How the original divine germ surrounds itself with more and more shells. Only when man was created did everything become visible in the world.
Heraclitus and the Zohar, the holy book of the Kabbalah
The beginning and the end are shared in the circumference of a circle ― Heraclitus
Heraclitus refers to the Egyptian archetype of a snake, Ouroboros, which bites its tail and forms a perfect circle with its body, representing eternal life. The circle symbolises our life, whose beginning and end meet at the same point; there, life passes into death and death in turn leads to a new birth.
On the one hand, this indicates that we live eternally by slowly dying while at the same time, in turn, new life slowly arises within us. On the other hand, Heraclitus sees the opposites in phenomena and observes how our consciousness experiences death and birth as irreconcilable and final opposites.
The ambivalence lies in the fact that the spiritual soul is enveloped by a corporeality. As a rule, this is where consciousness of the human being lies, and therefore the human being experiences death as incisive and as the opposite of birth. The world in its manifestations is ambiguous and yet it is the outflow of the One. Heraclitus says that when the soul directs itself towards the one inner divine spirit, it learns to understand our mysterious cosmos. There, cosmic fire, the element most similar to the divine spirit rules.
This fire arises and flares up in a play of flames which develops in opposite directions, slowly fading away at the same time as it flares up. Its life is a dying, according to Heraclitus, it is the transient-eternal,[1] the play of form and inner content.
Goethe wrote with this in mind:
Let the beginning merge with the end
Becoming one!
Faster than the objects
Themselves fly you by!
Give thanks that the favour of the Muses
Promises the everlasting:
The substance in thy bosom
And the form in thy spirit.
Does the life of man resemble a pilgrim who, eternally moving in a circle between birth and death, swings back and forth like a pendulum at every point?
Who is this pilgrim and what moves him?
The beginning of the divine creation process
The process of the divine creation of the macrocosm and microcosm is depicted figuratively and vividly in the Zohar (“Book of Divine Splendour”, 13th century), the most widely read book of Jewish mysticism or the Kabbalah [2]. It speaks of the human soul which searches for the riddle of life in a living relationship with the divine spirit.
A decisive role is played here by the relationship between the inner content of life and its living envelopes.
In the beginning – the will of the King left His imprint in the upper space: a light from the dark primordial region, and entered into the hidden sphere from the infinite. […] The hidden one in the hidden sphere, which is of the mystery of the infinite, struck rhythmically and splittingly into His spherical space […], until from the impact of that blow a point flashed, a hidden heavenly one. [… It is called] “Reshit”(beginning) and forms the first of all words, […] Reshit created for Himself a palace of beauty and splendour, therein He sowed the sacred generative seed for the salvation of the world. […] Thus, creatively, through that Reshit the Hidden One was at work, who was not recognised even by the shell [3].
The infinitely hidden emerging from the endless sphere is called Ain Soph in the Kabbalah, the infinite nothingness. As the Ancient One, the All-Holy One, as the unknowable threefold divine spirit, he works with his light (Aur) and is the primordial source of divine creation and all its beings. The primordial source of light springs from the darkness of infinite nothingness. For the human being this means that the divine light is only revealed in the mystery of darkness (the night). It rests in this mystery, so that it shall not be abused. It protects itself by hiding in the tissues of its soul which, in the language of the Zohar find expression in images of covers and shells that take the form of a garment, a cloak or even a palace.
We are all children of the divine light
In the Zohar it says: God said:
Let there be light – and let there be light. […] The first “let there be” refers to this world, the second to the world to come.
It is the light that the All-Holy One created in the primordial beginning: called the light of the primordial source. The All-Holy One showed this light to Primordial Man who therein beheld the beginning up to the end of the world.
The term Primordial Man refers to the first human being, who was once created in the image of God. He was able to see from out of the light. Due to the following developments, however, the light remains […] hidden and preserved until the day of that future world. And that future light must come from the darkness in whose shell it is imprinted.
The Zohar goes on to say:
Light gave rise to day, darkness to night. In this form, God was able to bind them back into a unity, […] so that day and night are called one. […] There is no light but in darkness and no darkness but in light; and although they are distinct in their nature, yet in this way they form a unity: “one day”[4]
So, the creation of the world was accomplished „in seven days“ from the sevenfold divine light. At that time, the All-Holy One placed in the earth the whole army of beings that was to grow. […] Only when man was created did everything become visible in the world.[5].
The Creator created for Himself a palace of divine light for His honour and for the benefit of creation. This pre-existent throne of God contains all forms of creation in an exemplary manner [6].
When man became a visible being, [everything] became visible. But when man fell into sin, everything withdrew from the world and the earth became darkened. [7]
From then on, human consciousness experienced itself as if trapped in a world of opposites of light and darkness, which, according to other traditions, set in motion a cycle of birth and death.
