June 2, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Why Kabbalah Is a Natural Science
Kabbalists are natural scientists, that reveal the single governing force of nature by achieving equivalence of form with it.
The first researcher to ask about the universe and the forces that conduct humanity was Abraham. He was one of many people who lived in Mesopotamia (ancient Persia), and in those days there was no division into nations. He discovered the method by which we can know the reality beyond our ordinary perception, and described his research and discoveries in his Sefer Yetzira (Book of Creation).
Abraham began to gather students and teach them the wisdom of Kabbalah. In time, this group of Kabbalists became a nation. Many years later, after the ruin of the First and Second Temples, this group of Kabbalists lost its perception of the Upper Reality; they fell from their degree of spiritual consciousness and were able only to perceive their physical reality.
This was actually a gradual process. Some lost their spiritual perception with the ruin of the First Temple, and the rest lost it with the ruin of the Second Temple. Rabbi Akiva was the last great Kabbalist to attain the degree of the spiritual law, “Love thy friend as thyself.” The intensification of egoism induced unfounded hatred, and only religion remained for people, instead of the wisdom of Kabbalah.
Yet, despite the decline, a select few remained Kabbalists, and they passed the wisdom on from generation to generation until a time when all of humanity would need it. Today, we must rekindle the ancient science, revive the study of Kabbalah, discover the Upper Reality through it, and pass it on to all humanity.
It is important to note, however, that Kabbalah has nothing to do with religion, and does not imply that we need perform any physical actions. As we have mentioned previously, Kabbalah speaks only about desires and intentions with respect to the Creator.
How Is Human Nature Different from the Creator’s Nature?
As we have said above, the Kli (vessel/creature) that the Creator created became a soul in the world Atzilut. This is the collective, or general soul, called Adam ha Rishon (The First Man). In the beginning, all its parts were bonded in wondrous harmony, and it was filled with the Upper Light. In that state, the sum of the parts created perfection. Later on, the soul experienced a process of shattering and fell to a degree called “below the barrier,” where the spiritual sensation ends. The pieces of the single soul continue to exist below the barrier, but feel detached from one another (Figure 6).
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June 1, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
The Root of Why a Person Eventually Desires to Want to be Like the Creator
The wisdom of Kabbalah explains that the matter of creation is the desire to receive, and this desire goes through a four phase development, reaching the last phase where it develops it’s own independent desire for the Creator’s status on top of its original fulfillment.
In this last state, the creature receives pleasure from sharing the Creator’s status, and indulges in it. Thus, the creature indulges in two pleasures: the pleasure that comes from the Creator, and the pleasure that comes from sharing the Creator’s status. This state of being is called Ein Sof (No End), and refers to a state where there are no limitations on the desire.
This does not refer to distance, time or space in the physical sense. Rather, this is an observation that pertains to the nature of the desire, meaning that the desire itself is unlimited.
Upon receiving these pleasures, the creature finds once more that there is a source of the pleasure. It discovers that the Giver is the source of the pleasure, and feels itself as the receiver. This time the sensation is valid because the will to receive in this state is the creature’s own, not one that came to it from the Creator.
Consequently, the creature feels that it wants to escape its own desire. It shuns it, and does not want to belong to its own desire any longer. The rejection that it feels toward its own desire induces it to “restrict” it (avoid using it). The desire is still there, but now the creature refrains from using it. Hence, the sensation of fulfillment—the pleasure—ceases.
Have You Ever Wondered How the Soul Comes to Be?
Having remained with a craving, the creature resolves to reach the status of the Creator, the only status that the creature now wishes to have—that of the Giver. It senses that it must give to the Creator without receiving any reward for itself. From this point onward, all its actions will be aimed solely to attain this goal.
To reach this objective, the creature executes a complex series of operations: It builds a chain of concealments (coverings) on the Upper Light, called “worlds” (the Hebrew word for “world” is Olam, which stems from the word Haalama, concealment). At the bottom of the chain of worlds stands “this world.” Because the process that created the creature was comprised of five parts, the lessening of the Upper Light occurs through five degrees of concealment, five worlds whose names are Adam Kadmon, Atzilut, Beria, Yetzira, and Assiya.
In the process of constructing these worlds, the creature builds a surrounding environment for itself. In the world Atzilut, the will to receive is split in two: an inner part—soul–and an outer part—environment (surroundings), in which the soul operates. This stage still does not pertain to our world.
As a result of later events, the soul and its environment will experience a process of shattering, and consequently decline several degrees down to the degree of “this world.” Only now begins the formulation of the matter that makes up our world.
How Spirituality Relates to Our World
From this stage onwards, from the broken will to receive, begins the historic evolution of the material world we are familiar with. Once the universe has been created, the still (inanimate), vegetative, and the animate degrees are made, and following them, the speaking (human) degree is formed (Figure 5).
