The Year of Jubilee
Chapter Six:
The Heavenly Yeshiva
The Holy Light, Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, begins his discourse in the Heavenly Yeshiva at the point he left off in life. He had expired while interpreting Psalm 133, verse 3:
For there Adonai ordained the blessing: LIFE even unto the WORLDS.
Thus
spoke Rabbi Shimon to the members of the
“When the Angel of Death interrupted me, I had not finished uttering the word LIFE, and so I resume with the same word here in the World to Come (Olam HaBa). First, let us consider the particular form of the word LIFE that the Psalmist uses in this verse. It is the plural form Chayyim, having an implicit duality that encompasses both Life in the earthly world and Life in the heavenly WORLDS, as is written: LIFE even unto the WORLDS.
We encounter the same form of the word LIFE Chayyim in Genesis 2:7, when Adonai Elohim blows into the nostrils of Adam the ‘Soul’ Neshamah of LIFE. The same verse then speaks of Adam becoming a living ‘soul’ Nephesh, but here the word ‘life’ is in its feminine singular form Chayyah, signifying that the Nephesh has a strictly terrestrial existence. And so we see that the Torah distinguishes between the animal soul Nephesh, which is consigned to the lower world of the flesh, and the celestial Soul Neshamah, which inhabits all of the upper WORLDS as well.”
At this juncture, Doctor Germinator, a scientific member of the Academy, framed a question:
“You have spoken to the idea of the plurality of LIFE, which bears upon subjective experience and the realm of the Soul. But is not this subjective plurality of LIFE inseparably linked to the objective plurality of the WORLDS? In cosmology we have the notion of parallel universes, perhaps infinite in number, constituting a Multiverse. And quantum theory envisions the scenario of an endlessly branching reality of ‘many worlds’. How do these concepts relate to the WORLDS, the Olamim?”
Rabbi Shimon responded:
“We must distinguish between the WORLDS that are manifest and the WORLDS that are not. This is why the word for WORLD Olam has the connotation of something ‘hidden’. Due to the Fall of Adam, we are in a condition of Exile, which means we are outside the realm of our full and unabridged LIFE Chayyim. Being ‘on the outside looking in’, so to speak, we necessarily see things from an inverted perspective. Which is to say that the interior of things looks like the exterior and vice-versa. So the world of our experience and the many WORLDS of ultimate Reality have an inverse relationship to each other.”
Doctor Germinator interposed:
“String
theory talks about six hidden dimensions that are ‘curled up’ inside the four
dimensions we perceive as Space-Time. We
can think of these dimensions as an unperceived ‘core’ of our reality. Strings are thought to be the fundamental
building blocks of the universe. Their
physical properties are determined by their total energy, which comprises two
components: (1) the negative energy
associated with the string winding around the ‘core’ dimensions, and (2) the positive
energy of the string unwinding from the ‘core’.
Either the ‘winding’ or the ‘unwinding’ energy mode can be used to
measure the dimensions of Space-Time.
But the two different string energy modes define alternative Space-Times
that are reciprocals of one another. In
other words, our ‘positive energy’ universe, which we measure as 15 billion
light years across, is associated with an inverse ‘negative energy’ universe,
which we would measure (if we could) as 10-94 centimeter
across. That means that 10172
such universes would fit inside a single hydrogen atom. The reciprocal universe exists ‘inside’ every
point in Space and ‘within’ each moment in Time.”
This
prompted another member of the Academy, the metaphysician Elias, to join the
discussion:
“Let’s
consider the characteristics of an inverse Space-Time. As an object moves forward in mundane
Space-Time, its reciprocal ‘shadow’ moves backward. If we imagine the flight of an arrow, when it
is a distance R from the archer in mundane Space-Time, it is separated by 1/R
from the archer in inverse Space-Time.
So before the archer shoots the arrow, it is infinitely far away (1/0)
in reciprocal Space-Time. After he
shoots the arrow, it travels back toward him in inverse Space-Time, because as
R gets larger, 1/R gets smaller. It’s
like watching a film in reverse, which tells us that the ‘arrow of Time’ in the
reciprocal realm in reversed. Events
proceed backward from their final state to their initial state. Causality is also reversed, as the endpoint
of a process becomes its operative ‘Final Cause’.”
Doctor
Germinator agreed:
“Yes,
Time is reversed and energy is negative.
As positive energy is applied to an object in mundane Space-Time, its
velocity — distance traveled over time, or R/t — increases. But reciprocal velocity is t/R (1/R divided
by 1/t), which decreases as energy is added and increases as energy is
withdrawn. So energy in inverse Space-Time
is negative energy. Furthermore, since
the ‘arrow of Time’ is reversed, entropy decreases over reciprocal Time. Which means that things spontaneously become
more orderly and structured under the reciprocal regime: spilt milk goes back into the bottle and
broken eggs reconstitute themselves. The
reciprocal Multiverse proceeds toward greater and greater Symmetry. Inscrutable chaotic processes become
transparent.”
Rabbi
Shimon spoke again:
“The
LIFE of the WORLDS proceeds at once
toward complexity at ever higher levels of unification. This is why the Garden of Eden appears at the
Beginning, which is also the End of Time, the Final Cause. Within the great trunk of the Tree of LIFE, Eitz HaChayyim, all of the WORLDS coincide simultaneously. Each instant in Time is eternal and each point
in Space is infinite in the inverse Space-Time which you have scientifically
and metaphysically derived.
Before
Adam’s Fall, the Tree of LIFE was
within Man, and he was within it. But
the immediate effect of the Fall was to separate Man from the Tree of LIFE, so that, as is written in Genesis
3:22, he needed to ‘stretch out his hand’
to touch it. Mundane Space-Time was now
interposed between Adam and the WORLDS
of inverted Space-Time, which became external to Man. This externality was enforced by the fiery ‘ever-turning
sword’ Lahat HaCherev — that is, by
the very ‘winding’ energy Lahat that
sustains the reciprocal order. The
ever-turning sword Lahat HaCherev can
also be read as the ‘metaphysical drought’. To continue with this theme, I will now call
upon my friend Rav Hamnuna Sava, the Great Fish.”
Upon
saying this, Rabbi Shimon was transformed into the appearance of Rav Hamnuna,
who resumed the discourse:
“All
that we perceive emerges from the great Ocean of the Divine, which is embodied
in the Torah. Our reality floats on this
Ocean and is supported by it, just as balusters supported the roof of the
Tabernacle Mishkhan of the
Congregation of
As
Rav Hamnuna pronounced the word “sword”, his Son Yose ben Nuna entered the
Assembly:
“I
knew it was my Father who was speaking, just a Moses knew it was the Voice of
the LIVING GOD that he heard on the
Mount of the Sword. I inferred this because
the hall in which we sit is even now encompassed by a seemingly impassable wall
of fire.”
Rav
Hamnuna asked him:
“And
how did you penetrate this wall of fire, my Son?”
He
replied:
“With
my Sword, the Sword of Torah that was endowed upon Moses on
Rav
Hamnuna smiled:
“Truly,
the fire embodies Shekhinah, who
yields only to the honed edge of argument.
I am girding the Sword onto my loins as you speak. But be warned: This a combat to the Death.”
His
Son rejoined:
“But
Death is Mavet, which becomes Emet ‘Truth’ when we extract the letter Vav.”
Rav
Hamnuna parried:
“And,
being the sixth letter, Vav
represents the Sixth Day of Creation, the Day on which Elohim said, ‘Let us make
Man.’ ‘Let us’, because the Creation of Man involved both the Male and the
Female principles in conjunction — the conjunction signified by the letter Vav, which is shaped like a hook.”
Laughed
Yose ben Nuna:
“The
same hook on which I hope to catch you, the Great Fish.”
“Then
proceed with your exposition, my Son ,”
said Rav Hamnuna, “the Fish awaits your cast.”
Yose
ben Nuna began:
“Why
does the flaming Sword Cherev that
enforced the Exile of Adam appear again when his progeny are released from Exile
at
The
Great Fish interjected:
“They
saw no water, yet they were surrounded by a Sea, the same Sea in which I
swim. This Sea is called Malkhut, which is the Dominion of Shekhinah over the all the WORLDS.”
Whereupon
his Son resumed:
“As
it is written in Psalms 145:13: ‘Your Malkhut
is a Malkhut of all WORLDS (Olamim). Your Dominion encompasses the entirety of the
Cycles.’ The Cycles are the waves of the
endless and timeless Ocean. Their entire
scope extends beneath the waves and within them — waves within waves and Cycles
within Cycles endlessly into the depths Tehom,
from whence they support all that exists.
Thus the next verse of the Psalm says that even the apparently gigantic Nephilim (descendents of the Fallen
Angels) are supported by the minute
sub-texture of Reality.
The
Great Fish interrupted his son:
“But
why does this incident of Moses drawing water from the rock occur twice — the
first within days of crossing the Red Sea, as described in Exodus chapter 17,
and the second in the fortieth and final year of
Yose
ben Nuna explained:
“Let
us remember that water mayyim like LIFE Chayyim
is a dual plural noun. And so there are
the WATERS above, pertaining to all
the WORLDS, and the waters below,
circumscribed by this world. As
described in Exodus 17, Moses stood upon the rock and lowered his right arm to
strike it, and striking it only once, brought forth mundane water for the
people to drink. With the lowering of
his right arm, the WATERS ceased to
flow from above, and Shekhinah was no
longer protected from the Qlippot of
the Other Side, which seek to defile Her.
And so it was no accident that immediately thereafter the Congregation
of Israel was attacked by the army of Amelek.”
Rav
Hamnuna observed:
“Amalek
was the son of Esau, or
His
son resumed:
“Let
us follow the rule we agreed upon before.
Namely, let us extract Vav so
that Mavet Death may be transformed
into Emet Truth. And since Vav
is the sixth letter, we look to the sixth verse of Exodus chapter 17, which is
usually translated as:
Behold, I will be standing there before
you upon the rock in Choreb.
But
which can also be read as:
They will be standing facing Thee, the
NAME, upon the Rock with a Sword.
Because
‘there’ sham with different vowel
points (serei instead of qamatz) becomes ‘name’, referring to the
ineffable Name of YHVH, the
Tetragrammaton. ‘They’ signifies the Six
Sephirot that face toward the Name, Tiferet, in which ‘They’ are
reconciled. When they stand apart from
the Name, however, they demand harsh Judgment, represented by the Sword.”
The
Great Fish interposed:
“Now
that you have extracted the hook Vav,
you must cast it into the Sea Yam,
which was created on the Third Day.”
Taking
the cue, Yose continued:
“Yes,
for in the third verse of this chapter we find:
And the people thirsted there
for water …
Which
we should render instead as:
And the people thirsted the NAME into
the WATERS …
That
is, they thirsted for the NAME so as
to bring forth the flow of the WATERS
from the hidden dimensions Olamim of
Reality.”
Rav
Hamnuna interrupted again:
“All
of the Olamim enter the Kingdom Malkhut by unseen paths. The personification of the Kingdom is David,
who writes (Psalms 42:3):
My Nephesh thirsts for Elohim, the
LIVING GOD …
The
Psalmist asks himself continually, ‘Where Ayeh
is your Elohim?’, but his question
answers itself in its alternate rendering, ‘Ehyeh
is your Elohim.’ When Moses asks the Voice from the Burning
Bush for Its name, It replies Ehyeh. Ehyeh
signifies the most exalted and most inscrutable of the metaphysical Spheres, or
Sefirot. Since it is inscrutable, Ehyeh is also called Ayin,
signifying negation or nothingness. It
is the negative existence of the higher WORLDS
that invisibly sustains all LIFE. ”
His
Son continued:
“As
interpreted by the Holy Light Rabbi Shimon (Zohar 1:2a), Psalm 42 describes the
process of emanation from the supernal Mother Binah to Her Daughter Shekhinah. Since Binah
is the highest level of the Divine to which Thought can reach in its
questioning, She is called ‘Who’ Mi. In Her role as Creatrix, Binah emanates the seven lower Sefirot,
which are called ‘these’ elleh. Hence, the Psalmist (42:5) enjoins: ‘Let me
remember these elleh.’ The emanation of elleh (Aleph, Lamed, Heh) from
Mi (Mem, Yod) composes Elohim (Aleph, Lamed, Heh, Yod, Mem), the
garment that Binah bestows upon Her
Daughter Shekhinah.”
