11

MESSAGE IN THE MESSENGER:

THE JUDAISM CODE

"There is a kabbalistic teaching that says that the secret of the Torah is in the first letter.

If you cannot understand the secret from the first letter, God, in His infinite mercy, repeats the secret, in greater detail, in the first word. If you cannot understand the secret from the first word, God, in His infinite mercy, repeats the secret, in greater detail, in the first verse. If you ..., in greater detail in all five books. This is a description of what mathematicians call a hierarchical array. Each layer repeats and includes the previous layer, always in the same pattern, but with increasing detail. This implies that we could find something fundamental about Genesis 1:1 if we could see how the first letter was like the first word and how both were like the entire first verse."

- Stan Tenen⁽¹⁾

As we observed in Chapter One, the inventory of cultures that were once at least partially familiar with the Binary Soul Doctrine is quite extensive. 'Partially familiar', however, would seem to be the key phrase here; the majority of those other cultures seem, in contrast to the JudeoChristian tradition, to have been unfamiliar with the complete scope and long-term potential of mankind's situation. They do show evidence of having known about mankind's two souls and the division that happens to them at death, but displayed little concept of how these divisions ever started to occur in the first place, or if there would ever be an end to them, a day when human beings would no longer be in danger of rupturing apart at death.

As I discussed in The Division of Consciousness, the JudeoChristian tradition seems to have once possessed relatively unique insights into these aspects of the Binary Soul Doctrine. More so than any other tradition in the ancient world, Judaism seems to have seen 'the big picture', understanding what was going on from a long-term historic perspective. Or perhaps it would be better to say that Whoever formed and created Judaism understood what was going on, and designed that knowledge directly into the history of the Jewish people, using their very lives as the ink and paper He employed to write His message to the world. The pattern was there, mysteriously encoded both in the history and the sacred texts of the Jewish people, but there is precious little evidence to suggest that anyone, Jew or otherwise, comprehended the priceless meaning of this pattern.

In The Division of Consciousness, I explored some of the more obvious parallels between the Binary Soul Doctrine and the Biblical text. In this book, on the other hand, I had intended to focus instead on the parallels between the BSD and the data emerging from modern paranormal research. However, the fact that the actual recorded history of the Jewish people has continuously repeated the pattern of the BSD seems too paranormal to ignore; from the perspective of the Binary Soul Doctrine, the events in the history of Israel repeatedly parallel the lifecycle of the human psyche:

1. An infant's psyche starts off whole and undivided, but differentiates into two equal but opposite elements as the child grows to maturity.

2. In most people, the masculine, intelligent, more cerebral left-brain mind asserts its dominance over the feminine, emotional, more earthy right-brain mind by the time the child reaches adulthood.

3. At death, these two divide apart, the left-brain conscious mind continuing on unharmed to reincarnate again, while the right-brain unconscious finds itself exiled and imprisoned in a netherworld wilderness.

Amazingly, many of the most famous stories of the Bible -- Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Isaac & Ishmael, and Jacob & Esau -- follow this very same pattern:

1. One entity gives birth to two entities which seem virtual opposites from one another.

2. One of these two, the younger or smaller one, has characteristics in common with the conscious spirit, while the other, the elder or larger one, has characteristics in common with the unconscious soul.

3. These two interact and conflict, and from this conflict, the elder/larger entity is condemned and banished into exile.

Of course, one could argue that this pattern was intentionally designed into these stories by human authors, that these stories are not truly historic reports at all, and all we are observing is a oft-used literary tool -- repetition -- intended to drive home a point. But the same pattern also turns up in the later history of the Jews, in events which are not in doubt, such as the division of the kingdoms of Israel & Judah, and in the division of Gnostic Christianity & Roman Catholic Christianity, two more dividing pairs which also seem to be variations on the very same archetypical theme.

