Descriptions:
Video Description
The Middle Pillar ritual superimposes the kabbalistic Tree of Life onto the body, working the energy centers that run up its central column. Whether these centers are literally real is treated as less important than the practical effect of working “as if” they are, since both ease and disturbance follow from committing to the practice daily alongside the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram.
As a person matures, self-identification migrates from the gut to the heart to the head, and the ego that forms there tends to choke off the rising current beneath it. The Middle Pillar loosens that stranglehold, which can feel like being devoured from below by what is named here the oblivion monster, or Choronzon: the force, echoed in the Egyptian god Apophis, that annihilates the ego so a truer persona, no longer unconscious or compulsive, can remain.
Full Video Transcript
this video is going to be about the middle pillar ritual surprise surprise you could probably see
this coming because of the last two posts um i often tell people you know who don’t want to do
the grade work or who don’t want to do the curriculum work and the kabbalah magic book
uh if there were you know just one or two simple rituals that you could do that would facilitate
your enlightenment process uh yes those two rituals would be the lesser banishing ritual
the pentagram and the middle the ritual the middle pillar those two performed every day
are enough to facilitate your process and i say that i say that out of faith because
uh if you were to do these every day you would gravitate into other situations that would also
be encouraging your progress let’s say on the path all right uh the middle pillar ritual is quite
serious as is the lesser banishing ritual the pentagram as you have already seen from that
video um it should not be performed lightly it’s not something to play with necessarily
it can be fun but it also is going to stir up some things that could be very dark and disturbing
it can also you know give you a sense of energy and lightness and all the wonderful things about
that enlightenment practices can do as they carry you towards complete and utter unconditional
liberation in other words enlightenment so the middle pillar uh is normally performed after the
lesser banishing ritual the pentagram and sometimes after the some other kind of invocation
depending on what you are doing okay uh it is a fundamental technique of magic okay and we’re
going to talk about the things it does and the things behind it and i just want you guys to
remember that you’re getting the viewpoint of a practitioner here and somebody who’s an initiate
not somebody who is a scholar uh just want to point that out okay there’s lots of scholarship
out there that doesn’t contain the viewpoint of a practitioner and as such it misses the mark very
often in terms of what’s actually going on with real magic performed by real practitioners in
the real world. Okay. In the real world, in the fantasy world of magic, yeah, they’re both kind
of the same. All right. So the idea behind the middle pillar, now we’re going to get into the
fantasy aspects here. The idea behind the middle pillar is that you have energy centers up and down
your spine or up and down through the center of your body. Okay. Are these energy centers real?
like do you have chakras are chakras real uh many people debate about this okay uh and if you are a
practitioner there it becomes a time when there’s no question about whether there are such energy
centers um but they are not necessarily cut and dry like this system’s correct and this other
system is incorrect uh what tends to happen in your energetic body is that um there’s a separation
that evolves over time as you mature from child to teenager to adult to super adult as you get older
and these energy centers uh form as a result of that they’re not necessarily uh energy sources
or anything like that necessarily though they can be um i often like to describe them as energy
blocks places to work through okay and because a lot of times the sensation is when you sort of
cleared one of these chakras or whatever they are they disappear and they kind of don’t bother you
anymore all right so there are there are different kinds of experiences for these centers like if you
feel one of these centers it’s probably because energy is getting stuck there that’s very often
what’s what’s happening okay uh and once you have initiated yourself through that block if you want
want to say it that way it disappears and you don’t notice it anymore okay so these aren’t
necessarily wonderful centers in your body that you have now activated and now they’re fully alive
not necessarily okay there are various ways of looking at this so if you like if you went to
see an acupuncturist is the map of the meridians that the acupuncture uses to treat you is that
real? Not necessarily. Okay. Just as allopathic medicine, no, or let’s say germ theory is not
necessarily real. Germ theory, I do say theory, is the theory that in medicine, that illness is
caused by bacteria, viruses, fungi, things invading your body and attacking your body.
And that’s a view of nature that sees it as hostile and as attacking you.
