En Esto Creo

Past the White House

A Sunday walk down Buray Avenue, September 12, 2021 A little past one on a Sunday afternoon I decided to walk home, under a sun that kept losing its nerve, ducking behind thick dark clouds and then peeking out again like Peter Pan at a nursery window. My way took me past the White House where the Divine Master once lived. The house has grown old and largely untended, and the few patches and improvements someone began on it in recent years now lie fallow and unfinished, as though the workers stepped out for lunch and the lunch lasted several seasons. Walking by, I wished it had been preserved the way the Rizal house in Calamba has been preserved, with a gate people could pass through and rooms they could stand in. From the road I could see its side, the outer walls worn by weather and by the slower erosion of years. If walls could speak, or could keep the voices and whispers that passed through them long ago, what a joy it would be to put an ear against them and listen backward throug...

In Much Wisdom Is Much Grief

On what the Tree of Life gives, and what it takes away "For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow." Ecclesiastes 1:18 A moment comes to everyone who walks this path long enough, and nobody warns you about it beforehand. You are reading, the Zohar , say, or Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah , or the dog-eared copy of Crowley's 777 that has followed you through three apartments, and something clicks. A pattern rises out of the chaos of symbols and numbers, and for a split second the universe makes perfect, terrible sense, and then you wish it did not, though by then it is too late to choose. The Tree first became real to me on a Tuesday afternoon in late summer. It stopped being an abstract diagram and became a map of reality I could see operating everywhere, the Sephiroth no longer pretty circles with Hebrew names but living forces, currents of divine energy running through everything around me, through me, and through th...

Eighteen Lines, Opened

What The Master Universe Sets Out to Do I. A Message Read Aloud and Left Alone On December 9, 1969, his birthday, Ruben E. Ecleo, Sr. gave his followers a message of eighteen short lines in English, which they have kept ever since under the title The Master Universe : You cannot see me, but I can read your thought. I am not only visible but also invisible and superhuman. I am all about you and even inside of you, without Me you cannot live, no one knows how large I am. Yet I am many times larger than the earth. I am the same to everyone a common Denomination in the lives of all living persons. People are now beginning to explore my possibilities. Yet I have changed every phase of human relationships. No one can hide from me, because, I am omnipresent. My value is the exact ratio to the number Of people from all walks of life. I am the effect of every government, Every creed, every tongue, every inch surface. I am a man yet my knowledge, My intellect and bein...

The Scholar and the Seer

Could Rizal and Blavatsky Have Met? I. Two Lodgers in London In the summer of 1888 two of the more remarkable minds of the century were living a few miles apart in London. One was José Rizal, the twenty-seven-year-old Filipino physician, novelist, and reformer, whose Noli Me Tángere had been published in Berlin the year before and had made him a marked man in the eyes of the Spanish friars. The other was Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, fifty-seven, Russian-born, the co-founder of the Theosophical Society, who was finishing the book she regarded as her life's work. No record shows that they ever met, and the question this essay asks is whether they could have, and what the asking teaches. Rizal arrived in London in late May 1888 and took lodgings with the Beckett family at 37 Chalcot Crescent, a curving terrace of houses at the foot of Primrose Hill. He had come with a single purpose. Spanish accounts of the Philippines before the conquest described its people as barbarians whom S...

The Tree of Life

Ten spheres, thirty-two paths, the Qabalistic Cross and the Lord's Prayer The longer one stays with Kabbalistic thought, the more one pattern keeps surfacing: the universe as a web of relationships among its parts, with the Tree of Life as the map that web produces. A medieval Hebrew manuscript and a modern Western esoteric manual draw the same figure, ten spheres arranged on three pillars and joined by paths, and both use it to describe the same thing across centuries of commentary and practice. Where the Tree came from is disputed. Some writers find its forerunners in Egyptian, Mesopotamian or Gnostic systems, though the evidence for any direct descent is thin. The doctrine of the ten sefirot as divine powers first appears in the Sefer ha-Bahir , which surfaced among the Jewish mystics of Provence in the late twelfth century, and Kabbalah spread from there through Spain and the wider Jewish world. The diagram itself came later still. The familiar drawing, with its circles, pilla...

The Key That Was Taken

Jesus, the Kabbalah of Entering, and the Orchard of Pardes Luke records a sentence that many readers pass over on the way to something else. Jesus is at table in a Pharisee's house (Luke 11:37), speaking to the nomikoi , the lawyers whose trade was the interpretation of Torah, and the King James Version gives his words this way: "Woe unto you, lawyers! for ye have taken away the key of knowledge: ye entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering in ye hindered" (Luke 11:52). The verse usually gets filed as a rebuke, one more entry in the long ledger of Jesus quarrelling with religious authorities, and the reader moves on to the next pericope without much thought. The accusation, though, is oddly concrete. He charges the lawyers with removing an object, a key, and with failing to perform an action, entering, and the Greek presses the second charge by using the same verb, eiserchomai , twice inside one clause, once for what the lawyers refused to do and once for...

En Esto Creo

Eighteen Lines, Opened

The God Who Descends and the Savior Who Ends History

In Much Wisdom Is Much Grief

The Key That Was Taken

The Scholar and the Seer

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Past the White House

In Much Wisdom Is Much Grief

Eighteen Lines, Opened

The Scholar and the Seer

The Tree of Life

The Key That Was Taken