Again and again throughout Jewish history we find this same story being repeated, as if history itself was trying to hammer home a single thought or image. Or perhaps as if it were trying to insure that a single thought and image would be preserved across the ages, by masking that thought inside a metaphor and repeatedly offering it up again and again as a variety of seemingly different reports.

The Division of Adam and Eve

The first human, according to the Bible, was originally a single whole being, until a part of him was divided away,⁽²⁾ effectively cutting him apart into two separate beings : Adam and Eve. After this division, as we all know, the two then interacted and conflicted with one another over the forbidden fruit, which resulted in Adam being given dominance over Eve, and in Eve being cursed with suffering during childbirth. After the division and the conflict, the figure most symbolic of the masculine left-brain conscious mind -- Adam -- is granted dominance over his feminine counterpart, who is both forced into subservience and cursed with suffering. This pattern is repeated again and again in subsequent stories. However, this is one of the few times in these Biblical stories where the figure most symbolic of the feminine right-brain unconscious mind is not specifically discarded into exile; in all subsequent versions of this pattern, exile also plays a part.

The Division of Cain and Abel

Eve gave birth, as everyone knows, to two offspring -- Cain and Abel , who, like Adam and Eve, again were exact opposites, symbolically opposite archetypes. The firstborn, Cain, was a gentle farmer of the land, while his younger brother Abel was an aggressive herdsman. As one who coaxed crops from the land, Cain's profession was more earthy, reactive and responsive; Abel's profession, requiring him to slaughter livestock, paints him as more decisive and willful. Thus Cain can be seen, like his mother Eve, to be symbolic of the passive and earthy right-brain unconscious, while Abel, like Adam, had more in common with the active and self-assertive left-brain conscious. And just as in the Adam and Eve story, we see that the figure most symbolic of the left-brain conscious is favored over his partner. Abel received favor from God while his brother did not, and when this happened, Cain's response showed him to be highly emotional and reactionary, again like the unconscious soul.

When the two then interacted and conflicted, Cain, symbol of the unconscious, was condemned and exiled, another piece to the puzzle that recurs again and again in subsequent versions of this story pattern. Exile, the punishment given to Cain for murdering his brother, has always stuck out like a sore thumb in this story, because the more logical and expected Old Testament 'eye-for-an-eye' sentence would have been Cain's execution. But perhaps Cain could not be executed because that wasn't the message this story was meant to deliver; the unconscious soul, after all, is not really killed or destroyed after dividing from the conscious mind at death. Instead, like Cain, it is merely sent off into exile. The story had to reflect that, and does, but at the cost of settling for an unequal punishment. But that unequal punishment also serves a function; by sticking out like a sore thumb, it calls attention to itself, thus suggesting there is more to the story than meets the eye. The fact that the younger of the two was preferred over the elder, and that the elder was sent off into exile, are two elements that occur again and again in these stories. In the same way, the conscious spirit is also ever young, always reincarnating and renewing itself, while the unconscious soul preserves the memory of the past, thus knowing what came before (as would an elder brother), but is sent off into exile after death.

The Cain & Abel division uses the same basic outline of the Adam & Eve division, but adds two new elements : the younger is preferred over the elder, and the elder is sent off into exile. In subsequent appearance of this story pattern, additional elements are added, each building upon the pattern of the earlier ones while introducing new details. And invariably, the details that recur from story to story make perfect sense from the perspective of the Binary Soul Doctrine.

The Division of Ishmael and Isaac

After making his special covenant with God, Abraham fathers two sons, Ishmael and Isaac, who again are archetypical opposites. This pair also conflicted (both through their mothers when they were infants, and later through their descendants, the Arabs and Jews, respectively). And once again, the younger Isaac won out over his elder brother Ishmael, who was, like the elder-born Cain before him, also sent off into exile. The inheritance of Abraham's blessing went to Isaac, despite the tradition in those times that the elder son would receive the inheritance (again, this incongruity suggests there is more to the story below the surface).

