The Year of Jubilee
Chapter Five:
The Hidden Time
But thought’s the
slave of life, and life Time’s fool,
And Time, that takes
survèy of all the world,
Must have a stop.
William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, Act V, scene iv
The time is out of
joint. Oh cursèd spite
That ever I was born
to set it right!
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, scene v
When
we left off at the end of Chapter Four, we were considering the Biblical image
of the “parting of waters”. Since this
is a motif that shows up at several critical junctures in both the Torah and
the New Testament, it’s meaning warrants some careful scrutiny. When Moses wielded his hallowed rod to part
the waters of the Red Sea, he opened a path leading to the Theophany on
As we discussed at the beginning of this book, the Hebrew word gilgal relates to the peculiar sort of Time which characterizes visionary experience. It’s a two-dimensional time-frame, a non-linear mode in which Time is cyclical. Thus, the prophet Ezekiel hears the word gilgal used to summon the “wheels within wheels” embodying the spirit of the four Chayyot, or “Living Creatures”.[3] The four Chayyot represent the fourth level of the human Soul, the “Living Soul” or Chayah — the collective Soul restored to the full Symmetry of the World to Come. Within this higher level of Symmetry, a “hidden” second dimension of Time — the Olam — reveals itself.
Since
the term Olam has no exact equivalent
in the English tongue (or, I daresay, any other language beside Hebrew), it is
typically translated in the Scriptures as “forever” or “everlasting”. For example, when Joshua explains to his
people the purpose of the circle of twelve stones at Gilgal, the King James translation
renders his words as: “… these stones
shall be for a memorial unto the children of
The
The
flow of a body of water is a common metaphor for the passage of ordinary Time —
which I’ll refer to hereafter as “mundane Time”. We can infer, therefore, that all this
Biblical imagery of rivers and seas that have stopped flowing relates somehow
to a cessation in the “flow of Time”. And so it’s no coincidence that, not long
after the river crossing at Gilgal, we find Joshua commanding the Sun and Moon
to stand still in the sky during the battle of
Based on our discussion thus far, it appears obvious that this crossing will also demand of us a profound insight into the nature of Time — both the mundane and the visionary variety. Let’s put aside the latter for the time being and concentrate on what we know about mundane Time. Ever since Einstein propounded his theory of General Relativity, scientists have viewed Time as a fourth physical dimension, of the same fundamental nature as the three spatial dimensions. Considered from this perspective, however, mundane Time is, as Prince Hamlet put it, “out of joint”. If Time is a physical dimension, then it appears to be an incomplete and defective one.
The most obvious defect of mundane Time is its asymmetry. Unlike the three spatial dimensions, Time has a preferred “direction”. While we are free to go backward and forward, up and down, in and out in Space, we are compelled to only move forward in Time from past to future. Physicists have endeavored to explain the so-called “arrow of Time” as a consequence of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which stipulates that the “entropy” of a system has a very high probability of increasing from one point in Time to another. Entropy measures the amount of “disorder” in a physical configuration. The more possible arrangements there are within a given configuration, the more entropy it has. If we break out a brand new deck of 52 playing cards, for example, it has only one possible arrangement; hence, its entropy is very low. On the other hand, a shuffled deck has very high entropy, since there are about 8 × 1067 possible arrangements. Entropy also indicates the amount of information that a configuration can yield. If, instead of playing cards, we have a deck of 26 alphabet cards, each depicting one letter, then we can compose only a few words with an ordered deck, but a great many words with various shuffled arrangements.
Hence one can argue that mundane Time is not reversible because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. All the King’s men and horses can’t put Humpty Dumpty back together again: broken eggs don’t reassemble themselves and spilt milk doesn’t pour itself back into the container. But at least one eminent physicist has pointed out that this explanation of the “arrow of Time” is flawed, because the law of increasing entropy applies equally to both directions in Time. That is, if we have a whole egg today, the Second Law of Thermodynamics says not only that it’s more likely to be a broken egg tomorrow, but also that it was more likely to have been a broken egg yesterday. So entropy’s “arrow of Time” turns out to be a Janus-like double-headed one, pointing forward and back.[10]
The only was to salvage this argument is to build into it the hypothesis that the initial state of the physical Universe — on the eve of the Big Bang, so to speak — was one of minimal entropy.[11] This ultra-orderly and super-symmetrical initial condition would then have biased the “arrow of Time” in the forward direction from the outset. Which means that the one-dimensional, unidirectional Time that we experience in our everyday lives is actually a vestige of the breakup of a condition of total Symmetry which obtained “in the Beginning” of the Universe. Extrapolating from the physical to the metaphysical, this traumatic primordial event of “Symmetry-breaking” corresponds to the supernal event described in the Kabbalah as the “shattering of Vessels” or Shevirah.
All that happens in the lower World of manifestation is but a reflection of transformations in the upper World of eternal forms (aka archetypes). Thus, the disintegration of the World Soul (Pleroma) in the upper World — as mythically portrayed in the Fall of the Angels — has its counterpart in the breakdown of the primordial Symmetry of the physical Universe, which generated the “Big Bang” and propelled us down this one-way street of mundane Time. It stands to reason, then, that the work of restoration of the Pleroma necessarily involves a transcendence of strait-jacket of one-dimensional Time. It requires a “rectification” — Tikkun in Hebrew — of the defect in Time that was introduced by the Shevirah. As Shakespeare correctly observes, this labor of Tikkun to “set it right” is the reason why each of us was born.
