The Fantastic Journey of Your Soul

Kabbalah describes all the preceding states of creation, beginning from the state of the existence of only the Creator, to His creation of a general soul—a spiritual being. It then follows the gradual descent of the spiritual worlds from the highest to the lowest level, to the last state of the lowest spiritual realm.

Kabbalah does not describe all the following stages (how an individual of our world apprehends the lowest level of the spiritual realm, and then one’s further ascent from the bottom to the top, to one’s ultimate goal—the return to the original point of creation). This is because the ascent follows the same laws and levels as the descent of the soul, and everyone who seeks to understand must independently experience every stage of spiritual birth, up to the final spiritual level of completion.

But all souls, having reached, at the end of their growth, the absolutely corrected state of their original qualities, will return to the Creator and merge with Him into an absolutely indivisible state because of their complete similarity.

Your Existence Is Limited by Your Perception

In other words, from the moment of one’s spiritual birth to one’s complete attachment with the Creator, the soul must ascend from the bottom to the top through the same 125 levels that it descended from the top to the bottom, from the Creator to us.

In Kabbalah, the first level from the bottom is known as “the birth,” the last, at the very top, is known as “the final correction,” and all the levels in between are designated either by the names of places or people in the Bible, by Kabbalistic symbols, the names of the Sefirot or the worlds.

From all of the above, it becomes clear that we are incapable of completely comprehending the creation and ourselves without fully realizing the goal of creation, the act of creation, and all the stages of development up to the end of correction. Since we examine the world only from within, we can only explore that part of existence that we perceive. Thus, we cannot attain complete knowledge of ourselves.

Seeing Others Faults but Not Your Own?

Moreover, our understanding is limited because, in order to understand an object, we must explore its negative qualities, and we are incapable of seeing our own shortcomings. Despite any desires to the contrary, our nature automatically excludes them from our consciousness, because if we are aware of these shortcomings we will feel tremendous pain, and our nature automatically avoids such feelings.

Only the Kabbalists, working on the correction of their natures in order to attain the qualities of the Creator, gradually uncover the shortcomings of their own nature to the degree to which they can correct themselves. Since these characteristics are already undergoing correction, the uncorrected attributes are as if no longer belonging to the individual. Only then will the intellect and the nature of the Kabbalist permit recognition of these shortcomings.

Our tendency to see primarily negative qualities in others does not help us analyze ourselves. Because human nature automatically avoids negative sensations, we are incapable of transferring onto ourselves negative qualities we recognize in others. Our nature will never allow us to perceive in ourselves the same negative aspects.

In fact, we are able to detect negative qualities in others because it gives us pleasure!

With Kabbalah You Receive the Creator’s Help

Thus, it can be confidently asserted that not a single person in this world knows himself.

A Kabbalist, on the other hand, grasps the full scope of a person’s nature, of its root, comprehending a person in the primary form, which is the soul.

In accordance with this, in order to gain a real understanding of creation, one must analyze it from above to below, from the Creator to our world, and then from below to above. The path from above to below is called “the gradual descent of the soul into our world.” This is the conception and development of the soul according to an analogy with our own world—the point at which the fetus is conceived in the body of the mother with the seed of the father.

Until the last lowest level manifests in a person, a level at which one is completely removed from the Creator, as the fruit of the parents, as a seed, which has completely lost its primary form, one cannot become a physically independent organism. But as in our world, so in the spiritual realm one continues to be completely dependent on its Source until, with the help of the Source, one finally becomes an independent spiritual being.

“Now You Can Benefit from Kabbalah and Receive the Creator’s Help” is based on the book, Attaining the Worlds Beyond by Dr. Michael Laitman.