Interview
of Stan Tenen by Dr. Jeffrey
Mishlove
Virtual
College on Wisdom
Radio, March 15, 1999
©1999 Stan Tenen, Jeffrey
Mishlove
Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove is a licensed clinical psychologist, an accomplished radio and television interviewer, and author of an encyclopedic volume of consciousness studies, The Roots of Consciousness (available via his website at www.mishlove.com). Dr. Mishlove also interviewed Stan Tenen in 1992, and again in 1999, on his television series Thinking Allowed, syndicated on many PBS television stations. VIdeotapes of these television interviews, The Origin of Sacred Alphabets (1992, 30 minutes) and The Geometry of Language (1999, 60 minutes) are available from Meru Foundation at www.meetingtent.com.
Stan Tenen is Director of Research for Meru Foundation. Note: References during the live broadcast to Mr. Tenen as President of Meru Foundation have been corrected in this transcription.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Hello, everybody
out in Wisdomland. We're
back again for another week of
Virtual College broadcasting live
from Marin County, California at
the base of Mt. San Pedro. Many
people don't know where Mt. San
Pedro is, most people have never
heard of Mt. San Pedro. It's
actually a State Park here in
California, which is based on that
mountain, China Camp State Park.
And we're right at the base of it,
it's a lovely location right
between the San Francisco Bay and
the Pacific Ocean. And we're
broadcasting on the Internet, on
the C-Band Satellite, out to the
whole world.
What we're attempting to create
here on Wisdom College is the kind
of experience that many of us
wished we could have had in
college,
and were never able to get that.
And I speak as a person who spent
15 years inside of big state
universities in Wisconsin and
California.
During that entire time, I found
that every Professor who was
really turned on, passionate about
his or her own work, either quit
or got fired, almost inevitably.
And my goal, with this program, is
to bring to the airwaves, bring to
our listeners around the world,
those kinds of people -- people
who are so passionate about their
work, they will dedicate their
lives to it. People who see
deeply.
People who are willing to work in
between disciplines. People who
make the realm of the intellect
come alive.
And with me tonight, I have Stan
Tenen, who is the Director of
Fesearch
for the Meru
Foundation. Stan is based
in Sharon, Massachusetts, but
he's here with me now in
California, and Stan has explored,
throughout his professional
career, the origins of sacred
language,
particularly the Hebrew language.
He has a background in physics
and mathematics and he has applied
that background -- and also I
should say, in particular, geometry, to looking at very shape of
the letters of the Hebrew
alphabet, to determine in sort of
a
Pythagorean sense, what it is that
those shapes are telling us.
JM: So, Stan, it's a
pleasure to have you with me on
Virtual
College.
Stan Tenen: It's a
pleasure to be here, Jeffrey. Thank
you
for inviting me. This is a very
exciting venture, I think.
Actually, I had an opportunity to
teach once. When I first started
this work in California, about
almost twenty years ago now, we went
down to U.C. Santa Cruz and talked
to Ralph Abraham, the
mathematician, and I think he was
still Chairman of the Math
Department at the time, and I asked
him if maybe there was a way he
could get me a job, and he probably
could have, but he dissuaded
me. He said there just was no place
in the university system for
this kind of research. And as I've
learned over the years, he was
probably right.
JM: I think that's
an unfortunate situation, but times
are
changing and we hope eventually,
Stan, to be able to offer academic
credit to people listening to this
radio program, so that people
can study cutting-edge ideas such as
your own.
ST: Well, that
would be very useful, because there
are many
different researches that don't fit
so easily into the conventional
curricula, and that may make the
faculty uneasy. That needs to be
outside --
JM: Interdisciplinary research of all
kinds has a hard time.
I know in your field you're applying
mathematics and physics and
metaphysical geometry to the study
of ancient languages,
ST: And that makes
everybody unhappy, because -- Well,
I
might as well start off, we're going
to talk about discovery of
some basic principles in the Hebrew,
and in all likelihood, in the
Greek and Arabic alphabet. But this
of course relates to religious
traditions and sacred
texts, so I often tell people, my
Jewish
friends think this work is much too
Christian. My Christian friends
think it's much too Jewish, my
religious friends think there's much
too much math in it, and my
mathematically-inclined friends
think
it's much too religious.
It doesn't fit in any one place. And
the normal academic custodians
of this work, the people who do this
sort of work, who've evolved
to do it, tend to be experts in
History, in Languages, in English
and Poetry, in the Belles-Arts and
Letters. They tend not to be
interested in geometry, and so
they've missed this, in my opinion,
and if I try to carry it back to
them, it only puts them in an
awkward position.
As honest scholars, they don't want to evaluate something they are
not familiar with, because how are
they going to know the quality
of the work when they're not really
comfortable with the ideas?
With geometry, in this case.
So when you're in a niche that falls
between disciplines, it's very
hard to satisfy any of them.
JM: But actually,
you're in a very ancient tradition,
and
that's the irony, that because
you're in effect studying, in
effect, Sacred Geometry.
ST: That's right.
JM: The study of
Sacred Geometry goes back to Plato,
it goes
back to Pythagoras, it goes back to
--
ST: -- It goes back
to Egypt, it goes back even earlier
than
that.
JM: It's not as if
you've made this up out of whole
cloth.
You're part of a long tradition.
ST: No, not at all.
In fact, to the extent that I may be
making this up, I'm probably off
target. I believe that what I
found is so extraordinarily elegant,
that I don't want to add or
take from it.
I think that the philosophers who
worked on this in a wide range of
traditions, did an excellent job. An
astonishing job. And to some
extent, what I'm trying to do is
demonstrate how they could have
done it. Because part of bringing
this back into public view is to
make it plausible. If what I find
requires modern Projective
Geometry that we know was not known
in the ancient world, then I'm
probably making it up, because it's
not plausible.
But if I can show that techniques
and materials and tools were
available in the ancient world, and
could tackle these problems,
then it's quite plausible that they
were used. And so, what I'm
finding has a place, and then it can
be brought into the modern
world, it can be made to be
understood today and it can be true
to
what was understood initially --
what was the intent.
JM: Let's talk
about how you got started, Stan.
ST: Yeah, we've
been dancing all around. I think we
better
tell the audience what this is
about!
(Segment 2)
Jeffrey Mishlove: We're back. This is Jeffrey
Mishlove, and with
me is
Stan Tenen, Director of Research for
the Meru Foundation, based in the
Boston
area. Stan was describing an
epiphany he had back in the 1960's
when he began to look and see if he
could spot geometrical,
mathematical patterns in the Hebrew
letters. Let's go right to
that.
Stan Tenen: Initially, I didn't know what it
was. All I
realized,
very quickly, when I spotted this,
is, if it were already known and
explained, it was probably, that it
was probably not --
JM: And what were
you looking at?
