The Tree of Life, Part One

[ecosophia]

The essay below is the first of a series of seven instructional papers on the Tree of Life, the basic glyph of Cosmic structure and process in the traditions inherited by the FHR. It was written by John Gilbert and is presented here with only minor editing. When he sent out these papers to students, John was always careful to remind them that he didn’t expect them or want them to believe the material presented in this, or any of his essays. Belief and disbelief are equally useless in occultism, or for that matter in the Gnostic spirituality John lived and taught. What matters is that you read these texts, think about them, understand them, and come to your own conclusions about the material covered in them.

It’s probably worth mentioning, given the current rhetoric around cultural appropriation, that the Native American deities mentioned in this essay are referenced because John had a significant number of Native American students, and consecrated two of them that I know of as Gnostic bishops. Some of his Native students asked him to include references to their ancestral traditions in his writings, and he was happy to do so. 

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THE TREE OF LIFE

by John Gilbert

Part One - Awareness

The Book of Genesis begins with: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."  Three things are mentioned in this first sentence: God, heavens and earth.  In this article, we'll call this first God mentioned in the Western theology as Creator God or simply as The Creator for the sake of clarity.

This creation story is told in every commonly known religion.  The principle character in this story is called by many names (Ahura Mazda, Brahman, Ptah, and YHVH for example).  The other two characters are called male and female, heaven and earth, light and darkness, energy and form, and several other pairs of opposites.

This is the nature of the Tree of Life. One creates two who are opposite in nature and those two combine to form one balanced whole.  This is where we'll start our discussions since this is where Gnostics started to become separated from the other Western religions and spiritual paths.    Gnosticism is not so much a religion as it is a spiritual path.  It is this spiritual path which is disclosed by the Tree of Life.  This is the topic of our discussion.

If Creator God created the heavens and earth we know Creator God must have existed prior to this creation.  On this assumption alone man has tried to define Creator God for thousands of years. We're no closer to arriving at a perfect definition now than we were back then.

Our second assumption is Creator God created something Creator God knew and understood.  We all create things we know and understand.  We don't create things we don't know and we don't understand.  So what Creator God created was familiar to Creator God.

If Creator God knows all about each of us, because Creator God did create us, then Creator God knows more than all of us put together.  In fact, Creator God knows everything we know and Creator God knows more than we know.  Thus, because Creator God knows everything, Creator God has to be Omniscient.

If Creator God was all there was in the beginning, then there was only one thing Creator God could have used to create and that one thing was Him, Her, It, Creator God. Therefore everything that is created is within Creator God, and Creator God is within everything.  Creator God is both Omnipresent and Immanent.

If Creator God created us and all that is within Creator God, then all the power that is must exist within Creator God. Creator God is and must be Omnipotent.  Additionally, since Creator God created the heavens, and there is no end to the heavens, and those heavens are within Creator God, then Creator God must be Infinite.

If Creator God was in the beginning and Creator God is Infinite then it follows that Creator God is also Eternal and Ever-living.  So, we know Creator God is Eternal, Infinite, Omnipresent, Immanent, Omnipotent, Omniscient and Creator God created all that exists.  Everything is Creator God.  Creator God is everything.

If we assume Creator God created something He, She or It knew and understood, then it follows that the Law of Correspondence may be true.  That Law says: "That which is above is as that which is below; and that which is below is as that which is above."  In short, this law is: "As above, so below."

This gives us the opportunity to understand more about Creator God because the Law of Correspondence says we create in the same manner.  How do we create?

We create because we get the idea we can create, we think we can create so we set about creating.  We might intuit this idea, reason it out for ourselves, or receive it from some Higher Source.  This logic leads to several possible ways in which Creator God came to create all that exists.

One possibility is Creator God received the inspiration to create Heaven and Earth from a Higher Source.  In this case, we drop our consideration of this particular "Creator God" and go back to the Original Source above and beyond which there is no other Higher Source.  In other words, we disregard this possibility since we've already decided there is no Higher Source above the Creator God we're considering.

If Creator God reasoned it out or intuited the idea to create a physical universe, the first step in this process was to become aware such a creation was possible.  As above, so below.

