Kabbalah Lesson 1 (5-Part Series)

welcome anyone who's watching online to intro to kabbalah this is actually our morning class called user's guide to the soul we just had a small technical glitch with the first 15 minutes of the class you're gonna you're gonna watch so we're reteaching that and learning it with this group and then we'll transition to the evening class uh so everything should make sense as you're watching um thanks maya and we're going to be using label wolf's text practical kabbalah which is available anywhere practical kabbalah by rabbi label wolf will be following through that so if you're watching at home good idea to get a copy of this book and we'll announce the pages as we uh as we uh introduce readings um and let me say even if you're out there i look forward to learning from each person that that i sit down with to learn including yourselves as label often says i've heard myself talk about this quite a bit in my case even when no one else is around so uh feel free to email in questions if you're going to start watching live you can texting questions as we're recording and be part of the class and i'm looking forward to learning from you before we start getting into kabbalah let's look at the structure of the soul and mind body and soul and what those definitions are and for those here want to grab one of these so you can follow as we go along so if you if you pull up please that first slide adam this is a model of who we actually are from a kabbalistic perspective right this is from practical kabbalah page 36. and this shows you sort of a diagram of what the soul is often in the west we think of the soul as a single point of light within or as a uniform glowing ball of light or something along those lines and judy's in the soul is quite a complex being a complex living organism and here's a basic structure of what it is the soul is an umbilical cord flowing from the bottom of this diagram space time and consciousness so this world where we are flowing upward through four spiritual worlds until finally it flows out of what we call the ainsof which simply means infinite without end so in kabbalah ainsof is the term most often used for god we'll mostly stick with that can we get sorry if we need to share it can we pass a few around i apologize if they're not enough thank you oh you've got good good beautiful so the soul is like an umbilical cord flowing from life from the here and now up through these four spiritual worlds until it flows out of the ain't south and we can see the four spiritual worlds perhaps we'll get into them a little more detail in a later class if there were this infinite light or in fact this infinity it doesn't it's not even a light yet but it emits an infinite light and that light would be impossible for us to use because if we encountered it we would be nullified like the flame of a candle within the sphere of the sun a tiny candle flame in a dark room may have reality but put it into the center of the sphere of the sun there's really no candle flame there it's just sun so we can't use that light it's too bright so in order to dim it the ain't stuff created a huge huge barrier where none of the light gets through whatsoever like a a shade on a lamp and yet even though none of the light gets through there's an impression on the other side and more light comes through which unfortunately is still infinite light that we can't use right so even this world of its seals is still too bright we would have no being so another another barrier another shade is put on and finally another and finally another until finally we get down to this world where there's almost no spiritual light and now we can actually see move around we can use that light as beings so to get back to the definition the soul is a spiritual umbilical cord flowing from our reality up through these spiritual worlds emerging out of the ain't self and just to clarify spiritual worlds are not sci-fi other dimensional different realities where different things are happening it's the same world moving upwards with the same beings however it's much much more subtle much much more energetic and spiritual a sword is secret sword yeah so yeah means one in yiddish that's correct but in hebrew ain means without and self means end so it's a hebrew term yeah but really what infinite without end there may be some nice casitas in that well i'll have to have to you know check if that's if that's the case that sounds beautiful now what is the body the soul is a very spiritual creature has a lot of trouble picking up this pen has a lot of trouble speaking with a physical mouth has a lot of trouble walking around eating food the soul is not used to physical reality it needs some kind of a vehicle to navigate all that that vehicle which we perhaps call the spacesuit of the soul is the body so when you look at your body what is it that's the vehicle by which your soul the spiritual being navigates time and space and even consciousness physical brain thinking physical thoughts that's the body's role and the soul can only think physical thoughts through the medium of the body and finally what's mind we'll define that very simply as the soul flows through the body mind is the byproduct of the soul flowing through the brain so soul flows through physical brain byproduct mind those are three terms we'll use in these five classes as we go through the basics of kabula soul mind and body and usually when i get to this point uh you know people realize it's a whole new language new terms that we're trying to to uh uh to adapt you know there's an anecdote about a a a fellow from poland who spoke mostly yiddish and polish and he came to america and he was taking an english class and the teacher said can somebody please spell the word cultivate and he raised his hand very proudly spelled it correctly and then the teacher said good now can use it in a sentence and he said of course i was waiting at the bus stop but it was too cultivate so i went back inside yeah there's a yiddis right [Laughter] i actually got a snort on the original uh on the original document right right from my friend right teacher gave money there you go so what what is kabbalah um and from people in this room have been learning how would you define kabbalah primarily what does kabala mean very good so the mystical information of judaism and the word itself kabbalah means what receiving like a belt receive so kabbalah primarily is spoken about as a means of receiving that's that mystical information and that's very much how it functions something was transmitted at sinai beyond the text of the torah there was something say above that text that couldn't be put into words and that was transmitted to moshe who taught it to a circle of people and throughout history it's been received and transmitted from teacher to student not something you can really explain consciously but somehow you can still receive it and transmit it to students later on and it arrives down to us and let me say first of all i i probably no one in this room thinks of themselves as a couple myself also i think of myself as a student of kabbalah not as a kabbalist but even people like us who are just learning the basics it is something you still can receive at your level whatever that is and transmit in whatever way to the people in your uh environment of kabbalah uh kabbalist those that's a very rare rare breed uh so these are these are people that are very at a very lofty level in terms of learning and personality uh uh uh um refinement and then