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It’s impossible for me to take these names out of context, but the general answer is that they refer to a reality. So the terms are flexible. For example I can be called Gianni, dad, son, teacher, all of them respectful and correct names. Each is appropriate for a different situation. In spirituality, the name is according to the state of the one attaining. There aren’t so many things in spirituality. There’s ten Sefirot. But the Kli changes and so the reality is attained in many different ways, and called by many names.
The writer of that ancient prayer wrote it out of his feeling of the Upper World. It’s an example. That if the options are to live in this world with no way to attain spirituality myself, then it’s better to at least repeat what someone else wrote. At least I’ll think of higher things in that moment. But now that the wisdom of Kabbalah is revealed, I need to use it to come to a prayer that comes out of my heart – and not to repeat the words of others and fantasize that I’m close to such states. The Creator has an x-ray of my heart and I can’t lie. But for me to express what’s in it, corrects me when I turn to Him with it.
As Baal HaSulam writes in The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah the Torah can be written in 4 languages, one of which is the language of Kabbalah. Each is writing about the same Upper World. However, when a person reads the Torah directly, especially without the commentary of Baal HaSulam and Rabash, they aren’t able to only think that this is about spirituality. He quickly starts imagining some historical matters, etc. The Zohar is a bit closer to us, however it’s still a must to read it only with the Ladder commentary of Baal HaSulam. He sort of “spoils” it for us, disallowing us to get lost in fantasies, because he intersperses the translation of what is written in the language of legends, laws, and so on – with the language of Kabbalah. This way, one knows for certain that he doesn’t know what the text is talking about – it’s clearly not from the reality I’m familiar with. This forces me to long for the Upper Light to change me, help me, etc. And this longing is actually the main thing. It’s the only thing I can really do that is near to spirituality.
That you can’t force a person to engage in spiritual matters if they have no desire for spirituality. You need to meet them where they are.
It’s best to take Baal HaSulam’s definitions as-is. Here’s how he defines Surrounding Light:
Ohr Makif: Any Light that is repelled from reception in the Sof of the Partzuf, due to the weakness of the Masach. It surrounds the Partsuf and pressures the Masach in order to be clothed within it in the future.
There’s an episode on physics but we don’t talk about entropy. We can boil it down simply and say that everything we see is a result of the Shattering of the soul of Adam HaRishon. After that, you just have offshoots of this action, which are all the laws of physics. If you want to relate it to the idea of entropy, we can say that what happens to this broken soul is that it’s brokenness gets increasingly revealed. That’s why you have such laws. Detail it as much as you want, but that’s all that’s happening. And there’s nothing to do in the universe besides connect the hearts of people, because all the other inanimate, vegetative, animate parts of reality appear in brokenness because of the brokenness of the connection between the hearts of people. In that shattering, all the distances within the universe are depicted. It’s true, that because this depends on free choice on the part of people, and no other action depends on their free choice, the laws of physics can’t take this free choice into account, nor can they account for the help of the Upper Force that comes in when people exercise this free choice, and therefore it looks like the inevitable state of the system over time is disarray. That’s only because the system is designed to show us more and more our broken state, till we can’t ignore it and can’t tolerate it, and will demand a correction.