To understand this process let's examine the life of a child.  The first thing a child does is cry.  Why?  The child has become aware of something and reacted to that something.  This is the story of a child's life: to become aware of something and react to it.  This is the story of life for most humans most of the time.  As we go through life, we become aware of many things and possibilities.  Once we become aware, we start to think and have feelings about the things in our awareness.

As below, so above.  Before Creator God could create anything, Creator God first needed to become aware of the possibility of creating anything.  Awareness is the first step of this or any other creation. 

On the Tree of Life, the topmost sphere is called Kether (pronounced ket' - er) or The Crown.  In the Tree of Life we're creating now, we'll call this sphere Awareness.  For our purposes, Kether, the Crown and Awareness are all the same thing.  What we know about one, we know about the other.

The Cabala teaches that Awareness is partially manifest and partially unmanifest.  It is partially of the world of creation and partially of the world above and beyond the creation.  Awareness is like that.  It's both partially in our consciousness and partially in our conscious mind.  We're aware, but we're only aware of what  we see, hear, smell, touch, taste or feel (intuit). 

The Creator created everything that ever was, is now or ever will be.  The first step in this creation process was the act of becoming aware it was possible to create.   Awareness precedes everything else.  It's the first step in thinking everything we think, feeling everything we feel, speaking everything we speak and doing everything we do.

According to the teaching of the Qabala, nine more steps are needed to actually manifest anything in the material plane.  But none of those steps will occur until and unless there is first Awareness of the possibility of creating something in our lives.

Awareness is the first step, the first of ten steps to manifestation.  Awareness is the first sphere on the Tree of Life, the first of ten spheres of manifestation.  Awareness is the first act of creation, it is the first creation from which all else flows.

According to the Big Bang Theory, in the beginning there was nothing.  At a point in this nothingness all the matter and energy that ever was, exists now and ever will be was created.  All this energy and all this matter were compressed into a single point, a single point in the Mind of The Creator.

The sheer power of all this energy being compressed into a single point caused it to explode in a Big Bang.  Matter and energy have been moving away from the explosion of this single point ever since.  Matter and energy will continue to speed away from this explosive beginning until the energy of that explosion has been expended.  Then, according to the Big Bang Theory, everything will reverse course and be pulled back to it's source in the Mind of the Creator.

Nobody knows for sure when the Big Bang occurred nor when it will collapse back on itself.  Scientists are looking back in time toward the center of the Universe with very powerful telescopes.  They say the Big Bang occurred about twelve billion years ago and that our Sun is about five billion years old.

These same scientists say the Universe is still expanding and it's not slowing down.  Not yet.  The best minds working on the Big Bang Theory guess the Universe will continue to expand for at least another ten to fifteen billion years.

To think it all began because Creator God became aware creation was possible.  As above, so below.  To think that all we are, have been and ever will be is so because you and I became aware we could create our own lives.  This Awareness was the first step in our own act of creation.

The Creator has been called many things.  In the tradition of the Universal Gnostic Church, The Creator is usually referred to as Creator God.  In Eastern traditions The Creator is called Brahman.  In Greek myth Gaia emerged from the Chaos and created the Earth and everything in it.  Thus The Creator can be considered to be Chaos though some call Gaia the Mother of All.

Tellus Mater was the Roman Goddess equivalent to Gaia and she, too, was born of the  Chaos.  In our discussions we'll consider Chaos to be The Creator in both Roman and Greek mythology.  The Creator of the Mesopotamians was the God El, the father of all man and creator of all things.  The Creator in Egyptian mythology was Atum the self-created, the Great He-She.  Memphis priests taught that Atum was the child of Ptah but this was apparently not a widespread belief.

In Irish Druidism the Creator is a goddess called Danu.  She is the Great Mother of  All that is and ever was. The name of The Creator in Norse mythology is lost to us.   Many consider The Creator to be Tiwaz but the stories seem to indicate Tiwaz was born of The Creator.

The North American Indians were not one faith or religion but many.  The Creator has as many names as there are tribal families.  The Pueblo Indians consider The Creator to be Awonawilona.  Awonawilona is The One Who Contains Everything.

