On Extracting Essence — Across Abrahamic Landscapes (M008)

Words: 2841 ⁘ Length: 24:28 min
⁘ Created: 2025-08-18 ⁘ Updated: 2026-09-30
On Extracting Essence — Across Abrahamic Landscapes (M008)Play

We have no need to craft and create new insight. It's all there in the countless traditions of contemplation. It's inherent in existence itself. When traditions become veiled by their specific clutter, it's time to re-extract.

When lineages of insight transmission become shrouded with essentially worthless complexity, when subscription and adherence demands that we embrace their significant baggage, it stops being worth the trouble for a seeker of clarity.

We look at the general concepts of decluttering and extracting patterns of essence — the primary principles that become the dynamics of meaning in these traditions. For you — that you yourself would unveil the essence in every teaching.

We tour the Abrahamic landscape of wisdom traditions. Judaism and Kabbalah. Christian ethics and mysticism. Islam's sharia and Sufi traditions. All with merit — all with their issues too.

#MetaLoom #Patterns #Essence #Religions #Abrahamic #Extraction #Universality

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Of the new, old, recycled, and upcycled into declutterings, extractions, distillations. Our musings on the underlying primary patterns in major traditions and otherwise continues. We've touched upon the east side Oriental traditions in our previous installment and today we venture into the west side, Abrahamic traditions, and then some.

With none of these superior or inferior by any absolute measure and, if we were to evaluate their merit, it would be in the context of what was actually accomplished in their times with the people to which all of this was presented. There are varying degrees of underlying essence, yes, but that is not the measure of their worth. The measure of their worth is the skill in application and the change for the better that was accomplished, that is, and will be accomplished by these respective traditions.

Beyond that, it needs to be noted that these traditions are like trees with manifold fruits and the outcomes depend on the individuals plucking from the tree. You have on one hand those who look for the best, most essential fruits, and you have even those who come to a point of transcending the form of the tree itself. They realize that underneath, there is a certain living essence that depends not on the shapes and presentations of the tradition. And these be the individuals who typically usher in transformation, reformation, revitalization, even new eras in old traditions.

Then on the other hand, you have those who, driven by their fear and desire, reach for the fruits that give them power, that give them security and so on, often clinging to the ritualistic behavioural overlay, the prescriptions, the ethical form and the behavioural codecs. And those, they are often so far removed from the brighter fruits as to be unrecognizable as children of the primary patterns of the tree of life.

So mileage varies significantly between individuals and their orientations, their phases of evolution. And as such, there is no categorical statement to be made of any individual tradition that would actually hold and apply to all. Look individually and look at the potentials of the different fruits in each tradition's tree of offering.

Exploring the Landscape of Abrahamic Traditions

Then into the actual excursion. Covering first the major Abrahamic traditions and then some. With all of this, bear in mind that time and format here does not lend itself to any measure of in-depth exploration and extraction of the specific primaries and essences in these traditions. Rather we are sweeping by with a general gloss based on what has emerged over the years as pointers.

Now we have, entering the Abrahamic traditions, the typical model of less philosophy than in their oriental siblings, and more of a faith-believe obligation, etc. overlay. Circling around initially the celestial, heavenly, High One and its, his, commandments to the tribes of mankind in a more ritualized, formalized religious framing.

But that matters not. What matters... You may have a religious framing. You may have a roleplay framing. You may have a mythic legendary framing. You may have children's fairy tales framings. It matters not. What matters is, what are these framings carriers for?

Bearing that in mind, let us hold no resentment, even the atheists and disbelievers among us, toward the particular dress and vessel, deployed in these various traditions in the west side of the world. Middle East, we count as the west side, okay? Simply open your eyes for the underlying essence and see what potentials lie therein, what may be accomplished by enhancing it while filtering out the overlays.

Exoteric and Esoteric Judaism — Torah and Kabbalah

And first in line, naturally, going chronologically from Abraham to Moses and the Torah or the Old Testament era. We have the Jewish tradition. And ironically, as it happens, if we look at the raw nuts and bolts of Judaism, it differs not very radically from the raw nuts and bolts of the inherited Abrahamic continuum that we find in their nemesis, the Islamic tradition. But we do also have the deeper, more contemplative strata.

We look at the Kabbalah, the more mystical engagement, interpretation of the essential bits of the Abrahamic tradition. And in there, if only you can strip the overlay, you find fantastic, essentially systemic framings, abstractions, the tiers of abstraction and creation from the one undivided Ein Sof, through the emergence of Adam Kadmon, the prototypical consciousness really, not Adam as the human being at that point.

