Most people are not aware that we live two different lives. One is internal and the other is external. Our internal life consists of many factors; we daydream, we have thoughts, we fantasize, we imagine, we have emotions, and when our physical body rests we dream. Our external life consists of pretty much everything we do outside of ourselves; our job, family, friends, school, etc. So we can say our internal life is our psychological life; our thoughts, emotions, etc. Our internal life is very important and is what we need to be aware of. Our external life is a reflection of our internal life.
Samael Aun Weor stated:
“Let us not forget that the exterior is merely the reflection of the interior.” – Samael Aun Weor, The Revolution of the Dialectic
Our psychological state of being, what we have going on inside of us conditions our life outside of us. All the desires that we chase externally are triggered from something within us, our inner life conditions our outer life and that is what we need to become aware of. It’s important for us to be aware of why we want to eat a certain food, buy such and such, lust after so and so, react with anger when faced with anger and frustration. It’s important to be aware of why we desire something? Why do I want that car, clothing, money, house? Are we aware of why we want these things? Our desires may be motivated by envy, we may find ourselves envying what others have, and work very hard to possess what they have, but why? Another example that’s very common for us is when faced with anger and frustration we react instantly with anger and frustration. After something like this happens we should go back over the event by imagining what happened. Before we reacted were aware of what was happening inside of us? Were we aware of ourselves before we reacted and were we aware of ourselves after we reacted? Most likely not. Some good questions to ask ourselves afterward would be: Why did I want to behave that way? Why did I feel that way? Why did I react that way? What is happening and why? It’s important to know why we are frustrated, angry, envious, sad, and fearful. A few more examples we can discuss is, if we feel negatively about ourselves, then we’ll most likely feel negatively about our boss, co-workers, friends, and family. Worldly issues that we have no control over will bother us to a great degree because of our internal well-being. If we’re a mess inside then we will identify with the world outside of us in a similar way. If we identify with the negative aspects of ourselves, then we are more likely to identify with negatives outside of ourselves. The chaos we’ve created inside of us causes chaos outside of us.
Our external life pertains to the physical world that we perceive with our five physical senses. We should all be aware that we have the senses to see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. We should also be aware that we have internal senses as well. We can think and we have emotions. People cannot see our thoughts, and cannot see our emotions. Someone may sense our emotions but if we’re not expressing them outwardly, then they cannot see them because they’re internal not external. Honestly, being miserable is not a good way to live, and having little to no awareness of ourselves is not going to help us. It will only deepen our suffering. If we long to change, and when I say change I mean psychologically then it’s time to wake up; it’s time to open our minds to something new. Gnostic psychology taught by Samael Aun Weor expresses the importance of becoming aware of ourselves.
When reading the following statement, pay attention to how you feel and what thoughts enter into your mind?
Samael Aun Weor stated:
“When a human being admits that he has his Consciousness asleep, you can be sure that he has already begun to awaken.” - Samael Aun Weor, Fundamentals of Gnostic Education
When we first begin studying Samael’s teachings it’s common for us to feel some sadness, doubt, and pride. When we first read a statement like this, it’s common for us to have thoughts and emotions that are very reactionary and prideful, “what I’m not asleep, I’m awake, what do you mean?” “I’m not asleep your asleep.” But the fact is we are very asleep. Most of us cannot recall what we did yesterday or moment ago. Most of us cannot remember our dreams. Are we aware that we have dreams? Something that’s very common now days is multitasking. Are we aware of ourselves if we go through our whole day multitasking, are we aware of what we’re doing? Something else we like to do a lot is daydream and fantasize. We like to imagine all the things we want and if we don’t get them we suffer. If we’re daydreaming, are we aware of the present moment or is our mind somewhere else? Another example of being psychologically asleep is when someone is talking to us and instead of concentrating on what they’re expressing to us we think about something else or zone out. If we are not concentrating, if we are not aware of the present moment, if we are not focused, then we are not conscious of what we’re doing and thus we are asleep. The physical body is awake but our consciousness is not; we’re on autopilot.
