ALEPH
dedicated to my fellow seekers of the mysterious
"Aleph"
In Memoriam- Pierre de Chardin S.J. Mati
Klarwein, Robert Venosa "Seek and Ye Shall Find" Indeed!
And the life changing: "Morning of the
Magicians" by Pauels & Bergeier
Arthur Allan Armstrong *
"Imagine a hollow globe whose inner walls are
reflecting surfaces. A centre of illuminations inside this globe is
reflected in myriad sequins on the walls: everywhere the universal
will in endless multiplicity, everywhere reflected images, single
aspects of the Godhead."
Rudolf Steiner
"Know that the world is a mirror from head to
foot, in every atom are a hundred blazing suns."
Mahinud Shabistari (The Garden of Mystery)
"....and I tried to show that
through all the immense
developments, the 'Mirror
of Being' is always the
object of true science.....'
-Humboldt, quoted in Giorgio de Santillana and
Hertha von Deschend, Hamlet's Mill
"See all things, not in process of becoming, but in
being, and see themselves in the other. Each being contains in
itself the whole intelligible world. Therefore All is everywhere.
Each is there All, and All is each. Man as he now is has ceased to
be the All. but when he ceases to be an individual, he raises
himself again and penetrates the whole world."
-Plotinus (third century)
"he took up the cup, and gazed.
he saw the seven climes reflected there,
And every act and presage of high heaven....
In that cup the wizard-king
Was wont to see futurity."
(Tenth-century Persian poet Firdausi)
"...R. Shimen's great saintliness in proportion to
his possession of great magical powers, and hangs three legendary
mirrors in his house. 'there he was able to see everything that had
come to pass and that would still come to pass' "
-Joseph Sherman
The Jewish Pope: Myth, Diaspora and Yiddish
Literature
"All around me became transformed into golden
glory, into light untellable. The golden light of which the violet
haze seemed now to have been as the veil of outer fringe, welled
forth from a central globe itself, were crowded to solidarity with
filling all place and space, yet composed of an infinitude of individuated
existences. These beings were, moreover present in teaming myriads
in the church I stood in: and they were intermingling with, and
passing unobstructedly through both myself and my fellow
worshippers."
(Vision occurring to a man named Watkins who was
singing Te Deum in church when he was enraptured with a
vision...from Wilmhurst, Contemplations)
"Oh, for a single life-moment enlarged to
eternity, enlarged to the limits of understanding, susceptible of
immensity high above the shining song. high above the shining
sunset...."
Broch
The Death of Virgil
"Everything is condensed into one single moment.
It decides our life."
-Franz Kafka
"Humanists presented the imagination as "a
hollow mirror," with distorting effects. Imagination was less a
faculty informing the subject of his identity than an external
prompting, a foreign agent causing turmoil, profiting from the
weakness of the senses and the fragility of reason. The
mirror-imagination had the capacity to feed creative intuition and
poetic inspiration by presenting the soul with "the best, most
gracious and beautiful images or appearances of things according to
their truth," but it often also came up with repugnant figures
that troubled one's thoughts and unsettled the course of life."
Sabine Melchior -Bonnet
The Mirror-A History
"Man will come to see that the world is the
perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at
particular wonders; he will learn that there is no profane history;
that all history is sacred; that The universe is represented in an
atom, in a moment of time."
Emerson
"Here we come at once to the modology of
Leibnitzs, which was so fully apprehended by Bruno as to constitute
an essential part of his philosophy. In this system of thought we
regard every part, every atom, as reflecting every other part of the
body to which it belongs, and therefore every universe comes to be a
reflex of the DIVINE, as if a light falling upon a crystal sphere
should illuminate the entire sphere and therefore all its parts or
molecules, and thus there would be a myriad molecules, each
consisting', of millions of atoms, all illuminated from a single
source of light; and every atom is a sphere in
itself."
Sepherial
The Kabala of Numbers
Time present and time past are both perhaps in the
future and time future contained in times past."
T.S. Eliot
... the point where mind perceives in a flash the totality of all
phenomena, their causes and their significance.
"I believe that the universe is no bigger than
a butterfly and that it never stops shrinking. It's shriveling up, It
is Concentrated on one Point in Space, and for me that point is
the railroad station at Perpignan."
