That sucked

Okay so that didn't work as well as I would have liked... hmm....

Crowley Quote

Just got Flock. Haven't updated, so here goes.

I am the Heart; and the Snake is entwined

About the invisible core of the mind.

Rise, O my snake! It is now is the hour

Of the hooded and holy ineffable flower.

Rise, O my snake, into brilliance of
bloom

On the corpse of Osiris afloat in the
tomb!

O heart of my mother, my sister, mine
own,

Thou art given to Nile, to the terror
Typhon!

Ah me! but the glory of ravening storm

Enswathes thee and wraps thee in frenzy
of form.

Be still, O my soul! that the spell may
dissolve

As the wands are upraised, and the aeons
revolve.

Behold! in my beauty how joyous Thou art,

O Snake that caresses the crown of mine
heart!

Behold! we are one, and the tempest of
years

Goes down to the dusk, and the Beetle
appears.

O Beetle! the drone of Thy dolorous note

Be ever the trance of this tremulous
throat!

I await the awaking! The summons on high

From the Lord Adonai, from the Lord
Adonai!

Liber LXV

Steady Practice

The importance of a steady ritual practicum is only really established when you haven't done a single damn thing in years and seek return. It's a lifestyle as is anything else. If you aren't going to do the rituals whether you feel them or not, you're not doing it right. If you don't feel it fine, but you should try to feel it, whatever the result. Failure is practice too.

Pray with your heart, not with your lips. Pray with your soul, not with your heart. Pray with No-Thing and All will hail.

In Lux.

Changes

Perhaps the most information can be yielded in changes. Calculus is concerned mostly with changes and progressions. There are many symbols and devices constructed to measure change, the derivative, limits (okay so they don't, but stick with me), the integral, &c.

Change is perhaps the most important thing that we can learn from, for change is always occurring... to say that it is constant is a misnomer, for change itself is changing, which is changing, which is changing, ...., you get the picture.

I had so many wonderful ideas to include here, and found that when I started writing they drifted away from me. I could make many comments from my memory, so I guess that will have to serve until my own discoveries are bolstered from whatever hole they've hidden in.

In Ceremonial Magick, and indeed Magick in general, change is a powerful event. Here now, I am not talking about the general idea of change as in life's progression, but actual instantaneous change, such as going from one thing to the next, leaving a room for another. The transition point in such a case is the door. The act of change and of the transition is powerful. Who could say no to this? Going from one room to another, one leaves behind the ideologies of that room for another. Going from the hallway to the bathroom forces one to abandon the idea of travel and directions for the idea of physical need, toiletry habits, &c. Leaving the bathroom reverses the process.

Now let's abstract this concept a bit. The sun rising and setting in its course causes continuous change, but looking at the instant change, say on the major points of the day, sunrise, noon, sunset, midnight, the changes are again obvious. Definitely the course of one's actions changes during the course of the sun... to say that the sun is the cause of these changes is perhaps a fallacy, but the representation of them is within our scope of consideration.

Magickians of Solomon's day had the concept of a Magickal Hour, whose length was variable, it changed depending on sunrise and sunset.. then that period of daylight was divided by 12, and lo and behold! that's the length of a Magickal Hour. Certain experiments conducted... a tad sloppily I must admit, by some parties many years ago determined that certain effects occur on the changes of the Magickal Hours... Nothing too deterministic... emotions wax and wane, hunger strikes and relents, little things that are more emotionally based. There are other effects, but I leave that to the reader to determine.

Transitions are the focus of everything because everything can be rendered into a change. Take two moments and find the "derivative" at any point between them. Time is continuous and integrable at all points in this case... so change is everywhere and wherever we want it to be. This brings to mind a certain one of the Magickal Formulae formulated elsewhere and by other authors, that of IAO.

IAO, Isis Apophis Osiris. In the short run, it represents a thing's original state, the death state, and the ressurected form. Take the example of a child who plays with a toy for a month, then becomes bored with it and leaves it alone for some period of time, then finds it one day and discovers another use for it, and brings it into the Osiris state. Isis Apophis Osiris. IAO is also a symbol for the Divine LUX (Lat: Light, pronounced "Lukes"), as transposing letters, &c. yields three forms of cross, and the cross is a symbol of LUX.

