A talk by Belsebuub in California, 2008
It’s so easy to take spiritual or esoteric knowledge as a belief because these things can’t be seen physically.
If you have experienced something spiritual then you personally know it.
To convey the experience to others is difficult or even impossible. But you can show them how to experience these things if you know how.
Most will not try to verify mystical experience as their beliefs stop them, or the effort it takes is too great for them to make.
Most do not value esoteric knowledge and dismiss it. Many in their ignorance become enemies to those who pursue it.
Skepticism stops many from really practicing in the first place, unless they’re able to have an open mind and get down to the exercises.
Even if you have a simple out-of-body experience, it becomes very difficult to describe what you’ve seen beyond the body, because people can’t see or feel those things—unless they have experiences themselves beyond the body, and also experiences of a like manner.
Even more difficult for people to understand is the journey to enlightenment. If you practice the teachings you may be able to experience at least the first stages of esoteric knowledge and with that you can go on to practice and experience more.
Faith is valuable, but if you don’t have the objective experience of things outside of your five senses, you can’t progress much further. And real progress is to walk along the path to enlightenment.
There are lots of different organizations and religions all explaining about spiritual things, which on the surface seem to be very similar. The correct practices give you the experiences you need to be able to discriminate between what is true and what is not.
Many have started to practice and stopped, or become completely stuck along the way. On the path there are multi-dimensional esoteric tests involved, leading to initiations, everyone is tested after a little while. Most fail and they’re thrown out en masse in the higher dimensions. Then people physically leave the esoteric work.
When I began, I was already looking for something spiritual; I knew that a mundane life wasn’t going to give me what I really needed. What I needed was to satisfy the longing that I had for the spiritual. I knew the spiritual was real and that the physical senses reveal just a tiny fraction of reality. So, I searched through lots of different organizations and teachings and groups until I found something that could allow me to practice and experience the things which I had been feeling inside, and had been searching for inside, even though I couldn’t give a name to them. And it also allowed me to see and understand what was going on within myself; something that I couldn’t do anywhere else. This gave me the knowledge that there was something real in all of this. So then I threw myself into it, practicing a lot and well, and began to get much more solid experiences out of the body and to learn about myself in a much deeper way.
Then, the path to the awakening began. It wouldn’t have begun had I not had the three main key components of the path, death, birth and sacrifice. It wouldn’t have begun if I hadn’t really thrown myself into it.
What has been experienced of the path when conveyed to people who are not on it can sound unreal. Esoteric things are hidden and secretive, spiritual beings don’t give the knowledge to everyone straight away, because it has to be earned, worked at and struggled for.
When something has been struggled for and worked at it is valued. That which is not valued becomes disregarded.
Disregarded remnants of esoteric truths become as trash on websites and in books where popular junk spews from people’s minds.
Real spiritual knowledge is not to be trashed, “pearls are not to be thrown before swine” as is said in the New Testament. Real spiritual knowledge is a treasure which should be cherished.
Esoteric knowledge costs very dearly, great efforts have to be put in. The ocean of different theories and beliefs must be swum through in order to get to knowledge.
More work again is required when finding esoteric knowledge as its rigor and wisdom increases incrementally.
Although faith is important, it also requires an objective study that leads to the observation and experience of what is real, as spiritual things are real.
Some scientists and medical practitioners accept that there is something that survives beyond the body because of what they see in near-death experiences, where the body is dead and the person has a conscious experience. What science can explain about the bigger picture of life is limited, because science doesn’t have the means to be able to explore it, physical means are used to study non-physical phenomena. The individual is left to explore and experience these things personally. Those who experience esoteric things have knowledge which can be passed onto others.
At a stage along the path the Being is incarnated, and later the Christ, Krishna to the Hindus. When that happens, the Christ must teach and the person becomes a vehicle for the spiritual teaching in the world. Yet people who are locked in beliefs and ideas can neither see nor accept that, as they are far from reality, the reality which very few discover.
There’s a very strong atheist movement in countries such as Britain, where people are subjected to the values of atheism from an early age by those with agendas who have power. People are even putting signs on buses saying “There’s probably no God out there”. But atheism is also a belief because it makes claims to things it doesn’t know; atheists often put their faith in science without taking into account its limitations, such as its inability to measure things that are not physical. So, atheism is nothing more than a belief, yet there is an air of superiority that many have about their atheistic beliefs that is completely misplaced.
