Carlo Suarès | The Cipher of Genesis | Review | Maitreya 1 1970 |
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This work offers a fundamental re-reading of the text of the Bible's Book of Genesis and some of its consequences in understanding the Gospels of Matthew and John. The revolutionary
meanings here presented will be of great significance, it is hoped, to those of the Christian, Hebrew and Moslem religions whose thinking has been conditioned by and rooted in the Bible.
And they will be of equal importance to those non-orthodox believers and non-believers, whose intelligence has so baulked at the traditionally accepted but unsatisfactory versions of
the cosmic drama, to the expent that they have gelt it necessary to repudiate the whole of Genesis which they are inclined to consider as being only ancient legends.
The first point to be made is that, differing in this respect from many other so-called sacred works which, whether or not rightly understood, can at least be read in their original language, the first five chapters of Genesis have been, more that many others, open to incorrect interpretations because they are not written in words which can be translated in any ordinary language. It may come as a surprise to many bible readers that these five chapters were written code and cannot be deciphered without knowledge of the code. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet represents a specific number, the significance of which must be understood -- a not too difficult process, as will be seen later in this book. These numbers are not to be considered in their arithmetical sense. Each one, in fact, signifies an aspect of living forces at play in the Universe; and the text is intended to project these forces into our very being, thus acting as a Revelation. This process, being based on Reality, does not involve the projection of an idea. It has nothing to do with a creed; for the only principles by which it is bound are universal. The original text deals with states of consciousness and their relationship to life as it happens now. It does not deal with anything that happened in the past. Life is now, and if there is anything that can be called Revelation it cannot be an illusory explanation of what has already happened, but is an incursion of the Life process in our actual being. Seen in its true light, the first verse of the Bible has an entirely different significance from that conveyed by the inadequate translation familiar to us from childhood: In the beginning God crated the Heaven and earth. this translation does not make sense at all, because it is unthinkable. A "beginning" of time and space is unthinkable as is their non-beginning. Therefore a text which proclaims the hopelessly inconceivable lead at the very start into the fictitious domains of wrong thinking.. Even the word "God" is inconceivable, obviously so. The hypothesis of the existence of an unthinkable God previous to an unthinkable beginning forces the mind to confront the absurdity of a something-before-anything creating everything out of nothing. The cosmic and human drama as described in the Bible is an interplay between two partners playing against each other: Aleph, intermittant life-death, unfathomable, timeless mystery evading all mental grasp, and Yod, its projection into the time-space continuum, which is its antinomy. The winner is always Aleph because all that exists must of necessity come to an end. But the psyche, dreaming of an indefinite duration -- in the form of an external soul, for example -- rejects the very notion of its own death and clings to the philosophies or religions that enrcourage it to believe that the word "always" has a meaning. When decoded the letter-numbers are of such a nature as to be able to satisfy our intgellect but their import can only reveal itself in the depths of our beings. They first appear in Genesis as archetypes pre-existent to any articulate language, but these gradually condense into allegories which in turn become constituent parts of an epic poem in which Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their wives are the principal protagonists. This metaphsyical narrative has come to be considered as being as series of episodes in the chronicles of an ancient Semitic tribe and continue to be looked upon for no apparent reason as being an important chapter in holy Scriptures of worldwide traditional beliefs. The traditional reading of the Bible is the result of intellectual subjugation to psychological demands. The Book of Genesis when read according to custom therefore appears in the form of a story relating the facts and gestures of such people as Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and so forth, but whose names when read in the light of the cabalistic code reveal that they are abstract formulae of cosmic energy focused in the human psyche. For example: in the first chapter of Genesis it is repeatedly written: "and God said". There is no such word as God in the book. The schema Elohim (Aleph-Lammed-Hay-Yod-Mem), as is exhaustively shown, is the process through which Aleph becomes Yod in evolutionary existence, and the schema Yomer (Yod-Aleph-Mem-Ray) which is translated "said" is an emanation of both Yod and Aleph in a state of existence and life. This book makes an invaluable contribution not only to a new understanding of Genesis but of the cosmic and human drama. |
| Day One: Genesis 1:1-5 | Genesis Code | Ten Principle Themes of Genesis |
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