These two brothers again seem to be symbols of the conscious and unconscious. Like the emotional, earthy, and unruly unconscious, Ishmael was also portrayed as animal-like and uncivilized.⁽³⁾ And while the texts do not provide much data on Isaac, the most famous story about him reports that Isaac was originally marked for death, but in the end another was sacrificed in his place. Similarly, although the conscious spirit is ultimately responsible for making all decisions during one's life, it is not the conscious spirit, but the unconscious soul, that is punished by death, while the conscious spirit is allowed to continue on unharmed, reincarnating again and again. The additional elements this story adds to the pattern are : the figure symbolizing the unconscious is portrayed as earthy, emotional, and animalistic, and the figure that symbolizes the conscious is allowed to continue on only because another was sacrificed in his place.

The Division of Jacob and Esau

This pattern surfaces next in the story of Isaac's twin sons -- Jacob and Esau -- yet another pair of equal opposites. Esau was the firstborn and so originally owned the birthright, the favored status and inheritance, until he gave it away to his brother in exchange for a small favor.⁽⁴⁾ Esau was a very earthy, instinctive, animal-like man of little intellect (like the unconscious soul). His brother Jacob was just the opposite -- very intelligent and clever (like the conscious spirit). Jacob used his cleverness to rob Esau of his birthright and blessing, thereby gaining dominance. Similarly, modern psychology reports that the conscious mind also uses its natural abilities to dominate, control, and overpower the instinctive, earthy, and subjective unconscious.

For the first time in these stories, the preferred younger brother is specifically identified with the left-brain attributes of intelligence and cleverness. Again, the older brother is diminished while the younger is exalted. In fact, the figure who represents the right-brain unconscious is not only rejected for his brother, but is forced to be his brother's subordinate as well, just as the right-brain unconscious is the subordinate servant of the left-brain conscious mind. And like the elder brothers Cain and Ishmael before him, Esau was then also condemned into exile :

"Your dwelling will be away from the earth's richness, away from the dew of heaven above. You will live by the sword and you will serve your brother. But when you grow restless, you will throw his yoke from off your neck."

- Genesis 27:39-40

The Division of Jacob's Children

Like the children of Adam, Abraham, and Isaac before him, the fate of Jacob's children also followed this same pattern. Interestingly, the pattern of the dominance of the younger child even holds true, both for Jacob's twelve children, and for their offspring -- the twelve tribes of Israel. Jacob's youngest son Joseph was divided away from the rest of his eleven brothers, and during the prolonged drought that followed their separation, Joseph found himself exalted above his brothers, granted a high governmental position in Egypt. Through this position of power, the story goes, he was able to save all his elder brothers from death and starvation. This again seems to fit the pattern of the Binary Soul Doctrine. Each person has only one conscious spirit, but may have many unconscious souls from various past lifetimes. Yet it may only be through the intercession of that one conscious spirit that those past-life unconscious souls can be rescued from death.⁽⁵⁾

Jacob's first wife, Leah, had six children, the first four of which were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah, in that order. In perfect accordance with the pattern, the eldest child, Reuben, was condemned,⁽⁶⁾ while the next three children were all highly elevated. Indeed, 'highly elevated' is an understatement, for of all the children of Israel, only the descendants of Simeon, Levi, and Judah have survived into the modern era; all Jews living today credit themselves as being descendants of those three men. The tribes of Judah and Simeon made up the Southern Jewish nation, which survived while all the tribes of the northern nation of Israel were taken away into captivity by the Assyrians, never to be seen again.⁽⁷⁾ The remaining tribe, descended from Levi, were a tribe of priests, and as they also lived within the Southern nation, they too survived. So again we see that the pattern holds : the elder child is condemned and taken away while the younger is saved and blessed.

