I hadn’t titled this post and my auto-permalinker made it “696″. Probably just the number of posts (good god! really? ok maybe it’s something else), but I’ve been reading about numbers for two days, so this worked fine for me, and I decided it was destiny I title the post that way. ;-)
Just teasing. I don’t believe in destiny. Unless it’s the “to eventually reconcile with one’s highest self” idea.
But I’ve been having a lot of synchronicity lately, in my thoughts and then reality giving me feedback. So I figure if I simply assign it meaning, I can then figure out what that is. Talk about creating your own reality…
In ref to my ranting yesterday about all the dead intellectualism reigning over the shell-game I found when googling about QBL topics, I saw this today: Reynold Blight wrote (in the foreword to Manly P. Hall’s “The Lost Keys of Freemasonry”):
Creeds, rituals, poems are parables and symbols. The ignorant take them literally and build for themselves prison houses of words and with bitter speech and bitterer taunt denounce those who will not join them in the dungeon.
I like it. That’s my official take on the “official” occult for the day. The fact that it came from an occultist, in a cult, writing a book about the occult, only adds to the irony.
***
My topic of interest for the moment: Cymatics. This is the study of the geometry that sound creates in form.
I was OBSESSED with this topic — back when it had no name and was merely a deviant interest inside Acoustic Physics — back in 1991 or so. I was really consumed with the idea of whether I could use a synthesizer to create shapes and whether doing this intentionally in some fashion might have some effect on the brain or consciousness. (I refer to the C word there meaning brainwave states — sort of — not the psi/metaphysical meaning. Back then I was a skeptic hypnotist, not a mystic.)
There was almost zero information on it available to me, a layman, then. We didn’t have the internet back then. In 1993-4 I spent time sitting in on alt.acoustic.physics solely out of my interest in this topic. So it’s quite interesting to me that now, thanks to the internet, it has a whole name and category and beautiful pictures and all free just for a little typing into my laptop. Man. The internet has changed MY world, never mind everybody else’s.
Slightly related to Cymatics is an idea I had earlier today: that every letter, just like every number, is an entire entity and energy of sorts, just as much as a sephira or a tarot card is. (Yes. The laundry list of meditations I should do is now reaching infinity!)
I wondered if this would be better tracked by letter — or by sound.
It got me thinking about gematria. Now back in 1994 or so when I was first exposed to Crowley et-al, I found that a very interesting idea. I spent about 3 days doing math, in hog-heaven. Then I understood, in one of those fortunate moments that have changed my direction in life, that this was the worst possible thing I could do to myself. (Much like I understood that about my plans to become a law enforcement officer, years before.)
Because there is nothing my denial-oriented brain would like better than to walk into a situation all about “spiritual insight” — and spend all day doing basic math instead. No profound challenges, no suspension of disbelief, no psychic visions — no ‘vulnerability’ — yep, I would have been a walking encyclopedia on that in no time, I’m sure, but it would have had very little contribution to genuine inner growth.
Rather like remote viewing with the approach of doing profiling (statistics) immediately upon feedback: people spend time viewing, and then instantly spend time doing math. Eventually you see the distortion as the viewing starts being more about the math results than the experience. Before it’s over people are giving you 11 pages of ‘descriptives’ that mean variations on ‘bright’ but they can’t tell you the target is a human, but their session is officially 99% accurate — hilarious. Many humans are just too good at using “logical thinking” as a shield when it comes to personal development.
So, despite my interest in Gematria, I dropped it utterly and did not touch it again.
But my reading got me thinking about it. Partly because I used to think that other languages were much closer to the ‘truth of the geometry’ with their meanings than English. I’ve no idea really as I only speak English. But after reading some on this and giving it more thought, I now suspect it is a mistake to simply disregard English. If anything it seems like restricting most Gematria work to Hebrew rather than Latin mostly just serves to make it more exclusionary (if we’re talking numbers).
But more importantly, it got me thinking about it this way: it’s true that English is a big “conglomerate.” But really, no matter what the origin of anything, the bottom line is that languages evolve just like anything else in a culture does, and I think English is old enough (I would think so if it were a century old, never mind so many) for the people using it to have unconsciously, subconsciously, shifted and stretched and selectively chosen from its many influences, what worked. So whether or not it is divine or profane, whether or not is ancient or logical, at this point it just IS.
