Qabalah, Essenes and Health
by Djin Aquarian
From Living Nutrition Magazine vol. 17
http://www.livingnutrition.com
[Hebrew letters image + qabalah diagram]
Health is wholeness, a state of being wherein all of our inner and outer “dimensions” of being--body, emotions, mind and soul--are in good condition and working together harmoniously, as one. The great work of the Qabala is to unify and sanctify these four “dimensions”, and make oneself whole.
Qabalah, the mystical teachings of the Jewish people which were previously inaccessible to all but the select few, has become increasingly popular, and has been adopted/adapted by many Christians and occultists alike, each bringing to it their own unique perceptions. There are two main positions concerning Qabalah. On the one hand, it is praised for its tremendous insights and revelations, and on the other, it is condemned for misleading its students with superstition, strange mystical practices and promoting false messiahs. Ultimately, we will receive valuable and practical understandings from the teaching only if we can validate its ancient message, concerning vital issues of soul and body, in the here and now. Because of these contradictory views and the difficulty many experience in penetrating its mysterious and often far out assertions, Qabalah remains inaccessible for most.
Nevertheless, Qabalah contains a message of health and healing which is infrequently perceived. This message is "written" or encoded in our chromosomes, in the cellular geometries of our inner and outer structures, seeking expression throughout all of our societies. It is a message of wholeness that has been scribed for posterity in the name/code of YHVH, commonly translated from Hebrew to English as “the Lord”, and known by the Essenes as the "Soul of the Qabalah." The Essenes were the sect of Jews who lived a natural Edenic lifestyle in Egypt, Israel and Greece. They were known to exist for several hundred years before and after the time of Jesus, yet remained apart from the post-biblical Judaic religion of the Pharisees who fostered the rabbinic era and modern Judaism, orthodox and otherwise.
I was raised in the Jewish faith, and from a very young age, the admonishment that I not speak “the Lord's” specific name, YHVH, sparked my curiosity to seek and interpret Qabalah for myself and come to my own conclusions. I have compared the various traditional writings on Qabalah, and have a good knowledge of its methods of mystical analysis. At the same time, I will only accept the truths that correspond to Nature and proven science, commensurate with the ancient axiom, “as below so above” or “ as within, so without." I’ve discovered certain insights of truth I wish to share with you here, but first, a little background on Qabalah.
On the one hand mystics, and some rabbis, believe that the Qabalah was given to Adam by the angels of YHVH (the Lord), in the Garden of Eden, as a gift for the redemption of all people on Earth. It is further believed that it was handed down through a select mystical lineage for many generations, and some 3600 years later the Essene communities combined the commandments of Moses with Qabalah and natural/organic living in an attempt to “return” to the wholeness Man once had in paradise.
On the other hand, it is believed that the Qabalah is not older than about 2200 years at most and that it is a hodgepodge of the collected gleanings by the Jewish disporas from all cultures, spiced with their own mysticism. Because these contradictory schools of thought are both true in a sense, and because the Qabalah is founded upon numbers, geometry and symbology, it is now possible, with the corroboration of modern science, to move beyond the guesswork of the misty past and see that there is something valid about Qabalah. Even though it takes a bit of abstract reasoning at first to read its universal message, it is often extremely accurate in mapping out the essential constituent parts of what makes a human being tick and what makes one a whole or complete person
There is much mystery and debate shrouding the origin of the Qabalah, the Essenes, and their mutual connection to each other. Some glaringly obvious connections, concerning the healing of our planetary body, emotions and soul, became apparent to me in studying the Torah, the bible of the Jews renamed the Old Testament, and the New Testament of Christianity, through the lenses of the Qabalah. All three ”voices” for God--the Torah, the New Testament and the Qabalah--prominently tell of a mystical entity called the “Tree of Life.”
