THE SCULPTURE OF VIBRATIONS 1971

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MAZE

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ZAZAZA ENTERS ZAZAZA

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MAGIKALALPHABET

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LIGHT AND LIFE

Lars Olof Bjorn 1976

Page 197

"By writing the 26 letters of the alphabet in a certain order one may put down almost any message (this book 'is written with the same letters' as the Encyclopaedia Britannica and Winnie the Pooh, only the order of the letters differs). In the same way Nature is able to convey with her language how a cell and a whole organism is to be constructed and how it is to function. Nature has succeeded better than we humans; for the genetic code there is only one universal language which is the same in a man, a bean plant and a bacterium."

"BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER

ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE"

"BY WRITING THE 26 LETTERS OF THE ALPHABET IN A CERTAIN ORDER

ONE MAY PUT DOWN ALMOST ANY MESSAGE"

Karen Armstrong 1993

The God of the Mystics

THE

BOOK OF CREATION

Page 250

"THERE IS NO ATTEMPT MADE TO DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE PROCESS REALISTICALLY

THE ACCOUNT IS UNASHAMEDLY SYMBOLIC AND SHOWS GOD CREATING THE WORLD BY MEANS

OF LANGUAGE AS THOUGH HE WERE WRITING A BOOK BUT LANGUAGE HAS BEEN ENTIRELY

TRANSFORMED AND THE MESSAGE OF CREATION IS NO LONGER CLEAR EACH LETTER OF THE

HEBREW ALPHABET IS GIVEN A NUMERICAL VALUE BY COMBINING THE LETTERS WITH THE

SACRED NUMBERS REARRANGING THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS THE MYSTIC WEANED

THE MIND AWAY FROM THE NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS"

THERE IS NO ATTEMPT MADE TO DESCRIBE THE CREATIVE PROCESS REALISTICALLY

THE ACCOUNT IS SYMBOLIC AND SHOWS GOD CREATING THE WORLD BY MEANS OF LANGUAGE

AS THOUGH WRITING A BOOK BUT LANGUAGE ENTIRELY TRANSFORMED

THE MESSAGE OF CREATION IS CLEAR EACH LETTER OF

THE

ALPHABET

IS

GIVEN

A

NUMERICAL

VALUE BY COMBINING THE LETTERS WITH THE SACRED NUMBERS

REARRANGING THEM IN ENDLESS CONFIGURATIONS

THE MYSTIC WEANED THE MIND AWAY FROM THE NORMAL CONNOTATIONS OF WORDS

FINGERPRINTS OF THE GODS

A QUEST FOR THE BEGINNING AND THE END

Graham Hancock 1995

Chapter 32

Speaking to the Unborn

Page 285

"It is understandable that a huge range of myths from all over the ancient world should describe geological catastrophes in graphic detail. Mankind survived the horror of the last Ice Age, and the most plausible source for our enduring traditions of flooding and freezing, massive volcanism and devastating earthquakes is in the tumultuous upheavals unleashed during the great meltdown of 15,000 to 8000 BC. The final retreat of the ice sheets, and the consequent 300-400 foot rise in global sea levels, took place only a few thousand years before the beginning of the historical period. It is therefore not surprising that all our early civilizations should have retained vivid memories of the vast cataclysms that had terrified their forefathers.
Much harder to explain is the peculiar but distinctive way the myths of cataclysm seem to bear the intelligent imprint of a guiding hand.l Indeed the degree of convergence between such ancient stories is frequently remarkable enough to raise the suspicion that they must all have been 'written' by the same 'author'.
Could that author have had anything to do with the wondrous deity, or superhuman, spoken of in so many of the myths we have reviewed, who appears immediately after the world has been shattered by a horrifying geological catastrophe and brings comfort and the gifts of civilization to the shocked and demoralized survivors?
White and bearded, Osiris is the Egyptian manifestation of this / Page 286 / universal figure, and it may not be an accident that one of the first acts he is remembered for in myth is the abolition of cannibalism among the primitive inhabitants of the Nile Valley.2 Viracocha, in South America, was said to have begun his civilizing mission immediately after a great flood; Quetzalcoatl, the discoverer of maize, brought the benefits of crops, mathematics, astronomy and a refined culture to Mexico after the Fourth Sun had been overwhelmed by a destroying deluge.
Could these strange myths contain a record of encounters between scattered palaeolithic tribes which survived the last Ice Age and an as yet unidentified high civilization which passed through the same epoch?
And could the myths be attempts to communicate?

