The Gnostic Eden

The Gnostic Eden

Eden

“And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.”
-Genesis 2:8-9

In the book of Genesis from the Old Testament, Eden is the paradisiacal garden created by God as the dwelling place for all life, including the first humans Adam and Eve. This garden is fed by a river and has abundant plants, trees, and animals, all existing harmoniously.

According to Kabbalistic teachings, Eden exists in a heavenly realm called Yesod, the fourth dimension.

Adam and Eve

The name Adam means “man” in Hebrew, and the name Eve means “woman. These names are symbols that represent the humanity which dwelled in a state of harmony and innocence in Eden. This was a humanity that had not fallen from the spiritual realm into the material.

Adam as the masculine aspect of humanity and Eve as the feminine aspect together have the power to create as gods. This sexual power and the responsibility thereof is symbolized in the two trees in Eden.

Tree of Life

“And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
-Genesis 2:16-17

Adam and Eve were told by God that they may eat freely of the fruit of the Tree of Life. The Tree of Life is the internal structure of our soul and Being, the multifaceted unfoldment of spiritual manifestation.

The fruit of life is the divine source of spiritual life. The humans of Eden were instructed to be always in communion with this source, and thereby rule the newborn Earth in wisdom and harmony.

Before the Edenic fall, humans innately knew their inner Being and their Tree of Life was fully illuminated.

Tree of Knowledge

While God said that humans may eat the fruits of the Tree of Life, He warned about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was meant to be enjoyed but not eaten.

The fruit of knowledge (daath in Hebrew, gnosis in Greek) is sex. Sexuality is true experiential knowledge of life and death, physically and spiritually.

Sexual, creative energy is divine, but when it enters into matter it multiplies material density and suffering. Sexual energy when returned to its source, multiplies spiritual life and an elevated consciousness.

Waters of Life

The word Eden in ancient Aramaic means “the well-watered place”. Eden is the interior, superior dimension that is well-watered with the transmuted creative, sexual force.

To enjoy the fruits of knowledge (gnosis) is to love the sexual energy and to conserve, circulate, and transmute it. To eat the fruits of knowledge is to consume the sexual energy for strong sensations, causing the energy to fall.

The fall of Adam and Eve (humanity) was a sexual fall. From Yesod to Malkuth, from Heaven to Earth.

“Eden is the Ethereal World. Eden is sex itself. The Ethereal World is the abode of the sexual forces. The Ethereal World is Eden. We were driven out of Eden through the doors of sex, thus we can return to Eden only through the doors of sex. We cannot enter into Eden through false doors; we must enter into Eden through the doors out of which we were driven.”

-Samael Aun Weor, The Major Mysteries

The Fall

“The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’” “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
-Genesis, 3:2-6

The story goes that the serpent tempted Eve into eating the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. After sharing the fruits with her husband Adam, they both became self-conscious of their nakedness. Humanity was for the first time experiencing conflict and shame about sexuality.

Ultimately Adam and Eve were expelled from paradise because energetically they were more attached to matter and sensation.

While Adam and Eve represent humanity as a whole, they also represent the internal masculine and feminine forces. It was not the feminine sex that succumbed to temptation, but the feminine energy within the human body of both sexes.

Before the fall, masculine and feminine (positive and negative, yin and yang) energies were in balance. With the loss of the sexual energy, the feminine aspect within both men and women was exaggerated and became attached to the material, losing the spiritual.

The result was the consciousness falling asleep into matter. The sexual energy moving outward to generate sensual pleasure instead of inward to generate love.

The fall is used to explain the tragedy of our suffering existence in this world. Humanity lost paradise when we traded obedience to God for selfish indulgence. When we broke the cosmic laws.

The Christ

Yet there is also a force that operates outside of the cosmic laws known as the Christ. Christ is not a person, Christ is a cosmic inhabitant of the Absolute. Christ offers radical mercy, compassion, and love.

When incarnated within a person properly prepared such as Jesus, Buddha, Mary, Moses, Quetzalcoatl, Mohammad, and many more, these Christic qualities are born on Earth.

The Christ force is pure sacrifice because it enters into and spiritualizes matter.

Christ as Serpent

There is an esoteric teaching that it was the Christ intelligence in the form of the tempting serpent in Eden.