The  Algonquin Nation called The Creator Kitchi Manitou and the name Manitou has been used by several tribes in describing The Creator.  Certain of the Pacific Coast Nations called this same God by the name Olelbis.  To the Pawnee Nation this God is Tirawa-Atius and to the Cherokee it's Kanati and Selu (father and mother) who created all that is.

You need to decide for yourself what name you'll use for The Creator who, according to the Western theology, created the Heavens and Earth.  Which is to say, The Creator created all that is, was and ever will be. 

Comments

Belief/experience

[(Anonymous)]

>> Belief and disbelief are equally useless .... What matters is that you read these texts, think about them, understand them, and come to your own conclusions about the material covered in them.<<

Coming to a conclusion re the material would, I suppose, be forming a “belief”, but with a caveat - when people ask me the what, when, and how of my “beliefs”, I answer that I trust in what my senses - including higher senses - tell me. I trust they’ll be a sunrise tomorrow because that’s what my material sense tells me. I trust in the Divine because my higher sense tells me that the Divine exists and that I am part of it.

So it’s not “belief”, it’s, I think, direct experience. I imagine that if one really understands the texts, one necessarily experiences them to various degrees, and that’s what I imagine makes a genuine study of the texts really worthwhile.

WM

Re: Belief/experience

[ecosophia]

A useful meditation on the theme!

Mind of the Maker

[(Anonymous)]

I just wanted to point to a book by Dorothy L. Sayers, „The Mind of the Maker“.

Sayers was a mystery writer and theologian, and in this book she applied the „as above, so below“ (or rather: „as below, so above“) idea to the process of creation. I.e. she draws parallels between the human experience of creating art, writing, …, and the process of creation by God.

It‘s written with a Christian God in mind (heavily leaning on the trinity), but I think it offers a lot of food for thought well beyond Christianity. (Plus, she was a really good writer, well educated, and a smart thinker. It‘s simply a joy to read her stuff.)

So well worth reading if somebody is interested in that.

Milkyway

Re: Mind of the Maker

[ecosophia]

Well worth reading indeed. It's out of copyright at this point, and so available for free download here.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm a member of the DOGD. Reading this text make my mind scream with the paradox between omnipotence and omnisapience. Do you have any pointers to how should I deal with this? Something something balance in the middle point, at a lower level? Solving the binary with a ternary?

[ecosophia]

One approach is to consider the options and decide that the traditional notion that the Creator must have both of these results in gibberish. That's what Alfred North Whitehead did, for example -- he argued that religious language attributing omni-anything to God is "metaphysical flattery" that cannot be taken literally without reducing theology to incomprehensibility.

Another approach is to see one aspect of the divine, or one deity, as being omnipotent but not omnisapient, another as being omnisapient but not omnipotent, and the creative power being a compromise between them. Norse mythology suggests something like this in the interactions between Odin and Mimir.

There are others. I'm delighted that you're wrestling with these concepts -- that's important, and well worth doing.

Alfred North Whitehead

[(Anonymous)]

Hello!

I am intrigued by North Whitehead's theological ideas. It has cropped up a few times here. Can you recommend some of his writings?

Many thanks!

[australiandreamer]

This reminded me of a paradox presented in The Evangelical Universalist (by Gregory Macdonald) quoting Thomas Talbot ...

1) It is God's redemptive purpose for the world (and therefore his will) to reconcile all sinners to himself.

2) It is within God's power to achieve his redemptive purpose for the worlds.

3) Some sinners will never be reconciled to God, and God will therefore either consign them to a place of eternal punishment form which there will be no hope of escape , or put them out of existence all together.

He suggests that you effectively pick any 2 (but you can't have all three)and in most Christian systems they 'get around it' but pretty much re-defining whichever one doesn't fit their choice and the various verses that support that one...

(as a universalist of course it is option three that is suggested to be the incorrect one)

[(Anonymous)]

From my meditating on J Boehme, my impression is that by the act of Creation, the Creator surrendered Its omnipotence. As above, so below - it’s the same as when we are full of tingly creative inspiration and we temporarily rule over a domain of infinite possibilities. It’s a heady feeling. Then we began our creative project by choosing among possibilities and we close all others down. The heady, all-encompassing feeling leaves us. The work begins. We have in a sense surrendered our omnipotence; we have limited ourselves in order to create.

