Gnosis - Secrets of the Kabbalah

Cibola is one of the most widely practice forms of mysticism followers believe that decoding its ancient texts we'll reveal the answers to the greatest mysteries of life in the 21st century celebrities including Madonna and Britney Spears have taken up a modern interpretation of the practice yet the spread of Kabbalah has sparked controversy strict adherence warned that this mystical practice holds hidden perils throughout history followers have coated their writings to protect Kabbalah secrets how many levels of understanding are there may be infinite so the more you have to decode the past to decode the text the more mystical it is the harder it is to decode in Babylon at the beginning of the sixth century BCE a young Israelite named Ezekiel has a vision as I looked behold a stormy wind came out of the north and fire flashing forth continually and in the midst of the fire there was a throne sitting on the throne was a figure that looked like a man Ezequiel believes he has peered into heaven and seen Gods seated on his throne this vision captivates a group of Jewish mystics they hope that by studying this image they will one day see God for themselves and become one with a divine spirit Jews who are seeking a mystical experience will try to reimagine what is he kill experienced so it becomes the model for Jewish mystical ascent really until the emergence of Kabbalah in the 2nd century CE II the Roman Empire controls what is now Israel Jews who practice their faith openly are either killed or forced into exile it is during this time that many Jews turn to mysticism to help them understand God's will rabbi Shimon bar Yohai is one of the men's searching for answers rabbi Shimon was a great advocate of the people of Israel and taught that Israel has a special intimacy with God and he fled from the Romans who sought to execute him because of anti-roman statements he had made according to Jewish texts bar Yohai hides from the Romans for 13 years in this cave in Pecha ie Israel here bar Yohai meditates on God and the universe using the Torah or Hebrew Scriptures as his guide his unique methods and devout practice make him one of the first key figures in Kabbalah history like bar Yohai other small groups of Jewish mystics begin trying to achieve a greater understanding of God since God wasn't coming to them they were going to her to where God was so they wanted some kind of experience of the divine they used certain meditative techniques that work them well up into another suggestive hypnotic trance their activities are kept hidden the Mystics warn that this practice is too dangerous for average people to attempt ancient legends tell of novices being driven mad or even dying because they were unprepared for the powerful spiritual forces they had unleashed if you're not pure enough if you're not modest enough then God might not accept you then God might not let you go through that journey through meditation the Mystics believe they have achieved a vision of God like the one experienced by the prophet Ezekiel in this vision the entrance to heaven is blocked by a series of gates the Mystics must pass through them before reaching God the entrances are also guarded by menacing angels who keep the unworthy from heaven before the Mystics can advance they have to learn the complicated names of the angels each name must then be repeated an exact number of times the Mystics would wear amulets that would shield them from the power of the Angels and if they went through all the gates and they got into the throne room then they would have this vision they would learn the secrets the Mystics claimed those secrets help them understand God's thoughts at roughly the same time unknown mystics recorded a startling concept into an influential book the text is called the book of creation or the stefarr Yetzirah it describes how God made the world by using the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet God spoke and said let there be light so obviously God's speech was the creating agent but what language did God speak God's will Hebrew of course so the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet were the alphabet of creation what separates Arad does is to try to describe how God created the world in more detail than we find in Genesis it builds on the notion that God created the world through language but now it's not words so much as individual letters and this is probably meant rather literally God took the three letters Olive bet none which spelled the word Evan stone by combining those letters a stone was created and similarly with every object in the universe God created by combining the letters with the numbers rabbis believe the teaching of the Sepher Yetzirah are too powerful for ordinary people to experience and the details of the book are kept hidden these mystical revelations remain underground for hundreds of years in the 11th century the Crusades begin a new wave of anti-jewish persecution as Christian armies try to reclaim the Holy Land from the Arabs fleeing from torture and execution Jews scatter across Europe and the Middle East taking their secret traditions into new territories by the 13th century the mystical teachings have spread to Jewish communities in what are now Germany France and Spain the term Kabbalah meaning receiving in Hebrew now becomes widely used to describe the practice we're really talking about a small group of Jewish teachers rabbis spiritual people who were gathering the earlier traditions developing techniques of meditation and reimagining God and some very startling ways one of the most significant events in Cabela's history occurs around 1280 when a Spanish rabbi claims to discover yet another mysterious text this will soon become the single most important book in Kabbalah it is called the Zohar meaning radiance or splendour in Hebrew it's really the masterpiece of Kabbalah the ideas of the ZOA are very radical and very startling written mainly in aramaic its pages are filled with arcane symbolism and erotic language by arousal below there is similarly arousal above male and female unite desire prevails worlds are blessed and above and below are enjoy to this day the author of the Zohar remains a mystery many Kabbalists believe that rabbi Shimon bar Yohai received divine inspiration to write the Zohar while living in a cave during the second century others suspect that the manuscript was written a thousand years later possibly by a Spanish catalyst or even by a group of Rabbis it's in a way written by someone in Aramaic who didn't really know IRA make that well and you also strangely find words in medieval Portuguese and Spanish in the Tzar so the question scholars have been wrestling with for a couple of hundred years now is who wrote it and had it at um to be but the greatest mystery of the Zohar lies within its mystical text you have to work so hard to decipher it and this is why it's so attractive because of this beautiful game it plays with you of revealing and hiding decoding these complicated passages promises a greater understanding of God and his relationship with humans the Zohar really sees the Bible as a secret code every event in a Zohar every bit of narrative every biblical