Spiritual growth is a personal process that can happen independently from socially created structures like religion. Yet, practicing a religious tradition sets up symbolic representations of these processes, making it possible to share our development in a group context. I think that when we are conscious of a spiritual reality it is easier to make intelligent choices and healthy life decisions whether or not we see ourselves as being religious. I hope to show how the Sephirot within the Jewish Kabbalistic tradition can symbolize important metaphysical growth. Even for those who are not Jewish, I believe there is great value in being able to see how Kabbalah works as a representational system. Mystical symbolism can be useful on a practical level when applied to healing both individual and societal traumas. However, before it is even possible to use a mystical method to do this successfully, we need to first legitimize alternative realities to a disbelieving modern world.
Often discussions within a Religious Studies context is on whether or not Religion is separate from religious experience, probably because generally it is believed they are one and the same. It would seem we lose a great deal of perspective when only religion is recognized and the process that ignites that religion is ignored, which is much like recognizing the car without acknowledging the usefulness of gasoline. This is particularly problematic as Gershom Scholem says:
From a historical point of view, the mystical quest for the divine takes place almost exclusively within a prescribed tradition – the exception seems to be limited to modern time, with their dissolution of all traditional ties. Where such a tradition prevails, a religious authority, established long before the mystic was born, has been recognized by the community for many generations.[1]
Every culture has access to its own magic and mysticism, but some cultures make it easier for an individual to access it than others. As the world globalizes, we see a purpose for diversity in religious attitudes as it pushes us toward Post-Modern sensibilities.
Over a century ago William James gave a series of talks for the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 that were published 3 years later by Longmans, Green and Co. as Varieties of Religious Experience.[2] This is an extraordinary accomplishment from a man who says that he has never had a mystical experience. During the last 100 years, there has been tremendous pressure to disbelieve any experiences that do not follow the very narrow perimeters of empirically explainable reality, otherwise known as science. Their premise is only that which can be measured by modern technology is valid. As we all know, whether or not a thing can be measured does not prove its existence. This is especially true when we understand how many natural phenomena are beyond our current levels of knowledge – two examples being the “dark matter”[3] being scientifically explored today or something more personally accessible like love.
In recent times Western Civilization has been bombarded by rationalist dogma that attempts to discredit mystical routes to information. I take a strong stance against theorists such as E.B. Tyler, Sir James Frazier, Max Weber, B.F. Skinner, Richard Dawkins, Mark Hauser, and Stephen Pinker who have been at the forefront of creating the new God of Science. Consequently, greatly contributing to our unbalanced American and Western European worldview is a strict language and methodology to support these scientific and technological paradigms. Their overwhelming use of well-researched facts and rationalist theories have been disenchanting society and creating a culture of secular non-belief. The public has responded by craving entertainment filled with fantasy, magic and spiritually guided inspiration so clearly Science does not speak about all things for all people.
According to Scholem’s description of mystics,[4] for example, I am a secular mystic. This does not mean that I am a prophet, contender for Sainthood, destroyer of traditions, nor a messenger from God. I am however, arguing that secular mysticism is ubiquitous, not exclusively ecclesiastical and a valid way to understand the world we live in. This is why spiritual processes can be perceived through the right symbols. Because secular mystics are eclectic and open to all kinds of thought, they do not need a religious construct to interpret the information they perceive.
Secular mysticism is useful when we need to merge cultural identities and interpret specific religious symbols that have broad mystical applications. By finding alternate uses for the information they contain, these symbols are both part of the religion they come from and separate in an expansive way. Studies show that those tribal approaches which apply mysticism to individual mental health issues can be therapeutically successful. Similar techniques can provide solutions to other types of non-tribal problems if the spiritual healing mechanism is understood. We can learn a great deal from different social symbologies, myths and allegories as we learn better how to open our own perspectives about unfamiliar cultural and religious worldviews. To do this effectively religion must be separated from its mystical components and then creatively and intuitively utilized in a mutually productive way. Science (as it is currently formulated) is not yet able to do this type of metaphysical work, nor can it explain the process of spiritual healing and transformation that people experience.
