A deep neural network could help classicists restore incomplete inscriptions from ancient times — and reveal new works of literature. […]
Source: Scientists are tantalizingly close to cracking any ancient texts wide open
A deep neural network could help classicists restore incomplete inscriptions from ancient times — and reveal new works of literature. […]
Source: Scientists are tantalizingly close to cracking any ancient texts wide open
On the Occult Corpus website, a poster by the name of alwayson posted a thread entitled ‘How to Become Better than a Golden Dawn Magician,’ in which he claimed that one could easily do […]
The Carnac Stones have been one of the most puzzling archaeological artifacts in the world for hundreds of years.
Source: The Carnac Stones: A Centuries-Old Enigma Solved Using Ancient Science
Gordon White materialized at the Virtual Alexandria to discuss his new book, Ani.Mystic. He shared what animism is (and what it’s not). How does animism relate to magic, and how can it provide a novel way of connecting with the renewing energies of the universe? It’s time for a new metaphysical language and vision of […]
Source: Encounters With A Living Cosmos – Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio
In this altered state of being, my mind was no longer preoccupied with the billions of details that my brain routinely used to define and conduct my life …. As my consciousness slipped into a state of peaceful grace, I felt ethereal.
Watch Jonny Enoch’s brand-new series on Gaia – https://www.gaia.com/jenoch – Esoteric researcher and historian Jonny Enoch examines esoteric topics ranging from Atlantis, Lemuria, Egypt, and ancient astrotheology, to recent discoveries of advanced technology from our archaic past, secrets of symbolism, spiritual ties to modern astrophysics, and more.
In this episode, a researcher and historian, Jonny Enoch, explores the ‘ Stargates’ of ancient Egypt, one of which is still very active and heavily guarded by military. It is believed that this stargate, located in Zawyet El Aryan, has an underground complex size of New York city.
A glimpse into the mysteries behind this glyph designed by the alchemist and occultist John Dee, and the received text that promises to unlock its hidden power.
Source: The Hieroglyphic Monad
The idea of a “mummy’s curse” actually precedes Tut’s discovery.
Plato once wrote that there wouldn’t be peace until philosophers were kings. But what about Emperors? If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already heard of Marcus Aurelius; Roman emperor, philosopher, and author of the much beloved Meditations. Perhaps no other book quite captures what we m
Source: Secrets of a Roman Emperor
Prophecy of Hermes | The Anunnaki & Forced Forgetting of the “Sky Beings” – The character Hermes laments the forgetting of a culture, a civilization and all the advanced knowledge and human development that it held.
“Why do you chase the darkness when the light is available to you? … Wisdom calls you and yet you wish for foolishness … A foolish man … goes on the path of the desire of every passion … it is like a ship that the wind blows from one side to the other, and like a horse that has no rider … before anything else … know yourself.”
– The Teachings of Silvanos, Nag Hammadi Papayri
The darkest hours are those before dawn.
According to what is happening around us, this is the stage where we are currently on the personal and collective level.
We are at the final stretch in the process of great change towards the entry of humanity into the new dimension.
The great change is currently taking place in the spiritual dimension, but until we can feel it here, on the physical level, many of us are still experiencing pain, fear, limitations, confusion and quite a bit of frustration.
The spiritual lesson brought to you here, is conveyed by seal # 12 of the King Solomon seals, the 5th pentacle of Mars, and explains exactly what is happening around us now, and what can be done to pull ourselves out of the thick darkness:
As we face a new stage in our spiritual development, our conscious vessels expand to absorb new lights.
The desire to absorb more and more filling light intensifies, but until we transform the vessels and get rid of negative thought and behavior patterns, the new light will not be able to fill them.
This is a critical and dangerous stage where we grope in the dark, and evil and harmful forces can befall us.
We are spiritually weak and exposed to dangers. In order to pull ourselves out of the mud, we must bring light into our lives in a conscious and proactive way.
To act altruistically for the common good, to engage in giving and help the disadvantaged.
Even in times when we feel a reduction in light, we still have the ability to make a good impact in the world.
Notice the verse that appears on the seal: “Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder: the young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet.” (Psalms 91 -13.) Seal No. 12 helps to draw light to the person and fights the forces of darkness that want to cling to him.
On the magical level, the seal gives you magical and spiritual powers and helps you control evil and dark forces.
When we spread our unique light in the world, and act for the common good, we can defeat the toughest forces of darkness. Therefore, dear friends – do not succumb to the darkness, and do not listen to the messages of terrorization and conspiracies that flood you from the media and social networks. It is very easy to get carried away with hysteria and helplessness because that is what we have become accustomed to over years of controlling our consciousness. Control through fear.
All this is about to change, because we are waking up now.
Although at the moment everything seems muddled and chaotic, always remember that in our limited vision, we cannot see the whole picture, only sections of it, and these sections may seem threatening when our vision is partial.
Be assured that everything is in the hands of the Supreme Providence, everything is happening just as it should be. When dawn rises (very soon), everything will be flooded with a bright light that will reveal to us the full story of what we are going through, and what enlightened reality we are entering.
Every year, about this time, I learn from various and sundry newspapers and journals across the land, that Mother’s Day originated in the worship of the Egyptian Goddess Isis.
The idea seems to be that Mother’s Day developed from the ancient worship of Mother Goddesses. And since Isis is THE most well known of these ancient Goddesses, then Mother’s Day had to be Hers, right?
Sorry. Nope. (You can learn the real story, at least as far as the US is concerned, here.)
But, of course, Isis is a Mother Goddess and many, many people have grown their relationship with Isis in Her motherly aspect. So today, in honor of Mother’s Day, I’d like to share with you some lines from a particularly interesting New Kingdom hymn to the Great Goddess.
See if you can guess which Goddess the hymnpraises. (When you see […] in the…
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The letter Vav ו is the sixth letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In the previous lectures we discussed the letters א Aleph, ב Beth, ג Gimel, ד Daleth, and ה Hei, which are the letters one through five and the numbers one through five. The ו Vav or Vau is the number six.
All of the letters have multiple levels of meaning and significance, but this is very apparent in the letter Vav ו. The importance of this letter is underscored by its usage in the bible. If you have in your possession a copy of the book of Genesis / Barasheet [בראשית] in Hebrew, you will be astonished to see that the first letter of nearly every sentence of the first five chapters is the letter Vav ו. There are only a handful of sentences that start with other letters. This is very important, yet is invisible in any translation of the Bible. Here are the first ten sentences:
בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ׃
והארץ היתה תהו ובהו וחשך על־פני תהום ורוח אלהים מרחפת על־פני המים׃
ויאמר אלהים יהי אור ויהי־אור׃
וירא אלהים את־האור כי־טוב ויבדל אלהים בין האור ובין החשך׃
והארץ היתה תהו ובהו וחשך על־פני תהום ורוח אלהים מרחפת על־פני המים׃
ויקרא אלהים לאור יום ולחשך קרא לילה ויהי־ערב ויהי־בקר יום אחד׃ ף
ויאמר אלהים יהי רקיע בתוך המים ויהי מבדיל בין מים למים׃
ויעש אלהים את־הרקיע ויבדל בין המים אשר מתחת לרקיע ובין המים אשר מעל לרקיע ויהי־כן׃
ויקרא אלהים לרקיע שמים ויהי־ערב ויהי־בקר יום שני׃ ף
ויאמר אלהים יקוו המים מתחת השמים אל־מקום אחד ותראה היבשה ויהי־כן׃
ויקרא אלהים ליבשה ארץ ולמקוה המים קרא ימים וירא אלהים כי־טוב׃
The letter ו Vav is a connector; it makes a connection, a bond. Vav is a channel, the means through which forces go from one place to another. This is why aside from being a letter and the number six, Vav is also the Hebrew word for “and.” Of course, in any sentence the word “and” is a connector, a bridge. We say “you and me,” and what connects us is “and.”
In Hebrew, “and” is a ו (Vav). This is very very important to grasp about the Vav, because the letter Vav is in the Holy Name of God. The four letter name of God (the Tetragrammaton) is יהוה (Iod Hei Vav Hei).
יהוה
That Vav is very important there. When you look at the Vav as the word “and,” you can discover new meanings in this name of God. In our lectures, we have explained this four letter name in many ways because it has many applications. But when you see the Vav as “and,” then the name יהוה reads יה and ה: “Jah and Hei.” In other words, it means masculine divinity and feminine divinity. You see the two polarities in this name.
The ו Vav on its own is a letter י Iod extended downwards. At the top of the letter Vav is a letter Iod, that small dot which is the tenth letter. If you extend a Iod downwards, you create a Vav. We will discuss the letter Iod in another lecture, but in synthesis the Iod represents many things. It is the man, a seed, a spark, and the covenant; it is many things.
The Iod is related to the sephirah Kether, the first emergence of the light. When the light that emerges from the unknowable begins to descend into manifestation, the Iod (Kether) extends itself downwards; this is symbolized by the Vav. The Vav in other words represents the bridge, the “and,” the connection between above and below. It is how God creates. This is why in the book of Genesis nearly every sentence of chapters 1-5 begins with Vav. In the English you only see it a few times: Nearly every sentence of these chapters begins with Vav.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. – Genesis 1:3
Creation is synthesized in the first five Hebrew letters. The first five lectures of this course have been an attempt to explain to you something that is very elusive to the intellect. The reality of how subtle energies gradually condense and become matter is something that the mind, the intellect, struggles to grasp because we make it a concept instead of perceiving the realities of it.
To review in synthesis, א Aleph the first letter represents the breath of God, which is unformed and subtle. The Aleph is three in one, represented as Aleph with the letters ב Beth (2) and ג Gimel (3). These three forces act through the letter ד Daleth (4), which relates to Daath [דעת]. Through the mystery of Daath is produced the letter ה Hei, the fifth letter, which represents the Divine Mother impregnated, fecundated, ready to give birth.
So the first five letters bring us to that moment represented in the letter ה Hei, where the Divine Mother, the Shekinah, will give birth. All of this is synthesized in the holy name of God, יהוה, in the first two letters, Iod and Hei.
The letter א Aleph is really three י Iods, but the middle Iod is extended: it is a ו Vav.
When the letter א Aleph combines with its feminine aspect, which is represented by ב Beth (the unfecundated Mother), their union produces ג Gimel, the third letter. These three letters relate to the world of archetypes, or latent potentiality, that in Kabbalah is called Atziluth. All of this is represented in the first letter of יהוה.
When the trinity creates, the doorway of Daath, sexual knowledge, appears. All of that archetypal energy enters into the world of creation, called Briah in Hebrew. Briah is represented in the second letter of יהוה. The second letter is the first ה Hei.
The descent of archetypal forms into creation is the movement from Atziluth to Briah, which is always through the sephirah Daath. Atziluth to Briah are the first two worlds of the Four Worlds of Kabbalah. They are also represented in the first two letters in the holy name of God. The first letter, Iod, relates to Atziluth, which is that very subtle level of matter and energy of archetypes, where nothing is created yet. When the Divine Mother and the Divine Father unite in Daath, those forces enter the world of Briah, creation, where those masculine and feminine principles give rise to fecundation, creation. This is why the second letter of the name of God is Hei, the fecundated womb, the feminine principle, the Mother. So the second letter of the four lettered name relates to the second of the four worlds.
So you see, this is beautiful symbolism that the intellect will struggle to understand, but if you grasp it intuitively it is not that hard.
In the world of Briah, the light of the supernal forces condenses and creates a form: this is how we arrive at the third of the four worlds, the World of Formation, called Yetzirah, and related to the third letter in the holy name of God יהוה: the ו Vav.
To explain it a little more clearly or visually, you can write these names of the holy name of God vertically on the Tree of Life. If you put the Iod in the upper triangle, the first Hei in Daath, and the Vav in tiphereth, you start to see how the three worlds Atziluth, Briah, and Yetzirah relate to these triangles on the Tree of Life, and also to the sephiroth. What we are looking at here is how these forces are descending and ultimately will create the final Hei, which is in Yesod.
This is a synthetic tool to help your visualization of these forces, and as we said before, these are not the only correspondences of these letters. This is not the only way to look at the four worlds. It is not the only way to apply the three triangles on the Tree of Life to the four worlds. The Tree of Life is very flexible and very intuitive.
In this process of the descent of energy, the forces of the light of Chokmah, the Christ, descend from the upper Hei, the first Hei, through the Vav, which is through the world of Yetzirah, formation. This is where those subtle principles of masculine and feminine are poised to become materialized; they still not physical, but through the forces of all the Elohim (the angels, archangels, thrones, potentates), all of those beings who receive that light and deliver that light further through sexual transmutation.
Every level of the Tree of Life is a reflection of the level above. Just as the Ab-Am, the Abba Aima (Father-Mother) unite to deliver that light downwards, so do the angels. They receive that light, and through Daath in the level of Yetzirah, they deliver that light downwards in order to illuminate all the beings in their domains. This is how the fourth Hei becomes Assiah, the world of matter, the world of action, the world of energy in action.
Assiah is the fourth world of the four worlds, and it relates to the physical world or a physical body. It is really beautiful to see how these four letters stacked vertically illustrate the creation of Adam, the celestial man, Adam Kadmon. This is the archetypal man, the perfect man made into the image of God. In his very structure he reflects all the worlds above him and contains within himself all of the archetypes. This man in the image of God is a Vav, because you see he is vertical he is standing, he is upright; this is a Vav in synthesis. Very beautiful. Unfortunately, we are not that. We have to become that perfect Adam, by recovering our Vav.
As written in the Bible, Adam was created male female and placed in the garden of Eden, which is an existence of beatitude, happiness, union with God. Adam in Eden perfectly reflected his creator. But unfortunately, due to temptation after the division of the sexes, humanity fell, and the archetypes were lost. When humanity fell into temptation, the Vav was removed. You see, the Vav represents the upright man. When the upright man falls from Eden, the letters are taken from him. The knowledge is taken from him. The empowerment is taken from him.
The Hebrew word אדם (Adam) begins with א Aleph. Aleph is made by three Iods, with the middle Iod extended into Vav. It is a Iod that has extended into nature and become a Vav. When Adam falls, that Vav is removed because he is no longer perfect. That Vav becomes a Iod again which means that Aleph collapses. That Vav is no longer there to provide the structure for Aleph, thus the temple falls into ruin. Aleph represents the principle and forces of God, the archetypes, in Adam. When that Vav is removed from Aleph, the temple falls, and Adam is outside, in exile. This is our state. We as a humanity no longer perceive God. We no longer are the Vav, the “and,” the bridge or connection that unites the lower worlds with the upper worlds. We do not have that in our consciousness anymore. Nonetheless, we can recover it. The entire science to do it is hidden in the letter Vav itself. This is why the letter Vav is at the beginning of nearly every sentence in Genesis. The Vav contains everything.
It is said in The Zohar:
Rabbi Shimon stood up and said, I observed that when the Holy One, blessed be He, planned to create man, the upper and lower worlds trembled. Why? Because they all depend on his actions for good or for evil. Therefore, the creation of man concerned them greatly and they were afraid that he might sin.
The creation of Adam affects all the worlds.
The creation of Adam is particularly concerned with the sixth day of Genesis. Remember, the Vav is the number six, and in Genesis on the sixth day through this process of all the forces descending, Elohim has put everything into place then puts the man who is male-female in charge of the garden.
And Elohim said, Let us make Adam in our image, after our likeness… So Elohim created Adam in his [own] image, in the image of Elohim created he him; male and female created he them. And Elohim blessed them, and Elohim said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it… And Elohim saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, [it was] very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day. – Genesis 1
It is very significant that the sixth day is the only day that Elohim says is “very good.” All of the others are merely “good.” In addition, it is the only day that is described as “the” day. On the previous five days, it says ‘a’ day, such as “It was a first day.” To say “the” in Hebrew, you write the letter ה Hei. This is a very subtle kabbalistic mystery, because what is written there is וה: feminine, masculine.
The unique aspect of the words, “the sixth day,” is the letter ה hei (heb. ‘The’). The ה hei was used in reference to no day except the sixth. For the formula is not “the first day, the second day, and so on,” but rather “one day, a second day, and so on.” This is because now the world was finished. Which is Zeir Anpin and Nukva, who were combined at the end of the works of creation, as the female was united with the male into one unit, hei, with “sixth,” to be completely one. “Thus the heavens and earth were finished” indicates that the unification of the male and female was complete in every detail. The works of creation were completed in every way and were fully equipped with everything. – The Zohar
The letter ה Hei represents a womb, and the ו Vav represents an erect phallus. The sixth day is the only one written that way, and its because on the sixth day is when all of the matter and energy is manifested and perfected in the union of male-female. Remember, this is before the fall from Eden. When the fall happens, everything changes.
Adam first was created male-female, an androgynous being containing both principles within. In this context, Adam is represented by the letter ד Daleth. Daleth, the fourth letter, looks like a ה Hei (the fifth letter) without the little separate leg on its left side.
As we learned in the previous lecture about the letter Hei, the separation of sexes is hidden in the symbolism of the letters Daleth and Hei. The letter Daleth represents the Adam who has those two polarities within. When that polarity is split and the sexes are divided, Hei (the feminine aspect) appears. When the division is complete, the man who is singular masculine – no longer androgynous, but strictly masculine – is now a Vav, the sixth letter.
To repeat, the fourth letter, Daleth, represents the androgynous Adam who is male-female. When the female is separated from the male, the letter Hei emerges to represent the female. The male is represented by the Vav.
The Vav is the man, Adam, as single masculine force. The Hei is the woman. This is why the sixth day is “very good.” Even though its not written in Genesis literaly, it is symbolized here kabbalistically: the sixth day is foreshadowing the separation of sexes, saying the Daleth will split into Hei and Vav, male female, two beings, two polarities who stand side by side.
This is also hidden in the holy name of God, יהוה. The Vav and Hei represent the man and the woman. Because the man and the woman are separated sexes, masculine feminine, the Vav also represents the phallus in a state of erection, the male sexual organ standing upright, energized and ready to serve. The Hei represents the receptive feminine sexual organ, ready to serve. So there is a very deep significance here, very profound, as long as the Vav and the Hei are contained in the holy name of God. Then there is something beautiful, something divine, something mystical in that sexual vibration. But unfortunately, as we have learned through the book of Genesis, Adam and Eve fell into temptation.
Now let us recall that Adam and Eve are symbolic. Most of the time in Gnosis, we are not talking about historical events. What we really need to know is how these symbols relate to us now, and how we can change. When we talk about Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, then relate it to us now.
Adam and Eve, the man and woman of Eden, relate to energetic principles within us; forces, energies. Adam relates to our brain and spine. This is the other meaning of the Vav. The Vav is a masculine principle, but it also relates with our brain and spine. If you superimpose the letter Vav over your body, you will see that the top of the Vav relates to your brain, and the length of the Vav is your spine. This is Adam in you, whether you are in a male or female body. The Vav in this context is your inner Adam: your brain, spine, and nervous system.
It is through your Vav that you receive and transmit energy. This Vav is your “and,” your connection to life. Life is chaiah, Eve. Without the Vav in your body, you would not be alive. Your Vav, your spine, your brain, is how your nervous systems receive, transmit, and manage so much energy. The very energy that is keeping you alive in this instant is because of your inner Adam: your brain, spine, and nervous system. It is transforming a vast amount of energy inside of you.
Your nervous system is the connection to your inner God. Your nervous system is also your connection to your inner Heveh, your inner Eve, which is your sexual organs. Your sexual organs are the most sensitive part of your nervous system. Your sexual organs, whether physically masculine or physically feminine, are your Eve: the most sensitive and the most powerful part of your nervous system.
חוה Eve (Chavah) means “the mother of the living.” Through your Eve you have the power to create chaiah, life. But: the power of creation is not just physical, it is also spiritual. Now you can see why every religion has always emphasized the importance of sexual purity, and not just physically. First, we need sexual purity physically, but also in the mind, because the relationship between your sexual organs and your mind is the relationship between Adam and Eve. When your sexual organs become hypnotized, become tempted by the sensations of desire, your sexual organs take that fruit to Adam and corrupt the brain, the nervous system. This is what is symbolized in Genesis.
We are tempted in this way everyday. Our sexual organs tempt us with sensation, with desire, with self-will. When we fall to that temptation, those energies are transformed, and results are transmitted through the nervous system to the brain. This is why our mental institutions are filled with lunatics who are addicted to sexual sensations. This is why people who abuse sexuality develop severe emotional and psychological problems. Because Eve takes the fruit to Adam and both fall from Eden, which in Hebrew means “bliss.” Yes, we are tempted by sexual bliss, but when we indulge in it, we are thrown out of it, into suffering. This is all mystically taught in Kabbalah, in the same way it is taught in the heart doctrine of every religion.
In the kabbalistic tradition, it is said that there are fifteen forms of sexual misconduct. If you have studied the ancient Tarot, you know the number fifteen relates to passion, the devil, temptation, Lucifer. But kaballistically, fifteen is also 1 + 5, which is six: Vav. That means sexual misconduct is always related with the letter Vav.
Why? Because the sixth commandment (when numbered according to Kabbalah) is:
Thou shalt not fornicate.
The number six relates to Tiphereth, the Human Soul. Tiphereth is the center of the Tree of Life. It is the axis upon which our life rotates. Tiphereth is our human will. Our life is as it is because of our will, our actions, and their consequences.
Tiphereth is the way through the central column up to heaven, the superior worlds. Tiphereth is the conduit (Vav) between the upper and lower worlds. It is the path (Vav) between the upper Eden (Daath) and the lower Eden (Yesod). It all depends upon how Tiphereth uses the energy of life.
The fifteen forms of sexual misconduct are symbolic and are synthesized in the commandments: though shalt not commit fornication or adultery. In other lectures we have explained these at length. The synthesis of them is that to return to Eden and advance beyond, to heaven (Schamayim), we must take care of the divine sexual forces that we receive from God. The sexual energy is the very power of the divine, whatever we call it. In Sanskrit terms, that energy is called bodhichitta. In Tibetan it is called tigle. The Aztecs symbolized it as corn. The Christians symbolized it as water and wine.
The creative power in the sexual energy has many names, but it is a force or energy that is not just physical, it is psychological and spiritual. From that energy is created a human being, and a human being is not just physical: a human being is spiritual, emotional, psychological, and all of that results from our sexual energy.
All of the potentialities, all of the archetypes from above, are hidden in the sexual seed. When we abuse that force, when we misuse it, when we corrupt it with desire, that force is corrupted.
Everything in nature is managed by laws. The very existence of our physical bodies and this physical world is possible only because of laws that are immutable, infallible. There are laws that manage energy, such as the law of polarities. Energies are polarized always, like light. Light is a great scale of vibrations. So is sexual energy. Sexual energy is polarized by our use of it. If it is expelled, it is wasted, dissipated. Our creative power is dissolved. If it is retained and purified, it is maximized, amplified, and empowered.
In the perfect Adam, in any Buddha, the sexual energy is retained and transformed. It is not infected with desire. In an Angel, the sexual energy is filled with fire and light. In the true Bodhisattva, the sexual energy is absolutely pure, without any lust, without any desire. Instead, that energy vibrates with a deep profound psychological purity. There is no lust in such a being, there is only the light of Chokmah, the light of Shekinah, the Divine Mother. This is a beautiful, pure light that illuminates the mind. In that perfected Adam or Buddha, that light fills everything. It descends into the person through their nervous system (the spine, Vav, Adam) to their sexual organs (Hei, Eve) and because it is retained and refined, it flows back upwards through the nervous system again, illuminating the consciousness, illuminating everything. In that process of transformation, the light is increased. This is what it means to be fruitful and multiply:
So Elohim created Adam in his [own] image, in the image of Elohim created he him; male and female created he them.
And Elohim blessed them, and Elohim said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
And Elohim said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which [is] upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which [is] the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. – Genesis 1
It is up to us to take that gift of creative power in our seed and grow it, expand it, through action. Action is the world of Assiah, the physical world. This is usually symbolized as “the earth.” In religion, the “earth” represents our body. We have to “subdue” our body and have “dominion” over it. This is why the greatest Buddhas, angels, and masters work through physical bodies, because it is in a physical body that the greatest power of transformation exists. That is because the physical body takes all the forces of the whole Tree of Life and puts them in a position where they can be transformed and sent back upwards greater then they were when they first descended.
