Descriptions:
Video Description
When an initiate says the physical world is an illusion, the claim is not that it fails to exist, but that it is not as it appears. The mind constantly drapes imaginary geometric surfaces, points, lines, perfect shapes, over raw physical reality to simplify it into separate, legible objects. Strip that overlay away, as artists sometimes train themselves to do, and the world can look startlingly different: more flawed, more organic, even unsettling.
The dream and astral worlds work the other way around: freed from the constraints of the physical senses, imagination can produce detail, color, and clarity that exceed waking experience, conjuring landscapes, faces, and monstrous forms out of old evolutionary memory and unresolved trauma seeking recognition. Both directions point to the same lesson: what feels solid and self-evident is a construction layered over something stranger underneath.
Full Video Transcript
Alright, we are back. Just to make a brief video about the illusory nature of reality. So, there have been a number of people responding to my portrayal of the four worlds of Kabbalah, and they have basically said that, well, the various planes and subplanes of existence that you can visit in the spirit vision, let’s say, are much more complicated than what you’re describing.
you can actually you know go visit various planes and subplanes of of the astral world or whatever
things like that right um so i wanted to clarify something about the four worlds just to show how
it’s possible for all of these amazing places to visit can exist there and still be the way that
i described the four worlds functioning okay and the main question is is the world an illusion um
so when people you know claim to have spiritual knowledge and they try to pass themselves off as
initiates they will often say things like uh oh the physical world is just an illusion anyway
the materiality does not really the material world doesn’t really exist uh so they’ll say these
things without really knowing what it is they’re saying because some ascended master somewhere has
said that the physical world is an illusion okay but to be clear when um an initiate says something
like that they are referring to the fact that the way that the physical world appears to you
is not as it seems doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist okay so it’s still out there more or less
physical world but the illusory nature of it is that it is not as it appears its true nature is
other than it appears okay and this can be quite startling so we’re going to talk about this like
what happens when you look at the physical world directly uh without seeing the illusory nature of
it okay first of all we can talk about when you are on the astral plane let’s say you’re having
a dream at night these various astral landscapes that you can visit we could call them subplanes
of existence whatever they can be startlingly real they can have a level of clarity that verges well
beyond what you experience in the in the physical world okay that might sound strange because the
physical world is supposedly more dense than the astral world and therefore the physical world
should have more detail than the astral world okay well the astral world when it becomes free
of the physical world is free then to create more detail than it would normally have
even on the physical plane okay we’ll talk about that a little bit more okay so the interesting
thing is that your experience in the physical world can actually inhibit the complexity that’s
possible for you to experience in the astral world okay and we can talk about hyper reality okay
one of my favorite things to look at right now on the on the internet is that all these cgi
artificial intelligence pictures and animation this is a picture of a man’s face supposedly it
actually is a artificial intelligence generated image of a man’s face as far as i know this man
does not exist and this is a cgi generated image and a human artist has been using various digital
techniques to firm up the detail and to the point where the face begins to take on a sort of hyper
real quality it becomes uh sort of infested by so much detail that it becomes more real than a man’s
face that you would look at just in the physical world in general okay this is kind of an example
of how the uh various ways of perceiving uh take over uh and leave the physical world behind and
create another reality that is simply uh based on aesthetic principles okay and we can talk about
this more simply to describe how it happens uh mainly just to maybe just to help you confront
the physical world for the first time first time in a long time and look at it the way it actually
is it can be quite frightening all right so in the grade work of the kabbalah magic book we learn how
to experience the four worlds of kabbalah okay and we do this by building a tree of life into the
aura or into our ritual space okay um we’ve already talked about this and the tree of life
can be said to exist on four different levels. The topmost level is Atzaluth, which is the world
of pure potentiality. Nothing really exists there except for potentiality. The next lower world is
then Berea, where now we get forces that are capable of interacting with each other. And this
is where consciousness can now turn to face itself and basically regard its own contents.
