The Tower of Babel, we are told, was a monument to mankind's hubris in thinking Heaven could be taken by an act of architecture. In a mythical age devoid of scientific philosophy, the Tower of Babel was what passed in that time for the Ontological Argument, a formal proof attempting to locate God at the conclusion of a series of logical syllogisms: rather than build steps toward a conceptual goal based on reason, bricks were fashioned of dried mud for much the same purpose—to get to Heaven.
“The will to system is a lack of integrity.” ~ Nietzsche I must confess that I’m finding it harder, more laborious, to write my regularly-scheduled column for TAG. It’s not that the project is losing its charm for me, because as time goes on I’m finding the work of my fellow writers to be getting better, and the work of the new additions to the stable is maintaining that trend. It’s rather that I seem to be going through one of my periodic nigredo phases, when I tend to regard the productions of my ego with a sort of nausea, perhaps a “metaphysical masturbation” which tosses its generative fluid out into the objective world around me just so I can hold a card game with myself. Indeed the guileless generation of horrifyingly mangled mixed metaphors is par for the course when this happens, so I’m glad I got that writer’s rubicon out of the way right here in the first paragraph. I would like to observe that the weekly themes our Editor has tossed at us seem to unerringly reflect something of earth-shattering personal importance going on at the time, or at least it sure looks that way after I’ve [...]
My life is measured by this glasse, this glasse By all those little Sands that through passe And see how they press, see how they strive, which shall With greatest speed and greatest quickness fall And see how they raise a little Mount, and then With their own weight do level it again But when they have all got thorough, they give over Their nimble sliding downe, and move no more Just such is man whose houres still forward run Being almost finished ‘ere they are begun; So perfect nothings, such light blasts are we That ere we are, ought at all, we cease to be Do what we will, our hasty minutes fly And while we sleep, what do we else but die? How transient are our Joys, and how short their day! They creep on towards us, but fly away How stinging are our sorrows! Where they gain But the least footing, there they will remain And how groundless are our hopes, how they deceive Our childish thoughts, and only sorrow leave! and how real are our fears! They blast us still Still rend us, still with gnawing passions fill; How senseless are our wishes, yet how great! [...]
The Sacred Geometry of the Tree of Life, Part Two Sephira VI: Tiphereth Carrying forth the theme of symbolic geometry of the Tree of Life (Figure 1) begun with Part One of this series, the sephira of Tiphereth, being the manifestation of the “idea” of the number 6, is symbolized by the simplest six-sided volume, the cube. The cube is thus the second iteration of the square (the first was with the base of the quadrangular pyramid representing Geburah). In addition to the cube, two traditional symbolic correspondences with Tiphereth are the heart and the sun—the combination of these two symbols should hearken back to last week’s column on the “Mystique of Blood and Light.” The cube is the first geometric figure in this series possessed of symmetry along all three spatial axes of length, breadth and depth (or x, y and z in the Cartesian coordinate system). Thus, a 3-dimensional cross is implied by its shape, as is the point at which all three axes converge—the center of the figure. Kether—the point—is thereby implied, as it was in the sephira immediately preceding, the pyramid (Geburah). In fact, given the square comprising each of the six faces of the cube, its volume [...]
"... these strange-looking figures in green with masks covering their faces so you can only see their eyes, they must be angels. And their hands are drenched with blood, my mother's blood, and they're holding like a trophy a small fleshy something with arms and legs and a face contorted into a scream, and that something is me. This is heaven."
A Metaphysical Field Guide for Photographers. “Eternity is in love with the productions of time” - so wrote William Blake in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," perhaps the best-known literary witness in the West to the reality of nonduality, that rarefied realm where subject and object forever incestuously join. Given a moment’s meditation, one can see in this allegation a fairly accurate description of the art of photography, taking as its substance that utterly indestructible (hence, eternal) medium: light.
The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, we are told, was the fateful catalyst for the expulsion of Mankind from the primordial paradise of Eden. The serpent approached Eve, the poor girl barely recovered from the shock of existing, and whispered some sweet nothings into her unadorned ear: “Go on, just a bite. Try it and see. Get on with the fascination.” The rest is, as they say, allegory. Yet there was another forbidden Tree in the garden...
A brief introduction to the labyrinthine metaphysics of That Which Rises Vs. That Which Falls, utilizing Greek myth, ritual magick, astrophysics and social psychology, for a perspective on catalyzing a positive personal transformation.
A gift that keeps on giving can sometimes be won with a baseball bat and a sense of desperation powerful enough to drive a family man to commit crime. This was the moral recently reported in a story seen on CNN.com...
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