The secret orders of the Rosicrucians and the Freemasons are shrouded in mystery. Dr. Robert Gilbert has dedicated a good portion of his life decoding these mysteries, and what he shared was nothing short of mind blowing. The trinity of Lucifer, Ahriman, and Christ was something entirely novel to my understanding and provided a fresh model to understand reality. This podcast is not just information, it includes some of the practices that have been used to help initiates unlock their spiritual potential. Dr. Gilbert also shares the profound wisdom of sacred geometry and myriad spiritual practices of ancient traditions tracing all the way back to Atlantis. Dr. Robert Gilbert is a multidisciplinary scholar with a deep understanding of both spiritual and scientific studies. With a Ph.D. in International Studies and extensive personal experience, he has the remarkable ability to distill complex information from various spiritual and scientific sources into easily comprehensible lessons.

AUBREY: I always open with a prayer that made these words find the people who need the most, and may this transmission be in service of the good of all, and all of life in the cosmos, and just find the ears and the hearts, particularly the hearts and the minds that are ready to be lifted, supported, evolved, liberated. Whenever the medicine may be, we understand that we're here in service to greater purpose. All right, here we are. Here we are. I've been really looking forward to this podcast. And one of the things that I look forward to more than anything else in a podcast is when I get to explore something that I'm lightly familiar with, through my own 24 years of psychonautic adventure, and philosophy and experience. But there's a corner of the universe that hasn't been well illuminated. So, like, I went deep into the Cabellian, and I got to explore the hermetic principles. It was like, yes, amazing, or like Mahayana Buddhism, or the wisdom of Solomon or something new that I got to explore. And I feel that emerging with the Rosicrucians, and also the relationship between the Rosicrucians and Gnostic Christianity. So, let's just start with a cursory understanding of what I mean, and what is meant by saying the word Rosicrucian or Gnosticism. And then eventually, I want to get to Zoroastrianism. I know that that ties in. So, I want to leave these breadcrumbs to like, let's explore these different categories here, and try to put language and experience to some of these constructs that have existed. And, then we can illuminate the wisdom that's been kind of encoded for so many years.
DR. ROBERT: Okay, that sounds good. So, when we use the term, Rosicrucian, it comes from the root of the rose cross. One of the fundamental spiritual concepts here is that it's understood in the European Rosicrucian tradition, that when we incarnate into the physical body, it's a kind of crucifixion. That the physical body is a vehicle as it's described in the Indian Vedic tradition. It's a vehicle or a sheath for our spirit to work through. But by moving into the physical body, it's like a black cross. It's a concept that you find in ancient Greece as well, where they would say in Plato's writings, that the world soul is crucified on the world cross, and that the human being is crucified in the cross of the physical body. So, it opens up particular experiences and education for us in a physical body. But, it also opens us up to potential suffering in a physical body.
AUBREY: Or ecstasy.
DR. ROBERT: Potentially, yes,
AUBREY: Potentially? When was the last time you had sex? Come on, Doctor, it's there.
DR. ROBERT: Absolutely. But if we were going to understand where they're coming from, with the rose cross concept, the foundation of it is that the physical body is like a black cross that we incarnate into of the four elements. And then what we can do is we can activate the energy centers of the physical body, like you're talking about with sex with Tantra, et cetera. And the activated energy centers can be brought into such activity, that they become like a blooming rose in the energy body. So, the rose cross is the black cross of the physical body, with the activated energy centers becoming so full of life and activity, that what we think of as the seven chakras become like seven roses in the human energy body, full of life and vitality. And so, it's about the experience of being in the physical body, in the physical plane as a spiritual being, and raising the potential of the physical body to where it becomes a vehicle for the spirit, a vehicle for higher experience, a vehicle for education. And so, this rose cross idea, then became the image for a particular group of spiritual initiates in Central Europe.
AUBREY: What time?
DR. ROBERT: Roughly 500 years ago, the early 1500s, we began to get the publication of certain texts, mostly around present day Czech Republic, Germany, areas of Europe. And they described that there was a hidden group of initiates, the Rosicrucians, that had this very advanced knowledge. If we're to understand this in a larger context, though, we need to understand that there are certain universal hermetic principles and teachings that have been around for thousands of years. And most of the time, we trace them back to ancient Egypt, with the original Emerald Tablet and the classic hermetic teachings. And so, it's understood that those teachings--
AUBREY: Which is probably just Egypt taking credit for a lot of shit that happened in the Atlantean, pre-diluvian times.
DR. ROBERT: Exactly.
AUBREY: All right, we'll give Egypt credit.
DR. ROBERT: Right, right. But I mean, if we go back to the Greek teachings, because some of the deeper teachings from Egypt weren't recorded in anything that we have access to today in Egypt, they were recorded by the Greeks who went to Egypt. And so, that's where we find the writings of Plato. And so, in Plato's dialogues, he mentions about a Greek named Solon who went to train in the Egyptian temples. And the Egyptian priest is basically making fun of Solon and saying, you Greeks are like little children, there's no ancient knowledge among you. Our knowledge goes all the way back to the previous epoch, and it goes back to ancient Atlantis. So, the whole concept of Atlantis is something that we get from the Egyptians as brought to us by the Greeks. But the idea is that there are certain universal principles of life and of spiritual development, and understanding who am I, why am I here? What's the purpose of all this? That the expression of it will change form in different periods of human history. So, the form that it took in the old Egyptian epoch was a bit different than what it took in the Jewish Kabbalah, and a bit different than how it then appeared in Greece and Europe. And by the time we get to the 1500s, it really took the form of the Rosicrucian tradition in Europe.
AUBREY: Why do you think they chose the metaphor basically, of the crucifixion? Because it seems like, and again, you could feel my bristling at the idea of the Incarnation being a crucifixion. Because crucifixion is a very dark thing. It's a very, very fucking dark thing. And it's a very painful thing. Your hands are nailed, your feet are nailed, whatever the fuck else is happening on the cross. It's a nightmare, basically. And this is Gehenna suffering in Buddhism, but there's other ways to look at life as the way to actually experience erotic lifeforce energy through the body as a vehicle to actually, wow, I can smell, I can touch, I can taste. Why do you think they chose the crucifixion? And obviously, I think that by placing the rose in there, they're actually doing a form of alchemy--
DR. ROBERT: Yes, exactly.
AUBREY: To the crucifixion. And I think that maybe where it's lying. So, it's maybe actually... So, I'm curious as to why they chose that crucifixion as a metaphor, and then what the rose means and how that actually performed the alchemy that I'm intuiting, that is what was going on.
DR. ROBERT: So, what's been done for thousands of years in spiritual traditions is that certain experiences that, one, has on higher levels of spiritual initiation, then get translated into a type of image, often a visual image. That is what my teacher from the Clairvision School of Australia, who was the French medical doctor, Samuel Sagan, he would refer to as the principle of the pact thought form. So, certain things that are nonphysical principles can be experienced in a download, or in a spiritual experience in just a moment, it's like a eureka experience, where you can perceive a tremendous amount of higher information in a moment's transmission. And so, this pact thought form can take the form of a visual image. So, a literal image of a black cross, with seven red roses coming out of it was the way that they expressed this direct experience, that from being out of the body in the spiritual world, and moving through the stages of condensation to end up in a small helpless infant's body, in a physical body, and what in the Hindu tradition they call the sheath made of food, to get reduced in scale to that level, and put into this localized physical matrix is something that does feel rather like a crucifixion. It is a being placed in a much more expansive spiritual body into the small physical container. And in that physical container, certain suffering is possible.
AUBREY: One of the ideas that I think a lot of people have is that we're a vessel for the soul, and when you break the vessel then the soul gets to leave. But actually, the soul is present, always. So, actually, our essence, our lifeforce, our soul self, exists in embodiment, and also, it's not like it leaves the body and all of a sudden, it's realized. No, it's always there. But there is an aspect of the flesh, bringing in all of the levels of suffering in the mind, the personal mind, the separate self mind, that brings in all the levels of suffering. So, there's the physical stimulus of the pain, there is the mental stimulus of the separate self pain, that then can create suffering due to the resistance to that pain and the relationship to that sensation. But the way that I've always seen it is that it's not like we have a soul that gets released. It's like we have a soul that's always there, and it's participating in the body form. Is that in alignment with the teaching of the Rosicrucians? Or did they have more of a, alright, everything's packed into this body, and then if you kill the body, then it's all released?
DR. ROBERT: No, it's very much a question of, their understanding was that we have to have the experience of incarnating into the physical body into a series of physical bodies over time to get the education of the soul, and to grow the consciousness, and to grow the level of Siddhas or powers that a person can have, through that experiential base. So, the physical incarnation is absolutely necessary. Because there's also in some spiritual traditions, the idea that, well, maybe the physical world is just a maya, maybe it's just an illusion, maybe we just get off the cycle of karma and reincarnation, and don't come back because this can be a plane of suffering. But the Rosicrucian--
AUBREY: Those people aren't having enough fun.
DR. ROBERT: That's exactly right. So, the Rosicrucian viewers know we have to incarnate into the physical body. And we have to also understand that at that time, this was at the very beginning of the Protestant Reformation. And there had been a lot of suppressing of free spiritual activity in Europe for a long period of time with the Catholic Church.
AUBREY: You don't say.
DR. ROBERT: And it was all based on the nobility of suffering, and not having the freedom to have any experience or experimentation with the conditions of the physical body or physical life. It was very regimented, and very restricted. And so their teaching was in some ways heretical, that out of the incarnation of the physical body, which is absolutely necessary, we can actually through our own spiritual activity, bring in the ripening of the potential. It's like the physical body being like a seed put in the earth. When that grows, when it ripens, it becomes these beautiful red roses of the activated energy centers, which means that we can use our physical incarnation to attain these much, much higher states--
AUBREY: And evolve.
DR. ROBERT: Absolutely.
AUBREY: It gets very interesting from a cosmic perspective when you think about evolution, because evolution requires time, actually. If you don't have the construct of time, then how are you evolving? You're already there, or not there. In the timeless place, you're everything and nothing. But the telos, the direction of fashion requires time, which requires a body, which requires a lot of different aspects that kind of start to layer in into this beautiful, synchronized magical existence, multi-dimensional existence that we live in.
DR. ROBERT: And that gives rise to the whole concept of the teleological destination, that there's something in the stream of time having incarnated into space and time that is pulling us toward our spiritual destiny, toward the full manifestation of our spiritual potential. And this may come in all types of inspirations and dreams and downloads that we receive. But it's almost like there's something in the future, even though from a higher perspective, all the moments in time are simultaneous. But if we look at it from a linear perspective, the concept like in the Greek tradition with the telos, we're being pulled toward what we have as the full manifestation of our spiritual potential, when all of the seven red roses are manifested in the human energy field. And so, this shows that there's a type of alchemy that needs to be done while we're physically present, done in our consciousness, done in our energy, done in our activities. And then that gets into a lot of very specific types of practices that the Egyptians would do that then transformed into the Jewish Kabbalistic and then transformed into the European action, and--
AUBREY: And may have had deeper, even deeper roots, Atlantean roots, spread through many different schools.
DR. ROBERT: That's what the Egyptians themselves said, is that this is all from Atlantis.
AUBREY: Yeah, indeed. All right, so now, I'm going to try and make the leap to try and understand the relationship between the Rosicrucians and the Gnostic Christians. So, what's the correlation and differentiation? How do you disambiguate the Gnostic Christians and the Rosicrucian?
DR. ROBERT: So, a lot of the Gnostic Christian tradition is really pre-Rosicrucian. It's around the 1500s that there's any public discussion of the Rosicrucians. And so, what happened in the early Christian centuries, is that nothing was formalized yet. People were receiving these tremendous spiritual experiences and downloads in their own direct experience of nonphysical realities, and trying to understand, what's the nature of the Christ being? What's the nature of developing Christ consciousness? What's the nature of accessing the power of the sun? Which is what they understood to be embodied with the Christ, the solar logos. How do we bring that power of the sun into ourselves to bring that spiritual fire and light and heat into our chemical process, to maximize all of our potential of what we can become? And so, there were many different schools of thought about what is this all about? How do we understand it? And so, one of those became what we think of today as the Gnostic Christian tradition. And so, this has to do with the different ways to perceive what is it to be incarnated on the physical plane? Why am I here? What's this about? And then, to what degree is that something beneficial or not beneficial? Working with ideas in the Gnostic tradition, like the Demiurge, the Dark Lord of the earth, that--
AUBREY: Yeah, let's go slow here. Explain the Demiurge.
DR. ROBERT: So, the Demiurge was one way to understand what are the spiritual forces that are involved with taking all these nonphysical spiritual beings and spiritual energies from the divine world, and taking them through a series of alchemical steps to crystallize them into physical reality, for us to actually as a spiritual being, move into a physical body, for the physical earth to be formed out of higher divine powers. And so, there was the understanding that there were certain spiritual beings involved in that process of physical crystallization. And one way it was described by the Gnostics was as the Demiurge. That's a particular type of spiritual being involved in a crystallization process. And again, this was seen somewhat differently by different groups.
AUBREY: So, my understanding of this is that, and this comes from my own journey experience, from conversations with Matias de Stefano, lots of different sources. But ultimately, there's the clear, pure light of source, right?
DR. ROBERT: Yes.
AUBREY: But it's undifferentiated. It's the moment of the Big Bang, where everything is just all pure, potentiality homogenous in its form. And astrophysicists will say that the universe was about the size the tip of your finger, and it's just all just pure packed white light, pure light, like the source light, all color, the all light, the all sound and then it differentiates. And then, creation actually came from creating prisms of distortion, which actually, and distortion is an interesting word, but it actually is more like a prism that just refracts the light so that now instead of the pure light, just like you do with actual light, you can use a prism to break it into a rainbow.
DR. ROBERT: Yes.
AUBREY: Even a drop of water, that's what a rainbow actually is. Water, it's refracting the light so that now you see seven colors instead of seeing just light, just the sun. So, like, wow, seven colors, holy shit. It's beautiful. So, the distortion is like the creation of the prism. So, is that accurate to say that the Demiurge is like the creation of these different prisms that refract the pure light?
