Why the Spiritual Reality Is Hidden
Throughout Its Existence, humanity has been utilizing its five senses to research the reality in which it lives, and gather the findings to formulate sciences. The purpose of science and the accumulated human knowledge is to improve our lives and help us more effectively use the world we live in.
The wisdom of Kabbalah, unlike all other sciences, researches a realm whose existence eludes an ordinary person. To research this realm, one must be equipped with another sense, a sense that perceives the “Upper World.” With this additional sensory ability, one can gather information about the Upper World and experiment with it. Like any ordinary scientist, a Kabbalist can record reactions to actions. Kabbalists are researchers of the Upper World, and as such, they have recorded their findings over thousands of years of research. The collection of their records constitutes the wisdom of Kabbalah.
What Kinds of Tools Does Kabbalah Give a Person?
The wisdom of Kabbalah describes the actions that originate in the Creator and hang down to our world through all the Upper Worlds. It also describes how they expand through the corporeal reality that we can all perceive with our five ordinary senses.
Our world is a consequence of the Upper Worlds. Thus, the wisdom of Kabbalah contains knowledge about the Upper Worlds and our world. The Upper Worlds pertain to a higher level of existence than our world, where time, space, and motion do not exist, but only abstract forces. It follows that Kabbalah contains the existence of all times as they are expressed in our world.
Kabbalah is a means to help us research all the states of existence. This sequence of states includes our state before our souls dress in physical bodies, all our phases while we exist in this world, and our situation once the soul departs from the body and returns to its root in the Upper World.
Kabbalah deals with everything that expands from the Creator to the reality that He has created, and which He leads to His desired goal. Kabbalah does not deal with the Creator Himself.
Why Humanity Is Evolving to Become Like the Creator
In light of the crisis that humanity is facing and the growing sensation of helplessness and emptiness, the time has come for the wisdom of Kabbalah to appear. Kabbalah explains that the purpose of reality is to raise humankind to a level of equality with the Creator. The purpose of humanity’s decline to this world is to enable us to rise independently to the highest level in reality—the Creator’s level.
While in this world and ascending towards the Creator, we hold both ends of reality, as we are in our world physically, and in our souls at the level of the Creator. This is the purpose of our existence, predetermined by the Creator Who leads all of us toward it.
At the end of all our physical incarnations in this world, our souls will reach the degree of the Creator. This process is similar to any other gradual process in reality. From the Creator’s point of view, the beginning of the process and its end are at the same point. But while there is no concept of time for the Creator, for us the process extends over millennia, a long enough period for us to acquire the necessary insights and qualities to evolve. These will help us gradually become more Creator-like, and to ultimately become equal partners with the Creator.
The process is essentially one of gradual evolvement. The evolutionary process of humanity is like the ripening of a fruit: dry and sour while unripe, and sweet and juicy at the end. Had we not known how fruits ripen, we would have erroneously thought that the sour fruit would ripen to an even more sour fruit. But since we know the good end of the process to begin with, we can justify the whole process. Thus, only those who know the end of the process can justify it; if we, too, could see our future state, we would understand the Creator’s actions and justify them.
Do You Know How to Correct Yourself?
“Climbing the degrees of the Upper Worlds” is a generic term for all the new discernments collected along the spiritual way, the perpetual internal improvement, and the new qualities that one assumes at every moment.
As previously mentioned, the creature consists of a will to receive pleasure. This will is divided into five elementary parts, called “five degrees of Aviut (thickness).” They are graded from Aviut zero (root) to Aviut four. Thus, the term Aviut serves to measure the intensity of the desire.
Each of the basic degrees of Aviut is divided into five sub-degrees, and each of those is divided once more into sub-subdivisions. Thus, the will to receive is divided into 125 degrees, and we are required to correct all of them.
Correction of the desire means using the desire for pleasure to bring pleasure to another. Such a use is called “giving” or “bestowal.” The attribute of the Creator is bestowal, and the abundance that expands from Him to His creatures is an expression of His desire to give to them.
Hence, correcting the human ego from wanting to please self to wanting to bestow is considered an ascent in degrees. With each degree, one acquires more of the will to bestow, and accordingly feels more like the Creator. With each ascent, one comes closer still to the attribute of the Creator and to the purpose of life. The process persists until one acquires the attribute of the Creator to the fullest and becomes identical to Him.
Why the Corporeal World Is a Consequence of the Spiritual World
To allow human beings to correct, the Creator created the worlds and their degrees before He created humans. Only afterwards was humankind created and lowered to this world. From here we humans must climb back to our roots. Consequently, Kabbalah deals with two successions: “from Above downward,” pertaining to the cascading of the worlds and their degrees, and “from below Upward,” pertaining to the soul’s ascent through the very same degrees.
The worlds that stem from the Creator are Ein Sof, Adam Kadmon, Atzilut, Beria, Yetzira, Assiya, and finally, our world (Figure 12). Kabbalah describes both the creation of the worlds and how a soul descends from the Creator through all the worlds down to ours. Between the Upper Worlds and our world is “the barrier” that separates the material world from the spiritual world.
