It is necessary to know that humanity lives with its consciousness asleep.

People work asleep. People walk through the streets asleep. People live and die asleep. When we come to the conclusion that the entire world lives asleep, then we comprehend the necessity of awakening. We need the awakening of the consciousness. We want the awakening of the consciousness.

Fascination
The profound sleep in which humanity lives is caused by fascination. People are fascinated by everything in life. People forget their Selves because they are fascinated.

The drunkard in the bar is fascinated with the alcohol, the place, the pleasures, his friends and the women. The vain woman in front of a mirror is fascinated with her own glamour. The rich avaricious person is fascinated with money and possessions. The honest worker in the factory is fascinated with the hard work. The father of the family is fascinated with his children. All human beings are fascinated and sleep profoundly. When driving a car we are astonished when we see people dashing across the roads and streets without paying attention to the danger of the running cars. Others willfully throw themselves under the wheels of cars. Poor people… they walk asleep, they look like sleepwalkers. They walk asleep, endangering their own lives. Any clairvoyant can see their dreams. People dream with all that keeps them fascinated.

Sleep
During the physical body’s sleep, the ego escapes from it. This departure of the ego is necessary so that the Vital Body can repair the physical body. However, in the Internal Worlds we can asseverate that the ego takes its dreams into the Internal Worlds.

Thus, while in the Internal Worlds the ego occupies itself with the same things which keep it fascinated in the physical world. Therefore, during a sound sleep we see the carpenter in his carpentry shop, the policeman guarding the streets, the barber in his barbershop, the blacksmith at his forge, the drunkard in the tavern or bar, the prostitute in the house of pleasures, absorbed in lust, etc. All these people live in the Internal Worlds as if they were in the physical world.

During his sleep, not a single living being has the inkling to ask himself whether he is in the physical or Astral World. However, those who have asked themselves such a question during sleep, have awoken in the Internal Worlds. Then, with amazement, they have been able to study all the marvels of the Superior Worlds.

It is only possible for us to ask such a question of ourselves in the Superior Worlds (during those hours of sleep) if we accustom ourselves to ask this question from moment to moment during the so-called vigil state. Evidently, during our sleep we repeat everything that we do during the day. Therefore, if during the day we accustom ourselves to asking this question, then, during our nocturnal sleep (while being outside of the body) we will consequently repeat the same question to ourselves. Thus, the outcome will be the awakening of the consciousness.

We study the three brains.

We have the motor/instinctive/sexual brain which is related to the body, habits of movement, sensations to act physically.

We have the emotional brain related to the heart, related to feelings, urges and impulses that are emotional.

We have an intellect where we experience thought.

None of these are our self. We think they are, but we are mistaken, and we need to understand that with our cognizance.

We think that the body is our identity. We think that what we feel is our identity. We think that what we think is our identity. We think that we are the music we like, they music we do not like, the clothes we wear. We think that we are the education we have, the city we live in, the language we speak, the memories, the conditioning that we have through our whole life but that is all just false. We think the body is our self. It is not.

You cannot know that until you begin to observe these three things. Until you begin to acquire conscious knowledge of them will you understand that you are not your thoughts. If you are your thoughts, then stop thinking, completely.

If you are that, then you should be able to stop. Do not have any thoughts. The fact is, you cannot control it. You cannot control the sensations in your body. If those are you, then shouldn’t you be able to control them? If those are yourself then shouldn’t you be in charge? Are you in charge? Who is in charge of your psychological house? Of your physical house? Who is in charge? Shouldn’t it be your self?

If you were really in charge of your thoughts, you should be able to stop your thoughts and you should be able to think on what you want to think. Instead, the truth is that when you are sincere and you observe yourself, thoughts come of their own volition. Thoughts have their own will, their own desires, their own intentions, and as much as you fight them, you cannot stop them. Why? Because those thoughts are psychological factors that arise from deep levels of our psyche. Karma. Those thoughts are the voices of trapped consciousness.

Next time you lie down to sleep, listen to those thoughts, listen to the voices that emerge in your head, and try and see if they really are who you are. You will hear voices that have voices of men, of woman, different accents, different cravings, different desires, things that do not make any sense. Who are they? Who are all those thoughts, where are they coming from? What about all those feelings, what about all those sensations? Who is the self in all of that?

Moreover, to really understand who you really are, you have to learn to meditate. You do not have to call it meditation, it can have other names. What I mean by meditation is a state of consciousness in which you have serenity, bright inner perception, clarity of vision inside, and a lack of conflict, no tension, no tension in the body, no tension in the heart, no tension in the mind, but perceptive awareness, awake, receptive. In that state you can access and experience who you really are.

In that state you can experience that you are not thought. Thought happens. Thought also can stop happening.

You are not emotion. Emotions arise and they pass away yet you are still there perceiving.

In the body, sensations arise and pass away. You can even abandon the body and still perceive that you are not the body.

That experience can only be had through meditation. Through that experience you learn. “I am not the body. I am not emotion. I am not thought. I am perception.” That is cognizant knowledge. When that can be established and maintained, you can acquire liberation.