At the cosmic scale of creation it was necessary to eventually enter into matter. To stay in Eden forever as innocence was going against the divine plan.

Creation needed to reach a material crystallization in order for the Christ to be able to truly sacrifice. It is also true that the material crystallization went too far and now we have forgotten our inner Being and the divine power of sex completely.

Yet the Christ force works tirelessly on Earth to guide us in our efforts to awaken our consciousness and water our Tree of Life. And in this way there is hope of returning to Eden.

The Sephiroth

The Sephiroth

The Sephiroth are the spheres depicted on the Tree of Life. The word Sephirah (plural Sephiroth) literally means “enumeration”, but can also be understood as “sapphire/jewel”, “brilliance”, “boundary”, and even “womb”.

The sephiroth are emanations of the Agnostos Theos, the unknowable divinity.

“The ten Sephiroth of universal vibration emerge from the Ain Soph, which is the microcosmic star that guides our interior. This star is the real Being of our Being. Ten Sephiroth are spoken of, but in reality there are twelve; the Ain Soph is the eleventh, and its tenebrous antithesis is in the abyss, which is the twelfth Sephirah. These are twelve spheres or universal regions that interpenetrate each other without confusion.

The Sephiroth are atomic. The ten Sephiroth can be reduced into three tables:
1. A quantum table of the radiant energy that comes from the sun
2. An atomic weight table of the elements of nature
3. A molecular weight table of compounds.

This is Jacob’s ladder, which goes from Earth to heaven. All of the worlds of cosmic consciousness are reduced to the three tables.” 

– Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah

 

“The ten known Sephiroth come from Sephirah, the Divine Mother, who resides in the heart temple. The mantra of the Divine Mother is IO which is the 10 emanations of Prakriti, in other words, the 10 (ten) Sephiroth.

The Holy Spirit is our Divine Mother that dresses with a blue mantle and a white tunic of exquisite splendors. The Mother holds in her hand a precious lamp. 

This lamp is the Innermost who burns within the depth of our hearts. The Innermost is contained within a fine and transparent glass of alabaster.  This glass is our own superlative Consciousness; it is our Buddhi.

The Innermost is the Sephirah Chesed, and Buddhi is the Sephirah Geburah.
The Innermost and Buddhi express themselves through the Human Soul.
The Human Soul is Tiphereth, willpower, beauty.

Therefore, the Innermost, with his two Souls, the Divine and Human, officiates on his throne, which is the cerebrospinal nervous system. The Innermost is crowned with the Sephirothic Crown. The Innermost abides in his temple. The temple of the Innermost has two columns, Jachin and Boaz. Jachin is the mind and Boaz is the Astral body. The mind is the Sephirah Netzach and the Astral body is the Sephirah Hod. These two columns of the temple are sustained upon the Cubic Stone of Yesod. This Cubic Stone also serves as a foundation for the Kingdom, Malkuth.

This Cubic Stone is the Ethereal Body. Malkuth is the physical body.

Therefore, the human being is a complete decade. We have ten fingers on our hands, ten Sephiroth, and Ten Commandments.”

– Samael Aun Weor, Tarot and Kabbalah

 

References and further reading

Kabbalah from Gnostic Muse
Dion Fortune, The Mystical Kabbalah
Samael Aun Weor, The Initiatic Path in the Arcana of Tarot and Kabbalah

Kabbalah: Origins

Kabbalah: Origins

To Receive

“The Kabbalah is the science of numbers. The author of the Tarot was the angel Metraton. He is the Lord of the serpent wisdom. The Bible refers to him as the prophet Enoch. The angel Metraton, or Enoch, delivered the Tarot, in which the entirety of Divine wisdom is enclosed. The Tarot remains written in stone. He also left us the twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet …The universe was made with the laws of numbers, measurements and weight. Mathematics forms the Universe, and the numbers become living entities.”  
-Samael Aun Weor, The Initiatic Path in the Arcana of Tarot and Kabbalah

Kabbalah (also spelled Qabalah) is from the Hebrew kabal, ‘to receive’. It is an ancient esoteric tradition and a living study of the Tree of Life, the map of the cosmos. The origins of Kabbalah are mysterious, although it is linked to occult wisdom at least as far back as ancient Egypt and is best known as the mystical aspect of Judaism.

