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November 2, 2014 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Ask the Right Questions
According to Kabbalah, there are four mandatory kinds of knowledge to attain. Armed with these four kinds of mandatory knowledge provided by authentic Kabbalah, you will have the tools to live fully and well…
Where Are We From? Where Are We Now? Where Are We Headed?
1. Creation: The study of Creation and the evolution of the worlds, namely:
- The way the Creator created the worlds with the creatures that populate them through consecutive restrictions;
- The interaction laws between the spiritual and material worlds, and their consequences;
- The goal of man’s creation is to form a system with an illusion of the existence of free will by combining the soul with the body, and by controlling them through nature and the apparent factor of chance with the help of two mutually balanced systems of light and dark forces.
How Can We Operate Reality?
2. Functioning: The study of the human essence – its interconnection and interaction with the spiritual world. Functioning deals with one’s arrival to – and departure from – this world. It also includes the Upper Worlds’ reactions to our world and towards other human beings, caused by man’s actions. It researches everyone’s individual path, from the creation of worlds to the attainment of the ultimate goal.
Is This Life All There Is?
3. Incarnations of the Soul: The study of every soul’s essence and its incarnations, as well as our actions in this life and their consequences for subsequent lives. The research of incarnations examines how and why a soul descends to a body, and what determines the acceptance of a certain soul within a certain body.
Incarnations of the soul also deals with the mystery of chance, and researches human history as a result of a certain order and cycles of souls. It also follows this path over 6,000 years and studies the connection of the soul with the general governance of the system of worlds and its cycles of life and death. It also states upon what factors our path in this world depends.
Who Is in Control?
4. Governance: The study of our world: inanimate, vegetative, and animate levels of nature, their essence, role, and how they are governed by the spiritual world. It studies the Upper Governance and our perception of nature, time, and space. It researches the Upper Forces that move material bodies, and the way one’s inner force pushes all things, animate and inanimate, to the preordained goal.
“4 Things You Should Know to Live Fully and Well” is based on the book, Basic Concepts in Kabbalah: Expanding Your Inner Vision by Dr. Michael Laitman.
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Image: "Connect 4" by Banalities.
April 24, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Kabbalistic Sources
How can the Creator (the quality of love and bestowal), which is eternal, perfect and absolutely good, give birth to such insignificant and small creatures as us, who are egoistic, stupid, greedy, and absolutely opposite to Him? If this comes from the Creator, how can something imperfect and defected come out of or originate from the One who is Perfect and Eternal?
After all, if it comes from the Creator, this means that there is a root or thought about them in Him as well? And if this is present in Him, does it mean that He contains an imperfection? If not, then how could He have created something completely opposite to Him that was not present in Him? This is impossible to understand. However, in principle, even if a thought was conceived about such opposite and insignificant creatures, doesn’t this suppose that this is present in Him, and this speaks about an imperfection in Him? These are very serious questions of a philosophical type; they are very deep, and Baal HaSulam (Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag) raises these questions and answers them in his article “Introduction to the Book of Zohar.”
Next, Baal HaSulam also asks the following questions: how can we imagine the appearance of something new at all? In our world we say, “Oh, look, something new suddenly happened.” How? It is because we do not observe all phenomena, since some phenomena are concealed from us. Something suddenly manifests, but we do not see the inner connection that caused this phenomenon to manifest, and therefore it seems to us that it is something new and supernatural. It is like a baby who looks and suddenly sees something, thinking that it is a miracle or fairy tale. The baby does not see all of the connections that give rise to this phenomenon. An adult does everything, doing something for this to happen for the baby. This is a mystery to the baby, a manifestation of something new from nothing.
Generally, how can we imagine anything “from nothing”? “From nothing” means that there were no preconditions of any kind at all. How can creation be absolutely new? That is to say, there was the Creator (the quality of love and bestowal), and from some moment on, creation (the quality of reception) appeared. If creation is not present in the Creator in any other form, then how can it suddenly appear? From what? From the thought? In that case it is not new, rather it existed, but only in thought rather than in matter; nevertheless, it existed.
All of these questions are examined in Baal HaSulam’s article “Introduction to the Book of Zohar.” In reality, we are unable to clarify them in such a short space as they are very deep and very interesting, voluminous. Also, it depends for whom: there are people who are more fascinated by this and others, less so, depending on each person’s development. Gradually you will reach a point when you will see that it is not for nothing that Baal HaSulam works through certain questions for us. As we ascend along the ladder of self-attainment, we will have to feel, study, and answer these questions ourselves. We will simply build ourselves out of them.
