Descriptions:
Video Description
There are two ways people approach forbidden knowledge: with a pull toward the mystery, or with a fear that the same mystery might hurt them. In this honest conversation, Lyam Christopher says fascination and trepidation are usually hiding inside each other. He steps back from the Hollywood images and asks a fair question, which fears are real, and which ones do we carry simply because someone told us to be afraid?
The things that genuinely deserve caution, he explains, are not demons leaping from shadows. The true difficulty is an inner one. As the old scene between Merlin and Morgana suggests, the knowledge itself does not send monsters after a person; it changes the one who receives it. He names the real challenge plainly: the false self built up in the head has to loosen, and that can feel like sinking, burning, or being pulled apart. Those pictures of the dark arts, he says, are the mind’s own old fears wearing costumes.
Then the teaching turns encouraging. Once a student understands what is actually happening, the path becomes a way of noticing those old fears and old stories as they rise, instead of being carried away by them. In Kabbalah, Magic & the Great Work of Self Transformation, the daily practice is designed to begin exactly that slow, steady work. The point is not to become fearless overnight, but to meet the darkness with eyes open enough to see what is really there.
Full Video Transcript
Okay, we are back. And this week, we are talking about the lure of forbidden knowledge, or more like the fear of forbidden knowledge. Because when people contact me for the first time, they often express fear of what they might encounter if they begin some kind of spiritual discipline or occult discipline. And because they’ve heard all kinds of scary stories from Hollywood and from their friends.
or urban legends, things like that, about the dangers of magic and occultism, or they’ve heard
it through their church, their pastor, or some other spiritual leaders from their parents.
And this is a difficult one for me because I didn’t have much fear of forbidden knowledge.
I had more of a lure for it ever since I was very young. But since I have a fascination with
forbidden knowledge and i’ve always had that um i think that indicates some level of fear there
wouldn’t be a fascination without the trepidation and you know the fear of going at that so i want
to explore what it is that people seem to be afraid of with the uh fear of forbidden knowledge
this should be kind of fun actually but i hope it will address some concerns that people have
about the path of magic especially golden dawn style magic so this is from the 1981 movie
excalibur when merlin decides that morgana is evil and she’s not worthy of his teachings he decides
to destroy her i destroy you i consign thee to oblivion or something like that he says something
like that right such knowledge would only burn and blind you and her response
to that is then burn me she wants that knowledge so badly and but he says it
will destroy your mind so there’s a fear of madness involved in occultism there’s
probably some reality to that I would think another fear seems to be external
and this is a fear that might lead us into occultism because we don’t think we
have control over our lives and so we want that control we want power we want
the ability to change the world around us and the fear of all of the things out
there that are gonna get us and there’s a fear of what’s out there in the
darkness let’s say right and we want to be okay with that interesting thing is
you know now that i paint it that way the only response to a fear like that would be to go out
there into the darkness and find out what’s there so what’s there in some kind of controlled fashion
in some kind of disciplined controlled way okay and um of course many people come to occultism
with the wanting to gain more control over their lives okay they feel that they don’t have that
control and that things are the universe is stacked against them well uh the universe is
sort of stacked against you you are mortal no matter what you achieve it’s gonna crumble away
okay so uh the world that you’re in so um maybe there is also a tendency to want to
um if i hack away at enough chaos if i destroy enough chaos around me i can establish some kind
of platform on top of the mountain where i can finally be at peace and be in control of everything
yeah well no that’s not possible but of course it isn’t necessary either okay so it can seem as
though um you can reach a point where these things don’t bother you anymore okay there’s the true
peace okay that’s one so one of the fears is that i can’t control my life everything all these
external forces are monstrously powerful or there’s the fear this is more
interesting there’s there’s a fear of what you really are what are you
underneath okay so if you were to really know the truths of reality if you want
that forbidden knowledge about what are the origins of humanity where do we come
from what are we in our essence is there anything there other than this meat sack
of nerve endings you know and some people would say you can gain that
knowledge but most people would be unable to handle it whatever it is we
really are what is the root of our being that knowledge yes that knowledge is
truly frightening to most civilized adults those people who suffer from the
mild psychosis of civilization are scared to death of their true nature is it possible to
find out what your true nature is yes or better yet it’s possible to experience your true nature
okay to know what it is there’s a little trick of words right there um is it possible to know it
uh we have to we have to get at that word what it means to know something okay so in one sense
it’s not possible to know your true nature but in another sense it is possible to experience your
true nature and you can experience it much of the time as you walk through the world it’s possible
and this is what’s possible when you uh take up take up a tantric or occult discipline um like
theurgy you know not just like you know spell casting to get money or some things like that
but a spiritual discipline that’s more like a tantric path okay this these that’s the goal
actually to get in touch with your true nature sort of yeah not that you ever lost lost touch
