Meno_ is the real master of esoteric writing, just as the dollar is the real cryptocurrency!
Yes, but the reduction toward archaic elements can not conspire not to take account of spatial-temporal morphosis, so such are inadequate to configure what the psychologism of ‘the eye’ ‘turns’ at critically compressed boundaries/ as the pre-formative is sought to literally preform what may intrinsically be understood as an intuitive cognitive operation.
At tat stage it’s an uncertain determination, whether it is consistent with a conscious or sub-conscious operation , sine a pre-reflective frame limits it’s
understanding.
The painting ‘The Metamorphosis of Narcissus’ I think exemplifies the preconsciou image of a transcendent object in conflict with it’s ethnographic counterpart, not realizing such as an effort to reduce toward an irreducible identity consisting of post reflective limits of boundaries.
Such is with the uncertainty that grows out of the archaic boundlessness, creating appearent paradoxes which occurred literally.
The reversal, or more commonly, the inversion takes place to account to this ‘illusion’ whereas it is simply a method of accountability.
Such is a necessary method of the mind, from being overwhelmed by all kinds of conspiratorial assumptions, and Socrates may be one of them, the one mostly most appearent to arrive at an arguably simple state of mind.
I take issue that there is no exit, since such will be a reassurance of the formative to take precedence over the pre-formative.
The variability of one for the other, may solve the problem of the ‘eye’ within and without the similarity which basically a cognitive/ phenomenal interplay,
, or, it’ transcendent- imminent counterpart searching for it’s objective clarity.
Extroverted Sensing is cognizing one’s process of sensing with no post-processing;
introverted Sensing is cognizing one’s process of sensing with post-processing;
extroverted iNtuiting is cognizing the results of one’s process of sensing with no post-processing;
introverted iNtuiting is cognizing the results of one’s process of sensing with post-processing;
extroverted Thinking is cognizing one’s process of thinking—about one’s Sensings and/or iNtuitings—with no post-processing;
introverted Thinking is cognizing one’s process of thinking—about one’s Sensings and/or iNtuitings—with post-processing;
extroverted Feeling is cognizing the results of one’s process of thinking—about one’s Sensings and/or iNtuitings—with no post-processing;
introverted Feeling is cognizing the results of one’s process of thinking—about one’s Sensings and/or iNtuitings—with post-processing.
Note that each clause about post-processing refers back to the process last mentioned.
Works on diminishing principled returns of discernment between extro and introversive sensation, and there multiple limits of cognitive signs easrablished along the way until they appear to fall off the map.
And the original object/objective is hypothesized as singular.
Jus’ musein’. ( without trying to be overly amusing.)
.and thanks , that clarified it
I now think the metaphor of post-processing isn’t even adequate. Next, I thought of the metaphor of screen burn-in or pixel burn-out, which is why screensavers can literally save CRT, plasma, and OLED screens. Introverted Sensing, for instance, could be understood as extroverted Sensing except with an image already present (though it needn’t be a still image). An introverted Sensor then adapts new sense data to that image. The image is burned in because introverts are, as Eysenck put it, more tender-minded than extroverts, who are more tough-minded. Introverts tend to be more deeply impressed by what they cognize. The impressions that have been left then function as the “moulds” for new cognitions.
I used to understand these functions in a way similar to yours, which is diagram 1 in the image I attached.
I have since then began to think that the only objective awareness we have is physical and hence it is by means of our senses. All other functions of consciousness are subjective, and nested in a russian doll fashion. By subjective I mean that we only become aware of them indirectly by how they affect our physical bodies. That is why we speak about “feeling” emotions, because an emotion can only be felt, through the physical body.
Likewise a thought provokes an emotion, and then the emotion is felt. And likewise an intuition provokes a thought, and a thought provokes an emotion, and then the emotion is felt.
The further away from the physical body in that nesting, the more indirectly it is perceived.
And that when we speak about expansion of consciousness, we are really speaking about focusing consciousness gradually outward from the physical body onto those outer and less direct spheres of thought and intuition, and less soo on emotions and on the physical body.
That best friend must have been me – Yes I was very far from delicate and Ive been psychologically very violent with people. I dont know what Sephira I was at, at the time, when things went wrong for me, mid 2021 - I was pretty high up I think, seeing, knowing things a mortal should not know - but at the same time I was a hopeless fool, sensitive to victim mentality. That has brought me down. Ive done that to myself, I think Ive fallen into the abyss.
