Gate 6: אז — PROTOSPACE

אז

Pillar 1: THE SOURCE

[6:1] "And the earth was without form, and void\..."

[6:2] --- Genesis 1:2

[6:3] "Space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade

away*

[6:4] into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will

preserve an independent reality."

[6:5] --- Hermann Minkowski

[6:6] "There was something formless yet complete,

[6:7] that existed before heaven and earth.

[6:8] How still! How empty!

[6:9] Dependent on nothing, unchanging, All pervading,

unfailing."

[6:10] --- Tao Te Ching, 25

[6:11] [6:1] Space itself had a beginning. Before that

beginning, there was something else.

[6:12] [6:2] Itzhak Bentov, the visionary scientist-mystic,

called it "protospace"---the arena in which creation unfolds, the

stage that exists before the play begins. It is not space as we know it,

with its three dimensions and its relationship to time. It is the

condition for the possibility of space, the openness that allows

extension, the "room" in which the universe can expand without

expanding into anything.

[6:13] [6:3] This is difficult to imagine because imagination

itself operates within space. We picture a vast darkness extending

infinitely in all directions, and we think we have imagined

protospace---but we have merely imagined a very large empty space, which

is not the same thing at all. Protospace is not big; it is not small; it

has no size, because size is a spatial concept and protospace precedes

space.

[6:14] [6:4] Consider: when physicists speak of the Big Bang,

they do not mean an explosion that occurred at a particular location in

a pre-existing void. They mean the emergence of space itself, along with

time, from a condition in which neither space nor time existed. The

question "What was there before the Big Bang?" is literally

meaningless if "before" and "there" both refer to

space-time---because space-time is precisely what began.

[6:15] [FIGURE 6.1: Two images. Left: A point labeled

"singularity" surrounded by arrows pointing outward. Right: The arrows

emerging from nothing, with no "outside." Caption: "The universe does

not expand into space; space itself is what is expanding."] [6:5]

Yet something must have been---or been-without-being---for the Big Bang

to arise from. The mystics knew this long before physics did. They

called it the Void, the Abyss, the Deep, the Unmanifest. Bentov called

it protospace: the unchanging, eternal, immutable background from which

all creation arises. Not nothing---for nothing cannot give rise to

something---but no-thing, a positive presence that is not any particular

thing.

[6:16] [6:6] In the model of the two toroids (see Gate 84),

protospace is what lies between the material universe and the divine

realm. The material world, with its space-time structure, is one

donut-shaped field. The divine world, with its eternal forms and

Platonic truths, is another. Between them---and around them, and

permeating them---is protospace: not subject to the laws of either

realm, but containing both.

[6:17] [6:7] When we speak of the "Glass" (see Gate 85), we

are speaking of the region where protospace becomes space, where the

unmanifest begins to manifest, where the timeless generates time. This

is not a place in the ordinary sense; it is a threshold, a transition,

the water-line between sea and sky.

[6:18] [6:8] From a meditator's perspective, protospace is

encountered as the awareness-before-content, the space in which thoughts

arise without being produced by the space itself. When you sit in

silence and attention expands beyond its objects---beyond bodily

sensation, beyond the stream of thought, beyond the sense of "I" who

meditates---what remains is not emptiness but a pregnant fullness, a

space that is also a presence. This is as close as the embodied mind can

come to experiencing protospace directly.

[6:19] [6:9] In dreamless deep sleep, according to the Mandukya

Upanishad, consciousness rests in undifferentiated bliss, withdrawn from

all content. This state (called prajna or sushupti) is closer to

protospace than waking or dreaming, but it lacks the awareness necessary

to recognize itself as such. The enlightened state (turiya, the

"fourth") combines the contentlessness of deep sleep with the lucidity

of waking---awareness present to protospace without collapsing it into

ordinary space.

[6:20] [6:10] Protospace is the womb of worlds. It is not

nothing, but it is not yet anything. It is the pause before speech, the

blank canvas before paint, the silence that holds all music in

potential. When the question "What am I?" first stirs in the depths of

the One (see Gate 2), it is into protospace that the stirring occurs,

and from protospace that the universe blooms.

[6:21] See Also: • Gate 1: אב --- The Gate of the Sleeping God

(consciousness prior to manifestation) • Gate 5: או --- The Gate of the

Substrate (the material aspect of pre-manifestation) • Gate 84: הו ---

The Gate of the Two Toroids (the structure of realms) • Gate 85: הז ---

The Gate of the Glass (where realms interpenetrate) End of Gates 4-6

Batch 2 Complete --- Pillar I: The Source (Continued) LIBER TIGRIS Gates

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