Qabalah

 

Qabalah is a system of mysticism, an intricate model of the operations of reality and Consciousness.

Qabalah posits that all consciousness, and indeed all everything, manifests from a single, unified, ultimate Consciousness (i.e., God). The whole universe and everything that happens in it – including all of the living beings in the universe and all the activities of those beings’ minds – is this Consciousness acting upon itself, talking to itself, dancing with itself.

In order to be able to dance, in order to be able to relate to itself, Consciousness must manifest Form; it must act upon itself to form the various structures and systems that make up Life, the Universe, and Everything. These structures and systems serve as the media of the dance, and some of these systems (e.g., people) serve as vessels for Consciousness. When a spark of universal Consciousness (i.e., a soul) mediates itself through a system such as a human being, it manifests as a discrete locus of subjective experience – in other words, it experiences itself as an individual consciousness interacting with a reality that seems to be separate from itself and that it can perceive only from a subjective viewpoint delimited by the capacities of the system that serves as its vessel.

So Qabalah is a model of reality as a system of forms (systems that act as vessels) and forces (the energies which animate systems – all such energies derive from the primal energy of universal Consciousness, but become differentiated from it and take on different qualities as a result of the process of being mediated through forms).

That sounds kind of esoteric, but it’s easily understood when one looks at a simple example: a human being. A human being is a form, a system that acts as a vessel. A human being is a vessel for a soul, which is a spark of the seminal force of universal Consciousness. Mediated through the form of a human being, the soul, like a beam of light refracted through a prism into various colors, is refracted into the various forces which animate its human vessel: the life force, encoded into the DNA, which manifests in all the instincts and processes that keep the body alive; the conscious mind; and the spirit that impels one to create, to love, to follow some calling, or to seek a deeper sense of connection with universal Consciousness.