February 5, 2025
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 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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July 30, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
The Mystery of Reincarnation Explained
In each generation, the same souls that existed in previous generations reappear. They are clothed in new bodies, evolve, and become more sensitive and receptive to sublime and complex spiritual knowledge. Thus, people who lived thousands of years ago had the same souls as our own but are more developed today, bringing technological and spiritual progress to our world.
Any progress in humankind is the result of souls rising to a higher degree, after having gained experience in previous lives. Each soul that comes to our world begins its life with the experiences it has accumulated in the previous life. Hence, the soul goes through a process of accumulating knowledge, spiritual attainments, and worldly sensations, leaving it with memories we call Reshimot (records or reminiscences).
Of all the souls that have come down to our world from previous generations, only a few have wished to evolve into the spiritual realms. However, in our time, many have done so. We are much more advanced than our ancestors. It is easier for us to absorb new information and live it, because we are born prepared to absorb this information. Hence, each new piece of data is completely natural for us.
How the Concealment of Kabbalah and Reincarnation are Related
Kabbalah books tend to be revealed and concealed intermittently. They can be hidden for several generations, reappear, and then be lost again. It happens this way so that humanity can go through certain “corrections” (Tikkunim). Generally speaking, these books exist throughout the history of humankind to correct humanity and assure its development. All these books will be known to everyone in the future. The Zohar and the books of the prophets state that in our final days, all humanity will use these books as manuals for attaining the upper worlds, and people will have happy, eternal, and complete lives.
Souls of great Kabbalists go through special cycles. They do not appear in our world in every generation but, like the books, only in special ones. The soul of the first man incarnated later on in Abraham the Patriarch, Moses, Rabbi Shimon Bar- Yochai, the Holy Ari, and, in our days, Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag.
Such a soul comes only during special times, when it is meant to influence and correct the entire human race.
The Story of the Reincarnation of a Very Special Soul: The Ari
In the 16th century, the time of the Middle Ages and barbarism, a child was born in Jerusalem. Later in his life he received the name the Holy Ari. He absorbed the entire Kabbalistic knowledge since the first man and processed it and phrased it in such a way that all the generations following him could receive their spiritual nourishment from his books.
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June 30, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books, Perception of Reality
How Can the Spiritual Reality be Perceived?
The gist of our work is the making of the Kli. If we know how to build our tool of perception correctly, we will understand where we truly are. Our substance consists of a desire to receive delight and pleasure.
If we can make this substance sensitive to insights concerning reception and bestowal, we will be able to use it to perceive the spiritual world. It is similar to the way a block of crude iron is melted to create engine parts. When assembled correctly, they yield a working engine.
Similarly, we must work with ourselves to perceive spirituality. Building the spiritual Kli is a lot like sculpting—you must carve the raw material and file it until the desired shape appears. The raw material, in this case, consists of our desires, our thoughts, and intentions.
How a Change of Intention Enables a Person to Feel Nature
The Creator formed Creation with the intention of doing good to His creatures. To realize His goal, He created a Kli—a will to receive—that would receive His benefit. At first, this will is shapeless. Shaping the will to receive is the work of us all until it is robed in its final form—bestowal, the form of the Creator.
The substance itself remains as it was first made—a will to receive pleasure—but changing the intention to bestowal likens its modus operandi to that of the Creator. Thus, the intention is the form.
Kabbalah books depict the forms that one should create in the will to receive, degree-by-degree, to finally sense the benefits that come from the Creator. The general will to receive consists of 613 desires, and each of these is topped either by an aim to receive, or an aim to give. These forms of reception or bestowal that “cover” each desire determine one’s degree of spiritual attainment.
A degree is a certain level of strength of the Form of bestowal. This enables the benefits of the Creator to manifest within the will to receive. The diverse fillings within the will to receive are the origin of the many names of the Creator. It is the perceiving individual who names the Creator according to the flavors he or she feels within the Creator’s bestowal.
What Kabbalah Researches
Once the Kabbalists attained the nature of reality and studied it, they divided the manner of recognition of reality into four levels: Matter, Form in Matter, Abstract Form, and Essence. Kabbalah is a practical study method that leads researchers thoroughly and systematically along the evolutionary trail. As in any other scientific method, Kabbalah teaches the researcher what to do, which results are to be expected, and expounds on the reasons for them. Kabbalah does not engage in depicting theoretical states that one cannot carry out independently and with full awareness.
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May 29, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles
In Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag’s (i.e. Baal HaSulam’s) article “Time to Act,” he discusses that precisely our time is special. It is when all souls that existed on our earth over the course of many reincarnations, constantly returning to this life, have now matured or ripened as a result of all of their reincarnations and reached the current state, when they are beginning to desire spirituality.
The desire for spirituality manifests when a person’s entire life, with all its joys, begins to seem completely meaningless and empty. This is how a person with a spiritual desire views himself and his environment. In our era, this is awakening in every person more and more.
“Time to Act” explains that today’s condition has been long-awaited, and has finally arrived. Now it is possible to reveal the science of Kabbalah because it explains what is:
- our very self,
- the goal of the universe,
- the way in which everything exists, and
- the goal toward which everything must aspire.
Nature does not create anything in vain. In principle, nature is the force of the Creator—Elokim—the name of the Creator. The Creator is Elohim (??????) in Hebrew, which is the same as ?aTeva (????) or nature. In Hebrew, these two words are equivalent. That is to say, nature—everything that we perceive around us—is the manifestation of the Creator relative to us.
And so, Baal HaSulam says that the manifestation of the Creator is directed at us so strongly in our time in order to compel us to reveal Him and exist in a completely different volume of the universe, in a completely different perception of our existence—in eternal and perfect movement, perceiving the flow of all matter, information, and energy. According to Baal HaSulam, we have to achieve this in our generation.
The Free Kabbalah Course is based on the articles of Baal HaSulam and provides step-by-step guided learning from experienced Kabbalah instructors of Kabbalah’s basic concepts. Baal HaSulam was the first Kabbalist in history who wrote articles not only for Kabbalists, but for the broad public, in order to explain Kabbalah’s fundamentals, because he understood the need that would emerge in humanity to answer deeper questions about life’s meaning and purpose. Therefore, if you’re interested in such topics, we recommend taking the free course and start learning about the world around you and inside you anew. Click the banner below to sign up for the free course …
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