Eastern and Western Spirituality

Non-Duality, Duality, and Beyond Duality: Perspectives on the Evolution of Consciousness

Abstract: The Divinization of matter and the materialization of Divinity.

Summary:

We will examine the origins of the two world spiritual traditions in the primal split of the Brahmanic and Abrahamic revelations and deny the assimilation of either one to the other, as in a so-called "perennial philosophy." We will then go more deeply into the dualism of the West as found in the opposing monisms of science and religion. We will see that dualism has been denied and repressed by all three orientations -- the non-dualism of the East, and the broken duality of Western thought, where dualism is a heresy to both science and religion. Finally, we will develop some of the tools and conceptual frameworks necessary to go beyond both non-duality and the contradictions of duality and toward a synthesis of both traditions or perspectives.

Context:

We are living in times not just of great change, but of ever-increasing acceleration of change towards an ever-more indeterminate and critical future. Old forms of thought and belief, and their related social structures, which have served humanity for thousands of years, are crumbling from age and the inability to adapt to the demands of modern scientific thought, technological change and rapid globalization and social upheaval. Regressive influences in the collective psyche, yearning for the simpler times of absolutist belief and authoritarian and totalitarian social structures, are promoting fundamentalist structures of religious thought in all three of the primary Western traditions, and cooperating among themselves to seize power in a self-fulfilling global "clash of civilizations."

In the West, secularization directly correlates with education and standard of living in democratic societies. As the religious traditions lose more modern, globally-oriented and intelligent psyches in the conflict between the sacred and the secular, they are increasingly represented by their most conservative and fundamentalist membership. The real clash of civilizations is between the 21st and the 2nd (Judaism) 6th (Islam) or 10th/16th (medieval Church/Reformation) centuries, and between science and religion, the global industrialized, polluting north and the primative, undeveloped, increasingly fundamentalist Global South, and the future and the past.

Where, then, are we to find the sacred in modern times, if there even is such a thing? Do we need to look to sources outside the Western tradition, perhaps to Eastern spirituality? Is there anything that is fundamentally different about the traditions of the East and the West? Is there an essential core to the Western tradition and does it have a future in modern times?

Non-Duality

Certain Asiatic myths carry though centuries the continuity of their religious and social structures. They can be compared to very old trees of knowledge whose fruits have dried on their branches for lack of any renewed sap. Contrarily, the Qabala has died and has resurrected many, many times amidst spectacular displays, on each occasion accomplishing and then burying its past.

Carlo Suares, Cipher of Genesis, p.27

Sometime in the past four or five thousand years, two major structures of religious thought took form in the psyches of humans living on the planet -- the Brahmanic tradition in the East and the A-Brahmanic tradition in the West. [See Abraham and The Abraham Cycle for the the structural differences between the two roots.] In the East, the Brahmanic tradition burst forth in an incredibile cross-proliferation of religious and spiritual thought, from Advaita to Zen, from Shiva to Wu-Wei, poly- and atheistic. In the West, the Abrahamic tradition gave rise to three successive monotheisms based on the God of the Old Testament and His relationship to the children of Abraham, including Jesus and Mohammed.

In the East, the laws of karma and 12-fold interdependent co-origination produce endless reincarnation until the cycle of death-and-rebirth is broken by the attainment of a state of non-duality called Nirvana. In the West, God writes history in the form of Biblical myth, and the faithful wait for 2,000 (or 1,400 for Islam) years to hear from their God and Saviour and Prophet again, living in a land of contradiction and duality called Canaan.

In the East, social structures are hierarchical and relatively static, and their Gods or lack of them don't lead them into battle. In the West, God (a Man of War) told Abraham and his descendents to conquer Canaan, and it was often bloody, down to this day, as men killed in the name of religion and the One True God.

The Hebrew Land of Canaan is the mythical land of maximum uncertaintly and developmental challenge and the psychological state of contradiction and duality. God's relationship to his children, through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed, is educational and developmental in purpose, with His Covenant with Abraham and telling Moses to set His people free from instinctual bondage (Egypt) as its basis and a story-arc of individual figures and personalities and their co-evolutionary relationship with God.

Both God and man develop in Abrahamic tradition. God's personality (see Miles and Bloom) -- the strongest Character in the greatest Story ever told -- is not static, but changing and evolving, all the while eluding definition, as He interacts with His chosen people and subjects His favorities to various trials and torments.

The East is oriented towards non-duality and relatively static and collective structures, while the West is oriented towards duality and dynamic development and individualizing structures. It should be clear that these distinctions do not apply to individuals of either the East or the West, especially in modern times, but to the broad outlines of the history of their religious and social structures. In the East, the non-dual revelation is basically unchanging and non-individual; in the West, it is never the same, since it is always being resurrected in a new historical context, in a new individual relationship to the Infinite.

In a time when we have not heard from God for thousands of years, and some of His writings seem discordant and a little out of date, Eastern spirituality has much to offer to increasingly secularized Western minds seeking an alternative to Judeo-Christian-Muslim traditions which have lost their truth and vitality. Everyone should know basic yoga, vipassana meditation and a little tantric sex. But is Eastern spirituality, in any of its poly/atheistic/non-dual forms, the answer for Western Spiritual seekers? If the goal should be non-duality, what was the point of the West's individualizing journey into duality and scientific and technological development?

Why bother with all this development and Western individualism if the ultimate goal is to dissolve our egos and return to the One? And what if there is some part of the Western psyche -- perhaps the part that makes it distinctly Western -- that can't be developed by Eastern forms of spiritual thought and practice?

And what about the swamis, gurus, and other self-qualified experts come to convert the West to the East? Why should we go to the East when we are already faced with our own gigantic riddle to unravel: the absurdities of the Bible, intimately linked to its Holiness. When fulfilled, that contradicition (contradictions again!) teaches us more than any Asiatic wisdom. It is life itself lived and perverted. We must learn to respect the innermost hidden core of the Bible. That means that we must discard every mere word of it, because every word perverts!
...

Even more than exhorting you to beware of Asiatic so-called wisdom (have they done any better than we in their social structures?), I most strongly advise you to beware of all preachers of "Jesus Christ!" They misinterpret and repeat obsolete words in the most archaic ways of thinking.

Carlo Saures, The Second Coming of Reb Yhshwh: The Cycle of Abraham p.130

The Bible is full of contradictions, which are built right into both God's character and His writings and the actions of His people. The greatest contradiction, however, for modern scientifically-oriented minds not rooted in primitive belief, is between its Holiness and its frequent absurdity and archaic irrelevancy. If the East is not the answer to the West's problems, what is the answer?

If Western psyches deny themselves an escape to the East, they are thrown back into their own tradition and its inherent contradictions. The choices then seem few. They can accept the contradictions by ignoring both internal evidence and modern science, and hurl themselves thousands of years backwards into a fundamentalist past. They can find a comfortable compromise between science and faith in a bourgeois adaptation that doesn't demand a real understanding of either. Or they can reject the Bible entirely and find salvation in scientific rationalism and ethical behavior. In all cases, the mythical structures of the Abrahamic tradition live buried within their psyches as a personal and cultural psychological inheritance. In none of the cases are the "words that pervert" discarded to find the innermost spiritual core of the Bible and a real encounter with the sacred.