law is telling something not only about what happens on earth but about God's inner being catalyst believe that if they can successfully decode the Zohar they will unlock the mysteries of both heaven and earth one of these secrets is a startling revelation about God's body and sexuality by the 13th century Kabbalah had spread throughout Europe and the Middle East yet even as the number of Jews studying kabbalah grew their secrets remained closely guarded ever since scholars have been searching for ways to unravel these secrets in Berkeley California Daniel Matt works surrounded by these copies of the Zohar the most revered and mysterious manuscript in Kabbalah his bookcase is filled with versions and commentaries in Aramaic Hebrew English and French they come from libraries around the world he hopes to complete the first English translation of the Zohar based on original Aramaic texts this ambitious work is the latest attempt to understand a book that has perplexed scholars for over 700 years I don't want to ruin the mystery or the strange cryptic quality of the Zohar but I'm trying to make it accessible to contemporary reader the Zohar is perhaps the most difficult Jewish text to translate most of its roughly 2,000 pages are in Aramaic an arcane language that may have been used to further complicate the decoding process on the surface the Zohar is a novel which follows rabbi Shimon bar Yohai and a group of Rabbis on a journey through what is now Israel they wander through the hills of Galilee sharing their secret teachings sometimes running into strange characters on the road catalysts believe that the narrative holds clues that can explain hidden meanings in the Torah or Hebrew Scriptures several examples can be found by reexamining the book of Genesis here the Zohar overturns the traditional account that God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden the Zohar's interpretation illustrates a revolutionary belief that humans can direct God but the ZOA asks a very radical question it says who kicked him out of the garden and the ZOA actually teaches adam expel god from the garden it's as if we're still in the garden but we don't realize it because we we've expelled God we've lost touch with a spiritual dimension and the challenge is to regain some awareness some intimacy with the divine the further catalyst delve into the Zohar the more cryptic the words become it has a very symbolic system this is a deliberated means to keep the Tsar for the elite only the writers probably thought that only those were spiritual enough will be able to decipher it the major symbolic code found in the Zohar is the ten aspects of God's personality the ten Sephirot one popular interpretation shows these characteristics as a map of God's body catalysts believe that if they can understand God's Anatomy they can learn how his powers work these ancient drawings reveal that God's body is similar to humans the top symbolizes God's head which is the source of will wisdom and understanding below that are symmetrically arranged organs and limbs representing love power beauty eternity and splendor the most unusual part of the diagram contains sensual imagery the ninth part of God called the foundation is the phallus or procreative life force of the universe but according to the cipa wrote God also has female components the final element often called Shekinah was depicted as the feminine half of God this image challenged the age-old view of a strictly masculine God what we find for the first time is that this feminine aspect the feminine concept of God is divine and is part of the divinity so to unite the male and female halves of God this becomes the goal of the whole system of the sefirot and the Zora describes that union in very graphic terms there really is a romance within God and a sexual union and that's a striking element of bizarre probably led to its to its wide appeal in some ways this complicated system supported the catalyst teaching that humans affect God students of the Zohar believed that human actions unite these masculine and feminine parts of God how are the two halves of God united through human virtue through loving one's neighbor through helping the poor through observing the Sabbath through various interpersonal and ritual Commandments one brings together these two halves of God you might say that this is how we actualize the divine potential in the world the idea that God is dependent on human beings clashed with traditional beliefs that saw God as an omnipotent ruler we and this is I think an extraordinary idea of the catalyst we have the ability through the performance of sacred deeds to nurture God to influence God to affect God to be able to affect the divine disposition which then will affect the flow down of divine grace to our world but in this relationship human sins create imbalance in this case human misdeeds human unethical conduct human evil empowers the cosmic evil or somehow ruins the harmony within God and stimulates evil in the universe another revolutionary idea encrypted in the Zohar is that even a seemingly insignificant verse in the Hebrew Scriptures can reveal how God feels and acts in the Tsar they read the Bible not only as a story about human beings what's going on in human affairs but they also read it on a mystical level as a story about what's going on within the inner life of God according to the Zohar biblical characters are often metaphors for God's thoughts and actions the quality of loving-kindness for instance came to be associated with Abraham in the Bible so every reference to Abraham doing something was actually viewed as a reference to the role of loving-kindness in the world the Zohar also examines biblical events for hidden meanings the flood according to Kabbalah is happening now if you don't know that the flood is still going on then you're drowning and you don't even know it so various symbols of chaos and destruction from the Bible we're also viewed not in the past tense but as still unfolding while Mystics continued to explore the mysteries of the Zohar another 13th century Spanish catalyst was devising a new method for uniting with God Abraham Abulafia technique involved intense meditation and yoga like movements his followers would use certain hand and head movements to concentrate on the Bible's Hebrew letters the most ancient idea is that God has multiple names and these names have power of Alafia wanted to have the reading of the Bible going to which the entire Bible speaks solely about that by transforming the normal Hebrew nouns and verbs into divine names one of the divine names are Bellavia used was the 72 letter name taken from three verses in Exodus when the letters in the verses were combined according to Abulafia instructions they spelled one of God's secret names through intense meditation on these letters abulafia believed the human mind and god's mind would then unite some catalyst claimed that Moses meditated on this name in order to part the Red Sea at the height of a Spanish Inquisition King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella declared that all Jews must either convert to Christianity or be expelled during 1492 over 100,000 Jews fled Spain once again religious persecution