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First US edition of Kabbalah Today - articles

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Participants Brian Foster3Kenneth Peterson5boldsailor32goldeneagle2Brian Lopez2Kyle Nelson2
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#1 ·
Q&A with Michael LAITMAN from his interview with New Jersey "COURIER POST"


P: Why on earth are you people calling Kabbalah a science instead of just labeling it a religion? It’s driving me absolutely insane how everyone keeps mixing these things up!

O: It’s called science because it actually *is* a science, plain and simple! People act like this stuff is some mystical fairy tale, but the wisdom of Kabbalah kicked off about 5,000 years ago back in ancient Babylon. Back then, humanity wasn't fractured into these tiny, selfish bubbles we live in now; everyone was connected, acting like one single, cohesive nation. But then this massive wave of egoism started crawling into people's hearts, driving everyone apart until we hit that legendary breaking point at the Tower of Babel. The only real fix for that disaster was a method uncovered by a man we know as Abraham. He figured out the literal blueprint for reconnecting people despite that growing selfishness, and let me tell you, his method was purely scientific. It’s all about using scientific tools to dissect our own internal mechanics—which is exactly what we call the wisdom of Kabbalah today. Honestly, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam showed up way later down the road and don't even have a direct link to Kabbalah.

P: Can someone actually study Kabbalah while they're still out there practicing a religion?

O: Look, anyone can dive into Kabbalah if they want to. It honestly doesn't matter if you’re deeply religious or just some totally secular guy living your life without any spiritual baggage at all. The wisdom within Kabbalah exists entirely outside of all that noise! It isn't tied to what you do for a living or whatever belief system or ritual you happen to practice—it stands completely on its own.
P: Is there actually any real difference between authentic Kabbalah teachings and the way some big-shot celebrities like Madonna try to play around with it? Honestly, it feels like such a joke sometimes!
Look, there is a massive difference here, plain and simple. If you actually want to dive into authentic Kabbalah, you can't just pick up some random paperback off a drugstore shelf; you have to go straight to the source. We’re talking about the five foundational pillars: the writings of Abraham, the Book of Genesis, and everything Moses passed down through what we now call the Pentateuch—you know, the Torah, those first five books of the Bible. Then you've got the Zohar, the Holy Aria, and finally, the teachings of rabin Yehuda Ashlag from the 20th century. Honestly, if you ask me, Ashlag's work is the only thing that actually makes sense for our generation; it's perfectly tailored for us.
Look, let's get one thing straight: Kabbalah is a field of study, plain and simple, just like any other serious science you'd find at a major US university. People go crazy thinking it’s all about red strings, holy water, fortune-telling, or some weird mystical charms and amulets, but honestly, none of that nonsense belongs to the original Kabbalah—not even the meditation stuff. It is nothing more than the pure, unadulterated study of reality, designed to sharpen your perception so you can actually get a grip on your own life and the world around you.

P: But seriously, does it actually exist on a spiritual level?
O: Look, spirituality isn't some mystical thing you can just touch or smell with your basic five senses—it’s a whole different layer of reality that most people are completely blind to. Honestly, studying the wisdom of Kabbalah is like finally getting a pair of high-definition glasses for your soul; it sharpens how we perceive everything around us and hands us all these incredible tools we'd never even dream of having otherwise.
Just like physics hands us a specific set of tools to make sense of the world, Kabbalah gives us an entirely different toolkit to work with. Honestly, you need all these various sciences working together if you ever want to grasp the full, messy picture of reality, because Kabbalah is what actually pulls back the curtain and shows us what’s happening behind the scenes.
Think of it like a tapestry or a woven rug. You look at it and see this gorgeous, intricate picture—maybe a field of flowers or something equally stunning. But if you flip that thing over, all you see is a chaotic, messy web of tangled threads. If we actually want to understand how that beautiful flower on the front even exists, we have to learn how those individual threads are knotted together on the back. That’s exactly what Kabbalah is about; it teaches us how to connect all those hidden threads behind the scenes.
P: How does Kabbalah actually change a person's life? Honestly, I’ve seen people go through hell and back, thinking they’re just stuck in some endless loop of bad luck, until they finally get a grip on these concepts and everything just shifts under their feet. It’s not some magic trick, but it completely rewires how you see the world and your own ego, which is usually the biggest thing standing in our way.
O: Once you finally start seeing those underlying forces we’ve been banging on about, everything just clicks—you'll realize how every single thread in your life is actually tangled together, and you'll finally see exactly how to fix those connections so you stop making the same damn mistakes over and over again.
It basically puts every single part of your life back in order! Take family, for instance—it stitches those bonds together; when it comes to school or parenting, it helps you actually get your kids and helps them finally understand you; it even stops disasters like drug abuse or crushing depression before they start because you actually begin to grasp the world around you and live in sync with it. Look, the "world" isn't just trees and dirt; the world is the people surrounding you and, more importantly, it's you. Kabbalah gives you the power to change things on a personal, social, and even global scale.
I mean, look at us today—it’s no secret we’re drowning in a massive global crisis. You see it everywhere, from the insane weather patterns to the way everyone is spiraling into depression or sickness; we are facing a total meltdown in every corner of our lives. But Kabbalah offers an actual way out because it pulls back the curtain on what's really happening behind the scenes and shows you how to make a difference right there. Honestly, right now, more than any other time in history, tapping into Kabbalistic wisdom isn't just an option, it's a damn necessity.
Q: What does it actually feel like to connect with the Creator?
A: It’s a deeply personal connection. It’s like you finally stop obsessing over yourself and start experiencing the thoughts and struggles of everyone else. You become connected and feel everything outside of yourself. And it’s not just feeling it—you actually step outside of time, space, and movement. In a way, you become eternal because you gain a perception of the infinite. It drives you to a point where all you want to do is give and give.
Q: Is that why you want to share Kabbalah with others, just so they can have that same experience?
A: Yeah, absolutely. Once you feel that harmony between nature and reality, you just want to pass it on. And honestly, it’s not even a privilege; it’s more like an obligation, because humanity as a whole has to reach a point where everyone feels that same sense of harmony. Truth be told, the crises we’re slamming into right now aren't happening by accident. They are here to force us to actually think about life and feel this desperate need to build some harmony within it.
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#2 ·
Honestly, I’m so sick of people acting like we’re the only ones who need to care about the environment when it feels like every massive corporation in this country is just pumping out filth while we struggle to recycle our damn coffee cups! It's exhausting watching everyone preach about saving nature like it's some trendy hobby instead of a literal fight for survival, and frankly, I'm tired of the hypocrisy.

