Greetings beloved brothers and sisters. Most of us know that there is an underlying problem with the world of today but most do not realise what that problem is. We are taught and pressured to focus on materialistic goals, even though they never fulfil us. There is hatred and suffering. There is corruption, secrecy and greed. No matter how hard we try, we cannot seem to achieve true long-lasting unconditional happiness. We ignore the effects that consumerism is having on our planet. We turn our backs on each other in times of need. We work long hours in jobs we hate just to survive. We build nuclear weapons even though the world would be destroyed from just one nuclear weapon being used. We declare wars in the name of peace. But why? The ultimate reason for all this is that we perceive a materialistic world of separation. We do not realise who we truly are and what true reality is. In the last topic we discussed the case for oneness; how all things are connected. If we all truly realised that we are one with each other, with the planet, with God, then the world would change dramatically and there would be no suffering.

Virtually all religions teach you that salvation comes from denouncing the world you perceive. This, in itself, implies that the world you see is not true reality and that once you realise true reality, you are saved.

Gnostics believe that humans are caught in a predicament consisting of physical existence combined with ignorance of their true origins, their essential nature and their ultimate destiny. To be liberated from this predicament, human beings require help, although they must also contribute their own efforts. One needs also to remember that knowledge of our true nature — as well as other associated realisations — are withheld from us by our very condition of earthly existence. In the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus answered that human beings must come by gnosis to know the ineffable, divine reality from whence they have originated, and where they will eventually return. This transcendental knowledge must come to them while they are still embodied on earth.

Hindus believe that as long as we confuse the myriad forms of the divine lila (the creative activity of the Divine) with reality, without perceiving the unity of Brahman underlying all these forms, we are under the spell of maya. Maya is the illusion of our perception when we think the shapes and structures, things and events around us are realities of nature, instead of realising that they are concepts of our measuring and categorising minds. Maya is the illusion of taking these concepts for reality, of confusing the map with the territory.

New Agers believe that anything negative a person experiences (failures, sadness, anger, selfishness, hurt) is considered an illusion. Believing themselves to be completely sovereign over their life, nothing about their life is wrong, negative or painful. Eventually a person develops spiritually to the degree that there is no objective, external reality. A person, upon realising they are one with God, creates their own reality.

In both Christianity and Islam, they believe in using this earthly life to worship God, follow his commandments and attempt to live without sin in order to gain entry into the ideal afterlife of heaven. People who learn to put their love and trust in God, instead of in worldly things, find a deep sense of peace and serenity that overshadows the evils, anxieties and disappointments of life, and the fear of death. In the book of John in the Bible, it says “Do not love this world nor the things it offers you, for when you love the world, you do not have the love of the Father in you.” Would it tell us not to love the world if the world was true reality? The Bible says that a deep sleep fell upon Adam, and nowhere is there reference to his waking up. The world has not yet experienced any comprehensive reawakening or rebirth.

Plato, a Greek philosopher who was a student of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle, used a tale of prisoners in a cave. As the story goes, these prisoners spent their entire lives chained up in a cave in such a way that all they could see was the cave wall in front of them. They couldn’t see a fire that was glowing behind them, nor that a group of actors was holding up puppets and casting shadows on the wall of the cave. For these prisoners, their entire world consisted of those shadows. One day a prisoner was released from the cave and taken outside. At first blinded by the light, after a while his eyes adjusted to the brilliance, and for the first time he saw the vibrant colours and depth of real reality. His former ideas about the world were shattered, and when he was allowed to return to the cave, he excitedly explained to the other prisoners that their shadow existence was an illusion. There was a richer, intensely luminous world just a few steps outside the cave. But regardless of what he said, or the arguments he used to try to convince them that their reality was a pale cartoon of reality, the other prisoners thought he had gone mad. Plato used this tale to argue that there was a difference between the everyday appearance of the world, shaped by everyday language and concepts, and the world itself. Common sense provides a poor copy of what is really out there, so to grasp the true nature of reality requires a special form of knowing, called gnosis. Knowledge gained through gnosis is different from intellectual or rational knowing. Gnosis is a type of deep intuition, a means of knowing that transcends the ordinary senses and rational thought, like knowing “from the heart”.