Separating Religion from Mysticism
Clifford Geertz is adamant about how distorted our perceptions of Religion and Mysticism becomes after applying social science’s labels for such phenomena as animism, animatism, ancestor worship, totemism, shamanism, mysticism, fetishism, saint worship and demonology. This need to label “is actually the first step toward denaturing our material, toward substituting cliche for description and assumption for analysis.”[5] For this reason, it would be more difficult identifying communities within a totem context in order to implement tribal processes. Neutralizing the negative effects of misusing various cultural paradigms becomes increasingly easier as we differentiate between the cultural structures around the mystical process and the mystical process itself.
Geertz is extremely cautious about universalizing mysticism as I am attempting to do because he says the study of Comparative Religions shows mysticism has different meaning to different people and he is interested in studying what those differences are. I believe the differences Geertz was interested in exploring are imbedded in the culture where the mysticism is experienced, not in the nature of mysticism itself. John Dominic Crossan believes that we can see a mystical truth through a sapiential vision, or rather a vision filled with wisdom. In a proper Greek context wisdom may bring virtue,[6] but Crossan also explores trance and possession[7] in Portuguese children who see a concrete vision of a woman that they have learned looks like the Blessed Virgin Mary. I can say through personal experience that yes, children can go into a “trance” state, and what they see in that trance is culturally determined. When I was three, I had a vivid and unforgettable experience during a “visit” with three little girls in dresses playing together on a stairway imprinted on the wall paper of a house at a Mother Goose fantasy park in Texas. They called my name, ran up the stairs, waved at me as they exited out a “side door” on the wall. I now feel my vision appeared in a form I could understand and that if I had seen the same vision as an adult, I would have experienced something completely different. Perhaps this is what Geertz was referring to as he struggled with translating mystical experience to an academic sensibility.
Interestingly, Joseph Dan explains that ideas around mysticism came from uniquely Christian religious concepts of “aspiration” and occasionally the “achievement of a direct, experiential relationship with God, seeking union with the Divine.” In fact, he explains that the religious mystics even testified that their experiences were different from those typically religious. He says:
While religion is an expression of faith in the words of scripture and revelation, mystics tend to claim that truth lies beyond any possibility of expression by terms derived from sensual experience in logical deduction. Linguistic communication is understood through the sensual and logical messages that language conveys. … In mysticism language is apophatic, a “language of unsaying”[8]
There are mystical experiences within religious contexts, but many are not. Once we see a mystical operation separate from the Religious social identifier, we next need to see how mystical concepts are communicated.
In Geertz’s model, the mystic evolves from a specific cultural worldview which is bridged with a developing ethos through the mystic’s visions and insights. The new ethos then creates symbols which the mystic interprets and feeds back to the general worldview.[9] So accordingly the mystic’s ability to interpret theosophical impressions comes at the completion of four stages:
1) Identifying the cultural paradigms and utilizing the paradigms’ spiritual perspective;
2) Receiving the information and identifying the cultural lens through which mystical information is filtered;
3) Engaging the society and assisting in the creation of symbols that will translate the mystic’s method into secular meanings; and
4) Incorporating the new symbols through the creation of a new cultural worldview.
Identifying the cultural paradigms and utilizing the paradigms’ spiritual perspective:
To answer questions about an “enchanted” reality, we would need to explore the perspective of mysticism (whether or not it is religiously based) by looking at the historical demarcations of the sacred and supernatural. What in this life and within nature could be super natural? Life by definition is natural and everything in the universe is sacred, so only our perspectives can go beyond this. From a mystic’s viewpoint, this is true because we are all interconnected and as Kushner states “Everything is God,”[10] which I believe will be easily illustrated in our next section through the symbolic language of the Kabbalah and more particularly, the Sephirot.
Many believe that mystical experiences outside of an ecclesiastical context are dangerous.[11] I argue there is nothing extraordinary about mystical experiences and that in fact they are a part of our nature with or without drugs, religion, meditation, or exercise, but are triggered during “every day” life. To me, it seems more normal to have periodic ecstatic moments than to not have any at all. Literature frequently describes altered states of consciousness. The OED has two definitions for “secular:” the primary definition being “of the world” which seems to mean living and natural. The second was “not ecclesiastical.” We get the sense that mysticism (natural or ecclesiastical) denotes degrees of interconnectedness between us and our world and something beyond. Considering that the experience of “God” or something transcendent is relatively common there are undoubtedly valid explanations for mystical phenomenon that are not supernatural.
