Know Thyself - E81 - Dr. Robert Gilbert: The Forgotten Wisdom Of The Rosicrucians: A Framework for Spiritual Actualization

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Dr. Robert Gilbert joins the podcast today to unpack the core teachings of rosicrucianism: a philosophy that synthesizes the best of ancient wisdom teachings and provides a foundation for living a spiritual life. He reveals how humanity lost touch with our intuitive gifts and access to the subtle bodies, as well as the great potential we have for regaining these spiritual powers.  He explains how to structure the subtle body in your own life, awaken your energy centers, and direct your life by the power of illuminated will.  Dr. Gilbert provides a strong foundation for anyone interested in understanding how to unlock spiritual illumination in a balanced and integrated way. André's Book Recommendations: https://www.knowthyself.one/books ___________ Timecodes: 0:00 Intro  1:46 Remembering Our True Selves  3:51 Understanding the Hidden Rosicrucian Teachings 14:33 How Humans Lost Touch With Subtle Realms  22:37 The Yuga Cycles & Global Awakening of Spiritual Gifts 29:37 Blessings and Curses of the Information Age  32:54 The Subtle Body: Structuring & Harnessing It's Gifts 47:23 Distorted Sexual Energy in Spiritual Circles 56:25 The Secret to Self Observance  1:03:50 The 6 Essential Rosicrucian Exercises  1:11:01 Awakening Kundalini Energy Properly 1:17:53 Illuminated Will: Balancing the 3 Centers  1:24:03 Breaking Addictive Impulses  1:32:29 Luciferic and Ahrimanic Beings Explained 1:58:35 Dangers of Spiritual Ego Inflation  2:14:32 Our Individual Spiritual Destiny 2:21:47 Humanity’s Golden Opportunity  2:27:49 Conclusion  ___________ Robert J. Gilbert Ph.D. is a former U.S. Marine Corps instructor in Nuclear­Biological-Chemical Defense, with over 30 years of research into both mainstream and holistic health methods. He holds a Ph.D. in International Studies, and contributed to the first academic textbook on Transformational Politics. Dr. Gilbert has extensively studied French methods of Vibrational Radiesthesia from the early 1900’s, sponsoring the translation of many rare texts into English for the first time. Dr. Gilbert was also the first non-­Egyptian to be granted Instructor status in the Egyptian system of BioGeometry®, founded by Dr. Ibrahim Karim of Cairo. Dr. Gilbert is currently the Director of the Vesica Institute for Holistic Studies in Asheville, North Carolina. He teaches both live and online courses, the latest of which is the Online series entitled Vibrational Testing and Healing. The Vesica Institute: https://www.vesica.org Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/vesicainstitute/ ___________ Looking to Start a Podcast? Podcasting Course: https://www.podcastpurpose.com/ Know Thyself Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/knowthyself/ Website: https://www.knowthyself.one Clips Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4wglCWTJeWQC0exBalgKg Listen to all episodes on Audio:  Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4FSiemtvZrWesGtO2MqTZ4?si=d389c8dee8fa4026 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/know-thyself/id1633725927 André Duqum Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/andreduqum/ Meraki Media https://merakimedia.com https://www.instagram.com/merakimedia/

As human consciousness evolves, the form that spiritual traditions take will evolve with it. The evolution of human consciousness, we went from an early state where human beings were effortlessly clairvoyant. Over time, this ancient form of clairvoyance began to die out. We're in a sleeping trance state all the time, and that's one reason why there's so much destructive activity in the world. So the goal is to be conscious all the time through the self-remembering process. There's certain things we have to be very cautious of. It doesn't matter if you're a musician or you're an artist or you're an architect or whatever. There's always the ego inflation challenge that will come in.

But on the spiritual path, it's particularly deadly. This is very much a time of being able to break the old patterns and regain some of our old skills at a higher level. We really do have the opportunity now to create a new golden age. If you choose the skillful way, rather than the unskilled way, you can get there more quickly. you can suffer less and you can help other people to suffer less. It's never too late to wake up and start now wherever you are on the path. Everyone, welcome back to the Know They Self podcast. I am so looking forward to this podcast.

One of my favorite things is when I get to do a two, three plus hour deep dive into some sort of philosophy or new area of life and understanding that I have recently found very fascinating and revealing and awakening from my own personal path. Today we're going to be diving in deep today with somebody who's a leading scholar, and Roschrucianism, Gnosticism, sacred geometry, the process of self-awakening, and so much more. So Dr. Robert Gilbert, thanks for being here. Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, the Rosicrucian saying in the beginning was the memory. Yes. It's where I want to start today. What does that mean? That's a great place to start. So there are many different maxims or sayings in the Rosicrucian tradition that provide some of the core principles. and when you unpack them, they really are related to certain types of practices or stages of an alchemical journey.

So when the Rosicrucians say that in the beginning was the memory, what they mean is that in every incarnation, we have to take what's known as the draft of forgetfulness. The draft of forgetfulness is where we incarnate and we don't have a clear memory of our previous lifetimes. Now, this can be overcome through certain types of structuring of the subtle bodies that we can do over time. And they will create literal structures in the subtle bodies that allow us to remember more about past incarnations. But definitely in the beginning, we have this draft of forgetfulness where we forget who am I, why am I here, and what is the purpose for the current lifetime. And so in the beginning was the memory is simply the indication that at the beginning of every incarnation, we have to go through this reclaiming of our memory.

And once again, knowing who we are and why we're here in this particular lifetime, it's somewhat like the ancient myth of Anana, where she dives into the underworld and gets all of her things stripped away from her at seven different levels until she's naked and hung up on a meat hook in the underworld, then has to take herself off that and then ascend back up and regain everything at a higher octave as she comes back to her full power. And so this is something very significant for every spiritual seeker, that particular process of remembering who am I and why am I here.

I'm really looking forward to unraveling that a little bit more. for people that are new to the word Rosicrucian to mystical Christianity, Rudolph Steiner, can you lay a little bit of the framework and, you know, foundation of what that is and where a lot of what we're going to be exploring today is kind of originating from? Great, yes. So I'll just say up front that my perspective on this may be a bit different than that you'll find from other people that teach things regarded to the Rosicrucian tradition. But the first thing I want to bring out about it is that,

From my perspective, the Rosicrucian tradition is simply the latest appearance of a particular perennial tradition that's been around for thousands of years. And it has some very clear roots connected to ancient Egypt, into the Jewish and Greek Kabbalah, into what became the Holy Grail tradition in Europe around the 9th century. And then really broke the surface in its current form as the Rosicrucian spirit, tradition in around the early 1600s in Central Europe. And so as human consciousness evolves, the form that spiritual traditions take will evolve with it.

And so the way that someone may be trained or educated in the Rosicrucian tradition is something that makes sense for our current culture that we grow up in. because if we were trained in the way that we were thousands of years ago in Egypt, that wouldn't necessarily make sense for people. The cultural context was very different. Even the structure of our consciousness was very different then. And so the Rosicrucian tradition, again, is the evolution of this deep spiritual science from that time through multiple cultural ages and consciousness states.

and when it broke the surface with the publication of some important documents in Central Europe in the early 1600s, it was really informing the public that there was a type of Western spiritual initiation lineage, of which there were people who were highly advanced and developed in it, the so-called Rosicrucian Masters. and there was a kind of invisible Rosicrucian college, which was the joining together of these initiates. And so as the information about the existence of Rosicrucianism developed, one thing to be very clear about is that in the beginning, it was not any type of external physical organization

that you could join and become a member of, or that was a physical location. What it was is a number of initiates who had incarnated and had regained their knowledge, in the beginning was the memory, of who they are, why they're here, and had for many lifetimes been a part of this particular lineage, as again it evolved into this new state, into this new tradition. And so one very useful way of understanding this,

And this is something that I found put into a very clear form by one of my teachers, Dr. Samuel Sagan, at the Clearvision School of Australia, when I lived and worked at that school in the 1990s. He said, you have to be very clear that every spiritual tradition is a particular group of non-physical spiritual beings who are the ones that stand behind that tradition and whatever the purpose of that tradition is, along with a certain set of human initiates that incarnate at a particular moment in time, then they go out of incarnation, they come back at another time, and so the resurrection tradition is the same. It's a particular group of spiritual beings working with human initiates to bring forward what we might say is the hermetic tradition into a current form that people who are educated in the European,

North American sort of way can really understand and apply in their own lives. So there is, as we move into the Rosicrucian tradition, the understanding that every tradition, being a group of spiritual and human beings working together for a common cause, they often will focus on particular purposes or strengths that is really the reason why you have this tradition versus that tradition. One idea behind this is that originally there is something known to the Rosicrucians as the original nosis or the original Michaelic knowledge. So connected to the highest of the archangel, Archangel Michael, understood in the Rosicrucian tradition

to not be a metaphor, but a very real living spiritual being that we can contact and have a connection with, that in that original gnosis, there was all of the spiritual knowledge related to humanity and humanity's evolution in a complete form. Then, many ages ago on the earth, that knowledge broke up, and in a sense, poetically it could be said to have fallen from the heavens to different parts of the earth. So the Hamalian tradition got a particular part of it, the Chinese tradition got a part of it, the Greek tradition got a part of it, South American tradition, etc. Different parts of the world received parts of that gnosis.

And so they became guardians of particular aspects of spiritual knowledge and spiritual practices with the understanding that the spiritual practices will structure the subtle bodies of the people who do those practices in a way that helps to attain the goals of whatever that tradition is. And it is also very possible, I want to be clear, that for every human being, we may incarnate into more than one tradition at different times. So many people that I've encountered who have a very strong connection to the Rosicrucian tradition do have lifetimes where they incarnated and were initiated in Chinese Taoism or in the Himalian systems, Kashmari Shavism, all types of things like this.

So it's not completely just one thing. But we do tend to have a primary link to certain things. traditions and to the spiritual beings of that tradition. So for the Rosicrucians, understanding it in that larger context, the Rosicrucians really specialize in attaining the most clear, concise, true understanding of non-physical realities and the sources of all physical existence in the spiritual world and really creating a new spiritual science. I would say that's one of the cores of the Rosicrucian tradition. But even then we have to be very careful about overly simplifying or rigidifying what's a very dynamic spiritual reality. Because even in Rosicrucianism,

there are branches that are related to the three functional centers of the human being. So we have what in the Chinese Taoist tradition might be referred to as the three elixir fields in the body, the three dantian, the upper dantian, which, is related to our consciousness and is referred to as the thinking pole in the Rosicrucian tradition, the middle dantean, the middle elixir field, which contains the heart and the lungs, and is connected to our feeling in the sense of the emotional body. And then we have the lower dantean, the lower abdominal forces related to life energy and our will forces and the actions we take in the world. So if you look at something like the work of Rudolf Steiner,

arguably the most advanced Rosicrucian ever to make himself known to the public and to have created a body of knowledge and work that got disseminated to the public because there are over 350 volumes of Rudolf Steiner's work. Most of them are collected lectures. Some of them are books that he wrote. But Steiner was essentially in the branch of Rosicrucianism related to what the Chinese would call the upper Dantian or the thinking pole. It's all about having a clear and understanding of spiritual science. Then for the feeling aspect related to the heart and the lungs, there's another branch of Rosicrucianism that is related to things that we associate today with the Holy Grail tradition, not in the sense of a lot of the modern materialistic work on the Holy Grail,

which tries to focus on physical bloodlines. That was not the original intent of the Holy Grail tradition. What it was is to become a vessel, a grail, to receive the solar logos, the powers of the sun into us. And this does have relationships to pre-Christian times with the ability to bring the forces of the sun into us. And a larger alchemy related to sun and moon alchemy in the body, which you find in many traditions around the world. This is like, for the Chinese, it would be the primeval yang and the primeval yin coming together, but sun and moon alchemy. So this middle aspect here has to do with the development of the heart as a spiritual organ of perception and also a development of human morality, not in some type of rigid or dogmatic sense, but in the sense of

understanding our core connection to every other living being and how that naturally leads to an ethical way of life to benefit others through our actions. It can also lead to extremely high forms of spiritual initiation and some very high initiates are connected to it. Then the lower abdominal forces with the will forces, the ability to take action to transform the earth, gives rise to things like biodynamic agriculture and literally transforming the earth itself through our willpower and working with it. So that's just a little introduction then to the Rosicrucian tradition, how it fits into the world system of traditions,

and some of the aspects. Incredible. So we live in a society right now that is in many ways very overly identified with the rational mind. And Einstein has that quote, I believe, that the intuitive mind is a sacred gift, the rational mind is a faithful servant. we have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.

And you're speaking to how we are very much so, especially with the Rosh-Crucian understanding, but also ties back to many of these different lineages in ancient wisdom traditions, that we are constantly walking, living in a sea of non-visible forces, and we have shut down our perception and our intuitive capacities to pay attention to these more subtle realms within us and around us. And so I would just love for you to share a little bit more about, you know, as we start to go on this process, and I want to go into the structuring of the subtle body and the 12 petal lotus and all of these things.