there's a certain gift that i'm told comes where you know they receive a flow of something and i don't know what that's about for me i'm just a normal guy trying to learn but we're told each one of us can still receive something of the flow and still teach it in our manner to the people in our environment even if we're not kabbalists so big disclaimer there you know uh yeah i've i've encountered a few people that are said to be kabbalists i i don't have an antenna for that so i just take their word for it uh so yes on the one hand it is a transmission of a mystical tradition that was hidden and for various reasons now is much more acceptable and accessible and people like us can get together and learn it in all kinds of languages wherever you want there's resources everywhere and you can look up and see why it is in history that in particular now new expressions of kabbalah have emerged that are much easier for someone to learn who doesn't know aramaic fluently who doesn't learn 18 hours a day who isn't necessarily a man etc etc but now it's a tool for all of us and let's dive in but the second definition of kabbalah is a little more counterintuitive and to see that let's look at how the word or the root is used in the torah in fact the only time in the five books of moses that that the root for kabbalah is used in the torah and that is in exodus 26 5 and and the term is right the loops are corresponding so what's happening we're building the mishka and we're building the tabernacle and there's these curtains these drapes rather that are on the outside and they have to be attached together so here's the instructions make 50 loops on the end of one 50 on the end of the other and the loop should be corresponding each to her sister is actually the word it uses it's a feminine and then attach them together so this word corresponding one correspond to the other has something to do with kabbalah as well because when we use a root in the torah it's always connected in hebrew words are very defined and any root all its meanings branch out of one point it's not like english where words can have different connotations that are unrelated because of poetry etc so how is kabbalah like correspondence right how does that work the point is we're trying to get at realities above consciousness right so here i am i'm in consciousness i have my thoughts i have my emotions i'm trying to get realities above consciousness and i can't i can only imagine things that have space time and consciousness elements i can't visualize things that don't have space-time consciousness elements give it a shot right imagine the ain't stuff okay i'm seeing light in space that's what i'm seeing obviously that's not the ain't self right so imagination can try and create visualizations and that can be useful but keep in mind all of our visualizations are still within time space and consciousness that's how we're built so how do we get above time space and consciousness to even the first spiritual aspect of asea and start to get some conscious understanding of spirituality the way we do it in kabbalah is to create correspondences correspondences so we find a model within consciousness we look at the relationship between the parts of the model how they fit together how does it work and then we recognize that that model in the physical reality is flowing out of a model in spiritual reality now why is that that's because that's the kabbalistic vision of the world to begin with physical world does not exist independently physical world is flowing out of spiritual world and spiritual world is creating physical world well actually ain't self is creating fear of physics physical world and spiritual world but the physical flows out of the spiritual put it that way so everything in the physical has its form and structure because it mirrors its spiritual source that's why the physical body is so complex because the soul is so complex so whenever you're looking at some physical model you're seeing a map of the spiritual model and by understanding the components of the physical model and making a corresponding model we can start to get an inner sense of what's happening in the spiritual are they making sense yes this was going with this yes so for instance we've talked about light many times in this class let's look at light as a physical model for how we can understand the or in self spiritual light of some kind of any kind right so just popcorn out and think at home what are qualities of light what effect does light have on me what are aspects of light that you might just consider anything light does what makes you feel what is what feels warm warm good makes you feel good and warm right right brightness in the world and brightness does what go away makes darkness go away very nice permits permits me to read permiss me to see things and so all these all these all these issues how physical light makes us feel so does spiritual light make us feel spiritually elevated right it permits us to uh observe things that otherwise we're in the dark also spiritual light lets us observe spiritual aspects internal aspects that otherwise would be in the dark and in fact as you said the light chases away darkness instantly so the spiritual light then makes spiritual darkness vanish and we recognize like in hanukkah that the darkness was just the absence of light let's not go deep into that add some other things physical light we know is always attached to a luminary if i see a beam of light coming through the window i don't think it has its own existence i know there's a luminary the sun if the luminary goes the beam of light goes same thing with spiritual light spiritual light comes from being stuff if there's something called spiritual light there must be a luminary it also seems to travel physical light through space almost instantly so does spiritual light travel through quote unquote spiritual space almost instantly right a great lofty spiritual being can connect with a very lowly spiritual being even though there's a great distance instantly through this thing spiritual light so just to give you a taste we're looking at the components of the physical model of light and now trying to leap over that gap into the super conscious and say okay there's something called spirituality that has the same components and i'm starting to understand something about its spiritual reality by using a corresponding model that's a primary tool of kabbalah and you'll see we'll use it very often in this class as we come back to it does the idea of connection also go along with the idea of correspondence is because those loops are there for the purpose of connection and the question is uh is connection part of that concept because the loops are corresponding so they connect i would think intuitively yes i mean i haven't read someone about that but i think intuitively yes the whole point of the whole structure of the world is for us to recognize the in self and connect to it so no doubt the only reason there's that there are these correspondences for us to be able to connect to to themselves i like that very much another level and two little points that i will touch on in the video shortly uh one is well we're gonna define the spheroid okay so let's look at the let's look at the next page of the human metaphor of the spirit these are the building blocks the basic literature of kabbalah the basic pieces of kabbalah and what you see here is called the tree of life it's heim they're called the swirot and if you're looking at them you might