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Hi Stephen,
That’s normal. We all come to the wisdom of Kabbalah with a certain baggage of past ideas. The main thing is to keep going, keep placing yourself under the influence of the light, especially through the Kabbalistic studies, and it will balance everything out.
1. Adam HaRishon is not referring to a person but rather to a spiritual system to which we all belong. We’ll parts of this system, like cells within a single body.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2014/05/puzzle-adam-harishon/
2. The Creator actually has many names. This is because we reveal Him only by becoming similar to Him, to His qualities of love and bestowal. So every time we correct a part of our egoistic desire, we reveal a different aspect of this thing called the Creator, and thereby name that revelation by a different name.
Check out these blog posts from Rav Laitman for more details:
https://laitman.com/2011/12/the-holy-names-of-bestowal/
https://laitman.com/2017/11/the-concept-of-god-in-kabbalah/
3. The purpose of our lives is not simply to ask for forgiveness and sneak into heaven. Rather the purpose of our lives is to rise to the highest possible state: complete adhesion with the Creator, with his qualities of love and bestowal. This process is broken down into 125 degrees. As long as we have not yet completed this process, we will continue to reincarnate to the level of this world again and again.
As for being judged in the heavenly court, this is not talking about life after death, but rather the internal process by which we judge ourselves in the process of correcting our egoistic nature.
Here’s an excerpt from a Rabash article on this topic:
the judgment that a person is judged in the beginning of the year means that the person judges himself, and he is the arbiter and executor, for man is the arbiter, the litigant, and the knowledgeable one, and witness. It is as our sages said, “There is judgment below, there is no judgment above.”
And a blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2022/03/where-are-hell-and-heaven-revealed/
Albert @ KabU
Hi Curtis,
1. Yes, but keep in mind that spirituality is built upon greater and greater levels of bestowal. So if we just receive, we will not come into equivalence of form with it. But our nature is reception, so how can we ever bridge this gap? We can use our nature to receive with the intention to bestow. In that case, even if the action is one of reception, the intention converts it into an action of bestowal.
Check out the Guest & Host Analogy from Chapter 3 of Attaining the Worlds Beyond for more details.
3. Kabbalah indeed defines these things different than psychology and also different than religion or philosophy, etc. If we just stick to our preconceived notions of these matters, we will not understand Kabbalah at all.
2. Equivalence of form means that we correct our egoistic nature to operate in the direction of bestowal. As a result, we reach the state of complete adhesion between us and the Creator.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2019/04/the-purpose-of-creation/
4. Equivalence of form is a gradual process broken down into 125 degrees. To the extent that we become similar to spirituality, to that extent we reveal it in practice, degree by degree.
5. In the book Kabbalah for the Student, there’s an article called Foreword to the Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah (http://www.kabbalah.info/eng/content/view/full/64187) which lists these 125 steps in the language of sefirot/partzufim/olamot(worlds). For now, these are just technical terms for us, but in the future lessons we’ll dive deeper into these things and learn how to feel and experience them.
Albert @ KabU
Hi Curtis, great questions!
1. Our nature is the desire to receive pleasure. It simply means that every calculation we make is to chase pleasure or avoid pain. This is similar to how any other animal functions. By itself, there is nothing wrong with this nature, it’s simply the program by which we function and preserve ourselves.
Egoism is when this program begins to be used in a way that harms others. Not only do I want to receive pleasure, but I want to receive it at the expense of others, at their detriment. This is the corporeal ego.
There is also a spiritual ego. Spiritual egoism is everything that stands in the way of our connection with the Creator. Normal people don’t have a spiritual ego. This is only something that we discover after doing some serious spiritual work.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2010/10/true-evil/
2. Spiritual perception works according to the law of equivalence of form. Meaning that in order to perceive spirituality, we need to become similar to it, to the qualities of love and bestowal that reside there. This is just like how a radio can pick up an external wave, when we tune the internal frequency of the radio to that wave.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: http://laitman.com/2013/04/everything-is-attained-by-the-equivalence-of-form/
And yes, each spiritual degree is felt differently. Just like in our world, the way a newborn perceives the world is different to how a five year old perceives it, and that is different to how a 25 year old perceives it, etc.
3. These terms are interchangeable. Sometimes they are translated from Hebrew as will to receive or sometimes as desire to receive. And sometimes they are called vessels (Kelim) of reception. So these terms can be used interchangeably. (Kli is Hebrew for vessel, Kelim is the plural form, vessels).
Albert @ KabU
Hi Curtis,
I’m sorry, I cannot answer your questions yet, we’re still as if speaking two different languages. I recommend that you go through a few of the lessons, get the course books and read through at least Kabbalah Revealed. Afterwards these things will become clearer to you and I’ll be able to further explain these concepts.
Albert @ KabU
Hi Sarah,
I’m not an expert in other methods, so I don’t know how others define this word. But when we use the word mysticism, we are referring to something mystical, something removed from reality, something that does not follow the laws of nature.
So when we make the distinction that Kabbalah is not mysticism, this is because Kabbalah is very much so grounded into nature. Kabbalah researches nature and the laws of nature using a very strict scientific method: “a judge has only what his eyes can see” and “what we do not attain we do not call by name”. Even our knowledge of the upper force, of the Creator, is limited to our research tools, meaning the desire. And whatever does not enter into this desire, we cannot research or talk about. For these reasons, it’s more accurate to classify Kabbalah as a science.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2011/06/kabbalah-without-a-trace-of-mysticism/
Albert @ KabU
Hi Allen,
Yes, you can say that. Just keep in mind that the Creator is concealed, so I cannot examine myself relative to Him. But what is revealed are other people. So I can examine if I’m aspiring towards the Creator’s qualities in my relation to other people, especially those on the spiritual path together with me. We’ll learn about this in the more advanced lessons.
Albert @ KabU
