Parashat Vayeshev 5784 — 12/09/2023
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.
Bereishit 37:1-40:23
We now return to our discussion of Rambam with Chapter 51 of Part I. He discusses some issues related to how we know things, and how we might be misled into believing things that are not true at all:
There are many things in existence that are clear and manifest: primary intelligibles and things perceived by the senses and, in addition, the things that come near to these in respect to their clarity. If man had been left as he [naturally] is, he would not have needed a proof of them – for instance, for the existence of motion, the existence of man’s ability to act, the manifestations of generation and corruption, the natures of the things that are apparent to the senses, like the hotness of fire, the coldness of water, and many other things of this kind. Yet since strange opinions have arisen due either to people who committed errors or to people who acted with some end in view, so that professing such opinion they ran counter to the nature of existence and denied a sensibly perceived thing or wished to suggest to the estimative faculty the existence of a nonexistent thing, the men of science have had to resort to proving those manifest things and to disproving the existence of things that are only thought to exist, Thus we find that Aristotle establishes the fact of motion, as it had been denied, and demonstrates the nonexistence of atoms, as their existence had been asserted.
First, let’s consider why it should be that many things are “clear and manifest.” First, there are those things that are “perceived by the senses.” While this seems pretty obvious – “what you see is what you get” – there are some obvious problems with this approach as well. One that we are all familiar with is optical illusions. It is possible to “fool” the interpretive capacity of the brain by arranging lines and other shapes on a page so they seem to be one thing when they are in fact something completely different. Magicians do the same thing in three dimensions – when he pulls a quarter out of your ear or a rabbit out of a hat, it’s not reality, but it is reality to our sense perceptions.
There is a deeper level at which the senses are not to be trusted, and that has been revealed by the scientific study of the objective world around us. For example, our senses tell us that the sun rises in the east, travels across the sky and sets in the west. Our modern scientific understanding of the situation is that the sun is an enormous (by terrestrial standards) glowing ball of gas, fueled by thermonuclear fusion reactions in its core, and the earth is one of a number of rocky objects that orbit around the sun, held together by the same force, gravity, that makes apples fall from an apple tree. An even deeper understanding is that there is no force of gravity at all, just objects moving in as straight a line and at as constant speed as possible in an underlying curved spacetime geometry.
On the microscopic level, our entire understanding of the world’s being made up of discrete particles, much like tiny billiard balls, has been shown to be incomplete. While objects may appear as bounded clumps of mass on the surface, in fact nothing is solid at all, and everything we see in the universe is actually a complex and richly variegated pattern of vibration of one self-interacting Unified Field. The contrast between perception and reality could not be more pronounced!
Later on in this passage Rambam praises Aristotle for proving that motion exists. I believe one of Zeno’s paradoxes purports to deny the reality of motion, but Zeno’s paradoxes fall apart when one introduces the idea of a limit as some parameter becomes infinitely large or infinitely small – in other words, when infinity is introduced. On the other hand, on the deepest level of life, the transcendent, motion does not exist! The transcendent is Pure Being and just is, unbounded and eternal. All the motion and commotion we see around us is just the virtual fluctuations within the Unified Field, and not motion of the Unified Field.
By the same token Aristotle’s proof that atoms do not exist is opposed to Democritus, who proposed that matter had a smallest indivisible unit (atom = “a” / “not” + “tom” / “cut” as in tomography or lobotomy). When faced with this question we generally pull out an atomic table and say that there are atoms of each element, but we also know that atoms can in fact be cut into elementary particles. At this point in the development of physics, we believe that there are a small number of elementary particles, all of which are actually indivisible – that is, they are not composed of other particles. Whether or not this assertion will hold up, we also believe that these elementary particles are not particles at all, but rather states of excitation of underlying fields, and ultimately, different modes of vibration of the Unified Field. So, the ultimate, unified level of existence at the basis of all the different forms and phenomena of existence is in fact indivisible – because it is not composed of parts. Whether that qualifies as an atom or not, I don’t know. I doubt that’s what Democritus meant, nor do I think it’s what Aristotle was opposing.
