​Chapter 20. Wills and Worlds

If Qliphoth and the cut beneath them are moves of a will, the Tree can look as if it has shrunk to psychology, a theater of figures a mind runs internally, with the powers of the Nightside — its demons and gates — dwindling to images in a private interior.

The objection rests on a partition it keeps out of sight. It sets a material world outside and a psyche within it, granting the outside the real and leaving the inside a faint copy, so that anything done on the side of the image is filed as something felt, with the doing reserved to the outside. That partition is the materialist settlement: the world given over to matter, the leftover interior transferred to a science of the psyche, and psychology is the name of that remainder. To ask whether the working is only psychological is to have signed that settlement, since the question grants matter its monopoly on the real.

The Left-Hand Path cosmology never signed it. There are wills, which are acts, and there is Tiamat, the undivided that no act has yet cut. A world is what a will deposits in acting, so a Sephirah is no image dimmed against a solid substrate, there being no matter behind it to serve as one. Tiamat cannot serve as the solid thing either, holding no determination for an image to copy; nor is she the empty nothing the Tree named her. What is determinately real is deposited will and nothing else. The Tree is will taken for the structure of being; the Nightside is will taken for its underside.

The objection's bedrock gives out on the tradition's own ground. The world is God's emanation, the light let down the Tree until it reaches the floor and settles as the made cosmos, so the matter the objection trusts as the standing real is the last and coarsest reach of the descent, laid down like every station above it. Idel finds the point already in the sources, where the stuff of heaven and earth is called pesolet, refuse, the coarse matter of Tohu, the world formed from the dross and man from what was finer. Matter enters as sediment, the residue at the bottom of the pour, and never as the ground beneath it. What was set outside as the solid real is one more thing a will laid down, holding no more of the real than the image it was meant to outweigh.

What happens between worlds is the meeting of the wills that laid them. A will leaves a deposit in cutting, and beyond that deposit it does one thing: it meets another will, pressing on it, gathering it, drawing it into its own line or breaking against it. Existence is wills, the sediment their cutting leaves, and the pressure of will upon will. The Demiurge's dominion is no more than this: a will that gathers other wills, so that they take its sediment for the ground of the world. No further principle is needed to account for the Tree's reign, and none is there to find.

Deposited will is objective in the single sense the word can carry here. It remains where it was laid and resists the will that meets it. A will entering a deposited world meets a cut it did not draw, and the resistance of that cut to its wishes is the mark that the cut is not its own. The Sitra Achra is objective in just this way.

The Sephirotic diagram was never a set of private mental pictures. To the Kabbalist a Sephirah is a power and an emanation, a name of the hidden God and a root of existence, and the diagram is the way into a hidden life that yields to no more literal telling. Put a form of will where the symbol once reached the hidden God, and the refusal of psychologism carries over intact. The symbol is how the hidden is reached, as the hidden appears under no other form.

Vital sets out this structure in Gates of Holiness, and his account leaves no room for the reduction. He has the practitioner's thought climb the levels to the root of the soul, and the light then descends back through him until the imaginative power sets it into a worldly image, which is met as though by the outer senses, at times as an angel that speaks. The imaginative power shapes the descending light; it does not invent what it shapes. The seer serves as a link in a chain of worlds, drawing the abundance down through himself before any portion of it becomes his own, so that the vision is a current that passes through a subject on its way. Strip away its aim — the return to the One and the repair the descent is made to serve — and the working structure stays: the seer is a passage in a chain, and the access runs through levels already there before him. Read the chain through this account and its levels become the deposits of wills. Its current is one will's cut crossing into the working of another, the passage a way opened between acts.

No will meets a bare reality, because there is no bare reality to be met. Tiamat is met by no one, and all else is already cut. A will has a world only through the cuts that give it one, through the names and differences by which it sorts what it faces, and the pulls and refusals that set it toward this and away from that. A Sephirah is a form of will, and its image is the way that form comes to hand, the shape under which it can be worked at all. Pain is felt through the body and forfeits no reality for being felt there; a form of will is encountered through its image and forfeits none for being worked there.

The instrument of the practice, whatever name the map gives it, gathers a scattered will into one gesture and holds it there. What moves when the gesture takes is the cut: what counts as one's own and what as foreign, what as barred and what as open to the hand. The cut is the founding act, and a world is a cut set down; to shift the cut is to shift the world the will has. The working reaches past the picture of a settled world into the line along which a world is laid. Held as Lehavah, the cut is shifted in the open, owned in the shifting; held as sediment, it is served.

Jung's labor halts on the near side of that line. He takes the disowned face back into a self and names the larger figure complete; the taking-back can ease a person, quieting the war he had waged on his psyche. The dark he reclaims is an attractor, and to accept it as a content of the self quiets the quarrel over the vector while it runs on, since the labor falls on the image and never reaches the cut. He keeps the interior the materialist handed him and tends it in good order. The practice meant here moves the line that produced the interior, and a will that shifts that cut no longer stands within the same bounds.

The Other Side opens as more than a man's own depths costumed as gods. Its powers are the deposits left by wills the Tree never gathered in, as real as the Tree and beholden to it in no way.