At its preliminary evolutionary stage, humanity has physical desires for sustenance, reproduction, and family. The body always has these elementary needs to sustain itself; we would need them even if we lived alone on an island.
The second stage in our evolution features a growing desire for wealth, followed by a desire for power and respect. These drives for wealth, power, and respect are considered “social desires,” thus called for two reasons:
A) We absorb these desires from our social environment. Had we lived alone, we would not want them.
B) These desires can only be realized within a social framework.
The final evolutionary stage is the craving for knowledge and erudition. We want more and more knowledge, and want to know and research everything–hence the evolution of science.
Today, as we are nearing the conclusion of this evolution, which has taken us thousands of years, we are beginning to realize that it really did not yield anything. We find ourselves in a unique situation: we want to be filled with pleasures, but can’t find around us any sources of true pleasure. Additionally, we cannot accurately define what it is we want. Thus, we find ourselves perplexed and disoriented, like lost children, not knowing which way to turn. Although we want something, we don’t know what it is or where to find it.
Why a Person Awakens to Want Spirituality
We assign the word, “heart,” to the sum of desires that have evolved in us through our life cycles: physical desires, social desires, and the desire for knowledge. Opposite these desires stands “the point in the heart,” a “speck” of a new desire that evolves above all other desires. In fact, the point in the heart is the awakening desire to know the Upper Force, and it is the awakening of this desire that brings one to the wisdom of Kabbalah as a means to realize this desire.
The awakening of the point in the heart brings confusion, a by-product of this point’s origins in the Upper World. The laws of the Upper World pertain to a reality where time, space, and motion do not apply.
Naturally, our brains are arranged so that we always think in terms of time, space, and motion. But in this new stage, we begin to feel that what determines everything is how we personally sense reality, and that reality in and of itself is unchanging.
Thus, we gradually come to sense that reality is static and that time, space, and motion don’t really exist at all. We begin to realize that all our past experiences happened only within our sensations, that everything depends on how much we have cultivated our abilities to sense.
We need time to adjust to the concept that nothing changes except the measure by which we open our “tools of sensation.” When we have done that, we will begin to sense the world we live in very naturally, simply, without any limitations, preconceptions, rules, oppression, coercion, or exterior pressures.
The point in the heart is the beginning of the desire for spirituality. Today, relatively few people are at this stage, but their numbers are increasing all the time. Eventually, every human being must come to the point where a craving for the Creator is uppermost, a point initiated by the above-mentioned envy, meaning the inherent need in every creature to reach the status of the Creator.
Kabbalah: The Manual for How to Reach the Creator
We must understand that when we said that the Creator is good, we meant that the Creator created us with the intention of bringing us to the best possible state of being, i.e. the Creator’s own state. Hence, this is the state to which we must be brought. Any lesser state than this one will therefore not be considered adequate. It follows that the purpose of Creation is to allow us to reach the status of the Creator.
In order to reach the level of the Creator, however, we must come to feel that our desire is totally opposite that of the Creator, that the Creator wants only to give, and that we want only to receive. This is the emptiness and darkness of the Kli (vessel) as opposed to the Light. Acknowledging this oppositeness builds us as creatures. For us to know the Creator, we must first know the opposite state from his, the “anti-Creator,” a state of unbearable torments that poses a big question mark about our ability to endure these torments.
It is fair to say that we haven’t yet begun the process of knowing the anti-Creator. To feel our complete oppositeness from the Creator, we will have to emotionally decline to much lower degrees. The wisdom of Kabbalah is surfacing now because it is impossible to experience these states physically, and Kabbalah is a means of easing our way through the states of oppositeness from the Creator, to experience them in our consciousness and our minds, not in our bodies.
We can compare this process to a person in pain. That person can either wait until the pain becomes intolerable and then turn to a physician, or turn to the doctor as soon as the pain appears. In the latter case, early diagnosis of the problem will spare one the suffering that comes with the actual breakout of the disease. In other words, a clever person takes medication as soon as symptoms of an illness appear, thus preventing its onset.
By so doing, one can evolve consciously, through reasoning, and thus the Kli (creature) learns to become aware of its oppositeness from the Light. The wisdom of Kabbalah is a method that helps us evolve through knowledge instead of through pain, and it is appearing today to allow humankind to acknowledge the evil that lies in egoism before it fully manifests itself, inflicting horrendous ruin in all aspects of life.
Hence, the wisdom of Kabbalah as the means to achieve both our evolution and the purpose of Creation should reach all of humanity. The more people engage in Kabbalah, and the more we circulate it throughout the world, the better off we will all be.
“Here Is a Method that Is Helping People Attain Spirituality in This Life” is based on the book, Kabbalah, Science and the Meaning of Life by Dr. Michael Laitman.
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May 25, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Where Does the Desire to be Like the Creator Come From?
There is a Creator who wishes to give. This is the Root, or Zero Phase. In order to give, He must have someone to give to, and because the Creator wants to give, He creates a Kli that receives the “gift,” meaning the Creator gives to the Kli. This is State One.