influenced the spread of Kabbalah's teachings a century later many catalysts would use their techniques to call forth the promised Messiah in 1492 the Spanish Inquisition cast tens of thousands of Jews into exile many fled to the Holy Land 90 miles north of Jerusalem in the Galilee region Jewish mystics known as catalysts settled in the town of Safed a number of table lists were attracted to Galilee partly because rabbi Shimon bar Yohai the hero of the Zohar had wandered around the Galilee today the dusty winding roads of Safed are peopled by artists and lined with galleries five centuries ago however Kabbalist believed that the Messiah would one day walk these same streets one of these scriptures it is being said that the Messiah when the Messiah will come to Jerusalem he will first appear in the Galilee so they sort of want to be the first ones to catch him the mystical texts known as the Zohar taught the good behavior increased God's powers on earth based on this philosophy catalyst hoped that a life of holiness would bring forth the Messiah catalyst in Safed strove to become a perfect religious Society the feeling was that our people have to help God bring the Messiah they have to be pure enough they would be up at midnight to say the prayers and then up again at dawn to pray with the rising of the Sun Cabala masters in Safed instructed their followers to engage in meticulous meditation fasts and adherence to the Torah the most famous leader was rabbi Isaac Luria from Jerusalem by the time Lauria began teaching in Safed in 1570 he was regarded as one of the most important holy men of the century as a young man Lauria had spent several years in seclusion near Cairo Egypt they're Kabbalist say Louie has studied the Zohar and had visions of angels and biblical prophets there's some evidence that he used the Zohar sort of a mantra that he would take passages of the Zohar and repeat it over and over again until he got deep in cited in this trance-like State Lauria acquired extraordinary abilities her by Isaac Luria he could look at a person's forehead and read everything about about that person somewhat like reading the the palm he was a healer he could tell people's past lives and what has did to be fixed Lauria believed that understanding a person's prior life would provide insight into their current problems he taught a theory of reincarnation in which he claimed that every individual is descended from a certain soul root after Adam and Eve you descended from either cane or Abel we are descended from the three sons of Noah Shem ham and japhet so you have at least five options if not more of a basic soul root and that soul root determines your essential nature with Luria's help many Kabbalist searched for links to their past these burial sites around suffit took on an important role as Kabbalists tried to find the graves of their previous incarnations they would take on the soul of the deceased who was lying there and speak with that person's voice to this day gravesite rituals and pilgrimages continue around suffit here of followers gather at the tomb of rabbi Shimon bar Yohai some are practicing Luria's teachings one of Luria's main contributions to Kabbalah was a new concept of creation the world only exists because God needed somebody to relate to implying that God has some need for love for relationship Lauria taught that the first act was not creation but actually a withdrawal God withdrew you might say in all directions from one central point creating a kind of vacuum an empty spot within God according to Lauria the emptiness gave God room to create the world God placed vessels in the void and began filling them with divine light shattering several of the vessels in this case the creation of the world and catastrophe are tied together you can't have creativity without destruction at the same time Luria explained that sparks from the shattered vessels fell to earth everything God created contained one of these divine sparks according to Lauria humans can reunite these fragments of divine spirit with God through good works our deeds can repair the upper world and when all of those sparks are restored then you have messianic Redemption in 1572 when isaac luria died of the plague many Kabbalist feared his death was a punishment for revealing forbidden secrets it's a blow to the expectations of redemption after suffered sort of fades away gradually until the end of the century the invention of the printing press would soon spread Kabbalah teachings like never before by the time of Luria's death bound copies of the Zohar as well as manuscripts written in Safed were available to the public Cibola seemed to have finally come out of hiding by the 16th century Kabbalah's mystical ideas had reached much of the Jewish world followers practiced throughout Europe North Africa and the Middle East in the coming century Kabbalah would spread like religious wildfire but in the wrong hands its teachings would have disastrous repercussions the sixteenth century was marked by the unprecedented spread of the Jewish mysticism known as Kabbalah it began when the Zohar and other mystical works were translated into Latin Christian philosophers were eager to study Kabbalah and believed it could help solve the mysteries of their own faith they're very much interested in Kabbalah especially as disolve is perceived as a text that was written more or less in that period of a of Jesus Christ hence they assumed that there is an uncontaminated pure Judaism of the time of Christ which entails the truths of Christianity this belief was the foundation of what is often called Christian Kabbalah Renaissance thinkers also used Kabbalah to understand the works of Pythagoras and Plato whose philosophies mirrored aspects of Jewish mysticism some scholars claim philosopher Gottfried Leibniz who invented calculus and even Isaac Newton studied Kabbalistic ideas I wouldn't assume that modern science is based on a on Kabbalah but certainly the people who created modern science and modern philosophy there was an interesting Kabbalah meanwhile Kabbalah was also been studied by two men who would unknowingly spark one of the greatest catastrophes in cabela's history Shabba ties V was born in what is now Izmir Turkey in 1626 as a young man's V suffered from recurring nightmares about demonic attacks and turned to the Zohar for answers Shabba tights fee was apparently a very gifted but very troubled young man who had reached a crisis by the age of 40 scholars now believes be experienced alternating states of deep depression and manic euphoria the climax came when he staged a mock marriage between himself and a Torah scroll it was the nature of his affliction to periodically violate the commandments publicly and be thrown out of a community on a wave of scandal banished by several Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire VIII fled to Jerusalem where he wandered through the streets reciting Kabbalistic chants in 1665 v met Nathan of Gaza a young man studying kabbalah the two spent several weeks together traveling through what is now Israel in time Nathan became convinced that's V was the Messiah Nathan proclaimed that the Messiah had appeared the good news travelled from synagogue to