Rawr!
I have given up coffee.
Fear me!
Best wishes!
Happy New Year to those who count the new year from tomorrow! 
Shabbat Shalom
I’ve increasingly been able to tune into the idea of Shabbat more as I practice it. This has become my day of meditation and writing, a safe haven from the maelstrom of schedule and timing. I actually relax on Shabbat, and my back and shoulders stop throbbing, as they do during the rest of the week. Now I suppose I must learn to extend the lessons I’ve learned through the experience of Shabbat to the rest of the week.
The Hierarchy of Arils
PaRDeS Rimmonim isn’t just a method of textual critical analysis as it is often presented. Indeed, this is another example of a practice that is derived from a ontological principle. Just as the PaRDeS method allows us to look at the Torah through different lenses, PaRDeS as an ontological principle allows for different viewpoints to manifest in a world that arises from emanation.
It is described by the Kabbalists as a Garden of Pomegranates. This is important, because you have to see the pomegranate as the basic unit, which here we’ll call a world. In common parlance, you might say that someone from another culture “lives in a different world”. That’s true from a certain perspective. However, these different worlds are all around us. The boundaries are subtle, but they are very real. Most often people have described them as ley lines, or as places where the substance of the world is thin.
Each world has it’s own feeling, it’s own range of states of consciousness. When you go to work, it feels different because you are helping to create a subtle atmosphere that self-perpetuates. In some places, these fields can become self-aware also, lending to the idea of a hidden presence. These areas are gateways, and if we do not have the keys, we can become stuck in one. In those cases, we take that area with us, wherever we go. That context stays with us, unless we can detach from it. To attach to an area, we create knots or issues within the psyche, which binds our tzelem/image (the astral body) to the local area’s tzelem. So by resolving whatever issue the area is attached to, you can move from place to place unfettered.
However, more importantly, you can start to get a glimpse of the hierarchy of worlds or arils, to keep our metaphor consistant. The Hierarchy of Arils has been mapped out in thousands of ways, through art and literature, through song and verse, through architecture and civil engineering. It is the way in which we attempt to keep sight of each other, to hold hands in the blinding fog of our spiritually occulted universe.
Kadmon provides an opportunity to map the worlds, as it maintains a low-level constant emanation flow between it’s members. This emanation flow isn’t just the Yechidah/Unity that everyone possesses without knowing it. This is a custom flow designed to attach directly to the conscious mind. Basically the practical side of this is that when one Kadmon net (a small group of people unified by purpose) concentrates on each other and they are in different arils, a comparison occurs.
This works something like the Powder of Sympathy experiment from Eco’s Island of the Day Before, except without needing any dogs. 
Kadmon is not alone in this ability, but it could be organized in such a way that it would make rapid acquisition of massive amounts of data possible in ways that we have not seen before with minimal amounts of investment in students and “cartographers”.
This is an accomplishment that would bring mankind out of the darkness and into the light. It would prove our sentience as a species, and then perhaps we could find some meaning in the suffering that we have inflicted on ourselves and other creatures.
PaRDeS & Kadmon
http://www.futurehi.net/archives/000767.html
I replied, “I like the idea of the singularity, whether it’s mechanisms can go all the way or not. It’s the acting out of the metaphor, p2p as a representation of group consciousness that interests me. Like the alchemist who actualizes spiritual awareness through chemical operations, the species itself is actualizing a mass spiritual awakening through technological operations.”
This is one method by which Kadmon could achieve its goals. I’m slightly averse to this particular methodology because as salimondo put it once, “Every civilization is a vector product of the inefficiencies of its magicians’ works.” The inefficiencies of using a technological operation would manifest in such a way that it would minimize the usefulness of Kadmon as a ontological construct. We can already see some of the inefficiencies of the alchemists in our own society, in our pill-popping addict culture. The alchemists are hardly to blame for this, but it is a sobering thought when considering methodologies for trying to alter history’s course. The real trick, I suppose would be to find inefficiencies that could actually augment the structure of the ontology, in other words, sacraments. These sacraments take a placebo’s role in replacing inefficiency with ritual. So you have to look at the mode of consciousness you’re creating, pre-analyze it, and build the therapy into ritual. And that’s just looking at it from the level of psychodrama.
