Kabbalah Revealed #4
The Force of Development and the Meaning of Suffering

Lecture presented for the American television channel, Shalom TV
Anthony Kosinec
June 29, 2006


The Force of Development and the Meaning of Suffering

Hello again and welcome to Kabbalah Revealed. I’m Tony Kosinec.

Previously we learned about the blueprint for reality, the Thought of Creation, the action of the Creator, the quality of the Upper World, what spirituality is.

This Thought of Creation, which is to create a creature and to fill this creature with unbounded delight, is the only reason that anything ever occurs, and everything that appears in our life is as a result of this; it’s either that it comes from it, and it’s on its way to fulfillment of it, whether we can perceive that quality or not. And this is the problem that we have because we think—and the deepest question that we have about our life, and our inability to feel where we are and where we’re going comes from the fact that we must ask, “If the Creator is completely good, and only does good, then why is it that we see evil? Why are there bad events?”

In order to investigate this question, the Kabbalists set for us a boundary of how we should go about our investigations, in order to get a real answer and not get confused.

Baal HaSulam tells us that there is a rule in Kabbalah and that is “what cannot be attained cannot be named.” What does that mean?

The goal that we want to reach is a direct sensation of the Creator, not an idea, not some kind of an intellectualization because there is no real answer in an intellectualization. You can’t feel confident about an idea. You must be able to feel it within you in the same way that you feel where you’re feet stand, or as you look at something that’s before you. It must be tangible. Only there is there a real change in perception, not in ideas or abstractions.

Man cannot really understand the events in his life because man rejects half of all reality. Half of everything that occurs that is considered by him to be bad, man rejects. And that’s because of an inner programming that we have, which is “the will to receive.” That will to receive functions as a guidance system, that is, we are completely controlled by it, and all that it’s doing is that it’s either attracting us to something that we find delightful that we find as pleasure, and that we consider to be good, or we are running away from something that does not give us pleasure, that gives us emptiness, so we flee from that.

We are constantly looking only for those things that are considered to be good. So, our perception of what the purpose of both of these events are, is faulty because our attention is never on the whole of the picture. It’s always only on a small part of the picture because we are looking at it from within the level of the problem itself. And this is a huge problem for us because all perception, as we can see just in simple nature, comes only as a result of contrast.

We only know cold by its opposite, heat. We only know up when we relate it to down. If we look just at the quality of heat in itself—if there was nothing opposite it, if it had no opposite quality—it would be an essence; we wouldn’t be able to feel anything in it. If there was no movement, no way to measure anything, what could we know about heat? There would be nothing there; there would simply be no sensation. So this comparison between what we consider to be good and why we consider it to be good, and what we experience as bad and why we consider it to be bad, this is the thing that needs to be measured.

We need to have something that is not a sliding scale. And it may not seem so to us, because we’re blinded by this inability to incorporate the greater scope of reality, but all of our evaluation of good and evil from within the will to receive is completely subjective; it’s a totally sliding scale. That is, we can say that certain events that we see are considered to be evil. But if you really look at it profoundly, if you look at what your true responses are (and here, this is what is meant by “only what can be attained can be named”), you have to look at the actual experience.

Take, for example, the Tsunami disaster. There were 400,000 people killed in that disaster and everybody, if you poll them will say “this is horrible.” The loss of life was terrible; the suffering of others was terrible. It’s almost unimaginable the scope of this biblical scope of destruction, evil. But what happens if you happen to be one of the owners of the companies that gets to rebuild the resorts in those areas? It’s the best thing that has happened to you in five years. So, what did you really experience? Can you say according to your idea, that “oh, I should feel this way about it,” and therefore the idea of what’s good is this, and an idea of what’s bad is this. No, you must go by what you actually feel. If you measure something else, you’re measuring something imaginary. Now, sometimes we can see this fact that something that we wouldn’t first take as a bad experience we can understand as a good experience when we look at the levels of life below us.

If we look at something like a forest fire and we see a tremendous amount of damage done, we can look at that situation and we can say, “well, you know, it was bad for the trees, but in the larger scope of things, what’s going to happen is that there was a purpose to this; there is going to be a thicker growth; we’re going to have, you know, maybe there’ll be a more diverse forest, a thicker forest, and the things that were preventing its successful growth are now changed.



And the only reason that we can see a disaster as a good thing is because we look at it as a process; we see the larger arc of development on the levels of life below us.

Below us there are levels of still or inanimate, there’s the vegetative level, there is the animal level and there is the human level that we live on. Unfortunately this level is just a complex animal. In order to be able to see what is happening to us, and the programming and the instinctive level, and the larger scope of what’s happening to us in our lives. Not to see just a single cross-section where we don’t understand the plan or the vector, the way in which things are progressing towards the goal. When we look at this (Tony motions a middle part of the vector with his hand) on the human level, we can’t understand; we can’t pull ourselves up by our own hair to some higher level. We have to be able to view it on a higher level, which the Kabbalists call “the speaking level.”

The speaking level of man is where he begins to be part of the Upper System and view the whole system of guidance provided by the Creator, that One Force that moves us through two prongs through the will to receive, that attracts us toward something good, and repels us from something bad. If we can see it from this level above, we stop seeing the events in our lives as isolated chunks and try to name them at a place in time and space where we really have no perception of the reason for anything.

So what do we do to be able to get ourselves into this Higher State? How do we see from this higher point of view? Well, we can’t do it ourselves. We can only do it with the aid of what’s already there, we have to be able to sense what’s there, and then we can become like it.

Remember that the force of evolution is just the development of desires and this system of Upper Light has arranged that we would be moved along through these desires until we came to desire precisely the right thing. But because we are involved in our development in an unconscious way, that is, “not by our will are we brought into this, and not by our will do we proceed in this,” until we come to the point where the awakening occurs in a person.

The awakening is arranged by these events that we call “good and bad.” In other words, our desires continue to be developed and change so that our question becomes greater. And each of these, what we consider to be blows make us ask the question on a deeper and deeper level: What is the real cause of suffering? Why am I suffering and how can I stop suffering? This force of development moves us along unconsciously until we will not settle for anything else but the answer to this question because the answer to the question can only come from the Higher Level that guides the system, that makes us feel as if there are good and bad events.

So now that this conscious tangible need has happened inside the sensation of the person that no other desire can replace, only the answer to this question, this conscious tangible need—now the answer has a place to go, a person can receive it. But in order to know why we’re suffering, we have to know what’s good and what’s bad and we know that we can’t feel that or measure it against a sliding scale. It can’t be from within the will to receive. It has to be against something that doesn’t change. This we know is the quality of the Creator, which always and only gives. It’s unconditional bestowal, and the quality of the creature is to receive the will to receive for the self alone. It’s the measurement of the contrast between these two qualities that begin to give us a sense of where we are, because the only thing there is to feel and to sense is the Creator. The question is how do I sense it? What do I sense it as?