Unfortunately, we have created a problem because we have succumbed to temptation; we allow desire to exist in our mind. We allow desire to be there – in fact, we encourage and feed our desires. So all these forces and energies that descend from above into our own Vav are corrupted by our psychological state.
But in Kabbalah, there is hidden a law, symbolically, that prevents our desire from making a mess even worse than the one we have now. It is symbolized in Genesis after Adam and Eve eat the fruit:
And Jehovah Elohim said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever:
Therefore Jehovah Elohim sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken.
So he drove out the man… – Genesis 3
The Elohim say. “They have become one of us, knowing good and evil,” and then they are cast out of Eden. Why is that? Because everything depends on our actions. Whether or not the upper or lower worlds will develop in their evolution in the right way depends on our actions in the physical world. You see, the letter Vav, which is us, stands between good and evil. This is why in Hebrew the Bible says: טוב ורע (tob ve ra). Tob [טוב] is “goodness.” Ra [רע] is “impurity.” The “ve,” the ו Vav, the “and,” is between them. That Vav is you and me. It is our inner Adam, the brain, the nervous system.
In an angel, a Buddha, the Vav stands upright, forming the Adam Kadmon, and retaining the Vav in the Holy Name of God: יהוה. An angel or Buddha walks on the middle path between the two Heis on the Tree of Life and in the Holy Name, between Tob (goodness) and Ra (impurity). Yes, the Elohim know good and evil, and are beyond good and evil. In the Elohim, the Vav stands upright and is the connection to the divine powers of creation. Yet, we fell from Eden. At this moment, the power of the Vav is lost. The Vav is removed from the Holy name. The Vav is removed from Aleph. Adam is cast out.
In us, our Vav is dark. Our nervous system is full of mysteries that doctors and scientists do not understand, even though they recognize that we scarcely use a small percentage of our nervous system, and only a fraction of the power of the brain. This is because the light, the force, that illuminates and empowers Vav has been lost. We have to recover it. We stand between two choices.
It is up to us to choose the path of goodness (tob) which leads to Chesed (our inner Being) or to choose the path of Ra (impurity, pollution). A casual observation of our planet reveals that the vast majority of people have chosen the path of Ra, impurity, because the vast majority of people prefer to indulge themselves in their desires as much as they can before they die, and that is all life is for them. The result is that through through our actions we have created Klipoth.
Klipoth is a Hebrew term that means “the world of the shells.” It is synonymous with any other religion or mysticism that explains the existence of inferior dimensions or lower worlds, also called “hell.” Yes, Hell is a real place, but it is real because it is psychological. We are in hell now, because of our actions. Is life now a heaven? Absolutely not! Everywhere on this planet we only see hell, Klipoth.
Hell exists because of cause and effect. Through our mind, through our inner Vav, we have created impurities. God did not create them. The Buddha, the masters, the angels, did not create lust, anger, hate, violence, rape, or theft. WE did it in our actions, here in Assiah, the physical world. And because we created those psychological elements, there is an aspect of nature that contains them. That aspect is our own subconsciousness, which is called Klipoth, hell, the infernos. Those energies that should be positive but have polarized negatively create the shadow or the inferior aspect of the Tree of Life.
When we feed a desire – and by desire we mean any self-willed element in the mind, including pride, anger, envy and more – we transform our psychological, physical, and spiritual energies and polarize them negatively. We take those forces that we receive freely from above, and we infect them with ego. In that moment something is formed in our mind. In sanskrit, it is called karma. Karma just means “cause and effect.” It is just a law. It is not predetermined fate or destiny. It is simply cause and effect.
…they that plow iniquity, and sow wickedness, reap the same. – Job
When you perform an action there is a result. When you feed your anger, you create harm. When you feel angry you suffer, and that anger causes others to suffer, people around you, and especially the people that anger is directed toward. This is all karmic, in other words, cause and effect. That anger is an expression of energies that have been polarized through pride, fear, envy, which are all selfish. The result is pain and suffering.
All of that negative energy cannot be managed and processed in the superior levels of life, because it does not belong there. Anger cannot exist in heaven. Lust cannot enter into nirvana. Envy cannot ascend, because it is heavy, corrupted. All of these desires (egos) abide in the inferior dimensions, processed through hell, our own subconsciousness, infraconsciousness, and unconsciousness, which are very deep levels within us.
Most of the time we are not even aware of these levels of our mind. We are so asleep (consciously, spiritually) we do not even realize that our day to day existence is a procession of these kind of desires. One after another. We feel a little afraid, we get a little stressed out, we start getting anxious, and then we suddenly become happy because we got something that we wanted, and then we get worried that we will lose what we acquired, so we become afraid and then we become hungry and want to eat, and than we become frustrated because we cannot eat what we want, perhaps because we are on a diet or it will make us fat, so we become frustrated, angry. Or we see someone eating and we become envious of them because we want to eat what they are eating but we cannot, perhaps because we cannot afford it so we become bitter about our poverty… This procession of desires (egos) goes on and on and on within us, and strangely we believe it is normal. Listen to me: it is not normal. That is not life, that is not Eden, Nirvana. That is Samsara, suffering. Sadly, we are so accustomed to our state that we do not realize that it is suffering.
All of those different elements are in our mind: in the intellect as thoughts, in our heart as feelings, in our body as impulses. In Gnosis we call them “I”s, as in ego, “I,” myself, me. We say, “I am angry, I am ashamed. I want, I don’t want.” We do not realize that those I’s are not the real self. We are so hypnotized by these elements that we believe they are our identity. In fact, they contradict one another; they fight with one another. We are filled with conflicting desires, wills. And most of them are rooted in sex. Most of the I’s have a sexual connection, even if we do not see it.
When Adam and Eve are cast out of the garden of Eden, it is to prevent them from taking the energies of God and creating more egos, more desires. It is to put a harness on those forces, it is too take the connection (vav) away. It is to protect the universe, to isolate Adam and Eve (the brain and the sex) from those divine forces so that that Adam and Eve cannot become a great devil. The power, the Vav, is taken away because of the compassion of the Elohim. This is why all of us are in spiritual darkness. You can say its a form of punishment, but it is self-inflicted. We did it too ourselves, and we continue to do it to ourselves everyday. As we persist in our desires, as we continue to inhabit the psychological house that we have made out of fear, pride, resentment, and envy, we have exiled ourselves from God. With compassion, the divinities have taken the Vav away, in order to protect us. Otherwise we would take and eat from that fruit and become as the Elohim, but fully evil. And we would do it. With the mind that we have now, if we had access to the powers of God, we would be terrible devils, much worse than we are now. Its similar to this urge that humanity has to go and inhabit other planets. How absurd is that! We think we are great angels who are going to walk to other planets and bring the glory of our light. We will not! We will only bring our disease! We will bring our filthiness, our failing economies, our corrupt politics, our addiction to lust, to other planets. How arrogant, how blind! We do not even see what criminals we are. But God does, the Buddhas do, and to help us they took the the power of the Vav from us. One day, if we realize our mistakes, we can correct them.
In The Zohar it says very clearly that through sexual misconduct, the Vav is removed from the holy name of God. This is to prevent the river that emerges from the upper Eden from reaching the lower Eden.
Those who commit sexual misconduct separate the upper hei of yud-hei-vav-hei from the lower hei of yud-hei-vav-hei, so that the vav of yud-hei-vav-hei may not come between them, as it is written: “You shall not uncover the nakedness of a woman and her daughter” (ibid. 17). The upper hei is the mother and the lower hei is her daughter. Because the vav cannot come between them and allow the abundance from the mother to reach the daughter, they are both harmed and dejected, because the acts of blocking and preventing this abundance from reaching the lower hei is considered to be her nakedness as well. And the mother and the daughter are the upper Shekinah, namely mother, and the lower Shekinah, namely her daughter.
During exile [from Eden], the reason why the vav cannot come between the upper and lower hei is that the mixed multitude [the ego]–which are the nefilim, the giborim, the amalekim, the refaim and the anakim (whose initials spell nega ra, which means evil infliction)–might come forth and receive the abundance from that vav. Thus, the Holy One, blessed be He, who is the vav, is not permitted to come between them. The secret of this issue lies in the verse: “And the river shall be wasted and dried up” (Yeshayah 19:5). The abundance of the upper hei, which is called the river, shall be wasted and the lower hei, which does not receive the abundance, shall dry up. And all this is for the purpose of not allowing the mixed multitude [the ego] to nourish themselves from the vav, which is the Tree of Life. Therefore, the vav is not permitted between the upper hei and the lower hei at the time when the mixed multitude is between them, during exile, at time of exile when they might come and draw sustenance from them. – The Zohar
This is very deep. The Bible is full of references to this. The Bible states
For your transgressions was your mother put away. – Yeshayah 50:1
Your Mother is that upper water, that upper Hei, the Goddess, who is Shamayim, which in Hebrew means “the fiery waters” but is usually translated as “heaven.” Those fiery waters are the Shekinah, the light of Chokmah, the Divine Mother, the Goddess.
The Goddess and the waters are always related to each other. In India, the great Goddess Sarasvati is also the name of the great river. The Ganges is also a Goddess. The oceans are Stella Maris, “the virgin of the sea.” You will learn more about this in the lecture about the letter Mem.
Through sexual misconduct, the Vav is removed from Adam and Eve, which is the connector that allows that river from the upper Eden flow to the lower Eden. Psychologically, this means that the forces of the Divine Mother which in a perfect Adam flow from Daath to Yesod are taken away from the one who falls, from the one who sins. In other words, the bodhisattva, the initiate who sins, who commits a sexual misconduct, loses his Vav, he loses his power, which is sexual, which is spiritual, and as such those energies, those waters no longer connect the two Heis, the two aspects of the Goddess. In the Bible, they are symbolized as a mother and daughter.
In the Bible it says “and the river shall be wasted and dried up.” That river is the river of the power of the Divine Mother, Shekinah. Its a river of light, energy, that moves down our spinal column into our sexual organs, to give us the power of creation.
Jesus answered and said unto her, “If thou knewest the gift of God, and who it is that saith to thee, Give me to drink; thou wouldest have asked of him, and he would have given thee living water.” [Living water, Mayim CHayim, is Hebrew and literally means “living waters.”] – John 4
When we commit sexual misconduct (fornication, adultery, etc), the Vav is taken away, and those waters can no longer flow into us. The lower Hei (Yesod) dries up. That lower Hei relates to us and our own inner Divine Mother. She is the Shekinah in us. This is why it says in the Bible when Israel sinned, the Shekinah abandoned the temple. That feminine aspect of God leaves the temple, the ark, the aron. Israel is left with nothing, and this is our state. Spiritually, we have nothing. Spiritually, we are dried up, we have no life in us, spiritually. We are dead. We are a desert. The little bit of energy that we receive, we still use it for crime. That little bit of force that descends into us through our Adam, which gives us just barely enough to scratch out a living on the face of this planet, we still use it for evil. We cannot even use that to honor the divine. We do not use that energy and respect it. Instead we use it and we disgrace it. And we do this everyday.
Every tradition states clearly that when you utilize your energies and channel them into impurity the path of Ra, we dishonor God, the Buddha. The impurity of our mind takes those forces, which are divine, and corrupts them and fills Klipoth.
The Zohar says the Vav is removed so that force cannot be given to the mixed multitudes. In the Jewish or Hebraic tradition, the mixed multitudes are five groups. There talked about as ancient beings or creatures like the nephalim which means “the fallen ones.” These five groups have a historical relationship with ancient races, but really they are a symbol of the ego.
…the mixed multitude [the ego]–which are the nefilim, the giborim, the amalekim, the refaim and the anakim (whose initials spell nega ra, which means evil infliction)… – The Zohar
The Zohar states that the force is stopped in its flow because otherwise it would feed the mixed multitudes. The mixed multitudes – our egos – would take it, use it, and make suffering worse. And this is true. If those forces and energies continued to flow from the divine into our mind as it is now, in other words if our inner, corrupted Adam and Eve were to still take the fruit from the tree, they would become terrible devils. Our mixed multitudes within – all those desires, those egos – would have the powers of God. What would the world be like if humanity had the power of the angels and Buddhas? You think suffering is bad now? What if humanity had powers? Such a thing could not be allowed. This is why it is stopped by laws in nature.
Stated another way, remember the letter Vav represents your spine. The top of the Vav is a Iod, but of course your spine is made by 33 Iods. Your spinal column has 33 vertebrae. 3 + 3 = 6, your Vav. In other words, when we sin our inner Vav is not allowed to receive the forces from above. In other words, through sexual misconduct, our spine loses its fire. That energy is arrested, blocked, stopped and what little energy we have is polarized negatively, and that energy feeds the mixed multitudes, the ego.
The fire, the light of Chokmah, which in an upright Adam fills the Vav, is called in Sanskrit “kundalini. ” The hebrew letter Vav represents a channel in the center of the spine, that in Sanskrit is called shushumna. It is that central subtle channel in the very center of the spinal column through which the light of Chokmah, the Shekinah, the Divine Mother, can rise and illuminate us.
Shekinah (Kundalini) is the river that brings life, chaiah. In the upright initiate, the Buddha, the Master, that is only possible when Adam and Eve are in harmony. This has a whole range of meanings. Physically and energetically, it means the nervous system (Adam) and sexual organs (Eve) are pure and free of Ra (pollution). Energetically, physiologically, it means that the caduceus is illuminated. The Caduceus shows two serpents entwined around the spine. Energetically, these two serpents are Adam and Eve (in Sanskrit, Pingala and Ida; in Kabbalah, Od and Obd). In the Bible, they are called “the two witnesses which stand before the God of the earth.” The “earth” is our physical body. The God of the earth is Chesed, our Being, who can descend into us through this fire in our nervous system, the kundalini. Chesed only can do this through Shekinah, that river, the light, the Divine Mother. Those two witnesses stand on either side of the spine. Symbolically, they are the letters Vav and Zayin. Symbolically, they are Adam Heva. This is all physiologically within us. But to accomplish that, to arrive at that we have to work, physically, sexually, spiritually, as Adam and Eve.
The Zohar says that the Shekinah, the Divine Mother can only emerge when male and female are united. did you know that?
And he asks: when does the Shekinah reside within him? And he said: when he marries, and this sign enters to its place, to the Shekinah. Then they are attached together, the male and the female, who are the sign of the covenant and the Shekinah, and are called by one name, and supernal Chesed rests upon them. – Zohar
This is the basis of Kabbalah. The very basis of kabbalah is sexual union. It says explicitly in The Zohar: when does the Shekinah reside within a man? When he marries. Sex is the clue, the key.
We have told you that one name of God in hebrew is El [אל]. We have described the meaning of the word אלהים Elohim. Elohim has many meanings, but it is a plural word. The singular form of Elohim is אל El, God, masculine. The feminine form is אלוה Eloah (Eloha). Eloah is a name of the Shekinah. Eloah means “Goddess.” Yes, the Hebrew, Judeo-Christian tradition includes Goddesses, even though the Christians refuse to accept it. The Bible is full of references to Eloah, the Goddess, but the translators put “God” instead of Goddess. In fact, as an example, the book of Job is filled with discussions and descriptions of Eloah, the Goddess, but you have to look in Hebrew to find it.
Should thy lies make men hold their peace? and when thou mockest, shall no man make thee ashamed? For thou hast said, “My doctrine [is] pure, and I am clean in thine eyes.”
But oh that אלוה [the Goddess] would speak, and open her lips against thee; And that she would shew thee the secrets of חכמה [Chokmah], that [they are] double to that which is! Know therefore that אלוה [the Goddess] exacteth of thee [less] than thine iniquity [deserveth]. Canst thou by searching find out אלוה [the Goddess]? canst thou find out Shaddai unto perfection? [She is] as high as heaven; what canst thou do? [She is] deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof [is] longer than the earth, and broader than the sea. – Job 11
Nonetheless, if we want our own inner Being, Chesed, to descend on us, to illuminate us, the clue is given in The Zohar: this happens through the Shekinah, the Divine Mother. And this happens through the sexual union, the marriage, of male and female. Let me show you something very beautiful, where this mystery is hidden. The name Eloha in Hebrew is spelled אלוה (Aleph Lamed Vav Hei). The first two letters אל (Aleph Lamed) spells El, God; this is Chesed, our Being, our Innermost. Knowing that, let us read from The Zohar:
…the name Eloha (El-Vav-Hei) is interpreted as follows: El is the Light of Chochmah, Vav is the male, and Hei is the female. Male and female are attached together and are called by one name, Eloha. So the holy soul [Shekinah] clings to this place, and everything depends on the sign of the convenant. – The Zohar
This quote states precisely what Tantra explains. Tantra – whether Buddhist or Hindu – explains very clearly that the goal of the Tantric initiate is to awaken the force of the Divine Mother, which is called “kundalini. ” The kundalini is the energy or fire of the Divine Mother. That is why it is called “Divine Mother Kundalini, ” or Devi Kundalini, who is Kali Ma, Durga. All these names refer to Agni, the fire, the force of all creation. Creation is always through the Divine Mother. The Tantric seeks to awaken that kundalini within, and raise it up through shushumna, which in hebrew is the letter Vav. The Zohar explains exactly the same thing, and that this can only be accomplished through the marriage of male and female.
When male (Vav) and female (Hei) are sexually united in the presence of God (El), they form this name of Eloah, the Goddess, Kundalini. When Vav and Hei unite, the force of El, the light of Chokmah, descends upon them.
In other words, God is there in every sexual connection. How else do you think that we have the power to create through sex? Because God is there. The power to create life (chaiah) is the power that God has, even if we do not call God “God.” That power of creation is in the Mother: all creation emerges from the creative power of the Divine Mother, who receives the spark of life from the Father, but without fornication, without crime.
If we respect that power, if we obey the guidance that we receive from the Buddhas, from the masters which all guide us to: restrain the sexual impulse, do not spill the tigle, the bodhichitta, the “jasmine flower drops.” Restrain it. When you do that, the light of Chokmah is the presence of the Shekinah or the Divine Mother who is there to create life, Chaiah. Restrained, purified, that light grows. This is the basis of Tantra.
This is how the light of that Iod, which is the sign of the covenant, descends through the upper Hei in Daath (the secret knowledge) through the Vav (the spinal column) into the lower Hei (Yesod). This is how our own individual Shekinah, our own individual kundalini, can be awakened. It is beautiful, but not easy. It takes a great deal of willpower, a great deal of self-knowledge.
If we fail in that moment of sexual union and we become tempted by desire, all of that force and energy is polarized according to our desire. This is when the man (the Vav) stands at the Tree of Knowledge, and Eve (the sexual organs) is tempted to eat the fruit, and takes it to Adam (the brain). But remember: the Tree of Knowledge is Daath tob veh rah: the knowledge of good and evil, purity and impurity, and the Vav is in the middle. You are the Vav. You choose in every moment between purity and impurity, but especially in your sexual life. This is the main opportunity to choose your path. The Zohar states that if we fail, if we commit sexual misconduct, whether in the sexual act or during our day to day life, we unveil the nakedness of the Shekinah. We use our energy to blaspheme. We use the sexual force (whether emotionally or in the mind) to look at the nakedness of our Divine Mother. We convert that energy of chastity into lust and the Shekinah becomes Lilith. Then, The Divine Mother who gives life becomes Kali Ma, the mother of death, the mother of hell. Those forces of the Shekinah, instead of creating in the positive way, in the upright way, create in the negative way. Lilith is Medusa.
Therefore, because of the transgressions of sexual misconduct, the children of Yisrael were banished and the Shechinah was condemned to exile. This is the uncovering of the nakedness of the Shechinah, because the going of the Shechinah into exile is considered to be her nakedness, as it is written: “All that honored her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness” (Eichah 1:8). The nakedness of the Shechinah is Lilith, the mother of the mixed multitude. It is considered nakedness because the rule of the Shechinah, the mother of Yisrael, and her bounty passed to Lilith, the mother of the mixed multitude. – The Zohar
The kundalini is symbolized as a serpent. In the Bible, this serpent is called “nahash.”
God sent poisonous [literally: fiery] snakes against the people, and when they [tempting serpents of Eden] began biting the people, a number of Israelites died.
The people came to Moses and said, ‘We have sinned by speaking against God and you. Pray to God, and have Him take the snakes away from us.’
God [Iod-Havah Elohai (Binah)] said to Moses, ‘Make yourself [the image of] a snake, and place it on a pole. Everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’
Moses made a brazen [Hebrew nechosheth: brass] snake [Hebrew nachash] and placed it on a high pole. Whenever a snake bit a man, he would gaze at the brazen snake and live. – Numbers 21
To raise a serpent upon a pole is to raise the kundalini upon the Vav, to raise the Divine Mother Shekinah on the Vav. That power of life can heal.
This is what we need to do in each moment by intelligent use of our energy: to raise the serpent on the rod (Vav). This is why the sacred symbol of the Divine Mother is an upraised serpent. This is why we see images of the Divine Mother with serpents, but particularly Athena, with a serpent who serves her and she always has a staff a spear which is the Vav, the rod.
This is why every Master carries a staff. Aaron carries a staff, a rod, and when he strikes it, becomes a serpent and it consumes the serpent of the Egyptians. This is why Herakles wrestles the serpents as his first task. None of this is coincidental. It all emerges from that one truth, which is Daath, Gnosis.
By wrestling the serpent, which is the power of Samael, with strength like Herakles we can raise the serpent on the staff through willpower over sex. But also willpower over mind, conquering our mind, dominating our desires with conscious will. That conscious will to do the work is the Vav. When you count six sephiroth downwards from the top of the Tree of Life, the sixth sphere is Tiphereth. Tiphereth is the Vav. Tiphereth is the human soul. This is our human consciousness, but specifically related with willpower, conscious will.
Tiphereth is always symbolized by a warrior, the knight who does battle with the dragon. Tiphereth is Perseus who conquers Medusa. Athena, the Divine Mother whose symbol is the serpent, provides to her hero the mirror, shield, the helmet, the spear, and through her intelligence (Binah), he conquers Medusa whose head is a chaos of serpents. Those serpents are the fiery serpents that bit the Israelites in the desert. The hero can conquer the mixed multitudes which are represented in the Medusa. This is how this initiate little by little, step by step, perfects himself.
There are many representations of this in the Bible. In particular, we call your attention to “the three kings.” Do you know who the three kings are? Saul, David, and Solomon. The Christians believe that the three kings, the three wise men, are the magi who came to see the birth of Christ. They do not realize that these are the same three kings of the Old Testament, symbolically speaking. The story of Saul, David, and Solomon is a story of an individual initiate, who in the beginning is nothing. He is Samuel, a prophet, but very low. Symbolically, in the Bible we see how that prophet announces the arrival of Saul (Shaoul) who becomes the king. But a low king, impure. Then from him emerges a new king, David, who is better than Saul, more pure, but has bigger problems. Then from David emerges another king, Solomon, who is better, more pure, but has even bigger problems. These “kings” symbolically represent stages of initiation. All of it is with the Vav. The name David is Daleth, Vav, Daleth. If you write that name over the Tree of Life, you put that Daleth where that upper Hei is, the Vav is where the Vav is, and the other Daleth is at the bottom. You see Iod Hei Vav Hei. David fits there. See, David is only in Malkuth. David is in the beginning. David is a king, a malachim, but needs to become more than that. In his name is the clue of what he needs. David is a letter Daleth, but he needs the Hei. He needs Beth-sheba. When David finds Beth-sheba, he finds a big problem. Beth-sheba is his twin soul, his true love, but she is married to another man. This is called “karma.” David, being impure, has to face the results of his actions. Through paying karma, we face psychological death. You see in the drama of David how beautifully this is represented. It is very painful, but by passing through that pain, that humiliation, David dies psychologically, and through his union with Bathsheba, Solomon is born. Solomon or Schlomo means “man of peace.” Solomon is the Solar man who is on his way to invite the arrival of Christ. You see, these three kings are traveling to greet Yeshua.
So the Vav has great significance, many levels of application and meaning.
Audience: You said that if we did not have God within us then we would not know how to create with sexual energy however if we are fornicating is the power still there or has the power left us temporarily because we are fornicating.
