…In Kabbalah, the mystery is creation, and in the development history of the investigation of this mystery, we see the investigation take two directions, the transcendent and the immanent.

In Kabbalah, the attack upon the mystery is addressed through Scripture. Since Scripture was considered to be the true word of God, the answer to all of life’s processes and problems were initially sought for in the text of the Bible. The same is true in the search for the mystery. There were two sections of Scripture that were used as the starting point for the search: one was the chapter dealing with Creation itself (Genesis 1). The other source was the vision Ezekiel had of God Himself, seated upon His throne in his chariot, surrounded by His ministering angels (Ezekiel 1).

The Ezekiel vision is one of transcendence: God is visible, but not available. Surrounded by His minions, God is too well protected to be approached by any person. One could only hope to be able to place one’s self in the vicinity of God, and bask in the reflected glory of the deity. There was no hope of speaking to God, or of even having God acknowledge one’s presence; one could only rejoice in the proximity. This concept of God’s transcendence led to the development among the mystics of what has come to be known as the heykhalot literature… These mystics saw the palace of God made up of many chambers—as many chambers as there were Sefirot, or divine emanations of Creation. They saw the twenty-two paths among these Sefirot as being guarded by angels, and saw the need to devise passwords and incantations so that their souls could proceed upon the paths in safety, until they reached the Divine Presence… The whole process was one of meditation proceeding to disassociation, then to reintegration. It was basically a selfish process, having nothing to do with the community or the needs of anyone else…

The contemplation of the mystery of Creation was to merge with an immanent God. The mystical thinkers of creation mysticism focused upon the biblical fact that man and woman were created in the image of God, and were seen to be very good (my underline). Thus the concept of the indwelling God became the key to the search for unity… It was but a step in the thinking of the mystic to believe that God was immanent, available—that indeed God sought the unity as well. God was seen as an indwelling reality—not the imitatio dei, the imitation of divinity in Christianity, and not the ayatollah, the shadow of Allah, in Islam—but the actual presence of God within each human being. Thus, the nature of the union with God did not partake of a tremendous journey outside the self into realms protected by angels and demons, but rather a search within, where God not only was present, but a Presence willing to meet one halfway.