DR. ROBERT: I think from the Gnostic perspective, they would see it more as the Demiurge is part of a later stage of alchemical crystallization into physical matter, because it goes through multiple stages. So, if we look at it from, probably, the easiest way to understand it today, the system that we use to understand different planes of creation, and this alchemical step by step process today in the West, is basically from the theosophist. So, we start with the divine plane. Now, the divine plane everything is one, everything's a unity, nothing's differentiated.
AUBREY: Source light.
DR. ROBERT: Source light, pure, clear light. And, then the next step is to move from, in sacred numerology, from the one to the two. And so, we go from where everything is one in unity, to a differentiation and to yin and yang, differentiation into masculine and feminine. And that's where you get--
AUBREY: Polarity.
DR. ROBERT: Absolutely, polarity gets created. But at its most fundamental stage, polarity is not polarity of the physical plane. It is polarity of beings, its polarities of consciousness, polarities of energy. And that's where we get in the Indian tradition, the idea of the Shiva and Shakti as the actual higher spiritual personification of the male and female, which then have to be reunified in tantric work to go back to the highest, divine clear light plane. From that spiritual plane, we're beginning to differentiate out first the pure polarities. Then we go into the deeper aspects of the prism, where all of the inherent potential for difference, then gets manifested out. And you then go from spiritual plane to the causal plane, where it'd be understood that through our actions, we create our karma. We have particular patterns in our life, certain things we have as potential, certain things that our telos is drawing us toward, to manifest as a fully awakened, activated Siddha or power. And then from the causal plane to the mental and the emotional, sometimes one or both of those referred to as the astral, and then into the vitality, or etheric Chi, ki, prana level of pure life energy. That forms then the pattern in energy that then is the blueprint for the crystallization of physical matter, the physical plane. Different beings and processes are involved with every stage of that alchemical movement. And then the Demiurge is involved at that last stage of the actual crystallization of the energy pattern into the physical matter. Whether it's our physical body, or whether it's the physical earth we're living in.
AUBREY: So, the urge feels like it's a desire, like something's being drawn forth. So, is urge the right word? Like, we're drawn forth into this by some force.
DR. ROBERT: We can certainly see it that way. In the original language, the Demiurge, it may not be as involved with the English concept of urge, but certainly it was understood that there was always a desire nature involved in it. Because there would be no life if we don't have the desire to unify with the other and then bring forth new life, which only happens through the alchemical merger of opposites. It's always the case in higher alchemy that it's bringing together the two opposite polarities in the right way that opens up the gateway to the divine plane, back to the source light. And so, this is the key to everything. It's going to be at the first level, a kind of subconscious desire, a subconscious urge that pulls us toward whatever it is we need for that process to take its place. Then as we become self-aware, we illuminate that and we're conscious of it, which means we can work with it in more conscious ways, to help to develop our own, as the Rosicrucians would say, the seven red roses, or the potential Siddhas in our own energy body. So, not just an animal being pulled towards something through subconscious urges, although that in itself is something natural and needed in the process. But as we become more conscious, we can bring more light, more love, more awareness into the process to help us develop ourselves into our fully awakened activated form.
AUBREY: So, is the Demiurge then value neutral, in that it's creating all of the positive aspects of love, truth, beauty. transformation, and also all of the negative aspects of distortion, delusion, separation, all of that as well? Is it value neutral, the Demiurge? Is it just more a force of creation?
DR. ROBERT: In many aspects of the Gnostic tradition, it's viewed as something negative, it's viewed as a force that pulls us down into darkness, and some type of over manifestation, over materialization. But again, this is seen differently by different groups and sects within things. Like when we use a term like gnostic, it actually pertains to many different groups, and teachers, and people having direct experience of it. So, some may see it as a more negative thing. And you can find Gnostic teachings that really see the Demiurge as a type of opposition force that we have to overcome. But it can be seen by others as an absolutely essential part of the process of a full alchemical movement, from the clear light unity space, through all the different planes into crystallization on the physical plane, which actually gives us the potential for freedom. And this then leads to one of the most important concepts of the Rosicrucians that I help things make sense of the whole process, which is, one of the most advanced Rosicrucian teachers ever to go public was Rudolf Steiner. And so, Steiner had the idea that if you look at the gnostic teachings about the spiritual beings that are around us all the time, that then developed into esoteric Christianity. We have an understanding of multiple ranks of angelic beings above us, angels, archi, et cetera.
AUBREY: Seraphim.
DR. ROBERT: Exactly. They all have different stages of consciousness, stages of development, different powers, things that they do. But there's the understanding that just as they have names that give them their identification for what their whole process is at that alchemical level, the human beings' alchemical name is spirits of love and freedom. That's the Rosicrucian concept. That's the two key polarities that according to the Rosicrucians, we're here on the physical plane to try to master. Now this leads then to--
AUBREY: So, spirits of love and freedom is what they describe humans?
DR. ROBERT: That's right.
AUBREY: So, we are spirits of love and freedom. That's the fundamental core belief?
DR. ROBERT: Yes. And that is all about what we're here for. Because these are two opposite Siddhas, two opposite powers, two opposite abilities.
AUBREY: Why are love and freedom opposites?
DR. ROBERT: Because the love is understood as the force that makes us want to unify with another being and return to the clear light, the one stage, in complete unity. And the freedom is the ability to separate out of that.
AUBREY: So as my teacher, Kabbalist Mystic teacher, Marc Gafni would say, it's the forces of allurements, the drawing towards, and autonomy, to actually be distinct and sovereign.
DR. ROBERT: That's right.
AUBREY: Allurement and autonomy, love and freedom.
DR. ROBERT: Yes. And we can also see that in terms of this alchemical ladder from the divine plane of complete unity and merging at the top, where there's, we're not a separate being there. We're a part of the complete one. And then at the most crystallized level on the physical plane. In a sense, we're the most free, we're the most separate. This could also be seen as a type of suffering by some traditions, but we are the most separate, but it gives us the most freedom. And so, understanding that we're spirits of love and freedom is how do we hold a balance? Has to be a dynamic balance between these things. Now, in the Chinese tradition, they talk about the heart pains, like the nine different heart pains. These are the things that we associate a lot of pain and suffering with in our lives. And that's because we're always searching for the other, we're searching for that perfect relationship, we need that other person to merge with to be able to reach the divine plane where the two polarities become one. And we merge so deeply with the other in love, that we can't tell ourselves apart from the loved one. And that's like the highest spiritual experience that we have in tantra and love and sex. It's what we all seek. Now, there's an aspect in this of that merging. That, again, this concept coming from Dr. Samuel Sagan, late teacher from the Clairvision School in Australia. He had this idea of combinessence. So, you may be doing an advanced spiritual practice, maybe you're doing a lot of psychotropics, but you're perceiving a certain nonphysical reality on a higher plane. That physical reality may appear to be one large being, a great radiant being of light on a higher level that you're directly perceiving. But then you see that out of the straight being of light, other smaller beings begin to move out of that larger composite being. And you begin to understand that this being is a composite of multiple beings.
AUBREY: Just like we're a composite of trillions of cells.
DR. ROBERT: Exactly. And so, this idea of combinessence is that out of the physical body and these higher nonphysical realms and planes, beings can actually have the love, the unity impulse to where they merge so fully, that they appear to be one great light being. But they still have the freedom to separate back out, to have an independent path of action. Now, the microcosm of this in our physical lives, is trying to find the right romantic love connection so we can have the perfect alchemical tantric merger, where there's no separation with the partner. And we have that feeling, again, of that connection to the divine to the unity stage. That's why the best sex is always said to be like a spiritual experience. But at the same time, that won't work out unless we have enough freedom in our lives, to pursue our own path in the midst of that. And so, again, spirits of love and freedom is the core Rosicrucian concept of what we're all about, how do we have the perfect development of both so we can merge and combiness with a partner when we choose and return to the divine one state, and still have the freedom to separate out and take our own path when we choose or when we need to.
AUBREY: Yeah, there's a recognition of the beauty of, even with the suffering, and even with the pain and all of that, we are in a stage of radical freedom, because of the degree of separation that we've gone from unity with the source field. We have maximum separation at this point in time. And also the ability through different technologies, whether they're psychedelic technologies, or whether they're psychoanalytic technologies of breathwork, and dance or sexual tantric technologies. We have ways that we can find the merger, but also abide in radical autonomy as well. I've always felt like human beings are in this kind of, we're in this kind of golden zone, of having the full potential to go radically merge with the one, with the source, and also radical autonomy and sovereignty. And to understand that and to say, yeah, there's a lot of things that are challenging, but there's also a great beauty to this place that we are right now, because we really have all access to the full gamut of expression of what life and evolution could look like.
DR. ROBERT: And there's the beautiful encapsulation of this in a statement by Khalil Gibran in "The Prophet" where he says, our pain is the breaking of the shell that surrounds our understanding. And so, it's understood that the suffering on the path is finite, but the gifts of the path are infinite. And so, we have to see that suffering aspect as something that is contextual. And we can develop to the point that we get into more nonresistance to the suffering that is incumbent in physical experience on this plane, because we're so focused, and so understanding of where this is bringing us to something that is so beautiful and so empowered. That to become as the Rosicrucians would see it in their tradition, a spirit of love and freedom that now is a free agent in the universe to be able to go anywhere and do anything at the end of our process of development here, in this crystallized state.
AUBREY: Yeah, it's a beautiful explication. Alright, so if I'm understanding Rosicrucians then, then they've sourced some info from Gnostic Christianity, sourced some info from Egyptian mythology, which was again sourced from Atlantean mythology and spiritual concepts, hermetic principles, which may go all the way, but also back way farther than the Egyptian way, farther than--
DR. ROBERT: Absolutely.
AUBREY: So it's like hermeticism, Gnostic Christianity, a variety of different things. And then an actual group of people get together and they say, we're going to make our own codex of symbols, which is going to be the black cross, the seven red roses. And we're going to actually come forth, call ourselves the Rosicrucians, develop an order. Was it like a secret society? But basically, they source all of this information in 1500s, and they're like, we're the Rosicrucians, these are our symbols. We're condensing all of this higher wisdom into this framework. And then starting to put forth content. Is that kind of what happened?
DR. ROBERT: Yes, the real publications that caught on were in the 1600s. Some of the spiritual work was going on back in the 1400s. But it was really developing as a process. Now, the Rosicrucians themselves would look at this as a process that was basically, essentially, non physical in nature. So it wasn't necessarily that they had like physical books or text from the Gnostics or from Egypt, or things of that kind, although they may have had access to some of those, and some of those teachings on the physical plane. But it was more of an understanding that there were human beings that had gone through initiatory processes in Atlantis, Egypt, in these other time periods, the Essenes, that now in their latest incarnation, with that being held within their consciousness, within their energy, are bringing it into modern Earth and cultural conditions. And so it always has to be changed somewhat in how it's expressed. And so they develop new images based on that, new expressions of it, new terms. And so, the esoteric group, really, that the Rosicrucians came out of, after the early Christian centuries was the Holy Grail tradition. Now, the primary way of representing the holy grail tradition was in the grail cup. But it was understood that there is a toroidal energy field around a human energy body that's shaped like a grail cup, open at the top, coming into the heart at its narrowest point, and then spreading out at the bottom. And that toroidal field then circulates around the human energy body. That the Christ being is a force related to the alchemical power of the sun, that can be brought in from the areas above the human head in tantric practices, and brought in to the top of the grail cup of our own body and our own energy field, and circulated inside as a way to develop ourselves to a higher alchemical state. Now, that holy grail tradition then went from its origins around the 9th century, into then, about 500 years ago with the Rosicrucian Order in Europe and began to use this new imagery. It's all an alchemical process moving forward. But this was then understood among the Rosicrucians, that there was no real physical group or order as a physical institution. It wasn't like a church or something where they had like some particular church they'd get together with--
AUBREY: It wasn't like the Masons.
DR. ROBERT: Not really. Now there are some connections between the Masons and Rosicrucians, but that gets a little bit more complex--
AUBREY: Bracket that for later. Because I want to talk about the Masons, because I saw you talk about...
DR. ROBERT: But in the beginning, it was really that these people who had been initiated in the earlier times were now incarnating into Central Europe. They carried with them the fruits of those earlier incarnations, they held it inside of themselves as Siddhas and knowledge. And the core of the Rosicrucian tradition, this is why it was not accepted by the Catholic Church and things like this. The core of it was that you don't go through any external human being or physical institution to connect to spirit. You connect to spirit directly of your own energy column, you connect to higher worlds, higher beings, spiritual inspiration. You don't have to go through an intermediary. It's all about--
AUBREY: How do you make money if you don't have an intermediary?
DR. ROBERT: Exactly. Catholic Church didn't appreciate that at all. That was taking away their power. And again, one reason that this Rosicrucian reformulation of the Grail tradition happened around this time is there was the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. There were people saying we want to still have an understanding of the Christ impulse, but we don't want to be stuck in this authoritarian control structure that the Catholic Church has created. So around that time, the Rosicrucians came out. Now we have to remember that in the Grail tradition, there were certain Grail groups in Europe like the Cathars, and the Albigensians, and the Bogomils, that were killed by the Vatican armies. That's where we get the whole statement about, kill them all, God will sort them out. That comes in a statement by one of the generals of the Vatican armies, that they're going to kill every man, woman and child in the Grail communities in the south of France, and God will know His own. So this had been savagely suppressed, the murders by the Catholic Church and the Vatican for years. And so that was part of that earlier Grail time. Now moving into the Rosicrucian time, they are writing on the--
AUBREY: So this is like an early form of an inquisition against these Gnostic Grail--
DR. ROBERT: Oh, absolutely.
AUBREY: And I think one of the tricks, and we'll talk about the force behind the tricks of Empire, Ahriman, and these kinds of energies. I'm very excited to get into that. But I think one of the tricks is they've tried to trick us into conceiving of these things as literal, right? Like the people who were looking for the grail were actually looking for a cup, and the cup had magical powers, because the cup held the blood of Christ. No, no, the Christ energy is the energy of the source light that comes, pours through the crown, opens the heart. And it is the secret to immortality because you merge with the source field of all life, eternal life. So yes, it is. But this is a metaphor. This is not about a cup, this is not Indiana Jones, where there's a special little cup, and it's a cool story and whatever. But even that story is a metaphor.
