Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in The Slave's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, June 9th, 2009
8:51 am [rebhershy]	You know those damn things! You know those things been weighing you down like anything, been carrying them since forever? Yeah, well, I got news for you. All that stuff on your back, like a massive backpack you haven't been able to shrug off, no matter how hard you tried, that has been getting heavier and heavier since high-school, yeah? Well there's something you ought to know. There's two of them. And the reason you can't shrug them off is that they grow out of you. And you know how some days you're sure they're so heavy they're going to bring you to your knees? Well, they're your wings, dummy. They're your wings for flying with. Use them! (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009
6:38 am [rebhershy]	Knowing What We Know We spend so much effort trying to make God in our image, forcing judgement or entitlement onto the divine, telling God how to run the Universe, we don't have time to know what we know. The Time to Know what you Know - the central column of Sephirot of the tree of Life. Keter - Being Everywhere Always Tifferet - Being Here Now Yesod - Coming Into Being Malkhut - Having Come You Have Become (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 1st, 2009
8:36 am [rebhershy]	The Divine Spark There's one significant way in which you are different from eveyone else on the planet. Something about you is unique. Now, I'm not refering to your genetic fingerprint, your DNA or some other simply defined physical characteristic. I'm talking about that thing we call genius; that gift, talent, aptitude or faculty you may or may not yet had discovered in yourself which gives you direct access to your divinity. Listen carefully, this is crucial, for as C. S. Lewis so memorably put it, “You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body." Your soul expresses the Creator. Another way of saying this is that your Creator is your Soul expressing itself. Of course, the question is, precisely what does it feel like when your soul tries expressing itself? That's your Torah. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 24th, 2009
10:56 pm [rebhershy]	Getting hurt People come to kabbalah and get hurt. Kabbalah is famous for it. Traditionally only highly educated, married and gifted men over the age of 40 years were allowed to study the mysteries. Many of them came to grief, as I said; this area of Torah is famous for the wreckage of would be practitioners dotting its landscape. It's a wilderness. That's the secret you have to bear in mind all the time. It's wild; terror incognita. Two definitions of wilderness to remember in order to maintain equilibrium and survive, are. 1.) Kabbalah is wild and elemental. Do not attempt to cultivate it, straighten in out or impose any sort of order on it. It is free and will remain free. Your struggle to tame it will destroy you. 2.) Kabbalah is uncivilized. Do not enter without survival skills of your own. No one can protect you from your blunders but you. If you get lost you'll need to be able to find your own way. If you cannot survive the wild singlehandedly, don't attempt to negotiate it. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
7:50 am [rebhershy]	On Counting Do you count? This is how it works. If you can look at yourself, take personal inventory until it becomes absolutely clear how incomplete you are without God; if you can be aware how much you need the divine to fill the gaps in your personality, to fix the basic flaws running through you from top to bottom; once you know for sure that you are not going to make it alone without God God will do the same. You  will be shown how everything depends on you; the Glory of God is incomplete without you God can't make it without you the world will never be whole until you add the missing piece which only you hold in your hand. That you count! (Comment on this)
Monday, March 16th, 2009
7:30 am [rebhershy]	Right & Wrong We waste so much of our time trying to figure out what to do; is it right or wrong? We have so many laws. And then we have even more unwritten obligations, codes of conduct, social contracts, behavioral mores. A person wastes a lifetime taking permission and getting leave to act, all without ever feeling any satisfaction in the doing. A person wastes a lifetime in fear of acting, of doing the wrong thing. What are we supposed to do, when should we act? Here's a rule to live life as a kabbalist. Ask youself, "Never mind is it the right or wrong thing. Is it the Only Thing to do?" (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 9th, 2009
