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The Making of Anatman, Part 2: The Qliphoth

Now we come to the real, meaty occultism that everyone’s looking for in their origami pyramids: Kabbalah. But, as J.R.R Tolkien found out when trying to research the Eddas, there’s a problem with learning about ancient mythology and the occult: the materials that have become the “official” accounts of both Kabbalah and Norse myths are usually heavily altered by later authors or totally made up for the purpose of gaining profit, cultists, and loose women. It’s this cross-millennial game of Telephone (more “Forgery and Revision”) that created the New Age movement, including Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabbalah.

So to understand the nuances of Kabbalah, you’d better be a Hebrew scholar with a doctorate in it. I’m not a Hebrew scholar, and I definitely don’t have a degree in medieval esotericism. I chose a much more practical, business-minded college degree (English). So I’m not an authority on the Sephiroth, I just play with its ideas.

That being said, Neon Genesis: Evangelion was a pretty fucking great account of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Shaving it down to its most basic ideas, Kabbalah is a primarily Jewish philosophy that proposes a hidden, or “esoteric,” symmetry in the Universe based around Ein Sof, which is the embodiment of God, Creation, Truth, and Infinity. The practice of Kabbalah is meant to help practitioners learn to reconcile themselves with Ein Sof and learn the truth of their connection to all of creation. The concept of Ein Sof as Infinity was especially fitting for ANATMAN, since it brings together truth, the universe, and the metaphysical (and mathematical) concept of infinity, which, as I’ve talked about before, all seem to overlap in the search for enlightenment. Another fitting concept of Ein Sof is Kether, or unity and oneness. Ein Sof unites everything in itself: humanity, the universe, and God. There are no fundamental divisions between things, and the only thing that keeps you from recognizing this is ignorance, deception, and unholiness. Compare this to Part 1 and the description of enlightenment in Zen Buddhism:

“Enlightenment is embracing your own annihilation, because the truth is that “you” do not exist. “You” is no-self, no-soul. You are Void, because you are the universe, and the universe is Void. There are no divisions anywhere, no up or down, no day or night, and no division between life and death.”

No divisions, just unity. You and the universe. Kether in Kabbalah, like the Void in Zen Buddhism, can be thought of as a coin, with oneness and self-annihilation as different faces. Now, the recurring problem: enlightenment means the disappearance of all your desires, pleasures, fears and the person you call yourself.  “You” have to die. Death is necessary for enlightenment. You either choose to die spiritually in enlightenment and reconcile yourself with eternity to be reborn, or you choose to die physically and succumb to time, old age, and constant change.

In Kabbalah, there is the Sephiroth, the Tree of Life and Knowledge, which is the ten-part route to Ein Sof, with Malkuth, or earthly existence, existing on the lowest branch of the Sephiroth. You can ascend the Tree or sit in Malkuth forever. In Buddhism, you would be thrown into the Wheel of Samsara again after death and be reincarnated, repeating life and death forever.

But what if there was another way, another path? A crack in the whole system of life and death, enlightenment and the universe? Anyone who found a way to escape the rules and unity of the universe would exist outside all rules and order. There would be a place outside of eternity.

And this is where the Qliphoth, the Kabbalah Tree of Death, comes in.

THE QLIPHOTH

There exists an antithesis to the Sephiroth, and it’s called the Qliphoth. The Qliphoth is the universal structure by which the Truth of Ein Sof is perverted, twisted, and otherwise hidden. Each of the ten points of the Qliphoth represent the antithesis of its correlating sephirot in the Sephiroth, and two of the highest levels of the Qliphoth are Thamiel and Chaigdel, which oppose Kether and Chokmah, respectively. Thamiel represents division instead of unity, and Chokmah represents emptiness when there should be fullness, especially in the universal life-force.

(Take note of these two ideas, Chaigdel and Chokmah–they’re going to show up later, in fractal geometry, no less.)

The Qliphoth offers an alternative to the conscious choice of enlightenment and the unconscious choice of ignorance, at least in my conception of it. By choosing to follow the Qliphoth, you can place yourself at an infinite distance from Truth, God, and Eternity, and this is different from being unenlightened. You choose to be the antithesis of the Universe rather than the embodiment of it. This is the greatest perversion of enlightenment: knowing the nature of yourself and the universe, and rejecting your place in the grand unity of it all.

What kind of life would that be? If you’re not part of the grand scheme of creation, are you a creation unto yourself? A closed circuit? If you’re beyond creation and destruction, how can you exist? If you’re beyond life and death, what kind of power can sustain you?

There is a name that sums up this kind of existence: Ouroboros, or the snake that eats itself.

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Next up in Part 2: Oroboro and Fractals.

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The Making of ANATMAN, Part 1: Eternity and Zen

When I was taking Art of the Book, we learned that there are things called ‘artist books.’ Artist books use their format and shape to tell a story, along with the words themselves. That fascinated me. I wanted to do something like that. I began sketching out the idea for an origami artist book in my notes. This project would become “ANATMAN,” a blend of trigonometry, origami, Buddhism, Kabbalah, alchemy, and letterpress printing.

anatman sketch occult triangle lab anatman sketch occult triangle lab

 

 

 

 

 

 

ANATMAN was the culmination of years of reading and thinking, and in many ways it’s a manifesto for the Occult Triangle Lab, despite only containing 16 words. It contains some of the ideas that have haunted and inspired me since I was a kid, along with the ideas I was beginning to develop in college. To explain the making of ANATMAN, you have to know where it began.

