Introduction to the Book of Zohar (PDF) - Kabbalah Media Archive

P R E FAC E T O T H E B O O K O F Z O H A R
ditional sense of perception, comprehension and adaptation to the true
universe.
Therefore, we need to adapt ourselves to the Upper World in order
to take from it what it has to give us. Unless we succeed, we will be lost
in our own illusions and superstitions, failing to establish contact with
the upper level.
To direct us at this contact precisely, to make it not only correct,
but also ultimate in its magnitude, Baal HaSulam provided us with this
Preface. It is similar to a healthy baby that receives nourishment from its
mother and can completely and properly digest it.
The text instructs us how to restrict ourselves (create a “tube”
through which everything will descend to me from the upper level), how
to receive correctly and most efficiently rise to the higher level.
Matter is our will to receive pleasure, the only thing created by the
Creator. Its form is a way of receiving pleasure: “for one’s sake” or “for
the sake of the Creator”.
We should stay within these two categories and avoid abstract
forms of reasoning about egoism and altruism without any connection
with matter, or speculate about the Creator, the essence. However, this
is insufficient, and from Paragraph 22 onwards, we will enter deeper
into these limitations, tuning ourselves up to the wave that “The Zohar”
transmits to us.
We will now discuss two limitations, or, rather, a correct combination,
contact, communication between the upper level that sends me the
light and me.
22. After all that has been said, we are left with describing, with the
help of the Ten Sefirot, all the material images that one encounters in
the Book of Zohar. Such images are upper and lower, rise and fall, diminishing
and expanding, small condition and large one, separation
and unification, numbers and so on – in a word, everything that the
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