"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.
We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." -H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu
An intriguing book became known to me right after I finished reading Dark Doorway of the Beast together with Soror 722 which oddly enough follows in a lot of the same vein regarding the Window of Thought, the 'matrix of operation', the browser of the mind, the field of being, the web of manifestation, etc. The book is titled The Peep-Hole of the Present: An Inquiry into the Substance of Appearance by Samuel Roth and prefaced by Sir Arthur Eddington and was originally published in the start of the Atomic Age, 1945 and reprinted in 1953 with a more artistic and Atomic-Saturnine cover by Boar's Head Books. The book has too many directions to cover completely, but some pertinent rays have gleamed through to me, especially in relation to the Dark Doorway of Daath, and I would like to work through some of them here. The reader should bear in mind that the real matters attempting to be pointed at are by nature of their substancelessness nameless, unspeakable, and may only be grasped through wordless understanding.
As an 'inquiry into the substance of appearance' it starts by discussing some of the major lines of Occidental thought from Pythagoras to Einstein and the gradual advancement in perspective of our own scope of being as humans, going from more materialistic and ego/geo-centric mentality to being able to see things more holistically and from a higher perspective than is merely allowed from on the ground without telescopes or long records of astronomical observation. As our window of perception grew wider the light of the intellect grew brighter. Our angle became more fluidic and we learned to see beyond our own point of view. It may help to quote from the dust-jacket to give a better synopsis of the attitude of this book.
"About the appearance of all things - except those which we see in our inmost feelings - there is an element of illusion which makes it impossible for anyone to say that he knows one of them as it really is. Take the table before you. If anyone walked into your room he could not possibly see it in the form in which it appears to you, so that you would both be seeing different tables neither of which resembled the image in the mind of the man who built it. This is due to the fact that all things in the outer world have to be seen at an angle.
Since most of the conclusions of modern science derive from the observations of phenomena of the outer world, from the limited and limiting viewpoint of an angle, they are at best only half truths. But there is also the inner world - as crowded with observable phenomena as the outer - which does not pretend to be at rest when it is in motion; creates no false lines of demarcation by calling one kind of substance matter and another kind spirit; and any one of its images can be grasped in its totality, without even the shadow of an angle.
As there is nothing in the outer world which is not fully represented in the inner, the author of The Peep-Hole of the Present brought to the latter the most important of the world's problems, and the result is a complete overturning of all prevailing conceptions of time, space and matter, and the emergence of the image of the world in the most amazing form possible, the one in which we actually see it! A revolution involving such fearful simplicities that, as the great Eddington hints in his Preface, it may take science a long time to encompass it.
"I have set out," says the author in his dedicatory note to Einstein, "to demonstrate that light, which deceives us in so many trifles, paints truly for us the size, shape and nature of the world; that, instead of being rushed to us from distant places at 186,000 miles a second, this portrait is homogenous to us with every breath we take, with every sensation we register; and that the fundamental living element is not some strange incomprehensible ether, but consciousness, the inescapable source of our kinship with all things."
The dedicatory note mentioned from which the quote derives is worth considering as he finds it imperative to challenge Einstein despite knowing it may come as unappreciated:
"Dear Dr. Einstein:
It was kind of you to read the galleys of my book; still kinder, to speak your mind so plainly. The matter would have been allowed to rest where you left it at the end of your letter, but for its last sentence which left me uneasy, as if I were in danger of neglecting a grave responsibility for no better reason than that your are so luminous in a world in which I am so obscure.
And you had only said something. You had said: "I must confess that I consider common language as a tool not of adequate precision for the treatment of questions concerning the fundaments of physics." In much the same spirit, Plato is reputed admission to his academy to those who were not trained in mathematics.
I write to you again, in spite of a latent fear that it may cause you annoyance, only because those random, easily thrown out words of yours have been crowding in on me from all sides, concerning me at odd moments, and reprimanding me: We know it's Einstein, but he's mistaken. What does it matter how much wiser than you he is on so many other things, if in this important one he is mistaken? You must write to correct him even if he won't listen.
