What is divinity? Humanity has a lot of theories about divinity, many beliefs, many traditions, and most of them are quite beautiful, but they are in reality the antechamber, the pre-school of the truth. Any belief we have, any theory we have is not the thing itself. Even the concept that we have of “my parent, my child, my spouse, my friends,” have very little relationship to the reality of those people.

We all have an idea of what a person is like and who they are, and perhaps through experience, some years, our concept of that person may be based on certain experiences that we have had with them, but it is not based upon all of our experiences with them (since we select only certain experiences to use in that concept), and it certainly is not based on all of their experiences since we have only seen a fraction of their experiences, and only been told a select few of their experiences. So our concept of each person is based only on a few select impressions, and from them we build an idea of that person. Eventually a day comes when they do something that does not fit our idea of that person, and we are shocked, overwhelmed, surprised. Perhaps we fight with them, or end the relationship. Yet, whose fault is that? It is ours, because we built an illusion in our mind of that person, someone we thought that we knew. But really, we only saw the lie we were telling ourselves about that person, we never saw the reality of that person, the truth.

If we are capable of that amount of self-deception with some tangible, perceptible phenomena in our immediate environment, how could we possibly have any idea about God… whom few if any of us have actually experienced? Yet everyone has the conviction of belief, the concept, the idea, that we have some notion of what God is, and we hold to that, thinking it is true… Meanwhile, the reality is that we do not see reality.

What I would suggest to you is that you adopt the modern scientific approach: gather facts until the truth becomes clear and undeniable. Learn to see as a scientist or a detective, and throw out beliefs; only study the facts, only study what you can confirm for yourself. Set aside your culture, tradition, beliefs, notions, theories, all those ideas that you have inherited from society, family. Consider, “What can I confirm for myself is real?” This is not to say anything bad about those beliefs, theories, or traditions, no, it is simply to set them aside and perform the experiment. “What can I confirm? What can I experience? What can I know?” If you need some comfort in that experiment, you can think, “I come from a certain religion, and it is all based on the experience of somebody else. The scriptures were written based on the experiences of prophets and saints and great masters or buddhas. If they, human beings of the past, were able to have those experiences with divinity, maybe I can too. Maybe there is a way for me to experience what they experienced, for me to know the truth of what they said, not to just accept it or reject it, but to know it…” To do that, you have to base yourself on facts that you can confirm for yourself.

That is what we study here: gnosis, to know from experience. In Hebrew it is called “daath,” knowledge. It is not knowledge in the intellect, it is not knowledge of beliefs, it is knowledge of facts, especially of the facts that can be known only by the consciousness through direct perception, not merely physical phenomenon, but non-physical. For that, you must know how to meditate.

The reality is easy to see when we study nature, the facts of nature. Study any fruit tree. In the course of its life a fruit tree it will produce hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of seeds.

But how many of those seeds will truthfully become another robust fruit tree like the parent tree? That is very rare. The vast majority of the seeds are lost; nature destroys them. Only a few seeds in very specific circumstances will have the opportunity to become another beautiful, bountiful tree. Humanity is exactly the same: each human being is a seed that has the potential to become an angel, a buddha, a master. Nature does not guarantee that development for anyone. Nature does not care. Nature is only a process of cause and effect, relentless, unstoppable: causes and effects, causes and effects. There is no force in nature that promises liberation for anything or anyone,

For that seed to develop it needs exact conditions, otherwise it is lost like any seed in nature. It needs extremely precise conditions. It is wonderful to garden, to grow plants, and many of us like to. We depend on plants to eat, to live, to survive, but plants are grown with a very specific set of conditions and if we do not match those conditions we do not get good plants. Observe how far down that is in the mechanical kingdoms. Minerals develop and survive easily. They do not need much to develop and to survive. Plants need more than minerals do, but develop and survive more easily than animals. Animals are more fragile in a certain way, their food sources are more specific, more narrow, more limited. Their life span is different, the quality of life is different, the quality of mind is different. And the same is true, especially true in the human kingdom. In all the mechanical kingdoms, we are the most fragile, and we need very specific conditions to develop and to survive, whereas the creatures in the other kingdoms are far more likely to develop and survive than we are. So, the higher up you are on the mechanical wheel of nature, the harder it is to develop and to survive. This is why the seed that is within us develops so rarely: it is the most difficult seed to grow. Its needs are the most specific, the most demanding. The method to do that is what has been encoded in all of our religions, but people have not understood it.

So, all of our religions were provided primarily to guide us towards a new kind of sexual creation: something beyond the animal level, something that requires individuality, willpower, love, devotion, the emergence of a new kind of mind, and new kind of being… Hidden in the world’s religions are the instructions for human sexuality, not animal. But we failed to listen, to learn, to apply it. That is what is explained in all our myths: Adam and Eve, Pandora, Persephone, Eros and Psyche, Noah and the flood, etc. Because we did not learn humanity sexuality to advance our development into a new level of conscious evolution, we have not escaped the lower mechanical evolution. We remain trapped, like animals, in a cage of our own making.

Humanity in this era is now reaping the consequences of that. Our dedicated to animal lust is the root cause of the degeneration of civilization, and it is taking us further and further into degeneration. The facts of this are obvious and everywhere. Humanity has the very mistaken belief that sex is entertainment, solely for the pursuit of pleasure, power, and fun. But nothing in nature is free. Every single action, not matter how small, has consequences. Cause and effect is the basic law of nature. We are deeply ignorant of the effects of lust, but the evidence is everywhere now if we open our eyes to see it.

We also have not understood that time is also a factor in our development. Seeds do not last forever.

Evolution is not a line, it is a circle. Nothing in existence continually improves. Everything that evolves will also enter into decay: into devolution.