Kabbalah - What is It?

Is it a science, a religion, a teaching? Is it secret or evident? Is it something we can sense and evaluate? Is it outdated, or is it relevant in our time?

Kabbalah is wisdom about the universe. However, it studies much more than the part of the universe that we perceive through our inborn five senses. Kabbalah explains that the universe is, in fact, much wider than what we perceive through our five senses. It teaches about that part of the universe that we currently don't perceive.

Kabbalah explains how the universe began, how it develops, and how it will end. It studies the universe’s general structure and all of its particular details. This wisdom consists of several sections, all of which talk about the general law of the universe and how we can attain it.

If we break it into sections, then Kabbalah covers:

• The creation of the entire universe and all of its levels: still, vegetative, animate, and human.

• The phases and the final goal of the entire evolutionary process, including man's part in that process.

• The connection between our current state and the states we were in before we appeared on the Earth.

• The purpose of existing in a biological body for several decades and perceiving the surrounding world through the body and its five senses.

• Our state after we leave this world.

• Our reincarnations and the relationships between them.

• The way of evolving to a higher, spiritual form while living on earth.

Where Did the Authentic Kabbalah Come from?

The wisdom of Kabbalah appeared over five thousand years ago. Its roots go back to deep antiquity, the Sumerian-Akkadian period and the time of ancient Babylon. However, Kabbalah remained virtually hidden from humanity for millennia.

Despite the concealment, people have always been interested in it. Renowned scientists and philosophers the world over, including Newton, Leibniz, and Pico Della Mirandola investigated the wisdom of Kabbalah and attempted to understand it. Johannes Reuchlin, a humanist, classics scholar, and expert in ancient languages and traditions, writes in his book, De Arte Cabbalistica: “My teacher, Pythagoras, the father of philosophy, took his teaching from Kabbalists … He was the first to translate the word, Kabbalah, unknown to his contemporaries, to the Greek word philosophy…”

Yet, to this day, authentic Kabbalah is tainted with many misconceptions and misrepresentations, such as red strings, holy water, spells, miracles and whatnot. Evidently, only a few know what authentic Kabbalah is really about.

Therefore, one must first clarify what the wisdom of Kabbalah is. Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag puts it this way in his article “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah:"

"...this wisdom is no more and no less, than a sequence of roots, which hang down by way of cause and consequence, in fixed, determined rules, interweaving to a single, exalted goal described as 'the revelation of His Godliness to His creatures in this world."

What does this mean? It’s saying that there is an Upper Force or the Creator, and there are forces that descend from Him to our world. We are here, in our world, and we are governed by these forces. They’re similar to the forces we are aware of, like gravity or electromagnetism. The only difference is that these forces are of a higher order, and they act while remaining hidden to us.

“The Creator” is the ultimate, all-inclusive force. He is the sum of all the forces in the universe and is the highest of all the governing forces. The Upper Forces descend from the Creator, going through phases called “spiritual worlds,” and finally they give rise to our world and man inside it. This constitutes the subject of the wisdom of Kabbalah.

Discovering Our Connection with the Upper Force

"All kinds of unpleasant situations are sent to us so that we will finally understand that it is not the external things that we should fear, but the lack of contact with the Upper One, the absence of spirituality." Awakening to Kabbalah, Rav Michael Laitman, PhD
If we were aware of the Upper Force that's always influencing us and arranging everything in our lives, then we would know the secret of life. We would know what life's grand purpose is and how everything in our life is led by that purpose.

So how do we reveal this Upper Force? We have to learn from the people who've already revealed it. Such people are called Kabbalists, and they have written books that can help anyone discover what they have discovered. By reading their books, one gradually begins to feel and understand how the Upper Force motivates his life and why it brings about the things that happen to him in life.