Noted
Rav Hamnuna:
“And
so the emanations of all of the Sefirot
flow from the highest level Ehyeh-Ayin
like rivers into the Sea which is Elohim. Which is why one can truly say, ‘Ehyeh is your Elohim.’ Elohim is the reservoir or pool Breikhah into which all blessing Barakhah empties from on High, through
the Name of YHVH.”
At
this point, Rav Hamnuna briefly morphed back into Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai for
just long enough to say:
“Excuse
me if I Breik-hah in here for a
moment. [Aside: Even very enlightened
sages can make bad jokes now and then.] I see now we have another interpretation of
the passage with which I began (Psalms 133:3):
… For there Adonai ordained the blessing: LIFE even unto the WORLDS.
Putting
this passage in context, a new reading is suggested. In the first verse, exhorting men to
brotherhood, the Psalmist exclaims ‘How good and how pleasant’ it
is for brothers to dwell together in Oneness.
Tradition teaches us that ‘how’ Mah
is a name for Shekhinah — whose title
itself derives from Shakhan
‘dwelling’. Shekhinah (aka Adonai) embodies
the Oneness of all human souls, the Neshamah. This passage then goes on to describe the
emanation of the Neshamah like an
anointing oil flowing from the head of the Sefirot
(Ehyeh-Ayin) down the beard of
Aaron. Aaron personifies the Sefirah of Hod, which is the Sphere of visionary experience. From Hod,
the divine chrism settles on
… like the dew of Hermon that falls
upon the mountains of
Inasmuch as the Name commissioned for
Adonai a Pool (Breikhah), LIFE extends into the WORLDS.
I
leave this as an exercise for my students:
What was this ‘Pool’ commissioned for Adonai?”
Not
waiting for Rabbi Shimon to transform back into his Father, Yose ben Nuna
responded:
“In
Solomon’s Temple on Mount Zion there was commissioned in Adonai’s honor an
indoor pool, a huge basin cast in bronze, about 15 meters in
circumference. Referred to as the ‘Sea’,
it was described (1Kings 7:23) as having been formed from a ‘mold’ yatsaq, as is an Archetype of the
Imagination, Yetser.”
Rav
Hamnuna rejoined the discussion:
“The
gematria of ‘Sea’ Yam is 50, thus
representing the 50 years of Jubilee Cycle Yobel
(‘in the Jubilee’ also has a gematria of 50), as well as the 50 Gates of
Understanding. Both of these pertain to
the Sefirah of Binah, the source from which emanates the WORLDS. The realm of the WORLDS extends from the First Gate,
which is Shekhinah, to the 50th
Gate, which is Yobel-Binah. The Hebrew word for ‘gate’ sha’ar with a different vowel point
under the Shin (qamatz instead of patach)
becomes ‘to imagine’ sha’ar. The vowel qamatz
signifies enclosing something in the hand, as one does with a key, while patach is the action of opening, as one
does a gate or door. So it’s like Rod
Serling says on the ‘Twilight Zone’:
‘You unlock this door with the key of Imagination’.”
Yose
was puzzled:
“I
have never heard of this Rav Serling.
Was he a great sage of Kabbalah?
Was he a Tanna?”
Rav
Hamnuna laughed:
“Yes,
a TV Tanna of mid-20th
Century Amerika. His parables were quite
entertaining as well as enlightening.”
His
son inquired:
“But
how did you learn of these parables, my Father?
You died many centuries before the time of this Rav Serling.”
The
Great Fish explained:
“But
in the Sea of negative existence, the current of events flows from Future to
Past, the reverse of ordinary time. Such
is the ‘dimension of Mind’ about which Rav Serling taught. We do not move into the Future, the Future
moves into us through the Breath of the universal Soul Neshamah. Mind draws images
of the Future through us as Sea water is drawn through the gills of a fish.”
Elias
the Metaphysician joined in:
“Remember
the Zen koan: ‘Not the flag, not the wind — Mind
is moving.’ The patterns of the Soul
Breath are recursive. They replicate
themselves infinitely and eternally on ever larger and smaller scales. That is why Time is represented as an hourglass. The cone of sand in the upper chamber of the
glass shrinks down into the aperture, from whence it inversely expands in the
same conical pattern into the lower chamber.
So the Circle of Time Gilgal
funnels down from the upper WORLDS Olamim, with the diameter of the Circle
shrinking until it reaches the Opening — the HERE&NOW Koh — from
which it unfolds into the realm of experience.”
Dr.
Germinator added his scientific perspective:
“The
hourglass is precisely the model physics uses to depict the structure of
four-dimensional Space-Time. It’s known
as the Minkowski ‘Light Cone’, and it looks like this:
The
point at which these two cones meet is also, I believe, the junction of physics
and metaphysics. Who can we call upon to
explain the mystery of this point, which my friend Elias has just referred to
as Koh?”
Rav
Hamnuna answered:
“This
matter involves the Gates of Light Sha’rei
Orah, on which subject Rabbi Gikatilla is our leading Tanna. I will yield my place
to him so that he may address this question.”
Momentarily,
Rav Hamnuna metamorphosed into Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla, who now spoke:
“Koh is a yet another name for Shekhinah. It refers to Her function as a entranceway to
all the higher Spheres. This attribute
is also known as Petach Einayim,
which means ‘the Opening of the Eyes’.
Recall that patach connotes
the action of opening, and the vowel by that name takes us through the Gate Sha’ar to the upper WORLDS by way of Imagination Sha’ar. The word Einayim
is the dual form of Ayin, which means
both ‘eye’ and ‘fountain’. So it can refer
to either a pair of eyes or a pair of fountains.”
Yose
ben Nuna asked:
“What
do eyes and fountains have to do with each other? It seems to me that an eye is passive,
absorbing light, while a fountain is active, emitting water.”
Rabbi
Gikatilla rejoined:
“Herein
lies a great mystery. In mankind’s
fallen condition, they consider the Eye to be a strictly passive sensory organ,
one that simply receives light from the external world and reacts to it. But we know that there are actually two kinds
of light — the mundane light they experience down below and the supernal Light we
enjoy here in the Olam HaBa World to
Come. This divine Light was the first
creation of the Elohim, who
immediately called it Tov
‘Good’. According to the Zohar, the Tov Light is the ‘Light of the Eye’,
which means it emanates from within the Eye.
By this Light, Adam was able to see all of Space and Time in one instant,
and Moses could view the entire Promised Land in one glance. This why there are two Eyes, because of this
dual character of Light. There is the
sublime Light that goes forth from the Eye, like the water that pours forth
from a fountain. This is the
quintessential Light that proceeds out of Mind to create all things and cause
all events. And then there is the
ordinary light that returns to the Eye, so that the Flesh may be able to orient
itself with respect to the things and events that the Mind has made.”
Dr.
Germinator interjected:
“Excuse
me, but I had to interrupt here because what Rabbi Gikatilla is describing is
incredibly similar to something in modern physics called the Wheeler-Feynman
emitter-absorber theory. For the sake of
brevity, I’ll refer to this as the ‘WF theory’.
That theory is based on the fact that there are two sets of solutions to
Maxwell’s equation for the propagation of electromagnetic waves. One solution describes a ‘retarded wave’,
which has positive energy and frequency and propagates into the Future. This is mundane light. But the other solution describes an ‘advanced
wave’ that has negative energy and frequency and propagates backward in Time. The latter seems to correspond to the supernal
Light that the Zohar talks about.
According
to the WF theory, the receptor that’s going to absorb a ray of light sends an ‘advanced
wave’ back in Time to the source that’s going to emit the light, and that
releases the source to emit a ‘retarded wave’ forward in Time to the receptor. When we look at something, the receptor is
our eye. So if the WF theory is right,
the eye sends out ‘advanced waves’ which go back in Time and trigger the
‘retarded waves’ of light that convey the things and events of our experience. All that we see is like an echo of the primal
Light, the Light of the Eye. If you look at the Minkowki ‘Light Cone’ diagram
that I displayed earlier, the Eye is positioned at the apex of the ‘Past Light
Cone’ — that is, at the Opening of the archetypal hourglass. It’s always at the Koh point, the infinite HERE
and the eternal NOW.”
Rabbi
Gikatilla noted:
“When
Moses approached the Burning Bush (Exodus 3:4), he experienced Elohim calling out his name twice:
‘Moses! Moses!’ He experienced it once
in the ‘advanced wave’ of divine Light, and once in the ‘retarded wave’ of
worldly light. Standing at the
crossroads of the Past and the Future, he became aware: ‘HERE
I AM.’ Thus began his Communion with Ehyeh — I AM. Ehyeh is
the ultimate I-Eye, positioned at the End of Time, such that everything is
encompassed by the ‘Past Light Cone’ of this I-Eye. The ancient Egyptian symbol of the all-seeing
Eye at the apex of the Great Pyramid is a rendering of this same universal
Archetype.
This
explains why each of us, by emitting ‘advanced waves’ from our Eye, do not
create our own isolated version of Reality — what would be, in effect, a
solipsistic universe. Instead, all Eyes
are attuned to the Vision of the ultimate I-Eye Ehyeh. The Vision of Ehyeh is transmitted by the sublime
Light backward from the End of Time into the Eye of each human. But the Vision is not the same for each
person. Rather, in passing through the WORLDS, the Light is refracted into its
multi-colored components, just as ordinary light becomes a rainbow in passing
through a cloud of mist. Each individual
is equipped to receive only one distinct ‘wavelength’ of the Light, and to each
is given his/her own unique Vision. But,
in totality, the individual Visions drawn from the distinct ‘wavelengths’ all
add up to One Vision — the Vision of Ehyeh.”
Yose
ben Nuna inquired:
“But
tell me, Rabbi Joseph, if all humanity shares the One Vision that emanates from
Ehyeh, why does Man experience Good
and Evil?”
Rabbi
Joseph responded:
“Because
the sin of Eve and Adam brought mankind into a type of perception that is blind
to the ‘advanced waves’ comprising the higher Light. The fallen Consciousness of the ego-self
experiences only one side of Reality — that which the Eye receives as ‘retarded
waves’. This appears as a Reality
imposed on Man from outside himself. But
this is because his ego-self does not include his higher Self, which is exiled
to the Un-Conscious. Only the so-called
Unconscious side experiences the ‘advanced waves’. Only the Unconscious is aware of how its
individual Vision communicates with the overall Vision of Ehyeh and creates the Reality echoed back to ego-perception in the
form of ‘retarded waves’.
But
the Unconscious knowledge is filtered out of fallen Consciousness by the
ego. When the Serpent seduced Eve to eat
from the Tree of Good and Evil, he promised her that its fruit would ‘open her
eyes’ and enable her to create her own worlds.
This was the false promise of a creative Vision unconnected to that of Ehyeh.
Eve and Adam’s belief in that false promise, however, caused them to
fall into the delusion of a separate, insular Vision — a delusion that made
them blind to the nexus between their Vision and Ehyeh’s.
What
is this splintered Consciousness like?
Think of a symphony orchestra, with the sounds of all of the instruments
blending to produce the musical Vision of the composer. Now consider what would happen if we divided
the orchestra in half and blocked out the sound from the right side. The symphony would now become uneven and
disjointed, sometimes sounding euphoniously ‘good’, but other times sounding
discordantly ‘bad’. This exemplifies the
unbalanced version of Reality that the ego-self perceives. It is like any unbalanced thing, lurching
back and forth from one side of the metaphysical plane to the other,
fluctuating between apparent ‘Good’ and apparent ‘Evil’.
By
the way, since I spoke of the Koh
point as the ‘crossroads’ of Past and Future, I should observe that the phrase
‘Opening of the Eyes’ Petach Einayim,
can also be translated as the ‘crossroads’.”
Upon
pronouncing the word “crossroads”, Rabbi Gikatilla was transformed into the
Holy Light, Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai, who now spoke again:
“We
are now prepared to enter the ‘crossroads’ of the Tree of LIFE — the paired Sefirot of
Netzach and Hod. These two are
personified by the two brothers Moses and Aaron, respectively. They also correspond to the two ‘Light Cones’
of Future and Past that our scientific colleague has so ably described. Hod
is Vision. It is the Eye’s emission of
quintessential Light — what WF theory calls ‘advanced waves’ — down the Past
Light Cone. Because this Light travels
backward in Time, it creates all Reality, as far back as the very dawn of Time
itself.
Therefore,
the Eye does not passively receive Reality, but rather Reality emanates from
the Eye. For example, I just now
perceived Elias standing up to stretch himself.
