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A major topic of the Kabala are the
Four worlds that make up reality: The
World of Physicality, the World of
Angels, The World of Spiritual Forces, And the World of Godliness.
World of Physicality
World of Angels
World of Spiritual Forces
World of Godliness
For the mystics, God's creative process proceeded, and continues proceeding, through four modes, each at all times:
... Atzilut/Spirit: the sheer will to create a world;
... Briyyah/Creative Knowing: the imaginative vision of the elements of such a world;
... Yetzirah/Shaping: the relational blueprint of how these elements would link with each other;
... Asiyah/Doing: Bodying forth the actual universe. Ways to take action.
So we will use this four-fold pattern as a map for our own peacemaking. We will save Briyyah for last; because the more we continue learning, the more fruitful and wise will be our actions in the other worlds.
Atzilut/Spirit: Prayer and Torah Study
The sephirothic Tree of Life presents a metaphor where creation
takes place in ten steps and there is the suggestion that ten
potencies (or emanations, or vessels, or garments, or crowns) are
involved. There is an alternative picture where the creation
takes place in four steps; this model is called "the Four
Worlds". The four worlds can be mapped onto the Kabbalistic Tree,
and the two models have become complementary.
The four worlds are
Atlizuth - the world of emanation or nearness
Briah - the world of creation
Yetzirah - the world of formation
Assiah - the world of making
The names of three of the four worlds can be found in Isaiah 43.7
where the Lord (speaking through the mouth of the prophet)
states:
"...for I have created him for my glory, I have formed him; yea,
I have made him."
Atziluth is the world of pure emanation, the outflowing light of
God which we see refracted through the glass of consciousness as
the ten lights of the sephiroth. "To emanate" is to "flow out
from", and Atziluth is the world which flows directly out of the
infinite and unknowable En Soph. The word atziluth can be derived
from the root ezel, meaning "near by", empasising the closeness
of this world to the hidden, unmanifest En Soph. Another term
used to describe the nature of the emanation is hamshakhah,
"drawing out", with the suggestion that the emantion is only a
part of something greater, just as we draw water from a well.
The sephiroth as an expression of the Holy Names of God are
normally attributed to Aztiluth and this is an indication that
early Kabbalists viewed the pure energies of the sephiroth as
being exceedingly remote, and inaccessible to normal
consciousness. The world of Atziluth is remote from the world
where it is possible to form representations of the sephiroth
(Yezirah), and this tells us that the pictures of the sephirothic
Tree normally employed for communication and instruction are
representations of something unimaginable and incommunicable: we
must constantly remember that the map is not the territory.
Intellectually we know that sunlight is composed of a spectrum of
colours, and even young children can draw a picture of a rainbow,
but we do not see the colours in sunlight directly. We do not see
the colours until the light is refracted in a shower of rain and
it is worth bearing this in mind when considering the importance
(or otherwise) of the sephirothic correspondences.
Atziluth is the world of closeness or nearness to God, the
world where one is bathed in the undifferentiated light. In the
terminology of the Merkabah mystics, it is the world of the
Throne. There is very little that one can usefully say about it.
Briah is the world of creation, creation in the sense of
"something out of nothing". The author of the Bahir makes the
amusing observation that as light is an attribute of God, light
did not have to be created, but was formed, "something out of
something"; darkness, on the other hand, was not a part of God
and had to be created. This ties in with the Kabbalistic notion
of contraction, or tzimtzum, the idea that for the creation to
proceed there had to be a space where God was not. If one also
supposes that the ultimate nature of God is good, then one must
also conclude that evil was created, that the goodness, light and
peace of God were deliberately withheld in some measure to create
the universe, and this reflects the separation of Kether into
Chokhmah and Binah, the right and left sides of the manifest God.
This is a key kabbalistic idea: the negative qualities of
existence, the rigour and severity of God as depicted by the
lefthand Pillar of the Tree of Life, are not the result of a
malevolent third party - a diabolical anti-God fouling-up the
works. They are the very essence of the creative act.
