Parashat Bo 5781 — 01/23/2021
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
This week I’d like to finish our discussion of “all knowledge in seed form.” We left off last week looking at the physics of both linear and non-linear systems. We gave a simple example of a non-linear system last week, viz the air above a hot plate. We saw that when the hot plate is turned on, the air organized itself into a system of convection cells, a level of structure and complexity that arises spontaneously when the flow of energy is sufficient to switch the system into a non-linear mode.
There is another fascinating instance of non-linearity that is a bit harder to grasp, but is more relevant for understanding the non-linear nature of the Unified Field. In 1905 Einstein published his Special Theory of Relativity, which melded space and time into a single arena in which the dynamics of physical systems played out. A decade later his General Theory of Relativity came out. General Relativity describes the effect of a massive body as creating curvature in the fabric of space-time. As objects move along the straightest possible paths, we see them moving under the influence of gravity. (An example of a curved space is the surface of a sphere, such as our earth. As is well known, the great circles are the shortest distance between two points on the surface of the earth – look at an airline route map – even though they appear curved from the perspective of a flat map.) To explain General Relativity aphoristically, Einstein’s student John Archibald Wheeler said, “Matter [i.e. mass] tells spacetime how to curve; curved spacetime tells matter how to move.”
Now the equations of General Relativity are non-linear. It is not true that if you double the mass, you double the curvature (this is a departure from Newton’s laws of gravity). One way of looking at this phenomenon is to look at spacetime as if it were “springy” – that is, as if it takes energy to bend spacetime the way it takes energy to bend a piece of steel. But as we know from the famous equation E = mc2, energy and mass are equivalent in the Relativistic world. Consequently, the energy of bending of spacetime causes some additional, smaller bending of spacetime. This second-order bending also takes some energy, and that energy causes a third-order bending, etc. There actually are an infinite number of additional bendings, but their magnitude decreases in a way that the sum total is something finite.
This way of looking at General Relativity, breaking it down into stages that feed on one another, highlights the self-interacting nature of the gravitational field, and hints to us how this self-interaction can be creative. However, it is really just a way for us to break the problem of figuring out the curvature of spacetime into small chunks that we can solve, and then adding them up. That is not the way nature works. Nature effortlessly “knows” exactly how much to bend spacetime given the presence of any given mass. It doesn’t have to go through the lengthy computations that we do – rather the laws of nature are built into the structure of creation somehow, as if they were the programming of a “cosmic computer” that governs the entire functioning of every part of the universe, automatically.
We find the same kind of structure when we look at the Unified Field. There are terms which describe the modes of vibration that correspond to the different elementary particles, and there are terms that correspond to the interactions between different particles. This describes a highly self-interacting structure, and one which can create all the forms and phenomena of nature from within itself, as we have discussed. But again, the equations that give us the behavior of the different aspects of the Unified Field and their interactions with one another, are simply a way for us to break down the problem into small chunks that we can solve. Nature knows how to “compute” the entire behavior of the Unified Field, which is the entire behavior of the cosmos, naturally and effortlessly, and completely on the level of the wholeness of the Unified Field, not piece-by-piece.
Now we can transfer this understanding to the subjective realm according to Vedic Science by understanding that our own Pure Consciousness is the unified field from which springs all duality, subjective and objective. Because of its nature as Consciousness, Pure Consciousness is inherently self-referential – it is aware of itself, it has a kind of virtual self-interaction, and this is the basis of its infinite creativity. We can analyze the different components of this creativity, and indeed, this is what the various components of the Vedic literature does. And just like the computations that physics does, this is a valid way of gaining knowledge of the underlying structure. However, it is not the way Pure Consciousness works, any more than the infinite series way of approaching General Relativity is the way spacetime works.
In both cases, the underlying field simply moves according to its own dynamics, effortlessly “computing” the appropriate behavior in every situation. The big difference between Consciousness and the Unified Field of physics, is that we experience Consciousness as our own Self. That means that knowledge of Consciousness is internal – all the laws of nature are spontaneously available to us on the level of our own awareness, once that awareness has been sufficiently purified. Our actions are governed by the same “cosmic computer” that is responsible for operating creation, because our awareness, which is the basis of our actions, is the cosmic computer that is responsible for operating creation.
That being said, we have no need to make any calculations at all as to the ramifications of any particular course of action. In fact, the human intellect is not capable of carrying out the calculation of the infinitely ramifying tendrils of influence of any one action, let alone all possible actions that we might take. As the Bhagavad-Gita puts it: “Unfathomable is the course of action” (IV:17). We can no more calculate action than we can calculate the bending of spacetime piece by piece!
Fortunately, having our awareness established in Pure Consciousness obviates the need to make such calculations. We spontaneously act in the most life-supporting, evolutionary way simply on the basis of having our awareness on the level of the cosmic computer. In the words of Pirke Avot (II:4), we make Gd’s Will our will – our every action expresses Gd’s desire, and consequently it is right and receives “help from Heaven” to bring the action to fruition.
This is what we call having all knowledge in seed form. We may not know all the details of knowledge, but we have a deep intuition of the structure of creation, because the structure of creation is the structure of our own consciousness. Just as all the information needed to create a great tree is contained in its small seed, so all the information we need in any situation is available to us in unmanifest form as an intuitive understanding of what is going on and what is the correct action to take.
This understanding, by the way, gives us an insight into the Sages’ expression that the Patriarchs kept the entire Torah, even before it was given. Torah may not have been revealed “publicly” so to speak, but it was enshrined in the Patriarchs’ awareness and they acted on this basis. We, who are not on the same level, need to have everything spelled out for us. Hopefully, as we evolve, our actions will reflect a better level of awareness and we too will be able to know from inside ourselves what Gd requires of us.
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Commentary by Steve Sufian
Parashat Bo
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, along with their children, flocks and wealth they have borrowed from their Egyptian friends — wealth borrowed from Mitzrayim, Restrictions, which will never be returned to the restricted value and will remain with the Children of Israel, dedicated to Wholeness. 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 that can never die, 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