ST: I was looking
at the very beginning of the Hebrew
text
of Genesis, and because I knew the
alphabet, I was looking at the letters,
and not at the words.
JM: "Beraysheet,
berah --
ST: " --Elokim et
ha shemayim v'et ha-aretz." "In the
Beginning, God created the heaven
and the earth." I asked, and
eventually somebody told me, it must
be Kabbalah. I'd never heard
of Kabbalah. I bought out the
bookstores, ultimately 2 or 3,000
volumes over ten years. I read
everything in sight.
Ten years later, they're repeating
the "Prisoner" show on KQED and
PBS, we're living in San Francisco,
I hold up the numerical
sequence equivalent to the letters
at the beginning of Genesis, on
the air, tell the audience it's like
the Arecibo message for outer
space, and that there's some meaning
to it, and I need help in
cracking this thing.
People called in with suggestions. I
tried the suggestions and it
worked!
It turns out, if you count out the
Hebrew letters by threes -- not
in binary but in trinary -- there's
27 letters in the full
alphabet, 27 is three-cubed -- and
you can lay all the letters out
in and on a little Rubik Cube, with
each letter being given its
position by its base-three count in
the alphabet.
So the Aleph, even though the normal
numerical count is One, in my
geometric system, it becomes Zero.
The Aleph sits at the Origin,
and then the Bet's at 0-0-1, and
then the Gimel, "C", would be
0-0-2, and the next letter[, Dalet,]
would be 0-1-0, cause you're
counting by threes, [and so] you get
coordinates for each of the
counts. And each letter has a
position on this Rubik Cube, and
then
an amazing thing happens. I did
something trivial, I tried
everything complicated and none of
that worked, and of course it
shouldn't have, because none of that
would have been known in the
Ancient World. But I did something
trivial.
I simply took my Rubik Cube, my
Alphabet Cube, and cut away all the
letters that didn't occur in the
first Verse. And what I was left
with was a symmetrical form. And
that shouldn't have happened by
accident.
And so then I investigated to see
what this symmetrical form might
mean. And it took a number of years
additionally to figure out how
to make use of this data. I ended up
doing the simplest possible
thing, something that everyone has
done.
You know how you make a paper model,
a paper airplane, a paper
doll? It's pre-set, it's got tabs
and slots. You put Tab-A in
Slot-A and Tab-B in Slot-B. And the
piece of paper folds up into
the intended form.
Well, I wrote the letters of the
text of Genesis out, letter by
letter, one each on a bead on a
bead-chain, loose on the chain but
locked in order, curled the chain
up, and slid the beads around,
always maintaining the order of the
text, until the same letters
were paired with each other, like
Tab-A in Slot-A, or letters in
symmetrical positions on my little
Rubik Cube. And when I did that,
I could account for all the letters,
in a pattern that was very
strong, very repetitive, so strong
that if any letter were to have
been miscopied or added or
subtracted over the centuries, it
would
stick out like a sore thumb and you
could correct for it.
That's how strong the pattern was.
Now, I knew that there was
patterning in the beginning of the
Hebrew text of Genesis. But I didn't
know if it was an accident!
Here I was working for ten years,
you know, if you work that long,
you can fool yourself. You can find
patterns in almost anything. So
I had to know if this was just a
little preamble, an accident, or a
coincidence, or if it went on
through the text.
And I did two basic tests and a
number of other minor tests, to
assure myself that the coding
continued. Even though I didn't have
the computing power to go much
further than the very beginning.
I made a prediction that there would
be a certain kind of
fold-point in the text and I counted
the letters out manually (I
didn't have a data-base, didn't have
a computer) and found the
fold-point right where I predicted
it. And I said, "Wow!"
JM: What is a
"fold-point"?
[Extraneous
material deleted]
ST: There was an
anomaly that I could grab, and say,
"Yes,
here's a demonstration that
something funny is going on at least
2000-odd letters into the text. [It
was] worth working on.
JM: And [Music]
we're going to have to come back
again, soon
enough after our break, because
you're opening up a whole realm of
what the Kabbalah, the Hebrew
Mystical Tradition says, that the
Hebrew language and the text,
actually is, there are many, many
meanings.
ST: Finding a
pattern doesn't mean anything.
Identifying
[one] does. That's what we'll do.
JM: Beneath the
surface. So the story is beginning
to unfold
for our listeners just as it
unfolded for you and we'll be back
after these messages.
Jeffrey Mishlove: I'm Jeffrey Mishlove, host of
Virtual
College, and I've been discussing
with Stan Tenen, Director of
Research
for the
Meru Foundation, his explorations
into some of the metaphysical,
mathematical, geometrical codes that
are embedded in the very
structure of the ancient Hebrew
language, and I think before we go
too much further, it would be useful
to talk about the Kabbalistic
way of thinking of the language.
Stan Tenen: The
Kabbalists claim that -- well,
actually, [a]
traditional Jewish teaching [is]
that there are four levels to the
Bible: there's the story that we all
know, that's with
translations, there is something
called Hints, which are additional
ways of understanding, there are
Commentaries, and then there's a
Foundation Level, Yesod, the bottom
level -- and that's the Letter
Level.
The teaching is, that somehow, at
the Letter Level of the text, the
text of Genesis in particular, has
something to do with the
creation of the universe. [It's] not
just the story, "God created
the heaven and the earth," but it
really is a template of creation.
That's the Kabbalists' claim. And
the trouble is, if you read
Kabbalistic texts in translation,
they don't deliver on the claim.
They repeat the claim, they
embroider the claim, they make all
kinds of outrageous statements, but
they are reduced to mythology,
to poetry, to fantasy. And no one
really takes them seriously,
because they've been so abused over
the centuries.
So what's going to turn out here, is
that by innocently and
directly examining just the sequence
of letters, without reference
to the other teachings, I found a
series of geometries which now
make sense of the Kabbalistic texts.
JM: Well, let me go
back a little more, Stan, because it
seems to me that one of the things
the Kabbalists are saying is
that every letter of the alphabet
has a numerical value.
ST: More than that.
Its name -- each
letter has a name,
and
that name represents a function. I
think the numerical value stuff
is actually part of the problem.
People have focused on it being a
number, and you can use Arabic or
Hebrew to write numbers --
JM: And there's a
lot of Numerology based on it --
ST: Right, but this
is not Numerology.
JM: I understand.
But I'm trying to give people an
appreciation for the complexities of
Kabbalah, and one of those is
that each of the letters is a word,
each of the words is made up of
letters, each of those letters
is a word --
ST: And what's the
first question that comes to mind
when
you have something like that? The
question is, It's fine to say
A-B-C-D-E-F-G. But in a Sacred
Language, where each letter has a
name, why should "camel", the letter
Gimel, come after Bet (the
letter "house"), come after
"master"? What's the relationship?
