Quality Five predominating, and the operation changes rather than the flavor. The other Trees generate. This one nourishes, and what it feeds the Tree with is the wound the Tree grew out of.
"What Joy there is here, there is no other Similitude of it, than when a Man is suddenly and unexpectedly delivered out of the Pain and Torment of Hell, and put into the Light of the Divine Joy."
Jakob Böhme, the Aurora, 1612
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QUALITY FIVE PREDOMINATING
In the Tart Tree the predominant Quality flavors every other Quality and each one still runs as itself. Tart Fire is still Fire. Tart Sound is still Sound. The character distributes and the operation holds.
In the Love Tree the predominant Quality changes how the Qualities relate to each other, which is a change of operation and not of character. The first Quality gives itself as food. The second becomes indistinguishable from what it produces. What was generation becomes nourishment.
The Tart Tree and the Bitter Tree and the Fire Tree generate. This one feeds. The earlier Trees produce offspring. This one provides meal. The earlier Trees' Centers awaken for themselves, and this Center awakens in order to give itself away.
[See TART TREE · THE BITTER TREE · THE SEVEN QUALITIES]
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THE WOUND BECOMES MEAL
The first Essence, that is, the Tartness, is wholly desirous or longing, wholly sweet, wholly light, and gives itself forth to be Food to all the Qualities, with a hearty Affection towards them all, as a loving Mother has towards her Children.
The Harshness is the first Quality, the wound, the root. Here it gives itself as food.
The Harshness that generated the whole sequence, that produced the Anguish, that kindled the Fire, that stayed root while the Tree grew, becomes what nourishes the Tree from inside. The wound feeds what grew out of it, which is circulation completing rather than anything being spent.
And the Bitterness may be rightly called Joy, for it is the Rising or Moving. Not bitterness carrying a joy-character. The two names becoming interchangeable, because the sting that was the Rising turns out to be what Joy always was. Not transformed into joy. Revealed as joy. The rising that registered as torment was Joy operating in a field that could not read it.
[See THE ROOT · THE CROSSING]
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IT IS NOT SACRIFICE, AND THE COUNTERFEIT IS BUILT ON THAT WORD
The giving here is not sacrifice as trespass theology means sacrifice, and the distinction has to be made before the sentence can be safely read.
Sacrifice in that register is a hostage destroyed to satisfy a demand: something is subtracted, someone else is paid, and the destruction is the point. The Love Tree subtracts nothing, because what it gives is metabolized rather than consumed, and the giving is the Tree's own operation rather than a price extracted from it.
Which is exactly the seam the counterfeit works. Told to a creature whose expression positions are occupied, the wound becomes meal converts instantly into an instruction to be eaten: give yourself, keep giving, your suffering nourishes others, and the depletion is called love. That is the first Quality handed over to whoever is holding the ledger, and it produces the sodden body rather than the Love Tree.
The test is whose Tree is being fed. The Harshness feeds the Tree it is the root of, and it is giving into its own body. A creature giving into an operation that is not hers is not running this Quality. She is being harvested by something that learned the vocabulary.
[See THE COUNTERFEIT LOVE-TREE · THE OIL · GIVINGNESS]
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THE DISCONTINUITY
Suddenly and unexpectedly delivered out of the Pain and Torment of Hell, and put into the Light of the Divine Joy.
Not gradual improvement, not slow healing, not progressive transformation. Sudden. Unexpected. Delivered.
One moment the Pain and Torment of Hell, the next the Light of the Divine Joy, with no path between them that could be walked in steps and no bridge that could be crossed by degrees. The discontinuity is the crossing, and any account offering a graded route between those two states is describing something else.
So this Tree names what the crossing produces rather than what it costs. The Fire Tree holds the pivot and reports anguish and intensity, which is the crossing from the near side. This is the far side.
And from the far side it does not read as accomplishment. It reads as recognition: this was always here, and how was I in Hell while this existed. The Joy does not feel earned. It feels like finding out what Bitterness was, and what Harshness was, and that they were always this, and that the thing which had been missing was the capacity to read them.
[See THE FIRE TREE · THE BIRTH OF THE SUN · THE FORGE]
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NO FEAR OF END
How should there not be Joy and Love, where, in the very Midst of Death, the eternal Life is generated, and where there is no Fear of any End, nor can be?
The Love Tree knows no fear of End because it operates by giving itself, and End has nothing to threaten it with.
The Tart Tree can fear rejection of its character, or the cutting down of its Tree. The Love Tree has already given itself as food, so if the Tree is cut down it was already eaten, already metabolized, already generating capacity in whatever received it.
This is the Temperatur's emotional register. A creature forged through actual fire and crossed with scars, whose wound became root and whose root became meal, does not fear. Not out of courage. She has already given what could be taken.
The Lily does not fight the Beast. The Lily grows. The Love Tree does not defend against End. The giving is the operation, and End cannot threaten what has already been given.
[See THE LILY · THE TEMPERATUR · CESSATION]
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Five Trees and one operation. The wound holding, in the Tart Tree. The motion carrying, in the Bitter. The fire opening, in the Fire Tree. The nourishment flowing here. The reception forming, in the Water Tree.
The Love Tree is what the law of the spirit of life produces once the cycle completes, which is the generating and the transforming and the regenerative running together rather than in sequence.
It needs Water to become nourishing rather than merely intense, and it needs its wound to have something to give as food. Both conditions are met from inside the Tree. Neither is issued to it.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
