The Structure of Reality
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.
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.
Kabbalah deals with everything that expands from the Creator to the reality that He has created, and which He leads to His desired goal. Kabbalah does not deal with the Creator Himself.
In light of the crisis that humanity is facing and the growing sensation of helplessness and emptiness, the time has come for the wisdom of Kabbalah to appear. Kabbalah explains that the purpose of reality is to raise humankind to a level of equality with the Creator. The purpose of humanity’s decline to this world is to enable us to rise independently to the highest level in reality—the Creator’s level.
While in this world and ascending towards the Creator, we hold both ends of reality, as we are in our world physically, and in our souls at the level of the Creator. This is the purpose of our existence, predetermined by the Creator Who leads all of us toward it.
At the end of all our physical incarnations in this world, our souls will reach the degree of the Creator. This process is similar to any other gradual process in reality. From the Creator’s point of view, the beginning of the process and its end are at the same point. But while there is no concept of time for the Creator, for us the process extends over millennia, a long enough period for us to acquire the necessary insights and qualities to evolve. These will help us gradually become more Creator-like, and to ultimately become equal partners with the Creator.
The process is essentially one of gradual evolvement. The evolutionary process of humanity is like the ripening of a fruit: dry and sour while unripe, and sweet and juicy at the end. Had we not known how fruits ripen, we would have erroneously thought that the sour fruit would ripen to an even more sour fruit. But since we know the good end of the process to begin with, we can justify the whole process. Thus, only those who know the end of the process can justify it; if we, too, could see our future state, we would understand the Creator’s actions and justify them.
On the Ladder of Degrees
“Climbing the degrees of the Upper Worlds” is a generic term for all the new discernments collected along the spiritual way, the perpetual internal improvement, and the new qualities that one assumes at every moment.
As previously mentioned, the creature consists of a will to receive pleasure. This will is divided into five elementary parts, called “five degrees of Aviut (thickness).” They are graded from Aviut zero (root) to Aviut four. Thus, the term Aviut serves to measure the intensity of the desire.
Each of the basic degrees of Aviut is divided into five sub-degrees, and each of those is divided once more into sub-subdivisions. Thus, the will to receive is divided into 125 degrees, and we are required to correct all of them.
Correction of the desire means using the desire for pleasure to bring pleasure to another. Such a use is called “giving” or “bestowal.” The attribute of the Creator is bestowal, and the abundance that expands from Him to His creatures is an expression of His desire to give to them.
Hence, correcting the human ego from wanting to please self to wanting to bestow is considered an ascent in degrees. With each degree, one acquires more of the will to bestow, and accordingly feels more like the Creator. With each ascent, one comes closer still to the attribute of the Creator and to the purpose of life. The process persists until one acquires the attribute of the Creator to the fullest and becomes identical to Him.
To allow human beings to correct, the Creator created the worlds and their degrees before He created humans. Only afterwards was humankind created and lowered to this world. From here we humans must climb back to our roots. Consequently, Kabbalah deals with two successions: “from Above downward,” pertaining to the cascading of the worlds and their degrees, and “from below Upward,” pertaining to the soul’s ascent through the very same degrees.
The worlds that stem from the Creator are Ein Sof, Adam Kadmon, Atzilut, Beria, Yetzira, Assiya, and finally, our world (Figure 12). Kabbalah describes both the creation of the worlds and how a soul descends from the Creator through all the worlds down to ours. Between the Upper Worlds and our world is “the barrier” that separates the material world from the spiritual world.
Below the barrier, the body and the soul are at the level of this world, and we begin our correction process at this level. From this world, the soul ascends by accumulating knowledge of the spiritual reality, traversing the worlds Assiya, Beria, Yetzira, Atzilut, Adam Kadmon, ultimately returning to the world Ein Sof. There, in a state called Gmar Tikkun (The End of Correction), the soul is completely reunited with the Creator.
The wisdom of Kabbalah encompasses the entire reality below the Creator: the worlds, everything within them, the descent of the soul to this world, and its return upwards. In other words, the wisdom of Kabbalah contains all of humanity’s states and situations.