(Tony drawing) We live in a sea of Light. That means we are always receiving delight into our vessel, our Kli. (Tony points to drawing of Kli) This is our will to receive. And the Upper Light is constantly filling us with delight, that is, with a sensation which is actually a sensation of the Light itself. It is always the Creator, except that it depends on what we say it is; it depends on what the dressing is, what we call this thing that’s happening.

All events of our life are sent to us in a way that we sense them directly, as Direct Light. But if we feel them that way, that means that we feel them through the will to receive, and we don’t know why they’re being given. What we seek to do is to feel the thought inside of it, that is: What is this quality here? What is the quality of bestowal that is the Creator’s intention behind giving to us in this event? How is this connected to the force of development that is bringing us to fulfillment?

If we can understand and get a sensation of this, then we understand the event and we also rise to that level. And all that we seek to do in the events of life is to justify the Creator. This is what a righteous man is, what a Tzadik is. It’s one who, regardless of the events of life, feels the Thought behind the giving of the event, the benevolent force of the Creator’s guidance. And only the difference between what we feel in our Kli, and what the Creator’s Thought is, that is, what our thought is compared to the Creator’s Thought is, this is the source of suffering.

This contrast between my nature—my intention of reception of the Light, and the Creator’s intention of the bestowing of the Light—this discrepancy causes me discomfort, suffering, and so on. This quality of bestowal, the quality of giving of the Upper Light is the general law of the universe, and everything in the universe follows from that. All laws, inner and outer laws of nature all follow from that. And it’s incumbent on all life to find a balance, a homeostasis between what is outside and what’s inside. So the degree to which we don’t keep this law of life, that is to become like it, our world and all aspects of it suffer; not just the man, but his surroundings—his world, his country, his family, all of reality.

One of the ways of attracting the Upper Light that will allow us to raise to a level where we can begin to understand and sense the Creator is by the study of Kabbalistic texts. The only reason to study a Kabbalistic text is to attract the Light that reforms; not for any intellectual knowledge, but for a transformation that happens within.



As we begin to read this text, bring your question, the thing you most need to know, remember it and bring it into the reading, it doesn’t matter what you understand intellectually, it only matters what you need and what you feel.

This article is called There is None Else Beside Him and it was spoken by Baal HaSulam and was recorded by his son, Rabash.
It is written that “there is none else beside Him,” meaning that there is no other power in the world with the ability to do anything against Him. And what man sees, namely, that there are things in the world, which deny the household of above, is because He wills it so.

In other words, it is purposely built that we see a system that we feel that there are good and bad events. And we feel that there is an opposing force to our good; that there is something that prevents us from feeling good. And the reason that this occurs is because the Upper Force itself wants this to happen; there’s a purpose, it wills it so, because there is no other force that can actually make this occur.

And it is deemed a correction, called “the left rejects and the right adducts,” meaning that that which the left rejects is considered correction. This means that there are things in the world, which from the beginning aim to divert a person from the right way, and they reject him from holiness.

He’s saying here that this experience of not being able to sense the Creator directly, of this feeling of this Force pushing us away, this is called “the correction.” This is a Force by which something occurs that allows us transform; it’s part of this system of guidance, and it’s called that “the left rejects [that is, pushes away] and the right adducts” [draws closer to the Creator].

We’re speaking here about a person who wishes to feel the Creator, not just the normal events of life, even though they’re structured the same way, because all of the levels of nature work by exactly the same principle.

But “this means that there are things in the world, which from the beginning aim to divert a person from the right way, and they reject him from holiness.” That means, when a person desires to feel a sensation of the Creator, to know the laws that govern their life, to taste holiness, which is Kedusha, which means to be separated, to be apart; that quality of Kedusha is the quality of the will to bestow. It is completely separated from this world; it is completely above it. So there are things that are purposely in this system that cause a person to be unable to sense this holiness.
And the benefit from these rejections is that through them a person receives a need and a complete desire for God to help him…
This pushing away—once there is a desire, once there is an intention to know the Creator—this pushing away does what we have seen in the whole system of nature: it causes a need. It means that there is a specific need that is being built. Not a need for this or that thing, for cars, for wealth, for food, for sex, for knowledge, for power, no: it’s building a particular need.
…the benefit from these rejections is that through them a person receives a need and a complete desire for God to help him…
The desire that’s being built is the desire directly for God, directly to God (in Hebrew, Yashar Kel) the desire directly for what is above.

…since he sees that otherwise he is lost. [In other words, they need a connection with the Higher Force that guides everything]. Not only does he not progress in his work, but he sees that he regresses…
That is, the more one needs this, the more the Light exposes the difference between his inner condition and the state of the Light. This is called “the revelation of evil.” What do we need this for? We need this because this is our means of measurement. It’s by the contrast that we know something.
We measure the scope of love, the completeness of the Thought of Creation, against the barrier in which we begin to sense our own nature. So not only is the nature of the Creator and the Upper World revealed to us through this process of contrast, our own nature is revealed. And the greater the desire to receive grows, specifically with this desire to receive contact with the Creator, the greater the amount of the sensation of the Creator can fill it.
Not only does he not progress in his work, but he sees that he regresses… [In other words, he sees the difference between him and the Creator] and he lacks the strength to observe Torah and Mitzvot even if not for Her name. [That is, a person feels that not only can they not sense the Creator directly, but they can’t even fool themselves that they’re doing it for any reason in order to reach the Creator. They feel the greatest degree of difference, but this is a blessing, because it’s by the expansion of the will to receive and its correction that we actually progress]. That only by genuinely overcoming all the obstacles, above reason, he can observe Torah and Mitzvot. [That is, not by his strength, not by his knowledge, not by any kind of ideas or theories, but only by the tangible reception of the Light, which has got to be above his reason; this connection is above the will to receive and all the thoughts connected in how to get those things that we want.]
This force, that we experience as good and bad events, are the left and right hand of the Creator, that guide us by means of ups and downs through the normal events of our lives if properly understood once we have this desire to go directly to God. No matter what it is that occurs in our life with this desire, then this one particular need grows until it can eventually encompass and swallow the entire imaginary world and bring us into a complete contact with reality.
This is just a taste of the beauty of these articles. We will continue our discovery of what exists within these articles and within Kabbalah.
Join us again.

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“You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.”
- Swami Vivekananda

Kabbalah Revealed #3
The Path of Pain & the Path of Torah and Mitzvot

Lecture presented for the American television channel, Shalom TV
Anthony Kosinec
July 21, 2006


Hello again and welcome to Kabbalah Revealed. I’m Tony Kosinec.

