Talk/performance given at 1015 Folsom, February 10, 1995 with Dubtribe.
This performance and several others are available now at Dubtribe's web site. This particular recording is in volume 2 of IDR025.
Later, we remembered the Tree as the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, with its
ten Emanations:
Malkhut, Kingdom;
Yesod,Foundation;
Hod, Emanation;
Netzach, Victory;
Tif'eret, Beauty;
Gevurah, Strength;
Chesed, Mercy;
Binah, Understanding;
Chokhmah, Wisdom;
and Keter, Crown.
Da'at, between Binah and Chokhmah).
Each of these Emanations has Its own characteristics, Its own qualities. We have not elaborated on the Tree of Knowledge.
We constructed then the Ladder. It first appeared in Jacob's dream, when he was traveling in the desert. He thought that It carried one above, to the Divine.
Indeed, in the olde days, we thought that different levels of the World meant Above. Since then we have learned that different levels of the World can also mean inward, like in our realization that the quantum world is the World on a much smaller scale, the atomic scale of matter.
Likewise, dancing allows us to travel inward, inside ourselves.
The Ladder re-appears as the means of putting together several Trees of
Life, the Tree of the Material World,
Assiyah,
the Tree of the Formative World,
Yetzirah,
the Tree of the Creative World,
Beriah
and the Tree of the Archetypal World,
Atzilut. These Trees are intertwined with each other.
It is perhaps a memory of the genetic structure of the double helix structure
of DNA, which we knew from the very beginning - We created it , after all!
The Chariot first appears in the visions of Isiah and Ezekiel. It is the means of moving up (and down) the Tree. Of course it is an allegorical reference.
The Tree is in the Ladder, which we ascend and descend with the Chariot. It is all for ourselves, for the Self.
To be more concrete, let me consider two examples, physics and dancing. In physics, the classical world corresponds to the World of Assiyah. Dancing, the social dances would be the first of Assiyah. Now, the Tiferet of Assiyah is Malkhut of the next World of Yetzirah. We interpret this new World of Yetzirah as that of quantum physics, or as trance dancing, both higher in energies, physical or social. We see that they share some of the qualities of the lower World but they also allow us access to higher Worlds, which we have not given names yet in physics - or dancing/movement.
