Q&A: Kabbalah — Do united souls create a unified consciousness? Ibbur, reincarnation, and understanding the parts of the soul
Kabbalah — Do united souls create a unified consciousness? Ibbur, reincarnation, and understanding the parts of the soul
Question
With God’s help,
Hello Rabbi!
I wanted to ask the honorable rabbi a question (or perhaps of blessed memory, and this requires further inquiry, based on the Ship of Theseus in changes of opinion, as follows). I understood that according to Kabbalah (or at least according to certain approaches), there are concepts such as reincarnation and ibbur:
Let us assume that the human being who feels and experiences on the simplest levels is described by the term nefesh, and that this is the basic element of a living being. But on top of this description they add that it may be that several souls or sparks are reincarnated in a kind of compound within a single human being. Or as we find in the concept of ibbur of a soul, that a soul which is not part of the original person enters him during his lifetime or at certain moments. (Though there is some room to distinguish, because neshamah is a higher level, and therefore apparently this is talking about something secondary to the person.)
And now, I am aware of the Rabbi’s interpretive remarks on the approach of the author of the Tanya, together with the studies that investigate where exactly “the person” is located in his view. So for example, the divine soul and the animal soul are parts of that same “person” and constitute him. Therefore the search for the difference between the entity and what composes it creates confusion for some people, because the components are themselves part of the entity. And not like Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles.
But what I wanted to ask is: if we assume that several souls are reincarnated into one person, how can this explain the unity of consciousness, which is one of the philosophers’ important and strong proofs for dualism and for accepting the soul as something relatively “unified”? (Or at the very least, not something composed of many people…)
And here I do think the puzzlement arises as to what exactly that “person” is, and the Rabbi’s answer regarding the Tanya will not help with this point. Here it sounds really, really implausible.
And while we’re at it, I would be glad if the Rabbi could make intelligible to reason (or refer me to) a place that explains the relations between the parts of the soul—nefesh, ruach, and neshamah—and in particular how each part here is composite or can be impregnated with parts of “other people.” Because when I heard these things they seemed very puzzling to me, and even when I discussed them with people who are supposed to understand, it seemed that they had simply “accepted” these things and made less effort to make them intelligible.
P.S.
The relation between different souls and compounds of the unity of consciousness seems on the one hand like a principle of emergence, as materialists bring up, but there still seems to be a deficiency, because each soul must be understood as something that senses on its own, and not as sensing in a fused way.
Answer
I don’t think I know how to explain things like this. Details are missing here. What happens at the time of ibbur? Does the other soul join the existing one or replace it? Is the soul what includes our memories and values and all that, so that all this gets replaced, or is it something else, more peripheral? Or perhaps it is the object that contains the memories and values (just the framework).
In short, these are vague statements and I see no point or value in engaging with them. No one really knows what is going on there, if indeed anything like this is going on at all, and these are just empty words.
As I understand it regarding the opening questions,
in ibbur an additional soul is added, and in any case the original one is not replaced. Maybe it is possible that a higher ibbur is added to him before he attained a neshamah, but I don’t know.
Only, as I said, it is possible that from the outset a person is composed of several souls (for example through reincarnation). But how does that fit with the unity of consciousness?!?
Most of the people I spoke with explain that the higher attainments, like neshamah and so on, are expressed in feelings of motivation and desire to do spiritual things. For example, when a person prepares himself for prayer on Friday night he receives an additional soul, and therefore his prayer seems different. Or if a person suddenly received great strength to do something that it would not have been reasonable to think he would do in the past, then apparently something external entered him. And it seems that a soul is some kind of object for something (maybe motivation and spiritual attainments, but in any case it contains less of our memories).
In general it seems that they explain human “phenomena” by using entities. And a change in human experience sometimes also includes a change in entity. I think the Rabbi mentioned that this is not customary in our modern age, which explains things through forces and theoretical constructs, and not through actual entities—like the “force” of gravity.
Those I spoke with also simply claim that a kabbalist can see in a person the root of his soul or what has entered him, and so on.
As for the Rabbi’s claim that he sees no value in it, I assume that if one sees some truth in it then perhaps there is an interest in studying it, especially since it is Torah study.
And as for saying that these are just empty words, that does not seem plausible to me. There are people who invest their entire lives in these subjects and never stop speaking and learning about them. But my feeling was that when I spoke somewhat with people who have been occupied for only a few years (say, 10 years or more), in most of their free time, with these subjects—and there is no doubt that they know many texts and approaches on the subject—
I did not come away with a clear sense that they really had an understanding of the terms they use and the basic definitions, or of how intelligible these matters are to them. But on the other hand, even in the natural sciences it seems that many terms are used without definition and people work with them, like energy or forces. And for the most part the “experts” in the field do not seem to have a particularly deep understanding of these terms either, aside from describing relations or equations as opposed to describing the essence.