Who Else Wants to Stop Being a Caveman and Acquire Human Properties?
What Kabbalah Can Do to Your Perception
There is a story about the American Indians who did not see Columbus’s armada approaching, since they simply had no previous memories, conception of such structures as ships.
If we think some more about the Indians and Columbus’ ships we might ask this: If a caveman were to be born in today’s world, would he see the cars and the buildings? The answer is that he would not. Would he then bump into buildings or be hit by a car as soon as he left the sidewalk?
Before we answer these questions, we must understand that we perceive only such Forms that our senses are equipped to detect. For example, the air around us, which seems empty, might actually be as condensed and solid as cement. We are accustomed to seeing this world as a space where we can move about freely. But if we build appropriate tools of perception, we will feel that the world is actually filled with the Creator’s enormous powers, which do not allow us any free movement. If this were to happen, we would feel totally controlled by the Creator, as if we were “planted” in cement, unable to make even a single free gesture.
Because our caveman would not have the sense that perceives the wall as Matter or as Form in Matter, he would be able to go through walls as if they were air. Kabbalists wish to direct our observations so we can perceive the world correctly. If we were to draw ourselves just a bit off our ordinary perception of the world and into the real perception that Kabbalists describe, this world may seem very strange to us.
Why What You Perceive on the Outside Is Really Inside of You
Today, many quantum physicists are discovering that the world has a “strange” regularity of time, space, and motion. For example, they say that objects can be in more than one place at a time. This oddity leads them to think that everything is measured with respect to the observer. This means that the existence or absence of the caveman’s wall, as well as the ability to move through it, are measured solely by the state of the perceiver’s vessels.