When Al Gore stood there accepting his Nobel Prize, he went all out with this massive, dramatic declaration that we’re facing a legitimate planetary crisis—something he claimed was a deep-seated moral and spiritual test for everyone on Earth.
But once the curtain finally dropped on that glitzy awards ceremony, it left me staring at the ceiling wondering: does all this sudden, trendy obsession with being "eco-friendly" actually do anything to stop an environmental meltdown, or is it all just expensive showmanship?

If we ever want to actually get a handle on this environmental disaster, we have to stop running in circles and start looking at how nature actually works and why its systems are falling apart in the first place!
Researchers studying the complex systems within physics, biology, chemistry, and all those other sciences have finally proven what anyone with half a brain should already know: everything in nature exists in this constant, delicate state of equilibrium. All these elements are so deeply intertwined and dependent on one another that if you mess with even the tiniest little piece of the puzzle, you risk knocking the entire damn system completely out of whack.

Honestly, monkeys just get it better than anyone else.
Nature stays in balance because everything actually gives a damn about everything else, and honestly, if humans could learn even half of that, we wouldn't be such a mess. You see it everywhere in the animal kingdom—from ants and bees to monkeys and elephants all looking out for one another—and it goes all the way down to those tiny microbes living inside us that basically team up just to help find iron. It’s wild because researchers have found this same sharing behavior in plants, and apparently, even inanimate particles engage in these little mutual actions just to keep the whole system from falling apart!
Jane Goodall spent her entire life out in the wild studying chimpanzees, and she really nailed what it means to actually live in nature when she said that she found a sense of peace that’s just impossible to put into words—basically, if we want to find any kind of peace in this crazy world today, we have to start by finding it deep inside ourselves first.

Man vs. Nature—it’s honestly a losing battle if you ask me. We keep trying to bulldoze everything in our way like we own the damn planet, but Mother Nature always finds a way to kick us right in the teeth eventually!
Unlike every other living thing on this planet, humans just can't stop messing up the perfect balance of nature. We strip the earth bare, get some sick kick out of watching others suffer, and basically build our own little empires right on top of everyone else's wreckage. Honestly, half the time we don't even realize what kind of mess we're making, but that doesn't matter—in nature, "I didn't know the rules" isn't a valid excuse to dodge the consequences.
Whether people choose to wrap their heads around it or not, we are fundamentally part of nature. When we act like selfish jerks toward our own environment, just trying to squeeze every last drop out of it for ourselves, we’re basically triggering a massive imbalance in the entire system—it's common sense, really!
Because of all this, nature does whatever it takes to force the system back into balance. It’s an automatic response, really—kind of like when the pressure under the Earth's crust builds up so much that the surface just can't hold it anymore, and you get a massive volcanic eruption blowing everything apart.
While minerals, plants, and animals just follow their instincts to keep everything in balance, we humans actually have this incredible, one-of-a-kind shot to step up and find our own equilibrium with nature through... Free agency is such a joke, honestly. I was sitting there watching the news about those contract negotiations earlier and I just lost it—it’s absolute chaos out there!Look, this is basically man's specific purpose within nature. If we actually had the guts to decide on our own to get ourselves back in sync with nature, we’d finally level up to this whole new plane of existence and actually experience that perfection that nature just hands out for free.

The whole ecological crisis is nothing more than a symptom, honestly. It’s just the tip of the iceberg when you look at how broken everything else is.
All these ecological disasters we're dealing with? They're nothing more than surface-level symptoms showing that we’ve completely lost our balance with nature. If we actually want to fix this mess, we need to stop playing around and finally learn the laws that govern nature so we can actually start implementing those same principles into how our society functions.
Basically, we just need to start following the universal laws of nature, you know? Look, let's just talk about this on a human level for once.It basically boils down to this: we need to start actually living by those natural principles of reciprocity and just looking out for one another, you know?
So, are we actually supposed to believe that people should just step up and care about one another? Please, that sounds like some straight-up utopian pipe dream to me. Honestly, in the world we’re living in right now, everything except genuine human connection seems to be considered totally normal—we’ve basically normalized violence, crime, the drug epidemic, depression, suicide, poverty, and segregation as if they're just part of the daily grind. Don't get me wrong, I'm not out here cheering for any of that garbage, but it feels like we've all just collectively accepted these horrors as unavoidable side effects of modern life, haven't we?
Wrong. Honestly, everything you just laid out is completely unnatural.
Nature is flawless and operates in perfect harmony, period. Every single mess we deal with on this planet stems from us being totally out of sync with the laws of nature. Because we’re too dense to realize we’re actually part of nature itself, we fall into this trap of thinking our selfish attitudes toward one another have nothing to do with things like the climate crisis. But let me tell you, in the real world, every little thing we do ripples through every single level of nature, including the ecology.
The way we neglect the environment is just a direct reflection of how we neglect each other. You can't just pretend you're trying to fix our relationship with the earth while simultaneously ignoring the people standing right next to you.
Now, Al Gore's heartfelt plea for the world to wake up and face these environmental challenges is definitely important. But if we’re actually going to make it happen, we need a real method—something that lets us see the big picture of nature and helps us find balance with all its elements, ourselves included.
Kabbalah today has laid out exactly that kind of method in their books. They describe a step-by-step path toward actual, positive change. It starts by fixing how we treat one another and eventually leads to perfection in every single aspect of our lives.
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#3 ·
The Ripple Effect

When you talk about economic globalization, you're really talking about tying every single local market to the entire damn planet. Look at what's happening right now—the dollar is tanking because of shifts in the Chinese market, which just goes to show how much of an illusion "independence" actually is for local markets.
We thought we finally figured out how to play the game within this massive connected web, but honestly, is there any better blueprint than looking at nature? It’s the ultimate master of perfectly integrated systems.

