When speaking of actualizing the wisdom of Kabbalah, we should take into consideration that our current Gilgul (life cycle) is far from being the first. We have gone through multiple cycles, and nobody knows exactly how many each of us has. It will be revealed to us farther down the road, but frankly, there isn’t much use in reviewing our past incarnations since all of them were at the still, vegetative, or animate levels of the evolution of the will to enjoy.
Based on this, our evolution went on. First, we existed at the still level of development, followed by the vegetative one when we experienced reality like plants do. Further on, each of us evolved at the animate level, perceiving reality similarly to animals.
Thus, we have gone through several lifetimes until, as written in the ARI’s The Tree of Life and Baal HaSulam’s The Study of the Ten Sefirot, Part 3, from the animate level, through the apes (an intermediate level between beast and man), we have finally come to the human level in this world. Humans are also an animate species, but much more advanced than beasts.
At the speaking level of this world, we, too, have undergone many lifetimes until we have reached our present condition. Now, in this incarnation, we are doing a special type of work in order to ascend to a completely new degree and experience a new, spiritual reality: the Creator’s reality.
During any transition from degree to degree and state to state, there are intermediate stages. As the ARI describes, between the still and vegetative levels, there are corals which combine both the still and vegetative characteristics. Between the vegetative and animate levels, there is an intermediate creature, a tiny animal called the “dog of the field” that lives in the ground and feeds off the land like a plant, but whose body acts as a beast. Between an animal and a human, there is the ape, a mammal with rudimentary human characteristics.
At present, we are in transition from a human of this world, who lives just like all the other seven billion people, and something spiritual. We don’t quite know yet what this “spiritual” means, but we are in between.
For the first time, in these transitions that we have undergone from the degrees of still to vegetative, from vegetative to animate, and from animate to speaking (human), unaware of what has been happening to us and living like all people in this world, we now have to make the transition consciously, fully participating in it. It is we who decide whether it will or will not take place, and in what manner. It is only our will that can make it happen.
This evolution is up to us. This transition is extremely unique and unlike any other because it is we who cultivate a human in us, a human identical to the Creator.
Therefore, for the first time in our history, in our entire evolution, the wisdom of Kabbalah is being revealed to us. It is destined to accompany us as an instructional manual, a prime directive, a code of laws, a science, with the help of which we will complete this transition. After all, if we don’t clarify it for ourselves, don’t wish for and don’t study it, we won’t be able to make it.
This is why we are named “Jews” (“Ivrim,” from the Hebrew word “Laavor,” to cross over) since we are crossing over from the state of human of this world to the level of a spiritual human, similar to Adam HaRishon, or the image of the First Man. Eons ago, he seemed to have broken into fragments, and now we have to re-assemble him anew, his male and female parts.
All of this has to be implemented in our collective work. We have all the necessary tools for it, but it is up to us to clarify it all, to learn what we lack in order to become this Human, and actualize it.
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From Lesson 2, Convention at the Arava Desert 12/31/10
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Only when we start assembling the broken pieces of Adam HaRishon (the First Man) into one whole, do we begin to notice how everything that happened to us in this world starts falling into places in some miraculous way. All events, from the very unpleasant to more pleasant ones, important or not, unexplainable and seemingly accidental, become ordered and match the other pieces perfectly, to the smallest detail.
