The Meru Project
Intro & FAQ

The Research of the Meru Foundation

©1990 Virginia Meyer

Virginia Meyer, MAT – Master of Art for Teachers – is a Washington State resident
and retired mental health professional and author.

 MERU Foundation, a small research and educational foundation in Sharon, Mass., recently released some of its 40 years of research on the first verse of Genesis. Based on Director of Research Stan Tenen's discovery of geometric forms and mathematical symbols in the text, this astonishing research supports an ancient Jewish belief that the Hebrew alphabet is "sacred." According to Joseph Schultz, professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, this discovery "could equal the importance of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and perhaps even surpass it."

Alphabets such as Greek, Hebrew and Arabic have been claimed as sacred, but in modern times no one agrees on what that means. According to Tenen, "If we take seriously traditional claims that some alphabets are sacred in a meaningful way and that sacred alphabets and sacred literature are actually, somehow, different than ordinary alphabets and literature, then we need to consider the possibility that our predecessors acted similarly to ourselves when they needed a special formal alphabet to record conditions and processes called sacred."

Present-day Western alphabets historically have been used for commercial and everyday use. They developed from pictographic, hieroglyphic, and finally phonetic images, and serve to record common speech and real-world information. Sacred alphabets, Tenen has found, evolved differently. They are formal languages, in the sense that computer languages and music are formal languages. "They record," he says, "not ordinary information, but fundamental states or conditions and fundamental processes that have to be used to formally navigate in a formal context." Many such sacred languages developed side-by-side with normal phonetic languages, making use of phonetic symbols, but with an operational rather than an idiomatic meaning. This means that while ordinary letters of ordinary alphabets point to a particular sound, sacred letters point to meaning in personal consciousness, like a process or a state of being. When, as in Hebrew, the language is used for both common and sacred purposes, any letter can indicate meaning both in physical reality and in personal consciousness.

BASIC, a formal computer language, is a good example of such joint use of an alphabet. Programs are written in ordinary English. However, unless readers know they are looking at a computer program, the message would be unintelligible or appear to be some very esoteric kind of poetry. A programmer would understand that every word or letter indicated a whole or partial process which could generate, in a computer, visual images, complex problem-solving, and other screen and keyboard magic seemingly unrelated to the programming language which created the program.

The Hebrew alphabet contains such dual level meanings, according to the findings of MERU. The common meanings give us the story line of Biblical texts, but the sacred meanings generate something more subtle on the computer screen of the reader's consciousness.

This secondary meaning was discovered because of a visual pattern in Genesis 1:1 which Tenen, a mathematician with the gift of pattern-recognition, saw when he was 26. He did not know Hebrew, so therefore was only aware of the visual appearance of the line of text. That pattern defined the formula for a geometric shape from which Tenen mathematically derived an unusual vortex many years later. When this vortex is held in 27 different positions between a lamp and a screen, it produces the shadows of the 27 letters of the Hebrew alphabet (and with slight modification, Greek and Arabic alphabets). This discovery led to further developments in which universal meanings could be ascribed to the individual letters based on their relative positions in the alphabet. These letter-level meanings, beneath the familiar words, appear to represent an experiential stratum of the text.

Research is currently focused on the connection between the vortex, the human hand, and the language centers of the brain, and their relationship to human consciousness. The vortex made to the size of a hand fits on a hand like a glove, allowing the wearer to tip the hand in 27 different directions to see each letter. He or she can then spell out the letters of the text, internalize the sacred meanings, and under some circumstances, may be able to re-experience, for example, Moses' encounter with the burning bush.

Since the vortex also generates Greek and Arabic, and possibly Sanskrit, MERU believes it may have discovered the elements of a natural universal language, the pre-Babel language. However, Hebrew is the only modern language whose sacred texts still retain the original purity of form, from which the letter-vortex can mathematically be generated. MERU believes that this sacred alphabet, which is common to the three Abrahamic religions, can help promote unity and peace among the peoples of those three faiths.

For further information the reader is invited to contact MERU Foundation directly at 524 San Anselmo Ave, Suite 214, San Anselmo CA 94960, 415-223-1174.