The Kabbalists discuss four worlds, each containing many worlds within them. They are:
World | Meaning | Description | Human Parallel |
---|---|---|---|
Atzilut | Emanation | Divine world containing infinite light. | Mind and Heart |
B’riah | Creation | Initial emergence of substance. | Thought |
Yetzirah | Formation | Substance with form. | Speech |
Assiyah | Action | Pre-physical & physical world. | Action/Sensation |
Where Are the Worlds?
You won’t come across these four worlds via space travel. Neither can you map them along different points in time. Rather, you’ll have to search a different parameter of reality, a third continuum along which they’re distributed.
Think of yourself. While you exist within time and space, there’s another dimension to you with an entire spectrum of depth that you certainly wouldn’t want ignored. That is your psyche and its many strata through which you can travel deeper and deeper. Yet, as deep as you go, you remain just where you are.
You’ll have to search a different parameter of reality, a third continuum along which they’re distributed.For example, you might say at times that you’re holding many thoughts in your mind, yet your brain has not expanded. Or that you are weighed down by many emotions in your heart, yet you are no heavier for all their weight.
Or that you’re digging deeper into yourself to find where these feelings are coming from. Or reaching further into your thoughts. And yet, all these thoughts and emotions occupy the same space and coincide in the same moments of time. Apparently, we all agree that there’s more to existence than time and space.
Within this third continuum, the universe also has a kind of psyche of its own. That makes sense. If we tiny instances of the universe include a third non-spatial, non-temporal continuum, shouldn’t the universe itself include an inconceivably greater one?
It does. Within any moment of time, in any particular place, endless strata of worlds share the same reality. And they fall into these four general categories.
Many Worlds for Many Perceptions
What is a world, after all?
Biologists speak of the idea of the umwelt--that each creature has its own particular world according to the means by which it perceives its surroundings.
If you have a pet dog, you may have realized that it does not live in the same world as you. When your dog growls in its sleep, it’s probably dreaming about odors.
That’s principally how a dog knows its world. It identifies people, animals, and objects with its perpetually sniffing nose. For you, a walk in the park is an opportunity to see pleasant sights and get fresh air. For a dog, more than anything else, it’s an opportunity to explore new smells.
If you have a pet dog, you may have realized that it does not live in the same world as you.You live in a world constructed principally of the things you see and hear. It’s also a world where each thing has a name and a function, because so much of your life is shaped by language. Indeed, once you learned to think with words, the world of pure sensation was almost entirely lost to you. When you dream, you dream about sights, sounds, and spoken words.
If you were a bat, your world would be almost entirely about sounds. Your concept of space would be fundamentally different, since your brain processes such things not through sight, but sonar echolocation. Even the size of a thing is measured in your world by the echo it provides.
Time also strokes differently for different creatures, slower for some, faster for others. A dragonfly’s world runs at one-fifth the speed of yours. Watching a movie, it would see a slideshow.
If you were an electric eel, your world would be principally about electrical impedance. Materials that conduct electricity well would be transparent, those that are resistant would be opaque. Salt water would be clear. Fresh water would be murky.
If you were a tick, in place of the warmth of the sun and a cool breeze, your world would be dominated by the radiant warmth of the closest mammal. The aroma that guides your life would be that of the butyric acid of mammal perspiration. And the most significant landmark of your environment would be not a tree or a mountain but the stroke of a hair upon an animal’s hide.
Not because you don’t care about the sun, the sky, the trees, and the earth. They simply do not exist in your world.
All these umwelten, these worlds, reside within the realm of physical sensation. But let’s say you were an angel. Maimonides describes angels as intellects without bodies.1 The Kabbalists disagree. Angels have bodies, just that their bodies are not of anything we would call physical.2
Matter as we know it is not real for an angel. Only ideas are real. In the world of ideas, time and space have very different sorts of boundaries. Ideas overlap, merge and move about in entirely different ways.
Matter as we know it is not real for an angel. Only ideas are real.Our world, to such ethereal beings, could be quite puzzling, even impossible for them to understand--just as it is impossible for us to imagine what it is like to live in the world of the dog, the bat, the eel, or the tick. But much more so.
The angel’s umwelt is a different category of world altogether. And beyond the angel’s sort of world is yet a higher form with yet more ethereal beings, removed from the angel’s world as much as the angel is removed from ours. And so the spectrum of worlds extends, higher and yet higher.
Yet, all these creatures share a single reality. All their worlds are governed by the same patterns and rules—even the worlds of the angels and beyond (albeit in a more abstract form, as we’ll get to later). Each creature affirms in its unique way that a single reality lies beneath everything experienced by all of us.
So is that shared reality the real world? It would be, except that a common reality that all share but none experience can hardly be called a world. The only one who knows that reality from the inside is its Creator.
The four worlds, then, actually delineate four degrees of perception.A world, it turns out, is very much an artifact of subjective perception.3 Someone with acutely refined senses can experience a higher world–as was the case with the ancient prophets, as well as with many of the great tzadikim of later times. And when something has become imperceptible in one world, it has left that world, perhaps to appear in another world.
