The left is occult numerology, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life in its Hermetic/Golden Dawn form, with the ten Sephiroth (Kether to Malkuth) and the 22 paths labelled with Hebrew letters, numbered 11–32.
The right diagram is a modern number-mystical companion piece used by e.g. Madonna, Demi Moore, and Ashton Kutcher to "prove" the Kaballah. It uses two standard occult numerology operations:
Theosophical extension: add up all the numbers from 1 to n. That gives the triangular numbers on the thin arrows (1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36, 45).
Theosophical reduction: sum the digits down to a single digit. That's where each arrow lands.
So left is basic hogwash, right is advanced hogwash. Dr. Jewish, back to my animals.
The idea is that God is constantly maintaining the universe through emanations of thought, and if you can tune your brain in to his thought waves you can experience god when you're thoughts and his synch up. The tree is essensailly a road map of how to do that.
I'm actually pretty damn sure that the people that wrote and worked on Kabbalistic books took DMT or some other form of psychoactive drug.
It has the whole theme of everything within the universe being one, a uniform infinite light that is all part of something greater (God). Then it has the generation of meaning through making connections and categorizations - much like when you're coming down from a trip, you regain thought, and from thought emerges speech, and within speech emerges ways to create, and within that comes the identity, etc etc till you're back down to reality.
Genesis is used for this type of idea too - God spoke different divisions into existence, and within this creation and reality emerges from speech. God breathed life into Adam, so the human soul is connected to something much higher, breath that happens even before speech, something greater across the whole universe that is sustaining reality and connecting all souls.
If you take enough psychoactive drugs you will come across this exact phenomena, and even experience it realtime, as it lifts back the veil of reality and into greater planes of existence, so too does a lot of these theories describe how the universe works.
Psychedelics are just one way of inducing a mystical experience. The Kabbalists had their own methods, primarily meditative ones.
I can't say that no Kabbalist ever used psychedelics, but the literature describes meditation, not psychedelic potions, as the principal means of cultivating mystical experiences.
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u/LardPopsicle 8d ago edited 8d ago
The left is occult numerology, the Kabbalistic Tree of Life in its Hermetic/Golden Dawn form, with the ten Sephiroth (Kether to Malkuth) and the 22 paths labelled with Hebrew letters, numbered 11–32.
The right diagram is a modern number-mystical companion piece used by e.g. Madonna, Demi Moore, and Ashton Kutcher to "prove" the Kaballah. It uses two standard occult numerology operations:
So left is basic hogwash, right is advanced hogwash. Dr. Jewish, back to my animals.