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Parashat Bo 5783 — 01/28/2023

Parashat Bo 5783 — 01/28/2023

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.

Shemot 10:1-13:16
Rambam continues his discussion of the problem of “preliminaries.”

He would also dislike being told that there is a thing whose knowledge requires many premises and a long time for investigation. You know that these matters are mutually connected; there being nothing in what exists besides Gd, may He be exalted, and the totality of the things He has made. For this totality includes everything comprised in what exists except only Him. There is, moreover, no way to apprehend Him except it be through the things He has made; for they are indicative of His existence and of what ought to be believed about Him, I mean to say, of what should be affirmed and denied with regard to Him. It is therefore indispensable to consider all beings as they really are so that we may obtain for all the kinds of beings true and certain premises that would be useful to us in our researches pertaining to the divine science. How very many are the premises thus taken from the nature of numbers and the properties of geometrical figures from which we draw inferences concerning things that we should deny with respect to Gd, may He be exalted! And this denial is indicative to us of many notions. As for the matters pertaining to the astronomy of the spheres and to natural science, I do not consider that you should have any difficulty in grasping that those are matters necessary for the apprehension of the relation of the world to Gd’s governance as this relation is in truth and not according to imaginings.

Rambam makes several points here. First, he states that the world consists of Gd and Gd’s creation, nothing else. Creation is the “totality of the things He has made,” and “includes everything comprised in what exists except only Him.” Since Gd, to Rambam, is essentially unknowable, we can only approach knowledge of Gd through the creation. After all, we are creatures ourselves and embedded in creation, so how is it possible to “get our heads around” that which is beyond creation?

Rambam’s answer is that we can come to know Gd through the creation – that is, through Gd’s actions within creation. I think this is why Scripture so often anthropomorphizes Gd, speaking of Gd’s Hands or Feet or Head, etc. This idea is also expressed in the liturgical poem Anim Z’mirot, which is sung on Shabbat at the end of Shacharit (some congregations only sing it on the holidays):

I shall relate Your glory, though I see You not; I shall allegorize You, I shall describe You, though I know You not,

Through the hand of Your prophets, through the counsel of Your servants, You allegorized the splendorous glory of Your power,

Your greatness and Your strength they described the might of Your works,

They allegorized You, but not according to Your reality, and they portrayed You according to Your deeds.

The other way to come close to Gd, to know Gd as best we can, is through Torah study. Since the Torah is the “blueprint of creation” according to our esoteric tradition, one can come to know creation through the study of Torah, and one can learn Torah by studying creation. As R. Akiva Tatz put it, the Torah is like a hologram of creation – when Gd’s light shines through Torah, what appears is creation. So we should be able to go in either direction – Torah first or creation first – and both should lead us closer to Gd.

Now it is clear that as finite creatures, this (asymptotic?) approach to Gd through creation is the best we can do. The intellect is that facility within us that makes distinctions, and distinctions are in the world of things that can be different from one another. Similarly, ordinary perception is on the level of boundaries – we see shapes and forms, colors and shades of black and white, we hear specific sounds and vibrations, etc. Our entire scientific world-view is based on measurement of various properties of the material world, and measurement only applies to finite objects, never to the unbounded, which is beyond all time and measure.

Human beings do have one facility however that can comprehend the infinite, the transcendent. That is the mind. As we have discussed on many occasions, when the mind settles down and all its fluctuations disappear, then it becomes one with Pure Consciousness, which, as we have seen is infinite, unbounded, eternal and unchanging. And this experience of Pure Consciousness is self-referential, that is, Pure Consciousness is recognized as one’s own Self, which is self-aware. Knowledge of Pure Consciousness is not anything separate from Pure Consciousness itself.
Once Pure Consciousness has been stabilized for some time, the Pure Consciousness inside (the Self) begins to recognize itself in every object of perception, until eventually we perceive Pure Consciousness as the all-pervading basis of all creation, and creation itself as simply the internal vibrations of Pure Consciousness. Wholeness predominates in the awareness. Gd is a living reality in our awareness, as perceptually real as our hand in front of our face.

I believe that the intellectual path that Rambam is discussing here is a way to create a concept of Gd, and to refine that concept progressively. This does require preliminary knowledge and culturing a way of thinking. It is as if external to our Self. Experiencing Pure Consciousness on the other hand is completely intimate – it is our Self. It is always there, and only requires us to clean the nervous system of anything that impedes our direct experience of it.

We will continue this discussion next time Gd willing.

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Commentary by Steve Sufian

Parashat Bo

“Bo” means “come.”  After seven plagues, the Lrd tells Moses, “Come to Pharaoh, tell him to let my people go but I have hardened his heart so he will not and I will visit three more plagues upon him and his people so they will know that I am the Lrd.” (paraphrasing).

We see Gd, Who is Totality, playing the roles of Moses and Aaron but also of Pharaoh and Pharaoh’s people.: As Moses and Aaron, He worships Wholeness; as Pharaoh, he worships partial values and refuses to open Himself to Wholeness.

This is a reminder to us, that Gd is All: Gd is our friend, Gd is our opponent, Gd is the neutrals, Gd is All.

It is a reminder to place Wholeness first in our lives and to draw upon Universal Love so we ARE this Love and it flows freely through us to transform restrictions, opponents, troubles into Wholeness, friends and Blessings.

Pharaoh refuses to let Israelites go and three more plagues are visited upon him and all Egypt.

With the plague of the death of the first born and the death of his first-born son Pharaoh finally drives the Children of Israel out of Egypt to worship the Lrd. They take with them their children, flocks, and the wealth which the Egyptians gave them — wealth borrowed from Mitzraim, Restrictions, which will never be returned to the restricted value and will remain with the Children of Israel, dedicated to Unlimited.

Literally, “first born” refers to the first-born child; symbolically, it is whatever is our most precious desire, our link between our present status and the future status we hope to achieve. Our religion guides us to cherish most a first-born, making our most precious desire the desire to be restored to full awareness of Oneness, One with the One, One with Gd, Who Is All There Is, Unborn and Undying.

And our religion guides us to “worship Gd with all our heart and all our soul” and “love our neighbor as our Self”, and thus to free ourselves from enslavement to limited values of life, which were the values of Pharaoh’s Egypt/Mitzraim/ Restrictions, and to gently become fully aware of the Wholeness within which all limits are no longer experienced as limits but are experienced as expressions of the Wholeness within which they exist, flow, flourish.

This parshah reminds us to keep our priorities in order and to free ourselves from restrictions so we have time to worship the Lrd, and thus to transform restrictions into Expressions of the Lrd, of Wholeness, and that includes restoring our experience of our restricted self to Full Awareness, One with the One.

Baruch HaShem