Quantitative essence - developed in a long line from Pythagoras to Plato to Weyl and Einstein - resides not in any of the mathematical formulae of the last twenty-five hundred years, but in the original meanings with which, first things, then sounds, then written words invested them. If numbers - presumably your alternate precision language - are capable of reference to objects in any field of thinking, it is only by a reduction of those objects to their special roles as mathematical figures. But these roles were originally conceived and set down in the common language by which they are still governed.
In this common language I have set out to demonstrate: that light, which deceives us in so many trifles, paints truly for us the size, shape and nature of the world; that, instead of being rushed to us from distant places at 186,000 miles a second, this portrait is homogenous to us with every breath we take, with every sensation we register; and that the fundamental living element is not some strange incomprehensible ether, but consciousness, the inescapable source of our kinship with all things.
Have you forgotten that we are still in the stage of breaking up the great boulders, and chopping down the primeval redwoods? when we get down to analyzing the smaller unites of matter, such as the particles of consciousness, it will be time enough to worry about the need of precision instruments.
Sincerely yours, Samuel Roth January 31, 1945
After the introduction, 'The Building and Rebuilding of a Model', Roth begins discussing Space and the Luminum by which it Generates. The 'Luminum' is the immaterial 'source' of light (propagated by friction), whereas space is the material continuum of it. He says
"As the all-in-one, space is material, electrical, living, sensitive, and conscious; simultaneously and everywhere. In the over-all process, every phenomenal attribute of the world first grows out of space, then recedes back into it to await new re-development. What a multitude of names and ideas have been mustered out of the imagination of man to cover this simple act of forming, receding, and reforming!
So commonplace a phenomena as a man and a woman meeting, acting upon each other with a powerful attraction, marrying, and begetting offspring, has been described by such popular profundities as love, sex, romance, the sacrament of marriage, and the maintenance of the race, when what has really transpired is that, through the exercise of an overpowering influence, something was taken out of the plenum of man to create a plethora in a woman, with all parties eventually returned to normal by the severance of a child into a new individuality.
There is not a form in the world - be it a tree, a rock, a cloud, a flower, a lake, or a kitten - that does not make its appearance in the same way. As for its exit, it is unnecessary to invent heavenly futures or theories such as that of transmigration of the soul to account for the return of the individual elements into the raw material of creation. After their task in the cosmos has been completed, one can be certain that these individual elements are only too happy to return to the endless and magnificent adventures of redistribution into other forms.
The immediate cause of all phenomena is friction-heat. The true and underlying cause, however, is the tendency for all things in space to propagate. For this chief, and possibly only business of propagation, space has major and minor instruments, everyone one of which must be examined in its proper place in the world-scheme. The greatest of these - the one which not only unites all matter but also keeps it alive- the one by which light is propagated. This instrument is a very simple one, and bears a strong resemblance to that common kitchen-utensil, the gas-range. We will call it the Luminum."
Since I have been analyzing the formula of 666 as a code for The Key of it All extensively for the last year it has occurred to me that the HIDDEN LUMINUM LIGHT SOURCE is in fact the Prismatic lens of the Ego-forming faculty, the 'fallen' key-stone which is Malkuth or the Daughter, the broken window of perception which needs reparation through shedding its illusions in time. The connection between the Window of Thought and Maat has been touched upon before, but it would do well to summarize certain connections. The Formula of the Daughter, the FINAL HE (=107) of Tetragrammaton is glyphed in the symbol of THE MAGICK EGG, or BITzH (Hebrew, 'Egg'; both =107), the space-time capsule of consciousness and rebirth.
THOUGHT as well is 107, generated like the GOLD Egg of Brahma and channeling forth THE AKASHA (the unmanifest) into ULLAM (consciousness). 107 is thus a formula of Manifestation par excellence, hence Frater Achad's attribution of MA-ION, the 'ends of Manifestation' referenced in the first and final verses of the Chapter of Nuit in Liber AL. As THE SIMULTANEOUS ETERNAL, 666 is the monad of Hadit aflame in the womb of Nuit in the procreative act of Cosmic Union, The Great Work. The friction of their interplay creates infinite BUBBLES (107) like the flute play of AZATHOTH (107) at the center of manifestation, the dream congeries of IDENTITY (107) which define the boundaries of one's own Window or 'Peep-Hole'.