5:26 pm [rebhershy]	Purim Tonight we celebrate the Jewish Festival of Purim, the Feast of Lots. The biblical Book of Esther (megilla) describes the historical events; read up on it, it's interesting. Purim is most closely associated with the coincidence, you know, the miracle wherein God wants to remain anonymous. It's called the Feast of Lots because the villain in the story, Haman, threw lots in order to decide on the right date for the extermiantion of the Jews. A lottery is a perfect example of an opportunity for God to play the hand without anyone being able to prove it. It's a lottery, right, it's governed by chance. Perfect. Kabbalistically Purim is the revelation of the Sephirah of Malkhut - Sovereignty, which is to say, it's the opposite of revelation. It's the very paradigm of hiddenness. Most people think that Hester Panim - Concealing the Face of the Divine, has something to do with God hiding his Face, so to speak, from the world, keeping us in the dark. It's a pity this idea has gained so much ground, it's very destructive to humanity as a whole. Hester Panim comes about not when God hides His Face. It comes about when we hide our faces from one another. D'you know when I hide my face? When I'm ashamed of it. Shame is the most destructive force in the human soul. Ultimately a person may become so shamed they even hide their face from themSelf. It happens when we believe we are cut off from the divine, that we are not Godly anymore, or that we are not worthy of housing the divine in us, on our faces in our bodies. The messages can be very loud. Our parents have it very bad. they can hardly help passing it on, the shame and dissociation, the despair and self-rejection. Humanity has a terrible time hanging on to its faith in itself; we live in a time of horrible Hester Panim. Luckily for us, Esther is not dead. I bless you to meet her this holiday, the one who can help you look in the mirror and see your Malkhut - Sovereignty, who can show you how to play and dress up the Godly child in you, to celebrate the beautiful divine girl in you, to adorn yourself in the richest and finest makeup and jewelry and robes of glory, to stand before a mirror and see the Face of God. Amen (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 13th, 2009
12:52 pm [rebhershy]	Everything you needed to know... According to our tradition, everything we needed to know about everything important was taught us, by our own personal Angel, in the womb. In the trauma of childbirth we forget the great truth. The aim in life is to relearn and rediscover what we once knew. Everyone knows that the most important thing we once knew but have now forgotten is the sound of our soul talking. There was a time we heard the voice of God, when we knew things without knowing that we were aware. When everything we experienced was at one with who we were; when there were no questions, no darkness, no doubts and no forgetting. How do you know when you're in the presence of the Messiah? When all your forgotten Torah comes back from that place in your soul where it has been hiding since you went through the trauma of being born, when you can remember the tune you were singing in your mother's womb, the music you heard in the beat of her heart, the light of her voice and breath, that's when. Many people come to the study of kabbalah expecting to learn something earth-shatteringly new and are disappointed when it doesn't happen. It's a pity, really, because the truly earth-shattering secrets you're here to learn are not news. They're already inside you. Listen, if it's secrets, well, I can't teach it, it's secret! If it's something you didn't already know, it wasn't a secret anyway. You were merely ignorant of it. A secret of kabbalah can't be taught, it can only be remembered. Now, we stood at Sinai and heard the first of the Ten Commandments, "I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt..." Why wasn't it, ...God who created heaven and earth, why was it, God who brought you out of Egypt? D'you remember? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 11th, 2009