Last time we spoke about the force of development; the progression of desires; and the way in which reality moves us along the path of development. We spoke about the quality that is the definition of the Upper Worlds, the Spiritual Worlds; the quality that is the definition of the physical worlds and what it is about the way that we perceive that makes the Spiritual Worlds the greater reality hidden from us.

We looked at the progression of desires. We saw that there were four categories of desires that are considered physical, and that because of the Thought of Creation, which is to create a creature and bring that creature to unbounded delight, it must progress by means of what the Creator finds delightful.

And so, all expression of development from the Thought of Creation is expressed through a lack and a filling. We saw that desires progressed from simple desires (animal desires for sex, for shelter, food, and family), and when that was filled, we moved onto greater desire, which was a desire for wealth, which is an accumulation of the first one. When that desire feels empty to us, because we are still feeling something driving us, something that’s pushing us ahead, something that’s pulling us forward, we feel that thing as a kind of a taste, as something that we must have, and we move towards it, and once we have it, we can’t taste it anymore. But this is the force of development moving us on. From wealth, we move onto fame, power. Once we fill that, we are moved on by our emptiness into knowledge. Once we find knowledge empty, we find ourselves in a confusing situation in which nothing from this world can satisfy us. If you recall, it’s at that point at which a completely new level of development becomes accessible to us.

The Path of Pain & The Path of Torah and Mitzvot

[Tony Kosinec]

When that special desire enters the heart from the spiritual, which is qualities of the will to bestow, it changes everything within the human heart. The human heart—when we hear the term “heart” in Kabbalah, it means the sum total of all desires that a person has—this heart is still filled with desires that come from the physical world. These are still the things from categories one, two, three and four.

This desire, which is a desire to reach the spiritual, is called “Israel,” from two Hebrew words, Yashar, meaning “straight,” and El, meaning “God”—a desire for a direct connection with God. These corporeal desires are called “nations,” “the nations of the world,” in other words, the desires of the physical world.

Up until this point, the force of development, the way in which desire moved us, until we came to a point where we actually needed to feel what was above the physical world, happened in an unconscious way. But from now on it has to happen in a conscious way because this point in the heart is a spiritual gene; it’s like the embryo of the soul. The soul is kind of a desire and it must be filled; the heart must be filled with this desire, it must fill everything despite these corporeal desires. In other words, all of the desires that we have, have to undergo a transformation, a correction. And it’s by correcting these desires that the desire to go directly to God can be fulfilled.

Now why is that? In our original state, at the root of our soul, we were connected to the Creator as “the Creator and the creature.” In fact these are the only two things that exist in creation: the Creator and the creature. And here, we were adhered to the Creator as one being, as one unified creature. But because of the Thought of Creation, which is to create a creature and fill it with delight, that was only the starting point, it was the beginning of the system. And this quality of the creature, which is the will to receive, started to expand purposefully, and as a result of the expansion of this quality, of this desire to receive for myself alone, a greater diversity in quality started to grow between the quality of the Creator (which is bestowal), and the quality of the creature (which is reception).

As this egoistic intention expanded, the first creature, the whole creature, the collective soul called “Adam ha Rishon” (meaning, the first man) descended through a system of worlds, through 125 steps to greater and greater egoism until the soul reached a point in which it became separated into what appears to be physicality.



That is, the collective soul was shattered into 600,000 parts, each one of these parts having a piece of the original; each one of these parts a desire. Now, because this is a process—and this is only the half-way point—this broken, shattered aspect of the collective soul in which we experience isolation, separation from each other, a kind of antagonism towards each other, a desire to exploit each other, and an experience of the physical world, is the half-way point and it is going to be corrected. It is going to rise back up through this system of worlds, back into this state of adhesion with the Creator, but it can’t do it all at once. So purposefully, it was broken into 600,000 parts.

Each one of these parts was likewise broken down into 613 desires. That is, each individual desire within Adam ha Rishon consists of 613 desires that can be corrected; the parts are small enough. It’s like dividing a huge treasure and giving a coin to each person knowing that each one will return this quality of bestowal. This point in the heart that’s placed inside of it can be trusted to bring that point back to its origin and put the treasure back together as a collective once again.

So in the point in the heart of the individual who begins to feel this desire for spirituality, this coin from the treasury of the King, plus the 612 other desires that exist in the heart must be transformed bit by bit to resemble to a greater degree the quality of the Creator, to reverse this process.

Now the thing is, this process of the return of the correction (Tikkun), of the transformation, of the fulfillment of the Thought of Creation, it’s going to happen, and all of us, all 600,000 pieces of the collective soul are going to rejoin, and are going to ascend from physical selfish perceptions and a world of suffering back into a complete and whole interrelationship with each other in such a way that we will reach the goal of creation, which is adhesion to the Creator and the complete filling of the greatest unbounded desire. It’s going to happen. But the question is, will it happen consciously, with our agreement, or will we be pushed to it?

You see, there’s one goal, and the goal is assured, but there are two paths to the goal: One path is called “the path of pain” and the other path is called “the path of Torah and Mitzvot.”

The path of pain is the path that we are all already on. It’s not even really a path. It’s what we see as the slow, grinding, evolution of humanity that we call “history.” It is a kind of clinging to our physical way of perceiving, to the characteristic that we really need to transform. And as a result of this non-conscious involvement with the process of development, we find ourselves being pushed by events. We see catastrophes, we see tsunamis, we see wars, we have personal experiences in our lives; experiences of pain, experiences of suffering, that are caused only by the lack of conscious involvement with the process of the development of desires in their correction. This path can go on and on, and on, and it’s disastrous. Once the point in the heart appears in a person though, it becomes a conscious involvement, and this is the path of Torah and Mitzvot.

Torah means “instruction by the Light,” and Mitzvot means a transformation of a quality of one of the 613 desires from its egoistic expression to its altruistic expression.

Every event that happens in our lives is really a Mitzva, a possibility for transformation being presented to us. Now, when I say the word Mitzva, I don’t mean like the physical commandments where you are instructed to do a certain thing. And there is a list of all these things in the Shulchan Aruch, in the Table of Jewish Law and so on—Do this physical thing now. I’m not saying don’t do the physical thing, but what I mean is that this is an inner correction; it’s a correction of desire. So whether you do the external good deed—whether it’s a religious good deed or whether it’s something that we consider to be something nice for somebody else—you can do any external deed and you can be filled with hatred and selfishness. You can’t measure anything by that. We’re talking about one of these 613 desires that’s presented to us as an event in our life.

