Thursday, April 25, 2013

Metabolism VII - The Alchemist

You are the control centre at the middle of your own reality but the only real way you can tap into the controls is through the use of your Mind. Felix the Perfect Helix and his three spheres is an effective map of this personal reality and by fixing this map in your mind it is possible to open up the information contained inside the 'nucleus' as well as unlock the gates to the various different magickal, mental or psychic powers that are contained within the 'cell'. These different powers come with lessons.



We posit since ultimately all functions of the body, such as the production of various hormones and pheromones, the control of blinking etceteras, are ultimately under control of the Mind, it is possible to tap into these forces at will and via will. It is your Mind after all!  Climb your spine and clasp it!




These powers/controls are locked away from your normal consciousness (ego) into the realms of your 'subconscious' because most people are not responsible enough to consciously look after things such as digestion and sweating, and if we were to consciously manage such processes it wouldn’t leave that consciousness much time or concentration to do anything else. It is best that way, for if the functions of your body are being controlled by your subconscious then it leaves your consciousness able to concentrate on other things, such as the accumulation of the Flux (attention, food, etc) necessary to keep it going, and keeping your guard against outside threat.




The practical upshot of this condition is this, if one can take control of one’s own consciousness in totality, at least temporarily, it is possible to switch on certain functions and actually use them to your own benefit.   Bear in mind that the body is a massive storehouse of potions, chemicals, electricity, power - even biological weapons - and you are the owner of this incredibly flexible Alchemist.*

*Control* must be taken before it is possible to undertake any of the techniques of Strategic Drama that we are about to discuss. You will achieve no real success in this field except through stoicism in the social world, and meditation in the inner world. Since the secret of success is being able to imagine the moment, desire and motive result in the formation of poor shadows, not exact mirrors because desire and 'motive' are in essence a form of time-travelling. You must mirror the moment and in order to do so your mind must be clear.  You must focus yet let go.  Do not push - but pull.  Think with the back and bottom of your brain not the front. Imagine a fluid floating around inside your head. Tip your head back and feel it slosh to the back and bottom. Now think.




Once control has been taken however one of the simplest routes to accessing the Alchemist of your body is with the power of your imagination, as the magi and alchemists of old were prone to use. If the correct mind-state can be achieved you can simply will a person towards you and they will correspondingly make the move. The sphere of perception acts as a kind of 'interface' between the will and the body.  This maybe works because the Alchemist generates the pheromones of attraction for you, in the same way you can generate those for anger. Moods collect in the air around people, most of us can sense the chemical mist. If one person comes back from work in a bad mood, all those around them are plunged into a bad mood, unless the forces of 'good mood' can prevail. Or maybe your Alchemist changes the bioelectromagnetic field of your body in order to attract the person; maybe it is some form of ''energy'' or even spiritual etheric link - all is Mind after all and these are words to label the fluctuations within the One thing.

If memory or ambition blinds us however our senses can be dulled and eventually masked. Memory and ambition bring us out of tune with the moment and propel us into the past or the future.  By judging the character of the moment incorrectly one can inadvertently generate the wrong kind of chemical effect.  It is certainly possible to make mistakes here.



The word is the most basic form of transmitting a mood or feeling other than simple gesture. By saying something harsh you can make someone feel bad to his or her stomach, his or her body producing all the chemicals they need to make them feel really miserable and in agony, like their arm has been torn off.   You can make people physically sick with your words and actions - either by causing stress to the point where the cortisol surge shuts down the immune system or sending people into paroxysms of self-doubt and mental agony.  You can say all these destructive things and not even really mean them.  You can say something with nowhere near the intensity that it is interpreted with.  You can also say and do the opposite - and heal merely with words and kindness.  A happy person is less likely to get ill and more likely to fight illness.

How much do we believe in words and how much more in action? This is why all good actors, and we do not mean stage actors, can stimulate the same effects as words with merely a look in their face. They may be so good they are not even conscious they are doing it anymore, but every single look they give seems to mean so much. Saying that you’re angry or in love in well-chosen words is one thing, looking like you mean it is something entirely different. The word or action in order to produce feeling in a different person is a direct influence of mind on matter. A thought conveyed into a word or action stimulates the chemical senses of another person in order and changes their thoughts, the position of their body and even the concentration of hormones in their blood.

However - it is actually surprisingly difficult to simply ‘will’ a person towards you and have them come, to ‘will’ them to do something and have them do it - and by will I mean that these effects are achieved without speech or action but simply by thought. The first difficulty comes in attaining the right mind-state and control of that mind, then focusing what one wants to happen on the environment is very difficult to do without losing yourself in 'desire of result'. This is why for countless generations we have used ‘focuses’ to transmit our will on to the world, ancient magicians used wands and staves for example. The wand, or rather, the knowledge of that wand tied them into reality, grounded them into the moment, if you like, so they could channel their ‘will’ into it.  The 'real' caduceus wand though is your spine and your brain stem.

