Q: Are we seeing an incorrect world?
A: The Creator started creation. To be more precise, He created a world of “evil,” or corruption. But man finishes creation, meaning man corrects it. Because man has the ability to lead the world, the Creator passes on to him the leadership of creation. The Creator increases the pressure on us to make us take the leadership upon ourselves. That is why the world around us is so bad; the Creator made it so, in order that we begin to correct it.
Q: Can you prove that Kabbalah aims us toward the purpose of creation?
A: Kabbalah is based solely on experimentation, and not on the human mind, or even on philosophy or other rational considerations. It maintains that everything that stems from logic and contemplation lacks any real basis. That is because our minds are a result of our desires, our nature. Therefore, it is impossible for us to discuss anything objectively or impartially.
An ordinary person who is not a Kabbalist can never discuss anything objectively, but only from a personal perspective. Such people cannot exit the boundaries of our world into a wider and more general world.
Those who are endowed with such abilities become Kabbalists. That means they receive higher knowledge about the whole of reality, they see and understand the general laws of nature and where they lead the universe. Those who do not enter the shared space of the universe cannot understand what purpose we are discussing. They are born; they live and beget children who are like them, and then they die, unconscious as ever.
That is why Kabbalah, as a science, refuses to describe the real system of the universe, as well as our purpose, on the basis of man’s current false understanding. Rather, Kabbalah takes man out to another space of feeling first, to another outlook on the universe. And those who go by the wisdom of Kabbalah can see that Kabbalah aims at the purpose of creation.
The role of each of us is like the role of the whole universe, because in us are all the components of the universe. Kabbalah teaches this to us when we study the Breaking of the Vessels, which occurred prior to our creation.
As a result of that shattering, all the parts of all the souls got mixed together, so that each soul contains parts of every other soul. This is the source of the mutual responsibility and the reciprocal bond between all mankind that is a major focus of Kabbalah.
A single individual cannot exit to the spiritual world. This would be like one individual beginning to develop the whole of physics or chemistry, and then starting to use these sciences. It would be similar to living like a Neanderthal without using all that humanity has achieved thus far, before attaining that knowledge by one’s own resources.
It is for this reason that a beginning student needs a teacher who has already attained the Upper World, and can show the student how to attain each step to develop towards the Upper World. The teacher is a spiritual connection to the student, but the student will understand it only after attaining the Upper World independently.
Unity with the teacher can occur in the preliminary stages because both bodies are on this worldly level. But unity with the Creator is only possible when one goes out to the Upper World. That is why contact with a teacher leads to a contact with the Creator. The teacher is the leader.
Kabbalah explains incarnation as a dressing of souls in new bodies after they have rid themselves of old bodies. That means that the souls of the previous generation dress in new bodies, and thus the new generation appears on earth. Each new generation is made of the same souls robed in newly born physical bodies.
Physical bodies are born, live and die. After their death they go from a stage of animation to a stage of stillness… and that’s it. Nothing else happens with those bodies.
Nothing of what the protein body had is re-lived in the new body. A “body” in Kabbalah is a body of a soul – the desire to be filled with Upper Light.
For this reason, we must understand that when the Torah speaks of the soul exiting the body, it refers to the Light leaving the body of the soul. When it says that the soul returns to the body, it means that the Light has returned to fill the soul after its ”will to receive” has died, been corrected and became a will to bestow.’
And when it says that a body has been revived, it refers to a will to receive that was once uncorrected, not spiritual; meaning “spiritually dead.”
The Kabbalah teaches that the term, “incarnation,” refers to the soul, not to the physiological body. The fact that we relate to a corpse with so much respect is because we must relate to everything in this world in accordance with the Upper World. But my teacher would say that he doesn’t care where and how his bag of bones will be buried.
There will come a time when the whole of humanity will open its eyes and will see both at the level that it does today, and a greater space, one that Kabbalists call the “spiritual world.” That state is called “the coming of the Messiah.”
Then, everyone will change their egoistic natures (their bodies) into the nature of the spiritual sphere, a giving nature. Kabbalah calls that process “the revival of the dead.”
How can we reach the Creator? We accumulate experience over our cycles in this world and evolve to the level that we are able to begin to develop consciously toward spirituality. In so doing, we learn to oppose unconscious development, as we have been led through by our past cycles. When we attain that certain level, a special desire begins to awaken within us.
All of our desires are to enjoy in this world, but this new desire demands pleasure from a Source of Light, from a spiritual pleasure that cannot be found in our world. That desire pushes us to search for the Source of that pleasure, to seek and find the Creator. The soul is what leads us from that time on.