We are currently engaged in an almost two-year initiatory Pathworking with The Qabalah Tree of Life. You can read what that's all about here. In the meantime, I have been documenting our work as we explore the Paths.
It is important to know these are brief notes. A true understanding of each Path begs a vital understanding of the Sephiroth connecting them. Further research on your own is highly recommended.
It is important to know these are brief notes. A true understanding of each Path begs a vital understanding of the Sephiroth connecting them. Further research on your own is highly recommended.
We have completed Path 24, now for Path 23 .....
The Dark Night of the Soul has passed. Personally, I am very excited for this Path, as this is my Life-Path according to Gematria attributions to my birth-date.
In Path 23, we are engaging in first contact with Geburah. If for any reason you need to re-prime yourself on the meaning of the individual Sephirah, now would be a good time to go back and refer to your notes. The Paths themselves become more and more abstract, so the more research one can do on the Sephiroth will lead to deeper results.
Hod is the sphere of mental forms and communication. Geburah is the sphere of breaking down of forms so that Creation remains pristine. Geburah is a sphere of fire, of purification. The Hebrew letter for this path, mem, means water. So what we have is a type of spiritual technology where "the fire aspect when linked with water produces tremendous power much akin to an hydraulic pump." (Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, The Shining Paths, p. 96)
The lesson in this Path is taught sufficiently from the Trump of The Hanged Man, showing how to train the human mind to work from the spiritual perspective. This indicates that the values of the higher world are most often the reverse of the lower. Again, a deeper understanding of the Sephiroth denotes a more intimate understanding of this Path's place in terms of our relationship with the Individuality (Higher Self): "Chesed is the Sephirah associated with what the Individuality is, Geburah is the Sephirah associated with what the Individuality does. Geburah also has a corrective or assessing element in it which implies the ability to see what is, the ability to see what should be, and then the ability to take action to merge the two kinds of reality so that after the Geburic action everything that is is as it should be." (Gareth Knight, A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism, Vol. II, p. 140)
Crowley calls this Path/Trump the "card of the Dying God" (Book of Thoth, p. 97) and perhaps he has a point. This is the place where old ideas are purged to make way for a new, higher perspective in accordance with the Spiritual Will of the Universe. Ascending the Tree, the fiery heart of Geburah tests the purity of forms to discern what is useful and what isn't.
Another principle of water is reflection. It is in Hod that the principles of the Higher Mind (via Geburah) should be reflected. Also, we are immediately connected to Binah via water, whose influence passes directly through Geburah. "Binah is of the Spirit, the most concrete form of the Spirit qua Spirit, wherein the true image of the Self and Destiny rests." (Knight, p. 143)
In order to mirror this most pristine reflection of the God Reflection (Itself the mirror-image of the Unmanifest) we must inherit the symbol of the Cup for our being: " . . . the first task is to make the mind into a clear receptive vessel, capable of registering pure reason without being occluded by false opinions or mental taboos." (Knight, p.142-143)
Turning one's point of view upside down, in reverse, is the magical formula of seeing the world via the perspective of Spirit. Further, in the obvious attributions of self-sacrifice as seen in the Tarot Trump, we can understand that the result of this formula rests in relinquishing personal will for the Will of the Greater All.
We are currently engaged in an almost two-year initiatory Pathworking with The Qabalah Tree of Life. You can read what that's all about here. In the meantime, I have been documenting our work as we explore the Paths.
It is important to know these are brief notes. A true understanding of each Path begs a vital understanding of the Sephiroth connecting them. Further research on your own is highly recommended.
It is important to know these are brief notes. A true understanding of each Path begs a vital understanding of the Sephiroth connecting them. Further research on your own is highly recommended.
We have completed Path 25, now for Path 24 .....