But as Elias stood, my Eye transmitted the Vision of ‘Elias stretching’ back
in Time. This Vision reached Elias at
the instant he began to stand, and as It unfolded in his Mind, his Body (which
is the physical extension of his Mind) stretched in response to the
stimulus. Ordinary light — the ‘retarded
waves’ — then carried his act of stretching back into my Eye, and I perceived
it as Reality. Because Elias and I are
within a couple of meters of one another, all of this was transacted within a
matter of moments in mundane time. But
in the mirror of inverse Time, the simple action of ‘Elias stretching’
stretches out over eons.”
Dr.
Germinator reflected:
“Since
the advanced wave propagates with negative energy and frequency, it must travel
through the realm of reciprocal Space-Time of which we spoke earlier. In this realm, each momentary, localized
phenomenon of ordinary Reality has a counterpart that is vast and
enduring. Since positive Reality
‘floats’ on this realm of negative existence and is sustained by it, the most
evanescent events truly form the underlying Foundation of all that we
perceive. Furthermore, it now occurs to
me that this Sea of negative energy is precisely the ocean of negative energy
that was predicted by physicist P.A.M. Dirac in 1928. When Dirac solved the relativistic Shrödinger
equation, he found there were two sets of solutions, one describing states of
positive energy and the other describing negative energy states. Since all things spontaneously seek their
lowest energy state, Dirac realized that the realm of positive energy could not
exist at all unless all of the negative energy states were already filled. Therefore, according to Dirac’s equation, the
world of perceived phenomena ‘floats’ on an immanent Sea of negative energy
states.
If
you’ll indulge me a little longer, it also occurs to me that Dirac’s Sea might
explain the observed periods of accelerated expansion of the physical
universe. Cosmologists have no clue as
to why this happens. They’ve tried to
fudge a solution by inserting an arbitrary ‘cosmological constant’ into
Einstein’s general relativity equations (as Einstein himself originally did in
the 1920s when he was trying to conform his equations to the then-accepted view
of a static universe). The best
explanation ascribes this acceleration to an unobserved form of energy called
‘dark energy’, which appears to account for 75% of the energy in the universe.
It
seems to me that this unobserved reservoir of ‘dark energy’ must be nothing
more than Dirac’s Sea of negative energy.
Negative energy implies superluminal velocity, which (per Einstein’s
equation for relativistic mass) implies an imaginary mass, which in turn
implies a repulsive gravitational force.
Thus, when Dirac’s Sea is filled, as it is now, it exerts a powerful
repulsive gravitational force that drives cosmic expansion. But expansion results in cooling of the
cosmic microwave background, and when the background temperature falls to
certain transition point (about 2.7º K), the Sea of negative energy congeals
into something called a ‘Bose-Einstein Condensate’ (BEC).
In
this state, the Sea no longer acts as if it’s ‘filled’, so positive energy
particles can no longer ‘float’ on it.
As these particles increasingly ‘sink’ into Dirac’s Sea, the amount of
negative energy increases as does the repulsive gravitational force it
generates. The latter causes the cosmic
expansion to accelerate. But particles
dropping down to negative energy states also release large quantities of
positive energy, which heats the microwave background until it rises above the BEC
transition point. Then the
“An
intriguing, though not altogether comprehensible tangent to our discussion,”
sighed Rabbi Shimon, who would have expressed exasperation were he capable of
such emotional foibles. “I suppose this
also explains how Rabbi Yeshua the Nazarene was able to walk upon the water of
the
Oblivious
to the subtle irony of Rabbi Shimon’s remark, Dr. Germinator responded: “Gee, I dunno, let me think about that, and
I’ll get back to you.”
“Fine,”
smiled Rabbi Shimon, “and while you’re thinking about that, let’s pick up where
we left off concerning the Eye’s capacity for Vision. Instead of watching my friend Elias stretch
himself, I am now looking up at the Andromeda Galaxy some 2.2 million
light-years away. That means that the
light I now see left that Galaxy over 2 million years ago, long before I or any
of my human ancestors were born, long before humans even existed as a
species. Yet the photon that my Eye now
perceives left Andromeda in response to my Vision of it, the advanced waves of
which travel down the Past Light Cone back in Time 2.2 million years while I
gaze upon it. In this example, therefore,
the interval in the ‘crossroads’ between Vision and perception has expanded
from the mere moments of Elias’ stretching to eons of starlight propagation.”
Elias
added:
“Yet
the counterpart of this perception in the WORLDS
of inverse Space-Time is a microscopic event transpiring in a fleeting
instant. The great expanses of Space-Time
which captivate unenlightened mankind in fact play almost no role in the actual
Foundation of Reality. Tragically,
however, fallen Man feels himself dwarfed by the imposing immensity of the
cosmos, never realizing that one strand of hair on his head contains much more
of Reality’s essence that all the stars in the heavens. The god of conventional religion — the idolaters’
god who muscularly flexes his supposed powers across the enormity of Space-Time
— is a non-entity ayin. He is a pitiful gnat magnified by the
distortions of fragmented Consciousness.
For
myself, as a metaphysician, the great challenge is to restore Consciousness to
wholeness. But we must recall, as the
poet Yeats wrote: ‘Nothing can be whole
or sole which has not been rent.’
Consciousness, albeit fragmented, retains the fractal structure of
self-similarity, so that each spark, each flint of fractured unity captures all
the information needed to restore the Whole.
Each one of us, if we could only recover our true and essential Selfhood,
would instantly restore the entire shredded fabric of Reality to seamless
integrity.”
Yose
ben Nuna chimed in:
“As
is written by the Psalmist (114:7-8):
Whirl thou Earth before the Face of
Adonai, before the Face of Jacob’s Eloah, who turned the Rock into a pool of
WATERS, the flint into a fountain of WATERS.
In
this passage, the word for fountain mayin
is a form of the word ayin, which
means both ‘fountain’ and ‘eye’. The
Hebrew for ‘flint’ challamiesh is
derived from the root chalam, which
signifies both ‘to bind’ and ‘to dream’.
Thus, the WATERS of visionary
experience are bound together in the fractal imagery of dreaming, in the symbolic
language of the so-called ‘Unconscious’ Mind.”
Dr.
Germinator roused himself from deep thought:
“There
is strong evidence that all of the possible outcomes of a quantum event — which
is to say, all of the alternate histories that make up the WORLDS Olamim — are
experienced by the Unconscious Mind. Consider
the concept of a ‘quantum computer’, which would perform calculations
simultaneously in each of the ‘many worlds’ that branch off from a quantum
event. Crude versions of such a ‘quantum
computer’ have already been made to factorize huge numbers that would take
centuries to factorize using conventional computers. And yet we have many reliable accounts of
‘idiot savants’ — mentally impaired people with very low levels of Conscious
intelligence — who are able to factorize these same numbers in their
heads! How else is this possible unless
their Unconscious Minds are able to access the Olamim and perform calculations simultaneously in the myriad WORLDS just as a quantum computer
does? Ironically, the idiot savant’s
lack of Conscious intelligence allows him/her to do this, because the Conscious
‘filter’ of Unconscious experience is inoperative.”
Elias
elaborated further on this thought:
“It
reminds me of the recurring mythical motif of the ‘blind prophet’. Tieresias in the Odyssey is one example, as is Homer himself. The prophetic poet John Milton is
another. As is true of the ‘idiot
savant’, their defect allows them to overcome the filtering effect of ego-consciousness. Deprived of the retarded waves of mundane
light as a means of orienting themselves in the world, they are compelled to
open their ‘other Eye’ to the advanced waves.”
Yose
wondered aloud:
“But
didn’t we say that advanced waves emanate from the Eye, while retarded waves
are received by It? How then does the
blind Eye perceive advanced waves?”
Elias
acknowledged:
“You
are right to call for some clarification on this point. We have two metaphysical Eyes just as we have
two physical eyes. We have spoken up to
now of the Eye of Vision, the Left Eye which actively creates Reality through
the medium of supernal Light. The
visionary rays of these advanced waves propagate down the Past Light Cone
backward in Time through the Sea of negative energy. But there is also the Eye of Prophecy, the
Right Eye that is turned upward toward the Future Light Cone and receives the advanced
waves emanated from the Left Eye of humans in the Time to come. Thus the prophet literally sees through the
Eyes of those who inhabit the Future Time by perceiving their visionary rays in
his Right Eye. While the person with
ordinary eyesight orients himself by looking backward at past events
transmitted by retarded waves, the blind prophet finds his way into the Future
by looking forward at the Light of advanced waves radiating from unborn
generations.”
Rabbi
Shimon’s face seemed to glow with satisfaction at the course the discussion was
taking:
“I
promised earlier that we would be entering the ‘crossroads’ of the Tree of LIFE, and now that promise has been
fulfilled. What my friend Elias has just
referred to as the Right Eye and the Left Eye correspond to the paired Sefirot Netzach and Hod —
Prophecy and Vision. The latter creates
Past Reality by radiating quintessential Light backward in Time, while the
former perceives Future Reality by receiving the visionary Light of the years
to come. Between these two Eyes, between
Netzach and Hod, between the Past Light Cone and the Future Light Cone, lie the
‘crossroads’ — the ‘Opening of the Eyes’ Petach
Einayim.
What
is Petach Einayim? It is the point at which the transcendent
Soul Neshamah enters the world. It is therefore the only point in Space-Time
inhabited by Self-Awareness. It is the
dimensionless point of HERE&NOW
or Koh — the point at which our
world-line crosses the path of Mind. It
is the only place in the physical universe where LIFE Chayyim is
present. Reflect on your thoughts as you
are listening to my words. Your thought
is present, YOU are present only in the instant of each sound from my
lips. Your experience of Awareness has
no duration; it does not extend into the Past or Future. The window of sentience has no width — no,
not even width enough for a single ray of light to pass through it. So then, what does pass through it? NOTHING
Ayin. Great waves from the Sea of
negative existence crash through this window, waves that are dimensionless in
mundane Space-Time, but infinite in the inverse realm of the Olamim.”
As
the Holy Light was enunciating the word ‘NOTHING’,
Yose ben Nuna began to morph into Eleazar, the son of Rabbi Shimon. It was he that spoke next:
“Accordingly,
when the Israelites thirsted for water at Rephidim,
where Moses struck the Rock, they cried out (Exodus 17:7):
Is the Name within us, or NOTHING Ayin?
The Name relates to the level of the Sefirah Tiferet — the condition of perfect Symmetry in which all division
is erased. Except for Moses, the
Israelites had not yet attained this level (as they would at
Eleazar’s
Father interjected:
“Well
said, my Son. Notice, however, that
while this verse does indeed say that the Israelites strove toward the Name,
the Name is not expressed simply as YHVH. Rather, it is written Et YHVH, which is the
union of Et with YHVH. So here’s my question
for you: ‘What is Et?’”
Rabbi
Eleazar responded:
“The
answer to your question is ‘yes’.”
Doctor
Germinator looked confused:
“I
don’t get it. Rabbi Shimon asked, ‘What
is Et?”, and the answer is ‘Yes’?
Rabbi
Shimon laughed:
“My
Son is right, the answer is ‘Yes’.
Remember earlier is our discussion, I said that Mah is one of the names assigned to Shekhinah. Mah means ‘how’ or ‘what’. Hence the statement, ‘What Mah is Et’ is correct, because Et
is yet another designation for Shekhinah. Shekhinah
embodies the Oral Tradition, the oral Torah, just as Her mate Tiferet represents the written
Torah. Accordingly, Shekhinah expresses the entire scope of divine Speech, from the
first letter Aleph to the final
letter Tav. And Aleph
Tav spells Et.”
Rabbi
Eleazar continued:
“It
follows, therefore, that the Israelites at Rephidim
were striving toward the unity of Et
and YHVH, the divine Wedding (or Hierosgamos) of Shekhinah and Tiferet. As is customary in a wedding, the bride takes
the name of her husband, so in the Hierosgamos,
Shekhinah takes the Name of YHVH.
She joins in the Name as the final letter Heh, thereby completing the Name and fulfilling its balance of Male
and Female. According to the prophet
Zechariah (14:6-9), upon the completion of the Name, solar/lunar light is
replaced by supernal Light. The prophet
sees the Consciousness of the Present moment Koh (represented by
In that
day, LIVING WATER shall flow from
And Adonai shall be King over all the
Earth; and in that Day YHVH shall be One and His Name shall be One.