-
Salvador Dali
(It is interesting to note that Astronomers now
agree with Dali….see article "A Hundred Billion Years of
Solitude" in Scientific American ,April 1999. by George
Musser "If astronomers are right and the universe is expanding
at a quickening pace, the cosmos will grow to untold size. But our
world will shrink…"
(Point at which"Punto a ciu tutti ii tenpo son
presenti." the whole of time is present~)
Dante
And it came to pass, as the voice was still
speaking, he cast his eyes and beheld the earth; yea, even all the face
of it; and there was not one point of it which he did not
be-hold, discerning it by the Spirit of God."
(A vision Occurring to Moses according to the Mormon
Book of Doctrine and Covenants)
"At the same time that
inquisitional fires consumed heretics, however, magic continued to
flourish. Around 1350, The Stone of the Mountain, a book
attributed to Philip I, son of the French king, featured a
virgin on a mountaintop in an Eden-like garden, surrounded by
attentive philosophers. She held in her hand "the mirror of
human life," presumably the stone of the book's title. Another
legendary figure, the Christian priest-king Prester John,
purportedly consulted a marvelous mirror-guarded by 12,000 soldiers,
reachable only by climbing 125 steps-in which all plots against him
were revealed."
Mark Pendergrast
Mirror Mirror
"In catering to its readers' demand for thrilling
supernatural adventures, the Mayse-bukh measures R. Shimen's
great saintliness in proportion to his possession of great magical
powers, and hangs three legendary mirrors' in his house...there he
was able to see everything that had come to pass and that would
still come to pass....
old Jewish story
"Melquiades had not put events in the order of
men's conventional time, but had concentrated a century of daily
episodes in such a way that they co-existed in one instant as if we
were looking into a speaking mirror."
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Hundred Years of Solitude
"The Aleph=the microcosmos of the alchemists
and Cabbalists, our concrete and proverbial friend, the multien in
parvo!"
"It is conceivable that there exist in space
ALEPH points, like the one described in Borges' story. In these
points the whole space-time continuum is represented, and the
spectacle ranges from the interior of an atomic nucleus to the
remotest Galaxy.
Pauwels & Bergier
Morning of the Magicians
"The mirror-above all, the mirror is our
teacher."
-Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519)
I come now to the ineffable climax of my story; and
this is where my despair as a writer begins. All language is
an alphabet of symbols, whose use presupposes an experience which is
shared by both parties; but how can I convey to others the infinite
Aleph of which my timid memory has hardly any recollection? The
mystics, in cases like this, abound in symbols; to indicate a
divinity. A Persian speaks of a bird which, in some way, is all
birds: Alanus de Insialis, of a sphere whose center is everywhere
and the circumference nowhere; Ezekiel, of an angel with four faces
facing simultaneously North, South, East and West. (I have a reason
for recalling these inconceivable analogies, as they have something
in common with Aleph.) Perhaps the Gods would allow me to use an
image of this kind; but then this. story would be tainted with
literature and falseness.. In any case, the central problem is
insoluble; it is impossible to enumerate, even partially, an
infinite number of things. In that gigantic instant, I saw millions
of actions, both delectable and atrocious; but none of them
astonished as much as the fact that they all occupied the same
point, without being either superimposed or transparent. what my eyes
saw was simultaneous: my transcription of it will be successive,
because language has to be. I want, however, to give some account of
it
"At the bottom of the step, to the right, I saw
a little mottled sphere almost intolerably bright. At first I
thought it was revolving around itself; afterwards I realized that
this movement was an illusion due to the vertiginous spectacle it
enclosed. The diameter of the Aleph must have been about two or
three inches, but the whole of cosmic space was inside it,
unreduced. Everything (the glass in the mirror, for example) was a
multiplicity of things, because I could see it clearly from every
point in the Universe. I saw the populous sea, I saw a silver
spider-web in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a broken
labyrinth (it was London); I saw interminable eyes gazing one upon
the other inside me as palpable as-if seen in a mirror, I saw all
the mirrors on the planet, and not one reflected my image; I saw in
a backyard in the Rue Soles the same paving stones that I had seen
thirty years ago in a house at Fray Bentos; I saw clusters of
grapes, snow, tobacco, veins of metal, steam; I saw convex deserts
under the Equator and each of their grains of sand; I saw at
Inverness a woman whom I shall not forget; I saw here disheveled
hair and haughty carriage; I saw her cancer of the breast; I saw a
ring of dried earth on a pavement where there had been a tree; I saw
in a county house at Adrogue a copy of the first English translation
of Pliny by Philernon Holland; I saw every letter on every page at
the same time (as a child I had always wondered why when a book was
closed, the letters did not get mixed up and-lost during the night);
I Saw the night and day together; I saw a sunset at Queretaro
which seemed to reflect the color of a Bengal light; I saw my
bedroom with no one in it; I saw in a room at Alkmaar a terrestrial
globe between two mirrors which multiplied it into infinity1 I
saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw horses with shaggy
manes on a beach by the Caspian Sea; I saw the survivors of a battle
sending off postcards; I saw in a shop-window at Mirrapur a pack of
Spanish playing-cards; I saw the sloping shadows of ferns on the
floor of a greenhouse; I saw the ants of the earth; a Persian
astrolabe; I saw in a drawer (and the handwriting made me tremble)
obscene letters--precise, unbelievable--that Beatriz had addressed
to Carlos Argentino; I saw the ghastly remains of what had
deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my dark
blood; I saw the connection between love and the transformations of
death; I saw the ALEPH from every point; I saw the Earth in the
ALEPH and in the Earth again the ALEPH, and in the
ALEPH the Earth; I saw my face and my entrails; I saw Your face, and
I was giddy and wept, because my eyes had seen that secret and
conjectural object whose name men utter improperly, but which no man
has ever seen: the inconceivable Universe I felt an infinite
reverence, and an infinite sorrow... I was afraid that there was
nothing left in the world that could surprise me, and that all my
life I should be haunted by the feeling that I had seen everything
before. Fortunately, after a few sleepless nights, I had forgotten
everything."