SPACE + TIME + LIGHT = 666 showing that not only is this a Solar-Illuminating number, but also that of Space and Duration which form the dimensions of the physical realm. As Light, Space and Time it could be considered a form of the Supernal Triad which generates the bubbles of the Ruach. The Triad of Kether (Light), Chokmah (Space), and Binah (Time) extend indefinitely like the 3 dimensions of space themselves, along with the 3 modes of past-present-future, and the 3 veils of Light (Ain-Ain Soph-Ain Soph Aur). The Light is refracted at the prism of Daath where differentiation is made and the white light divided into the seven main rays below the Abyss. As the central-solar key which aligns Kether, Daath, Tiphareth, Yesod and Malkuth it is significant that THE CENTER OF THE PEEP-HOLE is aligned as 666 showing yet another connection with the 'Peep-Hole', 'Window', or 'Vortex' which is essentially the same as the Will or 'Reality Tunnel', i.e. THE WINDOW OF THE SOUL. This latter phrase is usually applied to the Eyes which connects also with the RETINA, the photoreceptive part of the eye, and the Sol symbol ☉ which is the Eye but also refers to the Light Body. Note also that the theory of General Relativity says that the distortion of space-time is dependent on the energy and momentum of whatever matter or radiation (Light) is present. As Space, Time, Energy and Matter the quadrivium connects with the Space-Time-Spirit-Matter of Makashanah mentioned in Liber 418 and a blind for the Word of the Aeon, another formula of the Great Work.
Ayin (עינ Hebrew, 'Eye') equates with ION, which means 'going'. Remember how the nature of the Gods is in their Going and what Crowley said in Magick Without Tears;
"Why is the Tao translated "Reason"? Because by "Reason" is here meant the structure of the mind itself; a Buddhist who had succeeded with Mahasatipatthana might call it the Consciousnesss of the Tendency to Perceive the Sensation of Anything. For in the last resort, and through the pursuit of one line of analysis, this structure is all that we can call our consciousness. Everything of which we can in any way be aware may be interpreted as being some function of this structure.
Note! Function. For now we see why Tao may also be translated "The Way"; for it is the motion of the structure that we observe. There is no Being apart from Going.
You are familiar with the Four Powers of the Sphinx, attributed by the Adepts of old time to their Four Elements. Air is to Know, Scire; Fire is to Will, Velle; Water is to Dare, Audere; and Earth is to Keep Silence, Tacere. But now that a fifth Element, spirit, is generally recognized in the Qabalah, I have deemed it proper to add a Fifth Power corresponding: to Go, Ire. (Book of Thoth, p. 275)3
Then, as Spirit is the Origin, the Essence, and the Sum of the other four, so is to Go in relation to those powers. And to Go is the very meaning of the name God, as elsewhere shewn in these letters; hence the Egyptian Gods were signalized as such by their bearing the Ankh, which is a Sandal-strap, and in its form the Crux Ansata, the Rosy Cross, the means whereby we demonstrate the Godhead of our Nature. See then how sweetly each idea slides into the next! How right this is, that the Quintessence should be dynamic and not static! For if there were some form of Being separate from Going, it would necessarily be subject to decay; and, in any case, a thing impossible to apprehend, since apprehension is itself an Act, not an idea immobile which would be bound to change in the very moment of grasping it.
As I have tried to shew in another letter, the "Point-Event" (or whatever it is) of which we are aware is a change, or, less inaccurately, the memory of one; the things that change remain relentlessly unknown.
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The visible section of the electromagnetic spectrum is but a fraction of what is known,
far more forces operate beyond the range of ocular vision. .
