Wednesday, August 6, 2014

First Few Pages of The Egotist















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…











[i] Mark Harris, “Twilight of the Tummelers,” New York Magazine (May 24th, 2009), http://nymag.com/movies/features/56930/
[ii] ibid
[iii] Hitchens, Christopher. G-d is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve, 2007.

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