Our entire lives are planned in such a way by this process of development to present to us the opportunity to take what we first feel as a desire to receive for myself in a given situation, and transform that into its altruistic form to try to understand what the thought of the Creator is, the Thought behind giving me that situation, because as you remember, the only way that we progress along spiritual space is by altering a quality within me, to resemble that quality in spirituality that I want to enter. Thus, what it is that I want to know according to this new desire, this desire straight for the Creator, is that I want to know the Creator; I want to have a direct sensation. I want to feel in my desires, in the tangible things that occur in my life, what is the Thought of the One, of the Upper One, of that Upper Level that gave me this perfect, structured situation; that gave me this opportunity, like a birthday present, for me to take it first in its corrupted form, and by analyzing and seeing what it is, feeling what His Thought is behind it, that’s a Mitzva; that’s Tikkun—that’s transformation.

These 125 states by which we descended from our connection to the complete reality down into our separated status, as individual people and desires, these 125 steps are also completely encompassed by these 613 Mitzvot, so that the correction of these transformations will bring the individual all the way back up the ladder.

Another feature of this is that each and every level of descent is imprinted in us as a gene.



Every point by which a greater and greater degree of the will to receive was added is remembered by us, like breadcrumbs on a path. This being the first spiritual gene, this point in the heart, our access to ascent, is actually the entry point on a chain of spiritual genetics called “Reshimot,” remembrances, and all of the events that happen in our lives, that bridge us between these 613 transformations of the will to receive, to the will to bestow that bond us to the Creator. Each event is laid out for us in a perfect pattern so that we have the opportunity to recognize what it is that we need to do.

Now this action of correction and transformation, this Tikkun, is not done by us; it’s done as a result of a desire that we have to make this contact with Spiritual Light. And as a result of the desire that we have, the work is done by the Light. It’s an action done on us by Surrounding Light.

The Zohar says: “When a person comes to purify themselves, they are helped from Above.” In other words, it’s as a result of a gut-level need that used to be a need for those four corporeal desires being transformed into a greater and greater need to know what the quality of bestowal actually is. We can’t reach this ourselves. This work is called “the work of God,” not because we go out there like a bunch of nice soldiers and do the job that God assigned us; it’s because the work itself of transformation, purification, Tikkun, is done on us by the Light as a result of an expanded desire. But don’t be confused by the word “Light.” Don’t think of it as a physical thing. Remember that the quality of the Spiritual World is a quality of attributes; it’s a quality of intention, feeling-states.

If you want to feel the contrast between your intention and the intention of the Light, then you can’t simply have a desire and have it filled directly by some kind of pleasure the way that we do that in the physical world. In order to feel the difference between our state and the state of the Light, the “my intention” and the intention of the Light, it’s necessary to have a sensor, something that can feel the Light. And this sensor must be an intention. It’s called “a screen.” This is what we referred to in our last show as the additional sense, the sixth sense.

This screen acts as a resonator, a contrast point between the desire that sends this which is given by the Light. Rather than having it just go directly in, it hits this screen and it causes a sensation, a sensation of difference between the intention here [Tony points to Kli] and the intention here [Tony points to Light]. And this screen, or Masach, is the tool. This is the way in which we can turn the will to receive, which is our matter and the only tool that we have to work with, into something very different. We can begin to feel and receive the Light only according to an intention that matches the intention of the Spiritual World. We will deal with this more later. But what happens when this can actually occur, when the feeling in here, the intention in the screen, is the same as the intention in the Light. This is called “a corrected desire.” And this contrast creates a need in us, the right need, a particular need. It builds a lack in a particular direction. It makes us want to feel what we don’t have, and that is the sensation of the Light, the Thought, the intention behind the Light. And it moves us in the intended direction of greater and greater correction.

Every time that a desire moves in transformation from its corrupted form into its perfected form—a transformation from its will to receive to the will to bestow—this puts us in touch with eternity. It connects us more and more to the Thought behind the entire process. Not only does it do that for this one particular desire, and for one individual, but as a result of the connection, the interconnection in Adam ha Rishon, that part of person number 1, that desire within person number 1, like a hologram, becomes corrected in each one of the other desires and reconnects them to each other. So, it raises not only the person who does the correction, but their entire world, so that our perception of our reality, the reason that things happen, the Thought behind it, whether or not good and bad things are occurring, this changes. A person can feel the total goodness behind the guidance of the entire system, and is no longer fooled by physical ideas of what’s good and evil.

This perception of the love behind the process is really what enlightenment is. Now we see good and bad events surrounding us, things that we want to happen and things that we feel should not happen. This sense that we do something right or we do something wrong, that we make a certain act and we’re punished for it, that there is a good force and a bad force in reality—this is not reality. This is the way that it appears to the will to receive, and enlightenment means that we can see, despite anything that appears to us, what the real, unifying Thought is behind that.

Join us next time when we look at the force of development, the reason for suffering and how we can rise above that.

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“You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.”
- Swami Vivekananda

Kabbalah Revealed #2
Perception of Reality

Lecture presented for the American television channel, Shalom TV
Anthony Kosinec
June 19, 2006



Hello and welcome again to Kabbalah Revealed. I am Tony Kosinec.
In our first show, we did an overview of what Kabbalah is about and what it isn’t. If you recall what Kabbalah is for, it is for a person who asks the question,“What is the meaning of my life?” Let’s see where we go from here. Let’s start with a definition of Kabbalah and see what that definition is and where it can lead us.
Kabbalah is a wisdom, a science that enables man, a person to feel and know an upper reality. This is how it addresses the purpose of life but of course it brings up questions: What is a person? What is a man? What is an upper reality? What is it that enables a person to feel, know and enter an upper reality.
[Drawing]
If you recall, we looked at this diagram before in which we see that we live, our existence happens, within a complete and total reality that depends on nothing, that is unbounded; in which everything is completely interconnected, that is filled with infinite pleasure, complete knowing and contact with everything that exists in reality. Yet the Kabbalists tell us, the ones who have attained the whole system, for a certain purpose we descended from this way of existence, through this way of being, through a system called “worlds.” Worlds are Olamim, from the Hebrew word Olam, which comes from the root He’elem, which means “to hide,” “hiddenness.” We descended from this complete connection with reality until we reached a place, a cross over point called a barrier, and our existence happens in a very limited way here, in a place called “our world.” Our world is a place that has no sensation whatsoever of any of these worlds—and these are Spiritual Worlds, all of these—this is what’s considered to be the physical world or corporality.
If you want to know the purpose of life, the meaning of your life, it would be a good thing if you knew what the plan was. It seems like that’s an impossible thing; it’s almost a source of jokes that anyone could possibly answer that question about the meaning and purpose of life, but that’s where the Kabbalists start. Those who have attained this entire reality tell us that there is a plan—a blue print—for all of reality and for all of creation. They tell us that the purpose of life is to create a creature and to fill that creature with unbounded delight; to create a creature and to fill that creature with unbounded delight. That is the complete and total meaning, purpose, direction of everything that ever can occur, will occur, only happens for that purpose. In that thought, in that intention, in that thought behind all of creation, all of the rules for everything that would occur, were set down. All the principal laws that govern the spiritual and physical worlds, all are rooted in that one thought. Nothing that is happens in this world happens for any other reason than in order to create a creature and bring that creature to unbounded delight.
What is it that keeps a person out of the Spiritual World? What is a person? Well, we have to understand how our perception of this reality, the way in which we perceive reality, causes a hiddeness for us.
[Drawing]
This is a person, a closed box with five openings. These five openings are our five senses. Now, surrounding the person is an upper reality, a complete reality, the spiritual, and from that complete reality things approach us. That is what appears to be an exterior reality of some sort of unformed something, approaches the person and through the five senses that we possess, we determine what that thing is; in other words, what does reality consist of, according to my senses.
This spiritual object approaches the box, but something odd happens here. It doesn’t actually enter the box. The box is a closed system, because rather then this object coming in, it hits a barrier—a kind of transducer, like an eardrum or a retina or a nerve—on the surface of the skin or a taste bud. Instead of getting the thing on the outside, this thing gets reduced and is passed through a program; this thing here [points to the drawing]. As it passes through this program, it gets interpreted into something that we can understand according to certain principles within the program. Once it passes through this, it leaves our box or this machine, and what it produces is our reality.
[continues drawing]
It doesn’t matter how sensitive this sensor is. Let’s say it’s your eye; it can be the Hubble telescope or you can be completely nearsighted and unable to see the thing directly in front of you. It doesn’t matter the degree of sensitivity. What matters is the programming, what happens here within this subjective system, in the machine.