Eternity, Infinity, and Enlightenment

In Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, there’s a machine called The Total Perspective Vortex. It’s universally recognized as the most horrible torture device in existence. It does one thing:

“When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it there’s a tiny little speck, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, ‘You are here.'”

            That stuck with me.

In Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett, there’s a creature called a hiver. It’s an incorporeal mass of sight, smell, hearing, and a thousand other senses, and it rolls through the world incorporating more beings into itself. There’s no way to see it, and no way to kill it. The main character, Tiffany Aching, spends the book trying to find a way to beat it, or run from it, but she meets it in the end, and lets it into her mind. When she does, she realizes that the hiver can sense everything around it with perfect clarity, and can’t stop. This is what it says:

“‘Do you know what it feels like to be aware of every star, every blade of grass? Yes. You do. You call it ‘opening your eyes again.’ But you do it for a moment. We have done it for eternity. No sleep, no rest, just endless… endless experience, endless awareness. Of everything. All the time. How we envy you, envy you! Lucky humans, who can close your minds to the endless deeps of space! [ …] You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!'”

           And that stuck with me, too.

I remember looking out the window of my college dorm room at the sun rising. I’d stayed awake all night, working on a paper. It was so cold in the room that I couldn’t feel my fingers or toes, I hadn’t eaten anything, and I hadn’t changed my clothes for two days. I got up from my chair and stood in front of the window, listening to the quiet and watching the light IMG_0762creep over the buildings. It occurred to me that days and nights don’t build walls between you and the past—whether the sun is up or not, there is one continuous hour that stretches out forever, uniting the entire thread of your life. There’s a feeling of disappearing as you realize that you’re stretched from horizon to horizon, from birth to death, and that your life is carried out second by second. This is the same feeling I got when Mr. Powell taught us about Zeno’s Paradox all those years ago: the feeling that eternity is lurking in every nook and cranny, tearing at the seams of my mind. An hour can be an eternity, and standing at that cold window at 5 AM, I understood what hell could feel like.

It seems like the human soul unravels when it’s faced with eternity, and that’s what makes enlightenment so frightening and fascinating: to reconcile with the universe, you have to embrace eternity, the universe, everything, but that risks being destroyed under the sheer immensity of it all. So what kind of person backs away from that, gets so frightened that they put themselves an infinite distance away from enlightenment? How do you live with the ticking clock of death and the weight of eternity?

Zen Buddhism

Zen heavily influenced the project and my thinking about eternity and enlightenment, because Buddhism has a unique answer to the question of how do deal with the self.

Buddhist monks frighten and fascinate me, as I’ve mentioned before, but Zen most of all. Zen monks may ask you who you are. You might say you are a writer, a leader, a woman, a daughter, but they will shake their heads and say “A writer writes, a leader leads, and there are many women and daughters. Who are you when you are not writing or leading? Are you everyone’s daughter?” These are the absurd, silly questions that give Buddhist monks their reputation for being harmless, smiling, wrinkly, bald men. Zen monks are the same people who came up with the famous “What’s the sound of one hand clapping?”

What most people don’t know is that that question, about the clapping, is a koan, a phraseoccult triangle lab mu symbol that monks are supposed to meditate on. How can one hand clap? It is impossible. You’re supposed to give an answer. But you can’t answer. There is no answer, because the question itself is wrong. The lesson, if you can arrive at it through meditation, is that questions can be wrong, not just answers. This idea is called mu. And just like the question of one hand clapping, the question “Who are you?” is equally wrong, because everything you conceive of as “you” is wrong.

This is where Buddhism stop seeming so happy and benevolent.

“You” are an illusion, a pile of hungers screaming to get fed, wrapped in a bundle that’s held together by nothing. Enlightenment is embracing your own annihilation, because the truth is that “you” do not exist. “You” is no-self, no-soul. You are Void, because you are the universe, and the universe is Void. There are no divisions anywhere, no up or down, no day or night, and no division between life and death. When you understand this, and embrace your annihilation, you will understand no-self, which is translated as anatman.

The First Noble Truth of Buddhism is that life is suffering. Impermanence is the only constant. It is called annica. It means that nothing lasts forever, that there is no state of being that can last for an eternity. The desperation for something enduring, whether it’s a sense of self or happiness, is what causes suffering. The search for a way out, a way to become eternal, that is the ultimate path to suffering, because you can never attain it. Trying to become eternal, or immortal, is the farthest distance one can get from enlightenment.

i spent a lot of time reading about Zen, and I thought “What kind of person would choose that path, the one that leads away from enlightenment and annihilation, toward desperation and eternity? What kind of fear or insanity would that take?”

These are the thoughts that went into ANATMAN.

occult triangle lab oroboro

Next up in Part 2: Oroboro and the Qliphoth.

 

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