mistake them for something studying the east which is chakras right the phenomenal chakras and people often see a map like this with the human body and the spirit placed on them and they think oh these are the jewish version of the chakras where our class starts in the evening class i'll be explaining that they have nothing to do with chakras so so they're a different phenomenon entirely but just to introduce them these are 10 spherot the word is hard to define and we'll define it in three ways in just a moment but there are ten emanations flowing out of the ainsoft that flow through all levels of existence through our whole soul down from the top to the bottom and one thing i'll mention later there's two main categories of the spirit there is the intellectual which are the three on top leaving out ketter those are intellectual spherot and then there's seven on the bottom which are emotional and behavioral that's the main distinction main grouping and emotional intellectual and emotional and one other little confusion is that on the one hand we talk about the spheroid in terms of what comes from the insult and what flows through the cosmos and those are the sphere proper we also talk about the spheroid as something within us in our literature there you might use the word powers cohort attributes or sometimes even midot right me dot mainly is the emotional attributes are called midot but the way the spheroid flow within me that's my attributes my internal powers my cohort or my middle emotionally the way they flow in the cosmos that's always called the swerot but sometimes you'll hear sriracha disgust about my in my in my internal state and so here i'm going to get back to our regular class and online you'll be joining the evening class i hope that you'll join us for the rest of the five and feel free to be in touch with questions and i wish you an amazing amazing journey of learning thank you but let me let me just put out there one thing these aren't even though it looks like it these aren't the jewish chakras and not only are they not the jewish chakras they're completely nothing like a chakra they're a completely other phenomenon and the reason there's that confusion is sometimes we see it drawn like this on a human body with showing the right arm as he said the left arm is etc and so we look at we say oh that looks like the chakras there must be some some energy point here that's it some energy point here that's gevorah you know this is somewhere a point on this and if i meditate i'll experience an energy vortex there etc etc there are contact points in kabbalah 15 contact points that run down the center of the body are primarily used that's another topic that's not what these are these are not physical points on the body the only reason it's sometimes drawn on a body is because the body is one possible metaphor for the ten spheroids it can also be drawn as a series of concentric circles right or you could draw a chandelier if you want you could draw a caterpillar i don't care because this is all above time and space so when you're above time and space there isn't a right side and there isn't a left side there isn't an up for the head to be above the torso there isn't a down for the feet to be below the torso so any model you see keep in mind it has nothing to do with the model and the model almost doesn't matter at all it's just trying to give us a sense that this can use the human body as a metaphor to express itself that's a little tricky to say imagine take a take a trip with me into aesop's fables i'd say we were all in the story of the the tortoise and the hare right here we are and we live in a world that asap wrote and why did asap write this world what was the moral that he wanted to teach what's the moral of the tortoise and the hair thank you slow and steady wins the race joey how you doing have a seat right so we are here in aesop's fables and this whole world was created to teach slow and steady wins the race and there's some there's a story happening in the world that's really the central organizing story it's got a tortoise the tortoise represents what slow and steady the hair represents what fast and careless the race represents what life okay now the prophet of our world comes down and says this world was created by aesop he's the author of this world and the whole reason for your existence is slow and steady wins the race we say i don't get it you're crazy let me draw you a diagram he says here's the hair here's the tortoise here's the race the hair is fast and careless the tortoise is slow and steady the race is the life now you have a diagram now do you understand this whole race is a metaphor for a lesson that asap is trying to teach us and we look at the map we say oh okay so the hair is is speed and that point on the hair that that you're pointing to is actually where the speed is and the tortoise is slow and steady and here on the taurus shell there's a point that's slow and steady and the racetrack is and somewhere there there's there's a contact point on on the road and and the prophet says no no no it's not that at all the whole thing is the metaphor the whole story the hair itself is a metaphor for this idea an abstract idea there's no point on the hair it's just aesop is telling us a story and these are all metaphors now come back to our world kabbalah says this world has an author that author is trying to communicate something to us right things like you're all a part of something a oneness right you should be kind to each other don't don't steal these kind of things and there's all these metaphors they're being painted around us one of the primary metaphors is our physical body so the spherot created the physical body as it is as a metaphor to explain something to us not because there's some point on my right arm that's kohma of that but because the metaphors are always trying to express and explain something to us and you could find many many correspondences from the ten commandments to the ten statements god made creating the world to uh we'll look at some of the divine names almost anything you can look and see how it is a metaphor flowing out of the ten spheroids so that's why you'll often see this but it's not contact points in the body it's just uh it's just the body itself is a metaphor so i'm going to use instead of this chakra idea let's use the three definitions or the three meanings of the root of sphere to try and get a handle on what spheroids are perfect so the first the first word that flows out of that root is sup here which means sapphire sapphire right so there's many visions the prophets had of uh so this isn't we're still on this page on this page i turned my notes page and turned my uh so many of the prophets saw these beautiful gleaming emanations they call describe them as perhaps a block of sapphire as flowing out of the aim's self this is something that a prophet might see and and we can't really understand what they're seeing but they describe it as something like sapir and emanation that's the way that the spheroid function as emanations from the ainsoft right at the top of our worlds something flows out ten elements flow out completely united with the itself but each one of them has a aspect of brilliance so in the world in the level of ain't self that tends to rather flowing out as emanations right the second definition comes from safe air or sipur story right just like aesop's fables we're living in something that sort of represents a story we each have a sense of being something like a character