Air Israel – Kabbala – Golden Orbs – Keter – Dream 08-03-2025

This dream is from around 6 AM this morning. I have been waking because of pain in my lower spine and sacroiliac joints. I have been taking ~4 AM paracetamol to mitigate this.

The dream starts at an airport. The weather is warm and dry. On the tarmac with two boarding staircases is a jet air craft. In an angular script is written in large blue letters Air Israel. I am queuing with others to board the plane. There are people of all ages but the background is of wealth and the majority of them are Jewish. There are a few Hassidim with beaten up small leather carry-ons. There is a hub-bub of conversation. I climb the stairs and am welcomed by the cabin crew. Because of my appearance and colouring there is implicit an initial understanding that I am Jewish too. I take my seat on the aisle next to a couple with a toddler. The man is older than the woman and they are of American origin.

The flight takes off and I go to the galley to get food. The interior of the plane is now like the ground floor of a hotel with seminar tooms and a plenary. At the galley they are serving a very meat heavy dish with soup and dumplings, it is garlic rich. I move on to the self-service area. There is a selection of salads. I select one with lettuce and green lentils. I sit at a table and am soon joined by several young people who are in high spirits, they are anticipating their holidays, their stay on a kibbutz in the wilderness away from their parents.

Soon everyone moves to the plenary. A middle aged woman is on stage and she is throwing out pieces of puzzles. The idea is to use these pieces to construct a kabbalistic tree of life, Otz Chim. Everyone has flip chart paper, pens, scissors, card, string, glue and blue tac. The exercise is to keep people occupied on the flight. I catch some of the resources which the woman is throwing.

I start to build my tree of life. I start to make a three dimensional model between four vertical pillars. These pillars are about 2 cm in diameter and like Greco-Roman architecture pillars with striations top to bottom. They are gilded in a silver-gold mix. I build my tree of life in a quasi-helical fashion and not plan form. Each of the sephirah in my model is constructed out of a golden orb which I pull out of my pocket. The orbs are table tennis ball size and are decorated with an equatorial golden overlay motif. They are suspended in free space with no path structure. I pull out the last orb, Keter, and place it on top of the tree. Within the columns there is still top room for the veils of unmanifest. Keter is unusual in that it has to it a visor, like on a motorcycle helmet.

The woman on the stage suggests that we all switch tables and compare our handiwork. I join the table of a matriarch and her two late teen sons. I know that they are soon off to university. The woman looks at my tree and says that it in not bad for a goy. I open the visor on Keter and the model is filled with a radiant light, it comes to life. I say to her that the secret is Malkuth. She says don’t you mean Keter. I say yes, I deliberately mixed them up.

One of the sons comes over to me and takes out some tracing paper he is very keen to measure the dimensions of my design. He asks why there are no words on the paths and the sephirah like on everybody else’s designs. He says they could be in English or Hebrew. I say to him that if you need to use words then you have not understood nor attained the sephiroth. Words are by way of spells and are distractions from the path(s). The young man is excited and wants to learn from / with me.

In the dream I wonder if, because of the pain in my lower spine, Malkuth, I am under some form of psychic or occult attack. I make a resolution to look into it and if needed call up a Vajrapāṇi for protection.

The dream ends.

Dreaming and Rāja Yoga

“The trick in setting up the dreaming does not lie in looking at things, but in sustaining sight of them when they are no longer in sight. Dreaming becomes real once you have succeeded in bringing into sharp focus anything you bring to mind, for then there is no difference between what you do when dreaming and what you do when you are not dreaming.”

I think it fair to say that I am artistically challenged, I am not good at sketching. In school when there was a class mural for assembly, I was allowed to do the pine trees. I can however visualize well, perhaps very well.

There are many different notions on dreaming but the Toltec aphorism above suggests a visualisation perhaps in a meditative state. Setting up the active dreaming starts with the visualisation of a yellow rose. This is the Western analogue of the Eastern lotus. I have done both approaches. The idea is to open up the heart centre and connect it vis throat to Ajna.

When I am meditating, I look like some geezer sat in a chair with his eyes closed.This is what is going on inside.

In January 2009 I had been meditating on the Caduceus slowly building the form over weeks.  Here is an attempt to sketch what went on in a half hour rāja yoga or active dreaming meditation. If you take you time the form stabilises and becomes reproducible.

There are many models and if you look closely, you can see a re-presentation of kabalistic Otz-Chiim or Yggdrasil of the runic shaman or Asvattha which preceded the Hermetic Caduceus according to Blavatsky.

Attitudes to non-concrete science have changed since the days of Prof. James Emerson Reynolds FRS.

James Emerson Reynolds (8 January 1844 – 18 February 1920) was an Irish chemist who was the first scientist to isolate thiourea and developed the “Reynolds’s test” for acetone.

Reynolds was a member of a number of institutions, including the Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland, the Society of Chemical Industry, of which he was president from 1891-91, the Chemical Society and the Royal Society. In 1919 he had a serious accident, which was followed by a stroke. He died at his home 3 Inverness Gardens, Kensington on 18 February 1920. The chemistry department in TCD have his original specimen of thiourea on display.