This is a chapter that has also influenced a lot of my thinking. While I do not think Timothy Leary's 8 circuits of consciousness model has aged well, there are other ideas in this chapter that continue to stand out to me. "Each time an internal or external trigger causes us to quantum jump from one "self" to another, the whole world around us appears to change also." (Page 157). I am reminded of RAW's example that the person who goes to work and clocks in "is" not the same person who goes home and makes love to their partner. Although it may be the same body in both situations, there are very different mind states that accompany these activities. These mind states affect which behaviors are open and available to the body in both situations. These mind states also think and communicate very differently from each other. Depending on the personality constellation of the individual, these states might be "closer" or "further" away from each other in the individual's psychic territory. If one could imagine a circle that contains all of the possible selves an individual can embody, then some might be closer to the center and closer to the boundary. Depending on where one self might be located in relation to another, this could be an easy jump, or a jump that requires a lot of energy because it seems "further" away from the current embodied self. I have brought this idea up to someone else in the Order once who told me that they disagreed. They believed that we are the same person in all situations, and I interpreted what they were saying to mean that you aren't living in alignment if you aren't the same person throughout all situations. Having typed this out, I think that there may have been some confusion of the planes in that conversation, because it occurred to me that the greater circle encapsulating the constellation of selves can be likened to the Self, and from that plane, yes, you are only Self. The change of selves in Assiah seem to be the waxing and waning of Yesod, where change is constant. With that in mind, it occurred to me that by integrating the Tree of Life into our aura, we form a new personality constellation and develop efficient pathways. For example, someone may have a bunch of selves located all over their circle of Self. The connections between these selves have varying levels of movement (with some connections that are unavoidable and fast like in knee jerk reactions, and others that are more slow and difficult to tread on towards the self in mind). One could theoretically have a ball of spaghetti as their paths between these selves in their circle of Self, but I imagine this could cause lots of confusion and difficulty in knowing how to "show up" in each situation. The paths on the Tree of Life function like these connections, and the Sephiroth hold those forces that cause different selves to manifest in different situations. If that analogy is somewhat accurate, then theoretically the Tree of Life creates a more efficient system for the personality to constellate. There are clearly a lot of benefits to this aside from efficiency (such as the freedom to show up as you choose in any given situation and access to new selves in situations that one otherwise only reacted to with a particular set).

@Hannah Agreed. There's all kinds of Nephesh stuff that goes along with that. A lot of people seem to operate that they are somehow contaminated or sinful for being sick and/or being around sick people. I had a family member once remark that I was somehow undermining myself by helping friends that have chronic illnesses and/or disabilities. I think this family member thought that I could do more in life if I was around healthy, able bodied people, but it was misguided on this particular person's part haha Very rarely does punishment cause the desired outcome. One of the best examples I ever received in my Psychology classes was the child who breaks something. Almost every child has broken a precious vase or some other object, usually by accident. In terms of conditioning, unless you immediately punish the child right after the vase broke, punishment fails to communicate a lesson because it does not get associated with the incident. Generally, the child will wait for a moment, then tell the parent what happened. When the parent punishes the child after the child told the truth, it simply trains the child to lie next time. Too much time passed between the actual incident and the child alerting an adult for the punishment to link to the behavior that caused the incident. Instead, the child learns that sometimes when they tell the truth they will get punished for it. Adults would like to think that the child has the conscious awareness to distinguish what is actually being punished, but the subconscious, not the conscious mind, keeps the score. So the subconscious records the act of telling the truth about what happened as the event being punished because the subconscious has moved on from the initial state that caused the incident and the punishment occurs seemingly in response to telling the truth. The better course of action would be the recognize that the broken vase was not intentional and to remind the child to be more careful next time.

@zeph that is fair but.. viewing one's circumstance as "fortunate" as in the case of a debilitating chronic disease does not make the disease magically disappear. And because the disease doesn't disappear, doesn't mean that person hasn't changed their mindset enough to return to health. People under oppression of body, mind, and society, can choose to grow stronger as a result of their experience, but just because they are experiencing misfortune (in the objective case of literal oppression) does not mean they are responsible for it in their mind. I personally have a gripe about this interpretation that a lot of religions have that misfortune=punishment.