For this to occur, the receiver must first want the pleasure. If I build in you a desire for something and then give you what you want, you will not enjoy my gift because this is not your own desire. You must feel that it is your own desire before you can define it as “pleasure.” Thus, at the end of State One, the creature begins to sense the Giver and His nature.
The will to receive evolves by sensing the Giver (State One), and consequently wanting to be like the Giver (State Two). In that state it becomes worthwhile for the creature to be like the Giver (State Three). However, this is only a phase in the formation of the will to receive, and the creature is not really aware that it is receiving anything.
In fact, the creature isn’t aware of any of these observations; they are merely phases in the evolution of the crude will to receive. This crude desire must still descend, formulate, and drift far from the Creator until it stops sensing Him altogether. It must descend to the level of our world, and only then will it sense the desire in it as its own independent will (State Four). In this way, it will believe that it’s free and does not submit to the Creator’s guidance.
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May 23, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books, Evolution
Did You Know that Reality Is Really a Desire to Receive Pleasure?
The wisdom of Kabbalah is a method for discovering the hidden part of reality, that imperceptible realm of reality that our five senses cannot grasp. It develops another sense in us, one that perceives the reality that exists beyond our present perception.
Kabbalah says that the whole of reality consists of a substance called “the will to receive pleasure.” This will to receive pleasure is essentially a desire to be filled with delight, enjoyment; it is what we so often refer to as “egoism.” This will to receive operates on all levels of existence: still (inanimate), vegetative, animate, and speaking.
Although the will to receive is the substance of all reality, the desire in itself is neither matter nor atoms, which came later. Everything that was created, that exists as the basis of reality, is based on the desire to enjoy, an aspiration for pleasure. In each level of reality, this aspiration takes on different forms.
Every Kabbalist, without exception, from Abraham to the last great Kabbalist, Baal HaSulam, maintained that the entire substance of Creation consists of a desire to receive. Every Kabbalah book speaks of the same thing, and all Kabbalists are in agreement in that regard.
Kabbalists are people who attain the Upper World; they speak from tangible attainment, not from theory. The word, “attainment,” refers to the ultimate degree of understanding. Let me make things easier to understand by using some drawings.
How Reality Develops in a Step-by-Step Process
Phase One in the Development of Reality: A Giver Needs a Receiver
We said that the will to receive is the basis of Creation. It is created by the expansion of the Upper Light. (In Kabbalah, the term “Light” designates giving, bestowing, love; it is referred to as “the Creator”). Thus, the Light created the will to receive that wants to be filled with the Light. Hence, the will to receive is also called Kli (vessel/receptacle), see Figure 1.
In other words, the desire to give creates the desire to receive, meaning the Light wants the Kli (vessel) to receive what it wants to give it.
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May 22, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books, Perception of Reality
Are You Aware of the Amount of Reality that Exists that You Don’t Perceive?
The wisdom of Kabbalah (“reception” in Hebrew), as its name implies, teaches us how to receive. It explains how we perceive our surrounding reality. To understand who we are, we must first learn how we come to sense reality around us, and how to cope with the events that befall us. The wisdom of Kabbalah provides us with all these insights.
The wisdom of Kabbalah does not come to an individual naturally, but only when one reaches the right level of ripeness. This is why Kabbalah is being exposed to so many these days, and this is also the reason why it was hidden for thousands of years.
Previous generations believed that the world exists by itself, whether or not we are there to perceive it, the world is the way it is and exists objectively, independently. Afterwards, people began to understand that our picture of the world is shaped by who we are. In other words, the picture of the world is a combination of our own attributes and external circumstances.
Therefore, we perceive only a part of everything around us. For example, right now there are numerous waves outside us, but we can only perceive one of them, the wave that we are attuned to perceive. Hence, we perceive external conditions according to our internal qualities. If we have nothing in common with the outside world, we will not perceive or feel any of it.
Kabbalah speaks extensively of our perception of time, space, and motion. Why does it seem to us that reality expands, that it is at a certain distance from us? What is the source of our perpetual sense of movement and change? Is this a result of internal processes that we are experiencing, or does it exist regardless of them?
The more we progress in the study of our internal being, the more we find that our perception of reality depends on us. Once humankind sufficiently evolves in knowledge, science, and technology, we will be able to perceive what the wisdom of Kabbalah has to offer.
Here Is a Method that Is Helping People to Perceive the Entirety of Reality
The wisdom of Kabbalah says that around us there is only “The Upper Light,” a single force in a permanent, unchanging state. Nothing exists besides this Upper Light. In such a state, the words existent or nonexistent mean the same because we only measure changes. When there are no changes, there is nothing to measure.
Within each of us is a “gene,” a bit of information that constantly evokes in us new sensations and emotions. We picture the world from within these sensations, which is where we derive the awareness that we exist. All these processes occur within us and design our perception of the outside world.
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