Forum Replies Created
- Replies
We don’t need to deal with His Essence, and we can’t.
We need to reach Equivalence of Form with our first spiritual degree – the minimal equivalence in which He can be revealed. then, we will attain one of His names (but not His essence, and many degrees of further equivalence with Him stand before us, before that, anyway).
We attain Him only by way of “by Your actions, we know You,” meaning through Equivalence of Form. But just because we reach this, doesn’t mean He stops being the Creator or that we become the Creator. No. He remains the Creator, we remain the Created Being, who was created to reach equivalence, called adhesion, with the Creator.
It’s simply that this doesn’t speak about His Essence nor does anything else in the wisdom of Kabbalah, except when they mention Atzmuto (His essence), which they only bring up here and there to explain that they’re never going to talk about that, so if it seems that they are, be assured that they are not. They only speak of the names of the Creator, meaning the forms in which we attain Him.
Faith Above Reason is a force of bestowal. The other two just need to be explained, because you understand those states from experience, while Faith Above Reason can’t be explained because it’s beyond one’s experience in this world.
Faith is used in several ways in Kabbalah. There is faith below reason, which is the ordinary religious definition: I believe because it’s what I was told. It’s not that I was told by someone who knows from their experience. There is also faith in the sages, which is that I follow the experience of one who personally attained the Creator. And finally there is faith above reason, which is bestowal that is called above reason because I attain bestowal above my quality of reception, called reason.