 

Spirit of the Tradition

“This ancient mystical tradition of the Hebrews possessed three literatures: the Books of the Law and the Prophets, which are known to us as the Old Testament [Torah]; the Talmud, or collection of learned commentaries thereon; and the Qabalah, or mystical interpretation thereof. Of these three the ancient Rabbis say that the first is the body of the tradition, the second its rational soul, and the third its immortal spirit.”
-Dion Fortune, The Mystical Qabalah

The esoteric author of the Torah was the prophet Moses, who lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. Moses himself was raised in the house of Pharaoh and was initiated into the Egyptian mystery schools. The Hebraic, Kabbalistic wisdom contained in the Old Testament is part of the esoteric lineage from the ancient Egyptian mysteries.

 

Tree of Life

The Tree of Life in some form can be found  in all the ancient religions. The Egyptian, Mayan, and Aztec all have trees of life. Taoism teaches about the ten heavenly stems and the twelve earthly branches which form the matrix of the universe, The Nordic Yggdrasil is a divine tree which holds the world in its branches, and there is the sacred Bodhi tree under which the Buddha Shakyamuni was enlightened.

Religious traditions including Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity teach about the sacred heavens, often numbering seven or nine, which are the sephiroth of the Tree of Life.

Dante Aligheri’s famous Divine Comedy is the journey of its protagonist through the nine circles of shadow of the Tree of Life, and upward through the celestial spheres.

 

Symbol and Poetry

The Tree of Life glyph or symbol is attributed to a mysterious 9th century Andalusian alchemist and poet named Solomon ibn Gabirol. This glyph is composed of 10 circles arranged in a particular cascading pattern. It shows both a psychological and spiritual microcosm of our interior world and the macrocosm of the universe.

“Three things remind me of You,
the heavens
who are a witness to Your name
the earth
which expands my thought
and is the thing on which I stand
and the musing of my heart
when I look within.”

-Solomon ibn Gabirol

 

The Map of Heaven

The Tree of Life is a map of the Heavenly realms, and contains the diverse facets of God, the angelic hierarchy, and the history of creation within its branches.

The Tree of Life has the key to understand and liberate ourselves from our state of psychological sleep, because it is a map of states of consciousness, of the different dimensions, realms and worlds of our psychological interior.

The Tree of Life is also a representation of the true and complete human who has incarnated, activated and organized all the values of God within himself.

This is the vertical line of the Being that exists in every moment. We access the Tree of Life by activating our consciousness, and then it becomes a living tree and we live its teachings.

The true study of Kabbalah is with the intuition of the heart, guided by shekinah, the Divine grace, the gift of God. We need this grace in order to become an intuitive Kabbalist, to not be merely an intellectual Kabbalist.

 

References and further reading

Kabbalah from Gnostic Muse
Dion Fortune, The Mystical Kabbalah
Samael Aun Weor, The Initiatic Path in the Arcana of Tarot and Kabbalah

The Fruits of the Tree of Life

The Fruits of the Tree of Life

Each sephirah on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life is a state of consciousness, a jewel, a virtue of our internal Being.

The Tree of Life contains the history of creation, the many facets of God, and the map of the internal spiritual path within its branches. The Tree of Life is our own Being. To move consciously in the Tree of Life and to incarnate its fruits are what we yearn for.

These fruits are the holy virtues: victory over the mind, splendor of the internal worlds, real beauty, true justice, love, intelligence, wisdom, and the crown of life. These cannot be found externally but must discovered within ourselves.

The sephiroth of the Tree of Life are as follows, starting at the bottom branches and up to the roots in the Absolute. The names are in Hebrew and English.

Malkuth

The Kingdom. The physical world is a false world that we have created through psychological sleep and materialism. It is a kingdom without a king, a world without the Being. Malkuth is the physical world in the third dimension. Here we learn about our physical conditions, the limitations brought about by our karma. We have been given a powerful Kabbalistic prayer in this world, the Our Father prayer which contains ten segments, each relating to a different part of the Being.

Yesod

The Foundation. The vital world, is called the Foundation because everything physical is a crystallization of vital energy. Yesod is the energetic aspect of the physical world and related to the vital, sexual root of all of the energies in our body. In this realm we learn about the sacredness of our sexual force. Yesod is known as the ninth sphere and is always a reference to sacred sexuality.