Whatever it is that comes into here, it can only be what this program says that it is. Not what this [pointing to a specific area in the drawing] is, but a reduction that can be understood by the program.
What is this program that limits this? This [pointing to a specific area in the drawing] is objective reality; and this [pointing to another specific area in the drawing] is the limited portion of it that we can perceive. This program is called “egoism.” It’s self concern—“What’s in it for me?” “How is this going to affect me?” As a result of this, I’m locked into...the person is locked into a subjective view of all these things, only in relation to how it feels inside of the box. At no point does it have any sense of what really exists outside of the box.
We’ve got a problem because every single one of our five senses works by exactly the same program. Not one of them can tell us anything about what exists outside of that program.
In order to know what surrounds us, what the greater reality is, we need to develop an additional sense, what the Kabbalists call “a sixth sense.” Not the sixth sense of the lady who tells your fortune, but a sense that actually can make contact with what exists outside; that is not bounded by that kind of programming.
In order to do that, well you have to need to do it. It’s not possible to work outside, to build something outside of this box as long as we are satisfied with “What’s in it for me?”
The Thought of Creation has built in it laws that bring a person to this complete fulfillment. There is a motivating force that allows us to come to the point where we need to get out of the box. If we understand both what we are, which is the will to receive—“What’s in this for me?”—that we are built as egoists; but that’s okay, because it’s actually what we need in order to reach this fulfillment, there’s nothing wrong with it. We just have to learn how to use it, how to harness it, and how to harness the force of development that the Thought of Creation has provided for us.
What is it that moves things in reality? What makes things happen? Nobody does anything in this world—whether it’s an inner thing or whether it is a spiritual thing that is beyond this world. Everything that happens, happens only as a result of...well, let’s look at it.
You’re sitting there. Maybe you’re shifting in your chair; where your eyes are moving to, maybe you picked up something to drink. Any motion that you are now involved in is happening only as a result of one calculation, that you have become uncomfortable where you are, that a need has evolved in you, has appeared, and you have moved to a new position or a new situation that you believe will bring you more pleasure than the one that you were in before.
This lack and the filling of pleasure and a force of desire is what motivates everything in reality; and this will eventually take a person from the corporal world, from our perceptions of the physical world, the limitations that we experience, and the suffering that goes along with it. It will bring a person, if properly used, past that barrier and into the Spiritual World in this way.
[Begins drawing]
We all feel desires and we feel them change, but we don’t really pay attention to this system that is placed in us by nature well enough so that we can understand what it’s doing for us. We all understand that our first sort of grasp of what pleasure is, is just survival-type pleasures. The first category, we see pleasure as and require: sex, food, and shelter. All of our efforts, our work, what we perceive around us, the whole goal of our lives has to do with finding and getting these things, and this is a desire that we have in common with animals. It doesn’t require other people, we just need this to survive.
Once we have this filled, we realize that life is about much more than that and we can’t be satisfied with it and a second category of desires appears. This is a desire for wealth. Wealth is the accumulation of the first category, so that I’ll never have to worry about it again, I will be able to control it. Once we fill this desire for wealth, we come to the feeling that “is that all there is?” something else grows in us. Now, notice that it’s not simply that it’s another desire that’s growing, but it’s a greater desire—one that encompasses the one before it.
In other words, here we have a small desire and a small filling. Here, we have a desire that has grown and it requires a greater filling; and this one is incorporated in this one. Now, if I can’t be filled by wealth, there’s a new desire that arises in me and that is a desire for power. This doesn’t happen only to the individual in their lives, but it’s happened to humanity as a whole throughout history. The whole scope of history has been the evolution of these desires. Power is the ability to control both this and this, all systems that will bring me the greatest collection of that. Now, this is political power, this is empire, this is control in my job. Once I have that, I can no longer be satisfied with it. I become empty. I feel a lack, and a fourth desire is placed inside of me—a greater expanded desire for something that encompasses all of that, and that is knowledge.
Knowledge is the barrier, in a sense, of what it is that we define as the physical world. These desires, one, two, three and four, all have to do with what we perceive as pleasure. That is what we are being filled with and what we want—what will satisfy us. Well, knowledge is science, it is religion, it’s art, it’s the pinnacle of what we consider to be what humanity could possibly achieve. Yet anybody who seriously delves into this very great desire and attempts to fill it eventually discovers that this is empty as well; that there are no answers in science for the real causes of things. Because there’s no answer to purpose; there’s only mechanical answers. The answers only have to do with these desires.
Religion, though it gives us beliefs, cannot give us access to what it is that we really want—a direct knowledge. Once a person becomes empty, as a result of having this fulfilled, something very different and very special happens—a new desire arises—but this desire is not a desire from this world. This is a desire placed within our heart, which is the sum of all desires that we have—both for this world and for what’s beyond it.