Thus,
the divine Wedding signifies the end of the split between Consciousness and the
Unconscious — a split symbolized by the estrangement of Shekhinah from Tiferet when
She shared mankind’s Exile from
Rabbi
Shimon further observed:
“With
the Wedding of Shekhinah and Tiferet, oral and written Torah are also
joined together, as they were when Moses received the first set of Torah
tablets on
His
Son added:
“Since
Exodus chapter 17 locates the Rock that Moses struck ‘in Choreb’, this incident is clearly meant to foreshadow the divine
Wedding to come at the Mountain of the same name. The name Massah
— the locale of this event where
We
should further note that Massah can
be alternately read as Missah, which
signifies abundant flow, as from a melting block of ice. Moses waved away the illusion of a rigid
external reality, turning even the apparent solidity of Rock into a fountain of
water. He proved to the Israelites that
a Rock is not one inexorable thing, but rather many potential things. Like all things of this world, it has a
fractal structure of forms within forms, repeating endlessly. When we go inside that structure, its
apparent solidity melts away, and we encounter a vast interior space that dwarfs
the immensity of the cosmos.”
Sensing
an opportunity to insert one of his scientific analogies, Dr. Germinator
recalled a principle of geology he had learned as an undergraduate student:
“We
get water from rocks in a very literal sense ‘as well’. That’s a play on the word ‘well’, because a
well is usually nothing more than a pipe driven into a fracture in the
bedrock. So, in a very literal sense, a
well is something that extracts water from the fractal structure of rock.”
Whereupon
Rabbi Eleazar resumed:
“The
concept of flowing abundance expressed in the name Missah also echoes the theme of Zechariah’s prophecy, insofar as
the one-dimensional fissure of the HERE&NOW
is opened up to encompass both Past and Future.
Upon being struck by Moses’ rod, the narrow cleft in the Rock at Choreb broadens into a surging stream of
Consciousness flowing both forward and backward in Time. This explains why the incident of Moses
striking the Rock occurs twice — once (Exodus 17) before the Revelation on
In
this transformed metaphysical landscape, the ‘Opening of the Eyes’ Petach Einayim is now vastly
expanded: The Eyes can now view the
Sinai Revelation simultaneously from Past and Future vantage-points. Moreover, access to the quintessential Light,
aka ‘advanced waves’, enables the Left Eye to send visionary rays back through
Time to trigger events in the Past. The
stream of unified Consciousness released from its prison in the Rock of
‘objective Reality’ converges upon
Elias
followed up:
“The
prefiguring of the Mount Sinai events is implicit in the very name Massah, which has a common derivation
with Masseikah ‘molten’, the
descriptive term applied to the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:4-8). Yet, ultimately, it’s the advanced waves from
the Future scene that would have the final say, causation-wise. In a manner of speaking, the first Opening of
Rock at Rephidim/Massah is nothing
more than an ‘echo’ of the Final Cause (i.e.,
the second Opening) bouncing off
As
recorded in Number chapter 20, the second version of the Opening of the Rock
takes place at Qadeish in the
wilderness of Tzin (as compared to
the wilderness of Sin, the scene of
the first version). Insofar as the name Qadeish or Qadeishah refers to a ritual prostitute of a pagan cult, it suggests
a connection between this place and the practice of idolatry. Since the events at Qadeish operate as a Final Cause with respect to the Sinai
Revelation, the obvious connection is to the worship of the Golden Calf, by
which the sacred Wedding of Shekhinah
and Tiferet was tragically undone.”
Rabbi
Eleazar agreed:
“Yes,
we know something definitely went wrong at Qadeish,
because both Moses and Aaron were punished for what happened there by not being
allowed to enter the Promised Land. It’s
interesting that Qadeish is the same
place where
These
experiences are all symptomatic of a truncated ego-perception, blind to the
visionary Light. From this obstructed
perspective, the Sephirah of Gevurah — unbending Justice — appears in
isolated and terrifying form. The energy
of Gevurah that is misdirected by this
false Consciousness magnifies the Nephilim
(who are actually the bodiless shadows of Reality) into the appearance of
titanic bogeymen. The place-name Eshkhol also describes a cluster of
grapes. Again this refers to the wrath
of unmitigated Justice, with red being the color associated with Gevurah.
Moreover, the concept of a ‘cluster’ relates to a thing that has been
sundered from the overall fractal structure into which it fits and from which
it derives its true meaning. Thus, the
cluster of grapes is severed from the grape vine, which is literally a ‘cluster
of clusters’.
The
image of the severed grape cluster conveys the idea of a dissociation of the
Collective Soul Neshamah. As long as the Neshamah is intact, human Consciousness is limitless and embraces
the entire physical universe within itself.
But with the breakdown of the Neshamah,
Man perceives himself as a diminutive thing, cut off from his fellow man and
dwarfed by a vast and terrifying Reality that now appears exterior to his
sentience. That’s why the 12 spies at Eshkhol saw themselves as ‘locusts’ Chagavim, a word derived from Chaga, meaning ‘terror’. The locust is also associated with Amalek (cf. Judges 7:2), personifying the
vicious mindset of ‘dog-eat-dog’ which spurns communal solidarity.”
Dr.
Germinator added:
“The
severed grape cluster of Eshkhol is
the ego-self cut off from the constellation of Conscious centers that comprise
the whole Kol Self. Carl Jung’s theories call for the recovery of
the fractal depth of the psyche through a ‘constellated’ Consciousness. It seems to me that the Zohar’s paradigm of
the WORLDS Olamim is essentially the same as Jung’s Unus Mundus — the vital core of Consciousness from which all
experience emerges.”
Rabbi
Shimon agreed:
“This
is why the image of the Flaming Sword appears again at Qadeish to enforce an extended Exile from the wholeness Kol of Mind. Because here the people have repeated the
primal error of their first Parents, insofar as they have confused Shekhinah — the ‘Daughter of the Voice’ Bat Qol — with the entire framework of
the Godhead Bakol. Thus it is written (Genesis 24:1): ‘And YHVH
blessed Abraham with All Bakol.’ Abraham represents the Sephirah of Chesed, which
balances the harshness of Gevurah’s
pure Justice and tempers it with Mercy. Chesed is the unconditional Love that
unites the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac (aka Gevurah)
and Jacob (aka Tiferet). This Love is the glue of the Collective Soul Neshamah. As such, Chesed
is the threshold of the consummate Wholeness of Consciousness which is attained
at the level of Understanding Binah,
aka Jubilee Yobel.
So
when YHVH blesses Abraham ‘with All’ Bakol, Chesed is designated as the portal to complete Consciousness. In Bakol
the letters Bet and Kaph together represent 22, the number
of letters in the whole Hebrew alphabet.
It follows, therefore, that Chesed
contains the last of the 50 Gates of Understanding — the ultimate Gate that
opens up into the Year of Jubilee, the end of mankind’s Exile from
Rabbi
Eleazar noted:
“It
was at that 50th Gate where even Moses himself fell short, so that
his mission to lead his people into the Promised Land was deferred until the
Messianic Era. It’s not coincidental that
the place where Moses stumbled on his way to the Promised Land is the same
place Qadeish where his people
likewise faltered. Their collective
failure at Qadeish ‘post-figures’ (in
the sense of a Final Cause) the error of the Golden Calf at
In
the case of the Golden Calf, when the Chariot Merkavah of the Holy One descended on
Rabbi
Shimon added:
“And
so, revisiting the imagery of Psalm 133:3, Adonai’s ‘blessing’ Barakhah of Whole Consciousness gets
traded for a ‘pool’ Breikhah in
Solomon’s temple — the molten Sea supported by 12 golden bulls (1 Kings 7:25). The number 12 is the same as the number of
‘locust’ spies at Eshkhol,
emblemizing the dissociated unity of the Neshamah. As the Psalmist writes elsewhere (106:19-20):
They made a calf at Choreb … They
exchanged their Glory (Kavod) for the image of a bull …
The
gematria of Kavod is 26, the same as YHVH.
This is a ‘shorthand’ way of saying that the blessing ‘with All’ — that
is, with the full spectrum of Awareness — comes only with the full perception
of the ineffable Name. The four letters
of the Name obviously correspond to the four Chayyot of the visionary Chariot.
From that it follows that the ‘bull on the left’ matches up with the
left-most letter in the Name יהוה — which is the final Heh.
But, as we discussed earlier, the final Heh represents Shekhinah,
and its presence in the Name symbolizes Her divine union Hierosgamos with Tiferet. Therefore, the isolation of the ‘bull on the
left’ destroys the unity of the Name, as codified in the gematria of ‘Glory’ Kavod.”
Rabbi
Eleazar followed up on his Father’s thought:
“As
we all know, Shekhinah is like the
Moon, inasmuch as She has no Light of Her own, but shines only by the reflected
Light of Her divine Spouse Tiferet. Hence Her Glory is dimmed when idolatrous
ego-perception draws Her away from Her mate.
No longer connected to the flow of LIVING
WATER, She becomes like an empty cistern, as in the words of Jeremiah
(2:13):
… My people have done a twofold wrong:
They have forsaken me, the Fountain of
LIVING WATER, and hewed them out
cisterns, broken cisterns, which cannot even hold water.
Deprived
of Her reflected Glory, Shekhinah enters
the ‘dark phase of the Moon’, in which She no longer embodies the Collective
Soul, but instead becomes infested with the demonic Qlippot. This decline is
illustrated allegorically in Numbers chapter 12, which describes events
immediately leading up to the Israelite’s first encampment at Qadeish.
Moses had married a ‘Cushite’, i.e., a Black woman. Since we know that Moses was in fact always
married to Shekhinah, this tells us
that Shekhinah had at this juncture
devolved into Her ‘dark phase’. She is
personified in this story by Moses’s sister Miriam, who begins to condemn him
and to claim a standing as a prophetess superior to that of her brother. Adonai descends into the Tabernacle as a
wrathful Pillar of Cloud, and Miriam turns snow-white, reinforcing her correspondence
to the Moon. Miriam’s skin is infested
with the scales of leprosy, a metaphor for the Qlippot, and she is excluded from the Israelite camp for seven days
— the duration of the Moon’s ‘dark phase’.”
Doctor
Germinator interjected:
“Psychologically
speaking, Miriam represents the Anima,
the Female personification of the Unconscious.
She is very bitter and vengeful when spurned. The name Miriam signifies Meri-yam ‘rebellion of the Sea’. There is a bitterness associated with Sea
water. This bitterness expresses the
exclusion of the Anima from the
collective persona, as symbolized in this story by the ostracizing of
Miriam. She is forced out of the ‘camp’,
that is, outside the collective Body Syntagma
of the people. Once this happens, the peoples’
collective identity becomes dissociated, fixating upon the projected external image
of an Idol. In this sense, it’s
noteworthy that both of the locations at which Moses strikes the Rock come to
be known as Meri-bah, meaning
‘rebellion against Her’.
Miriam’s
name is also related to the name Marah,
the place of bitter waters where the Israelites camped before coming to Rephidim (Exodus 15:23-25). They were instructed to restore the sweetness
of the waters by throwing in a tree branch.
Based on everything we’ve discussed up to this point, I think the
symbolism here is quite clear. The
bitterness is caused by the one-sided collective Consciousness which lops the Anima off from the ‘tree’ of the
complete psyche. In terms of the
Kabbalah’s imagery, it’s the Tree of Life with one of its branches
missing. It’s the Female side, Gevurah, isolated from her Male
counterpart. She’s vengeful and
destructive like the angry ‘Pillar of Cloud’ in the tale of Miriam’s
leprosy. So, logically, the remedy for
the ‘bitter waters’ of Marah is
restoration of psychic wholeness, symbolized by throwing in the missing branch —
the Anima.”
Elias
extended this line of discussion further:
“What
we’re really talking about is restoring the Symmetry of the Tree of LIFE.
A good visual symbol of that Symmetry is the letter Aleph א, with its two symmetrical branches on either side of the
central stem. If we add an Aleph to the word for ‘bitterness’ Marah, we obtain a homonym Marah, meaning a ‘mirror’ or a ‘vision’. In this context, it’s interesting that the Midrashim say that the ‘branch’ that
restored the waters at Marah was
laurel — a recognized symbol of visionary insight.
