Right hello and welcome everyone, welcome
to our new semester then. Hello, are you good? We hope you are all well and this is the start
of our new semester, the first lesson about the wisdom of Kabbalah, now as your instructors
my name is, let me just write that down, it's a bit tricky, Mutlu Marty Meydan, now my friends
call me Mutlu, so if you can manage that, great! Worst case scenario, you got my middle name
Marty and together with me who we have here is Anthony "hello Anthony Parker, nice to
meet you, are you okay? great !and today what we're going to do is
going to start working into this wisdom, this deep wisdom called the wisdom of Kabbalah
and you're probably wondering or if you did a Google search on Kabbalah, you'll see that
there are a lot of things about the wisdom of Kabbalah, some mystical, some with red
strings some with yoga, all kinds of things from black magic to yoga. Like I said or mysticism or meditation and
this wisdom is actually five thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven years old, so during
the course, we'll get to know where this wisdom comes from and what it can really do to help
us in our lives because at the end of the day what we're really interested in is to
learn something and to attain something that will kind of get us through life with an understanding,
with a bit more easier flow and given all the international, you know events and the
personal events that we're going through globally we're all seeking actually some sort of wisdom
to kind of, to kind of push through life in an easier way and this is actually what this
wisdom does and the wisdom of Kabbalah we're going to talk about it in the way that it
was first authentically developed. So in terms of coming to this course you're
actually going to go into some of the sources that are really authentic from thousands of
years old. Now a little about us, if you haven't read
anything about Bnei Baruch, you can always go to our website Kabbalah.info to find out
what our organization is about and how we work. It's a nonprofit organization and all the
work we do is pretty much voluntary and the whole idea of giving these courses is actually
to open this wisdom to people who feel that they might use it in their in their lives,
to make their lives a bit easier and to make life a little bit more understandable. I've been studying this wisdom, teaching for
over well, nearly eight years now, over seven years and I've been teaching various classes,
I teach all over the world as well from the United States to South America, North America
Australasia, now Europe and Africa as well and I also teach in the Middle East as well. So I've been teaching for quite a long time
and as we progress I'm hoping that you'll find this course useful and the beautiful
thing is we're going to have an interactive lesson, so this is a very interactive course
and if you have any questions during the lesson, you can just ask through the chat box that
you have on the website as you're watching and if you have any queries, questions about
what Kabbalah is, we're happy to take them on board. Now we have ten lessons ahead of us and these
ten lessons are going to be quite interesting because we're not just going to discover what
this wisdom is all about but we're going to discover how thousands of years ago people
wrote about the perception of reality, how they thought about and discovered and wrote
about our free choice, do we have any free choice? what our nature is, what the nature of creation
is and all these things that they discovered and felt and attained, they wrote in these
special books called the books of Kabbalah and the most mystical thing about Kabbalah
in case you're wondering, it's that it's been kept a secret for many years, in fact for
thousands of years it was never clear what this wisdom was. Also in this first lesson what we're going
to do is to define what the wisdom of Kabbalah is. We're going to take a look at how we can study
together, how we can learn and how we can carry on learning even beyond this first semester
that we're going to go through. Now hopefully you'll stick around with us
over the duration of these and then we'll have a second semester where we'll be able
to get into more practical side of things. So this first semester is going to be really
all the fundamentals that are the building blocks and the knowledge that we're going
to really need to to kind of build ourselves. We want to build an approach to how to study
this wisdom because it's a bit tricky and because it's been misunderstood for thousands
of years, there are so many definitions about it, so many varieties of things related to
it but you know we need to really nail it and make sure we get the right definitions
so that the wisdom of Kabbalah from our perspective can guide us
according to a very practical methodology called application and that's what we're going
to do. During the course we’ll be studying a few
things that are really actually going to be important for us in our day to day lives as
well, we're going to discover how to act, how we actually perceive reality and if you
think about it science is now discovering all these things about how we live reality
inside our minds. Imagine writing about this and humanity didn't
know about it, so these texts are quite authentic and a quite authentic science and we call
it the wisdom of Kabbalah. Because it is a science and it's something
that a person gradually as he studies or she studies can attain and through that attainment
I can see the whole of reality from a different perspective. So hopefully we'll get a glimpse of that and
our first lesson is going to be basically defining the wisdom of Kabbalah. Before we carry on though, the book that we're
going to use is called "Kabbalah for the student "okay, so this book here now if you like books,
this is a, you can get one and our website for that is www.kabbalahbooks.info. So let me just write this down here as well
if you're interested in getting books, www.kabbalahbooks.info.All our books
are there but if you're not, if you're not a bookworm or if you prefer to read on your
mobile or your iPad, whatever you can always go to the website as well which is kabbalah.info
and there you can pretty much find all the articles in this book, just download it, read
it, it's all free, yeah all our books on the website. They're all in their PDF format or as separate
articles so you can go in there and read the whole article because we're not going to have
within the duration of one and a half hours, we're not going to have enough time to finish
articles and some of them are quite long, so what we'll do is we'll use excerpts from
articles but it's always a good idea to go in there and read the article for yourself
as well to clarify the matters for yourself and also if you have any questions afterwards
you can always raise them in the next lesson and we can answer them as well. So it is a bit of a thick book but there are
a lot of information in there and those articles that are in there actually is enough for us
to really come to a spiritual elevated state. If we learn from them and if we take from
them what we could what we do how we work and how we can apply the wisdom of Kabbalah. So we'll get smashing and I have read some
of the notes from people there, I do believe we have quite a lot of people from all over
the place from Africa, South Africa, Nigeria, very exciting, England, ok, Ghana. So, we have a lot of friends from Africa,
Ghana, Tanzania, Mauritius, Zimbabwe, Somalia and
also England, great and I think they're going to be translating these lessons to several
languages for the Europeans that want to see them in their language as well. So today we're going to have a lot of translations
I think into Portuguese, Slovakian, German and Scandinavian
languages and so on. So these will be also, if you should be speaking
another language, if your mother tongue is not english, you might be able to find the
translations as well later on, after the lesson has been recorded and archived. All the lessons will be archived so if you
miss any lesson, don't panic, you'll be able to go back and you'll be able to watch everything
again and you can watch them multiple times, you can download them and so on. So it's all free, you can study as you go,
