The Qlippoth with Frater RC Part 1

by Freda RCI. Freda RC has become a respected voice for many students of Western ESO terrorism because he has a rail ability to take material that is often buried under fear confusion into that mythology and sensationalism and bring it back into a serious, initiatory and historical frame. And that is exactly what makes him the right guess for tonight's subject, because tonight we're stepping into one of the

most charged and misunderstood territories and occultism, the clipoff. This is one of those subjects that people love to reference, love to speculate about, and very often do not actually understand. Depending on the system, the clipoff is are described as shells, husks, shattered vessels, this shadow or inverse side of the tree, fallen emanations, and pure powers or initiatory zones of descent. For some, it is a path of confront confrontation, and transformation.

For others, it is spiritually dangerous territory that has been glamorized far beyond wisdom. And that is where tonight's conversation begins. What is the clipoff really? What does the idea come from historically? How does it develop from Jewish mystical thought into later occult systems. Is it truly a map of evil? Or is it that? Or is it that far too simplistic?

What happens when modern practitioners approach it without grounding, without context, or without understanding what tradition originally meant by the forces? And why has the clip off become such a magnetic subject in modern occultism. Tonight we're going to slow the whole thing down. We're going to separate symbolism from projection, tradition from invention, in serious initiatory discussion from aestheticized darkness. So once again we're returning us, once once again, returning

to the o cult rejects as a fan favorite. We got fred er RC. But before I introduce him and the rest of the panel, I do have an announcement I like to make On Saturday, April twenty fifth, the Southeastern Masonic Symposium is happening at the Asheville Masonic Temple and that is at eighty Broadway Street in Asheville, North Carolina, and I will be there in person, So come on down and meet me and the rest of the crew and the people speaking. We will have John Michael Greer,

he will be there. We got a guy who's been on the show a few times will be coming on in the future, Colin Conkright from American Esoteric. And we got the man himself, Ike Baker from our Candem podcast. He will be there. And Tom Carter. So come on down. It should be a blast. And also want to remind people about the website if you're into reading. We have tons of information by multiple contributors and we got t shirts up on the site if you're interested and fun fact,

the art is all based on the eyeball. Now let me introduce the rest of the panel and the guests. Judith the Loom, what is going on? How are you.

Terrence McKenna meets cipherpunk, chaos, magic, schizophosting. Really good. So that is in reference to my latest three part series with Satchke, who is a Jewish cabalist, his sern researcher, inventor of crystal quantum computing. He does loms and AI and all this tech stuff, and he draws a lot from Robert Anton Wilson and like the Discordions as well

as a Jewish coubala. So we had a like eight and a half hour discussion and I cut it up into three episodes which are about only an hour and a half each, but they're all different, and so if you're interested in something like that, I also released an episode with bead Sillerno on the Dark Crystal film from nineteen eighty two, as well as I have an episode with Ike Baker coming out either tonight or so everybody can look for that, and thank you guys so much.

And we will have a Gray Lodge space probably this Friday, so I just I'll shout that out right now live. So if you're interested in that, check us out. You can follow me at wukomri born, wq wh and g Reborn or at the Threshold Saints on X and I G and as well my Subseac Threshold Saints at subseact dot com and at the True Gray Lodge dot com t r V, which Matt Mura is obviously the webmaster and our social media web coordinator. Thank you so much, Matt,

and so yeah, everybody can check us out. Thank you guys so much.

stuff going on there. Uh recent update and again yes, Also there's a library that I've been using a lot, especially with AI. If you have Claude you can use it. It's a library I made called Cabala k A A B A L A H. I've been using a lot for transits for example. It can copulate the transits for me very quickly and then it can interpret them. But yeah, super nice stuff. Again, do you have any questions about that, Just them me on any of those and I'll quickly let you know how it goes.

there's Patreon and YouTube. Memberships has blown up the past few months and so I've got a lot of stuff there for members that is not available elsewhere, and we have a good time on the new discord I made due to demand at last after many years boomers style and I don't know how it works, which apparently people find even more adorable. So I've shared some unique stuff

there as well. But most importantly, I am hosting two major events this year through the Arcane In Research Society, which I founded back in twenty nineteen and did a world tour by which by world, of course, we mean Europe and America starting in Canada, and you can go to our Kinresearch Society dot com Forward Slash twenty twenty six for this year's events, we're a Nokia Con dot com, which is the conference we'll have in Austin, Texas November

sixth through eighth. Our Spring Workshop has just been well, I'm waiting for the final call right now to confirm it in Austin on June thirteenth, and as soon as I do, I'll release our video promo for that, and that will be an all day workshop in a full We have a great, great venue downtown Austin that we have the run of, and the workshop will feature three three hour workshops, one by myself on what I'm on the topic of today and I'll say more about that

of course throughout the hour or whatever. And the other two workshop presenters, I don't know what their topics of will be yet for their workshops, but they're both renowned presenters and authors. So those people are Jason Louve and fellow Austin native Craig Williams, who's incredibly a remarkable author, very prolific and a wonderful guy. So there'll be the three of us there this June for our Spring Workshop.