The suggestion that the fundamental creative act was the
creation of evil is not (for obvious reasons) given much
prominance in Kabbalistic literature, but hints to this effect
can be found everywhere. The Bahir uses the metaphor of gold and
silver to make the point that the essence of the creative act was
"holding back". That which was held back was so much greater than
that which was given, and so that which was given, the mercy of
God, is associated with silver, while that which was held back,
the severity of God, is associated with gold. The essence of the
creative act was the withholding of God, and nowhere have I found
a suggestion that an entity other than God was involved - there
is no demiurge in Kabbalah. The essence of the creative act was
separation. One becomes two, Kether becomes Chokhmah and Binah,
and in this primary duality can be found the root of all
dualities.
When I first began thinking about Briah, and I tried to make
sense of the word "creation", I assumed that something tangible
was created, and I found I could not differentiate the end result
from formation - a rose is a rose whether it is created out of
nothing or grown in a garden. Does it matter whether I make a
cake miraculously by conjuring it out of nowhere, or whether I
make it synthetically by mixing ingredients and baking them in an
oven? I presume both cakes will taste the same. Synthetic
creation, the creation of "something out of something" is
commonplace, but miraculous creation is not, and if Briah is not
the world of synthetic creation (which belongs properly in
Yetzirah), then what does it represent?
The creation which takes place in Briah is differentiation; that
is, Briah predicates the *possibility* of creation. The creation
which takes place in Briah is *not* the creation of anything
tangible, but the creation of those necessary (but abstract and
definitely intangible) conditions which make creation possible.
It is difficult to find a good example without resorting to
abstract forms of theoretical physics which attempt to answer
questions concerning "why is the universe the way it is?", but
the nature of Briah is elusive unless the attempt is made, and so
I will make the attempt.
Pottery is a creative activity, the creation of new and
completely original forms out of clay and it is clearly synthetic
creation. A potter wants to make a jug to hold water. Note the
use of the word "make"; jug making is an activity which takes
place in Assiah, the world of making. The potter may incorporate
some novelty of design into the jug he or she is about to make,
and if this novelty is sufficiently unusual we might consider the
design itself to be creative - this is an example of Yetziratic
creativity.
Let us now go back through history to a remote time in the
past when there were no jugs. Should the creation of the first
jug be regarded as truely creative in the Briatic sense, rather
than synthetically creative in the Yetziratic sense? I would say
that the creation of the first jug would have been an evolution
from past experience; there must have been an experience of
"containment" which was almost certainly derived from cupping
hands to drink water, or from drinking water held in pools in
rocks. The idea for the first pottery jug was almost certainly
derived from a prior experience of using a variety of artifacts
to contain water, and all of these artifacts would have in common
the quality of "containment". Containment would not be possible
without the basic physical properties of the world we live in,
such as the existence of individually identifiable objects
extended in space with a specific shape. The abstract physical
properties themselves would not be possible without...what? What
was it that determined the most abstract properties of the world
and made it possible for us to conceive of containment as an
abstract property? In the terminology of Kabbalah, this takes
place in Briah; the world of creation creates the conditions for
form by providing differentiation and identity. This is an
abstract concept, and difficult to grasp; Wittgenstein put his
finger on the problem when he observed that the solution of the
riddle of life in time and space lies outside time and space.
Traditionally, Briah is the world of the archangels; these
attributions vary greatly from period to period, and from writer
to writer. The author uses the attributions given in Chapter ???.
Yetzirah is the world of formation where complex forms are built
synthetically, "something out of something", what I have
previously called synthetic creation. We are not yet in the world
of tangible things; to use an analogy I gave when describing the
sephira Yesod, we are more in the world of bottle moulds than a
world of glass bottles, and more accurately still, in the world
where one designs bottle moulds for glass bottles.
Yetzirah is a curious world, because its contents are both
intangible and real. Money is an example of an abstraction that
people will kill over. Criminal law is something clearly abstract
and synthetic in nature, but not something to meddle with too
often. Several times in these notes I have attempted to point out
the "real but intangible" nature of mathematical objects, with
computer programs being the most important examples; the
development of virtual reality systems drives home the point that
there is a world of objects which are not real in the sense of
being physical, but they are real in another sense: they are real
in the sense that they can be differentiated in some way, real in
the sense of having specific properties and behaviour. The world
of intangible but differentiated objects is the world that
Kabbalists call Yetzirah, and it is a world that spans thought,
from slippery abstractions like beauty and truth down to
something as specific and detailed as an engineering blueprint.
