Kabbalah

catalog

Well-known member
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Who knows what? No detailed explanations or anything, im just interested in whether anyone knows anything about it. Or practises. Whats the history? How has it crossed over?
 

john eden

male pale and stale
There are various crossovers.

Aleister Crowley was big on the correspondences of words and the associations that brought up.

Kenneth Grant was into that dark side of the tree of life stuff mentioned in the cartoon.

Madonna is into the red wrist band Hollywood version.

It’s hugeness is quite compelling I think.
 

catalog

Well-known member
Yeah that's what I find odd, how for an esoteric thing, it's got around to alot of corners. Kinda like tarot at the moment as well. I always remember thinking the Kabbalah diagrams you see, how they remind me a lot of models/diagrams in academic papers and so on. Like that visual structure. I might dig out promethea the full blown thing he did
 

other_life

bioconfused
there is no singular 'qabalah' but rather a proliferation of 'qabalot'. this is key before you go anywhere with this set of topics.
 

other_life

bioconfused
gershom scholem is great for looking into the medieval-early modern efforts to give a coherent symbolic structure to rabbinic judaism (and how it was contested ground/not a settled thing; doctrines of the sefirot and the letters were in flux and locally variant). 'hermetic' qabalah is really only a selective focus on certain aspects of this process.
 
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other_life

bioconfused
http://www.kotzkblog.com/ great blog for peering into how rabbinic judaism is no monolith
currently trying to work out what i believe and what i want to practice as a noachide; trying to reconcile my interest in 'christianity' as an attempt at a mission to the noachides with how christianity has actually been practiced; reading about how paul the antisemite and antinomian is purely a post-pauline literary invention, and how much the paul we encounter in canonical texts ascribed to him actually relies heavily on what became rabbinic judaism.
also looking into dialogical ethics especially in criticism of idealist philosophy (rosenzweig-buber etc.)
i'm looking at notebooks i wrote ages 18-20 and problematising/self-criticising, grounding them in what i've learned from actually talking to and learning from and helping real people out. i can share something i wrote recently that i'm proud of/gets at what i'm feeling
 
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other_life

bioconfused
actually Fock It i may as well:

[Later comment on a penitential prayer from early 2018:

"This first one is riddled with problems; ironically for something supposed to be penitential, I hope HASHEM forives me for writing all this! I overcorrected from Gnosis and Hermetica in favor of a mischaracterisation of the Rabbinic tradition, paranoid that the former would lead me to idolatry, and thinking there was some essential difference between 'Judaism' and 'Christianity', thinking the Rabbinites were the only 'authentic' vehicle for Jewish tradition. All it took to find out this was not true was growing up a little, actually talking to people.
I no longer believe in eternal punishment for temporal sins.
USB – UNIVERSAL SALVATION OR BUST – 28 February 2020"]

"'How can I ever hope to attain you when I am so unlike you, created not in your essence, but only in your image, opposite, distorted and watery reflection of your Majesty, Absoluteness, Oneness?' -

HASHEM is not a rung to be attained, or even a climb to be endured – to none of these may HASHEM even be likened. Rather, HASHEM can be likened to a companion on the road – you may only come to know him through a conversation in motion.
HASHEM creates not 'in an essence', but generates one substance whose name is 'כל' (ALL), from a centre whose name is 'אין' (NOT). It is you and all that really sustains and constitutes you, being of that substance , who may be called 'full'.
צלם is no mere 'image' or 'shadow' – it is, as Scholem says, a plastic form. It may be empty, but only YOU can fill it in, only your face may behold its face. And the entire thrust of דמותנו ('our likeness') is that man must be compared to HASHEM and HASHEM to man, as a prerequisite. Where else may you begin, who else's mind do you know other than social mankind's?
If you are 'opposite', you are complementary. Not solely complementary, but you interlock where you are supposed to interlock as a human being. And in being placed 'opposite', you are no mere reflection, as we have said! - You are of a world-filling, world-sustaining substance, and there is a subtler and higher form - which is material, and that only your complete corporeality made perfect may fill!
You are mostly water, but this is nothing to be ashamed of. The load you were placing on the word 'watery' was, again, one of mere reflection – but you are the water on which the LIGHTS play. You are, too, the silt in its shallows and the stones at its depths, you are the fires under those depths and you are the lights at the surface, you are the wings over it and the fins in it.
You placed emphasis on an othering oneness of your chosen ideal, your mind's god-object, and forgot the unifying otherness of the real HASHEM. You ascribed the absolute and the essence to your god-object, and forgot the play of the unfixed in the becoming-real of your GOD.
And for all of this, for ascribing guilt to yourself for existing, HASHEM forgives you still.
Because you are so forgiven, the rest of the text does not to be labored over. We are not writing a midrash halakhah, but something to make you less anxious about your changing body, which is the continuous work of GOD. Being inexhaustible, his attention to shaping your body - threading it throughout your life, to go through the door which is death - is as singular as it is with each body, with each smaller body which makes up your body, with the immense body that is the cosmos at each level. Render Him thanks in Your heart for such a work! AMEN"
 