The Seven Rays are the Seven VIALS (107) as well as the SEVEN SEALS OF THE BIBLE (666). |
Whereas Dark Doorway of the Beast is an expose on the mechanism of Daath as the vetoing factor in what constitutes the various planes and spheres of emanation, The Peep-Hole of the Present centers on the demarcation of frame-rate thought which is itself but a fragment of the whole. While we operate in the three dimensions of space (height, width, depth) through the 'fourth dimension' of time, we not only glimpse but a frame at a time chronologically but we have a 'Ring Pass Not' which extends infinitely yet still remains disconnected from all other Ego centers. Each Ego is a Peep-Hole opening outward to the world seeing but what falls within the lens of its perspective. There happens to be yet another book which I came across just after Peep-Hole titled Operations of the Other Mind by Edmund Shaftsbury (Webster Edgerly) which discusses the role of the Subconscious dark other side of the mind back of what is being viewed through the Peep-Hole. Considering how 666 veils the Light, Space, Time, Energy, and Matter - the High and the Low, THE MICRO & MACRO - Lux and Nox, it could well be said to represent the duality of the mind itself.
666 is THE LIGHT OF THE MIND, Consciousness. (Note that CONSCIOUSNESS = 517 = PERCEPTION, and it's not 'cherry picking' or 'confirmation bias' when they are using the same gematria formula which means the values are concrete and unchangeable.) Samuel Roth also says that Space is consciousness, both being tenuous extensions of awareness. The reason it is difficult to discuss the contents of this book is because there are many avenues of thought that are hard to separate as well as remember where to recall where things were mentioned, so I cannot but urge the reader to obtain the book, but I will quote at length an intriguing section on what he says about Space:
"When it begins to look as if there might be no precise way of measuring things at all, the relativist - who needs be neither pure nor experimental - sheds new light on the matter by asking whether there is "some absolute quantity in nature that we try to determine when we measure length? When we try to determine the number of molecules in a given piece of matter," he goes on, "we have to use indirect methods; and different methods may give systematically different results but no one doubts that there is a definite number of molecules, so that there is some meaning in saying that certain methods are theoretically good and others inaccurate.
Space being material, and measurement of it being practical only with things material, the only conclusion to be drawn from the argument of Eddington's relativist is that measurement can only determine the contents of space in such natural units as atoms and molecules. this is one of those truisms which have only to be presented to be thoroughly understood. Once you have that in mind, space steps out of the innocuous place assigned to it in dimensional geometry (in which things are measured according to arbitrary divisions like inches and feet and along illusorily even spaces such as squares and circles) and takes its place as that unseen formation of the world which bulges out of the dimensional norms everywhere into extra-dimensional figures, all undiagrammable because they can neither be predicted by the mind nor reckoned out by any known method of calculation.
Physical space is the basic material of the world. But since the word space can never mean anything more to us than a container, we had better think of it in terms of its granular nature, which is consciousness.
Look around you. everything that you perceive - tales, chairs, plants, fruit, typewriter, inkwell - occupies space. But what kind of space? To be able adequately to answer this question, you must determine in advance the nature of those thins that occupy space. We know that they are made of a very porous matter of which science knows nothing and about which philosophy still conjectures vaguely. But as things of matter they share one characteristic whose nature is no longer open to doubt; that is, their tendency, always, under all conditions, either to expand or contract.
As, in expanding, objects take up more space, and in contracting they take up less, how can they possibly fit into a precise, unchanging dimensional portion of space? Space is extra-dimensional, because the objects which occupy it are extra-dimensional.
II
To go forward with space, as the world slips slyly out of its dimensional norms into its extra-dimensional future, we must first visit a little behind the lines, where the reader is asking a very important question: "If you accept a limit to space, and you do when you approve the hypothesis that it is all there is of the world, what exists beyond it?"
the answer is that beyond space there is nothing.
"But, what is nothing?" presses the reader. "May it not be some wonderful substance or force out of which worlds even superior to ours may grow?"
The reader is right again, on both counts. Conceptual nothing is only another word for something.
