But this brings me back to the concept of fields and where they may fit into the picture. Technically, no fields are required for doing alchemy apart from the ones that form naturally when the different changes in focus happen. However, when I was exploring the Mardukite tradition and their view of things, this gave me an interesting perspective.
So they talk about things in the fairly familiar language that somewhat bothered me in the past. Considering reality similar to a videogame, and that the structures that exist in the world are here from existing agreements that have been made.
— When people jump into that with only a background in videogames and not the mechanics of energy, that seems a bit too affirming of the imagination. It seems to suggest that belief itself makes things happen, which is not exactly true. There are mechanics in the substrate of the universe, and belief is a sort of action on the substrate. So the Mardukite group made that concept a lot more palatable to me because they had established a sort of mechanics in the backdrop with their exploration of the history of occultism. William Gray was an influence on this group as well, so I tend to read them in reference to his works, which basically use the Tree of Life as a tool for viewing the ongoing formation of concrete events that occur in every instance of existence.
So the prospect of “agreements” isn’t just psychological, it would be mechanical and on the level of creating constraints from pure, transpersonal consciousness down to the more material levels of things.
But, anyways, their view of humanity is that humans are to be identified with the boundless capabilities of the Spirit. And, much like the Gnostic myth, these boundless spirits were caught up in restricted material bodies. The view expressed is actually somewhat similar to the Martinist view, where the desire to Create a body is what entrapped humanity within a body. But, instead being locked into a specific narrative (as Martinism was), the Mardukite view was that humans, in spirit form, were all creators. Which is to say, we were all creating different things in spirit form and eventually created things that were so engaging that we entrapped ourself in a restricted creation.
This is an interesting prospect because it suggests that the creation of things like Fields and Servitors was a natural state and occupation prior to being incarnated physically. —I didn’t really have an appreciation for that until I learned more about William Gray’s work and the role of the Tree of Life as a tool for understanding creation. The Sefer Yetzirah (where we get the tree of life) is the “Book of Formation” after all. And the act of formation creates forms and morphology. And so, it fits neatly together that we have “morphic fields” that stand between consciousness and the densest canvas of matter.
This seems to give a bit more perspective on the sort of role that a complete Buddha or Taoist Immortal could have. In William Bodri’s work, he describes how these different beings rise through the celestial ranks by pushing people towards enlightenment. And, if they had trained alchemically to be beyond reincarnation, they would exist as pure spirits and basically live and work on every level above Malkuth. So they would be living with the spirits, back on the level where we were all presumably creating fields and energy beings for the pure love of creation before the dense world down here came to exist and hold people hostage.
—At least, that’s where all of the information that I’ve picked up leads me. It’s been an interesting exploration.
Ah, post limits. No more than three consecutive posts can be written since I don’t own this thread any more.
New entry below, written 12/8/24:
William Gray is an interesting source. He never outright affirms what I know from Taoism, but he always creates very clear parallels to it. And, even where he avoids making a comment on some issues, he tends to line up ideas and references that can link to the Alchemical tradition.
I think Daath, as a quasi-sephiroth, is an interesting point. Many people understand it as being the Abyss. In Gray’s Christianized Kaballah, he considered the sephira as being part of the body of God. Amusingly enough, with Daath being considered the Abyss, it was likened by Gray to a cloaca that keeps all of the excrement sealed away from the sanctity of the Godhead lol.
But that, I think, is only when we consider Daath in an incomplete form. One very interesting set of Diagrams appears in his extended work on the Tree of Life — It has been published under the names “The Talking Tree” and “Growing the Tree WIthin”.
Those two diagrams actually illustrate the big distinction in how the informal doctrine of non-dualism that appears in modern occulture differs from the old alchemical meaning.
Just taking a dive into the TV series Supernatural, I was looking into some of the Fan websites that had been assembled. An entire wikipedia with entries on lore and all kinds of things. You don’t have to go too far to see that much of what appears on youtube from different sources is from people who seem to get much of their information from TV rather than written sources.
It’s one of those funny things where God and The Devil were put on even terms, and the world is seen as being held in a cosmic balance by good and evil.
The old sources wouldn’t say that. Technically, Evil doesn’t exist until Heaven and Earth were made separate. When the spiritual light of Daath is broken and descends through the lower Sephira causing Malkuth to form. When an alchemist finally refines the body back into pure spirit, it is the complete reconciliation of their portion of Malkuth into the higher realms.
With a background in the physical transformations described in the old Buddhist writings as well as Taoist Alchemical literature and some works on Yoga, it’s a clear illustration with obvious parallels. Daath isn’t supposed to be an Abyss. Only as a broken Sephiroth will it be an abyss. It starts to become restored when the light regains its fixture there.
That is the Taoist “Turning the Light Around”, the Therevada emergence of Nimitta, and the Tibetan developments of Thogdal. But, the proper development of it is built on the total coordination of the layers of energy that compose a person’s different “bodies”. That is how the sublime unity is gained.
But that’s, once again, a difference in the prevailing ideas in contemporary occulture. Good and Evil are not counterbalanced. Evil is annihilated/dissolved when harmony and, consequently, unity are achieved. Yoga is the uniting of opposites which also results in the dissolution of the lower levels. This is the true return to Oneness.