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 the broken world I was suddenly seeing with new eyes. The wonder lasted about a week before the weight of it settled in.

The harsh judgment of Geburah shows up now in every act of cruelty, and I cannot unsee it. The bureaucrat who follows rules without heart is Hod run amok. The drunk swaying at the stop sign has become a Nefesh trapped in Malkuth, cut off from his higher soul, and I find I can no longer see him as merely a drunk. Knowledge was supposed to set me free, and what it gave me instead was a set of new prisons to notice, new ways of understanding why the world hurts the way it does.

My walks through the city feel different now. A Catholic church I pass sometimes has beautiful old stonework and Gothic arches that still make my heart lift, and its builders knew something about sacred geometry even if they could not name it the way I have learned to name it. People stream out after Sunday Mass and I wonder how many of them realize they have just taken part in a ritual that maps onto Tiphareth consciousness, the sphere the Golden Dawn assigned to the sacrificed god, or that the cross they venerate holds the whole Tree of Life folded into its arms. Probably none of them do, and they are better off for it.

Last year I stood in that church during an evening service because the door was open and I was curious. The light came through the stained glass, the incense hung in the air, and the prayers were murmured in Latin, which is rare enough these days that I wondered for a moment whether I had walked into some other century. It was beautiful. Yet I could not simply be present with it the way the people around me seemed to be. My mind kept cataloguing correspondences, tracing the flow of energy, analyzing the structure of the rite, until I understood that knowledge can become one more kind of noise, keeping you from what is in front of you.

The isolation wears on you more than anything else. You can attempt to explain to your mother why you spent three hours meditating on the twenty-third path, the watery path of Mem that runs from Geburah down to Hod and carries, in the Golden Dawn's tarot, the image of the Hanged Man, or tell your closest friend that the trouble in their love life comes from an imbalance between Netzach and Hod, and you will watch a polite confusion spread over their faces, a worry that you have gone too far down the rabbit hole. Some days they are right, and I do not know how to climb back out.

Real gnosis ruins you for small talk, though you never mean to be condescending about it. You love these people, God, you love them more than you can say, yet you are speaking different languages now and no easy translation runs between them. A friend of mine who is brilliant in ways I am not, a mathematics professor and school director now studying engineering on top of everything else, looked at me as though I had begun speaking in tongues when I tried to explain how the four worlds of the Qabalah relate to quantum field theory. To him I was mixing legitimate science with medieval superstition. I still think I was onto something, though I may have been wrong about the details, and I could not find words to bridge the distance between us that afternoon.

The first humans who ate from the Tree of Knowledge must have regretted it, less for the exile from Eden than for the sudden understanding of what they had lost, since ignorance once shattered can never be put back together. The mystics speak of the dark night of the soul, a phrase they owe to the Spanish Carmelite John of the Cross, and they make it sound temporary, a hard passage you go through on the way to illumination. What they leave out is that for some of us the dark night becomes a way of life, a country you learn to travel by its own strange stars.

I dream sometimes of going back, of being content again with the simple explanations I used to accept and finding meaning in things that now feel hollow, of no longer seeing the pain behind every smile or the desperate reaching behind every prayer. What I know stays known, however. Even on the hard days, when the grief threatens to drown me, I cannot imagine choosing ignorance over this, because alongside the sorrow comes wonder, a childlike wonder at the intricate beauty of existence that I would never have seen otherwise.

A homeless man keeps to the corner near my place. My heart breaks for his suffering, and I also see the spark of Kether blazing in his eyes, the same divine light that illuminates the highest seraph burning in someone the world has decided does not matter, and he is my brother and my teacher in ways that have nothing to do with sentiment. The news fills me with despair at humanity's capacity for destruction, and yet the cosmic drama is playing out as it must, each tragedy serving the larger unfolding of consciousness through time, which I know sounds cold written down. When someone I love leaves, the pain is unbearable in the moment, and love itself remains Chesed moving through the universe, seeking expression wherever it can find it. Whether all this makes me wise or delusional I cannot say, and the distinction matters less to me than it once did.

A friend asked me last month why I keep studying if it only makes me sad, why I read another book about the Sephiroth or spend hours contemplating divine names that nearly everyone now regards as ancient superstition. The answer is that every so often someone understands. You mention the Middle Pillar and their eyes light with recognition, or you quote Dion Fortune and they finish the sentence, and for a moment you are no longer alone in your cosmic homesickness. Sometimes the understanding even helps another person make sense of what is happening to them, as when a friend in crisis finds meaning in the suffering once you can describe it as a difficult planetary transit or a necessary descent into the underworld of their own psyche.

The alternative is to pretend the mystery does not exist, and I have tried it. It fails, because what you have seen stays seen wherever you turn your eyes. This path demands everything, your certainties and your comfort and your simple faith in simple answers, and it shows you beauty that makes you weep and horror that makes you question whether existence is good at all. You become a stranger in your own culture, unable quite to share the concerns that fill other people's days, and yet the path makes you real in a way nothing else has.

The Tree of Life grows in the soil of human experience, its roots sunk deep in our untidy world, and every Cabalista is called to be a bridge between the worlds while knowing that few will ever understand what the bridge leads toward. The line from Ecclesiastes still holds after all these centuries. Wisdom makes you sadder because you finally grasp how little you know, how much work remains to be done, and how small you are against a mystery that stretches out in every direction.

My books stay on the shelf. On Friday nights I still light the candles and trace the paths between the Sephiroth in my notebook, because the flame needs tending and the old stories need someone who remembers them, and someone ought to be there when a person turns up at the crossroads between the worlds, frightened and asking for directions, even if the answers are never as clear as either of us would like. My heart breaks over all of this regularly, and I go on doing the work regardless, by candlelight, one path at a time.

R☉ 𓂀