The fact that nouns are destined to lie in the nature of human names is only further proof that they do not belong to the same order of words that create God's name. For God's name (Torah) is a verb, not a noun, and that verb starts with "aleph". God looked at the Torah when he created the world, and so the word with which the world starts is a verb. Our language, therefore, has two levels--a divine level and another one that is of dubious origin, probably connected to Gehenna, to the expanse of the north of the Lord. Thus language and the letters of language already contain hell and heaven, the past and future.
The letters of language! Here we come to the bottom of the shadow. The earth's alphabet mirrors heaven's and the shares the fate of language. If we use both nouns and verbs together, although verbs are infinitely above nouns--the two are not equal in either age or origin, since verbs appeared before and nouns after the creation--then all this also applies to the alphabet. Thus, the letters used to write nouns and the letters used to designate verbs cannot be of the same ilk and since time immortal have been divided into two orders of signs, but our eyes today confuse them, because oblivion lies in the eye. Just as each letter of the earth's alphabet corresponds with a part of the human body, so each letter of eh heavenly alphabet corresponds with a part of the body of Adam Cadmon, and the white spaces between the letters denotes the rhythm of the body's movements. However, since parallelism between the divine and the human alphabet is permissible, the one always retreats to make room for the other, just as the other pulls back to let the former expand. This also applies to the letters of the Bible--the Bible is always breathing. At moments it is the verbs that shine and then, as soon as they retreat, the black letters of the nouns appear, only we cannot see it, just as we cannot read what the black flames write on the white. So it is too with the body of Adam Cadmon, which alternates between filling our being and deserting it, like the ebbing tide, depending on whether the heavenly alphabet is on the rise or on the wane. The letters of our alphabet appear in our waking consciousness and those of the heavenly alphabet in our dreams, strewn like light and sand on the waters of the earth at the moment when the divine letters rise to push back the human letters from our sleeping eye. For in dreams one thinks with the eyes and the ears; speech has no nouns, just verbs; only in dreams is every person a zaddik, never a murderer . . . . I, Samuel Cohen, the author of these lines, plunge like the Khazar dream hunters into spheres situated on the dark side of the world, trying to extract the trapped divine sparks. But it may well happen that my own soul gets trapped there as well. Out of the letters I collect there, and those collected by others before me, I am putting together a book that, as the Khazar dream hunters said, will constitute the body of Adam Cadmon of earth . . . .
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