When we finish our creative work, we bask in the feeling of omnipotence again, but it’s not as wildly giddy as we initially felt it. It’s an accomplishment, a directed act of love.

I imagine that the goal of Creation is to “finish the work”, which would be, should we freely accept it, the gift of omnipotence, that which the Creator surrendered when It created us.

[(Anonymous)]

An interesting interpretation of something similar as “choosing among possibilities and closing others down” is that that is in fact the source of creativity. By applying limits we force ourselves to work within those limits and that becomes creative. An example here is poetry and a subset of that is forcing things to rhyme. By imposing the limitation of rhyming you limit word choice have to reject possibilities that don’t rhyme, etc. But the power of limitations to guide the creative process is something I’ve personally found over and over again. We can stare at a piece of wood and imagine a thousand projects. It’s only be deciding to make a chair that we begin the process of realization.

[(Anonymous)]

This is a fascinating take, thanks for this

[(Anonymous)]

Christian gnostic Jacob Boehme has, for me, a fascinating take on the Creation process. Boehme’s “Ungrund” - which I imagine to be the same as the Roman and Greek Chaos - could be defined as a “Nothing”, but not an absolute Nothing, rather a pre-existence broth of potentialities, possibilities.

This is difficult to sum up, let alone articulate , but in Boehme’s cosmology, the first thing to stimulate the Ungrund’s manifestion of Creation was *Desire* - perhaps the same as “awareness”? The Ungrund’s desire was to know Itself, to see Itself through a Partner, a reflection of Itself.

Here’s where it gets really interesting - because the Ungrund was a seamless One-ness and Indivisible, the desire for manifestation was thwarted, and the Ungrund experienced a fiery Anguish. It was by the Ungrund’s acceptance of this Anguish that the Desire’s fiery nature was sublimated into Divine Love and then manifestation of the cosmos.

The above/below pattern is obvious, I think - as atoms in the Creator’s body and as participants in ongoing Creation, we must pass through the Creator’s lower fiery nature. Our red in tooth and claw physical world is all the evidence we need of that. And it is through our own acceptance of anguish and opposition that we sublimate our fiery nature into Divine Love. Thus we as individuals, in our day to day grapples with life, replicate the same Creation process that the Ungrund, the Chaos underwent.

[gullindagan]

Well I guess Hvergelmir could be the creator in the Norse mythos. Or Ginnungagap... Odin creates the world from Ymir, but the poisonous well and the land of fire are prior. And the Cow... and also Odin appears to be mortal...

I see Ginnungagap as the Gaping Void, the Grinning Gap, Awareness, Nirvana.

[jprussell]

It seems perhaps significant to me that the Norse myths as we have them don't seem to ever get around to really defining a first "something". Niflheim and Muspelheim are just there, and Ginnungagap is between. The cow is there (where? somewhere), suckling Ymir and licking Buri out of the ice. What strikes me is that heathen thought might not have gotten to such abstractions as "the first mover/creator" and instead focused more on the interactions of opposed forces (to put it into Cabalistic terms, using my very basic knowledge - there's no Kether. The most basic Norse thought gets is the Binah/Chokmah binary).

The only other thought that comes to mind is that I encountered somewhere (likely in Thorsson's writing, but possibly in Kveldulf Gundarsson) the idea that the core notion in Norse mythology is the importance of consciousness as a force, and that most everything is set as "Consciousness vs the chaos of the rest of existence". If so, it's a bit interesting that there's no ultimate source of consciousness (Buri? Ymir? Audhumla?)

Anyhow, all of which is to say I also have no firm answers, just that it's an interesting seed for thinking.

[australiandreamer]

Only yesterday I was listening to an audio book about Norse Myths - love it that I am reading this today - and without that your words would have been a kind of a blank incomprehension for me (and I now know what some the spelling looks like!) whereas today I get to read with awareness if not understanding.

[tiporcupine]

Hmm, who the Creator God would be in Norse mythology -- strictly for FHR purposes, of course -- is something I'll have to meditate upon. I'm leaning toward it being Wyrd itself.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks very much for this, I really enjoyed the logical way it flowed from one concept to the next, building upon itself.

I have a question: did Creator God create Kether or are Creator God and Kether the same?

