Why One Soul Makes Up Reality
The structure of creation is a lot simpler than we think: Everything happens within one’s soul. The soul feels within it the Creator, itself, and the connection between them.
The soul is the only thing that was ever created, and it is all that exists besides the Creator. That soul doesn’t feel anything outside itself and is only aware of its inner world. It is called Adam or Adam ha Rishon (first man), and it is divided into many parts. Each part is an organ of the body of the first man. The soul is, in fact, the very same will to receive delight and pleasure. Its parts, called “unique souls,” are desires for reception of pleasure.
Why the First Soul Shattered into Many Parts
Each soul contains the 613 desires that the collective soul of the first man had before it sinned and broke into many pieces. In Kabbalah, a sin means receiving pleasure for our own delight, as opposed to receiving to bring contentment to the Creator. That was also the sin of Adam ha Rishon. As a result of his sin, his soul was divided into 600,000 separate parts, which came to be 600,000 individual souls. Each of these 600,000 souls consisted of 613 parts, also called desires. Those desires fell 125 degrees down from their original status, called the “root of the soul.” The last degree to which they fell is called “this world,” and it is the lowest spiritual degree of the soul. From that low state a person must correct his or her soul until it returns to its highest state, to the root of the soul. It must rise through the 125 degrees by a gradual correction of the 613 desires.
What Sin Really Is and How It Relates to the Soul and Freedom of Choice
Adam’s sin is misunderstood by us, as is the case with all the terms that take on a physical meaning in our world. Although the Torah seems to use the language of people, it really speaks of a different matter altogether, not about the issues between people. That is why there are misconceptions in the interpretation of the term sin.
The sin of the first man designates a descent from a spiritual height to the lowest possible degree, so that humanity will be able to start rising to the Creator of its own accord, con- sciously and out of its own free choice.
If we had remained in the state of sensation of the Creator in the upper world, where we were created, we would have had no way of acting independently and would have been under the control of the light like a robot, like a person under the shadow of a great personality. We would have had no freedom of choice and would be completely subject to the influence of the Creator. Hence, only when the Creator detaches Himself completely from humanity, hiding behind every veil, behind all the concealments that separate our world from the spiritual one, do we have real freedom of choice.
That fall from the spiritual world is called “the sin of Adam,” although we now see how compulsory it was.
The Laws that Govern the Soul (Reality)
The structure of creation consists of 613 laws. Each law is a system of correction that applies to each one of the soul’s 613 desires. Some of these laws belong to the management of creation in general, and some belong to the individual system of providence in each and every creature. But without exception, they all operate within the soul, because besides the Creator, the soul is in itself the entire system of creation and reality.
The more one learns about these laws and begins to spiritually execute them, in their corrected form, the closer one comes to the degree of the Creator. That is to say, there is a ladder of 613 rungs that stands between our degree and the degree of the Creator. To climb a rung means to acquire a screen and yet another of the 613 desires of the soul.
Undertaking the Correction of the Soul
After the sin, the vessel (the desire of the first man) kept breaking into smaller and smaller pieces. That is why the Torah speaks of the sin of Cain who killed Abel, which is in fact the next sin, the next breakdown in the vessels of the first man. To complete the correction of the soul, it is necessary to bring the souls further and further down, until they reach the level of our world. For the soul to begin to rise to the degree of the Creator independently, it must be completely detached from Him. It must drop below the degree of Cain and Abel, the generation of the Flood, the Tower of Babel, Sodom, and all the way down to the degree of our corporeal world.
We are at the very bottom of the ladder of degrees. When the soul descends to the degree of our world and is clothed in a body, it is completely detached from the Creator; it has no sensation of Him whatsoever, and then it thinks it is completely free. If we begin to rise from this situation, we will really be correcting everything as a result. That is why the uniform soul of the first man had to be broken: the souls needed to be brought down to the degree of this world to begin the process of rising up again.
“The History and Future of All Souls Explained In a Nutshell” is based on the book, Awakening to Kabbalah: The Guiding Light of Spiritual Fulfillment by Dr. Michael Laitman.
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