Posted by jonvon on September 01, 2001 at 20:16:00:
In Reply to: Re: Kaballah posted by john on September 01, 2001 at 14:43:06:
: Anyway with relation to Kabbalah, I think there is a danger in the secrecy. What is on the surface is really cool. What they actually seek, I don't know. But I do know that in practice it ends up like a secret society trying to dabble with powers far beyond their control. At this point if spiritual talk creeps you quit reading because I have to touch on it now. Kaballah is very much like dark witchcraft in that it seeks to effect personal power in the unlocking or invoking of powers that are supposedly controlled by these runes (ancient Hebrew is really a runic language) and processes. The reason I caution against Kaballah is that i used to dabble in these kinds of arts and honestly had quite a bit of success getting things done for me in the psycho-spiritual sense. The problem is that eventually you realize that your guide is really only toying with you until it can get you in a place to devour you. Now in the terms of Kaballah, it invokes some extremely powerful names which i won't even mention. and when these names are invoked they are present immediately. Now I know from experience even feeling these things coming will make you lose control of your bodily functions. I don't think anyone wants to chance using Christianity as a spiritual bungee against that kind of weight. I say this because nothing can harm us because Christians are higher than all of these things spiritually by virtue of Jesus and the holy spirit which has restored us to the level of priests... that is if you can hold on to that knowledge in the face of such intimidation. I spent years getting out from under it. It's flat out bad news. That is the danger of the Kaballah... it is real. It's a whole different game than playing with tree spirits or taro cards and the like.
WOW now that is a post! jeez, what can anyone say to that?
personally my interest in kabbala has largely been via these pop culture sources i mentioned, i am certainly not a practioner or even really a dilletante. paula and i were talking a bit this afternoon about it. it seems like whenever i picked up this book on kabbalah we have lying around, whatever i read really just seemed really shallow. like they were sort of picking up ideas that have been more beautifully and thoroughly expressed in other places and kind of tossing them around. it sort of struck me as possibly well meant, but rather lame. like the thing that paula posted, i kind of had the same reaction. so even though kabbalah has been theoretically interesting because of other things i'd read or seen about it, i've never really seen anything that was actually interesting. i wouldn't really be interested in the black magic part anyway, that is just plain dumb dumb dumb. while we were talking paula said that the thing she posted felt "hollow" to her. i'm still not exactly sure why she posted it.
that story about the golem has always been very fascinating to me, as has the tale of frankenstein. i think because for a long time i've been interested in this question, What is man? we've all gone round and round about lots of other questions like Who am i? and Who is God? and perhaps What is God? and stuff like that, but for me there has been this question kind of haunting me for a long time. I want to know WHAT i am. lately i've been uncovering some interesting things, some of it having roots in the upanishads by way of a guy named Allan Watts. i think one of these days i might start working on an essay or something to try to get all of these thoughts down. anyway i think that is why the golem thing has been interesting to me, its like there is this mythological thing in there somewhere hinting at something, this little bell goes off somewhere in my brain.
oh well i got to git back to the family... maybe i'll write a little more another day.
:-)