain, and as long as you are avoiding unpleasant things, you are sustaining them. This is the great pendulum of nature; it is a law of infallibility, called invariance in physics. If you observe water and if you drop something heavy on the water on one side the whole body of water adjusts itself to accommodate the change. But then what happens? It moves back the other way and keeps moving again and again in a wave like pattern in a pendulum swing until everything eventually calms. The same thing happens with every action in your heart, in your mind, and with your body. This is a profound law of nature, which is the whole purpose of the first level in religion, to analyze that, to study our daily lives, and to see how our actions produce results. What are the results we are experiencing? Why are we experiencing them? Because the causes are within us, so we analyze the result and the cause, the cause and the result, in order to understand how to behave properly. The next stanza says, 4 Leisure and fortune are hard to find, life is not long; Think it constantly, stop desire for this life. Think over and over how deeds and their fruits never fail, And the cycles suffering: stop desire for the future. "Leisure and fortune are hard to find, life is not long." This leisure and fortune does not refer to just having a trust fund, it does not refer to having a couple million dollars in the stock market. It is talking about having the leisure and fortune of having a physical body, simply that. On the cosmic scale, that is an incredible fortune; it is also a great leisure, because we can use it or abuse it as we will, and we do. The second part says, "Life is not long." None of us have cognizance of that; none of us truly comprehend that we are going to die, not one of us. And thus, how can we claim to be great Tantric practitioners or Mahayana Buddhists when we do not even understand the most fundamental teaching of every religion, which is you will die, death is unavoidable. Every single teaching in the world emphasizes this, and yet every spiritual aspirant in the world ignores it. In the teachings of the Buddha in the introductory level, Shravakayana, these are the basic things that every student needs to learn: to meditate on karma, action and consequence to meditate on impermanence to meditate on death Let us not have the arrogance that presumes that we already understand those things and we can skip on to the next level. None of us comprehend these facts. None of us really comprehend impermanence. If we did, we would be free of suffering. Comprehension of Death If we really understood that we were going to die, we would not be wasting our time in so many stupid pointless activities, and yet we all do. What is the spiritual fruit of watching television? What is the spiritual fruit of wandering around in the shopping mall? What is the spiritual fruit of browsing around on the internet? If you were to do a detailed analysis of how you spent your time, even just for the last week, and you were strictly sincere with yourself, and you made two columns, two lists, one list that shows each moment of your day that will benefit you spiritually and the other list with everything else you did, which list will be longer and have more energy invested into it? It is a simple question, but it must be answered, especially when you comprehend that you will die. Who here knows when they will die? Anybody in the back? I strongly recommend to you that you meditate on your death. It is one of the most potent, powerful, inspirational meditation practices that exists, and yet we are all terrified to do it, even though it is one of the most basic practices in Buddhism. In most Western schools, including the Gnostic tradition, there are many people going around thinking they are experts of Tantra, yet they have not ever done the first practice of the basic level, which is to comprehend the inevitability of their death. It is absurd to see so many self-proclaimed experts who lack any real knowledge. We need comprehension of our approaching death, and this is why Samael Aun Weor focused on it so much, in so many books, so many stories, so many examples about death. What he wrote wasn't accidental, and it wasn't just for fun; he wrote those books because we need to

understand death. When we understand that we will die at any moment, true renunciation emerges naturally, because we cannot bear to waste a moment. Leisure and fortune are hard to find, life is not long; Think it constantly, stop desire for this life. For me, at my level, that is all I need from this scripture, and we are only in the fourth stanza of fourteen. I have still a lot of desire for this life, I still want comfort, I want security, I have pride, I have anger, I have all these defects related to this life. So I have not accomplished this line, "Stop desire for this life." If I am not done with that line, how can I ever proceed to the rest of the scripture? I am not there yet, but I will read it for you. Comprehension of Karma: Action and Consequence The next line says, "Think over and over how deeds and their fruits never fail." Action and consequence never fail. This is a Shravakayana, foundational level teaching. In the Bible it says, "Ye will reap what you sow." That is karma, simple and pure, but none of us grasp it, because we continue to perform actions that produce suffering. Now, once we become "spiritual," we hide our harmful acts even from ourselves; we try to act like we know better. We do not want to show people what we really are inside, so we act spiritual. That is normal. But inside, in the mind, we are angry, vengeful, proud, stuck-up, full of ourselves, judging other people, condemning everyone, envying everyone, coveting what they have, full of fear, consumed by anxiety none of that is spiritual. A truly spiritual person is in equanimity, peace, and radiates love even to their enemies. None of us have that; none of us have the right to act like we are that when we are not. Think over and over how deeds and their fruits never fail, And the cycles suffering: stop desire for the future. Let us think about that for a moment: action and consequence, Karma. We "spiritual people" take this idea for granted; we think we grasp it, because we have studied the word karma, we may have read a couple of books about it, we have heard Samael Aun Weor talk about karma a lot and we think, "Oh yeah, I get karma, I know what karma is." Sorry! Wrong! You do not! None of us do. Comprehension is proven through your actions. Shall I repeat that? Comprehension is proven through your actions, not through your intellect, not through the mind, not through your words, not through your pantomime of spirituality, but through your actions in your heart, in your mind. Samael Aun Weor said, "What matters most is not how people treat each other visibly, but how people treat each other invisibly. That is very profound; certainly, I cannot measure up to it. Every single motion of matter and energy produces a consequence. That is karma: action and consequence. The Four Certainties of Karma There are four basic rules that we need to grasp about karma. 1. Actions produce related consequences. When you perform an action there will always be a consequence that is related to that action. That is basic karmic law. We need to look at that in our lives; this is where we can apply this analytical meditation that I was describing. Analyze the consequences you are experiencing in your life. How are you suffering? In the evening at home, in the morning before you leave for your day, analyze yourself. How am I suffering? What are the consequences that I am bearing? Look at that, analyze that, and then look to see what actions could produce that because nothing is accidental. This is the first rule for a Gnostic: nothing is an accident, nothing is coincidence. We know there is a law of accident, but it is rare. What is most common is the law of karma. So we have to analyze ourselves, our mind, our suffering, our problems, our pains, and look what action could produce what we experience 2. Consequences are greater than the action. I know the mind hates this one, the mind says, "No way, it cannot be like that, I do not accept that at all." Sorry, but this is a law. In fact, consequences are greater than the actions. Think about that. I explained the law of invariance, and I gave you the example: if we drop something into water, the water makes waves; the wave is water moving up as the water where the impact occurred goes down; it is a kind of pendulum swing. Think about that: when the object strikes the water, there is a certain amount of water displaced. Correct? But it goes out in a ring: far more water is affected than the impact point. Do you grasp that? When the stone hits the water, we think in our mind that the only thing affected is the water that the stone touches, but that is not true. All of the water in the whole area is affected. The whole body of water moves.

Now, this is just an intellectual example. In the real world, the energies in motion are far greater than our mind can imagine. Moreover, this law applies to all energy, even psychological energy. That is, the same is true with your anger, with your pride, with your lust, with your envy: the same law applies. When you feel an explosion of covetousness inside, that is like the stone touching the water in your heart, but those ripples flow through your three brains, and they flow to your spouse, to your children, to your coworkers, to your family, to every person that comes in contact with you. They affect your household, they affect your workplace, they even affect your clothing, your bedroom they affect everything. The consequence of that anger, covetousness, pride, lust, irradiates out in waves upon waves, especially if you keep feeding it. The energy of our mind is flowing and flowing and flowing saturating every atom in your body and saturating every person that you pass near, and then you wonder why when we walk around our cities there is so much pain and so much suffering. Because we produce it! We do not realize that consequences are greater than the action, but let me explain something to you: the inverse is also true. If you perform a good deed, the consequences are greater than the action. This is the secret of religion. This is why sacrifice is the greatest aspect of the three factors. Yes we need death psychologically, yes we need birth spiritually, but most of all we need to sacrifice for others, because that action produces consequences far greater than the original action. That is how we can transform the world, by understanding karma, the first level, Shravakayana, basic. And remember, I am only on number two of the four aspects. 3. You cannot receive the consequence without committing its corresponding action. You cannot be nourished unless you eat. You cannot be clean unless you bathe. You cannot go to jail unless you committed a crime. You cannot receive your payment unless you performed the work. What does this mean? If you want to be rich, you need to earn your money. This is a very superficial and foolish idea or example, and yet we all suffer from ignoring it. We all think there is a trick, a way to get rich overnight. Americans are the stupidest ones of all in regards to this, because all the Americans are obsessed with concepts, ideas, tricks, regarding How to get money right away. That is what all those commercials are about, If you sign up for my seminar, my program, or get my book, you will get rich really fast doing real estate, doing investing, whatever the concept or idea, the hook is, yet it is all lies. You know why? Because the only one getting rich is the one selling it. We have this psychological weakness because we do not understand karma. This affects us in many, many ways. We also think we can trick our way into heaven. We think, If I believe in Jesus, I have nothing more to do, I am going to heaven. If that were true, he would have said it, but he did not. For two thousand years people have been altering the scriptures to try to support that concept so they can stay in power, but the concept is still false. Millions of people believe that belief takes them to heaven, yet nothing in the entirety of God's creation supports that idea. God does not make exceptions to the law; the law is the law. Spirituality functions in accordance with laws. You cannot get something that you did not earn, but you will get what you deserve. The Bible says whatever you sow, whatever seeds you put in the earth, determines what you are going to get back. But think about it, the seed is tiny, you put that little seed in there but what comes out? A big plant, a big tree: the consequences are greater than the action. This is only number three, and we are still only in the fourth stanza of the scripture. You can see how much work we have to do. 4. Once an action is performed the consequence cannot be erased. We love to try to get away with feeding our desires. We think we can cheat everybody, be sneaky, and let our mind dwell on those lustful images, let our mind dwell on our resentment towards our mother or father, or our boss, or our wife or husband. We love to indulge in our grievances and our pleasures. We always forget that they have a consequence, too. This statement has to be understood in context with the other three. Once an action is performed the consequence cannot be erased; this is a fact. Everything you do is permanently a part of nature. You cannot erase it from the memory of nature. However, a superior law can transcend that law. In other words, if you perform an action whose consequence will be painful, you can then perform a superior action whose consequence will be superior to that pain, thereby you transcend the inferior consequences. If you feel anger towards someone and you say something angry, that person is going to get upset, but if you realize it and you apologize, sincerely, then the suffering is averted or healed. Right? If the person accepts it, if they feel and accept your sincerity and truly accept the apology they do not need to have revenge on you, it is solved. The same is true spiritually. This is why we have to perform good deeds in order to conquer all of the karmas that we can, to pay our karma, to pay our debts, to be free of pain. Not

every action can be erased in that way, but many can, many can be absolved you might say, or cleared. The record is there but it does not mean that you have to suffer the consequences for every action; you do not if you perform good deeds, if you work with the law. These painful things that I been talking about are all related to the first level, to really see how our emotions, our thoughts, and our actions not only make us suffer, but make other suffer. When we grasp that, it is painful, it hurts. There was a great lama in Tibet who lived in isolation and was quite old. Occasionally other lamas would come visit him. He asked them, "Have you heard anything about so and so lama? How is he doing?" The visitor said, "Oh, he is doing so well, he is building temples, stupas, he is printing dharma books, he is spreading the teachings everywhere." The great lama said, "Oh, wonderful, wonderful, but isn't it great to practice genuine dharma?" Later another visitor came, another lama and this old lama said, "Have you heard about this other lama? How is he doing?" The visitor said, "Ah, he is teaching, he has many students, he is doing well." The old man said, "Oh, good, good, but isn't it great to practice genuine dharma? Then later another lama came, and the old man would say, "Ah, have you heard about such and such lama? How is he?" The visitor said, "He is doing very well, he is in a strict retreat, in the mountains, meditating, doing mantras, for three years." The old lama said, "Oh, good, good, but isn't it great to practice real dharma? Later, another lama came to visit, and the old man said, "How is so and so doing? The visitor said, "Ah, that guy, all he does is sit around and pull his robe over his head and cry." The old man said, "Oh! He is practicing real dharma." This story explains a lot. Those tears, that crying, was not a cry of self-pity, or remorse, those are tears of compassion. That is the entry into Mahayana, the second level, by really comprehending suffering, the causes of it, why it happens, and how we ourselves are responsible. This comprehension causes quite naturally to emerge in oneself remorse, the urge, the longing to change, this is important and necessary. But by really going deeper, by really meditating on that, the doorway appears to the second level of any religion, which is to comprehend that all people all beings everywhere in existence are suffering, we need to help them. We, who have a tiny glimmer of understanding about our own cause, the way we ourselves have created suffering and have made them suffer, need to help them. How many of us have truly comprehended the immensity of suffering? None of us, because as soon as the lecture is over, we go out skipping around, dancing, and running from place to place, and eating lots of food, and having a great time. Until we have to go to work and then we are in pain, or we have to go home to our spouse and then we are in pain. But we do not really grasp suffering. The immensity of suffering is not a concept, it is a reality, now. We are all comfortably listening to this lecturewe have great fortune and leisure to sit around and listen to me talk that is extraordinary. Do you know what a small fraction of the beings of this planet have that? How few people can afford to listen to this lecture? Very, very few, because bound by karmathats why this line saysBeings are fettered. What are they fettered by? Desire that produces consequences that bind us because of the law of action and consequence. Desire as a term does not encompass what we need it to encompass, so lets ta lk about the psychological factors that bind us to suffering. In Buddhism theyre presented as eight worldly concerns. The Eight Worldly Concerns A great Buddhist master named Nagarjuna explained the eight worldly concerns beautifully in a scripture. He said, By the eight worldly concerns we mean: The worldly thoughts [from receiving]: Gifts or no gifts, comfort or discomfort, Fame or notoriety, praise or criticism. Keep a level head. These are not subjects for your thoughts [if you want liberation]. - Nagarjuna Concerns one and two refer to gifts or no gifts, to acquire what we want: fulfillment of desires for things, sensations. Concerns three and four are comfort and discomfort, which refer to feeling good, feeling bad; in other words, the desire for security, comfort, etc.

Concerns five and six, fame or notoriety, refer to being well known whether by a good or bad reputation. Concerns seven and eight, praise or criticism, refer to being respected or criticized by others. Those are the eight worldly concerns. They sound simple, but they are not. They operate very deeply in the core of our minds. These concerns even afflict the Gods. Many peoplemaybe some of usthink when they read the "Eight worldly concerns" that it does not apply to them because they believe they are renunciatesthey have renounced the world, thus they are not concerned with the world, so they do not have these eight worldly concerns. What a lie, what a deception to put on oneself. Worldly concerns relate to the mind. These are concerns in the mind. It does not matter if you are a monk, abbot, lama, or yogi. How do we know that is true? Look at all those monks, yogis, lamas, and spiritual practitioners who do a lot of practices, build a lot of monasteries, and attract a lot of students: in the back of their mind the reason they are doing it is to be famous, respected, admired, talked about. They are afflicted by these worldly concerns, but garbed in robes. Yet, such concerns are pointless, because when they die, nothing will change: they will continue to cycle in the wheel of samsara. So the point is, it makes no difference for you to spend your entire lifetime in meditation, in a cave chanting mantras, bringing thousands of students to religion, if in the end your mind is poisoned by any one of these eight desires, because that one desire keeps you tied to the wheel of samsara and you will come back. That is how severe the law is. The mind has to become completely free from desire one hundred percent only then can you step off the wheel. This is why we see many spiritual teachers, carted around as a spiritual incarnation, or because of karma are put into the forefront of big movements or groups, because in the past they did some spiritual work. Do they still have the ego? Do they still have pride? Do they still have desire for comfort? Then they too are condemned to suffer until they change that. All of us have that, so let us not worry about the authenticity or value of those teachers, lamas, and yogis. Let us focus on changing ourselves. Any of us can do this analytical meditation and see in ourselves that we have a desire for comfort, we have a desire for fame, we have a desire to get things that we want to get, and we suffer when we do not get them. There is another story coming in my mind about a lamasorry for so many lama stories; they are coming in my mind because I am studying this scripture. There was a lama who saw a monk devotedly doing his practices. The lama said, "You know, uncle, I am so glad to see you doing your circles around the temple and doing your prostrations, but that is not real dharma." The lama said this often to the monk about all his practices, so the monk was starting to get frustrated. Every time he would see the lama, the lama would say, "I am really glad to see you meditating, but it is not real dharma." Finally the monk said, "I give up! I am doing my mantras, I am doing my meditation, I am doing all my practices. What do you mean I am not performing the dharma? What do I have to do?" The lama looked at him and said three times, "Give up on this life. Give up on this life. Give up on this life." He was not talking about committing suicide. He was talking about dealing with those desires in your mind for this life, for pleasure, for comfort, for things, for name, for fame. All those desires that make impure all of your spiritual exercises, that is the key: renunciation. That is why renunciation is the foundational level. So the scripture says, Think over and over how deeds and their fruits never fail, And the cycles suffering: stop desire for the future. The previous stanza said Stop desire for this life. This one says, Stop desire for the future. Then it continues, 5 When you have meditated thus and feel not even A moments wish for the good things of cyclic life, And when you begin to think both night and day Of achieving freedom, you have found renunciation. That is the entry way to real meditation, to real spirituality: real renunciation. So, what is this saying here, When you have meditated thus? Okay, we need to stop right there, because most of us would read this scripture and think, "Oh, yeah, blah blah blah, renunciation, ok, I get it, cool." And we toss it aside and we forget it. Right? How many thousands of pages of scripture have we read, how many thousands of books, hundreds of books, have we read? How many have you comprehended? I do not mean intellectually remember what I said, comprehension is proven in actions. How many of those scriptures do you live? Not just pantomiming them in your day to day life and when you are in front of other spiritual people. Do

you live them from your heart, even when you are alone? That is what proves comprehension; you can only reach that through meditation. The only way is to meditate, to comprehend, to understand it, so that it is in your atoms, in your bones. Comprehension is there when you cannot conceive of acting another way, because you know how to act, how to be, how to live. That is comprehension, You see, when we say you need to comprehend your ego, you need to comprehend your pride, your lust, it means you cannot even conceive of letting that demon into your mind-stream for even the space of the width of a needle, you cannot even conceive of it, it is inconceivable, you would never allow it that is comprehension. None of us are like that; we hear that demon of lust, or that demon of alcohol, or that demon of drugs, or that demon of smoking, or that demon of greed, or envy knocking on our back and we say, "Oh, yeah I remember you. What are you saying? Hmmm interesting, let me think about that, let me meditate on that. Hmm, maybe I should have a drink, I am a gnostic, I can transform it. Maybe I should look at that pornography, I am a gnostic, I need to comprehend this lust. Everyone does this, allo wing demons to run around in our mind stream and pollute our practice. This happens because we do not comprehend them, we do not understand them, and that is why I said Samael Aun Weor is a perfect renunciate, and is very severe. We all think he was severe in his writing, in his way of talkingno, I'm sorry, what you see there is the love of his Being, but really in his writings you see nothing of his severity, nothing. The severity of Samael is devastating, incomprehensible. Samael is the angel of Geburah, which is severity, justice. The severity of Samael is the severity of the law of karma; it is the most severe force in existence. Samael carries a sword of severity. There is no greater severity, and yet he is our teacher. Who among us lives by the example of Samael, embodying that severity towards our own mind, that severity focused unwaveringly on conquering the ego? None of us! We cannot find good followers of the example of Samael. What we do find are all of the Gnostics indulging in pride, seeking for fame, competing with each other, spreading the noxious pollution of politics, corrupting schools and instructors with politics, with psuedo-spirituality and intellectual garbage. All of the so-called Gnostics are destroying the work of Samael, not enlivening it, and not just with politics, pride, and laziness, but with poisonous doctrines that they mix up and confuse because of a lack of study. We need a solid, severe foundation in renunciation. We need to comprehend the teachings inside, and to embody them, even when we are alone. This is how you become a master of meditation, and thereby a real Gnostic. A real Gnostic is free of the eight worldly concerns. One does not reach that freedom merely by sitting in front of a group and having people admire you. It isn't by pontificating, it isn't by writing books, it isn't by building temples or schools, or getting a lot of students, or building a big movement no, it is by dying psychologically, it is by the ego dying every day. We need this foundation in our practice, we need the first fundamental, renunciation: mystical deathnothing else can happen without that. You will know you have renunciationas it says in this scripturewhen you feel not even a moment's wish for the good things of cyclic life. In my experience, I have only met very small handful of people who have that, and I am not one of them. Those people are like Samael Aun Weor; he is one. In him, there is not a spec of desire for cyclic life, a spec of desire for comfort, fame, pleasure, cappuccinos, hotdogs, chocolate, cornbread, beer, a big house, a nice car, a big group, a big spiritual movement, etc. Do you see how many desires we have? You will know you have found renunciationit says herewhen you begin to think both night and day of achieving freedomspontaneously, in your blood, not because you just read something, or heard a lecture and get fired up, but because in your blood, in your heart, in your bones, you comprehend suffering. This is the quality of mind, a quality of consciousness that is required to enter the Bodhisattva path. If you do not have this quality, you will never grasp the next level, which is Bodhichitta, it's impossible. You might get the concept, you might get it in your intellect, but you will not experience it. To acquire real Bodhichitta, your renunciation has to be extremely solid, pervasive, an extensive and robust foundation. It has to become your main characteristic. This is why Samael Aun Weor said, we have to become like a lemon. Have you ever tasted a raw lemon just by itself, taken a lemon and put in your mouth? Nothing can stand against that taste. Right? Nothing. When you put that lemon in your mouth it wipes out everything else, everything, you cannot override it. That is renunciation, that is what he is talking about. He is not saying you have to be bitter to each other, which is how some people interpret it, "You have to bitter like the lemon and cruel," No, Samael is not cruel. Severe, yes, but remember Samael is the Logos of Mars, and the virtue of Mars is love. The antithesis of love is war, hate, violence, which is the force of Mars used by the ego. The virtue of Mars is a diligent, cognizant love; Mars is severe because of love for humanity.

Renunciation is not something you can fake. We all try; we go out with our friends and maybe there is a Gnostic around or another spiritual person, and there is beer or pot and we act like a renunciate, No, I do not do that. But in our mind the desire is there, isn't it? We may be thinking about that for a while late r on, that desire keeps coming in the mind, Maybe I can have a little, remember how good that used to be, remember how much I used to love doing that? We all indulge in that way of thinking, especially when it comes to sex. There are many people walking around like big shotsGnostics and other spiritual peoplewho act like they spiritually elevated, observing chastity, but in their mind, what are they thinking? They are remembering when they used to have the orgasm and how much they enjoyed it, and they replay their experiences in their mind, and replay them, indulging in those experiences in their mind, thinking there is no consequence. By that behavior they demonstrate that they have no comprehension of karma, no comprehension of all the most fundamental aspects of tantra, thus they are not real Tantrikas, but are merely imitating it. Of course, all of us are guilty of that, so let us not claim to be something we are not. Renunciation proves itself through actions, not just physically, but in the mind. Someone who has truly comprehended fornication will not even approach it in their mindthat is how you know if you comprehend it in all the levels of the mindand not just fornication, but greed, envy, covetousness, fear, pride. Pride is a noxious poison, but we all like it. Where there is pride, there is no renunciation. Where there is vanity, where there is envy, where there is covetousness, where there is fear, where there is anxiety, where there is stress, there is no renunciation. There is no excuse that will free us from the consequences of our actions. If we seriously want to achieve the goal of our spiritual path, we need to become severe like a lemonnot severe with each other, but severe with ourselves. We need to renounce the mind, to conquer it, and this does not come through mere rejection. Samael Aun Weor said very beautifully in the book "Fundamentals of Gnostic Education" that if you simply reject something, later it will come back even stronger. You know why he said that? Because he understood the law of karma and the steps that I explained: the consequence is greater than the action. Repression is an action, avoidance is an action, and thus when you see in your mind pride, lust, or fear, and you avoid it, you repress that desire, you only strengthen it, and it will come back later even stronger. We have observed many people who come into the Gnostic teachings full of fiery enthusiasm and who make dramatic sweeping changes in their personal lives, abandoning alcohol, drugs, and sleeping around, all those types of different behaviors that produce suffering for them. Then a year goes by, maybe two, and all the sudden they disappear, and we always wonder what happened to them; later we find out they are back in the same old routine but worse, because they did not comprehend anything, they just repressed it, and it all became stronger. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen that happen, Even though I am new in this tradition, I have seen it more times than I can count. It is because those people fail to comprehend the most basic level of the teaching; they thought they were big shot tantric practitioners because they heard of Gnosis, they read a few books, maybe they started teaching, but they did not comprehend anything. If they comprehended, it would live in their actions. But what are their actions? They left the teaching, they started drinking again, sleeping around again, doing drugs, some of them are dead. We do not acquire this teaching for free. You cannot just walk in and out. Your Being had to go through an enormous amount of effort to put you in this teaching, to expose you to it, and when you walk awayto be honest, I prefer not to talk about that, it is too painful. ...we warn those who like to snoop around that Gnosticism is not like the other schools that they have been to. Many become Theosophists and then they leave; they then move into the Rosicrucian Order and also withdraw without anything significant happening to them. Thus, this is how they like to go around like butterflies from school to school, in conformity with all of those Spiritualist, Theosophist, Rosicrucian and pseudo-Aquarian, decadent doctrines etc., and nothing happens to them when they switch schools. However, if they think that they can do the same with Gnosis, we warn them that they cannot, since whosoever enters into Gnosis is internally subjected to the remarkable test of the Guardian of the Threshold. If one succeeds in the test, one then enters into the straight, narrow, and difficult path which leads us to Nirvana. Then, the degrees, initiations, and other tests, etc., come afterwards. Thus, the higher the disciple is, the more terrible is the fall. Those who have not seen the Light ignore a great deal and therefore, much is forgiven of them; however, the greater the degree of cognizance, the greater the degree of responsibility.