so it's going to be nice and comfortable and feel free to interact and later on as we go
through, we're going to use a special software called zoom, where we'll be able to actually
see each other on the screen as well, So right now you guys can only see me but it's really
great to have students also join in later on with the software so we can all interact
much better. All right, there, so let's get smashing and
then we'll see how we go, so first of all let's define the wisdom of Kabbalah. Now if you did a Google search like I said
you probably came across a lot of definitions about the wisdom of Kabbalah and there are
a lot of things out there. People try to make it look like black magic,
they try to show you red strings and holy water they try to do yoga poses according
to Kabbalah and there are you know a variety of things. However the wisdom of Kabbalah in a nutshell
is basically understanding human nature, understanding the nature that we're in and also understanding
why all the problems we have, the reason for all the problems, the reason for creation,
why we were created. So this is a science that really discovers
that magical, well not magical but that deep question humanity has been asking for itself
for thousands of years. What is the meaning of life? You will discover as we go along that meaning
of life is not in red strings or drinking holy water some organizations sell, no, it's
not by doing yoga poses with Kabbalistic I don't know what and it's not black magic. I mean I've travelled the world quite a bit,
lived all over the place, I lived on four continents actually and I have never seen
any magical things, especially not black magic so as adults with a sound mind I think we
can all come to an evaluation here that there are certain things that are just not going
to happen in the world. So all those things may be according to what
somebody's related to, but according to the authentic wisdom of Kabbalah, it is a science
based on discovering the purpose of life, why we're created, who created us, why he
or she /nature, let's call it created us and what does life want from us. So all these things we need to discover you
know, first to have a healthy life because as you see in our lives were going through
a lot of problems at an individual level, at a societal level, at a global level and
we can't seem to get out of this this loop that for centuries of years humanity
has been just going through, you know one drama after another, a lot of suffering all
around the world and we just can't seem to come to a resolution, so this wisdom actually
really helps us to bring all those things together and it allows us to solve all the
issues from a different perspective, so if we understand what this wisdom is all about
and how to apply it we can actually solve all of our personal problems, societal problems,
living in global problems, the whole idea is to stick around to learn it and to apply
it and to move forward with it. It is a deep ocean of a wisdom but as time
goes on we will discover it together so it's not difficult. Okay, so I don't want to scare you, it's a
very, very practical wisdom, it's applicable to anyone
who can study, anyone can study it and you don't need any special talents and you don't
need a high level of IQ to study. Anybody who really wishes to study this wisdom
can learn it. It's very practical and simple to learn. So let's start with some definitions:
Let me give you also our sources, how we study and from which sources we study, now our group
Bnei Baruch studies Kabbalah according to the sources of Rav Yehuda Ashlag who is known
as Baal haSulam which means the owner or the master of the ladder and this Kabbalist was
the most prominent of the previous century and he's known for his work and got this name
because he wrote a commentary on the book called the Zohar. So our foundations are from the book called
Zohar that dates back more than 2000 years ago and his commentary on a book called The
Tree of Life and no other Kabbalist has done that since that book has been written. If you think about it, it is a very, very
important step. A prominent Kabbalist who brought authentic
sources and he arranged them and organized them in such a way that we can read them because
if you think about it how could we delve into something written, without having any idea
about what's talked about, even the language is so different. I mean if you think about the English they
were using, what we're using now is English that is very different, so imagine, imagine
all those years we'd never be able to get into those books. So Baal haSulam did this, a big favor and
he arranged all the authentic books that we need to study in order to attain this wisdom
plus he wrote articles so for any new person any beginner can come in and just from those
basic articles he can begin to enter this wisdom. Our methodology is based on the teachings
of Ari, that teaching actually dates back to thousands of years ago. The second source we use is Rav Baruch Ashlag
the son of Baal haSulam. He was the teacher of our teacher, Dr Michael
Laitman and he wrote a lot of articles which we use for our practical work. Now before. Baruch Ashlag, We also call him Rabash, so
we should get used to that.He wrote the articles that gave us the ability to understand what
we need to do in in a practical way because Kabbalist actually never wrote about how to
do this work practically because Kabbalists actually never wrote about how to do the work
practically, all their books described the spiritual worlds, spiritual meaning, a higher
level of consciousness and this is why they write all their books to to teach people that
there's a higher level of reality and that reality is all in their books but how to attain
that was done by Rav Baruch Ashlag, also known as Rabash and because he's the teacher of
our teacher Dr. Michael Laitman and he set up this organization called Bnei Baruch, which
means the sons of Baruch, so we're going to study only their sources and those sources
are based on the Zohar and the Tree of Life and all the articles that these two great
kabbalist wrote are only to guide us into the depth of the wisdom. All right, so we're going to study only their
sources and those sources are based on the Zohar and the Tree of Life and all the articles
that these two great kabbalists wrote are only to guide us
into the depth of the wisdom so let's start by going through some of the definitions that
Baal haSulam wrote for us about what this wisdom is really all about so on day one we
can really clarify for ourselves and understand what this wisdom means and we can clean everything
else in our heads from any other website. So we're going to read from an article called
the essence of the wisdom of Kabbalah, it's in this book and you can also find it on our
website kabbalah.info and you can read the whole article from that, so let's take a look
at what he says Baal haSulam from "Kabbalah for the student", the essence of the wisdom
of Kabbalah. This is from page 21. "the wisdom is no more and no less than a
sequence of roots which hang down by way of cause and consequence by fixed determined
rules interweaving into a single exalted goal described as the revelation of the Creator
to his creatures in this world" Now that definition within itself might need
a bit of explanation so we need to delve into it. Basically Baalhasulam is saying, this wisdom
can get you to perceive the creator or this creating force, call it God, nature, a higher
force, it doesn't matter what you call it, at the end of the day when we are born in
this world we feel like you know we're born here and we understand that we didn't create
this reality, so we have an instinctive feeling that somebody, some force or something created
this reality and Baalhasulam is in this definition, is telling us that if we do this spiritual
work we can actually come to sense that higher force and attain a higher level of conscious
living and from this definition we can understand also what he's trying to say with respect
to how our lives are being lived here. So he's saying this whole wisdom is about
discovering the cause of everything and the consequence and he divides those two realities
into two, so there's a place called cause or causes and he names them as the roots. So this is where everything that happens in
