Reaching Your Essence - 003 Hearing the Souls Inner Voice

Viewing Through the Soul Is A Different Kind of View

We will try now to draw these matters closer to our soul and be more specific in how to apply these concepts, with Hashem’s help.

We have begun to explain^[1] that a person is made up of body and soul, and our mission is to learn how to identify ourselves as a soul. Now we will expand upon these words.

The body, as we know, is not entirely one part. There is a head, feet, hands, and organs. The fact that we are a soul is also not one part alone. It has layers to it. As we know from our Sages, the soul has five names: Nefesh, Ruach, Neshamah, Chayah and Yechidah.

It sounds like these are five separate “parts” in our soul, but really, they are just five different “names” that describe one fact: the soul. They are five “names” that describe the same existence (havayah) of the soul, and it is just that there five unique perspectives on how to view the essence of the soul.

To illustrate this, think about a house with many rooms. A person can look at each room like a “part” of the house, or he can look at each room like another view of his house. Our soul can be looked at the same way. The soul doesn’t have separate parts to it; it is one entity, but it has several “rooms” within it.

So the five “names” of the soul are really five different ways to “describe” the soul. As in the illustration we brought, I can look at a room in the house as a room, or I can see it as being a part of a house. So too, one can look at the soul through five different lenses; one can see it from different perspectives, but whatever the perspective is, it is always a way of how to view the same thing – the soul’s spiritual essence.

The way to view the soul’s layers is not like when you cut a cake and you get five pieces from it. It’s not like a father and mother with three children, which add up for a total of five people.

When a child looks at the world, he sees things through a childish perspective, and he can think that things are a game. So too, it is possible for an adult to see everything through a childish perspective – when he only sees things through the lens of his physical body.

Thus, we need to become accustomed to a totally different view on things than what we are used to until now, in order to view things through our soul. Our body and soul do not view things in the same way at all; we cannot view spiritual concepts through our body’s lens. Physical sight is a materialistic kind of view; you can learn how to view the same thing through a lens that sees deeper into the very same thing. When you see through your soul, you see the depth in something which the human eye cannot see.

Seeing the soul is even deeper than how you understand seeing through a microscope. When you look at something through a microscope, you can see more subtleties in it, but seeing through your soul is not simply to see the subtleties in something. It is rather a totally different lens from what you are used to.

For example, feeling the cold is a totally different kind of feeling than heat, and vice versa. So too, just because we know to see things through our eyes doesn’t mean that we can see through our soul. We need to learn how to gain a whole new way to view things, in order to enter our inner world and identify ourselves as a soul.

Therefore, you can’t try to know about your soul from your body’s perspective. You need to acquire a whole new perspective than what you are used to.

Learning About The Soul: Entering The Unknown

Entering the world of spirituality means that you will have no idea what you will be entering!

To illustrate, a child learns things on his own by observing the world, and he develops in steps, slowly.

The world of our soul is like a whole different language that we need to learn. There will be mistakes as we learn it, because we are entering a place that we’ve never been in before, like when you’re in a new country for the first time. Be aware that it’s a whole different perspective than anything you are used to. Spirituality is just not viewed through the same lens as the physical world is viewed, which you see through your physical eyes.

We are trying to learn here how we can identify ourselves as a soul. How can a person identify himself as a soul, though, if he doesn’t know what the soul is?

Many people identify themselves as their background. If a person is Ashkenazic, or Sephardic, or Chassidic, often he thinks that this is “who” he is: “I am Ashkenazi”, “I am a Sephardi,”, “I am Chassidic”, etc. But really, your background is not who you are; it is only a comparison of yourself to your background. If a person thinks that he is who he is because of his background or community, he views things through his body and not from his soul.

So how do we identify ourselves as a soul when we don’t know what it is? A person cannot be told to get there by thinking certain thoughts, because he is not there yet. He doesn’t identify it.

Recognizing True Spirituality: Hearing A New Sound

When G-d came to Shmuel HaNavi, He appeared to him as a human. Why was it necessary to do this? It is because we are used to recognizing something based on human properties, such as a voice. If he would have heard Hashem’s voice, he wouldn’t have known what it is, because he never heard it before. We hear a physical voice in something and then we can know it is real.

