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Hi Yusbel,
1. We perceive reality through the desire. If the desire is corrected towards love and bestowal, then we perceive the spiritual world. If the desire is still uncorrected, egoistic, then we perceive this world.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2016/12/fantasies-and-reality-part-5/
2. The heart symbolizes all of our desires. The point in the heart is a single desire, among all of our desires, which aspires towards spirituality.
Spiritual love is fulfilling the desire of someone else, meaning that it’s pure bestowal.
Albert @ KabU
I’m amazed at how similar Kabbalah is with Gnosticism. But instead of the wisdom of God (Sophia) running amuck and vicariously creating all of us through the Demiurge, we are the negative, or Egoic, reflection of the Upper Force. I’m also very curious as to what these 5 worlds are, exactly. Are these other worlds related to the Sephirot? Or how do these 5 worlds interact with or relate to the 10 emanations of the Sephirot?
My take is that these 5 worlds are a Kabbalistic cosmology, of sorts, like in Neoplatonism these upper worlds become purer and purer, closer to the true nature of the Upper Force or “the Endless.” And the worlds closer to us are coarser and less pure reflections of the Upper Force. Until you get down to us at the lowest or most impure form (i.e. the material world). However, in Neoplatonism this progression of higher realms from the material to the spiritual is very gradual, but in Gnosticism is very abrupt. I bet the Kabbalistic view lies somewhere in between these two extremes.
Further correlations to Gnosticism I found mind-blowing:
Our goal is to reunite with this Upper Force, or Ein Soph (to become like it): similar in Gnosticism through Gnosis our divine sparks are reunited with the Alien God to restore it to wholeness.
Autogenes Christ is the Adam Kadmon in the Gnostic system, which is a salvific figure (a spiritual psychopomp through which Gnosis is attained).
The Demiurge in Gnosticism can be thought of as the Cosmic ego in which our own egos are reflections of it.One interesting tidbit is that “the One” in Gnosticism seems to be in a crisis as in our world. It is often said that the Gnostic system is like this: “God went mad and became us.” Our goal then, is to heal this fracturing of the consciousness of the One to a state of wholeness. In Kabbalah, I don’t perceive the Upper Force as being in a state of crisis or explicitly needing our help. The Upper Force seems a bit indifferent, or quietly waiting for us to evolve to a state where we need it and want to unite with it.
Can’t wait to learn more about the metaphysical orientation of the Kabbalah!
The thing that blew my mind in the lesson was the three reasons kabbalah was hidden, the fact that it was purposefully hidden by kabbalists after the destruction of the second temple and after the second diaspora, the hidden language of branches which must be understood which excites me because I work a lot with mechanisms in game development and roleplaying, and finally that it is hidden to the five senses asking the person the hard question, “What is the meaning of my life?”, and the many questions that arise in a person, especially the concepts of the creation of the worlds as the soul descended and our ascent back to the spiritual again.
There are many things that I have found profound though I wouldn’t say they are easy to understand. For example the notion about the Creator being a force that is constantly giving and his creatures having the will to receive is something that I find fascinating though I do not know what is the basis on which this and other notions have been built. Equally fascinating is the notion that what happens in the spiritual worlds determines what happens in our earthly world. Also that the spiritual world does not really operate according to how we think it should operate. Take this contrast between egoism and altruism for example The Kaballah position that we need not get rid of our egoistic nature and that even immoral people can study Kaballah makes you contemplate and want to delve deeper into the subject.
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