Now,
if we go back to the second ‘Rock-striking’ incident in Numbers chapter 20, we
read that the fault Adonai found with Moses on this occasion was that he failed
to unify the vision of the people:
Because you believed not enough to
sanctify Me in the Eyes of the children of
All
of this seems to suggest that the crucial failure of Moses at Qadeish was a failure of Vision — a
defect relating to what we’ve been calling Petach
Einayim, the ‘Opening of the Eyes’. Moses’
inability to reintegrate the Anima as
a vital component of collective Vision of his people was symbolized by the fact
that they arrived in the wilderness of Tzin,
where Qadeish was located, on the
first New Moon of the 40th year — i.e., during the Moon’s ‘dark phase’. It is equally significant that the Anima’s personification, Miriam, died and
was buried there, and her death caused the people to thirst again for the first
time since Moses struck the Rock at Rephidim/Massah.
Rabbi
Shimon interjected:
“Moses
had gotten too far out ahead of the people, and the resulting strain on the
unity of the Neshamah became evident
at both ‘Rock-striking’ incidents. The
advanced and retarded waves from these two events converged on Mount Sinai/Choreb from the Future and the
Past. As a result, at Sinai the people
shrunk back in terror from direct contact with Elohim. Moses alone drew
near Elohim (Exodus 20:18), and he
alone rose to the level of the Name YHVH
(aka Tiferet) (24:2). But the attainment of Knesset Yisrael did not keep pace with the attainment of Moses, for
Moses never succeeded in restoring the unity of Consciousness on the collective
level. That was a task left to the
future Messiah.”
Rabbi
Eleazar added:
“It
was not that Moses himself suffered from a lack of Vision, because he had in
fact surpassed the level of Vision Hod
on the Tree of LIFE. Since he had overcome the division of
Conscious-Unconscious Mind, he was able to directly experience all of the WORLDS Olamim free of any ego-imposed filters. Hence, he achieved total unification of the
Voice proceeding from Binah/Elohim
with the Word enunciated by Malkut/Shekhinah. Consequently, Elohim did not need to communicate with Moses through his
Unconscious, which is to say, through dreams and visions, because he had
achieved a unity of Consciousness that allowed direct perception of ultimate
Reality. The Torah (Numbers 12:6-8) is
quite explicit in this regard:
If there be a prophet among you, I
Adonai make Myself known to him in a vision; I speak with him in a dream.
Not so with My servant Moses, who is
trusted throughout My House.
With him I speak mouth to mouth,
in plain sight, and not in riddles, and he beholds an embodiment of the Name.
It
was this palpable ‘embodiment temunah
of the Name’ which Adonai expected Moses to convey to his people with the WATERS from the Rock, first at Choreb and then at Qadeish. But he was unable
to cleanse Qadash the Eyes of the
people and consummate their rise to a state of collective Vision, the initial
steps toward which they had taken at Marah
and Massah.”
Rabbi
Shimon continued his Son’s line of analysis:
“You
have quoted from Numbers chapter 12 concerning how Moses was set apart from the
rest of Knesset Yisrael. Yet in this same passage, the Light of Shekhinah — represented by Miriam — is
darkened, and She is sent into Exile outside the camp. Adonai announces that Moses is now ‘trusted
throughout My House’, where ‘House’ Bayit
designates the abode of the supernal Mother Binah. Therefore, Moses goes to that House alone,
after his impending death, but he does not bring the Daughter Shekhinah with him. Since Shekhinah
personifies the Collective Soul, and Binah
is the level of
Instead,
Moses — through his death — rises alone to the level of Binah/Elohim, leaving Shekhinah
behind to accompany the people into the Promised Land.”
Elias
interposed:
“When
the unity of the divine Mother and Daughter is restored, then the illusory
barrier between Mind and Matter disintegrates.
Bob Marley sings it: ‘One Love … As it was in the Beginning… One Heart …
So shall it be in the End.’ In other
words, in the Beginning, the Voice of higher Reality ‘engraved’ Ba’ar Its meaning on the WORLDS.”
Rabbi
Eleazar added:
“And
since ‘to engrave’ Ba’ar also means
‘to explain’, the writing and the oral interpretation become one. The separation of Meaning and Phenomenon
comes to an end.”
Dr.
Germinator piped in:
“The
ego perceives only Phenomena of the manifest world, while the Unconscious Anima is a Pool of Noumena — the WATERS of Meaning. When we combine Phenomena and Noumena, we
achieve the LIVING WATERS Mayyim Chayyim, which is Matter that
conveys its own explicit Meaning ‘mouth-to-mouth, in plain sight’.”
Rabbi
Shimon observed”
“If
Ba’ar is the source of the LIVING WATERS from above, then Be’er (the same word with different
vowel points) is its correspondent below.
Be’er signifies a Well, which
is something dug or ‘engraved’, so to speak, into the Land itself. This brings us back to the story of Miriam’s
banishment and how that relates to Moses’ problem at Qadeish. Let’s go back even
a few steps further, back to the first ‘opening of the Rock’ at Rephidim/Massah. There are no reports in the Torah of the
Israelites suffering from a lack of water for the next 40 years afterward —
until they got to Qadeish, that
is. Why was that?”
Eleazar
answered his Father’s question eagerly:
“According
to the Oral Tradition, the Israelites never lacked water after the first
‘opening of the Rock’ at Rephidim/Massah
because that miracle created a mystical well, known as ‘Miriam’s Well’. It differed from an ordinary well in that it
was not fixed in one place, but instead followed the Israelites wherever they
camped and provided them with water throughout their 40 years of wandering in
the Wilderness. In addition to
satisfying their thirst, the waters of Miriam’s Well had healing powers. Elohim
established this Well on the Second Day of Creation, when the celestial WATERS Mayyim where separated from the mundane waters.”
Elias
inquired:
“Was
not the Second Day the only one on which Elohim
did not see that Her work was Good Tov?”
Eleazar
answered:
“Yes,
because by the divine Light She had created on the First Day, Elohim peered into the Future of the
world She was fashioning. When She saw
the wicked generations to come — those of Enosh, the Flood, and the
The Light of the wicked is withheld. (Job
38:15), and
Light is sown for the righteous.
(Psalms 97:11), and
How abundant is Your Goodness that You
have hidden away for those in awe of You. (Psalms 31:20)
Hence,
Elohim did not see the Good of the
Second Day, because the Good Tov was
hidden on that Day.”
Dr.
Germinator interjected:
“I
think that the ‘separation of the WATERS’
that took place on the Second Metaphysical Day corresponds in the physical
universe to the separation of the realms of positive and negative energy. Since the advanced waves of quintessential
Light propagate as negative energy, that Light became ‘hidden’ in Dirac’s Sea
once the two realms were divided.
I’ve
also been thinking about Rabbi Shimon’s question — albeit asked tongue-in-cheek
— concerning the possible linkage between Dirac’s Sea and the
Rabbi
Shimon laughed:
“As
a psychiatrist, Dr. Germinator knows that humor often reveals unconscious
truths. I think as we follow the story
of Miriam’s Well to its conclusion, we do discover a linkage between Dirac’s
Sea and the
Eleazar
continued:
“Yes. Since Miriam’s Well was created on the Second
Day, it was part of the Good Tov that
was hidden on that Day. I accept the
scientific parallel of the division of the positive and negative energy realms
of the physical universe. From that
perspective, Miriam’s Well was hidden in Dirac’s Sea. It became manifest again when Moses opened
the Rock at Rephidim/Massah. This implies that, in the physical sense,
Moses had opened a portal between the positive and negative poles of the
universe, so as to be able to draw Miriam’s Well out of the Sea of negative
energy.
But
remember that Moses only struck the Rock once at Rephidim. That means that he
opened the portal in only one direction — in this case from negative to
positive. The flow was one-way only,
from Dirac’s Sea into our world. Miriam’s
Well came out of the Rock, but nothing went back in. At Qadeish,
however, it was different. Moses struck
the Rock twice. The portal was opened in
both directions. There was flow and
counter-flow, Symmetry on both sides of the divide. This time, something did go back into the realm of negative energy — and that was
Miriam’s Well, which disappeared at this time.
Where
did it go? Now here’s the interesting
part. The Oral Tradition teaches us that
Miriam’s Well was concealed in the
Shimon
was visibly pleased:
“This
is the serendipity of exploring Torah.
One never knows what one will find.
The idea that I poked fun at mere minutes ago now appears irrefutable! The physical universe is an extension of the
metaphysical WORLDS, and
vice-versa. Matter and Meaning are not
divisible, they are integral, each containing the other. Meaning cannot be partial; It must be total
or not at all. It must extend up and
down through every level of Reality.
When
Miriam’s Well comes out of the Rock at Rephidim,
it signifies the greatest of all Revelations — Matter and Meaning manifest
together simultaneously. In Man’s fallen
condition, there seems to be an ‘uncertainty principle’ of sorts with respect
to Matter and Meaning, somewhat analogous to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle
in physics. For fallen Man, the closer
he gets to the pole of Matter — that is, the more he focuses his attention on
the ‘thing-ness’ of things — the more uncertain he becomes of their
Meaning. And conversely, the more deeply
he contemplates the Meaning of the things he perceives, the more indefinite and
intangible these things seem to become.
But
in the LIVING WATERS of Miriam’s
Well, we have the Thing that has Meaning ‘in Itself’. We have a Reality whose ‘outer garment’ of
Matter does not conceal its ultimate significance, but instead reveals it with
perfect and flawless transparency. This
is the Garment of Light that adorns the blessed Souls in the Garden of Eden, as
opposed to the opaque Garment of Skin with which Adam covered himself in shame after
the Fall. The Hebrew words for ‘light’
and ‘skin’ are both pronounced Or. But ‘light’ begins with the letter Aleph, which signifies the Oneness of
unified Consciousness, while ‘skin’ begins with the letter Ayin. Ayin has the numerical value 70, which corresponds to the 70
disparate tongues into which human speech was divided at the
Rabbi
Eleazar followed up:
“This
State of
Tear off the gold rings that are in the
ears of your wives, your sons and your daughters, and bring them to me.
The
Bahir (§52) teaches that gold represents the feminine Sephirah of Gevurah,
while silver represents its masculine counterpart Chesed. This is because Chesed is open-handed and giving, which
is appropriate for the less valuable metal, while Gevurah is closed-handed and withholding, which reflects the
greater value of gold. As we discussed
earlier, a parallel dichotomy exists between the vowels Qamatz, the ‘closed-hand’, and Patach,
the ‘open-hand’. The latter informs the
symbolic content of Petach Einayim,
the ‘Opening of the Eyes’, about which I will have more to say later.
But
getting back to the Golden Calf story, Aaron commands that gold — i.e., Gevurah — be torn away from the ‘ears’. What are the ‘ears’? Again according to the Bahir (§§69-87), the
ears correspond to the feminine Sephirah of
Binah. Binah personifies
Understanding, which is associated with the faculty of hearing. Binah is
also the supernal Mother, from whom all the lower Sephirot emanate. That’s why
She has the mystical cognomen Be’er Sheva
— literally the Well Be’er, or
source, of the Sheva, the lower Seven
Sephirot.
As
we’ve already said, Aaron personifies Hod,
the Sphere of Vision. Consequently, when
we read that, in fashioning the Golden Calf, gold was stripped from the peoples’
ears at Aaron’s command, we should understand that an incomplete vision had
torn Gevurah away from Binah.
And thereby was broken the path by which the Daughter Shekhinah must rise to be reunited with
Her Mother Elohim to restore the
unity of Consciousness.”
The
Holy Light wept and kissed the hand of his Son:
“If
I had come into this place only to hear these words, it would be enough. Let me explore further through the door you
have opened, my Son. Why does the Vision
of Aaron, the Vision of Hod, become
incomplete at this juncture? Because
Miriam is not with him. With the
exception of the ineffable Crown Ehyeh,
all of the Sephirot of the Tree of LIFE are paired, Male with Female. The branches of the Tree are Male on the Right
and Female on the Left. Being on the
Left, Hod must therefore have a
feminine embodiment, who is Miriam, the sister of Aaron and Moses. With Miriam absent, Hod assumes the strictly masculine aspect of Aaron, who reaches out
to grab hold of feminine Gevurah,
pulling her away from her own Male complement Chesed. So the path between Gevurah and Chesed is where we find the break in the flow of Barakhah — the Blessed State in which
Matter spontaneously reveals its Meaning.