And you can access both those events online or in person by getting an annual membership at Arcane Research Society dot com.

me and can't eat grains. So that's the best way to think of CLiPPA, by the word that the Jewish mystics and rabbis use to describe it. I mean, and as we know today, the significance of those Jewish mystics and magicians is more significant than we ever realized. I only just today received my copy of Galas Sofer's amazing new academic book from Brill, which of course you have to sell a kidney to purchase. I found a secondhand

copy for half price, only one hundred dollars. And doctor Angela Puka has just putting out a video of breaking this down with really great visual aids. So shout out to doctor Puka for doing the heavy lifting for a lot of us. But this text, for example, shows the Jewish origins of the Solomonic magic tradition centered around demon workings, shall we say so? The CLiPPA have often been sort of thought of apart from the Solomonic or Western magical systems,

and something that entered late. But what gal Soofer's work shows is perhaps one in One of the many things it shows is that we can place a much earlier understanding of the rule of clipote in the Western magical traditions than previously we could before. So that's a preliminary understanding. You want me to keep going. Let me say, there's so many interpretations of the clippote, the CLiPPA, the cliff off,

and I'm going to say them. The word in every possible pronunciation you can imagine, just so that no one feels excluded. That would be bad. The only and if anyone debate wants to debate the correct way to spell the word, well there's only one correct way to spell the word, and that's in Hebrew. Colahmid you know, I think there's a yacht in there, or is there a yeah ud pay hey? I should probably know it's spelled in the Hebrew. But that's okay, So cliff off, clipote,

clipa whatever once plural one's not. I address this like what I'm doing at the Spring workshop is is giving a The first thing I became known for in the magical world was in the late nineties early two thousands for giving a workshop on a text I wrote in the Golden Dawned at the end of my Outer Order training, which I call I can't remember the original name, but I published it as Sacred Magic and the Clipote, and that's been my most successful little you know, pamphlet or

book that is sold on Amazon. It's dropped in sales during the pandemic as someone'st and sold it on Scribbed and made fifteen grand and my royalties dropped from three point fifty down to twenty bucks a month, so I may sue scribbed at some point if I ever have the resources. I certainly have the evidence, and as a result, I have been working on rewriting, entirely updating it since the late nineties, where you can imagine my understanding of

these things was a lot more limited. Plus I was a teenager, so I started giving this workshop based on that text that I wrote as part of my Golden Dawn training from practice to portal, and the workshop took forevers.

lasted five hours. By the end of the workshop, my classroom at the first temple I delivered, it was full of adepts to where skin being out of their own duties just to listen in to what this little kid was saying, which was very flattering, of course, and it led to me being invited to temples around the world to give this workshop and I was never allowed to not give this workshop every year there on out for the rest of my time in that order, and so

I haven't given the workshop since then. But my understanding of the Klippote has changed since then, or not changed, but grown and developed and matured, especially as I became an adult and dealt with life and learned to go from knowledge or from information and knowledge to wisdom, you could say. And so I'm very excited for the second

edition of that text. I have a new title for it, and then I'll discontinue the current version that is currently online, and I'll be giving that workshop for the first time ever since since two thousand and three down in Austin, Texas, free for all members of the Arcane Research Society. And I'm going to try and fit it into three hours. So it's going to be an intense three hour morning of Cliffo and theorgy and spirituality from me that day.