The Division of the Kingdoms of Judah and Israel

For a brief shining moment, the Jewish nation was a single kingdom, whole and undivided. Israel's idealized king, the man "most like God's own heart", was David, whose great accomplishment was the original union of Israel's twelve loosely affiliated tribes into a single cohesive nation. David was the only Jewish King who treated both the Northern and Southern lands equally and justly, thereby preserving their continued unity and autonomy. Shortly after David's reign ended, however, a gigantic schism broke the unity of the nation into two parts. Ten tribes splintered off to rule the northern provinces, while the remaining tribes in the southern kingdom of Judah remained loyal to David's dynasty. Weakened by this division, foreign invaders from Assyria conquered the northern ten tribes, marching the entire population off into captivity, never to be seen or heard from again. After that, the only remaining descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob lived in the Southern kingdom of Judah. From that point on, they were known simply as Jews.

Thus it becomes clear that even the political history of the Jewish people is aligning itself with the Binary Soul Doctrine. Whether by design or coincidence, the patterns match : just as the human psyche splits apart into two pieces at death, with the larger unconscious part being cut off and sent into exile, so too the Jewish nation once also split itself into two parts, the larger/elder of which was then cut off and sent into exile.⁽⁸⁾ After all these uncanny parallels, can there remain any doubt that the history of the Jewish people is somehow being purposely and intelligently designed to reflect the pattern of the lifecycle of the human soul?

The Division of Christianity

An argument could even be made that this same pattern holds true for the two versions of Christianity descended from Christ -- that of the elder (the earlier gnostic, subjective, loving, intuitive teachings of John, Thomas, and the other original Apostles) and that of the younger (the later, more authoritarian, objective, and legalistic teachings of Paul and Rome). Both schools of thought, it seems, descended from the same original Messenger, but split apart and started to conflict with each other shortly after Christ physically left the scene. And just as the previous pattern would lead us to expect, the elder, right-brain oriented teaching of the Gnostics was the one to become condemned and drop from view, while the younger, more authoritative left-brain teachings of Rome became dominant.

Yet in the end, will the birthright and rightful dominance of the elder again be established?

An Unexpected Barrenness

Other relevant patterns also emerge from these stories. Again and again, we encounter parents that are barren at first; it is only after enduring great trials that they are finally able to conceive and give birth to offspring. Adam & Eve, Abraham & Sarah, Isaac & Rebekah, and Jacob & Rachel were all unable to have children at first. It is a very consistent pattern.

At first, for the unspecified amount of time they resided in the Garden of Eden, Eve was barren; she had no children until after she and Adam were condemned for disobedience and exiled from Eden. Then Abraham's wife Sarah was also barren, and couldn't get pregnant until after she first asked her husband to sleep with her handmaiden as a substitute wife. Isaac's wife was also barren until Isaac finally prayed to God for help.⁽⁹⁾ And Jacob's wife Rachel was also barren until after she asked her husband to sleep with her maidservant Bilhah in her place.

Assuming that this very consistent pattern is not accidental, one is left wondering why all these couples were ever barren at all. Other couples on the planet might be expected to occasionally suffer from barrenness, but these couples were all supposed to have enjoyed the special favor and support of God. Why then did they all consistently exhibit the same inability to produce offspring at the very time they were supposed to be their healthiest and most lucky? We will find a possible answer to this question in the next chapter.

The Wife/Sister Pattern

Another relevant theme is also repeated throughout Genesis -- that of a wife also being a sister. On two different occasions, Abraham tells the Pharaoh of Egypt, and then later the King of Gerar, that his wife Sarah is merely his sister.⁽¹⁰⁾ Isaac does the very same thing a few chapters later,⁽¹¹⁾ deceiving the king of the Philistines into thinking that Rebekah was not his wife, but just his sister. And in a variation on this theme, Jacob marries two women who are each other's sisters. Sticking out like a sore thumb, this recurring theme seems purposely designed into these patriarchal legends, yet this repeated identification of wives as sisters seems devoid of any significance in conventional theology. The Binary Soul Doctrine, however, reminds us that the conscious and unconscious are both partners and siblings; to the conscious spirit, the unconscious soul is both its sister and its wife.