Two weeks ago, I wrote:
[T]hese last few days I’ve come back full circle to the beginning of that existential crisis [i.e., the crisis of the Abyss]… More precisely, it hasn’t been a circle but a downward spiral, as I’m now at an even lower point than ever before—although somehow it hasn’t really affected me emotionally this time. That is to say, Saturday night two things happened, one of which gave me an adrenaline rush and the other made me really angry and indignant; but then I transcended that, and now I’m beyond despair. I even found my Word, in the sense of Thelema (Crowley’s philosophy).
And:
That adrenaline experience led to another significantly unpleasant experience later that night, where I was filled with wrath at the general lack of respect I tend to receive by a specific case of disrespect (mutual, I suppose). This set off a chain of thought where I first re-embraced moral indignation and the like, then interpreted that embrace as a mere temporary relapse and rose beyond good and evil again, but this morning descended as deeply into the nihilist abyss as I’ve ever been. I could finally go to sleep, however, after I became the equal of the Buddha in a sense:
“Whom Men call Gotama, or Siddartha, or the Buddha, was a Magus of our Holy Order. And His Word was ANATTA; for the Root of His whole Doctrine was that there is no Atman, or Soul”. (Aleister Crowley, Liber Aleph.)
My Word, I finally figured then, is ATHELEMA ("no Will"¹)…
This is not to say I was wrong about “self-lightening”, for that amounts to the same thing. Still, ΑΘΕΛΗΜΑ is more explicit—most importantly to myself.—Victim mentality is foolish, yes; but you still haven’t attained to Wisdom. You haven’t done anything to yourself, no more than others have. To be sure, you’ve long stressed that “self-valuing” does not mean the valuing of a “self”; and yet, you’ve also asserted that self-valuing brings itself into existence out of nothing, that this is no spontaneous or effortless event, but that it takes a tremendous amount of effort, struggle, and suffering (my paraphrase). I say: No, there’s no such thing whatsoever anywhere, ever; there’s only the feeling of struggle etc. In reality, there’s only an effortless self-lightening.
¹ “There is no will”, as Nietzsche said (WP 715; see also GS 127; BGE 16, 19; TI “World” 5, “Errors” 3; A 14; WP 46, 488, 668, 671, 765).
Im sure I did not say these things about coming into being out of nothingness through a struggle, if I did I was wrong; it is holding oneself into being against nothingness that is a struggle, or that is felt as a struggle -but really what is the difference between struggling and feeling that one struggles? Isn’t struggle a feeling?
Here’s the thing though about victim mentality and why it is foolish against the laws of self-valuing (indeed, as I at the last point in our correspondence denied but before that constantly stated, it is of course valuing self through valuing other); the struggle is the attaching to values. That connects to Buddha - he gives up the struggle, gives up the value, gives up the existence as entity/soul –
but then yet, what does he become? He still is, we still speak of him -
In the Tree of Life the Soul is the Middle Triad, whereas the Spirit is the Supernal Triad. Which is beyond particular entity.
I remain however a Nietzschean, though no longer in the cocky sense of before, where I presumed ease in affirming the ER - its just that I value the Earth and its forms very much and affirm my attachment to them, and immensely suffer from my detachment from them, immensely suffer form my loss of earthly joys, the loss of my foolishness. Indeed, that loss does not amount to wisdom.
I would not agree that there is no will, I would rather say that the will is passive. That it the key, I think, that VO offers - will is in valuing, not in radiating. But then, this applies only below the abyss, above the abyss there is pure radiation, and there is no particular thing which is valued, all simply increases in value through being in the presence of this radiation. I dont mean literal light;
“What we call light he calls wind. Our highest spiritual experiences are what he calls light.”
Liber CDXV, The Paris Workings
That light is what I believe is transmitted in Reiki. It is not owned, claimed, generated, it is just transmitted.
When I was still with Kathi, she had a friend who did Reiki. That friend wasn’t particularly good at it, but what I learned, I found to be nobler than any other healing art - cleaner, truer. Only recently I found a book about it that pleases me, and I learned, from another source, that according to the current masters of that art, the age of the Yin gods is dying and the age of the Yang gods is now dawning.
Sei Heiki.