When the testament of an ancient, submerged civilization was brought down from the legendary Mount Ararat to the purified plains, its message split in two. In the East, the Aleph shone in a mythical heaven. Hypnotized in their devotion, the people meditated. This was Brahma: Bayt, Raysh, Hay, Mem, Aleph. In the West, the Aleph penetrated into Hebrew flesh. This was Abraham: Aleph, Bayt, Raysh, Hay, Mem. These are two contrary and complementary processes. The Aleph at the end of Brahma and the Aleph at the beginning of of Abraham created two entirely different traditions. In the Orient, the omnipresent Aleph ages on the Tree of Knowledge, dries up, decays, and is replaced by another fruit of exactly the same pattern on the same tree. In the Occident, the Aleph dies; its fruit falls on the soil, rots, releases its seed, and produces a new tree. It is a succession of deaths and rebirths.

Carlo Saures, The Second Coming of Reb Yhshwh: The Cycle of Abraham p.135-136 (em. added)

The idea that the Hebrew letters themselves and their order might mean something will be discussed in more depth below, but for now, the Eastern Tradition begins with the continuity of Bayt (Brahma), the Western with the discontinuity of the timeless Aleph (Abraham). Dharma in the East is an unbroken chain of transmission; Revelation in the West has died and been resurrected countless times.

The East has been exporting enlightened masters of their tradition to the West for almost a century. Where are our truly enlightened Jewish or Christian or Muslim masters, who embody the sacred teachings and communicate them in the structures of modern thought with relevance to our own times?

In the West, God is a hands-on guy in the early part of His Book but ends up walking away from the phone and leaving us waiting for a very long time for His Son (who promised to be right back) to come again or for another genuine prophet to appear. We are left with another contradiction and evidence of the absence of a living Spirituality in the West. Meantime, we are left on hold.

(L.22) Jesus saw children who were being suckled. He said to his disciples: These children who are being suckled are like those who enter the Kingdom. They said to Him: Shall we then, being children, enter the Kingdom? Jesus said to them: When you make the two one, and when you make the inner as the outer and the outer as the inner and the above as the below, and when you make the male and the female into a single one, so that the male will not be male and the female not be female, when you make eyes in the place of an eye, and a hand in the place of a hand, and a foot in the place of a foot, (and) an image in the place of an image, then shall you enter [the Kingdom].

When we understand those words (Logion 22), we see how mistaken are those who attempt to "spiritualize" the flesh, or those who (in India, for example) pray that they should be led from the duality into the unity.

Carlo Saures, The Second Coming of Reb Yhshwh: Gospel of Thomas, Logia 22: p.208

Any serious inquiry into the question of the sacred in Western tradition can benefit from new discoveries in the history of early Christianity, particularly the recent availability of early Gnostic texts from Nag Hammadi and the Gospels of Judas and Mary Magdalene, which miraculously survived an otherwise rather thorough extermination/abandonment of non-standard texts by the emerging orthodoxy of the early Church. Christoph Markschies (Karen King, Gospel of Mary Magdala) estimates that 85% of early Christian writings were destroyed or lost to neglect, leaving a lot of room for non-standard thought. It is clear that those who called themselves "knowers" lost out to the ones who called themselves "believers," who have always been in the majority.

The Gnostics were the scientists of their day, insisting on experimental data and knowledge, and rejecting belief and external authority. Ironically, the Church is challenged once again by knowers, this time from the other side of duality.

In Logia 22, from the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus is dealing with the problem of unifying the contradictions of pairs of opposities, not transcending them in a state of non-duality. Those who assimilate Jesus' teaching to non-duality miss the whole point of the difference between East and West, and the heart of the Abrahamic tradition.

The Gnostics were charged with being "dualists," which makes their opponents "monists" regardless of whether the propaganda (part of a larger anti-heresy campaign) was true or not. In any case, Gnostic methods for unifying the opposites of duality and entering the "Kingdom" were lost, and it took another thousand years for science to rise from the bosom of the Church (Aquinas, Galileo) and challenge it with an opposite monism.

With the three major Abrahamic traditions increasingly mired in the past, their members waiting for justice and salvation in belief and submission and the repetition of out-of-date rituals and social structures, the Western tradition has been vulnerable to colonization by Eastern thought. Western elites, often looking for ways to preserve their power and position, have yearned for an undifferentiated pre-natal state that sees no difference between the East and the West.

René Guénon is a representative of the Traditionalist School of thought who converted to Islam.

The core beliefs of Traditionalism were synthesised by the French writer, Rene Guenon (1886-1951) ...

There were three distinct aspects to Gu�non's thought. The first is Perennialism, the idea that all religions express the same Perennial Philosophy, a truth that is contained in most spiritual beliefs, and which can be best realised by a return to an authentic religious form. This is the least acceptable to any religious absolutist and was rarely publicised in the Islamic world. The second is the idea of inversion. Sedgwick writes, 'Inversion is seen as an all-pervasive characteristic of modernity. While all that really matters is in fact in decline, people foolishly suppose that they see progress' (pp.24-25). The solution to this inversion is the wisdom of Eastern spirituality, which will overcome the West's superstitious faith in reason, progress, sentimental morality, and a belief in change for changes sake. Whereas the East had held onto its Traditional Society, the West had foolishly abandoned its own version in pursuit of a material modernity. This is a theme that has been particularly popularised by soft Traditionalism and will be more than familiar to students of all types of movements from some Green Politics, especially that associated with Edward Goldsmith, to Islamism. Finally, Gu�non wrote of the need for initiation, a process of induction into spiritual organisations that would create a metaphysical elite that would be the catalyst for returning the West to a spiritual path. This would not be an organised conspiracy but an intellectual network, suffusing the mainstream.

Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century by Mark Sedgwick, Oxford University Press, 2004 rev. by Peter Ryley for Democratyia (em.added)

Traditionalism: all religions are the same, development is decline, the East is authentic and you need a guru.

Instead, we say that the aptly-named Perennial Tradition is the fruit on the Tree of Knowledge that "dries up, decays, and is replaced by another fruit of exactly the same pattern on the same tree." "Inversion" (the "false progress" of individuality) is the alternative to traditional authoritarian group belief, and the last thing we need is a spiritual authority to tell us about our true selves.

What do we need then? Who has time for salvation, and anyway, aren't we already saved? But do we really think that Jesus is coming back to save the souls of the most un-educated and stuck-in-the-past Christians, who in fact have already been left behind?

If technological progress is just illusion and sort of a meaningless postscript to Jesus' saving everybody who believes in him -- actual deeds during one's life being mostly irrelevant -- or an interlude before His re-arriving to smite all the non-believers (and their horses) and take the saved to heaven, it's obvious that God's Plan, besides being infantile, has some holes in its plot.