A desire is placed in us from a completely other level of development—from the greater reality. What appears inside of our heart is a “point in the heart”—that’s what the Kabbalists call it. This point is a part of the greater reality. It has an aspect of spirituality, which if this desire becomes fulfilled, unlike these, it grows continually, until it fills our entire experience, our entire existence, and can bring us into the Spiritual World.
So what is an upper reality? The Kabbalists who have attained the totality of reality tell us that it consists of a particular quality. They tell us that we were created in exact opposite phase to the quality that exists in the Upper Worlds and this is why we cannot perceive what’s there. It appears as though there’s nothing there at all. [points to drawing] We know, from the drawing, that what we consist of, what the man or the person or the creature consists of, is egoism. That’s what’s inside of the box.
[Continues drawing]
What’s inside of the box is called “the will to receive.” This will to receive makes us experience limited existence, makes us experience suffering, isolation and all of the things that we find difficult about life. What exists outside of this, in the non-subjective condition of egoism, is an objective reality that the Kabbalists tell us is “the will to bestow.” The will to bestow is unconditional altruism. In other words, the experience out here is unlimited existence, unbounded pleasure and delight. Yet, we can’t feel this because we have no means to get there. Or do we?
There is a quality of the Spiritual World that differs also in its quality from the physical world. In the physical world, movement, what would get us from one place to another is purely mechanical. That is, I can take two objects that are completely different in their form, even in their purpose, and I can draw them close together mechanically and I can say, “We have closeness here!” But in the Spiritual World, things can only be considered to be close under completely different conditions, because there is no time and there is no space—there is nothing mechanical there.
The Kabbalists tell us that the Spiritual World is made up only of feeling-states, of spheres of influence that have to do with certain attributes, qualities—inner qualities—and that all movement in spirituality consists of similarity or dissimilarity between two feeling-states or two qualities. In other words, we can see this in friendship. If my friend takes a certain delight in comedy and I don’t care for comedy, I’m just a serious person, then it’s not very likely that we’re going to be very close friends. If I hate comedy, then we are considered to be distant. But if I love comedy, and I love the same comedians and the same films that they did, then in this respect of the love of comedy, my friend and I are close in that feeling. In other words, in spirituality, if two attributes, two feelings are similar, they are considered to be close; if they are different, they are considered to be distant. But—and this is the most beautiful and the most precious thing for us, the thing that can actually move us from the physical into the spiritual—and that is that if they have exactly the same quality, purpose and intention, then they are the same thing—they are bonded, connected. It’s this law, called “the law of equivalence of form” that can get us from our egoistic state of separation to be able to build an additional sense that can feel what’s outside.
[pointing to drawing]
What we need to do is to build within us a similar frequency, a similar quality, an additional sense that has a quality of this bestowal within it. Though we’re not yet capable of perceiving it in its simplicity, the Kabbalists tell us that there are only two things that exist in reality—there is only the Creator and the creature.
[Continues drawing]
Everything that we perceive is simply the quality of the Creator and the qualities of the creature. The Creator is the Upper World and the creature is the lower world. The quality of the Creator is the will to bestow; the quality of the creature is the will to receive. This is all that exists. Getting out of the box means that what we need to do is to move in spiritual space.
Moving in spiritual space means to change this quality [points to drawing], the will to receive, of the quality of the creature, to become more and more similar to the quality of the Creator. The way in which all of reality has been hidden from us through a descent through these worlds, well, these worlds are only made up of ratios of the will to receive against the will to bestow.
[Continues drawing]
The entire ladder, by which we descended into this world can be climbed simply by changing our inner quality of reception, egoism, the desire to receive for myself, to greater and greater ratios of the will to bestow rather than the will to receive. Each one of these states, steps of the ladder, are increasing ratios of the will to bestow over the will to receive. By this increase in similarity, by being able to feel what the quality of bestowal actually is, what it means to love and support everything that exists, and to build that similarity in myself—that is what Kabbalah deals with. It’s a method of being able to sense bestowal and to create an inner similarity to this quality.
This is what we will continue to investigate as we look at the keys to the hidden wisdom. Join us again.

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“We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.”

“You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.”
- Swami Vivekananda

Kabbalah Revealed #1
A Basic Overview

Lecture presented for the American television channel, Shalom TV
Anthony Kosinec
July 13, 2006

Hello and welcome to Kabbalah Revealed. I’m Tony Kosinec. I’m one of the students of Rav Michael Laitman, who is the direct disciple of Rav Baruch Shalom HaLevi Ashlag, who is the son and direct disciple of Rav Yehuda Ashlag—Baal HaSulam, better known as “The Master of the Ladder,” who was acknowledged as the pre-eminent Kabbalist of the twentieth century.
I give you those credentials because there is such a thing as a teaching lineage within Kabbalah, and what we are going to speak about is authentic Kabbalah. We’re going to give you a perspective, not of scholars, but of practitioners—people who are Kabbalists. In this series, you’ll not only get an overview of authentic Kabbalah, but also the keys—the basic concepts, the ways of approaching this wisdom so that it can open to you—because it is a way of study, a way of thinking, and a way of feeling which is very different from our normal sense of things, and it requires, as any skill does, a mastery of the basics. In our series of twenty or so lessons, we will cover all of the ones that are important for you to know.
Let’s start with an overview of Kabbalah, because there’s a great deal of confusion about it. There’s a lot of information about Kabbalah out there. There are, I think, maybe a thousand books a year published on the subject and almost none of them have anything to do at all with Kabbalah; they’re just some kind of a mish mash of people’s imaginations of what they think it could be, what it should be, their intuition, their imagination, and it’s not their fault. There’s a great longing to know what Kabbalah actually is because there is a sensation that it’s important, that it’s powerful, and that it has a grasp of something that is hidden in this world.
It’s called “the hidden science” for three reasons. One—It has been purposely hidden by the practitioners of Kabbalah themselves, by the Kabbalists. Kabbalah started four thousand years ago with Abraham, around the year 1947-1948 BCE (Before the Common Era). For that period of time—two thousand years—until the beginning of the common era, the destruction of the second temple, it was not hidden, it was widely taught. You know the stories of Abraham, sitting by the door of his tent and welcoming travelers to come in, and he would show his hospitality. Well, what he was actually doing was that he was feeding them and he was teaching them about the wisdom of Kabbalah. The type of souls that lived at that time in this world were a little bit more refined than the souls that live now and they understood it more naturally.
But something occurred at the beginning of the Common Era, at the destruction of the temple, that made it impossible for people of that generation and for the two thousand years that followed to really understand anything in Kabbalah. That’s the point at which religions appeared; that’s the point at which speculation about how this world works, what the universe is, what the Creator is and so on grew up in the imaginations of people according to a particular principle that leapt to the forefront within the human being and their development. This quality within people prevented them from understanding, so the Kabbalists hid it.
If you don’t have access to something, you still have the books. The problem is that it’s also called the hidden wisdom because the books themselves are written in a very special language unbeknownst to the people who are reading them. All the books of Kabbalah are written in a language called “language of branches” in which they use words from our world—objects, cup, book, table, family, travels, wars—all of these things that you see in the five books of Moses and all the other Kabbalistic books, but they’re not speaking of anything in this world. Not a single word of any Kabbalistic book is referring to anything in this world. It only refers to the forces above, which create and sustain the things that appear in this world.
The Kabbalists used a special language that would indicate what they were really speaking about, and only a student who had attained a certain wisdom would be able to understand and hear it that way. Now you have to understand that the world that we live in is not a world of causes—it’s a world of outcomes. There is nothing that we do in this world that has any effect whatsoever on the Upper World where our source comes from, where the things that we see in this world take their roots. No physical action has any effect on it and that’s why none of the things that we do in order to solve our problems here in this world have any effect whatsoever on their outcome. Only a connection to the roots, to the causal level of things, can have any effect whatsoever and this is what Kabbalah deals with.
[drawing]
Our reality as a whole is structured in such a way that there is a world that exists above, so to speak, and a world that exists below. The language of branches points to what exists in the world below. It speaks about this object, let’s say “a family”; you’ll read about it in the Torah. The Torah appears to be the story about the Jewish people. Well, a family will move to a location called “a land,” but the Kabbalists are not speaking about this at all. They are speaking about the abstract forces Above, that actually create these things and make them occur. Only a wise student can understand what’s really going on here. [Referring to the drawing] This is the branch level, and this is the root level.



