Not Quite Poseur, But...

"I was asked to memorise what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner." -- Aleister Crowley

Anyone who has taken upper level college mathematics knows the truth of this statement intimately. Case in point, Real Analysis... the proofs are only feasible if you actually understand why they work, or at least half understand. Memorization is not learning. I've seen so many trite posters of this that I cannot even be bothered to repeat any, except to summarize the popular phrase (with teachers, at least) that if you cannot teach something back you have not truly learned it at all. He who cannot tutor what he was taught has not learned a damn thing.

The Qaballah presents a huge amount of material to learn. But it must be learned, not memorized. Take Crowley's Liber 777, for example. Therein lies correspondences between everything on the Tree of Life. It is an example of what will eventually end up in your head (although I shudder to think of how it would be represented... certainly not a table... maybe an infinitely dimensional array... wow, my head just exploded), through your making of connections throughout the span of your lifetime(s). However, to memorize this table and hope to apply it is sheer folly. You must understand why the connections hold before you can use them properly.

In a ritual, the goal is to choose the attrapments of the Temple with care so that everything lies in accordance with everything else, which of course, lies in accordance with the goal. If you are doing a ritual to attain deeper inner peace, for example, one might choose the color white, pick symbols that represent the element of Spirit, and things that associate with YHVShH, for example. One would not seek inner calm by surrounding oneself with symbols of Red, of Mars or Saturn, for example. Everything must be in agreement. These things are felt out with experience. This is where book learning does not help a damn. You must do things for yourself. It is the greatest temptation of a Qaballist to simply turn scholar and scribe, which is fine if that is your goal. But to be a Qaballist means doing.

Imperfection in Deity

More perusing of Fuller's book The Secret Wisdom of the Qaballah has thrown up the following quote:

This strange story is both obscure and perplexing, because it is difficult to attribute imperfection to God. But to the Qabalist it is otherwise, for the No-Thing evolves into the Some-Thing, the Who; and necessity creeps in, for necessity is impossible without a choice, and choice demands the existence of opposing forces, the male and the female, or the positive and the negative.

Something to think on. The Qaballah redefines the state of things and the reaction to this is often violent, as no one wants their schemas to be broken, for when this happens the mind reaches and does not find. The effect is that of leaning the foot down, expecting the next step on the stairs and finding nothing, only to have to grope about for a new connection/solution (ie grabbing the railing) to save oneself.

Ethics and Qaballah

One of the major issues that others have had with the Qaballah is that it does not seem to engender a system of ethics, as Christianity and all other religions do. It is necessary for one, to distinguish Qaballah from other religions in that Qaballah is not a religion. It is not. Whatever else it may be, religion it is not. It is not, precisely so it does not encompass the problems that other religions encounter.

Ethics to the Qaballist is what is wishes to be. No, that's not quite right. Good and evil are a part of this world, only because we are in this world. Were Creation to be undone and everything restored to its proper state, the "accident" corrected to proper form, then good and evil would have no hold, they would become irrelevant and useless (because in the corrected form, there is no "use").

To quote Isaac Meyer (taken from The Secret Wisdom of the Qaballah by J.F.C. Fuller):

"The Qabbalah does not recognize in the Good and Evil, two independent, automatic, opposing powers, but both are, according to it, under the power of the Supreme Absolute Deity. It asserts that the Evil springs out of the Good, and only originated from a diversion of the latter. Evil exists, for God's own wise purpose, by the sufferance of the Absolute One, who gives us the blighting cold, frost, and night, and also the beneficent and blessed daylight, warmth, and sunshine. Man therefore partakes of two regions, that of the external, visible, matter world, that of Evil and Darkness, and that of the internal spiritual higher world, that of Goodness and Light."

Nature of Life

There is misery in the world. Obviously this is true. Perhaps no one is more cognizant of this little fact than myself. It is the nature of Existence.

Most view existence as a very good thing. It is what we see, feel, hear and touch, ergo, this is what was supposed to happen. What if it was an accident? What if each new layer of Creation added walls between us and Godhead? We know, through references to the Edomite Kings in the Old Testament, and through other writings in the Sepher ha-Zohar that there were failed worlds, in which the balance was upset and the Edomite Kings ruled. This world is simply the one that sort of worked.

But why does it work? The Fall. The Fall is the only reason that we're here today, thinking, feeling, smelling, touching, tasting, &c. The Fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden is a simplified notion of the Qaballistic dealing with the Fall. Creation was formed by contractions of the Divine Will, by adding layers and layers of reality, almost like an onion, except God started with nothing in the beginning and technically ended up with no onion. The Tree of Life comes into play as follows: Take Light from Ain Soph Aur, the Limitless Light, and pour it into Kether, the first sephira, let it flow into it until even Kether can hold no more, and spills over in Chokmah, which spills into Binah, and all the way down into Malkuth. Now, Malkuth is the last sephira, so where does this spilling over of Light go? It cannot go any further, so the whole system gets "backed up" with Divine Light, and the sephira all crack, except for the Supernal Triad, Kether, Chokmah, and Binah, who retain their Divine shape and properties.

The other sephiroht didn't precisely crack, it is more like someone smacked a sphere too hard and broke off a few outer layers, which they shed like skin. These shells became the Qlippoth (the Kelli-poht) or Shells. They mirror the positive sephiroht with negative ones. The reason we are here is because of them. They formed the Balance. The entire Tree dropped when the Fall ocurred, and now Malkuth and the last of the Qlippoth (because the Tree of the Qlippoth is upside down to mirror the Tree of Life)... they didn't merge but they are a bit too close for comfort. And now we are susceptible to the influence of both Sephiroht and Qlippoth. The goal of Qaballah is to correct the Fall in each of us.

