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Qabala -- Summary of my work & Now: working the paths...

To: alt.magick.tyagi,alt.pagan,talk.religion.newage
From: tyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com (mordred)
Subject: Re: Qabala -- Summary of my work & Now: working the paths...
Date: 11 Mar 1995 00:25:21 -0800

[from alt.magick: cal@hplb.hpl.hp.com (Colin Low)]

Steven Cranmer (CRANMER@brivs2.bartol.udel.edu) wrote:

> cal@hplb.hpl.hp.com (Colin Low) writes about the Paths...

> >[...]                                   There are plenty of commentaries
> >on the G.D. map (such as Gareth Knight's), but I have real misgivings about
> >some of the G.D. material, and most of these misgivings centre on the paths.
> >I am not saying there is no value in these attributions - clearly, lots of
> >people have used them, and got something out of them. Nevertheless, they
> >seem contrived to me. A superficial menagerie of symbols that conceals more
> >then it reveals. A forced fit, and not only forced, but badly forced. 

> I agree, but I find it harder to dump the "forced fits" so easily...

[many perceptive comments deleted]

Steve,

I wasn't suggesting anyone should dump the G.D. stuff. Even taken
superficially at the level of a symbol set for the art of memory,
there is a lot of useful stuff. The discordance between G.D.
correspondences and traditional correspondences can easily be ignored by
taking a leap upwards through the planes to the point where the
difference between a raging rogue elephant and a pet hamster is of little
consequence. I had another point, but I didn't make it explicit.

I have noticed that pathworking has degenerated into fluffy-bunny game. 
Pathworking should tear the psyche to pieces. What I find described
as pathworking is little different from KingsQuest, a game where you
wander through a magical land filled by curious and strange creatures
and artifacts. You pick things up, you put things down, you pass guardians,
have banal and incomprehensible conversations, and rescue the princess. Or
something like that - what I described in my last post as the multi-media
CDROM approach. There are many fluffy-bunny presentations of pathworking
using the GD correspondences which seem to me to lead to practices as void
of content as an evening watching "The Never Ending Story" on a continuous
loop VHS video.

Part of the reason for this is the lack of intelligent questioning. You
are clearly asking questions, so you are excused, but there are lots of
pathwork clones who follow the GD correspondences "by the book" (777 that
is), and if they spend an evening wandering through enchanted landscapes,
they consider the mystical quest is coming along just fine. Personally,
give me KingsQuest, or better still, a bottle of whisky.

The message in my last post wasn't a suggestion to junk the GD correspondences.
It was a result of my own realisation that outside of the fluffy-bunny
approach I had seen no deeper appraisal of what the paths really
signified, and I didn't understand them myself. If they aren't an
excursion through symbolic landscapes, then what is the territory being
concealed so effectively by the map? What psyche-shattering revelations
are pointed at by the 22 paths? 

The nearest I can come to explaining what I think the paths signify from
a personal point of view (i.e experienced subjectively) is based on the
idea that the sephiroth underpin states of consciousness. That is, the
quality or energy or emanation of a sephiroth as it manifests in the
psyche is perceived as a "state of consciousness". These states do
not stand alone - each state is influenced by other states, but this influence
is at so basic a level that it is virtually unconscious, just as you rarely
notice the hum of the air conditioning, or the oxygen content of the air
you breath. Kant's categories are exactly what I have in mind - something
so basic to one's consciousness in a particular state that you can't conceive
that things might be different, like the person who said "my doctor thinks
I'm paranoid, but he only says that because he hates me".

Taking this idea, the paths only appear at the moment of a genuine and
significant shift in consciousness, where the preconditions underlying
the original state are exposed in a revelation. Thus the paths are experienced
as gnosis, an influx of genuine revelation with the power to completely
change one's outlook ...permanently. The basis for gnosis is also revealed - 
in any state of consciousness on the lower face of the tree we have only
a very incomplete understanding of the possibilities of being, and the
paths are experienced as an instantaneous comprehension that one has
been unconscious of something that one is now conscious of - it isn't
"knowing-about", it is as content-free as drawing the curtains on a sunny
morning. What can one say? 
   "I suddenly realised the curtains were shut".
   "But what did you learn?" 
   "Well, I learned that when you draw the curtains you see things differently". 
   "What things?" 
   "That isn't important - it was realising that the curtains were 
    drawn that was important".
   "But there has to be more to it than that."
   "There is; if you pull *these* curtains you see out into the
    front garden, and if you pull *those* curtains, you see the house
    next door".
   "But tell me about the curtains."
   "Well, this curtain has a picture of the devil on it, the Hebrew
    letter ayin, the sign of scorpio, and a picture of a large cheesecake"
   "So I could meditate on those?"
   "No no no - you have to *draw* the curtains"
   "On paper ... you mean, like a sigil .. "
   "Not exactly ..."
   "And what about the cheesecake?"
   "The cheesecake is the Kabbalah."
   "You mean it represents the Kabbalah?"
   "No ... it *is* the Kabbalah."

;-)

Colin

Trying to say "what the paths mean" is tricky however, and that is when
one employs words and symbols, and before you know it you are back in
fluffy-bunny pathworking. Or you end up having arguments with "777" clones.

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