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Colin LowGuest WritersArticles by Colin LowNotes on Kabbalahby Colin Low Reprinted with permission. The Tree of Life
At the root of the Kabbalistic view of the world are three
fundamental concepts and they provide a natural place to begin.
The three concepts are force, form and consciousness and these
words are used in an abstract way, as the following examples
illustrate:
- high pressure steam in the cylinder of a steam engine
provides a force. The engine is a form which constrains the
force.
- a river runs downhill under the force of gravity. The
river channel is a form which constrains the water to run in
a well defined path.
- someone wants to get to the centre of a garden maze. The
hedges are a form which constrain that person's ability to
walk as they please.
- a diesel engine provides the force which drives a boat
forwards. A rudder constrains its course to a given
direction.
- a polititian wants to change the law. The legislative
framework of the country is a form which he or she must
follow if the change is to be made legally.
- water sits in a bowl. The force of gravity pulls the water
down. The bowl is a form which gives its shape to the water.
- a stone falls to the ground under the force of gravity.
Its acceleration is constrained to be equal to the force
divided by the mass of the stone.
- I want to win at chess. The force of my desire to win is
constrained within the rules of chess.
- I see something in a shop window and have to have it. I am
constrained by the conditions of sale (do I have enough
money, is it in stock).
- cordite explodes in a gun barrel and provides an explosive
force on a bullet. The gas and the bullet are constrained by
the form of the gun barrel.
- I want to get a passport. The government won't give me one
unless I fill in lots of forms in precisely the right way.
- I want a university degree. The university won't give me
a degree unless I attend certain courses and pass various
assessments.
In all these examples there is something which is causing change
to take place ("a force") and there is something which causes
change to take place in a defined way ("a form"). Without being
too pedantic it is possible to identify two very different types
of example here:
1. examples of natural physical processes (e.g. a falling
stone) where the force is one of the natural forces known to
physics (e.g. gravity) and the form is is some combination
of physical laws which constrain the force to act in a well
defined way.
2. examples of people wanting something, where the force is
some ill-defined concept of "desire", "will", or "drives",
and the form is one of the forms we impose upon ourselves
(the rules of chess, the Law, polite behaviour etc.).
Despite the fact that the two different types of example are
"only metaphorically similar", Kabbalists see no fundamental
distiniction between them. To the Kabbalist there are forces
which cause change in the natural world, and there are
corresponding psychological forces which drive us to change both
the world and ourselves, and whether these forces are natural or
psychological they are rooted in the same place: consciousness.
Similarly, there are forms which the component parts of the
physical world seem to obey (natural laws) and there are
completely arbitrary forms we create as part of the process of
living (the rules of a game, the shape of a mug, the design of an
engine, the syntax of a language) and these forms are also rooted
in the same place: consciousness. It is a Kabbalistic axiom that
there is a prime cause which underpins all the manifestations of
force and form in both the natural and psychological world and
that prime cause I have called consciousness for lack of a better
word.
Consciousness is undefinable. We know that we are conscious
in different ways at different times - sometimes we feel free and
happy, at other times trapped and confused, sometimes angry and
passionate, sometimes cold and restrained - but these words
describe manifestations of consciousness. We can define the
manifestations of consciousness in terms of manifestations of
consciousness, which is about as useful as defining an ocean in
terms of waves and foam. Anyone who attempts to define
consciousness itself tends to come out of the same door as they
went in. We have lots of words for the phenomena of consciousness
- thoughts, feelings, beliefs, desires, emotions, motives and so
on - but few words for the states of consciousness which give
rise to these phenomena, just as we have many words to describe
the surface of a sea, but few words to describe its depths.
Kabbalah provides a vocabulary for states of consciousness
underlying the phenomena, and one of the purposes of these notes
is to explain this vocabulary, not by definition, but mostly by
metaphor and analogy. The only genuine method of understanding
what the vocabulary means is by attaining various states of
consciousness in a predictable and reasonably objective way, and
Kabbalah provides practical methods for doing this.