in that story we're a main character in our own story we're a supporting character in someone else's story or an incidental character in somebody else's story and the whole thing flows like a narrative through time and the spheroid also function in our consciousness kind of like the the author of a story putting a story together they create our sense of having a constant flow of consciousness and identity and choices to make etc with emotions with intellect with words with speech all that is flowing also out of the spherot so that's a second level on the level of ainsof they function as emanations superior and the level of consciousness they function as story a narrative and the third dimension of them is from the mispar number all from the same root and mispar is more if you're a fan of the matrix remember the matrix series the famous you know flowing back and the so they realize the whole world is just sort of a grid on some kind of a server and that server has a program if you can figure out the program you can do all kinds of fun tricks not saying you can but yes the world itself and how the world is created at every moment because in kabbalah we see the world as being created constantly not just in bray sheet and being projected from this spiritual light onto a screen of time and space and consciousness and the way that's happening is out of a matrix that is again the ten spheroid so that's how they function in terms of creation in terms of the world so three levels one is the ain't self and they function as emanations two is my consciousness and they function as a book or a story three is the world itself and they function as a matrix out of which the physical world and the spiritual worlds all emerge okay very nice yeah that's nice yeah digital sphere sephrath seafront i like that thanks uh yeah so usually usually when i finish this it's very quiet in the room it's kind of like what happens in a pharmacy when they have when they have very very slow business you can hear a cough drop no snort that's not okay sorry well you know the first class is the most is the most abstract and then we'll start get to you know some things that i can actually that i understand even as i'm saying them uh one more detail about about the spheroid you'll often hear hear the sphere word sphyra used for the spheroid as they are coming out of the divine out of the in self and also for how i experience them in my own consciousness right uh so we'll learn about in a moment is that spark of intellect i experience that all the time i realize things all the time that's not the same as god's there's obviously a difference between god's so the way that they express in our consciousness there's another word for that midot or attributes right so we're talking about them on on several levels the way the cereal flow in the whole cosmos that's the spirit of the world the way i experience them in my own consciousness those are my attributes the midot and the beauty is my attributes flow out of the cosmic spheroid so it's something like an old-fashioned holograph remember the holographs the museum these like 3d kind of screens if you break them in two what do you see in each screen same picture right just a little bit fuzzy in each picture but it's not two halves you get the same picture on each screen break it again now you get four pictures keep breaking it until you get tiny crumbs each one still has the whole picture but very very blurry you can barely see what it is same thing with us the attributes as they expressed within me they flow out of the cosmic attributes except by the time you get to my little crumb of it it's very blurry i'm looking at it i'm looking directly at the cosmic attributes i'm seeing the whole picture but i'm actually seeing it's very difficult to decipher what it is from my perspective of course many of us coming together the picture gets a little bit clearer doesn't it and finally the whole community all all of judaism together and then the whole world together it becomes clear that's why oneness is so key we all have a piece to fit back into this picture uh yep so let's move to uh the first varsity and we have this beautiful oh i love this here danelle can we put up uh usually it's written without the vav but my my assistant maya thank you maya she likes um she likes to fill it in in modern hebrew it's it's often spelled with avov but this is the first this hero here our picture we have a gentleman and he's sort of thinking of something and there's this one flash of light there in the middle right there's this one spark that's there on its own and looking at you'd think you're really just there for a moment and then it vanishes and something else takes its place right have you ever had that experience where you were thinking deeply about something where you were trying to work out a problem where you're encountering a new situation suddenly now you know what it's about now you realize what what's the what's what's the deepest interpretation here for you at that moment at that exact moment that you realized the solution or the interpretation not not a half a second later at that moment did you understand anything about the solution or the insight think back to the moment you solved a problem you were in the shower and oh i got it i know i got it i have no idea what it is if you look at the exact moment there's a flash that's like a spark that emerges out of a void but it's incomprehensible we cannot we don't know what it is it's it's it's hidden from us but we know it's emerged as a spark that is how hohma appears in our consciousness that's also how appears in the cosmos so let's go to a label's text i like how he expressed it because he really brings it into the the relational yes i know i didn't design the picture i just found the picture so those i have no i'm nothing to say about those things that was just the art if i could have found one without them i would use that so so yeah that's just that's just adobe art it's a pretty introduction but look at the spark itself that's kind of like in this empty space that's what i had in mind yeah that that's actually dot we'll get to that that that's that you already knew what you're looking for so the hawkman spark was there previously dot disconnected from it and you forgot and then your dot reconnected to it yeah but yes okay so what i like to do is perhaps if we if we read a paragraph and discuss when we start start here and then and then pass it on when we're done think of yourself think of yourself as a deep pond fed by the gushing waterfall of the severoat you are also the one who fishes in that pond your natural disposition can be likened to a fishing reel your deeper wants and wishes are the bait the way you pursue joy and alleviate pain is represented by the area of the lake where you prefer to fish your thoughts are the fish you catch most of us fish in exactly the same way in exactly the same area of the pond and we always catch the same fish in general we respond in the same way to the same stimuli is this familiar to people we're creatures of habit i see someone and immediately i have a set of reactions that's that's there ready right i love this person i have such a good time i'm so happy to see them right automatic oh this person they always great on me they always say this and that i'm gonna have a terrible time i hope it's over as soon as possible right they haven't opened their mouth right maybe maybe they're doing something completely different today but no i'm ready right my fishing rods