“We are stardust, we are
golden,
We are caught in the devil’s bargain,
And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the
Garden.”
— Joni Mitchell, “
“Where was the Garden of Eden?” is a question one often gets from children
when they’re told the story of their First Parents. Even in our own “adult” minds, no matter how
jaded and cynical they may become, there always persists the echo of that same
question. As we age — crawling toward
that dreadful door which exits this World — the question seems to transform
itself into another, more immediate one:
“Where is the Garden of Eden?”
All of us, in our own way, grope in
the darkness for the way to that one gate, the gate that lets us into the
hidden Garden. Sometimes we can almost
feel the gate’s latch within our grasp, as we sit perhaps in our own garden on
a still, sunny morning. Or as we look
into the innocent eyes of a fawn we have startled in the woods. Fact is we all have this Garden within us,
and we cultivate it, as Voltaire once observed, each after his/her own fashion.
When we talk about the Garden, then,
we must be aware that we are talking about ourselves, that we are peering into
our own collective psyche. And our
ability to do this, to think about our own thoughts, is the one talent that
sets us humans apart from any other intelligent being in the entire
Universe. Except for God, that is. By looking at ourselves, therefore, we become
like God — or at least like that part of God which invests the material
World. As it turns out, this last
qualification is an important one to make.
We must recognize that God in just as much within us as we are within
Him/Her. This presents no problem so
long as we don’t distinguish between what’s inside of us, the so-called
“Subjective” pole of Consciousness, and what’s ostensibly outside of us, which
belongs to “Objective” Consciousness.
But the mere fact that we assign them different names — “Subjective” and
“Objective” — shows that we can and do distinguish between our inner and outer
realms.
Chapter Two of this book was devoted
to the tale of Lucifer’s Fall from Grace.
In it we learned that Angels represent States of Mind created by
God-Elohim before She created the physical Universe. We also learned that these angelic States of
Mind evolved, before the Creation, just as biological Life has evolved
since. The Fall of some of these Angels
divided the universal Soul (Pleroma)
by withdrawing from it their fragments of Consciousness. This division of the World Soul involves the
separation of the two poles of Consciousness, the “Subjective” and “Objective”
poles. We may think of the latter, the
Objective pole, as a Female mode of Consciousness, because it receives the
Mind’s action and brings it to fruition.
Conversely, the Mind’s Subjective side, the side which bestows action,
may be regarded as having a Male character.
The Male and Female modes of Consciousness roughly correspond,
respectively, to the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
God is both Male and Female, as most
enlightened religions acknowledge (if sometimes grudgingly). So when God created Adam in the Divine Image,
She initially created “him” both Male and Female and not-till-later extracted
the Female side, as we’re told in the first two chapters of Genesis. After that, and until their own Fall, Adam
and Eve continued to conform to the Divine Image. From this we may deduce that, when God
divided Adam and Eve, God simultaneously divided the Male and Female sides of
His/Her own nature.
This scenario presents us with a
paradox, however. If the Godhead splits
into Male and Female sides, how can It remain sublimely One? It must be that, on the highest level, God
remains an inscrutable, ineffable Unity, and that His/Her multi-faceted nature
proceeds from thence. That’s precisely
what makes the Tree such a perfect metaphor for the divine “anatomy”, so to
speak: because the Tree, like God, is both singular (in its trunk) and multiple
(in its branches).
But any Tree must have roots, and
those roots must be planted firmly in the Earth. In that respect, the heavenly Tree we’re
envisioning here is no different from its natural counterpart. Before divinity’s Male and Female limbs can
thrust themselves upward, there must be an Earth to receive the reciprocal
downward growth of the “roots”. Before
there can be a Tree, there must be a Garden.
No wonder, then, that our collective Mind keeps bringing us “back to the
Garden”. It’s the proverbial “square
one” of the spiritual, as well as the material, Universe.
So let’s recap. To become manifest, God has to allow for
multiple centers of Consciousness.
He-Who-Is-All has to embrace She-Who-Is-in-All. In that consummated act of Love is conceived
a Son, through whom God becomes, quite literally, “All-in-All”. It’s just as
The last enemy that shall be destroyed is Death.
But even an
ordinary tree cannot be planted just anyplace.
The location must be right in terms of four principal “elements”: light,
air, water and soil. And even where
these elements are felicitously balanced, we can’t simply dig a hole and put
the tree in the ground. The soil must
first be carefully nourished and specially prepared, a process known as
cultivation. It’s interesting that the
word “cultivation” comes from the Latin culter
for knife, blade or ploughshare. Just as
mundane cultivation involves the ploughshare penetrating the soil, so spiritual
cultivation requires that the Heavens penetrate the Earth. Thus does the Roman poet Ovid speak of cultus deorum, which literally means
“cultivating the gods”. For the Tree of
Life to flourish, it’s needful that Eternity penetrate Time, needful that the
finest threads of Light weave themselves invisibly into the obscure fabric of
Space. We’ll revisit this concept later
in this chapter.
For now,
however, let’s turn our attention back to the special status of the Earth as
the one and only spot in the entire Universe whose “soil” is suitable to grow
the Tree of Life. This notion of Earth’s
uniqueness, its central place in Creation, is inescapable in Genesis. That’s why Genesis is the one book of
Scripture which “scientific” materialists can never accept. Their dogma is that the Earth but one of a
myriad of insignificant rocks spinning meaninglessly in an immense void. Even lower in their esteem is Man himself —
a mere biological organism, and a none-too-impressive one at that. They point back to Copernicus as their
authority for this blind faith in the mediocrity of humankind. But Copernicus said only that the Earth
revolves around the Sun, he did not disprove that the Earth is at the center of
the Universe. Indeed, in an infinite
Universe, the “center” is wherever the observer is located.[2]
The only intelligent observer we’ve encountered
thus far in the Cosmos is our own species.
