When we speak about the sources of the wisdom of Kabbalah, the civilization and the Jewish people, we should understand that it isn’t about history or philosophy but about real matters that are directly connected to our life and to our wellbeing. The processes that started in ancient Babylon are now coming to their inevitable end.
During that crisis, there were two men, or rather two thinkers, two rulers—material and spiritual—Nimrod and Abraham. They were teachers, leaders of their generation, who symbolized two approaches of evolution, the two currents in humanity. What is more, Terah, Abraham’s father was Nimrod’s spiritual mentor.
First, Abraham belonged to Nimrod’s stream, until he discovered the system that governs creation. Therefore, he broke away from his father and became the opposition to his father Terah and Nimrod.
Nimrod believed that we have to use our ego as much as possible while keeping the public order but allowing competition. Even though there was virtually no competition in ancient Babylon, the ego suddenly erupted and surged in each and everyone there and in all of them together. Nimrod suggested using it in order to compete, to develop and use it to reach new heights and to rejoice at its growth.
However, in order to get along with one another, they had to disperse a bit, like residents of a collective apartment who leave it and move into private homes; then everyone is happy and even remains in touch, although previously they didn’t speak to each other for years, didn’t say hello to one another, etc.
Nimrod is the recognition that there is an ego that keeps us apart. “Well, if the ego separates us, let’s separate.” It is very logical, very corporeal. This is Nimrod’s position.
Abraham’s position was totally different: There is no need to separate, but rather to connect, and then in the right mutual connection we will find the way to the next state, to a state that is really called Adam (a human being), stemming from the Hebrew word “Domeh,” to resemble the upper nature.
We will bring humanity to homeostasis, to harmony with all of nature not only with our nature. We will establish harmony between us and include the ego in it (after all we cannot escape it), so that we will include it correctly, work above it, and use it correctly, meaning not for the sake of competition but for the connection between us against our self-love that separates us.
Here we use a totally different method and activate forces that are opposite in nature: plus and minus, attraction, and repulsion, etc. We balance the two opposite forces with one another and eventually discover a totally new existence, which is altruistic not egoistic. We create it by ourselves, above our ego with its help. Therefore, the ego is called help against. That is what Abraham said.
On the whole, Nimrod offered a partial solution: that we draw away from each other a bit, that we compete against each other and live a good life, etc. At the same time, we crowd the earth and multiply since the ego turns in different directions: we want more children; we want to build more, to create more to conquer more, etc. Thus, the ego leads a person from a small home in the village to domination, conquests, and so on.
But that is still not the solution to the problem but simply the fulfillment of what awakens in me now, meaning the impulses and the egoistic forces that are concealed in me. Therefore, it is not a global solution, not the exit to the next level of existence; it doesn’t look to the future.
On the other hand, Abraham doesn’t prove his approach. His proof is only logical while Nimrod’s is practical. Nimrod is materialistic while Abraham is actually an idealist to a certain extent. He claims that if we ascend above the ego, we will reach the next level of existence. Our whole civilization can ascend to this level.
However, the ego that is being revealed in us now and which separates us from the corporeal existence cannot be used as we are accustomed to because eventually we will only harm one another when we have to really come together. When we gather, we will be like the greatness of nature that is totally global, integral, and in complete harmony.
The general nature and its one force is called our Creator. To the extent that we resemble this immense creation and this force, we will begin to reveal it and to adapt ourselves to it, to connect, to resemble it, and to get close to it. Then we will really begin to feel the world we are living in, the small earth and the relations between us, and to ascend upwards to a new dimension.
Question: What Nimrod says makes sense and everyone sees it. It is possible to feel it. If we separate we will really be better off. Today each of us lives in his own country, in his own home, in his own corner, and we like it. So who are the strange people who followed Abraham?
Answer: Imagine that there are those who feel they lack something in the egoistic evolution and are not satisfied by it. The ego, which is concealed in the few who join Abraham, tells them: you should go out and attain, conquer, develop…but upward. This means not in the corporeal sense, but in knowing who you are, where you come from, and what you are living for.
I want to move forward on the timeline and to know what is beyond the world we are living in. I want to understand where all this comes from and where I can get to in the end.
The point is not to develop the desires that are in me at the moment. Suppose I develop them and have a villa instead of a small apartment and become a great scientist, a first class expert and all that it involves… I see this picture and it isn’t enough.
Question: This means that you see the people who refused to follow the simple materialistic logic as wise people who can see what the future holds.
Answer: They don’t only see the future like Nimrod, whose decision postponed their coping with the problem for thousands of years. It is about people with a different egoistic desire, who understand why the other people follow Nimrod, but they have to find an answer to the question about the meaning of life. They are not interested in living a better life but in the meaning of life and what the point is in everything that they do.
If this question is not resolved, I simply have no powers to act. When there is no meaning, this life doesn’t interest me. It is tasteless and meaningless and there are no aspirations. “So I will study and work and provide for myself somehow…,” but this is actually a state of depression. I have to know what I need all this for. The end of my life, which is supposed to be in another thirty or fifty years, is here now and I care about what is beyond that. In other words, I have a global feeling in my ego that is not limited by ordinary life: a home, a family, etc. and so they cannot keep on living like that.
