Beyond Knowing
Everything the last chapters have done, taking apart the self, uncovering the will that drives it, and naming plainly the state that keeps a person chained to appetite, desire, sensation and gratification has served one aim throughout, clearing the ground so that something otherwise impossible becomes possible. Once a person sees their present constitution for what it is, false, narrow, built entirely from a will to receive that mistakes itself for the whole of reality, attention is finally free to turn toward what lies beyond that constitution altogether.
What lies there cannot be reached by the intellect, because the intellect itself belongs to the apparatus built for receiving, and has no instrument for recognising anything that stands outside reception. It cannot be reached by sensation either, since sensation was made to register pleasure and pain, not the ground from which both arise which is beyond sensation. Every tradition that has ever pointed toward this territory, the Kabbalists among them, has met the same difficulty, that it sits beyond mind, beyond sense, and beyond the ordinary reach of words. Each has still tried, in its own language and its own age, to point toward the eternal space of reality beyond oneself regardless. What follows is an attempt to advance a little further along that same path had to put to you as Kabbalah puts it this great vast territory ahead of each and everyone of us and the race as a whole.
The First Great Truth
We have come a long way to arrive at this point. Chapter by chapter we took apart the very idea you hold of who you are, and stood you before a mirror to notice that even the face looking back at you has never once stayed the same long enough to be called the real you. We listened for the voice inside your head that dared to ask who you really are, and beneath that question we found something stranger still, an awareness that stands quiet and unmoved behind every thought you have ever had, present through all of it and indifferent to pleasure and pain, loss and gain alike. We looked at the body and its five narrow senses, through which an entire universe must squeeze itself before you are permitted to know anything of it at all, and we looked at a self built from memory, mood, aspiration and habit, changing so completely across a lifetime that the child you were and the elder you are becoming could pass each other in the street as strangers. The real you, then, is not a definable or fixed entity of any kind. What does not shift beneath the endless telling of who you are and what you want, we called awareness, the witness that sits nearer the centre of you than any role you have played or any label you have worn.
Five chapters have earned the right to say plainly what comes next. Knowing that you are not who you thought you were is not the end of the work. It is the condition that makes the next stage of the work possible at all. Everything you presently think, want and judge rises out of a single root, and Kabbalah names that root the Will to Receive. Baal HaSulam wrote that the whole of creation, in every one of its forms, is built from this one substance and nothing else, that all of existence is simply desire wearing different shapes. The blade of grass wills to be a blade of grass in exactly the sense that the mountain wills to be a mountain, that the night sky wills to be the night sky, and that the whole cosmos wills to be the cosmos, for all of it is the Will to Receive expressed at ever changing intensities of the one same desire, and you are your own portion of that same will and nothing more than that. This is not a flaw hidden inside an otherwise sound structure. It is the whole of the material world as it now stands, and it is all we presently have to work with. We work with what has been emanated, never with what emanates it. We work with matter, never with the force that impelled matter into being, because results are what our present state allows us to touch, and we remain, as things stand, asleep to the force behind all things.
This constitution did not arrive from nowhere. It is what remains after aeons carried the Will to Receive up through the still, the vegetative and the animal until it reached the speaking level, where it took every power handed to it and turned all of it back toward itself. What drives it now is a narrow band of pleasures that rise, are satisfied, and vanish, only to rise again. Food, sex, money, power, control, knowledge, and beyond these very little else. Whatever grants gratification in the moment is chased while everything else is left behind, so that a whole life passes on this wheel of appetite, feeding needs that empty out again as soon as they are filled.
This is the Evil the great traditions speak of, and it names nothing more elaborate than this: a constitution that blinds a person completely to any order of life beyond itself, chained to a perpetual round of desire, want and need, filled and emptied and filled again. The Psalms describe this same wheel with a precision worth sitting inside rather than passing over. Surely every man walketh in a vain shew: surely they are disquieted in vain: he heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them (Psalm 39:6). The heaping is real, and so is the disquiet beneath it, but the vanity the verse names is the promise itself, the quiet assumption that enough of this accumulation will finally deliver the fullness it was never built to deliver. Elsewhere the same book puts it more starkly still. Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high degree are a lie: to be laid in the balance, they are altogether lighter than vanity (Psalm 62:9). Read as Kabbalah reads it, this is not a judgement on any person’s worth. It is a statement about the weight of a self built entirely from the Will to Receive, a self that, set on the scale against anything real, has no substance to register at all.