But just speak to how we very much so become disconnected from these more subtle realms. So the understanding in the Rosicrucian tradition, and you find aspects of this in other traditions as well, is that in the evolution of human consciousness, we went from a early state where human beings were effortlessly clairvoyant. And this had to do with the activation of particular energy centers in the body. Certainly, the third eye center is very important there. But there are other, what we think of as chakras today, that are related to the process of clairvoyance in different ways, and other energy centers that are not as well known to the

public, such as the middle brow center and the upper brow center, which, is around the hair line, which is what's known as the Unicorn Center to the Filipino spiritual healers. So again, knowledge distributed in different places. But we had a type of innate clairvoyance where everyone could immediately perceive non-physical beings. So you study the oldest spiritual text, and everyone is just perceiving these spiritual beings all the time. Now, this was something that allowed human beings to be guided by spiritual beings and forces. But human beings had not fully developed the ability of what we think of today as logical linear thinking that becomes completely independent and is linked to every human being becoming

a independent actor in the world. Rather, there is more of a group consciousness. So in the ancient world, one of the worst punishments you could have would be to be thrown out from your tribe or later from your city state or something of that kind. That was the worst punishment imaginable. Today, people would love just to be punished by being thrown out of their city or their state or whatever it might be. That would seem like a very little punishment to us. But for them to be separated from their group was a terrible experience. It was just the state of consciousness at the time.

And so over time, human consciousness developed so that we became more involved with the brain thinking, the logical linear thinking, taking this larger energy field around the head and its connection to the column of energy above our head and the modal energy centers above the head. Again, not well understood today, but particularly in the Himalian tradition and in especially things like Nepali's Tonka paintings, you'll see, very clear depictions of the centers above the head, their sacred geometric form, and non-physical beings connecting to them, usually through things like blue-skinned women writing on clouds or something and they're connecting to these centers. So this ancient form of clairvoyance began to die out as human beings develop the ability to think with the brain in an individual independent way and we developed the capacity to have logical linear, what we think of us today, more materialistic scientific thought.

And that gave us a certain type of control over the physical world that we didn't have before. But it cut us off not only from perceiving non-physical beings, but even being able to work dynamically with the pure energy and life forces in our own body and in the world around us. Some very advanced modern initiates like Stylianas eteschlis from science. Mypres, modern Greek Christian hermetic master, he described the way that in his old Egyptian incarnation, he could do incredible things with nature forces, you know, part the waters and great storms and all kinds of things. It was just natural at that time because of the connection to the life forces. where we might refer to from the Rosicrucian tradition as the atheric forces of dynamic life energy,

which we would call prana in India or chi in China, etc. It said that back in those days, incredible things could be done with the nature forces, can still be done by certain initiates. But today, because of the condensation of our energy field and moving into this type of logical linear thought, a lot of that connection to and control over our own energy centers and body has been greatly reduced and for the vast majority of humanity they have no consciousness of it only people going into certain traditions to study and learn practices begin to reclaim those abilities and also to work with the dynamic energetic forces around us in a way that in the ancient world the initiates did fairly

automatically. So one way this is described in the Rosicrucian tradition is that this process of moving into the brain is what became mirrored in the mythology of the labyrinth and the minotaur in the labyrinth. We're entering into the labyrinth of the brain and into this logical linear thought. I believe this is also connected to why you find, for example, the Jewish tradition had this prohibition against graven images and against visual representations. Because the old form of consciousness was extremely visual. It was based on a type of clairvoyant pictorial representation of non-physical beings. And the true perception of non-physical beings, of course, is never as, you know, a blue woman floating on a cloud in the east or of a young, blonde, muscular man,

wearing a suit of armor and a cape in Europe. Those are things that as we become more materialized, it's the form we put it into. It's so we cast on it. In its primeval form, it's much more the reality of these beings, which is more in terms of moving, light, color, energy, sound, tone.

For non-physical beings, that's more their true nature than anything that's like a physical person in front of you. They could take that form or represent themselves in that form, or we could clothe them in our own mind with that form as a way to understand them. But again, these images became more materialized over time, and the majority of humanity lost the capacity to directly perceive non-physical worlds

and even their own life energy. So part of what's happening now is that we've become so materialistic and our logical linear thinking has become so advanced that the natural movement now in the evolutionary process, We could see it in a sense as a type of descent from a higher state of perceiving non-physical planes, non-physical worlds, beings, and then descending downward into the material plane. So now we're very material beings. People associate themselves very much with the current incarnation and whatever their qualities are in that particular incarnation. And that's reached this point where now it's starting to pull up again.

Now, this is understood in the Rosicrucian tradition as a particular cycle of time. and that they refer to in the Eastern terms of the end of Kali Yuga. Now, according to some Eastern traditions, we're not at the end of Kaliuga yet. It's a tremendously long period of time. But in other Eastern traditions and in the Rosicrucian tradition, there's an aspect of Kaliuga that's considered to have ended in 1899. So that's what you find, for example, in the Babaji lineage from the Hamalyas,

where that teaching went to Sri Yukta Spar, who in his book, The Holy Science, gives the date 1899 for the end of Cali Yuga period. So this opening up from the dark age to this new age of light is accompanied with many, many challenges when you make these transitions. And we're still very much, very deep in materialism. This process is just beginning.

But it is leading to things that you can see mirrored in the world around us today, such as until a little over 100 years ago, there really weren't forums for free independent spiritual development and sharing amongst people until the theosophical society developed in America in the late 1800s. There really wasn't an organization that had branches all over the world that allowed you just to share spiritually with other people from the perspective of many traditions,

rather than just being a part of one tradition. In the past, most people would join one tradition for their entire lifetime. And they would go very deep in that tradition and be initiated in it, but they wouldn't necessarily have the knowledge of many different traditions. When people did acquire knowledge of many different traditions, they were often known to history and seen as remarkable people. So only around this time of the end of the Cali Yuga, as seen by the Rosicrucians and certain lineages, do we really have this growth of what people think up today as the modern metaphysical movement? or the modern New Age movement. So this is something that we have seen in the last hundred years people choosing an independent path of spiritual development

rather than sometimes joining one particular group and learning only from one teacher from one perspective. People are learning really in the hermetic way of many different perspectives, many different teachers, and finding their own path that way. And so a natural part of this is what the Rosicrucians refer to as developing the new etheric clairvoyance. The new etheric clairvoyance is that as we begin to develop, once again, clairvoyant

faculties that are not just fantasy or our own mental projections, but something real, then one of the first things we become aware of are the etheric life forces in the human body. And so we've become aware of the energy centers, the energy flows, being able to work with this. part of the process of losing the old clairvoyance is that in ancient times the human atheric body was much further outside of the physical body than it is today it began to contract into the physical body and particularly around the head it began to contract into the brain that allowed us to use the brain much more effectively as a logical linear scientific instrument but where we're coming to now is that having contracted so far, there's beginning to be expansions of the energy field and people

naturally seeking out different systems, whether it's yoga or Chinese internal alchemy or any other system around the world, that we can start becoming conscious of and working with the energy in the body and the energy flows in a highly productive way. And again, we can now understand that at this growth of independent spiritual initiation and spiritual seeking and of more and more people going to yoga and other types of practices to understand the relationship

between the physical and the energetic body and open up the energetic body. Now this is also connected to the tremendous, what sometimes referred to today as the psychedelic renaissance. Because one of the effect of psychedelic substances used in the ancient world now coming back today is that when you take them, you have the capacity

to start getting certain forms of clairvoyance by taking sufficient dosages of some of these plant medicines. Now, many of these are, in a sense, a poison. And so, with all toxicology, the dose makes the poison. And if you did too much of it, it could have certain effects that may not be beneficial. But at a certain level, one reason why it gives you this perception of non-physical world

activates these brain circuits is that it's having the effect of expanding the energy body outside of the physical body. So people often find if they did a lot of LSD, they're starting to perceive all kinds of non-physical things and trying to make sense of it. The issue is if they haven't properly purified or structured their subtle body before they do it,

they're expanding a structure that may not be completely balanced or properly structured, and so there's a certain amount of phantasmagoric, sometimes illusory perception that happens with the expansion because the energy centers weren't essentially cleared and activated beforehand so that this expansion expanded them in a completely balanced way. But nonetheless, this process is ongoing with the psychedelic renaissance with these types of what's considered to be hallucinogenic, but in its true form is actually clairvoyance-inducing. It will become hallucinogenic if the energy centers aren't

properly purified and activated first because then you're simply expanding a structure that's off balance but again this is expanding the energy body outside of the physical body and that's also why after someone does that experience they have this tremendous opening and all of these powerful experiences that they often feel very tired a couple of days afterwards because then there's like a shock retraction of the atheric body back into the physical body so all these are aspects of people becoming aware of the energy body and the things we're seeing in society today related to it. I think that provides a lot of incredible context for the expanded awareness that a lot of people are experiencing right now on their own spiritual paths. And yet, if you spoke to, if there's not the proper integration and structuring of the subtle body,

you're potentially opening up yourself to forces that will keep you really out of balance. And so there could be great danger with it. And I've heard you share many times also how we live in a time now where we have access to so much information and wisdom and wisdom traditions and so much knowledge, which is an incredible gift. And at the same time, we can take it for granted. And what used to in many traditions take years, decades, or lifetimes to be able to get access to certain information, we can just see on our phone, you know, which is great. Right. But then also, like, if we're not doing that work of integration to actually be able to embody you. that change, then it becomes something that can almost be detrimental, right?

This is the thing that I often refer to about the blessing and the curse we have today, that in our previous lifetimes, particularly for the last many thousand years, we've had the challenge that it was very hard to acquire deep initiatory knowledge. You'd have to join one group and go over many, many years of deepening what they taught you to, like, reach the deeper mistrust. trees. Today, many of these things that were very, very hidden until extremely recently, you can find in a book that you can buy for $20. But they were like massive spiritual secrets before. But the problem is that the trivialization of modern culture and the trivialization

of particularly spiritual science has led to a lot of fragments of information, sometimes true but unconnected to the larger context that it came from, or sometimes slightly warped and twisted. This is something where the real challenge today is the challenge of discernment and of the ability to reunite the fragments back into a coherent whole. And that's really been something that I've really devoted most of my life to, is finding those often very amazing fragments from all types of different traditions and bodies of knowledge and finding the way to put them back into a clear, co-eastern.

whole in a concise format where people can access it fairly quickly and having to spend years trying to find the pieces and put it together. And also in a format where you don't have to join any organization, you don't have to give your power away to anybody else, you're finding the pieces of the knowledge and practices that you need to craft your own particular path forward. So that's something that I've really dedicated the VESCA Institute to. So, again, the challenge there is to be able to discern between what's true, what's not true, what's partly true, but has to be corrected.

And in every case, put it into the larger context of the complete system. So that's very much what we're dealing with today. Many people know a lot of fragments, but whether it's coming together into a coherent system that's actually going to structure their subtle bodies for real growth that will survive the passage through the gate of death and into the next incarnation. is the thing we have to be very careful about now. Yeah, it's so easy to take spiritual knowledge to inflate the ego versus actually honoring it with reverence,

working with it in your own spiritual life and practice, embodying it and allow the life that you live to be the example for you knowing what you know, right? Because you don't know until it's in the body anyways. I want to dive a little bit deeper into one of those understandings, which is the structuring of the subtle body. because as we live these lives in this physical form, we can get very disconnected, very distracted into accumulating things in the physical,

into materialism, and we lose sight of one of the greatest possibilities and gifts and potential in this life to truly cultivate something that will carry with us after this physical form fades away. And so I just want you to speak into how important the structuring of the subtle body is, what that is, and the importance of really cultivating that because it's, It's what we take with us as we leave.

Yes, thank you. So we have the understanding in multiple traditions that there are different planes of existence. So these are often referred to as the spiritual planes or sometimes as the plains of nature. There are slightly different systems in different parts of the world. The most common system we find in the West today is the one popularized by the Theosophical Society, starting in the late 1800s. So you have the physical plane where you have the physical materialization of concrete physical matter. Above that you have the atheric life energy, Chi Pi Prana. And this is the dynamic life force that actually creates the pattern for everything that will physically crystallize.

So it has a sacred geometric type of structure to it and sometimes referred to by the Rosicrucians as the atheric formative forces that are going to literally form the shape and the function of everything that physically crystallizes. Is this something for example sorry to sidebar but just like cymatics for example will reveal the sacred geometric structures on a 2D plane. Exactly so when you put those particular sound frequencies into the paste or the powder or the water you can then immediately see that by changing the sound frequencies you're changing the geometric structure of the substance. And that's very much the way that this works.

