Keter literally means crown and sits at the top of the tree of life. It is called in The Zohar, ‘The most hidden of all the hidden things’ and ‘absolute compassion.’ Dion Fortune describes it as: “interstellar space, which is nothing, yet contains all the potentialities of all things.” Keter is the crown of the entire mystical path—a symbol of the ultimate union with the divine
Fortune says that Keter can be symbolized as a point in a circle. The circle represents totality, so Keter is the point in totality. However, the Keter point has no actual location—it is everywhere and nowhere; the circle has no center or circumference. These are the kind of paradoxical statements that are common in mysticism, descriptions of what cannot be described.
Like a king receiving a crown, Keter is bestowed on us through grace, not gained through self-effort or work. We can’t earn the crown through our actions—enlightenment is the already-existing dynamic absolute. However—paradox alert—nobody has ever worn the crown of enlightenment without self-effort. It would appear that we need to go through the effort of exhausting all efforts for the crown to appear to us—for the shattering of the vessels and the lightning flash of realization.
It is important to remember the radical equality of all the attributes: that the tree of life isn’t a staircase representing a hierarchy of value—even if the apparently ordered hierarchy is essential in a functional, relative sense. Keter, like space, is everywhere and nowhere—even though we give it a location at the head. The point is that each attribute is an essential part of the whole. The ‘head’ is not better than the ‘feet’—all the body parts are equally essential—higher and lower do not indicate linear value. Keter is said to be equal to Malkhut or the ‘kingdom’—or the entire manifest universe—at the tree's base. The crown and the kingdom are one.
One might ask: why bother with the rest of the tree if Keter is the ultimate truth? The answer is—to remove the veils of ignorance. If we really understood our ultimate unity with existence, we wouldn’t need a spiritual path or to define paths and attributes. The human problem is that our experiences seem fragmented and full of suffering, so we search for the crown (like the holy grail) that is our birthright. We only seem to have fallen from the Garden of Eden or lost the crown of Keter. This seeming is why there is a whole mythology of attributes and paths and preparation for meeting ‘the crown of pure being’ or ‘the Godhead.’ And this is why we have to be strong and prepared to face the deconstruction and revelation that the whole process entails.
Symbolic practices are less about constructing anything than removing the obstacles that stop us from seeing that we are already wearing the crown of Keter, even if we don’t know it. Meeting the crown of Keter is supposed to annihilate or at least make transparent, the ego construction, which is sacrificed in a gesture of absolute compassion or love. The divine sacrifices to the divine, fundamentally.
The crown could also be considered a symbol of faith: not naive faith in a personified creator God, but a recognition of ‘unity’ that can’t be shattered by the diversity of phenomena. The other question or Koan worth contemplating is ‘why is Keter’ called the ultimate compassion? But like a Koan, the intellectual answer is not the answer.
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