Ramchal presents us with a couple of vital over-arching remarks in his comments to Petach 33, one of which touches upon all the Partzufim, Sephirot, and Olamot, which is to say, upon all of reality itself, and another which explains a vital detail about Adam Kadmon in its entirety.
As to the former, he says that “the truth is that all the levels discussed in Kabbalah, from the beginning of Adam Kadmon to the end of all of Assiyah (the lowest world) are bound up with each other and develop from each other. The (major) difference between them is that higher levels are more concealed than the ones lower ones because things move from a state of concealment to one of revelation, but (the point still needs to be made that) all are one interconnected chain”. And so, for example, “everything that will eventually be revealed in the form of the lights of SaG where initially concealed in the lights of AV (which preceded it)” and the same goes for other such interconnected phenomena.
And he says in regard to the latter that “R’ Chaim Vital wrote that even though we use the terms ‘ear’ and ‘eyes’ in the context of Adam Kadmon, this is only … to give us a faint indication of something that’s intrinsically beyond our grasp [1]. For these terms only actually apply where the light relates to the lower realms…. whereas here above (in the very highest realms) the use of these terms is purely figurative inasmuch as this is the place of the root of the phenomena below”. That’s to say that ‘seeing’, ‘hearing’, etc. are only ideational — “theoretical” — in Adam Kadmon. We extrapolate their functions and makeup from the lower realms in which they actually function [2], but these phenomena don’t actually function in the lofty and recondite realm of Adam Kadmon.
Note:
[1] Eitz Chaim, Gate O,Ch,P Ch. 1, p.34a.
[2] See Adir Bamarom p. 337 where it’s written, “If you have the heart of a sage you’ll understand (i.e., extrapolate) the hidden from the revealed, that is, the superior (formation) from the inferior (one)”
(c) 2012 Rabbi Yaakov Feldman
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