New Book Project Mysteries of the Kybalion -Chapter 1, Part 1: Principle of Mind

CHAPTER 1 Part 1 THE TEACHINGS OF THE KYBALION PRINCIPLE OF MIND

We spoke earlier of the origins of the Kybalion text as being from the Hermetic period but deriving its teaching from the Ancient Egyptian Mysteries system and in particular from the wisdom surrounding the Ancient Egyptian god Djehuty. Djehuty is a reflection of the High god, Ra. Ra is the sun and Djehuty is his reflection so Djehuty is associated with the moon, which shines due to the reflected sunlight. It is said in the Anunian Theology, the Theology of the city of Anu, that Djehuty was one of the sons of Ra and Djehuty actually represents the reflection of Ra in time and space. It’s like when you see a reflection of yourself in a mirror, or more precisely, the reflection of the light of the sun on the moon.

We are currently here on the East Coast of the United States, we are in the middle of the day and the sun is shining, in twelve hours from now, the moon will have risen and we are approaching the full moon period, which will be in a few more days, but even now you can see the reflection of the sun in a very dynamic way, but it is a cool way, it is not in a hot way. The sun shining is hot and the moon shining is cool. And the moon therefore represents the subdued aspect of the spirit, what I mean by that is Ra represents the fire and the moon represents the coolness of that fire.

If the sun was to blaze on the earth constantly, just realize that the earth would not be able to survive, to sustain life, there has to be a hot and cool period, and the balance between those two. If the earth gets too cool, or the earth gets too hot, there will be an insufferable condition. And so it also operates in the human being also. You have spirit and then you have soul, Ra is the spirit and Djehuty is the soul, as it were. The reflection of the spirit in time and space, so specifically reflecting in the mind.

Your thoughts, your mental apparatus, your mental capacity is actually a reflection of your deeper consciousness. And again, if there is an imbalance of either one of those two, there is going to be an (again) insufferable condition, an unworkable condition. If you are always conscious of your spirit self and never conscious of your mental self, your time and space self, what will happen? You would be existing in spiritual realms exclusively, and if anyone were to comes to talk to you, you would not be able to answer them, because in that state you would not be aware of them since you are only aware of the spirit realm, of all encompassingness. If people are only aware of time and space, then you can easily see what happens; people become egoistic, only aware of the world and nothing beyond the world, nothing beyond what the senses can bring; nothing beyond time and space. Spirituality then becomes what people consider a myth in the pejorative sense, what most people think of as something unreal, something that is illusory, something that is a lie or at most a legend without any basis that stupid or ignorant people believe in. You are to know that myths are not meant to be literally true but are true in the sense of the principles they relate in the form of a Creation story with characters that represent aspects of Creation and the human experience that lead us to understand a spiritual origin and reality that transcends the physical Creation. Without balance, the knowledge of that teaching of myth and or the knowledge of time and space, are distorted, perverted and human beings become twisted shadows of their higher self, manifesting as animals in human form.

So there must be a balance, between those two. And if the teaching of Djehuty is learned, one can transcend time and space, while not needing to destroy or leave behind time and space but rather, discovering its illusoriness and thereby becoming free from it. This is also the teaching of the Kybalion, as we are going to see. Learning how to develop dual consciousness, this is the task of every aspirant; developing consciousness of the world and consciousness of the spirit.

And so Djehuty had a particular city, the city of Khemenu in Kemet. Khemenu or chemenu means eight, the number eight; so he is the God of the city of the eight. And it is also said, he is the manager of eight Gods and Goddesses, the eight gods and goddesses are essentially the same as the eight Gods and Goddesses of Memphite Theology, they are the Gods and Goddesses of the eight opposites of creation;. which is one of the principles of the Kybalion, which we will get to at a future class, but for now, we are staying with the wisdom aspect.

The first Principle which Djehuty talks about in the Kybalion is mind. Djehuty being the God of the mind, and particularly, intellect, is always seen in Kemetan/Kamitan or Neterian iconographies or reliefs at the balance of the judgment of the soul. He carries a scribe’s pallet and he is writing down the results of the balance. What is being weighed is your righteousness, your conscience is what is being weighed. Your level of awareness of virtue, and his hands are Shai and Rennenet, fortune and destiny. The person who is actually handling the balance is Anpu, and Anpu represents lower mind; Djehuty represents intellect, in this particular mythic iconography. And he is associated with the Goddesses in the balance scene. This is one of his main functions. He is associated with the Goddesses’ Meskhenet, who is the Goddess of the birth, specifically the future birth, i.e. the next incarnation [reincarnation]. Djehuty is recording, writing down the result of the judgment, based on your own fortune and destiny. The judgment is based on your own actions and then bearing the fruits of your own fortune and your own destiny; that is going to come to you in your future astral life; in your reincarnated life, or your transcendental life. There are three possible results in the balance, and this is what Djehuty records on his scribal pallet.