In this moment are you aware of what you’re doing? Perhaps you are and perhaps you’re not. Become aware of what your doing. If your asleep become aware of it, and if you are it’s no reason to become upset with yourself. We don’t need to be ashamed, instead we should be content that we became aware of being asleep. When you become aware of your psychological sleep, simply become aware of what’s going on inside of yourself and go back to being in the here and now. Most of humanity thinks it’s normal to behave in a mechanical unconscious manner. We think it’s good to daydream, to multitask, and we can take it a step further, most of us think it’s normal to be angry, envious, and lustful, it’s not. Anger and lust is normal for an animal. If we wish to be more than an animal then we have work to do. Anger, envy and lust cause suffering. To be compassionate, to be content, to be happy for others, to be calm, to be chaste and ethical is normal and helps reduce suffering. Serenity is what we seek right? Freedom from suffering should be the objective.
In order to reduce our psychological sleepiness we need to study ourselves, we need to become aware of ourselves, we need to become our own science project so to speak. For example: study what is motivating you to do anything at any given moment, what’s pulling your strings? It sounds like a lot of work and it is, but it’s a one-step at a time kind of work, it’s a beautiful work and we get better at it overtime. It is not possible to work on every aspect of yourself at once. We pick a couple of things that we become aware of and work on them. To put it another way, we need to study the teachings because they point the way. The teachings are like a map that help us find our way. We also need ethics, ethical discipline. We need to meditate. It is important for us to meditate. “Meditation is how we come to know the truth” of anything. We need to live the teachings so that we can experience them. We need to perform them. We need to become aware, observe, meditate, and comprehend. By doing this type of work little by little we begin to change and we begin to experience true joy, true happiness, peace and freedom.
We achieve a great comprehension when we discover that we have our consciousness asleep. This type of comprehension helps us begin the awakening process. By doing the work, by working to purify our inner life our outer life will begin to change for the better. Think back to when you discovered the teachings of Samael Aun Weor. It’s not a coincidence that you found these teachings. Most of us feel an inner urgency to know more or we sense that there’s something more to life. Perhaps we had an experience, perhaps we studied something that ignited a spark within us and that spark motivated us to move forward, too search.
That spark, the inner urgency, is coming from within us. It’s coming from our Innermost Being. Some of us may have heard or read about the Being. Here is what Samael Aun Weor states about the Innermost Being:
“Our real Being is of a universal nature. Our real Being is neither a kind of superior nor inferior “I.” Our real Being is impersonal, universal, divine. He transcends every concept of “I,” me, myself, ego, etc., etc.” - Samael Aun Weor, The Perfect Matrimony
“God is the Innermost Spirit who is within us, the universal spirit of life. The Innermost is the divine person. It is the heavenly person who is within us. – Samael Aun Weor, Beyond Death
Our Innermost Being is our own individual Divine Father, our Inner Spirit, our inner source, our inner “I Am.” The Being is not easily definable and is something that we need to experience. We cannot experience divinity through theories and beliefs. By meditating and by awakening our consciousness we can experience Divinity.
Something else important to bring up is the fact that it’s very common for us to think we can experience happiness through something external. We think our spouse will make us happy, a friend, our job, a vacation, a house, a retreat, etc. Happiness, peace, serenity comes from within not from without.
If we truly want happiness, if we aspire for purity of heart and mind then we need to work on the psychological conditioning that we’ve inflicted upon ourselves.
Self-observation is very important. If we want to change we need to observe, and become aware of our psychological state from moment to moment. Life is about balance, nature itself seeks to balance herself, we too need balance. With hard work and dedication we will learn to balance our internal life and our external life.
This type of work will help us change our lives.
Samael Aun Weor said:
“The revolution of the consciousness requires tremendous super-efforts.” – Samael Aun Weor, Spiritual Power of Sound
It takes extraordinary effort for us to be aware of ourselves from moment to moment and we can do it. This work can be done, has been done, and is being done. It’s up to us.
Samael Aun Weor stated:
“It would be interesting to grab the bull by the horns, to observe the ‘I’, to study the ‘I’ in order to discover the causes of suffering.”
- Samael Aun Weor, The Great Rebellion
The “I” is the ego and we’ll be discussing the ego in greater detail in another presentation, but for now we can state that the ego is the root of ignorance, pain and suffering.
Now will discuss the Four States of Consciousness, but first what is consciousness?
Here we have the consciousness defined in three different ways.