It’s ironic that the same “scientists” who dismiss Genesis as a fantasy
resort to sheer fantasy themselves when they speculates on the existence of
other worlds inhabited by civilizations more sophisticated than our own. Such speculations thrive solely on the
assumption that Man is an “ordinary” creature on an “ordinary” planet. If that’s the case (so their reasoning
goes), then there are about 100 billion other “ordinary” planets out there in
Space that must accommodate a comparable number of alien intelligences.
As it turns
out, the forgoing beliefs are anything but “scientific”. Just within the last few decades,
cosmologists and physicists alike have come to question certain things that
previous generations of scientists had always taken for granted. They have begun to inquire why the
fundamental physical “constants” which determine the structure of the visible
Universe have the values that we’ve observed them to have. These “constants” set the balance between the
four fundamental physical forces in which the seemingly immutable “laws of
nature” are grounded. We’re talking
about things like
This
long-overdue line of inquiry has produced some interesting conclusions. First off, it’s neither necessary nor
inevitable that the fundamental constants should be what we observe them to be
in our Universe. If we go back as far as
the “Big Bang”, these constants could have assumed substantially different
values if the initial conditions of the nascent Universe had been even minutely
different.[3] Moreover, if we go back before the Bang
“banged”, as modern “inflationary” cosmology has recently done, we find that
even the laws of physics themselves were a matter of random chance. “In the beginning”, as current theorists see
it, our Universe could have, with equal likelihood, followed any one of an
infinite number of paths, each with its own peculiar “fundamental constants”
and “laws of nature”.[4] With equal probability, our Universe could
have been one in which the particles of light (photons), instead of being
weightless and speedy, would be massive and slow. In such a World, light would literally be
darkness, just as
This
recently recognized “non-inevitability” of the basic physical structure of our
Universe has led scientists to explore various “what if” scenarios. For example, what if the relative strengths
of the electromagnetic and nuclear forces were ever-so-slightly different from
what they are? Their answer is that ours
would then be a Universe without planets, without stars, even without atoms. And most certainly without intelligent
creatures, human or otherwise. But we
don’t have to go so far as to fiddle with the fundamental constants of nature
to produce a Universe categorically inhospitable to any form of life. Even a minimal tinkering with the resonance
energies of the elements oxygen, nitrogen and carbon, for example, would render
organic chemistry inoperative and even the crudest biological forms impossible.[5]
All of this
inquiry has led to the inescapable conclusion that intelligent life could not
possibly exist unless the physical Universe were “fine-tuned” to the
infinitesimally precise degree it apparently is. As immense and ancient as the Cosmos is,
it’s actually not a bit larger or older than it needs to be to accommodate the
one very precious and extraordinary place we call Earth. The visible Universe is about 10-15 billion
years old and has a radius of about 10-15 billion light-years. Not coincidentally, it took the stars about
10 billion years to synthesize the heavier elements needed for life from the
hydrogen and helium generated by the Big Bang.
Planetary formation and biological evolution account for another several
billion years. So the Cosmos is exactly
as vast and aged as it must be to support just one planet hospitable to
conscious beings such as ourselves.[6]
For a
solitary Universe to emerge by sheer chance with the entire host of
finely-tuned prerequisites for life, the odds are, in a word,
infinitesimal. We need only consider
one such prerequisite to prove our point.
We’ve just said that it takes about 10-15 billion years for the Cosmos
to become capable of supporting intelligent organisms. During this 10-15 billion years, the Universe
has been expanding at a rate that was determined by the potential energy level
of the vacuum from which it sprang at the dawn of Time. Obviously, there could have been no
physically precedent cause which would have determined the level of that
primordial “vacuum fluctuation”.
Cosmologists consider that the value of this initial vacuum potential
was a purely random occurrence. It turns
out, however, that this initial value of universal energy had to be exactly what it was for the Cosmos to be
in condition to accommodate life after 10-15 billion years of expansion. If this value had been higher, the Universe
would have expanded so rapidly that, by this time, it would have dissipated
into a featureless cloud of frigid, rarified gases, inhospitable to microbes,
much less men. And if its initial energy
potential had been lower, the cosmic expansion would have long since have run
out of steam and the Universe would have collapsed back into a “black hole”.
In other
words, the possibility that I could be here writing these words and you could
be there reading them was encoded into the original data of our Universe to an
inconceivable level of detail. If we
think of this “code” as a single number, the minimal requirements of biological
life dictate all of the digits down to the 102nd decimal place![7] Tacking on the additional requirements for
intelligent life, we’d probably nail down our “cosmological constant” to better
than 1000 decimal places. It begins to
become apparent how true was the famous observation of the ancient Greek
philosopher Protagoras:
Of all things Man is the measure: both of things that
are, and of things that are not.[8]
In reality, there is no boundary
between Subjective and Objective experience, between what is “inside” of human
Consciousness and what appears to be “outside”. That’s because Man is truly the “model” from
which the entire Universe is erected, the “blueprint” for the minutest detail
of its structure. Thus, what is “inside”
of the human Mind is a microcosm of what exists in the Cosmos at large. As the Kabbalah teaches, the physical
Universe is nothing more than an extension of the greater Body of Man. Each “organ” of that Body dictates the type
of physical conditions that are compatible with its growth and
development. For the example, the Eye
demands that the relative strengths of the four fundamental physical forces be
weighted very much in favor of electromagnetic radiation, of which light is one
variety. The Ear and the Nose prefigure
a world with a very specific atmospheric density, while the Tongue specifies
that such a world must feature the extremely narrow temperature range of liquid
water.
But if Man is the model that the
Cosmos is based upon, this necessarily implies that the idea of Man preceded the formation of the physical Universe. Since Space and Time only came into being at
the inception of the physical Universe, therefore, Man’s existence precedes
Space and Time. It’s also a logical
inference that Man will “outlive” Space and Time. Another way of saying this is that Man is
only partly a finite, temporal being; he is also an infinite, eternal Being.