The first possible judgment is that your heart is heavier than the feather of Maat and this means that you are an unrighteousness person, your mind is heavy, your conscience is heavy with worry, with doubt, with ignorance, with vice, greed, lust, jealousy and so on and so forth, all of which makes your heart heavy; heavier than the feather of Maat, which symbolizes a state of mind that is in balance or devoid of such mental thoughts and feelings that weigh on the mind and cause worldly worry, anxiety, fear desire, etc. which all amount to egoism. If your heart is judged to be heavier than the feather then you are going to experience hellish conditions after death and then you reincarnate, to try it all over again.

If your heart is equal in the balance with the feather of Maat, then you are judged to be worthy to come into the presence of Asar, and to be his servant; and being a servant of Asar, a shemsu Asar means that you… or really a Hem, Hem is really the term for servant, almost like a slave and as you know, that is the same term, for priests and priestesses. As you do that service you become purified thereby, you become worthy one day, to do what the people whose heart is lighter than the feather of Maat do, you will go to the judgment balance and if the heart is found to be lighter than the feather of Maat, they go directly to join with Asar, who in this context, is the Supreme Being, they become one with God essentially.

Above: from the Papyrus of Ani, the soul of Ani (far left) observes the balance of his heart.

The term “unrighteousness” in the context of its usage here in relation to the results of the judgment of the balance, does not necessarily mean, you are a bad person. It can mean that but more often it means that you are ignorant and that you don’t know, the true meaning of life, you don’t know the spirit, you have not learned what is beyond time and space, that you are more than a body, a mortal and finite being. It also means suffering and reincarnation. If you fall into the other two categories, you don’t come back to the world. It means you are sufficiently spiritually evolved (gained in the knowledge of self) so as to merit not suffering and returning to the world of time and space physical reality. You move on to the astral plane and you transcend eventually from there either gradually or immediately. And Djehuty presides over all of this; meaning your own intellect presides over all of this, and your soul is a witness just as the soul of Ani (human head with hawk body watching the judgment-see image above-on left side) witnesses the results of the judgment. And your higher self is also a witness, Asar is watching over all of this; but the higher mystical and philosophical key to understand this is that, your own mind (which is Djehuty) presides over all of this so reality is perceived and experienced in and through the mind and therefore, you yourself control your own fate. So, the first principle of the Hermitic teaching is the All is Mind, the universe is mental.

Think about it, the high philosophy of this teaching, the universe is mental, what does that really mean. When you are aware of your mental body, when you are asleep, when you are imagining things, when you are hallucinating, when you are having thoughts that carry you into your fanciful notions, fanaticizing about the future, reminiscing about the past, your desires and so on and so forth, that is when you are aware of your mental body. Think about it, during that period you are not aware of your physical body, for a few seconds, or minutes, things happen in the physical world but you are, as if, removed from that awareness even as your body continues to operate in it. You may even be walking down the street and you start fantasizing. It’s as if your body takes an automatic kind of mechanical function, and your mind is thinking elsewhere, all of a sudden you come back to your conscious awareness of time and space, the physical reality, and you realize you walked the whole block, you didn’t even know what happened. That is when you are aware of your mental body. You’re living in your mind, you are perceiving a reality that’s in your mind and not at that time aware consciously of the world of physical time and space.

All experience is in and through the mind. When you touch something you are experiencing sensations but you are not in direct contact with any object, even your body. So what is the nature of that mental experience? When you are in the waking state, you are perceiving a “physical” reality that you believe is and recognize as the “world of time and space”. When you are dreaming you perceive a different reality, a different world that you believe is correct time and space but all the while none of these experiences are real, none of these experiences are absolute or abiding, either in the physical or the dream world. What is happening is that you are perceiving with your senses. Your senses are impressing your mind and your mind is ascribing reality to those perceptions and this process is called “experiences”. Those perceptions that you are becoming aware of in your mind, are being given value by your concept of reality which is based on your unconscious mind’s awareness of self and knowledge about the nature of being and existence itself which is based on your past experiences, feelings and actions, which is termed aryu in Ancient Egyptian religious philosophy. So if your awareness is limited to the physical then your ascribed value to the experiences are relegated to the context of physicality, etc. Since we know by the ancient philosophy and now also by quantum physics, that physical reality is actually not abiding, not real, except to the gross senses, then we also can conclude that physical reality is illusory and therefore the perceptions and feeling of reality of the experiences in time and space is relative to the perceiver, based on the contents of their unconscious mind, their aryu, that ascribed to the experiences the judgment of being “real”. In other words, what is real to some people is not real to others; this goes for objects as well as concepts and ideas. Therefore, some people may believe in certain things or fear certain things while others will not. If a person is ignorant of the higher philosophy, the higher understanding, the higher awareness of reality, that is beyond those illusory perceptions of an illusory physical relative reality, that perception that that person has assigned a reality to, that becomes their truth, their “reality” and they cannot escape that reality, as long as they have given it that value of being “real” and as long as their capacity for perception, based on ignorance of higher understanding and experience, is limited.

