Apech

Shut yourself

She's pissed.

I'm not enlightened ... is that ok with everyone?

Always close and never far ... Big black is good ... much joy to you ....

Looky here: ... this is Nabta Playa in the Egyptian desert dated to between 8 - 10,000 years BC. Aligned to the sun, sirius and orion ... not great engineering ... except its lasted all this time and they built it for a purpose ... it had meaning ... close by are a series of cow shaped stones placed carefully over hidden natural rock formations which are also cow shaped ... bloody good estate agents really ha ha.

Damn I wondered why all the paper doilies ... where's GrmP gone .. outside for a smoke?

What kind of pub is this?

Why do you think that's a contradiction? Good engineering and religion (for want of a better word). Do you think they built Stonehenge for a laugh ... just chuck a few stones in a field for the tourists?? No it meant something ... and it still does to a lot of people cos its in our psyche (or however you like to put it). They built it well because it meant something ... get it?

I think your understanding is a bit limited and you are confused by these references to Xtianity ... those Xtians are even more confused than you. But each to his own. Its your round anyway ... I'll have a Barley Wine if that's ok with you.

Ok if you want to call him an engineer, that's ok with me ... but his design was based on their religious beliefs. The stretching the cord and measuring the fields after inundation goes back to pre-dynastic times ... the Greeks were late comers ... the Egyptians did not abstract like the Greeks it was both/and practical and religious in their eyes ... no difference ... your view is the product of 2000 years of fucked up thinking .. that's all.

Buckets of sweat mate ... buckets of it.

Imhotep was a priest and vizier ... and designed the whole Step Pyramid complex as well as the pyramid itself. It is you sir who is wearing the silly hat ... a pointy one I think.

How about ... to learn the really interesting stuff you need a grounding in basics which takes time. To test that people are making progress through basics you introduce a grading system so that you can judge progress and to let people know they are getting somewhere ... once you get to a certain level you forget about the grading. How about ... people like to teach what they know and like to teach people because it benefits them ... that's a reasonable motivation isn't it?

Groan. A pyramid shape is both the most practical way to build a stable tall building and the perfect symbolic shape to reflect the benben stone or first mound. The whole point of celestial geometry is that it reflects and is reflected in nature. Its not reveres engineering as you put it but reflexivity.

I've listen to many but not all of the recordings and to be honest I'm struggling to get through them. Mr. Wallace, lovely chap that he is, seems very aligned to the Gelugpa and Theravada traditions and to be honest although I am sure his Dzogchen descriptions are accurate in accordance with the text he is using ... I do not feel he is talking from authority. However Dzogchen which seems to popular is not something I feel at all connected with ... @alwayson ... you make me wish I was still a mod ... you really do.

Butterfly: I'd like to be a caterpillar again. God: Well if you encyst.

It seems to me that the transmission sometimes occurs via direct revelation to individuals .... here's an example of Jacob Boehme ...

Well, I suppose the best thing is to start at the beginning ... the word Hermetic is from the Greek god Hermes and the Greeks were particularly fond of making equivalences between their gods and other peoples. There was no real religious division in those days since as polytheists they were quite happy to accept that different peoples worshipped different gods. But as I say the Greeks liked to make correspondences and the one we are concerned with is Hermes = Thoth (or Djehuti). The reason this god is so important is that he is the god of wisdom and learning. And as such he was the god of the priest/king/scientists (as they have been called) of the ancient world. His learning and wisdom makes him the inventor - or the bringer to mankind of writing, mathematics, medecine and magic. He knew the words and how to utter them to effect magic. Magic in Ancient Egypt being called heka. So to the Egyptians Thoth was the god of doctors, scribes, architects and so on. This relationship between men and god gives rise to a particular importance in the 'project' of understanding ourselves and the world around us. In other words if they wanted revelation, truth and the secrets of how things work .. they would appeal to Thoth. The Greeks saw their equivalent Hermes as a helpful messenger between gods and men and a guide to the underworld ... just as Thoth was. Also the ancient books such as the Book of the Dead were said to be written by Thoth ... and so are in a way the very first Hermetic texts themselves. Indeed the oldest extended religious writing in the world are the Pyramid Texts ( c. 2350 BC) and these would be the oldest Hermetic Texts known. As such the Pyramid Texts, the Middle Kingdom Coffin Texts and the New Kingdom Book of the Dead form a corpus of tradition spanning about 3000 years. They are all essentially guides to navigating the hidden realm of the Duat, or underworld as it is usually translated. All attributed to Thoth and all about helping those who sought the knowledge to journey in their consciousness through the Duat and become an akh or imperishable spirit. ( a form of immortality). We know that these ancient civilisations and their knowledge were destroyed (or had become worn out) by the end of the Roman Empire and when Rome converted to Christianity they were actively persecuted. However before this happened there was a period mainly in the first few Centuries AD when in places like Alexandria the thinkers of that time were formulating new philosophies and mystical systems. These were mostly written in Greek which was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire and hence were attributed to Hermes (and not Thoth) ... but they actually mean the same god/person and they were attributed to someone who probably never existed called Hermes Trismegistus ... which means Hermes Thrice Great ... and the link is that Thoth also had this title of Thrice Great ... so in the guise of an ancient sage they were addressing Thoth himself. So the Hermetic Corpus, the books written in Greek and attributed to Hermes Trismegistus were actually claiming to be the wisdom handed down from the ancient world ... not only of Egypt but also Sumer (Iraq) and Persia (Iran). On the Christian persecution and burning of books much of this was lost in Western Europe which descended into the so called Dark Ages but the Arabs kept the books in Greek and some in Latin and preserved them ... so that following the Crusades to the Holy Land the were refound .. translated and became used in Italy and Germany/Poland by the hermeticists and alchemists of the Middle Ages. These texts together with the philosophy and science of the Greek sparked the renaissance. What has been called frequently into question is whether there really is a historical transmission of knowledge which goes with these documents and constitutes a genuine western hermetic tradition. Or is it a fabrication that, even if the texts are genuine, is merely a way to give legitimacy to whatever people are practicing.

