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The Lightning Flash visits each of the Sefirot in turn on the involutionary journey
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The Serpent visits each of the Paths in turn on the evolutionary journey |
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As the four Kabbalistic Worlds in turn became manifest during the process of Creation, each already contained within itself the potential of the structure corresponding to the Tree of Life. But in order to become functional it must be suffused with the Divine Essence.
We may envisage the Essence as running down through the various channels and filling the Sefirot, but this is slightly misleading: the Sefirotic construction cannot exist for any meaningful length of time in the absence of the Divine influence, so the Essence descends almost instantly, like a lightning flash.
We can compare this with modern physical theories of the origin of the Universe, in which matter as we understand it appeared a tiny fraction of second after the Big Bang and, within the first second or two of the 20 or 30 billion years of the age of the Universe, atoms of many of the elements that we know today had been formed.
The human soul in its prototype, or rather in its archetype, form, descended through the Paths of the Tree of Life to enter matter and animate mankind. This is the process that is known as involution.
It is in the nature of material existence that it can never be constituted by a single Sefirot alone; the Sefirot represent pure existence, whereas materiality requires a balance between dissimilar energies in order to provide the impulse for constant movement, which is an essential feature of the material world. In the material world nothing is, everything is becoming.
For this reason, the spirtual progress of the human soul on its destined journey to reunite with the Divine takes place via the paths. The sinuous path that this course must follow resembles a snake, hence it is called the Serpent. The imagery is taken up in many sources: the Serpent entwined around a rod, the symbol known as the Caduceus, is a Hermetic emblem representing knowledge and learning. And the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was instrumental in persuading the soul to set out on its journey of evolution back towards God.