life or the system of nature or call it destiny, fate, whatever everything that happens here
to us, to this world, in this reality are based on causes which he calls roots and let's
read it again this wisdom is no more and no less than the sequence of roots which hang
down by way of cause and consequence, so these roots are influencing our reality and causing
a consequence. Whatever happens in this world in our reality,
in the way we see things has a reason and that reason stems from a higher level which
we don't perceive at the moment. So what else is he saying, "by fixed determined
rules" so there's a cause and consequence relationships, there is a rule, whatever happens
here as a cause, let's say something happened here, it is reflected in our reality, let's
call it our world as an event. Nothing can actually happen without a cause. What else is he saying? "They're interweaving to a single exalted
goal described as the revelation of the Creator to his creatures in this world"
Therefore everything that happens here to us, to everyone is so the whole universe has
only one reason and that is to bring us to the revelation of the Creator. Now in Kabbalah we don't use the word God
or anything that's religious, we use the word Creator, the reason they used the word Creator
is simply because they, the Kabbalists are very scientific and pragmatic guys, they don't
want to believe in something they haven't seen. When they look at life they understand that
what we are created because I didn't create myself, it's obvious and we live here and
this whole creation somehow was created, so a logical person comes to the conclusion that
there must be a force, something, a creator that created this reality and obviously us
too because we're stuck in it, we get born here and nobody really asks us if we want
to get born here, we're just born and we don't really have much of a choice but to live it
out, so any person asking about the meaning of life starts to stumble across these questions
well who created me? why are we created? what's the purpose of all the suffering that
we're going through in life? and then ending up dead. It doesn't really make sense to us. So the fundamental question about what the
meaning of life is, what the purpose of life is, that question is answered in this wisdom
and in his definition here is describing to us that if we discover all that causes then
we can understand all the consequences that happen here and through that understanding
we can actually attain a higher level of consciousness and that higher level of consciousness is
actually called the Creator. So the Creator is not like some guy that you
might imagine up on the clouds like father Christmas but it's actually our thought, a
perception that we need to attain and we need to be integrated into reality at a much higher
level of consciousness than the state we're living in right now ' if we look at our lives
right now it's a big mess. We really don't know what's gonna happen tomorrow. Our whole life is uncertainty, so based on
uncertainties nobody knows when something good is gonna happen, when something bad's
gonna happen and usually it's negative. You know the things that happen and the world
seems to be going from bad to worse all the time, the wars never stop, you know in the
total recorded history I think there's only been like short periods where there was no
war, but besides that we have always had wars, conflicts and all the agony and the suffering
that's been brought along by it. So we have this vicious circle that we're
going through, this mess of a loop that humanity is going through and through this tremendous
suffering experience we come to this question about what is the meaning of my life. Why am I living? So this wisdom from the time of Adam which
we're going to go through in the history of Kabbalah ! (don't worry about it but this
wisdom actually comes from Adam )so it predates all religions and it has nothing to do with
religion at all, actually it really is a science. Sometimes people confuse it and say it's Jewish
mysticism, first of all there's nothing mystical about science, it needs to be attained by
the person who's studying it, second of all there's nothing mystical about Judaism either,
Judaism is in our modern days, it's a religion and Kabbalah has nothing to do with religion. Like I said it predates religion and we'll
get into it much deeper along the way, it's really interesting as well how Kabbalah developed
and then how really it just came out. So in the ongoing lessons when we discuss
these you find how humanity has evolved through this teaching and started developing things
that was just simply not true, some kind of a philosophy. If you look at life right now as well, religion
is basically that as well, it's just dry belief, nothing concrete behind it and this wisdom
will give us that concrete standing because it's a wisdom that a person can relate to
everything he or she is going through in life and as emotional creatures we're going through
a lot of emotions and we can't decipher why we're going through the things we're going
through. So this science, this wisdom is actually about
ourselves and what's more important that actually trying to understand everything that's happening
to us since it's our life, we want to discover why things happen to us and for what reason
so many of the things we go through during the day we just wonder or what why did that
need to happen, why me? , I mean I'm sure if you asked yourselves
this question many times in life when something bad happens, well why me? A good answer to that, why not? Ok good, there's seven billion, eight billion
people on the planet and we're all going through it and we need to understand why we're going
through the things we're going otherwise we're just going to be passing our lives like animals,
like beaten animals, actually like animals in captivity, suffering and then we just end
up dead trying to you know do all our efforts to stay alive, to have a good life as best
we can but never really achieving what we want and then by the time you know it, everything
goes by in a blink of an eye. As my grandmother used to say and she died
at like 90, she had a long life and she used to say, "you know what I don't understand? how life went by so quick, it feels like yesterday
when I was a teenager "you know like, I know what happened, so our lives go by very fast
and Kabbalists advised us to really study this wisdom so we can really understand why
we're going through everything that we're going through. The reason actually this wisdom was hidden
for thousands of years was because humanity wasn't really asking this question about the
meaning of life. There were a few people here and there who
wanted to know why and they were mostly Kabbalists, they became careful afterwards and they kept
the wisdom going on for centuries from teacher to student but the masses, they didn't really
ever need to ask this question, you know common people weren't asking this question but in
this massive leap in humanity where we're actually sick and tired of this corporeal
loop that we're living in and a lot of people are asking why we're living, what's the meaning
of life, this is why spiritual methods have been popping up. Before, you know spiritual methods, spirituality
and all this kind of stuff, we weren't really that interested but come the generation of
humanity wanting to know something beyond our life then meditations, all these books
about the power of thought, many books, many methods came to light because people were
just searching and if humanity doesn't search things don't come out, so those who search,
those who seek, find things according to their desire and the wisdom of Kabbalah really became
a focal point in that people were interested in but in the wondering what this wisdom is
all about and rightfully so, because it really answers that question, why am I living, who
created me and what for and what I need to do about it. So let's just read this definition one more
time now, that we have an explanation about it and it'll sink in and then we can carry
on. "this wisdom is no more and no less
than a sequence of roots which hang down by way of cause and consequence by fixed
determined rules interviewing to a single exalted goal described as the
