Monday, July 20, 2015

The Tree of Life - The Shadows of the Past

ViaGnostica wrote very elegantly on the Tree of Depths and as he points out what the Tree represents is a framework for orientation to discover ourselves in infinity and exploring this framework is both exhausting and exhilirating.  Having recently returned from England where I  performed several ancestral pathwalkings it encouraged me to reflect on the Depths of the Past or Malkuth.

In the WMT, Malkuth is often understood to be physical reality and here we encounter the first hurdle of understanding as we have to remember that most people believe the physical world that surrounds them is something they observe directly and in the now.  However, what we think is the physical world is actually a hologram of that world created by sensory signals bouncing off physical objects into our sense organs ultimately interpreted by the mind.  Our consciousness then observes and interacts with this hologram from somewhere else inside our mind.

We know that as conscious beings we are surrounded by our ideation/sensation of the physical world and this is enclosed by the rest of our subconsciouness which some of us then believe is contained in a physical brain which is then in the physical world.  This consciousness of the physical world that we interact with is not in the nowWe are never present.  The sense impressions that are transformed into the hologram we percieve take time to reach the brain so the hologram is the past - it is history.

In observing physical reality it will always be like this - we never directly percieve the physical world in the now, but only our ideas/impressions of the physical world in the past.  This understanding of the physical world, not direct physical reality, but the physical reality that we percieve - is Malkuth or the Depths of the Past.

The consciousness of individuals is constantly fogged up by the tendrils of the past, whether it be endless analysis and recall of experiences - regret, guilt, anger, revenge, or in the desperate attempts to forget - alcohol, self-medication, sleep problems, and it is part of the journey of every initiate to confront and overcome the challenges they represent and as a healer to extend that wisdom to help others.  When one is stoic one can live in what I call the immediate past, which others call mindfulness*, an experience of the past which is uncluttered by remembering and forgetting. But there is a lot to be learned from the deep past that coils and writhes inside your every cell- here are the memories of untold generations of incarnations and the secrets of the powers of a real human being - VITRIOL.  Whilst being as present as you can be, in the shallow end of the immediate past, is a sensible position for day to day life and much preferable to  wallowing and drowning - there are great treasures in the sunken wrecks and coral reefs of the ancient deep for the intrepid diver.




 *They often continue to mistake their perceptual world for the now though.


 

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