A fundamental premise of the Kabbalistic model of reality is
that there is a pure, primal, and undefinable state of
consciousness which manifests as an interaction between force and
form. This is virtually the entire guts of the Kabbalistic view
of things, and almost everything I have to say from now on is
based on this trinity of consciousness, force, and form.
Consciousness comes first, but hidden within it is an inherent
duality; there is an energy associated with consciousness which
causes change (force), and there is a capacity within
consciousness to constrain that energy and cause it to manifest
in a well-defined way (form).
First Principle
of
/ Consciousness \
/ \
/ \
Capacity Raw
to take ________________ Energy
Form
Figure 1.
What do we get out of raw energy and an inbuilt capacity for form
and structure? Is there yet another hidden potential within this
trinity waiting to manifest? There is. If modern physics is to be
believed we get matter and the physical world. The cosmological
Big Bang model of raw energy surging out from an infintesimal
point and condensing into basic forms of matter as it cools, then
into stars and galaxies, then planets, and ultimately living
creatures, has many points of similarity with the Kabbalistic
model. In the Big Bang model a soup of energy condenses according
to some yet-to-be-formulated Grand-Universal-Theory into our
physical world. What Kabbalah does suggest (and modern physics
most certainly does not!) is that matter and consciousness are
the same stuff, and differ only in the degree of structure
imposed - matter is consciousness so heavily structured and
constrained that its behaviour becomes describable using the
regular and simple laws of physics. This is shown in Fig. 2. The
primal, first principle of consciousness is synonymous with the
idea of "God".
First Principle
of
/ Consciousness \
/ | \
/ | \
Capacity | Raw
to take _____________ Energy/Force
Form |
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Matter
The World
Figure 2
The glyph in Fig. 2 is the basis for the Tree of Life. The first
principle of consciousness is called Kether, which means Crown.
The raw energy of consciousness is called Chockhmah or Wisdom,
and the capacity to give form to the energy of consciousness is
called Binah, which is sometimes translated as Understanding, and
sometimes as Intelligence. The outcome of the interaction of
force and form, the physical world, called Malkuth or Kingdom.
This quaternery is a Kabbalistic representation of God-the-
Knowable, in the sense that it the most primitive representation
of God we are capable of comprehending; paradoxically, Kabbalah
also contains a notion of God-the-Unknowable which transcends
this glyph, and is called En Soph. There is not much I can say
about En Soph, and what I can say I will postpone for later.
God-the-Knowable has four aspects, two male and two female:
Kether and Chokhmah are both represented as male, and Binah and
Malkuth are represented as female. One of the titles of Chokhmah
is Abba, which means Father, and one of the titles of Binah is
Aima, which means Mother, so you can think of Chokhmah as God-
the-Father, and Binah as God-the-Mother. Malkuth is the
daughter, the female spirit of God-as-Matter, and it would not be
wildly wrong to think of her as Mother Earth. One of the more
pleasant things about Kabbalah is that its symbolism gives equal
place to both male and female.
And what of God-the-Son? Is there also a God-the-Son in
Kabbalah? There is, and this is the point where Kabbalah tackles
the interesting problem of thee and me. The glyph in Fig. 2 is a
model of consciousness, but not of self-consciousness, and self-
consciousness throws an interesting spanner in the works.
The Fall
Self-consciousness is like a mirror in which consciousness
sees itself reflected. Self-consciousness is modelled in Kabbalah
by making a copy of figure 2.
Consciousness
of
/ Consciousness \
/ | \
/ | \
Consciousness | Consciousness
of ________________ of
Form | Energy/Force
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Consciousness
of the
World
Figure 3
Figure 3. is Figure 2. reflected through self-consciousness. The
overall effect of self-consciousness is to add an additional
layer to Figure 2. as follows:
First Principle
of
/ Consciousness \
/ | \
/ | \
Capacity | Raw
to take _____________ Energy/Force
Form |
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Consciousness
of
/ Consciousness \
/ | \
/ | \
Consciousness | Consciousness
of ________________ of
Form | Energy/Force
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Consciousness
of the
World
|
|
|
Matter
The World
Figure 4
Fig. 2 is sometimes called "the Garden of Eden" because it
represents a primal state of consciousness. The effect of self-
consciousness as shown in Fig. 4 is to drive a wedge between the
First Principle of Consciousness (Kether) and that Consciousness
realised as matter and the physical world (Malkuth). This is
called "the Fall", after the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden
of Eden. From a Kabbalistic point of view the story of Eden, with
the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the serpent and the
temptation, and the casting out from the Garden has a great deal
of meaning in terms of understanding the evolution of
consciousness.