A Covenant of Division

The word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision [...] He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars--if indeed you can count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your offspring be." [...] the LORD said to him, "Bring me a heifer, a goat and a ram, each three years old, along with a dove and a young pigeon." Abram brought all these to him, cut them in two and arranged the halves opposite each [...]When the sun had set and darkness had fallen, a smoking firepot with a blazing torch appeared and passed between the pieces. On that day the LORD made a covenant with Abram and said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates."

- Genesis 15:1-18

Abraham's covenant with God is held to be the underlying foundation of three very different religions : Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. And when we review the recorded description of that covenant, what do we find? That, like so much else in the Bible, Abraham's covenant was based on a symbolic division. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are based on Abraham's covenant, which was itself based on division, established by carefully cutting living creatures into two equal but opposite parts, and symbolically arranging their halves opposite one another.

It is striking how sharply this rite differs from the Egyptian rite performed during the feast of Osiris (mentioned in Chapter One). The Egyptian rite started with two separate inanimate halves of a statue, and after binding the molded halves together, the priest pronounced the statue whole and alive. But Israel starts out with living creatures and cuts them into two but opposite pieces, terminating their lives. The two rites could not be more opposite, and yet more similar. Both apparently held the concept of division to have some supreme theological significance, yet, whereas Egypt felt that nonintegrated duality was the root of all evil, Judaism seems to have felt that such divisive duality was so useful and good, it needed to sit center stage in the most important religious ceremony in Jewish history -- the one that cemented Abraham's eternal covenant with God. Still, Egypt was one of Israel's closest neighbors; like a planet teetering on the rim of a black hole's gravity well, Egypt had to have had a huge influence on Israel's culture and intellectual climate. Why then did Judaism seem to feel so differently about division than Egypt did?

The First Letter

"A universe comes into form when a space is severed or taken apart."

- G. Spencer-Brown ⁽¹²⁾

The first letter, first word, first sentence, first chapter, etc., of the Bible all have something in common, according to ancient Jewish tradition, and that common element, whatever it may be, is absolutely essential to fully comprehending God's revealed message to humanity.

The very first letter of the Bible, the first letter of the first word of the first chapter of Genesis, is bet -- the second letter of the Hebrew 'alpha-bet'. Being the second letter, of course, in and of itself implies duality and therefore division, but the parallels to the Binary Soul Doctrine go far deeper than simply that. In Hebrew, letters have meanings, and the meaning of the letter bet is 'house', and what a house does and represents. So bet, then, represents the separation, or distinction, between what is inside and what is outside. A house divides the inside from the outside. Bet, in other words, represents the first possible distinction, the first division. It is perhaps not surprising that it has been mathematically proven that literally all of formal logic can be derived from this single distinction.

The Bible begins with this letter, this image -- the image of division.

The division represented by the first letter of the Bible, as it so happens, also has much in common with the division between the conscious and unconscious within the human psyche. Like the outside of a house, the conscious mind is exterior and right out in the open. And like the inside of a house, the unconscious is interior and concealed.

The First Word

Although the first word in the Bible -- B'reshith -- is traditionally translated as "In the Beginning", that is not the only possibility. Stan Tenen of the Meru Institute points out that this word also breaks down into beth, which means "in", esh, which means "fire", and shith, which means either "a thorn" or "the number six", or, more likely, both a thorn and the number six: a "six-thorn".

"A 'six-thorn' as an archetype is readily identifiable with what mathematicians call a tetrahedron. (A tetrahedron is a pyramid shape, the first Platonic solid, with 4 triangular faces, 4 corners, and 6 edges. Tetrahedra look like thorns.) When we put a fire in a tetrahedral frame, we have an archetypical model of the relationship between inside and outside - a light in a tent."

- Stan Tenen⁽¹³⁾

The First Sentence

"In the beginning God _______ the heavens and the earth."