They almost took home the big prize
Myron Scholes and Robert Merton had everything a scientist could ever dream of: they held the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, they had prestigious chairs at the top universities in the world, and they were absolute celebrities. But all of that went up in smoke after they took one specific opportunity back in the mid-nineties. Some high-profile broker saw their genius and decided he wanted to put it to work to make a mountain of cash.
Scholes and Metron were convinced that trading on the stock market was basically just like rolling dice; they thought you could measure the probability of every outcome using simple math. Their whole strategy rested on predicting the market through intense statistical studies.
So, these two scientists assembled a powerhouse group of math and economics professors. Then, teaming up with that ambitious broker, they launched a private investment fund designed to squeeze profits out of the market regardless of how things were looking. They called it Long-Term Capital Management. This fund built its entire investment policy around mathematical models, set up shop in a fancy suburb right near Wall Street, and just started rolling.
In just four short years, this fund became the object of pure envy for every single banker and trader on Wall Street. Even the old-school sharks, the real legends of the exchange, couldn't wrap their heads around how this fund was pulling in staggering 40% annual returns without a single loss or even a tiny bit of fluctuation. It looked like these scientists had cracked a magic code by finding patterns within the chaos of the world. In plain English, they found a way to print money.
Even the investment bankers—who are famously skeptical of anything in the business world—were totally floored. Seriously, they were so impressed that they offered to back the fund with $100 billion in credit without even asking for the usual collateral! Before long, the fund was financially tied to every major bank on Wall Street, creating this insanely complicated chain where every single link affected the entire structure.
LTCM seemed invincible until that one catastrophic night in September 1998. The bubble burst. The disaster kicked off from something that seemed totally insignificant—the crash of the Thai currency, the baht. That triggered a massive sell-off across Asian and Eastern European markets, and that snowball just kept rolling until it slammed right into LTCM. The fund completely imploded, sending shockwaves through every economic system across the globe.
It felt like the markets were heading straight for a point of no return. In a desperate move, the legendary Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, forced the top bankers from Wall Street and Europe to have an emergency meeting behind closed doors. In the end, it was nothing but the prayers of economists and some incredibly expensive decisions to bail out LTCM that kept the world from falling into an even deeper economic abyss.

Collapse is contagious

Watching the dollar slide right now brings back memories of what caused the LTCM collapse. While the dollar has been slipping for a while, the most dramatic drop is being driven by shifts in Chinese policy. China is playing it smart and focusing on its own economy, starting to distance itself from the dollar and redirecting investment payments into other currencies. As the echo of that decision rings around the world, countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Venezuela, Sudan, Iran, and Russia have all started looking at ways to ditch the dollar in trade just to protect their own economies.
We saw this exact same pattern play out during the recent sub-prime mortgage meltdown that kicked off right here in the States before spreading like wildfire across the entire globe. Honestly, the fallout from that absolute disaster is still being felt today. The biggest waves hit everything from Europe and Asia to Canada and Australia, and it wasn't just banks—it trashed corporations, manufacturers, marketing firms, and even high-tech giants.
It feels like every few years, some new "global economic crisis" crawls out of the woodwork, and frankly, all those attempts to predict market trends have been a total joke. Now we’re stuck asking the million-dollar question: how on earth do we build an economic system that actually works and stays stable?
Systems Among Us
The answer is actually pretty straightforward if you look at the wisdom of Kabbalah. And look, you don't need to be some genius economist to get this. You just have to realize that we—and everything we do, including the economy—have to follow the laws of the universal system we call nature.
Kabbalists explain that the overarching plan of nature is to bring all its parts, including us, into perfect unity. In terms of human society, that unification means that everyone's work serves the whole group.
Think about cells in a living body; they are the perfect example because they are all interconnected and give to one another just to keep the whole body functioning. In that flawless system, the body provides the cell with everything it needs, so the cell is totally dedicated to the well-being of the entire organism. In his article “Building the Society of the Future,” the Kabbalist Baal HaSulam writes that “…nature obliges every member to receive needs from society and to contribute to their surroundings through their own labor.”
The artificial systems we've cobbled together in human society are the exact opposite of nature's plan. At the core of human behavior sits the ego, which is what drives these broken systems. Our egos prefer selfish, narrow interests over the good of the collective, constantly chasing wealth, status, and control—often specifically at the expense of everyone else.
This ties directly back to the economy. In our ego-driven economic mess, the main priority for corporations is simply the self-interest of capital and investors. Even when companies claim to be helping society, you really have to wonder if it's just a cheap stunt to get their names splashed in the media for more publicity and a flashy reputation.
Globalization + Ego = The End of the Dead End
After thousands of years of purely egoistic development, we finally find ourselves backed into a corner: the harder we try to profit off one another, the more we realize how deeply interconnected we actually are, just like those cells in a living body I mentioned earlier.
The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management about a decade ago, the current credit crunch, and the ongoing slide of the dollar all prove just how intertwined our systems have become. A tiny tremor in a local market can trigger a massive earthquake in the global economy.
What's more, every single thing we do as consumers ripples through the entire hierarchy of other systems. It's like the "Butterfly Effect"—this "Consumer Effect" works exactly the same way.
When some lady from the suburbs goes to buy something at the local shopping mall, she is significantly impacting lives all over the planet. The products she picks up could decide if a factory stays open, if a family has to pack up and move, or if a child is saved from starving. When some old guy at home flips through the channels on his TV, he's hitting the entire advertising market. One click of a remote can influence jobs and the lives of thousands of people.
Globalization has made our world so incredibly fragile that even the smallest crack can cause a total meltdown. Local events like the mortgage crisis here in the United States, a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, or even just some rattling of weapons in the Persian Gulf, directly impact international trade prices and threaten the stability of the entire global economy.
Where's the exit
“It’s honestly wild how nature acts like some shrewd judge, punishing us based on how much we’ve actually grown. You can see it right in front of your eyes: the more humanity tries to advance, the more pain and suffering we have to endure just to stay afloat.”
Baal HaSulam, "Peace"
The wisdom of Kabbalah gives you a massive, much broader perspective on this whole mess we're in. It basically explains that we're all just kids playing in a sandbox called Earth. Nature is basically raising us like a parent—as we grow up, the expectations placed on us just keep climbing.
According to Kabbalah, humanity is caught between two parallel tracks. On one hand, nature is shoving us toward unity, trying to get us to act like a single, cohesive organism. On the other hand, our individual egos are exploding at an insane rate. The fact that these two things are happening at the exact same time is absolutely no accident.
One way or another, we’re going to be forced to flip the script on our egoism and start acting as one body. But instead of waiting for nature to beat us into submission, Kabbalists suggest there's a way we can actually take the wheel ourselves.
They argue that through our education systems, we could actually raise human consciousness to realize that humanity is essentially one multi-faceted body where everyone is interconnected. By studying the vast systems of nature and how they work, people would finally grasp exactly what kind of changes need to be woven into our social structures so they actually align with the laws of nature.
If we actually lived in harmony with nature, we’d thrive in every single part of our lives, even the economic side of things. Luckily, we already have the science that maps out nature's actual blueprint. We call that science “the wisdom of Kabbalah.”
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#4 ·
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
Kenneth Peterson5 Kenneth Peterson5 Active Member
124 messages
joined Nov 2007
#5 ·
Brian Foster3 said:
The Ripple Effect

