Month: October 2013

Following up on the idea of an imposter self, Louis Claude de Saint-Martin makes a similar point about the number two in the course of explaining the proper object of contemplation. While contemplating a higher truth about God, our lower faculties are suspended and we become one with the Creator. On the other hand, if we turn our gaze to ourselves, looking for some inner light originating from our self, there arise two centres of contemplation, one real, the other false. This is the illegitimate binary.

Tomberg then seeks for a legitimate binary based on the divine Breath and its Reflection. Then one is aware of the two aspects of reality simultaneously: the noumenal and the phenomenal. Keep these in mind because he will switch terms, using essence and substance, respectively, to mean the same thing. Thus his point is that two is the number of the reintegration of consciousness.

Tomberg then addresses in an interesting way the question of the fundamental nature of reality. There is no need to repeat it here, but comments on the writers mentioned would be appropriate. The binary nature indicates that Love is the fundamental principle, since it necessarily requires two. He addresses alternatives such as Being and the Good, although fundamentally the Good is the “abstract philosophical notion of the reality of Love.”

The idea of Being is morally indifferent, as it leaves out the experiences of the good and the beautiful. Being is passive and objective while love entails activity and subjectivity. You can experience being externally. However, the experience of love touches our inner life. The choice between Being and Love is an important question, even the most important question, facing us, since we find what we look for.

If you choose Being, there can only be the One and any second thing will be false, a mere illusion. Tomberg attributes this attitude to the Eastern religions such as the Vedanta and claims that on that path, “one loses the capacity to cry.” This path regards the divine union as the absorption of one’s being into the divine Being.

The other path sees the divine union as the experience of the breath, illumination, and the warmth of Divine Love. The human personality is not extinguished but is instead set ablaze. This legitimate binary quality is the union of two separate substances in one essence.

Tomberg holds to the traditional understanding that essence is the idea of something (the noumenal) and substance is its actuality (the phenomenal). God is essence as He is not an object in the world, thus no one has “seen God” face to face. Tomberg points to several documented experiences of God, but it is the Beatific vision that he is ultimately driving at. This can only occur in the domain of essence (or ideas); it is an encounter in which the human personality not only remains intact, but actually becomes truly itself. Since everyone was first a Thought in the Mind of God, we become fully what we were intended to be from all eternity.

If the meaning of the Bateleur is one side of a coin, it must immediately reveal the other side. The letter writer provides several synonyms for the Arcanum of the Bateleur: “intellectual and heart-felt geniousness (“génialité intellectuelle et cordiale”), true spontaneity, and the act of pure intelligence. The pure act is that of the Spirit, it is spontaneous and cannot be controlled. More importantly, it cannot be known directly, but only through its effects, i.e., we become aware of it through its reflection.

Perhaps you have seen photographs in the forest of a very still lake, the trees, clouds, etc., are reflected to perfectly in the reflection off the lake, that it can be a challenge to know if the picture is upside down or not. We are in the position of someone suspended above the lake starting down at it but unable to turn around to look upward. Nevertheless, we can know what is above from what is below. However, if a motorboat crosses lake, causing turbulence, the image immediately becomes distorted and that perfect correspondence has been lost.

Now we know what concentration without effort is. The spirit is the one, the central point of concentration. The world is the many, but united as the reflection of the one spirit. The Arcanum of the High Priestess is that of the reflection of the pure act of intelligence. In other words, the pure act is the Spirit, the active principle, and the reflection is the Soul, the passive principle, which is represented by water. This is the analogical meaning of John 3:5 – “unless  one is born of Water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the Kingdom of God.” The act of the spirit and its reflection in quiet waters gives us the conscious experience of the Kingdom of God.

Once again, this points us to the reintegrated consciousness, i.e., that before the fall of man. This requires two things: Spirit must become again the divine Breath or Holy Spirit, and the Water must become the Virgin Mary. (NOT “virginal” as translated in the English text.) Now we can understand the analogical meaning of this text from the Creed:

“And by the Holy Spirit [the Lord Jesus Christ] became incarnate of the Virgin Mary.”

