re: #475 LudwigVanQuixote

I’m sorry, I was not trying to be cagey. I also wasn’t really meaning to write what will be another really long essay to do justice to, but the short form is that ruach is the breath that was breathed into Adam. This is something spiritual and with it comes a certain spirtual awareness.

In a very real sense the idea is that humanity, and the creation of humanity is defined by a human souls and a certain human awareness. This awareness and the ability to make choices comes from the Divine and iis the spark of the Divine in Humans.

The Tree of Life is Torah itself, but the concept goes beyond the notion of the printed scroll, rather it is the full spiritual understanding of the mysteries. It was not that Adam and Eve were never supposed to partake of these trees, but rather that they jumped the gun and gained a flawed awareness.

There is a huge amount more to say about this and I am not even close to doing it justice.

The upshot is that, according to the Zohar, the consumption of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil was damning precisely because it was the premature consumption of the divine, which Adam and Eve (read ancient humanity) had not sufficiently evolved to be able to wisely internalize and handle. We still don’t appear to be handling it all that well.