Let
us consider this Blessed State and how it relates to Chesed. We’ve said before that Chesed contains the 50th Gate, the threshold of
reintegrated Consciousness. It’s the
unrestrained stream of unconditional Love.
The prophet Isaiah refers to it by its token metal silver when he writes:
Ho, all ye who thirst, come ye to the
WATERS, though there be no silver…
Come ye, buy food without silver, buy
wine and milk without price.
It
is Abraham, the personification of Chesed,
who digs the Well at Be’er Sheva
(Genesis 21:30), thus enabling the LIVING
WATERS of Meaning to penetrate and impregnate the world of Matter. Because, in the most real and direct sense,
where do we find Matter that openly and unequivocally expresses its own
Meaning? Where is it but in the Eyes of
our Beloved? To the Lover, the Meaning
of the Beloved is the Beloved Herself.
There is no higher level of Meaning than this:
Who is She that comes up from the Wilderness
(which can equally be read as ‘from the Word’ or ‘from the
Thing’), leaning on Her Beloved?
Set Me as a seal upon your heart, as a
seal upon your hand. For Love is strong
as death, passion as mighty as the Underworld…
Many WATERS cannot quench Love, nor
floods drown it.
If a man offered all the substance of
his House for Love, he would be laughed to scorn.
I’ve
just quoted from the Shir HaShirim,
the ‘Song of Songs’ (8:5-7), which I sure my friend Elias will recognize as a
very ‘recursive’ title. That’s because
Love is the quintessential fractal phenomenon.
All the great cities of the world, all of the most dazzling jewels, all
of the wonders of nature, all of the great works of mankind … all of these
things are found in the body and countenance of the Beloved and in Her every
gesture. Her one wish is for the license
to give all of this to Her Beloved openly and without shame:
If only it could be as with a brother,
as if you had nursed at my mother’s breast:
Then I could kiss you when I met you in
the street, and no one would despise me.
I would lead you, I would bring you to
the house of my Mother, who would instruct me. (8:1-2)
You
seem anxious to say something, my Son?”
Rabbi
Eleazar spoke:
“The
passage you have just read appears in the Zohar (1:184b) in connection with the
story of how the brothers of Joseph betrayed their bond of fraternal Love. I think this story will enable us to elevate
the ‘Opening of the Eyes’ to the level of Chesed,
from which vantage point the 50th Gate should become visible.”
“Proceed,
my Son,” said the Holy Light.
Rabbi
Eleazar resumed:
“Joseph
was a dreamer. A dreamer is not simply
someone who dreams, because all men dream.
But a dreamer is one who transcends the narrow persona which denies the
Reality of dreams. Perhaps Dr.
Germinator would like to amplify on that a bit.”
“Gladly,”
replied Dr. Germinator. “As I said before, in the Unconscious, we experience
all of the WORLDS Olamim, not just the world of
ego-experience. These WORLDS contain all the potential
outcomes of the Shrödinger Wave Function, which defines the unfolding of
manifest Reality over Time. All that
potentially can happen, does happen; so there are, in fact, ‘many worlds’. But, like many paths which diverge form one
another and then meet up again, the ‘many worlds’ join back together again in a
process called ‘interference’.
So
in the end, there is One Reality, which expresses the sum of the WORLDS, or the ‘sum over paths’, as Dr.
Feynman terms it. That Reality has
depth; it’s not ‘flat’ like a ‘single world’ experience would be. It’s got a certain ‘texture’, a certain
‘color’, a feel to it that comes from the Noumena
of the ‘many worlds’ that combine to make it.
When
we’re actually inside a dream, it’s like being in what I call a ‘quantum
cinema’. Which is to say, it’s like
being in a movie theater in which thousands of different movies are playing on
one screen at the same time. Some of the
movies are very different, and some are quite similar — almost
indistinguishable. We see all these
movies at the same time, but they are not confusing to the Unconscious Mind,
because the Unconscious does not insist on a ‘single track’ world the way the
ego does. It simply takes in all the
various movies and goes out of the theater with an emotional aura — a ‘mood’,
if you will — based on what it has seen.
Now,
the vast majority of people remember very little of what their Unconscious
experiences in the ‘quantum cinema’.
That’s because the ‘sanity’ (if you can call it that) of the ego depends
on denying the reality of everything except what it allows itself to experience
in waking hours. So this cinema is definitely
X-rated and heavily censored by the ego.
One thing the ego can’t censor, however, is the emotional aura. That’s why people awake in certain ‘moods’
(which usually last all day) but are absolutely clueless as to why they’re in
those ‘moods’. They ‘got up on the wrong
side of the bed’ — that’s about as far as they can go in understanding their
own unhappiness!
At
any rate, in the transition between waking and sleeping, the Conscious Mind
gets a peek at the ‘quantum cinema’. Due
to ego censorship, the images it sees usually slip right back into the
Unconscious pretty quickly. But
sometimes, the images seem to tell a story, and we remember it as a
‘dream’. What we remember as the
‘dream’, is not actually what we saw when we were asleep. Instead, it’s what Freud calls the ‘secondary
elaboration’ — which is the ‘sense’ that the Conscious Mind tries to make of
the ‘quantum cinema’.
The
‘un-constellated’ ego-dominated mode of perception can only operate in the
linear mode. That means it can only follow
one ‘story-line’ at a time.
Consequently, when it sees thousands of movies going at the same time,
it creates a ‘crazy quilt’, picking one frame from this one, then the next
frame from that one, and so on. I think
Joseph’s ‘coat of many colors’ is a metaphor for this quality of dreams.”
Elias
asked:
“So
then dreams are a jumble of non-sequiturs, with all Meaning lost in the
‘secondary elaboration’?”
Dr.
Germinator answered:
“No,
because Meaning exhibits self-similarity, just the way Shimon and Eleazar have
been explaining. Miriam’s Well Be’er goes all the way down to bedrock,
all the way down into Dirac’s Sea. It
carries its Meaning with it, so it doesn’t depend on context. It follows us around in our wanderings and
still yields its LIVING WATERS wherever
it goes. The fractal structure of the
Dreaming permits its images to be shattered in tiny pieces, 99.999… % of the
pieces thrown away, the remaining pieces shuffled into random sequences, and
still the Meaning to be recoverable through the Imagination, which is able to
reconstruct the entire picture from the recursive patterns of its tiniest
fragment.”
Elias
added:
“Just
because a dream contains Meaning, that doesn’t dictate that it means only one
thing. The dream is like the Voice, it
can express anything and everything, but its interpretation is the Word, which
reduces it to a specific Meaning. This
is where, it seems to me, Joseph’s brothers created the seeds of their own
jealousy. Joseph simply dreamed about
his brothers’ sheaves of grain bowing down to his, and the Sun, Moon and stars
bowing down to him (Genesis 37:5-11), but his brothers extracted the specific
meaning of their future submission to Joseph out of their own egocentric
insecurities. Their own skewed vision
engendered the very outcome they most feared.”
Eleazar
continued:
“Correct,
this is the ego’s antipathy to the unity of Consciousness. That unity depends on a diversity of
perception, whereas the ego strives for an hegemony of perception. As viewed in this mindset, Joseph’s
‘many-colored’ dream perception is a bid for domination of his Vision over
those of his brothers. Therefore, the
ego-persona is inherently incapable of genuine feelings of Brotherhood,
incapable of true Love in the Chesed
sense — Love that is given without strings and without regard for any quid-pro-quo. As Isaiah puts it, genuine Love offers its
food, milk and wine, ‘without silver and without price’.
After
Joseph’s dreams arouse the jealousy of his brothers, they go off to tend their
flocks in the countryside and he follows after them. When they see him coming, they conspire to
murder him. But what they really want to
murder are his dreams:
Behold, the Master of Dreams
cometh. Come now, therefore, let us kill
him… and we shall see what comes of his dreams. (Genesis
37:19-20)
Notice,
by the way, that this story appears in chapter 37 of Genesis, while the story
of Esau’s intent to murder his brother Jacob appears in chapter 33. Keep those two numbers in mind for later in
our discussion.
Anyway,
after hearing Joseph’s pathetic pleas for mercy his brothers decide against
killing him outright and instead throw him into an empty cistern to let him die
there. According to the Oral Tradition,
the cistern was one of the abandoned dry well pits Abraham had dug before here
found water at Be’er Sheva. This is meant to remind us of Jeremiah’s
words about abandoning the LIVING WATERS
for dry cisterns.
Josephs
spent three days and nights in the pit, but Shekhinah
protected him from the snakes, scorpions and wild beasts that his brothers had
assumed would devour him. Growing
impatient, the brothers decided to finish him off themselves the next day after
their meal. While they were eating,
however, a caravan of Ismaeli traders on their way down to
The
brothers struck a deal with the traders to sell Joseph for the price of 20
pieces of silver. The money was divided
among the brothers, each of whom used it to buy themselves a new pair of shoes,
saying: ‘We will tread upon him, because
he dreamed he would have dominion over us.’
They sold the righteous for silver, and
the needy for a pair of shoes. (Amos 2:6)
In
the quotation from Amos, notice that ‘righteous’ Tzaddiq refers to Joseph, who personifies the Sephirah of Yesod. Yesod is
the Rainbow Qesheth into which the
sublime Light from the Eternal Eye of Ehyeh
disperses as it is perceived by individual Souls. It is the summation of the WORLDS Olamim displayed in the
Dreaming. The ‘shoes’ represent
coverings of the two ‘feet’ of the Tree of LIFE
— the dual Sephirot of Netzach and Hod, which embody the faculties of Prophecy and Vision. It is through these ‘feet’ that the advanced
waves of divine Light are perceived.
Without such perception, ego experience cannot be transcended in favor of
the Collective Consciousness of Neshamah,
which is the ultimate realization of Brotherhood. The covering of the ‘feet’ with ‘shoes’,
therefore, is a metaphor for screening out the holy Light and turning away from
the path of Brotherhood.
And
what did Joseph’s brothers give up to purchase their shoes? Silver, the symbol of Chesed. For those shoes,
they renounce the sublime Love of Abraham that binds the WORLDS together with its silver thread.
When
the brothers propose to ‘tread upon’ Joseph with their new shoes, they are
expressing the configuration of the Sephirot
in the Tree of LIFE, insofar as the
‘feet’ Netzach and Hod are above ‘Joseph’ Yesod, which is their supporting
Foundation of Righteousness. It’s this
Foundation that enables Consciousness to ascend from the ‘crossroads’ of Netzach-Hod to the level of wholeness in
Tiferet. By choosing to tread upon Righteousness and
trample it down, Joseph’s brothers elect to descend
rather than ascend the ladder of Awareness.”
Rabbi
Shimon interjected:
“This
is so, because the next chapter of Genesis begins by telling us that Judah —
the one who had proposed selling Joseph into slavery — ‘went down from his brothers’.
He descends to marry a Canaanite woman named Shua, who bears him three
sons: Er, Onan and Shelah. Consider the name of the first-born, Er spelled with Ayin Resh, the same as Or,
the ‘skin’ of Adam’s garment of shame.
The same letters spell Ar
‘enemy’, and when reversed they spell Ra,
meaning ‘evil’. And so it is written
(Genesis 38:7) that Er was Ra in the Eyes Einayim of the Name YHVH. Because he is conceived on
Elias
remarked:
“Yet
his condition of death is not permanent.
It is reversible. Since it is a
product of the path of descent from Brotherhood, it can be reversed by a
compensating path of ascent, which is to say, by a brother’s act of Love.”
Dr.
Germinator mused aloud:
Greater Love has no man than this: to
lay down his life for his brother.
Rabbi
Eleazar responded:
“Hold
that thought, Dr. G, because we’re headed in that direction. But in this case, the required act of
brotherly love is a good deal more pleasant than crucifixion. Since the path of descent involves sexual
relations —
Rabbi
Shimon sought to clarify:
“When
we say ‘reborn’, we’re not talking about so-called ‘reincarnation’, which is a
doctrine of pagan idolatry. Idolatry
views the world of ego-experience as the only world, as the sole ‘objective
reality’. And so it believes that Souls
must migrate back and forth through the portals of the ego’s insular world,
passing from death into life and back again.
But those of us who understand the LIFE
of the WORLDS Chayyei Olamim know that the Soul in always in LIFE and that the experience of Death is
a delusion of ego-perception. But that
delusion enforces its own distorted reality and prevents the reappearance of
the Soul of one who has experienced Death.
Er does not experience Death, instead he descends to the level of his
mirror-image twin Ra in the Sea of
negative existence.”
