Why Kabbalah Is a Natural Science
Kabbalists are natural scientists, that reveal the single governing force of nature by achieving equivalence of form with it.
The first researcher to ask about the universe and the forces that conduct humanity was Abraham. He was one of many people who lived in Mesopotamia (ancient Persia), and in those days there was no division into nations. He discovered the method by which we can know the reality beyond our ordinary perception, and described his research and discoveries in his Sefer Yetzira (Book of Creation).
Abraham began to gather students and teach them the wisdom of Kabbalah. In time, this group of Kabbalists became a nation. Many years later, after the ruin of the First and Second Temples, this group of Kabbalists lost its perception of the Upper Reality; they fell from their degree of spiritual consciousness and were able only to perceive their physical reality.
This was actually a gradual process. Some lost their spiritual perception with the ruin of the First Temple, and the rest lost it with the ruin of the Second Temple. Rabbi Akiva was the last great Kabbalist to attain the degree of the spiritual law, “Love thy friend as thyself.” The intensification of egoism induced unfounded hatred, and only religion remained for people, instead of the wisdom of Kabbalah.
Yet, despite the decline, a select few remained Kabbalists, and they passed the wisdom on from generation to generation until a time when all of humanity would need it. Today, we must rekindle the ancient science, revive the study of Kabbalah, discover the Upper Reality through it, and pass it on to all humanity.
It is important to note, however, that Kabbalah has nothing to do with religion, and does not imply that we need perform any physical actions. As we have mentioned previously, Kabbalah speaks only about desires and intentions with respect to the Creator.
How Is Human Nature Different from the Creator’s Nature?
As we have said above, the Kli (vessel/creature) that the Creator created became a soul in the world Atzilut. This is the collective, or general soul, called Adam ha Rishon (The First Man). In the beginning, all its parts were bonded in wondrous harmony, and it was filled with the Upper Light. In that state, the sum of the parts created perfection. Later on, the soul experienced a process of shattering and fell to a degree called “below the barrier,” where the spiritual sensation ends. The pieces of the single soul continue to exist below the barrier, but feel detached from one another (Figure 6).
To clarify these words we can say that they remain in “the same place” as they were before, but another sensation is added to them. This is the sensation that they exist within themselves. In spirituality there are no places and the changes are merely in the quality of their perception and their sensations. Thus, each of the parts now lives within itself and senses nothing but itself.
Such a state of being is called “this world,” which is the situation we are in today. The Upper Force is operating on us (the detached parts) to bring us back to the corrected state, and this will be the realization of the purpose of Creation.
Actually, the Upper Force “threw” us down to this world to acknowledge how different we are from It. We must come to want to rise back from this lowest point to the correct state of existence, where we are all connected. The gap between human nature and the Creator’s nature is evident through millennia of sufferings, a complete process of descent and ascent designed to enable us to see how hateful we are to one another. In other words, every person’s egoism must be exposed, and only then will we realize why we must willingly reconnect with one another.
The Secret of Never Ending Pleasure
We must understand the problem that arises when we want to satisfy a desire. For example, when a hungry person sits in a restaurant and waits for a meal, the minute the meal is served and the person begins to eat, the appetite begins to decrease. The more that person eats, the less hungry the person becomes, and with the lack of hunger, pleasure diminishes. Even if much of the food is left on the table, and even if the food is delicious, without a desire (appetite) for it, the pleasure ceases.
This scenario repeats itself in the fulfillment of every desire. If a desire appears in us, we are motivated to satisfy it. We strain and exert to fulfill our craving, but once we have achieved our desire, it vanishes. It might take a few minutes, a few hours or a few weeks, but sooner or later (mostly sooner) the fulfillment fades away. Thus, the same pleasure that satisfies the desire also eliminates it.
Moreover, obtaining one pleasure builds a desire that is twice as strong as before. Kabbalists have said that “One who has one hundred wants two hundred,” one who has two hundred wants four hundred, and so on and so forth. As a consequence, when we obtain a certain pleasure, we remain twice as empty as before. If we could only find a way to always be filled with pleasures, we would be feeling eternal life.
There is one way to do this: to separate the “sensing unit” into two parts. One part will receive the pleasure, and the other part will sense it. In other words, if there were someone else to whom the pleasure would flow through me, my pleasure would not be quenched. If there were another person in the process of my receiving pleasure, the sensing unit would be split in two.
In such a case, I could separate the receiver of the pleasure from the one who feels it. The receiver would be another person, and the one who senses the pleasure would be me. In so doing, the sensing of the pleasure can become unending and yield a sensation of eternal living.
We can compare the above situation to a mother and her child. The mother enjoys her child’s pleasure and can therefore give without restraint and delight in it. If I could love someone in such a way that pleasing him or her would feel like my own pleasure, my delight would be unlimited. In order to recognize that principle, our souls had to break and come down to this world.
Who Else Wants to Speed Up their Evolution?
When the point in the heart—a genuine desire to reawaken the sensation of the spiritual world—awakens in people, they come to the wisdom of Kabbalah. The study of the wisdom of Kabbalah is the study of our true state: the pre-shattering state. This is the only state that exists. Even now we are in it, though we are unaware of it. By wanting to come out of the dark state we are in and awaken to feel our real existence, we draw to ourselves the effect of the Light within that state.
Our efforts to unlock our tools of sensation and to perceive our actual state of being, develop new vessels in us. Thus we begin to feel how we are all connected as parts of a single system.