All the worlds, including ours, stand one below the other. Hence, all the worlds comprise the same elements. The Light emerges from the Creator and traverses all the worlds down to this world. Therefore, each element that is present in the world Ein Sof, is also present in all the other worlds. Kabbalists define this relation as “root and branch”:
Thus, there is not an item of reality, or an occurrence of reality found in a lower world that you will not find its likeness in the world above it, as identical as two drops in a pond, and they are called “Root and Branch.” That means that that item found in the lower world is deemed a branch of its pattern found in the higher world, being the root of the lower item, as this is where that item in the lower world was imprinted and made to be.
—Baal HaSulam,
The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah
We therefore see that every element and detail in this world, with all its connections, is present also in all the Upper Worlds, from Assiya to Ein Sof. The universe, Planet Earth, the still, vegetative, animate, and the speaking are all found in the worlds above this world, too. There is only one difference between the elements of this world and the elements of the Upper World: in the Upper Worlds the elements are forces, and in our world they are matter.
Attaining the Upper Worlds enables one to see the forces that operate upon every item in this world. When we attain the Upper World, we come to know the modes of behavior of every element of that world’s reality, the reason for its behavior and its qualities. The wisdom of Kabbalah facilitates our ascension to the Upper World and permits one to observe every object’s behavior in this world from above.
Crossing the barrier is a gradual process. Studying Kabbalah with the goal of nearing the Creator’s attribute—the attribute of bestowal—enhances one’s keenness. Increasingly subtler insights surface, pertaining to the reality in which one lives. One begins to feel the operations at the “backstage” of matter, the forces that operate the visible, perceptible matter.
A Kabbalist continues to feel the same reality as before with the ordinary five senses, but at the same time perceives the forces beyond the perceptual boundaries of the five senses with the help of the sixth sense. The hidden reality becomes more and more lucid, and the existence of another reality beyond the picture of this world becomes apparent.
The revelation of the spiritual reality is divided into three phases, called Ibur (gestation), Katnut (infancy), and Gadlut (adulthood). In the first phase, the Ibur, we can see our state, but cannot understand it. In the second phase, the Katnut, we understands that something is happening, but still cannot independently participate in spiritual action. In the third phase, the Gadlut, we obtain the strength and wisdom to participate in spiritual action and affect the spiritual reality.
At the third level, we begin to determine the flow of forces from the Upper World to our world and back. As individuals, we then become active participants, conduits through which the flow travels from above downward and from below upward. At the level of Gadlut, we realize our part and operate as a connector between the worlds. This is our corrected state, and each person must reach it.
Each person can come to feel every item and element of every world. All that we need is a special, subtle sense, an ability to discern and to feel. Even in this world, we discern considerable differences between the sensations of a young child, a youth, an adult, and a scientist. The study of Kabbalah continually builds new insights and discernments in us, eventually leading to the perception of the Upper Worlds.
From the above we can understand why Kabbalah contains all the teachings and sciences of this world. Without proper explanations, we would be lost and think that Kabbalah is a mystical teaching of wizardry and miracles.
There are others who relate it to Judaism, but in truth the wisdom of Kabbalah has no connection whatsoever with mysticism, religion or any other manmade fantasy. The purpose of the wisdom of Kabbalah is one: to bring humanity to congruence with the Creator through gradual correction.
Kabbalah is such a successful method for the correction of humankind’s egoism precisely because it is written by those who are corrected. One’s desire to draw near to the states described in Kabbalah books makes those states “project a correcting force” upon one’s present state. This force is called “Surrounding Light.” It changes one’s qualities, enabling individuals to sense their corrected state by gradually forming altruistic qualities in them.
The study of Kabbalah focuses on the world Atzilut. The world Atzilut, called “The World of Correction,” is above the Parsa. It is a system designed especially to correct a person whenever one wishes it. The Light that fills the corrected soul of a person in the world Atzilut shines upon one’s present state as Surrounding Light, a force that corrects human nature from egoism to altruism. The Surrounding Light elevates the soul through all the worlds until it returns to its root. Thus, the world Ein Sof is the ultimate goal, our world is the starting point, and the improvement of human attributes is called “ascent in the degrees of the worlds.”
Kabbalah is for those who ask about the purpose of their lives, those who are not satisfied with mundane pleasures such as sex, wealth, honor, or knowledge. When the whole of humanity awakens to ask about the purpose of life, the wisdom of Kabbalah will emerge. Kabbalists pointed to the year 1995 as the beginning of this time, hence the necessity to disseminate it.
