SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
OF THE ZOHAR
According to
Fritjof Capra, Claude Bernard (1813-1878), who pioneered modern experimental
medicine, insisted that there was an intimate relationship between any organism
and its environment, an idea that is simply taken for granted today. Bernard talked about each organism’s internal
environment, in which the organs and tissues exist, and he believed that in a
healthy organism the internal environment remains constant, even in the face of
large fluctuations in the external environment.
To take this idea into the Zohar leads us to ask
whether the Zohar might be an organism and then to ask about its internal
environment.
An organism is in
modern terms an organized system that exhibits properties of life, the chief of
those properties being an ability to respond to stimuli. In a highly enlightened individual, the
spiritual/psychological internal environment is one of serenity in the face of
stresses that would destabilize an ordinary person. The Zohar is at the very least a powerful
force for stabilization and serenity in the human. But could the Zohar itself BE an organism? It can be said that highly evolved systems of
thought have a life of their own that seems to transcend the century they are
delivered in and the language in which they were developed. But the Zohar has another characteristic that
it shares with some of the other sacred texts of the world: it was not just
written by a human being, although it was written down by a human being.
The Bible, the
Koran, the Zohar and other scriptures were in an exact sense dictated to those
humans who were able to open themselves to divine inspiration. The Zohar flowed through the human mind, and
its overall structure and content pre-existed the person or people who
transcribed it onto those first scrolls.
The supernal Zohar still exists in that higher realm where it is still
accessible to a very few people who have even in this century that same ability
to open to extrasensory transmissions.
And it is in this sense that it is and always has been an organism,
because it responds to each of those seekers differently, based on their own
abilities, understandings, needs, and levels of spiritual development. Its internal environment is one of a highly
organized flow of understanding moving around a pivotal core of faith and
dedication to God. As much as the
external environment changes, both in terms of the types of humans accessing
its wisdom and in terms of the divine plan that is ever-evolving, that internal
environment of the Zohar remains constant in its nature and purpose.
You will need at
the very least to hold in your mind the possibility that the Zohar was dictated
by spiritual forces, even if you reserve judgment on the truth or falsity of
this position, because unless you do this you will not be able to understand or
appreciate some of what we are telling you.
There are scholars in the thousands who will say based on all kinds of
textual evidence that the Zohar was written in the 13th century, and there are
mystics who will say based on their own direct experience that it was never
written at all — it was written down, which is an entirely different
thing. If you can at least take a
neutral position on this issue it will allow you more easily to evaluate some
of what we are going to say. The authors
are of course, we must admit to this, prejudiced in favor of the mystics
because we have had those experiences, and there is absolutely no substitute
for direct experience. On the other
hand, we also know that people only believe what they have experienced
themselves or at least what is common in the world around them, and this is not
common nor widely known. We also employ skeptical inquiry as do you, and such inquiry only fails when personal experience is
so overwhelming and proven in so many different ways that it no longer becomes
a viable mode of operation. This is why
we ask for your indulgence as you think about what we are saying.
One of the most
powerful models of the twentieth century that emerged almost simultaneously
from the fields of chemistry, particle physics and biology was the concept of
dissipative structures. These can best
be explained as highly organized structures that arise as a result of extreme disequilibrium in a system. There are examples in the test tube, in flora
and fauna, in laser light technology, in weather patterns, and so on. The perfect spiral that flows down the bath
drain is a dissipative structure that succeeds the earlier turbulence of the
escaping water when the plug was first drawn.
Another example is what happens when an extremely thin layer of liquid
is evenly and slowly heated; the random movement of the liquid is suddenly
replaced by a pattern that looks much like a perfect honeycomb. In Megabrain (p.57), Michael Hutchison
writes: “Dissipative structures... are largely formed by the energy and matter
flowing through them, just as our bodies are not simply preexistent structures
that pass energy and matter through them in the form of food, water, oxygen and
so on — they literally are the energy
and matter that flow through them.
Dissipative structures... are flow.”