@Hannah This seems even more pertinent given how much we've watched society swing from one side of the polarity to the other over the past decades. Perhaps this statement highlights the significance of learning from the past so that we do not recreate the reality tunnels that put humanity backwards rather than forwards. It certainly feels as if we have taken two steps forward and one step back with how the world stage keeps unfolding.

@jjones Yes, definitely!

@Hannah What a relief that I'm not alone in this experience :') The mutability of it all is definitely trickster vibes. I often find I don't want to respond to things knowing that whatever I might say right now will probably change in the near future. So I tend to rely on structural statements rather than statements of opinion (though I still tend to be highly opinionated ). This has led me to largely experience socializing as comparing opinions, and few in the mundane sphere care about structurally sound statements haha. I often fear I come off boring or overly safe. The people who are aware of the non rational tend to be the people who find value in the way I interact, but I admit it makes it difficult for me to have surface level conversation, even when that's what the situation calls for. I'm curious how this has affected you socially? After this experience, I found it difficult to talk about anything I didn't have personal experience of. I also became hyper aware that whatever experience I have, other people have a completely different experience and set of circumstances they're working with, and bridging that gap is the miracle of communication. Nowadays, I find myself pretty introverted (partly as a means of defense in regards to projections and partly because communication became more difficult as I realized how many different ways it can go wrong) and sometimes wish I was more talkative like I used to be. Realizing that the world runs on projections, I find it difficult to identify with anything anymore (since my inner voice says "That's just a projection!"). I also find it difficult to take people too seriously (perhaps because I couldn't take myself so seriously anymore). Nonetheless, the social skills I've used in the past no longer seem to work, having realized that most of the skills I used were built from projections that no longer benefit anyone. Although everyone "is" unique, Uniqueness only has value in relation to something else. Because of this, I find it difficult to assert uniqueness in and of itself. However, it seems asserting uniqueness motivates a lot of attention seeking behavior that creates social situations in my life.

@Hannah For sure! Research in developmental psychology indicates that children typically develop the ability to understand outside perspectives around the age of 10. Prior to this age, children tend to concentrate primarily on themselves as they are in the process of becoming familiar with their own bodies and developing self-awareness. Around age 10, children generally begin to grasp concepts of independence, moral reasoning, and social integration. I think about how there are so many opportunities to disrupt development before the age of 10. It is no wonder so few people seem prepared to enter the world, given that so much psycho-spiritual "dirt" can accumulate before we are even aware that we are in the thick of it all!

@Hannah & @Because0 It's not unlike LLMs. I'm no expert on AI, but it strings together combinations of words that seem statistically likely to produce the intended meaning. Meanwhile, AI does not have a sensory apparatus to interact with material existence. So when AI says water... what is it talking about? I mean, sure, we can infer that it is talking about that substance that chemists designate as H2O, but it cannot actually experience what we mean by that word, "water." I'm sure y'all have experienced the word salad of AI slop, so this might seem somewhat obvious haha but it's perhaps a more extreme tangent to what RAW is getting at. It's crazy to think about how much of the world operates (without even considering AI) on people who talk about things they have never experienced. I mean, I encounter so many people who talk with certainty about knowing things they admit to have never met face to face, yet they make all kinds of decisions as if they were trained in such encounters. It's a bit of a miracle anything gets done at all

@jjones same!!

