When we engage with a philosophical inquiry, What is that which wants to know? Is it not the mind? Who asks the question? Who is asking this question? Is there an expectation for an answer when this question is asked? What would satisfy this question?
The mind who is thinking creates the I who thinks. I think.
This I who says “I think” wants to be a real entity. A real thing. But the I who says “I think”, “I want to know”, “I wonder”, “I want”, is the result of thought. “I am Mexican”, “I am Peruvian”, “I am Argentinian”, “I am American”, “I am White”, “I am Black”, “I am male, female”. This I who speaks, this I who asks questions, the I who wants to know, is that I not the result of thought? Is that I not the one that keeps talking and asking?
The mind is aware of itself. And the mind continues to negotiate its existence. It wants validation from others. It wants confirmation of its own existence. It creates anything to feel that it exists. It creates depression. It creates confusion. It creates anger. Just to prove that it exists. But it is the product of thought. And this mind which creates thought, which creates ego, wants to argue. It wants to prove itself. It wants to be heard. It wants to be validated. It wants to ask questions. It wants to understand the answers. But is this ego, this I, not the result of thought? Does it exist beyond thought? Does it exist without thoughts?
For a philosophical inquiry, we need intensification of tolerance. I am not referring to social tolerance, but of electrical tolerance. A lightning rod allows the passage of power without breaking because it has a high electrical tolerance. a material with high resistance will burn out and break. This tolerance is the movement of the attention necessary to develop for this inquiry. It is the same as putting a 9-volt battery on your tongue. The initial shock makes you want to pull away.
That is what the mind experiences when it meets silence. It wants to do something to stay away from that shock. That something can be boredom. It can be feeling insulted. It can be the thought that says: “let’s talk about something else”. But if one is able to hold it, the initial discomfort is going to go away and we are going to find this pulsing energy flowing through the tongue.
The intensification of magickal force necessary to make this crossing, and this is a crucial point, is not about us doing something stronger. It’s about us opening up more. The intensification is of our tolerance so that the flow of power can continue. The intensification of the mind in a philosophical inquiry is first and foremost about the ability to receive more, to tolerate more. Put that battery on your tongue. Let it flow. It takes practice though, because the ordinary mind has been trained wrongly—in our schools, in our entertainment and in our language.
I hear people speak for hours and for days without hearing one another: switching and changing, following any impulse and retreating from any topic without regard for the dance of the dialogue, without regard for timing. It takes a very disciplined mind to be able to hold something.
The language that you acquire when you train in an esoteric school is the magickal language, Qabalistic thought, logical thought, and archetypal thought. A Philosophus can approach language from a very different perspective. There is an exactitude necessary to language, but at the same time there is a letting go of stagnant and calcified meanings. One has to be able to be very precise and at the same time to not hang on to unconscious agreements about what words mean.
There are a couple of tendencies of the mind that keep us from engaging in Philosophical inquiry. One is the tendency to let go of the effort. When you concentrate on one thought or one term for too long, the mind wants to move on. It wants to say: “yeah, I already know that. Give me something else.”
Another barrier is when you hold on and can’t let go of a point for ego reasons. That usually happens when the ego is involved and you feel like your point has not been heard or you feel like you are being misunderstood and your ego is attached to the outcome of the conversation. You want to keep going back to one point. The difference between exploring an idea for a long time and holding on to one idea, the difference between those two things, is that when we are exploring an idea from a philosophical standpoint, we are moving with it. You are seeing it from this angle then this angle then this angle until something becomes universal. There is a silence that springs in you when you find yourself looking at an idea from multiple directions. However, if you are identified with the outcome and lust for results, then the ego gets involved in the discussion and we will get stuck.
The third impediment is when we listen and compare what is being said to what we think we already know. To try to compare what’s being said to your idea of reality, to judge what is being said as being true or being false, whether you like it or dislike it, to whether you’re being entertained or not, are all tricks of the mind to get you back to an ordinary state. When the intensive chamber of the Teaching becomes strong, the mind also tries to shut down by confusing you, by making you tired. You keep listening to the words, trying to find something of interest. However, even if every thing in every word is quite understood, the mind begins to give up the effort necessary to hold on to the idea. The body becomes tired. Therefore, you need the blood-flow to the head. The breathing must be open and natural, the spine erect and the blood must flow to the brain so that you don’t fall asleep. The ego has to be put out of the equation. So that nothing that is said is interpreted as insult, as personal.
