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That is why the Good came to be among you. He came to restore every nature to its basic root. You become sick and die because you did not have access to (knowledge of) Him who can heal you.

The Lord our God is but one only God. Of him, through him, and in him are all things: in another, Am not I he that fills all things? Through his Word are all things made, that are made. He is the original of all things: He is the eternal unmeasurable Unity.

When I think what would be in the place of this world, if the four elements and the starry firmament, and also nature itself, should perish and cease to be, so that no nature or creature were to be found any more; I find there would remain this eternal Unity, from which nature and creature have received their original.

When I think with myself what is many hundredthousand miles above the starry firmament, or what is in that place where no creature is, I find the eternal unchangeable Unity is there, which is that only Good, which has nothing either before or after it, that can add anything to it, or take anything away from it, or from which this Unity could have its original: There is neither ground, time, nor place, but there is the only eternal God, or that only Good, which a man cannot express.

The universe and I came into being together; and I, and everything therein, are One.

The eternal Unity is the cause and ground of the eternal Trinity, which manifests itself from the Unity, and brings forth itself, First, in desire, or will; Secondly, pleasure, or delight; Thirdly, proceeding, or outgoing.

The desire, or will is the Father; that is, the stirring or manifestation of the Unity, whereby the Unity wills or desires itself. The pleasure, or delight is the Son; and is that which the will wills and desires, his love and pleasure.

Thus there are three sorts of workings in the eternal Unity. The Unity is the will and desire of itself: the delight is the working substance of the will, and an eternal joy of perceptibility in the will; and the Holy Ghost is the proceeding of the power.

If there were not such a desiring perceptibility, and outgoing operation of the Trinity in the eternal Unity, the Unity were but an eternal stillness, a Nothing; and there would be no nature, nor any color, shape, or figure; likewise there would be nothing in this world; without this threefold working there could be no world at all.

Nothing is more wretched than the man who goes round and round everything, and, as Pindar says, 'searches the bowels of the earth', and seeks by conjecture to sound the minds of his neighbours, but fails to perceive that it is enough to abide with the Divinity that is within himself and to do Him genuine service.

The ancient Rabbins among the Jews have partly understood it; for they have said that this name is the highest, and most holy name of God by which they understand the working Deity in sense.

I is the effluence of the eternal, indivisible Unity, or the sweet gracefulness of the ground of the divine power of becoming somethingness.

Unless you fast (abstain) from the world, you shall in no way find the Kingdom of God; and unless you observe the Sabbath as a Sabbath, you shall not see the Father.

The wisdom is the outflown Word of the divine power, virtue, knowledge, and holiness; a subject and resemblance of the infinite and unsearchable Unity; a substance wherein the Holy Ghost works, forms, and models; I mean, he forms and models the divine understanding in the wisdom; for the wisdom is the passive, and the spirit of God is the active, or life in her, as the soul in the body.

She is the true divine chaos, wherein all things lie, a divine imagination, in which the ideas of angels and souls have been seen from eternity, in a divine type and resemblance; yet not then as creatures, but in resemblance, as when a man beholds his face in a glass.

By the word center, we understand the first beginning to nature, the most inward ground, wherein the self-raised will brings itself, by a reception, into a something.

Thus we understand that the desire is the ground of somethingness, so that something may come out of nothing; and thus we may also conceive that the desire has been the beginning of this world, by which God has brought all things into substance and being; for the desire is that by which God said, Let there be. The desire is that Be it, which has made something where nothing was, but only a spirit; it has made the Mysterium Magnum (which is spiritual) visible and substantial, as we may see by the elements, stars, and other creatures.

The Second property, that is, the motion, was in the beginning of this world the separator or divider in the powers and virtues, by which the Creator, viz. the will of God, brought all things out of the Mysterium Magnum into form; for it is the outward movable world, by which the supernatural God made all things, and brought them into form, figure, and shape.

Thus, by the Third property of nature, which is the anguish, we mean the sharpness and painfulness of the fire, viz. the burning and consuming; for when the will is put into such a sharpness it will always consume the cause of that sharpness; for it always strives to get to the Unity of God again, which is the rest; and the Unity thrusts itself with its effluence to this motion and sharpness; and so there is a continual conjoining for the manifestation of the divine will , as we always find in these three, viz. in salt, brimstone, and oil, a heavenly in the earthly.

For the soul of a thing lies in the sharpness, and the true life of the sensual nature and property lies in the motion, and the powerful spirit which arises from the tincture lies in the oil of the Sulphur: Thus a heavenly always lies hidden in the earthly, for the invisible spiritual world came forth with and in the creation.