There are sounds we recognize and sounds we don’t recognize. No two voices are the same. This we can recognize already from the physical world; we identify voices. When we hear a voice, we know what kind of voice it is. When the phone rings, we can tell from the voice on the other end of the line if it’s our friend, or if it’s the bank, just by hearing the tone of voice on other end of the line before he even says a sentence. We can all identify the natures of different voices.

But there are also voices going on inside us, and we need to able to listen to ourselves, and hear those inner voices.

Hearing Your Inner Voices

We all have a yetzer tov (good inclination) and a yetzer hora (evil inclination). We can tell if there is there is an inner voice in us is coming from our yetzer tov or yetzer hora.  Sometimes we hear an inner voice in us and we don’t know where it is coming from, and we aren’t sure if it’s telling us to do something good or evil, so we don’t know if it’s the yetzer tov or the yetzer hora.

If we hear a voice in us telling to do a mitzvah, we know it’s coming from the yetzer tov, and if we hear that something is forbidden, we know it’s the voice of the yetzer hora if we want to do it.

But even if we are aware if we’re hearing something good or evil, it’s not because we recognize the voices. It’s simply because we know the nature of what the information is telling us, and therefore we discern where the voice is coming from. But we still don’t know how to recognize the actual inner voices. It is something we have to learn about.

Hearing The Subtle Tunes

The Arizal said that there are four “voices” contained in every word of the Torah: taaamim (the tune of the word), nekudos (the prononciation of the word) tagim (the crowns on top of a letter in a Sefer Torah) and oisiyos (the letters of the word).

The oisiyos\letters of a word don’t mean much to us, because we can’t hear any meaning when we just read the letters of a word.

The nekudos begin to tell us what the word is saying, by showing us how to pronounce it - we begin to “hear” the meaning word. But nekudos don’t fully reveal the meaning, because we can interpret the word to mean different words. For example, when we see the word “av”, it can be read as av, but it can also stand for the words “aleph beis”.

[The tagim\crowns of a letter, are hidden matters that we don’t understand, so they do not tell us anything about the meaning of a word].

The taamim, the way a word sounds, is what reveals the meaning of the word to us. The taam in a word, the tune that it sung\pronounced with, is really like a voice in a word. Taamim are thus what gives inner meaning of a word in the Torah. If a person doesn’t know how to sing the taam in a word, he cannot read the Torah for the congregation (l’chatchilah). 

Taam means taste. When you taste a food, you recognize its essence. So the taam is the inner tune that each word is carrying.

Others describe it in the following terms. The oisoyis\letters are like the “body” of a word, while the taamim are like the “soul” of the word.

In order for a person to recognize his soul, he must acquire the ability of taam, to hear the tune behind something, which gives him a taste of the matter. It is essentially an ability in a person to pay attention to his inner voices.

Using Your Power of Taam\Taste to Discern Inner Voices

If a person knows how to taste foods, it is actually a tool he can use to listen to his own soul. When this ability is never channeled towards spirituality, it is used as an ability to taste food and discern what ingredients are in the food and what it needs. A person can develop this ability and become the best chef in the world, but this is not the deep way to use the power of taam\subtle discerning of taste. The ability to sense the taam in foods is really a tool given to us so we can sense subtle tastes - the ability of inner listening.

Expanding Upon Our Senses For Subtlety

We need to be able to feel our inner voice, to hear it.

To illustrate, there are people who are gruff and people who are refined. We can tell right away if someone is like this, just by hearing his voice. Sometimes we do not always a correct assumption, but often we can sense when we are in front of a person with a tough personality or a sensitive personality, because we sense it. We really hearing something in the way the other person talks, and we are discerning what kind of person he is.

Another example of the concept is that when a person is trying to become a musician, he needs a subtle sense for hearing sounds. If he doesn’t already have this subtle sense, I’m not saying he can’t become a musician, but it will be very hard. There are people who were born with a subtle sense for music, and they keep expanding upon it throughout their life, and that is why they succeed with music.

