The Purpose of Reincarnation According to the Zohar
The Book of Zohar - a complex and profound book – contains the wisdom of Kabbalah in its entirety. It tells us of the complete path a person must go through from the moment his souls finds its place in a corporeal body; the time he lives along with it in the corporeal world, and how he ends his life, continues to exist as a soul without a body, and how it descends to this world again. Thus, many life cycles go by and we call them “reincarnations” of the soul.
The Zohar explains that the purpose of those reincarnations, of those repetitive returns to this world is to bring man to a state where he feels all the world completely, and not just the one he is living in at the moment.
The Zohar says that apart from our world, there is another world – much more spacious – that only Kabbalists can feel, or the souls that exist outside the corporeal body. Man must come to a situation where he lives in both worlds simultaneously. It gives him the ability to be master of his own fate, to plan his future and not be influenced by the life and death of his biological body, but rather to be directly connected with his soul.
The Zohar speaks of the path each soul goes through separately, and the way that all the souls go through as humanity, starting with the descent of the soul to the body for the first time, through all the cycles that this soul goes through, and ending in the state where the soul, along with the body, comes to a state where man feels his existence in the whole system of creation, and life and death cease to exist for him, and he becomes an active part of a complete eternity. That is the situation we must all come to.
The wisdom of Kabbalah maintains that the descent of the souls to our bodies continues for 6,000 years, meaning that it began some 5763 years ago, and will continue for 237 years. In the remaining years the souls must attain the whole system of creation, that sublime form of existence, where man will identify himself with his soul and not with his body.
All the Kabbalists wrote in their books about the uniqueness of the time we live in. They talked about how gradually, over thousands of years, souls descend and dress in the bodies of our world, accumulate a certain amount of experience and climb back up to the upper world. Afterwards they come back down to this world in order to dress in new bodies, and so on.
Thus, the souls gradually accumulate experience which makes them come to study the wisdom of Kabbalah, through which they will attain the upper world. According to the Kabbalists, that will happen when the last exile of the Jews ends. The year 5755 (1995) was marked by Kabbalists as a very special year; a year that is a historic cornerstone from which begins a genuine change in man’s relation to the world, in his relation to the wisdom of Kabbalah, and his relation to his destiny.
That change is a consequence of a process of evolution that man goes through, which compels him to bond with the leadership of creation, to take an active part in it, to rise to the same degree where he will be master and guardian of the whole world. If he does not aspire for that, then the collective law of creation will make him do it by torments that will force him to think of such questions as: “What am I living for?” “What do I exist for?”, and examine the purpose of his life and ask why is he living so poorly.
Thus, everyone will begin to feel that question, burning. It will begin to irritate us precisely in order to make us think of how to control our destiny. People in this generation are slowly beginning, according to the level of development of their soul, to come to a situation where they feel a great need to know the purpose of life. Torments, agony and the lack of confidence about the future compel us to think of the meaning of our lives. Pain pressures us to begin to learn about providence in order to become the most active part of it.
That is what the wisdom of Kabbalah speaks of, and this is the method that gives man the knowledge of how everything that happens in our world is generated in a higher world, and from there extends to our world. We are but witnesses to the picture that spreads before us as the Creator has planned it.
If a person can feel the upper world, he knows what is going to happen ahead of time, and the most important part is that he can even determine what will descend to him from above. By studying Kabbalah, a person acquires the knowledge of how he can influence the events of his life.
Let us assume, for example, that a person faces a certain situation – how should one relate to it, how should one understand what is happening in order to relate to it correctly, so that his reaction will soar upward and cause the consequential events to be more pleasant and better than the current one.
We therefore see that the wisdom of Kabbalah teaches us not only to witness what is going to happen, but at the same time respond to it in order to produce good results in the future. That is how the system of guidance works. Meaning, a person can feel what is happening with him and what he must do in order to determine his future situation.
Coming to such a capability is possible only through studying the writings of Kabbalists. Kabbalists are people who feel and who reside in the upper world, while writing their books. As a result, the words that a Kabbalist writes when he is completely immersed in the spiritual world, are adopted to certain superior-spiritual actions. Therefore, a person who reads them and expresses them, even if he does not understand what the words speak of, because he is not in the spiritual world, still, even unconsciously, he awakens the upper light on himself, the upper force which gradually purifies and prepares him to a state where he begins to see and feel what he reads about. Reading and studying from the special books of Kabbalah, gradually brings a person to a state where he begins to feel the upper world, because that is what the study is based upon, and that is why Kabbalists write their books, so as to help us advance.
But because each of us has only a small desire to attain the upper world, the students of Kabbalah form a group in order to join the desires together and thus increase the influence of the upper light on them, and by that progress faster, meaning attain the situation where they begin to feel the upper world faster, and begin to guide their own destiny.
Thus, throughout time Kabbalists have studied Kabbalah in groups such as that of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochay, the writer of The Book of Zohar and the holy ARI from Zephath.