DR. ROBERT: Yes.
AUBREY: And everything is metaphorically understood. And actually, the suppression was not against actual people who were looking for an actual cup. It was for people who are living and abiding by this idea that undermined the power structure of the church at the time.
DR. ROBERT: Absolutely. That's exactly the case. And so, the Rosicrucians were adamant about this thing that you don't have to go through another person, don't have to go through an external institution. You develop the ability to directly connect to spirit, and have your spiritual development that way. That's what they were all about. But there was no physical organization to join. That was like a big thing for the Rosicrucians. We don't have a physical organization for you to join. That only came later. A few hundred years later, we began to have in Europe and North America, people creating Rosicrucian organizations based on these principles. But they somewhat formed them on the ideas coming from the Freemasons, like a series of initiations and grades. And that can be beneficial for certain people at certain times.
AUBREY: It also exposes you to attack. As soon as you say I'm a Cathar, they're like, well, kill them all, let God sort them out. There's a lot of shit that can happen as soon as you actually crystallize--
DR. ROBERT: Exactly. And the other challenge that can happen is that it can lead to people getting caught up in the political machinations of the organization trying to move to higher and higher grades in this type of external institution, rather than the direct connection to spirit, and having a trajectory of development. Again, it can lead to somewhat, I'm going through this external institution, I'm going through this particular leader of that group, whatever it is.
AUBREY: Yeah, there's a lot of pitfalls of hierarchy. Not that hierarchy can't be helpful in organizing a mission, a plan, a directive, etc. And I think we become allergic to hierarchy because of the abusive hierarchy.
DR. ROBERT: Yes, absolutely. And it may be the case as well, that we see this in context, people that have had a lot of initiatory experience in previous incarnations are at the stage of development, that they simply can't tolerate being beholden to an external institution, or something of that kind as a thing they have to go through to connect to spirit for sure. But people that don't have as much initiatory experience, they may feel they need the support of that type of organization, to give them some type of structure, or guidance on the process, which requires a lot more pulling it out of yourself if you're going to connect directly. But it's important, I think, to understand that the original Rosicrucians were not about any external physical organization. It was all about your connecting directly to spirit. And although these initiates may recognize one another, and they may work together on the physical plane at certain times, they would often themselves say that a lot of their connection was not physical. It was on a spiritual level, because they're conscious on that level to be able to work together. And so the idea, though, that there were these great European initiates in a Christian context, that had a level of development equivalent to what we might see in the Indian tradition, or the Chinese Taoist tradition or something, is something that was very exciting at the time, and still as exciting to people today, that there's a Western version of a type of very advanced spiritual knowledge.
AUBREY: It's important to recover that lineage, and understand that it wasn't entirely broken. All of these Empire, is the term that I like to use to describe it. It's just the force. It's that force of control and domination. And we'll talk about these forces from the extra dimensional perspective. But Empire seeks to break all of these lineages, and includes the more kind of pagan in the good way sense of the earth based traditions of the Druids. At the same time that the Roman army was going to decimate and destroy the Hebrews, they were also going up to destroy the Druids. Both different peoples who had access to direct communication with source, which then would leave no authority and no power, or not enough power for the Empire that seeked to have all the power and all the control.
DR. ROBERT: Absolutely. In some esoteric Christian circles it was considered that the druid, that tradition in the Celtic lands, had one of the healthiest ways of incorporating the Christ impulse into their work. That they were so tuned in to the elemental forces of the earth, and what was happening with the nature energies that they could perceive when these higher alchemical energies came into the land and came into the world. And it wasn't until later where the Catholic church came in and starts to try to affect the Celtic lands as well as they had taken over Europe, that they began to get more rigidified, and began to have more of the unpleasant aspects of external Christianity and lost some of that beautiful original Celtic Christianity again with...
AUBREY: Yeah, I want to weave a couple threads in here as well. So, you hear something like the Knights Templar.
DR. ROBERT: Yes.
AUBREY: Who were they? What were they doing?
DR. ROBERT: So, the Knights Templar developed as an order within the Catholic Church. But they were always considered as something that needed to be observed by the Catholic church, because they were extremely dedicated to their own goals. Now, at this time, the Catholic Church basically dominated all of Western Europe. So, the Templars developed inside of that, but the Knights of the Temple were basically a monastic order. So, these were people that had taken vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, to be able to work for spiritual purposes and--
AUBREY: Probably wasn't a Knights Templar in a past life.
DR. ROBERT: Well, you never know, because what happens--
AUBREY: No, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure, Doctor.
DR. ROBERT: Is that sometimes people will have great tantric incarnations. And then, so we have the complete spectrum of experience, we'll go into a monastic experience where we don't have any of it, and then realize, well, I really liked that tantric experience. Let me get back into that.
AUBREY: Yeah, alright, I understand.
DR. ROBERT: So that way, we cover the gamut. But these were people that really wanted to serve a spiritual purpose. Now, we could talk a lot about the historical aspect of the Knights Templar, but just to talk about the real spiritual impulse behind it. So, the Knights Templar, were people that were working toward creating a spiritualized earth, a new spiritualized world. And so one part of that is that they were creating a new economic system. And that's why one reason they took a vow of poverty, they don't own anything for themselves, but they became really the first international bankers. And so you could deposit money, gold, whatever, with the Knights Templar in one city, and then you get a note, and you could then get it out in another city in Europe. Or after they moved into the Holy Land.
AUBREY: This is highly helpful when you've got brigands on all the pathways trying to rob you of all your gold. If you can distribute it to the Knights Templar, who had armor and swords, which were effectively the power that would allow them to protect themselves, and then just have the note. Then you could...
DR. ROBERT: And so, they were creating a type of new economic system to be able to fund people doing spiritual activity, people being able to manifest good things in the world. But they didn't take any of it for themselves. So again, they had a vow of poverty. So not doing it to enrich themselves. And it was really trying to create a basis for a kind of banking that's not based on usurious charges of interest, which then became a huge control mechanism for--
AUBREY: Empire took it over.
DR. ROBERT: Yeah, Empire took it over. And now banking is like one of the major levers. It's how you control the money system. But they were trying to create something on a completely different level, with money being understood as one of the great levers of power, and to be able to manifest spirit on the earth itself. Now what happened, unfortunately, is that all kinds of things happened.
AUBREY: But I feel like they had something to do with the Grail tradition.
DR. ROBERT: They absolutely did. So they consider themselves to be knights of the grail. They consider themselves to be completely dedicated to the Christ impulse to spiritualize the planet, and to develop the world to a higher level. But they weren't afraid of getting into a fight. So, they became one of the elite units in the Crusades.
AUBREY: Man, if they just had a little more sex, I think I might have been a nice templar.
DR. ROBERT: You would have been into it.
AUBREY: I'd have been into it, because I'm like, I'm with them, I like fighting, I like all these ideas. It actually reminds me of this movement for decentralized currency in cryptocurrency, which is obviously now contesting against Central Bank digital currency which is Empire's version of controlled currency versus democratized and decentralized currency. So it's almost like those who are fighting for this crypto and decentralized currency are the new Knights Templar in a way.
DR. ROBERT: It really is a kind of new Templar impulse trying to wrest back all the power in economics to people using it spiritually in the world, rather than the current control structure. And unfortunately, of course, as everybody knows, what happens to the Knights Templar is they were destroyed by the Catholic Church.
AUBREY: Empire got them.
DR. ROBERT: The Empire got them. The Pope was being controlled by the King of France at the time.
AUBREY: Or vice versa.
DR. ROBERT: Well, this is what was called the Babylonian captivity of the Pope. And he was actually being dominated by the French king. And so, he got the Pope to declare the Knights Templar to be heretics so that he could seize all the gold and all the money that the Knights Templar had. And that's what happened. So they said that, they're heretics, they're devil worshipers, they're having sex, all this type of stuff. Anything that in the Catholic world would be considered to be bad they threw at the Knights Templar. They murdered huge numbers of the Knights, they seized all of their holdings. And that was the end of the Knights Templar. But it was understood there was a spiritual impulse behind it. And so for example, in the Masonic tradition, there's like a particular grade out of the 33 steps that's considered to be like the Knights Templar grade, and there's other Knights Templar imagery within the Masons. But essentially, it was one particular type of warrior monk group that came together to try to do good spiritual things in the world. And like you say, Empire got them. But the whole beauty of the thing is that even if you kill them all, they will all come back in the next incarnation.
AUBREY: Sorry about it. We're going to keep coming. We're going to keep coming, and we're going to keep coming.
DR. ROBERT: You can kill us this time around, but you're going to die off in this incarnation, you're not going to live forever. And we're going to come back. And we're going to come back with even more determination. Now, this is also--
AUBREY: And more experience.
DR. ROBERT: Exactly. And this is also connected to what you're saying about, you'd like to be a Knights Templar except for the celibacy part of it. But there is an idea within spiritual--
AUBREY: Maybe I was the Ikkyū Sōjun of the Knights Templar, and I was like, "Yo, it's even better if we do all this and have sex," and they're like, "You're crazy, bro." And I'm like, "But do you see what I'm doing? Yeah, I'm fighting better than y'all. I'm fucking better than y'all. It's all getting better." Maybe that, maybe now seeing a pathway where... In a previous incarnation.
DR. ROBERT: Well, there's also a particular principle involved here, that in many spiritual traditions, they would give something up for a certain period of time, because it gives you magical powers in that thing later, to have given it up for a period of time, because that's when you fully experienced the loss of it, and you fully experience it when you get it back, the true power of it.
AUBREY: Like fasting.
DR. ROBERT: Exactly.
AUBREY: I remember I've been on like five-day fasts, where it's just, usually like juice or saltwater or something like that. I don't go for the full intense dry fast vision quest version. But I remember the first time I did one of those, and I had a cashew. And I was like, "Oh, my God. A raw cashew! What a gift from Gaia, the heavens." I was chewing it slowly, like, this is incredible. Whereas you've been eating a bunch and you're kind of full, it's the end of the meal, grab a handful of those fuckers and just chomp them down, be like, "Cashews." You know what I mean? It's a totally different thing. So definitely, when you have an absence. Also I did a darkness retreat experience, absolute black for six days. The way that you appreciate light and your sight, and the ability to see, after you've been in complete darkness is astounding, and is one of these tools to actually help spring you into the proper gratitude and right relation to the gifts of this amazing world.
DR. ROBERT: And to help activate the pineal and pituitary from the darkness. Another example of this is the vow of silence. So, like some medieval monks would take a vow of silence, because by doing so they became hyper aware of speech. And the idea was that they would incarnate at a later time with a magical power of speech, abilities to speak higher than the average person because they gave it up. So, for a person that went through a period of celibacy. Now, this may be interpreted at that time, like in the Catholic Church in a different way. But the real spiritual principle behind it was by giving it up, you then when you get it back later, understand it in a completely different way that you can do much more with it than you could before when you kind of took it for granted.
AUBREY: So as you're describing this, it seems like this idea of the continuity of your soul, and that your life includes your death, and the future reincarnation of your life had to be present. Because you're going to take a lifelong vow of silence for a later incarnation, you have to have this rock solid belief of this continuity of your life, which also gives you immense courage. It's like, yeah, kill me now, alright, good for you. But I'll be fucking back. You're not going to be able to kill my actual life essence, my soul essence. I'm going to continue to evolve and continue to return.
DR. ROBERT: It's interesting that every major spiritual tradition in the world throughout history has always believed in reincarnation, except for the three monotheistic traditions, in their external forum. Their esoteric versions always have believed in reincarnation. So, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, in their esoteric forms already have incorporated an understanding of reincarnation.
AUBREY: Sufism, Gnosticism, and Kabbalism.
DR. ROBERT: Exactly. So, if you read the documents from the first few Christian centuries before the Catholic Church brought in their dogma, in the first few centuries, writers like Origen from Alexandria, Egypt, he wrote an incredible book called, "On First Principles" about what is the nature of the Christ being, what's the nature of a human being. And one thing he talked about was the transmigration of souls. Reincarnation was a Christian doctrine for the first few Christian centuries until the Catholic church got a hold of it. It was absolutely present in all the early documents. And in Judaism, there was a book written by a Jewish rabbi called "Beyond The Ashes" of this Kabbalistic Rabbi, finding the current reincarnations.
AUBREY: Do you have his name?
DR. ROBERT: I know we can look up the name of the book.
AUBREY: "Beyond The Ashes", name forthcoming.
DR. ROBERT: Yes. So, he talks about in the book that he sought out the current reincarnations of Jews who died in the Holocaust. And in many cases, they weren't currently incarnated as Jews. They had incarnated in other groups, but he sought them out in their current incarnations. And so, we can find all these indications of reincarnation being understood at the highest levels of the Western tradition, as well as every other tradition around the world. And again, that is one of the most important steps I believe, for the key questions of human life, who am I? Why am I here? What am I chosen to do in this current incarnation? To where we move beyond what is sometimes referred to as our present personality. I think I'm Robert Gilbert, I think that I incarnated in South Carolina and this particular Scottish background, or whatever it is. But the permanent personality is much more than that. We're beyond just our current gender incarnation, we're beyond the current racial incarnation, the current culture, something much bigger. And this is sometimes referred to as developing the vision of the eagle. The vision of the eagle is that if we look at the stream of time, if you stand at a stream of water, all you can see is that present moment, the place on the stream that you're standing right then. But an eagle can rise above the river of time, and see it from the beginning or to the end of the complete river. And that's a major part of initiation, and all classical traditions, to develop the vision of the eagle to see not only Earth incarnation, from the beginning to the end, but our personal incarnations, so that we understand ourselves based on the permanent personality, with all the incarnations together as one, rather than just the present personality. And that opens up a lot more potential for higher consciousness and all kinds of activities.