In The Law of One, Ra regularly refers to our physical bodies, lives and the space/time continuum as illusions, and refers to our actions within this density as a dance. They said “You are not part of a material universe. You are part of a thought. You are dancing in a ballroom in which there is no material. You are dancing thoughts. You move your body, your mind, and your spirit in somewhat eccentric patterns for you have not completely grasped the concept that you are part of the original thought.”.

The cause of suffering:

In the last topic, we discussed how there is no separation at all between us and others, us and other living things, between us and God, and no separation of time or space in the universe. All is one. If this is the case, then when we perceive a world of separation, we are believing in an illusion. And it is this basic illusion which is at the root of all suffering in the world.

All suffering in this world can be boiled down to believing in some form of separation. When you believe you are your ego, or when others are their ego, you create a distance between you and others. This distance can lead to emotions of anger at others, fear of others, not helping others or just turning your back on them, guilt and shame for what you did to others in the past, unworthiness because of what your ego has done, loneliness, and even awkwardness around others. It is what also leads to racism, sexism, and homophobia. When you believe there is separation in time, and so you believe that the past and future exist, this can lead to feelings of guilt and shame when you think of things you may have done in the past, it can lead to anxiety which is just fear and stress about the future, it can lead to depression which is sadness and grief about the past, it can lead to prejudices against others because of what you have experienced in the past. When you believe you have no control of reality and so you are separate from the universe and God, this can lead to suicidal thoughts and feelings of sadness, anger and unworthiness as you feel like a victim to life. It can also lead to feelings of stress and thinking you are unlucky or cursed. When you believe you are separate from God, you may feel fear of God or his punishments or judgement, you may believe you are sinful and unworthy, and you believe you can die and so are constantly fearing death. When you believe in matter and a physical reality, this affirms your false beliefs about separation. So when you think about it, any form of suffering can be boiled down to believing in some form of separation, but when you begin to correct your perception and realise that there is no separation, then all suffering stops.

In Mahayana Buddhism, the intellect is seen merely as a means to clear the way for the direct mystical experience, which Buddhists call the ‘awakening’. The essence of this experience is to pass beyond the world of intellectual distinctions and opposites to reach the world of acintya, the unthinkable, where reality appears as undivided and undifferentiated suchness. The Buddha expressed his doctrines through his four noble truths. The first noble truth states the outstanding characteristic of the human situation, duhkha, which is suffering or frustration. This frustration comes from our difficulty in facing the basic fact of life, that everything around us is impermanent and transitory. “All things arise and pass away”, said the Buddha, and the notion that flow and change are basic features of nature lies at the root of Buddhism. Suffering arises whenever we resist the flow of life and try to cling to fixed forms which are all maya, whether they are things, events, people or ideas. This doctrine of impermanence also includes the notion that there is no ego, no self which is the persistent subject of our varying experiences. Buddhism holds that the idea of a separate individual self is an illusion, just another form of maya, an intellectual concept which has no reality. To cling to this concept leads to the same frustration as adherence to any other fixed category of thought. The second noble truth deals with the cause of all suffering, trishna, which is clinging or grasping. It is the futile grasping of life based on a wrong point of view which is called avidya, or ignorance. Out of this ignorance, we divide the perceived world into individual and separate things and thus attempt to confine the fluid forms of reality in fixed categories created by the mind. As long as this view prevails, we are bound to experience frustration after frustration.

No such thing as physical universe:

In the last topic, we introduced the findings of quantum physics which explains how there is no such thing as matter, there is just a zero point field of energy and possibility. In fact, scientists have found that all that what we call physical matter in the universe can be condensed together to form a ball the size of a pea. It would be the heaviest pea ever, but it would be tiny. However, our body’s senses and brain perceive the opposite; a world of separation and matter. How can this be?