I offer this because it seems to be in line with your philosophy, - the effortlessness of it, the absence off will, the fact that it simply is, and ones experience of increased will/ will to power is a product of that – and of course because given the situation you describe you may well have use for it, given also that, your philosophy being so much related to it, you may have some powers there. Good to hear from you.
It’s good to hear from you, too, when it is like this. And yes, these things are really interesting to me right now. The Jungian functions, not so much—sorry, Phone! Actually, I’m not sorry, because I don’t believe in—free—will, and therefore believe no one and nothing is to blame or to praise for anything. In other words, I don’t believe in power(s)!
If struggle is only a feeling, it’s only a seeming struggle. The feeling is real, but what it feels like is only apparent. For example:
“[L]ike a sick man who, feeling one of his limbs uncommonly heavy, comes to the conclusion that another man is lying on top of him, the naive homo religiosus divides himself into several persons.” (WP 135.)
“[M]an has not dared to credit himself with his strong and surprising impulses—he has conceived them as ‘passive,’ as ‘suffered,’ as things imposed upon him” (WP 136).
Now Nietzsche is usually understood as teaching that man is himself the cause of these feelings (and perhaps he does teach this—exoterically, for the “noble”!). However, all he really teaches is that “they come without being willed, consequently we are not their author: the will that is not free (i.e., the consciousness that we have been changed without having willed it) needs an external will.” (ibid.)
There is no such external will, but there’s no internal will, either! “What alone can be our teaching? That no one gives man his qualities—neither God, nor society, nor his parents and ancestors, nor he himself” (TI “Errors” 8)…
I think the word “will” is meaningless if it doesn’t mean free will. I’m saying there is no freedom or agency whatsoever! There’s only self-lightening—which, when it lightens itself on (an)other self-lightening(s) which lighten(s) itself on it, is self-valuing.
Without the notion of praiseworthiness, there can be no pride; and without pride, can there be joy? “[W]henever man rejoices,” Nietzsche writes, “he is always the same in his rejoicing: he rejoices as an artist, he enjoys himself as power, he enjoys the lie as his form of power.” But the fundamental delusion is precisely that “he dupe[s] himself” (WP 853, emphasis mine)… If joy/pleasure (Lust) is the feeling of power, and if the feeling of power is the feeling of freedom, and if the feeling of freedom is the feeling of free will or agency, then it is groundless. To see this groundlessness is the deepest abyss. I envision the rest of my sane life as a war waged on my feeling of free will by my disbelief in free will.
I don’t think Ive ever believed in free will. I know I haven’t. I do believe in drives, in valuing one state over the other, and in power and lack thereof - to will I regard simply as having the power to be in the preferred state, but we aren’t free to determine the state we prefer, nor to determine, of course, our power to attain it.
Free will - from what should the will be free? I’ve never really understood the concept of its freedom. All I see in nature is compulsion, determinism, and a boundless richness in that, from some perspectives. All I experience is an increasing externalizations of my “will” - multiplying agencies outside of me, fucking with me, “willing me” in all sorts of directions, and that is what sort of killed me, cost me my pride, sort of caused me to become ashamed of my lack of free will in which I never even believed.
Well, there are less deep-rooted and more deep-rooted beliefs. For example, since my adolescence at the latest, I hadn’t believed in a continuation of my consciousness after death, yet it was well over a year after I’d “crossed the Abyss” that I finally found I still believed in it on a deep, childhood level. That is, I only realized I’d still believed in it when I finally completely lost that belief.
As for free will, etc., if we aren’t free to determine our power to attain what we prefer, is it really our power? What we happen to prefer codetermines our “power” to attain it: for the fact that we prefer it informs our drive (incl. “drivenness”) towards it.
What you say about externalizations reminds me of the horror I experienced when I first, finally, understood self-valuing as “self-valuing through other-valuing” (which is all I meant by “indirect self-valuing”). It was quite literally a bad trip that lasted for six days straight: the other self-lightenings through which you self-value may indeed will you in all kinds of directions. As Blake said, however, shame is pride’s cloak. That is to say, when you’re ashamed you haven’t really lost your pride. And what is there to be proud of, anyway, in the absence of self-determination? (To be sure, one doesn’t have to be proud of oneself, of course, at least not directly; one may be proud of one’s ancestors, or even of one’s God.)
