The Iceberg

And there was an image over the heads of the creatures, a dome like the awesome ice, stretched over their heads above.
Ezekiel 1:22

Our world is like an iceberg. The iceberg visible to a sailor at sea is just a small portion of the actual iceberg, while 90% of the iceberg lies beneath the surface. Similarly, the physical world that we see is but a small part of God's creation. The major portion of creation – the spiritual realm – is concealed from our everyday vision.

In the physical world, man is able to probe the secrets of nature through the use of technology and scientific observation. The world of microbes, the vastness of space, the depths of the ocean, and the peaks of the highest mountains are all amenable to exploration using appropriate tools and instruments.

But knowledge of the physical world alone does not satisfy us. Man also seeks to understand the divine, and to gain insight into the ways in which God relates to man and thus to find a meaning and a purpose to our existence. Indeed, it is possible for us to probe the depths of the spiritual world and to connect to its essence; but the tools that we must use are not of a physical nature. Rather, they are tools of the spirit, which we may find within our souls, and thus they are harder to use than the physical means by which we approach an understanding of the physical world.

But how can we, who are so rooted in the physical world, hope to understand anything about the spiritual realm, which is so removed from our experience? Fortunately, there are three aspects that facilitate our inquiry.

As the Zohar – the central book of Kabbalah – emphasizes repeatedly, when God created our world, He created it on the same pattern as the world above (the spiritual realm). The world below is thus bound to the world above, and the features of our physical world have their equivalents in the spiritual realm. This analogy of the physical and spiritual realms is one of the factors that enable us to have a measure of understanding of something that is completely removed from our experience.

The second aspect that enables us to connect to the spiritual realm is the human soul. The Zohar discusses three components of the soul: Nefesh, Ru’ach, and Neshama. Of these three components, the Neshama is the divinely-given part of the human soul. The Neshama descends from the world above and comes to inhabit the human body. But even during its sojourn in our physical world, it always remains part of the spiritual realm, maintaining its connection to its source. Thus, the Neshama is the means through which each person can aspire to holiness and can achieve some perception of the upper world.

The third enabler of our understanding of the spiritual realm is the Bible. Throughout the Biblical text, there are many hints to the nature of the spiritual world and to the nature of the interaction of our world with the realm of spirit. But these hints are by no means obvious, and they only become apparent through careful study of the Biblical text and by correlating similar phraseology used in different parts of the Bible.

These, then, are the ways in which we are able to approach an understanding of the spiritual world and how our known world interacts with the spiritual realm.


© Copyright 2009 by Ben Roshgolin. All rights reserved.