Me And The General Soul

Question: On one hand, we are all one soul connected into one body. On the other hand, who am I with my personal character, my tastes, and my habits? Don’t I exist?

Answer: Now, you only exist in the corporeal sense like any corporeal body in our world. If you want to know your real form, you have to rise to a higher level where you exist in your real form, where your spirit is, not your corporeal body.

If you attain it, you will attain the upper world, a new level of existence where you are connected to everyone, you influence everyone and everyone influences you, feelings and thoughts, in positive mutual influence on each other.

There you exist positively influencing all of the parts of the system that are called the individual souls that are connected into one soul, one system.

Baal HaSulam wrote in the article, “600,000 Souls“: “… there is indeed only one soul in the world, as it is written (Genesis, 2:7), ‘and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.’ The same soul exists in all the children of Israel, complete in each and every one, as inAdam haRishon, since the spiritual is indivisible and cannot be cut—which is rather a trait of corporeal things.

“Yet, saying that there are 600,000 souls and sparks of souls appears as though it is divided by the force of the body of each person. In other words, first, the body divides and completely denies him of the radiance of the soul, and by the force of the Torah and the Mitzva, the body is cleansed, and to the extent of its cleansing, the common soul shines upon him.”

We are in a state in which we all are connected into one soul, and there is nothing other than that soul. However, this is on condition that we feel this one soul, the connection between us. We exist in this connection, but we don’t feel it because everyone hates the other and is repulsed by them.

Therefore, instead of one soul that connects us into one, in which we feel a perfect eternal life, we feel something else that is opposite to that: our world. The word “world”(Olam) stems from the Hebrew word “concealed” (Alama).

It is as if we are in a state of concealment, in the dark, and it seems that we exist in a corporeal world in which there are the inanimate, vegetative, and animate levels of nature, and human beings, and we are in a continuous struggle with one another. But this is only how it seems to us.

This is called the “dream” world, our world, in which instead of one soul, we feel that we are in an imaginary world that appears before us now. And this is all because between us rule the evil forces in the form of our desires, attitudes, and relationships.

To the extent we return to good relations between us, we will discover that this world doesn’t exist and that this is all one soul, and we are in it in a perfect eternal state.
[170736]
From the Israeli Radio Program 103FM 11/18/15