Now two eternal Principles arise here, viz. the darkness, harshness, sharpness, and pain dwelling in itself; and the feeling, power and virtue of the Unity in the light; upon which the scripture says, that God (that is, the eternal Unity) dwells in a light to which none can come.

For the spirit of this fire receives ens [or virtue] to shine, from the Unity, or else this fiery ground would be but a painful, horrible hunger, and pricking desire; and it is so indeed, when the will breaks itself off from the Unity, and will live after its own desire, as the devils have done, and the false soul still does.

And thus you may here perceive two Principles: the first is the ground of the burning of the fire, viz. the sharp, moving, perceivable, painful darkness in itself; and the second is the light of the fire, wherein the Unity comes into mobility and joy; for the fire is an object of the great love of God's Unity.

Therefore in fire and light consists the life of all things, viz. in the will thereof, let them be insensible, vegetable, or rational things; everything, as the fire, has its ground, either from the eternal, as the soul, or from the temporary, as astral elementary things; for the eternal is one fire, and the temporary is another, as shall be shown hereafter.

You must understand, in the spiritual fire of the will, the true desirous soul out of the eternal ground; and in the power and virtue of the light, the true understanding spirit, in which the Unity of God dwells and is manifest, as our Lord Christ says, The kingdom of God is within you; and Paul says, You are the temple of the Holy Ghost, who dwells in you; this is the place of the divine inhabiting and revelation.

And so likewise it must be conceived to be in the eternal ground; for the temporary substance is flown forth from the eternal , therefore they are both of the same quality; but with this difference, that one is eternal and the other transitory, one spiritual and the other corporeal.

When the spiritual fire and light shall be kindled, which has indeed burned from eternity in itself, then shall also the Mystery of the divine power and knowledge be always made manifest therein; for all the properties of the eternal nature becomes spiritual in the fire, and yet nature remains as it is, inwardly in itself; and the going forth of the will becomes spiritual.

The first is the going upwards of the fiery will; the second is the going downwards, or sinking of the watery spirit, viz. the meekness; and the third is the going out forwards of the oily spirit, in the midst, in the center of the fiery spirit of the will ; which oily spirit is the ens of the Unity of God, which is become a substance in the desire of nature; yet all is but spirit and power: but so it appears in the figure of the manifestation, not as if there were any severing or division, but it appears so in the manifestation.

For every property makes unto itself a subject, or object, by its own effluence; and in the seventh all the properties are in a temperature, as in one only substance: and as they all did proceed from the Unity, so they all return again into one ground.

And though they work in different kinds and manners, yet here there is but one only substance, whose power and virtue is called tincture; that is, a holy penetrating, growing or springing bud (essence or being).

Now these are the seven properties in one only ground; and all seven are equally eternal without beginning; none of them can be accounted the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, or last; for they are equally eternal without beginning, and have also one eternal beginning from the Unity of God.

The visible world is only an effluence of the seven properties, for it proceeded out of the six working properties; but in the seventh (that is, in paradise) it is in rest: and that is the eternal Sabbath of rest, wherein the divine power and virtue rests.

Practise thoroughly all these things; meditate on them well; you ought to love them with all your heart. It is those that will put you in the way of divine virtue. I swear it by he who has transmitted into our souls the Sacred Quaternion, the source of nature, whose cause is eternal.

God created him in his likeness, out of all the three Principles, and made him an image, and breathed into him the understanding fiery Mercury, according to both the inward and outward ground, that is, according to time and eternity, and so he became a living understanding soul.

Apparently destroyed, yet really existing; the material gone, the immaterial left,—such is the law of creation, which passeth all understanding. This is called the root, whence a glimpse may be obtained of God.

The spiritus mundus is hidden in the four elements, as the soul is in the body, and is nothing else but an effluence and working power proceeding from the sun and stars.

The earth is the grossest effluence from this subtle spirit; after the earth the water is the second; after the water the air is the third; and after the air the fire is the fourth: all these proceed from one only ground, from the spiritus mundi, which has its root in the inward world.

As we may know by the earth, which is so very hungry after the influence and virtue of the stars, and the spiritus mundi, after the spirit from whence it proceeded in the beginning, that it has no rest, for hunger; and this hunger of the earth consumes bodies, that the spirit may be parted again from the gross elementary condition, and return into its Archaeus again. For the Archaeus of the earth becomes thereby exceeding joyful, because it tastes and feels its first ground in itself again, and in this joy all things spring out of the earth, and therein also the growing of animals consists.