There is endless Light and fulfillment flowing continually through each part of the system. The reason for all the suffering and troubles the world is experiencing today is to force humanity to return to its true, perfect state, called Gmar Tikkun (“The End of Correction”).
Returning to the natural, perfect state is a process that the Creator has predetermined from beginning to end. Each phase is dictated from top to bottom. In each of us is a spiritual gene in which all our past, present, and future states are imprinted. The soul must move up the same route and stages from which it had fallen from Above. However, the way back depends on the extent to which we recognize that our egoistic state is bad, and our understanding that being closer to the Creator is the preferable state to experience.
Thus, the predetermined stages built in the spiritual gene evolve through the Light, namely through the Upper Force, and lead us from state to state. If we realize that it is in our interest to ascend and “invite” the Surrounding Light to work on us, we will accelerate our evolution and come to feel true spirituality. Hence, our freedom of choice lies only in accelerating the process.
The term “Surrounding Light” describes the Force that attracts us toward the attribute of bestowal. It draws us to the corrected state, which is the attribute of the Creator. All our future states exist within each and every one of us, even though we do not sense them. The projection of our altruistic, corrected state on our egoistic state awakens the attribute of bestowal in us.
Now You Can Improve Your Relation With Others and Discover Spirituality
Our corrected state is called Gmar Tikkun (“The End of Correction”). At Gmar Tikkun, every soul is filled with boundless pleasures and a complete equivalence of Form with the Creator. In our present state, the Light that fills our souls at Gmar Tikkun shines in the form of Surrounding Light; its power is determined by the intensity of our desire to acquire the attribute of bestowal.
The Light is the power of bestowal, the power of giving. If a person wants to reach the attribute of bestowal, that person must make the force of bestowal—the light that fills one when he or she is corrected—project upon one’s present state. The Surrounding Light corrects us and brings us back to the quality of bestowal. It is like a decent person who has gone astray and now reawakens to return to decency.
In fact, in order to cross the barrier that separates the corporeal world from the spiritual world, we must change our intention from relating to each other hatefully to relating to each other with love. The same rules apply to all parts of Creation, from the lowest element of reality to the highest. It all depends on the perspective of the observer who discovers the rules.
However, until a science is mathematically established, it cannot be considered a science. For example, quantum physics relates to a reality confined by time and space. But what we are talking about here is beyond time and space.
Hence, as long as quantum physics is not extended to include dimensions beyond time and space, it might be difficult for conventional science to proceed with the research. For this reason, it is important to find a tangential point, a connection between quantum physics and Kabbalah, for Kabbalah takes the research of reality to a place where physics cannot reach.
In other words, to progress to a higher level we must expand contemporary science to include consciousness, and this is a big step.
Why Researching Reality Requires a Change in the Researcher
At this point, it might be beneficial to describe how Kabbalah relates to our perception of reality. We perceive reality through our five senses—sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. However, all we really feel is our own reaction to whatever exists outside of us, with no perception of the actual, objective reality.
For example, a wave reaches my ear, which it interprets as sound. I know it because of the reaction of my ear’s membrane to the wave that presses it. In truth, all I am measuring is my own reaction; I do not feel the wave itself. I perceive a range of sounds according to the changes in my hearing abilities and the health of my hearing mechanism. However, I have no idea what is actually happening outside of me. All our tools of perception and our senses work similarly.
We can say that we are closed in a box, and all that we measure is our interior impressions, creating in us a sensation that reality outside us changes. We cannot know if anything at all changes; we cannot even know if anything really exists outside of us. We simply have no means to come out of ourselves and test it.
Prof. Tiller mentioned Tor Norretranders, the renowned Danish researcher who published a book entitled The User Illusion. Norretranders notes an intriguing point regarding the functionality of the unconscious and what it contains. It appears that the five senses perceive fifty million bits of information per second, gathered as streams of information in the consciousness. The subconscious processes the information mathematically, but it only processes a tiny fragment of the information—some fifty bits of information per second.
Evidently, there is a huge gap between the received fifty million bits of information and the processed fifty bits. The important element to note is that the subconscious sends to the brain only the information that the brain determined in advance would be meaningful. The rest of the information is dismissed by the subconscious. These findings appear to corroborate the Kabbalah perspective with regard to the will to receive.
It is still unknown whether cutting-edge science and prominent researchers realize that the evolution of research depends on our changing our own interiors–the interior of the researcher. At the end of the day, we are studying ourselves; our ability to progress in research depends on the extent to which we change ourselves.
In the film What the Bleep Do We Know? and in similar publications of popular science, we can find claims that there are infinite possibilities around us. The wisdom of Kabbalah explains that all that exists around us is the Upper Light in a state of complete stillness, and all the changes and the endless possibilities are inside us. All that we see is the reflection of ourselves in the fixed, unchanging Light.
I regard the concept that to progress in research we must change ourselves as the next perception that the world will come to understand. It is a process that began with Newton, continued with Einstein, and continued with Quantum Physics. Now it is time for the next phase. Research will eventually discover that nothing changes except our inner tools, something that Kabbalists have discovered thousands of years ago. Today, a growing number of researchers and thinkers are anticipating that science will reach that view.
“Do You Recognize How Kabbalah Can Help You Expand Your Perception?” is based on the book, Kabbalah, Science and the Meaning of Life by Dr. Michael Laitman.