It's really a revelation of atheric formative forces, structuring physical matter. Then above the atheric life plane, and any one of these levels you could talk about for hours, because they're all full of their own intense powers, the next level above that is sometimes just referred to as the astral in the Western world. And when they use the term the astral, sometimes it means the next level as the emotional body, which this, how it appears within the human being as the emotional body, but then it is from a higher source or the astral plane, the first true spiritual plane, that we encounter.

And sometimes the term astral is used to indicate both the emotional and the mental planes. It just depends on the group using it. So we have then our emotional function, our mental function, which comes from higher plane levels. at that point we're going from the vibration, density, pressure, tingling, hot and cold, types of sensations of the atheric body to perceiving light and color. And as we move to the emotional and the mental levels, we then move to the causal level. The causal level has sacred geometric blueprints of how everything will take form at the later levels. It's the type of essence that will create.

create everything in the world. And the causal level also is where the actions that incarnate beings take will then create patterns, blueprints, for cause and effect for what these beings will encounter in the sense of karma. Then level above that is the spiritual plane, and above that is the divine plane. So to really understand those planes, we need to know that the divine plane has no separation. Divine plane, everything is one.

That's the core highest teaching of every tradition is connecting back to the one where there's no separation between beings at all. Now this is something that we can perceive through the process of individuation because as we go below the divine plane, things begin to separate, individuate, start by splitting into yin and yang polarities

and then they go into multiplicity and then form everything on the lower plains. But we will sometimes perceive, for example, that you may, in your clairvoyant meditative work, perceive a large spiritual being that appears to be one being, and then you'll see multiple beings coming out of that being. And they had combined into one great being because that is the capacity at a non-physical level

for beings to unite back into the one, but also to separate back into individual. spiritual beings. And so that's related to what's happening at the divine plane when the way this tends to work for human beings as we experience that merging during types of tantric practices with an intimate partner where we're embracing the partner and the energy bodies merge to the point that we can't tell where we end and they begin. And so the two become one. We connect back to the divine plane. that opens up these highest yoga tantras and very high realization states, often in dual cultivation with a partner. So as we move from the unified state, everything is one at the divine plane.

The next level down, the spiritual plane, is where all of these different powers, states, functions of the divine that are inherent within the one, then separate out. and they become personified in specific spiritual beings. Now this is something that even a lot of people in metaphysical circles today only have an intellectual understanding of the way that the powers of the divine first form into conscious spiritual beings of a very great stature is fundamental to all the ancient traditions of the world. If you're going to understand something like Shiva and Shakti,

that's one of the initial separations from the divine godhead. into masculine feminine pairs in an embodied form as a real spiritual being, not an abstraction. And of course it is the same thing as in the Chinese tradition with the yin and yang polarities. But again, it always starts as something that is personified in conscious spiritual beings of a very high level. And then it moves down to the lower plains to manifest everything until we get the manifestation of the microcosmic beings like human beings on the physical plane, but we have within us the fractal of all the seven planes inside of us. That's connected to certain energy centers and certain structures of the subtle body.

So that's the first thing we have to understand that the human being, as the ancient texts say, is the microcosm of the macrocosm. And in some text they say that we're the crown of creation. And the reason for that is that we are becoming conscious beings and that we have all the different planes inside of us as our subtle bodies. So all the subtle bodies of the human being are nothing other than detachments from the substance of these higher planes that we've individualized into our own subtle bodies in this lifetime. So that's the prerequisite for understanding the structuring of the subtle bodies. Once we've been given that gift of these subtle bodies from the

higher plane substances, then everything we do with our mind, our consciousness, our thinking, everything we do with our life of feeling, everything that we do with our life of action and will with these three centers are all causes set in motion. They all have a vibrational quality. They all will activate in the fractal structure of the energy points, chakras, meridians of the human energy body, all of which are reflections of higher things. They will start to activate certain parts of our energetic structure and it will sedate other aspects of it. It will start to link up certain functional centers in the energy body with other functional centers, then creating two-dimensional shapes or three-dimensional forms and essentially creating a sacred geometric patterning

inside the subtle body. And so the structuring of the subtle body is really one of the most important concepts that we can have. It is really that pearl of great process. of what we go through in every incarnation, that is what we take with us. We don't take all the material stuff with us, but you will take how you structure the subtle bodies. So if we act simply on a bestial level of the reactive mind and we don't try to attain any type of higher state of consciousness or understanding or loving kindness action to other people, then what these, what the Tibetans would call unskilful states that we're constantly

generating with our detrimental thoughts and emotions and real impulses and actions in the world not only has an effect at the causal plane level of how it affects our karma, but it also will activate parts of our energy structure that will be off balance and will be somewhat toxic and works to sedate the more beneficial potential that we hold within the energy body. If, on the other hand, we're working toward loving kindness and a higher enlightened, constantly being expanded forward, things of this kind. Then we're activating the energy centers and linking them together into functional sets that, again, have a sacred geometric template to them.

And that will be what we take through the gate of death. So this is absolutely vital knowledge for everyone that everything that you do, every thought that you generate, every emotion you generate, every action you take is a cause set in motion and is structuring your subtle body. Through repetition, you're entraining your subtle body to a particular form. Now, one of the ways that psychedelic renaissance, the psychedelics can be used is they can be used for deconstruction purposes. they take us temporarily out of the emerging in our own hypnotic trance of these lower states. And we say, oh, why am I acting like that? I don't have to have a life like that. I could be something different.

And we can start consciously moving it forward. This doesn't always happen, but certainly the potential within the experience and happens for many people. So that's some of the core of the structuring of the subtle bodies. then within initiatory practices, you have particular methods to activate specific energy centers or particular linkages between energy centers, sometimes within particular geometric structures. So that's why, for example, in my Gaia TV series, I talked about the pattern of what is called in the Jewish Kabbalah, the tree of life. And in Daskalos's work from Greece is referred to as the symbol of life from its earlier Egyptian.

Egyptian roots. And I refer to as the gold pattern for the geometry of life design. And this has 10 centers that are linked together into this type of tree pattern that in the ancient world, particularly in Egypt, Jewish and Greek Kabbalah, and hidden aspects of later European traditions, is understanding that this is not just a cosmological map. This is actually something that appears in a fractal form in every human energy field, and by activating this pattern in a human energy body, it's a very powerful core pattern to move forward. Other traditions may work on activating other patterns or centers in the energy body, and that becomes a huge body of knowledge and possibility for human development. But that's, I would say, is some of the core things I

would offer about what is the structuring of the subtle bodies? This is something that I think we all experienced, but maybe haven't put into words the way that you just did, because whether it's a pattern, which was a behavioral compensation from childhood or whatever it might be, over-sexualizing in your brain or jealousy, we've often met individuals who later in life after decades of entraining their energetic body to be that way and be calloused in that way, where we've met older. spiritual men, for example, that are kind of unconsciously, like, have leaky sexual energy or, like, the myriad of different ways in which our subtle body kind of informs our psychology,

right? Because, like, we're co-creators with the subtle body in ways that we kind of create it, but then also it creates us. And so I just want to speak into a little bit more of how we can, because it's easy to get, like, stressed out of, you know, everything that I'm doing, every thought that I have, every feeling that I have is in a very direct way, creating my reality, but it's also very liberating once you realize to protect the accumulations of impressions from the outside and to be mindful of the thoughts that you are thinking and to uproot those those paradigms that we hold so deeply there and become the offspring to so much of those thoughts. And so it's just a really powerful thing to double down on for our audience here because if we're

looking to structure the subtle body in a way that is beneficial to us in the world around us, then it's just really important to harness the power of our intention of our intention and attention and and yeah and structure it intentionally yes so this is going to be then a discussion about the primal significance of self-observation mindfulness what gerjeeve called self-remembering yeah does this go now into the six six pedal lotus as well we'll get to that in a moment absolutely first I want to touch on what you were mentioning about like the leaky sexual energy that you will find and I do think it's that's a universal phenomenon for both men and women at particular stages and there are certain things we have to be very cautious of that I don't think has been clearly delineated in modern spiritual circles. So one aspect of this is that all three Dontyen must be fully activated and fully unified. That means that there must be full activation of the sexual forces

and they have to be integrated into the healthy emotion, the healthy mind, a healthy United States. Because the sexual energy is understood in the Chinese tradition is the jing. It is the core densified life energy. And once you pass through puberty, it gets expressed through the sexual forces. So that has to be brought to its highest level of intensity in order to to nourish the entire human energy body, but also has to be integrated with all these other aspects or it can become something toxic. Yeah, perturbed.

So there's an aspect of this that number one, there were the problems in the European tradition of the overly sex negative Christian tradition, particularly within Catholicism, that led to the suppression healthy sexual feeling and expression in a way that it then will become toxic. If you have to hide it, then, or it's like something that is described as being somehow satanic, then the reason for all of the black magic circles and the black mass and all

these things that developed within the Catholic Church among the priesthood is because they didn't have a healthy sexual outlet. It's going to take a detrimental form. Yeah, how much shame you're going to create when you're going to create when you think you're in a burn in hell for eternity for having such a natural biological process happen. Because someone coming from like a South Sea island that was not sexually repressed would never think to like hold a black mass where they're doing all these incredibly crazy things. But that's because they got mentally programmed that, oh, if you're going to claim your sexual

energy, now it's satanic and now it's linked to all these other things. But a healthy person would never make those associations. So that was some of the problems that came into the Western tradition is that the sex negative aspect led to something absolutely fundamental becoming pathological and toxic. Another aspect, and this also occurs with the Eastern tradition, is something that is known as premature purification, and that's not well known in spiritual circles today. Premature purification, you will find in many traditions, also in the East, in which a person begins to go on a very powerful, dedicated, spiritual path. But they're doing what's known as purification in place. That means they haven't

fully lived through their full sexual nature and sexual experiences, which include sexual exploration and all types of experiences. They haven't really lived through that yet. And by purifying in place, they're in a sense suppressing that. And what might be at an early adolescent stage of sexual development stays there and gets covered up with all these layers of higher spiritual development. But then when they get taken out of their spiritual ashram context, and this happened with quite a few Eastern masters that came to the U.S. in the 60s and 70s, they had developed.

Like certain llamas in different things also? Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is true for Tibetans, Indians, many Eastern traditions. Once they begin to come to the U.S. and many of the U.S. disciples had somewhat naive expectations of them. The thing is that there was the expectation that if this person has real sitas, real powers, then somehow they're a perfect human being. That's not the case at all. You can have all kinds of sitas and still have all types of uncompleted processes in your own energy body.

So you had these masters that often had real abilities and higher states of consciousness. But when they went from their ashram environments in the Hamalayas to being surrounded by new bowel young women or men in a Western context, then it became all types of improper sexual manipulation of students. And that's simply because they were faced with temptations that the purification in place brought out the part. to themselves that weren't allowed to develop to a higher extent. So actually one of the things I think is a great benefit of the modern Western independent spiritual path that we're seeing today is a often not clearly defined understanding, but somewhat in the background, that we do need to have that prodigal son or daughter stage

of experiencing and experimenting with the sexual energy because it's the core life force until it becomes fully integrated and that even people that are highly advanced in all kinds of ways if you actually get to know them you'll find that there's all kinds of weird sexual stuff

they're still working out partly because you can experiment with it today and in many of our past incarnations that was very suppressed and very difficult to work with so that's something I think people need to be aware of upfront is the challenge of premature purification

of purification in place I very rarely hear any discussion of it and the understanding that just because someone has certain advanced spiritual abilities it doesn't mean they've worked through all these core issues because the sexual energy then gets very tied into the emotional energy has to do with all types of issues of self-worth and of the desire nature and all of these types of things and then it's going to be connected to the thought forms that we have

around our sexuality other people's sexuality And again, once people begin to get certain level of spiritual knowledge, spiritual ability, some sitas, as I've spoken of in other places, there's one of the first challenges on the path is the path, the challenge of the falling prey to a premature ego inflation and thinking you're more advanced than you are, then starting your own little guru. group and then maybe it was fairly clean in the beginning. Then as you get more power, more people give their power to you. Then all of those unaddressed things come out, sexual manipulation. And it's one of those things that you see so often that at this point, any person involved in spiritual work just needs to have a mature attitude toward it. That this is, just because someone spiritually advanced in certain ways doesn't mean that they've

completed all these other developmental processes. and that's very true emotionally and it's very true sexually. Even if their thought forms are fantastic. These two centers require a lot of work, and we have the opportunity today to explore with them in ways that were very difficult to do in many previous incarnations. So I just wanted to mention that as something very important. That's one reason why I never present myself

is like I never say I'm an initiate. I never say that I'm a spiritual master. That's all a bunch of ego nonsense. I'm just someone that has studied on the path and I'm offering what I think may be of use to other people. I still have all kinds of crazy stuff that I'm still working through. And I don't want to be inauthentic and ever claiming anything else. And the people I'm most comfortable with who teach spiritually and do things with that kind are people that also acknowledge that and don't pretend to have a total purified nature. Now, there may be spiritual teachers in the world that have attained that.