Hod

Splendor. The astral world, the intermediary between the physical/vital and the superior worlds. The astral world of dreams is where the impulses of the higher dimensions become symbols, myths, archetypes, stories.

Netsach

Victory. Triumph in the world of the mind, where we work on conquering the battles of the opposites of the mind.

Geburah and Chesed

Mercy and Justice. Called Atman and Buddhi, the Divine soul and the Intimate. Mercy and Justice must be in equilibrium. Justice without Mercy is tyranny, Mercy without Justice is chaos and anarchy.

Tiphareth

Beauty. Central on the Tree, this sephirah is love and wisdom, mercy and justice in perfect combination. Tiphareth is the causal world, the origin of all cause and effect, and the world of conscious will, the realm of the Human soul.

Binah

Intelligence. This is not the same thing as mental quickness or cleverness, we can have mental quickness and still be psychologically asleep. Binah is the intelligence is of the Being, the chess master who can see 50 moves ahead. This sephirah is the unfoldment of the Holy Spirit into the Divine Mother, completing the trifecta of the upoer triad.

Chokmah

Wisdom. The Christ force is the wisdom and compassion that descends over and over into creation to sacrifice itself and bring light and salvation to all beings. When Jesus Christ said, “No one enters into the Kingdom of the Father except through me.” he was speaking as a manifestation of Chokmah, the Son, in relation to Kether, the Father.

Kether

The Crown. “Be thou faithful until death and I will give you a crown of life.” –Revelation 2:10. Kether is the highest sephirah of manifestation, the Father, who always faces the Absolute in deepest contemplation. The crown is the triumph of the Being and the entry of the virtues we have incarnated, brought into the Absolute.

The Absolute

Beyond matter and energy, beyond creation, from where the roots of the Tree of Life grow.

The Tree of Eternity has its roots in heaven above and its branches reach down to Earth. It is Brahman, pure Spirit, who in truth is called ‘The Immortal’. All the worlds rest on that spirit and beyond him no one can go. This in truth is That.
– Katha Upanishad

 

References and further reading

Kabbalah from Gnostic Muse
Dion Fortune, The Mystical Kabbalah
Samael Aun Weor, The Initiatic Path in the Arcana of Tarot and Kabbalah

 

The Map of Creation

The Map of Creation

The Tree of Life is a map of the higher and lower dimensions of the universe, used in the study of Kabbalah.

The Tree of Life shows a macrocosm and microcosm within the human being. The Tree shows us the path to discover God within ourselves, and the many facets of God.

The roots of the Tree of Life are in the Ain, the Limitless, the Absolute, from where all manifestation emanates.

Divine energy descends into creation and at the same time creates and forms each sephirah, “jewel” or “womb”. Like water overflowing from a fountain, each world becomes denser than the last, heavier and with more laws.

The diagram of the Tree of Life is arranged as follows:

Ten Sephiroth

Ten sephirah arranged in a cascading pattern from the highest heaven to earth. Kether, Chokmah, Binah, Chesed, Geburah, Tiphareth, Netsach, Hod, Yesod, and Malkuth. Also the mysterious hidden sephirah Daath.

Twenty-two Pathways

The pathways connect the sephiroth, each corresponding with one of the 22 major arcana of the Tarot. The sephiroth themselves are pathways making thirty-two paths in total.

Three Triads

The three triads consist of nine of the ten sephiroth.

Three Columns

The three column represent Mercy, Justice, and Equilibrium.

Thirteen Dimensions

The different dimensions of the universe ascending in levels of increasing rarity, descending in levels of increasing density.

The Absolute

The unmanifested reality from where the Tree descends, and which has three components: the Ain, the Ain Soph, and the Ain Soph Aur.

The Shadow

The shadow of the Tree of Life called the Klipoth, which means shells. The Klipoth is the same Tree but the shadow aspect of each sephiroth, the hell realms corresponding to the heavenly realms.

The Fourfold Worlds

The entire Tree of Life is replicated as four worlds that interpenetrate and superimpose within each other. The worlds are called Assiah, Briah, Yetzirah and Atziluth.

 

Creation

In the very first sephirah called Kether, there is one law, the law of Love. In Malkuth, the physical world that we know, there are forty-eight laws. God has never left us, but there is much more density and complication in Malkuth, we often do not feel the direct effect of God.