In this context scientists also talk
about emergent properties, which are those properties that emerge at a certain
level of complexity but do not exist at lower levels. A good example is the fact that the taste of
sugar is nowhere present in the carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms that sugar
consists of; the whole is greater and different than the sum of its parts. The underlying chaos in many systems under
stress requires only a critical influx of that stress in order to accelerate
the disequilibrium to a point where, miraculously, a much higher order of
organization is suddenly generated. The
Zohar exhibits this pattern quite clearly.
In its seemingly chaotic mixture and flow
of trains of thought that can’t be comprehended, gematria (or sacred numerical
values of Hebrew letters and words), letters circling through the air,
rearrangement of the letters in the Names of God, the shift and flow of the
Sefirot, incomprehensible explanations for supernal events, and so on, there
are the seeds of a profound and probably unprecedented pattern of higher understanding.
Claude Bernard, mentioned earlier, said “It is
what we think we know already that prevents us from learning”. This has direct application to the Zohar,
because the intensive study of the text results first in a profound emptying of
the mind that is very conducive to the reception of new material. There comes a point where one is certain only
that one knows nothing about the
Zohar — nothing about its content, its message, its purpose, its structure, its arguments. Nothing. As in Zen,
this is an extremely valuable point to reach; it is in fact a prerequisite for
learning what the Zohar has to teach.
And it is of course the Zohar itself which is the stressor, the factor which pushes the mind that seeks to
understand it to such a point that the mind is finally transformed into
something quite different than it had been, and into a new and much higher
state of organization.
The organization
of the Zohar shows that it is a system; it is organically connected in each of
its parts to the human psyche itself.
The system which it incorporates is one which has three characteristics:
relationship, flow and context; each of these characteristics has deep
significance in any understanding of how the Zohar works.
Perhaps the most
important thing that the Zohar demands of the mind that engages it is the
simultaneous use of left and right brain functioning, or in simpler terms the
ability to use logic
It was also noted
that a lifelong habit of orderliness in paperwork became replaced by a much
more casual and seemingly disorganized desktop, and yet without losing the
ability to track outstanding work and issues.
In short, there is
no question that the immersion in the Zohar made fundamental changes in the way
the mind processed information. This
could easily be seen as one outcome of an engagement with a system that resulted
in a dissipative structure of the mind.
Let’s take a look
at the Mandate of the Zohar, which I have arbitrarily divided into nine parts:
1.
to
establish a foundation for right thinking;
2.
to
increase understanding of balance and flow;
3.
to
remind people of the role of divinity in the patterning of the world;
4.
to
establish rules for social justice;
5.
to
form a framework of societal norms that are in keeping with a clear knowledge
of divine force and intervention;
6.
to
foster strong relationships between those of the oligarchy, those dedicated to
spiritual growth and those who have incarnated to raise their levels of
closeness to God;
7.
to
free expression from the purely material manipulations of world leaders who are
dedicated only to their own advancement, in other words, to engender freedom of
speech;
8.
to inform
the spirit with suitable objects of contemplation; and
9.
to foster relationships between the divine
and the human in order to give humans access to higher wisdom and knowledge,
higher powers and higher beauty.
Any entity,
project or system developed with a mandate must have done so in response to
some perceived need, and the needs that the Zohar fulfills, or at least that it
fulfilled in the earlier centuries of its existence on earth, were the needs
for Structure and Connection.
People needed
structure so that they could know their own place within their world, so that
they could live in a secure society, so that they could have good governance
and justice, so that they could know what to expect from their lives given
their roles and positions at birth, and also so that they could understand the
place that heaven, earth and Gehenom played during and after their lives. This also included the need to understand how
The appearance of
the Zohar also spoke to the need for connection: peoples’ connections with the
divine, with their families, friends, tribe and coworkers, with others in their
town and their nation, with others in the world at large and in the greater
universe. It also gave them some
understanding of the connection between their lives in their own time and those
who lived in their past or their future — and it connected them to those
spirits who live in no-time.