Kabbalists gave this understanding a name of its own, the Recognition of Evil (Hakarat HaRa, הכרת הרע). Not evil as wickedness, and not a moral verdict, but the plain seeing that self interest is the entirety of what a person is built from until it is corrected, and that nothing else stands between a person and the pleasure they were made to receive except this single force. Baal HaSulam and his son the Rabash both taught that this recognition has to come before anything else can advance, and every chapter that came before this one was preparation for reaching it. The truth the path demands of you now is simple to state and hard to sit inside. You are false, not in some fixable corner while the rest of you stands sound, but false through and through, built entirely from a single root serving itself.
Life after life is lived inside a self full of opinion and accusation, self protection and protest, angst and judgement, with error built into it from the ground up. The vessel each of us presently inhabits stands on foundations no steadier than the last desire that filled it, while the true light of existence waits, still and untouched by the chase that leaves the self empty at every turn. This is the false self, and to see clearly that any judgement made from within this current state is already a false judgement of the world is the first great seeing available to a human being. Every thought, want, need and lust a person carries is built on this same misjudgement, and it is the ground from which the next and far greater seeing will spring.
Every person who has gone deep into this science of sciences arrives at the same point. An ordinary mind, still ruled by self interest, has no instrument capable of registering what lies beyond the self. Attainment is not information added to a self that stays the same. It is what happens when the self is rebuilt on a different axis, so that it faces outward rather than inward, one degree at a time, along a path the Kabbalists mapped across a hundred and twenty five ascending steps, until a wholly new quality of perception stands where the old one used to be.
The Way Out
Before that path can be walked, something has to be seen plainly, and every teacher in this lineage, from the Ari to Baal HaSulam, has pointed to the same starting place. Whatever the self chases while it still faces itself, wealth, honour, comfort, control over circumstance, even the more refined pleasures of knowledge and achievement, is not simply insufficient. It is false in the precise sense that it promises a fullness it cannot deliver and was never built to deliver, and it is exactly this chasing of the matters of the material world that keeps humanity from any true advancement. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told (Psalm 90:9). Kabbalah does not read this as a comment on anger directed at a person, but on the wrath built into the Will to Receive itself, a force that consumes whatever years are given to it and leaves, at the end, only a story told rather than anything held.
Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the glory of his house is increased: for when he dieth he shall carry nothing away: his glory shall not descend after him (Psalm 49:16-17). Kabbalah reads this the same way it reads every line that speaks of riches and their end. It is not a comment on money as such, but on the entire structure of a life built to receive for itself alone, a structure that ends exactly where it began, holding nothing, because nothing it gathered was ever built to last beyond the gathering. Man is like to vanity: his days are as a shadow that passeth away (Psalm 144:4). The days pass, the desires that filled them rise and empty and rise again, and the self that lived only for its own filling has, at the end of it, nothing of substance to show, because substance was never what the Will to Receive alone could produce.
This recognition, once it takes hold rather than being merely agreed to in passing, changes everything that follows, and it arrives not as gloom but as relief, because a person who has quietly suspected for years that the getting and the having would never be enough finally has that suspicion confirmed rather than argued away yet again. Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity, and quicken thou me in thy way the same book asks (Psalm 119:37). That is not a request to stop living or wanting altogether. It is a request to stop mistaking the object of a desire for what the desire was actually reaching toward, which was never the object at all.
What stands in the way of this is what the tradition calls the evil inclination (Yetzer Hara, יצר הרע), simply every desire that keeps a person from the goal they were built for. It is not deleted but corrected, turned to a different use, and the plain confusion of an ordinary life, the years spent not knowing why or toward what, is not a design flaw either. It is a person digging in their own depths until they strike the one thing that was buried there from the start, whole and intact beneath everything a lifetime piles on top of it. Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee. My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever (Psalm 73:25-26). Read as Kabbalah reads every force named God in these texts, the verse describes exactly the moment this chapter has been building toward, the collapse of a self that had nothing beneath it but appetite, and the discovery, underneath that collapse, of a strength that was never built from appetite at all. That warm, fixed, still point is your truest identity, and it is what we turn to look at directly next.
