Parashat Korach 5785 – 07/05/2025
Beginning with Bereishit 5781 (17 October 2020) we embarked on a new format. We will be considering Rambam’s (Maimonides’) great philosophical work Moreh Nevukim (Guide for the Perplexed) in the light of the knowledge of Vedic Science as expounded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The individual essays will therefore not necessarily have anything to do with the weekly Torah portion, although certainly there will be plenty of references to the Torah, the rest of the Bible, and to the Rabbinic literature. For Bereishit we described the project. The next four parshiyyot, Noach through Chayei Sarah, laid out a foundational understanding of Vedic Science, to the degree I am capable of doing so. Beginning with Toledot we started examining Moreh Nevukim.
Bamidbar 19:1-22:1
We move on to the fourth premise of the Mutakallimūn:
This is their saying that the accidents exist, and that they are something superadded to the something that is the substance, and that no body is exempt from one of them. If this premise did not mean more than this, it would be a correct, clear, evident premise, and give rise to no doubt and no difficulty. However, they say that in every substance in which there does not subsist the accident of life, there necessarily subsists the accident of death, for the recipient cannot but receive one of two contraries. They say: similarly it has a color, a taste, motion of rest, aggregation or separation. And if the accident of life subsists in it, there cannot but subsist in it other genera of accidents such as knowledge or ignorance, or will or its contrary, or power or powerlessness, or apprehension or one of its contraries. To sum up: there must necessarily subsist in it all the accidents that may subsist in a living being or one of their contraries.
This premise deals with what are called accidents, which do not have much to do with, say, automobile accidents. Wikipedia defines an accident:
An accident, in metaphysics and philosophy, is a property that the entity or substance has contingently, without which the substance can still retain its identity. An accident does not affect its essence, according to many philosophers…. Examples of accidents are color, taste, movement, and stagnation. Accident is contrasted with essence: a designation for the property or set of properties that make an entity or substance what it fundamentally is, and which it has by necessity, and without which it loses its identity.
The premise therefore states that, since everything has at least one accident, one non-essential feature, that nothing can be pure essence. This is not the only possibility, as Wikipedia goes on to say:
In modern philosophy, an accident (or accidental property) is the union of two concepts: property and contingency. Non-essentialism argues that every property is an accident. Modal necessitarianism argues that all properties are essential and no property is an accident.
It appears that there are 3 choices here: (1) Nothing is essential; (2) Some properties are essential while others are not; (3) Everything is essential. It appears that the Mutakallimūn choose option 2. In trying to understand the difference between essence and accident I’ve tried to come up with some examples. Take an apple for example. Most apples are red, but Granny Smith apples are green. So whatever the essence of apple is, it doesn’t include the color – an apple can be green and still be recognized as an apple. The color is an accident. The essence of an apple would include things like having an edible peel, more or less crisp fruit, a core with small, brown seeds, etc.
What we see is that to get to the essence of something we need to find properties that are common to all instances of the thing. All apples have cores, for example, so we say that the core is part of the essence of apple. Items that are not common to all apples are accidents. We can take this process further. For example, apples are fruit. To get to the essence of fruit, we need to find the common factors present in all fruit, from navel oranges to bananas to apples, etc. Not being a botanist, I will not even attempt to do so. Suffice it to say that not all fruits have cores (e.g. navel oranges), so something that is essential to the apple is certainly not essential to fruit in general. We get to the essence by abstracting away elements that are specific to all instances of the item in question, leaving us with only that which is the same for all.
We can continue this process. In our example, fruits are instances of plant matter, as are leaves and stems and vegetables, etc. The things that are generic to plants for the essence of plants, while those things that are specific to fruits or leaves or stems or vegetables are accidents to those particular instantiations of plant matter. If we keep going we find that the one property that is common to everything in creation is that it exists. Existence, pure Being, is the ultimate essence of everything. And pure Being has no specific attributes – if it did it would not be pure, but rather it would have the accidents of one particular class of things or another. So pure Being is unbounded in any dimension we can think of – time, space, or anything else. Furthermore, it is the essential nature of everything, including every person, and every object.
If pure Being is the essence of everything in creation, then everything other than pure Being must have some accidents. Diversity is what makes creation, otherwise pure Being would just remain quiescent, and there would be no creation. In words with which we may be more familiar, the Absolute is pure Being, and it is attribute-less and unchanging. The Relative, the creation, is the world of distinctions, and these distinctions are accidents laid on top of the essence of everything in creation. If this sounds like something like the way the Rambam discusses Gd, I think it’s because both Rambam and Maharishi (and the Vedic tradition) are describing the same reality. My whole intent with these essays is to demonstrate this very fact.