12:43 pm [rebhershy]	On Chokmah - Wisdom and Binah - Understanding What part of your brain works when you're in Chokmah Consciousness? Imagine you're just about to touch something really hot accidentally and your hand snatches itself backwards from the fire or flame. What part of your brain was it made the decision to override your instruction to your hand to grasp the burning thing? It happened without you consciously thinking about it, or else it happened so fast that even if, in retrospect, you can identify a consciousness and decision making process, it was automatic and overrode your previously consciously made decision without a moment's hesitation. It is a higher mind and loftier decison making process than the one you are commonly aware of using. That's where the Sephira of Chokmah - Wisdom operates. Now imagine you're just about to touch something that you know may or may not be really hot, and your hand hesitates as you attempt to stretch it forth, as though making ready to snatch itself backwards from the fire or flame. That's Binah Consciousness. Pharaoh spoke at the Jewish midwives, (Ex. 1:15-17) one of whom was named Shifrah and the other was named Puah; “When you are helping the Hebrew women to give birth and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, kill him; but if it is a daughter, she shall live.” But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt had spoken at them them, but let the boys live. The Talmud notes: From the peculiar phrasing used in the verses above we can see that Pharaoh tried talking them into sin, but they would not be drawn. He never even managed to speak directly to them. it was only at them he spoke. This is an example of Chokmah Consciousness and why it is also called Fear of God. It snatches back from doing wrong without even thinking about it consciously, as above. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, December 29th, 2008
6:26 am [rebhershy]	Hear O Israel.... Most people think the famous confession, "Sh'ma Yisrael Adonoi etc.," translates as, 'Hear O Israel the Lord our God etc.' They're wrong. Sh'ma Yisrael really means, Listen O Israel. Hearing is passive, Listening is active. Try it. We all want to be active kabbalists, well then, the secret is in listening to the divine. You have to go beyond hearing it in yourself, recognizing and seeing it. You have to become creative with it, to learn how to use the divine energy flowing through your body. To get there you have to be a participant. We've learned to distinguish the programs our computer runs. There are word processing programs, video and music programs, there's a desktop and root directory, short and long term memory functions, a calculator a clock and a volume control. Our souls run a variety of programs called Sefirot, using the same basic language, On and Off. Together they comprise what we know as our Life. So long as I only experience my computer as someone who writes letters in Word and plays DVDs in the Media Player I'm a consumer. You don't think you can stand inside your central processor unit and feel the energies flowing as the computations are performed? You can't sit on the hard drive and feel your switches thrown this way and that? Have you tried imagining being there, listening in, feeling it all? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, September 15th, 2008
11:38 am [rebhershy]	Shechinah (part II) So, what do kabbalists mean when they talk of striving to unify the Shechina and Holy Blessed One? How mindful can you become? How selffully aware can you be. Not Selfish, mind you, SelfFull. One of the insights concerning the nature of reality that Albert Einstein grasped almost intuitively was the nature of the Field. That which we call reality; sticks and stones, solid things with weight and hardness are really nothing but flickering fluctuations of the Field. The universe, Einstein understood is a Field. A field of what? people asked. Aether? No. Phlogiston? No. Electromagnetism? NO. Physicists will be arguing about the nature of the Field for the foreseeable future, and odds are that when they do reach agreement their conclusion will be completely unintelligible. What they are all agreed upon so far, is this. Substance is an illusion. What looks like a stone being thrown through the air, is not really a solid at all, just agglomerations of energy assembling near one place in the field for a fraction of a moment then dissipating, then, immediately, another agglomeration assembling right next to where the first has just disappeared and disappearing itself. This happens along a line you think of as the trajectory of the thrown stone. The stone as a solid mass of substance was an illusion. The stone is gone, the field is what it was. What is the field? Whatever remains when you've removed everything having existence is the Field. Previously we learned that the Brit - Covenant of Unity flowing from God irrespective of the 10 Sephirot, without cessation, without limit, without beginning or end; the Desire to have desire for desire... the wanting to want want; craving the hunger, is what we call the Shechinah. Another name for the Field is Shechinah. You become aware of yourself as the Shechinah when you are completely aware that your desires are, in fact, the resonance of Divine Desire. You are but a fluctuation in the field, describing a parabola in the trajectory of God's craving. Your existence is as illusory as Einstein's stone thrown through space; no more than a blip, a wavicle, a flickering light. You are the manifestation of God's will, because Will and Desire are synonymous. When you are aware of the shape of your longing own you are looking at God in you. The realization of who you are, what desire of God you manifest, is the Unification of God and the Shechinah. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 14th, 2008