If
this is a system, then there ought
to be an unfurlment, there ought
to be some reason why "A" is
Mastery, and "B" is a House, and "C"
is a Camel and "D" is a Door, and
"E" is a Window. What does that
mean? If it's random, if it's ad hoc,
then this is silliness.
But if there's a system,
if
there's a reason why those letters
are
in that sequence, of meanings, then
you can do something with this,
you can build on it, you can work
with it. One of the things we
found is that there is a
system. And that there's an
underlying
meaning to the name of each letter.
In fact, you can look at Hebrew
words as if they were acronyms.
Because, you can take a word and
read it as a sentence, letter-name
by letter-name. When you do that,
you get expanded meanings for
these translations, and that's one
of the Kabbalistic principles.
JM: You've gone
further because what you've shown is
that
there is a geometric foundation, an
underlying geometric form, in
fact, we're sitting here looking at
it! Here in our studio,
ST: We'd better
stop talking about it, cause this is
the
punch-line.
JM: This is a
beautiful shape, it could be many
things. It
could be the core of an apple, it's
a vortex, it could be like a
tornado, it could be like the flame
of a candle, it's a --
ST: It's a harp --
JM: -- A hand, a
harp, it's a very elegant shape. And
what
you've discovered is that you could
take this shape, hold it up to
the light, move it in different
positions, and it will cast on a
wall, its shadow can [cast] the
shape of all the letters
of the
Hebrew alphabet.
ST: That's true.
But in and of itself, that would be
meaningless. Because one could take
a coat-hanger, and bend a
couple of squiggles in it and make
shadows that look like just
about any letter you wanted. The
point is that this is a meaningful
form that is generated by
pairing off the letters in the
Hebrew
text of Genesis!
And it's meaningful because of what
it represents. As it turns out,
it represents a model human hand.
What you said is very nice: you
can hold this shape up and you can
make shadows, but what tells you
how to hold it to make this
particular letter? You couldn't
figure
it out without a coordinate system.
Not only that, but I had to create a
set of criteria and this had
to have a purpose. My idea was, that
the meditational exercises
that Jewish and Christian and Muslim
Tradition, were written out as
sequences of letters that
represented different ways of
viewing
this same form. But you had to turn
the form over in the mind's
eye. In your mind, in your head.
If you couldn't visualize this thing
easily --it's a difficult
thing to see -- and you don't know
how to look at it -- even that's
a nice theory, but you couldn't do
it.
It wasn't until several years later,
because I was told by an
Orthodox Rabbi that it was the right
thing to do to say the Morning
Prayers and such, because I was
doing all this work -- I was
drinking the sweet water of the
Hebrew town well, and I wasn't
supporting the well. --that I
finally decided, even though I was
nervous about it, as a modern
person, to put on tefillin --
phylacteries -- which are little
boxes you put on your arm and on
your head -- which you put on with a
leather strap.
And there's a teaching that you see
letters in the leather strap on
your hand.
JM: This is done
during prayers,
ST: During Morning
Prayers. For the first time, I put
on
this leather strap, and I'm putting
it on my hand, and it finally
dawned on me: this little abstract
vortex shape that I had derived
from lining up the letters at the
beginning of Genesis, was a model
human hand.
And as soon as you put it on your
hand, you can see it in your
mind's eye! You could reach behind
yourself and pick up a
salt-shaker, an apple, or a fork on
the table. You can tell the
difference. You can see what's in
your hand.
So by putting it on your hand,
immediately it becomes more than
just an ordinary alphabet, it
becomes a Sacred Alphabet. Not only
for making gestures, which can be
read, as it turns out, you can
even do that on the radio, it's so
obvious, but also for reading
and writing and meditational dance
in your mind's eye. A truly sacred Alphabet capable of
transmitting an experiential
Tradition
based on meditational exercises, and
not just admonition.
JM: What we're
getting to, from a metaphysical
perspective,
here, I think, is the notion of self-reference.
Because when we
look out and see our own hand
pointing back at us, it's a gesture
of self-reference, and that seems to
be one of the fundamental
gestures behind the --
ST: You want to
wake up from a dream, you look at
your hand
because it gives you back your
volition. Your hand is your
volition, you express your will by
pointing with your hand. And
that's what we're going to talk
about next. [Music]
JM: It's getting
fascinating. I hope you're hanging
out
there with us, everybody in
Wisdomland, and that your neurons
are
growing little spikes on the axons
of dendrites,
ST: There's a
website where you can see some of
this, too,
when we get finished talking.
JM: So, Stan Tenen, my guest and
Director of Research for the
Meru
Foundation, for those of you who
are interested, Stan's website, if
you could check while you're
listening to this program, is http://www.meru.org
and you'll see some of the
geometrical patterns to which
we've been
referring, on that website.
What we're getting into now is
fascinating because we're talking
about a mathematical basis, we're
talking about a kind of code that
exists in the letters of the
Hebrew alphabet, we're talking
about a
geometrical relationship, and
we're talking now about the human
body and how gestures, hand
movements, actually like the
American
Indian Sign Language, but perhaps
in a somewhat different sense,
that the various hand movements
reflect both meaning and form the
shapes of the letters.
ST: Can I read a short quote? This was
recently published in Nature by two researchers that
we have nothing to do with. This
is
by Jana Iverson and Susan
Goldin-Meadow, and I'm just going
to read
excerpts.
JM: What issue?
ST: This November, 1998. But there's
also an excellent
article in The
American Scientist this
current month. [March-April
1999] I forget the author's name,
but it's the Sigma Xi magazine,
JM: The
American Scientist.
ST: "Why
People Gesture as they Speak," is the name of this little
abstract. It says that
"congenitally blind speakers
gesture to each other despite
their lack of a model, even when
speaking to other blind people."
It points out,
If people go to our website, they're
going to see that the Hebrew
letter "Dalet", which literally
means "to pour out", which is seen
in outline in this model hand, when
the model hand makes the same
gesture, as I just described.
This paper was written recently by
two researchers who never heard
of what I'm doing. And I'm very
grateful they did this. The point
is, that what's being claimed now is
that before predecessors to
modern humans acquired spoken
language, we had gesture language!
JM: Once again, if
you're interested in contacting the
Meru
Foundation, I encourage you to log
onto their website, www.meru.org.
There's just a wealth
of information there, beautiful
geometric patterns there. The
geometry is really like the geometry
of flowers, or something.
ST: It's a living
system.
JM: It's just
gorgeous, the incredible art-work
you've
created that explains these
geometrical principles. And there
are
many other articles.
ST: A number of
essays and there's some introductory
material.