God is the eternal, immense, incomprehensible Unity, which manifests itself in itself, from eternity in eternity, by the Trinity; and is Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in a threefold working, as is before mentioned.

Out of this fiery property, and the property of the light, the angels and souls have their origin; which is a divine manifestation.

The visible world is the third Principle, that is, the third ground and beginning: this is outbreathed out of the inward ground, out of both the first Principles, and brought into the nature and form of a creature.

God has manifested the Mysterium Magnum out of the power and virtue of his Word; in which Mysterium Magnum the whole creation has lain essentially without forming, in temperamento; and by which he has outspoken the spiritual formings in separability [or variety]: in which formings, the sciences of the powers and virtues in the desire, that is, in the Fiat, have stood, wherein every science, in the desire to manifestation, has brought itself into a corporeal substance.

Chuang Tzŭ said: "O my exemplar! Thou who destroyest all things, and dost not account it cruelty; thou who benefitest all time, and dost not account it charity; thou who art older than antiquity and dost not account it age; thou who supportest the universe, shaping the many forms therein, and dost not account it skill; this is the happiness of God!"

From this essence the word expresses itself in the second separation, that is, of nature, and in that expression, the separation out of the fiery Science is understood; for thence comes the soul and all angelical spirits.

The ultimate end is God. He is manifested in the laws of nature. He is the hidden spring. At the beginning, he was. This, however, is inexplicable. It is unknowable. But from the unknowable we reach the known.

Blessed is he who came into being before he came into being. If you become my Disciples and heed my sayings, these stones will serve you. For there are five trees in paradise for you, which are undisturbed in summer and in winter and their leaves do not fall. Whoever knows them will not experience death.

To have attained to the human form must be always a source of joy. And then, to undergo countless transitions, with only the infinite to look forward to,—what incomparable bliss is that! Therefore it is that the truly wise rejoice in that which can never be lost, but endures alway.

All things come from that other world, starting from that common governing principle, or else are secondary consequences of it. Thus, even the lion's jaws, deadly poison, and every injurious thing, like a thistle or a bog, are by-products from those august and lovely principles. Do not, then, imagine them to be contrary to what you reverence, but reflect upon the fountain of all things.

On the other hand, the pains which souls suffer after death all have their source in excessive love of the world.

It is the delegated image of God. Your life is not your own. It is the delegated harmony of God. Your individuality is not your own. It is the delegated adaptability of God. Your posterity is not your own. It is the delegated exuviæ of God.

The reason of the human spirit seeking to return to that upper world is that its origin was from thence, and that it is of angelic nature.

There are three relations: one to your environment, one to the divine cause from which all things come to pass for all, one to those who live at the same time with you.

If they say to you: From where do you come? Say to them: We have come from the Light, the place where the Light came into existence of its own accord and he stood and appeared in their image. If they say to you: Is it you? (Who are you?), say: We are his Sons and we are the chosen of the Living Father. If they ask you: What is the sign of your Father in you? Say to them: It is movement with rest (peace in the midst of motion or chaos).

The verse, "I breathed into man of My spirit," also points to the celestial origin of the human soul.

I-Am the Light who is over all things, I-Am the All. From me all came forth and to me all return (The All came from me and the All has come to me). Split wood, there am I. Lift up the stone and there you will find me.

Images are visible to man but the light which is within them is hidden. The light of the father will be revealed, but he (his image) is hidden in the light.

When you see your reflection, you rejoice. Yet when you perceive your images which have come into being before you, which neither die nor can be seen, how much will you have to bear?

If then, when you arrive at last at your final exit, resigning all else, you honour your governing self alone and the divine element within you, if what you dread is not that some day you will cease to live, but rather never to begin at all to live with Nature, you will be a man worthy of the Universe that gave you birth, and will cease to be a stranger in your own country, surprised by what is coming to pass every day, as at something you did not look to see, and absorbed in this thing or in that. 2 God beholds the governing selves of all men stripped of their material vessels and coverings and dross; for with His own mind alone He touches only what has flowed and

Whenever you feel something hard to bear, you have forgotten (a) that all comes to pass according to the Nature of the Whole, (b) that the wrong is not your own but another's, further (c) that all that is coming to pass always did, always will, and does now everywhere thus come to pass, (d) the great kinship of man with all mankind, for the bond of kind is not blood nor the seed of life, but mind. You have forgotten, moreover, (e) that every individual's mind is of God and has flowed from that other world, (f) that nothing is a man's own, but even his child, his body, and his vital spirit itself have come from that other world, (g) that all is judgement, (h) that every man lives only the present life and this is what he is losing.