are ready i'm in that little mud spot in the pond i'm ready to catch my tadpole right and also uh places right oh my wife wants to go to this restaurant i hate it there's always always too loud i'm going to have a bad time and i'm grumpy heading out the door the way that we project and interpret any situation or any information is unique and if you think about it we have the possibility to reframe it in any way there's infinite ways of interpreting any set of facts or any situation and we each have our characteristic way of doing that on our way of doing that that's how we fish for the spark that's our style of sourcing right and once once it comes in now the rest of consciousness flows out of that how we interpret reality determines everything else let's go on scientists if we persist in interpreting an event in the same negative way hurtful and fairly then our brain will persist in delivering its characteristic load of excessive stress releasing hormones that trigger a chain reaction of biochemical events and by the way if you're on the video we're on pages 68 and 69 of labels book practical kabbalah so feel free to follow with us so for many of us life involves a lot of stress we've had negative experiences that are stored up in our memory and is always looking to connect a new experience with that with that past stressful experience and if that's the way we interpret reality as a chain of recurring stressful events then it's going to be difficult as well on our physical being we know about that because we live in a very stressful time right running around working dealing with media dealing with traffic we live in a more stressful time than if you just had a house and had a farm and went back and forth right so learning how to fish differently for khokhma is a very very important skill for the time our souls are now living in scientists scientists have verified that the body's memory of fear is the emotion most deeply recorded in the brain's memory banks for instance if you remember a traumatic job interview in which the interviewer tried to discredit and demean you that memory will become part of the recorded information your brain relays to your body every time you enter an interview room just thinking about it you may find that your palms grow sweaty your face flushes with discomfort and your heart beats uncomfortably loud in your chest all right and we all have our version of that some past situation that every time we now encounter it there seems to be some automatic spark that is stressful that has fear involved in it is that necessary right might we do better fishing from a completely other part of the pond and what would happen if we did because we don't know what the future holds it's always uncertain so why not assume that it's going to be something positive right if i assume it'll be something negative i may be adding to that pattern if i assume it's something positive a i'll be higher functioning b i'll have more fun and c i'll be contributing to that possibility anyways because in kabbalah we say your thoughts do affect the world around you subtly right but actually even though it's subtle so when i put out a certain wavelength everyone in my sphere of influence in a subtle way receives that that's why we like being around people that are happy and optimistic there's certain people you just gravitate towards not because right you just get something from them that you like so each of us we affect the people around us we affect systems so if it's 50 50 and their interview might go positive or negative why not project positive i see no reason to project otherwise and yet we often do let's go on is it possible to reinterpret consciously negative circumstances and positive outcomes in denial the truth is that very little in life is categorically positive or negative most of the circumstances we face even the seemingly insurmountable obstacles are the product of subjective interpretations can we really know that this deal we lost might not prove to be a stepping stone to an even better one are we in a position to determine whether being burned by love interest might not eventually lead to permanent joy and happiness with another is it possible that an illness might not prove to be a very trial that strengthens our resolve in another area right when i was finishing up cantorial uh the cantorial program was in i love you guys at bethel i wish you all the best i saw i saw an ad for bethel but i hadn't gotten to the end of my control program i couldn't apply for it it was such a horrible thing i was so stressed it was perfect it was close to to toronto it was close to family when was another detroit synagogue ever going to open up again it was a nice big synagogue it had a big musical uh tradition amazing it was the worst thing in the world finally they found somebody and they went out of placement before i could apply worst thing in the world right or not because when i finally got to the placement suddenly temple israel came into placement same city same place uh i will say a much better fit for me and voila i'm here right so i could have interpreted that that first lost possibility as a closed door as a life-ruining experience it could have ruined my whole time but we don't know maybe not so why not assume that everything happening around me is actually leading towards a positive outcome there's actually no negative anyone can name to having that assumption and yet there are many positives in terms of my experience my effectiveness and what i'm putting out to the world that's changing how you fish for your spark of khokhma it's the most powerful thing we can learn to do and you simply direct your consciousness there over and over again and you suddenly find you can fish in different parts of the pond catch different fish row around to whatever whatever part of the pond is most useful now and you can broaden your perspectives and you can take whatever your physical circumstances are and put all kinds of different frames of reference around them to have incredible positive effect on the entire structure around you uh yet some people yet some people consistently get up on the wrong side of the bed smash their heads into the wall of fear and doubt and stumble anxiously through the day others face the same travails and interpret the same reality as an opportunity is one of them right and the other one wrong not empirically but the criterion is health and well-being obviously the latter attitude is miles ahead now let's do one more cavalla maintains that spiritual repose can be trained and mastered you can learn how to reinterpret reality you can draw upon and maintain a positive disposition by catching different fish by metaphorically changing your fishing style you can become a happier and more likable person and also profoundly alter the chemistry of your body you can obliterate the old grooves of fear and form new tracts with new interpretations of old memories kabbalah even goes one step further joy and happiness are the soul's expression of its successful navigation of the sea of the body the nerve endings the cell receptors and the billions of microscopic even right down to the cellular level are the channels for the soul's journey so that's the first step in the whole tree of life as it flows through consciousness if you want to learn how to articulate all the different spheroid in the tree of life and to be much more mindful and positive about how we flow through how a soul flows through a body the first step is because guess what if i'm