The Verbal and Non-verbal Tilim and Totachim Deployed to Approach God
Seas and seas – and seas – of words have been devoted to the spiritual experience of God by mystics such as Philo of Alexandria, Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel – to name but a few.
Philo of Alexandria was born circa 20 BCE and died Circa 40 CE.
Purposefully or instinctively, he used allegory as an approach to God. Though he used other means as well, his name became a byword for this, the allegorical, approach.
What, though, is allegory if it is not another “language” – a “language” akin to the “languages” of music, mathematics, the arts and other “disciplines”?
Music, mathematics, the arts, perhaps all disciplines are “languages” which in turn have raised the levels of those seas.
It is here proposed that all “languages”, apart from sharing this characteristic of being a “way” to God, have another property in common, and that is that they all evoke a memory of, or actually produce, the physical and non-physical experience of being with, or at the fringes of, God.
Not only, therefore, is there evidence of the causality kind supporting the mystic – causality being admissible as evidence by courts of law – there is also proof in the form of the brain’s understanding, memorizing and neurological processing of the experience: in sum, material evidence of the mystic experience – materiality of the effects produced by an event also being accepted as admisable.
As the words ascribed to God have influenced and determined aspects of law, so law, in its turn, has influence in – and on – the field the writer is here examining.
These “languages”, then, produce or evoke an experience which itself produces changes in the brain: they cannot, nonetheless, determine that God exists, or who, what, where, when and why God is.
In so producing or evoking, the motive behind those who created those “languages” was to define what is, at this stage of human development, probably ineffable, though not inscrutable.
Like their immediate relatives, languages proper, they are human confections and are, therefore, perhaps irrelevant when trying to pin Him down. Maybe.
The writer, with the aid of her theory – thereby increasing the number of words devoted to the subject – proposes that, in future, man may be able to articulate the indescribable.
The writer’s theory is set out in her third submission to Blogs section of the website.