The idea that there might be a middle ground (or better yet a nexus) where science and academia meet the religious community really appeals to me. I think it exists in a place where we can separate ourselves from the barriers of disbelief in our modern culture. Charles Taylor calls this intersection Jamesian Space, in honor of William James.[12] This Jamesian Space, then, gives us the much needed neutral area from which to ask objective questions and identify a particular lens through which the information is being filtered;
Receive the information and identify the cultural lens through which mystical information is filtered:
We could argue language is a form of cultural symbolism and offers many ways to express meaning of non-concrete experiences, like poetry for instance. Translating meaning from one culture to another, or one state of consciousness to another, is required whether the interpreter is an academic or a mystic. But then, in his JUDAISM a Very Short Introduction,[13] Norman Solomon reminds us that English is primarily a Christian language, especially with its Latin influence. He says, “The English language is not neutral. It evolved in a Christian civilization; it comes ready loaded with a cargo of Christian concepts and assumptions.” It would seem there would be more efficient and easier ways for the empire building English-speaking people to succeed at cultural assimilation than to marginalize and completely destroy non-English speaking cultures, especially since people often use non-linguistic symbols when words are inadequate; which is exactly how ritual can be effective.
The meaning embodied in ritual, for example, is effective for translating potency of a story or myth for specific cultures to a general audience. While text is still a more efficient means of communication, symbolism in characters and pictures can also be successful for translating meaning between cultures. If we first accept Kabbalah as emerging from the Jewish community in the 13th century it would seem best understood and utilized in a Judaic context, however there is a “mystical” interweaving between what we see, taste and feel under various states of consciousness that is not religiously driven. If, as I contend, all cultures can contact the same non-physical mystical experience, then the only thing separating our spirituality from religion is the identity which culture imprints on our existence.
Some mystics see their experiences as coming from a divine source and believe we are all part of the Monad. Every perspective has some aspect of the truth that it sees clearly. Some within the Jewish tradition tell us that there were 600,000 Jews at the bottom of Mt. Sinai when Moses brought the tablets down from the mountain top and each Jew present took with them one part of God’s revealed truth.[14] Even more compelling is that Mt. Sinai is identified as a mountain in the wilderness and not belonging to any nation. This would seem to tell us God’s truth does not belong to any particular tradition, but to everybody – religious.[15]
From what I understand, there are at least 3 Judaic principals that can be universally shared:
1) Interconnectedness lying within Isaiah 6:3 declares that: “God’s presence is the fullness of the world.” Simply put, everyone and everything is a manifestation of the Divine.[16]
2) PaRDeS, the four ways to interpret Torah: It is through varying interpretation of religious text[17] that Jewish scripture shows their traditions are ever-changing and continuously alive, but since the meanings are so fluid, interpretations could also fit into contexts outside the Jewish traditions. One can tell stories, write books and poems, connect one verse to another without changing the text. This is especially true for the deepest layers of mysticism.
3) The symbols of God as depicted by the Zohar are represented through 10 spheres of emanations that produce the Sephirot.
