⚠ Three, then five — the seam in the middle of the doctrine

Most of what this tradition says about the soul, it says about three: nefesh, ruach, neshamah — the biblical vocabulary, the Zohar's working set, and the subject of Sava de-Mishpatim, the long discourse already shelved in this house.

Chayah and yechidah come from a different place. They are in Bereshit Rabbah's list of five names in the fifth century — but as names, alongside the others, not as storeys above them. Turning them into two further levels, stacked over the three and reaching into Atzilut and beyond, is the work of the Lurianic system in the sixteenth century.

So the familiar five-level soul is a three-level structure with a later attic, and the attic is where the tradition put the parts it says you cannot introspect.

⚠ This app dates the seam rather than hiding it — the same reason the tefillin room prints four layers with four years, and the same reason the Tree here is wired the Ari's way with Kircher's 1652 chart kept one toggle away and labelled. A doctrine with a date is not a weaker doctrine. It is a legible one.