synagogue in the Ottoman Empire and then in Europe by 1666 the entire Jewish world was captivated by the coming of the Messiah shrimpanzee was a manic-depressive and but a very charismatic manic-depressive and uh and a lot of people gathered around him you know other people felt that you know the time was ripe in fact this might be what we've been waiting for in early 1666 Ottoman soldiers arrested V and brought him to the Sultan's palace in what is now Turkey the Sultan sentence VIII to death for creating a public frenzy the Turkish sultan gave him as an offer you can't refuse namely convert to Islam or I'll cut your head off because if you are the Messiah and I cut your head off you'll be able to put it back if shop tats fee had been willing to have been martyred this might have created another phenomenon such as Jesus here's the Messiah dying for his faith but Chuck debts he took the easy way out and converted to Islam Wednes V emerge from the palace a Muslim a handful of supporters followed his example and converted to Islam but the vast majority of Jews were outraged Jews accused Kabbalists of heresy and blame Kabbalah for leading them astray I would say that one of the major effects he had was convincing people that mysticism was bad stuff that mysticism was dangerous that mysticism led to all kinds of terrible things it's at that point that you have the restrictions really put into place more more severely about who should study Kabbalah and how widely it could be spread a few Kabbalistic circles continued to thrive in Eastern Europe including a group whose practice became known as Hasidism a rabbi and mystic called the Baal Shem Tov or master of the good name became the leader of the Hasidic movement at the beginning of the 18th century the Baal Shem Tov unified other mystical circles who were operating under the radar as it were while early Kabbalah had been reserved for a select few hasidism took elements of Kabbalah and made them accessible to ordinary people contrary to the strict meditation and study of early Kabbalah Hassid ism emphasized celebrating God in everyday life the seed is amol so encouraged a more open exchange of cabbalistic ideas there's a democratic impulse and how citizen anyone can serve God anyone is beloved of God if one discovers the spark so this idea of the hidden sparks which had appeared in Kabbalah now it becomes a technique of finding God in the world while the larger Jewish population continued to shun mysticism Hasidic Jews preserved Kabbalah's traditions throughout the 1800s today Kabbalah has taken on an entirely new appearance in the City of Angels some scholars believe this trend is precisely when early practitioners had feared most that Kabbalah would fall into the hands of the spiritually unprepared Kabbalah achieved widespread popularity for the first time in the late 1600s but when the mystical practice became linked to a false messiah catalysts across Europe and the Middle East were shunned for the next 250 years Kabbalah remained in the shadows of Jewish life in the 1930s a German historian named Gershom Scholem began to rediscover the teachings of Jewish mysticism he spent many many years travelling through the libraries of Europe and cataloguing and reading these manuscripts some of which had simply not been opened for decades or in some cases centuries you could say that he made this material accessible to the Western world as Hitler's Third Reich spread terror throughout Europe Jews found themselves struggling to understand the persecution torture and murder faced by their people Kabbalah's believe that evil deeds could throw the universe out of balance was tragically underscored by the Holocaust with over 6 million Jews killed the world had reached one of its darkest hours yet Jews and catalysts were also hopeful that the world could be repaired at times of crises at times of suffering when people are trying to satisfy their own need for order and meaning and fulfilment mysticism can provide some of the answer to that in the 1960s the American counterculture explored new approaches to religion one of those spiritual seekers was Philip Berg a rabbi from New York in the late 1960s Berg traveled to Israel where he delved into Kabbalah's teachings Berg soon devoted himself to studying the ancient practice his goal was to share kabbalah with the masses he reshapes it by presenting it in a way that Simon was not versed in kabbalistic texts in' and doesn't know much even about judaism can understand these ideas and apply them for his way of life Berg simplified interpretation of Kabbalah spread quickly at the beginning of the 1970s Berg opened his first Kabbalah Centre in Tel Aviv during the 1980s Philip Berg and his family constructed a Kabbalah Empire based here in Los Angeles today what is known as the kabbalah center has several million followers and operates branches in nearly 100 cities making it the largest cabbalistic organization in the world here at the LA headquarters Kabbalah has caught the attention of celebrities seeking a spiritual dimension to their lives berg's two sons help promote the concept that unlike the restricted kabbalah of the past this practice is open to all we offer COBOL for everyone without any barriers raise sex religion anything so we're very excited about the opportunity of bringing this wisdom which has been hidden - to the masses but making it accessible understandable and practical by opening the doors to everyone the kabbalah center has opened itself to harsh criticism you have all of these Hollywood people jumping on the kabbalah bandwagon but many of them in i choose and they're not observing jewish law where they're studying a real cabal i doubt it they tend to say here's a sacred name here's a sacred practice that will bequeath to you some cabbalistic power the kabbalah center emphasizes ancient practices such as meditating on the 72 names of god and making pilgrimages to catalyst sites in Israel like Madonna did in 2004 a pop star called Madonna adopting Kabbalah I think this is in a nutshell this is postmodern called spirituality for you it's really a a match made in heaven between kobata center in madonna wearing religious objects is also popular such as tying a red string around the wrists to ward off evil forces the practical Kabbalah the world of amulets as it is today is an aspect that they can touch that they can read that they can feel that's physical and these are all things for which theoretical Kabbalah doesn't touch them doesn't reach them new Kabbalah is study Kabbalah not in order to understand the universe the secrets of the universe but in order to find a practical way of Mike making your life better decoding Kabbalah has been a complex mystical journey for thousands of years and the quest to control its secrets and continues to this day I think there is a struggle of possession of Kabbalistic knowledge who's in the possession of interpreting it and explaining its Worth and significance to the water rule you can have one and that connects to God and that's this true serious deep study of Kabbalah is going on and will continue I'm sure that a lot of them who are not said the not sincere ones will simply drop out sooner or later Wow many followers say that