Imagine our universe for a moment: the endless amount of galaxies, stars, and worlds. Now imagine that we remove from our universe a specific portion of space. How are we able to imagine the resulting emptiness of this void if it contains nothing that is able to be measured or described? In reality we perceive all phenomena in terms of time, space, and movement. We cannot envision something that is absolutely static, frozen in time, without any volume. This is an analogy of our understanding of the spiritual worlds. There is no time, movement, or even space in the spiritual worlds. Since all our reality and perceptions are based on these physical concepts, it follows that there is absolutely no connection between spirituality and our construction of physical reality based on our perceptions and sensations. This results in a lack of words and vocabulary that is able to express spiritual concepts.
So if Kabbalah is the study of the spiritual worlds how are we able to discuss something that we are unable to imagine? If we are absolutely unable to envision the spiritual, then how can we comprehend what is written in Kabbalistic books?
What is described in the Torah (Bible)
When we study the Torah (Pentateuch, Bible) we must understand that all the words of the Torah and all other sacred books just appear to be words associated with our world. The words however represent spiritual objects and roots, which are under no circumstances connected to our world. There should be no confusion of these spiritual concepts and physical objects. The Torah contains the sacred names of the Creator, which represents the degrees of His attainment. This is similar to how we designate a name to an object in our world depending on how the object manifests itself to our senses. The entire Torah describes the levels of approaching and sensing the Creator.
The Thought of Creation and the Language of Kabbalah
All the worlds, including our world and all the objects in them are in tune with the single thought of creation: to give endless pleasure to the creature – the soul. This single purpose envelops all creation, from the beginning to the end. It is this purpose that determines all the suffering that we go through, our internal work upon ourselves, and the reward. After the individual correction all the souls will re-unite into a single soul. The soul receives not just a double pleasure (from both sensing the pleasure and from bringing pleasure to the Creator), but this pleasure is also multiplied by the number of re-connected souls. Meanwhile, the more people are ascending spiritually by working internally on themselves, the more they start seeing true reality and sensing the other worlds. While still living in our world they are able to attain all the worlds.
The seemingly odd language of Kabbalah turns into the language of actions, thoughts, and feelings, with opposing ideas in our world coming together in a single root.
For example "Jerusalem" in Kabbalistic literature does not refer to the physical city, but to certain spiritual forces and a concentration of certain spiritual energy, which have a specific place in the system of the spiritual worlds. In addition, parts of human body in Kabbalah such as the "Rosh" (head), "Guf" (body), "Chaze" (chest), "Peh" (mouth), "Einaim" (eyes), and so on, are referring to their spiritual roots. The world "Rosh" implies decision-making part of the spiritual object, while "Guf" refers to the concentration of executive functions.
The descriptions of the Upper world are the way of describing our soul and the degrees of its closeness to the Creator, an increasingly stronger sensation of the Creator. Kabbalah divides the collective soul into parts and designates each part a specific name that corresponds to its properties. It then describes the actions of these parts. This is the language of feelings, yet, it is precise and often uses graphs, drawings, and formulas. Kabbalah describes the engineering of the soul.
Yet how are we able to use our imprecise and limited language for such precise spiritual investigations and descriptions? How can language that was born out of a subjective sensation of ”our world” be used for conveying an objective sensation of the spiritual? For example, the word "light" (which is a difficult concept to comprehend), we image as sun light which has no connection to the spiritual light.
Yet the light in our world can be interpreted in another way as well. We also may use the word in a different context such as "the soul feels light", "you are like a ray of light", especially when we feel satisfaction in our Kli, or refer to the brightness of thought, mind.
If I choose the words that match my sensations and convey them to you, and you then imagine your own sensations which in your opinion correspond with my words, then there needs to be a common standard to help us measure the similarity of our sensations evoked by the same notion or word. My sensations are not necessary identical to yours, yet they need to evoke something similar if there is to be a common language. Yet if we are unable to express precisely what we feel, then how can we use this language to describe spiritual categories? The spiritual world is the world of sensations. There are no bodies, just desires and their sensations. Moreover, Kabbalists claim that these are absolutely and extremely precise perceptions, and because of this they call for an absolutely perfect and precise language to describe them.
Try to give a precise evaluation of your mood, compare it, in a drawing, with someone else's mood, and then give a percentage value in comparison to your mood yesterday. Try expressing all the nuances of your sensations in numbers, indicating how your mood depends on what you feel (e.g. anxiety or tiredness); try giving formulas of fear, and so on. We will see that in our world, we are incapable of measuring our inner sensations precisely.
Suppose, the connection between my touching something hot and the wave explosion in my brain is also dependent on my mood, the way I feel, training, and other individual parameters.
We do not know how to compare pleasure that we experience from music with pleasure that we get from a tasty dish, in terms of its percentage value, quantity and quality. But if our language is so primitive, limited, subjective, and imprecise, then why were the Kabbalists able to use it to describe absolutely precise sensual actions, and why did adopt this language instead of inventing their own?
Even if a single symbol gets misused in exact science, a person who is familiar with that symbol but is not aware of the confusion won't understand where these results are coming from. He will perceive the result as an absolutely artificial scientific claim. However, a person, who is not familiar with symbols, would mistakenly accept this claim as the truth.
The Language of Branches
The Kabbalists opted for a special language called the "language of branches". The reason behind this choice is that everything that exists in our world (inanimate, vegetative, animated, and human levels of nature) everything that happened with them in the past, is happening now, and will happen in the future, that is, all objects as well as their governance emanates from the Creator and passes through all the spiritual worlds before appearing in ours. Governance of this all is constantly renewed from above down into our world.
Everything that exists in our world originates in the Upper world, with everything gradually descending into our world. Because everything in our world comes from the Upper world, there is a strict connection between objects of our world, their consequences, causes, and origins in the spiritual world.
Kabbalists who pin point this exact connection, seeing both the upper object (the root from which stems everything) and the lower object in our world (which receives from the Upper – its cause and governing force -) unconsciously, without sensing this) can tell precisely each connection. They can therefore call the roots in the Upper worlds by their names of their material consequences, that is, the branches in our world. This is why this language is called "the language of branches" and not "the language of roots". Roots are called by the names of their branches and not the other way around. Thus, Kabbalists have found the language which, using everyday words, describes the spiritual world precisely. There can be no other language because there are no other words understandable for those who exist in both worlds. This is why in order to describe the Upper world Kabbalists take names of our world and use them to describe the Upper objects, the roots of our world.
However, if one is unaware of this, it seems that a Kabbalistic book tells a story about our world. These words, however, do not confuse a Kabbalist who clearly sees what the book is actually talking about. They know exactly which branch (i.e. effect) in our world corresponds to its root in the Upper world.