Four Languages in the Wisdom of Truth
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 SecondTemple, 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.
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.
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.
The chief Kabbalah textbook at present is Baal HaSulam’s six-volume Talmud Eser Sefirot (The Study of the Ten Sefirot), based on the writings of the Ari. In just over 2,000 pages, Talmud Eser Sefirot expounds on the structure of the Upper Worlds, accompanied by charts, glossaries, and tables of questions and answers for revision of the material. In the introduction to the book, Baal HaSulam elaborates on the reasons for preferring the language of Kabbalah to the other languages in our generation.
Today, humanity has come to the last phase in the evolution of the will to receive. This is why Baal HaSulam adapted the method of the Ari to the structure of the souls in our generation--to make it accessible for everyone.
Changing Myself
Many people mistakenly relate the wisdom of Kabbalah to the Jewish religion. In truth, Kabbalah and religion are fundamentally different. The purpose of religion is to calm people down; it nurtures the hope that if I pray, the Creator’s attitude toward me will change.
Kabbalah takes a very different approach: The root of the word “prayer” (Hebrew: Tefila) means “sentencing,” or “judging” (Hebrew: Palal). In other words, one sentences oneself, examines the difference in quality between oneself and the Creator, and asks to receive strength to correct one’s own attributes.
The wisdom of Kabbalah explains that the Creator is unchanging. His attitude toward His creatures is categorical—He is good and does good to both the good and the bad.
Everyone feels the constant pressure of the Upper Force according to his or her distance from It. When one is far from the Upper Force, the pressure is heavy, and when one comes nearer to the Upper Force, the pressure eases.
Although the Upper Force engages diverse means to draw us near It, Its purpose is always the same—to bring every human being to perfection. If we want a change for the better, it is we who must change. We have to rise to a higher level, and in each ascent we will feel ourselves closer to the Creator and our souls will be fulfilled and satisfied. There is no other way to induce change in our lives.
All through history, humankind has been begging for a change that would come from the Upper Force, but change has not come. The Upper Force waits for the change to come from us. Until we evolve through the wisdom of Kabbalah, our paths will remain filled with affliction. Blows that push from behind compel us to find another place that seems better. But it only takes a while for us to see that the new place is not as good as it first seemed. Thus, we relocate and the scene repeats itself.
However, if we evolve through Kabbalah, our corrected state will project to the present state and illuminate it. With this Light, we will know how to move forward. If we know the correct goal to begin with, we will be drawn to it gladly. This is the difference between ordinary human evolution and evolution according to the wisdom of Kabbalah.
Today, the world is evolving unconsciously, without understanding the reasons for its existence. Humanity does not know where it is being led and why every person is born, lives, and dies. The wisdom of Kabbalah opens our eyes and guides us to the perfection and eternity that come with obtaining the Creator’s degree.
When we begin to examine our position in reality using the wisdom of Kabbalah, we find that the Creator’s attitude toward us is purposeful. It becomes evident that asking the Creator to change His attitude is pointless. If we move forward with the help of the Light, our pace will exceed the sufferings and we will progress ever faster. This is the whole benefit from the study of Kabbalah: accelerating spiritual progress to beat suffering.
Today, at the beginning of the 21st century, humanity is at the brink of a chasm: drug abuse is escalating, and despair and the fear of total destruction will not leave humankind a choice but to flee the suffering that will goad us from behind.
From all the above, we can clearly see that discovering that the Creator’s attitude toward us is purposeful is of paramount importance. This attitude of the Creator enables us to turn to Him as to a fellow traveler and ask Him for the help, wisdom, and strength to progress toward Him. Such a request is answered by the Creator instantaneously. He will disclose the Upper Worlds, and teach us how to progress.
Just as we teach our children to use their surrounding reality wisely, so does the Creator teaches Kabbalists. He reveals to them the spiritual worlds and admits them within these worlds. In this state, Kabbalists feel the Forces that operate in reality and begin to independently and wisely participate in the process.
The wisdom of Kabbalah shifts one from progressing through the negative force that pushes from behind, to easy and rapid progress through the Positive Force that pulls from ahead. Kabbalah is unique in that it develops our ability to recognize evil and acknowledge it. It develops subtle, keen insights of good and bad.
