Chapter 6

Our Bodies Don’t Have Souls; Our Souls Have Bodies

In This Chapter

Situating souls and bodies

Navigating the four worlds that Kabbalists live in simultaneously

Exploring the five levels of the human soul

Some people think that humans are just bodies; human bodies are born, they live, and they die. Some people say that humans are bodies alright — but they’re bodies that have souls. Kabbalists reject both ideas and say that humans aren’t bodies with souls, they’re souls that have bodies.

What’s the difference between a body with a soul and a soul with a body? Kabbalists believe that, contrary to what humans see on the outside, human souls are much greater than human bodies. Most important is the Kabbalistic view that that our bodies are temporary; our souls are eternal. The world that we see with our eyes and perceive with our senses is only part of creation. To be a Kabbalist is to train your senses to remember how much more you are than just your body.

Kabbalists know that their souls exist, they existed before the body they now have, and they’ll exist after this current body is used up. The soul behaves in certain ways, is nourished by certain things, and must learn how to get along with its partner and instrument, the body. In this chapter, I look at the soul, how it functions, how to take care of it, and what its job is in Kabbalistic terms.

According to Kabbalistic tradition, human beings aren’t just the result of two parents but rather are the product of a partnership of three. The mother and father give the baby its physical being, and God gives the baby its spiritual aspect. This idea, by the way, is alluded to in the opening chapters of the Torah, in the book of Genesis, where the description of the creation of man includes the image of God breathing into Adam’s nostrils. The great sages throughout the generations have understood this divine breath to be the soul, or the spiritual aspect of the person. The two parents are responsible, however, for both a child’s physical and spiritual nourishment. Just as it’s important to treat your body right, your soul also needs care and attention. When a Kabbalist realizes that he or she is more soul than body, the attention focused on the soul grows in intensity.

A Spark of God in Everyone

Kabbalists believe that bodies are physical aspects and souls are spiritual aspects, and as such, bodies are temporary, and souls are eternal.

The idea that souls exist prior to birth and will also exist after death is a fundamental element of the Kabbalistic notion of the soul. According to Kabbalah, when God sends a soul into the world, God in a sense “houses” the soul in a body. The body is the instrument of the soul, and the soul uses the body during its incarnation and lifetime.

When the body is used up, so to speak, it’s buried in the ground, and the soul continues on its way (see Chapter 7). Although tradition speaks of all creation being a manifestation of God, the soul in its deepest aspect is God Himself. In a sense, the world is generally considered something other than God, but the deepest part of the soul is part of God.

Kabbalistic tradition also carries the idea that, in its essence, the soul has the potential for some of the actual capacity of God. This capacity is the ability to move, to choose, to build, and to destroy — essentially, the capacity to create.

Getting to the Soul of the Matter

To begin the process of understanding the human soul, you need to understand three foundational ideas about the soul:

The soul is ultimately beyond human understanding.

Each human soul is really a fragment or a part of a single soul that’s made up of the sum of all souls.

Although all souls are part of one general human soul, each fragment is unique and irreplaceable and works with all the other souls to become itself.

The soul? It’s beyond me

Of absolute and fundamental importance to understanding the soul is recognizing that, ultimately, grasping the true nature of the soul is absolutely and categorically impossible. Although there’s much that people can say about the soul, and although many great sages have speculated on the way of the soul, the soul is one of those divinely created entities that’s simply beyond human comprehension.

It’s vital that the student of Kabbalah acknowledge at the outset that full comprehension of the soul is, by definition, impossible. Remember, however, that, many times in the study of Kabbalah, the acknowledgment of the impossibility of grasping a subject is a paradoxically giant step in the direction of understanding that very same impossible-to-comprehend subject.

We’re all part of one great soul

In Kabbalah, human beings are part of one great soul that exists in the world. On the most fundamental level, there’s only one soul in the world, and each individual soul is a part of that greater soul. That’s not to say that humans shouldn’t also see themselves as halves of the souls they create with their spouses. And the concept of a great soul doesn’t interfere with the idea of various levels or parts of the individual soul that I talk about in this chapter.

Many Kabbalists have attempted to describe the soul in terms of light. God’s divine light shines outward, and one of the rays of light that comes out of God is the one great soul. Kabbalah teachers often suggest this means that every soul is a fragment of the divine light. The soul is a spark of the Divine, and part of its task in the world is to experience and live from the humility of being but a piece of the one soul.