It's just I have a fuller understanding of Taye. Plus I have the lived experience when I when I wrote about it initially, I was looking at the role of that kind of spiritual struggle in the context also of Saint John of the Cross is understanding of the spiritual journey, and in the Dark Knight of the Soul, Saint John of the Cross divides that journey into two parts, the Dark Knight of the Senses and then ten fifteen years later or something like that, you might, if you're lucky,

go through a really brutal experience called the Dark Knight of the Spirit. Ironically, in the book The Dark Knight of the Soul, there is no experience called the Dark Knight of the Soul. So, and as you might surprisingly, that is actually a good thing because it means that there's no need to get upset with someone when they say they went through a Dark Knight of the soul, because John of the Cross never talks about a Dark

Knight of the Soul. He talks about the Dark Knight of the Senses and the Dark Knight of the Spirit, and they're very specific things with specific signifiers, and so I did get to go through that dark Knight of the Spirit in my thirties. It was exactly as he described, and I didn't even understand I was going through it at the time, because to be able to go through it you have to have been challenged by certain things in certain ways that would necessitate you not really being

aware of what you're slipping into in life. Yeah, so that was interesting, and I have perspective on that now and I have a sense of the reality of it, and that's I think very interesting and could be perhaps

helpful to others. I shouldn't fail to mention also the fabulous work done by one of my modern living alchemical cabalistic heroes, which is the great David heim Smith and his book Black Ether and his course on that is something that has also rounded out my understanding of these things and given me some new perspectives, especially since I also follow a monistic view of reality, which is, you know, necessary in the hermetic path, and he also follows that

monistic view, which is not necessary in the coblistic path. There's lots of coblistic duelists out there, I think.

from like a theistic or monastic perspective. I'm coming from like a Buddhist nondualist sort of like a post Lurianic sort of DCS perspective. So that's all.

which you can understand them is absurd. Everyone's gonna look at things in their own way. So you have people who are personifying them and treating them as demons of the guetia and working with them like that. You have people who are treating them a left hand path, people who are treating them like just gods there to work with theurgically in the same spiritual way you would work with any other deity like Osiris or Jesus or Zeus or Odin. And then they're like, oh, Thamiel purified me.

It's like we are not talking about the same thing. Then we're not on the same page. There is no conversation there possible between those two points of view other interpretations. I think there is room for some dialogue, but I think it's important to understand that we have such different paradigms of these things, and often people want to have this unified find some unified or meaning or reality to everything, and it just doesn't work that way, because again, we

should have different, different paradigms and perspectives. So there's definitely a variety of many forms of clippoat. When I wrote Sacred Magic in the Clapoat, it came out of a real occult struggle, right. It was definitely not the perspective.

Weren't even allowed to use the names, speak them out loud or any or ever show them to members of lower grade in the Golden Dawn Order I was in, and certainly we didn't see them as any form of aesthetics that a lot of our I'm chair folks and diabolists like to see them as this sort of creative esthetic of like, oh, there's the chaos in the world and I love dark music. I play dark music. I love that stuff. Prep you know, But but that's that's

not what you know. I I was dealing with them with I was looking at you, seeing them and understanding them as as realities that cause evil, absolutely, that that thwart us on our way to where we want to go. And so I like in the but I do right in the preps of my book. Here's a line I do right, Sometimes we must transgress a little too far in order to learn what is the what is the

limit of safe spiritual progress up the mountain? And you can imagine that that would be the idea of a seventeen year old in the grade of practicue learning the clipothic names and trees and hierarchies for the first time reading Kenneth Grant's Night Side of Eden and as an aquarius, and you know, defining my experience of life through personal experience. Obviously, I was inclined to push the envelope a little bit and it absolutely almost killed me. So for me, the

clipoths are not just monstrous externals or sensational symbols. They reveal what is in us, unpurified, misdirected, or spiritually asleep. And one of the central ideas in the book that I'll be challenging and reclarifying is that as the path gets real, the glamour starts to fade. So another thing I say in the book is sloth is the abandonment

of spiritual and of spiritual and ritual work. At this point of which Saint Johnathan Cross calls the dark Knight of the Senses, and so you can see why I need to rewrite the book there that sense could be a bit better. But it is this idea we'd look I look at the sins in relationship to the clip boat in a very different way than people usually understand the sins today, following from Saint on. And so this

is where the work really begins. And it's why I say in the book work becomes true invoking into the spirit only when the goal of pleasure is replaced by the impetus of devotion.

Hebrew other than the memorization of the alphabet. Of course, by the time I finished my Master's of Divinity at UBC and had graduated from Seminary, I had two years of Hebrew grad school Hebrew under my belt and a year of Aramaic, so I was able to start digging into that stuff. But I didn't because I had I was busied with doctoral studies and playing music and things, so it's something I never did. I'll be point blank about that. But the clip us originate in the Zohar.