But that's a minority. and particularly in the West, many people that we work with, we're all working on our own stuff. Okay, so that's one aspect of it. Now, the next aspect of really developing on the path is what you were touching on before, is the importance in really every tradition, whether you look at the ancient temples of initiation

that had know thyself over the entrance way, or the concepts of mindfulness, in Eastern traditions, the concept of self-observation in more modern Western and Eastern European traditions, also Gherjeef's concept of self-remembering is absolutely essential. There are really the same thing, and that is to be able to observe yourself with complete neutrality as if you're observing a person outside of you to see what is the actual content of your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions. Now, this takes slightly different forms and other traditions. It would be, for example, for the Buddhist, it would be observing your thought, your speech, and your actions.

But these things are very closely connected. And so, of course, these are reflections of the three primary centers. What are we actually generating there that's creating the structures of the subtle bodies? And so to observe these centers as the first aspect of the work. So we're observing the thoughts that we generate, the feelings, things that we have, the actions that we're taking, and getting to the point where we observe the will impulses that precede the action,

not just the physical action itself, because we can stop performing detrimental actions in the world if we can start catching the will impulse before it manifests in the action. So in day to day life, this looks like just paying attention before like the impulse to say something that might be hurtful to somebody or to reach the cookie jar or whatever the case might be to observe the impulse before you act on the

sensory, like to actually do it. Absolutely. And so through the observation stage, the first stage is one in which we don't try to change the content. Now, usually when things are observed, they're on their best behavior. So our worst thoughts, feelings, actions are when we're not observing ourselves or we think we're not being observed by others. Once we start observing it,

people often make the mistake when they start self-observation of like, oh, I'm observing my thoughts, so I have only the most beautiful, loving, kind, thoughts, etc. But that's not really what they're actually generating during the day. So you have to do it in the midst of lived activity,

in the midst of being with other people, and the challenges that we encounter, that trigger emotional reactions, those kinds of things. And so we observe it without trying to change it. And then we begin to see how detrimental, or as the Tibetans would say, unskilful, many of the thoughts, feelings, and actions regenerating actually are. It also leads to what Gurdjif, I think quite

brilliantly referred to as the terror of the situation. That has many different aspects, but one part of it is, man, my thoughts, feelings, actions are really something I wouldn't want other people to clearly see because it's not very advanced at all. So that's the first stage. You're simply observing it, like it actually is, no sugar-coding. Then we start working with the direction of it. So this then, as I describe in my online course and essential teachings and practices of spiritual science, one of those essential teachings and practices is the one about being able to generate a clear mind state, that's receptive meditation, where we can hold the mind clear, and then we can perceive non-physical realities or even our own internal content without sugarcoding or illusions

over it. So there's the receptive meditation, there's the active meditation. That's where we take action to craft a thought form and to create on a higher level. So the receptive and the active work together. We're doing the receptive when we're observing the internal content. You have to have a clear mind state. Mind is like clear surface of water. or a clear sky as a way it's often described. And then we go into the active where now I'm going to generate the beneficial thought forms that I know would be my true potential. The generation of the beneficial emotions, that's my true potential.

The generation of the actual will impulses and actions, that's my true potential. And so there's those two aspects of meditation come in. And often in many traditions today, there's only the teaching of reception. receptive or active, but rarely both. And we have to have both. So you'll find with things like Zen, Vipassana, Transcendental Meditation, very powerful, fantastic systems, primarily receptive.

But many Western systems primarily active. And in some of them, they never teach people to attain a clear mind state before they start generating more things. So now you're generating more content on top of monkey mind chatter and it destroys the power of the coherent thought form. So like a very powerful,

combination would be like a papasana or a shunia something that kind of helps you realize the clear sky of your being and then a gratitude or a loving kindness met of meditation where it's you're directing with your will kindness and well-being for those around you essentially absolutely and this would then lead to that active meditation where you're crafting the specific types of thoughts the specific types of emotions the specific actions in the world and that is really the active part of it Now, when we understand that this is absolutely essential, I've mentioned a number of times, but I think it's worth repeating here. Something that I often like to bring up as an example of this type of waking up and self-observation process. Again, it comes from the work related to the Russian esotericist Gherjeef.

One of his students was P.D. Al Spensky, who wrote a fantastic book called In Search of the Miracian. And in that book, Al Spensky talks about the way that he's learned from Gertjeef the importance of what he calls self-remembering, which is to observe yourself throughout the day. Because when you're not observing yourself, you're actually unconscious. You're actually in a trance state. And so he describes the way that he wakes up in the morning. He manages to attain self-remembering. He's observing himself all the time. He's going to work in the morning and he looks in a shop window and he sees something.

And the next time he becomes conscious again is it's late that night and he's taking his clothes off after the day of a full day at work and everything else. But he had been unconscious the entire time. He fell unconscious looking in the shop window and he didn't wake up again until that evening. He had gone to work. He'd done a full day's work. He'd gone out to dinner with friends. He'd done all these other things. but he had been unconscious the whole time

just operating in this trans state. This is one aspect of the terror of the situation. When you wake up and you realize we're in a sleeping trans state all the time. Most of humanity is and that's one reason why there's so much destructive activity in the world is that people in trans states are programmed to do certain things that are often destructive.

And so that is the experience that many of us have on the path is we will have that tear of the situation of good God, I just fell into a trans state. That person spoke to me in that voice that subconsciously reminded me of this trauma state and I just went out. And I spoke and I acted detrimentally and then I did all these other ridiculous things and now I'm just becoming conscious again. So the goal is to be conscious all the time through the self-remembering process. Now we can also connect that to what is considered the most essential practice in the Rosicrucian tradition, which is sometimes called the six basic exercises.

I prefer to call them the six essential exercises, and sometimes when they're dealt with, only the receptive aspect is described. And I think that under the rubric of the six essential exercises, both the receptive and active aspects must be practiced. So I go into detail about all six of the exercises in my essential teachings and practices of spiritual science course, because that's where I try to lay down some of these fundamentals.

Everything else has to be built on this beginning. So the six basic or essential exercises in Rosicrucianism are six because they are half of the lotus petals of the 12-pedal lotus of the heart. So it's understood in the Indian tradition that the chakras have a certain number of lotus petals. There's very deep knowledge in the Himalayas of what these energy centers are. And if you look at the original Sanskrit names of them and Sanskrit descriptions, they'll talk about the divine forces that are microcosmically present in us through these chakras that give us these divine abilities. Even like Anahata, which is referring to that energy center. Yeah. In early Sanskrit teachings, my understanding is that the actual vibration of the word when it was said actually correlates and resonates to the geometric pattern.

Yes. of that. It's fantastic that in the ancient sacred languages like Sanskrit, Hebrew, some aspects of ancient Egyptian, these languages are the expression of the vibrational power of the

thing into the scale of sound. And so that's where you get the Hakal sounds of power in ancient Egypt. That's where you get the mystery of the Kabbalistic word. There's something very similar in the Indian tradition where these are the seed syllables. These are the sounds. They carry

of power and the original true names of things are the combinations of the seed syllables that are the vibrational manifestation of the power of the thing that's being described. And that's a tremendous thing. So fascinating. I was really just having a conversation recently with a new friend about the, yeah, one of the lineages in Sanskrit, there's many different ways in which the alphabet is constructed, but one has 64 letters, which also encodes. with 64 of the DNA, you know, and many different...

Fantastic. It's just so interesting in how the six Indian, six original Indian schools of philosophy, Vedanta being just one of them, like, would correlate as you were saying the hymns or whatever, would actually be the correlation. And the vibration and saying it is more so the teaching than the intellectual, I guess, digesting of the words. It's just, it's so fascinating, like delineating all these different wisdom traditions and how they would disseminate this wisdom.

Yes, absolutely. And you find that these types of universal mysteries are so core you find it in multiple traditions like the mystery of the primordial word and the sounds of power is very, very significant. Because again, then when you said the name of something, you actually were manifesting the power of it through the sound. So with the six exercises,

we have the six lotus petals the heart, one lotus pedal is being developed by each of the six different exercises and the six essential exercises. The other six lotus petals are considered in the Rosicrucian tradition to have been developed in previous lifetimes, in previous stages of evolution. So six of them are already somewhat active. The other six need to be brought up through our own activity to their full activity. The first one of the exercises is the observation and direction of our thinking content,

upper dantean content. The second is the observation and then direction of our feeling content, the middle dantian. And then the third is the observation and direction of our will forces and our actions in the world and our dynamic life forces, the lower dantian. Then the fourth one has to do with a type of unbreakable positivity toward all of our life activities, toward everything that comes to us through our life, which is easier said than done to keep a positive view on it. Because even the most terrible destructive things are often a part of developing the pearl of great price. They are the initiation trials.

And often people that have a lot that they need to overcome are simply on the accelerated path of spiritual development, even though they have a lot of challenges and it's very painful. to always look for the beneficial, the positive in things. That has a real effect on the whole energy body. Then the fifth one is having a kind of, like they talk about Zen mind, beginner's mind. It's a type of openness, an openness to seeing everything differently than how we normally see it, no matter how advanced we get,

that we have the openness to new experiences, new people, completely new ways of life. and really seeing and experiencing things completely differently. So a radical openness at all times. Because you'll often find, even though somebody is very spiritually developed, they kind of get into their little, you know, it may be a fairly healthy rut, but it's still kind of a rut. And we need to keep that dynamism of like the beginner's mind.

I find like especially when it's most difficult, are usually our most intimate relationships, like family at Thanksgiving dinner, like the times where it's really difficult to stay open. and carry that openness are actually our greatest opportunities to cultivate that capacity for staying open. You know, like when it's hard to is actually when it's that real opportunity is to develop that. Absolutely. Yeah, that's very much the case. We have so many embedded trans states related to interactions with family, particularly because there's so much of that happened when we were very young before we developed conscious mind.

And so that stuff goes really deep. So that's five of them. Then the sixth is a harmonization of all of these together into one thing. So the idea is that in the Rosicrucian tradition, Rudolf Steiner mentioned that no matter what are other exercises you do, any detrimental effects that could come from any other detrimental activities that you engage in, detrimental thoughts, feelings, actions, detrimental effects of other types of spiritual practices, they will be balanced by doing these six.

So particularly for people today who are experimenting with things a lot of different traditions, this really creates a core foundation. Because again, we're observing and directing beneficially everything that's happening on all these levels. The other aspect of it is that why are we focusing then on developing the heart center first? Because we have to understand that in many ancient traditions, they're using the method of bottom up activation. So that's like Kundalini systems. You activate the base of the spine first, then you go upward. But we have to understand that historically, many of those types of, particularly Eastern traditions, would be in an ashram setting. And you'd often be separated from people of the opposite sex or any type of sexual

temptation. Because if you open up the base of the spine energies first, you're taking them up, Shishumna, you're taking them up to the crown. And then, of course, in more advanced work, like you find in Nepalese tradition, Kashmiru Shavism, you're starting to go up and you're working with even higher centers. But it's within a context that you're opening up these very powerful vital life energies. And it was understood at the time. Well, that could just go into wild levels of sexual activity if you're opening up that powerful forces.

And so that's why, you know, in some of the older traditions, they would say they would give people meditations, like seeing the, in your meditation on it, the body of a person you might have sexual desire for as being full of excrement and all kinds of horrible, nasty things you wouldn't be attracted to. And these are ways to try to manage it in a practical form. Now, of course, it has its benefits. This is a real path that works if it's done properly. The problem we have today, of course, with bottom-up systems other than what I just mentioned,

is that you have to have the subtle energy channels open, otherwise you get what's called diverted risings, and that leads to Kundalini sickness, like what Gropi Krishna talks about in his book on Kundalini, and a lot of people got it in the 60s and 70s. Now, just as a quick side note to that, for the bottom-up method, when many people began to develop,

because they hadn't opened up the subtle energy channels enough before they opened up Kundalini in 60s and 70s in the U.S., that was based on, certain Eastern approaches that normally would have prerequisites before you did the higher level work. So one thing that happened then is the early 1980s, the hidden material from the Chinese Taoist yoga became available for the first time to the public, very hidden before. And so at that time, they told people, well, what you're really working with then is the spinal channel and then the front channel of the body governing vessel and conception vessel in Chinese medicine.

So the problem is that you're getting diverted risings, it's not going straight up to the crown center, it's getting stuck in these other channels. And what you need to do also is to make sure the energy doesn't get stuck in the head, because the head cannot store vital energy safely. Vital energy is stored in the lower abdomen, what's called the lower d'antian in the Taoist tradition. And so they taught people how to connect the circuits simply by touching the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, the governing vessel coming up the spine, This is also what's behind the Egyptian form of the staff in Egyptian initiation. The first part of the staff is coming up the spine, into the j-pillow, around the back of the head, going up to the crown center, then to the front, where part of it can come out of the upper brow center as the Euras. But then it continues down to the upper palate.