JM: The other thing
I certainly want to mention for
those of
you who've been enjoying Virtual
College here on Wisdom Radio,
check out our website,
www.mishlove.com and there you will
see who
our upcoming guests are, and you can
check out their web-links in
advance of the broadcasts, and
there's lot of other information,
including past guests and other
institutional affiliations, etc.
"Mishlove" is my name.
Well, Stan, we've got just about a
minute or so before the top of
the hour break. Is there a
concluding thought you'd like to
leave
our listeners with, before we end
this hour?
ST: I think the
most important thing to realize is
that this
is in the center of every one of our
faiths, just as the organs in
our body are different projections
of the same common DNA, each of
the letters is a different
projection of the same hand, the
"Hand
of God," essentially, metaphorically
speaking. And so, what we're
really looking at here is a way to
understand the relationship
among the Western faiths, and a way
to empower the whole system.
It's not just the alphabet. It goes
much beyond that. This
is an
ecological model that enables us
to live together. Or at
least
contributes to that.
JM: In effect, it's
showing how some of the universal,
metaphysical principles are
embodied, not just in the Hebrew
alphabet, but in many other Sacred
Alphabets as well. [Music]
ST: Certainly the
Greek and Arabic alphabets are in
the same
system. And I think there's some
relationship to Sanskrit, but
probably not in the shape of the
letters.
JM: Stay tuned to
Wisdom Radio and we'll be back at 6
and a
half minutes after the hour, with
Stan Tenen. I'm Jeffrey
Mishlove.
Jeffrey Mishlove: I'm back again. Stan Tenen is my
guest. He
is the Director of Research for the
Meru Foundation, and we've been
talking
about some of the metaphysical,
theoretical, geometrical,
mathematical and even biological
bases to Sacred Language. We've
been focusing particularly on the
Hebrew alphabet. However, the
principles that Stan has uncovered
are applicable to other ancient
alphabets as well -- certainly,
Arabic and Greek and very likely,
some of the others.
Stan Tenen: The
idea is that the scientific
knowledge of
these various peoples is usually the
same. We all have the same technical knowledge. The
cultural embodiments are different,
so
Judaism and Christianity and Islam
are distinct Paths, and
obviously the Apollo Mysteries in
the Greek Tradition were very
different, but the underlying
geometries of the Apollo System and
the underlying geometries in Egypt
and in Israel and later in
Christian and the Moslem world, and
later in the Hermetic
Traditions, and in the Celtic world,
all turn out to be the same.
That the models we found, these
model hands, which express human
volition, the projection of our
conscious will, which is clearly
subjective, into the objects of the
physical world where others can
see it, is a fundamental process by
which we express ourselves. We
use our hands to do that, in all
cultures.
JM: And from a
philosophical point of view, the
great
Mystery of Life, is, how in the
world is it that we combine Spirit
and Matter!
ST: And that's what
this model expresses. The center tip
of
the model, which forms around the
thumb, is like the seed inside of
a fruit. And the hand itself is like
a tree. And the palm and the
fingers are like the whole fruit.
And so, what you're doing is
expressing -- I think it's Genesis
1:11 -- you're literally building a
model of a "fruit tree yielding
fruit, whose seed is in itself,"
mapped back onto itself. And this
mapping is a natural process, and in
fact it's this natural process
that gives meaning to the letters.
Earlier I was saying, why does a
camel follow a house, follow a
master -- C, B, A. Why is [that] the
order of the alphabet? It's
because the order of the meaning of
the letters of alphabet follows
an embryonic unfurlment, from the
singularity of a seed to the
wholeness of a fruit. And if you
take this very bottom-line,
topologically minimum, operational
set of meanings, and project
them into human experience, you get
the idiomatic names of the
letters.
You get the names of the letters in
the Hebrew Tradition, and in
the Arabic Tradition, the letters
are named after the attributes of
Allah. But they correspond
one-to-one, as you go [through the
alphabet]. And it looks like particular Arabic alphabets, particular Greek alphabets, particular Hebrew alphabets derive
from
this same form and this same basic
principle.
And the principle is the Principle
of the projection of our will
into the world, and that is broken
up, is quantized by
articulations of our hand. Our
different gestures are different
projections of our will, just as the
different organs in our body
are different projections of the
common DNA.
And so, this is a natural
system,
that could be deduced anywhere.
What I'm saying is that it was used
all over the world. And these
geometric models make sense of
mystical texts -- Kabbalistic texts,
Sufi texts, the Emerald Tablet of
Hermes Trismagistos -- it turns
out that you're describing the same
geometry that you're finding in
Genesis. Much to the consternation
of the ordinary translators, who
compete on the fine meanings of
various words, but never identify the Emerald Tablet!
Well, this identifies the Emerald
Tablet. It doesn't translate it.
It makes an
identification.
JM: You're dealing
now with the marriage of geometry
and
linguistics, and that's two fields
that rarely come together.
ST: That's right.
Again, the actual basis of the set
of
meanings is entirely geometric.
There are 27 pointing directions
that mathematically correspond to
the normals to the tangents of a
hypersphere. Basic ways you can
navigate in hyperdimensional Space,
which is where consciousness is and
where physics is -- and that
lays out the 27 explicit meanings.
But they're expressed in human
embodiment by our gestures. So, say,
if a dolphin were to use this same
system, they would use the same
27 meanings, but they don't have
hands, a dolphin doesn't have
hands. They'd use their acoustic
pressure-waves to express the same
set, and thus would, in principle,
if I'm right, we
ought to be
able to communicate with any
self-aware creature whether
they're
extra-terrestrials, or elephants, or
dolphins.
JM: You mean, the
fundamental principle of a seed
unfolding
into a tree that creates more seeds,
or of a human being making
reference to oneself by virtue of a
hand-gesture, these principles
are so universal that even conscious
creatures with other body
designs would understand them.
ST: And they're
psychologically effective. You
become aware.
You gain lucidity in your dreams
when you look at your hand. It
reminds you of your volition. [The
alphabet is] a full set of
articulations of our hand in our world.
I'm saying, that the sequence of
letters in the Hebrew Bible brings
lucidity to this dream -- to our Waking
Dream. That's why it's part
of conscious evolution. This isn't a
religious teaching only. This
is a Path that we can follow and
learn from, and be able to include
all of -- Look at an apple, consider
the Earth-plane to be the
equatorial cut through an apple. If
you were to look across from
various diameters of that
Earth-plane, they'd be diametrically
opposed points.
But if you spiral up around the stem,
and head down toward the
seed, go up over the outside of
apple and spiral down around the
stem, all of those divergent points
on the diameter of the
Earth-plane converge as they come
back toward the Center.
This is a model that reconciles the
One and the Many -- the seed
and the fruit -- Mind and World. The
four-letter Name of God, and
the five-letter Name of God.
