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When a person finds himself involved in various teachings and mystical organizations thru out the years, is that a result of reaching ‘a point in the heart’ or is that just one following their curiosity about various things?
Hi Mikel,
It could be both. It could be curiosity or it could be the point in the heart ripening and pulling him to a few places to see if anything resonates with him.
Check out my reply to Frederick below for more details.
Albert @ KabU
Week 1 explains that a person is drawn to Kabbalah when the desire for life’s meaning—the “point in the heart”—awakens, often after ordinary forms of fulfillment no longer satisfy. How can a beginner distinguish a genuine spiritual awakening from temporary dissatisfaction caused by personal difficulties, and how should we work with this desire correctly without neglecting our family, career, or responsibilities in this world?
Hi Frederick,
When the point in the heart awakens, it does not let a person enjoy life. Meaning that even if a person is rich and has no problems at all, if his point in the heart awakened, he would feel life as empty and unable to find satisfaction in it.
Furthermore, the point in the heart is like a piece of metal in a magnetic field. When it awakens, it begins to pull us in the direction where we can satisfy it. So if a person simply feels bad but continues to tolerate it, that’s not yet a real point in the heart.
But if he feels bad and begins to search through different methods, that’s already the beginning of the point in the heart. And when he finds what his point in the heart is looking for, he will feel what he’s learning as strongly resonating with him.
This is why we the Kabbalists tell us that “there is no coercion in spirituality” and “one studies only where one’s heart desires”. Meaning it’s up to each person to feel for themselves if the place they found is what they were looking for.
Check out these blog posts from Rav Laitman for more details:
https://laitman.com/2011/06/aspiring-to-a-point-of-equilibrium/
As for working correctly with the point in the heart, you’re right that we need to find a good balance between our corporeal lives and our spiritual aspirations. Without a good balance in our corporeal lives, we won’t be able to advance in spirituality either. This is called “no flour, no Torah – no Torah, no flour”.
Meaning a Kabbalist continues to exist on the level of this world throughout the entire spiritual ladder. So I cannot just turn into a monk and disconnect from this life and only focus on spirituality. On the other hand, if I only focus on corporeality, then I’m no different than an animal.
So the important thing is to find the right balance between the two: to take care of all of one’s normal necessities: to work, take care of the family, health, etc (this is called flour) and to set aside some time on a regular basis to focus on spirituality (this is called Torah). And in the more advanced stages of our development, we will see how our day to day life and obligations also help us with our spiritual development.
Albert @ KabU
Where do the misconceptions come from? For them to be so prevalent there must be a reason for the confusion?
Also, is it a case of they have nothing to do with the subject so are irrelevant, or that it is inherently harmful to incorporate other beliefs?Hi Oliver,
Authentic Kabbalah has been around for about 5800 years, but it’s been concealed for the past 2,000 years, so people don’t really know what it’s all about. Just picture a 2,000 year old game of telephone and all the distortions that would spring up as a result.
Furthermore, during this time of concealment, humanity was not yet ripe for Kabbalah. So Kabbalists themselves would put up barriers around this wisdom and push people away from it. Let’s put this into perspective:
Kabbalah is the method of correction of our egoistic nature, thereby revealing the Creator, the general force of love and bestowal. Why was it necessary to conceal such a wisdom? Because egoism was still not yet fully developed. For example: if you compare Kabbalah to a medicine that can cure a rare disease, obviously you can’t take the medicine before you’re diagnosed with the disease, but once the disease actually manifests, you can take the medicine and be cured of it.
It’s just like the 5 stages development of a disease within a person. First a person is healthy. Then he is sick, but he does not feel it. Then the disease spreads to the point that he starts to feel pain and symptoms of the disease. This then pushes him to go to a doctor to get diagnosed and find the cure, and etc.
2000 years ago, egoism was still on a very low level, there was no need to correct it. Starting from the days of the Ari, egoism already grew to a certain extent (and technically the prohibition on Kabbalah ended there), but humanity still didn’t feel sick, on the contrary the ego was the main driving force of all of our development. Then from around 1995 egoism peaked and began to show itself as bad, like a cancer that begins to kill the host body. This is the peak at which there was a true need for the cure. Which in essence is what the Kabbalists have been waiting for all these years, for the desire, for egoism to fully ripen.
Albert @ KabU
Hi everyone! There is one question that keeps spinning in my head. The complete bestowal means that you don’t put limits towards other people’s attitudes or behaviors that are not good for you? How can you manage those types of situations where your limits are necessary? Are those limits some sort of will to receive pleasure as well?
Thanks you in advance for the reply and for this amazing course.
Hi Simón,
There are 125 degrees of spiritual bestowal. Ranging from bestowal in order to bestow, in which we restrict our egoistic nature and focus only on bestowing. All the way until the highest degrees of bestowal in which we tap into our egoistic nature in order to bestow even more.
Keep in mind that we practice this type of spiritual work primarily in the Kabbalah group. The Kabbalah group is like a lab where we practice manifesting the Creator’s qualities of love and bestowal. In the group we build a strong connection with other points in the heart that are together with us on the spiritual path. This becomes like a nucleus. Once we build that nucleus, we will be able to add to it wider and wider circles of the world, until we’ll come to include the whole world in that connection. But this is gradual work. And until we build that nucleus, we have nothing with which to do any spiritual work towards the world. Meaning that until then, with the rest of the world, just act normal.
