Four Worlds in Community

Our dear friend Hilda.

In the Toledano Tradition we often focus on the Kabbalistic Teaching of the Four Worlds. I like to think of these four dimensions of life through the metaphor of an apple...

The fourth world, the material one, is like the skin of the apple. In conventional Western culture we tend to focus on the surface of life, on the outer, physical aspects. We assess  people by how they look or what they do. We give much time and energy to material well being and to dealing with practical issues. This is a bit like eating the skin of the apple and ignoring or throwing the rest away.

The third world, the psychological one, is like the flesh of the apple. It may be sweet or bitter, unblemished or bruised and once we get below the skin, it's tempting to get very preoccupied with this vast inner world and forget to look deeper.

The second world, the spiritual one, is like the core of the apple. It is the essential structure that underpins every apple, no matter how different it seems on or just below the surface. Religious traditions are like apples...they can look and taste very different, but often core spiritual principles are the same.

The first world, the Source or Divine one, is like the seed within the core of the apple. It contains everything to create a new apple tree and endless generations of apples. Every human being has the potential to tap into their divine, creative Source and find their inner seed.


During the Introductory Course, one of our distant learning companions, Hilda, was travelling Britain and reading Kabbalah and Scott Peck. She sent the following thoughts about his idea of different levels of community, which seemed to resonate with aspects of the Four Worlds teachings...

Peck: Four stages of true community:

Pseudo community – Can we see here the superficial ‘niceness’ of the basic physical world?

Chaos:  Is this where we begin to be aware of the underlying tensions of our world, where conflicts begin to be felt, but we don’t always know how to deal with them; where relationships become confused; where received modes of dealing don’t always work; where there is a feeling of being lost as superficial strategies fail…?

Emptiness: As we learn to discard ‘nice’, but superficial, ways of relating to each other, is this where our understanding of psychologically flawed pathways leads us into deeper waters - a more spiritually aware realisation that there is a different level of authenticity more in keeping with the divine purposes of our creation? 

True community: Allowing ourselves to be overtaken by this power of honesty – authenticity – is it here that we enter into a truer understanding of our inter-connectedness with each other and the whole of creation? Does this mean giving up our superficial niceness, holding more honestly to the variability of our relationships, and trusting ourselves to divine glimpses of the true potential of being in harmony with the divine purposes of LIFE?

There is no suggestion that there is a clear ‘progression’ through the various stages towards true community – but rather that it is helpful to be aware that these are stages which, if recognised, help to affirm and stabilise our growth from the superficial niceness of pseudo-community into the disintegration and re-building that underlies moving towards true community.  Neither is there any guarantee that we will not regress, preferring the relatively easy ways of being nice, to the often painful  path of accepting our own, or others’, authenticity.