A message in the bottle of time

'Of all the other stupendous inventions,' Galileo once remarked,

what sublimity of mind must have been his who conceived how to communicate his most secret thoughts to any other person, though very distant either in time or place, speaking with those who are in the Indies, speaking to those who are not yet born, nor shall be this thousand or ten thousand years? And with no greater difficulty than the various arrangements of two dozen little signs on paper? Let this be the seal of all the admirable inventions of men.3

If the 'precessional message' identified by scholars like Santillana, von Dechend and Jane Sellers is indeed a deliberate attempt at communication by some lost civilization of antiquity, how come it wasn't just written down and left for us to find? Wouldn't that have been easier than encoding it in myths? Perhaps.
Nevertheless, suppose that whatever the message was written on got destroyed or worn away after many thousands of years? Or suppose that the language in which it was inscribed was later forgotten utterly (like the enigmatic Indus Valley script, which has been studied closely for more than half a century but has so far resisted all attempts at decoding)? It must be obvious that in such circumstances a written / Page 287 / legacy to the future would be of no value at all, because nobody would be able to make sense of it.
What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them - and the city of Teotihuacan may be the calling-card of a lost civilization written in the eternal language of mathematics.
Geodetic data, related to the exact positioning of fixed geographical points and to the shape and size of the earth, would also remain valid and recognizable for tens of thousands of years, and might be most conveniently expressed by means of cartography (or in the construction of giant geodetic monuments like the Great Pyramid of Egypt, as we shall see).
Another 'constant' in our solar system is the language of time: the great but regular intervals of time calibrated by the inch-worm creep of precessional motion. Now, or ten thousand years in the future, a message that prints out numbers like 72 or 2160 or 4320 or 25,920 should be instantly intelligible to any civilization that has evolved a modest talent for mathematics and the ability to detect and measure the almost imperceptible reverse wobble that the sun appears to make along the ecliptic against the background of the fixed stars..."

"What one would look for, therefore, would be a universal language, the kind of language that would be comprehensible to any technologically advanced society in any epoch, even a thousand or ten thousand years into the future. Such languages are few and far between, but mathematics is one of them"

"WRITTEN IN THE ETERNAL LANGUAGE OF MATHEMATICS"

A HISTORY OF GOD

Karen Armstrong 1993

The God of the Mystics

Page 281

Philosophy threatened to turn God into a remote abstraction but the God of the mystics was able to touch those fears and anxieties that lie deeper than the rational. Where the Throne Mystics had been content to gaze upon the glory of God from without, the Kabbalists attempted to penetrate the inner life of God and the human consciousness. Instead of speculating rationally about the nature of God and the metaphysical problems of his relationship with the world, the Kabbalists turned to the imagination,
Like the Sufis, the Kabbalists made use of the Gnostic and Neoplatonic distinction between the essence of God and the God whom we glimpse in revelation and creation. God himself is essentially unknowable, inconceivable and impersonal. They called the hidden God En Sof, (literally, 'without end'). We know nothing whatever about En Sof: he is not even mentioned in either the Bible or the Talmud. An anonymous thineenth-century author wrote that En Sof is incapable of becoming the subject of a revelation to humanity ⁵⁴ Unlike YHWH, En Sof had no documented name; 'he' is not a person. Indeed it is more accurate to refer to the Godhead as 'It'. This was a radical departure from the highly personal God of thc Bible and thc Talmud, The Kabbalists evolved their own mmythology to help them to explore a new realm of the religious consciousness. To explain thc relationship between En Sof and YHWH, without yielding to thc Gnostic heresy that they were two different beings, the Kabbalists developed a symbolic method of reading scripture. Like the Sufis, they imagined a process whereby the hidden God made himself known to humanity. En Sof had manifested himself to the Jewish mystics under ten different aspects or sefiroth ('numerations') of the divine reality which had emanated from the inscrutable depths of the unknowable Godhead. Each sefirah represented a stage in En Sof's unfolding revelation and had its own symbolic name, but each of these divine spheres contained the whole mystery of God considcred under a particular heading. Thc Kabbalistic exegesis made every single word of the Bible refer to one or other of thc ten sepiroth: each verse described an event or phenomenon that had its counterpart in the inner life of God himself, Ibn al-Arabi had seen God's sigh of compassion, which had / Page 282 / revealed him to mankind, as the Word which had created the world. In rather the same way, the sefiroth were both the names that God had given to himself and the means whereby he had created the world. Together these ten names formed his one great Name, which was not known to men. They represented the stages whereby En Sof had descended from his lonely inaccessibility to the mundane world. They are usually listed as follows:

