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 t...