If we refuse the regression to confusing and archaic belief-systems, or the compromise of a watered-down ethical, semi-rational Judaism or Christianity or Islam, and deny ourselves an escape to the oneness of the East, where are we to look for the sacred in the West? We are no longer living in tribal societies or Bronze Age kingdoms or Roman Empires, though their vestiges are very much alive in contemporary psyches. If God has a Plan, what was the purpose of the past two thousand or four thousand years? If God's Plan does have a purpose, what would it look like to contemporary minds? What is the purpose of modern civilization in God's design for humans? And what if God is a lot smarter than we give Him credit for?

Duality

John 1:5 The Light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.

And still doesn't, two thousand years later. Unable to find the darkness (undeveloped, primitive) in ourselves, we are unable to see it in the individual and collective psychological structures of either the present or the distant past. If we can't recognize human psychological development and real maturity in our leaders or in ourselves, how can we find it in our conceptions of God and His Plan? If the First Coming of Jesus was not understood -- and it really doesn't appear to have been -- are we any better prepared to understand the second?

Even after two millennia, we face major obstacles to a intelligent understanding of God's Plan and the meaning of Jesus' last appearance at the intersection of myth and history. The two competing monisms of the West, science and religion, are losing any common ground as science becomes impatient and scornful of fundamentalism, and fundamentalism increasingly resists the future, stuck in an out-of-date interpretation of its own myths. We seem to have no way to assess either real mental health or true spiritual attainment. Unable to see our own psychological history, we are blind to the evolution of consciousness in the West over the past six thousand years and its great adventure in Canaan, land of conflict and duality.

Mark 8:34-38 And when he had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.

Has anyone, in all this apparent time, denied themselves (rid themselves of their conditioned consciousness), taken up their cross (entered fully into the contradiction of opposites) and followed Jesus (in their unification in cosmic consciousness)?

Here is the crux of the matter: we are incapable of realizing that God's Plan (the purpose and evolution of consciousness on earth) might not be finished, and if not, what further psychological development in humans might look like. In the East, manifestation (and the individual self) is an illusion to be transcended in non-duality. In the West, spiritual development consists of keeping the commandments, faith in Jesus and submitting to Allah. Individual and collective psychological development since 600 CE -- most of modern civilization -- is irrelevant to salvation. None of mankind's achievements after their respective religious revelations has made them better Jews, Christians or Muslims.

To return to the crux (of matter and spirit): what if science is in God's Plan?

What if the development in the West of the separate, individualized self and the capacity for objective thinking and experimental science and the development of technological civilization had a spiritual purpose? Ever since scientific thinking evolved out of natural theology, the chasm between science (objective data) and religion (subjective belief) has widened. Caught in the contradiction, we are unable to see why God might design humans capable of building anti-belief technology.

It's an old story, but one we have never understood. Why did God show Adam the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and tell him -- but not Eve -- not to eat the apples of knowledge? We are simply not mature enough to understand our own symbols of psychogenesis and resurrection. Captivated by the Original Sin and our guilt over the dead body of Christ, we see neither the Tree of Life (lest we eat of its fruit and become as Gods) or the Cross of Contradictions and Duality.

This Cross of Light is called by Me for your sakes sometimes Word (Logos), sometimes Mind, sometimes Jesus, sometimes Christ, sometimes Door, sometimes Way, sometimes Bread, sometimes Seed, sometimes Resurrection, sometimes Son, sometimes Father, sometimes Spirit, sometimes Life, sometimes Truth, sometimes Faith, sometimes Grace.

Acts of John: 98th verse

The non-dual orientation of the East is obvious, from Hindu Atman to Advaita Vedanta to Mahayana Buddhism and Vajrayana Tantra (the Realists are an exception). In these systems creation is an illusion and evolution doesn't exist because there is nothing to evolve, only ignorance to be overcome, resulting in a dissolution of individuality into the One in a Nirvanic state of passive meditation called Samadhi.

The West, however, caught in its contradiction, cannot even recognize its own duality.

Science is a materialistic monism -- only matter exists, and all phenomena including human thought and behavior can be explained by physical states and processes. Western religion is monotheistic and anti-dualist, but allows for a creation separate from, or emanated by God and unified again in soul and bodily resurrection. As noted, Christian theology's attempt to deal with the natural world gave rise to the viper of science in its bosom.

If East/West is itself a duality, it is characterized by the non-duality of the East and the dual, opposite monisms of the West and their corresponding static/collective (East) and dynamic/individualizing (West) social and psychological structures. The duality of the West is an intensifying contradiction of onenesses -- the physicalism of science and the idealistic (Logos) orientation of religious thought. Neither has the means to comprehend the other. The dualism of the West, if that is its characteristic, seems broken.

Yet, whether you are an idealist or a materialist, your experience of life in existence is completely conditioned by duality. We live at the intersection of self and other, future and past, sensation and perception. Thought itself is intrinsically a dual process as a response to sensation and in its discriminatory and containing functions. Babies are hard-wired to believe in the supernatural and are Natural-Born Dualists . Modern physics finds dualities everywhere -- in observer and observed, in complementarity principles and momentum and position, in waves and particles, in particles and anti-particles, in positive and negative charge and left and right-hind spin, in symmetries whole and broken, in membranes and bulk. Whichever monism we subscribe to, both our psychological experience and our experimental data are saturated with dualities, a consequence, it would seem, of living in something called space-time.

Which we know as Canaan, land of contradiction and duality and evolution and development. Where we find ourselves caught in the increasing contradiction of science and religion, matter and spirit, where neither our belief nor our anti-belief system can understand one another, let alone their relationship.

And by these names it is called as toward men: but that which it is in truth, as conceived of in itself and as spoken of unto you, it is the marking-off of all things, and the firm uplifting of things fixed out of things unstable, and the harmony of wisdom, and indeed wisdom in harmony.

Acts of John: 98th verse

The Cross is Duality. Its own duality, or counterpart in the East, is the yin-yang, where interpenetration and harmony are emphasized, rather than distinction and contradiction. Entranced with the dead body of Jesus, we are blind to the Cross, a contradiction in itself, as Jesus intended, aware as he was of the state of resistance and lack of psychological development in the Western psyche, then and now.

Humans appeared on the planet at least 200,000 years ago. One of the mysteries of human history is the long period before the beginnings of primitive civilization aproximately six or seven thousand years ago. In any event, God's Plan suddenly kicks into high gear around 2000 BCE with Abraham's journey into Canaan, only to run out of gas about 2,600 years later, leaving many to wonder -- now what?

Are we waiting for an apocalypse, an armageddon, a Second Coming? To be lifted from our airliners and convertibiles and graves into outer space? Was modern technological civilization and the development of a separate, individuated self capable of analyzing its own belief systems just a meaningless diversion before the end of human evolution on earth?

Or is it possible that evolution is continuing in humans? Or that the Plan isn't finished and modern civilization and science have a place in it? Or that God is even smarter than we thought, just as we are a lot less evolved than we thought? How can we even begin to think of a future evolution of humanity?

As we have noted, the East has no need to evolve either physically or psychologically, there being fundamentally no world and no self. In the West, religion fundamentally doesn't believe in physical evolution, while fundamentalist science doesn't believe in psychological development or spiritual evolution, since mental processes don't exist independently of material interactions, let alone something called spirit.