even with absolute dedication it is impossible to discover all the hidden meanings within Kabbalah there's another whole level the countless there's so many layers and levels of cabal that you could take your whole life and still not going to finish learning the universal law this ancient mystical wisdom will no doubt continue to reveal new mysteries to the modern world people search for new techniques and means and paths to make their lives spiritual so I think as long as there will be humanity there will be useless ISM it's something very ancient and something very immediate and contemporary at the same time and I think that's what makes Kabbalah so intriguing is that it it's both new and ancient this questioning why are we here in the world there's questioning about the nature of God and Kabbalah does promote and try to answer those questions you the entire aural was not written down the oral tradition was given to Moses at the same time that it was given the tablets and given the written Torah the five books of Moses he was also given an oral tradition at that time and that was also handed down for many many centuries in fact until the second century it was handed down and then it was written it was handed down orally with people making notes and things like there was no formal written oral tradition but because of the persecutions they were suffering under the Romans and the fear that much of the oral tradition was going to be lost so some of the sages under the leadership and guidance of Rabbi Judah the Prince Ravi who Ganassi wrote down the Mishnah which is the basic kernel of the Talmud and at the same time more or less the Kabbalah was written down in form of the Czar and several other capitalistic works as well at the same time more or less more or less at the same time Cabala as I said means Jewish mysticism so it's important not only to put the accent on mysticism it's important to put the X until the Kabbalah is a mystical tradition coming out of Judaism and therefore is an inextricable part of the Jewish religious tradition meaning its theology its laws its rituals it's holiday observances and you cannot detach Kabbalah from Judaism it would be like having a premise without a conclusion which is a fallacy and I say this because many people today are maintaining and you see advertisements for courses today in Kabbalah where they say well this has nothing to do with Judaism it's impossible to have Jewish mysticism without Judaism so Kabbalah is the mystical tradition of Judaism this goes back to the whole issue raised by the sifrits era and other forms of Jewish cosmology how the world came into being in other cultures you had a variety of ideas let's say in mythology's of how the world came into being through a fight between the gods through the death of a god and using the body to be the basis for the world or for human beings or something like this you have legends about the world coming from a hatched primordial egg you of all kinds of legends in Jewish tradition you have a kind of I would say unique view and that is that the key to creation is language that language brought about the creation after all in the biblical story of creation we read God said let to create this and there it was so the idea was that the world was created through the use of language particularly the Hebrew language so therefore if you could master the permutations of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet particularly the permutation of the letters of certain words in the Hebrew alphabet like the ineffable name of God called in fancy language the tetragrammaton then you could undertake creative activities of your own and one example of this that comes out of the safer yet serie it's found the commentaries that say fruits iran not in the book itself is an idea that floats through the history of Jewish mysticism is found in many novels today even and that is the idea of what's called the golem namely the creation of artificial life through the manipulation of certain letters of the Hebrew alphabet as the key to creation now if this idea sounds very outlandish consider if you will how we look at the new discoveries about genomics the genome is presented as being represented the four nucleotides of which were all composed are represented by four letters G ATC and the combination and recombination of those letters leads us to knowledge hopefully of how to cure disease and even how to create life this is essentially the exact same idea as you find in the commentaries to the Seyfried serie and in certain Jewish mystical texts so the idea was that yes the safer at serie was used to create things if you mastered the techniques that the commentaries explained as being implicit within this very short treatise the book of formation or the savory at zero magic plays a big role in Jewish magic and Jewish superstition in Jewish mysticism in Jewish superstition today a lot of these ideas sound very quaint to us but I would suggest that we look at them another way than we usually do rather than simply look at them as superstition look at them first as a kind of science of the day in other words they use let's say certain potions and certain charms and certain behavior because it worked in the past so it was the kind of science of the day they didn't have the technology we did but they knew that if you did certain things certain other things one can happen usually certain bad things secondly they view the world as being populated by demons by malevolent invisible forces now this sounds like a very bizarre idea but if you look at say things that were afraid of like viruses these are invisible malevolent forces and we take action to try to prevent them from hurting us this is exactly the same view that they had there are invisible malevolent forces trying to hurt us and we have to take certain action to try to prevent that or if they do hurt us to try to cure ourselves of us of this so I would call it a kind of proto scientific approach and I would say that in the history of Jewish mysticism in magic there are four kinds of Jewish magic one is predictive magic in other words using certain techniques to try to predict the future so if it's going to be good you can take advantage of it and if it's going to be bad you can either mitigate the effect or avoid it altogether and we have a whole industry in our contemporary society futurology even weatherman Ultra and stock market Alastair everybody's trying to predict the future for the same reasons that they were then you have preventative magick taking using certain techniques to try to prevent certain things from happening to you an amulet can be used in this regard it tries to keep certain evil forces away from you I mean that's why people take flu shots it's kind of a modern form of an amulet to try to keep the viruses away from you and what is a virus mean the viruses means it's in the air means it's invisible and it's malevolent then you have curative magic which is the use of certain techniques to cure a person who has been adversely affected by some kind of evil force and you use say potions called today drugs pharmaceuticals you use charms spells amulets folk medicine some of it not very unlike what we're using today