We’re all unique, though, too

Also fundamental to the Kabbalistic view of the human soul is the basic idea that no two souls are the same. Every soul has its own function and its own path. Every soul has its own capacity, and nobody can replace another soul.

A basic principle in Judaism and Kabbalistic tradition is the profound regard for human life and the view that each person is irreplaceable. In fact, Kabbalists teach that each person has a part to play in the perfection of the world and that, even if you can do my part better than I can, my soul must complete it’s journey in this lifetime by doing it’s part. Nobody can replace anyone else.

Kabbalistic tradition also teaches that each individual soul is the result of special and unique combinations of the ten sefirot within that person. Keep in mind that the Tree of Life, the chart of the sefirot, is both the blueprint of the world as well as the blueprint of the structure and components of the soul. Each soul consists of the ten sefirot in various combinations and permutations. Kabbalists believe that the reason people are all different from each other in personality is because each is a unique combination of the sefirot and each soul tends toward certain sefirot more than others. Here are some examples (I cover the ten sefirot in depth in Chapter 4):

Netzach is the sefirah that manifests as the urge to get things done. People wouldn’t be productive without it, but too much Netzach produces a workaholic.

Chochmah is intuition, and Binah is logical analysis. It’s common to find that some people make decisions based on the feel of a situation while others gather as much information and base their decision on the “facts” they’ve brought together.

Descent for the Sake of Ascension — That’s Life

It has been said that if only the soul were allowed to stay in heaven and bask in the divine light, its experience would be far more pleasant than it is wrapped in a human body and spending a life in the physical world. After all, without a body, the soul is free; it doesn’t get entangled in the temptations of life. But it’s fundamental to Kabbalistic belief that even though the soul’s journey in the world is a great risk and can result in damage of the world and of the soul itself, the risk is worthwhile based on a notion described as a descent for the sake of ascension.

The soul descends into the world because the world gives the soul an opportunity to purify itself and raise itself to a level that it didn’t exist at before it made its descent. This process, which is actually the process by which people come to know God, is the goal of life. The more people purify themselves and raise their spiritual levels, the less of a barrier there is between humans and their perception, experience, and ultimate knowledge of God. According to Kabbalah, God created humans to give them pleasure, and there’s no greater pleasure than to know God. Think of the soul as a roller coaster: The only way a roller coaster can go very high is if it builds momentum by going very low very quickly.

No pain, no gain

No doubt you’ve heard the expression, “No pain, no gain.” When people go to a gym, they usually come out with sore muscles. The sore muscles are actually broken down muscle tissue, but the breaking down of the muscle tissue during exercise leads to a rebuilding of that tissue to be even stronger than it was before.

So it is with the soul, which descends into this world of trials and tribulations and ends up with even greater spiritual achievement than it could have had without the descent. This is one of the secrets of Kabbalah: God gives people trials in life as a way for them to purify themselves and ascend to great heights of spiritual consciousness.

Leaving God only to come back again

Although describing the soul as being housed in the body paints a useful picture, Kabbalistic tradition urges students to attempt to conceive of the soul in slightly different terms.

As one of my teachers says, the soul isn’t caged in the body, and humans shouldn’t conceive of the soul as a point in space. Rather, the soul is a line, like the line of light created by a flashlight or a beacon, and the source of that line of light is God. When the line of light shines on a person, it goes through the person and continues on after passing through the body. In other words, the soul isn’t in one particular point in space because it’s a line of being.

As I mention earlier in this chapter, the soul exists before the body and will exist after the body is long gone. To extend the metaphor even farther, some Kabbalists teach that the soul is a circle. The soul is a manifestation of God that shines outward, picks up a human body, and then continues around the circle back to its source, God.

Introducing the Four Worlds of Kabbalah

Kabbalists view reality as consisting of four fundamental worlds. In Hebrew, the term used is olam (oh-lam ; world). In order to understand the Kabbalistic conception of the soul, which has five levels (see the section, “Going Up? The Soul’s Journey of Five Levels,” later in this chapter), you first have to explore the notion of the four worlds. The four worlds correspond to the first four levels of the soul (the fifth level is the deepest level of the soul, the place where Kabbalists say that the soul is actually a part of God). Humans are a microcosm of the universe; just as the universe consists of four worlds, the human soul has four corresponding levels.

