Three years ago I was riding a subway train in Toronto when a short announcement in the newspaper caught my eye. There was to be an introductory Kabbalah lecture at my local library and although I was totally unfamiliar with Kabbalah, I somehow felt that it was an ancient wisdom that might have something to offer me.
This initial lecture by Tony Kosinec (lecturer for the ARI Online Kabbalah Education Center and spokesperson for Bnei Baruch USA) was a mixture of technical diagrams and an assertion that there was some sort of potential power in a unified group of students. I felt compelled to check out this assertion.
That was three years ago and my life has now changed so radically that it seems like another lifetime. What have I learned in three years?
Most people believe that the troubles that we experience in our lives come in a random manner of good or bad luck. If they get sick or lose their job then the tendency is to say "Well that's life, what to do?"
Kabbalists will tell you otherwise - that there is nothing random about any of life's events: every single thing, good and bad, is sent to us purposefully in order to prompt us to eventually question the purpose of our lives and to try to get to know the upper power that is orchestrating our world.
Just as we organize all aspects of our schools in order to maximize the learning progress of our children, so this upper power organizes all things within our world to hasten our progress through the stages that will culminate in an enlightened state of "loving our neighbors as ourselves."
We can refer to the upper power as Nature, the Creator, God or whatever suits us. Kabbalists explain that we can never know the essence of this upper power but can only understand its qualities by the way it treats us.
Kabbalists say that Nature acts towards us in absolute goodness, kindness and benevolence. Moreover, Kabbalists don't just say this, but speak from their attainment of Nature's laws, where these qualities exist on a completely different level of perception to ours. Kabbalists give us their method of attaining Nature's laws, inviting us to reach the same perception as them.
Through undertaking the method, we eventually come to understand that Nature is uniformly benevolent to every single one of us. Therefore, all the painful events that are inflicted on us are actually intended only to help us to an eventual transition from our inborn selfish egoism to the altruistic qualities of Nature itself.
I accepted this new framework for our world very readily and thankfully. Is it not infinitely better to live in a totally purposeful world rather than one based on random chance? I realize that the reason that I accepted this new order so readily is that for years I had been desperately seeking to find more purpose to life.
In Kabbalah it is understood that we all progress through different stages of desire. A person begins with seeking the ordinary necessities of food and shelter. When one feels that one needs more than this, then this person may progress to a desire for money. When money is no longer sufficient, so may begin the search for fame or status, and if one needs more than this, then one searches through all kinds of higher forms of pleasure: art, music, philosophy, sciences, and so on, which characterize the next stage of desire, the desire for knowledge. The desire to find meaning in life, or what Kabbalists call "the desire for spirituality," appears in the final stage.
The fact that I am in this last stage does not mean that I am better or smarter than others. Is a child in the fourth grade smarter than a child in the first grade? No, he is just older. In fact, the younger child may be a lot smarter than the older one.
However, we see that many people do not appear to progress through these desire stages but remain in one of the earlier stages. This introduces another major revelation from Kabbalists - reincarnation.
Advanced Kabbalists tell us that the desires that define the "I" are actually part of a higher spiritual world, disconnected from this world we see and know. Thus, these desires survive physical death. It is these desires that allow us to be reincarnated over and over again.
We reincarnate until we pass through all our stages and reach a final enlightened form. Every single one of us has to pass through a program of millions of developmental stages in a prescribed sequence.
This is similar to the developmental stages that we see our children go through. It is a mistake to think that a child can go straight to the walking stage and bypass the crawling stage or go directly from grade one to grade three. Every stage introduces something that is needed for the final product.
This concept of stages has helped me to "love my neighbor" more truly. For instance if I see somebody acting in an antisocial or disagreeable manner then I can find tolerance or compassion by remembering that they are just passing through a phase that every one of us will have to pass through.
Kabbalists tell us that spirituality is attained gradually in 125 discrete stages. Where am I? I am still struggling to reach the first stage! Three years ago I felt that I was getting old and my life was drawing to a close but my new perspective is that I am just at the embryo stage with a very long path ahead of me.
This article refers to the method of Kabbalah taught at the Bnei Baruch World Center for Kabbalah Studies, www.kabbalah.info