Dear John, I feel most at home in a list about our ignorance! Thank you and Bruno for the warm welcome.
Regarding your question, the wonderful thing is that we both are right. The Hebrew alphabet has 22 and 27 letters. There you are, an example of the multiverse! Not either-or, but both-and! The explanation is simple. The Hebrew alphabet is generally considered to have 22 letters, all of them consonants. The reference to the 27 letters is due to the fact that 5 out of the 22 letters (Kaf, Mem, Nun, Pey, Tzadi) are written differently when they find themselves at the end of a word. We don't have this phenomenon in the Latin alphabet, so for us it is rather unusual. Therefore, depending on how you prefer to count the letters, there might be 22 and/or 27. > Now I am ashamed for my 'giving in' to young-time ignorance and count on > your remarks to make me change my opinion (what I do with pleasure any time > when I learn something new). I think that thanks to illustrious figures like Mrs. Maria Ciccone and the like, Kabbalah has drawn the attention of the public as one more weird cult in the new-age supermarket. Kabbalah is actually what we could call Jewish mysticism (otherwise called prophecy by Jewish sources) and as such it could be compared with Sufism in Islam. All being said, the scholarly research of Kabbalah had been neglected by scholars until relatively recent times but nowadays it is a thriving, though quite young, field in academia. If this appeals to you, I believe that the questions posed by the first hunters and gatherers and the modern physicians are not that different. Kabbalah appeared in medieval Spain and it owes its lexicon and cultural codes to its historic and geographic setting, but if you break through the shell of its circumstances I think -and this is why I am here- that Kabbalah has something relevant to say to fields apparently so distant such as literary criticism, physics and computer science. I want to make clear, though, that this is not a particular characteristic of Kabbalah. In the multiverse everything resonates. I just happened to enter it through this gate. Now let me go back to my thread of thought from my first post. Hopefully this will be interesting for Bruno, as well. I feel that when I try to understand the meaning of Abulafian letter combinations I am groping in the dark. Let me recall Bruno's sentence again: "Most mystics, including the introspective universal machine, agree that God has simply no name at all." I think there are different ways to look at this, but I will limit myself to the three extreme possibilities. One of them is what Bruno says, there is no Name of God. On the other extreme we could have those who believe that God has one name, only one true name. The idea seems logically consistent: One God, One Name. [For many Jews, for instance, the disclosure of the Name of God -YHWH, the Tetragrammaton- in the Torah is the climax of divine revelation.] If Abulafia would think like this but discard YHWH as the true Name of God, hence believing that the true Name of God is still hidden, then his method could be understood as a way of cracking the Name of God through the application of an algorithm. If my maths are right, given that there are 22 Hebrew letters (I'll stay at 22 if you don't mind, John) that means that there would be 2222 possible combinations, an absurdly large number for a human intellect to combine (*). In this case, the search of Abulafia for the true Name of God would be hopeless, unless he would receive it by an act of grace (something tantamount to cheating). I think, though, that there is a third possibility much more interesting and promising than either “there is no name” or “there is one name”. The other possibly, the boldest one, is that the 2222 possible combinations, each and every one of them, is a Name of God. Now let's translate the “Name of God” to the language of our time. What is the Name of God? Using Gematria we know that the Name of God is a word but it is also a number. What we are looking for here is the key number that will unlock the secrets of the multiverse. Pauli thought it was 317. I think Pauli was right and so it is anyone who says any random number. This is the meaning of understanding the 2222 possible combinations as Names of God. The circle closes: In the multiverse everything resonates. I just happened to enter it through this gate. Yours truly, R. Rabbit (*) By the way, if you would put all these words in a book you would have the Dictionary of Abulafia, the most authorized dictionary in my opinion to check anything you would find in the Library of Babel. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to everything-l...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