It is difficult to write about Yetzirah because it contains the
whole of human culture; our myths, legends, music, poetry, law,
cultural behaviour, literature, sciences, games, and so on; these
fall into the "intangible but real" category - things which have
no substance but which constitute our inheritance and define our
experience of being human. It is a kind of "mind-space" where all
the forms ever conceived can be found, a space where it is
possible to interact with form. One of the most interesting
developments in recent times is the realisation that it is
becoming possible to bridge the gap between Yetzirah and Assiah
using computer technology, and the term "cyberspace" is widely
used to describe this idea. Computer programs have become the
medium for turning form into something that can be shared; a
program which defines a jug in all its respects allows us to
share the form of the jug without any potter having to get her
hands dirty. It isn't a real jug, and it won't hold real water,
but it can hold the form of water, the Yetziratic representation
of liquidity, and I could pour Yetziratic "water" out of my
Yetziratic "jug". The fact that we can share the form of an
object without having to *make* it (and this is increasingly the
way industrial designers work today) means that humans will have
the ability to interact in Yetzirah (as magicians have always
done) without any form of magical training. Writing was the first
breakthrough in recording the contents of Yetzirah and it gave
the contents an independent (if static) existence. Cyberspace
will be an even greater breakthrough in that it will not only
record the contents, it will enable us to bring them to life in a
limited way. Yetzirah is in the process of "becoming real".
The world of Yetzirah is traditionally the realm of the Angel
Orders, but like the Archangels, the attribution to specific
sephiroth vary greatly from writer to writer.
Assiah is the world of making, the world where forms "become
real". The essential quality of the "world of making" that
permits us to make things is stability, the fact that the
material world has stable properties and behaves in a predictable
way. Our sciences are an outcome of this predictability - there
would be no science if there were no stable properties. Our
technology is an outcome of our scientific knowledge, and our
ability to make increasingly complex artifacts is an outcome of
our technology. If I make a chair at lunchtime, then (left to
itself) it will still be a chair at dinnertime, and it won't be a
towel, a giraffe, or an igloo. An ounce of gold remains an ounce
of gold. A pound of lead weighs the same on each successive day
of the week. It is this stability and predictability which allows
us to have a shared experience of the world. If you place the
pound of lead on the chair I made at lunchtime, then I will find
the same pound of lead on the same chair at dinnertime, and both
of us can behave with some confidence that this will indeed be
the case. An unstable world where you leave a pound of lead on a
chair, and I find a hedgehog in a goldfish bowl, and this happens
in a completely unpredictable way would not, in my opinion, be a
world of shared experience - each person would have their own
individual and private experience of the world, and we would have
a world more resembling Yetzirah than Assiah.
The stability and predictability of Assiah forms the rock on
which we have build our material culture of "things" - millions
of different types of thing - screws, nails, tools, books,
hairbrushes, trouser presses, shoes, pens, paper ... list goes on
almost indefinitely. It is interesting to ask whether any life
could be sustained in a world with less stability; we know living
organisms have a distressing tendency to die when their
environment changes. It is also interesting to speculate whether
life could exist in a more predictable world, and we must
consider the possibility that our world is unpredictable in ways
we do not appreciate because we have no other experience to
compare with. Perhaps there are more predictable worlds which are
too predictable and mechanical for life - I am reminded of the
Zoharic myth of the kings of Edom, the kingdoms of "unbalanced
force" which contained a preponderance of Din, judgement and were
destroyed. If this is so, then it is probable the properties of
the Assiah we know and love are necessary in a deep and
fundamental way.
