⬡ The five souls — and the two lists that are not the same listחמשה שמות

The soul in this tradition is not one thing with one name. Bereshit Rabbah 14:9 says it has five: nefesh, ruach, neshamah, chayah, yechidah.

Open any sephirah in this app and you have already been reading them. Every one of the eleven carries a soul: line, and the four worlds name their level too — fifteen places, and until now not one of them was a thing you could point at.

⭐ The interesting part is that the two great lists of five are not lists of the same kind of thing.

The Midrash is counting a body. Its reasons are physical and you can check them: nefesh is the blood; ruach is what goes up and down; neshamah is a person's disposition; chayah is called living because it stays alive while the limbs die; and yechidah is called the single one because it is the only thing in you that is not in a pair.

The Ari is counting a cosmos. A thousand years later the same five words are world-levels — nefesh out of Assiyah, ruach out of Yetzirah, neshamah out of Beriah, and the top two often said not to be resident in the body at all.

Same five words, two entirely different arguments, thirteen centuries apart. This house draws both and dates both. It does not blend them into one tidy diagram, because the tidy diagram is where the information goes to die. ⚠ Reference only. Nothing here is a rite.