Since the first principle is self-evident (either you accept God in everything or not), we need to explore, then, the second principle using Michael Fishbane’s explanation of the four ways of interpreting Torah commonly known as PaRDeS, as he shows us in his book Sacred Attunement.[18]
According to Fishbane, PaRDes is an acronym for:
Peshat (the so-called plain or contextual meaning of scripture; the direct or ungarnished sense, so to say, insofar as we can know it); derash (that far-ranging theological and legal reformulations of scripture; providing more indirect and mediated meanings of the text, in response to the ungoing challenges of religious life and belief); remez (the assorted hints of allusions of scripture, insofar as its words and phrases may be decoded to reveal moral and philosophical or psychological allegories); and sol (the intuited spiritual or mystical dimensions of scripture, inseparatble fromt eh cosmic and supernal truths of Divine Being).(65)
Through considering Pardes, we better understand how Judaism cultivates sensibilities from scriptural study that serves both life and theological consciousness. (65) The point to reading scripture through Peshat, though, is to use “a vehicle for speaking about the fitness of a specific linguistic turn or formulation, and thus, in its adapted use as a principle for interpretation.” As is important with any phenomenological study which interprets the correct intent of unfamiliar scriptural text, peshat stresses the importance of fitting the meaning of the correctly translated word to its context. Fishbane feels Torah may read as if it was depicting everyday life, but as you read it, it takes on a “second-order construction” as one from a literary imagination used to demonstrate intentional acts that “rise into actuality through the role of a reader, who calls them forth in the process of reading.”(66) Scholem supports this premise as he explains that Torah appears in its purest form as an oral tradition which then is interpreted through text to become an organism of 2 spheres, the oral and written.[19] It is extremely important to understand that the meaning of a particular scripture in the Torah becomes clear within the full spectrum of meanings that unfold through the process of interpretation.[20]
Another important aspect of peshat is the interpretation of names and places as they are purposefully used. Our teachers and parents guide us through the demarcations of our world making these demarcations habitual as we begin to distinguish one place or person from another. We are constantly attuning our self then to clues and terms utilized by Torah bridging an “other” ancient world to one that is familiar. We are then able to participate in a shared experience as the words spoken help us to hear the truth as is filtered through all of mankind’s diversity differentiating one person’s way from another. (70-71)
Where peshat is concerned the “discursive contexts of the text and concern to disclose its meaning as a document of antiquity,” Derash stimulates contemporaneous meanings of scripture. There has been an interrelationship between words within scriptural language that are relevant beyond their immediate context. “But now it is not the syntax of a given sentence that helps determine the sense of the words, but the inner resonance of selected words or phrases with others in the larger canonical whole.” Also, peshat focuses on the context of what we are and are not, where Derash is concerned with the similarity or difference of one word or phrase from another. (75)
Scripture is deemed an everflowing fountain with diverse meanings expressed through the mouths of its teachers. This sage said this, and that one that; another person transmitted this teaching or that one, and from all this new possibilities are disclosed through creative combinations or reformulations of scriptural language. (76) … the acts of derash swing far and wide and gather textual citations into a vortex of instruction. (78)
The act of linking phrases from Genesis 28:12-13 to Mt. Sinai validates the “omnisignificance of the Written Torah,”(79) The most relative aspect of the Oral Torah for me is how it is created within changing historical contexts. There is within derash, though, a “distinctive mode of consciousness” that permeates our life and theology. Foucault called this distinctive mode of consciousness an “unthought” which becomes the pre-imminent knowledge, presupposition and natural cultural foundation that permeates our infancy, childhood, adolescence, and creates the fundamental base by which we make our adult decisions. Our facts, therefore are actually taken from the texture of our world, so a specific Jewish worldview will necessarily generate an interpretation that is distinctive to his time and belief systems. We could even say that the modern Jew would see things from a completely different perspective from those that were waiting for Moses to descend from Mt. Sinai. What all this means is even if my vision is not connected with a diaspora, memories of slavery, heroisms through progroms and genetic cleansing, I can still apply spiritual truth to the context of my life even if I can not interpret texts with the same Judaic cultural understanding. As Fishbane says,
Moral life is bound up with concrete determinations and the ongoing explication of norms and ideals. This has particular force when one is dealing with the language of precedent or tradition, and one must be mindful of the way terms are carried over and applied to others.(83)
Through Derash we develop sensitivity toward interpreting facts and the differences in various modes in how we talk with one another instead of projecting our own truth onto somebody else.
The third means of interpreting Torah is remez utilized by those who see beneath the surface of text. Where the peshat gives us hints through the incongruencies scripture sometimes has with reason. These steps into what does not seem to make sense makes us look deeper into the text for what is meant to be interpreted. Fishbane explains that though an arm can simply be an arm in one respect, even within our own paradigm we say something like “Take my hand if you need to.” This obviously is not supposed to be read literally but has another entirely different meaning than what is communicated by words alone.