And so on and so forth, through generations of specificity to concrete manifestation. And again, we have the famous classic Tree of Life, the Sefirot. I did some digging into that a bit back, actually extracting that into a general, multi-tiered universal frame of simply principles and dynamisms. And I tell you, it was one hell of a dig going through all of those layers of casting, interpretation, even when the original Hebrew itself is a poetic rather than definitive, precise, what to speak of the myriad of translations.

In there, you crack the shell by holding your own mind with a filter that only accepts a certain level of abstraction and complementarity. Those are the keys to unraveling, unclocking, and pinning down the primaries in any one of these traditions. But it was rather highlighted with the thickness of the poetic overlays to the Tree of Life and the Sefirot.

Exoteric and Esoteric Christianity — Ethics and Revelations

Moving onward into Christianity, the next dispensation, an attempt to essentialize and also purify or upgrade the traditions of yore, basically the prevalent Jewish tradition with its branches and approaches. That had, as happens time again, time and again, as is even well documented in the Old Testament itself, the repeat cycles of divergence, fall from grace, drifting from what is actually essential in the grand scheme of things.

So we have a brilliant bouffet of basic ethical teachings rooted in this basically monotheistic frame of reference, many, many worthy universal contemplations, and in fact, and indeed, such principles that form many of the ethical grounds of being for even modern legislative systems. Many of which are abundantly shared with their Oriental siblings, to a point where people are prone to draw parallels between Buddhist and Christian ethics and core teachings on good life. So that's there.

But as we know from the churnings of the Kabbalah, there is also an ancient Hebrew tradition of cognitive alchemy, symbolism, layers of consciousness. We have the visions of Ezekiel, etc., in the Old Testament that were brought into a single codex in the epic book of Revelation. That, read it as the end-time tale if you will, but a work that is chock-full of the stations and dynamisms of consciousness, and that spells out a certain path of purification, reconciliation, refinement, and ascension of awareness. Into, and now, here again, we enter into trivial, literal debates on surface readings.

On for example, the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven, as to is the Kingdom of Heaven up there or down here or in between, or perhaps in your back pocket or in my front pocket. That is all beside the point. The conversion of 144 cubits into metric units is utterly beyond and besides the point. The 12 tribes also, go do your DNA samplings and whatever, and try to track what was meant, but really, we have the 12 archetypal tribes of consciousness that are in the game here, with their 12 gemstones, their 12-fold representations, and these 12 are a bridge of universal comparability, access, interchange between different traditions.

If only we look at them beyond the surface expressions and actually just coordinate, triangulate, the archetypes emergent, the primary principles of existence, underlying all of these narratives and all of these fantastic visions. So we have the more esoteric aspect of Christianity, meriting our attention as a source of bridges that span the whole world.

Exoteric and Esoteric Islam — Sharia to Sufism

Then we have the third turning of the Abrahamic wheel. We come to Islam. Islam that often divides opinions and indeed for reason, a tradition that initially was born as a matter of upcycling, upgrading the revelation, but where the prophet presenting his visions and their correlation with the existing tradition was basically just liberally pissed on by his peer-believers, Christians and Jews of the time, and harshly dismissed, even though there was clear merit. That led to a certain significant retaliation, but blame not the man for being frustrated in face of significant blindness to the essential meaning that he inherited, that he extracted.

And now the part of Islam that gets the more negative rep is the Sharia, the behavioral codex, the legislation, the formalization of human behavior and all of its constraints. And as to how relative and absolute all of that is, is a debate I will not enter into at this time. Needless to say, much of it goes in parallel with a strict orthodox reading of the Torah, the Jewish codex of behavior itself.

So drop equal blame if you intend to drop equal blame. And while you're at it, also look at the east side, the Dharma Shastra, Manu-Smriti, and so on from the Vedic Hindu tradition, and all that it prescribes that may not be as across the board implemented, but that lingers in the attitudes and behavioral standards, gender roles, castes, stratification of society, and so on, to this day in India on a very deep level. So please apply the same measure of critique across the board. Do not single anyone out. So those are a matter of debate as to what is relevant and compulsory for a contemporary context and what is not. What's more important is understanding the why of the what.

Suppose the five daily prayers, the Salat. Now that is a fantastic reset point engineered into the daily lives of the umat, the Muslim community. But has it developed in the popular faith from an actual turning point into the oneness of all being, snapping out of your tunnel of conditions and self-absorption into the oneness of all. Has it devolved from that into ritual recitation, a ceremonial prostration, a matter of communal belonging, etc. and so on and so forth, riddled by layers of superstitious belief, with a certain veiling from what is actually supposed to be happening when you do your prayers. The Tibetans do the same thing by the way, not by the same schedule, but the prostrations they do, to some significant degree. The Hindus do it, so I mean everyone does a similar thing. It has a function, right? So again, apply across the board and try and look at the underlying essence.