Again,
we must be mindful of the ineluctable linkage between the physical and
metaphysical realms. If mundane Time is
incomplete, it’s because our individual Souls are likewise incomplete. And the converse is also true: we cannot hope to restore the wholeness of
the collective human Soul unless we also restore the Symmetry of Time. As we’ve said before, the restoration of the
Pleroma crucially depends upon the unobstructed flow of Souls out of the supernal
Treasury of Souls (the Sefirah of Binah) into incarnation through the Womb (the
Sefirah of Malkut). This flow of Souls is
described in Genesis as a “river that goes out of Eden [Binah] to water the
Garden [Malkut]”.[12] And, according to the visions of Isaiah and
Now, the principle of upper-lower correspondence tells us that the flow of Souls into incarnation has a cognate physical process, which is the flow of Time. When the original Symmetry of the Universe was broken, the most sublime portion of the divine Light — the Quintessence which was Elohim’s first creation — was withdrawn. The incarnation of righteous Souls then became the exclusive channel through which this Light was reintroduced into the World. But the Shevirah’s shattering of Symmetry also generated a host of empty Worlds wherein scattered sparks of that Light became trapped. Interestingly enough, the Hebrew word for “Worlds”, which encompasses these empty Worlds as well as our own, is Olamim — the plural of Olam. This suggests that the Hidden Time is the dimension that connects all of the Worlds — the “parallel universes” of modern cosmology — with our own. In that sense, the Olam is the great axis of Symmetry, the “bolt that passes from extremity to extremity”,[13] uniting the upper and lower Worlds. It corresponds to the Middle Pillar of the Tree of Life.[14]
Since all Light manifests itself on the mental plane as Consciousness, the sparks trapped in the empty Worlds became the energy source of a negative Consciousness, which we have referred to as the Qlippot. The Qlippot have a virtual existence below the threshold of Reality in a realm known as the Other Side, or Sitra Ahra in Hebrew. When Eve and Adam prematurely tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they gained access to the Olamim before having effected the Tikkun needed to neutralize the negative energy of the Qlippot.[15] Consequently, human Consciousness became infected and our metaphysical identity contracted into the shell of the ego-persona, as personified by Eve’s firstborn Cain. It now became necessary to “quarantine” this fallen Consciousness and stop it from inhabiting the empty Worlds and thereby strengthening the Other Side to such an extent that it could effectively resist and thwart the Tikkun. To prevent that, the “Lord God” (Adonai Elohim) expelled Man from the Garden and set up the Cherubim with a flaming sword to keep him from the Tree of Life, “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the Tree of Life, and eat, and live in the Olam”.[16]
The
All
of this provides us with the background we will need to penetrate the story of
the
The qanah
reed also has other connotations that bear upon the mystical import of the
The qanah reed was also an ancient symbol for the number twelve and was associated with the twelfth month of the lunar calendar.[21] In this sense, it is linked to the sacred cycle of two-dimensional Time represented by the twelve stones of Gilgal and the twelve signs of the Zodiac. It’s noteworthy that the dodecahedron — a twelve-sided polyhedron which is one of the five perfectly Symmetrical solids — has long been considered to be the fundamental form of the Cosmos as a whole and/or of the Quintessence.[22] Each of the twelve faces of a dodecahedron is a pentagon, the proportions of which are based on the infinitely self-replicating Golden Ratio φ. The dodecahedron is thus an ideal image of the five-tiered fractal structure of the collective Soul reintegrated into the twelve-fold Symmetry of the Neshamah. The Neshamah is the third level of the Soul and the highest that can be achieved in this World.
An
interesting example of the dodecahedron as a blueprint of the Neshamah’s
mystical Symmetry appears in Salvador Dali’s painting “The Sacrament of the Last
Supper”. (See Figure
3) Here Dali depicts Jesus and the
twelve Apostles enclosed in a transparent dodecahedron surmounted by a large
human torso. With outstretched arms, the dodecahedron-torso appears to subsume
the twelve Apostles within one Body.
Thus, Dali sees the effect of the Eucharistic feast as transcending the
individual human Soul — which is Ruach, the
Soul’s second level — and restoring the twelve-fold unity of the collective Neshamah. This was also the effect of the Theophany on
While the Neshamah is a collective Soul, it retains the uniqueness of each individual Soul within its fractal pattern, where the whole is not merely the sum of its parts but replicates the form of each of its parts. Again, the structure of the dodecahedron illustrates this principle. Its pentagon faces stand for the five levels of the Soul transmitting their eternal forms downward into the material Universe through the mathematical self-replication of the Golden Ratio. If we connect the vertices of a pentagon with diagonals — in effect, inscribing a pentagram within it — we form another smaller pentagon inside the pentagram. (See Figure 4) The ratio of the length of each diagonal to the length of each of the pentagon’s sides is φ. Each diagonal is also divided into segments exhibiting the Golden Ratio: a:b = (a+b):a = φ . Furthermore, each of the isosceles triangles surrounding the interior pentagon is a “golden triangle”, with the ratio of longer to shorter sides equal to φ. Theoretically we can repeat this process of replicating the pentagon on a smaller and smaller scale indefinitely — at least until we get to the quantum limit, a topic we’ll revisit later in this chapter.