On another level we can see the remez as a Buddhist kohn or Christian parable which Fishbane uses in his example of Jacob’s dream. Within Jacob’s vision is 1) a ladder, 2) that is set on the ground, 3) which goes up to heaven, 4) where angels are climbing up and down, and 5) something that the Lord stood upon. Each phrase, each word becomes distinctive onto its self and is conjoined into a discernable pattern with the other words and phrases. It was from this dream, for instance, that the Kabbalist, Maimonides determined that God is “stable, permanent and constant.”(89-90) Fishbane asserts that this makes sense if the ladder is understood to be gradations of knowledge and that we move from gross to higher spiritual realities while developing our perceptions about the nature of things.
Finally, we see how the sod brings us to terms with there being no difference between the hidden and revealed mysteries. The civilizations existing for millennia understood reality as the divine seamlessly blending with worldly affairs. As we began to separate deity from some “profane” way of living, I believe we lost the sense of the ever present GOD. It still exists within ideas of Interconnectiveness and God being everywhere, but a concept that we are living in the presence of the divine at all times does not seem to coalesce with a transcendent God that works outside of our personal realities. Within the paradigm of “everything being divine” is that every interpretation we read from scripture rings a truth that can add to a general theme if allowed, no matter what Religious Faith is speaking. Truth, after all, can only be considered Truth if it smacks of reality.
Within Fishbane’s explanations of Pardes, he reminds us over and again that if we take on the responsibility of reading into someone else’s understanding of Truth, we need to take our own history, experience, teachings out of the interpretation to more closely examine the author of the text in context with his own time. I am not sure that is possible. There have been many changes in our cultural paradigms since the ancient authors first put their stories down in print. Some of their beliefs are simply not accepted today on any level, the keeping of concubines for example. Fishbane sees the sod as a scriptural recognition of the ruptures and repairs incorporated within our human dynamics.(94) For me these ruptures and repairs are part of nature, but because of our self consciousness we take these processes personally. What in nature does not engage in the rise and fall of a tide that is connected to the power of the moon? Everything in our lives is subject to the same laws of nature, though humanity seems to engage in some sort of need to control the swing of the pendulum. I believe it is that simple. If we want to look at reality, we have to understand that there is not one person who is outside of the natural rhythm. Thus there would not be a real separation between us some sacred.
Fishbane tells us as we look at the borders of speech, we should guard our tongue for “what can hardly be said; and out of fear for its trivialization and misuse.” (95) We can learn from the respect demonstrated within the Jewish approach to scripture. I have personally experienced that when someone approaches me with respect, channels open between me and the other person. This would seem to be a realistic mode of approaching any relationship whether between author and reader or two people passing in the street. This premise can transfer then to the idea that if everything is one, interconnected God, it would follow that there is only that which is holy in all its natural flow and rhythm, a belief closely held by the ancients long ago.
Fishbane asks, “How might the exegetical modality of sod help cultivate the reader for the tasks of life and God-mindedness?” (97) There is a process engaged while reading Torah that changes us. This happens when you read any text that touches on Truth as does Torah. Apparently we morph so to speak from one state of mind to another. It creates the lens that we are able to see more objectively and read the scripture written by people living in the distant past. For me the only thing we need to change about our interpretation of text is the idea of “and” rather than “or.” What I mean here is that to read within the context of sod perhaps we need a manner of incorporating the vision of others that might be looking at the same scripture, and not believe that one vision is mutually exclusive. A heresy then becomes a different plane of the prism. Turn it in the light and a different color filters through. Through a more flexible perspective we could experience a gestalt shift that allows us to enter the mysteries from the mind into the body.
A final point with Pardes I take from Fishbane is that mysticism is a physical dynamic that connects us to everything else as shown within scripture through that which was seen, heard, tasted, and then spoken to others in order to both teach and ask questions. Even our lungs and breath establish the rhythm we approach the world. (100) The physicality of mysticism should not be surprising considering the many rhapsodies of passion embodied in a plethora of mystical writings since the beginning of the written word. Mysticism is indeed physically engaging at all levels as the given message strikes every bodily center. It is interesting to see how this rhapsodizing becomes more discreet as we progress in time. Rumi’s poetic Muslim epiphanies are tantalizing but not as graphic as Solomon’s Jewish Songs which pale next to Inanna’s Sumerian Sacred Marriage.[21] Perhaps from a mystical standpoint, one question we could ask would be whether our increasingly delicate sensibilities creates sexual taboos to protect our civilization or creating harmful barriers to both our own natures and the connections we have to our world. Kabbalistic language and stories give provocative perspectives to a mystical experience by “saying one’s own Torah.”[22]
In his Introduction, Lawrence Kushner tells us that Psalm 19[i] starts us on a “guided tour of the Jewish mystical imagination. The biblical poet elegantly sets before us the primary themes and the sequence of their occurrence in the formation of a personal, Jewish mystical world view.” Psalm 19 is reflective of the Tree of Knowledge and when things actually have verbal meaning as we see through Adam in the Creation they are not always obvious.[23] Kushner views Psalm 19 as translating into four parts.