Unless a person learns how to read and understand the key to this language called “language of branches,” they will continue to see things as they exist in this world.
As a result of those two aspects of hiddenness of Kabbalah and because of a lack of contact with the teaching lineage and the real methodology, people have still needed to know, but they’ve had to fantasize, they’ve had to make concoctions of things, and they’ve gone according to what they could understand without the correct teaching and without the proper inner properties that would allow them to understand it.
A lot of myths have grown up, and we will deal with these in a little more detail when we talk about some of the other basic concepts of Kabbalah. Just a couple of the major ones are that Kabbalah is Jewish mysticism. Well, it is neither a religion nor is it mysticism. Kabbalah predates religion. Religion is a phenomenon of disconnection from the Upper Force, of speculation, and a misunderstanding of Kabbalah, even though it has a formal similarity with it because the Kabbalists created Halacha, they created the books that we study and consider to be holy books. Our traditions and so on come from them, but their purpose, the meaning of them, what the books are actually written for and what they speak about; we are not very well in touch with these things. The relationship with Judaism is like Kabbalah and amnesia.
As far as mysticism goes, Kabbalah is a science, it is not mysticism. It’s a way of making a direct connection with things that seem to us magical and unfathomable only because we, in our current state of awareness, don’t understand how they work. It’s the same as if you brought a lighter to some tribe that lived on a desert island that had never seen any technology at all; you would be the god of fire, some mystical creature that can produce fire out of your hand. It’s simply a matter of what is hidden and what is revealed.
That it’s magic? Well, magic implies the use of hidden upper forces in order to manipulate people to get what you want and to cause certain outcomes for your benefit or against other people and so on. But it is impossible to make any contact with the Upper Forces at all unless a person changes their moral inner nature. The attainment within Kabbalah is a matter of inner transformation and it is impossible to be in contact with the forces without that. This simply has nothing to do with anything except somebody’s vivid imagination.
Only a few people are allowed to study Kabbalah and there are conditions, the conditions being that you have to be Jewish. This is not so, because the Kabbalists all along taught people who were not Jewish by birth. Some of the greatest Kabbalists, in fact, were gentiles—people of other nations such as Ancholos, Rabbi Akiva, and the list goes on. All Kabbalists took students who were worthy students, not based on some kind of physical attribute, but on an inner attribute that is called “Yechud,” and we’ll explain that later.
That you had to have mastered preliminary wisdom—Gmarrah, Mishna and so on—before you can study Kabbalah well. If you don’t understand what’s written in Torah or Gmarrah, then you’re not going to understand Kabbalah either. It’s not that you need these preliminary wisdoms, it’s that if you cannot find spirituality in these preliminary wisdoms, you must move to books that talk directly about spirituality in a way that they can’t be mistaken for things of this world, like the language in which the Torah is written, or the language of stories, Haggadah, and so on.
Amulets and protection, and the use of letter and number manipulations in order to create stuff and to protect people from evil…Well, this is the complete and total opposite of what Kabbalah deals with. In fact, it’s completely forbidden. It’s considered as idolatry that one should use the Upper Forces for some selfish, personal reason here. Besides that, there is nothing to be protected from. So holy water, amulets, red strings and so on are psychological things and they have absolutely nothing to do with Kabbalah.
Finally, there’s the mixture of Kabbalah with eastern religions. Since we didn’t know anything, we made an association with Buddhism or with aspects of Hinduism that deal openly with spirituality, and that’s only because spirituality from the books of the Kabbalists were not open.
However, that’s changed. As of 1995, all books of the Kabbalah were open. The only requirement for Kabbalah, to be accepted as a student, and that you should feel safe and comfortable in looking at Kabbalah and seeking the thing that you need—the only requirement for Kabbalah is that you have a need for it. That your answers as to why things happen and to the meaning of your life and your role in it—if these things cannot be answered anywhere else, that’s the requirement. And all the great Kabbalists have said so.
From the time of the Ari on, he said the only requirement was this desire. Rav Kook, who was himself a great Kabbalist and even the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, when he was asked who can study Kabbalah, he said everyone. So, it’s not so.
Finally, my favorite is that if you study Kabbalah you’ll go mad. It’s my favorite because it’s like everything else, it’s just the way that things appear. There are kinds of inner changes that a person goes through as a result of attainment in Kabbalah, of the understanding and connection with realty, the pleasure that they get, the source of the pleasure that they get is very different from a normal way of thinking. It’s opposite because it is the kind of thought that exists in the spiritual world. So to somebody who has an opposite goal from spirituality, a person may appear insane, but not really.
The third reason that Kabbalah is called “the hidden science” is because it deals with what is hidden from our five senses. It answers a question that can’t be answered any other way. It answers, basically, “What is the meaning of life?” This is a deep and severe question, because a person who has this question and cannot find the answer in what their traditions tell them, in what their science tells them, in what art and literature tells them, in what psychology tells the—a person who simply cannot be satisfied with anything but the answer to this question, “What is the meaning of my life?” is a person who is ready to sense beyond the five senses.