The difficulty in discerning good from evil is that the real evil—our ego—seems good to us. We are accustomed to treating our egos as a means to evolve. In fact, our pleasures, our livelihoods, our very essence and our personal selves are felt in our egos.
Kabbalah helps to discern what causes harm, how it can be mended, and allows us to progress in each phase of the evolution. The difference between a highly evolved individual and a less evolved one lies in the ability to discern good from bad.
We can compare this to a gauge. The smaller the unit the gauge measures, the higher the precision of the instrument. The study of Kabbalah makes us increasingly sensitive to the discernment between spirituality and corporeality, between bestowal and self-reception.
If a contemporary person has the opportunity to hear about Kabbalah and the possibilities it offers, such a person can realize his or her purpose of creation: to rise through all the worlds up to Ein Sof while living in this physical world.
The Right Attitude towards Reality
Kabbalah in Hebrew means “reception.” As its name testifies, Kabbalah teaches how to receive. With the right attitude towards reality, it is possible to experience endless enjoyment. This endless enjoyment is not from sex, food, a new car, a big house, or other transient, mundane pleasures. Instead, it is from those delights that can fill us with such utter bliss that we would transcend any sensation of time to receive them.
We sense the passing of time by the fluctuations between good and bad feelings, or sensations of fulfillment and absence of fulfillment. However, when we are in a state of elation, we are unaware of time. The wisdom of Kabbalah tells us that we can eliminate time altogether, along with the sensation of distance and any other limits or boundaries. One who has reached such a state is clearly living in an infinite, unlimited world.
Our lives will always contain two opposing elements—pleasure and desire, plus and minus. A pleasure that pervades a desire satiates it and cancels it. We come across this phenomenon in every area of life. When the plus neutralizes the minus, we end up feeling nothing at all. As long as we short-circuit pleasure and desire, we will be locked in a zero-sum equation. However, put a resistor between these opposites and they will work perfectly, creating everlasting enjoyment.
Kabbalists explain that pleasure stems from the Upper Force. This Force sends us pleasure because It loves us. When we try to receive the pleasure directly, the pleasure cancels our desire to enjoy it and the pleasure stops.
Yet, there is another way to relate to the pleasure: If we could discover the love of the Upper Force towards us and return His love with ours, we would become equal to the Upper Force. Each party would want to please the other, and the desire to please the other would be each party’s enjoyment. Thus, the pleasure would be coming from without, originating from within each party, a consequence of each party’s love for the other. This is why pleasure from love does not quench the desire for it, and the creature receives an endless sensation of pleasure, which is felt as endless life.
Let us clarify this with an example: When a mother gives her daughter a candy, the daughter enjoys the pleasure of the candy’s flavor. As soon as the candy is finished, the pleasure fades. However, if the daughter related to her mother, instead of to the candy itself, she could think of her mother’s love for her, which is why she gave her the candy. She could then decide to receive the candy not because it was tasty and pleasing, but because she wanted to return her mother’s love.
The way she could express love for her mother would be to receive the candy that her mother wanted to give her. Thus, the daughter would not relate to the pleasure from the candy, but to the joy that her mother received from her daughter’s pleasure from the candy.
This creates a completely new relationship between the giver and the receiver. Now, the two have equalized. Thus, the problem of the plus and minus that neutralize each other is solved because the receiver—a minus—has become a giver—a plus. If the vessel receives the Light solely to return the Upper One’s love, it completely equalizes with the Giver, the Upper One. The pleasure no longer extinguishes the desire, and the pleasure lasts.
It is of no importance who gives and who receives. Only the intention matters, the way by which we relate to giving and to receiving. We can relate to the Upper Force in such a way that we will not be receivers from It, but Givers of It. Such an intention would enable us to receive not because we want the pleasure, but because we want to please the Upper Force.
At the end of the process, and because we act as the Upper Force does, we will gradually acquire Its reason, stature, and degree. When we can execute this process within us, we will begin to feel a connection with the Upper Force; we will feel that we have acquired Its reason, that we are learning how to receive from It and how we can give It pleasure. It only takes this simple act of changing the intention to become increasingly similar to the eternal, boundless Upper Force.