The basic teaching of Qabalah is found in the 32 Paths of Wisdom upon a ” Tree of Life”, as stated in its oldest written text called the Sepher Yetzirah, translated as Book of Formation. These 32 paths are divided into the 10 numbers from 1 to 10 and the 22 letters/symbols of the Hebrew alphabet. Everything was created out of these 32 Pathways of Wisdom, and Man, as stated in the Bible, being in the “image and likeness” of YHVH, the Soul of the Qabalah, male/female, is said to be the most perfect and complete expression of these 32 Paths, a veritable Tree of Life. This would explain why the Essenes revered the tree, symbolically and in reality, and considered its fruit the best food for a human’s diet. Taking this concept of each of us as a Tree of Life with 32 Paths of Wisdom, it should manifest in our bodies. Sure enough, we need look no further than two of the most fundamental structures of our bodies, which bear considerable responsibility for our health and beauty: the spine and teeth, both normally comprised of 32 structural elements. And there’s more: 32 corresponds to our 10 fingers upon which we count numbers and do the creative outer work of our DNA, and 22 corresponds to our chromosomes, minus the one that determines gender. Timothy Leary's book “The Game of Life”, written in the 1980’s, relates the 23 chromosomes to the 22 Hebrew letters and 22 major arcana of the Tarot.
The Qabalah is said to be the Soul of the Bible and YHVH the Soul of the Qabalah. Therefore, YHVH would be the Soul of the Soul of the Bible. The name of the Lord, YHVH, sometimes written in English erroneously as “Jehovah” or “Yahweh”, literally conjugates the verb “IS” or “Was, Is and Will Be”. When the four Hebrew letters spelling YHVH are stacked vertically as in the accompanying figure, the silhouette of a human form is revealed and a message is derived. YHVH is the Eternal and Whole (Holy) Essence of a human being, and this could imply that we have the same characteristics, which theoretically could be transferred into the physical dimension of personality. The Essenes, being Jews, would most definitely have known of YHVH as their Father and God and being Qabalists would have understood and accepted It as a teaching for the way of return to complete wholeness.
In using the Bible (I will use the term Bible to refer to both the Torah of the Jews and the New Testament of the Christians combined into its now secular form for easiest communication purposes) as a reference source of universal truth and of how to make ourselves whole, we must have a basic understanding of these previous concepts plus the realization that just as the physical body and personality is the outer expression of what is within, so too are the books of the Bible and their stories merely the outer expressions of deeper revelations, which actually transcend the outer form and go beyond the religious “garments” of Judaism and Christianity. Most of us, I’m sure can understand this premise.
The Qabalah speaks of three Mother letters as matrices of our “three-part soul”, named Aleph, Mem and Shin. These, it says, correspond, in order, to Breath, Blood and Brains. How important are they to our wholeness and health? Very! Breath is what we consume the most of in a lifetime, blood carries oxygen and nutrition to every single cell of every organ and tissue it can, and brains carry the will and wisdom for making the highest choices in food selection and other crucial issues. These Mothers are considered the foundations of our lives and very deep teachings go along with them. Space does not permit elaborating on this, but I just want to point out the ingeniousness of the Hebrew alphabet in placing Mem at its 13th position. The blood is made up of 12 cell or tissue salts plus hemoglobin which carries oxygen, making thirteen essential elements of life. In fact, the entire Hebrew alphabet has an anatomical and psychic correspondence that is critically important for total health.
Perhaps you are thinking right about now of the old chicken and egg conundrum, and I don’t mean whether they are fit foods for human consumption, but rather, [ whether Qabala or Man came first. The ancient wisdom states that number and letter were first created in the “mind of God” and then in the world and its inhabitants. This is consistent with our nature, since all human manifestations are preceded by a mental and emotional condition. So important is this Tree of Life that it is spoken of in the Bible, in the early chapters of the very first book called Genesis, in the garden of Eden story, where this Tree is said to have the ability to give eternal life, and again in the later chapters of Revelation, where it is said to be the healing of the nations who come unto it. This is no accident or coincidence--rather it is a clear statement of its ongoing importance and relevance to our process of becoming whole, as individuals and as a race, and of the one-pointed consciousness of the Qabalistic authors, sometimes referred to as The Brotherhood of the Elect.