The authentic wisdom of Kabbalah deals with this only: revealing the Upper Force to a person in this world. Or as Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag, author of the Sulam commentary on The Book of Zohar, puts it: "This wisdom is no more and no less, than a sequence of roots, which hang down by way of cause and consequence, in fixed, determined rules, interweaving to a single, exalted goal described as--"the revelation of His Godliness to His creatures in this world." (The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah)

Authentic Kabbalah has nothing to do with temporary distractions like lucky charms and magic spells, red strings or holy water. Rather, it is an ancient, time-tested wisdom that helps people open their eyes and discover their interrelation with the Upper Force.

This is not something you will feel in your imagination one moment and forget about it the next instant. It is a discovery of a whole new reality that you did not feel before. Kabbalah explains that there is a vast spiritual world concealed behind the picture of reality surrounding us. And this hidden reality is intended for us. Once we discover it with the help of Kabbalah books, we will feel life's perfect and eternal flow, and experience genuine, lasting joy. Studying Kabbalah, one suddenly realizes where everything comes from and that life has no coincidences. One tangibly feels that everything in our world comes from the Upper Force. As a result, one begins living in harmony with the Upper Force and avoids making mistakes in life.

In practical terms, learning about the Upper Force gives us real knowledge about how to live correctly. We become conscious of what is harmful to us and are able to avoid it. One gains a spiritual vision, where he sees the full scope of existence, the entire system of reality and how to use it to benefit the world. Hence, Kabbalah is a practical and essential wisdom.

Kabbalah: God is Altruistic Nature

Of all parts of Nature, only man puts his own interest before the needs of the system. Kabbalah shows how we can operate according to the altruistic laws of Nature, which in Kabbalah is the same as God. In a presentation at a Tokyo hall in November 2005, evolutionary biologist Elizabeth Sahtouris stated that "Every molecule, every cell, every organ ... has self-interest. When every level in the body shows its self-interest, it forces negotiations among the levels. This is the secret of Nature. Every moment in your body, these negotiations drive your systems to harmony."

Quite similarly, Kabbalists state that cells in organisms unite by reciprocal giving for the sake of sustaining the whole body. Each cell in the body receives what it needs for its sustenance, and spends the rest of its energy tending to the rest of the body. At every level of Nature, the individual works to benefit the whole of which it is a part, and in that finds its wholeness. Without altruistic activities, a body cannot persist. In fact, life itself cannot persist.

Both science and Kabbalah acknowledge that the biggest, if not the only, problem with our world is us. Below are two examples of such states of mind:

"I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image" (Stephen Hawking, British cosmologist and physicist).

"And in simple words we shall say that the nature of each and every individual is to exploit the lives of all other people in the world for his own benefit, and all that he gives to another is only out of necessity. Even in that there is exploitation, but it is done cunningly, so that his friend will not feel it" (Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam), "Peace in the World").

Thousands of scientists, judging by the latest reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, already state that we must stop working against Nature, as we have been doing for centuries, and begin to work in harmony with it. They explain that Nature already knows what to do and when to do it. If we only get out of the way, things will sort themselves out. Just as each body has its immune system, Nature has mechanisms that maintain its balance.

This balance is a dynamic equilibrium controlled by interrelated regulation mechanisms, in which Nature thinks not of particular elements within it, but of the whole system. Just imagine the havoc our body would fall into, if each organ cared only for its own good, instead of caring for the good of the whole body.

In such a state, organs would steal blood vessels from one another, denying neighboring organs nourishment and oxygen. Organs producing antibodies would direct them against other organs because other organs would be considered foreign bodies, and the ones with the strongest antibodies would destroy the other organs. Soon, very soon, the body would die, and its self-centered organs would die with it. When such a process happens in an organism, it is called "cancer."

The fact that Nature does exist and that it isn't destroying itself every single moment is proof that Nature does not work egoistically. It is a proof that Nature works as a system, putting the well-being of the system before the well-being of its parts. In Kabbalah, when the system's needs come before the needs of the part, it is called "altruism." In an altruistic system, the particular elements constantly contribute to the system, whether it is an organism or a human society.

Humans, in almost every aspect, are just another animal species. But there is one aspect in which we are different from Nature: We put our own interest before the interest of the system. This is the essence of egoism. We don't need to teach animals, plants or rocks how to behave. Their behavior is always in harmony with Nature, altruistic, putting the system's needs before their own. This is why when prey animals hunt, they hunt only enough to sustain themselves, and thus maintain the natural balance of their habitat.