AUBREY: Yeah, absolutely. And it does an amazing thing with fear. If fear is the contractive force in the universe that actually keeps the flower, all the flowers, all the seven roses of the Rosicrucians, fear is what actually contracts them, and slows down their spin, and keeps them clogged and blocked and distorted, right?
DR. ROBERT: Yes.
AUBREY: This continuity of the self actually starts to loosen the grip on all of these fears, so that you're actually really free to start to flourish, because the temporal fears of this one finite incarnation, then are extended into a longer strand so that actually your deeds, your lessons, everything that you've learned, everything that you've evolved in your own life will carry forward with you into all lives going beyond this one.
DR. ROBERT: And once we understand that, not only does it change everything in our current lifetime, knowing that we are more than just our present incarnation as part of a much larger thread. It also allows us to understand what they were doing in some of the earlier traditions with some of their very advanced spiritual practices, and using things like sacred geometry, that there'd be certain patterns that you could activate in your energy field or you could stabilize in your energy field that help you to hold on to the siddhas, the gifts, the knowledge from the previous incarnation in the next incarnation. And so, this is like one of the hidden aspects of what's referred to as the Tree of Life in the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition, that in ancient Egypt, and among the Essenes and other traditions, they understood that this was actually a form to be constructed, an energy in the human physical body. Because once you are able to structure the energy and consciousness in the body, then when you leave the physical body, it is a structure that can help to hold that content as you move to the next incarnation. And until you understand this about reincarnation, you don't really get why they're doing these practices the way they are. Because they understand that everything is a pattern. It's like biohacking at its highest level, like a spiritual biohacking. Once you understand how to create the right pattern, that pattern is what creates a specific result. And that's the language--
AUBREY: I mean, it's beautiful to think of it in that way. Because you're like reinforcing and reifying a pattern that exists beyond the locality of the body. And you're saying, I am this pattern. And if I strengthen all of the energy centers of this pattern, I will be a being that can carry forward and all of the information can be coded and kind of distributed in a way into this pattern that strengthens the pattern and the geometry of it. And when that geometry comes into a new form, it will still be intact, and then the form will then acclimate to the pattern that's already been established.
DR. ROBERT: Absolutely. One of the great examples of this in modern times is a Greek Christian hermetic initiate, Stylianos Atteshlis, who was known to the public as Daskalos. Daskalos was a Greek initiate who became known to the public in the 1980s when a book was written about him by a professor from the University of Maine. But he had incredible abilities. Daskalos was known for his ability to dematerialize parts of people's bodies that he was working on, and rematerialize that body part in a completely healed form. He was known for being able to read, write and speak every ancient language he knew in previous incarnations. He could do fully conscious out-of-body travel and from an out-of-body state. He could rematerialize an etheric hand to manipulate physical objects from an out-of-body state, the kind of very advanced things we normally associate with some Eastern initiates. Because these western initiates that have these powers don't like to be known publicly. There's no structure to contain them in the Western world, the way that they exist in things like India.
AUBREY: And there's swords, or guns that come for them.
DR. ROBERT: Exactly.
AUBREY: That's the interesting thing about the Eastern and Western traditions. A lot of these Eastern traditions, you could be a guru, and you don't get killed.

DR. ROBERT: That's right. There's a structure for it in the society.
AUBREY: Yeah, it's like, oh, cool, you're a guru. Fantastic. Awesome. You want this temple? It's amazing. Just sit there and eat fruit and throw it at people, whatever you want to do. We're just talking about Maharajji there, just like gave snacks to everybody, and did magical things. But you become a messianic figure in the Western tradition, and it's like, here come the spears, here come the arrows. Didn't have a container for it, didn't have a story for it. The story is the container.
DR. ROBERT: That's right. And so Daskalos, he had these incredible abilities, and people would ask them, "How did you develop these abilities?" And he said, "I didn't develop them in this lifetime. I developed them through what I learned to do in the Egyptian temples thousands of years ago." He described the way that it was the Egyptian precursor to what later the Jewish capitalistic tradition called the tree of life, and at that time was referred to as the symbol of life, was constructed in the human energy field. He says, because I was able to create this to such a degree in the Egyptian initiations, I don't lose my knowledge of my previous incarnations. That's why I remember all the old languages and remember who around me who they were to me in a previous incarnation. He doesn't lose the knowledge, he doesn't lose the abilities. So, when we see it from that perspective, some of these very esoteric practices of building these structures in the energy field make a lot more sense. And they also show us how we, in our present incarnation, can do things that will lead to better conditions in our next incarnations. And so, that's something I think is very important, because today, particularly with psychotropic culture, people are getting more and more interested in sacred geometry. Because what it is--
AUBREY: Because you see it?
DR. ROBERT: Yeah, you directly perceive it, and you get all this beautiful psychotropic art that's happening today, of people like in their DMT experience, or whatever, this is what I'm seeing. But these are patterns that often you can find from ancient cultures. They were perceiving the two because this is the angelic language. This is the thought formed from the mind of God that is the structural basis of everything and physical existence. And so, there's a reason why we have this psychotropic renaissance right now. There's a reason why this is connected to the sacred geometry. And again, it all brings us back to spiritual science and to spiritual initiation in its current form that we're developing now in a very dynamic way at the present moment.
AUBREY: Yeah. So, when you were describing Daskalos, it reminded me a bit of my friend Matias de Stefano. Are you familiar with Matias de Stefano?
DR. ROBERT: Yes. I haven't met him, but I know of him from Gaia.
AUBREY: Oh, you've got to meet him. We'll make that happen. That must happen.
DR. ROBERT: Yes.
AUBREY: Because he remembers his past incarnations, and remembers the wisdom and technologies that he was accessing during those times. It's very interesting. He's become a good friend. And oftentimes, he has one of those phones that has like a little stylus where you write notes with the stylus. And he'll be writing in Atlantean, just because that's like his home language. Because his primary incarnation, it was the source point, was in the civilization of Kem. So, he has songs that he would sing. You'll just see him scribbling in notes and be like, "What the fuck is that?" He's like, "Oh, it's Atlantean. I'm just making notes for myself." And he's able to do, I just spent 10 days in Egypt with him.
DR. ROBERT: Wonderful.
AUBREY: And just seeing the absolutely ridiculous things that he was able to do, and the technologies he was able to do with different geometrical patterns. He had me and my wife in the center of a circle, and then he had three men and three women forming this kind of merkaba form, the six-pointed star, which was actually representative of a multi merkaba, instead of just a flat star, and the masculine and feminine polarities. And then he had them spin. And then he had two, basically like electrons moving over masculine, feminine, circling in the opposite direction. He created this portal, which awakened this massive explosion of my own heart center in a temple in Egypt. And it was, because he remembers these technologies that are capable. But what's interesting is he also remembers that one of the ways, some of the ways they used to be able to move some of the megalithic stones was form, like, enter into sympathetic resonance with the stone, change the vibration of self, and then in resonance with the stone, change the vibration of the stone, change the actual physical weight of the stone, so the stones can be easily moved. Because they weren't as heavy because you were actually changing the way. So this is a type of manipulation of the physical world that Daskalos seemed to be able to keep intact. And I want to talk to Matias about those powers, "Well, why can't you do it now?" He refers to the necessity of a field of belief that allows for that possibility, that actually the collective belief, if the collective belief does not allow for that possibility, the single person's belief that they're able to do that will be kind of butting up against the collective belief field. So that's why some of these things that were very, not only possible, but regular in times past are now no longer available. Daskalos seemed to be able to either have such a strong belief field that he is able to generate, that he was actually able to do some of these things that were known and done in previous times in this incarnation, so it seems like he had a particularly powerful ability. And there's other examples of people who have had these abilities.
DR. ROBERT: I think one of the key concepts here is about structuring the subtle body. Now for me, this is like the million dollar idea that we hardly hear about anymore in metaphysical circles, that our subtle body is structured by every thought that we have, every emotion we have, every action we take. All those things create particular types of energy emanations, particular vibrations, and they allow the subtle body to take on certain structures, for better or for worse. And so, the ability to work consciously with structuring the subtle bodies for some of the people to the level of a Daskalos, they've got a structure to the level they can still do some of these things. But to back up your point, Daskalos himself said there were things that he could do in the Egyptian times that he cannot do now, because he said the conditions on the earth have changed. So they've become much more dense on the earth than they were previously. And he talked about a way that the vibrational forces, the etheric life forces on the earth have become more densified. And even for advanced initiates, it's a bit harder to do some of these miraculous levitation of stones things and such that they could have done much more readily 5,000 years ago. And so, I think that this can be tied into the idea about the belief field, in that if we think of everything as being a vibrational resonator, every human being with the thoughts they're generating, the emotions they're generating is emanating like a radio waves tower all the time, and helping to construct the vibrational field and the world around us. That is affecting the etheric field of the Earth itself, and can make some of these things easier or more difficult. One of the great concepts I want to throw into this from my teacher in Egypt, Dr. Ibraham Karim, the founder of biogeometry, is this idea that in the ancient traditions, they talked about creating a new golden age. And this is not an abstract metaphor, we literally can create a new golden age because one of the energies we work with in biogeometry, is something that's referred to as the higher harmonic of gold. So, when you see these religious paintings of a gold field around the head, or the entire body of an initiate--
AUBREY: A halo?
DR. ROBERT: Yes, it's not a metaphor. It's a literal energy emanation of a gold quality. And so this is part of an alchemical transformation process. And so, we can bring the energy fields of the Earth up to this gold emanation, and literally create a new golden age based on these principles. So, through the structuring of our own subtle bodies, and the development of the raising of our consciousness and energetic potential, it affects the world around us.
AUBREY: And I think this is again, another one of those tricks where people tried to reduce alchemy to a bunch of scientific kooks in the basement trying to turn actual lead into actual gold. When actually, maybe that could have been possible. But the first requisite kind of process for the initiate was to turn their own etheric lead, into etheric gold so that they were vibrating at the frequency of gold. And then the very best of those adepts and masters could potentially manipulate the base of lead in the physical density into actual gold. But that's like the hypothetical masters in trick, and at that point, when they're already radiating gold energy, they probably don't even care that much about gold. That's right. You know what I mean?
DR. ROBERT: That's right.
AUBREY: So you almost have to get to the point where you don't care about gold, if you're going to make gold out of lead. So, we have it all backwards, but we tried to reduce it to this thing. And a lot of people probably fell for that path. Like, I want to make gold or mercury or lead, or something like that.
DR. ROBERT: Rudolf Steiner in the Rosicrucian tradition has a great term for this. He calls it cult materialism. It should really be a spiritual principle, but you get so materialistic, it's like, oh, can I make physical gold out of it and make a bunch of money? And again, my Egyptian teacher, Dr. Karim says that the story of Midas is like the cautionary tale about this. He followed the wrong path trying to make the physical gold. But then in the end, he couldn't eat anything, and he died. Because everything turned to gold.
AUBREY: Yeah, he turned the real gold of life into lead.
DR. ROBERT: Exactly. And so, one of the things though, like there's a practice that we talk about in Egyptian biogeometry. Now, we use a variety of energetic tools in Egyptian biogeometry that were designed by Dr. Karim, and are made in Egypt to detect the different energy qualities, like higher harmonic of gold. But a very simple example of how it could be done is that you can take a sample of actual physical gold in one hand, because physical gold is a crystallization or condensation of the etheric gold energy. So it becomes a sample of that energy. So, you hold a sample of physical gold in one hand, take a pendulum in another hand, and connect energetically the two together. And then if you put the pendulum into a back and forth search position over a person's energy field, you might only get a very slight pull. But if the person goes into deep authentic blessing or prayer, you'll see the pendulum start rotating very quickly, because it's connected to that gold energy of what's being held in the other hand. Because the person is literally emanating this gold energy from their energy field, when they're in a state of true blessing, true prayer, or a state of unconditional love.
AUBREY: Alright, so, this seems very pragmatic for those fellow occultists who are listening. It seems like a very pragmatic process here. So you got gold in one hand. Maybe it's a coin, maybe it's a bar, maybe it's a piece of jewelry that's made out of gold, whatever. You have gold in one hand and then you have a pendulum, and I know that Ibrahim Karim, he has his own particularly sacred geometry pendants that he uses for this, which is probably the highest level that you can do. I don't necessarily want to go into that rabbit hole but we can. But pendulum, because I'm assuming it works with other pendulums as well that--
DR. ROBERT: For this process, does not require a specialized biogeometry pendulum. It can be a fishing weight on the end of a string, simply oscillating.
AUBREY: Right. Alright, so you're then basically creating as I use the term sympathetic resonance from the gold to the pendulum, so that the pendulum is detecting gold frequency. Is that right? And then you're moving it up and down energy centers of the body, and seeing where there is strong gold energy.
DR. ROBERT: That can be done, although that's a different practice than the one I was just describing. The one I was just describing, when we're in the state of blessing, prayer, unconditional love, the gold energy is emanated from the entire body, the entire energy field.
AUBREY: So, what are you using the pendulum for?
DR. ROBERT: The pendulum allows you to see the movement connected to if that energy is present or absent. So for example--
AUBREY: But that sounds like a diagnostic.
DR. ROBERT: If you want to call it that, but it's basically detecting the presence or the absence of a specific vibrational quality.
AUBREY: That sounds like a diagnostic.
DR. ROBERT: Okay.
AUBREY: Right? Because you're detecting whether it's the gold, the emanation of the gold energy is--
DR. ROBERT: Is present or absent.
AUBREY: Present or absent, or to the degree at which it's present.
DR. ROBERT: And that point, in this very simple analog method, we have much more advanced methods in biogeometry but this is just to describe something very simple. Then you'll actually get an increase of the rate of rotation, and the amplitude of the swing as the amount of that higher harmonic of gold energy increases. So if you test any place that's called a power spot on earth in this method, you'll find it has that strong higher harmonic of gold energy, it's a power spot. If you test any of the chakras in the human body, it will have a certain amount of this. But what we do with our thoughts and our emotions, etc. can determine whether or not we are constantly emanating this higher harmonic of gold into our environment, that then becomes part of the general mix and the environment around us, or whether we're actually generating other vibrational qualities that are sometimes quite toxic or quite harmful.