Therefore, those who saw the Light and then leave become demons. This is how horns have grown on the foreheads of the Astral bodies of many bodhisattvas; this is how these fallen bodhisattvas have become demons. Therefore, from Gnosis one becomes either an Angel or a devil. After a false step, many continue rolling downward into the abyss and finally the horns grow on them and they become demons. This is the remarkable reality in Gnosis. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increases knowledge increases sorrow. - Ecclesiastes 1:18 Therefore, stay back, nosey people! Therefore, stay back, profaners! Gnosis is a two-edged sword, it defends and gives life to the humble and virtuous; yet, it wounds and destroys the curious and impure. - Samael Aun Weor, The Major Mysteries Studying Gnosis is a tremendous responsibility. That is why severity is so critical. That is why renunciation is so critical. This is not a game. We have to be serious. Everyday, analyze what you study and what you do. Do not just read scriptures, the books of Samael, and the teachings of the Buddha or Tsong Khapa, and just toss it aside. Meditate. I hear many students saying, But I do not know how to meditate on something; how do you do it? I just explained it: sit down, close your eyes, and think about it. Start there; think about it, digest it, analyze it, look at it in context of your life, compare it, take it apart, put it together, you need to digest it. In the mind? Yes, but mostly in the consciousness you need to digest it. Take it into your Being so that it will become part of you. Why do we encounter so many people from different traditions who are bad examples of their traditions? Because they do not comprehend their own tradition. We recently observed a person who came to visit a Gnostic group but proclaiming that their group was the best, and their proclamation was filled with pride, sarcasm, and bitterness. That is contradictory, isn't it? They embraced their sarcasm, pride, and anger as examples of why their group is the best. Strange, isn't it? How can we accept groups that proclaim that their group is the best, insisting that everyone come and join them because they are the best for this and that reason, and everything is filled with pride and condemnation of others? Or what of groups who utilize fear to make students dependent upon them, saying If you are not with us, you will go to hell, and other such idiotic statements? Remember the story I told you about the lamas building temples, going on retreats? The only one practicing real dharma was the one crying. Who among all of these groups, teachings, and teachers really demonstrates in their actions that they comprehend suffering and compassion? That should be your measure, not who has the big name, who is famous, who has the most students, who has the most schools, or teachings, or teachers, or books, or the most illustrious lineage. Judge them by their actions. Jesus told us, You shall know them by their fruit. not by what they say or want you to believe. We are judged in the same way: by our actions. In the end, when our inevitable death approaches, we will not be judged because of what group we belonged to, just in the same way as we won't be judged by the color of our shirt. We will be judged by what we did, by the consequences of our actions. In the book "Hell, Devil, and Karma" Samael Aun Weor said it is the results of our actions that matter, we are judged for the results of our actions. Our intentionseven if we have the greatest intentions in the world mean nothing if the results are catastrophic. There are a lot of people with great intentions; we all have good intentions. Who among us has bad intentions? None of us, we all want to do good, we all want to be good, but the results of our actions prove that we are not. We need to analyze that; everyday, analyze your behaviors. Retrospection We teach a practice called retrospection. Every Gnostic school in the world should teach this practice. Yet, it is not the property of Samael Aun Weor. He did not invent it. Retrospection is present in the Tibetan Buddhist traditioneven Tsong Khapa taught this practice. It is present in the teachings of the Buddha, and it is present in every religion in its heart and core. I have attended a Zen temple where they teach retrospection. The practice is very simple: every day, at the end of your day, spend some time reflecting on your day. Review it with your imagination. You can spend as much or as little time as you feel is necessary. It could be a few minutes, it could be a few hours, but if you are serious about wanting to uncover why you suffer

and how to reach God, you need to analyze yourself, because the answers to both are within. The answers are not in books. You can't get the answers from your teacher or from your friends, you can only get the answers by observing and analyzing your mind. You can do some preliminary practices to prepare for retrospection, and I recommend it, especially at the end of the day when you come from work or your daily activities, and you have all that energy buzzing, you need to calm down. You can take a shower or a bath, take a walk, clear your mind, relax, get some exercise, have a light mealdo not eat a heavy meal before you sit to meditate because you are not going to be comfortable and you will fall asleep, your body will distract you. Do some pranayamas, do some mantras, do some chanting, do some exercises, runic, or Tibetan, something to help you center yourself, steady or stabilize your energies and relax. And then once you are really relaxed and calm, sit down and begin to replay the events of the day in your imagination. It is not so much to think about it, but to replay the events, to review them like a movie, and it is very effective to do it backwards, to start with sitting down to meditate and go backwards through all the events. Observe it in your mind like you are an actor who you are watching, look at yourself like you are an actor, and go back and review everything step by step. Slow or fast does not matter, up to you, but follow your intuition. Watch how your mind tries to change what happened, because it will. You'll start to remember that moment when you saw that man who was so attractive and you thought, "Oh if only I could be married with a guy like that." But then when you remember it in your mind, you start thinking something else, your mind changes the memory. Or you start to reflect on an argument that you had with somebody and instead of remembering what they said that was true, you can only remember your resentment. See how your mind starts to change and play with your memories, its a very important thing, because it will inevitably. That is the basic practice. From there, there is a lot you can do, a lot you can learn, but you need to practice it first, you need to learn how to do it. The more you learn, the more you practice, the more we can teach you, the more you can teach yourself, but make no mistake: this practice is real and it works if you use it. It will lead you to a great deal of understanding about yourself, about life, and the result of it is love. When you start to really see your own behaviors and your own actions and how you affect people, you will start changing because you want to, and you do not want to be that person anymore, you do not want to be that person, you want to be better. This isn't fake, it's not something that you are doing just to show off, it is doing something sincere. So, when you master that, then we'll go to the next level, and we'll talk about Bodhichitta, but you can't grasp Bodhichitta until you really know what it means to renounce, to feel that remorse, and to stop acting in stupid ways. Questions and Answers Audience: You were breaking down the scripture, particularly the part where it says, you know, We have leisure and fortune (unintelligible) have a physical body, but what of the people who have deformed physical bodies, and are deformed mentally also? Will they at least have another chance to work on themselves, maybe not in this life time but in a future life time? Instructor: Well, firstly we have to comprehend that every single particle of our existence is due to past actions. Everything about your body, about your circumstances, about your life, is so because how you yourself acted previously. To this, there are no exceptions. When you understand that, then you can really start to meditate on your life, on your body, on your mind, on your heart, and see the causes. For people who are born with disfigurements, it is due to karmic causes, causes that they themselves produced in the past and that resulted in those consequences. Why does that happen? Firstly, it happens because it's a law of nature. Nature has to do that to balance energy, that is the basis of this law "Invariance" in physics and that's why water makes those motions, it takes the energy that hit it and moves itself in order to balance all those forces and become back into a state of equanimity. This is true in every level of natureit happens in gases, solids, liquids, and in the ether. When you push against the force, that force pushes back but there is more consequences all around it, it isn't equilateral. So, those people who are suffering disfigurement or ailments are paying their karmanot out of vengeance, but because it is the law of nature. If they ignore it, once the karma is paid they will be back where they started. For example, if you get a ticket or you get convicted of a crime, you go to jail, or you pay your fine, but after that you are back where you started, you do not get anything else, you just pay your debt and then you are free of the debt but back to zero. It is the same in the law of karma, the same in nature, yet if the person who has an ailment, mental or physical, were to comprehend the karma, to really understand it, then things would be different, they would get something, they would get comprehension, wisdom, knowledge, and there are cases like that. I've met several people with physical and mental

disabilities or problems, who understand it, comprehend it, they can't necessarily explain it with the intellect, but emotionally and consciously they get it. One man in particular that I know, who I have enormous respect for, intellectually is disabled; intellectually, he does not have the power of retention or attention to study things and remember them, but in his actions he shows great comprehension, he is very kind. Personally, I would rather hang around him than a know-it-all spiritual person who is crueland there a lot of them. Right? A kind person, a good person, is better to be with. Simply, his kindness shows that he has more comprehension. I respect that. Question: Is not desiring to know desire itself a desire? Instructor: Yes, if its in the intellect. We have to make a difference between what we mean by desire as a cause of suffering and desire as a cause for happiness. We generally use the word desire to connote causes of suffering because that is 97% of what we are, desires that are selfish and rooted at grasping at an ego. We have a small percentage, we say an average of 3%, of consciousness that is not trapped in those types of aggregates, it is what we call the essence, Buddhadatu, or Tathagatagarbha in Tibetan terms. This is the Buddha Nature, a kind of free or unrestricted consciousness. That also has what we might call a desire or a longing, and those are multifaceted. If you look at for example the person I was talking about, that person has a sincere desire to help other people; this is beautiful, and is a cognizant part of him, conscious. You can call it desire if you want, but what will the consequences of that be? Will he suffer from that? Will the law punish him because he wants to help others and be kind to others? No, because the consequences always relate to the action. Remember the four steps I explained. Thus, we need to apply that law karma to understanding what desires are and what they are not, and what is beneficial and what is not. In every case, no matter what our intellect says or the terms we use, what matters is our actions. How we act, how we behave, what we think, and what we feel, that's what matters. We can call it desire or not; that is irrelevant. How you act creates a result; that is karma. So, if you want to say that your longing for God is a desire for God, feel free, but act on it, and reap the benefits of that action. Student: One of the great comprehensions of Raja Yoga was concrete fact. Now, is this a form of repression when the mind creates scenarios, when the mind gossips about the others, when I tell the mind "Okay show me some concrete fact that it's true." Right? I do not know if this person is making these things about me. Right? Now, is this a form of repression when I question the mind, Show me a concrete fact? Instructor: That is not repression, that is analysis. When you are questioning the mind in that way, you are forcing the mind to state the facts. Right? That is necessary, everyone should be doing that. To repress it would be to say No, no, no, no, I do not want to deal with that." Repression is avoidance. When you go into it to analyze it, thats what we need to do, and based on facts, absolutely ri ght, no question about it. In fact, that is a great measuring tool we should use in our meditation practice and in our dream interpretation. Everything we see internally in meditation and in dreams needs to be compared with facts, and if there are no facts to support it we should set it aside and wait. Question: When the mind, during retrospection, tries to change our memories should we simply observe it and how it is changing things? Or should we try and stabilize? Instructor: That is a good question. This depends upon the point of view you have in your meditation. The question implies that there is an instability in the consciousness. If your attention is not continuous in other words if you are in danger of losing the continuity of your awareness that needs to be the first thing you pay attention to; you need to stabilize your meditation. So if the event that you are observing is causing you to lose awareness and you are starting to slip into a dream, fantasy, or a memory, or get distracted by your thoughts, the very first thing you need to do is center yourself, and remember yourself, and remember you are meditating, being mindful. Do not forget you are meditating. This is super critical, because if you lose your mindfulness of meditating, you will just start dreaming, and you will fall asleep, and you will waste your time. Always retain that mindfulness. If the mindfulness is there and you have a relative degree of concentration but the mind is trying to alter the event, then yes, observe that, but furthermore, apply the analysis. As Samael Aun Weor stated and explained in his books, We need to coldly analyze everything that passes on the screen of the mind. There are many techniques we can use regarding this. An example just cited is to use facts. So when we see the mind starting to change that event, we need to consciously remember what are the facts of this event. What do I know is factually true? So as an example, you said "Do I really know this person is saying these things about me? Did I hear them saying it? Or did somebody tell me that they are saying it? Or did I just think that they are saying it? So these are all different, but we respond to them as they are

the same. A lot of the imagery and contents of our mind that we think is real is really just self-projected. What people think of us, what they say about us, whether we are successful or not, a lot of that is just projections of the ego, a lot of it is just stuff we heard from other people, very little of it is based from facts, so bringing in the facts is important. The other thing you can do is bring in the opposites. Remember I explained to you these eight worldly desires; really it is four sets of two: positive, negative; craving, aversion. We want that object, so we suffer because we want it. We do not have that object, so we suffer because we do not have it. But even when we get it we suffer because we might lose it. Right? What's the answer? It is to renounce, to be the same whether you have it or do not, to be in equanimity, and the same is true with name and fame, and what people say of us, and what they do not say of us, everything, to be in equanimity. That equanimity doesnt come through repression or indulgence, it comes through comprehension, through understanding. Question: How much detail should we go into retrospection to get the most out of the practice? Instructor: There is no rule in this practice, you have to listen to your heart. This practice is not mechanical. No one should tell you sit and spend 30 seconds on the first hour and 30 seconds on the next hour, or spend an hour on the first hour; if you are doing that you are going to be there all day. You need to listen to your heart. What is your heart telling you that you need to meditate on? What caused pain for you or someone else? How much time you spend on it depends on how much you want to deal with that pain. If it is something that is not significant to you, you are not going to want to spend any time on it, so if I tell you to spend an hour you won't. You need to spend the time on it that you are naturally inclined to spend, and the same with the amount of detail you grasp. Look for the details that are relative and important. Understand something here: the purpose of this practice is not to recall an event and try to remember whether the person's shoes had laces or were pull on, or whether they were wearing black pants or dark brown. No, no, no, no, these are not the reasons to do this practice. You are not trying to test your memory, rather you are trying to determine the facts of what happened in all three brains and in relation to states and events, and why suffering is occurring. It does not matter if you can remember every infinitesimal little detail about how their hair was styled, or how the light was playing on the window in the background. None of that stuff makes any differencegreat if you can remember it, then you have a good memory and your imagination is working, that's great, but it does not matter. What matters is: can you understand the egos at play, the desires at work, how the personality is functioning, how the karma is functioning? That is what you need to look for. You need to remember the facts of what you felt, what you thought, what you saw, what you did, and in your environment. And then you reflect on those facts and analyze what is causing suffering, and what will the results be of how I behaved. Question: My question is referred to the retrospection, how do you handle when your analytical meditation when it blends in with inspired meditation. Like I was meditation like I was meditating, retrospecting and one of the Hebrew letters popped in my imagination, it's the Ayin. And then I started dissecting everything that was in the lecture because thats all I knew about the letter, so... Instructor: Perfect, thats exactly right; you are doing it, the right way. When we are doing this analytical meditation, the first purpose is to comprehend the event, to get information about it, and what we want to be watching for is what you saw, something new, something unexpected, some new information, and it will happen, it will come. Every student who works with this technique will experience it. Where you are concentrated on an event and then something totally unexpected and without your will comes into your mind, a Hebrew letter for example, that is perfect, beautiful. Now you have a choice, but your heart needs to answer it, not your mind. Do I meditate on the symbol that came? Or do I keep meditating on the event? Or do I meditate on both? The answer needs to be determined by your own evaluation of how stable your meditation practice is and how clear and penetrating your imagination is. That is something only you can know. You will know more if you studied the techniques. In your case, you followed the letter and began to analyze the letter; great. There is a relationship between what you were meditating on and that letter, so you need to determine what is the relationship. Why did that letter appear? Your intellect will never be able to answer it, because the answer is not intellectual; you are getting information from your Being and you cannot comprehend that with the intellect, you have to comprehend it with the heart, so keep meditating. Question: I am still not quite sure what it meant as far as the event, I just started recalling everything I heard from memory Instructor: At that point, you may want to explore a slightly different angle on the practice, which is to visualize the new information but let go of the analysis and start to move into more imagination. Let the

imagination open up more, and that takes some skill because you have to be able to do that consciously; it is the same as going into the astral plane. Let the body relax more, let the mind relax more, and visualize that letter so that it starts to reveal more information to you. Often times the analysis can get in the way. So, it's a tricky spot, but if you can manage it you can get more information and start to understand that, and that's why the Master explained the three levels imagination, inspiration, and intuition. It takes time. I have had images that I saw in meditation 10, 20 years ago and I still do not comprehend them. You know? And I still from time to time will remember, "Oh yeah I still do not understand that." Maybe one day I will, I hope, but practice is like that; some things we understand immediately, some things we understand slowly; we just have to keep working with whats most immediate. Question: I know I've done pretty much the same thing, and it's, I know sometimes your mind will go into a direction where things pop up. And at one point you almost consider is this really being distracted or I saw something like, or is these things that do pop in my head (Unintelligible) Because I know you can spend hours, you can spend at least two hours without even knowing, little things that pop up and just reviewing only few minutes of the day. Instructor: The key there is the difference, learning how to taste the difference between something that comes from conscious imagination and mechanical imagination. As you said there are many things that can come in the mind and the ego uses a lot of that to distract us, especially when we are working on eliminating something, so many things will start to come. But with some experience in practice you start to learn the difference in taste between the distractions that are occurring in the mind as a matter of course and something that is coming from the Being. There is a distinct difference, and I cannot put it in words because it's not intellectual. It's something you have to taste with your consciousness that you will know it when it happens. And when it happens then you need to determine is this worth, which direction do I go in my meditation? Most of the time especially in the beginning most of what emerges is just mechanical, it's just the mind. Question: To truly comprehend a book or a scripture should we only study one book at a time, without trying to study many at one time? Instructor: In my personal experience, yes. We have the tendency to read scripture the same way we read comic books, or the same way we read a cereal box, and this is a big mistake. A scripture is a locked treasure; you can see the outside of that box and admire it, but if you want to get what's inside of it you have to meditate, you have to comprehend. These short few lines that I read you today, the intellect especially if you studied spirituality for a while, they do not seem like a big deal, because they really just condense the Buddha's teachings into a few short little lines. So, a lot of students and people who study religion can read it and say, "Oh yeah, okay, I know whats in there, I get it." Big mistake!!! This text is special, and the scripture I picked is special because of the experience that you can draw out of it, what is contained inside of it. Only your consciousness can retrieve that. This is also true of all of the books given by Samael Aun Weor. Those books are extremely special, and let me give you a hint about that. There are many people, who with very good intentions take out a dictionary and try to translate the writings of Samael into another language, and this is fine, with good intentions, I respect that. But if they do not comprehend the treasure hidden inside those lines, then they can never translate it, it is impossible, and thus the translation will be dead, lifeless. The same is true when we try to study a scripture and teach from that scripture, or use that scripture in our daily lives, and all of us have the evidence, every one of us has proven it already, because every one of us has read probably hundreds of sacred books, of spiritual books. And yet how many of us have comprehended it, have lived what those scriptures have taught? Very few, and thus how can we claim to understand them? So, it's a mistake in my opinion to read a bunch of spiritual books all at the same time or to read them rapidly. Samael Aun Weor gave a number of examples about that, he said about "Great Rebellion" for example, he spent one year writing that book and yet people sit and read it in a few minutes. It is outrageous but we all do it. So let us stop. Student: I thought it was "Revolutionary Psychology?" Instructor: One of those. Anyhow, it does not matter; the point of it is the point of the story, which is that we need to comprehend it, we need to learn to live by it. The books of Samael Aun Weor are a new level of teaching that is distinct from every other scripture that is on this planet. They are something very special, very sacred, and it is sad to see people treat them like newspapers, as if they can read it quickly and toss it aside and think they understood it; no way. I read some of those books 20, 30 times, meditating on those books, and I still find things in there I did not know were there. I am truly, humbly, profoundly amazed by what is in those books.

If you read them fast, you will not get anything lasting from them. You have to read them very slowly and digest them, practice them, contemplate them, analyze them. In the same way you do your retrospection practice, you need to analyze scripture, especially when a scripture affects you, when it hits you and your struck by it, there is a reason for that, you need that. Do not just toss it aside and think, "Wow that was great." It is not like drinking a coffee or eating a donut. Your heart, your soul needs that scripture, so meditate on it, digest it, take it into your spirit. The consequences of that are beautiful. Question: I was thinking about this, that I might be okay at helping people and that you know I might be able to do a few things for people but from the help I've gotten from my Being he is a lot better at it. Instructor: Hehe, hehe, no doubt about it. Hehe. Student: So, actually I should have him to go help people. Instructor: No doubt about that. Student: Now how exactly, and I am thinking about the monk in the story who had his hood in his robe over his crying. How does he go about this push that he has to help people, letting his Being help, he is in tears, how does he go into meditate so he can actually have his Being present so he can help them. Instructor: It's a beautiful question. Well the answer is actually quite simple, in my experience; the first thing you have to do is reach the stage of being like that monk: to really truly and deeply have that sense of renunciation and compassion for others, truly sincere, not to do it because you feel like you have to. Right? But, you should help others because you truly from the depths of your heart have to do it, you have no choice, you have to, thats how you do it. Until that stage arr ives for you, the best thing for you to do is to transform every action that you do into service to others. When we perform the factor of sacrifice, we always talk how important it is to make donations, or to teach, or to spread the doctrine, and there is no question those are important. But not all of us are teachers and not all of us have money to share, right? But what we do have is a job, a daily life, a family, and friends, and people we associate with. Let us transform our job into a spiritual practice. So, instead of going to work with that dread of, "Oh God, I have to go to work today." Instead, look at what your job is. Most people have a job that serves others in some way. So look at your job as service. Do your job consciously, with kindness towards others. Think, I am actually going to work today to help someone. That is beautiful. I am going to work to help someone. It may be with communication, money, their life situation, in any number of things. You can do so much good for humanity if you take your job as service for others. What about your marriage? What a huge opportunity that is to serve, to serve your spouse! How many people really take marriage as service? How many people take their relationship as an opportunity to serve? Not many, most think, what am I getting out of this? Did he or she cook for me? Did he or she do my laundry? Did he or she clean? Let's turn this around. If you are serious about wanting to enter the Tantrayana teachings, let me tell you the prerequisite. Right? To enter Tantrayana you have to have mastered Bodhichitta. And what is that? That every action you perform is not for you. Where are we in our level? Every action we perform is for ourselves. We are not ready for Mahayana or Tantrayana. We need renunciation: we need to renounce our selfish desires, and instead seek to serve. That point of view of serving is what opens the doors of Mahayana to you, which is only the middle level. But when you start to live by that through comprehension, through your actions, then the real beauty of tantra emerges. Do not have the mistaken notion that tantra is sex, it is not, sex is only a part of tantra. Real tantra is the knowledge and method to transform energy. Tantra is based upon a strong foundation of renunciation and cognizant love. That is how tantra becomes truly empowered and creates a Bodhisattva. There is no other way. Take each action that you do and learn to do it for others. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says beautify, "Do every action for me." That is a Shravakayana level of teaching, that is foundation, to do everything for God, to seek nothing for one self. Everything you do you do for Him, your Divine Mother, your Divine Father. But see that is the basic level, and when you get that, when you start living that way, then you are introduced to the next level, which is realize that God is in everyone else, so do for them as you do for God. That is Bodhichitta, and that is in every tradition, every religion. As we are now, we do not do that, so we need to learn.

Ethics
Written by Gnostic Instructor In the previous two lectures that we gave about meditation, we set up certain principles in order for us to be able to guide ourselves as we develop a strong meditation practice. The purpose of this effort that we

make is to acquire comprehensionself-knowledgeso that we can become better human beings. This is the reason why so many great teachers have appeared on this planet in order to help us. Their teachings were not given for us to be entertained, acquire powers, or to show ourselves off before others. Rather, the goal of the teachings is for us to try to save ourselves and humanity from getting any worse. The potential to succeed in that effort begins with each individual working on themselves. In order to aid us in that effort, we have received huge volumes of teaching and instruction from spiritual teachers all over the world, all of which are important and vital, and can contribute to our progress in our internal, psychological, spiritual evolution. But that information will remain useless if it is not actualizedthat is, if we do not live it and make it part of our very perception, not merely something that we think about, but a way that we see. So when we study these teachings and scriptures, and read the books of Krishna, Jesus, or Samael Aun Weor, it should be with the goal for us to improve our way of seeing life and transforming life. Amongst the tools that we were givenparticularly in the teachings of Samael Aun Weorthere are a huge range of techniques, from very simple ones to very challenging ones. Throughout them all, Samael Aun Weor emphasized the basic foundation for someone to be a true spiritual aspirant, or what he would call an esotericist or an occultist: the person has to have the ability to consciously work outside of the body. In other words, they must be capable of having their consciousness awake while the physical body is asleep, so that the soul, the essence, can acquire self-knowledge in all the levels of the mind, not merely those that are perceptible from the physical body. Samael Aun Weor gave many techniques and a lot of practical guidance for us to develop that skill. This is one of the main elements that attract students to this teaching, that we have such a robust and very practical system that anyone can use in order to awaken their consciousness outside of the physical body. However, in spite of good intentions and even effort, many fail in this endeavor and become frustrated. Many even hide their failure, and may even be instructors or be reputable people in the tradition who yet do not have this capability. Samael Aun Weor explained why students fail: it is because they do not know how to meditate. Their minds are unstable, out of control. So, the prerequisite to be a true magician or a true priest, and have your consciousness awake outside the body, is to be able to control your mind, to be able to meditate, to be able to comprehend. Even in the endeavor to meditate, many fail, due to a lack of instruction, or not understanding the instruction, or not trying; there are many reasons. Many try seriously to meditate, but fail to acquire mastery or even the experience of Samadhi, which is ecstasy, experiences with the divine. This also is a source of frustration, and causes many to abandon their spiritual work, or to begin to attack those who were trying to help them. Many students abandon their schools or traditions because the student fails to actualize the practice in themselves. Why? In some cases we can say it is a lack of effort. In some cases, we see people who make enormous effort and yet still fail to have those fundamental experiences, even to fail to reach quietude or a silence of mind. A great friend of Samael Aun Weor explained why this happens. His name is Swami Sivananda. He explained that people who fail in meditation, who fail even to have quietude, fail because they have not been trained in ethics. "Some foolish impatient students take to concentration practice" this is preliminary concentration, not real meditation yet "without in any manner undergoing any preliminary training in ethics. This is a serious blunder. Ethical perfection is a matter of paramount importance." Sivananda also said, "Concentration without purity of mind is of no avail. There are some occultists who have concentration but they do not have good character. That is the reason why they do not make any progress in the spiritual line." In my own experience, I've observed these phenomena exactly as they've been described by Sivananda and Samael Aun Weor. I have seen very serious, dedicated people who work very hard to meditate and have even some degree of concentration, but fail spiritually because they have bad character; they do not have cognizant ethics. Instead, they justify their behaviors, they excuse themselves because they say they are "advanced" or they are "practicing tantra" or practicing some esoteric philosophy, so that supposedly gives them the right to continue with their harmful behaviors. Samael Aun Weor explained very clearly many times that there are many who have been in the teaching for many years who may speak about the doctrine beautifully and may appear to understand the teaching very well, but they do not change. That is, their minds are the same. This is a real problem in all traditions, in every religion. So for those of us who are really sincere and serious about our practice, we need to remain extremely vigilant on this point: meditation, comprehension, understanding, divine experiences, spiritual awakening,

true illumination of the heartnone of these can occur unless we have a profound training in ethics. This is not "morality," this has nothing to do with what is "moral or immoral," it has to do with what is right and what is wrong. Ethics are fixed, they are part of nature. They are part of how energy and matter function. We may debate philosophy or morality, but nature does not debate. If we perform an action that is harmful, we will suffer a consequence. This is indisputable, and this is something that we all experience continually. And yet, because we remain ignorant of those consequences in our lives, and we ignore the connection to the causes, we continue to suffer and we continue to be in spiritual darkness, because we have not created the proper foundation for true practice. In the previous two lectures, we outlined fundamental principles that we need in order to establish an effective meditation technique. In the previous lecture we talked about a scripture from the great teacher Tsong Khapa that explains three fundamentals or three principles, and those are: Renunciation Bodhichitta Prajna These three principles or three paths represent three levels of instruction and also three levels of comprehension. For all of us who are mere beginners, we start with the first, which is renunciation. As we explained, renunciation is not related so much to renouncing physical things like comfort or living in the world or shaving your head, which are mere superficial signs of renunciation. Real renunciation is in the mind and heart, it is of the spirit, it is the renunciation of harmful action, it is the comprehension of when something is right and when it is wrong. When we comprehend that an action is wrong, it is not painful to renounce, it is natural, it is normal. This is true renunciation. Yet for us, when facing renunciation we experience pain, because we have attachments and desires.The solution is comprehension, understanding. When we truly understand the harmful nature of a behavior, it is not painful to renounce it. This is why all religions without exception begin with ethics. Every religion in the world begins in its catechism or its first instruction that it applies to all those who enter into it, and that first instruction is always ethics, not morality, even though nowadays it has become simple morality or philosophy. True ethics are not "moral." You see, morals change with time and with culture. Behaviors that are moral in North America are immoral in Asia. Behaviors that are moral in Asia are immoral in the west. Thus, morality is subjective. Morality is not eternal, immutable, and infallible. Morality changes with time and culture. Ethics, on the other hand, are eternal. True ethics, conscious ethics, are laws of nature. Religions originally emerged from consciousness of those ethical laws, even if later the religions degenerate and collapse into moral dogma. In the West, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, ethics have been synthesized in what we know as the Decalogue or the Ten Commandments. These are ethics that you have heard, such as "Thou shalt not kill," "Thou shalt not covet," "Thou shalt not commit adultery, fornication," "Thou shalt honor thy father and mother," et cetera. All of these have an ethical foundation. They are not the only representation of ethics in the Jewish or Christian traditions, they are just a simplified synthesis of them. Likewise, in Hinduism there are many presentations of ethics. Probably the most famous is in Patanjali's Yoga Sutras, which is an exposition of Raja Yoga. In Raja Yoga the first two steps are Yama and Niyama. Those two steps are ethics and observances, and these are things that you should do and things that you should not do. Why? What is karma that you have done? An action that you have thought about or that you have set into motion either physically or vocally. - Yoga-carya-bhumi Ethics are not just mechanical laws that some external authority is trying to impose upon us. These rules, commandments, or vows have a very specific function, which must be clearly grasped, and that is this: If you perform actions that are harmful, you create disharmony not only in your environment but in your mind. Yet if you follow these "observances," or positive practices, you create positive energy, not only into your environment, but in your mind. So the purpose of Yama and Niyama or the Commandments of Moses is to stabilize our psychology so that we are no longer vibrating with so much negative emotion. For example, in Buddhism, any Buddhist, whether a lay person or a monk, always takes five fundamental vows: to not steal to not kill to not lie

to not commit sexual crime to take no intoxicants If you kill, steal, lie, have sexual misconduct, or take intoxicants, all of these create a great energetic disturbance in your mind and the environment, but firstly in your mind. When that energetic disturbance is there, you cannot have quietude and peace of mind in order to meditate: to dive in and experience your true nature, to experience and comprehend what the divine is in you. It becomes impossible. If you observe yourself in the course of life, you can see how true it is. When a strong negative emotion like anger or lust takes a hold of you, you cannot relax, you do not have a calm mind; you are very agitated. That agitation is precisely what prevents us from seeing the truth. When we are very angry, we only see through that anger. We only want what that anger wants. In a fit of anger, we can even throw away a marriage, our job, our social status. Anger is totally irrational and dangerous. That is what anger does to us, and so does lust, envy, gluttony, greed, fear, laziness, etc. So with ethics, we are trying to regulate these qualities, and eliminate them. Like a poison that has been ingested, The commission of even a small sin Creates in your lives hereafter Great fear and a terrible downfall. As when grain ripens into a bounty, Even the creation of small merit [from virtuous action] Leads in lives hereafter to great happiness And will be immensely meaningful as well. - Udana-varga (Collection of Indicative Verses) There is a great quote from a Buddhist scripture that describes a conversation between Buddha Shakyamuni and the king of the Nagas. A Naga is a serpent being. In the West people laugh about such stories, but nagas are a race of humanoids or creatures, rather, who are intelligent like us, but are a different race. They exist on this planet and they can sometimes appear physically, both as people and in their original form. But they are rarely seen nowadays. Anyhow, the king of the Nagas came to the Buddha with questions, and the Buddha told him: "Lord of Nagas, a single practice of the Bodhisattvas correctly stops rebirth in the lower realms. What is this single practice? It is the discernment of what is virtuous. You must think, "Am I being true? How am I spending the day and the night?" - Sagara-naga-raja-pariprccha (Questions of the Naga Kings of the Ocean) That single perspective or point of view can take you all the way on the path. Thus, we have to question ourselves: "Am I being true?" Pose that question when you are tempted by lust, pride, or fear. "Am I being true?" Who is that 'I', first of all, and what does it mean to be true? Are you true to your Being, true to your Innermost, true to your Divine Mother and Father? So what this question underlines for us is that the beginning of our spiritual work and the ending of our spiritual work are the same: throughout our entire spiritual path we have to be inquiring into ourselves: "Am I being true? How am I spending the day and the night? What am I doing with my mind, with my body?" This question has to be ever present. In order for the question to bear fruit, though, we need to have good understanding of these fundamental aspects of the path. We need to know how to answer the question, "Am I being true? Who am 'I'?" We have to be able to answer that. True to what? So we study these fundamental aspects. In order for us to enter the higher aspects of the path, such as the middle range of the path which is the Mahayana aspect, and then the Bodhisattva path, which is the Tantric aspect, we have to have a strong foundation first, which is the sutrayana or foundational path. To have that foundation, we need to comprehend two primary aspects: death and Karma. We have already explained in the previous lectures that none of us comprehend either. This is proven and easy to see. When we analyze just a day of our lives, yesterday for example, if we are sincere with ourselves, we can see how much time we wasted in futility, in activities that are completely pointless, spiritually speaking. There is so much that we have been doing, spending time on, thinking about, being worried about, investing energy into, that are fruitless spiritually. Moreover, we do them thinking that we still have time on this planet, that we will not die. We believe that death may happen to everyone else but not us. We act in ways in which we think we will not bear the consequences, as if we can act, think, feel, and do what we like without receiving consequences. So, for example, we think lustful thoughts, we look lustfully at others, we nurse our anger, we feed our pride, we indulge in envy. All of these are done in ignorance of death and Karma. It is quite simple and

