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Hi Helen!
I love reading your little posts and questions. It feels nice. It softens my heart a little bit. You seem like a very joyful person.
Thank you 🙂
My frustration has subsided a little bit now. So, let me add a couple of questions.
I feel like I want to give spirituality my all. With all the intense desire I can muster. At the same time, I feel like I am being “blocked” by the time constraints of this course. Also, right now I have every day all day to study, but soon I will have to return to a day job again, so I want to use my time in the best way possible.
Where is this frustration coming from? What is its purpose? What do you recommend?
I have a couple of questions.
First, in the past week, I have undertaken a small side-journey by conversing a little bit with Melody from Support. This side-journey has lead me right back here, to the forums. I think there are a couple of reasons why I sought answers to my questions from Support instead of the forums:
1. Some of my questions were not answered (or even replied to). I also noticed that some of the questions of other students remain unanswered. Why do you not reply to every single question?
In the beginning, I was very enthusiastic about reading the posts of fellow students, connecting with them etc. Often, I then had the urge to reply to their questions myself. However, then, I always felt like I am overstepping. For example, if I have learned quite a lot in Christian Mysticism about resurfacing old memories, a purification process etc. and a fellow student asks about this kind of thing, and I see that the instructors do not reply with something that seems to help him (at least as far as I can comprehend) or even nothing at all, naturally, I want to give my own opinion. At the same time, however, I do not want to overstep. Also, in the previous weeks I have learned how many of my opinions stem from egoism and how they are not really useful or sometimes even downright harmful.
So, here is my second question:
2. In the courses “Kabbalah Revealed Part 1 & 2”, “Kabbalah in Action” and “Kabbalah Experience” do you actually want students to reply to each others questions and insights or would you rather prefer that we stay silent so as to not confuse each other? Would it change something, if I only reply with quotes that I remember from authentic Kabbalah books that come to mind when reading the question from a fellow student?
In Kabbalah Revealed Part 1 I already asked about the reason behind the weekly time limitations of the course. Why it is built like that etc. This is a question that went unanswered by the instructors. So, I set out to find my answers elsewhere. After a while, I was lead back to Kabbalah again and now the same thing happened. I got frustrated because of the weekly time limits. So, I channeled all my energy into reading Kabbalistic books such as “A Guide to the Hidden Wisdom of Kabbalah”, “Kabbalah for the Student” etc. Today, I reached out to Melody and asked, if the time limits can somehow be skipped, so I can finally join a working TEN and begin my study in earnest.
She replied that it is set up like this, so that the study group stays together more or less, and that by engaging with the questions of my fellow students and the instructor’s replies as much as possible and caring about them or even trying to care about them (above reason), this will advance me equally much or even more than any lesson. (Hopefully, this also affects my fellow students equally).
Now I have experienced that my focus and intention can influence other people’s focus and intention even non-verbally and beyond the limits of time and space. I believe that this was my experience because it was tremendously hard to keep my focus during Michael Laitman’s lecture in the Related section of Week 2 titled „Dr. Laitman’s Public Lecture, World Kabbalah Convention 2016“. The people there were incredibly unfocused for whatever reason and I felt this during the video. Still, I kept my own focus and intention as stable and intense as possible and at the end of the video I felt like to some small extent I had actually helped all the people at the convention keep their own focus a little bit better.
I also came across the statement in „A Guide to the Hidden Wisdom of Kabbalah“ that traditionally Kabbalists study in the „wee hours of the morning“ because „in a sense, in those hours the local thought-field is quieter and filled with less distractions“.
Also, during the past two years I have built up incredible fire within me and I have already grown my spiritual desire tremendously. Since I did not know what I was doing, I thought it necessary to sacrifice a lot in my life for walking this path. In the end, Christian Mysticism, as all Religions, tell you that this is necessary.
Now, I have realized that whenever I open my heart towards other people even a little bit, if I show myself or if I phrase a philosophical question that burns in my heart, it seems to hurt them tremendously. They withdraw, explode or implode emotionally, get the sudden urge to go for a run or just fall asleep physically in the middle of my sentence. It doesn’t matter whether it’s parents, friends or strangers on the street.
Now, of course I want to engage with fellow students. I want to use every drop of intensity and fire that I have built up inside to „break open the crusts surrounding their hearts“, as I called it before hearing about Kabbalah. If I have the opportunity now to engage with fellow students in the Kabbalistic context, I want even more to use all my intensity, focus and intention to care for them, and to somehow transfer my own huge desire for spirituality to them.
All in all, however, I am afraid that again I will be „overstepping“ and maybe even hurt them because I do not have the sensitivity to feel whether a fellow student only came here for lukewarm exploration or with the strong intention of entering the study. The last thing I would want is to hurt them somehow by increasing their spiritual desires to a point at which it causes them as much suffering as it did cause me.
So, here is my fourth question:
4. If I read through the various questions, answers and insights from fellow students, and I do my best to connect with them, care for them, transfer my own spiritual desire to them, will it hurt them or help them? Also, is it better to implement temperance in these things or is it better to give it all I got and attempt to „break the crusts“ with all the desire I have?
Since I got frustrated with the time limits and there is only one week missing in „Kababalah Revealed Part 2“ I already subscribed to the next course „Kabbalah in Action“. Then I got an e-mail of a scheduled live Q&A session with Julian for tomorrow. Since Melody said that the time limits are designed to keep the study group together as well as possible, I suddenly do not feel welcome anymore in the Q&A session with Julian. It feels like it is designed for the students that already approach the end of „Kabbalah in Action“. So, it would be a different group, right? And if I decide to „abandon“ this group in favor of another group it would certainly hurt both of them, and of course, that is the last thing I want.
So, here is my fifth question:
5. Would it be more beneficial to others and to me to stay away from the Q&A session or to engage with it? I do not expect to understand much, but at least I want to be a part of it.
Please reply to these questions. If I do not get an answer, I will continue reading „Kabbalah for the Student“ on my own, so as to not hurt anyone around me by accident.
What was my best experience from the previous course?
The insight that Kabbalah is not an intellectual study, but a study done by the heart. It is amazing to be able to read Kabbalistic books and experience that the mind seems to absorb the information, correlate it and produce useful insights all by itself.
Often, watching videos or reading a book takes a lot of strength, but I learned throughout the course that this is actually a great sign of progress.
What do I expect from this course?
I expect to be propelled towards Dvekut (adhesion with the Creator) and also “love others as thyself” with huge steps.
If the Creator is in fact only benevolent, as Kabbalists tell us, then I would imagine that “He created the world, looked at it, and said that it is good”. Therefore, if we saw reality from His perspective, I imagine that we would only see good.