Albert @ KabU
Hi all,
I was pondering on the following and wanted to ask. Or maybe this will be answered in the following weeks?If Kabbalah is not a religion, then what is the connection to Judaism? Did Judaism spring from kabbalistic teachings? What are the importance of for e.g. Ezekiel‘s vision of heaven or the Psalms? How are these viewed in Kabbalah?
Thanks and kind regards,
Oliver
Hi Oliver,
Yes, you can say that Judaism, in its modern form, sprang out when Kabbalah became concealed. Let’s put this into perspective:
Kabbalah is the method of correcting our egoistic nature and thereby revealing the Creator, the general force of love and bestowal. The first one to actualize this was Adam. His name gives us a hint at this since Adam comes from the Hebrew word “Dome”, meaning “similar to”. He was not the first one alive, but rather the first one to reveal the Creator by becoming similar to this quality of bestowal.
This wisdom gets passed onward from Adam until Abraham who adapted it to the people of his generation and made the wisdom more practical. Abraham put together a large group of Babylonians who were interested in actualizing this method. These people later on became the Israeli nation. The word Israel comes from the Hebrew words “Yashar” “El” meaning straight to God. These are the people who had an active point in the heart in those days and were interested in revealing the Creator.
These people greatly succeeded in this method. The peak of their success was symbolized in the building of the first and second temple, which reflected the level of unity and bestowal they were able to reach. At a certain point, they lost the spiritual connection between them (the destruction of the 2nd temple) and what remained was just these external symbols of their connection.
At this point the wisdom of Kabbalah became concealed. People still had the holy books, Torah and etc, but they did not know how to use them. Since the Torah is written in the language of roots and branches. Meaning it uses words of our world to describe spiritual phenomena. But if a person does not have this spiritual connection through which he can see this, then he thinks this book is talking about this world, history, morals, commandments, etc. From this emerges the Jewish religion.
From all the above we see that Kabbalah itself is not connected to any religion and that the modern religions came out due to the concealment of Kabbalah. At the same time, Kabbalah is not against religions. In fact we have millions of students worldwide, from many different backgrounds and religions. Many of them do choose to maintain their religion or to perform certain religious customs while studying Kabbalah and there is nothing wrong with that. Just like with any other science, a person can be religious and also be a chemist or physicist. Likewise a person can be religious and also study the science of Kabbalah. Baal HaSulam writes that even after the full spiritual correction people can still keep their religions.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2015/12/the-wisdom-of-kabbalah-and-the-other-religions/
As for Ezekiel’s vision, Psalms and other such Kabbalistic texts in the Tanakh, all of this is written in the language of roots and branches. Meaning it uses words of our world to describe spiritual phenomena. As such, we don’t interpret it literally, as applying to the level of this world. But rather it’s something that we discover within ourselves, in our spiritual development.
Let’s take the story of Passover as an example. This story symbolizes how our point in the heart (symbolized by Moses) help us come out of our egoistic nature (symbolized by Egypt/Pharaoh) and acquire the Creator’s qualities of love and bestowal (symbolized by the land of Israel). So as we develop spiritually, we’ll begin to see how the entire Torah plays out inside of ourselves.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2016/05/dispelling-myths-about-kabbalah-part-4/
Albert @ KabU
Hello!
I am enjoying this course enormously so far however, as a Kabbalah neophyte, I am finding its concepts very obscure and abstract as well as quite difficult to fully comprehend at this early stage.
Something that has truly impressed me so far, is the fact that Kabbalah introduces science, which basically explains numerous laws of the material world, into its teachings.
Thus, my question is, since science adopts evidence to explain every law in nature, what is the proof, or evidence, that Kabbalah is a tool to explain the forces in the material world, which are basically a consequence from a deeper level of reality.
Or shall we just limit ourselves to believe in the laws of Kabbalah just by mere faith, which in that case would render Kabbalah a religion no different than Christianity or Islam.
Thanks very much!
Hi Claudio,
Kabbalah is a science because it uses the basic scientific method to research reality. The Kabbalists are the scientists of Kabbalah. Everything we know is based on their research. This is similar to how other sciences work. The Kabbalists are those researchers that have performed a certain experiment and reached a certain result: the correction of our nature, the revelation of the Creator, the force of bestowal, etc. So if we are to replicate their experiment, to follow their procedures we should reach the same results.
But if a person is not yet on the degree of a Kabbalist, how does he relate to everything he’s learning? Like to any other science. For example, when I read a physics textbook, I see different formulas and experiments that research our reality. If I’m reading this textbook in 8th grade, then I have no choice but to accept the things written there since they come from a credible source. If I’m reading this textbook in college, I’m already given some tools with which I can measure and verify some of these things for myself. And yet there are some concepts that are so advanced, that I have no way to verify them until I become a physicist myself and get access to all the tools that will help me research these things.
Same with us here. There are some things I can verify for myself even when I’m just starting in the fundamentals of this wisdom, and then there are things that I can verify only when I myself have reached attainment.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2011/01/kabbalah-and-other-sciences-philosophy-and-religion/
Albert @ KabU
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