Self-consciousness introduces four new states of
consciousness: the Consciousness of Consciousness is called
Tipheret, which means Beauty; the Consciousness of Force/Energy
is called Netzach, which means Victory or Firmness; the
Consciousness of Form is called Hod, which means Splendour or
Glory, and the Consciousness of Matter is called Yesod, which
means Foundation. These four states have readily observable
manifestations, as shown below in Fig. 5:
The Self
Self-Importance
Self-Sacrifice
/ | \
/ | \
/ | \
Language | Emotions
Abstraction_______________Drives
Reason | Feelings
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
\ Perception /
Imagination
Instinct
Reproduction
Figure 5
Figure 4. is almost the complete Tree of Life, but not quite -
there are still two states missing. The inherent capacity of
consciousness to take on structure and objectify itself (Binah,
God-the-Mother) is reflected through self-consciousness as a
perception of the limitedness and boundedness of things. We are
conscious of space and time, yesterday and today, here and there,
you and me, in and out, life and death, whole and broken,
together and apart. We see things as limited and bounded and we
have a perception of form as something "created" and "destroyed".
My car was built a year ago, but it was smashed yesterday. I
wrote an essay, but I lost it when my computer crashed. My granny
is dead. The river changed its course. A law has been repealed. I
broke my coffee mug. The world changes, and what was here
yesterday is not here today. This perception acts like an
"interface" between the quaternary of consciousness which
represents "God", and the quaternary which represents a living
self-conscious being, and two new states are introduced to
represent this interface. The state which represents the creation
of new forms is called Chesed, which means Mercy, and the state
which represents the destruction of forms is called Gevurah,
which means Strength. This is shown in Fig. 6. The
objectification of forms which takes place in a self-conscious
being, and the consequent tendency to view the world in terms of
limitations and dualities (time and space, here and there, you
and me, in and out, God and Man, good and evil...) produces a
barrier to perception which most people rarely overcome, and for
this reason it has come to be called the Abyss. The Abyss is also
marked on Figure 6.
First Principle
of
/ Consciousness \
/ | \
/ | \
Capacity | Raw
to take _____________ Energy/Force
Form | |
|\ | /|
| \ | / |
--------------Abyss---------------
| \ | / |
Destruction | Creation
of_____\_____|_____ /____of
Form \ | / Form
| \ \ | / / |
| \ \ | / / |
| \ Consciousness / |
| of |
| / Consciousness \ |
| / | \ |
|/ | \|
Consciousness | Consciousness
of ________________ of
\ Form | Energy/Force
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ Consciousness /
\ of /
\ the World /
\ /
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Matter
The World
Figure 6
The diagram in Fig. 6 is called the Tree of Life. The
"constructionist" approach I have used to justify its structure
is a little unusual, but the essence of my presentation can be
found in the "Zohar" under the guise of the Macroprosopus and
Microprosopus, although in this form it is not readily accessible
to the average reader. My attempt to show how the Tree of Life
can be derived out of pure consciousness through the interaction
of an abstract notion of force and form was not intended to be a
convincing exercise from an intellectual point of view - the Tree
of Life is primarily a gnostic rather than a rational or
intellectual explanation of consciousness and its interaction
with the physical world.
