Before the beginning of anything, there was only God. Nothing existed, not even existence. Tradition states that God willed to see God and so God’s Will, symbolised by light, shone nowhere and everywhere. Thus the EN SOF AUR, the Endless Light of Will, was omniscient throughout Absolute All. From God knowing All, God willed the first separation so that God might behold God. This, we are told, was accomplished by a contraction in Absolute All, so as to make a place wherein the mirror of Existence might manifest.
The place that was vacated was finite in that it was limited in relation to the Absolute All that held it. This act of contraction, or Zimzum as it was called, brought about the void of Unmanifest Existence even though it was, we are told, the size of a dimensionless dot in the midst of the Absolute.
Unmanifest Existence is the place of Emptiness. It is quite different from No-thingness because it is a thing, although it is negative like the void in a hollow ball. Such a condition must exist so that Positive Existence may come into being within it.
According to some Kabbalists, the Will of God that surrounded the vacated space in the symbol of the EN SOF AUR began to penetrate as a beam of light into the void of Unmanifest Existence. This brought into focus the three factors that made the void. The first was the Will of the Absolute, the second the Act of allowing it to happen and the third the Restriction to limit and contain the event. These three principles at work within EN SOF AUR are called by some Kabbalists the three Zahzahot or the three Hidden Splendours.
The Zahzahot were the hidden roots of what eventually would become the first of several sets of major laws that would govern Existence. They generated the processes of expansion and contraction overlooked by Will. Kabbalists sometimes regard them as the original acts of Mercy and Severity operating under the direct eye of the Absolute. While these Hidden Splendours lay outside both Unmanifest and Manifest Existence, they profoundly affected the nature of the Universe, which was the result of their interaction, as it came into being out of the Will of EN SOF.