I have a somewhat mystical perspective that the godhead, the
root of existence, had an urge to become conscious of itself, and
the cosmogenic descriptions in Kabbalah, of which the "four
worlds" model forms a part, are an attempt the show the necessary
steps for this to take place, with Assiah being a final and
necessary step. The problems of living in a finite world
suffering the attendent ills of the flesh has lead to some
prejudice against Assiah, but there is nothing "wrong" with
Assiah. What we perceive to be its imperfections are necessary
components of its perfection. Everything is right with Assiah; if
there is a flaw in the creation, it is that when "God wished to
behold God" and ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge it did not
become conscious of its own nature. It was seduced by the beauty
of Assiah, overwhelmed by the miracle of its own making, and the
Yetziratic consciousness, which should have united the worlds of
Assiah and Briah, turned away from Briah and faced Assiah
exclusively, creating the Abyss.
The four worlds can be related to the sephirothic Tree, and there
are many ways of doing this. There is general agreement that
Atziluth corresponds to Kether, Briah to Chokhmah and Binah,
Yetzirah to the next six sephiroth, and Assiah to Malkuth. This
is too simple however. The four worlds represent four distinct
"realms" of consciousness, and there is more in this idea than a
simple attribution to sephiroth. Out of the many ways of
presenting the four worlds I will present two schemes which I
consider to offer more in the way of real, useful substance than
other schemes I am familiar with. There is no question of
"rightness" or "wrongness" - any map, unless it is grossly or
maliciously misleading, is bound to contain some useful
information. It is a question of how useful the map is, and in my
opinion the following attributions of the four worlds to the Tree
are outstandingly useful and enrich the basic sephirothic Tree
considerably. The first attribution relates the four worlds to a
single Tree; the second makes use of four separate Trees and is
called "The Extended Tree".
The first attribution begins with a small amount of simple
geometry, and if you have not done this before then it is well
worth doing. Draw a vertical line on piece of paper. At the top
of the line place the needle of a pair of compasses and draw a
circle with a diameter approximately half that of the length of
the line. Without altering the compasses, draw a second circle
where the first intersects the line. Repeat this for the second
circle, and then for the third. You now have a line and four
intersecting circles. Label the centre of the first circle
"Kether", the second "Daath", the third "Tiphereth", and the
fourth "Yesod". It should be obvious where to place Malkuth, and
the rest of the sephiroth can be placed at the intersection
points of the four circles.
The four circles represent the four worlds. The first circle,
Atziluth, is centred on Kether, reaches up into the Unmanifest,
takes in Chokhmah and Binah, and reaches down to Daath. It is
entirely on the other side of the Abyss. The second circle,
Briah, is centred in Daath, reaches up as far as Kether and down
as far as Tiphereth, and takes in Chokhmah, Binah, Chesed and
Gevurah. The third circle, Yetzirah, is centred in Tiphereth and
reaches from Daath to Yesod, and includes Chesed, Gevurah,
Netzach and Hod, the six sephiroth traditionally associated with
Zoar Anpin, the Lesser Countenance or Microprosopus. The final
circle is centred in Yesod and reaches from Tiphereth to Malkuth,
taking in the sephiroth Netzach and Hod. This is shown in Fig X.
Note that most sephira can be found in more than one world, and
this is an important point: the worlds *overlap*. There is a
subtle but real distinction between Hod in Assiah and Hod in
Yetzirah. The sephira Tiphereth can be experienced in three
distinct ways, depending on whether one's vantage point is that
of Assiah, Yetzirah or Briah. These are not intellectual
distinctions, and an example would be the ways in which one can
experience Tiphereth as the King of Assiah, as the Sacrificed God
of Yetzirah, or as the Child of Briah (refer to the magical
images for Tiphereth).
The worlds overlap, but they are distinct, almost like social
strata which co-mingle but are nevertheless clearly defined. The
upper middle-class nineteenth century household, with its
"upstairs" and "downstairs", is a good example of two completely
distinct but co-mingling strata. There are ways of trying to
articulate this, but they obscure as much as they reveal; I was
taught that in going from one world to the next there is a
"polarity switch", so that one might regard Assiah as negative,
Yetzirah as positive, Briah as negative once more, and Atziluth
as positive. This idea can be related to the Tetragrammaton,
where the Yod corresponds to Atziluth, He to Briah, Vau to
Yetzirah, and He final to Assiah: this points a finger at the
deep relationship between Briah and Assiah. Just what a "polarity
switch" might be I leave to the reader to explore - there is no
way I could attempt to describe this.