This is the contradiction facing us. Any attempt to resolve it will depend on modes of thought that exclude one half of the contradiction and deprive us of the tools we need to think our way into its heart, toward the unification of opposities.

Both Western science and Western religion have made a long journey in Canaan. At various times in history, they were unified in one vision of reality, as the religious revelation was expressed -- as it must be, because it is always new -- in the language and structures of thought of the time. The so-called "sacred sciences," which built the Pyramids and Stonehenge, and developed the Vedas, Pythagorean thought and the Mayan Calendar were the product of these prior unifications. But we have not had a renewal for some time, and our structures of religious thought are out-of-date and out-of-sync in relation to modern knowledge and scientific thinking.

If we are continuing to evolve and develop as a species, the past two thousand years in the West have produced two great achievements, both invisible, fundamentally, to each side of the contradiction -- a tool for exploring the objective world and a subjective self to do it with.

Why should these go together? Why did the East develop neither an advanced science of the objective world or an individual psychology? And why are we confronted with yet another duality?

The more deeply science has explored the objective world, the more separate and individualized our subjective selves have become. Both arose in parallel out of the Age of Reason and The Enlightenment in the 17th and 18th centuries, building on earlier developments in the Rennaisance like printing, alchemy, bookkeeping and linear perspective, the dawn of virtual psychological space. All these developments emerged from the Scholastic bosom of the Mother Church, usually in conflict with it.

Science and religion finally parted company in the 17th century with the mind-body problem of Descartes, which also split psychology and religion, which were both originally from the same side of the duality and concerned with the salvation of the individual soul or psyche. Descartes had a foot in both worlds -- science and religion -- at the last time they were close enough for that to be possible. After Descartes (with brief revivals by Hume and Liebnez) dualism went out of style again, rejected by both sides and emerging only in the repressions and nightmares of the resultant opposite monisms. Both the church of religion and the church of science have always hated the idea of dualism, committed as they are to their respective onenesses. See Piero Scaruffi on Mind and Matter and David Chalmers Mindpapers: Consciousness and Dualism for a review of contremporary thought on the problem.

In 1895, Freud wrote his Project for a Scientific Psychology, in which he claimed:

The intention is to furnish a psychology that is a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles.

Over a century later, in 2006, at a conference at IBM Laboratories in Almaden California, one of the pre-eminent philosophers of mind and consciousness, John Searle, gave a talk called "Beyond Dualism." which typifies modern philosphical and cognitive scientific thinking on the problem of consciousness. Searle characterizes consciousness as 1) an irreducible unity, 2) subjective, 3) qualitative and 4) intentional. He spends most of his lecture (to other eminent researchers in the field) elaborating his view of consciousness as a "brute force of nature" completely explainable in materialistic terms and a product of the evolution of higher order systems in the human brain. Finally, at 51:05, using the word for the first time, he has this to say about the duality he is trying to get beyond:

"Dualism is incoherent. You cannot give a coherent description of the world that shows how we fit in as conscious, mindful rational beings in a world that is made of physical particles."

And of course, scientific materialism has succeeded so well at that task. Dualism seems to be the true repressed ghost in the machine of materialism. Why is Searle defending against a viewpoint which hasn't had any popularity for three hundred years? (At least until very recently.) (Nobelist Sir John Eccles is another exception) Why does he do such a pathetic job of representing the philosophy he is so vigorously opposing for over an hour? And does "Beyond" really mean beyond when it means "brute force of nature?"

Freud thought that a biological explanation of mental phenomena was just around the corner. Modern philosophers of mind and researchers in cognitive neuroscience, having largely disposed of Freud and his crypto-dualism (Psychoanalysis) are asking us to keep waiting for their imminent solution to the problem of consciousness, which is surely again just around the corner. (Or maybe not: Stephen Pinker is a New Mysterian).

It is true that Dualism is incoherent, since it has never been able to show where and how the two sides of the duality of matter and spirit, brain and mind -- whether considered as substance, property, or predicate -- interact. Yet we have the ineluctable dualism of both our own experience and the physical world, without even trying to resolve the duality of their relationship.

In addition to the dualities found in physical science mentioned previously, Lisa Randall, particle phenomenologist, in Warped Passages (2005, page 310) states:

Duality is one of the most exciting concepts of the last ten years in particle physics and string theory. It has played a major role in recent advances in both quantum field theory and string theory, and, as we will soon see, it has expecially important implications for theories with branes.

Two theories are dual when they are the same theory with different descriptions.

The same theory with different descriptions. Given the nature of our observational data -- both internal and external -- are monistic explanatory theories really the best tool for the job? Modern physics has been working on the problem of consciousness since the early days of quantum theory. Religious thinking about science, as usual, seems to be lagging behind. If we are to get anywhere with our observational data, it would seem that we need to be able to think scientifically about religion and religiously about science.

This isn't as impossible as it sounds, except for the part about remaining open to both sides of the duality. Thinking scientifically about religion would mean approaching our core myths with the tools of modern scientific thought; thinking religiously about science would involve finding spiritual significance in the continuing evolution of humans in their psychological and social structures.

Before leaving the land of duality, we can note two problems from opposite sides of the spectrum in currect scientific thinking, where consciousness-information and matter seem hopelessly intertwined.

New Mysterianism is a philosophy proposing that certain problems will never be explained or at the least cannot be explained by the human mind at its current evolutionary stage. The problem most often referred to is the hard problem of consciousness; i.e. how to explain sentience and qualia and their interaction with consciousness.

Wikipedia: New Mysterianism

We have seen that consciousness is a "hard problem" for materialistic science to solve. Some, like Colin McGinn and Stephen Pinker (above) think it may never be solved "by the human mind at its current evolutionary stage." Which is a really interesting qualification, since it implies that an evolution of consciousness may be necessary to understand consciousness -- something we don't understand needs to evolve so that we can understand it. Materialistic science seems dangerously close to the event horizon of the black hole of dualism with this kind of thinking. After all, what is evolving? And what would be the qualia of understanding the hard problem (qualia)?

Finally, from the laboratories of Quantum Information, where both Quantum Realism (pre-existing properties prior to observation) and Macrorealism (quantum effects limited to very small scales) appear to have failed:

To repeat a famous dictum, "All information is physical." How we get information from our world depends on how it is encoded. Quantum mechanics encodes information, and how we obtain this through measurement is how we study and construct our world.

I asked Dr. Zeilinger about this as I was about to leave his office. "In the history of physics, we have learned that there are distinctions that we really should not make, such as between space and time... It could very well be that the distinction we make between information and reality is wrong. This is not saying that everything is just information. But it is saying that we need a new concept that encompasses or includes both." Zeilinger smiled as he finished: "I throw this out as a challenge to our philosophy friends."

Seed: The Reality Tests 6/4/2008 (emphasis added)

So we may need an "evolution of consciousness" and a "new concept that encompasses both" (information and reality). Can consciousness imagine its own evolution and begin to think with concepts for which it has no language?

"'Thinking', in the sense of engaging in that activity which is concerned with the use of thoughts, is embryonic even in the adult and has yet to be developed fully by the race."

