I recommend for everyone to watch my last lecture at the Odessa congress, on the perception of reality. This topic is becoming more and more attractive to people, especially the younger generation. People are beginning to feel and realize that we are not living in the complete reality, but in a partial and deformed part of it.

I received very impressive questions about this from a former classmate. He experienced a severe electric shock, after which he started seeing through objects and even feeling the future to some degree. He had always been a skeptic, but after the electric shock (by a powerful magnetic field), he began to perceive additional forces that exert an influence on the world.

The topic of perception of reality helps us not only to realize how limited our perception is, but also to understand that all the spiritual worlds are inside us, and exist together with us in the same dimension that we are now in. We can reveal them by revealing new “altruistic” properties inside us; through these properties we will feel the additional worlds. The method of revealing these new, altruistic properties within is Kabbalah.

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Questions I received on perceiving spirituality:

Question: I am absolutely convinced by the way Kabbalah explains everything – the creation, life, and the end of all of this. But in my heart I feel that I need something tangible, something that I can sense with my ordinary five senses, some kind of a clue, sign or miracle. I know that this is not how Kabbalah works and I feel it is rude and ignorant to desire such things, and I should not do it. What do you advise me to do with such thoughts and desires?

My Answer: You will become more and more detached from this desire, because you’ll begin to understand that spirituality is attained differently – inside you. Actually, you even perceive our world, all the corporeal things, only inside yourself. Nothing exists outside of you. Gradually you will begin realizing this, to the extent that you will gain a perception of the world of souls, the Creator, in parallel to your perception of this world.

You shouldn’t do anything forcibly, but only include yourself in the group. Then the desires you receive from the group will draw the Upper Light, which will change you and make you just how you should be, without your intervention.

Question: When you talk about the sixth sense, you don’t mean just one more “sixth” sense in addition to the other five, but five new senses that exist in parallel to the ones we already have, and that operate differently from them?

My Answer: It’s a new type of perception comprised of five parts (from Keter to Malchut with Ohr Hozer). It is called a “soul” and it perceives like the Creator, inside the quality of bestowal, in the Reflected Light. Of course, it is not just an additional sense, as I sometimes say to avoid scaring off the beginners.

After a person gains the ability to perceive in the Reflected Light, in bestowal, he also begins to perceive differently in his five bodily senses, perceiving new relationships and connections between forces, objects, and actions. In addition, he always retains the ability to descend to the regular perception, to be like an ordinary person, to understand him.

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Questions I received on the perception of reality:

Question: In the “Introduction to the Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” Baal HaSulam says, “All the worlds, both Upper and lower, are inside man.” Does the authentic meaning of these words mean that the entire reality takes place only in our imagination and is perceived through our senses (vessels of attainment)?

My Answer: Yes.

Question: If so, are physical bodies even real?

My Answer: “Real” is what I perceive.

Question: But we always learned that throughout all of its stages the soul is inside the insignificant physical body.

My Answer: I never taught this. Maybe I was talking about the soul’s body (not the physical body) – the Partzuf or Kli, and the soul is the Light inside it.

Question: If we accept this, then doesn’t it mean that everything around us (including our friends and family) doesn’t actually exist, but is just a figment of our imagination?

My Answer: Yes. However, instead of imagining things, we have to attain the state where we will perceive everything outside us as being inside.

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Questions I received on aliens and other creatures:

Question: According to your explanation of Kabbalah, there is nothing but the Creator and the creation. The creation is man or the human soul. Does this mean that aliens don’t exist according to Kabbalah?

My Answer: Yes.

Question: Then how do you explain the fact that millions of people all over the world have witnessed encounters with aliens?

My Answer: It’s their imagination! They perceived something they really desired to be true as if it were actually happening.

Question: How can you even combine the topics of Kabbalah and aliens?

My Answer: You can’t. Kabbalah speaks about the soul that’s in the spiritual world, rather than different kinds of animate creatures in our world.

Question: How does Kabbalah view other creatures?

My Answer: As creatures of the still, vegetative, and animate levels of nature. Man only lives on planet Earth.

Question: What is the meaning of different sacred living beings that are mentioned in the Torah? Are they different kinds of creatures?

My Answer: The Torah speaks only about man’s soul!

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Questions I received on pity, being judgmental, dreams, and the love of fairy tales:

Question: Why do we feel pity for puppies, kittens, elderly people, the crippled, and so on? What is pity?

My Answer: Always start at the beginning, from the initial premise – we are egoists. Therefore, our pity is egoistic. It’s one’s sensation of suffering, or the fear of suffering.

Question: I often get into the situation where the minute I’m judgmental of someone and say “I would never do what they did,” things suddenly take a turn so that I end up doing exactly what I thought I’d never do. When I’m judgmental of others, I end up in the same situation as them.

My Answer: It is written: “Don’t judge others until you are in their place.” You are being shown who you really are. You should learn about yourself from others, since you only notice all the negative things in them because you also have the same properties.

Question: Dear Rav, what happens to the thoughts, desires, and especially the will during the hours when the physical body rests?

My Answer: They are uploaded into the system in one’s brain that sorts them, and then into one’s memory. At this time one may experience them in the form of dreams, which are removed from reality and therefore the situations in them are fantastical.

Question: Are there people who meet and stay together forever? Does one have to realize something very important to deserve such happiness?