In a previous forum post, I mentioned Alfred Korzybski and Semantic Reactions. Expanding on my earlier post seems to be the most fitting response to this chapter on my part. Alfred Korzybski founded the field of General Semantics. He is notable for a book, Science and Sanity published in 1933. Korzybski sought to expand our understanding of semantics beyond our internal mechanisms of meaning making and interpretation. He focused primarily on how we react to language and symbol in our environment, including our moment-to-moment interactions with other humans in conversation. One of Korzybski's key concepts was Semantic Reaction. Semantic Reactions are whole-organism responses to a symbol. Rather than the denotative definition, this is the feeling one develops in response to a symbol. Whereas connotative meanings tend to be cultural and sociological, Semantic Reactions are the individual's physiological responses to a symbol based on the individual's psychology. A great example of this is the word, "Socialism." Oxford Languages defines Socialism as, "a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." That definition sounds pretty cool (assuming we're living in an ideal society), right? As many already know, when you use the word, "Socialism," around different people, there is a wide diversity of responses. Some people may say that Socialism is positive and that they aspire to live in a society where Socialism makes up the structure of that civilization. Others may say that Socialism is a dirty word and react as if they smelled something foul. A third group may not have any internal experience of the word, finding it to be nothing more than a string of letters. The range of feelings associated with the word are Semantic Reactions. Korzybski believed this occurs because information processing is not a neutral mechanism. Instead, our nervous system responds to symbols based on prior conditioning, memory, fear, desire, prejudice, anxieties, etc. This may not seem like a new idea now but considering how many people ignore the importance of word choice in our daily lives, it's not hard to believe how revolutionary this idea seemed in 1933. Korzybski argued that Semantic Reactions form when we confuse the symbol for the reality it is describing. In fact, Korzybski is the one who coined the phrase, "The map is not the territory," which RAW uses as a primary thesis of Quantum Psychology. When we use language, we create an abstraction out of some "referent," the actual object we are trying to refer to. Sometimes, people speak as if the reality of the referent is smaller than the abstraction or word used to refer to the referent. To go back to my earlier example, when some people use the word, "Socialism," they do not seem to be responding to the definition of the word. Instead, they respond to what they've been told about the word. Most people in the United States have not experienced a socialist government. Yet, those who respond to the word with disgust tend to be certain that Socialism is a bad word not even worthy of contemplation (much less education on its meaning), and those who respond with pleasure tend to be certain about that a socialist government's merits and values overshadow the fact that we do not live in an ideal society where people are 100% good. I would argue that the term, "Buzzword," refers to this idea of Semantic Reactions when the reactions are positive, pleasurable, and/or addictive. People use Buzzwords, or specialized terms, to assert authority and/or impress those around them. These words often become trendy and experience an increase in usage not because of what they mean, but rather because of the Semantic Reactions they elicit in others. People mimic others, spreading Buzzwords like Social Contagion, until their nervous system is attenuated to that Semantic Reaction. When attenuation occurs, the Semantic Reaction loses its novelty or thrill, much the same way a drug addict develops a tolerance. Then the Buzzword fades away as people no longer use that term. Semantic Reactions can be even more subtle. For example, when I catch someone in a "lie," my natural reaction is to label that person a liar. Liar is a negative category in my mind, and makes me feel very distrustful, sometimes even angry at the person labelled "liar." But suppose this person spoke in Good Faith, unaware that I labelled them a liar? Perhaps their information is simply skewed or ill-informed and they are unaware. Depending on how they presented their information to me, I might be in the wrong for projecting the label, "liar," onto them. The person may have spoken in a way that made me feel as if they were a liar. Since "Liar" is a bad word, my anger and distrust are a reaction to the meaning I've projected onto the word "Liar." If this is the case, then my reaction is maladaptive and unfounded. Being able to perform maintenance on our Semantic Reactions was one of Korzybski's calls to action. In future chapters of Quantum Psychology, RAW presents a formulation of the English language that, when internalized, provides a means of recognizing our Semantic Reactions. However, certain Buddhist exercises also seek to accomplish this as well. When one becomes aware of Semantic Reactions, communication becomes more miraculous. At a certain stage of my own path, I became acutely aware that people were not actually listening to the words I was saying. Instead, people were listening to the Semantic Reactions they formed from their own associations with words. I discovered that often, others and I were not actually communicating with each other. Instead, we were essentially responding to whatever words we liked and didn't like completely independent of the actual messages we were trying to communicate. This led me down a rabbit hole that made me wonder how much of my speech and others was truly understood, and how much of it was simply forced into the conditioned responses to the words myself and others were using. This will, of course, drive someone insane because we can never know the depth of such a phenomenon. I suspect that people with more knowledge and care about their words are perhaps more likely to understand me than those who believe words are unimportant. Considering there are people in positions of power that are unaware of these ideas, it's a bit of miracle that communication and social cohesion exist at the scale that they do. In response to the specific chapter we read, RAW seems to be emphasizing institutions like the FCC are policing what is considered acceptable language by forcing other people to agree with their Semantic Reactions. Given the nature of American culture, it is likely that these Semantic Reactions are particularly puritanical. The 7 Forbidden Words are a particularly useful example in showing how groups can enforce Semantic Reactions. With a large group to enforce Semantic Reactions, it is not hard to see why RAW believes many in our modern society operate and cogitate similarly to those from Medieval England. Semantic Reactions are perhaps one of the best explanations for what the occultist can mean when referring to “spirits,” as they are one of many unseen forces that affect individuals as well as groups.