The Free Kabbalah Course is based on the articles of Baal HaSulam and provides step-by-step guided learning from experienced Kabbalah instructors of Kabbalah’s basic concepts based in Baal HaSulam’s articles. Baal HaSulam was the first Kabbalist in history who wrote articles not only for Kabbalists, but for the broad public, in order to explain Kabbalah’s fundamentals, because he understood the need that would emerge in humanity to answer deeper questions about life’s meaning and purpose. Therefore, if you’re interested in such topics, we recommend taking the free course and start learning about the world around you and inside you anew. Click the banner below to sign up for the free course …
March 20, 2014 at 10:57 am · Filed under Articles, Books
In “Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” Baal HaSulam divides the onset of Creation into five stages and one restriction, but we can cluster them into three groups. Think of the first two groups as a car and the fuel for its engine, and imagine that the third group is the driver.
The first group contains only Stage Zero, the Root. This is the desire to give, the energy that creates and sustains the car called “Creation.”
The second group—Stages One and Two—builds a “platform” for evolution. This is the car itself. In a sense, the platform that the two stages have built resembles what Richard Dawkins described in The Selfish Gene as “The primeval soup,” the oceanic substrate that contained the ingredients for life’s inception.
The third group—Stages Three and Four—is “the driver.” Its role is to start the engine of evolution—the interaction between the desires. As we will explain below and in the next chapter, the restriction is the wheel with which creation is driven toward its purpose: discovering the Thought of Creation.
Stages Zero and One
In Kabbalistic terms, the existence of a desire to bestow without a desire to receive is called “the Root Stage” or “Stage Zero.” The Root Stage is immediately followed by its mandatory offshoot—“Stage One”—the desire to receive, which is permeated with the abundance given to it by the Root, the desire to bestow.
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February 9, 2014 at 7:00 pm · Filed under Articles
There is a positive force, meaning constructive, and a negative force, meaning negative and destructive. They create and complement the entire reality in general and particular through their harsh and perpetual war with one another. As we have said above, the negative force appears at the end of every political phase, elevating it to a better state, and thus the phases follow one another until they reach their ultimate perfection.
Let us take planet Earth as an example: first, it was but a ball of fog-like gas. Through the gravity inside it, it concentrated the atoms in it, over a period of time, into a closer circle. As a result, the ball of gas was turned into a liquid ball of fire.
Over eons of terrible wars between the two forces in Earth, the positive and the negative, the chilling force in it was finally triumphant over the force of liquid fire, and cooled a thin crust around the Earth and hardened there.
However, the planet had not yet grown still from the war between the forces, and after some time the liquid force of fire overpowered and erupted in a great noise from the bowels of the Earth, rising and shattering the cold hard crust to pieces, turning the planet into a liquid ball of fire once again. Then an era of new wars began until the cool force overpowered the force of fire once more, and a second crust was chilled around the ball, harder, thicker and more durable against the outbreak of the fluids from amidst the ball.
This time it lasted longer, but at last, the liquid forces overpowered once again and erupted from the bowels of the Earth, breaking the crust in pieces. Once more, everything was ruined and became a liquid ball.
Thus, the eons interchanged, and every time the cooling force was victorious, the crust it made was thicker. Finally, the positive forces overpowered the negative forces and they came into complete harmony: the liquids took their place in the abdomen of the Earth, and the cold crust became thick enough around them to enable the creation of organic life as it is today.
All organic bodies develop by the same order. From the moment they are planted to the end of the ripening, they undergo several hundred situations due to the two forces, the positive and the negative, and their war against each other, as described regarding the Earth. These wars yield the ripening of the fruit.
Every living thing begins also with a tiny drop of fluid, and through gradual development over several hundred phases by the power of the tug-of-war, finally reaches…
…a great ox fitting for every labor, or a grown person fit for his tasks. However, there should be yet another difference between the ox and the human: today, the ox has already reached its ultimate phase of development. For us, however, the material force is yet insufficient to bring us to completion because of the contemplative power in us, which is thousands of time more valuable than the material force in us. Thus, for humans there is a new order of gradual development, unlike any other animal; it is the gradual development of human thought.
In addition, being a social creature, the individual development is not enough. Rather, one’s ultimate perfection depends on the development of all the members of society.
The above is an excerpt from Baal HaSulam’s (Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag) article, “The Solution.” This text is part of the study material for lesson 10 in the Free Kabbalah Course – “Creation & Evolution Explained: From Before the Big Bang to the Future, Final State of Existence.” Sign Up for the Course Here »
February 25, 2008 at 5:10 am · Filed under Books
The Creator and The Creation
A Collection of Authentic Kabbalah Inspirations
The inspirations contained in this book are derived from the works of authentic Kabbalists. Meaning, only Kabbalists who actually attained the spiritual levels of which they speak. The truth in these inspirations is clearly evident to those seeking the answer to the question, “What is my purpose?”
The Creator and The Creation: A Collection of Authentic Kabbalah Inspirations – compiled by Rob Taylor
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