My Answer: We are becoming more and more egoistic. In our time people are realizing their inability to love and be faithful. This is happening so we will realize that it’s necessary to correct egoism, and then we will deserve happiness. Two people with a well developed egoism can meet and stay together forever only in our dreams.

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Perception of the World

(Baal HaSulam, “Preface to the Book of Zohar,” item 34)

With our sense of sight we see a great world before us,

And all its wondrous filling.

But in fact, we do not see all that

Except in our own interior.

There is a sort of a photographic machine in our hindbrain

That portrays everything that appears to us,

And nothing outside of us.

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A question I received: According to Kabbalah, everything in this world is perceived by our five senses. But what about the other things that are in our world and we can sense them, but without the five senses – like thoughts, ideas, information, and dreams? What are they and are they also under the rule of the ego?

My answer: Everything is sensed (perceived) only in our egoistic desire, regardless of how it gets there – through our five senses or from our conscious (or subconscious). The latter is also formed by the perceptions of the five senses. As Baal HaSulam writes – everything we imagine appears in our imagination only because we have sensed something similar to it in the past. Our imagination can only add and expand on this. Otherwise we would not be able to imagine those things.

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A question I received: In the “Introduction to the Book Tree of Life” Rabbi Chaim Vital describes many aspects of the Kabbalah of the Ari. He writes the following about the Ari: “He was able to speak with reincarnated souls. He knew all the secrets of all people, the roots of their souls and all the details of their past lives. He was able to speak with the dybbuks (translator’s comment: this probably refers to evil spirits that possess people and need to be exorcised), as well as to correct them and drive them out of the bodies of the people whom they possessed.” My question is: What are the “dybbuks”? I couldn’t find this word in any of the study materials available today. It probably refers to one’s inner forces, doesn’t it?

My Answer: That is absolutely correct. This refers to man’s inner forces, since everything that exists is inside us in the form of forces, desires, and thoughts. See Baal HaSulam’s “Introduction to the Book of Zohar,” item 34. Nothing exists outside of man. We perceive the world as being outside of us, but in fact it is only a projection of our properties onto the white Light. It says in The Book of Zohar, “All the worlds are inside man,” but man perceives them on the outside in order to feel the Creator as being outside him and to attain similarity to the Creator. To the degree that he attains similarity to HIm, he will start perceiving everything that happens “outside him” as happening “inside him.” Today in our world we are beginning to attain the fact that our perception is absolutely subjective – that it happens inside us.

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Questions I received on perceiving the common soul and the Upper World:

Question: Everyone and everything is inside of me. The Creator is all around me and inside me. Once you understand that everything is inside you, you start desiring to unite with everything that “surrounds” you. So far so good. However, this means that I will be doing everything only for myself, since even a chance passerby is actually inside me. So in reality I actually want to correct everything for myself and not for others?

My Answer: A person certainly discovers that everything around him is part of him, and is incorporated in his egoism. However, this only happens when one aspires to come out of his egoism and be inside others – inside the environment. First he acquires the property of Bina, bestowal, “not for one’s own sake”; and then, once he is above this property (Tshuva mi Iraa, Hafetz Hesed), he attaches everything to himself and makes everything a part of him. Then he perceives all the souls as his own (Tshuva mi Ahava) and receives the entire Upper Light into this united Kli.

Question: How do we know that the Upper Force is the only one, and that what we will feel after the Upper Worlds are revealed is not our imagination or an illusion?

My Answer: We will know this by revealing the Upper World in our soul and comparing the two worlds. Everything in spirituality is attained inside us – just like we attain this world. We draw our conclusions only from our attainment of the Upper World. The science of Kabbalah is based exclusively on Kabbalists’ practical experience.

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We exist in a sea of information. We are floating inside it like croutons in a bowl of soup. Everything and everyone is inside the soup. There is no time here, and that’s why it doesn’t matter whether you are watching a live broadcast or a recording of the lesson – because everything and everyone is inside this sea of information, including Abraham, Rashbi, Moses, the Ari, and Baal HaSulam. Whether you are part of the lesson in “real time” or not is only a psychological impression of a person who hasn’t yet come out of the boundaries of our world.

For example, when a person doesn’t know that the lesson isn’t being held in real time, then he watches it as if it were. It’s because this information doesn’t get old. And it doesn’t matter what time of day or night one studies, because everything that we study immediately enters and becomes revealed in the entire universe.

This information has never been revealed to man, and it is becoming revealed only now, with the help of the united group. This force already exists in the field that we must fill – in the entire volume of the World of Infinity. And we fill it. And then the rest of humanity also exists in this information, because they exist in the same field that we are adding our information to.

We are doing this, because following the Restriction, only a thin glowing line passes from Infinity to this world – to the center of the universe. Everything besides this thin line is empty space, and we fill that space with the work we are doing.

This is why the sensory and rational information that we extract already exists in this space. And all the people, regardless of their location, or whether they want it or not, are already spinning around it, in harmony with it.

There is a good example of this in nature. Have you ever seen a flock of birds fly in the air, and suddenly they all make a turn together? How do they know that they need to turn? It’s because they receive their information from one place. And it’s the same with all parts of nature. Physicists are already discovering that the field of gravity spreads immediately and that elementary particles immediately inform one another about any changes happening to them. Everything we learn already exists “around us” – so just tune in to it and become filled!

This is why there is no time and it makes no difference when you watch the lesson. You get in touch with the spiritual information that has already been revealed in this space – and this information exists there for you.

(Taken from the lesson I gave on 06-27-08.)

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