The Magic Mandrake

Vayetzei

Being a witch makes joy in me. Truly. There is no separation between joy and I. Joyful am I. Neither do I have cause to pray as one separated from herself.

Rachel said to Leah: 'Give me, I pray thee, of thy son's mandrakes.' Bereshit 30:14

In follow-up to my earlier commentary on Vayetzei discussing The Magic Ladder, the question exists for many reading this Torah portion - was Jacob's vision in the night really a dream?

I can't answer that, but I can answer that my own experience, as described in The Magic Ladder and correlated to Jacob's ladder, was no dream. The experience I described was one I had before I was born, before "I" was incarnate or connected to a physical body or bound up with any psycho-spiritual form or structure of any kind. Thus, the words of my poetic discourse on my particular magic ladder do not create a "picture", but rather, they elicit an apprehensional perception of pure Acting Awareness. Without structure, form or physicality, my experience was one of pure consciousness, known in Sefer Yetzirah as sekhel tahor. In practical kabbalah, sekhel tahor corresponds to the magical botanical called mandrake.

Sekhel tahor ... "purifies the Sefirot. It tests the decree of the their structure and the inner essence of their unity, making it glow. They are then unified without any cuttoff or separation." [Sefer Yetzirah, The Thirty-Two Paths Of Wisdom]