String magick is very ancient with hundreds of variations according to the culture that produced it. String magick for lovers may involve the sewing of a circle on cloth with two different threads. One represents the target and the other the perpetrator. The two threads are intertwined in various and different ways to bring about the intimacy of the pair involved.
To prevent certain persons from acting in specific ways a doll representing that person can be used and a spell recited as the hands or feet or whatever are bound together or apart, or maybe the jaw is tied shut. Everybody knows the Hollywood version of the voodoo doll magick, which does actually contain the principles involved in casting, directing and sending a spell, though not always in the ways that Hollywood pictures.
The discovery of the slip knot has initiated hundreds of different spells to bind or release, the culmination of the spell being the pull that makes the knot, and the problem disappear. Tuscan folk magick has myriads of applications of a simple piece of string together with a practiced intention.
But none of these simple folk magicks compare with the Kabbalistic string magick that is used to erase specific characteristics and behaviors from the life of the practitioner, to his or her great benefit. And we have to realize at the start that the Kabbalah material is not just for Jews.
I remember giving a talk and a Q/A session to a group of Celtic Wiccans. I pointed out that some of their hexagon and pentagon work was based on the Kabbalah, just as their circle was derived from the Sufis. I was asked if that Kabbalah wasn’t all Jewish stuff. My reply was that Wiccans did whatever worked and that British, American, Russian, Japanese and German scientists all use the physics and results of Einstein’s theory. The fact that a Jew discovered it doesn’t mean that only Jews can use it. Christians play the music of Mendelssohn, though he was a Jew. Some 80% of the musicals around when I was young were written by very clever and talented Jews.
A lot of people don’t realize how many of those wonderful words with tunes that fit them so exactly were written by brilliant Jewish composers and lyricists. How about this short selection from the memory of someone who doesn’t like live theater but loves well written songs. And these are just shows I know about. There are obviously many more known to the enthusiast: My Fair Lady, Annie Get Your Gun, Brigadoon, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, Cabaret. Camelot, Carousel, (The three C’s), Zorba, Porgy and Bess, Damn Yankees, Sunset Boulevard, The Desert Song, Fiddler on the Roof, The King and I, Finian’s Rainbow, Oklahoma, Flower Drum Song, Gigi, West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, Les Miserables, Titanic, Man of LaMancha, Show Boat, Mary Poppins, Oliver, The Producers, ThreePenny Opera.
Whatever works, whoever first did it or discovered it. I bet every reader has whistled or sang something from one or other of these Jewish inspired works and has ignored the religion or philosophy of the composer or lyricist. And that’s the way to turn knowledge into wisdom. Forget the source, unless it is helpful knowledge on its own merits, and focus on the principles involved.
So here is a summary of a really elegant piece of ultra simple Kabbalistic science that anyone can use to clear out or transform old programs that are hidden triggers to current behavior. It can be performed by anyone following any religion or none and is connected in essence to the yoga methods of becoming aware of your own consciousness as the source of everything. The yoga of living only in the present moment, the eternal NOW.
There are many places where I will have to give brief explanations of matters that may be old knowledge to some and new to others. Old timers bear with me. You will still learn something.
Kabbalah gives an account of how the energies of the universe react with one another and flow from a higher subtle level to a lower denser level, ending up with the dense and solid mundane, material world. Anyone who understands the diagram of the Tree of Life to any extent has a good idea of the priorities involved.
For a simple magickal example. When Wiccans do their Low Magick work to augment the income of their group they often use the color green, the color of the Sephirah Netzach, number seven on the Tree in their rituals. When ritual magicians who have studied High Magick work to augment income they use blue, the color of Chesed, number four on the Tree.
Low and High are technical terms that can easily be misunderstood. Low Magick was the magick discovered by the people who lived in the fertile valleys. They worked from sunup to sundown on the land and depended on the knowledge of their wise ones about natural cycles to prosper. Such knowledge about Moon cycles and the properties of herbs was often kept in specific families. Low Magick was the magick persecuted by the Church.