@Hannah Fascinating! I had not heard of that term before. In response to your last question, there are languages that are built without Aristotelian logic. Without giving away too many spoilers, RAW presents a form of the English language that prevents Aristotelian logic in future chapters of the book. However, I am currently also listening to a seminar on Non Violent Communication where Marshall Rosenberg (the creator of the Non Violent Communication modality) mentions encountering a tribal people who do not use language to classify people, instead focusing on needs. He says that rather than calling people selfish, their custom would be to ask what needs aren't being met that are causing this person to act in a way we call selfish. This is similar to Non Aristotelian thinking in that it doesn't identify people as static categories. More abstractly, I think the Qabalah is a language that doesn't rely on Aristotelian thinking. People who try to make it rely on Aristotelian thinking (those folks who say each symbol only has one correct meaning at the expense of everything else that symbol means) don't seem to be 'doing' Qabalah correctly. For example, the Hebrew letters and words have multiple meanings and cannot be classified in a binary. In my opinion, at its essence, Non-Aristotelian thinking is a Non Rational process that seeks to perceive the gradation between opposites. This inherently requires one to unify a few opposites before they can see what is meant (i.e. that A and B also have C in between the two terms, etc.) and this means being allowed to sit with Uncertainty until the Cognitive Dissonance collapses and reveals their connection. However, once one grasps the process of unifying opposites, I would hope that it would get easier and easier to sit with the opposites. The ideas RAW presents in this book are not necessarily original. RAW has stated that he got most of the ideas from Alfred Korzybski, a linguist that eventually was deemed a pseudo-scientist. Korzybski believed that most people, when they believe they are communicating with each other, are actually reacting to Semantic Reactions. I don't intend to be crass, but you know how certain people get really, really upset when you use the word socialism or talk about social welfare? Well, the knee jerk response to the word, "Socialism," is precisely what Korzybski was referring to. The people who react that way are not actually offended by the word, "Socialism," and don't actually seem to know what that word really means. Instead, they are reacting to a meaning that has been associated with that word, triggering a maladaptive response. Korzybski said that the best thing we can do to overcome this is to only speak, "facts," which he has a technical definition for. The way we do that is very similar to what RAW presents in future chapters. RAW is the most accessible manual of Korzybski's linguistics that I have found. So I hope this gets you excited for the chapter of the book when we learn about "E-Prime"!

