Cipher of Genesis: Chapter 4, The Thoughts of Man
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Bereshyt
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The Thoughts of Man |
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IT is the purpose of all ciphers to invest a few signs with much meaning. A peculiarity of the Book of Genesis is that
it begins with a very strict and close code and gradually develops and unfolds its fifty chapters through symbols and
allegories and finally through semi-historical tales.
In the severity of its beginning, in its first chapter, in its first verse, in its first sequence of letter-numbers, is the seed, and in the seed is the whole. This whole can be (and is expected to be) grasped in the Bayt-Raysh-Aleph-Sheen-Yod-Tav of Bereshyt. This sequence is in the Revelation and is the Revelation, and those who grasp it are in the Revelation and are, in action the Revelation itself. It is in effect a formula, or rather a fundamental equation of the interplay between Aleph and Yod. Aleph, timeless pulsation life-death-life-death, is shown in the first three graphs Bayt-Raysh-Aleph in its surging motion of creative energy, and Yod, the evolutionary process of existence is held, so to speak, between the hammer of cosmic metabolism, Sheen, and the anvil of its resistant container, Tav. The complete schema goes beyond a mere formula affirming the equivalence of those two terms; its sweeps beyond every duality by amalgamating Aleph and Yod and making them one. The very formulation of that equation is therefore its solution. In spite of being introduced by means of an intellectual approach it can project in us the essential game of life and existence if we will allow it to break up our every-day linear way of thinking. The six graphs of Bereshyt do not express different ideas linked one to another by a logical sequence. They do not belong to any time process. They are simultaneous and can therefore be permuted so as to form different schemata, each one of them significant. But these developments cannot be considered here. It will be enough to examine the equation Bereshyt just as it is written. There is no delusion in it because the Revelation is not a fantastic message from a supernatural world. Surely the fantastic thing is to be alive and yet not to know what life is. The whole mystery of life is within us, and yet we search for revelations concerning it in books. Does thinking or speaking about God give us any knowledge of what God is? Are we surprised to discover that the human mind is in a state of total contradiction? We are living in time and space, which we can measure only by sections. We can never reach the top of the ladder; for it is just as impossible for us to conceive of a beginning or an end to time and space as it is to imagine that time and space never were at all. Thus our reasoning faculties are inadequate if we wish to express any vital truth in terms of daily language. Such vital truths are: existence, life, death, the cause of thought or the way to awaken the revelation within us. The words which our reason has concocted belong to a world where everything is measurable and contradictory (as are life and death). In fact, contradiction exists in the very thought that has coined these words. The sacred language of the letter-numbers, however, is not a product of this thought. These signs are apertures through which to glimpse the presence of the cosmic forces. What is more, they permit these forces to penetrate into our very being. It is necessary that we understand the extraordinary dissimilarity between the language of the letter-numbers and our own language, into which the so-called translations of the Bible were made. This difference becomes strikingly evident with regard to the word Bereshyt, the very first sequence of letternumbers in the Bible: 2.200.1.300.10.400. It is absurd that this should have been translated, In the beginning (God created the heaven and the earth). That unconceivable "beginning" abruptly thrusts the mind into the deadlock of a creed. The believer is he who dreams an unthinkable thought. We make two fundamental errors. In the first place, our own language is an exclusive language: that is to say, if we speak the words "chair" or "yesterday" or "hot", we exclude every thought that is not "chair" or "yesterday" or "hot". We have thus settled our thoughts exclusively upon a certain thing or fact. But when this thing or fact is "the beginning of all things", which we cannot conceive, we do not know what we are talking about -- we are simply dreaming. The second error is to use this limiting thought in trying to perceive the totality of life; for as soon as we designate something that we do not know, we do not designate something that exists. At once, we are in the projection of our dream. We can "talk our heads off" saying words such as God, the Eternal, Supreme Being, or Universal Mind; but what we mean by those terms will never be anything more than indefinite imagery, and very mediocre and puerile at that, since it is in accordance with the limited measure of our own thought. The result of these two mistakes is that as "believers" we tend to think of God in terms of men. We attribute to "him" thoughts, will, projects, a plan of evolution and what not. When in our thinking we relate ourselves to something which we do not know, we are, in fact, imagining something about which we are ignorant. What we need, instead of faith, is direct perception. This includes, first of all, knowledge of ourselves. Our instrument of perception being ourselves, if we do not perceive directly so as to be Revelation itself, why do we not "check" our instrument