Bion, Seven Servants, p.85

It's obvious that if there is to be "an evolution of consciousness" something about our thinking is going to have to change. The problem is that we don't have the tools to think about thought in a way that might indicate its potentials for evolution.

Bahir, section 103 The seventh? But, after all, there are only six? This teaches that here is the Temple of the [celestial] Sanctuary, and it bears all [the other six], and that is why it is the seventh. And what is it? The Thought that has neither end nor limit. Similarly this place, too, has neither end nor limit.

Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah, Princeton, 1990, p.115

Beyond Duality and the Supramental

It's time to start answering some of the questions we have accumlated in our attempt to clear some space to think about something impossible to think about with our current material and spiritual conceptual frameworks and present evolutionary stage of consciousness (see above).

From our brief tour of the Lands of Non-Duality and Duality, we have seen that Eastern Spirituality, while it has much to offer, may not be the solution for the psycho-spiritual developmental needs of the Western Psyche, which is caught in the widening gap of Science and Faith and needs to resolve its own contradictions. The logical duality of non-dual Eastern thought and dual Western thought is broken and unrecognized, as both sides of the Western duality deny each other's central argument (Spirit vs Matter).

So it looks like we need some new concepts and frameworks, and probably a whole new way of thinking.

Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) and Carlo Suar�s (1892-1976) both challenge our assessments of human psychological evolution and emphasize the necessity of a psychospiritual evolution or mutation beyond where we are now. Both of these men, Sri Aurobindo, a Hindu Brahmin from Calcutta, and Suares, a Sephardic Jew from the Diaspora, offer radical reformulations of their respective root traditions.

Both writers place human evolution in long term (precessionally-based, multi-25K+ years) cycles. Both point to the possibility of human evolution of consciousness in the near future (next 2,000 years).

Sri Aurobindo, who "taught something totally different to the entire Vedantic and Mahayanist tradition", brings something new to Eastern "Perennial" Spirituality, where Maya/matter usually is an illusion to be overcome, with his revelation of a "new path" of Integral Yoga , preparing for a transformation of consciousness necessary for the Supramental manifestation upon Earth, the next step in the evolution of man (who is considered a transitional being) and the evolution of life into life divine, or the Divinization of matter.

Suares, writing from the root of the a-perennial A-Brahamic tradition, and using a "kind of thinking that proceeds by unitary principles and analogical developments" gives us a language of biologically structured energy and consciousness and a precise description of the evolution and purpose of consciousness on earth and man's potential for the materialization of Divinity.

An evolution of consciousness is the central motive of terrestrial existence. The evolutionary working of Nature has a double process: an evolution of forms, an evolution of the soul.

Sri Aurobindo: The Future Evolution of Man: Chapter 2 - The Place of Man in Evolution

In terms of gnosis it is the statement of a simple fact: there is only One energy, only One life, only One movement. All is one and one is in all. The One is the one game of life and existence, of energy as energy and of energy as its own physical support, which is its own resistance to itself, without which nothing would be.

Carlo Suares: Cipher of Genesis p.205

So here is our first new conceptual framework: one two-fold energy in a double process of evolution of form and soul, matter and consciousness, across the entire range of structuration.

This is not your Baba's non-dualism, which teaches liberation from illusion and rebirth. And neither is it Science's or Religion's dualism, which have no conceptual frameworks to think of both at the same time.

Liberation in Paramatman with the subsequent loss of all identity is part of the old "Yoga of Ascent", whereas Aurobindo taught something very different - the "Yoga of Descent". He never taught the goal as the attainment of paramatman or nirvana. He certainly did not deny that that state can be attained, but it is not the aim of his own message. For Aurobindo the goal is Supermind. (M. Alan Kazlev: Kheper and see Merkabah.)

Aurobindo (and the Mother) and Suares start from opposite ends, use similar (integral, unitary) means to transform thought and find their way to the same place with different emphases - the Supermind as the Divinisation of matter, and the incarnation of YHWH (a formula for the two lives of the double process in fertile conjunction) as the materialization of Divinity.

Our first framework is not just a concept, but the gateway to a whole new way of thinking, based on the constant conjunction of material and spiritual (psychological) processes and the interplay of the two partners, Aleph, timeless beyond-space-time and Yod, space-time, duration and existence. We will need this mode of thought in order to resolve the basic Western duality of religion and science and to begin to move beyond duality (rather than retreating to non-duality) toward an integration of opposities (including non-duality-duality).

John Searle rightly accuses dualism of being "incoherent" because no one has ever been able to show how Matter and Spirit/Consciousness relate. That has been true because none of our conceptual frameworks integrate this duality in themselves, in terms of their own composition of Matter and Spirit. For this we need not just a new concept but a new language of energy and consciousness which does integrate duality in its own structure, and which allows us to think in a new way.

There is no reason to suppose that this transformation is impossible on earth. In fact, it would give the truest meaning to earthly existence. There is no conclusive validity in the reasoning that because this is a world of Ignorance, such a transformation can only be achieved by a passage to a heaven beyond or cannot be achieved at all and the demand of the psychic entity is itself ignorant and must be replaced by a merger of the soul in the Absolute. This conclusion could only be solely valid if Ignorance were the whole meaning, substance and power of the world-manifestation or if there were no element in World-Nature itself through which there could be an exceeding of the ignorant mentality that still burdens our present status of being.

But the Ignorance is only a portion of this World-Nature; it is not the whole of it, not the original power or creator: it is in its higher origin a self-limiting Knowledge and even in its lower origin, its emergence out of the sheer material Inconscience, it is a suppresed Consciousness labouring to find, to recover itself, to manifest Knowledge, which is its true character, as the foundation of existence. In universal Mind itself there are ranges above our mentality which are instruments of the cosmic truth-cognition, and into these the mental being can surely rise; for already it rises towards them in supernormal conditions or receives from them without yet knowing or possessing them intuitions, spiritual intimations, large influxes of illumination or spiritual capacity. All these ranges are conscious of what is beyond them, and the highest of them is directly open to the Supermind, aware of the Truth-consciousness which exceeds it. Moreover, in the evolving being itself, those greater powers of consciousness are here, supporting mind-truth, underlying its action which screens them; this Supermind and those Truth-powers uphold Nature by their secret presence: even, truth of mind is their result, a diminished operation, a representation in partial figures. It is, therefore, not only natural but seems inevitable that these higher powers of Existence should manifest here in Mind as Mind itself has manifested in Life and Matter.

Sri Aurobindo: The Future Evolution of Man: Chapter 2 - The Place of Man in Evolution

And we arrive at our second conceptual framework: evolution of consciousness in the East is Supermind; involution of consciousness in the West is the incarnation of YHWH .

These concepts differ only in their emphasis: collective (Supermind/divinisation) or individual (YHWH/materialization) and evolutionary/involutionary orientation (see below).

The evolutionary goal of consciousness in the West is involution and individuation through the dissolution of collective structures of thought and belief.

The history of the West is both a history of individuals (mythical and real) and, if we could see it, a history of the process of individualization.