7:26 pm [rebhershy]	Shechinah (alternative transliterations Shekinah, Shekina, Shechina, Schechinah, שכינה) American Heritage Dictionary She·ki·nah (shĭ-kē'nə, -KHē'-, -kī'-) n. Judaism A visible manifestation of the divine presence as described in Jewish theology. [Mishnaic Hebrew šəkînâ, from Hebrew šākan, to dwell; see škn in Semitic roots.] Wikipedia has lots to say about it, too: e.g. In the work by anthropologist Raphael Patai entitled The Hebrew Goddess, the author argues that the term Shekhinah refers to a goddess by comparing and contrasting scriptural and medieval Jewish Kabbalistic source materials. And this: The Shekhinah is held by some to represent the feminine attributes of the presence of God (shekhinah being a feminine word in Hebrew), based especially on readings of the Talmud. When you think about it, it's enough difficult being a Jew; having to worship using the language in which the Jewish Faith is couched. Hebrew is rigidly constructed around separate genders, and wherever you look in the Bible God's a Man. He's a masculine, manful, manlike and mannish type of person, it's almost impossible to squeezefit femininity into the texts without torturing them to death. But sometimes even Jews have to deal with God the Mother (as opposed to their mother the goddess) or despair of expression forever. The result is a fantastical and fanatical denial of any plurality in the Godhead, while simultaneously trying with all its strength to unite The Holy Blessed One and His Shekhinah. Surely if God is One there ought to be nothing requiring unification? I won't even go into a description of the hagiographic literature, culture and mythology growing up around the development and evolution of the alternative to the patriarchal Male God within Judaism, the attempts to replace Him with a less testosterone driven feminized version. As though that would relieve religion of its dillemas, solve its problems or even lighten its mood. If you seriously believe the solution to the world's problems is to have it run by women, you've never spent much time in a sorority. In the Sefer Yetzira, Ch.I Mishna 2, (Ramak version) we read: Ten Sephirot without what, numbering the ten digits, five opposite five and a covenant of unity designed between them, in the circumcision of the tongue and the circumcision of the genitals. We haven't talked much about the Brit - Covenant of Unity in kabbalh_101, but this is certain, it is something between the Ten Sephirot yet not of them; something flowing between them but not actually part of them. Not an eleventh Sephirah. It is the Divine Desire we have talked about often in these pages. If you could only look at yourself without having to peer through those flesh colored eyes you have in your head you'd see who you really are. You are God's divine desire, the longing we've talked of, the emptiness in the Godhead, the Shechinah. That which we call the Brit - Covenant of Unity flowing from God irrespective of the 10 Sephirot, without cessation, without limit, without beginning or end is the Desire to have desire for desire... wanting to want want. Craving the hunger. All these divine sensations, feelings, emotions, call them what you will, are the sound of God calling you into being. That sound, the calling of your name, the humming of your melody, God's manifestation of your beingness in His Desire, that is what we call the Shechinah, no more, no less. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, August 4th, 2008
8:37 am [rebhershy]	Visions Listen. Many of you reading this are not tuned into the Jewish Calendar and may be unaware that this is the week of visions; a time when even the most prosaic and unimaginative kabbalah student is granted the power of scrying. The downside is that most of the visions are dark. You see, what it is, the Sefirot of Chokhma - Wisdom and Binah - Understanding are analogous to the two lobes of the brain. They don't often work in tandem and mostly act as though they're competing for dominance. Here we discussed it in a way that may be useful to you now. (But it's worthwhile going back through the kabbalah_101 archives to learn more about the Sefirah of Da'at - Knowing in general) Unfortunately, one of the