with it begin with we’ll do some quotes here uh from h.v lovecraft the most merciful thing in the
world i think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents someday the piecing
together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality and our frightful
position therein that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into peace
and safety of a new dark age so hp lovecraft is so interesting because the ultimate horror that he
says uh is waiting for us out there in the darkness is our true nature and if we ever got
to see what our true nature was, we’d be ultimately, we’d flee in terror at the sight of
it. And so much of his cosmic horror, which he supposedly invented that genre, much of his cosmic
horror is simply based on that. What you actually are, you can’t handle that. You can’t handle the
truth. It will drive you mad, scare the living shit out of you. And this comes from the first
dr strange movie the one that’s worth watching um and that is uh the sorcerers the sorcerer the
sorceress supreme says um if i told you everything else that you didn’t already know you’d run from
here in terror as dr strange is trying to learn magic right and she’s like you you’re not ready
for this knowledge you know because you you’d be just too terrified if you saw it all at once
we’re going to talk about that in a bit too that’s a good one this is all along the same vein um so
notice that in pop culture all these references to forbidden knowledge are like constantly coming up
because of you know it’s a it’s sort of an archetype it’s sort of a um the way that we
flinch at the threshold of finding out what the universe actually is we we don’t really want to
know or do we approach avoid approach avoid you know so um here uh this is from the dark
phoenix saga from the actual comics that inspired the x-men and the dark phoenix and all that stuff
um the dark phoenix is a very powerful telepathic mutant and um here she is uh basically um giving
one of her enemies a glimpse into the universe as it actually is i don’t know if i can see this
clearly that gene’s touch his mind expands at the speed of thought racing instantly from one side of
the reality to the other through all the infinite realms of space and time and so he yeah he gets to
see how all the mutual um the opposites all the contradictory truths of existence he gets to see
how they all make sense and it blows his mind and up at the top there it says some people can handle
this experience and some people cannot and then we can see that um apparently because he’s evil
and he’s not you know potentially good like the phoenixes um he can’t handle it okay and he
collapses it into a stupor okay and so this is the kind of fear that we have of our true nature if we
could see the whole universe all at once or a true nature all at once what we truly are what the what
the meaning of life is it would fry our brains and destroy our minds probably true but you know
you’re basically talking about what the problem here is it’s a fallacy um to experience your true
nature that doesn’t mean you have to cram the whole universe inside your nervous system okay
to experience it just means to be in touch with it okay so it’s not if so to understand your true
nature doesn’t mean you have to absorb all the knowledge in the in the entire universe which
would fry any you know any brain pretty much or or any memory um but we have to remember remember that
a human being is not a computer okay and the type of knowledge that we have access to is not
contained in memory banks okay or in circuitry we don’t know how we actually store this knowledge so
to be in touch with your true nature suddenly all kinds of knowledge is available to you and you
you don’t even know how it arises and where it comes from. And that’s perfectly fine. There’s
nothing brain-frying about that experience necessarily. But there are truths involved
with that about who you are that can scare the hell out of you. Yeah, if you’re not ready for
them. Yes, that’s true. This comes from a novel I recently read. Then one star appeared, sparkled,
followed by another more and more popping open like eyes then abatha saw to her great horror
that they were they were eyes a hundred a thousand a million eyes all of them every one staring at
her she understood something of great magnitude yet so simple all the eyes they are one they’re
all one i think uh i should have put a bit of artwork here where there’s some there are
depictions of the enlightenment experience where like the whole universe is full of eyes
or you have these uh depictions of angels where there are eyeballs all over their wings you know
things like that like everything um that exists is full of eyes okay that’s kind of a way of saying
that um awareness permeates everything and i guess that’s scary because there’s no place to hide
like say if you have a guilty conscience that then the mind of the universe sees sees all can
see you no matter what you do there’s no place to hide um and uh that’s a really cool one too
because um because of our ignorance of the moral dimension of the universe we can sort of um you
know deceive ourselves and um uh we can we can hurt others and think we’re getting away with it
when in fact um the consciousness of the universe is always watching always aware
and so when people develop a conscience they can begin to realize that everything that they do
does um have an effect on their outlook and their and their their manner of becoming
and there’s no hiding from that and it’s almost as though everything they do is like
everything they’ve done in the past is still lurking there saying oh you want some more of this
here you go like and that’s that that’s a fear that your past is going to catch up
with you okay or that’s the universe is watching from all directions and it’s going to say here
you want some of what you really want what you’re asking for here you go here’s more of it
and so in other words you get your just dessert sort of thing right um and primary image of that
is the whole universe is watching you and is aware of all the horrible things you’ve done
yeah um yeah and to so to have that vision um yeah it can be really frightening because there
are there are things that you are ashamed of about yourself that you suddenly realize you can’t hide
in fact you kind of wear them on on the surface of your behavior and people can sort of see them
