t - 3 and counting...
Introduction:
I will do my best to make this as coherent and readable as possible, but I make no gaurantees that it will not confuse, mystify, or otherwise obsfucate the ideas embedded within. I intend to present to you, dear readers, a certain way of thinking about the Tree of Life in its dualistic manifestation, and here I refer to both its "dayside" and its "nightside" or also known as the Otz Chiim with its sephiroth and qlippoth respectively.
This is, of course, hot on the heals of love for diZzy, and will employ some of the linguistic structures developed in that thread. You have had fair warning.
Thread:
It is commonly thought that the Tree of Life is a diagram that represents the macrocosom in the microcosom; this means, under a standard interpretation, that the forces and archetypes that fit onto the tree are not only present in the external world, but are also parts of each and every one of us. This would look something akin to {external, internal} if we should desire to try and represent the resolution of opposites in a language. For this to be accepted as "the way things are" we must also accept that each of us really is the universe as it exists outside of ourselves, but also, we must accept that we are a manifestation of the universe. In other words, we are both the individual in the world, and the world in the individual. Again, we might represent this as {self, other} or {human, universe} or some other binary pair which shows itself as a singular system, structure or such. This is at once both awesome and empowering, but also terrifying and disempowering. However, as magicians (or whatever label you choose to use) we must strive to remain centred and recognize that we do not need to emphasize or lessen anything that comes our way, but merely live in the now and be. This means that we silently and humbly accept that we are both an individual and the universe at large, assume the responsibility that such a sense of Self requires, but do not conceede to collapse under such an immense and difficult existence.
In traditional qabala there is but ten sephiroth, and there certainly is no recognition of a "nightside" to the tree of life. Perhaps this is where the Jewish tradition could use some reform, but that is not the issue here. In modern or popular qabala we have those practitioners who have added the idea of both an eleventh sephira and the notion of the darkside of the tree. However, I tend to view this as a further decent into dualistic thinking, and intend to illustrate why the two sides of the tree can be seen as one and the same.
Crowley has put forth the importance of the High Priestess as the only arcana which "crosses the desert." Here he has refered to daath through the metaphor of a desert, and I find this curious. Granted, deserts are teeming with life, but we typically associate notions of barrenness, emptiness, lifelessnessand other such ideas with 'desert.' Other magicians have called daath an illusory or false sephira, and EE Rehmus describes it as "existing/non-existing." This says to me that daath is at once real and non-real, or {real, nonreal}, and is an attempt to capture yet a further singularity of {empty, full}. By this I contend that to think of daath as an empty space is also to think of it as a full space, for the dualistic pairing {nothing, everything} represents a reality that we cannot express nor quite comprehend given the limited depth of our language.
Daath is commonly thought of as the gateway to the other world, and by this it is meant to the darkside of the tree with its demon guardians of the tunnels that run between the qlippoth. Rehmus describes this doorway as that through which "death, non-existence, and Hell come into life." However, I see here more dualistic traps of thinking for what is life without death, what is non-existence without existence, and what is Hell without Heaven? In other words, the {true, false} sephira/qliphah 'daath' represents the unification of opposites, the sacred alchemical marriage, the union of {divine, mundane}. Christ himself said that the kingdom of God is here on earth, but we only need the appropriate way to see it (of course, he claimed that this way was through him, and I'd like to think that, as Christ is an archetype that fits into the sixth sephira, tiphareth, that he is a part of us, and his claim is a metaphorical one which invites us to become as Christ through our own works). By 'kingdom of God' I tend to think that this is synonymous with 'heaven' and certainly we can see our world as a Heaven and a Hell depending on our point of view, location in space-time, and other such factors. So, what I am driving at here is that it might be better to think of daath as a sort of black box through which we are able to run opposites to get at their resolution/dissolution.
The cost of such thinking requires that we take a step beyond our beliefs about who and what we are. Again, the Tree is a diagram of both the external world and our internal world, and as such, it appears that it itself is a diagram of the sacred marriage, but what does this mean?
For starters, I feel that it means that we must begin to take responsibility for both the good and the bad in this world. That is, we cannot merely see the horror and claim that we had no part in it, or that it was not our doing. If daath is a doorway to the darkside of the tree, but it has an elusive nature of non/existence, then perhaps it is the case that there is no door: both sides of the Tree are merely one side, and the demons and angels of their appropriate stations on the Tree are merely reflections of the same being (which, if you are picking up what I am putting down, is merely manifestations of your own being). Peter Carrol has said that "a demon is merely a god acting out of turn," and this suggests that there are no such things as god/desses or demons, but only {god, demon}, which we could place into another pairing: {self, {god, demon}}. In other words, each of us is both the host of angels and the hoardes of demons, and it is this recognition and admittance which might actually spur us to behave in more responsible ways to the "others" that inhabit this planet (and again, these others are merely extensions of Self, but seemingly seperate through our immature and undeveloped thought patterns and ways of being).
Further, we must begin to take responsibility for how the world unfolds, and that each one of us is a centre that creates a criss-crossing of manifestations which results in the shared world around us. This appears to mean, like Martin Buber talks about in "I and Thou," that the way we experience the world around us has a direct effect on the way the world around us is. This is given some scientific weight by the fact that two interacting quantum systems define one and other by that interaction. To move from the abstract to the more concrete, an example: suppose you are walking down the street and you are looking at someone and thinking what a snotty fucker he or she must be, your intent and thought behind that feeling assists in generating in that person a sense of their own snottiness. What I am getting at is that we all play a role in collapsing identities of things into ways that will assist in making our own desires and prejudices manifest in those things. Now, since we are the world inside out, what we are really doing is collapsing our own identies into what we feel ourselves to be. Thus, to work on oneself and to strive to discover one's identity, are we not best to attempt to control our knee-jerk reactions and stiffle our personal prejudices. Should we not attempt to overcome our hate by recognizing it for fear, and thus, seek to become fearless as our warrior paths require? It seems to me that by adopting such a large responsibility we may become humble in our own sense of individuality; that is, by attempting to understand our own identity by linking it to the identity of the world around us we become less eager to exploit and abuse because we recognize that it comes around to self-abuse and self-use. Of course, we all have a penchant for self-abuse, but this brings us back to the notion that we all have our inner demons/angels we merely have to come to recognize when it is appropriate to act.
As the Buddhists have urged us with their eight-fold path, we come to appropriate action through appropriate thoughts and speaking (this is not the whole of the path, but will do for my hijacking of their ideas here). Certainly our language has placed us in cages with shackles forged strong from the depths of history, but there is no reason why we cannot make the attempt to break such bonds. Indded, it appears that this is the magickal path in its essence: not about control, desire or manipulation, but about realization and self-actualization. However, if we cannot work to see ourselves as part of the problems that we face in our daily affairs, then how can we even attempt to think that we can be part of the solutions?
Conclusions:
Daath represents a synthesis of opposites, and it is the most important sephira/qliphah in so far as it urges us to recognize that the nightside and the dayside of the Tree are one and the same, and it is ourselves who come to create and destroy, to heal and to harm, to live and to die. Certainly we need to be evil in the same way we need to be good (since one only has existence in contrast to the other), yet, we can certainly make the attempt to emphasize a positivity over a negativity, and in the end, transcend dualism altogether as we cease to look for answers because we have no more questions, or rather, because we recognize that there never were any questions in the first place, but only a lost and confused Self who insists on remaining trapped in a hall of mirrors which was built by the Self's own hands.
Again, agian, again, I ask: who are you, who are you really?
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