most effective ways of being dragged into the high-moment of Da'at - Knowing is to be in pain. Few things have the power to drag us out of reverie, out of fantasy and speculation and into the present moment that way pain does. This is why some of the greatest masters of the spirit and kabbalah are also Ba'alei Yesurim - Master of Pain. Careful what you wish for... There was a time, it seems we must have been young, when longing could lay us prostrate, when our craving for the divine could fill us to the brim with unquenchable thirst. We thought we would die of it, a romantic Liebestodt - love-death. D'you remember? And now? Now it is only a longing for the longing, a desire for desire, a memory of memories. Which, tell me though, is more real; the operatic longing I suffered in my youth or the genuine thirst for lost desires that I experience now, huh? (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
5:36 am [rebhershy]	What is Chokhma - Wisdom The Hebrew word for Wisdom is Chokhmah. The four Hebrew letters comprising the word Chokhmah, Chet, Chaf, Mem and Heh can be rearranged to read Koach Mah, translating as, The Power of What. Perhaps it is thus. In the Introduction to the Zohar (p.1a), we learn: [the Sefirah of] Binah - Understanding is sometimes called the World of Who, as it is open to inquiry, but cannot ever be known, it is so far beyond the boundaries of comprehensibility. [The Sefirah of] Malkhuth - Sovereignty is sometimes called the World of What, because a person questions and inquires, trying to peer and penetrate from one level to the next, to the ultimate level, where, upon his reaching it, we ask; ‘What do you know? What did you see?’ For it is all is as mysterious as before he began searching. The Tikun - Restoration of the Sefirah of Malkhuth - Sovereignty, to its original perfection, only happens when the unknowable quality of What, is clearly revealed. And so it must be with a person who, after all the worship and study in which life is wrapt, realizes that neither worship nor learning has begun. As the Zohar said, ‘What do you know? What did you see? All is as mysterious as before.’ The person becomes a manifest revelation of Koach Mah - The Power of What. By realizing I know nothing, I become a revelation of the Sephirah of Chokhmah - Wisdom, which is Koach Mah - the Power of ‘What’. This is a revelation of the Supernal Chokhmah - Wisdom within my lower Chokhmah - Wisdom, as is well known. Malkhuth – Sovereignty, the World of Mah – What, that we all inhabit, is also known as the lower Chokhmah – Wisdom. Hence, the well-known Kabbalistic aphorism, “Father establishes Daughter”. (Chokhmah - Wisdom) = (Malkhuth - Sovereignty). Dated: July 11th 1942. From Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury, 1939 - 42 (written in the Warsaw Ghetto by R. Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira) Pub. Jason Aronson 2000 (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
9:04 am [rebhershy]	Who, What? Most kabbalah texts refuse to discuss or examine the upper triad of Sefirot, Keter - Crown, Chokhma - Wisdom and Binah - Understanding. Whereas the lower Sefirot are given corresponding body-parts, e.g. Chesed - Lovingkindness = Right Arm, Gevurah - Judgment = Left Arm, Yesod - Fundament = Penis etc., limbs of the mythic human divine projection, and whereas there is no end to the personification of character traits associated with those lower Sefirot, e.g. Biblical Abraham = Chesed - Lovingkindness, Isaac = Gevurah - Judgment and Joseph = Yesod - Fundament etc., nothing like that exists for the upper three Sefirot. For good reason. To what can the Mind of God be compared? There are two very different ways we can inquire about God, we can ask, What is God? or we can ask, Who is God? Of course, neither inquiry is answerable, we can never get an intelligible answer to either question, but there is a big difference between the two, and this brings us back to something we learned previously, here: The Chokhma - Wisdom question asks, What? The Binah - Understanding question asks, Who? While the answer to the second question does not really interest us because we know the question to be unanswerable, it assumes and presupposes a vast and tremendous principle. The answer is immaterial and insignificant because the question itelf is so fascinating. "Who is God?" is at once so mindboggling a sentence, who cares if it's a nonsense... The question asked by Chokhma - Wisdom on the other hand is unintelligible in and of itself. The question is What? Might it not be more helpfully be phrased, a statement, God is What? Listen carefully. I am no one having gone nowhere until I have absorbed this lesson; until I have brought this Chokhma - Wisdom down into my private world of Malkhut - Sovereignty, into my own kingdom. I am What? (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 20th, 2008