This is the concept – we have already have a bit of a sense to hear subtleties, and we just to have to expand upon it further, in order to hear the subtle inner voices inside us.

Spiritual Sound: Powerful, Yet Subtle and Refined

The Kotzker Rebbe would say that if a person can only cry aloud to Hashem, but he never davens in a whisper to Hashem, this is like the prayers of a non-Jew, for the non-Jews of Ninveh were crying aloud. A Jew, however, can cry from inside himself, and he doesn’t have to make it audible to Hashem. That is the unique inner voice that a Jew has. The Baal Shem Tov calls this a “silent cry.” It is a subtle sense in a person to be able to hear an inner voice going on inside himself – it is a powerful kind of voice, but it is refined at the same time.

Why is it that most people are not succeeding at serving the Creator? Some people are simply not searching for it, and some do not have a will at all. Others have a will, and they are searching, but they aren’t succeeding, because they don’t realize that spirituality is really a world of our inner soul, and the soul is a very refined and subtle kind of world that you have to listen to.

In order to really live the inner world, a person needs to be able to listen to himself. If a person doesn’t have that ability of inner listening, he doesn’t grow in spirituality. People who live their inner world are able to hear the voices of their soul. The sounds of the body are gruff, while the sounds of the soul are refined.

Chazal say that when Moshe was performing the plagues, the Egyptians couldn’t produce lice, because lice is small. The meaning of this is that the magic of the Egyptians, which was the impure knowledge of spirituality, cannot create subtleties. Evil spirituality can create blood or frogs, which are big, but it can’t create something that looks like a small kernel, because the real spiritual world is a very subtle world. Thus, they couldn’t create lice, which are small and subtle, because the nature of evil spirituality is that it is gruff, and therefore it cannot produce anything subtle.

Thus, a person can’t live the inner world of spirituality if he has a gruff and unrefined nature. In order to live and experience the inner spiritual world, a person has to hear its sounds, which are subtle, and it is very different from the nature of physical sounds that we are used to.

The “Bas Kol” – The “Heavenly Voice”, and Beyond

The voice of a person changes as he gets older. A child and a teenager sound very different, and the voice of an old person is another kind of voice. But the soul in us has its own voice, which always remains the same.

Again, as I said before, it’s hard to describe the inner world. It’s like trying to describe color to a blind man. You can describe to him a shape, but you can’t get him to actually see. So too, we have a soul and body. When we live through entirely the body, all we hear are physical sounds, and we will be deaf to the sounds of the soul.

However, there is no person who lives totally in his body. If a person was totally controlled by his body, he can’t survive. All of us are being held alive by our soul. Although this is true, though, a person doesn’t know how to differentiate between the voices of the body and the soul. When a person never learns how to discern between all the voices, he remains with a salad-like mixture of voices going on inside him.

We have in us the body’s voice and the soul’s voice. It is not possible to hear both of them at once, except for certain rare individuals.

Chazal say that every day, a Bas Kol (“daughter of a voice”, a Heavenly voice) goes out every day by Har Sinai and says, “Do Teshuvah, wayward ones.” The Baal Shem Tov explained it that any person who has thoughts of doing Teshuvah is really hearing the Bas Kol.

The Bas Kol is not the actual kol (voice) itself, however, because it is only the “bas” of the kol, the “daughter” of the “voice”, thus, it is the bas kol of the neshamah, but it is not the kol itself of the neshamah. The actual kol\voiceof the soul, itself,is the essence of our soul which we need to get to – it is the inner and most subtle point of life that there is. Just to hear the bas of the kol is like remaining with the branches and missing the root.

Listening To The Inner Voice

Thus, either we are hearing the sounds of our body, or we hear the bas kol of our soul. We can’t hear both at once; either we are involved in physicality and thus deaf to spiritual sounds, or we are involved with spirituality and we can’t hear anything physical. If we can’t do both at once, and we have a body and a soul, then how do we listen to our inner voice?

In Birchas HaMazon, we say “BaKol, Mikol, Kol”. Avraham said “Yeish Li Kol”, “I have everything.” This represents the ultimate level of kol, to feel that one has everything inside himself. The Gemara says that BaKol is referring to Avraham, Mikol is referring to Yitzchok, and Kol is referring to Yaakov.

