As I mentioned in my last post, I've been starting to study Hayim Vital's Shaar HaGilgulim, Gates of Reincarnation. The book explains Isaac Luria's understanding of reincarnation. This is the first in a series of posts outlining the basic concepts of reincarnation as found in this text, and I hope that it will help us to understand the spiritual growth that takes lifetimes to develop.
Vital writes that there are the five names for the soul: Nefesh, Ruah, Nishama, Haya, and Yechida. He introduces them as five aspects of a person's soul, though his language quickly shifts to discuss them as five separate souls. This reflects the paradox within much Kabbalistic thought: God is one yet we discuss the ten sephirot. The soul is one, but it can be talked about as five. My understanding is that God is so indescribably large that the sephirot represent different places where God interfaces with the world. It's like describing the ocean differently as different ports around the world. The clarity of the Mediterranean is the same ocean as the murky depths of Boston harbor, yet swimming in each is a very different experience. In the case of souls, I think it is easier to talk about them as separate souls, but with the understanding that they are really one.
We receive them as we grow older. The first soul received is the Nefesh, which is given when we take our first breath. The second is the Ruah which enters the body at age 13. The third, the Nefesh, enters the body at around age 20. He does not specify when the last two enter the body (at least not yet).
In order for the Ruah and Nishama to enter the body, the person needs to be worthy of them by means of good deeds and following commandments. If a person is not worthy of his next soul when the time comes, he does not receive it in this lifetime. So a person may go though this incarnation with just a Nefesh, or just a nefesh and Ruah but no Nishama.
Each soul has a ladder of spiritual growth which allows him to receive the next soul. If a person completes, or repairs, his nefesh at a point in his lifetime at some point after his 13th year, he must wait until his next incarnation to receive his ruah. Spiritual growth, by design, takes place lifetimes. The same is true of all levels. If a person completes his ruah he needs to be reincarnated again to receive his Nishama. A person is able to climb up within his soul during his lifetime, but not into the next soul. Reincarnation is a necessary part of spiritual growth.
Each of the five names of the soul represents a different soul level that can be reached by completing and repairing each step of each soul. But to merit the next soul, a person must be reincarnated.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
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2 comments:
Sounds like if you miss the train, you have to wait until your next lifetime to try to catch the next one. Kind of frustrating. I believe all of us can develop new abilities or reconnect with our wholeness through our whole lives.
Philosophically speaking, the idea that the soul can have parts is more established in the Western tradition than the idea that God can have parts. Theologians often feel they have to stick up for the singularity of God's essence by rejecting the idea that it has different components, or to take your metaphor, that there can be different territories within God's beingness. I like your approach better -- question though, are all of God's power, goodness, and knowledge in all of his parts? How are these different parts of God connected and informed by each other?
Vital hints that there are ways to move soul levels within a lifetime though the "normal" way of doing it is as I described. I don't think a person would hit an end point of their spiritual development, only that reincarnation is part of the process.
In answer to your question: God is one and only appears to us, in our limited perspective, as manifesting differently in different situations. So yes, all of God's power is everywhere in God. There are no "parts" to need to communicate.
Kabbalists calls God אין סוף Ein Sof (without end) and I've read an opinion that even that name is incorrect as a name applies boundaries to the thing it names and God has no boundaries. As Lao Tzu might have said: The God that can be named is not the true God.
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