Beyond Knowing
Everything the last chapters have done, taking apart the self, uncovering the will that drives it, and naming plainly the evil that keeps a person chained to appetite, 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 registering 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 us in truth. 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 it regardless. What follows is an attempt to walk 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. We took apart the very concept you hold as to who you are, and stood you in front of a mirror to notice that even the face looking back has never once stayed the same long enough to be called the real you. We listened for that persistent voice inside your head that dared to ask who you really are, and beneath that question we found something stranger still, awareness itself, quiet and unmoved, standing behind every thought you have ever had still and untouched by it all. Not a thought among thoughts, but the one constant that watched your worst grief and your highest joy without being lowered or raised by either. We looked at the physical body and its powers of sensation, the five narrow senses through which an entire universe is made to 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 single lifetime that you as a child and you as the elder could pass each other in the street as complete strangers, unlike in appearance, character, constitution, and thought. So much so that the real you is not, in any way, a definable or distinguishable entity. We explored how, underneath the shifting masks of self and the endless telling of what you want and who you are, something does not shift, and we called it awareness, the witness, the self that sits nearer the centre of you than any of the roles you had throughout life or the labels you have given yourself.
Here is where the final piece of this begins, and five chapters have earned the right to say it plainly. Knowing that you are not who you thought you were is not the end of the work but is the very condition that now makes the work possible at all. Everything you presently think, want, and judge rises out of one root, and Kabbalah names that root as the ever shifting Will to Receive. Baal HaSulam states the matter as a plain fact, that the whole of creation, in every one of its forms, is built from this single substance and nothing else, simply as one form of desire or another but all of our existence is just sesire. The blade of grass wills to be a blade of grass in exactly the sense that the Himalayas will to be the Himalayas, 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 in one form or another, and you are simply your own portion of that same will, and that is all you presently are. This is your present constitution, not a flaw hidden inside an otherwise sound structure, but the whole of the physical material world, and in truth it is all we presently have to work with. We work with the emanated, never with that which emanates it. We work with matter, never with the force that impelled matter into being. We work with results, because results are what our present state allows us to touch, and we remain, as things stand, profoundly asleep to the force behind them.
Our present constitution is not something that arrived from nowhere but is what remains after aeons of evolution carried a single will to receive up through the still, the vegetative, and the animal, until it reached the speaking level, and at that height it took every power handed to it and turned all of it toward itself. What drives it there is a narrow band of pleasures that rise, are satiated, and vanish, only to rise again. Each person lives by these same narrow lights: food, sex, money, power, control, knowledge, and beyond that, nothing. Whatever grants gratification in the moment is chased, and everything else is left behind, so that a whole life passes on this wheel of appetite, forever feeding needs that empty out again as soon as they are filled. This, and nothing more elaborate than this, is the evil the great traditions speak of. It is found across the Psalms, the Talmud, and every kabbalistic text, and it names nothing but this, one’s own constitution as it presently stands which blinds completely to any order of life beyond itself, chained as it is to a perpetual round of desire, want, and need, filled again and again and left, each time, emptied again.
Kabbalists gave this understanding a name of its own: the Recognition of Evil {Hakarat HaRa, הכרת הרע}. Not evil as wickedness, and not evil as 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 move, and every chapter that came before this one was only ever 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 self serving root.
Life after life is lived inside a self crowded with opinion and accusation, self protection and protest, angst and judgement, error built into it from the very ground up. The vessel a person presently inhabits stands on foundations this unsteady, chasing desires that never last, while the true light of life waits, still, beyond it. This is what is meant by the false self. To see it, to know that any label given from within this current state is already a false judgement of the world, and that humankind has, as things stand, no apparatus by which to judge reality at all, is the first great seeing. Every idea, thought, want, need, and lust a person carries is built on this same falsity, error, and misjudgement, and this is the ground from which the next seeing, far greater still, will spring. That has to be taken in fully, not glanced at and moved past, before anything further can be built.
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 completely so that it faces the other way out from self outeward, 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.
What stands in the way of this is what the tradition calls the evil inclination, 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. That warm, fixed, still point is your truest identity, and it is what we turn to look at directly next.