The Kabbalah, Bestowal, Creation of the Spiritual Creature and Our World

by Gary Rosenberg

Two years ago, I had an awakening.  This was an event with a strong message from the Universe that it was time to accelerate my spiritual path; that my spiritual journey in this world and in this physical form had limited time to realize my true spiritual existence. This event was similar to those awakenings people have experienced in the past and continue to today.  It was not unusual, though many may doubt its authenticity.  I am glad I listened and have been on a remarkable re-discovering and remembering of my (our) true essence.

Prior to this event, I was a political junky with a well-defined and inflexible universe.  I was opinionated, angry, hurtful, depressed and generally miserable, though I never admitted this.

Until the Universe spoke in an unconditional manner and I listened.  Today I am alive, healthy and happy.  I accept things I could not accept about myself and others and try to view the world in an objective manner without judgement.  I have learned much along this path and want to share this with others who may be interested which is why I started my blog www.lifesolutionsenlightenment.com.

This path has introduced me to some wise and incredible people, presented me with books, articles, stories and other spiritual writings and most recently attracted me to a wonderful online course on Kabbalah with Bnei Baruch http://edu.kabbalah.info/home which for the last ten weeks has been both inspiring and profound.  While I had tried to read books on Kabbalah in the past they never resonated with me.  Then while researching online for an unrelated topic I stumbled on the Bnei Baruch website.  This like most things in life was no accident. The course and related readings hit a chord.  This was Truth explained in a different manner than other religious and mystic writings I have encountered, but was the same Truth.  So, in this writing I want to share some of my thoughts on how Kabbalah explains the world as I understand it.  Hopefully some of this will resonate with you.   As you read this keep in mind that there is no one path to God.  Everyone is on their own path of self-realization and whatever paths we all choose they all will lead to the same place:  Our Creator/Love/Joy.

My understanding of Kabbalah is that of a student.  I do not profess to be any kind of expert in this spiritual discipline and share this writing now as it may help us grasp current human actions in our corporeal world and lend some comfort that we can still choose to be happy in a world seemingly dominated by fear, anger and hate. It is never too soon or too late to expand our mind and spirit with the ideas and words of God’s many messengers.  The Kabbalists were such messengers some 9,000 years ago and what they had experienced then and teach us today still has relevance for humankind.

Keep in mind that describing any spiritual experience as the Kabbalists had is nearly impossible through our language and corporeal physical senses.   This is why I required a studied course to grasp its basic teachings.  Combine this with my early understanding of Kabbalah and I have ventured out on a questionable task by writing this post, but I felt inspired to do so and hope at least some of this resonates with you.  This is a very abbreviated discussion around Kabbalah and I am leaving out an enormous amount of detail as it is not the purpose of this writing to teach Kabbalah, but to touch on the wisdom of Kabbalah.

In Kabbalah creation begins with God’s thought which is referred to as God’s thought of creation.  God’s intention is to bestow love, joy and pleasure.  So, God creates a vessel to bestow upon it pleasure.  Kabbalah’s cosmology is based on the Creator’s whole purpose to bestow joy and pleasure onto this vessel which overtime evolves into a spiritual creature.  God creates this vessel or creature (Humans, though we are not yet the spiritual creature Kabbalah talks about) to be a receptor of the pleasure or Light of God’s bestowal.    We have all been created to receive pleasure. This is the attribute of humans.  Our whole purpose is to receive pleasure bestowed upon us from God.

This means we are designed to receive pleasure for self- benefit and in this way God gets to bestow as was her original thought.  Our ego was designed as the receptor of pleasure.  It wants pleasure and is motivated by pleasure.   If we look at the world today we can see manifestations of people acting in their own self-interest. Humans are constantly seeking pleasure and avoiding pain even if this has a detrimental effect on others and Nature. 

However, the process of creating the spiritual creature is rather complex and I will not attempt to discuss this.  What we need to understand is that a world emanating self-benefit, self-absorption, self-satisfaction and self-interest is all by design.  Everything that we as humans have manifested is the result of our egos focus on their purpose of personal desire for pleasure.

What is God’s bestowal?  In answering this question, I will refer you to my post of November 7, 2016, ‘How We Create Our World.’  I will be touching on some points made in this last article.  If you read the post you will remember that we create our reality with our thoughts; that the Universe responds to our thoughts in non-judgmental fashion manifesting in our world what we want (think). 

The Universe is always responding to our thoughts and if they are made with strong enough desire and consistent enough detail we can create what we come to see in our world as our reality.  This interaction we have between the Universe and our thoughts is really God’s bestowal.  God wants us to be happy and to bestow pleasure on us, that’s how he designed us.  However, God (the Universe/Creator/the Giver) is non-judgmental.  She does not decide, “Well, this person’s thoughts/desires really might do them harm in the long run or harm others or are really selfish, so I will not respond to them.”   God bestows us what we desire as requested by our thoughts.  This is how we interact with God’s constant bestowal.  God remains non-judgmental.  It is we who decide what is good or not, what we want or not.

