Fear Love....and the abyss in me?
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Oh yes, and a quick recommendation to you, fellow seeker of Light:
If one is seriously interested in bridging and crossing the abyss, one might look into the formation of the palace or the Tree before the fall, and the direct relations to the universe and Tree after the fall.
This is when Tiphereth was where Da'ath is now, and Malkuth was where Yesod is now. If one looks at the big picture, one can see how unification before the fall at Tiphereth, became a challenge of knowledge and reason, that is of course the crown of the mind:
As Hermes hath been interpreted, "Enough of reason, be he damned for a dog!"
When one sees this, one realizes when one lets go of one's reason and chaos of mind that one is quickly crossing the abyss, and that is all one had to do all along -- with the reason and air-thinking being warning signs to stop thinking and silence the mind/consciousness.
And of course, why must everything seem like a joke after realization occurs? Well my friend, it's a lot better than being in darker, falling universes whose inhabitants are completely doomed.
93s
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I think the key to your questions is in the definitions of your terms. The stumbling point is when two different people talk about two different things, and happen to use the same word.
For example, when we talk about "love" in the sense of "Love is the law, love under will", it's important to note that the words that immediately follow are, "Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love."
When I talk about "Love" in this spiritual context, I'm usually referring to something that isn't an emotion like "anger", "sadness", or "affection". Those emotions can only be "part of the picture" and carry within them their opposite qualities (e.g., "forgiveness", "joy", or "repulsion"). Love (in this context), on the other hand, carries no opposite. It's a pure, expansive, uniting force.
"For I am divided for love's sake, for the chance of union."
"There is no bond that can unite the divided but love"Also, when you say "the abyss in me", I'm recognizing something like the path of Tav, where meditating on fear can be an important part of the process of the path. I'm not thinking of "The Abyss" with a capital "A".
When you talk about forming intent, based on a combo of "fear" and "love" (which, I think in this case means affection and emotional attachment), I would say: Yes. Real intent has to be "whole" to be effective. It has to be include all of us, including the "negative", rejected aspects of our sometimes fragmented selves. Otherwise we end up sabotaging ourselves somehow.
True Will is about the sum total of our character. Initially, that might be about many apparently contradictory pulls. Over time, as they integrate, it becomes more about a single core motivation.
Edit: Just a final point to throw into this thread about "the Abyss" vs "the abyss in me"...
"For the decision which determines the catastrophe confronts only the Adeptus Exemptus 7=4. Until that grade is reached, and that very fully indeed, with all the buttons properly sewed on, one is not capable of understanding what is meant by the Abyss. Unless "all you have and all you are" is identical with the Universe, its annihilation would leave a surplus."
"The Exempt Adept must prepare and publish a thesis setting forth his knowledge of the Universe, and his proposals for its welfare and progress. He will thus be known as the leader of a school of thought."
So, sorry, I discount any claims to have "crossed the Abyss" by anyone who isn't obviously a well-developed Adept, with a published thesis, and serving as a leader of a school of thought.
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Excellent point, Benj.
The Love mentioned in the Book of the Law is the all-encompassing law of true creation.
The love mentioned sounds eerily like the feeling of "love" produced by a certain brain chemical, (I forget which, you can find the exact chemical in a book titled "Craving for Ecstasy: The Consciousness and Chemistry of Escape.")
This chemical is what is produced, released and used when one is around someone who physically attracts them, or someone who they have known a long time and have had positive experiences with. I think the shortened name of the chemical is 3 letters, starting with a "D". The man who discovered it, was on some kind of psychoactive libation, and saw three snakes devouring their own tales in his fireplace, eventually forming a chemical shape he later recognized as something produced in the brain. Very, very interesting read.
Very good point, Benjamin, and well-stated.
