Kabbalah for Beginners: So, Who Are We Anyway?

This is my "I'm so young I'm an embryo" pose.

As promised in my last entry, for those who don't have the means to purchase the materials I suggested for beginning study of Kabbalah, I'll be sporadically posting "Kabbalah for Beginners" entries that should give you an idea of what this way of life is all about. I'd also suggest visiting some of the links in the sidebar, especially Weekly Wisdom and Weekly Astrology, as they will prepare you on a more basic and immediate level.

The first thing you'll hear during any beginner's lecture at the Kabbalah Centre or any starter's book written by the Bergs is to not believe anything they tell you. This may seem like an absurd concept at first, but Kabbalists drive home that their study is far beyond that of religion, it's more a spirituality and a way of life. Unlike "religion," Kabbalists don't do the "blind faith" thing. They believe in results. They also "teach" instead of "preach." They suggest and endorse a way of life and it is then up to you to try it for yourself and see if the tangible results work in your life. As they say: "Breathe the lessons and see if the 'air' is clearer." And naturally, what organization wouldn't want someone who actually knows and experiences the truths of their teachings as opposed to just blindly believing them? Any organization that does, I would take a long, hard and critical look at personally.

Part of the reason Kabbalah study was restricted for so long was due to fear. Imagine telling someone in the 15th century about the Internet. They'd probably burn you at the stake. Anything "new" and "revolutionary" will always strike fear in the hearts of man because we fear what we do not know and do not understand. As Angela Monet once said, "Those who danced were thought to be quite crazy by those who could not hear the music."

So, who are we? At the core of each of us, what is the #1 thing that drives everything we do, everything we say? What element drives our vehicle, the gasoline that it runs on? In one word: Desire. We're all just walking Desire. When you start to see this truth in everything you do, things become a lot more clear. You get answers to questions you never even knew you had. Kabbalist Rav Ashlag once wrote, "A human would not twitch a single finger if not for some inner desire."

There are two types of desire. One will take you on the path to The Light and one will put you on the path of darkness. There is Desire to Receive for the Self Alone, wanting power, money, ego, materialism, etc. and there is Desire to Receive for the Sake of Sharing, which is wanting to become a better person or create a better life so that you can affect society as a whole in a more positive way, realizing that we are not separate entities but actually One. Sometimes changing paths of desire has nothing to do with your actions, but just shifting your consciousness as to why you're performing them.

Whether you believe in the theory of the Big Bang or a particular religion, all beliefs of "the beginning of man" can be boiled down to this analogy: We were once one big vessel. We were then divided into smaller vessels.

Once we were One.

Kabbalah suggests that a book as profound and as great as the Bible is not to be read literally, but is actually a code that throughout any age can be interpreted many different ways. Therefore, beginning with the book of Genesis, we are looking at a metaphor for why we were once One, why we were once One with the Light, and why we then became separated. If all we were ever given was the Garden of Eden, we wouldn't really know how amazing it is, would we? We wouldn't appreciate it in all of its glory because we'd never experienced anything else. (Without darkness, there can be no Light.) This is true of all of us on a human level today. We instinctively don't like being handed something on a silver platter and when we get something "for free," we usually find a way to destroy it or destroy ourselves. Our God-like nature is to want to earn something because it then means more to us. We wanted to earn The Light. And because The Light is all giving, it gave us this opportunity by separating us from one big vessel to smaller separate vessels that must put themselves back together and become One by sharing the Light from which their image was made.