We now turn to the fundamental texts and sources behind the material that forms Kabbalah and examine them in turn. By looking directly at these principal sources as closely as possible from the perspective of a cabalist, you will be able to see for yourself what they actually being said and conveyed through these principal texts not in cold print not what the words say but what is conveyed in their meaning And this is the heart of the mystery of kabbalah.
The Psalms
A Key Hidden in Plain Sight
The Psalms are among the most familiar writings in the Hebrew Scriptures, and familiarity can deceive. We read them and recognise at once the language of fear, longing, suffering, praise and hope, yet recognition is not understanding. The words are clear enough on the surface, while what they describe lies far beneath it, and without the key to that inner language it is easy to read the Psalms as nothing more than the personal reflections of an ancient king.
As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants after You. Psalms 42:1
Read literally, it is a fine expression of longing. Read through Kabbalah, something more exact begins to emerge, for David is not describing a mood but a change taking place within desire itself, the turning of the Will to Receive towards the Will to Bestow that stands at the centre of the whole work of correction.
This turning is what a prayer actually is. Baal HaSulam writes that a prayer is at root a lack, the craving for what one does not have, and that the yearning itself, rightly directed, becomes what Kabbalah calls the raising of female waters {Mayin Nukvin, מ״ן}, the reaching of the lower towards the higher that must precede any light descending to meet it. David’s thirst is exactly this kind of prayer. It is not decoration and it is not sentiment. It is the mechanism through which a created being reaches beyond what it presently holds.
Once this is grasped, many Psalms begin to read differently. David continually finds himself in a condition of struggle, pulled down by fear, surrounded by enemies, overcome by distress, yet something in him refuses to remain there.
Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God.
Psalms 42:11
He is not pretending the lower state does not exist. He looks directly at it, recognises it, and turns towards what stands above it. This is the movement that runs through the Psalms again and again. David is frightened, angry, despairing and uncertain, sometimes within the space of a few lines, and then he turns again towards praise and trust. What looks at first like a simple record of shifting emotion becomes something else once it is read as an account of the struggle between two directions within desire. One direction says receive for yourself, protect yourself, satisfy yourself, secure yourself. The other begins to ask what lies beyond the self, and what it would mean to bring this desire into harmony with something greater than its own satisfaction. The struggle is not between good people and bad people, nor between virtue and wickedness in the ordinary sense, but a struggle within the structure of desire itself.
This is why another Psalm asks for something more exact than a change of circumstance.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.
Psalms 51:10
David is asking for correction, the transformation of the vessel itself rather than the relief of what presses upon it. The desire remains, but the intention governing it changes, and in that change the separation between the created being and the source of its life begins to close.
You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.
Psalms 145:16
At first this reads as a simple statement of provision, yet the structure it describes is precise. There is desire on one side, a vessel able to receive on the other, and abundance moving between them. This is the same principle carried by the recurring language of thirst, hunger, darkness, light, falling and rising throughout the Psalms. None of it is ornament. It gives shape to states that could not otherwise be seen. The desert is the condition in which nothing satisfies desire. Water is fulfilment. Darkness is concealment and light is revelation. The enemy is whatever opposes the movement towards correction, and the ascent of David is the ascent of desire itself.
This is why the Kabbalistic reading of David carries such weight. Kabbalah identifies David with Malchut {מלכות}, the receiving quality within the structure of creation, and the Zohar returns to this identification repeatedly, describing him reduced to poverty at the gate of the palace, pleading to be heard, precisely because Malchut is the quality that owns nothing of its own and must receive everything from what stands above it.
Anyone who lowers himself before the Creator, the Creator raises him above all.
The Zohar, Vayechi
David’s Psalms can then be heard as the voice of that receiving quality reaching towards its source. His cry is the cry of the created being and his longing is the longing within creation for connection with what it came from.
Once this key is held, phrases that seemed merely poetic acquire a different precision, and understanding every word of a Psalm is not the same as reaching what it says. The Psalms speak in the language available to ordinary perception, using thirst and hunger, mountains and valleys, darkness and light, to point towards a movement that is not itself visible, and Kabbalah does not set that language aside. It shows where it has been pointing all along. Read this way, the Psalms stop being simply the record of a king’s troubles and victories and become a description of something taking place now, in whoever reads them, the movement by which desire discovers the limits of what it can hold for itself and begins to reach for what it was always meant to become.
That is where the Psalms begin to open.