not you know directly they don’t know what exactly what you’ve done but they can see
something’s wrong because your past behavior is still sort of being carried
and uh and a fear of that you know that’s going to be found out that the universe is watching
and always keeping score or something like that yeah that’s a that’s a really cool kind of fear
um something to be afraid of um and the way to get past that is to uh to repent to have regret
and to or to really delve into what has happened before and then see how that incident arose to
understand it better there’s really no blame possible for things you’ve done in the past
okay i mean blame is possible but it’s not um there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with anything
that ever happened but you have to be able to see it as in its essence how it works so the the idea
of you know forgiveness for your sins and all that stuff really involves being able to see all the
forces that are at play in the supposed sin and then um so i i would guess that all of these eyes
that you see you watching you are trying to tell you no you just need to look at what has happened
okay and what’s happening now just see it as it is not in terms of how you beat yourself up
i don’t know if that makes any sense uh but there’s a there’s a tremendous fear of of the
universes out there watching you keeping score ready to dish out karma following you around
there’s also a fear of um the darkness below yeah this is a pretty strong one i think a lot
of people get into occultism this isn’t the one that i am so afraid of uh but there’s a little
bit in there i think yeah there was a little bit of fear like that um mainly because the way that
we evolved we kind of see ourselves as rising up from the slime from the from the universal slime
evolving upward into from from the minerals up into the vegetable realm and up into the animal
realm and then up into um up up up into the head right and so uh when we were before we were human
as we were as life forms were evolving there wasn’t really um a cephalic brain or a head brain
there was just a nervous system and there was a sort of gut brain which is down in the intestines
which we still have and then there’s the cardiac brain which is up higher and then there is the the
brain in the head that thinks it’s in charge that’s the clever one and um as we establish
this sort of control tower in the head that really has evolved mostly to help us find food and run
away from predators in really clever ways okay how to survive in really clever ways it’s kind
of how it evolved but it’s become so much more than that of course um the the fear is that um
in this control tower um we sort of established this identity of this person who is going about
our daily world um getting things for survival keeping um harmful forces at bay and this is what
we are this is our existence finding things to so i can eat them and keeping harmful whatever
enemies at bay so i can live another day on the on the planet even though i’m eventually going
to die which is an unsettling kind of knowledge right um and then yet if the attention turns
downward to look at where we came from the true knowledge of what we are it can be quite horrifying
that i’m what am i i’m just this sort of um gelatinous entity that developed bones and a
nervous system and the nervous system merely has evolved to um to help me find food and evade
predators in very clever right ways that’s there’s a fear of really knowing what that is
and my response to that is no just investigate just investigate really what’s what’s all in the
body and and what the body is how how the brain has evolved up here into the head um because
eventually the the blessing of that is you can you start to see past it all um it’s not
reductionistic anymore okay so it’s really good to investigate that forbidden knowledge of of you
know evolution uh biological evolution where we came from how the slime became a human being
and eventually right um not because we find out that we’re nothing but um glorified slime but
because we see there’s a process behind all that that is sort of orchestrating this into existence
and that’s what we are we’re not slime we are the we are the the life force that is orchestrating
all this from behind the scenes that can be terrifying too because we happen to be quite
fond of our meat sacks right and then of course if i if i’m not really this uh embodied thing
this uh incarnate meat sack what am i and in order to find out what that is do i have to let go of
this i i’m not ready i can’t do that i have to i have to be ready to die in order to find out
what i truly am yes these fears are legitimate and so the earth down below us becomes this sort
of evil place because it is the um place where all the animal urges and all the blind forces of
nature are and we have this quote from the christian theologian i’m not even going to
try to pronounce his name as jacques something right um may the earth be accursed may the earth
be accursed a thousand times accursed because from it that heavy fog and those black vapors
continuously continually arise that ascend from the dark passions and hide heaven and its light
from us now there’s a truth to that our our material conditioning does seem to hide our
true nature from us that much is certain but that does not make the earth accursed okay so to um
to basically pass judgment upon the lobe dark places as evil is premature okay it’s really more
the conditioning that we have taken on from being hurt by all these external forces let’s say
throughout countless eons right all that conditioning that we’ve taken on that make
us think we’re something we’re not and they hide the knowledge of heaven from us all those
experiences okay we’ve had a sort of this fake life conditioned into us by all of our experiences
as evolving bags of protoplasm you know and it’s possible to see past that okay and that’s the
great thing about doing an occult practice or magical practice no knowledge is forbidden so
you can study biology and you can study evolutionary psychology and you can really go after
what we seem to be according to science or according to reductionistic terms and then you
can note the limits of that kind of thinking and then keep looking and keep looking keep looking
deeper and further okay and so yeah all this knowledge of science and evolutionary psychology
