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2. Mystical Qabalah - Background

H. Mystical Qabalah, Physics, and Astrophysics

A number of elements in the qabalistic teachings regarding the “Work of the Chariot” (ma’aseh merkabah) and the “Work of the Creation” (ma’aseh b’reshith) provide rich opportunities for comparison with the ideas and models of modern physics and astrophysics. For instance, it has been particularly popular in some recent books to compare the Lurianic doctrine of the expansion of light in the envacuous, circular Contraction (Tzimtzum) to the modern astrophysical model of the Big Bang. In the Big Bang model, this universe originated in a quantum fluctuation that generated an immense explosion of tremendous mass (1058, or in the more technical parlance, 10E58 grams) contained in an infinitesimally small space (10E-33 cm). As the universe expanded and cooled, clouds of plasma accumulated through which gravity waves passed and ignited thermonuclear fires that generated suns. The suns eventually consume a critical amount of mass through the process of nuclear fission, whereby they either burn out or assume new forms. The universe continues to expand in a four-dimensional space-time continuum until it reaches a point where it starts to contract and return to its original condition. The expansion of the “Everlasting Arms” that connect the six Directional Sefiroth to one another around the periphery of the double pyramid Tree of Life delineated in the Sefer Yetzirah, and the movement of the Chayot in the Chariot of the Book of Ezekiel allude to the same idea. In the Hindu holy books known as the Vedas, we find another analogy to modern cosmology in the comparison of the Creator to a spider that weaves a web and then retrieves it back into its body.

The mentor in the Work of the Chariot Trust speculated further on the correlation between Torah B’reshith 1:1-4 and modern scientific cosmology. He based his exegesis upon a different breakdown of the letter sequence of the first line of Torah B’reshith. This breakdown includes an alternative rendering of the first word of the Torah as “Bara-shith” i.e. “IT created Six,” reflecting the six symmetry breaksA symmetry break is a phase transition, like water freezing into ice if heat is removed from the water-ice system. of modern quantum physics. His detailed exegesis is presented in an appendix in Qabalah: The Mystical Heritage of the Children of Abraham. Some other authors, such as Leonora LeetLeet, Leonora. The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah, Inner Traditions, Rochester, Vermont, 1999. The reader is particularly referred to Chapter Nine: "A Synthesis of Sacred Science and Quantum Physics.", have also speculated on the correlation between qabalistic formulations and the components of particle physics.

Another core idea in modern cosmology that finds its counterpart in qabalistic doctrine is that time is relative and subject to compression and expansion. The first chapter of Torah B’reshith describes the “Seven Days of Creation.” In Zohar B’reshith, it says that the entire cycle of Creation is contained in the first verse of Torah B’reshith. In this light, it can then be said that the Hebrew calendar of seven thousand years spans the entire life of this universe in matter, which is currently estimated to be twenty billion years. The implication of this idea is that the sequence of events in Torah B’reshith, all of which are assumed to occur in one plane of existence, actually manifest as a nonlinear space-time sequence occurring in more than one plane. Time-space is exponentially expansive in each successive plane of existence. Perhaps the reader has had the experience of an elaborate dream that seemed to span a long period of time, maybe years, only to wake up and find out that it actually occurred in a manner of minutes. Consider also the oft-told story of a person seeing their entire life “pass before their eyes” in a near-death episode.

From the perspective of a multi-plane, time-space sequence of events, one could conceive of the Great Flood described in the parable of Noah in Torah B’reshith as an allusion to a great solar cycle spanning approximately six billion years in matter. During that cycle, the Sun consumes its mass and eventually expands into a Red Giant, enveloping the planets that it had created, including the Earth. Then, the Sun (known as Elohim in Hebrew and Brahma in Sanskrit) contracts its mass, reconstitutes its core, and spins off a new planetary system in which life is created and evolves. Within the qabalistic worldview, the forty days that Noah is said to have spent in the Ark occurs two planes removed in the World of B’riyah (Creation). The genetic information regarding Noah and his wife and all fauna and flora thereby existed in a formless state as vibrational signatures in the World of B’riyah (Creation). This information then reemerged with the regeneration of life on the planetary mass in the World of Asiyah (Activity in Matter). This extraordinary idea is also found in ancient Sanskrit texts in the account of the incarnation of Vishnu as Matsya the Fish, where the Flood is called Pralaya (“Dark Night of Brahma”).

The next section of this site addresses the primary written sources of the Mystical Qabalah.

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