Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Evolution, the Bible, the Zohar, and Our Own Thoughts

Greetings,
How strongly do you believe in evolution? If you think about it, the chair you're probably sitting on evolved from a flat rock or a log that was conveniently placed for some neanderthal bottom to rest on.
One of the perennial questions is: What was the First Cause of this amazing multiverse in which we exist? Physicists and mathematicians have gone back in time to amazingly near that point that we've been trained to call the "Big Bang". Of course the so-called Big Bang theory depends on (a) a bunch of esoteric math and on (b) believing that light is both a particle and a wave form, needing only the Higgs Condensate (something as yet undiscovered) to travel through empty space.
How did the monstrosity called M-theory develop from six or seven string theories? Every time the string theory du jour was proven wrong, it got changed. That's neat. It's kind of like your computer programs getting ever more complicated to overcome goofs by the programmers (apologies to Apple).
To our way of thinking a purported scientific hypothesis or theory should predict the unknown, not be adjusted to fit, it's neither a hypothesis nor a theory if it doesn't work and if it needs changing every few weeks. Come on, people!
Have you ever thought that Adam might have been something like an amoeba? If the great Juju made something in Its own image--something which contained both male and female--maybe the great Juju itself was an amoeba. Though of course the great Juju evolved from it's own beginings into something with which to keep children and gullible adults in line. Okay, so did these very complex theories develop from something like 1 + 1? I'm not sure an amoeba can do even that addition.
You're all supposed to be good meditators. Let's go on an imaginary trip. Meditate on the railway line that runs dead straight for 700 miles, curving only for the curvature of the earth, across Australia's Nullarbor Plain. At its western end there stands upright across the very railroad line an extremely complex domino. This domino represents the multiverse as it is now. As we start there and travel ever so slightly eastward in our meditative state, there is a domino quite close to the first which is barely less complex, (yesteryear's multiverse). The further eastward we move, the less complex and the smaller become the dominoes until at the far eastern point (because we all know that everything must start in the east) there is a domino you can hardly see with a microscope. You can see how the dominoes evolved from this ultra-small, completely elementary and simple transparent wisp. (There is no mathematics in the wisp.)
So along comes a big-booted hairy-chested outbacker in a safari hat and kicks over the wisp. The resulting cascade effect represents evolution. From almost nothingness we evolve into the horror we see around us today ... and into the good stuff too. There are many side branches to the track across the Plain. If you pursue them, you will find that some of them have branches on branches and others fall into ravines, never to be seen again; and yet others rejoin the track further down toward its western end.
You don't need us to tell you that the branches represent all those false starts and stops that have occurred in the course of the evolution of the multiverse.
So what does our metaphor tell you?
"God" could have been an amoeba or even something smaller and more rudimentary: perhaps something as fleeting as a thought. If God is so rudimentary, It clearly cannot interfere in our life today. It cannot be an interventionist deity. Of course this may be why God, when "He" came into the Garden of Eden, couldn't find Adam, let alone Eve, and had to clothe them in skin before they could enjoy sex and populate the world.
Notice skin, not skins. The problem of plurals in translating from the Aramaic is well known: When it was convenient, the translators made nouns singular--whereas in other places the nouns arbitrarily came out plural. And remember that the word for God, HaShem, also translates officially as The Name or The Names. Today we your authors have used the word God with a capital G to mean some form of First Cause or Ultimate Deity--a duo-gender concept--as is our amoeba.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