The cause of this way of perceiving, is due to a misconception of the three aspects of your consciousness. You have three aspects to your experience; the first aspect is the witnessing aspect, there is something in you that is aware of things, that is called Amun; and then there are objects that you become aware of, that Amun becomes aware of, and those are called Ptah. The means of Amun interacting with Ptah is called Ra, your senses, your mind, your instruments of your senses. So there is a triad that constitutes the capacity to have “experiences”, and that triad allows the personality to engage in the capability of perception. This is the triad of mental experience. Without any element of the triad the “experience is not possible. There is, however, a fourth element of being, a fourth aspect of existence, which is Neberdjer. Neberdjer is the “ALL”, it is the same ALL talked about in the Kybalion. “The All is Mind, the universe is mental.”

Neberdjer is “All Encompassing Consciousness”, undivided by the trinity of human experience. If a person were to fully understand the illusoriness of the triad and discover the unitary experience, that is Neberdjer, then that person would achieve the goal of the Mysteries and this is the purpose of the teaching of the Kybalion and all mystery or mystical texts. The problem occurs when a person, who’s spirit is intrinsically Neberdjer uses the triad to have experiences. This is when a person changes perception from all-encompassingness to perception as an individual, finite, mortal human being. The Amun, or witnessing aspect of the mental triad, has come to believe it is the true I Am, the ultimate I Am, forgetting the Neberdjer deeper self, and that’s how every individual comes to think; this condition may be termed “egoism”. Forgetting the ultimate deeper identity of the ALL, the Neberdjer, the individual perceiving person adopts given name, “my name is John,” “my name is Larry” or “Jean,” whatever the name is and they believe that is their ultimate reality, their only reality. The egoistic person perceives the world with the senses and thinks that the world is “real” and yet the senses are incapable of perceiving reality because they are limited. It is not possible for a person who uses the physical senses and the idea of egoism, to perceive reality with the senses, it’s impossible because the senses cannot perceive the totality of existence, in and through a limited mind, a mind limited by the individual concept of self. It is like when you look at the wheel on a car, there are people who like to spend a lot of money on their cars, they put on these expensive wheels on them that have elaborate designs, the chrome wheels or the gold spokes, the racing wheels or this or that, and there can even be empty spaces. When they are standing still, they look very cool, very nice and very “snazzy”, whatever term you want to use… the bomb, etc. However, when they are in motion you really can’t see the design, what you see is a blur, so you can’t see those designs anymore. All you see is one blur. And it looks like there is a solid piece there. Another example is when you look at a fan, the fan is spinning fast, you can’t see the spaces between the blades of the fan and this motion the Kybalion calls vibration. When the ignorant perceiving mind confronts that illusory perception that is in motion, it is easily fooled by the illusion of the experience. Such a mind is referred to as “ignorant”, “deluded”, etc. The physical universe is not real in an abiding since but it is a mental experience that has been mistaken for abiding reality; it has been mistaken due to incorrect, ignorant, deluded mental processes, for the sages have discovered that if that delusion were to be dispelled then a higher perception of reality and deeper insight into the nature of self, beyond egoism, would be revealed. This delusion is dispelled through study and correct understanding of the wisdom teaching, reflection on the wisdom teaching, practice of the wisdom teaching and meditation.

So then why is it that we cannot perceive that the universe is mental; the reason is because we are so caught up in the mundane reality, the time and space reality and we have not learned how to separate ourselves from that. And the Kybalion goes on explaining, mind as matter may be transmuted from state to state, degree to degree, condition to condition, pole to pole, vibration to vibration. True transmutation is a mental art. Transmutation is something that every initiate, every aspirant must learn to do.

You are to realize that physical matter is condensed subtle matter. It’s composed of, the same matter that you see in time and space in the physical world and in outer space. This is what people refer to as matter, the air water, fire and earth; If you want to be more scientific about it, then add the whole table of elements. Now when we look closer we realize that there is a subtle aspect of those elements and they disintegrate into pure energy. If you want to be more esoteric about it add ether and these subtler aspects of the elements compose the thoughts that occur in the mind; so mind is composed of subtle elements and energy and the world is composed of gross elements and energies.

Think about it, when you are moving thoughts around in your mind, you are actually moving subtle bits of matter. Like the computer, when you are moving documents from one folder to another, or from one folder archive (memory) to the screen (conscious awareness), you are moving little bits of information which are little bits, pieces, of subtle matter, and that is what we refer to as mind and the awareness aspect of the personality, the Amun, is what is referred to as consciousness or awareness. And if your consciousness engages with and intensifies the worldly thoughts then those thoughts become more coagulated and less subtle and the mind becomes clouded (because the now grosser thoughts begin to make the mind more opaque to awareness of subtler realities of existence, to the higher reality. This means that that mind will not be able to understand that the universe is mental and discover the illusoriness of the world of time and space and the subtle higher nature of self beyond time and space; again, this is called ignorance, the opposite of enlightenment.