Instructor: Every sexual union is a transformation of divine forces. All energy is divine, ultimately, all energy. The animals, the plants, the minerals, all take energy, which is in its root divine. They take that energy and transform it. That energy in itself we call Christ; it is just fire. Life exists because of that energy. Every atom in your body is active and energetic because it has that force in it. If that force were removed, it would not be alive, it would be dead. So that means any act is a transformation of Christic forces. Any act, even the cellular division in your body, is a sacrifice of fire. Those cells go through a great transformation of energies and they are split and divided. It is a division of sexual forces. The same transformation happens in plants, minerals, animals, everything. But the sexual act in the humanoid level is the greatest collection of forces that we have access to. Whether its done in an animal way or an angelic way, the energy is the same; it is the result that is different.
Audience: Are the names meanings of God and Seth refers to keeping traditions because of the biblical animosity to each other?
Instructor: The names in the Bible in relation with Ra and Seth – especially in relation with the Hebrew tradition – is explained pretty fully in the lectures about Daath. We gave three lectures about Daath where we talked extensively about Seth. Also in the lecture called The Sons of Samael we talked about Seth. But in synthesis, the word Ra is not spelled the same way as the divine name Ra. They are different. We should not confuse them. Seth, as well, has multiple applications. Seth can be positive or negative, just like us. We can be positive or negative. It depends how we use our energy. Seth is the same; we are Seth.
Audience: In the engravings of paintings those with the holy spirit are pictured with a holy fire over the head is this like Vav or Lamed in the way that God raises in the kundalini?
Instructor: The question is about the Pentecostal flame that emerges on the foreheads of the apostles in the book of Acts, and it says that “the spirit of God descended upon them.” That fire is the fire of Christ. It is the light of Chokmah, which is Shekinah, the Divine Mother. That light can be represented in many ways. Most significantly, it is visible in the letter Shin which looks like a fire or a flame. It looks like a flame with three points. Nonetheless, that fire illuminates all the letters. The Iod is like a spark of fire. The shin is three Iods. So you can see that everywhere, in all the letters. The Shin can also be three Vavs, because those Vavs are the upper triangle, the Aleph. When those three Vavs descend and unite, that is shin, that is the process of involution from the Absolute to Briah and below.
Audience: You said that subtle energy can turn to matter; what type of matter? And can subtle energies build up into matter overtime provide a very powerful experience for a short period of time?
Instructor: Yes, i was talking about the transformation of energy into matter and matter into energy. This is the basic postulate that Einstein revealed through his theorem. This is not an unusual thing. It is a basic fact of existence, that you really cannot destroy anything completely. You can only change it from one state to another. You also cannot create anything, you can only change some things into another state. The importance of that understanding is that the sexual energy is subject to those laws. When we have sexual matter in us physically, it is a condensation of subtle energies. That matter is energy, and that energy is matter, and you cannot separate them, you can only transform them by will. When you accumulate sexual matter, you are creating a storehouse of forces. If you do not transform them, those forces will become destructive, they will polarize. We can witness this all over the world in traditions where religious people teach others to save their energy but they are not taught how to transform it. Those people become fanatics, abusers of children, homosexuals, masturbators, because that energy needs to work: it has too. If they ignore it, the energy will go wherever it can. When that person has a mind full of lust, that energy will power that lust. It will drive it. So, they end up with a lot of problems. Yet, if you learn how to transform that energy, it becomes a higher form. The physical matter is transformed into spiritual matter, which we call kundalini. There is a lecture called The Fire of Kundalini where we explain that.
Audience: Why are the sexual organs so sensitive and how does positive sexual stimulus affect the nervous system?
Instructor: The sexual organs are so sensitive because they are the prime transformer of energy in the physical body. They need that degree of sensitivity in order to manage the intensity of the sexual force. It sounds contradictory but it is necessary. The sexual energy is extremely fine, it is extremely particularized, it is rarified. If you do not have the subtlety of sense to perceive it, you will not see it . In other words, if your sexual organ has become desensitized, then you cannot perceive when there is energy that needs to be transformed. If you are a tantric practicing tantra and you want to transform the totality of your sexual forces, to make them spiritual and divine, if your sexual organs are not sensitive then you cannot perceive those energies. You will not know they are there. In other words, those energies will become harmful, they will hurt you, because they are not transformed. You need the sensitivity of the organs in order to completely transform all of the energy. It makes it very difficult but its necessary.
When you are able to positively harness your sexual energies, this has a dramatic impact on the body, the nervous system, and the mind. This is because the sexual forces are the hormones, the very force of chaiah, life, the force of being. Our physical bodies grew and developed because of hormones. From being a baby to being an adult, the whole process of that beautiful flowering is the result of sexual forces. When we become an adult, we can continue the unfolding of that beauty if we harness those energies and use them well. Then our mind, our body, our heart, become more beautiful. This is why the angels are so beautiful. This is why the Masters and Buddhas are so beautiful and radiant, because they irradiate purified sexual fire.
The name Tiphereth in Hebrew means “beauty.” Tiphereth is related to the letter Vav and the human soul. When our soul transforms the totality of our sexual force, it becomes an angel, it becomes the greatest creation. This is why its stated in the beginning that when God said he was going to create man, the angels were worried. They knew if the man became what the man should be, he would be more beautiful than the angels, and some of them became jealous. Have you heard that before? It is part of the story of the fall. In fact, those fallen angels sometimes are called “nefalim,” which are one of those five races of the mixed multitude.
Audience: Is playing a video game fornicating at some level is obtaining from playing a video game and then meditating that is better use of the sexual energy clearly. But is playing a video game fornication.
Instructor: Any activity can be fornication when the energy that is passing through our three brains is infected with desire. In the Gnostic tradition, we use this phrase “sexual abuse.” Most people use “sexual abuse” to describe when someone physically sexually abuses another person as in rape, incest, or something like that. But we use the term more broadly and more specifically at the same time. In Gnosis, sexual abuse refers to any abuse of sexual energy. All of us abuse our sexual energy psychologically. We might not do it physically, but we all do it psychologically.
Stated another way, any action we perform is a transformation of forces, whether we see it or not. The forces of the mind are empowered from the forces of sex. This is the relationship in us between Adam (brain) and Eve (sexual organs). When you use your mind in the wrong way, you are taking forces from within you and directing those forces. In the Bible, this is called “blasphemy.” It is to use those forces in the wrong way and commit a crime, not only against ourselves, but against God, Christ in us. So yes, you can fornicate by watching television, by watching movies, by reading books, by fantasizing, by daydreaming even if it isn’t sexual imagery. When you are using those forces to create desire, that is fornication psychologically.
To fornicate is to use the sexual fire to create in the wrong way. You might fornicate physically, which is a wrong thing to do because it creates suffering. You can fornicate emotionally when you use your emotional forces to create envy, anger, jealousy, lust. These are all forms of creation but they are fornication, because God does not create envy, anger, lust, fear, we do. That is fornication psychologically.
Audience: Does transmuting sexual energy completely remove them from you in a gross state completely for awhile is there physically no semen left in you?
Instructor: The transformation of the sexual energies is not limited to physical matter. A tantric who is working in the practice of White Tantra, restraining the sexual force and the mind, and transmuting that energy, will not necessarily have the physical matter vanish from the organs, but they will take the energy out of that matter.
Chastity is the duty of God in us to transform that matter into energy. That only happens through the lower letter Hei, which is in Yesod. That represents our own inner Shekinah. The purpose of the presence and existence of the Shekinah in us is to receive those forces from the upper letter Hei. She needs to transform those forces and redirect them back upwards and illuminate the Tree of Life. This is why that energy descends into the physical body and condenses itself as sexual matter, the sperm and the ovum. That matter is there full of all the archetypes, the potentialities of God, but we waste it, physically, psychologically. If we harness it, we extract those spiritual essences and send them back upwards. We transform those forces. There may not be a visible sign physically.
This is why we state when someone awakens the kundalini, you cannot tell physically. You cannot look at a person and say, “Oh, that person has awakened their kundalini. ” No way! Because that energy is not physical. In the same way, the forces of the Shekinah are not physical. You cannot see the forces of God with your physical eyes.
When you transform your sexual matter, you are extracting energy from the physical level and bringing back to the subtle level, but transformed. The physical vessel remains where it is. Do not confuse the laws of physical matter with the laws of spiritual matter, they are different.
In the same way, when you leave your body, your body remains where it is. You cannot tell physically if someone has left their body. The body is just there. This is why great masters can leave their body even while their physical body is active. The spirit, the soul, can leave, and another part of the Being can use the body.
When we talk about sperm and ovum, the same rule applies. The extraction is to extract the soul and the spirit of the mercury, which are the vital forces, not the physical aspect. It is to extract the soul and spirit from the matter. That is alchemy.
Hei, “behold,” take this knowledge from God and receive it with your consciousness; the letter ה [Hei] represents creation.
The shape of the letter Hei ה is formed by the letters Daleth ד and Iod י.
The Iod י is the left line or foot that may become a Zayin ז, if we prolong that left line to the top by means of action. The horizontal line on the top and the vertical line of the right in the letter Hei ה form a letter Daleth ד, which represents the physical world, and the isolated left line is the lower part of a Zayin ז cut from the horizontal line, which represents its Iod, the world to come. Therefore, the letter Hei represents the combination of the physical and spiritual realms, all that is above and all that is below.
The isolated left line of the letter Hei shows the feminine aspect of the letter Daleth, which is to the right of it. This Daleth represents the Adam of the lower Eden, Yesod. This Adam or Daleth in Yesod, the lower Eden, is the outcome of the secret of Daath, the Upper Eden.
The letter Daleth of the name ADAM אדם is at the bottom of the middle column of the Tree of Life, exactly in Yesod, the lower Eden. From there, the letter Daleth ד embraces the letter Aleph א in the right column and the letter Mem ם in the left column of the Tree of Life, thus forming the name Adam in Hebrew.
The three mother letters Aleph א, Shin ש, and Mem מ ם are related with the first triangle of the Tree of Life, namely, Kether, Chokmah, Binah, respectively.
The letter Aleph א represents the holy trinity that is commanded by the father (Kether), who in the physical body is related with the crown chakra, and with the atom in that magnetic center located at the root of the nose. From that magnetic center at the root of the nose (esoterically speaking), the forces of Aleph א, the breath of God, descend through the right column of the Tree of Life, from the top of the head, in order to join Daleth ד at the bottom of the central column. According to esoteric human anatomy, the right column corresponds to the right cord, which isn Sanskrit is called Pingala.
As is shown in the graphic of the Tree of Life, in the human being the right column relates to the letter Aleph א, which represents the first triangle (Kether, Chokmah, Binah); this is why the first letter of the name Adam אדם (that represents the brain) begins with Aleph א.
The left column of the Tree of Life is controlled by the Sephirah Binah; this left column relates – in the esoteric anatomy of our physical body – with the left cord, which is Sanskrit is called Ida. This Ida, this left column is related with the letter Mem ם, the feminine waters of Eve, since the other cord (Pingala) is related with the letter Aleph of Adam א. This is why you find the letter Mem ם (final Mem) at the end of the word Adam.
Thus, the terrestrial man, the Daleth ד of the name Adam אדם, embraces the two creative polarities: Aleph א (representing the Father) on the right column, and Mem ם (representing the Mother) on the left column. Thus, the Daleth ד in the middle of the name Adam relates to the central column of the Tree of Life; Daleth ד hides at the bottom of the Tree of Life all the forces from above. Daleth ד represents the terrestrial man, the human being.
Thus, the horizontal line of the Hei ה represents thought. The right vertical of the Hei represents speech. The short vertical line at the left of the letter Hei ה represents action. These are the three aspects represented by the three lines that form the letter Hei ה.
The joined horizontal and vertical lines of the Hei ה form a letter Daleth ד; the horizontal line represents the female and the vertical the male; both lines represent the primordial Adam that was made male-female. So, the Daleth ד in the middle of the word Adam encloses all the Archetypes that come from above into the physical world, which is Malkuth.
Therefore, the two lines of the letter Daleth ד represent male and female; in other words, we terrestrial humans are the letter Daleth, which Kabbalistically represents a poor man or a poor woman.
The Daleth ד of the name Adam אדם in the lower Eden at the bottom of the central column of the Tree of Life embraces the right and left columns: the letter Aleph א, at its right, Pingala, and the letter Mem ם at its left, Ida.
The right and the left columns, Abba and Aima, Aleph and Mem, become creative when the join the Daleth ד, at Yesod, the bottom sephirah of the middle column.
Adam therefore embraces the secret of all the 22 letters, since the Daleth at the bottom of the central column – which represents the central channel in the spinal columns, called Sushumna in the esoteric human anatomy – receives the 22 archetypes of Chokmah.
Among the three mother letters Aleph א, Shin ש, and Mem מ ם, Chokmah is represented by the letter Shin ש (fire), who through initiations joins all the lower archetypes in Daleth to the three mother letters.
In Genesis, the verse, “And God said, let us make Adam” can be explained as follows. Through Vav ו (“And”), the spinal medulla, Elohim (Aleph) uttered:
Shem Hamphorash
…so that the 22 letters or archetypes can be established below in Malkuth, within Daleth, the terrestrial man by means of the letter Mem in Yesod.
Kabbalists utter “Shem Hamphorash” instead of יהוה Iod Hei Vav Hei, that is translated in English as “Jehovah.” Shem שם (Shin Mem) means “name,” which in the Bible is also the name of the first son of Noah. Hamphorash means “to interpret” or “to expand.” What name are we interpreting or expanding? It is the Holy Name of God, which is יהוה Iod Hei Vav Hei. So when you hear the words “Shem Hamphorash,” this is equal to יהוה Iod Hei Vav Hei, which in Gnosticism we pronounce ‘Iod-Havah.’
The Elohim work through our spinal medulla, which is represented in the letter Vav ו, and is also represented in the right vertical line of the letter Hei ה, as well as in the letter Daleth ד; therefore the left short vertical line of the letter Hei ה is an unfinished letter Zayin ז, which in the Hei shows the feminine aspect of the letter Daleth ד. So, the left line of the letter Hei ה represents the feminine aspect of the letter. This is why it is separated, isolated from the other two lines of the letter.
To understand how the hidden feminine aspect is represented in the letter Hei ה by this left short line, it is necessary to interpret the name Shem Hamphorash, that is the numerical value of the name יהוה Iod-Hei-Vav-Hei as follows: the letter Iod’s י value is 10; the letter Hei’s ה value is 5; the letter Vav’s ו value is 6, and again the letter Hei’s ה value is 5. By making the Kabbalistic addition in relation with the four worlds of Kabbalah, which represents the entire universe, we have the Kabbalistic value of 72, as follows:
Hei represents action in Assiah, Malkuth. So we find two Hei’s in the name Iod-Hei-Vav-Hei.
So when we make the Kabbalistic additions of these four worlds of Kabbalah, we find the following:
Iod = 10
Iod-Hei = 15
Iod-Hei-Vav = 21
Iod-Hei-Vav-Hei = 26
Total = 72 = 9
Shem Hamphorash: by Kabbalistically interpreting or expanding the value of the name Iod-Hei-Vav-Hei, we have 72 that adds (7+2) to 9.
Notwithstanding, many Kabbalists state that Shem Hamphorash is related to Exodus 14:19, 20 and 21, where we find all the names of God that Moses utilized in order to form the pillar of fire that was guiding the Israelites in the wilderness. Moses was utilizing the magic of the word of God in order to hold the Egyptians who were coming after them, and thus with the word of God he opened the Red Sea. Moses uttered the 72 names of God in order to do it. Of course, there is something hidden within those verses of chapter 14.
The way to interpret the name of God is that Iod-Hei-Vav-Hei has the Kabbalistic value of 72 which is 9. 9 is the same value of Adam and the number of the Sephirah Yesod, which is Eden, where we always place the human being or the Man, Adam made into the image of God.
Remember that the lower Eden (Yesod) is one with Malkuth, so when we imagine the Garden of Eden in the Tree of Life, we have to understand that Kabbalistically such a Garden is Malkuth and Yesod together, one Sephirah. Of course, in us, these two Sephiroth (Yesod and Malkuth ) are separated because of the downfall; yet according to the Bible when Eden was established with Adam in it, Malkuth and Yesod were one single terrestrial paradise in the fourth dimension. Remember that we state that our physical body is tetra dimensional, four dimensions, thus the fourth dimension of the tridimensional physical body is the vital body, which is Yesod.
Here in Daleth (Hebrew: Door), which is the terrestrial man at the bottom of the Tree of Life, is where all the archetypes are hidden, which we already explained in many lectures; that is, all the archetypes are in the vital body, the superior part of the physical body. This is why we explain that the terrestrial man, Adam receives all the mysteries, all the archetypes of the Word of God in potentiality in the letter Daleth through Shin (the fires of Chokmah in the central column) through the Aleph, (the wind in the right column) and through the Mem (the water in the left column). As you can visualize, we are talking about the three mother letters: Aleph, Shin and Mem, which are related with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
These three mother letters are related with the two serpents and the central staff of the caduceus of Mercury, which in esoteric anatomy is represented in our spinal column with Sushumna, Ida and Pingala; Aleph is Pingala, Mem is Ida, and Shin is Sushumna.
In order for Chokmah or the letter Shin from above, to work in our Sushumna – which is in the middle of our spinal column or the middle column of the Tree of Life – he needs Daleth at the bottom of it. Thus within Daleth (the Doors of the gate of the city of Gaza, and the two posts, that is, the cross, the vertical and horizontal lines of Daleth within the Hei) is hidden the Shin, the virile fires of Samson (שמש-און), the Sun, the Son, which is Christ, Chokmah.
Kether is related with the letter Aleph through the right column of the Tree of Life and in the esoteric human anatomy with Pingala. Binah is related with the letter Mem through the left column of the Tree of Life and in the esoteric human anatomy with Ida. Chokmah is related with the letter Shin through the central column of the Tree of Life and in the esoteric human anatomy with Sushumna. This is how we have to see Aleph, Shin and Men macrocosmically and microcosmically in relation with the Tree of Life. Remember that we always state that our spinal column is the Tree of Life and that in our spinal column is also hidden the Tree of Good and Evil.
In the word Adam אדם, Aleph א has the value of 1, Daleth ד the value of 4, and Mem ם the value of 40. If we make the addition of 1+4+40 we have 9, which is the same 9 that we get when we make the addition of 72 related with the name of God. This is how it is Kabbalistically explained that Adam was made in the image of God, that is, by Shem Hamphorash, by interpreting the name Iod-Hei-Vav-Hei, by expanding the name in the four worlds of the Kabbalistic universe. This is how the name of God is hidden with the name Adam or this is how Adam was made in the image of God.
Thus in order for us to become the Daleth ד of the Adam made in the image of God, we have to have all the letters self-realized in our consciousness, since right now we have them but only in potentiality. This is how we have to understand how the letter Daleth encloses all the 22 letters of the word of God.
Therefore if Daleth ד in Adam encloses all the 22 letters of the word of God within, this means that the letter Hei, the woman represented also in the letter Zayin, is inside Daleth, inside Adam.
Now in esoteric Kabbalistic anatomy we now that in our spinal column, the letter Vav represents the man, Adam, Pingala and the letter Zayin ז represents the woman, Eve, Ida. The letter Zayin ז is similar to the letter Vav ו, but the difference between the letters Vav and Zayin is in the vertical line that emerges from the Iod which is above in both letters; the vertical line of the Zayin ז is protruding from the middle of the Iod whereas in the letter Vav ו the vertical line is protruding from the right edge of the Iod. Vav ו is Pingala and Zayin ז is Ida which is related to the woman or to the feminine aspect.
Thus, if we utilize our imagination, we will see how the letter Zayin ז is at the left side of the letter Hei ה; by means of action, we continue drawing the left short line of the Hei ה until it touches the horizontal line of it, of the Daleth, thus forming the letter Chet ח, which hides the mystery of Vav and Zayin, positive and negative.
Notwithstanding, in the letter Hei ה the Zayin ז is severed from the top of the horizontal line. Why? It is severed in order to show us that Zayin was taken out of Daleth, which as we explained encloses the 22 letters, which were place by Chokmah from the world of Atziluth through the central column of the Tree of Life.
Daleth ד encloses all the 22 letters within it. This is why Adam represents the 22 Arcana. We have the 22 letters or archetypes in potentiality.
In order for Adam, the terrestrial man, to put the 22 archetypes into activity, there is the need to take the letter Zayin ז out of him. This is explained Genesis as follows:
And the Jah-Chavah Elohim caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam (Daleth went to sleep), and he slept: and he took one of his sides (one of his two ribs = Ida and Pingala, Vav and Zayin) and closed up the flesh instead thereof; and the side (Zayin), which Jah-Chavah Elohim had taken from Adam, made he (a Hei) a woman, and brought her unto Adam.
So if Jah-Chavah Elohim took one of the sides of the androgynous Adam in order to make the Hei, the woman, it is obvious that God took Zayin ז out of Adam, since in the mysterious left side of the occult anatomy of Adam we find Ida represented in the letter Zayin ז. God made the Hei ה, the woman, by taking the letter Zayin ז out of Adam.
In the Bible when you read the Hebrew letters related with Eve, you find the following:
And Adam said, This [זאת] one [ז Zayin] is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called אשה Isha (Aleph, Shin, Hei), because she (Zayin) was taken out of איש Ish (Aleph, Iod, Shin = the Daleth is the terrestrial man in the lower Eden that conceals all the letters between Aleph and Tav, the first and last letters of the Hebrew word for ‘The”).
In Hebrew we write ‘this one’ with the letters זאת Zayin, Aleph and Tav. So “this one” refers to the letter Zayin that is out from between the letters Aleph and Tav, the first and last letters of the Hebrew alphabet.
So God took Zayin ז from Adam, who encloses the entire Kabbalistic alphabet within, since Adam is represented by the letter Daleth that receives the 22 archetypes from Chokmah, from the Word of God, since Adam was made in the image of God.
This is why we find a gap between the horizontal line and the left line of the letter Hei, as if telling us, this left line was severed from the horizontal line which with the vertical right line form a Daleth in order to form the letter Hei. If the left line were joined to the horizontal line then it will not be a letter Hei but a letter Chet.
Nevertheless, many Kabbalists state that such an isolated left line is a letter Iod that forms a foot.
This can be also true since the androgynous human being has two feet; the right and the left, like the two serpentine legs of the rooster of the Abraxas, which represents Ida and Pingala. Thus, the left foot of the letter Hei is Ida, and if you visualize above the gap of the left of the letter Hei you can see with your imagination the letter Iod; thus when you sever the lower vertical line from that Iod of Zayin, then a gap remains between the Iod and the line.
Thus in order to show the feminine aspect of the letter Daleth, we just place the severed line from Zayin at the left of Daleth, in order to form the letter Hei. This is why the left line of Hei is isolated, severed, separated.
This is why when Adam – as a Daleth – saw the letter Zayin ז severed from him, he saw part of himself yet with the shape of the letter Hei and said:
This one “Zayin” is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Isha (Aleph, Shin, Hei), because she (the vertical line of Zayin) was severed from the Iod of Ish (Aleph, Iod, Shin).
This Ish is the androgynous man, the heavenly man above from the world of Yetzirah.
אישים
Let us comprehend this word with the heart with intuition: so, in Hebrew אישים Aleph, Iod, Shin, Iod and Mem form the plural word for Ishim, men; Yet, only איש Aleph, Iod, Shin is singular for man and only אש Aleph and Shin together spell the word for fire.
This אישים Ishim – in the world of Yetzirah, the world of Formation, the world of the angels – is the androgynous Adam, explained as follows: the male aspect of the word is formed by the letters Aleph and Iod that represent the right column of the Tree of Life; the female aspect of the word is formed by the letters Iod and Mem that represent the left column of the Tree of Life; these are the two polarities of the fire, which is represented by the letter shin in the middle of the word, the letter shin correspond to the central column of the Tree of Life; these aspects of the fire are hidden with the Daleth of Adam.
In the world of Yetzirah, Ishim אישים is related with Malkuth. It is related with the self-realized Adam.
This tridimensional world is the world of Assiah. The Adam of this world is not self-realized. We are not self-realized. Yet let us comprehend that the Self-realized Adam is called Ishim אישים.
In the invocation of Solomon we say:
Ishim, assist me in the name of Shaddai!
Ishim is the name of Malkuth in the world of Yetzirah. Ishim אישים means men, it is a plural word that points at the human androgyne.
When we isolate the letters Aleph, Iod, Shin of Ishim we are left with the word איש Ish, the male, yet in order to write the word woman in Hebrew you take the Iod from Ish and add the letter Hei at the end of it: אשה.
