Let’s start with a foundation of agreement.

1) The universe exists. This is a 100% true fact.

Now you should notice that I have not defined the word “Universe” nor the word “exists”.

So, hopefully we can agree.  The universe exists, I exist, and you exist.  These are also 100% true facts.

2) You and I are all humans beings and we live within the universe.  This is a 100% true fact.

Hopefully we are all still in agreement, again I haven’t defined or qualified ‘live’, and ‘live within’.

3) The Universe is an interactive process/structure of matter and energy.  All of this interaction and structure does so in an orderly way.  There is an order to how all things exist and interact with other existing things.  This is a 100%true fact.

4) Broadly speaking, for humans, the study of this order is the process called science.  Science is the attempt by humans to make metaphoric maps of how the universe and everything in the universe exist and interact.  Science attempts to lay out explanations of how things in the universe exist in ways that can be tested as either being true or false.  Sometimes the test and the answers that result from those tests are only degrees of truth or falseness.

5) The universe being in orderly place of interacting matter/energy means that there are limitations on how the universe as a whole and all the parts that makes up the universe, function.  That statement is a 100% true fact.  What those limitations are is one of the things science tries to describe. 

Are we all still in agreement? 

6) The statement: ‘The Divine exists’, is not a provable fact.  The statement that ‘The Divine exists’ is a human opinion that cannot be proven as true or false.

The consequences of statement 6 are the following:

7) Every statement, or collections of statements that have or will ever be spoken or written in all human languages concerning the nature of and the activities of the Divine is therefore also an opinion.  Opinions about the Divine can only be true in the sense it is true that X person made that statement or X person believe the truth of the opinion s/he made.

If you agree with statement 6 then statement 7 is an inevitable logic consequence.

Statement 7 is all-inclusive.  It means everything that I write or that you write are all our opinions, which cannot be proven.  All that we can ask is and demand of each other is that our opinions should be consistently logical.

8) If we agree that we all want to discuss and consider that statement 6 is true, despite the fact that we cannot prove statement 6, we will agree that it is our collective opinion that we all believe that it is an opinion we all truly believe in.

9) The Divine is infinite.

10) The Divine is to the universe as the mind/spirit/soul is to an individual human’s body.

These statements 9 – 10 are my opinions, perhaps ones that we can agree on, despite the fact that they cannot be proven.

11) If the Divine exists its existence must be consistent with statements 1 – 5 and therefore the Divine although infinite is limited by the rules or laws concerning how the universe functions.  This is what logical consistency demands.

12) Now if we agree on the statements 6 – 11, then it can be our agreed opinion that all the books that collectively can be labeled ‘Sacred Scriptures’, such as the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, the Zohar, Upanishads, Tao Te Ching, etc., were the result of some yet unspecified process of communication between the Divine and some human being or beings.

13) Statement 7 means that all the books that collectively can be labeled ‘Sacred Scriptures’, all of them are the opinions of the human authors, whoever they are.  These books were written in a human language and are the products of the limitations of finite human beings. 

These 13 statements are guiding principles.  They are I believe a solid basis upon which to conduct our ongoing exchanges about the Divine.

The consequences of these 13 statements is that since the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Scriptures is only an opinion and much of what it contains is not an historically true account of what occurred on this planet Earth.

Another consequence of those 13 statements is that Adam and Eve are thus fictional characters.  Or Mythic characters like the myths told about the 12 labors of Hercules.  Myths have valid purposes.  But myths are not historically real accounts of actual historical events.

Another consequence of those 13 statements is that the claim that Jesus is the messiah is a statement of an opinion and not a statement that is true.  The statement that the Earth rotates around the Sun is true.  Any and all statements about Jesus being the messiah are not statements that have truth akin to the prior statement concerning the sun and the earth.

I can chose to join in on the mythic discussion of the story of Adam and Eve, or the story of Jesus being the messiah, but I have agreed to enter into a conversation which is akin to discussing for the sake of entertainment the fictional proposition: what if we pretend that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. James Watson were real people.

Another consequence of these 13 statements is that much of what Peter has said concerning Adam, Eve, the Divine, Jesus, etc, is his opinion and nothing that is actually true.  I can choose to play the game of pretending that Adam, Eve, the Divine and the idea that Jesus is the Messiah, but it is a game of 'What if'.  Most, if not all, of it cannot be proven.

