Sublime

A Key Observation

said:6 “There are those who serve God with their human intellect, and others whose gaze is fixed on Nothing.… He who is granted this supreme experience loses the reality of his intellect, but when he returns from such contemplation to the intellect, he finds it full of divine and inflowing splendor.”

Around this time, Jewish mystics begin to use the metaphor of a journey through mansions as a form of occult visualization. There’s a whole body of Jewish mystical literature from the first century AD (when the Jerusalem Temple was destroyed by the Roman Army), called hekhalot or mansions, in which the mystic imagines an inner temple, and journeys

The compiler of the Yalkut Shim’oni collected in the thirteenth century the old Aggadahs which, as preserved by the Midrashic literature, accompanied the biblical text. In the Yalkut Reubeni, on the other hand, we have a collection of the Aggadic output of the Kabbalists during five centuries.

the error of assuming that kabbalah and Ḥasidism are “one entity expressed in different forms.” In an effort to correct this miscalculation, he explained that the former is the study of esoteric matters by a limited group of people, the elect (yeḥidei segullah) of a given generation, whereas the latter is about publicizing these secrets to afford e

The Four Questions

Just as Jung equates the “inner experience of individuation” with what the mystics name “the experience of God”—the “smallest power” confronting the “greatest power,” the “smallest space” containing the “infinite”—so we can think of Schneerson becoming an “in-dividual,” that is, a “separate, indivisible unity or ‘whole,’”89 the individuated point t

Israel is the model of variety and diversity when it comes to prayer and Jewish community.

This unconscious mass component is opposed to consciousness and the world of culture. It resists conscious development, is irrational and emotional, anti-individual and destructive. It corresponds mythologically to the negative aspect of the Great Mother—it is her murderous accomplice, the adversary and man-slaying boar. This negative, unconscious