What Is Kabbalah? The Basic Principles Explained
You may have heard a lot about Kabbalah in the media and you may have a sense of its spiritual promises, especially given its current popularity. But what’s it really all about? In this guide, we will look at the basic concepts of Kabbalah.
The Reality of Reception
In Hebrew, the word Kabbalah means “reception.” But Kabbalah isn’t just reception. It’s a discipline of study, a method that teaches you how to receive. Kabbalah …
- Prepares you to be able to receive.
- Tells you what you are about to receive.
- Explains where it comes from.
- Lets you know what you need to have and still have yet to receive.
It’s a reception to which everyone is invited. You don’t need a special invitation, only the willingness to explore the larger questions of existence: how you and I relate to God, how God created the universe, and what will happen when time ends. Not your typical wedding talk, to be sure, but the kind of talk that can help you, as a citizen of planet Earth in the twenty-first century, understand and receive the wisdom of the ages and have it inform your daily decisions.
Kabbalah helps you know where you truly are in relation to where you think you are. It shows the boundaries of the five senses of perception and opens up the spiritual world of actual reality by helping you develop a “sixth sense.” This sixth sense not only enriches your present life with a new dimension, but also opens a door to a brave new world. There is no death in this world, no sorrow, no pain. And best of all, you don’t have to give up anything for it: you don’t have to die to get there. Neither do you have to fast, avoid any pleasures, or restrain yourself in any way. In short, it is with this sense that you achieve the revelation of His Godliness to His creatures in this world.
Kabbalah is very different from teachings that promote asceticism and austerity as means to achieve spirituality. It teaches that only one who has developed the desire for pleasures to the maximum can receive what the Creator has to give. Kabbalah doesn’t take you away from life; it adds a whole new meaning and strength to everything that happens. If you want to be a Kabbalist, you’ll have to live life to the fullest.
The Force of Giving
To understand the pleasure and meaning that the Kabbalist receives, it’s essential to understand the abstractions used in Kabbalah. The most basic principle in Kabbalah concerns giving. In the whole of reality, there is only a single force, a force of giving. And because that force is giving, it creates “something” to receive what it gives. The giving force in Kabbalah is called “Creator,” and what it creates is called “creation,” a “creature,” or a “created being.”
This creature goes through a process of learning and development, and at its end discovers the full grandeur and beauty of its Creator. As Rabbi Ashlag explained, this revelation of the Creator to the creature is the essence and the purpose of Kabbalah. Actually, it is the purpose of the whole creation.
To put it simply: Kabbalah teaches us how to receive the Creator—literally for the creature and the Creator to merge. The result is an experience of tremendous beauty and joy in every moment of every day.
Revealing the Creator
When Ashlag describes the purpose of Kabbalah as “the revelation of His Godliness to His creatures in this world,” he means that the essence of Kabbalah (“reception”) is to reveal, or discover, the Creator.
Understanding the tight link between reception and revelation is a key element required to understand Kabbalah. Given the abstract nature of Kabbalah—that your five senses cannot perceive the forces it describes—Kabbalah often uses metaphors to describe its concepts. Rabbi Ashlag describes the wisdom of Kabbalah as a “sequence of roots.” He uses a reference to nature (roots) to show that what happens in our world doesn’t begin here, but in the spiritual world.
In Kabbalah, the metaphor of nature extends even farther: discovering the Creator means discovering nature. The Creator is nature. Because you perceive only a tiny fraction of nature, the goal of the wisdom of Kabbalah is to disclose reality in its entirety, the whole gamut.
Discovering the whole of reality isn’t just about expanding your view of life and your understanding of it. If you can understand all sides of nature, you can reach far beyond your present physical life, far beyond the boundaries of your five senses, as if someone has removed a blindfold from your eyes and allowed you to see the true vastness and beauty of the world. The wisdom of Kabbalah is designed to lift you up to another world view while opening up a whole new mental and emotional level of existence.
Perception of Circumstances
Kabbalah teaches that everything you experience comes from your contact with the human and natural environment. Your communication and interaction with the outside world activates your sensations, emotions, views, actions, and experiences. So whatever exists within you remains passive and unfelt unless it comes into contact with something on the outside. This does not mean that nothing exists inside you if there is nothing on the outside. It means that until you come into contact with the environment, everything is potential, not actual fact.
At the same time, the actual fact of a person’s experience to the same environment is, of course, different. No two people react the same way in a given situation, even when all the external conditions are the same. So if the external circumstances are the same, the reason we react differently must be that our internal circumstances differ.
Here is the heart of the matter for the Kabbalah way of thinking: the reason people act differently is not because the outside circumstances are different, but because we perceive the outside circumstances differently. Different people are sensitive to different things. Although our senses of perception work the same way—they see, hear, and taste—we interpret the sensations differently. Some interpretations are so different that what is tragic to one healthy, normal person may go completely unnoticed by another, or even be a source of joy.
The Sixth Sense
The “how” of reception in Kabbalah is all about perceiving the spiritual world, a world invisible to the five senses, but one we certainly experience in some way. We don’t need to look for anything outside of ourselves, but we need to cultivate a perception that already exists within us that lies dormant. In Kabbalah, this perception is called “the sixth sense.”
Here’s the Kabbalah crux of it all: our five senses are presently “programmed” to serve personal interests. For this reason, all we perceive is what seems to serve our best interests. If somehow your senses were programmed to serve the interest of the whole world, then that’s what you would perceive. In this way, each of us would be able to perceive what every other person, animal, plant, or mineral in the universe perceives. We would become creatures of unlimited perception—omniscient, literally Godlike people.
In such an unbounded state, even the five senses would be used in a very different way. Instead of focusing so much on personal interests, the senses would serve more fully as a means of communication with others. The fact is that in Kabbalistic terms, the sixth sense, which enables perception of the spiritual worlds, is not a sense in the usual meaning of the word, but the intention with which we use our senses. In Kabbalah, this intention is called Kavana.
From The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Kabbalah by Rav Michael Laitman, Ph.D. with Collin Canright