When you talk about economic globalization, you're really talking about tying every single local market to the entire damn planet. Look at what's happening right now—the dollar is tanking because of shifts in the Chinese market, which just goes to show how much of an illusion "independence" actually is for local markets.
We thought we finally figured out how to play the game within this massive connected web, but honestly, is there any better blueprint than looking at nature? It’s the ultimate master of perfectly integrated systems.

They almost took home the big prize
Myron Scholes and Robert Merton had everything a scientist could ever dream of: they held the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, they had prestigious chairs at the top universities in the world, and they were absolute celebrities. But all of that went up in smoke after they took one specific opportunity back in the mid-nineties. Some high-profile broker saw their genius and decided he wanted to put it to work to make a mountain of cash.
Scholes and Metron were convinced that trading on the stock market was basically just like rolling dice; they thought you could measure the probability of every outcome using simple math. Their whole strategy rested on predicting the market through intense statistical studies.
So, these two scientists assembled a powerhouse group of math and economics professors. Then, teaming up with that ambitious broker, they launched a private investment fund designed to squeeze profits out of the market regardless of how things were looking. They called it Long-Term Capital Management. This fund built its entire investment policy around mathematical models, set up shop in a fancy suburb right near Wall Street, and just started rolling.
In just four short years, this fund became the object of pure envy for every single banker and trader on Wall Street. Even the old-school sharks, the real legends of the exchange, couldn't wrap their heads around how this fund was pulling in staggering 40% annual returns without a single loss or even a tiny bit of fluctuation. It looked like these scientists had cracked a magic code by finding patterns within the chaos of the world. In plain English, they found a way to print money.
Even the investment bankers—who are famously skeptical of anything in the business world—were totally floored. Seriously, they were so impressed that they offered to back the fund with $100 billion in credit without even asking for the usual collateral! Before long, the fund was financially tied to every major bank on Wall Street, creating this insanely complicated chain where every single link affected the entire structure.
LTCM seemed invincible until that one catastrophic night in September 1998. The bubble burst. The disaster kicked off from something that seemed totally insignificant—the crash of the Thai currency, the baht. That triggered a massive sell-off across Asian and Eastern European markets, and that snowball just kept rolling until it slammed right into LTCM. The fund completely imploded, sending shockwaves through every economic system across the globe.
It felt like the markets were heading straight for a point of no return. In a desperate move, the legendary Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, forced the top bankers from Wall Street and Europe to have an emergency meeting behind closed doors. In the end, it was nothing but the prayers of economists and some incredibly expensive decisions to bail out LTCM that kept the world from falling into an even deeper economic abyss.

