The Tree of Life

Given that the Qaballah encompasses a lot of material (beyond All material, in fact), I will start with the basics, and work my way through all the knowledge that I possess, elaborating on what is written in common texts on the subject with personal experience and what I myself have discovered from personal research. It is how this system is supposed to work, and I'll attempt to stick to it. Thus, we begin with the Tree.

The Tree of Life, in Hebrew Etz Chayyim, is the symbolic representation of the Universe. It is the Tree of Life in the Old Testament, the one guarded in the Garden of Eden. It is written that the Tree of Life is what will restore the Garden of Eden to its proper state, but that's another lecture. The Tree is composed of ten spheres, called sephiroht, each individual sphere being a sephira. Connecting the ten spheres are 22 paths, which are the numbered with the Hebrew alphabet (because in Hebrew, as in some other languages, the letters also represent the numbers, so aleph=1, beth=2, &c.). These yield the 32 Paths of Wisdom of the Tree of Life.

There are many subdivisions of the Tree that one can make, into pillars, Palaces, Worlds, and the like. Without the diagram, the description of these is useless for the time being, so I will later on return here to edit this post and give the rest of the information. A judicious search on Google will find a diagram, several of them better than I myself could have rendered.

{place diagram of tree of life here}

The sephiroht are numbered 1 through 10, as I stated previously. Each sephira has a name and properties. First is Kether, the Crown, then Chokmah, Wisdom, Binah, Understanding, Chesed (sometimes called Gedulah), Mercy, Geburah, Strength, Tiphareth, Beauty, Netzach, Victory, Hod, Yesode, Foundation, and Malkuth, Kingdom. The Kingdom of God is here! In more than one sense... we dwell in the realm of Malkuth. Malkuth gave birth to the four elements, Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, and is the rockbed upon which we exist. It is the physical, the tangible, the things we see, taste, feel and touch (and smell, of course).

Perhaps before I start talking about the sephiroht, I should mention the Three Veils of Negative Existence, being Ain (Without), Ain Soph (Without Limit, or Limitless), and Ain Soph Aur (Without Limit Light, or Limitless Light). Before there was positive existence as we know it, there was negative existence. What, pray tell, is negative existence? It is something we cannot know, because it is nothing at all like our existence. We cannot even frame suitable questions about it, because it is completely out of our realm of comprehension. It is as if we lived in only 2 dimensions and were asked to talk about the 3rd. There's little we can do about it, it isn't even a human error problem, it is simply beyond anything in this Creation.

According to Lurianic Qaballists (those who follow the school of thought of Rabbi Isaac Luria), God created the Universe by the process of tzim-tzum which is similar in effect to that of someone bring a fragrant bouqet of roses through a room. One can smell the roses still in the room, even after they have departed. The essence of God still remains in Creation, even though God himself is not there. I am not stating that God does not abide in this Existence, only that this Existence is not directly identifiable with God (this only makes sense... look around, the world is not composed of pure deity).