To Change the World a New Level of Consciousness Is Needed

By now it is clear not only for people studying Kabbalah, but for everybody that unless the path the world is on changes, we are heading for disaster. The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches us that we can only change the world by changing ourselves.

In order for the world to change, there has to be a new consciousness among the public, one that is above emotions. There has to be reason as well as emotion in the way we relate to the world. We need reason to relate to good and bad critically and to realize that if we feel bad, it must mean that there is a reason and a purpose for it. The public is stuck in a cycle of merely “feeling bad,” or “feeling good.” It can take hundreds of years before people start asking: “Why is this happening to me?”

Rising Above Feelings of Subjective Good and Bad through Kabbalah

Our goal is to explain where our present state is leading us. As Baal HaSulam wrote, “Religion is not for the good of the people, but for the good of the worker,” meaning that the purpose of religion is not to benefit people, or to benefit the Creator, but to benefit those who are working to be corrected. The entire world was created for that ultimate goal. But if you judge what happens to you only by feelings of “good” or “bad,” you remain in the degrees of still, vegetative, or animate and never advance to the degree of speaking, the degree we need to complete our correction.

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How the Study of Kabbalah Works On You in a Gradual Way

In truth our present perception of reality is very limited, undeveloped. Our sensors are very unrefined. We cannot feel much of what happens inside our own bodies, such as molecular collisions or the birth of new cells. Therefore, there are many changes that need to take place for us to start feeling anything. Before any feeling is created in us, millions of wheels must revolve inside, entire mechanisms have to perform many corrections before those corrections are felt by us.

The study of the Kabbalah works on various levels of our soul, in attributes of the will to receive what we cannot feel just yet. A person reads but understands nothing, and so feels no reason to continue to study. The person feels this way because the text is working on attributes below the threshold of his or her feelings. It is like a person filling a glass of water and wondering why the bottom part of the glass has to be filled first before he or she can drink off the top. There seems to be no reason to be concerned with the other parts.

For Kabbalah to be Effective a Special Intention Is Needed from You

Our will to receive is corrected through the study of the Kabbalah. The study deals with the different levels of the soul, the vessel and the desire, which are at the bottom of the glass. We don’t touch them, do not drink them, and do not feel their actual taste until they reach the top, where we actually begin to feel them.

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The Shift from Suffering to Spirituality

Kabbalah teaches us that at the beginning the Creator uses pain, and unfulfilled desires in order to turn the person’s attention towards spirituality. Thus one’s reality is full of pain and suffering until one starts to locate the source, and the meaning of it all.

Reality changes because if we strengthen our contact with the Creator, there will no longer be a need for pain, the very same pains that are initiated from above to bring about that contact.

Thus, the external circumstances will change, since we will no longer require the same pains.

How Life’s Torments Build in You a Desire for Spirituality

People do not understand how changes in the world occur or how. But the torments they suffer make them search subconsciously for an upper power and pray to it because there is no one else on whom to rely. That prayer, that earthy still prayer, works. Using the torments, the Creator puts us in a no-win situation and corners us until we actually start looking for an alternative planet to live on. But that planet cannot be found, except in the Creator.

For example, it is interesting to consider why the Creator brought the Jewish people to the corporeal land of Israel, rather then to the spiritual one. The return to Israel was the result of a prayer that was lying in our subconscious and of the pain and suffering we Jews had endured over many years. We prayed for our own place, and we received that place. But if we had truly understood that our sufferings had happened for a certain purpose, then our prayer, the prayer of the unsatisfied mass, would have been aimed differently, and a new solution would have arisen on a different level, a spiritual one.

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To Fight For or Against the Desires You Have to Develop Spiritually

Can we overpower our own desire? Should we or should we not fight our own desires? After all, how can we know what is in store for us in this lifetime? That depends on our degree of spiritual development, which determines everything inside us and what we can and cannot do. The answer is to indeed fight, but just to realize that we cannot do anything by ourselves, and also to study ourselves. That is what we were given our minds for, in addition to our desires.

How Sensations Influence Your Perception of Reality

We attain everything within our Kelim (vessels), our emotions. Our world consists of the overall impressions we receive from our senses, and this is how we perceive reality. If our senses change, or if we add another sense, then our world will change as well. Hence, we expand our world by changing our senses and acquiring new senses, as if rising from world to world on the ladder of worlds. By that we change the reality in which we exist.

Why Bitter Sensations Actually Aid Spiritual Progress

In the spiritual world, things can only exist in pairs: pleasure or the absence of it, true and sweet, false and bitter. The truth is always sweet, and the lie is always bitter, and they always correspond. But that situation doesn’t exist in our world. Falsehood is not bitter, and truth is not sweet. In our world we constantly face tough decisions: to choose the sweet but superficial and false way, or the bitter but sincere way.

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Why Every Action Brings a Person Closer to Spirituality

Every person was created with a complex corporeal body, and what one does in this world affects it. Therefore, what we do in our world is important. Whatever we do with an intention toward the Creator is considered a spiritual act, though the act itself might still be completely “beastly.”

Nevertheless, anything we do inevitably leads us toward the purpose of creation. Even the pains we suffer in life do not come in vain, but are collected, and when the right time comes, they count in our favor. This happens slowly over many years, and we are not a consciously active part of it. To shorten this long path of pain, the Creator gave us the Torah, which directs us to the right goal less painfully.

Kabbalah Is a Method that Speeds Up Your Spiritual Development

Only in recent decades have a growing number of special souls begun to descend to our world, these souls having collected a sufficient amount of pain. These souls took the path of pain, accumulated deficits, and now those pains have turned into a yearning for the wisdom of Kabbalah. In future lives, these souls will delve into the study of Kabbalah more intensely and within a month or two attain fantastic results because they have accumulated a sufficient desire for it in their past lives. If a person has a strong enough desire to study and focuses just on Kabbalah for one purpose only, then in three to five years he or she will enter the spiritual world.

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