A basis for understanding the true nature of nothingness was laid down by Hegel in the suggestion that being and non-being are inalienable foils to each other, like an object and its shadow. There you have it, then; the world entity, space-nothing (which P.A. Campbell describes as the "Siamese twins of relativity; no knife can cut and have either twin still alive"), in the form of a dualism which bolsters up the fundamental unity of the world, leaving it an indivisible being-non-being or space-nothingness mono-duality. To destroy both of them by putting an end to either one, would still leave everything in perfect order, for the destruction of nothingness or non-being would simply yield being or space again, according to which operation has been put into effect. Following out this new definition, space and nothingness become each other's alter-ego. The world is revealed as a Janus-head with two faces; a coin, of which the head-side is space and the tail-side non-space or nothingness.
Matter - electrical and radiational - is, then, no more than a mode of spatial being. Far from being mathematically stereotyped or frozen as Euclid would have it, matter is the breeding ground of all known phenomena. Pry out the structure, the elusive ramifications of this being-non-being, space-nothingness concatenation of forms and you have attained a full view of the world.
Presumably, space has a finely-grained skeleton, every one of whose limbs is a space-nothingness structure of particles composed of consciousness - the stuff scientists will some day discover inside of protons and neutrons. Each limb is a unit of energy, and they all tend to adapt themselves formatively with respect to one another as best they can, and so make up organically the system of extension we think of as dimensional space. In this way they perform their parts for themselves separately, and for the realm of space as a whole.
Every unit of the spatial skeleton is of its own self an infinitesimal world in which the space-factor and the nothingness-factor are engaged in a timeless struggle for self-perpetuity. In this struggle each emerges victorious only because of the extraordinary failure of either of them to win. They clash in and out of the forms which Campbell calls 'norms of space' every single rational unit prepared to sacrifice its individual interests to those of the local field of space in which it functions. In that way, the whole space system is tied together in an inextricable system of being and non-being phases. But while space is extra-dimensional the things which grow out of it do so in norms strictly dimensional, and conform to the intellectual and physical grasp of the human sensory system. The immediate results - unnoticeable by us until a new norm has come about - are therefore abnormal, and are properly so described when related to our processes of cognition. This extra-dimensional abnormality is, then, the norm of the realm of space as a whole - the space of being-nonbeing. But in the realm recognizeable by our senses (of which Plato wrote that it "geometrizes") all additions to matter issue forth in strictly dimensional norms.
The realm our senses recognize is a somewhat loose-jointed infinite solid which changes its forms in a dynamic mutational manner that accords with the strict necessities imposed upon it by the organic parts of its inner structure. Because of the purely inward urge of this necessity, the whole cosmos and the world of its inclusive phenomena came into being, and continues to recur infinitely through a strictly limited space. The phenomenal flux of what we call matter, electricity and radiation, may be described as a parade of caught-up manifestations of space. Endlessness - the paradoxical attribute of space - is something of an assurance to us that the condition of phenomenal flux is not a thing of yesterday, today or tomorrow only, but of the ever-present now.
It is in this paradox, perhaps, that scientists will some day discover the source of the one inalienably unique element of space; for the changes which take place in it frame no mere history of repetitions. Aside from the fact that nothing of a repetitive nature could be awaited each time with such breathless excitement, there is also the contributing factor that the events in space undergo a perpetual and unlimited redistribution throughout the entire realm. This perpetual reconditioning of space's extra-dimensional condition is the sum and substance of phenomenal nature. It has produced the phenomenal microcosmos, and the microcosmos is man himself!"
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Aleister Crowley, an impression
by Kenneth Grant |
Incidentally, SPACE + CONSCIOUSNESS also = 666, the FRACTAL EXPANSION of LUMINOUS SPACE. The Veto of Daath is there to balance the brilliance of infinity and thus the schism of the Fall of the Abyss which creates the illusion of light and shadow fleshes out into materialization according to the Will or charge of the cells, shells, or souls which are separated like sparks or embers from the central source-flame. The circuit of electrical power is eternal, although its main dual functions of active and passive appear to be transitory, eternally changing - Going. (Note that the duality of GOING & STILL = 666, or in another way, STILL GOING.) Since Magick is said to be associated with Od, 11 and Daath by Crowley and Grant the EGG (=11) is therefore an apt symbol of the transformative alchemical vessel of space-time-spirit-matter, and being also the totem of LAM THE WAY, 107, and the window of the FINAL HE we can see that the interplay of dimensions through time is the working out of the Tetragrammatonic formula with Maat as the Daughter aspect representing the double wand of power balancing the triple-formation Isis, Osiris, Horus, or Space-Time-Light.
