LittleBuddha said:
It reminds me of how Buddha worked towards enlightenment and nirvana - that being the light/crown at Kether. As you move upwards, the receiving of light is greater.
Yes, but this is to somewhat misunderstand the actual Tree, methinks. AS implied in Aeon418’s quote I respond to below, the whole point is to GAIN
10 WITH the Light ‘in hand’, NOT retrace steps and return Light to its source,
1 – it is ALREADY united with its source and needs OUR effort (
opus, the Great Work,
tikkun) to free it from entanglements at the ‘bottom’ of the Tree and complete the task of
circulatio.
Keter is the Light because it is the source. Remember that the Tree itself is the process of unfolding – from one whole or unit, to one ten-fingered that can reflect on it. (There are as many actual Trees as there are upright sentient beings.) Mentally following paths into the layers of the onion of what we have traversed to become selves... is like Jungian psychoanalysis, finding out what ‘makes one tick’.
But the process that leads to enlightenment is more specific than that, and it is this. In the great original wheel or Monad centered atop the head of standing Adam Qadmon, we have come from the 1st station, straight up, to the 10th, straight back. Now 10th is actually the end of the process 8-9-10 through which we progressed from being the fully developed earth or nature-matter (7) to being a conscious self: 8th departs FROM ‘straight down’ (earth’s crust) and thus represents
desire (circumcision is on the 8th day), 9th is APPROACH to straight back (inner horizon) and thus
thought, 10th IS straight back and thus
self-knowledge. These are doer, thinker, and knower (Son, Holy Spirit, and Father to the Gnostic), self’s three aspects. Plato said that the eternal can be known and finite durations thought about but that
of the fleeting present instant we (the doer) must remain ever ignorant (it vanisheth ere it can be considered). It can only act responsibly if guided by thinker and knower, those aspects of self dealing with things of finite duration and things eternal, respectively.
The human situation is most simply represented in the suit of Staves: 8 fails to accept guidance from 9 and 10 (both called Victory in the
Bahir) but adheres rather to 7, the Holy Palace (physicality). In other words, we have already
backtracked from where we should be and in a sense are: we ARE 10 (the Shekhinah or Presence) but act like mere 8s! or 7s even! what doofuses we be...
The situation in the other suits is more complicated (but still much simpler than general relativity).
Aeon418 said:
The "light" from Kether at the top, to Malkuth at the bottom is the same all the way. Only on it's way down it's form changes and becomes less fluidic and energetic. "Kether is in Malkuth, and Malkuth is in Kether.
Okay, I just sort of figured this out, so I’ll share it with those who triggered the understanding in my storm-clouded cognitive process.
Light, 1, is to be carried all the way to 10, whereupon it forms the totality 1-10. The next ‘level’ or layer-of-things would be 2-9, the next 3-8, the next 4-7... Now 3-8-9-2 represent the phases lead-mercury-silver-gold of the Great Work, in the Tree of Coins or rounds (where they are the cycles Saturn-Mercury-moon-precession). 3-lead is air/thinker instructing water/doer, 8-mercury is water/doer (us) opening up TO that instruction, 9-silver the (our) opening up to the Light itself (fire/knower), and 2-gold air/thinker’s OWN receptivity to the Light, in which we (water/doer) now share(s), having ‘reunited’ WITH air/thinker and, now finally, fully with fire/knower as well.
3-8 completes the first or ground layer of the Work in other words, 9-2 the second layer, and 1-10 the final layer, the Light itself (oneness with it, that is). So one does not so much ‘climb’ the Tree as stretch oneself out to its limits above AND below.
DewDrop said:
...we most often learn the Major Arcana from the Fool to the World... [yet] when compared to The Tree of Life, the Fool's Road start at the topp of the tree and the World's Road is the last road to enter Malkut at the bottom.
This confuses me!
It may help any not fully committed to the GD (or similar) ‘system’ if I point out that in the
medieval (British/Irish bardic) system of correlating letters with numbers, Hebrew tav (T-tinne-holly) resides at XI Force, not XXI World. Careful analysis makes it clear 21 (17-21 remained secret) referred to bardic Aa-ailm-palm, one of two letters restored (hypothesized as explanation) by Robert Graves (the other being Ii-mistletoe/loranthus, which is OBVIOUSLY yod), Aa turning out (by process of elimination) to be Hebrew tet. If the letter-path correlation generally accepted happens to be correct (I can point to ONE piece of internal evidence it MAY be), tet marks the path from Chesed to Gebhureh. But in trump terms (being first-from-the-end) and poetically, XXI World is the outer aspect of unity, which is brought about of course by duality’s enabling more than one aspect to be so-distinguished (within unity). Unity's inner aspect is, of course, LeBateleur, the conductor: where attention is focused (that which motivates-toward-uprightness).
[Edited to add:] Oh, and the Fool by bardic numeration is H-huath-hawthorn, or chet, which by the commonly accepted correlations marks the path from Binah to Gebhureh. These correlations are in alef-bet-ical order starting at the top or root and thus show an unfolding motion from unity, not a dynamic of 'climbing back up' (which would be the alef-bet in reverse).