Egypt, the home of the Pyramids and the Sphinx, was the birthplace of the Hidden Wisdom and Mystic Teachings.

The Principle of Mentalism: THE ALL IS MIND; The Universe is Mental.

THE ALL is Mind; the Universe is Mental.

THE ALL is Infinite Living Mind -- the Illumined call it SPIRIT!

But always remember, that THE ALL is but One, and that in its Infinite Mind the Universe is generated, created and exists.

THE ALL, in itself, is above Gender, as it is above every other Law, including those of Time and Space. It is the Law, from which the Laws proceed, and it is not subject to them.

Anything that has a beginning and an ending must be, in a sense, unreal and untrue, and the Universe comes under the rule, in all schools of thought. From the Absolute point of view, there is nothing Real except THE ALL, no matter what terms we may use in thinking of, or discussing the subject.

All are on the Path, whose end is THE ALL. All progress is a Returning Home.

The Created and the Creator are merged.

THE ALL, in itself, manifests a constant vibration of such an infinite degree of intensity and rapid motion that it may be practically considered as at rest.

The Hermetists teach that if the vibrations be continually increased the object would mount up the successive states of manifestation and would in turn manifest the various mental stages, and then on Spiritward, until it would finally re-enter THE ALL, which is Absolute Spirit.

We are able to see now, with eyes made clear by knowledge, that everything is governed by Universal Law in - that the infinite number of laws are but manifestations of the One Great Law-the LAW which is THE ALL.

The earliest beginnings of this mysticism are usually accredited, by modern Jewish scholars, to the Essenes.

One can see quite clearly how its governing idea is based on a conception general to all the mystics, that the quest for the ultimate Reality is a kind of pilgrimage, and the seeker is a traveller towards his home in God.

An angel as an 'incorporeal soul' is more akin to the Aristotelian doctrine of 'intelligences,' the intermediate beings between the Prime Cause and existing things.

The choice of the metaphor probably rests on the fact that 'fire' can be adapted to symbolise either or both of the following truths: (a) the brightness, illumination which comes when the goal has been reached, when the quest for the ultimate reality has at last been satisfied; (b) the all-penetrating, all-encompassing, self-diffusing force of fire is such a telling picture of the mystic union of the soul and God.

These latter words are the description of the ecstatic state, the moments of exaltation, the indescribable peace and splendour which the soul of the mystic experiences when, disentangling itself from the darkness of illusion, it reaches the Light of Reality, the condition so aptly phrased by the Psalmist who said: "For with thee is the fountain of life; in thy light shall we see light" (Psalm, xxxvi. 9)

The term 'angel' stands for the powers embodied in all earthly phenomena, the world-forces which are outflowings of God and represent the aspect of the Divine activity in the universe.

It would be incorrect to say that he derived this theology from the Rabbinic sources. Platonic and Stoic teachings are largely responsible for them. But Philo endeavoured to bring them into line with Rabbinic modes of Biblical interpretation.

Angels are emanations of the Divine working here below. Man is in a double sense made by them. It was they who had a hand in his creation. It is they who fill his environment, and make him realise that he is ever in the grip of a Presence from which there is no escaping.

He represents the active phase of Deity as manifested in the universe.

The date and origin of this extraordinary book - the oldest philosophical work in the Hebrew language - are shrouded in obscurity.

Emanation implies that all existing things are successive outflowings or outgoings of God. God contains within Himself all. He is perfect, incomprehensible, indivisible, dependent on nothing, in need of nothing. Everything in the cosmos, all finite creatures animate and inanimate, flow out, radiate, in a successive series, from God, the Perfect One.

Everything is originally comprehended in Him, "with no contrasts of here or there, no oppositions of this and that, no separation into change and variation".

The multiplicity that one beholds in the cosmos, the whole panorama of thought, action, goodness, badness, the soul, the mind - all things that go to make up the pageant of man's life in the universe, are emanations, radiations from the one Unity, manifestations of the God from whom all things flow and to whom they must all finally return because they are ultimately one with the One, just as the flame is one with the candle from which it issues.

In all probability it originated with the Rabbis of the Talmud in the first three centuries of the Christian era. Thus, a passage in T.B. Ḥaggigah, speaks of the "Ten agencies through which God created the world, wisdom, insight, cognition, strength, power, inexorableness, justice, right, love, mercy."

