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I had a huge revelation this week, related to this week’s lesson, about the nature of suffering and sickness. It seems like the Wisdom of Kabbalah completely reverses the normal understanding of sickness, which says that we must be healed of sickness by doctors, medicine, prayer, magic, etc.
This amazing Wisdom (which I am learning to appreciate inestimably more and more every day) totally turns that old (and wrong) understanding on its head by pointing out that suffering and sickness are not really the problem at all; that they are actually the cure for the real sickness, which is egoism.
All that sickness is designed to do is to point us to those dysfunctional, addictive, and unskillful behaviours (which were once called “sins”), all rooted in one source: egoism. These are the exact and precise causes of sickness and, ultimately, the death of “this mortal coil.”
So, the real sickness is egoism, and diseases have been sent to us as the cure for egoism, for there is nothing as powerful and acute as suffering that pry us away from our attachment to the Will to Receive for ourselves and for our own (bodily) pleasures. Once we have been sufficiently alienated from attachment to the body as a spurious source of being, we turn to the true Source of True and Authentic Being, the Upper Force, which then puts us in a spiritual world of boundless pleasure, infinite perception, and eternal Being.
I want to share an excerpt from “Kabbalah for the Student” about this. It is from a chapter called “The Weakness of ‘World Reformers'”
This is the key to understand the weakness of world-reformers throughout the generations. They regarded man as a machine that is not operating properly and needs mending, meaning to remove the corrupted parts and replace them with good ones.
And that is the tendency of all world reformers—to eradicate any harmful and bad in the human species… and it is true that if the Creator had not stood against them, they would certainly have by now cleansed man entirely, living only the good and useful.
But because the Creator meticulously watches over all the elements in His Creation, not letting anyone destroy a single thing in His Domain but only reform it and make it useful and good, all the reformers of the above-mentioned kind will vanish from the face of the earth, and evil inclinations will not vanish. They live on and count the degrees that they must still traverse until they complete their ripening.
At that time, the bad attributes themselves will turn to good and useful ones, as the Creator had initially perceived them to be, like the fruit on the tree that sits and waits and counts the days and months it must still wait before the completion of its ripeness, at which time its taste and sweetness will become evident to any person.
However, I feel a certain tendency to buy into the thought of “I have the answers and all those world-reformers are wrong“. I don’t like that. So, here is another excerpt about this that hopefully softens the heart a bit.
It is from “Kabbalah for the student” chapter “Everything is Evaluated Not by its Appearance at a Given Moment, but According to its Measure of Development”
Everything in reality, good and bad, and even the most harmful in the world, has a right to exist and should not be eradicated from the world and destroyed. We must only mend and reform it because any observation of the work of Creation is enough to teach us about the greatness and perfection of its Operator and Creator. Therefore, we must understand and be very careful when casting a flaw in any item of Creation, saying it is redundant and superfluous, as that would be slander about its Operator.
All the above chapters are from the bigger chapter “Peace in The World”, if you are interested.
That Tikkun is first and foremost repair of our hearts (alignment with the Light), before it is repair of the world. Interesting.
So far so good, am enjoying/relating to mostly everything I read. Where I am starting to feel a little skepticism creep in is when the narrative of the method gets extremely precise (like, gives a precise number to the levels of worlds or numbers of Mitzvot). When it’s kept at an abstract level I don’t seem too bothered. But when it gets so details, I think – did the ancient Rabbis have a measuring tape? Having a bit of a hurdle there…
Hi Sharon,
Kabbalah is a science. So of course everything the Kabbalists pass to us in this wisdom is measured and precise.
Regarding 613 corrections, this number is further divided into 248 desires of bestowing in order to bestow and 365 desires that operate on receiving in order to bestow. These numbers are based on the structure of the upper worlds. We’ll learn about this in detail in the more advanced lessons on KabU that deal with the technical structure of the upper worlds.
Albert @ KabU
I was wondering to understand how we could know the “going way back” of the ladder, and this part of the lesson changed my perspective:
“These 125 states by which we descended from our connection to the complete reality down into our separated status as individual people and desires, these 125 steps are also completely encompassed by these 613 Mitzvot, so that the correction of these transformations will bring the individual all the way back up the ladder. Another feature of this is that each and every level of descent is imprinted in us as a “gene”. Every point by which a greater and greater degree of the will to receive was added is remembered by us like breadcrumbs on a path. This being, the first spiritual gene, this point in the heart, our access to ascent, is actually the entry point on a chain of spiritual genetics called “Reshimot,” remembrances. And, all of the events that happen in our lives that bridge us between these 613 transformations of the will to receive to the will to bestow, that bond us to the Creator. Each event is laid out for us in a perfect pattern so that we have the opportunity to recognize what it is that we need to do“.
Kabbalah is beyond what I had thought… It’s beyond concepts which I had fallen into. It’s way deeper than I can ever conceive. Today, I’ve understood that there’s a repelling force within me that always wants to identify with good and not evil. I’ve always missed opportunities to do a “Tikoon”. I have heard about “Mitzvahs” but I don’t see reasons why I must do them and even if I do, I always have one reason not to. Hmmm… I don’t even trust myself anymore… I think I’ll just stick to the tip of the week. Truly I’m humbled and repentant. Thank you.
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