Collapse is contagious

Watching the dollar slide right now brings back memories of what caused the LTCM collapse. While the dollar has been slipping for a while, the most dramatic drop is being driven by shifts in Chinese policy. China is playing it smart and focusing on its own economy, starting to distance itself from the dollar and redirecting investment payments into other currencies. As the echo of that decision rings around the world, countries like Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Venezuela, Sudan, Iran, and Russia have all started looking at ways to ditch the dollar in trade just to protect their own economies.
We saw this exact same pattern play out during the recent sub-prime mortgage meltdown that kicked off right here in the States before spreading like wildfire across the entire globe. Honestly, the fallout from that absolute disaster is still being felt today. The biggest waves hit everything from Europe and Asia to Canada and Australia, and it wasn't just banks—it trashed corporations, manufacturers, marketing firms, and even high-tech giants.
It feels like every few years, some new "global economic crisis" crawls out of the woodwork, and frankly, all those attempts to predict market trends have been a total joke. Now we’re stuck asking the million-dollar question: how on earth do we build an economic system that actually works and stays stable?
Systems Among Us
The answer is actually pretty straightforward if you look at the wisdom of Kabbalah. And look, you don't need to be some genius economist to get this. You just have to realize that we—and everything we do, including the economy—have to follow the laws of the universal system we call nature.
Kabbalists explain that the overarching plan of nature is to bring all its parts, including us, into perfect unity. In terms of human society, that unification means that everyone's work serves the whole group.
Think about cells in a living body; they are the perfect example because they are all interconnected and give to one another just to keep the whole body functioning. In that flawless system, the body provides the cell with everything it needs, so the cell is totally dedicated to the well-being of the entire organism. In his article “Building the Society of the Future,” the Kabbalist Baal HaSulam writes that “…nature obliges every member to receive needs from society and to contribute to their surroundings through their own labor.”
The artificial systems we've cobbled together in human society are the exact opposite of nature's plan. At the core of human behavior sits the ego, which is what drives these broken systems. Our egos prefer selfish, narrow interests over the good of the collective, constantly chasing wealth, status, and control—often specifically at the expense of everyone else.
This ties directly back to the economy. In our ego-driven economic mess, the main priority for corporations is simply the self-interest of capital and investors. Even when companies claim to be helping society, you really have to wonder if it's just a cheap stunt to get their names splashed in the media for more publicity and a flashy reputation.
Globalization + Ego = The End of the Dead End
After thousands of years of purely egoistic development, we finally find ourselves backed into a corner: the harder we try to profit off one another, the more we realize how deeply interconnected we actually are, just like those cells in a living body I mentioned earlier.
The collapse of Long-Term Capital Management about a decade ago, the current credit crunch, and the ongoing slide of the dollar all prove just how intertwined our systems have become. A tiny tremor in a local market can trigger a massive earthquake in the global economy.
What's more, every single thing we do as consumers ripples through the entire hierarchy of other systems. It's like the "Butterfly Effect"—this "Consumer Effect" works exactly the same way.
When some lady from the suburbs goes to buy something at the local shopping mall, she is significantly impacting lives all over the planet. The products she picks up could decide if a factory stays open, if a family has to pack up and move, or if a child is saved from starving. When some old guy at home flips through the channels on his TV, he's hitting the entire advertising market. One click of a remote can influence jobs and the lives of thousands of people.
Globalization has made our world so incredibly fragile that even the smallest crack can cause a total meltdown. Local events like the mortgage crisis here in the United States, a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, or even just some rattling of weapons in the Persian Gulf, directly impact international trade prices and threaten the stability of the entire global economy.
Where's the exit
“It’s honestly wild how nature acts like some shrewd judge, punishing us based on how much we’ve actually grown. You can see it right in front of your eyes: the more humanity tries to advance, the more pain and suffering we have to endure just to stay afloat.”
Baal HaSulam, "Peace"
The wisdom of Kabbalah gives you a massive, much broader perspective on this whole mess we're in. It basically explains that we're all just kids playing in a sandbox called Earth. Nature is basically raising us like a parent—as we grow up, the expectations placed on us just keep climbing.
According to Kabbalah, humanity is caught between two parallel tracks. On one hand, nature is shoving us toward unity, trying to get us to act like a single, cohesive organism. On the other hand, our individual egos are exploding at an insane rate. The fact that these two things are happening at the exact same time is absolutely no accident.
One way or another, we’re going to be forced to flip the script on our egoism and start acting as one body. But instead of waiting for nature to beat us into submission, Kabbalists suggest there's a way we can actually take the wheel ourselves.
They argue that through our education systems, we could actually raise human consciousness to realize that humanity is essentially one multi-faceted body where everyone is interconnected. By studying the vast systems of nature and how they work, people would finally grasp exactly what kind of changes need to be woven into our social structures so they actually align with the laws of nature.
If we actually lived in harmony with nature, we’d thrive in every single part of our lives, even the economic side of things. Luckily, we already have the science that maps out nature's actual blueprint. We call that science “the wisdom of Kabbalah.”

Brian Foster3,
Welcome Back!
(even though, you never actually left)
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#6 ·
Kenneth Peterson5 said:Brian Foster3,
Welcome Back!
(even though, you never actually left)

Thanks so much, Kenneth Peterson5, you're too kind. 😉

If you want to dig into more articles from this same publication, just head over to the "Spirituality" subforum.

Enjoy the read.
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#7 ·
Kabbalah isn't philosophy

Listen, back in the day, Kabbalah was what actually inspired the heavy hitters looking for actual meaning, but then this whole branch called "philosophy" just veered off into a completely different direction

People probably picture Kabbalists as these antisocial types hiding away in dark, candlelit rooms scribbling down magic spells, and honestly, until the end of the 1900s, Kabbalah really did stay under wraps. That secretive vibe created all these fairy tales and legends about its nature, and even though most of that junk is totally wrong, it still trips up even the smartest thinkers out there.
But look, Kabbalah wasn't always some secret club. The early practitioners were actually pretty open about what they knew and stayed heavily involved in their communities—I mean, many of them were straight-up leaders! Out of all those big names, King David is probably the most famous example of a massive Kabbalist who also happened to be a legendary leader.
Because these guys were so plugged into society, they helped lay the groundwork for what we now call "Western philosophy," which eventually became the bedrock of modern science. With that in mind, check out what Johannes Reuchlin—this huge humanist scholar and expert in ancient languages—writes in his book De Arte Cabbalistica: “My teacher, Pythagoras, the father of philosophy, took his teachings from the Kabbalists... He was the first to translate the word, Kabbalah, which was unknown to his peers, into the Greek word philosophy.... Kabbalah doesn't let us live our lives in the dust; instead, it lifts our minds to the heights of knowledge.”
The problem is, philosophers weren't Kabbalists. Since they didn't study Kabbalah, they couldn't possibly grasp the sheer depth of that knowledge, so they ended up mishandling and misinterpreting stuff that was supposed to be treated in a very specific way. Once that knowledge migrated to other parts of the world where there weren't any Kabbalists around, it just took on a completely different evolutionary path.
So basically, humanity took the long way around. Even though Western philosophy absorbed bits and pieces of Kabbalistic knowledge, it ultimately went in a totally different direction. Western philosophy spawned sciences that focused on investigating the material world—the stuff we perceive with our five senses. But Kabbalah is the science that studies what's happening on the other side of what our senses can pick up. Shifting the focus like that sent humanity in the exact opposite direction of the original knowledge the Kabbalists uncovered. This detour led everyone down a path of total delusion regarding what Kabbalah actually is.
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#8 ·
If you want to dig into more articles from this same publication, just head over to the "Philosophy" subforum.