93
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Frank -
Luckily, just found the only chapter available of this book for free on the internet, and it's the proper one:
PEA is the name of the "love drug" produced by our brains that cause the feelings we experience during this lower manifestation of love.
psy2.ucsd.edu/~nchristenfeld/Happiness_Readings_files/Class%204%20-%20Milkman%201987.pdf
PEA is actually phenethylamine, the natural precursor to mescaline found in Crowley's "The cactus", a work that was lost.
This is very interesting indeed.
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"There are some practitioners that value a doctrine of love and light, I respect what it is they value. As I consider the work that it requires to reach that part of our circuitry, that critical and crucial part where we hold everything we have determined to be correct postulate. What was it that drove you across to determine this? Was it fear or love? "
love and light are easier to digest then hatred and darkness.
i can honesty say that I have expierenced terrible fear, that shook me to my core, prolonged, for most of my young childhood. I also know that I have expierenced Bliss and love of such a magnitude that it felt like my being was being comp,etely awashed in warmth and light that changed me at a cellular level.Recently I read an article about one time when Jimmy Page was caught with some whips in his suitcase. My mind asked.. are those for me, or him.?
s n m love and fear, pain and pleasure, they are motivators by all means, but from what I know about trying to get food to grow, it is easier to culitvate and feast on love, then with Fear.The new movie of Clash of the Titans has a good show of living on fear, and the new green lantern tells about using fear as well. love and light transmute from what I know. Fear is stagnent.
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And though fear is stagnant, it causes the heart to palpitate and the blood to flow as if it were trying to raise you from some physical stagnation.
I forget the exact wording Crowley uses for the Major arcana "Lust", but it's something like purification through, (not stagnation), but something that reminds me of stagnation. Kind of like stagnation that has recognized itself and is beginning to move towards purification.
Fear itself is the only cause of itself. Experience and letting go of fear, that is what bridges the abyss. One can take those bricks that they have walled themselves in with fear, and build a bridge right on the path of Gimel if one so wishes.
Veronica, in childhood, I experienced what you explained. I am sure I used to have ulcers just from the anxiety produced by fear of the unknown.
Destroyed it was, with the eye-opening sacraments of Nuit, when I was seventeen, but we've already got plenty of threads mentioning sacramental libation.
It almost makes me laugh to think I would fear existence as I did from childhood until that most sacred night and every sacred night that followed.
Our ideas of fear eventually transmute themselves into vritris of strength, courage, and wisdom, that we might be an example to, and explain to others how to overcome their weaknesses.
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Feels important to mention this:
Quite a few of new-age thought-patterns have attempted to align themselves with the idea that there are only two causes for any form of existence: fear and love.
This might not be further from the case, if one meditates on the trinity above Kether, which condensed and manifested Kether itself.
The base, and original form of existence is Ain, nothing. Shall nothing "fear" the limitlessness that is to follow? Not very likely, in my opinion. Manifesting itself only after many turns and twists in the condensation of the original manifestation of limitless light, fear seems a blatant hallucination, far away from the de facto idea that "everything is hallucination/Maya/illusion."
93 cents, enough to buy peanuts, one of my favourite foods.
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A couple of thoughts...
(1) The fear in us is very mortal. It's wired into our instincts, which have imbed it as biolgical circuits especially in terms of survival of self and protection of close loved ones first (and a widening cicle of those proximate to us as we expand). This function has to continue (to some extent) doing its job of preserving us biologically; but the magician deepening in the spiritual path eventually outgrows this as a motivation - one layer occurring in the crossing the Path of Tav to open the field within to Yesod, another layer in stabilizing oneself in the luminous love of Tiphereth, and a very substantial level in the opening thereafter to Geburah, the sephirah that is also called Diyn ("Fear").
(2) The engulfing dark void is not absence of Divine Light, but IS that Light, of such intensity that we cannot withstand it, nor bear it until we grow a little stronger! It is the embrace of Divine Love, the fabric of the spiritual Unknown that we seek and have sought. As an experienced and discerning palate is to fine wine, so mature our inner faculties to the appreciation of this wine, aged from our own spiritual lifeblood. This becomes more evident as one matures in discerning the eternal from the transient - the Briatic from the Yetziratic and biological.