Matter is not a fundamental property of physics. Einstein’s equation, E=mc2, is simply a recipe for the amount of energy necessary to create the appearance of mass. It means that there aren’t two fundamental physical entities — something material and another immaterial — but only one: energy. Everything in our world, anything we hold in our hands, no matter how dense, how heavy, how large, on its most fundamental level boils down to a collection of electrical charges interacting with a background sea of electromagnetic and other energy fields. Mass is not equivalent to energy; mass is energy. As Einstein put it: “What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible by the senses. There is no matter”. If you have ever watched The Matrix, there is a scene in the film where a child bends the spoon with their mind and tells Neo not to try to bend the spoon, but to realise that there is no spoon.

So if atoms simply consist of energy, then why can’t we walk through closed doors? What gives matter its solid aspect? Quantum theory has shown that an atom’s electrons can behave as either an energy wave or a “solid” particle. If there is someone that is observing the electron, it acts as a particle, but if no one is observing the electron then it behaves as an energy wave. These electrons are confined to a small region of space within the atom, and so it reacts to this confinement by moving around; the smaller the region of confinement is, the faster the particles move around in it. The tighter the electrons are bound to the nucleus, the higher their velocity will be. In fact, the confinement of electrons in an atom results in enormous velocities of about 600 miles per second. These high velocities make the atom appear as a rigid sphere, just as a fast rotating propeller appears as a disc. It is very difficult to compress atoms any further and thus they give matter its familiar aspect.

So we now know why atoms look solid, but why do they feel solid? Well, again, quantum physics has come to the rescue here and it explains how two electrons cannot occupy the same quantum state, this is known as the Pauli exclusion principle. Therefore, the electrons in your hand can’t occupy the same quantum state as the electrons of a table, making the table feel solid.

The eastern terms of ch’i or prana are used to denote the vital breath or energy animating the cosmos. Like the quantum field, ch’i is conceived as a tenuous and non-perceptible form of matter which is present throughout space and can condense into solid material objects. When the ch’i condenses, its visibility becomes apparent so that there are then the shapes of individual things. When it disperses, its visibility is no longer apparent and there are no shapes. As in quantum field theory, the ch’i is not only the underlying essence of all material objects, but also carries the mutual interactions in the form of waves.

Illusions of the ego:

So what all this science is telling us, and what Hindus and Buddhists have been saying for thousands of years, is that when we focus on a material reality, we are only focusing on a very tiny portion of the universe, ignoring the one zero point field that connects everything. There are multiple energy waves we cannot see, for instance wi-fi, microwaves, and radio waves. In fact, visible light only forms about 0.0035% of the whole electromagnetic spectrum. There are multiple sounds we cannot hear, and forces that we cannot feel. But who we truly are is one with the universe, one with all these energies, one with all that is. That infinite mind is therefore filtered by the brain into a manageable experience in order to exist in a physical body. Our body’s senses and brain must filter out the majority of reality, and only decode a tiny fraction of the energy waves around us to make us believe in matter and separation. This is all part of the One Infinite Creator playing hide and seek with itself.

In the first topic, we discussed that who we are is a divine, perfect being of love/light that is part of God. So who is it that perceives separation? Your true self could never perceive this as it knows what true reality is. It is only when we listen to the ego, our false self, that we feel separate. It is easy to think why — the ego believes who you truly are is your physical body and so perceives the world by solely relying on the senses and brain. It also believes it is the individual character that you are playing in this movie of life — if you perceived oneness, the ego would not exist as the illusion of your character or a separate body would fall away. So the ego uses several tricks to keep you believing in separation, so that it can continue to exist.

In the Law of One, Ra states “much of the activity of a mental nature of which you are aware during the experience of this space/time continuum is as much of a surface illusion as is the chemical body complex.”.

