Mythological Overview 6-21-2024

This morning as I sat for meditation I began thinking and “listening” to more on the mythology. To fill in the gaps when I started typing, I referred to my notes and the Internet.

Nothingness/Everything creates God, the qualities of the fruit of the spirit—”love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control”. All these qualities exist in the first vessel of the Kabbalah as intentions, subjects without objects, everything in potential and possibilities without time or space…what Franklin Merrell-Wolff experienced and called “High Indifference” and others have experienced as enlightenment.

Today we might refer to this state as quantum energy or Light before it becomes wave and particle, subject and object, observer and observed. For the qualities to be in material form there must be a sentient being to embody them. And for the religious mythology, there must be a God and humans, beginning with Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Adam embodies all the Godlike qualities and everything is blissful. In a sense, he is one with God. When told to name the animals, he does so but isn’t aware that it is the beginning of subject/object duality. After Eve is created from Adam, the snake enters the mythology to inform her it is necessary to eat the forbidden fruit so the world can be set in motion. In fact, God wants them to experience the world because it has been created for them to receive.

Morning Contemplation 6-19-2024

Where to start? I have been reading and studying the introduction to the Pritzker Edition of the Zohar by Daniel Matt. This morning around 4:15 a.m. I woke up and thoughts began flowing. I lay in bed and hoped I would remember everything but, when I looked at my watch at 4:44 and 44 seconds, I decided to get up and type.

Grammatically the statement seems awkward but the essence of my contemplation was “God is Qualities”. This morning it felt as if a light suddenly went on. As I stated in a previous entry, Daniel Matt wrote that when the original text of Genesis is read correctly, God is not the subject but the object of the sentence. God is created from Nothingness/Everything. The Kabbalah is the biography of God.

In the Kabbalah, Nothingness/Everything, which retains its Essence, sends its Light into the vessel which has the quality of Wisdom. There the Light remains unformed, more like an intent, until the Light flows into the vessel of Understanding which births the qualities of the following vessels, the Godlike qualities.

So God is not a “sky God”, as Ilia Delio states in her writing, not an anthropomorphic being, but the qualities of loving-kindness, strength, beauty, all the qualities of the fruit of the Spirit, all the qualities of the archetypes as described by Amit Goswami. In other words, we know in our hearts what those qualities are—intuitively we know what it would be like to embody all the highest and best qualities. We may pretend we don’t know; our ego may confuse us; but our soul knows and whispers them to us always.

Back to Reading

Due to a two-week cold, not much was accomplished because I didn’t have enough energy to even read. Two books stared at me from the desk: Ilia Delio’s The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole, which I have been reading in sections, and her more recent book, Re-Enchanting the Earth: why AI needs religion, which I haven’t yet begun.

But, what roused me from my inactivity was the arrival of The Zohar, Volume One, the Pritzker Edition, translation and commentary by Daniel C. Matt. I have looked online at the set, eight volumes from the Stanford University Library, at a cost of $800.00. Volume one alone is 500 pages, so I wondered whether I would live long enough to read the whole set. I contemplated purchasing volume one but, thanks to Frank DeMarco’s suggestion, I was able to request the book through interlibrary loan. Volume one was available in the United States, from Barton College in Wilson, North Carolina. Two other copies were available in France. Yesterday I picked up the book at the Yellow Springs Library and, my present to myself for Father’s Day, was to begin reading it this morning.

I have only read to page xxxv and taken two pages of notes since Acknowledgments and an Introduction similar to Matt’s other book, Zohar Annotated & Explained, which I read recently, are included.

Matt writes that, “So, as you undertake this adventure, expect to be surprised—stay alert. The Zohar’s teachings are profound and intense; one who hopes to enter and emerge in peace should be careful, preserving, simultaneously receptive and active. The message is not served to you on a platter; you must engage the text and join the search for meaning. Follow the words to what lies beyond and within; open the gates of imagination.”

Zen koan: “First there is a mountain; then there is no mountain; then there is.”

Today I finished read Zohar Annotated & Explained, translated and annotated by Daniel C. Matt. This book, along with Semion Vinokur’s book The Secrets of the Eternal Book: The Meaning of the Stories of the Pentateuch, have occupied my reading and thinking for several weeks.

When I finish reading books that mean so much, I often just sit and ask myself, “Now, what do I do with the information?” I don’t know anyone who has as much interest in the Kabbalah and Buddhism as I do, probably because I don’t know many people. So, I mentally write a blog entry.

Matt uses the Zen koan above as an explanation for reading the Torah. First there is the plain meaning of the words on the page. “As meaning unfolds, layer by layer, one encounters the face of Torah. This is revelation, enlightenment. But in Kabbalah, enlightenment leads back to the word.” Thus, he concludes, “One emerges from the mystical experience of Torah with a profound appreciation of her textual form.”

And then, as often happens, my mind leaps from one book I’ve read to another. This time it connected me to Ilia Delio’s book The Not-Yet God: Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, and the Relational Whole. Delio wrote that “The religion of tomorrow is beyond the axial religions of yesterday,” and then asks, “But what will be the myth of the new religion?”

Morning Meditation 5-25-2024

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.”