High Magick was the magick developed by people living in the fortified cities on the hills. They were not agricultural workers, had more leisure, and were more likely to have access to books and to use artificial light to study in laboratories. The High Magick people were often Kabbalah scholars and knew the Tree. High Magick was often practiced by priests, and several Popes were accomplished practitioners of High Magick.
The practitioners of High Magick knew that the Sephirah Chesed whose colour was blue and whose planet was Jupiter was above the Sephirah Netzach whose colour was green and whose planet was Venus. They knew that the energy of Chesed was higher than that of Netzach and flowed into it from above. So the High magician was dealing with the actual source of the money that the Wiccan was working for. The blue level was for prosperity; blue, the prosperity tree so to speak, one of whose fruits was money. The Wiccans were looking for the apples. The High magicians were looking for the tree that grew the apples. Get to the top of the Tree and you find the source of everything, mundane, atomic, galactic and spiritual.
Now the philosophy and technology of the Kabbalah deals with every energy level up to the initial impetus that causes and creates the universes and down to the mundane levels at which we live. So Kabbalists have dealt with subtle questions like ‘Why are we here at all?’ for centuries while everyone else was squabbling about which tribe had the greatest local god. Their answer may surprise you and possibly enlighten you. You are here, they say, because you asked to be here.
They postulate from their inner explorations the kind of environment that many religions plug into the after life as a reward for being subservient to the priesthood in this one. But the Kabbalists put it before not after. Everyone who has bought into the New Age combination of quantum physics and positive thinking knows that everything now manifesting on Earth began in a subtler world as a thought creation and gradually worked through the four subtle levels into this dense one.
The chair you sit on started as an idea and worked its way down from the concept of sitting into the mundane, material object formed by the manifesting of that mental concept. But the chair and everything in this mundane world is changing every moment. “The Rockies may tumble, Gibraltar may crumble, they’re only made of clay.” Only the real is eternal.
The Kabbalists had worked out that the real, subtle, eternal and authentic world is the one from which this one comes. And the first such world they called the Endless World. It can only be experienced by mundane humanity in the NOW, in the space between thoughts. Every human life is merely a temporary dream of God but NOW is forever, therefore real.
In that Endless World they say that we lived with every kind of pleasantness in cosmic amounts. And they postulate what seems to be a very human trait, boredom with unmitigated goodness and comfort, no possibility of improving it or altering it. That was the cosmic womb environment from which humanity emerged. They say that way back you asked the Cosmic Consciousness to let you become the creator of your own bliss instead of having it supplied ready made. And It agreed. I shall use the word God for It. You can affix your own preference.
You come into this chaotic mess on Earth and your quest is to find once again that Eternal Light, Consciousness and Bliss. Many pagan and non-Christian religions agree there, and many agree about a method to use, which is usually some form of meditation which gets you in touch with the unchanging witness of the movie that is your current life. That witness is who you really are. The witness of the mind. As my beautiful red haired mentor said to me half an hour before she died, “What is looking at you from behind my eyes is what is looking at me from behind your eyes. And in that subtle realm we are one and always will be.”
Kabbalists say that God, in answer to the human request, put a veil between the humans and the Light. The Light is still there but has to be found by becoming aware of, thinning and eliminating the veil. God is playing a game of hide and seek with himself. And you are it. The Hindus call it leela the game of God, and have a board game based on it and reincarnation. Our mundane version of it is called Snakes and Ladders.
Consider now this analogy used by the top Kabbalists. Suppose you as a kid are about to play the hide and seek game. You are going to count to ten and then try to find everybody. You close your eyes and count to ten, getting more and more excited, and then you open your eyes and everyone is standing right in front of you. You’ve found everybody. Are you pleased? No, because the fun of the game necessitates the hiding of the one or ones being sought.