The four worlds, then, actually delineate four degrees of perception.
The Four Worlds Within You
This would be very difficult for us to grasp were it not that our own psyches also contain multiple strata of realities. At times, we live in our thoughts, at other times in our words, and at times, just within the sensations of the physical world.
Try taking a virtual trip through those strata of perception.
You’re strolling through a park, talking with a friend. Your friend asks you a question. It’s an important question, perhaps about a decision you made in the distant past and why you felt you needed to do what you did. It’s something you never quite figured out yourself.
You fall deep into thought, pondering the answer. The world around you vanishes. For a moment, you don’t know how long, you stand still, immersed in a world where events that span many decades in places distant from one another merge into a single frame. You are no longer in the park. You are reliving the emotions and the thoughts you felt at those times.
You just slipped into your own personal world of thought.
But eventually you need to tear yourself away from there and descend into the world of speech so you can respond to your friend. Which you do quite well. You articulate that vision of yours as best you can, all that you perceived of those feelings and notions.
You’re never going to be satisfied with your articulation. An entire book of the choicest of words will never be able to represent the richness and intimacy of your world of thought. But you descend there, nevertheless, flattening that world into words and phrases in careful sequence–because if you would speak everything out at once the way it just appeared to you, your friend would be completely lost.
You just slipped down into your world of speech.
And now the two of you trudge onward along the park’s path. You feel the crackling of dry autumn leaves beneath your feet. You become once again aware of the crisp, cold air as the daylight begins to dim, the shadows lengthen, and colors fade into darkness. Your legs begin to tire. You have returned to your world of sensations and physical activity.
Of course, all this time you never really left. Your words were transmitted via pressure waves in the gaseous atmosphere. Even your thoughts were limited to representations within space, time, and matter as you perceive them. You’re stuck down in the world of physical sensation even as you escape into the rarified atmosphere of your mind.
But at least you have a model within you. The world of language, and especially the world of thought, are your gateways to comprehend the invisible macrocosmos you inhabit.
The Four Worlds You Are Within
Solomon wrote that G‑d placed the entire world within the human heart.4 Your psyche is a microcosmos of the universe. You and all other creatures reside within the thoughts, words, and actions of a Greater Mind.5
Of course, divine thoughts are not human thoughts. They hardly are the same thing at all.
You think about things that you have seen or heard. You can imagine a pink flamingo standing on a grey elephant, or a pink elephant standing on a grey flamingo. But with the wildest imagination, you could never imagine a color you’ve never seen or a sound you’ve never heard.
With the wildest imagination, you could never imagine a color you’ve never seen or a sound you’ve never heard.Before G‑d thinks of an animal, there are no animals to think about. He comes up with colors, light and darkness, time and space entirely out of nowhere. Before He begins, there is nothing at all to think about other than His own existence. He thinks not about what is, but about what He desires should be.
The same with divine speech. You can tell a great story, but if it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen. You can develop your characters so artfully that your audience feels like they met these guys, but none of those characters will leap out of your mind, turn around, and shake your hand for creating them.
G‑d, on the other hand, says, “Let there be light! Let there be a world!” and a world exists as though it always was.
Nevertheless, there are parallels between our thoughts, our words, our actions, and G‑d’s. And those parallels allow us insight into worlds entirely beyond us.
At the top of the hierarchy is the World of Atzilut, so let’s start there.
Atzilut: A Divine World
Atzilut also has a parallel in the human psyche. Beneath your actions, your words, and your thoughts, there lies you, the person who thinks those thoughts, speaks those words, and performs those actions. What drives all of these? Your mind and heart. So too, the world of Atzilut can be thought of as the Divine Mind from which all things are conceived.
As much as your thoughts churn and buzz, your inner self doesn’t change much. Beneath all the swings of mood and tempo, you remain the same you. That provides an inkling of a notion of what Atzilut is all about.
Atzilut is beyond change. It can hardly be said to have time and space at all, other than in a very abstract sense. Think of how time and space can be represented by horizontal and vertical coordinates on a graph. Or how you can hold them as raw concepts in your mind. There’s an order to things, but they’re there all at once. Things can be in different spaces, but as a single whole.
As much as your thoughts churn and buzz, your inner self doesn’t change much. Beneath all the swings of mood and tempo, you remain the same you.That’s why Atzilut is also called a world of oneness. Nothing has yet been created. The elements necessary to construct a world are there in latent potential, like a seed under the ground yet to emerge. Everything that ever will be exists there as a single whole.
In that way, Atzilut is not truly a world. It is an intermediary stage between infinite, unbounded light and finite, defined creations. It is called, quite paradoxically, the place where infinity ends and the possibility for the finite begins.6
Perhaps it can be called the proto-world. Or you could think of it as the inaccessible reality that underlies all worlds. It is the Creator imagining, so to speak, what it is like to be confined within a world. And yet, nothing confines Him there whatsoever. Even as He pervades this world and breathes life into it, He remains entirely beyond it all.
