Power Feng Shui For Success

Kabbalah

Debra McGhee

The metaphysics of Kabbalah imply that consciousness can determine of its own, the nature of the world we all seek to know and understand. In their quest to determine the underlying unity within nature, scientists constantly find themselves returning to the origins of the universe É the day of Creation. The generally accepted principle in modern physics is that time shares a common "geography" with space. All points in space co-exist along a single continuum, just as all points in time, past, present and future are simultaneously distributed within the same network. Cosmological processes produced this space-time continuum and from that point, the universe as we know it, began expanding.

Kabbalah is a method of searching for the "Creator" of our universe; the search for God. Having some sort of perception of God is called faith and it is our faith that gives us a sensation of being linked with the eternal, a sense of completeness, a purpose for life and immortality. According to the teachings of Kabbalah, all the trials and tribulations we encounter, times of war, the feelings of helplessness and lack of worth we sometimes experience, are a result of not feeling the presence of God, the Creator. The goal of studying Kabbalah is to help the student arrive at a feeling of the presence and a recognition of the Creator. One learns Kabbalah not to understand and know, but to begin to feel and see spiritual forces, lights and levels.

For centuries the Kabbalah was considered to be the true Jewish theology and almost no one attacked it. A book known as the Zohar, which was revealed to the Jewish world in the thirteenth century, has been regarded as the central work of the Kabbalah É Jewish mysticism. In the more modern Jewish world, a world where rational thought was more highly esteemed than the mystical, the Kabbalah began to be ignored. Jewish rationalists often dismissed Kabbalah and the Zohar as dangerous nonsense, feeling that they encouraged Jews to act according to mystical impulses rather than reason. Ideas that many contemporary Jews might find un-Jewish in nature, are sometimes found in the Kabbalah, such as the belief in reincarnation.

In more recent years, there has been an increase in interest in the Kabbalah and its teachings. Seventeenth century rabbis legislated that Kabbalah should only be studied by married men over forty years of age, who were also scholars of the Talmud and Torah (the Hebrew Bible.) Medieval rabbis wanted the study of Kabbalah limited to people of mature years and character. Most commentaries interpret the Torah as a narrative and legal work, but mystics interpret it "as a system of symbols which reveal the Secret Laws of the Universe and even the Secrets of God." (Deborah Kerdeman and Lawrence Kushner, The Invisible Chariot, p.90). The rabbis felt that to fully appreciate and understand the teachings of the Kabbalah, one had to be scholarly in religion and mature enough to rightfully acquire and process this information.

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