The Wisdom of Kabbalah Today
The practice of the wisdom of Kabbalah has been taught in an unbroken lineage of Kabbalists for thousands of years. The Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education & Research Institute at kabbalah.info is an organization founded and taught by Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. He teaches daily and virtually, to students of all races, genders and nationalities all around the world. The two prime Kabbalists from which the study material is taken are Kabbalist Yehuda Leib HaLevi Ashlag, known as Baal HaSulam for his commentary on The Book of Zohar, and Kabbalist Baruch Shalom HaLevi Ashlag , known as Rabash, who expanded on his father’s explanations and his articles guide students in the method and the practice of the path to attainment.
Let us start at the beginning.
There was a Force. The Force was bestowal, a will to give. It wanted a receiver for this love and created a creature, opposite Itself, with a will to receive to enjoy all the good It wanted to give.
At some point the creature wanted to give back to the Creator but found that it could not, because giving was not in its nature. The creature felt such shame at not being able to give that it restricted itself in order not to receive the bounty radiating all around it. The Creator found a way to help His creation by shattering it [symbolized by Adam and Eve and the fall from heaven] with the addition of divine sparks. Along with the will to receive, they could not change, the creatures were given a divine spark of bestowal to develop so that they could thereby give back, or bestow.
The shattering was the Big Bang where our material reality unfolded from the beginning of time to its end from a tiny dense dot of matter, the creature. All mammals, fish and insects, live according to their genetic programming, perfect for their propagation and survival. Humanity is the apex of creation. We are the only mammal that has the potential to go beyond Nature’s programming. We started wanting more than we needed to survive. This is when the Wisdom of Kabbalah was needed.
Humanity has gone as far as it can with the expression of the ego. We have exploited each other and the planet for profit, to the point that many living creatures are extinct and the poisons we have been and are using on the world are making us all sick both physically and mentally.
We desperately need a new educational system that teaches about the Natural world and how integrally connected we are in this system; that we are very much a part of it. In Gematria, God/Force/Nature are the same. Each term refers to the Creator.
We must learn to live with, not against Nature. We need to be connected instead of competitive. We have to stop with the ‘them and us’ mentality. We are ONE humanity as Covid has shown us. Every country has been infected.
Covid has been Nature’s global wake-up call to stop and see where our ego has brought us. We are being shown what is truly important and that is not acquisitions, but connection with people. Still, many have made it a political issue and a blame game. Nature gave it to us as a relatively gentle reminder that the exploitation of each other and the environment comes at a cost. This is a global issue which will require global participation in getting rid of it. This is humanity’s issue to collaborate in solving. We share the same issue, the virus, but the solution will be the same for all. Humanity must connect, ignoring borders, in order to stop the spread.
Our material reality exists within spirituality and the world is as perfect as the perfect Operator who created it. Our problem is that we can only see reality through our ego, which is selfish and only wants to receive no matter the cost to others.
Michael Pollan has written How To Change Your Mind about his experiences with magic mushrooms and LSD, and in an interview with Stephen Colbert, told him that he experienced the shedding of the ego and the perception of being part of his natural surroundings. I am not advocating the use of drugs to alter your perceptions; along with those who have had near death experiences, many have seen a very different reality, one where the ego doesn’t seem to interfere. It may be a taste of the spiritual. The Flatlander Analogy will clarify the fact we are perceptually limited by our five senses, even if we were to add intuition.
The path of Kabbalah explains the method to revelation of the Upper Force. You don’t try to get rid of the ego, rather, you cover it with the intention to love through the help of the divine spark you develop along with others on the path, thereby expanding your reality.
We must work together and connect above our differences and reveal the true reality while we are still alive. When we die, we are like ‘a candle to a torch’ we cannot give back to the Creator. We must therefore clothe again in another human body in order to develop the divine spark, which will allow us to bestow above our egoistic nature to receive.
There is an end to this material reality. By then, we will have accomplished the goal of being able to bestow to our Creator.
We have the choice to accomplish our work of connecting the easy way, consciously, willingly or the hard way, through Nature’s blows, and it won’t matter how many of us are left to do it.
There are many who are not interested or don’t believe in the Wisdom of Kabbalah. Consider the modern notion of reality through the Simulation Hypotheses or the Holographic Principle. Both suggest that there is an operator. The Unifying Theory proposes the combining of quantum mechanics and classical physics into a unified approach which could explain the laws of the universe. It’s all right to be skeptical because there are those who aspire to actively reaching the purpose of creation. Thousands of students on the path are working to further the spiritual development of all humanity.
Until the time comes when people no longer want to be pushed into the need for personal change, there is only one message that Kabbalists give as the Torah instructs: “Love your neighbor as yourself”, or “Don’t do to others what you hate”.