June 19, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Now You Can Understand What the Bible Is Really About
Kabbalists, as previously mentioned, research the Upper World, the world beyond the perception of an ordinary person. Hence, the depictions of Kabbalists’ attainments relate to the Upper World, but because we are not aware of the existence of a spiritual world besides our own, we ascribe their words to our world, a phenomenon called “materialization.”
When the Torah (Five Books of Moses) was written, the people of Israel were at a spiritual degree. But after two thousand years of detachment from spirituality since the ruin of the Second Temple, the Torah stories seem to refer to historic episodes or moral conduct.
Yet, this is not the case. Each element in the world is connected to the same element in all the other worlds by a “root and branch” connection. Based on that principle, Kabbalists developed a language that relies on the parallelism between the Upper Worlds and our own world. In it, processes unfolding in the spiritual world are described using names of branches taken from our world.
Introducing the 4 Languages of Kabbalah
Kabbalists use four different languages to explain how we can reach the degree of the Creator and how we can draw to ourselves the Correcting Force that will invert our nature from egoism to altruism. These languages are the language of the Bible, the language of laws, the language of legends, and the language of Kabbalah.
In his essay, The Wisdom of Kabbalah and its Essence, Baal HaSulam wrote that there are four languages in the wisdom of truth, and the essence of the wisdom of Kabbalah is no different than the essence of the Bible. However, the laws, the legends, and the language of Kabbalah are the most convenient and appropriate to use.
The difference among the languages is in their accuracy. The language of Kabbalah is more precise in depicting the connection between the root in the Upper World and the branch in the lower world. The more accurately one connects oneself to one’s Upper Root, the greater Correcting Force one receives.
What Is the Best Kabbalah Book for People Living Today?
The language of Kabbalah applies to terms that do not exist in our world, such as “worlds” and “Sefirot,” charts and formulae. This language makes it easier to avoid confusion and materialization, and facilitates a clear and ordered approach to the study. The language of Kabbalah is essentially different from other languages because of the clear, unequivocal way it describes the purpose of Creation—the similarity of the creature to the Creator, i.e. inversion of egoism into altruism.
If we want to obtain a different, opposite perception of reality, we should acquire the additional properties suitable for this: the quality of giving instead of receiving, and bestowal instead of consumption. Our constant desire is to absorb everything into “ourselves,” but this is only half of nature. The other half is bestowal, the tendency toward the outside.
People who have already received this second force of nature and, together with it, have acquired the perception of the whole of reality, are called Kabbalists. The science itself is called the science of Kabbalah, the science of reception, because a person acquires all of reality, rather than just the tiny part he is able to absorb in his current qualities. Then, as Kabbalists say, a person reaches a state where he rises above the current perception to an eternal, perfect reality. [Source: Dr. Michael Laitman, “The Path to a Perfect Reality.”]
What Is Unique about the Wisdom of Kabbalah?
Philosophy and any other of our attempts to understand reality are based not on research but solely on reason, which is really based on what is not known, as a rule, they are based on our egoism, but we do not realize it.
As a result, philosophy died a long time ago. All so-called spiritual teachings are gradually vanishing, since people rise above them and see that they are invalid. There are no substantiations or verifications concerning the seriousness of multiple spiritual teachings. They’re exclusively based upon our sensations, but as we all know, feelings can be very diverse; that’s why presently there are about 2,800 religions and belief systems, and we see them gradually disappearing.
Kabbalah is not for or against them. It stands aside them; it explores nature as physics or any other regular science does. The major principle of Kabbalah is investigating nature, becoming similar to it, and by doing so, succeeding. Kabbalah is a very concrete science; it does not discuss the soul in the way other religions do.
A soul in Kabbalah signifies an extremely serious and profound attainment and understanding of the world in which we currently live. The purpose of this kind of realization is staying afloat and protecting ourselves from a huge storm that approaches us in response to our ignorance and unwillingness to follow the laws of nature. [Source: Dr. Michael Laitman, “Kabbalah and Occult Teachings.”]
The Free Kabbalah Course provides a guided step-by-step introduction to the fundamental principles of Kabbalah, and clarifies what Kabbalah is and isn’t, the difference between Kabbalah and other teachings, how to attain the perception of the hidden reality using Kabbalah, as well as many other principles. We recommend, if you’re interested in these topics, taking the free course and starting to learn about the world around you and inside you anew. Click the banner below to sign up for the free course …
We scoured the Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education Center‘s Fundamentals semester student forum for the 10 most asked questions about Kabbalah by beginners, and here they are … with answers!
As for finding answers to these questions, how did we do it? We simply ran the following searches in Google’s search engine:
site:kabbalah.info write your question here
site:laitman.com write your question here
…and then sent the Q&A doc to a Bnei Baruch senior instructor for some basic editing and review, and here you have it.
Why are we mentioning how we ran the searches for the answers to the questions? The reason is that the websites kabbalah.info and laitman.com have so much content, including many full books, 1,000s of articles, videos and more, and many people do not know what a wonderful resource is at their fingertips waiting to answer any question they might have.
Give it a try! Don’t see a question you have here below? Write your question in Google’s search engine preceded by the “site:kabbalah.info” and “site:laitman.com” prefixes, and see what you can find!
10 of the Most Asked Questions about Kabbalah by Beginners
Click on a question here in order to go directly to its answer:
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