My Journey into Gnosis

At the time of my awakening, I understood Gnosis not as a theory, but as a living experience of the One, an undeniable awareness of a universal truth that seemed to exist beyond belief. It felt as though I had touched God, the Source of all that is.

What I experienced was only a glimpse. No matter how much I tried to explain it then, or try to explain it now, words always seem to fall short.

Perhaps this is related to what esoteric teachings mean by “incarnating the Word.” To truly express something of that nature, intellectual understanding is not enough. We must somehow become what we have understood.

The word Gnosis comes from the Greek γνῶσις (gnōsis) meaning knowledge. In its spiritual sense, it refers to something different from ordinary intellectual knowledge: knowledge acquired through direct experience, an inner knowing of spiritual realities rather than a belief in them.

Experience Before Study

After my awakening, I instinctively distanced myself from dogma, religion, churches, and spiritual groups. I had a strong inner sense that joining an organization could interfere with my development. I needed to remain independent and allow my experiences to unfold without immediately placing them within someone else’s system.

After first experiencing that state of inner balance during meditation, I began meditating daily. I was not trying to become spiritual. I felt a need for it, almost as essential to my well-being as food is to the body. I could hardly believe that someone as restless as I had always been could sit quietly for an entire hour, yet meditation soon became a necessity in my daily life.

Beginning each morning with an hour of meditation allowed me to approach the day free from anxiety and with a sense of inner calm. Even if circumstances later disturbed that state, I was gradually becoming more accustomed to the equanimity I had begun to experience.

That growing inner balance also gave me more opportunities for self-observation, allowing me to become increasingly aware of my thoughts, emotions, and reactions as they arose.

Yet the call toward hidden knowledge had been present long before my awakening.

Back in 2005, only two weeks before my mother’s accident, I was returning to the United States after visiting my home country when I received a message from what I perceived as the nonphysical realms:

“The secret knowledge has been released to the public. The Masters have ordered it. You may now go find it.”

All my life, I had sensed that sacred knowledge existed somewhere beneath the surface of ordinary life. I had searched for it in different ways, occasionally catching glimpses without really knowing what I was looking for.

This time, I listened.

When I returned home, I discovered Kabbalah courses online and immediately purchased the first lessons. That encounter contributed to one of my first significant spiritual experiences, an inner ignition that would eventually lead to a much deeper awakening.

For years afterward, however, I remained cautious about spiritual study. I had already seen how easily the mind could interfere with direct experience. I feared that too much information might give my imagination material from which to construct experiences of its own.

Had I read extensively about these things beforehand, I might never have trusted what was happening to me. I would always have wondered whether I was experiencing something genuine or simply reproducing something I had read.

So, for a long time, experience came first.

The Invitation to Study

Eventually, I reached another kind of limitation. I felt stuck.

During one of those states between waking and sleep, a kind elderly master appeared to me, one of the figures I associated at the time with Master Germain. He had a particular way of smiling with his eyes that always made his presence feel gentle and familiar.

“If you want to advance further, you must begin to study,” he told me.

Study?

What was I supposed to study?

I began sincerely asking for guidance.

Not long afterward, while doing the repetitive accounting work that occupied much of my day, I was listening to a young man speaking passionately about natural laws. I found myself somewhat amused by his anger toward the system and the state of humanity, which reminded me of my own temperament.

That same day, while moving quickly through pages on my computer, I accidentally opened an audiobook: The Kybalion, by the Three Initiates.

There they were, the very natural laws the man had been discussing. I smiled, recognizing once again the orchestration of events and the guidance of someone behind the veil.

I began listening, and the principles felt strangely familiar. Many resembled things I believed I had already been shown through my own experiences, except that now they were organized and explained in a way my intellectual mind could follow.

That marked the beginning of a more serious period of esoteric study.

A few weeks later, while browsing a friend’s Telegram channel, I came across six lectures on alchemy. I listened to them eagerly. Following the material further eventually brought me to the Glorian website and the teachings of Samael Aun Weor.

There was far more there than I had expected: alchemy, psychology, meditation, Kabbalah, the Tree of Life, sexuality, consciousness, death, reincarnation, and many of the subjects I had been trying to understand independently.

