October 23, 2024
June 19, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Now You Can Understand What the Bible Is Really About
Kabbalists, as previously mentioned, research the Upper World, the world beyond the perception of an ordinary person. Hence, the depictions of Kabbalists’ attainments relate to the Upper World, but because we are not aware of the existence of a spiritual world besides our own, we ascribe their words to our world, a phenomenon called “materialization.”
When the Torah (Five Books of Moses) was written, the people of Israel were at a spiritual degree. But after two thousand years of detachment from spirituality since the ruin of the Second Temple, the Torah stories seem to refer to historic episodes or moral conduct.
Yet, this is not the case. Each element in the world is connected to the same element in all the other worlds by a “root and branch” connection. Based on that principle, Kabbalists developed a language that relies on the parallelism between the Upper Worlds and our own world. In it, processes unfolding in the spiritual world are described using names of branches taken from our world.
Introducing the 4 Languages of Kabbalah
Kabbalists use four different languages to explain how we can reach the degree of the Creator and how we can draw to ourselves the Correcting Force that will invert our nature from egoism to altruism. These languages are the language of the Bible, the language of laws, the language of legends, and the language of Kabbalah.
In his essay, The Wisdom of Kabbalah and its Essence, Baal HaSulam wrote that there are four languages in the wisdom of truth, and the essence of the wisdom of Kabbalah is no different than the essence of the Bible. However, the laws, the legends, and the language of Kabbalah are the most convenient and appropriate to use.
The difference among the languages is in their accuracy. The language of Kabbalah is more precise in depicting the connection between the root in the Upper World and the branch in the lower world. The more accurately one connects oneself to one’s Upper Root, the greater Correcting Force one receives.
What Is the Best Kabbalah Book for People Living Today?
The language of Kabbalah applies to terms that do not exist in our world, such as “worlds” and “Sefirot,” charts and formulae. This language makes it easier to avoid confusion and materialization, and facilitates a clear and ordered approach to the study. The language of Kabbalah is essentially different from other languages because of the clear, unequivocal way it describes the purpose of Creation—the similarity of the creature to the Creator, i.e. inversion of egoism into altruism.
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June 18, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books, Evolution
Why the Spiritual Reality Is Hidden
Throughout Its Existence, humanity has been utilizing its five senses to research the reality in which it lives, and gather the findings to formulate sciences. The purpose of science and the accumulated human knowledge is to improve our lives and help us more effectively use the world we live in.
The wisdom of Kabbalah, unlike all other sciences, researches a realm whose existence eludes an ordinary person. To research this realm, one must be equipped with another sense, a sense that perceives the “Upper World.” With this additional sensory ability, one can gather information about the Upper World and experiment with it. Like any ordinary scientist, a Kabbalist can record reactions to actions. Kabbalists are researchers of the Upper World, and as such, they have recorded their findings over thousands of years of research. The collection of their records constitutes the wisdom of Kabbalah.
What Kinds of Tools Does Kabbalah Give a Person?
The wisdom of Kabbalah describes the actions that originate in the Creator and hang down to our world through all the Upper Worlds. It also describes how they expand through the corporeal reality that we can all perceive with our five ordinary senses.
Our world is a consequence of the Upper Worlds. Thus, the wisdom of Kabbalah contains knowledge about the Upper Worlds and our world. The Upper Worlds pertain to a higher level of existence than our world, where time, space, and motion do not exist, but only abstract forces. It follows that Kabbalah contains the existence of all times as they are expressed in our world.
Kabbalah is a means to help us research all the states of existence. This sequence of states includes our state before our souls dress in physical bodies, all our phases while we exist in this world, and our situation once the soul departs from the body and returns to its root in the Upper World.
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June 13, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books, Perception of Reality
Why We all Strive for Balance in Our Lives
As children, many of us believed that the world was filled with all kinds of forces, like ghosts in fairytales. As we grew, we gradually relinquished this belief, but every now and again we still feel as though these forces actually exist.
