What the Creator Is

Reality consists of two elements: Creator and creature. We feel this in our senses in various ways, but it is unchanging in and of itself. The sensation of the Creator is what we call “the world,” or “creation.” The creature can sometimes sense that the Creator is being partially or fully revealed; at other times He is altogether concealed. The creature may even lack awareness of the Creator altogether. The extent of awareness of the Creator depends solely on the creature, because the Creator, like the sun, never stops shining.

The Creator has the attributes of bestowal and benevolence. When the creature acquires these Creator-like attributes, this state is called equivalence of form with the Creator. The individual then senses the Creator as fully revealed, to the exact degree that his or her attributes resemble those of the Creator. When the attributes of a person are incompatible with those of the Creator, he or she feels the Creator as concealed. When these attributes oppose those of the Creator’s, the individual feels the Creator does not even exist.

How Your Attributes Determine Your Closeness to Spirituality

The creature feels the Creator as pleasure, as wisdom and peace and wholeness. Therefore, the intensity of those sensations depends on the intensity of the sensation of the Creator. The Creator formed all the creatures from an egoistic desire to enjoy. The Creator is perceived by the creature as pleasure in all its manifestations. Pleasure means the sensation of the Creator, or the light of the Creator, which are actually one and the same.

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The Need for Additional Senses to Sense the Spiritual Reality

To research itself and the surroundings, humanity has developed various sciences such as physics, chemistry, biology, and so on. These are called the natural sciences, and they are based on our five senses. To help ourselves study nature, we have built instruments that extend the range of our senses. Gradually, from generation to generation, we have gained experience and reached a better understanding of the problem of survival in this world. But among all sciences, there is one that develops us quite differently—the science of Kabbalah.

Beyond the corporeal world that we research, there is another world, which is concealed. But if it is invisible, how can we assume that this other world really exists? It is because we see that there are specific laws, which are a part of a broader reality. We understand that such general, more rational laws, which describe our lives and our existence comprehensively, simply must exist. There is something that eludes us, something around us we cannot grasp. But how can we come to grasp it if we don’t have the appropriate senses?

Why Human Development Increases Suffering

It is quite possible that this alternate creation does exist around us in all its layers, but we divide it into the apprehended part we call “our world” or “this world,” and the as-yet-unfelt layer. If we had other senses, although it’s hard for us to imagine it, we would probably also feel the world differently, perhaps with a broader and deeper vision. But such senses don’t exist, and so we suffer. We don’t know how to behave with one another and with our surroundings because we don’t see our past and future lives.

When dealing with a scientific study of the world, we come to a stage where our knowledge is exhausted, and we’re left helpless. Though there are many ways to enhance our ability to predict the future, beyond the boundaries of our regular senses, they in fact add very little to our understanding of the world. We are capable of attaining very limited abilities to predict events, but we never achieve clear knowledge of the future and complete attainment, which can only happen when we are acting in full cooperation with the world around us.

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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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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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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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