A few landmarks in the evolution of individuality in the last two thousand years : St. Augustine wrote the first autobiography four hundred years after Jesus' disappearance. Shakespeare wrote Hamlet twelve hundred years after that. Since the 17th Century, people have thought of themselves as separate individuals. If one can imagine what it's like not to have a word for oneself as a separate individual, we can begin to imagine what the next involution in consciousness might look like in terms of not having a word for it.

Embedded in ancient structures of thought, we are unable to see our own individuality and its historical development, let alone its purpose in God's plan -- that Western consciousness has evolved scientific objective thought and technological civilization to free itself from the archaic structures of magical thinking and collective belief, where there are no words for "individual".

We can't see where we are going because we can't see where we've been.

For context, we can review three non cognitive neuroscience (out-of-fashion) perspectives on where we've been and the evolution of Western consciousness:

In 1954 Erich Neumann, a developmental psychologist and student of Jung, published The Origins and History of Consciousness, describing the archetyal/mythical stages that both the individual and the evolution of human consciousness must pass through:

World Creation
Great Mother
Separation of World Parents
Birth of the Hero
Slaying the Dragon
Rescue of the Captive
Transformation of the Hero

where the movement is from undifferentiated (Ouroboric) consciousness to the individual consciousness of the "hero." See the comparative mythology of Joseph Campbell.

In 1963, Gerald Heard wrote The Five Ages of Man, describing five phases in the development of human culture:

1. Pre-individual, co-conscious man
2. Proto-individual, heroic man
3. Mid-individual, ascetic man
4. Total-individual, humanic man
5. Post-individual, leptoid man

Again, these phylogentic stages are recapitulated in the ontogony of the subjective experience of being of the individual, i.e. in their psychological development and awareness, or lack thereof. Heard's system posits a fifth "Age of Man" -- "Leptoid Man" -- requiring a leap or mutation in human consciousness.

In 1976, Julian Jaynes, an American psychologist, published The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, arguing that ancient people don't think like us and were in fact not "conscious" in the sense we understand it today. Left and right brain hemipsheres were not integrated and the individual "sense of self" was very different. Jaynes observes that there is no first-person agency and in general, no consciousness in the Iliad, in contrast to the story of Odysseus, the first Western autonomous individual.

Something happened about 3000 years ago: people started thinking for themselves: differentiated consciousness is an emergent phenomena

The evidence of the co-conscious, un-individuated group self is all around us, yet we assume that people in prior times, even two or three thousand years ago, thought exactly like we do, with the same conceptual structures and the same sense of individual self.

The concept of the individual self itself has fallen into the giant crack between Faith and Science, even though it is one of the most obvious products of the past 500 years, along with objective materialistic science. It is also clear that Faith, traditionally entrusted with the care of the soul, is uncomfortable with the concept of thinking for oneself and has increasingly lost its grip on the modern psyche, while a cognitive neuroscience that denies consciousness or subjective experience has little place for a self, let alone a spiritually or psychologically evolving one. The 20th Century, the The Century of the Self, actually ended without a coherent methodology or metapsychology for the exploration of the conscious individual self -- and with Psychoanalytic Theory in the dustbin of pre-scientific ideas, with no apparent future, for all its advances in the Psychology of the Self.

Yet it should be obvious that consciousness has already evolved in the awareness of its own individuality (see Western Civilization). What is our necessary "evolution in consciousness" supposed to be conscious of, other than itself?

Which brings us to our third conceptual framework: Jesus is the archetype of the fully realized, cosmically conscious, individual and the goal of the evolution-involution of consciousness in the West.

John 14:6
Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.

He meant that literally. Humans must learn to "find Jesus" as the archetype of their own true individuality. This is, of course, the true meaning of "the kingdom of God is within you." and "no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." The Second Coming is the individual realization of that archetype and signals the next evolution of consciousness in humans.

John 14:16
And I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter, that he may abide with you for ever;

Two thousand years may seem like a long time to human consciousness, but God has a different sense of no-time. We have defined the evolution of consciousness of man in the West as a journey through Canaan, land of duality and contradiction, and maximum developmental challenge, and Jesus as the archetype of that evolution and the integration of those opposites -- "Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me." Non-duality is not a solution. But what do we do with all our contradictions?

West

East

Spirit

Matter

Atman

Maya/Illusion

Evolutionary thinking has followed different paths in the East and the West. In the East, at least in terms of mainstream Advaita Vedanta and Mahayana Buddhism, manifestation is seen as illusion and ignorance. Both individual self and the world are illusions; there is fundamentally nothing to evolve, only an Absolute Atman to dissolve into.

	Involution	Atman	Evolution
		Maya/Illusion

Moreover, the directions of evolution and involution are reversed in Eastern and Western thought. In the East, Atman involves into material unconsciousness and illusion and evolves through a succession of forms and rebirths back into Oneness. In the West, biological evolution results in man, who has the capacity for psychological involution: individuation and development through the dissolution of the structures of collective belief. In the Abrahamic myth, Elohim evolves the world, and Abraham, Isaac and Jacob conquer duality so that YHWH can incarnate as Israel.

In the West, to return to our two opposing monisms, science defines evolution as "Differential inheritance of genetic variation via stochastic and deterministic forces." Religion in the West (again mainstream) rejects physical evolution as a fundamental defense against the recognition of psychological evolution, which would destroy its structures of faith and belief. From the point of view of Christianity, psycho-spiritual evolution ended two thousand years ago when Jesus Christ atoned for our sins and saved the believers for all time.

Neither seem to have an answer for

The Thicket of Duality
	Spirit	Absolute	Noumena	God	Elohim
	Matter	Relative	Phenomena	Man	YHWH
	Religion	Subjective	Mind	Jesus	Word
	Science	Objective	Body	Marx	Dialectic
	Discontinuity	Seed	Inner	Synthesis	Conscious
	Continuity	Shell	Outer	Analysis	Unconscious
	Revelation	Light	Heaven	One	Qabala
	Tradition	Darkness	Earth	Many	Judiasm

For this problem, we need our fourth conceptual framework: three levels of organization of the one dual energy/consciousness in a two-fold process of evolution.

Non Duality

Duality

Beyond Duality - Supermind

Where the third level represents the unification of opposites in existence and the realization of Cosmic Consciousness - Supermind on earth, the goal of planetary evolution.

Let's expand the concepts inside the framework a little:

Archetypal: Outside Space-Time

Existential: Space-time and Duration

Cosmic: Beyond Space-Time: Unity of Opposites

The non-duality of Eastern thought has always had a structure. Physics thinks there might be something beyond space-time, or at least outside of it, and certainly thinks a lot about multidimensionality (see Randall, above). Western philosophy has always had its Idealism, however out of fashion it might be today, to complement its Materialism, while Western Religion has its own spiritual cosmologies and hierarchies.

If we stick to the facts, we are living time-limited lives in space-time and modern science is pretty sure there is something outside of our 4-dimensional space-time that has a lot to do with what happens inside it. We can think of outside of space-time in terms of archetypal forms, seed energies or rolled-up extra dimensions -- they are outside of time and duration. Our own existential level, where the events of life and death happen, and where we find both consciousness and energy, but no way to relate them, is self-evident.

