Reach a new Level of Attainment

Baal HaSulam, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”: … render us complete satisfaction although we have no perception whatsoever in the essence of the subject.

Furthermore, you have no perception or attainment whatsoever even in your own essence. Everything you know about your own essence is nothing more than a series of actions extending from your essence.

It turns out that what I have is enough for me. If I feel some kind of phenomenon and it completely fulfills my desires and satisfies my questions, then I do not yearn for anything more.

Is it still possible to be infected by further questions? Perhaps somewhere somehow it is possible if we get closer to the Creator and want to acquire His nature. Maybe there we will be able to reach such possibilities of attainment that are higher than our current ones. However, this is a completely different level of the universe, a different level of attainment.

Everyone exists on the inanimate, vegetative, and animate levels of nature, including all the people in our world. If a person who studies Kabbalah rises above the animate level, ascends to the level of the Creator and begins to attain this system, he or she feels not only it, but also the causes of all the phenomena.

That is, I do not just feel the Creator, but I reveal His essence, the next level of reality. This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah studies. But that is already a top chord.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 9/15/19

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A Person Is a Reaction to the Influence of Nature

Baal HaSulam, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”: This name is as tangible and as close to us as though it were entirely perceived by our senses. Even little children are familiar with the word, “electricity,” as well as they are familiar with words such as bread, sugar, and so on.

Moreover, if you wish to exercise your tools of scrutiny a bit, I shall tell you that as a whole, as there is no perception of the Creator whatsoever, so is it impossible to attain the essence of any of His creatures, even the tangible objects that we feel with our hands.

It seems that everything is clear to us, but in fact, nothing is clear. We can somehow work with electricity because everything around us is the manifestation of this force. But what is this force? We do not know.

Moreover, if you wish to exercise your tools of scrutiny a bit, I shall tell you that as a whole, as there is no perception of the Creator whatsoever, so is it impossible to attain the essence of any of His creatures, even the tangible objects that we feel with our hands.

Thus, all we know about our friends and relatives in the world of action before us are nothing more than “acquaintance with actions.” These are prompted and born by the association of their encounter with our senses, which render us complete satisfaction although we have no perception whatsoever of the essence of the subject.

The fact is that we attain not the essence of any natural phenomena, such as electricity, gravity, magnetism, and so on, but rather only their effect in us. Something gravitates me – “Oh, it means there is a force of gravity and I can measure it.” Yet, I do not know what this force really is.

The wisdom of Kabbalah says that in such a form we can also attain the Creator. We attain Him from His actions. It is written, “From Your deeds we shall know You.”

This is a very serious limitation for us. Will we ever attain the essence of the phenomena? Never! Even if we aspire to it.

In fact, we, in general, do not even aspire to it. We have some kind of movements, impulses, but we do not suffer from the fact that we do not have this, and therefore, we have nothing in which to reveal the essence of natural phenomena. We see only their effect because we ourselves are the effect.

Yet, is it possible to rise above this to absolute attainment? There, far-far beyond the full attainment of the Creator, we will begin to contact the point from which everything comes. Perhaps, there is an opportunity to get out of our sensations of effects and get to the essence, to the truth.

Somewhere deep inside we want this, although where can we get such a feeling, such a lack? Is the feeling of the truth, the root, the basis, the source, of everything that is happening so necessary to us?

There are a lot of nuances here, and I would like to tease you a little, to cause you such excitement that you will want to reveal this.

In other words, all corporeal phenomena we attain are only through the reaction of our sensory organs to their influence. That is, we are the effect, the reaction to some kind of influence.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 9/15/19

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Do we perceive the essence of natural phenomena?

Baal HaSulam, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”:

The Actuality of the Wisdom of Kabbalah

Actual things are found even in the corporeal reality, set before our eyes, though we have neither perception nor image of their essence. Such are the electricity and the magnet, called “fluidum.”

Nevertheless, who can say that these names are not real, when we vividly and satisfactorily know their actions? We could not be more indifferent to the fact that we cannot conceive the essence of the subject itself, namely electricity itself.

Indeed, we do not understand what electricity is or the essence of any other physical phenomenon. We observe only their effects.