What we’re finding nowadays is that that view of nature, as correct as we thought it was,
is not really so much correct because many of the bacteria and the viruses and the fungi,
most of them are harmless to you and many of them are helpful.
and when you destroy them with your war against nature and your antibiotics and things like that
your health suffers so just what that’s just one example of how one theory about the body or
medicine you know we think is correct and it’s turning out to be not correct okay that doesn’t
mean that germ theory is invalid as a way of treating illness it’s most certainly is valid
because it works okay for some types of situations uh it’s also at the same time not entirely
accurate and there are problems that result when you take it as literally true as i’ve just gone
over okay so the same thing goes for these various energy maps of the body there are ways of
interpreting the body and the the energetic system that have some say about what’s actually happening
but they are not necessarily the one true version of what’s happening.
I hope I explained that well.
So these energy centers, do they exist?
Do they not exist?
Yes.
So when you’re working with magic, it’s important to proceed in an as-if mode.
That’s kind of the way Christians operate, secretly.
They proceed as if these beliefs are true.
i don’t think they realize you’re doing this but they kind of say well i’m going to proceed as if
christ does this and this represents that i’m going to proceed as though all these things are
true just to see what will happen and wonderful things can happen okay it’s almost like a
scientific method if you think about it because if you if you adopt a certain belief system
it’s like basically assuming that a hypothesis is true just to see to test it to see what will
happen okay so if you superimpose of one of these energy maps upon your body with you know various
maps of psychic centers you can do that to uh proceed uh in a manner so that you the the
attitude is like let’s see what happens when i adopt this energy system let’s see what happens
when i pretend that the chakras are real okay and some some marvelous things and some scary things
can happen when you do that okay now the golden dawn system uses uh sometimes uses the chakras
but it mostly uses the kabbalistic tree of life all right and this gets superimposed upon the body
and as you can see the kabbalistic tree of life has a middle pillar that’s that path right up
through the center okay and especially that middle pillar is worked with in the ritual of the middle
pillar as you can see it has four psychic centers it’s four sort of chakra like globes or spheres
right there’s actually five okay uh and those get superimposed upon the body this is probably
the most profound most powerful aspect of the golden dawn teachings as you may recall from
previous videos uh magic is not what it appears to be and so if as you restructure your psyche
according to systems like this you become a better and better manifester of things you desire
or things you need in order to facilitate your evolution okay and as you can tell that you’re
going to work on yourself in this way many of you know some kabbalah okay so the kabbalistic
tree of life these spheres one through ten this is a map of how things manifest in the universe
supposedly okay it’s one version of such a map and if you adopt it as though it’s true
profound interesting wonderful and terrible things can happen we’re going to talk about
both wonderful and terrible things so uh people who work with the chakras and the kundalini
awakening systems and and that uh there’s a lot of insistence that in those systems that you raise
the energy up the spine and there’s the idea that shakti is asleep you got this kundalini energy
that’s asleep at the base of your spine and you bring it up through your energy centers
and see if you can get it to come up to the crown of the head where the the highest chakra is okay
and once it reaches there you are enlightened because that’s when shakti and shiva are now
joined together very profound system really um and there’s a lot it’s a very sexy system too
because shiva and shakti are male and female in some represent and most represent representations
and mythology of of kashmir shivism let’s say um and uh the energies that you’re working with
you could say are sexual in nature they really are more in a jungian sense more body energies and
psychic energies not necessarily just sexual energies all right but they can feel very sexual
as you are working with them in the golden dawn the um the energy is drawn down the middle pillar
okay hmm supposedly that’s much safer okay and and the insistence is that if you have worked
with to raise energy up the spine that’s so dangerous that you need a teacher to um to help
you work through those blocks through those uh those chakras that are tied in knots and you as
you and you and i have no doubt you can you can do some serious damage to yourself but that would
be pretty rare i think that the the ego has enough healthy defenses to keep you from from doing a lot
of damage to yourself if you’re doing chakra work or middle pillar work okay i don’t necessarily
consider drawing energy down the spine any safer or more dangerous than bringing energy up the spine
and in the middle pillar work that the golden dawn taught me anyway it’s both down down the
body and up the body okay so there isn’t one that’s correct okay um we can talk about that
in a bit i think um uh one of the things like um i’ve mentioned before that the osiris current
rises up it rises up from the earth into you it rises up through the earth from the underworld
into you okay uh this is basically osiris floundering in the underworld he’s been killed