That is not a trifle. It is a very deep spiritual lesson. The EFFORT of finding is essential to the game. The ACT of hiding is also an essential part of the game. And so it is in the search for the Bliss that has been hidden. And the cosmic consciousness hid itself inside the human, not outside. Those who seek what they call God outside are never going to find Him. As St.Francis said,”What we’re looking for is what’s looking.”
So how did God hide everything from us. Another standard analogy of the Kabbalists is that of a dark, windowless room with a single light source lighting it up. It is the only source of light in the room. Then God puts a light proof cover over it. Now the situation is that you can’t find the light because of the cover, and you can’t see the cover because it hides itself as well as the light.
That cover, say the Kabbalists is the human ego. In my own books about such matters I call it the ego mind complex. Let’s go with ego for this posting. Getting rid of the effects of the ego means getting rid of the cover and seeing the Light again, and the room, which is our real world, not the public dream of the world that we share with others.
Ego is the sense of separation from the rest of the world. Young children acquire the mathematical concept of sets without realizing it. To them there are only two sets in the universe, everything else and me. But that concept is learned from the parents and family.
The ego is therefore the seat of envy, anger, jealousy and all those negative emotions you associate with other people’s actions, or the injustice of their good fortune and so on. You can make a list yourself. If you are what some people call beautiful or successful there will be someone or someones who envy you. And they will try to pull you down to their level.
Much of what we call journalism is based on the assumption that nobody is perfect and our top notch reporters can find out the dirt on the most honored celebrity. And it sells. It makes inferior people feel equal to or superior to others; a major activity of the ego. Making others wrong and yourself right is always the focus of the ego.
There are some 20 or 30 million people in America at the moment rooting for a political figure with no particular capabilities but a great gift for complaining about the exact same things that those millions complain about because of envy or a feeling of injustice. And in such matters prejudice and bias matter much more than facts. But judgments are many and strong.
Now here is the root of the Kabbalist way of looking at such matters. According to the Kabbalists your own negative actions and what others call sins can never come back to judge you. Unlike the teachings of so many cults Kabbalah says that God is not in the least bit interested in your behaviors, not even who you happen to be sleeping with currently. The cosmic creative consciousness that I have called God for simplicity is never going to judge you. But here is the basis of the hide and seek game. Everyone you meet contains the same sort of stuff as you do. The moment you pass judgement on their ‘sins’ or negative behaviors you have pulled the rug from under your own feet. Only your own words, spoken against another can be used to produce a guilty verdict against you.
As soon as you extend judgment against someone else you have opened the door for it to be given to you. You have added darkness to your own veil. The look of judgment or envy or jealousy that precedes such emotional happenings has the very old code name of the Evil Eye. When the rich man has a beautiful wife the Evil Eye switches on and there is a scramble to find out if she is just a gold digger, or if he is secretly a homesexual and has her as a safety device, or if she is just a prettier trophy wife than his rival, etc., etc. The Enquirer and People are filled with such queries and fulfill a purpose in articulating the envy, anger and jealousy of the egos of their readers. And fortunes can be made by using and marketing such negativity.
Even the pitiful translations of the Lord’s Prayer in modern New Testaments make it clear that whoever said the original words knew the Kabbalah. The endings that contain Kingdom, Power and Glory are clues to a student of the Kabbalah, as is the injunction, “Judge not that ye be not judged, for with what judgment ye judge ye shall be judged.”
The problem to the Light seeker is that giving judgment adds to the cover over his or her own light, and refraining from judgment does not. But you may not have known this until reading this article. What are you going to do about all the stuff you have accumulated by doing what most people do? Envy and judgment of others affects them adversely and also affects the one giving judgment. A lose-lose situation. What can be done about it? Well Kabbalah also produces tools with which to deal with the situations it unfolds and it has one that deals with the judgment business, though it entails work and a piece of string. With this technique you can protect yourself and others from your own Evil Eye stuff and protect yourself from the Evil Eye stuff of others.
