What a day…
I had another busy day today. D and I hung out and went around doing little errands while K was off shopping. It was fun and we cracked many fart jokes, as ten year olds (I was an honorary one for the day) are wont to do. We looked at stuff and reserved video games and then went and saw a movie with K, Lil, and my mom. I remembered once again why I have been watching movies and television less and less often, so I suppose it was a positive experience in that regard. My dad joined us for dinner in P’ville, and a good time was had by all. Now I should be tired, but I am not. So I will sit and write, perhaps read my new Scholem book, and dream.
Cleansing
The dark crust of earth spread out wide
Raw red molten cracks dendritic spread
Beneath the pain release beneath release
Crumbling stacks pile high mounting and
Out flow influenzas of fire and scorched
Push deeper the irritant and deeper and
More pain more we seek the depth strive
Blast wane and no more shall come not today
Recline rest complete the wash and die
Doubtless there was indirect contact between Egyptian spirituality and the early Kabbalah. However, Kabbalah owes far more to the Assyrians and the Greeks than to the Egyptians. No culture develops in a vacuum, of course, and Jewish culture is no exception. Emanatory theories deriving from Hellenistic thought were combined with the ecstatic tradition of the prophets, and this was added to the concept of the square script as holy (based on Aramaic script – the Phoenician scripts were abandoned as the Jews mainly spoke Aramaic after the Babylonian exile) to produce the early Maaseh Merkava.
There was also a cross-pollination with the Assyrians, from whence springs the Tree of Life. Some have concluded that the Epic of Gilgamesh can be interpreted as a mystical text in light of these elements of Assyrian spirituality (which was also monotheistic). In the SeferYetsira we can see an early framework that incorporated portions of all the aforementioned elements blended together (along with some astrology and other generic Middle Eastern concepts).
However, this is just the bare-bones surface of the Kabbalah. There’s so much that was developed from that framework over the past 2000 years or so, that it’d be impossible to list it all here. From Lurianic Kabbalah and it’s radical theodicy, to the systems that relate the Divine Names to the Sefirot, and even the angelic formula in the Lesser Banishing Ritual are all inventions of the Kabbalistic tradition.
Tired but still postin’
It really did turn out to a very long day. Lily had to go in for her checkup. She’s getting more and more verbal, as well as physically coordinated and strong (for a toddler, I guess). Fascinating stuff to watch. She emulates the Hagnizo rite, as well as typing, reading, cooking, and talking on the phone. Guess that tells you something about us as a family, eh? 
Our apartment’s phone wiring is taking a crap, so the DSL has been up and down, as has the phone line itself. Major pain, but it’s going to be dealt with soon. [sigh] There’s so much to do right now.
And now for something completely different: The Cursor Kite.
Stayed up too late and ended up…
…updating the site a bit. I’ve been working on a series of descriptions for the Partzufim of the Kadmon System, and I’ve added it to the information on the Principles page. I also tried to make the color scheme more uniform here, here and here.
Well, I have a busy day ahead and I should get a couple hours before the day starts without me, so I must go now.
Converting posts into dreams…
So I had a brilliant post worked out in my head last night, but it evaporated as I dreamed and only the dream remained. I dreamt of growing huge trees that would be turned into housing for refugees. I dreamed that they would make the desert bloom and the rain fall.
Today I’ve been explaining what the ExK letter study was about on a Yahoo Group called “The_Great_Work”, so I might pick a few quotes from that discussion for a later post.
Mini-Vacation
Yesterday was a lot of fun. We went to Fresno for a bit of running around. I had one of those point-based gift certificates for CompUSA and we hadn’t been to the Brass Unicorn for awhile, so it seemed like a good enough reason to get out of the house. I picked up some in-ear headphones, and some hyper-caffeinated stuff so we wouldn’t have to buy sodas later. I had, at one point, a pair of Shure E2c’s but they seem to have vanished sometime around Pantheacon, so I held off, hoping to pick up another pair. However, I get really sensitive to sound at times (I could put the E2c’s in and drown out just about anything without even plugging them in), so I thought a nice cheapy pair of JVC’s with the Shure ear fittings might work just as well. Turns out they don’t work as well as the Shure’s but they do work well enough to drown out background noise. We got to the Brass Unicorn just as they were closing, so we really didn’t get to check anything out. The kids remembered playing in the little play area they have there, when they were much smaller. We’ve come a long way since then. So K proceded to “ooh” and “aah” at the variety of herbs and plant stuff they had, vowing to return and acquire some of them. It was somewhere in the 110′s according to the car’s external temperature sensor, and a lot of the shops were closed, so we decided against walking around. Still, we got out of the house, which was good.