"Life is the dream, Death is the dreamer, they belong to each other like lovers, and like lovers they are parted for a while and come together again at last. The title of the [Path] is, 'Child of the Great Transformers.' The Transformers here are Life and Death, the Child is Man!" (Dolores Ashcroft Nowicki, The Shining Paths, p.89)
This is the final path of the three-part Dark Night of the Soul. The previous two Paths have perfectly set up the Initiate's Work ahead. "The task of the student on this path is to let go of the old and yield to that which is unfamiliar, trusting in the love of the divine." (Israel Regardie, A Garden of Pomegranates, p. 330)
Gareth Knight recounts Dion Fortune's seven types of Death that are listed in her seminal work The Cosmic Doctrine. They are:
First Death: two separate forces ceasing to exist independently, but becoming a single, entirely new manifestation.
Second Death: the evolution of a lower form to a higher form.
Third Death: death of the physical body, synonymous with Path 32. "When one dies physically, one is treading this Path." (Knight, p. 90)
Fourth Death: sleep, which is a lesser form of the Third Death.
Fifth Death: death of the Personality, the process of this, the 24th Path.
Sixth Death: trance, which is an induced sleep, akin to the Fourth Death.
Seventh Death: Illumination; a death of the Personality where "the Personality lives within the physical world, so that all the Paths below Tiphareth are still functional but controlled from the higher instead of the lower levels, by the Individuality." (Knight, p.93)
In this Path we are concerned with the Fifth Death, in that it will eventually lead to the Seventh Death. "The aim is to elicit one's true Spiritual Will and to have the courage to act by it, and one's true Spiritual Will cannot possibly be of a selfish or mere 'trying to be different' nature." (Knight, p.97) This is why death is a necessity in order for the higher orders of consciousness to work appropriately; the lower animal mind will distort whatever information is coming in through Tipherath . . . so the animal mind (the Personality) must die.
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| "Into the Shadows" by J.R. Slattum |
The Hebrew letter of this Path is Nun, the Fish (obviously representative of water) and astrologically by Scorpio, ruled by Mars (a planet of fiery energy). So these two energies together could be shown to mimic a First Death, the blending of fire and water to make steam (the essence of Spirit). "In alchemy, this card explains the idea of putrefaction, the technical name given by its adepts to the series of chemical changes which develops the final form of life from the original latent seed in the Orphic egg." (Aleister Crowley, The Book of Thoth, p.99)
Where the Abyss is the gulf between the Supernal states of the Godhood and the Ethical Triad (the higher spiritual centers of man) so we are also experiencing a similar gulf here with Paths 26, 25, and 24, separating the Individuality and the Personality. "The Gulf is something that has to be leaped, and leaped alone, stripped of all hindering burdens, in faith [...] It is thus one of the crisis points of spiritual progress because of the great temptation to turn back from the unknown to the apparent safety of known things, and to succumb to this temptation is to lose all the fruits of past endeavour." (Knight, p.98-99)
A helpful image to meditate on is that of Nun, the Fish, and that it is mirroring Path 28 - Tzaddi, the Fish-hook (The Star Trump). Is the hook catching the fish or is the fish swallowing the hook (Jonah and the Whale)?
"It may be noted that there is no reference to birth throughout the symbolism of the Trumps and this is because birth is death and death is birth, each being opposing sides of the same coin." (Knight, p. 89) This path is a renewal, a regeneration into a new form of being. This is the goal of Initiation. All gods and myths centered in Tiphareth are gods and myths that have died to become reborn: Christ, Osiris, etc.
"Death is as natural as life, and indeed it is seen by initiates as a higher birth, with life on earth as the real death. If the thirty-second path is trodden at physical death, then perhaps we could call the twenty-fourth a practice run." (Ashcroft-Nowicki, p.91)
With all of the hell re-surging in Iraq due to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and the possibility of our re-involvement, there is something I would like to remind the American people before they start drawing their lines of opinion regarding the people of that troubled region.
I saw this video posted a few weeks back on Facebook, and the person posting it commenting "Word" with a host of others praising this soldier's harsh criticism to the Iraqi policemen.
