Kabbalah: Unraveling Our Spiritual Memories
We all remember having had sudden reminiscences of past events whilst involved in activities that engaged our emotions or involved choices. These reminiscences are usually unexpected and random, take us back months, years or decades into the past and present to us some episode of our life, words we heard, images we saw, with apparently little connection to the present.
Spiritual Memories
Kabbalah tells us that a similar phenomenon exists in a spiritual context. At the beginning of creation, the spiritual creature was in complete accord with the Creator, surrounded by a force of Light and pure love. The Creator’s only desire was to bestow pleasure on his creation, and the creature was ready to receive that pleasure to its fullest.
At some point, however, the creature realized that he was the exact opposite of the Creator. While the Creator was pure giving, the creature was pure reception. This realization, along with the creature’s discovery that he had nothing to give in return, led to an overwhelming sense of shame. The connection between Creator and creature was broken. This breaking began a chain of events that produced mankind and our world.
When we, the whole of humanity, descended from the original “place” of creation, we went down through successive steps of progressive darkening. At each step, we rejected a little more of the divine Light that we could not tolerate in our egoistic nature. At each one of those steps, a record was made; a nugget of memory was created to capture that particular incompatibility between the loving Light of the divine and the egoistic nature of the creature. All these nuggets of memory were stored in our souls, like a long string of beads.
The Return to the Creator
As our lives unfold, we are presented with opportunities to revisit this incompatibility between the love of the divine and our egoistic nature. And at each step, we have a chance to correct our action to be more like the altruistic qualities of the Creator. When the moment comes, one small bead of memory is opened in front of us, as a cameo of a spiritual discernment, a desire and a test of our readiness to overcome our egoistic nature with regards to that desire. Often we fail that particular test and our egoism prevails. The bead is put back on the string waiting for the next opportunity.
These beads that randomly appear in our lives are the precise record of our descent from infinite Light into utter darkness. Decoding them provides us with the key to understand why we live in darkness and how we can ascend again. Therefore they are very precious and worth contemplating as a gift of the spiritual.
Kabbalah provides us with a methodology to reveal these memories and climb the spiritual ladder back to our point of creation. At that time, all of mankind will once again dwell in unending pleasure and love.
Related Material:
- 125 Degrees to Happiness - an article discussing the successive degrees of creation, our descent to this world, and our ascent to the spiritual world.
- Tree of Life, Kabbalah - a video of the Ari's "Tree of Life" poem about the creation of the universe.
Mark Zimmerman - Mark Zimmerman is a student of Dr. Michael Laitman and English content editor for the Ashlag Research Institute and the Bnei Baruch ...