You will hear the term Light used a lot in Kabbalah. Light comes in many forms: it's the energy that surrounds us, it is God, it is Jesus Christ to Christians, it's Buddha, it's The Force in "Star Wars." Basically, it is a non-denominational term Kabbalists use to convey the broad spectrum of fulfillment that we has humans long for. Light is not just defined as happiness or joy though. Light denotes "unending happiness." A painkiller will give us temporary relief but it won't solve the problem at its root. The Light is in the root. It's the difference between the joy of a one-night stand and the joy of a life-long marriage. It's the difference between the short-term high and the Garden of Eden, which is still there, waiting for us to return to it. This Light also includes the force that is known as Intuition, the magic that attracts the right people to us at the right times for the right opportunities in our lives. It's your "gut instinct" and your sixth sense. How do we have it? Again, because we are "born in His image," if you look at those words as a metaphor or code. If a rock falls from a mountain, is it not still made up of the same particles of that mountain? The Light we were born of is always within us.

But we don't always connect to that Light and its during our moments of disconnect that we unconsciously create and experience chaos in our physical lives. When we are connected to the Light, there is no fear, no anxiety, no insecurity about the future. Wow, amazing concept, right?

So if people are the essence of desire and the universe is flooded with Light to connect to including that within ourselves, what is standing in the way of our everlasting happiness? A curtain. A veil known as the physical world. Even an atheist scientist will attest to this! My computer is not really a computer or its parts. What we can't see are the protons and neutrons, etc. the "energy" that it's made of. The physical matter is only an "illusion" for what is actually there. Kabbalists believe that the physical world makes up less than 1% of reality, whereas the other 99% is that which we don't see: The spiritual realm, the home of the everlasting Light.

What keeps us from seeing past the illusion, seeing beyond the curtain? The Bergs in their books refer to this as "The Suddenly Syndrome": He suddenly had a heart attack! Suddenly, life felt so empty. The deal suddenly fell through. All of a sudden, he walked out on her. Kabbalah believes there is no such thing as "suddenly." You don't wake up one morning and "suddenly" find a full-grown oak tree standing on your front lawn. The chaos that we experience is brought on by no one but ourselves. You attract the people in your life. You allow for people to treat you the way that they treat you. And even in moments were life doesn't seem "fair" or the pain you're experiencing isn't directly related to your own actions, a true Kabbalist would insist that this is their "karma" from some negative energy you have put into the world. In some cases, your karma with a particular person may go back so far that it is rooted in an experience you had with them in a past life and this type of heightened karma is called "Tikun" and is your responsibility in this life to correct. Ever wondered why someone treated you unfairly for absolutely no reason whatsoever? That was your tikun. That was what you owed from a previous life. Or it was your karma from something similar you'd done in this life. Either way, no one else is ever to blame for our problems but us and this can be quite a polarizing concept for some people. Kabbalah is very big on taking responsibility, not only for every one of your actions, but also for every action that happen to you. Hard to take, huh? The good news in this: This means we also have the power to create miracles in our own lives simply through how we treat others on a constant basis.

The key is "action" instead of "reaction." It's knowing when someone calls you, screaming and yelling at you, that you screaming and yelling back at them isn't going to solve any situation. So instead of having a "reaction," you take" action" by staying cool and collected, not for your sake, but for theirs. You shift your consciousness to: "How can I help this person not be so angry? How can I truly care about helping him through whatever he's yelling about?" Easier said than done, right? Hell, wars would be eliminated if it were only that easy.

But it is only that easy. We just choose not to do it. We react constantly in our lives, when someone cuts us off in traffic, instead of combating it with positive energy and loving that person, we throw more negative energy out into the world and flip them off. But we're all One. You're only flipping off yourself. You receive only what you give.

It's a lot to take in, I know. But try it for a week and see how things change. See if people stop cutting you off in traffic. See if that guy yelling at you on the phone suddenly calms down and apologizes when he realizes you care so much about helping him through his problem.

And then post your comments by clicking the comment link at the bottom of this post and share with us your own experiences! You can also ask questions, leave comments, debate the theories, etc.

Before I wrap this up, I want you to do a little exercise for me. Count how many times the letter "F" is in the following statement. This is not a trick question!

Finished files are the re-
sult of years of scientif-
ic study combined with the
experience of many years.

Did you count how many? Click on the comments link below to see how many times the letter "F" is actually in the statement. You may be surprised!



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