The Parable of the Nut
In the Zohar the structure of divine creation is compared to a nut:
After the primordial light was hidden, the shell for the marrow was created and this shell expanded and brought forth other shells. […] King Solomon […] took a nut and looked at its shells. Then he realised that all those lusts [… of man] correspond to the shells of the nut; they only seek to cling to people and make them unclean. […] But the All-Holy One must nevertheless create everything in the world and thus bring the world to perfection. And everything has a core within, covered by numerous shells. This is how the whole world behaves above and below, from the head, the mystery of the upper point, to the end of all the levels; they are all one clothing upon the other, one core within the other, one shell around the other. [8]
The various souls of man
The image of the nut and the shells covering each other refers to the gradually developing life in the cosmos. And it can also be applied to the „small cosmos“ of man.
The core of creation, which is the unity of the threefold primordial source of divine light (also referred to in esoteric literature as the divine monad), is at work in all developing units of life. Starting from this core, subtle and finally gross material shells gradually unfold around the respective soul monads. The outer, hard shell symbolises the physical body of the human being.
The following diagram, based on the three souls of the human being mentioned in the Zohar may illustrate this:
– Firstly, there is the threefold divine source: Neshamah, the spirit soul, belongs to it, followed by
– the human mental body: Ruach, the thinking soul,
– the astral body: Nephesh, the feeling and desiring soul,
and, on the further steps of solidification:
– the etheric body (vital body): the vitalising soul breath of God and
– the physical body: Guph and his body soul.
In the human process of development, the different bodies build up one after the other from the moment of birth, starting from the physical body. The mental body, which is formed at the beginning of adulthood, is strongly solidified in our time, so that it represents a kind of wall against the higher possibilities of the human being. At the same time, however, a purified mind that is open to the Spirit can open the door for a conscious return to the divine source.
So a twofold process takes place in the growing human being: the shells that build up are a life or birth process, which is usually accompanied by a dying process in relation to the monadic activity.
However, the monad can make itself felt via the latent spirit soul. Through painful experiences, human beings can become aware of their divine source and long for it. They can become pilgrims seeking the way back.
The crucial question is then: How is this way back organised?
Can the personality easily detach itself from its old shells, one by one? Can it slowly die off from this earthly life and emerge from the cycle of birth and death in the midst of the present existence in order to return to the “One”, to the original divine flame of the spiritual cosmic primordial fire of which Heraclitus speaks? And in this process be covered by a „spiritual shell“?
Or do the shells that turn themselves into egos cling too strongly to human beings? Does the mental soul dominate in them and does their mind overshadow the inner longing of their heart? Do they identify with their physical body? Does their sentient soul stubbornly desire earthly pleasure?
The gateway to paradise
When physical death occurs, the deceased sees, as if in a panorama illuminated by divine light, the unfolding of their life, all the way back to their birth.
When man leaves this world and gives an account to his Lord of all he has done in this world, while spirit and body were still united in him, when he then sees what he can see there before entering that other world, then he meets the primordial man, who sits there at the gates of paradise to behold all those who have fulfilled the commandments of their Lord and to rejoice with them. [9]
The deceased can now become aware of the causes that kept them away from the divine source. They can repent and gradually let go of their old ego souls and become “empty” or open to the divine spirit. Then, if they are ready for it, they will receive a “new robe” in which the spirit can be reflected. Or they can choose a new birth in an earthly life. This will be the case if they have not made any preparations for the other path.
The Parable of the Flame
Consider the flame that rises from coal or from a burning lamp. This flame can only rise if it has connected with another, a coarse substance. And note well: In the rising flame there are two kinds of light: one is a white light, the other, which combines with it, black or blue, the one above the other. While the white light rises straight upward, the blue or black one remains below it, for it forms the throne of the white light. This rests on it, so they become united and the dark light bears the glory of the white light as its throne. […] The blue [dark] light unites on two sides, upwards with the white light, downwards with that which enables it to shine. And by connecting with it, it feeds on and also devours its base. What it is connected to and what it rests on, the blue light, it consumes. […] Thus it is the cause of the consumption of everything, the death of everything. [10]
This parable at the end of the Zohar contains an answer to the enigmatic question raised by Heraclitus at the beginning of this text about the unity in the contradictory movement of the cosmic fire.
The black-blue blazing light of the “astral soul”, which is marked by human feelings and desires and lies between the lower dark matter and the upper bright light, sacrifices itself when a human being decides in favour of the path to the origin and the white, radiant light of the spirit soul, which can now flare upwards into its spiritual source. At this moment death and birth meet at the same point on the eternally vibrating circle of the divine-spiritual One.
[1]Heraclitus, Fragmente (Fragments), 1986, Artemis Verlag, Munich and Zurich, pp. 50, 53
[2]Der Sohar. Das heilige Buch der Kabbala (The Zohar. The Holy Book of the Kabbalah), Diederichs Verlag, Munich, 2005
[3]Der Sohar, op. cit. pp. 99 f.
[4] 1.cit. pp. 50 f.
[5] 1.cit. p. 121
[6]Gershom Scholem, Die jüdische Mystik in ihren Hauptströmungen (Jewish Mysticism in Its Main Currents), Suhrkamp, 1980, p.47
[7]Der Sohar, op. cit. p. 121
[8] 1.cit. p. 83
[9] ibid., p. 120
[10] ibid., pp. 304 f.