Finally,
the qanah reed has a dimensional
connotation as well, since it was commonly used as a measuring rod in Biblical
times.[24] Accordingly, a “
Pulling
all this together, the
Futhermore, the word mayim is recursive, which is to say that it contains itself. That’s because, as we mentioned in the Introduction of this book, the letter mem itself denotes “water”. Hence, the word “waters” is composed of “waters”, i.e., two letters mem. So we can expand “waters” מים to read: water י water, or מיםימים, which in turn can be expanded to מיםימיםימיםימים, and so ad infinitum. We’ve encountered this kind of recursive Symmetry before and can recognize it as the basis of fractal patterns, in which the subunits endlessly replicate the structure of the whole pattern on an ever smaller scale.
Getting
back to the word mayim מים, we can now see
that the “parting of the waters” takes place at the letter yud. Since rabbinical scholars treat yud י
as if it were a dimensionless point, it makes the perfect symbol for the Olam,
the hidden orthogonal Time axis which intersects every point of our mundane
Space-Time but manifests no duration within our World. Recalling the
Zeno, a Greek philosopher of the 5th Century BC, proposed a number of logical paradoxes, one of which involved the flight of an arrow. While Zeno may not have been aware of the symbolic interplay of arrows and reeds, his paradox is still very relevant to our inquiry regarding the flow of Time. Zeno noted that, at any given instant in Time, it would be impossible to determine if an arrow were moving or at rest. Therefore, he concluded, all motion is impossible and our perception of motion is illusory. Aristotle in his Physics takes the opposite tack, arguing that everything is in motion and stillness is an illusion. According to Aristotle, Zeno’s Paradox of the Arrow is premised on his false assumption that Time consists of discrete moments, instead of being continuous. In other words, Aristotle contended that it was meaningless to speak of a point in Time — a “now” — because Time can only be measured in intervals.
Obviously, Zeno and Aristotle had radically different concepts of what Time is. If we allow for two Time dimensions, however, their seemingly antagonistic views can be reconciled. From the standpoint of mundane Time, Aristotle is right: There is no present instant, no “now”, but only the interval between “now” and “then”. From the standpoint of the Hidden Time, however, Zeno is correct: Everything — past, present and future — is happening “now”. From the Olam perspective, nothing really changes, nothing really “moves”, except our Consciousness of what is. It’s like the Zen riddle about the flag fluttering in the wind. From the standpoint of the flag, it’s at rest and the wind is moving, but from the wind’s perspective, it’s the other way around. Which one is right? “Not the flag, not the wind,” the Zen koan concludes, “Mind is moving.”
From the Aristotelian view, Time is a continuous flow, just like a river. We can speak of a certain “place” on the riverbank — or even in the riverbed, the source of Gilgal’s stones — but we really can’t fix a location in the river itself. There’s the old joke about two fishermen who find a place where the fish are practically jumping into their boat. The first fisherman tells the second to make sure he marks this spot so they can come back to it again. Later, when they’re done fishing and are taking the boat out of the water, the first fisherman sees a big red X painted on the keel asks his friend how it got there. “You told me to mark the spot!” the second fisherman replies.
If we accept the premise that Time flows like a river, however, we encounter another paradox that exposes the incompleteness of mundane Time standing alone. A flow can only be measured from a stationary reference point. Unless there’s a bridge, who can say how much water has gone under the bridge? Or if the bridge is on pontoons floating down the stream, that doesn’t help us much either. Again, when we try to apply the concepts of spatial dimensions to mundane Time, they just don’t fit. Motion in Space is measured by distance traveled during a given interval of Time. We speak of velocity in terms of miles-per-hour, meters-per-second, etc. But how can we measure motion in Time? There’s simply no way to use a yardstick to measure itself. We can’t very well have “hours-per-hour” or “seconds-per-second”. Unless, of course, there’s another Time axis, orthogonal to the first, against which to measure the passage of mundane Time.
This difficulty in defining the “flow” of mundane Time becomes even thornier when we introduce the four-dimensional Space-Time paradigm of Einstein’s General Relativity. In that formulation, all things can be represented as paths drawn through four-dimensional “Minkowski Space”. These paths are known as “World lines”, which is interesting in light of the fact that Olam also means “World”, as in Olam HaBa, “the World to Come”. Could some of Einstein’s more profound insights have been inspired by the Kabbalah? Perhaps not consciously, but his portrayal of Space-Time certainly bears a striking resemblance to the “static Universe” as seen from the Hidden Time. In Minkowksi Space, each of us is part of a “World line” that has no beginning and no end. Even though I am sitting at my computer as I write these words, my World line is extending through Space-Time at the speed of Light![26]
In Minkowksi Space, mundane Time does not “flow” anymore than the three spatial dimensions do. Neither do World lines — the primary physical Reality of things — really move: they simply are what they are. While we can speak of a “velocity” associated with the movement of my current position along my World line, mundane Time cannot be used to measure this “velocity”. That’s because mundane Time — which physicists denote by the letter t — is one of the four components of my change of position in four-dimensional Space-Time. We’re back to the problem of trying to use a yardstick to measure itself.