1.Kether Elyon. The 'Supreme Crown'
2. Hokhmah: 'Wisdom'.
3. Dinah: 'Intelligence'.
4. Hesed: 'Love' or 'Mercy'.
5. Din: 'Power' (usually manifested in stern judgement).
6. Rahamin: 'Compassion'; sometimes called 'Tifereth': 'Beauty'.
7. Netsah: 'Lasting Endurance'.
8. Hod: 'Majesty'.
9. Yesod: 'foundation'.
10. Malkuth: 'Kingdom'; also called 'Shekinah'.

Sometimes the sefiroth are depicted as a tree, growing upside down with its roots in the incomprehensible depths of En Sof, [see diagram] and its summit in the Shekinah, in the world. The organic image expresses the unity of this Kabbalistic symbol. En Sof is the sap that runs through the branches of the tree and gives them life, unifying them in a mysterious and complex reality. Although there is a distinction between En Sof and the world of his names, the two are one in rather the same way as a coal and a flame. The sefiroth represent the worlds of light that manifest the darkness of En Sof which remains in impenetrable obscurity. It is yet another way of showing that our notions of 'God' cannot fully express the reality to which they point.
The world of the sefiroth is not an alternative reality 'out there' between the Godhead and the world, however. They are not the rungs of a ladder between heaven and earth but underlie the world experienced by the senses. Because God is all in all, the sefiroth are present and active in everything that exists. They also represent the stages of human consciousness by which the mystic ascends to God by descending into his own mind. Yet again, God and man are depicted as/ Page 283 Diagram The Tree of the Sefiroth. omitted) Page 284 inseparable. Some Kabbalists saw the sefiroth as the limbs of primordial man as originally intended by God. This was what the Bible had meant when it said that man had been created in God's image: the mundane reality here below corresponded to an archetypal reality in the heavenly world. The images of God as a tree or as a man were imaginative depictions of a reality that defied rational formulation.Sometimes the sefiroth are depicted as a tree, growing upside down with its roots in the incomprehensible depths of En Sof, [see diagram] and its summit in the Shekinah, in the world. The organic image expresses the unity of this Kabbalistic symbol. En Sof is the sap that runs through the branches of the tree and gives them life, unifying them in a mysterious and complex reality. Although there is a distinction between En Sof and the world of his names, the two are one in rather the same way as a coal and a flame. The sefiroth represent the worlds of light that manifest the darkness of En Sof which remains in impenetrable obscurity. It is yet another way of showing that our notions of 'God' cannot fully express the reality to which they point.
The world of the sefiroth is not an alternative reality 'out there' between the Godhead and the world, however. They are not the rungs of a ladder between heaven and earth but underlie the world experienced by the senses. Because God is all in all, the sefiroth are present and active in everything that exists. They also represent the stages of human consciousness by which the mystic ascends to God by descending into his own mind. Yet again, God and man are depicted as/ Page 283 Diagram The Tree of the Sefiroth. omitted) Page 284 inseparable. Some Kabbalists saw the sefiroth as the limbs of primordial man as originally intended by God. This was what the Bible had meant when it said that man had been created in God's image: the mundane reality here below corresponded to an archetypal reality in the heavenly world. The images of God as a tree or as a man were imaginative depictions of a reality that defied rational formulation.