What is True reality:

The oneness of the Universe is an extremely hard concept to consider, particularly when the materialistic model of the universe is all that you’ve ever known. But based on the science we have discussed so far in this topic, this materialistic model of the universe has been shattered. So what model of the Universe can we look to to make the perception of oneness a little easier to understand? I will offer a few models here, please use any that resonate with you and help you to visualise oneness.

Holonomic Brain Theory: Karl Pribram, a professor at Georgetown University, showed that the brain is a highly discriminating frequency analyser. He demonstrated that the brain contains a certain envelope, or mechanism, which limits the otherwise infinite wave information available to it, so that we are not bombarded with limitless wave information contained in the zero point field. When we look at something, we don’t see the image of it in the back of our heads or on the back of our retinas, but in three dimensions and out in the world. It must be that we are creating and projecting a virtual image of the object out in space, in the same place as the actual object, so that the object and our perception of the object coincide. This would mean that the art of seeing is one of transforming. In a sense, in the act of observation, we are transforming the timeless, spaceless world of interference patterns into the concrete and discrete world of space and time. We create space and time on the surface of our retinas. As with a hologram, the lens of the eye picks up certain interference patterns and then converts them into three-dimensional images. It requires this type of virtual projection for you to reach out to touch an apple where it really is, not in some place in your head. If we are projecting images all the time out in space, our image of the world is actually a virtual creation. So in this theory, we are observers collectively projecting time, space and matter from our minds.

Holographic Universe Theory: Many physicists believe that the universe is actually a hologram. Every tiny part of a hologram contains the whole picture, which gives it its 3D look. This, in my opinion, is the best way to explain how we are both part of God and contain the whole of God within us. We are like the tiny parts of the hologram, each of us contain the whole of God and collectively we make up God.

Fractal Universe — A fractal is a type of geometrical pattern, like the one showing below, which, whenever you zoom into it, you find the same geometrical pattern. Basically, it is saying that the Universe is like a giant Russian doll. The giant clusters of galaxies are arranged in a similar pattern to those of individual galaxies, to solar systems, to cloud patterns, to things like snail shells, to even the atom. In the last topic, we showed how the cosmic web looked very similar to our brain neural system. This is another type of fractal. Essentially, this too says that each part of the whole pattern contains the whole pattern, further proving oneness. The book of Romans in the Bible states “For as in one body we have many members, and the members do not all have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”. Could this be describing fractals? We will discuss more about fractals and sacred geometry in the next level of the course.

Simulation theory: Another popular theory among scientists is that we are in a computer simulation or video game. This, again, implies that there is one player, playing each character within the simulation/game. Like virtual reality games, the universe appears real and solid while you are in it, but in reality, it isn’t solid at all.

Like dreams, holograms and video games, the universe is created to appear real. But the dreamer is not separated from the dream. Everything is happening in oneness. To the creator, the world is an illusion, but to the individual within the world, the world is real.

How to see past illusions:

So how can we see past the illusions of separation and matter, and end the suffering we are experiencing in this dream? Well the first step is to question the illusions. Illusions are investments. They will last as long as you value them. The only way to dispel illusions is to withdraw all investment from them, and they will have no life for you because you will have put them out of your mind. We must look upon our illusions and not keep them hidden, because they do not rest on their own foundation. In concealment they appear to do so, and thus they seem to be self-sustained. Reality is always there to be accepted, but its acceptance depends on our willingness to have it. To know reality must involve the willingness to judge unreality for what it is. How else can one dispel illusions except by looking at them directly, without protecting them? But there is nothing to be afraid of, for what we will be looking at is the source of fear, and you are beginning to learn that fear is not real. Its effects can be dispelled merely by denying their reality. We have the power to deny illusions anywhere outside of us, merely by denying them completely in ourselves first. Therefore, it is important to deny the ego’s reality. The conviction of reality will not remain with you unless you do not allow the ego to attack it.