Enjoy the read.
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#9 ·
Dreams


People get way too obsessed with dreaming and trying to find deep meaning in every little thing they see when they close their eyes. They honestly think dreams are some kind of cosmic life coach that’s going to solve all their problems, but let me tell you, from the perspective of Modern Kabbalah, a dream is nothing more than a basic biological function. It’s got absolutely zero connection to the soul or anything spiritual.

When you're out cold, your brain is just busy sorting through everything you dealt with during the day, processing those random impressions and filing them away into memory. That’s literally all there is to it—it's just mental housekeeping.

And don't even get me started on people who bring up dreams mentioned in sacred texts like the Bible or the Zohar to try and prove me wrong. Those holy books are strictly about spiritual reality and how the soul evolves; they don't give a damn about mundane, worldly events. When those texts talk about "dreams," they aren't talking about what happens in your head while you're sleeping; they’re describing profound spiritual insights occurring within the soul itself.

Take the term "awake" in Modern Kabbalah, for instance—that refers to someone who actually feels the Light of God within their soul, whereas "asleep" means that Light has departed from them. Once the soul is refilled with that Light, that's when the person truly "wakes up" to a new day.

I'll say it again: sacred texts describe the spiritual states of a Kabbalist's soul, not the physical body or some dream dictionary nonsense. A Kabbalist can experience a state described as "dreaming" while they are wide awake and physically conscious. There is no link between the soul and the physical body; they are completely separate entities.
boldsailor32 boldsailor32 Active Member
126 messages
joined Feb 2003
#10 ·
Harmony said:Honestly, if philosophy were ever declared a material science once and for all, I wouldn't bother showing up. But that’s never going to happen. 🙂 First, because philosophy isn't a science. It birthed Western material science, sure. But on its own, it isn't one. So what is it?
I already explained why I write here. Philosophy attempts to answer the fundamental questions of human existence. There is a raw desire for those answers, and that is truly all that matters. In the language of Modern Kabbalah, Desire attracts Light. 🙂
I believe I will eventually find my footing and adapt my approach to this subforum.

Over on "Spirituality," it's been a few days and there hasn't been a single response or comment. It's unproductive. Very quickly, everyone falls into arbitrary comparisons and parallels based on a "if you agree with me, I'll agree with you" mentality. Critical thinking is more developed here, but there is still a lack of genuine desire to perceive higher dimensions of reality. People get lost in matter and refuse to lift the heavy weights even for a second. If they did, they would have to admit they actually have no clue what life is, who they are, or why any of this exists. Instead, they stay locked in their "comfort zones," pushing away anyone who tries to prompt them to re-evaluate the "meaning" of their lives and existence. But that's fine. That's just how it works. Every fruit ripens when it's ready. You can't force spirituality. Desire is either felt or it isn't.

There are three subforums where Kabbalah makes sense to exist. All three share one common denominator: the meaning of life and existence. Each requires a different approach. Given that shared purpose, it is counterproductive to nitpick over formalities or stifle living content by forcing it into a single specific mold. Doing so doesn't just go against the spirit of the entire forum; it reduces the "natural habitat" of Kabbalah. If we put everyone in a "drawer" and separate those drawers further, we will all remain fragmented, isolated, and intolerant toward one another.


Are you commenting on your own topic from the Philosophy forum over on the Spirituality subforum, and criticizing people on Spirituality for ignoring your topic???

Or did I misunderstand something? 😁

boldsailor32.
goldeneagle2 goldeneagle2 Active Member
58 messages
joined Aug 2005
#11 ·
Hey there, Harmony—good to see you back in the mix. I’ve been hoping you spent your time away actually hitting the books and making some real headway with your studies over these last few months. Honestly, it would be a crime to let this stuff just sit around, so do me a favor and get some of these writings posted on some other forum or two!
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#12 ·
boldsailor32 said:Are you commenting on your own topic from the Philosophy forum over on the Spirituality subforum, and criticizing people on Spirituality for ignoring your topic???

Or did I misunderstand something? 😁

boldsailor32.

You nailed it. I’m laying out my own blunt critiques for both the Spirituality and Philosophy sections, plain and simple.
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#13 ·
goldeneagle2 said:Hey there, Harmony—good to see you back in the mix. I’ve been hoping you spent your time away actually hitting the books and making some real headway with your studies over these last few months. Honestly, it would be a crime to let this stuff just sit around, so do me a favor and get some of these writings posted on some other forum or two!

Thanks for the warm welcome. 🙂
My studies and my hands-on work with Kabala are coming along great, thanks for the kind words. 🙂
Anyway, I went ahead and moved the texts over to that forum. Thanks for the nudge.

And yeah, thanks again. 🙂
Brian Lopez2 Brian Lopez2 Newcomer
1 message
joined Feb 2008
#14 ·
Brian Foster3 said:If you want to dig into more articles from this same publication, just head over to the "Philosophy" subforum.

Enjoy the read.

What a joke. There aren't any other articles on the "philosophy" subforum!
Guess they don't want any Kabbalah over there.😢
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#15 ·
Brian Lopez2 said:What a joke. There aren't any other articles on the "philosophy" subforum!
Guess they don't want any Kabbalah over there.😢

They sure don't. They're terrified someone might actually steal their bread and butter, honestly—it's just pure professional jealousy wrapped up in this fake "righteous formality" nonsense.🙂

All the articles are right here, though. They just moved them from philosophy over to this section, so you aren't actually missing out on anything.
goldeneagle2 goldeneagle2 Active Member
58 messages
joined Aug 2005
#16 ·
So, Brian Foster3, where can I actually pick up this magazine? You got a link or something? I actually went ahead and printed out your latest write-up—it was quite the read—and sat there sipping coffee with my wife during our morning routine, just taking it all in. It would be pretty great if they stocked this stuff at my usual spots—you know, my favorite local cafes and bakeries—so I could catch up on it when I drop by, and maybe even give the rest of the neighborhood something decent to read for once.
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#17 ·
goldeneagle2 said:So, Brian Foster3, where can I actually pick up this magazine? You got a link or something? I actually went ahead and printed out your latest write-up—it was quite the read—and sat there sipping coffee with my wife during our morning routine, just taking it all in. It would be pretty great if they stocked this stuff at my usual spots—you know, my favorite local cafes and bakeries—so I could catch up on it when I drop by, and maybe even give the rest of the neighborhood something decent to read for once.