The Kabbalists were not antagonistic towards Falsafah - many of them revered figures like Saadia Gaon and Maimonides - but they found symbolism and mythology more satisfying than metaphysics for penetrating the mystery of God.
The most influential Kabbalistic text was The Zohar, which was probably written in about 1275 by the Spanish mystic Moses of Leon. As a young man, he had studied Maimonides but had gradually felt the attraction of mysticism and the esoteric tradition of Kabbalah. The Zohar (The Book of Splendour) is a sort of mystical novel, which depicts the third-century Talmudist Simeon ben Yohai wandering round Palestine with his son Eliezar, talking to his disciples about God, nature and human life. There is no clear structure and no systematic development of theme or ideas. Such an approach would be alien to the spirit of The Zohar, whose God resists any neat system of thought. Like Thn al-Arabi, Moses of Leon believed that God gives each mystic a unique and personal revelation, so there is no limit to the way the Torah can be interpreted: as the Kabbalist progresses, layer upon layer of significance is revealed. The Zohar shows the mysterious emanation of the ten seftroth as a process whereby the impersonal En Sof becomes a personality. In the three highest sefiroth - Kether, Hokhmah and Binah - when, as it were, En Sof has only just 'decided' to express himself, the divine reality is called 'he'. As 'he' descends through the middle sefiroth - Hesed, Din, Tifereth, Netsah, Hod and Yesod - 'he' becomes 'you'. Finally, when God becomes present in the world in the Shekinah, 'he' calls himself 'I'. It is at this point, where God has, as it were, become an individual and his self-expression is complete, that man can begin his mystical journey. Once the mystic has acquired an understanding of his own deepest self, he becomes aware of the Presence of God within him and can then ascend to the more impersonal higher spheres, transcending the limits of / Page 285 / personality and egotism. It is a return to the unimaginable Source of our being and the hidden world of uncreated reality. In this mystical perspective, our world of sense impression is simply the last and outermost shell of the divine reality.
In Kabbalah, as in Sufism, the doctrine of the creation is not really concerned with the physical origins of the universe. The Zohar sees the Genesis account as a symbolic version of a crisis within En Sof; which causes the Godhead to break out of Its unfathomable introspection and reveal Itself. As The Zohar says:

In the beginning, when the will of the King began to take effect, he engraved signs into the divine aura. A dark flame sprang forth from the innermost recesses of En Sof, like a fog which forms out of the formless, enclosed in the ring of this aura, neither white nor black, red nor green and of no colour whatever .⁵⁵

In Genesis, God's first creative word had been: 'Let there be light!' In The Zohar's commentary on Genesis (called Bereshit in Hebrew after its opening word: 'in the beginning') this 'dark flame' is the first sefirah: Kether Elyon, the Supreme Crown of Divinity. It has no colour or form: other Kabbalists prefer to call it Nothing (ayin). The highest form of divinity that the human mind can conceive is equated with nothingness because it bears no comparison with any of the other things in existence. All the other sefiroth, therefore, emerge from the womb of Nothingness. This is a mystical interpretation of the traditional doctrine of die creation ex nihilo. The process of the Godhead's self-expression continues as the welling of light, which spreads in ever wider spheres. The Zohar continues

But when this flame began to assume size and extension, it produced radiant colours. For in the inmost centre a well sprang forth from which flames poured upon everything below, hidden in the mysterious secrets of En Sof. The well broke through, and yet did not entirely break through, the eternal aura which surrounded it. It was entirely recognisable until under the impact of its breakthrough, a hidden supernal point shone forth. Beyond this point nothing may be known or understood, and it is called Bereshit, the Beginning; the first word of creation. ⁵⁶