If it stays there, you can build up too much energy in the head, and it'll start getting Kundalini sickness. If you touch the tip of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, the tongue, the tongue is the electrical conductor that links the governing vessel to the conception vessel, and then the energy will run down from the head, down the tongue, move down the conception vessel, where it can either circulate in what's called the microcosmic orbit, or it can be stored through vortex movements in the lower abdominal region, in the lower d'antian. So that's just a quick side light for people related to the bottom-up method of activation. Then the top-down method really became popularized with Christian initiation,

where you see the pictures of the Christ in the baptism in the Jordan by John, and you see the line of light above his head, that column of spirit that's so important in all traditions for advanced initiation. And you see the dove of the Holy Spirit descending down into his crown center. So that's an indication of the top-down method. And so you would actually activate the consciousness first. And then from the consciousness activation, you then move down to all the other chakras and centers. So that bottom-up, top-down, but what people don't often realize is there is a center-out method.

And that's the Rosicrucian method is center-out. So that's why we're doing the six basic exercises first and activating the heart chakra first with the six basic exercises. Because it's understood in the Rosicrucian tradition that we can activate any of the chakras. We can activate any acupuncture point in the body, any meridians. Every one of these holds a nectar inside of them. Even all the acupuncture points have a different divine power and nectar. And on a greater scale, so do the chakras. And so when we activate them, we go into them, we can taste, feel, participate in that nectar.

But the thing is, there always has to be some type of larger pattern or coordination for the activations. Otherwise, it can just be all types of scattered fragments. So the Rosicrucians understand that by doing the six basic exercises first, we're activating the heart to become the organizing center for the entire body of energy, which is of incredibly significant impact for people's spiritual development so that whatever else they're doing to activate things in their energy body, which again we're doing all the time through our thoughts, our feelings, our actions, is all getting harmonized and coordinated with this type of vortex center of the chakra of the heart

being fully active and then organizing and coordinating everything throughout the body of energy. And again, the beginning of it is those mindfulness consciousness practices that then linked to our earlier topic. So now we see how that's now developing into a specific system in one particular tradition, in this case the Rosicrucian, that understands these other things contextually for why are we doing this? I think that's, I mean, you dive much deeper in your courses, which I think are incredible, like you're such a powerful synthesizer of so many of these understandings. highly recommend this process of cultivating the illuminated will. I would love for you to share a little bit because it's tied in here, right, as we walk through

our life and we go on the process of self-actualization, clearing out, a lot of the stuff become more healthy, clear. We have the power and capacity for this illuminated will to arise within our life. And so what is that for people that don't understand or aren't familiar with that? So again, I think we can understand it in context as part of the three primary center. with the consciousness and the heart forces of the emotional life and then the dynamic life forces of the body and how that manifests behind every action that we take. So if we understand these three centers from another perspective,

the Rosicrucians, Rudolf Steiner, working with other Rosicrucians, created what's known as Anthroposophic Medicine. Anthroposophic medicine is a Rosicrucian form of medicine. It actually has hospitals and things in Germany. And there are practitioners around the world. They're all accredited medical doctors before they do the anthroposophic medicine training. And they'll then, as far as functional centers of the body, refer to the head center as the nerve sense center.

They'll refer to the Middle Dantia and the heart center as the rhythmic center. because there's a rhythm that's maintained in the human body that's essential for life in both the respiration rate of the lungs and the pulsation of the heart. And then in the lower abdomen, they call it the metabolic limb system. Because that's everything to do with our metabolism, our dynamic life force and vitality, and how it gets expressed through our actions through the movement of the limbs. So when we see it from that perspective,

We can also add in another perspective. There's a particular meditation that I do in some courses to activate the three centers with their core function. And so we refer then to the function of the head center, the consciousness center, as the function of light. Because consciousness is light. When light gets turned inside out and we experience light internally, we experience consciousness. When consciousness gets turned inside out to be expressed externally, it becomes light. Light and consciousness are the exact same thing. So this is the center of light.

Then for the forces of the middle, Dantian, those are the forces of love. So we have light, love, and love is the force that allows us to unite our essence with another person. It's that force of pulling us magnetically toward another person to be able to have two become one. and return back to the one, the divine state. It can only be done through the heart forces, the force of love. Then the lower abdominal forces are life. They are the life forces. They are what animate the physical body and make us alive

and are behind every action we take in the world, which also generates karma. So we have light, love, and life as the three centers. So when we talk about the illuminated will, we're talking about those forces that are connected to the lower abdomen, the metabolic limb forces, the ability to take action in our life, the ability to take action in the world to transform the world around us. And so, illuminated will is really bringing together all of these centers where we have

the clear consciousness, the clear understanding of the upper Dantian, the loving, kindness connection to all that lives from the love heart center. And then the ability to take action through the limbs and other actions in the world through the lower Dantian. So illuminated will has to be illuminated with light and with love. So it really is a coding for activating all three centers together and then it being expressed. Sign me up. Sounds great. So illuminated will, then as we were talking about.

the six essential exercises, there's an aspect of this again that it's not just the observation of the actual actions we take in the world, but it's also becoming aware of that moment before the action is taken to where we have that impulse that will lead to an action, and that requires a deeper level of self-observation, because we can stop ourselves from taking detrimental actions from speaking in an angry, destructive way to another person, or even thinking destructive thoughts and generating destructive emotions. There's like a first impulse that comes in. Anybody that observes their reactive mind will become aware of that impulse and how it flares up. Like there's an actual energetic activation in the lower abdomen that happens. It's a flaring of energy

when a person becomes angry, activated, in some way triggered by external things. So it's the observation of that trigger state before action is taken. And so, again, whenever anything is observed, it tends to get on its best behavior and we'll have a moment, a gap there, between that initial impulse and acting on it and doing something.

So illuminated will requires that ability to observe that initial impulse to the action and run it through the powers of the three centers to only make it an action if it's something that is connected to our highest ideal and what we really want to accomplish in the world and not a reactive mind, simply reactive state to something that we should deal with differently. So I want to get your quick opinion

because, I mean, I could literally talk to you for eight hours and I feel like I'm going to. There's still a lot when to dive into this conversation. But for those that, of course, want to cultivate the capacity for illuminated will to the actions that take in the world to be in coherence with the light and love of their body. But it's very, they find it very difficult to pay attention to the sensation before the impulse, to even observe it before it happens. It's very much so automatic and especially that people, when people feel like they're very held onto by their addictive tendencies.

Like the grip is so strong. It's really hard to even get to what we're speaking to, I feel like oftentimes. And so is there anything that you would mention for those that feel like the grip on an addictive impulse for alcohol, for sex, for weed, for even a thought pattern? Like it is just so ingrained. There's a lot of things. I'll just mention a few of them briefly. So, of course, there's a master system developed in. Buddhism for these types of things, which again goes back to the mindfulness.

So when they work with addiction, they will often say in the beginning, don't even try to stop the addiction, just be completely mindful of everything that you're thinking, feeling, et cetera, at the moment that you're doing it, and just completely observe. How does it actually make you feel? What's the actual impact on you when you're fully conscious? Because an addictive impulse is one that's a trance state. and if you can be fully conscious of that moment, you can do what in neurolinguistic programming

is called a pattern interrupt, and you can interrupt the trance. So that's one thing. Again, there's much more detail on it in all the great Buddhist traditions, but the core of it is simply to be very mindful. You don't not do it, but actually, what does that alcohol actually taste like?

What does it actually feel like? How does it actually affect your consciousness? Are you becoming more aware, enlightened, loving, or are you becoming something else through the effect of this on your consciousness? Can you even stay conscious after you've drunk alcohol? Or is it pulling you automatically out of that into nothing but trance states? So the observation and the actual experience of it fully is like a major part of it. Now there's also the aspect of it that as we have today in neurolinguistic programming,

as a clarification of a lot of the subconscious programming of the human being, there's the aspect of it where it all comes down to pain and pleasure. If we subconsciously associate pleasure with the activity, we will always do it. No matter what the conscious mind says, no matter what we're told from external sources is the right thing to do, if we associate pleasure with it, we will continue to do it or to seek to do it. and if you haven't worked through changing your association of it from pleasure to pain, then even if you stop doing it, it's like the people who are working against addictions and they say,

oh, I struggle every day. I'd love to have a drink. And so they're like suffering inside because, oh, I want it. I yearn for it so bad, but I can't have it. And there's like a lot of internal conflict. They're not a superconductor spiritually. It's like massive internal conflict all the time. So the way to get out of that is simply to change the association.

Now that may be easier said than done, but the core of it is that this is the truth of it. And that's why neurolinguistic programming has been very successful for so many people for different things. Quick side note, I do think that neurolinguistic programming has taken many wrong turns. And a lot of neurolinguistic programming today, like courses that are offered, etc., is basically how to use it for like marketing things to people that they don't need, or how to use it to manipulate other people subconsciously by knowing their inner code and triggering them to certain actions. So I think a lot of it has become very toxic.

But that doesn't change the fact that the actual observations in neurolinguistic programming are very, very helpful. The problem is that it became this type of, you know, how do you hypnotize another person to doing your will type of thing rather than what it should be, which rather than how, you induce trans states and other people to get them to do what you want them to do, it should be how to train people to observe for themselves their trans states and how to get out of them

and how to observe when another person is trying to put them in a trance state through their speech, their cadence, their tonality, all these methods that are used in hypnotic induction and that are very well mapped in your linguistic programming. If it was used for the light, it would be training every member of the public for how it works. so they can no longer be manipulated by it and to teach them how to get out of trans states and into another state. That's what its potential is.

So I just want to make that clear when I'm talking about NLP. A lot of the way that it's being done today I don't think is healthy. But nonetheless, the knowledge itself is something significant. So if you can change your association, so people that do therapy connected to NLP, a person's trying to stop smoking or stop eating

and they're obese or whatever it is, it has to do with the fact that they have the subconscious trance state where they associate pleasure with the activity and instead they have to be taken through a process where now they associate tremendous pain with the activity like for people who are heroin addicts and can't get off heroin they associate tremendous pleasure with it but what about all the people that aren't on heroin they don't do it because they associate pain with it They associate the pain of shooting up. They associate the pain of what it does to your life. They associate the pain of what it would do to all the aspects of their social connections.

So it's all the matter of where the attention is focused. So if we can change the focus of attention, along with mindfulness, to what something actually is and how it actually affects us. And we can, for the things that are detrimental, associate pain with them, there's no inner struggle. You're a superconductor and you have no attraction to that addictive thing. whatsoever. If the things that we should be doing that we don't, I need to eat healthy, I need to exercise, I need to heal my relationship with this person, whatever that is. If we associate pleasure

with it, we will do it. So it all comes down to pain pleasure association. And again, we have these modern systems that will help us understand exactly how the trans state is formed and how the trans state is disintegrated. I would then mention that this is also part of the psychedelic Renaissance. I was just meeting yesterday with some lovely people in Santa Monica who have a medical practice that is exploring the use of psychotropics with stopping addictive processes and overcoming trauma, et cetera. And of course, there's a lot of that happening now. This is a real growth field. It's really in its infancy as how it's becoming medicalized or systematized within medical practice.

But it's so well understood now that some of these substances, if you take them, they will be the pattern interrupt to where you can change that state and you can break the addictive pattern. And this goes all the way back to the 50s, people doing LSD and they stop being alcoholics after one trip. So that's because it's changing our focus,

it's changing our perception. and it's also activating the energy body in a particular way, all of which are interrelated. Yeah, like John Hopkins' recent studies or fairly recent studies of psilocybin in conjunction with therapy being extremely much more effective than any SSRI or like the futility of pharmaceuticals. Yes.

So those are just a few things I would bring up for the breaking of addiction. That's powerful. You know, Young has that quote that pleasure is tension reduction. And a lot of it is like, it's just it's so illuminating to see how all of it really is programming within us and how we perceive what is going to bring us pain versus pleasure so i think even alone the awareness of that insight um starts to open the door into you actually reprogramming that through the various

different buddhist nLP or whatever very out of different um yeah uh methods to to be able to rewrite that that code so i want to now open up who the beings of aramon Lucifer, these luciferic and armonic impulses within us, the qualities that come from these beings, and for people that aren't familiar with them and their traditional understanding of what and who they are. And then we'll kind of find the middle way as we tend to do here. But yeah, I'm excited to dive into this because it's been a big, I think, point of illumination of my own path the past few months. So excited that been. Yes.

