November 24, 2024
Archive for September, 2014
September 10, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
What Does Kabbalah Study?
The Kabbalah is a science that studies the system of creation, the way it was formed, the root of its essence and its structure. It examines how the Creator conducts this system and how creation should correct itself to rise to the degree of the Creator, which is in fact the purpose of creation. Kabbalah is a science that deals with drawing near to the Creator, whereas religion simply indicates to people what they should do with the protein bodies of our world. The wisdom of Kabbalah has no connection with any popular religious movements.
The Real Reason behind the Development of Hasidism
The Baal Shem Tov created the movement of Hasidism to help the Jewish orthodox person integrate a certain amount of spiritual intention in the performance of the physical Mitzvot (commandments). However, the Baal Shem Tov was first and foremost a Kabbalist of the highest degree. He therefore established Hasidism as a popular movement in order to select out of the masses the few people who had the desire and the ability to become Kabbalists. This way he managed to find disciples who later became the first Admorim (Jewish masters and teachers), who went on to establish their own trends in Hasidism and beyond. The task of the movement was to select the individuals who wanted to attain the Creator from the collective and render certain support to the general public.
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September 10, 2014 at 1:41 pm · Filed under Events
September 9, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Did You Know That There Are 5 Stages of Human Desires?
The development of humankind over thousands of years is a realization of different levels of desire. The search for ways of fulfilling these emerging desires determines this or that level of civilization’s evolution and everything we define as technological and scientific progress.
Because desires constantly improve, evolve from smaller to bigger, humankind advances. Kabbalah divides the entire complex of human desires into five stages:
- Primary stage or still degree: need for sex and food
- Second stage or vegetative degree: striving for riches
- Third stage or animate degree: craving for power and fame
- Fourth stage or speaking degree: thirst for knowledge
- Fifth stage or speaking within the speaking degree: aspiration to spirituality, to the Creator
The Desire for Spirituality Is the Greatest Human Desire
The need for sex and food are the same desires as those of animals. Even in complete isolation, we would still feel hunger and the urge to reproduce, to have sexual relations.
Desires for wealth, power, fame, and knowledge are human desires, since to satisfy them one must be surrounded by other people.
We are born, our animal and human desires develop, and then we find out that their realization does not satisfy us, since our secret but true aspiration, which we cannot yet realize and formulate, falls outside the boundaries of this world.
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September 8, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
The Reason for Studying Kabbalah In a Nutshell
If we cannot feel the upper world, it appears to us as though we and the world have our own existence, and we cannot see how much we ourselves and the world we live in are controlled from above. This is the reason we feel that our surroundings are hostile and not a means to rush us back to our root.
Before the soul descends to the body, it is a small point in its root. From there, the soul descends to our world, clothed in a body, and loses contact with its root. It can return to its root only if it annuls the bodily desires for worldly pleasures. There are, all and all, 620 desires in the body. By correcting them, the soul returns to its root, where it receives 620 times more pleasures than it had before its descent.
People who have crossed this road and accomplished this correction are called Kabbalists. They live in our world and in the spiritual root simultaneously. They tell us how to rise in degrees that climb from this world back to our spiritual root. When we read their explanations, we attract the illumination of the upper light that pulls us forward.
How a Kabbalist Operates for Everyone’s Benefit
All through the generations, Kabbalists have helped humanity advance to its goal: the purpose of creation. But that help was mostly secretive, “behind the scenes.” Today, however, because the desire for spirituality has already developed in millions, the Kabbalists clearly state that the help of the entire population is necessary to draw the spiritual light by the study of the wisdom of Kabbalah.
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September 7, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Did You Know That Your Soul Is a ‘Desire to Enjoy’?
Like the earth in the story of Genesis, the soul must go through a certain process of development in the body. It takes more than one lifetime to complete the process, meaning that the soul clothes itself in many bodies over many cycles. Although the process is clear, we can go our entire life without feeling that we have a soul, a spiritual component, thus not realizing the purpose of our life in this world.
As we have said, the soul is merely a desire to enjoy, to receive. It defines the attributes and the needs of the body, while the body itself is a dead object. The development of the soul creates different needs in the human being. Its desires change with its evolution from desires for bodily pleasures—food, sleep, and sex, just as in animals—to the desire to return to its spiritual state, its primary state from which it descended to this world.
Those desires do not evolve one at a time, but in a jumble. That is why a person can feel he or she has a craving for knowledge and at the same time a desire for money, honor, and sex. It happens in any person, because all the desires are made of a unique compound.
Why the Desire for Spirituality Is Unique
The same principle applies to the desire for spirituality. It can be revealed along with lower desires, but what distinguishes it is that we cannot satisfy it with anything mundane, because the source for this desire is outside our world. The revelation of such a desire testifies to the degree of development of the soul.
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