AUBREY: Alright, so let's say there's somebody on a bodywork table. Gold in one hand, they've got a pendulum in another. And I'm finding, let's say, the mind, the third eye energy. Wow, a lot of gold, beautiful thoughts coming out of here. Strong Energy. Alright, then I'm moving down to the sacral chakra, for example. That sexual energy, that power source, and I'm like, wow, not a lot of gold energy circulating from this point. So, that to me would mean that, alright, so now what do I do? Is there something that I can do with the pendulum and with my, I'm using me as a surrogate, as just an avatar for any practitioner who wants to practice this. So let's say you determine, this is feeling pretty good. You may actually feel that the whole field is absent of gold energy, which, at that point, there's something to elevate the whole field. But let's say you find an imbalance, like a strong mind, low sexual energy center.
DR. ROBERT: Yes. So there's many different ways around it. Any type of vibrational input into the weak center could be used all kinds of different methods to do it. There could be essential oils, it could be various types of natural plant substances. It could be any number--
AUBREY: Some type of reiki, some type of intentionality.
DR. ROBERT: And in classical traditions, there is a very interesting aspect of this work in the human energy field. That just like we talk about seven chakras, there's a hidden pattern in a lot of classical teachings. So for example, in the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition, the original Hebrew alphabet is 22 letters. And in the classic works of Sefer Yetzirah, the Book of Formation, it says those 22 letters break up into three sets. There are three mother letters, seven double letters, and 12 elemental letters. Now, the hidden part of that coding is that there are three major energy centers in the human body, for our astral body, or our consciousness work. There are seven major centers in the etheric life body that we think of as the chakras. There's 12 levels of differentiation within the physical body that you see in these medieval diagrams. But sticking with the three for the moment, there's three major energy centers in the body. It's understood in many traditions, but one of the clearest descriptions is in the Chinese tradition. So, in Chinese medicine, they talk about the upper elixir field. Upper elixir field is around the consciousness in the head. And certain alchemy happens here. Then there's the middle elixir field that happens around the chest and the heart. Then there's the lower dantian, or lower elixir field, and that's in the lower abdomen areas. And so--
AUBREY: And for those of you who don't know, the dantian is, I don't know, roughly an inch below the belly button. And it's kind of deep. If you do body work, you can find that spot. It's almost like the center of centers in a way. There's another center in the heart, but the dantian is very much like a center of incarnation--
DR. ROBERT: It's the center of balance for the physical body in Chinese medicine. And it's really fascinating, again, to know that dantian means elixir field. So, this is where we do internal alchemy. And so, if a person was to have, let's say, a weakness in the sacral chakra, then it's possible to develop the thought forms from the upper dantian that have that higher harmonic of gold energy, and the opening of the heart chakra to develop a lot more of that gold energy, and to direct that to the sacral chakra as a way of working together with the three elixir fields. That would be one internal alchemy method. We could also have external alchemy, where again, you're using energy medicine from the outside or essential oils or plants, or whatever it is, to bring the vibrational force to that center. So it can be generated inside the human being to develop our own forces and to direct them to the place needed in the body, or from an external source coming in. But with that, it'd be a question then, with our discussion of higher harmonic of gold, to be able to increase that higher harmonic of gold. Now, that's increasing the alchemical potential of that center. Because many people, their sexuality is not full of alchemical potential. There's all kinds of neuroses or blockages or all kinds of things. Their understanding of it, their relationship to it may not be a purely healthy one. But if they can understand it in the deeper form, where literally the higher harmonic of gold is the vibrational signature, it's the vibrational resonance with the divine plane, with the state of unity, the state of oneness, that's simply being expressed by the gold field. It shows the connection to that unity state. And so that becomes very strong in the sacral chakra. That greatly increases the ability of the person to attain the unity merging, tantric goal of sexual activity. Because so much gold is contained in that chakra. And again, the more in the whole body, the better. Because the whole body should become a tantric instrument. And all of the five senses become tantric forms to work with sight and smell.
AUBREY: Yeah. Would it be good to have a gold pendulum, if you could?
DR. ROBERT: You could, but it's not absolutely necessary. Because you can get the same result with particular types of shapes, or certain types of number sequences. So, Egyptian biogeometry, again, from my friend, Dr. Karim in Egypt, is sometimes referred to as nature's design language. What's the pattern that everything is created on? Nature's design language of shape, sound, color, motion, angle, proportion, every one of those things is its own quality scale. So, there are people that are healers with light and color. And so, a particular color will have an effect on the human energy field that's different from a different color. Some people are sound healers, and one sound will have a different effect on the field than a different sound.
AUBREY: Yeah, I wish my wife was here. She would, Oh, there she is.
DR. ROBERT: She is here.
AUBREY: There she is. Sound healer.
DR. ROBERT: Exactly.
AUBREY: So, she knows exactly what we're talking about.
DR. ROBERT: So, with biogeometry, we can also create this with geometric shapes. And also with again, things like number sequences. So, putting together the correct shapes and the correct numerical sequences can create the same vibrational quality as actual physical gold could. And that, again, is part of the steeper mysteries of ancient Egypt and the alchemical work of all traditions.
AUBREY: I'm making a gold pendulum.
DR. ROBERT: Oh, yeah. It's beautiful. I'll say that Dr. Karim himself has a particular pendulum that he created to have the shapes that resonate with the seven planes of nature, the seven spiritual planes, made out of pure gold.
AUBREY: That's pretty dope. That's a power tool. Alright, so this is really illuminating part of this process of going through and healing both yourself and other people if you're in the process of, because actually, once you see other people as just different emanations of the self, then the actual desire to heal self collectively grows stronger. So we're starting to understand that. I saw in one of the videos that you produced, excellent, excellent work that you're putting out there. And I just encourage everybody to devour a lot of the content that you have out there. There was basically something likened to the Hippocratic Oath, which has been obviously very much abused, which is, do no harm. So in these orders of understanding, there was always this idea, as you develop these powers, do not use these powers for your own selfish gain at the detriment of others. And that was the unbreakable principle of working with this kind of, being a lightworker basically,
DR. ROBERT: It's one of the core principles of the Rosicrucian tradition, which is that all the powers, all the siddhas, all the knowledge, all the abilities that we get on the path are to be put to the service of other people. It's an absolute foundation of the path.
AUBREY: Yeah. All right. So, there's all of this that's happening in the physical body, in our 3D, in our life. We've talked about some of the history, we've talked about Empire, we've talked about the slaughter of different orders, we've talked about the discovery, talked about physical gold, we've talked about all these things. But let's talk about the way that the Rosicrucians, the Gnostics understood and potentially even the Zoroastrians understood the nonphysical dimensions. And you talked about three particular beings that I would really like to illuminate for the audience, and also for myself. The beings being Lucifer, Satan, who is related to Set, which was I thought was very interesting, which is an Egyptian God, Osiris, I know a bunch of different pieces. That's also an interesting myth. And then, Ahriman, which is...

DR. ROBERT: Well, Ahriman and Satan are the same. They're different names for the same being from different traditions. And the third is actually the Christ in the Rosicrucian tradition.
AUBREY: Got it. So, Ahriman and Satan are just different names for the same...
DR. ROBERT: Yes.
AUBREY: So, Ahriman, Set, Satan. But isn't from this kind of understanding of an egregore basically, like a thought form actually condensing a reality in the nonphysical. Like, the more you actually worship a being with a particular quality, would there not be a little bit of disambiguation between these entities based upon what has been placed upon the names themselves, even if they come from a similar origin?
DR. ROBERT: Yes, that's a very good, deeper aspect of this whole thing. So, let's start with the fundamentals of it. So, if we started the divine plane, everything is one. It's all the unity, it's the source light. Then as you move to the spiritual plane, things begin to differentiate out into different high level beings that have specific qualities or powers from the Godhead. Like Shiva and Shakti as the initial power split. Shiva is holding the divine center at all times. But it's the Shakti that creates everything, it's the divine feminine, it's moving around that center all the time. So they all have a particular principle involved with them. So, another polarized principle is the one of the complete range or gamut from completely spiritualized to completely materialistic. And so, these things at the highest divine plane level is a thought form in the mind of God, that as that thought from then begins to manifest out going toward physical crystallization as its final stage, at its spiritual plane level, it'll become embodied with a tendency of certain beings. Certain beings are going to be very attracted to the process of materializing things into physical matter. That's like the Demiurge we talked about before with the Gnostics. Other beings are not going to want to deal much with the physical plane, and they're going to want to keep very nonphysical and very spiritual. Now, as that affects human beings, that can be two opposite influences on us that we can become aware of from different types of spiritual beings that we encounter. So, for the one extreme, spiritual beings that are extremely spiritualized, much more advanced than we are, but don't fully understand the purpose of the physical plane, and just try to get us to have constant ecstatic processes and get off the physical plane and not reincarnate, and that sort of thing, that's toward a particular aspect of spiritual light that became known in the earlier Western traditions as Lucifer or light bearer. These beings don't necessarily intend harm, but they, not wanting to deal with the physical manifestation, muck down there as they see it. They see human beings as innocent children being thrown in a slaughterhouse going into the physical world. So, they get off the cycle of karma and reincarnation, and come back to the spiritual world. This is your real home. And so, these beings were referred to again as Lucifer or light bearers.
AUBREY: I mean, when you're saying referred to as Lucifer, like who's referring to, because Lucifer has not been referred to like that by most people.
DR. ROBERT: Well, we're talking about what's the deeper aspect behind it that then came into terminology, and the Hebrew tradition and the Greek tradition that then became known in the Western tradition as Lucifer. It moved through these stages.
AUBREY: At some point it got corrupted dramatically, and then actually conflated with Satan.
DR. ROBERT: They couldn't even tell the difference between the two. I keep trying to keep it as simple as possible. This is like one extreme--
AUBREY: And I'm going to keep trying to keep it as complicated as possible.
DR. ROBERT: Okay, great.
AUBREY: So, we'll begin a good tension here.
DR. ROBERT: Between the two of us, we'll always hit the center. So, with the Luciferic beings, they influence human beings in a way that does pull people towards spiritual activity. And we should never think of something like oh, those bad people over there are influenced by Lucifer, not me. We're all influenced by these beings all the time.
AUBREY: Of course. You talked about us having a permeable spiritual membrane, where all these beings are actually available at all different times.
DR. ROBERT: They're moving through us all the time. And so, these Luciferic beings, their influence towards spirituality, is that the light can be so bright that it blinds. Whereas the opposite, the satanic or Ahrimanic is like complete darkness. But either one can lead to an inability to see. And so, this tremendous light from the Luciferic beings can sometimes have the influence on people toward illusory forms of spiritual development. Things that are based on not true spiritual principles or upon wanting constant ecstatic process where a person becomes like a heroin addict, or something like that, because they want to just be in this out of the body, elevated state all the time. And of course, the physical body can't tolerate that. It doesn't work in the physical world to do that. But that's like a Luciferic influence. And the opposite of that--
AUBREY: I mean, so, as I'm imagining this, I would have never made this correlation without understanding this idea of a Luciferic being, but you imagine some of the monastic traditions as being highly Luciferic. Basically, like all the asceticism, which is like deny the body, deny the body, spirit is the only thing that matters, go seek the clear light, everything else is bullshit, all is my, like all of these you can see that as another form of Luciferic influence, as well as the kind of escapism from somebody who just wants to be in a ketamine journey all day all the time, where they're just experiencing the nonphysical reality, disassociating from the flesh, and getting stuck in that cycle. So, you can see how there's a beauty to the impulse. But there's also a shadow to the impulse, if we allow it to be too strong in relation to the field of the other beings, being Satan in Christ, if you want to use those terms. The three different types of beings.
DR. ROBERT: Again, that's the way it'd be expressed in the Rosicrucian tradition, but the principles are universal. And so, you're absolutely right, that in a very ascetic approach, it's extremely Luciferic. Because it's kind of denying the body and denying the physical world. And we see that a lot in everybody's spirituality. There's a part of us that we're attracted to that Luciferic side. And it's not 100% bad. One of the difficulties of even talking about this in the modern world--
AUBREY: Christians get all mad.
DR. ROBERT: Well, the Christians have such a superficial caricature of the reality of these beings, that to talk about the reality of what Luciferic beings are, and how they influence us, it's going to be quite difficult. Because I think once you use that name, they think they know what it is, but it's a caricature of what it really is. So, we're influenced by these beings all the time, all these beings. It's a constant process, and we have to just dynamically balance it all the time. They all have to be present.
AUBREY: Let's stick with Lucifer for a moment. I went through an interesting kind of thought process where I looked out and I saw the morning star, which is Venus. The morning star is also referred to as Lucifer. And so, I made this correlation, Lucifer Morningstar Venus, and then the demonization of sexuality, which a lot of people have Venus, which stands for Eros basically, it's Aphrodite. And is like, this is just the biggest fucking hoax that's ever been pulled. But I can also see that potentially, there was a deeper truth if someone was completely lost in the light that's available from Eros alone. So then they could become this kind of hedonistic, orgiastic, in a way like bacchanal, like the Luciferic impulse to actually transcend, and just merge with the light through the vehicle of sexuality could also be Luciferic.
DR. ROBERT: Yes, absolutely. Because if you had pure Eros with no agape, without universal love to go with the Eros, it could become unbalanced. And so, this is all a principle of balance. So, everything is always... As a divine principle, you have two extremes, and then you have the perfect balance in the center. So, the Luciferic aspect is pulling us towards spirituality. But if it becomes too extreme and unbalanced, it can become illusory forms of spirituality, or addictive forms of living, or things that pull us away from taking full advantage of physical incarnation and the nitty gritty of physical life. The opposite sides of that is going to be the forces that are actually involved, like the talks about, with the Gnostics with the Demiurge, with the process of crystallizing the higher energy patterns and consciousness patterns from the Godhead into physical reality, to literally make the physical plane. And again, that's how the Demiurge was understood. But long before Gnostic Christianity, we had the Zoroastrian tradition. So, the Zoroastrian tradition from Persia, they were one of the first traditions in the world to give a name to this other extreme, the materialistic extreme. Because in ancient times of human history, people had more of a kind of effortless clairvoyance. They perceive spiritual realities, much more usually than we do, become much more condensed, become much more materialistic over time. So, if you read ancient texts, people just seeing spiritual beings everywhere. But now it's an extraordinary thing if people do. So, in ancient times, they didn't perceive this materialistic being's influence as much but by the Zoroastrian era, they began to perceive it. So, they refer to that being as Angra Mainyu, or as Ahriman. And Ahriman, is considered then, that's the archetype of the dark lord of the earth that the Gnostics talked about. This is the being that actually allows the physical plane to get crystallized. It's a group of beings--
AUBREY: We're moving away from Lucifer. So, in the Zoroastrian tradition, do they even have an idea of Lucifer as we've described, or is that not really there?