and then you have creative magic the most prominent example being the creation of artificial life usually formed around the legend of the God so I would say that you have all of this kind of magic within Jewish folklore and within Jewish mysticism and in Jewish mysticism you also have the idea of what they call the drawing down of the divine flow called in Hebrew the chef of the divine influx in other words there's good stuff up there there's divine energy up there and you want to draw it down to help you achieve your most material goals in other words the most spiritual thing in the universe to flow divine grace if it's brought down to our world and channeled in the right direction helps bring about most material results like let's say prosperity fertility safety and the creature and fulfillment of the creature needs Shekinah is one of the most important contributions of Kabbalah it balances the patriarchal view of God what God is described predominantly almost exclusively in masculine terms and most of most of Western religion most of Western religious literature God is seen as the but as the King as the judge as the ruler as the warrior and that masculine depiction of God Kabbalah is really offering a critique a theological critique and saying that this is an inadequate way to picture God God should be seen as equally male and female so in some ways the feminine depiction of God is emphasizing the more intimate side of God God as mother God is the constant companion of Israel the other amazing thing about Shekinah is that in some ways it's a in some ways it's a it's a recovery a rediscovery of the ancient goddess of course if we go back to the ancient Near East we have many goddesses a not a shara a start a just to speak of the Canaanite forms of the goddess and we find in the Bible a very strong criticism of Canaanite fertility worship the prophets are railing against the people because some of them are attracted to the Canaanite goddesses but we know that there were Israelites who worship the goddess there were even Israelite to try to combine worship of the goddess with worship of the Hebrew God for example archaeologists have found material on which is written - you'd have of hay and his azshara - God and his goddess now the Bible condemns this kind of syncretism is combining of of monotheism with with paganism and in later Judaism you find hardly any references to the goddess and yet in Kabbalah the goddess re-emerges you might say that the goddess has now been made kosher that I think is a startling a startling development it somehow it shows this shows that the the feminine depiction of God had a stronghold on people and answered a deep basic human need for God to be intimate and accessible and not just the the ruler in heaven this is how the zohar interpret the opening words of Genesis the Hebrew is Bereshit bara Elohim which we usually translate in the beginning God created but the Zohar insists on reading the words in the precise order in which they appear in Hebrew beret sheets in the beginning bara it created Elohim God in the beginning it created God the Tsar takes that to mean in the beginning infinity created God now what could that possibly mean God is now the object of the verse not the subject which sounds impossible or heretical but the Tsar I think is saying that infinity is the true reality of God anything else that we call God is puny compared to that that's our own imagination or our own our own estimate of what God could be doesn't do justice to the true reality of God so infinity brought about all that we think of as God and for the Zohar that's the meaning of the opening of Genesis in the beginning infinity created what we call God well the first thing to understand is that the Zohar is very concerned with Jewish practice and the first set of secrets that it's in concerned with are the secrets of why you do certain things the way you do them why you leave three little hairs sticking up from the base of your phylacteries of your tefillin why you pour off a few drops of wine every time you recite the ten plagues at the Passover Seder small inexplicable things are explained by the Tsar as having deeper meanings in fact both of those things that I mentioned are sacrifices to the demonic forces the demonic forces the forces of evil want their want their piece of the pie they want to dip their beaks in the religious practice so to speak and you give them a little something when the ZOA presents its view of underlying reality it definitely says that evil is to some degree separate from God the forces of evil can work for God they can be God's employees they can also be simply obstructions leftover materials from creation like tripping over a beam or a brick on a building site something got left around and it served as an obstruction but certainly there are forces of evil that are slightly different and they do mischief there were always demons and evil spirits in Talmudic Judaism one of the most interesting ones was Lalit Lalit was according to the one rabbinic reading of the Bible Adam's first wife that is to say the rabbi's taught the woman in Genesis 1 is not the same woman in Genesis 2 the woman in Genesis 1 is Lalit the woman in Genesis 2 is Eve Eve is not the same as Lalit Lalit left Adam got tired of him and went off to become the queen of the d-minuses she is the queen of nocturnal emission and crib death and as a popular amulet there are amulets soul to protect infants from Lalit she's also become a feminist icon in liberal Judaism which is an odd thing you can walk down the streets of a Jewish neighborhood walk into a conservative temple and find a copy of Lolita magazine which is the magazine of Jewish feminism and then you can walk across the street to a Jewish bookstore in Los Angeles and st. Louis wherever and buy an amulet to put in your child's crib to protect them from Lalit the most ancient idea is that God has multiple names and these names have power already from the time of the Talmud there were secret names of God and these names never left Kabbalah eventually invoking these names was seen as a way to protect yourself from evil forces many Jews of the the last generations used to wear a little mezuzah a little gold amulet around their neck with the basic Jewish prayer the schwa in it now there's no commandment to wear a mezuzah around your neck what it is is in Prior generations they had worn amulets around their necks to protect them to gain a a spouse for them to protect them from disease to ward off evil these amulets were based in sacred names the idea that there's a dichotomy between the body and the soul really began in the Talmud in the Midrash and they said that there in fact five names for the soul and Jewish philosophy began to employ three of these saying that there's a lowest part of the soul that dwells in the gravesite there's an emotional soul that goes and lives with God in heaven when people die and there's a transcendent soul a spark of God that dissolves back into God when a person dies therefore a person's soul really has three parts the physical soul the emotional soul which is gone to live in the celestial Garden of Eden with God and the transcendent divine soul which dissolves back into God