This leaves us with an unexplained hypothetical third level, our cosmic level of the unification of opposities and transcendent realization, for which we have no conceptual frameworks to think about. For this, we're going to need a whole new language specifically designed to deal with the relationship of energy and consciousness.

To continue: three levels connected and integrated by an abstract, completely-generalized, semantically-accurate language dealing with biologically structured energies in different states of organization.

Nine Archetypal Formative Energies

Nine Existential Formative Energies

Nine Cosmic Formative Energies

Searle's (and everyone else's) basic criticism of dualism is that it cannot give a "coherent description" of the relationship between material and spiritual/psychological processes. There is actually a third possibility beyond that goal: to give a coherent description of the relationship that is so integrated that the two are understood as one.

Once we begin to conceive of the potential for the organization of energy and consciousness in states outside, or beyond, space-time, we quickly realize that our natural languages and thinking processes are rooted in experience inside of space-time: our words refer to sensous objects and our interaction with them (including our own body), and are arbitrary and particularlizing.

The decoding of Genesis and of any other cabalistic text is therefore not a mere matter of transposing from A-B-C to Aleph-Bayt-Ghimel, but a process of penetrating an unknown world by means of a manner of thinking which has to be experienced by the very use of the language which must be learned in order to understand it. However paradoxical and perhaps difficult this may appear, it stands to reason that were the Revelation a matter of ordinary words, it would be an obvious fact prone to superficial observation.
Carlo Suares, Cipher of Genesis, Introduction (Emphasis added)

We need to change our "manner of thinking." One way to do this is to learn a new language which "must be learned in order to understand it" and which is the opposite of our ordinary languages: non-arbitrary, recursive, generalizing, abstract, instrumental and projective, and which includes in its alphabet all three levels of organization. See here and here.

Three Worlds: Outside, Inside and Beyond Space-Time
		Archetypal 1-9	Existential 10-90	Cosmic 100-900
Life/Death & Existence	1
Container / Boundary	2
Movement	3
Resistance	4
Organic Life	5
Sex / Fertility	6
Indetermination	7
Unstructured Energy	8
Structure/Cell	9
Semantic Structure of the Hebrew Alphabet

So we have our archetypal level of noumenal forms, our existential level of space-time phenomena, often the inverse of the counterpart noumenal energy, and a cosmic level of transcendent realization and the unification of the opposites of the first two levels -- which means it appears in existence, on Earth.

To recapitulate our frameworks:

1. One two-fold energy in a double process of evolution of energy and consciousness.
2. Leads to divinisation of matter in the East and materialization of divinity in the West.
3a. Jesus is the archetype of the unconditioned individual in the West.
3b. The Second Coming is the next evolutionary/involutionary step in human consciousness.
4. Duality is integrated and Non-Duality/Duality transcended in three levels of organization connected by a generalized structural/formative language of energy and consciousness.

So how do we fit in?

Framework five: Your total individuality is your soul and it resides outside of space-time.

To return to Suares, from The Second Coming of RebYhshwh: The Rabbi Called Jesus Christ:

1. Seek your total individuality. Don't write it down anywhere. Don't give it a name. Any definition of yourself is a deceptive hideout.

2. You will not find your total individuality. It is your total individuality that sees you, that witnesses your doings. It acts in our space-time continuum but is not restricted to it.

3. Your total individuality is your soul. It abides in the indeterminate plurality of universes. Because it is alive, it is evolving. Because it is outside of time, its evolution is only the time that you need to permit it to find you. Because it is multidimensional, it contributes to the composition of an Ecclesia. It is one and innumerable.

The answer, it turns out, was staring us in the face. The goal of the evolution of consciousness (at least in the West) is the awareness of our total individuality and the path is not dissolution of identity, but analysis and integration of our personal and collective evolutionary inheritance.

4. Your soul will not find you as long as your consciousness is made of the stuff of false evidences created by your mind: as long as you do not feel a sense of suffocation in those space-time false evidences.

The only way to let your total individuality find you is to let false evidences -- of all kinds -- die within yourself. It is as simple, and as complex, as that. This is not "waking up to the non-dual nature of reality" but a long working through of all our contradictions -- we can call this an involution or individuation of consciousness -- within ourselves. The individual is transformed by duality, not liberated from it. The revelation is resisted, not pursued, and premature births avoided. Which is why there are so few true Western Masters on the New Age speaking circuit and so many of the non-dual Gurus seem to have have unresolved personality issues.

The involution of the individual self is based on the dissolution of largely-unconscious collective structures of thought and belief (what else could it be based on?). We evolve in our consciousness of our own individuality to the extent that we can tolerate the truth about our illusions, which the ego and its defenses experience as catastropic change.

5. The death of false evidences is a psychological death, announcer of resurrection. Each false evidence denounced opens a window in the inner space where the measurable dies.

As highly conditioned pre-individuals we barely have a framework for the process of psychological and social and religious deconditioning (though we know it happens) let alone the goal of a differentiated and integrated, unconditioned consciousness.

As long as we fill our minds with the thoughts of man, which are of space-time and duration, we will never know what is beyond thought, and will never know ourselves as carriers of the Intemporal.

6. This death of the measurable in the inner space is a personal experience. All that is said to you about it will prevent it from occurring. Do not listen to the professionals of any religions.

7. Beyond this death, our infinitely multiple individuality reveals to our present person that we are only one of its multifarious manifestations. We then meet the other manifestations of our soul spread out through history, still present and alive.

8. So this consciousness emanating from our soul integrates its earthly past and also its future. It knows itself continuous, without limits. It is all-consciousness, it penetrates every consciousness, it understands every consciousness, and that understanding is love.

Carlo Suares: Eight Propositions

We now have sufficient new conceptual frameworks to begin to understand our core myth from the inside, in terms of the evolution and involution of consciousness.

The hypothesis of framework four is that there is a trans-temporal language of energy and consciousness hidden in the shell of the Hebrew Alphabet. The inner meanings of the letter-numbers represent basic formative energies or patterns or fundamental powers (G. Scholem) responsible for the on-going creation of the indeterminate plurality of universes.

We have repeatedly stated that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet have always been, throughout the centuries, the foundation of the true tradition and the only key to the knowledge of the Hebrew Revelation. (Carlo Suares, Cipher of Genesis, p.32).

Suares' decoding of these meanings and his translation of fundamental texts of the Hebrew Bible, like Genesis, reveal another way of looking at our Biblical history, from the inside out, as it were, in terms of the evolution of individuated and deconditioned consciousness, and in the present, not in the past.

According to Suares, the true core of the tradition antedates the Jews (Abraham was not a Hebrew, but came myseriously from the East), who were chosen as guardians of the Torah, the shell and container for the revelation hidden in the Hebrew letters. Jesus broke that shell two thousand years ago at the last conjunction of myth and history and knew the alphabetic code. The code can be used to decipher parts of the Hebrew Bible that are written almost completely in our fourth framework language (the first four chapters of Genesis, parts of Exodus, the Song of Songs in its entirety -- and the Sepher Yetsira as a commentary on Bereshit). Here we find familiar stories, not reinterpreted, but actually decoded, letter-by-letter and word-by-word to reveal unseen meaning written in an unfamiliar language that forces us to think in a new way.

