Mysterious Kabbalah..........Part 1

What is the world? Who are we? What is the significance of our lives and actions? What is God? How can we come to know ultimate reality in our own experience? How do the body, heart, mind, and spirit fit together? And what are the roles of myth, ritual, Introduction, morality, eroticism, meditation, ecstasy, sacred text, and prayer on the spiritual path?



These are some of the questions asked by the Kabbalah. You probably know that, in recent years, the Kabbalah has become very popular —



Kabbalah literally means “receiving”, study of Kabbalah, like other contemplative practices, can be de-centering, even frightening. In those moments when the phenomenal world really does blink out of existence, you're left with yourself (at an intermediate stage, anyway; eventually that, too, blinks out) and your fears. This can be a very unsettling, and psychologically dangerous, place. So I think the restrictions on Kabbalah study are actually quite wise. They are there to make sure that only well-grounded people study it — because only well-grounded people can really enter the Orchard and come back in one piece, others may get disturbed psychologically like Britney Spears and Madonna in the recent times who attempted to gain the knowledge from Kabbalah.



There is no evidence when this Kabbalah was written but it took the contribution of many Jews mystics. So much of the Kabbalah is kept secret because it is meant to be revealed only to those who are capable of receiving it. Share the light with everyone, and some people will shatter, like the vessels in the Lurianic myth.

I will only explain the ten sefirots of Kabbalah. Ten sefirots are not only the map of a human but also of the universe and it secretly tells us about the creation of universe. Following is the explanation of the ten sefirots and the story of creation, read patiently:

                                                            Click to enlarge the picture

The "top" triad of the sefirot is, in a sense, the mind of God. Keter, meaning "crown," is transrational, and beyond all cognition. We can say almost nothing about it, except that it is the first stirring of what we would call "will" within the Infinite. In the world of keter, nothing exists: not "God," not the universe, only the Ein Sof, with the most subtle intention to expand into manifestation. (It's important that we keep reminding ourselves, by the way, that the spatial and temporal language of theosophical Kabbalah is analogical only. There is no before and after in this world of the Divine, and there is no near and far. Everything is now, and here; all these primordial processes are, from our perspective, constantly occurring.)



Hochmah, meaning wisdom, is like a point: no dimension of its own, but the beginning point for dimensionality. From our perspective, hochmah is that "higher wisdom" that some systems call primordial Awareness. It is the first quality to proceed from Nothingness: that Being knows. This noetic quality of the universe — that every leaf "knows" when to fall in the autumn, that every atom "knows" how to organize itself — is, for the Kabbalists, the most refined quality of the manifested world. If you'd like to imagine the emanation of the sefirot in terms of the Big Bang, hochmah is the singularity with no size, but with the "laws of nature" already instantiated. There is nothing there, but there is the Divine Wisdom which organizes all of creation.



—Binah, meaning understanding, is a kind of partner to Hochmah. The sefirot are often gendered (sometimes multi-gendered), and their interaction is often depicted as a series of erotic interchanges. In this case, hochmah is the male and Binah is female, the Divine womb, the generative principle of the rest of the universe. Binah gives birth to the sefirot, and thus to the world of manifestation itself. She is the concealed, hidden, supernal Divine mother. She is also the beginning of separation — binah is related to the words for knowledge based upon distinctions. Binah is the ocean, the many-chambered palace (note the Jungian flavor to the symbolic associations here), and womb in which Hochmah sows the seed of creation. She is the ground of space and time — not yet expanded, not yet contracted, but the principle of spatiality and temporality itself, ready to give birth to the world.



Notice also the remarkable correlations between the Kabbalah and other systems of thought. Binah and hochmah map easily onto "left brain" and "right brain" thinking, even though the Kabbalists presumably had no scientific knowledge of the brain's internal structure. I have already made an analogy to the Big Bang theory of cosmic origination. Many people suggest similarities between the tree of the sefirot and the Hindu system of the chakras, energy-centers within the body….



Cont…..