and detect the flaws in our functioning, instead of searching for truth with inadequate means? To discover where and what is the error: that is what truth is. Remember, But he turned and said unto Peter, Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me : for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men (Matt. xvi, 23). Translated into other languages, the text runs thus: Because your thoughts are not the thoughts of God, but the thoughts of men (which associate themselves inseparably with continuity in existence, Yod). We have often mentioned the reversal of cosmic energy from Aleph to Yod. We have seen it epitomized in the historical action of Moses. We will again witness it further on when Judas will do what he is bidden, by becoming the instrument of Jesus-Aleph's delivery unto the world of Yod. The understanding of that reversal is essential. The code of letter-numbers will be of no avail if we do not instruct our sense-based thought to yield to the disruptive pressure of timelessness and to the necessity of allowing its immanence to blend with its opposite, and still keep itself alive. We have to remember that the only instrument of investigation that we possess is our mind. If we do not completely understand how our mind works, this instrument will twist and disfigure whatever of "reality" we may discover. The quality and condition of the telescope govern the observation resulting from its use. If there is dust on our lens, we see dark spots in the heavens. We have seen in the six letter-numbers of Bereshyt the elements of the problem. We can now understand the Bayt, and be it totally. But we have so far gleaned but few ideas concerning the letter-number, Aleph (1)-just enough to know that we cannot know the Aleph, that the Aleph is unknowable. If we should pursue ideas concerning the Aleph following the wrong habit of thousands of years, we shall never discover it. It is not a question of finding and of understanding intellectually the creative and timeless immanence, discontinuous and always new, having neither past nor future, always present, in which the rhythm of life-death is one unified whole. This Aleph is in us; but one of the means of stifling it, of killing it, is to seek it out, to hunt for it! There are innumerable ways of stifling and killing it. To deny or to believe it, or to resort to alcohol or to prayers: all these have the same disastrous effect. Considered in its original, fundamental position, the problem is a duality-non-duality consisting of life-death Aleph (1), which is intermittent, and Bayt (2), which is a continuing process of existence bent upon preserving its continuity. Knowing that the body is mortal, the psyche identifies itself with the continuum of existence and invents religions in order to persuade itself that it will carry on indefinitely, in the form of an immortal soul or otherwise. The psyche does not wish to understand that this belief is absurd, the "always" of duration, of time, being unthinkable. Thus the psyche makes no distinction between what it calls the Eternal and duration. But if there is anything which transcends thought, it has nothing to do with the element of time. It is non-time. And if in that transcendence there is no time at all -- nor space -- then it is "happening" not only here and now, but everywhere else, no matter where or when. To project the Revelation into a morrow or into a heavenly hereafter is to imagine that, after counting to an enormous number of billions, some special number will emerge from its numerical order. Today is as good as any day, and so with a number. Piling them up will lead nowhere. To believe that Revelation took place only in the times of Abraham or of Pontius Pilate is equally mistaken. So if, in spite of Aleph being within us we are in darkness and if, instead of being reborn as new beings without a past or future, we are entangled in a mediocre existence, the reason is that we prevent the Aleph within us from functioning. If we prevent Aleph from operating, then our thinking is wrong. Moreover, if we believe that the Revelation can be transmitted to us by somebody else -- Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Mohammed -- we are labouring under a delusion because no matter what we are told or what we have read, we shall be holding ideas about what we think someone else has experienced; these are mere projections and have nothing to do with reality. In short, if we find what we are "looking for", it is always ourselves that we find. We must then stop searching and bring about a salutary reversal of our efforts. As a beginning, we will avoid thinking about anything that we cannot conceive of. In other words, we shall leave the mind free and simply listen to this story. A very last reminder before going into the text: let us not build a creed upon Aleph. Although Aleph cannot be known it can be witnessed. We observe it in the fact that thought cannot think of a duration which never ends; in the fact that our everyday thought is established on a duality; and in the fact, also, that the further we investigate our own minds the deeper is the mystery of existence as such. Ultimately we come to realize that consciousness is a discontinuous phenomenon. Qabala is a training of the mind that makes it so subtle and pliable as to allow it to pass through the mysterious doorway of human genesis and enter into the sphere where life-death and existence carry on their inter-play. Jointly, on both sides, the most precious gift of life is at stake: the principle of Indetermination, which allows all that can be to become. Suares, Cipher of Genesis, p.72-77 |
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