Now in Vedic Science, we identify pure Being as pure Consciousness. Consciousness is not an attribute of Being, it is simply the nature of Being, and represents the Self-referral nature of Being. We associate self-referral with Consciousness because Consciousness, being conscious, can assume the role of both Observer and Observed – this is a way by which we can understand the self-referral property, and also, this is the way we experience the self-referral property of pure Being within ourselves. In any event, it is this self-referral property that creates the virtual, internal dynamics of Being / Consciousness – and the creation is actually nothing other than these internal dynamics. Everything is all essence, all Being, all Consciousness, and all the accidents we see are just Consciousness expressing itself to itself. This is the reality we awaken to in Unity Consciousness.
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Commentary by Steve Sufian
Parashat Chukat
In this parshah, Miriam dies, the well that follows her dries up, the people complain, Gd tells Moses to take his rod, speak to a rock and water will come out of it, Moses instead strikes the rock and Gd denies him entrance to the Promised Land for his disobedience – there are different rabbinical theories about why Gd denies Moses entrance but Torah is very clear that Gd Did deny Moses entrance.
Does that mean that Moses lost his chance for teshuvah, return to primordial Oneness?
Put it another way: when Moses is denied entry to the physical land of Canaan, Eretz Israel, does that mean he’s also denied entrance to the spiritual Promised Land, the land of fully developed awareness?
No, this Land he can enter. And, perhaps, since he has been a conduit for Gd to speak through him, he is already in this Land. He struck the rock because Gd guided him to strike the rock, even though Gd told him to speak to the rock.
Let us see what we can find in Torah and in this parshah that supports this view, not only for Moses but for every generation, including our own and all future generations.
1) “Be Thou holy”:
Gd many times said, “Be thou Holy, for I Am Holy” (for example, Leviticus 11:44) and has given many directions that suggest how this can be done; for example, “Love the Lrd thy Gd with all thy heart, all thy might and all thy soul.” This Love is something Moses clearly has: even when he pleads with Gd to give forgiveness to wrongdoers, Moses is loving Gd with all his heart and soul, pleading for the life of people who are expressions of Gd, even though Gd is seeming to hide within them, even though they seem to be unaware that they are the Whole hidden in Its Expressions. “Loving Gd” is something that clearly doesn’t depend on entering the physical Promised Land.
2) Earlier in Torah (Numbers 12:8) Gd describes Moses as someone with whom Gd speaks mouth to mouth, clearly, not in riddles.
What will make the physical Promised Land a spiritual place will be the ease with which people can perceive Gd’s Presence in it: since Moses is already in Gd’s Presence (and serves as the physical body through whom Gd’s Voice speaks to the people) Moses is already living in the spiritual Promised Land even though he cannot enter the physical Promised Land.
3) Going beyond duality.
Teshuvah, return to Oneness, requires going beyond the struggle between opposites; for example, requires seeing that Gd is within Egypt (“Mitzrayim,” restrictions), within the wilderness/desert (barrenness/Transcendent Fullness) and within the Promised Land (“Canaan,” synchronicity, Wholeness with all detail, freedom along with restrictions).
In serving Gd, anyone, not just Moses, can experience this Awareness that Gd is All-in-All, Wholeness containing duality and multiplicity.
4) Perceiving Gd in All.
Experiencing that All is One requires perceiving Gd in All. When Gd denies Moses entrance into the physical Promised Land, Gd is forcing Moses to experience freedom within restrictions: to accept the restriction of not entering the physical Promised Land and to find freedom within that restriction. Gd is the Restrictor and the Restriction: The Restriction is Filled with Gd’s Presence. Gd is setting up the condition in which Gd as Gd begins to reveal Gd fully to Gd, playing the role of Moses; Gd begins to reveal Gd as Unlimited, and Gd’s Moses role begins no longer to be lost in weeping over loss, exulting over gain, but begins to perceive the Wholeness that flows in Streams of Loss and Gain, of Weeping and Exulting.
The same thing happens to us: Gd hides within each of us, playing the role of the limited people that we are and Gd may sometimes give us restrictions that force our limited self to surrender, open to Gd within our self, as Gd – always Gd, always Whole, always One – begins to soften the limits and to reveal that we are what we always are: One!
This Revelation becomes clearer, deeper, longer lasting, through our innocent desire and actions to serve Gd, to do God’s Will, as we know it from family traditions, religious traditions, spiritual practices, Torah on the surface, Torah in the Transcendent and our intuition.
Baruch HaShem