Another characteristic of mundane Time that disqualifies it as a suitable “metronome” in Minkowski Space is its lack of universality. According to Einstein’s Special Relativity theory, different observers will disagree on what t is at any given point. As a matter of fact, under Einstein’s formulation, mundane Time is purely personal and local. I perceive that I am writing this book during the administration of President George Bush II, but to an observer in another galaxy, I could be writing this during the reign of the King George III … or during some future regime of Emperor George Bush III![27] (I can only pray that the extra-galactic observer will avert his/her eyes so that I may be spared the latter indignity.)
Since mundane Time t won’t do the do the job as a temporal framework in four-dimensional Space-Time, physicists have contrived a “universal Time” — represented by the Greek letter tau τ — to define movement along a World line.[28] This represents an implicit, albeit backhanded, acknowledgment that motion in Minkowski Space inherently demands a second Time dimension. For the sake of convenience, we’ll adopt the physicists’ notation for the two different dimensions of Time, using t for mundane Time and τ for the Hidden Time.
Let There Be Light
Now that we’ve “stepped into the water”, in a manner of speaking, we observe that there are two different forms of the letter mem in the Hebrew word for water/waters mayim מים. The first mem is written in the “open” form מ, while the second one is the “closed” form ם that is used when the letter appears at the end of a word. The closed form of mem has acquired a special mystical meaning stemming from Isaiah 9:5-6,[29] in which it anomalously pops up in the middle of a word. The passage in question appears in a familiar chorus from Handel’s Messiah:
For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given: and the government
shall be upon his shoulder… Of the increase of his government and peace there
shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it,
and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for
ever.
This last phrase of this passage is another example of the translation of Olam as “forever”. A more accurate and meaningful rendering would be “… with justice from now unto Olam.” We note the close connection here between the concept of “now” and the Olam. Isaiah is clearly alluding to the advent of the Messiah, and Christians interpret these verses as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. As is often the case in Isaiah, the formulation follows the pattern of the Kabbalah’s Tree of Life. (See Figure 1) We have the Prince of Peace, who corresponds to Zer Anpin and the Sefirah Tipheret. Then we have the Kingdom, which is the Sefirah Malkut. Lastly we have Justice or Righteousness, which is represented by the Sefirah Yesod. All of these three Sephirot lie along the central axis of the Tree of Life, the axis of Symmetry which corresponds in temporal terms to the Olam. Consequently, Yesod forges the link between the “now” of our World — which is absent in mundane Time but present in our Consciousness — and the Eternity of the many Worlds.
We’ll
have more to say about the role of Yesod and its nexus with the Olam as we
proceed in this chapter, but for now let’s focus on the meaning of the closed mem in this passage and in the word mayim.
According to the Talmud, the closed mem
in Isaiah 9:6 signifies that the “end of days” — i.e., the end of mundane Time — is “hidden”.[30] Similarly, the Zohar says that this mem was closed when the second
As interpreted by the Bahir, the closed mem represents the Womb of Time, which is Malkut. As we discussed earlier in this book, the rotundity of the Womb is a metaphor for two-dimensional cyclical Time. The Bahir goes on to say that the shape of the Womb is like that of the Hebrew letter tet ט .[32] With its opening oriented to the upper Worlds, womb-like tet makes an excellent symbol for the Olam. Being the ninth letter, tet is closely associated with two Sephirot of the Tree of Life (see Figure 1). The Tree can be viewed from the perspective of either the upper or lower Worlds. From the former standpoint, the ninth Sephirah is Yesod, which we have just explained is the “node” connecting mundane Time with the Olam. On the other hand, looking upward from our vantage point at the Tree’s base, the ninth Sephirah is Chochmah. We recall that Chochmah represents a state of pure temporal Symmetry in which past, present and future merge.
For these reasons, tet ט can be taken as shorthand for the Olam. Because the Latin alphabet has only one “t-sounding” letter, we are obliged to borrow the Greek tau τ to designate a second Time dimension. But, as if by design, Hebrew has two “t-sounding” letters: the ninth letter tet ט and the last (22nd) letter tav ת. From this we might infer that, since tet stands for the Hidden Time, then the letter tav should make a fitting symbol for mundane Time. Tav appears in the word ‘eth עת for ordinary Time. Its form is also the opposite of tet, insofar as tav ת is boxy and closed off at the top — suggesting a one-dimensional linearity cut off from the higher Worlds. Interestingly, there is a tradition recorded both in the Talmud and in early Christian writings to the effect that the letter tav originally had the shape of a cross.[33] Since the cross depicts a two-dimensional grid, this tradition seems to hark back to the temporal Symmetry “before the Fall”, when mundane Time was paired with its now-hidden orthogonal counterpart.
In our Kabbalistic algebra, therefore, we can state that tav ת = t (mundane Time) and tet ט = τ (Olam). Having explored some of the infirmities of mundane Time, let’s turn our attention now to the nature of the Hidden Time. In our initial exploration of the Olam, we’ll use the letter tet as our guide. This letter appears for the first time in the Torah in the word “good” tov:
And Elohim said, “Let
there be Light”, and there was Light.