@zeph Hahaha I was hoping to dodge that question. I have been trying to type out specifically what I mean all morning and have been unable to adequately communicate it. I don't know that this is an entirely new idea, but I like the way this chapter combats some of the blockages in understanding the True Will. If the True Will is a distant object that we are aspiring to align with and grow closer to, Aristotelian, or binary logic appears as one of the earliest obstacles obscuring the nature of the True Will. I notice, between myself and others I have spoken to online or in person, the discussion of the True Will can easily become a question of individual certainty. The True Will inherently contains a large amount of uncertainty at the outset of the path, and the emphasis placed on the True Will (as well as the projected advantages of operating from True Will) might inspire an individual to make discovery a high stakes event. It is natural for an individual to want answers. Many, myself included, have attributed messianic and apocalyptic proportion to the discovery of the True Will. The perfectly innocent question, "What is my True Will?" suddenly becomes a demon of uncertainty that must be killed so that one can magically right their life and escape suffering forever in a lightning flash. However, this demon of uncertainty (and egoic grasping towards the True Will) is predicated upon this yes/no logic. In my own experience, every possible answer I came up with to answer that question, "What is my True Will?" has not been good enough. There has always been some shred of uncertainty preventing my ego from attaining that 100% certain answer to whatever my mind posits to be my specific True Will. My ego gets very displeased with uncertainty and would rather not take action if it doesn't have everything already worked out. Rather than discover True Will in the things I already do, my ego mistakenly believes that I must be doing something else, something outside of me, otherwise I wouldn't be experiencing this uncertainty or the discomfort that comes with it. Nonetheless, I have been told, and I have experienced that my True Will keeps on regardless of my awareness of it. But if only I could say, "Yes, this IS my True Will!" then my ego could rest and my life would just magically work itself out, right? My ego would love to believe that it is that simple, a change from one state of not knowing into the state of knowing like the flip of a switch. It foolishly believes that if I just flip that switch, I will never have to suffer again. Never mind that this is a subtle tactic the ego uses to give away autonomy. I know I am not the first or the last to experience this fantasy. Any time spent on the path should demonstrate that this fantasy doesn't hold up against reality. The True Will, in my experience, appears non-local. It expresses itself in infinitely varied circumstances. Sometimes these circumstances appear completely out of left field and do not initially align with what my ego believes to be "me." Of course, the demon of uncertainty feeds on those expressions of True Will because they fly in the face of what my ego considers orderly, predictable, and easily simplified into binaries. So how does one integrate all of that without going insane? Well, if we dispense with the idea that we can be 100% certain about our True Will in any given moment (since there is always a factor we cannot account for), we must also get rid of the idea that we are entirely 0% certain of our True Will at any given moment. Already, this rearrangement of our limitations has major implications. One can easily fall into the nihilism that RAW describes if we fixate on the loss of certainty. However, if someone decides to go in the opposite direction, then there is always some level of certainty we have in every situation. Since our goal is to act with more certainty (assuming that everyone else's ego also likes certainty), we might have a lot more data to work with in any given situation than what might be apparent. If it is our responsibility to act with certainty, then we have the opportunity to be responsible in every circumstance in our lives. What does this imply further about the True Will? If the True Will "is" not the thing we do with utmost certainty, we cannot use certainty as a marker of True Will. Instead, since the True Will expresses itself in varying circumstances and varying degrees of awareness, the True Will must also follow probabilistic logic. The True Will, then, becomes a specific set of probabilities (limited by our biological vehicle and material reality) that are likely to occur based on the expression of the Life Force in any given moment. Regardless of the situation I find myself in, every set of choices I come up with can be measured as more or less likely in alignment with True Will. Rather than place high stakes on one specific choice that is 100% certainly my True Will, I now have a range of motion I can choose from with relative confidence that it will align. This blows the lid off the initial yes/no logic analysis I proposed at the beginning of this post. Suddenly, "What is my True Will?" no longer holds weight because the True Will no longer appears as an object that falls in the "True" or "Certain" category. True Will becomes infinitely more adaptable, fluid, attainable yet illusive, and even more non-rational. It is no longer one simple title, or action, or thought, etc., but rather a set of optimized potentials with varying degrees of likelihood to manifest LVX. The specific identity of the True Will no longer matters because it's infinite potential inspires more freedom. True Will holds a space between yes or no, and every situation an individual finds themselves in becomes a series of probabilities, "How likely is this choice I've settled on in alignment with my True Will?" It also dispenses of the messianic urge and apocalyptic stakes that come with the fear of acting outside of 100% alignment with the True Will. What I believe this chapter of Quantum Psychology to imply about the individual "is" that awareness progresses from binary logic (I am doing my True Will, or I'm not doing my True Will) into probabilistic logic (I am making choices that are likely in alignment with my True Will). Furthermore, some of the highest levels of probability appear to function as if I acted with 100% certainty, showing themselves to be just as effective as 100% certainty (though less destabilizing when it turns out to inaccurate). This in turn lowers the stakes and dispels superstitious thinking. Viewing the True Will as a force of potentials that are not real until brought into Assiah implies a Bell Curve of choices in every situation increasing potential freedom of movement and action not present in a "This IS True Will" dichotomy. When we dispel the need for 100% certainty, True Will no longer needs to be a specific form, and instead becomes a game of increasing confidence levels in choices to strengthen likelihoods and other probabilities. Someone can identify a different level or register of cohesion in their actions, a non-rational cohesion, that doesn't easily fit into a box. Disparate occurrences become chains of events that appear unified to the individual acting from True Will and largely chaotic to the other who has no knowledge of that individual's path. In my opinion, once a certain amount of knowledge accumulates, probabilistic logic seems to be the only practical way of navigating an otherwise overwhelming existence. If we remain in binary logic, we risk insanity as we get lost in the infinite nuance that complicates our existence. The better we can assess those probabilities, the better we can make choices that align with our overall goal and path through the world.

