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I think that the denial of the flesh is fairly 'built in' to the Qabalah, particularly if one considers the influence of the Essenes in the development of Qabalah. Their beliefs regarding the body were described by Jospehus:
"It is indeed their unshakable conviction that bodies are corruptible and the material composing them impermanent, whereas souls remain immortal forever. Coming forth from the most rarefied ether, they are trapped in the prison house of the body as if drawn down by one of nature's spells; but once freed from the bonds of the flesh, as if released after years of slavery, they rejoice and soar aloft. Teaching the same doctrine as the sons of Greece, they declare that for the good souls there waits a home beyond the ocean, a place troubled by neither rain nor snow nor heart, but refreshed by the zephyr that blows ever gentle from the ocean. Bad souls they consign to a darksome, stormy abyss, full of punishments that know no end."
Interesting quote from cusm, in this thread:
The abyss too is an illusion. It represents a barrier we erect between the levels of relaization we can reach as humans, and the levels we can not reach save through divine inspiration, or transcendence through death. There are many paths across to the top three spheres, not all involve death. The divine awaits beyond the abyss, to the dualistic thinker, with the earthly reams below. When one realizes that the macrocosmic and microcosmic are one, there is no abyss for all the spheres are within the self and so are accesible. If the {self,divine} duality is resolved and understood as M3 describes above, death is merely change from one state to another, for there is truely no dissolution or distruction of reality, only change into new states.
And a quote from Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki from an interview here in response to a question about the abyss:
DAN: I’ll tell you something about that. All this hoo-hah about the Abyss. Humanity has been building bridges over large chasms as far back as it could put two bricks together. If you can’t cross the Abyss in your imagination, then get out of the ball game. It is one of the biggest myths, and it is there as a psychological barrier, and if you have anything in you, you will head up and over that, without any trouble. ... (The Abyss) is to protect those who do not have the courage. That’s not to denigrate. There are some people who say, I can’t do this but I’m going to try. There is in some people, such a desire for knowledge, such a desire for understanding, that they will go into a state of non-being to look for it. You do, you get whirled into this point, where the point is you, and you are also everything outside the point. That brings on an enormous sorrow, because you’re everything and you’re nothing. You want to get back, and yet you don’t want to leave, and you go into a state of total acceptance. You give up yourself. Then you move into Hockmah. |
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