Belzebuub: This first talk is on Gnosis. I’m sure that most of you know what it is, or rather, the usual explanation for it, which is that it’s knowledge, self-knowledge. I want to just explain though, what we do to get this self-knowledge and what the purpose of self-knowledge is.

Essentially, the purpose is to change from a human being to a spiritual being - that’s why we’re trying to get Gnosis, that’s why we’re trying to get self-knowledge. We’re not just getting it to pursue an intellectual understanding, because that kind of understanding is very superficial - it doesn’t go far at all. For example, we can read all about states such as anger, we can read about psychiatry and all of this, but we don’t then really understand the way that the human psyche works, because we’re studying other people’s knowledge, other people’s information. And the psyche is something internal, so if we feel anger, then we feel it inside of us. No one can see that anger outside of us - they can see the manifestations of it, but they can’t see the actual thing. We however, each individual, can see anger within themselves. And it’s that observation of that emotion, which is what we’re after. So it’s something that we do within ourselves in order to get knowledge about ourselves. This knowledge about ourselves though has a purpose, which is to change. If we just have knowledge and we don’t change, there’s no point in it really. So it brings about change for a spiritual purpose. So, we’re going to try to, in Gnosis, change from being the way that we are, the way that we start out, to being a more spiritual person. But, that is really the start of a profound journey, because if we can become a bit more spiritual, we can also become a lot more spiritual - and the techniques of Gnosis allow us to do just that.

This is essentially the same knowledge which has been taught in all the different religions around the world; it’s been restated in the modern world by Samael Aun Weor, who put the ancient knowledge in a way that is quite easily understandable, and certainly is achievable for us. If we continue along this Gnostic way, this Gnostic path, then we take this journey, this path to enlightenment - this is the enlightenment that the different religions have spoken about, it’s liberation. And, in it, we free ourselves from nature. So, we free ourselves from these animal drives, these animal desires, and we become truly free - not simply able to do what we want, but to be instruments of the divine will, so that we do the things that we need.

Now, to change like this, to free ourselves from nature is a big job. We have three essential things that we do in order to do it. The first is to die to ourselves inwardly, to die to the egos, the emotions of anger, of hatred, pride, bad feeling, ill will, and all these different things, which really cripple us spiritually, and these things which have made this world a place of suffering, where it doesn’t need to be. If we were more spiritual, this world would change. The whole structure of society is based around the state of the individuals within it; it’s the creation of the individuals within it. If the individuals can change, society can change. So, we work to get rid of these elements of the subconscious, these desires. As we do that, we free consciousness. This consciousness gives us awareness, and that gives us the ability to perceive the present moment.

Perceiving the present moment, we perceive the here and now, we perceive reality, and Gnosis is about perceiving reality. While we are locked within the subconscious, we see this distorted view of the world, we see it through our own emotions, our own opinions; we rarely see things as they are. With awareness, we observe things as they are in the present moment, and from there, we develop this awareness so that its faculties increase, and we’re able to perceive things beyond this three-dimensional world, things which are real, things which exist. But we create the things within us to be able to perceive them.

And that then brings me on to the second essential exercise to do, which is Alchemy. It’s the transmutation of energies, of sexual energies. Every creative process requires sexual energy; this is the heart of change, of creation. If we tried to change and we don’t understand the way that sexual energy works, we won’t really be able to change, because we won’t have the means to do it.

And the third essential exercise for change is sacrifice. We sacrifice our lower states for higher ones, bestial desires for spiritual peace and happiness and love. But also, we make sacrifices to bring this knowledge to people, to take it out into the world so that other people have the chance to practise it and to experience it.

Birth, this alchemy is very interesting because it gives us the substance within which allows the spiritual to manifest within us. It allows the divine to come into us. When we start out, we only have a small part of the divine, like a tiny fragment of consciousness. But it’s possible to incarnate really spiritual parts within us. It’s alchemy which creates the substance for those spiritual parts to come in, and allows us then to really experience the world in a very, very different way.

If the being, if the divine, this truly spiritual merges within us, then we have real peace, real happiness, and we feel a love that is completely unknown to the rest of the world, because very few people actually have the spiritual incarnated within. Therefore, there’s no shared knowledge, there’s no shared understanding, and therefore, there’s nothing to really talk about. If we don’t have this, it’s like not having an essential thing within us, like an emotion. If you had never had an emotion, you would not know; you wouldn’t have a clue what an emotion is like. It’s the same thing when the spiritual comes within us. It has its own quality, and if we don’t know what it - if we’ve never experienced it - we just won’t know what it’s like and we won’t know, really, how to talk about it.