You will remember everything the instant you desire it wholly. In the book of Matthew in the Bible, it says “Seek and ye shall find”. This is telling us that if we seek the truth whole heartedly, we will find it. As Ra puts it in The Law of One: “In the experiences of the mystical search for unity,….The seeker seeks the One. This One is to be sought…by the balanced and self-accepting self, aware both of its apparent distortions and its total perfection. Resting in this balanced awareness, the entity then opens the self to the universe which it is. The light energy of all things may then be attracted by this intense seeking, and wherever the inner seeking meets the attracted cosmic prana, realization of the One takes place. The purpose of clearing each energy center is to allow that meeting place to occur at the indigo-ray vibration, thus making contact with intelligent infinity and dissolving all illusions. Service-to-others is automatic at the released energy generated by this state of consciousness.”.

In Hinduism, to be free from the spell of maya means to realize that all the phenomena we perceive with our senses are part of the same reality. It means to experience, concretely and personally, that everything, including our own self, is Brahman. This experience is called moksha, or liberation. One of the best ways to do this is to grow in knowledge through meditation of Brahman (oneness) to realize that circumstances in life are not real, that selfhood is an illusion and only Brahman is real.

In Buddhism, the third noble truth states that the suffering and frustration can be ended. It is possible to transcend the vicious circle of samsara, to free oneself from the bondage of karma, and to reach a state of total liberation called nirvana. In this state, the false notions of a separate self have for ever disappeared and the oneness of all life has become a constant sensation. Nirvana is the equivalent of moksha in Hindu philosophy and, being a state of consciousness beyond all intellectual concepts, it defies further description. To reach nirvana is to attain awakening, or Buddhahood. The fourth noble truth is the Buddha’s prescription to end all suffering, the eightfold path of self-development which leads to the state of Buddhahood. The first two sections of this path are concerned with the right seeing and right knowing, that is with the clear insight into the human situation that is the necessary starting point. The next four sections deal with right action. They give the rules for the Buddhist way of life, which is a middle way between opposite extremes. The last two sections are concerned with right awareness and right meditation and describe the direct mystical experience of reality that is the final goal.

Gnosticism viewed the central importance of gnosis as a way of directly perceiving higher states of being. The Gnostics taught that we are like the prisoners chained up in Plato’s cave. That is, we have a spark of the divine within us, but we’re unaware of it. Fortunately, even though we fell from grace, we can work our way back up the spiritual hierarchy by attaining gnosis of our true being. In this way, the Gnostics provide a way to escape from the chains of ignorance and the suffering of the material world. We can be like Plato’s prisoner who escaped from the cave. The best way to achieve the state of gnosis is to hold the desire for knowledge of oneness while in meditation. I have created a meditation to help you feel oneness and end suffering which I will put a link to below:

A sure way to feel if you perceive illusion at any one time, is whether you feel peace and relaxation within the present moment. If you don’t, it is because you are listening to your ego which is a false character that promotes separation.

This course is all about dispelling the illusions of your perception of the world, one bit at a time. Upon dispelling all illusions, you will only perceive true reality. This is the spiritual awakening. However, just because the world is an illusion, it does not mean it has no meaning or purpose. We will discuss this in a future topic called ‘The Purpose of Life’.

I will finish with a lovely quote from The Law of One: “We leave you in appreciation of the circumstances of the great illusion in which you now choose to play the pipe and timbrel and move in rhythm. We are also players upon a stage. The stage changes. The acts ring down. The lights come up once again. And throughout the grand illusion… there is the undergirding majesty of the One Infinite Creator.”.

Thank you for listening, I hope you enjoyed hearing about this interesting topic. If you would like specific advice, a different perspective on something, or to share experiences during your spiritual journey then please feel free to book a free spiritual support session with me through my website: www.highvibelivin.co.uk. I also offer free healing sessions for any chronic condition through my website as well. Peace, love and joy O perfect being of love and light.