Lovely yes.

yes his name is Egyptian Meses meaning 'born' as in Ra-meses (Ra is born). As to what he learned there I am not aware of any authentic sources that might tell us. Its possible you could relate the 10 commandments back to the 42 negative confessions ... but that's not very interesting. the burning bush ... there's plenty of sacred trees in Egypt some of which are clearly symbols of the luminous body. Like this What he def didn't learn is that Kabbalah is from Ka-Ba-Ankh ... this is one of the those false etymologies which float around the ineternet ....

That page is about Tipareth ...

I suggest Imodium if Uranus is excitable.

Looking in the Richard John Lynn trans. of the I Ching I see that Kan (water) has the association moon ... so I feel happier about that now. @viator ... good points all ... still not sure about Daath and Heaven though. What kind of complicates this for me is the placing of single line yin and yang on Binah and Chokmah ... Te source of the mother? @cat ... yes I get that but still not very convinced.

I would make a direct comparison with vajrayana where the text says this is transmitted by the Sambhoga Kaya 'deity' of Chenrezig or other ... in other words direct revelation and not historical transmission. This deity exists beyond serial time as we experience it. Hermes T. would stand as the 'person' through which this knowledge is transmitted by direct revelation. As a side note the Egyptians themselves had two words for eternity ... nHH and djt ... when put to gether they are usually translated as for ever and ever , or through eternity and everlastingness. The first one is the continual cycling of energy as typified by the solar cycle and the second is the endless passage of time since the beginning (Zep Tawi = First Time). So there is a sense of eternal truths transmitted through serial time.

Right have been having a look at this and comparing Crowley's Tree with that given by Cat in her ppf which I think is from Dion Fortune. Firstly I think its important to remember that the I Ching is a complete and self-consistent 'system' (if system is the right word) as is the Kabbalah and the Tree of Life specifically. So within themselves there is harmony and completion. It seems to be a specific 'project' of modern Hermeticism to try to place everything on the Tree of Life ... to use it as a kind of universal schema (is that the right word) for all mystical thought. So the Tarot, the planets and so on are placed on it ... as a kind of meditation to give insight. Crowley then is going along with this approach .. to maybe allow assimilation of Taoist (or at least I Ching) into his system. I don't think Jewish Mystics would have bothered to do this ... so I guess this practice started with the likes of Mirandola ... and also I think it is entirely legitimate given that the basis and history of Hermeticism is entirely this unifying of strands of thought and insight. I think Crowley enjoyed being idiosyncratic and had, to put it politely, a very high level of self confidence. I don't go along with the view that he was just a charlatan ... I think he made a serious study of these ideas and had genuine insights ... although he did mix it with a lot of 'business' as they call it on the stage. So looking at his attributions of the trigrams to the Tree I have the following questions/queries about what he does here: 1. The Tao itself is placed on Kether (the crown) which seems a little odd ... I would have thought Aim Soph ... what is beyond the tree is the place for the mysterious 'source' ?? 2. He calls Thunder Fire ... why? 3. He calls Lake ... water and Water moon. Moon usually means the phasicity of the system ... but the water trigram is often associated with the dark and dangerous ... so not sure what the consequences of this are. 4. Heaven is Da'at .... no don't get that ... can anyone explain ... I know what Da'at is and I know what Heaven is but I can't get the equivalence. .... anyway just some thoughts ...