And whatever it IS, ought to be able to be studied just like anything else in the world. Everything is a reflection, right. “All numbers are infinite: there is no difference.” (I believe there is a truism in that line.)
Maybe one difference is that we wouldn’t be studying it in relationship to ancient manuscripts — which aren’t in English — but in relationship to the living language we actually USE. Technically, whether some group of people used “Alef” for A, in Hebrew, vs. whether some people use “A” for A such as English does, it shouldn’t matter: both of these are an energy of their own.
Letters are a geometric “form” in print; they are a geometric form in sound. So, they are a “thing”. A manifest energy in our world. Something we are in fact using constantly in both forms, and that is “woven into” everything, just like numbers are. Given that everything is “holographic” in nature, that means that our language ought to give us just as much insight as anything else.
It almost doesn’t matter what numbers we choose for the letters or how we arrange them. Any “consistent” system (consistent only because irrational inconsistency opens the way for self-delusion) ought to work.
***
An aside: every time I briefly talk with Nedlund, I tell him that I just don’t understand how he can represent “sound” as if that is a whole spectrum of the universe. Yes I do get that “things make noise” but I just have not been able to wrap my head around how this could be so “fundamental” as he made it seem.
But I was reading the last couple evenings, and kept seeing reference to the three ways of recording spiritual insight (in symbolism, in QBL, etc.): as “letter, number, and sound.” Well, it occurs to me that a number is a FORM — a geometry. Ithikah is entirely geometry — entirely! — he communicates only in shapes. Nedlund is entirely sound — aside from a ‘flash of eyes near mine’ when we first met, which he said he gave me so I would be aware of him, he has never ‘showed’ me anything, unlike the other Aeons. For some reason I had never made this connection before — that both of these Aeons are such specific divisions of energy and in that way, are similar.
So it occurs to me that my Aeons actually include FORM and SOUND. And I was thinking, “Well is a letter a form or a sound?” — it is both. As are numbers in a way. And anything visual almost has to be form, unless it’s pure color and nothing else, right? So what is left, aside from simple color and other forms of energy such as heat? It made me wonder, since I am not close to either of those Aeons, what they might have to teach me if I spent some time with them.
***
My next med is with 3 of Disks, which is “Works” in the Thoth deck, but which apparently means something like, “the first manifestation of idea into form,” which personally, to me, is ‘geometry’. The universe is “an idea incarnate,” I got that grokking years ago during an experience; and the first ‘in-carn-ate’[1] part is essentially geometry. As if that is the skeleton of matter, even the most primal level of matter.
[1] doesn’t that breaking up that word bring to mind that form, which seems ‘outside’ is actually ‘inside’ the nothingness which contains and comprises it, as my old “Nothingness” experience — which occultists call “The Abyss” — suggested…
***
Getting to the dream, which is kind of another form of synchronicity. I wonder if it’s possible that my brain is ‘following’ the ‘patterns’ that I’m looking at now, the tree of life and tarot for example, or if it was always in those patterns and I just didn’t see it. Much like I’ve had so many experiences I considered totally novel, never heard of them, anybody I told found them bizarre, but then years later it turns out they were almost archetypal in occult studies, and better yet, happened right in sequence as would have been expected if I’d known more about the topic.
On the other hand, trying to talk with Occultists about the Four, or the 12 Aeons, leads to their silence or implying I am a new-age idiot, so apparently this is where my inner material diverged wildly from the norm.
So I was reading some of the pages I hadn’t got to yet, those in the category of “unique approaches to the tree of the life” pages. I had finished making this “personal version” of the Tree, this with Crowley’s tarot attributions, and one opinion of my own (about the unicursal hexagram fitting in the top area). As part of this, because some sephira had 8 different cards related to them (all 4 of two cards), I had created a square, an X, and a 8-segment pie-like effect in my rounds. So in reading, this one guy turns the tree on its side and it occurs to me that somehow, this way, the sephira like I’d made in the various shapes, seem to me like ‘turning gates’. Like those turning doors in stores where you have to fit in while it’s open and then it turns around and you can get out the other side when the opening is over there.