quite sad, but these are the fundamental aspects. How can we expect to move on to the greater and higher aspects if we do not even grasp this today in our daily life? It is important that we do. In the previous lecture, we explained four basic aspects of action and consequence, which I'll remind you of now because you need to keep this in mind as we study today's topic. 1. Actions produce related consequences. When you perform an action, there will be a result, and that result is always related to the action. 2. The consequences are greater than the actions. I used the example of throwing a stone into water. We tend to think that action and result are equal, partly because of what we learn in school about Newton's third law of motion, even if we happen to apply that law of motion to thought, matter, energy, psychology. But the actual fact is the result is stronger than the action. This is because, for example, when you throw the stone in the water, the water does absorb the stone and the water moves back up an equal distance to the impact, but there are also rings on the surface and throughout the depths. All the water is moved by the impact. So if you were to quantify all of that motion, that energy, the energy that was set in motion by the action is far greater than the energy of the original action. The same true when you speak a lie. When you speak a lie, you think "Oh, I'm just saying these few little words," or even just a gesture, or even just not speaking seems like a small action, but it not only affects you, but everyone else involved in the situation about which you lie. There might be two or three, there might be a hundred, there might be a thousand. How do you know? So the action is one level of energy, but the result is always greater, even if we cannot see it. 3. You cannot receive the consequence without committing its corresponding action. This is also quite simple, just as the Bible says: we reap what we sow. If you have not committed the action that causes cancer, you will not have cancer. Nature functions on the basis of invariance. There are only laws: cause and effect. If you are experiencing an effect, it is because you produced a cause that allowed it, and because the conditions are ripe for that consequence to emerge. 4. Once an action is performed, the consequence cannot be erased. If you pull the trigger, you cannot pull the bullet back. It is the same with our thoughts, feelings, and actions. Once you have said a critical word and caused pain, you cannot take the pain away. Once you have struck someone, you cannot take away the bruise. The same is true for actions that you do to yourself. Once you commit a wrong act, you cannot take away that act or its consequences. But: all four of these rules are modified by an essential principle: A superior law always overcomes an inferior one. If you have committed a wrong action, you can cancel your reception of the consequence if you perform a superior action. A very crude example is, if you are running and trip and are going to fall, but you catch yourself, you may not fall and get hurt. You might stumble but you might be able to catch yourself. The same is true when you say a critical word, you gossip, you lie, you indulge in lust; you might be able to perform an action that transcends the mistake if you catch it in time, and if you are sincere. This is an important rule to comprehend, and it is the entire basis of the path. If Karma was invariable, if Karma was a fixed destiny, there would be no hope for any of us and we would not receive this teaching. We would just devolve and be consumed by nature. But the fact is, there is hope because a superior law can transform, can transcend the inferior law. That is our hope, but it is an action. Our hope is not in belief, it is not in faith, it is an action: conscious action, ethical action. To know how to perform the right thing at the right time. This is how we change our situation, our Karma. In our tradition, in keeping with western esotericism, we tend to talk about seven capital sins, or seven defects. These are the negative aspect, or the polarized aspect of seven virtues. These are qualities of spirit, qualities of pure mind. So in these lectures, we always talk about laziness. Laziness is a defect, a "sin" if you want to use that word. Its opposite is diligence, conscious action. This is what we are talking about today: Diligence, but it has to be conscious diligence. In context of the last two lectures that we have given, which were based in the teachings of Buddhism, we are going to look a little bit at ethics in the same perspective. Ten Non-virtuous Actions The Buddha taught that there are ten non-virtuous actions. This does not mean that these ten nonvirtuous actions are the only wrong actions. So for example, in this list of ten, he does not mention taking drugs, or drinking alcohol, or beating your children. These are still wrong, they are still harmful, they just do not happen to be in this list. This list is talking about fundamental psychological axioms that we need to understand.

The first three are considered to be actions of body. Buddhism tends to look at the potentials for Karma as emerging in three ways: physically, verbally or mentally. So in Buddhism, you always hear: body speech mind These are three doorways through which we utilize energy. But again, do not think that these are the only ways to create Karma. This is just a model to help you get on your way towards analyzing yourself, but these do not include everything. As a matter of fact, these ten non-virtues are generally studied after somebody has already taken other vows, such as, do not kill, do not steal, do not lie, do not have sexual misconduct, do not take intoxicants, et cetera. So these ten non virtuous actions come after that. In Buddhism, the first non virtuous act is called killing. We tend to interpret this as the act of murder, which of course, creates a lot of harm. To kill is a grave crime, and this is why it is punished so severely in all traditions. But we have to remember something, we can kill with a word. We can kill with silence, because we can kill not merely the body, but the spirit. We can kill someone's mind. We can kill someone's heart. Killing is not merely the physical act. To kill is to take someone's life, to take the life of another being. In the scriptures it is stated that this is a right reserved only for God. Depending upon the religion or tradition you study, that right may be further elaborated. For example, there are what we call angels of death: Devas or Buddhas who are responsible for ending life. In this case, killing is not a crime, it is their job, their duty, and it is performed with love. Likewise, there are cosmic executioners whose job is to kill, as punishment, as compassion. Killing is the domain of Geburah in the Tree of Life. Geburah is the Sephirah of justice, and it is ruled by the angel Samael. This is why the Zohar says that Samael is the angel of killing. Samael has a sword and has the right to kill in accordance with Karma, in accordance with the law. Likewise there are great masters, great teachers, great illuminated prophets who acquire this right. David, Solomon, Padmasambhava, Quetzalcoatl, others who in accordance with the law, in accordance with Karma, were able to kill without accruing any debt. We are not at that level. We do not have that right. But, we think we do. Now, most people who hear this topic look at themselves and say, "Well I've never killed anyone, so this does not apply to me." I am sorry, but it does. Our society is as it is because of who we are as individuals. All of us share in the karma of killing. Which civilization, which country on this planet is responsible for more wars and more killing? Which civilization, which country on this planet is spending the most money developing and perfecting the art of killing? The United States. The vast majority of the money that comes out of the United States is spent on the act and the art of killing. Why? We have a lot of "reasons," a lot of "justifications." Some may be good, some may be not. But it is an undeniable truth and all of the citizens of the United States are part of that, in some form, at some level. Whether through active participation or through apathy, we contribute. None of us are innocent. Moreover, many of us are being trained daily in the art of killing. Do you watch television? Why is it that most TV shows for the last few decades are all about the art of killing? Those who watch television are trained daily in how to murder. Media celebrates criminals, murderers, serial rapists, gangsters, war, and all of us indulge in these movies and TV shows and think "it's just entertainment" without realizing that all that information is going into the brain and is teaching us. Is this what we need to learn? What will be the consequences of a society that loves to learn about death and killing, and how many "creative" ways there are to harm one another? What are the consequences of that? What are the results of that? Remember: cause and effect. If you teach generation after generation of children how to use weapons, how to handle guns, how to shoot, how to stab, what will be the result? Peace, serenity, a golden age, or war? What do you think? What about video games? Have you noticed that the most popular video games are always games about killing, with extreme violence? All of our children are spending hours and hours and hours teaching themselves how to kill: to enjoy it, to indulge in it. Again, there may not be a physical act, but there is a psychological environment that is being created from this. If we wonder why there is so much violence in the United States and North America because of guns, we have to look to ourselves for the cause. If we wonder why there is so much violence in the Mid East because of guns, the people who live there have to look to themselves, not blame other countries, but look to themselves. Or in Africa, or in Asia: the causes are within us. The second non-virtuous action is stealing. Again, we tend to think of a thief who wears the little black mask around his eyes and sneaks into a house at night to steal jewels and leave. Yes, that is stealing, but that is relatively rare compared to the kind of stealing that we all do every day. It is a crime to steal energy, to steal attention, to steal ideas, to steal the truth. We steal in many ways, not just by taking a

possession. We may take away someone's identity. If you have ever had a dream that someone comes and steals your driver's license, passport, or wallet, that means someone in the physical world is criticizing you, cutting down your image, taking away your identity, making you look bad. When we criticize, gossip, lie, point out defects of others, and otherwise calumniate or bring someone down, we are stealing from them. This is wrong. Why do we do it? Because of our pride, resentment, and envy. Samael Aun Weor wrote that the true spiritual aspirants always have many people around them doing everything they can to destroy their image, saying they are stealing money, are a homosexual, a fornicator, an adulterer, a liar. Every spiritual aspirant, true spiritual aspirant faces this. Why does it happen? Because all the people in the spiritual community have envy, pride, fear, resentment. Deceit is a form of stealing. When you misrepresent something, you steal. What can we say about all these companies who make big promises and offer beautiful products for us to purchase, and then when we buy it, it is cheap, it is junk, it does not work, or it breaks the day the warranty ends? This is deceit, it is stealing; it is wrong. How many companies or people out there genuinely want to make something that is really good and worth it and will last a long time? Nobody; everybody is trying to get something for nothing. Nowadays, this is the big obsession: to get something for nothing, such as to win the lottery, which is, by the way, a form of deceit sanctioned by authority. What can we say of people who are professional deceivers? Who are paid, who make their living by deceiving others? Some of us may be those people and we should carefully analyze what we do with our time. Many of us are paid to lie. The third non-virtuous actionwe are still talking about actions primarily related with the bodyis sexual misconduct. Sexual misconduct is a very vast topic, but it includes all those actions that most of us are familiar with, such as fornication, adultery, homosexuality, masturbation. But it includes other actions such as trying to have sex with someone, your spouse, for example, when they are ill or not interested or against their will or when they are pregnant or menstruating. These are all forms of sexual misconduct. Having the sexual act in sacred places is wrong. It is wrong to have sex with children, prostitutes, renunciates. So there are many rules related to that sexual crime. Pornography is sexual misconduct because it is a form of adultery. We have often quoted the master Jesus who said in the gospels that when you look at a person with lust, you have committed adultery with them in your heart, so you have broken a commandment. But Jesus was not the only one to say that, the Buddha said it also five hundred years before. Commit no adultery. This law is broken by even looking at the wife of another with a lustful mind. Buddha It is also in the Zohar. So in every tradition, pornography, or looking at others lustfully, is defined as unethical. Sexual misconduct is not merely a physical act, it is in the mind and heart. Adultery is any act that corrupts something that was once pure. To adulterate means to change or corrupt something, to make it impure. We tend to think of adultery as just sex between a married person and someone else, another married person maybe. But no, not according to this doctrine, not according to any true religion. That is a form of adultery, yes, but not the fundamental form. The fundamental form occurs the instant we allow ourselves to have lust towards another person, even our spouse. Lust is a form of adultery; it impurifies the consciousness, it dirties the soul, it puts filth into the temple of God, which is within. This is not to condemn sex, because sex is natural and normal, but only when that sex, that sexual act, that sexual emotion is illuminated with the presence of God, is pure. Then there is no adultery. But for us to see that is not easy because we have eyes of lust. We tend to see everyone else through the projection of our own mind. So that's a very long topic we could spend several lectures just on that, but we need to move ahead. The first three non-virtuous actions are related with the body. The next few are related with speech. The fourth non-virtuous action is lying. To lie is possible even without speaking. We can lie with our silence, we can lie with a gesture, we can lie with a word. Moreover, we can cause others to lie, either for ourselves or others when we affirm something that is not true. What is the gravest form of lie? It is the spiritual lie. When we affirm something spiritual or religious that we do not know is true, we commit a horrible action whose Karma is extremely intense. For example: if we join a group, a spiritual movement, a religion, and we begin to preach and try to bring people into that religion but it is all a lie, whether we know it or not, we have accrued a very serious Karma. When you lie to the soul, you affect the inner Being of that person, you affect their spiritual development. This is an act equivalent to killing, because you kill the soul. For example: those groups and schools who are working very hard to spread black Tantrain other words, indulgence in desire, indulgence in lust, indulgence in

the egothey are committing a form of deceit of the most serious type, because they are affirming to the souls that follow them that desire and lust is ok with God. This is not true, and no authentic scripture in the world affirms it. The black scriptures do, but not the real scriptures, not the pure masters. So this is an extremely serious crime whose consequences will reverberate far into the future, not merely with consequences in this lifetime, but in future lifetimes. This is why it is such a serious step to become an instructor, to become a spiritual teacher. You must have one hundred percent clarity about what you teach, about what you offer, about the guidance you give. One should not teach merely because "it's fun" or people might respect you, or because you think you have to because you have to sacrifice for humanity, no. You have to teach because you know you are doing the right thing, because you know that what you teach is true. If you do not know with absolute certainty, then restrain yourself until you do. Confirm the teachings completely, know it, experience it. Then you can teach without fear, and teach with confidence. Too often we hear instructors repeating what others have said, or quoting from popular theories and beliefs, because they do not want to contradict what is popular or what people like. We have to teach the truth, but we first have to know what the truth is. The next non-virtuous action is divisive speech. Divisive speech is related to actions in which we try to separate people from each other, or keep them separated. In some families, for example, there may be an argument and one sister will not talk to the other sister. If we get involved and say "You shouldn't talk to her, she's really bad, she shouldn't have done that." That is wrong. This behavior is very common in the workplace. Some people love to split others into groups, to divide people, control them, and manipulate them. Usually, the people who do this appear quite innocent or as "martyrs" who seem to deserve our sympathy. How can we be a spiritual person when we are trying to separate all the people from each other? Real spirituality is about bringing people together, cultivating harmony, mutual respect, tolerance, peace; not divisiveness and contention. The gravest form of divisive speech is when it is performed in spiritual groups. In some scriptures, especially in Buddhism, it is said that this is the worst crime of all crimes: worse than killing, worse than fornication, worse than adultery is the crime of divisive speech in the spiritual community. Some say it is worse than the crime of killing a Buddha, so it is very serious. And yet, everyone is doing it. Anytime someone is making statements like, "That group is no good, you should stay away from them. They are bad people. They are not true to the lineage. They are not true to the master. They are merchants in the temple. They have left the path. They are not serious. They are all black magicians." These are all forms of divisive speech and they are extremely serious problems. This is rampant in every spiritual tradition, especially among so-called "Gnostics." Every group claims that their group is the only true and good group. It ridiculous to see all these different groups saying "We are the good ones, not them!" This is all lies. Let me tell you something: there are no good groups, not on this Earth. Do you want to find a good spiritual group? Then go to heaven: visit the internal worlds, bow at the feet of your inner Master, then you will find a good group. In the physical world, it is impossible to find a good spiritual group. All of us here have too much ego. All of us here are liars, cheats, adulterers, murderers, and fornicators, without exception. Everyone who says otherwise is a liar. These so-called leaders who claim to be illuminated ones or incarnations of "master so-and-so," they are all liars. The real master we need to follow is within. The real group we need is within. Divisive speech is a major crime because it separates the Sangha, the spiritual community. It empowers the ego. When groups are divisive, split, and separated into many different small factions and not united, they are weak. How can they fight if they are weak? How can they work for humanity if they are all separated and fighting with each other because of politics, gossip, rumors, and pride? They cannot. This is a problem that Paul wrote about in the years after Jesus. It was a problem then, it is a problem now. Gossip, rumors, pride, divisive speech, all of this interrupts the efforts of Christ to help us. The sixth is offensive speech. Offensive speech encompasses a wide variety of actions. Speaking critically of others, condemning others, attacking others, even attacking ourselves can be offensive. When our hostility, malice, and anger are coming out through our words, whether written or spoken, or even in our silence, it is offensive speech. I once visited a gnostic instructor's home with a group of other people and we were all having a very pleasant conversation, when suddenly the wife of the instructor came in the room and the whole tone of the room changed. When I looked at her, she did not say a word, but she was raging with anger. It

affected everyone. It interrupted the entire purpose of our gathering. This was an example of offensive speech through silence. You see, she had a lot of resentment at some of the people that were gathered there and she was unwilling to transform it. I understand that and I feel bad that she made this mistake because it is going to affect her later if she does not deal with it. Offensive speech is generally to create hostility or pain. The seventh is senseless speech. We tend to think of "senseless" as words that have no meaning, but this is senseless in terms of spirituality. For example, we spend hours talking about sitcoms or about celebrities, about what "so and so" is doing and "Now they're divorced and they've got kids and what are they going to do and oh my God." That is senseless. Reading magazines is senseless speech. You do not have to speak it, you can indulge in it mentally. Television is senseless speech. It is senseless spiritually and it creates harm. Talking about all kinds of things that are a waste of time is senseless speech. Gossip is senseless speech. "Oh did you hear that story? Did you hear what such and such person did? Oh I cannot believe it, is it true?" Gossip, senseless, harmful, it's wrong. Swami Sivananda has a very colorful phrase to describe this harmful action, he calls it "diarrhea of the tongue." Senseless speech is marked in those people who cannot control their tongue. Who are always "Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah" all day long. A person like that cannot meditate. You know why? Because that tongue is only showing what their mind is doing. If you want to control your mind and have serenity of mind and enter into calm abiding, control your tongue. The tongue is so small, isn't it? James said in the bible: "Such a small thing can light such a terrible bonfire." It is true. If you want to know more about your tongue, study the Book of James in the New Testament. He gives very beautiful profound teaching about the tongue. Talking about all things that do not contribute to spirituality or our wellbeing is considered senseless speech. On that note, we need to talk a certain amount about our jobs, school, educating children, feeding ourselves, taking care of our lives. This is not senseless speech, these are important things that need to be talked about and discussed. Ethical speech does not mean that every time you open your mouth you have to talk about scripture. It means when you open your mouth, you talk consciously, and you know what you are saying and why you are saying it. The remaining non-virtuous actions are related with the mind. The eighth non-virtuous action is covetousness. To me, it is very interesting that this is one of the only ones that relates directly to the seven deadly sins. Covetousness or envy, why? To my experience, it is because it's so strong. Samael Aun Weor said that envy is the secret trigger of all action in the world. When we analyze what is happening with our governments, with big companies, with our family members, with ourselves, we can pretty much always find envy. What is envy? It is wanting what someone else has. We want that car, we want that job, one country wants the resources of another, wants the respect of another, one family member wants the money of another, the love that another one gets. Envy is when we want something that is not naturally ours. Envy always says, "I want it." I challenge you to watch for that in your mind. "I want it." That is covetousness. In most cases, we experience it in relation with material things. "I want money, a spouse, a better place to live, a big house, an island." We have a list, probably had it since we were kids. I will give you a little secret: burn it. Burn the list, you will have so much more peace when you have no covetousness. When you are content with what God has given you. You see, in the Bible it says: "Let every man accept what God has given him." Who among us does that? Who accepts gratefully what we have? None of us, we are all craving and dying and scratching out a living trying to get more and get more and get more. Why? Because we have not comprehended death. We have not understood that we are going to die and all of those things we are working so hard to get will be useless. So why did we spend years and years and years struggling so hard to get something that we have to give up? What is the value of that, what is the point? Reflect on that. When a desire emerges in you, really reflect: "What will this fundamentally change for my soul? What will this change about the moment I am dying?" Have you meditated on the moment of your death? You should. Sit and imagine it. Do not hide from it, do not run from it. If you avoid death, when it comes you will be unprepared. And you will die in a panic and afraid, and those energies will affect your next transition. But if you prepare every day for death, it will not come as a surprise, you will be ready, and you will pass into that transition with happiness, with contentment, conscious. The true Gnostic prepares for death every day. The true Gnostic path is a path of dying from moment to moment, preparing for death. And if you are doing that, what is there to be attached to? Why do you really need those shoes or those new pants or that new computer, or to redecorate the whole house, why? It is not that anything is wrong

with those objects, what is wrong is our attitude and our enslavement to attachment. You see, attachment is the key factor of covetousness. The state of our world is because of this factor. Yes, we have killing, we have lying, we have deceit, we have divisive speech. We have all those things but the key to suffering on this planet is covetousness. No one is content with what they have and they want what the neighbor has. So because of envy we kill our neighbor, we lie about our neighbor, we deceive our neighbor, we go to war. Covetousness, attachment. Some examples that you can look for in your mind: "How nice if I were the one in charge." Now you might hear that and think "That does not sound like covetousness to me, it sounds like pride." But it is covetousness. How else will we get the idea unless we are trying to get it from someone else? We see the boss who is in charge: "Look at that nice car he drives, everybody respects him, they bow at his feet when he walks by, everybody salutes the guy in charge, I want to be that guy." Covetousness. All of these apply spiritually, by the way. A lot of people want to be the Lama or the master who all the students bow to. Why? Not to benefit the students, but to get the praise, to feed pride. To hide from their fear. "How nice to have the wife of so-and-so, to have their possessions? How nice if I could eat that food?" This is all covetousness. "How nice if others knew me to be humble, to be compassionate, to be wise?" Every spiritually inclined person has thought that. "I hope everybody can see me as a spiritual person, very humble." That is covetousness. That is not true spirituality. When you want something from someone else, when you are attached to how people see you, when you want their attention, when you want their respect, it is covetousness. It is not sincere, it is not conscious. It is the ego. "How nice if people in high places respected me?" Some people think "If everybody respected me, even celebrities would respect me, even politicians would respect me." That is covetousness. "How nice if I could be reborn in Nirvana (heaven) with powers and servants." Covetousness. "How nice if I had the ability to go in the astral body, how nice if I was a master of Samadhi." Covetousness. We should not covet what we do not have. If you want something different, analyze that want, and give it to God. This does not mean that you sit back and wait. There's a great quote from the Muslim tradition: "Pray to Allah but tie your camel to the post." There is another one I like even better, I do not know where it comes from, but: "Pray to catch the bus, but run like hell." We have to give up our desires, analyze our wants, but we also have to work for what is right. Some people always say "Well if I accept what God has given me, does that mean I do not have to work? Does that mean I should quit my job? If I am not supposed to worry about my clothes and paying my bills and eating, should I just stop doing anything?" No, because if you do not do anything, you will starve. You have to work, you have to act, you have to be prudent, you have to be intelligent. The ninth non-virtuous action is called harmful intent, or malice. This is any desire or any thought or action directed towards causing harm for others. Our anger wishes others to suffer. We imagine our enemies suffering. We imagine our boss getting fired. We imagine our spouse getting a divorce and being miserable because you left her or him. We imagine our parents suffering in loneliness because of our resentment to them. We imagine our friends missing us because you won't call them back. We imagine our co-workers confused because you won't speak with them. These are all malice, they are the intent to harm. Any attitude of hostility is malice. It is very common now to find an attitude of hostility in people. How rare it is to find sincere kindness? How easy it is to find hostility? Impatience with others is a form of hostility, malice. When we become impatient, we become angry, we want others to serve us, especially when we are hungry. Impatience is hostility. When you have that thought, imagining, "I wish that person would just go to hell." That is malice, that is harmful intent. Directing curse words at another, even just in the mind, is harmful intent. That is the opposite of compassion. How interesting it is that we speak and think without cognizance of what we are saying. We say to people, "Go to hell." Or we say "I'm going to kill you." "I could have killed her." We do not think about what is behind those words. The personality thinks, "Ah, it's just a phrase that we toss around nowadays, it does not mean anything." Then why do we say it? What is behind it? What psychological element is behind those phrases? We should analyze those tendencies. I guarantee you they have nothing to do with Bodhichitta.

The tenth non-virtuous action is wrong views, ways of seeing life that keep us doing wrong things. Primarily, for our perspective at this moment, it is to be ignorant of the reality of death. To be ignorant of the reality of cause and effect. To be willfully ignorant of the reality of a higher life. Many of us willfully ignore these truths. Many people, when they encounter this type of teaching, cannot bear it. It stimulates too much pain in the heart, it stimulates too much doubt in the mind, too many conflicts, and so they prefer to ignore it. This is to willfully ignore something that is fundamentally true. Wrong views include any attitude that delights in wrong action. Any attitude in us that indulges, that delights in lust, that delights in pride, that delights in gossip, that delights in killing, that delights in stealing; these are all wrong views. In each one of these ten, there are enumerable psychological aggregates that we have within ourselves. It is our duty to discover them, to analyze them and to stop acting on them. When we perform actions, we set in motion a stream of energy, and that energy modifies matter according to its vibration. When we feel anger and express that anger, even if it is not outside, but in the mind, that energy affects matter. Matter and energy cannot be separated, remember that, even Einstein said that. Energy exists, maybe not physical, but it exists in the mind stream. So when anger is projected, it has an inner relationship with matter. It may not manifest now, but it must conclude itself. This is a law of nature called invariance. Any energy that is projected must be satisfied, must be brought back to balance, including psychological energies. Therefore, this is the basis for why we are reborn, continually. From moment to moment we are setting in motion a lot of energies, and then we die. Those energies do not stop to exist, they continue to exist psychologically in the mental plane, in the astral plane. Those energies are what push the trapped soul inside of them to be born again so those energies can manifest and satisfy themselves. This is why we keep being born, this is why we keep suffering, this is the wheel of Samsara, this is the wheel of life, which the Buddhists illustrate. This wheel of twelve Nidanas. The center most part of the wheel shows the cycle of birth. When those energies are there, in our mind stream, they can only emerge when the conditions are ripe, in the same way that a seed can only grow if the conditions are right. If there is no water, if there is no sunlight, the seed cannot grow. Likewise, our subconscious mind is a mass of seeds which we ignore, which we sometimes go skipping through at night when we dream. And this is why our dreams are so complicated and confused and obscure. We do not remember them because we are asleep as a consciousness. When you begin to awaken your consciousness, you begin to remember your dreams, you start to see the vast amount of confusing and complicated elements that are in your mind. In fact, when you fall asleep tonight, listen to the voices in your head. Listen to what they say. Those voices are in your subconsciousness, they are your egos. Listen to them; do not try to change them, just listen. When you are falling asleep, start listening, start listening, listen, listen, inside, inside, listen. You are not going to like it, but it is inside of you. Do not be afraid of it. What is to be feared is that you ignore it, and what is in you is being ignored. You need to learn about it and get in there and see it for what it is. All of those egos, those aggregates in the mind, are waiting for the conditions to be right for them to act. So when we go to work and some situation starts to brew, conditions are being cultivated by Karma, by past actions that are starting to be prepared for something to emerge. If we are not aware of ourselves, cognizant, watching our mind, suddenly, we start to do and say things and act in a way that is completely inappropriate before we realize what we have done. I am giving you an extreme example. Maybe we will say something we will regret, or do something we will regret, and then we wonder "Why did I do that? Why did I act that way?" or "Why is this situation happening to me? Why do I have to suffer like this?" Because the causes are there, the conditions emerge and then the effect is realized. So let me read you a list of effects and see if any of these sound familiar to you. These are causal effects from non-virtuous actions. For the past act of killing, a short lifetime, many illnesses. For the act of stealing, a lack of resources, poverty, or to have to share everything with others. For sexual misconduct, an untrustworthy spouse [adultery]. For lying, your life will be filled with slander towards you, gossip about you and you will be deceived by others. For the past action of divisive speech, you will suffer loss of friendships and people you depend on will always be splitting and divisive with each other, so you cannot depend on them. For the past action of offensive speech, you will always hear unpleasant words and be surrounded by quarrels and arguments.