B’riah: A World of Creation
But then comes B’riah, the World of Thought.
Thoughts are amazing. Not intelligence or raw intellect, but the articulate words and imagery that chatter busily in your mind. They are the landscape of your consciousness. You observe them and know who you are, what you are thinking, and how you feel.
Your thoughts are you, but they are not you. They are articulations of what’s going on inside you. And that is what is so amazing. Because there are no words inside you. There is emotion. There is intelligence. But words—where did they come from?
Conjuring up those thoughts in your mind is by far the most creative thing you do. It’s the closest you come to creating something from nothing. And in this way, your inner world of thought provides a window upon the first iteration of creation, the world of B’riah.
Imagine yourself as a thought in G‑d’s imagination. You are aware that you are only a fantasy, that you arose out of the void. You perceive your own existence and cannot help but wonder how such a thing is possible. How could anything at all exist?
The world of B’riah is not G‑d, yet in the perception of its denizen, all that really exists there is G‑d.That’s because B’riah is only the very beginning of existence. It is existence without form.
Or think of it this way:
Just as your personal world of thought is a very private space, isolated from all others, so too the world of B’riah is a hidden, private world for its Creator. Your thoughts are not you, but the only one privy to them is you. The world of B’riah is not G‑d, yet in the perception of its denizen, all that really exists there is G‑d.
Yetzirah: A World of Forms
The world of Yetzirah, in stark contrast, is a world similar to your experience of communication with others. Communicating, unlike thinking, is all about “the other.” If you have difficulty acknowledging that those listening to you are not you and may think and feel differently than you, you will have a hard time communicating.
Yetzira means “formation.” This is the world in which the substance of existence takes form, occupies its own space, and thereby emerges from the subliminal into the revealed. Yetzira, then, is the first instance of a world that leaves room for its creatures to feel their own space and existence.
This is the world in which the substance of existence takes form, occupies its own space, and thereby emerges from the subliminal into the revealed.And yet, in Yetzirah, time and space still do not have the sharp definition with which we physical creatures are familiar. Just as the meanings of words overlap, bend, and change according to context, so the granules of time and space in this world blend and blur together with fluidity. In any one moment of Yetzirah, it is said, its denizens can perceive some fifteen years of earth-time.7
So, if you were a creature of the world of Yetzirah, you would have a much stronger sense of “yes, I exist” than you would in B’riah. But on the other hand, you would feel that you are but an expression of something beyond you, just as words express the mind and heart of the person who speaks them. You would be sharply aware of a transcendent Being that imbues you with life. And you would be perpetually yearning for more of that life-energy.
This is the world of the angels and their songs.8 It is also the world to which most of the prophets ascended to receive their prophecy. Through asceticism and disciplined training, they were able to divest themselves of their physical senses and tune in to a spiritual reality. They could perceive a world where divine decrees may be heard before they come to materialize here below.
To an angel, a thought is as loud and real as a spoken word. The prophets, in their ascent to this world, reported hearing the tumultuous songs of the angels. Indeed, to one with such fine senses, the thoughts of human beings ring much louder.9
Assiyah: An Actual World
The world of Assiyah is the universe we perceive with our physical senses and devices. It’s the world where the Creator is most hidden, as though this world is here just because it is here and always was here. Not because it says something or means something, but just because it is. Indeed, most denizens of this world are not at all bothered by the question of how they got here or why. We just are.
Assiya means an action, such as throwing a rock, or kicking some pebbles. Thoughts and words carry meaning. An action is just a thing that happened.
If you hear words, you know they came from someone and they carry information. If you see a rock flying through the air, the only information you have is that a rock is flying through the air.
Assiyah is a world where each thing says, “I am here, and where I am, nothing else can be.”Assiyah is also a world of high definition. The fundamental law of Assiyah is: Where one thing is, another cannot be. For one to begin, another must end. Your hand cannot go through the table without at least one of the two breaking. No two things may share the same space in the same moment of time.
Assiyah is a world where each thing says, “I am here, and where I am, nothing else can be.”
Yet it’s to this world that the soul descends to do mitzvahs and learn Torah. Because only here, where divine light is most concealed, are we granted enough of our own space to make our own decisions and employ our own free choice. And only through making those decisions in the darkness, in a place where failure is always a possible outcome, can growth, change, and transformation occur.
That is why all the higher worlds, the many realms within Yetzirah, B’riah, and even Atzilut so much depend on our thoughts, words, and especially our actions down here in the world of Assiyah. In a way, the lowest world is truly the highest.
Beyond Worlds
Beyond all that, the Kabbalist will tell you, lies Infinite Light, unbounded and undefined. No rules, no patterns. Nothing that can be known at all.
And from where does that light emanate? From G‑d Himself.
Where is G‑d?
Everywhere.
As the Zohar repeats again and again, He fills all worlds, He encompasses all worlds, and there is nothing else but Him.
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