This is why Adam said:
This one “Zayin” is now a “Hei”, bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called אשה Isha (Aleph, Shin, Hei), because she was taken מ out of איש Ish (Aleph, Iod, Shin).
It does not say that she was taken out of Adam, but out of Ish.
The terrestrial Adam is below in Malkuth-Yesod but in his spinal column is the mystery of Ishim; because the female aspect of the fire relates to the letters Iod and Mem of the phrase “from man: מאיש
In other words, we should say: And Jah-Chavah Elohim caused a deep sleep to fall upon the terrestrial Adam, and as Daleth slept, he took – from the heavenly man – the female fire; the Iod and Mem of the word Ishim and made the Hei of Isha.
In the letters מאיש of the word Ishim lies also the mystery of the woman. The woman is not as many fundamentalist Christians or people who read the bible literally think, only flesh and bones, as it is symbolically written. Listen, the woman encloses the whole mystery of the letter Hei in Malkuth, the bottom of the central column of the Tree of Life. Let us see:
The word אישים Ishim relates to the fires of the central column of the Tree of Life, which relates to our spinal column and to our three brains as follows: Aleph א is the intellectual brain, Shin ש is the emotional brain and Mem ם the motor, instinctual sexual brain. The two Iods י of the word belong to the two creative powers: the throat and the genitalia. The word Ishim contains the three mother letters and two Iods, the two polarities of the fire which are also represented in יהוה Iod Hei Vav Hei, the sacred name of God, synthesized in the number 72, all of the powers of Shem Hamphorash written with 22 letters.
The woman, the Zayin ז, holds within herself all the mystery of creation represented in the left isolated line of the letter Hei ה.
Because Zayin (Eve) was taken out of Adam, now Adam is incomplete, this is why it is written:
Therefore shall a man (Ish = Aleph, Iod, Shin) leave his father and his mother (the two polarities of Ishim) and shall cleave unto his wife (Isha = Aleph, Shin, Hei, the fire in Malkuth): and they shall be one flesh. – Genesis 2
The two polarities father mother are the two polarities of the fire represented in the plural word אישים Ishim; so in the beginning the terrestrial man Adam was androgynous as the heavenly man Ishim. But now the two polarities are separated and this is why it is stated in the bible that the androgynous man abandoned his androgynous state (father and mother, the two polarities of the fire), now the man or the woman holds only one polarity, therefore we have to cleave unto our spouse, which is the other polarity of the fire, and to become one triple fire in the flesh (sexual union) in order to become again the androgynous Ishim. This is the mystery of the separation of the sexes, which is Kabbalistically very well explained in the bible, and very well hidden within the Hebrew letters.
This is why we explain that the letter Hei ה hides the mystery of creation, because the mystery of creation is directly related with the two creative polarities of the fire and in the left short line of the letter Hei ה is hidden the letter Zayin, the power of Binah which is the feminine aspect of the forces of God related with creation.
The Hei ה, the woman, retains in herself all the powers of creation, although in order for the Hei ה, the woman, to create anything within her womb she needs the activity of the male, but the rest, that is, the whole of creation is made through her, as it is simply demonstrated in the word אלה Elah (Aleph, Lamed, Hei), which means Goddess.
“אלה (Elah), The Goddess’ generations of the heavens and of the earth when in her (in the letter Hei) were created, in the day that Iod-Hei Vav-Hei Elohim made the earth and the heavens.” – Genesis 2: 4
Hei ה also represents the terrestrial woman, this is why we state in many lectures that the word יהוה Iod Hei Vav Hei means: Iod-Phallus Hei-Uterus, Vav-Man Hei-Woman. These letters represent the two polarities.
Now, it is written that the woman, the אשה Isha, the Hei was taken from the man איש Ish; this is explained as follows: when you take the middle Iod י out of the word איש Ish (Aleph, Iod, Shin), and by stretching it you make – with that Iod or dot – the short line of the Hei ה, that, without such a line, is just a Daleth at the very bottom of the Tree of Life; and this how the woman appears as a Hei ה with the feminine aspect represented with the short vertical line at her left side as a creative active force.
Let us now talk about the Hei of the word הגדה haggadah which means ‘to tell.’ This word has two Hei; one Hei at the beginning of the word and the other Hei at the end, united in the middle by the letters Gimel ג and Daleth ד, about which we have already talked. The letter Gimel ג represents the Inner Man, the Ishim. The letter Daleth ד represents the terrestrial man, the Adam, so the union of both letters make the word GOD, who is represented in the union of the two (Gimel and Daleth). In the Bible there is a tribe named Gad which is also written with Gimel and Daleth. The word haggadah begins with Hei and ends with Hei. The first Hei is in the Daath, the throat and belongs to the Gimel, the heavenly man; the second Hei is in Yesod, the genitalia and belongs to Daleth, the terrestrial man; they represent the two Hei, the one above and the one below, which explains how GOD creates.
This is why when you read the first words of the book of Genesis, you read: בראשית ברא אלהים “Bereshith Bera Elohim” (in the beginning God created), then you read “the” which in Hebrew is the word את ‘AT’ (Aleph, Tav). Aleph is the first letter and the letter Tav is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet; so this short word is showing us that when it is written: Bereshith Bera Elohim At” the word את ‘AT’ is synthesizing the whole alphabet of the word of God, because without the את AT’ (the alphabet) Elohim cannot create.
Then the next word is השמים ‘Ha-Schamayim’, the letter Hei appears in the beginning of the word, the translation in English is ‘the heavens’ (At Ha-Schamayim). So such a Hei means that Elohim is placing the 22 letters hidden between ‘AT’ (Aleph, Tav) through it in order to make Schamayim (the heavens), so through the letter Hei above the Elohim created. This is why we stated that the letter Hei means creation.
Then ואת הארץ ‘And the Earth” appears, which is another mystery that you understand when you know the meaning of the Hebrew words ואת ‘Ve AT’ (And the), here appears again the letters Aleph and Tav but joined to the letter Vav (which symbolizes the spinal column). So Heaven above and the Earth below; ‘And the’ (ואת Ve At) means: from above, through ‘Vav’ the spinal column ‘AT’ (Aleph, Tav), the word of God (the 22 letters) created ‘Ha Aretz’ (the Earth), through the letter Hei below.
This is how in as simple manner the two Hei of the word יהוה Iod Hei Vav Hei appear in the first words of Genesis. We are explaining the meaning of these Hei only at the surface level, because the depth of them implies a great deal of wisdom.
Moses wrote Genesis in synthesis in order to Kabbalistically explain a lot; thus when you meditate on it, you discover how everything was made, only by meditating in the first words of Genesis:
בראשית ברא אלהים את השמים ואת הארץ
‘Beresheet Bara Elohim At Ha Schamayim Ve At Ha Aretz’, meaning, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
השמים Ha-shamayim: heavens; these heavens imply dimensions because the first Ha-shamayim (heaven) is Daath which is the beginning (Beresheet) in the world of creation which is the world of Briah—Ha-Schamayim of Briah. And thereafter it says
ואת הארץ Ve At Ha Aretz; “Ve At” (תאו) means ‘And The’; “Ve” is written with the letter Vav, the spinal column and “AT” with Aleph Tav. Again “AT” represents the twenty two letters within the “Vav” of “Ha Aretz”, the Earth
Or as Master Samael Aun Weor stated:
The Tree of Life is the spinal medulla. This Tree of Wisdom is also the ten Sephiroth, the twenty-two creative Major Arcana, letters, sounds, and numbers, with which the Logos (God) created the Universe. – Samael Aun Weor
Likewise, through many lectures we explained how this is done; let us explain it again.
The earth itself is the letter Hei of יהוה Iod-Hei-Vav-Hei; it is the world of Assiah below Yetzirah, Briah and Atziluth.
Assiah is the world of action and matter, it is the outcome of three previous cosmic manifestations: Saturn—the Saturnian epoch, Solar—the Solar epoch, Lunar—the lunar epoch.
When studying the Tree of Life, we know that Saturn is related with Binah in Daath, and the Sun with Chokmah in Tiphereth, and Yesod-Binah with the Moon.
In the three Sephiroth (Daath, Tiphereth, Yesod) of the central pillar of the Tree of Life we can see how these three former cosmic manifestations were dimensionally manifested in םימשה the Heavens, and crystallizing the power of the 22 letters of “AT” through the “Ve” or the letter Vav of “Ve At Ha Aretz” ץראה תאו cosmically speaking. In other words these heavenly powers crystallized through the word.
This relates to the famous first verses of the Gospel of John:
In the beginning (בראשית Beresheet) was the Word (the letters את AT are in Beresheet), and the Word (את) was with (אלהים Elohim) God, and the Word (את AT, the beginning and the end of the 22 Hebrew letters) was God. The same (Hebrew ותוא = Aleph, Vav, Tav. Vav) was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made. – John 1: 1-3
Remember, when we talk about the word we are talking about the twenty two letters, the twenty two archetypes that are hidden within “את AT’, Chokmah; they descend through the letter “Vav” in the same way (ותוא).
So when common people read ‘the heavens’, they think that Genesis is talking about the atmosphere: the clouds and all that that exists above this earth, “and the earth” is this terrain or the solid matter here. No, listen. Heavens relates to super dimensions; heavens also relates to previous manifestations because this is what we call involution. Do not mistake this word “Involution” with devolution which is different. To devolve is to return to the chaos. To involve is to descend, to involve the divine archetypical forces into the different densities of the matter.
These divine archetypical forces descend from above; this implies what we always state that God creates through the letter Vav ו. Through the Vav ו is how the divine archetypical forces descend. This is how the Bible explains it many times in Genesis:
And [ו] the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And [ו] the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And [ו] God said, Let there be light: and there was light, etc. – Genesis 1: 2, 3
‘And’ God said because God is the word, the Logos. ‘And’ means that through the letter Vav ו,—through it God is doing it.
“And the earth” ואת הארץ, as you see the “Vav” is always preceding the letter Hei in Ve At Ha-Aretz. The letter Hei sounds like a deep breath through the throat. This is why the breath of God (Aleph) through the throat (Hei) are interrelated.
What is the letter related to the breath of God? You know that is Aleph א because this is the fifth lecture and the first was Aleph א which relates to the breath, the wind, the air. And as you can see here that the spelling of the letter Hei is הא Hei-Aleph. Can you see how beautiful this is?
הא Hei is the breath of God; it is Aleph א pronounced through the Hei ה, the uterus, the cosmic uterus, the throat of God, the Divine Mother.
Aleph א is the father represented only in the Iod. Because I repeat again, Aleph א encloses the three primary forces, the three Iods: Father, Son and Holy Spirit; Kether, Chokmah, Binah. So, when through the “Hei”, the throat, we pronounce the sound “AH”, the Aleph, we are naming the trinity through the eternal feminine.
The Hei ה is the feminine aspect of that trinity because remember that Hei, which is the woman, was taken from the Iod of איש Ish, which is the man; and this is why the woman was called not Ish, but אשה Ishah—with the letter Hei ה at the end.
The letter Hei ה at the end of any Hebrew word always implies the feminine aspect; that is why the word אלה Eloah ends with Hei, meaning Goddess, the feminine divinity. So all the words, the suffix, the Hei which is always utilized at the end of the Hebrew words implies femininity. As אדמה Adamah (ground), this is another feminine word.
Are you getting this? Because it is very important for us to understand what the letter Hei ה is.
The throat relates to the Hei ה, and to the uterus, because Elohim created through the throat: “Hei” Ha Schamayim and “Hei” Ha Aretz, the whole universe. This is how we understand that people that think that God is only masculine are half atheists because they are separating the femininity of God from the masculinity; God cannot do anything by being only male. The male “El” needs “Elah” its female aspect which is very hidden in the mysteries of the letters of Elohim, the Hebrew letters for divinity.
Moreover, the wrod “letter,” in Hebrew, is אות’. אות (Aleph, Vav, Tav) is pronounced ‘Ot’. “Ot” Aleph, Vav, Tav also means sign.
The important thing about the word אות (Aleph, Vav, Tav) is that we again find in it Aleph א – the first letter of the alphabet – in it, aat the beginning, and Tav ת – the last lertter of the alphabet – and the end, together with the letterו Vav in the middle. Again we find that the entire alphabet descends through the letter Vav, because the spelling of “letter” אות in Hebrew is Aleph, Vav, Tav. Thus, the whole alphabet (תא) is hidden within (ו) “the Vav” which represents Adam.
It comes into my mind – when talking about אות “letter” which in Hebrew also means “sign”—something from the Old Testament, from the book of Isaiah, the prophet:
Ask thee a אות sign (or a letter) of יהוה Iod, Hei, Vav, Hei thy Elohim; ask it either in the depth (the last Hei ה at the bottom of the word Iod, Hei, Vav, Hei), or in the height above (the first Hei ה of Iod, Hei, Vav, Hei). – Isaiah 7: 11
Isaiah says ask of Iod-Havah a letter a sign, an אות; as you see—the name of God is Iod Hei Vav Hei—if I am asking a sign, a letter, from Him, well, the letter “Hei” is above in (השמים) the heaven in Daath, and below in (הארץ) the earth, Malkuth: So, Iod, Hei, Vav, Hei Elohim has a “Hei” below and a “Hei” above.
ץראה תאו םימשה תא םיהלא
Thus “Hei” is the sign, the letter אות, which hides the mystery of the word את of Elohim in the heavens and the earth.
This is why in Matthew 12: 38 it is written:
Then certain of the scribes (the intellectuals, those who – at that time – studied very well the Torah, the Kabbalah) and of the Pharisees (who – at that time – were also doing the ritualistic works of Kabbalah) answered, saying, Master (meaning Jesus), we would see a sign from thee.
If you literally read that verse in the Gospel of Matthew – “we would see a sign from thee” —you might think that they are asking for a miracle, right? But they did not ask for a miracle they ask for a sign אות which means a letter.
But he answered and said unto them, An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign (a letter); and there shall no sign (letter) be given to it, but the sign (the letter) of the prophet Jonah (הנוי – Iod Vav Nun Hei): – Matthew 12: 39
Jonah in Hebrew is spelled with the letters יונה Iod, Vav, Nun and Hei—thus, in all of those letters or signs of the name Jonah, which Jesus is given, is hidden the whole secret of the self realization: the mysteries of the Iod, the Hei, the Vav and the Nun נ.
The Nun נ is the fish which is the symbol of ancient Christianity, Nun is related with the human seed; the letter Hei also relates to seed.
For as Jonah (dove in Hebrew) was three days and three nights in (the Hei) the whale’s belly; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth (which is Assiah, Malkuth represented by the letter Hei in Kabbalah) . – Matthew 12:40
So in other words Jesus is directly talking about the mysteries of the whole work that we have to perform.
The whale, the fish, is the letter Nun נ. And the Hei ה of the name יונה Jonah is precisely the heart of the earth; יונה Iod Vav Nun Hei—Jonah.
When people read these verses in the Gospels, they interpret them in different manners—because every symbol is interpreted in seven manners. But here, we are Kabbalistically speaking, since Jesus was talking to the scribes and Pharisees—and these scribes and Pharisees were Kabbalists—they were not like in this day and age where the scribes and Pharisees ignore Kabbalah.
If in this day and age, lay people (who do not know what a sign means) ask a sign of the Gnostics, we will give as a sign the letter Hei. Yet, the so-called “Christians” from any denomination or people from other religions, they would not know what sign to give, because they simply do not know. At the time when Jesus was in the Holy Land, the lay people that were around him did not know about these mysteries; only those people, who, in the beginning of his preaching, were Initiate Jews knew of these things. Thus, not all of them were Kabbalists and not all of them knew about the alchemical esotericism of the kabbalistic letters—such as when Isaiah said, “ask a sign of Iod-Havah”. — Isaiah 7: 11 said “ask a sign” why? Because ‘ask a sign’ means ask a letter which relates to “Hei”; as in Genesis 47: 23, “take seed”, the words ‘take seed’ are related also with the letter Hei (הא).
הא־לכם זרע וזרעתם את־האדמה (lo, take seed for you, and ye shall sow the land.)
Then Joseph said unto the people, Behold, I have bought you this day and your land for Pharaoh: lo, take seed for you, and ye shall sow the land. – Genesis 47: 23
Gnostic interpretation:
And Joseph said about the ‘El’ (Chesed, the Ruach Elohim, the Abraham) of people, Behold, this day the (קניתי) ‘Kenyan’ (Gedulah, the Gimel from the land of Cush) for you, and your lands (Adamoth: physical bodies, your Daleth) for Pharaoh: “Take for yourselves your sperm (the seed of Abraham), so that you shall (become enlisted. or initiated by) sowing (your consciousness, that is part of Geburah, Neshamah in) the land (of Havilah, your physicaliity, that has the seed, the sperm where there is gold). – Genesis 47: 23
This is why when we talk about the letter Hei we always associate it with the Divine Mother, the feminine aspect of the Holy Name of God (יהוה Iod, Hei, Vav, Hei); “Hei” is the fifth letter of the Hebrew aphabet, thus, it relates to the number five.
In Gnosticism, we know that the Divine Mother Kundalini unfolds in five aspects and that the shape of the letter Hei ה is formed by a letter Daleth ד and a letter Iod י; Daleth 4 and Iod 10 = 14, 1+ 4 = 5. We are not going to talk about those five aspects because there is already a lecture related with those five aspects of the Divine Mother Kundalini. Nonetheless we are just going to name Her five aspects:
All of us have these five aspects.
So the Divine Mother is five and these five are also related in Kabbalah with the five souls.
In the lecture of Gimel we talked to you about Nephesh, Ruach, and Neshamah—the three souls that all of us have. Nephesh is the animal soul which is very strong in us; it is that animality that characterizes us, that donkey on which Jesus was riding when entering into Jerusalem. Jesus was riding the donkey, and this is what we have to do; to ride on Nephesh, which is the first soul. The second soul is Ruach, the intellectual emotional soul that all of us have within our intellect and emotions. And Neshamah—we have just part of it, this is the Essence, the Consciousness that we have within; that is part of Neshamah. We have to develop those souls that we have within in a positive manner, in order to develop the human soul.
Now, there are other two souls related with the letter Hei. The fourth soul related with the letter Hei is Chaiah (חי). This Chaiah is life. In Hebrew when you toast “to life!” you say, l’chaim, to life! —Chaiah: life. עץ החיים Otz Chaim is the Tree of Life, which we always address here. So חי Chaiah relates to the feminine aspect of divinity. The Divine Mother above, who we call Kundalini; it is that soul that is above, which we said is the Divine Mother inside.
That Chaiah we explained in other lectures relates with the four creatures of Ezekiel we call the Chaioth or the four manifestations of Chaiah, the Divine Mother Nature. Remember the sphinx in Egypt; the sphinx in Egypt represents all of those forces of Mother Nature which Ezekiel talks about: the lion, the eagle, the ox and the man—the face of the sphinx is the man—those are the four aspects of Chaioth and relate to the soul, Chaiah, which is related to all the forces of nature.
Why do we state that Chaiah is the feminine aspect of God? Chaiah is the feminine aspect of God and it is related with the letter Hei—yes Chaiah (חי life) in Hebrew is alternatively spelled with Chet, Vav and Iod (חיה life). The meaning of this alternative spelling is hidden, in the Book of Genesis; it is stated that when Adam was going to give a name to his wife, to his Ishah, he named her חוה [Chavah]:
And Adam called his wife’s name חוה [Chavah]; because she was the mother of all חי [living]. – Genesis 3: 20
And if you ask what does חוה Chavah (Eve) have to do with life? Adam answers for you, “because she was the mother of all living חי.”
So the letter Iod of Chaiah (חי life), stretches and becomes the letter Vav of Chavah (חוה). So Chavah – Eve in English – the wife of Adam, encloses the mysteries of Chaiah (חיה) life.
This is why if we want to self realize ourselves, we need a woman—because the womb of a woman encloses all the mysteries of nature, the mysteries of Chaiah; life develops within her and she shows that practically by making in her womb a physical life. So God works through her.
Thus, if we want to work in the path of self realization as men, we need a woman. Well, the woman might say, “yes, I have all of those forces within me”. But if a woman needs to put into activity all of those forces within her, she needs the activity of the man inside her; in other words, she needs the phallus of the man—because by herself she cannot do it because the man has the seed and the woman has the life-ground, she is the Hei. You see how beautiful this is?
This is why we state that Chaiah (חי life) is the Divine Mother in her higher aspect, because there are many types of Chaiah (חי life) within us, but the higher aspect of that Chaiah (חי life), is that soul of the world, the Divine Mother Kundalini above that should incarnate or, better said, should swallow us because Chaiah (חי life) is one of the mysteries of self realization.
When one makes an equilibrium in the three lower souls—Nephesh, Ruach and Neshamah, when Neshamah incarnates in us as the Father, the inner Chesed within you, you become then a master, a reincarnated master.
What is a reincarnated master? A reincarnated master somebody who has Neshamah within. That Neshamah is that breath that is written in the Bible:
“And (God) breathed into his (Adam) nostrils the ‘breath of life’ (neshemah: נשמת חיים); and Adam became a ‘living soul’ (nephesh chaiah: נפש חיה).
God breathed Neshamah inside of Adam and Adam became a living soul. The breath-Neshamah is precisely the incarnation of Chesed and Geburah, the Master, the Monad.
In the initiation, when you enter into initiation, you start working with Nephesh, with your animality. As Paul of Tarsus states:
And so it is written, the first man Adam was made a living soul (נפש חיה); the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.
Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural (Nephesh); and afterward that which is spiritual (Neshamah). The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they also that are earthy: and as is the heavenly, such are they also that are heavenly. And as we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly. – 1 Corinthians 15: 45-49
There are many people who want to start working with Neshamah and to have ecstasies—and to self realize the Neshamah within them without working with Nephesh—it is stupid to work like that. First, to make of Nephesh – that animal soul – human—means transmute your seed, to be chaste, to transform your emotions and your mind (Ruach) in a positive manner; this is done through initiations, meaning the creation of the Solar bodies, the annihilation of the ego, etc. When the egos are annihilated and the creation of the bodies is completed, then Neshamah – who is your Inner Being – enters into you; he is the Monad, your master. Such is an incarnated master. Understand, somebody with ego is not an incarnated master; the ego has to be annihilated. The incarnation of a master has always been celebrated in Tibet— the incarnation of a master is a great thing; to be an incarnated master is not an easy thing, it is a great work.
The incarnated master, who has taken the direct path, has to be swallowed by Chaiah, the Divine Mother. Comprehend the Divine Mother does not eat garbage. The Divine Viper cannot swallow you if you are filthy. She only eats holy things; she does not eat refuse. So therefore Neshamah has to be purified; this is what, in alchemy, is called to transmutation of the lead into gold. When all of the bodies of the true man – the physical body, the vital body, the astral body, the mental body, the causal body, the Buddhic body, the Atmic body – are very well purified, made gold, the Divine Mother swallows each one of them and then the master becomes a Chaiah in the earth; or, in Sanskrit terms, a Naga (serpent). This is the process, of the letter Hei; when the letter Hei swallows the man then that man is endowed with all the powers of the Divine Mother, because she is one with him, she is the Chaiah with him.
The last process is to be swallowed by Yehidah.
Yehidah: from masculine yahid the one, the only, the unique from the verbal root yahad oneness, union; cognant with the Hebrew ‘ehad one
Yehidah is another soul, the fifth. First you incarnate the three souls – Nephesh, Ruach and Neshamah – and purify them, but the process of the other two other souls Chaiah and Yehidah,…. they do not incarnate in you, instead, they swallow you. And that is why most of the rituals in ancient times, said that the Lord does not eat garbage, does not eat refuse; it means that we have to purify and to be worthy to be swallowed by God, that is, to be taken as Enoch into heaven.
How does this happen? When Yehidah (which is the one, singular, the unique in Hebrew) which is that Aleph, Kether, symbolized by the eagle, comes and swallows Chaiah.
This process of the eagle swallowing the serpent, meaning, Yehidah swallowing Chaiah is symbolized in the flag of Mexico, and thereafter the initiate becomes a feathered serpent—this is the whole work of the Hei, the whole work of creation, with the five souls: Nephesh, Ruach, Neshamah, Chaiah, and Yehidah. All of that is the mystery of the letter Hei. But, how do we start doing that?
