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As I said before, I only yesterday realized what the Mirror in Yesod can accomplish through the 32nd path and that shook me to the bones. I did not have any idea that this could be done or that it was even possible. I believe that receiving knowledge about HALF the Sephiroth can well take up more than a decade and you ask me questions about some random of them like its a walk on the park. I honestly do not know and anyone thinking that he can identify by simply relating his everyday life to a list of abstract qualities is fooling himself.
Once again, you are coming across much like a classic example of the school of thought that I am talking about and attempting to critique. There is this sense in your posts that Yesod is some totally abstract super-sphere that you - as a magician - have inquired into, and with great effort derived some special insights that have blown your mind. You have discovered something that shook you to your bones and which you never thought possible. You are outraged at the idea that someone might locate these experiences in their everyday life, as it is special arcane knowledge that you reckon it needs decades to grasp even a fleeting glimpse of.
My position is that Yesod, and all of the Sephiroth, are a map of the fundamentals of our being. Something that each of us have continual experience of every single day of our lives. We live and breathe Yesod. It's in our dreams, our reflections, our private fantasy world, or secrets and hidden impulses, everything we can imagine. It is our interface with the rest of the Tree, the mirrored surface that reflects the Universe and the light of Tiphareth - and these things too are part of our daily living experience. The talisman of Yesod is the Moon in the night sky, sometimes treacherous like a hall of mirrors, yet the very substance that we must peer through and work with to understand the other mysteries of existence described by the Tree. In Vodou, it's the magic mirror - le miroir fantastique. Yesod describes something fundamental about the nature of our being.
This, by definition, is not something that only special magicians who spend time delving into arcane areas should have direct knowledge of. None of it is. If there is any validity to this stuff whatsoever, then it must be a description of being both microcosmic and macrocosmic. We all have direct experience of Yesod every night when we go to sleep and slip into dreams, when we enter into vivid daydreams on the train to work, when we live in our illusory inner worlds and filter the experience of our senses through this lens. This, for me, is where Qaballa gets most interesting. The Sephiroth of the Tree of Life really do describe our living experience, and "magic" is located right here in every step and every breath of our being. It's important stuff. It seems to be totally missing from a lot of people's sense of this material. I think that should be addressed.
There's almost an exotic othering of the Sephiroth, in a lot of discourse around these matters, they are almost always pitched as secret worlds that the Adept peers into - like Dr Strange scrying through a portal. I think that is real obstacle to an understanding of what this map is actually describing. It's almost like there is a chronic fear of "mundanity" and an escapist desire to look everywhere for magic except directly under our noses in the living world that we are a part of. It's like someone looking for their glasses when they are on their head all the time. Here it all is. In the world. In our experience. In our being. Right here and now. What else is there but this?
I think that the only purpose of the rituals and exercises is to lead you to that - where you are living the Tree of Life - and it's not a lofty goal to attain to, so much as a deep understanding of our nature, the nature of our being and of the Universe, and the microcosmic and macrocosmic relationship between the two. I brought this up in this thread because all the posts so far seemed to be taking this well worn path of delving into ancient tomes and trying to make sense of all of this material, without much sense of any relationship between these discrete magical worlds of symbolism and the magical world that we actually exist in. Focusing on the idea of the thing, rather than the thing itself.
Now for reasons that I don't quite fathom, all of this seems to be shockingly controversial and has got various parties into a horrendous flap. The notion that Qabala might not be an escapist magical mystery tour that reinforces our sense of ourselves as special mystic explorers with arcane knowledge, but actually something that every living thing experiences in every moment. I think it's fairly apparent from the literature that the Tree of Life is supposed to be a map of existence, both microcosmic and macrocosmic. Which means it is a map of our existence - the one that we live each and every day, whether we are a magician or a window cleaner or a hairdresser.
I think that this is an important thing to try and wire back into our understanding of these matters - something that should really be right at the forefront of our engagement with this material. Here it is - the Tree of Life. We're living it right now. All of the exercises and pathworkings really ought to be a support towards this remembering of our nature and the nature of our existence, rather than a solipsistic end in themselves that in a lot of instances seems to actually carry us even further away from the core of our experience into abstract worlds of symbolism that have long since lost their direct connection to our actual life and world, and are inhabited largely for their own sake and because it is in books.
Why should I sacrifice my little time and try to prove to you that something is A where you see it as B ?
Well I'm sacrificing a huge amount of my time to try and get my point across right now, in the face of much aggression. I was not aware that there was a language barrier between us, which I would imagine is a big factor in your initial misunderstandings of what I'm on about and where I am coming from. I was making my point quite reasonably and without snark, until you broke out the exclamation marks in response to my post without really seeming to read and understand what I was attempting to convey - which was frustrating. If you make strong statements like that in a debate with me, expect to be pushed to elaborate and expand, or don't make them. I'm sorry if my manner was brusque yesterday, but I had limited time and was frustrated by responses from people who didn't seem to have really read or understood the point I was trying to make.
Similarly, I had no snark with Medula until the smug comment about how much I make her chuckle, like some remedial child whose efforts trying to form a sentence have caused amusement. That's fairly annoying, and I'm not likely to respond well to it. Especially since her comments also seemed to totally miss the point of what I was trying to say. There's no snark without fire, as they say.
Ev: Thanks for that. Interesting stuff. Will respond in full later this afternoon. |
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