But humans don't hunt to eat; they hunt to gain wealth, to exploit. This is why we have penalties for poaching. The only problem with the human race is that, unlike animals, it runs on an egoistic "operating system" instead of an altruistic one. To mend ourselves and to stop disrupting Nature's homeostasis, we need to install an altruistic operating system instead of our current, faulty system.

And to find the missing disk, you need to go to the "program vendor," the Creator. In Kabbalah, the words "God" and "Nature" are synonymous. This is why they have the same numeric value: 86. Kabbalists have discovered and upgraded a method that teaches how we can replace the egoistic disk with an altruistic one, and today, when many already recognize that a real change of heart is necessary, they are stepping to the fore and introducing it to the world.
By Bnei Baruch
Published: 12/17/2007

Developing Our Latent Sense

We feel that there is a world, an entire universe around us. But what we don't realize is that there is another part of the universe that we don't feel. Let's call it the "upper" part of the universe.

Presently, we perceive what our five senses can absorb, and they only allow us to attain a part of the universe called "our world." However, Kabbalists explain that we have the ability to penetrate much deeper. We can delve through our world into nature and perceive the Upper World. Let's take a closer look at how we can do this.

We perceive our world through our five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. We also build physical instruments such as microscopes or telescopes that widen the range of our senses' perception. But all the instruments we create can only expand our senses' perception and hence they can't let us perceive something beyond the reality called "our world."

Again, all investigations we conduct in our world are confined to our five senses. And as long as we are confined to them, we cannot begin to see, feel, and understand what lies beyond our senses.

O ur imagination is also a product of our five senses and the experiences which stem from them. We cannot imagine an object or a creature unless it resembles something that our five senses are familiar with.

For example, if you ask someone to draw an alien from another planet, he will draw it according to the elements he is familiar with from our world. And if you ask someone to describe a fantastical scenario, he will no doubt describe something which is fundamentally very similar to this world.

We all live in a small world and are not able to feel or imagine anything beyond it. And since our science and philosophy are also limited to the perception of our five senses, they too cannot help us understand what lies beyond this world. Therefore, to get behind the scenes of our world and recognize the forces that affect it - we need a new sense.

The wisdom of Kabbalah offers a person the method to develop his latent, additional sense, called the "screen." Using the screen, one can penetrate through our world and reveal deeper, inner layers of reality, which influence our level of reality. Hence, the Kabbalists call these layers "Upper Worlds." These worlds are like the layers of an onion, where our world is in the midst of all the worlds.

To summarize, we naturally feel only the innermost sphere in all of existence, but Kabbalists explain that 'this world' is just a small fragment of the true reality. It's the fragment we are able to feel with our inborn five senses. But if we develop the additional sense called "the screen," we will feel the Upper Worlds that Kabbalists feel. This is what Ka bbalah teaches: how to acquire the screen.

www.kabbalah.info

5 Stages of Desires’ Development

Kabbalists discovered that our desires for pleasure evolve by 5 stages:

1) The first, and most basic desire, is the desire for food, health, sex, and family. These are necessary desires for our survival.

2) The second stage is the aspiration for wealth. Here we think that money guarantees survival and a good quality of life.

3) The third is the craving for honor and power. Here we enjoy controlling others, as well as ourselves.

4) In the fourth stage appears the desire for knowledge. Here we think that having knowledge will make us happy.

5) But only when the fifth, and last stage of desire appears, we become attracted to an unknown “something” that is beyond us. Here we feel that connecting to this unknown “something” can bring us greater and lasting enjoyment, and we search for ways to make this connection. This desire for something higher is called “the desire for spirituality.” more…

Taken from “Kabbalah in Our Times: Spirituality, Kabbalah and the 21st Century” in the “What Is Kabbalah?” environment of Kabbalah.info

VIDEO: Rav Michael Laitman, PhD explains the process of evolving desires:

Watch more videos like this at Kabbalah TV

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