GENESIS REVISITED: THE WAVE

1. In the beginning there was nothing but God. God thought, and the waves of His thought formed peaks and hollows and troughs, and where they reinforced one another the peaks began to push and pile, and particles were formed, and probabilities of links; and joinings occurred, so in the troughs and hollows matter tumbled in and piled up. And the matter was without form.

2. God thought about the matter, which could not be seen. He sent forth one beam of His essential Self while thinking 'Light'. And matter appeared for the first time, clothed in the shining Light of God.

3. God thought about the waves of His own thought, about the concept of the wave, the highs and lows, the length and frequency and modulation and amplitude and pulse. And from His own Upswelling and His concept of the wave and the matter He had made, He formed the Seas.

4. God thought about the seas, the shifting and the swelling and the neverending movement and the flow. And for the balance, He created that which was none of these --- that which neither shifted nor swelled, nor moved nor flowed, and so He thought of Place, and made the dry land earth.

5. And the seas and the land were the body of the earth, the mochin and the flesh that kissed so sweetly on the shore which was nothing more than the place they met. And God gave thought to this.

6. And from His wish to preserve, God thought of cohesion, centrifugal force, the keeping together of everything He had made. And from the Unified Field Theory of His heart He extracted gravity, and thought it into Place. And He gave the earth a mighty spin, and saw that it was good.

7. And then God conceived the medium, that thing through which His waves of light and sound could move and be, that thing that carried waves of life for the futurebreathing ones He had yet to conceive, and so He made the firmament of air, the atmosphere the atomspherah all ripe for breath and light and sound --- the carrier of everything that moved in waves.

8. God watched the oceans for a time. He saw the circles form and swell and enlarge and move. He thought therefore of growth, and in His pure organic heart He made potential and actuality, and showed them one to the other, and He made the word 'become'. And so the first seed observed the first plant, and thought to become, and thus it grew, drawn toward actuality on the waves of the purest pleasure.

9. Now God observed the words that He had made, and He saw that they were good: waves and matter and light and flow and place and balance and medium and gravity and potential and actuality and becoming and growth. But He saw that there was one word missing yet.

10. God thought about Himself for a very long time, and from the universe of His heart he extracted the word and quality of Love, and He thought of a container in which to enclose and shelter it. And so He designed containers He called creatures, beings which encapsulated all his words; and the beings crawled and swam and flew, and in the depths Leviathan gave birth and nuzzled its calf. And God observed all this, and saw that there was love within the species, but not the Understanding Love He wished to see.

11. And so God measured the resonance of His own heart and He created the Heart of Man to resonate with His, and He created the Mind of Man to reach His Understanding, and He created the Spirit of Man to return to Him, and He created the Body of Man to move and grow. And God breathed into Man the wave, that on its peak was Life and in its trough was Death; and God thought about the sweet lift and swell and dip and plunge, and the cycling pleasure of the wave, and He saw that it was Good.

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That reading is not from the Zohar. And yet it is illustrative of three pivotal features of the Zohar.

First, it shows the type of thinking released by long and intensive immersion in the text. The Zohar not only releases the mind into more creative pathways; it seems to change the way the mind actually works.

Second, the passage I read does exactly (although in a different form) what the Zohar itself does through thousands of pages; it takes a piece of scripture and applies to it a metaphor, analyzing it exhaustively in terms of that metaphor, and then it applies another metaphor and then another, going ever deeper to bring new layers of truths to the surface.

Third, the concept of the wave is in fact a kabbalistic one, known as the mochin, a particular spiritual/cosmic force or wave which carries a quality before it, perhaps into material reality. As well, the Zohar refers frequently to something called Mayin Nukva, which translates as 'female waters', and that has to do with the apprehension of the surreal; this is also the initiatory principle of birth by which the spirit is raised into the body, and through which the higher faculties of humans are enabled to rise above themselves.

Here we see a nice circularity, for it seems then that we can only apprehend the higher wave forces through the grace of having those same forces within ourselves. And this is a reasonably good definition of mysticism itself!