There are such people. Rambam (Maimonides), the great Kabbalist of the 11th century says Abraham collected about 5,000 supporters who agreed with him. They felt that it suited them and that he thinks like them and that he had found a way to work with the type of ego that characterizes them, which means the ego that wants to know: “What am I living for, and what is concealed behind that; who raises me and where am I headed? etc.”
Question: It turns out that those who followed Abraham were all the different depressed people who were not satisfied with what this world can offer.
Answer: Precisely. They felt empty and followed him and he took them from their homes to the desert.
Abraham taught his students that it is possible to advance only by ascending above the ego and by using it correctly. Nimrod developed by using the ego and so do we, but we develop above it. He is in the ego, while we are above the ego.
This system operated in them although their life wasn’t so easy: a desert on the outside and a desert on the inside. On the other hand, Nimrod led his supporters with red flags and slogans of “forward” toward the victory of the egoistic workers, towards clear and satisfying goals. The environment supports you and everyone is happy, advancing and singing praises to Nimrod.
Here, however, the development is different, in emptiness. After all, you don’t develop in the ego so you have to find another point of development that is revealed when you exit yourself and connect to others. All your work is to grow stronger and to build the exit from yourself.
What is more, your ego sees this work as leading to nowhere and that it will never yield any positive outcome. The usual formula: “work a little and then you will receive a payment,” doesn’t work here. In ordinary life you can wait for a month or a year, the ego simply enters a process of preservation and waits knowing that it will eventually receive the payment and that the more it waits the greater the reward will be.
But here everything is different. Here you will never receive anything in your current desires because they are egoistic. You have to exit them and establish a totally new dimension above them, a new level on which you will exist. Your whole existence is focused on bestowal and all your pleasure and your filling will be in order to bestow. The more pleasure that goes through you to others, the better the outcome will be.
Question: So what gives these people energy? They constantly work and don’t receive anything…
Answer: It is already a spiritual desert, an inner emptiness, and what gives them energy is the attraction, the inner conviction that there is no other point to our existence, what for? Is it in order to run around like everyone else looking for profit?
There are many people in this world living according to a different principle, like artists and painters for example. They too don’t chase material goals but are looking for a more internal reward that brings them great pleasure, although it is egoistic.
Here, however, we have to create totally new vessels of perception that are external to us. If we connect, a state in which I am ready to give everything to others and to exist solely in them, when my “I” totally melts and disappears in them, it will be created. But then a new “I” exists in them and I begin to feel that I am truly free of my current nature.
This is what they want. This is what Abraham teaches them: the way that everyone can exit himself with the help of others who assist him in exposing himself and getting rid of the old “clothes.” He cannot do that by himself, but together they get rid of the chains of their ego, and when that happens they become real spiritual figures.
They get rid of their egoistic clothes, use them correctly because they are above them, and connect by their new impulse. Then, unlike Nimrod’s followers who establish an egoistic community, together they establish an altruistic community that merges into one whole, because every one exits himself into others.
Then they begin to feel, to accept, and to be filled by the force of nature that exists and surrounds all of reality, including our egoistic world, the egoistic desires and the way we picture it, but this force isn’t felt here since we cannot feel it without having a suitable vessel to feel it. There, however, we create new senses that resemble the integral force. This is called the dressing of the Creator in the created beings.
Question: This means that they do receive pleasure.
Answer: They receive great pleasure; absolute filling for all their desires, but not in the old desires that were never meant to receive anything. When you go through the desert, turn yourself from a receiving creature into a creature that bestows, and tie yourself to work in order to bestow together with people like you, you begin to see the world as a world of forces instead of a corporeal world: a great many forces existing in perfect harmony, and now you are part of it. This is what we call the spiritual world.
This is what Abraham taught. This phase is called Adam (man), similar to (Domeh) the Creator, the one force.
The emptiness that was felt in them becomes the vessel that the pleasure now enters. They are filled with attainment, connection, and a common feeling, mutuality, when all the forces, the attributes and the energy of nature, not the nature of our world, but of the general reality, go through you. They exist in a new dimension that is eternal and whole.
Question: Did they feel all that when they followed Abraham?
Answer: In principle they knew that without this attainment there was no meaning to life. They didn’t know anything more than that. They may have guessed it by somehow feeling that there was something beyond this, but on the whole, it is the ego, of course, that pushed them forward.
This group became the foundation of the Jewish nation. The Jewish people are those 5,000 people who gathered into one whole above their ego in one altruistic yearning for a common desire, a common thought, as one man in one heart, in one thought. Israel is called “Yashar-El,” straight to the Creator, and the general connection is called Adam.
Thus, despite the egoistic fuel, this connection, this nation, was created and consolidated according to a spiritual perspective that is altruistic and not egoistic. They came from different tribes that lived in Mesopotamia and were totally different people. They even spoke different languages that were formulated just then. They had nothing in common, except for their yearning to advance.
Abraham united all these people, and they received a common language, Hebrew, since this is the most accurate and shortest code that stems from their spiritual attainment, in which it is possible to convey spiritual discernments, spiritual mathematics, the combination of different forces. Thus, this language was created out of the daily yearning to advance to connection.
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From KabTV’s “Babylon Yesterday and Today” 8/18/14, Part 2
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