The second scheme for representing the four worlds is based on
the tradition that each of the four worlds contains its own Tree,
and these are sometimes shown strung out with the Kether of the
world below intersecting the Malkuth of the world above. This is
not a very illuminating arrangement, and there is an alternative
arrangement called "the Extended Tree" which will require some
more draughtmanship to appreciate. Use the "four circles" method
for drawing a Tree described earlier, and draw four identical
Trees on clear acetate film; an even better method is to draw the
Tree once and photocopy it four times onto acetate - any copy
bureau should be able to do this. Now observe that the Tree
contains two diamond shapes which I will call (incorrectly, as
it happens, but it is a useful convention) "the upper face" and
"the lower face". The upper face is bounded by the sephiroth
Kether, Chokhmah, Binah and Tiphereth; the lower by the sephiroth
Tiphereth, Netzach, Hod and Malkuth. Now take your four identical
transparencies, label them from Atziluth to Assiah, and lay the
lower face of Atziluth over the upper face of Briah, the lower
face of Briah over the upper face of Yetzirah, and the lower face
of Yetzirah over the upper face of Assiah. You should now have a
single, large Tree, some times called "Jacob's Ladder" for
reasons which should be obvious when you look at it.
The Extended Tree makes clear the dynamics of the four worlds,
and is probably the most useful Kabbalistic map you are likely to
find. It provides a map of the four worlds, and a method for
representing the sephirothic correspondences for each world, and
it shows how the worlds overlap and interpenetrate. The
representation of the four worlds on a single Tree (given
previously) is consistent with the Extended Tree, but the
Extended Tree is considerably more useful in that it provides the
Kabbalist with a powerful new map - it is like going from a
large-scale map of a whole country to a series of detailed,
overlapping small-scale maps.
The worlds of overlap are Yetzirah and Briah, and in these worlds
the sephira Hod overlaps the sephira Binah, the sephira Netzach
overlaps the sephira Chokhmah, and the sephira Yesod overlaps
Daath. When one makes the polarity switch from one world to the
next, then one sephira becomes another; for example, Binah in
Assiah, the "Intelligence" of the body, becomes the Hod of
Yetzirah, the capacity for abstraction. The mystery of Daath can
be fathomed by flipping to the world above, where it becomes its
Yesod. The king who wears the crown (Kether) of Assiah becomes
the Sacrificed God of Yetzirah in Tiphereth, and is reborn in the
Malkuth of Briah as the Child.
The four worlds should not be viewed as an arbitrary four-fold
"graduation" of the Tree, with little additional content. There
is a great deal of experiential worth in this scheme, and it
reflects real and important changes in consciousness which can be
observed in practice. This is one of several holistic views of
the Tree that concentrates less on the sephiroth and paths, and
more on its deep structure. I must emphasise that the Extended
Tree is not another piece of pretty Kabbalah for the armchair
Kabbalist to indulge in, and I say this because there is tendency
for many who study Kabbalah to become lost in the pretty
patterns. The Vision of Splendour is the curse of those who like
pretty patterns. To use the Extended Tree effectively it is
necessary to have integrated the model of the sephiroth into
one's internal awareness, and be capable of observing
(relatively) subtle changes in consciousness - it is pointless
having an exceedingly detailed map when one is too short-sighted
to observe the countryside as it passes! For this reason I will
say no more about the extended Tree.
I have stated that the four worlds represented "realms of
consciousness", and in support of this view Kabbalah contains a
view of the soul which integrates with the four worlds. My
interpretation of the word soul is firstly, that it is a vehicle
for a particular kind of consciousness, and secondly, it carries
with it the connotation of individuality or uniqueness, so that I
can imagine my souls as encapsulating, in different realms, that
which is unique to me.
In Kabbalah there are five parts to the soul. The sephira Binah
is the Mother of souls, the letter associated with Binah is He,
and the number associated with He is five. The five souls are:
Yechidah - uniqueness
Chiah - vitality
Neshamah - breath soul proper
Ruach - wind-spirit intellectual spirit
Nephesh - soul vital spirit/soul
The attribution to the four worlds is
Briah - Neshamah
Ruach - Yetzirah
Nephesh - Assiah
The precise difference between Yechidah, Chiah and Neshamah is
unclear; Kaplan gives the following attribution:
Yechidah - Kether
Chiah - Chokhmah
Binah - Neshamah
For practical purposes only the Nephesh, Ruach and Neshamah need
be considered, and the bulk of the discussion will refer to this
trio.
