I felt like I was looking at a total upside-down version of reality. I was digging through some old texts the other day—you know how I get when I start falling down those rabbit holes—and I ended up looking at the Babylonian Talmud, specifically that Pesach treatise, and it just blew my mind all over again!
What even is reality anyway? I mean, how do we actually perceive any of this stuff? Does the world even exist if we aren't around to look at it, or is everything just some mental projection cooked up inside our own heads based on our own internal baggage?
Look, reality is obviously everything right in front of our faces—the houses on our street, the people we bump into every day, the entire damn universe stretching out forever. It’s what we can actually see, touch, hear, taste, and smell. That’s reality, plain and simple. Or is it?
It’s morning. You open your eyes, stretch, and look out at the sunshine and hear the birds chirping like everything is just fine, but deep down in your gut, you just know something is off. It’s one of those days where you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, and honestly, the last thing you want to do is actually get up. I mean, it’s infuriating because it’s not even that long ago that you had one of those perfect days—you know the ones, where you wake up feeling like you're going to crush it and you just glow all day long—but today? Today is a total wash and you can barely even find the strength to move.
So, what exactly changed? Did reality itself shift under our feet, or is it just you people who have gone completely off the rails?
According to Kabbalah, this entire "world" we think we're living in isn't even real! It’s just some phenomenon that humans perceive, basically acting as a mirror that shows how much our own personal traits actually align with that massive, abstract force out there—the force of nature.
So, what exactly is this force of nature that's constantly surrounding us? If you look at how the Kabbalists describe it, they see it as this pure quality of absolute love and constant giving. They basically argue that once we reach a certain level of equality between our own inner qualities and the qualities of nature itself, that’s when we finally start to perceive what we call the "world."
What does that even mean? Look, let's use a radio as an example because I'm tired of people overcomplicating things! Radio stations are constantly blasting their programming out there, but we only actually hear anything when we dial in to a specific frequency. How does the radio "catch" the broadcast? It’s simple: the receiver generates its own internal frequency that matches the sound waves traveling through the air around it. So, the radio isn't magically grabbing something that wasn't there; it "catches" the signal only after it shifts its own frequency to match, even though those waves were floating around us the entire time!
The Kabbalists tell us that we all perceive reality through the exact same lens—it’s entirely dictated by the "frequency" we generate deep inside ourselves. Basically, the entire world surrounding us is nothing more than a direct reflection of our own inner qualities. So, really... It’s just her—she’s the only one who can actually change things!
A person's entire life is contained right there inside them!
Think about how we actually experience reality—it’s basically like we're all just trapped inside a sealed box with five little slots poked through the sides: our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hands. Those are our five senses, right? Sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. Everything we think we know about the world around us is nothing more than a filtered version of reality dictated by those five sensory inputs, so every single sound you hear or sight you see is entirely dependent on how those specific organs perceive them.
Look, just take a second to think about how our hearing actually works because it’s honestly wild! First off, you’ve got these sound waves hitting your eardrum and making it vibrate like crazy, and then those vibrations get passed straight to the tiny bones in your middle ear, which sends all these signals racing to your brain. Then, your brain has to step in and translate those raw waves into actual sounds or voices so you can make sense of anything—that’s basically how we hear, it's this whole massive process happening inside your head right now! I just can't get over how everything feels like it's being squeezed tight lately, like there's this constant pressure building up from every single direction! Look, it’s just us. Every other single one of our senses works exactly the same way.
Every single signal hitting our senses gets funneled straight into the control center of the brain, and honestly, it’s wild how it works! Once that raw data arrives, the brain starts frantically cross-referencing everything against the stuff we already have stored in our memory, and based on that comparison, it spits out this entire perception of the world sitting right "in front of us." It creates this total illusion that we’re actually occupying some physical "place" out there, when in reality, that whole sense of location is just something happening deep inside our own heads!
So, what are we actually perceiving here? Just... nothing. It’s honestly infuriating how we let every little thing that happens to us—every single external trigger—completely hijack our internal state like we don't have any control over ourselves! I was sitting in traffic on the I-95 the other day, just losing my mind because some idiot cut me off, and it hit me how much we let the outside world dictate our inner peace instead of just handling it.We don't actually see what's out there in the real world. We’re all just trapped inside our own little mental boxes, so how can we honestly claim to know anything about what exists outside ourselves?
Our perception of reality is nothing more than a byproduct of how our senses work and the data already hardwired into our brains. I was reading about this a few years back—science actually proved that if you hit the brain with specific electrical impulses, you can trick someone into feeling like they’re standing in a completely different place or caught in a totally different situation!