Consider that if you had an electron microscope and were to look at a piece of paper, you would be able to see beyond the piece of paper. You would see a universe of atoms, protons, electrons and neutrons and if you were able to go deeper, beyond where the electron microscope can go, you would perceive energy and beyond that there is pure essence of all encompassing divinity (Neberdjer, the ALL). An example that is used to point out the illusoriness of the senses is the sense perception of animals. Animals perceive differently from human beings because they have order of senses. A bloodhound can smell something two miles away, can a human being smell something two miles away? The bloodhound is living in different world, his senses have a different capacity, he is aware of something that you are not aware of.

Cats can hear fantastic distances, they can hear very fine sounds. You ever notice how cats are, when they walk around; you learn a lot from cats, we have two cats here, they are walking around nicely, cat like, softly and all of a sudden they will turn around, look up and down look to the side, they are like, “what’s going on?”, “what’s that noise?”; have you ever noticed that, you look at them and think they are crazy but they are perceiving sounds and vibrations and perceptions that human beings cannot. They are hearing things that you can’t hear. Dogs have an interesting perception also. They can know you are coming home, even when you are blocks away, driving home. How do they know that? Way before you come they start barking at the door, sitting by the door, what is that all about? They have a different capacity for perception, than what ordinary human beings have, and we go on down the line, there are animals that have such wondrous forms of senses, that lead them to perceive a totally different reality from each other and from humans. This means that perception with mind and senses, is relative and based on the perception instruments and capacities. Therefore, perception with mind and senses is not abiding and hence illusory. This is an important key to understanding the overall Kybalion and ancient Egyptian Mystery teaching. And what is to say that their reality is worse or better than ours? The idea is that the human senses are very limited but before you start thinking that it would be nice to have the olfactory glands of a dog and the hearing capacity, poise and relaxation of a cat reflect that while animals with expanded sense perception ma have greater awareness they too cannot perceive the totality of abiding reality. (end side 1).

Cats, seems like all they seem to do is sleep and they run around chasing things and they eat whatever they want, and they come to you so you can pet them; when you examine the situation it seems that you are actually their pet. So wouldn’t you like to be a cat and have all that great…, they seem to live a life better than human beings; they get fed and they don’t give anything to you, they take everything. Before you start thinking that, you better start realizing that, all the animals and all their fantastic senses put together, cannot equal the glory of the human being, meaning the potential glory of a human being which has the capacity to transcend the illusoriness of the senses and time and space. As I said before, human beings can have a special capacity that animals don’t have and that is mind and the capacity to understand this teaching. Animals cannot understand this teaching about the universe being mental. They can be exist in it using their rudimentary, instinctual mind, they can be affected by it and be controlled by, susceptible to the world of time and space, but they cannot have more than a rudimentary, instinctual understanding about the world and their instinctual mind does not rise to the level of the intellectual capacity of an adult. Human beings have a special capacity, that they can understand what is going on and thereby transcend it. Animals do not have that capacity; but they are some drawbacks being a human being too; I don’t think you have ever seen the birds in the morning, when they are singing, when they are waking up to the sun, I don’t think you have ever seen them get up and say ohhh I’ve had a bad dream last night, I hate to sleep in this mess, and my life is a misery because my little chicks would not get out of the nest and they are hanging out here and they wouldn’t go to work and find their own life; you never heard a bird say that. The lizards, you never hear them talk about how they can’t find a little ant to go and eat, or you don’t hear a lizard say that he is worried about a bird that might come down from a tree and grab him…, they don’t worry, they just live from minute to minute; all the animals are like that, unless there is some kind of danger at the moment, but apart from that, they don’t worry or perceive concepts about the past or the future. If you have a pet such as a dog, he is happy to see you when you come home because the last time he saw you he did not know where you disappeared to or when you might exist again but now that you are here in the present he knows you and is happy to see you, now, in the present moment.

Human beings are constantly worried about not getting what they want, constantly worried about losing what they have, constantly worried about how the world is going to blow up; or their lover is not going to come; or they are not going to get to go to a party; or this, or that, not enough money in the bank, or whatever it is. Your parents want to kick you out of the house, you can’t get a house because it is too expensive; why did they bring me into the world, etc. All these things that people think and worry about, animals don’t think or worry about. They go living from day to day, but also they have no aspiration, they have no capacity to dream, or to…aspire, from the standpoint of envisioning the higher reality. So therefore, human beings have a higher potential, a higher capacity, but they also have a lower capacity, human beings can actually become very degraded, to become lower than animals. They can descend to a level of consciousness that is worse than that of animals. People can worry themselves to death, literally. They can lead themselves to ulcers, to disease by their mental condition, but also, they can lead themselves to Sagehood, and that is why the choice is always best to be a human being, to have the chance to make that attainment. While in human embodiment, it is always best to try to learn the teaching, to try to become virtuous, to try to transcend the balance (of Maat between the opposites of Creation) and not to come back to human embodiment, because you never have a guarantee of what you are going to come back as. It is your aryu, your karmic basis, your past previous actions, thoughts and feelings and the concept of who you are that those past actions, thoughts and feelings come together to form your conscious awareness of who and what you are that is being weighed by Djehuty, that is to say, your own intellect. Depending on that, that is what leads you to your Shai and Rennenet, your fortune and destiny. Therefore, it is wise to be virtuous, wise to learn the teaching, wise to purify your mind, to develop a purity of heart.