God descends down into creation, first through the three primary forces, the creative Law of Three in the first triad. Then fractioning like white light through the prism via the Law of Seven, into the next seven sephiroth, with the corresponding seven Archangels, seven planets, metals, colors, musical notes etc.

God descends from the Absolute into creation because He wanted to know Himself, to gain knowledge to understand the happiness of perfection.

From the sayings of Prophet Mohammad:
“I was a hidden treasure and I longed to be known. So I created the Creation so that I may be known…”

The Tree of Life can be a source of infinite study, but its most important role is as a source of inspiration to discover and integrate these facets within ourselves.

 

References and further reading

Kabbalah from Gnostic Muse
Dion Fortune, The Mystical Kabbalah
Samael Aun Weor, The Initiatic Path in the Arcana of Tarot and Kabbalah

Kabbalah: The Three Triads

Kabbalah: The Three Triads

The Kabbalistic Tree of Life

The Kabbalistic tree of life is an ancient and profound diagram that is intimately related with alchemy, tarot, numerology, Hebraic wisdom, and astrology. A basic understanding and orientation to the map of the tree of life is useful to guide us in our inner work.

The key to studying Kabbalah is in the development of intuition, imagination and inspiration, in order to work with these cosmic forces in a practical manner and not get lost in intellectualism.

Practical Kabbalah

To truly know Kabbalah, to practice it, is to walk the initiatic path.

To incarnate the fruits of the tree of life requires an esoteric and psychological work. To move beyond our selfish nature, to love and sacrifice for others, always remembering shekinah, the divine grace, the gift of God.

Each sephirah, each pathway, each dimension, each pillar, is a lifetime of study and reflection unto itself. The focus of this article is the three triads that divide the nine superior sephiroth into three basic levels.

 

triangles

Logoic Triangle

The topmost triad is the logic, or supernal, triangle. The holy trifecta of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, also known as Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, or Osiris, Isis and Horus.

This triad contains the mystery of the trimurti or the trifecta in Christianity. Chokmah, the Christ, is an unfoldment from Kether, the Father. Binahthe Divine Mother is an unfoldment of the Christ.

Ethical Triangle

The middle triad is the ethical triangle. Revolutionary ethics have nothing to do with right and wrong as we understand it, but always working to have the will of God prevail, to allow the divine influences to guide the lower.

In this triad contains the sephiroth called Chesed, Geburah and Tiphareth.  Here is the mystery of the human soul united to the divine soul, something that happens at a certain stage of initiation, a wedding of the soul to the spirit.

Samael Aun Weor writes in his book, The Initiatic Path in the Arcana of Tarot and Kabbalah that while the human soul, which is masculine, works, the divine soul, which is feminine, plays. This is the union of love that everyone on earth is truly searching for.

The sephiroth Geburah and Chesed represent the balance of justice and mercy. Justice without mercy is tyranny; mercy without justice is anarchy.

Magical Triangle

The lowest triad is the magical triangle, consisting of the mental, astral and vital worlds.

The sephiroth called Netzach, Hod and Yesod. 

We who have our center of gravity in the physical world can access these higher planes only by uniting our vital force, intention and mind toward the divine. Here is the bridge to access the will of our Being, and the wisdom and love of God. This is the realm of ritual which is an act that vibrates into other dimensions.

Malkuth

Malkuth is the physical plane. Malkuth is a fallen sephirah.

It is the “wilderness” where Adam and Eve (the Lemurian humanity) were cast after they had eaten the fruits of the tree of knowledge and broken the law of God.

There are 48 cosmic laws in Malkuth, 24 laws in Hod, 12 in Netzach, and only 1 law: law of love, in Kether.

In Malkuth we have a much greater struggle against materialism to find the spiritual, which is understood with a study of the tree of knowledge. We stand on the brink of heaven and hell.

Above us is Yesod, the 9th sphere, the vital sexual force, the way off of the tree. Below us is the Klipoth, the shadow realms, where there are more laws, more darkness, more conditioning.

 

References and further reading

Kabbalah from Gnostic Muse
Dion Fortune, The Mystical Kabbalah
Samael Aun Weor, The Initiatic Path in the Arcana of Tarot and Kabbalah