You may have the idea that you would like to live aware and in the present moment, to live peacefully freed from the endless chain of thoughts and low states.
But if you’ve actually tried to do this you would soon realise that however much you want to be in the present moment, you soon forget about it as other things grab your attention.
Moreover, a whole range of emotions and feelings involuntarily arise, with or without situations to trigger them off.
You’ll find that you just can’t remember to be aware or to observe yourself for long and before you know it, you are living in just the same way as you were before you started this spiritual journey.
The only way to have inner peace permanently within yourself is to change the very nature of what you are inside psychologically. That requires alchemy, to take the journey to awaken and to have the spirit, the Being, merge with you.
If you can do that, you will have a vast and all immersing peace which overpowers thought and emotion. It will propel you to be in the moment, until you always are blissfully present.
But everyone has to start from the beginning.
From that perspective, if you know what starting the spiritual work consists of and you try it, you’ll see that it takes work to do it. Even if you do it, you can find it difficult to sustain.
If you have an idea that you more or less know how to do this work, then you won’t search. We have to continuously search in this work; it’s not a belief system, nor a matter of just mechanically doing some exercises.
You’ve got to search and inside, break through, push the boundaries, look into the unknown. So when you get something to investigate, you should investigate it and that means not being satisfied to prove what you already know.
You have to go into the unknown, to search and to find new things, things you didn’t know before – then it’s worthwhile. But you’ve got to get the basic things right such as being aware and observing yourself. If you don’t, everything’s going to be a waste.
Enormous efforts and enormous sacrifices are all going to be counting less than what they should do if the inner death (the removal of ego based negative states) is not there. To get the inner death right, you’ve got to get the basics right, and search to find out how it works.
You can’t do this work and then go around like a cockroach all day long; you have to be actually doing it. But the difficulty is remembering to do it; this is a real problem – remembering to do this work.
Q: How did you train yourself in the remembrance? Was it just something that automatically came, was it something that you had to make yourself do or teach yourself to do?
Belsebuub: I was interested and decided that this work was what I was going to do and so I didn’t let any kind of compromises get in the way.
To remember is a function of the mind. There’s also the essence, but it’s passive. There’s the influence of the Monad (the Being outside the person). Now the Monad gives an active influence, but it has to reach the person, it has to reach the personality, the mind, and all this, so that’s a problem. So what each one can do is to try to remember, because if we can remember, then we can do it. And if we remember to do it, we just do it!
The environment and the group strength in a gathering of people are two things that contribute towards making it easier to remember to be aware. It’s never easy, but how can we make it easier to remember in daily life?
It has to come from inside. A gathering such as a retreat is an environment that reminds us to do it, but in the office, the environment doesn’t allow us to remember. So, we would have to remember from inside to do it.
Well, it needs support; because there’s just not enough strength on its own. The support that it needs is a group of people, because when there’s a group of people, as we know, there’s a spiritual strength generated. So it’s important to have those group meetings and group exercises.
But it’s also that you have to change the way of thinking, and that is to have a clear direction to do this work. If you see a dog with a bone and it goes to bury its bone, how is that happening? It locks on to this idea: “here’s a bone and off I go,” and then, it’s very difficult to distract that dog once that idea is there. It will go and it’ll bury its bone. A dog does all of this without self-awareness. It doesn’t remember itself at all – throughout its whole life – and yet, it can do this.
Now people in the normal run of the mind are the same. There’s an idea, and then the activity goes on, and we get the result. Right from the beginning, we’re in the result. And so everything else then is going towards that, everything else can get out of the way. Something might come up, you might say well you have to deal with this or that, but something inside is still driving us to go and do that task. That is the mind, and that’s the power of the mind. So when the mind is set upon something, even though you’re distracted and you do a few things here and there, underneath, the mind is working away, isn’t it? And, if you’re interrupted from doing that thing, what happens? You can feel anger and might respond with a few irritating words to get rid of that person. There’s something inside that is driving the person to go and complete that task.
Now, don’t you think that happens every day? You might get up and go to work for instance. You have to design this leaflet for the company or whatever it is. So you get up, you start thinking of that. Along the way you remember “Oh Yes, well I’ve got to be aware, I have to do these practices, I’ve got this and that to do, maybe I’ll remember later on, I’ve got to do a little group exercise at six o’clock this evening” and then somewhere along the way, remember to do the inner death here and there. But it’s not the main thing; the main thing is driving you underneath, it’s to get that brochure done. It’s in the subconscious.
When we observe, when we look, we’ve got to be uncovering all this stuff – do you understand? Seeing how we function. The more we uncover, the more we’ll know about how things work, and the more we can set ourselves free of them. These are important things, which are vital to get right.
The mind has its function in animals and in humans. And unless we can do something, it is going to control us throughout our life. “I’ve got to go and clean, clean the kitchen, do the washing up” – as soon as you think of the washing up, you become like a programmed automaton. And not only that, but very often when you get to it then it’s done without any self-awareness too, because you’ve already lost the thread of remembrance throughout the day, so you’re only remembering it in bits here and there. The whole thing’s a mess. And then a day goes by, then another day, and then another day and it’s lost. So you need to look inside and understand the process of the mind and how it works, because it’s a very powerful thing.
What enables us to remember ourselves, to remember to be doing the esoteric work? The mind. The essence, the consciousness, is passive in the beginning, so it’s the mind, and we have to tackle this.
There must be something that needs to be done for that decision to be coded in the mind so that it drives us throughout the day.
