The Tree of Life (the Otz Chiim, in Hebrew) is the master key for the gates of creation itself. The greatest of the Kabbalah’s mysteries, it is the blueprint that underlies everything from the structure of the universe itself right down to way the human personality is constructed. It is a model of the fractal building block of reality – God’s route for approaching the world, and therefore our route for approaching God. It encompasses everything, structuring every aspect of reality within its complexities.
According to the doctrine of the Sundering, a key tenet of Kabalistic thought, all of reality is an aspect of God’s divided self, seeking reunification with divinity, connected to itself at all levels. This is remarkably similar to recent theories of quantum mechanics, which suggest that every subatomic particle is connected to every other one, and that each part contains the whole – the ‘Holographic Universe’. Swap the names around, and science and the Kabbalah say the same thing: that all was one, and then it split and became the universe, but remained connected, and will one day return to being one again.
The Tree of Life shows how the spark of divinity became the substance of the universe, in Kabbalistic thought. It is the route from energy to matter, from God to Man. It is at the heart of each mote of existence, and so manifests time and again, in all areas, at all levels. Therefore, it is also a depiction of God Himself: “as above, so below”. Just as fractal mathematics show us that the shape of a leaf’s pores echoes the shape of the leaf – and also the shape of the branch, and even the shape of the tree – so the Tree of Life can be found on all scales of reality, from the universal to the most personal.
Don’t worry too much if this is tricky to grasp; the mystical and philosophical implications of the macrocosm and the microcosm are advanced, and difficult for the human mind to really get a hang of. We work by comparisons and dualities, so it is hard for us to make sense of a scheme which talks about universal unity. As a basic concept, it is enough to know that the Tree of Life represents and explains many different levels of reality, and that all are linked. It is the way the universe works, the route by which everything came into existence, and the template upon which everything is patterned.
Hi Tim, thank you for these articles – I find them very interesting and helpful.
By the way, I’m also an INFJ, not too many of us around!
Thanks for the kind words, Johannes. Much appreciated. And it’s always a pleasure to meet a fellow INFJ!