Phobos: Mayan Fear by Steve Alten Read Free Book Online Page B

scientist.” Logically, I saw no reason to exclude a Creator from the evolutionary process—provided, of course, the evidence could be found.
    Maria Rosen was a friend and fellow student at Cambridge, majoring in religious studies. The future Mrs. Julius Gabriel was born in London to a British father and Spanish mother, she and her two sisters were raised as Reform Jews. While on summer break, Maria traveled to Israel, to pursue her archaeological interests.
    By fate or chance, she met Rabbi Yehuda Tzvi Brandwein.
    Brandwein was an Orthodox rabbi living in Tel Aviv. In clear defiance of the ultraconservatives, Brandwein was openly teaching a secret ancient wisdom that, for the last two thousand years, had been rigorously restricted to devout Orthodox Jewish males over the age of forty. Rabbi Brandwein believed the time had come for all people, regardless of their particular faith, to have an opportunity at spiritual fulfillment. At his own peril he began offering this long-hidden knowledge to the masses.
    The secret ancient wisdom: kabbalah.
    The word kabbalah translates as “to receive,” a reference to receiving fulfillment from the Creator’s light. While some may define kabbalah as “Jewish mysticism,” it is in fact a nondenominational primer of spirituality that predates organized religion. Four thousand years ago, God passed this wisdom down to Abraham, the unintended patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Abraham encoded the knowledge into the Book of Formation, where it was secretly passed down through the ages, its information far too “mystical” for ancient man to comprehend.
    Moses was handed the wisdom on Mount Sinai. Fourteen centuries later, about the time the Maya were developing their calendar, a kabbalist by the name of Rabbi Akiva began openly teaching the ancient wisdom to a new generation of Jews in the Holy Land, among them one Rabbi Joshua ben Joseph, more commonly known as Jesus. Akiva was skinned to death by the Romans, Jesus crucified. Another disciple, Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, managed to escape into the mountains of Galilee with his son, Rabbi Elazar. The pair spent the next thirteen years living in a cave studying the Torat HaSod, the hidden wisdom encrypted within the Aramaic passages of the Old Testament.
    The fruit of Rabbi Shimon’s labor produced the Zohar, the main text of kabbalah.
    The Zohar firmly placed God behind evolution, revealing the very secrets of existence, providing answers as to how and why man was created along with the “cause and effect” that actually led to the Big Bang and the creation of the physical universe.
    In retrospect, it is no wonder why the wisdom had been kept hidden from the masses for so long, for it contains advanced concepts that deal with everything from atomic structure to the quantum physics of black holes. Over the next twenty centuries the Zohar’s wisdom would be tapped by some of our species’s greatest thinkers, including Galileo, Copernicus, Albert Einstein, and Sir Isaac Newton, whose personal copy of the Zohar remains on display at Cambridge.
    Included within the Zohar is a passage that refers to the End of Days. According to the ancient wisdom, when the scales of humanity are finally swayed toward the Light, fulfillment and immortality shall be had by all. But when negativity outweighs the positive forces, then the End of Days shall be upon us. As transcribed in the Zohar, this epoch of human existence shall begin in our present era—the Age of Aquarius on the twenty-third day of Elul in the Hebrew year of 5760. It shall be ushered in by an event, described as “a great tall city, its many towers collapsed by flames, the sound of which shall awaken the entire world.”
    The Hebrew date translates to September eleventh in the year 2001 … nineteen days from today.
    How this date ties in to the Doomsday Event forecast for December 21, 2012, may be revealed to me in three weeks’ time. In anticipation of things to come,