The Watchtower
The Beaded Thread and Event Horizons
This is an entry from my personal record of dreams, visions and active imagination sessions. It may appear mysterious, but it is not hard to understand with the right set of conceptual tools.
The vision begins with an ‘ascent of the Watchtower,’ the process of silencing, which I have seen many times. This is consistently how it is represented — the removing of the outer layers that conceal deeper meanings. Here, the ascent appears to reach a very high level, perhaps one accessible only to angels.
This may be why what they were saying came through so vaguely, I may have no good frame of reference with which to understand the content of the exchange.
In order to unpack this, we have to go back to December 21, 2024.
The Vision of the Beaded Thread
December 21, 2024. I was in a small, remote cabin I’d rented for the night. The only warmth came from a little old gas stove in the corner of the living room. In the rest of the cabin, you could see your breath and everything was icy to the touch.
After long prayers of preparation, the angel and I began speaking. With my permission, he set to work fashioning an image in front of me. He drew it in the air using my hands as instruments. This had never happened before, and it was quite surreal because even though it was my hands making it, I did not know what it was going to be until it was completed.
At the end, it looked like this:
Then, in the third person, I saw myself with this beaded thread going down to the base of my spine and reaching up beyond my head all the way to heaven with an infinite succession of these beads along its length. Turning around each of the beads was a shining wheel of eyes orthogonal to the string. Higher up the string, the wheels became larger and larger.
I saw angels going up on one side of the string and going down on the other side to bring messages from one wheel to the next. Each wheel watched over the circle that corresponded to its respective bead, and each circle encompassed an area of space around me. The lowest bead for instance simply formed a circle around the place I was standing, whilst much higher beads extended far beyond the horizon.
The wheels then took on a new shape, appearing as bowls of brass. Each bowl contained a flame. I saw that each of the bowls in the column was watching over its respective circle. Each one was an angel and each angel had the power to permit or refuse entry to the interior of the circle which was given to it.
Each bead represented a telos, and the angel charged with its guardianship was tasked with seeing that purpose fulfilled. When it was not time for a thing to enter the circle which the angel was protecting, it would keep that thing out. But when it was time, the angel would allow the thing to enter.
The lowest beads represented things to occur in the next few minutes. Higher ones represented things to be fulfilled many years from now. Thus, my entire life was a segment of this string with a given length. The beads beyond that were purposes to be fulfilled by my descendants as the purpose of their lives are above mine, those of their children are above theirs and so on and so forth ad infinitum.
Symbolism
This is not as arcane as it might first appear. It’s just very dense and steeped in context. It is the structure of what I called the ‘solar temple’ in Contact 2020.
The first thing one needs to understand is that the vision is symbolic, which is to say: psychocentric. This means it isn’t literal, but it isn’t not literal either. It uses imagistic processing, the native mode of cognition, as a primary frame of reference.
The image is ultimately a circumpunct — a solar symbol — with some added complexity: a third, orthogonal axis and several concentric circles instead of just one.
Here, the dot is the ego and the circle represents the unconscious which encompasses the ego. This is because the outside world is veiled by projected background processes. Therefore, the macrocosm: human in the midst of the world, is internally mirrored in the microcosm: ego in the midst of the unconscious.
The dot and circle together represent the totality of the mind; what Jung called ‘the Self.’ In the conical framework, that totality is represented by the ‘bead’ which contains both the circle and the dot within itself.
To simplify: the ego is the protagonist. The unconscious is all the other characters in the story. The ‘bead’ is the author, who is above the story, works through all the characters and steers the story toward the fulfillment of a preconceived design.
The story itself is thus a composite character — the person of the author. This transcendent unity, however, is usually invisible to the characters in the story.
The pattern is recursive and it exists at every level. The ‘author’ is also the protagonist of a higher drama in which the lower drama is contained. This structure was revealed to be ‘the Watchtower’ that had repeatedly been alluded to.
Long time readers will recognize that this Watchtower is both the ‘angel’s pyramid’ and the ‘five shells’ simultaneously. The vision formally solved a long standing problem I’d been banging my head against for the entire previous year, namely: why the capstone of the angel’s pyramid corresponds to the outermost shell rather than the innermost.
This was previously counterintuitive because symbolically, the outside part of something is usually considered the most profane or impure and is thus the ‘lowest.’ In a temple for instance, interiority is synonymous with sanctity.
How the ‘highest’ (the pyramidion) could also be the ‘lowest‘ (the outermost sphere) was difficult to wrap my head around.
It’s obvious in hindsight, but this is a consequence of a parity between verticality (vertebrae) and horizontality (horizon) — that is, if you attain a higher vantage point, the horizon expands. You perceive more of the world.
This parity is contained in the vertical and horizontal cross in which ‘Christ the king’ (highest/esoteric) and ‘Christ the criminal’ (lowest/exoteric) are one and the same.
The largest and most inclusive circle is the fullest and most complete picture of reality, but also the most complex and confusing. It requires a very high vantage point to see correctly. This relationship between the exceptions and anomalies and the highest principle is why the rejected stone becomes the capstone. That which is not circumscribed by a framework reveals the existence of something higher.
I was curious why the image used ‘beads’ (or at least why I instinctively named the octahedra ‘beads’), so I looked up the word’s etymology. It turns out ‘bead’ means ‘prayer,’ as beads are often used to count prayers on prayer ropes, which the watchtower seems to be an image of. This suggests a strong and unsurprising link between teloi sent down from Heaven and prayers sent up from Earth.
The watchtower also seems to be a quite transparent reference to Jacob’s ladder.
The watchtower is esoterically an almond tree. This connection in like manner appeared through etymology. The two words for ‘almond’ in Hebrew are luz/לוּז and shaqed/שָׁקֵד. Both words have more than one meaning.
Luz refers to the almond, but is also the ancient name of the city of Bethel — the place where Jacob’s vision of the ladder took place. In later Judaic tradition, the luz bone is a mythical, indestructible bone in the spinal column from which the body will be regenerated at the resurrection. Although the luz bone is not of our own tradition, it grew out of patterns in scripture which we can see in the symbolism of the almond in scripture
The almonds which budded on Aaron’s rod reiterate this link between the almond and resurrection — new life out of death.
The word shaqed likewise refers to almonds and the almond tree, but also to watchfulness and vigilance. This double meaning is used by God in Jeremiah 1:11-12.
“…The choice of this symbol for the purpose given is suggested by the Hebrew name for the almond tree, שׁקד, the wakeful, the vigilant; because this tree begins to blossom and expand its leaves in January, when the other trees are still in their winter's sleep…“
- Keil and Delitzsch Biblical Commentary on the Old Testament
The almond tree is related to the menorah, the seven branched lampstand in the temple as seen in Exodus 25:32-33
“Six branches are to extend from the sides of the lampstand—three on one side and three on the other. There are to be three cups shaped like almond blossoms on the first branch, each with buds and petals, three on the next branch, and the same for all six branches that extend from the lampstand.”
Looking at the shape of the menorah, we can see that it alludes to the same concentric ring structure. Here is the meaning of the bowls of fire, which represent a union of Heaven and Earth: the fire is the luminous and immaterial heavenly principle (the bead) and the brass bowls, being round and metallic represent earthly vessels (the circles).
Exegesis
So what exactly does this image mean?
The Watchtower is both a cosmological and psychological schema. I have gotten into some trouble for talking about things I understood intuitively but not intellectually, so I’ll try not to make the same mistake here. I will not go any further into detail than I am presently able.
We will examine the cosmological and psychological significance in separate sections, although it must be remembered that the two are inextricably linked.