revelation of the creator to his creatures in this world " One other thing, we can add to this is when
we're talking about the Creator, we really need to get into the habit of thinking about
the laws of nature because Creator is not something that if you grew up in any religion
or in a religious method you really want to clean that definition out, you want to take
it out, you want to start with a fresh page if you're studying kabbalah. The word Creator here means basically from
all the causes and consequences, all the events of this world is to understand the thought
behind what's happening and this is what it means to
understand the Creator because to understand the Creator is one thing, like it's in a family
right...having a dad is one thing but understanding your dad, it's a different thing. Here Kabbalists want to give us a methodology,
they want to open up this wisdom to us so we can really attain the thought behind everything
and that's called that higher level of existence which actually makes us free from this corporeal
restricted body that we're in and that we define ourselves as this body right now, however
Kabbalists say that we're not this piece of meat, the sack of protein but we're actually
destined for a higher level of existence which we don't feel at the moment.We just feel our
lives in this five levels of perception with our five sensory organs and once we get old
or once we I don't know what else, what can happen in life, accidents can happen, anything
until we die, we just feel life in these five senses and according to these five senses
we either feel good or bad and that's our life. We strive for the good, run away from the
bad, how we try to have everything good as best we can usually ends up in disappointment
and from there on from all the disappointments and the restrictions of our lives, here we
begin to ask why are we living? So from there on we need to understand that
this word Creator needs to take on a new definition when we're studying kabbalah and the whole
purpose of this wisdom is to attain the thought of the creator and to understand all the actions
that are done in this reality, so we can actually begin to format ourselves, give ourselves
a new perspective, a new way, a new perception of reality, so we can live beyond the borders
of our corporeal existence and for that we're going to have to develop a new sensory organ,
call it the sixth sense, call it the soul, doesn't matter what but the whole idea of
creation is to attain everything while we live in this world. So some people believe that something will
happen after we die, nothing will happen after we die, everything must happen here while
we are alive and that's the whole purpose of the creation of this world. So this world is a stepping stone for us to
attain a new level of reality and therefore everything needs to happen while we're alive
here so if you have any, yeah if you have any thoughts about something that might happen
after we die or whatever, in the wisdom of Kabbalah, we must do it here ! As the definition also says in the last part
"the revelation of the creator to his creatures in this world "....we are the creatures and
we need to reveal the acting force behind reality and we need to adapt ourselves to
that force while living in this world. Right then, up to here, let's see, do we have
any questions? are we interactive? We had some questions but you basically answered
them. ..one was, why it was from Ronel from South
Africa he asked why was it kept secret and you spoke about that. That's a good question, that's going to go
a bit more deeper, why was the wisdom of Kabbalah a secret for many years, it's very simple
if I have a child and I want to give him a wisdom but I understand that he can't handle
it right now, he's not capacitated enough to understand it, I don't want to open it
to him because it will cause confusion, so what Kabbalists did was very simple, they
said look we'll develop this wisdom from generation to generation, we'll only open it to a few
individuals who's really mature enough to take care of it, who's really wanting to discover
the meaning of life and they feel that this is their life's purpose and will only hand
it down to those and we'll keep it a secret until maturity of the whole of humanity, becomes
mature enough and is wondering why we're living so we can open it up a bit more and Baalhasulam
rightfully mentioned it, that he wrote these articles describing how the whole of the human
society, how the whole world was so integrated with globalization. Now we started talking about globalization
in the nineties, well he wrote about it like in the nineteen hundreds and he wrote like
in nineteen twenties the whole world is so integrated, so integral and the whole world
is in such a connected situation that the next level of human, we'll have to be finding
out and discovering how to integrate correctly so that we can move to a higher level of living,
higher level of existence and all our problems in the world is because we don't know how
to really integrate our lives properly with everybody else. So he wrote about these things, they need
to see he could foresee that humanity was big, was really cooking, it was becoming ripe
to start asking questions and in fact one of his articles he says you know they'll study,
they'll start to study my books.He created all the material, he wrote all the articles
put the books together because he understood that this generation was going to start asking
questions and that the level of development in human society had now come to a point where
people would seek this wisdom. So Kabbalists rightfully kept it so that humanity
who wasn't ready for it at the time, wouldn't get confused from some of the students of
kabbalah in the past who had no attainment about the wisdom and developed philosophies. ..many of the Philosopher's, Greek philosophy
actually came out from those who studied Kabbalah but didn't really attain the essence of the
wisdom of Kabbalah. So humanity already went through a lot of
misunderstandings thousands of years ago and Kabbalists seeing that this misunderstanding
was going to cause even more great suffering to humanity, it just kept it a secret because
once you have a student who studies something and he gets things wrong and messed up then
he starts talking about it in a completely unrelated, in a wrong way and this is how
philosophy developed and what is philosophy? Actually philosophy is a person's imagination
of how things could be good without actually living that state, so philosophy was just
basically human imagination of what could be great for us and every time we try to implement
those philosophies the world just went into more and more corruption, more and more difficulties,
so if we had actually kept ourselves without philosophy and had just developed on a scientific
concrete basis we would have been much better off. We wouldn't have all these trial and error
as we have in history. So all the political systems came about through
what it was all philosophy ;communism, neoNazism, the feudal system, it was all through philosophies
developing trying to build a method or a way of life in the hope that it would work out
for us and none of them did. So this is why they kept a secret after seeing
that some of the students started to develop, you know in the wrong way and they didn't
want the wisdom to get out and they only wanted to keep it for those who were really worthy
for the wisdom until, like I said, humanity was ripe enough and was asking about the meaning
of life. This is very important because this wisdom
just answers that question and how you can attain it, so because of the very, very thin
line, they just kept it secret. Okay next question, we have Gerald from Liberia,
yeah he says does Kabbalah differentiate between physical forces and spiritual forces, if so
what is the difference between these two forces? That's a really nice question as well, we
can also find that in the definition here Baal haSulam touches it's slightly, when we're
talking about a spiritual force, it's the force that we don't really understand or grasp,
that's why it's it's called spiritual but in Kabbalah what we like to say. ..laws of nature, simply because the creation,
the whole of creation was created in such a way that it functions on laws and these