Page 286

This 'point' is Hokhmah (Wisdom), the second sefirah which contains the ideal form of all created dlings. The point develops into a palace or a building, which becomes Binah (Intelligence), the dtird sefirah. These three highest sefiroth represent the limit of human comprehen-sion. Kabbalists say that God exists in Binah as the great 'Who?' (Mi) which stands at the beginning of every question. But it is not possible to get an answer. Even though En Sof is gradually adapting Itself to l~ human limitations, we have no way of knowing 'Who' he is: the higher we ascend, the more 'he' remains shrouded in darkness and mystery.
The next seven sefiroth are said to correspond to the seven days of creation in Genesis. During the biblical period, YHWH had eventu-ally triumphed over the ancient goddesses of Canaan and their erotic cults. But as Kabbalists struggled to express the mystery of God, the old mythologies reasserted themselves, albeit in a disguised form. The Zohar describes Binah as the Supernal Mother, whose womb is penetrated by the 'dark flame' to give birth to the seven lower sefiroth. Again Yesod, the ninth sefirah inspires some phallic speculation: it is depicted as the channel through which the divine life pours into the universe in an act of mystical procreation. It is in the Shekinah, the tenth sefirah, however, that the ancient sexual symbolism of creation and theogony appears most clearly. In the Talmud, the Shekinah was a neutral figure: it had neither sex nor gender. In Kabbalah, however, the Shekinah becomes the female aspect of God. The Bahir (c. I 200), one of the earliest Kabbalistic texts, had identified the Shekinah with the Gnostic figure of Sophia, the last of the divine emanations which had fallen from the Pleroma and now wandered! lost and alienated from the Godhead, through the world. The Zohar links this 'exile of the Shekinah' with the fall of Adam as recounted in Genesis. It says that Adam was shown the middle sefiroth' in the Tree of Life and the Shekinah in the Tree of Knowledge. Instead of worshipping the seven sefiroth together, he chose to venerate the Shekinah alone, sundering life from knowledge and rupturing the unity of the sefiroth. The divine life could no longer flow uninterruptedly into the world, which was isolated from its divine Source. But by observing the Torah, the community of Israel could heal the exile of the Shekinah and reunite the world to the Godhead. Not surprisingly, many strict Talmudists / Page 287 / found this an abhorrent idea but the exile of the Shekinah, which echoed the ancient myths of the goddess who wandered far from the divine world, became one of the most popular elements of Kabbalah. The female Shekinah brought some sexual balance into the notion of God which tended to be too heavily weighted towards the masculine and clearly fulfilled an important religious need.
The notion of the divine exile also addressed that sense of separation which is the cause of so much human anxiety. The Zohar constantly defines evil as something which has become separated or which has entered into a relationship for which it is unsuited. One of the problems of ethical monotheism is that it isolates evil. Because we cannot accept the idea that there is evil in our God, there is a danger that we will not be able to endure it within ourselves. It can then be pushed away and made monstrous and inhuman. The terrifying image of Satan in Western Christendom was such a distorted projection. The Zohar finds the root of evil in God himself: in Din or Stern Judgement, the fifth sefirah. Din is depicted as God's left hand, Hesed (Mercy) as his right. As long as Din operates harmoniously with the divine Mercy, it is positive and beneficial. But if it breaks away and becomes separate from the other sejiroth, it becomes evil and destructive. The Zohar does not tell us how this separation came about. In the next chapter, we shall see that later Kabbalists reflected on the problem of evil, which they saw as the result of a kind of primordial 'accident' that occurred in the very early stages of God's self-revelation. Kabbalah makes little sense if interpreted literally, but its mythology proved psychologically satisfying. When disaster and tragedy engulfed Spanish Jewry during the fifteenth century, it was the Kabbalistic God which helped them to make sense of their suffering.
We can see the psychological acuity of Kabbalah in the work of the Spanish mystic Abraham Abulafia (I 24o-after 1291). The bulk of his work was composed at about the same time as The Zohar but Abulafia concentrated on the practical method of achieving a sense of God rather than with the nature of God itself. These methods are similar to those employed today by psychoanalysts in their secular quest for enlightenment. As the Sufis had wanted to experience God like Muhammad, Abulafia claimed to have found a way of achieving / Page 288 / prophetic inspiration. He evolved a Jewish form of Yoga, using the usual disciplines of concentration such as breathing, the recitation of a mantra and the adoption of a special posture to achieve an alternative state of consciousness. Abulafia was an unusual Kabbalist. He was a highly erudite man, who had studied Torah, Talmud and Falsafah before being converted to mysticism by an overwhelming religious experience at the age of thirty-one. He seems to have believed that he was the Messiah, not only to Jews but also to Christians. Accordingly, he travelled extensively throughout Spain making disciples and even ventured as far as the Near East. In 1280 he visited the Pope as a Jewish ambassador. Although Abulafia was often very outspoken in his criticism of Christianity, he seems to have appreciated the similarity between the Kabbalistic God and the theology of the Trinity. The three highest sefiroth are reminiscent of the Logos and Spirit, the Intellect and Wisdom of God, which proceed from the Father, the Nothingness lost in inaccessible light. Abulafia himself liked to speak about God in a trinitarian manner.
To find this God, Abulafia taught that it was necessary 'to unseal the soul, to untie the knots which bind it'. The phrase 'untying the knots' is also found in Tibetan Buddhism, another indication of the funda-mental agreement of mystics worldwide. The process described can perhaps be compared to the psychoanalytic attempt to unlock those complexes that impede the mental health of the patient. As a Kabbalist, Abulafia was more concerned with the divine energy that animates the whole of creation but which the soul cannot perceive. As long as we clog our minds with ideas based on sense perception, it is difficult to discern the transcendent element of life. By means of his yogic disciplines, Abulafia taught his disciples to go beyond normal consciousness to discover a whole new world. One of his methods was the Hokmah ha- Tsenlf (The Science of the Combination of the Letters) which took the form of a meditation on the Name of God. The Kabbalist was to combine the letters of the divine name in different combinations with a view to divorcing his mind from the concrete to a more abstract mode of perception. The effects of this discipline - which sound remarkably unpromising to an outsider - appear to have been remarkable. Abulafia himself compared it to the sensation of / Page 289 / 
listening to musical harmonies, the letters of the alphabet taking the place of notes in a scale. He also used a method of associating ideas, which he called dillug (jumping) and ketifsah (skipping), which is clearly similar to the modem analytic practice of free association. Again, this is said to have achieved astonishing results. As Abulafia explained, it brings to light hidden mental processes and liberated the Kabbalist from 'the prison of the natural spheres and leads [him] to the boundaries of the divine sphere'.⁵⁷ In this way, the 'seals' of the soul were unlocked and the initiate discovered resources of psychic power that enlightened his mind and assuaged the pain of his heart.
