September 15, 2002 – redux
closed captioning provided for the l33t-sp34k impaired:
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{The Fool}
by < 4 5 3 Y 5 |-| 3 |_ |> 0 |\|
{by Casey Sheldon}
The sparkle and glint in the eye of a friend
Can do very well for my soul to mend
The burning remission of cancerous souls
Can be summed up clearly with words like bright coals
The lyrics of living are noble and true
They ring in the soul like bells chiming new
The cold lonely song of an ego alone
A sadness that no hero’s act can atone
The fear deep inside us illusion at best
Seems our fastest friend or a capricious test
We strive and we pledge to complete this our task
To shred every piece of ego, our mask
The test becomes lesson, and friend becomes ghost
Our beliefs are deserted, no longer our post
We find that our sadness was merely a tool
To force us to jump into playing the Fool.
Moon/Father
Another thing that I have noticed in The Moon is the two canines: a wolf and a dog. These seem to represent nature, wild and uninhibited, and nurture, domestication and training. In between these two, with both at our heels, perhaps (The Fool) we see the winding path of Maturity (Shardik to Maturin, Alicia).
==
And this isn’t going to be a particularly spiritual post from here on
Why am I still working for him? I shut him up three times already… just by virtue of the fact that he realized he was being shitty for no reason, and stupid to boot. What more is there, now? I’ve taken his superiority away, but something still remains, and I want to hear the old man say it. Whatever it is he thinks when he’s wrong and I’m right, I want to hear it. I’ve hemmed and hawed before his ‘dizzying’ intellect since I was 2, and now it’s his fucking turn, dammit. I want to hear him say that I beat him… or something.
Is this Rubedo? Am I mad with just this tiny bit of illusory power over another?
40:3
Then Job answered the LORD, and said,
40:4
Behold, I am vile; what shall I answer thee? I will lay mine hand upon my mouth.
40:5
Once have I spoken; but I will not answer: yea, twice; but I will proceed no further.
Liber White Wolf
Ran my first game in two years tonight. God, it felt good to get back into the thick of it. I ran GURPS World of Darkness for lack of other types of dice, and because I have so many of the source books in PDF.
Beat FF Tactics Advance… playing in expert mode now, just for the fun and the extra missions. So many things coming to an end… so many new things beginning. Soon I must start X-2… not really looking forward to all the active combat system though.
Reading ‘Meditations on the Tarot’, that voluminous guide to Christian Hermeticism. Interesting so far, and I really like how it ties in with my studies on the Hebrew alefbeit.
… must remember to come up for air …
Spirits of the Future
Dreamed of worms. They were being placed in my vehicle, in out of the way spots, to measure whether I was altering the flow of time or not while I drove.
Dreamed of Law Cards – an incredibly powerful Anti-Law being used to break the Ace of Skulls in two.
Went to the Edison AgTAC Festival of Lights… Nothing particularly dazzling, although I found the Christmas tree covered in LED’s to be pretty cool. It was more like one of those roadside oddity shows that my dad used to take us to, or the hysterical… er, historical markers, in the sense that Gaiman talks about them in American Gods. Lots of trains this year… may be the time of Blaine the Mono.
Before I read anything else, I think I’ll read Eragon by Paolini, because it’s easy to forget why I used to get so enthused about reading adventure novels like the Shannara books or Tolkien or even Donaldson, as depressing as he could be. There were many lesser names before them, but they all showed me new visions of the world which I am grateful for now.
==
Qoph is the voice of Holiness. There’s a lot more to that statement than meets the eye. In one verse in Isaiah, it talks about how the seraphim call one to another (ZH AL-ZH) or thing to thing, subject to subject. The word ‘call’ is QRA, which might be transliterated as keraw. It is a summoning, a proclamation, and a crying out… as well as an encounter. In the language of dreams, two people or a group of people may be represented as a single bird. Now, despite the fact that these people are separate and have different physical forms on this plane, at that particular level, they are the same. They are one bird. I spoke in Tzaddi of learning to speak in the language of Omens and Auguries, but now we see what this produces in practice. This is the level of Yetsirah, and it’s true nature. It is the aggregate of all of our symbolic natures. I say natures and not language to indicate that this is not necessarily all man-made. We do not know what effect other denizens of the cosmos may have on this world of symbols. And I believe that this level was first emanated from a Creator, not simply an emanation from below.
