How The Light Finds Us
The study of Kabbalah is not for everyone. It is for the
seekers who aren’t satisfied with the life they lead. They sense that the world
has more to offer—a deeper truth lurking in the shadows, waiting to be
uncovered. These are the people endowed with a point in the heart, a yearning
that builds a vessel (kli) that allows them to tap into the spiritual world.
Only the Creator can decide if this
wisdom is meant for you. We are all different. Maybe your desire to comprehend
the meaning of life isn’t developed enough to seek spiritual wisdom. Maybe you
have sought wisdom from other sources and found they weren’t for you, or that
they may have ceased to answer your questions. A desire to know more could be
pulling at your heart. If you are seeking to find meaning in your life, you are
blessed with an important opportunity to correct your nature through the
ancient wisdom of Kabbalah to find unending happiness, or at the very least,
unending purpose.
This is not a story about a man
making his mark on the world in any easily recognizable way. The changes I made
in my behavior and the events that shaped these changes were incidental to the
story. What happened to me was a full-scale internal change that came to me by
making mistakes over and over again, so I could develop more colored and
precise wisdom.
I now know the feeling of love as
something deeper than romantic love. It is the feeling of the force of the
universe clutching at your feet, offering a glimpse of the Creator.
The Creator (G-d) is the force of
bestowal through reception. You will learn that by going against your nature to
take, you will reconnect to your purest self. Kabbalah forces you to look
deeply at yourself and correct your nature to receive the love the Creator
wishes to offer every being on this planet.
From Below Upwards
For some time many of our greatest minds have submitted
themselves to the notion that the world is a terrible place that only seems to
get worse. Let’s observe Woody Allen’s attempt at describing the state of the
world through the lens of realism. “I don’t feel that I’m pessimistic. That’s
something I get called: pessimistic, nihilistic, cynical…I don’t see it that
way. I just have a realistic attitude, and the hard facts are so brutal and
terrifying that each person has his own way of rationalizing that it’s not so
bad. But it is so bad. And the trick is to acknowledge that, and still get
through.”[i] We are aware that the
world is unwell, that suffering is all around us. Some are better than others
at disguising that fact, because our brain does not see the point of looking at
the world objectively. Since human beings are incapable of objectivity,
everything is viewed through an emotional lens.
Some are more honest about the state
of things than others. Allen’s friend and fellow comedian, Larry David,
Seinfeld co-creator and painstaking observer of the minute details of life,
confirms Allen’s take on suffering. He elaborates, “I agree with that…I go
through life feeling sorry for pretty much everybody. I’ll pass a toll, and
I’ll think about the toll collector standing in there for eight or ten hours a
day—how do they do it? How do they get up in the morning and go back? I feel
sorry for everyone.”[ii]
The world has a way of beating us
until we get to a point where we can’t take it anymore. Our egos have risen to
the point where we refuse to help each other. All we do is watch other people
suffer and feel the same emptiness. Whether we have hundreds of millions of
dollars (like Larry David), or we work in the tollbooth, we are disappointed
with what our lives amount to. We want to empathize with each other. We want to
find alternatives to our mutual suffering, but our egos won’t allow it. We can
make little, or even big gestures, to make others feel some solace in the
misery that eats away at strangers and the people we love most, but these
gestures don’t direct us towards anything meaningful or lasting.
Everything outside ourselves that
we look at as fulfilling is merely a distraction that keeps us from looking
deeply within. And when we do address our internal struggles, we toil in our
self-awareness. We believe we are unique individuals and use our self-interest
to destroy each other and the world at large. In fact, the world that we
consider to be reality is an illusion, blinding us to the infinite spiritual
world.
Our lives feel random, disconnected
and meaningless. Material aspirations are either unfulfilling or out of reach.
We lack desire for anything greater than personal fulfillment. And once we are
fed, we only get hungrier. There’s a hole in the pit of our stomachs.
While this hole is impossible to
fill by traditional means, there is a solution to the life-suck keeping you
from getting what you need from life. You are experiencing life as it is and
are ready to uncover the reasons for your lack. You may even sense that the
coincidences that have shaped your life have some meaning you would like to
uncover.
Many of us begin life with high
hopes, but can’t help believing we are somehow being cheated by forces out of
our control. As we get older, we are hardened by these realities of the world.
We learn to temper our expectations when success doesn’t come our way. If and
when we do succeed, the expectation of further success will ultimately be a
disappointment, whether you’re Michael Jordan or Steve Jobs.
This is because once we feel
happiness it quickly dissipates. It is only natural. We are disappointed that
we didn’t receive what we were promised as children sitting in front of a
television set that offered a version of life we did not have the means to
replicate. The big secret is those who seem to have replicated a seemingly
perfect life usually feel exactly the same lack. Everything that hurts us comes
from the Creator, just as everything that gives us joy comes from Him. So,
whatever we perceive as material lack is really a spiritual lack and vice versa
until you attain spirituality.
As painful as it feels to our
senses, this is an opportunity that gives us the desire to find a true purpose.
We know that there is an abundant force that we can’t seem to tap into. There
must be another way. This can’t be the totality of life.
We are compelled to both escape
from and find meaning in the emptiness stirring inside of us. Unfortunately,
without a method to channel these frustrations, we will not find an escape. We
can study philosophy, psychology and religion to fill this hole, but for many
of us this doesn’t work, because it doesn’t reform us in any meaningful way. We
will ultimately mistake faith with ritual and stay blind to the Creator. We
will never perceive Him. Some people escape troubling feelings by obsessing
over sports franchises, and feeding on pornography, drugs, alcohol, television
and movies. Others work until they’re too exhausted to do much else.
While this may quell our loneliness
and suffering from moment to moment, we tire of these escapes from the reality
of our existence. Universities and great minds promise answers to the purpose
of existence through intellectual pursuits. Intellectuals like Christopher
Hitchens will offer, “Art is a reflection of life that gives life
meaning…Philosophy will provide universal truths and reveal knowledge is the
path to wisdom,[iii]” while true wisdom
is the sum of experiences and feelings. Of the few who seriously consider these
matters, we are eventually troubled by their contradictions and errors in
logic. Something is always missing, because there is no such thing as
objectivity.
I, like many of us, felt
intolerable suffering and voraciously tried to cure it. After studying a
smattering of Western philosophy in college, I spent my entire adult life
repelled by the concept of G-d. I didn’t see any purpose in the delusion.
However, I found that rational
thought was as flawed as the spiritual solutions to life’s problems. I was
embarrassed to ascribe myself to any answer to life’s big questions that
couldn’t be explained rationally…
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