always going to that one little patch of mud in the pond i'm saying this is going to be a native experience i'm going to fail this is going to be scary whatever whatever whatever my habit is it's just a habit then everything else that develops will come out of that spark of we have no other options but we have a whole pond to fish in beautiful beautiful other areas with beautiful depths and beautiful other fish and beautiful bait that we can use and beautiful other fishing equipment whatever you want to say and we can train ourselves to completely reinterpret the world around us so that every other attribute that we have can now have a different fish to deal with and we can have a whole other experience through the whole tree of life that we're going to be learning about that make sense so in consciousness as it flows in me and that's the main model we're using it's that first spark that seems to come out of a void it's coming from a super conscious source a higher part of our soul that i'm not conscious of but that super conscious light or information has a way of getting through to my conscious mind that way is it condenses down like a point it flashes into my awareness but because it's super conscious it's something it's light that i can't reach with my awareness it has to come in in an incomprehensible way when it's there that moment i don't know what it is i need the second sphera to actually learn about what's in it and in moments after it happens it's pulled open and it's explained and it's illuminated by my second intellectual sphera and that's the sphere of bena all the time all the time so it depends what quality of spark we're talking about uh perhaps i i'm meeting somebody in a situation i suddenly realized there's something important about this person and that's the first time i've met my future partner and it's this huge revelation i don't even know what it is but i know something's different and it's love at first sight and suddenly i have all these feelings so that's a major spark of kokuma but it could also be oh you know where am i going to put this counter i don't know i don't know i don't know oh there's perfect right that's also a spark of so in big and small ways this is flowing all the time this is a constant flow of how divine light is revealing itself as my consciousness and your consciousness so any any realization of any appreciation of any aspect of reality is a spark of kokuma how does this tie to the idea well it can also try to be miserable if your spark is always uh it's going to be horrible right so it doesn't necessarily tie to being happy you have to choose to fish for the hawkman spark in a way that will be most productive so if if i decide i don't know whether this is for the worst or for the best i'm going to assume it's for the best and that's my hockey spark suddenly i'm going to be more happy it's my it's my free will right the aspect of intellect that allows us to understand what's in is bina do you know do we have this nice photo up there okay again it's just adobe art so don't it's not all ones and zeros we have tens to write don't worry about that but there's much more going on in here what before for the gentleman was just a spark of light that emerged now has developed into almost a globe that's forming in many different figures and numbers and loops and information that's the function of being on being a force is open this spark of awareness not awareness the spark of insight right the english word we use for is is um wisdom which is tricky but it's a spark of insight the word used in english for being is often understanding so this spark of to understand it bina has to force it open and we start to see the details right oh my god this person's really cool i'm gonna i'm gonna sit and talk to them i wonder if we're gonna have a relationship right whoa suddenly you realize what that spark was or oh yeah the counter goes there and it has to be this high and has to you know we got to take out this piece or whatever the situation is right oh the problem with this child is they need more attention or they're spending too much time in front of the tv now i realize it i realized it now the details emerge what does that mean they're spending too much time in front of the tv how am i going to deal with that spending too much time watching what what is too much time right what's what's the best way to approach them that's albina working out the details of the spark of chakhma that emerged yeah so label in his metaphor if how we fish in our pond of consciousness for that spark of realization being is now how we cook that fish right do we fry it do we boil it do we make a soup out of it how do we spice it right so we're taking the raw fish and we're creating something that we can actually uh now serve or use or benefit from let's look a little more we're in practical kabbalah chapter 6 page 82 and and where do we leave off go ahead accordingly deepak chopra we think about 100 000 thoughts a day but about 95 of these are repeated day in and day out our mind climate seems to be both boring and inflexible no wonder we feel ourselves replaying the same old record over and over again we tend to be creatures of habit it's natural i tend to have a certain way of analyzing things and i'll just do the same thing with everything right whatever old catfish uh fishes i'm just gonna i'm just gonna man fry it i just stick it on a plate and eat it right you know what that means right just some oil and some heat and it's ready right sorry my apologies to interview men who have culinary culinary culinary expertise right but there's many ways that we can analyze a situation and we want to learn how to be more plastic more flexible with bena so that depending on the situation depending on the spark we can approach it from many different ways categorize it many different ways bring out many different dimensions and the more flexibility we can have the more we can take that new spark of khokhma and develop it so that it can be enjoyed as a meal intellectually right these are still our intellectual spheroids and just back to back up one moment when we said that the spaceship of our body had two uh two frequencies i i skipped over something and that is there's a main there's a main distinction in the spheroid there's one set that are intellectual and then the rest are emotional and behavioral right so what we're looking at leave out keter for various reasons we're looking today and hopefully dot those three are the intellectual spheroids and by looking at them we can learn how to reorganize and re-categorize intellect as having three natural components and that will allow us to have mastery over how they become emotional muddads so today i want to go through the intellectual being inspiration now being it being cogitation understanding so my apologies for for leaving that out that's an important little piece i just go on on page 82 do you respond humiliated fear and insecurity carve out these groups of habits the key to creating will change lives the key to creating change applies in recognizing these habits of the mind the function of the sera of bina is to take the creative spark of reinterpretation the hakwa and reinteract it into a new way of thinking right so to master khakha we have to be find a new way of being inspired as it were up there where i'm fishing around for that aha it's not thought i don't even i don't even know what it is it's super conscious i'm not aware of it i i actually can still direct it my will can go up there and i