Pattern Recognition

A continuation of the essay on Qabalah:

“The highway is for gamblers better use your sense.

Take what you can gather from coincidence

The empty handed painter from your streets

Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets

The sky too is folding over you

And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.”

-Bob Dylan

It seems common knowledge, in scientific circles, that the majority of energy in the Universe appears undetectable to ordinary human sense receptors. A plasma physicist, Claude Needham, once presented the image of a stack of sheets of paper extending from Earth to the Moon saying, consider this stack to represent all the energy we get exposed to every moment. The amount of energy detectable by human sense organs approximately equals the thickness of one sheet of paper.

Qabalah can help extend our reach into these invisible worlds. It can serve as a springboard into the Unknown, as Crowley puts it.

Recognizing patterns of qabalistic communication is how we learn and expand our vocabulary of that language. However, there exists functional purposes for qabalah. We do not study it for purely academic reasons.

Qabalah can act as a guide to hidden worlds - more rarefied, "higher" dimensions of space and time. By placing a qabalistic lens over our daily experience it becomes possible to detect or formulate the existence of a guide. If persistent, we become able to use qabalah to receive contact with a guide to higher realms. We are unconcerned whether the guide has an objective existence or we are simply awakening a higher part of our brain. If it works, it works. This is the barometer we go by. We call it the bootstrap method – you pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, the bootstraps being how you use your attention to look at things.

Pattern recognition seems critical toward opening the eyes to the unseen world. Like the Wilson Cloud Chamber, a scientific device that particle physicists use to deduce the behavior and existence of invisible particles through known events, paying attention to repetitive occurrences and attempting to decipher the patterns they create can give us a much bigger picture of the world and our place in in it.

Synchronicities (meaningful coincidences) can indicate the presence of a guide or an archetype. Archetypes comprise deep-rooted patterns inherent within the collective consciousness. They may point to a lesson to learn, or work to do. They can also be an affirmation of alignment with our right track, following in the right direction, that direction becoming the aims or goals we have set for ourselves. Our path through life. The Truth of who we are. What Crowley calls True Will.

Archetypes may also be considered teaching entities as well as guides. They can seem very alive in their own way. Contact with them opens the possibility of accessing areas of knowledge and experience normally unavailable through common channels. It’s known as gnosis or simply inspiration when received.

I'll provide some examples of the qabalistic lexicon in the next installment.