So we mentioned before everything comes from the one, everything comes from the divine plane. Then all the things that will manifest on the lower plains first manifest as spiritual beings that hold particular impulses, particular functions, in an individualized form. And so again, that's why you find in all the ancient traditions, they have all these gods and goddesses that have different powers. Now over time, that became materialized. and somewhat caricatured, but nonetheless, the core idea was there. So as we're looking at the idea of the proper path of our spiritual evolution on Earth,

there's going to be those forces that are part of the absolute correct pathway directly in our evolutionary trajectory of getting to our spiritual destination. Now, all of these things that we're talking about here are these core spiritual principles that form everything in our world, starting with divine to the spiritual plane, then to the realms of karma and carization with a causal plane, then everything below it. They're all thought forms in the mind of God. So that's one of the terms that I find absolutely essential on the spiritual path, is that the highest level, the thought forms in the mind of God are of all the differentiated systems

that will create the alchemical chamber that we're incarnating into as human beings for the structuring process and the alchemical retort. And so those thought forms in the mind of God will manifest as beings on the spiritual plane. Now, that as thought forms in the mind of God, always has a sacred geometric form to it. And that's why when you see these geometric forms in different traditions, they are themselves packed thought forms. There's very deep things behind what you just see as a simple shape. So, for example, if you look at the form of the tree of life, the gold pattern that I talk about,

this core pattern of energy in the human body has a central channel and has two side channels. The human body is based on that. We have the right and the left sides, the yin and the yong. But before there was ever polarity, there was the one. there's that one central channel. So this occurs in the human energy body in the central channel that goes from the perinium to the crown. Now this is not Shoshumna.

Shachumna is an interior channel of the spine, also a very important channel. But the one in the absolute center of the human body is the central channel that you see on the tree of life. It certainly connects to and works with Shishumna, but it's its own thing. Then we have the two side channels in the body that are polarized.

The Ida and Pingala? Yes. No, those are the forces within it. They're not described that way in, let's say, the Egyptian, Jewish, Greek Kabbalistic. But they do exist there. So we have, in this case, we're talking about two straight side channels. But within the two straight side channels is the potential for caduceus movement of the polarized forces, which is the Edia and Pingala. and at that point they can begin to caduceus and interconnect with the chakra system.

And whenever you get two opposite polarities connecting together, now we're getting to vibrational science. In vibrational science, you get two opposite polarities together. And this is also the core of tantra in biological beings, but it occurs with everything. Two opposite polarities combine together, they will create a type of implosive cascade to center that opens up a gateway beyond time and space. And that's happening all the time with Ida Pingla combinations and Caduceus. And there's things about this not using the terms Ida and Pingla, but using other terms and connection to spiritual beings

in things like the Greek tradition, for example. But if you understand the core pattern, you can find it how it's being expressed in different ways. So we've got the two side channels in the body, which can also caduceus. And then we've got the central channel. Only that central channel on the tree of life goes up to the very highest,

the crown, Ketter, and all the way down to the lowest, the earth, Malcote. So this is actually a pattern in the human energy body. Now, if we see this then as a microcosm of the larger pattern, we can also see this aspect where the two polarities

can manifest in their most primordial form as a circle because the circle in the sphere are really the first forms in sacred geometry. They're like a evolutionary cascade from thought forms in the mind of God. You always start with an immaterial center. That immaterial center, like the Bindu point, has other names and other traditions. That immaterial center is the connection point to the divine plane. It's in the center of everything, not metaphorically, but literally. A lot of Egyptian biogeometry,

that I'm also very fortunate to teach through my teacher Ibrahim Karim and Cairo, Egypt, is all about how do you activate that immaterial center of any person, place, thing because there's a divine plane energy that expands when you do so. It's a remarkable system. So the beginning is always the immaterial center that connects us back to the divine, to the one.

Then that moves outward, just like the concept of the singularity in physics, moving outward to form. form space time. And that's what it does. It forms space time. And it forms then around it, spiritual plane, causal plane, etc. So these planes then form and sheathes around it. Microcosmically, that is present in every person, place, and thing on Earth. Those planes also have this formation. This gets into technical knowledge of temple initiation and temple sciences. until you get to the outer boundary with the physical plane.

So you always have that movement from the immaterial center out to the periphery, and that's what you see, for example, with the hieroglyph for the sun in ancient Egypt. It's a point in the center of a circle. And then that becomes, in later traditions, the point in the center of the circle for the Rosicrucians and Godhead, they'll have something under it saying that it's the form of the Godhead. point in the center of the circle is the godhead. The sun is the center of our solar system, but also connected to the divine plane in the godhead.

So it's a symbol for the sun as an ancient Egypt. It's also a symbol for gold. So in alchemy, point in the center of circles, the symbol for gold. That's because gold is the material crystallization of the energy field of the sun, not metaphorically, but literally. It has that vibrational essence,

which is why I was so revered in ancient times. Just like silver is the actual crystallization of the energy field of the moon. So you then have that form of the circle of the sphere is the primordial movement. So let's say you have one of those that is made of one polarity. Now if you're going to combine that with the opposite polarity, the two circles or spheres will overlap, creating the vesica. So that's the whole idea behind the vesica institute. It's where the two opposite polarities, male-female, heaven and earth, inner and outer, all these sorts of things, then combine with each other and where they overlap,

and what today is sometimes called a Venn diagram, it makes that almond shape where the two become one. But then the outer sides of both circles where they're not overlapping, then has the pure polarity information of the two. But this is like the key to Tantra. The two are overlapping and they create that almond-shaped enclosure, and now you can connect back to the divine to the godhead. So if we understand that as a core pattern for how energy works,

as when we apply that same principle to human evolution, then we have a central path that goes to heaven, earth, and is like the direct path in our development. Which would be like Christos or the Christ channel kind of energy? Exactly. When we see it in the concepts and terminology of the Western tradition, this would be the energy of the Christ is held in that central channel.

And then as we move it from the Christ level to the angelic level, then in the West that central channel is connected to Archangel Mikhail, considered to be the most advanced of the archangels in the Western system. So you have that as the central channel, the only one that goes all the way up and all the way down in the tree of life microcosmically in the human body. And then you have the two side channels, and that manifests as what must occur if there's any freedom in a developmental system.

For freedom in a system that is conscious and can make free will choices, you have to have the option to go off toward one polarity or the other polarity. If you don't have that option, there is no freedom. And so our challenge as human beings is how to stay on that path toward our spiritual destination and not get too pulled off to one side or the other. Now, just as the Christ, Mikhail, et cetera, in the Western system are the beings that are supporting us on that journey on the middle pillar, the middle path described by the Tibetans, because the Tibetan system is all about the middle path. Take that middle path, don't go too off to that extreme or the other extreme. So there must be spiritual beings that embody going off the pathway to one side.

Because this is really the pathway, because we are spiritual beings incarnated in a physical body, it is the question of how do I act as a spiritual being in a physical body, combining the necessities of spirit with the necessities of matter to get to the goal? Because that's a complex system we have to work with. All of the demands of the physical body, all the demands of the physical plane, of embodiment with what the spiritual goal is, and to keep all that coordinated, is a real art in every human life. So we have then, if it goes off balance

with the perfect balance of spirit and matter, it can go off to the spirit side. If it goes off to the spirit side, it can lead to illusory forms of spiritual development. It can go to the side of wanting constant ecstatic process to the point that the physical body cannot maintain it. And so, like, example, if you're heroin addict, you're wanting constant ecstatic process.

process, but the physical body just degenerates if you do that. I can't take that, can't handle the charge. And so the impulse that's leading us to an unbalanced spirituality that ignores or doesn't properly esteem or understand the physical plane is what became known in terms of Lucifer, meaning light bearer, because there's a tremendous misunderstanding in some modern spiritual religions and even spiritual seekers that we have the darkness and the light and the light is good and the darkness is bad. But too bright a light can blind us as surely as complete darkness can. And so there's a misunderstanding in working with spiritual beings that any being that appears in light is a good being. Not necessarily because these are beings of tremendous spiritual light.

The luciferic beings are at large. And of course, they're least. leader would be Lucifer himself. The problem of even discussing this, I'm doing my best to go very pedantically step by step through it. Because otherwise if you just start talking about, oh, Lucifer and Aramon and Satan. There's so much conditioning. There's so much conditioning,

there's so much caricaturing, it becomes so trivialized and so ridiculous that we have to understand that our thought forms about these things are highly corrupted. And so it's very hard for me to talk about this in public things because people have all types knee-jerk reactions to these things. Either they don't exist or they want to go some fundamentalist route toward it. We have to start from the beginning. So that's what I did the best to start

at the beginning with it. So we then have the luciferic forces which pull us toward getting away from everything we have to deal with in human physical life and just wanting to be totally spiritual and constant ecstatic process, things of that kind. So it manifests with everything. of that nature, and it also manifests as, again, illusory forms of spirituality. Spiritual teachings that are not true, because for the luciferic beings, it's fun to influence human beings, which are like little children from their perspective, to like come up with these wild fantasies about what actually exist. They're not really that concerned with spiritual science.

Like, whatever wild fantasy you have about how things are, that's fine. So that's the luciferic side. then the aramanic side is the opposite temptation to give all the weight to the material side of the incarnation and then their ultimate teaching just like the ultimate teaching of the luciferic is basically everything of the physical plane is a Maya it's an illusion it doesn't exist get off the cycle of karma

reincarnation there's no purpose for being here and part of that comes from compassion for them They have their own weird ways, but there's a term in Russian that means a kind of condescending pity. And they kind of have that. They kind of like, why put these young spiritual beings through this thing? That looks terrible. Have a good time. Get out of there.

So on the other side, we have the Aramonic beings. They have the name Aramon because that's how they were described in the Persian Zoroastrian religion many thousands of years ago. that was the first religion to describe them clearly, because that was at the stage of human development, the time that that religion crystallized with its particular spiritual initiates, Zora Aster, that formed it, they were the first to, like, really perceive this action.

Before, they were so clairvoyant, they weren't perceiving or was in the matter side so much. So the aramonic forces are the ones that make us believe that everything spiritual is an illusion. It doesn't exist at all. Only matter is real. They are behind all types of materialism.

If they had their way, we would believe that we're nothing but an accident of chemicals randomly coming together and through a force of some type of blind evolution. We're just an evolutionary accident. And we don't exist before birth. We don't exist after death. There's nothing spiritual. There's nothing but the Darwinian survival of the fittest. nature is red in tooth and claw and you're actually serving evolution by victimizing other people

because the strongest should get the proceeds and the weak should be destroyed and consumed so that's the aromonic side of it pure materialism and so this became embodied within the passion play of the life of christ with the christ being crucified on a cross between two thieves. So there's one on one side and one on the other side, just like the vesica, the two polarities and Christ in the center. The two pillars on the tree of life and the one that goes all the way up and down is in the center with Christ literally being crucified on it. The Shuma and Ida and Bingala. Yes, exactly. And so what you find in that is that the thief that has a luciferic tendency is overshadowed by Lucifer says to the other thief, you and I deserve to suffer, but this man is blameless. And he inclines his head toward the Christ. And you see this on all of the depictions of the three crosses at Galgatha, that one of the thieves has his head inclined toward Christ, the other is turned away from

Christ. The one that's head inclined toward Christ is the one with the Luciferic impulse. Luciferic beings don't intend harm to the level that the Aramonic do. And so he inclines his head toward the Christ and he says take me with you into your father's kingdom and Christ says you will be with me in my father's kingdom tonight and the other thief rebukes and reviles the Christ and his head is turned away and that shows a certain something about the nature of these beings and the redeemed Lucifer is known as the paraclete or the paraclesian spirit and that's something that happens within our own nature where our more wild partying, exuberant experience of life, sometimes not very grounded, can be turned toward

the central pillar and toward the central path in a way that should be understood. The materialistic side is the other thing. So we have then the idea that we have the middle pillar with the Christ, Mikhail, we have the unbalanced spirituality with Lucifer and we have the unbalanced materiality with Aramon. Now of course this is just a fundamental thought form about the whole thing and many dynamic activities in spiritual reality are happening all the time. And we are all influenced by Lucifer and Araman all the time. We would not have a physical body and a physical world to live in without the activity of the Aramonic beings. They're the beings

referred to in Gnosticism as the Demiurge, the dark Lord of this earth. They actually took the blueprint and crystallized it into physical matter. That's part of their power. they're all about materialism and they would be perfectly happy to manifest in human bodies they'd love to do that but because of certain things that are in place with the entire spiritual structure

of human incarnation on the earth by and large they're prevented from doing that because that would be like getting an old child molester playing in the sandbox with the children they're not allowed that particular thing but they have to be present here they have to have that magnetic pull

toward their materialism side just like Lucifer gives the magnetic pull to the other side, or else there'd be no freedom in our development. In Rosicrucianism, all of the higher angelic ranks, the nine ranks above the human race, who are conscious beings that went through their stages of becoming self-aware multiple cycles ago, and the ones that did it most recently are called the angels, two cycles before us, archangels, three cycles before Archai, all the way up to many, many cycles before you get cherubim and seraphim.