can say i want to be inspired this way rather than this way i want to interpret this way within this but it's all above consciousness bena is the same retraining of habits and freeing of habits but within intellect within how can i think what are my patterns of thought that develop into actual thought what are the ways that i that i bring things out put them together remember them store them analyze them etc all of that and it's infinite ways of even even describing how one might think all that is beena right it's a very very complex sphere and going involvement on the transition of thought sparks into the maturity of the vena flow is the way we draw on our source for inspiration and creativity of mine this wave and spark of inspiration becomes a cogent body sequence bookmark fish for that thought being cooked right so for instance some people tend to be really oriented towards khokhma and will have many many creative insights and many great new ideas uh many original thoughts etc but they may not be very strong in the being a department i see some people smiling there right but i'm not strong in the b department i may not even write them down and they're gone right i had some so many great ideas last year and poof right nothing happened to them other people are very beena oriented they may not be the most original thinkers but when they get that thought they can pull it apart analyze it make it something that's a useful intellectually so it can stick around and actually flow onwards in our consciousness ideally we want to have both so when when required we have to look into inspiration and say okay what's what's this about what's needed here and leave an empty space for hakama to emerge i know you can't force huakmah you can't think of it yourself you can't you can't rush it usually it happens when you stop wondering about situation it kind of pops out by not by accident because it has to come out of a void and then if it's important that's a good sparkle kokuma now bina goes to work if i have both of them now i can start to really uh be more impactful internally and for people around me and finally when you learn the process of self-refinement even more dramatic understanding energetic strategies for change replace anger instead of struggling to control life you practice faith and acceptance there's no causes accomplishment may be about the insight of the heart yeah so if you're getting a picture inspiration and cogitation that's bina and another model to how to look at them is uh and this again it's a metaphor not by accident for many many spiritual realities is human reproduction right we see often in jewish texts human reproduction is used as a model to teach us about spiritual worlds and human reproduction flows as a metaphor exactly like chokma and bina in that it has a male aspect and a female aspect and if you look at this chart male and female doesn't mean man and woman it just means masculine pole and feminine pool everything has a masculine and a feminine pull itself everything relates to the rest of things around it either as a masculine to feminine or feminine masculine we're not using it as a gender we're using it as a polarity right so if everything flows out of the insulf each one of these spherot is masculine to the ones below it and feminine to the ones above it right so bena is feminine compared to hogma but actually masculine compared to the rest below it it's it's contributing them right so seeing the as a masculine feminine pair they function very much like human procreation is a spark that flashes out that you don't understand that you don't know what it is you can't see the information in it at all well what's the male contribution it's it's a point and and you know without without electron microscope can you really see what the information is in there without without getting the genes out of there and and doing it normally no it's just it's a point i don't know what's in it the female contribution is a whole structure that receives that point of information and forces it to expand and expand and expand and then differentiate okay now you're gonna be brain you're gonna be heart more cells differentiate again you're gonna be skin you're to be bone nervous system etc etc until you get a whole structure out of this one point of potential that point of potential if it didn't enter into the feminine womb of bena would be completely lost nothing would come out of that potential and yet it had all the details of what would emerge once it once it entered into the womb of beena to be forced open but it's only once it enters that feminine container that those details can emerge and develop you can start to look and say oh there's a boy it's a girl it's this is that right and finally you get a fully developed baby and then we move on to the next stage so in our minds there's something going on all the time that's like human procreation there's a spark of khochma and that spark needs to flow into the womb of bena and there it gets developed and those are the first two components of intellect and how we're going to try and understand ourselves as a soul flowing through a body from a kabbalistic perspective you know we talk a lot about about frames of reference it's amazing how frames of reference change there was like an old timer that was talking to his grandson and he said you know in the old days you could you could go to a store with a quarter and you can get yourself a loaf of bread a dozen eggs a watermelon and a brand new bike you can't do that anymore nope too many surveillance cameras that's all in perspective right now to go to haha like you said you said ha ha ha like what was that because i knew it was funny or no okay so we have just enough time to do dot see i guess this is the spot for like the the you know the side guy i will be your side i am ed mcmahon they got one you got a deal [Laughter] no i didn't yeah it ends with um was wise yeah and it was white in his heart yeah and in judaism the heart is actually the in many ways the seed of wisdom and it's not as simple as we're saying although our intellectual process we identify with with the brain and thinking actually the heart has a role in thought and we're discovering that in neuroplasticity as well that the heart has a brain uh oh yeah and the gut too yeah very very beautiful i've been learning with label about four years so not very long but enough to get fired up okay so i didn't put the the text for dot but i hope we'd have time let me just fill in the third aspect of the intellect in the last 10 15 minutes we have left six minutes we have left can we go can we go ten is anybody good with that if you need to leave i'll understand uh next class oh okay good dot is uh is the third component of intellect and it has two roles and it's described as knowledge knowledge so wisdom understanding and knowledge are the classic english words each one of them is is such a red herring and so-called confusing and complicated i would almost throw them out because what is knowledge in english when you have knowledge about something you have what it's a collection of what information right so i'm full of knowledge means i have a whole rolodex of information in my mind i have the knowledge right i i've learned it i've memorized that's knowledge and dot has nothing to do with that nothing at all to do that it's it's the worst word to use awareness is closer again how is dot used in the torah in genesis the first time we hear it adam knows eve right in hebrew so knowledge is strangely used