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Yeah, fair enough. All I know is I can’t wait to know more about what happens post-Machsom.
By the way, today I happened to be watching an old lesson you gave, and in it I asked to clarify something about Malchut being “hell” and in your response you indirectly answered this threads question of how a Kabbalist relates to corporeality.
Funny how that happens. Anyway, thanks for your responses!
Agreed, but by “enlightenment” I don’t mean a specifically Eastern doctrine or method.
I mean the more universal phenomenon of awakening to the recognition that there is no separate “I” in the way one had always assumed. Not a belief, concept, or temporary mystical state, but a real and permanent change in one’s identification of what the self is. Many people who reach that realization don’t even call it happiness or bliss; they simply call it being awake.
That is why the overlap with crossing Machsom seemed important to me. In both cases, it sounds like the ordinary identification with the ego as an independent self is reoriented. The person no longer experiences themselves in the same self-centered way.
But I take your point: Kabbalah does not treat that as the end. Crossing Machsom is a threshold into a different kind of work—receiving in order to bestow, equivalence of form, and the correction of the will to receive. So the overlap may be real at the level of the loss of ego-identification, while the goal, method, and completion are not the same.
Very interesting.
Does crossing the Machsom have anything to do with what is traditionally called “enlightenment”? It seems to have a lot in common: the person no longer identifies with the ego as the center of reality and begins to live from a higher, non-egoic center. But in Kabbalah, that threshold has a further purpose of attaining relationship and adhesion with the Creator.
I have a lot of experience in non-dualism (“There is None Else besides Him”) but I never felt that simply dropping identification with the ego was the be-all and end-all. To me, reaching that state seemed more like the beginning of the work. If crossing the Machsom is that threshold, then it lines up perfectly: once we realize we are not our ego, we become free to do the real work of attaining the Creator.
Please let me know if I’m way off here. I only bring up another tradition because it seems to describe only a limited glimpse of Kabbalah’s truth, and I’m trying to understand my experiences through Kabbalah’s lens.
I posted my reply to Gianni here as its own post by accident, I reposted this in the correct thread.
I see your point about before and after the Barrier, and that the Creator guides the whole process. I’m not trying to take credit or claim any kind of progress; I’m only making observations about my experience since beginning this path.
And to be clear, I’m not looking for corporeal results or benefits from this work. The pleasure and fulfillment I feel simply from studying and being surrounded by these texts and lessons is beyond anything I’ve experienced in any other method. My only goal and focus is to attain spirituality and adhesion with the Creator, at whatever pace and degree He wills.
What I’m saying is that the internal shifts and states I’ve passed through have already changed my relationship to “external life,” and the more I “push the gas” through study and immersion, the more the work seems to demand a change in how I relate to the world around me.
So I now realize that my question is really about life after the Machsom: once one has a vessel capable of receiving in order to bestow, how does that change one’s relationship to corporeality and participation in ordinary life?
I see your point about before and after the Barrier, and that the Creator guides the whole process. I’m not trying to take credit or claim any kind of progress; I’m only making observations about my experience since beginning this path.
And to be clear, I’m not looking for corporeal results or benefits from this work. The pleasure and fulfillment I feel simply from studying and being surrounded by these texts and lessons is beyond anything I’ve experienced in any other method. My only goal and focus is to attain spirituality and adhesion with the Creator, at whatever pace and degree He wills.
What I’m saying is that the internal shifts and states I’ve passed through have already changed my relationship to “external life,” and the more I “push the gas” through study and immersion, the more the work seems to demand a change in how I relate to the world around me.
So I now realize that my question is really about life after the Machsom: once one has a vessel capable of receiving in order to bestow, how does that change one’s relationship to corporeality and participation in ordinary life?