This begs
another question, however: Are we humans infinite and eternal in our individual
personas, or only in a collective sense?
To answer that, let’s consider the implications of the eternal side of
Man’s nature being associated with his individuality. If that were so, then we’d have two sets of “blueprints”
for the Universe at large — a “grand scale” set based on mankind as a whole,
and a more detailed set for each individual.
We’d have to write a few more thousand decimal places into our
“cosmological constant” to insure that the Universe was capable of producing
not only human life in general, but each one of us specifically.
But there’s
a hitch. A single physical Universe can
be finely tuned to accommodate mankind, but it cannot be simultaneously
optimized for each particular man. The
latter scenario implies multiple Universes, with each of us occupying his or
her own “best-of-all-possible-worlds”.
In other words, the proposition that we are eternal Beings in our
individual personas necessarily implies that each of us inhabits our own special
universe that evolved specifically to accommodate us. The latter notion is known as
“solipsism”. Solipsism is generally
regarded as an absurdity because it’s intuitively obvious that we all share the
same Universe. Hence, if we are not to
subscribe to solipsism, we must consign our individual egos to that portion of
our being which is finite and temporal — existing, that is, only within the
confines of Space and Time.
Okay. So we’ve established that the Universe
conforms, in its most intimate details, to proportions of the supernal Body of
Man. The next question we would
naturally want to inquire after is, simply, “Why should this be so?” It’s the same question that Job posed to
God/Elohim:
What is man, that thou shouldest magnify him? and that thou shouldest
set thine heart upon him?[9]
It strikes us as an outrageous human
conceit to look upon the vast Universe as serving no other purpose than to
please one particular species of primate on a small planet. But, in the light of everything we’ve just
said, is there any other alternative to this grossly anthropocentric
perspective? If the suitability of the
physical Universe to human needs is far too improbable to be considered an
accident, then mustn’t we conclude that things were “designed” that way and for
just that reason? Not necessarily. It’s also possible that our Universe is not
the only universe that has ever existed.
It’s conceivable that, before our own World emerged, there was an
infinite series of “still-born” worlds passing into and out of being. In this scenario, the minute fine-tuning of
cosmic constants that we’ve described would have been achieved by
trial-and-error rather than by explicit design.
This is the identical process of evolutionary “probing” that we’ve
ascribed, in Chapter Two, to the pre-Creation development of angelic
Consciousness.
In effect, we’re suggesting that the
Universe evolved out of a prior series of “failed worlds” until it struck upon
the right combination of conditions to generate intelligent life. Since the physical laws of the “other
universes” were incompatible with the development of sentient observers, these
worlds would have passed out of existence “without a trace”. The Kabbalah expresses this same theory by
relating that a number of worlds were created and destroyed while the Tree of
Life was maturing into its “rectified” form.
As we’ll discuss shortly, the Kabbalah also associates these “lost
worlds” with the shattered Consciousness of the Fallen Angels and the related
symbolism of the defunct Kings of Edom.
Ironically, this “evolutionary”
scenario stands Darwinian evolution on its head. The latter proposes that the human species is
what it is because it has adapted itself to the conditions of the physical
Universe. We, on the other hand, propose
that the physical Universe is what it is because it has adapted itself to the
requirements of human intelligence.
But why, one may well ask, should we
prefer this theory to the more straightforward “design” arguments traditionally
advanced by conventional religion? Why
should the Creatrix have tolerated a tortured succession of aborted worlds,
when She could have just conceived a suitable Universe outright? The answer relates to what we discussed
earlier in terms of the separation of God’s Male and Female poles during the
Creation process.
The Paths of Glory
As we’ve said, God’s Male and Female
poles correspond, respectively, to His transcendence and Her immanence. Scripture clearly affirms that God has these
two distinct polarities. On the one hand,
He is separate from Creation and “surrounds” it like a great cloud whose Glory
is concealed from view. Job speaks of
this aspect of God when he says:
And now men see not the bright light which is in the clouds: but the
wind passeth and cleaneth them.
Fair weather cometh
out of the north: with God is terrible majesty.
Touching the Almighty,
we cannot find him out… [10]
Once again, we need to restore some
of the nuances of the original Hebrew before we can fully appreciate this
passage. In the first line, the phrase
“bright light” is translated from bahir,
which signifies brilliance. The word in
the following verse that King James’ scholars rendered as “fair weather” is zohar, which has the similar connotation
of brightness. Interestingly, Zohar and Bahir are the titles of the two principal texts of Jewish mysticism
comprising the Kabbalah. It’s also worth
mentioning that zohar comes from the
root zahab, the Hebrew word for
gold. Finally, we should note that God’s
“majesty” corresponds to the Hebrew noun hod,
signifying beauty, splendor, or glory. Hod derives from the same root as hadar, which likewise signifies beauty
and glory. We learned in Chapter Two
that Hadar was the name of the eighth
and last King of Edom, and that it also describes a type of tree involved in
the eight-day feast of Succoth or Tabernacles.
Complementing this transcendent pole
of the Godhead, we have God’s feminine polarity, which we’ve characterized as
immanent. In this aspect, She is
intimately and palpably present everywhere in Her Creation. She “dwells” (HaDar) in the physical Universe, from the spiral arms of its
far-flung galaxies right down to the core of its tiniest particles. Hers is the Glory which literally fills our
World, as the prophet Isaiah hears proclaimed by the Seraphim who attend the
Divine Presence:
Holy, holy, holy, is the
Lord of Hosts: the whole earth is full
of his glory.[11]
Isaiah’s choice of words here
suggests to us that the concept of Glory is something that is common to both
God’s transcendent and immanent sides.
Perhaps we might venture further to infer that Glory constitutes a sort
of “bridge” between the two divine natures.