The Tree is composed of 10 states or sephiroth (sephiroth
plural, sephira singular) and 22 interconnecting paths. The age
of this diagram is unknown: there is enough information in the
13th. century "Sepher ha Zohar" to construct this diagram, and
the doctrine of the sephiroth has been attributed to Isaac the
Blind in the 12th. century, but we have no certain knowledge of
its origin. It probably originated sometime in the interval
between the 6th. and 13th. centuries AD. The origin of the word
"sephira" is unclear - it is almost certainly derived from the
Hebrew word for "number" (SPhR), but it has also been attributed
to the Greek word for "sphere" and even to the Hebrew word for a
sapphire (SPhIR). With a characteristic aptitude for discovering
hidden meanings everywhere, Kabbalists find all three derivations
useful, so take your pick.
In the language of earlier Kabbalistic writers the sephiroth
represented ten primeval emanations of God, ten focii through
which the energy of a hidden, absolute and unknown Godhead (En
Soph) propagated throughout the creation, like white light
passing through a prism. The sephiroth can be interpreted as
aspects of God, as states of consciousness, or as nodes akin to
the Chakras in the occult anatomy of a human being .
I have left out one important detail from the structure of
the Tree. There is an eleventh "something" which is definitely
*not* a sephira, but is often shown on modern representations of
the Tree. The Kabbalistic "explanation" runs as follows: when
Malkuth "fell" out of the Garden of Eden (Fig. 2) it left behind
a "hole" in the fabric of the Tree, and this "hole", located in
the centre of the Abyss, is called Daath, or Knowledge. Daath is
*not* a sephira; it is a hole. This may sound like gobbledy-gook,
and in the sense that it is only a metaphor, it is.
The completed Tree of Life with the Hebrew titles of the
sephiroth is shown below in Fig. 7.
En Soph
/-------------------------\
/ \
( Kether )
/ (Crown) \
/ | \
/ | \
/ | \
Binah | Chokhmah
(Understanding)__________ (Wisdom)
(Intelligence) | |
|\ | /|
| \ Daath / |
| \ (Knowledge) / |
| \ | / |
Gevurah \ | / Chesed
(Strength)\_____|_____/__ (Mercy)
| \ | / (Love)
| \ \ | / / |
| \ \ | / / |
| \ Tipheret / |
| / (Beauty) \ |
| / | \ |
| / | \ |
|/ | \|
Hod | Netzach
(Glory) _______________(Victory)
(Splendour) | (Firmness)
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ Yesod / /
\ (Foundation) /
\ /
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Malkuth
(Kingdom)
Figure 7
From an historical point of view the doctrine of emanations and
the Tree of Life are only one small part of a huge body of
Kabbalistic speculation about the nature of divinity and our part
in creation, but it is the part which has survived. The Tree
continues to be used in the Twentieth Century because it has
proved to be a useful and productive symbol for practices of a
magical, mystical and religious nature. Modern Kabbalah in the
Western Mystery Tradition is largely concerned with the
understanding and practical application of the Tree of Life, and
the following set of notes will list some of the characteristics
of each sephira in more detail so that you will have a "snapshot"
of what each sephira represents before going on to examine the
sephiroth and the "deep structure" of the Tree in more detail.
The Pillars & the Lightning Flash
In Chapter 1. the Tree of Life was derived from three
concepts, or rather one primary concept and two derivative
concepts which are "contained" within it. The primary concept was
called consciousness, and it was said to "contain" within it the
two complementary concepts of force and form. This chapter builds
on the idea by introducing the three Pillars of the Tree, and
uses the Pillars to clarify a process called the Lightning Flash.
The Three Pillars are shown in Figure 8. below.
