There were two interesting talks this week - one (at Treadwells) on the Jewish mystic Abraham Abulafia who flourished in the thirteenth century and one (at the Moot With No Name) on the Giza cave system by Andrew Collins. This week's posting concentrates on reporting back on them.
On Abraham AbulafiaThis was a dense but highly informative talk-seminar from Simson Leigh, not an academic but deeply learned on Jewish mystical and magical culture - an earlier lecture, which I did not attend, was on 'golem-building for dummies'.
Abraham Abulafia, the man and method, was the main subject but Simson dealt brilliantly with other Jewish mystic-meditation techniques including, briefly, the nearest that one might come to a Jewish sex-magical tradition.
He spoke on both breath control and letter manipulation and circulated a diagram and demonstrated.
Abulafia's technique simply and intensively employed these techniques of breath control and vocalisation to systematically remove all extraneous mental matter through mental 'crowding'.
At risk of over-simplification, the technique is a sort of anti-Zen, using the mental noise of language guided by the intellect alongside physical (mostly head) movements, all designed to suppress the imagination and enable a mystical state that works through stages that are clearly outlined in the Bible.
This is the Judaic tradition of pulling in the emanations of God and creating a form of disassociation that enables the appearance of angels as messengers and one's own voice as the voice of God working from deep within. It is probably not accidental that it limits carbon dioxide to the brain through posture as well!
There was a brief but informative discussion afterwards of the relative lack of research into the physiological processes going on, certainly compared to those surrounding Buddhist techniques. These also use sound as in chant but are concerned with emptying the mind rather than 'filling it with the attributes of God'.
In a sense, the contrast between the implicit intellectualism and integration of self with God of Judaic mysticism and Eastern loss of self and anti-intellectualism was fascinating in itself.
This bears consideration as an ideological difference in 'ways of seeing' that has not been considered fully in the context of history - with non-mystical pragmatism (from Confucius to Maimonides and Aquinas) as the working middle (my view not Simson's).
After neglect since the 16th century, Abulafia is now being rediscovered in some high qabbalistic circles and there are rabbis who are working in the revived tradition - you can even get podcasts from New York :-)
This was also a fascinating insight into the rich Jewish culture of the Mediterranean and into a 'mind-set' that finds yet another way into an expanded consciousness - this time, without emptying the mind or drugs (the other two main methods).
It might be called (at a stretch) Judaic shamanism but directed wholly at God in a spirit of humility (too much God stuff, it was made clear, can kill or make you go insane which brings us back to CO2). Some commentators noted similarities with Thelemite practice but there were no OTO members in the room to verify or comment.
Interesting discussion also took place on technique seen by Abulafia (it would seem) just as technique unrelated to lifestyle, practice or belief other than in God, and as enabler of the body itself to channel its emanations into externalised forms capable of speaking back to the subject.
This, of course, brings us back to the oldest spiritual debate - that between essentialists and existentialists - as to whether the fruits of such techniques pull real entities from outside or construct their realities from within. I am clearly of the latter camp but 'believers' can argue from their perception in the other direction with passion.
From this perspective, Abulafia's approach to the 'Tree of Life' is not at all analogous to chakra meditation because the Tree itself is almost (as I understood it) incidental. It all sounded like very hard work but with consciousness-changing rewards for those who (unlike in the traditions of the East) want a direct relationship with 'God'.
On the Cave System at Giza
I won't go into the detail of the content of this talk which was dense and his position and opinions can largely be studied through Andrew Collins' own work. He regularly updates his website and you are referred to it.
I am not one of those very much convinced by attempts to over-link ancient monuments with various astronomical phenomena.
I think it probable that there are such links and many accounts are highly plausible but, after a while, there is such a degree of nerdish speculation involved that one has to stop and say that we can surmise but not know the truth.
Collins had complicated theories about the Milky Way as Nut and the 'cygnet' constellation as the birthing point of new souls. I am not saying it is right or wrong but astro-nerdism never got my rocks off ... it is just one of those things, like the Mayan calendar or Babylonian astrology, that I leave to others.
The interest for me in this talk was the account of the cave system itself which clearly exists up to a point and requires further exploration as an eco-system even if it proves to contain nothing of archaeological interest.
Collins suggested that there is an 'official' version of the cave exploration which downplays its existence and importance in order to discourage tourists and amateurs (a policy which he seems to approve in order to protect the eco-system) but it seems evidenced that some exploration is clearly continuing.
There are good reasons not to go too far down the discovered route (which Collins and his wife explored for some distance). The air is filled with disease-ridden bat guano, there are poisonous spiders and the air becomes dangerously low on oxygen at a certain point, leading to disorientation and to a dangerous mild euphoria (CO2 again!)
It is certainly unclear how far the caves go (though an earlier eighteenth century explorer suggested they were extensive). I suspect they are simply being prioritised as low, given limited budgets ...
Hawass, the famous Director of Egyptian Antiquities, seems to be a bit of an odd fish but I am happy to interpret his eccentricities relatively benignly as someone clearly trying to manage the complex archaeological situation without allowing too many amateur new agers to trample important sites.
I would not (IMO) assume he is the bad guy - or that there is any 'conspiracy motive'. The prize, eventually, it is said, might be the legendary tomb of Hermes Trismegistus and the ''Emerald Tablets' but the caves are not great environments to explore without funding back-up and little has been found down there to date.
Almost certainly, if it is worth exploring, Hawass wants to do the exploration professionally and then make sure his face is on the National Geographic story if something is found. Collins has done his bit in drawing attention to the phenomena and I am persuaded it deserves further geological and archaeological effort in due course.
However, we should not get over-excited. They are not provenly under the pyramids yet - if ever. They are a natural cave system not a human artefact and that's all they are until the archaologists/geologists have done their job.
Nor should we get seduced by the Hermes story, of course ... it is just a legend although it may mean that there are early burials there which might be worth uncovering.
Some of my informants get quite exercised by their concern that the New Age Egyptology movement has a political motivation with a sinister ideology all of its own but, even if this was to be so, I keep my feet on the ground. The photographs of the cave system were evidence enough of its existence.
Business Update
This week has seen a concentration of effort on the campaign (referred to in an earlier post), which will be announced next week or soon after, and on consolidating the financial position of Pendry White (which continues to win small bits of business week by week) in advance of a review of its 2010 budget on Tuesday. All, in short, is well.
The only irritation has been the enormous performance in getting a replacement blackberry to do what I wanted it to do - give me precisely the same service as I had had from the broken one. The product has fallen in my estimation. Anything that wastes my time is bad - end of story.
Naturally, Blackberry think they are doing me a service by offering 'improved services' that are unnecessary, like multiple calendars and the entry of Google as some kind of default into its browser (which then screws up the reception of my own Blog). It is not.
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