Meru Foundation Research: The Hebrew Letters: Tefillin in Hand, an introduction to the work of the Meru Foundation

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The Hebrew Letters: Tefillin in Hand

An Introduction to the Work of the Meru Foundation

In 1983 when we started Meru Foundation, we had shown that there was a pattern to the letters in the first verses of B'Reshit. We had several theories of what it might represent and why it was there. We now know one of its most important qualities.

The letters of the first verse of B'Reshit can be paired off so as to fold a ribbon with the text written on it into a recognizable geometric form. The most compact and elegant representation of this form is a particular and unique form of vortex. We have shown that this vortex represents a path of self-organization applicable to living systems, consciousness, and physics. It represents an ideal fruit whose form traces the embryonic unfoldment of a "seed" into a "fruit-tree" into a "fruit bearing new seed" (B'Reshit I.11.), an idealized candle flame representing the self-referential qualities of our consciousness and their use for exploration in meditation, as well as an idealization of the Quantum of Action providing a geometric basis for describing the dimensions of the physics of unfolding spacetime.

One of our most important findings has been that this special vortex form - this Flame of Consciousness - displays all of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet when it is viewed from various directions. Thus each letter represents an aspect of this Flame.

This suggested that the letters in B'Reshit might represent a path specified by the sequence of these letter-directions, and that this path might be a particular meditation (perhaps Rabbi Akiva's PaRDeS meditation) that a person could experience as they visualized each letter by turning the model over in their mind's eye. But we realized that this would be extremely difficult, because the vortex form is completely asymmetrical and difficult to visualize by itself.

We now know how and why this is all possible. Just as the alphabet is said to connect Chochma (wisdom, in our mind-space) and Binah (understanding, in the world), all of the whole systems modeled represent a process of projection from one state into another. Whether it is a seed becoming a fruit with new seed - a generational life-cycle, or our mind's projection towards the transcendent in meditation, or the projection of space and time from spacetime, the underlying geometric model can be the same. The Flame vortex form represents a General Projective Principle.

This General Projective Principle is embodied in our human experience by our hands, which project our conscious will (inside our mind-space), onto the physical world (outside). We use our hands to implement our conscious choices in the world - our hands are our Projective Principle. Our unique opposable thumb is linked to our human self-awareness.

We also know that it is the motor and sensory cortex for the hand which humans adapt to control speech. Broca's region and Werneke's regions are there.

We have found that the Idealized Fruit, the Flame, the Quantum of Action, are also a form of tefillin strap bound on our hand - our projective instrument par excellence.

In retrospect, it seems quite natural that the letters of the alphabet come from an idealization of our own hand. We call writing, "hand-writing". The Hebrew letters are traditionally said to be made of flame or fire, and to derive from "Yod" - the letter Yod, "i", designating the pointer of our personal consciousness - and Yad means "hand." We use our hands to point to things in our experience in the same way as the "quantum state vector" designates entities in physics. Torah descriptions of the "hand of G-d" do not imply that Hashem has physical hands. Rather, they describe Hashem's projection of an event into our conscious reality. All humans, blind or sighted, young or old, can always visualize their own hands. When we bind the model hand specified by B'Reshit on our own hand (just like a tefillin strap), it fits like a glove, and we can feel it against our skin. When we visualize our hand in our mind's eye, we can also immediately "see" the Hebrew letters. As we move our hand physically, we "see" different letters displayed in our minds. It now is possible to understand how the letters of B'Reshit could be viewed, in order, as a particular meditation. We move from letter to letter in the text by tipping our hand as we view the sequence of letters in our minds.

We believe that the General Projective Principle, as embodied in the tefillin on our hands, is one of the fundamentals of creation. It must be a part of any Grand Unification in physics, and between physics and consciousness.

One result of the identification of the General Projective Principle has been our development of a compact logical matrix that assigns explicit meaning to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet. (These meanings closely coincide with traditional meanings.) The matrix is sufficiently precise for it to be used to "decipher" root word meanings - in all languages where the Hebrew phonetic equivalents are known - without a dictionary. This may represent rediscovery of the natural language alluded to in the story of the Tower of Babel.

There are many issues and implications that are too lengthy for inclusion here, but I hope that this provides a sense of what we have been doing.