In rather the same way as a psychoanalytic patient needs the guidance of his therapist, Abulafia insisted that the mystical journey into the mind could only be undertaken under the supervision of a master of Kabbalah. He was well aware of the dangers because he himself had suffered from a devastating religious experience in his youth which had almost caused him to despair. Today patients will often internalise the person of their analyst in order to appropriate the strength and health that he or she represents. Similarly Abulafia wrote that the Kabbalist would often 'see' and 'hear' the person of his spiritual director, who becomes 'the mover from inside, who opens the closed doors within him'. He feels a new surge of power and an inner transformation that was so overwhelming that it seemed to issue from a divine source. A disciple of Abulafia gave another interpretation of the ecstasy: the mystic, he said, became his own Messiah. In ecstasy he was confronted with a vision of his own liberated and enlightened self:
Know that the complete spirit of prophecy consists for the prophet in that he suddenly sees the shape of his self standing before him and he forgets his self and it is disengaged from him . . . and of this secret our teachers said [in the Talmud]: 'Great is the strength of the prophets, who compare the form of Him who formed it' [that is, 'who compare men to God'].⁵⁸
Jewish mystics were always reluctant to claim union with God. Abulafia and his disciples would only say that by experiencing union with a spiritual director or by realising a personal liberation the Kabbalist had been touched by God indirectly. There are obvious
/ Page 290 / differences between medieval mysticism and modern psychotherapy but both disciplines have evolved similar techniques to achieve healing and personal integration.
In the West Christians were slower to develop a mystical tradition. They had fallen behind the monotheists in the Byzantine and Islamic empires and were perhaps not ready for this new development. During the fourteenth century, however, there was a veritable explosion of mystical religion, especially in Northern Europe. Germany in particu-lar produced a flock of mystics: Meister Eckhart (1260-1327), John Tauler(1300-61), Gertrude the Great (1256-1302), and Henry Suso (1295-1306). England also made a significant contribution to this Western development and produced four great mystics who quickly attracted a following on the continent as well as in their own country: Richard Rolle of Hampole (1290-1349), the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton (d.1346) and Dame Julian of Norwich (c.1342-1416). Some of these mystics were more advanced than others. Richard Rolle, for example, seems to have got trapped in the cultivation of exotic sensations and his spirituality was sometimes characterised by a certain egotism. But the greatest of them discovered for themselves many of the insights already achieved by the Greeks, Sufis and Kabbalists.
Meister Eckhart, for example, who greatly influenced Tauler and Suso, was himself influenced by Denys the Areopagite and Maimonides. A Dominican friar, he was a brilliant intellectual and lectured on Aristotelian philosophy at the University of Paris. In 1325, however, his mystical teaching brought him into conflict with his bishop, the Archbishop of Cologne, who arraigned him for heresy: he was charged with denying the goodness of God, with claiming that God himself was born in the soul and of preaching the eternity of the world. Yet even some of Eckhart's severest critics believed that he was orthodox: the mistake lay in interpreting some of his remarks literally instead of symbolically, as intended. Eckhart was a poet, who thoroughly enjoyed paradox and metaphor. While he believed that it was rational to believe in God, he denied that reason alone could form any adequate conception of the divine nature: 'The proof of a knowable thing is made either to the senses or the intellect,' he argued,Page / 291 / but as regards the knowledge of God there can be neither a demonstration from sensory perception, since He is incorporeal, nor from the intellect, since He lacks any form known to us. '⁵⁹ God was not another being whose existence could be proved like any normal object of thought.
God, Eckhart declared, was Nothing.⁶⁰ This did not mean that he was an illusion but that God enjoyed a richer, fuller type of existence than that known to us. He also called God 'darkness', not to denote the absence of light but to indicate the presence of something brighter. Eckhart also distinguished between the 'Godhead', which was best described in negative terms, such as 'desert', 'wilderness', 'darkness' and 'nothing', and the God who is known to us as Father, Son and Spirit.61 As a Westerner, Eckhart liked to use Augustine's analogy of the Trinity in the human mind and implied that even though the doctrine of the Trinity could not be known by reason, it was only the intellect which perceived God as Three persons: once the mystic had achieved union with God, he or she saw him as One. The Greeks would not have liked this idea but Eckhart would have agreed with them that the Trinity was essentially a mystical doctrine. He liked to talk about the Father engendering the Son in the soul, rather as Mary had conceived Christ in the womb. Rumi had also seen the Virgin Birth of the Prophet Jesus as a symbol for the birth of the soul in the heart of the mystic. It was, Eckhart insisted, an allegory of the co-operation of the soul with God.
God could only be known by mystical experience. It was better to speak of him in negative terminology, as Maimonides had suggested. Indeed, we had to purify our conception of God, getting rid of our ridiculous preconceptions and anthropomorphic imagery. We should even avoid using the term 'God' itself. This is what he meant when he said: 'Man's last and highest parting is when, for God's sake, he takes leave of God.,⁶² It would be a painful process. Since God was Nothing, we had to be prepared to be no-thing too in order to become one with him. In a process similar to that 'fana described by the Sufis, Eckhart spoke of'detachment' or, rather, 'separateness' abgeschieden- heit).⁶³ In much the same way as a Muslim considers the veneration of anything other than God himself as idolatry (shirk), Eckhart taught / Page 292 / that the mystic must refuse to be enslaved by any finite ideas about the divine. Only thus would he achieve identity with God, whereby 'God's existence must be my existence and God's Is-ness (Istigkeit) is my is- ness,.⁶⁴ Since God was the ground of being, there was no need to seek him 'out there' or envisage an ascent to something beyond the world we knew.
Al-Hallaj had antagonised the ulema by crying: 'I am the Truth' and Eckhart's mystical doctrine shocked the bishops of Germany: what did it mean to say that a mere man or woman could become one with God? During the fourteenth century, Greek theologians debated this question furiously. Since God was essentially inaccessible, how could he communicate himself to mankind? If there was a distinction between God's essence and his 'activities' or 'energies', as the Fathers had taught, surely it was blasphemous to compare the 'God' that a Christian encountered in prayer with God himself? Gregory Palamas, Archbishop of Saloniki, taught that, paradoxical as it might seem, any Christian could enjoy such a direct knowledge of God himself. True, God's essence is always beyond our comprehension, but his 'energies' were not distinct from God and should not be considered as a mere divine afterglow. A Jewish mystic would have agreed: God En Sof would always remain shrouded in impenetrable darkness but his sefiroth (which corresponded to the Greeks' 'energies') were them-selves divine, flowing eternally from the heart of the Godhead. Sometimes men and women could see or experience these 'energies' directly, as when the Bible said that God's 'glory' had appeared. Nobody had ever seen God's essence, but that did not mean that a direct experience of God himself was impossible. The fact that this assertion was paradoxical did not distress Palamas in the least. It had long been agreed by the Greeks that any statement about God had to be a paradox. Only thus could people retain a sense of his mystery and ineffability. Palamas put it this way:
We attain to participation in the divine nature, and yet at the same time it remains totally inaccessible. We need to affirm both at the
same time and to preserve the antimony as a criterion for right doctrine.⁶⁵