- Genesis 1:1

The first line in the Bible, of course, is usually translated "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." However, the Hebrew word that the author of Genesis chose to use for "create" was bara, which strictly means to divide, to separate, to cut or cleave, both in the literal and idiomatic senses. Thus the first sentence in the Bible shows God using division to create the universe.

But the parallels of this first sentence to the Binary Soul Doctrine do not end there. In the 1970's, physicist Stan Tenen discovered an astounding mathematical pattern encoded within the letter sequence of this first line of the Bible. The letter patterns of Genesis 1:1, he found, generates the topology of a torus, a three-dimensional model of dynamic process and continuous creation. The torus of Genesis 1:1 appears to illustrate a primary distinction -- that between inside and outside. Furthermore, he found that, when viewed from different angles, this model casts shadows that perfectly replicate all 27 letters of the Rabbinic form of the Torah Scroll Hebrew alphabet. Tenen's discovery led to the founding of the Meru Foundation in California in 1983, a nonprofit organization that has spent the last 25 years exploring some pretty amazing mathematical, philosophical, theological, meditational, and mystical offshoots of this discovery.

Did God implant a unique message into the Abrahamic traditions that He gave no other people or culture? Tenen believes his research demonstrates that Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic are indeed 'sacred alphabets', and that the 'Primary Distinction' of Genesis 1:1 may hold priceless gifts for both science and spirituality. While the jury may still be out on those issues, the student of the BSD cannot help but prick up his ears when hearing that the very first line of Genesis has a dynamic model of the distinction between inside and outside embedded mathematically within it, and will be paying very close attention to further developments from the Meru Foundation in the years to come.

And The Theme Is?? Just as Jewish tradition has held for generations, the theme of the Bible's first letter -- the division of bet -- does seem to be expanded upon more and more in the first passage, and then the first chapter, and then the first book. In the first chapter of Genesis, God divided the heavens from the earth, and then divided the light from the darkness, and then divided the water underneath from the water above, and then divided the water from the dry ground, and then divided the day from the night. In the second chapter he divided humanity into male and female. In the third He divided good from evil, and in the forth we again encounter the story of the division of Cain and Abel.⁽¹⁴⁾ The theme seems to continue throughout the whole work; indeed, the whole of the Old Testament could be seen as telling a single story : the division of God and humanity.

Did He really divide all these pairs in two, or did He just differentiate them one from another? Genesis sets before us this inscrutable symbol -- the house of bet -- as if asking this same question: "does this image show division, or merely differentiation and distinction"? It seems to be an entirely subjective distinction; what seems to one person to be division seems to the next to merely be differentiation.

Perhaps the universe doesn't even have a final and definitive question to this question. Bet almost seems to ask if the universe itself IS a question, and who and what we make of ourselves is the answer -- the only possible answer -- to that question. For every yin, after all, there is a yang; if the universe is a question, then perhaps we are the answer. Is it possible that no one single final definitive answer to the question the universe asks even exists? Perhaps the whole point of the universe is for it simply to be the question, to give us the opportunity to have a question to answer, and the whole point of our existence is to be the answer, to create an answer in and through our lives. We seem to find this same question asked all over again in the second verse of Genesis:

"Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep,

and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters."

- Genesis 1:2

This 'deep' was pure formless emptiness, the ultimate unknown, the ultimate question. And right there alongside the ultimate question we find God, the Ultimate Answer Himself, hovering above it, staring, as it were, directly into its endless darkness. If so, this would seem to emphasize our freedom, and the importance of our creativity; giving a new depth of meaning to the phrase "the truth will set you free".

The Division of God

Even if Judaism once revolved entirely around the concept of the importance of an archetypical, primary division, showing reflections of it again and again, in the first letter bet, in all the divisions God performs in the first chapters of Genesis, in the division stories of Cain & Abel, Ishmael & Isaac, Jacob & Esau, the Kingdoms of Israel & Judah, and the Christianities of Gnosticism & Roman Catholicism, no other division seems as profound as that between the two faces of God.