This is one of my favorite chapters of the book. There is a lot to unpack here. RAW illustrates how linguistic features (especially limitations) determine not only how we describe Reality, but also how we experience Reality. Even more convoluted, we often make statements about Reality that cannot be tested against reality. He describes how so much of Philosophy has evolved as a process of weeding out these statements and axioms that cannot be tested, discovering that many of them do not survive reality testing. As @hannah pointed out, this is most easily analogized with AI. AI has never actually experienced the physical world, yet it will spit out volumes about manifestation. Does this mean AI is intelligent, or does it mean that it can fabricate the illusion of intelligence? If you answer that AI is intelligent because it can spit out volumes about a topic, what if those volumes are filled with useless information? Does that still qualify as intelligence? Humanity, quite often, displays this same uncertainty. In college, I met many who claimed to know exactly what was being described in the Psychology textbooks yet were perfectly unable to identify those same concepts in their own psyche and day to day life. Worse were people who claimed that their projection of those concepts was the entirety of those concepts, ignoring further nuances. In my daily life, there are people who claim to know everything there is to know about plumbing because they can describe a generic plumbing system. They have never actually performed any plumbing work, but still assert to my coworkers that they somehow know more than the plumber that they hired. It seems to be confusion of the map with the territory. In many day-to-day interactions, I encounter people who claim that because their "map" is not as detailed as mine, mine must simply be wrong. What this is really pointing to is simply a disparity in the awareness of myself and the other (rather than any type of moralistic or egotistical reason that the Nephesh likes to mythologize and project). In my experience, this is typically because someone has decided within themselves that things "should be" a particular way. When their map of how things "should be" fails reality testing, people often resort to "Bad Faith". This is because it is easier to say that the world must be imperfect than it is for the Nephesh to admit that it could be wrong and course correct. As an individual's Bad Faith increases, their senses seem to dull, and they neglect the observation of their external environment. I suspect that this is because the Nephesh retreats further behind Bad Faith until the Bad Faith turns into Saturnian Lead. Ultimately, it means that an individual has decided to neglect the calibration of their instrument/map (their nervous system in this case) to justify their Bad Faith and protect their Ego. Even in the case where I am comparing my map to someone else's of equal quality and similar terrain, differences in vocabulary further obfuscate that our maps describe the same thing and function the same. I cannot tell you how many arguments I've gotten into with friends only to realize that we were saying the same thing and had not properly understood each other’s definitions of terms. In cases like these, I have caught myself doing exactly what RAW describes in this chapter, asserting that my map and my variables must be correct and that the other's map must be flawed, otherwise they'd see what I saw. When I come to an agreement with the other, both of our maps are validated, and we now develop a wider vocabulary of terms to describe the terrain our maps illustrate. In other words, when more of our maps withstand reality testing and align with each other, they create a richer picture. This is precisely why shared maps, such as those of the Tree of Life, can be so powerful and so dangerous. If understood properly and defined adequately, it provides a shared language and units of measurement that allow conversation to flow. If misunderstood, it is no different from the example I gave in a previous paragraph of someone whose map that does not survive reality testing. In those latter cases, these people appear solipsistic and delusional. "Every religion, for