Existence on Earth is on Four Levels
Volumes have been written about the levels of relationships among all the entities that exist in the universe. The wisdom of Kabbalah describes four levels, called still, vegetative, animate, and speaking and reveals to us that they are desires that act according to the force within each.
External Levels
The earth developed out of state called still. This level includes all inanimate elements on the earth, including rocks, soil, water, and minerals. This desire is a weak one, merely to maintain its structure and to resist external forces as much as possible so as to stay undamaged. This is the most basic existence as it is without growth or change.
The still can educe the three properties, vegetative, animate, and speaking, and we discern three values in the quantity of their force, from the beneficial and detrimental in them.
The smallest force among them is the vegetative, made up of all things that grow on the earth. These living things grow, connect their roots together, and cover the earth. The flora operates by attracting what is beneficial to it and rejecting the harmful in much the same way as humans and animals do. However, there is no individual sensation in it, but a collective force, common to all types of plants in the world, which affects this operation in them.
Then, after the means of their sustenance had developed, animals appeared with their more advanced qualities. Each creature feels itself, attracting what is beneficial to it and rejecting the harmful. It follows that one animal equalizes in value to all the plants in reality. This sensing force in the animate is very limited in time and place, since the sensation does not operate at even the shortest distance outside its body. Also, it does not feel anything outside its own time, meaning in the past or in the future, but only at the present moment.
Finally, after millennia of development, the earth was habitable for humanity, being populated with everything we need for survival and societal advancement. Atop all the others is the speaking or human level, consisting of a feeling force and an intellectual force together. For this reason, its power is unlimited by time or place in attracting what is good for it and rejecting what is harmful to it like the animate. This is so because of its science, which is a spiritual matter, unlimited by time or place. One can learn about others wherever they are in the whole of reality, and in the past and the future throughout the generations.
It follows that the value of one person from the speaking equalizes with the value of all the forces in the vegetative and the animate in the whole of reality at that time, and in all the past generations. This is so because its power encompasses them and contains them within its own self, along with all their forces.
Internal Levels
Each level after the still includes within it all the elements of the levels that preceded it. Thus, humans contain with all that exists in the universe! And here’s the interesting part. Within each of us these four levels exist.
The still or inanimate within us does not have an authority of its own. It simply exists in its place, maintaining its structure and supporting the entire body. It, in fact, provides the structure for the entire body. This structure is bones.
The vegetative is that which already has its own authority to some extent. It can grow, its form can vary according to action on it by the host, but it cannot change itself. It obeys the rules of growth within the body and is incapable of any basic change in itself. This level is hair and fingernails.
The animate level is animalistic. In addition to knowing itself, it also knows different phenomena that reveal smaller and bigger desires. Thus the animate level sees its life from one end to another. Animals have offspring and bring them up. On the whole, at this level, there is an instinctive inner program of knowledge of one’s life, even though it is limited and inevitable. This is man’s body.
The defining factor of these first three levels is that all minerals of the earth, life energy and beastly instincts are part of who we are. These levels are fulfilled instinctively.
The fourth level of existence is called speaking, or human. Human life is more important than all other forms and levels of nature, because we include all other forms of nature within us. All global natural disasters and problems —tsunamis, droughts, the harm that we inflict on nature, environmental disasters—are ultimately nothing more than a phenomenon projected onto nature by the person. Therefore, definitely, human life and its role in nature is most important. Human life is not guided by instinct, but by thoughts, feelings and actions.
The Responsibility of Humanity
If we change ourselves, then we will certainly change nature as a whole. If we treat nature correctly, we will correct ourselves, as well as all of nature in general. This is the message of the wisdom of Kabbalah, that describes how nature works on all of its levels: still, vegetative, animate and human. It engages in how we are made and operate at deeper levels of reality, and not in any abstractions.
Because mankind holds the entire world within, we have a grave responsibility to care for this world, and as the most fulfilled level, we begin with ourselves and work downward through the hierarchy of levels. Self-correction requires inversion of the ego into its opposite, altruism, sometimes called enlightenment.
When we act out of ego, it is out of the belief that we can do anything we want to without having any concerns about the results of our actions on others. The chaos in our world is a reflection of the individual and collective ego of mankind. An alternative to egoistic action is altruism, that inner state in which we derive all our pleasure from caring for others before ourselves. In other words, not a smidge of self-satisfaction for serving another, but only pleasure in the performing of the action itself.
In other words, we have to change our very nature. The wisdom of Kabbalah is the fascinating and elegant method for making this profound change. As we work together to correct ourselves, we will begin to see the animate level of nature correcting itself, then the vegetative and finally the still.
To learn more about the fascinating world of the wisdom of Kabbalah, you may go here.
