“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 2:9
The Tree of Life
The Tree of Life is shown as the beautiful glyph of cascading sephiroth, the illuminated virtues of God, the nine heavenly realms. The Tree of Life is the Being, our divine lineage, to where we must return.
The Tree of Knowledge
The Tree of Knowledge is hidden within the Tree of Life as the mysterious sephirah called Daath, “Knowledge”. The Tree of Life in micrososm is the human being, where the sephirah Yesod, the Foundation is in the sexual organs, the vital root of our existence. Daath is located in the throat, the secret teaching of the power of the word to create.
The Key of Sex
In sex is the key to our exaltation and our fall. This is as much true in life as it is esoterically. The greatest and most sublime joys can be with loving sexual union, and the greatest types of trauma can be from the abuse of sexuality.
Esoterically the sexual energy is understood to be a divine force that belongs to the Being, and can return us the state of illumination we have lost if know how to wisely transmute and sublimate our sexual energy.
When the sexual energy is wasted then our vital force flows downward into the Klipoth, into unconsciousness, psychological sleep and hypnotism.
The Shadows of the Trees
In the teachings of Kabbalah it states that both trees in Eden had a shadow.
The shadow of the Tree of Life, the Being, is the multiplicity of the ego, our unconsciousness.
The shadow of the Tree of Knowledge is misuse of the sacred sexual force. We cannot experience all the faculties of the Being because the door has been closed to us, because of our misuse of sexuality.
Transmutation & Sublimation
The beauty and joy of elevating one’s sexual energy is sublime. It is never about repression, it is about the full expression of the light of the Essence, it is the perfect harmony between mind, heart and sex, the imbalance of which is the cause of so much suffering in our world.
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