Maat would thus be Malkuth/Matter, the fallen daughter which is the reflection in illusory form the essence of the preceding three. Lam is the Magus of the Aeon of Maat crowned and conquering, almost resembling a light-bulb because as a Vrihl hologram his electrical center is at the region of Bindu-Sahasrara, and as an idealized self-portrait of Crowley it could be said to be yet another forms of his incarnational avatars, albeit rayed back to him as a future memory rather than one of the past. (Note CROWLEY'S LAM VISION = 666, LAM THE WAY = 107 = SKETCH = The Greys. Could this refer to THE GREY ALIEN FUTURE SELF of Crowley?)
The importance of the book being only briefly touched upon and from my own particular angle at that is of valuable consideration in regards to the Maatian Gnosis as has been worked upon throughout this publication as it gives an interesting glimpse into a unique thought-working indicating that just in the way that the visible spectrum is not all we know there to be operating in the various 'dimensional' field-planes of the electromagnetic spectrum there is likely to also be various other phases of both the passage of time, not merely just the movement of objects but a virtually limitless plethora of potential variations of movement of objects (i.e. parallel multi-verses), as well as potential room for advancement in understanding these matters if but the will to widen the lens is there. Of course, this is precisely what is claimed by those working on these matters at CERN, albeit without the Qabalistic knowledge which would lend great insight if they could but understand it and they are going about it merely externally rather than also internally. Widening the view of the world without widening the understanding of the mind however will have its consequences and it is for the inner work to be but pointed to and left for those who Will to do it when they are ready.
The magickal significance of the Circle in regards to practical ritual is quite mundane and basic, repetition is practice and practice makes perfect, or at least better. Reenactments, calculated proceedings, daily and nightly routines, habits and behavior patterns - they all go to create the overall quality of mental and physical environment, therefore the modulation of these factors will greatly adjust the output and feedback. The Circle is the Portal, or A PORT or PORTA rather, meaning "gateway" in Old English port "portal, door, gate, entrance," from Old French porte "gate, entrance," from Latin porta "city gate, gate; door, entrance". The portal is to any possible point in space-time, much as the 0 which is everywhere and nowhere - the Eye of Amun. The Mirror of the Seer, or the MIRRORED SEER which conversely is 999 (the pleroma of the 0) reflects the Infinity in the 0, and in the process 0=2 becomes 0³, bringing it back to the original 000, or Ain-Soph-Aur.
Though the 0 is an oval, and the circle is 360 degrees, the 360th degree is also the 0 point, and the fact that 107 is the number of so many various connections to the 0, (I.e. OVAL, THE MAGICK EGG, BITzH 'egg', MA-ION, Μηδεν 'Zero', etc.) shows that the FINAL HE of Tetragrammaton, which is attributed to the dark daughter aspect (implying the shape of the Diamond and all its significance, see The Diamond of Perfection) is aligned with THE AKASHA, itself an ancient analog of the idea of 'Plasma', the 'fourth state of matter' equated with THOUGHT itself. Remember also that 107 is the formula of the AB (Father), AIMA (Mother), BN (Son) triad, which veils the Daughter as the encompasser and precipitator of the matrix of manifestation (the fourth dimension). This could also be figured as Yang (+) and Yin (-) and their counterparts the Yang aspect of Yang and the Yin aspect of Yin, balanced in the Yang of Yin/Yin of Yang which is Balance. THE TAO CIRCLE of 360 is the Golden Flower of Chinese mysticism composed of the light of consciousness and centered not in one singular place but distributed more or less evenly in 360 around each of the 3 dimensional planes. (Note that 360 extended into 3 dimensions is 1,080, which when centered with a point gives 1,081, the number of תפארת, Tiphareth and a form more akin to the Sphere rather than the Circle with the Point at its center.) The Egg/Circle of Light is thus the Golden Flower of Beauty with Sahasrara as the upper flower portion, and Muladhara the lower root portion. 
