Question: In our world, all of humanity has a common understanding of what faith is. You have been told something, and although you have not seen it, do not feel it, and do not attain it, you believe in it. And knowledge is what we attain in our five senses.

But Kabbalah studies a state called faith above reason. What does it mean?

Answer: In Kabbalah everything is absolutely different from this world. The state of faith above reason comes to a person after a period of rather hard work when he begins to understand what Kabbalah says about our world and the spiritual world.

Doing certain exercises, a person begins to feel that everything that happens to him comes from some upper force, upper intelligence, upper will, and follows a certain program that can be called the Creator, the Creator’s desire, the Creator’s plan. And then a person sees that he has practically only one action left in our world—to connect all his sensations with the Creator. And he is gradually does so.

He ascribes everything that happens around him to the upper force, not because it is written to do so, but because he begins to feel that there is a certain tendency, meaning, and purpose in this—in all cases of life to direct a person to only one source, the Creator.

As a rule, a person begins to experience all sorts of unpleasant sensations, threats, fears, and defeats in his egoism, in his pride, and in his self-awareness. He feels the hostility of the world toward him emanating from various sources. And then, behind all these sources, he begins to see a certain system of forces called the “Creator,” which works on a person in this way so that he is directed at Him. That is, behind all the variety of inanimate, vegetative, and animal nature there is some kind of a force, a plan, a program; there is a single source.

And the force itself is hidden from a person. It deliberately manifests itself to him in such a way that he looks at its direction. What does it mean at its direction? It is not clear yet. It is just that in everything that happens to him, he becomes used to seeing the single source.

Making efforts in this, a person, as it were, rises to another level of attitude toward what is happening in the world, in the universe, to what is  called faith above reason.

Reason is what a person can feel in his five senses in our world, like all other people. And faith is the ability to relate everything that happens to him to the next level, to a certain force, which in this way gradually educates him.

Initially, this is just a sensation because a person does not yet exactly attain the source itself. He cannot say anything about Him except one thing: it is the source that sends him all the trials. And above the trials, the same source helps a person turn to Him.

Thus, He directs a person to Himself: “Pay attention to Me. You receive everything from Me. I am the only ruler in this world. I am the only one who rules over you, over all your actions, states, thoughts, feelings, over everything around you, over the entire universe. And everything that affects you comes from Me.”

This is the beginning of attaining the Creator as the source of everything that happens, when precisely in critical conditions the need for something bigger arises and a person does not understand what is happening to him, why, and how. It all overwhelms and confuses him.

And then, as a result of great inner turmoil, a feeling suddenly awakens that it comes from the upper force.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 3/11/19

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