Holocentric Qabbalah

Holocentric Qabbalah is at the crux of my magical orientation and system of practice. It has a western characteristic but to me spans the cultural band that spreads from Europe to East Asia, from the latitudes south of the Mediterranean to the Arctic Circle. That is not to say that these cultures practiced what I call Holocentric Qabbalah, but that their systems can be readily adapted to it due to an intrinsic compatibility. Holocentric Qabbalah is more an organization of existing occult knowledge than it is a creation from scratch. The word Holo-centric means the All-centered, whereas Qabbalah is best understood from its Hebrew letter roots. The word is transliterated QBLH, from the root QBL. Qof.Bayt.Lammed poses three glyphs: the back of the head signifying our existence as a product of evolution, the house signifying something that contains and nurtures, and the ox goad signifying the driving will.

Together these three glyphs send a message. They tell us QBL is our evolutionary dynamic contained and nurtured by our conscious will. The final Heh or H represents the life-breath, whose glyph is a window or banner, through which light and life flow, both a connection and an opening to the greater reality of life. So QBLH is the living, breathing QBL. The latter word is related to the English Cabal, usually interpreted in terms of “cult”. What this may reveal is that “cults” are or were meant to be systems where humanity takes normally slow and haphazard evolution and brings it into a context of conscious guidance and control. In that sense, Qabbalah and internally transforming Alchemy are complementary terms.

The fundamental representation of Holocentric Qabbalah is the centered sphere. The image is an astrological sun glyph in three dimensions, and signifies perfection. Although in evolutionary terms such perfection is an open ended dynamic, the image is like a chaotic attractor, never quite attained, but always the goal. At the same time the center of the sphere represents the center of our essence, the core of our being, and this is the essence of unrealized perfection. The periphery of the sphere is our world, including all worlds and dimensions, and ideally this reflects our internal essence. In practice the sphere is of infinite radius and the world is amorphous and dynamic, always flowing and changing, and always tending to resonate with our essence within. The centered sphere is the Holocentric Meme in a nutshell. It takes a form of Qabbalah or Internal Alchemy to interact with it.

Qabbalah represents any number of conceived systems where the conscious will contains and guides the evolutionary dynamic, where evolution from a seemingly random set of transformations becomes consciously purposeful in the human sense and includes the dimensions of mind and psyche and spirit as well as those of body and physical nature. In practice any Qabbalah revolves around a meaningful array of symbols that represents the interactive and progressive elements of the evolutionary dynamic. These are also the fundamental elements underlying our human expression and the structure and metaphysical function of the worlds around us, all of which reflect something within us. The goal of Holocentric Metaphysics is to awaken the essence at the center and orient our nature toward the world as if it were its perfect yet polymorphous mirror.

When our perception is purified so the world is experienced as a mirror of self, and self is purified so that the eternal center shines through the two become images of each other. These images can be likened to the object and image on two sides of a lens. In terms of the Holocentric sphere or Holosphere, the medium between the center and the outer “shell” is called the Qadmon Lens. I borrow and modify the word from the Hebrew Kabbalistic term: Adam Qadmon, signifying the archetypal human essence. The Hebrew letters Dalet.Mem represent the word for blood, and Qof represents our evolutionary system of existence, the intelligence through which we evolve and all it entails. The back of the head representing the primitive areas is the glyph for Qof, as expressed previously. Qof.Dalet.Mem.Vav.Nun-final can, therefore be considered as the evolutionary progression of our blood in feedback with the indeterminate structure of events (or event structure as I like to call it). In this sense, however, Qof is not the mindless evolution of western science, but a dynamic system where divine essence and meaning is at its heart.

The Qadmonic Lens is, therefore, a natural presence even though my mapping of it is rather abstract and metaphorical. I describe the process the Lense engenders as “lensing”. Lensing to me is the proverbial mechanism of all magic if not all manifestation. Contrary to how materials lens light there is no distinction between image and object. Both images are real in the Holocentric context, and lensing can go both ways, the outer sphere lensing the center and the center lensing the outer sphere.