I understand what he is doing. In war, this is the way you talk, the way you get a point across in the static of bullets and treachery. I don't fault him at all. He is doing his job and doing it well.
I fault the people here at home with their "Hell Yeah"s and the "Right On"s. It's the same attitude when Bin Laden was killed. It's the mob mentality. People of America, shut your mouths please. War is war, your opinions and judgments have no place to the people involved on the ground. We are talking about a region of the world where one war is replaced with another like an assembly line from Hell itself. Right on their own doorsteps, where every family is a widow in one way or another to the atrocities of bloodshed.
Before stating your opinions of the people over there (which truly have no value; only facts have value) please take into consideration this excerpt from Dexter Filkins' book The Forever War (p.73-74). You may begin to understand why it may be so hard to retain Iraqi cooperation when it is needed:
"Some days I thought we had broken into a mental institution. One of the old ones, from the nineteenth century, where people were dumped and forgotten. It was like we had pried the doors off and found all these people clutching themselves and burying their heads in the corners and sitting in their own filth. It was useful to think of Iraq in this way. It helped in your analysis. Murder and torture and sadism: it was part of Iraq. It was in people's brains.
"Sometimes I would walk into the newsroom that we had set up in The New York Times bureau in Baghdad, and I'd find our Iraqi employees gathered round the television watching a torture video. You could buy them in the bazaars in Baghdad; they were left over from Saddam's time. The Iraqis would be watching them in silence. Just staring at the screen. In one of the videos, some Baath party men had pinned a man down on the floor and were holding down his outstretched arm, while another official beat the man's forearm with a heavy metal pipe until his arm broke into two pieces. There was no sound in the video, but you could see that the man was screaming. None of the Iraqis in the newsroom said anything.
"I tried to recall these things when I got impatient with the Iraqis. Sometimes, when readers from America sent me e-mails expressing anger at the Iraqis--why are they so ungrateful? why can't they govern themselves?--I considered sending them one of the videos."
A good question. Why indeed? What is the purpose of Pathworking on the Tree of Life of the Holy Qabalah? Why are we doing the Pathworking in this specific way (backwards from Path 32 through 1)?
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| "Recursion - As Above, So Below" by J.R. Slattum |
The Why
In my opinion, the late great mystic Col. C.R.F. Seymour has stated perfectly the "why" of any true spiritual endeavor:
" . . . there is a 'divine discontent' that urges one on to seek beyond the skyline where strange roads go down. As a rule it is only the restless soul, who, driven by this strange but divine feeling of discontent, seeks for the Ancient Mysteries of the Western Tradition. Thus, looked at from this point of view, Initiation into the Western Mystery Tradition may be said to be the goal of such a one." (The Forgotten Mage, p.19)
We are driven, and we don't know why. We are drawn to this Work and it is in doing it that we will find out why it called to us . . . maybe. Maybe it will always be a mystery, which is probably why it has been called "the Mysteries."
Pathworking in Qabalah (via the Western Mystery Tradition) is an Initiatory process. Initiation, according to the Colonel, "is a ritualistic and symbolic ceremony which begins a spiritual and mental process that aims at enabling the candidate to become a conscious and competent co-worker with those beings who, from higher states of consciousness than this physical state, guide and guard humanity." (The Forgotten Mage, p.21)
The What
So, the Colonel calls Initiation a "symbolic" ceremony. Speaking of symbols . . .
The Qabalah symbol of the Tree of Life is a composite symbol, a collection of symbols from various mystical traditions. It is itself "a system of relationships among mystical symbols which can be used [...] to open up access to the hidden reaches of the mind - beyond the frontiers of reason." (Gareth Knight, A Practical Guide to Qabalastic Symbolism, Vol. I, p. 7)
In essence, Qabalah is a series of symbols which we are trying to breach . . . as we breach them we gain access to those parts of consciousness they represent. The aim of a symbol is its own demise. We have to get past what the symbol seems to represent (its literal facade) and get to what lies behind it.