I believe that is the first instance of them originating, and they were discussed in other rabbinic texts throughout the from the Middle Ages onward. And I'm not sure the extent of which text they're discussed in that would You would need to talk to a Jewish scholar to know the full extent. But I do know that the major text, the one and only major text on the Cleipoat, is something that no one reads other than me. I've translated the first several pages of it, but it was taking

me so long to translate. I outsourced that to a Jewish professor and translator who I met through Marcelo del Debio's Brazilian podcast. This was the translator who worked with Marcello, and so he put us, me and my friend, my magical working partner, in touch with him to have us

to translate the book. And so we paid him a lot of money and he strung us along for a year, then deleted his Telegram account and Marcelo del Wio ignored all my messages and so we got ripped off for a lot of money and never got the work translated. So you don't all have the Book of Horns Sefer Karnaim to enjoy and read at this point in time, because Marcelo del de Wio and his buddy are thieves

and scam artists. Man, that's fucked up. It's increasing. And I have, of course, I have all the receipts because we have the PayPal transaction. We have all the texts and all the message we have everything. And I found the translator on Facebook now just trucking along like nothing happened. And well, I think the clip out might have their way with him at some point, and it won't be because of me, It'll be his own evil actions.

whole thing, and no, I just don't have time. It would be great if someone did translate it. I might be willing to pay someone else to translate it. But you can imagine my reticence at this stage.

to in a bullshit manner, right. I wouldn't say that's the only way of seeing the kleithos, but it's like an interesting way. But not that said about this system, like what the fuck I'm gonna get, you know, know, all this stuff like this, it's very weird.

huge error. I think that is a tremendous miscalculation and also not true to what the Jewish mystics were trying to communicate to us, sticks especially the rabbi who wrote the Sefarkhana the Book of Horns, who was masacred along with his congregation and the Cossack raids in the seventeen hundreds in Poland, a horrific way to die for someone

who wrote the book on the Klei boat. They definitely have periods where even in the Zohar, I think it's arguable that they see them as entities of some sort, but the essential you know, I prefer David Heinsmith's understanding of them, of course, and I prefer the traditional Jewish view of seeing them as husks around what is good,

which are the spheres the aspects of God. And in this way, it's very deceptive for people to look at the Tree of life as the tree of life model the inter secting rings the rings going out from the center like imagine the symbol of the sun or the monad, and then with circles between the point and the outer ring. That's an older view of the tree of life that I think is generally much more helpful for understanding Cobbla

most of the time. And so with the Tree of Life in the you know, the quote unquote cure Her diagram. Though cure Her didn't create that diagram, he just you know printed it. Can you imagine a Jesuit actually creating a diagram or the tree of life not gonna happen, Not gonna happen. You see the cleipboat as this inverse tree sometimes, and that is again I think, very deceptive. Seeing it more as that which prevents you from accessing the sphere I think is the best way to understand it,

certainly the most useful in my opinion. So del Wo's point of seeing, Oh, there's the hode splendor sphere, and then there's the kleipoat of the Hode, and I can use either of them, I think, is to fail to get the point of the clipboat, which is that if you're caught in the lying, you're not able to access the truth. If you're lying, it's because you can't access truth.

It's because you didn't transmute that klipo, that husk, that shell around the thing that it is of actual value, and so you weren't able to attain that, and that's your spiritual failing or sin as some people might look at it. Just like here's another example of you're walking down the street because these things have to come into play in your life otherwise what's if you can't understand them in your daily life? What's the point? How is

that helpful? It's just metaphysical speculation. At that point, it becomes extremely masturbatory very fast, which a lot of people also liken more power to them. They can do that. But you say, see a person begging for change, right, and you reach in your pocket and you feel, oh, there's just a bill there, there's no there's no loonies or tunnies, no dollars or two dollars coins, just a five or twenty, and you feel this resistance. Well, what

is that? That is the shell around generosity preventing you from exercising loving kindness and selflessness. And so that you're confronting you have to wrestle and transmute that clipout right there, and then to penetrate it, throw it away as a husk and reach in and feel that charity and just give what you intended to do, which was to give some money to the beggar on the street.

understanding them. And I was going to actually ask a freight or RC if he considered them, if he considered that you can clarify klipas or that perhaps in the correct in the sort of way, that they also are

luminous or transparent. DCS has talked a little bit about this in relation to like nondualism or qualified non dualism, and how the kleepas can be perceived as luminous in and of themselves like a glass, a glass sheath, excuse me, that is, like the vessel that contains the spark of luminosity. So perhaps there's even no difference between the kleipa and the suffer themselves. That's just a one idea, but i'll i'll for freight or address.

