You’re basic.

I mean, not basic basic, bro. Sorry. You contain multitudes. But for the sake of argument.

Just roll with me here.

Be basic for a second. Just plain old you.

So you see yourself in these tiny little flickers. That’s how you move down the timeline. Flickering. Every Planck instant flush against the next one. You experience them one at a time. One after another. Basic.

But Brahma?

Brahma experiences the world in one more dimension.

The fifth dimension. And it’s a cool dimension. Brahma gets to be in it.

He sees the fourth dimension — time — all at once.

All at once, he sees it.

Meaning he’s not like you, grinding along second by second. He experiences every phenomenon from its birth to its death as a single unit.

You, for instance. He sees you as a 3D sculpture that starts as a fertilized egg and ends as a dead skeleton. Every move you ever made through space across the whole run of your life? He experiences all of it simultaneously. A sculpture. To him you’re a sculpture. And your sculpture doesn’t move at all. Not for him. It’s fixed. Locked into the exact path your body traced from birth to death.

Pretty cool, this Brahma, right?

Brahma is the king of kings.

I mean, down here on this rock, we’ve got kings. Putin, Caligula, Ieyasu. No argument. Kings.

And Brahma is their king. They’re small potatoes to him. They’ve only got four dimensions. He’s up by one.

So who’s the king of kings of kings?

The Holy One, Blessed be He. Obviously. It’s literally in the Haggadah.

But he’s also sort of a Brahma.

And this Brahma, the king of kings of kings, isn’t satisfied with a fifth dimension. Him? He’s got a sixth too.

He sees every possibility of every change and permutation of everything. And he sees those as sculptures too. His world is packed with sculptures of every possible outcome of everything. From the Big Bang to the collapse of this whole cosmic setup.

King of kings of kings — what do you expect? Guy’s heavy. Not gonna argue.

But here’s the thing.

Every universe has its own king of kings of kings.

And every king of kings of kings figures he’s sitting at the top of the pyramid.

But there are more. Nine more. Nine just like him. Each one experiencing a different universe. They run in parallel and none of them has any idea the others are there.

And hold on.

Above them there’s another Brahma. He’s the king of kings of kings of kings.

He’s above all of them, experiencing all of them.

That’s the seventh dimension.

This is where Judaism taps out.

From here on it’s Buddhism.

Because that Brahma is above all ten of them. They don’t know there are other Brahmas alongside them, and they sure as hell don’t know there’s one above them. Each of them thinks he’s the top dog. Only the Brahma above them knows he’s the actual top dog.

Sorry.

That’s not quite right.

Because there are ten of those Brahmas, lined up side by side.

And every one of them thinks he’s the top dog.

And you can probably see where this is going, man…

It doesn’t end.

Every time, there’s some Brahma one dimension up, figuring he’s the summit.

Nope. It never ends.

Forever, bro. Forever.

And each of these Brahmas — how’d he get to be a Brahma?

Simple.

Simple but hard.

You could do it too.

It’d take you a whole lot of time. And a whole lot of effort.

Probably takes some luck in there too.

At minimum, luck can’t hurt, I’d imagine.

I don’t know. I’m not a Brahma.

And by the way, whatever goes up can come back down.

Today’s Brahma can be tomorrow’s schmuck.

It’s a two-way street, this thing.

So how do you get out of it?

Simple.

Simple but hard.

Buddha.

And the good news is you can be a Buddha too.

But like I said. Effort. And time.

Luck never hurt anybody either.

Just saying.

Figured you’d want to know.

Shabbat shalom, man.