now from this came an interesting set of practices to Kabbalah that is first of all the highest part of the soul in order to dissolve back into God takes at least a year to rise up to God and it requires a lot of help so from the Zohar among other sources came the idea that the mourner has to recite a certain prayer called the Kaddish in which God's name is sanctified and the recitation of that prayer once a day three times a day once a week whatever they can manage will help push that highest level of the soul back to God at the same time the gravesite the graveyard really contains the lowest level of the soul so if a person goes to visit the grave that's not a simple emotional thing to do there is a meaning to going to the grave the soul of the deceased lives there and if there the soul of a very great saint then their soul has great mobility if you pray there that prayer will be transmitted to the lower soul which is still connected to the emotional stole which is still connected to the transcendent soul which has dissolved into God so that is a place to go to pray that is an acupuncture point of spiritual or if you have a deceased relative somebody who cared about you an elderly grandparent let's say and you pray at their grave they will take the trouble to communicate that message to God so graveyards became positive places to the Mystics particularly in spot and spot is dotted with graves going back to the Hellenistic period that have great meaning and our pilgrimage sites one of the great spot rituals was the right the cult shall I say of the shrine ah and the cult of the divine marriage now people don't really think about this when they go to Temple in America and rise at the end of a certain him and bow and sing come o bride come o bride but in fact that spot kabbalists viewed the Friday night service and meal as a wedding feast when the divine parts of God above unified with the earthly feminine aspect of God in the world the sheena and they had sexual union on friday night and this has survived into general Jewish practice to this day o Brahma Bellavia was born in 1214 Saragosa and then he pelegrin ate it actually almost all his life to today law to Italy to Greece to a curl a corn and the visceral back to Greece back to Italy back to Spain again back to Greece vector Italy and then in Sicily where he apparently died in 1291 so that's a very intense what's called an itinerant scholar or errant scholar he did it because he wasn't search for other Taft's types of knowledge and regular and he moved from one center of culture to another and attempted to absorb n to offer synthesis between different forms of knowledge he learned basically he started as a philosopher and then he started to study Kabbalah and he offered a synthesis between Jewish philosophy what's called Maimonides in between Cassady Ashkenazi Lazzaro forms which is much more magical much more linguistically oriented so he started with the Greek form of knowledge maimoni daeun philosophy which is basically started and then he combined it with theory which is totally different just to do with the power of language which is rejected by my wonders rejected by Aristotle so he offered a powerful synthesis then two forms of Jewish culture the under Lucian one Maimonides and the German one which is Casa deafness so that how the broader picture is that two cultures totally different in clash were brought together by someone who studied both of them in his jaws and around the age of 31 he came with the synthesis which he attempted to disseminate in all the thousand part of Europe he did it because he believed that he is a prophet that's the way to achieve prophecy and he believed that he is a prophet and even more so because he believed that he's the Messiah so it was part of his messianic enterprise which means that he believed the nation is not just someone coming and bringing the Jews out of exiled to a certain place hardly he believed it he believed that messianism is teaching people how to rescue himself from their body from their exile in the matter in the body which that is for him real Redemption so for him the series that I'm going to elaborate about and not just mystical techniques there are ways to reach ecstasy with which he holds prophecy which is a redemptive experience he believes that he is going to teach all the people on the world Jews or non Jews he is going to be on side he will save them that doesn't mean it's going to happen in the same year that is maybe a cumulative process but for him that was mechanism so his assumption is that he can bring together the idea of intellectual perfection from Maimonides with a technique how to achieve it instantly from Eleazar forms that's why he wrote commentaries on my own in this book and the other side he wrote commentaries on separate serie a book which is very dear to us our forms and my one is never mentioned and he rejected it basically implicitly so he attempted actually to capitalize on the two most important medieval achievements in the generation before him so he offered a technique which has two different how to visit aspects one is how by combining letters someone is deconstructing the normal consciousness and in such a way he is able to open his consciousness to another form of experience which means that by reciting letters of the divine name and letters of the Hebrew alphabet which are meaningless someone is in a way this constructing the notions he believes in or his worldview magic and the use of amulets as expressing it was a part of the Jewish people from time immemorial and even before the Kabbalah became a discipline as it were sometime in the twelfth century as it's normally figured it's dealt with in the Talmud then we have documentation from the Cairo Genizah of earlier documents having to do with magic but today nonetheless all of these things are called practical Kabbalah even though some of them have histories going back to the pre Kabbalistic period nonetheless today the idea of magic and Kabbalah on a practical level are considered one in the same distracting the ego is turning the will to receive into will to receive is the ego is the egoistic will yes and destroying it is becoming divine now this is a ashlag young Kabbalistic theme but that fits very well New Age ideas of constructing also constructing fighting combating the ego ego seen as something superficial in superficial and finding the inner self in a divine self so here again there's a New Age interpretation of Kabbalah but it's based on a Kabbalistic theme that appears previous to to this new in New Age interpretation kabbalah center and noise almost everyone does various levels and of course one is appropriating saying that they know they're in charge if they do represent a very radical interpretation of Kabbalah which is perceived as sacred to many Orthodox Jews who perceive cabal in a very different way for them teaching Kabbalah to Gentiles for instance that's a red line that should be crossed the popularization of Kabbalah against something that's very very offensive to many Orthodox rabbis and because of that is quite a polemical struggle against them academics are also usually quite against them again after teaching Kabbalah and studying kabbalah