Chapter One
I Discover the Power of
the Genesis Prayer
My story with the Genesis Prayer, or Ana B'ko'ack (pronounced Anna BeKo-ak), began five years ago when I started studying the pre-Islamic, pre-Christian, pre-Jewish, pre-Buddhist writings of Abraham and the ancient sages, the universal foundations on which all religions were originally based. I'd studied Christianity, Buddhism, both North American and South American shamanism, and even aboriginal dreamtime, wherever my research and personal journey took me, but I never settled long in any one place until my teacher, Rav Berg, revealed the true secrets behind what I was seeking. Yes, I had an advantage over most of those who'd rediscovered these teachings after thirty-four hundred years of near-total concealment. I was already certain that God existed; I was only looking for ways to prove it to others. I knew in my heart that the precision and advanced mathematical concepts I'd found while examining other ancient structures would hold true for the Bible as well, that the mathematical evidence pointing to an origin beyond our capabilities would be there. Because I already had strong clues to go on, I was certain I could find this evidence, which was important to me because I wanted to share this certainty. When we don't know something for sure, doubts creep in, but if I could give people something concrete, they, too, could share in the benefits of certainty, especially in these most uncertain times.
Also, thanks to my varied journey, I'd already been to the spiritual places and experienced the cognitive transitions described in the ancient books my teacher suggested: books like the Sefer Yetzirah (the Book of Formation), written by Abraham, the Patriarch, thirty-eight hundred years ago; the Bahir, written over two thousand years ago; and the Zohar (the Book of Splendor), written nearly nineteen hundred years ago by one of the greatest sages of all time, R. Shimon Bar Yochai. Nevertheless, after five months of studying the writings of the sages, my pursuits were all intellectual, all about the knowledge, until I took a trip to Israel, my first, to visit some of those power vortices and ancient sites spoken about in the books for myself.
Rav Berg told me that the best way to tell the importance of a prayer or meditation is by how little attention is lavished on it by traditionalists, and by that reckoning the Genesis Prayer, being one of the most overlooked prayers in Judeo-Christian practice, ranks as extremely powerful. I was to find out just how potent that fateful afternoon. My studies had taken me in so many different directions that in my time of greatest need I, too, almost overlooked the Genesis Prayer.
It was late in the afternoon and I had a couple of hours to kill before meeting up with one of my teacher's senior students in central Jerusalem. He suggested Rachel's Tomb, the Matriarch's Tomb in Bethlehem, one of those earthly power spots where one can make powerful spiritual connections. He said it was an easy drive, practically a straight line, and right off the highway. I never made it there.
The highway was closed by the military, the traffic was detoured, and no one spoke enough English to explain why. Some of the many lessons I learned on that trip was that I couldn't do everything on my own and that I couldn't be so blindly stubborn and determined, especially since I didn't speak Hebrew, none whatsoever. But life's a process and I was thick in the middle of it. Undaunted by the odds, I followed the traffic and made my way through a tunnel and onto a parallel highway, exiting where I estimated the back roads would lead me up and over a hill to Rachel's Tomb. That was my first mistake. I had no idea that would take me through the heart of Palestine.
Talking my way past the Palestinian policeman with the sadistic gleam in his eye was my next mistake. Two blocks from the highway there was a makeshift barricade and I, along with all the other cars with Israeli plates, had been stopped and ordered to turn around. With my inflated ego still intact, I refused, invoking my Americanism as my right to pass. Forget the fact that I was wearing a yarmulke (skullcap), which I'd only decided to wear since my arrival a few days earlier, and that I hadn't had the foresight to remove it. Insistent as I was, he told me to pull over; he was taking me to jail. Only the kindheartedness or levelheadedness of another guard saved me that time. He waved me through when the other turned his back. Not turning and running was my next mistake.
Shaken, yet still determined to climb the hill, I came to a dead halt as the traffic came to a standstill not halfway up. We all crawled the rest of the way, my plates and conspicuous yarmulke sticking out like a sore thumb and causing many a caustic glance. Before long, we made it to the top of the hill and the main part of town, and I'd even managed to hide the skullcap beneath my seat. But I still had no idea what was going on, where I was going, or even where I was. Through repeated attempts and broken English, though, I realized I wasn't going to get to Rachel's Tomb, and getting out alive should be my first priority.
There were only three main exits to town, one of which was back down the hill into the hands of the guard who wanted to jail me before I outwitted him. I could only imagine what he wanted to do to me now. He wasn't going to get the chance. Both of the other thoroughfares were sealed off tight by ill-tempered guards with machine guns, and the side streets around them were choked off by traffic, some as desperate as me, but at least they understood what was going on. I was pretty much left with my imagination.
After being turned away from both gates, I peeled off the ever-lengthening traffic line and made my way onto a back road. The years I'd spent in South America numbed me from fear of gravel roads that turned into ever-narrower dirt roads, then steep paths—I knew one of them had to lead back down the hill. Yet they didn't. They all led toward more hills and deeper into Palestine, forcing me to retreat, dangerously doubling back over steep precipices. Like cats in the night, distinctly malevolent stares pierced the deepening shadows, eyeing the plates on my car. It wasn't the roads that frightened me; it was the darkness. Dusk had descended swiftly, and on dirt roads, there are no streetlights.
I made it back to town as nightfall officially descended, and after being turned away by an angry guard, I tried my luck on one of those interminable traffic lines to nowhere. Someone with a British accent informed me that the Israelis had ordered the town sealed off for security reasons. I didn't know it at the time, but the intifada was only weeks away. I tried the roadblock with the angry guard yet again—what else could I do—but he snarled back, menacing me with the muzzle of his submachine gun, indicating that he'd already told me to turn around once.
A woman with a reliable voice told me that the only way out was down the other side of the hill, but that meant getting past the guard with the angry gun, not to mention his well-armed buddies, a paramilitary force with more in common with the PLO than the NYPD.
I called Moshe, for whom I was already an hour late, and he asked if I'd tried the Ana B'ko'ack yet. I'd forgotten all about it, and was pretty nervous by then, so he talked me through it, instructing me to relax and meditate on the Ana B'ko'ack yet again when I'd calmed down. I told him I'd check back in half an hour and then repeated the meditation, this time recalling the words of our teacher: Everything is an illusion, and the Genesis Prayer is our tool to see past it. As I said to myself, "It's all an illusion," I approached the guard for the third time, and told him I was going down the hill.
He waved me through. With the makeshift gate swinging shut behind me, I sped around the corner and down the hill. Miraculously, I found the original closed highway, and was whisked back into Israeli territory. Whether the Genesis Prayer saved my life that night, or only saved me from a frightful couple of perplexing days in an increasingly antagonistic Palestine with my Israeli rental car, I'll never know, but it did clue me in to the enormous power hidden within the short, seven-line, 42-word meditation called the Ana B'ko'ack, or Genesis Prayer.
I saw the miracle firsthand, saw it in the face of the guard who only minutes earlier was willing to shoot me just for being a nuisance, but suddenly didn't recognize me or my American face. Something had shifted in the universe. From other spiritual practices I knew it as a paradigm shift, something only master practitioners could do, but I was a novice, a rank novice, reciting the prayer only for the first time under real-life conditions. Could it really have been that easy? I was thankful for the experience and for the knowledge that I now had a new tool to help me get through life, but I'd gained even more. A gateway had opened for me; the parallel universe I'd shifted into would never be the same. My journey had just begun.
Copyright © 2005 by Jeffrey Meiliken. All rights reserved.