Note that this is the analogical meaning of the incarnation, not the “real” meaning. That is, it doesn’t replace the literal meaning, but understands it using the principle of analogy described by the Batelleur. Without the actual incarnation, this understanding would just be philosophical speculation. Without the analogical level, the historical event would be without meaning for us.

So the initiation, the second birth of the Logos in consciousness, requires the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. The water, i.e., the Soul, must become a perfect mirror. Unfortunately, such as we are, our minds are agitated by the turmoil resulting from the imagination, passions, and personal desires. These are incompatible with real concentration since they scatter the attention of the mind in various directions, destroying the unity of consciousness.

It is as though an imposter self has replaced the Holy Spirit and what we experience in our consciousness are the reflections of this imposter. This imposter keeps a tight grip because the rebirth that we are promised can only seem like a death for him. However, that imposter is not real, but rather a creation of our imaginations, passions, and desires, that we then mistake for our real selves.

This is an ongoing task and not something accomplished immediately after reading the first two letters. To hear the sound of the Holy Spirit, i.e., to consciously experience Him, we must be concentrated, and to be concentrated, we must transcend the turbulences in our soul. Only then can the initiation of rebirth take place.

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Since concentration without effort puts unity into practice, the theoretical teaching therefore is the unity of the world, without which no knowledge would be possible. The method for extending knowledge then, is the Method of Analogy; phenomena that manifest at different levels are analogous to each other. This is usually known by the formula: “As above, so below.” Note that this is different from logical knowledge which uses the method of deduction and also from the scientific method which derives universal laws from specific facts.

Analogy is the distinctive method of Hermetism, although we will see that it the hidden assumption even behind empirical science.

Space and time are two of the preconditions of all manifestation. They divide manifestation into two different levels: “above and below” for space, “past and future” for time. Two fundamental notions of analogy arise from that.

SPACE: the typological symbol is the prototype. These are ideas, forms, or essences of which the phenomenon is its manifestation.

TIME: the mythological symbol is the archetype. These are patterns that repeat in history under different guises.

Tomberg next brings up the crucial point that hierarchy is at the root of all manifestation. All wars, murder, and revolutions are the result of the “denial of hierarchy”, or, in other words, the “pretense to equality”. Note that my translation here is clearer than the text. I’ve found that many modern people have difficulty accepting that.

Tomberg’s distinction between prototype and archetype does have practical ramifications. For example, the story of the fall of Adam and Eve my lead some to assume a corresponding fall in Heaven on the basis of “as above, so below”. But a mythological symbol is horizontal, not vertical.

The method of analogy is expressly used by two medieval doctors of the Church: Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure; you may draw conclusions from this if you like. Jesus, himself, resorted to analogies in some of his parables.

Dangers of the method

Although the method of analogy is a powerful tool to penetrate into reality, there is certainly a danger. As it comes from experience, it is subjective and hence erroneous applications may creep in. A good analogy is an intuition rather than discursive thought. In other words, “getting” an analogy is more like “seeing” than thinking, except that the seeing is into the subtle realms rather than the phenomenal world of the physical senses.

Hence, this intuition comes only after the practice of “concentration without effort” and there is no shortcut. Hence, one must be careful of the danger involved in this “game”. In particular Tomberg mentions two dangers in particular and the failure to recognize these distinctions leads to charlatanism:

• The confusion between concentration without effort and the lack of concentration
• The confusion between simple mental associations and the vision without effort of the correspondences of analogy

Genius

I need to point out here that “geniality” is a misleading translation of “génialité” since in English it means being a “nice guy”. Rather it means “geniousness” or the quality of genius (English does not have a good word). Without this understanding the passage in the text makes no sense. Thus there are two opposed paths:

• The path that leads to genius
• The path that leads to charlatanism

Does this now make it clear why moral purification is first necessary to follow this path? A physicist, for example, can make groundbreaking discoveries in his field regardless of his personal moral qualities. A great artist may be a cad. Not so for the Hermetist. It takes humility and careful discernment to ensure he is following the correct path.

Ultimately, the temptation to charlatanism often arises from the denial of hierarchy and the pretense to equality.