This then, gives a bit of a, I suppose a danger if we’re trying to start out on this path, if we’re trying to really find true spirituality. And that is, that it’s easy to get misled, it’s easy to go down lots of different tracks, to listen to talks which sound very nice; but if those who are giving the talks have never incarnated the divine within them, have never changed themselves fundamentally through alchemy, have never died to themselves, or sacrificed themselves, then they’re just ordinary people - no matter what wonderful sounding words they may say. So, the challenge of Gnosis is to understand ourselves, to get knowledge, and therefore, to understand the whole fabric of life, to incarnate the spiritual within, and to free ourselves from nature, to reach liberation.

Ok, this takes us on then to the questions, so if you have any questions, let me know.

Q: sometimes I work towards being more conscious and it seems like as soon as I get a bit of understanding, there’s a part of me that gets excited and it’s really, really hard to keep moving forward when this happens, because it’s like I want to hold onto that understanding and it kind of makes me nervous to move forward and like I fear that something’s going to take it away. I just wondered if you could expand on that a little?

Belzebuub: This is something that the mind is bringing up. It’s not something that you should really pay much attention to. Essentially, consciousness is in a war with this kind of way of thinking, because if we are trying to be aware and we feel any kind of emotion or whatever or worry because of it, then, we’re not going to be aware. So, you just keep your awareness, and you fight even that which is coming up in your mind, because it’s like a trap that will just take you away from your purpose and what you need to do. You just get on with it, and then you fight your way through. As you do that, you learn about the various traps of the mind, and that’s how you start to get yourself free from them.

Q: I’m from Athens, Greece. Sometimes, as someone progresses into very, into the very let’s say, small stages of esoteric work, I notice that sometimes things get really, really hard. And - I’m actually near to twenty years old now - and slowly starting to realize that what a normal progression in life for a twenty year old is starting to get away from me, and, that really scares me sometimes. So, apart from some experiences that give me strength, all the other times I’m really, really afraid, and, it’s like my whole other life is collapsing on me. So, that’s basically it: that sometimes I feel very, very afraid of what I’m going to do, and how I’m going to do it. And, that’s about it basically…

Belzebuub: Can you pinpoint what it is that you’re afraid of?

Q: Sometimes, I’m afraid that things are not going to turn out as I thought they would, the first thing is that. The second thing is that I’m afraid of losing things that I already have, although I don’t know whether those things are legitimate enough. And, that basically.

Belzebuub: Ok, all right - the thing there is that you’ve got this idea of how things should turn out and how they should be. Even if you try to do what you think you should do in order to get those, they may turn out to be different anyway, because life has lots of twists and turns along its way. But, if you’re taking up the Gnostic work, then certainly we have to put that first to make it succeed. And, if we’re doing that, then certainly you can have a fear that this idea of how your life would be will change. But, we’re doing this for a reason; we’re doing it to get something better than we could get if we take up just an ordinary life. Everybody, just about lives an ordinary life. At a certain age then we get married, have children, and bring up children, grow old, and all that - at certain stages there are certain things that we do.

Ok, but that leads to death, and, we’re inevitably going to face that at some point. It could be very, very soon, it could be a long time away, but we’re going to face it, and how do we prepare ourselves for that? And if we live just an ordinary life, then we are in these animal states, and the purpose of Gnosis is to get ourselves out of these animal states. So, to me, no matter what job I have or whatever, if I live in animal states, I don’t find that a satisfactory way of living. I think it’s much better to have spiritual peace than it is to have all the different emotions that everyone has in ordinary everyday life. So I would sacrifice all of that in order to get spiritual peace and to get freedom, and to get something much better after death, something that lasts.

Now it’s a matter of priorities - if your priorities are the car, and the house, the exact number of children you were hoping for, and the job, and all that; if your heart is in that, then you’re going to be very fearful of losing it. But if your heart is in the spiritual, then you would be very fearful of losing the spiritual if you took up the mundane life. So, I’d say that you should choose which you really want to have - a spiritual life or an ordinary life. And if you choose the spiritual life, then you take whatever comes along on the spiritual path. It’s a defined path, and the things happen to us on it that happen to every single person that takes it, more or less in the same sort of ways.

So, it’s a matter of decision and a matter of priorities.

Q: Hello?

Belzebuub: Hello.

Q: I’m from Malaysia. I have a question about the spiritual life you just mentioned.

Belzebuub: Yes…

Q: I do want to live a spiritual life, but the situation in my workplace sometimes really pushes me and kind of involves egos. And sometimes I feel like, you know, I just want to change the job, or move to another work, or another place. And, sometimes it makes me think, is this because of the ego itself playing in my mind, or, am I trying to escape from the situation, or should I just continue in the workplace and try to fight the egos? So, it’s always in a confusing situation for me, whether I should just stay on and try to learn from this situation, or should I try to change the situation so that I can spend more time doing the spiritual work? So, it’s always this confusion state that sometimes, it gets to me, and you know, it just makes things difficult. Do you have any comments about that?