And Elohim saw that
the Light was good[34]
The word tov טוֹב consists of the three letters tet, vav and bet, with a cholem vowel marking over the vav. Tet we know stands for the absolute Symmetry of Chochmah that prevailed before the Creation of the material Universe — the same condition that modern physics envisions as preceding the Big Bang. As we’ve discussed before, the sixth Hebrew letter vav is a symbol of Symmetry, as displayed in the six Symmetrical branches of the Menorah, three on either side of the central sconce. In fact, the word Olam itself illustrates the symmetrical role of vav. Olam עוֹלָם is divided in the middle by vav, with the numerical value (gematria) of the letters on either side of it amounting to 70, a number associated with Equilibrium. In the previous two chapters, we’ve repeatedly encountered the number 70 in connection with the allotted time-frame for the reunion of the upper and lower Worlds that were divided with the Fall of Man. And, not coincidentally, these two sets of Worlds are represented by bet, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet and the final letter of tov.
It’s important to understand the nature of the “good” Light that was Elohim’s first creation, because it’s quite different from the ordinary light that illuminates the physical Universe. According to rabbinical tradition, Adam was able to see by the supernal Light from one end of the World to the other in one glance.[35] This necessarily implies that the sublime Light (Quintessence) travels with an infinite velocity. Because mundane Light has a finite velocity (300,000 kilometers per second), we cannot see all parts of the Universe simultaneously. In fact, there are remote galaxies in the Universe that we have never seen because the Light from them is still traveling toward us.
In order to propagate instantaneously, Quintessence must be indivisible — that is, it cannot be comprised of subunits.[36] This means that it cannot be composed of “quanta” in the same way as ordinary Light consists of photons. Infinite velocity also demands infinite energy, a quality we will find to be essential to the realization of a temporal present “now”.[37] Not only did this divine Light brighten the entire Universe “all at once”, but it also simultaneously revealed past, present and future Time. Indeed, it illuminated not only the World of actual events, but also the myriad Worlds of unrealized potentials — the entire spectrum of Olamim.
Remarkably, Torah scholars are able to derive all of this simply from the particular Hebrew verb forms used in the statement, “Let there be Light, and there was Light.” In Hebrew the words are Yehi aor, vayehi aor. Yehi is the imperfect tense of the verb “to be”. This imperfect tense can be translated either as the future — “There shall be Light” — or the jussive — “Let there be Light”. In the second part of the statement, va-yehi is the imperfect yehi again preceded by the “and” conjunction vav. But because the vav has the vowel qames attached to it וָ , it can “flip” the imperfect yehi over to the past tense. Thus the phrase, “and there was Light” relates not just to a past occurrence, but to the whole temporal procession by which an event develops from a “future” potential to a “present” experience and then to a “past” remembrance.
But because the Torah uses the multi-faceted imperfect tense yehi, it also conveys the sense that all events — regardless of whether they are perceived as past, present or future — retain the uncertain character of mere potentials. Although we can intuitively grasp this concept as applied to future events, which we regard as being in the realm of probability, it is quite enigmatic as applied to the present — and positively baffling as applied to the past. Believe it or not, however, this temporal paradigm has been largely confirmed by the findings of modern quantum theory.
Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle tells us that we cannot know whether what we perceive in the “here and now” is exactly “here” or precisely “now”. The primary Reality, as the quantum theorists see it, is Schrödinger’s Equation, which describes only a set of probable outcomes. So, while we only experience one of these outcomes, all of the other alternatives are nonetheless Real. Even more disconcerting to our conventional world view is the extension of this quantum theorizing into the field of cosmology. This has led to the hypothesis that our Universe is but one of a myriad of potential Universes described by Schrödinger’s Equation. We’ll explore the metaphysical implications of this “quantum cosmology” later in this chapter.
The Moving Finger
So the idea of a fixed and certain present goes out the window whether you are a dreamy-eyed mystic Kabbalist or a hard-nosed quantum scientist. But what about the past? Surely past events that have already “come and gone” cannot be subject to vague probabilities. Something that has already happened can’t change. No one expects to wake up tomorrow and read in the morning headlines that the Confederacy won the Battle of Gettysburg. We are reminded of the compelling lines of the poet Omar Khayyam:
The
Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves
on; nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.[38]
The Moving Finger does indeed write and move on. But until a Daniel appears on the scene to interpret the writing,[39] it could signify any number of things. Getting back to the subject of Light, we can take a flashlight and shine it on a something called a “diffraction grating”, which consists of a series of parallel opaque lines inscribed on a transparent medium. When the Light emerges from the diffraction grating, it produces an alternating pattern of bright and dark bands called a “diffraction pattern”. If we capture one of the particles of Light, called “photons”, we can try to figure out which of the transparent slits of the diffraction grating it passed through. What we discover, however, is that, in order to produce the diffraction pattern we observe, each photon has to act as if it had passed through all of the slits of the grating! So, while we look at the diffraction pattern and think we are seeing one outcome, one set of past events, all we are really seeing is the sum of a number of potential paths the photons may have taken. The perception of a fixed and determinate past proves in this case to be an illusion.