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Before finishing up the practical teachings of the first Arcanum, we can speculate about the origins and purpose of the Tarot. The Bateleur was more like a street performer with more skills than juggling. In the medieval era, Hermetists would pose as street performers, horse traders, and similar occupations, that gave them cover. Since their jobs required travel, they could move about from town to town without attracting undue attention. Since books were quite expensive, not to mention bulky, it was easier to carry a deck of cards which served as summaries to esoteric teachings. In that way, the Hermetist could meet with his groups in various places, using the cards as a teaching tool. To the outsider, it would look like men playing a game … one way to look at “turning work into play”.

The transformation of work from a chore into play is completed following the presence of the zone of perpetual silence. At this point, the soul is in contact with heaven. Note how Tomberg is bringing in the idea of reintegration, as taught by Martinez de Pasqually and Louis Claude de Saint Martin. The goal of reintegration is to restore man to his state before the Fall. After the fall, work became toil and man was separated from God. In the zone of silence, the effects begin to be reversed. Work becomes creative play once again, and man’s soul regains contact with heaven. Hence, in the state of silence, a person is never alone.

Thus Jesus’ promise that “every yoke that you have accepted becomes sweet, and every burden that you bear becomes light,” is fulfilled as part of the process of reintegration. Moreover, this becomes one’s actual experience and not just a pretty phrase.

Silence is the sign of real contact with the spiritual world, which in turn leads to the influx of forces.

Tomberg summarizes the practical teaching of the Bateleur with a rule, a very important rule since it is the foundation of all mysticism, gnosis, magic, and esoterism. It has two parts … It is necessary both

• To be one (un) with oneself (concentration without effort)
• To be united (uni) to the spiritual world (i.e., to have the zone of silence in one’s soul)

These are the prerequisites. All the remaining cards depend on this, so it would not be wise to skip past this step without understanding it fully. And the only way to achieve concentration without effort is to begin concentrating as everything else is a distraction.

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The principle underlying the other arcana, as revealed in the first Arcanum, is the relationship between personal effort and spiritual reality. The juggler relates the practical method that is necessary to know and to be able to do in order to enter the school of spiritual exercises that constitutes the game of Tarot as a whole. These are therefore the initial steps:

• Learn first of all concentration without effort
• Transform work into play
• Make every yoke that you have accepted, sweet, and every burden that you bear, light

Concentration without Effort

Concentration is the faculty of fixing the maximum of attention on a minimum of space. To understand what concentration is, we can start with what it is not. And that is the automatic or mechanical movement of thought and imagination. As the first step of the first principle of the entire Tarot, it is necessary to understand this, and not in a merely intellectual or bookish sense, but in the actual sense of adverting to that automatism in one’s own consciousness. This does not happen overnight or from reading a text.

A simple exercise in concentration is to follow the movement of the seconds hand on a clock or watch for one minute without losing attention. You will see how that automatism will intrude thoughts and images into your awareness, thereby causing you to lose concentration. The remedy is not to “try harder”, but rather the opposite, a sort of mental Aikido. By not fighting them, the thoughts and images will pass by and disperse; otherwise, they will take hold and one thought will simply lead to another.

After this calm, the silence will follow. This is why in Hermetic teaching Silence precedes Knowing, Willing, and Daring. This is the esoteric meaning of silence beyond the exoteric practice of certain orders. Tomberg makes a key distinction. True concentration is free from passions, obsessions, and attachments that enslave the mind. Obsessions may mimic concentration because of the intense focus they bring, but that is not what is meant here.

So clearly passions, obsessions, and attachments are obstacles to concentration without effort; they make concentration difficult. As soon as the mind begins to be quiet, these thoughts and images will arise and absorb all the attention. That is why these meditations cannot be separated from the moral purification of the will.

Bateleur is a French pun meaning “the low deceives you” (“le bas te leurre”). We are deceived by the lower elements in us, that is, if we just satisfy this desire, or avenge a wrong, etc., then all will be OK. But initiates are not deceived as they learn to let go of all such obsessive thoughts. Patience is necessary. As Tomberg points out, we first measure our periods of concentration with instants, then minutes, and so on, until Silence becomes the fundamental element always present in the life of the soul.

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