Borges – The Aleph
"All around me became transformed into golden
glory, into light untellable. The golden light of which the violet
haze seemed now to have been as the veil of outer fringe, welled
forth from a central immense globe of brilliancy. But the most
wonder thing was these shafts and waves of light and even the
central globe itself, were crowded to solidarity with the forms of
living creatures, like a single coherent organism filling all place
and space, yet composed of an infinitude of individuated existences.
Those beings were, moreover present in teaming myriads in the church
I stood in: and they were intermingling with, and passing unobstructedly
through both myself and my fellow worshippers. The
Heavenly host drifted through the human congregation as wind passes
through a grove of trees; beings of radiant beauty and clothes in
shimmering raiment."
(from Wilmhurst,Contemplations)
When the white shining point had appeared, it was
called "Kether", which means the "Crown", and out
of it radiated nine great globes, which arranged themselves in the
form of a tree. These nine together with the first crown constituted
the first system of "Sephiroth." These ten were the first
limitation of ten abstract points with the nature of AIN SOPH
itself. . The power of AIN SOPH did not descend into these globes
but rather was reflected upon them as the light of the sun is
reflected upon the earth and planets. These ten globes were called
the shining sapphires, and it is believed by many Rabbis that the
word '"sapphire" is the basis of the word 'Sephira' of
Sephiroth). The great area which had been privated by the withdrawal
of AIN SOPH into the central point, "Kether", was now
filled by four concentric globes called worlds, or spheres, and the
light of the ten Sephiroth was reflected down through each of these
in turn.
Manly P. Hall
Masonic Hermetic Qabbalistic & Rosicrucian Philosophy
"I have often said that GOD is creating the
entire universe fully and totally in this present now."
Meister Eckhart
"The Jewish mystic Solomon Ibn
Gabirol spoke of "the souls, close packed, /Peering in mirrors,
(who) hope these may reflect/God's image glimpsed," and
Christian mystic Meister Eckhart wrote: "The soul contemplates
itself in the mirror of Divinity. God himself is the mirror which He
conceals from whom He will, and uncovers to whom he will.....The
more the soul is able to transcend all words, the more it approaches
the mirror." Muhyi'd-Din ibn ' Arabi, a Mohammedan wrote of
man's resemblance to God, and vice-versa: "God is the mirror in
which thou seest thyself, and thou art His mirror in which He
contemplates His names.
As translated in the King James Bible,
Saint Paul wrote: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but
then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as
also I am known" (I Corinthians 13:11-12). But the Elizabethan
"glass" is misleading. What Paul actually meant was:
"Now we see indistinctly, as in a mirror; then we shall see
face to face." Referring to poor-quality mirrors of metal, he
meant that our view of the world (and of ourselves) is flawed in
comparison with the overwhelming knowledge and love of God.
The Mayan creation myth in the Popul
Vuh eerily echoes St. Paul's image of a poorly reflecting mirror
in which humans see reality only dimly. The four earliest humans
were all-wise and all-seeing, which alarmed the gods. "What should
we do with them now?" one asked. "Their vision should at
least reach nearby, they should at least see a small part of the
face of the art." Another suggested, "We'll take them
apart, just a little, that's what they need." So that's what
the gods did to the four ancestors: "They were blinded as the
face of a mirror is breathed upon. Their vision flickered. Now it
was only when they looked nearby that things were clear."
