The Kabbalistic Myth Of Creation Reimagined: The Truth—With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

The Gnostics had it right, sort of.  We need to wake up.  Wake up from our slumber of powerlessness and lack of responsibility.  We need to wake up and realize that we are the Cosmos.  We are one with it and all being.  We need to imagine ourselves as made from the stars and made from the Divine.

In 1937 Olaf Stapledon published a novel called Star Maker. 

In it the narrator, a simple ordinary human finds himself going on an extraordinary quest.  He imagines he can venture out into the universe and he discovers the Cosmos.  He joins with other self-aware beings who dwell on other worlds and joins with them to create a unified community of self-aware minds that go in search of answers to the ultimate questions of why are we all here.  This communal mind realizes that there the universe is sentient and self-aware and that the cosmic mind is the mind of the Star Maker—the creator of everything.  The narrator discovers that the Star Maker didn’t know what it was doing, it just created, and out of that creation came species scattered across the universe that developed consciousness and self-awareness and thus gave birth to it—to the mind of the cosmos that was the Star Maker.

The Star Maker and the narrator who is part of the cosmic self-awareness realize that it is, we are, the ground and the goal of creation and the cosmos.

I want us to realize that on this little piece of the universe, our tiny fragile blue-green globe we call Earth is our place in the grand scheme of things.  We, the human race, consider ourselves the only species on this planet with the potential for self-awareness.  We must wake up to our power and our responsibility.  The ultimate making is to remake ourselves.  We are the stuff that is the Ground of Being and we are the stuff that is the Goal of Being.  We are it.  On this place called Earth, there is no savior but us.  No one and nothing else is going to help us.  We have to do this for ourselves.

The mythos of the Kabbalah as it evolved through the Zohar to the mythic vision of Rabbi Isaac Luria is not the end of the storytelling.  We need to keep going.  We need to re-imagine it.

The Zohar tells that Ayn Sof, the Star Maker, had at one time the power to create and to destroy.  It made and remade the cosmos many times, not satisfied with its creation.  Then, according to Luria it created one last time and made this cosmos.  And here it ends.  According to Rabbi Luria, the cosmos shattered and what was to be a cosmos in harmony was no longer.  Disruption, chaos, confusion, and disharmony now reigns. 

We live in this flawed creation created by a flawed and imperfect Divinity.  That is what I call a being that creates such a mess that we find ourselves in.  When you screw up you need to take responsibility for what you did.  In this shattered cosmos, Ayn Sof, the Dao, the Star Maker, according to Luria no longer has the power to fix this.  Tikkun Olam—the power and the responsibility to make things right lies not in the Star Maker, the Dao, Ayn Sof but in the beings with the potential of self-awareness, us the created ones we are the only ones who can tap into the cosmic Divine power.  All of the power that once resided in Ayn Sof that could be tapped into through the gate of Keter flooded out and down and powered into Malkuth at the moment of creating it and once the cosmos shattered that flow was disrupted.  It could not go back up to its source.  All cosmic Divine power resides in Malkuth, in this world of Making.  We, on this planet called Earth, are the created beings who can tell the myths of creation.  We need to continue telling our story.

We need to make this right.  We do have the power to destroy our world and we are doing it.  We by our acts in history, by our technology applied without self-awareness, have helped to gut our planet and to spoil its beauty and its potential to sustain our own existence.  We have changed this planet and its climate.  We are moving this planet into a phase in its existence where our own life is threatened.  We have the power to diminish the territories that can sustain our human life as we currently know it and live it to a smaller and smaller landscape on this planet.

We must stop this.

We must fix this.

We can do this.

There is no one else who can.

No one else is coming to the rescue.

But we can only do it by awaking to the realization that we are that part of the cosmos on this planet with the potential for self-awareness and thus Divinity.  We are all that remains of the voice and dreams of Ayn Sof, of the Dao, of the Star Maker.

We must take up the song of Tikkun Olam and we must sing it and be it.

We must restore and repair the disharmony in ourselves, and thus in the cosmos.

That is why we are here.

That is our destiny. 

And to this, let us say, Amen—that Hebrew word that means ‘So Be It’.