How Kabbalah Reveals Your Destiny

Kabbalah is a circular teaching. No sooner do you reach the end that you find yourself at a new beginning. As Bob Dylan put it, “You’ll find out when you reach the top that you’re on the bottom.” The more highly spiritually advanced you are the more deeply into your core of inner darkness you must descend. There is no getting around this.

The ten Spheres on Kabbalah Tree of Life describe for us the creative process, how the whole universe comes to be, from beginning to end.

Sphere 1 represents the ultimate Will or Intention behind creation, the ultimate cause behind whatever happens. Spheres 2 and 3, respectively, represent the Perfect Wisdom and Understanding demonstrated by that Causative Will. These first three Spheres, called The Three Supernals, teach us that there are no accidents, that everything that happens to you is Intended or Meant To Be, and that the Will behind each event is Perfectly Wise and Understanding. Nothing goes wrong. Nothing can go wrong.

Spheres 4 and 5, respectively, represent the Perfect Balance of Mercy and Justice that governs creation. If you are treated unfairly today it is a balancing out of the unfairness you demonstrated in the past, or a balancing of the great benevolence coming to you in the future. If someone treats you unfairly you need not concern yourself with hopes for revenge. The Court of Time brings justice to one and all.

Sphere 6 on the Tree, the center of the entire design, represents the Perfect Beauty that is always at work in the universe. Your life is essentially beautiful, no matter how it appears. You can experience that beauty by opening your heart to it. You can find the beauty in every smile, in every tear. There is no getting away from the absolute love ever present, expressed in the unbearable beauty at the core of each moment, unless you turn away from it by focusing on your ideas of ugliness and closing your heart to love’s pain.

Spheres 7 and 8, respectively, represent the Perfect Victory and Glory of each moment of your life. You are always progressing in line with the Purposeful Intention behind creation. Every event is essentially glorious, a display of the Perfection of the Power behind it. You cannot fail and you are never defeated at the level of life fulfilling its Perfect Purpose in you and through you. You can feel humiliated, disgraced, dishonored only through the hubris that you bring into any situation. You are a glorious being of infinite value and so is everyone else, and every moment of your experience.

Sphere 9 represents the eternally Perfect Foundation of creation. Beautiful Law and Order can always be relied upon. You can rely upon creation to set things right. The Foundation of creation equates with the ancient Chinese teaching of the Tao, the underlying current of truth that cannot be spoken of, but always followed through a state of attentive inner balance.

The 10th and final Sphere on the Tree represents the physical, manifest level of creation. This is the ultimate end result of the first Cause represented by Sphere 1. The physical world is an outer representation of that initial Intention. While it may seem imperfect, flawed, chaotic in reality it is Perfect. You receive by way of physical experience nothing but a reflection of the Perfect Wisdom and Understanding that knows just what you need in the now.

The Tree of Life operates in you and in me as the True Self in each one of us. To penetrate most deeply into the conscious realization of who and what we are is to realize the 10 Spheres that cause and govern creation as representative of our own essential Divine Nature. At the deepest level of our being, we cause what happens to us. We cause ourselves! We are the Power to Be, Eh-Heh-Yeh in Hebrew, “I Am That I Am”, the name God gave to Moses when Moses asked God to name Himself.

We begin ourselves and we end up discovering the beginning of ourselves through all of our life-experiences. Experiences in life are essentially a process of return, a process of being awakened to our original Divine Nature. This is no easy process.

We are born into the world to meet our chief challenge, which is to get through our chief weakness in the Divine Awakening process. In early childhood you went through experiences that prepared you for your ego-shattering. Your ego-shattering takes place when life confronts you with your deepest fears, the fears you have spent your life trying to run away from or wall off. Perhaps you were terrified of being unloved, unlovable, alone and unsupported. Perhaps you were terrified by the realization that you really have no idea about what to do, how to live, who you are.

You responded to this original terror by creating a false protector. That protector was the false self, the personality, your “psychic nature” as Vitvan labeled it. You began living artificially, trying to put on that you knew you were loved for who you truly are, that you were not in need of anyone’s support, that you knew what to do, how to live and who you really are. You lived a life of pretense and throughout your life worked desperately at making that work, doing everything in your power to prevent anyone from seeing through your mask, to prevent life from proving that you really have been just pretending.

But no matter how hard you work at maintaining control of your world, it repeatedly comes crashing down. Your life gives you evidence over and over that what you want to believe about yourself, and what you want everyone else to believe about you, is false. Again and again you find yourself back to where you started out, living in the terrors of early childhood, when your pure innocence was shocked by a world that seemed loveless, dangerous and cruel.

But wait a moment! Didn’t we just see that life is essentially beautiful? We did. But we also saw that we can turn away from that beauty by closing our hearts and focusing on ideas of ugliness. This is what happened to you in your early childhood. You learned to close your heart in a misguided effort to protect your heart. So now you have to go back to re-open your heart to return to your realization of Divine Perfection. There is no easy way to do this.

We achieve this return to our beginning by opening ourselves up to all the terror that we have been trying to conceal from ourselves and from others. We have to face that we really have no control over our lives, and that all we have can be lost in an instant. Beyond this, we have to discover that all of our thoughts about ourselves, others and life are essentially false-to-fact. They are all made up. And as long as we live in identification with our thoughts, treating our thoughts of reality as reality, we continue to suffer the blows of life upon our false self, blows that insist, ultimately, upon our ego-shattering.

When you are young and beautiful you imagine yourself as young and beautiful. When you age and show signs of physical decrepitude you feel as if that beautiful youthful self you has died. Now you are this old and wrinkled self no longer inciting physical desire in the strangers who pass you by as if you were invisible. You have lost not only your beautiful self, but your self-value. Why? Not because life has done anything to you. You are identifying with your imaginary thoughts of yourself. In your mind you see yourself as old and you say, “That’s me”. But it’s not you. YOU are the Kabbalah Tree of Life. Any ideas of your physical appearance are mere ideas, imaginary projections, mental movies and nothing more. Take your attention off them and they disappear.

As you cease your identification with the world of thought you leave the realm of illusion and delusion, the only dimension where suffering exists, where things go wrong, where hell happens. As you open up to your earliest childhood terrors by accepting reality as it truly is, completely out of your control, and gently lead yourself into finding true peace, faith and love within that, and stop counting on artifice, you get through that chief challenge that you came into this life to deal with.

Your life is actually under your Perfect control, but it is not under the control of the false self. As long as you insist on being false you must fail, over and over and over again, until you face the underlying weakness that you have been trying to hide. Facing that weakness ultimately reveals the real absolute strength lying beneath the masquerade of strength you have been trying to prove real.

This is the chief challenge to your realization of the Perfection of Life and the Perfection of your true self. Your terror of reality is all that stands between you and your realization of the true Love of Reality. You can run from this challenge for a long time, but you can no more run away from it than you can run away from yourself, because you are that reality. You are the Tree.