laws don't change. Nature doesn't break its laws, only humans
do, so the wisdom of Kabbalah really what it wants to teach us is how the laws of nature
work and how dysfunctional we are with respect to those laws and how we can adapt ourselves
to those laws and then discover how these forces in nature act, from gravity to I don't
know, to the Moon and Sun, everything in reality, everything is acting according to these laws
and this wisdom is basically going to teach us how we can decipher all that, so we don't
like to divide it into spiritual and physical but what we'd like to say is there are laws
in nature which we haven't discovered and these laws are the laws that Kabbalists did
discover and they wrote about and we'd like to learn from them. So for us that they shouldn't be anything
airy-fairy, everything should be concrete and it should be felt inside of us, it should
be attained inside of us and there should be no room for question marks as we attain
a higher level of reality. Actually attaining a higher level of reality
is understanding the causes for everything that happens and because everything that happens
must have a reason otherwise it would just be a mindless creation if we had things that
were just happening randomly then you could never figure out what the purpose of creation
was because everything is just ad hoc and just havoc so with them the whole wisdom of
Kabbalah is a way, it's a teaching that can allow us to understand the laws of nature
and then we don't have to differentiate or separate things, a spiritual or physical spirituality
is also, its also an attainment of a law of nature which we'll learn as we go along, as
well spirituality. In terms of spirituality, we should define
that properly because spirituality if you look at the world right now, there are (apparently
)if you ask Google, four thousand two hundred spiritual methods in the world, so many as
four thousand two hundred and there are three thousand eight hundred religions according
to account and you know there's no real way of getting out of it, you can't really say
you know spirituality has that many definitions, according to that many religions and spiritual
methods. Spirituality in the wisdom of Kabbalah is
actually attaining the attributes of nature, attaining the attributes of the Creator, attaining
the thought of creation and all these definitions they'll become clearer inside of us and in
a nutshell, what we should direct ourselves towards is to attain the understanding and
the thought of creation and the Creator, that force that created everything That's pretty
hard for us to attain the attributes of the Creator, so we could come to his level of
perception and living /existing. Ok now we have Tony from Ghana. Tony asks : how does Kabbalah relate to astrology? Astrology was a science from ancient Babylon
and many Kabbalists were known to know that science, in fact we also know from Abraham,
we will study Abraham as well, he also used to look at the Stars and watch the stars,
so astrology comes from Babylon, it's where humanity was born as a society and from that
science many people were studying the laws of nature they actually understood that we
were in a in a system where things influenced what happened in reality and they tried to
use astrology and they didn't use it as a science to determine how to do things and
when to do things and during that period actually also we discovered how agriculture started. The first agricultural revolution, the industry
actually started in Babylon because they were developing these studies towards nature. However the wisdom of Kabbalah 'the science
of Kabbalah does not relate to astrology, it really relates to everything that happens
from the thought of creation. In the in the upcoming lessons, hopefully
you'll stick around, in the upcoming lessons, I'm going to explain how the whole of reality
was created and with what thought behind it was created so once we discover how this force,
this nature or creator created the whole of reality, what the idea behind it was and how
our world was created and how in our world we were created and how we developed through
thousands of years to get to this level we’re right now and now we want to discover the
meaning of life, then the wisdom of Kabbalah enters our life and says listen !the purpose
of life is to meet our Creator while living here and that's what it focuses on to really
discover the Creator while living here and to understand him and to exist in his level
of existence rather than in this corporeal bodily format that we're living in. Okay now I believe it's Tish from Zimbabwe
and the question is. ....so it's not enough to know and follow
the laws of the Creator but one has to understand the Creator? what does it mean to understand the Creator? That's a very good question...absolutely the
whole purpose of life is not just to understand the laws of nature but we want to attain the
Creator, attaining the Creator, understanding the
Creator means that we need to become like him and like I said just a minute ago, in
our future lessons we're going to talk about our human nature and according to this human
nature how different we are to the whole of nature of creation and why that opposite/this
conflict between our nature and and the laws of general nature bring us all the problems
in life, so it's not enough just to understand the laws of nature but for a Kabbalist, he
must attain the Creator, he must be like the Creator, so the whole objective of studying
the wisdom of Kabbalah is to bring our attributes to the same functionality of his attributes
and that's called being like the Creator, becoming like the Creator, not the Creator
but becoming like the Creator. Just like as a child grows up he becomes like
his dad or she becomes like her mother and so the Creator /Nature wants from us to become
perfect, being a perfect creature and to exist in that perfection, so understanding is not
enough, in terms of our understanding in, terms of intellectually understanding in Kabbalah
it is actually living that state of perfection. Ok good, so we have the last, we have some
nice questions here, very good questions, ok so basically the method is a methodology
by which one can attain a higher level of reality and it's an empirical method, it's
a scientific method, it's not a belief okay, so one warning, straight away. ..Kabbalah is not a belief, it's not a religion,
you don't have to believe what you read. We study and the study over time will open
up new feelings and sensations inside of us, through those experiences that we go through,
we'll begin to understand, see feel, we'll begin to get a vibe from the things that we
read in the books and we'll begin to see as we apply this method that what the books are
writing are actually true because we're going to live what they're talking about and then
you can say I believe. This is a very important aspect because a
lot of people have grown up in religious environments or in a religious culture or have some contact
with religion. We have a tendency to believe, that we need
to believe in something. In Kabbalah we only believe in what we see
and seeing can only happen when I feel and I then have an understanding for what I felt
and that needs to be true and once that's true the understanding and the mind, they
connect and I have a confirmation between them, then we can say I believe because what
a person feels and understands concretely is called truth and I can say we believe. Until then though, please don't mix this wisdom
up because we're talking about the Creator and sometimes people relate that to God and
it can be called God, it doesn't matter, let's not get hooked up on the words, let's get
hooked up on the methodology here, so until we see, until we feel and understand and we
go through this inner change there is no such thing as I believe even the Kabbalists, they
say don't believe what we wrote. Once you attain it, then you will believe. It's a very important topic and at a point
so it needs to be a very tangible sensation not in theory, not intellectually, just like
we we live a state of happiness and we understand we're happy, spirituality, in the wisdom of
Kabbalah is exactly so once we go through an inner change, we understand that change,
we're going through a change in sensation and there's an understanding accompanying