You may come back as an ant and somebody may step on you, without even knowing it. Then you may come back as a lizard; then you may come back as rat; then you may go and come back down, you may go and come back as an amoeba. That’s why it is wise to apply yourself to the teaching, not just so that you wouldn’t come back and that is something else, even after death, but also right now we are talking about even while you are alive, you can have the best kind of life possible, by being able to control your mind, if you learn to understand that the universe is mental. Your experiences, everything you desire, occurs in your mind. When you touch something, you are not actually touching it with your true self, only your finger is touching it. Whatever your finger is, remember we are not perceiving what the finger tip is; you are touching a piece of wood, we do not even know what the wood is, we are not perceiving it properly with our mind and senses. Whatever it is that is going on, that message is transmitted, as if by radio, to your brain. Your brain impresses upon your senses, upon your higher senses, your mental senses. Your intellect puts a value on that perception in relation to your idea of yourself as an individual human being who possesses consciousness of self-existence. In other words, animals do not have a notion of being an individual that exists with a past, present, future and with relationships and they have no idea about death, though they have an idea of instinctual experiences such as pleasure, pain, fear, etc. That is where the experience occurs for a human being, in the mind, and with the conceptions of past, present, future and relationships to the world, other people, etc, and not in the world of time and space. In the state of ignorance, human beings can believe their existence is tied to the senses and that the perceptions of the senses are THE experience itself. However, that idea is discounted when we reflect on the fact that dreams seem “absolutely and abidingly” “real” when they are happening and when one wakes up it is realized that the perceptions were not realities but only transitory mental experiences. The experiences in the waking physical world are actually the same though they are a little more abiding than the dream world, yet the physical world and the dream world are both made up of the same elements though the physical world is more coagulated, more dense but yet both are equally illusory and the perception of both occurs in the mind. So whatever the physical world or the dream world may be, it is not being perceived by the mind directly but rather through the limited and imperfect senses and the process is thus inherently illusory. When a human being develops their spiritual awareness he or she can find that they can wake up in the middle of a dream to the fact that they are dreaming and then also control the events of the dream. When a spiritual aspirant wakes up to the philosophy of the illusoriness of the physical world, he or she can control their experience in the world of time and space and thereby change their destiny from being controlled by the world to being the architect of their own destiny. Therefore, just as a human being can learn to control the events of their dream they can also direct the course of their life in the waking state.

“Whatever” is going on in time and space that’s whatever “it” is. What I mean is that we cannot perceive “it” the way “it” is due to the limited senses, as we discussed. The universe is a projection, your reality is a projection of the spirit in time and space, your mind becomes aware of that perception. So you yourself, the higher self is projecting whatever “it” (limited perceptions) is that you are perceiving that is going on in time and space in your limited mind and your mind is becoming aware of “it” to the limited extent that it can. You are the creator and you are the awareness of your own creation. What this comes down to is that, you can transmute, that’s what the teaching says, you can change that reality, if you so desire. Really what we are talking about is shifting, changing, from the perception of reality that is limited to one that is based on a higher perception that provides a higher reality, an abiding reality of what is absolutely real and true as opposed to what is limited, ephemeral, mortal and transient.

So what is the procedure in changing this reality, first to understand that the universe is mental, as we have been explaining. So if this universe is mental, it is also infinite in its capacity. If you were to be able to be alive for a million years, do you realize that every time you go to sleep, you will be able to have a different dream, you will be able to create a different world. Sometimes you have more than one dream a night, and this can go on indefinitely. And when you are asleep, when you are musing, when you are aware of your astral body, that is your abiding reality for that period, meaning that when you asleep, you don’t think of your waking reality, it has no meaning, it doesn’t have anything to do with you. Think about that, that personality that who that you think that you are, at that time, what you learned how to be through your limited senses and limited education and upbringing, whatever your name that your parents gave you, etc., it appears so real; but when you go to sleep, that goes right out the window, you throw that personality and it’s possessions, relationships, worries and concerns out, and you take on another personality and concerns. What does that say about your waking personality, if your waking personality is so real, how come you don’t take it in with you to your dream world? What I’m getting at is, you don’t even treat it and experience it as your abiding reality. Reflect on that profoundly before reading on.