And as we speak of the underlying essence, we must necessarily mention the Sufi traditions from Al-Arabi onward, the marvelous thinkers from days bygone, drawing from the golden era of Islam. I mean we do recall, do we not, that renaissance was facilitated by the groundwork and the preservation of the Greek classical heritage that was handed over, translated and further translated into Latin and whatever for renaissance thinkers through the Arabic world, through the globe-spanning integration of essence, essential knowledge that was brought together. Even said the good prophet himself, to him what matters is knowledge that is of value and that which is dear to God. So he clearly valued knowledge. He was not anti-reason and the golden age of Islam is the testament to that inheritance.

We have since then entered in many parts of the Islamic world into something of a dark age, where the brutal interpretation of the codex of behavior rules sovereign and is a matter of exerting power and establishing essentially barbaric empires. We have fallen from the renaissance, the blossoming, the golden age, and at one point there must be a turning back to the essence if the tradition is to survive in a form that sustains in the future. I suppose I would actually have plenty and plenty to say of all of this, of the heart of the prophets, the essential extract and common thread and loom that saturates all of the Abrahamic tradition, but that shall be for another time, another day. We have already covered plenty.

From Gnostic to Hermetic to Magic and Archetypes

In today's west side excursion I had also hoped to cover some of the more fringe, if you may, but also essentialist, synchretic or synthesizing traditions from the early gnostic onward into hermeticism, whatever all that was brewing during renaissance, including alchemical, magical traditions and their extracts. That have also brought a significant impact into today's world.

For example, in the works of Jung, the archetypes of psychology, and on the other side in the works of Alistair Crowley, the good old To Mega Therion, who did some fantastic extraction and aggregation work across the entire global scape of mystical and alchemical, cognitive alchemy traditions into his particular shape of essentialist magic, heavily laden with symbols, so it is a package to crack. All of it worthy groundwork. As to their applications, again, mileage varies by individual. Some of it, more on the lucid side, much of it, rather to the dark side.

Again, these are all vessels, these are all framings and dressings. Look at the patterns themselves. The patterns themselves are neutral. They simply describe the properties and dynamisms, the interrelations of what is. That's all there is to it. Look at the "what is" underneath. That's what we do in the east, That's what we do in the west, and that's what we do in between, and above as below, in the world out there, as in the world in here, in the physical body, in the mental conscious body.

All of it is reconcilable through unification of patterns through the discovery of parallels. Not cheap amalgamation, but an actual recognition of the identical dynamic and then the framing and the casting, the overlay that flavors it. Keep those separate, do not blur it all together for a pop consumption, cool thing. That is counterproductive, that simply repels and drives away actual perception of unification from those who truly wish to establish authentic unity.

Dual Streams Wrap-Up: Essences of East and West

On these notes, we've covered the east, we've covered the west, at a glance from Vedic and Hindu traditions, through Buddhism into the elders Hinayana Theravada, through Mahayana and Vajrayana the tantric alignments, into Taoism, Old and New. And we've looked at the Abrahamic side of the dual streams. We have the Dharmic and the Abrahamic. We have touched upon Judaism and Kabbalah. We have touched upon Christianity, ethical and esoteric.

And we have touched upon Islam, the doctrinal surface level and the Sufi traditions with their fairly in-depth insight into the layers of emanation from the one monad, monistic non-dual ultimate, through emanations of grace, unified. Diversification of the same essence into elemental, into human spheres, substances, natures, stratification of being. Brilliant stuff there.

We have touched upon that in brief and, in conclusion for all of us, let us look at what the passenger in all of these vehicles is, and that's all there is to it. Let the contents, let the primary essence be the bearer of merit that we recognize. Not the so many temporal contexts and conflicts that all of these invariably undergo.

And again let us respect and even look for the individuals who have culminated, extracted the essence of the tree of each tradition, for they have come to witness the tree that we all share in our lives, the tree of generality, primary abstractions, the fabric of life itself, the book of life itself beyond anyone's opinions. And there we conclude.

Enjoy the process of contemplation and make it not an intellectual exercise, make it a living basin of essence, make it the grounds of your multi-spectral perception of truth and actuality that unifies us all. That is what all of this is aimed for, what I hope to share. Not speculation, but lenses of perception that bring us closer to what is.