God’s goodness is giving us what we want as expressed through our thoughts.   What is it we want?  Generally, we want food, shelter, clothing, sex, money, power, knowledge and ultimately pleasure.  There is nothing wrong with this. We gravitate towards pleasure and away from pain. These desires are neither good nor bad, they simply exist.  However, by continually wanting pleasure we find that over time we can never receive enough pleasure and therefore are rarely if ever satisfied.  Our ego constantly tells us we want more, we can do more, we deserve more. However, we never really seem to get fulfilled.  We always want more and in fact our whole society is based on wanting more; our economy would not grow if we did not consistently consume more.  Our world is in the state it is because people, all of us and those in power are unfulfilled by God’s bestowal because our egos are designed to want constant pleasure.  So, being unfulfilled people reach for other sources of pleasure and as they do this their egos become more powerful.  Sometimes the wealthiest can’t have enough money to make them happy, so they turn to power and this power can manifest itself into exploitation of others.

The enlarged ego’s desire for more can result in fear of not having enough, anger and hatred of others who seemingly have more than us, jealousy of others who are richer, smarter or more powerful than us and this constant yearning for more pleasure manifests itself in our world in ways which may be by our definition harmful to ourselves and others. Whole nations’ collective egos can be influenced in this way manifesting into the exploitation of the planet, other peoples and wars. 

So, has the Creator created a monster in this creature we call humans simply so that she can bestow unconditional love and pleasure on us – creating us to be the receptors of this pleasure?  Not exactly.  You see the fully developed or evolved spiritual creature has not yet been created with the human being.  Our spiritual evolution involves our desire to be like the Creator.  That is to have the attribute of bestowal.  This presents a whole host of problems because we have been designed with the attribute of reception of pleasure for self-benefit.

The evolution of this spiritual creature as explained by Kabbalists is a detailed and lengthy process taking what in our world would be described as many lifetimes. This process solves the problem of creating the attribute of bestowal within us – to become altruistic like the Creator.  We are all on this path towards bestowal knowingly or unknowingly.  We often may not understand this path, though we constantly get messages from the Universe to remind us in the form of thoughts, events and people who are God’s messengers.

Many of us have experienced the human ability to bestow in acts of kindness which we either bestow on others or have bestowed on us.  These acts of kindness are moments when our point in the heart, which the Kabbalists refer to as our soul in development, expresses its true nature.  While this is in conflict with our ego, these moments of altruism do occur.  The challenge is how to create realities for ourselves where altruism is constant in our lives.  And, while we will always maintain the attribute of reception, so that we continue to receive God’s Light bestowed on us, our spiritual evolution will see the two attributes bestowal and reception eventually in balance.

In our current state, we cannot fully accept and absorb God’s Light to fill our vessel and with this infinite pleasure.  The Kabbalah is a system which allows our vessel, through many steps to achieve the fully created spiritual creature capable of God’s infinite bestowal and pleasure.

How can we develop our attribute of bestowal and with this our soul?  Remember that the Laws of the Universe are always in play.  So, if we are constantly bestowing love and goodness on others in an altruistic fashion, the laws of attraction and reciprocity (what goes around comes around) respond and we get acts of bestowal shined upon us giving us what we need - pleasure.   What we can do is practice bestowal on those we encounter in our daily lives whether this is manifested in our actions or simply conveying positive thoughts of love, goodness and joy.

In fact, our whole purpose in this lifetime and future lifetimes is to learn how to receive God’s love and joy in order to bestow, to become like that of God with the attribute of bestowal.  We already have the powers of God to create through our thoughts.  The world we as humans have created for good or bad is a manifestation of thoughts both individually and collectively.  Imagine what might happen if we individually and collectively increased our thoughts and manifestations of bestowal.

As we look upon our world of corporeal reality remember that each one of the billions of us as well as our collective societies are trying to solve the problem of how to transcend our attribute of reception (of pleasure for self-benefit) and develop our attribute of bestowal.  This problem sets up all kinds of conflicts within us individually and collectively which we see manifested in many ways in our world. 

This conflict in solving the Kabbalistic problem exists because there are parts of bestowal and reception in all of us.  As we travel down our paths towards the self-realization of bestowal in a world of seeming destruction and evil, take comfort in knowing that bestowal is always there for us to embrace if we truly have the intention and desire to bestow onto others without self-benefit – and by doing this bestow upon God.

Always remember that God loves us unconditionally, our true essence is immortal, we can choose to experience love and joy even in the most difficult times and we have the power to create through our thoughts.  The process of self-realization never ends, so we might as well enjoy it and spread joy and goodness to others along the way.

Know you are powerful, know you are Love