When you wake up in the morning, the waking reality seems more abiding, things change more slowly, and seem to be real, don’t they. Take this classroom we are meeting in again, for example. You see the same pictures on the wall that you saw last week, don’t you, the same tiles on the floor, etc., but yet if you examine them with higher scientific instruments, you will see that nothing is exactly the same as it was last week. The tiles on the floor seem so hard, but if you examine them, there is a little bit of change in their molecules, they are disintegrating, falling apart. For example, consider our new African Origins book, the huge book that we have now, a six hundred and eighty pages, hard cover book, that we can put out here on the table. If we were to leave it here and then if we could come back in a hundred years we won’t find the book, it will be disintegrated, it will be gone. However, the mind is fooled because if you come back tomorrow, it will still be there, you come back next week, it will still be there, but if you look closely even over a period of weeks you could notice small amounts of deterioration from week to week, a little bit of deterioration, a little bit of fading, etc. The reason for this is that this world takes longer to dissolve all your creations as opposed to the quick changes in a dream world and for the reason you have come to believe that this physical world, that you experience in your waking state of mind, is solid, abiding and real; yet, everything in it eventually breaks down, just as in the dream world. So, the physical plane (waking world) of existence is just a slightly more coagulated version of the Astral plane (dream world) of existence. That is called the teaching of entropy or chaos and in ancient times the divinity Apep (Apophis) presided over entropy and as such he is the enemy of the god Ra-Horakty, the one who sustains Creation. They are in constant struggle to maintain Creation or dissolve it back into it’s constituent parts known as Nun or undifferentiated consciousness. Order (Maat) in the universe, that allows the sun to shine, planets to stay in their orbits, gravity and the other laws of physics is a temporary and artificial creation of the cosmic mind (Neberdjer, through the creative agency form of the God Khepera). It is a conditioning process of the mind, you have conditioned yourself to believe in certain ways and therefore you are caught in and limited by that conditioning, you are circumscribed by what you have created. If you learn how to uncondition your mind, you will realize that the reality you have created, is really one of several possibilities, and that you are the master of all those possibilities, whatever you have decided to create.

Nothing stays the same, everything changes. That change is what you are perceiving as time. Time actually does not exist either. Time is a misconception. The idea that we are going to start this lecture at 12.15 pm and we are going to finish at 1.15 pm or an hour later, this is an illusion, this is a convention, something we are agreeing upon to bring order to our activities. In the morning the sun is at the horizon and at the middle of the day it is at the top of the sky, this is a change of movement of objects in space, but you are creating some kind of philosophy that says from the movement of the morning to the noon, that is a passage of time… essentially time does not exist. The change of your childhood to adulthood and to your death, is a change of matter not a change of time or a change of life to death. Nothing has happened in time, shall we illustrate further. There were some people who were trapped in a cave once, only one person had a watch and he knew what time it was, according to his watch, but the other people didn’t know, they kept asking what time it is ,when are they coming to save us and he gave them the time, reduced by a factor of let’s say ten. So ten hours passed, he told them one hour had passed; a day pass… oh two, three hours had passed. So people had this idea they could survive, they had a long way to go before they die, right, because they are mentally conditioned, that they could only survive a certain amount of time. Couple days later, miners came and dug them out and they were in good condition, but the guy who had the watch he died. Yea, consider when you are having a good time, time passes fast; when you are having a miserable time, time passes slow. When the activity is tedious or distasteful the time is perceived as tedious or distasteful, miserable or even terrible…People may say things like “this job that I hate, all day long, the grind.” But when you love your job or something else you are doing that you like to do, “oh boy, I just came this morning and it’s time to punch out, what happened, where did the time go? That’s the illusion of time and the relativity of human perception through limited senses and the impact of those perceptions on a conditioned mind.

When you go to bed at night and you have your dream, you can dream a whole lifetime over one evening. What time frame did it happen in? A person that falls out of a plane without a parachute, their life flashes before them, what time frame did that happen in. There is no such thing as time. The universe is mental, you are projecting a concept and that projection that you believe in is controlling your life. If it is a a negative projection, then you can have a miserable existence. You have a positive projection, then there is no limit to what you can experience, including higher consciousness.