by seth and he’s now going to be reborn in horus and that energy rises up and the energy of osiris
isn’t uprising energy it’s the power that makes the the crops grow up up up in egypt okay towards
the sun or towards illumination okay uh osiris is a black god or in a green god because of that
powerful uprising those shoots of little plants as they work their way up through the soil up
into the open air of awakening into the bounteous nature of life okay and in the middle pillar the
one way of looking at that is the energy that comes down is the result of the energy that goes
up okay this is not the correct way of looking at it this is just one way okay so the energy goes up
the body and then of course explodes at the top of the head and showers down with blessings all
over you purifying you okay it’s like a fountain of light this energy pattern is quite real it does
tend to facilitate what’s hap what happens in the enlightening enlightenment process okay um
is it literally the way it’s described no these various systems facilitate the rising of the
energy okay and the rising of the energy that we’re talking about now is not necessarily what
you think it is and we’re going to get into that right it’s not something that’s um the energy that
rises up through the body is a consequence of the way that we have evolved it’s not necessarily
it’s kind of like a mechanism that has evolved because of the way that humans have evolved it’s
not necessarily the way that all beings function in order to discuss this we need to talk about
what happens in the human psyche as people develop okay when when you are a baby you are so
sort of proto-enlightened you’re an enlightened being that’s so wonderful to handle a baby to
smell the top of the baby’s head and the baby is just so incredibly like a unified field of bubbly
energy uh and their mitochondria are at a pristine state of health the aura of their bodies is
completely round and beautiful and glowing uh but as a result of that since their energy field is so
unified they don’t have a lot of self-awareness yet okay and one of the beautiful things about
humans is that humans are divided against themselves okay that that causes them a lot
of suffering of course but it also causes a lot of joy and i think was it alistair crowley said
i’m divided for the sake of union the pain of separation is as nothing and the joy of dissolution
all okay and so what happens as we get older is that beautiful round aura of the baby’s body
begins to separate okay so it’s kind of what we talked about before um we we have the sort of
rising up okay so the energy goes up uh the place that we identify with okay it kind of starts in
in the gut oh this is who i am in the gut okay there’s really not much awareness self-awareness
going on there but as the human being develops further the the place you identify with tends to
migrate up the spine and many adolescents when they talk about who they are they’ll point at
their heart this is who i am you know and they’re starting to struggle with their self-identity okay
uh and eventually as they get into a full-fledged adult they if like a european style adult
the energy is there the place they identify now is is in the head okay uh and what happens then
is that the um the aura has now been separated in two okay this is the the baseline this is
supposedly where the sleeping shakti energy is and the ego has suddenly developed upwards like this
and this can be experienced uh quite in a quite tangible way many people describe the ego itself
as a sort of cul-de-sac or uh because the energy as the place you identify with migrates up into
your body it’s almost like you’re a sock puppet okay and uh but of course the the ego in the head
thinks it’s in charge and it’s driving its energy now from the energy stream from down below which
which is the osiris current okay but that osiris current now gets certain suddenly gets choked off
because the ego says i’m in charge and it starts to constrict the very energy that creates it
it’s cutting off its own energy flow because it thinks it has all the energy and it is the power
source of its own universe okay and in the process it can make you very sick and it can make you
uh you lose vitality okay uh the the stronger the ego the more ill you can become possibly okay
because it the ego will start to try to make an its own universe uh and deny that it has energy
that is rising from down below okay uh there’s a difference between the persona and the ego okay
uh when i say ego i mean of a persona that is largely unconscious it’s compulsive it thinks
it is in charge it thinks it knows what’s good for it okay uh it’s cut off from the universe okay
when that no longer becomes a problem it’s no longer ego and it just becomes persona so an
enlightened being is somebody who no longer has an ego but has still has a persona okay and they
proceed as many people like to say well the ego is really important it depends what kind of
vocabulary you’re using okay um i’d like to say that if the ego is no longer unconscious and
compulsive it’s it has died okay and it has just given away to a persona and that’s all that’s
left is the persona okay now that’s interesting too because now as the as since you identify with
being in your head let’s say as somebody of a european heritage let’s say because european
culture has pretty much taken over the world at this point we all sort of think that we’re
intellectual beings uh lords of our own bodies bossing our body around jerking it around making
at do things because it’s not being cooperative you know that sort of ego consciousness um the
middle pillar ritual uh taps into that schematic and it begins to loosen the stranglehold that the