From various dictionaries:
1. The state of being conscious; knowledge of one’s own existence, condition, sensations, mental operations, acts, etc.
2. Immediate knowledge or perception of the presence of any object, state, or sensation.
3. An alert cognitive state in which you are aware of yourself and your situation.
“In the esoteric traditions of the Western world, the range of potential consciousness is allegorized in the Ladder of Jacob, upon which the angels ascend and descend. Thus there are higher and lower levels of consciousness, from the level of demons at the bottom, to highly realized angels in the heights.” – What is consciousness
Consciousness is the foundation of perception and understanding. Consciousness is the basis upon which we evolve or devolve. Our improvement or degeneration is marked by the state or level of our consciousness. The higher our level of consciousness is, the more refined and penetrating our perception. Try to understand the consciousness is not the mind, it’s not the senses. Consciousness utilizes the mind, emotion and senses to perceive.
We have levels of consciousness and this relates to the line of being or the vertical path. There’s also the line of life or the horizontal path. The line of life relates to being born, living and then eventually dying. We’re born, and while we’re living in our physical body we experience things in the physical world such as: family, friends, work, vacation, hardship, joy, etc. We gain some knowledge, usually by what others have taught us or what we’ve read, we learn to react egotistically to situations in life, we learn to chase desire believing that someday we might get what we want and in this way we never really comprehend why all of this is happening. The horizontal line really leads to nowhere fundamental for our development. Thankfully there is another path, the vertical path or the line of being. This line has to do with our level of consciousness.
The First Sate of Consciousness is called:
1. Deep sleep or Eikasia: Ignorance, human cruelty, barbarism, exceedingly profound sleep, a brutal and instinctive world. – The Perfect Matrimony, Samael Aun Weor
The first level corresponds to the sleep of the consciousness, which is a very deep. It’s an unconscious level without any self-awareness. In this state our physical body can be very active but our consciousness is asleep, meaning, we have little to know awareness of what we’re doing. In this state we are capable of making grave mistakes. Plato the famous Greek described the first state of consciousness as human imagination that perceives fantasy or that which is illusory. So this means Eikasia is the perception of illusion, but taken as reality, and it corresponds to the deepest levels of the sleep of the consciousness. We can describe this state as when we act or behave driven by forces that we are unaware of, and this is profound psychological sleep. In other words, we are unconscious of what drives our behavior. We have no awareness of ourselves.
We can correlate the first state of consciousness to both lines but someone at this level of being is only concerned with the line of life. In this state of consciousness we are mostly concerned with violence, greed, selfishness, eating, drinking, revenge, and are driven mostly by instinct, impulses and desire. An example would be: People who live by the sword or by the gun are at this level of consciousness. People who are addicted to intoxicants, and other vices. They only care for warfare, power, sensations and thus their level of consciousness on the line of being is very low.
The Second state of consciousness is called:
2. Dreaming/Vigil or Pistis: Pistis is the world of opinions and beliefs. Pistis is belief, prejudices, fanaticism, theories in which there does not exist any type of direct perception of the Truth. Pistis is the consciousness of the common level of humanity. — The Perfect Matrimony, Samael Aun Weor
Our consciousness is asleep or in a state of dreaming at this level as well, but not as deep as the first state. This means the consciousness has perception of imagery, of phenomena, but without self-consciousness or self-awareness. When we’re in this state we are not aware of ourselves. We’re physically awake but not aware of our psychological state of being. Pistis relates to the mind and is sometimes translated as faith, trustfulness, or wisdom but Pistis is also a quality of perception. Pistis is another level of illusion and relates to beliefs, ideas and theories. An example of the Pistis level of consciousness would be when we act or behave motivated by forces that we believe in or theorize about; this state of consciousness is sleeping and dreaming while our physical body is awake. Here, the word “dreaming” refers to illusions that we take as real. In other words, we have reasons or beliefs that motivate our behavior, but these reasons or beliefs are psychological illusions. Most of the time, our entire humanity exists in these two states of consciousness, and that is it.
In this state of consciousness we may be a little higher on the line of being but still not very elevated. We may have a theory or belief that we can go to heaven, perhaps we were taught during our lifetime that we can go to heaven through mere belief. We may spend a lot of time daydreaming about going to heaven one day. We also may be very close minded because of our beliefs. Some of our beliefs may have created prejudices toward any other type of teaching other than what we were taught as we grew up. This way of being keeps us asleep and if we don’t change we keep our level of being low; we travel mostly down the line of life without ever experiencing our beliefs in religion and divinity. We also may not be concerned with working on ourselves or any kind of fundamental change because we believe the work has already been done for us.