Elias
chimed in:
“Er
jumps the tracks and crosses over into one of the ‘alternate worlds’ that Dr. G
talked about earlier. The quantum paths
diverge, but they could converge again when the paths ‘interfere’ with each
other. Only paths that are very close,
very similar, can recombine in this way.
So Er has to ‘go back’ through a set of circumstances very close to
those he left under. Having his closest
genetic replica, his brother, conceive a child on his widow might do it.”
Dr.
Germinator spoke again:
“I’d
like to focus for a minute on this idea of a reversible Reality, which is
totally alien to ego-experience, but quite familiar in the Dreaming. A physical process that is limited to the
realm of positive energy is not reversible.
A deck of cards doesn’t get shuffled back into the order in which it
began as a new deck, because positive energy is expended in shuffling the deck,
and the nature of positive energy is to always increase the amount of disorder
(aka ‘entropy’). It follows that if we
only had the positive energy regime, something that was done could never truly
be undone. So much for the notions of
redemption, forgiveness, and mercy.
In
fact, we’d have exactly what my Kabbalist colleagues here have talked about in
terms of the harshest, most unbending form of Judgment that characterizes an
unbalanced Tree of LIFE — i.e., the Tree of Good and Evil. It would be irretractable Judgment Gevurah unmediated by Love Chesed.
On
the other hand, a physical process that extends across the boundary between the
positive and negative energy regimes — such as Moses striking the Rock — is reversible. When negative energy is applied to a deck of
cards, they get shuffled back into perfect sequence. What’s done in the positive realm gets undone
on the negative side. It’s only due to
the presence of Dirac’s Sea that the reversal of Adam’s Fall is conceivable at
all.”
Elias
agreed:
“We
got started on this line of thought with a passage from the Song of Songs. The Midrash
Rabbah focuses on one particular line from that book that deals precisely
with the metaphysical role of reversibility.
This line is spoken by the Beloved Shulamite,
who represents Shekhinah and the
Collective Soul of the people. Her name Shulamite is a form of the word Shalam, which connotes a reciprocal
action, an act of restitution. The Shulamite says of Herself: ‘I am black, but comely.’ The Midrash
extracts the entire Meaning of the Beloved Herself from this one line:
I
was black by the Red Sea, as it says, They were rebellious at the sea, even the
Red Sea (Psalms 106:7), and I was comely at the Red Sea, as it says, This is
my God, and I will be comely for Him (Exodus 15:2). I was black at Marah, as it says, And the people murmured against Moses,
saying: What shall we drink? (ib. 24), and I was comely at Marah, as it
says, And he cried unto the Lord, and the Lord showed him a tree and he cast
it into the waters and the waters were made sweet (ib. 25). I was black at Rephidim, as it says, And the name of the place was called Massah
and Meribah (ib. 17:7), and I was comely at Rephidim, as it says, And Moses built an altar, and called the
name of it Adonai-nissi (ib. 15). I
was black at Horeb, as it says, They made a calf in Horeb (Psalms 106:19), and I was comely at Horeb,
as it says, And they said: All that the Lord hath spoken will we do, and obey
(Exodus 24:7). I was black in the wilderness, as it says, How oft did they rebel against Him in the wilderness (Psalms 78:40),
and I was comely in the wilderness at the setting-up of the Tabernacle, as it
says, And on the day that the Tabernacle was reared up, etc. (Numbers
9:15). I was black in the action of the
spies, as it says, And they spread an evil report of the land (ib. 13:32), and I was
comely in the action of Joshua and Caleb, as it says, Save
Caleb the son of Jephunneh the Kenizzite, etc. (ib. 14:30).”
Eleazar
paused, and for a moment all was silence.
Then he resumed:
“
Onan
is literally asked to ‘raise up seed Zera
for his brother’. Zera is spelled by adding the letter Zayin in front of the word Ra
‘evil’. So Onan is required to raise
Er’s mirror-image shadow Ra from the
realm of negative existence by giving it Zayin. Since Zayin
is the seventh letter, it represents the seventh day Sabbath. This is the condition of Peace Shalom, which is derived from the
reciprocal action of Shalam in
reversing iniquity and restoring balance.
But Onan (whose name can be read as ‘their iniquity’) proves to be too
much a product of
Rabbi
Shimon expanded on this subject:
“This
incident was the source of the law set down Deuteronomy chapter 25 concerning
the duty of the Levir (Latin for
‘husband’s brother’). It begins at verse
5:
When brothers dwell together and one of
them dies and leaves no son …
Which
brings us back yet again to the theme of Psalm 133, where we began our
discourse. The Psalm begins:
How (Mah) good Tov and how (Mah)
pleasant Na’im it is that brothers dwell together in unity!
The
law of the Levir extends the duty of
Brotherhood to the Female principle as well as the Male principle, because the Levir’s obligation to the woman, as her
husband’s brother. Thus, the verse
quoted above refers to the embodiment of the Female principle Mah (aka Shekhinah) in terms of a dichotomy.
On one hand, there is the lucidity of the Garment of Light Tov , but on the other hand there is the
obscurity of the widow Naomi, whose
name derives from the word ‘pleasant’ Na’im. In the book of Ruth (1:20), Naomi calls
herself Mara because of the
bitterness she has experienced in the death of her husband and both her
sons. This obviously relates to the
bitter waters of Marah, of which we
spoke earlier, and the darkening of the Female principle when separated from
Her Male counterpart.
But
there is also the connotation here of Mareh
‘comeliness’, which goes to the notion of reversibility we’ve been
exploring. Again we have the Shulamite formula, ‘black, but
comely’. In that sense, the Levirate
marriage is a metaphor for history’s undercurrent of Redemption that cuts
across the linear scheme of a strictly positive world order.”
Rabbi
Eleazar resumed:
“The
name Naomi is also related to na’al ‘shoe’. When the Levir
declines to fulfill his duty to redeem his brother’s widow, she is entitled to
remove his shoe and spit in his face (Deuteronomy 25:9). This is a reference to the shoes that
Joseph’s brothers bought with the 20 pieces of silver they got from selling him
into slavery. Naomi’s daughter-in-law
was the Moabite widow Ruth, who married Boaz only after his older brother
signaled his refusal to redeem her by taking off his shoe (Ruth 4:7-8).”
Elias
added:
“This
story has a broader significance. Boaz
fathered Obed on Ruth, and Obed sired Jesse, the father of David. So we’re talking about the Messianic lineage
here. Non-Israelite blood comes into the
Davidic bloodline twice, through Ruth the Moabitess and earlier through Tamar,
who, according to Oral Tradition, was an Aramite descended from the priesthood
of Melchizedek. In both cases the women
are widowed and the Levirate marriage comes into play — the undercurrent of
Redemption as Rabbi Shimon put it.”
Eleazar
responded:
“Let’s
return then to the story of Tamar and see where it takes us. Onan refuses to bring his Er back from the
realm of negative existence, where he was evil Ra in the Eyes Einayim of
YHVH.
A betrayal of a brother is ultimately a betrayal of one’s self, and so
it is for Onan, whose persona is now also seen as Ra in the Einayim. And so Onan descends into the negative realm
to join the shade of his brother.
Zarah’s
hand emerges from Tamar’s womb first, and the widwife ties a scarlet thread to
it. But Zarah draws back his hand into
the womb, and his brother Paretz emerges, surprising the widwife, who exclaimes: ‘How you have burst forth!’. This is the origin of his name Paretz, which means ‘to burst forth’ or
‘to breach’. Paretz therefore effects a
breach in the order of events, a reversal that catapults him past his twin into
the role of first-born. This replicates
the reversal of roles that took place between the twins Jacob and Esau, whereby
Jacob obtained the blessing of the first-born, although Esau was in fact the
eldest. The scarlet thread on Zarah’s
hand further identifies him with the ruddy-complexioned Esau, because scarlet
in the color of unbalanced Gevurah. It represents the unbending, irreversible
Judgment which characterizes the positive regime when it is sealed off from
negative existence.
But
Paretz bursts forth through the barrier between positive and negative
existence, thus gaining access to the negative energy of the latter which
allows all things to be reversed and the work of Redemption to begin. He thus fits into the role of his prototype
Jacob, whose Vision at
Elias
added:
“Since
we can read Zera ‘seed’ for Zarah, Tamar succeeded in raising up Er
from negative existence and thus undoing the wrong Onan had done his
brother. As for Paretz, he would be the ancestor of Boaz and David. As Rabbi Eleazar says, he is identified with
Jacob, and his name means ‘to burst forth’.
That phrase gives us a kind of ‘hyperlink’ to a very important passage
in Isaiah:
Then shall your Light burst forth like
the dawn … (58:8)
Here
the verb for ‘shall burst forth’ is yibbaqa,
which is spelled with the same letters as Ya’aqov,
the name Jacob.
In
this chapter (58:1) the prophet refers to the Voice Qol being raised like the trumpeting of the Ram’s Horn Shofar that marks the beginning of the
Year of Jubilee. This is the ‘acceptable
Day of Adonai’ (58:5), the Day when Mother Binah
and Daughter Shekhinah are reconciled
at last and an undivided Consciousness becomes perfectly attuned to the Voice
of Ehyeh.”
Dr.
Germinator extended this theme further:
“In
the phrase ‘acceptable Day of Adonai’, the word for ‘acceptable’ is Ratzon, signifying ‘Goodwill’. It reminds us of the angelic chorus in the
Gospel of Luke (2:14) proclaiming ‘Peace on Earth to men of Goodwill’. ‘Good will’ is the will, the persona
associated with the Good Tov Light,
the Light which must ‘burst forth’ from its Exile in the Unconscious, as Isaiah
says. Good will is nothing less than the
formula for transcending the narrow ego-persona and realizing the constellated
persona in which all Conscious centers of the psyche participate equally. This is the explosive expansion of the scope
of sentience, the radical widening of the ‘Opening of the Eyes’ for which the
story of Tamar and her twin sons is a metaphor.”
As
Dr. Germinator spoke the word ‘twin’, Elias metamorphosed into Dr. Germinator’s
twin from the realm of negative existence.
“Please
allow me to introduce myself. My name is
Judas Thomas, or Jude the Twin if you prefer.
I am Dr. Germinator’s shadow on the negative side of Reality. And, since we don’t draw distinctions between
ego-personas on that side, I’m also a ‘collective Shadow’ of sorts. I even fill in at times as the Messiah’s twin
brother, when I’m needed in that role.”
Rabbi
Eleazar was somewhat confused:
“In
some of our past discussions here in the Heavenly Yeshiva, we’ve been fortunate
to have the Messiah himself visit us and help us interpret Torah. But this is the first time we’ve had a visit
from His twin brother.”
Jude
the Twin answered:
“Well,
you see the Messiah’s busy getting ready to enter the mundane world down
below. It’s about that time, you
know. So He asked me to step in here and
help you fellas out. As needed, of
course. I mean, I don’t want to
interrupt the flow of the discussion.
Just go ahead and I’ll chime in when it’s appropriate.”
Rabbi
Eleazar seemed a bit uneasy:
“But
how do we tell you and Dr. Germinator apart.
You look absolutely identical.”
Jude
the Twin responded:
“I’m
left-handed. And I’ve got this scarlet
thread around my hand. (Raising his left hand) See?”
Rabbi
Eleazar still seemed a bit tentative, but he proceeded nonetheless:
“I
think Dr. Germinator was suggesting that the acts of Goodwill toward the poor
and unfortunate that Isaiah talks about are, in a certain sense, an extended
metaphor. The iniquities of society —
the oppression of the poor and weak by the wealthy and powerful — are a
reflection of the central Iniquity in the human psyche, in which the
ego-persona dominates and suppresses the Unconscious centers of Awareness. So the Year of Jubilee really aims to reverse
that hierarchy.”
The
Holy Light agreed:
“The
Jubilee Cycle is intended to accomplish exactly that — to periodically reverse
the stratification of society by setting bondsmen free, forgiving debts,
restoring the land to its original owners.
It’s as Isaiah commands (58:6-8):
… to unlock the fetters of wickedness,
and untie the cords of the yoke,
To let the oppressed go free… to share
your bread with the hungry,
And take the wretched poor into your
House;
When you see the naked, to clothe him …
Then shall your Light burst forth like
the dawn, and your healing spring up quickly;
Your Righteous One shall march before
you, and the Glory of the Name shall be your rearguard.