ego has on that spinal column let’s say it’s not really a spinal column it’s just the middle pillar
energies okay it begins to open up that middle pillar uh and this will this can result in the
death of the ego this is what the middle pillar does okay it’s opening up that osiris current
so that you can be annihilated from below okay this is where the concept of the oblivion monster
comes from this is the term that that i created to refer to how it feels when the energy rises up
to annihilate you okay so in other words you’ve identified with this ego mon the ego monster in
your head okay uh and uh as the energy of the osiris current opens up it can feel as though
you’re being attacked from below okay like these devouring frightening monster forces are coming
down from below to destroy you and it so can feel like that it can feel sort of like not that i can’t
be that that can’t be what i am no no no and then you resist and you try to choke off that energy
coming from below because if it completely rises up the ego will die the oblivion monster and all
this sort of imagery of the mouth of hell uh it really comes from the oblivion monster okay in the
neophyte temple this is represented by apophis which um you might want to think of the neophyte
ritual as a sort of um a shower you’re taking a shower in divine energy okay and at the at the
bottom of that shower is the shower drain okay and that is one of the god form stations that’s
the station of apophis and this is the uh powers of set the powers of darkness which are devouring
all the unworthy aspects of yourself okay in other words that ego if it dies it’s going to
break into pieces fall down in the shower drain and get devoured by apophis
in egyptian mythology he was a crocodile as well as other things um apophis i know is has
it’s a greek word but uh the crocodile god is essentially what he was in the um egyptian
pantheon the devouring aspect of evil the devouring aspect of seth apophis is a really good
um peril pairing up of egyptian and uh greek mythology that is also the oblivion monsters
also karanzon okay this is the lord of dispersion which uh supposedly if you can cross the abyss
okay you will be annihilated you will your ego will be destroyed okay and so this karanzon is
the same entity essentially okay not interested in all the scholarship that tries to split hairs
between coranzon and apophis okay this is the viewpoint of an initiate who has confronted these
things okay uh and so these various forces the mythologies around these forces can be very
complex working with the forces themselves can be quite simple so simple that it’s devastatingly
simple all right coming back to the vajra symbol okay just to let you know how these energies work
we’ve talked about this before it’s going to bring some eastern symbolism here if you turn this vajra
symbol right side up you’ve got the lotus flower facing up okay and remember on that lotus flower
there’s sitting a buddha who’s meditating okay or a tantric practitioner who’s meditating and he has
his uh middle pillar energy rising up and and descending through his body in the middle and
he’s also got these side currents out to the side okay that are also in operation the uh the side
currents these sort of side looping things that rise up from the lotus these are offshoots uh and
there’s these are offshoots of the demon that exists right underneath him let’s say karanzan
or apophis that thing right underneath him that’s ready to devour and eat all of the artificial
aspects of himself that are now the ego dies right uh offshoots of that primary demon that’s down
at the base of the neophyte temple though that demon also projects out in all kinds of weird
forms out into the environment okay so if you remember the lbrp ritual we talked about this okay
uh the middle pillar is tuning directly into that okay and of course the middle pillar eventually
is going to facilitate that rising energy which annihilates the ego all right circulation of the
body light body of light okay um to talk about the the middle pillar uh it’s easy to find that
online if you’re wondering how to perform it okay it’s also in the kabbalah magic book very very
specifically described you are vibrating divine names at the various energy centers okay down
through the body and when you circulate the the body of light that is uh you’re visually you’re
visualizing energy coursing through uh various channels around you looping around you okay
which is kind of playing with that vajra symbol again okay um the most serious current most like
i would i would say is the one that rises up through uh the center of the body and then
showers down around you okay now we’ve already talked about that and that rising energy of course
uh can facilitate the destruction of the ego okay it’s not necessarily going to happen while you’re
doing the ritual these rituals basically restructure the psyche so that the enlightenment
experience or the death of the ego will take you by surprise and it will probably zap you
in between waking and sleep that’s often when it happens and you can get a little zap of
enlightenment usually when that happens people will resist and they’ll snap out of it and go
what the hell was that okay but in some cases it turns out to be permanently enlightening and the
ego will be destroyed i think with some i think it was nisargadatta maharaj who described it
And one day, a surprise day comes along and your ego is destroyed permanently, never to rise again.
So that demon that exists sort of at the bottom of the shower drain dissolves completely, no longer being necessary.
And the ego that exists in the head dies, gone.
And all you have left is the persona.