For the past act of senseless speech, others will not listen to you, will not respect your words, will not understand your words, or you will have poor confidence in your words. For the past act of covetousness, you will suffer from attachment and have no contentment. For the past act of malice, others will be hostile towards you, and you will always be seeking things that are unbeneficial for yourself, always inadvertently harming others or being harmed by others. For the past action of wrong views, you will suffer from confusion and deceit. Environmental effects are more widespread and in your environment. For the act of killing, you will have poor or little food, poor or ineffective medicine and the harvests and other resources that you bring will have little strength or will even produce illness. For the past act of stealing, you will also have poor crops, poor food, droughts, floods, spoiled foods, poisoned foods. All of that sounds like where we live. All of that sounds like every country I've been to. For the past crime of sexual misconduct, you will live in filthy places, there will be excrement, urine, mud, vomit everywhere on the streets. You will have unclean things, bad smells, misery and discomfort everywhere. For the past crime of lying, your work does not flourish, there's no harmony in workers, everyone is deceitful, you will be fearful and have many causes to be afraid. For the past act of divisive speech, you will live in a place that's difficult to get around, and have many causes to fear. For offensive speech, a dangerous environment and no comforts such as parks or pools or safe places. For the past act of covetousness, all good things diminish every year and do not increase. For malice, you will be surrounded by epidemics, injury, infectious diseases, quarrels, disputes, harmful animals, thieves. For wrong views, the most important resources will be unavailable or too expensive, unclean things are plentiful, misery appears to be bliss, you will have no home, no protector and no refuge. - [These correspondences are collected from the Buddhist scriptures Lam rim chenmo, Satyaka-parivatara, and Dasabhumika-sutra.] To me, that is a description of our planet. I cannot name a single place that is free from those qualities. I do not know a single person who is free from them, as far as someone who is living in this world. So, based on that, you can understand: if these are our circumstances, how can we meditate? How can we have serenity of mind? How can we have calm abiding, Pratyahara? This is why we need to abandon these unvirtuous actions. When we abandon these unvirtuous actions and we begin to perform conscious upright action, we change the circumstances. Let me explain this very carefully. When you perform upright action, that is, you begin to restrain your tendency to gossip, to spread divisive speech, to kill with your words, to have covetousness, to lie, to deceive; when you begin to restrain those things and act consciously in your life, those energies can no longer affect your mind and your environment. So what happens? Naturally, your mind begins to calm down. Your environment could be chaotic, you could live in a big city or in a workplace that is very stressful, but by restraining the mind, the mind becomes calm. The first benefit is, you have that serenity which begins to emerge, which makes meditation a real possibility. The second benefit is you have stopped allowing the conditions to exists for your past Karmas to emerge. This is so profound, that I could just repeat it again and again. And I say it that way because I have had personal, dear friends of mine who never grasped it, who just felt they can continue to smoke, to drink, to look lustfully at others, to boast about their attainments, and think that they're going to get somewhere spiritually. They use vulgar words, they curse, they say bad words, they talk bad about others, and some of them are instructors in this tradition. They think that somehow, being that way they can continue on the path. And they wonder why they are frustrated, they wonder... When you restrain those behaviors, it is not just a game, it is not just for beginners, it is so that the environment, internal and external, is calm. It is so that those latent propensities of the psychological aggregates in our mind cannot emerge. They cannot come out if the environment is not conducive. So, for example, if you restrain your tendency to talk bad about others, to criticize others and a situation comes up when you really could do it, you really got something on this guy and you could crucify him with a word, but you do not. What happens? The Karma that was driving that urge cannot come out. It cannot emerge and destroy your life. You have restrained it. Now the next step is, you have to meditate on that urge and eliminate that Karma, because if you do not, it will come back later. If you just repress it, it will come back later, stronger, because that repression strengthens it. So that is why this is the path of the

razor's edge, a very delicate psychological balance. We do not walk the path tomorrow, it is in every moment. In every moment your mind is a surging sea of these tendencies that want to come out. "If you fear suffering and do not enjoy it, do not commit sinful action, either in public or in private. Whether you have committed sinful actions or are committing them, you will not escape suffering even if you try to run away. No matter where you stay, there is no place that Karma has not created. Neither in the sky nor in the ocean, nor even a place in the mountains." - Udana-varga (Collection of Indicative Verses) You cannot run from Karma, because it is within. You cannot run from the consequences of what you have already done or you are doing now. What you can do is change what you are doing now and create an environment, psychologically, within which meditation becomes easy. You see, when your mind is surging with lust, pride, fear, your mind is disabled, it is out of equilibrium, it is chaotic. You cannot meditate, you probably cannot even sleep. You have tension all over your body. You try to sit and close your eyes and your eyes are fluttering around like crazy, your neck is tense, your stomach is tense, your back, your arms, your legs; because of your mind. But when you restrain those tendencies, when you observe them and you analyze them and you see, "This is no good, this is no good." They start to calm, they start to settle. So we learn about the four powers.Do not worry, I am almost done! But I am not going to leave you just feeling bad about all the bad things you have done. The purpose of this teaching is not to make everybody feel guilty, it is to give us the tools to change it. This is the tool, right here. In Buddhism, they call it the four powers. The Four Powers First is the power of eradication. The power of eradication is analytical meditation. We talked about this in the other two lectures. Sit down, analyze it. When you see these disturbing qualities in your mind, tendencies, impulses, analyze that, analyze it in the light of these basic instructions: death and Karma. So if you feel that tendency towards lust, you have to meditate, "What is this lust? What will I gain if I let it live, if I let it continue in me? What will I benefit, how will it help my soul? What will be the consequence if I act on this lust?" And then you try the other side, analysis, "What will be the result if I eliminate it? What will happen to me if I kill that lust, if I remove it?" This is not just something to think about right now, this is something you need to apply in yourself continually, continually. Even while you are walking and doing things. You are sitting at the car at a stop light and you feel impatience, analyze that impatience, "Why should I feel impatient? The light is red, so what? It is red, what can I do? What is my impatience going to gain me? What is my anger going to gain me? However, what will I gain if I eliminate that anger? What will I gain if I stop feeding that anger?" And, remember your Being! Not just "Oh yea, I remember God, He's out there somewhere." No, your Being is in your heart. Your Being is the fire in your atoms. Be in the presence of your Being. Remember yourself. If you seriously visualize that, and feel it with every ounce of your willpower, you will not be able to act on that lust, it will be impossible. You will not be able to act on that anger or spread that gossip because you will feel the presence of God, that divinity. And if you still do not feel it, pray. Chant the Lord's Prayer if you have a Christian tendency. Repeat that, pray on that. In those moments when you are really tempted and you are really struggling with something, chant that in your mind, even chant it aloud. It will give you great strength and it help you remember God. If you are more interested in Buddhism or Hinduism, there are many Mantras you can use. "Om Mani Padme Hum," or "Om Tat Sat Om." The Fons Alpha prayer is good. All of them work. Even just chant the name of God. But the main thing is to analyze those elements. This is the first power, the power of eradication, analyze it. Not just say "Oh yeah, that is pride, yea, I see." That is not good enough; you need to really deeply understand why that pride is no good and why it would be better for you to get rid of it. Your analysis has to be strong so that you reach a very specific result. If you do not reach this result, you have not analyzed it. The result is this: you must feel a deep remorse, a deep repentance for that action. If you do not feel that, you are not done. If anger emerges and you feel justified in your anger, you do not understand it, you have not analyzed it. If lust emerges and you start looking at that person or that pornography with lust, you have not comprehended that lust, you have not analyzed it. Because you are in that desire, that is wrong view. It is a view that cultivates suffering, so you have not comprehended it. The sign that represents that this first power of eradication is in motion is repentance. Sincere, true repentance. So that then, if that anger or that lust emerges and you feel it, you say "No way." You cannot even bear the thought or the feeling of the presence of that anger or that lust or that pride. That is true repentance and that is how the true virtue emerges.

People in this tradition talk a lot about transmuting vices into virtues, and Samael Aun Weor was very clear, we have to transform lust into chastity, but that does not happen in the mind, it happens in the heart when we have comprehended lust. And when lust comes and we say "No way, I'm not letting that filth into my mind, into my heart, into my marriage, into my temple," that is comprehension, that is chastity. "The only thing I want in my temple is love, remembrance of my Being and true, hundred percent conscious selfless love for my spouse and for humanity." That's comprehension, the same with anger, the same with envy. When envy comes and we feel like "Oh, I really want that car." or "I really want that respect, I really want success" True comprehension says "Why? I have my Being, I have the Dharma, I have the teaching, I have a chance to stop coming back and suffering like this. What more could I want? I have a physical body, I have the Dharma, I have the teaching, I have my Divine Mother. I do not need anything else. I do not need an iPod." Why do you need these other things when you have got the most precious jewels that exist in the universe? Now you need to use them. The second power is the power of applying remedies. This begins with learning the teaching, studying the teaching, listening to the teaching, meditating on the teaching; comprehending it, not just memorizing but actualizing it, becoming it. If you get tempted and you have that lust or desire or envy tempting you very strong, a remedy is: say a prayer, say a mantra, analyze, these are remedies. Remember your Being, that's a remedy. Use the conjurations, use the prayers, these are remedies. Another remedy is to meditate, to comprehend the essence, the consciousness, so that you see that an ego is not the self. That is a great and very powerful remedy. The third power is the power of turning away from faults. This is to restrain those actions. But for this one to work, you have to have the first one, the power of eradication. You cannot turn away from a fault until you have understood that that fault is wrong. You won't turn away from lust as long as you think lust is good and normal and natural. Until you see the painful consequences of lust, until you have comprehended the suffering that lust creates, you won't abandon it. You must comprehend it, you must understand it in order to truly abandon it. The fourth is the power of the foundation. This one really synthesizes the other three, and it's synthesis is Karma. The power of the foundation is knowing cause and effect is real. We do not get that yet because we still persist in wrong actions. But when you have applied the other three powers and you have really started to see how eradicating a power, applying remedies and turning away from those faults produces a strong effect, then you will have confirmed the truth of Karma, cause and effect. That gives you a rocksolid foundation to continue on the path. Without that conviction in the power of Karma, you will fall. I make you that guarantee. If you do not comprehend the power of cause and effect, you will fail. And if you want to see why people fall from the path and fail in the path, it is because of that. We say, yes, the masters fall because of sex, indeed. And it is because they fail to recognize the consequence of that action, that is why they fall. If they really understood Karma, deeply, they would never fall. So a full and rich and deep training in these fundamentals is absolutely essential. This is why it is very interesting that Sivananda made a really important statement: "Do not imagine that you are a great initiate and that you only have to sit in meditation and enter into Samadhi. You will have a terrible downfall. Even after years of practice, you will find you have not progressed an inch forward because there are deep within you lurking desires and cravings which are far beyond your reach. Be humble. Make a searching analysis of your heart and mind. Even if you are really a first-class aspirant, think you are an aspirant of the lowest class and practice the eightfold steps. The more time you spend in the first steps, Yama and Niyama, ethics, the less will be the time needed to attain perfection in meditation." That is extremely powerful. If you are having frustration in meditation, this is where you need to look. If you have been spending years meditating and not getting anywhere, you need to look at your ethical discipline. So he continues, "It is the preparation that takes very long, but do not wait for perfection in ethics in order to take the higher practices of the path. Try to get established in ethics and at the same time practice the other steps. The two must go hand in hand, then, success will be rapid." Questions and Answers Audience: When we meditate on our death, are we meditating on our actual death or are we meditating on different ways that we can possibly die. For example, a traffic accident, etc. Instructor: To meditate on your death, you can use your imagination and you can be creative. There are many practices given in relation to this step. One very good example is to just imagine the moment of dying, regardless of the cause. That moment when death is about to take you. Visualize it, let your

imagination show you that. See yourself unable to reach up, unable to take your clothes away, unable to speak, reaching out to your loved ones, dying. See all the pain of your loved ones, see all your beloved possessions that you will now have to abandon. Visualize that, let yourself feel those emotions and prepare for that. It's painful. You can also imagine the different ways you might die, but the single most effective way to do this is to cultivate the continual remembrance that at any moment, death could arrive. We do not know when we are going to die. But if we have the continual mindfulness of that, we will behave better, right? That's the basic point. Yes, meditate on your death, imagine it, different ways. Audience: If energy cannot be destroyed, why do you use the word destroy when you are talking about transforming ego? Instructor: So if energy cannot be destroyed, why use the word destroy when talking about the ego? Einstein's postulate states that energy and matter cannot be destroyed, they can only be transformed. As we are now, we have an enormous amount of energy trapped in our subconscious mind. And this is why Jung, the famous psychologist said, "We have to make the unconscious conscious." The goal, then, is by analysis of these subtle tendencies, these latent tendencies in the mind, we need to free the consciousness within these Karmic bonds. Each Karmic aggregate traps consciousness. This is why we are mostly unconscious, we are asleep because most of our soul, our essence is trapped in these tendencies towards wrong action. The goal, then is to destroy the vessel. The vessel is a false creation in the mind. Like a crystal or a bottle that is constituted of Karmic tendencies. Through comprehension, through understanding and through the power of our Divine Mother, those tendencies can be shattered. What emerges is the consciousness, free, emerges out of that cage. It is restored to it's rightful place. This is a long process. What happens, then, is a transformation. It is a transmutation. The energy and matter that was inverted, polarized in the wrong way, is shattered from that bondage and reverts to its natural state. You see, the natural state of the mind is cognizant love, serenity, peace. When it is trapped in ego, it is the opposite; chaos, confusion, darkness, pain. So it is a matter not of the energy being destroyed, but freed and restored to its natural state. Audience: How would you compare the law of recurrence and the law of Karma? We cannot change the law of recurrence but we can change the outcome? Instructor: The law of recurrence is the description of how these Karmic tendencies work in nature. Nature works in spirals in all levels. There is a chapter in the book Hell Devil and Karma in which Samael Aun Weor talks about subterranean crypts. He explains the relationship between the serpent and the spiral. He talks about Ananke, which is a Greek deity. Ananke means "necessity." She represents the latent or the residual or the base Karmic tendency of all energy and matter, which tends to move in spirals: day and night, orbits around the earth, birth and death. These spirals function through our life as well. Every Karmic propensity or tendency in our mind stream also passes through cyclical or repetitive patterns. We see this in our daily lives where we tend to repeat the same mistakes and repeat the same sufferings and repeat the same problems. This happens from existence to existence. That is recurrence, it is Karma in action. So when we change our attitude and we cultivate restraint of the mind and expression of consciousness, we harness that power. We can redirect it, but it takes enormous willpower. Audience: Controlling the anger, sometimes I'm able to control the anger by praying. And the next day I try to do the same thing and then sometimes I'm not able to control it. It's because I do not meditate on it, you know, I mean I tend to forget, it happens during the day and at night I forget to meditate on it. And then so it recurs. Instructor: Absolutely, it will keep recurring. So the key is to learn to reflect on that. At the end of the day, spend a little time, reflect on that anger, analyze that anger. Pray about it, and little by little as you understand it more, it will have less power over you. But it requires that conscious attention on it. Otherwise, we ignore it, we avoid it, and it just keeps emerging and we have no control, right? So it works that way. The first step is: become aware of it. The second is: analyze it, meditate. Only then can you begin to approach removing it. Audience: Related to that question that anger rises. When a desire arises and you use the analysis as a remedy for that desire, is that the same as when you talk about the transforming the impression? Instructor: Absolutely. All of these steps I've explained are the specifics of transforming impressions. To transform an impression is to receive it consciously and comprehend it. But to fully do that, you need to have consciousness awake, right? So until we reach that, we need to analyze. And even when the consciousness is awake, we need to analyze to go deeper. Audience: So the analysis, that's the auto transformation?

Instructor: That's right, because at a certain point when the consciousness is bright, active, awake and vibrant, it naturally transforms impressions. That is its basic function, it naturally will do it, unless there is a impact on the consciousness that is too strong for it, and then it gets knocked back to sleep and an ego takes over. That can happen easily, but yes, generally you got it. Audience: What is the difference between lust and sacred sex, especially for a single man? Instructor: The difference between lust and sacred sex is quite simple. Lust is an animal desire that says "I want it." Sacred sex is a conscious love that says "I love you." Do you see the difference? One is an expression of pure emotion, the other is desire that seeks to acquire One gives, the other takes. Sacred sex, true divine sexuality, is an expression of the divine. It is pure love, it is Christic. Lust is animal, it wants desire, it wants sensation, and when it's satisfied, it walks away. Audience: It is such a huge task to remove all of the impurities. Do we still get to experience true meditation if we have not cleaned all these issues up? Or do we need to completely keep these in check before we get a chance to experience meditation at all? Instructor: When do we get to experience real meditation, since this task is so big? In accordance with the law of Karma, we receive what we deserve. If we approach our meditation practice from the point of view "I want experiences," we have to realize that this is a desire, it is covetousness, it is attachment. If we approach our meditation practice from the point of view of "I want to change, I want to be a better person," then this is good. Experiences will come naturally when the conditions are right. You do not need to worry about that. Whether the experiences come or do not come, your focus should be on comprehension. When you really understand something, when you really comprehend something, that is the most beautiful gift, the most beautiful result you can ever have from meditation. It is far more valuable than "hobnobbing with God," as the Master said in one of his books. Yes, an experience in Nirvana or in the heavens can be very beautiful, but it does not change your Karma. It does not change your suffering, in fact, it can make your suffering worse. If you come back from an experience in Samadhi and then you feel proud, or you feel lazy, you say "Oh, I did it now, I reached Nirvana, now I am done." This happens. A lot of yogis learn to meditate, they reach that experience and they think "Ok, I hit Samadhi, now I am liberated. Now I'm going to go liberate everyone else." This is very foolish, but also very common. An experience of Samadhi is not liberation. The death of the ego is liberation. Experiences will happen, they will. In the same way that when a tree grows, the leaves emerge and the fruit comes and it feeds us. Experiences come in the same way. Slowly, with patience, with development. Audience: The experience of the truth is conscious. Instructor: That's right. As I explained in the first lecture of these meditation lectures, the truth does not come from exertion or effort. It comes naturally without expectation. So you will get experiences when you need them, when you deserve them, when God gives them to you. Do not look to have experiences. Look instead to work on your mind and change. Then true change will come and little by little, awakening occurs naturally, spontaneously, on its own. A man came to the Buddha and said, "Ok, Buddha, if I meditate for fifteen hours straight, how long will it take me to reach liberation?" The Buddha said, "Hmm, fifteen years." The guy said, "Oh, that is not good enough. Ok, if I meditate for twenty hours straight, how long will it take me to reach liberation?" The Buddha said, "Twenty years." The man said, "What? Ok, what if I meditate for twenty-five hours straight, how long will it take?" The Buddha said, "Twenty-five years." The guy said, "I do not get it! Why do you keep increasing the time?" And the Buddha said, "Because you are looking at it in the wrong way." The point is: change. Audience: Can you give a better example between not identifying with an ego and restraining from doing the behavior? Instructor: A better example? I do not know if I'm capable of any better examples. Between restraining and not identifying? When you feel a strong impulse in your mind, and it could be a subtle impulse too. For example, if you are walking down the street, you can sense when you are attracted to someone or someone else is attracted to you and you do not even have to see them with your eyes. Has anybody ever noticed that? You can sense it without your eyes. I know women especially are good at this. Men are kind of clueless a lot of the time. Women especially can sense from behind them when somebody is looking at them lustfully. They can feel it. Why? How is that? But, listen, that's not the point. The point is,

how do you act on that? What impulses arise in you as a woman to respond to that? Women tend to like that, they might deny it, but they like it and they might encourage it. In fact, they might dress in certain ways in order to encourage lustful attention. They might stand or walk or act certain ways in order to encourage lustful attention. How do we respond to those little minutiae of our behavior? When we learn this teaching, we start learn "Ok, I shouldn't do this thing, I shouldn't encourage men to lust for me. Ok, so what do I do?" You need to analyze your behavior. It does not simply mean that you start wearing garbage bags every day instead of your regular clothes. What it means is, you have to be cognizant of what you are doing and why you are doing it. So when the impulse arises, you have to be continually in observation of yourself to know: is this action proper or should I restrain that? And that's why the question was asked in that Sutra "Am I being true?" "Am I being true?" The distinction has to be made in this way: There's a pendulum in all things. Nature works in polarities, positive and negative, charges. Everything: light and dark, hot and cold, alkaline and acid. Everything has a polarity; so does our mind. This teaching is a middle path teaching. It is a Taoist teaching, which means, we are seeking to be in the Tao, in the middle, in equilibrium, and that is why we put this equal sign here. So as the pendulum of our mind is swinging between "Should I?" or "Should I not?" We need to be in the middle, neither avoiding or craving. Not indulging or repressing, but in the middle, observing and comprehending. And from that comprehension, then we act. You see, these other two ways we tend to do automatically. So the guy walking down the street automatically looks at the girl with lust. And then he might realize it, "Oh, I'm looking at this girl, I shouldn't do that! Should I? Maybe I should." And so that right there is where the man is making that decision. "Ok, you know, I'm a Gnostic, I can handle it, I'm going to stay with my lust, I'm going to keep looking just to see what happens." This is how Gnostic men fool themselves into continuing to develop their lust, but they give it a spiritual name. On the other hand, the guy could say, "No, I'm not going to look at all, I'm not going to look." And he avoids it, but instead of analyzing the lust, why it's harmful, he just avoids it, he represses it. The true Gnostic observes himself in equilibrium. He says "It is not a matter of if I look or not, it is a matter of how I am inside. Am I restraining my mind inside? Am I conscious, cognizant inside? Am I in the presence of my Being inside?" You see, this is not easy, but it's the very basis of the path: inner psychologic equilibrium in all things. Audience: So as far as ethics go, he might stop looking, but he'll keep observing the lust in himself? Instructor: That is exactly right, you stop looking first. Clearly, you have to control the senses, you have to restrain the senses. But if he represses it, he will immediately start trying to think of something else, distracting himself, going here and there with his mind. But later, that thought, that image of that person will be revived in the mind. Maybe not during the day but at night. That is what causes wet dreams. This is why the bachelors have so much trouble: because they repress lust. It's normal in the beginning, because it is hard to learn to comprehend it. But that repression only feeds the desire. The right step is to continue the observation of the mind. So the person walks away, this guy walks away, the girl is left behind and he keeps watching his mind and he sees these thoughts of the girl keep coming into his mind. He keeps having to say, "That is lust. That is not welcome here. I am in the presence of my Divine Mother. I am in the presence of my Divine Mother! How can I let that lust come into the temple of my heart?" That is equilibrium. It is a continual remembrance. Because at any moment if we forget that equilibrium, then we start indulging or repressing or indulging or repressing. And that is the cycle of the mind. So all of this ethical behavior only describes how we need to learn about that pendulum so we can place ourselves in the center, in the Tao, in the moment to comprehend. Audience: If a thought goes on in the mind, isn't it the same as if you have done it, even if you did not do the behavior? Instructor: It depends: are you indulging in the thought? Thoughts come and go without our control. If I tell you to stop thinking for one minute, who here can do it? Well, let me tell you something: you can do it, if you know how. If you have trained yourself in this exercise, you can experience a full minute without a thought, you can experience a half hour. You can experience an hour, because in that stage, you have learned to have such equilibrium, that the mind gave up. That can happen, but none of us are there yet. So when the thought emerges, it depends on what you do with it. Do you indulge in it, do you repress it, or do you observe it? If you indulge in it, then yes, you have committed that action again. This is why our Karma becomes so deep. We have anger with our boss, our coworker, and we keep thinking about it and the thoughts keep coming in the mind, and we keep getting more angry and more angry. That is harmful. Or, that anger comes up and we think "No, I shouldn't be angry, I shouldn't be angry, I'm going to go do the dishes. I shouldn't be angry, I'm going to go wash the car." And we try to avoid it; this is also harmful.

You know those people that go into their offices and kill their coworkers? They suffer from this problem. They have a lot of anger that they did not deal with. Every single one of us has the same capacity. Every one of us. Anger is not a game. Lust is not a game. The correct way to handle it is to remember the presence of God, and analyze. Samael Aun Weor told us repeatedly that every single image, every thought, every concept that emerges on the screen of the mind must be analyzed, coldly, without passion; seen for what it is.

How to Conquer Afflictions

Written by Gnostic Instructor The training of real meditation is very long and requires a great deal of study and practical experience. In order to understand what meditation truly is, it is not something that you can acquire by attending a meditation class once a week. By only reading a few books, websites, or watching videos, you will never, ever understand meditation. The experience of real meditation is something that emerges in your consciousness once the proper conditions have been established inside of you. That is a result of action. So in these recent lectures we have been discussing what those conditions are, and how to establish them. You may have attended other meditation lectures, retreats, and classes, and encountered the common approach to meditation, perhaps regarding technical aspects such as a proper posture, preliminary concentration practices, and the use of mantra. All of these are important, but really they are a step that comes after a first step that most people skip. Traditionally, if you were a student of a lineage such as Zen, Raja Yoga, or Tibetan Buddhism, for example, you would not be introduced to the technical details until you had extensive preliminary trainingthe very first trainingwhich can extend for quite a long time, and that is training in ethics. Of course, nowadays especially North Americans and Europeans who are very intellectual by naturepeople think that they understand ethics already, believing that ethics is easy, and that they can skip to the next "more interesting" step. This is one of the main causes for why North Americans and Europeans fail to learn how to meditate. Schools of meditation have been active in Western countries for some decades now. Meditation was known and practiced amongst the Native Americans, but that tradition was destroyed. Meditation was not brought with the Europeans when they came, so after they destroyed the native traditions, the practice of meditation was lost in the western hemisphere for a long time. With the arrival with the Asian wisdom which started arriving more or less a hundred years agomeditation began to re-emerge as a topic of interest amongst Westerners, particularly among those who lost faith in their traditional religions. Unfortunately, the real science and practice of meditation has not gained a strong foothold in Western culture. It is not that people are unaware of itmost people have heard of the term meditationbut what is difficult to find is someone who has sincere realization of meditationthat is, real awakening and experience with other states of consciousness. This is very difficult to find among Westerners. You can easily find teachers in schools, and many who present themselves as experts, but to find someone who has practical knowledge that emerged out of meditation practice is very rare. It is easy to find scholars and people who are well versed in the terminology or scriptures, who have studied comparative religions, and may have translated many different texts, but none of that is real knowledge, none of that is conscious knowledge that stays with the consciousness when the body dies and the consciousness moves into a new body. It can be easy to approach meditation intellectually, and to just assume that we already know some of this because we have heard some of the terms. You should measure your understanding of meditation by your experience in meditation, not just intellectual information, not just an understanding of how the words and terms work, but actual experience, consciously. In the first lecture of this series on meditation we talked about wisdom. We talked about the Prajnaparamita sutra, one of the most important scriptures in any Asian tradition, certainly Buddhism. That scripture describes something deeply profound: Prajna, which means "wisdom." Paramita means "perfection," but we prefer to translate it as "cognizant attitude." The Prajnaparamita sutra might be the most commented upon scripture in Buddhism, since there are more commentaries and references to that short passage than any other scripture. And yet, to truly understand it is something that is truly difficult to achieve. Fortunately, the founder of our tradition, Samael Aun Weor, had a lot of practical experience with the subject of that Sutra; he experienced it as young as the age of 18, and entered into the experience of prajna, of knowing what that means.