Well, there are less deep-rooted and more deep-rooted beliefs. For example, since my adolescence at the latest, I hadn’t believed in a continuation of my consciousness after death, yet it was well over a year after I’d “crossed the Abyss” that I finally found I still believed in it on a deep, childhood level. That is, I only realized I’d still believed in it when I finally completely lost that belief.
May I ask for (more) details about when and how you crossed the abyss?
Did you arrive in Binah? Of course the virtue of Binah is Silence, but in as far as it would be sane to discuss it.
My mystical experiences early on convinced me
against prior belief that there is existence beyond timespace where consciousness can dwell in eternal form.
Im mostly speaking of my ascent to Tipharet in 2004, which then must have been Tipharet of one of the higher worlds.
I saw time as a ring of frozen lightning around the sphere.
It was an immensely solid experience and I figured then okay I need to see this only the once.
It was the most powerful kabbalistist experience I’ve had. I did a bit of strong pathworking in my late twenties.
Im not making a claim, just saying that I’m not convinced of the opposite.
As for free will, etc., if we aren’t free to determine our power to attain what we prefer, is it really our power? What we happen to prefer codetermines our “power” to attain it: for the fact that we prefer it informs our drive (incl. “drivenness”) towards it.
It is indeed only in as far as there is an I that it is our power, or rather only in as far as there is identification with that power that there is an I - and yes, that power is a function or tangent in a sense of our type of preferences. That was my argument against James, that affectance (power) is general, whereas consciousness is made up of more particular qualities (values) the interplay/alchemy of which amounts in affectance.
What you say about externalizations reminds me of the horror I experienced when I first, finally, understood self-valuing as “self-valuing through other-valuing” (which is all I meant by “indirect self-valuing”). It was quite literally a bad trip that lasted for six days straight: the other self-lightenings through which you self-value may indeed will you in all kinds of directions. As Blake said, however, shame is pride’s cloak. That is to say, when you’re ashamed you haven’t really lost your pride. And what is there to be proud of, anyway, in the absence of self-determination? (To be sure, one doesn’t have to be proud of oneself, of course, at least not directly; one may be proud of one’s ancestors, or even of one’s God.)
To the first part, I hope it hasn’t weakened you. VO does have the effect, it seems, of disintegrating by perhaps exposing inner workings. Exposing things to the light which work best in the subconscious, which has so much more raw calculating power.
To the second part, yes direct pride in a self is indeed illogical in terms of VO, pride in ancestors and Gods and also Works perhaps, might lead to a more solid self-respect.
On the other hand, where is the fun in that, and where is art when there is no fun?
Dedication to the great work seems to require pride and direct self-love from time to time. Terrible contradiction.
May I ask for (more) details about when and how you crossed the abyss?
Actually, I created this user account and its first post as a consequence of it! It happened on the night of May 2nd, 2020, when I wrote this thing I quoted there:
‘‘I just had the ultimate insight during my Holosync. I am now mad like Nietzsche.
[…]
Well, I’m also not mad, because my madness is the measure of everything. I am the mad God, Dionysus.
Everyone and everything who is not Dionysus is my Ariadne.’’
Did you arrive in Binah? Of course the virtue of Binah is Silence, but in as far as it would be sane to discuss it.
Well, as I introduced the section in which I quoted the above:
‘[W]hen one has come to understand the whole rationally, when one is wise, one’s very understanding or wisdom impels one to love and, moreover, to will, all beings who are not wise.’
But as Crowley writes:
“To attain the grade of Magus he [the Master of the Temple] must accomplish Three Tasks: the renunciation of His enjoyment of the Infinite so that he may formulate Himself as the Finite; the acquisition of the practical secrets alike of initiating and governing His proposed new Universe; and the identification of himself with the impersonal idea of Love.” (Crowley, “One Star In Sight”.)
My current crisis revolves around my renunciation of the Will, my identification with the Love that is not under Will. To be sure, Nietzsche distinguishes the two as follows:
“‘Willing’ is not ‘desiring’, striving, demanding [verlangen, lit. “longing”]: it is distinguished from these by the affect of commanding [Commando, lit. “command”].” (WP 668, Kaufmann trans.; cf. BGE 19.)
But the thing is precisely that this affect is just that, an affect…
My mystical experiences early on convinced me
against prior belief that there is existence beyond timespace where consciousness can dwell in eternal form.