To perform such an act, we need the disclosure of the Upper Force, the sensation that there is an Upper Force, that It loves us and wants to fill us abundantly. If we felt all that, we would begin to sense the relationship between ourselves and the Upper Force. Thus, the only difficulty before us is finding a way to discover the Upper Force, feel It and maintain contact with It.
The study of Kabbalah helps every person develop this kind of contact. This relationship between a human being and the Upper Force begins once a person feels there is a “field” that sustains the whole reality, an Upper Force, and that he or she is inside It. If we only begin to feel that this Force exists and that It relates to us lovingly, wanting us to know and come closer to It, we will naturally begin to develop this kind of relationship.
People who experienced clinical death speak of a sublime Light that awaits us, and many scientists are also beginning to consider similar concepts. But it is not necessary to experience such predicaments to feel this Light. The study of Kabbalah can gradually enable us to sense the Upper Force. We begin to research reality and operate according to what we discover and perceive.
When we feel this Force outside us, we discover that the Upper Force loves us; we then begin to feel that the Upper Force exists to benefit us and that It wants us to enjoy. We develop our reciprocal attitudes accordingly.
There is no fantasy here; these are very real and measurable things. Kabbalists measure the shape and power by which this Force comes to them, the pressure It puts on them, the corresponding resistance they have to apply, how they can connect to It, resemble It, in which of their desires they can already be like It, and in which they still cannot.
Kabbalists are impressed by the Upper Force and return its love to the extent that the Upper Force appears to them as loving, as wanting to benefit them.
We are “vessels that feel,” hence everything begins from our sensation of the Upper Force. We all want something. If we could feel that this something came from someone, our attitude to reality would change drastically; now, we would have someone to relate to. The study of Kabbalah can help us feel the Upper Force, the sensation of the Giver.
The Outside Reality
The minute we begin to feel the Upper Force and build a relationship with It, we begin to feel the outside reality. Kabbalists say that there is nothing around us but the Upper Force, that we are in a field that fills the whole reality. When we begin to feel this field, our bodies become completely insignificant. We begin to feel where we exist permanently, endlessly, with or without our bodies. In such a state, we no longer depend on the sensations we receive through our five senses.
We begin to perceive the external reality beyond the five senses in addition to our natural sensory perception. When that happens, physical life or death no longer matters. This state is above the sensation of life we experience while we are in our “box”; we become connected to the boundless stream of life surrounding us. Although we do continue to exist in this world, we simultaneously live in all the worlds, forever.
Such a sensation is evoked by perceiving the two forms of reality: the reality perceived in our five senses, and the outside reality. As a matter of fact, the sensation of the outside reality overshadows the sensation of the reality perceived in our five senses because it is far more intense, boundless, and unlimited.
Crossing the Barrier
When the Upper Force appears to a person as loving and evokes the Form of bestowal in that person, one “crosses the barrier” and enters “the spiritual world.” This process is very similar to the way photographs were developed. When I was a child, we would take pictures on a film and dip the film in chemicals to develop the pictures. When the film was immersed in the chemicals we would watch how the picture gradually became clearer.
We are used to treating the world as a reality where people, organizations, and public institutions influence the course of our lives, such as our neighbors, our employers, and our government. Slowly and gradually, through actions aimed at discovering the Upper Force, we will begin to feel what truly stands behind everything that happens in the world. We will begin to see how this Force operates people like puppets on strings, and we will understand what It wants of us.
Slowly, through our life experiences, we will begin to see that everything comes from a single attitude of someone, this Upper Force that operates on us. This is the point from which the wisdom of Kabbalah truly begins.
Everything that happens prior to this is called “the preparatory period,” before the crossing of the barrier. From the moment one begins to feel the Upper Force and comes in contact with it, one begins to understand the instructions in the Kabbalah books that are written especially for the reader. These books tell Kabbalists what they should mind, what to do, and which reactions they can expect.
This process is similar to the way grownups teach children to behave. Because children do not know the rules of conduct in this world, we warn them of things that might fail them and suggest how they should behave. Kabbalists have written their instructions for us in precisely the same manner. Books of Kabbalah are actually manuals that inform us how we can advance more quickly and improve our relationship with the Upper Force, a relationship we call “the spiritual world.”