Look, any actual scientist worth their salt already knows that different creatures perceive reality in totally different ways! It’s common sense, really. Take cats—they can see in the dark about six times better than we can. Or dogs, whose hearing is so much more acute and sensitive than ours that they pick up on sounds way before we even realize anything is happening. The thing is, the human eye is just hardwired to a specific wavelength between red and violet, which is exactly why we’re basically blind to light waves shorter than violet, like ultraviolet. But bees? They can spot those UV waves perfectly fine and use them to track down different kinds of flowers. We're all living in different worlds here!
It just goes to show that if we actually had different senses, the way we perceive reality would be completely unrecognizable!
It was all just a damn dream.
The Kabbalists claim that we actually perceive reality on two distinct levels, and honestly, it’s pretty clear to me that how we experience either one depends entirely on our own damn inner qualities!
Look, at the most basic level, we’re all stuck with this massive egoism that just flies in the face of how nature actually works. This selfish streak we've got running through us makes us feel totally disconnected from everyone else, and honestly, it even gives us this twisted little kick when we exploit people to get ahead. It’s exactly why our entire perception of reality ends up being this endless cycle of war, constant struggle, poverty, and nothing but pure corruption.
Look, if there's one thing life eventually beats into your head, it's that living solely through your own selfish lens is a total dead end because you're never actually going to touch that kind of lasting, continuous bliss.
When you step up to that next level, our core essence becomes nothing more than pure love and selfless giving—it’s exactly like the raw power of nature itself! People who actually get how the world works can see that we're all just moving parts in one massive, interconnected system, all working together to create this endless loop of total satisfaction.
According to Kabbalah, this whole existence we're stuck in right now is nothing more than a temporary phase we have to grind through, and honestly, its entire purpose is just to give us the chance to finally take control and choose to shift how we perceive reality ourselves! People who study Kabbalah and actually figure out how to flip that switch on their perception define our current state of being as nothing but an "imaginary life" or some kind of "imaginary reality."
And then you've got these people who claim that this corrected, whole, and absolutely perfect version of existence is what constitutes "real life" or "true reality." They look back at all those selfish, narrow-minded perceptions we used to have and just dismiss them as nothing more than a dream!We were basically just a bunch of dreamers wandering around without a clue. Psalm 126:1
It basically means that true reality is being totally hidden from us right now! We can't even feel it because we’re out here perceiving the world and ourselves through this lens of our own internal qualities, which—let's be honest—are nothing but pure ego at this stage. We don't feel that deep connection where everyone is part of one single whole, mostly because that kind of unity actually repels us. This selfish urge buried deep inside our guts just isn't interested in those kinds of bonds, and that's exactly why it won't let us see what reality actually looks like!
If we could just take all that selfish energy we carry around and flip it into something resembling the actual harmony found in nature—you know, like actually loving people and giving back instead of just taking—we’d start perceiving everything around us in a completely different way, noticing things that were totally invisible to us before! Everything we thought we knew would suddenly look different, too; it would all feel whole, eternal, and perfectly purposeful. That’s exactly what the Kabbalists are getting at when they quote that line from the Babylonian Talmud, the Pesach treatise, about seeing an "inverted world."
Take a look and see for yourself.
The whole point of Kabbalah is that we aren't meant to just sit around stuck in this tiny, pathetic little existence we have right now—it’s actually about clawing our way out of these limitations to reach some kind of true, eternal reality!
How the hell are we supposed to actually pull this off? Honestly, the only way to finally shake off this selfish, narrow-minded perception we all cling to is to actually plug ourselves into the reality that exists outside our own heads. To even stand a chance, we need to get our hands on those original Kabbalah texts, because they were written by people who actually managed to see the true picture of the world and reality as it really is. In their writings, these Kabbalists talk about this perfect reality that is, de facto, sitting right here next to us if we’d just stop being so blind! We basically just need to shift our internal frequency so we can finally "hear the broadcast" of what's actually being transmitted.
When we start reading about what reality actually looks like, it’s like this fog over our senses finally starts lifting and we actually begin to feel things for real! Honestly, those who study Kabbalah explain that just sitting there trying to wrap your brain around a text won't do a damn thing to change your inner state. Even if you don't get a single word of what you're reading, that raw desire to actually grasp it is what aligns your perception.
“Even when they don't fully grasp the material, that intense longing and massive craving to understand what they're learning awakens the lights surrounding their souls... So, even if someone doesn't have the right vessels ready, by actively engaging with this wisdom and speaking the names of the lights and vessels in relation to their soul, the lights immediately shine upon them to a certain extent....”
Baal HaSulam,
"Introduction to Talmud Eser Sefirot"
The gap between how we experience life right now and the kind of life we could actually be living is absolutely massive! If you try to put words to it, the Zohar compares it to the difference between a tiny little candle flame and infinite light, or like comparing one single grain of sand to the entire world. But look, if you really want to know what I'm talking about, the Kabbalists say you just have to go out and prove it for yourself..
“Taste and see that the Lord is good.”
Psalm 34:8