Im mostly speaking of my ascent to Tipharet in 2004, which then must have been Tipharet of one of the higher worlds.
Well, the vice of Tiphareth, and be it that of a “higher world”, is pride, of course. In my view, the notion of “mystical experience” is already an expression of pride.
By the way, what do you think of this idea I’ve had?: Just like “Tzaddi is not the Star”, gluttony is not the vice of Chesed; Chesed and Yesod should switch places in this respect. Then the cardinal vices of the Ethical Triangle are the “will” sins Pride, Wrath, and Envy, while those of the Aesthetic (lit. “Sensual”!) Triangle are the “love” sins Lust, Greed, and Gluttony.
The thing is, I am not wise. Ive never really tried to be, was always falling happily into the mould of The Fool which Sander gave me. Now I’m not so happy about where that’s led me.
So I have no stake anymore in what you say, those ambitions of building a universe, I don’t have them anymore.
Btw mystical, more properly occult experience - i mean the sort of thing Crowley is always writing about. I’m sure the experience was of a real thing, and I’m actually more or less certain that there is entity beyond death. I don’t care to convince anyone and I won’t be able to, but it feels better to just say it outright than to smugly leave it in the middle. I know we will never agree on this and I’d accept the title Hinterweltlung if I didn’t find my best joys and loves in nature.
Also VO allows for consciousness out of dense matter. Matter being as it is conceived a product of valuing rather than vice versa. We’ve discussed this and disagreed on it and will continue to disagree, no?
Why the 7 of swords card?
I don’t go along with swapping elements in the Tree, the point of Tzaddi and the Star/Emperor has been very puzzling to me, they seem to both apply in both places. I don’t agree with swapping Justice and Strength, I think, though I can’t be sure.
The madness - this seems a state belonging to Chokmah rather than Binah, - so you may have taken the Vaw path up from Chesed.
And then the only remaining path upward is that of the Fool. But you will be incinerated according to the lore.
All this Supernalness is supposed to be beyond the Soul, if I got that right, as eventually at the end of the Day of Brahma all souls are absorbed into the Godhead - even the eternal soul, according to Gareth Knight and maybe also Dion Fortune, is merely “relatively eternal”, which is a ridiculous phrase.
In any case all thats left of eternity in this way is the ER.
Perhaps to love all unwise beings is the path to wisdom?
Perhaps to cease loving oneself is the path to such wisdom…
Brrr
It is snowing now. Flakes flurry, fluzzle down in front of the churchtower I can see through the slit between curtain and wall. It’s insidiously cold today.
Is to be the same as to radiate light - is it not less than being to not actively radiate? And is to radiate perhaps the same as to love? Not to want, desire, rather to love as a form of commanding - oneself. Thus love a form of will.
But it leaves me cold to think this way. Love used to be spontaneous in me.
According to Crowley—and my own experience accords with this—, crossing the Abyss always means moving from Chesed to Binah, and there is (indeed) no path between the two. Still, it’s also true that moving to any new grade means traversing the paths that lead into the corresponding Sephira: thus those “Three Tasks” mentioned above correspond to the Star, the Hierophant, and the Empress, respectively.
Now I don’t want to raise the subject again, but I read Crowley esoterically, in the Straussian sense I mean. So I don’t take his occult writings seriously—I mean the stuff about rituals and the like. As the Dalai Lama, for example, has repeatedly expressed, that is for those of lesser capacities.
The 7 of Swords was meant to indicate, to myself at least, the connection between the cardinal sin of Greed and the vice of Hod—Falsehood, Dishonesty. (I didn’t address the 9th Sephira, but that defect was kind of complemented by the fact that Hod is the 8th, not the 7th… Oh, by the way: Envy fits well with Chesed, since that Sephira’s gods are jealous gods like Jove and Jehovah.)
