THE PYRAMID
Just as it happens in the spiritual worlds, everything in our world evolves along the same five stages from Zero to Four. Our world is built like a pyramid. At the bottom, the beginning of the evolution of this world, there is the still (inanimate) level, made of trillions of …
UP THE LADDER
When Kabbalists talk about spiritually evolving, they talk about climbing up the spiritual ladder. This is why Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag named his commentary on The Book of Zohar, Perush HaSulam (The Ladder Commentary), for which he was named Baal HaSulam (Owner of the Ladder). But if we flip back a …
THE DESIRE FOR SPIRITUALITY
Different Strokes for Different Folks The only difference between people is in the way they want to experience pleasure. The pleasure in itself, however, is amorphous, intangible. But covering it with different “dresses,” or “coatings,” creates an illusion that there are different kinds of pleasure, when in fact there are …
IN A NUTSHELL
The physical world evolves by the same order of degrees as the spiritual world, through a pyramid of desires. In the spiritual world, the desires (still, vegetative, animate, speaking, and spiritual) create the worlds Adam Kadmon, Atzilut, Beria, Yetzira, and Assiya. In the physical world, they create minerals, plants, animals, …
In the beginning of the previous chapter, we wrote that before anything was created, there was the Thought of Creation. This Thought created Phases One through Four of the will to receive, which created the worlds Adam Kadmon through Assiya, which then created the soul of Adam ha Rishon, which broke into the myriad souls we have today.
It’s very important to remember this order of creation because it reminds us that things evolve from above downward, from spiritual to corporeal, and not the other way around. In practical terms, it means that our world is created and governed by the spiritual worlds.
Moreover, there is not a single event in our world that doesn’t happen up there first. And the only difference between our world and the spiritual worlds is that events in the spiritual worlds reflect altruistic intentions, and events in our world reflect egoistic intentions.
Because of this cascading structure of the worlds, our world is called the “world of results” of spiritual processes and occurrences. Whatever we do here has no impact of any kind on the spiritual worlds. Therefore, if we want to change anything in our world, we have to first climb to the spiritual worlds, the “control room” of our world, and affect our world from there.