11:55 am [rebhershy]	on Gevurah - Judgment melimeli asks a good question: why on earth would gvurah, like gibor, like power or might, why would that mean "constriction"? why would it have that nuance? and why would that then go into another meaning, in terms of love, of being the right thing for your loved one? i don't understand that at all. are these meanings or associations to the words only in the context of kabbalah? Now, I know that this response does not adequately cover the subject of Gevurah - Judgment, but it may be a helpful building block nonetheless. Here's a quote from SACRED FIRE: TORAH FROM THE YEARS OF FURY 1939-42 (Pub. Jason Aronson 2000). It is dated Feb 1942. Just before the Warsaw Ghetto and all its surviving Jews was liquidated, the Piazecna rebbe, R. Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, wrote the following: Let us try to understand a little more fully the concept of ‘original thought’, wherein Din - Judgment is actually Chesed - Loving-Kindness for Israel, and learn how with our limited intelligence this understanding can be applied to our present, sorry state. To do this we need to understand Rashi's comment (Genesis 1:1); ‘In the beginning, the original thought was to create the world with the attribute of Din - Judgment. Seeing, however, that it could not last, God preceded it with Rachamim - Mercy and made it partners with Din - Judgment.’ Rashi’s comment raises a host of questions. How do the principles of Briah - Creation and Din - Judgment operate simultaneously? How could it originally have arisen in God's thought to Create with the attribute of Judgment, when it is taught in the Zohar in Elijah’s opening speech, (Tikunim Intro.II) that Din - Judgment is ‘short’, intrinsically restrictive, i.e. that it conceals Light and withholds revelation. How do they work together when the very essence of Briah - Creation is revelatory? Perhaps it can be explained using a human analogy. If a person does a small favor for someone, the attribute of Gevurah - Judgment need not be utilized. But if he wants to do something great - for example, to give someone a large sum of money - he may well have to overcome his own tendency to withhold. He may need to use the attribute of Gevurah - Judgment to awaken and reveal his Chesed - Loving-Kindness before he can bring himself to do any great act of giving. What he actually does with the attribute of Gevurah - Judgment is use it against himself. It may be difficult for him to give away so a large sum of money, so he has to use the power of the attribute of Gevurah - Judgment to overwhelm his own resistance. This, however, is the difference. When a person uses Gevurah - Judgment on himself, it can be used to reveal kindness. In fact, certain acts of great kindness cannot happen without using Gevurah - Judgment in this way. This is not the case when Gevurah - Judgment is being used against someone else, for then it is always punitive, involving Hester - Concealment. This is why, for God to create the Worlds of Tzimtzum – Constriction, He had to use the attribute of Gevurah - Judgment, as it were, against Himself, because God, blessed be He, is utterly above, beyond and without boundaries or restriction. And what is more, as is well known, the original Tzimtzum – Constriction preceding Creation, that which produced the original brilliance was, as it were, a constriction in the Light of the Infinite Self. That is why Rashi says; ‘In the beginning, the original thought was to create the world with the attribute of Din - Judgment.’ For, as is well known, ‘God and His knowing are One’, and so any reference to original thought is a reference to God’s Self. It was in the very Self of God, then, that the original constriction occurred, at the beginning of Creation. For this to happen, God had as it were, to overwhelm and restrict His Light. The Gevurah – Judgment God used, as it were, was upon Himself, and not against anything else. It was only when the Din – Judgment, constriction and withholding began to permeate creation, that God saw the world could not stand it, and so He introduced the attribute of Rachamim - Mercy. Nevertheless, the attribute of Gevurah - Judgment which, we said, arose in the original thought, was no less than the original revelation of Chesed - Loving-Kindness. The roots of the Jewish people are also in the ‘original thought’, where even Din - Judgment is Chesed - Loving-Kindness. This is why when the ‘original thought’ was revealed during the Exodus from Egypt, there was ‘plague and healing’ together - plague for Egyptians and healing for Israel. Din - Judgment was at the level of ‘the great hand’, as we said above. (Comment on this)