What you say about madness does seem right to me. Thus my “embrace of madness” upon crossing the Abyss actually entailed my being saved from madness, whereas my moving from Binah to Chokmah seems to lead straight into madness…
Your reference to Knight and Fortune agrees with the information I’ve received on the subject: all Hindu moksha is temporary; only Buddhist moksha is definitive. Though that reminds me:
In Buddhism, to be fully human, fully vernatürlicht [“made natural”] as a human, means to fully realize one’s Buddha-nature—in other words, to be fully enlightened. But this Buddha-nature is something the human being has in common with all beings: it is not just the deepest, but also the highest reality of all beings. But here’s the thing: one can only be fully enlightened when all other beings are also fully enlightened. This is called anuttara samyak sambodhi, and I’ve translated this literally as “unsurpassed correct coillumination”. The prefix “com-” in “correct” and (my coinage) “coillumination”, like the “sam-” in “samyak” and “sambodhi”, is an intensive prefix, but it’s quite apt that it literally means “together” (for both prefixes). A bodhisattva is more enlightened than an arhat because he realizes he cannot be fully enlightened unless he is so together with all other beings.
[…] Anuttara samyak sambodhi would of course be the absolute moment simply. But bodhisattvas are already “enlightenment-beings” (literally) because they anticipate that absolute moment. The moment in history in which the bodhisattva lives is therefore the absolute moment of all his previous “personal” history (i.e., the whole sequence of his many lives, previous and present).
But also:
[“]To attain the Grade of Ipsissimus he [the Magus] must accomplish three tasks, destroying the Three Guardians mentioned in Liber 418, the 3rd Aethyr; Madness, and Falsehood, and Glamour, that is, Duality in Act, Word and Thought.”
And in Liber 418, the 3rd Aethyr, he [Crowley] says:
“And this is the mystery that I declare unto thee: that from the Crown itself spring the three great delusions; Aleph is madness, and Beth is falsehood, and Gimel is glamour¹⁶.”
And:
“¹⁶ Aleph is incapacity to apprehend—the absence of any steady truth. ({HEB:Aleph} = {Air}, the volatile). Beth is the assertion of false relations, even in the illusion of the dyad. ({HEB:Bet} = {Mercury}) And Gimel is the clouding of aspiration by the marsh miasma of desire ({HEB:Gemel} = {Moon}). Such are the evil and averse counterparts of the three highest faculties of the Soul: Aleph, the inspiration of the soul in ecstasy; Beth, the virtue of Truthfulness without care of other issues; and Gimel, the direct link of the human with the divine Consciousness.”
When I’d finally become a self-aware bodhisattva (only to, quite abruptly, no longer be a Buddhist a couple of days later—but never mind that now [this was August 23-25, 2021]), my first “public experience” was the following—of which Crowley’s description of the “evil and averse counterpart” of Aleph strongly reminds me—:
“O divine princes, the astonishing singular difficulty for those bodhisattvas is […that] those sentient beings whom they would lead to final nirvāṇa are utterly non-apprehensible.
Those great bodhisattva beings who think they should seek to train all sentient beings […] might as well think they should seek to train space. If you ask why, sentient beings should be regarded as voidness because space itself is void. Similarly, sentient beings should be regarded as emptiness because space itself is emptiness, and sentient beings should be regarded as essencelessness because space itself is essenceless. For this reason, divine princes, it is difficult for great bodhisattva beings”. (“The Transcendent Perfection of Wisdom in Ten Thousand Lines”, 26.37-38, translated by the Padmakara Group.)I was again reminded of this a couple of days ago, when I read the following:
“For intuitively, or in concreto, every human being is actually aware of all philosophic truths: to bring them, however, into his abstract knowing [Wissen], into reflection, is the business of the philosopher, who neither should nor could do anything else.” (Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation I, 493, my trans.)
(Source: https://onlinephilosophyclub.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=18157)
However that may be, in the meantime I’ve learned that the concept of “Buddha-nature” is just an exoteric tool, a “skillful means”, and the same, I think, goes for the concept of “rebirth”—so we may say that I’m still, or again, a Buddhist, albeit only a Straussian-esoteric one. And as to the ER:
“A genuine act of will presupposes a modicum of initiative, some form of freedom for acting upon and altering the world. Yet, if the will is knotted together firmly with all things, its freedom is illusory. If it is unfree then its pretensions to mastery are a vain delusion. Although it could appear as a solution to the problem of willing backward, the doctrine of eternal return abolishes the possibility of willing altogether.” (Berkowitz, Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist, page 199; cf. Seung, Nietzsche’s Epic of the Soul.)
Lastly, I forgot to mention that the 7 of Swords also seemed to fit the fact that I wasn’t replying to roughly the whole second half of your post.
Excellent.