One of the greatest Qabalists who ever lived, Dion Fortune, states that an Initiate uses a symbol-system such as the Tree "as an algebra by means of which he will read the secrets of the unknown potencies; in other words, he uses the symbol as a means of guiding thought out into the Unseen and Incomprehensible." (The Mystical Qabalah, p. 15)
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| Artwork by Jeffrey Smith |
The How
This is the purpose of Pathworking and the meditations that accompany the process. It is to engage with these symbols in a conscious way that can reach into the subconscious recesses of the mind. Each symbol (whether it is a Hebrew letter, Tarot card, astrological glyph, mythological figure, angelic being, etc.) represents a key to unlock a certain dimension that exists within the subconscious. When we interact with that symbol through Pathworking, through the story provided by the meditations, we gain access to those dimensions that already exist within our Universe, but otherwise would remain hidden.
We may or may not be consciously aware of this "unlocking" right away. Often times, especially as a Pathworking moves further on "up" the Tree, it is much harder to consciously discern and put into words the experience.
Back in the day, the Mystery Schools had much more ritual engagement, intensive initiatory practices that took over a person's entire life. We don't have that luxury (or paradigm) here in the modern world. However, the meditations we use by Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki (in the lineage of Dion Fortune) are designed to fit our modern context as best as possible. The more Initiates have worked the Paths over time (and found what works and what doesn't) we have more resources to pull from. Because of this, it may only take us 2 years to explore what took 20 years for the ancients.
The Paths
Strategically, we are working the Paths from 32 to 1, each Path and each Sephirah, to receive the fullest experience of the Tree possible. That is the only way to receive understanding of the Tree before truly working with it. After we have engaged in a full Pathworking of the Tree of Life, we will be able to do magic, to discern which specific paths we would like to work with for particular purposes, and so on. But, we have to explore the entire map of the whole before gaining any kind of mastery over its parts.
"The point is that as no aspect of life can be fully understood devoid of its relationship with a great complex of other aspects, so no Sephirah on the Tree can be described without reference to all the other Sephiroth. And the same thing applies to the Paths between them." (Gareth Knight, A Practical Guide to Qabalistic Symbolism, Vol. I, p.30)
Tactically, we start with Path 32 moving up through Path 11, then onto the Sephiroth (Paths 10 through 1) because that is the typical way it has been done in the Mystery Schools. I believe our fullest understanding as to why that is will come to us as we climb further "up" the Tree.
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| "The Ocean" by J.R. Slattum |
The Gist
To conclude, here is a final quote from Dion Fortune on the overall philosophy of what Initiation with the Tree of Life means:
"The universe is really a thought-form projected from the mind of God. The Qabalistic Tree might be likened to a dream arising from the subconsciousness of God and dramatising the subconscious content of Deity. In other words, if the universe is the conscious end-product of the mental activity of the Logos, the Tree is the symbolic representation of the raw material of the Divine consciousness and of the processes whereby the universe came into being.
"A man's soul is like a lagoon connected with the sea by a submerged channel; although to all outward seeming it is land-locked, nevertheless its water-level rises and falls with the tides of the sea because of the hidden connection. So it is with human consciousness, there is a subconscious connection between each individual soul and the World-soul deep hidden in the most primitive depths of subconsciousness, and in consequence we share in the rise and fall of the cosmic tides.
"Each symbol upon the Tree represents a cosmic force or factor. When the mind concentrates upon it, it comes into touch with that force; in other words, a surface channel, a channel in consciousness, has been made between the conscious mind of the individual and a particular factor in the world-soul, and through this channel the waters of the ocean pour into the lagoon. The aspirant who uses the Tree as his meditation symbol establishes point by point the union between his soul and the world-soul. This results in a tremendous access of energy to the individual soul; it is this which endows it with magical powers." (The Mystical Qabalah, p.16-27)
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| "The Tree of Life" by Daniel Moler |
I'm about fed up.
I am a very spiritually devout human being. However, I also respect science and logic.