For example, we know how to work with electricity, with electromagnetism, we use them freely in our lives in everyday household activities. But we do not really know what it is. Yet, this does not bother us at all. We continue to exploit these natural phenomena completely unaware of their essence. And we understand that we do not know this.

Do we know what gravity is, even though everyone feels its impact on themselves? Try to jump, you will see what it is. We measure this force, learn how to overcome it. But what is this force? What is its essence? Where does it come from? We do not know. This is how it is with all natural phenomena.

Baal HaSulam writes that our knowledge about their manifestation satisfies us completely. We do not need anything else in order to use them.

The main thing for us is to use these phenomena. We do not attain their inner essence because nature created us this way. We attain only their effects in our sensations and nothing more.

Of course, we could decide that it would be good to find out where magnetism, electricity, gravity, and all other natural phenomena come from. But they are completely concealed from us. We are just the instruments in which these phenomena manifest, and their manifestations are what we feel.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 9/15/19

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No Limit to Perception

Remark: One can study the article “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah” forever. I have gone back to it for 20 years and still find something new in it every time.

My Comment: The need for a beginning is felt more from the end. Any real science develops a person so that he needs to study it again and again.

Remark: Let’s say The Study of the Ten Sefirot studies the physics of the spiritual worlds, and every time you seem to discover it anew. However, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah” seems like an ordinary article that can be treated lightly, and suddenly you discover such depths within it.

My Comment: This is not because of the article, but because it expands the limits of your perception and your attitude to the world. The first four topics in this article are “A conduct of general and particular,” “The Abundance of Partzufim, Sefirot, and Worlds,” “Two Conducts—from Above Downward and from Below Upward,” and “Abstract Names” in the wisdom of Kabbalah. They talk about many concepts that are very complex and serious.

When you get to the fifth or sixth concept you begin to understand that you, in fact, still do not understand the first ones. You have read, agreed with them, and moved on. And now you see how comprehensive they are internally, and you again turn to them. There is no getting around it, you have to do something about it. So you study them again.

How many times do we go through all the articles of Baal HaSulam? Those who read “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah” for the first time today cannot even imagine what else they will see in it after they go through it the second and third time, or in a year, or in 10 years.

For example, I have been studying the wisdom of Kabbalah for 40 years and I cannot even compare what I had imagined about these concepts previously and now today. The current me and the person who opened this article 40 years ago are completely different people.

Question: Does it mean that in Kabbalah there is no such thing as in our world, “I have already read this”?

Answer: There is no such thing in Kabbalah. In anything! You get into this wisdom and you immerse yourself in it without the ability to somehow finish it.

It talks about such a round, interconnected world that you can pull one string and all of reality will change for you. Every new definition, every new sensation, and new attainment changes everything because there are only ten Sefirot, but each of them consists of another ten and another ten; it turns out that there is no limit to perception.

The world is infinite, although it consists of only ten parts, ten emanations.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 9/15/19

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“The history of the past” sounds a little ironic, like someone’s story based on one’s own subjective experiences, or even a novel. People think that history is the events that happened a few days, months, or many years ago in our world, for unknown reasons, in a random order of cause and effect.

However, the fact is that our reality has a spiritual root that descends and reaches the corporeal world, creating the concept of time in it. At certain times, due to certain forces emanating from their spiritual root, the spiritual form spreads downward and materializes in a corporeal form. We perceive it all as history.

The wisdom of Kabbalah reveals the events that must happen. Therefore, it does not separate between past history and future events. The same spiritual roots must be revealed in this lowest world, only some roots have already been revealed and others are yet to be revealed. It turns out that there is a story about the past and the future.

The entirety of history is predetermined and will undoubtedly happen. Many things written by Kabbalists have already come true. Therefore, history is not divided into the known past and unknown future. For Kabbalists history is one clear process, which is impossible to doubt. They study it as a process of descent of the upper roots that descend to our world losing their spiritual degree, that is, “materializing’ and manifesting in matter such as inanimate matter, plants, animals, and humans of this world.

For example, is it important for us to know that the point in the heart, called “Moses,” which takes a person’s desires out of egoistic slavery, was once embodied in this world as an old man with a snow-white beard whose name was also “Moses,” who led his people out of Egypt? It is written that a person should see himself as exiting Egypt every day. In other words, it is not an event that happened a long time ago and now does not exist. A person should exit his ego every day, from the slavery of egoistic desire to freedom.