instance, seems to other religions (and nonbelievers) the result of logical deductions from axioms that just don't fit this universe." (pg. 61). Crowley, in Porta Lucis, is abundantly clear that a proper Thelemite respects the maps of other religions, even if that Thelemite does not agree with the map. I suspect that this is partly explained by the reasons described in this chapter of Quantum Psychology. A map (religious, political, or otherwise) is ultimately human-made and therefore is bound by the same limitations that any other instrument is. It is a system of units that serve as convenience to talk about reality, but do not replace the ineffable reality. This is no different than me saying that "Nothing is real until it manifests in Assiah," not unlike what Jim says in Chapter 16 of 776 1/2. So one of the safeguards Crowley builds into his system is this acknowledgement that (no matter how much richer of a map it is) a map is just a map. This implies that even the Qabalah or Thelema is subject to the same problems that any other map is subject to. Qabalah is a system that, relative to itself, is coherent and well developed but holds no inherent reality in the face of "Things as They Really Are". There is no "figuring everything out," there are only closer approximations (like Pi or the Golden Mean) to the truth. This was a difficult pill for me to swallow at first given how much Qabalah is written about being oh-so Holy and Divinely created. Instead, it means that things such as the Hebrew alphabet, the Tree of Life, and any other glyph included in the Qabalah is not any more special than the glyphs the comprise a math textbook, or a tool used for measuring electricity. In fact, I know many people who harness the same or even more intellectual rigor than me to study Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Those same people find me to be strange for wasting my intellectual abilities on Qabalistic nonsense. The advantage that Qabalah does have over mathematical symbols or Lord of the Rings, however, is that we have centuries of data collected from the users of Qabalah that provide a much clearer map than a map made of mathematical symbols. This is the basic idea behind “Tradition." There is nothing inherently special about one tradition over another outside of "Success is thy proof." Qabalah has survived centuries of reality testing (to greater and lesser degrees depending on the operator) and puts the objects that obscure reality from the operator front and center. Given that the Qabalah is such a transparent map, it succeeds in showing the operator what they must get over if they wish to ever perceive things as they are. But this also means that we are not inherently exceptional or special for practicing Qabalah. In fact, to assert exceptionalism over non-initiates for being unaware of Qabalah is precisely the same thing RAW describes in the quote above. It basically is saying, "I must be better than you because I have better variables and I can judge you for things that you've never told me to hold you accountable for!" Not far off from a Christian telling me that I will go to Hell unless I abide by their Law

@jjones for real! There is a difference between "sex" and "gender" but these can overlap. Sex is the biological difference between what we have named "male" and "female" which reduces plainly down to who has the smaller sex cell vs. the larger sex cell. There is a lot of variation between these two classifications, though, when considering physical sex organs, hormones, genes, and so on. "Gender" is the cultural interpretation of sex which is more malleable and dependent on , well, culture. Those who are perceived culturally "male" might actually have some physical characteristics of females such as a higher production of estrogen or even ovaries. Our culture puts a lot of emphasis on the outward expressions of sex (penis vs. vagina) but these are only outward, there are other internal markers that are harder to detect.

@Hannah Well put! "29. For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union. 30. This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all."

@Hannah hahaha I got a little excited! I've been known to send walls of text towards people