Prajna, wisdom, is not the ability to recite platitudes. In the West we tend to think of "wisdom" as clever phrases stated by a person with grey hair, or seated upon a throne or a mountain top, but that is not wisdom. In the context of gnosis, real wisdom is represented by the sephirah Chokmah. This is a Hebrew term that refers to the second sephirah of the Tree of Life. In Sanskrit, equivalent terms include prajna and bodhi, which refer to a kind of intelligence that is one of the faces of God: it is far beyond the intellect. Prajna or bodhi is the very essence or force that emerges in the heart and mind of a true Bodhisattva [Sanskrit for "essence of wisdom"], someone like Jesus, Buddha, or Krishna. The light that comes through their eyes, words, and action is prajna. This is a kind of intelligence that is revolutionary. It is far beyond the recitation of commandments, the remembrance of vows, or the restrictions of morality. Prajna is a penetrating wisdom that cuts through appearances to the truth itself. All of us only see appearances. We do not see the truth of any given thing. We see our body and we assume, "This is my body" and we take it for granted. We do not see the body itself. We are not cognizant, conscious, of what is happening in the body at any level, of all the billions of atoms that are active and working, the systems and marvelous processes that are unfolding. We do not even see that, and yet it is the most superficial level. The body is mostly empty space, it is mostly nothing at all. Every atom of our body is mostly empty space, yet we, deluded by appearances, assume the body is real and lasting, when the reality is the opposite: it is highly unstable, unreliable, and subject to a myriad of vulnerabilities, any one of which can kill it easily. The body is not reliable or lasting. It is temporary. It is also constantly changing in thousands of ways, but also do not see that. To actually perceive the truth of the body (not merely think about the concept, but see it), to be aware of that, takes a certain insight perception: prajna. This is the type of wisdom that Chokmah imparts, it is a kind of insight, consciousness. Not the just the thought of something or remembrance of something, but the direct perception of it. Prajna is a perception and understanding that cuts through appearances to see the truth, not just of the body, but of the heart, the mind, of how to behave and how to act, on how to love. This is the greatest gift that wisdom can give us: how to love. That is the doctrine of the Bodhisattva, the way of life of a Bodhisattva. Every single motion that a Bodhisattva makes is for the love of others, for the benefit of others. Prajna, wisdom, gives that. In our tradition, the Gnostic tradition, what we want is that wisdom. We do not care about memorizing texts or conforming to a rigid structure of moral behaviors. These have nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with the truth. The truth is something that lives, that comes alive inside one's heart and mind. This is why we meditate. Traditional Buddhism posits three trainings to prepare for the emergence of the wisdom in us, and that wisdom is the third training: Renunciation (Ethics) Compassion (Concentration) Christ Wisdom (Prajna) In order to create the psychological and spiritual environment within which that wisdom can emerge in our consciousness, we need concentration. This is not a superficial concentration, but is having a mind that is undisturbed. You see, when your mind is in perfect equanimitystable, not distractedthan that wisdomlight can emerge and we can see it, we can perceive it and we can use it. But if the mind is chaotic, full of doubts, concerns, fears, pride, that light cannot work, we cannot see it, we cannot sense it, so therefore we need concentration. We need a mind that is stable, in equanimity. Equanimity is In Chinese: Mo Chao In Sanskrit: shamata In Tibetan: shin-e (calm abiding) In Zen: one pointed mind This is a kind of mind that is in perfect peace, not mechanical, not reactive, but receptive, open, empty, at peace, serene. None of us have a mind like that, so to rediscover that state of mental stability, we need ethics, the first training. Yet, we tend to skip the stage of training in ethics. We human beings think, "I know ethics are not kill and steal, so I am going to go on to the next step, concentration." It is fine to practice concentration, we need that, but the foundation of spirituality is not in concentration, it is in ethics. In fact, there is a tantra that says this. It is called "The Tantra Requested by Subahu": "Just as every harvest grows without fault and dependance upon the Earth, so too the highest virtues depend on ethical discipline, and grow by being moistened by the waters of compassion."

It is very common for us to find peopleprobably some of us herewho think that the heights of spirituality can be reached by adopting practices and behaviors such as mantra repetition, sexual transmutation, meditation, rituals, etc. We all have this concept that, "If I do this practice hard enough and for a long time, I will have experiences with God"or"I will incarnate my Being, Christ, I will become a saint or a Buddha." This is a wrong view. This is a wrong way of thinking. It is a delusion. This is because the practice does not bring God into your mind. Repeating a mantra, performing a posture or spiritual exercise, or engaging in a meditation practice does not bring God. What brings God, Christ, the Buddhadhatu realized, is a pure mind: ethics. Discipline in psychology is what brings that Presence into us. This can be easily proven. You may have had your own experience of working very hard in a given practice, for days, weeks, months, years, and afterwards you may have looked back and thought, "What did I gain from that?" This is a cause for many people to abandon spirituality altogether; they may have entered into a certain school that says "If you do this practice for a certain period of time you will awaken your kundalini, activate your chakras, you will see God face to face, etc." Schools and teachers make many promises. Some even say that, "If you do this practice for six months, you will create your astral body." We have heard every kind of promise that you can imagine. The people, students, listen to these promises and apply them, work very hard, and yet gain nothing. In the end, they receive a spiritual trauma. They receive damage in their soul. They lose faith and develop doubt. Many abandon any further effort in spirituality. Thus, a great crime has been committed. Those who make such promises are killing souls. Spiritual practices are useful and importantwe need thembut what creates the fundamental change in our consciousness is not spiritual practices, it is the ethical discipline that accompanies it and provides the foundation for it. Spiritual practices only work if our consciousness is ethical. Imagine that you want to climb a mountain that is quite steep. It is quite difficult to ascend a steep incline, especially when the environment is harsh, like our psychological environment, which is very harsh and opposed to spirituality. Our society does not encourage us to cultivate our spiritual life, so we have a harsh environment. It is very difficult to go up a step or two. Maybe we are making some kind of effort, but then after our meditation practice, or the whole day before, we spend the whole day trapped in our pride, feeding our anger, drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, putting many poisons into our body and mind. We go through our daily life filled with resentment towards others, with aggression and hostility, maybe depression. Consider the whole range of psychological states that we experience from day to day. Engagement with these negative states is akin to turning around on that mountain and leaping downwards. If you think about it, it is quite easy to leap down a steep slope and you can go a long way very fast, yet it is very hard to turn around and climb back up. Psychologically, this is what we do everyday. We may have great discipline to meditate every day; we may spend ten minutes or an hour meditating, but what about the other twenty-three hours and fifty minutes of that day? What are we doing with our energy? What is the nature of our mind? What are we experiencing in our heart? What are we cultivating? What are we creating? This kind of inquiry is the basis of gnostic psychology. This is the entrance into the work. Real spirituality is aided by practice, transmutation, meditation, and mantra, but it is actualized through psychology. In my short time in these teachings, I have observed hundreds of people coming in and going out. Some have great discipline and do a lot of practice, but outside of the time of practice they persist in their old behaviors, thus they do not change, and eventually leave. But I have also observed many who may not practice quite as much, or as diligently or regularly, but who sincerely want to change their mind and their heart, who sincerely want to stop suffering from anger, anxiety, pride, etc. Those ones DO change for the better. Ethical discipline is the basis that we need if we want to change suffering. It is the foundation of the teachings. The foundation of all spiritual effort, spiritual accomplishment, spiritual achievement, is in ethics. The reason for it is quite simple and logical: When you observe a conscious and cognizant ethic in your life, you stop creating karma. It is that simple. In other words, you stop creating harmful results or consequences that disturb your mind. The basic result of applying ethics from moment to moment in your life is that your mind starts to become focused, and you are less distracted. Ethics create a psychological environment within which you are more mindful, more aware of yourself, because you realize that if you do not watch your mind, then pride, lust, envy, anxiety will take over. This effort to watch the mind, to stop wrong thinking, wrong feeling, wrong action, creates an environment in which concentration becomes easy. Yet, if you do not practice ethics, then our psychological

environment only gets worse. If you are persisting in your bad behaviorspsychologically primarily, but also physicallythan your environment will never be conducive to concentration, and therefore never to wisdom, and so meditation will always remain elusive to you. This is why we always start with ethical discipline: to struggle against those elements in the mind that produce a distracted mind, an uneasy mind, a mind that suffers. It is through ethics that we accomplish this. "Right now, only this internal struggle with the afflictions is important. If you do not struggle with the afflictions, you will not achieve a pure ethical discipline, in which case, you will not attain the concentration and wisdom that, respectively, suppress and uproot the afflictions. Hence, as the Buddha said, you will have to wander continually through cyclic existence. Therefore, as I explained before, once you have identified the afflictions, reflected on their faults and on the benefits of separating from them, and planted the spies of mindfulness and vigilance, you must repeatedly fend off whatever affliction raises its head. Further, you must see any affliction as an enemy and attack it as soon as it arises in your mind. Otherwise, if you acquiesce when it first appears, and then nurture it with improper thoughts, you will have no way to defeat it, and it will conquer you in the end." - Neu-sur-ba The basis of this work is a profound vigilance over our own mind: a continual mindfulness of what we are doing, feeling, and thinking, to ensure that how we act, how we think, how we feel is congruent with our goal. This is very important. As an instructor, in my experienceeven though it is quite limitedthis is what I try to encourage in students. My emphasis is not so much to begin learning about a lot of practices, but to learn to watch your mind, because from this kind of vigilance everything spiritual will come naturally. In the beginning, do not worry too much about all the technical details; before anything else, learn to watch your mind. Establish this foundation. With that foundation, the rest will come, yet without that foundation, no spiritual development will ever come. training in ethical discipline makes a distracted mind undistracted. training in concentration balances an unbalanced mind. training in wisdom liberates an unliberated mind. In this tradition, we emphasize three factors: Death Birth Sacrifice Typically we talk about death as the death of the ego, the death of those afflictions. We talk about birth as the birth of the soul, creation. Sacrifice is to give of ourselves to help other people. Yet these three factors are not just beautiful ideals, and they are not simple concepts; rather, they are conscious action that we have to perform in ourselves, and all three factors are incorporated in all three trainings. Every aspect of religiontrue religionrequires these three factors. As beginners, we are trying to receive the training on ethics, the first training, thus the factor of death means to stop harmful action. As beginners, we cannot yet understand how to eliminate an ego. We all have this question "How do we really eliminate an ego, and how do we know we have eliminated an ego?" If you go around and ask students, you might have a hard time finding someone who can confirm they have eliminated an ego and can tell you how it happened; do you know why? Because it is hard to do, and because most people skip learning real ethics, so we rarely find a person who can tell you in detail how they eliminated an ego from step one to the end. It is also because, as beginners, we are all still deeply asleep. The elimination of an ego can never happen without ethics, but most of all, without seeing the ego for what it is. This begins here, in the factor of death: to stop harmful actions. In this stage, we are working with what Samael Aun Weor called the stage of discovery. Discovery Comprehension Elimination Just like with meditation, students tend to jump to the end, "Ok, the steps are discovery, comprehension and elimination; so, exactly how do I eliminate an ego right now?" They do not ask how to discover the ego, they do not ask how to comprehend the ego, but only how to eliminate it. We want to skip to the end. But, the reality is that you cannot skip steps. Death arrives naturally when the values of a given object are exhausted. Thus an ego will die naturally when it has no fuel. If you stop feeding the tiger, it will die. If you want to know how to kill your lust, stop feeding it. In order to know how to do that, you need to know how you feed it. You will never know that by reading a book or asking advice from others. You will only see

your pride when you see yourself, when you study your mind and when you study your behavior. The first training is ethics. We do practice meditation in this stage of ethics; this is what we have been talking about in recent weeks: analytical meditation, retrospection. Whenever you have a few minutes, lay down, reflect on your day, review the events that you have seen in yourself, both outside and inside. Analyze your behavior, your thoughts and feelings. This is extremely important. I know it is not full of technical details that your intellect can really indulge in, because this technique not technical, it is simple. Simply review the events in your daily life. When we apply the factor of death, we are stopping harmful action. Why? Because we are starting to understand something about karma: cause and effect. "This anger that I have in my mind only produces suffering; let me stop that." This is a fundamental training that we have to give ourselves. We have to train our mind. When we read the "three trainings," it would be easy to think that these are three training that I will give to you, but that is not the case: they are three trainings that you have to give yourself. In the first training of ethics, you train your mind. In the second training, concentration, you train your mind to concentrate. In the the third, you train yourself in wisdom. No one else can give you this. No group, book or teacher can give you spiritual development. In the process of training in ethics, we start here with death; you first have to see in yourself what is suffering. Once you see it, you have to transform it into something that produces happiness. This is why I was emphasizing in other lectures that in order to go into the higher levels of the teachings (Mahayana and Tantrayana), we need the foundational level of Shravakayana / Sutrayana, which teaches us that we need to comprehend death and karma. We need to see that this envy in my mind produces suffering for myself, but for others as well, and then when you feel the suffering and you see it and you comprehend that, the sincere wish arises, "Let me exchange this envy for altruism, for happiness for others. Instead of suffering with envy and making others suffer because of how my envy wants me to behave, let me be happy for others, and content with what I have." Instead of feeling that the wish to have what she has, or that clothing, that better life, or another country to live in, when we see envy we say "No, that is envy, a cause of suffering, a wrong view." We take hold of our mind and say, "What would be the right approach, how do I apply the factor of birth? What would be the virtue here that my consciousness, that my Being would really want to express?" By denying the desire of the ego, we activate death. By opening the heart to virtue, we activate birth. When envy is transmuted into happiness for others, we are truly happy for that other person, for what she has. If a friend won the lottery, instead of wishing we won, we say "Wow, I'm so glad they won. They need that!" It is a wonderful feeling when a genuine virtue blooms in the heart, and perfumes our mind and actions. All of this is a sacrifice: we sacrifice our selfish interest in order to love others. So you see, all three factors are at work there. We have to be very strict with ourselves. Apply the factor of death to kill, to cancel, to eliminate the causes of suffering that emerge in us from moment to moment, and exchange them, transform them into birth, the causes of happiness. Instead of being proud of ourselves, be humble. Instead of indulging the lust in our mind, adopt chastity. None of these become possible as long as we ignore the causes of suffering. The third factor is charity: not to do these things only for ourselves, but to benefit other people. If you are a parent, start there. As a parent you have a natural strong love for your children, and this can be a strong impulse or motivation to apply these factors in relation with your child. If you have a spouse or you are caring for a parent, someone that you love, apply this and start learning it there. Then, little by little, you can extend it to include other people that you may not feel as strongly about. When you apply this to someone you really love, it can teach you a lot, to really start to think not only from your own point of view, but to also think from another person's point of view. What do they need? What do they see? How do they suffer and how do I make them suffer? The entire basic of ethicslet it be very clearly understoodis not just to do what instructors say, it is not just to do what God says: it is to do what is right for others, it is to act from love. What is the most compassionate, loving, beautiful thing you can do from moment to moment? It is never going to be for yourself. We are always thinking for ourselves: "It would be so compassionate and loving if I bought myself this new laptop." No, it would be for more compassionate and loving for you to utilize that thousand or two thousand dollars for something more fruitful to other people, for something that can benefit others, instead of thinking about ourselves all the time. In the previous lecture we explained to you the ten non-virtuous actions that are explained in Buddhism:

killing stealing sexual misconduct lying divisive speech offensive speech senseless speech covetousness harmful intent wrong views These are actions through which we create karma. All of these actions that the Buddha described are not egos, they are ways of behavior. So offensive speech, malice, or hostility is not an ego in itself, it is an action produced by a psychological element. We need to see the action in order to discover the element that produces that action. This is a place where a lot of students get confused, because we give lectures repeatedly talking about envy, pride, and lust, but then the students go out in their daily now thinking, "I am watching for ego, for anger." We have all these expressions of hostility, not realizing that these are expressions of anger. We do not see the behaviors in our physical lives or our dream lives, and thus we cannot see the ego that is producing them. We have to study ourselves more deeply. In this tradition we talk a lot about egos or aggregates, and every religion has different ways of presenting these psychological elements. In Christianity, we hear about the seven deadly sins. In Buddhism, we hear about the six afflictions. What is important for us to understand is that each religion is describing the same thing from a slightly different point of view. All of them are valid. If you, in your heart, have a natural affinity to Christianity, then use that perspective to help you. If you have a natural affinity to Buddhism, then use that to help you; use that as your guide. They are equally valid. The same is true of Islam, Zoroastrianism, Taoism in their own ways, they all describe psychological elements that create suffering. It is as if a group of saints or prophets from different religions were all in a room, in a circle around an elephant, and each one describes the elephant according to their point of view and in their own language; all of them would be slightly different, but describe the same creature. The same is true of our mind. What matters is not to memorize the list, or debate about which list is better, it is to go to the elephant, and get to know it. The elephant is your mind. All of the models work; all of the outlines of ego work. The same is true of the practices of meditation: there are different ways to analyze the practice of meditation, and they all work, if you apply them, if you use them. Six Afflictions Buddhism describes six afflictions. The first three are ignorance, craving and aversion, which appear in many forms in us. The first one, the most important, is ignorance. Ignorance Ignorance is symbolized in the very center of the wheel of Samsara (Bhavachakra). There are three animals depicted there: a pig, a rooster (or bird), and a snake. They represent ignorance, craving and aversion, which are also translated as ignorance, hatred / anger, and gluttony / lust. Ignorance is the first of these six afflictions. This word ignorance does not mean in the way that a lot of Westerners use it now, which means to be stupid. The real meaning of ignorance is "to ignore," even willingly. You see, in that word ignorance is GNO from Gnosis, knowledge. When we ignore, we lack knowledge. Ignorance is a lack of knowing. Gnostic instructors are trying to teach Gnosis, but the Gnosis that we are trying to teach is something we cannot teach. Gnosis can never be imparted in a discourse, or in a book, because real knowledge is something you experience in your consciousness. Likewise, real ignorance is ignorance in your consciousness. In Buddhism, the affliction of ignorance is a state of not knowing the truth about oneself. It is to fundamentally ignore the true nature of your consciousness, to lack knowledge of That, to not know your Being, to not know who you truly are, and why you are alive. That is ignorance. It has nothing to do with book study, or learning your alphabet, or learning languages, or getting a phd. That is not the type of ignorance that is being described here. It is the ignorance of the fundamental facts of existence. All of us suffer from this ignorance, because all of us are here, and suffer. That is the meaning of ignorance: a lack of self-knowledge.

The antidote to ignorance is to learn the truth. We start by studying intellectually, learning through our mind, through our intellect, about the concepts of religion, how nature functions, what the consciousness is, and what it means. But you won't get knowledge of reality until you experience it. Memorizing, studying books, is only study of the map. You have to follow the steps of the map, and experience reality, in order to dispel ignorance. Hostility The second affliction described in Buddhism is hostility (anger, aversion). In the first affliction, we suffer from ignorance, and perhaps the most significant sign of that ignorance is the way we fundamentally, wrongly grasp at a sense of "I." Hostility is the anger that emerges when that "I" is contradicted. The fundamental sign of ignorance is a lack of knowledge of oneself, and because we lack knowledge, we grasp onto a sense of self that is false. The first part that we grasp on to is our personality, which we acquired only in this lifetime. The personality that we have now is impermanent, it only is from this life. In our previous existences we had different personalities. We lived in different cultures, different religions, different times. So, we have this fundamental wrong view, that grasps at this sense of self, and when that sense of self is contradicted, we experience hostility. For example, if someone calls you a name, says you are a fool, especially if it is someone that you hold dear, or someone that you respect, the pain that you feel is immense. What generally emerges out of that pain is hostility. It may not go outwards, we may not express it, but we may feel angry, upset; that is hostility. Hostility is rooted in the fundamental ignorance of our true nature. This is why Samael Aun Weor emphasized repeatedly that if you give no value to the words of the accuser, then the words cannot hurt you. As an example, when you are a parent and your child says, "I hate you, daddy!" or, "You're a jerk", you laugh it's a child, right? (Ok, not all the time; some parents get mad.) But, as an example. Or if a very sick person, or a very afflicted person, like a crazy person on the street starts yelling obscenities at you, generally, you can just brush it off and not be affected by it, because you know the person is suffering. If you are a nurse or a doctor, you deal with this a lot; people vent their anger and hostility at you, but you know they are just sick and they do not really mean it. That same capacity to respond patientlybut at a far greater levelemerges when you know more about your true nature. This is how the great saints and prophets were able to take so much abuse from humanity, and not react. Even on the cross, when they were abusing Jesus, he said, "Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing." He was not angry, he had no hostility; he knew himself, and he knew them. So, hostility is, generally speaking, anger, malice that emerges from this fundamental wrong view. It also relates to attachments. We become angry and hostile when we cannot get what we want or when something is taken from us that we want. This is due to grasping, craving. We also get angry when things happen that we do not want to have happen, or trying to avoid something and it happens. In all of these examples, you see these three creatures in the center of the wheel of Samsara: ignorance, craving, and aversion. We are always craving something that is illusion, we are always trying to avoid something that is illusion, and in the middle of that, we are ignoring the true nature of how things function. If we had real knowledge of how laws function in the universe, we would not grasp at things out of desire, nor would we avoid things that are unavoidable. We would have acceptance, we would have peace. If we are trying to work on this defect and apply the factor of death to our anger or hostility, the antidote is to cultivate patience. So, when things happen in life that make us angry or upset, instead of getting more angry and frustrated, we have to cultivate patience. There is a traditional prayer in the West called the Serenity Prayer, that is very effective at helping us transform these types of events. "Father, give us courage to change what must be altered, serenity to accept what cannot be helped, and the insight to know the one from the other." You see, that comes from remembering God. In the book, The Major Mysteries, Samael Aun Weor says, "The initiate places all his longings into the hands of his Innermost." For me, that statement has changed my life, those few little words. Because, now, when I feel disappointment or frustration, or a craving for something and I feel that frustration of trying to change a situation in my life, for example, when I am sick or having trouble with a person or economics, my traditional habit was to get more and more frustrated and upset, which creates stress, anxiety, and anger, and I become short-tempered with people, and make everyone around me miserable, because of my own misery. But now, I remember that line that Samael Aun Weor wrote, and then I pray to my Being, "You

know what I need, and I accept what you give me." From that, there is great serenity, great acceptance. It helps me a lot to deal with my pride and hostility. So, cultivating patience is the antidote. Attachment The third affliction in Buddhism is attachment (craving, lust). Attachment can be towards anything. Truly this is a place where we can see how very creative our ego can be, because it can get attached to the most profound and the most ridiculous things. We become attached to our image, to how people see us, to how they talk about us. We become attached to objects, to people, to places, to ideas, to politics. We become attached to everything we see, everything we think, everything we feel, because we do not comprehend them. Attachment is rooted in ignorance. We do not realize the true nature of a given thing, we forget karma, we forget our Being, we forget impermanence, we become attached and thus we suffer. We crave so much to get somethinga situation, a spousewe get it, and then we suffer. Then we crave to keep ita spouse or a child is a profound example. First we were craving to have it, and then when we get it, we are craving to keep it, but the child grows up. The spouse ages, gets sick, dies. Everything is impermanent, but we ignore that. Craving / attachment produces enormous suffering. If we had knowledge, if we did not have ignorance, then our knowledge would remind us: this is all impermanent anyway. In the case of relationships with those we love, knowledge gives us power over attachment. With real knowledge (gnosis), you know from experience that relationships with child and spouse are not merely of this life, they go far beyond. When you have real knowledge, then you have knowledge of death, and then you have no fear of death. You have no craving or attachment to this body, to this life. You know the body will die. There is freedom in that knowledge, there is serenity. You also know your spouse will die; there is freedom in that knowledge. Because, you know you will always love them, you will always have them, you will always see them, whether in this body or out of this body. The fears we have, the anxieties we have, the attachments we have are rooted in fundamental ignorance. We ignore the truth, we are terrified of death, because we do not know what happens with death, or afterward. We have a lot of ignorance. Let me tell you: there is no need to be afraid of death, you have already died millions of times. Millions of times. Why be afraid of that? It is like being afraid of going to sleep and waking up, it is the same thing. When you die, it is like going to sleep. There is only a little difference, the cord that connects the consciousness to the body is cut, and you move on to take another body. What you have to fear is suffering, and the odd thing is, we are creating suffering everyday and we do not fear that. We do not fear the consequences of the anger, the hostility, the craving that we are cultivating and indulging in everyday, from moment to moment; that is a fundamental ignorance. We are creating suffering that we will inevitably will deal with later. Do not fear death; rather, fear the results of your action, not just physical action, but action in your mind. Fear the consequences of what you do, and do what is right. That way, you do not need to have fear. This attachment, craving, is one of these three creatures in the center of the wheel of Samsara, because it is attachment that spins the wheel. Ignorance provides the foundation or ground upon which that wheel can spin, because we ignore our true nature, we forget karma, we forget impermanence, we ignore dependent origination and these fundamental laws of matter and energy. The conditions are created so that wheel of suffering can spin. The wheel of suffering basically means cause and effect that repeats. It is a cycle. We experience it every day. We wake up in the morning, we begin to go through our day, and we repeat ourselves. The vast majority of things we think and feel, we have thought and felt before. The only difference is, those things tend to get a little heavier, a little more dense. If you are an older person, you know the truth of this. As you get older, the mind gets more rigid, more stuck in its ways, stubborn. When you are young, the mind is very elastic, flexible. But, as you get older, it gets more and more stuck. That wheel spins on that basis of ignorance, ignoring the nature of the wheel itself, and our true nature. But, also because craving, running after things that are illusions, make it spin. Our attachment towards social status, because we ignore that we will die and that we cannot take anything with us, we work so very hard, everyday to save money, to get money, to get status, to get fame, for what? At any given moment, on any given day, death will come, and all of that will have been wasted. And often is. The lawyers take it, the government takes it, ungrateful children take it. What is the point? You see how hard we work, for what? To scratch out a living, and then die. What is all our time spent on, and why? It is this attachment that spins the wheel. Attached to having a family, always chasing that. And in the end, are they really grateful, do they really benefit? Are they free of suffering? How many parents get to later age and their children forget them,

abandon them? Put them in homes where they do not have to be dealt with. Move them out of the house because they are irritating. Hundreds of thousands of old people are dealing with that right now. They spent their whole lives working so hard for their families, only to be stuck in a home and abandoned. It is very common. This is not an isolated incident, it is a social institution. We cause that, and it is because of attachment and ignorance. We have to find these factors in ourselves, what are we attached to? What are we chasing after? What are we spending all our time and energy on? These are profound questions. We have a given amount of time and energy during the week, what do we spend it on? What will be the results of that expenditure? Look at your life as a series of values, numbers. You start with 100 percent. Divide that percentage by how you spend your time. Take out 50% because you spend that sleeping, in bed. So, half your life is gone with sleep. Then divide the rest of it; each person is a little different, but a huge percentage is spent dealing with work to get money to take care of ourselves and our family. Another huge percentage is spent cooking, getting food, and eating. Then, what about the rest? Most of it is driving, being sick in bed, worrying about money, family, taking care of our house, taking care of our responsibilities, and watching television or surfing the internet. Then, we might have a little leftover percentage, we may have half a percent (0.5%) to study a little spirituality, maybe do a little spiritual practice every once in a while. Now take all of those percentages and convert them into factors for multiplication, and determine which will have the greatest result. Where will the strongest consequences be? If everything in your life was reduced to numbers, a mathematical equation, and you just boiled it down to get the sum, what actions will give the highest result, the most force to impel your future? Clearly, wherever you invested the most energy will determine your future. If you spent 30% of your life driven by fear or attachment, then that will produce a powerful consequence. Only you can answer that equation, and only you can change it. Since we are asleep, the result of the equation is determined by our afflictions. To change it for the better, we have to awaken and change our behavior through ethics. The antidote to attachment is acceptance. It is to realize the nature of the truth, which is impermanence, karma. It is to transform the way you see the object of attachment. To meditate, to analyze, the impermanence of it, the cause and effect of it, and to remember God, remember your Being. In these ways, you can transform that attachment, so it does not afflict you like it did before. Pride The fourth affliction is pride. Tsong Khapa said, "Pride is the chief obstacle to spiritual development." Quickly defined, pride is to have an inflated or false view of yourself. We usually think of pride as somebody with a puffed out chest who is always at the front of the group trying to get attention, thinking they are a big shot, better than others. Yes, this is pride, but it is not the only form of pride. The person who rejects the group, who thinks they are better than them, also suffers from pride. The person who says, "You see how humble I am?" That is pride. Or, "I am worse than all of you" that is pride. Shame is the opposite polarity of the one who struts around like a rooster, yet both are pride. The one who slinks into the corners is also suffering from pride. Every psychological element is a polarity. In relation to the seven deadly sins, we tend to think of greed as people who hoard money. But, properly stated, greed is really a kind of wastefulness. So, the ones who waste money suffer the same defect, but in it's opposite face. They waste resources. Instead of being a miser and hoarding it, they are a spendthrift, they are wasteful. They spend money without thinking about the consequences. Greed applies to any resource, not just money. All of us have this defect in different ways; in some areas, we hoard resources, and in others, we waste them. Laziness is one of the seven deadly sins. We always think laziness relates only to someone lying on a couch watching tv all day long, who does not work or do anything. Yes, that is laziness physically, but really, the defect of laziness relates to laziness of the consciousness: someone who pays no attention to themselves, consciously. That refers all of us: we are asleep. A person could be extremely active physically, always running from event to event, thinking, "I am so busy, I have got to go here and there, I have got a schedule and I cannot talk to you now," and we think, "Wow, they are really diligent, not lazy at all." No! They are completely lazy, 100% asleep, because their consciousness is asleep. This is the most popular way to live life now, do you see that? It is not the one we put billboards up about that is, going to the beach, and just being retired and living on a boat, or in a hammock. No, now the one that everybody celebrates and admires nowadays is the one that is so super busy that they have no time for you, no time