Belzebuub: Yes - in the workplace, we’ve got a great opportunity for learning. In the workplace, we can meet all sorts of people and be in various situations, which bring up things in our subconscious, our egos, our emotions - this is where we learn. We learn in daily life - we don’t learn in some imaginary ideal situation - we learn in the things we go through in the life that we lead.

In the life that we lead, if we take up this work, we walk along the path, then situations will occur, which may mean you would need to decide something or other with your job. But, if it’s a simple matter of having to deal with people’s emotions, people’s negative thoughts perhaps or whatever in that job, then, it’s best to use it to learn. It’s a really, really great way of learning. We have ideas about what it is to learn, but the learning comes with the things that we do in our lives; it comes with the job and with the people that we meet. This is where the path takes place; it takes place in our daily life, in all the different opportunities that come up with it, and that, that is our life.

So, if it’s not something that actually stops you from participating in Gnosis, for example, if you were completely unable to attend any courses, unable to read any books because of your job, then yes, you would be faced with a choice: whether to take the job or Gnosis. But if it’s not that, and if it’s just that there are difficulties in there and things that feel uncomfortable and so on, then, that is part of Gnosis. You need to go through that and learn from that.

Sometimes it’s hard to face it; it’s easier to just get out of a situation and say “oh well, I’ll find something else that’s a bit easier, a bit more pleasant, and then I’ll be able to study Gnosis”. But it’s not like that. Gnosis can be very, very difficult to do. It can be very hard situations that come up; difficult people that we have to deal with. And yet, that is where the learning takes place; it takes place in those difficult situations and difficult times. When we have just easier times, we learn a lot less, but it’s the difficult times that we learn most.

That said, you know, it’s up to everybody to make their own decisions on this, their own choices, and to work things out as best they can.

Q: Hello - can you hear me?

Belzebuub: Yes, I can hear you.

Q: Oh fantastic, my question was - you spoke about spiritual or a love that you can attain from doing the work, like a divine love that you can experience, a spiritual love…

Belzebuub: Yes…

Q: And my question is as opposed to the love that we feel now for people, which I guess from an intellectual knowledge is, is often derived from egos, but in order to I guess you get that you develop that kind of spiritual love at a certain progression with this work, but in order for us to see what it is that we’re trying to fight for and to help us through times of entropy and things like that, is there a way that we can get an insight into, yeah, what it is that we’re going to gain, to give us the strength to keep going?

Belzebuub: Yes - you need to do exercises that strengthen the essence, because this is where a feeling such as, well love, a state such as love comes from. So if you do awareness as much as you can and practise mantras, mantras are going to stimulate the senses of the astral body, and they’re going to make you feel more spiritual sensations - these then spark off these more spiritual feelings in daily life. So, I’d recommend that you concentrate on awareness and mantras, and obviously, a big exercise is alchemy, but that’s for whoever has that ability to do it.

As far as people’s capacity for love in everyday life - there is a spark of it, which we see here and there: a mother’s love for a child, love that spontaneously happens throughout the world. But that love, if we look at the world, is very, very small. If people had just a small percentage more love, this whole world would be different. There are so many stories of exploitation, of greed, of destruction and famines, and wars and fights all throughout the planet, that it’s obvious that love is very, very small within humanity. So, we’re trying to increase this capacity for love, but when it happens, it happens naturally, you don’t have to think about it. If you’re thinking about love, it’s not love.

Love is just the way that we are, and the way that we are changes as we become more spiritual. And then you feel for people in a way that, it’s as though they’re yourself - you can’t not feel love once you have it. And then you feel that for everybody that you see, and it’s a strange thing, but that’s the way that it goes. So, it’s something that we can develop, but we have to put in a lot of work to develop it; we have to make a lot of changes to those negative states, which I was explaining a little bit about earlier. And, also then, to carry out these exercises to awaken the senses of the essence, because that is where the root of our change, and the root of all of our spiritual development is.

So, this is about developing that essence, making it stronger, and then we can feel those spiritual feelings a bit more, and that gives us strength to help us to go forward. We need to make sacrifices to be able to do that; to move forward, we have to sacrifice lots of pleasures, lots of things. And if we can do that, we’re doing it for a reason, for a superior state - so we’re sacrificing lower states for superior ones. If we keep giving in to lower states, they weaken us, they take away the capacity to feel those higher states, and then they drag us down, they drag us down into even lower states, and before we know it, we’ve lost track and we have to try to fight our way back. So, we need to know the essential exercises to do, and to realize that it’s about increasing the capacity and feelings of consciousness. And it’s on consciousness that we need to focus and concentrate, so that we develop it. And then it merges with the divine and it becomes a strength, a power, which fights against all of those negative elements, which are inside.