Concerning Hei, many Kabbalists always point at the verse in the Book of Genesis that states: “take seed for yourselves.” The word “take” is related with the letter Hei, which reveals charity. When Joseph was sold to Egypt, he became the interpreter of dreams for the Pharaoh.Following that, the Pharaoh had that mysterious dream of the seven fat cows, and the seven malnourished, ill cows. Joseph told the Pharaoh, “The seven good cows will be seven years of abundance; and the seven poor and very ill cows will be seven years of famine in Egypt, my advice” said Joseph, “is the following:
Let them gather all the food (seed) of those good years that come, and lay up corn under the hand of Pharaoh, and let them keep food in the cities. And that food shall be for store to the land against the seven years of famine, which shall be in the land of Egypt; that the land perish not through the famine. – Genesis 45: 35, 36
And this is how Joseph, who symbolizes that archetype IO-Cephas which is in Malkuth—starts working in the initiation—because seven is initiation, i.e. the seven days of Genesis, etc., etc. So when the other archetypes related with the world of Israel descend into Egypt – Malkuth, as it is written in Genesis, they are looking for seed which they know, Egypt has, since Mizrahim gathers all the seed of Yesod—that Egypt is Malkuth.
Then in Genesis 47: 23, it is written that Joseph told them:
הא־לכם זרע וזרעתם את־האדמה (lo, take seed for you, and ye shall sow the land.)
So, within the words, “lo, take seeds for yourselves” in the Hebrew Bible, is hidden the spelling of the letter Hei (הא) the letter Hei together with Aleph spells Hei in Hebrew.
“Lo, take seed,” Joseph says.
Thus only by seeing הא, the Kabbalist states, “Lo, take,” is the spelling of the letter Hei, thus, the whole mystery of the seed is there. Thus, take seed for yourselves.
Kabbalists interpret this Hei (הא) in different manners. But when you are an initiate, when you have intuition you know that “lo take for yourself seed” means transmute for yourselves your seed because the seed is the sexual sperm, yes that is the meaning of seed.
“Lo, take for you seed” means, transmute for yourselves your seed; it is a reference to the sexual act for self realization which is the godly way of giving, which in Hebrew is called kosher. Are you familiar with the word kosher? You find it in many labels at the supermarket; many products have it, i.e. some salt is kosher, meaning it is ritually pure, sacred.
Listen, the salt of the earth is the semen; if you want to make it kosher, you must transmute it into energy. Nevertheless, if you reach the orgasm, you then spill the salt of (Ha aretz) the earth, you spill it from the Hei of God, then, it cannot longer be kosher. To eat kosher, as it is demanded in the Bible, implies to transmute the sexual energy to make it holy through the sexual act.
In the Hebrew language the letter Hei denotes femininity. So therefore, you have to know how to take that seed; take seed for yourselves. You have the seed, you are physically the letter Hei, Mizrahim, Egypt and that seed is in Hei (הא) the earth, Malkuth. Thus, if you transmute it, you then attain the creation of the Adam into the image of God within you.
How do you achieve it? The letter Hei ה hides that mystery; why? Simple, when you use your intuition, when you study with your heart; listen. Hei is in the throat and it is accompanied by the letter Aleph, which is the wind, which is the air, which is the breath of God. The letter Hei encloses the mysteries of nature, of the four creatures that we have spoken about in other lectures; the lion is the sight, the ox is the ear, the nose, related with the eagle, Tiphereth… When we go to Tiphereth, which is the nose, Tiphereth is related with Ruach. Ruach in Hebrew is wind, which is Aleph; and Tiphereth breathes the Ruach; Tiphereth is precisely the soul, the human soul.
Now, how do we do it? The Hei ה, the seed, is in the sexual organs, you know this; the seed is זרעTzara or zera in Hebrew, and also means, semen, sexual seed, either in the sexual organs of the woman or the man.
So, how do you take that seed? how do you feed yourself with that seed? how do you take your seed for yourself and make it kosher? In other words, how do you feed your soul with it? Listen, you have to understand this very well, our nose, in accordance to the animals of Ezekiel, is related with the eagle. Why? because in the root of my nose I have Aleph which is the wind, the atom of Kether, the Father.
So therefore when I breathe, I take the breath of God into my lungs, the Aleph of God into my lungs. So Tiphereth takes the breath, meaning, that you have to do this during the sexual act; this is why the whole realization lies in the human soul—because you as soul have to breathe, to inhale your seed, you have to transmute your seed, you have to place all the seed-elements in your head and in your body by means of the sexual act. So the clue of sexual transmutation, of the taking of the sexual seed, which is the godly given of God in our body, is in the respiration. When you breathe through your nose remember that occult anatomy teaches that the nostrils are connected to the testicles and to the ovaries—so when you breathe through your nostrils the breath of God is taking or is giving you (the soul) the seed from your ovaries and testicles—through Ida and Pingala.
Without the breath you cannot transmute whether as a single or married person—when you do your sexual transmutation you do it through Pranayama or sexual alchemy, through respiration—knowing that through the nostrils, Tiphereth, the eagle of Ezekiel, is there connected to Aleph (the wind).
Indeed, Adam is precisely the outcome of the combination of Aleph (the wind) and the seed through the respiration. This is how you perform Kosher, you make your seed Kosher; this is how you eat the life of your seed. This is what is called kosher; remember that. It is not just to eat through your mouth; it is to know how to breathe and to take the seed in order to receive the blessings of God.
You take your seed from your Hei—the lower Hei of “Iod, Hei, Vav, Hei” that in your body symbolizes the sexual organ—remember that Chavah, Eve symbolizes the sexual organ, the physical body and also the woman.
This is why the woman was honored and respected in ancient temples because without the Isis, without the priestess, without the woman, it is impossible to create. So, when married men and married women unite, they breathe and through their breath they take the seed into their souls; this is how that Nephesh is transformed into human, that Ruach is transformed into human, and this how we perform the whole process. This is why we state in Gnosticism that the whole path is sexual. But we have to make sex holy and this is done only when you take your seed for yourself, that is, not to spill the seed through the filthy orgasm of animals; the orgasm was the sin of Adam and Eve, who, instead of breathing and taking the seed from their own bodies, they reached the orgasm and thus they threw away all the seed that God was giving to them for the puposes of feeding their souls. This is how they separated themselves from God, and did not become kosher—but filthy, Rah, polluted in other words.
Do you follow this? Are you getting this, the mystery of the letter Hei? Because in itself Hei implies five aspects related in ourselves with: thought, speech and action:
Thought is represented in the horizontal line of the letter Hei; there are two types of thoughts: subjective and objective—you know this; thought is in relation with the mind in us. Objective thoughts are those that come from God and subjective thoughts are those that come from the ego.
Speech is represented in the right vertical line of the letter Hei is also subjective and objective. We are not talking about subjective things here. Most of the time people talk about subjective things related to the ego. Understand, objectivity is related with objective reasoning – things that come from the heart (Tiphereth), when you receive (Kabbalah) from the heart. When you receive from the heart, you then give Kosher, symbolized in that letter Hei (אה), this is to give from God—to give that which is divine.
All of these four aspects that you see; two types of thoughts and two types of speech are accomplished through action, which is represented in the isolated left vertical line of the Hei which is Chavah.
The isolated left vertical line of the Hei is action—because when you transmute your seed, you then unite the left rib (Chavah) with your head (Adam) which is your Iod; and this is how through your actions, you perform religare, re-ligate (religion), that is, you reunite, re-ligate (rejoin) your soul to God. Thus, you do it through your actions, this is why you see in the letter Hei, that the left vertical line is separated, severed because either you unite that line to the top of the letter Hei or you keep it as it is, disjoined, and project it down to hell by spilling your seed through the orgasm.
So action means whether you do it or not. So that is why when we talk about action, it is just one—either above or below—it should be only one, not two. Either you do it or not. If you do not do it then you just speak subjectively, you just talk subjectively—Yet, if you do it then you develop objectivity within you, in both thought and speech.
Audience: I was just relating with the verse that says “be fruitful and multiply,” how people use it as a pretext to spill the seed…
Speaker: Yes, people have many excuses to spill the seed, they say, God said “be fruitful and multiply,” and therefore, if we do not spill the seed, we do not multiply. But remember very clearly and understand that the Bible does not say be fruitful and fornicate, it says multiply. In order to multiply it is not necessary to fornicate. In the animal level, yes, because the animal is irrational, instinctual. The animal loses the seed in the very brute way because he does not reason. But reason was given to us in order for us to choose between to spill it or not.
So when we learn how to transmute the seed we also learn how to release only one sperm in order to fecundate the woman. Because in order for the woman to become pregnant in the physical plane, she needs only one sperm, not millions. If you go into a field, for instance, and you open a little hole and you say I am going to plant corn, then you put a few seeds, but one is enough—you do not see the people that are doing that work putting millions of seeds in that little hole, since they know that the seed will be wasted.
The truth is that in the level in which we are right now, we multiply as beasts because we use Nephesh in order to multiply. So in other words we do not know how to take seed for ourselves. If we learn how to take seed of ourselves, then we make of the sexual act kosher, a sacred thing, a holy thing—then we learn how to take the seed and transmute it into energy.
Listen, easily, by the will of God, a sperm can be released from the gonads and the woman can become pregnant. There are many couples who become pregnant in that way. When you ask, you also can have that privilege. But in this case Binah, the Holy Spirit, is the one that does it. This is not your will. This is not like saying, “Oh I want a child”… No; you ask of your Inner Being for a child, because you respect his will; thus you say, “My God, I would like to have a child in the physical world,” and then he says, “I will give it to you just perform the sexual act and I will take one sperm from you so that your wife will be pregnant.” That is the way, the human way; remember the sentence “be fruitful and multiply” in the Book of Genesis was uttered by God. To be fruitful is, as the Master Jesus said, “for their fruits you will know them,” meaning that we have to develop the fruits of the Tree of Life and the fruits – in the positive way – of the Tree of Good and Evil, Knowledge. So when we are fruitful, when we are very developed and adult then we can multiply. It does not say multiply and then be fruitful; first be fruitful. How are you fruitful? You are fruitful by transmuting your sexual energy, by inhaling the seed, there is no other way.
In this day and age, as you know, a lot of people have one two three four five six seven eight children—thus they do not care about being fruitful; they just want to multiply—and this is why this society is a chaos—because everybody is multiplying without caring a bit about being fruitful.
Audience: Could you explain the death of the ego in order for the transmutation…
Speaker: To explain the death of the ego…? The animal ego has to die in order to make the sexual act holy and for this it is important for us to meditate every day, to comprehend every day our Nephesh, our animality. Remember that, in accordance to evolution we come from the animal kingdom, thus, if you observe the animals they fornicate, they adulterate; that is normal for them. But now that we are in this human level we have to learn how not to be an animal and for that we have to control Nephesh, the donkey, our animality; this is what Jesus taught by riding a donkey and entering into Jerusalem: if you want to enter into Jerusalem, the higher levels, you have to tame your donkey and for that of course you have to comprehend your donkey because your donkey works through your mind, through your heart and through your sex. Your donkey is lust, anger, pride, envy, vanity, laziness, gluttony etc., etc.; that is your donkey. Those animal aggregates that we have within have to be annihilated and the way of doing it is by meditating, comprehending them in meditation. And of course, in the sexual act, is how you destroy them by knowing how to utilize the sexual energy of the Divine Mother Death.
Audience: …We have to work with our Nephesh first, then what is the next step?
Speaker: The next step is emotion. Well we have to work with our three brains. Remember that emotions and intellect are related with Ruach and Nephesh is related with the flesh, with the bones, with the sexual energy, with all those elements that we have unfortunately in the sub-consciousness, unconsciousness, and infra-consciousness, which we call ego; that is Nephesh—trapped—so we have to purify that Nephesh through the transmutation and by the annihilation of the ego and then the Ruach develops in the superior manner and of course that is when we create soul—the soul has to be created by the transmutation of the energy—our Solar Bodies or electronic bodies that we have to develop. The culmination of the development of Ruach ends in Tiphereth. Ruach is a thinking soul. But remember that we have two types of mind: abstract mind, which is Tiphereth and concrete mind, which is Netzach. So when your reach Tiphereth, the abstract mind, the complete development of Ruach in the superior manner is ended; then you reach the level of mastery. Then you have to work more with your Ruach and your Nephesh to purify them more in order to incarnate Neshamah which is Geburah and Chesed, the Monad. And when you incarnate Neshamah, which is Chesed and Geburah, inside of you, then you prepare yourself working higher and higher and higher in order to be swallowed by Chaiah. Then Chaiah swallows you—and thereafter Yehidah has to swallow you—when that happens, the five souls are already there. And then we have the Tetragrammaton within the Pentagrammaton, the five pointed star—do you see that?
The Pentagrammaton, the five pointed star, is precisely the symbol of the perfect man, made into the image of God. Why? Because in the right arm of that pentagram is written Adam, which sums nine and in the left is Iod Hei Vav Hei the Tetragrammaton which as we explained also makes the addition of nine; so 9+9 = 18, 1+8 = 9; that is the Adam Iod-Chavah—the perfect man (9) made into the image of (9) God.
A single person can annihilate as much fifty percent of ego—this is in accordance with the teachings of the Master Samael Aun Weor; because the Divine Mother receives more weapons, strength in the sexual act; there is no ego that can tolerate the fire in the sexual act in order to be destroyed. But a single person with patience and a lot of prayer can annihilate 50%; ..like Paramahansa Yogananda for example: Paramahansa Yogananda is one of those yogis that came to the United States and was teaching Kriya yoga; Yogananda was single all his life but worshiping the Divine Mother. All the songs, all the writings of Yogananda are to his Divine Mother. Of course he awoke a lot—he is an awakened elemental—not a master—maybe a master of minor mysteries but not major mysteries because he did not create the internal Solar Bodies. But for him, if he returns, or if he already returned, to create the Solar Bodies will be an easy task because he is awakened 50%. So like him, many single people can reach that level, if they dedicate themselves – as Yogananda – seriously to the work. But remember, Yogananda was worshiping the Divine Mother, Hei—the letter Hei, inside of him, and was respecting his sexual energy—as a single. The best thing for him now is to worship the Divine Mother with a wife.
Audience: Are there mantras related with the letter Hei?
Speaker: Well there are many mantras. “Ha” is a mantra related with the ether; it is related with the throat. The mantra related with the mental body is written in the book of Occult Medicine, the mantra of the mental body.
Do you have another questions? I hope that the seed “Hei” will be in your consciousness. You might say that this lecture is very cryptic. It is, but it is a seed; if you inhale and meditate in it you will have all the knowledge that we are pointing at here, because I was just giving you the tips of the whole knowledge that encloses the letter Hei. When you really meditate and see that in you, I could say more. But I do not know if you can take it…do you know what I mean? With other Kabbalists it is easy; but when you are learning Kabbalah it is difficult. That is why I always cite the Bible in order for you to understand. Look in the very beginning at the Hebrew letters; the letter Hei is there in the moment when God is creating the heavens and in the moment when he is creating the earth: Hei is in Ha-Schamayim and Ha-Aretz –because without the Hei there is no creation. That is why Hei encloses the mystery of creation.
Daleth ד is the fourth Hebrew letter. In the previous three lectures we have discussed א Aleph (1), ב Beth (2), and ג Gimel (3). In order to understand the letter ד Daleth we need to remember the first three letters and have at least an elementary understanding of them because Daleth, the fourth letter, is an intermediary between the first three and all the rest.
The letter ד Daleth is shaped with two lines, one horizontal and one vertical, and the simplicity of its form belies its incredible depth. Like all the Hebrew letters, ד Daleth has many levels of significance and conveys a type of spiritual wisdom that will escape the intellect. To comprehend ד Daleth you have to approach it intuitively because just like the three letters that come before it, it can mean many things depending on the context and where it appears.
The shape of ד Daleth is two lines, one horizontal and one vertical, which is a reflection of its root. The letter ד Daleth is related to many other ancient letters, like the Arabic Dal which looks similar at a slightly different angle, and the Phoenician letter Dalt which looks like the Hebrew ד Daleth but with an additional line connecting the two ends of the horizontal and vertical lines. Significantly, this Hebrew letter ד Daleth is related also with Δ Delta, the fourth Greek letter, which also looks like a Daleth turned, with those two lines connected. It looks just like the Phoenician Dalt. All of these letters in their respective languages are the root of our English letter ‘D’, the fourth letter, and all of them carry significant importance.
In Hebrew, this fourth letter has the numerical value of four. Daleth also represents a doorway. In other words, when the letter is placed in a word, you have to keep in mind that not only is it the letter ‘D’, it is the number 4 and symbolizes a door. For example, in the name אדם Adam – A D M – Aleph, Daleth, Mem in Hebrew, Daleth is the central letter, between the Aleph and the Mem. This has incredible importance symbolically and spiritually. Daleth has the numerical value of four; when you add the values of the letters of the name Adam, the result is nine, which is also very significant.
These levels of meaning are important to understand because when we start studying the Bible or any scripture, the names, the symbols, the places, the words have a numerical significance. They have a symbolic significance, e.g. the word עדן Eden. The word עדן Eden has ד Daleth in the middle of it; that ד Daleth is the doorway to Eden. It is the door through which Adam and Heve left Eden. Guarding that door is an Elohim, a great Angelic intelligence who guards the entry way back to Eden. To return to עדן Eden is the purpose of this knowledge.
Eden has two levels or aspects:
In Hebrew, this knowledge (Gnosis) is called דעת Daath; the first letter of דעת Daath is Daleth. The first letter for “knowledge” is a doorway. דעת Daath, knowledge, is the doorway back to Eden. What is exceedingly interesting about this word דעת Daath beginning with Daleth, a door, is that every door is twofold: you can pass through it in two directions: in or out. The same is true of Daath, Gnosis, knowledge. This is why the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of דעת Daath, is called the Tree of Knowledge “of Good and Evil” because from that door are two potential outcomes.
Knowledge is not a plaything or a toy. Sadly, we treat it as such, and the results show in the state of our world and the awful suffering that knowledge has produced. Knowledge is power, and power entails a terrible responsibility. If we utilize knowledge without consciousness of that knowledge, we create harm. We create destruction. This is abundantly evident in this day and age. Humanity has been bestowed with great knowledge, but also is afflicted with terrible ignorance, and utilizes its knowledge for destruction. This is why the single largest expenditure in the world today is to create weapons to kill. We do not spend most of our money on food or on the welfare of others. We spend the majority of our countries’ budgets on weapons, on death. This is because we use knowledge ignorantly guided by the animal instinct, the Nephesh, desire, passion and all of the egotistical elements that infect us due to our karma.
You see, knowledge is a doorway of cause or effect. Every action that we perform produces a result. When that action is empowered through knowledge, the result is multiplied, and there is an exponential scale that unfolds. The greater our knowledge, the greater power we have for either good or evil.
Daath does not refer to materialistic knowledge or anything you can learn in books. Daath is a very special kind of knowledge that relates to superior levels of consciousness. Before the fall from Eden, the ancient humanity represented by the symbolic Adam and Eve were to be instructed in Daath, but they failed to abide by the instructions. Unfortunately, we continue to make the same mistake now. That is why we are spiritual ignorant: from in (not) + gnarus (knowing).
In the ancient past, humanity was in “Eden,” which is both a place and a state of consciousness. As a place, Eden is represented in the Tree of Life as the Sephirah Yesod, which means “the foundation.”
In Hebrew the Tree of Knowledge “of Good and Evil” is:
עץ הדעת טוב ורע
Knowledge is דעת Daath. The English “good” and “evil” are translated from the Hebrew טוב Tob and רע Rah. Good is טוב Tob. Evil is רע Rah. But רע Rah is not just evil like a guy in a red suit with a pitchfork, or some man in black in a movie. Rah really means impurity, pollution, but it implies a force, an intelligence. You can translate רע Rah as “impure spirit.” This is why when Heve, the woman, is tempted in the garden to eat of the fruit of knowledge, that symbolic Tree, her desire corrupted her action and the result was impurity, רע Rah. Thus, she passed through the doorway of Daath, knowledge, and left Eden because she failed when facing her desire. The last letter of the word Yesod is Daleth. Eve used that daleth to leave Eden. Yet, that doorway is still there should she decide to return. In us, Eve is our sexual organs.
Through a sexual mistake, Adam and Eve left Eden. Adam / Heve, Ish / Isha, the man and the woman in Hebrew terms, are symbolic. The man, the masculine force, represents our brain. The woman, the receptive force, represents our sexual organs; the relationship between the two is how we create. We create through the doorway (Daleth) of Daath (knowledge).
Adam and Eve are symbols related to creation, not only in the past, but in the present. The root of our forces of creation reside in our brain and our sex, which are Adam and Heve, in us. We are tempted by the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, Daath. That fruit is sexual.
That knowledge that is within us and we fail when our desire clouds our judgement, and we leave Eden. Of course, none of us are in Eden now. We are all in the wilderness. We are in suffering, we are subject to death, decay, pain, uncertainty, anxiety and spiritual darkness. When we look for God, we do not find God. Adam and Eve walked and talked with God. We are not at that level. We are out of Eden. If we were back in Eden, we would walk and talk with God. We would personally commune with the Innermost within us. This is a state we can recover if we walk back through that door, Daleth, and return to Eden by redeeming ourselves of the mistake.
We have to remove the causes of the mistake which are within our mind. Those causes are anger, pride, envy, jealousy and most especially lust, the chief amongst them. The most powerful force, psychologically, that we struggle with is lust. Daleth has a special significance in relationship with sex, with sexual energy, because it is through that force that God creates. The Elohim, the Buddhas, the Yab Yum, Shiva Shakti, whatever religion, whatever terminology we utilize, the creative power to gestate a universe, to create a Sun, to give birth to a planet or even just an insect, is always sexual. We in our arrogance think that the universe happens by accident, but this is a foolish point of view.
When we observe nature we see sex is the cause of every form of creation, without exception. Even the great composer who creates a beautiful symphony does so through the harnessing of his own inner Adam/Heve, the sexual power that is uplifted through the brain and expresses itself musically. The same occurs in an artist, who takes that same creative power and expresses it through his hands, words, paint, or any format. All of those are Daleth, doorways through which something is expressed. This is Daleth: a door. When we study these letters we have to realize that.
We talk about how the letters relate to certain Sephiroth on the Tree of Life. For example, we have mentioned that Aleph, the first letter, is related with Kether, the first Sephirah. Aleph is also related with all the spheres. Daleth, also, has relationships with different Sephiroth on the Tree of Life, but is related also with all of them. In the same way, when you breathe, you take in Aleph, air, the breath of God, but that air is circulated throughout your body: through the lungs by means of the heart into the blood, and from the blood into every cell. That is the power of Aleph, but that power comes through Beth, Gimel, Daleth, and Hei. All of these letters are involved symbolically and explain the transformation of air. Similarly, the letter Daleth applies in many levels, in many ways to us.
Daleth is a doorway. We ourselves are a door. Adam/Daleth is the door in the midst of Adam, and each of us is an Adam. We are an Adam who is out of Eden, who is in the wilderness, who has given birth to Cain, the mind that murders the Soul. We are that Daleth. Through us pass creative forces, the power of Daath. But how do we direct those energies? Who is in charge? Who manages what passes in and our of the door? Which way do those energies flow in our life from moment to moment? We actually do not know because we do not have control over our own psychological house. We are a chaos, a multiplicity, a legion of conflicting desires. In one moment we are in love with our spouse, passionately, and in the next moment we are completely indifferent to them, and in the next we hate them. We go through cycles of conflicting desires, contradictory I’s, egos. We are not one, we are many. Because of that, our doorway is always in flux: the doorway of our mind.
Furthermore, the energies that flow in and out of us as a Daleth, flow through multiple doors. You see, our body is a Daleth, it is a doorway for energy. Our mind is a Daleth, because it is a doorway for energy. Each of our eyes is a Daleth. Each of our nostrils, our mouth, hands, feet are Daleths
Our mouth is a doorway. In Hebrew, to speak is dabar, which begins with Daleth, because to speak, the air has to emerge from our throat, which is where the Sephirah Daath (knowledge) is hidden.