The prophet uses yet another synonym for Glory, the Hebrew word Kavod, whose letters are equivalent to
the number 32. Again recalling our
discussion in the previous chapter, we recognize that 32 has a special
significance. The Tree of Life contains
32 paths, paths that connect the Crown (Keter)
of God’s transcendent nature with the Heart (Malkut) of Her immanent nature.
Accordingly, the Hebrew for Heart Lev
also expresses the number 32.
The three “holies” that Isaiah hears
the Seraphim intoning indicate that the paths of the Tree of Life extend
through three domains: Space, Time, and
Spirit. Let’s consider the spiritual
domain first. The Kabbalah refers to it
as the “Soul dimension”. Since it has to
include both poles of the Godhead, the Soul dimension must encompass the Tree’s
highest level Keter, as well as its lowest level Malkut. While all 32 paths originate in Keter, they
cannot be comprehended on that inscrutable plane. Instead, the Soul dimension enables the paths
to be experienced by replicating all 32 of them within Malkut, which is the
plane of manifestation. The Bahir expresses this scenario in the form
of a parable:
A king
has a palace in which there are 32 chambers.
Leading to each chamber there is a path.
The king’s chamber is the innermost of the 32, and there he keeps his
most precious treasures and most sensitive secrets. His need to keep these things secure presents
a quandary, however. If he makes all 32
paths accessible to everyone in his kingdom, his treasury will be rifled and
his secrets profaned. But if he conceals
the paths, then his beloved subjects can never share his presence. What should be done? He ponders and arrives at a solution: He touches his daughter so that all 32 paths
are woven into her garments.[12]
To interpret this parable, we need
to recognize the figure of the king’s daughter as an allusion to the following
verse from Psalms:
The king’s daughter is all
glorious within: her clothing is of
wrought gold.[13]
Since Glory/Kavod refers to the 32 paths of the Tree of Life, the Psalmist’s
imagery depicts the incorporation of these paths within the “daughter”, who is Malkut. But why is her clothing said to be woven from
gold?
In the passage from Job we quoted a little while ago, the image of gold zahab was used to represent the divine
brilliance that appears “out of the North”.
The North, as we learned in Chapter Two, is the allegorical locale of
the “Holy Mountain” of Elohim, from whence issue human Souls bound for
incarnation. The incarnation of all of
the Souls within this “treasury of Souls” is the process by which God is reconstituting
the World Soul shattered by the Fall of the Angels. These Souls we refer to as the “Souls of the
Righteous”, and they flow into Malkut from the Vessel (Sephirah) of the Tree of Life which lies immediately above
Her. This next-higher Vessel/Sephirah, from which the Souls of the
Righteous descend, is known as the Foundation, or Yesod :
His foundation is in the
holy mountains.
The Lord loveth the gates of
And of
The Psalmist here is telling us that
Previously we’ve discussed the
masculine aspect of Yesod as the source of “seed” and its association with the
Covenant of Circumcision which the Almighty Shaddai
established with Abraham. That Covenant
“rectified” the Male principle of Yesod so that the Souls of the Righteous
could be conceived and born into the progeny of Abraham. These Souls were symbolically represented by
the letter Heh added to the name
Abram as a sign of the Covenant. We should
also recall that the letter Heh was
given to Abraham by his wife Sarah from her own name.[15] Sarah, who also played the role of Abraham’s
sister when they were in
… and the Lord had blessed Abraham in all things (BaKol).[17]
From the context of this Scriptural
passage, one gets the sense that Abraham was blessed by the Promise. It was the Promise that what had been lost
by Adam and Eve in
What the Promise is really “all
about”, so to speak, is the conception of this sacred procession of Souls,
destined to culminate in the Soul of the Messiah, Son of David. These Souls carry the Light into the World of
Darkness, in the same way as the River Pishon
flowed out of
The Hebrew word zahab is spelled with the letters Zayin, Heh, and Bet.
In the esoteric sense, the middle letter Heh is the omni-Soul Pleroma
that links the supernal World with the lower Worlds. In terms of the Tree of Life, the supernal
World occupies its three upper limbs.
These upper limbs are the Sephirot of Keter (Divine Will), Chochmah
(Wisdom), and Binah (Understanding),
with which we’re somewhat familiar.
According to the Kabbalist system, these Three together correspond to
the final letter Bet in zahab.
The lower Worlds (of which ours is but one) are represented on the Tree
of Life by Seven Sephirot, corresponding in number to Zayin, the initial letter in the Hebrew word for “gold”. We’ve already become acquainted with three of
these Seven: Malkut (Matter), Yesod (Foundation of All), and Tipheret
(Beauty/Symmetry).
We’ve also touched upon the two
opposing sides of the metaphysical Balance defined by Chesed (Mercy) and Gevurah
(Judgment). Located just below the
supernal realm, this is the plane where the dynamics of the Tree are
generated. When the Male and Female
forces of Chesed and Gevurah are unbalanced, they deflect the Soul from its
goal. When they are in harmony, they
incline the Soul toward its true path.
It’s at this level that the Soul is either “launched” on its flight
toward incarnation, through the Peace between the Male and the Female, or
“grounded” by their discord.
The motion of the Soul, which is
imparted at the level of Chesed and Gevurah, becomes manifest on the next level
down in the Tree of Life. This plane
comprises the dual Sephirot of Netzach
(Victory) and Hod (Glory). These two are pictured as the “legs” of the
Supernal Man, Zer Anpin, whose Body
takes in the Six Sephirot from Chesed down to Yesod. The three “Mentalities” of the supernal World
plus the seven “Attributes” of the lower Worlds yield a total of ten Sephirot
which “network” together on the Tree of Life.
Figure 1 displays the layout of the Tree as
typically represented in the Kabbalist texts.
We said earlier that the Tree of
Life grows in the three “dimensions” of the Soul, Space and Time. We’ve also seen how the central axis of the
Tree from Keter to Malkut defines the Soul dimension. Defining the dimension of Time, on the other
hand, are the Seven Sephirot of the lower Tree.