it as the cause and consequence effect. Then we can say we believe, it's very important
aspect. I know we're running short on time but we
just got another question from Jimmy, yeah Jimmy from England says :could we do this
by creating artwork for example or is that too corporeal? You know if you're good at art, by all means
do art but we need to understand that this wisdom means by applying this wisdom we're
going to learn how to attain the Creator and it's not going to be through art but it's
going to be really connecting with the whole of reality and that reality we're going to
learn how to discover between the interactions of people. So we still have about half an hour so let's,
if you don't have questions, we can carry on I think, we're good okay, let's carry on
so let's take a look at our nature a little bit. Let's take a look at the reason why we become
despaired from life and the reason why we're unfulfilled in life. This is a very important topic because that's
the whole topic. Kabbalists, being good observers of nature
and human nature describe a person, a human being as a desire to receive pleasure, this
is how they define us. We define ourselves as I, me here, the human,
the intellectual me or the feeling me but kabbalists being very straightforward guys,
they said listen humans, we just desiring machines, we by nature by default want things,
that's our nature, a desire to receive and they draw it like a little vessel like this
and all we do in life is want things, this is our nature and our nature in their definition
is a desire to receive pleasure, sometimes we call it “a will to receive “a desire
to receive, well we want to basically receive pleasure, a desire to receive pleasure. We want to feel fulfilled, we want to feel
happy, we want to feel good, this is our nature and Kabbalists say well if this is our nature
then to feel good must be also the purpose of life. It’s logical, if I always want to feel good
and strive to feel good well then that really must be a purpose, feeling good, feeling happy
must be a purpose in life and that's so. So there's a question, well in that case why
are we unfulfilled? why are we not happy all the time? why do we have moments of happiness and pleasure
and then we have a long period or many unhappy moments or unfulfilled moments or sufferings? If that's our nature and according to our
nature that's possibly the purpose of creation, why are we not fulfilled? The most important law of nature all of us
need to know and understand is this the relationship between the desire and the pleasure, this
is our desire, let's say I want something, I don't know, anything, what do you guys want? You guys tell me, tell me what you guys want
and let's let's make an example according to your desires okay. This is pleasure, so constantly we want to
fulfill the desires that pop up inside of us and that pleasure, once we've, once we
fulfill ourselves with pleasure, we feel happy. Don't worry Anthony, oh yes, what do you want
to tell me, what you want? Anthony answers :"Ah you know me I like food
". All right, so let's say you were hungry yes
and okay so Anthony's desire (what's your favorite food? )chocolate cake? Chocolate cake, okay, so you want chocolate
cake, now what's the problem with desiring chocolate cake? There's no problem, it's a great desire, I
love chocolate myself, so this is the problem, the moment I start to eat that most wanted
chocolate cake the desire and the pleasure begin to cancel each other, so the first bite
of the chocolate in my tastebuds tastes wonderful, it's great but the second bite and then the
third bite and then the fourth bite decreases the pleasure I get from it. So every time I have a desire and I fulfill
that desire, the pleasure and the desire they cancel each other out, so by the time I've
got my fifth bite or my fourth bite, my taste buds are not really feeling the same chocolate
taste as I felt in the first bite and afterwards I'm just eating it to finish the chocolate
cake. Is that right? well correct, yeah, yes and if I order a second
plate of chocolate cake it's usually in the anticipation that I'm going to get the same
pleasure as I did in my first bite because I still remember it and this is the defect
in our nature. The moment I begin to satisfy a desire, the
pleasure disappears and the desire disappears as well because the moment Anthony starts
eating the cake, as the taste starts to decrease, his desire for the chocolate cake also begins
to diminish, so by the time he's finished his chocolate cake, he doesn't have the desire
for chocolate cake and he doesn't taste it either. So the biggest defect here is that the desire
and the pleasure they cancel each other out. What's the problem with that? It's a big problem because we're a desire
to be happy, we're a desire to be fulfilled, we now have to find something else to be happy
about and what does that bring you? A life running after a bunch of things that
are never going to keep you fulfilled, we just shared a basic example here about joy,
but if you think about anything and everything in life, no matter what I want, I don't know,
a shirt, a car, a house, a holiday doesn't really matter, the moment I buy what I want
the pleasure I get from it begins to decrease. This is the problem with our nature, desire
cancels pleasure, pleasure cancels desire and I end up feeling not just zero but -why
am I in a - because I had to work and make money and run around and through all the dramas
in order to get what I want, so I put a lot of time and effort, maybe stress, because
depending on something I want to buy a car and you want to save up for it, you want to
work hard for it, you're running around doing all kinds of things, you want to advance in
your career, let's say, that's also a desire, so I want to progress in my career, I have
to put a lot of working hours behind it. I have to really probably get some continuous
professional education to really you know bust myself for it so I can move up the ladder,
so I have to invest a lot but when I get there, overtime the pleasure from getting there gets
less and less and less and in fact at that higher level I begin to get more stressful
because I've taken on more of a load, taking on more responsibility, I have less time for
myself, I have to work more even though I'm high up the ladder and I have to deal with
more problems and stresses so things that we seem to do, anything from all our desires
seems to be just as we get older and older and older, a waste of life. So this defect that constantly makes us run
around in life and then makes us feel empty all the time brings us to the question. ...why can we not be fulfilled even though
I might have everything I really want? Because there are a lot of people in life,
they have everything they want /need but they still feel unfulfilled especially rich people
right who go into therapy, more rich people, why? because they have everything. If you have everything, you don't have a desire
for anything and if you don't have a desire for anything you don't have a taste for anything. It becomes a big problem, especially among
people who have everything they become more depressed, sad and they don't know what to
do because you have the money to do anything and everything and you don't know what to
do with it because you've done everything and you can't feel happy about it. So it's a big problem and this law of nature
we must understand because now nature is showing us by presenting us this dilemma, is showing
us, listen you want to become happy? that's your nature and you should be happy,
however you going around it the wrong way and life is teaching us that we're going around
things the wrong way, so we're looking for fulfillments that are not really going to
fulfill us but because our nature is seeking fulfillment there must be a fulfillment that's
going to give us a constant elevated state. We need to understand these laws, so that
we can seek how we need to relate to our nature so that we can find that fulfillment because
at the end of the day we want to be happy and we should be happy and if our nature is
actually pushing us to seek happiness, then that's the purpose of life and we should go
about it the right way and the laws of nature, just like in like these laws of nature I just