Friday, July 18th, 2008
7:55 am [rebhershy]	Religion and Kabbalah What's the difference between religion and kabbalah? Well, religion starts out thinking about God as a person and ends up in worship. Kabbalah starts out thinking about God in relationship and ends up in wonder and amazement. If you manage to integrate and synthesize them both you're a lucky soul; it's a rare gift. The study of kabbalah requires the sort of thinking generally considered inimical to religious thought. When you're six years old you cannot be objective about your parents; you cannot compare your mother to other women and decide whether she is more or less beautiful than they are, or compare your father to other men and decide if he 'measures up' to them. You cannot be religious and be objective about God, make side by side comparisons with gods of other religions, see who is more beautifu or who measures up the greater. Religious thinking is at best chlidlike, at worst childish. Religion poses God as the answer to everthing, kabbalah poses God as the ultimate question. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008
8:16 am [rebhershy]	What is the question FYI: This is one of them Zen Cohens we've spoken about. The Sefirah of Chokhma - Wisdom is really the Sefirah of "What?". It's the place of the Great Question. Not a place of answers. I'm amused watching scientists, physicists and now cosmologists looking for a Grand Unified Theory, an answer that wraps all questions with a single coherent answer. Their logic is that God, the Creator or Whatever Power it was decided on the Physical Laws governing the behavior of the Universe must have some One, single answer to the great questions of Life. They assume that if everything observable in the world obeys a single command or fits a certain model of reality that this will somehow explain the nature of reality. Silly really, when you think about it; it's nothing better than a conceit. Then they are suprised when every answer poses deeper mysteries and harder questions. Back in the 1890s graduates at Princeton, Yale and Harvard were discouraged from wasting energy on further study of Physics. All important questions in Physics had already been answered, they were told, except for the (aptly named) black box radiation catastrophe... Well, Max Planck solved that riddle and gave birth to the idea of quanta, and the rest is history. Because the essential ingredient, from which all substance takes its shape, so to speak, is Mah - "What". The single element, if you will, from which all elements are composed is likely called Questivium - the power of the question. But what exactly is the question? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 22nd, 2008
12:30 pm [rebhershy]	In response to Desire for desire cusanusia asks: What about the difference between love and lust? First of all let's examine Love's placement on the Sephirotic Tree. It is so similar to that of the Tetragrammaton, YHV"H (Yod Heh Vav Heh) it's very striking. Notice how in the word AHAVAH - Love and in YHVH - Divine Name the letter Heh appears twice in the same place. The differences are actually similarities because the letter Alef which opens the word AHAVAH - Love is the number 1, the primary, while the letter Yod which opens YHVH is the number 10, the next level of Oneness. As Alef - 1 develops it becomes 10 then 100 finally 1000 which is once again called Alef - Thousand The third letter, the Veth in AHAVAH is the number 2. In the Divine Name the third letter is Vav the connector. (Excuse the crudity of the schematic here.) I've chosen a side view of Adam Kadmon (primordial man) in order to highlight the chief differences in the positions of the Veth versus the Vav. Beth (or Veth if the letter has no dot inside it) ,the second letter of the Hebrew Aleph Beth translates as House or Vessel or Inside or Womb. And that is also its shape; its Gematria - Numerical Value is 2. As a whole word/process AHAVAH describes the Creator saying, "I, (Alef =1) breathe outwards (Heh = 5) to make You (Veth = 2) in Love (Heh = 5) breathing inwards." As a whole word/process YHVH describes the Creator saying, "I, (Yod =10) who am both in and beyind everything, breathe outwards (Heh = 5) to connect with You (Vav the connector, hook) in Being (Heh = 5) while you breathe back into Me." AHAVAH - Love, then, does not contain within itself the Vav - Hook we associate with the genitals and lust. Love contains the Other within the Self, like the letter Beth - House - Inside - Womb. Love does not demand to connect with the other in the sense of giving to and receiving