These are some of the tendencies of the mind that take us away from the present. Somehow, the reader could be hearing what I’m saying just as prologue. As something that is not the topic yet. In other words the mind is already talking and the things I’m saying are not heard. They are being categorized and cataloged into interesting or uninteresting. I question that function of the mind which wants to talk about something else: something that was talked about last week, for example; or something that your mind was considering a few months ago or a year ago; or something you heard in the past. All of that is at the expense of the moment. For at this moment, the tactics of the mind to get away from the now are being approached.
Enlightenment is your natural state. The world of human concerns is a veil covering the naked presence of reality. The ego is product of that veil, and it is built with thoughts, beliefs, and concerns centered around that ego.
When the eternal self identifies with that ego, we fall into the slumber of the dream state.
In order to evolve from that slumber, you have to create some restrictions—self-imposed restrictions. They can’t come from someone else. Listen to this: they can’t come from someone else!
If you do it just to obey someone else, it’s only a distraction. You are merely placing the power of your own will on someone else. I don’t care if that someone else is a teacher, a guru, a great illuminated master, an ancient spirit, a voice in your head, or God himself. If you accept restrictions because someone else wants you to have them, they are useless to you.
Of course, you can decide to follow someone else’s advice, but that’s all you can really do. You decide on a course of action because it seems like a good idea to you, and if so, own your decision. In all ways, follow your own counsel, and be responsible for all your choices.
You are the architect of your own being. You choose what is it that you will not do, and what you will do. Once you choose, develop discipline by submitting your actions to your will.
What happens to animals that are tormented/abused by humans? What happens to their souls? What about those people? My heart is often so heavy, I just don’t understand. I can feel it all and it’s challenging to shift out of that. I know we are somehow all connected but I don’t feel like I want to be connected to that. Why does it happen? Just feeling very sad at the moment. 😥
Those who suffer because of empathy and compassion, move humanity to higher awareness.
All humanity suffers the consequences of the cruelty of those who torture and oppress. Those of us who move away from the gross actions of humans, pull the mass of human consciousness in the direction of evolution and refined awareness. It is like a huge ship in the ocean, which to change course needs steady pressure in the desired direction. At first, the pressure doesn’t do anything, because the mass of the ship is so large. However, the constant pressure does make a slight shift, and this shift moves the ship on a different course. This is how the compassion of a few can affect the course of the whole of humanity.
The key is to have compassion for the suffering, while at the same time rooting our consciousness on our higher aims. To fall in despair and hatred for humanity, simply plunges us into the dross of the masses. This does not move the ship in the direction we desire. On the other hand, to become indifferent to the suffering is to disconnect our intent from the momentum of the ship.
We need, then, to stay anchored to the suffering of the innocent through compassion, while pulling on that force to the desired direction by rooting our higher attention in the higher good.
In this manner, not only humanity changes course, but the beings who suffer also are moved with us in the direction of evolution.
Every thought comes and goes.
Every second of time comes and goes.
Every aspiration comes and goes.
Every lifetime I’ve had, it comes and goes.
Every second of time, it comes and goes.
Every flicker of time, it comes and goes.
The watcher watches; and when I move,
the watcher watches.
When I dance, the watcher watches.
When I love, the watcher watches.
When I kill and consume the flesh of my enemy,
the watcher watches.
When I sin of hatred, the watcher watches.
When I sin for love, the watcher watches.
When I pray to God, the watcher watches.
When I blaspheme against God, the watcher watches.
The watcher watches all the time;
and it does not change;
it does not move.
The watcher watches;
and the watcher inside me is what the five watchers
perched on the Tree of Life,
vulture like,
beady eyes,
and through the darkness within them,
watch the watcher within.
To really destroy the ego would be as useful as destroying the body, intelligence, creativity, language, etc. The ego is a construct we create to navigate and experience this world. Why get rid of it—eve if such a thing could be functionally possible? No, the ego is a magnificent tool. We must learn to use it well. The key, unlike many falsely teach, is not to destroy it, and not even to weaken it.
The key is to make it an efficient, well crafted, strong, and equilibrated tool. To do this, you must not let the ego be the boss of you. It is a part of you and your tool. The ego that ignores the master is unbalanced, afraid, and out of control. Train it well, keep it healthy and strong, and it will be a worthy avatar to your earthly experience.
As a child, sitting at the beach of El Espino in El Salvador, I would look ahead of me and I would see a horizon where the blue water kissed the blue sky. And I would wonder about that line that divided the heaven and the ocean. It was thin—maybe not really there.