So these are the great ancient ones. They talk about ennosticism. These are ancient beings, massive consciousness states for these. And so the human race also has a name because we are the group of spiritual beings that are currently undergoing our self-aware state to become independent beings. And so our esoteric name in Rosicruchnism is spirits of love and freedom. so we have to perfectly balance love and freedom in our lives the same way as we balance spirit and matter in a sense the spirit is connected to the love and the materialism is connected to

the freedom in the sense that as an independent being separate from the others love is the force of attraction to merge back to the one and that's very connected to spiritual activity but you're not independent then you're part of you're back to the one and then the independence come when you're separate from others which is materialism you're completely separate from others you don't care of what happens to others if you become totally materialistic and it all becomes completely egocentric your own ego inflation and then you control and dominate and screw over other people so we have to balance love and freedom both have to be completely present in an alchemy that we're developing So Lucifer and Araman have to be present with spiritual and materialistic sides,

or we wouldn't have any freedom of choice. Many human beings will shade over to becoming more luciferic. Many have shaded over to becoming more materialistic and Aramonic. Would you say many more? Is there an imbalance currently arimonically? Certainly in the West, there's no question that Aramon is ruling the day. And sometimes with people involved in the spiritual science work, we refer to

Aramon's flagship is America. America is Aramon's flagship in the world. We're sailing on Aramon's flagship living here. There's a reason why we might have chosen to live here. It is really leading this whole particular type of movement. Then you find more luciferic tendencies in some of like the eastern mountain kingdoms and things like that.

And I say that without any type of fundamentalist like condemnation of them. These are incredible places. You have places like Bhutan and such where they look at, rather than the gross domestic product, they're looking at whatever they call the gross human happiness scale

or things like that. I mean, I appreciate very much what they have. It's not putting them down to say that. But you see the different tendencies. The East tends to be more luciferic. The West tends to be more aromatic. Is this a kind of tendency that happens with how that sacred geometry gets distributed

in the world? So all this then comes together with understanding what people learn in a completely corrupted way about Lucifer and Satan. So people have been taught in the West today that Lucifer and Satan are the same being. It doesn't make the slightest bit of sense. Lucifer is the light bearer. He's a tremendous being of light. How does that connect to a satanic being that lives in the underworld as this type of corrupt, gnarled type of being? They're absolutely opposite forces.

So they're not the same being at all. Now, in higher levels of even some of the more rigidified religions, like in Catholicism, the Jesuits will talk about, oh, yes, Satan and Lucifer are two different beings. But outside of that, the way that it tends to get disseminated is people think they're one being. And again, that leads to a tremendous corruption. You always have to understand the middle path is the way we're going on, and we can fall off to either side without any type of sensationalistic understanding of the beings involved. It's just a matter of fact, just like there are certain bacteria that we can't

let spread in our bodies, but we don't freak out about the fact that bacteria exist. So the concept of Satan comes from the movement of the understanding of araman into later times. So in Hebrew, this being was referred to not as araman, but as ha satan, which means in Hebrew the adversary and then that got simplified to Satan in the Western tradition. And not coincidentally, ha setan is related to set in Egypt when the Jewish people came out of Egypt and the Exodus. The knowledge they got from Moses is all from the Egyptian temples. So Araman becomes set, becomes Ha satan, and now Satan today.

So that's my capsule summary of the nature of these beings. how it pertains to our own particular development and not having a sensationalistic view of it, but understanding that these beings are influencing us all the time, and it's always a matter of trying to find our way on the middle path. I often like to give this particular anecdote that many years ago I was watching the series Miami Vice, and Tubbs and Crockett are talking to each other, these two cops, and one of them asks the other, says, you know, as undercover cops, we have to always deal with the question of, are we crossing the line in what we do? And the other one looks at him and says, I don't even see

the line until I'm over it. And I thought that was like the best summary of this type of thing. That middle pillar line is something that we often don't even see it until we're off of it and realize I've gone off to one side or the other. it makes so much sense like how can one has have the experience of itself without the duality without the separation to be able to to see itself and it's all of its glory yes yes incredible so i find the understanding of both these luciferic and armonic impulses very contextualizing for our own human journey on a microcosm level but then also societally on the macrocosm level these are both very important energy systems for us to be able to have the free will and to eventually actually know who we are without that separation. It's not possible. Right now, for every listener, we have our own imbalances one way or the other. One very common one is this luciferic inflation, which I've heard you speak too many times, which I actually

feel like I've kind of had my own encounter and realization to my own personal journey the past few weeks. I think that with this being the know they self podcast, with so much of like spiritual work kind of being focused on the self, self development, self attainment, self realization, like a lot of focus on self. I'm also very blessed to receive a lot of beautiful reflections and compliments of like, you're so mature, you're so developed for your age, you know, being in the position where I'm discussing a lot of these topics. Like I get that.

It's beautiful. And I was examining, especially the part of me that like really believes it, you know, or like even subtly relishes in hearing that and convinces myself that. and convinces myself that like, no, I don't need to receive it like that, but thank you, you know. But the part of me that actually does kind of believe into that and feed into any superiority. And it was actually kind of like a painful just uncovering of realizing how in many ways I was viewing my spirituality, stopping within the confines of my own comfort and convenience, any ways in which like my own view of spirituality was kind of creating more separation. And so I want to speak into this because, you know, this conversation kind of, this insight, I would say, kind of came out of a conversation with a friend Daniel Schmachtenberger a few, like four or five days ago, which I don't know if you're familiar with.

Incredibly brilliant individual, hopefully have them on one day. But I was just really paying attention to this part that, like how it builds into that superiority. And I've heard you speak into how the luciferic karma is armonic, meaning we become these like spiritual materialists in many different ways. right and so i wanted to speak into your your uh feelings about this luciferic inflation this egoic inflation and kind of coming back into balance and realizing that yes it's important to go in this process of knowing who we are but it exists within the context that we can't stop ourselves from seeing the suffering of the planet and um being of service in the heart of service so i know i opened up a lot there yes yes so i i think a helpful context

for this is that, you know, the Earth plane is in some ways the school of hard knocks that we have to deal with a lot of challenges, but it's through overcoming the challenges that we develop new abilities, new understandings, greater strengths. Sometimes I refer to it to spiritual weightlifting. It's like if your physical body lifts increasingly heavier weights, it'll get stronger and stronger. and if we are dealing with greater and greater challenges in our physical incarnation, then we can spiritually become stronger and stronger. And so a lot of the things that we deal with in a particular incarnation are related to this. In spiritual traditions, they often refer to this as the initiation trials we have to go through. Now, some of these are just things that are brought to us by our personal karma or world karma that we're embedded in,

or are there things that are set up by the tradition themselves that we have to overcome as a type of initiation trial to get to the destination? What I want to talk about now, though, is some of the fundamental types of trials that we will encounter on the spiritual path as we move forward. So I've already referenced, for example, the particular trial or temptation of purification in place, which is to do very advanced spiritual development on some levels, but not having dealt with some of our own core stuff, particularly as it relates to physical incarnation, love and emotion, sexuality, and then later on it comes something toxic. But people are seeing you as very spiritual and very advanced, but nonetheless, these things we're dealing with.

And of course, one of the ways around that, that spiritual trial, is to never claim too much about our state of spiritual development. People come to us and say, oh, you're so fantastic and all. On the one hand, I think that we should allow ourselves to feel the kindness and warmth coming from the people expressing it to us. Because it is a type of a kindness to express it to us

and to make us conscious that we did have an impact on someone that helped them on their journey. That's very, very helpful. But again, we can't take it in such a way as I'm more than or I'm more advanced or something of that kind. That will always become toxic. So it's just like sometimes we get into a state in our development where we want to be the ones doing nice things for other people all the time.

But if they offer do a nice thing for us, sometimes like, oh, no, no, I can't accept that. We have to accept other people doing nice things for us the same way as we want to do nice things for other people because that's how everything flows. So we need to accept their compliments and their kindness and reflect back to them what we see authentically with them as well that we appreciate. But there is the side of this that in not doing the premature purification

and not pretending that we're more advanced than we are, that that directly relates to what you were describing with the luciferic inflation. So if I'm giving a talk and I don't want to get into having to describe Lucifer and Aramon and those things, I just refer to it as ego inflation. But it's always a temptation on the path. And this is true both in spiritual evolution as well as in any other body of work in the world. It doesn't matter if you're a musician or you're an artist or you're an architect or whatever. there's always the ego inflation challenge that will come in. But on the spiritual path, it's particularly deadly.

If you start thinking, you know, I'm the guru now type of thing. First thing people need to realize is that the whole thing of coming forward as a spiritual teacher or a guru or in the sense of the resurrection tradition, it's really just like a brother or sister on the path and I'm sharing with you what I found and hopefully it's useful. but it's not positioning oneself at a high level or above others. But there's always the challenge when we are doing this work to think that we're more evolved than we are, that our work is tremendously advanced,

and we accept that appreciation and kudos from other people in such a way that it works on their naive expectation that we described before that if you have some development in some area, you're developed in all areas. No, you're not developed in any area other than the one that's being focused on. You may be a good speaker, you may be a good architect, whatever it is. But that doesn't mean that you've worked through your emotional, sexual, whatever, other stuff that keeps tripping people up. So when we deal with these initiation trials, It is absolutely one of the first trials that we will encounter of once you start to get a little bit of spiritual understanding, get a little bit of some spiritual sitas, these kinds of things that we then present ourselves at a higher level. And this has all types of manifestations we have to be careful about.

So on the one hand, one can choose to change one's name to reflect their true spiritual nature and their, their goal, their destination. But we have to be very careful that in that name that we choose, we're not choosing something that represents us as a master of a very high level, when in fact we're still dealing with some real core human stuff in this lifetime that we're trying to get right. So, you know, taking on certain titles, changing of the name to certain things, if we're not careful about it, it can be a claim to authority. and when you make too many claims to authority, you leave people unfree.

You've got to leave them free. The whole thing in the Rosicrucian tradition is that, you know, if you're born Joe Slobotnik, you're just Joe Slobotnik. And people can think that you're spiritually advanced or not, but you're not making any claims toward it. So claims to authority are one part of it, a practical thing, to be very, very careful of. I don't even make any claims like for myself that I like I don't claim that I speak for the Rosicrucian tradition or like I'm any great Rosicrucian initiate. I'm a person on the path and I found some things that other people reflect to me are useful.

But other than that, I know all the parts of me that aren't developed yet and that I'm still doing all kinds of wacky stuff all the time so that I can develop on my own pathway forward. So that's a part of it. Another part of it is that if we start making those improper claims to authority, we're representing ourselves as more advanced than we are, again, taking advantage of people's naive expectations, then this will not only hinder our own development, it will change the spiritual beings that we're connecting with. Because spiritual beings never give their authority or their gifts to someone on a permanent basis. It's often misrepresented as absolutely a falsehood when in any spiritual thing, they say,

oh, this church or this tradition is the lineage holder of this thing and that's permanent. No, as soon as someone who is guiding that particular lineage or tradition becomes corrupt, the beings will leave. They're not going to stay when it becomes corrupt. I think this is even true in some of the Christian traditions that claim like, oh, we're the heirs of blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, hey, you lost those connections a thousand years ago through the terrible manipulations that you did in the world. So any spiritual tradition, any spiritual person can lose the spiritual connections that they had because behind our work is always the inspiration and the support of spiritual beings. And based on our own levels of integrity and how clean our work is, that's going to affect what beings connect to us.

Once we start getting more manipulative, et cetera, and believing our own ego inflation, we'll get different beings coming in. And you can actually, when you observe certain people who are very well-known spiritual teachers in the West, in their early work seemed really good. Look at them 15 years later, and they're like a demon. It's just like their stuff has become so corrupt. The whole energy in their field has become something very toxic. So we have to be aware that it's all a system of resonance. What we're connecting to spiritually, including the spiritual beings that are behind everyone,

will change as soon as we change that vibration. It's never given permanently. So I think that's another very important consideration. As we're evaluating ourselves on that path, we have to always stop, take stock, see where we've made mistakes. Because we always will make mistakes. It's not like, well, I'm always perfect and I never make mistake with this. Being conscious of it helps to not make the mistake, but what it really helps with is noticing when you did make the mistake and starting to correct. Again, I don't always see the line until I'm over it, and then I've got to come back to the middle way.

