Question: Do the previous lives dictate our present lives?
Answer: Don’t forget that there are future lives as well, not just previous ones. Today, every person has a chance in this life to affect his future lives. Every one of us should know how to influence his life correctly, to study the laws by which the influence continues from life to life.
Man can pass on from one life to the next a lot more vital information that would assist him, and thus prepare himself for a better life in the next round. Man can advance toward the purpose of creation within just a few lifetimes, and accumulate his attainments. He is the only creature in the whole of creation that is given that opportunity.
A person can determine his own destiny and consciously influence the environment he lives in. Our whole world lives at the expense of the light that comes down to us and clothes everything around us. This invisible light revives the entire reality. Man can control the descent of this light to our world: The acquisition of a screen through the study of the wisdom of Kabbalah enables a person to control the descending of this light. He can open a Kabbalistic prayer book and act according to the orders that are written there, instead of waiting for heaven’s mercy.
In order to demonstrate it, here is an instruction page from a Kabbalistic prayer book by the Rashash (Rabbi Shalom Sharabi). It says: “Extend the middle third of Partzuf Abba to the Sefirot Keter, Hochma, Bina, Daat of Partzuf ZA, and reject to the Sefirot Hesed, Gevura, Tifferet.” After that it explains elaborately how to perform this instruction. In the end it says: “Build an aim for rejecting a small light to the two bottom thirds of the Sefira Tifferet of Partzuf ZA.”
A person who still hasn’t risen to spirituality cannot understand the meaning of these instructions; it is not clear to him what to do or what to do them on, and what should be the outcome of the act. That is why the wisdom of the Kabbalah is the wisdom of the hidden. But it is hidden only from those who still haven’t attained the sensation of the upper powers.
A person who follows these instructions passes the upper light through him and as a result feels confidence and the perfection of the attainment. He knows what is going to happen and how to control it.
This is where the real freedom of choice appears. In this level of bestowal man holds the full control over his life, his future and the whole of nature. He brings to our world all the goodness through the upper light, and that light reflects back on him doubled and tripled.
Question: Does a person have to study his past lives in order to affect his future ones?
Answer: The evolution of the generations in the world is nothing more than an appearance and disappearance of physical bodies. The souls, however, which are the filling of the physical body, man’s primary “I,” do not disappear. They only change the body that carries them. Therefore, all the generations, from the first to the very last are considered to be one generation that has been stretched over thousands of years, from the cradle of mankind to its final correction and the attainment of the complete rest and wholeness.
That is why it makes no difference how many times a soul dresses in the body, the demise of the body doesn’t affect it, because its substance comes from an upper level. It is as meaningless as cutting our nails or our hair is to the physical body. That is because they are in the degree of the ‘vegetative’ in man, whereas the physical body belongs to a higher degree, the ‘animate’ in man. By studying the mechanism of the dressing of the soul in the body, a person becomes freed from the control of death in his life.
Question: Can we get back to our world, to our life, for a minute? Is there a way that we can find some freedom after all, somewhere where we have the ability to act freely and make a difference?
Answer: There is an aspect of creation, in our world, in this life, that we can indeed influence. This aspect, in turn, affects every other aspect of reality. But that is only on condition we know how to control it, how to change it for the best, and then we can avoid being controlled by nature.
The Four Elements that Comprise Us
Question: What exactly does the upper force leave us to choose?
Answer: In order to answer that question, we must first examine our “I,” what elements man is made of.
Man is made of four elements. The first element is called the “bed,” the foundation. It is the basic, primary substance we are all made of. That is what we received from the Creator. It is what defines our essence. The Creator created it “existence from absence” (when something new is created that does not exist in the source). This is the substance that is imprinted in every one of us. That is why I said that we need not worry about the basic fundamentals of the soul, because they are predetermined in advance.
Question: How can we examine any kind of natural phenomenon?
Answer: Only when we rise above nature both in mind and heart will we be able to observe it from a higher degree. For example: we can meticulously research the evolution of the seed of the wheat, influence the course of its life, the number of lives it will have, by putting it in the ground and thus killing it, but also reviving it from its previous condition to the new life.
These processes can be done only with the vegetative nature, because there are no cycles of life and death in the still, and we cannot yet rise above the beastly-living nature, because we are in it. We cannot investigate outside this nature with our ordinary senses from above. Even the most sophisticated instruments cannot help us here, because they were also built in the same beastly level.
We will be able to see what happens with us only if we exit this level, which is the highest in our world, to a higher level, to the spiritual world. We will be able to research ourselves and influence our own lives, much like we research and influence the wheat. That is precisely what the wisdom of Kabbalah enables us to do.
If we compare our lives with the life cycle of the wheat we will discover our own evolution mechanism. A seed that is put in the ground rots and disintegrates completely until there is nothing physical left of it. It is turned to dust; still. From that situation its new form begins to emerge, its new life. The former shape is completely gone and there is nothing left of it but the spirit, the force, the Reshimo, the knowledge that instigates the appearance of a new life.
If we were in the degree of the vegetative, in the degree of the wheat, we would not be able to examine life and its transformations. We would not be able to see how the seed loses its vitality, disintegrates and loses its former life, and from that situation begins its growth again with all its former attributes passed on to the new life. Although nothing physical is left, because everything rots, but a new fetus emerges from the former state, from the spirit, a new cycle of life evolves, a new entity with no recollection of the past.
