Many from One
“’The Deity (the ever Invisible Presence),’ says the Zohar, ‘manifests itself through the ten Sephiroth which are its radiating witnesses. The Deity is like the Sea from which outflows a stream called WISDOM, the waters of which fall into a lake named intelligence. From the basin, like seven channels, issue the Seven Sephiroth. … For ten equals seven:The Decade contains four Unities and three Binaries.’ The ten Sephiroth correspond to the limbs of Man. ‘When I framed Adam Kadmon,’ the Elohim are made to say,’the Spirit of the Eternal shot out of his body like a sheet of lightning that radiated at once on the billows of the seven millions of skies, and my ten splendors were his limbs.’ …
“In the beginning of Time, after the Elohim (the ‘Sons of Light and Life,’ or the ‘Builders’) had shaped out of the eternal Essence the Heavens and the Earth. … The Chaldean Book of Numbers contains a detailed explanation of all this. ‘The first triad of the Body of Adam Kadmon (the three upper planes of the seven) cannot be seen before the soul stands in the presence of the Ancient of Days.’ The Sephiroth of this upper triad are: ‘1, Kether (the Crown) represented by the brow of Macroprosopos; 2, Chochma, (Wisdom, a male principle); and 3, Binah, (Intelligence, a female principle).” Then come the seven limbs (or Sephiroth) on the planes of mainifestation.” ~H. P. Blavatsky
Radiating Witnesses
In various ancient esoteric and mystical documents, we find variations of this concept. While the details vary, the basic concept is much the same. That concept is this: from the one Deity (God) comes many. In short, the one Godhead splits into a number of lesser beings, each of which has a special purpose or function. Here we see the first level of this Divine Hierarchy called radiating witnesses. They are called this because many believe that God created other beings to learn more about Himself. These beings could study Him from afar, and communicate back what they saw. That may or may not be true. What is more important is that God created these lesser, though still quite powerful, beings to do specific tasks for Him. Then several from One can become many from One.
Ten and Seven
In the Kabbala, we see a tree of life that has ten nodes. But here, the Zohar, according to Blavatsky, speaks of seven. She resolves this by saying the Seven Sepharoth are four Unities and three Binaries (pairs). That makes a total of ten, so we get ten from seven. In this particular section, she doesn’t go into detail about the significance of the numbers, but we can surmise that it connects man to the tree of life by the idea that man has seven energy centers (chakras)1
Limbs of Man
I think we all know that Man doesn’t have ten limbs, or even seven, so what is Blavatsky saying? I interpret this as not meaning the physical limbs of Man’s body, but the various levels of being that exists as part of our complex being. In Cosolargy, we speak of man having four levels or bodies: the physical, the mental, the psychic, and the spiritual. But we also recognize that just as we have many lesser energy centers, we probably have lesser levels of being besides those four. Logically, it makes sense that if the universe has ten levels (dimensions), then we have ten as well, one corresponding to each dimension. Continue reading “Many from One is the Structure of the Universe”