I remembered what Crowley had written about making the disks back into ‘spinning wheels’ in his tarot, as opposed to coins, spinning disks like a galaxy or chakra opening for example. And these in my little page just happen to look like disks of course. It seemed an amusing idea like something you would see in a video game, that you’d be traveling the paths and would have to get your timing right in order to get into, and out of, the spheres.
Then I remembered a dream that I told a couple people about, 2-3 days ago. This is *before* I started reading on this stuff so I can’t blame it for that. Yet oddly… synchronistic, I think.
Me and others were moving down these paths, on our way to something; it seemed like we were inside something like some giant cavern structure. We kept being stopped at these official doorways that were like big metal things, with “gatekeepers” who had keys. We got through several. Then we were at one that we were urgent to get through. Me and the Four (I *think* the symbolism suggested that) were at the door, and I could hear others coming after. The gatekeeper would not let us through without some kind of secret or key (or secret-key I guess you could say).
The Senior frag’d into a human-shaped mass of those tiny shards of nearly-black metal filings, the magnetic kind (maybe this is a symbol for iron?), and then it was like the magnetization released and he just “shag’d into nothingness” as they fell apart. Maybe this was a message, as the other man next to me (who I think was the 3rd), was then attempting to send a message to the gatekeeper via something small and handheld, like a cell phone or something. I watched as he entered into it only: the number zero. He pressed “send” — and the gatekeeper let us through.
On the other side we were in a big, spherically shaped cavern. In the bottom was a perfectly round pool of water and others (not me and my Four) were leaping off the ledge into it, in glee. Over at the far left side on the ledge where we stood, behind some metal (silver) bars, some people were prevented from entering.
When I first recounted this dream I hadn’t the slightest idea that it might have any kind of QBL symbology. I wasn’t working on that at the time, I was just about the start the Ace of Disks meditation, and I hadn’t yet been looking at that little diagram in the Thoth deck instructions that has the mappings.
But this morning just as all the memory of that dream from a few days came back to me, looking at the tree on its side, I realized all this. The perfectly round pool of water made me wonder, as in this same article the author was saying he feels the hidden sephirot is actually Pi — the circle formula. And, that he thinks Adjustment is related to Saturn (I totally agree, just based on my experience with these as Archetypal energies). I thought that the missing/invisible sphere in the middle being, instead of a number like 3 (which is just above it) or 4 (which is just after it), the value of Pi (3.14-ad infinitum), and the ‘center’, all of the circle, which is also zero, which is also nothingness, and ever-the-circumference and all those other symbolisms — I thought that was great. I promptly added that to my little tree. Why not. I think it goes there. I can always change my mind.
> My current version of my “archetypes meditation tree”
So the writer was talking about how Crowley had referred to the jews having “only half” of it, and the page goes into some other stuff about the tree of life being only half (something he calls the ‘garden of eden’ being the other half), and then I remembered this verse — probably subconsciously sparked by memory. It turns out that it comes immediately before the part he quoted. The part I recalled, from Liber al, was:
“Nothing is a secret key of this law. Sixty-one the Jews call it; I call it eight, eighty, four hundred & eighteen”
– I don’t know what the numbers are, but “nothing is a secret key” sounds suspiciously like a dream where the senior defrags into nothingness and the third enters a ‘zero’ as the answer and the gatekeeper opens the door. Doesn’t it?? Or am I just over-reading it? Anyway I know this is probably quite dull to anybody who is not me but I found it rather interesting.
***
Hey! OK, so cool. Up top I was rambling about synchronicity, and about just making my post title what my software wanted to name the page. So I was finished with this post and thought I would real quick see if I could do a google and see if, in english, there was anything in gematria that added up to 696. I was thinking you know, funny things — like you get with anagrams — that I could end the post with. Here’s what I found, first link I liked near top of page 1 of results:
http://davidcherubim.net/englishqabalah.htm
titled: Numbers and their Words by use of the English Qabalah
696 = English Qabalah, Key of it All, Thelemites, Bind Nothing, Pure Will, Glorious, Angel of Light, Eternity, Sushumna, Vivasvat, Sannyasin.
Hahahahaha! That it actually directly relates to using English for gematria, a topic in this post, and the ‘key of it all’ – ?! — just makes it a lovelier and more intriguing synchronous match!
OK I really am shutting up now. Next post better have an archmed in it . . .
P
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