Question: If everything disintegrates and disappears, what will be left of the present life to the next? What will be left of the feelings, the thoughts, and my own unique personality?
Answer: What happens to our body is much like what happens to the seed of the wheat. The physical body disintegrates and we receive a new body. But the soul, the former spiritual potential still remains in the form of a gene, potential information that transcends from one phase, from the old physical body to the next, through a physical detachment called “death.”
As long as the old substance of the body did not disintegrate, the next cycle does not start. Only when it disintegrates do the previous Reshimot begin the new cycle of evolution. That is why Jews bury their dead without delay. There are even some practices that enable the new life to begin sooner, such as adding cement to the grave so that the body would rot faster – as though asking for the new phase of correction to begin sooner.
The transition from life to life involves a complete decay, just like the seed of the wheat, until there is only the essence left; a pure power, denied of any physical clothing. This is the Reshimo. Between the degrees, between one life cycle and the next there is a severance, a void. For this reason a person cannot see the transitions from phase to phase. However, a Kabbalist transcends from cycle to cycle thousands of times. He controls the transitions and in each of them he leaves a Reshimo. He doesn’t need to leave his physical body in order to begin a new life, because he identifies with his soul, not with his body.
Question: Is it possible to go from this life to the next without dying?
Answer: In order for this ‘breakthrough’ to happen, in order for the soul to jump over this corporeal incision for the purpose of instigating a new degree of development, where a new body will carry it, a person has to die physically, or be detached from his body in a different way, mentally/spiritually, like the Kabbalist. Thus he experiences many cycles during his physical life. In one lifetime he can go the whole way from beginning to end, to the purpose of creation, to the starting point of the soul.
We will be able to see the changes that occur in us with our own eyes, only if we exit the degree of our world to the spiritual world, much like a person in a state of clinical death, watching from the side how the doctors fight for his life. From the upper level we can see what happens to us, research and manage our own lives and control their quality.
This force that transcends from our past lives, from the previous body of the previous seed, to the next life, is called the “bed.” It is the force that carries on the spiritual information itself, the essence. If the seed were a seed of wheat, it continues to be a seed of wheat. A certain soul will remain the same soul, but it will be dressed in a different body.
Question: What does the choice of a new body for the soul to dress in depend on? Can we affect it in any way?
Answer: The soul dresses in a body that is suited for the execution of the program inside it. The attributes of the soul and the corrections it must go through, define the characteristics of the physical body that it creates around it. We determine our future situation through our spiritual attainments in this cycle, meaning what kind of body and what conditions we will have in the next life. It is all up to the Reshimo, which creates around it a new body after the demise of the current one. All the data about the corrections that the soul still has to go through is found in the Reshimo.
Question: If a person finished his corporeal assignment, does he still come to this world?
Answer: Yes he does. And what is even better, he appears when he is already completely corrected, and his soul descends only in order to help others. From the same Reshimo that creates the human body extend all the differences between people: the characteristics, the talents their tendencies, are all determined by the internal attributes of the soul, by its need to realize what it must do in this world. By the way, that is why any coercion is strictly prohibited in education.
We receive the first element, the “bed,” the essence, the spiritual object, our spiritual gene, directly from the Creator. Therefore, it is clear that it is impossible to influence it in any way.
That element includes the origin of man within it, his echelon of thought, and the state of mind of his ancestors as well as the knowledge they had acquired. Afterwards this knowledge appears as tendencies and corporeal and mental characteristics of the personality that we are unaware of. They can be imprinted in a person as tendencies to believe, skepticism, materialism or spirituality, or perhaps to shyness or stinginess etc. These attributes are like the seed of the wheat that had lost its corporeal shape in the ground. They are given to us without a physical body to contain them, through natural inheritance, and because of that they sometimes appear in the opposite form.
The second element is the laws of the evolution of our essence. These laws do not change; they are predefined by the Creator, because they extend from the nature of the essence and its predetermined form, which the essence strives to come to as the purpose of its creation. Every seed, animal or human, have within them the program and the laws of their evolution. This is the second element, and we cannot influence it.
The other two elements, the third and the fourth, relate to our development, but they are external to the soul itself. Those are the external conditions that make voluntary changes in me, of my own free choice, but activate on me a pressure that I cannot control, sometimes against my will. Hence, the third element in our evolution is the external conditions that can partially change our path of evolution to the ‘right’ way, or to the ‘wrong’ way.
Let us get back to the seed of the wheat, because it is an easy process to observe. It will help us understand the principle in discussion. For example, if we sow the same kind of wheat in two parts of a field, and influence each part differently, such as block the sunlight on one side, not give enough water, not weed out the weeds, while the other side gets the best possible conditions, we will see how much the external elements affect the growth process. Although we will get the same wheat, but the question is what difficulties did it encounter during its growth and hence, what final quality will it have.
The fourth element is the changing of the external conditions. We cannot directly affect ourselves, but if we provoke a change in our external conditions, we can determine our own future, our future thoughts, aspirations, and in one word, the quality of our future.
The first element, the bed, and the second element, the laws by which our essence evolves, can be expressed negatively through what we refer to as inheritance: physical weakness, feeblemindedness, or a psychological or spiritual weakness. Therefore, if a person finds himself the right place to develop, by going under a positive influence of society, he can attain wonderful results, much like the seed.