Everyone is obliged to perform such exodus, and this is not ancient history, but everyone’s personal story, which one must write: to understand that he is enslaved by his egoism, to fight with his own personal Pharaoh, to escape from him, and reach freedom. He must then undergo all the other changes up to the end of correction, which is not yet visible to us in our world.

The history of this world unfolds as if according to a clock ticking on the wall. We, however, should work according to the upper clock where there is no past, present, and future, but everything is determined relative to the observing person. Therefore, it does not matter whether or not the event has already happened in our world. Kabbalists do not look at this at all because they do not feel time and do not measure it by the criteria accepted by the people of this world.

History in the view of the wisdom of Kabbalah is not something that happened once upon a time or will happen in the future, but rather, it is something that already exists now. Each person himself discovers this history according to his spiritual advancement. I can go through all of history from beginning to end and in the opposite direction from end to beginning, walk through it, feel what the First and Second Temples are and their destruction, the Egyptian exile, the Maccabean war, and so on. If a person is controlling his will to receive, he can experience all historical periods as he wishes.

It is said that there is no past, present, and future in the Torah because it is above time. It is precisely about rising above the time of our world and not being tied to my egoism that at the moment determines for me in what time I should live, that is, what I should feel now. I must rise above my egoistic desire and then I myself will determine not only in what time and era, but in what state I want to live. That is, I will become completely free as if floating above time.

When a person receives a spiritual nature, he is already not tied to time, movement, and space, that is, corporeal parameters, but exists above them, in spiritual space. By studying Kabbalah, a person gradually departs from childish ideas about history. Yet, in order to really break away from corporeal perception, it is necessary to acquire an anti-egoistic screen (Masach), a tool that lets us rise above egoism and become free. A person can then already imagine everything that exists in our root.
From KabTV’s “First steps in Kabbalah. The history of Kabbalah,” 10/7/19

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How Do Kabbalists Relate to the World?

Question: There is an attitude to the world and to others. What is the difference between the way a Kabbalist relates to the world and the way ordinary people do?

Answer: The Kabbalist treats the world as the work of the Creator. The world is an example of how I relate to the Creator. A good attitude toward people, toward the world, means a good attitude toward the Creator. In principle, nothing exists for a Kabbalist except himself and the Creator.

Question: Baal HaSulam writes in his article The Solution: “The religious form of all the nations should first obligate its members to bestowal upon each other to the extent that the life of one’s friend will come before one’s own life, of “Love thy friend as thyself.” One will not take pleasure in society more than a backward friend.

This will be the collective religion of all the nations that will come within the framework of communism. However, besides that, each nation may follow its own religion and tradition; one must not interfere in the other.”

So do all Kabbalists relate to this that way or only Baal HaSulam?

Answer: Kabbalists act according to the law “there is no coercion in spirituality.” Each from his point in the heart, from his character, from his egoism, will gradually reach equivalence of form with the Creator and will enter that place in the general system of private souls where he will complement them and will interact with them in complete harmony.

Question: That is, a person can engage in Kabbalah, explore his selfish nature, work with the upper force as a law of nature, and at the same time, be in some specific traditions, religious frameworks, and one will not interfere with the other?

Answer: Of course. A person can have any religious framework. Religion in this case is simply considered as culture.

Question: Does this refer to the root of the human soul?

Answer: Yes, to any manifestations of a person. One can worship anyone and do anything, it does not matter. The main thing is that a person accepts the basic tenets of Kabbalah. If one fulfills them, then one will gradually reveal the true world.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 12/17/18

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The Purpose of Creation Is to Become Like the Creator

Question: Kabbalah says that a person should become like the Creator, not in some external actions, as in other beliefs, but in intention. What is the difference?

Answer: If in action I want to be like the Creator, then it is very simple. Take a look at our world. Only the actions of the Creator are manifested in it. “There is None Else but Him.” Do you like this world?! Everyone can be similar to the Creator according to the actions we see in our world.

This is not what is meant in Kabbalah. To be like the Creator means to achieve what we comprehend within this system: complete love, complete bestowal, complete interconnection. In order for us to attain this, the Creator provides us with a picture of a ruined, torn world, so from it we attain the opposite perfect world.