DR. ROBERT: Not in as--
AUBREY: Clearly they have more of a duality instead of a trilogy, right?
DR. ROBERT: In a sense. They had the aspect of what we would think of as the Christ being, which they called Ahura Mazdā, which means the being that I see in the sun, the being glimpsed in the aura of the sun. And Ahura Mazdā was opposed by Ahriman. So they had the huge contribution that they brought forward, this understanding of the opposite being, but part of that is they didn't focus as much on the Luciferic side, because now we're bringing this new knowledge about this being which hadn't been as present before. And so, they talked about the Dark Lord of the Earth, Ahriman. And then as the Zoroastrian tradition in time period moved into some of the Egyptian mysteries, then this being was referred to as Set. Now they understood that the Pharaoh, the initiate, had to have their power activated, or had to have certain dispensations from Set. So you'll see these images from ancient Egypt where Set, like on one side, Horus on the other side. They're like doing things to the energy field of the Pharaoh or an initiate. So Set has to be involved with that. Because this is a being that's involved with living on the physical earth and the powers of the physical earth. So, they never had a thing like, we're just going to get rid of Set. You couldn't do that. He's an essential part of this world. But he is an opposition being. Again he did dismember Osiris, and he is a being that is in opposition. Because if we were to give ourselves completely over to the set impulse, we would be completely materialistic, we would lose all spiritual understanding, all spiritual perception. Our spiritual path would decay into something that would be fairly--
AUBREY: And even in the myth of Osiris, he cuts him into 12 pieces, or whatever which is basically
DR. ROBERT: 14, I think.
AUBREY: 14, yeah. And the idea of that, that is what material world does, is it takes the light, the light of source, and it cuts it into a bunch of different pieces.
DR. ROBERT: And then they couldn't find the phallus, and that becomes part of what--
AUBREY: Isis kept it for a little while. She was playing around with it, that's my theory.
DR. ROBERT: But we have to understand that in the--
AUBREY: It was the first dildo, Osiris's etheric cock.
DR. ROBERT: Per the Egyptian tradition, they would show very plainly, a pharaoh or an initiate with an erection. They wouldn't show that in the Catholic Church. But that was like a basic thing in ancient Egypt.
AUBREY: Of course, same with Greek and Roman tradition.
DR. ROBERT: Yeah, there's a power principle. And so, what it shows us, that Set can take away your power if you were to have too much of that influence. As you become completely materialistic, you'd lose your spiritual power. And so, it's a bit of an opposition being, but not one that you get rid of, because it has a place here and you have to even be empowered by that being, is the way they looked at it. So, when Moses led the Hebrews out of Egypt, and of course, Moses was an initiate in the Egyptian temples. He knew their practices. The concept of Set became in Hebrew, Ha-Satan, meaning the adversary. And Ha-Satan became simplified to Satan in the later Christian tradition. So Satan is that being of complete materialism. And what happened is because they tried to take the deeper teachings away from the public, and you have to go through the Catholic Church and things to access any spiritual knowledge, or to connect to spirit, is they lost the differentiation for the public between Lucifer and Ahriman. And so, they started talking about them like they're just the devil. Like they're the opposition being. And they turned it into a simple polarity between Christ and the devil. The problem is, anytime you do that you're going to create terrible destruction in people's understanding, and in social processes on the earth. Because it's always the true principle is like what the Tibetans teach about the middle way, the middle path, even in the Jewish Kabbalah on the tree of life, there's the two side pillars. One is Luciferic, one is Ahrimanic. And then the middle pillar, it's the only one that goes all the way up to Kether at the top, and all the way down to Malchuth at the bottom. It's the only one that goes all the way up to heaven and earth. That's the principle of the perfect balance between extremes. So we can't get rid of the extremes. What we do is we constantly dynamically balance those extremes. That's the path to health, can't be too hot or too cold. You can't eat too much or too little. It's a matter of the Tibetan middle path. And so when you reduce it to, in this case, Christ versus the devil, then anything you don't like in society is going to be of the devil. Like sexuality. Well, sexuality is from the devil. You can only have sex in the missionary position, if you're going to have children or whatever. Everything gets put in that way. And then people start thinking subconsciously, whenever you've got two polarities, rather than both being essential, and equally good, and having to come into the right balance, they start thinking one is good, and one is bad. Liberal or conservative, one is good, one is bad. Male or female, one is good, one is bad. And this leads to destruction.
AUBREY: Yeah, it's a nightmare for the actual healthy structuring of their consciousness to have these polarities and these different energies, with the value proposition of good and bad put in them. Rather than necessary components of a healthy system of the yin and the yang, of this balanced polarity that requires both to exist. But when you put the value proposition of good and bad, it actually corrupts the mind in a way that you can no longer see the truth. And again, to go back to a Buddhist teaching from John Churchill, who I had on the podcast, he talked about the highest realization is, being the place where the demon and the Buddha meet. So they started the practice of Tonka worship. It wasn't even worship, it was almost that they were evoking their own demonic and Buddhic Christ-like qualities and expressing them, as in totality and full balance. That was actually what the higher initiates were actually attempting to do.
DR. ROBERT: Yes. So it was understood in the initiation traditions that we're constantly being influenced by the Luciferic beings that help pull us towards spirituality, where we can't give ourselves completely over to them, or things will get very unbalanced, and that we're constantly being influenced--
AUBREY: Yeah, and it's a slippery slope into the shiny materialist spirituality, like the escapist spirituality, what Marc Gafni would call the pseudo Eros. Like the false light, almost. Here's a glimpse of it. Take a little more of this drug, take a little, shoot up this heroin, take this thing, like you'll experience it. Give up everything. Or, even the darkest form, I suppose it could be, give up this life. This life is bullshit.
DR. ROBERT: Yes, exactly.
AUBREY: You know what I mean? So there's ways in which that light could be, if it's out of balance.
DR. ROBERT: Absolutely.
AUBREY: So really, it seems that the Rosicrucians had in some ways, and even an evolution of the Zoroastrian, which was important because it created things in balance, and the necessity of the tension between the balance, which was also the Buddhist kind of concept of the tension between the balance, and also the Hindu, Shiva. There's a lot of balance of a duality. But then adding the Trinity seems like it's even a more interesting and complex way to understand and structure our consciousness if our goal is balance.
DR. ROBERT: I actually think that understanding of the three foldness of it, the two extremes, and then the middle path in the center, is essential today to heal our societal rifts. Otherwise, we think one extreme is the right way and the other extreme is the wrong way. And people will just tear each other up in society if that's the idea, rather than understanding, bring it together in the center. So the--
AUBREY: Now, let's talk about the Christ. Let's talk about the Christ being, and the Christ archetype. Because we've focused on the darker... Well--
DR. ROBERT: The two extremes.
AUBREY: The two extremes, yeah.
DR. ROBERT: So, the understanding then, is that both these forces have to be present. Extreme spirituality, which we call an unbalanced extreme materiality, which creates the physical plane, but we can't give ourselves over to it. And so, something's going to hold the center. And so, the sacred geometry image for this is going to be that, Lucifer and Ahriman are their own particular extremes, are their own worlds. So, the fundamental expression of an entity, of a thing, is in its perfect form as a circle or a sphere. So, you have two spheres, and where they perfectly overlap creates an almond shape in the middle that's called the Vesica Pisces. And so, the Vesica form shows two extremes either side and where they overlap creates this perfect balance. So, in the Masonic built temples in Europe, you will see above the entryway into the Cathedral, the Christ inside of the Vesica. They don't show you the other two circles, but they show you that Christ is holding the center in the Vesica. But sometimes, you'll see things like the Buddha in the center of Vesica, in the Eastern traditions. So, whatever their being is of a being that has spiritual wisdom or balance, and knows how to balance these forces, that's what's held in the Vesica and the sacred geometry for him. So it was understood in the Rosicrucian tradition, that the Christ being and other beings of a similar nature, like at the archangelic level, it'd be Archangel Mikael, that these are beings that hold a balance between heaven and earth, between spirit and matter. And they can help us to unify these two things in a healthy way. And that's the foundation of mental health, emotional health, physical health, having a life on Earth, that leads to a great outcome or not. And so, this was part of the understanding that the Christic process is to bring in the power of the being of the sun, the solar logos, in an alchemical process, to bring it in, like was shown with the iconography around Jesus. Jesus, when he's going through that process of bringing in the Christ, has the descent of the dove of the Holy Spirit coming down the central column and entering into the crown center, in the classic Christian iconography. And so, this is turning ourselves into a grail cup, allowing a being of a higher level that holds the balance to enter into us. Because the whole idea of the Christ is that this is a very high spiritual being, the being behind the sun. This is meant quite literally, it's not a metaphor. That behind everything we see in physical reality, there are nonphysical beings. So, behind the sun, there's a great being. And we can bring that being into ourselves. Now, this had been done for thousands of years previously, and other spiritual traditions with what they called sun and moon alchemy, where they would bring in solar and lunar forces into their own body for alchemical purposes. But this has a slightly different focus to it. So, it was understood that Jesus had the capacity as an advanced initiate, to do this process of bringing the Christ being into his own sheath in a very powerful, tangible way. And so, this then creates the understanding in the Rosicrucian tradition, that unbound spirituality is connected to the spiritual beings that we experience on the spiritual path, that are unbalanced, that are referred to as Luciferic beings. And then, the materialistic impulse that we're constantly dealing with in our physical lives and spiritual lives related to the Ahrimanic beings. And then the being that holds the perfect balance in the center is the Christ being.
AUBREY: Now, are you using the sun being and the Luciferic being as somewhat interchangeable, or is it separate?
DR. ROBERT: No, separate. We have to understand that when they understood the nature of this being in the Zoroastrian tradition, they referred to him as Ahura Mazdā, the spiritual being seen in the aura of the sun. A person who had clairvoyance could actually perceive the sun being, and that was the Ahura Mazdā. So, this is like a later understanding of the same principle. They refer to them as the solar logos. So, the solar logo then becomes the Christ being in Christian understanding, but really the same as Ahura Mazdā, and really connected to the sun being understood in multiple traditions. But now with the development of the alchemical process that Jesus could do, and bringing the Christ being into the physical seas of the body, to transform consciousness, energy, everything else. The focus became there with the way that we understand Christ in the Rosicrucian tradition or in the Western tradition today. But as a complete system, then you have unbalanced spirituality Lucifer, unbalanced materiality with Ahriman, and the Christ being holds the balance between the two as a spiritual being who incarnated into the physical plane, which most of them don't do, and to that level.
AUBREY: So within the sun, as I'm trying to understand this, because I'm seeing Christ in the center of the Vesica Pisces. I'm seeing Ahriman on one side, and what's the name of the light being in Zoroastrianism?
DR. ROBERT: Ahura Mazdā.
AUBREY: Ahura Mazdā, but in the Rosicrucian, it's Satan and Lucifer. And then there's Christ in between.
DR. ROBERT: They actually use the term Ahriman rather than Satan, because it's so misunderstood today that--
AUBREY: Right, okay.
DR. ROBERT: But yeah, same thing.
AUBREY: And then there's the light being of the Sun, which seems very much like the source light behind it all, almost like the Tao that's behind all of creation. It's what my teacher, Marc Gafni would call, Shekhinah. Like the force of Eros that moves underneath everything else. And so he allows that to kind of pour through as he's holding the opposite. So, it very much, it's kind of bringing all of these systems together in a way where Jesus as the point of the Trinity, or Christ, I should say, is the point of the Trinity. Jesus is the one who accessed the Christ, is the balance point in the center, the middle path that then allows because of the balance of those two things, the light of the sun, light of the source, Eros, Shekhinah, the Tao, whatever, to move through, and actually explode him or her into full potentiality.
DR. ROBERT: Because it was understood in all the ancient traditions that everything on the physical plane, including all the planetary forms, had a spiritual being behind it. And so, the source of all life in our solar system, all light, all heat, all life is the sun. So, in the early Christian centuries, they were trying to figure out what is the nature of the Christ being. We have all of these older types of understandings of spiritual beings, what spiritual being is the Christ being? And so, this was described in the early Christian centuries before the Catholic Church's dogma came in, in the 3rd century AD in Alexandria, Egypt, with, now known as a church father named Origen. And origin wrote in a book called "On First Principles". He said the way to understand what the Christ's being is, is that the Godhead is a being that is everything. It is literally the one source of everything, it contains everything inside of it. And this being is so vast, you can't really perceive it as a separate thing, as an incarnated being, because it's everything. But what the Christ's being is, is moving from the divine plane level, to what they would refer to as the macrocosmic level. It is the macrocosmic emanation of the Godhead with all the qualities of the Godhead, but reduced in scale, to where human beings can perceive and interact with this being.
AUBREY: Atman is Brahman, they're the same, but they're different. It's the local point of the collective field of God.
DR. ROBERT: It's very much the same thing in esoteric Christianity, that from the Godhead at the divine plane level, the macrocosmic emanation becomes the Christos, which then becomes the being that manifests physically as the sun in the solar system because it's a macrocosmic being not a microcosmic being. And, then human beings are the microcosmic emanation of the Godhead. We have all the qualities of the Godhead, but at a smaller scale, at the microcosmic level. And that's why they develop the saying in esoteric Christianity of not I, but Christ in me, because we're moving from our microcosmic level of an emanation of the Godhead, to start bringing in more macrocosmic aspects.