Pillar Pillar Pillar
of of of
Form Consciousness Force
(Severity) (Mildness) (Mercy)
Kether
/ (Crown) \
/ | \
/ | \
/ | \
Binah | Chokhmah
(Understanding)__________ (Wisdom)
(Intelligence) | |
|\ | /|
| \ Daath / |
| \ (Knowledge) / |
| \ | / |
Gevurah \ | / Chesed
(Strength)\_____|_____/__ (Mercy)
| \ | / (Love)
| \ \ | / / |
| \ \ | / / |
| \ Tipheret / |
| / (Beauty) \ |
| / | \ |
| / | \ |
|/ | \|
Hod | Netzach
(Glory) _______________(Victory)
(Splendour) | (Firmness)
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ | / /
\ \ Yesod / /
\ (Foundation) /
\ /
\ | /
\ | /
\ | /
Malkuth
(Kingdom)
Figure 8
Not surprisingly the three pillars are referred to as the pillars
of consciousness, force and form. The pillar of consciousness
contains the sephiroth Kether, Tiphereth, Yesod and Malkuth; the
pillar of force contains the sephiroth Chokhmah, Chesed and
Netzach; the pillar of form contains the sephiroth Binah, Gevurah
and Hod. In older Kabbalistic texts the pillars are referred to
as the pillars of mildness, mercy and severity, and it is not
immediately obvious how the older jargon relates to the new. To
the medieval Kabbalist (and this is a recurring metaphor in the
Zohar) the creation as an emanation of God is a delicate
*balance* (metheqela) between two opposing tendencies: the mercy
of God, the outflowing, creative, life-giving and sustaining
tendency in God, and the severity or strict judgement of God, the
limiting, defining, life-taking and ultimately wrathful or
destructive tendency in God. The creation is "energised" by these
two tendencies as if stretched between the poles of a battery.
Modern Kabbalah makes a half-hearted attempt to remove the
more obvious anthropomorphisms in the descriptions of "God";
mercy and severity are misleading terms, apt to remind one of a
man with a white beard, and even in medieval times the terms had
distinctly technical meanings as the following quotation shows
[1]:
"It must be remembered that to the Kabbalist, judgement [Din
- judgement, another title of Gevurah] means the imposition
of limits and the correct determination of things. According
to Cordovero the quality of judgement is inherent in
everything insofar as everything wishes to remain what it
is, to stay within its boundaries."
I understand the word "form" in precisely this sense - it is that
which defines *what* a thing is, the structure whereby a given
thing is distinct from every other thing.
As for "consciousness", I use the word "consciousness" in a
sense so abstract that it is virtually meaningless, and according
to whim I use the word God instead, where it is understood that
both words are placeholders for something which is potentially
knowable in the gnostic sense only - consciousness can be
*defined* according to the *forms* it takes, in which case we are
defining the forms, *not* the consciousness. The same
qualification applies to the word "force". My inability to define
two of the three concepts which underpin the structure of the
Tree is a nuisance which is tackled traditionally by the use of
extravagent metaphors, and by elimination ("not this, not
that").
The classification of sephiroth into three pillars is a way
of saying that each sephira in a pillar partakes of a common
quality which is "inherited" in a progressively more developed
and structured form from of the top of a pillar to the bottom.
Tipheret, Yesod and Malkuth all share with Kether the quality of
"consciousness in balance" or "synthesis of opposing qualities",
or but in each case it is expressed differently according to the
increased degree of structure imposed. Likewise, Chokhmah, Chesed
and Netzach share the quality of force or energy or
expansiveness, and Binah, Gevurah and Hod share the quality of
form, definition and limitation. From Kether down to Malkuth,
force and form are combined; the symbolism of the Tree has
something in common with a production line, with molten metal
coming in one end and finished cars coming out the other, and
with that metaphor we are now ready to describe the Lightning
Flash, the process whereby God takes on flesh, the process which
created and sustains the creation.
In the beginning...was Something. Or Nothing. It doesn't
really matter which term we use, as both are equally meaningless
in this context. Nothing is probably the better of the two terms,
because I can use Something in the next paragraph. Kabbalists
call this Nothing "En Soph" which literally means "no end" or
infinity, and understand by this a hidden, unmanifest God-in-
Itself.
Out of this incomprehensible and indescribable Nothing came
Something. Probably more words have been devoted to this moment
than any other in Kabbalah, and it is all too easy to make fun
the effort which has gone into elaborating the indescribable, so
I won't, but in return do not expect me to provide a
justification for why Something came out of Nothing. It just did.