So these are considerations not just for people who are spiritual teachers or things of that kind, but really for every human being. One of the great gifts of the last couple of generations of human beings on the planet, particularly in the West, has been a movement toward authenticity, that it's okay to represent what parts of oneself are broken. It's okay to represent what parts of oneself are still moving forward and not having to claim some artificial form of perfection. So I think that's actually a very, very healthy movement. Again, it's always a middle path,

so you don't want to go off the other direction to where you're just like constantly coveting about all the problems you have in your life and that type of thing. helping anybody, but to be authentic about where we actually are and to try to keep it as as clean as possible and not overclaim will not only make our work better, but it will help to connect people to the beings they need to connect to. Because lots of times when people connect to us through the things that we're teaching or

talking about, I try to get myself out of it as much as possible. The whole thing about the Rosicrucian tradition from the beginning was that we're not connecting through an external authority. You're not connecting through an external institution. There's no organization you have to join. There are many so-called Rosicrucian organizations in the world, often set up on the lines of Masonic lodges where they have different grades and initiations. I have nothing to do with any of that. I want to make really clear when I talk about Rosicrucianism, my style of that is the original Rosicrucianism where every person is connecting through the column of spirit above the head directly to the spiritual

world and to the spiritual beings of their team, they're not going through any human being or any external institution. There may be other spiritual beings helping with it, but it's not based on going through someone else. So it's very important to me that everything that I teach people doesn't make them dependent on me and that I teach them how to connect directly up in their own columns, not through me or somebody else or some organization or institution. Now, again, there are some organization institutions in the world that do have spiritual integrity, and if you choose to work in that, and that helps you on the path, it's absolutely fine. I'm talking about my choice.

I want to be able to go through the prodigal son aspects that I need to go through and not claim that I'm not doing that. I'm going to make mistakes, and I'm going to explore all kinds of crazy stuff. So don't connect through me. You connect directly. And that, to me, is the whole purpose of independent initiation on the Rosicrucian path. And so the more I can get people to understand that as one of their options, then I feel like I've been helpful on that. But lots of times when people are connecting something I'm saying, it's like that whole saying about when you see the finger pointing to heaven, don't focus on the finger, focus on where they're pointing toward.

because sometimes when I'm talking about a topic this is true for other people teaching spiritual things there is an energy that comes through that's not me it's something of a higher level if I have any integrity that's coming through me at that time don't try to connect to that thing through me connect to it directly

but learn through the energy present at that moment what the vibration of it is so you can resonate with and then train to it and then connect to it directly up the column yeah ultimately I find like a lot of gratitude for when you do kind of steer too far from the line, you become aware of it.

Of course, it's painful to see how much you're out of balance in a certain aspect or, you know, it's all relative. Some people are what maybe I or somebody might perceive as way out of balance is like relatively subtle comparatively. Exactly. But ultimately grateful for that experience because then it allows us to come back to breathe in that humility, to come back into the balance.

You kind of spoke to a little bit earlier about like our spiritual goal in a way. I would just love for you to share like, the path and the purpose of these energies weaving, giving us different contrast of experience coming back into the finding the middle way and like where we're going to on an individual level before we start to close and talk about the collective, I would love for you to share like what are we aiming towards what is our evolution path going to as an individual spiritual being in this physical body.

So again, my perception is that when we take the draft of forgetfulness as we started out in the beginning talking about, Take the path of forgetfulness and in the beginning was the memory, we have to remember who am I? Now that includes things on what is considered to be the older Rosicrucruccian path of initiation where there's certain stages or steps. And there's one that's called reading the name inscribed on the stone. It's connected to remembering the past incarnations. Now this is very prone to fantasy.

And so one of the rules that I follow that is also far on the Rosicrucian tradition is I never talk publicly about any past incarnations, because that could become a claim to authority. If there's a past incarnation that's known to history and you say, oh, I'm the reincarnation of so-and-so, I've never seen that go well. That almost always becomes toxic. So we don't talk about that publicly, but it's something that we know for ourselves, and just as something that people can be aware of, if you're like, because I meet a lot of people who claim to be the incarnation of the exact same previous spiritual master, I won't name any

names but they like all say oh I'm the reincarnation of so and so and said well I've met 20 other reincarnations of that and I don't know maybe so yeah like Thoth or Mary Magdalene or it's always somebody very important oh my god you hear so many of those it's so frequent and there's certain things they could have had as a spiritual experience connected to that force but doesn't necessarily mean that they're the reincarnation of that entity that becomes a technical topic yeah I could imagine how it's a very subtle discernment process of seeing what you're authentically connecting to versus what that Lucifericinflare conflation is trying to convince you to build more superiority and all that. Absolutely.

So one thing that we'll find is that you actually have authentic memories of that thing. It's not just look at what a fantastic spiritual initiate I am and what an amazing thing this is. Those lives were not easy. If one was one of the disciples of Christ, you don't remember like how awesome everything was. It was tough. You didn't have enough to eat. It was hot. Everything was massively uncomfortable.

You were in danger all the time. You didn't know if you were going to get crucified. It was a tough life. And so you don't just remember like this type of ego inflation sensationalistic thing. It's like the school of hard knocks that they didn't have an easy time. That was tough stuff. So if you're only remembering the good things and nothing about the difficulties of it, then that's already an indication is probably a fantasy projection.

But the reason we need to remember who am I, which includes the past incarnations, the current incarnation is always the latest bead on the chain with a particular trajectory. Now, there's a term that relates to our ultimate spiritual destination. It's from the Greek as a teleological destination. So we have a teleological destination. Everybody's getting magnetically pulled toward what we're supposed to become. because collectively every human being is part of the human race, the spirits of love and freedom. We're all part of that.

It's a great thing to put on your business card, by the way. Dr. Robert Gilder, Spirit of love and freedom. And so we all started as like that group and separated out. But it's the same idea, this is my favorite metaphor for it, that all snowflakes, are crystallized water, so they're all water, but they each have a unique geometry that will not be repeated. So every human being is crystallized spirit, but we will each have a crystallization that is unique to us. And if we fall out of the process of human evolution, the gift of that crystallized form will never be made to the whole, never be made to the universe. So we have the potential

and the opportunity and to some degree the obligation to manifest our teleological destination as quickly as possible. You know, that's what the Buddhists talk about. You can take the school of hard knocks and you'll get there eventually, but there's a lot of unnecessary suffering. But if you choose the skillful way

rather than the unskilledful way, you can get there more quickly. You can suffer less, and you can help other people to suffer less, cause less suffering to people through whatever crazy stuff you're doing. So that teleological destination, we need to be conscious of it. We need to feel pulled toward it.

Sometimes we don't know clearly why we're doing something, but we can feel in our will forces that there's something I need to do now to get there. That's something that if you haven't advanced your cognitive capacities in the upper Dantian and the centers above the head enough, when the spiritual impulses come toward you from higher beings, they will have to go to the will impulses. and you'll get a feeling like, I need to go here, I need to do this. Somebody says, well, why did you do it?

I don't know, I just knew I had to because you don't have enough structure here yet for it to be completely seen. So we're pulled toward the teleological destination and we need to become that unique being in the universe because everything we're doing right now is a spirit of love and freedom is that we're going to develop this whole field of citizen powers

that then as an independent spiritual being we'll be able to choose our pathway in the world. We'll be a free agent in the universe with our particular crystallization of these powers that to some degree is unique where we'll be able to help other beings and systems and all kinds of things we can barely dream of at the moment when we reach that stage. So that's my view of why it's so important to be clear on who we are, why we're here, what we chose to do in this incarnation, I will often tell people the disaster of the current moment is the majority of people

and not fulfilling their karmic contract. They're not doing what they chose to do themselves before they incarnated because Earth, the incarnation is too confusing and too difficult for them to stay on track. It's very important they do what they came here to do in this incarnation. And there's always the side of working on yourself

and moving toward your teleological destination and the part of what you're offering in service to the whole. Those two always have to go hand in hand as we move ahead. So powerful outside of the fact that you called everybody listening a snowflake, I think. We're finding our own geometric pattern in the form of a snowflake. But no, it's like finding that unique individuation of how God is expressing itself through us.

Exactly. It's really beautiful. And like that's a process of self-creation as much as it is, I guess, discovery. And it's something that will have to sidebar it probably for the next time we talk. So I'm excited to. Yeah, it's a great topic. Just in closing, you have been able to study. like various different wisdom traditions, you know, from Rosicrucian to, you know,

we talked about yoga and understanding of the Kaliuga to the Mayan calendar, all referring to the greater cycles that we're currently operating within right now and the seasons and cycles of light. What do you see as the conciliance between all these different wisdom traditions about what they say is happening right now within humanity and the cycle we're on? this is very much a time of being able to break the old patterns just like with the concept of and of callaguga we're able to break some of the old patterns and regain some of our old skills at a higher level like the new clairvoyance is different than the old clairvoyance the new clairvoyance is one that is actually alchemically combined with our logical linear

thinking so it can be directed consciously to targets in a way that before we were just kind of a passive receiver of all kinds of wild information from the spiritual world so it's a it's a new form of clairvoyance and the same thing with our new vibrational temple science that's generating it's going to have a new flavor new capabilities and that's why you know along with the spiritual science we It's the vibrational science with Egyptian biogeometry, things like that. These are very important. Egyptian biogeometry is dedicated to creating the new golden age. And so the concept of the new golden age, I think, really comes into play here.

I'm not sure that it's inevitable that the golden age will fully form because there's enough free will involved with our whole development. We can never become spirits of love and freedom without free will, which means the opportunity to not accomplish the goal. We need to take that seriously. And we've seen it time and time again in human history in the last hundred years, the world wars, things like this, horrific events that came from the terror of the situation. People who did not wake up, who did not bother to do the practices to be self-aware and followed these destructive forces that killed millions of people and led to massive suffering. This will keep repeating until people wake up. I mean, this is, it reminds me of one story with Gerjeefe where someone came to him and they were asking about, well, you think you can like see the future and like you have this clairvoyance and you can do all these things. Well, can you tell me what my future is?

And Gerjeef says, yes, absolutely. Your future will be exactly like your past until you wake up. That was the best possible response. So we really do have the opportunity now to create a new golden age. I mean, once we regain our memory of past incarnations, this is an amazing incarnation. People can live just at a basic level of income. People can live today in a way that kings couldn't live a few thousand years ago. Good God.

Our situation is amazing. The ability to travel. The incredible release, as part of the end of the Caliuga, of previously very hidden information from so many traditions. Again, as we said before, it's fragmented. But we have the opportunity to work with it. So one thing that I always do my best to encourage people to is you need to wake up and realize this is a limited time opportunity.

If I was going to make a T-shirt and wear it all the time, it would be like life is a limited time opportunity. This will be over soon. I'll be over before you know it. And if you haven't done the work, taking advantage of the incredible opportunities we have right now for your own spiritual evolution and then what you're doing in service to the world, that is also connected to one of the other Rosicrucian maxims, which is that all of the powers, the sitas that you gain on the spiritual path, will be put toward the benefit of other

beings, to the service of other beings. So even when we're working on ourselves, we get closer to our teleological destination, we can be of more service as we go forward. But this is a time of tremendous opportunity, but like the Chinese say with the term crisis, you know a crisis is a dangerous opportunity and that's what we have right now and it's not i don't believe predetermined it's all going to work out perfectly but that's part of the excitement of it because how good would a movie be that you're going to see that's a thriller if you knew in the beginning that everything would turn out fine at the end we don't know that and it's not going to turn out fine unless we

all wake up and remember who am i why am i here and what is my task for this incarnation so beautiful In closing, is there anything else that you want to share that's on your heart in terms of people that are listening that want to make the most out of the potential that is the gift of life that has been given to us in the act of pursuit of the golden age and the uncovering of our own individuation? Just any other last thoughts that you want to share before we close out? It's really always a matter of starting the work now, starting the methods, the whole idea of the observation and direction of your heart. thinking, feeling, and willing. If you understand nothing but that and you absolutely do it, you will advance very, very quickly with just that. But if you live an unobserved life and you don't have the mindfulness, you're not going to get rid of all these detrimental things that are holding back your development. And I can assure you that when you pass through the gate of death before you expect to, and on the other side you look back, you will regret not having taken a

advantage of the time right now. You had so much that you could have done, but you fitted the time away. That's something that we need to take super seriously. That it's never too late to wake up and start now wherever you are on the path. Thank you so much. Yeah, this is just like my favorite thing, most fun thing that I could be doing with my time. It's just like diving down these deep rabbit holes and you're such an incredible scholar and synthesizer and an articulator and teacher of all these concepts and so just thank you so much for the work that you're doing. I know it's been decades and decades years and years of synthesizing a lot of this information down. And so yeah, as you close, just any other ways people can connect with you, the work that you're doing. Well, thank you.

Basically, it's always a matter of connecting to our website, vesica.org. which is V as in Victor E-S-I-C-A-O-R-G. And that will have the listing of our online courses. It will have any upcoming live events. I haven't done any live events for four years since the beginning of COVID. And this year I'm going to start doing live events again. And also some of the other initiatives that we're a part of because things are moving very quickly now and getting this information out.

So we do encourage people to check out the website and sign up. up for the notices that we send out about the latest events and activities. So thank you very much. Amazing. Thank you so much. And for everybody tuning in, please let us know what uniquely was insightful for you and what you want to carry out in your life. I'm just always fascinated by how these conversations become fractals in the world and become a ripple effect and how somebody changes their life path and how they choose to serve in the world. So again, Robert, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you so much. Back in the future. Yeah, and for everybody tuning in, thanks for coming on this journey.

Until next time.