So in Atzaluth, or in the highest world where Kether is up there, consciousness really doesn’t
have any any awareness of itself um it can’t see itself that is and in uh some people would say
that in that in trying to find itself it then begins to disturb its uniform um flatness if you
want if you will and it becomes it starts to oscillate and vibrate and then of course you can
get different patches of vibration which can then now somehow regard each other which can see each
other in some mysterious way, okay? And that is what begins to happen in Berea and Yetzira,
okay? So Berea is simply the two forces that can now regard each other. Most simply, you could
describe them as the seer and the seen, okay? Or the perceiver and the perceived, okay? This is how
reality begins to manifest. And then below that, all of the very increasingly complex interactions
of perceiver and perceived produce uh more and more detail and yet zero okay which is the dream
world okay and then by the time that you’re in the waking world which is a sia the levels of
interaction of vibration or whatever are so complex uh that they are beyond our understanding
okay and in order to make sense of what we see in the physical world we are superimposing a dream
world upon it yeah so this is actually quite interesting okay all right and as you can see
when we think of the four worlds in terms of advaita vedanta we have the waking consciousness
which is supposedly the physical reality and then we have the dreamy sleep level or the daydream
level the imagine imagination level and then we have the deep sleep level where we tend to black
out and just disappear across the abyss okay and then the white space around that is the highest
world of absolute which is pure potentiality uh when so when you’re walking around in the world
buying groceries or going camping or or going canoeing or doing having fun doing some fun things
dating things like that you are operating in the world of waking consciousness but not only waking
consciousness you’re also operating in all of the other worlds as well okay but waking consciousness
has now become sort of um as is occupying a lot of your attention okay but you also are existing in
the level of dreamy sleep or daydreaming okay and of course the the the level of daydreaming is
being generated by the higher worlds of the deep sleep level and the level of turia or the level
of ataluf okay uh but the interesting point here is that when you’re walking around in your physical
world, you are imposing a dream world upon that physical world, okay? And this is what it often
means for an initiate to wake up, okay? When somebody asked the Buddha what he was, what are
you? Are you a god? And he simply said, no, I am awake, okay? And this is somebody who is no longer
compulsively imposing a dream world upon the physical world around himself, okay? And the way
this happens, it can be regarded quite simply. If you walk down a city street, and you are imagining
all kinds of shapes around you, like cylinders, and triangles, and squares. Okay, so the city
streets exist on a grid of apparent squares and rectangles. And what’s really happening,
you could say in to make it as simple as possible. Let’s just say that if you close your eyes, and
you’re walking around on the city street, you have this geometric entity in your mind that’s
ready to fly out there and wrap itself around things to create separate objects out of them,
okay? And that’s the plane. You have this sort of flat geometric plane in your mind that’s ready
the moment you open your eyes to fly out into the world and then wrap things up nice and neat
behind imaginary surfaces, okay? So if you imagine that you have this perception operative,
And so when you’re looking at people and things around you, they’re actually being super simplified into abstractions by these various geometric entities that you project out into the environment around you.
There are no such things as points, lines, planes, circles, squares, spheres.
These entities do not exist.
if you look at the physical world here you see the lines on a roadway are they really lines
are there lines anywhere there at all are there lines anywhere in the world ever at all or are
they simply being projected out from your mind because it wants to see geometrically perfect
shapes out there now what this means is when you enter the dream world or the astral plane
let’s say the the imagination is now liberated from the material world and it can create any
kind of shape it wants to okay it’s very often going to do this based on what it’s already
experienced in the physical world so you’re going to you’re going to still have you know
experience things that you have notably seen in the physical world but you can also experience
colors that verge beyond physical reality and you can experience details sometimes that
get much sharper than the physical world ever could become for you in waking reality okay
and also your dreams at night or your daydreams can be blurrier can be fuzzier than your physical
experience as well okay but this goes to show that all of the amazing experiences that we can
have on the astral plane or in the world of yatsira we might attribute them to higher worlds still but
they’re really they’re only reflections of those higher worlds okay so all the detail that you can
get has to occur pretty much in yatsura okay even if you’re looking at the physical world
the detail that you see is superimposed upon it by your imagination okay so um it’s interesting
to note that okay so you can so any kind of version of heaven or hell that you have uh that
you’ve experienced possibly in a dream or something like that um these are creations of the mind using
that geometric perceptual apparatus that you have okay if you can actually look at the world
without so looking at the world without projecting geometric perfection upon it you get something
that joseph campbell called the graveyard vision you can actually start looking at people and you
begin to notice the flaws in their organic flesh because you what might happen as you spiritually
evolve is that you occasionally will shut down that geometric apparatus that’s projecting perfect
shapes upon everything and you’ll actually end up looking at the world just the way it is without
imposing imaginary surfaces upon it okay when that happens you can see every flaw every lack
of symmetry every bit of strangeness it can be quite frightening because people can look
look maybe momentarily ugly or hyper-realistic or even weirder. They seem to be beset upon by
mortality. They have all these flaws that are in their flesh that show how frail and vulnerable
they are. And all of the imaginary perfection that we were projecting upon them isn’t really there.