The truth of the matter is that we are searching for them every single moment. We want to know about the world we live in because if we do not, we will never be freed of the sensation of uncertainty, to live in peace and confidence. We are curious to understand the world we live in and to improve our state of being. This curiosity evokes questions such as, “Who am I?” ”Where am I?” “What shall become of me?” Such questions prompt us to strive to know the reality in which we live.
Reality is divided into two parts: the human being and his or her surroundings. Some claim that we should only study and change ourselves, asserting that by so doing, we will feel tranquil and regard the world more positively. Others, however, say that we should stay as we are, make the most of what the world brings to our doorsteps, and change the world to fit our needs. Either way, it does not seem that our lives are working very well.
The best state in which we can get along with the world is that of equilibrium. If everyone understood me and wanted exactly what I want, that would be a state of equilibrium. There is no state more perfect than the sense of being in balance with the world. It can only be compared to being a fetus in my mother’s womb: everything exists only to care for me; there is no need to erect any defenses.
Science refers to that state as “homeostasis.” The Greek word, homo, means same or similar, and stasis is Greek for condition. This is the state of being that every object in reality strives to achieve.
Here’s a Quick Way to Understand the Limits of Your Perception
The laws of physics, chemistry, and biology explain that the only reason for any movement of matter, whether still, vegetative, animate, or speaking, is its longing to be in balance with its surroundings. For us, as human beings, to be in balance with our surroundings, we must know about the nature of the surrounding world and how we can equalize with it.
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June 12, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books, Depression
If the Creator Is Good, then Why Is There Suffering?
The wisdom of Kabbalah is like a “users guide to reality.”It gives people the tools to learn, understand and use what is around them, whatever happens to them.
One of the topics that people find most difficult to accept is human suffering. On the one hand, suffering motivates people to search for spirituality. On the other hand, it is very hard to accept suffering.
This is indeed a question that troubles everyone. On the one hand, we are speaking of a benevolent Upper Force, but if it is “Upper,” it means it is better than us. Yet our world is filled with anguish and torment. Do anguish and torment also come from this Force? Is there more than one Force, and if so, are they at war with each other?
Reality is made of our desire to enjoy and the pleasure that motivates this desire to operate. These are the only two components on all levels of reality—the pleasure and the desire to receive pleasure. In Kabbalistic terms we call them “the Light and the Kli (vessel).”
When pleasure is absent, it creates a sensation of a desire to enjoy. But sometimes the deficiency of pleasure is so intense that it creates a sensation of suffering. Because everything is made of a certain measure and quality of a desire to receive pleasure, everything also suffers when it is absent—minerals, plants, animals, and people.
In fact, suffering is a necessary sensation that impels a creature to leave its present state and move on to the next. Without suffering, there is no motion. In fact, motion means that my present state is unsatisfactory, so I decide that I will be better off in a different state. Suffering enables us to make the necessary effort to move toward a situation that seems better. Hence, without suffering, progress is impossible.
The Upper Force has no other way of promoting us to better states except through suffering. If it created us as egoists with a desire to indulge in pleasure, then the only way it can move us from one state to the next is through a sensation of suffering.
Why Human Suffering Is Increasing
However, we still need to explain why there is so much more suffering today than before. The purpose of Creation is for humankind to reach the highest degree in reality.
The only way to approach that goal is with an immense drive to reach it, or phrased differently—from the greatest suffering. This does not necessarily relate to physical suffering. We seemingly have everything today, yet we feel that something is missing, and that sensation of absence is the greatest degree of suffering.
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June 5, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Why Kabbalah Is the Method that Opens Your Eyes
The Kabbalistic knowledge we possess is a result of Kabbalistic investigations performed by those people whose souls were burning with the question regarding the meaning of existence. They used a special method to begin to feel the comprehensive reality, and they wrote books about what they discovered. When Kabbalists first sense the complete reality, they call it “the opening of the eyes.”
The opening of the eyes is a process of climbing up the same degrees by which we all came down from the previously mentioned infinite state (Ein Sof). The wisdom of Kabbalah comprises two parallel orders:
1. From Above downward—the descent of the will to receive from Ein Sof through all the Upper Worlds down to “this world.”
2. From below upward—the ascent of the researcher from this world, through the barrier, to the Upper Worlds, to Ein Sof.
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