Examples of this would be Nisargadatta Maharaj.
um eckhart tolle is another good example of somebody who’s achieved this state of enlightenment
uh he’s still alive today um so uh rupert spira is another one um michael rodriguez is another
one there are people who have actually achieved this permanent death of ego all right circulation
of the body of light um is it a mistranslation to say okay so um this is really interesting
uh when i’ve read um a version of the secret of the golden flower uh and the scholarship there
said that oh the idea of circulating the light which came apparently from that book um was a
mistranslation and so the circulation of the body of light uh it came about apparently as a
misunderstanding because uh the original wording i guess it was sanskrit or something like that
where the actual phrase was turning the light around.
Now, turning the light around really, from what I gather,
refers to something other than circulating the body of light.
And as a result of a mistranslation,
we have all these people in the West
who are visualizing energy coursing through their bodies
and around their bodies in an effort to circulate the light
in this sort of alchemical way.
all right very interesting because turning the light around what it actually means is to have
your consciousness turn around and look at itself it’s a deep form of let’s say meditation okay i
would actually call it non-meditation when you get to that point um your consciousness stops
focusing in on this or that in the environment and it completely turns back upon itself
and looks at itself if such a thing is possible okay but once i’ve once again i’ve already said
when the consciousness separates out and evolves up the spine you have the separation of you looking
down on your um outward world or your lower world okay uh this is separation between the observer
and the observed the separation between the observer and the observed is very important for
human beings because it’s the essence of bliss we have evolved this way so that we are the universe
appreciating its own beauty okay so if if you were to say oh how terrible that our our consciousness
has risen up into our heads and is now divided away from itself that’s not terrible it’s actually
a form of ecstasy and so the middle pillar becomes a secret symbol for a phallus and i as our as you
may might recall alistair crowley was fond of depicting himself as a dickhead basically as a as
a walking phallus okay um he has self-portrait of himself like you know as as a penis um but this
coursing energy of the consciousness the way it has evolved the universe’s ability to look at
itself and to play with itself to fondle itself and to appreciate itself uh this is the essence
of bliss what it means to be alive okay so i am divided for love’s sake for the chance of union
the pain of separation is as nothing and the joy of dissolution all and as you might gather when
consciousness gets increasingly separated from what it’s observing that’s like sexual tension
that’s building up and then of course the union the the two energies come together and then unify
into a big glow orgasm right so yes enlightenment is like an orgasm and of course but the real
cool nature of that is that the interplay between consciousness and what consciousness is conscious
of is a state of bliss okay so you it’s not that’s not necessarily you want to live you don’t
necessarily want to live in a completely unified state of being you actually want that dualistic
perspective to be operative uh and so that the energy all of life becomes a sort of sexy dance
between the observer and the observed um i don’t know if i’m explaining that very well um this is
is why tantra is such a sexy discipline uh and why it gets misinterpreted as it’s all about sex
it’s not of course not okay so um turning the light around the interesting thing is that um
well when you circulate the light even though that was a mistranslation you are now facilitating
you’re playing around with that energy that has evolved the way it has okay there are many things
in magic that came about as a mistranslation or a misunderstanding doesn’t matter because the psyche
saw something there took advantage of it so the psyche saw the psyche sees something misinterprets
what the message was in terms of turning the light around let’s say but doesn’t matter because it it
basically sees something useful there and develops a whole system based on that misunderstanding okay
another example of that is the sign of silence the sign of horus that supposedly was a mistranslation
and a misunderstanding the greeks saw that and and thought he was it was a sign of silence
but in fact it was just a sign of him sucking his finger to indicate that he was
the infant stage of the god horus and they turned it into a sign of silence which is very important
it plugged right into the mythology of horus because he was being protected from set his
existence was a secret and as he was developing he was kept hidden in the marshes of the nile
delta and don’t tell anybody that he’s alive because he’s eventually going to grow up and
become the heir of osiris he’s going to be come he’s going to become osiris risen okay so um so
that you know that was misinterpreted but it doesn’t matter because it plugged into the myth
and of course the sign of silence is now a very powerful magical gesture in the golden dawn yes
i would say it’s probably the most powerful ritual gesture taught in the golden dawn all right i
guess it’s a type of mudra a western sort of mudra all right so that is the the some of the low down
behind the middle pillar ritual uh so i’m wondering what you guys think about that i’m looking at the
comments and i am beginning to think about what i might do based on what you guys have said you
want to see so yeah please keep the comments coming and yes they will be determining what
future videos will be about okay until next time
Source: Lyam Christopher