דבר Dabar [Talk] no more so exceeding proudly; let [not] arrogancy come out of your mouth: for Jehovah [is] a God of דעת Daath, and by him actions are weighed. – 1 Samuel 2:3
All of our senses are doorways: ד Daleths. They are all doorways to transform energy, and yet, who is in charge of them? Is God directing us in our envious efforts to “succeed” or “beat” someone else? Is our Innermost guiding the proliferation of lust that constantly pulls at our attention? Obviously, God is not the one guiding us. We are unable to hear the voice of God. We only hear the voices of our many desires.
This is extremely significant. This is not merely fun and games, or an entertaining theory to debate. In each moment of your life, you are creating. The human organism is a transformer of forces, and according to your will and your action, those forces are transformed, and those forces produce consequences, results. This is called karma in Sanskrit, from the word karman, which means “to act.” Karma is simply the Law of Cause and Effect.
We are not here on this planet to do whatever we want, to do just do whatever we please, even though this is the philosophy that our media loves to promote. Our culture loves to tell us that life is just about enjoying all of the pleasures we can, as much as we can, until we die. This is a very convenient lie for those who are benefiting from us behaving in that way, but we do not benefit from this behavior, neither does God, neither does humanity. The evidence is all around us. Because of our behaviors we have created this society. Because of how each of us behaves individually on a day-to-day basis, we have created this world, not God. We have created starvation, poverty, rape, war, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons. We are the ones who created all kinds of cunning ways to cheat one another. We have made all of that because of desire. To change this planet, we have to change ourselves.
In mathematics, when you use the Greek letter Δ Delta, which relates to ד Daleth, it means change. It is a symbol in math that indicates change. It is a door through which things change. We need to become a conscious Δ Delta: We need to consciously (with knowledge, Daath) utilize our precious opportunity of having a physical body, of having a few moments to breathe and live, and to use them for the benefit of others, not ourselves, not our own conveniences, not our own desires, but for the good of others. We know this is true because it is the core teaching of every great religion: charity, sacrifice, conscious love, selflessness. As we are now, we are a Δ Delta / Daleth that is not enriched with conscious knowledge and a living visible connection to God.
This is why ד Daleth represents a poor man or woman. This poverty is not financial or materialistic. True poverty is to be spiritually poor.
We are spiritually impoverished, very poor, because all we have is this legion of desires which can never be satisfied. As much as we feed them, as much as try to we satisfy them, we are never satisfied. I don’t care how rich you will get, you will still not be happy. No matter how many sexual partners you get, you will never satisfy that lust.
In one of the most ancient scriptures known publicly, The Laws of Manu, it states:
Through the attachment of his organs (to sensual pleasure) a man doubtlessly will incur guilt; but if he keep them under complete control, he will obtain success (in gaining all his aims).
Desire is never extinguished by the enjoyment of desired objects; it only grows stronger like a fire (fed) with clarified butter.
If one man should obtain all those (sensual enjoyments) and another should renounce them all, the renunciation of all pleasure is far better than the attainment of them.
Those (organs) which are strongly attached to sensual pleasures, cannot so effectually be restrained by abstinence (from enjoyments) as by a constant (pursuit of true) knowledge.
Neither (the study of) the Vedas, nor liberality, nor sacrifices, nor any (self-imposed) restraint, nor austerities, ever procure the attainment (of rewards) to a man whose heart is contaminated (by sensuality).
That man may be considered to have (really) subdued his organs, who on hearing and touching and seeing, on tasting and smelling (anything) neither rejoices nor repines.
But when one among all the organs slips away (from control), thereby (man’s) wisdom slips away from him, even as the water (flows) through the one (open) foot of a (water-carrier’s) skin.
If he keeps all the (ten) organs as well as the mind in subjection, he may gain all his aims, without reducing his body by (the practice) of Yoga. – Laws of Manu 2:93-100
The more you feed desires, they just get hungrier. That’s because those desires are the vehicle of the tempting serpent. Yet we become addicted to sensations. Physical sensations, emotional sensations, mental sensations. We are impoverished because our desires have stolen everything of value from us.
Many of us have jobs and careers and lives that we (our soul) did not really want anyway. A lot of people choose careers and directions in their life because they want to impress other people. Or they are trying to do something to impress their parents or their family, not because they wanted that. In the end they end up being disappointed, discouraged. Many times we follow our desires only to discover we did not get anything of value out of it, or when we got something, it was painful.
As much as we seek and seek and seek in this external world, as much as we think we need something outside of us to give us happiness, we are fooled, we are suffering a delusion, because nothing external to you will ever give you lasting happiness. Happiness is a quality of consciousness. It is a vibration of the Soul, which is internal, psychological and that vibration can only emerge when that Soul is free of desire.
When there is no desire to cage the soul, then happiness is natural, normal. Joy is the natural state of the mind. Joyfulness, happiness, contentment, peace are normal in the free consciousness.
A tranquil heart, a joyful heart, is the natural state of the human being. The anxious heart, the fearful heart, the lustful heart, is unnatural. It is unnatural; it is not normal. Yet, this is the most common state we find amongst humanity now. That is because we are abnormal; we are sick, we are fettered, we are diseased, and we are dying. This humanity is dying. We are observing the death throes of this humanity. Humanity is a dying patient who refuses to accept the cause of our illness, and we keep trying to find external things to fix it – like economically, politically, materially – but none of these external conditions can solve the problem, because the problem is psychological; it is inside.
The letter ד Daleth represents a poor man or woman. In Hebrew, the word for poor is דל dal. In Arabic, the letter ‘D’ is Dal. In Sanskrit, the basic food eaten by poor people is called dal. “Poor” is where we get the word “porridge” in English. We all look at such food as if we are above that. Thus, we want to eat expensive, rich food, as if it proves our value. But the truth is that as rich as we may be in the physical world, and no matter how good our food is, if we do not have God within, then we are poor spiritually. We do not have God within. What we have within is desire, ego, fear, resentment, attachment. We are a poor man, darkened, burdened with terrible karma: This is why we suffer.
There is a way to change this, because the ד Daleth is the doorway, and every door goes two ways. We have the potential to change if we are serious, if we are humble, if we put ourselves in the hands of our Innermost Being, our own Yidam, which is an Asian term referring to the Innermost, the Being, God, the Buddha:
He raiseth up the דל dal [poor] out of the dust [the dust Adam is made from], [and] lifteth up the beggar from the dunghill, to set [them] among princes, and to make them inherit the throne of glory… – 1 Samuel 2:8
Our inner Father (Chesed / Gedulah) is symbolized by the letter Gimel. Gimel (3) represents the rich man, and Daleth (4) represents the poor man. The rich man, Gimel, is our Innermost. He wants to bestow his riches upon us, but will not if he knows we will squander it on stupidities. We are only poor because we are stupid. If we prove ourselves to our Innermost, he will lift us up from our dunghill.
Come and see the water of that river which comes out and flows from the Garden of Eden, Binah [the third sephirah], never stops flowing. It supports the poor by giving the light of Chassadim through gimel [the third letter] which is Yesod to Malchut, which is dalet [the fourth letter], that is “poor” (Heb. Dala) and needy. Hence, hosts and legions wait here for sustenance from Binah, the secret of the said river. This union is therefore called by the name of גד gad [gimel + dalet], the ג gimel taking out from Binah to give, and ד dalet accepting and receiving from it. – Zohar
This is why The Zohar states ג Gimel can never be separated from ד Daleth. They need each other. That is, our Innermost cannot be separated from the terrestrial man. This sounds strange to westerners. Those who have a religious bent may accept that we terrestrial people need God, but to us it sounds sacrilegious to hear that God needs us. Gimel, our Innermost, the Son of God in other words, in Christian terms, needs the Son of Man, his Soul, to become perfect to receive his inheritance, to receive his treasures from Heaven so that that terrestrial man can become a doorway of the Light: a Prophet, a Bodhisattva, a vehicle of Christ, a transmitter of wisdom who is selfless but radiates the Light of the real Being, who is a non Being, who is beyond any kind of ‘I’ but is the perfect individual.
To become Daleth, one has to become a perfect expression of the Inner Being, ג Gimel. Gimel and Daleth together spells God. In Hebrew we would say גד Gad. גד Gad means “to tell,” “to speak,” and how else does God “create” but through Daleth in the throat (Daath):
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
On the Tree of Life, Daath, knowledge, is at the level of the throat. The Elohim creates through the Word, which in Greek is Logos. The Word of God comes from the throat. Let there be Light. Aur is Light. That creation occurs only when Gimel and Daleth are united.
When the poor man is divested of his spiritual poverty, meaning his ego is destroyed and he has been cleansed, then ד Daleth is united with Gimel. Gimel and ד Daleth together, גד GD, (GOD), cause the Word (Christ) to emerge from the throat. When those two parts are united, then the Being can say, Gad, speak, tell. Then the Prophet can speak the words of God. This is how John the Baptist performed his mission.
For this [John, IEAOUMS] is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, “The voice of one crying [גד gad, through Daath] in the wilderness [outside of Eden, calling the souls to return], ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” – Matthew 3:3
All of the prophets represent the union of Gimel and Daleth: גד.
The letter ג Gimel (3) and the letter ד Daleth (4) both relate to the Sephirah חסד Chesed. If you count downwards from the top of the Tree of Life you will reach the fourth Sephirah: חסד Chesed. Chesed is related to our Innermost. Daleth is the fourth letter and it also relates to חסד Chesed. The word חסד Chesed ends with ד Daleth. Chesed is also known as גדולה Gedulah, which is spelled with both Gimel and Daleth. In the Sephirah Chesed / Gedulah the union of Gimel and Daleth is manifested.
In Sanskrit terms, Chesed is Atman, the Self. What Atman emerges from, what the Self emerges from is Anatman, the non Being, the Father of the Father: אהיה אשר אהיה Eheieh Asher Eheieh. In Hebrew, He is that He is, or better said, He shall be which he is becoming.
And Moses said unto Elohim, Behold, [when] I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The Elohim of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What [is] his name? what shall I say unto them? And Elohim said unto Moses, אהיה אשר אהיה [Eheieh Asher Eheieh] I shall become what I am becoming: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I shall become hath sent me unto you. – Exodus 3:14
Eheieh means, “I am becoming.” Through the prophet, He is becoming. That which will become is That which is Not Yet: the archetypes in Atziluth. That is symbolized in the process of the Light emerging through the first three letters of the Hebrew alphabet: Aleph, Beth, Gimel. In the first three lectures of this course, this process was explained to some degree of how that Light (Ain Soph Aur) emerges through processes of creation, through Trinities.
The upper Trinity of Kether, Chokmah, Binah in the world of Atziluth, in the world of archetypes, is the blueprint of the Soul that is not yet formed. That Light needs to descend and create a Soul. Binah (the Holy Spirit, Shiva Shakti) descends by means of Daath (knowledge) into the world of Briah, the world of creation, and it is here that that Three in One of Atziluth becomes Two, and each of those Two contains the Three within. The Trinity expresses as Father-Mother: the Yab Yum, Shiva Shakti, God and Goddess, El and Eloha, Abba and Aima, the Divine Couple, the Divine Parents. Each Parent contains the Trinity (Δ Delta) within. In other words, the upper Trinity (Δ) expresses as a unity of two Trinities: ✡. This forms ✡, the Seal of Solomon, the Star of David.
The Hebrew word גד Gad, Gimel Daleth, means “to tell” or “to say.” To “say” is the means of expression of something archetypal; in other words, a word is the expression of a thought. Spiritually, our Being longs to become. Eheieh Asher Eheieh, He that is becoming, will become through Daath, the power of knowledge, which is symbolically related to the throat. The power to “say” (גד Gad) the words of God is the power of a prophet. That is in the epic symbolic story of initiation written by Moses about the Kings Saul, David, and Solomon, the prophet who guides David is named גד Gad: “to say.” What God has to say is realized through the process of initiation, symbolized by Saul, David, and Solomon. The middle king, David, is spelled with two Daleths, between which is vav, the spinal column. These three kings symbolize the process of initiation, which is how the archetypes from Atziluth are molded into a perfected soul.
The unfoldment of the Light from Atziluth to Briah is how God creates. God creates sexually. God is not male only. God is male/female. God is Elohim: El (masculine) plus Eloah (feminine). Creation through sexual cooperation is mirrored in every other level of nature. Creation is always sexual because everything mirrors how God creates. Yet, sexual creation changes from level to level. Creation is always sexual, but sex changes from level to level. Nonetheless, God, the Elohim, the Yab Yum creates through purity – through Tob, not Rah, not impurity, not lust. There is a profound difference.
The Star of David, ✡ the Seal of Solomon, is two triangles united. Those two triangles are two Δ Deltas united: two Beings, one male, one female; one projective, one receptive. So look at the mathematics here, intuitively. One male, one female, that is two; they unite, and the force that unites them is the third factor, the third force. This is why in ד Daleth we have two beams, one vertical, one horizontal. The vertical is the male, projective, erect: the phallus. The horizontal is the female, receptive, passive: the uterus. The force that unites them is invisible. This is why in the ד Daleth these two lines touch, but do not cross. They connect, but do not yet merge. This is a beautiful symbol, and you will grasp why when you comprehend the letter Hei in the next lecture.
Why is this significant? The third force that binds them, that connects them would be drawn between the two ends of the horizontal and the vertical lines. When you imagine that line, that invisible force of love, that mystical, beautiful force of love, you form a triangle, a Trinity: you form the power to create.
The power to create is the Law of Three. To create anything, there must three factors, three forces – projective, resistant or receptive, and the one that conciliates, equilibrates, balances. The easy way to understand, but the most mystical, is the relationship between husband and wife. It is sacred because it is a reflection of how God creates. The man is the projective, active principle, who chases the woman. The woman is the second principle, who is receptive or resistant. The only way they can be united is if a third force magnetizes them.
The male and female represent Shiva and Shakti, and the third force that unites them should be love, but in these times it is usually lust, greed, envy, fear, etc. Therefore, modern unions are often destructive. When lust is the binding factor, what is created is pain. The sexual force, which should create positively in the upper Eden, Shamayim (Ouranon, Heaven), instead creates in Hell. This is how Eve left Eden. Because, you see, Heaven and Hell were both established by Divine Laws as conduits for energy. Everything in nature is polarized: positive/negative, black/white, night/day, hot/cold, acid/alkaline. Every energy is polar, including sexual energy.
Sexual energy is polarized according to our actions. Sexual energy is polarized when it passes through our Daleth, our door: our mind and our sexual organs, which are intimately related. When we enter that door of Daath, sex, then these two parts of ד Daleth merge and connect, the vertical male, the horizontal female and we form a cross, the most ancient and sacred symbol in the world.
When the Europeans arrived in Latin America in Mexico, they found crosses in every temple and they were outraged so they destroyed them. In every Buddhist temple there are crosses. Amongst the Assyrians, the Babylonians, even amongst the Jews, the cross is an ancient and sacred representation of Daath, knowledge, because it is the crossing of the Father and the Mother. That crossing is creation. The entire power of religion is in the cross – not in belief, theories, schools, groups, movements, any Master, or any person outside of you. The power of religion is your sexual power. When that sexual power is put into the hands of your own Innermost, with it he can create a Prophet of you, he can make a Buddha of you, he can make of you an Angel, he can make of you a Vajrasattva: a Diamond Soul, a perfect Soul. This is why the Law states “Thou shalt not fornicate”, “Thou shalt not commit adultery”. This is why in the scriptures of every religion the orgasm is forbidden, sexual abuse is forbidden, because that energy is Divine. It is the very power of God to create. We utilize it for selfish purposes and the result is destruction and pain. This is why Adam and Eve entered the wilderness to suffer and die.
גד Gad, “to say,” is also the name of the twelve tribes of Israel. The twelve tribes symbolize the twelve astrological signs of the zodiac. גד Gad is Scorpio, which rules the sexual organs. Our legacy is created by what we “say” (גד Gad) through our use of sex: either physically, through children, or spiritually, through our Word. Even the shape of the scorpion is revealing: it is triangular, with the longest point being the stinging tail. That triangular shape is present in our sexual organs, too:
Obviously, when man Δ and woman Δ unite, the result is the same symbol: ✡.
This is why all the religions have chastity as the first requirement to enter the Daleth. To really enter religion and become a serious practitioner, a person always takes vows. In every religion, the traditional vow includes to not spill the sexual energy. In Buddhism even lay practitioners take this vow “I vow to cease sexual misconduct”. If you have been initiated into Kalachakra Tantra, then you take the vow “I will never emit the Jasmine flower drops”, which is the Thig-le, the sexual energy. Interestingly, in the Tibetan language, the word for door (sgo, which looks like a daleth) is also the first letter for egg and for testicle.
Every monk, nun, Lama, and priest is required to restrain their sexual energy. All of these traditions still have vestiges of this ancient knowledge but most have forgotten why. This is why priests all over the world now are secretly having relationships, masturbating, or abusing children because they do not remember why they have to keep that energy, and how they are to use it correctly. In order to return to Eden, it is the sexual force that empowers it. We left Eden because of sex, and we return to Eden by means of sex.
The Hebrew word עדן “Eden” literally means “pleasure, bliss, delight.” Yet remember, every energy is polarized. There is sanctified, pure delight in heaven, and there is also destructive, damaging pleasure in hell. The most intense energy in us is sexual energy. There is no doubt it can produce pleasure, but humanity ignores the polarization of that pleasure. Humanity only knows the Rah side of the Tree of Knowledge. Yet, if we respect the command of Jehovah, we can experience and return to the Tob side of Daath.
The energy that explodes through the orgasm is the very energy that can create the Soul. When we abuse that power we are caste out of bliss (Eden), but if we retain it, if we respect it, if we harness it, that power is delivered into the hands of our own Gimel, God. When divinized, the sexual energy illuminates the mind. In Sanskrit, they call this Ojas.
“Sublimation is not a matter of suppression or repression, but a positive, dynamic, conversion process. It is the process of controlling the sex energy, conserving it, then diverting it into higher channels, and finally, converting it into spiritual energy or Ojas Sakti. The material energy is changed into spiritual energy, just as heat is changed into light and electricity. Just as a chemical substance is sublimated or purified by raising the substance through heat into vapour which again is condensed into solid form, so also, the sexual energy is purified and changed into divine energy by spiritual Sadhana.” – Swami Sivananda, Brahmacharya
Ojas is the fire of the sexual waters that rises up the spinal column into the brain and awakens the full capacity of the human being. Such a person is different. There is an energy, there is a presence, a force that is different. Ojas is transmuted sexual energy. It is the Light of the Shekinah, the Divine Mother. In alchemical terms, that energy is called sulfur.
The tradition of Alchemy was a game in a certain way, because it was a system of encoding and hiding this knowledge. Most of us have heard about the Philosopher’s Stone or turning lead into gold. Most of us think this was silliness, and that was intentional. By thinking it is silly, we ignore it. Those Initiates were able to practice in peace, to transmit their teachings under the guise of foolishness or obscurity. The real alchemists were Kabbalists, mystics, yogis, who were creating the Soul. They were transforming the lead of desire, that heavy metal which burdens us, and creating from that the gold of the spirit, the awakened consciousness. The gold is To Soma Heliakon, the Solar Bodies, the bodies of gold, the Sahu in Egyptian terms, the Merkabah in Hebrew. Those are the bodies of gold that withstand the flames when Nebuchadnezzar put the men into the fire, into the furnace; they were not burned. Those are the Solar Bodies that were not burned by desire, by the flame of passion. They are pure; they belong to God.
Sulfur represents fire. There are many kinds of sulfur, if you have studied alchemy in the western tradition. In alchemy, the symbol of sulfur is a triangle from which hangs a cross. This is a sexual symbol. When we look at the Tree of Life we can see why: the upper triangle, which is the creative power of the Law of Three, expresses itself through the Cross. The ‘Crossing’ of male and female. This is why we see in this symbol for sulfur the Triangle with a Cross below it. We see how this power of the Trinity manifests through Daath as a Cross. This is incredible knowledge that has been hidden right before our eyes for thousands of years. We just have not paid attention.
Even more amazing is that among the Greeks this exact symbol represents Athena, Minerva, the Divine Mother, because her power is sexual. The power of the Divine Mother is her womb, her uterus, her sexual power. The woman creates through this vehicle, this vessel, this door. Athena, Minerva, Diana, Durga, whatever name you apply to this force, is Eloha, the Goddess, the Shekinah whose power to create is through Daath by uniting with her husband, her spouse.
The symbol of Athena, Minerva, is the serpent. Her antithesis is the Medusa, the inverted Goddess, a diabolic polarization of the divine feminine; the single serpent of Athena becomes the many serpents on the head of Medusa: desire, lust, ego, pride, vanity. This is the same symbol of Pandora (Eve), who opened the sexual box and released all the evils into her psychological world.
Athena can deliver unto her hero the weapons to kill Medusa. We have to become that hero, to take that fire of sulfur and harness it through sexual work: transmutation, scientific chastity, white pure tantra. That work demands there be no lust, only love – cognizant, conscious, pure.
When the sexual fire is harnessed and utilized through prayer, creation happens. The most beautiful, the most amazing, the most spectacular doors, Daleth, are opened: the doors of the consciousness.
By this method has arisen every Buddha, Angel, and Saint, without exception. It has always been secret, it has always been protected because humanity would abuse it, in the same way we have misused every other kind of knowledge we have received. Throughout our sad history we take knowledge to feed our lust, our pride, to satisfy our anger, our resentment.
The time has grown short. The age is drawing to a close, so the door of the temple has been opened. The sacred knowledge has been revealed, just as I have opened it to you in this lecture, because the time is short.
We do not have time now to play games, to keep trying to cheat each other, lying to each other, stealing from each other, abusing one another, subjecting this humanity to so much pain.
A great doorway has opened. It started in 1950, and in stages has opened further and further because we have moved into the very beginning of a new era. Humanity is passing through a great doorway, a huge Daleth.
The result will depend upon you, and no one else. It does not depend upon any Master, movement, group, book, or school. It depends upon you. What you do today, from moment to moment, will determine what happens tomorrow. How are you using your energy? How are you using your Daleth? Will you continue to hide your desires, to protect them, to feed them, to nurse them? Or will you conquer them? Can you become Δ Delta, the agent of change? That change is not outside, it is inside. We have to know ourselves. The entrance into Daath, knowledge, is inside of us. It is sexual. It is psychological. It is spiritual. The entrance into Daath, knowledge, does not come by accident. It comes by cause and effect. The whole work is cause and effect.
Daleth is very important, but Daleth cannot be understood by itself. You have to see it in context, especially with Gimel. When you hear the next lecture on Hei, even more is revealed about Daleth.
Audience: We see a lot of people wearing symbols of the cross in one way or another. By now we know the symbolism of the cross, the true symbolism, how blasphemous is it for a person to wear the cross right side up and not work on his or herself? Is that blasphemy?
Instructor: The blasphemy that we perform is through our use of energy. Whether we wear a cross or not or how we wear a cross is pretty much irrelevant. It is the same as having beliefs or theories. You can have all the beliefs and theories you want. You can dress like a priest if you want but it does not make you holy. Remember what Jesus said:
Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught? But those things which proceed out of the mouth come forth from the heart; and they defile the man. For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are [the things] which defile a man: but to eat with unwashen hands defileth not a man. – Matthew 15
What comes out of the throat, Daath, is what makes us perform blasphemy. What is blasphemy? Nowadays we associate blasphemy with the commandment “Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain,” but we forget that “to speak” is Gad. Gnostically, spiritually, Gad does not mean physical speech, Gad means “thou shalt not treat this force from Gimel” lightly. Gimel represents the gifts from our Innermost. Do not take those gifts in vain. Do not ignore them. Do you see that? To take the name of God in vain means to not value Iod-Hei-Vav-Hei, which is what we do. We are the poor man, Daleth, because we do not recognize the value of what comes to us from God. We only value material things and physical sensations. We do not value the qualities of the spirit – chastity, humility, charity. These all come from God. We take that name in vain, we speak blasphemy when we do not perform this work Gad, Gimel Daleth, to say, to tell. Instead we exchange our birthright for a plate of porridge, dal, lentils like Esau. Esau represents our animal passions. Esau was fiery and red. We need to become Jacob, his brother, who took that birthright and valued it.
Audience: You mention that God has a need for the human in order to transmute. How does that relate to the Being being self-realized within us?