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There was nothing new in Palamas's doctrine: it had been oudined during the eleventh century by Symeon the New Theologian. But Palamas was challenged by Barlaam the Calabrian, who had studied in Italy and been strongly influenced by the rationalistic Aristototelian- ism of Thomas Aquinas. He opposed the traditional Greek distinction between God's 'essence' and his 'energies', accusing Palamas of splitting God into two separate parts. Barlaam proposed a definition of God that went back to the ancient Greek rationalists and emphasised his absolute simplicity. Greek philosophers like Aristode who, Barlaam claimed, had been specially enlightened by God, taught that God was unknowable and remote from the world. It was not possible, therefore, for men and women to 'see' God: human beings could only sense his influence indirecdy in scripture or the wonders of creation. Barlaam was condemned by a Council of the Orthodox Church in 1341 but was supported by other monks who had also been influenced by Aquinas. Basically this had become a conflict between the God of the mystics and the God of the philosophers. Barlaam and his supporters Gregory Akindynos (who liked to quote the Greek version of the Summa Theologiae), Nicephoras Gregoras and the Thomist Prochoros Cydones had all become alienated from the apophatic theology of Byzantium with its stress on silence, paradox and mystery. They preferred the more positive theology of Western Europe, which defined God as Being rather than as Nothing. Against the mysterious deity of Denys, Symeon and Palamas, they set up a God about which it was possible to make statements. The Greeks had always distrusted this tendency in Western thought and, in the face of this infiltration of rationalistic Latin ideas, Palamas reasserted the paradoxical theology of Eastern Orthodoxy. God must not be reduced to a concept that could be expressed by a human word. He agreed with Barlaam that God was unknowable but insisted that he had nonetheless been experienced by men and women. The light that had transfigured the humanity of Jesus on Mount Tabor was not God's essence, which no man had seen, but was in some mysterious way God himself. The liturgy which, according to Greek theology, enshrined orthodox opinion, proclaimed that on Tabor: 'We have seen the Father as light and the Spirit as light.' It had been a revelation of 'what we once were / Page 294 /and what we are to be' when, like Christ, we become deified.⁶⁶ Again, what we 'saw' when we contemplated God in this life was not a substitute for God but was somehow God himself. Of course this was a contradiction but the Christian God was a paradox: antimony and silence represented the only correct posture before the mystery that we called 'God' - not a philosophical hubris which tried to iron out the difficulties.
Barlaam had tried to make the concept of God too consistent: in his view, either God was to be identified with his essence or he was not. He had tried, as it were, to confine God to his essence and say that it was impossible for him to be present outside it in his 'energies'. But that was to think about God as though he were any other phenomenon and was based on purely human notions of what was or was not possible. Palamas insisted that the vision of God was a mutual ecstasy: men and women transcend themselves but God also underwent the ecstasy of transcendence by going beyond 'himself' in order to make himself known to his creatures: 'God also comes out of himself and becomes united with our minds by condescension.,⁶⁷ The victory of Palamas, whose theology remained normative in Orthodox Christianity, over the Greek rationalists of the fourteenth century represents a wider triumph for mysticism in all three monotheistic religions. Since the eleventh century, Muslim philosophers had come to the conclusion
that reason - which was indispensable for such studies as medicine or science - was quite inadequate when it came to the study of God. To rely on reason alone was like attempting to eat soup with a fork.
The God of the Sufis had gained ascendency over the God of the philosophers in most parts of the Islamic empire. In the next chapter we shall see that the God of the Kabbalists became dominant in Jewish spirituality during the sixteenth century. Mysticism was able to penetrate the mind more deeply than the more cerebral or legalistic types of religion. Its God could address more primitive hopes, fears and anxieties before which the remote God of the philosophers was impotent. By the fourteenth century the West had launched its own mystical religion and made a very promising start. But mysticism in the West would never become as widespread as in the other traditions. In England, Germany and the Lowlands, which had produced such / Page 295 /distinguished mystics, the Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth century decried this unbiblical spirituality. In the Roman Catholic Church, leading mystics like St Teresa of Avila were often threatened by the Inquisition of the Counter-Reformation. As a result of the Reformation, Europe began to see God in still more rationalistic terms."