is around it. So it's out of necessity that you have to encounter the clipo, why would you go through the trouble of reifying it anymore or vibrating its name, or drawing or focusing on sigils of it. I mean, I think Kenneth Grant's Side of Eden is fun, but I found it of limited value in its insights. Many of those insights I think are wonderful. That's why the subtitle of my book as it stands is you know the Tunnels of Set or seven Deadly Sins in the

Tunnels of Set in Kenneth right. It's a long title anyway, but yeah, those ideas definitely helped me find my way to Saint John of the Cross as a method of theorgy and working with them. And yeah, did I in the early days go a bit too far and maybe try some direct contact with these forces? Yeah, and it definitely And it directly almost led to my very young death. And it took the intervention of the Adepts around me at the Temple down in LA to save my life

from that error. So that's something I haven't talked about in the past, but I'm gonna be talking about it now. Leading up to this workshop and the release of my second edition.

I really don't know much about this topic. I mean, I know enough, but I was just wondering, like if if you use the hamiticabala and like you kind of looked at the negative aspects of all the stuff that was associated even maybe with planetary and the astrological stuff, do you think that maybe you'd somehow be kind of almost doing close to the same thing, but just not using those I guess name associated with those spears and husks as you call them.

externalize and treat these cliffhothic names as beings. Doesn't that allow us to employ mechanisms such as those found and that originate in the Rabbit rabbinic practices and created the solemonic tradition for us to pull them into our triangle of manifestation and and purify and control them through those external ritual practices. I mean, I think that's a strong argument for doing that. I'm not convinced that it's safe or necessary. It seems sort of to me, it seems unnecessary.

There's a question with one of my friends mentioned the chat on screen. Yeah, I had a couple este Steve Mitchell, my buddy Steve Mitchell. He'll be at the workshop in there in June. I believe he's a great Golden down adept in a huge order. He says, what do I consider the key klopathic texts? Well, the original I think is the Zohar, but the key text is undebatable. It is the Book of Horns, the Cepher Kanaiem.

want to give to this other concept. But usually people will also call it like gleefop whatever, which is kind of like emptying a symbol. Right, I can give an example. Uh, well, anytime you speak to an AI, right, you're going to speak something to the AIDA is just going to generate some text based on mathematics, and you are the one putting some kind of emotional backdrop, some meaning to that

basically empty text. Right, the idea is just giving you some gibberish and you're trying to make sense of it. Or when you have some kind of let's say you have a cartoon, a famous cartoon, and then for whatever reason political or social reasons, that cartoon now means something else. Now again the symbol is emptied. You know, you had I don't know, something that was supposed to bring happiness or whatever you know in the cartoon, and now people are just mad about it. So again the symbol is

emptied out of its meaning. And what do I think that's an interesting and interesting concept and maybe not necessarily necessarily related to the cluefuss, but people might conflate them. Is that you can that is something that you can use practically. What do you mean by that? Let's say you have I mean you can work with the tree of life to try and rectify things right insteade of

you as one. And sure, that's pretty good. Sometimes though, it feels as if let's say you have something you're want to rectify in yourself, like a symbol or a situation or whatever, and the more that you try to go against it, the more that it becomes powerful. It's like a kind of feeding it because you're trying to go against it, right, It's like this enemy, they're trying to go against it. But h and I picked this

by with personal experience. Once you understand that, you can also just empty the thing of meaning and see, okay, maybe that's actually not, you know, not even as great. You know, it's kind of like you were seeing this shadow a big monster, but then you look at it and it's like, oh, actually, it's like just just something that doesn't even make sense. You can again kind of ground yourself and kind of make that lose lose power.

So I need to understand from prodder if. First of all, it if it makes sense that idea of like not necessarily being the cleeful but concept that people may make conflict And yeah, if again, since it's always always also

cool to understand practically how we can use things. How from your perspective, the understanding that cleifods can be something practic done in practice, Like you gave the example, you know, you're something gives you, compels you to do something, and then you either get blocked by or you go forward. You know, like what maybe are other ways of going about just being aware and work around them maybe if not with them.

So I think that's a great sort of like if you want to distinguish it in that way, Like klipas can just be husks, right, Like they can just be perceptual ideas that we have that are actually wrong. They don't actually have to be anything quote unquote evil or even things that obscure our view. And there's even an idea in non Lorianic kabbala of the nogalla or the

kind of illuminating husk around certain suffra. So I mean it's it's it's very view dependent and like I think freder rc spoke on this before that it is like it there is like a context to which that you can speak about it that makes will make sense to the way like your worldview frames the like views the tree.