other_life

bioconfused
shadow work and the entire enterprise of pantheist heresy is actually key because 'what you bring out of you will save you and what you don't bring out of you will kill you'
 

catalog

Well-known member
Good stuff lads, cheers. The Genet book I was reading recently has some bits where he's talking to a Palestinian who's talking to him about how they are the Jews left behind, as in, before being Palestinians, they were Jews. And I just read r.crumbs version of genesis, he refers to a book in the appendix (can't remember the name or author) but it's talking about the importance of Sarah, how she was probably a priestess, as in she was more important than Abraham to begin with, but it got amended. So these two things sort of a similar thing to what you're saying about Paul? Dunno.

Anyway, who's Hashem? What's the connection? Sorry, if I should just go to Wikipedia, tell me
 

catalog

Well-known member
shadow work and the entire enterprise of pantheist heresy is actually key because 'what you bring out of you will save you and what you don't bring out of you will kill you'

See the beer thread where luke is talking about skeletons, shells and shadows
 

other_life

bioconfused
Good stuff lads, cheers. The Genet book I was reading recently has some bits where he's talking to a Palestinian who's talking to him about how they are the Jews left behind, as in, before being Palestinians, they were Jews.
this is the true scandal of zionism. these are people descended from european converts (irrecontrivably, halakhically jews, though!) boxing out and pursuing and killing their own brothers and sisters.

And I just read r.crumbs version of genesis, he refers to a book in the appendix (can't remember the name or author) but it's talking about the importance of Sarah, how she was probably a priestess, as in she was more important than Abraham to begin with, but it got amended. So these two things sort of a similar thing to what you're saying about Paul? Dunno.
anita diamant's the red tent is a good contemporary d'rash (disguised as a novel) on the women and their role in the Family Drama of b'reishis/genesis which talks about this. it focuses on dinah (as opposed to yosef) but there's a VERY evocative scene w sarah in her tent surrounded by sacred artwork. it's a good update + corrective both in real archaeological/anthropological knowledge and attitude/focus to something from the nineteenth century like thomas mann's yosef cycle.
there's also two rabbinic midrashim on the binding of yitzhaq: one is that the text skips from that episode to 'after the death of sarah' because she died of a broken heart on account of it. but the more interesting one, which gets at how important she really is, is that sarah left avraham, either divorce or separate living it's not clear/also tangential, for the binding of yitzhaq. on the point of dialogical ethics 'the unbinding of yitzhaq' is short and good and focuses on the family drama of genesis as its text.

Anyway, who's Hashem? What's the connection? Sorry, if I should just go to Wikipedia, tell me
funny question
 

catalog

Well-known member
Gravity's Rainbow p753:

"At the creation," explains Kabbalist spokesman Steve Edelman, "God sent out a pulse of energy into the void. It presently branched and sorted into ten distinct spheres or aspects, corresponding to the numbers 1-10. These are known as the Sephiroth. To return to God, the soul must negotiate each of the Sephiroth, from ten back to one. Armed with magic and faith, Kabbalists have set out to conquer the Sephiroth. Many Kabbalist secrets have to do with making the trip successfully.

"Now the Sephiroth fall into a pattern, which is called the Tree of Life. It is also the body of God. Drawn among the ten spheres are 22 paths. Each path corresponds to a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and also to one of the cards called 'Major Arcana' in the Tarot. So although the Rocket countdown appears to be serial, it actually conceals the Tree of Life, which must be apprehended, all at once, together, in parallel.

"Some Sephiroth are active or masculine, others passive or feminine. But the Tree itself is a unity, rooted exactly at the Bodenplatte. It is the axis of a particular Earth, a new dispensation, brought into being by the Great Firing."
 

luka

Well-known member
A friend is asking me to read Sefer Yeziah (spelled that wrong. It's a bit too far away to read the spine properly). It feels churlish not to because he gave me my copy but at the same time I'm not sure how much affinity I have with this stuff really.
 
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