AND

THE LORD GOD

FORMED

MAN OF THE DUST OF THE GROUND

AND

BREATHED INTO HIS NOSTRILS

THE BREATH OF LIFE

AND

MAN BECAME A LIVING SOUL

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A HISTORY OF GOD

Karen Armstrong 1993

The God of the Mystics

Page 288

"By means of his yogic disciplines, Abulafia taught his disciples to go beyond normal consciousness to discover a whole new world. One of his methods was the Hokmah ha- Tsenlf (The Science of the Combination of the Letters) which took the form of a meditation on the Name of God. The Kabbalist was to combine the letters of the divine name in different combinations with a view to divorcing his mind from the concrete to a more abstract mode of perception. The effects of this discipline - which sound remarkably unpromising to an outsider - appear to have been remarkable. Abulafia himself compared it to the sensation of / Page 289 /  listening to musical harmonies, the letters of the alphabet taking the place of notes in a scale. He also used a method of associating ideas, which he called dillug (jumping) and ketifsah (skipping), which is clearly similar to the modem analytic practice of free association. Again, this is said to have achieved astonishing results. As Abulafia explained, it brings to light hidden mental processes and liberated the Kabbalist from 'the prison of the natural spheres and leads [him] to the boundaries of the divine sphere'.⁵⁷ In this way, the 'seals' of the soul were unlocked and the initiate discovered resources of psychic power that enlightened his mind and assuaged the pain of his heart."