can come to your um aid but there’s much more to learn than than just the science and the you know
the the material existence that supposedly is so accursed right one way of looking at this is that
um the true nature of what you are is invisible but it actually becomes visible
through the material manifestation okay so you can’t really appreciate it and experience it
without the earth or those lower forces that sort of um that it dawns as clothing as it shows itself
in manifestation okay so it’s uh it’s kind of a mental illness to be at war with the medium of
your manifestation okay so if you are to find out who and what you truly are you might start
exploring how you manifest and exploring how you manifest involves looking at your physical form
looking at your feelings your thoughts all these things that are sort of external to you
examining these things they’re not evil it’s kind of like um if if you call those things evil it’s
kind of like the the painter calling his painting and the canvas and this and the pigments calling
them evil i’m working with this evil stuff oh my god what am i doing i must i must renounce
it all like throw down the paintbrush and throw away the canvas i don’t want to do this anymore
because all these mediums of manifestation are evil come on really um you can see how that’s a
sort of a madness of um i think christianity um when it becomes purist tends to suffer from that
you know it it dismisses sexuality as evil dismisses the body as evil our bodies are
prisons for our souls you know sort of thing right your body is a medium for the manifestation of
soul yeah and your soul is a medium of manifestation for spirit why not you can see it that way and
down below ultimately there is the oblivion monster so um that we can kind of experience
this in the body when you begin to do middle pillar work and you’re working with that kundalini
energy the the fake identity that we have developed up in the head up here it begins to you
begin to notice that it’s not real it’s just a fabrication and so like this tap this control
tower kind of collapses and you sink back down into the darkness of oblivion back down into the
primordial slime once you evolved um that’s an actual experience you can have uh sort of like a
an ego death experience and what that can feel like is that you’re falling into a dark pit of
oblivion and you’re going to be snuffed out okay can also feel like you’re being torn to pieces
or burned up okay because of the all the images of trauma that we have coming at us from our
evolutionary past all the different ways of dying they get tangled up in with that ego death
experience and so it can feel like you’re being devoured by a mouth of hell from below and then
of course inside there’s nothing but oblivion or lots of being torn to pieces and then oblivion
right um or being burned up right something like that uh in hell the mouth of hell right
the oblivion monster um so yeah when you do spiritual work um eventually you will experience
the oblivion monster it’s an opportunity for ego death to experience ego death which some of you
guys have experienced through the use of psychedelics or entheogens yeah um when you when
you experience ego death through magic or through tantra or through meditation um it tends to
be more permanent it’s more likely to be permanent whereas experiencing it through drugs is just a
flash or you’re gone and then you’re back again and then and all your problems are still there
you know everything reconstitutes again and there’s like um it can be pretty bad too because
you know what’s possible now but you still have all this crap to deal with
and so the nice thing about doing spiritual work or cult work is that you
are diminishing all of this these samskaras and the vasanas of these these
some psychological baggage is diminishing and as that baggage
diminishes then you begin to see your true nature and then you can be snuffed
out of existence you so your ego death happens and then of course after the ego
ego death happens you’re still here oh lo and behold there’s just um the fake you that was in
the control tower is now sort of gone and all that’s left is a sort of persona that has always
existed in this body at least up until this point that um is now kind of at your disposal
and suffering is almost non-existent you could say suffering will try to creep in and take you
over but you can always catch it then it just kind of creeps in it’s like tries
to pinch you and drag you along somewhere and you’re like nope I’m not
gonna follow that all right so let’s talk about for those of us who are
afraid of jumping into a cult practice or you know doing golden star golden
dawn style magic also known as theurgy have to remember that the magic of the
golden dawn is strictly strictly it’s primarily about achieving enlightenment
we should make no mistake about that okay it’s not about getting things by working magic
necessarily okay but that’s in there okay that’s that is possible uh but that kind of thinking if
you think you can get into golden dawn magic so you can make things happen by doing ritual
that’s kind of booby trapped because um the way that magic works is not really like that
i’ve talked about this in previous videos okay uh but anyway so if you’re doing magic to achieve
enlightenment um and to have an easier life you know a life free of suffering which is the same
thing as enlightenment um then there are the the kinds of fear that you have about that kind of
life um i’m going to categorize them into two categories the needless fears and the the the
real ones, the fears that turned out to be real. Okay. So the
fears that are just pointless, and I don’t have much bearing on
reality. Okay. So I think the big one for me, in regard to
going down on a cult path, was the fear of getting in with the
wrong crowd. This is something I still have to this day. I don’t
like to be pulled along with a fad. I don’t like to conform to
what the masses are doing. I had this image that they’re all sort
of plotting or running along like lemmings and they’re all
going over the edge of a cliff and I’m being dragged along with
them. I don’t like to follow the herd. And so if there’s a fad of
doing magic, let’s say oh, I’m going to get this video called
the secret or the book called the secret and learn how to
