Binah Qlifa | בינה קליפה
The illusion of Binah is that to which we refer when we say that the world is an illusion, the illusion of form as something in itself: birth and death, things and beings distinct and separate, a cosmos subject to the passage of time.
All mysticisms have affirmed its illusory character; which is not a denial of its existence, but rather the perception that reality has two sides indissolubly united, the being aspect and the nothing aspect. It is not a matter of affirming or denying, for neither attitude does justice, but of being silent. Truth manifests itself. Truth is not a statement about the nature of reality, but a state of reality.
Anyone who in the realm of everyday life believes that nothing changes (in a closed, deterministic world, dominated exclusively by necessity) is falling into the Qlifa of Binah. He is absolutizing a Law, which cannot be broken from below, but can be transcended from above, for Wisdom is prior to Understanding. There is no situation that is not open and in which the creative cannot break through. Ultimately everything is Ein Sof, that is to say, infinite.
From all this it is understood that the quality of Binah is silence, which is deeper than that of Malkuth (where it is related to discrimination). In Binah it is the silence that is inner emptiness to be born again in a space, this time divine. The Understanding is born of silence and every birth supposes a passage through emptiness.
Also the vice of Binah repeats one of the vices we saw in Malkuth: greed. Greed is an excess of form only that in this case it does not apply so much to material goods as to spiritual ones. The spiritual is associated with its own sensuality, an enjoyment that, while necessary as a lever of motivation, can end up enslaving the soul. The soul attains its ultimate fulfillment not by the acquisition of positive spiritual virtues (important as this is) but by the denial of itself as apart from the Divine. This demands total self-donation in silence. Spiritual greed (the inordinate appetite for spiritual goods) contradicts silence and blocks it.
Spiritual experience is the vision of pain, of Tikkun: the pain of separation from the spiritual nature. It is the contemplation of the necessity of Creation and of the concealment of the Light, giving rise to its laws and cycles of births and deaths; of the pain of the higher nature for the "fall" of creatures in the worlds of form. We hear the cry of the Mother and how she tolerates so much evil and misfortune, waiting with infinite patience for the soul to return to her. It is to open the heart to universal compassion, feeling immersed in the task of cosmic redemption, of ultimate perfection, in which every being will be transparent to the Divine Light and the world will be restored to God.
And it is to feel the shout of joy of the souls who, after their exile in the sea of contingent existence, in their ascent reach perfection, shining with a light that surpasses the splendor of every earthly luminary. It is to participate in the very joy of the Deity who then gives himself without measure and fulfills every aspiration of the soul. What we have to suffer is transformed into joy when we ascend towards Binah on the path of return. One of the names of Binah is Teshuvah, which means precisely return, since the state of Binah is our true home.
The commandment of Binah, the third word, is: "You shall not take the Name of your God in vain...". The Name of God is the formula of totality, the perfect expression of the Thought of Creation. The word that represents it is the resource at our disposal to adhere in consciousness to it.
It is to take it in vain to cut off the constant communication between the planes. In positive terms the formulation of the commandment would therefore be: Thou shalt adhere to the Name; which means to promote a state of constant connection. It is to awaken to the consciousness of the constant presence of the divine. Only in this way is the return to which we alluded earlier possible.
Binah organizes the energy that comes from Chokmah. In Chokmah (in wisdom), knowledge expands, in Binah it must be restricted, but it is not restricted in a negative way, on the contrary, the fundamental thing about the energy of Binah is that it is restricted in a positive way. Binah is understanding. To understand one must necessarily classify. Of course, every time I classify I lose knowledge that comes to me from Chokmah (from wisdom), however, whoever organizes himself, whoever makes a plan, is acting positively in Binah.
Concepts are understood when they are ordered, because, from there, we can build. A building can be constructed when we know what materials we need to use for that construction. We do not build a thing with just any material. We must classify the material and organize it. We do not build with all the accumulated material (Chokmah), we build with the material that really serves us. In Binah we understand which is the material we need.
We organize ourselves to get ready to build. In Binah we make the plans of the house, we gather the material, we study the formulas that allow us to build. We are not building yet, we are only working with theoretical elements. We open the plans, we study the structures, we look at the possible failures of the system.
There is still time in Binah to rectify the path that we have not put into action. We are in the mental process of sorting and ordering. We are trying to make the best possible classification. The more organized we are, the better prepared we will be for the moment of action. The greater our comprehension (or our understanding), the greater our clarity of knowledge. Let us remember that daat (knowledge) is derived from Binah, and a problem in Binah directly affects Daat.
If we do not have an order, a classification, we do not achieve understanding. We can have many elements (Chokmah), but if we do not know how to classify them, we do not know what is important and what is accessory. Everything is mixed, we believe that the accessory is the important and the important is the accessory. We don't have an order of priorities, we don't have a plan to follow.
We have a lot of Chokmah (wisdom) material but we don't have a project. The Qlifa of Binah can work on disorganization as well as on extreme order. Many live obsessed with organization but miss the underlying element of Chokmah and operate their organization on a void of content. One cannot organize something weak or non-existent.
We see, then, that perfectionism is another transgression that corresponds to the dark side of Binah. In summary, we can say that the dark side of the dimension of Binah is paralysis, either because we feel that we should organize ourselves better, or because we are completely disorganized. Either alternative leads us to the same negative effect, because we do not understand, or because we believe that we do not understand as a consequence of our disorganization.
Whoever fails to organize himself in his life will always find himself in a state of confusion. It is not possible to have good knowledge (Daat) if we do not transit Binah from Chokmah to Daat.