Breaking Down the Barrier

The problem with feeling the spiritual world, meaning the total volume in which we exist today, is the problem of its perception. Now we are also inside this volume, along with our nature, which is still concealed from us. However, we feel only a small part of it with our earthly, bodily senses.

We have to attune ourselves so we would feel not just what enters our small egoistic desire. After all, it's enough for egoism to desire something and we suddenly perceive what we did not notice earlier.

For example, when I start a new job, I start working with new materials and new phenomena, and some time later I start to feel what I am working with. We are attuning ourselves to a finer perception, creating inner models of phenomena and objects that we are dealing with. For example, a metalworker feels a metal by its sound and by the motion of the chisel. Likewise, people connected to nature understand it through signs that we are unfamiliar with.

We are created so that the surrounding world is depicted for us in a three-dimensional coordinate system. But is this really so? Other creatures perceive the world in a completely different way: through smells, temperature waves, ultrasound waves, and so on. However, no matter how much we expand the range of perception in this world, we always come across the same restriction: ourselves, our capability to receive or absorb inside.

In this way we limit our perception and do not feel the huge world that is around us. Gradually we begin coming closer to understanding these phenomena, or at least to the sensation that this is really so. However, it is difficult for us to cope with this and to work with this difficult problem because that is how our bodies are built.

Thus, as a result of our earthly development, it becomes clear to us that we are simply blind. We do not see where we are or how to live. This brings us to feel enormous suffering, which accumulates more and more. On one hand we develop, while on the other hand we do not know where and how, or what to do with ourselves.

As a result it becomes simply necessary for us to break down the barrier separating us from the real world. It is necessary for us to understand it because we cannot continue to exist this way. We already see that there is a certain psychological barrier here. Whether it is inside us or outside of us, we have to overcome it.

From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 01/16/11, Writings of Rabash

In the Infinite Reaches of Emptiness

Our earthly existence has practically exhausted itself. What once seemed valuable to us is losing its previous charm. All the different pleasures related to food, sex, family, wealth, fame, power, and knowledge no longer satisfy us and can no longer serve as the goal. Even while being fulfilled by them, we still feel empty inside.

That is why today we are facing a very serious challenge from Nature, which is showing us that we completely don't understand where we are. After all, the entire volume of the universe is there, in front of us, but we only perceive a microscopic part of it.

In reality all of matter is emptiness. Matter consists of atoms and every atom consists of a nucleus and electrons. But if you zoom in on the atom so the nucleus is the size of a small coin, then the distance between it and the electrons would be equal to an entire kilometer! An atom is like a solar system where the planets (electrons) rotate around the sun (nucleus) while everything else is emptiness. Moreover, it's not like cosmic emptiness which nevertheless contains particles of matter, but it is total emptiness.

Thus, overall in relation to us, matter consists of emptiness. But we can look at it differently: It isn't emptiness, but filled space and we just don't feel the filling. However, the filling is the most important part. It is the invisible filling between the nucleus and the electrons, or between all of us. It's not the material parts that are important, but what is between them.

We will be able to feel it only if instead of perceiving the surrounding nature as an object for egoistic reception, we will feel it through the opposite quality, bestowal.

Nature consists of two qualities: reception and bestowal. All of it is sustained upon the balance between them. But we-all of us together and each of us individually-are receiving elements that aim to fulfill ourselves. We use only the five senses or our small "reservoir," the receiving desire, which is why we only perceive a small volume, a very limited piece of the existing world, qualitatively speaking.

That is where the science of Kabbalah comes to the rescue, being a science of reception, of perceiving the true state. The gist of this science is to develop the opposite quality in a person: instead of reception, to develop the feeling of bestowal. Then you come out of yourself, out of your inner, closed volume and start to feel the world outside of you and outside of the dependence on yourself.

In the previous emptiness, inside of its infinite reaches, where matter has a minimal share, you will suddenly discover a volume filled by the force of bestowal-a different, external world. It is absolutely connected with our world, complementing it, being its root and source.

That is when we will begin to understand why we exist, where everything originated, and how it operates. Instead of a measly grain that has no beginning or end, we will see the general, closed picture of the whole universe and it will tell us about the causes and goals, and about what happens to us.

 From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 01/16/11, Writings of Rabash