Mark Pendergrast
Mirror Mirror: A History of the Human Love Affair
with Reflection
"His palace was located somewhere in Africa,
behind the arrogant ranks of Islam. Perpetual peace reigned
through-out his vast kingdom; before his palace there hung a
marvelous mirror in which he could see every detail of what was
happening in his realm and the world beyond.".
(description of Presbyter Johns domain)
Antichrist and the Millennium E.R. Chamberlin Saturday Review
Press
"Simon Goulart in this Treasury of
Admirable Stones (1610) describes a magic mirror scene which took place in
the Chateau of Chaumont on the Loire. The Marshal of Paiz had been
heard to say that the Queen Catherine de Medici, wishing to know
what would happen to her children and who would succeed them,
summoned someone to assure her on the matter. A magician showed her
the royal children reflected in a circular mirror. Each royal son
moved around the room as many times as he would reign in
years."
The Book of Spells
David Norris & Charrot Lodevidge
Lorrirner Pub -London
"However eloquent, that figure (Aleph) is
only a symbol. We must never forget that any description of ‘Aleph’
fails to describe it: Aleph transcends thought."
Carlo Suares
"For was and is, and will be are but is; And
all creation is one act at once…"
Tennyson
"The living moment is everything."
D. H. Lawrence
"The soul is a mirror in which in some way we
know God."
Peter Lombard (around 1130 AD)
"A universe lies hidden in a grain of millet;
everything is brought together at the point of the present....From
each point along that circle thousands of forms are drawn. Each
point, as it revolves in a circle, is at times a circle, at others a
turning circumference.
Aahrnud Shabestari
Sufi Poet 14th century
"....Aleph, a Hebrew letter symbolizing
"Unity". referring to a real or imaginary cosmic point at
which all the events, ideas, actions, forms of life, art, music,
poetry, in fact every person and every thought, every force and
every illusion in the entire universe must eventually come together.
This point is a beginning, a depository, but it is also a finality,
the convergence of the infinite at a theoretical pinpoint, where
past, present, and future blend, forming a single, perfect presence
on concept."
Carol Miller & Guadalupe Rivera
The Winged Prophet
"The singular contains within it, the totality.
In experiencing the singular, the totality, One can experience a
serenity only found in the absolute All of the universe is in one
tree, one bird, one flower, one person."
Carolyn Klaefeld
Satan Sleeps with the Holy
"Men’s curiosity searches past and future and
clings to that dimension. But to apprehend the point of intersection
of the timeless with time, is an occupation of the saint-no
occupation either, but something given and taken, in a lifetime’s
death in love, ardor and selflessness and self-surrender."
T.S. Eliot
"Mirrors ushered in the earliest
human civilizations, and now they point us into the future-while
simultaneously allowing astronomers to peer ever farther back into
time. The history of mirrors covers a vast territory, from the
creation of the universe (perhaps along with alternate mirror
universes), to the first hominids, to the Hubble Space Telescope and
beyond. The cast of quirky characters looking into and manipulating
mirrors is equally diverse."
Mark Pendergrast
Mirror Mirror
"The nymph still looks at herself and admires
herself in the water, as she has done since the beginning of time.
Long before Hubris entered Arcadia, the terrible intoxication was
known. The gravest crimes, the most senseless adventures have sprung
from the self-regarding gaze, and though we make poetry of pride in
the West, and pretend to ourselves that there are some forms of
pride which are legitimate and others which are not so, the most
deathly instrument placed in the hands of man remains the mirror."
-Robert Payne
Hubris; a Study of Pride
"...Long before cameras existed, Indra, a chief
god of the Hindu religion, responsible for rain and thunderbolts,
described the phenomenon in terms of the pearls said to hang over
the gods' palace: "If you look at one pearl, you see all the
others reflected in it." The author of the sutra explained:
"In the same way, each object in the world is not merely of
itself, but involves every other object and, in fact, is everything
else."
Joseph Eger
Einstein's Violin
*********************
Book: "The Mystery of the Aleph: Mathematics,
the Kabala, and the Search for Infinity" by Amir D. Aczel
Book: "Mirror Mirror" by Mark Pendergrast
Book: "The Mirror and Man" by Benjamin
Goldberg
Book: "Mirrors in Mind" by Richard Gregory
Book: "The Mirror: A History" by Sabine
Melchior-Bonnet
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