The Essenes mention the Tree of Life in the "Dead Sea Scrolls”, and it is a historical fact that the Essenes lived the teachings of the Torah by their own interpretation, which would include the first dietary instructions, in Genesis, of YHVH, their Father and Chief of the Elohimic Creator Gods. There we find two dietary rules given to Adam and Eve; one on what foods to eat, and the other for the purpose of developing strength of will by heeding one's divine wisdom: avoiding the temptations of the flesh represented by the Tree of Knowledge, and selecting the best food for human blood and DNA from the Tree of Life Eternal. The latter tree represents the highest wisdom of the parent, God, and the other, personal choice between "good or bad”, yet causing death. In this story, YHVH first lovingly tells the Adamic couple, progenitors of a coming race with a budding moral/rational soul capable of hearing and obeying a great wisdom, ”I have given you every herb and fruit yielding seed to be to you for meat." YHVH then gives them a test to help them develop their higher selves, a test of faith and loving trust in those words and the warning of death from eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. "Death" here means separation from life’s Source.
These are the two great lessons as taught by their Creator YHVH: to know the most positive and wise selection of food; and to have the spiritual and moral strength to follow this first great wisdom teaching as spoken on the 6th Day of the Creation story--a story and teaching with vast social and health implications.
Who or what is this YHVH Name whose voice is imbedded in our nature and substance, and of whom we are all, by divine law, part and parcel? This YHVH who the Essenes, the Qabalistic Vegetarian Jews, and all Jews in general, including Jesus, called their Father, who lovingly instructs us on how to live happily on Earth and in our bodies? Here we find the spiritual and mental connection between Nature, Mankind, and The Divine Eternal Wisdom Mind of Life, which the Essenes demonstrated.
YHVH is the “Law of Four being as One” and speaking the word of wisdom as the Voice of Nature herself in silent sacred geometries of a divine order, stamped right into the very fabric of all all life that underlies the surface of creation. This should be obvious to those of us who "have eyes to see." As a wise old Jewish man once said to me down at 9th and Judah Street by Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, 1971: “You CAN believe and trust what your eyes see and your ears hear once you have seen and heard the wisdom contained in the name of YHVH within your body, heart and mind.” It’s as if in the song "Amazing Grace" you were blind but now you can see. What do we see then that reports of the “Law of Four being as One? It comes down to the four categories of elements: Fire, Water, Air and Earth. These four elements are the basic distinct categories that the Essenes included in what they called “Nature's Seven Healers.” The other three of the seven are sleep, exercise and positive mental attitude. All seven of these are specifically emphasized in the Qabalah.
One final Qabalic teaching for one who has pondered and penetrated the letters, numbers and geometries of the Name/Code YHVH in their mind, who feels its truth in his or her gut and who learns to see it in the very heart of Mother Nature: the Hebrew grammatical meaning is the conjugation of the verb “IS” or “ Was, Is and Will Be”, implying forever-ness. Its numbers 10 5 6 5 (letters and numbers are one and the same in Hebrew) add up to a total of 26 which reduces to 8. As the 8 relates to infinity, eternity and regeneration, this is a further confirmation of the symbolism and meaning of YHVH.
All of these convergent tidbits of universal and self knowledge that are expressed so concisely in the Qabalah and reflected within the lifestyle of the Essenes can help many to unravel and clarify some of the mysteries of life and the mind. We must follow in the Essenes' footsteps if we wish to reach the deeper understandings that will only come with putting this knowledge to practical use in our everyday lives, as they did.
The Bible would have instructed the Essenes by faithful obedience to the Word of YHVH because they knew that their Father’s Name contained the Way, the Truth and the Life, but only the Qabalah would have taught the Essenes and us all exactly why and how YHVH “was/is and will be” the Truth for all generations on Earth. Now is the time for these mysteries to be revealed and hopefully practiced by all in moving toward a better world situation. In the end the Truth will prevail, Love will not fail, and a new beginning will dawn for humanity--one of total wholeness and health.
Djin Aquarian is a teacher of the “Qabalah of YHWH” in Mount Shasta, California. He has a school called YHWHHOUSE. For further information on private or group classes call 530-938-1583 or contact us via email - yhwhhouse@yahoo.com