What Exists Beyond Matter?
Question: In Kabbalah there are two fundamental concepts: the Creator and the creation. What are they?
Answer: Initially there is a incorporeal, nameless force without any properties that could be defined in any way and that has nothing to do with us.
This force is called “Atzmuto,” which in Hebrew means existing by itself; that is, it is something we do not touch at all and cannot research.
Question: And we will never attain it?
Answer: We cannot say this because we deal only with our own correction. We do not know what we will begin to attain and reveal after we correct ourselves.
Atzmuto gives birth to the quality of bestowal and love. This quality is what we call the Creator. It can be defined only in relation to the creation. There cannot be the Creator without creation and creation without the Creator. They emerge from Atzmuto simultaneously: the light and the desire within it. The desire is called the creation, and the light is called the Creator.
The desire of the Creator is to bestow, to fill, to love. The desire of the creation is to receive, to be loved, to absorb.
Gradually, these two mutually opposite forces begin to develop through the four phases of direct light from which the desire to receive emerges that completes its formation in the last, fourth phase, Malchut.
From Malchut the worlds branch out: Adam Kadmon (the prototype of the future human), Atzilut, Beria, Yetzira, and Assiya. Their purpose is the gradual weakening of the light and the simultaneous development of desire: the less light, the greater the desire. The desire develops all the way to our world by absorbing the light.
In the process of the development of the desire, many different actions take place. When it reaches our level, it breaks, absorbs the light into itself, and begins to develop into a semblance of the light. This is what is happening with us.
The fact is that corporeally, in the form we now perceive ourselves in now, we do not exist. Our world and we ourselves are an illusion in our sensations. We perceive everything only within ourselves.
Question: If we do not exist, then why do we feel each other and the world?
Answer: It is because we have a commonality of sensations through which we can interact with one another.
Very often, we do not understand each other because beside this commonality, we also have individual desires and thoughts. Therefore, we interpret what we perceive differently. But in sensations, we are in agreement with one another.
For example, we have a shared sensation that there is a table in front of us. Such natural agreements are initially embedded in us because we are all built on the same principle.
Question: If there is no corporeal reality, then what does exist?
Answer: Our entire universe, everything around us, and we ourselves are a set of waves. Even physicists agree with this today.
Question: Physicists say that if we look at electrons, we see them as corporeal particles. But if no one is looking at them, they behave like waves. Why is that?
Answer: It is because the waves outside of us are also us. Everything is spoken of and felt only in relation to us. There is nothing that we can perceive outside of ourselves.
Question: Why is this not taught in schools? People would treat each other quite differently.
Answer: When I was a child, we were taught that the universe exists eternally and is infinite in size. Today science refutes this and claims that the universe has existed for fourteen billion years and has definite dimensions. That is, we are constantly developing.
But this knowledge will not change the relationships between people. What difference does it make to a person what scientists say? First and foremost, one thinks about one’s livelihood, health, and diversion. A person is an ordinary animal organism that wants “bread and circuses.”
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From the Kabbalah Lesson 11/10/2017, “Kabbalistic Principles and Their Spiritual Meaning and Application”
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