Day to Day Events

To train yourself in the Qaballah, take whatever knowledge you have and apply it everywhere you go. The goal of the Qaballah is to connect everything with everything else. Hmm... to put it into terms of graph theory, I guess the idea would be to create the largest sized complete multigraph possible... very hard to do when the order of the graph increases continuously... alright, away from my mathy side. The Qaballah tells you that 10 is associated with Malkuth, 1 with Kether, and so on. The element of Earth (or the elements in general) are associated with Malkuth as well. So, if you go and see a grassy field, you think to yourself, that is Earth, it is associated with Malkuth. The archangel of Malkuth is named Sandalphon, the Divine Name of Malkut is Adonai ha-Aretz (which happens to be Hebrew for Lord of the Earth). Thus, the Divine associated with that field is Adonai ha-Aretz. Connection made. Your soul will be the greater for it.

By increasing the amount of these intellectual connections, you can elevate your knowledge to new levels. Of course, eventually the amount of new connections you can make will be severely limited, so that everytime you try to do so, you will end up with something that you previously new, an old connection. When you are at this point, it is time for a new phase of your life, going beyond the Abyss. Such people who approach the Abyss are few, but those who do are Masters of what they know. Woul d that I could ever accomplish so lofty a goal as to be cradled as a Babe of the Abyss and continue onward. My connections are still pithy few, but I struggle onwards. It will take lifetimes, but I will achieve and correct the way the Universe turned out in the Fall. It is in the Qaballah to do so, and so shall I.

The Tree of Life

Given that the Qaballah encompasses a lot of material (beyond All material, in fact), I will start with the basics, and work my way through all the knowledge that I possess, elaborating on what is written in common texts on the subject with personal experience and what I myself have discovered from personal research. It is how this system is supposed to work, and I'll attempt to stick to it. Thus, we begin with the Tree.

The Tree of Life, in Hebrew Etz Chayyim, is the symbolic representation of the Universe. It is the Tree of Life in the Old Testament, the one guarded in the Garden of Eden. It is written that the Tree of Life is what will restore the Garden of Eden to its proper state, but that's another lecture. The Tree is composed of ten spheres, called sephiroht, each individual sphere being a sephira. Connecting the ten spheres are 22 paths, which are the numbered with the Hebrew alphabet (because in Hebrew, as in some other languages, the letters also represent the numbers, so aleph=1, beth=2, &c.). These yield the 32 Paths of Wisdom of the Tree of Life.

There are many subdivisions of the Tree that one can make, into pillars, Palaces, Worlds, and the like. Without the diagram, the description of these is useless for the time being, so I will later on return here to edit this post and give the rest of the information. A judicious search on Google will find a diagram, several of them better than I myself could have rendered.

{place diagram of tree of life here}

The sephiroht are numbered 1 through 10, as I stated previously. Each sephira has a name and properties. First is Kether, the Crown, then Chokmah, Wisdom, Binah, Understanding, Chesed (sometimes called Gedulah), Mercy, Geburah, Strength, Tiphareth, Beauty, Netzach, Victory, Hod, Yesode, Foundation, and Malkuth, Kingdom. The Kingdom of God is here! In more than one sense... we dwell in the realm of Malkuth. Malkuth gave birth to the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and is the rockbed upon which we exist. It is the physical, the tangible, the things we see, taste, feel and touch (and smell, of course).

Perhaps before I start talking about the sephiroht, I should mention the Three Veils of Negative Existence, being Ain (Without), Ain Soph (Without Limit, or Limitless), and Ain Soph Aur (Without Limit Light, or Limitless Light). Before there was positive existence as we know it, there was negative existence. What, pray tell, is negative existence? It is something we cannot know, because it is nothing at all like our existence. We cannot even frame suitable questions about it, because it is completely out of our realm of comprehension. It is as if we lived in only 2 dimensions and were asked to talk about the 3rd. There's little we can do about it, it isn't even a human error problem, it is simply beyond anything in this Creation.

According to Lurianic Qaballists (those who follow the school of thought of Rabbi Isaac Luria), God created the Universe by the process of tzim-tzum which is similar in effect to that of someone bring a fragrant bouqet of roses through a room. One can smell the roses still in the room, even after they have departed. The essence of God still remains in Creation, even though God himself is not there. I am not stating that God does not abide in this Existence, only that this Existence is not directly identifiable with God (this only makes sense... look around, the world is not composed of pure deity).

Introduction

I have blatantly stolen the idea for this from someone else, and while my project is in a completely different bent than the original, I hope the original's author will agree that the general purpose overrides the specific content, with which he would probably disagree.

I am a Qaballist. The knowledge that I seek is available only through the means of the Tree of Life and Ceremonial Magick. In this blog I am going to show you my fears, failures, trials, successes (few as they are), and hope to illustrate the greatness and sheer majesty of the Qaballah. I don't claim you should practice it. In fact, if you are like most of the people I know around my age, you are too stupid to walk on your own feet. The Qaballah is not for all. Aleister Crowley once stated in a letter that his then current Order would only accept those that had the time, the money, or the sheer intelligence to study. Any of them is sufficient, one of them is necessary at least. The Qaballah is not for Everyone, it is for All, meaning it is not for everyone individually, but the knowledge it contains and the pathways it provides benefit All.

I hope that these (not always so) humble writings will shed some light in a practice that seems to be heading back underground (the New Age movement and influx of those between religions or against religions have hurt the Qaballah and legitimate Magick to no end), and will encourage others of like minds to seek out Truth in the ways that they can, even if it be not through my means.