A point crystallised in the En Soph. In some versions of the
story the En Soph "contracted" to "make room" for the creation
(Isaac Luria's theory of Tsimtsum), and this is probably an
important clarification for those who have rubbed noses with the
hidden face of God, but for the purposes of these notes it is
enough that a point crystallised. This point was the crown of
creation, the sephira Kether, and within Kether was contained all
the unrealised potential of the creation.
An aspect of Kether is the raw creative force of God which
blasts into the creation like the blast of hot gas which keeps a
hot air ballon in the air. Kabbalists are quite clear about this;
the creation didn't just happen a long time ago - it is happening
all the time, and without the force to sustain it the creation
would crumple like a balloon. The force-like aspect within Kether
is the sephira Chokhmah and it can be thought of as the will of
God, because without it the creation would cease to *be*. The
whole of creation is maintained by this ravening, primeval desire
to *be*, to become, to exist, to change, to evolve. The
experiential distinction between Kether, the point of emanation,
and Chokhmah, the creative outpouring, is elusive, but some of
the difference is captured in the phrases "I am" and "I
become".
Force by itself achieves nothing; it needs to be contained,
and the balloon analogy is appropriate again. Chokhmah contains
within it the necessity of Binah, the Mother of Form. The person
who taught me Kabbalah (a woman) told me Chokhmah (Abba, the
Father) was God's prick, and Binah (Aima, the mother) was God's
womb, and left me with the picture of one half of God
continuously ejaculating into the other half. The author of the
Zohar also makes frequent use of sexual polarity as a metaphor
to describe the relationship between force and form, or mercy and
severity (although the most vivid sexual metaphors are used for
the marriage of the Microprosopus and his bride, the Queen and
Inferior Mother, the sephira Malkuth).
The sephira Binah is the Mother of Form; form exists within
Binah as a potentiality, not as an actuality, just as a womb
contains the potential of a baby. Without the possibility of
form, no thing would be distinct from any other thing; it would
be impossible to distinguish between things, impossible to have
individuality or identity or change. The Mother of Form
contains the potential of form within her womb and gives birth to
form when a creative impulse crosses the Abyss to the Pillar of
Force and emanates through the sephira Chesed. Again we have the
idea of "becoming", of outflowing creative energy, but at a lower
level. The sephira Chesed is the point at which form becomes
perciptible to the mind as an inspiration, an idea, a vision,
that "Eureka!" moment immediately prior to rushing around
shouting "I've got it! I've got it!" Chesed is that quality of
genuine inspiration, a sense of being "plugged in" which
characterises the visionary leaders who drive the human race
onwards into every new kind of endeavour. It can be for good or
evil; a leader who can tap the petty malice and vindictiveness in
any person and channel it into a vision of a new order and
genocide is just as much a visionary as any other, but the
positive side of Chesed is the humanitarian leader who brings
about genuine improvements to our common life.
No change comes easy; as Cordova points out "everything
wishes to remain what it is". The creation of form is balanced in
the sephira Gevurah by the preservation and destruction of form.
Any impulse of change is channelled through Gevurah, and if it is
not resisted then something will be destroyed. If you want to
make paper you cut down a tree. If you want to abolish slavery
you have to destroy the culture which perpetuates it. If you want
to change someone's mind you have to destroy that person's
beliefs about the matter in question. The sephira Gevurah is the
quality of strict judgement which opposes change, destroys the
unfamiliar, and corresponds in many ways to an immune system
within the body of God.
There has to be a balance between creation and destruction.
Too much change, too many ideas, too many things happening too
quickly can have the quality of chaos (and can literally become
that), whereas too little change, no new ideas, too much form and
structure and protocol can suffocate and stifle. There has to be
a balance which "makes sense" and this "idea of balance" or
"making sense" is expressed in the sephira Tiphereth. It is an
instinctive morality, and it isn't present by default in the
human species. It isn't based on cultural norms; it doesn't have
its roots in upbringing (although it is easily destroyed by it).
