Excerpts and Articles

Excerpts from the Foreword to the Book of Zohar article by Kabbalist Baal HaSulam

34) Let it not surprise you that you find such a conduct in our corporeal perception, too. Take our sense of sight, for example: We see a wide world before us, wondrously filled. But in fact, we see all that only in our own interior. In other words, there is a sort of a photographic machine in our hindbrain, which portrays everything that appears to us and nothing outside of us.

He has made for us there, in our brain, a kind of polished mirror that inverts everything seen there, so we will see it outside our brain, in front of our faces. Yet, what we see outside of us is not a real thing. Nevertheless, we should be so grateful to His Providence for having created that polished mirror in our brains, enabling us to see and perceive everything outside of us, for by this He has given us the power to perceive everything with clear knowledge and attainment, and measure everything from within and from without.

Without it, we would lose most of our perception. The same is true with the Godly will, concerning Godly perceptions. Even though all these changes unfold in the interior of the receiving souls, they nevertheless see it all in the Giver Himself since only in this manner are they awarded all the perceptions and all the pleasantness in the thought of creation.

You can also deduce this from the above parable. Even though we see everything as being in front of us, every reasonable person knows for certain that all that we see is only in our own brains.

So are the souls: Although they see all the images in the Giver, they have no doubt that all those are only in their own interior and not at all in the Giver.