You could ask yourself, how you could begin to explore enough that you might know that this teaching is true and what it is that you have to do to make it work for you.
It’s easy for those without knowledge to get taken off track by more entertaining ideas and more interesting beliefs. The media has played a part in educating people to have a short attention span and to go searching for things which are increasingly more entertaining. The entertainment grabs the intellect, emotions and feelings and draws people to them, who are then easily be led by those who have the money and the skills and the way with words to be able to catch their attention. From formulas standards in the world are born.
Therefore, you have to fall back upon your own personal experience and stand by that—this is the only way to really search for esoteric knowledge. And, when you get there it becomes much more of a personal thing, it becomes more of an intimate communication. But to get to that you need to practice. If you can practice, you have a chance of getting real spiritual knowledge.
Q: What are some pitfalls that you see from people that are trying but just aren’t doing it 100 percent, who are not doing enough to be to be getting these experiences, to be really taking up this work?
Belsebuub: People tend to sit on the fence and not be completely committed to it. You have to have a strong commitment for it to work. Otherwise, what’ll happen is you’ll just get intermittent astral experiences and teachings in dreams that won’t be enough to really piece together a clear picture. Also the kinds of experiences that you get won’t be properly esoteric; they won’t be the sort that really shake you. So, you just carry on in a lukewarm state, with very occasional things happening, with long spaces between anything taking place, and with nothing of any significance taking place.
What you put in you get out, what you are seeing there is a result of what you put in. If you keep putting this amount in, this, you’re going to keep getting the same or less amount back, so in order to progress, you have to do more. You have to realistically look at what you’re doing and see what results it’s giving, you can’t expect to get more than you put in.
Another pitfall is that someone takes it as a belief, and then is happy with it. Once you get content with something, you’re not striving to push forward. I remember I got to a stage in the work and I became complacent. And then, over there they told me that I had only done x amount and that I still had a long way to go to reach to the Absolute, to the true full awakening. But because I had achieved something which to me was once beyond my wildest dreams, I became content with it. And when I became content, I became stuck. A lot of people become content with what they find within the belief structure of an organization or a religion—it fulfills things they’ve been looking for in itself, and then they get stuck.
There are some who are tied up in certain psychological states, such as worries, fears, depression and habits, and these things lock a person into a vicious circle from which it’s difficult to get out. There are many techniques to overcome this, but by applying themselves fully to the task, they can do what they need to do to be able to come out of it.
One thing that does help is activity. If you are fully involved in teaching, in helping others spiritually—then help comes back to you spiritually. That activity can help to combat low and negative states. If you’re in low and negative states, then activities tend to narrow; they tend to make a person small in what they do, and then they get stuck in a vicious circle. So it helps to be aware of the ways in which you get caught by your egos and get stuck in them, so you can realistically see what you need to do to get out of them. The more you can get out, the freer and more capable you become of doing things.
I want to ask something about what you have said once in the past. You said that we must try with the correct kind of effort. And I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that, about the correct kind of effort.
The correct kind of effort is putting your efforts into doing the right kinds of exercises in an effective and intelligent way. It helps to able to assess what you’re doing. You can make efforts all you like, but if they’re in the wrong direction, they’ll lead to the wrong place. Study the teachings and understand what the requirements of awakening are, then you will have a basis from which you can start.
You were saying before that a lot of times skepticism gets in the way. What advice do you have for the person that may just be sitting on the fence or may be skeptical about these things, so that they don’t put themselves into it 100 percent?
You have to realize that everything you do has an effect. And being skeptical has an effect. If you want esoteric knowledge, then see how skepticism affects you finding it. You have to do something to make the teachings work.
There is a quality to skepticism however, which is when you assess things objectively without believing them, but if you don’t then take the step to practice, which is a leap of faith, you won’t have much of a chance to get personal experiences. It’s like looking at a map to find your way to a place—you follow the directions of that map to get to your destination. That in a way is a leap of faith, but because you are used to using maps so much, you follow it and don’t have any problems with it.
In this case, it’s similar to a map, but the steps ahead are sometimes very difficult to see. If you don’t take the step however, you will never progress to your destination.
Being skeptical therefore, while having a healthy sense of questioning to it, is not in itself going to get you anywhere. You’ve actually got to do something to make the teachings work.