I can also completely or partially disagree with Peter's or anyone else’s story concerning Adam, Eve, the Divine, Jesus, etc.  I can make up my own.  I can state my own opinions, and even claim that there are the results of communications I had with the Divine.

In the end all statements about things beyond the physical concerning the nature of things such as the soul, spirit, and the divine, are not provable.  All of it is an opinion.

What we can require of each other is logical consistency.

What Ortega says about Quixote, I believe is true of any of us who are willing to take up the challenges that life present to us.


The Hero

[from: Meditations on Quixote, chapter 15 by Jose Ortega Y’ Gasset .

Now our story leads us back to this subject.  …This something is nothing less than the will of Don Quixote.  People may be able to take good fortune away from this neighbor of ours, but they will not be able to take away his effort and courage.

…In Don Quixote we have …a man who wishes to reform reality.  But is he not a piece of that reality?  Does he not live off it, is he not a consequence of it?  How is it possible for that which does not exist-a projected adventure-to govern and alter harsh reality? 

Perhaps it is not possible, but it is a fact that there are men who decide not to be satisfied with reality.  Such men aim at altering the course of things; they refuse to repeat the gestures that custom, tradition, or biological instincts forces them to make.  These men we call heroes, because to be a hero means to be one out of many, to be oneself.  If we refuse to have our actions determined by heredity or environment it is because we seek to base the origin of our actions on ourselves and only on ourselves.  The hero’s will is not that of his ancestors nor of his society, but his own.  This will to be oneself is heroism.

    I do not think that there is any more profound originality than this “practical”, active originality of the hero.  His life is a perpetual resistance to what is habitual and customary.  Each movement that he makes has first to overcome custom and invent a new kind of gesture.  Such a life is a perpetual suffering, a constant tearing oneself away from that part of oneself which is given over to habit and is a prisoner of matter.

In the beginning there was Ayn Sof.  Ayn Sof is a word which represents the true essence of the Divine.  Ayn Sof literal means “No End”, hence the Infinite.  Ayn Sof is the mystery before which no human word or thought can comprehend.  Ayn Sof is without definition, and is before definition.

Ayn Sof decided to create.  And so Ayn Sof first made itself manifest.  It formed Keter, which was the primal cell.  Out of this mystery was born Hochmah, Wisdom and Binah, Understanding.  Out of the sexual union of Wisdom and Understanding the rest of existence was born.  Malkuth was the final resting place of the Divine forces.  And out of Malkuth it created the Heavens and the Earth.  On the Earth was created a Garden in the land of Eden.  Out of Malkuth It also created all the trees and other plants in the Garden.  Then out of Malkuth It created all the animals.  In the center of this vast Garden was created one a very special tree, The One Tree and its name was Sefirot .  The word Sefirot is without translation but it is a plural feminine noun made from the root letter SFR.  From these root letters derive the words for numbers and for writing.

After the entire Garden had been filled with plants and animals all was ready for the home for the crowing glory of creation: Humanity.

The first child of humankind was an absolute perfect being, an Androgynous being of unity made from the Earth itself.  Then Malkuth divide up the Androgynous being into two equal halves, into a male and a female.   The male was named Adam and the female was named Lilith.

Now Ayn Sof was to hard a concept for Adam to deal with and so Adam invented a name for the Creator, Adam named the Creator: God.  Now God explained to Adam and Lilith God’s plan.  God wanted grand-children, lots of them.  Perhaps a few hundreds, maybe a few thousand, hey if need be the Garden could be expanded to house happily perhaps a few million.  God explained sex and child birth.  (Now back then time moved differently.  So, it wouldn’t take 9 months to give birth.  Perhaps a mere 9 days or 9 hours, who knows, none of us were there back then to tell us.  Adam and his wife were perhaps too busy having sex and making babies to keep track of time.)

Anyway, Adam and Lilith liked the sex part but Lilith wasn’t to keen on the giving birth part of the deal.  She realized she would be doing most of the work.  So, she slipped away from Adam and wandered off to check out center of the Garden where God planted this special thing.  Know, God didn’t tell Adam and Lilith exactly what was in the center of the Garden.  Only that it was a special place.  When Lilith got there she saw The One Tree.  She realized it was not just any tree but the Tree of Life!  [This is how come we now call Sefirot by the name “The Tree of Life.”]  And she realized that the Tree of Life is a map!  It was a representation of the Divine itself.  Then she realized that as below so above and as below so above; that the Tree of Life was a map of the macrocosmic Divine and the map of the microcosmic soul within us all.  With this realization came power.  With this power she became the Queen of the Night, and left the Garden.