“In Gnosis, our human consciousness is called the Essence. The Essence or consciousness is really just an embryo, a seed that can be grown into a fully developed human being, also called an angel, buddha, or by whatever name. But unfortunately, 97% of our consciousness is trapped in subjectivity. That 97% is trapped in mental formations that filter our perceptions, resulting in our consciousness being characterized by Eikasia and Pistis. The mental formations exist in levels of our own interior consciousness that are subjective and illusory but that we believe are real. From this we can see why the world is in its current state. These mental formations are our beliefs, memories, theories, ideas, fears, worries, desires, and more. Most of it is invisible to us, being submerged deep within our psyche.” – Consciousness, Beginning Here and Now
The third state of consciousness is called
3. Waking/Self-cognizance or Dianoia: intellectual revision of beliefs, analysis, conceptual synthesis, cultural-intellectual consciousness, scientific thought. – The Perfect Matrimony, Samael Aun Weor
Dianoia is a true vigil state. We describe Pistis as Vigil but truly Dianoia is a state of being vigil. Even though we are awake physically doesn’t mean that we are cognizant of ourselves. We are not aware of ourselves if we are on autopilot all day long so to speak. In this state of consciousness, we are working to be aware of our thoughts, emotions and impulses, we can call this self-cognizance or self-awareness. This means we are actively working to be aware of ourselves. Which also means we are utilizing our consciousness to objectively perceive our subjective mentality. Objective meaning: conscious perception or reasoning. An example would be: we are aware of our anger but we don’t become identified with it, we don’t react, we observe it and don’t act on it, we study it, we observe it impartially, we don’t become disappointed in ourselves, we see it for what it is; an emotion that eventually passes. When we have time we meditate on the event. In this state of consciousness we begin to see more clearly.
As you can imagine, our level of consciousness is beginning to go up on the line of being. Our experiential knowledge/Gnosis is helping us become aware that there is more to life. Our level of being is going up because we are working on ourselves, we are discovering our psychological conditioning and working to eliminate it. We are working with Divinity to free ourselves from our psychological conditioning.
The Fourth State of Consciousness is:
4. Superconscious/Objective Cognizance or Nous: Perfect awakened consciousness, completely awakened, objective, illuminated.
– Samael Aun Weor
Nous in Greek means intellect or reasoning but is pure objective reasoning, without any subjectivity. Nous is a state of consciousness that is perfect. It is a level of perception that is purely objective. This means that someone who has this state of consciousness is free from subjective conditioning, meaning they have liberated themselves from their ego. A few names we can mention who’ve achieved this state of consciousness are Jesus, Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Samael Aun Weor. Try to understand that this level of consciousness, as we are now, is way beyond our level of perception but we also need to understand that it can be attained. The great masters are pointing the way.
Nous is a very high level of consciousness. There is no fear, no prejudices, no psychological conditioning at this level of consciousness. There is only kindness, compassion, empathy, diligence, and serenity; perception of reality, knowing truth and there is no confusion. Beings who have reached nous consciousness know and perceive reality at their own level.
Conclusion:
The basis of Gnostic Psychology is to understand these levels of consciousness. It is to work and study oneself. It is to acquire knowledge of oneself. By studying ourselves we begin to understand our inner and outer lives and we begin to awaken our consciousness from it’s slumber. Awakening positively leads to freedom, it is the “Great Work” that leads to liberation from suffering. Our objective is to utilize the 3 percent of our free consciousness in order to free the remaining 97 percent that is trapped within “ignorance, human cruelty, beliefs, prejudices, ideas, theories, dreams, etc.” These are submerged qualities and they motivate us to behave subjectively, subjective meaning submerged. So we seek to transform our ignorance into self-cognizance, our sleep into self-awareness, our ignorance of ourselves into experiential knowledge of oneself.
We’ll end this lecture with a quote from the “consciousness, beginning here and now lecture from Glorian.org.
“Learning how to perceive consciously, objectively, we activate the free consciousness and we begin to acquire objective knowledge about ourselves. That objective knowledge is to see the reality within us and around us without the filter of our own subjective point of view.” – Consciousness, Beginning Here and Now
For more on objective reasoning and subjective reasoning please follow the link.
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