learned the law of attraction and it’s oh my god this stuff is amazing so I see all these people
doing that I tend to want to run in the other direction okay I’m not saying that’s rational
I’m just saying that’s a tendency I have because I don’t like to get in with the wrong crowd and
you know as today the people who who get sort of enchanted with the whole mythology around the
secret uh they’ve they’ve ended up looking kind of silly of course um and i guess that’s also
um a concern i think among a lot of you that you will end up doing something that’s just going to
make you look like a fool okay uh that um to believe in magic you know and then to um chant
words of power and draw sigils in the air every day um that’s going to make you look foolish okay
um in the end no not at all okay there are people who know that i do this stuff uh and um what i’m
able to do with them is validate everything in their lives that has magical thinking involved
and so um very often the effect is that they will look to you as eventually as someone who can
validate the kind of magical thinking they have going on in their lives okay or sort of rescue
that magical thinking that’s going on in their lives from being silly so you become somebody
who’s actually capable of showing people that it’s not silly to have you know magical thinking type
practices even superstitions you know um the the main thing about doing real magic is that
the superstitions go away you don’t subscribe to superstitions anymore and you notice them whenever
they pop up doesn’t mean you don’t you don’t participate though yeah you can still participate
in magical thinking and in fact that’s kind of what magic does but it does it with a different
kind of knowledge from underneath or from inside you know from you’re now inside the inner order
and you’re operating magic from the other side of the veil which is very different than um poking
magic from the outside and trying to get something out of it uh so uh the fear of looking silly
eventually that’s going to you’ll find that that’s needless because you’re going to become somebody
who can help people understand their own silliness and validate their own silliness okay i hope that
makes some people feel better another thing about um about magic that’s that’s frightening and this
is for people who have been practicing it for a while they begin to see that the um the amount
of work that needs to be done seems to be insurmountable there are so there’s so much
darkness inside of us there are so many psychological scars in our evolutionary
past there’s so much conditioning it’s like mountains upon mountains of
conditioning just churning ever forward this mountain of karma that just keeps
pushing the universe to do its thing right how can I possibly overcome all
this it’s everywhere it consumes everything who am I to think that I can
stop this crazy um karmic insanity from from going on all this suffering all needless suffering and
you begin to see that everything in the universe is sort of suffering life is suffering and uh so
and the problem with that is that you think that um uh it’s the slings and arrows of outrageous
fortune right i’m trying to quote shakespeare here um when it says to to take up arms against
to sea of troubles and by opposing them end them that’s the famous to be or not to be speech right
um do i have to fix the world that’s what i have to do here i have to save the world
um and the world is just oh so incredibly huge and monstrous and unsavable and um that is needless
because the thing that really needs um fixing let’s say is not out there in the big bad universe
it’s just right here okay so in other words that um what the problem is that when we draw our magic
circle um we are still conditioned to look out into the world and try to fix everything around us
okay that’s not fixable okay so you know the next time you’re driving in traffic and you think
by doing some clever maneuver in traffic you can teach everybody how to drive
properly you can’t do that give it up i’m going to teach this personal lesson and that will teach
everybody out there right there’s too much ignorance out there you can’t fix it this stuff
okay focus on what’s going on the ignorance right here yeah that’s manageable and of course that
makes everything better everything so you can basically now just it’s so oh my god it’s
everywhere this whole this monstrous karma machine is everywhere and this insanity and the suffering
is everywhere that’s not your responsibility let go just focus on the suffering and the insanity
that’s going on right here okay that’s why the fear the fear of the um even in the jewish
tradition like uh it’s called olam takun like where there’s by our actions here we fix the
universe right not really by our actions here we just we make our peace with it and the peace is
established right here shalom peace right so um uh so and when our work is done we retire at the end
of the day shalom that’s that’s what we’re after here not to try to go out there and fix the world
and and hammer it into place you know and the idea of eyes being everywhere like the whole universe
is watching you or you can’t escape from your own conscience and if i go down this occult path i’m
going to have to look i’m going to have to face up to all the horrible things i’ve done not really
doesn’t really matter where you’ve been and what you’ve done but it is important to look at how
these things arise and how they repeat. You want to see the mechanisms of them. That can be very
painful, yes. So in regard to the moral dimension and being ashamed of things you’ve done or being
ashamed of what you think your true nature is, all these things need to be examined. There’s not so
much going on in here that you can’t handle. If you try to fix everything out there, that’s
overwhelming. You can’t do that. Sorry, but that’s not necessary. Existential angst. This is the fear
that if i really look i won’t find any meaning anywhere there’s no there’s no point to existence
at all and this is what the existential philosophers tend to say they’ll say that
there is no meaning anywhere and they’re supposed to make you feel better to say
accept the meaning that you create right somehow that leaves you trapped inside your own skin
living in a fantasy world of i’m going to make meaning out of this i’m going to pretend right