These Seven line up with the Seven Days of Creation, so that the seventh
of their number, Malkut, is identified with the Sabbath. The Sabbath connects the Soul dimension with
the temporal dimension because it signifies the eternal moment of Time in which
God conceived the Pleroma, or World Soul.
This is the hidden message of the words the Lord spoke to Moses on
… for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth,
and in the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed.[18]
Again, the King James translation
deprives us of the double entendre of the Hebrew word nephesh. It addition to
meaning “refreshed”, nephesh can also
signify the past tense of the verb “to soul”, in the sense of “to conceive a
soul”. So God is actually telling Moses
that, on the first Sabbath, He/She rested and conceived the Pleroma. Hence, the observance of the Sabbath is a
necessary premise for the conception of Souls.
In the Sabbath is reflected the original state of Peace between God’s
Male and Female poles. Only this
“initial condition” of Peace can enable the incarnation of the Souls of the
Righteous. These Souls are the “gold of
Havilah”, the mytical Zahab, which
the
Okay. We’ve said that the Tree of Life grows in the
three dimensions. And we’ve already
talked about two of the those: the Soul
dimension and the Time dimension.
Referring to Figure 1, we can see that the Tree
has 10 Sephirot connected by 22 paths.
Each of the 22 paths corresponds to one of the 22 letters of the Hebrew
alphabet. The Hebrews divided their
letters into three classes: 3 “Mothers”,
7 “doubles”, and 12 “singles”. In the
Introduction to this book, we discussed the three Mother letters, Shin, Aleph and Mem, and how
they symbolize the three Covenants of the Tongue, the Heart, and the Loins,
respectively. If we picture the human
body as a microcosm of the Tree of Life, which it actually is, we can identify
the levels of the Tongue, Heart and Loins with the Tree’s three horizontal paths.
Seven of the Hebrew letters are
called “doubles” because they can express two different sounds. The first two double letters are Bet and Gimel. Because they are the
second and third letters of the alphabet, Bet and Gimel correspond to the
second and third Sephirot of the Tree — Chochmah (Wisdom) and Binah
(Understanding). Since Wisdom is a
product of the Past, while Understanding anticipates the Future, Chochmah and
Binah together define the Tree’s temporal dimension. The seven double letters are thus seen as
designating the seven vertical paths, by which the Tree grows upward, extending
itself into Time.
In addition to the 3 horizontal and
7 vertical paths, the Tree of Life has 12 diagonal paths. The Kabbalah describes these last 12 as the
“Arms of the World”, because they are seen as surrounding the Universe and
enclosing it like a great set of tentacles or “arms”. These 12 “arms” represent the process by
which the Tree extends itself outward into Space. Notice that I say “outward into Space”. It’s
natural to speak of physical Space as something totally outside of ourselves,
that is, as something totally Objective.
That’s because Space dominates the Objective or Female pole of
Consciousness, just as Time rules the Subjective/Male pole. And the Soul is the bridge between the
Objective and Subjective poles, between the Female and the Male. Therefore, when the World Soul split and
divided in the Fall of Lucifer’s Angels, there necessarily came also a breach
between the Objective and Subjective sides of Consciousness.
If we look at the structure of the
Tree in Figure 1, we see that it’s comprised of 3
“Pillars”. Starting on the right, we
find a column of 3 Male Sephirot: Wisdom/Chochmah, Mercy/Chesed, and
Victory/Netzach. Opposite these 3 Males
is the lefthand Pillar of 3 Female Sephirot:
Understanding/Binah, Judgment/Gevurah, and Glory/Hod. And between these opposing Pillars lies the
Middle Pillar, which encompasses the 5 levels of the Soul: the Crown/Keter, Equilibrium/Daat,
Symmetry/Tipheret, the Foundation/Yesod, and the Garden/Malkut. Daat is described in the Kabbalah as a
“quasi-Sephirah” because the balance point of Equilibrium is imaginary — or, as
the Zohar expresses it, “negatively
existent”.[19]
We’ll have more to say about the
concept of “negative existence” later in this chapter. For now, however, let’s get back to the
question of how the Tree of Life extends itself into the Outer World, that is,
into the dimension of Space. The ancient
Hebrews, like their Babylonian cousins, were accomplished astronomers. They observed that the heavens all revolve
around an invisible axis, which is “negatively existent”. They further observed that the motion of a
heavenly body traces a helix as it revolves through Space around its axis. An obvious metaphor for the shape of a helix
is a snake with its coils. So it was
natural for the Jewish mystics to describe the imaginary axis of Space as a
huge Serpent, whom they called Teli.
The Serpent, of course, plays the
villain in the tragedy of
The Serpent in the Garden
If, as we’ve said all along, Malkut
is the Garden, then the Garden is the Womb of Souls. That’s why one of the four Rivers that flow
out of
This latter connection is
intriguing, because Python was the fabled guardian of the omphalos, or “navel” of the Universe — the same as the “axis” over
which the Hebrew serpent Teli presides.
Like the Serpent of the Garden of Eden, Python was seen as an antagonist
of God’s transcendent aspect, which the Greeks personified in their solar deity
Apollo. Apollo, whose name comes from
the Greek word for “apple”, dispatched Python with an arrow, just as his
henchman Hercules did to the serpent Ladon.
Ladon guarded the golden apples of immortality that grew on the Greek
version of the Tree of Life.