Hyper-Stition
Examining the elements of Hyperstition. Also you may wish to check out “The Sorcery of Islamic Apocalypticism” for an example. We need more of these but instead of endless war, direct them toward resolution or universal liberation, lest this dominate the internet-based hypersigil stage. It takes much less effort to propagate a destructive idea than it does to promote a creative one.
Initiation and Transgression
One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is the truly transgressive nature of initiation. It is my experience that the deepest and most profound initiatory experiences occur in the midst of situations that would be considered abhorrent to the values of normative society. This has been confirmed by my interactions with others. I was reading about Camille Paglia on wikipedia (here) and I was thinking about how transgressive her ideas on sexual personae must seem to the advocates of normative value in our culture.
“I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become the authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The ‘nice’ girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go.”
While I think that she is in many ways correct, you don’t have to agree with her point to see the value of the principle. One of my own initiations was performed while living in a hole called Teviston. This was not a nice place by any means. Drug usage was the norm there, but not in a way that made pretensions towards enlightenment. This was pure lust for chemical result, and I revelled in it at that time. I think back to the time I spent meditating while using methamphetamine and the things I saw while doing so. Much later, I stumbled upon the idea of reality tunnels, and how they interact with the “tzelem” or image to produce a being capable of experiencing multiple contexts all overlapping onto each other. I saw these contexts as a system of tunnels that scale upwards and downwards to different levels of our emanatory framework, as described by the sefirot of the Etz Chaim. Now despite the elegance of this solution, there is signal attenuation, which I now beleive to a result of internal censoring of experience. This censored experience is pushed out of the reality tunnel and thereby stays hazily on the outside of what is remembered later, and I experienced this during my meditations as a rapid-fire flashing of images. Some of these could be mistaken for prophecy as they were later incorporated into my life as moments of experience. Others were only things I was afraid of, but later it turned out that I needed to know what I was afraid of, what I rejected, and what I hated in order to fulfill the ancient injunction: Know Thyself. Basically, by using this technique, I was able to break down a large portion of my psychic censor and eat the rebellious spirits – experiences that I wished to reject and futures that I wished to deny. This is the power of transgression, the mysterium iniquitatis, that Aikeena used to talk about, and the Krisis flow that Kadmon uses still.
As I write the Lithosis rite, these are the things I aim for. Can we truly expect a ritual to work in this manner on every person? I don’t think we can. I think that there comes a point where the ritual is the phatic handshake that begins the process, but doesn’t really define it. It’s the situations we put ourselves into as we explore that really flesh out what is transgression to the individual. I felt a great resonance between my own experience and that contained in the Black Lodge of Santa Cruz, not because of the OTO-related elements, but because I lived outside of the normative world and its demands in a similar way. At the same time that I was experiencing the lowest events of my life, I also felt an extreme joy that would well up within me. A couple of times, after particularly bad binges, I would lay on the couch and drink only Slimfast for days, and at night my spine would arch with something like an electric current of pleasure for what felt like hours. Even now, I cannot really fully describe these experiences, but I can say that they are the foundation of my understanding of ontology. To understand the normal, I had to live through the abnormal. To see the territory, I had to climb a mountain. To begin the journey, we start by leaving home.
Life Today
The stories are coming hard and fast, like the “writer’s block” has been blasted. Re-finding the illustrations in my fingertips is slower, so I work on it as it comes. Have two stories finished, need the illustrations. Will be good soon.
Dreaming harder and faster. Reading Lacan and related stuff is hysterical really. I would hazard that the end of my early college experience was less due to starting a family and more some sort of coping mechanism. Reading the material was like running through fields of land mines. I am apparently afraid of nothing but myself and snails. Hmmm, what does that say I wonder? Nevermind.
I was declared a brilliant conversation partner last night. This cracks me up mainly because it was by an individual that I have known going on two years, and they were embarrassed to only have discovered this. It was a lovely compliment. Outings without underage chaperons are clearly called for. It would seem my reputation is on the line.
Also had a brief snippet of a conversation about applying an in depth study of children’s nonverbal communication in the case of trauma to adults with suppressed/altered memories. I think I have opened more than one flood gate. Is there ever enough time in a day?
I still need a job. I still need to remember to do the dishes. Then I need to play my new game. Valkyrie Profile came out on the PSP.