well uh they almost got it right uh it’s just the matter that when you find yourself in that
predicament of of saying oh i’m the one who’s making the meaning it’s like no no the meaning
making process is now happening okay and so the meaning making process is something that you are
now um immersed in and it’s something that’s going on all over the place it’s not um so um to say
that the the universe out there is meaningless and all that matters is the meaning that i create in
my mind um that uh is delusional okay the problem with that is we think the only thing that has
intelligence is inside our heads which is absolutely silly okay there’s intelligence
everywhere it should be obvious okay and so we now participate in that meaning making process
it’s not like we are the only ones making meaning and everything else out there is meaningless okay
that is truly a frightening scenario and is that even possible of course not but just look yeah so
this whole existential angst thing i gone let’s let’s torch that dispense with it and move on
fear of losing control yeah yeah so um the thing about that is um we have found ourselves in a
condition of the castaway on the beach it’s like when at some point in our lives when we achieve
some kind of self-awareness maybe we were i don’t know four years old and we suddenly realized
i exist i’m aware of myself maybe that’s how old we are i don’t know three years old and um but
then of course we begin to realize that we don’t know who or what we are and so this this it’s
almost as like you wake up on the on the beach on a ship in a shipwreck and you really hit your head
hard and you can’t remember who you are and this is how we feel when we wake up in life it’s like
oh okay now i’m in this physical world and i don’t know what to do i don’t even know what i am and i
have all these urges but i don’t know what i don’t i don’t know what they mean what do i do with all
this and then people come along who are all around you and they say here we’ll show you we’ll show
you what this is all about come follow us right um so these are people who come and educate you
who have fabricated a system of meaning that’s simply based on their experiences on the beach
on you know pretty much and they have patched together some kind of belief system that simply
helps them survive in this form and they say this is the truth of your existence and they convince
you that this is how to live. They teach you all these survival routines, how to take care of
yourself, how to feed yourself, how to clean yourself, how to find a mate, how to proliferate,
how to blah, blah, blah, right? And this is a quote from my book. The average human underneath
a veneer of confidence is still a terrified castaway, is severed from his true nature,
clinging to the first paradigm that comes along to give him a modicum of security.
The proud father hands over the traditions of his prosperous forefathers as though he were passing along the Holy Grail, and yet he knows nothing.
He receives his instructions from his forefathers, who also know nothing.
They receive their traditions from the same nothing.
And so it goes on and on until the mind is left staring into an abyss of nothingness, the foundation on which it has built its sense of self.
this fear of if i find out who i really am that means all these systems of control that i have
learned from my elders are wrong and they are okay now they’re perfectly fine as things go
in a karmic sense as they perpetuate themselves and they help us perpetuate ourselves as survive
right these things just go on as they go on but they are they as they those systems try to define
who and what you are they get it wrong okay it says no no nothing really much to fear in that
i think we already know that the things we’ve been taught don’t really capture who and what
we really are so it’s okay okay so when begin when we begin to discover that all the things
that we’ve been taught about ourself are wrong of course they’re wrong okay the absolute knowledge
of existence is not really objectifiable anyway so any knowledge that you hold on to is not real
it’s temporary poof you hang hang on to it for a while until it becomes until it ceases to be
useful and then you have to let it go otherwise you’re really gonna you’re really gonna suffer
then right so um and kind of the ultimate knowledge then is that there’s nothing really
to hold on to okay and then there’s that loss of control if there’s nothing to hold on to what
what’s what do i do i can’t let go now that means that that means i don’t exist yeah exactly right
you don’t exist as you think you do anyway as an objectifiable entity and with all that then
there becomes there comes the experience of the abyss of walking down the street
okay so um one of the experiences when you’re doing the work is that behind everything there’s
nothing there’s like just a vast emptiness of of chaos and formlessness and that any moment you
could fall into it and and disappear into oblivion and there’s even a sense that um like i’ve i’ve
seen um speeches of uh like hellfire sermons of um they say be thankful to god who’s holding you up
okay as you’re walking down the street right you’re walking down the street and he’s the
one who’s holding you up and keep you he’s keeping you from falling into the abyss of
absolute oblivion he’s holding you into existence okay be thankful for that because if he were to
withdraw his hand from underneath you you would fall into hell you know burn up and be destroyed
right um that’s that experience that behind everything there’s nothing okay um and the
funny thing is we all sort of sense that there’s a reality to that okay and so what we have to deal
with this is the idea of nihilism or like you know that nothing is truly nothing truly exists
and if nothing truly exists then i don’t exist and then i’ll i’m gonna have to face being snuffed out
out of existence. Okay. Um, this is all really very much needless because, because whatever’s
in that abyss of nothingness, um, this is the identity that you’re clinging to is sort of
derived from the identity that’s in there. Okay. That can’t be lost. Okay. There’s nothing to fear
about that though. Uh, so the, the feeling or the sensation that there’s an abyss of nothingness
behind everything actually becomes quite pleasing. Um, Oh my God, nothing’s real. Oh, what a relief.