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Unaware was I, until now, that Geburah was synonymous with diyn, or fear. This sounds etymologically similar to Djin, the elemental spirit of Fire, or Djinn, the Muslim demon that can possess humans and animals.
Bob Weir and Ratdog have a rather wonderful and interesting song entitled "Two Djinn", where a "genie" manifesting simultaneously in two forms at once:
"one was bright as pride and thin" and
"the other was fat, and black as sin"
"isn't this how all good tales begin?"They mislead him and lie to him and end up telling him to "have a real fine day."
Bob replies with,
"Isn't that was genies always say?"
"Night come sudden, dawn be soon,
bide my time, by the dark of the Moon.
My strange heroes lead me on,
but when I get there, they'll be gone." -
@ThelemicMage said
"Unaware was I, until now, that Geburah was synonymous with diyn, or fear. This sounds etymologically similar to Djin, the elemental spirit of Fire, or Djinn, the Muslim demon that can possess humans and animals."
I don't think that a word pronounced deen is related to a word pronounced essentially gin - especially since the first letter in the latter is probably a Jimel. (I have only trace familiarity with the Arabic language, mostly what I've acquired in looking at Hebrew etymology and cross-overs to Arabic.)
BTW, I made a mistake when typing this moments from awaking way ahead of the Sun. I should have said Pachad, not Diyn. (In other words, cerebral flatulence.) Here's the fuller explanation: Geburah has three layers. From lowest to highest expression, these are:
Pachad (PChD), "Fear"
G'boorah (GBVRH), "Strength"
Diyn (DYN), "Justice" -
Many, many thanks, sir Jim.
Working with triplicities I have been, and this will be very useful.
Peace and Power
Force and Fire
Strength and Sight93's
Frankie
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Love is life energy.
Eros is not some little fat cherub, baby of Aphrodite, but an original Titan.
our will to live, to be, all desires, of breath, and warmth, and pleasure are of Eros.as a living organism, I have needs, and an innate sence that my needs can be met, and should be met. I Desire, which if love is understood to be life energy, I think then that I desire is just simply I am.
Often I see how people manipualte and attempt to control others with that which they think is love, or positive reinforcement: or by using fear, which some would say is a negative reinforcement model.
As a parent, I know I have fallen in the trap of this sort of game, using the fear of the denial of pleasures (no radio for you if you...) or the acceptance of fear ( your backside is gonna hurt if you...), or things like that, and parents try to manipulate, control, and form responses that they believe are correct, and harmonious to the environment.
fear seems to be a conditioned response to what we percieve as a denial of our p,easures, of needs not being met. But there is no need, no desire that cannot be met.
And I dont mean for one instance that if you "desire" a 68 year old asian woman to walk on your nuts with stellitoes, shes out there just waiting for you shining her shoes. That is just an ego thing, maybe this cerebelum flatulence Mr. Eshelman spoke of. What I mean is that the Universe, Nuit, is abundance incomprehensible, and as you reach out with your desire, your love, your Eros, She is reaching towards you as well.
When I was a child, I was filled with fear because I was surrounded by bad, horrible people who were mean and selfish, and hurtful, and I was never afraid that I couldnt take what ever they were gonna dish out. i was afraid that because they were so obviously wicked, that She would never forgive them and love them again. i was convinced that these people were going to Hell in a handbasket, and I was afraid that since they were so weak and sick that they would never be able to handle it, like I knew I could.
When I was shown the depths that Eros contained, I was freed from those fears because I then knew they were completely unfounded.
Molecules have three choices in any situation, they can move towards something....maybe food, they can move away...like a poison, or they can just stay put. Most of the times they do t stay put, they actively move away from things that will harm, and move towardsthi gs that will help. I think that maybe where our concepts of love and fear, pain and p,easure arise. Molecules do not usually ever say, well Ill take a little poison and a little food, and see if that does the trick.