Here are the principles behind the method that make it work. Basically it just looks as though you are wearing on your left wrist a piece of red cord of some kind. You may have seen people wearing red string on their left wrist. They are probably doing it for protection from the influence of the Evil Eye, their own or another’s. Students of the great teacher Gurdjieff often wear one red sock on their left foot for reasons similar to the Kabbalist’s reasons why this works.
The color red is the low end of the visual color spectrum and has many associations. In the chakra system, the heart is the balancing chakra and the chakras below are the Yang chakras and the ones above are the Yin. Red is at the bottom, the most negative with respect to the heart. Red to the Jews is to do with protection because of the sign in blood put on the door that protected the Israelites from the Angel of Death on his trip through Egypt.
The Kabbalistic reasoning that puts protection from negativity into the area of the most negative of the colors and the very symbol of anger is subtle and very 21st century medical. The ultimate color of pure light is white light. “Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow,’ says the Zohar, a Kabbalistic text. You may be familiar with the Biblical version that says ‘white as wool.’
The original color of the wool used to make the amulet is white. By adding red dye to it the wool, though actually white, now looks red, the color of anger and jealousy. It is what we do in medicine when we add a weak version of a virus in a vaccine and it protects against the strong version of the disease. Judgment is the big problem of the ego. The opposite of the technical term judgment to the Kabbalist is the technical term mercy. All acts are either judgment or mercy. The red wool on the left, receptive wrist, picks up the negative energy of judgment and the white wool that is its basis turns judgment into mercy. The judgment is destroyed as light destroys darkness.
Kabbalists put all this stuff together with the story of Rachel the great matriarch of the Old Testament. They say that the protective maternal love of Rachel for the human race can be employed as a tool to transform judgment into mercy. They wind red wool round the tomb of Rachel and use pieces cut from it to make the bracelets. And some people like Sarah of Jerusalem who sells long pieces of the now sacred wool will sell them only to Jews. But since the Kabbalistic methods work with anybody you too can make such a bracelet and by understanding the reasoning behind the using of red dye on the white wool you can make it work for you.
So, what does it actually do? Wearing the red string, as it is called, or the red sock of Gurdjieff is actually a mnemonic device that acts as an alarm system when you are about to make a statement of judgment or think a judgmental thought. When that happens you have about a tenth of a second to change your thought into something else.
If you understand that the white wool (mercy) dyed red (judgment) is actually a device that absorbs judgment and transforms it into mercy, then the red string, put on in a special way that I will describe later, actually gives you a little mental nudge when the negative stuff approaches the surface of your mind. And at that moment you can change the thought into a positive one. That way the program in you that has produced judgment will be gradually weakened and in the end will not function at all. Your life will become lighter and lighter as the negative stuff no longer affects you and you will be expecting better and better of life and as your thought average becomes more positive, so does your life improve.
And the red string is doing more than this, though this is very beneficial. It allows you to enter the state of becoming the witness of your mind instead of identifying with your mind. We live in a field of negative, public, psychic garbage. People who have never considered what is happening in their lives always pick up any thought that enters their mind and own it. It may not even have originated from them. It could be a floater from the public cloud. But when they own it, it has power to affect their behavior and the direction of the next thoughts.
Practicing with the red string enables the user to become very aware of his or her thoughts. Instead of owning and identifying with a thought of anger and immediately looking for someone else to blame, the usual cycle of events, the red string practitioner doesn’t think “I’m angry,” He thinks, “Anger has arisen” a straightforward observation with no reflex action involved. With a little practice he can watch the thought arise and follow it as it leaves, without having produced a negative situation. I tell my own students to watch their thoughts as we can watch our neighbor’s dog from the living room. Interested but not involved.
And while we are on dogs…if you have seen The Dog Whisperer of Cesar Millan you will know already that it is the thoughts and therefore energies of the owners, picked up by the dog, that cause the dog to have its problems. By being in the NOW, as is the natural state of the dog, Cesar has removed the most ingrained effects of the owners, sometimes in less than five minutes. The red string acts as an interpreter like Cesar and enables you to see what the ego is trying to accomplish.