Some people have it in a large measure, and some people are (to
all intents and purposes) completely lacking in it. It doesn't
necessarily respect conventional morality: it may laugh in its
face. I can't say what it is in any detail, because it is
peculiar and individual, but those who have it have a natural
quality of integrity, soundness of judgement, an instinctive
sense of rightness, justice and compassion, and a willingness to
fight or suffer in defense of that sense of justice. Tiphereth is
a paradoxical sephira because in many people it is simply not
there. It can be developed, and that is one of the goals of
initiation, but for many people Tiphereth is a room with nothing
in it.
Having passed through Gevurah on the Pillar of Form, and
found its way through the moral filter of Tiphereth, a creative
impulse picks up energy once more on the Pillar of Force via the
Sephira Netzach, where the energy of "becoming" finds its final
expression in the form of "vital urges". Why do we carry on
living? Why bother? What is it that compels us to do things? An
artist may have a vision of a piece of art, but what actually
compels the artist to paint or sculpt or write? Why do we want to
compete and win? Why do we care what happens to others? The
sephira Netzach expresses the basic vital creative urges in a
form we can recognise as drives, feelings and emotions. Netzach
is pre-verbal; ask a child why he wants a toy and the answer will
be
"I just do".
"But why," you ask, wondering why he doesn't want the much
more "sensible" toy you had in mind. "Why don't you want this
one here."
"I just don't. I want this one."
"But what's so good about that one."
"I don't know what to say...I just like it."
This conversation is not fictitious and is quintessentially
Netzach. The structure of the Tree of Life posits that the basic
driving forces which characterise our behaviour are pre-verbal
and non-rational; anyone who has tried to change another person's
basic nature or beliefs through force of rational argument will
know this.
After Netzach we go to the sephira Hod to pick up our last
cargo of Form. Ask a child why they want something and they say
"I just do". Press an adult and you will get an earful of
"reasons". We live in a culture where it is important (often
essential) to give reasons for the things we do, and Hod is the
sephira of form where it is possible to give shape to our wants
in terms of reasons and explanations. Hod is the sephira of
abstraction, reason, logic, language and communication, and a
reflection of the Mother of Form in the human mind. We have a
innate capacity to abstract, to go immediately from the
particular to the general, and we have an innate capacity to
communicate these abstractions using language, and it should be
clear why the alternative translation of Binah is
"intelligence"; Binah is the "intelligence of God", and Hod
underpins what we generally recognise as intelligence in people -
the ability to grasp complex abstractions, reason about them, and
articulate this understanding using some means of communication.
The synthesis of Hod and Netzach on the Pillar of
Consciousness is the sephira Yesod. Yesod is the sephira of
interface, and the comparison with computer peripheral interfaces
is an excellent one. Yesod is sometimes called "the Receptacle of
the Emanations", and it interfaces the emanations of all three
pillars to the sephira Malkuth, and it is through Yesod that the
final abstract form of something is realised in matter. Form in
Yesod is no longer abstract; it is explicit, but not yet
individual - that last quality is reserved for Malkuth alone.
Yesod is like the mold in a bottle factory - the mold is a
realisation of the abstract idea "bottle" in so far as it
expresses the shape of a particular bottle design in every
detail, but it is not itself an individual bottle.
The final step in the process is the sephira Malkuth, where
God becomes flesh, and every abstract form is realised in
actuality, in the "real world". There is much to say about this,
but I will keep it for later.
The process I have described is called the Lightning Flash.
The Lightning Flash runs as follows: Kether, Chokhmah, Binah,
Chesed, Gevurah, Tiphereth, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, Malkuth, and if
you trace the Lighning Flash on a diagram of the Tree you will
see that it has the zig-zag shape of a lightning flash. The
sephiroth are numbered according to their order on the lightning
flash: Kether is 1, Chokhmah is 2, and so on. The "Sepher
Yetzirah" [2] has this to say about the sephiroth:
"When you think of the ten sephiroth cover your heart and
seal the desire of your lips to announce their divinity.
Yoke your mind. Should it escape your grasp, reach out and
bring it back under your control. As it was said, 'And the
living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a
flash of lightning,' in such a manner was the Covenant
created."
