Description

An introduction to Kabbalah through an examination of the way we perceive reality.

Transcript

Can I ask you a serious question? Where are you? In front of a computer screen? In a body? a home? a city? On a planet? In love? In pain?...  What is all this that you see and feel? What is it for?  Why are you having the experience your having? Where are you ? ... And why are you there?  

If you really think about it, it's pretty clear that the answer to those questions holds the answer to every other possible question, and the only thing preventing us from getting the answer is the way we perceive reality. Cause if we could see it for what it really is we'd know what we are, where we're going, and the reason for everything that's happening in our lives. So what is it about the way we perceive that's stopping us from knowing?

What's keeping us in the dark? 

Lets start here. This (gesture, pointing to whole space in a large circle) is the total of reality, and out here is what we think of as other dimensions, non material potential, our future and everything that's hidden to us, what we want to feel but can't, what we want to know but don't know yet. For some reason we have no sense of this. so for us it's as though this doesn't exist at all. And what is all this? - unbounded pleasure, unlimited existence, complete perception and connection with the force that builds and guides the material universe (hold up box) where we are. This is us - A closed box with 5 little openings to what surrounds us. Even though we have these five senses to determine what's real and to guide us, none of them works in a way capable of sensing anything that's out here for what it really is. The problem is, this is where we actually live...and yet we only experience what you find in there (point to box) and what you find in there is limited perception, isolation, fleeting pleasures, and all kinds of problems that cause suffering.

So why don't we experience what's out here instead of what's in there?

(zoom into box)  

When something from the total of reality comes calling we think we know what it is, but we never get the thing itself. It never actually enters the box because the senses aren't really openings. What's outside hits some kind of resistance, a screen, a barrier, like an eardrum, or a retina, a taste bud, or a nerve that interprets what's outside and then gives it an identity and meaning according to the effect that this unknown thing might have on the box. But the interpretation that the sensor gives us is entirely limited to the way it's programmed. The program doesn't tell us what the outer, objective reality actually is - it reduces it, feels it only according to the nature of its inner programming - and all of our senses run on the exact same program, so whether your eye uses an electron microscope or the Hubble Space telescope, what you'll ultimately see will always be a subjective picture, controlled and determined by the program.

So what exactly is this program? It's called Egoism, self-concern, how does this affect me? What's do I get out of this? Or as the Kabbalists call it "The Will to Receive,"   

The box is a machine. The input is a formless unknown (which has no shape until you give it one) that gets processed through an inner program, and the output of the box is our reality.

But that's NOT real reality, that's just how it appears to the Will to Receive. Cause out here everything operates according to another all encompassing program that always and only creates, sustains and guides, it has absolutely no self concern so it has no limitations. It is unconditional altruism, or as the Kabbalists call it "The Will to Bestow", the general law of the universe, the single benevolent force behind all nature and existence. The thing that gives you your life. 

This is the complete polar opposite of the box. It's like comparing the big bang to a black hole! It's so unlike the reason behind everything we feel, want, and do, that as long as we measure life through our five senses and the Will to Receive, we will never know our true nature, the nature of reality or the purpose of our lives.

THE END 

You don't really think this is the end do you? Because that would mean that life was designed to be cruel and pointless, and even though it often feels that way, - like right now - there's something inside that feels there's got to be a way out of this narrow existence.  And there is! But it all depends on what you desire. When the need to get out of the box finally becomes strong enough a different kind of desire appears as a tiny point in your consciousness and the only thing it wants is to be directly connected with the program outside the box. Once it's awakened, if you know how to develop this desire, that point can grow to become the basis of a completely new sense different from the physical senses that can allow you to perceive the greater reality and feel the nature of the force behind it. 

How can that happen? Kabbalah tells us there is a law called Equivalence of Form.  

In the physical world you can take two things that are very different from each other in form and quality, place them beside each other in space and we say they're close.

But out here there's no time or space, no separate objects like the physical world. Here there are only forces, fields of influence which are varying degrees of bestowal resembling the attitude of the general law of the universe. In the non physical, if these fields have different qualities they're distant from each other, if they have similar qualities they're close, BUT if they have exactly the same quality, purpose and feeling they are in fact the same thing! Inseparable, bonded! 

So, this opposite egoistic quality of the five senses blocks our perception, and gives us the experience of separation, isolation and constant lack.

But that embryonic point in your heart, the reason you're asking these questions, tiny as it is, is unconsciously similar in quality and feeling to the unseen world, it's intimately connected, interwoven with it, and will ultimately bring you to know and enter it and reveal that every event in your life, every experience, desire, joy and disappointment is actually the general law of the universe guiding reality to develop and awaken you to consciously choose to come into balance with it, by receiving what it most wants to give - the ability to become exactly like it - so that what it feels, you feel, what it knows, you know, and what it can do, you can do.  

The method of developing this additional sense is called Kabbalah.

Kabbalah is not a religion; it's not magic or mysticism. It's the user's manual for reality, a map of our sensation and feelings. It explains not only the way our inner and outer worlds are constructed, but why. It's a science so fundamental that it can truly be called wisdom, Kabbalah has been passed down through an unbroken chain from teacher to student over thousands of years, kept hidden, until the time when humanity would finally reach the need, the stage of our development where we could properly understand and use it. That time is now. 

Bnei Baruch is a non profit organization making authentic Kabbalah available free of charge to anyone who needs it, regardless of religion, nationality, age or gender (see all Bnei Baruch websites in all languages at Kabbalah International). If that point in your heart wants to know more here are the links

THE END - no, really, it's the end.