right um instead of oh my god nothing’s real oh my god nothing’s really like just
somehow there are the whole thing changes okay so the fear of oblivion goes away because
oblivion is just a silly concept there’s no such thing as oblivion it’s impossible so the things
that we can really be afraid of let’s say this is just for fun right um well once you start on
path there’s no turning back slippery slope oh once you’ve stepped on the slope of occultism
now you’re going to keep sliding on into oblivion and then you’ll be gone right but you so um well
once you discover you get a hint of your true nature um there is a problem there because
eventually the things that you used to think gave you satisfaction will not give you satisfaction
satisfaction anymore because you begin to see how futile most of the things we do are okay
And this can be very difficult because you, you begin to see through everything and the
things that used to give you pleasure don’t really give you pleasure anymore.
Okay.
And then you’re kind of stuck there for a while.
And this is called the dark night of the soul where, um, you, you kind of begin to notice
that what people out there call pleasure isn’t really pleasurable.
It’s just more suffering.
Okay.
It’s like getting stressed out and being relieved and getting stressed out and being relieved.
if i make lots of money i feel what a relief you know that’s supposed to be happiness it’s not
happiness and then of course you wonder well what will truly make me happy nothing this is a
difficult experience to go through okay but eventually what happens is like that idea of
nothing can make me happy becomes oh my god nothing can make me happy oh what a relief
you just let go of all of it and then everything’s happy or everything’s hilarious okay so um the
idea that you’re looking for happiness anyway it was somehow got programmed into your the nervous
system functions that way i must have i don’t have enough i must have this i must oh i’m not
safe here i must get away from that that’s you can turn that off it’s possible to turn that off
okay but in the process of sort of cycling that down and shutting it off we do go through a period
of dryness and there and and you have to go to push through that okay it’s a dark night of the
soul got to push through that dark night of the soul things begin to get difficult you need to
stay on the path keep going so that you can eventually let go and just and come to the
realization like nothing out there can give me pleasure oh what a relief i don’t have to chase
these things anymore and the utter freedom that comes from that beyond comprehension does that
sound weird probably doesn’t sound very weird at all does it there’s the idea of the poison snake
all right um this is the idea that when you begin to see just how pervasive our karma is
our conditioning all the poisonous thoughts that we have going on inside ourselves all of
the vasanas and the samskaras and the um the monstrousness of our conditioning um the idea
is that we have to flatten all of that out like it’s in order to we see how stormy the ocean is
right it’s like how am i gonna how how can i calm the whole ocean this is a great big biological
seething mass of life that’s in turmoil and i’m part of it and i’m stuck in it and i don’t know
what to do and the only thing solution i can think of is to calm the entire ocean so i can be okay
that’s ridiculous okay and the reason i’m saying that is because when you see all the suffering out
there um you see how that suffering has is inside you as well okay there’s a story about this where
um where there’s a uh a great master who is being mean to his student he keeps beating on his
student bam bam bam beating on him with a stick um and uh being cruel to him and chasing him around
until the student finally gets so sick from the pain that he vomits up a snake and then the snake
slithers away and he’s like oh what a relief and he’s like why were you beating me like that it
was enough that i had the snake inside me and then the the master says well if i had told you that
you had the snake inside you you would have died from shock so instead i just had to be mean to you
and discipline you and get you to run around and do all these things so eventually you would vomit
up the snake and then you’d be okay all right so that’s the idea of the poison snake okay so
you the thing that you will encounter on the path is that you see everything’s poisonous
everything is filled with this poison oh my god and if you could see the whole thing at once yeah
you probably would die from fright from shock okay but the antidote to that is that remember you
don’t have to fix the world you don’t have to um beat the world with a stick and beat it into
submission so that you can be happy the only thing you have to worry about is what’s going on inside
okay um in your relationship to the world because all this karmic stuff that’s going on in the
universe is really none of your business it’s not really who you are that’s the idea of detachment
you become okay with it as it happens and this is why when you meet somebody who is reasonably
enlightened they tend not to be offended by anything because they know it’s just karma just
keeps going doesn’t it it takes on these horrible forms that are self-torturing self-mutilating
whatever um and why should we why should we be surprised when we see it we know that corruption
is out there in the world and when we come across it why become outraged we know it’s there okay but
we can adjust our attitude towards it and of course we could detach from it too so that what
we are is no longer really caught up in that anymore very possible even as the body itself