AUBREY: Yeah, being able to have the multidimensionality, and the understanding which creates paradox, ultimately, because that's also something you have to grapple with as you walk the path, is the paradox of physical three dimensional reality. I've got to go to work, I've got to eat, I got to do this stuff. And then, multidimensionality, the aspect of the angelic realms that don't require such things. You don't have to deal with it. Yeah, one of the things that's coming to mind is, it seems as if, actually, with this understanding that we've explained today of the Luciferic beings, I think a lot of people associate Christ with actually what the Luciferic impulse is, which is like nothing matters, but the light. And that's not what this model is saying about the Christ, because it's also held in balance by Ahriman, ultimately, right? It's the combination of both. So it's not like form is ridiculous, just go to the next life already. Be good so you get there. But actually, so there's been this interesting move where actually, the way that Christ has been taught, is taught as Lucifer in a way.
DR. ROBERT: This becomes a challenge in modern spirituality, because without a clear understanding of the two polarities, of the Luciferic and Ahrimanic, what happens is then people associate any being connected to light as being Christic, or a "good" being. In our case, good would be balanced. And that's not the way it is. We can be approached by all types of great beings of light, that don't have a balanced energy to them, that may be giving us counsel that is illusory, and is not real. Because again, the blinding light blinds as surely as the complete darkness. And so, it needs to be understood that we're, all of us, affected by the Luciferic and Ahrimanic beings at all times. Human beings are like fish in water that don't know we're living in water, and that there's all these other invisible forces moving through the water all the time. And the water is the spiritual world around us. We're embedded in it. And these beings are constantly moving through our energy field, and leaving traces of emotional impulses, thought forms, things of that kind, that we have to be clear enough to perceive that, separate it from what we ourselves are generating in our thought field and decide, do I want to go with that, or with this? And as a person really opens up spiritual perception, this is where the rubber hits the road in real spiritual development. And you start perceiving nonphysical beings and understanding the nonphysical influences coming in, without going off into some state of psychosis. It's got to be held in balance. That at that point, you can then differentiate, where's this information and these impulses coming from? The different types of beings. So, it was understood classically, and then that I got lost, that we go through certain stages. The first state is always mindfulness. It's simply to observe the content of our thoughts that we have, our emotions we have, our will impulses. Mindfulness is always the first stage, so that we become self-aware. And being self-aware, we already start to clean up a lot of our garbage. Because once we see it, it's kind of horrific. I can't believe I generated a thought from that negative about that person. That's completely destructive.
AUBREY: Right, these are my agreements in fear. We started to become aware of actually what we're doing. So awareness is, and that's also something that John Churchill, again, the Mayana Buddhists, he was talking about, is that most people think, well, that's the end goal, and actually, it is a momentous task to be aware, and there's levels and levels and levels of awareness. So, it is an ongoing process. So you can put that as become more aware, more aware, more aware. But it's actually not the end goal. He was like, that's like the first stage.
DR. ROBERT: That’s the beginning.
AUBREY: That's the beginning.
DR. ROBERT: It is, it really is.
AUBREY: That's just where we start. Most people think, oh, yeah, well, that's the goal, awareness. But it's just actually the first stop of the train.
DR. ROBERT: And so, seeing from a particular perspective, you develop the mindfulness, so that you're aware of your internal content, then you start to clean it up a bit, so that you're resonating at a higher level and more productive. Then you become aware of what's inside of your present personality. That then as you do the vision of the eagle, and you begin to see, this is a bead on a chain of multiple lifetimes, you then become more aware of your permanent personality. And then this helps you to understand what thoughts, feelings, etc. you're self-generating, versus those coming in from the outside. And then at that point, you start to perceive. you can in a healthy way, perceive nonphysical beings and influences, and start to have some discernment about what's the nature of the influences coming in. Because the average person who doesn't do any mindfulness, they are not aware of these influences coming in from the outside at all. They just think it's part of their own internal dialogue, if they're even conscious of it, and doesn't go straight to the subconscious. In the Rosicrucian tradition, there is a particular exercise or practice, that's known as the six essential exercises. And it's basically taking mindfulness to its full extent. They say that if a person does this series of practices, then they will be safeguarded against detrimental effects of all kinds of things in the world. It's really the foundation of everything. So, the first three practices are to observe the content in your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions. And then to illuminate what it is, so that you can direct your thoughts, feelings and actions in the best way possible. So, first, you observe what's there without trying to change it, to see what you're actually generating. And then you're consciously choosing the higher level thought forms, the higher level emotions, the higher level actions in the world in a fully conscious way. So, it's mindfulness taken to a full extent. Then the next practice is one of positivity. No matter how bad things look in your life or the world around you, to look for the positive hidden in it. So the Rosicrucians give one example of this. There's a Persian legend of the Christ, where the Christ is walking with a group of disciples past a dead dog. And the dog is rotted and smells and there's maggots crawling in it. And all of the disciples turn away in disgust. And the Christ looks at it as they walk by, turns to the disciples and smiles and says, "What beautiful teeth that animal had." It's like always looking for the positive in anything. And then the next exercise is radical openness. Radical openness to new perspectives, radical openness to new information, radical openness to new ways of living and being. And then the sixth and final exercise of it is to harmonize all that together in your daily life. So, you've got illuminated mind, illuminated heart, illuminated will, positivity, openness to new things, new ways, so you don't get caught in the old traps.
AUBREY: Illuminated will, I don't think we've fully expounded upon that.
DR. ROBERT: Okay, so just like you can, in a clear mind state, observe the thoughts you're generating, or the emotions you're generating, you can observe the impulses to the actions you take in your life. So, before you take any action, if you really observe yourself internally, you'll see that there's an impulse toward that action. And some of these actions may be detrimental actions. Like people that end up in prison. People that end up in prison have particular problems in impulse control. If they were able to perceive inside themselves the impulse before they took the action, they could choose and say, "Well, that's not the action I wanted to take--"
AUBREY: And the awareness of the source of the impulse.
DR. ROBERT: Exactly.

AUBREY: In the Kabbalist lineage that I'm studying, this is what we call the process of bearer, which is the process of the clarification of your desire, to understand what is driving what you want. And then ultimately, the goal is that what's driving what you want is that Christ archetype of the being that's in balance, that's actually one with the will of the universe. So, you try to clarify your desire so that your desire is ontically identical, or as close to identical as possible with the will of the universe as expressed through you as a unique incarnation of the unique self of the being of the one. So, the bearer is the awareness and clarification of your desire until what you want is what God wants, and what God wants is what you want. Then you're really in flow with the universe. It's like this infinity loop of, alright, what I want is what God wants, what God wants is what I want. And then that's when you're in bearer, you're in the clarification of your desire. And you've merged with the will of the universe.
DR. ROBERT: And at that point, you've got the prerequisite to do true divine tantra, and things of that kind. But not only are you maximizing your ability for the greatest level of pleasure, joy, etc. in sex, but also focusing on maximizing that in your partner. And at that point, having as the focal goal, the returning to the unity state, that both of you are in such an elevated state, you're both so happy, you're both so joyful, you're both so open, that at that point, there's no shields in place, and the merger to become one and to connect back to the divine, it then becomes possible. Now, I want to bring out one other hidden thing about the six exercises, that it's not always immediately obvious. But in doing these six exercises, think of them as things you're doing in your consciousness, but everything you do in your consciousness is structuring your energy body. So, when you do those six exercises, the way it's described by the Rosicrucians, is that your heart is a 12-petal lotus, like they talk about in India. Six of the petals of your 12-petal lotus, they say, were developed in earlier times of human evolution. We have to work on another six petals to complete the process in this time period. So, each one of those six exercises I just described, develop one of the six remaining lotus petals. Once those six remaining lotus petals are developed, all 12 lotus petals of the heart become active. At that point, the heart becomes a fully active center for the entire energy body. And it becomes the organizing center for the entire human body of energy, for a higher alchemical process to take place.
AUBREY: If someone wanted to double click on this, go deeper, understand the process of developing these six petals of the heart, this sixfold process, just real quick, where would they go? Maybe you have some resources, maybe there's a good source material that they could point to.
DR. ROBERT: So, thank you very much. In the resources I created, there are things that are toward spiritual science, which is developing consciousness and some that are toward developing energy with the vibrational science. So, the introductory course that I have online for the spiritual science is called Essential Teachings and Practices of Spiritual Science. And that goes into great detail about each of the six practices and the six essential practices, and describes everything step by step, for how you actually do it in a practical way in your own life. And it also covers a lot of things we haven't touched on about absolutely essential principles for developing consciousness and energy. So that's the essential teachings and practices.
AUBREY: And where do they go to find that?
DR. ROBERT: They go to my website, which is vesica.org. And Vesica, again, is that almond-shaped enclosure of the balance.
AUBREY: Beautiful. Alright, so I want to zoom out real quick, and talk about the imbalance collectively that we're experiencing in the world, because in consuming some of your material, and I agree, there is a strong Ahrimanic impulse that's sweeping and overreaching into our world.
DR. ROBERT: Yes.
AUBREY: And this is materialism, transhumanism, and you even make the connection to AI being actually the final step in the Ahrimanic victory, where everything becomes material, where you've actually split off all of your ability to access the higher spiritual actualization, and therefore split off your ability to access the Christ because you'll be completely out of balance. You'll be overtaken by the Ahrimanic kind of impulse. So, talk about this principle applied not to the individual, but to the collective, and where you see it showing up. And then the correlation to what people see and ascribe to these ideas of, is there actually a satanic, we usually use the word satanic, not many people use the word Ahrimanic. But is there a satanic undercurrent, and is this Ahrimanic being underpinning this and is there a structure behind it? What's happening here in the collective?
DR. ROBERT: So, the difficulty of discussing this, just like with discussing Lucifer and Ahriman to begin with, is that people associate certain things with the concepts, rather than the dynamic reality of what these beings actually are. And so, when we say something like, is there really a satanic force involved with this? The short answer is yes. But again, the difficulty of discussing it is the way that people have such a sensationalized view of it, and are often very reactive in their approach to it. They've been programmed with all kinds of things about this. Either it really exists like in fundamentalist Christianity and is behind everything, or it doesn't exist. And that's like a fear thought form you should get over. It's hard to talk about it in a realistic way. But there's definitely, these influences of the Luciferic and era moniker very, very strong at all times, on a mass societal level, as well as on a personal level. It's just a matter of microcosm and macrocosm in this form between the personal and the societal. So we can see that, for example, in the 1960s, American culture was quite Ahrimanic in many ways. And as a counter impulse, you then had the counterculture in the 60s form. And--
AUBREY: And that was their Luciferic.
DR. ROBERT: And it could have become very Christic. But it became Luciferic. Because there wasn't a clear understanding of the balance between the polarities. What happens time and time again in society is because we have the simplistic good versus evil polarity idea, is like this extreme must be good because that extreme is bad. Rather than understanding both extremes are unbalanced, and you got--
AUBREY: So, looking historically, we're coming out of the World War Two, it was about how many bullets and bombs and science and technology, and then we have the boomer--
DR. ROBERT: Can you buy everything?
AUBREY: You can get a house, you can have a white picket fence, you can have all of these different things. We got new food sources that are coming out, we got everything is materials. So it's Ahrimanic in its nature. And people are like, fuck this. There's something else here, and then they go swing too far on the pendulum the other side, and they get Luciferic, which is just chasing that bliss, chasing that light at the expense of what's happening in the physical.
DR. ROBERT: So, what we have to do now, particularly with the psychotropic renaissance that we're in right now, is make sure we don't have happen what happened in the 60s. I mean, we've got to learn from history, or we're going to repeat it every time. And so, if you look at something like what Timothy Leary told people, and he influenced a lot of people with this. He said, with the psychotropics in the 60s, you need to turn on, tune in and drop out. Well, to turn on and tune in is fantastic. But once you put in the drop out, now you're going to Luciferic thing. I'm not going to activate myself, to go to the center and balance the Ahrimanic aspect of the society. I'm just going to drop out. That's a purely Luciferic part of it. So, when people don't have discernment, the thing we have to develop at a societal level is discernment. And understand that it's always a matter of finding a center between two unbalanced polarities, with every social question, everything that we're doing, everything in our personal lives. It's always the balance point, the radical center between two extremes. Because we don't want the psychotropic renaissance right now to turn into this drop out thing, which could easily happen, because it can also happen that we become extremely self-absorbed, that my internal process is so fascinating as I'm working through all my old stuff, and I'm developing these new Siddhas and powers and abilities and seeing these things. We have to be careful of what was discussed in the past. And this is really at a societal level as well as individual. There are certain challenges that occur on the path of spiritual development. So, one of the first challenges that I talk about in my work, "Classical Idea" that happens when you begin to awaken spiritually, is something that is known in the Rosicrucian tradition as Luciferic inflation. That's where you begin to get a little bit of knowledge, a little bit of spiritual powers or Siddhas. And immediately, as soon as you do that, Luciferic beings will come in and they'll whisper in your ear that, oh, yes. Not only are you on the path now and awakening, but you are so incredibly powerful and advanced and significant. And they'll start telling you all these things about you're the reincarnation of the most advanced people in human history, and you're this great avatar, and all these things about how you're better than other people, and you're more advanced than other people, and you're incredibly significant. And so, the Luciferic inflation status you see a lot in spiritual circles, where people get overly inflated, overly self-absorbed, and self-referential, and way inflated estimates of their own level of spiritual development. And so, that's something we have to be very careful of.
AUBREY: Which ultimately is Ahrimanic in the fact that they're becoming spiritual materialists.
DR. ROBERT: That's exactly what happens. Yes.
AUBREY: So, it's almost like the Lucifer, there is a beautiful intention behind the core of the Luciferian impulse. But when it gets mixed in with the Ahrimanic materialism and blends in an unhealthy way, in the shadow way, then you get Luciferic inflation.