It was there just so I could see it and imagine a separation between the two. And as I tried to penetrate that almost visible barrier, I would notice that the periphery of my eyes would widen, almost as wide as the ocean. And I sat there with my small eyes, with my small mind, in this small world, almost able to hold the immensity of the ocean.
It was vast. Huge. I could not hold it in my thoughts. Any thought I begun to have about it would be washed away with that roar, with that sound, deafening all over—a busy silence. Before every thought formulated in my mind: silence. After every thought: silence. And all around the thought, that loud roaring silence of the ocean.
This brain of yours is, right now, creating the world. It is, at the same time, forming scientific hypotheses about the universe. It is doing this not only at the social level, but also at the natural and even the spiritual level.
The process of awakening has to do with taking these processes of the brain and bring them to a conscious level. It is about becoming conscious of the assumptions that you are making when you are defining yourself, and the assumptions that you are making when you are face to face with the infinite.
The brain is doing all this in a mater that is unconscious to you. Automatic. Make them conscious, and voluntary.
Your family, your tribe, takes care of giving you the assumptions, the foundations, and principles that let you navigate the world.
Eventually, society takes over and provides you with the stories, the narratives, that allow you to know what group to identify with, what beliefs to hold, how to behave with other people, and how to behave when you are alone.
Then, religion takes over to tell you how to think about god, and how to behave in the face of the infinite
The Great Work is, in a way, a work of heresy where you begin to discard what religion tells you.
You begin to set aside all the identities and assumptions that the social group has given you: all the identifications with a race, a nation, a religion. All identifications with a human group being to be set aside as programs that have invaded your system. A lot of these programs have kept you trapped in a form that is limited, and are not your real self.
Even the way that we perceive nature has to be questioned, analyzed, and reformed in a conscious manner, so that what we are, what the world is, and what the universe is can be approached as a great mystery—as a unique path that will lead us to a lifelong adventure of discovery. To know thyself, as the oracle of Delphi commanded, and as socrates told his students, is not only to know your identity—with all its preferences and histories—but to know that you are not that at all. It is to know the limits you have imposed on yourself. To know that manner in which you were educated by family, culture, country, and religion; and how they have provided limits for yourself, because they has created an avatar that functions on behalf of those religions, countries, and artificial human groups.
This great work is an ultimate act of rebellion where you dare to stand alone, to disrobe yourself of all your programs and all your identities, and to face the empty void only as a silent presence. Then you can look at everything again, from this perspective, and pick and choose your experiences, your hypothesis, your assumptions. Pick them consciously, and they’ll go from being unconscious assumptions to being tools for you to use; as a carpenter uses and chooses a hammer, a saw, a nail.
Ultimately, there is beyond the center of centers, there, at the origin of your attention, beyond the sense of self, the origin of all you are. This is the God that creates the world that you perceive. This is the God that sustains the life of the one that says ”I Am”. This god within has been considered the greatest of heresies of all the religions that have made a world of worship, the have created a culture that sees them, and only them, as the true intermediaries between you and god. Their success, strength and wealth has depended on you believing that you are not god; that you are only a limited ego that is a suffering fool whose only possibility of happiness depends on the graces of an external, remote god, and whose only intermediary is the church.
In this unholy trinity, a tyranny of a remote father and a tyrannical mother, are placed the only source of redemption for a child that never grows. But the truth is that the Holy Father is you, not your ego, not your identity, not even your memories, but you—the one behind the curtains of perception. You are the true God, and this vessel of flesh and mind that contains the history of humanity, that contains all knowledge and experiences, that contains the good and the bad, that contains all the teachings, and all the words of all the masters is the true church.
The marriage between God and the church produces, outside of you, the kingdom of heaven—always new, always created, always reflecting the will of god. In this Kingdom outside, the world created anew, is a true reflection of the inner marriage between the true God and the true church. This union is the true wine of ecstasy that brings the satiation of our deepest aspirations. Those who would keep humanity enslaved will tell you that it is a great heresy to believe in this God within. And I tell you that you have nothing to believe. No belief is necessary. You have to approach this as a true scientist, a true explorer of the inner spaces, and seek for yourself the knowledge of your true essence, of that which is silence and infinite, of that which is true beyond all forms, beyond all time—the center of yourself.
Seek within your heart, not the emotional or physical heart, but the center of yourself. There, you will find it. Silent. Vastly infinitesimal. All knower. Creator. Maintainer. Destroyer of all worlds. Look for the god within. Commit the ultimate heresy, and make contact with your true self.