Jewish theology, it seems, once addressed the Egyptian paradox of "a unity composed of a duality" by giving God two names and two 'faces', and then constantly stressing the unity of the two. For literally millennia, the central Jewish prayer has been the unity prayer:

"Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, The Lord is one."

- Deuteronomy 6:4

However, what practically no one realizes today is that back in the original Hebrew, what is being translated today as 'Lord' and 'God' originally referred to two very different names with very different meanings. Like the conscious mind, one aspect of God (HaShem, often translated as 'Lord') was seen as singular, distinct, and highly focused, while, the other aspect of God (Elokim, often translated as 'God') was, like the unconscious, seen as having perfect wholeness and all-inclusive totality. The central message in this unity prayer was not simply that this HaShem and this Elokim both existed at the same time, but that they were in fact, secretly and despite appearances, the very same Being:

"Abraham realized that the inner world of consciousness and the Source of conscious volition (personal will) is a Singularity in meditation in the mind, and that the outer world is a panoply of All-There-Is. The Singularity in the mind is identified with the state of being (consciousness): the Four-Letter Name, "Lord." The panoply of "All-There-Is" is identified with the Five-Letter Name, "God." Abraham's discovery is that the inner Singularity and the outer Whole are in fact the same. The "Lord-God" is Abraham's discovery. It's this fundamental discovery that academic scholars, modern Jews and Christians, and just about everyone else, completely ignores. Without the distinction between inside and outside, conscious life cannot exist."

- Stan Tenen ⁽¹⁵⁾

1. Stan Tenen, The Meru Foundation, http://www.meru.org

2. Commonly translated 'rib', the part that was taken away from Adam is more properly translated as 'side', suggesting that a whole side of Adam, one whole half of his being, was removed from him to create Eve.

3. Genesis 16:12

4. The text emphasizes that the elder child originally held the birthright until it was taken away from him, partly through deception and partly due to his own foolishness. Much the same thing could be said of the unconscious soul. As we will see in Chapter 12, it may only be by turning away from the messages and content with our own unconscious souls that we bring division and exile upon ourselves at death.

5. See the Appendix: What is Baptism for the Dead?

6. Genesis 49:3-4.

7. Thus originating the legend of the "Lost Tribes of Israel".

8. Interestingly, the Jewish prophets promised that the lost tribes would be found one day; not only would they return en mass to the land of Israel, but they would even be given rulership over the other kingdom when they did return. Even though these prophecies were in their own scriptures, however, the people of Judah laughed at such predictions, asking "How could a lost people who have been assimilated into the bloodlines of other cultures ever be recovered?" But if the Binary Soul Doctrine is correct, then this prophecy could refer to the return of the lost and exiled past-life souls of mankind. If so, then what will be the kingdom they conquer when they return?

9. Which is something that Isaac might not have done in his life at all prior to that moment. Asking God to let his wife get pregnant was the first time the Bible record indicates that Isaac prayed to God since almost being offered up as a burnt sacrifice to that same God as a young child. It was probably no small matter to Isaac to now be forced to ask favors from that seemingly irrational and fearsome Being, and the Bible does not indicate how many years he waited before finally breaking down and asking for help from the God he feared, and, quite possibly, hated. But it must have been some number of years indeed, for Rebekah was labeled 'barren' as if no question about the matter remained.

10. Genesis 12:11-20 and Genesis 20:1-17

11. Genesis 26:7-10

12. G. Spencer-Brown, The Laws of Form, as quoted by Stan Tenen in http://www.meru.org

13. As posted on an e-list, November 1999.

14. Chapters five through ten deal with the story of Noah and the Flood, which almost seem to belong to a different book altogether. Then in chapter eleven the saga of all the divisions of Abraham and his descendants begins.

15. Stan Tenen, as posted on an e-list, May 2000.