Читать книгу Edgar Cayce and the Kabbalah - John Van Auken - Страница 14

As physical and earthly as we may feel, Kabbalah teaches that our true nature is not physical. We are beings of mind, soul, and spirit that are only temporarily using a physical body and living in a physical realm. And even while we are here, we live a good portion of our incarnate life beyond the body, as on average we sleep one-third of our incarnation. During sleep the nonphysical portion of our being may reach far beyond this plane of existence. Add to this that the death of the body is not the death of our nonphysical self. A major portion of our being survives death. We live on and may even return to incarnate in a new body—or not. According to Kabbalah and many other schools of thought, there is much activity on planes beyond this physical universe that we are so fully invested in.

Not only is a major portion of our being alive beyond sleep and death, it is amazingly active! We will cover more on this in chapter four.

Over the past many years, books have been published recounting hospital near-death testimonials that have contributed to our understanding of life while the body is dead. Of course, the testimonials come from those whose bodies were resuscitated, but the accounts are amazingly similar to one another. The patients each experienced existence outside their dead bodies and saw imagery of loved ones who had died previously as well as realms of light and activity. Then, when the chemistry, electricity, and physical manipulation were sufficient to revive their bodies, they felt themselves drawn back into their bodies and this world, as if traveling rapidly through a long tunnel. Bang! They awoke on the operating or emergency room table with bright lights glaring at them.

Can we imagine this nonphysical aspect of our being? Can we feel our being without a body? If so, then we are aware of our higher nature, and this is much of what Kabbalah is about.

Ancient and modern philosophies and religions acknowledge various components of our whole being; most common is the simple body, mind, and spirit or soul arrangement. The ancient Egyptians identified five distinguishable parts to us, as does Kabbalah, although most teachers focus on the three aspects that are most present with us now.

These divisions are delineations of a oneness for the benefit of understanding and awareness, not a fixed condition. Oneness is the true, eternal condition; division is a temporary measure for the purpose of assisting us. We are whole, but consciousness and energy may be more focused in certain areas at any given time. Certainly, in this realm, the physical is dominant for most people.

The ancient Bereishit Rabbah (“Great Genesis,” a midrash, or homiletic study, section 14:9, on Genesis) speaks of five levels, or qualities, of our being. A problem occurs in that the five Hebrew words for these divisions are all translated in English as the same word: soul. And it does not help that three of the Hebrew terms are similar in their meaning: breath, wind, and breathing. We simply must understand that the distinctions are subtle, because we are talking about a wholeness of being. Even so, the distinctions are helpful to our understanding.

In a wonderful metaphor and using some of the imagery in the Zohar, Kabbalists Shim’on Lavi (1492–1585, an old guy for those times, ninety-three, although Shim’on Lavi may have actually been a father-and-son team by the same name) and Moshe Cordovero (1522–1570) compared these parts of our being to a glassblower, one who creates a beautiful, projected object by blowing through a pipe with molten glass on the end until the glass object is formed and then cuts the object from the pipe so that it sits on its own. In this metaphor, the glassblower’s essence is our highest level of being, the glassblower is the next level, the breath of the glassblower is the third level, next is the expressed breath of the glassblower through the pipe that forms the glass and, finally, the breath inside the glass object is the last level of our being—it is as the breath inside our physical body, the glass object our physical body.

Let’s begin at the physical level which we know so well and then move to the highest level of our being. The first three parts are the only ones involved with the physical body. These are (1) the Living Being (Nefesh), (2) the Soul Mind (Ruach), and (3) the Soul Being (Neshamah). The higher two levels, (4) the Spirit Mind (Chayah) and (5) the Spirit Being (Yechidah) do not reside in the body. Yes, there is a portion of each of us that has not touched this world or our physical body.