It can be a startling version of reality. And this is the actual, the physical world,
way it actually is around us okay and then we can settle back into our imaginary more abstract world
and start imposing shapes and surfaces upon it so that it becomes simpler to look at for us okay
all right and so um it is possible to look at the physical world without without imposing these
imaginary geometric entities upon it and then what you see can be startlingly different from what
you’re used to it tends to be the way artists train themselves they train themselves to look
at the world so they can really capture it and it’s the way it actually looks okay they stop
imposing all these imaginary perfections on it and they actually draw what they see okay can lead to
some very strange experiences all right and when this happens you then can become aware of a sort
of shell world that we live in of course it’s not really there okay but if your mind is busy
creating imaginary surfaces that it’s draping over everything in the in the environment to create
separate objects out of it uh then what you become aware of is that you’re kind of walking around
this imaginary world of wrapped up objects of imaginary surfaces okay this is the shell world
okay this is the world of the creep off all right so in in kabbalah the world clip off
it’s another word for a demon okay so the outward appearance of something is the sort of deceptive
abstract shape that it assumes because you are superimposing some kind of imaginary surface upon
it okay and then uh what can sometimes happen as part of your if you uh work is you you might
occasionally have like hallucinations um you might see images of like demon faces or animals
attacking or fangs and claws and teeth and horns angel wings uh these kinds of things might come
to you because they are remnants of of stressful situations we’ve had in the past okay um in our
evolutionary development okay there have been many animals let’s say that are dangerous and
these animals have horns and fangs and claws and teeth and etc right that’s why these things flare
up in our dreams or in our hallucinations because they are remnants of past trauma that our species
has experienced okay uh but your mind when it creates these things it doesn’t exert a lot of
effort it simply creates a surface world of those objects and i’m saying this because um some of you
might have even had the experience of waking up in the morning and there’s an extra person in bed
with you and oh that person is still here that person’s from the dream i was just having and
they’re still here uh and their armor is they have they have their arm around me in bed how nice but
then you the strange and stuff it hits you it’s like wait a second they can’t come out of my dream
what the and then of course you snap fully awake and then that person or whatever whatever it is
dissolves and for a moment you can see it’s like oh it was only all surface world there was nothing
inside it i just felt i could just my mind was just creating the surface aspects the surface
experience of whatever that image was okay so who knows what was happening there was some kind of
spirit there that was taking on the form of something that you’ve experienced in the past
perhaps a friend of yours or something like that or even a dead relative came it’s taking the form
of that to speak to you okay or to have you acknowledge it kind of the way dreams work
so if you have a deceased grandmother and she visits you in a dream that’s not necessarily
your deceased grandmother okay that is some kind of aspect of consciousness that is asking for some
attention and it has dawned the imaginary surface of your deceased grandmother putting on it’s
putting on her face and speaking to you through that image okay these various forces or entities
can take on all kinds of forms in your dream world okay they can even take the form of landscapes
and speak to you right through the landscape stormy sky or the playground where you grew up
or something like that they can take on these various forms but they’ll also take on frightening
animal shapes or scary vehicles careening out of the darkness at you or people or hybrid forms as
well like people with wings people with horns okay this is mainly happening because there are images
from our evolutionary past that are still asking for us to make sense of them because they’re
frightening and stressful and things like that okay but so essentially what’s happening is that
when you walk around in the physical world you see the physical world through your physical senses
but mostly what you’re apprehending is what your mind is creating out of that which is a
simplified version of reality that is superimposed upon it a world of imaginary surfaces imaginary
geometric shapes okay and of course these geometric shapes and surfaces do not actually
exist the way that you think they do okay any look into what if you look into what a physical object
actually is in terms of quantum mechanics i’m sure you’ve heard descriptions of that before
there really are no surfaces on these objects okay that we are imagining the the surfaces are
themselves imaginary phenomena and if you stop imposing those surfaces upon everything around you
you can see things the way they actually are at least for a moment maybe okay so just to be clear
that that’s i think we clarify two things that the physical world around you is not what you think it
is okay it is there but the illusory aspect is is what you project on top of it and your dream world
or your astral worlds can be startlingly much more clear than the physical world possibly okay and
And of course, your mind can create all kinds of sub-lanes of existence on a level of Yat-Zira.
You might think that, oh, that’s the level of Bria or something like that.
No, it’s not.
Bria would simply involve you disappearing back into that, through that gateway of duality, back into pure potentiality.
okay if anything that helps you see the universe as not as complex as many other
systems of metaphysics would try to convince you it is okay all right well until next time
Source: Lyam Christopher