is freaking out still going through its karmic cycles you become more of a spectator actually
it’s very interesting to watch your body freak out okay and so that’s the the um all the sensations
of pain let’s say will still happen but the suffering is gone okay that’s the whole um idea
and when suffering is gone um you many of you probably know this um the pain doesn’t really
hurt anymore okay i’m not saying i’m at that level yet but of course when suffering is truly gone
pain is just very intense and interesting and yes the body will avoid it because the body’s
programmed to do that fine whatever but i’m not the body and so i’m not really the one who’s
you know agitated anymore that’s that’s kind of what um that kind of freedom is beyond description
okay the fate of the unenlightened hmm here’s a real horror for you so supposedly
let’s go back to the greeks the greeks sort of believed that when you died you went down
into hades everybody who died went down into hades and hades is not really a pleasant place
it’s kind of gloomy and dark and and you basically all that’s left of you is a shadow self that list
that lives in a sort of listless gloomy wandering around ghost-like existence and this is where
everybody went but um there’s also like from the greeks we have the orphic tradition where
there are people who were initiates who could um be spared that existence that could um could avoid
the experience of hades and they could enter into elysium okay uh and you could do that through
various religious practices or or magic you know initiation practices uh the orphic mystery
tradition okay um now hades was an interesting place because um among some people um they would
say well you just stay there forever and that’s it you’re stuck in hades forever okay well other
traditions would say that the eventually that ghost-like shell that exists in hades would
eventually decompose and then you would reincarnate and the whole cycle would start over again and
then you would die again and go back and sink back into hades and then that ghostly shell would
eventually dissipate or rot away and then you would come back again into another body having
forgotten who you were before um so yeah they believed in reincarnation but they also believed
that there’s a way of being spared that um dreadful descent into hades and the experience of
decomposition and then reaper and rebirth you could be spared that existence and sort of live
forever i don’t know um in elysium um and this sort of um echoes the idea of the various buddhist
realms of existence okay i think the very interesting thing about buddhism is that
none of these worlds including elysium is really permanent yeah uh and that’s you eventually reach
a state of knowledge where you know that’s true like anything that can be objectified is not going
to hold on you can’t hold on to that forever it’s going to eventually go away but of course in the
middle of all these realms of existence there is the absolute still point where the buddha supposedly
sits right so the truly enlightened one and so um one of the scary things you see as you’re
doing practices like these like these occult practices these theoretic practices is that the
the bulk of humanity around you is pretty much faded to disintegrate back into whatever it is
like hades whatever and eventually going to reincarnate come back in different forms or
something like that just think this thing keeps going on and on and what you can sense behind
that is there’s a way out of that okay um by going into it okay so it’s not really you can’t get
it’s a wheel of manifestation unmanifestation manifestation unmanifestation right um and yet
there is a um a way of no longer suffering in that round of existence okay uh so you begin
the sense that there’s a way of being spared that horrible fate of being caught up in uh going to
hades uh being reborn going to hades being reborn okay um that there’s a way off that wheel of
existence okay of becoming pure potentiality and then living forever um of course there is
no forever and in a timeless realm you just basically into pure being again and so um
um what if if you try to take the attitude that i need to fix all these things out there in order
to experience that it looks like a monstrous task i can i’ll never be able to do that it’s just too
hard what you have to remember though is that you’re just working on what’s going on here okay
and this is not so hard to deal with what’s going on in your own conditioning where you begin to
sort of detach from the uh the conditioning that keeps trying to take you over and make you do
things it’s like you begin to notice it all around you okay and we’ve talked a lot about this in
previous videos about how to do that and and many of you can already see how the ritual work helps
to get that process going where you begin to notice your conditioning and you begin to set
yourself free from that conditioning and when you can do that apparently you can eventually
or even instantaneously right now disengage from that round of existence of descending into hades
and coming out of hades and descending into hades again okay yeah i think um maybe next maybe in the
next video we’ll talk about reincarnation the secret behind reincarnation the esoteric meaning
of reincarnation maybe um because we shouldn’t take it so literally it’s there’s always a tendency
to take these things very literally and say,
oh, yes, I die, and then I come back,
and I don’t remember who I was.
Maybe I can remember who I was, if I’m lucky.
And then I die, and I come back.
No, it’s not exactly like that.
All right, so, well, until next time.
Source: Lyam Christopher