Instructor: The Being, God, is a very sophisticated intelligence. It has many levels, many aspects. We tend to think of the Being or God as a man in Heaven with a beard on a throne. This is not the case. Our Being is more like an army of intelligences or sparks that need to be united in one thing. To be self-realized is to have complete cognizance of oneself. This refers to the Being.
In the writings of Samael Aun Weor you will often seen this phrase “the inner self-realization of the Being”. We do not read that carefully. What it is actually saying is the realization of the inner self. We are not the ones who become realized. It is the One (Gimel, Chesed, Gedulah) inside of us who becomes perfect. When we perfect ourselves, we reflect that inner perfection, but we are not that. We are just a mirror. We, here terrestrially, are just a terrestrial man, nothing more. God is perfect, we are not. Even a Prophet, even a Bodhisattva, is just a man or woman, and should be treated as such. No man is better than any other man because every man, every woman has God within. It is that Divinity that should be respected.
No person deserves to be worshipped. To worship a terrestrial person is to perform a crime against them. When you worship a terrestrial person you infect their pride, you support mythomania, you create an obstacle for that soul. You commit a crime. This is why Jesus stated very clearly
Neither be ye called masters: for one is your Master: Christ. – Matthew 23
He did not call himself a Master, and he was a beautiful example of a Master. He never called himself anything but a man, and when he spoke in terms of “I am” he was speaking in terms of Eheieh Asher Eheieh: He is that which is becoming. But nowadays this has been corrupted by translations. It is no longer clear in the teaching. Nonetheless, God needs us. Our Innermost needs us because we are a part of that. We are only a part. We are a servant. We think we are kings and queens. We think God should serve us and so we pray, “God give me this and give me that.” That is blasphemy, because that fails to recognize what God has already given to us. We do not want what He gives us. We want other things. We want money. We want security. We want comfort, and we want these things even when we have not provided them to others. What we need to do is to be grateful for what God has given us. This is why Paul wrote in his writings:
Let every man receive with gladness what God has apportioned to him.
Not to say, “On no, I don’t want that God, thanks. I’d rather have a new car. I’d rather have a nicer apartment or a big house or a wife.” We have a list. This is blasphemy, because we fail to receive the gifts that our own Gimel can bestow upon us, our patrimony, our inheritance.
Audience: Is the D of the devil, the Rah, the evil of Daath?
Instructor: The D of the devil related to the D of Daath, Daleth, yes of course. Just as the D of Deus, the Latin word for God. The D is related, of course, because that doorway is twofold. It is a polarity. You see, Deus and demonius are reflections of each other. We choose through our actions which we prefer to be aligned with.
March 17 is St. Patrick’s Day, a yearly holiday celebrating Ireland’s favorite patron saint. While it’s a big event in Ireland (and used to be a very solemn
The centuries-old texts were erased, and then written over, by monks at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Egypt
Source: Lost Languages Discovered in One of the World’s Oldest Continuously Run Libraries
Practice in a comfortable position, sitting on a cushion, chair or meditation bench and make sure your spine is straight. Rest your hands in whatever position you like. Once you have found a comfortable position, make an intention to stay in that position for the whole meditation without shifting or moving. The eyes can be open or closed. If they are too open you may become distracted, and if fully closed your meditation may become foggy or dull. So adjust your practice accordingly so that your meditation is vivid and lucid.
In the previous two lectures, which were called “The Elements in Spiritual Growth” and “Transmutation,” we were talking about how spirituality is based on the transformation of energy. One of the emphasized points of those lectures is that every given element and every given existing thing is composed of three components:
All things have this trinity, from the tiniest to the largest. We ourselves are composed of these three components. Only by working with these three in conjunction with each other can we fulfill the purpose of spirituality.
We also described how those three components relate to the five basic elements that make up all manifested things.
The five elements are sometimes simplified to just four: air, fire, water, and earth. Those four elements in spirituality do not refer merely to physical elements. They refer to spiritual and psychological elements as well. The elements also are composed of those three primary factors: matter, energy, and consciousness.
The four elements are ultimately only manifestations of one element. They are particularizations, condensations, or crystallizations of a more primordial, raw matter-energy-consciousness. In Hinduism, that fundamental source is called Prakiti. In Hebrew it is Shekinah. In English terms, we would call it “Divine Mother.” In Latin, it is mater, and it is where we get the word matter. This word has in its construction the root term or phrase ma, which is universally the word for mother.
The four elements, air, fire, water, and earth, are particularizations or condensations of the body of the mother nature, Ma, mater, Amma, mother, matter—these are all the same thing.
Our physical body is a very gross level or dense level of the condensation of these four elements that emerged into existence (because of a physical mother). But that ability for that physical body to exist, even though it is composed of these four elements and they came through a physical mother, is only possible because of a cosmic mother, our individual inner mother, she who gave us these forces and energies to work with.
That primordial source can also be called Kundalini in Sanskrit. But we have to understand the use of that word “Kundalini,” because in us, it is not active. It is latent, it is asleep. This is why Kundalini is depicted in ancient religions as a sleeping serpent, a force that is not yet activated, not yet awakened. But it is the very power or energy of the Divine Mother, and this is why She is always represented with a serpent. My particular favorite representation of that force is the Divine Mother Athena or Minerva whose symbol is the serpent; she wears a serpent, and she commands the serpent, and often times you see here with the serpent in her hand. That serpent represents the power of nature—Her power, that in us is asleep, not yet activated. That power is the Ouroborus, the serpent eating its tail: it is the cyclical power of nature, which, as the root of all things, can be found in all things, but particularized in different ways.
Unfortunately in us, that energy has been dispersed, misused, and has elaborated what in Greek symbolism is represented as the opposite of Athena. In Greek mysteries that opposite is called Medusa, which still begins with M, Ma. Medusa is a woman who fell from purity because of pride, vanity, and lust, thus that single serpent becomes many. The same duality of the serpent force can be seen in other religions, such as related to Moses in the book of Numbers. Because of the ego, the single serpent of the Divine Mother becomes multiplied, symbolized as the serpents on her head.
Her horrible power is to turn her victims into stone, into earth. In other words, the power of the Medusa is to crystalize the ego. The power of Medusa is the same power of the Divine Mother, but inverted. She turns the heroes into stone, into earth, just like the wife of Lot in the Bible, who looks back at the degeneration in her past (Sodom and Gomorra), and turns into a pillar of salt. Alchemically, this is the same symbol. Salt is a mineral, it belongs to earth. Looking back to the past represents how the ego is attached. All of this is represented in the Arcanum Six.
The Divine Mother, as the root energy, can be called Prakriti, and another word for that energy is Akash, the root vibration or prana, the energy that vibrates in all things. So it is in us, it is the core or heart fire in every atom within us. Physically, and psychologically, we have that prana within, we have the power of the divine mother. The problem is that we have misused it and crystalized the ego; we have turned that power into something negative. The power of Medusa is very strong in us.
That is why in the previous lectures we were describing how to transmute, how to reduce elements back to their essence, and to reform them into something pure. What this essentially means is that we take that very power of the Divine Mother and harness it. And we pulverized everything that is within us in order to reform it. To create something new, something pure, something better. In other words, we withdraw the energy of the four elements in order to bring them back to their original source, which is Akash. In the tradition of alchemy, that force is called Quintessence, which means the fifth power. It is the fifth element. Is is the Kundalini, it is the energy of the Divine Mother.
In order to do that work, we need a laboratory. Without a laboratory, it is impossible to perform that type of work. We need a place within which we can bring the needed elements, focus on them, pulverize them, purify them, extract the essence, cast aside what is unneeded and unnecessary, and repeat. And repeat. And repeat. The four elements, through the process of heat and pressure, gradually, with patience, become pure. This means that the power of the Divine Mother grows in us. Awakens. Emerges… And instead of being a latent and static power, becomes an active or kinetic power, something that moves, something that acts.
This illustration represents the laboratory that we need.
This illustration was designed by an Alchemist-Kabbalist from the 16th century named Heinrich Kunrath. He was a great Alchemist and a great Kabbalist, a Christian Kabbalist. He was a European, not a Jew, but a Christian, who applied the principles of Kabbalah and Alchemy to his Christian faith. He taught his principals through these type of drawings; he hired artists to create them. They are all beautiful, and there is a series of these types of images. This one in particular is important for our work, because it represents in symbolic form the teachings that only now are being taught publicly in lectures like this. The teachings that he was working with and protected were completely secret. He utilized these images both to communicate to other initiates who were practicing this science, and also to fish for students, to attract souls who were prepared, who worked with the science, which were very few, and even now are very few. The science was not stated explicitly or given explicitly but was given in symbolic form which only the trained could penetrate. Only those who were trained, only those who were given the keys or clues could understand the meanings hidden in these types of drawings.
This drawing belongs to the Western tradition of alchemy. If you go to a university or a school where they study Alchemy in a scholarly fashion, as history, they will tell you all kinds of inventive theories about alchemy, but it is all garbage, because they are not initiated into the tradition of alchemy. Everything the university and library books, and websites, tell you about alchemy is just theories invented by people who have no idea what they are talking about; they are just spreading their ideas and theories about Alchemy, but none of that is what Alchemy actually is. Only the ones who have been initiated in the science, who have been brought into the actual tradition and experienced first hand know what alchemy actually is. There are many famous books, websites and movies that claim to teach alchemy and that talk about many beautiful and fantastic things, yet they are all wrong. Their theories can be very beautiful, very compelling, and move your heart, but be completely wrong.
Alchemy is a science to access the power of the Divine Mother Herself, which is a divine power. It is not given to the profane. It is not given to those who simply are curious. Ever. Even now, in these times in which the teachings are being openly revealed, the actual access to the power is still restrained, it is only given by one being: God.
Only the divine bestows the power of alchemy on the person. No school, no book, no instructor bestows that power. They may open doors, but to actually become an Alchemist is a power given only by God. It can only be that way. To understand that we need to know what alchemy means. We need to understand the real meaning. Not the meaning that we see in movies and in popular books, but the actual meaning. So to understand that we will study this drawing.
Regarding real alchemy, Samael Aun Weor said,
“We need to transmute the lead of personality into the gold of Spirit. This work is only possible in the laboratory of the Alchemist.”
Probably the most popular statement that people make about alchemy is that its supposedly was just a farcical belief of a bunch of clowns running around Europe claiming to have the ability to transform crude metals into pure gold. Without question, there were many such clowns. There were people who dressed themselves up to look fantastic, to play the part of an Alchemist, who were tricksters, who were only trying to get attention or money. Without a doubt, there are many such people even today.
The truth is that the concept of transmuting lead into gold was merely a symbol of the actual work of alchemy, which was to transform the base metals, the earth, into pure metals. Symbolically speaking, that earth is us. In Kabbalah, the earth is represented by the sephirah Malkuth, which represents you and me. Our metal, our earth, is very impure. It is very corrupted, very weak, susceptible to many illnesses and dangers, very impermanent, very unreliable. We do not know when we will die, we are very susceptible to illness, weakness, and pain. We have no real power in the world. The tiniest thing can lay us flat. A microbe can make us sick, and kill us. This does not equate to strength. This is not a sign of strength or power in nature. It is a sign of weakness.
To transmute the lead into gold refers to transforming the psyche, the mind, the heart, the personality, everything, into spiritual gold, a vessel through which the Divine Mother can operate without any obstacle.
Samael sais this work is only possible in the laboratory. Naturally, over the centuries those who have been curious about alchemy, who have wanted to make gold so they could become famous and rich, have made themselves many laboratories and tried to reproduce the teachings of the alchemists physically, by crafting all sorts of fantastic vessels and objects and ovens and limbics and many type of tools that they’ve gathered together, and as a result we have now our modern science of chemistry. What we have now today as chemistry came from alchemy; you see the words are similar? But the difference between chemistry and alchemy is that chemistry has lost the first two letters “Al”. If you know Arabic, you know what that means. If you know Hebrew, you know what that means. “Al”, “El” means God. Al-kimia means “to fuse with God.” To bind, to merge, to become one. Modern chemistry renounces divinity, “Al.” Modern chemistry has created some useful things, we do not deny it, but no chemist is an alchemist.
We see here in this image the typical representation of alchemists laboratories that have been mimicked and celebrated for centuries in the West, as many foolish, greedy people have wasted their lives attempting to create gold from lead, studying ancient texts, pouring their fortunes into futile pursuits.
What we need as a laboratory is not this type of laboratory. The type of laboratory we need is revealed in this next image.
This painting is also a painting of alchemy, and it represents the great difference between those who are initiated into actual alchemy and those who are not. This image shows an alchemist in the center, in his robe, who is observing an angel, a woman. She is seated in a very strange looking tree, and behind the alchemist is a building, and inside the building we see one of those alchemists laboratories filled with all sorts of strange vessels in an oven. This image shows the difference between the materialists, the curious, the skeptics, the chemists, who play with physical matter as they pursue their greed, as they pursue their lust, envy, and pride, attempting to play games with the matter of nature, the energy of nature, while ignoring its consciousness. That is represented in that mechanical laboratory in the back. That is why at the bottom of it says “Opus Mechanicus”, the mechanical work, physical work, literal work, the spiritually useless work.
On the left we see a woman, an angel, a cherubim, who has on her head a seven pointed crown and has under her hips a fire. That is the fire of the Divine Mother Nature. That is prana, Akash, Kundalini, She represents nature, who here is revealed to the eyes of the alchemist who looks here directly in the face and knows who She is, and bows his head. But you see that his hands are hidden from view, because the work that he is performing is not visible to the uninitiated; his right hand is hidden, his left hand is hidden, enclosed in black. The work of alchemy has always been done in darkness, hidden from the eyes of those who were uninitiated, in order to protect it and in order to protect the uninitiated, because those who play games with this type of teaching can cause great harm if they are not properly prepared. The tree that She sits in represents the Kabbalah, the structure of nature, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, and as one works with nature that is what precisely is elaborated and protected: our own inner tree of life. This tree has three roots, a trinity, which are united in one as a fire. That fire is the Kundalini, the fire that gives the power to create life. Naturally, it is the sexual power.
So this image shows us that we need proper instruction, and we need to understand that the work is in our relationship with our Divine Mother. No where else.
This image is from an ancient book called Mutus Liber, which means “the mute book” or “silent book,” and it illustrates the principals of alchemy. It shows a typical representation in alchemy: a couple, man and women, working with difference devices in the process of purifying, heating and breaking down, purifying, heating and breaking down, purifying, heating things up, breaking them down, purifying, constantly working until new things emerge, many symbolic forms that are hard to understand, that are very dream like. At the bottom, we see the Divine Mother as Luna / Selene, the Moon, with Saturn. The Moon represents procreation, birth, gestation, life-giving. Saturn represents death. Alchemy is that: the death of the old and impure (the “lead”), in order to give birth to the soul, the spiritual gold.
Alchemy:
Here we see the meaning of alchemy: to fuse with God, to make our metal, our body, our heart, our mind, one with the divine. This is the real meaning of alchemy.
And what about the laboratory? Of course, nowadays we take this concept of a laboratory for granted, and we immediately think of people wearing glasses running around in white coats, and usually have a bunch of pens in their pockets, and we think they are very smart. Nowadays, we treat scientists like priests, as if somehow they are better than other people, or holy, as if they know more than the rest of us, but really, the so-called “scientists” did not invent science of the laboratory. In fact, the whole concept of science and the laboratory came from the tradition of alchemy. Furthermore, all of the historical scientists were alchemists: Newton, Gallieo, even Einstein knew what real alchemy was.
“Because the way by the Mercurial principle may be impregnated has been thought fit to be concealed by others that have know it, and therefore may possibly be an inlet to something more noble that is not to be communicated without immense damage to the world if there be any verity in Hermetic writers. There are other things besides the transmutation of metals which none but they understand.” – Isaac Newton
The word laboratory actually means something different from what we think it means. It comes from Latin: laboritorum.
The first part, labor, means “to exert with hardship, pain, fatigue,” a work of labour, something difficult, something that is not easy… Without question, that applies to the Gnostic work. It is very tiring work, a very exhausting work. It requires great exertion, toil, it engages much hardship, and causes much pain. It is not pleasant. But it is worth it.
The second part is oratorium, which means “a place of prayer.”
So the laboritorum is a real laboratory is “a place of prayer and work.” Without prayer or labor, there can be no alchemy.
This image shows a woman representing nature, but she’s removing her mask, meaning that he’s seeing her true face. The veil of Isis is being lifted. Remember Isis states: “No mortal can see past my veil,” which means that in order to see the face of Isis you have to become more than a mere mortal. You cannot reach that state by means of devices in a physical, common laboratory. That is only possible by appealing to the divine, and through the application of a very specific and exact science. Thus: labor-oratorum.
This image of the Alchemists’ laboratory was drawn by an artist for Heinrich Kunrath; he did not draw it himself. He gave instructions to the artist, who drew this based on those instructions. It is filled with cryptic messages, and we do not have time in the context of the lecture to explain all of them, but I want to point out some of the important ones because they help us understand the teachings of alchemy.
In this image, before a tent is an alchemist on his knees, with his hands out, praying. The tent is very much like the tents used by the Israelites when they were out in the wilderness. Inside the tent we see a table, and on it are many sacred books, but of great significance here is the posture of the alchemist. Nothing in this image is accidental. It is all purposeful. The alchemist is on his knees, as is a sign of humility, obedience. It is a representation that in order to engage in the real work of alchemy, we have to bow before the will of God. Not acting from our own will, but doing what is required of us by God. His outstretched hands form a crucifix. This is a complete relinquishment of personal will. This represents the full and complete sacrifice of oneself on the cross. This is to be crucified on behalf of others. This is to die in order to serve. The alchemist here is representing that the basis of the work is prayer, obedience, devotion.
That side of the image, the left side, is the prayerful aspect, the emotional aspect of the work. On the right hand side, we see the logical, labor aspect: all the tools that are arranged in the laboratory, and in the middle, we see a table, that is also with many instruments, especially musical instruments.
Of particular significance here is that the entire image is topped by a seven pointed lantern. It is a candelabra with seven flames.
Those seven flames hang from a trinity, so there you see the tree of life: the law of three and the law of seven. Those are the forces at work that we need to harness: the three and the seven. We need to light those fires in our own inner heavens, in order to succeed in this work of alchemy.
On the left hand side we see the alchemist in prayer, kneeling on his cushion; on the very top of that tent we see a cross, which always represents the four elements in activity.
The cross represents the crossing of man and women. The vertical pole represents the active principal, the male, while the horizontal pole represents the passive principal, or receptive principal, the woman.
The cross is also the four elements: air, fire, water, and earth.
These aspects are all always engaged in any practice of alchemy. Moreover, they are the pinnacle, they are the most sacred, and they must be held very high.
Below that it says, “oratorium,” which means “A place of prayer.”
Below that it says in Latin and Hebrew:
Felix cui יהוה a consilis
“Happy is he who follows the counsel of יהוה Yod Hei Vav Hei.”
That יהוה Yod Hei Vav Hei, or Yod Havah, is our Inner Guide, our Inner Divinity, the four forces of the Tetragrammaton that work in us. That is our Master. No one else. No one outside, anywhere, should be our counsel. Our counsel should be God. We should seek out the guidance we need through prayer, not the internet, not e-mail, not the phone, not over coffee, not in groups, churches, or temples, not at retreats or conferences, but through prayer. Everyone talks about wanting guidance from the Divine, but few have the determination to actually acquire it. This is the message at the pinnacle here, below the cross. We must follow the guidance of our Inner Master. To do that we need to pray, constantly.
Under that in Hebrew is says הכמהאל ha-kama-el, which means, “the longing for God.” That should be our motivation: longing for Divinity. Not the longing for fame, recognition, security, comfort. The longing for God, at any price, at any cost. We can withstand any suffering if we hold fast to that longing for God. If we remember our Being, constantly, focusing our attention on that Divinity, we can withstand anything. The problem is that we forget. We become distracted by our desires, by the eight worldly poisons, name and fame, gain, all of the things that we long for and desire, the comfort, the security, the recognition, the revenge, the redemption… That is why we suffer. If we really hold fast to our prayer, to the remembrance of divinity, to that devotion, we have a place of solitude, of solace, which is here, this area of prayer.
Burning inside of this tent is a single flame. That is the flame of the heart. We all want that flame to be enlivened through romance, through the love of our friends, or our children. We want the respect of our peers. But all of those are mistaken cravings. Those types of flames in the heart are completely impermanent and unreliable. They do not last, they cannot last. The only flame that can burn in your heart that can last, and can actually give solace to the consciousness, is the love of divinity. A reciprocal love… That love is always coming towards us, but because we do not pay attention, we do not feel it. If we learn to pay attention, to listen in to the heart, to sense divinity in our presence, that becomes a real living thing, a fire, a flame, that you can feel. That can sustain you… But it requires exertion on your part… to reach out and to feel it.
The alchemist kneels before a table that represents the four bodies of sin: the physical body, the vital body, the astral body, the mental body. We call them the four bodies of sin because with these four vessels we commit mistakes and create suffering for ourselves and others. The physical body is the vessel through which we transmit all our energy, we transmute it improperly. The vital body is the body through which energy goes in and out of our psyche. The astral body relates to our emotions; unfortunately in us it has become Kama Rupa, the body of desire. The mental body relates to our inner Judas, our betrayer, the liar, the mind, the Pontius Pilate within, the part of ourselves which refuses to accept any responsibility for our crimes and always sees ourselves as innocent, just a victim of circumstances. “We are not really at fault.” That is what we tell ourselves…
Those four bodies have to be transformed, transmuted, in order to become a proper table of prayer, so that table of four legs becomes the solar bodies. That transmutation is what creates the alchemists table upon which the real alchemist can work.
The real alchemist is our inner Being. The real alchemist is God. The one who really performs the work of Alchemy is the Innermost, the Magician the first card of the Tarot. If you study that card you see that he stands before a table, and that table represents us. But in us that table is unsteady, impure, weak. It needs to be transformed and made strong. That is why underneath the table in this drawing we see an arch, and inside that arch is a skull. It is in darkness. Written in Latin, it says Disce bene mor (spelling), if you know Italian you know what that means, it means “Learn to Die Well”.
Learn to die well. This is not talking about physical death, it is talking about psychological death. The death of those four bodies of sin, so that they can be recreated, made into something pure, something strong that the Being can use for his work. Learn to die well.
The pose of the alchemist represents the same thing, that is why they are close together. His crucifixion, his obedience, his humility, his prayer, all represents the attitude that we need in order to die well. That is an attitude of submission. We do not like that. Our pride does not like that. We do not want to submit. We want God to submit to us. That is why when we pray, we say “God, give me this and give me that. God, I want this and that. I’ll make a deal with you, God. If you give me ABC, I will do this little thing over here for you; I will do this little favor for you, if you give me A, B, and C.” We want God to submit to us. This is why we cannot feel God. This is why we hear silence when we pray. God will NEVER bow to the ego. This is not a matter of pride, it is a matter of how things work. The ego is the devil. Our mind is Satan.
The alchemist here shows the proper attitude for prayer. It is submission to Gods’ will. This is why Jesus taught his prayer: “THY will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” That “earth” is the body. That earth is Malkuth. That earth is us.
On the right side of the drawing, we see two pillars, and behind that in obscurity is a collection of tools. These two pillars have great significance in all ancient esoteric traditions. In the Bible they are called Jakin and Boaz. Anyone who has been a freemason knows about these two pillars. The two pillars represent the two sides of the tree of life: the pillar of severity and the pillar of mercy. These are the two sides of the tree of knowledge: Tob and Rah. These are man and woman. The two sides of all creation. You cannot create with just a man, or just a woman. Life emerges when you combine man and woman. Thus, all life is founded on two pillars.
Behind the two pillars hidden in the back is an oven. There is incense burning. There are tools scattered around: a lute, bellows, tongs. These are all tools for working in the fire. There is a feather hanging on the pillar.
What is particularly interesting are the inscriptions at the base of the two pillars. One on the left says Ratio, which is a Latin word that means “reason” in the sense of logic, method. If you think of ratio in terms of method, it becomes very interesting when you look at the other pillar which says, “Experentia.” Naturally in English we would say it means experience, and yes it does, but not the way we use it now. Experientia means wisdom. So, these two pillars are method and wisdom. Anyone recognize that? Any Buddhists here? Those are the two pillars of Buddhism: Method and Wisdom.
