yet it is itself part and parcel of that Eternity; for Life alone can understand Life.
What is that “Spark” which “hangs from the Flame”? It is Jîva, the Monad in conjunction with Manas, or rather its aroma—that which remains from each Personality, when worthy, and hangs from Âtmâ-Buddhi, the Flame, by the Thread of Life. In whatever way it is interpreted, and into whatever number of principles the human being is divided, it may be easily shown that this doctrine is supported by all the ancient religions, from the Vedic to the Egyptian, from the Zoroastrian to the Jewish. In the case of the last-mentioned, the Kabalistic works offer abundant proof of this statement. The entire system of the Kabalistic numerals is based on the divine Septenary hanging from the Triad, thus forming the Decad, and its permutations 7, 5, 4, and 3, which, finally, all merge into the One itself; an endless and boundless Circle.
As says the Zohar:
The Deity [the ever invisible Presence] 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 tenequal seven: the Decad contains four Unities and three Binaries.
The Ten Sephiroth correspond to the Limbs of Man.
When I [the Elohim] framed Adam Kadmon, the Spirit of the Eternal shot out of his Body, like a sheet of lightning that radiated at once on the billows of the sevenmillions of skies, and my ten Splendours were his Limbs.
But neither the Head nor the Shoulders of Adam Kadmon can be seen; therefore we read in the Siphra Dtzenioutha, the “Book of the Concealed Mystery”:
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, they formed the worlds six by six.
The seventh being Malkuth, which is our Earth[382] on its plane, and [pg 260] the lowest on all the other planes of conscious existence. 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 [383]] cannot be seen before the Soul stands in the presence of the Ancient of Days.