explained now are guiding us, so the wisdom of Kabbalah is going to take us through this
labyrinth and it's gonna help us, hold us by the hand so that we can discover, even
just knowing this rule already should make you think about what to go after tomorrow
and not to go after tomorrow. We can make better calculations. Any questions there Anthony? So far no questions yet, okay. So this method, the wisdom of Kabbalah can
also be defined as the wisdom of how to be happy and fulfilled. If you look at life, what gives us the greatest
suffering is not that we're suffering from something but because we don't know why we're
suffering from something. Sometimes children, they bang their heads
somewhere on a table or a chair and then you see them get really upset and agitated and
they start hitting the chair because they don't understand that it's not the chairs
fault. You need to learn how to sit properly sometimes,
I don't do that - oh I see a lot of people bashing their countries, right okay, so look...okay
let's talk about adults right, let's not talk about kids, so adults a lot of times they
get something wrong, with their computer, they start hitting the computer, they're frustrated
because it's not because of the frustration of the computer, because you know they're
in the middle of something and they don't know why that happens. If they knew why the computer had a problem
they wouldn't suffer, they'd go and fix it, they aren't there to understand what the issue
was and they take care of the problem, so in life as well, when we're going through
problems and dramas our biggest agony is because we don't understand why and because we don't
understand why we don't have to relate to it properly. So Kabbalists want to give us a helping hand
and they want to elevate us to a higher level of perception where we can look down to our
situation and understand how our life is here because let's take a moment, let's do another
page here because if you recall previously I drew this and we said but this is where
the roots are the causes for everything and the consequences is us living in this world. So all of us here, something happens to us,
the causes for it whatever happens to us, they're all clear here (root)because there's
a reason for it, nothing happens without a purpose otherwise it would be a mindless creator
and then there's nothing to talk about but because everything happens for a reason and
we don't know why we're suffering, that not knowing is suffering because we feel hopeless,
we feel like we can't take care of ourselves. In order for us to understand everything that
happens to us here kabbalists are saying, well let's go up here (root)and then start
looking at life from here, let's observe from a higher level and then we can get rid of
suffering because then we know why things happen to us and this is the whole dilemma
and all the problems and the unfulfillment, the suffering, the agony and all that kind
of stuff that's happening to us is only to push us, it's only to push us forward so we
can seek an answer to all our problems and then as the lessons go forward, we'll understand
how to do that properly. So this is basically this first lesson that
we're going through together is just to understand our place here and how this nature in it,
in a very primitive way because we're actually very primitive creatures, we want things,
if we get them, great !if we don't get them. .bad news, we're unhappy and if we get them
then the pleasure disappears as well and then we feel like we have to run after something
else as well and then when this ‘dog chasing its tail’ loop run around and our whole
life goes by like that and then all of a sudden we get old and die so we need to through this
study, through this wisdom elevate ourselves to a new observation point where we can begin
to decipher everything and of a conscious life and then even if we
die because we're living at a conscious higher level of existence, then our body just becomes
like a shirt we're wearing, it doesn't matter if it still stays or not because it doesn't
affect our existence and this is the main idea. That to make our lives permanent in a really
permanent non ending manner, a person has to attain that higher level of existence because
our body is at the level of an animal, it's not a human, it's an animal. Animals have bodies as well we're just a little
smarter so we think we're special, in fact we're not special at all, animals have a much
better life in their environment than we do. You don't see animals taking drugs, getting
into depression throwing themselves off the bridge and committing suicide but humans do,
they're living that, they're having a much better life than we are, so in this, in this
sick animal kind of life that we have we need to raise ourselves to a real state called
human and that state of human that many of the books
talk about is that elevated state of existence. All right no more questions, okay good. If you have any questions feel free, so how
can we, how can we, well how do you know if this wisdom is for you or not? That's another question I guess you'll discover
as the lessons go on and then you begin to feel whether you're really, whether this wisdom
is for you or not. There are a few things to take into consideration
if you feel this is for you and because we're sensual creatures we need to start observing
what we feel and we should start doing that on day one because we're educated and grown
up in an intellectual way, everybody's talking about how smart we are but that's actually
a wrong way to educate a child because we're sensual beings, we need to first feel things
and then develop our intellectual ability to comprehend what we're going through so
that there's a parallel matching between what we feel and what we understand. So all those understandings of the sensations
that we go through, other things, that actually make us smart. ....by reading books and not living anything,
I can't actually become smart !Imagine learning how to swim from a book, you'll never learn
to swim, but according to the book you know how to swim !So really it's not going to make
your swim, or is it? So the way we need to educate ourselves as
well is to start to get a feeling as we study, if this is a good sensation inside of us. A lot of people ask well why should I study
Kabbalah? do I even need a higher level of reality and
a lot of people ask well I just want to be happy in this world, do I need to attain a
higher level of existence? if you want to be the just happy living in this world that's
great, this wisdom then can actually show you the laws of nature and when you choose,
you can actually choose smartly because then you know what makes you happy and what doesn't
make you happy. The whole idea of the wisdom is actually to
show an educated person about how his or her nature is working and if we understand how
it's working then we can actually be happy. Isn't that correct? so it helps us being fulfilled
and happy while living in this world and for those who are really obsessed about attaining
something beyond this world, it also helps to raise to that higher level as well, to
help anyone, everyone both in this life and to actually go beyond the borders of this
life in terms of our perception as well. It all boils down to understanding the laws
of nature and human nature so as time goes by, as we go to the next lesson because the
next lesson we're going to touch on the perception of reality and then we're going to touch on
many topics about how the whole reality was created and the timeline of creation. It's also very interesting, we're going to
discover how everything in creation and its explanations from kabbalah have a timeline
so through that chain of Kabbalists we'll get to discover. But let's read something else as well, once
again from Baal haSulam and a lot of times people say "well who can study Kabbalah? Can I study Kabbalah?" You know because a lot of things out there
on the internet, some people say well can I study before I'm the age of 40? Jewish? Okay I'm not Jewish, I'm teaching it, I'm
teaching it to everyone to Jews, Christians, Muslims, atheists, anyone and Anthony, "Anthony
you're Jewish right? " Anthony is Jewish, I'm not Jewish but as
you can see we're studying, he was my teacher and I was his teacher, there
