Tangled knots

More thoughts on this previous post, responding to Joe again. The only appeal to authority I see Joe is that you accept the Sefer Yetzirah and its Cube attributions as if they are a given. I'll grant that you are making a good case for recontextualizing it in postmetaphysical terms given the SY premises and attributions. It's just that perhaps the SY and the Cube itself could undergo some further development and even transformation?

As some possible examples of the last comment, note that only the consonants are used in the basic  Hebrew alphabet (with the exception of Aleph). Of course that language further developed to add marks in certain places to indicate the vowels, but originally the alphabet was based on consonants. I don't know the historical reasons but some of the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo I've heard is to hide the correct pronunciation of 'magic' words which actually create things out of thin air, so the vowels and their placement was kept hidden. Whatever the reason, what if we add the vowels into the Cube, since there are only 22 places for attributions?


Also I like the idea of the Fool as the number 0 in the center of the Cube to indicate the withdrawn potential and excess full of new possibilities. Which of course would change the entire Cube attribution structure. I like the idea of the World as the Cube as a whole rather than in any particular position, but again it changes everything. As for the vowels, how about them on the axes from top/bottom, east/west, north/south and from the corners? It might work if we uses 6 vowels (including Y) instead of 5, since A is in the center. Granted I'm not going to actually develop these initial ideas, since neither the SY or Cube are my current interest, just throwing them off the top of my head.

Again this would change everything not using the SY as the source for the Cube. And perhaps you'd be right that to stick to the Cube would require a relatively stable model like the SY instead of starting from scratch. But as we can see, when we start trying to fit other models and contexts into it there are conflicts that just don't fit. I guess I get frustrated when we all, not just you, try to fit everything into our theories of everything. And then assume that our theory subsumes or envelops or supercedes other theories in some 'next turning' of the wheel. I'm guilty too and consider this as much self criticism as anything. It just frustrates me sometimes. Sorry if it seemed personal to you.

And as I've stated before, I also wonder about trying to postmetaphysically recontextualize admittedly metaphysical systems. It seems that when we do in some respects our lower evolutionary impulses are activated and we unconsciously adopt the metaphysical premises that arose in those wordspaces. So it is with Wilber's mixed bag of both metaphysical and postmetaphysical enactments. I've spent a lot of time and energy examining the former and lauding the later but it is a complicated and tangled knot.

PS: I realize that within the 22 Hebrew consonants some them them do double-duty as vowels: aleph, he, vav and yod. But the vowels were not assigned their own letters like English, hence our 26 letters instead of 22. I even wonder if this is so because if there were more letters then they wouldn't fit into the Cube! As an aside, the hermetic (GD) Tree of Life paths between Sephira were definitely changed to fit the 22 Tarot trumps.