"For those who want to embark with Stan Tenen on a geometrical voyage through the Kabbalistic seas of sacred alphabets and consciousness, the work of the Meru Foundation, and this tape, come highly recommended." 
                                                                    Review by Jordan Gruber, Gnosis Magazine, Spring 1990

This tape is a technical adjunct to "Geometric Metaphors" and is formatted in three sections: 

I.  ORIGIN OF LETTER-SETS USED IN AUTO CORRELATING B'RESHIT (Hebrew Genesis): 
TRIFOLIUM ALPHABET AUTO CORRELATION (Appendix A) 
The "Atbash/Base-3" symmetry used to autocorrelate the letters of the first verse of Genesis is more elegantly presented by placing the letters on the trifolium projection of the 2-torus.  Plus "The Turtle that Holds Up the World." 

II.  LIFE CYCLE OF AN IDEAL FRUIT AND FRUIT TREE 
Rabbi Shimon in the Introduction to the Zohar, quoting B'reshit, tells us to examine "a fruit tree yielding fruit whose see is in itself."  We apply this principle to define the exact "flame-form" used to generate the letters of the alphabet.  We discuss the relationship between a fruit as a "pump" on the chain of being, and compare this to our heart as a pump between our physical and spiritual reality.  The life-cycle of the fruit-tree is  also compared to sacred dance. 

III.  TETRAHELIX, TRIFOLIUM, & "A COAT OF MANY COLORS" 
This is the first discussion in our work of the 22-letter Hebrew alphabet.  We unfurl a 22-letter section of Buckminster Fuller's tetrahelix model of DNA into what is called in physics, a "reflection space."  We mention that this reflection space may be related to Joseph's "Coat of Many Colors" described in the biblical book of Genesis.  We also offer one explanation fro the choice of letters that now have final forms, and we speculate on the possible identification of this patter n with the traditional Hebrew prayer shawl, in its primal form as described in Torah. 

A Matrix of Meaning for Sacred Alphabets (1991) 
2 hours  $29.95  (MM-1)
A lecture by Stan Tenen, presented January 10, 1991 at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness, Berkeley, California
Meru Foundation research proposes that the letters of the Hebrew (and likely Greek and Arabic) alphabets are generated by an idealized human hand, identified with our reflexive consciousness and with the self-referential process of living systems.

After a brief review of earlier material, this lecture focuses on a new logical matrix which gives meaning to each letter in both Hebrew and English, and gives examples of how these letter meanings can be used to decipher word roots.  Tenen suggests implications of this natural language system for our spiritual traditions, for visual, tactile, and dance meditation, and for the study of self-organizing systems including those of biology, language, physics, and cosmology.

Our Hands project our conscious will (inside our mind-space) onto the physical world (outside).  We use our hands to implement our conscious choices in the world - our hands are our Projective Principle.  We are called "human" from the Latin manus, meaning "hand"; our unique opposable thumb is linked to our human self-awareness. 

It seems quite natural that the letters of our sacred alphabets come from an idealization of our own hand.  We call writing "hand-writing."  The Hebrew letters are traditionally said to be made of flame or fire, and to derive from Yod - the letter Yod, "i", designating personal consciousness - and Yad means "hand."  We use our hands to point to things in our experience in the same ways as the "quantum state vector" designates entities in physics.  Biblical descriptions of the "hand of God" do not imply that God has physical hands.  Rather, they describe God's projection of an event into our conscious reality.

All humans, blind or sighted, young or old, can always visualize their own hands,  When we place the model hand specified by the text of Genesis on our own hand, it fits like a glove, and we can feel it against our skin.  When we visualize our hand in our mind's eye, we can also immediately "see" the Hebrew, Greek, and Arabic letters.  As we move our hand physically, we "see" different letters displayed in our minds.  It now is easy to understand how the letters of the text of Genesis could be viewed, in order, as a particular meditation.  We move from letter to letter in the text by tipping  our hand as we view the sequence of letters in our minds. 

This tape provides our initial findings in the form of 22 hand gestures for the 22 original letters of the Hebrew alphabet, seen in alphabetical order.

The Alphabet in Our Hands (1992)      2 Hours    $29.95  (AH-1)
  Can there by real meaning - beyond pride and apologia - when a religious tradition claims discovery of the One true God?  If it is not myth and metaphor, is there a modern sense in which a spiritual text could be the Truth, and if this is so, how could so audacious a claim be proven? 

On this tape Stan Tenen presents the results of his investigation of the Hebrew alphabet in a demonstration of a sequence of gestures of an idealized hand.  This hand-model defines the shapes of the letters and confirms their natural and universal meaning.  He then discusses some of the philosophical, spiritual, and practical implications of these findings. 
This presentation also includes and expands on Stan Tenen's article, The God of Abraham, as published in Gnosis magazine, issue #28, Summer 1993, and it includes original Music of Genesis, computer-generated directly from the sequence of letters at the beginning of the Hebrew text of Genesis by Stephen James Taylor and Stan Tenen. 

Stan Tenen demonstrates how the torodial process represents a fundamental unity, both in physics and personal consciousness, how it can be understood to underlie a wide range of traditional teachings, and how it leads to an elegant, natural, and universal alphabet.   On this tape he expands on topics introduced in Alphabet in Our Hands, and answers questions arising from the previous presentation.  This lecture is also based on his article First Hand: Canaanite and Hebrew-How the Names and Shapes of the Hebrew Letters were Determined, published in Meru Foundation Journal Torus, Vol. 2, #4.   Tenen also discusses implications in various cultural legends, symbols, and icons including Kabbalah and European iconography.

Squaring The Circle (1999)          2 Hours        $29.95  (SC-1)
The One and the Many, Mind and World
Ten years after his first appearance at 3220 Gallery in San Francisco (see Geometric Metaphors of Life) Stan Tenen returns to this location to review, update and present his latest material.  This tape begins with a detailed account of Stan's initial process of discovery, reviews the key elements of Meru research, discusses the relevance of "maximum contrast" and how it defines unity, and shows how the Meru model solves a basic philosophical puzzle.  He then presents some startling and intriguing new implications of this research. 
 
 

The Origins of Sacred Alphabets (1992) 
 28 Minutes        $24.95   (TA-1)
On this discussion with Jeffrey Mishlove, Stan suggests that the ancient alphabets embody a system of knowledge that is self-referential and not inconsistent with modern thinking in theoretical physics and general systems theory. He claims to have discovered the sacred spiral shape through which one can project all of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and with modifications, the Greek and Arabic alphabets as well. 

The Geometry of Language, Parts One and Two (1999) 
56 Minutes  $34.95 (TA-2)
Stan Tenen notes that the two primary names of God in the Hebrew Torah refer to the fundamental metaphysical principles of duality: the god within and the god without, god as a singular entity and god as infinite. The key insight of Judaism, that these principles are actually one, is embedded in the very structure and shape of the Hebrew letters. Tenen further explains that these letters can all be derived from a language of gestures - and suggests that this was the original language of humanity.  He shows how the three Abrahamic faiths - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, are reflected as natural elements of the process of unity and presents implications for the future of these three faiths.