Rabbi Joel Bakst: The Torus, the Hyper-Cube, and Adamic Consciousness
Picture an elongated doughnut. That shape has a name, a torus, and the first thing to notice about it is what it lacks. No edges. No corners. Nothing runs in a straight line. Every part of it curves, every part has a surface. At its center sits a funnel, with a cone rising up through the middle. Whatever pours out from the top funnel loops back down around the outer walls, feeds into the lower funnel at the bottom, and re-enters, climbing again through the central channel. The motion keeps feeding itself. That is the body of Adam. That is the body of humanity taken together. Think of it as a plain sketch of what religion and psychology will look like once we move forward.
Compare an ordinary cube to a hyper-cube and you start to feel the difference. Someone asks how many cubes you are going to need, and with a hyper-cube the question simply dissolves. It doesn't apply. The same thing happens to the questions we ask today. They stop being the questions. There is a rule I keep coming back to: wrong questions have no right answers. Worse, a wrong question pushes you off in a wrong direction before you even realize it.
The idea of religion as one separate, bounded thing is itself a fallen, collapsed idea. The Torah, what people call the Jewish religion, isn't really a religion at all. It is Adamic consciousness, and that consciousness can take on form in countless ways, close to infinite ways, which is what makes room for every human experience, every emotion, every thought. All of the pieces get assembled right here.
Think of existence as one enormous panoramic jigsaw puzzle, cosmic in scale, made of millions and billions of pieces that someone is trying to reassemble. In the beginning it was a single picture. Then it broke. That shattering is the fall, the collapse, the prolapse of Adamic reality. Putting it back together looks nearly impossible, except for one thing: the backboard. You know how these puzzles come with the backing that carries the faint indentations, the lines showing where each piece belongs. That backing is Adamic consciousness. Reassembly becomes possible because the template is already there.
That was the whole point of Judaism from the moment it began. It is Adam himself saying this piece goes here, that piece belongs over there, and nothing gets left out. Everything is an expression of Adam. This is why I say that Jew plus non-Jew equals the original Adam. That wholeness is what we are moving back toward.
So when people ask what religion becomes in the future, in a higher dimension, I'd push back on the word future. We are not sliding along a straight line toward some later point. We are returning to something higher-dimensional. From where we stand now, going back like that is what we happen to call the future.