The model I use counts three other levels at which it’s necessary to evaluate group output. Action, Psyche, Belief, Emanation. This is my PaRDeS Rimmonim, my Garden of Pomegranates – Every aril a world and a life. So I’ll continue to examine and correct, discuss and research, until the time has come for my seeds to sprout.
dream
I dreamed that I was talking on the phone to J and everybody in the gaming group. It was wierd because I could see the adventure they had been engaged in while talking to them about it. Then I was telling them about the LVB which was like the Livejournal View Basis and was a way of rp’ing using the White Wolf system and Livejournal. T was playing a Final Fantasy style black mage who had been ejected from the castle they were trying to save, and kept trying to find a way back in. In the mean time, bits of metal from the top of the very tall castle kept falling down and hitting him. Once he got back in, N had to run to get his cell, so the vision shifted. At that point I think I was talking to someone else (havendreamer, I think) about a cake with brown icing that had green streaks in it.
Life goes on.
When the crowd moves on to the newest of the new news, and you’re still holding the remnants of a severed connection, there’s a natural tendency to try and fill the void. I think that this drive is one of the strongest components to the addiction complex that I’ve experienced. Most often it’s described as a release, when you find a replacement, so perhaps it’s some part of you that wants to flow outwards. But it’s described also as a need, which is usually something you take into yourself. So which is it? Both.
It’s an exchange process, and we all do it. In fact, I think that the exchange of emanation is the primary reason for existence. We talk to each other and say nothing, but somehow it still seems imperative that you keep walking over to So&So’s desk to jabber about nothing in particular. We talk to keep the flow going (nod to salimondo), to keep the exchange constant. What are we exchanging with each other? Code rewrites. We are constantly re-writing the code that we all use to enact our reality, through psychodrama, through emanation, through belief, and through plain old interaction. All these things are running on a complex aggregate intelligence that we rarely question. Most people don’t care how they are able to throw a baseball where they want it. They don’t question the mechanism that lets them learn and continually improve. These are the mechanisms I’m talking about. These are shared through emanation during ordinary conversation, whether with a stranger or your best friend.
And that’s what brought me here. My friend who is now gone. I sit awake in the middle of the night, working on support tickets, and I think about the sound of his voice. I remember it as vividly as I can. I symbolize it and turn it into glyphs in my head, like an Umberto Eco style oscilloscope. But really, all of that is just a cover, because I miss him.
In other news…
So in switching to WordPress, I think I’ll be able to learn a bit of PHP which is good for me professionally as well as something I’ve been interested in for awhile. Just in adding the necessary hacks to my journal to dual post, I’ve learned that I knew a bit more than I thought I did.
Tomorrow is the Hanukkah party and my family’s Christmas meal. There will be a vegetarian lasagna there, which is nice, because in the past we’ve tried to be cool about it and bring a main dish for ourselves as an alternative to turkey. My family has been a bit tense about things lately, but hopefully they’re getting used to us. The Hanukkah party will be lots of fun though, I think.
Got my copy of “The Jewish Home” by Daniel B. Syme, which is an invaluable resource for Jewish ritual in the home. Also got “Halakhic Man” by Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, which is an interesting defense of Halakhah. Although I’m converting Reform, I want to know why I am and am not abiding by certain portions of Halakhah.
More site updates to come!
:)))
w00t!
K has put up an article on the Ayrkain site. Everybody go check it out and let her know how awesome she is!!!
tired
http://www.goodiebag.tv/video/yogah_qt.htm
YO… GAAAH!
“Once the game is over, the king and the pawn go back in the same box.”
- Random sig
Read this today and felt sad for a moment.
