Just What Exactly is the Zohar? New Thoughts on Joseph Smith's esoterica

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Philo Sofee
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Just What Exactly is the Zohar? New Thoughts on Joseph Smith's esoterica

Post by Philo Sofee »

This is why I don't believe Joseph Smith was completely correct in going with the literal historical aspects of the Old Testament. Yes, I actually do believe he tapped into some esoteric aspects of truth, but he stumbled and fell when it came to him literalizing far too much about things. I suggest this is why there is such an incongruence with and within the theological ideas in Mormonism, not only about cosmogony, but cosmology, and the point of it all.

I have been testing and am truly becoming more convinced and actually quite stunned into something I believe I have discovered. No, in all serious liklihood it is not new, at least not new to the Kabbalah rabbis, but something has opened up in me that is a possibility I have never before entertained. All I can do is share generalities at this point. Because that is all I know, but some pieces of the puzzle are fitting in astonishing ways.

I have this last year truly put forth the magnificently difficult effort of reading and attempting to grasp what Leonora Leet has shown in her books on the Kabbalah, focusing on her three books "The Kabbalah of the Soul," "The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah," and "Universal Kabbalah." I am not going to sugarcoat it, they are exquisite, though difficult to grasp.

Her conception is the Kabbalah is based on Sacred Geometry. Not just any kind however, but a very specific kind. The question is, just why is the Tree of Life in the Kabbalah the shape that it is? Who made this up? 10 circles and connecting lines? Why is it called the Tree of Life when it doesn't really look much like a tree after all? The fact is, it is not made up at all, but becomes manifested by very logical and coherent processes in the geometry of hexagrams! She discovered upon actually doing the work, going on her journey of drawing geometric diagrams and expanding them, testing them, permuting them (much like the Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar explain one is to do with the Torah itself - a hint, a really good HINT), that the Kabbalah Tree of Life is actually embedded in the geometry of hexagrams. It arise perfectly naturally as one expands hexagrams! Now that is intriguing, especially to an artist, but also to a mathematician! Her discovery led her also to realize the Star of David, also called the Seal of Solomon, the Menorah and its structure, the Cube of Space, are all discovered in the geometry of hexagrams, and in point of very fact, hexagram construction indicates that the story of the creation of the universe is embedded in Genesis with the base of the hexagram as its unit!

Genesis has nothing to do with the scientific view of how the universe came about, its basis is not on how it actually happened but is described being grounded in and tied in with geometry of triangles and hexagrams and the diatonic musical scale of Pythagoras. And it is absolutely perfectly fitted and internally coherent to that paradigm. All of the wrangling of science refuting the Bible and creation is a red herring, because that is not what Genesis is grounded on. It is not meant at all to be literal physical, it is meant to proceed forward from the diatonic and harmonic musical scales, coupled with geometric expansion using hexagons and hexagrams. And she shows this in exact and explicit detail. Nothing is missing, everything fits, there are no contradictions.

Through her vast explorations (in her books The Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah, and Universal Kabbalah) of the ever expanding geometry of hexagram construction, and the purposeful mythological explanations, as second order truths, not fake and made up stories (she explains this in her books) the geometry of hexagrams and her startling discovery of what she has termed "The Sabbath Star Diagram" and "the science of expressive form" she has actually discovered a very powerful new model which can be used in chaos theory and what that model indicates about our universe. It is very interesting indeed.

In the first chapter where she sets up showing how she made her discovery, she shows how the Zohar, through a revelation from Elijah the prophet to one of the rabbis, indicates a concealed geometric form, not the Tree of Life, but something even greater, which the Zohar only hints at, which has to do with the universe, our place in it, and the reason for creation in the first place. It is this sacred concealed diagram that the Zohar says is the key to truth, universal truth. Leet believes her Sabbath Star Diagram is what the Zohar was talking about, which the rabbis never explicitly revealed as such, either verbally or visually in the Zohar.

Now for something that has been dawning on me as I am making my way through Daniel Matt's magisterial translation of the Zohar. Leet only had access to Matt's first volume of the Zohar when finishing her last book, and then she died, very sadly. As I am reading, many, many descriptions, elaborations, and explanations of the rabbis in the Zohar are, in very point of fact, very astonishingly similar to how Leet was describing her advancing the geometry of the hexagrams. In fact, I now personally believe the entire Zohar is the full explanation of the Sacred Geometric expansions of the hexagrams as they are expanded all the way out to infinity, and the stories told in the Torah and scriptures are the elaborated mythological explanations of the Sacred Geometry. Leet explained this is the logical consequence of what she had done, and the Zohar is doing the exact same thing only using the stories of the Torah to explain the geometrical materials instead of the Kabbalistic ideas Leet uses, though she does include many of the biblical stories also, just not to the extent the rabbis in the Zohar use.

The Zohar is the fullest exposition and explanation of the Sacred Geometry of the hexagram and expansions of the hexagram which helps explain the Kabbalistic doctrines of the Four Worlds, the ten sephirot, the 22 paths connecting them, etc. The reason the Zohar is so cryptic is we do not have the geometry in front of us being explained in the written Zohar, we only have the second order of truth being told using the stories of the scriptures as that explanation of the geometry. But Leet does show the geometry.

I am discovering that the Zohar, with the idea of geometry in mind which Leet has so powerfully and logically demonstrated is now making much better sense. The reason one was not allowed to read the Zohar without a teacher is because they were involved with not only drawing out the geometry, but explaining it, and one needs to see it in order to grasp it as it is explained. The language in the Zohar in many, many, many places is geometric language of explanation of drawing lines, connecting points, and seeing entire pictures of completed steps. It is precisely when they are talking this way that the cryptic aspects begin to occur, cryptic, because one is not aware that a geometric picture is what is being explained to them, in the form of stories about oh say Adam and Eve, or Abraham, or King David, or the heavens, etc. But Leet shows the geometry with many of those same stories in her vast writings on this.

To put it blunt: The Zohar is the explanation of the Sacred Geometry of the Kabbalah Cosmology and Cosmogony.
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