The Nephesh is the animal soul, the "soul of the body". Animals
possess this soul, and as human beings are animals, we share this
inheritance. The Nephesh is concerned with the needs of the body
- hunger, pleasure, rest, sexual satisfaction, social status etc.
In many cultures, if a person is asked where their soul resides,
they will not point to their head: they point to their heart. The
Secret of the Golden Flower provides a description of the animal
soul:
"This heart is dependent on the outside world. If a man does not
eat for one day even, it feels extremely uncomfortable. If it
hears something terrifying, it throbs; if it hears something
enraging it stops; if it is faced with death it becomes sad; if
it sees something beautiful it is dazzled."
Note the close identification with the body and its feelings.
Kabbalists believe the Nephesh comes into being when we are born,
and it decays with the body when we die. According to widespread
belief, women are more attuned to the body soul than men, and the
Nephesh is sometimes depicted as being feminine; whether this is
simply sexual stereotyping must remain an open question. The
Nephesh is associated with Assiah, the world of making, and this
emphasises its close link with the material world, and the body
itself.
The Ruach is the rational soul, and is associated with air or
wind (the word literally means air), and with the world of
Yetzirah. Traditionally, the Ruach was not seen as something that
one was given automatically; in the words of Scholem, it was a
"post-natal increment". It is the case that some people live
almost exclusively according to physical needs, and others spend
a great deal of time finding a rational basis for their
behaviour, but I do not think there is any evidence for a
discontinuity, and I think we must assume that the Ruach is
everywhere present in some measure. What can be said is that a
level of consciousness represented by Ruach exists in varying
degrees from person to person. The Ruach is based on the ability
to create abstract models of the world in conciousness and
reflect on them, so that while a hungry Nephesh might grab a
whole pizza and consume it without a moments thought, the Ruach
might reflect on the activity of pizza-eating in the context of
"Do unto others..." and conclude that sharing it might be a Good
Thing. We see here the basis for morality, the ability to make a
conscious choice between good and evil, and it is here that the
Ruach is elevated above the Nephesh in the eyes of traditional
Kabbalah. This ignores the possibility that the Ruach might well
knock the Nephesh over the head (making an impeccable ethical
case, well argued) and not only grab the whole of the pizza, but
attempt to corner the market in Mozarella.
If we ignore the questionable value of being able to reflect on
the morality of our decisions, we are still left with the ability
to reflect; we have the ability to reflect on ourselves, perhaps
even to reflect ourselves, and create a "self-image". The Nephesh
lacks this ability to reflect upon itself - I have never seen an
adult cat study itself in a mirror. Because the Ruach can reflect
upon itself, and create a self image, it can become an entity in
its own right, perhaps even dissociating itself from the body and
its needs, perhaps even producing someone who feels guilt at
indulging in the "sins of the flesh". We find the "spiritual"
person who cannot accept their physicality and lives in hope of
achieving a mythical dreamland. We have millions of people
reflecting upon themselves and concluding that they are "wrong"
in some way - the wrong shape, the wrong size, the wrong colour,
the wrong age, and other people trying to manipulate our language
to fix a problem that is unlikely ever to go away in a culture
hedged around with so many taboos - sex, death, danger, natural
religious expression, pain. It is unlikely that someone who
thinks they are the wrong size is going to ever feel good about
themselves as long as they view the body as a means to an end, a
vehicle, a carriage which conveys them through life, a fashion
accessory. There are strong taboos connected anything which
points too directly towards our physical and animal nature.