What makes Suares' Revived Qabala completely different from any religious or theo-philo-mysto-sophical speculation is the simple fact that it's a code. And it's open-source.

We don't have to take Suares' word, or anyone else's. The whole point of a Beyond Duality Framework is to reconcile the opposities of duality, in this case scientific method and belief. We don't need (in fact it is useless) to listen to anyone's interpretation of "God's Word." Suares' Qabala -- because it is based on a decoding process -- is ultimately an experimental method whose postulates and equations can -- and must, if they are to be understood -- be tested and verified.

// All you need to do is boot-strap the compiler* by assembling a little of the basic code and then you can run the programs (code given below) and see for yourself. //

Framework six: The myth of Abraham and his descendents is the myth of the involution and individuation of consciousness in the West -- from the separation from the undifferentiated co-conscious light of the Magicians through the long developmental journey through the land of duality , to the indeterminate and unconditioned realization of Israel.

Mostly from The Cipher of Genesis:

The Abrahamic Myth from the Perspective of Beyond Space-Time:

The core of the myth is the Great Game betweeen the two partners, the discontinuous Aleph, infinite, intemporal consciousness/energy and the continous Yod, matter, spacetime and duration. Elohim , beginning with Aleph, is the evolutionary process, and works in space-time to create all that is. YHWH, beginning with Yod, is the involutionary process, the existential union of the two lives, outer and inner, of material and psychological process, and works to manifest in human consciousness. This interplay can be followed in Bereshyt/Genesis, where Elohim appears alone in Chapter 1, intertwined with YHWH in Chapters 2 and 3, and YHWH appears alone for the first time in Genesis IV, 1, when Hheva/Eve says I have aquired man et YHWH. (Abel will appear with no-one's help and Eve will recognize that Elohim is there with Set).

Qaheen/Cain is the archetype of Cosmic Consciousness in the human psyche. Hevel/Abel (Hebrew: wisp, vanity) is an ego which dissolves when confronted with cosmic consciousness-existent-cosmically indeterminate, the literal encoded meaning of Cain. This is the first full expression of the two partners, Aleph (Cain) and Yod (Abel), in (archetypal) human form, and the first expression of the myth in human history after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. We can see the problem -- YHWH needs to manifest in human consciousness in space-time, but the state of the human psyche is primitive and incapable of individuation and integration. Abel dissolves into the earth.

Henceforth, YHWH will look before He leaps, and will thorougly test the candidates He selects for his revelation, as the myth begins to unfold in history and the essential theme of the two partners is elaborated in the archetypes and psychological configurations of the Chosen. Still in the archetypal sphere (mythical, non-historical personages), YHWH will test both Abraham (the sacrifice of Isaac) and Jacob, the first incarnation of Israel. Then, in the sphere of Creation, he will repeatedly try to kill Moses, whose mission is to build a container for the Elohimic seed in the body of the people of Israel.

At the beginnings of proto-history, ten Generations after the Flood, God sent Abraham into Canaan and told him to conquer it by unifying the opposites of duality. This Abraham did in a three-fold movement through Isaac and Jacob, resulting in the first incarnation of Israel and the first resurrection of Aleph in duality. Yissav/Esau, representative of Yod in this stage of the Game, is an advance from Abel in the last pairing: he surrenders his birthright and does not die when Jacob confronts him in the field, the same place Cain confronted Abel. Both Qaheen and Yaaqob carry the Cosmic Aleph, Qof.

Here, we are entirely in the Sphere of Emanation and the personages are mythical and archetypal.

Joseph, the eleventh son of Jacob, is a dual entity, the carrier of both 1 (Aleph). and 10 (Yod). "He was that which a few initiates in the Qabala happen to be from time to time: the historical consciousness of the myth's biological necessity" (Suares, CoG, 8). Joseph scattered the seed of Abraham into the rich material womb of Egypt, where it grew and matured into a pre-natal state.

Joseph, still in Emanation, is the seed of Israel, which is the unification of time and timelessness in a human incarnation. He takes the seed into Egypt in preparation for its eventual birth in the Jewish people.

Four hundred years later, when the seed was ready to be born, Moshe, Moses, whose name means fire in the waters, arrived to free his people from the instinctual bondage of Egypt and lead them back into the promised land of Canaan and evolutionary duality. Moses gave his band of wanderers the Torah, the Word of God, and created the Jewish people as a container, or protective shell, for the revelation of Abraham.

Moshe operates in the Sphere of Creation, where the first task is always building a container for the Emanation (see Bereshyt). Moses stands at the conjunction of two apparent opposites -- the uncreated and the created worlds -- and brings the Jewish people into existence as an evolutionary and historical process characterized by the dual, material and spiritual, covenants of circumcision and Torah, flesh and Word.

After fourteen hundred years, during which time God radically cuts down on His public appearances -- talking only though His spokes-people, the Prophets and Judges, and eventually appearing to abandon His Chosen People altogether -- and during which the Jews gradually imbed themselves in world history, another incarnation of Israel appears to unify the opposites and trigger a new phase in the development of human consciousness.

Reb YHSHWH, Jesus, is an incarnation of Jacob, Israel. He came not to save humanity, but to save Cosmic Consciousness from humans. Mosaic law was the necessary container for the revelation, which had to be expressed in symbolic, mythological terms because scientific language was not available (the human psyche was still too immature). The revelation is not in the past, but now, for it is outside of time. Jesus did not die for our sins, he came to harvest the souls who are capable of breaking through their conditioning and living in the fire of His revelation. The dawn of the Third Day is the dawn of the Third Millennium and the Second Coming is now.

Jesus is a single, not a dual entity. He is the Spirit in the Flesh and can be only One with the Father. He needs a partner to enter into space-time, to become "the historical consciousness of the myth's biological necessity." One person, and one person only, is responsible for our knowing of Jesus at all. His name is Judas, and he delivered the Light into darkness, and he is still doing it today, and he is still not received.

Finally, our seventh and last framework: The purpose of the endogenous evolution of life on Earth, the stake in the Great Game of Life, is Cosmic Indetermination.

The Hebrew alphabet has twenty-two letters but five of them have "final" (end of word) forms which complete the cosmic level of hundreds after the first four: Qof/100 (cosmic consciousness), Raysh/200 (universal container), Sheen/300 (cosmic movement, Breath of God) and Tav/400 (cosmic resistance and sanctuary). These are transcendent states of realized life (Kaf/500), fertility (Mem/600), cosmic indetermination (Noun700), unstructured energy (Phay/800) and cosmic structure and feminine perfection (Tsadde/900).

The goal (for the last time) of the evolution of consciousness on earth is the realization of cosmic consciousness (beyond space-time) in existence and completely indeterminate, which, as we noted above, just happens to be the formula/equation for Qaheen/Cain, the murderer of our dreams. When will we stop letting our vanity (Abel) interpret our myths?

Root document at: http://www.psyche.com/psyche/meta/eastern_and_western_spirituality.html