Editorial notes:
This essay can be categorised as the first in a series of 18 expositions comprising Shai’s Consolidation work.
Shai commences his analysis by stipulating that the core ideas found in the “Indus Canon” – apparently referring to the wisdom of the East – provide a better philosophical reach than those found in the “ancient West” – referring, I believe, to ancient Greek philosophy.
He then moves to a comparison of the “Indus Canon” with Jewish philosophy as found in the Torah which he refers to as an “Infinite nexus” and describes as a universal connector to all aspects of reality. Shai states that not only does the Torah describe the physical world, it also describes the “phenomenological world” which he later refers to as “the world as made up of experience, and not as made up of real things that cause experiences”. To illustrate this point, he refers to the creation of the “two great lights” (the sun and the moon – as referred to in Genesis 1:16). Although the two heavenly objects were created to provide physical light, they are also a potent reminder of the Kabbalistic imperative that is incumbent on the ‘created’ to aspire to the same revelation as projected by the ‘creator’.
The first paragraph may strike some as ironic, blasphemous, or as an act of foreign worship. None of these are intended; the opposite is intended.
The Indus canon comprises a length that outweighs by scales of magnitude those of the ancient West (whichever one chooses); its core story, the hours before a battle, are authoritatively read as both literal and archetypal. Members of its principal cast are understood to represent aspects and forces of each reader’s mind.
I propose the following.
The Torah is an infinite nexus. It is a prism through which each and every perspective and subset of our world can be dissected and understood correctly. Where it is true, it is true in conjunction and by simultaneous channels.
The Torah can be read as a description of the paradigms, vectors, and spiral unfolding of the phenomenological world. This is simultaneous and parallel to its primary meaning and comprehension, viz. literal and simple.
I step aside to describe my use of “phenomenological world”. The phrase itself derives from Western philosophy, but its concerns are reflected in the Eastern thoughts. It means to see the world as made up of experience, and not as made up of real things that cause experiences. There are various ways to classify things in a phenomenological world, for example, sensations, feelings (dis/like), thoughts, mental qualities (e.g. concentration).
In the Eastern text, it is taught that the hero prince is a characterization of the part of the self that can direct other parts, and that is beset by enemy forces that are rationales for submission and that are the suffering that accompanies struggle.
I propose that the Torah is simultaneously a description of the entities and relationships that comprise the phenomenological landscape. Thus when the two great lights were given governance in the expanse above, this also explains the construction of our internal world. The difficulty of course being, how to comprehend the words, phrases and narratives in applying them our each and every mindscape.
A lesser, second, difficulty is to then perceive the external world and the internal world as reflections.
A third, but the primary difficulty is to perceive the relationship of the Torah to the world, including the various logos of its iterations, static truth, unfolding, as well its corollary vistas in the Nach.