What
we’ve just described is not just some weird anomaly that happens with
diffraction gratings; it actually represents a universal paradigm of
physics. Nobel laureate Richard Feynman
has developed a quantum methodology called “sum over paths” or “sum over
histories” which basically explains why we see just one past event among all
the potentials outcomes. According to
Feynman, if an object — let’s say a baseball — follows a trajectory from point
A to point B, the path that we observe it to take is actually the sum of the
contributions of all the paths it potentially can take.[40] In other words, things that “don’t happen”
contribute to things that “do happen”.
If we take away the non-events, there are no events. Even for occurrences that are in the past,
“what might have been” remains very much operative and viable. General Lee’s decision at
When we talk about the “alternate threads” of Reality, what we’re talking about are the Olamim. All of these “threads” may be thought of as strands of hair growing out of one head — that “head” being Keter, the Crown of the Tree of Life. In the lower World of Malkut, these strands merge to present a unitary experience. This is the hidden meaning of David’s Psalm, which is typically translated as “Your kingdom is an everlasting kingdom.”[41] But with the literal Hebrew restored, it reads: “Your Malkut is a Malkut of all Olamim.” In other words, King David — the preeminent Kabbalist of his day — recognized that experience (Malkut) is the product of all the potential outcomes (Olamim). He also recognizes that this “sum over histories” approach is just as applicable to the past as to the present. In another Psalm, he writes: “I have contemplated days out of the Before-Time, years of Olamim.”[42]
As it turns out, Feynman’s “sum over histories” theory is the key to restoring the lost Symmetry of Time. It dispels the conventional notion that the past is “set in concrete” and the future is “up for grabs”. The truth is that, as a matter of physical Reality, the past is no less uncertain than the future. If there is an asymmetry between past and future, therefore, that asymmetry reflects a defect in our perception of Time. In other words, our perception of Time is partial — we are blind to one of its two dimensions. Just as the Norse god Wotan traded one of his eyes for a drink from the Well of Knowledge, so we humans have forfeited one of our eyes for a taste of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. But the lesson of Feynman’s theory — which strikingly confirms the insights of the Kabbalah — is that this loss is not without remedy. Time is not irreversible. The work of rectification, of Tikkun, can and must extend to the past as well as the future.
In
our partial blindness, we are no longer able to see by the divine Light by
which Adam was able to gaze from one end of the Universe to the other. This Light was withdrawn from Adam when he
was exiled from
Limited to “one eye”, like the doomed god Wotan or the foolish giant Cyclops, we see only one outcome of events. Like blind Samson, we are bound to the Wheel of Fate, enslaved to a cruel, whimsical and indifferent goddess of Fortune — who is herself depicted as blindfolded. While speaking about the concept of Equilibrium earlier in this book, we used the metaphor of our two eyes producing a single vision. In order to do this, the eyes must turn inward and “face each other”, so to speak, so that their images can be superimposed. The eyes of a human — unlike the eyes of many animals, such as birds and rodents — are set in the front of the face so that they can operate in this fashion “face-to-face”. This distinguishing feature of our facial anatomy was critical in our ascent from animal awareness to human Consciousness.
The principle of Equilibrium that’s at work when we superimpose the separate images of our two eyes to make one image is the same principle that allows us to superimpose the many potential paths of a ball in flight and come up with one path. So Feynman’s “sum over paths” methodology is really just an extension of the concept of Equilibrium. And just as the two eyes interact “face-to-face” to produce a unitary vision, so must the two poles of Consciousness — the feminine Objective and the masculine Subjective — face each other and perform in unison to compose a unified experience.
“But,” I can hear some of my readers objecting, “isn’t that experience the same regardless of how our Consciousness deals with it?” In other words, if the slugger Barry Bonds hits the ball and it lands in a kayak in McCovey’s Cove, don’t all the potential paths of that baseball have to add up to that destination, regardless of what we think about it? Well, yes and no. Quantum physics teaches us that the Observer (i.e., the Subjective pole) and the Observed (i.e., the Objective pole) are inextricably entangled with each other. So the event of the ball meeting Barry’s bat at just the right spot to propel it into the kayak doesn’t consist simply of leather meeting wood, but rather it’s composed of leather, wood, air, stadium, San Francisco Bay, etc., all meeting Mind. There is just no sense in which we can validly say that any event is independent of and external to Consciousness. The belief in an objective existence external to the Mind is the hallmark of defective perception and the source of all idolatry.
All that being said, we must still suspect that the thoughts of all the people in the ballpark are not going to change the path of Bonds’ homerun in the slightest. Those thoughts are like 50,000 arrows all pointing pretty randomly in different directions, so they add up to nothing. But in the instant the ball hits the bat, the crowd spontaneously lets out a great roar, which is heard by the fellow in the kayak, who now starts paddling faster toward the stadium, and — lo and behold — the ball drops into his lap instead of hitting the water six feet further out. So what goes on in the minds of all the fans in the park — as diffuse and unfocused as they are — nevertheless contributes to the ultimate path of Barry’s dinger. In fact, all of their observations of the event go into the “sum over paths” calculation that determines where the ball will land.
