Visualisation is the art of training yourself to see images vividly in your mind’s eye. As such, it is one of the most important skills you can develop for future work with the tree, because it will make your meditations significantly clearer and more absorbing. It requires no preparation. Make sure you’re not going to be disturbed for five minutes and make yourself comfortable physically, sitting or lying down as you prefer. Close your eyes and take several slow, deep breaths. Concentrate on your mind’s eye, and imagine the number ‘2’. Picture it in your mind’s eye, in white, as if it was written in chalk on a blackboard. Just concentrate on it, and keep it in mind.

When you feel that you have a fairly firm mental hold on it, add another digit next to it. You can pick one at random, or select digits from a number that has meaning to you, like your telephone number. Remembering to keep the ‘2’ vivid, hold the second number next to it. When it is stabilised, add another number, and then another, and keep going until you can no longer hold the whole number simultaneously in your mind’s eye. At that point, start back from the first ‘2’, and try building back up.

During your first attempts, you may find that even the initial ‘2’ is wavering and difficult to keep hold of. That’s perfectly normal; visualisation is not something that many of us practice. Keep at it, and you’ll find that you quickly improve. When you can hold an entire ten-digit phone number steady for minutes at a time, expand your horizons a little. Imagine the surface of your mind’s eye really is a blackboard, complete with chalk dust and a wooden frame. Rub a number out and replace it with something else. Fill in the rest of the classroom that the blackboard is in. Finally populate it with attentive, polite, quiet little children.

If you can hold the image of an entire class – with individual children in specific places – and still retain the numbers you started with, then you’ve mastered visualisation. You can move on earlier though if you are impatient to give up visualisation training, but make sure you can at least envision the blackboard and the wall it is mounted on. This is likely to take several weeks.

You’ll find that visualisation is easier some days than others. Factors such as fatigue, when you last ate and even the moon’s phase may play a role. Look back over your notes and see what correspondences you can identify. As well as the critical benefits your meditations will receive from well-trained visualisatory ability, be aware that when you work with images in your mind’s eye, you are painting pictures with the very fabric of Yesod itself. It is the essence of everything that Yesod is.

Pure Intelligence: “God said: ‘Let us make man’”

The ninth sphere of the Tree of Life, Yesod (pronounced yeh-SODD) means ‘Foundation’, and it is the first sphere that Malkuth connects to, the place of interface between the state of just being and the wisdoms represented by the rest of the Tree. It is also known as Tzaddik, righteousness. Yesod is described as the ‘pure’ intelligence because it is the final product of the rest of the Tree, just prior to its ultimate embodiment into the chaos of the world through Malkuth.

To understand Yesod, it is necessary to look at its position on the Tree. It is often identified with the moon, and like the moon, it reflects the light of the sun/soul from its home in Sephira 6, Tiphareth, straight down to the earth/body in Malkuth. It is also connected to the Spheres of thought and feeling (Hod and Netzach, 7 and 8 respectively), but it lies below their level, close the unthinking instinct of Malkuth.

In other words, Yesod is the sphere of the unconscious. It integrates the past with the urgings and tendencies of the higher soul, and blends that material in with conscious thought and feeling, feeding the resultant material to the self. This is a realm of the imagination and the unconscious, of phantoms, dreams, legends and horrors. Self-awareness begins here, in the dim memories of past pains and glories, and the inherited needs of the soul.

The Cat in the Mirror

Yesod receives all of the urges and imaginings generated within Malkuth. It is a sphere of illusions and phantasms, as infinitely malleable as Malkuth is stubbornly inflexible. The past lives on here, in patterns cast by prior events and thoughts – not just individually, but collectively as well, for after all, we are all one. When you look into your mind’s eye and work with your imagination, you are manipulating the stuff of Yesod. When you dream, this is the sphere that you wander through. Yesod is a place of unbridled creativity, where anything can be brought into existence and given a chance to show itself. This is the realm of the psychic and the astral – a place of possibilities rather than truths.

Without the influence of Yesod, there would be no house for the influence of the past, no place for common understanding, no way for the light of the divine to touch the world. Formation takes place here; patterns filter down to Yesod from the rest of the Tree and are turned into blueprints by which Malkuth can bring them into manifestation. All that is and was lives on in Yesod’s reflections. This is the home of symbolism, hidden meanings and desires, and all manner of images and chimera.  It is the path by which the divine light of the soul is able to make itself manifest within the world, for if it shone directly onto Malkuth, that beauty of Tiphareth, the pure house of the soul, would sweep away our free will in a bright burst of divine love. Every soul yearns for completeness, for the return first to Tiphareth, and then up to Kether and unity with God. If that completion were enforced however, there would be no room for growth or understanding – it would be as if God had never Sundered himself in the first place.

So, by acting as a confused, misty mirror for the glories of the soul in Tiphareth – as well as the fires of the mind in Hod and the waves of emotion in Netzach – Yesod allows Malkuth, with all its imperfections, to remain in existence. Without it, the entire universe would be swept back up in the rapture that is Kether, oneness with God. Yesod is a dark, twisted mirror, but it has to be, because the light that it reflects is so intense.

Be aware though that like any other mirror, Yesod reflects both ways, and while it does distort the glory of the divine, it also purifies the physical. Illusions can not pass upwards out of Yesod. Further more, like a more conventional mirror, it brings the soul into the personality through the unconscious, but it can also show twisted aspects of the personality back to itself. Horrors and glories can be generated out of the twists in our own unconscious. Yesod is a dangerous sphere: a trap for illusions, both our own and others’, layered over the years. We need to learn to identify our own fantasies (both good and bad) before we can move through Yesod in safety. Many mystics have been trapped here by false wonders and terrors.

Are you able to tell the difference between a twisted reflection of your own fears and desires, and a true reflection of your divine will? Are you ready to look beyond the words and tricks of false prophets and see the beauty of God’s light? These are the challenges that you will need to rise to in order to master the many nodes of Yesod.

Yesod

In meditations, Yesod is normally visualised as a grassy hilltop clearing poking out of a vast forest of trees. The forest is full of hidden, distant activity. It is night, and the moon is overhead, its phase corresponding to the current physical one. The only colour is a dark indigo wash over the blacks, whites and greys of the scene – and even then, only when the moon is at least half full. Towards the centre of the clearing, a wide circle of stones surrounds a ring of pillars. Each stone is about a foot round, half white and half black. The pillars themselves come in pairs, one black and one white. At the top, exactly level with your face, each pair holds a round mirror. There are nine pairs, distributed evenly around the circle. As you stand at the centre and look into the mirrors, you see that each contains a different aspect of your personality; positively skewed, negatively skewed and undistorted versions of your childish ego, your restrictive, parental id, and your rational ‘true self’.

Yesod is variously associated with the colour indigo, mirrors, the sexual organs, lavender, violets, willow trees, incense, cats, vampires, the virtue of independence, burial mounds, employee rights and the moment of conception.