Preface
The domestic cat is a curious creature. Anyone who has lived with a cat will have become accustomed to finding the creature on top of the wardrobe, in the attic, beneath the bed, under the floorboards, and inside each and every cardboard box that appears in the home.
Human beings are curious creatures too, every bit as curious as cats, and differ only in being less fascinated by the interiors of empty cardboard boxes. For many people the urge to explore is as vital as eating, drinking and sleeping.
Kabbalah is part of an ancient tradition of exploration. The domain of exploration is the human condition. For some people the experience of living in the world is not enough; because we are self-conscious we can observe ourselves in the process of living, and we can observe ourselves observing ourselves, and immersed in this introspective hall-of-mirrors, people have attempted to find meaning and make of sense of it. Morality, ethics, metaphysics, theology, science and mysticism are consequences of a long tradition that places human existence inside a larger framework. The truth, as Chris Carter observes, is out there.
The urge to explore is as strong today as it ever was. It is an individual impulse that cannot be satisfied gratuitously through books or television. For some people the need to explore the human condition is urgent and instinctive… and personal. It is the personal element that distinguishes received knowledge from first-hand experience, and it is the root of wisdom. Should you live a moral life because you were instructed in morality, or can you find an inner wellspring of morality? Can we ground our lives in a context that is not completely arbitrary? Is there a home for our hearts that does not insult our intelligence?
We live in a deeply confused age. A plethora of full-time professional experts in every subject has disenfranchised the majority of people from genuine inquiry. Pick up a book on any subject, work through its references into the heart of the subject, and you will discover a world of complexity that is utterly intimidating and alienating. There is so much to know.
My primary motivation is to learn at first hand. It is important to learn what other people have learned, but too many people have lived and died for me to learn more than a small fraction of what there is to learn. There is a prodigious supply of information, facts, opinions, theories, suppositions, and doctrines, but the wisdom needed to sort through the mountain of information and disinformation in the hope of finding a gold nugget is not guaranteed.
Kabbalah is part of a long tradition of learning about the human condition that devotes as much time to the heart as to the head. The head can be catered for en-masse—this is what schools and universities do—but the heart is always intensely personal. The head can be taught in lectures and instructed from books, but the heart has to live each experience, many of which may come from outside, but once it experienced, it continues to live inside.
Kabbalah arose from a time when people lived less in their heads. Kabbalah has been practised since Crusaders were riding to the Holy Land in the early Middle Ages, and its underpinnings go back another fifteen hundred years to a time when Rome was a one-chariot town on the banks of the Tiber. There are elements that date from a time when Jews were living in Babylon in the time of the Assyrian kings, and there are borrowings, buried deep within, that go back as far as Sumer and Akkad five thousand years ago.
Kabbalah is capable of touching the soul in a way that very few things can. It contains much that went out of fashion two hundred years ago when it seemed that human reason could provide answers to all meaningful questions. It contains much that has been actively suppressed by established religions - and even Judaism has gone through phases of trying to limit the influence and accessibility of Kabbalah. Kabbalah brings the subjective and personal element back to learning (hence attempts to suppress it). Unlike science, which studies the natural world in a way which factors out the subjectivity of human consciousness, Kabbalah takes ‘consciousness-acting-in-the-world’ to be a primary field of study, and the world of the Kabbalist extends beyond the world of natural science to include a larger world of direct mystical apprehension. It includes God.
From the point of view of Enlightenment rationality, Kabbalah is a reversion to a discredited metaphysical view of existence that projects human values onto a universe that is utterly alien to human values.
The astounding success of modern physical theories, particularly quantum mechanics and general relativity, shows that human beings do indeed have a deep and penetrating understanding of the natural world through the medium of mathematics. We reason about the natural world and create exceedingly complex technologies on the basis of that reasoning. Our minds can function as a simulacrum of the external world. The Kabbalistic doctrine that the human being is a microcosm, a perfect miniature simulation of the world at large, contains more than a grain of truth—it is at the heart of modern epistemology.
What does this book propose to achieve? What are its goals?
If a chemist from the twentieth century could step into a time-machine and go back two-hundred years, he or she would feel a kinship with the chemists of that period. The glass apparatus would be cruder, the chemicals less refined, and there would be considerable differences in terminology, underlying theory, and laboratory procedures, but a chemist today still shares much in common with the chemists of the past. However, despite this kinship, chemists have not been trapped in the past, and the subject as it is studied today is very different from the chemistry of two hundred years ago.
Kabbalah has existed for, at least, nine hundred years, and like any living discipline it has evolved through time, and it continues to evolve. One aspect of this evolution is that it is necessary for living Kabbalists to present what they understand by Kabbalah so that Kabbalah itself continues to live and continues to retain its usefulness to each new generation. If Kabbalists do not do this and become trapped in the past, then it becomes a dead thing, an historical curiosity, as was virtually the case within Judaism by the nineteenth century.
These notes were written with that intention: to present one view of Kabbalah as it is currently practised, so that people who are interested in Kabbalah and want to learn more about it are not limited to texts written hundreds or thousands of years ago, or for that matter, modern texts written about texts written hundreds or thousands of years ago. For this reason these notes acknowledge the past, but they do not defer to it. There are many adequate texts for those who wish to understand Kabbalah as it was practised in the past.
These notes have another purpose. The majority of people who are drawn towards Kabbalah are not historians; they are people who want to know enough about it to decide whether they should use it as part of their own personal exploration into the condition of being human. These notes may be brief, but there is enough information not only to make that decision, but also to move from theory into practice.
I should emphasise that what I present here is one interpretation of Kabbalah out of many. I leave it to others to present their own variants and I make no apology if the material is biased towards a particular point of view. It is easy, when looking at history from a great distance, to see homogeneity where there was none, and when looking at a tradition as long-lived and complex as Kabbalah there is a temptation to over-simplify and create for the modern reader the fiction of an homogeneous, monolithic and internally consistent tradition called ‘The Kabbalah’. There never was such a thing. The variety of viewpoints, interpretations and practices was (and still is) bewildering.
And the title? It comes from the Sepher Yetzirah:
“Ten sephirot of nothingness: Their measure is ten which have no end. A depth of beginning, a depth of end …”