Lesson 4: Perception of reality - Fundamentals of Kabbalah 2024/2025

Is the reality that we perceive through our five senses the only reality that exists? Why is the wisdom of Kabbalah called 'hidden wisdom'? Are there additional layers of reality?
What is the difference between the perception of reality of animals, the ordinary person, and the Kabbalist?
Review of development: How has the human view of the perception of reality changed in light of scientific development?
The hidden law in the wisdom of Kabbalah—the “intention”.
What is the “law of equivalence of form”?

The desire to receive is the internal software that manages our “perception of reality” mechanism. We see what we want to see. In order to perceive spiritual reality, we must change the software according to which we perceive reality, that is, the desire to receive.

According to the law of “similarity of form,” in order to perceive the spiritual reality, we must develop within the desire to receive sensitivity to spirituality, an intention to bestow, to give.

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Quotes:

"It is well known to researchers of nature that one cannot perform even the slightest movement without motive power, without somehow benefiting oneself.
When, for example, one moves one’s hand from the chair to the table, it is because he thinks that by putting his hand on the table he will enjoy it more. If he did not think so, he would leave his hand on the chair for the rest of his life without moving it at all."
(Baal HaSulam, Article: The Peace)

"Take our sense of sight, for example: We see a wide world before us, wondrously filled. But in fact, we see all that only in our own interior. In other words, there is a sort of a photographic machine in our hindbrain, which portrays everything that appears to us and nothing outside of us.
(Baal HaSulam, Foreword to The Book of Zohar, Letter 34)

He has made for us there, in our brain, a kind of polished mirror that inverts everything seen there, so we will see it outside our brain, in front of our faces."
(Baal HaSulam, Foreword to The Book of Zohar, Letter 34)

“Everything is Godliness, above time, place, and change. All those degrees and corrections we discern in Godliness are only various concealments and covers toward the lower ones [...] Likewise, all the imaginary images of time and place and actions are but various covers of His Godliness that seem that way to the lower ones. As man is not affected or changes at all because of the covers that he covers in, and only his friends are affected by his disappearance or appearance, so His Godliness does not change and is not affected whatsoever by those degrees and corrections and names in time, place, and changes of actions that the lower ones discern in His covers.”
(Zohar for All, Nasso, “The Holy Idra Rabah,” Item 299)

"Like a worm that was born inside a radish. It lives there and thinks that the world of the Creator is as bitter, dark, and small as the radish in which it was born. But as soon as it breaks the peel of the radish and peeps out, it says in bewilderment: ‘I thought the whole world was like the radish I was born in, and now I see a grand, beautiful, and wondrous world before me! So, too, are those who are immersed in the shell (Klipa) of the will to receive they were born with […]
[they] would try to break the Klipa (shell) of the will to receive in which they were born, and would assume the desire to bestow, their eyes would promptly open to see and attain for themselves all the degrees of wisdom, intelligence, and clear mind that have been prepared for them in the spiritual worlds."
(Baal Haslam. "Introduction to the Book of Zohar)