Don’t think of these four worlds as four planets or four galaxies. When Kabbalists speak of “worlds,” they’re not talking about different locations but rather different dimensions of being. These four worlds are four general levels of reality, and Kabbalists conceive of the human consciousness as constantly going up and down and back and forth between worlds.

Following are the four worlds, according to Kabbalistic tradition:

Atzilut (ah-tzee-loot): The world of emanation; the world of the spirit

Beriyah (bree-ah): The world of creation; the world of the intellect, where ideas reside

Yetzirah (yeh-tzeer-ah): The world of formation; the world of emotions

Assiyah (ah-see-yah): The world of action; the concrete, physical world

Each of the four worlds is reflected in each person, who has a spiritual nature, an intellectual nature, an emotional side, and physicality. Each person resides in all four worlds at the same time, but one’s consciousness or focus tends to go back and forth among them. For example, there are times when an individual is mostly feeling something emotionally, and at that moment, his consciousness resides in the world of emotion, which is the world of formation.

Similarly, sometimes a person is actively engaged in thinking, in which case his soul is dwelling in the world of creation. And when a person is ravenously hungry and just gobbled down a plate of food to satisfy a physical hunger, Kabbalisticly, his consciousness is residing mostly in the physical world, in the world of action.

Each of the four worlds is parallel to the others, which makes it easy for one’s consciousness to bounce back and forth from one to the other over the course of each day. Interestingly, the word “parallel” in modern Hebrew comes from the same root as the word for “Kabbalah.”

The progression of the four worlds

A progression exists from atzilut (emanation) to beriah (creation), to yetzirah (formation), and to asiyah (action). One way to imagine this progression is to compare it to a source of light. Imagine God as the source of divine light, with light pouring out of God in all directions. From there, the following happens:

1. In creating the world, God emanates divine light and begins the process of creation. The light emanating from God begins as a boundless emanation until God takes that boundless light and makes something out of it, which is creation.

2. God takes the process of creation a step further by beginning to form whatever it is that God has in mind. The light, therefore, goes from emanation to creation and then to formation. In the formation stage, God refines the creation by beginning form something.

3. The result of creation and then formation is the world or the universe itself.

4. After formation, the process is more or less complete, and the world that God has emanated, created, and formed is able to act or be. This is the world of action.

The world of atzilut (emanation), which is sometimes referred to as nearness to God, is the most abstract of the four worlds, but it’s also considered to be the highest of the four worlds. When Kabbalists use the word “higher” to describe something, they mean that something is closer to God, more abstract, clearer, and more transparent than something that’s lower. Atzilut is the most spiritual of the four worlds, and some Kabbalists go so far as to say that the world of emanation isn’t really a world but is itself God.

Considering the four realms of human existence

Another way of looking at Kabbalah’s four worlds in order to understand them is to relate them to the four realms of human experience: the physical, the emotional, the intellectual, and the spiritual.

Each human being exists simultaneously in these four levels:

Physical: Every person has a physical aspect that includes the body and the physical senses. This aspect corresponds to the world of action, in which the human being acts within the physical world.

Emotional: Every person lives within the world of emotions, which is more spiritual than the physical world. All have within them a wide array of emotions of seemingly infinite gradations. The world of emotions that each person experiences is said to reside in the world of formation.

Intellectual: Every person has an intellectual life that exists above the world of emotions. Just as the world of emotions is not a physical world, so too the world of ideas is an abstract spiritual world.

Spiritual: Above the intellectual world of each human being is the world of emanation. Sometimes this realm isn’t even considered a world; because it’s so abstract and transparent, some consider it to be God Himself.

You can look at the four worlds from either direction or order: from emanation to creation to formation to action, or from action to formation to creation to emanation. Similarly, when speaking of the four levels of worlds in terms of aspects of a person, you can view them from physical to emotional to intellectual to spiritual, or the other way around.

Who inhabits each world?

One of the ways to best understand each of the four words is to see the differences among them, so Kabbalists often speak of the beings that reside in each world and help to distinguish them from each other. To start, humans reside in the world of asiyah (action), and angels reside in the world of yetzirah (formation).

Kabbalists create angels constantly with every thought, deed, and inclination. Within the world of the angels, Kabbalists conceive of both positive and negative angels.

A good deed obviously creates a positive charge in the universe, and a bad deed creates a negative charge. The positive and negative angels attach themselves almost parasitically to the soul. The more positive deeds, the more positive angels are attached to the soul, and the more negative deeds, the more negative angels are attached to the soul. When a person dies and drops his or her body, the soul remains and continues its work but still carries the positive or negative nonphysical essences that the human being created. (See Chapter 8 for more on Kabbalistic angels.)

