Rabbi Joel Bakst (Interview Archive)
The Adamic consciousness made a miscalculation, and that error alone is its own field of study, as remote and difficult as quantum mechanics. He received a warning: if you eat from it, which is to say if you become part of it, you will die. So what is death here? In the Kabbalistic sources death simply names the movement of anything from its true level down to some level beneath it. Understood that way, death is relative rather than final.
When the text says you will die, it means you will descend into the lower dimension. Picture those three nested cubes that telescoped into one another, or a set of Russian dolls spilled apart. You have to go down into each of them, all the way to the bottom of the bottom one, and gather what is there. Pick up the pieces and carry them back up. That task, start to finish, is what this reality is for.
This also speaks to one of the oldest human puzzles: what is this reality, and why is there so much horror inside it? The pain and the suffering, emotional and physical and spiritual, seem to make no sense at all. People follow that straight into the usual question, which I think is the wrong question. If God is good, how could He permit any of this? From there you conclude there is no God, or only a limited one.
There is another route entirely, and it dissolves a great many of these problems at once. Everything we call reality sits inside of Adam. We are within that Adamic higher consciousness, that higher reality. All of history is inside it. Every good and every evil is inside it, and nothing stands outside it. He's got the whole wide world in his hands.
And the one who holds the whole world, well, Genesis puts it another way: the higher dimension created man, Adam, in his image. That is fractal geometry. The higher dimension produced a replica of itself, iterating downward into a lower-dimensional copy. The human form we inhabit is a lower and lower and lower and lower replica of what it is at its supernal root.
You cannot look there directly without particular training and particular tools, because what arrives comes as a projection. I know only my three-dimensional reality. I know human, I know form. So any attempt to picture that higher dimension, to picture what God is, collapses into my limits. Try to imagine God and you end up with a three-letter word, confined to three dimensions, and everything you see is a projection. We have a name for that: anthropomorphism, the casting of human qualities onto the divine, onto the higher dimension.