for anything. We admire that; we think, "Wow, they are really on top of it. They are doing a lot, they are really going somewhere." No, they are asleep. You know the person that has got two phone calls going at the same time, and they are writing an email and they have got people coming in waiting for a meeting, that type of situation? This is everywhere. It is not diligence, it is laziness. They have no awareness at all of what they are doing. No consciousness. That is laziness. Multitasking is laziness of consciousness. It is hyperactivity of the ego. Laziness is a polarity. On one side is the person who does nothing, and on the other is the person who is hyperactive. Both have their consciousness asleep. We were talking about the affliction of pride. There is an antidote to pride. When you observe pride in yourself, when you discover pride in yourself, remember death. Remember, even if you are a great spiritual aspirant and you are having all kinds of experiences in heaven, and you are zooming like a rocket to God in your Path, remember: even Jesus died. Even Buddha died. Even Krishna died. Even Moses died. You will die. What have you to be so proud of? Remember illness, remember aging, remember death. These are a great antidote to pride. And, remember your Being. The reality is, we are just specks of dust on the mirror of the universe. For instance: when a person feels proud because of his social position, or his money, such pride, which exists within him, has as its basis ignorance. If, however, this person realizes that his social status is made up of mere mental matter (a series of impressions which have reached his mind) and he then analyzes the value of this mental matter, he comes to realize that such a position exists only in his mind in the form of impressions. Those impressions, which money and social status produce, are nothing but the external impressions of the mind. Thus, by simply comprehending that they are only impressions of the mind, a transformation of the same impressions occurs. Then, pride, by itself, declines, collapses, and humility is born within us in a natural way. - Samael Aun Weor, The Revolution of the Dialectic Doubt The fifth affliction is doubt. Doubt is very subtle. This applies to having doubt about our Being, about God. We all may have enough of a spiritual longing to try to answer the riddle in ourselves, who or what is God? Who or what is That? But, surrounding that impulse, that urgency, is an enormous cloud of doubt. Doubt is a chief affliction. I think Westerners are usually surprised to hear that doubt, in Buddhism, is put up there the way we put up pride and lust and greed. This is because doubt can take you out of the path, very easily. Doubt does not just mean an intellectual doubt, or the thought of doubt. Doubt is in our actions. We may proclaim to have great faith in God, or great faith in the teachings, we may say, "There is no doubt that cause and effect is real, and that the Dharma is real, and that Gnosis is the real deal and I have my Being, and there is no doubt about Samael Aun Weor," etc. We can proclaim that, and we can even be a big shot instructor, but the proof that doubt as an affliction exists within us, is in our very actions, because we persist in behaving poorly: we still have anger, we still have pride, and when we have those elements in our mind and we allow them a sliver of room to exist in our mindstream for example, we feel a little resentment for someone, and we allow ourselves to feel that resentment. Or, we feel a little envy for someone, and we allow that to be there. This proves unquestionably that the affliction of doubt is alive in us, because in our actions, we still do not realize cause and effect. We still do not realize that anger is going to produce suffering, and it binds us to the wheel of Samsara, to suffering. So, doubt is not simple. Doubt is not dispelled by proclaiming faith, by raising our hands to God and saying, "I believe, and now I am saved." This does not dispel doubt. Doubt is dispelled when our every action is in accordance with the Law. That shows that doubt is gone. Wrong Views The sixth is wrong views. This includes a wide variety of concepts, theories, and behaviors related with religion. Primarily, wrong views are related with the eightfold path, and the first step of that path, which is right view. Right view is a form of cognizant perception that sees the nature of the truth. In other words, it is a way of being conscious of oneself, spontaneously, intuitively, without thought, that sees the truth, that sees reality. That is right view. True right view is the full embodiment of wisdom, pranja. Until we get there, we have a lot of wrong views. Wrong views include the other afflictions. We have wrong views of ignorance, of hostility, of attachment, of pride, of doubtthese are all wrong views. But, other wrong views are wrong views we have about religion, about life, about ways of behaving. A very strong and difficult wrong view is the belief that, "If I just adopt this new religion, or this way of behaving, I will be liberated." Everyone in the world suffers from this. They hear about the Catholic religion and say, "If I believe in Jesus and I become a Catholic, then I am going to go to Heaven, I am

saved." That is wrong view; no one is saved by belief, they are saved by action. We are proved by our works, by the quality of mind that we have. The same is true in Buddhism. People say, "If I believe in this and I become a student of this Rinpoche, and begin to follow this teacher, or become a disciple of this school, then I am on my to liberation, I will become an Arhat." This is a wrong view. The Gnostics suffer this also, thinking, "If I belong to this group, then I am on the express train to God. If I belong to this group or follow this teacher, and if I do this or that practice, then I will be saved." This is wrong view. Spiritual practice does not save us from suffering and hell. Your quality of mind does. The quality of your soul, your ethics. There are groups out there that teach, "If you do this certain mediation practice, or these mantras 100,000 times, or a million times, or 3 or 4 hours a day, there is no doubt that you will reach liberation." This is all wrong view. It is fundamentally wrong. It has total incongruence with karma: cause and effect. The repetition of a mantra can open a door to experience Nirvana; yes, you can see Nirvana. Different practices can help you to experience a type of awakening; you may see God. But no spiritual practice can liberate you. This is a mistake that many yogis have fallen into. Many great teachers have fallen into this error, and teach how to repeat what they experienced, so you can experience the same thing they did. I am talking about people that you all know about, but I do not want to name any names. There are a lot of them that state, "If you do this practice, everyday, seriously, for such time, you will experience God." Yes, it is true, you can, but you will not be liberated from suffering, because suffering will continue as long as all these faults exist in your mind. If instead of working on your ethics and changing your psychology, you spend all your time trying to experience something spiritual, what do you think the end result will be? Well, you might have an experience or two, but you will still be bound to suffering, and might have made your situation worse, because you converted your spiritual pursuit into another source of craving (selfish desire); do you realize that? Craving produces suffering. It is very important that you properly manage your spiritual inquietude and your longing to know God: do not let it become a self-centered desire. Do not let it become a craving. Do not let spiritual experiences become your focus, and do not let the lack of them become doubt. You see, these afflictions are extremely powerful. We suffer because we have them. And, we stop suffering when we end them. So, we need to apply the antidotes, from moment to moment, from day to day, from event to event. We have to learn how to transform our actions. Tantrayana is Transformation In these lectures up until now, we have been talking about the foundational level of the path Shravakayana or Sutrayana teachingsto remind you they are concerned with ethics, karma, impermanence, death. Working at this level, we apply those teachings to our experience from moment to moment. So, when we are back in our daily life, after this lecture, when you do not have to act like a good Gnostic, and you are back in your normal life and you are trying to act like everybody else in life, you have to learn to apply these techniques. When you observe fear in your mind, when you feel in your heart a feeling of superiority to someone else, do not wait, fight that immediately, transform it. Remember your Being, and look at that element in yourself and say, "Do I really want this?" When you catch yourself experiencing lust, either as a imagination or through your eyes, or through any sense, remember yourself, look at that element, and analyze it, "What will this element produce?" Be very scientific. "If I let this element use my energy, what will be the effect? What will be the consequence"? Analyse it, do not just avoid it, do not just run away from it. Analyze it in that instant. "If I let this lust process in me and use it's energy in me, what will be the result of it? What will be the consequence? What will happen? Furthermore, how can I transform it? If I do not want those consequences, then how do I get those consequences that I do want? How do I transform that?" Gnosis is a science of transformation. We seek to transform our impurity into purity, by means of knowledge (gnosis). Mercurian Laziness into Diligence Lunar Avarice into Altruism Venusian Lust into Chastity Solar Pride into Faith, Humbleness Martian Anger into Love Jupiterian Envy into Philanthropy, Happiness for Others Saturnian Gluttony into Temperance So, let us take an example of avarice or altruism. We work really hard in our lives, we all do. Maybe not physically, but intellectually and emotionally, we expend a great deal of energy, heading towards some goal that we have, whatever that goal happens to be. We need to analyze that goal, and determine if our

actions are really congruent with the result we want to achieve. Moreover, we have to do it in the moment. Let us say, for example, we have worked hard at our job, 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week, for years, trying to gather some savings and we want to do good with it. So, we are walking down the street, and we see a homeless person, and we feel compassion for them, and want to help them. This is a beautiful longing. Most of us would, without really thinking about it much, give them a little money. But, we haven't analyzed the consequences of that action. You see, we would think, "I'm being compassionate, I'm doing good work, I'm doing a good deed." But, are you really? You have to measure it, and be sincere. What if that person is an alcoholic? What if that homeless person is a drug dealer, or a drug addict? What are they going to use the money for? It would be better for you in that instance, if they are asking for money for food, to say "I will not give you money, but I will buy you a meal. Let's go to this place over here and I'll buy you a meal, I'll feed you, or I'll take you to the soup kitchen, they'll feed you." But, you know what they will all say? I know because I've done this; they say, "No no no, I need the money for the bus." "Okay, I'll buy you a bus ticket." So they say, "No no no, I have to get it myself, I can't get it until tomorrow..." And they will give you all kinds of excuses, because they are lying. They are like us, really good liars, because we all are; we are all experts at lying. You have to be very cautious, even when you think you are doing good. Are you really doing good? Let me give you another example. Let us say you were going to give that person $10, what would they do with it? They might go buy alcohol or drugs, something. Something to hurt themselves, or to hurt someone else. What if you gave that $10 dollars to a charity? Think about the consequences of that action. What if you gave that $10 to a student who really needed it for a book? What if you gave it to someone who was sick and needed medicine? What if you gave it to someone who really needed Gnosis, or the Dharma? Compare the results of all these actions, and look at the karma. If I perform this action, this is likely to happen. If I perform action B, this is likely to happen, and then you choose. What is the most effective way for me to reach my goal? Some think this is a selfish way of thinking, and at a certain level it is, but is necessary: all action is reciprocal. Whatever we do affects others and ourselves. We need to benefit both. In the Shravakayana level which we are talking about, the beginning, the concern is generally first with ourselves. We have to change our mind, change ourselves. And so, most schools at this level are not really too concerned with other people. They may talk about compassion and love, but the focus is generally first, on changing ourselves, and helping ourselves to become better. To stabilize the mind. This is important, good, and necessary. But, there is a higher way. There is a superior way, and it is called Mahayana (Greater Path). In the Mahayana example, we would apply this example story, and in that instant of saying, "Am I going to give him my $10?" A person training at the Sutrayana level would think, "How is that going to affect me? If he uses the money to do harm I will gain karma." And this is important: we need to think that way. But, the person training in the second stage, Mahayana, has to think, "How is this action going to affect him?" Now, we think we're doing good, but are we really? And if we question it, we will say, "Really this will probably be bad for him, because he will persist in his habit, his addiction." This is where we start to think about the effects of our actions on other people. This is the entrance into Mahayana. The Gnostic teaching goes way beyond Mahayana. It is founded on Sutrayana, enlivened by Mahayana, but fulfilled as Tantrayana, the third level. At this level, to fully transform the event, you have to take yourself out of it. Most of us have not trained ourselves enough to work in that way. As the example, a Tantrayana level student would immediately see, "This is going to hurt me if I give this addict the $10, it is going to hurt him if I give him that $10, but if I take that $10 and I give it to my Master, to my teacher. Or, if I give it to a great Lama, or somebody who's really doing a lot to help humanity, the impact is magnified beyond calculation." Far beyond calculation. That is a very Mahayana, or even Tantrayana way of thinking. A Sutrayana person who was watching this might think that the Tantrayana level person lacks compassion, because he gave nothing to the person! We have to apply a rigorous analysis to everything we do. How we think, how we act, what we do. Not only how it affects us, and the person we are dealing with, but everybody else in society. Tantrayana is about taking our Sutrayana training (ethics and karma) to serve others (Mahayana) by transforming the energy of every situation through superior knowledge (prajna: Christ Wisdom: bodhichitta). We have a job in life, we fulfill a role in society. 100% or 99.997% of the time, we only think about our job in relation with ourselves: how much we suffer, how much we hate it, how much we drag our feet, how much we are abused, how much we are in pain. It is all about me, it is all about "I": pride, ignorance. The first step would be, if you really want to transform that 40-80 hours a week you spend of your energy at

work, instead of thinking about yourself all the time, think about your coworkers, or the client that you are serving. Transform that job! Think, "How am I serving others? Am I really doing a good job? Not just from what my boss says, so that I get recognition, but from what the person I am serving says. Am I really serving them? Is my job a spiritual practice?" That is a Mahayana approach, and it is hard, because we have too much pride, attachment, etc. Let me promise you that, because it is hard. Our ignorance, our craving, our pride, our doubt, our wrongs views, and our hostility are all very strong, especially at work, because we expend an enormous amount of energy at our jobs. So, then we need to look at this. "Why do I have the job I have? To benefit whom?" If you are picking between two jobs, how do you pick? Let us says you have two offers, you are one of those rare people nowadays who has two offers for a job [laughter]. How do you pick? Well, most of us would say, "Oh, the one that has the most money, of course. Easy." No! If you are practicing Sutrayana, you are going to look at how the karma will affect you. If you are practicing Mahayana, you are going to look at how that job affects other people. "Is that a good company? Is the job good, does it really contribute to other people? Not to me, because I'm going to work hard either way, to others? Does it contribute to society? Does it provide something of benefit?" Now, I am not telling all of you to go out and change your jobs. I am not saying that; what I am suggesting is to learn to transform your way of thinking. You see, the Sutrayana level teachings are very good and helpful, but limitedthat is, you develop ethics and the beginning of understanding about karma and how it affects you. The real power of spirituality, when it as founded in an ethical discipline (Sutrayana), only emerges when your way of thinking is concern about the wellbeing of other people (Mahayana). And, when you start to think that way, your religious life will be 100% transformed. Think about it. It is logical. If you are a parent, and you have two kids, and the one child is always just doing for themselvesthey do not help in the house, they do not help anybody, they are only worried about getting for themselves. They are always coming to you saying, "Mom, I want this, I want that." But, the other child is always helping, always cleaning, always helping the others. Which one are you going to reward? Which one is going to be more valued? Which one is going to be more loved? Which one will have a better life? The answer is obvious. Yet, none of us live that way. We live like the spoiled child, because we always go to God saying, "God, I want this, I want that!" We do not do anything to clean our psychological house. We do not do anything to help others. We are always just trying to feed and help ourselves, to help our attachment, to feed our pride, to express our hostility. We have a parent, but that parent, our Innermost, is not like a terrestrial parent. The Innermost is far beyond terrestrial psychology. Our Innermost respects the Law, works with cause and effect. If we do, too, we will receive the effects that we deserve. If we want spiritual experiences in meditation, if we want wisdom, if we want spiritual development, we need to establish a profound practice of ethical discipline. From that, everything else comes. Questions and Answers Audience: You're going about your day, recognizing thoughts in yourself and identifying what that is, and finding your way of combating that. What techniques do you use? Instructor: The way that we learn to learn to fight or battle against the afflictions is a very intuitive process, because it is a cognizant or conscious process. It is not intellectual. I have seen and read many different intellectual descriptions, and outlines and structures that people try to memorize. The reality is, you just need to establish the first step: mindfulness. You need to be aware of what you are doing at all times. That is just to be mindful from moment to moment of what you are doing. This is the basis for meditation, and the basis for any spiritual experience. Ethics is summarized in mindfulness. You can also call it vigilance. It is to be like a soldier who is watching for the enemy to arrive. We have to that degree of attentiveness over our psychology, because we do have an enemy, but the enemy is inside. The enemy is our own mind. From that attentiveness, the rest unfolds naturally, because once you become aware of an element or defect in yourself, then intuitively you learn how to battle them. How to combat them. There is no simple answer to this, and that is because the afflictions, the egos in us, are so radically diverse. There is no one antidote that will work in every case. Samael Aun Weor described it as a process of psychological judo. He explained that what we know of as Judo in the physical world is simply the shadow of technique that was originally taught to monks in order to work on their mind. We all admire Judo, because it is a beautiful art, but really, it comes from the psychological art. And, the basis of that technique is that you use your opponents energy against him. So, we do the same thing psychologically. You see, in physical Judo, you learn, when someone attacks you, you take the energy that is directed at you and you redirect it back at your opponent. In that sense, even a very weak person, or a child, or an older person who does not have much energy, can fight a much

stronger opponent. This is definitely the case with us and our mind. We are David and we are fighting Goliath, a huge giant. First, we become aware of the element. Whatever that is, whether is lust, or pride or envy. We have to see that. That awareness alone begins to redirect that energy, provided we sustain the awareness. Do not make the mistake of," Okay, I see that pride now" and then we go off and get distracted again, or we start intellectualizing about that element. Those are mistakes. You have to remain continually vigilant. Those elements arise, they might sustain themselves for a while, but they will pass. You have to remain cognizant, watchful of yourself throughout the process, and then later, could be immediately after, or later when you have time to reflect, you replay that event in your imagination, and analyze it with these tools: karma, impermanence, remembering the Being, looking at the cause and effect. These are the basic tools in the beginning. You can also use the Law of Opposites. This is a cause for some confusion, I think, with some students, but the Master Samael taught what is called the Jewels of the Yellow Dragon, and these are related techniques to the psychological judo, where you take the opposites and you work with them. So, if you feel lust for a person, then the way you can apply the antidote is to imagine, "Well, this person that is so beautiful now, is really just a walking corpse, in reality. I would not feel lust for them if they were dead. They are going to die, so why should I feel lust for them? Moreover, this person that I feel lust for is carrying around inside of that little, thin layer of skin, all kinds of things that I would never feel lust for: blood, mucus, phlegm and all kinds of filthy things, so why would I feel lust for them?" Or, "why would I feel lust for this person, when really, they are just like my sister, or my mother, or my brother or my father, who I would not feel lust for, so why should I feel lust for this person?" So you see, you use these polarities to teach the mind, to discipline your mind, to say, "No mind, I am not going to let you use my energy that way, I am going to be conscious of my energy." So, there are many techniques that you can apply, but all of them are rooted in cognizance, watchfulness. Audience: [Inaudible] Instructor: There are many examples you can study about the polarities the ego, but they are going to be individual in each person, so what I would recommend is that you start to look at yourself. Do not just label these elements in your mind. When you see something in yourself, you can feel if it is wrong. If you are really paying attention and sincere, you can feel it, you will know, because you have a conscience. You see, you have to listen to the conscience, it is that element of your consciousness that can tell the difference between it's right and wrong. That is what matters. It doesn't matter if you say, "Oh okay, I see this thing inside myself, what is that? Is that anger, or is that pride? I'm not sure, maybe I'll call my instructor? Maybe he'll know." No no no, this is not the right way to do it. The way to approach it is to say, "Why is this wrong? Why?" If you just put a label on it, you will end up lazy, and I will tell you frankly, that I have watched this with hundreds of people. Hundreds. People will see an element of lust in themselves and think, "Oh yeah, that is lust, I see it." And that is all they do, they just put a label on it, but the lust is still processing in themselves and they do not comprehend why that is harmful to them or other people. They do not analyze. Do not just put a label, analyze. And let me give you an example of why. Let us say, for example, that you feel angry. It would be easy to say, "Okay, that is my ego of anger, so now I'm going to meditate on my ego of anger." But, what is that going to really get you? What is is better is to do this: "Why am I angry? Why? Was it because my spouse said I was an idiot for making that decision, and my pride was hurt?" Okay, so now we are not talking about just anger, we are talking about pride. But, if I just leave the labels, I won't go into the depths of that either. So, "why was my pride hurt? Because I want to be a big shot? Because I want everyone to admire and respect me? Because I want my spouse to treat me a certain way? Why, because I have self-esteem? Is it that I have fear that she will leave me to go with someone else?" You see, all of these elements are interconnected. No psychological element works alone. When you have identified an element in yourself, let me give you a word of warning: they never act alone. Never. No ego is by itself. They always have their buddies, always. Egos work in groups. So, when you see anger, that anger is being fed by something elsepride, attachment, lust, envy, craving, aversionand that in turn is being fed by something else. So, you might put name tags on your egos, but labels will not help you understand what they are doing, or why they are wrong. You have to analyze them, and get at the roots. Who is feeding who? How are these functioning in your mind? How are these different elements manipulating your behaviors? It is very sophisticated; your mind is extremely complex. That is why the intellect cannot resolve it. We study with the intellect in the beginning to learn about these teachings, to learn the structures of our soul

and the structures of the universe and something in general about the mind, but to really get in there and change the mind, you cannot do it with the mind. You cannot do it with intellect or labels. The only way to change it is with the consciousness, which is intuitive. The consciousness does not need to memorize that pride has a, b, c, d, e, etc examples of how pride can act. The consciousness just says, "Oh yeah, that is pride. I can taste, I sense it, I can feel it." That is cognizant, intuitive. And then it can say, "I feel that this pride is somehow related to that lust." Or "I can feel that this pride is somehow related to that aversion." So, only your heart, your intuition, can navigate those complex paths and reveal them to you only intuitively. I have seen many schools who tried to build elaborate diagrams of the ego and how it functions those attempts always fail. The ego is far more clever than any diagram you can make. The only one who can outsmart your ego is your Innermost. Think on that. If you have been in suffering in the cycle of existence for however many uncountable numbers of lifetimes, do you really think that you can unravel it? You are the one who made all the problems, right? We created our own suffering. We are in this mistake, in this problem, in this life, because of our own actions, and we have to initiate the process of changing it, but the only one who can lead us out, is the one who is not trapped in it! Remember Ariadne's thread? When Theseus is going to descend into the labyrinth (the mind) to kill the minotaur (the ego), the only way he can navigate it, and make sure he gets in and out, is because his Divine Mother gives him a thread of gold that he uses to keep his path, so that he wont get confused. That thread of gold is the consciousness in continuity: continual self-awareness, observance, mindfulness. That is the thread. That gold is your energy, transmuted, purified, used consciously. You can use that to navigate to get through the labyrinth of your mind, in order to get to the heart and kill the beast. Audience: In the scriptures of the Bible, a term "revealing of the mind" is written... [Inaudible] Instructor: About the Mental Body, does the Mental Body have an impact on ethics? Absolutely, there is no question about that. To create a Solar Mental Body initiates a profound change in the psychology of an initiate. Firstly, because in order to reach the level of creating a Solar Mental Body, you must have first created a Solar Astral Body. As Samael Aun Weor in his book, "The Seven Words", the only way you can create a Solar Astral Body is if you have broken all of your commitments to the Black Lodge. You see, our ego exists, it has power and energy, because of cause and effect. Because we have, in our mind, impurities, defects, errors, vices, and those all belong in the realm of Klipoth, Hell, what we call the Black Lodge. It is our sub-consciousnes, un-consciousness, infra-consciousness. To create the Solar Astral body requires that we break contracts with the Black Lodge, cause and effect, karma. We have to break ties, we have to make a commitment, a very serious commitment, to our Innermost. Only in that way, can we then go on, later, to create the Solar Mental Body. So, in other words, what I am saying is, before you can have Mental Body, you need an Astral Body, and to have an Astral Body, you need strong ethics. Once you have those strong ethics established, then your Astral Body can be made, completed, and then you can go on to create the Mental Body. These two in combination give an incredible facility in going deeper into the ego. They are a great aid, because they are vessels that belong to God. They are superior vehicles, or superior aspects of mind. The definitive characteristic that they provide is a profound intuition. They are related with the Abstract Mind, with the kind of understanding that you can acquire, because those bodies act as mirrors that reflect the contents of any given phenomena. So, someone who meditates on their ego, who doesn't have those bodies, cannot see as much. Someone who has those bodies, can see more. The other part of that question was what? Audience: [Inaudible] Instructor: The scripture James talks about the "renewal", and also in other places in the Gospels, but renewing the mind is a concept that is not unique to Christianity, it's also present in Buddhism and Hinduism. And from my understanding, the basis of that concept is that, the term "mind" there, is not the same way in which I am using it. Mind, in this context, would be more akin to consciousness. So, for example, in Buddhism, when they're talking about mind, they're normally talking about consciousness. So, if you read a Buddhist scripture, or a Hindu scripture, you have to be careful about the translation and how they're using the terms. When we say, renewing the mind, yes, we need to renew the mind. Well, the mind relates to many Sephirah, Buddhi, Binah, Tiphereth, Netzach, Hod, all of them have relations with the mind, and how the mind functions. Renewing that means, cleansing it through ethics. Audience: [Inaudible]

Instructor: The question is about the polarizations of the ego; so you're aware of the virtue, and learning to practice that virtue. Yes, I agree there is some value in that, in the same way a child learns to write the alphabet by studying the letters, and writing them over and over. You gain a certain facility for what those letters are, and how they work. So, I agree, and that is why we read scripture. We read scriptures and stories of Masters and Saints in order to see how virtue functions, and what real virtue is. But, it is not enough. If you want to speak the language of the Spirit, you have to be cognizant of it, not merely repeat it. So, it is good to study the scriptures, to study how the different religions present defects or afflictions and upright action. We need to know those things. But, you cannot "practice" them, you have to live them, you have to be them. When you say "practice" them, it is as if you are implying that you will superimpose over yourself a model or template, as if to say, "I shouldn't wear this red shirt of anger, I should put on a white shirt of patience." Well, this is a fine intention, but it does not change what is inside the shirt. It sounds subtle, maybe, but the difference is in what is in your heart, what you are doing from your heart and mind. Not merely trying to imitate another behavior, but trying to sincerely do what you know and feel in your heart is right. You see the difference? You cannot learn virtues through imitation, you learn them through action. Audience: [Inaudible] Instructor: Yes, this is a good example. There are many groups that try to help addicts for example, and they teach addicts to adopt new behaviors through imitation. So, they say "do not go to bars, do not go here and there, do not go with these friends and avoid these types of environments." This is good advice, and it is important; we need that. As a Gnostic you especially need to not to put yourself in an environment where these harmful influences will cause you to return to those behaviors. However, the behavior emerges from inside of you, not outside. If you only modify your external behavior, you have not dealt with the source of suffering, which is inside of you. That is why those elements will resurge again later, stronger, because they have been processing in the submerged aspects of the mind. This is why we see Gnostics, monks, nuns, priests, all over the world who go into a religion, adopt that religion, believe everything, and begin to act like everyone in that religion, but they suppress, they bury and avoid all of those elements in themselves, they do not deal with their minds, and later they break, they snap, and those elements come out even stronger; they drink secretly, they have secret sexual pursuits, etc. It is very sad, we cannot afford to make that mistake. The Buddha said something very interesting, and I'll end with this: Someone came to the Buddha asking questions about infractions. He asked about how one makes an infraction of an affliction, such as we are not supposed to act on pride, we are not supposed to act on fear, etc, etc, but isn't death worse? The Buddha said, "If you die, it is wonderful, because you will just be born again; there is no problem with death. But, if you perform a wrong action, it is horrible, because it affects you not only in this life, but in your future lives." So, wrong action is worse that death. Death is natural, normal, all of us will die. This is why Joan of Arc said something that I admire very much: "I would sooner die than do anything that I know is wrong." Strong words. She lived by it. We should do the same.