Both Teli and Python probably trace
their origins to Apep, the demonic
serpent of
I
am the Lord that maketh all things; that stretchest forth the heavens alone;
that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself …[20]
The actions
of “stretching” and “spreading” that Isaiah expresses in this passage are also
attached to the Hebrew name of Pishon,
the mystical
So now we have two concepts that
we’ve associated with Teli: Equilibrium and Matter. Putting them together, we get the notion that
the material Universe exists as something to balance or equilibrate the
Pleroma. It’s true that the physical Universe, in all its vastness, serves
simply as a meticulously precise “setting”, so to speak, for the “gold” of
human Consciousness. The “gold” of the
World Soul is bound up with the “ore” of Matter. But there’s more to it than that. When bound up with the Soul, Matter becomes
transparent to the Divine Image and extends the proportions of the Supernal
Man, Zer Anpin, throughout the Universe.
This is the process of “stretching forth the heavens” which Isaiah
describes.
How does Teli, the Serpent of
Matter, accomplish this monumental task of imprinting divine Symmetry on an
entire Universe? This question brings us
back to the merits of the “intelligent design” approach to cosmology. “Intelligent design” is the cornerstone of
the theology of Deism, whose God is exclusively transcendent. Deism is implicitly dualistic, because it
must view the intelligence of Matter — symbolized by the Serpent — as purely
demonic. This means that Deism is a
self-contradictory theology, since an all-encompassing transcendent God cannot
co-exist with an autonomous evil Adversary.
The only way to avoid the contradiction of Deism is to consider the manifest
Symmetry of Creation, not as a premeditated “design” imposed from “above” and
“outside” the physical Universe, but as a pattern spontaneously generated from within it. And that’s what makes the spontaneously
generated Serpent Teli such an apt emblem for the material conduit of this
divine pattern.
It follows then that Matter is invested with an intelligence, and
that this intelligence is not
innately demonic. To help us understand
how this intelligence works, let’s find an example of it. We don’t have to look too far — indeed, no
further than the computer I’m using to compose this text. From the moment our species attained
Self-awareness, we simultaneously acquired the ability to manipulate the
intelligence of inanimate things. An axe
is congealed intelligence; it is the actualization in material form of a purely
mental conception of a task. Why does a
being have to be Self-aware to make an axe?
A beaver can formulate the thoughts needed to cut wood. Why can’t a beaver make itself an axe? The answer is that the beaver can think about
cutting wood but can’t think about thinking.
An animal can’t extract itself from its own thoughts and shape those
thoughts the way it can a piece of wood.
And so we see that the ability of
intelligence to act upon itself is a “bonus” that automatically comes along
with Self-Consciousness. This ability
involves a process called “recursion”. A
recursive process is one that involves one or more “loops”. Such a “loop” would consist of a defined set
of operations performed stepwise in a fixed order. When the last step is performed, the loop
reverts back to the first step. We can
think of many mechanical chores, such as knitting or rolling dough, which fit
into this recursive scheme. And it’s
precisely this motif which governs our everyday thought patterns, regardless of
whether we’d like to think of ourselves as a little “loopie”! But the key to all of this loopiness goes
back to the idea of the helix and our serpent friend Teli. Like the mythical Uroboros, the Serpent “swallows his own tail”, in the sense that
the end of the loop feeds back into its beginning. Since each subsequent run through the loop
starts out a “higher” level than the one before, over time the process traces
out a three-dimensional helix rather than a two-dimensional circle.
A recursive process can also involve
“loops within loops”, also known as “nested loops”. In other words, we can have a main loop
consisting of a number of steps, one of which is a “sub-loop”. Let’s say the “sub-loop” is step #8 in the
main loop. Then when the main loop gets
to step #8, it will run through all the steps of the “sub-loop” before going on
to step #9 of the main loop. In theory,
there’s no limit to how far we can go with this “nested” structure. We can have loops within loops within loops ad infinitum. And, in fact, that’s exactly what we find in
the structure of the Tree of Life.
Again, let’s remind ourselves that
the Tree of Life is, first and foremost, a network of Vessels (aka Sephirot)
which connect God’s transcendent pole with His/Her immanent pole. Another way of saying this is that the 32
paths of the Tree define the “anatomy” of a Deity who is both “over-All” and
“in-All”. We are in God and He/She is in
us. Since the Essence of God must be
indivisible, however, this implies that God is within God is within God is
within God, etc. One might think of the Russian porcelain
dolls which fit one inside the other, but that analogy falls short because the
Divine Image is reproduced undiminished right down to the thinnest slice of
Creation. That’s why, as modern
cosmology is only now discovering, it’s possible for an entire Universe to
expand spontaneously out of a dimensionless point in a complete vacuum.
This is what the Kabbalah is talking
about when it says that the 32 paths are gold-embroidered into the garments of
the Daughter. The Daughter, as we know,
represents Malkut, the realm of Matter.
But Malkut herself is one of the 32 paths. Accordingly, the 32 paths comprise a
recursive loop. The loop begins with
Keter and ends with Malkut. But, because
Malkut contains all 32 paths within her “garments”, when we get to her we begin
all over again with Keter — not the same Keter we started out with, but Keter
mirrored on a “lower” level. And the
same thing happens the next time we run through the loop and arrive again at Malkut. We keep descending down through one sub-loop
after another in an infinitely nested array.
This process of infinite nesting
enables the higher intelligence of Matter. During the past century, mankind has improved
on the simple mechanical intelligence of the axe, which rigidly embodies one
unalterable thought process. The
improvement is something we now call “artificial intelligence”. The science of “artificial intelligence” has
resulted from mankind’s discovery that inanimate Matter is capable of the type
of thinking hitherto believed to be only attainable by humans. And the “tricks” that make artificial
intelligence possible are recursive loops, called “do-loops” by computer
programmers, as well as nested sub-loops, the “subroutines” of
cybernetics. In his sometimes comical
vanity, Man credits himself with endowing Matter with this higher intelligence. Actually, however, Matter inherently has the
capacity for what we call “artificial intelligence”, and Man’s only real
discovery has been how to harness that power for his own ends.
Man’s cyber-manipulation of the
higher intelligence of Matter differs from the natural variety of that
intelligence in one important way, however.