DR. ROBERT: The Rosicrucians have a saying about this, that everybody wants to give themselves to Lucifer, because that looks like fun. But what happens is that, it says the karma of Lucifer is Ahriman. That if you go too far out on that edge to where you're unbalancing your brain chemicals, and your physical body, and all by doing too much of this stuff, and being too self-absorbed, you're going to burn your life out, and you're going to end up in a really rough Ahrimanic space. And so, these things happen all the time. They're in constant dynamic interaction. And it is very, very possible to become a spiritual materialist, even though you think you're going this one path on spiritual development. So, we have to be careful about not understanding, creating a center through the psychotropic renaissance that we have now, and not falling prey to a really unbalanced self-absorption. And way overestimating our level of spiritual development, with Luciferic inflation on this path. Because again, the only thing that's going to change the world is people changing their consciousness, and changing their way of living, and having discernment between these different forces. Because everything in our society right now is based on neuro linguistic programming, and presenting things to us in a way that is meant to make us into a stimulus response organism and push our buttons, even the way issues are described. They're described in terminology, that's meant to push some subconscious impulse inside of us, to push us to a particular action.
AUBREY: Yeah, so at the center that I'm involved with, and going to step into the board chair of, which was formerly the Center for Integral Wisdom, and it's going to be World Philosophy and Religion. They have a term, and this is Marc Gafni, Zak Stein, again, they call it techno-feudalism. And it's this idea of like the Skinner Penland kind of idea of complete control of people's actions, which we're really seeing play out in social media, because we're being rewarded and coerced subtly in all of these different ways. And you make a not so veiled implication, that there's, if you were going to claim an incarnation of that impulse, you'd look at somebody like Zuckerberg, who's behind Meta, right? I saw that in the video of, this is the control impulse, which you link to the Ahrimanic impulse, which is basically to control all aspects of being. So, explain that a little bit more of what I saw.
DR. ROBERT: So, what always happens is that there's going to become certain organizations, certain focal points for any societal impulse. And so, you see who gets the most rewarded by Ahriman in the sense of mammon. They get power, they get money, they get all these things. And so, that's what we're seeing with the tremendous amount of censorship with what can be talked about in social media today. And it's even worse in Europe than it is in North America. What's happening now there where all of the social media outlets have to agree to the rules against misinformation from the European Union. And they're saying they're going to take down Twitter, because Twitter didn't agree to sign on to their--
AUBREY: Elon's like, fuck that. Good luck taking down Twitter.
DR. ROBERT: We have to look at what the organizational centers are there. And it's going to keep shifting. What were the power centers a hundred years ago, are not exactly the same as what they are now. It's going to keep dynamically evolving. So, this is where we really need to develop discernment. So, I don't like to focus too much on any one particular organization or any one particular person, because the people can change. People may be working some really destructive things at one time, and then they have enlightenment experience, and they try to change it.
AUBREY: Redemption is part of the source code, right? So it's possible.
DR. ROBERT: So, part of the thing for me is, I always try to live life without enemies. Like, no man is my enemy. No person is my enemy. Any person that I have a conflict with, then hopefully we can both get more enlightened and work ourselves out of it. Even organizations hopefully can be adaptive--
AUBREY: In a way, the only enemy is imbalance.
DR. ROBERT: Exactly. But we have to see where those imbalances are for what we want to support or not support, and find the ways, because there's probably never been a time in human history that we didn't live in a coercive system. The system always tries to reward you for doing what they want, and they punish you if you don't. Rather that punishment is being banned from social media or demonetization or whatever, it's very, very real. And so, if we can understand this in the larger context, and again, it comes back to the very simple thing of look at the two extremes and find the center. But if we lose freedom of speech, which we're quickly moving toward, then it's going to be a lot, lot harder. Because we have to see that if we understand the development of modern technology from a spiritual perspective. What's really happened here is something where we now have the ability to almost instantaneously transfer ideas across the planet. And as long as we have the freedom to keep transferring those ideas, then in the end, the goodwill will win out. But the more that the censorship comes in, and the more constriction that we feel in what we talk about, because I feel constriction of what I talk about. There's certain things I'd love to talk about, but I know instant banning from social media and demonetization, if I do. So, one of the ways to work around that is talk about in terms of principles. These are the key principles, here are the things we can work on in our own lives, here are the things we can work towards societally, that we can reward the activity for societally, and help support the people who are doing it. So, if we see a particular organization, or a leader of it is not kowtowing to a censorship regime, that's somebody we should support. And this is a very simple principle.
AUBREY: Yeah, I agree. I want to just touch on, and we're moving towards the close here. IT's been a beautiful conversation. Thank you so much.
DR. ROBERT: Thank you.
AUBREY: There's this idea of the Masons. And you actually referred to some symbology in the kind of Masonic tradition of using stars, and you pointed to a bunch of different stars in different corporation logos and different things, which was this kind of identification of alright, we're part of the same team here, as this kind of like a symbolism. So, in some ways, I think of masons, like one part of my mind is man, it's like my fraternity. I was a Kappa Sigma, it was cool, we did some stuff, but really, we just kind of got together and we had some drinks, and whatever. You go to the lodge, you smoke a cigar with the boys, you do a few different kinds of flaccid occult rituals that don't really have much power. And we do shit in the dark and whatever, and speak some things, and evoke some, whatever. It was all very flaccid and very impotent.
DR. ROBERT: You're trying to create your own initiatory process.
AUBREY: Right, it was all just kind of a group that got together to play intramurals, and launch kegs of beer into the University of Richmond, really that was pretty much it. And some part of me is like, yeah, that's the fucking Masons. But then I'm open to the idea that there's actually a stronger deeper power structure that exists. So, where do you fall in the balance of those extremes? Whether this is a major influential piece of what we're experiencing that's hidden. And that actually, they want us to think that it's Kappa Sigma, where you're just kind of getting together hanging with the boys and drinking some beers, or whether it's actually a foundational power structure that has deep influence even now.
DR. ROBERT: So, the first thing we have to be aware of is that there's a difference between what was called operative masonry, which were the people that actually learned how to build cathedrals and build structures. So they're operative masons, because they actually built stuff. They were literally masons. But that became what became known as speculative masonry around the 1700s, where these people no longer were being trained to build sacred buildings. And it became a type of fraternal lodge. And these types of organizations can change energetics over time. And certainly, there was a big change at the time they moved from operative masonry training, to speculative Masons to meeting on a Wednesday night or whatever. So, in the original operative masons, this goes back to the Temple of Solomon and the knowledge in the Western world, really before that in Egypt, to be able to use sacred geometry to enhance the power of sacred power spots on the earth, to create real operative energy devices as temples on the Earth's energy grid. And that's what the masons were very, very skilled at. They knew the secrets of how to do this. And so the original operative masons, and they in their own mythology go back to the Temple of Solomon, understood how to use sacred geometry the way that higher spiritual beings did to create the physical world, to use the same patterns and principles to create our world, to help create a new golden age. So I believe the original Masonic principle and intent to be something highly beneficial to create the new golden age, to know how to create temples. And of course, part of that was create the temple of the human body. There's some very, very deep levels of that that are not well understood anymore. So, one of the original Masonic principles was something called the royal art. And the royal art was based on, we're going to learn the sacred geometry principles that the higher spiritual beings use to create everything in our world. And once we learn it, it's going to be our responsibility at a later point in time, to create the patterns of the next round of spiritual evolution. Just like this Earth was created by these higher beings. And just like human beings become parents, and we have children, and then the children do the things that we used to do after we move on. Same thing for spiritual beings. Spiritual beings made everything for the earth for this round of evolution. But for the next round of evolution, human beings need to learn the same patterns, and we need to create the conditions for the next round of evolution. Now that became things like the Masonic influences on the founders of the United States to create the patterns of how do you create a constitutional democracy? And they were absolutely brilliant in it. And we're starting to throw away a little bit too much of that, because yeah, they weren't great people in all cases, and yeah, they did bad things. And yeah, they may have had slaves, not excusing any of that. But nonetheless, what they came up with as a framework of checks and balances, so that nobody in the government can take over everything and become a dictator was absolutely brilliant. And that comes out of the Masonic work. All the original people that worked on the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, they were all Masons. And that is something I think is highly beneficial. So, we've got a very esoteric side of it. How do we use sacred geometry to amplify power spots and create temples and things of this kind, and create our own body into a temple in some of the deeper teachings? But around the 1700s, this became an intellectual thing, it became an organization like a fraternal lodge. And again, had some very good outlets like creating the United States's democracy. Then as we move on, I believe my experience of it has been that a lot of the esoteric knowledge that was held in Masonry has become very diluted. So I don't believe that the Masons are a primary influencer in where things are going right now. There may be some people who are Masons, and understand some of that work. But I know from my experience of modern day Masons and Masonic lodges, I am not a mason myself, but because I teach sacred geometry, and that's a big thing for Masons, I was invited many years ago, to give a talk to one of the oldest Masonic lodges in the United States, which is in Savannah, Georgia. And I gave a talk there about the foundations of sacred geometry, including as it's reflected in certain types of Masonic imagery and things of that kind, but really talking about the whole principle of sacred geometry. At the end of it, the different past masters of the lodge all came out, said, "Oh, thank you so much for giving the talk to us. None of us here know anything about any of this." And he was like, "Oh, there's this one guy, Craig in like Kansas City, who knows something about it. But it's always like some mythical person in some place, but nobody here knows anything about it." I don't know what came of this. But at the time, they were saying, oh, there's even an impulse now that rather than spending years working through the grades from 1 to 33, to become a 33 degree Mason, that maybe we can put something together, that a person can become a 33 degree Mason in like a weekend or something. And that way, they can come to some more of the meetings and the Shriners thing, type of thing. But in my limited experience of it, maybe there's a whole other hidden cabal of it that I've never seen and have no contact with. But the average Masonic lodge, it's more of a fraternal lodge. And there are a very small number of people there that know anything about the real esoteric background of this. It's more for business networking and social stuff. So, it could be that they still have some real influential things somewhere. But I tend to think these things change over time. The ball has been passed to some other control groups that are now working in some different configurations. Because certainly, the external Masonic lodges, if you actually spend time with them and talk to the people there, they're not highly esoteric.
AUBREY: Yeah, I mean, it seems like originally it was a Christic impulse. It was about bringing this, how do you bring the divine light into manifest, Ahriman and Lucifer balanced in this Christic impulse, and then influenced by the shadow versions of both where it was like, alright, let's get drunk and let's make more money. So, it almost was diluted and also mildly corrupted as we all are by these influences.
DR. ROBERT: One thing that happens over time is that organizations as they have their original founding people die off, there's a lot of the knowledge can get lost. So, within a lot of esoteric organizations as time goes on, it's definitely the case that the vast majority of external Masonic members know very little about any of the spiritual principles, or what's behind their rituals. And I've met a lot of nice people who are Masons, but they're not knowledgeable in this area. And so it becomes a thing that for those Masons who actually are interested in the stuff and who became a Mason because they want to understand the spiritual principles, they find that there's not much within the lodges now to learn from of that. It might be good for political or business networking, but they learn very little inside of it. So some of them want to rejuvenate the esoteric impulse within masonry, and others are just happy to have it become more of a networking thing. And I've been invited to become a Mason, and I'm not putting Masons or Masonry down. But my thing was that I'm not certain why I would want to join this, because I know more about the subject. And I say that hopefully, without ego, but I gave the lecture to people and they knew nothing about it. Then the people that I would now have above me in a hierarchical structure, it doesn't make any sense. Plus, I have no personal urge whatsoever to join any hierarchical structure. And I feel a little bit sometimes like Woody Allen saying that I wouldn't want to join any organization that would have somebody like me for a member. So, I'm not a big organization guy. But I think if you look for where some of the controls are being pulled today, at one time, certainly it was the Masons. I'm not so certain that we're the focal point is right now.
AUBREY: Yeah, it seems that now we're in the time of the democratization of all of this esoteric wisdom and knowledge, and it's time for it to no longer be in closed societies. We don't have people going around with swords and guns killing the people who have the esoteric knowledge. They may censor some of it here and there. But actually, it feels like the powers that be are almost, they've forgotten how powerful this esoteric wisdom is. So they don't even see it coming.
DR. ROBERT: They don't care about it.
AUBREY: They don't care about it, because they've forgotten how powerful it was. And I think that's to the advantage of those of us who are now democratizing this information, people like yourself who are bringing this information in the light is that, those powers that be are like, yeah, yeah, whatever, that's not going to amount to anything. Are they putting bodies in the streets? Are they trying to go against this pharma mandate, or whatever it might be? They're focused on these other different things. But I think there's immense power in this movement of remembering, which is putting back together all of this information, and synthesizing many of these different schools from the hermetic principles, the Rosicrucian principles, the Gnostic principles, Cabalists principles, the deep Buddhist, everything is invited into this new alchemy and this new synergy that's being created. And I think, those powers that are opposed to it are really sleeping to the dragon that's awakening.
DR. ROBERT: Yes. For me, one of the big impulses with creating the Vesica Institute was that I had no interest in being a part of an external hierarchical organization. And I don't want myself to be seen as anyone who's like an infallible source. It's all about the original Rosicrucian impulse was for everyone to connect directly to spirit without any external intermediary. And my purpose with Vesica was to be able to gather the information from many different sources where it's very fragmented right now, and often very unclear, and to put it together in a clear, concise context where people could save time by accessing the information and the practices that they're going to do with whatever they choose to do with it. Because their path might not be the same as my path. There's nothing about following me or my being anything other than a person collecting and transmitting the information. It's all about them getting what they need to connect directly, and understand this incredible legacy of people that came before us, which also includes us in previous times, put together as bodies of knowledge and practices that will help us to develop in this lifetime, and help the world around us in this lifetime, to get to the next stage it needs to get to.
AUBREY: Yeah. Thank you for your work. Thank you for coming in and sharing your wisdom here on the podcast and illuminating this field. You've mentioned where people can go and find you. And I just really encourage people, I mean, I got to absorb a lot of this content before this conversation. It's just fantastic what you've been able to do. So, keep going. And I look forward to how our own paths will weave as we go to democratize access to the truth.
DR. ROBERT: Yes. Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be here with you. And I love the work you do. So, it's a great pleasure to be here.
AUBREY: Yeah, thank you so much. And thank you, everybody, for listening. We love you, and we'll see you next week.