And I can't find a way to wrap up this ramble, so I'm now done. There.

Graph Theory and the Tree of Life

No one, to my knowledge, has ever applied the techniques of graph theory to examine the Tree of Life. Thus, being into graph theory as I am, I'm doing it.

A few definitions. A graph G is a collection of vertices (nodes) V(G), and a set of edges E(G). A node is generally represented by a dot or circle, and an edge by a line between two nodes. Thus the Tree is a graph, with each sephira as a node and each path as an edge.


Now, if we can find a set of nodes and edges between two nodes on a graph, then there is a path between them. If we can do this and then take a different set of edges and nodes to get back we have a cycle. A Hamiltonian Cycle is such a cycle that uses all node sin the graph only once (except the first/last node which is the same node).

The Tree of Life has a Hamiltonian cycle... which is also the Path of the Flaming Sword (among others) [note: lost my notes... again, not so sure on this]. Early inspections seem to indicate that all subgraphs (same Tree with removed sephira) have Hamiltonian cycles as well, which doesn't always happen.

there is a perfect matching on the Tree... ie, we can also pair off all the sephiroht without using an edge more than once. Obviously subgraphs don't have this property, as it requires an even number of nodes.

The Tree is 3/2-tough, which means that the best possible result we can get is by removing 3 nodes and yielding 2 disconnected components... remove Tiphareth and Netzach and Hod. Two parts with just Yesode and Malkuth and the rest in separate parts.

The Tree of Life is also 4-partite, meaning the nodes can be grouped into 4 parts and have no edges between any node and the other nodes in its part. Took me a minute to figure this one out, until i drew it in Word and started dragging around the nodes and the edges could move with me.

The girth of the graph (shortest cycle) is 3, as there is a triangle.

*sigh* I'll add more to this at another time, when I have more time for deeper study.

Stillness and Knowledge

I had always wondered what it was about walking around late at night on campus that I loved. I especially loved to watch the light on our old castle-like buildings and on the trees and grass. This year I discovered that it is the stillness. Go out around your house or on campus or down the road late at night at 1AM and look at the trees. They are very calm and very still. Absolute silence and darkness except for whatever lights may lie nearby.

This is not how life is. Life is truly not static at all, not even the objects are static during the day, but at night everything seems to stumble to a crawl. I have sat out many an evening and can never pinpoint exactly when the trees stop.

This post doesn't really have much to do about anything, other to say that life is dynamic and that any peace and goal we may obtain are changeable. The only constant is variable. Time never stops, for it never really existed to begin with, not in the way we'd imagine or would like it to. The only thing to do is press on as if this makes sense. In that respect I agree with Camus' ideas on the absurdity of life, in short that the human mind desires to know the sense of things and the world disappoints with a senselessness that is enfuriating. Yes, Ody, I do agree that sometimes not everything has an answer, some things you can't "know" in the usual sense, but then I've always told you that and never seemed to explain the differences in "knowing" properly. For the many futile arguments over that, I apologize, and even though you probably haven't caught on that this is here yet, I'm going to explain a little more.

This isn't an uncommon idea, that there are different means to knowledge. Knowledge is obtained through many avenues, through experience, through reason and logic, through God and deity, and just plain random inspiration (which differs in source from God and deity, but is similar in effect). There is also a knowledge that we can never know consciously (it is this kind that arguments seem to arise from with me).

The knowledge that the Qaballah gives is available through all these routes, but not all knowledge is available through all routes. For example, the correspondences, as in why the Divine Name (otherwise regarded as the Atziluthic Title) of Kether is Eheieh (I Am), and why Malkuth's is Adonai ha-Aretz (The Lord of the Earth), are reason knowledge. Scholarly knowledge. Books can give this information or it can be taught and passed on. What Malkuth means, how it feels, how it functions, how it "exists" are things that cannot be passed on, they can be experienced to an extent, but most of the experience is never shown consciously. It may influence further conscious thought and action, but is never directly known. The human mind is a many-faceted thing, whose facets may break. We can only take in so much and our minds can only directly understand little.

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.