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Hi Tamar, great questions!
The student/teacher relationship remains for so long because everything that we learn from our teachers, gets passed down to us in a chain. It’s like when water trickles down a staircase. It goes from the top step, to the next step, to the next, etc, until it reaches the bottom step. In other words, this chain, this structure will always remain. Everything we get, we will always get from our teacher. And everything our teacher will get, he will always get from his teacher, etc. Even if the teacher passes away, this chain will always remain. And this chain goes all the way back to the very first Kabbalist.
Check out these blog posts from Rav Laitman for more details:
https://laitman.com/2019/02/the-ladder-of-attainment-is-constant/
https://laitman.com/2017/01/receiving-light-through-the-teacher/
And yes, at a certain point a student becomes a teacher for the next generation to pass this wisdom onward. But this does not necessarily mean to teach in a frontal way, because there are many different means by which we can share this wisdom with others. We’ll learn about these things in the more advanced semesters.
As for teachers of Kabbalah being not like us, it depends. On the animate level, they are exactly like us. So much so, that even during the pandemic, our teacher also went under lock-down, just like everyone else. His animate (animalistic) body is no different than any one of us.
So what is different about a Kabbalist? It’s not in their animalistic bodies, but rather in their soul. A Kabbalist has corrected his egoistic desires, at least to some extent, and has converted them to operate in the direction of love and bestowal. In that corrected desire (called a soul), a Kabbalist reveals different levels of spirituality.
Can we measure these things? If we are on the level of a Kabbalist, we can measure these differences in the desires in an extremely precise way. But if we are still not, if we still only exist on the level of this egoistic world, then we still lack the tools to objectively measure these things.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2017/05/what-is-the-soul-4/
Albert @ KabU
P.S. This is the reflection forum, please post future questions to the question forum.
Hi Amani,
It’s normal to not understand these things. This is why the Kabbalists tell us “it’s not the wise that learns”. Meaning we’re not learning this material simply to acquire knowledge, to store it in some box in our brains. After all, If knowledge was the path to spirituality, then a supercomputer loaded with all of the Kabbalistic texts would be the most spiritual being in the world. Obviously this is not the case.
So why do we spend so much time studying if not to gain knowledge? Because through the study, we draw the force of the light. This force is what makes all the internal changes, clarifications, corrections that need to be made. After we extract enough light and correct ourselves to a certain degree, then we won’t just intellectually philosophize about spirituality, but we will begin to feel it in practice. And only out of that feeling will we begin to truly understand it.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2013/02/sunbathing-in-the-rays-of-the-reforming-light/
Albert @ KabU
Hi Peter,
We learn from the Kabbalists that every single moment comes to us directly from the Creator, this is called “there is none else besides Him”. Furthermore, they also say that He is the “good that does good”. Meaning that every moment He is sending us nothing but goodness. Why then don’t we see this in our world? Why don’t we feel everything that is happening as something good?
This is because our world is governed by our egoistic nature. This egoistic nature is opposite to the Creator’s nature. Because of that, it inverts the Creator’s goodness into something bad. It’s just like multiplying numbers, a positive times a negative equals negative.
So as long as we remain within this egoistic nature, we will continue to see and feel more suffering and horrors in the world. But if we correct our nature to be similar to the Creator’s nature, we will reveal the true reality in which only goodness exists and that our previous egoistic state was nothing more than a dream.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2011/06/how-can-we-justify-the-creator/
Albert @ KabU
Hi Maria,
We’re still in the fundamentals learning about this concept of freedom, the actual point of freedom is still ahead of us.
There is a saying that the Creator puts man’s hand on the good fate and says “choose this for yourself”. Meaning He awakened your point in the heart and brought it to a good spiritual environment in which you can nourish it, but after that the rest is up to you.
But if the point in the heart is forcing me to be here, what needs to happen for me to start actualizing my free will? This desire then needs to be taken away from me little by little, and there I begin to reveal more and more the place of my freedom.
This is similar to how we teach a child to ride a bike. First the parent holds the child completely. Then as the child learns to pedal and balance himself, the parent lets go a little, then a little more and a little more, until the child continue to pedal without the parent holding him at all.
So we too need to learn to continue to do this work even when that initial desire for spirituality begins to disappear or when the ego grows and begins to pull us into many different directions. Here there is already a need for mutual work in the group, the spiritual environment. On one hand when I fall into my ego, they need to pull me out, and on the other hand I need to help pull others out when they fall. This is why Kabbalists have always studied in groups (physical or virtual).
We will learn more about this in the more advanced semesters on KabU, where you’ll receive your own Kabbalah group with whom you can practice these things.
Albert @ KabU
Hi Hooman,
Yes, you can say that. Essentially the worlds are levels of concealment. World (Olam in Hebrew) comes from the word concealment (ha-alama). So the 5 worlds are 5 levels of concealment between us, the desire to receive, and the Creator the general force of love and bestowal. Why was it necessary to create the worlds? Or in other words, why was it necessary to conceal the Creator? In order to give us room to develop freely. If the Creator was revealed, there would be no room for righteous or sinners, we would all simply act like robots in accordance with His will.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2011/07/without-concealment-we-couldn%E2%80%99t-reveal-perfection/
Albert @ KabU
Hi Natalie,
It’s not so much that we change this code, but rather we speed up the rate at which this code is revealed. To understand this, we need to understand these things called reshimot.
Everything we went through, are going through, and will need to go through is preset in the reshimot. The reshimot are our spiritual genes. Just like when we investigate our corporeal genes, we reveal our entire ancestry, where we came from, as well as the reasons for our inclinations, tendencies, etc. Similarly, the reshimot are our spiritual genes. They are all the states that we have gone through and all the states that we will need to go through in the future.
In other words, they detail the process we need to undergo starting from the initial thought of creation all the way until the end of correction. Essentially our entire path of development is preset in these reshimot. So all the forms we need to evolve through and all the desires that will awaken in us is also preset there. The only choice we have is in the pace we go through it. It’s like all of life is one big strip of film or a movie reel. Every new moment is a new frame, a new reshimot is shown to us. And we cannot change the movie at all, but only to fast forward or go one frame at a time.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2010/07/the-whole-world-is-inside-the-reshimo/
Albert @ KabU