The academic scholars tell us the
Bible texts were edited, because
there are two different Names of God
used all over the place. "Lord" and "God". My work
indicates that these
two words were used
precisely, because their distinction
was understood; and that the
whole basis of the Teaching is
reconciling the One and the Many -- "Atman" and "Brahman". Inside
and Outside.
Consciousness and World.
The Four-letter Name of God, which
is a singularity in the mind's
eye, and the Five-letter Name of
God, which is the expanse of All
That Is in the universe. And that
bridge between the Singularity
and Wholeness encompasses
everything.
And that's why these forms, derived
in the ancient world, overlay
our modern physics. They weren't
doing physics. But our physicists
are taking the Everything and trying
to find the One Big Bang. And
I'm saying that in principle, that's
exactly what the ancients were
doing.
JM: It's a very
ancient quest, it's just taken a new
form,
as you say. How about the Sanskrit
language, or the Chinese
language?
ST: I don't know
enough about it, but the basis of
the
Sanskrit language is supposedly the Sri
Yantra, which is a
Creation mandala of 9 interlaced
triangles that unfurl from a bindu point which is said to be toroidal
into a hypersphere. If you think
about 9 triangles, that's 27 lines.
Twenty-seven edges, three edges
for each triangle.
I'm claiming that even though the
Sanskrit letters are only
determined tonally, by this Sri
Yantra form, the basic idea
of
unfurling from a torus into a
hypersphere via 27 lines, is exactly
the same geometric model as was used
to generate Hebrew, and later
Greek and Arabic. It's the same
model at the meaning level even
though the shapes are different and
the embodiment is different.
JM: When we talk
about these geometric principles
being
embedded in these languages, I'm
assuming, Stan, that you're not
saying that the ancients did this consciously.
ST: Yes, I am. I
think that there were two paths of
development of the alphabet. The one
we all know and love, that's
in the textbooks, which is still
being elaborated on today by some
very great scholars: Start with
Egyptian pictogram-type
hieroglyphics, simplify them into
Canaanite stick-letters, fix them
up a little, and eventually you get
Greek and then Latin and then
English.
And you can see how the letter "A"
starts as a picture "Alpu", the
Bull of the Taurean Age, a V-shape
with a crossbar, so it looks
like an ox-head with two horns? You
flip it on its side, you get
the Aleph of the Canaanite
tradition, you turn it completely
upside-down, and you get the "A" of
Greek, and later Latin and
English.
Those are hieroglyphics that have
turned into pictograms. And
they
could never be used for a
monotheistic Tradition because
they're
all pictures of Pagan idols. "Alpu" is the Bull of the Taurean
age,
no Rabbi worth his salt is going to
look at that! Those pictograms
were replaced.
The meaning-set was kept. But you
know, you can't worship a slave.
Nobody worships their own slave
unless they're an idiot. Well, our
hands are our slaves. And therefore,
taking an image of a hand
making a gesture with the same
meaning as the original letter
replaces the Pagan image with a
non-idolatrous image, and enables
you to create this meaning-system.
What I'm saying is that this was a
formal system that was devised
separate from the phonetic system,
and later became merged with it.
And that accounts for the historical
development. That [in] the
normal phonetic alphabets, each
letter points to a sound. In this
system, each letter points to a
gesture that has a feeling
associated with it. And the sequence
of feelings makes up a
meditational dance.
JM: Is there any
historical record to corroborate
that a
group of scribes or Rabbis or
scholars got together to create an
alphabet?
ST: Yes and No. It
depends on how you read the history.
Obviously, conventional reading of
the history doesn't give you
this. But there are many clues that
this is what's going on. I'll
give you a perfect example. I have a
short quote here. It's on a
slightly different topic, but it
makes the point.
If you read these things in their
simple form, you don't get this.
If you go deeper, you do. And the
simple form is the obvious one
that people have defaulted to. The
way you make this model is to
take a circle and a line, and pull
it up into three dimensions. And
that makes this hand-shape which
then makes all the letters
simultaneously.
Now here's a traditional quote from
a traditional source. This is
from "The Origin of Letters and
Numerals According to the Sepher
Yetzirah," by Phineas Mordell. It
was written in 1914, it's still
available from Sam Weiser, and it
says:
Well, the common meaning of that,
which everyone takes to be the
meaning, is that you could make
letter-shapes from line-segments
that are straight and curved. That's
what he's saying, a line and a
circle. That's how everyone
translates that.
I say, if you go deeper, you find
that you can take a circle and a
line, a straight edge and a compass,
if you will, and you square
the circle philosophically -- you
can't do it geometrically -- with
a straight edge and a compass, by
pulling a line and a circle into
3-D, to form a hand, and from that
hand, that ONE hand, you get ALL
the letters.
Much more interesting than the
trivial solution.
JM: You used a few
phrases or terms that our listeners
may
not be familiar with? You used the
term Sepher
Yetzirah.
ST: That's the name
of a book. It's called "The Book of
Formation". It's a Kabbalistic text.
Its title is "Book of
Formation," and everyone agrees it's
all about the letters. But,
you know, it never discusses the
form of the letters, in modern
translations! You plug these
geometries into the text, identify
these geometric models that come
from lining up the letters in
Genesis [with] nouns used in the Sepher Yetzirah and instead of
getting what you get now, which
skirts the issue of the form of the
letters, you get the form of the
letters.
It's one test of a good model --
Does it work?
JM: And the Sepher
Yetzirah was considered one
of the core
texts of the Kabbalist Tradition.
ST: Jewish
tradition says it was originally
discovered by
Abraham. It was originally written
down by Rabbi Akiba . The
academic scholars believe it was
written down somewhat more
recently. My work indicates that it
must be ancient, and that it
must go back in time to the original
understanding of the letters
because otherwise you wouldn't get
this result.
There is much other evidence. For
instance, we all have this
picture of Charlton Heston coming
down, carrying the Tablets in
each hand, these giant Tablets, but
that's not what the Torah text
says. The word in Hebrew is
:"b'yah-do": "in his hand." It's ONE
hand. The text, the Torah, the
Tablets, are in ONE hand. [Music] Or
ON one hand. And that's what I'm
saying.
JM: Aha!
ST: "A Tree of Life
for those who grasp it."
JM: Now we're
getting more into the esoteric
understanding
of these things, and of course there
are many Mysteries. But more
shall be revealed.
ST: More shall be
revealed.
JM: We'll be back
with Stan Tenen, Director of
Research for the
Meru
Foundation, after these messages
from Wisdom Radio. I'm your host,
Jeffrey Mishlove.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Stan, at an earlier segment, you
talked
about the mystery of the two Names
of God, in Hebrew, one is
Ado-nai, and the other is Elo-henu
or Elo-him.
Stan Tenen: Yes. I
won't pronounce them, but that's
basically [correct], the first one
Ado and then noy is the
Tetragrammaton, the
Name-of-Four-Letters.