for many years that others come this group and target small as the same kind of audience and offers them I think there is a struggle of possession of Kabbalistic knowledge who's in the possession of interpreting it and explaining its worth and in significance to the world water world I'll scholar I don't think we should get into this struggle we should try to understand things and not be part of it but I think some of the academics are very opposed because they would say this is not the Kabbalah what you're teaching is Kabbalah is not the Cabal of the 13th century now for me that is obvious of course it's not because of that it was interesting it's so interesting if it would be developed 18 surgery it will be a significant a cultural phenomena but trying to appropriate Kabbalah to the 21st century and succeeding in that that is what I think as a historian of culture of Jewish a history etc that that's what I find fascinated and I think that what Kabbalist always did because also ruya isaac luria in the 16th century didn't represent the zohar 'ok ideas he appropriated them to the 16th century audience and that is what kabbalah center and many other groups neighbor all other groups are doing and they're doing it very successfully and i find it fascinating and interesting and really legitimate if there is such a thing of legitimacy in these issues as continuing the tradition of Kabbalah taking things from tradition and appropriating and explaining them in a way that is significant to people in their own time the text starts by stating that God created the world with 32 paths of wisdom and the three two paths are defined as ten Sephirot associated with numbers and 22 Hebrew letters and ten Sufi wrote in the text are explained as the past and the future that's the time to mention the space dimension has six directions east-west north-south up and down and then the the spiritual human mind body dimension is good neva how we choose between good and evil so that's the ten and then there's 22 Hebrew letters that are divided into three groups three mother letters seven double letters and twelve simple letters and these numbers three seven and twelve are explained in terms of time and space and that spiritual human dimension the three mother letters they're expressed in in time as fire water and air fire is like the hot season water is the cold season and then the air is a temperate season so throughout the years divided into three seasons and space it's the heavens is fire the earth is water an atmosphere it is air and the human body the head is associated with fire the belly with water and the chest with air seven in time are associated with the seven days of the week in space are associated with the seven planets that we can see with the naked eye and the seven openings of the senses the two years the two eyes two nostrils in the mouth a lot of Kabbalah has to do with the Messianic idea and the Czar speaks about the Messianic era as taking place in the sixth the end of the sixth millennium preparing for the seventh millennium this has to do with the Jewish calendar and the Jewish calendar starts with Adam and the first the first two millennia take us from Adam to Abraham according to the Jewish calendar Abraham was was born in 1948 of the the Jewish calendar and then the third millennia and the fourth millennia was a time that the the Torah the books of the Old Testament were reformed and also the Talmud the fifth millennium in entirety the Jewish people were in were in exile and they had a tradition that the redemption would happen at the sunrise of the of the sixth millennium now this has to do also with the parents of the Zohar at the end of the thirteenth century if you want me to talk a little bit about about this idea of the sixth millennium I think it's important to understand one of the services in in Judaism is receiving the Shabbat on Friday afternoon so the nights the the day starts with the night says it was evening it was morning one one day so Shabbat starts in in the evening and the service of receiving the Shabbat was developed here in Tsfat so it's not just receiving the seventh day it's about receiving the seventh millennium so the sixth millennium starts in the Hebrew year five thousand which is 1240 C and the Zohar appears something like 12 1290 and in Spain so that's like the stars coming out on Thursday night the beginning of the the sixth millennium so if we fast forward from there 250 years so it takes us to midnight of the sixth millennium and that's the Year 1492 a lot of changes happen in the world from twelve forty to two fourteen ninety one of them is the explosion of the Jews from from Spain and that's when Columbus was sent and discovered the whole other part of the world there was a shift from thinking about the world is flat to thinking of it as round it was the beginning of the the Renaissance or the Renaissance was happening Galileo was that at that time as well important changes in in the world and that's when kabbalah would became very popular in in spot the zohar was first published in the middle of of the sixteenth century so the Kabbalists in in spot had not just manuscripts available but actual printed tests and that was the midnight of the sixth sixth millennium the Zora teaches that the rooster crows at midnight announcing the dawn so the spreading of the teachings of of a Kabbalah which is about how to align one soul and become inspired it's about returning to prophecy so the teachings of the Kabbalah it's about bringing back inspiration to a people that has been suffering in exile for for for many years so the spreading of the the teachings was about to prepare for the Messianic era the Tsar can be explained we wrote in a more general sense but loriana Kabbalah is primarily about parts of him and it's about using the metaphor of family as for for tikkun olam repairing the world the idea is that if we see God in our own image and just like we are both masculine and feminine young and old so we see God in in Kabbalah those visions of God in Kabbalah as both young and old both masculine and and feminine and just like the dynamics that we have with our family sometimes they're broken and sometimes we repair so it's a metaphor for the entire universe that there's broken aspects of the universe and it's a part of our our job to repair their brokenness so if we can heal the the breaks in our in our family and then extend that outward to our community to our nation and ultimately to the to the entire world this is the process that human beings and God are engaged as a partnership in repairing the world

Channel: Raphael Panameno

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Keywords: Gnosis, Gnosticism, Kabala, Kabbalah, cabala, Talmud, Torah, Zohar, bahir, Yetzirah, Gematria, Temura, Jesus, Biblia, Evangelio, Cristo, documental, Señor, Jerusalem, Pedro, Pablo, Juan Bautista, Juan, bautista, Resurreccion, Maria, magdalena, cristianismo, biblia, meditacion, Copto, Samael, Samael Aun weor, Litelantes, karma, Buda, Dalai, lama, dalai lama, Apotol, esóterico, metafísica, Documental, Teosofia hermetica, hermetismo, rosacruz

Id: ppT8JK1loSg

Length: 84min 32sec (5072 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2013