Consciousness that is not aware of itself, however, is necessarily passive. As we’ve said before, active human Consciousness differs from passive animal Consciousness because it can “look at itself”. But there are entire domains of our Consciousness of which we remain unaware, and one of these pertains to what we’re now discussing. Because of our reflexive belief in the externality of the World, we are not aware of the role our Consciousness plays in shaping Reality. This inherently idolatrous belief is characteristic of the ego-persona. The ego regards only the Objective pole as capable of influencing what happens. To the extent the ego exerts its will to affect events, it regards itself as an object interacting with other objects.
Therefore, all that the ego perceives is rendered a purely objective phenomenon — an externality. That’s why ego-perception is innately idolatrous. The Godhead encompasses both the Male and Female principles, both the Subjective and Objective poles of Consciousness. So the perception of God as someone or something having a purely objective existence is idolatry, regardless of whether we conceive Him as a gray-bearded Father in the clouds or as a statue made of stone. Since perception is an integral part of Reality, moreover, this externalized conception of the Deity produces a dysfunction in the Godhead itself. It follows then that the Godhead itself requires the reformation of Tikkun. Our task in this life involves not only fixing ourselves, but fixing God as well. God needs us to do something He/She can’t do for Him/Herself. If you think about it, why else would She/He have created us?
Looking Face-to-Face
In
Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, the gods
of
As
for Wotan, he debases himself in his pursuit of self-aggrandizement, which leads
him to betray the universal Soul embodied in the gold of the
Throughout this book, we’ve been nibbling at the edges of the difficult question of Free Will, but now perhaps we’re finally prepared to meet it head on. We’ve already established what it’s not. It’s not some elaborate game set up by God to test Man’s obedience. That’s the perspective of the implacable goddess Frika, rigidly imposing the pointless exactions of a dissociated Objective consciousness. To endow humans with Free Will and then punish them for exercising it is the mark of a cruel and sadistic deity. It reflects the unmitigated fury of an unbalanced force, of one part of the Godhead detached from the whole. This is the denial of Equilibrium, the negation of Balance. It amounts to nullifying all the potential paths, all of the various “World lines” of Reality, and decreeing that only one path is the “right one”.
No,
Man is not given Free Will so that he might be better trained to be a
slave. Quite the opposite, God needs an
independent agent to correct the defects which afflict both Creation and the Creator (for the two cannot be
separated). This is the whole point of
the Exodus story. The crossing of the
It’s not enough that Man unwittingly does the work of Tikkun. It won’t suffice to have humanity coerced and cajoled to the task by rewards and punishments. If that were all God needed, He/She could have stopped the process of evolution after it produced dogs and horses. Rectification can’t be carried out unless its human agents are totally aware of what they are doing and why. Nor, indeed, can Tikkun be accomplished by Man unless it’s his own idea. Wagner’s Wotan hit the nail on the head: The Free Man must create himself.
It’s axiomatic, however, that our freedom cannot exceed the scope of our awareness. That which we do not comprehend controls us and circumscribes our liberty. But as long as our awareness remains tied to the ego-persona and the one-dimensional Time within which it functions, its reach must be severely restricted. There are limits to what the ego will allow itself to know, limits imposed by the need to maintain the illusion of its insular existence. There are also limits to what the ego should be allowed to know. Because ego-perception is tainted, it taints all that it touches.
When Eve ate the fruit of the Tree which allowed her to experience the Hidden Time and its alternate Worlds, she did so with the hope of making herself a goddess, a ruler of universes. In other words, she sought the apotheosis of herself as an individual. The ultimate desire of the ego-persona is, always has been, and always will be its own apotheosis. The ego’s every action can be traced to its unquenchable thirst for immortality, its obsessive denial of Death, which is the inevitable consequence of a Consciousness restricted to mundane Time. It follows therefore that Eve had already fallen into ego-consciousness when she lifted the forbidden fruit to her lips, and that her experience of the Olam was ego-experience.
Ego-perception is frequently referred to in the Zohar as the “evil eye”.[45] As the baleful gaze of the Medusa turns everything it beholds to stone, so the eye of the ego transforms all it sees into it lifeless objects. Such experience takes in only the surface of Reality, never penetrating the shell to reach the kernel. When, after tasting the fruit, Eve peered into the many Worlds, what she saw there were not the potentials that underpin manifest Reality, but rather objective phenomena — “things”, if you will. By biting the apple, she overturned the metaphysical applecart, insofar as she transposed negative and positive existence. While the Olamim are benign when they function as the background of manifest Reality — what we described in the Chapter Four as “negative existence” — they become malevolent when experienced as “things” having an existence in mundane Time.
The
objectification of the Olamim transmuted its many Worlds into the Other Side,
the diabolic Sitra Ahra, which is the
source of all the evil inclinations that beset fallen
The purpose of human history is to achieve the rectification of this primeval transgression. As we shall discuss presently, this cannot be done by destroying the Other Side. This would destroy our World as well, since the World of the manifest is supported by the many Worlds. Rather, the Tikkun must be accomplished by restoring the Sitra Ahra to its proper sphere, that being the Hidden Time. For any occurrence, all potential outcomes eventuate, but only one becomes manifest — that is to say, apprehended by Self-aware Consciousness. The other outcomes proceed in the Olam, which constitutes an orthogonal axis of parallel Worlds. Without all the other potential outcomes, the experienced outcome cannot exist. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, neither can the experienced outcome exist if any of the other outcomes are experienced. This explains why the dislocation of the Other Side caused by Eve’s transgression cannot simply be ignored or “forgiven”. Its continuation threatens the metaphysical foundation (Yesod) of existence. If not rectified, this flaw ultimately dictates that our World will become one of the empty Worlds, and that, consequently, another World of manifestation will succeed our own.