JM: That's right,
that's not really how it's spelled
in
Hebrew at all.
ST: No, it's
spelled Yod-He-Vov-He, which leads
to other
specious pronunciations.
JM: Like "Jehovah".
That would be the basis of --
ST: ....... the
vowels ....... So that's where that
comes
from. Orthodox Jews say "Hashem",
the Name, when they mean that.
That word is translated "Lord". And
that's going to lead us to some
information.
JM: In the Jewish
Tradition, it is considered a sacred
Name,
not to be pronounced.
ST: That's right.
JM: Except, as I
understand it, once on Yom Kippur,
by the
High Priest in the Temple,
ST: Something like
that, that hasn't happened for many
centuries, and in fact, I have a
theory that it wasn't really the
pronunciation of the Name that they
cared about. The word "Name"
("Shem"), if you vowelize it
differently, also means "There," as
in
"Place." It's the place of the
meditation that was lost. Not the
verbalization of the Name.
The other Name which is pronounced
with an "H" -- Elo and then Him,
I'll say "Elokim" -- is the
"Five-Letter-Name." It's the one
that
appears in Genesis. That refers to
the expanse of All-There-Is.
JM: It's a plural.
It really could --
ST: Well, it's not
a plural. It has a plural ending.
The Yud
final-Mem ending becomes the
masculine-plural later in the text.
But Yud-Mem has a meaning by itself!
You can look it up in the
Dictionary. That's the word for
"sea", an ocean, an expanse.
Yud-Mem means "a great expanse."
The God-name "Elokim" really means
the "Expansive God".
The Four-Letter Name is the extent of God. Now those are very
important. First, Judaism claims
that those two are the same. I'm
saying, the Abrahamic discovery was
not that there was a God, but
rather that the Singularity in
Meditation, and the Expanse of
All-There-Is in existence, are the
same thing. That's what the two
Names imply.
JM: Sounds very
much like the "key" inside of
Hinduism.
ST: I think it's
very close.
JM: That "Atman" is
"Brahman".
ST: That's right.
And I would go so far as to say that
additional research might
demonstrate that the Abramic traditions
and the Brahmic traditions are
really more closely related than has
been previously suspected. And that
this is one way to show that.
In any event, the model that makes
this hand, the geometry that
makes the hand is a geometry that's
based on taking the credo of
Judaism, the so-called "Sh'ma"
("Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God,
the Lord is One!") and making an
algebraic equation out of it,
setting the Lord as Radial
Extent,
and God as Angular Expanse.
And
setting them equal to One.
"r x theta = 1" is the equation for
the Reciprocal or Hyperbolic
spiral. It generates a spiral that
looks like the spiral under the
Eye of Horus. Not a logarithmic
spiral. Not a Golden Mean spiral.
They're too self-similar. We're
looking for the most asymmetrical
spiral possible.
JM: I'm sorry that
we can't present these on a computer
screen right now, but people can log
onto your website to see this.
It's like as you say, the Eye of
Horus.
ST: Yes. Under the
Eye of Horus there is a spiral that
starts out straight, and then curls
up. Not a log or an Archimedean
or a common spiral. This one is the
most asymmetrical -- it's got a
straight part like a line, a
circling part like a circle. Again,
like the quote I read, a line and a
circle making all the letters.
It metaphorically, philosophically
squares the circle by connecting
the
inner Singularity of consciousness
with the outer expanse of
All-That-Is.
We are what squares the
circle. The sequence of letters in
the text
is the meditation that connects
inside with outside, just as surely
as Pi connects a radius and a
circumference, and truly squares the
circle. That's the metaphor they're
reaching for.
If you look at the Names, the
Four-Letter Name is translated
"Lord", based on a word in Hebrew,
"adin", which means "a
pedestal". The Lord sits high up on
a pedestal, radially very high
and far away. The "Elokim" Name is
an Expanse -- All the
surrounding.
You know where that shows up (very,
very important!) Roger
Penrose's new book, "The Emperor's
New Mind," has a section in it
where he describes where it is that
the vegetable kingdom gets its
self-organizing information to
become alive.
JM: Just let me, for
benefit of our listeners, state that
Roger Penrose is a scholar in the
theory of Relativity,
ST: -- A famous
physicist --
JM: Physicist,
based at, was it Cambridge
University?
ST: Oxford, maybe,
I don't know,
JM: Or Oxford, in
England, and his book "The Emperor's
New
Mind" is regarded as one of the
classic books, approaching the
physics of consciousness, and it's
one of the densest and most
difficult.
ST: He's got others
that follow, that are even denser.
But
he recapitulates something that's
well known, and if I have a
moment to explain it, you'll see why
this is such a beautiful
model. He points out that the only
reason that there's enough
information for there to be
self-organization of Life is because
the sun, a hot, bright point in the
sky, puts out visible photons
which the plants swallow, and use to
gather information from, and
then they radiate back out [from]
the planet, infra-red photons to
a dark sky.
Now if the sun weren't brighter than
the sky, you couldn't do that.
If the sky were all bright like the
sun, you couldn't re-radiate
back the infra-red photons. It's
because of the contrast between
the bright, hot sun, and the cold,
dark sky all around, that you
can gain information from the
difference in light taken in vs. the
light radiated out.
I'm saying, extend that metaphor.
Instead of a pretty, fairly hot,
bright sun, in a generally cold,
dark sky, let's make a
hyper-model, a model that might
account for our self-awareness, not
just our self-organization. Let's
hypothesize an Utter Singularity
in consciousness. An Infinitely hot,
bright spot against an Utterly
cold, dark sky.
That's the Four-Letter Name against
the Five-Letter Name.
That's why the Four-Letter Name is
the attractor of consciousness,
in the mind's eye, against the
background of the Earth-plane of
All-That-Is. And that's what I'm
saying is the basis of the
Kabbalistic Tradition, and later the
Christian and Moslem Teachings
as well. And this is a fundamental,
definition-based Teaching.
It doesn't say that my God is the
One God because it's my God, and
is a "jealous" God in the ordinary
sense. This is a One God that's
jealous in the same sense that there's
only
one number "Pi" that's
intrinsic to the Universe.
We're making a definition of
singularity, and a definition of
wholeness, and we're spanning them
with a metaphoric hand.
JM: Come back to --
Are you saying that the number "Pi"
is a
jealous number?
ST: Yes! There's no
other number like "Pi"! [Music] It's the
only relationship between a radius
and a circumference. This is the
One God, not because Jews or
Christians or Moslems say so, it's
because it's defined that
way. And that definition turns out
to be
functional. And that's what brings
the Traditions alive!
JM: We'll be back
with Stan Tenen, Director of
Research for the
Meru
Foundation, after these messages.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Stan, right before the break, we
were talking
about Pi
as being a "jealous number".
