“And with them, He depicted all that was formed and all that would be formed.”
(Leicester 2003 – Bath 2004)
Using the methods outlined above, the students proceeded to study the letters in turn from Alef to Tav, and like the study of the Sefirot it would be impossible for me to make a comprehensive list of all I learned about the letters and what I experienced of
them, let alone the group’s knowledge and experiences – suffice to say that simply the physical background of summaries and short essays written on the letters exceeds 250,000 words and ranged across an incredibly diverse list of commentaries, source texts, bible quotes and insights from the students. All I will attempt to do here is again to synthesise the main outcomes of the study:
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- Revelation: What is a Letter?
- Euphoria: The Power of a Letter!
- Trembling: The Dangers of a Letter!
- Unification: The Alefbeit
What is a letter?There is an expression and a truth which dictates that if someone is called a fool for long enough and believes themselves to be a fool because of it, then indeed a fool they shall become. Call someone ugly or worthless repeatedly, and if they believe it for a
second they are in danger of becoming or feeling ugly and worthless. What was once an idea will become a reality, at least in the mind of the victim; Yetzirah, the world of imagination will become as of flesh, Assiah.
It is this notion which is behind the discovery of what is meant by a letter or symbol in the Yetziratic sense. By meditating on or contemplating the meaning of the letter those meanings seemed to be made apparent in the outside world, either through manifestation, or a deeper awareness of this meaning- it came to be… Abrahadabra! “I create as I speak.” Many of these experiences were passive, for example the student may have been contemplating Mem, a symbol for waves and water, and quite inadvertently have, through the suggestion of a friend, had a picnic by a river or a journey to the
seaside, where their contemplation of water would have been more “material”.
But sometimes the experiences felt more active. A student may have been meditating on Shin and a house across the street may have caught fire and burned to the ground – and it was this problem, whether the experiences were passive or active that lead to an
inquiry into the nature of how the SY should indeed be read for it is possible to translate the text in two ways, either 3rd person or Imperative. You can read “He made Shin”, or “Make Shin”. Out of the many experiences that I had during this study I could never
say for sure whether I was witnessing the action of some outside force or was indeed “creating as I spoke” and this lack of certainty lead to the next two realizations the Euphoria and the Trembling.
The Power of a Letter!
Every letter that I worked with seemed to be a composite of positive and negative forces, i.e. there were benefits and hazards of working with them, but indeed some felt more beneficial than others and some felt more hazardous than others. I think that this
difference in the apparent benefit or risk of working with each letter is down to the astrological makeup of the individual student. For example, I had particularly strong experiences of Heh, Yod and Lamed, which govern my Sun, Rising and Opposite sign
accordingly. Regardless of these differences every letter did culminate in a sense of euphoria or connection with divinity or infinity (devekut). It was, as if standing in the circle of 231 gates you were filling the cup of your mind with the energy of
whatever particular letter you were facing, until it overflowed – the moment that it overflowed tended to be connected with the euphoric experience and took
between half a moon and one moon to complete.
The Danger of a Letter!
The feelings and physical/paraphysical experiences in working with the letters were not always pleasant and there were many times when I experienced disturbing breaks from myself, feelings of intense dread, physical trembling, painful sensations and physical
accidents that on a number of occasions nearly claimed my life. Again I believe that this was due to the fact that my astrological makeup didn’t necessarily produce a vessel that nature intended to be filled by a particular letter or that my vessel produced a
dangerous amplification of a given force. I only knew that I and every other student survived the experience and this was almost certainly down to the facts I stated above a) we were working a group, so if someone fell off the spiritual mountain, so to speak, there
were others there to catch them and b) that ultimately we had someone, be it Hermes, Jesus or Elijah, that had already attained to the summit and to whom we were
roped and anchored. I cannot attest my survival to any other factors.
The Alefbeit
Once every letter had been meditated on we had reached the point where we were standing in the middle of our metaphysical circle of foundation in Yetzirah, the
Sefira, surrounded by a ring of 22 infinite letters which had been carved, engraved, permuted, weighed and probed with and which via 231 gates are connected with
each others and with the mind of the students, us, in the centre. Just as Chapter 1 was concluded with the unification of the Sefirot into Sefira, not an eleventh but 10 as 1 in Yesod, so Chapter 2 has been concluded with the unification of the Alefbeit and in
so doing 32 paths are now 1.
BLOGOS 
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