The vast number of symbols, the dense nature of this symbolic realm of Yetsirah makes it easy to miss the forest for the trees. 
For us, I’d say that it is our link to the Source of All Things. The letter Qoph is said to be a man praying (the lower part, a Vav) to God (the upper part, a Resh). If we look to the gematria value of Qoph, 100 could be seen as a nullification of Yetsirah and Assiah, and seeing the One through the lens of Beriya. What does this mean though?
There seems to be a questing, or seeking nature within man that awakens when he is no longer hungry, sex-starved, or in need. There seems to be an artificial sense of need that cannot be quenched, not by anything other nor truly by anything within. It may be satisfied but for awhile, yet it always rekindles itself even stronger than before. It is here that the spiritual journey begins. When one has found the source, it is beyond his understanding, and hints at its nature through signs and symbols. The seeking leads sometimes through dangerous paths, sometimes through peaceful meadows. But there comes a point in the seeking when it is realized that the seeker has not gone anywhere. The symbols were the objects that composed his life from before, and nothing new was truly introduced. The symbolic and the concrete have negated each other, and like the pillars of the Moon card they merely demarcated a path through which one needed to pass, so as to see the Creator through his Creation. Beriya as I understand it is the Created Realm, and it is the level where symbols and signs themselves can be seen as equally existent with physical objects. The artificial need described at the beginning of this paragraph can be seen as the dogs, the primal urges that drive us forward into the search. The moon can represent the reflected light of Beriya (in the Four Worlds diagram, I think only Atziluth experiences the direct Light of God), as it descends into Yetsirah and Assiya.
So I guess it means that this is the way in which we learn to call to our Creator in the best way we know how. We begin by crying out, “Abba!” or “Ama!” but as we progress we learn that our Creator has other names, and we learn them, not to gain control through divine names, but as we might wish to learn about someone we love, like a lover or a friend. In Qoph, as stated before, the Vav is below, because the ‘motivation’ from below is that of a human desire for union. The motivation from above though is that of Resh, the circle emanated out from a point, wherein God seeks to further define Himself through self-experience. It is at this place (Maqom – MQVM), that Ezekiel and Isaiah had their visions. This is the Throne of Glory, or in the midst of the Temple, the place where we see the glory of the three worlds, and we say Holy, Holy, Holy (QDVSh), is the Lord God Almighty (YHVH TzBAVTh), who was and is and is to come.
[Note: I'll include the english text of Isaiah 6:1-3 (NIV for readability) for comparison -
1 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. 2 Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. 3 And they were calling to one another:
"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory." ]
Kaos and Movies
“Quantum theory describes the behavior of matter in terms of probability waves. It is difficult to visualize what this means, but to a rough approximation it can be said that in the quantum description reality can only be divided up into certain minimum-sized pieces or ‘quanta.’”
- Liber Kaos, Peter Carroll
Looking back to high school days, I remember first seeing the term ‘quanta,’ in The Number of the Beast by Heinlein. Makes me wonder where the term originated, in science or science fiction. Makes the boundaries seem more blurry, especially after this.
Watched one of my favorite movies…
Top ten list of movies I watch to get through the holidays
(In no particular order)
1. Prophecy 3
2. 13th Warrior
3. Transformers the Movie
4. Clash of the Titans
5. War Games
6. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
7. End of Evangelion parts 1 & 2
8. Any of the Monty Python movies
9. Pi (geez, at least I don’t have headaches like that guy!!)
10. Macross Plus
Spirits of the Past
This time I wasn’t dreaming, although it may have seemed like it. My friends were all there, maybe as a reminder of who I was and who I am becoming. I used to think that I wished they could ‘see’, too. Now I’m not sure I’d wish that on anyone, not because it is awful, but because it would be selfish for me to do so. It was the most fun I’ve had in years.
And even now, no rest for the wicked. I slept lightly last night, and woke up this morning with fire in my veins. I think this is an albedo experience – like a moth it flutters, or rather, my heart pumps wildly and it feels like my breath flutters in my throat. Purity of power, often presaged by intense pain (at least in my case), then a calm before it begins. Then as it begins, it drowns out the pain (which serves almost like a rain gauge) and purges, reshapes, and reforms. The glow grows more intense, and typically I wake seeing it (which doesn’t happen most of the time). Also, I can’t sleep much past 4 hours, my libedo can become, um… well… increased, and my appetite for food diminishes.
