by Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.

…I would suggest…begin the task of memorizing the Hebrew alphabet. Within this system, the Hebrew alphabet has no connotation of religion or sect. Its letters are considered "generic" and "holy" symbol—powerful doorways into the inner world — and are not associated with dogma or esoteric religious organization.

The ancient mystics first saw these Hebrew letters, these symbolic doorways, as a universal code and thus they set out to completely grasp their meaning. Their goal was to create the image of the primordial human being, and to do this they had to allow the symbols to come alive within them and connect, providing new insights into spiritual and material existence. If they succeeded, they would become fully realized human beings.

This realization comes directly from the Biblical word that man and woman were created in the image of God. Hence, divine life must exist in the human being; and this divine existence must appear and be realized in each part of the human body. A fully realized mystic then becomes, in the image of God, the Adam Kadmon. According to the mystics, from this Adam all human life originates.

Throughout its long history, Qabalism has attempted to tie two worlds or stages of human development together. The first world is primitive mythology and the second is spiritual revelation. To attempt becoming spiritually enlightened without realizing the world of mythology within us is a serious mistake. People who attempt this often find themselves "in battle with the devil" or "in fear of evil." Carl Jung referred to this mythological avoidance as the "shadow." Isaac Luria’s sixteenth-century school of Qabala based in Safed, Israel clearly emphasized this. According to Isaac Luria, creation began when God withdrew Himself into Himself in an impossible to imagine self-referential loop. From this withdrawal a divine light emanated and flowed into the first space ever to exist. Our own three-dimensional space was a later development of this primordial space. And the Adam Kadmon—the first being—came from this light. From his eyes, mouth, nostrils, and ears, unconfined primal light emanated. In a great overwhelming mystery, special vessels containing this primal light then appeared out of nothing. These vessels were primal or seed-like matter. But the primal material vessels broke, and chaos was liberated. From this, ultimately, man fell into space-time as a kind of mental projection of the Adam Kadmon.

CREATING A NEW VISION OUT OF SCIENCE AND SPIRIT

And so today the mysteries still persist. As smart as we are in the modern world, we apparently can never pass behind the veil which divides the seen from the unseen except by engaging ourselves in the way appointed by the ancients—the Mysteries. The questions are as vivid today as they were to the early minds that first thought them. What are we? What is intelligence? What is our source? What is the point of Life? We still look for the tools of our personal transformation. Self-help books fill our shelves. And even with our material needs covered, many of us feel lost and hopeless, driving our way through an objectively stuffed universe with a vacancy in our hearts.

Did the ancients answer these questions? Who are we to say they didn’t? With our modern "objective" science-oriented minds, are we even capable of understanding the discoveries of the wisdom of, the ancient alchemists—even if it’s right before us? Physicist Wolfgang Pauli once put it that scientists went too far in the seventeenth century when they attempted to make everything understandable strictly as objective science. By denuding the subjective view from any firm ground, much was lost. In much the same way that modern dictionaries make alchemy a mere shadow of the chemistry to come, modern science has attempted to make the study of the subjective a mere reflection of the objective and reducible science of matter. Some of us, including many scientists, don’t agree with the new objective materialism. We believe in our heart of hearts, as did the alchemists that came before us, that something far richer than materialism is responsible for the universe.