Recently I have begun my meditations by thinking about the Divine World of Ein Sof, Keter, Chokmah and Binah. Then, as Semion Vinokur writes in The Secrets of the Eternal Book, in meditation we wait for the wisdom and understanding from the Divine World to flow into us. Sometimes I wait and nothing seems to flow; other times I “listen” to what feels like a teaching.
This morning the following quotations returned to me. (I study the Kabbalah and Buddhism, switching back and forth from the Tree of Life to the Five-Buddha Mandala. I see both as paths to the summit. Where the Kabbalah uses the term God, I see the abstract qualities of the sefirot. Where Buddhism refrains from any mention of God, I see the abstract qualities of the Buddha.)
The first quotations are from Daniel Matt’s book Zohar Annotated and Explained.
Daniel Matt writes, “What are the very first words of the Bible? Everyone knows that In the beginning God created. But for the Zohar, which insists on interpreting the original Hebrew words in their precise order, the verse means something radically different: With the beginning, It [Ein Sof] created God [one of higher sefirot]. There is a divine reality far beyond our normative conception of ‘God,’ and it is this reality that the Zohar inspires us to discover and explore.”
“The immediate reality of God is not foreign to us: it was once our original nature…The Zohar urges us to recover the loss, cosmic consciousness, without renouncing ourselves of the world.”
“By penetrating the literal surface of the Torah, the mystical commentators transform the biblical narrative into a biography of God.”
That led me to write this entry which took much of what I’ve been reading and reassembled the information. Ein Sof created God? For years I have been reading about the Kabbalah and different versions of introductions to the Zohar, but I have never seen an explanation of the original Hebrew as Daniel Matt translated it.
It opened up a whole new perspective for me. Ein Sof is Nothingness and “creates” God. [The Buddhist Heart Sutra: Form is Emptiness; Emptiness is Form] In essence, God is unlimited potential, Everything, in the form of the qualities of the Tree of Life. And then I think of the Fruit of the Spirit: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness.”
So, God is not a manifested form that we can comprehend, God is abstract qualities, so it follows God is Love. From there I think of the Torah, not as history, but as a mythology in which, as Vinokur writes, we all are Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and others; they represent God’s qualities in manifested form. They are what we are to be. It’s all a mythology: in Egypt we are slaves to our animal natures, but we can find our way to the promised land.
Pondering the Garden of Eden, God creates Adam and Eve, the male and female aspects of us. Adam is symbolic of consciousness without an object, and the Garden is the blissful world in which Adam is like God, not separate. But the purpose of creation is for humanity to be like God by making choices. We bite the apple [or whatever the symbol happens to be] which causes consciousness to become subject and object; light is wave and particle.
In essence, we begin the Hero’s Journey. We go out into this subject/object world, encounter obstacles, struggles, suffering, joy, happiness and live our lives attempting to embody the God-like qualities of the Sefirot, the fruit of the spirit, or the Eightfold Noble Path.
In the New Testament the mythology continues: Jesus is symbolic of a human who has united ego and soul, who lives in the world but is not trapped in the world of manifestation. He embodies all the God-like qualities; he represents what we are capable of becoming. The possible symbolic death, the three days between death and resurrection, are similar to the bardo period in Buddhism, a time when the ego or subject/object consciousness is supplanted by the unconscious; i.e., like when we dream.
This is why The Tibetan Book of the Dead suggests we prepare ourselves in meditation so that the scenes before us are familiar, such as the five-Buddha mandala as well as the wrathful buddhas and the possible realms from the hell-being realm to the god realm. For others they may see a white light and whatever version of a deity to whom they have prayed.
The time between dying and when the subject/object consciousness returns is not like our twenty-four-hour days, but a sense of time passing which, for some people, may be only minutes. If Jesus is the symbol of what we are capable of becoming, then after his three days, he reenters the world to show us that our lives continue after death.
And, as in Buddhism, Jesus’s subtle body is always ready to assist us much as the Bodhisattva remains in the world to help all sentient beings.
As I always do, oh so many times, I write and rewrite and often discard a possible entry. What I write is not what is in my head. It’s as if what flows in does not flow out the same way. This morning at about 6:40 I sat for meditation and information became available. As I listened, I realized how important it was so I got up and turned on the computer.
I typed, rewrote, and almost stopped because two hours later I was still rereading and typing the entry which didn’t seem to convey the depth of understanding.
I am presently suffering from some vertigo, literally, and this information seemed to slightly turn the world at an odd angle. Thinking about the words “Ein Sof created God” was as if a large piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.
I don’t know if this entry does the same for readers, maybe it’s more like lots of puzzle pieces but without the box top to show what the puzzle should look like. If that’s the case, my apologies.
P.S. More than 24 hours later, now Sunday morning almost noon, and with the help of editing by Frank DeMarco, I am finally posting the entry.
Tags: Buddhism, Consciousness, Kabbalah, Meditation, Religion, spirituality, Torah, Zohar
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