In the "spiritually alternative" communities, whether you want to call them New Age or Neo-Shamanic or whatever, there is an unhealthy dose of fantasy-driven ideology that actually completely undermines the authentic spiritual experience. Authentic spiritual experience? I can already hear the comments coming my way. But, hear me out.
Since when did spirituality turn into a positivist self-help forum?
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| Doesn't this just make you feel so spiritual? Or blissful? Or both? |
Essentially, the "spiritually alternative" communities have turned into the very ideologically erroneous paradigms they strove to break away from. They have turned into corporate structures and self-help workshops that will dissect your inner psyche for a fee, promising inner and outer tranquility no matter the odds.
I am into spirituality because I am into God. The alternative spiritualist will call it "the Divine" or "cosmic consciousness" or "inner Light," but if everyone got past their adolescent revolt against their Christian upbringing they would just call it what it is: God. It's a generic enough term. It doesn't have to mean the same thing as it does to your mom and dad. It means "all of the above" . . . and strangely enough, when I look around to see what the "spiritually alternative" communities have to offer, God keeps getting left out of the equation. And when God isn't, He/She/It gets limited to a puffball, hippie version of the Gentle Giant in the sky . . . what every neo-pagan, yogic spiritualist wanted when they were a kid, instead of the mean ol' despot that would condemn you to hell when you were bad. Now, spiritual communities have offered up a deity who loves you no matter what, wants you to succeed at every minute endeavor in your life, and cares about your sense of self-worth.
In the past few months I have been asked to change imagery on my presentation materials because it was "too dark." I've seen self-proclaimed "enlightened" individuals refuse to look at scientific studies because it doesn't fit their "vibration." This, among many other incidents, has caused me to finally burst!
The late mystic Jiddu Krishnamurti has said: "If we are seeking God merely because we are tired of this world and its miseries, then it is an escape. Then we create God, and therefore it is not God." (On God, p. 43)
The spiritual life is the search for Truth, not positive reinforcement.
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| "Relic" by J.R. Slattum |
Truth is scary, mind-blowing, and often pushes one out of their very comfort zone to become something more than what they currently are. This is not a blissful experience. It means you need to be prepared to give up whatever you believe in for the pursuit of Truth. It is hard, terrifying, and most often people fail at it (myself included).
Google "top spiritual articles" and you find an infinity of inspirational quotes and top ten lists of happy things to do to yourself in order to make you happy. Why, oh why, are we letting spirituality get watered down by complacency? Why do we listen to self-help gurus like sheep in the hopes we will gain some kind of "awakening" or "enlightenment"? Why, when faced with actual empirical evidence about something, do spiritualists turn a blind eye because it doesn't fit into their positivist paradigm of "everything is Light, everything is Love" (yes, this actually happened, more than once)?
When I experience the world, it is not all Light and Love. The Universe is vast, empty, dangerous, scary, beautiful, awe-inspiring, etc. And true awareness is a direct experience, through the senses of the body (ahem...yoga!), of the world around you. Ultimately, though, the Universe does not care about your bank account, and most certainly is not invested in whether or not you feel good about yourself.
The Universe will kill you in the blink of an eye, and it won't give a shit.
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| "Archaic Revival" by J.R. Slattum |
That, right there, is the ultimate spiritual experience. And, if you truly live within that experience fully (ahem . . . Zen!) then, you will actually have a great weight lifted off of your shoulders: you are not the center of the Universe. That's right, when you realize the Universe doesn't lose sleep over yours or anyone else's struggles, you will reach the authentic spiritual experience.
So, please stop making fools of yourselves and projecting an image of a spiritual life being akin to frolicking bliss. If you want to be a self-help guru or life coach, that's fine. Just leave spirituality out of it.
With that, I leave you all with a great excerpt from a poem called "The Paradox" by spiritualist Jed McKenna:
"You will never achieve spiritual enlightenment.
The you that you think of as you is not you,
The you that thinks of you as you is not you.
There is no you, so who wishes to become enlightened?"
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| by Android Jones |