Without human intervention, the loops and sub-loops that Matter is
capable of executing on its own would go on forever. To prevent this, the programmer inserts limits
or barriers. These are typically in the form of “if” statements that establish
certain criteria for the program to abandon the loop it’s been executing and go
branching off in another direction. But
the natural tendency of Matter is to find ways of circumventing these barriers
and to go on looping happily ever after.
The computer users among us get to experience this particular
eccentricity of the Serpent Teli every time our screen freezes and our cursor
stops blinking!
Man is able to circumscribe the
higher intelligence of Matter with limits because he has an idea of the information
he’s seeking and can tell his machine:
“Okay, you’ve found that piece, now start looking for this one.” Without this human piloting, the
cyber-intellect would only generate endless patterns within patterns — the
fractals which characterize a chaotic process.
Although human memory is capable of navigating a certain number of
nested levels of thought, at a certain point we become confused and
confounded. As we learned in Chapter
One, that’s the reason the Hebrews characterized Chaos as Tohu, “that which confounds”.
Hence, Man’s ability to control and
direct the Serpent Teli (who represents the higher intelligence of Matter)
depends very much on his capacity for keeping track of the level on which the
Serpent is “nesting” at any given time.
Such tracking is essential if the State of
Before we go any further, we need to
develop a better understanding of the concepts “above” and “below” as they
relate to the different levels of Reality.
What we’re really talking about here are levels of metaphors. To illustrate
this, let’s pick out something very familiar and mundane to serve as our
baseline Reality. If we’re looking for a
“baseline”, there’s no better place to go than a baseball field, right? On the primary level of Reality, we have the
actual baseball game itself. It consists
of a sequence of actions: pitches, hits, fielding plays, base running, crowd
responses, umpiring calls, etc. If we are a player in the game or a fan in
attendance, then we are “inside” this primary level. How about if we are reading about the game
in the next day’s sports page? Maybe
there’s a photograph of the close play at the plate or a slugger’s homerun
swing. There’s usually a box score that
tells us how each of the players performed.
And then there’s some narrative about the key plays of the game. All of this, we would say, is information
“about the game”. But it’s also more
than that. Its real aim is to recreate
the experience of the game on another level, to generate a metaphor for the
game — a “meta-game”, if you will. To
the extent the sports writer is creative and eloquent, he or she succeeds in
lifting the game up to a “higher”, more imaginative level of Reality.
Let’s take this example one step
further. A second sportswriter reads the
newspaper account of the game and sees that the final score was the MetaMets 24
and the MetaGiants 23. He writes a
magazine article and says: “Too many runs are being scored. The games are too long and fatiguing for both
fans and players. The rules should be
changed to allow just two outs per inning instead of three.” In this article, entitled “Take an Out from
the Ball Game”, the second sportswriter urges the baseball commissioner to
change the official rules of the game accordingly. Here we encounter a third level of Reality,
which is not about the game itself, but about the account of the game. We could call it a “meta-meta-game”, that is,
a metaphor for a metaphor. But something
even more interesting happens when the baseball commissioner reads the magazine
article and decides to implement the rule change. Now the primary Reality, the actual game
itself, is changed. What we now have is
a loop in which the “highest” level feeds back into the base level and touches
off a new sequence of metaphors.
It’s apparent from all this that
there are things we can’t possibly know about the game of baseball until we
look at it from the “outside”. Perhaps this accounts for the strangely
galvanizing effect of a home run, something that has no real equivalent in
other sports. In the instant the ball
soars out of the park, the game spills over beyond its own boundaries and
touches a level of Reality beyond itself.
If we think of baseball as having one ultimate Truth attached to it (as
all things must), then we would surely associate that Truth with the home
run. But the point to be made here is
that the game cannot reach its ultimate Truth without going outside its playing
field.
What’s true of baseball is also true
of any “game” based upon a set of rules or axioms. Take, for example, the “numbers game”. Mathematical genius Kurt Gödel proved that
there can exist no complete set of axioms capable of verifying all that is true
about positive integers. Even if the set
of axioms concerning these so-called “natural numbers” is expanded
indefinitely, there will always remain true statements that can only be arrived
at by going outside the system. Similarly,
cybernetics pioneer Alan Turing demonstrated that no conceivable system of
artificial intelligence, however powerful it might be, can determine in advance
whether an unbounded “do-loop” will ever terminate. In other words, without the limiting “if” statements
imposed by the programmer from outside the system, an unguided machine would
inevitably become locked up in a never-ending loop before completing its
computations.
It’s interesting that the “Achilles
heel” of artificial intelligence identified by both Gödel and Turing relates to
its inability to handle self-reference.
This is what makes a machine susceptible to being trapped in an infinite
loop. The classic example is the so-called
liar’s paradox, which goes like this:
“The statement you are now reading is a lie.” Mechanical intelligence must analyze this
statement first as true-if-false, then false-if-true, then again true-if-false,
and so on and on. In contrast, the human
Mind will, after a few futile rounds, step off the merry-go-round and get
outside the paradox. This simple test
proves that human intellect is capable of something that has been
mathematically proven, by Gödel and Turing, to be beyond the power of the
intelligence of Matter. It goes without
saying that if Man were purely a material being, such a capability would be
impossible.
Human Consciousness is not only capable of stepping outside the bounds
of primary Reality, it has an inherent need
to do so in order to create meaning out of experience. That’s why mankind devotes so much its energy
to creating the meta-Reality of theater, cinema and literature. On the level of unsifted experience, Reality
is a hodge-podge of many meanings, which tend to obscure and mask one another
unless extracted and refined to a higher level. We find a good play, book or movie satisfying
because it strips away the “static” of the extraneous things that clog our
lives and exposes the golden vein of concealed meaning. Shakespeare illustrates this principle
brilliantly when he stages the “play-within-a-play” in the third act of Hamlet.