I began slowly, taking small bites and trying to digest them thoroughly, sometimes returning to the same material repeatedly before I felt I understood anything at all. Like a cow chewing its cud, I needed time to digest what I was taking in.

To my surprise, I also discovered that these teachings were part of an established spiritual movement. Samael Aun Weor had written extensively and founded a Gnostic movement from which numerous organizations and schools eventually developed.

That immediately made me cautious.

The idea of a church or organized spiritual institution carried uncomfortable associations for me: hierarchy, group identity, separation, judgment, and the human tendency to turn teachings into a form of belonging. Yet Gnosis was teaching unity and direct knowledge of the Divine.

I wondered whether my resistance came partly from my previous experiences with Orthodox and Catholic religion.

For the time being, I preferred to study independently.

Beginning in the Present

The first book I read by Samael Aun Weor was The Yellow Book, which had been mentioned in one of the alchemy lectures. It immediately caught my attention because it discussed things I had previously considered almost impossible, including levitation and the Jinn state. These subjects seemed connected to experiences I had already had but could not explain.

I also began practicing pranayama, a form of conscious breathing, every day.

Something very simple happened then that became important to me. For once, I did not tell myself that I would begin tomorrow. I began immediately.

Until then, I had never fully understood the significance of postponement. I could sincerely intend to begin something the following morning, and often did. But I suddenly recognized another meaning in it: by placing an action in the future, I was keeping it outside the only moment in which anything could actually be done.

The present.

That realization stayed with me. Pranayama became part of my daily meditation practice, and the combination changed the direction of my inner work.

I remained particularly grateful to the instructor from Glorian whose alchemy lectures had led me to these teachings. During an earlier ayahuasca experience, I had received an understanding of what it meant to be a true master: someone capable of transmitting knowledge through the heart because that knowledge had already been lived and experienced.

That was why certain teachings remained with me while others, however intellectually impressive, did not.

I recognized something of that quality in this instructor. His teaching felt alive because I sensed experience behind it. I could also recognize the activity of a quick Mercurial mind in him, perhaps because I knew that tendency so well in myself.

We may attract the teachers we need at a particular stage of our development. I remain grateful that his lectures crossed my path when they did.

At the same time, I often wondered what would have happened had I discovered Samael’s teachings before my awakening.

I suspect they might actually have interfered with it.

My intellectual mind would have devoured the material. I might have accumulated concepts so quickly that I would have mistaken knowledge about awakening for awakening itself. The ego can become fascinated with spiritual knowledge just as easily as it becomes fascinated with anything else, perhaps even more dangerously because it can mistake that fascination for consciousness.

For me, experience had needed to come first. Only afterward did study become useful.

A Teaching Without Walls

Years later, when I almost accidentally enrolled in an online First Chamber course, an introductory course offered by another Gnostic group, my earlier reservations resurfaced. I heard references to the group having been founded by a living master and later learned that advancement to the Second Chamber required an in-person initiation.

In my naivety, I had assumed that Gnosis was a universal teaching expressed through different organizations but rooted in the same source. Yet when I contacted another Gnostic center, hoping simply to join a local community, I was told that I would need to repeat the First Chamber through their organization, even though the doctrine came from the same teachings of Samael Aun Weor.

I did not know what to make of that.

Perhaps there were reasons for these structures that I did not yet understand. By then, I had learned enough about myself to recognize that immediate judgment could also become an obstacle. I could question what I saw without pretending to understand everything behind it.

Still, I knew that my allegiance could never be to a group or a personality. It had to remain with the Divine within. I found that same principle expressed in Samael’s teachings: the true Master is the Being, the Intimate within us.

I understood the value of teachers, communities, and institutions in preserving and transmitting knowledge. What troubled me was the possibility that the structures created to serve a teaching might eventually become barriers between those seeking the same truth.

And so I found myself facing a question that humanity has faced many times before:

Are we capable of receiving a spiritual teaching without eventually building walls around it?

Or are we repeating what we have done so many times before, turning a path toward unity into another reason to separate from one another?

Iuliana S.

October 2026