Stan Tenen: That's
right. To mathematicians, Pi is a
jealous
number
because it's a definitional number.
It's intrinsic. Once you
investigate the relationship between
a radius and a circumference,
Pi is not making some theological
claim to be special, it's a
definitional claim.
The model I'm suggesting is
definitional. It turns out to have
relationships to theology and
religions because it's a very
effective definition. But you start
with a definition. And the
definition is simply to unify
Singularity and Wholeness, in every
possible way. Whether it's inside
the singularity of consciousness
and [outside] the wholeness of the
world, whether it's the
principle of the One and the Many,
whether it's, in Kabbalistic
metaphor, the Light in the Meeting
Tent, the Light is the One, the
Tent is the diversity of the world.
These metaphors can also be turned
around. You can also take it the
other way. There's a vestment -- I
can't do this on the radio --
But the idea [is] that we
make
metaphor. And the geometry
tells us
what the possibilities and
relationships are.
This is all deducible. I want to
read you another quote, which is
an unusual quote, but it's very
important to what I'm saying,
because it's could have been done in
the ancient world, that could
have been the basis for all of this.
The first letter of the Hebrew Bible
is the letter "Bet". "Bet" is
a house. Except that these really
aren't nouns, they're verbs. So
it's what a house does. A house
distinguishes inside from outside.
These are the words of topologist,
Spencer-Brown, writing in his
book "The Laws of Form", where he
specifies a "mark of distinction"
that archetypally distinguishes
inside from outside. And he says,
Looking at relationships instead of
things is exactly what the
religious traditions mean when they
say, Don't look at idols. God
isn't a thing, God's a process.
Hebrew words aren't nouns, they're
verbs. Idols are different, they're
mutable, they're changeable,
you could make [them] anything. But
the relationships between
things, Spencer-Brown is telling us,
are always the same. And if
you start with "primary
distinction," you can unfurl all formal
logic, and the unfurlment is inexorable.
You start the Hebrew Bible with the
letter "Bet". And you unfurl it
this way, you're going to get
All-There-Is.
JM: We're talking
about the Creation -- "In the
beginning
..." It begins with a "Bet". The
very first aspect of a Creation is
the idea that something emerges out
of nothing.
ST: It's simpler
than that. A child comes from within
the
womb to the outside world.
Embryology proceeds by replication
and
invagination. Inversion. Inside to
Outside.
JM: But that's
biological "creation".
ST: But all Creation
is like that.
JM: -- [Even] the
Creation of the Universe.
ST: Exactly. What
I'm saying is that the stories in
Genesis
are at a story-level, but that at a
deeper level, it really is
Creation. This is the distinction
between the objective and the
subjective, that occurs at the
Garden of Eden.
JM: What do you
mean? The Garden of Eden, the
objective and
the subjective?
ST: We become
self-aware. We become ashamed. We
have a skin,
we incarnate. And so, what was
initially all objective if we were
in constant contact with the
All-That-Is, we become cut off.
There
becomes a distinction between the
subjective and the objective, in
the Garden of Eden. That's a
traditional Rabbinic teaching, by
the
way.
If we look at this model hand, we're
told in the Bible that the
Tabernacle is made of "gold and
silver and brass." If we look at
this hand, we find it has a golden
center, like a seed.
JM: Hold on. You've
lost me. Golden center, like a seed?
ST: If you look at
it, like a natural --
JM: When you say
"this hand",
ST: The hand that
we've found, that makes the letters,
that
we pull out of an idealized fruit,
JM: It's a
geometrical shape --
ST: It's a
geometrical form --
JM: -- That you and
I are looking at right now,
ST: -- That's
right. But if you picture a fruit,
in the
middle of an apple there's a star of
seeds, a golden center. If you
break an apple in half and consider
it an Above and Below
hemisphere, it's like Hamlet's Mill.
JM: Wait, Stan.
What is "Hamlet's Mill"?
ST: Hamlet's Mill
is a metaphor for the universe that
was
discussed in a book by that name, by
two authors whose names I
don't remember right now,
JM: Santillana?
ST: That's right.
And Von Dechend?
JM: I'm not sure.
ST: Another
synthesis of many teachings from the
ancient
world which comes down to looking at
two millstones with a grinding
surface between them, which you drop
seed, grain, down the middle
of, well, think of an apple. Sliced
horizontally. If you were to
drop seed down the stem until you
reached the middle, you'd have
the same model. It's a golden seed
down the middle.
JM: Why "golden"?
ST: Because grain
is associated with gold and the
model is
also a model of the sun. In the sky.
As I was just talking about.
There's this model the plant reaches
for: the hot sun against the
black sky. Same model.
JM: What you're
suggesting here is that there're
kind of
geometrical, metaphysical principles
that are at the basis --
ST: Geometrical
metaphor --
JM: -- Not only of
language, but ecology.
ST: Exactly. I'm
saying that all the mythology of the
Western World can be mapped onto
this geometry in Genesis, and that
the distinction between
Consciousness and Physics, between
inside
and outside, is what Genesis is
really about, and only on the
simple story level does it become
the story we know.
And I'm saying that if you look at
the basic components: a seed, a
tree that grows from the seed, and
the fruit that grows from the
tree, you're looking at a module of
the whole cycle of Life, one
cycle. I'm saying -- to take this to
the sociological level -- the
seed is the Jewish Covenant, the
Torah, the Law, clear thinking,
conceptualization, the Tree.
The cross is the Christian Covenant,
work, passion, compassion,
dharma, carrying things.
And Islam is "the fruit of Islam".
And together they form a whole
system. And when they recognize and
respect each other, then the
System comes to life because the
organs in the body politic form
one whole organism. [Music]
JM: Stan Tenen,
Director of Research for the Meru
Foundation,
looking
deeper into the metaphysical
principles that unify diversity, and
we'll be back again after these
messages.
Jeffrey Mishlove: Stan Tenen, at the beginning of the
first
hour of this program, nearly two
hours ago, you told a story about
what motivated you to begin your
explorations into the geometrical
dimensions of the Sacred Traditions,
sacred alphabets in
particular, and that story had to do
with being at the wall in
Jerusalem, the Wailing Wall, shortly
after the six-day war in 1967,
and feeling the tension amongst the
Jews and Arabs and the
Christians and wanting to do
something to heal the three splits
in
the Abrahamic Traditions.
Now you've come up with a metaphor
of the seed, the tree, and
fruit.
Stan Tenen: What
I've found, and it makes sense if
you think
about it, and again, based on this
metaphor of the organs in our
body. My heart and my liver "believe
in" different religions. They
do different things. They follow
different paths. The cells don't
look the same. If they got in each
others' organs, they'd either
hurt the organ or they wouldn't
survive.