from. If you love someone you don't necessarily want anything from them, even if you want the very best for them. Back here and then here we discussed how kabbalah sees sexual procreation as a natural process or product, so to speak, of the flow of energy up and down the spine from brain to genitals and back again. If we look at the Sephirot head on we see that Hesed - LovingKindness is represented by the right hand. (see here) The difference between Love and Lust is also this, that Love involves Hesed - LovingKindness which is an aspect of the Midot - Divine Characteristics in the Sephirot. As such, it is the opposite of Gevurah - Withholding of the left side of the tree. Whereas Lust is merely the up and down flow of energy. As such it is not an automatic invocation of the two opposing sides. If you are ready to feel your lust without also feeling the need to act on it in anyway you are feeling that same creative force you experienced in what you called, "writing ecstasy, or meditational lifting". It is powerful and divine. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 18th, 2008
12:15 pm [rebhershy]	The opposite of Peace is Evil Sefer Yetzira Ch. IV Mishna 1 Seven double letters, Beth, Gimel, Dalet - Khaf, Peh, Resh and Tav, expressed with two tongues. Their elements are, Life, Peace, Wisdom, Wealth, Grace, Seed and Dominion. Mishna 2 And expressed in two tongues, Beth Veth, Gimel Jimel, Daleth Tahleth, Kaf Khaf, Peh Feh, Reish Reish and Tav Thav. Soft and harsh, strong and weak; doubles that are also substitutes. Substituting for life, death. Substituting for peace, evil. Substituting for wisdom, folly. Substituting for wealth, poverty. Substituting for grace, ugliness. Substituting for seed, desolation. Substituting for dominion, slavery. It's significant that Sefer Yetzira does not make strife or war the substitute for peace. In the larger scheme of things it is not good and bad which oppose each other. The universe is not a war between good and bad, between the light and dark sides of the Force, the way Obe Wan Kenobe and Lucas Films would have us believe. The word 'radical' does not mean turnaround, revolutionary or inverted. Radical means it is of or going to the root or origin; fundamental. Radical Kabbalah means a kabbalah whose roots, whose fundamentals are original. This livejournal class: the Torah of Desire is radical because it challenges basic assumptions. It was a generally accepted tenet of kabbalah that, and I quote from the Lurianic textbook, Etz Chaim, "before the archetypes were designated and creatures created there was simple supernal light filling all existence. There was no emptiness or free space or air cavity, rather everything was full with that infinite, simple light which has no beginning or ending. Everything was that single, equal simple light we refer to as the Infinite Light - Ohr Ein Sof. And when it arose in His Simple Desire to create the worlds, to set up the archetypes, to bring forth into the light His perfect deeds and Names and Appellations, which is the reason for the creation of all worlds, God constricted His infinite Self into the center point in His Self, in the absolute middle of His Light." In this, classic, image from the kabalah Tzimtzum - Constriction of the Divine Self is understood to mean that the Creator made Himself small somehow; damaged Himself cosmically, forcing Himself to make room for us. Have you ever had a craving? Here are some synonyms: aching, asking, begging, beseeching, coveting, desiring, dreaming, fancying, hankering, hungering, imploring, longing, lusting, needing, praying, requesting, requiring, soliciting, supplicating, thirsting, wanting, yearning. Can you remember craving so much it hurt? Can you recall feeling there is a huge gnawing hole in your gut where a ravenous cement-mixer churns with your need, your urgent and desperate desire? If you've ever gone cold turkey or jonesed for a hit you know what I mean, for sure. Imagine if you had to feel that all the time, because that's what we mean we say that God has a Desire for you and me. A full-on universe-sized desire that goes on and on and on. God never had to make Himself samll to make room for us. The Tzimtzum - Constriction of the Divine Self doesn't mean that God had to do anything to make room for us. All it means is that God had to admit of a Desire. And every time you get in touch with your own gut-wrenching desires you're in touch with God. You're mirroring Him. When you come to terms with your cosmic desires and no longer have to act out on them, when you can live with the pain of just feeling them, then your Evil Desire is no different from your Good Desire and you will know Peace. (4 Comments |Comment on this)