So to establish that, you have to study yourself here and now; learn to see the distinction between perceiver and perceived. In learning to see, to experience, to know that you can perceive without the body. You can perceive without emotion. You can perceive without thought, thus you are beyond all three. You are not the three brains, you are something else. That begins to open real knowledge. That requires that you are here and now.

“Action cannot destroy ignorance for it is not in conflict with ignorance. Knowledge alone destroys ignorance as light destroys dense darkness.”

This has been a very controversial passage of this scripture and deeply misunderstood by many religions for centuries. This is because people read it literally and do not awaken their consciousness and do not understand that genuine spirituality, yoga, religion, is about awakening consciousness, not about wearing robes and going to temples. Real yoga is about awakening, whether you are a pauper, a rich person, a nun, a laborer, or a lay person, it is all irrelevant.

What is relevant is awakening.

Remember, knowledge is not from books, but from perception of the truth. This knowledge is not the knowledge of scripture or of ritual or mantra. It is the knowledge of suffering, and what does not suffer.

It is the knowledge of consciousness in oneself. Ultimately, it is the knowledge of the being.

To really be free from ignorance, we need knowledge. Knowledge of what makes us suffer and knowledge of what is free from suffering. So we start here and now learning about ourselves; self knowledge, self observation, self remembering. I already explained that self is not the terrestrial self. Our real self, our real Being is not our terrestrial me, but the only way we can get to know our real self is to first know the self that is here and now. To know that which does not suffer we need to start by knowing that which suffers.

The Gnostic path is a path of pure science: not accepting, not rejecting, but proving through ones own experience. Until one knows, one does not say yay or nay, but suspends judgement.

The Christians in this day and age teach that to be born of spirit is just a matter of stating a few words and then you are done, you are “born again.” It is absurd, sad really, to reduce the great mysteries of God to that ridiculous theory. God is far more powerful than that, and mysterious, and beautiful. The second birth is far more than just stating a few words to be born again, and Paul said as much. St Paul in the first Corinthians 15 said:

“All σάρξ [Greek sarx: bodies, flesh] [is] not the same flesh: but [there is] one [kind of] flesh of men, another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, [and] another of birds.

“There are] also celestial bodies, and bodies terrestrial: but the glory of the celestial [is] one, and the [glory] of the terrestrial [is] another.

“[There is] one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for [one] star differeth from [another] star in glory.”

Paul is stating clearly that there are levels and levels of σάρξ sarx, which in the Bible is translated as “flesh,” but sarx also means “body.” So, Paul is saying that there are many levels of bodies that our soul can inhabit.

Paul is not talking about physical matter here. He would have wasted his time if his writings were about physical things. Paul was concerned about the qualities of the soul, the qualities of the spirit, and that is what this passage is about.

“All flesh is not the same flesh.” What is the flesh of men? In Hebrew, to say the word “men” you take the word iysh (man, singular) and you put a letter Mem at the end of it: iyshshim or ishim. That makes it plural, but it also adds the element of water: the letter Mem.

So, the flesh of “men” is not the flesh of you and me, the physical people. It is related with those who have entered “the kingdom.” The Ishim are people who have the fire awake and active within them to some degree. They have the Kundalini awakened to some degree.

In Hebrew, the “kingdom” is Malkuth. Malkuth is the tenth sphere. Someone who is an iysh (a real Man) has that fire awake. That fire of divinity is already active in them; an iysh is an initiate.

An iysh, a “man,” does not mean a masculine person or a feminine person, it means someone who has already started to work with the fire and has started awakening the Kundalini. This means they have already entered into the first initiation of fire, and the kundalini is rising up their spinal column.

Another type of flesh is that of beasts; well, that is you and me, we really are animals. We are really just animals that use the intellect to reason, and the power of reason has only give us the power to create more expensive and deadly weapons, and more extravagant ways to exploit each other, and more clever justifications of our crimes. It hasn’t really improved our situation on this planet. We still live and die in complete ignorance, never knowing our purpose, never knowing God. There are lots of theories and lots of beliefs, but no knowledge: no actual experience of the truth. So we are really just beasts.

Another is the flesh of fishes. The fishes represent initiates who have awakened in the water, related to the Mem, related with the vital body and the astral body. Another flesh is that of birds, which are related with the air, the sephirah Netzach, the mental body.

So these first few bodies or types of flesh that he is describing here are related with levels of initiation, levels of spiritual development, levels of creating kundalini and creating new types of bodies, inside, spiritually. Bodies that are born of spirit and water. Bodies born not physically, but internally, spiritually.

In the same way that we create our physical body, physically using sexual energy, when we harness that energy and save it, and give it to God, that energy creates inside, creating new types of bodies, in levels and levels.

In other words, there is not one serpent of kundalini. There are seven. If you have studied Buddhism, you have seen the Buddha with seven serpents risen. Those seven serpents represent the seven lower sephiroth on the Tree of Life, from Malkuth to Chesed, and those seven serpents are represented here by Apollo and the muses. Here in this image, they are waiting in the earth, still waiting to be brought out. The earth is our body. Those are the seven serpents or seven bodies that we need to create. We haven’t done it yet.