- J

[ecosophia]

That's a question a lot of people have discussed, and different people come to different conclusions!

[deng]

Empty space, with a light shining in it, would still appear dark. Awareness is often compared to light. Light reveals the existence of objects. Objects reveal the existence of light.

Is awareness aware of itself? Aware of being aware if there is nothing else to be aware of? If awareness is the light by which one sees and knows, does the Creator need creation to be aware of itself?

[jprussell]

Other than as "a source for as many themes for meditation as you can wring out of it", is there any further guidance on how these lectures fit into the curriculum for the FHR? I don't think I'll be able to do more than follow along fairly shallowly for a bit here, but the chance that I might want to come back and work through this stuff more rigorously in the future is not small, so I'd like to have an idea of what to be looking for.

[ecosophia]

Nope. Read them, think about them, and decide what you want to do with them -- that was always John's approach, and I'll be copying him shamelessly here.

FHR Curriculum

[iprescott]

Hi JMG,

I really enjoyed the way this lecture was presented. To me, it resonated much better than knowledge lectures for the Hermetic Oder of the Golden Dawn. There are so many themes for meditation just in this one lecture. Guess I better get started. ;)

Ian

[(Anonymous)]

In Norse mythology, according to the Eddas, there was only Ginnungagap at the beginning. One of my Greek mythology references said that "Chaos" meant a chasm as well.

In which case - I'll look up the exact sequence of events in The Eddas, but I don't remember Tiwaz being mentioned in this context. Checking with a Germanic mythology site, he was the oldest of the gods, and always a god of war and justice, and the chief among the gods in Tacitus's time. replaced by Odin during the chaos (modern meaning) of the migration era, when a ruthless, amoral trickster and sorceror had an edge over the plain warrior, who was often bound by a certain code that didn't apply when all rules were off the table.

But in any case, Gaia would be the Creator in the Greek mythology, unless you count the two great chasms - Greek and Norse - as the fountainhead of creation. For what that's worth.

The Grey Badger

[(Anonymous)]

Is there a difference between manifestations and realization? Because I’m preferring realization the process of making something real.

As I was reading this and noticing the colors on the tree of life my mind shot to the rainbow bridge (Norse) and the path on the rainbow (Native American, George W. Cronyn). As the Creator God is creating the world through the Tree of Life it seems to me almost like that brilliant light of the unmanifest is going through a prism. Thus creating the rainbow of the tree of life and joining and blending again in Malkuth. Much to think about.

[ecosophia]

Manifestation is the broader term. Depending on how you define "real," a thing can enter into manifestation without becoming real. (An illusion is a manifestation, for example.)

As for rainbow symbolism, in some versions of the Cabala the three paths rising up from Malkuth are called Qesheth, the rainbow, because the Hebrew letters assigned to those paths are Qoph, Shin, and Tau, which spells Qesheth.

[(Anonymous)]

Mmm, here in Oz we have the rainbow serpent in indigenous traditions which created much of the landscape. I always thought this referred to water, especially moving water, and its prisms. However, this shows another dimension as well. Much to think about.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes it's fascinating. Across much of Island South East Asia the movement up from earth to heaven is represented by the naga, or water serpent, and it's also associated with that prismatic shimmer of water. It's also associated with the feminine. Then the movement down from heaven to earth is represented by manuk, the great bird, and is associated with the masculine. The two movements are reunited in the afterlife. This reuniting in the afterlife finds reflection in many traditional indigenous funerary motifs of the region.

[open_space]

If Creator God is within everything and Creator God used himself to create the manifest reality then in everything there is must be an exquisite detail of craftsmanship. I had some trouble with this because if there it this then I must be extremely distracted for I pass by many things without even looking in everyday life. I then set myself to do a little silly naive experiment of finding Creator God. I went outside and grabbed a piece of soil in my hands and looked at it, just looked at it for a few minutes. At first I had a strong resistance because if Creator God created me then Creator God is clearly bigger than myself, but if Creator God is also the soil I'm holding in my hands it means the soil is bigger than myself! Ego didn't like this.