Remark: Kabbalists say that if it were not for the purpose of creation to become like the Creator, there would be no need to do good deeds in our world and generally relate to others.

My Comment: Of course. We are all absolute egoists, and with each generation egoism is growing in us more and more. In the end, this should lead us to a state of mutual bestowal and love. Merging with the Creator is truly the goal of creation.

Question: Does the Creator reveal our egoistic nature? He created it, and without Him we cannot correct egoism at all?

Answer: In no way. We are completely dependent on Him.

Question: Why did He do this?

Answer: So that we depend on Him. Indeed, it is this dependence that leads us to perfection, likeness to Him.
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From the KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 12/17/18

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In A Dance With The Creator

Baal HaSulam, “Freedom of Will“: The way of Kabbalah consists in relying on the minds of those who already attained the ultimate goal, as if it was our own life experience. … Hence, the law of communal living is considered one of nature’s laws and we must observe it with great caution. This law must develop realization of: self-love as evil and love for others as good, because this is the only way to loving the Creator.

The essence of all spiritual techniques is to understand the Creator, comprehend Him. But only the science of Kabbalah leads us to this because it reveals how the Creator acts on us, how we must respond to Him, and through this two-way interaction “He is for me, I am for Him” to establish a right constant connection, like in a tango in which two are dancing in unison.

Such a dance, when we enter into full integration with the Creator is called the “bride’s dance,” in which what comes from Him to me and what comes from me to Him are completely incorporated.
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From the KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 12/17/18

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Why Does the Creator Love Sinners?

Question: Baal HaSulam wrote that he rejoices at the revelation of sinners within himself, meaning egoistic intentions toward the Creator. What does this mean?

Answer: The Creator loves sinners more than the righteous because the sinner reveals that the Creator sends him evil. The Creator created the soul, a huge universal web where we are all connected, and then broke it. And now He is showing us its fragments so that we constantly keep asking Him to properly reconnect us.

Therefore, when I feel separated from others, unwilling to connect with them, in opposition to the Creator and the whole world, I am called a sinner. But that leads me to ask Him for correction.

The righteous is a state in which I have nothing to ask for. It is possible that I mistakenly remain in this state.

Question: In any case, all these states keep changing; they are not static?

Answer: Of course. The most important thing is to change. This happens only if a person is in a group and the group is directed toward the Creator.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 12/17/18

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Turn to the Creator

Baal HaSulam, Shamati, Article 209: There are three conditions in prayer:

1. Believing that He can save him. Although he has the worst conditions of all his contemporaries, still, “Will the Lord’s hand be too short to save him?” If it is not so, then “the Landlord cannot save His vessels.
2. He no longer has any choice for he has already done all that he could but saw no cure to his plight.
3. If He does not help him, he will be better off dead than alive. 

These are three correct attitudes to life. Everything is determined by the Creator. There is not a single thought or feeling that comes from me, only from the Creator.

Therefore, I have to always be in a heightened state of readiness, analyzing everything happening in my mind and feelings, realizing that the Creator presents it to me, and ask Him immediately for correction, to direct me properly to have good thoughts of love and bestowal toward others, that is, accompanied with good feelings that are above oneself of bestowing to others.

The Creator reveals only evil in me, as it is said: “I created evil.” However, I catch this evil mid-way and immediately ask Him to change it to good.

I then begin to enter into an interesting relationship with the Creator called “a dance,” like a tango: He leads me, and I lead Him. He influences me, and I give back to Him. Thus, we complete each other.

Acknowledging the evil is primary here. Once you understand that it came from the Creator and that “There is none else besides Him,” there is only one thing left to do: ask Him to change the evil to good. This is what our whole life is about, our entire spiritual work.

Question: Can I turn to the Creator without acknowledging my egoistic qualities and their destructiveness?

Answer: No. It is like you are the goalkeeper and the Creator constantly shoots at the goal, and you have to constantly deflect His shots.

Question: Do Kabbalists engage in self-reproach?

Answer: If you constantly cry, dissatisfied with your life, reproach anyone and everything, then you are dissatisfied with what the Creator has given you.

Question: Does Kabbalah view the cause of human depravity positively?

Answer: The Creator specifically did this so a person would need His help, and thus could ascend to His level.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 12/17/18

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