you go, so who can study Kabbalah? let's take a look what the Kabbalists say
once again from the writings of Baal Hasulam in this book on page (? ) , the article is
called Introduction to the study of the ten Sephirot' and the ten Sephirot book is actually
Baal Hasulam 's writings about the Tree of life, so it's a very fundamental hardcore
Kabbalistic book and he says on "indeed if we set our hearts to answer but
one very famous question, I'm certain that all these questions and doubts will vanish
from the horizon and you will look unto their place to find them gone, this indignant question
is a question that the whole world asks namely what is the meaning of my life? So who can study Kabbalah? It is anyone seeking the meaning of his life. As we progress, you'll also see that's a very
solid very sensibly lived experience, you really feel it on yourself when you're going
through many of the states that they're talking about, that it's really a wisdom for a person
who wants to really understand the meaning behind everything, the purpose of life, why
one is not happy, how one can be happy and then those are really the secrets of life
and those are the things that many of us are missing and because we miss those things you
can see Humanity is always in a turmoil, constant problems all the time in society, family,
between countries. It's just a big dilemma that we're all going
through. Yes I know this time we are really wearing
short on time but I have a few more questions that just came in okay and there are really
good questions, one of them is coming from Jimmy from England. Jimmy says the roots are the thoughts from
the mind of the creator and the consequences the reality formed from those ideas? Yeah we could say that Jimmy, because life
has a purpose just like an apple grows on a tree becomes mature, becomes a ripe fruit
and tastes great but when it's first forming, it's very bitter and life has a purpose for
us as well so from that bitter first initial formation of the apple until it becomes a
nice juicy ripe fruit, it has to go through phases and so humanity is also going through
those phases at an individual level and at a societal level as well. The whole world together and all that is coming
stemming from the thought of creation. So humanity is progressing through the thought
of the Creator, where this force wants to bring us to ripe juicy good tasting states
basically. Okay, we have Dora from Spring Maryland USA. Dora's question does Kabbalah address the
concept of reincarnation? what is the position about reincarnation in
this teaching and can you talk about the concept of reincarnation? Reincarnation is a hot topic but we have to
understand reincarnation when we go through the structure of the soul because reincarnation
and Kabbalah, you might relate it to the reincarnation that's discussed out there, from when a person
dies, does he or she come back in another body and carry on living that's called reincarnation. In Kabbalah reincarnation has a different
twist to it and we can only really talk about it, which we will in the structure of the
soul so yeah, it's a good topic to talk about, thank you for the question, we'll discuss
it in the upcoming lessons so stick around. They're going to be in this ten lesson course
that we're going to do definitely. Tommy from Ghana he says, "is it possible
for humans like us to reach above the red line" (to the roots) Tony can you elaborate
on the red line? okay, oh sorry yes, it is actually, that's
the purpose of creation, it's like a baby being born and it's a little baby and if somebody
was observing say from Mars and this was the first time he was looking at humanity, say
what's gonna happen to this baby? You know it can't look after itself, constantly
needs looking after but as time goes by, we see that a baby grows up becomes an intelligent
being that's able to take care of his or her life in this world by him or herself, so just
like a baby coming from a helpless state can grow up to become something that takes care
of itself and even others when it grows up, same with us, from the level of this world
we need to come and we need to grow, that's the purpose of creation we need to grow to
that level where we actually become a participant in the whole of creation, just like the Creator
is. Really otherwise there would be no point,
imagine our kids constantly staying at the age of five they'd drive us crazy, okay, that's
right, they would drive us absolutely nuts, so we're willing to go through a short period
of you know craziness but as we grow them up, we understand that they're going to take
care of themselves, they're going to participate in society and hopefully they'll become a
positive aspect, a positive part of society and and will contribute, so the Creator also
wants us to grow and become like him, just like we'd love our kids to grow up and become
even better than us so the Creator also has that thought for us and we'll come to discuss
that in later lessons as well. Right now we're just touching the topic, right
now getting to know each other and breaking the shyness with all this questions and so
on, but as we develop and go through, you'll see that all these things, questions are very
much answered. So very nice questions, feel free to ask questions
and this is also making my life very easy as well because when you ask questions, I
feel me a bit more relaxed and then I can, you know, give the lesson in a more happy,
kind of relaxed way, so feel free to interact and ask all your questions. I've just got one more paragraph to read,
once again from the wisdom of Kabbalah and philosophy by Baal Hasulam, it's also in this
green book, the article, the wisdom of Kabbalah and philosophy page 99 “understanding the meaning of the word,
“spirituality, ” has nothing to do with philosophy. This is because how can they discuss something
that they have never seen or felt? What do their rudiments stand on?” If there is any definition that can tell spiritual
from corporeal, it belongs only to those who have attained a spiritual thing and felt it. These are the genuine Kabbalists; thus, it
is the wisdom of Kabbalah that we need.” People confuse Kabbalah with philosophy. A Kabbalist is a person who genuinely attains
the attribute called the spirit, which is the attribute of the Creator and until one
attains, that it lives inside of that person, any other definition of spirituality is just
philosophical talking, which we shall not go into. It
is also to reference and investigate genuine Kabbalists, by the
sources they're studying and the lineage of their teachers. Kabbalists have a lineage, from teacher to
student, the books, articles and material all follow a sequence of events creating the
authenticity of the material, students and teachers which is all very important. We're coming to the end of the lesson, if
there are any unanswered questions don't worry, write them down, in fact you should have a
notebook for yourself so you can write things down and then if any questions pop up, you
can ask them later on and then what we're going to do is we can go over those questions
in the next lesson as well. So I hope this lesson gave you a bit of a
you know clear-cut definition in the direction that we're going to go about the wisdom of
Kabbalah and how we're going to move forward and if that's not clear still, we'll have
enough time to discuss all your questions about what kabbalah is and how we're going
to study. So we'll get going to all those. In a nutshell basically what we wanted to
say in this lesson was Kabbalah is a way, a method and a methodology that we can use
in order to attain the purpose of creation which is to understand the creator and to
live at that level of existence and to understand everything about our nature, the laws of nature
and why everything happens the way it does in our reality in this world. That's all, so no red strings, no holy water,
no black magic or mysticism or doing yoga with Hebrew letters. According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, build
up a solid understanding about our life here and how we need to bring it to a higher level
of existence right here. I hope that was all good for you, we've certainly
enjoyed being with you and hopefully we'll see you at the next lesson, next Tuesday,
all the best, have a great night. Bye bye now.