That’s right. Because otherwise it’s yet another idea that we like, so we have to understand that the mind is a driving factor and use it in order to remember ourselves through the day.
How do you code that remembrance of actually practicing through the day into the mind? What is the difference between that decision that was so clear and drove that person or that dog to do what it wanted to do, to the other flimsy decision that evaporated before it even started?
This is not suitable for a hobby. This is completely done in what we do. So we have to gear everything towards the practice of this, everything. It’s not good enough just to attend groups and then try to remember during the day. Everything has to be geared towards practice: practice of each of the exercises, practice of the elimination of the egos throughout the day, the observation of the egos – everything has to be directed towards practice. And that means asking, “What can I do in a day to really get the most out of these practices, to make them work?” And a day that’s not lived for that generally is a failure, because you never get the strength to start and to keep going. This is all about what we do, all of it.
You mentioned before about pushing forward into the unknown, does that just come automatically as you get better at it? How do you push into the unknown when you don’t know where the unknown is? I mean if you’re just observing, watching things come up, then when they come up, you die to them. How do you push into something that is sitting there waiting for something to come?
If you’re pushing into something that you’re waiting to come, then it’s something that you already know – it’s not the unknown, you see exactly what’s there. That’s the unknown. Who knows exactly what’s there? The structure of the mind, how the mind works, how consciousness works? The rigid mind says, “I know.” But it’s not true.
How do thoughts arise, where do they come from, what exactly is the mechanism that brings a thought about? What’s it like, the beginning of a thought? What brings it on? Why are they coming so fast, thoughts appearing here there and everywhere, like that? You can’t say that you know and you’re just waiting for the unknown to appear.
It’s more like, how do you push into the unknown if you don’t know where it is; it’s unknown, you don’t know where it is?
By seeing what is, you push into the unknown, because you increase your level of consciousness by doing this. All the time we’re discovering things, we’re seeing new things about how we function, our egos, our thoughts, all these things, and so we’re acquiring consciousness if we’re eliminating egos, we’re discovering these things. And that greater capacity allows us to see more when we look, so we go into the unknown.
But this is not just a physical thing here, I mean not just a purely psychological thing here, because that then has its repercussions in the astral world, in the higher dimensions. And then we learn new things there, according to the capacity, according to the level that we acquire here. You can’t really exclude one from the other – the physical from the astral, or the astral from the physical – because the learning is one learning, with one psychology, in the here and now, it’s all one.
So when you’re not seeing new things, it’s because you’re not trying hard enough or you’re not remembering often enough?
Seeing something new is a consequence of observation. If you look for something new, you’re again looking for something from the mind. So just observe and you will see new things, inevitably. But the mind, the egos that don’t want to observe, the laziness, gets content with a certain way of operating and a certain way of being. And then it recognizes when that same old feeling of anger comes up, and then perhaps an hour later another similar feeling of anger arises, and then it just goes on and on and on – nothing really new is being discovered, because there’s not this push, this sort of revolutionary drive to see what’s going on. And we can never be comfortable in this; we have to be alert and watching all the time.
So basically we need to push harder, because with the egos what I find is that if you slow down they pick up again. And if you are unconscious in the astral, they feed in the astral too. So, you have to sort of push harder than what they are pushing to win the battle, otherwise they’re always going to keep up with you, and keep feeding themselves, because we do the inner death in a very scattered way, or they feed in the astral.
Yes, so then nothing really happens. And people wonder why then there’s no progress. It’s completely down to the individual. No one can do this work for us. Each one of us stands on what we do – answerable for what only we do. We are responsible for our own success or failure in this; there is no one else to blame. Even if we don’t know esoteric things, basic esoteric things, then that’s all due to one’s own activity. Only the individual is responsible for their own progress.
So we’re stuck with the work in the physical world, as whatever the Being is giving us, is something that is not really that tangible for us?
Well if someone doesn’t have the Being incarnated, then it’s somewhere out there. So everyone has to take where they are. And that means in the astral world, getting the knowledge, the information that is needed, whatever that is, at whatever stage and at whatever level. It comes back down to the work that’s done in the physical world; it still has to go on. And all the tests, all the difficulties, all the trials, all that still has to go on in the physical world.
Some people go into darkness and never come out. The important thing is, is to fight and endure through the hard times so that you come out of it with an esoteric reward, which is a true reward. And again, the gains that exist in the physical world are not real gains – they’re just things that are there for a moment in time, or for a period of time. But when that period of time is over and life is finished, the person is as they were when they started it all, with nothing physical. The physical world is no more than a memory, if that. It’s finished.
We’re just down here as though someone has put a little animal into a clay model, for all these sorts of experiences so that this little creature can know that it exists. When it dies then, it’s taken out of the clay model back into a dimension that’s more real – but even that dimension has things above it that are more real. So it’s pointless being attached to things in the clay model, you’ve got attached to this little clay door and this little clay oven, you know what I mean – it’s very sad.
But for people that you say, it is sad to be in that clay model, but at the time when people are living in the clay model, everything is so real; so real then, you can’t say “it was an illusion,” they will simply not believe it.
It’s not really an illusion, because for us it exists. So we have to live in this, but we also have to see its picture in the overall scheme of things, where it stands.
We can see something of that if we go to the astral, and we go to another dimension. But we can live an illusory life of the egos in this clay model, in this model world, in this three-dimensional world – a model is not a perfect analogy, it’s just a light one. Most people live a completely illusory world. It’s like a fun fair, where everything is just heightened sensations in order to give an illusion of fun; it’s not real happiness.
~ A talk by Belsebuub given in Australia, 2002
