ATD | Kabbalah & Divine Light (HUGE SPOILER - only read if you finished!)
Bryan Snyder
wilsonistrey at gmail.com
Fri May 11 12:32:45 CDT 2007
I was reading about Kabbalah (cause of the GR allusions) and I found this
section that really seems to tie into ATD, especially with regard to the end
when Merle, Lew and . shoot I forget the third guy (book is not on me. )um.
I totally forget the third person, who has a shop with Merle.
They put the crystal they obtained from the Balkans and shoot a photograph
through it and the photograph shows the person's life since the photo, and
before and also. alternative life-paths.
Here's what struck me as very relevant:
"Moreover in Kabbalah, Divine Light is the carrier of consciousness.
"The human soul is a part of the Creator [that is, Divine Light]. Therefore,
there is no difference between Him and the soul. The difference is that He
is the 'whole' and the soul is a 'part'. This resembles a stone carved from
a rock. There is no difference between the stone and the rock except that
the rock is a 'whole' and the stone is a 'part'". (Yhuda Ashlag
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yhuda_Ashlag> , Introduction in Ha-Sulam.)
Thus, a human's consciousness is a part of the Divine Consciousness, where
the rest of the infinite Divine has been hidden from the human. This
kabbalistic [sic] concept that consciousness is an aspect of Divine Light is
similar to the protoscientific [sic] hypothesis that the electromagnetic
field generated by the brain is the carrier of consciousness. In other words
if the hypothesis is correct, consciousness would be an aspect of light
(electromagnetic radiation) and not an aspect of the physical brain per se."
So I'm wondering if anyone has any idea, either suspicion or gleaned from
some source somewhere, about TRP's feelings about Kabbalah. While reading
GR, it seems like he parodies it entirely but he does it with . what I could
only describe as some perverse respect. while he seems to poke fun. it seems
like the fun an insider would poke.
Take care and happy reading. and re-reading. and re-reading.
B
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20070511/67ae1e4d/attachment.html>
More information about the Pynchon-l
mailing list