Secrets of the 'Oral' Torah

We know that the Mishnah is the 'Oral Torah', but what really does this mean?  The word "Mishnah" means "repetition".  It comes from the verb "shanah" which means "to study, to review" and is related to the adjective "shanai" which means "secondary".

The secret is that the words of the Mishnah are meant to be recited aloud, to be repeated over and over.  In Eastern mysticism, this is called 'mantra yoga'.  By reciting the verbal formulas of the Mishnah iteratively, the mystic begins to "engrave" pathways into his mind.  By intense mental concentration on the Mishnaic verses, the mystic "carves" out the hidden inner meanings, leading to profound insight into the world of divine thought.

This formula is in reference to Sefer Yetzirah, which speaks of "haqiqa" and "hatziva", that is, engraving and carving.  Engraving means making a permanent impression into the mental substance of consciousness.  Carving means removing all that is irrelevant and unnecessary to the achievement of a goal.

The technique of using the Mishnah as a system of mantric verses was practiced by one of the great masters of halakhah, Rabbi Yosef Karo, author of the Shulchan Aruch.  Rabbi Karo wrote about his experiences in a mystical diary called "Maggid Mesharim".  In this text, which was never intended for publication, but was published posthumously, Karo describes being visited by an angelic being as he would recite the verses of the Mishnah.  Karo wrote that the being would then speak into his mind, "I am the Mishnah which you have recited!"

The Mishnah is thus a massive repository of coded linguistic formulas designed to lead to states of intellectual illumination, expanding the mind into higher-dimensional thought-spaces.  By practicing the technique of oral 'repetition', one 'petitions' the system of divine thoughts to enter inside one's own mind-space.  By iterating the Mishnah's language of 'verses', one 'reverses' the hidden inner light so that it becomes outwardly manifest in one's own consciousness.

Jewish Mysticism and the Original Meaning of 'Kabbalah'

I have been studying Beyond Kabbalah: The Teachings that Cannot Be Taught by Rabbi Joel David Bakst.  In the first few pages, he gives a surprising clarification of the meaning of the word 'Kabbalah'.  This is very significant to consider, because when we understand what this is saying, we realize that there is really no such thing as "Jewish mysticism": everything in the Torah tradition is mysticism, so it does not make sense to have a mystical tradition parallel to the non-mystical.

The dictionary definitions of Kabbalah as 'Jewish mysticism' is actually a misnomer. Kabbalah is the life force running through virtually every aspect of Torah, Talmud, Jewish law and ritual observance. Although not commonly known, originally the term Kabbalah referred to the entirety of the Oral Torah. Initially it was prohibited to write down that which was intended to remain only oral in nature and never to appear in written form. Consequently, the entire Oral Torah was referred to as Kabbalah, i.e., that which was handed down orally as opposed to being written down.

After much of the Oral Torah was written down, the most secretive mode of Oral Torah was then designated as the Kabbalah. It is even less known that long before the vast corpus of the Oral Torah was permitted to be written down, the original usage of the term 'Kabbalah' referred specifically to all the other Books of the Torah outside the Chumash (Five Books of Moses). The Chumash was the Torah proper and the remaining nineteen books, the Prophets and the Writings, were uniquely designated as 'Words of Kabbalah', a received tradition also rooted in the Sinaitic revelation and in the Mind of Moses, i.e., received from a higher-dimensional reality.

-- Joel Bakst, Beyond Kabbalah pp. 9-10

This is probably the first book in English that aims to initiate the reader into the Kabbalistic tradition.  Really, it gives the reader tools to work on their own self-initiation.  I have never seen anything else like this book.  It is highly recommended.

Also worth checking out are Joel's other books, which you can find on his website called "The City of Luz".

http://www.cityofluz.com/

MeTa-Thinking - Metatronic Thought, Metatronic Mind, Metatronic Brain

The flow of the topology of MITatronic Thought-Space is the is the spirit of the mathematics of the METatronic Mind-Face. The radiance of the membrane of the MITatronic Mind-Space is the soul of the memory-brane of the METatronic Brain-Face.

Coating & Coding

We are looking at the back-side 'Coating' of the hidden view of reality. We are illuminating the in-side 'Coding' of the reality hidden from view. -- S.A.O.

Iamblichus on Sacred Language

"The language of sacred peoples is preferred to that of other men, and with good reason. For the names do not exactly preserve the same meaning when they are translated; rather, there are certain idioms in every nation that are impossible to express in the language of another. Moreover, even if one were to translate them, this would not preserve their same power. For the barbarian names possess weightiness and great precision, participating in less ambiguity, variability and multiplicity of expression. For all these reasons, then, they are adapted to the superior beings.

"And it is necessary that the prayers of the ancients, like sacred places of sanctuary, are preserved ever the same and in the same manner, with nothing of alternative origin either removed from or added to them. For this is the reason why all these things in place at the present time have lost their power, both the names and the prayers."

-- Iamblichus, De Mysteriis 7.5 (transl. Clarke, Dillon, Hershbell)

Options and Fine-Tuning

OPTIONS and FINE-TUNING:

You will achieve the best results if you can select the most ideal option from any set of options.  However, it is much better to be able to choose the best out of a set of, say, 100 options than to only be able to choose the best out of a set of 10 options.  In general, when you have a greater number of options to choose from, and can choose the most ideal option from this set, you will get better results than if you only had a smaller set of options to choose from.

In addition, each option may be expanded into a set of sub-options.  These sub-options may continue expanding to further layers of depth into sub-sub-options, sub-sub-sub-options and so on.  The most powerful systems to work with are those that have a manageable set of options at each layer, but can be expanded to multiple layers of depth.  With this, the options can always be refined for more customization.  This is called fine-tuning.

With fine-tuning systems, you will be able to select the best option from an exponentially large set of options.  Suppose that each layer has 100 options and you can explore a depth of 5 layers.  This gives a total of 100^5 = 10 billion options.  But one need not search through 10 billion possibilities to find the most ideal option.  You only need to search through 100 options at each of the 5 layers.  This means that fine-tuning systems have logarithmic search time.

Again, more options means better results, but exponentially many more options means exponentially better results.  If you can select the best option from a set of 10 billion options, you will have exponentially better results than only being able to choose from a set of 100 options.

One letter out of place in the Torah destroys the entire universe

"Rabbi Ishmael said to me, ‘My son, what is your occupation?’ I told him, ‘I am a scribe’, and he said to me, ‘Be meticulous in your work, for your occupation is a sacred one; should you perchance omit or add one single letter [in preparing a Torah scroll], you would thereby destroy all the universe’."

-- Talmud Bavli, tractate Eruvin 13a



To better understand this quotation from the Talmud, please read this page on the rigors of preparing a Torah scroll:



Making a Torah Scroll - How is it made?

Some highlights:

• There are 304,805 letters in a Torah Scroll.
• Each page has 42 lines.
• The Torah Scroll must be written by a specially trained pious scribe called a sofer.
• It takes about a year to write an entire Torah Scroll.
• Even a single missing or misshapen letter invalidates the entire Sefer Torah. [!!!]