For those who stray onto side roads and lose their way, it is reassuring to know that returning to the marked road is always possible. Even when feeling lost in the complexities of reality, with its pressures, pains and incomprehension, what the wisdom of Kabbalah calls “the Four Phases of Direct Light” offers guidance. Understanding these four phases provides a foundation to navigate through confusion and fog.
Before creation, a supreme power—the source force of love and bestowal that exists in nature, which Kabbalah calls “the Creator”—created four stages of connection to extend the light of goodness to the created beings. Everything we experience in our lives passes through these stages. Despite life often feeling complicated and full of troubles, it is not because the Creator sends other forces to the goodness that He wishes to impart. The key to feeling the Creator’s influence as solely good, eternal and perfect is in fixing our connections to each other. Until we do, we feel the Creator’s influence as mixed into good and bad, sweet and bitter, pleasure and suffering, and so on.
How did Kabbalists discover these four phases? It is similar to how scientists make discoveries in our physical universe. Kabbalists, like scientists studying light, delved into its nature, frequencies and composition. However, Kabbalists explore the spiritual light, which is the pleasure, abundance and goodness that extends from the Creator. Their investigation revealed that this light gradually passes from the uppermost force of love and bestowal in reality—the Creator—to the very last phase, where it fills and transforms us into a vessel capable of receiving the light in an eternal and perfect manner.
Kabbalists employ desire as their research tool. In every era, those seeking answers to life’s questions—Why am I alive? What is my purpose? Who gives me life?—experience a kind of “shake” from the spiritual light. This prompt urges them to seek answers about life’s mysteries. The wisdom of Kabbalah thus begins with the desire to understand, discover and know the meaning of life, and the very blueprint of life’s foundation is this four-phase structure. We then head on a journey of discovering the distinctions within the four phases of direct light, establishing a positive connection with others through which we develop our connection with the Creator. That is how we progress in the method of Kabbalah.
Based on the Daily Kabbalah Lesson on January 18, 2024. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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