22 January 2004: Chesed

Ook! Eek! Happy Year of the Monkey!

I feel great.

The Initiations lab is over. Whew!

Best lab I’ve ever been in. What a group! Sherpa has already summed it up nicely in his own Initiations lab journal:

Looking back now, I can say this lab was successful in achieving its intentions on both individual and group levels: of proffering initiatic experience. This leaves me feeling very grateful for the tremendous commitment, trust and faith shown by everyone who made it happen.

Yes.

So, about those last two lab sessions...

Sunday. Session fifteen.

The Personal Polarity of Vanity-as-Flaw/Vanity-as-Sacred-Power-Source went quite well. Strong charge. Tense and contorted full-body gestures and demonic grimaces on the Vanity-as-Flaw side. Like some sort of imperious and spiteful demon portrayed by William Blake or Gustav Dore. Vanity-as-Flaw seemed here to be synonomous with Vanity-as-Resistance: the self-attachment of an ego that refuses to open to, or even acknowledge, a consciousness higher than itself, thus becoming increasingly corrupted by its self-imposed isolation. This seems to be a very deep and full expression of the qliphotic side of Vanity. Vanity as the Sin of Lucifer. The Vanity relinquished by Inanna. Vanity as an obstacle to initiation – being too full of oneself to admit the mystery, as in the classic zen story about pouring tea into a full cup.

Vanity-as-Sacred-Power-Source produced a gentle, graceful dance and song of worship, of the sort that I tend to end up with in those occasional rituals where I’ve passed through the resistances, worked through the charge, and established a deep, solid connection with the Sacred. In other words: Vanity can be as holy a source as any, if turned to the service of the Sacred. Like skepticism, science, language, passion, belief, and the body, Vanity is an excellent servant but a poor master.

Sunday’s group rituals were full of rich vocalizations. Last week’s vocal explorations seemed to have sunk in and germinated. We did some further vocal exploration this time, after the Personal Polarities, to warm us up – experimenting with Head, Heart, and Gut as vocal sources. Then we did a Group Polarity ritual: on one side, the Core Self; on the other side, the Most Superficial Self. Sherpa cautioned that we should not approach this polarity with any notion of the Most Superficial Self being “inferior” to the Core Self, or less sacred than the Core Self, or less “really me” than the Core Self. A good point, I thought. Not a notion that I had any trouble with – I like both my Core Self and my Superficial Self, and generally enjoy being me at whatever level of “me” the situation calls for. These days, anyway.

Sunday’s final ritual was, for me, the high point of the entire lab. The big payoff for all the hard work everyone put in. The “this is why I do it” point. The realization of one of the prime objectives of this work: what Sherpa calls “the miraculous interaction of self-governing bodies.”

The Setup: everyone spread out in no-form in a big, fairly evenly-spaced square at the outermost periphery of the room – i.e., against the walls. A single small square cushion marking the very center of the otherwise empty floor.

The Direction: imagine a huge counterclockwise spiral superimposed on the space, spiraling in from the walls to the center. From no-form, step into the outermost ring of the spiral, and then begin to slowly follow the spiral around, in a series of ever-smaller counterclockwise rotations, gradually in toward the center. The outermost ring of the spiral is the Most Superficial Self. The closer to the center of the spiral one gets, the closer one gets to the Core Self. The most central area of the spiral is the Core of the Core, the deep-as-Self-gets. At various places in the spiral path, there are Points of Initiation – places where one passes through some sort of initiation in order to get to the next level of depth. The number and location of these points is different for each person, and unknown to any of us – we find out about them by running into them as we follow the path.

As I walked the spiral path in toward the center, passing through my points of initiation into different levels of my being, I ran into – or became – a few old friends. There was Slippery, my demonic alter-ego from the Crux lab, now integrated into my psyche as an ally and resource. There was Daemon, from my performance in Hungry Ghosts of Albion – first in his Act One masked and creeping form, then in his more upright and awakened Act Two form, with a point of initiation in between. There were other forms, unnamed but with familiar feelings and movement signatures, from other labs and other work. And finally, there was that hooded desert Hermit-figure, the Yesodic proto-self I channeled on my acid trip during the big dust storm at Burning Man 2000, whom I’ve since come to call the Prince of Spheres.

And then I was at the center. The whole group came together in a beautiful, perfectly harmonious ritual interaction. All of us, everyone in the right place. I was one of four people sitting in a square right in the center, surrounding the cushion Sherpa had placed there. The four of us stayed there, in perfect symmetry, holding the center and singing. Mindwarp, the youngest of the group, at the North, facing Zoe, the eldest, at the South. Me at the East, facing Ambe at the West.

I didn’t turn my head, so I mostly knew what the others were doing by sound and by feel. I could feel Salamander moving around the periphery, holding and defining the outer border, orbiting like a vast moon, affecting the tides. Others gathered around, joined our song, knelt in prayer at the corners of our square, came and went in their own initiatiory cycles. Paradox ventured onto the central cushion for a time, and we laid hands on him and gave him whatever it was he needed to receive – as we also did sometimes with those who came to kneel at the corners.

Our song was beautiful. Fifteen people, all singing, humming, and chanting in no earthly language, each one tapped into his or her own core, and everything coming out in perfect harmony.

This is not the sort of experience that can be done justice in writing. Althought for those adept with the Kabbalistic frame of reference, I can sum it up in one word: Chesed. Purest and deepest experience of Chesed, the fourth sephira, that I’ve yet had. Which makes sense, when you think about it, because Chesed is as far up the tree (or as close to the core, if one considers Kether as “in” rather than “up”) as one can get and still be a “self.”

From where I was sitting, the experience also bore a striking resemblance to the Invocation card from Syrinx’s Vertical Oracle divination deck:

Naturally, when I went to scan this card, it was the very last one in my deck, so that I had to look at every other image in the deck before I got to it. The more of this sort of work I do, the less God seems to bother with any pretense of subtlety.

So, anyway, I’d call that a successful lab. That’s some serious initiatory work, to get all the way to Chesed. I’ve never gone that deeply into one of the above-the-Veil-of-Paroketh sephiroth without drugs before.

(For those still learning their way around the Kabbalah: the Veil of Paroketh is a reflection of the Abyss, at a lower level. The Abyss separates the lower seven sephiroth from the highest three, and requires the complete surrender of one’s very existence to cross. The Veil of Paroketh separates the lower four sephiroth (Malkuth, Yesod, Hod, and Netzach) from the higher six, and requires surrender/transcendence of the conscious ego to cross.)

Ah, but this was only the second-to-last lab session, wasn’t it?

That’s right. But I’ll post this now, and write about the final session next time.

I’ve got ten days off for some much-needed processing and schoolwork-attending-to, and then, on the evening of February 1st, I and ten others from the Initiations crew start meeting again, on the same schedule, for six weeks of distilling some of the lab material into a ritual performance piece, Orphans of Delerium, which will be performed two nights, March 13th & 14th, at Wildcat Studio in Berkeley, and then on the 21st at CELLSpace in SF. For details (and maybe photos and other cool stuff as things develop), keep checking the Orphans of Delerium Page on the Paratheatrical Research site.