gematria
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@Steven Cranmer said
"And I think there's far more evidence that the Bible does indeed contain intentional gematria-coding (especially Revelations!) than there's evidence against.
Steve"
Is that just an "off the top of your head" kind of statement, or have you verified this for yourself? Kieren Barry does mention Revelations as the only book specifically to have gematria-coding, but according to Barry it is far less than one might imagine (as I had imagined). There's plenty of symbolism related to magical correspondence, but it's not gematria. Interesting to note, when Barry discusses 666 in Revelations, he makes no mention of the sun whatsoever.
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I think I would answer some of the points raised here like this:
The core idea of Gematria is that words of the same numeration are understood to disclose something about each other.
Sometimes, gematria only discloses instruction intentionally encoded by teachers of the past. At a deeper level, though, it provides an inner language by which its devotees sustain a silent conversation with the Divine. In this sense, it is a specific branch of the deeper levels of Gnana Yoga.
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@Redd Fezz said
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@Steven Cranmer said
"And I think there's far more evidence that the Bible does indeed contain intentional gematria-coding (especially Revelations!) than there's evidence against."Is that just an "off the top of your head" kind of statement, or have you verified this for yourself?"
Sorry; yes, just off the top of my head. I'm no biblical scholar; just a collector of trivia that seems to point in this direction. Jim earlier talked about the 32 paths (10+(3+7+12) ) encoded in Genesis. There's also "encoded" letter symbolism in Psalm 119 and "hidden" acrostic messages in other psalms (my list gives 34, 111, 112, and 145, but I haven't looked at them in ages). The Aryeh Kaplan books on Kabbalah are filled with pointers to more.
One can go too far in looking for this stuff, of course; the "Bible Code" books seem to be the far-fetched extreme of looking for connections in randomness.
But again let me take off my science hat and say that looking for connections in randomness can be an extremely useful and valid thing to do, even for non-mystical purposes of jump-starting ones' creativity. The tension between the usefulness and the futility of this kind of search was summed up perfectly by Hermann Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Bead_Game
Let me just give one quote from the book that shows how the act of searching for connections can be thought of as a sacrament in the truest sense of the word...
"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created."
Steve
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I don't have the time to research the thing, but I'm 99% certain that there are Hebrew words in the Torah which are constructed with final-letter forms in the middle of those words. If that's not intentionally coded gematria in the Torah, what the devil is it?
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I have a further question on this topic. In Genesis of the Bible there are the lifetrees of the first ten generations springing from Adam and Eve. Is there a gematric correlation? Any definition of the numbers at all will satisfy my curiosity, though.
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@Malaclypse said
"I have a further question on this topic. In Genesis of the Bible there are the lifetrees of the first ten generations springing from Adam and Eve. Is there a gematric correlation? Any definition of the numbers at all will satisfy my curiosity, though.
"What interests me most are the sets of ten generations and the apparent correspondence to the Four Worlds. Thus, the first 10 generations are of Atziluth - the next 10 (beginning with Noah) in Briah - the next 10 (beginning with Abraham) in Yetzirah. (Have to retrace and review - may have facts wrong - but didn't that third one clmax with Moses? Gotta go back and look when I have time.)
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Ah, thanks for the info, Jim!
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Every ounce of effort I have made in the path of Gematria has brought me to one conclusion: That there is no difference. This is not as trite as it may sound. Once we can see that there is a numeric relationship between "licking", "Jehovah's Witnesses" and "Bes Na Maut"; then we are better able to eliminate paradox as a barrier to actual understanding through unity.
Practically it is very effective for building ritual along a particular line.
That's my two cents.
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