Here is where it will get weird.  The person in front of you that you are willing to do something, or trying to heal, etc is not so much objectively real (although we assume they are) as they are an ''apparition'' or even 'spirit' in your Mind - and this is one of the secrets of Magick. The Astral Plane that is referred to does not only mean that sea of images that one enters in deep meditation but also the world which one interacts with when fully conscious. The people in the world around you are the ‘spirits’ of the ‘astral plane’ and one can summon them and bind them as magicians of old did.  The mistake remember is thinking that one looks through their eyes rather than at their eyes.  You *never* directly experience this 'physical world' you presume exists.

By pulling a certain face you generate a certain emotion, maybe humour, despair, anger (as discussed earlier). Making people laugh is more about your movement and personality than it is the sharpness of your wit. Some people laugh at their own jokes and suddenly other people laugh with them, don’t they? They mirror the moment they wish to unveil.  Of course people can see that you’re doing it, which means of course you are clearly responsible for that piece of Strategic Drama and the consequences of pulling that face will be felt.

The *trick* is to pull that face in your mind, if you wish to intimidate someone, imagine a tall, powerful version of yourself towering over them, or shout and bellow at them *in your mind*, if you wish to seduce  imagine you are telling them how beautiful they are, etceteras. You must do this while continuing to interact with the environment in a completely normal way.  You will find that thought is the more powerful of the three.




Feelix in his perceptual sphere is a reflection of the structure of the Alchemist in that it is a structure of the cell in its representation of the nucleus in the cytoplasm.  This reflection is very similar to the physiological diagram of the homunculus, a diagram where the human brain is turned into parts of the body, revealing huge hands and feet because of all the brain space devoted to these functions. This is the true secret of the Mask; most people are limited to their knowledge of words, some of actions and gesture and words/actions are limited to the physical, lingual, social, psychological and economic limits of the Conflux however. The power of your thought and your dreams - if you can control them - are not bounded by these rules however.

With some knowledge of physiology, anatomy, genetics and biochemistry you may understand that certain places in the body are responsible for the production of certain chemicals and hormones, substances which if used correctly can greatly enhance physical power, sexuality, concentration, etceteras. Oriental mystics from Japan, China, India, focus on points on the spinal column, the seven chakras and imagine them glowing in their mind. If one is correctly prepared with meditation, this can lead to some interesting physical responses in one’s own body (if one concentrates on the chakra above the head, a pleasant feeling of being lifted up may result, the heart, euphoria, and focusing along all the chakras, can lead to a feeling of rotation, one may even begin to swirl around on the spot, like you were mapping the helix with the movements of your spine). Obviously the sex organs can generate pheromones and attract the opposite sex if they are concentrated on, the adrenals can be stimulated for adrenaline or emotional control. If one thinks about love, the feeling comes from the solar plexus, if one thinks about sex the feeling comes from the genatalia and in between them, for some reason, in the adrenal medulla, is the power of lust. The chakras of other people may be touched in this way imagine the third eye/pineal gland of someone else to be glowing and they may turn to look at you. We all know instinctively that someone is looking at us, don’t we, how does that work? What may happen, although beginning in the mind, concentrating on the back of a brain, our look is translated into chemical messengers, electrical fields, whatever, that are released from our body and sensed by the other person’s Alchemist. Since every chemical medium is a proton/electron network formed into the shape of a molecule, what is essentially happening, when anything happens regardless of will or no, is a mind tapping into the Flux. 

Or in fact only the Flux is happening.



*All matter is essentially a condensed form of Mind.


Wednesday, April 10, 2013

The Tree of Life - Alternate Names for Kether



You cannot conceive the many without the one.
Plato, Dialogues, Parmenides



Within most texts explaining the mysteries of the QBL you will see oblique and opaque references to something called 'God' as if we all know what this means. The etymological beginnings the word God or a God in its true meaning refers to spirit or a spirit – not necessarily a wise, omnipotent, all knowing all loving being. However the QBL provides us with many words to “know” this God more completely and avoid the often poorly understood common usage of the word: En Sof, the Limitless; El, the Mighty; and Adonai, Lord, amongst many many more*. God in its general use is often seen to be an ineffability an unknowable force beyond human, beyond sense, beyond reason and as such, beyond discussion. We may come to the something called “God”, this “spirit” with many names through an understanding of its works, its creation – and in the QBL these works are undertaken through and with the Sefirot.

From reading the Sefer Yetzirah this essay recognizes the ten Sefirot as not only the tools and processes of creation but also as a map of the absolute directions of existence – spatial, temporal and observational. The ten Sefirot are the ten directions of the five polarities of the hypercontinuum of the universe – up-down, east-west, north-south, beginning-end and good-evil. This essay on the alternate names for Kether will avoid spurious references to God and instead use the rich literature of QBL to describe Spirit and its mode of operation within manifestation, the Sefirot – we will use and provide explanations of the meaning for God names, alternative names used in core texts, the Sefirot as universal directions of existence, and the letters as the pathways we take within it to provide the most precise meanings we can.

In the Sefer Yetzirah, the Sefirot are described as depths and the letters as infinite so although our essay will attempt to provide a comprehensive but concise account of the metaphysics behind the system, it must not be taken as fact or as all that is known and the student who would follow his own path should use texts like these only as guidelines for his own journey into the mysteries.



