Question: If a person meditates, he looks at some object and tries to feel how this object affects him. When we study Kabbalistic texts, we also look into them and ask for them to influence us internally. So how, then, does Kabbalah differ from ordinary meditation?

Answer: I don’t understand what meditation has to do with it? Meditation is when you envision some kind of image, some kind of letter, something hanging in the air, and you meditate on it.

I absolutely cannot relate to this action and intention that we would develop in ourselves in our Kabbalistic efforts to unite. Because in Kabbalah everything is very real. We discover within ourselves mutual hatred, rejection of one another, and we try not to run away from it, not to float away somewhere in the clouds, but instead to find connections that would force us, despite the mutual rejection, to unite with each other.

Kabbalah by no circumstances destroys egoism, it uses it. That is why it is called “the science of receiving.” All meditations are based on the idea that you suppress egoism, as if it doesn’t exist. And so, I fly off somewhere into the clouds, and I’m already an angel of God.

But here, no, you become even more vile, an even more egoistic individualist, opposite to others. But you rise above yourself, above your “I,” above mutual rejection.

Mutual rejection is called “Aviut“(the “thickness” of your egoism in the group), and mutual connection is called “Zakut” (the “purity,” the serenity of your relationships). These two qualities must be together, one above the other, and through this, a third quality is created, the so–called “middle line,” which combines both of them in itself.

Therefore, Kabbalistic meditation, if it can even be called that, is absolutely real, because it always and entirely is based on egoism, which is growing more and more.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Kabbalistic Meditation” 5/23/10

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