Beyond Kabbalah Blog

book This blog is primarily intended for those who are studying the manual Beyond Kabbalah. Here I will add additional notes and observations as I teach the ongoing Wednesday night class. Here also you can add your own insights and questions on the material.

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 Your comments, questions and critiques are encouraged. Every comment is privately reviewed by Joel. When your comment is posted your email address is never displayed and, if you prefer, you can use any screen name you wish.

 

    19 Comments

  1. Not sure if this is what we’re looking for, but I have another nothing. (I think it’s one we’ve already heard, it’s just that I’m trying to sing it now)

    Ki ein banu ma’asim.

    It is the most difficult part of the last 6 phrases of Avinu Malkeinu for me to learn.

    I woke up recently with an idea of Tikkun completed in the present echoing backward in time, rectifying history.

  2. The torus is the tool of the mind to make sense of 3D reality, but pain and perplexity (gevurot) raise questions of meaning. So, then the mind exhausts itself in searching, using the torus, to find the I Am (hasadim), but has to give up being unable to find 4D due to its subject/object limitation. Giving up (humility) is good, however, and it is like the moth and the flame, consumed by the 4D, gaining the awareness (consciousness) that the mind/ torus has been a simulation all the time, and the hasadim is both no-thing and every-thing. But now, time for the tzimtzum, making space for a new mind/torus and a new search. However, all of this cycle is quite relative because there is
    no time or space in 4D. So…we need to be a humble and happy simulation..! 🙂

    Further: The simulation is the stimulation is the tzimtzum…!

  3. Interstellar Adam

    Our real Self
    resides in dimensionless
    space-like presence..
    Future and past reside
    in this Now..
    Attending to wormholes
    we confront the darkness
    which veils understanding of
    Our real Self…

    reflecting on the movie:
    Interstellar…

  4. The No-thing-ness of the Day- Painting

    Anything can become a “thing” in painting.
    Careful not to let eyeglasses be a thing, even a nose or an eye
    can be a thing. This is one no-thing-ness in painting.
    Even when you are painting a “thing”, ie. still life, objects as the subject
    you don’t actually want a painting to be about things as the content.
    The only thing is the painting itself and even that is more common
    when the subject of the painting is the painting
    (abstract art can be about itself).

    Rita bat Levi

  5. I am reading through Beyond Kabbalah for the second time. Last night I was reading about Mashiach ben Yoseph, and came upon the concept of ‘Od Yoseph Chai’. When I turned out my light and tried to go to sleep, I found I couldn’t. As I lay there thinking about all I had read…. something came to me…

    I pray HaShem will help me articulate it!

    If we are succeeding in making tikkun on the prolapse of the Gevurot… and by ‘we’ I mean ALL of us since the fall… the millennia of souls who have done this work… then because she is being more and more enfolded by the Hasadim… the part of her that IS still exposed must be more ‘potent’ and grows ever more so as time goes on because of the increasing mitigation of the Hasadim.

    Here is a drawing I made of what I’m talking about… link:

    https://www.flickr.com/photos/10029303@N05/15138213288/

    But this also means that the forces of the other side have available to them, stronger energies. They are now in a feeding frenzy. Wherein any fool can do evil and gain great profit by it because of the potency.

    They don’t know that ‘Od Yoseph Chai’. They can’t see nor understand that the decree has been nullified. They are blinded by the ‘brilliance’ of their apparent success and think his demise is almost within their grasp. Their certainty makes them so bold and arrogant that they film beheadings in the face of God and all mankind and never think that anything can stop them!

    Bear with me now…

    I once was privileged to witness a total eclipse. When it is just about to be total, even when there is only a small spot of light left shining, that light is STILL so bright, you cannot look at the sun at all until the very last of it has been obscured by the moon. You must wait, but then, just like THAT, the light is cut off and all is revealed. .. or concealed as the case may be… 🙂

    The forces of the other side won’t realize until the Hasadim surrounds the last ‘molecule’ of the Gevurot that the source of their ‘power’ is gone. BUT that last molecule will be SO full of the power of the mitigated gevurot, it will seem that they ARE the masters of the universe.

    BUT, suddenly it will be cut off to them, totally unavailable, hidden once more in the Hasadim.

    Now, we also (at least in my eclipse metaphor) are ‘blinded’ as to where we really are in the process of tikkun. We are doing the work, but cannot ‘see’ our progress very well because of the increasing potency of the forces battling all around us. It SEEMS that the other side is unstoppable and we have so far to go, but this is just because we cannot see properly right now.

    Once I understood this dynamic… I was filled with hope and comfort, because I don’t have to be upset or worried that ‘they’ will succeed. We just have to keep on making tikkun and dancing the dance no matter WHAT it looks like!

    This gives me courage!

    • Thank you, D’Vorah Davida. Most interesting. My “Adamic” response would be quite simple. You mention being blinded and seeing, which relate to the significant topic of perspective…where we are looking from. From the hasadim perspective we find no-thing-ness, and from the gevurot we find some-thing-ness. Awakening, or becoming Aware, is to experience the relationship between these. The truth is the primacy of the hasadim perspective, from which we see that the gevurot is simply a modulation of the hasadim, and actually is made out of the hasadim. When a critical mass of persons become Aware of this Reality, the “flip” will be underway..