Crown/Keter – A crown sits on the head of a king as a sign of his majesty and influence; to crown a work is to perfect it. A king without a crown is bereft of recognition in his kingdom; a crown alone is ring of rare metal and precious stones enclosing nothing. In the Early Kabbalah (i.e. Bahir), the Sefirot were all called Keter (Keterim) – that is, per the Sefer Yetzirah, ten crowns of nothingness.



Existence/Ahyeh – Keter is known by the God-name of Ahyeh or existence. We have in Keter then the simplest concept of being or doing – existing. Taken in its fullest context we have the idea of Keter as all existence, and therefore the universe – creation itself as the crown of “the King of creation”.




Nothingness/Ayin – When we look into the universe we see immense reaches of nothingness, untold billions of leagues of empty space, distances so vast that even light itself takes epoch-smashing amounts of time to cross – so much so that when we look into space we look back into time at the light from the stars that has journeyed millions of years to reach and show us what once was. Since space and time are so intimately linked it is not only space that is mostly empty, but time itself as well.



Absence/He’der – Within this boundless ocean of emptiness we do observe little islands of form and matter but further observations, penetrating into the nature of matter itself, reveal tiny particles of opposing and neutralizing charge orbiting each other, from their perspective, at yet more vast distances of empty space. Indeed, were one atom a football pitch, the nucleus would be a ball on the kick off spot, and the opposing electrons would be peas circling around the lines of the edge of the pitch itself! Nearly all of the field is empty! Our islands of matter within the empty cosmos have been shown to be hollow and empty themselves, spheres of absence punctuated by the tiniest flickering sparks that oppose and neutralize.



Obliteration/Hefsed – Atoms are composed of protons, neutrons and electrons. The charges on protons and electrons are opposed and cancel out within the stable atom or molecule, but the mass of a single atom concentrated within the nucleus, the tiny football in the gulf of atomic absence, is composed of titanic energies which when released can destroy whole cities and worlds. When one is heading with love towards the highest of the worlds the Kabbalists counsel one to withdraw in fear and trembling for fear of being obliterated; the core of the Earth is a super dense sphere of molten uranium which no man-made vehicle could penetrate without being ripped asunder.



Darkness/Hoshekh – In Lurianic Kabbalah, Keter is said to be the light of En Sof (a limitless expanse) concentrated to a single point within a hollow sphere. Concentrating atoms into an ever increasing density leads to a monstrous magnification of the forces of gravitation, and ultimately to the phenomena known as a black hole. Built in the imploding core of a supermassive star which gives light by crushing matter, black holes are so powerful they bend both space and time and even swallow light. At the very core of our galaxy, the primum mobile itself, there may well be clusters of giant black holes, their rotation and their swirling gravitational pull dragging the stars into their familiar spiral arrangement. Black holes themselves look white because we can only see them by the light they suck in – light itself travels along grooves in space-time caused by the gravitational maelstrom caused by the interaction of all celestial bodies.



Unity/Achad – Keter is one, the unit, the basis of mathematical reasoning which is the crown of the intellect. Keter is the everything that did not come from something, and will always be what it is forever; it fails to know even nothing as its father for as we have seen, the stuff of it is nothingness, and it operates within nothingness – the nothingness is the one. This everything certainly contains some things but these things by virtue of there being from the one thing that is everything are united in that one thing. It is impossible for us to take our existence outside of the existence we are within and look at it, but if we could we would surely see only the tiniest spark and this is all. From within this existence that is our existence, we simply see it streaming off in all directions; spatial, temporal and observational.


Thought/Machashavah – The oneness of Keter that serves maths, serves the mind as well for 1 is not so different from I. Keter is said, by Isaac the Blind, to be “thought” – it is the idea of one, i.e. Me, that the self depends on – as Adam Kadmon, the essential self awareness which is the true identity of man and the fifth and highest world, the tip of the Yod; as Arikh Anpin, the partzuf of Keter, the “Long Suffering One” who experiences all the countless identities within the one thing, and suffers as we suffer.




Alef, Yod and Qoph – These letters by virtue of their numerical oneness (1, 10, 100) take from and lend to the idea of Keter. Alef, the silent inbreath before speech, the airiness that blows leaves, the ox that symbolizes work about to be done. Yod, the closed hand, a sign of concealment, or as a fist, force about to be unleashed – with the fingers closed the five dimensions are clasped tight. Qoph the back of the head, that which we cannot see, and that part we rest upon when we close our eyes to the darkness of the self that cannot be known, when we close our eyes on the great concealment.



Keter is the sefira that symbolizes both everything and nothing. It is everything that it is existence, the cosmic crown of universal perfection, the unity that binds all form to the singular master and the building block of both mathematics and identity. But it is also nothingness, the emptiness that gives the form of things their structure and power, the darkness of our acknowledged ignorance that separates the tiny sparks of matter and knowledge that are scattered within the limitless cosmos.



*Enlil --> Ellil --> Eli --> El --> Al --> Allah