1. God’s presence is the fullness of the world: as recognized within what Abraham Joshua Herschel called “our legacy of wonder.” For Herschel “our chronic dullness to wonderment is the beginning of sinfulness. There is simply more to reality than meets the eye.” By quoting Herschel Kushner writes:
Among the many things the religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder. The surest way to suppress our ability to understand the meaning of God and the importance of worship is to take things for granted. Indifference to the sublime wonder of living is the root of sin. (10)
2. The power of the Creator within each created thing. According to classical Hasidism, each created thing carries the Power of the Creator. Kushner quotes Menachem Nachum Twersky of Chernobyl as saying:
God is the fullness of the world: there is no place empty of the divine. There is nothing besides God and everything that exists comes from God. And, for this reason, the power of the Creator resides within each created thing.(12)
3. There is no place without God’s presence. Kushner says this is true even within a concentration camp. He quotes from Beneei Makhahava Tovah, a mystic that wrote this before dying in a concentration camp:
I may not be able to see it right now, but the Holy One fills all creation, being is made of God, you and I, everything is made of God—even the grains of sand beneath my feet, the whole world is included and therefore utterly nullified within God—while I, in my stubborn insistence on my own autonomy and independence, only succeed in banishing myself from any possibility of meaning whatsoever. (12)
4. The light of Divine Presence is Everywhere and realized through our every action. From Rav Abraham Isaac Ha-Lohen Kook we hear:
I you want, O creature of flesh and blood, contemplate the light of God’s presence throughout all creation. Contemplate the ecstasy of spiritual existence eand how ti suffuses every dimension of life—spiritual and material. Right there before the vision of your body and the vision of your soul.
Meditate on the wonders of creation and the divine life within them. Not in some diluted form, as a mere performance distant from your vision but instead, know it as the realityh within which you live. (13)
Sometimes a mystic identifies a useful “truth” within a foreign religious paradigm. When that foreign truth is then transferred to the mystic’s culture, it is for all intents and purposes new information. It is up to the mystic to assist the society at large to assimilate it within their own structure.
Engage the society and assist in creating symbols that will translate the mystic’s method into secular meanings
“What is of interest to the history of religions,” says Sholem, “is the mystic’s impact on the historical world, his conflict with the religious life of his day and with his community.”[24] We who see an enchanted illuminated world are the final vanguard against a modern non-believing mechanistic mainstream. It is said that every sephira directly affects and is affected by the other nine. It is possible then to theorize a pattern of triggers set off by a given action. We see this in nature through the gene within a chromosome that is set off by a chemical reaction. This one gene follows sympathetic triggers built within the genes along its path. As I am not a Kabbalist, I am not in a position to say this a cosmic Truth or symbolic reality, however, I am following the premise that there are connections within nature that can reflect a mystical symbol. With that said, using one of many possible paths, the most direct way from Ayn Sof to the Shekhinah would be efficient to illustrate how the mystical experience appears to a otherwise closed off society by following the path of the Kabbalistic Sefirot. I will first give Scholem’s description for the meaning of the Sefirot as he describes on pages 102-105 from On the Kabbalah and its Mysticism in the first column below and in the next column will be my personal interpretation of its symbols and how they can show the way mysticism works. [25]
Incorporating the new symbols through the creation of a new cultural worldview.
There are historical perspectives as we consider new symbols for new worldviews. Our society has completely changed since Lindberg first flew his plane across the Atlantic as it has seen the effects of science and technology when left to its own devices. We are dazed by Toffleresque Future Shock, with the most dramatic results being the speed of global communication and the relentless pace of daily life. If a mystic finds a message for a specific culture, it is quickly picked up and flung across many different social paradigms. What might be meant for a Jew, for instance, quickly also gets translated into Taoist perspectives. This is largely an economic issue and a part of globalization.