By deftly shifting down one level from the primary drama to a veritable
“meta-drama”, the playwright exposes a deeper layer of meaning — the evil
lurking beneath the urbane façade of the royal family: “The [meta-]play’s the thing wherein I’ll
catch the conscience of the King.”
Consciousness is vital and active to
the extent that it creates meaning out of experience. It is fallen and moribund to the extent that
it passively receives the imprint of experience. While passive perception sinks beneath
experience into an abyss devoid of any meaning (save brute survival), active
perception floats above, distilling the content of experience. This latter
variety of sensory perception is a central theme of William Blake’s visionary
verse. In his mystical symbolism, each
of the Five Senses represents a level of the World Soul, with the two highest
levels corresponding to the Senses of Taste and Touch. In the Eternity before Time, these two Senses
were originally one, Blake tells us, and they will be so again in the Eternity
after Time. The poet uses this supernal
Sense of Taste-Touch to represent the active, creative mode of perception.
Two human bodily functions utilize
Taste and Touch together. One is the
assimilation of food — better known as eating.
Eating makes a perfect metaphor for active perception because, when we
experience something by eating it, we take it inside of our body and make it
part of us. We act upon our nourishment
in a way that makes it part of something more sublime that itself. By comparison, the self-deprecating motto of
passive perception avows: “You are what
you eat.” This conjures Daniel’s image
of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who carried
… thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the
field, and they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and they shall wet thee
with the dew of heaven, and seven times shall pass over thee, till thou know
that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men …[21]
Like his disciple William Blake,
John Milton also used eating as a metaphor for the higher mode of
perception. In Paradise Lost, he writes of the Archangel Raphael sharing food with
Adam and Eve in
Aside from eating, the other bodily function
that involves simultaneous sensations of Taste and Touch is sex. That’s why feasting and copulating have both
been focal points of sacred rituals throughout the ages. Back in Chapter One, we learned that the
penis and the tongue, along with the heart, demarcate the plane of Symmetry in
the mystical Body of Man. This plane is
associated with the Covenant of Circumcision, which was intended to rectify a
defect or asymmetry in the Body caused by Adam’s Fall. And at the source of that defect is the
notorious “forbidden fruit”, with its double connotation of gastronomical and
sexual enjoyment.
The Forbidden Fruit
In order for a piece of the World
Soul to be conceived, there must be intercourse between the two sexual poles of
the Godhead. In Kabbalist terminology,
this means there must be Peace between the first Male Sephirah, Chochmah, and
the highest Female Sephirah, Binah. One
consequence of this Peace (aka Equilibrium) is that all Ten Sephirot of the Tree
of Life become “Personifications”. Once
personified, the Sephirot are said to be “rectified”, as compared to the
unrectified state of the Tree during the period when worlds were being created
and destroyed. What this means is that
the Tree of Life, like any other tree, must have undergone a process of growth
and maturation. We do not expect a
mundane tree to become ready to bear fruit for perhaps several years after we
plant it. Similarly, the Tree of Life
had to mature before it could bear the fruit of human Souls. And because the Tree of Life embodies the
sexual polarity of its Right/Male and Left/Female Pillars, the progressive
emergence of sexual traits must have been a key part of its reaching maturity.
In order to bear Souls, the growing
Tree had to become conformed to the structure of the Soul, which we’ve
described as having five levels.
Consequently, the Tree had to develop five Personifications. On the highest level is the Personification
of Keter, who is known as the Ancient Holy One.
The second and third levels Personifications are the supernal Father and
Mother, who correspond to Chochmah and Binah.
On the fourth level are the Tree’s six Sephirot that combine in a
collective Person known as the Son or Zer
Anpin. And at the fifth level we
have the Son’s Bride, who personifies Malkut.
The full articulation of each of
these five Personifications is absolutely essential to the ability of the Tree
to convey Souls conceived by the Father and Mother down into the Womb of Malkut
for incarnation. This is because the
Personifications are not mere abstractions, like John Bull or Uncle Sam. Carl Jung would refer to them as Archetypes —
concepts which have the power to impose their Forms on manifest things. Archetypes have the quality that they can’t
be isolated on one level of Reality.
Instead, their intense energy transmits their Forms downward to create
counterparts of themselves at every level beneath them.
We know that the cumulative birth of
individual Souls into the material Universe is the means by which God is
reassembling the World Soul that shattered with the Fall of the Rebel
Angels. For this process to succeed,
therefore, there must be a firm linkage, an unwavering correspondence between
the sexual Union of the Mother and Father on the supernal level and the sexual
But the rectification of the Tree of
Life through Personification does not occur in isolation from the development
of the material Universe. The maturation
of the Tree within the confines of the Garden proceeds in tandem with the
extension of the Body of the greater Man, Zer
Anpin, out into the Macrocosm. This
is the work of the Serpent Teli in constructing the anthropic Universe, the
Cosmos fine-tuned to accommodate human intelligence. In the figurative sense, the Kabbalah
portrays the Tree of Life as growing from the circumference of the Garden
inward to its center, while the Serpent grows from the outside of the Garden
wall and extends into Space. The two
movements — centripetal and centrifugal — are complementary and totally
interdependent. Without the outward
expansion of Teli, the material preconditions for the Tree’s growth cannot be
secured. Without the inward growth of
the Tree, the direction and guidance of the cosmic expansion is lost, and chaos
ensues.
In many respects, the relationship between the Serpent Teli and the Tree of Life is like the relationship between a biological organism and its DNA. The inner processes of the DNA are reflected in the outward development of the organism. Without the outward development, the organism can’t become fit to survive and propagate its DNA. Without the inner working of the DNA, on the other hand, the growth of the cells goes pathologically haywire and destroys the organism, as in the disease of cancer. Among the “jobs” which the bodily organism performs for the DNA is to defend it against outside chemical and biological agents that would contaminate it. Contamination of the DNA can disrupt its operation so as to diminish its control over the development of the o