Beings referred to as seraphs reside in the world of beriah (creation). One way to imagine an intellectual being in the world of ideas is to think of a brainstorming session at a business that depends upon creativity. Two people each express an idea, and those two ideas connect with each other and give birth to a new idea that neither participant would have been able to think of on his or her own.

In the highest world, atzilut (emanation), there are no individual beings at all; it’s a profoundly abstract world filled with clarity and transparency.

Going Up? The Soul’s Journey of Five Levels

Kabbalists conceive of the soul as having five levels. Each level has a name and represents aspects of the divine soul in man. The five levels of the soul are

1. Nefesh (neh-fesh): The lowest and most basic aspect of the soul. Sometimes, the word “nefesh” is used more generally to refer to the soul. Nefesh animates existence and gives the human body its ability to move, its life force, and its ability to reproduce. The level of the soul called nefesh corresponds to the world of action.

People living on the level of nefesh share it with animals. These people simply move, breathe, and are alive.

2. Ruach (roo-akh): The second level of the soul. Ruach is often translated as spirit. The level of the soul called ruach corresponds to the world of formation and emotions.

People living on the level of ruach not only are alive but also experience the range of human emotions including love, compassion, humility, and awe.

3. Neshama (neh-shah-mah): The third level of the soul. The word “neshama” is sometimes used informally to refer to the soul in general, but neshama really refers to the higher soul, corresponding to the world of creation and ideas.

People living on the level of neshama think, meditate on God, and reach for an intellectual grasp of the world and the Divine.

4. Chaya (khah-yah): The fourth level of the soul. The level called chaya corresponds to that which goes on in the spiritual world of emanation.

People living on the level of chaya pierce through the worlds of emotion and ideas and enter spiritual realms that are almost impossible to describe. They begin to grasp spiritual reality and see that they’re far more than bodies that are born, live, and die.

5. Yechida (yeh-khee-dah): The fifth level of the soul. This level is called the most inward point of the divine spark. Kabbalists see yechida as being beyond all the four worlds (see the section “Introducing the Four Worlds of Kabbalah”) and the actual point in which the soul and the Divine make contact.

People living on the level of yechida have reached the point of contact between the soul and God.

Proof of Kabbalah’s ancient tradition

The five levels of the soul are a good example of the fact that Kabbalah is an ancient tradition. Too often, modern scholars think that Kabbalistic tradition began sometime relatively late in Jewish history — some say perhaps in the 1200s while others point to the 1500s.

Of course, they’re wrong. For example, one can see a discussion of the five levels of the soul in the early Rabbinic literature, whose tradition is over 2,000 years old. A Rabbinic commentary on the book of Genesis known as Bereshit Rabbah talks about the Rabbinic conception of God breathing into Adam’s nostrils. This commentary includes reference to these five levels of the soul and represents the fact that the ancient mystical tradition is indeed ancient.

Kabbalists teach that most people go up and down, down and up, from the lowest level of the soul upward toward God. People don’t stay on one level all the time. A person can work hard spiritually and thereby raise his or her consciousness and generally live on one plane of existence. But even that person — and everyone else — has moments of consciousness that are higher and other moments that are lower. The human consciousness never stays in one place. Sometimes one is all wrapped up in his or her emotions, whereas at other times, one’s consciousness resides on the level of ideas. According to Kabbalah, the world of ideas is higher than the world of emotions; emotions should be ruled by ideas, not the other way around.

As a result of great struggle and intense spiritual work, the consciousnesses of rare individuals reside on the level of chaya. Rather than be ruled by their emotions or intellectual ideas, those who are on the level of chaya have a grasp of spiritual reality. A person can’t reside on the level of yechida because it’s the point of intersection of a person and God. Someone fully on the level of yechida is someone who no longer exists and has fully merged into God.

What’s the point of all these levels? Well, the point of the levels is the point of life, and the point of life, according to Kabbalah, is to realize one’s spiritual potential and ultimately connect with the Divine within oneself. In other words, the purpose of life is for one’s soul to perfect itself, and the way to that perfection is to identify with the highest level of consciousness as possible. The soul uses its instrument, the body, to travel up and back among the levels. This constant movement, up and down, back and forth, is the essence of the process of purification and results in greater and greater Da’at, knowledge of God.