In the beginning of Chapter Three, we wrote that before anything was created, there was the Thought of Creation. This Thought created Phases One through Four of the will to receive, which created the worlds Adam Kadmon through Assiya, which then created the soul of Adam ha Rishon, which broke into the myriad souls we have today.
It’s very important to remember this order of creation because it reminds us that things evolve from above downward, from spiritual to corporeal, and not the other way around. In practical terms, it means that our world is created and governed by the spiritual worlds.
Moreover, there is not a single event in our world that doesn’t happen above first. And the only difference between our world and the spiritual worlds is that events in the spiritual worlds reflect altruistic intentions, and events in our world reflect egoistic intentions.
Because of this cascading structure of the worlds, our world is called the “world of consequences” of spiritual processes and occurrences. Whatever we do here has no impact of any kind on the spiritual worlds. Therefore, if we want to change anything in our world, we must first climb to the spiritual worlds, the “control room” of our world, and affect our world from there.
Just as it happens in the spiritual worlds, everything in our world evolves along the same five stages from Zero to Four. Figure 7 focuses on the part of Malchut’s desires that could not receive in order to bestow, and hence remained dark. The smallest desires create the still level of Creation, and the stronger the desires become, so does their activity level: from vegetative to animate to speaking, and finally, to human.
However, it is important to remember that the desires in Figure 7 are inactive. They are not receiving Light, so they are doing no harm. They become active only when Adam tries to use them to receive Light. This is when their egoistic nature surfaces, and this is when they break. Hence, as long as they are inactive, they are still considered spiritual desires, because there is no active egoism to separate them from the Creator’s quality of giving. They become detached from Him only when they are activated.
The still, vegetative, animate, speaking, and spiritual levels in our world are actually manifestations of desires that originate in the Upper World. They become physical only when they are activated in the wrong way—egoistically. If we could activate them in the right way, in order to please the Creator, we could use them to receive Light. This is the essence of the correction that we need to make here in this world.
Also, recall that we said that the still level is made of the smallest desires, and vegetative of stronger ones and so on through the strongest desire—the spiritual level. So when the desires break and begin to work selfishly, the weaker desires are the least broken, and the strongest desires suffer the worst shattering. Accordingly, the still (inanimate, mineral) level in our world is the least broken (egoistic), plants are more egoistic, animals are more egoistic than plants, and humans are the most egoistic of all.