The Voice of Tahuti, 4th Installment

The Ritual
Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram
Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram
1st Enochian Key
Ritual Israfel
(reception)
Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Hexagram
Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram


The Vision
I see a vast sun shining out from within. The light from the sun dissolves everything it touches. The sun is the Word, and it seems to exist in all four phases at once (sunrise, noon, sunset and midnight).
The source of light appears as constant, eternal and unchanging, while the point of view of the observer is constantly changing according to the cycles of the sun, the moon, the seasons, etc.


The Voice
The four stages of the sun reflect the four faces of the Word.

The rising of the sun is the dawning of the visible appearance of Truth.
The sun at noon is the apex of visible Light.
The setting of the sun appears as the veiling of the Word.
The sun at midnight appears as the absence of the Word, silence and darkness.

Only at midnight can a higher truth be known. In the darkness it is possible to go beyond the visible light, which is as the echo of the echo of the Word, and into the naked Truth. This is the only hope of advancement.

What appears as darkness is a subtler form of light, it is closer to the source and it appears as devastation and destruction. It is an opening for the seeker after Truth. It is pure utterance, unbroken light.

Only in the unknowing, the seeming darkness, can a higher truth be found. It is the imperfection of the seeker that allows them to approach the perfect. Beyond the visible appearance of light is Mystery unknowable. What appears as light is only the fading echo of the Word.


The Commentary
This calls to mind the following, from Crowley's Liber LXV, I:
There is a light so strenuous that it is not perceived as light. 
[...]
Wolf's bane is not so sharp as steel; yet it pierceth the body more subtly. 

Meaning, of course, that the subtle is more effective than the dense, though at first it can barely be perceived. Dense 'light' reflects, whereas subtle light is all-penetrating.

LXV continues:
So also the light that is absorbed. One absorbs little and is called white and glistening; one absorbs all and is called black.

This also calls to mind the the Sufi concept (so eloquently presented in Henry Corbin's Man of Light in Iranian Sufiism) of the midnight sun and the darkness that accompanies the approach to the pole (the pole star representing the summit of higher consciousness). There's the Ahrimanian darkness, being simply the absence of Light or gnosis, and then the pure light or 'black light' which appears after a certain threshold is crossed. Pure light, with no external object from which to reflect, is invisible. Crowley called it NOX (light withdrawn, as opposed to LVX or light in extension).

That which is below is like that which is above. I've seen case after case in which a beginning student gains the ability to generate a not insignificant amount of energy, yet they have no clue that anything at all is happening. The light they're generating is too subtle for them to perceive, and it takes some time before their perceptual apparatus is refined enough to be able to sense the product of their own work. The sooner a student lets go of all expectations and simply observes, the sooner they'll grow aware of the subtle essences they're invoking. All along the path of advancement, the perceptual apparatus must be continually refined in order to be made to register subtler and subtler degrees of light - first the subtler essences of Assiah, then the visionary light of Yetzirah, on to the experience of mystical union characteristic of Briah, and beyond to Atziluth.

It is the imperfection of the seeker that allows them to approach the perfect.
The perfect seeks expression in the imperfect.

The fact that I find these so easy to comment upon makes me wonder just how far outside of my own subconscious I'm getting with these visions. Some visions baffle, only revealing their light after prolonged study yields connections that could not possibly have been known beforehand. All visions are filtered, some more than others. Ah well, hopefully they're of some use anyway.