The Four Worlds

In the five worlds of the Kabbalah the four-worlds concept is easy to understand. The fifth world is generally accepted to be the concealed world of the Spiritual Creation. In the work of life it is good always to remember the four.
1. The physical
2. The mental
3. The emotional
4. The spiritual
Let's consider the work of a personal friend of ours who makes musical instruments--such as harps and dulcimers--from recycled wood.
The physical work, perhaps the reprocessing of, say, a piece of salvaged cedar into the soundboard of a guitar, is obvious.
The mental effort--visualizing the result of measuring, planing, cutting, forming, etc, to get the pieces perfect--is extensive and comes only after long discipline and practice.
Emotion comes in as the pieces go lovingly together and the strings are first tuned. Then some friend takes the instrument and makes it live. At the beautiful sound, the emotion is so heavy that it sometimes reduces Bob to tears.
So where does the spiritual come in?
Bob listens to that inner voice that tells him in the first place to move out of his comfort zone and make a musical instrument. Then he continues on that path, often giving up other pleasant pastimes such as eating, to finish the job. He is driven by his inner spiritual voice.
Yes, we know we're simplifying.
In all the millions of words written on spiritual development, we've found very few that consider the concept of the four aspects of the Work. We Frosts have come to believe that anything undertaken using only one of the four will not lead to a genuinely satisfying end.
Today everyone seems to concentrates on the physical; yet in even such a mundane pursuit as simply beating out a dent in the fender of a car--even this--can call for all the four aspects of the Work your soul/spirit is here to do. If the worker is a trained metal-basher, he has learned to make the physical movements required: to bash the metal not too hard and not too soft to achieve an ideal result. If a recalcitrant dent causes him problems, he will need to maintain an emotional calm. He can achieve such a calm through mental control, just through past knowledge that losing his temper will not lead to a better result. His mental effort may be almost automatic, but it is still there, especially when it comes to, for instance, mixing the color necessary to achieve a perfect match with adjoining undamaged parts.
You may not think there is much of a spiritual aspect in work such as this; but do you not think that when he admires a perfect result he feels a little spiritual uplift?
Now how about circle work?
Casting a complete Church of Wicca triple circle is a chore. Crawling around (often nude) on the floor or in a field is outside the physical comfort zone of many people. It takes mental effort to get the sizes right and the signs aligned. Preparing for the circle with the requisite fasting and celibacy, even making the tools and robes: It all takes mental and physical effort.
As we enter the sacred space of the Circle, emotions run high, especially if there is a neophyte to be initiated. Then they are pushed higher with the sealing of the Circle and perhaps dancing and chanting. At the interlude, everything becomes grounded so that we can move into the spiritual phase of meditation and astral travel. When everything is over and we restore ourselves with a feast, many of us feel empty and washed out. Thus we sleep soundly, knowing that we have operated in all four worlds--and maybe even touched the fifth.
What we are saying here is this: All too often the fact of the four aspects of the Work is overlooked. And very few people seem to teach that, if you want a fulfilling experience, you need to work with all four aspects in everything you do.
The Kabbalah is not the only place where this belief in four aspects appears. An intriguing thought comes through popular crime novels based on beliefs of this continent's First Nations, as made available to us by author Tony Hillerman. He shares with us the idea of a one-legged Sacred Buffalo. That is what life is like today, emphasizing only the physical aspect of activities, especially entertainment, instead of a stable four aspects. A one-legged buffalo--a world that excessively emphasizes one aspect of four--cannot long endure without crashing.
Why don't you try moving out of your comfort zone and entering the four worlds?

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Miscellaneous/schedule

To all those who inquired,

Gavin is experiencing a disk problem in his lower back. So far the neurologist's injections have not helped, so it looks as if a replacement disk will be in order at some time in the near future. This means that he has some pain, which is controllable. More importantly, though, at the present he cannot dance, though he can still teach dance.
This gets us, then, to upcoming festivals to which we have been invited.

Date           Event                                                                                                     Website
03 20        Ostara                                                                                          unitarians@frontier.com
3 p.m. - 5:30 520 Kanawha Blvd, Charleston WV: Unitarian Universalist church
04 02 Book signing 1 p.m. The Book Worm 1057 E. Main St, Radford VA
                                                                                                             Suzanne Chrysalis on facebook
05 05 - 05 08 Florida Pagan Gathering                                                                            flapagan.org
                       Ocala National Forest
05 27 - 05 30 Michigan Pagan Fest                                                      mipaganfest.org                  Belleville, MI: Wayne County Fairground
07 11 - 07 17 Sirius Rising                                                                                      brushwood.com
Brushwood near Sherman NY
07 18 - 07 24 SummerFest                                                                                      brushwood.com
Brushwood near Sherman NY
07 27 - 08 01 Kaleidoscope Gathering                                                      kaleidoscope-gathering.ca/
Raven's Knoll    50 miles west of Ottawa in Ontario Canada
09 16 - 09 18 Mabon Mountain Mysteries                                                   mountain-mysteries.com
Heavenly Acres Campground, Stanardsville, VA

Troops out west, we're sorry; it looks as if we won't be making it this year. Nor will we be carrying a vast variety of books to festivals. Watch this site for updates of a happier tone.
About the School of Wicca
Yes, the Church and School is still teaching its courses and signing people up. No, we have not updated the website. The only way to sign up today is to download the application form from the website and send it with check or money order to the School via snail-mail. For a variety of reasons, the School is not handling credit-card transactions.
Faithful students and friends already know full well not to expect prompt replies to their e-mails. The volume of such messages incoming is simply too great for us to reply this minute to that e-mail. We do a lot of humility here in Hinton.
Of course students come first; but the students too know that we do not teach by e-mail. After trying out the net, we believe that the good old USPS allows more time for contemplation and for meditation on the themes and ideas than the instant turnaround of the e-mail system.
You must find your own answers through meditation and not be satisfied with the shallow answers, the glib one-liners, and the blue balls of fire you may get from other sources such as occult books and on the web. Craft precepts are radically different from the sick, twisted ideas in this western culture; thus they need time and re-reading and pondering to sink in to any meaningful depth in your mind.
Yes, we're old-fashioned. But to offset that you have the fact that the School has had some 60,000 students internationally and that it has been around for a very long time ... so deal with it.