In this metaphysics the reason this dynamic seems to be flawed or distorted in our experience is because our evolution is incomplete, even as it is Self-generated, where the self is defined as the complete Holocentric system. For now, an incomplete evolving reality is lensing many centers to activate and bring it to completion. In so doing each center will manifest its own potential to lens a complete reality. Thus reality when singularly complete will become infinitely more evolving, more variant, more complex and more alive and meaningful without contradictions because every contributing reality reflects an individualized contributing center that is one version of the polymorphous essence of perfection.

In other words, if reality is an evolving God it gives birth to divine point sources that also grow to become Gods, but far beyond any polytheistic sense. Within this evolution the Gods do not rule, nor are they ruled, because the ultimate rule is free will, the only rule that can fit the essence of polymorphous open-ended perfection, whose essence is Love with a capital L. This, to my chagrin, can be likened to the Thelemic: Love is the Law, although there is no “love under will” part. I say, “to my chagrin” because Free Will and Law are contradictory terms. My version of Thelema would rather be: Free Will in Love and Love in Free Will.

Holocentric understanding focuses on transforming inner dynamics whose foundation is lensing. Understanding lensing in its encompassing sense in my experience greatly simplifies the understanding of occultism, especially magic by any name. Magic here is defined as the conscious lens path from center to periphery in existence, from subject to object, in other words. Karma is one form of the lensing dynamics of incompletion that create the reverse current, from periphery to center. When the central essence grasps, comprehends and embodies the peripheral current it can transform the situation and use it as means toward further completion. This is why karmic lessons are also termed “soul lessons” since the soul is one way of understanding the central essence, at least in the evolving individual sense.

Qabbalah is a system of conscious evolution that ultilizes lensing as its means, cultivating receptivity and understanding of incoming flows to respond with corresponding and “correcting” out-going flows, thus bringing the full system of existence surrounding a given individual center into balance and wholeness. One of the aims of Holocentric transformation is the tangible realization of the whole and complete nature of the centered sphere of being. In this metaphysics even the proverbial One is an aspect of wholeness and not the whole. Thus there is no denial of anything in our nature so long as it is of our nature. Being whole does not mean being all of existence in the embodied sense. It does mean the embodiment of paradoxes, but not of contradictions. We cannot be free when we are also enslaved, for example. We cannot for the sake of a biased and misunderstood intellectualization of the concept of wholeness be fulfilled and suffer at the same time. We cannot be alive and dead all in the same breath and believe we are complete.

Contradictions exist as the background of the infinite and eternal sphere of existence. There can be no open-ended possibility without contradiction, just as there can be no choice without a “no” to accompany the “yes”. In the deeper metaphysical sense, we do not completely eliminate the “no”. We simply act on it, removing contradictions to our nature and free will beyond our existential domain. This ability means we encompass both existence and non-existence by the sheer fact that we can choose for something to not exist in terms of our experience, but these two do not mix. Death does not mess with life, and life does not mess with death. They each have their place in accordance to our chosen experience.

All of this reflects an ideal state, but it is also emerging in our currently evolving state. Cultivating and catalyzing that emergence is what any Qabbalah is all about. Qabbalahs relate to the Holocentric system in terms of axes and coordinates on the sphere. In practice, Qabbalahs using alphabets or meaningful construct arrays define the orientation of the sphere in what is called sacred space, both in the abstract and in terms of superposition of the sphere onto the human aura. Holocentric Qabbalah can be based on the nine worlds of Yggdrasil and the Runic alphabets just as it can be based on the ten sephiroth of the Hebrew Tree of Life and its corresponding alphabet, or any other meaningful contruct array of elements representing reality and our place in it. The axes and designation would be different, the languages of expression and mythic representations different, the applications and implications of these two systems may be different, but the ultimate reality context described would be the same. Construct arrays don’t even have to be alphabetic. Enochian occultism, for example, can be applied to the Holocentric system as can the array of planet correspondent representations known as the spirits of the Goetia.

The latter case is an example of two systems complementing each other in the same Holocentric context, these being Hebrew Qabbalah and its planetary attributes and the system of Goetic seals. Placing any system in a Holocentric context “slaves” it (in the computer and not the enslaving sense) to the parameters and dynamics of Holocentric metaphysics. Thus a system that is hazardous on its own becomes not only safe, but creative evolutionary catalyst and manifestation of lens potential when Holocentric- oriented.