Now Adam saw Lilith leave.  He called out to God and complained.  God took pity on Adam, and was a little ticked off at Lilith for not wanting to play the game of life by the Divine Rules God laid out, so God put Adam to sleep, took out of him a rib and from this created a new partner for Adam.  And God named her Eve.  Now God was certain that Eve and Adam would stick to together.

Eve was told by Adam all that had occurred in the Garden so far and about God’s plan for them, perhaps placing more emphasis on the sex part than the child birthing part; anyway Eve seemed okay with the overall situation.

[Now, there was this whole ‘serpent thing’, but who he was and what he had to do with the whole situation is not that important right now, so we’ll just ignore him and what part he played in the grand scheme.  I will mention that the serpent was created for the sole purpose of stirring up trouble and moving the plot along.  The Serpent was trapped in a rigged game from the get go, he was set up to take the fall by Ayn Sof.]

Now Adam and Eve took a walk to the center of the Garden to check out what was so special there.  When Eve beheld the Tree, she saw the true nature of the One Tree, she “saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes [Note: It had High Quality!], and the tree was to be desired to make one wise ”.  So she ate from the tree and gained wisdom.

Now, as we all know, the reason we got kicked out of the Garden was all Adam’s fault.  Later on some Jewish guy named Saul even made up a rhyme about it: In Adam’s fall we all fell, or something like that.  Some people make a big deal out of Adam’s mistake.  But they are mistranslating the Hebrew word.  What is translated as “sin” means only mistake, a falling short of the mark.  Be that as it may, Adam is the culprit.

When Adam looked upon the One Tree he saw two.  Adam had this mental block and he tended to divide things up, he took things too literally.  So, he mistook the fact that there were two names, the tree of Life and the tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as meaning that there must be two trees.  And so Adam saw two trees.  Adam divided up what was originally one.  He not only did that but he looked upon the tree and rather than seeing it as a continuous dynamic unity he saw a static hierarchy of separate parts.  Adam also saw those two trees as being something separate from him and thereby invented Subject - Object Metaphysics.

This really pissed God off. Adam had made a real mess of God’s elegant map.  God then shoved the whole lot of them out of the Garden and told them that henceforth there would be toiling in the fields, death and worst of all, taxes.

Before Adam the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Tree of Ethics was united with the Tree of Life, which was the representation of the governing principle in all things, i.e. Quality or the Tao.  So Adam split off Ethics from the knowledge of governing principles.  Adam tried to correct this by making a big deal out of studying the tree of life and thereby further splitting the study of life, which he called science, from ethics.  It just went down hill from there.  Adam enjoys categorizing things, making up more names and separating the whole lot from each other.  We’ve been waiting around ever since for someone to come along and put it all back together.

Now, all this could have been remedied years ago if Adam had listen to Eve. But, he didn’t.  The Rabbis unfortunately inherited the same prejudice about Eve that Adam had.  They got it from this later descendant of Adam named Abraham who unfortunately, truth to tell, invented male chauvinism, i.e. ‘patriarchy’.  Eve had been teaching her girl children all that she knew.  This was the secret wisdom of women, but that knowledge got lost and messed up when Abraham shut down Eve’s separate school for women.  Which he said he was doing all in the name of equality, something called ‘Title IX’, it’s hard for me to keep the name for those laws that Adam made up.  I think this law goes something like “there shall be no separation amongst the sexes if you want tax money.”

So, that’s the true tale of the Garden, the One Tree and how the whole things got so messed up.

Real Magic and the Tao.

Is there such a thing as magic?  I believe the answer is yes – but to understand that answer you have to ask and consider what I mean by the word: magic.

When encountering any abstract word it is best to recall why Lewis Carroll had Humpty Dumpty say concerning words – “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.  The question is which is to be the master – that’s all.” [Chapter VI of Through the Looking Glass, by Lewis Carroll, 1872]  It is important to realize that Humpty said he chooses what the word means.  Thus to understand someone’ else’s words you can not automatically assume that what you think the word means is a match for what the speaker thinks the word means – they are the master of their words – consciously and/or subconsciously.  You should not assume your meaning is accurate for true communication and mutual understanding.  In the end – ask for clarification.

