POINTS OF LIGHT 928 EAST FIFTH STREET VOLUME V I #4 Brooklyn, New York 11230-2116 Copyright 1993 by: Temple of the Eternal Light (718)438-4878 An "Omni-Denominational" Religious Fellowship _____________________________________________________ WELCOME ALL READERS. POINTS OF LIGHT is the monthly newsletter of TEMPLE OF THE ETERNAL LIGHT. It is an open forum for anyone to send in articles, poetry, short, short,stories, advertising or anything else. It has blossomed into a cornucopia of fact, or fantasy relating to modern magickal living, spiritual growth and a network linking all members of our human family by a chain of fellowship. With wishes for Love and L.V.X. Rt. Rev. Jerome Peartree, Publisher Rev. Karen DePolito, Editor ****************************************************************** OPEN INVITATION TO ALL These events are open to both members and non-members. Please call a day in advance and let us know you are coming. SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 1993 @ 8:00P.M. GNOSTIC MASS PRIEST: Jerome PRIESTESS: Karen Suggested Donation $3.00 SATURDAY, MAY 1, 1993 at 8:00 P.M. BELTANE SABBAT Kindly bring some food and drink! Donation: $1.00(optional) ****************************************************************** A LITTLE "CABALLA" The following is an excerpt from "Thirteen Tools Toward Enlightenment". It is a conversation recorded and transcribed between the imaginary Swami Schwartzananda and a "typical" ego. Any similarity to anything living or dead is purely intentional. Only the names have been changed upon the advice of divinity, my attorney, the local political party and all dictators in general. D. What does the Tree of Life, as a whole, stand for? S. The Tree, as a whole, stands for an individual road map of a human person. All of that human person, and what a human person contains within, all his carnate and incarnate energy forms -- from the physical to the etheric, the astral, mental, emotional, the causal -- and finally the God fountainhead. And so, by studying what the symbols represent that compose the Tree of Life, one knows what one is --fulfilling the Biblical injunction of "Know thyself". D. Now this Tree is made of ten spheres, called Sephiroth. What do they symbolize? S. Actually, there are more than ten. There are really eleven. It's like a Mobius strip in three-dimensional -- with Yesod extending forward, and Daath extending backwards. However, there are essentially ten Sephiroth. These ten represent seven planetary attributes, given to the known planets of that particular era: the moon, the sun, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, Mercury, and Saturn. And the Earth. And of course the Supernals: Chokmah being all of the astral bodies, Binah being Saturn, and Kether being the ultimate, the Crown, the hidden light. Each Sephira is linked to the others by 22 paths. These paths can also be expanded on, symbolically, by the 22 Major Arcana of the Tarot. So here, again, is an additional link between the Tree of Life and the Tarot, in bringing together the intellect of the Caballistic rabbis, as well as the emotional or charismatic images of the Tarot. D. How was that connection made? S. I'm unfamiliar with the actual origin of the Tarot. Everyone says it originated in France, but I believe it goes back much further. I believe that the images depicted in the deck -- the Major Arcana, anyway -- were part of the collective unconscious of the individual, from the time of the first conception of Man. And that somebody decided, one day, to draw them, to tap that collective unconscious. From that time on, other people who have been able to visualize that archetype world (something else we should talk about), were able to draw their own symbolic representations of what they saw. D. There's also a relation between the Caballa and the Minor Arcana: the numbered cards and the court cards corresponding to the ten Sephiroth? S. Yes. There are many correspondances. A study of those may occupy many years. D. Explain the four worlds in which the Tree exists. S. The highest state is called Atziluth, or the world of Emanations. It's a world in which all of us -- everything --are part of an ocean of energy. In a microscopic sense, this is true; everything is composed of electrons and protons and neutrons, which are particles that have been manifested by large amounts of energy. It's a world which, by the way, was virtually unknown to modern-day science until the turn of the century, when lots of things happened. In the World of Emanations, thoughts appear like flotsam on this ocean of energy. These thoughts we can choose to accept or reject. If we reject them, the flotsam disappears back into the sea. If we accept them, we can expand on the thought. We can move to the world below, the world of Briah, the world of Creation. In this world we call forth, in its raw form, all of the four types of energy required to manifest a thought into an idea. The four types of energy are called Earth, Air, Fire, and Water -- which really have no relation to those substances as we know them. So if we choose to expand in Briah on the thought first manifested in Atziluth, and form a picture of it in our mind, we move on to the next world. That world is called Yetzirah, the world of Formations. Here we put together these energy forms, as we would the building blocks on a building, if we were architects. And we do this thru seeing -- thru taking the thought, the idea, and visualizing it. Visualizing it in our imagination, but imagination in the sense of making what we see, real. The only thing that separates the world of Yetzirah from the world below it, Assiah the World of Physical Reality, is time. Once we see it, it's happened. If we visualize a thing happening, and really believe it is happening, all we need do is wait for it to happen. So if I walked up to a mountain and said, "Mountain, begone!" and I "saw" the mountain gone -- it would only be a matter of time for that mountain to disappear. In essence, the future comes before the present. Which is a great concept, because we're seeing what happens tomorrow in our mind's eye today, before tomorrow really comes. D. That's how magick works anyway. S. Absolutely. And so you see half a cycle -- from Atziluth, to Briah, to Yetzirah, to Assiah. To complete the cycle, what happens to us in Assiah as physical reality, we think about. We see it in our mind's eye -- in the world of Yetzirah, we form a picture of what has happened to us. And that picture rises up to the world of Briah, and breaks down into forces, into raw energy. This in turn goes up to Atziluth and taps the archetypal images in the storehouse -- the ones we see in the Tarot cards. We tap them to form thoughts that form this flotsam on the sea of energy. These thoughts, if we choose to accept them, become ideas, and the raw energy of the ideas appears in Briah, works its way down again to Yetzirah, where the energy takes form of what we wish to see -- and ends again in Assiah, materializing. This cycle is repeated over and over again. D. In speaking of the 32 "paths" referred to by the Caballists, what is the difference between those paths between spheres [22], and the ten paths represented by the spheres themselves? Is one kind of experience necessarily more powerful than the other? S. I think "powerful" isn't the word. I think more of a major personality characteristic appears on a Sephira. The planets symbolized by them represent more than the 22 paths. But the paths are represented by the Major Arcana, so there would be some controversy on that. I see 32 of them: 32 characteristics, 32 representations, 32 things to analyze and think about. S. In all of these, the basic individual consciousness is preserved. A person like a D. would still know it's a D.. And then we make a choice. We can merge our consciousness back into the source, like the samadhi, the satori -- the experience of oneness, of completely being the light. The realization we are divine always remains within, and we're propelled toward that realization. This realization was attained by the great boddhisatvas that have lived -- Buddha, Jesus, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Mohammed and even, Lee Lozowick. Why not?