Comprehension in Meditation
Written by Gnostic Instructor To continue our discussion of meditation, first we remind you that the purpose of meditation is to comprehend, to understand, to receive wisdom. In other words, we meditate in order to acquire information. This concept or understanding may be new to you because many traditions that discuss or teach meditation in the west do not necessarily present the science of meditation in this way. They may say that meditation is to reach enlightenment, or to acquire powers, but in the Gnostic tradition we go directly to the point, the purpose or reason for meditation, and we call it Comprehension. Comprehension This word Comprehension is really significant, and in order for us to understand our meditation practice, we need to understand what comprehension means. We tend to mistakenly think that comprehension is related to the mind, to an idea, to a concept. We use the word in this way in our everyday language, and we say, 'I understand' or 'I comprehend.' Usually what we are talking about is a concept, or an idea, for example, we say 'one plus one is two,' and the teacher says, 'Do you understand that?' We all say, 'Tes, one plus one is two.' We may understand the idea of it, but in Gnosis, the word comprehension does not mean that. Comprehension is related with the heart. To have an understanding in your mind or in your

intellect about an idea or a concept is an intellectual understanding, or a theoretical or conceptual understanding, but it is not comprehension. Comprehension is intuitive, natural, spontaneous, and it is related with your conscience, with your consciousness; with knowing something without having a reason, or even logic, but you have experience that proves it. A simple example: as you grow up and learn about your physical body, how it works, you encounter many sensations. When you experience those sensations, you acquire comprehension of them at the physical level. You begin to understand that if you fall down, it may hurt you; if you cut yourself, you will bleed, it hurts, it is pain that is a kind of comprehension. You do not need the idea of it, or understand intellectually why pain happens, but you comprehend, you know it will happen. Moreover, when you get a little older and you start to experience what happens when you say a harsh word, or when you yell at someone, and it hurts them, and you feel regret, and you feel pain: that is comprehension. It is that feeling, that sense, 'I should not have done that, it was wrong.' That is a form of comprehension. The same is true when you do something really good for someone else. When really help someone, truly, and they show you that gratitude and they feel and display, the benefit of the action you did for them, and then you understand that was a good act. And you feel it and know it, but you couldn't explain it, but you feel it. That is comprehension. This is why we learn to meditate; to have deeper comprehension of our day-to-day, moment-to-moment life. Meditation is a means to acquire comprehension, but will also provide you with experiences, powers, visions, clairaudience, and many types of perceptions that are beyond physical perception. Those are not the reasons why we meditate. Those perceptions are natural to the consciousness, and are necessary in order for us to comprehend, to understand. In order for us to penetrate the real meaning of our minds, of our hearts, of our lives, we need to see more than our physical senses can perceive, and upon that basis, we as students of Gnosis develop a meditation practice. Everyone is at their own level. Every student has their own karma, their own psychological scenario, their own psychological cage, and to extract yourself from that cage is only possible when you have an in depth knowledge of that cage. In other words, there is not just one key that will open all the cages of all the minds of all the beings in the world. Every key has a slightly different shape, because the lock is different, the cage is different. Nonetheless, there is a key. The key is individual, formed in accordance with our karma and psychological idiosyncrasy, but the key itself is comprehension, it is understanding of the lock. The way you unlock the key of the mind, that tight knot of your karma, is through understanding it. This is why the Buddha said: "If you want to untie a knot, you have to first understand how it was tied." If you know how the knot was tied, then it is easy to unravel. That understanding is comprehension. Comprehension is the key to unlock the cage of suffering. But how we acquire comprehension is up to us, and only we can do it. No one can come to you and say, 'Your mind is shaped like this, so you must do A, B and C.' It does not work that way. In order for you to undo the causes of your suffering, you need to see your mind yourself. You have to see the nature of your own suffering. So, the key to that is comprehension, but to reach comprehension, you need to be able to see the cage for what it is. As we are now, we do not. This is why we suffer. We suffer because we are in ignorance of our true nature. We suffer in a cage of a false self. We call it ego, we can call it aggregates, we can call it Samskaras. There are many names and languages for this structure we have built. Steps to Comprehension For us to see the cage, we need to have a tool that gives us that vision, and the tool is consciousness. Consciousness is the basis of perception, whether that is physical perception or internal spiritual perception, therefore, we need to learn how to use the consciousness, and as it is, we scarcely even know what the consciousness is, much less how to use it. Even if we know how to use it, we do not use it consistently, because we are always contradicting ourselves, getting distracted, getting caught up in desires, fears, and emotions. Therefore, we need concentration. We need a stable consciousness, that has the capacity to remain cognizant of itself, to be stable, to be serene, and in that serenity is reflected the true nature of that mind. That is why in the previous lectures we have been discussing how to experience having a serene mind. The way to reach it is to stop disturbing it. Our mind is dispersed, distracted, chaotic because of the influences that are pressing upon it. Those influences are external and internal. They are the intensity of our daily lives, where we are always running

around, consuming all types of impressions that are harmful to us. We go look at the internet, we look at movies, T.V, and we deal with people at work and at home. All of this intense information is hitting our minds, which makes the mind very agitated. Moreover, those impressions stimulate impressions in our mind, in our heart, that stimulate desires, anxieties; a wish for money, a longing for comfort, a craving for security; the resistance to exposure to shame or pride, great motivations of envy and jealousy. All of these internal circumstances, stimuli, also make the mind chaotic. If we were to put an analogy to this, our mind is like a boisterous ocean that is totally chaotic, in which there is no form or shape to the waves, they just leap about constantly and are very difficult to understand. This is why when we meditate, even if we have some serenity of consciousness, some stability of mind, or attention, what we see is confusing. When we look in to our mind, it is dark and unsettled. When by chance we do happen to see or sense anything, it makes no sense, because the mind is so disturbed by internal and external impressions. Therefore, in order to arrive at mental stability, we need to transform the impressions as they arrive, and the best mechanism and the best tool we can use for that is ethical discipline. This is why in the last few lectures we have been discussing ethical discipline and what that means. So, you can see that what we've just done is a quick review of these quick trainings. In order for us to have wisdom and comprehension, we need meditation, but for us to have meditation, we must have ethics. The Three Trainings Ethical discipline Meditation Wisdom, Comprehension When we are living from moment to moment making the effort to not be dominated by fear, anxiety, lust, stress, pride, envy, jealousy, gluttony and laziness and all those things that are in our mind, when we are making the effort to curb them, to control them and to only express what is good in us, which is the Essence, then the impressions from inside and outside of us change. We stop reacting mechanically to everything, we start to behave in a cognizant way, in a way that will benefit ourselves and others. And as such, naturally, without any exertion over the mind at all, it begins to calm down. You see, you cannot force the mind to rest, you cannot force the mind to be silent, you cannot make exertion in order to force the mind to be serene it has to arrive at that state naturally. In the same way, if you approach the ocean of our analogy, how would you force the ocean to become calm? You cannot. Yet you can stop throwing stones into it, and watch and wait for it to settle on its own. It is quite simple. It is nature. It is cause and effect. Meditation functions in the same way. Your mind is an entity; it is matter and energy that is subject to the law of cause and effect. There is no force in existence anywhere that can force your mind to be calm. But sadly, many traditions, teachers, and students of certain kinds of meditation try to force the mind to be silent, and all they end up doing is creating a great imbalance in their psyche. You see, if they understood that if they refocused that effort, instead of trying to make the mind silent, if they took that effort and worked on their ethics, if they worked observing themselves consistently from day-to-day, from moment-to-moment, and made the effort instead to curb their desires, to restrict those desires from expressing themselves, then they would realize that the mind settles naturally on its own, and it does not take a long time. This is why in one great Buddhist scripture, it says this: "Tranquillity maybe realized rapidly provided one does not concern oneself with gain and similar desires, abides perfectly by the moral law, is capable of joyfully enduring suffering and the like, and makes serious effort." That is what we have been describing in the previous lectures: adopting an ethical discipline understanding and abandoning attachment and desire for fame and gain and security and comfort and all those things that our ego wants making effort to observe ourselves, to pay attention, to relax, to remember the Being. From that combination of efforts, we place our consciousness in a place where we do not have to exert it. There is an inner balance or inner stability that we acquire naturally, and then when we look into the mind, wisdom emerges spontaneously. You see, comprehension cannot be forced. No one can force understanding to arrive. It comes naturally, spontaneously, through merely paying attention.

Therefore, ethics relates specifically with self-observation and self-remembering. This is to be cognizant: to be conscious of oneself continually, to never stop. This takes a lot of effort. Effort in Meditation Let us be clear about where we apply effort and where we rest, because there is a lot of confusion about this when it comes to meditation. Where we have to make the effort is in concentration throughout the day, which is to sustain our selfobservation, to remember the Being, to observe ourselves, to be aware of all internal and external events what we call states and events. Internal phenomena are called statespsychological states. The external phenomena are called events. By maintaining awareness of both, we will naturally transform impressions. If we maintain this effort throughout the day, then at the end of the day when we are ready to take a break and reflect on what we observed, we sit to relax, we straighten our back, and turn our self-observation completely inward. That effort, that struggle to maintain cognizance, forgets the external world and then looks exclusively inside. In other words, we forget our environment, we forget our body, and just look at the mind. It is the same directed attention that we have been using all day, but instead of including the external phenomena, we only look at the internal phenomena. This is how we enter the second training. Sometimes we call it concentration, but more accurately we say meditation. We make the effort everyday to be observant of our internal states. This has to be in the context of isolating ourselves from external perceptions. It does not matter if there are phenomena happening externally; we should be capable of not being distracted by them. When we are performing this effort to observe internal phenomena (retrospection, or imagination) what emergeson its own, without exertionis comprehension. Comprehension cannot be forced. Understanding, wisdom, cannot be forced, it cannot be imitated, it cannot be tricked. It comes on its own, like any inspiration in life, it comes on its own. Even though understanding cannot be forced, there are ways to make effort to put ourselves in the right position so that understanding can emerge, and this is what we have to grasp. Comprehension is Easy You see, this process is not hard. To comprehend is not hard, it is natural, it is normal. We make it difficult because of the mind, because we are lazy, because we have a lot of wrong ideas, wrong views, wrong thinking, because we have desire, because we have fear. These elements stop us from succeeding in comprehension. Many people fail even to learn to self-observe, and even the ones that learn to selfobserve may not remember themselves. Even the ones that learn to self-observe and self-remember may not learn to meditate. At every stage there are different causes, different reasons, different excuses, but if we study this seriously and study ourselves seriously, it is very easy to reach comprehension, it is not hard. What stops most people is the first step: ethics. By far, the main reason why most people cannot meditate is that they fail to renounce some desire; they remain attached to some desire. It could be lust, it could be pride, it could be fear. Some people are afraid to meditate; they remain attached to their fear. Some are attached to a concept of meditation, to a belief or a theory, which is false, and thus their minds remains trapped to some concept and they cannot go past it. Some remain attached to the physical body, so attached to being in the body and experiencing the sensations of the body, hoping that Samadhi is some great sensation in the body, that they never leave it, and thus they never leave that attachment to physicality and they never have comprehension. There are many obstacles, and it is different for everyone. We have to find our own. Some of us are just too lazy. Some of us are just too excited, too wound up, to relax. We have to observe ourselves and find our obstacles. Some of us have too much doubt it may be doubt in the teaching; it may just be doubt in ourselves. And to some degree or another all of us have all these obstacles. So, this is where we start: identifying the obstacles and applying antidotes. When we find that we have too much fear, we have to analyze that fear: what are we afraid of? What are we avoiding? If we have fear of meditation, then it is quite illogical, because we are afraid of seeing what is inside of us. Really we should be afraid of not knowing what is inside of us. We should want to know. Moreover, some of us are just lazy; we have to contemplate that laziness. What will result from laziness? What will happen? It is inevitable: if you Do not make the effort, you will get no benefits. In fact, you will become worse. It is very simple to see, if we look. In this way, we approach each potential obstacle, and we analyze it.

If we have doubt, let us contemplate that doubt; what is the antidote to doubt? It is faith. How do we cultivate faith? Look at those who have accomplished it, and remember that those great beings were just once like you; full of mistakes, fear, doubt, pride. If they did it, so can we. We have to cultivate optimism; we have to cultivate strength, energy, and understanding. So, these three trainings summarize a structure of how to understand the ego, the mind. It is not a complicated structure, but it has specific details and information that can be very, very helpful to us, specifically when we reach this second aspect: meditation. What Are We? Unfortunately, we have a strong tendency to create fantasies about ourselves that we believe are real. We adopt ideas and beliefs, assuming they define who we are. For example, we think, 'I heard about this political theory, so now I am that. I like this political theory and now I am one of them. I am that!' We think that way with everything. We hear about a religion and we think that religion sounds so nice, thus, 'I am that. I am [insert religion-of-the-day]!' Yet, these assumptions are not true. There have been people who heard so much about America and loved the idea of America, but lived elsewhere, such as in Africa or in Asia, but nonetheless, even though they had never been to America, they called themselves Americans. They loved the idea of Americans so much, that they decided to be that. You might think this is ridiculous, but we all do it in our own ways. We all think we are what we are not. We all have longings, attractions to ideas or beliefs, or ways of being that we want to be, and think we are, but are really just lies we tell ourselves. This is most critical in our spiritual life, because when we think we have something but Do not, we will not make the effort to acquire it. If we think we are already wise, we will not seek wisdom. Similarly, many people think they know how to meditate, but they Do not, and worse, they will not seek to learn. The same phenomena happens when we learn about spiritual masters, and we all think, "Maybe I am one of them." This is a delusion. We have to look at what we actually are. This important because when we learn about self-observation, meditation, or comprehension, we may think we already know how to do it. Knowing the theory is not the same as doing it. Furthermore, when we learn about Gnosis, we tend to start calling ourselves a 'Gnostic' or a 'meditator.' But the reality is that Gnostics are Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, Moses; they are Gnostics. The rest of us are just students of Gnosis. We are not Gnostics. To be a Gnostic is to be the teaching. It is your way of Being. Not your way of thinking, fantasizing, or day dreaming, or theorizing, but your way of living. Previously we talked about three levels of teachings. Called Sutrayana, Shravakayana Called Mahayana Called Tantrayana, Vajrayana, Mantrayana 'Yana' means vehicle, way, or path. These are three schools, ways, or paths three levels of teachings. Samael Aun Weor told us that Gnosis includes all three. Gnosis is Tantrayana, Mahayana, and Sutrayana. So, there are people who study these teachings who consider themselves Gnostic, and also consider themselves as Tantrists, or Mahayanists, or Sutrayanists. But let me tell you, this is wrong. Let me start with myself: I am none of these yet, but one day I will be. I can say this without any hesitation, because I understand what these three terms mean. Let me explain by starting with the highest level of teaching, because many people call themselves 'Tantrics,' and there are many who claim to be masters or teachers of Tantra. Well, let us look at this, because to grasp this puts a very strong foundation in our meditation practice this is very important. Tantrayana is the highest aspect of any religion, the secret aspect. It is secret because it is powerful. It has traditionally been kept very protected because of its tremendous potential. But that potential can be polarized, according to the nature of our mind, not according to our intentions, and this is the critical thing. It polarizes according to the nature of our mind. Now, let us look at ourselves, what is the quality of our mind? If we sincerely observe ourselves, we will see that our mind is filthy. Our mind is completely wrapped up in selfishness - attachment to self. All of our thoughts, feelings, and our actions are about "me." Thus, if we were to acquire the teachings of Tantra in its full implication, that power would empower that desire, that "me." We would become demons, even worse than we already are. So, based on this, I can tell you that I am not a tantric, because I still have a lot of ego, thus I have not reached the level of being qualified to be trained and empowered as a fully accomplished Tantrist.

So, what about Mahayana, the middle level? 'Maha' means greater vehicle, and this is the teaching specifically related with Bodhichitta, the "awakened mind." Bodhichitta is (1) cognizant love for others accompanied with (2) comprehension of the emptiness. This is a very subtle philosophical point of view, which is very empowering, which is why it is called 'Maha' or 'Great,' but its entire focus is on benefiting others. Every action of a real Mahayanist is performed exclusively to benefit others. Their every thought, their every act, their every emotion, is concerned with and aware of other people. The central practices that define Mahayana are practices within which the Mahayanist takes all of the suffering of the world on themselves, and gives away all of their powers, benefits, virtues and useful resources, in order to aid others. By altering the mind to tranquil equipoise, one will reach its intrinsic purity. Through perfect perception of the inherent purity of reality, a Bodhisattva practices in great compassion for all beings. Dharmasamgiti-sutra Now, what happens if you give such teachings and powers to an ego? If you empower a mind like ours with that kind of skill it will become a great, big fat demon, who thinks it is the saviour of mankind, who thinks that it loves everyone, but only really loves itself and wants to be admired. Therefore, we have to be sincere. Let us observe ourselves do we have a Mahayana mind? When we look into our own mind stream, even if we do have a thought about someone else, or a longing to help someone else, it is accompanied by 'I will look good, they think I am really generous... they will think that I am really practicing Mahayana and that I have a lot of Bodhichitta.' That is not Mahayana, that is pride. That is envy, that is jealousy. A real Mahayanist does not even think about themselves. Therefore, I am not a Mahayanist, because I see that my mind is not like that. Finally, the most basic level of teachings is for a Sutrayana practitioner. This aspect is defined by learning the preliminary aspects of any religion, such as Cause and Effect: i.e., if you act poorly, you will receive suffering. If you act properly, you will receive happiness. They also work to realize the inevitability of death and the impermanency of all things, so that they can dispel attachment. Stated simply, a real Sutrayana practitioner is defined by a natural, spontaneous, completely pervasive way of living that is based in renunciation. A real Sutrayana person has no interest in materialism none. Someone who has fulfilled the basic entry level of the teaching has renounced attachment; they have realized that this physical life is an illusion, and they care nothing for pride, fame, wealth, security, sensation, gluttony, good food, nice clothes, a fancy house and cars, etc. They naturally and spontaneously renounce materialism, because they know that all those things lead to suffering. All of those things are illusion. All of those things are meaningless and what matters is the quality of the heart. That is how you can recognize a genuine Sutrayana-level practitioner. I have not reached that level of attainment. Therefore, in synthesis, I am a beginner, and hope one day to be accomplished in these three levels of teaching. To clarify, someone who enters into real Mahayana training is already fully qualified in Sutrayana, meaning that they naturally and easily have no interest in materialism, and understand the impermanence of all things, and know that cause and effect are the basis of everything, thus they need to learn what Mahayana can give them. Subsequently, someone who enters into real Tantra is already fully qualified in Mahayana, meaning that they naturally and easily have no interest in themselves, only in the welfare of others. So, we have to be sincere with ourselves, and see how much work we need to do. Why is this important? Because if we go around with ideas that we are great practitioners, we are going to build even more pride, which will hurt ourselves and everyone who contacts us, because negative emotions are extremely contagious, they are infectious. Negative emotions are far more infectious that any virus or bacteria. You know why? Because negative emotions Do not depend on physical matter. They Do not answer to the laws of physical matter. Negative emotions are very powerful. Observe how easily you can be infected by the resentment of someone else. When you hear their story, 'This guy did this and that, I cannot believe it!' Then you start to feel resentment, even though the story had nothing to do with you! You start to feel that same feeling, 'Yeah, he is no good. I heard this and that about him. Oh, can you believe what he did or what she said!' It has nothing to do with us, but we start to feel pride that we are better than them, and resentment that they did something wrong. In reality, that situation had nothing to do with us, but we are now infected with negative emotions. Worse, we will infect others. Similarly, if we call ourselves "Gnostics" or Tantrists" but are really just the same as we have always been, not only are we liars, but we will give a very bad impression of the sacred teachings to others, and we will turn them away from the knowledge. This is a very serious crime.

Let us not call ourselves Gnostics, Mahayanists, or Tantrics until we have actually achieved the level of having a mind stream defined by those levels of teachings. Any of us can do it, but we have to start at the beginning. We have to start with reforming our mind through an ethical discipline, and as we have explained this is related to being cognizant, being observant of ourselves. Learning to listen to our conscience. Learn to do what is right and we learn more about that by studying the teachings, by studying the scriptures, by studying the lives of the great masters, so we can start to discriminate between these qualities that emerge in us. When reach that time of day when we are going to reflect on our day and analyze those events from the day that stand out, as needing understanding, things we need to understand more about; then we meditate. But let us talk specifically how to do it. Meditation is not vague. Meditation is not a process of spacing out. Meditation is not a time to escape; it is a time to reach understanding. The basic pre-requisites for meditation begin with conscious attention this is the main thing, and this is why we work with self-observation all the time. That is a practice of concentration. When you are really learning to observe yourself, you are really developing your powers of concentration, but in your consciousness. Concentration We call the second step concentration, but it is developed in the first step. We develop concentration by watching our mind. We can also use preliminary practices, like working with a mantra or observing the breath, visualizing a given item or element there are many practices to develop concentration, all useful, and I recommend them. If you are having a hard time concentrating, use these techniques, they are good, but understand the principle. Firstly, we already have concentration; the problem is, it is dispersed. Reflect on yourself look at examples in your life, when you can concentrate very well. For example, when something really grabs your attention, naturally, you can concentrate on that and not be distracted by anything. All of us can do it, but we tend to do it without awareness, for example, when you watch a T.V show or a movie that you really like, you concentrate very well, so much so that you forget your body. You think that you are the actor or actress, or you are in the movie. That is concentration, but it is negative, because you are not aware of it. Become aware of that same capacity and use that to observe your mind, and you will have discovered concentration in yourself. It is that simple. Become aware of paying attention in that way. Likewise, when we listen to music, when we see a beautiful sunset, when we see someone we have not seen in a very long time and we become very attentive to them that is concentration. If you are an artist or a musician and you arrive at something inspiring in your work, you become very concentrated on that music or art to the exclusion of everything else, and time stops existing for you. Or, when you are working really hard on something that captures your attention that you are really are focused on and you forget time, you forget your body that is concentration. We all have it, so become aware of that capacity. Learn to use that in your meditation practice, learn to use that in your self-observation, and all of this will become very easy for you. The problem is that most of our ability of concentration is trapped in actions that are harmful, trapped in desires. Some of us are so addicted, attached to the sensations of the tongue, that we spend a great deal of concentration and energy preparing a meal or going to get a meal, cooking or buying something and then eating it, and a lot of concentration in indulging in that attachment. Or we use all of our concentration in lust, whether looking at pornography or indulging in a sexual act; with a lot of concentration and attentions, but polarized by desire. Or, we have our attention and energy caught up in envy, or in appearances. All these different psychological aspects trap our consciousness, trap our ability to concentrate. So, if in your meditation practice you are having a hard time concentrating, look to see where you can concentrate and change that behavior. You see, when you can change that behavior, those powers of concentration become restored to you, become freed. This is how we gradually recover the powers of the soul: by recovering it from the desires within which they are trapped. So, the first aspect is this development of concentration. There are many words for this in different languages. If you have studied Ashtanga or Raja yoga, then you know Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi. These terms relate to gradual stages of meditative absorption or concentration. If you have studied Tibetan Buddhism, then you know the terms shine in Tibetan, or in Sanskrit, Shamatha, and this basically means calm abiding, tranquillity, and it refers to a type of serenity in the mind, an ability to concentrate without distraction. Another Sanskrit word is Pratyahara. All of these words refer to similar states of varying degrees of concentration or meditative stability.

Energy These abilities are part of you. They are not outside of you. This is not something you can go and get. It is not something that you can force. The ability to have a tranquil mind is natural in your consciousness, if you stop disturbing your consciousness. If you abandon bad behaviors and adopt good behaviors, your mind will naturally stabilize. There are couple factors that will accelerate that process. The most important one is transmutation. Sexual energy is the most powerful energy available to us, without question. It is the very energy at the basis of existence, and the sexual force is the very power to create, not only a physical person, but anything. Our ability to be creative in our work, or in our hobbies and passions the things that we love to dois directly related to the quality of our sexual energy, and this why in the history of humanity, if you observe the greatest works of art that have ever been produced, they were always produced by people who observed sexual purity, who were chaste; not in sexual abstention necessarily, but chastity, sexual purity. This is directly related with meditation, and this is why all of the ancient religions always established in the ethics: sexual purity, chastity. Usually in the beginning the students were required to observe a period of sexual abstinence in order to give them a chance to work on their mind; to lower the extreme disturbing nature of those energies, to begin transforming them and let the mind settle, because if they continued engaging in sexuality with the mind so activated, they would never have a chance to let it rest. And plus this is all related to former Piscean age in the way that humanity needed to be guided at the time. Now we are in a new age, the Aquarian era. There is a new energy, a new current. Humanity has changed, the mind has changed. Now, we need to harness that energy, immediately, without hesitation. When we learn how to take advantage of our sexual forces, to not waste them, those energies are transformed inside the body, inside the spirit, inside the soul. Those energies rise into the mind, the brain, into the heart, into every aspect of our physiology and psychology. They nourish us. They restore what has been damaged. They give fuel and energy to the consciousness. This is why if you were to observe a meditation schools where chastity is not taught, you will see that the students are, generally, very disturbed emotionally, in life, mentally, spiritually; unable to have spiritual experience, unable to advance, with a lot of fear, doubt, a lot of problems almost no practical experience of meditation. If you go to another school where they teach chastity and sexual transmutation, you will see a totally different atmosphere. For instance, where monks or nuns learn to transmute their energy a lot, typically (not all the time), those types of people have better ethics. They tend to be better people, they also tend to have experience of meditation, and this is because of this fundamental reason. By transforming the sexual energy, by learning how to harness it and purify it, those forces saturate the brain physically, saturate the mind psychologically, the heart psychologically, and the aid in its stability. In other words, if you really are serious about learning to meditate, transmute your sexual force. Do not hesitate, Do not go backwards. If you take up that practice, take it up and never look back. That is not merely a physical practice, it is a psychological one. You may restraining the energy in your physical body, but you also have to restrain it in your heart and mind. It is the heart and mind that you seek to stabilize and understand, and if you persist in behaviors such as lust, prostitution, adultery, pornography, you are going nowhere. In fact, you might be making your situation worse. This is one area where you have to be extremely well defined, and when you find areas where you are not defined fix it. The quicker you are able to firm up your physical and psychological awareness of chastity, the quicker your mind will stabilize. It is very simple: they are in direct relation with each other. In my own experience, I have observed even Gnostic instructors who have not been able to manage the psychological aspect, and because of that they have difficulty controlling the physical aspect, and because of that they cannot meditate. It is sad, but it is entirely due to a lack of willpower. Their desires are still too strong. In other words, they have not established ethics. Without ethics there is no concentration, and without concentration there is no comprehension, and this is why this same person tends to run around and around in the same circle, over and over, repeating the same problems again and again, always confused and always confusing others, because they have no understanding. Do not make that mistake. Make your ethics very strong, then your concentration and meditation will come easily. So, at the end of the day, when you begin to observe the mind, do some practice of transmutation. This could be meditating or vocalizing on a mantra. It can be a Pranic exercise, it can be a Runic exercise. In fact, if you have to meditate when you come back from work and you are still agitated from your day, go

for a walk, get some exercise. This will help you to stabilize yourself and let go of all the busyness of the day and focus inward. It will help. Secondly, you can do other preliminary practices like mantras, you can light candles, burn incense do whatever you can to make your environment conducive to relaxing. Then we get to the meat of it, the actual concentration. Now, while all these preliminary exercises are useful, they are not true spiritual exercises. I know most people think that when they become spiritual, they start doing mantras and start meditating, and start doing this and that, they consider this to be spirituality no, it is only the antechamber. Real spirituality is to have comprehension of the spirit. To have experience of your true nature is real spirituality and you cannot reach that through all the preliminary practices, at least not directly. Those experiences can emerge occasionally, but those practices are not designed to take you to those experiences. All the preliminary exercises are designed to stabilize your mind, that is all. The mantras work with charkas and energy in order to help everything become stable, active, awake, aware. Concentration practices help you focus and bring into some degree of stability, but that is it. Concentration and Imagination To reach comprehension, understanding, insight, you need a different technique. In the Gnostic tradition we teach a variety of techniques to have comprehension. The most important one that we practice everyday is called Retrospection. Retrospection means to review, to recover, to analyze, to look over, and to investigate. This is a form of analytical meditation. It is not the only kind of meditation that we teach or practice, but it is the most important one. In a practice of retrospection, after you have set up all the preliminaries we have described, you simply begin to review those events that feel significant to you. You sit to relax, you forget everything outside, you take your attention inside and you concentrate, but moreover, you visualize. This is why this second step of meditation or concentration really shouldn't be limited merely to concentration. That term "concentration" can be misleading. What are you concentrating on and how? This is why the Tibetan model is so useful. The Tibetan model breaks this down into two aspects of the same thing: Shamatha and Vipashyana. Shamatha is calm abiding, what we could call concentration or meditative stability, or tranquillity. Vipashyana means special insight, and relates to the ability to perceive and see something new, to see into something, to analyse something. So, if in a Shamatha type of practice you would just be simply concentrating in order to acquire a stability of mind, there are also Vipashyana exercises in which you seek insight into to something. But understand, it is very simple: you cannot have insight without concentration. If you cannot concentrate your mind, you will not be able to visualize and sustain it, much less penetrate into it to see what is contained there. In the Tibetan traditions there are many practices related to Shamatha and Vipashyana. What I am talking about are the principles behind these terms. Samael called them concentration and imagination. You see, he taught the same thing as the Tibetans. Shamatha (tranquility) is one-pointed concentration. Vipashyana (insight) is analytical comprehension. - Ratnamegha Concentration is the ability to observe (visualize) something without distraction, to be focused on something without forgetting that you are focusing on it. This is generally the first hurdle, once we have set up the preliminaries for our practice and we start to meditate. Most of the time we get a few minutes into the meditation and we forget we are meditating; we get distracted and we dream. A few minutes or an hour goes by and then you realize, 'I am supposed to be meditating.' This is the first thing that has to be worked on: to not forget yourself, to remain concentrated, but also mindful of concentrating. This is specifically defined in the nine stages of Shamata. On the Gnostic Teachings website, there are several lectures that explain these nine stages, a very simple concept taught by Maitreya that can really help you when you are trying to develop meditation, at least to the degree where you Do not forget that you are meditating that is the most fundamental thing. If in your own practice you are meditating and you forget that you are meditating after a few minutes, utilize that tool to help you, so that you can establish more consistent mindfulness of your practice and not forget you are meditating. This is important, because if you forget that you are meditating, you are wasting your time. If you persist in meditating that way, eventually you will give up, because you will not get the fruit or benefit of meditation. You will get frustrated and you will abandon your practice, and there are many people who have suffered this problem. The solution is quite simple: learn about concentration. Learn about these degrees of meditative stability, because at each degree there are antidotes to obstacles, steps you can apply that are quite simple, and they just take patience and some effort.