But then there's like different ways to understand it. Like Freder was talking about Saint John of the Cross and the sense aggregation, Well, we have the exact same idea in Buddhism, like the five sense aggregates and the five elements and the sort of five poisons of the mind. So all of those things actually are also klip as. We would call them Skanda's dcs, thinks and I but I said this before I even knew JCS, So I just want to for the record, but I always said

skandas are kleipas because the etymology is very similar. It means aggregation. It can also mean husk or shell, and so you in Buddhism, what we want to do is rectify those things in our mind, because that's really where klipas are initially, at least they might exist out externally like as goetics or as things. I don't know. I don't know but about that stuff, but I agree that you shouldn't worship. I don't worship the angels, and I

definitely don't worship the Gotesha. But I don't consider them different. Really, I just think it's one like, it's just it's just the hosts, it's how we understand them. And so I just maneuver the tree in that way without like assigning it to be have gross spiritual forces, I would say. But yeah, I great, great points everybody.

just part when you can worship. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well yeah, yeah, you means as demons in the sense of the later term guetia, as is used because guetia means sorcery. It means, I mean, working working with any spirit essentially is guetia, including working with angels, if we go by the popular definition.

a certain dark thing. It's not really true. We can experience anything anywhere all the time in my in my experience, and that's my theoretical understanding as well.

original ideas right like, for example, karma. You know, what we've done with karmen in the West is completely obliterated the original meanings, whether you take it as a social structure imposed by Brahmins or in the spiritual sense seen in the context of dharma. Western views of that have led to all kinds of wacky spiritual ideas, and I think we all know what those are, so it doesn't need to be drawn out. But just so, when we import these right hand why do people call people like

me right hand path? It's not a self def it's not a term we use. And so the same people that will label us right hand path or left hand path are the same people who are usually whining about cultural appropriation. It's like, so you're complaining about cultural appropriation, but you're imposing a term on me that I reject and saying it doesn't matter if I reject it, it's still true. Well, how does that work both ways? Would you like it if we started labeling you terms that

you don't like and find repugnant? Would that elucidate more about the nature of you? If we start imposing terms on you that don't have any place in your spiritual world, it's just not very helpful. And So in the path that I've followed my whole life, which has got elements of Kabbala in it, there's no right hand left hand path.

There's just the middle path of consciousness. The middle pillar is the pillar of consciousness created by the tension and polarity of jachinim Boaz, And that's the path right does it sometimes wind to and fro absolutely, But that's not how consciousness raises upward on the tree of life. That's why in grade structures like the Golden Dawn, our grade structure only goes straight up the tree. We don't actually have any grades on the right or left hand pillar.

That's an illusion, and that's something that you find out only after getting to a certain point. So yes, I did just spoil that for a lot of people. But tough shit, because this idea of going first to get sometimes to the right and then sometimes to the left, it's just not real. It's just not real, certainly not in the Golden Dawn tradition, though it may have been rareified in other traditions that were based on the Golden Dawn.

And that again is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it depends how it's dealt with methodologically in the system of spiritual progressions. So yeah, left hand path. People want to do what they want to do with it, and that's fine. You know, they're on their own path, which has nothing in common with what people like me are doing. So there's really no point comparing them, right,

You don't compare. You don't compare the strength of an Olympic weightlifter to the strength of a downhill skier and see which one is a better athlete because the completely different sports.

tree from the middle path. This is something that Matt's heard me say, like probably hundreds of times in the last two and a half years since we've been doing the Gray Lodge. I always said, like the way that at least we're going to do the show is that we're going to approach the tree from the middle path. But there's also an Tontric idea of the middle path as being a positionless position, meaning that you don't get

caught in extremity. So very similar to what you're saying, Frater, but it is a little different because we can still draw from the polarities, but it's not the resolution of paradox or the result or the sort of balancing of

tensions is not necessarily found either in extremity. So like I personally don't work with angels in the same way that I don't work with I'm going to call them go atic spirits with the acknowledgment that that is a more contemporary idea, but I'm really talking about like the spirits of the lesser keys. So I personally don't work with any of those spirits because I'm obviously a Tontraic Buddhist, so I work with like the cosmology that we use.