Below the barrier, the body and the soul are at the level of this world, and we begin our correction process at this level. From this world, the soul ascends by accumulating knowledge of the spiritual reality, traversing the worlds Assiya, Beria, Yetzira, Atzilut, Adam Kadmon, ultimately returning to the world Ein Sof. There, in a state called Gmar Tikkun (The End of Correction), the soul is completely reunited with the Creator.
The wisdom of Kabbalah encompasses the entire reality below the Creator: the worlds, everything within them, the descent of the soul to this world, and its return upwards. In other words, the wisdom of Kabbalah contains all of humanity’s states and situations.
All the worlds, including ours, stand one below the other. Hence, all the worlds comprise the same elements. The Light emerges from the Creator and traverses all the worlds down to this world. Therefore, each element that is present in the world Ein Sof, is also present in all the other worlds. Kabbalists define this relation as “root and branch”:
Thus, there is not an item of reality, or an occurrence of reality found in a lower world that you will not find its likeness in the world above it, as identical as two drops in a pond, and they are called “Root and Branch.” That means that that item found in the lower world is deemed a branch of its pattern found in the higher world, being the root of the lower item, as this is where that item in the lower world was imprinted and made to be.
—Baal HaSulam, The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah
We therefore see that every element and detail in this world, with all its connections, is present also in all the Upper Worlds, from Assiya to Ein Sof. The universe, Planet Earth, the still, vegetative, animate, and the speaking are all found in the worlds above this world, too. There is only one difference between the elements of this world and the elements of the Upper World: in the Upper Worlds the elements are forces, and in our world they are matter.
What Acquiring the Spiritual Reality Gives a Person
Attaining the Upper Worlds enables one to see the forces that operate upon every item in this world. When we attain the Upper World, we come to know the modes of behavior of every element of that world’s reality, the reason for its behavior and its qualities. The wisdom of Kabbalah facilitates our ascension to the Upper World and permits one to observe every object’s behavior in this world from above.
Crossing the barrier is a gradual process. Studying Kabbalah with the goal of nearing the Creator’s attribute—the attribute of bestowal—enhances one’s keenness. Increasingly subtler insights surface, pertaining to the reality in which one lives. One begins to feel the operations at the “backstage” of matter, the forces that operate the visible, perceptible matter.
A Kabbalist continues to feel the same reality as before with the ordinary five senses, but at the same time perceives the forces beyond the perceptual boundaries of the five senses with the help of the sixth sense. The hidden reality becomes more and more lucid, and the existence of another reality beyond the picture of this world becomes apparent.
Kabbalah Is Necessary for a Person to Feel the Entirety of the Spiritual Reality
The revelation of the spiritual reality is divided into three phases, called Ibur (gestation), Katnut (infancy), and Gadlut (adulthood). In the first phase, the Ibur, we can see our state, but cannot understand it. In the second phase, the Katnut, we understands that something is happening, but still cannot independently participate in spiritual action. In the third phase, the Gadlut, we obtain the strength and wisdom to participate in spiritual action and affect the spiritual reality.
At the third level, we begin to determine the flow of forces from the Upper World to our world and back. As individuals, we then become active participants, conduits through which the flow travels from above downward and from below upward. At the level of Gadlut, we realize our part and operate as a connector between the worlds. This is our corrected state, and each person must reach it.
Each person can come to feel every item and element of every world. All that we need is a special, subtle sense, an ability to discern and to feel. Even in this world, we discern considerable differences between the sensations of a young child, a youth, an adult, and a scientist. The study of Kabbalah continually builds new insights and discernments in us, eventually leading to the perception of the Upper Worlds.
From the above we can understand why Kabbalah contains all the teachings and sciences of this world. Without proper explanations, we would be lost and think that Kabbalah is a mystical teaching of wizardry and miracles.
There are others who relate it to Judaism, but in truth the wisdom of Kabbalah has no connection whatsoever with mysticism, religion or any other manmade fantasy. The purpose of the wisdom of Kabbalah is one: to bring humanity to congruence with the Creator through gradual correction.
What the Books of Kabbalah Focus On
Kabbalah is such a successful method for the correction of humankind’s egoism precisely because it is written by those who are corrected. One’s desire to draw near to the states described in Kabbalah books makes those states “project a correcting force” upon one’s present state. This force is called “Surrounding Light.” It changes one’s qualities, enabling individuals to sense their corrected state by gradually forming altruistic qualities in them.
The study of Kabbalah focuses on the world Atzilut. The world Atzilut, called “The World of Correction,”is above the Parsa. It is a system designed especially to correct a person whenever one wishes it. The Light that fills the corrected soul of a person in the world Atzilut shines upon one’s present state as Surrounding Light, a force that corrects human nature from egoism to altruism. The Surrounding Light elevates the soul through all the worlds until it returns to its root. Thus, the world Ein Sof is the ultimate goal, our world is the starting point, and the improvement of human attributes is called “ascent in the degrees of the worlds.”
Kabbalah is for those who ask about the purpose of their lives, those who are not satisfied with mundane pleasures such as sex, wealth, honor, or knowledge. When the whole of humanity awakens to ask about the purpose of life, the wisdom of Kabbalah will emerge. Kabbalists pointed to the year 1995 as the beginning of this time, hence the necessity to disseminate it.
“The Ultimate Guide to the Future of Human Evolution” is based on the book, Kabbalah, Science and the Meaning of Life by Dr. Michael Laitman.