And yet, if they go inside, if you
go deep in the liver, [if] you
go within each cell, you find the
same DNA. You find [the same DNA
in] each cell in the heart. If you
go deep into each of these
traditions, if I'm right, you're
going to find the same geometric
metaphor.
Because, as one approaches the
center, as one goes deep within, all
the Paths converge. And so, I'm not
a Jewish person telling
Christians or Moslems what to
believe. I'm saying, each of us
should go within our own Traditions,
and find out what our own
teachers are saying.
And I'm confident, if we do that,
we're going to find that this is
a whole System, that the Jewish Path
is concentrating mainly on the
Law, and Christian Path is primarily
concentrated on Good Works,
and the Islamic Path is letting go,
submitting to Allah, which is
what a fruit does. When it matures,
it lets go of its tree. And
when fruit reaches the ground, it
opens and becomes the fertile
soil for the next generation to grow
from.
So I'm saying, if this model is
correct, and it's not a model I
derive from a faith or traditional
Path, it's a model I derive from
examining the document for itself,
letter by letter. Not the story.
Not each individual religious
teaching. But the actual sequence of
letters that all three Western
faiths appreciate, the text of
Genesis.
That common Path can show Christians
and Jews and Moslems what
their place is, how they can
contribute, and how there can be
enough spiritual room, even if
there's very little physical room.
And I'm predicting flat out, that if
these ideas are understood and
appreciated, maybe not in our time,
maybe at some future time, it's
the Moslems who will help to rebuild
the Temple. Voluntarily.
Because the Moslem world will see
itself as being the hosts, the
good custodians and the Jewish world
will see itself as carrying
the seed, of not being a world power
but being a mind-power. And
the Christian world will build a
bridge and a relationship. And
each will contribute with respect
for the others, and then the
System comes to life and everyone
benefits. There's enough room for
all of us.
So this is a demonstration of this
set of models, in an attempt to
bring them to credibility, so they
can be made use of.
JM: It almost sounds
a little bit like a closed system,
with
these three religions. What about
the other world religions?
ST: The same holds
for the relationship between East
and
West. I said earlier that the
Abrahamic and the Brahmic seem to be
much closer than we suspect. The
Brahmic have gone within, have
kept the Meditations. The Abrahamic
have gone out to the world.
That's the difference between the
Eastern and the Western worlds
even today: the Western World is
outgoing and conquering,
conquering Nature. And the Eastern
Traditions go in to the
spiritual Traditions, go deep for
their faiths. Bringing those two
halves together is part of the same
model. It's a Yin-Yang, and
each of the Yins and Yangs has three
parts itself.
Also, the indigenous Traditions come
into this. There is no people
that doesn't dance around the
campfire of a tripod of sticks. The
basic model that I found in Genesis
is a Light in the Meeting Tent,
a tetrahedron with a vortex. The
tetrahedron is the Tai Chi
opening, when you rotate your arms
across each other (which you
can't see on the radio).
And the Light is this hand that
invigorates the vessel, that brings
it to life. And all of the faiths
make use of this same model, they
all have an "Eternal Flame" in front
of the altar, the "Green Flame
of Islam," they all go back to the
same Abrahamic principles, and
remember I said earlier also, that
the supposed author of the
Sepher Yetzirah, the source-book on
the alphabet, is Abraham.
So how far back does this go? It
goes back to Abraham, at least in
principle. It goes back to the
common root. And if we go to that
place, we can find out how we fit
together. If we want to find how
Jews and Christians can get along,
go back to the time when there
wasn't any distinction, and see how
the early Christians got along.
JM: What you've
said earlier, at least in a
mythological
sense, go back prior to the Tower of
Babel.
ST: Yes. The most
recent research indicates that
gesture
language preceded spoken language.
You can use these gestures today
as an international alphabetic
language in everybody's alphabet,
because it's [everyone's] gestures.
It doesn't matter if you're from
Asia, [or if] you're from Africa,
from North America, or from
Australia. If you put your hands to
your mouth in a shouting
gesture, everyone knows that [means
"shout"].
If you point [with] your arms
[outstretched], extend them straight
out in front of you like you're
sleep-walking, everyone knows that
means "to project." And if you do
that, you see dangling from your
hand the Hebrew letter whose name is
"spear" or "arrow" or
"projectile". And the same would be
true in Aborigine faiths, in
Amerindian faiths, in Eastern
faiths, in Western faiths.
JM: So, in the
field of linguistics, we have Noam
Chomsky,
who's from your home town of Boston,
who developed the idea of a
universal grammar. He's had an
enormous impact, and of course he's
looking at grammar very differently
from you --
ST: Very
differently,
JM: But still the
idea of a universal grammar in your case
not based on the mathematical
analysis of sentence-structure, but
based on a somewhat different kind
of geometrical analysis of --
ST: People who
speak with hand-gestures have been
shown to
develop their language in the same
way as people who speak with
speech, and develop very similar
grammars. And in fact people from
different cultures with different
sign languages find that they can
teach each other a common sign
language very quickly. Based on
these innate grammars. These innate
gestures.
This is natural. My work is not the
same as Chomsky's, but it's
certainly not in conflict.
JM: No, it would
seem to be very much in the same --
ST: I want to tell
people, I'm not saying "I'm right
and
you're wrong!" This is saying,
"You've all been right, and on this
level we can show it!"
JM: We've been
talking to Stan Tenen, Director of
Research for
the Meru
Foundation. We're going to have some
messages again, from Wisdom
Network. After we come back, we'll
give out Stan's website and some
other contact information, so stay
with us.
JM: And if you'd
like to contact Stan Tenen and the
Meru
Foundation directly, you can write
to them at P. O. Box 503,
Sharon, Massachusetts 02067. Their
website is, once again, www.meru.org.
And if you don't have
access to the Web, you can call
their toll-free number, 1 (888)
422-MERU. That's 1 (888) 422-MERU.
After giving out all that
information, I'm a little hesitant
to
give out my own website on top of it
all, it almost seems like URL
overload. But here it is: It's
MISHLOVE.COM. www.mishlove.com.
It's been a great pleasure being
with you for these two hours,
Stan. I've never seen you so
animated.
ST: Thank you, that
was entirely due to your asking the
right questions and keeping this in
line. I really appreciate the
opportunity, and anyone who wants
further information can get in
touch with us. It is a very
beautiful, elegant System, and it
needs
to be known.
JM: I know you're
very passionate about this work and
it has
the potential to move in many
different directions. The day will
come, I think, when people will be
dancing the Dance of the
Letters.
ST: Absolutely.
Thank you.
JM: Well, thank you
and your lovely wife, Levanah, for
coming here to California to be with
us on Wisdom Radio. Tune in
again, every weekday evening, 8 PM,
Pacific Time, 11 PM, Eastern
Time, for Virtual College. [Music]
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