Chicago Gnosis Podcast

Beginning Self-Transformation 11 Karma

All of nature is governed by karma: the law of cosmic causality. The same with the development of the soul. To achieve self-transformation and awaken our complete conscious potential, we must enact the causes for its realization. Learn how through the five principles of karma within the Buddhist and Gnostic traditions.

Beginning Self-Transformation 10 The Spiritual Power of Sound

Sound, vibration, and music are sacred vehicles for the transmission of divine energy, which meditators effectively utilize to experience serenity and awaken consciousness. Through a variety of exercises, including runes, pranayama, and mantras (sacred sounds), we accumulate spiritual force to enliven different energy centers (chakras) of the vital body, thereby accelerating and catalyzing profound inner transformation.

Beginning Self-Transformation 09 The Energy of Awakening

Every action in life requires energy and application of will, down to the smallest molecules, atoms, and particles, to the most complex sentient organisms. Practical meditators learn to harness different modalities of energy within their body, heart, and mind, so as to empower the development of their full conscious potential. When energy is directed by intuitive action, we awaken virtue and achieve liberation from suffering.

Beginning Self-Transformation 08 Imagination and Fantasy

Understanding reality through clear perception is a fundamental power of the practical meditator. However, this faculty, known as imagination or clairvoyance in spiritual circles, can either be liberated, free, and pure, or conditioned by egotism, negativities, and desires. Discover the nature of spiritual vision in its multifarious forms and its essential role in the path of self-transformation.

Beginning Self-Transformation 07 States of Consciousness

Consciousness is the capacity to perceive, yet perception can be conditioned or unconditioned, based upon its use or negligence. The psychological science of introspection seeks to liberate consciousness trapped within conditions in order to perceive reality in its direct and clear form.

Learn about four distinct states of consciousness as taught by Plato in the Allegory of the Cave (from his monumental philosophical text, The Republic). Such an allegory, usually interpreted as a symbol of acquiring philosophical knowledge and intellectual understanding of the truth, represents the path of the soul's liberation from the darkness of ignorance, superstition, theories, beliefs, and suffering, towards the heights of genuine spirituality, freedom and wisdom, symbolized by the sun or Solar Platonic Logos: the absolute divinity within every sentient being.

Beginning Self-Transformation 06 The Three Brains

Human beings do not merely possess a single brain within the cranium, but within the heart and spinal column as well, since in esoteric psychology, a brain is a psycho-physiological machine that processes energies of different modifications. Just as the mind has its nervous systems and basis within the material, cranial matter, likewise the heart (the seat of emotions) and the spinal column / sexual organs (the seat of instinct, movement, and sexuality) possess their own forms of intelligence we must become familiar with. By comprehending our human organism: mind (thought), heart (emotions), and sexuality (desire and attraction), we can learn to use the machinery of these three brains for our individual self-transformation and growth.

Beginning Self-Transformation 05 The Human Machine

The microcosmic human being is, in his turn, a solar system in miniature, a marvelous machine with various distributed nets of energy that are in distinct degrees of tension...

The human machine (as any other machine) moves under the impulses of the subtle forces of Nature. The secret agents that move the human machines are first the cosmic radiations and second the pluralized “I.”  ―Samael Aun Weor, The Narrow Way

The body, heart, and mind possess tremendous forms of intelligence and power that remain in a potential and inactive state. Learn how to activate this latent intelligence within the human body, consciousness, and nervous systems through study and practical works. When we comprehend how the machine of our mind, heart, and body function, we can use it for the free development of the consciousness in obedience to intelligence and will. This lecture elaborates on the previous discussion of self-observation, explaining the structure and dynamics of our psycho-biological machine: intellect, emotions, movement, instinct, and sexuality, as well as how our sense of self relates to these five centers.

Beginning Self-Transformation 04 Self-Observation

"To change is the best; however, we must begin by being sincere with ourselves.  We need to make a psychological inventory of ourselves in order to know what we have in excess or what we lack.” ―Samael Aun Weor, Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology

Our internal states shape our exterior life. By becoming acquainted with the numerous conditions of our internal, psychological world, we can modify them in order to awaken the free and natural state of consciousness: compassion, empathy, wisdom, serenity, cognizant love, and happiness for others. Through liberating the consciousness of its egotism, faults and obscurations, we can then penetrate, with the eye of awakened, spiritual perception, into the true knowledge of life's mysteries. However, all of this is based on directing conscious attention, not reacting mechanically to life in a passive, unconscious manner.

The first, kindergarten step to awakening to our essential nature begins with observing ourselves. By directing our attention with full consciousness and will, we can discover what psychological elements within our interior universe produce suffering and conflict. Therefore, by observing the conditionality of our psyche, we can modify it. Only by learning to observe and eliminate our faults can we produce radical, fundamental, and permanent change, and thereby experience the awakening of our true spiritual and divine potential.

Beginning Self-Transformation 03 Discover Your True Self

"We all know that we have within ourselves that which is called ego, I, me, myself. Unfortunately, the Essence is completely imprisoned, absorbed inside the ego, and this is lamentable. To dissolve the psychological “I,” to disintegrate its undesirable elements, is something unavoidable and non-excludable. This is the meaning of working upon oneself...

"...Unquestionably, the Essence shines within ourselves when our psychological “I” has died. The liberated Essence confers upon us inner beauty. Perfect happiness and true love emanate from such a beauty. The Essence possesses multiple senses of perfection and extraordinary natural powers. When we die within ourselves, when we dissolve the psychological “I,” we can then enjoy the precious senses and powers of the Essence." ―Samael Aun Weor, Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology

Discover the fundamental makeup or machinery of our internal, psychological constitution: the essence (soul or consciousness), ego (defects, vices, errors) and personality (language, habits, name, race, customs, culture, etc.). By learning about what makes us mechanical beings, or intellectual animals (from the Latin anima, meaning soul), we can therefore strive to make profound changes through developing the capacities and potentiality of the consciousness. By overcoming the mechanicity of our life, we can experience, in a state of alert novelty, the purpose of our existence: the manifestation and realization of our true identity.

Beginning Self-Transformation 02 Psychological Rebellion

"It is not irrelevant to remind our readers that a mathematical point exists within us. Unquestionably, such a point is never found either in the past or in the future. Whosoever wants to discover that mysterious point must look for it here and now within oneself at this exact moment, not a second earlier, not a second later. The two horizontal and vertical lines of the Holy Cross intersect at this point. Thus, we find ourselves from moment to moment before two paths: the Horizontal and the Vertical.

"It is apparent that the Horizontal path is too base; it is traveled by my buddy and everybody, by those who are juvenile and those who are senile. It is evident that the Vertical is different; it is the path of intelligent rebels, of revolutionaries.

"When one remembers oneself and works upon oneself, when one does not become identified with all the problems and sorrows of life, it is a fact that one is traveling along the Vertical path." ―Samael Aun Weor, Treatise of Revolutionary Psychology

Learn about the basis for true spiritual change: psychological rebellion. Real change is produced through cognizance of our inner faults and rectifying them through meditation. By identifying and removing the causes of suffering within oneself, it becomes evident how one might modify one's daily circumstances, the repetition of sufferings, comedies, and tragedies, so as to acquire genuine serenity and the happiness of living.