Ever feel like things are just... trickling down? Like some amazing, pure energy is slowly getting diluted as it makes its way into our everyday lives?
That's actually a pretty insightful way to think about Kabbalah, the ancient Jewish mystical tradition.
Specifically, it touches on this idea of how divine abundance, what's called shefa (שֶׁפַע), interacts with our own desires, our own will to receive.
Think of it this way: the more that shefa – this divine flow – gets tangled up with our own self-centered wants, the more it has to "descend." It’s as if it has to become increasingly material and less purely spiritual. It’s a process of gradual embodiment, as the will to receive becomes more and more defined.
This descent isn't a one-time event, but a continuous process, happening from one spiritual level to the next. According to Petichah LeChokhmat HaKabbalah (Introduction to the Wisdom of Kabbalah), the seminal text we're diving into here, this carries on until it lands in the lowest possible place. The place where our desire, our will to receive, becomes completely, undeniably real.
And what is that lowest place?
That, my friends, is the world of Asiya (עֲשִׂיָּה), the World of Actualization. The world we inhabit. The world of action, of doing.
In Asiya, the will to receive shows up as something very tangible: a human body. And the shefa? That manifests as the life force, the vitality that animates that body. The breath in our lungs, the beat of our heart. It's the same for all the other creatures and things in our world too. That rock, that tree, your dog, your neighbor - all vessels containing varying degrees of that divine shefa.
Pretty wild, right?
It makes you think about the nature of desire, doesn't it? And the responsibility that comes with being a vessel for this divine energy. Are we using our "will to receive" in a way that elevates the shefa, or does it just drag it further down?
That's the question I'm left with, anyway. What about you?