But I so I don't need to resolve like either the right hand traumonic more like monastic ascetic ideas with the more sorceress ideas, because I also understand that I'm using magic, using sorcery to resolve those paradoxes in and of themselves, but it's also of my own mind. So what I'm saying is is, like I I don't think that a lot of those left hand path ideas are wrong or bad. I actually think that they're very pragmatic

and useful at times. I think what happens is is that they get twisted and then in popular culture and then can sort of get distillated down into a kind of I'm a depressed goth edge lord and like as someone who was like a depressed goth, like all right, and so they they treat it like it's gospel. They treat

it like it's gospel. It's kind of like the anti Christianity for the anti like everything that is good, like the anti anti cosmic and like we have talked about discussed many times, like Judith and I have this long running sort of dialogue about Mott on the show, and like I believe in like the balancing of the polarities.

So like I personally don't see the I don't see the point in being like completely I don't reject the body, and I don't reject the spirit and I but I'm also like trying to resolve those things that tension body spirit tension in my own mind. So I'm not trying to deny anything or go so far into hedonism either.

I'm very much like we need to do what is like generative and reconciliatory, like in rectifiable, like we go to we go to tiffer It, we come back down to aisode we you know, resolve the resolve the four elements or five elements in contra and then we go back up. It's the dialectical relationship between the five and the six. I'm obviously using five as not in the traditional cabalistic way, but I'm using five as in the Buddhist way, which is like primordial consciousness, primordial ground where

the five elements converge. But but it refers to you, so really, so that's what I think it is. I think that the left time path can be really generative and useful as conceptual ideas. But like with all conceptual knowledge that is not like true nosis. You can utilize it, but then you have to also, like a husk, like a cleep up, you also have to discard it. It's not useful to contain the fullness of an identity. Like you see this a lot on IG. You'll see people

be like left hand path anti cosmic. I know, I have a lot of them following me, and I like some of them, like some of them are like cool people, cool mutuals, whatever. But then they'll have pronouns in their bio. Then they will have like political ideas in their bio. And I'm not saying that that's horrifying or whatever, but I'm just saying like, what if you are so edge lord, then why are you so stuck on identities? The more edge lord thing is to be like, Okay, I'm going

to let the identities go. I'm not going to like, I'm not going to position myself within a klipa, because that is what identities and those kinds of names are. They're just husks that we use to contain who we think we are. I don't know, this is an interesting idea.

most Jewish texts, and support your local rabbis through that purchase. PA, And yeah, it's a book that I'm sure as a result of me sharing it, the link there and this chat will be now featured on many people's live streams and many grifters private schools where they they they tell you that just by having that book you will either be cursed or have mighty power. So yeah, I call I'm helping the Satanic panic two point zero wonderful.

some really interesting ideas about God? Absolutely? Absolutely, very appropriate especially to his time and place, but very useful in a changing world because it takes account of change. I mean, people say that the Roman Catholic Church, the Roman Catholic Church says that they've never changed and their theology necessitates that point of view, even though all evidence points to the contrary. So they could they they've they could do with a little bit more process theology, which would just

be them admitting like, yeah, yeah, we do change. But they're not allowed to say that because it would contradict their own doctrines. So the Catholics are fucked.

idea of Kabbala. And where it even came from, and if you like me positive as coming from Persia in the second century, I'm not saying it was invented there. I'm saying it came out of the second Exile period from Babylon, and it was probably something that the Zoroastrians were looking at, and the Jews were there, and the Manichaeans were there, and the Mandians were there, and everybody's looking at this tree which may or may not have been a tree, like DCS talks a lot about this,

like there are Sufi ideas of the tree. I became a podcaster because I sort of stumbled upon what I think is a version of the tree, which is called the Mahavidja grouping, which is a grouping of ten goddesses, which Nick and I did three years ago on this show. We discussed how you can understand the ten goddesses to mean the Sefra and I did an eleven part series on et cetera, et cetera. Okay, so yeah, there's many I think there's many versions of the tree, is what

I'm trying to say. And I think that it's there's a sort of fundamental nature where you I'm sorry, I totally forgot where I was going with that, but yeah, I agree with a lot of what you were saying Frater, and like there is definitely a kind of convergence of ideas and then a sort of splitting of where the tree went. So I think that if you're looking at it from that perspective, you're seeing like, Okay, there's a

Arisitilian dialectic of time, space, light and dark. And this matches very very well to sort of late stage or Astrianism, which is called Jervinism, where they obviously assigned God the quality of time, but in the originals or Astrian thinking, you're not supposed to assign God any quality, which is also interesting from a rabbinical perspective because you're also not supposed to assign God an equality. But hesse, that's God's really only quality is loving kindness.

wheel is always turning. We're always in progress, We're always sort of in the process of becoming.

just like the world's in process. And this is Paul Tillick's theology that he drew from Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy. So we adapted Whitehead's philosophical ideas into theological and so they'd be useful for Christians in the twentieth century. And someone in the chat actually pointed out the major critique of process theology, which is actually really good. Lucy rose Up.