And
thus it is the Righteous One — which is to say the Messiah — who consolidates
the Collective Soul Neshamah and
leads It beyond the Sphere of the Name Tiferet
to the House Bayit of Binah — the Heavenly Eden.”
Rabbi
Eleazar added:
“In
order for this process of Redemption to go forward, reversing the entire
history of Iniquity, the ‘closed hand’ of the Qamatz must be replaced by the ‘open hand’ of the Patach.
In this manner, we may Imagine
Sha’ar the Gate that opens into
Jude
the Twin began to sing:
“Imagine all the people, sharing all
the world …
You-ou-ou … You may say I’m a dreamer …”
I
was also John Lennon’s stand-in on occasion.
Bob Dylan’s too:
“There are no Kings inside the Gates of
Rabbi
Shimon’s next remark had a slightly biting tone:
“A
certain amount of obscurity is acceptable in a discourse on Torah, Mr. Jude,
but we’re not accustomed to arbitrary non-sequitors. Is there some reason lurking behind your
rhymes?”
The
Twin answered the Holy Light with deference:
“Excuse
me, Rabbi, I didn’t mean to be irreverent.
I’ll speak more to the point. You
guys seem to be fixated on the ‘nice guy’ side of the Messiah. He loves everybody, he brings everybody
together, he leads us all to the Gates of Eden … Yada, yada, yada …”
Rabbi
Eleazar was again confused:
“Yada,
yada, yada? What language are you
speaking now, Mr. Twin?”
Judas
Thomas chuckled:
“Twenty-first
Century Amerikan colloquialism. Anyway,
the Messiah’s also a warrior of sorts.
Not violent against people, of course.
But turning over money-lenders’ tables, that kind of thing. I know, because I sub for him sometimes when
He needs to do the rough stuff. What I’m
trying to say is that simple alms-giving and acts of mercy are good — or Tov as you guys like to say — but they
don’t get us all the way we need to go.”
Dr.
Germinator was becoming livid:
“Who
let this guy in here? I can’t believe a
character like this was actually admitted into the Heavenly Yeshiva!”
Rabbi
Shimon was a bit abashed:
“Well,
when we let you in, Doctor G, we had to let him in with you. It was sort of a ‘package deal’.”
“Why
is that? Is there something wrong with
me?” the Doctor asked defensively.
“No,
not at all,” said Rabbi Shimon. “It’s
just that you’re still alive down there in the mundane world. So you needed to have a guide to take you
into the Olam HaBa. You remember how Dante was led through the heavenly
Spheres by Virgil?”
“Well
this guy is no Virgil. I don’t care if
he does look like me,” huffed Dr. Germinator.
“Calm
down boys,” said Jude the Twin. Then
addressing Dr. Germinator: “If you’re
not accompanied by your shadow, then you’re dead. You wanna be dead buddy?”
“What’s
that supposed to be, a threat?” Dr. G fulminated. “Do I have to listen to this?”
“I
didn’t expect you two to get along,” said Rabbi Shimon, “but it’s necessary
that you coexist here for a while, so try to make allowances for each other.”
Jude
the Twin continued:
“Look,
you were all yakking up this babe Tamar before, right? Now, I’m no slouch myself when it comes to
Hebrew, since I’ve stood in for my share of Jews. In Hebrew Tamar
is a palm tree. And a palm tree branch
is one of the four things — ‘species’ I think they’re called — that a Jew is
supposed to carry around on the Feast of Sukkot. That’s the Feast of Tabernacles to you, Dr.
G. The ‘G’ is for Goy, right?”
The
Holy Light looked dismayed:
“Mr.
Jude, I don’t want to have to be a referee here. Please stop provoking your twin. Nonetheless, your point about Sukkot is an
intriguing one. Recall Jeremiah’s
prophecy (14:16) about the remnant of the Nations at the end of Time making a
yearly pilgrimage to
Judas
was quite animated:
“Right
on, Holy Light! Now you’re catching on to what I’m saying. This isn’t about doing alms or being
charitable. It’s about what the poor and
dispossessed are entitled to. At the
Sukkot feast, they’re not to be served the leftovers or the second-rate
stuff. They’re to get the prime
portions, according to the Zohar.
Because they’re sitting there in the role of the Sephirot: Abraham, Isaac,
Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, David.
You’d serve those dudes the slops scraped from the bottom of the
pot? I don’t think so!
You
guys have had a lot to say about the realm of negative existence, of negative
energy. Dirac’s Sea and all that good
stuff. Well then, take it from me,
‘cause that’s my ‘hood’. I grew up there. It’s where I live, man. Taken from my angle, Redemption means
reversal of every privileged status.
Like Isaiah says, ‘every valley exalted and every mountain made
low’. The wealthy and powerful can only
salvage their Eternal Selfhood by becoming subservient to the poor and weak.”
Dr.
Germinator mused aloud:
“Christ
washing the feet of the Apostles …”
“Now
you’re cooking, Brother,” said the Twin.
“Let’s ask ourselves: Why are the
poor worthy of this? It’s because
they’re the souls who are least compromised by the regime of
ego-domination. They’re the ones whose
core Selfhood remains least corrupted by oppressing others. The meek are like children, like the two golden
Cherubs who sit atop the Ark of the Covenant and spread their wings over it —
just as Shekhinah spreads her wings
to encompass all Souls within the Nashamah. Within the
Rabbi
Eleazar pondered:
“The
same can be said of the Sukkah, the
crude shelter of tree branches made for the Seven days of Sukkot. The Sukkah
is a covering that reveals, rather than conceals. It is an outward expression of its own
Meaning.”
Dr.
Germinator added:
“… out of his belly shall flow rivers of
LIVING WATER.
There
is a profound teaching here that commands us to turn ourselves inside-out. To expose what is deepest and most essential
in our Selves and wear that as if we would a garment — the Garment of Light
that was lost in the Garden of Eden.”
His
Twin queried:
“Would
you not fear to wear that Garment in the presence of the ever-turning Sword Lahat HaCherev? The Sword that severs our bond of Oneness and
Brotherhood?”
Dr.
Germinator:
“No,
because I see now through your Eyes as well as my own. In your region of negative existence, the
Circle Gilgal through which the Sword
gyrates in Time becomes smaller than the head of a pin. It’s like the point of a thorn Tzin, which gave its name to the
wilderness where Moses struck the Rock a second time in Numbers chapter 20. According to the Oral Tradition, the entire
Congregation of Israel was able to fit in the confined space in front of that
Rock, which indicates that we are dealing with reciprocal Space-Time.
To
understand how this works, imagine the sphere of the Earth. Let’s say everyone on the Earth pointed ‘up’
at the same time. None of those ‘up’
directions would be the same, and we would be able to distinguish the location
of each person by the direction they designated as ‘up’. If everyone were holding a sword and pointed
it up, the swords would all point out into different directions in space. From a distance, the earth would look like a
pin cushion. That’s the idea of the ever-turning
Sword. Viewed strictly from the positive
realm, it puts everyone in a different place, separates everyone, makes
everyone different.
Now
let’s say we shrink the earthly sphere down to a pinpoint. Everyone is now is one place, but still the
‘up’ direction is different for each person.
In physics, we’d say that each person has a different ‘phase’. If we bring light rays with different phases
together, they ‘interfere’ and combine into a single light ray. The same thing happens with the WORLDS Olamim, which sum up by
‘interference’ to make the World to Come Olam
HaBa.
At
any rate, when the entire Congregation of Israel — the Knesset Yisrael that embodies the Neshamah — was standing in one space in front of the Rock at Tzin, they were actually all in different
‘phases’, all with a different ‘up’ orientation. So when Moses asked them to point to the Rock
he should strike, they all pointed in different directions.”
Rabbi
Eleazar remarked:
“And,
contrary to the instructions he received from the Name YHVH, Moses did not endeavor to integrate these various orientations,
so that there would be a unified Vision of one Rock to be struck. Instead, he followed the direction given by
his own unique ‘phase’ only, and struck the Rock of his own choosing. By failing to unify the Vision of all
‘phases’ in One, Moses failed to sanctify the One Name YHVH in the eyes of the people, and thus forfeited his chance to
restore the Wholeness of Neshamah.”
Rabbi
Shimon assumed a solemn tone:
“The
Talmud tells the story of the 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva who all died of a
plague in one season. Why? Because they did not show respect, each to
the path of the other. Comrades who do
not love one another cannot converge on the One Path of Ehyeh, which is on the level represented numerically by
thousands. So the 12 pair of thousands
of students are like the 12 palm trees of Elim, insofar as their Meaning is
expressed in their unity — in their ‘dwelling together’. When Comrades turn away from this unity, they
produce a defect in Shekhinah, who
embodies the In-dwelling Shakan. Comrades must be willing to offer one another
their Breath of LIFE so that they may
rise together as one Neshamah, one
Collective Consciousness, whole and perfect.
When
I left the world below, Shekhinah chose
the feast of Lag b’Omer for me to
ascend to this
Dr.
Germinator paraphrased a line from a Dylan song:
And the Son will show respect for every
face on the deck, the hour that the ship comes in.
Eleazar
added:
“I
spoke before of the significance of the numbers 33 and 37. Lag
b’Omer marks the 33rd day of the 50-day ‘Pentecost’ period
between the Exodus and the Mount Sinai Theophany. It is the 18th day of the month Iyar.
It was the third day that the Israelites had received manna in the Wilderness. The first Sabbath Shabbat was observed four days later, on 22 Iyar, the 37th day of the Pentecost. It was on that 37th day that Moses
struck the Rock at Rephidim,
restoring us to the beginning of the cycle of phases that run from the
Wilderness of Sin to the Wilderness
of Tzin and back again. And so the Time has come to close the
Circle.”
Jude
the Twin sang:
Now the Time has come… There are things
to realize … Time has come today.
Dr.
Germinator commented:
“The
Chambers Brothers… I remember that
one. From the psychedelic era.”
Jude
spoke up again:
“The
Rainbow of diverse Visions diffracted from the One Light — that’s our
guidepost. And it was given to Noah for
just that purpose, as a reminder. During
Rabbi Shimon’s lifetime, the Rainbow never appeared. It never had to, because that Light was
inside the Rabbi and his disciples, in their Hearts. Isaiah envisions the Day when that same Light
bursts forth in all Hearts at once (60:19-22):
No longer shall you need the Sun for
light by day,
Nor the shining of the Moon for light
by night,
For YHVH shall be your Light of Olam,
And your Elohim shall be your Tiferet.
And your people, all of them Righteous,
Shall possess the Earth for Olam…
The little one shall become a thousand,
The smallest one a body of people.
But
to get to that day, the entire regime of ego-centrism must be rooted up and
destroyed, like bad weeds in a garden.
We have to cast off the unfaithful Brother’s shoe, as the law of the Levir commands us (Deuternomy 25:17-19):
Remember what Amalek did to you on your
way after you left
How, not fearing Elohim, he ambushed
you on the way,
When you were famished and weary, and
cut down the straggler in your rear.
Therefore… you shall blot out the
memory of Amalek from under heaven.
Do not forget!
Eleazar
seemed strangely moved:
“For
that reason, in the Messianic voice, the Psalmist repeats twice (60:10, 108:9),
once for each Eye of Awareness:
Who will lead me into
Unless
we rid ourselves of the filth of
As
the last word left Rabbi Eleazar’s lips, he vanished, as did Jude the Twin,
leaving only the Holy Light and Dr. Germinator sitting in the Yeshiva.
Rabbi
Shimon whispered, as if someone were eavesdropping:
“They
have gone into the world below, to find Shekhinah
and bring Her to us. Let us meditate in
silence while we await their return.”
Suddenly
a mirror appeared before Dr. Germinator, blocking his view of the Holy
Light. In the Mirror he saw that he was
naked. He heard a distant voice reciting
from Numbers 20:22-26:
Setting out from Qadeish, the whole
Congregation of the children of
Then
the mirror before him transformed into a door.
Written on the door was the Hebrew word
עוּר
When
he awoke, Dr. Germinator found himself lying on his living room sofa. He was fully clothed, except that the sandal
on his left foot had fallen off while he had dozed. Next to him on the sofa was an open volume of
the poems of William Blake. Picking it
up, he read from where he had left off:
And all this Vegetable World appeard on
my left Foot,
As a bright sandal formed immortal of
precious stones & gold:
I stooped down & bound it on to
walk forward thro’ Eternity.
FINIS