Tipareth, the sixth sphere,
is at the centre of the Tree of Life. It is the heart and the sun. It is known as the sphere of beauty.
Tipareth
is the only sphere below the abyss which has a direct connection to the highest sphere of Kether, and it is also connected
directly to every other sphere except for the lowest sphere of Malkuth; it is through this sphere that the divine spirit from
Kether is poured forth throughout our being. The Sepher Yetzirah calls the consciousness of Tipareth ‘Sekhel Shefa Nivdal’
or Transcendental Influx Consciousness, and says this about it:
‘It is called this because through it the
influx of Emanation (Atziluth, from Kether) increases itself. It bestows this influx on all blessings, which unify themselves
in its essence.’
Tipareth is the seat of our sense of self, the
unifying centre around which our psyche is organized. It is the primal unity of Kether descended into the realm of plurality,
where the singular point becomes the centre spot of a circle – the occult symbol of Sol. The eternal subject, the knower
which is never itself known, of Kether becomes the individual subject of a single life – that spark of the limitless
light which gives us life. In the symbol of Sol referred to above the centre spot represents the eternal unity, and the circle
shows a perimeter, a definition of inside and outside, self and other; this leads to the paradoxical concept of the whole
contained within the part which, as strange as it may seem, is a concept also to be found in the modern discipline of quantum
physics. The Buddhist doctrine that the individual self is an illusion is based on the fact that the most fundamental essence
of the self – the point in the centre of the circle – is not unique in every individual, but is actually the shared
essence of all things, the ‘prima materia’ of Kether. The Qabalistic tradition is distinguished from the eastern
tradition because whereas Buddhism is a ‘direct path’ which seeks only to escape from the conditions of existence
and be dissolved back into the spiritual essence, Qabalah is a magickal path which recognized the necessity of all ten spheres
and twenty two paths, and seeks the perfection of the material conditions of existence rather than escape from them.
It
is a common theme in western esoteric philosophy that this unifying centre represented by Tipareth is not fully and properly
manifested in the ordinary human being. This idea was particularly prominent in the early part of the twentieth century when
it provided the central tenet in works by such luminaries as Gurdjieff and Carl Jung. In his philosophy of the ‘fourth
way’ Gurdjieff taught that the ordninary human being has many ‘I’s, and that each time we say I did this, or I am that, although we may think we are referring to
a constant entity, each ‘I’ is actually a different part of our psyche. A large part of the practical work of
the fourth way philosophy revolves around the development of permanent centre of self to unify all these different ‘I’s.
The psychologist Carl Jung, in his work of personal and spiritual development called ‘individuation’, which has
often been compared by both himself and others to the Great Work of alchemy, talked about the ‘latent self’ in
the ordinary psyche and aimed to help people to create a ‘manifest self’ which would act as the unifying centre
of the psyche and thereby resolve the conflict between the conscious and unconscious mind, as well as between fragmented parts
of each one. Such work as is given in both of these systems is wholly consistent with the practical Qabalistic work of Tipareth
