Nothing special

The intelligent walked willingly into the mouth of the Beast, while the others were lead to their consumption by empty promises and unfulfilled desires.

10 trees in one Tree

So, today I experimented with placing 10 kabbalistic trees of life into one larger Tree.
To diagram the trees I use Frater Achad's method outlined in the book: "Anatomy of the Body of God". Basically 4 larger circles are drawn on a line, with each center starting at the intersection of the circle and line, the first circle can be placed arbitrarily. This generates the distances in order to place the ten sephiroth.
Now, if we reduce our compass size to 1/4 the original radius (I did this by horizontally drawing a line through the middle of one of the 3 vesica piscis that are generated from the drawing of the original 4 circles, then placing the compass at the intersection of the horizontal line and the vertical line that the circles were drawn on. Then reduce the size of your compass' radius so the pencil is at the center of your original circle).
Now that we have our compass drawing circles 1/4 the original generating circles we can now proceed to draw another 10 sets of generating circles emanating from the original ten sephiroth. Today, I made each sephera it's own kether on the tree generating down from it, but I am sure we can experiment with placing different sepheroth on each of the sepheroth on the larger tree... perhaps each larger sephera should correspond to itself on the smaller tree? I'll report my findings on that tomorrow, or maybe later tonight.

I have been splitting the 10 trees out of the larger tree in order to make individual diagrams and labeling the overlapping sepheroth on each one.

-nak
"I knew it, then I had it, then... RAW WHORE KA-HOOEY!"

The 3 of Wands

I pulled the 3 of wands first today. I pulled it off the top of the deck 2 days ago as well, and has been showing up in my studies of the cards pretty frequently, especially after I assigned my "own word" to it.
Crowley uses the word "Virtue" on his 3 of wands, I am using the golden dawn deck (R. Wang) which doesn't have any words at the bottom of the small cards to help remind the user/lover of what attributions the world wants you to think of when reading those cards.
I just recently finished reading "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" and thought that his explanation of the word excellence and especially the Greek word areté needed to have places in the tarot, but I realized that the 3 of wands WAS representative of areté.

From Richard Hooker's website on Greek Philosophy (link at the bottom):

The most articulated value in Greek culture is areté. Translated as "virtue," the word actually means something closer to "being the best you can be," or "reaching your highest human potential." The term from Homeric times onwards is not gender specific. Homer applies the term of both the Greek and Trojan heroes as well as major female figures, such as Penelope, the wife of the Greek hero, Odysseus. In the Homeric poems, areté is frequently associated with bravery, but more often, with effectiveness. The man or woman of areté is a person of the highest effectiveness; they use all their faculties: strength, bravery, wit, and deceptiveness, to achieve real results. In the Homeric world, then, areté involves all of the abilities and potentialities available to humans. We can, through the frequent use of this term in Homer's poems, make some tentative conclusions about the early Greek world view. The concept implies a human-centered universe in which human actions are of paramount importance; the world is a place of conflict and difficulty, and human value and meaning is measured against individual effectiveness in the world.

Areté brings about a lot stronger sense of something powerful and truly GOOD (what's that, eh?) than the word Virtue, which brings about mental imagery of people stuck in old ways, unable to see how wiggly this world really is, parents (of all origins being biological, government, peer etc) telling you what is right and wrong and perhaps some Aesop's fables.

Here's the other paragraph of Areté from Hooker's site:

Aristotle, areté is explicitly linked with human knowledge. Plato repeatedly returns to the question of areté , and the evidence of his earliest writings suggest that Socrates, Plato's teacher, was equally obsessed with the question. Various Platonic dialogues deal with questions such as: Can areté be taught or learned (Meno )? What is areté (The Republic )? The famous Socratic paradox, "Virtue is knowledge," is in Greek, "Areté is knowledge." This would be the foundation of both Socratic and Platonic philosophy: the highest human potential is knowledge and all other human abilities are derived from this central capacity. Aristotle also locates the highest human potential in knowledge: theoretical knowledge. If areté is knowledge and study, the highest human knowledge is knowledge about knowledge itself; in this light, the theoretical study of human knowledge, which Aristotle called "contemplation," is the highest human ability and happiness.

Richard Hooker's entry on Areté

Signing off for now,
-nak
"I knew it, then I had it, then... RAW WHORE KA-HOOEY!"

Perhaps I'll be back...

I stopped blogging, recording experience etc. for a while and then began keeping a "personal journal" or "magickal diary" last year in November. I've actually been writing in that darn thing this whole time... and I mean relatively well updated, when "real life" gets too intense I won't even have enough gumption/percieved time/care to record those time spans, so there have been some gaps in the written time-line of the journal.
I wanted to start writing on a blog again tonight for some reason, perhaps it's because I've de-activated my Facebook account and I want to just type my thoughts out to the Internet in general instead of my "friends" that also have FB accounts.
When I write in my journal I sometimes feel it's a blog that only "G-d" and myself can read and reflect upon instead of the numerous tulpas that exist in my day-to-day.
I question the extent of experience the tulpas are attuned to that exist in my experience, and my own tulpahood. Tulpas can be tricky, especially humans and myself! They can seem to understand things, use words that outwardly appear understanding, but I myself have feigned understanding in order to "save face" or, more commonly, keep conversation flowing in a way that I feel is beautiful and uninhibited.

I don't know if I am fishing for something here, or if I just want to try typing, or maybe it's the two beers I just downed that's creating this desire that I am acting upon here.

I've been thinking of the concept of negative and positive zero. That may seem extremely silly to a person who thinks of numbers as merely quantities (number line thinkers), what else is zero besides zero?! It's nothing right? Therefore it's impossible to have a negative or positive aspect to that number. But to the fool that has readeth'd and understood it not, zero is a very real thing in the universe that can become + or -. There seems to be different types of zero, just as there are different types of infinities. Infinite whole numbers, infinite digits to the right of the decimal of pie or 1/3, infinite recursion, infinite fractals, infinite loops...
Zero in a moment, +infinity + -infinity = 0. But what if we are more focused on the +infinity we may forget about our precious, and most necessary -infinity and the observer creates the property of observing a +0 experience, the opposite (as always!) is also true and holds. Illusion, maya, etc is true and it's this carefully perceived imbalance that seems to generate the (un)changing, (un)predictable experience that we are going through in our day-to-day.
Maybe the secret isn't all that secret, it's just the blatant nature of the interactions of the infinities and our "Malcom in the middle" status experiencing the thing.
What a subtle, genuinely amazing universe we are participating in.

-nak
"I knew it, then I had it, then... RAW WHORE KA-HOOEY!"