Are you hearing what this means, do you see the grandeur of it? About this wisdom, the Kybalion says: the lips of wisdom are closed except to the ears of understanding, are you understanding? are you listening to this? You won’t get this in your regular school. The Principles of Truth are seven, he who knows these understandingly, possesses the magic key before whose touch, all the doors of the temple fly open. When the ears of the student are ready, then comes the lips to fill them with wisdom. Where falleth the footsteps of the masters, the ears of those ready for the teaching open wide. This is like that joke I use to give; those of you remember the old EF Hutton commercial? They used to say: “When EF Hutton talks, people listen!”. Are you like, as a spiritual aspirant, that attentive with the teachings? Do you stop and drop whatever it is that you are doing and open your ears wide and lean in to listen carefully at what has been said? All this really means is paying attention and stopping your mind, stopping your egoistic conditioning about worldly desires and that also includes desires about what you think the teaching is or should be. You have conditioned the teaching also, in accordance with your expectations and opinions. One of the biggest dangers for an initiate of the mysteries is imposing your opinions onto the teaching and thereby only listening to things that agree with your egoistic and ignorant conditioned mental thoughts. Then you don’t want to listen to whatever the teacher is saying the teaching is, so therefore you have created a reality for yourself of what the teaching is, and that leads to failure as you are following a path lead by an ignorant person, yourself! Even if you do not impose this egoistic notion on the teaching and the spiritual path, if you are not led by an authentic spiritual preceptor you can fall into the trap of falling in with groups of ignorant people that follow teachings based on faith instead of science (mysticism and the Egyptian Mysteries is a science, not a faith-based religion) and an initiatic tradition managed by a qualified spiritual preceptor. So, unless you are on an authentic path you can delude yourself or you can be deluded by the world. Even if you do not create an illusion about reality, the illusory reality conditions you and controls you, and leads you down a path of worldly experiences of alternating happiness and sorrow but ending in ultimate disappointment and death without having discovered the meaning of life and the glory of self-mastery and enlightenment. Therefore, a life in ignorance is like a life of slavery and a life of wisdom is the life of self-mastery.

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“Salvation is the freeing of the soul from its bodily fetters; becoming a God through knowledge and wisdom; controlling the forces of the cosmos instead of being a slave to them; subduing the lower nature and through awakening the higher self, ending the cycle of rebirth and dwelling with the Neters who direct and control the Great Plan.”

-Ancient Egyptian Proverb
__________

Let’s say that you are a religious fanatic, you think everything is to be taken in a literal or fanatical way; you go and create a fanatical life for yourself, and if you are not a fanatic, but you are ignorant, the fanatics around you are going to control you and lead you to have a fanatical life since you do not know any better. All this capacity to become fanatical or a follower of the fanatics, is due to the ignorant perceptions throughout life and ignorant conclusions about the meaning of those perceptions. This is referred to as a soul that is fettered to bodily ignorance and desires.

So unless you have this wisdom teaching and fully understand it, however you get it, either through Neterianism or some other authentic religion, your life is doomed, you are doomed to have miserable existence. Therefore, the teaching, the wisdom teaching is the best. It is the glorious way of life, it is that which aspirants throughout history have striven for. Do you understand the grandeur of what we are talking about here? This is the means by which you can truly begin to control your life. The means by which you can truly begin to discover what life is all about, and not be caught up by the illusions of other people, or your own illusions. For that there must be humility, there must be a willingness to listen. You can discover the magic key, that makes the temple doors fly open. And Djehuty opens those doors, Djehuty is your own intellect. Not the intellect of intellectuals or intellectualism, but the enlightened intellect that has learned to discern the illusoriness of the world, from the absolute abiding reality.
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“The principles of truth are seven, he who knows these, understandingly, possesses the Magic Key before whose touch all the Doors of the Temple fly open.”
-Ancient Egyptian Proverb
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That abiding reality, is the underlying essence of who you are, beyond all of those transient experiences of consciousness that we have discussed today; what is the reality behind your waking state right now, you are awake right now, hopefully you are all awake and you are not dreaming somewhere, or fantasizing, you are listening to me. All of you on the internet, everybody, wherever you are, even if you are reading this book in the future, you might have lost in thought or been fantasizing a few minutes ago, your attention might have wandered, but I’m calling your attention right now, “hey wake up! Listen now”.

That can happen. The mind that is unaware of the deeper underlying reality and caught up in the reaction to the senses which is based on the aryu can be constantly dragged around to pay attention to things that are not abiding, not real, while treating and experiencing tem as if they were real. Since they are not real or abiding, they change constantly, offering no consistency for the mind to hold on to. This is why the Ancient Egyptian proverb says, “there is no happiness for the soul in the external worlds.” This happens because that’s the nature of the ignorant and weak mind, to wander and be distracted by the perceptions. It is the duty of the aspirant to reign in the mind whenever it wanders during spiritual studies or practices. I’ve been talking all this time, you have probably faded a dozen times since I started and you brought yourself back to awareness, back to the talk. This weakness of the mind, the struggle to concentrate on the teaching, this is one of your worst enemies as an aspirant. Not being able to concentrate your thought process, your attention, on the teaching. Remember what we talked about, how to be a successful student, one of the critical things is to be able to concentrate, when you are listening to the teaching, so that it can be impressed on your mind, in a powerful way. That is when the student is ready.

