Talmud Bavli Megillah on Studying the Laws of Sacrifice

"Abraham said before the Holy One, blessed be He: Master of the Universe! Perhaps, Heaven forbid, Israel will sin before you, and You will do to them as You did to the generation of the flood and the generation of the Dispersion. He said: No! Abraham said before God: Master of the Universe! Whereby shall I know? With what will they atone for their sins? God said to Abraham: 'Bring Me three calves' (Genesis 15:9).

"Abraham said before God: Master of the Universe! That is fine for the times when the Holy Temple will be in existence, but in the times when the Holy Temple will not be in existence, what will be with them? God said to Abraham: I have already established for them the Scriptural section of offerings. Whenever they read from them, I will consider it as if they were bringing an offering before Me, and I will forgive them of their sins."

-- Talmud Bavli, Megillah 31b


Perhaps the Temple never existed as a historical reality. But the plan of the Temple exists eternally in the divine mind. Then all the laws of sacrifice are seen as coded formulas for theurgic enactment.

The Torah teaches us how to become like Moses, whereby we receive instructions from the divine mind and teach them to others, and how to become like Aaron, whereby we serve as priests in the temple and perform blessings and prayers and rites of purification, atonement and mystical elevation.
  

Talmud Bavli Megillah on the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies

"Rabbi Levi said, 'The following statement is a tradition that has been passed down to us from our fathers: The space taken up by the Ark is not included in the dimensions of the Holy of Holies. Miraculously, it did not take up any space at all inside the Holy of Holies.'"

-- Talmud Bavli, Megillah 10b

The Gemara continues: "This was also taught in the following Baraisa: 'The Ark which Moses constructed had ten cubits of space on each side between it and the two walls of the Holy of Holies.' And it is written 'And the area in front of the partition was twenty cubits long and twenty cubits wide.' (I Kings 6:20) This teaches that the Holy of Holies measured twenty cubits by twenty cubits in total."

To clarify: the length from the edge of the ark to the wall of the Holy of Holies was ten cubits in each direction. But how could this be so if the ark itself was 2.5 cubits by 1.5 cubit? Therefore, the ark did not take up any space at all inside the Holy of Holies.

The answer is that the ark only exists in a higher dimensional space, but can be accessed from the center of the Holy of Holies.

It is not a METaphor to say that the Holy of Holies must be the third central ventricle of the brain and that the ark must be the pineal gland. It's the other way around: the human anatomy is a MITaphor of the architecture of the Temple.