[begins drawing]
The books of Kabbalah tell us that we live in the whole of reality. There is a totality of reality and that’s where we actually exist, except that we have no sense of it. We have a completely restricted sense of what we are and where we are, so much so that we don’t know what will happen in the next moment of our lives. We do not know why things happen, when they happen, where we came from, where we are, and where we’re going.
[continues drawing]
There exists a complete and total reality and this reality is divided and reduced into a system called “worlds.” By means of five worlds, the complete reality, an unending Light, becomes reduced to a brightness by which we can perceive. [Referring to the drawing] This first world is called “the world of Adam Kadmon,” the next world is Atzilut, the next is Beria, then the world of Yetzira, and then Assiya. You can think of these as levels of consciousness, closeness or distance as it descends from this complete reality, from connection and awareness to it, until finally we reach a disconnecting point called “the Machsom” or “the barrier” [ed. Machsom is Hebrew for “barrier”].
These are spiritual worlds. Below this barrier is our world. Here, we have absolutely no sensation of the spiritual worlds, of the place that we actually live and where we came from. Here we have limited sensations that are called “corporal” or “physical.” This complete Light and whole of reality, by which, if we knew this were connected with it, we would be able to direct our destiny, we would stop making mistakes, we would understand the forces that guide us, and we would become connected with them to such a degree that we would be able to live life in its fullest and for the benefit of all life.
[continues drawing]
Yet, just as Kabbalah itself has been hidden from us, so has this force—this complete reality—been purposely hidden from us, reduced through these levels, by a system of 125 steps into this world. What Kabbalah is meant for is to allow a person to trace their steps from the descent into this world back through the 125 steps, all the way to our root in the spiritual world, our source and connection with the totality of reality.
In order for us to be able to achieve that, this benevolent force which we call “the Creator” has purposely created a system for us. In other words, this map of creation is not the end of creation—it’s the halfway point; it’s a process by which we descended from our roots in the spiritual world to the state that we’re in now in order to fulfil the plan of creation itself, in order to rejoin this totality of reality.
All of the books of Kabbalah, including our Torah, Mishna and Gmarrah, speak only about the states that are found at these levels, both of the reduction as our soul fell from this complete connection, and of the states that we find on the ascent back up. The method of Kabbalah is the means by which a person can begin to sense and enter the spiritual world.
Now, in order to do that, a person needs to be taught what they are made of, what it is that prevents them from the entry into this world, and how they can gain a sense of the spiritual again. This takes a very special material, very directly created for the purpose of allowing a person to enter the spiritual world.
The books of Kabbalah are written in the language of branches and they are very difficult for us to understand. It’s no wonder that we have great difficulty in being able to use them on the surface level to learn anything about how we can enter this higher reality. But the great gift of Kabbalah is that in our generation, since 1995 when the wisdom was opened to the world as a whole and to those who really need it, special books have been prepared for us. These books were written, commentaries written by Baal HaSulam and by Rabash, his son and his disciple, that for the first time were not written for Kabbalists already in the spiritual world. They were written for people who wish to enter the spiritual world. They are written in a special language that allows a person to get a foothold on the first rung of the ladder.
It’s from these books, in the lessons to come, that we are going to take our sources. We are going to look at what the quality is that keeps us out of the spiritual world, what it is that allows us to enter the spiritual world, and the method revealed in the science of Kabbalah through the works of Baal HaSulam.
The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches a practical method of attaining the Upper world and the source of our existence. By realizing our true purpose in life, man attains perfection, tranquility, unbounded enjoyment, and the ability to transcend the limits of time and space while still living in this world. —Rav Michael Laitman, PhD.
Join us next week as we begin this exciting journey.

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“We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.”

“You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.”
- Swami Vivekananda

WALLABIES are hopping into Tasmania's opium poppy fields and getting high.
The Hobart Mercury
The revelation has also solved what some growers say has spurred a campfire legend about mysterious crop circles which appear in the state's poppy paddocks. In true X-Files style, Attorney-General Lara Giddings said yesterday the drugged-up wallabies had been found hopping around in circles squashing the poppies, creating the formations.
The wallabies are increasingly entering the fields and eating the poppy heads.

That causes them to get high and run around in turns creating "crop circles".

"The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Ms Giddings told a Budget Estimates hearing.

"Then they crash. We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

Tasmanian Alkaloids field operations manager Rick Rockliff said wildlife and livestock which ate the poppies were known to "act weird" -- including deer in the state's highlands and sheep.

"There have been many stories about sheep that have eaten some of the poppies after harvesting and they all walk around in circles," Mr Rockliff said.

"But as growers we try our best to try and stop this sort of consumption, particularly by livestock, due to concerns about the contamination of the meat.

"There is also the risk to our poppy stocks, so growers take this very seriously but there has been a steady increase in the number of wild animals and that is where we are having difficulty keeping them off our land."

Tasmania is the world's largest producer of legally grown opium for the pharmaceutical market. About 500 farmers grow the crop supplying the market with about 50 percent of the world's raw material for morphine and related opiates.

Ms Giddings was answering questions about the security of Tasmanias poppy stocks, that are considered some of the safest in the world.

However there has been 17 thefts resulting in 2280 poppy heads stolen throughout the financial year.

Of those, Ms Giddings said 551 heads, eight events were from thebaine crops.

Thebaine is a variety of poppy opiate alkaloid is can be potentially deadly when it is consumed.

The other main variety is morphine.

Mr Rockliff said those figures were still considered very low but called for a review into the state's security protocols.

"Although there has not been a major incident in the past 40 years of this industry it is time that we look at licensing measures and other security handling procedures to make sure that stays the same in the future."

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“We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.”

“You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.”
- Swami Vivekananda

A study published by the American Psychosomatic Society has proven that personality is linked to longevity. 7Of 216 subjects who completed the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) for research at the Mayo Clinic from 1962 to 1965, a total of 7080 subjects (98.1%) were followed over four decades.

Yoga guru Sanjeey Bhanot teaches us some exercises for our pelvic area to balance our sympathetic nervous system and help develop a happy response on life.

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“We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.”

“You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.”
- Swami Vivekananda

The Energization Exercises, as taught in the Ananda Course in Self-Realization, are a wonderful system of exercises originated by Paramhansa Yogananda. They are, undoubtedly, his unique contribution to the science of yoga.

Based on ancient teachings and eternal realities, Yogananda explains that the whole physical universe, including man, is surrounded by, and made of cosmic energy. We can, through the act of our will, release tension that blocks the energy flow to our body and mind, and draw on this infinite storehouse of life-force all around us. Through daily use of these exercises we can systematically recharge our bodies with greater energy and train our minds to understand the true source of that power.

Barbara Bingham teaches the Energization Exercises during a comprehensive 34 minute session of which this is only the introduction. In the original materia, Swami Kriyananda then leads the Energization Exercises during a Kriyaban Retreat at Ananda Village, 1991

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“We are responsible for what we are, and whatever we wish ourselves to be, we have the power to make ourselves. If what we are now has been the result of our own past actions, it certainly follows that whatever we wish to be in future can be produced by our present actions; so we have to know how to act.”

“You have to grow from the inside out. None can teach you, none can make you spiritual. There is no other teacher but your own soul.”
- Swami Vivekananda