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Based on their spiritual attainment, Kabbalists tell those who follow them what will make their advancement toward attaining the spiritual reality the quickest and most convenient. That’s often not what is most pleasant to the corporeal ear since it’s correction. The student doesn’t have to take the advice. There are other paths and teachers which the student might find more agreeable.
I’m not affiliated with money/memberships, but it’s interesting to know what memberships were like with Kabbalists throughout history. Almost as soon as you entered the study hall, you were approached – and asked to place on the table a jaw-dropping amount of money! I understand this is, as usual, opposite of how we think spiritual things should work. Even if after you left the lesson, the Kabbalist would throw your money out onto the street (which they sometimes did), the teacher had to charge, proportional to the student’s income, a sum commensurate with the value of a wisdom by which one can burst out of the dark bitter radish of this world to the wide wonder of the spiritual world – in a way that the Will to Receive feels it’s paying. Otherwise, the Will to Receive doesn’t allow me to advance spiritually, and I’ll never reach the spiritual world. Whereas to the extent the person pays, the Will to Receive itself demands one’s spiritual advancement rather than digging its heals in against it, even though spirituality is opposite its nature. These are the conditions from Above. It’s not up to the teacher.
If we’re talking about real spiritual work, one needs an environment of those presently awakened toward the goal of life with a drive so sharp that its tributaries led to authentic Kabbalah. Among these friends, it’s not so important which ten, but it’s good it’s some fixed ten so that against that lenticular spiritual background I can work and accurately measure my growth.
You explained well, but you should know that attaining spirituality has the following condition, described here by Baal HaSulam in The Teaching of Kabbalah & its Essence:
The most successful way for one who wishes to learn the wisdom is to search for a genuine Kabbalist and follow all his instructions, until one is rewarded with understanding the wisdom in one’s own mind, meaning the first discernment. Afterward, one will be rewarded with its conveyance mouth to mouth, which is the second discernment, and after that, understand in writing, which is the third discernment. Then, one will have inherited all the wisdom and its instruments from his teacher with ease and will be left with all his time to develop and expand.
However, in reality there is a second way: Through one’s great yearning, the sights of heaven will open before him and he will attain all the origins by himself. This is the first discernment. Yet, afterward, one must still labor and exert extensively until he finds a Kabbalist sage before whom he can bow and obey, and from whom to receive the wisdom by way of conveyance face to face, which is the second discernment.
You’re actually depicting a bad reality that wouldn’t be a gift, would it? All of the pleasure, which has ever been felt by anyone in all our history, if you add it up it isn’t one billionth of the lowest spiritual Light. Included in that, of course, have to be solutions for those issues you raise. We’re talking about a whole pleasure, with all the parameters for enjoyment the Creator built into our nature. It’s not the “happiness” gurus and religions call happiness, which paradoxically is a thin veil over great denial, listlessness and sorrow.
Hi Nicole,
We’re very realistic, as scientists. You have what you have, you see what you see, and you don’t have anything else. In the 5 senses one is born with, these trees, cars, people, planets is all there is. The fact that there’s a spiritual reality, just as real and even more so, that we can’t see is because the spiritual Screen over the desire doesn’t develop naturally as does the screen in, say, your eyes (retina), without which you’d lose most of your perception of this world as well. The spiritual Screen, nature doesn’t build for you without explicit requests from the person, in specific ways. With this screen you’ll discover everything that Kabbalists wrote about: Garden of Eden, etc.
