slapdash - rushed, sloppy, anything-goes, no quality control. usually the sort of thing people think intuition is.
I meant that it makes sense and seems to follow pretty clearly from descriptions of the olamot and descriptions of the levels.
i'm glad you think so.
I was thinking, I wonder if it would be helpful in terms of clarity of language to look at the way post-Jungian astrology refers to the houses, signs and so on. Bare with me for a moment.
well, i like jung better than i like freud, but bearing in mind what i think of freud ("G!D Is really just your dad and if you really want to grow up you'll need to get rid of him, which will leave you free to marry someone who to a greater or lesser degree will be based on your mum") that isn't much of a recommendation. jungian archetypes are as i recall based on kabbalistic ideas in the first place, but as he didn't really get kabbalah (no understanding of the purpose of the middle pillar) i don't believe it ever really took, although you can still see the vestiges in things based on jungian archetypes, like myers-briggs testing.
House is where it happens, in which part of one's life.
Planet identifies the aspect of oneself being described.
Sign identifies what's going on there.
oh, i see. obviously you know about the astrological correspondences in the sefer yetzirah i dare say.
I don't remember all the houses, but for planets and signs, an example might be if your moon sign is scorpio. The moon is pleasure-principle, what you feed yourself, where you feel nurtured. Scorpio is transformation, life-death, resurrection and so on. If a person's moon sign is scorpio then they feed, as it were, on transformative activities, on radical change and the like. The quality of every house is also found in a sign and a planet, but each of those functions differently. Then you can also compare a person's natal chart with their daily chart. There are all sorts of things you can do.
the trouble for me comes in believing that when and where you were born in terms of physical and temporal location has any significant differences between, say, two people born six months apart in modern-day london. i can believe the differences in socialisation and environmental factors, but those are only to the most remote degree determined by your place of birth, which is likely to be a hospital some distance from where you're actually "from", as it were. then to believe it has some connection with actual astronomical entities i find highly questionable. if there's some more reliably diagnostic way of getting the baseline reading, i would be more positive.
What is the difference, in terms of function, of a sefirah and an olam within your system? Relationally they occupy a different space, but do they serve different functions or are they merely permutations of the same things?
i think to explain how i see this i would need to send you about five pages of book, but suffice it to say that an 'olam is more of a holon than i think a sefirah is, because of the lack of dynamic tension in a single sefirah.
A strong way to illustrate that might be to give concrete examples of how, within the system, gevurah in yetzirah would be read vs say, chesed in beriyah.
if we were talking about an orchestra, gevurah in yetzirah would be a rehearsal where the conductor was spending a lot of time looking carefully at the technical execution of certain phrases, whereas hesed in beriyyah would be the conductor himself having a rather flamboyant conducting style, or choosing for a particular concerts to play up the romantic side of a piece. if we were talking in military terms, gevurah in yetzirah would be an NCO giving very narrow terms of reference in order to attain a tactical objective ("we must attack the hill from the north and we won't have any air support") whereas hesed in beriyyah would be the lieutenant telling the NCO that they must command a majority of the northern approaches to a sector and leaving the tactical details to the NCO himself.
That's where you lose me because, while I've read about the partzufim, I don't think it's something I'm supposed to understand well yet.
i don't pretend to understand it that well myself, but that will come hopefully when i start doing zohar in earnest.
I just mean ...where you could have say, beige to red mapped onto the last hei and so on. It would be easiest, I think, to stack the colors vertically. Bottom 1/3rd beige, middle purple, top red.
yes, that's essentially the same approach, but using the "yosher" configuration of the sefirot, which means you lose the dynamic equilibrium.
I'm wondering too if, following that model, you could then think in terms of black fire on white fire for each sefirah in each olam.
hmmm. not sure about this. can you say more?
I had a feeling that might be connected to your work.
indeed. however, spiral dynamics has only just popped up properly since, at your suggestion, i read the ken wilber book on the holiday i've just been on - and then i found it popping up in the frameworks of another book i've been working through on systematic innovation and at the same time in the toolbox of a close friend who works with NLP and organisational development; when something pops up three times like that in under a month then the universe is waving and trying to attract your attention. so, i've just ordered the cowan and beck SD book from amazon. i think you are probably to blame for setting this off in the first place, so thank you.
There have been a number of people historically and today other than Wilber who've taken an integral approach.
yes, i think i've been pursuing an integral approach in my work, wilber and SD have given me some good vocabulary to help with the integration.
The guy behind Kheper.net is based more strongly in Sri Aurobindo than in Wilber.
if you go to chris cowan and natasha todorovic's consulting website you will see in the FAQs their views on ken wilber, which are, on the whole, sceptical in a tolerant sort of way, albeit i think there is bad blood as they feel don beck has parted ways in working with wilber who they think is too reductionist; they're not comfortable with the spiritual side of this, whereas he is almost more concerned with that.
In my own mind Wilber seems more like a collector-of-theories than a philosopher. He tries to integrate them all by getting rid of the pieces that don't conform.
that is what they seem to be saying and they're not all that happy about it, although they are at any rate saying "well, we don't know that we're right and we don't think we have the answer to everything, this is a work in progress, but at least we're treating the data with respect", which wilber is also doing, except i'm not sure his research methodology in respect of data is nearly as robust as the strictly gravesian model.
What does a blown system look like? I'm asking this because there have been people who've expressed very worldcentric ideas in some areas while expressing very ethnocentric ideas in others. Some of this may simply be due to the limitations of their cultural conditioning and exposure to other ideas. Take the hasidim for example. There are some very up-there spiritual ideas present but there's also a heavy amount of othering going on.
it seems to me that mediating everything through the figure of the rebbe places an inordinate amount of stress on the system, in that the same person is expected to be fulfilling the functions of da'at, tiferet and yesod all in one. i think the only reason it has been successful is that both right and left pillars have been so strongly balanced, in particular with HaBaD, that they have spent a great deal of time dealing with the divergent community, unlike the other sects, but it still relied on the rebbe to hold the system in balance. without that, they will, like the other hasidic sects, converge with the mitnagdic haredi hashkafah.
Water wheels that I've seen are circular. But if you have an array of ophanim working in tandem that scale worlds upon worlds then I think they would behave like a spiral.
AHA! that is what i was thinking about - if you put a ball at the bottom, it would travel in a series of helixes. archimedes' screw is simply one device that does the same thing as an array of wheels.
b'shalom
bananabrain
!!