“Primary intelligibles, philosophers hold, are general concepts whose referents exist in the external world.” (Hikmat-e-Islami, Persian philosophical journal, 6/2019.
https://fhi.hekmateislami.com/article_88323.html?lang=en) It would seem to me that primary intelligibles are actually secondary to sense perceptions, since it is from the supposed objective reality of those sense impressions that the primary intelligibles are derived. That is, “chair” might be a primary intelligible, and it is an abstract term that is derived from our experience with chairs of all shapes and sizes. What that would mean is that the primary intelligibles might suffer from the same issues as sense perceptions, since they are derived from sense perceptions.
The primary issue here I think, is that Rambam seems to take perception of the objective world as firm and absolute. We know, both from practical experience and from theoretical physics, that it is not possible to separate the consciousness of observer from the process of observation and the interpretation of the results. In fact, speaking about objective reality is a bit of a misnomer according to modern physics. Rambam will take this issue further in talking about Gd’s having or not having attributes, but we will leave that for next week.
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Commentary by Steve Sufian
Parashat Vayeishev
This parshah begins with telling us that “Jacob dwelt in the land of his father’ssojourning, the land of Canaan.” “Canaan” seems to derive from the Hebrew “kana,” to bring into synchronicity.
It seems that “dwelt” is more stable than “sojurnings” and we can get a sense that the difficulties that Jacob experienced with his uncle Laban and his brother Esau are now over and he is living peacefully in a land where all the parts work synchronistically, harmoniously.
And yet this peace and harmony are upset when Jacob gives preferential treatment to his son Joseph and more deeply when Joseph angers his brothers by telling them and his father two dreams that seem to indicate he will dominate them.
Despite this break, Gd’s hand is in this as Joseph tells his brothers when his ability to dream and to interpret dreams have led him to become de facto ruler of Egypt (Mitzraim: restrictions) and a famine has forced his brothers and father to leave Canaan, the land of harmony, to obtain food from Egypt, the land of restrictions. Canaan may be both a real land and a symbolic land: the famine may be a famine in the perception of Jacob and his sons that caused them to lose sight of the full harmony of the land. To restore their perception to wholeness, Gd arranges for the brothers to sell Joseph into slavery so that Joseph’s ability to dream after has arranged for him to become virtual ruler of Egypt and for Egypt to store up food during the seven full years that he predicted will be followed by seven years of famine.
One way to look at this is that when our perception of harmony is of limited scope, our perception of harmony can be easily broken by misbehavior and then we find ourselves not dwelling, but sojourning, in a land of famine, forced to leave it to struggle for food , material and spiritual, in a land of restrictions, a superficial world that nonetheless allows us to survive, even though not in the harmony we had previously enjoyed.
A message that I draw for myself and for our world is that it is very important that we always act open-heartedly, place Gd/Oneness first, treat everyone fairly, with love, and thus extend the range of harmony we perceive and enjoy, and the range within which we do not mind and fully forgive the seeming offenses of others.
Most importantly, we need to do our best to innocently remind ourselves from time to time that Gd’s Plan may not be clear to our vision and so we need to do our best to be open to whatever comes, to somehow gracefully adapt.
Then we extend the range of Canaan, of harmony, to include the realm of Egypt/Mitzraim, restrictions and harmony prevails–Jacob in our souls is “Israel” “one who prevails over Gd,embraces Gd (really, it is Gd within Jacob who prevails over Gd during this stage of Gd’s revealing to Jacob Jacob’s true Nature – Pure Oneness).”
With Pure hearts our souls and our world return to awareness of the Oneness that Is Always All There Is.
Today! Let this happen today for everyone, all souls, today and let it last unendingly!
Baruch HaShem.