Thus, when I said there is real magic – I was first thinking of stage magicians and their elaborate sleight of hand illusions.  That is clearly one form of magic that is real.

But the more interesting form of magic I believe in is the ability to bend probabilities to obtain significant results.  I believe that real magic is defined through synchronicity.  Synchronicity is a term coined by Carl Jung to refer to "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events.”- It is a significant or meaningful event arising without direct cause.  Real magic is being in the right place at the right time and being there more often.

How does this work?  To use the metaphor of Taoism I believe that there is order and structure to the cosmos.  To align oneself to that flow of order and structure is the secret ‘cause’ of synchronicity.  There are 2 modalities to do this.  At one end of the continuum is the Magician at the other end is the Mystic.

The Magician through directed will creates a center of ‘gravity’ which brings the flow of the Tao towards her/him.  The act of will is a form of energy which when sustained and maintained translates in a held pattern that has the ability to attract results – meaningful and significant events will occur.

The Mystic transforms her/him-self to attunement with the cosmos.  The Mystic connects with the Tao by bringing about the attitude of harmony with oneself, with others and thus with the cosmos at large.  This act of being in harmony results in finding one flowing with the cosmos and thus finding meaningful and significant events unfolding around her/him.

Both the Mystic and the Magician will find that unexpected invitations are dancing lessons from the Divine.  That unexpectedly the cosmos will provide meaningful and significant signs that ask to be acknowledge.

 Addendum:

On the continuum of the way of the Mystic and the way of the Magician - 'random chance' adn getting & or being 'lucky' are at the Mystic end of the spectrum.  It is finding oneself in sync, as in synchronicity, with the flow, fate and chance. 

We live not only in a physical environment but also in a symbolic environment.

Our physical environment, of three spacial dimensions, is a geographical location which may have rivers, valleys, flat plains, hills, mountains, trees, plants, buildings, roads, etc..

We, and all that stuff, exist in a fourth temporal dimension and environment also. Time seems to start when we are born and stop when we die. But we are not so egocentric as to ignore the fact that everything has existed before we got here and will continue to do so after we are gone. We know this and we experience the effects of time on our surroundings and on ourselves.

But, we humans also live, colloquially speaking, through our heads, through our mind. Everything starts off entering our bodies through our physical senses, but when it comes to understanding any of it, we are trapped in our mind, in our limited first person perspective.

We live in a fifth dimension. This fifth dimension is the most important of all, the dimension of humanly crafted symbols. We live through words. We can think thoughts which are images, we can feel emotions, but anytime we try to understand any of it, we come up against words. We all live in the our own world of words.
A world of our making which is contained in the world of our culture’s language system. The language we think and speak with is itself an environment which can also be described by using the metaphors of space and time.

What shapes up?  We are told that it is either Nature – our genetic inheritance, or Nurture – how we were treated and raised as a child.  I believe there is a third factor and that is Culture.

Through the accident of our birth we are born into macro and micro cultures.  These cultures provide us with varying sets of metaphoric ideas and beliefs about “Life, the Universe and Everything.” – as Douglas Adams said.

For example – I am writing in English and thus I belong to these varying macro to micro cultures:
Western Civilization
The English language civilization – born out of the heritage of Great Britain
American English
Through my family – my micro culture I was raised as a Reform Jew.

All these varying cultures taught me ideas about, god, faith, truth, right and wrong, etc.

I understand the world by agreement with or disagreement with those cultures and their values in which I was exposed and raised in.

Once I recognize the affects of culture I can acknowledge that we all are the same way.  It is an accident of fate that I was born – in this lifetime, when and where I was.  Once I recognize the accidents of fate I can image what I would have believed if I was born at a different time and to different parents.  I could have been born to Muslim parents, or Catholic parents, Protestant parents, Buddhist parents, Hindu parents, Atheist parents, etc.

The values and beliefs you have were shaped by the cultures that you were born into.  Realizing this – invites us to take a global perspective; to realize that we were all born into ‘the box’ of our birth culture.  We can then awaken to the possibility that perhaps we should open up that box and look around us at all the varieties of possible ideas, values and beliefs.