Last year, when I was taking a class on Religion and Film, I had an idea that I wanted to write up, but didn’t get to it. I had an epiphany that 2001: A Space Odyssey. make sense if we think in five dimensions. I was struggling to interpret the final scenes, when the protagonist seemingly goes through a whole life cycle, while at the same time retaining his essence. That was a clear indication for me that I was seeing a 2D representation of a 4D experience with a 3D intermediary. 2D, because the flat movie screen is two dimensional. 4D, because the makers f the film wanted to convey that time is just another dimension where we move through like the 3 dimensions of space. (E.g. the intermediary of the 3D soundstage where the movie was shot.) Except that normally in this 4th dimension (of time) we can move only one direction. This science fiction film (and the book it is based on) took that dimension and turned it into multidirectional dimension. Read more »

This (from The Salt Lake Tribune) was the first of the few reviews I bumped into about Arthur Goldwag’s The Beliefnet Guide to Kabbalah. It quotes Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s introductsion

“this includes ghosts, dybbuks, golems, weird dreams, bizarre coincidences, Bible codes, and secret cantations, as well as mostly everything in the general category of ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ ” - as mystical.

The book’s official website at Beliefnet includes a quiz a short excerpt from the book. I browsed through the book at a bookstore and liked its clear layout and organization. The few minutes I had was not sufficient to developa real opinion about its content.