Equivalence of Form
We have thus far established that the nature of the Light is opposite from that of the vessel: one is giving and the other receiving. When Light fills the vessel, it cancels it. In other words, the desire to enjoy is neutralized by the pleasure that satisfies it. As a result, people are engaged in a constant pursuit of new pleasures, but never manage to hold on to them. No real pleasure is possible as long as the contact between the Light and the individual is based on the individual being a receiver.
To receive real pleasure, one must receive with the intention of pleasing the Upper Force. If one maintains that intention, he or she will be fulfilled and will always be a giver. The profit from such reception is twofold: one is filled with both the pleasure and the recognition of the Giver. If one receives in order to please the Upper Force, one begins to know the Upper Force, which in turn brings the receiving person a sensation of the outside reality.
If we receive from a solely egoistic interest, we only feel ourselves. Receiving with the intention of giving to the Upper Force enables us to know the Upper Force. Through such a reception we transcend our own “box” and experience our surrounding reality.
The sensation of the outside reality brings us to a level of existence that supersedes the existence of life and death in this world. Reception by egoistic interest, called “corporeal reception,” is disqualified, and the person transcends to reception in the soul, called “reception in order to bestow” upon the Upper Force.
For one to begin to receive in order to bestow, one must feel the Upper Force. The sensation of the Upper Force as a Giver evokes shame in the receiver, resulting in that person’s decision to receive only on condition that he or she can return pleasure to the Giver.
Yet, the Upper Force is hidden in our world. Were it disclosed, we would all enjoy a twofold egoistic pleasure, from the pleasure and from the contact with the Upper One. Such a state would egoistically “lock” us on the Upper Force extracting pleasure from It, and we would never be able to switch to returning love to the Giver.
Thus, the first condition for the sensation of the Upper Force is to be rid of egoism. The sensation of the existence of the Upper Force cannot be perceived in the human ego. If we had perceived the Upper Force with our egoistic desire, we would become a Klipa (shell). A Klipa is such an intense egoistic desire that one is unable to break free. The only way to be rid of the ego is to equalize in form with that of the Collective Soul.
The Collective Soul
We are all created as one Kli (vessel) called Adam ha Rishon (The First Man). We are tied together in that Kli as parts of a single system. To enable the Kli to correct, the spiritual structure of Adam ha Rishon was shattered into numerous particles. These particles are the individual souls that clothe our bodies in this world. The result of the shattering is that each person is confined to his or her egoistic desire, oblivious to others and feeling only oneself.
Today, after a long evolutionary period, people are beginning to feel the points in their hearts, the points that drive them to reconnect with the Upper Force, to search for spirituality. At this stage, we must obtain the strength to overcome our egoism and transcend it, since we will be able to connect to the Upper Force and draw near it only to the extent that we equalize with It.
The way for us to connect with the Upper Force is for those who share the same spiritual goal to join together. Although each of them is subjugated to their individual will to receive, they all wish to transcend it. Such a social environment is defined as a “spiritual environment.” With it, one can break the wall that separates him or her from others.
While those in a “spiritual environment” may still be egoists, they are nonetheless doing their best to create a structure similar to the corrected structure of the soul of Adam ha Rishon. We cannot succeed in this task alone, as such a task contradicts human nature. What we can do is acquire an intense desire and join with others.
This is where the wisdom of Kabbalah comes in. Books on Kabbalah describe the corrected state of the souls and the difference between these and corrupted states. The key difference is the intention with which we use our nature. Correction means that we change the purpose for which we use our desire—from inducing self-gratification to benefiting others.
When we correctly study genuine Kabbalah, we come to depict our own corrected state. This depiction prompts the Light that already fills our corrected state to correct our soul. Once that Light corrects our soul, It fills it, and we begin to experience the spiritual world.
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There is no time in the spiritual world, no space, and no motion. The Upper Worlds are not above us in the physical sense of the word. “Ascent” actually means “regaining consciousness.” The study of Kabbalah requires us to shed our corporeal clothes of familiar mundane sensations and perceptions, and penetrate through matter and into the Forces behind it.
In spirituality, we turn from observing the picture of reality to knowing the Forces that paint it. We begin to understand how reality is made, acquire the ability to connect to the Forces that created the picture and ultimately govern them. Kabbalah is our key to the “Control Room” of reality.