Thanks for saying that. Well, I don't know if this is what they were intending to comment on, but they say it's been all cherry picking aka changing as they go. That's exactly the critique of process theology. And when you study the stuff in theological colleges, they let you know all the criticisms of something as you go along. Of course, they're not meant to teach you what they think is true.

They're meant to teach you how to think. That's what all schools should be teaching you, of course, and that is the criticism. Now, the response to that criticism is like, process theology maybe done bad, is cherry picking, right, But what it's intended to do is allow you to accept and reject those things which allow you to know God better as time moves on. So in the past certain things were necessary for us to know God better, but in the modern day, maybe some of those things don't

help us know God anymore. And so they can be discarded in favor of other ideas or other folki along the way. So that's a basic idea of process theology.

I remember first hearing about Christian churches. I remember in kindergarten not being allowed to go back to play with friends who I met in kindergarten because I at some point along the day I asked when we had to go win our meditation dictation time was and they looked at me like concerned, and I would describe what I was talking about how my parents would do the yogic flying thing and bounce up and down, you know, during their mantras when they were channeling their Kundlini to the

base of spine, allowing them to shoot up and do their levitating. And you know, I'm sure the kindergartener parents were horrified, and I didn't go back to their house again. And along the way I found out about Christianity and was like, what is this new fangled thing all everyone does but us?

try and put my own preconceptions onto it. Now because I'm in dialogue with DCS, I have had to sort of up my game, like you were talking about, like get a little better at the heat brew, get a little better at the sort of like way that he describes it. Because I'm much more of an experiential like Cabala's like, that's how I encountered the tree was through experienced sepharotic experience like color and conceptual word. But they didn't appear like that to me necessarily. It was much

more like through the lens of contra. So even how I approach the tree is interesting. So it is interesting to me that you pick that up. So thank you, Frader, I appreciate that.

kabbala happened to be. But that's a debate for another time. Eh. So, Like my central thesis is looking at the Kleephoath not just as e spooky externals, but as mirrors of your own corruption. And when you do that, you of course have to realize that we see the sphere out of the Tree of Life as macrocosmic and the paths is microcosmic. So from a certain point of view, we never experienced

the sephar at all. We only experience them through the paths that we walk, and the only connection between the spheres is the paths that we connect to them. And so Kenneth Grant makes this point actually really well. It's one of the things I really liked about Nightside Veeden back in the nineties, and still like it today as I've been rereading it from a older and wiser point

of view. And so Kenneth Grant points out that his tunnels of Set, as he calls them, are microcosmic and the spheres are acrocosmic, just like we see in the Tree of Life. As it's understood in the Golden Dawn in the in the nineteenth century and still today, those ideas are generally what's taught. So the book treats the tunnels of Set as inner realities that connect the evil

Sephra or the Klipo to each other. So the only reason these dark things connect is because we connect them with our lives and actions, which is an interesting idea to keep in mind, would they even exist without us? Probably not. And so when you look at this in terms of the seven Deadly sins, I look at sloth, which is not laziness, but it's spiritual abandonment when the

sweetness of the work is gone. And I say in the book sloth is the abandonment of spiritual work and ritual work at this point, at which Saint Johnathan Cross refers to in the dark Knight of the Sentences. And so the great work must be pursued past the stage of transcendental lust and astral inspirations to the saturnine point of aridity. And the real test isn't whether you practice when it feels magical, it's whether you keep going when

it feels dry. These are all quotes from the book, which some of which I'll keep in, some of which I will rewrite, rework and turn into new and brilliant paragraphs. So yeah, I essentially argue that devotion matters more than spiritual thrills. Probably won't be a shocker to anyone here. And another quote is I say the work becomes true. Work becomes true invoking into it the spirit only when the goal of pleasure is replaced by the impetus of devotion.

So one of my main messages is that pleasure is not the measure of truth in spiritual work, of course, and that's just an example of my approach and the I think important differentiation between subjective and object realities. In this particular interpretation of the Tree of Evil.