as intercourse right sexual union and believe me the torah is not shy about describing all kinds of of graphic things it wasn't to be cutesy that the torah used the word knowledge to describe union it's because that's what dot is it's not a collection of information it's connection to the information it's not a collection it's a connection to the information make sense so when you have physical union with somebody it's not that you go and you say oh now i know i know this about them and that about them and i know more about you know i can put into a book the facts i've learned there's something entirely else you're joined you're connected now you care about them now anything about them that happens affects you there's billions of people in the world but if it happens to this one person now it's happening to me i'm connected to this person dot is the capacity to connect personally to information as well it actually fulfills a role higher up there's higher and lower dot higher dot actually has hoffman being attracted to each other so they're always they're always uh entering hawkmoon's always entering into into bina dot allows hoffman to be attracted to each other which was your example at the beginning when i walked into the kitchen i knew i wanted something i walked in i forgot what happened i retreated out of bina the spark was gone now bean is like what was i looking for i don't know yeah yeah so the problem is dot was weak and dot did not keep hormone spark in beena that's the focus element of dot where you can deeply focus on something and the chocolate being a keep together right so what i do i sit in the scene i sit in the kitchen i fire up dots that thing that you reach into to try and get it to re-emerge that's dot getting caught from being attracted to each other and now i remember oh i need it i need to catch up or whatever right that's actually a function of dot for our purposes the more important function of dot is that i connect to the information that it's not just intellectual information that stays as inspiration and analysis but cold intellect but we now want to move to the emotional spheroid which we'll learn about next week in order to feel emotions about something dot needs to connect it to those emotions connect it to myself and cause that energy to flow down into my emotional being because if it's just intellectual i can sit and learn it all day and my emotions will never flow so there's a story we'll finish with uh that i heard on a video from the last master who was my teacher's teacher this is the babucha rabbit the last master of this kabbalistic tradition and he taught in the name that he heard from a very very old hasid that heard from another variable question named rebecca berliner of a story that he used to tell to his disciples that in the old days there were yeshivacas there were these village jews that had to move to villages just to make a living so they moved to some remote village maybe one or two families in each village and over time despite their tremendous piety and goodness uh they they became illiterate to these communities and couldn't even read uh all of this even with vowels and so to train their kids a few villages might hire one tutor one muhammad who would live in a central location and they'd send their children to learn aleph bet and some torah and some prayers so one day one of these shuvnikis one of these villagers received a letter and unfortunately he couldn't read the letter at all had no relationship to language it was just it meant nothing to him so to understand it he brought the letter to the to the malama to the teacher and of course a little crowd gathered because this is an event a letter arrives the mulamid opens the letter and the muhammad was a very learned person who could read hebrew even without vowels who understood everything on the letter who could relate to it directly and so the muhammad opened the letter and read it and unfortunately tragically the letter informed the villager that his father had died and when the villager got this terrible news the villager fainted and the muhammad calmly put the letter away and then help the villager back to consciousness and and comfort him but then uh michael beliner asks why is it that the villager fainted and not the teacher the teacher was the one that directly read the letter why was teacher not affected by that information the villager who just heard the letter was the one who fainted as a relationship exactly right right it was the villager's father the teacher was just reading a letter so the difference between them is dot right for the villager dot ignited and that information was tragic and the villager fainted for the teacher it was just intellectual no doubt even though the teacher was the one that could relate to the hebrew had had read the letter should have been more affected the teacher wasn't like for instance again if i if i hear that somebody in michigan won 20 million in a lottery that's nice information i'm excited for that person if i hear my wife won one million dollars in a lottery right here we go so information on its own does not equal emotions dot is that bridge which causes me to connect to emotions nothing to do with the knowledge the the package information that's beena right dot is connection to it and there's an even deeper uh even deeper message to get out of the story we'll finish on that and that is it's easy to learn this stuff just out of a joy of learning it's fascinating it's wonderful i hope you find it fascinating and not uh something else but it's lovely to learn and we can feel like we become expert and we can feel like we can explain this stuff and we become masters this stuff and we might have a wonderful time but the the the rebbe of this tradition said when you're learning this please don't ever read it as a letter about somebody else's father please don't ever read this as information about somebody else's father and you're just catching up with what's going on in heaven here's the news here's where the angels are stationed here here's where the spheroid are here's how the cosmos flows into humanity it's a lot of fun you have to read this always about a letter about your own mother and your own father right isn't that the same as they say that that you have to feel that you were the slave in egypt that was brought out that's somebody else that's exactly the same very good so we if you didn't hear isn't the same in haggadah says you must read this as if you yourselves came out of slavery not somebody else right this isn't a story about some other people this is a story about me i was a slave and i was free whoa that's different right so please i invite you and help me as well as we go through this information let none of this be a letter about somebody else's parent this is always a letter about our parent and we're the ones that should be fainting and we're the ones that should be changing ourselves and moving and excited and if we always have that element of dot we'll see amazing things can happen in our emotional realms and even more amazing things can happen in our behavioral realms as we move this into practice uh yeah empathy is very much involved in it yeah yeah but yes let's leave it a yes okay okay thank you beautiful first class any questions i'm hanging around but uh feel free to take these home and uh yeshiko well i thought this would be easier you

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Length: 66min 21sec (3981 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 06 2018