Parashat Bo 5785 – 02/01/2025
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.
Shemot 10:1-13:16
Rambam goes on to discuss the logical structure of “divine science.” He demonstrates first that one can prove the existence of Gd whether or not the universe was created in time. His point is not to demonstrate that Gd’s existence is proven, but rather that one can hold any opinion on the creation-in-time issue and it’s irrelevant as to Gd’s existence. We say that the two assertions are independent of one another.
Postulates or axioms are the building blocks of any logical system. They are considered “self-evident” truths, although in some cases they are less than self-evident, and may not even be true. The system of Euclidean geometry is a good example, and one which was probably known to Rambam, although the weakness I am about to point out was probably not known to him.
Euclid’s postulates are the foundation of Euclidean geometry. The first four postulates are:
1. A straight line segment can be drawn joining any two points.
2. Any straight line segment can be extended indefinitely in a straight line.
3. Given any straight line segment, a circle can be drawn having the segment as radius and one endpoint as center.
4. All right angles are congruent.
There is a famous Fifth postulate, called the Parallel postulate that states:
For any line, L, and any point, P, not on the line L, there is exactly one line through P that does not intersect L.
That is to say that for any line and any point, there is only one line through the point that is parallel to the original line. On the apparently flat surface of the earth, this seems to be self-evident, and it is taken as a given in Euclidean geometry. If you remember back to your high school geometry class, it was called “plane geometry” because it dealt with the geometry of a flat plane. “Geometry” means “earth (geo) measurement (metry)” and over fairly short distances the surface of the earth is flat (local terrain features excluded), plane geometry provided accurate enough results. For many centuries various “proofs” of the parallel postulate were offered, based on the first 4 postulates, but in the end it was recognized that the parallel postulate was independent and had to be accepted as a given.
When people began surveying larger tracts of land (think of the surveyors and map makers who had to map out the Louisiana Purchase) it became obvious that the parallel postulate was not so self-evident after all. For those readers who live in Iowa, take a look at the county lines in Iowa. The horizontal lines generally follow the lines of latitude and the vertical lines generally follow the lines of longitude (the lines that go through the poles). If you look at the tiers of counties, every two or three tiers there is a break in the vertical boundaries. It is clear why – as you get closer to the poles, the longitude lines get closer together, and the surveyors wanted to make each county a rough rectangle. Therefore, they did not follow the longitude lines exactly over the distance of the entire state. For the smaller distance of one or two counties they could treat the longitude lines as parallel, but over longer distances, this is not possible.
Towards the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, a new field grew up, called non-Euclidean geometry. It recognized that on curved surfaces (surface of a sphere for example) one might have a situation where there are no parallel lines (all pairs of lines intersect) and other curved surfaces (surface of a saddle for example) where there are many lines parallel to any given line. The surface of the earth is an example of the former. Space-time itself is a curved surface, and it is not clear whether it is of the first or second type. You can look up some of the details here.
The point of this excursion was to demonstrate that “self-evident” truths may be true if we restrict our attention to a small segment of reality, but may be shown to be not generally true at all once we expand our awareness to a greater portion of that reality. In the same way, Newtonian dynamics was perfectly suitable to the terrestrial world of low speeds and fairly low gravity, but gave way to Special and General Relativity at high speeds and strong gravity. Classical mechanics was an accurate description of the interaction between objects at human scales, but at atomic and nuclear scales it gave way to quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.
So one weakness of what appears to be Rambam’s program of establishing a logical, and to some extent empirical, basis of “divine science” is that the set of postulates that we may believe are self-evidently true, may not be true at all. Further, we may, because of the limitations of our awareness, not be considering the entire field of existence, gross and subtle,
But wait! There’s more!
You may remember a few weeks ago I suggested you look into Kurt Gödel’s famous Incompleteness Theorem. In short, this theorem states that in any sufficiently rich formal system, there will always be statements that are true, but cannot be proven to be true. Adding these statements as postulates doesn’t help, as it only makes the system richer, but does not free it from the bounds of Gödel’s theorem. The new, richer system will still have true statements that cannot be proven from within the system, and so on ad infinitum. There is no purely logical system that is complete, or can prove its own consistency.
I think what Gödel is telling us is that any finite system of knowledge – for that is what a logical system is – is bound to be non-self-sufficient. I believe that that is because any logical system is inherently finite – it is a series of relationships between finite objects. Of course any finite system has something outside it, and therefore knowledge of the system cannot be comprehensive. Just as in Gödel’s systems we can keep adding true, but unprovable statements as additional postulates, so with any system, we can keep on expanding it but never exhaust the infinite creativity of nature – we cannot achieve infinity by adding finite pieces.
According to Vedic Science there is a way out of these conundrums, and that is to allow the mind to settle down and experience infinity directly – to transcend all the fluctuations of thought and become Pure Consciousness. Maharishi has described Pure Consciousness as the “home of all knowledge,” because it is from this level that the entire creation is structured. All of creation is nothing other than the fluctuations of Pure Consciousness within itself. Since we are Pure Consciousness, the complete knowledge of all of creation is within us, on the level of our awareness. Since it is infinite and all-encompassing, the limitations of knowledge of science, or of logic, do not apply to it. When Pure Consciousness is established in the awareness, our knowledge is its own validation, because it is knowledge of our own Self. As our awareness grows to Unity Consciousness our Self is seen as the essential nature of every object of perception, until eventually we experience the unbounded wholeness of our Self as the all-pervading reality of creation. Wholeness is primary and the parts are secondary, nothing more that expressions of that wholeness within itself. This knowledge is beyond logic, beyond ordinary perception, beyond measurement, but open to direct experience. As the Psalmist sings (Psalm 19:1-3) The heavens declare the glory of Gd, the sky proclaims His handiwork. / Day to day makes utterance, night to night speaks out. / There is no utterance, there are no words, whose sound goes unheard. In the infinite silence of the Self, beyond speech, beyond argument, knowledge is total, complete and unassailable.
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Commentary by Steve Sufian
Parashat Bo
“Bo” means “come” or “go.” 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, Gd 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 the 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 wealth the Egyptians gave them, wealth they infuse with Wholeness..
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