Rabbi Joel Bakst (Interview Archive)
Hebrew doesn't spell out the vowel, so the word reduces to three consonants: A-D-M. Aleph, dalet, mem. The sages noticed something in those letters a long time ago. The aleph, the A, points to Adam. The closing mem, the M, points to Messiah. And the dalet in the middle, the D, stands for David, King David, who sits historically between those two poles. The point being that Adam is a structure. History is a structure. Time itself is built a certain way.
We tend to think of structure as a property of space. But time has shape too, and really the honest term is spacetime, because the two are one thing. If spacetime is what the physics says it is, then no moment is ever only what it seems to be in passing. Everything that has happened is still present in some form, and we catch only the outer rim of it. The same goes for now. What's here in front of you, this instant, you are seeing nothing but its edge.
All of this bears on the pineal gland. Peniel: face, presence, the showing of the Divine. Creation copies itself at every scale. What is true collectively and geographically is true personally, because it is all one Adam. On the large scale there is one Adam, and I am one Adam as well. Inside my head sits this pineal gland at the center of consciousness, and it manufactures a strange substance, endogenous DMT, dimethyltryptamine, with effects nobody has managed to account for.
Read the literature on DMT. Talk to anyone who has gone through the experience. No one comes back able to pin down what it was. The one thing people agree on is the negative: it was not a hallucination. Something else is present. There is a dimension underneath this one.
If that is the case, consider Jerusalem, and the Foundation Stone on the Temple Mount, sitting now beneath the golden dome. Most people have lost the history, so here it is. Islam arose in the 7th century in the Arabian peninsula. From there it moved outward, overrunning the surrounding nations and converting almost everyone. In the course of that expansion its armies took what the Romans had renamed Palestine, which was Judea, the land of Israel, and it was during that same stretch of the 7th century that the Dome of the Rock went up.
Ask yourself why they chose that spot. Because everyone knew the Holy Temple in Jerusalem had stood there. The Second Temple lasted 420 years. Solomon's First Temple stood for 410, with roughly seventy years of ruin in between. They built on that ground knowing it was holy, and the building was also a flag planted: we arrived, we conquered, this is ours now. That is geopolitics, and it too is part of the whole thing. All of it is held inside Adam.