156 @ The Secret L@ of Nature
zero to ten, with zero as the Absolute, one as the Manifesting Logos, and
the other numbers representing the spiritual entities down to man in the
material world at number ten. Every other number is alternately taken
as corresponding to a particular level of reality, related to both the num-
ber above and the one below. And what every tree branch has in com-
mon with all the others is that it is primarily and unambiguously a
number, alternately "affected" by the preceding and "cause" to the suc-
ceeding, each number being considered at all times either masculine or
feminine in its relationship to the others, with a constant polarity shift
going hand-in-hand with a gradual increase in value and increasing
density.Through this step-by-step change from zero to ten, the infinite
light from the first tree branch "materializes" into finite life in the last.
In an even more sophisticated mathematical analysis of the arrange-
ment of the sephiroth, Phillips goes further: far enough to find the su-
perstring space-time theory structured into the patterns laid down in
the Tree of Life, a correspondence that Phillips says was already sensed
by Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater a hundred years ago, though
the state-of-the-art of physics was not then up to describing the cor-
respondence.
In Phillips's analogy, the three dimensions of ordinary Euclidean
space correspond to the supernal triad of Kether, Chokmah, and
Binah. Next come the six "sephiroth of construction" to represent the
six hidden dimensions of compactified space. Last, Malkuth, the tenth
sephirah, corresponds-aptly says Phillips, because one of the kabbalis-
tic meanings of Malkuth is the temporal physical world-to the time
dimension.
All of this, says Phillips, gives strong mathematical support to the
notion that the building blocks of matter--subatomic particles studied
by physicists-are created in the image of the Cosmic Logos.
Phillips's analysis, in no way arbitrary, is based on the numerical
value attributed by kabbalists to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Applying gematria, number mysticism, to its twenty-two letters, kab-
balists were able to assign a Jewish "God-name" to each sephirah to ex-
press in numbers the essence of its metaphysical meaning in relation to
the Tree of Life structure of creation. Thus Chokmah (Wisdom), the