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From the Out Basket

Here is a series of visualizations inspired by the Qabalah of Light developed
in the 16th century by Isaac Luria.  For further information on this approach,
see "The Kabbalah a Study of the Ten Luminous Emanations from Rabbi Isaac
Luria", by Rabbi Yehuda L. Ashlag, translated into English by R. Levi
Krakovsky, two volumes, 1969 and 1973, Research Centre of Kabbalah, The Old
City, Jerusalem, Israel.  The presentation which follows is adapted from the
Tarot classes of Bill Heidrick.  Copyright (c) Bill Heidrick.

     This is a Qabalistic way of seeing the creation of the universe and the
beginning of all things.  In it light is spoken of as though light were the
essence of the Creator.  This is necessary so that the human mind have
something to fasten on, not because light or any other perceivable thing is
truly the essence of the Most High.

     Let your mind calm itself.  Send away all the cares of the day, dispatch
all your concerns from their inmost places.  Relax even the feelings of self
and ego a little.   For this is the place where such things had not yet come
into being.
    Close your eyes and let a vision of warm and featureless light come upon
you.  In all directions there is a soft glow of brilliant light.  Even the
idea of direction is meaningless, for only the limitless light exists.  Hold
that for a bit.
     Within the vastness of the limitless light there is a sense of glowing.
This is not separate but it is tangible.  Light is about you like a thickness
in the air.  Soft and calm, bright and warm.
     Within the light a feeling of imminence grows.  There is no change yet,
but you feel that a change must occur.  The light is featureless but it is
about to move.
     Within you builds a feeling that something must be changed.  It is not
enough to be in a place of perfect limitless light.  There must be difference.
There must be a place within the infinite different from all else yet still of
the infinite.
     The limitless light changes.  Far off there is no change, the light
extends away in featureless brilliance.  Within you the light gathers to a
greater brilliance, near about you the light dims.  At the center of your
being the light forms a brilliant smooth point of radiance while all the
nearby light seems to flow in toward the center.
     When the point is firmly glowing within, there is an established darkness
about you.  Far off there is a great and distant shore of light, as bright as
it was before the beginning of the universe.
     Thus is the universe begun, a point of self and being concentrated in the
center, about the point a great expanse of outside and something else.  Far
away, a great sphere of light that is as true as the point within and as
limitless as the beginning.  This is the circle with a point inside, the
symbol of the invisible sun and of Keter on the Tree of Life.

Parallel in Human Thought:

     When we are fully involved in doing, working and resting, it is as though
there is no boundary between the world and the self.  The trees bend their
leaves to the same breeze that blows throughout all the world and moves the
hair upon the head.  This is the moment before creation.  When something
disturbs our revere, consciousness pulls back from oneness with the world and
hides behind the eyes.  Then the world with it's people, places and things is
outside and the self is inside.  Somewhere beyond what we see there is a
knowing that all the world is one place, and we are one with it forever.  Yet
those things about us are separate seeming and perhaps even dangerous to the
precious spark of ego that hides like a bright point behind the eyes.

                                 -oOo-

     Let yourself relax.  Return to a peaceful state.  In the center of your
being there is a bright point of pure brilliant light.  About you is darkness,
featureless darkness.  At a great distance from you is a vast and perfect
light like the point at your center.  This is the form of pure existence,
light gathered in a single point from surrounding space with infinite,
limitless light beyond.  The circle with a point at its center, the sphere of
existence with the focus of the existing one at its center.  Hold that image
about yourself.
     From the distant and limitless light above you a single beam of light
begins to descend down toward the point of brilliance within you.
     The beam becomes a line of light, slowly crossing the darkness toward
you.  You can see it now, approaching you from above, carrying with it a
contact to the limitless light from before the beginning, from the eternity
before the point of light that is your particular existence became separate
from the vastness of the limitless light.
     The line of light touches the point of light and stops its evolution
downward.
     You were alone in the silence.  Now you are linked with the eternal light
by a single line of light.
     All the essence of all that can ever be is drawn into that line of light
from the head of it, the place where it emerges from the limitless light so
far away.  All that you shall ever know descends to you by that single
brilliant chord across the vastness of the silence, the silence that was left
behind when the light that it contained drew together into the point of
brilliance that is you.
     The light of the line from infinity descends no farther.  It is a touch
of the All Existing that reaches only into you to embrace only you, to
establish for you one path from the beginning infinite to the ending infinite
that is your particular existence.
     This is the image of the great Sephira Chokmah on the Tree of Life, a
vast sphere beyond which there is endless and undifferentiated light.  A point
of brilliance at the center of that sphere.  A line of the same brilliant
light, a radius to the sphere drawn from above to the center point.