I’m dreaming of a white litmus.
Spirits of the Dark
In my dream I was working for a rogue monk who had left his order years ago, to pursue and capture ancient spirits of the dark. There was a lot of martial arts fighting, and at the beginning of the dream, I had already caught one of them. The second one was going to be more difficult. The problem was that they were spirits of Metal… they possessed objects as their bodies. So one might possess a sword or a gun, etc… The scene occured right outside of my bank, and it was desperate to find something to use against me. It found one of those flimsy mop handles that are hollow on the inside. So after grappling with it for awhile, I grabbed it and bent it in two. I kept doing this until the whole thing was little pieces. For some reason I was very afraid it would cut me as I bent and broke it, but it didn’t. I took the pieces back to HQ, where a girl pulled out a cutting torch and proceeded to ritually destroy the individual pieces. I commented on the fact that the pieces were probably a little too small for that. She shot me a look that said, I know, but this is my job, so I have to do it anyway.
Joust
Strange dreams again. I see a high school in the nearby town named after the cat-tails. There is a huge contest of models or cheerleaders or some such inanity. I can’t remember why I’m there, except that I used the buses to travel because it was safer than public transportation or using my own vehicle. An old friend nicknamed Wormy (after Luke in the original Star Wars: ANH book) was with me and we were trying to contact a girl I used to know in high school and her boyfriend, as we thought they might have some useful information. As we searched around for them, I kept finding Scrabble tiles with the letter Y and the number 10 on them – Yod, of course. Sometimes I would pick up a T with a number 9 on it, but as I would pick it up, it would morph into the Y – 10 tile.
After much searching around, we saw them and all of us hurried to the parking lot. We decided to procure some transportation at that point. Then we were driving back into my town, when the boyfriend became angry with us for something. He flipped his car around and produced a lance. I pulled my own out from behind the seat in this car which had changed into my truck. We revved the engines, then began our passes. After about the third pass, the dust settled and the tip of my lance was embedded in his chest.
Then I woke up.
Flying and Cubes
Earlier I had a dream about driving in a car with
So then it sort of faded away, and I was on an old back road next to a grove of almond trees. It was night and it was very foggy. I realized that I wasn’t in a car any longer. I was just sort of floating along the road, body horizontal with my head up… superman-style. When I realized I was flying, I became very unsteady, and swerved into the other lane. I saw a car coming and tried to fly out of the way, but I passed right through it. Then I was compelled to fly to the side of the road, and when I did I found myself facing head down, and my body vertical (feet up). A voice told me that I could descend any time that I wanted to, and gave me very specific instructions for how to do so.
Tonight I was reading about the Five Loves and the Five Strengths, and their connection with Yetsirah. They are referred to as Wings, and they are related to the Six Directions of the Ruach/Spirit, which also is corresponded to Yetsirah. I was thinking about how 5 out of a 6 sided cube is a Cup. Having recently studied Peh and being in the midst of a Tzaddi study, I saw how Peh, the lightning strike could represent a cycle of being empty (upturned cup) -> filling up (right-side up cup), while Tzaddi might represent a cycle of being full (right side up) -> emptying out/sharing (upside down).
Also, the 5 sides of a cube could be very important for spacial vector mapping. 4 sides to represent the four armed X/Y axis sitting flatland style on the paper Olam/Universe-Eternity continuum, while the other direction indicates Upperworlds / Underworlds -> depth and height are only relative to themselves. Any heaven is perfect to a man in hell, and a warm man cannot know what a cold man feels. ‘Sides, as I understand it Memory only really applies in Flatland. That’s why we make Memory Palaces, right?
Serpent’s Tooth
One short low kick… lots of torque behind it as the foot twists sideways with precision. A kick to end a football career and the Bane of Shins [morbid pun intended]. That was today and this last week. Kicking out the glass on an upturned school bus. That sort of urgency that arrives and leaves before you’re even aware of it. So now I’m peeking through this hole to the Other Side, and people keep getting all pissy at me.
Dreamed I was discussing programming with my father. We were trying to find a meta-programming interface that suited all the tasks we had before us. Something like Visual Studio, although plenty versatile, didn’t support the macros, shortcuts, and code library functions we needed to use to get the whole job done in time. Then I was driving something – a low to the ground sporty car of some sort – on some really slick roads while it was raining, and he commented on how I just liked the challenge implied in the fact that the odds were against me. I agreed.