This kind of occult innovation between traditional or designed systems and the Holocentric model is not arbitrary like chaos magic. Every organization establishes an array of implications and interweaving meanings whose patterns and relationships need to be understood if lensing is to be effective. Grafting two systems in a holocentric context is a process of learning because not every system is compatible with every other. Such grafting is similar to genetic engineering only the result is a new set of lensing options, patterns and meanings.

Although Holocentric Metaphysics is not really that difficult to understand, it has wide ranging applications and possibilities, and as such constitutes an advanced metaphysical system, or meta-system coordinating other systems. Applications even range beyond occultism, given that even energy devices can be arranged according to qualities and orientations using this model to result in profound effects. One very useful quality of this model is that given the nature of the centered sphere and what it represents, this model cannot be abused. The model orients the lensing of wholeness, and no amount of contradiction can distort that nature. You cannot perform harmful magics, for example using this model even though you can generate profound transformations in yourself and the world around you. In doing so, however, you cannot avoid the cause/effect cycle of what might be called karmic feedback, even though you are free to deny its existence all you want.

In addition, as long as you remain receptive and don’t dive into something so complex that the resulting lens feedback will overwhelm you, you cannot hurt yourself. The only time I saw this happen was when someone tried to superimpose the sphere onto her aura without proper grounding and became overwhelmed by its complexity. If you start with a simple circle and master that first, and if you value the qualities of centering and grounding, there is no problem here. When a Qabbalistic application is utilized, on the other hand, if there is lack of grounding the system will simply refuse to activate beyond its intellectual and theoretical form. The ungrounded mind will simply keep things mental because there will be too many ideas to correspond to actual vibrations. The time it takes to understand things in terms of experience is also the time it takes to acclimate to the vibratory nature of the sphere-aligned correspondences. The more I worked with this model the more it revealed regarding the potentials of human evolution, and the more I could use lensing to insure the format vibrates stability for anyone trying to access it. This may be hard to believe even for a seasoned occultist, but the effect has been tested on at least few people.

Holocentric applications can be used in a context of eastern yoga, western magical systems particularly qabbalistic ones, psionic and psychic development, as a system of metaphysical awakening, as a format for arrays of energy devices using sound, light and fields, and as a system of internal energy development as well as internal alchemy.

The Holocentric model is a post-modern interpretation of the ancient metaphysics of the Divine Chariot or Divine Throne. The system of cakras oriented with the heart at the center and each pair of chakras forming the poles of a surrounding spherical shell is also compatible with the model. In fact, it is all too easy to interpret the circular Indian yantras in three-dimensional Holocentric terms. For the western occultist, however, the easiest and most comprehensive format of understanding this model is the Qabbalah of the Sepher Yetzirah. This Qabbalah is an array of correspondences based on the Hebrew alphabet whose elements are aligned in relation to each other in terms of a three dimensional space around a center. Traditionally, the space is considered to outline a double four sided pyramid or octahedron, or a cube. The linearity of the image, however, is arbitrary and the correspondences just as easily fit in a spherical context.

Given the properties and nature of the spherical template, this is not just symbolic geometry but a very potent dynamic of lensing. The meaning of the sphere in terms of human evolution and esoteric psycho-cosmology is deep enough to resonate those metaphysical properties into any symbol system aligned with it. It is this quality among others that defines the Holocentric model as a potent occult understanding. I’ve written this article because so far I’ve been explaining my views and practices around a fundamental model and understanding, without ever clarifying what that model is. Till now it was simply difficult to describe or discuss it in few words, relatively speaking, which make sense to anyone involved in more traditional practices. My mind was simply in a different gear, oriented to elaborate possibilities related to applications, not summarize and define the nature of the beast.

I realized that in describing other systems in this context there is a limit to how much I can simplify those descriptions without seeming to make speculative claims out of the blue. In the future I will attempt to express things in a much simpler manner, however, even at risk of sounding arbitrary, in parallel with my more elaborate writings. I am conducting these writing to generate a comprehensive record of my explorations, but also to have a more organized personal reference as I encounter new frontiers in my applications.