My own view of the Ruach is profoundly negative. Our culture
develops this single aspect of consciousness to such an absurd
degree that the Ruach is incapable of forming a sensible notion
concerning either the Nephesh or Neshamah, and turning its face
away from both the lower and higher worlds, becomes obsessed with
its own creations. The Ruach has a tendency to reduce the body to
an object and often lives a life completely at odds with the
needs of the Nephesh. Where there is a spiritual aspiration, the
Ruach produces a monstrous and bloated reflection, "itself-made-
perfect", and aspires towards this caricature of itself. The
Ruach is a patchwork monster, a grotesque reflection of its
creator, and it lurches about the world trying to make sense of
what is happening, sometimes playing like a child, sometimes
leaving a trail of destruction. It is the king that needs to be
slain, the god that must be sacrificed.
The Neshamah is the Breath of God. In the Bible it states "And
the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed
into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living
soul". The "breath of life" is the Neshamah, and unlike the
Nephesh and the Ruach it is a gift from God, and the source of
our ability to intuit the realm of the divine.
It is difficult to write about the Neshamah. The Ruach tends
to idealise the Neshamah, and in the absence of a genuine contact
projects a distorted reflection of itself. An attempt to describe
the Neshamah encourages the creation of such reflections.
A characteristic of the World of Briah, to which the Neshamah is
attributed, is that it is beyond space and time, and from the
point of view of those living in space and time the Neshamah has
an eternal quality of being...just being. It is the hub around
which the wheel of personality turns. As we live our lives, we
change, but something at the centre of our being does not change.
The magician Aleister Crowley wrote about "True Will", and while
this concept is no easier to grasp than the Neshamah, both refer
to a part of us that exists outside of the ebb and flow of life
in the mundane world. Writing about the three souls, Crowley
comments:
"The Neschamah is that aspiration which in most men is no more
than a void and a voiceless longing. It becomes articulate only
when it compels the Ruach to interpret it. The Nephesch, or
animal soul, is not the body itself; the body is excremental, of
the Qlippoth or shells. The Nephesch is that coherent brute
which animates it, from the reflexes to the highest forms of
conscious activity. These again are only cognizable when they
translate themselves to the Ruach. The Ruach lastly is the
machine of the mind converging on a central consciousness, which
appears to be the ego. The true ego, is however, above Neschamah,
whose occasional messages to the Ruach warn the human ego of the
existence of his superior. Such communications may be welcomed or
resented, encouraged or stifled."
The relationship between the Neshamah and the Holy Guardian Angel
is unclear. What can be said is that in many cases people
approach Neshamah through the medium of an entity which acts as
an intermediary between the Ruach and the Neshamah. There is no
doubt that in many cases the HGA is the Ruach's own idealised
projection, but that does not invalidate the notion that it is
capable of linking the two levels of consciousness. The HGA is
associated with the sephira Tiphereth, the point on the Pillar
of Consciousness where Briah overlaps with Yetzirah.
A discussion of souls carries with it, far more so than any of
the Kabbalalistic framework discussed so far, the temptation to
indulge in metaphysical speculation. Traditional Kabbalah is
filled with this, and there is much speculation on the origin of
souls, the nature of souls, the fate of the soul, reincarnation,
and so on. This traditional material is adequately presented
elsewhere: I feel public speculation on such topics is
counterproductive as it simply provides more material for the
never-ceasing elaborations of the Ruach.
In Kabbalah there is a view that if there is a defect in the
creation, it is a result of separating that which should have
been united. I have made my views on the Ruach clear, that here
is a level of consciousness which has turned inwards and no
longer carries out its task of mediating between higher and
lower. A trace of this attitude can be found in the quotation
from Crowley above, where one can detect a negative attitude
towards both the body and the Nephesh. In the main, Kabbalah has
a very positive attitude towards living in the world; the world,
far from being the "dead matter" of the Neoplatonists, was
infused with the Shekhinah, the indwelling presence of God. In
some traditions one sees people turning away from the world and
mundane life and seeking a "world of the spirit". In Kabbalah the
world and God are two poles of the same thing, and the purpose of
the Kabbalist is to bring God into the world, and take the world
back to God. I say this to emphasise an important point: the
Neshamah is not higher than the Nephesh, the body is not
something divorced from spirit. These are ideas which create the
separation the Kabbalist tries to overcome. The world, the souls,
and god are links in a chain, and there is no higher or lower,
spiritual or mundane - they are all parts of the same thing.
Plotinus, "The
Enneads", Penguin Books 1991
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