“The guy asleep at the wheel?”
“Exactly.”
“Tell you what, let’s do a test.” Virgil reached for Patrick’s face and pinched his cheek.
“Ow! That’s your test?”
“You seem wide-awake to me. Still, it pays to be sure.”
Shep jumped as a phantom sensation suddenly oozed a healing warmth from his butchered left deltoid muscle. As he watched in stunned amazement, the protrusion formed a humerus, the bone miraculously extending down from his shoulder, followed by a progressive web of nerves and blood vessels, tendons and muscles, the growing appendage extending into a forearm, wrist, hand, and fingers, the newborn limb atomizing flesh before his spellbound eyes into a fully formed and functional left arm.
Shep fell to his knees, flexing his fingers… giddy. Unlike the experience in the Ninth Circle of Hell, he could instinctively tell that this limb was real. “How?”
“Stem cells. Amazing things. It’s a shame mankind waited so long to begin using them. Imagine the boundless joy that could have been spread across the world by harvesting new limbs for amputees, spinal cords for the paralyzed, organs for the decrepit, or cures for diseases — all of which were intended to challenge man’s ability to better himself. Unfortunately, the Adversary bound you to organized religion. That was Satan’s trump card, and man’s ego embraced it like opium.”
Shep stared at Virgil, as if seeing the old man for the first time. “You really are God, aren’t you?”
“God is a concept of man, a digestible image of a ruler on a throne, a divine entity one petitions when one wants to hit the lottery or is faced with death. I am the Creator’s desire to reveal Himself to you within the Light of Wisdom, appearing to you in a reflected finite image your mind can accept and absorb.”
“The Light of Wisdom?”
“The essence of existence.” Virgil’s blue eyes danced behind his rose-colored spectacles. “You wish to know how all this came to be.”
“Please.”
“Very well. But what I explain now are supernal matters — matters that occupy neither space or time, nor material manifestations — the very elements that dominate your senses and surroundings. There are things you may not be able to accept or grasp, yet instinctively your soul will know them to be true. Try not to fight your gut reaction by using finite logic.”
“You’re telling me my brain’s too small to handle this.”
“I am saying your senses are hardwired into the Malchut, the physical world. The Upper Realm is a completely different reality. It’s like you, a three-dimensional being, having to explain existence to a two-dimensional cartoon character. You’d have to limit yourself to two-dimensional vernacular in order to describe three-dimensional concepts.”
“This is algebra, and I’m only in first grade, got it. Anything else I should know?”
“As I said, time and space do not exist in the spiritual realm. Therefore, if I use the word ‘before,’ it refers to cause. If I say ‘after,’ it is the effect.”
“Understood. Now tell me… what’s really out there? How did this all come to be?”
“In the reality of the infinite, there is the Creator, there is the unknowable Essence of the Creator, and there is the Light that comes from the Creator. The Light exists in the Endless. The Light is perfection. And though you can never know the Creator, at His essence is the nature of sharing. But because there was nothing upon which to share, a reciprocal energy was necessary to complete the circuitry, in this case a Vessel to receive the Creator’s infinite Light.
“And so the Vessel was created, and its entire purpose was to receive. And the Vessel was the unified soul. And now there were two types of Light in the Endless: The Light of Wisdom, which was the essence of existence that simply gives, and the Light of Mercy, or the Vessel, which desired only to receive. Remember the example I gave earlier? If the Light of Wisdom was the electricity circulating throughout your home, the Light of Mercy, the Vessel, would be a lamp that plugged into a wall socket to receive the energy. Without the lamp, you have no illumination, without the Light of Mercy the Light of Wisdom cannot reveal itself.”
“Like you said earlier with Dawn, it’s like the sun. The sun radiates energy, and yet its radiance can only be seen when it reflects off a body in space… like the Earth.” Shep paused, his mind racing. “Virgil, you said you were the Creator’s desire to reveal Himself to me within the Light of Wisdom. Does that mean you are reflecting… off my Light of Mercy?”
Virgil smiled. “Let’s return to the story of creation. In the infinite Endless that filled the entirety of existence, there was the Creator’s Light that gave unconditionally and now, through cause and effect, there was the Vessel, a repository of the unified soul and the only true creation that has ever occurred. The Torah encodes the Vessel with a name: Adam. But the Vessel Adam, like a battery, was composed of two aspects, or energies. Its male energy, positively charged protons, and its negatively charged female aspect — the electron, so named Eve in the encoded Creation story. And the Vessel had only the desire to receive, and the Light only gave, and so there was boundless fulfillment. Still, Adam lacked an awareness of its own fulfillment, for how does one appreciate a sunny day if every day is sunny? More important, how does one come to know and appreciate God if one never experiences the absence of God?”
“So what happened?”
“Cause and effect. As the Light continued to fill the Vessel, it passed along the Essence of the Creator, His desire to share. The Vessel, created only to receive, now desired to share, to be the cause of its own fulfillment… in essence, to be like the Creator. But the Vessel had no way of sharing; furthermore, it felt shame because it had not earned the endless Light and fulfillment it was receiving. And so, in order to be like the Creator, the Vessel shunned the Creator’s Light.
“This act of resistance caused the Tzimtzum, the contraction. Without the Light, the Vessel contracted into a singular point of darkness within the endless World — the infinite giving birth to the finite. Suddenly without the Creator, the Vessel expanded to allow the Light back in. This sudden contraction and expansion, what you refer to as the Big Bang, was the cause that led to the physical universe, giving Einstein his time-space continuum. And yet this bubble of existence is not true reality. The true reality of existence is in the 99 percent… the Endless. What’s wrong?”
“It feels right, it’s just hard to get my mind around this. But go on… please.”
“When the Tzimtzum occurred, the constriction formed ten dimensions, or Sefirot. Six of these ten Sefirot compacted, enfolding into one super-dimension, the Ze’ir Anpin.”
“Why ten dimensions? What is their purpose?”
“The Sefirot filter the Creator’s Light. The upper three realms, known as Keter, Chochmah, and Binah, are closest to the Creator and do not exert direct influence in man’s physical realm. The bundle of six that remain just beyond man’s limited perception is the source of all knowledge and fulfillment available to mankind in this physical world. The physical world, the lowest of the ten Sefirot, is called Malchut. As immense as the universe appears, it represents a mere 1 percent of total existence, and it is a reality based upon deception, reinforced by the limitations of man’s five senses.”
“Incredible. What about the soul?”
“Every soul is a spark from the shattered Vessel, Adam. When the Vessel shattered, it separated the male principle, Adam, from the female principle, Eve. Just as conception in the womb is followed by the division of the cell, so too did the shattered Vessel divide, its sparks becoming male and female souls. Lesser sparks filtered down into the animal kingdom, trees, vegetation, and so forth, all the way down to every aspect of matter and energy that makes up the cosmos.”