To Feel Another World
Spiritual concepts are independent of time, space and motion. That is why we cannot picture them, because everything we feel exists in a framework of time and space, and in some sort of motion. Our universe, for example, exists in a certain space. If we imagine that we take everything out of the universe, what will be left? In spirituality there are no bodies, there is no time, motion or space. That is why there is nothing in common between spirituality and the structure of our nature or our emotion. Can we examine something we cannot feel? Why do Kabbalists say that Kabbalah is a science or a wisdom, if the topic it speaks of is inconceivable to our senses? How can we speak of something we cannot even imagine? How can we understand what is written in the books of Kabbalah, if spirituality is something we cannot begin to imagine, and how Kabbalists nonetheless explain it, and in the terms of this world?
Kabbalists are people who were endowed with the opportunity to feel another world. Only those who see, feel and understand it, are called Kabbalists, because they receive knowledge and sensations from ‘that’ world.
But because we are unable to feel anything that it is outside of time, space and motion, we cannot feel the spiritual world, and therefore we live as blind. It is as though the spiritual world exists without connecting to our emotion. Yet it is here! And although we cannot imagine a timeless, spaceless and motionless world, we must nonetheless accept the fact that those terms do not exist in the spiritual world. But how then can we say anything about the spiritual world? How can a Kabbalist tell us anything about the spiritual world, if it has none of the things we have in our world? After all, we feel our world only through time, space and motion, and all our terms stem from our five senses. This is how we create our vocabulary. We cannot measure our feelings, which are something personal, private, we cannot know if it is good or bad, plenty or little, we measure all that toward ourselves, vis-a-vie our personal desires at the moment of the measurement, denied of any absolute values.
In addition, we know from experience that our feelings can change, and any living creature feels his world differently. I’m stressing ‘his world’ on purpose, because each of us has his own world, and we cannot compare and see how identical our emotions are. All creatures, still, vegetative or animate, feel the world differently. Scientists discovered that each type of animal has its own sense-structure, each species sees a completely different picture of the world. If, for example, we could connect with extra terrestrials, how would we compare our impressions of the world? Our whole discourse is built on what we feel, which already includes our subconscious values of ‘good and bad’ regarding each object. We express something as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on how we feel ourselves. It is enough for our framework; we understand one another.
We can converse only if we feel that the difference of thought and culture, or the way of life, do not exceed the boundaries of some general consensus, based on common senses. But besides those limitations on our senses, because there are personal impressions, even what we can feel is only the figment of our imagination, and there is no way for us to tell how absolute they are.
Our vision, for instance, pictures some affect on our eyes, then this limited and personal impression is overturned in the head, and what we get back from our mind is already felt as something that exists outside of us. This is how we perceive everything that we can see.
All other external impressions are accepted relative to our senses as well, depending on their limitations. We cannot know and feel the outside world within us; only a certain amount of influence on our senses, but this is no more than the reflection of our senses on some of the external factors that they feel. Thus, we realize that we are but a closed box that reacts only to some of the external factors that it feels. We have to understand that our beautiful and rich and creative language describes but a tiny portion of reality, that we are somehow impressed by. But if that is the case, how can we describe in our own language, which is based on individual sensations of our world, the various concepts of the spiritual world. Even if we take the finest word in our world – light – that seems to be closest to spirituality, we will see that it too talks about a corporeal idea such as the light of the sun, or an enlightened mind, that has nothing to do with Godliness.
By the way, light is the most misunderstood phenomenon even in our world, despite all the physical theories. It was the RAMBAM who wrote that our whole universe is below the speed of light, and that above that speed there is another world. In another explanation to that word, we describe it as pleasure, or as the light of the mind. But if I choose my words according to my emotions, and pass them on to another, which in turn interprets them according to his own understanding, how can we compare the sensations we ascribe the very same word? What is the common basis by which we can compare our sensory words? And because we cannot compare our emotions with any accuracy (and who knows if psychology and psychiatry will ever come to that understanding), we are compelled to use terms without first comparing the emotions they bear for us. It is not necessary for my emotions to be the same as yours. What I do awakens something similar in you… and that is the whole language of the Kabbalists.