How to Cross the Barrier into the Spiritual World

Our desire for spirituality, which is called the “point in the heart” in the wisdom of Kabbalah, emerges in our lives when we are ready to shift beyond corporeal fulfillment of food, sex, family, money, honor, control and knowledge, and embark on a spiritual path. 

Such a desire becomes characterized by us questioning the meaning and purpose of our lives, when we feel an underlying dissatisfaction in our daily lives, and long for a certain “something else” that we cannot yet pinpoint. 

Depending on the intensity of this sensation, we seek through various environments, such as books, teachers and groups, until we eventually come across the wisdom of Kabbalah. The wisdom of Kabbalah was created as a method specifically for answering our existential questions by guiding us to a clear perception and sensation to the purpose of our lives. 

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, the purpose of our lives is to attain the higher reality. The higher reality has several names, including the “spiritual world,” and it is characterized by a quality of bestowal, love and connection. 

The more we apply ourselves to the method of Kabbalah, the more we develop our spiritual desire until it eventually gains the minimum “volume” necessary in order to resemble and enter the spiritual world. This minimum “volume” for crossing the barrier between our world into the spiritual world is called “the ten Sefirot.” 

In the ten Sefirot, we start perceiving and sensing the higher reality. We feel how the quality of bestowal, love and connection, also called “the light,” enters and exits us, bringing about various sensations. 

It starts with small changes in our perception as we start sensing and relating to the causal level of reality. We then start seeing our world amid a backdrop of a much vaster and more complete spiritual world. 

By crossing the barrier into the spiritual world, while living in this world, we understand and feel the connection between the two worlds as causal and consequential levels of reality. These two levels of reality are called “root and branch” in the wisdom of Kabbalah. 

During our application of the method of Kabbalah, we attract the light from the higher spiritual world to ourselves, and it repeatedly enters and exits our desire for spirituality, giving us the sensation of what is known in the method as “ascents and descents,” i.e. closeness and remoteness from the spiritual world. Before we cross the barrier between our world and the spiritual world, we feel these sensations in a relatively unclear way, similar to how a newborn baby experiences our world, yet without knowing clearly what is going on. 

For instance, if the baby is in a room where the light is turned on and then turned off again, it does not know how to define that phenomenon as light turning on and off, but the baby nonetheless experiences the phenomenon. Likewise, as we apply the method of Kabbalah and enter the process of drawing the light from the spiritual world closer to ourselves, then that entrance and exit of the light provides us with a sensation of the spiritual world (as the light enters) and our world as its mere imprint (as the light exits). 

In later stages of development, we start orienting ourselves in this light more optimally to the extent of our abilities, and we develop qualities that resemble the light more and more, entering into increasing balance and harmony with the spiritual world. Such a process continues until we eventually reach the completion of our soul, a state of eternity and perfection.