  6. Reflecting on the torus as no-thing-ness…
    The torus is a thing, a process of thought
    which connects 3D with 4D. So…we ask
    ourselves what happens when, in our torus
    meditation, one arrives at the point (the
    black hole) imagined as our entryway to
    4D. Then a realization should say that
    no-thing-ness now holds sway. And
    spontaneously that no-thing-ness nullifies
    our torus entirely, leaving only bright
    Consciousness or Awareness
    aware of Itself…

    This is the rapidly disappearing torus, and
    it is stimulation from below…!

    • Ah, the famous case of the disappearing Torah Torus!

  7. Joel….I thought I would comment on what I see as the significance of starting each of your classes with reflections on “no-thing-ness.” Without this understanding it seems that these teachings also cannot be learned. The world of the separate self and its duality overwhelms. No-thing-ness is the red pill necessary for any further learning. It is the Formula out of which all iterations flow. Experiencing this, we can make the seeming concessions to the separate self, which Torah B does, but retain the background of no-thing-ness, and realize that all those “things,” are really made of nothing but no-thing-ness…! Or….just climb into our Torus..!

    • You are 100% correct. You could not have said it more to the point. Now, we have to go back to every single class I have taught, rewind it and start it again with Nothing! And yes, the Torah Torus is a big, cosmic ball of auto-revolving Nothing!

  8. I am having some trouble integrating the following aspects: Specifically, I do not know how to reconcile Moshiach ben David as a person with the period of the Resurrection, Olam Haba and our returning to the daat of Atzilut.
    I recall that in class you had said that the “elastic sheet” can stretch as far as it can and immediately spring back at anytime right now, and my understanding of this is that once this happens we will be in the world of Atzilut. So it seems that this (return to Atzilut) can happen right before the arrival of Moshiach ben David.

    I hope you will be able to clarify the above for me: (if only in a linear fashion). Thank you

    • I will explain these matters at the beginning of class this wed.

  9. This is about “drop” problems in imagining the H and G poles of HuG.
    It seems there are always subtle drops in attempting to imagine the hasadim or gevurot energies in their pure state. The subtlety comes from the names themselves. In considering hasadim, the name “hasadim” is a limiting factor, and so is essentially the gevurot drop. Similarly, in considering gevurot, the name suggests an ordered entity, and so is the drop of hasadim. In other words, polarity seems always to reign in the HuG relationship..! Having said that, perhaps in a meditative exercise, we might imagine diluting the “names (drops)” over and over to reach purity, but, as in homeopathy, a drop, or non-drop, remains…

  10. I’m not sure which category to post this in, but I was listening to Matisyahu’s song ‘Youth’ and heard the lyrics ‘youth is the engine of the world’. Is this a reference to Metatron, or just a general saying about young people? I’m wondering if anyone has heard that expression before. Shavua Tov!

  11. A thought regarding the slogan “Never Again”1

    As one thought leads to another, given the teachings in “The Ascension of G0d’s Thought”, and the fact that we are the last generation, I am now wondering if the slogan “Never Again” is an iterating formula for “The End of All Flesh”.

    Footnote 1: “According to the great historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg, the phrase “Never Again” first appeared on handmade signs put up by the inmates at Buchenwald in April,1945, shortly after the camp had been liberated by US forces…Since then, “Never Again” has become kind of shorthand for the remembrance of the Shoah.”
    http://www.learntoquestion.com/resources/database/archives/cat_genocide.html

  12. So we might say that the preservation of HuG (Hasadim and Gevurot relationship) is the unexpected primal event in the Exodus..the Threshold, jumping-off point, for the advance to Mt. Sinai. The launch pad had to be prepared for the launching, and the danger existed that the rocket fuel was not ready.. Not a Sunday school lesson..!

    • What if we were to overlay the Torus model upon the The Two Worlds According to the Deeper Understanding drawing, page 62. in Beyond Kabbalah? Olam Hazeh, as the Corridor, stimulates (from below) the creation of the multiplicity of Olam HaBahs, So, in essence, we are seeing (co-creating) our own Olam HaBahs, and we might visualize drawing them closer, but really recognizing that they were awaiting our recognition of having never been separated. But then, this perspective is from below, what if we change our perspective from above.? No multiplicity do we see, only an Awareness of Singularity with stimulation (from where?). And so, this experience leads to the Qashe of who is doing the “knowing.” Only the Torus knows..!

      • This is great and very true. This follows the explanation of the Nefesh HaChayim (R’ Chayim Volozhin) that we are literally making (or breaking) our home NOW in our “Olam HaBah”.

  13. I want to encourage everyone who is attending Rabbi Bakst’s classes, either in person or on-line, to make use of these blogs, especially this one. Often thoughts occur after the class which might be shared for the enrichment of all. Questions or In-sights..! A developing Da’at requires continuing attention, not just one night in class..!

    Charlie Coon

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