Sukkot 5787 – 09/26/2026
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. The text we are working from is the two-volume translation by Prof. Shlomo Pines, University of Chicago Press, 1963.
Shabbat Sukkot
Rambam continues with his exposition of Aristotle’s position. As a reminder – he is not trying to prove Aristotle wrong, he is only showing that Aristotle has not proven his position that creation is necessarily eternal. Aristotle posits the existence of a “first matter,” which is formless substance – that is, so to speak, raw, unformed clay out of which all the forms that we see in creation are formed. The “clay” (hyle) can take on different forms, and it can change form (which is basically what the activity of creation is), but it itself is neither created nor destroyed. Rambam seeks to show that this last statement is not proven by Aristotle’s logic; introducing Gd into the mix, Who can indeed create or annihilate this hyle, cannot be disproven by Aristotle:
He said that the first matter is subject to neither generation nor passing-away and began to draw inferences in favor of this thesis from the things subject to generation and passing-away and to make clear that it was impossible that the first matter was generated. And this is correct. For we do not maintain that the first matter is generated as man is generated from the seed or that it passes away as man passes away into dust. But we maintain that Gd has brought it into existence, it was as it is now – I mean everything is generated from it and everything generated from it passes away into it; it does not exist devoid of form; generation and corruption terminate in it; it is not subject to generation as are the things generated from it, nor to passing-away as are the things that pass away into it, but is created from nothing. And its Creator may, if He wishes to do so, render it entirely and absolutely nonexistent.
Rambam is here reiterating the Aristotelian assertion that nothing can come from nothing, and that projecting this back in time, if things exist now, there must always have been things in the past whence the current things have sprung. The argument is just transplanted into the “first matter,” thus allowing for continual change in form (or state), while keeping the argument for an eternal creation. Rambam dismisses this argument by arguing that Gd can, and does, create “first matter” out of nothing and returns it to nothing at His Will. This is reflected in part of the Yom Kippur liturgy, where Gd is compared to an artisan (potter, glassblower, etc.) who at will shapes the material one way or another. The analogy breaks down of course, because in the case of the artisans, the material already exists and the artisan just gives it form. In the case of creation, Gd creates the material, the substance, as well as the form, out of nothing. It is reminiscent of the story of the scientist who tells Gd that scientists have figured out how to create life out of dirt. Gd expresses surprise and a desire to see this breakthrough. The scientist bends down to scoop up some soil and Gd interrupts him and says, “No, no – get your own dirt!”
One way to look at this dispute, in my opinion, is to consider what existence and non-existence mean. If we are looking at life from the surface, then existence means material existence – there has to be matter on which everything that we say exists is founded. Even for mental events, we always look for a physical substrate (e.g. the brain and its electrical activity). And it appears to us that physical matter is neither created nor destroyed, but only changed in form. Even if something is burned to dust and we measure that the mass of the dust is less than the mass of whatever it is that burned, we explain that some of that “missing” mass combined with the oxygen in the air and the resulting molecules volatilized and went up in smoke (literally).
At the beginning of the 20th century, Relativity theory and Quantum Mechanics began to uncover levels of reality that we hadn’t considered before. Einstein’s Special Relativity showed that energy and matter were two aspects of the same underlying reality. Mass could be converted to energy – this is the principle behind atomic energy – so mass could not be a fundamental measure of reality. Mass could really exist at one moment and not at the next, or vice versa. Is this creation ex nihilo ? Not really – it’s more of an extension of our conception of material reality. But wait! There’s more!
With the advent of quantum field theory, our understanding of matter changed again. Instead of being composed of little point particles with certain properties (mass, momentum, electric charge…), particles were now understood to be levels of vibration of underlying, abstract fields. As energy gets transferred between fields, particles (matter) can indeed be created or destroyed. On the level of the Unified Field (which physics has not fully elucidated yet), all of phenomenal reality is nothing but a pattern of vibration of this one field. The shifting patterns and changing forms, the “particles” of matter and the “particles” of their interactions, come and go, combining and recombining, are all the Unified Field self-interacting. And this leads us to the conclusion that the Unified Field is the only reality, the only Truth, which can neither be created nor destroyed, which is eternal, unbounded, silent and unmoving, that which never changes while projecting what we call creation to itself.
According to Vedic Science this Unified Field is the field of Pure Consciousness. We are a part of that field, a pattern of vibration of consciousness, which is evolved enough to be able to experience Pure Consciousness and to cognize within ourselves the virtual dynamics of Pure Consciousness. Early on in our evolution we assign reality to the patterns of vibration; when we have fully matured, we recognize that there is only one reality, the reality of Consciousness. In this state, the question of creation in time does not arise. Consciousness is all that there is, and there is only the appearance of creation. The question of creation in time only arises if we think creation is real. It is real on its level, but on the level of actual reality, there is only the unbounded, eternal ocean of Being / Consciousness.