Shabbos is called “a resemblance of the World To Come”. Chazal are telling us how to “taste” the World To Come - how to hear the to the sound of the World To Come. The kol that we currently hear in us [the voice in us that is motivated to do teshuvah] is a spiritual sound, but it is not yet the ultimate spiritual sound we can hear in ourselves. It is only a bas kol, which is a partial kol, thus it is not yet the inner point of a kol.

If we want to hear the actual kol - the inner voice itself - we need to realize, that a partial kol that we hear inside ourselves is only the kol of the body.

There is only one kol that is complete and not partial: the kol of Hashem. It was a kol that could have created the world in one sound, but Hashem split it into ten sounds. It was a complete kol.

Any kol we hear is kol, from the word kelalah (curse), which implies that the bas kol we hear is incomplete. But the “complete” kol which we need to hear is kol from the word kaf, and it is the inner kol.

We are used to hearing kolos (voices) that are only partial kinds of voices, because they are different and this impermanent. We need to get used to hearing the kol of the neshamah, the kol of the World To Come, the kol of Hashem, Who is One. It is a kol that never breaks up, and it is only one kol, unlike the many kolos we hear, which can become split up.

All Jewish souls were by Har Sinai and thus we all heard Hashem’s voice. That voice remained forever, for it is the voice of Hashem, and thus it can still be heard, deep in the soul. We need to learn how we can listen to it.

There are five names to our soul. The lower layers of the soul, from Nefesh, Ruach, Neshamah and Chayah, all came after Adam’s sin. Had Adam not sinned, we would have remained with just our Yechidah, which hears only one voice, the voice of Hashem.

We can get to our Nefesh and Ruach and Neshamah, and maybe to our Chayah, if we become aware of our inner voices. But to remain at that level is still not the level of hearing our actual essence, which is always once voice alone. We need to hear our essence, which is our Yechidah, thus we need to get used to listening to the one voice alone, which contains everything that we need. It is the kol that is hakol, “everything.” It is also known as the kol demamah dakkah (“soft, silent voice”).

Everything is there! We need to hear the inner voice in us, which is the complete kind of voice; it is the voice of our actual essence.

The inner voices we are familiar with are sometimes loud and sometimes quiet; they fluctuate in their frequency. How do we hear the constant kind of voice, which is the voice of our actual essence?  When someone is talking, we hear his voice, and when someone is not talking, we don’t hear his voice. So how do we hear a voice that is constant?

The voice of our essence never ceases, thus it is can always be heard. “Hashem is not found in a great noise, but in a kol demamah dakkah (soft, subtle voice)” – Hashem’s voice is found in the voice of our soul’s essence, which is a “soft, subtle voice”. That is the voice we need to hear how to listen to.

We hear voices of our yetzer tov and our yetzer hora. Sometimes we hear one of them more than the other, while the other one goes to sleep. But those are just partial voices, because they fluctuate, and therefore, even the voice of our yetzer tov isn’t yet our innermost voice. We need to hear the voice of our very essence, which is always one voice.

We are trying to learn how to identify our “I” as a neshamah, a soul. What does that really mean? It means to listen that we need to listen to the voice of your soul’s actual essence. That is how we will come to identify our neshamah as being our true self.

In Conclusion

Concerning Channah the prophetess [mother of the prophet Shmuel], it is written, “And Hannah spoke on heart, and only her lips were moving, and her voice was not heard.” This does not mean simply that she spoke quietly or that she whispered. The depth of this matter is that she spoke from her heart, from her innermost voice, the voice of her very being. In that inner place in herself, her voice could not be heard, not because she was whispering, and not because it was a quiet tefillah, but because it is the eternal voice of the soul’s essence, which is found in the deepest inner silence. It is the inner voice of Creation contained in each soul.

I hope that besides for hearing these actual words, that you be able to hear and feel the soul of the words contained in them. They cannot really be described in words, for they can only be understood if you connect deeply into yourself. It is my hope that all of us here should reach the essence of our soul.