The quotation within the quotation comes from Ezekiel 1.14, a
text which inspired a large amount of early Kabbalistic
speculation, and it is probable that the Lightning Flash as
described is one of the earliest components of the idea of
sephirothic emanation.
The Lightning Flash describes the creative process,
beginning with the unknown, unmanifest hidden God, and follows it
through ten distinct stages to a change in the material world. It
can be used to describe *any* change - lighting a match, picking
your nose, walking the dog - and novices are usually set the
exercise of analysing any arbitrarily chosen event in terms of
the Lightning Flash. Because the Lightning Flash can be used to
understand the inner process whereby the material world of the
senses changes and evolves, it is a key to practical magical
work, and because it is intended to account for *all* change it
follows that all change is equally magical, and the word "magic"
is essentially meaningless (but nevertheless useful for
distinguishing between "normal" and "abnormal" states of
consciousness, and the modes of causality which pertain to each).
It also follows that the key to understanding our "spiritual
nature" does not belong in the spiritual empyrean, where it
remains inaccessible, but in *all* the routine and unexciting
little things in life. Everything is is equally "spiritual",
equally "divine", and there is more to be learned from picking
one's nose than there is in a spiritual discipline which puts you
"here" and God "over there". The Lightning Flash ends in Malkuth,
and it can be followed like a thread through the hidden pathways
of creation until one arrives back at the source. The next
chapter will retrace the Lightning Flash by examining the
qualities of each sephira in more detail.
[1] Scholem, Gershom G. "Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism",
Schoken Books 1974
[2] Westcott, W. Wynn, ed. "Sepher Yetzirah". Many reprintings.
The Four Worlds & the Souls
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."
It is interesting to compare the Kabbalistic four worlds with the
neoplatonic scheme of Plotinus [ ], where we find a similar four-
fold division into the One, the Divine Mind, the All-Soul and the
Sensible World. A comparison can also be made with the "celestial
hierarchies" of the gnostic Psuedo-Dionysus, where we find a
super-celestial world of the Nous, the Real; a celestial (and
potentially hostile) world of the demiurge, guardians and
Archons; and the sub-lunary world of the elements. The
Kabbalistic model of four worlds shares with both these
alternative and older views an attempt to bridge the gap between
the perfection of a transcendent Godhead and the finiteness and
imperfection of the material world - it would seem inevitable for
metaphysical speculation to attempt to bridge the gap between the
two extremes.
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
Source: http://digital-brilliance.com/kab/nok/index.htm BOOKS by Colin Low
About the Author
Colin Low was born in Scotland in 1951 and attended 14 schools in Scotland, Nyasaland and Australia. In spite of this erratic education he studied physics at the University of Western Australia and graduated with first class honours in 1972. He went on to study star formation at the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge, UK. His entire professional life has revolved around computers, with four years as a consultant, 9 years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of London, and 13 years as an industrial researcher with Hewlett Packard. He has authored several academic papers and is named as inventor on 27 patents. Colin has three sons, who make him feel outrageously proud. Kabbalah has been a life-long passion. He began to take an interest in
1968, and studied and practiced it informally in a number of small groups
before meeting a teacher in 1978. He studied and worked with her until her
death in the early 90s. More information about the author (and pictures) is available
here: Tree of LifeThe Tree of Life is one of the most familiar of the Sacred Geometry Symbols. The structure of the Tree of Life is connected to the sacred teachings of the Jewish Kabbalah but can be seen in other traditions such as the ancient Egyptian. The Tree of Life is explained in Sefer Yetzira ("Book of Creation").
The book explained the creation as a process involving the 10 divine
numbers (sefirot) of God the Creator and the 22 letters of the Hebrew
alphabet. The 10 sefirot together with the 22 letters constitute the "32
paths of secret wisdom". The Tree of Life pendant forms the key to God's original creation. The
pendant fits exactly to the Seed of Life and the Flower of Life. The Tree of Life is used as a sign of unity and love.
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