Stephen Pinker and Richard Dawkins laugh at the idea of “ghosties” and messages from a nether region saying these ideas come from outmoded sensibilities that lost their value centuries ago. I believe this is because the skeptical scientists are confusing mysticism with religion whose movements are much slower and fill a different human need. As I have previously said, religion is not the same thing as mysticism and the spirituality that houses it any more than a car is the same as the gasoline that fuels it. If we think about how man evolves very slowly, we have put biologically prehistoric man mentally in charge of a very fast moving automobile. As much as we want to say modern religion is more advanced than our precursors’ spiritualities, older belief systems similarly wrestled with newly found conflicting scientific knowledge and stubbornly resisted its incorporation at times. The scientific method and mystical processes can be compared in some interesting ways. They both experiment and use intuition as they explore their new ideas. In fact, their motive forces and methodology are nearly identical. While religion must change, however, to keep up with science and social developments, mystical gnosis is immune to the vagaries of time and place.
A mystic’s message is not going to be accessible to everybody and the modern world is spiritually diverse. Their vision may travel much faster and be accessible to a great many people, but each person has their own way of organizing information, just like the Midrash regarding the 600,000 that were gathered at Mt. Sinai attests. Regardless of global communication capacity and speed, the message will only reach those that are meant to hear it. Select few may internalize the information, many will tune it out. However, we can see the way memes and movements impact upon society. Some of our most potent cultural messages no longer come from the printed word, but rather from movies, songs and television … media that ancient mystics didn’t have access to. The best assimilated messages are those with the most skilled public relations and media management. Popular mystics today like Eckhart Tolle have learned how to share their vision with millions and are hugely successful.
My husband, David and I believe one of the ways to get esoteric information is through automatic writing. In 1999 we took down information that was independently published three years later in a book, The Psychic Vampire Codex, by Michelle Belanger. Even though we had never met this person, her book had a cosmological system and terminology almost identical to what was channeled to us. While the “vampire” paradigm seemed to be a silly affectation by Goth kids and teenagers, Ms. Belanger was using a familiar mythos to explain how energy is ethically exchanged between donor and recipient. The concept of energy being used wit a spiritual paradigm is unfamiliar the more mainstream religions. Traditional vampire mythology (sans the bloodsucking) describes how this psychic exchange works and was a great way to spread the concept. This is exactly how one can quickly and effectively transmit a mystical vision through resistant subcultures into mainstream society.
So to encapsulate, I believe:
That there is a cycle where mystical information assimilates into a targeted group which includes 1) identifying the cultural paradigms and utilizing their spiritual perspective; 2) receiving the information and identifying the cultural lens through which mystical information is filtered; 3) engaging the society and assisting in the creation of symbols that will translate the mystic’s method into secular meanings; and 4) incorporating these symbols into a new cultural worldview. People enjoy new twists on old themes, thus myth is a good way to transmit classic mystical ideas to modern society. There will always be a competition between science, religion and mysticism as each attempts to hold on to their share of economic and informational power. But, above all, what is most important to me is the freedom to access and enjoy the relationship I have with something metaphysical that I can not always cognitively understand.
[1] Scholem, G. (1965). On the Kabbalah and Its Sumbolism.trans. R. Manheim. (p. 6). New York. Schocken Books
[2] James. W. (1905). The Varieties of Religious Experience. (11) Adamant Media Corporation 2005
[3] Primack, J. and Abrams, N. E. (). “In A Beginning…” Quantum Cosmology and Kabbalah.
[4] Scholem. G. (1996). On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. (17) New York:Schocken Books
[5] Geertz, C. (1971). Islam Observed Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia.. (24) Chicago:University of Chicago Press..
[6] John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper, 1995), 55.
[7] Crossan, Jesus. Ibid. 87.
