7 ﹁ Spirituality

A life can be unified, honest, clear, founded, well-ventured, and well-ordered — and still feel hollow.

7 ﹁  Spirituality is the seventh of the ninety-five untyings of the Order of the Universe, and it meets the sharpest crisis of the Self: the specific vertigo of the person whose life works and who cannot say what it is for. The knot of this degree is Emptiness. The untying is Purpose — and the Order's teaching is counterintuitive: purpose is not a thing acquired, not a mission handed down or discovered like treasure. It is a direction the emptiness was always pointing. The void is not the enemy. An empty vessel is the only kind that can be filled.

This degree also marks a turn in the ascent. From here the Order teaches in two voices at once — the Sloamslo, which teaches with conviction, and the Sicwn, the counterpoint, which doubts, interrupts, and asks the reader to be no less skeptical of this Order than of the worst cult imaginable. For a degree about belief must be able to contain its own disbelief, or it is a fraud. The two voices are not resolved. You are meant to leave holding both.

A full monograph of sixty-odd pages with twelve engraved plates:

The Mythological — the seventh day that turns making into meaning; Inanna descending through seven gates, surrendering an adornment at each until she stands empty before the underworld — the great myth of emptiness as the price of depth; the seven heavens and the soul's ascent; the seven-branched menorah; the Pleiades; the seven seals; and the mathematical loneliness of seven, the "virgin" number the Pythagoreans gave to Athena.

The Philosophical — the seven chakras and the rising of kundalini as a map of individuation; the Theosophical sevens — the Seven Principles, Planes, Rays, Root Races, and Sacred Planets; the Tibetan Seven-Branch Offering; the mystics of emptiness — Eckhart's detachment, the Cloud of Unknowing, the Buddhist śūnyatā in which emptiness is the openness that makes compassion possible, the Taoist usefulness of the hollow. And here the counterpoint presses hardest — that the feeling of depth is not evidence of depth, and that beauty is the most effective delivery system for a lie.

The Numerological — seven as the seeker, the mystic, the number of solitude and inner wisdom, and its shadow, the endless seeking that avoids arriving. The Chariot of the seventh trump, driven by two opposed sphinxes that must both be held — purpose as the mastery of contradiction, not its elimination. The seven notes before the octave returns transformed; and the near-magical status of seven in the mind, which holds about seven things as a single whole. In the Order's tongue seven is na[ — prime, indivisible, answering to nothing but itself, which is why the Order gives it to the individuating self.

The Developmental — the Age of Seven, the age of reason and the birth of the interior life: the arrival of a private, continuous inner narrator; the first unbidden questions of death and infinity, often at night; the capacity for chosen solitude. And the knot tied in either of two homes — the child whose inner life was intruded upon and who sealed it, growing into a working exterior with a hollow centre; or the child whose interior questions were met with certainties that did not fit, so that belief itself became suspect.

The Operative — the finding of purpose through the disciplined use of emptiness, rather than the search that is itself an avoidance. Individuation, in Jung's precise sense: becoming the self one actually is, withdrawing the projections, earning a belief by passing honestly through doubt. And the installation of the counterpoint as a permanent inner faculty — the mark of the individuated self being neither the believer nor the disbeliever, but the one who can hold a conviction and its doubt in the same hand, and act anyway.

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This digital file is a ZIP archive containing both PDF and ePub editions of 7 ﹁  Spirituality. It is the seventh in a series of ninety-five degrees — the untyings of the Self (1–19), then of the Tribe (20–54), then of the World (55–95).

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You have untied Division, the doubled tongue, the silence, the moving ground, the unpriced venture, and the formless day. Now sit in the emptiness, and read its shape.

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