Love the Creative Power of the Soul - Chapter 3:
Love - The Revealed "Something"

One of the basic Jewish beliefs in regard to Creation is that G-d created the world ex nihlo ("something from nothing"). This concept relates directly to love's ability to translate and transmute potential into actuality.

On a deeper level, Kabbalah and Chassidut explain that there is in truth a three-rung process of Creation: something, nothing, something. G-d is the true "something" preceding the stage of "nothing," referred to as the tzimtzum ("contraction") and the formation of the primordial vacuum in which Creation, the final "something," takes place.

In terms of the human creative process, the initial "something" is the true essence of the soul, containing the totality of hidden potential, available if only contacted and realized. This point of the soul rests at the "peak of the crown," a term in Kabbalah referring to keter ("crown"), the highest of the sefirot, the Divine channels through which G-d creates and maintains finite reality.

To actualize this hidden potential, a person must paradoxically enter into a state of "nothing" or self-nullification, thereby allowing the soul to become a fitting vessel for the potential true "something" to emerge uninhibited into the "something" of reality. The characteristic in the human personality identified with the "peak of the crown," the abode of pure potential, is emunah ("faith"). Though one cannot "see" or "touch" this transcendent supraconscious level of the soul, faith cultivates the pure belief that it is nonetheless real and accessible. The sefirah of chochmah, "wisdom," is what nurtures the quality of self-nullification, transforming faith into the "something" of material reality. Chochmah has the ability to "see"--with a spiritual eye (ayin, beginning in Hebrew with the letter ayin) --the "nothingness" (ayin, beginning in Hebrew with the letter alef). Emunah has the sensitivity to see through even the "nothing" to the true "something" residing within.

The spark that begins the entire creative process is that point of love enwedged deep in the hidden potential of the heart of faith. The end of the process, wherein the true hidden "something" is drawn down through the clear channel of chochmah--egolessness--and then revealed in worldly form, is revealed through the sefirah of chesed ("lovingkindness"), the first of the emotive powers of the soul, whose inner activating force is love.