Mute’s Echoing Prayer

Editorial notes:
The title suggests that a person who is unable to speak (such as a seeker for truth or reality or God who cannot articulate just what is being sought nor where it resides), nevertheless emits a deep prayer that “echoes” and thus can be heard in some sense. The text of this essay is that prayer. “Part 1” is unclear. “Part 2” is more comprehensible. “The Book of the Spirit Ladder” apparently refers to the “Seder Hishtalshelut,” i.e., the Order of [Cosmic] Unfolding (or Chain of Being), as described by Lurianic Kabbalah, which is also mentioned in the later essay “Howl” (from August of 2017). That “Order” embraces the cosmological/cosmogonic levels of the entire universe, from its emerging from God’s primal Creation, through its sublime spiritual levels generating powers and energies, to the material universe as we know it, all as symbolised in the Kabbalistic schema of the four worlds and the ten sephirot governing each. The schematic diagram of these levels that is generally presented in Kabbalistic texts is often termed “the Tree of Life,” or as “the ladder of being” that undergirds and produces this world, up which the mystic can ascend in ecstasy to the Throne of God itself. But we also travel this “ladder” in our everyday life, in the course of which every mitzvah gives an illumination of God’s presence and elevates some part of our world and us with it. This more everyday “ladder” is what Shai refers to here. Because it underlies the experienced world, if it is to be brought to consciousness it requires some awareness of the deeper symbolic levels contained in the mitzvah acts of sanctification. So at least two perspectives on everyday behaviour are needed to grasp this embodied symbolism, that it is always “more” than it seems, that God the Eternal is present right now in our moment of time. The “unfolding” therefore can be conceptualized as both short-term, in regard to everyday experiences and deeds of loving-kindness, justice and sanctification that must involve actual people and things, and long-term, in which all this is linked to deeper spiritual foundations of reality. It is pointed out that the material world and encounters with people in it sometimes entrap “the seeker of the wind’s birthplace,” i.e., the seeker for the Spirit’s source, Ruach, “wind,” “breath,” also denoting “Spirit” as such, which has its origin in God. The entrapments of the moment and self-interest pull the seeker down into immediate concerns and goals. So the seeker must learn how to avoid these traps. Three major meditational methods for doing this are listed: “eye meditations” (which may refer to being mindful of everything that you see and engage in, constantly seeing them as unfolding from their divine source), “court” (which may refer to assessing constantly what you are doing, holding yourself to high standards and reproaching yourself for falling short), and distracting your mind from crude self- referential thoughts and behaviours by “various yogas of oral law study,” i.e., restraining and elevating yourself through Talmud-study. The essay concludes with the affirmation that it is important to observe the annual festival cycle in order to experience “Kedusha Plus,” i.e., the direct experience of holiness. The festivals also can perhaps be seen as a metaphor for the journey of the soul through life [_EZ*]. *Many thanks to Dr. Evan Zuesse for providing the commentary for this essay.

{Part 1 -19/05/2017}

How to use Omer meet Anais Nin^[I]
To cycle life
And love

Aka Why Armageddon was a tower of love

(see otiyot of Gog next to Magog. 1 is a level of tower 2. Ancestors vs children.

{Part 2 – 21/06/2017}

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Judaism on many more legs than just one; or, The Book of the Spirit Ladder

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What is the meaning of life? Too broad question, be more specific.

Ditto, according to Judaism, using the metaphor of a ladder to centralize narrative? Better question.

To be explained: We ascend “Jewish superpower” class [Is in Israel] via a ladder which unfolds like a side-scrolling video game, demanding instantaneous reactions to unfolding events. The events are every moment, although most humans are not conscious of that part of their being, instead of focusing on feelings and thoughts. To understand the ladder is beyond a single perspective, which is why two is a minimum. Here will use short-term unfolding, and long-term unfolding. Thus it will be shown that Judaism is about finding the best swiss-knife through the jungles of reality (it teaches that the Torah is), which are instantaneously responsive (so that life can be lived side-scroll style) and at the same time creating growths that transcend iterations of “now”. If you were asked to design such a system from scratch, most would never succeed in any coherent systematic relationship of pertinent ideas. Thus perhaps it is a freebie.

Brainstorm:

1. Let’s imagine a “year” as a cycle of any human’s life story
2. Let’s have a model for seeing the calendar year as a metaphor for a “year”
   1. Need this
3. Then understand the vagaries of our ontologically pre-ordained entrapment into prisons. I emphasize by quoting, “understand the vagaries.” [Aka there are so many traps everywhere, and no one else seems to notice me walking through walls. If you aspire to be a Windwalker like myself (seekers of the wind’s birthplace), then I recommend you find a way to advance to a stage where you stop admiring your number of broken chains and discover a state of walking when you no longer see any chains ever.
   1. TL;DR If you seek freedom, seek the meaning of “truth to oneself”
4. Then learn to practice courts:
   1. Three main strategies I used to explore improvements here:
      1. Eye meditations
      2. Court
         1. E.g. Self-dialogue at repeated junctures within day designed to simulate internal courtroom proceedings
      3. Finding a safe fire to purify your wisdom against its limitations
         1. E.g. various yogas of oral law study

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Q: How important is it to do the festivals if want to experiment with J-Kit (Homebrew Edition)?

A: For Kedusha Plus, vital and essential. But even if doing K+ will be implicitly repeating cycles on different scales (both regular and irregular, e.g. the week as year, or rejected fear as Purim).
Further reading: Thoughts on seeing the festival-calendar as a metaphor for the structure of life at varying stages, regular and irregular.

^[I] “Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell, known professionally as Anaïs Nin, was a French-American diarist, essayist, novelist, and writer of short stories and erotica. Born to Cuban parents in France, Nin was the daughter of composer Joaquín Nin and Rosa Culmell, a classically trained singer”. For further details see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana%C3%AFs_Nin.