The Study Of Kabbalah Will Rid Us Of False Stereotypes And Beliefs

the-goal-of-creation-is-perfect-fulfillmentTwo questions I received about how to deal with the erroneous ideas and imprints we receive in life:

Question: When people begin to study Kabbalah, they often bring their baggage of erroneous ideas, and they can get lost in the authentic concepts. What is the quickest and best way to sort out this inner mess?

My Answer: We must accept the student the way he is. The only thing that affects spiritual progress is the inspiration received from one’s environment, which is then aimed at the Creator. Besides, we don’t understand the value contained in false methods, as per the law “the rind protects the fruit.” This will be revealed to us at a later time.

We come to Kabbalah burdened with a myriad of misconceptions and stereotypes received in childhood and over the course of our lives. Everything we heard in childhood forms the foundation of “facts” within us. Then, the person is guided by these “facts” and unable to rise above them.

Until he acquires new qualities, which act within him with the same force as those “slogans and facts” that he naively heard and believed in as a child, he will not be able to feel the Upper world. But he is unable to rid himself of the old conceptions on his own, because they need to be replaced by the new – and this can only be done by the Light, which descends from the next degree of attainment.

Question: To what degree does everything we took in as children limit us?

My Answer: When a person receives the spiritual power of bestowal and rises above the corporeal, and begins to see his corporeal self from the side, he is astonished by the incredible amount of utterly baseless stereotypes that he is filled with. These are just things he had once taken on faith. It had entered his childish mind and left a non-erasable imprint, which he couldn’t do anything about.

That is why anyone can come and start studying. And only as time goes by, gradually, i.e. under the influence of the studied material, will he rid himself of false stereotypes and beliefs. The conceptions one had acquired later in his life are easier to part with; it’s the things that he had absorbed in his childhood that are the most difficult. Nevertheless, step by step, man peels himself of all this “rind,” until he begins to use the spiritual fruit when it truly becomes ripe.

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A Person Is An Entire World

manA question I received: How is it that an external Upper Force balances Malchut (the desire to receive pleasure) with the spiritual worlds, if all the worlds are within a person?

My Answer: The spiritual Force resides within us. There is nothing outside. Everything is within a person: the Creator, the creature and all of creation. And if it seems to me that an external world exists, it is because I am lacking the true, corrected perception.

But, if I view myself as being the entire world and concern myself with becoming similar to the Upper Force, if I constantly imagine this Force as increasingly more bestowing and loving to all, then to the degree that I understand and feel this Force, I will organize all my internal desires and qualities in such a way as to unite with others. And all this is done within me.

It turns out that I must correct only myself and my perception that the world supposedly exists outside of me. I begin to sense that indeed the world is all within me, and thus I correct reality. It turns out that the correction consists not in changing my relations with others, but in correcting my current perception that others exist outside of me and are not part of me. But having discovered that everything is mine, do I still remain an egoist?

Then, all of reality, its external and internal parts, seem to be as one. And even if I’ve yet to reach the true spiritual perception of reality and everything does not seem to me to be one single whole, it does not matter. The most important take-away from the science of Kabbalah is that a person has to correct only himself.

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We’re British And Lazier Than Ever

how-do-you-fight-group-lazinessIn the News (from The Guardian):No sex please, we’re British and we’re lazier than ever” – Despite a huge government push to encourage healthy living, Britons are lazier than ever, concludes the study conducted by Nuffield Health. One in six people would rather watch a TV programme they didn’t like rather than leave the sofa to change the channel if their remote control was broken. A third (36%) …would not run to catch a bus and more than half (59%) would not walk up two flights of stairs to reach their office, choosing instead to take the lift. More than half of dog owners (52%) did not walk their dogs, and two-thirds (64%) of parents admit to always being too tired to play with their children. The laziness epidemic appears to have spread to the bedroom, with almost three-quarters (73%) of couples saying they regularly do not have enough energy at the end of the day to have sex, with more than half (58%) blaming a lack of fitness … The nation has fallen into a vicious circle of laziness…

My Comment: Kabbalah says that there is no laziness, but only lack of interest, meaning a lack of desire. Now we are going through a stage where our desires are changing from material to spiritual, and this explains that apparent laziness. In other words, it is a lack of desire to fulfill those previous desires that we used to have, but are no longer tangible to us.

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The Recipe For Eternal Pleasure (Advanced)

recipeA question I received: What’s the connection between the revelation of a new Kli or desire, and the revelation of the Creator?

My Answer: These are the same, because the Light shines to us inside the concealment. What do I mean by that? The science of Kabbalah explains that this process is like a flirt. In our world, for example, a woman covers herself up and then gradually reveals herself to a man. It’s a game, where beauty is revealed out of concealment, and the concealment attracts.

While we are in the state of concealment, we acquire a desire for revelation. But that’s not all: the revelation that we later achieve must be concealed from our own egoism, as well. So, the Creator maintains the concealment in order to reveal Himself to you. He reveals Himself while in concealment. On the other hand, if you are ready to accept the screen that conceals the Creator from your egoism, and to build a screen yourself, concealing your ego, you thereby rise above your egoism and reveal the Creator.

At that point, there are no more screens of concealment between the two of you. Instead, you guard your ego yourself, so as to keep it hidden. You always preserve the concealment, but now you do it in your attitude to the Creator. This, however, is not a concealment of the Creator, but a concealment of your egoism. This is how you achieve fulfillment.

Our whole problem in this world is that we annul the screen and try to fulfill ourselves directly, but this fulfillment immediately neutralizes the desire. No matter how passionately a person wishes to achieve what he desired – whether food, drink, sex, or fame – as soon as he achieves this, the pleasure immediately fades. He wishes for it so much, and spends years chasing after something, but as soon as he receives it, the pleasure is gone.

Why is this!? A person saves money for a new apartment for several years, then finally buys it, and just one week later, or two weeks, or a month, he no longer has that feeling of novelty and pleasure. And that is because by buying this apartment, he nullified the screen.

The entire science of Kabbalah talks about how to reveal and receive pleasure while keeping the screen. That way we can guard the pleasure, ensuring that it will fulfill us without fading away. As a result, we achieve the feeling of eternal and perfect life.

The only reason we ever feel worthless, defective, and mortal is because we reject the screen – the partition that has to exist between the pleasure and the desire. People who work in technology know how to implement this principle. They don’t just connect two wires directly, because that would cause a short circuit to occur. Instead, they place resistance between them – a resistor, and then they can derive a beneficial product. However, when it comes to our lives, we disregard this principle, and this is why our devices work, while we, the main device, are uncorrected.

The greatest wisdom is in knowing how to keep the covering with which the Creator first concealed Himself, because then the concealment will always attract us. However, we will then need to conceal our desire, our egoism, and rise above it. That is how we will reveal the Creator. When we do so, we do not lose our Kli or desire, because we constantly get an additional desire, as well as a screen over it, and thus, the revelation of the Creator.

This is the science of revelation – the science of Kabbalah, where we really receive what we desire and we don’t lose it right away, the way we do when acquiring anything in our world. In the spiritual world, you can’t achieve a revelation of the Creator even for a second if you plan to reject the screen. You have to first prepare the screen that hides your egoism, and then you can reveal the Creator above it. You need the preliminary preparation.

This is why we have to go through the period of preparation – the first few years of studying Kabbalah. In the long run, a person has to learn how to force or convince himself, and to understand that he requires a covering. This is why it is written that “wisdom is for the modest” – meaning those who can hide their desire to receive pleasure. It is precisely by hiding his desire that a person can receive fulfillment inside that same desire, and this fulfillment will never fade.

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