The greatest degree of separation comes from the experience of being trapped within one’s sovereign ‘self’ without any feeling for or from the world or others. A spiritual ‘locked-in syndrome’ stems from a projected rock-like solid sense of personal identity which is impervious to outside influences. Nothing gets in or out. My overwhelmingly fixated ‘I’ acts the part of both the prison and the warden, ensuring the insurmountable difference that socially isolates me. My habitat becomes the world of Action where fully independent objects exist in and of themselves in states of completion which prohibit intimate exchange. All interactions are reduced to external forces that bump into each other and which can be reacted to whilst leaving one’s inner person untouched.

This world of Action is all about rigid self-control in that it relates to an unrectified sense of malchut or kingdom. I may come to think that if I am to be like a ‘king’ in my own domain and I don’t want anything to challenge my supreme authority (including my deep set desire to be the sole author of my own life), I am best suited by not risking conflict or exchange but retreating into a form of social-political and psychological isolation. In this way, if I avoid all engagements with the other, perhaps I can maintain total control over the geography of my soul, the lands of my embodied being, the territory of my person without compromise.

In the three worlds above this final one we dealt with three types of ‘separation’: the ‘virtual’ separation of the world of Emanation called havdalah that involves intuited ‘soft’ and subtle differences, the more pronounced ‘real’ separation of hafrada in the world of Creation with the carving of ‘hard distinctions’ within conceptual categories, and the potentially explosive emotional instability and breakdown within the world of Formation that results in a shevirah or shattering and fragmentation of our feelings. What word in Hebrew then denotes the ‘terminal’ distinction that leaves a person in the what the Torah explicitly states is a ‘not good’ situation of being alone in the world of Action? The answer is kritah which meaning ‘cutting.’ A person feels ‘cut off’ in the absence of a relationship with the other.

The Kuf-Tav-Reish root of kritah produces a host of conceptual kin in a word bank that we will have to make numerous withdrawals from. For example, this root does not only imply an unwillingness to enter into relations with others, it also alludes to a separation of spouses and the finality of divorce (karat). Karat is also a server form of ‘Divine punishment,’ a extirpation or excommunication (karait) of the soul. As ex-communication suggests having nothing in common (we’re totally different, total outsiders) we thus have nothing to communicate, nothing to speak about, no basis for maintaining relations. Hence, karat represents the psycho-spiritual eventuality of ‘total difference’ producing ‘total distance.’ If we sense this is being facilitated by the Divine then it is raised up to being a metaphysical principle: ‘I am alone because that is the Nature of things, that’s Life, God made me this way’ etc….

Here we can uncover one of the sources of certain self-destructive tendencies that are today coming more and more into public attention and which desperately need to be addressed. This includes self-mutilation behaviors such a cutting (kritah also means ‘self-mutilation’ as well as ‘cutting’). While this is too big a topic to do justice to at present, let us merely say that the inclination to cut one’s own skin may be an attempt to both break through a sense of social isolation and to awaken some feeling when a person feels nothing at all. As the ill-logic goes, better to at least feel some pain rather than the excruciating absence and pitted sensation, the hollowness within. In the Torah this root-concept of cutting applies both to the body and soul. It is also important to note that it can have positive (cutting of circumcision for instance) and negative manifestations as we will attempt to address later on. In Kabbalah, the negative psychological sense of being ‘cut off’ is first and foremost a severance within a person. I am disconnected from aspects of myself.

The classic phrasing of this phenomenon can be found in Vayikra/Leviticus 22:3 where the verse speaks of “…that soul [nefesh] will be cut off [nekratah] from My Presence, I am God [Havayah].” First of all, ‘nekratah’ is just a grammatical variant of karat (cutting). But why does the text state “that soul will be be cut off” using the word nefesh? In Kabbalah we learn that the soul is structured in five levels, each of which has its own designation. Of these, the lowest is the nefesh which functions as the vital soul which enlivens the body. When we consider ‘life’ within the framework of the world of Action, we mean a minimal subsistence. The soul provides just enough to keep the body on life support. It can function mechanically. But, the higher capacities of a person, such as the inspired cognitive ability associated with the neshamah or the spirited emotive epicenter in the ruach, are both soul levels stacked on top of our nefesh. Just being alive is not the same as being really alive, infused with the depth of mind and emotion.

In light of this, the kabbalists understand the verse as describing a situation wherein the lowest level of soul (our impoverished limited existence in the world of action) is being cut off from the ruach (emotive soul) and the neshamah (intellectual soul) etc….This would be like a person who acts without significant thought or feeling. I am just ‘doing’ and in my activities I am not even fully present to myself. I can’t relate to others including the ‘othered’ sense of my higher soul levels. I lack inner integration. I am cut off from my own feelings to the degree that when I search within myself, frantically looking for some sort of emotional response, I can’t tell what I feel or worse still there is nothing which I can hold onto. I feel nothing. The same goes for the understanding: I cannot begin to understand myself. Everything that I do, the rhyme and reason of it all, is a mystery to me. Nothing in my mind seems to have any relevance to how I am acting. This is far worse than a mere ‘break up’ with my internal relations. Even a fragmented self can be said to have a faint memory of the connections between the shattered pieces. Just using the terminology of ‘shattering’ reminds me that these parts once went together. By contrast, being cut off (from real others and from my ‘altered’ self) formally renounces these relationships. It documents the ‘divorces’ (k’retot) confirming that these relationships do not work.

As for the rest of this verse, how does the soul’s isolation from the Divine Presence amplify the negative effect? According to the plain meaning as explained by Rashi, the ‘cutting off’ casts a person into exile. To paraphrase: ‘this person will be uprooted from one side of the world (presumably from one’s home) and forcibly transferred to the other side of the world (foreign lands where one becomes a ‘stranger in a strange land’)’. In other words, such a soul will experience maximal uprooting and ‘thrownness.’ By including the phase “I am God” where the Divine name used is Havayah (the Tetragrammaton) which means ‘Being’ or ‘Reality,’ the Torah informs us that this exile makes one feel like an existential ‘outcast.’ We are cut off from ‘Reality’ and disconnected from the entirety of ‘Existence.’ Negative loneliness causes a dislocation of me within my own life.

In such a state a person may begin to think that ‘I have no place in this world,’ ‘I don’t fit in anywhere’  or most horrifically, that ‘I [God forbid] am not suited to this life.’ Commentators explain that karat or being divorced from Reality or Being (Havayah), if the relatability is not repaired, can lead to a premature death. Rabbinic thinking also contends that this death can be spiritual–where a person feels like the ‘living dead’ which  is experienced as profound apathy. Rather than being crushed by the gravity of my isolated existence which causes me to further withdraw into the singularity of myself, I need to restore the connection back to the higher soul levels so that I can think and feel again.

One way back to basic psychological health necessitates that I be able to once again relate to myself, which in our discussion means to connect the different soul levels back together. Being able to stomach myself, I can begin to open myself to other others. Yet, sometimes getting remarried intrapersonally happens by way of outside assistance. My interpersonal relations jail broke me after trying enough combinations to pick the lock that held me at bay. Truthfully, in both situations we require both an inner ‘other’ and an outer ‘other’ to release us from our fortress of solitude. As the Talmud remarks (Berakot 5b) ‘A prisoner cannot release himself from his own prison.’

Our diagnosis of the solitary self continues in Part 14.

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/relationship-differences-fusion-and-defusion-part-14/

http://www.interinclusion.org/inspirations/relationship-differences-fusion-and-defusion-part-12/

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