Consider the totally different effects of “Anger has arisen.” “Grief has arisen.” “Misery has arisen.” “Depression has arisen.” compared with the identification…”I’m angry,” “I’m miserable.” “I’m depressed.” The latter group lead into negative spirals of thought that pull the person down into a morass of anguish or self pity or whatever. The impersonal observations of thoughts that may not even have originated from the thinker have no such effect.
Those of you who follow the yoga path of living in the present moment will see how the red string produces a similar effect. The negative stuff ceases to have an automatic effect and it finally dawns that everyone and everything is part of the same cosmic consciousness and it is only the egoic activity insisting on separateness that is stopping the revelation. When someone treats praise and blame with an identical equanimity and realizes why, and has compassion for those giving either offering, then they are a considerable way up the mountain we are all destined to ascend to the summit.
OK, if you are still interested you will need to know some practical details. Many of you are practicing magicians of various paths and know the ultimate importance of intention. I am going to offend people who charge $26 for a piece of red wool from Rachel’s tomb, but it can’t be helped. I tested the idea myself, and I have been a magician since I was seven, and checked for the message that it would work. Every magician knows that the message is synchronicity or coincidence as some say.
The day I decided to try this myself, though I already practice the yoga of being in the present moment, my wife Shirley was given a bag containing knitting needles and skeins of wool. I immediately checked the bag for skein of red but didn’t see one. Next day I was being irritated by the coincidence bug, you probably know the feeling, and emptied out everything from the bag. The last thing out was a practice piece of wool knitting about three inches by one, and it was the only red piece in the bag. Obviously work was involved, so I spent quite a long time taking it apart and re-rolling the wool. Then I Googled 'Rachel’s Tomb' image and connected with the energy. After that it was straightforward following the usual instructions.
I checked pictures of the thickness of the red string on practitioners and my single strand wasn’t thick enough, so I cut it into three and braided them tightly and it was much better.
Tie the wool round your left wrist, firmly but not so as to impede circulation. Now you have a red bracelet with one knot. On that knot tie six more so that there are seven knots. Everything you know about the number seven is involved. Cut off. Keep your intention clear all the time.
That very simple machine is like a wire from a judgment input into a mercy output. Just being aware of it for a few days will give you the awareness of the tiny moment between receiving the thought and acting on it reflexively. Continual practice will make it a positive automatic response instead of a negative automatic response, and as this situation becomes the norm, so will the level of your life improve. You will output and input less and less negativity.
You don’t take it off. Wear it for all your activities. None of them are immune at first from the virus of negativity, ego interference. When it falls off way down the pike, make another one.
The ego won’t give up easily. It likes to own everything you do or think. Give a young kid a nice clean pad of paper and some colored crayons. It won’t focus on making the best picture it can on one sheet. It will make marks on every single sheet of the pad. That’s the level at which your ego works to deceive you that everything is happening to you, and that it’s you against the world.
If you want to go more deeply into other practical uses of the Kabbalah in your life look up Yehuda Berg on Google and check his website and books. He’s always a good read. Every one of you who has been involved in Enochian Magick knows the power of the 24 permutations of the four letter name of God to give you the names of the twelve Angels of Severity and the twelve Angels of Mercy with their powerful effects. Kabbalists use the 42 and the 72 names of God for practical purposes. Check www.kabbalah.com.
If some of this has interested you but you aren’t really into magick then the yoga I have mentioned may be just what you need to get you on a non-stop and accelerating journey to your Inner Self, the God who has been playing hide and seek with you. A blog on this yoga, and a correspondence course that I have to recommend are available at http://truthofthepresentmoment.blogspot.com.
My blessings on whatever you do. Thanksgiving is probably a very good time to think on these things. You can think of a hundred things to be grateful for that others do not experience. And gratitude is the attitude that raises your spirit.