🙂 Man, goldeneagle2, you really made my day. 🙂
I don't have a physical print version ready to go just yet, but it’s coming real soon. We're currently in the middle of finalizing everything and getting it ready for the press. It won't be anything massive—just something small and humble based on what we can manage right now. I’d be more than happy to send you a dozen or so copies if you think that’s enough to get things moving. And don't worry, the magazine is completely free.
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#18 ·
Cracking the code to happiness is honestly such a joke when you look at how people try to fake it through some mystical nonsense instead of just living their lives!

Look, once you dive into Kabbalah—this whole science of happiness—luck stops being some big, mysterious enigma that just happens to you. It’s actually something you can break down into pieces and finally wrap your head around. Honestly, it’s just like how E=mc² works; there’s absolutely a formula for lasting happiness out there if you know where to look.

Quick—just stop for a second and think about what would actually make you incredibly happy.
That was the opening line for the lead story on the cover of the May issue. Newsweek's latest piece is just more of the same nonsense!Back in 2007, there was this massive deep dive into the whole concept of happiness. You had all these top-tier psychologists, sociologists, biologists, and even economists putting their heads together to tackle that age-old, nagging question: "What’s the secret to being happy?" Or, if you want to get more technical about it, they were basically trying to figure out exactly what it takes for us to actually feel fulfilled.

The dollar always looks greener when you're looking at it from the other side!
"Maybe it's all about the money?" researchers are asking. Honestly, if you listen to any typical dreamer out there, they'll swear up and down that if they just had the cash, they could finally live the dream—you know, hop on a flight to Paris, buy whatever ridiculous gadget catches their eye, quit that soul-crushing job, and finally take the wheel of their own life. It’s like they actually believe a fat bank account is some kind of magic ticket to pure happiness, right?
It’s honestly not even surprising, though it still ticks me off, how all these modern studies keep proving that once you have enough cash to cover the basics, more money doesn't actually make you any happier. I remember reading about this one famous study where they tracked lottery winners—people who were absolutely over the moon when they hit the jackpot, just riding that massive high—but pretty soon, that euphoria just evaporated into thin air, leaving them right back where they started emotionally, just like they were before they ever saw a dime of that winnings.
Honestly, once you finally hit that point where you’ve got more cash than you actually need to cover the basics, your ability to even enjoy the money gets totally hijacked by this constant, nagging comparison like, "Do I have as much as the Matics?" It doesn't matter how much you're pulling in; it always feels like the neighbor's dollars are just a few shades greener than yours.

The Economics of Happiness.
What happened to actually having some free time? I mean, if we weren't constantly grinding ourselves into the dirt and actually took a breather to relax, would we finally stumble upon that elusive happiness everyone keeps chasing?
Happiness researchers aren't buying that theory for a second, and honestly, looking at the "world map luck" recently released by the psychology department over at the University of Leicester, it’s pretty clear who's actually winning. Hardworking Americans are sitting pretty all the way up at number 23, while France is just coasting along in a total slump at 62nd place!
So, one by one, these researchers are basically tearing down every single cliché theory we’ve ever been fed about how to actually find happiness. They’ve officially concluded that in the long run, stuff like landing a massive promotion at Goldman Sachs, having a perfect marriage, or even staying in peak physical shape won't actually make you any happier. It's honestly infuriating how much time we waste chasing these hollow milestones!
And then what? Seriously, what else is there to say? I don't even know where to start with this nonsense, but honestly, I'm just about fed up with the way people try to spin these things! What actually makes us happy? Honestly, researchers are just staring at a blank wall trying to figure that out, and it’s driving me nuts! It feels like it's way easier to pin down all the things that make our lives miserable than it is to pinpoint what actually brings us joy. They just aren't doing it! Look, instead of just preaching to the choir about being happy, I'm actually trying to lay out a practical formula for finding some real, genuine happiness!
Luck is everywhere—it’s plastered all over those bestseller lists, it’s stuck in the heads of every politician in D.C., and even the big-shot economists can't stop obsessing over it—but honestly, the damn thing still remains completely impossible to pin down! Rana Foroohar wraps it all up by pointing out... Newsweek's She’s just some economy writer.
So, how on earth are you supposed to actually pin down that elusive sense of luck? It’s like trying to grab smoke with your bare hands, I swear!

The mechanics of luck.
If we’re ever going to crack the code on how to actually find some happiness, we have to start by getting real about who we are and what makes us tick. It’s actually incredibly simple: at our core, we are nothing more than a constant, driving desire for fulfillment. To put it bluntly, every single one of us is just out here chasing pleasure and trying to soak up life—which is exactly what Kabbalah describes when they call us the "will to receive."
Everything about Creation—from the first spark to the absolute end—is driven by this single, raw hunger to experience pleasure, and honestly, all this massive variety we see in the universe is nothing more than different ways that fundamental will to receive manifests itself!
I can't even begin to wrap my head around how people try to make sense of Yehuda Ashlag's work without actually getting it, because honestly, if you aren't looking at the deep roots of his teachings, you're just spinning your wheels! I was reading this piece in Time Magazine the other day about how modern thinkers approach these ancient concepts, and it just reminded me how much everyone misses the mark when they try to simplify things. It’s like trying to navigate a complex city without a GPS; you might move, but you aren't going anywhere meaningful.I can't believe I'm even wasting my breath on this, but people need to stop ignoring the weight of Baal Hasulam!),
An introduction to the wisdom of Kabbalah.