Parallel in Human Thought:

     At times we dwell in solitude and see the world as though it was a thing
wholly other, a thing apart, not of the self.  Yet somewhere beyond that world
is the greatness that holds all, the totality of existence that is one with
the world and the self.  In answer to this need, in consolation of this
aloneness, a single awareness sometimes descends from the highest hope in the
infinite.  This ray of Truth passes through the great void of the outside
world, lighting by its passage all the highest things in that world, showing
that all the world draws its nourishment from the same root as the self.  This
line of thought and inspiration, this moment of mystic insight reaches from
the infinite to the inside of the self.  At the moment of its touching there
is no more loneliness.  There is enlightenment in the void.  And the void is
void only by comparison to the light.

                             -oOo-

  A point of light at your center, darkness all about you.  At a great
distance in all directions the same light that is concentrated at your center
extends away to infinity.  Hold that image.
     From above, a line of light descends toward the point of light at your
center.  Let that be the beginning of this meditation.  Visualize the line of
light as a thin beam reaching down from the luminous infinity far above.

     Within the line of light are strange shadows and brighter glowings.
Patterns seem to appear and vanish inside it.  Some of the patterns illuminate
the darkness a little to either side and grant visions of other realities than
your own.
     From dimly perceived images in the line of light, you form ideas and
learn to see the elements of your own world.  Below the bright point of light
at your center is a vast darkness.  Rays of light descend downward in
imitation of the line of light.  These gleamings are the efforts of your mind
to penetrate the darkness.  By their means the darkness is rendered less
empty.  One by one the glimmerings of thought find more and more tangible
images in the darkness.  The mind extends by stages of evolving awareness the
patterns of the line of inspired light.  These images grow with understanding,
first being very dim, then having rational form, then becoming almost solid
and at last having the appearance of matter.  This is the way in which we
learn about the outside.  This is the beginning of discovery of form through
exercise of Understanding.
     The gradual outward spread of that part of self called form and
perception is the function of the Sephira Binah on the Tree of Life.

Parallel in Human Thought:

     When a new idea comes into the mind by inspiration or more outward
instruction, at first that idea lays dormant.  In time other abstract
expressions of the new idea are seen.  Later the new idea becomes a principle
by which truth is discovered in the world.  The idea becomes a tool, a power
to shape and change the details of life.  Finally objects come to embody the
idea, and what came first as a flash of awareness in the mind becomes in its
turn a thing of the senses.

                            -oOo-


     Four flames burn between heaven and earth.  Four tongues of fire compose
the Holy Name.
     Yod is a single radiant light in the darkness of beginning creation.
From this light all knowledge radiates.
     Hay is a triple flame.  One tongue of fire leaps upward.  One tongue of
fire burns across the sky.  One small tongue of flame dances within the other
two like the light in a lantern.
     Vau is an elongated flame seeking to dart upward.
     The last Hay is flame within flame, burning forever in the darkness.

     When the spirit of the Yod moved to create all things, it first darted
three ways and formed the first Hay.  This first Hay was like a window filled
with too much light.  The light grew until it burst open the window and sent
sparks of ungraspable truth flashing into the night.  The sparks are the stars
in the sky and the unexpressed dreams of all who live in the world.
     Then the Yod extended itself gently downward.  It formed the Vau with its
careful light.
     The scattered sparks were gathered to form the second Hay after the
pattern of the first.
     This second Hay became like a window with a curtain so that it could
contain the light without burning the eyes of those who look to it for wisdom.
The Vau gently entered the prepared place and illuminated the universe.

Parallel in Human Thought:

     When we first discover something new, the light of the discovery often
blazes up in ecstasy and impossible hopes.  This is like the Yod burning too
brightly in the first Hay.  Soon the new discovery burns away the new hopes
and ecstasy passes into sadness and hopelessness.
     In time fragments of the new idea reappear like lesser inspirations.
These do not lead to the great ecstasy of the first appearance of the new
idea, but they are promising and full of hope in a lesser way.
     We become aware of ways to express the fragments of the new idea, ways
that are possible and do not lead to the sadness of failure.  From such things
our life grows slowly and well.


                                --- TSG

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March-April 1990 Thelema Lodge Calendar/Newsletter  (April and May events)

Mailed free within 100 miles of San Francisco California

            Ordo Templi Orientis
            P.O. Box 2303
            Berkeley, CA  94702  USA

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                           Oakland, California
                           (Entrance in back, to the right)

          Phones: Lodge/Temple:   (415) 655-4942
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