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Century proponent of a school of Jewish ecstatic mysticism, Abraham Abulafia, whose interpretation of the Guide and his own Commentary on the Secrets taught that the human mind, if transformed into a “state of active intellect,” could become one with Spirit, realizing the Kingdom of God in rational mystical experience in a state of excitement with new ideas. The new consciousness achieves deep knowledge of both the “upper” and “lower” realms of what he called “reality” both spontaneously and directly. He said that without personal transformation, this knowing is not possible.

Abulafia’s lesson was that the mundane intellect of man has the potential for transformation into another kind of mind in a spiritualization of thought. This occurs via developmental stages that begin with intellect and imagination and culminate in what he called prophetic emanations. The exercises leading to this transformation are to be strongly willed and practiced with regularity. This work results in ascension to an ecstatic state accompanied by great intuitive powers, which Abulafia called “prophesy.” Ibn Adret, the Chief Rabbi of Spain at the end of the Thirteenth Century, banished Abulafia from the Country, a Century before the Spanish Inquisition ousted all the Jews.

Following what my father said was required in the practice of Kabbalah, a 13th Century tradition of esoteric and mystical interpretations of the Scriptures, I learned the secret meanings of each of the twenty-two letter Hebrew alphabet. Much like the Platonic view of mathematics, that it existed before the physical universe, these symbolic equivalences were believed to be eternal in the transcendental realm. One of the rare written accounts of this oral tradition is in the thirteenth-century Hebrew Book of Splendor called the Zohar which describes the Hebrew alphabet as the heavenly code of the cosmos.

I learned that the Tegragrammaton’s repeated letter Hei, being fifth in the Hebrew alphabet, represents the number five. In the Kabbalistic tradition, Hei implicates the functional five-partition of the human inner self or soul. The five parts are: nefesh, instinctual drives; ruach, mood, affect and emotions; neshamah, cognitive activities of the mind; chayah, efforts to understand and attain transcendence; yechidah, experiencing the world as a cosmic unity. Later in life as

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