Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What can one get out of Kabbalah?“
At the end of our childhood, our eyes gradually start opening up and we find ourselves in a particular world. We can live in this world without giving it much consideration, simply living “like everybody else” and taking after their example. However, some of us feel a deeper need that makes us feel uncomfortable and dissatisfied with the idea of simply going through life’s motions.
What we want out of our lives depends on the desires that awaken in us. We all have a desire to explore our surrounding reality. When we are children, we explore our rooms, and the more we grow up, the wider the canvas of our exploration: from our rooms to our yards, then our neighborhoods, our cities, countries, the planet and we then look out into space, trying to figure our what is going on in our universe. After extensively exploring our surroundings over the course of our development, we end up at the conclusion that we find no lasting fulfillment from such endeavors.
Today, even our interest in space exploration has waned. We relate to it mostly in a mercantile manner, for instance, in order to operate mobile devices via satellites or for espionage. We find exploration of distant galaxies much less interesting than we used to. This is because our desires have changed. Our desires no longer aspire to explore cosmic distances, but on the contrary, at a certain point of our development, our desires start turning inwardly, directing us at seeking the source of our very thoughts, desires and qualities.
In other words, our questions gradually shift from how we can best survive and be comfortable in our world, to why are we here. The question “Why?” awakens the more we develop beyond a certain threshold. It is a question about our life’s meaning and purpose. We start asking about the causal factors in our existence, about where we are from and where we are headed.
Our increasing difficulty to fulfill ourselves from one year to the next is not because we have less desires, but on the contrary, our desires constantly grow and the systems we previously created in order to fulfill ourselves no longer succeed in doing so. The more we develop, and the more dissatisfied we become, then the more we try new and different things to fulfill ourselves. Take, for instance, the transition taking place in the attitude to drug use. Today, there are moves throughout the world to legitimize and legalize the use of various drugs that, until recently, their possession and sale constituted punishable criminal offenses. It is all in order to give us a sense of calm and to forget about our growing disillusionment with the world.
In our times, whether or not we verbalize the question or not, we start demanding answers to the meaning of our lives, and not just answers as to how we can live a comfortable existence in our animal bodies.
We feel less and less meaning in fulfilling ourselves in the materialistic manner in which we have developed over the generations. On one hand, we find ourselves needing cars, living spaces and thousands of material goods in order to live comfortably. But on the other hand, we do so in order to simply feel comfortable, and the material items themselves hold no meaning. Rather, we feel a more inner need for something else, which we cannot pinpoint in our world, but which gives us a growing sense of dissatisfaction with our material existence.
This is the question about the meaning of life. It is a question that no science, technology, or even philosophy and psychology can fulfill, as it seeks far deeper, to the very causal root from which everything extends.
In short, our increasing loss of interest in our materialistic existence points to the emergence of a new level of development that is awakening within us, and it assumes the form of existential questions that we will increasingly feel that we need true answers to.
Kabbalah was made in order to answer precisely these questions. Using the wisdom of Kabbalah, we learn how to fulfill our innermost questions about the meaning and purpose of life. By applying the time-tested method of Kabbalah, we gain access to the causal level of our existence while alive in this world, and by doing so, we attain an eternal and whole sensation of reality, which completely fulfills us. In other words, the wisdom of Kabbalah was made for answering the question about the meaning and purpose of life in a practical and methodical manner.
Based on the Daily Kabbalah Lesson on the article by Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam), “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on January 24, 2011.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Filed under: Kabbalah Study, Meaning Of Life, Q&A, Quora | Add Comment / Ask Question →
Question: Those people who feel that their fate is in their hands believe in their own strength more. Can a God-fearing person better control his nature, his thirst for power, if he believes in the upper force of governance? If he believes but does not feel it, can it help?