It went a little further. Body is clearly more complex than soil then how can it be that soil is bigger than myself? I didn't build the body, it built itself, I am just using it and it stretched into what it is by itself. So I must not be the body, the body is a loan of Creator God, the same goes for the mind. I just used it and it became this much by itself.

Isn't it weird that a handful of soil actually is bigger than myself? For what am I if I have not really done anything? There actually is that much detail of Creator God in the simplest of things and if I ever actually do something by myself it is because I used what Creator God created in the first place, including my body and my mind. That's humbling. I'm so little! I say this with joy, for I do struggle with thinking too much of myself. Just a tiny piece of awareness looking at what awareness of Creator God created. *head explodes*

[ecosophia]

And since you are also something the Creator made from Himself, when you look at the handful of soil, it's one highly detailed creation of Creator God looking at another highly detailed creation of Creator God!

[(Anonymous)]

Here’s the bear that I grapple with:

If the Unknowable Creator created us along with the manifest universe by limiting Itself and creating us out of Its own “substance”, so to speak, how did it come about that we have the freedom to choose between Light and Darkness?

Put another way, if the Creator desired to have a Divine Partner - and a partner must be separate in some way from its Creator in order to be a genuine partner, ie., it must be able to choose partnership - how was this separateness accomplished? We are not clones of the Creator, we are Its children - we have similar DNA in a sense, but we are separate. How?

[ecosophia]

Nobody knows. People have been meditating about that, praying about that, and beating their heads against various brick walls about that since the beginning of history. There have been a lot of interesting speculations, but most of it comes down to "Well, we don't know that yet, and maybe we never will."

[open_space]

Nice!

[(Anonymous)]

Hmmm! Very logical, very well laid out!
Since the text mentions the Big Bang, I thought I'd mention that there is now some thinking that our Universe is actually trapped inside the event horizon of a Ginormous Black Hole. My meditations on that bring me to ideas that make sense to me--
Inside the event horizon, we may be living in a 'tachyverse' that can't go any slower than the speed of light. The relativity equations apparently still work, as the negative numbers cancel each other out.

At speeds faster than light, what we remember is the future. The past is no longer known, so we are actually living backwards through time.

The Big Bang Theory, then, is the event in our distant future at which all matter collapses into singularity. We know it well, because we think it is in the past. The heat death at the end of the universe is actually the point in the actual past (which we think is the future) at which all the matter of the Universe crossed the Event Horizon, and began its journey to the centre of the black hole in which we live.

I'm not sure that all this, if true, makes much difference to the course of our current lives, but it does explain a lot of things.

Cheers,
--EG

[ecosophia]

There are many wonderful myths that help us understand the cosmos. Some of them are written in the language of astrophysics...

[illyria2001]

The Creator God would be Netjer for Kemetics and other followers of the ancient Egyptian religion, and the Star Goddess for Feri/Faery witches.

[deng]

Beautiful. Not a word wasted. Thank you. Mood - Thoughtfully Content

[arth_cerdded]

JMG,

Between this and GSF, I think I've found my home for a while. I will also be adding Observation from "The Druid Path" as well. I still need a significant improvement to my connection with nature as I proceed with these. The fact that they are compatible is a huge plus for me as I find that the SOP is much more comfortable to me than the LRBP. Time will tell for sure.

Question - Is it possible to work more than one divination tool at the same time? I have seen That you suggest to stick with one for a year. If that's the case I will stick with GSO first and then move from there.

Thanks,
-Bert

Creation Stories

[joshuarout]

I like creation stories, they and other myths are magically useful, and I think we should have as many as possible to choose from. One story I like is that all the gods get a turn at being Creator God, and someday, when we have become as the gods are now, we too will get a turn at being Creator God. But once it just so happened, when it came the turn of certain asuras to be Creator God, the experience went right to their heads, they became very conceited and superior about it, and soon each of them started thinking they were the One True God...

Chaos Creator

[(Anonymous)]

I am inclined to Hellenism, but Chaos does not sound to me like a particularly benign creator. Gaia doesn’t appeal to me either. I prefer Phanes or Hesiod’s elder Eros, but then they’re created rather than creators, aren’t they? Being born from the World Egg as they are. So I’m not really sure what I mean by a creator god. And how does the ineffable One fit into all this, if at all? Theology can be so confusing.