You probably think you’ve heard this all before, but honestly, most people have no clue how deep this goes. Our human nature—this raw, primal drive to actually take things in—is way more sophisticated than anyone gives it credit for. It isn't just some mindless, constant craving that keeps us chasing after happiness like a bunch of amateurs; it's this specific, deep-seated will to receive that's actually driving the whole engine. Everything. Everything we do—from the tiniest little thing we get done to every single stray thought that flashes through my head—it all counts!
That damn will to receive is such a relentless parasite, always hunting for its next hit of pleasure and refusing to let up until every single one of its greedy little demands is met. It’s constantly micromanaging our entire emotional state, too—if we actually manage to feed it, suddenly everything feels great and life feels like a damn song, but the second we fail to satisfy it, we spiral straight into frustration, rage, depression, or even worse, total violence or suicidal thoughts.
Maybe you already guessed this part, but there’s this thing we constantly overlook—and honestly, it’s the absolute key to cracking the code of happiness—which is the fact that once that "will to receive" is satisfied, the joy just evaporates.
The legendary Irish writer Oscar Wilde definitely nailed this when he wrote, "There are only two tragedies in life. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. The latter is much worse; the latter is a real tragedy."
Kabbalah breaks down the mechanics of why this happens: initially, we want something and we grind away to get it. The second we actually land what we were craving, we feel this rush of satisfaction, bliss, and pure joy. Or, if you want to use the technical Kabbalistic terms, that first collision between desire and fulfillment is the absolute peak of pleasure.
So far, so good, right? But wait, the process isn't finished yet. The very moment we grab what we wanted, the desire itself starts to shrink. In plain English, we gradually stop wanting the very thing we just acquired, and because of that, our sense of satisfaction begins to fade... until it completely vanishes into thin air.
For example, you know that feeling when you are starving—like, seriously famished? You could probably inhale a steak the size of a small car (or if you're vegetarian, just imagine a massive tofu slab). But what actually happens once you start eating?
That first bite is pure ecstasy, and the next one is phenomenal. The one after that is wonderful, then it's great, then it's... okay, and the one after that is just... whatever. And eventually, you're thinking, "Ugh, not another bite, I'm getting full..."
This happens with everything, not just food. We can spend years obsessing over a dream sports car, and when we finally pull it into the driveway, we're thrilled—well, for a few moments or days at least. But pretty soon, we find ourselves enjoying it less and less until it provides zero satisfaction. Then, every time we look at that car, all we feel is the crushing weight of the massive loan we have to pay off for the next ten years!
Richard Easterlin, an economics professor at the University of Southern California and a pioneer in happiness research, calls this phenomenon "hedonic adaptation," which basically means, "We get a new car and get used to it. We buy new clothes and get used to those too... Very quickly, we adjust to the pleasure we're getting..."
But surely that can't be the end of the story, can it? Because even after hearing all this, we still crave lasting satisfaction. Did Nature design us to be stuck in this endless loop just to keep us miserable? Is happiness nothing more than a fairy tale, like some Santa Claus myth that's never going to come true?

(The Secret) Formula for Happiness
Thankfully, Kabbalah explains that Nature isn't being cruel at all; in fact, its only goal is to bring us the happiness we are searching for. If we weren't meant to realize our aspiration for happiness, we wouldn't have had the desire in the first place. The purpose of Nature is to allow us to independently achieve a sense of complete and total happiness—not just "some kind" of happiness or "mostly" happy, but happiness that is absolute, perfect, and eternal.
And the truth is, we are much closer to it than we think. Modern trends in happiness research and our growing realization that we are never quite satisfied have actually brought us closer to true happiness. We're starting to see the pattern: happiness has nothing to do with how much money we make or how great our marriage is—in fact, it has nothing to do with any other kind of gratification we try to chase. We are beginning to uncover the fundamental truth that happiness can only be felt by using a different principle of enjoyment.
This is where Kabbalah helps us tackle the root cause of the happiness problem. We've already explained why we never feel lasting satisfaction from anything: because the moment satisfaction enters the desire, the desire is neutralized. And since our desire is gone, we can't enjoy the pleasure anymore.
So, the secret to happiness, as Kabbalah explains, is to add one more ingredient to this process: the ingredient of "intention." This means we continue to desire just as before, but we give that desire a different direction: we steer it towardLook, it’s like we’re giving it to someone else entirely. Basically, this intention turns our own desire into a literal "conduit" for pleasure. That way, the satisfaction we feel doesn't just hit a wall and stop; it keeps flowing through our desires, fueled by that intention. It means our capacity to feel can just stay open and keep receiving without ever running dry.
That right there is the secret sauce for endless joy, or what people call lasting happiness. When you actually put this into practice, you go through this massive internal shift where you start experiencing all these different kinds of pleasure. In Kabbalah, they call these "spiritual," and that’s why they never run out.

The Bottom Line – Quick Summary

So, what actually is happiness?
It’s that feeling we get when we finally satisfy our "will to receive."

Why does happiness always vanish?
Because once you feel satisfied, it kills your desire, and if you don't have any desire left, you can't feel any more pleasure. It’s a total cycle.

What’s the actual formula for feeling endless satisfaction?
You take that "will to receive" and plug in an "intention to give," which lets the pleasure flow through your desires forever.
Real happiness is just "around the corner," waiting for us to figure out how to sense it by adding intention to our wants. By studying Kabbalah, we naturally pick up this new, spiritual intention, and we finally start receiving exactly the way Nature intended—perfectly. That’s why "Kabbalah" literally translates to "receiving"—it’s the wisdom that teaches us how to truly receive.
goldeneagle2 goldeneagle2 Active Member
58 messages
joined Aug 2005
#19 ·
Brian Foster3, is there any way to actually order or pick up those Kabbalah publications in print? Like, can I find them in a physical format somewhere?
Brian Foster3 Brian Foster3 Active MemberOP
116 messages
joined Aug 2007
#20 ·
goldeneagle2 said:Brian Foster3, is there any way to actually order or pick up those Kabbalah publications in print? Like, can I find them in a physical format somewhere?

Fazlija, did you seriously not read my answer from that first time you asked me this exact same question in the other thread? 🙂

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