By means of the twenty-two letters, by giving them a form and a shape, by mixing them and combining them in different ways, God made the soul of all that which has been created and of all that which will be.

It shows how both Jewish and Christian mysticism are alike indebted to one and the same set of sources. Gnosticism and its development - the Alexandrian Neoplatonism.

When the spirits and the souls come out of Eden they all possess a certain appearance which, later on, is reflected in the face.

It is man's duty to strive after union with the Infinite, his pursuit of the finite leads him to that which lies at the extremity of the Divine nature rather than that which lies at the heart of it. This constitutes evil. It is a state of absence, a negation, because man who, like the universe, is but one of the manifestations of the Divine, can only attain the real when he seeks the Real who is his fount, his home.

He is the beginning as well as the end of all stages (dargin); upon Him are stamped (etrashim) all the stages. But He can only be called One, in order to show that although He possesses many forms, He is nothing other than ONE.

The Zohar is, par excellence, the textbook of Jewish mediæval mysticism. Its language is partly Aramaic and partly Hebrew. While purporting to be but a commentary on the Pentateuch, it is, in reality, quite an independent compendium of Kabbalistic theosophy.

A ubiquitous term is En-Sof, applied to the Deity. These words mean literally 'No End.' The Deity is boundless, endless.

Before having created any shape in the world, before having produced any form, He was alone, without form, resembling nothing. It is forbidden to picture Him by any form or under any shape whatsoever, not even by His holy name, nor by a letter [of the alphabet] nor by a point. But after He had created the form of the Heavenly Man (Adam ‘Ilā-ā) He used him as a chariot (Merkābāh) on which to descend.

ALL finite creatures are, in divergent senses and varying degrees, part and parcel of the Deity.

All existences are emanations from the Deity. The Deity reveals Himself in all existences because He is immanent in them. But though dwelling in them, He is greater than they. He is apart from them. He transcends them.

The Most Ancient One is at the same time the most Hidden of the hidden. He is separated from all things, and is at the same time not separated from all things. For all things are united in Him, and He unites Himself with all things. There is nothing which is not in Him.

The first of the Sefirot denotes, then, the primordial Divine Thought (or Divine Will, as the Hebrew commentators often style it).

He has a shape, and one can say that He has not one. In assuming a shape, He has given existence to all things.

He made ten lights spring forth from His midst, lights which shine with the form which they have borrowed from Him, and which shed everywhere the light of a brilliant day.

Afterwards He brought out that light which is the celestial mother, and when she bare a child, then He called Himself 'that I am'.

The Ten Sefirot together are thus a picture of how an infinite, undivided, unknowable God takes on the attributes of the finite, the divided, the knowable, and thus becomes the cause of, the power lying at the bottom of, all the multifarious modes of existence in the finite plane - all of which are thus a reflection of the Divine.

The universal infiltration of the light of the En-Sof, its diffusion throughout all the Sefirot, gave rise to the idea of the existence of a changeable and an unchangeable element in each of the Sefirot.

That the Zohar is a debtor to a double source - the Talmudic teachings and the teachings of the Neoplatonists - is very apparent from its treatment of the soul.

Neoplatonism gave to the Zohar the idea of the soul as an emanation from the 'Overmind' of the universe. There was originally one 'Universal Soul,' or 'Over-soul,' which, as it were, broke itself up and encased itself in individual bodies. All individual souls are, hence, fragments of the 'Oversoul,' so that although they are distinct from one another they are, in reality, all one.

The soul's most visible, most tangible, most perceivable quality is love. The soul is the root of love. Love is the symbol of the soul.

But if Neshāmāh is so exalted, so sacrosanct, why should it have emanated from its immaculate source at all, to become tainted with earth? The Zohar anticipates our question and gives its answer as follows: "If thou inquirest why it [i.e.. the soul] cometh down into the world from so exalted a place and putteth itself at such a distance from its source, I reply thus: It may be likened to an earthly monarch to whom a son is born. The monarch takes the son to the countryside, there to be nourished and trained until such a time as he is old enough to accustom himself to the palace of his father. When the father is told that the education of his son is completed, what does he do out of his love for him? In order to celebrate his home-coming, he sends for the queen, the mother of the lad. He brings her into the palace and rejoices with her the whole day long.

When the soul has completed the cycle of its earthly career and hurries back to become blended with the Oversoul, it revels in ecstasies of love, which the Zohar describes with a wealth of poetic phraseology.