[8] Dan, J. (2007) KABBALAH, A Very Short Introduction. (11) New York:Oxford University Press
[9] see Read, K. (3/15/09) Lecture REL 300 . DePaul University
[10] Kushner
[11] Gitomer, D. PhD REL 305 Lecture in Spring of 2008
[12] Taylor, C. (2007). Secular Age. (592) Cambridge, Massachusetts:The Belknap Press
[13] Solomon. N. (1998). JUDAISM A Very Short Introduction. (1) New York:Oxford University Press
[14] Kushner, L. ibid. Jewish Mystical Tradition. (63)
[15] Edwards, Rabbi Laurence lecture REL 305 May of 2009.
[16] Kushner, L. ibid. Jewish Mystical Tradition. (9)
[17] Kushner, L. ibid. Jewish Mystical Tradition. (59)
[18] Fishbane, M. (2008) Sacred Attunement. (65-107) Chicago:University of Chicago Press
[19] Sholem, G. ibid. Kabbalah and its Mysticism (50)
[20] Fishbane, M. ibid. Sacred Attunement (67)
[21] http://www.piney.com/BabCourship.html
[22] Kushner, L. ibid. Jewish Mystical Tradition. (69)
[23] Kushner, L. Ibid. Jewish Mystical Tradition. (9)
[24] Sholem, G. ibid. Kabbalah and Symbolism (5)
[25] Sholem, G. ibid. Kabbalah and Symbolism (100-104)
[26] See Genesis 1:1-5
[27] See Genesis 1:6-8
[28] See Genesis 1:9-13
[29] See Genesis 1:14-19
[30] See Genesis 1:20-23
[31] See Genesis 1:24-31
[32] See Genesis 2:2
[ii] According to tradition, Ayn Sof begins at the top and moves through the first three stages of Keter, Chokhmah, and Binah which exist in a state that we can not see.
[iii] Excerpt from “In A Beginning…” quantum Cosmology and Kabbalah by Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams:
At that time Moses Maimonides, the Aristotle of Judaism, was teaching that God could only be truly described by negatives: unknowable, incorporeal, unlimited, unchangeable. How, the kabbalists asked, could God be beyond human description yet walk with Adam and Eve and talk with Abraham and Moses, as Torah reports? How, if God is infinite, could there have been room for anything else to be created? In answer to questions like these, the kabbalists developed a
theoretical system portraying God pictorially as having ten different aspects--in Hebrew, sephirot--with complex relationships among all the aspects. Beyond the picture was Ein Sof, "Without End," the unknowable God, which emanated the light that created the aspects of God knowable to humans.
Of ten sephirot, the first three deal with creation, and they correspond fairly closely to concepts from Inflation and Eternal Inflation, although these theories are being developed by cosmologists in response to completely different questions. The first Sephirah was Keter, meaning the Crown, symbolic of the unknowable God’s infinite potential to create--to enter into some relationship with our universe. The second was Hokhmah, the bursting through of our universe. The third was Binah, the female womb in which creation expands from Hokhmah to become what it becomes.
Keter might be a thought-provoking name for the state of eternal inflation, which, like Keter, is infinite, the source of all that will come, yet Nothing, because no differentiation can exist within it. Hokhmah is the exiting from eternity, the beginning of time, the instant with no instant before it. Binah is expansion or spacetime. There could probably be no more accurate name for the Big Bang as we understand it scientifically today than to call it Hokhmah-Binah.
Kabbalah is an example of a cosmology resembling our own which successfully penetrated and enriched the lives of a society. In the sixteenth century, the great kabbalist Isaac Luria developed the scheme further, teaching that at the initial point, Hokhmah, God began to withdraw into self exile in order to make space for the universe. God envelopes the universe, in the Lurianic view, but when God withdrew, evil became possible inside. God sent holy light into the world, but the world was too weak to hold God’s glory. Its cornerstones were vessels that shattered in the light. The role of the Jews is to repair the shattered vessels by recollecting the sparks of God in the world. Tzimtzum is the name of God’s self-exile. Tikkun Olam is the repairing of the world. For Jews in the century or so after the expulsion from Spain in 1492, the concept of a God in exile gave cosmic meaning to their people’s traumatic and seemingly endless history of expulsions and exiles. The cosmology alone, however, did not provide the meaning. It came from the circumstances of their lives and their era, but it was expressible at a deep and satisfying level with the help of their kabbalistic cosmological myth. Can the same become true with modern cosmology?
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