That’s kind of what Baal HaSulam, in his “Preface to Zohar,” is getting at when he talks about "abstract forms." He's diving deep into how we perceive reality, and specifically, the limitations we face when trying to understand things that are, well, really abstract.
He lays out different modes of perception. We're not going to get into all of them here, but it's this "third mode" that’s got our attention. These are abstract forms, ideas that float around, unattached to anything concrete. And it gets even trickier when we consider abstract forms that haven’t even been "enclothed" in any kind of substance. In other words, ideas that haven't even touched base with reality as we know it.
Think of it like this: imagine trying to understand the color blue if you’ve never seen blue, or any color for that matter. It’s just…an idea. A word. How can you truly know it?
Baal HaSulam is suggesting that trying to grapple with these completely detached abstract concepts might be a bit of a fool's errand. Why? Because they don't intersect with our grasp of reality. They're so far removed from anything we can experience or relate to that attempting to understand them is largely useless. A waste of time, even.
Now, before you think this is some kind of anti-intellectual argument, it’s not. It’s more about focus and practicality. Baal HaSulam isn't saying that abstract thought is bad. He's just pointing out that when those thoughts become completely untethered, when they have absolutely no connection to the manifest world, we run into a problem. We lose our anchor.
It's a reminder that our understanding, as human beings, is always going to be rooted in our experience. We build our knowledge from the ground up, from the tangible to the abstract, not the other way around.
So, what does this mean for us? Maybe it's a call to ground our thinking. To make sure that even when we're exploring the most esoteric ideas, we're always looking for a connection to something real, something we can touch, feel, or at least imagine. Because without that connection, we might just be chasing smoke.