Nonetheless, once you have reached the level of having mindfulness of your practicenot forgetting that you are meditatingthen you reach a stage where Vipashyana becomes really useful. In terms of Samael Aun Weor, this when we really start to unify concentration and imagination. You see, what I am doing is setting up levels of importance, gateways that you have to reach. You cannot skip them. Do not think you can immediately jump to the Tantrayana aspect of meditation you cannot. It is impossible. The teachings are established in a very specific way, and if you follow the steps it is not hard and it does not take a long time, but if you do not, you will not get anywhere and eventually you will abandon your practice, because you will get frustrated. So it is very important to understand these steps clearly. When you have reached this level of having enough concentration, to not forget you are meditating, then your visualization practice will become very effective. It will become much more achievable, but before that point, it is very difficult. So, you may have experienced trying a retrospection practice, or trying a visualization practice and you get a minute or two in and then you start fantasizing, dreaming, and forget that you are meditating, and all of sudden you realize that a half hour or hour has gone by and you wake up and you cannot remember anything. I am sure most people have had an experience like that. Well, all you have to do then is work on your concentration powers, and the best way to do that is to improve your self-observation. If we forget that we are meditating, it is because we are not mindful of meditating. If we are not mindful in those few moments of meditation, then we are not mindful the rest of the day. If you are forgetting you are meditating, it is because you are forgetting yourself during the day, so learn to remember yourself during the day. Make the effort to be consistent in your self-observation and selfremembering. Imagination is merely the other half, the other aspect of concentration. In reality, you cannot separate concentration from imagination. This is another mistake that some teachers, schools, and students make, where they try to enforce upon the student to concentrate and to reject or avoid the perception of images, to not imagine. This is similar to demanding that you stop breathing. It is not possible. The consciousness perceives naturally, it is normal, it is the way the consciousness functions. We all have the ability to concentrate, and we also have the ability to imagine. But, these abilities are trapped in desire. If I asked you to imagine a desire that is important to you, like something lustful or something gluttonous, you would very easily be able to have images arrive into your mind, even with your eyes open. If I asked you to remember a particular event from your life that you really enjoyed or indulged in, like a lustful event or something related to food, or something related to where your pride was puffed up, you could easily remember that. All the images related to that would easily emerge in your mind's eye. Everybody has this ability naturally, and that is because the consciousness which is the ability to imagine and see internallyis trapped in those desires. On the other hand, if I asked you to imagine God, if I asked you to imagine your Being, most people say, 'What?' They struggle and nothing appears in their mind. Or, if something appears, they are confused and it does not make sense. Or, if I asked you to imagine an event from your life when you experienced chastity, or when you really felt real cognizant happiness for someone else, you have to struggle to remember anything. You would have to work at it to remember something related with a virtue, but related with a defect, it is easy. So, here is our goal, in the same way we need to extract our powers of concentration from our defects, we have to extract our powers of imagination, and we do them both at the same time. This is the value of retrospection meditation; this is the importance of retrospection. In retrospection practice, you are utilizing your consciousness to analyze the events of a given day that disturbed you, and when you are analyze them, you are inverting the power upon that element. That element that disturbed you has your consciousness in it, and when you become aware of it, you become cognizant of it, you are taking power from it. Just in the same way, if you find out in your daily life that someone you trusted was stealing from you, if you become aware it, a great deal of their ability to take anything away from you is taken away, because you are aware of what they are doing. The more you learn about how they do it, the less power they have. When they discover that you know, they have lost. The same thing happens with every ego, with every defect. You have to observe those egos. You have to observe those qualities of yourself that make mistakes, that perform wrong actions, and the more you observe them during the day, the more power you take from them. The more you investigate them in your meditation, the more power you take from them, until eventually the ego is left as it should be empty, with no energy. Then it can be destroyed. This is the point of comprehension, the essence of it. It is self-investigation, and with every defect and

quality of mind that we investigate, that we analyze, we extract its power and we restore it to its rightful place in our psyche. Thus, a combination of all these factors puts a great deal of energy into our consciousness, which helps to stabilize our mind and give us comprehension, and more and more it feeds itself, until becomes naturally sustaining. In the beginning it takes a lot of effort it is very hard, it is painful, and we complain, 'When I meditate, I keep forgetting myself.' Well, if you realize you are forgetting yourself, you are doing well. If you do not realize you are forgetting yourself, you need to work harder. The Buddha said that if you catch yourself a thousand times being distracted, it is a very successful meditation. If you do not catch yourself at all, you need to work harder. So, do not be deflated or defeated and feel like you cannot do it. If you are aware of the problems, if you are aware that you are not able to do it, you are doing well, you are on your way. Deepen that, keep looking. Do not give up. These combined powers of concentration and imagination are the gateway to comprehension. When these two become very strong, and become one thing, it opens a doorway in your consciousness. In Sanskrit, we call it Samadhi. That word in this context means ecstasy. But not ecstasy in the form of a sensation in your body. Many mistake it that way, but that is it not the case. You might experience such sensations, but that is not what Samadhi means. Samadhi means, in its strict definition, an experience of the consciousness free of the ego. That is truly ecstasy; to feel your Self, your true identity, your soul, your consciousness, your Being, without any karma, without any pain, without any desire, free. That is a true Samadhi. Anyone can have that experience, if the conditions are established. It is not that some people are capable and others are not, no. Every being that exists has the capability. Every being who has consciousness can have Samadhi, because Samadhi is simply consciousness free of ego, simply that anyone can experience that. The obstacles that prevent Samadhi are attachment, desire, laziness, and karma. Sometimes, as hard as you work, you will not access Samadhi; it maybe your karma, something you have to pay, it does not mean you should stop. It means you should work harder. The faster you work, the faster you will pay off the karma, and then reach those experiences that you are longing for. The capacity of imagination is something that is natural to us, but we have to learn to manage cognizantly, and when we do that, images emerge. This is normal and natural. Do not become identified with seeing images. It is a sign of progress, when in your meditation practice you are trying to work on your retrospection and a new image comes; it can be sound, it can be a voice, there are different types of phenomena that can occur, these are normal. Do not be afraid, but also, do not be attached. Whatever emerges in your mind, observe it, analyze it, but do not react emotionally. In this way, you start to comprehend those things. We have reached another juncture here that is very difficult for people to understand, and that is, they have established the preliminaries, they have learned some concentration, and they are starting to work with imagination, and then they start to see things that do not make sense. It is confusing. At this point, what is needed is more practice, more effort, more relaxation. When the images we see are confusing, it means that you are starting to see the contents of your mind; the mind does not make sense. The mind we have is full of contradictions, and full of all kinds of information, an unbelievable amount of information. This is quite logical actually. In your mind is everything you have seen or experienced, ever. Not just this lifetime, but all of your existences that is a lot of images and a lot of impressions it is all in there, like a big mass of circulating chaos. So, you look in your mind and you start to things that are all mixed up and do not make sense. You may remember dreams like that. Those dreams are your mind. It is what is in your mind. The basic idea I want to communicate in this lecture is, establish these preliminaries and begin to work with this practice and be disciplined with it. It bears a great deal of fruit. The fruit that it gives you is precisely comprehension, understanding. The greatest benefit of comprehension is serenity. The ability to love the virtues that we have become natural, when we really start to understand and comprehend ourselves, we start to gain some foothold into letting our Being work through us. That's the value of comprehension. We always wonder, how did the Buddha do it? How did Jesus do it? But really, for them it is effortless; they do not have to exert themselves to be what they are. They are what they are. They just are that. We are not, and to become that we have to make effort. We have to exert ourselves, but let us make the distinction; that effort is not to calm the mind. That exertion is not to force the mind. That exertion is to reach the stage where we do not exert. So, philosophically it sounds contradictory, but it is not, and it

becomes clear as you practice. As you make the effort in the right places, and non-exertion in the right places, then it becomes very clear. Let me read you a quote from Samael that explains that. He said: 'Comprehension replaces exertion when one tries to comprehend the truth intimately hidden in the secret depths of each problem. We do not need any exertion to comprehend each and every defect that we carry hidden in the different levels of the mind.' You cannot force understanding. It emerges on its own, so he explains this: 'In practical life, each time a new problem torments us, we make many useless exertions. We appeal to exertions to solve it. We struggle and suffer, but then, the only thing we obtain is to commit inanities that complicate our existence even more. The disillusioned ones, the disenchanted ones, those who even no longer want to think, those who were not able to solve a vital problem, find the solution to it, when their mind is serene and tranquil, when they had no hope whatsoever. No truth can be comprehended by means of exertion. The truth comes like a thief in the night, when one least expects it. Extrasensory perceptions during meditation, illumination to the solution to a problem, are only possible when no kind of subconscious or conscious exertion exists, when the mind does not exert itself to be more that it is.' We need to exert ourselves to make effort in our daily lives in our efforts to be cognizant, to pay attention to ourselves, to observe ourselves. When we sit to meditate, we make effort to concentrate, to be present, but that is all. Then we let what is, arise. And what arises, we observe, and what passes, we observe and that is all. Understanding comes on its own. Questions and Answers Audience: Do you think exertion and meditation is discrimination, because some say do not expect anything in meditation, because it is only the mind interrupting... Others say, expect the first meditation to be the best meditation. So, is this a separation of consciousness and mind really? Speaker: It does not require exertion to see the difference between an illusion and reality, but it does require perception and knowledge. When you see an image, if you are conscious of seeing, the image is digested automatically. Recognition of what it is depends upon our knowledge. For example, if I show you a sentence written in English, if you already know how to read, you will not have to exert yourself to understand it. The understanding will emerge on its own. However, if I show you a sentence written in Sanskrit, if you do not know how to read it, it will not matter how much you exert yourself, you will not understand it. Similarly, through knowledge we understand what we see internally. This is why we study Kabbalah and ourselves. Audience: What is the difference between imagination and fantasy? Speaker: The difference between imagination and fantasy is a matter of polarity. Both are functions of consciousness. Imagination can be either mechanical, driven by attachment, ego, desire, etc. Or, it is conscious, driven by the cognizance or the conscious will. In mechanical imagination, which is what most us experience, this is that ability we all have that I mentioned; is quite easy for us to imagine our desires and to revive our memories and to review events where we were wronged, or where we indulged in some kind of sensation; this relates with fantasy where we imagine some spectacular future for ourselves, or imagine ourselves as Buddha's, or imagine ourselves as very wealthy. It is daydreaming. It is 11 o'clock in the morning and we are hungry for lunch, and we already start dreaming what we are going to have for lunch, fantasizing and daydreaming about it that is mechanical imagination. That is using those powers in a way that creates suffering. Cognizant imagination is when you utilize those powers of imagination for benefit, with virtue, with right action. An example would be to sincerely pray for the end of suffering and to visualize all beings freeing themselves from suffering. How many of us pray that? How many of us visualize that? Most of us probably visualize eating food or having sex, or getting popular, or getting a lot of money and things like that. But very few of us imagine an end to hunger, an end to poverty, an end to our pride. This raises a very interesting point. In retrospection practice, it is essential that it not become a damaging form of self-recrimination. It is necessary for us to recriminate ourselves, we need to be critical of our defects, but likewise it is essential for us to love God, and love humanity. If our practice consists entirely of criticism against ourselves and beating on ourselves and always attacking ourselves, gradually we will become depleted, we will become bitter, sour, and this can be harmful. It is recommended then that you also meditate on virtues, that you also meditate on your Divine Mother, that you meditate on the suffering of humanity, that you pray, that you develop devotion, that you cultivate chastity, humility, and these types of virtues in your heart. So, my advice to you is, when you are analyzing an event from the day that bothers you, that you should not have done, or some feeling that you had that you feel regret about; do that, recriminate yourself, you

need to feel remorse. But then, meditate on what you should have done, visualize what should have been the right action and pray to your God what that should have been, so that you see both sides. A very effective way to do that is to put yourself in the shoes of the other person. If you are having a conflict with someone, meditate on your part, but visualize how they see you you will learn something. I promise you that. You will start to see that you are not the saint that you think you are, and the way people see you is quite different from how you see yourself. Furthermore, when you put yourself in the shoes of others, you can start to understand their suffering. This is how we start to understand the Mahayanic ethic. We start to cultivate Bodhichitta that sincere wish to aid others to escape suffering. So, we need to analyze things from a more well-rounded perspective. Audience: When we begin to do our retrospection, should we focus on the events that stand out during the day, or should we review everything, or seek to reach that goal of reviewing everything? Speaker: My own experience of this practice is that you have to learn to follow your intuition. In the beginning, it seems to me you will focus on events that stand out to you, that you feel regret for, or feel some interest in discovering what is behind it. Gradually, naturally your ability to review more events will begin to grow. This means in the beginning, if you are meditating for 10 or 15 minutes, and getting something from that, and benefiting from that, that time is begin to grow you will not be able to review everything in 10 or 15 minutes. You will start to find too much information, and you will start to extend your meditation practice on your own, because you want to. That is the way it should work. As to should you be mechanical and automatically review and retrospect every single instant of everyday no. If you have the time, great you will learn things from that, but my recommendation to you would be to focus on those events that your conscience is leading you to. Your Being speaks to you through your conscience. It is your Being who will say in your heart, 'you shouldn't have done that.' Or, 'you missed a chance here to do something good,' or, 'you need to understand something about this or that situation.' You have to follow that guidance. Audience: Should the mind make sense to us? Because often we work at our meditation and often we go into it looking for comprehension and then we see the chaos and we are analyzing these egos and it does not make sense. Like as much as we dissect it, it still does not make sense, it does not add up. Speaker: That is normal. When the images begin to emerge in your meditation practice and you are starting to see things, in the beginning it will come almost like koans, like Zen koans that are completely illogical. The famous one is, what is the sound of a single hand clapping? Your mind says, 'what?' And the images that emerge in meditation are like that, in the beginning you start see things that do not make sense. This is normal - do not stop. There are three levels in this practice. First is imagination, second is inspiration, and third is intuition. In the phase of imagination in a given practice of meditation, we are starting to imagine. So, we are doing a retrospection practice, as an example, we are imagining an event from the day, this is the first stage, imagination. The second stage is when something new emerges, something that does not make sense, you are seeing aspects of your mind, you are seeing images or you are hearing sounds, and it just does not seem to connect. This is the second phase, inspiration. This is when we are starting to gather new data. It may not appear to be related to the intellect, but there is a relationship, but your intellect cannot find it. In other words, the mind cannot see the problem, because the mind is the problem. You have to keep meditating. In fact, you can start to meditate on that new information, the new image, the new scenario that you see visualized or that appears to you. You have to be patient because you are waiting for the real comprehension to come, and this the part you cannot force. You cannot force the new images to arise and you also cannot force the comprehension. All you can do is observe the scene that you want to understand. Just keep watching it. Gradually, on its own, spontaneously, understanding will come. You will not know where it comes from. You will all of a sudden get it. It is like all of a sudden a light bulb comes on, 'oh, now I get it!' Some connection gets made. This is the third aspect, intuition. Imagination, inspiration, intuition these are the three parts. Some people think that these are like stages of initiation. They think that at first you work for years at imagination, and then you get to inspiration, and then you work for years at inspiration, and then you get to intuition, and then you work for years at intuition. No, it does not work like that. These three can happen in one practice, repeatedly. Imagination is your act of visualizing, inspiration is the new information that arises, and intuition is the understanding of that. Just keep practicing, especially when you first start to visualize and you first start seeing images, it is confusing. Little by little understanding emerges.

This explanation applies to dreams as well. The same process unfolds in dreaming, because dreaming is merely the mechanical reflection of the same practice. When you dream at night, you are doing the same thing. You are doing what you should be doing in meditation; you are seeing the contents of your mind, but we dream without awareness. Become aware of dreaming, cognizant of dreaming and therefore you will know how to meditate. This is why we practice Dream Yoga, Astral Projection it is the same science. The difference is, one is inside the body and one is outside the body. Both lead to comprehension. Both lead to seeing new images inspiration, and understanding them intuition. This is why, the more you meditate, the easier Dream Yoga becomes, and the more you practice Dream Yoga, the easier meditation becomes. It Is the same thing. Audience: Would you say comprehension is Daath? Speaker: In a sense it is, but that's a little tricky, the way the question is phrased, and the reason is this. Daath is specifically the tree of knowledge of purity and impurity, which is at the level of our throat. It is the abyss between the spirit and soul, the lower seven sephiroth, and the Being which is the upper three sephiroth. Daath is that gateway. Psychologically, spiritually, Daath is a door. So, more specifically then, Daath would be related with Samadhi. It Is a doorway; it is a vehicle or a way of entry. Comprehension though, itself, as a substance, is Chokmah, Binah, Kether. Binah is intelligence, Chokmah is wisdom and the union of those with Kether, is Christ. So, that upper Trinity in union with Daath represents the highest aspects of the soul, the Kayas, and that is real Prajna or comprehension. Audience: You mentioned earlier in these lecture series that we should leave our bodies to experience the most in meditation. Now, when we are entering those states where we are leaving our body, how can we tell what state we've entered into versus the confusion of the mind we might have and we might experience a sensation that we have never experienced before, and it might not be at a certain level of the Tree of Life; it might just be a sensation that we do not know. And we also do not know what levels there are to reach as well, so how to fix the confusion of that? Speaker: Experiences in meditation have to be understood in a psychological aspect, not a materialistic aspect. What that means is, instead of trying to measure an experience, or the result of meditation by the sensations it produces, you have to analyze it in terms of the psychological aspect. Samadhi is simply a state in which the consciousness is free of ego. You can have Samadhi in your physical body. Great masters are in a continual state of Samadhi, because they have no ego. Those great masters, generally, have to make great effort to stay in the body. Not like us, we have to make effort to get out. So, understanding that is important, because Samadhi is not related to one plane or another, although you can have Samadhi in different planes, this is determined by the psychological state, so it would be incorrect to say that Samadhi is only related with Tiphereth. It is related, but Samadhi can be anywhere. You can have Samadhi physically, or in the abyss, because you can go into klipoth, into hell with just consciousness, if you have that ability, and that would be a Samadhi, but in the abyss, and that could be very fruitful. Likewise, with any other sphere on the Tree of Life that type of experience is possible. So, you cannot really say that the Tree of Life relates to levels of Samadhi. It does not really relate that way. The Tree of Life relates to levels of physicality and psychology. Samadhi can be anywhere. Audience: One of the problems with my question is that I am looking at the Tree of Life and thinking well here's this point, here's this point, and here's this point and it does not work like that, so I am trying to see when I do leave my body, how do I see where I am at? Speaker: That is a different question. Part of what you need to remember that the Tree of Life is multidimensional. We look at this tree of ten spheres, but each sphere is multi-dimensional. The bottom is Malkuth, we always talk about the physical body, but your physical body is multi-dimensional. Right now we see the physical body at this particular scale, so we see a body that appears to be unified. But, you can zoom into that body and see the organs, or go even further and see the organisms that make up the organs, like the molecules, the cells. Then, you go even further into the atoms, and then you go even further into what makes the atoms. So, these are levels of dimensionality even within this dimension. Does that a make sense? The reason that is important, is because every sphere is like that. When you have an experience in meditation it becomes tricky to identify where you are on the Tree of Life when you have these types of experiences. That is why it is best to relate to it psychologically. And that is why I said not to look at it in terms of matter, but look at it in terms of psychology, because the psychological component will reveal the

nature of the place you are in. It may sound like an elusive answer, but when you have experiences in meditation it will make sense to you. As an example, if you have some kind of an experience and you see an event, instead of analyzing the appearance (matter) of the event to determine where you are, analyze its content, its emotional content, it psychological content and then you will know. The reason it is important is because we are easily fooled, very easily fooled, even physically we are easily fooled. Physically we think we have good understanding of these things, that we are Gnostics and someone comes along talks very well about these teachings and says, 'yes, I am also a master,' we believe them. And see that everybody else thinks they are master, so we think they must be a master, because everybody says that, they sure act like one, whatever that means. Well, the same happens in the internal worlds, especially with our own experiences. We start to see, people coming to us and asking us for advice in the astral plane, and we think, 'oh, I must be a great master', not realizing that is something trying to test our pride. We could actually be in limbo, we could be in hell being tested. But, if we do not discriminate and analyze the psychological content of that experience, we will not know. This is how many people get fooled. They get fooled by their experiences, because they take them at face value. They base them on materiality, on appearances, instead of analyzing the psychological content. In the previous lecture, the speaker mentioned having an experience of seeing himself as Moses. If he didn't understand what I am explaining to you, he would have thought that he was Moses, he would have come back and said, 'I had an experience, I am Moses! Everybody come bow at my feet.' No, it is not like that, he knew enough to discriminate its experience and understand its psychological content and its symbolism. That's what is important, and that's how you reach comprehension and analysis. So, whatever experiences you have, analyze them, do not take them at face value. Audience: Now that you mention, when we see the structure of a whole dream, for example, so when we have a dream we see them as pictures, do we analyze each piece separately? Do analyze the contents of a dream should we analyze and meditate on each piece of the dream? Speaker: This is a really important question, and also relates to meditating on the contents of a lecture, on the contents of a book. I am glad you asked and it is something I forgot to mention. What I was talking about in this process of first concentrating and then visualizing something, there's a very important boundary is what all these lectures have been about up to now; is knowing where the boundary is, and that's the difference between exertion and non-exertion, there is a specific limit that you have to place for yourself. That limit is precisely here when we want to understand something. When you want to understand a dream or a scripture or a lecture, or investigate anything, the process is simply: concentrate on it, visualize it, and that is all. You do not have to go any further than that. Now, your mind, your intellect might start to analyze it, and that's fine ignore it. If the mind is analyzing it, if the intellect is picking at it, do not get involved. Put your attention and your centre of gravity into observing, cognizance. It sounds elusive, but this is a really important point, because what people will tend to do is get caught up in the intellectual analysis and hammering on that phenomena, to try to break it, to try to get some information out of it and that's the wrong approach. That's what the masters explain in their books: you cannot comprehend through exertion. You cannot comprehend by putting that image in your mind and hitting it with the intellect, thinking, 'what does this mean? And what about the other side, what did this person do, and what did that person do? How do I figure this out? What about those other images, what about this other part, and what about the numbers?' We get confused, we make a mess. We all experience that, because we all have a dream and it is a big giant green man with the number 165,000 on his chest and we start thinking what does that mean, and we start calling our friends and we start adding up the numbers and comparing them to the Tarot cards. That's all fine, but you will not understand it until you stop doing that. Until you just relax, look at it and let it be what it is, and without expecting it, without any exertion, at a certain moment the answer will just emerge, on its own. I know it sounds frustrating, because we want the answer now. Yet, it does not work like that. The answers that we need, the comprehension that we need, will come out naturally, not by force. So, when you are meditating on a scripture, on a lecture, on a dream, on an experience that you had, just put the image on the screen of your intellect, the screen of your mind, and leave it alone. Just watch, and when you are patient and you do that, new things will emerge, new images, new sounds, new memories, something you didn't expect will come out that is inspiration. At first, you will not understand it. Let me tell you again, you will not understand it, it is normal. Do not expect you are going to understand immediately, because usually you will not. The second stage after imagination is inspiration that's when

those images come, we do not understand it yet relax, do not start forcing it again, because people get excited when that first image comes and they start hammering with the old habit using the mind. You cannot do that. The new image comes relax. Just bring that image into your visualization and hold it there and keep watching. Little by little another image will come, until a certain point it becomes effortless and this is the beauty of it. When you learn to be serene, tranquil on your inner observation, your inner visualization, the images emerge spontaneously. When established, this practice is just like going over to the door and opening it and looking out into the city. You just go over to the door and you can see whatever you want. Meditation works like that, but you have to have that ability to not force it, to not demand it. When that happens, you can just stand there and watch everything that is going by, and you wait until the understanding emerges naturally. This is how meditation becomes something that requires no exertion. No exertion, just observation. Does that make sense? Okay, I am glad it made sense, because when you try to do it, it will not make sense anymore! You are going to go back to meditation and say, 'What? No, I want the answer now!' Forcing the mind. It takes patience to train the mind. It takes patience to train the consciousness, for it to return to its natural abilities. Let me say one thing and we will get to another question. The entirety of these six lectures in Tibetan is called Lojong mind training. I didn't make any of this up. Everything that I have been teaching you is established on thousands of years of meditators using them. You can have confidence in it. I can also tell you from my own experience, it works. All of this works. I am nobody special. I do not have any powers, or any special abilities, but I have been lucky enough to learn this, so that is why I am sharing it with you, because it works. It is not hard. Another question? Audience: Master Samael in Dream Yoga training suggests on waking up in the morning and writing everything down you dreamed of. I understand that is to improve our memory? Speaker: Absolutely. This technique master Samael talked about, keeping a notebook for your Dream Yoga practice, and when you wake up you write down everything that you remember, without moving too much, because you will disturb the ability for the memories to come into your brain. You can use that for meditation also, and I recommend it. When you sit to meditate, keep a note book there and a pencil ready, because you are going to get very stable and very serene and you will start to see things, and if immediately jump up and start vacuuming the house, or cleaning up you are going to forget everything. It will not stay with you, so write it down. Do not show it to anybody. It is for you. But, it does help develop memory; the ability to retain those experiences, so, use it for Dream Yoga and use for your meditation. Very effective, I am glad you mentioned that. Audience: You mentioned that the times have changed and that our humanity has changed in this era and the Aquarian era which started not too long ago. Most of us, or all of us grew up on or were raised on a Piscean doctrine, so what are the major changes, if you could recap them of what we need to do with the Aquarian state of mind versus the Piscean one that we grew up on? Speaker: The fundamental difference between the Piscean era of teachings and the Aquarian era of teaching is that the Piscean era required and emphasized secrecy of the higher aspects of the doctrine. All of the intiatic schools were closed during that era and the higher aspectswhich include the Mahayana and the Tantrayana aspectswere closed and only given to initiates in very specific, limited cases. That meant there was withholding or a period of repose for the esoteric knowledge. That also meant groups had to be isolated in order to protect that knowledge. So, we had groups isolated in the Himalayan Mountains, groups isolated in India, Egypt, South America, and Central America; many places around the world where that knowledge had been protected and isolated away. Now, we are in the Aquarian Era. It is marked by the bringing of knowledge, the arrival of knowledge, symbolized by that deity pouring water out the vessel; that represents waters of the Divine Mother the knowledge that we need. That knowledge is now given freely and openly, without restriction, the entire teaching given openly, freely to anyone who wants it. Moreover, it means the elimination of the isolated groups. The Aquarian Era is characterized by fraternity, cooperation, and social engagement, whereas the Piscean Era was characterized by a withdrawal from society, by the need to go and hide in caves and monasteries. The Aquarian is the opposite. In the Aquarian Era the teaching has to be given to everybody openly and freely, and everyone has to cooperate as equals and friends. So, those are the differences and we need to adopt that way of thinking. We need to allow that to emerge in our minds. Most of us, especially those of us who have karma with spiritual groups, still have the karma of the Piscean concept, and that is why you still see a lot of spiritual groups who restrict and restrain their

knowledged and do not let people have itd and have all kinds of reasons, but they do not give it out freely. Even some Gnostic groups say we should not give out the sexual teachings to the public, and some say we should not give out Kabbalah to the public, but what is disingenuous or inconsistent about that is that their founder gave everything freely to the public. All of his books are free to the public, except one, which is restricted for advanced levels, and anyone who enters those levels can get them. You have to be in a position where you can take advantage of it. It is not that it is restricted because none can use it, or that we do not deserve it, it is just we do not need it yet. When we need it, we get it. In that way we see that Samael Aun Weor gave the entire teaching freely to anyone, without restriction, and all Gnostic groups should follow his example that is Aquarian. Moreover, he did not set himself up as a patriarch that everyone had to bow to. He stated repeatedly, "I am less than anyone, no one should follow me, we are all brothers here." That is the Aquarian ethic. So, our job as students and instructors of the tradition is to understand the Piscean Era, but go beyond it. That is why in these lectures I have been bringing these traditional concepts to help explain that the teachings of Samael contain all those concepts, but go beyond them and show their Aquarian value. Audience: Master Samael talked about went to some place where he saw his Divine Mother where he was in rags and very poorly dressed, and all that. That means as his own situation spiritually, right? So, is it something we can relate in our dreams with someone? Speaker: With another person. I am not sure I understand your question. Audience: Like if we see someone that we love so much and we think it is out Divine Mother and is dressed poorly, in rags, can we relate that as our psychological state? Speaker: I understand. Absolutely, this is the whole thing about experiences in meditations and in dreams. If you have an experience or a dream, it relates to you. Any dream or experience you have is yours. Even if you some other person, it is because somehow that person represents something to you or in you, or is somehow related to something in you. So, any dream you have, you always have to interpret it psychologically in relation to yourself. Do not take them at face value. Sometimes we will have dreams of a friend or a family member and we will see them doing something bad, and then we come back to our body and think, 'I didn't know they were doing something bad. That's really terrible. They are really a bad person.' I am sorry, but that interpretation is wrong. That person, more likely, represents a characteristic in you. So, then you have to meditate what is the chief characteristic of that person. How do they behave? You might discover that you behave that way and that symbol was showing you your own behavior is like that. Do not think the people you see in dreams are literally those people. Most of the time they are representing something in you, that you need to see about yourself.