Thus the urgency of the Tikkun. But if we are to rectify not only our own World, but also the upper Worlds and, indeed, the Godhead itself, where are we to begin? And how are we to know where the principal defect lies?
These vital questions were addressed by a gathering of Jewish sages (Tannaim) described in the Zohar as the Idra Rabba, the “Great Assembly”.[46] At the outset of the Great Assembly, the great Tanna Simeon ben Yochai asks: “How long will we abide in a state of existence supported by one pillar alone?” It should be pretty clear from what we’ve just been discussing that the “state of existence” Rabbi Simeon is referring to here is ego-experience. It’s an incomplete mono-reality which shuts out all alternative realities. This defective state of Consciousness excludes negative existence and thus ignores the myriad potential paths whose sum yields manifest Reality. In a rectified condition, the World of manifestation must rest upon the foundation of the many Worlds. But in the defective status which Rabbi Simeon laments, our World is supported solely by the one thread of Reality that registers in our conscious experience.
Such a condition is inherently unstable and unsustainable. It’s like an edifice that rests upon an incomplete foundation. The phenomenon that we perceive with our senses is only the outward shell of Reality. Within the shell of the phenomenon lie the noumena, the “alternate threads” of Reality. The noumena comprise the kernel that embodies the nourishing content of experience and gives meaning to the phenomenon. As we’ve mentioned, narrowly phenomenal perception is at the root of idolatry, because it nullifies the inner dimension of the World where true divinity resides. Rabbi Simeon confirms this in the Idra Rabba, insofar as he follows his denunciation of the “one pillar” mono-reality with a curse upon those who worship graven images.
As an alternate mindset to the phenomenal idolatry he decries, Rabbi Simeon offers the model of the Greater Assembly, of which he declares: “We are the sum of all.” His formula of the “sum of all” is of the same tenor as Feynman’s “sum over histories” and represents yet another remarkable instance of how the Kabbalah anticipates the concepts of modern physics. In this instance, Simeon ben Yochai not only anticipates Feynman’s theory, he goes beyond it. When he speaks about the “sum of all”, he is also referring to the Sephira of Yesod, which is called “all” because it conveys all the divine Light that enters this World.[47] The Hebrew word for “all” is kol ֹלכּ, for which the gematria is 50 — the number of the Jubilee Cycle which epitomizes the non-linear Time of the Olam.
Yesod of Olam
Yesod is considered to be the Foundation on which the World (Malkut) rests. It follows that when Rabbi Simeon in the Idra Rabba alludes to the defective condition of “one pillar”, he is actually referring to a dysfunction of Yesod. To understand the consequences of this dysfunction, we must first comprehend the nature of Yesod. Earlier in this chapter, we observed that Yesod is the metaphysical axis that connects the World of manifestation with the many Worlds, aka the Olamim. In his Proverbs, Solomon defines the role of Yesod:
As the whirlwind passeth, so the wicked is no more: but the righteous is an everlasting foundation.[48]
From
our discussions in Chapter Four, we recall that the whirlwind is a metaphor for
the closing off of mundane Time from the orthogonal “imaginary” Time dimension
that links it with Eternity. In other
words, it’s the process by which the Olam is hidden and concealed from our
perception. What’s particularly
interesting is that the Hebrew word for whirlwind suphah also signifies the
Yesod
is the archetypal phallus that penetrates the Womb of Time. It “parts of the waters”, in the sense of opening
the closed mem of mayim מים. It’s the same mystical
principle that enables the “rod” of Moses to access the orthogonal Time
dimension concealed in the “reeds” of the
Getting back to Solomon’s Proverb, the part about the Righteous being an everlasting Foundation requires some Hebrew restoration before we can extract its full meaning. The Hebrew version reads: “The Tzaddik is a Yesod of Olam.” In other words, the Consciousness that characterizes the Righteous Tzaddik is grounded in more than the “one pillar” of ego-centered perception. It is instead sustained by “Yesod of Olam”, the multiple centers of constellated Consciousness. The Tzaddik is one who perceives not just the phenomenon of experience — the outcome of Feynman’s “sum over paths” — but also the unrealized potentials that contribute to that “sum”. The latter we have called the noumena, which reside in the Hidden Time and constitute the source of all meaning.
When
the noumena are reintegrated with our experience, our Consciousness is no
longer infected with the “evil inclination”, which is the legacy of Eve’s
transgression. No longer is the
illumination that flows down to Malkut from the upper Worlds constrained to pass
through the narrow one-dimensional “reed” of Mundane Time. Now Yesod, the channel of supernal Light, is
opened to the many Worlds of the Olam, opened to the full Symmetry of the
higher dimensions. The symbol of this
reconstituted Symmetry is water, and the noumena which are its essence comprise
“living water”. With the flow of “living
water” through Yesod restored, our experience of this World again becomes the
experience of