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“There is no happiness for the soul in the external worlds since these are perishable, true happiness lies in that which is eternal, within us.”
-Ancient Egyptian Proverb
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If you are one of those students who listen to the teachings and says “this sounds great, I get it”, “I have heard this before”, but they do not reflect deeply and practice what they have heard but only think about it when in class, then go home and live life doing worldly things, not applying the teaching to those worldly activities, you may come back for the next teaching, and the next, but taking it in superficially and not profoundly but to the extent that is comfortable or palatable, then you may fall back into the world, that is not being ready for the teaching. That will not allow you to have a successful spiritual evolution. That will only allow for a partial movement, sometimes forward and sometimes backward. By the time you are ready to have the great judgment, you will be one of those people who will fail the judgment, and will be one of those who will come back to earth to do it all over again. Your heart will not be measured equally with the feather, or it will not surpass or be lighter than the feather, because your mind is too heavy with desires, delusions, fears, insecurities and worldly feelings from the past. You believe too much in the world and initiates, followers of the hermetic teaching, do not believe in the world and that’s what this first principle is all about, they believe in their mind.

People who are worldly, if something happens to their body, they are all broken up and distraught. People who have the mental concept, they realize that they can do powerful things with their minds, even though their bodies may be broken up; think about Steven Hawkins, his body is virtually useless and yet his intellect is shining bright. He can still come up with fantastic theories of quantum physics. He has learn to control his senses and his body, when you have transcended the body hold on you, you have controlled it, you have transcended it. When your body does not get in the way of the intellect discerning truth that is when you have transcended it, you may continue to have a body and yet it is no obstruction, it has nothing to condition you, to hold you back. At that point it cannot fool you anymore, the senses cannot fool you. So this teaching needs to be meditated upon, it needs to be reflected upon, you need to repeat it, as many times as the inputs you are bringing into your mind through your senses; you need to impress that mind with the words and sounds of this teaching. Reading the teaching, studying it, repeating it and reconditioning, this is the path of the transmutation of the mind.

HTP
END OF CHAPTER 1
( end of Seba maas’ lecture)

Commentary by Seba Dja

Just to comment on a few things that were discussed by Sebai MAA. I wanted to start off by reading a proverb from the Kemetic proverbs book, that is in harmony with the message today, in which I’ve several times before discussed and it is in the section of the illusion, born from the human senses. It says “it is very hard to leave the things, that we have grown used to, which meet our gaze on every side, appearances delight us, whereas the things which appear not, make their believe in heart, evil are the more apparent things, whereas the good can never show itself unto the eyes, for it hath neither form nor figure.”

So what is the good referring to that can never show itself unto the eyes, what is the proverb referring to. Everybody agrees, your true essence is the good that can never show itself unto the eyes, because it does not have a form or figure. So it’s talking about the higher self, the Asar, the Amun, whatever name you want to call it, because look around, where is Asar?, where is Amun?, where is Aset?, where is Heru?, where is Djehuty? You might point to a picture on the wall, but I am saying, no I want to see them as I drive down the street, where can I go see them and yet the self is everywhere and in all things and that is the only reality that there is.

The evil are the more apparent things, and here the term Seba Maa referred to earlier, evil not in the term of hellish conditions, not in the term, you might think in the terms of Christianity, but in the terms of ignorance, in terms of the mind being caught up in the trap, in the illusion, in the veil of Aset. So the evils are the more apparent things, the ignorance in the world. How many times do you turn on the television and see that they are reinforcing the good, the truth, the higher self, the spiritual nature, how many times do you see the T.V. saying; you are the Self, you are everywhere, how often do you hear that being reinforced… pretty much not at all . So the proverbs also says “their appearances delight us” whereas the things that don’t appear make their believing hard and you know they are many atheists, they don’t believe in God, because where is God… show me, show me, show me. Yet they believe in gravity and they can’t see it, they believe in air and they can’t see it and they believe in all of these different types of ideas. They believe in the pilot driving the plane, he/she is okay and competent and they are going to get them to where they are going, safely and soundly. So they buy the ticket, they believe that, they don’t know it, that’s not apparent necessarily, they didn’t check the pilot out, do a drug test and see if they are okay, but no, all of these things are taken for granted. But yet, what is really true and real cab be easily dismissed and cannot delight us.

How many times is your mind captivated or captured by someone’s beauty. Especially in this western culture, where everything is about looks and how beautiful that person is, their buns and their thighs and their abs, you know. Even nature, we become captivated by it, they are appearances that delight us don’t they, am I lying. When was the last time you were captivated by, oh it is beautiful, it is really wonderful, it is really cute. But what about the Divine, what is the relativity in this world that you see, in this world of time and space, relative to what you may not have experienced, but what the scriptures tell you about the Divine. What is the relativity, seeing beauty out of something, whatever beauty you see in the world of time and space, how much more beautiful is the Divine suppose to be… If you were able to capture that. Why is it that you don’t capture that, perhaps your mind is not on that. How can you capture something, if you are not thinking about it.