“…there are two main aspects to the Buddhist path: method and wisdom.” – The 14th Dalai Lama, Training the Mind
Images of Samantabhadra, or any great Buddha, show them in a sexual embrace of masculine and feminine. If you ask any monk what it represents, they say it is the union of Method and Wisdom, which is how the dharma is performed…
We see the same teaching given here in alchemy, a tradition from the other side of the world, from a totally separate culture.
The two pillars, method and wisdom, mean that we need a combination in order to build our temple. We need theory and practice. We need a strong intellectual culture. We need to know the teachings VERY WELL, but we also need to be doing it. These two need to be in perfect harmony, perfect balance with each other. There are many people who read a lot of books, study a lot of theory, study all the methods, but do not actually do it. There are many others who do a lot of practices, and a lot of techniques, but never study. Both camps of people will fail.
The path of alchemy is extremely precise, more than anything else in the world. It is extremely precise. Our understanding has to be razor sharp, and guided by divinity, not our intellect, not our habits. You see, those who lean towards the method side like to pick up different practices that appeal to their habits, and those who lean towards the wisdom side, the experientia side, like to read and study those things that feed their intellectual habits, that lean towards their habits of believing or disbelieving. So the intellectual types like to read and study a lot of intellectual things, but they do not like to practice. The believers like to study a lot to build up their beliefs and make them feel secure, but they do not like to practice, and do not like to study and remember things, because we are all lazy. We need balance, and we need to be very critical with ourselves, and if we see we are lazy about practice then we need to practice more, and if we see we are lazy about study we need to study more. This is not a game. The future of your soul depends on it… Everything is at stake. Laziness will take you to hell. Laziness and old bad habits will cause you to fail. So these two pillars are very important.
In front of the pillars, the very front of the image, we see an alchemists collection of tools that we can call an oven or a furnace, comprised of different vessels that are connected together in a strange way. By appearance alone it does not make a lot of sense. Written on the center vessel, which is quite tall and very phallic, we see written Festina lente, which is Latin and means, “Hasten slowly.” Kind of makes your brain skip, doesn’t it? It is supposed to. It is supposed to get you to pay attention, to be present, to be here and now. Its written on a phallic symbol, a sexual symbol, for a reason. It is saying “pay attention, be present, use your energy wisely, do not waste it. Be persistent, work constantly, but do not rush, work with great caution and care.” So this symbol at the bottom front is representing the main mysterious tool of the alchemist that was never revealed publicly, but today we are going to talk about.
Looking at the entire image, we understand that all of these symbols together hide a great secret, but it is very hard to penetrate it. It can be hard to see. Yet this is a very purposeful drawing, and I am going to show you why and how right now.
If you study art, you will understand that the genuine artist creates every little detail with a purpose. Not like so-called art nowadays, where the so-called artists merely vomit their psyche on canvas, making a chaotic mess that only manages to display their lack of anything useful to say. That is not art. Real art is communication, conscious, that delivers knowledge that otherwise is incommunicable. This drawing is a great example of that. There are many messages here that you will gather if you meditate on the image. But I am going to give you a hint towards once that has real significance, and is quite surprising.
If you study the image you see that there are many converging lines; it is a very architectural type of image. All of the lines are converging on a single point. We call this “perspective.” Most of us do not pay attention to that, we do not think anything of it. But if you look closely, you see all the lines of the perspective of this image are converging on the very center of the image, passing through an arch of four pillars. These four pillars are the four elements, the four bodies, the cross, the four letters of the holy name of God. That has a great deal of significance. The arch above it is the Akash, which comes from this trinity at the top. Here we see the tree of life. All the lines ultimately point towards an open door. And what is behind the open door? A bed!
Why would an alchemist’s drawing have ALL of the lines and everything in it converging on a bed? Well, now we know why, but for the last five hundred years, no one knew why. The bed is where the sexual act is performed. The bed is the heart of the laboratorium, where the work and prayer must be performed: on the bed. Laboritorium, the place of prayer, where the work is performed is in the bedroom. That work is between man and woman. If one is single, one works within oneself, with ones own energy, and with ones’ Divine Mother, through prayer.
These images represent the furnace, oven, athenor, that the alchemist has to use. This is the heart of the alchemists’ laboratory. The furnace of the laboratory represents a sexual secret.
For hundreds and hundreds of years, people have been trying to build these ovens in their workshops and basements. They are wasting their time, and you know why? Because everyone of us is carrying this oven around with us all the time. This furnace is your body. The laboratory is your mind, your heart, your body. The laboratory of the alchemist is this here and now, working with your energy here and now. That is the laboratory.
The furnace, the tools, are here in the body. The fire burns in sex, in the sephirah Yesod. It is the fire that creates life; it is the sexual energy. That fire burns us if we do not know how to control it. The fire can destroy us, and consume us, if we do not know how to use it wisely. That fire must be kept “with a gentle heat, with much attention.” This is the instruction that Hermes gave in the documents that formed the foundation of alchemy, that gentle heat is to keep that fire burning but low and controlled; not inflamed with lust, not within inflamed desire, not overwhelming, but low and controlled, with much attention. In that context, that fire heats the vessel, the sexual organs.
In Alchemy, our vessel represented as a clear glass vessel. Within it burns that fire or the water of mercury. Mercury is a symbol of sexual energy. And inside of this we see a man and a woman forming a cross, and the holy spirit as a dove putting the other element which forms a six pointed star. That of course is very deep, significant symbol: it is the rune Hagal.
This man and woman represent Adam and Eve within us. Physiologically, psychologically, they are the channels Ida and Pingala, Od and Obd, Rasana and Larana, the red and white channels. These are energies or forces that move within us in preparation for the Advent of the Fire, the awakening of the Kundalini.
The fire of sexuality heats up the waters of the mercury and causes steam to rise up the central column of the spine, to the brain. That is what is represented in all these images: the awakening of the Kundalini, the energy of the Divine Mother.
That energy rises up the spine and awakens the seven lights on that candelabra of seven flames, the chakras or churches that are written about in the book of Revelation. Those lights give us the ability to see spiritually. They restore us to the state of Eden, to have the ability to talk with God directly. That does not come when we are seeking only material gold, or material success. That ability to see God and talk with God comes through prayer and work.
On either side of this oven we see a man or woman with deep red faces, wearing green clothing. These represent the forces of divinity. We can call them Shiva and Shakti; these are our Inner Being and Divine Mother. They are the guides who oversea the process of transmutation within us. In other words, no matter what fantastical ends you may pursue in your physical life to achieve the ends of alchemy, if you do not work in harmony with your Innermost, you will achieve nothing. The one who performs the work in you is your inner divinity. That work is performed by satisfying the Will of God, and the first Will of God is for you to die, as an ego; for all of your impurity to be purged. That is what the fire does. This fire boils the water to remove the impurities; the steam rises, not the impurities. What is steam? Water and air heated by fire.
Yeshua answered, “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and [of] the Spirit [air, wind], he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.”
“I [Christ] am come to send fire on the earth [you]… Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth [your body and mind]? I tell you, Nay; but rather division [between the pure and impure]…” – Luke 12
The “steam” rises up through the earth to awaken and enliven the brain (Adam), the glands, the chakras in the head.
So that is in synthesis the process of alchemy or the work in the laboratory. It is to work with these forces in ourselves, in harmony with the Will of God.
If you are transmuting your sexual energy, studying these teachings, and trying to put them into practice, you are learning how to practice alchemy, whether you are single or married. Your sexual scenario is just circumstantial, the nature of your karma, and that is what you need to work with. That is what God is giving you to work with, so work with it. Either way (single or married), your Innermost and your Divine Mother bring into the laboratory the elements that need to be transformed. Then there we are in the laboratory saying “No, God, I do not want to work with that. That is not the spouse I want. That is not the job I want. I need more money than this. I need better clothes. I need to be living somewhere better than this. I need some respect from my friends. I need education, I need money in the bank. I do not want these things you are bringing into my life. I want A, B, and C, then I will do what you want, after that.” This is a big mistake.
Who in the universe knows better what you need for your spiritual growth than your own Innermost? It is time for us to trust our Innermost, to submit to the Will of our Innermost, to accept what our Innermost puts in our lives, and to learn to transmute them. This is the basis of alchemy.
Oftentimes, we talk about alchemy as something materialistic: we think that we merely take the sexual energy, transform it, and then we awaken consciousness. It is not that simple. You cannot get anywhere with just that attitude. The real process of alchemy is to transmute your entire psyche. Where is all of your sexual energy anyway? It is trapped in your ego. It is all trapped in lust, anger, pride, and envy. So to free it, to redeem it, to free yourself from suffering, you have to transform those elements. And how will God do it? He will put it in your face, by making you suffer. So he says, “You see, here is the bed of roses that you made. It is filled with thorns.” The life that you are living is the life that you made by your own worksl if you want to make that better, accept the guidance of God, the counsel of God. That counsel is: “You want to do the work? You want to be an alchemist? You want to be liberated from suffering? Here. Deal with this mess that you made. Here is your life, here are your circumstances, here is your situation. You made it. Fix it.” We do not fix it by changing everything in our external circumstances; we change it by fixing our attitude, changing how we deal with other people. How we deal with God. How we deal with ourselves.
Those who are focused only on changing their physical circumstances will always end up disappointed. We can never modify external circumstances to our liking, because the cause of them is inside of us. If the cause remains the same, the effects will remain the same.
Why do we suffer? Because of who we are inside.
Our Innermost is bringing us our situation, as painful or as difficult as it may be, because we need it. Because that is what we need to work on, that is the most important element that we face. We always hear students pray, “God, please give me what I need to work on myself. But change this and that! Give me a better job, give me a better place to live, I need a better apartment, etc, etc”.
We do not realize that what our Innermost is already giving us is exactly what we need.
In the book “Tarot and Kabbalah“, Samael Aun Weor wrote,
“Salamanders keep the fire; Undines are within the raw matter, which is enclosed within its receptacle. The Undines can help us if we dominate them; if we do not, then they do what they want because they are very whimsical. The sylphs make the steam that escapes from the raw matter to rise. The Gnomes are in charge of the distillation of the raw matter, in order for it to be converted into gold within the brain.”
That quote is describing how the four elements in ourselves are managed by conscious elements that we call elementals. The process of alchemy is the process of working with the elements. Those elements are not just physical matter, they are energy, and they are also consciousness. The fire, the air, the water, and the earth, all have consciousness in them. And traditionally, in alchemy, they have these names. The elements of the air we call Sylphs, the elements of the fire are called Salamanders, the consciousness of the fire. The consciousness of the water is called Undines, and the consciousness of the earth is Gnomes, dwarfs, pygmies. These are not invented or made up things. They are the consciousness of the elements, they are inside of us. Moreover, as we explained in the first lecture, all of the ordeals that we face in life, all the difficulties and problems, ordeals of air or water, of earth or fire, are the activity of those elementals in our life. When we are facing difficult psychological challenges, our old habit is to complain, and complain, and complain. In our mind, in our heart, and verbally. What we are failing to realize is that those problems are exactly what we need. Those problems are the activity of those elementals within us and outside of us that are bringing a great deal of energy, that if we are smart, we will harness that and transmute it into something beneficial.
I will give you an example: if you are in a circumstance when you have to be very close to someone who is criticizing you behind your back, this can be very frustrating, and it can build a lot of resentment in you unless you learn how to transform it. What would be the right way to transform that? Firstly, you can only transform it if you are cognizant of it, aware of it. If you are just being mechanical, the way you always are, you will just build a lot of resentment, you will become angry with the person, you will start treating them badly, you will ignore them, you will intentionally do things to create obstacles for them, you will speak badly about them, you will do all these things mechanically because we are alseep. But if you become cognizant, aware, and pray and remember God, you will remember, “God is giving me this for a reason. This person is talking behind my back all the time, they are telling all these people bad things about me. What do I do, God, help me. Help me learn to die well.” Then what do we do? We have to learn to treat that person with love, because they are helping us. They are showing us our pride. We do not like to see that! Wwe do not like the one who makes us see it. But really, we need that! That person is actually the most important person in our life at that moment. They are doing a service for us that can never be repaid, because they are giving us the keys to liberation from suffering. They are saying “Here, let me show you your pride. Here is your anger. Here is your resentment.” If we act mechanically, we will indulge in the pride and in the anger and the resentment; we will hate that person, and we will deepen our suffering, and waste the opportunity. If we are cognizant, prayerful, learning to die well, then we can see this person and say, “they are really doing me a favor. Look at my pride. Let me feel that, let me see it. Let this be the last time that I suffer with this pride. Let it die.” And then we can respond to that person with kindness, with gratitude, with love.
What will happen to that situation? It will be transformed. Completely. And this is the type of attitude we need to generate in all of our circumstances. This is how we take advantage of the energy that the elementals put into motion.
Our Innermost Being is orchestrating all the circumstances of our life, in order to put these things in our face, and that happens with the help of the elementals, inside of us, and around us. So we need to learn how to transform that energy, to have a better attitude. Learn to accept with gratitude all of the unpleasant manifestations of our fellow men and women. Receive them gratefully, because they are the keys to awakening. The problems of our lives, the adversities, the obstacles, the pain and suffering are exactly what we need in order to see why we suffer, and to change. If God gave you what you wanted, a totally peaceful life, rich, living in your castle with all your servants, whatever it is that you dream of, not only would you not become liberated from suffering, you would become worse. Really contemplate that. Really think about that. When those desires are emerging within you, really think about that, “If I got that, really, honestly, would I become better?”, No! If you won the lottery, would you really become better? I do not think so. I really doubt it. You have to be your own judge.
Audience: [inaudible]
Instructor: Her leg is being revealed because she is the Divine Mother Nature. So as the work of alchemy is proceeding, the identity or reality of the Divine Mother is revealed. And its something intimate, so that leg being exposed is that: something intimate.
Audience: [inaudible]
Instructor: The process of alchemy is broken down into many different stages by different alchemists, and there are a variety of terms used to describe those stages, and it depends on which alchemist you are studying and which stage of the work they are addressing in order to interpret those symbols. Sometimes those steps are broken down to 7, 10, 12, 14, many stages, and they all apply to different parts of the work. In general, though, we talk about a process called putrefaction or blackening. This is a process in which, through the heat of the fire, the ego becomes blackened, the fire accelerates the decomposition. So when we look in the context of our ordeals in life, before you were transmuting your energy, you suffered a lot, we all suffered. And we suffer from many psychological and circumstantial problems, but when you begin to transmute your sexual energy, your suffering seems to intensify. And that is the process of the blackening, putrefaction. That happens because when the power of the sexual energy, when it is being harnessed and directed towards the ego, it intensifies all of the experience of the suffering of that ego. So the suffering seems to get worse because it is, but that is needed in order for those elements to be completely eradicated, eliminated, and broken down. We need that; we need the pressure and heat to crush it, so we can extract the diamonds and gold. So again, it depends on which particular alchemist and which stage, becomes that comes in many stages, there are stages in the beginning, middle and end, there are many stages of that.
Audience: [inaudible]
Instructor: We are going to talk about that in additional lectures, specifically about that. The process of the work in the laboratory is a gathering together of energy in order to direct that energy. Our primary purpose is to completely pulverize all the impure elements that exist within our psyche. The only way that process can succeed is if we are cognizant of it. In other words, you cannot change your anger if you are unaware of your anger. You cannot change your pride if you are unaware of your pride. So that process of becoming cognizant comes in your daily life through self-observing and self-remembering, and transforming situations in the way I explained. But secondly, you cannot succeed in that completely if you are only doing it during the day. At night, you need to meditate on those events, and really investigate them more deeply, abandoning the physical body, so that you are not distracted by any physical senses, and you can go deeper into the examination of those elements, in order to pulverize them more accurately, in order to completely, completely reduce it to dust. So that is a process of meditation, and that is a long process. We will get more into the details of that in a later lecture.
Audience: [inaudible]
Instructor: In this image, above the bedroom, we see written in Latin: Dormiens vigila, which means, “While sleeping, watch.” This means that we need to be vigilant at all times, conscious of ourselves.
We need to do this while the physical body is sleeping. That is one level of meaning of the bed in the back, and some people who have studied this image have realized that it relates to the tradition of dream yoga. This is easy to see. But the deeper meaning is that we are always sleeping, because our consciousness is asleep; we have not awakened our consciousness yet. So we need to become vigilant. That vigilance is not at one time or another, it is all the time. Dormiens Vigilia (spelling) means: watch how you sleep. Become aware of how you sleep. Awaken! And that is what it says in the gospels:
“Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.” – Matthew 24
Audience: How do the Runes fit in with Alchemy?
Instructor: Everything about Alchemy is based on the runes. If you have studied any of the symbols of alchemy, you will see that all of the symbols are runic, and I gave you a clue here. When you look into the vessel here that shows the man and the woman and the holy spirit or bird, between them all they are holding the Rune Hagal, which we talked about in the previous lecture. Every alchemical symbol, every alchemical stage is based on the runes.
Audience: Is this process the process of Moses leading the Israelites to Jerusalem?
Instructor: The process of alchemy is hidden throughout the Bible. Moses is an alchemical symbol, his name is Moshe, which means “born of fire and water.” That is what we see here. The fire is below, the water is in the vessel. The one who is born of that is our divinity, our own inner Moshe. So the entire process, every stage of the work of Moses or Moshe, is a symbol in alchemy. All of the plagues, all of the works that he performs, all of the magical events that happened, the parting of the waters, the coming of the frogs, all of those things represent stages of working in alchemy. The Israelites are a symbol of the consciousness that is trapped in the ego (slavery) and must be redeemed by the guidance of Moshe, our willpower guided by Divinity.
Audience: Is Alchemy something for beginners, and if so, what is the first stage?
Instructor: Truthfully speaking, alchemy is for all human beings; all of us need alchemy. In order to become a true human being, we need it. We are all beginners, without exception.
The thing that we need in the beginning is to study. We need to study the teaching, we need to study it very well. Without a strong foundation and understanding in the teaching, in a very comprehensive way, we will very easily be misled by very clever people and very mischievous people. So it is essential in the beginning to study relentlessly, and at the same time to begin to incorporate practice at your own level. We can say in some way, in the beginning, those two pillars (Method and Wisdom) are a little bit out of balance. We do not know how to practice in the beginning, we do not know the method. We do not even know the teaching. So in the beginning we have to first start by learning the method, by learning the teaching itself, learning how it works, the theory, concepts, word, language, how it works. Little by little, we need to add practice as well so that they nourish each other. This is very important. Establish that equilibrium between the two. Part of that is to learn to recognize the realities about yourself, to be sincere, be honest with yourself.
This type of work is not social and has nothing to do with any group. Unfortunately, some people make it into something social. They believe their spirituality can only succeed if they have a social group. There is a need for the sangha or spiritual community. It is one of the three fundamental jewels or aspects of any real spirituality. But ultimately, the real community is not in the physical world. The real community or sangha is in the internal worlds. You do not need to be too worried about the physical part. We should not be focused on the social aspects of our spirituality. We should be focused on the psychological aspects within ourselves. Be honest. Be sincere. Look at yourself, and see what you really are, and do not hide from yourself. It is painful to see our impurities, it is very painful, do not avoid it. If you avoid something painful, you let it get worse, and it will kill you, and the same is true spiritually. Especially spiritually. If you avoid looking into your psychological and spiritual pain, you will never succeed in this work. Thats’ why the phrase on that drawing says, “learn to die well.” We need to look into the face of those things that hurt us, so they won’t hurt us anymore. It is not an easy thing to do, but it must be done.
Audience: [inaudible]
Instructor: Where is Lucifer in the laboratory? Lucifer is everything in the laboratory. He is the laboratory itself. Lucifer is a Latin phrase that means the “Carrier of Light.” Lucifer is the one who makes its possible for this work to be done. Lucifer in other words is the heat of the fire, lucifer is the boiling of the water, lucifer is the rising of the steam.
Audience: [inaudible]
Instructor: When you look into the symbolism of alchemy we see that always that the stages related to the disintegration of the ego are a process of putrefaction, decay. So we see many images of corpses, and of a black raven, and animals eating corpses, things like that. Lucifer is that process. Properly said, Lucifer is the one who orchestrates the ordeals around us so that we see ourselves for what we are. So in the early part of the lecture when I was saying that the Being is the one who is giving you your ordeals, it is that aspect of the Being, Lucifer. Nowadays, we think Lucifer is evil, Satan, but that is inaccurate. That was a misinterpretation made by the Catholic churches centuries ago that they never corrected, but it is easy to see, because in ancient times even the Bishops and Popes were named Lucifer! It was not always a negative name. They made it into something negative because of a political squabble. A translator of the Bible, Jerome, was fighting with a bishop named Lucifer, so he changed the bible to say, “Oh thou Lucifer, how thou art fallen,” because he was talking about a bishop that he did not like. Ever since then we have been hearing that “Lucifer is Satan,” but it is not true. Lucifer is an aspect of Christ.
Audience: Which alchemical book is the best?
Instructor: Well, honestly, the best alchemical book is yourself. Everything you need to know about alchemy is in your psychological makeup.
But you cannot learn about that unless you have guidance and instruction. The best place you will find that is the book of Genesis, the Bible, but not in English. In Hebrew. The second place is the book of Revelation. But not in English, in Greek.
The other places that you will find it are in all of the scriptures of tantra, such as Kalachakra. Tantra is just a Sanskrit name for alchemy. It is the same tradition. In fact, if you investigate the secret writings of the great tantric masters, you will finally use the same terminology. Tsong khapa spoke often of the foundation stone, transmutation, and the philosopher stone. These traditions from the east and the west are actually one tradition.
In this tradition [the six yogas of Naropa] the expressions “the inner heat, the foundation stone,” is well-known. This is because in the completion stage yogas one uses the inner heat technology from the very beginning in order to collect the subtle life-sustaining energies into the central channel and thereby arouse the innate great bliss. This is the actual basis upon which all practices rely and upon which all later completion stage yogas are founded. This inner heat doctrine establishes this basis.
The practice of the inner heat doctrine entails directing the life-sustaining energies into the central channel. Here the energies enter, abide, and are dissolved. When one trains well in this technique, the strength of the experience has the power to give control over the loss of the bodhimind substance [i.e. the sexual drops]. Then, based on this power, one can rely upon a karmamudra [sexual consort] as a conducive condition to arouse the four blisses. On this foundation, innate bliss is aroused. Arousing this innate bliss is the purpose of the practices of the inner heat yoga and karmamudra. – Tsong Khapa
The other important book in the tradition of alchemy is the Emerald Tablet, which was presented to humanity by Hermes, the God Thoth of Egypt.
So those are the most important treatises of alchemy, and below that there are hundreds more, and they are all interesting. But let me point out something important: the truth about alchemy is that you will not find it in the past. The past is dead. The past is gone. The past is a rotting corpse. Do not waste your time sifting through dusty, mistranslated books. The truth of alchemy is found here and now in your heart, by prayer to God, and in your life, by practicing the principles that are now openly available. That is where you will find it. The texts are interesting, and we need to study the teaching, and we need to understand the principals, but do not be distracted longing for the past, or trying to uncover secrets from the past, because you will not. Everything in the past was hidden, and is already dead. Why dig up an old corpse just to pick through the bones? The living truth of alchemy is burning inside of you, now… It is the fire of your Divine Mother who is waiting to awaken, if you have the courage to do it. That is the courage to face yourself as you are, and to change, to take your energy and use it better, to awaken, to transmute yourself. Then you will find the reality of alchemy, you won’t need all those old books. You won’t need dusty papers and stale concepts, and to memorize old terms and theories and images, because you will see that its all just dust. The living vibrating reality of alchemy is waiting for you inside of your heart right now. But you have to have the courage to look, and to use it.
I have something old/new for you this time.
It’s old in that it is an ancient method of divination that is specifically connected with our magical Lady Isis. It is (a bit) new in that it is a new translation of the ancient text in which the divination is found. The new translation doesn’t really change things much but it does, perhaps, give us a slightly better understanding of the original. And that’s always good.
The other new thing is that we can try it for ourselves.
This Isiac divination is found in the Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri. You’ll usually see them just called the Greek Magical Papyri (Latin:Papyri Graecae Magicae, abbreviated PGM) because they are written in Greek, but the scholars who worked on them tell us that they reflect, in large part, Egyptian magical techniques, so I prefer Greco-Egyptian Magical Papyri. What’s more…
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