Splendor

Splendor is the English title of the eighth sphere on the tree of life, Hod. The names of the other sephiroth like Wisdom, Victory and Foundation make sense to me. Splendor is not something I have been able to wrap my head around until now.

Hod is a sephira of water that is associated with the intellect. The paths around it are full of creative fire, save one. That one is the experience of water, the Hanged Man of the tarot. Your intellect combined with your emotions create your universe or, at the very least, your perception of it. That part just makes sense to me but Splendor, what is that?

I have had some experiences of late that I think reveal the meaning. Yesterday, I posted about Old Robert and New Robert. Old Robert was driven by the ties between his thoughts and emotions. He saw the world through this filter and saw those perceptions reflected back to him in the deeds of others. In this is a bit of self-fulfilling prophecy, being co-creator and/or projecting and internalizing a biased viewpoint. This is not to slam that guy because everyone does that. Some can speak in such a way that their biases are not obvious or in other ways be more circumspect but we are all driven by this thought/emotion perceptual soup. In my case that soup was quite negative and pain driven.

Splendor is rising up past the thought/emotion energy and seeing the perfection of it all. It is the difference between the ordinary mind and the transcendent mind. From there, everything is PERFECT.

Last night, I had a difficult conversation where ordinary Robert-mind appeared. As soon as it was over, I meditated and took the disturbing thoughts to transcendent Robert-mind. All the negativity was gone in an instant. It was like putting my thoughts/emotions through a coffee filter. What remained were precisely the few items I needed from that conversation. Immediately, I fell back into the view of perfection and woke up in that same that place this morning.

From a place of perfection, it is easy to be accepting and loving of those living in their immanent thought/emotion soup.

The place of transcendent mind is awesome. It is by far the easier to bring into the manifest world than any other realization I have had. Every day, I experience the knowledge of perfection. Even though there are moments when I cannot see it or forget, the knowledge mindset reappears. This is wondrous.

The danger is thinking that this work is complete. This is but one experience of transcendent states on the tree of life. The climb up the tree does not end with the eighth sephira.