Reining in Your Reactivity with Kabbalah with David Ghiyam

In this Episode

• [01:34] – Let’s talk about Kabbalah! David explores what the light is before clarifying the difference between the light of wisdom and the light of mercy.
• [04:11] – David clarifies that the only way that someone can reveal the light of mercy is to overcome their nature, not just to do good deeds.
• [07:44] – The light of the creator has all of the types of pleasures and fulfillments that we’re looking for within it, David explains.
• [10:17] – Stephan takes a moment to give a specific example to clarify what it means to give proactively without expectations.
• [11:57] – David differentiates the kind of prayers that are typical (like praying for health and financial abundance) from praying for things like certainty and desire.
• [14:58] – What does it mean that certainty is not of this real or dimension?
• [17:34] – We should be excited about finding a negative attribute ourselves because we can now fix the problem and expand our vessel.
• [18:24] – David talks about the various aspects of ego. He then digs deeper into pride specifically.
• [21:28] – As long as we follow the steps that Kabbalah outlines for us, we’ll know how to handle any challenge that we face.
• [25:15] – David talks about the Ana b’Koach prayer and the role it plays as a tool.
• [27:58] – We hear about the concept that truth before mercy creates chaos, which led Stephan to make a lot of changes.
• [31:25] – Stephan gives an example from his own life that illustrates the importance of coming at something with mercy instead of just truth.
• [33:34] – If you eat meat with consciousness, prayer, and gratitude for the animal, then that elevates the animal’s soul. David points out that just about everything that you do needs to have this kind of consciousness.
• [36:31] – David talks more about the Bible, the Zohar, and how they relate to everything he and Stephan have been discussing.
• [38:01] – We learn about the tree of life and the tree of knowledge.
• [40:05] – David stumbled on financial success early, and talks about how this experience propelled him to learn the system and wisdom of the Kabbalah.
• [41:42] – What one thing would David recommend a listener do as the next step? One option is to text “Kabbalah” to 797979.

Transcript

‏‏We are on a role here with spirituality-focused episodes, this is episode number 140. We’re gonna dive into clairvoyance, connectivity, desire, certainty, mercy, wisdom–it’s just an incredible episode. Our guest today is David Ghiyam, he’s a senior lecturer at the Kabbalah Centre and the founder of MaryRuth Organics. David, it’s great to have you on the show.

‏‏Thank you so much, Stephan. It’s great to be here.

‏‏Let’s talk about Kabbalah. One of the concepts I learned recently from you that was just so powerful is the difference between the Light of Wisdom and the Light of Mercy. Maybe we just start by explaining what the Light is and why our listeners should care about the light and then we can go into the distinguishing of the Light of Mercy and the Light of Wisdom.

‏‏Okay. Obviously, you bring up an advance topic that requires a lot of background in Kabbalah but we can start with the simple concept that the Kabbalist believe. There’s a force that we call the Light of the Creator which is an all-encompassing powerful energy that consumes our entire world and is the energy behind all of life, all of everything. When that lights is revealed, there are blessings, there is fulfillment, and there is order. When that light is concealed, we experience darkness, pain, and suffering. When a person is experiencing pain and suffering in their lives, they are basically disconnected from that light. That light which is everywhere all the time is concealed from them. Our purpose in this world is to do our spiritual work which is to transform ourselves, transform all of our negativity, our negative selfish attributes to those of the Light of the Creator and Kabbalah explains, what are all the positive attributes of the Creator that we need to become like. Once we do that we earn our connection to the light and we experience blessings and miracles and fulfillment in our lives.

By the way, call me up at any moment if you have question or need a clarification. Then we can divide it up into the Light of Wisdom and the Light of Mercy. It’s an advance Kabbalah concept but it pretty much means that the Light of Wisdom represents that raw, naked energy of the Light of the Creator, the Light of Fulfillment that we all experience, that we all want, and then there is the Light of Mercy, which is our own personal efforts or energy we put out to transform ourselves, if that makes sense. Every time I transform my nature I’m revealing an energy from me which we call the Light of Mercy and that Light of Mercy then becomes the vessel that encapsulates to receive the Light of Wisdom, which is the Light of the Creator and the Light of Fulfillment that we’re all looking for. I hope that makes sense. It’s definitely an advance concept.

‏‏Yes. Essentially, we want to plug into the Light of the Creator and that’s where we get fulfillment, that’s where we get so much of our joy and life purpose and all of that. If we do good things and we do them with positive intent and so forth then we can reveal light from within ourselves and that’s the Light of Mercy.

‏‏Right. The Light of Mercy then encapsulates in and becomes the vessel like the container to hold the Light of the Creator also what is known as the Light of Wisdom. But to be clear, the only way a person can reveal the Light of Mercy—the light from themselves—is if they overcome their nature. Simply by doing positive actions actually, doesn’t reveal the Light of Mercy which in turn reveals the Light of Wisdom and has miracles. A person actually needs to overcome something, go against their nature, against their comfort zone, against their reactive tendencies, their selfish tendencies, their anger, their neediness, and their fears. Every time the person breaks a fear, they reveal the Light of Mercy from them which then holds the Light of Wisdom from the creator and then there are miracles.

‏‏When we overcome our nature, that means our kind of our robotic consciousness is to just go after our own selfish desires just for ourselves alone and when we go against our nature, when we restrict that automatic behavior being on autopilot and we’re more conscious, more aware, more kind, more like the Creator then we reveal light ourselves and that is the vessel that you described is our vessel captures that Light of the Creator and the smaller—this is another probably pretty advance concept—our vessel the less of the light of the Creator that we can take in. Right?

‏‏Right. There are a lot of concepts there and usually, for beginners, we just say, “Once
you act like the Creator then you can connect to the Creator.” Later on, probably even a year later, after people learn those basic concepts then we explain how does that happen exactly, how is it that by the transformation of my nature, my passing my test of overcoming my nature, let’s say, your wife upsets you with something, or your kids are getting on your nerves, or let’s say you just lost a major business deal, or you found out your friend or somebody’s talking bad about you, all of these things trigger need to be reactive, need to do something that is ungodly, unlike the Creator. To be selfish, to be upset, to be hurt, to laugh out, to get some kind of instant gratification.

‏‏To be reactive.

‏‏To be reactive. That is the definition of reactive behavior. It’s really any thought or action that comes from lack or fear. Every time I’m inclined to be reactive and I go against that nature, I connect with the light or what we know is the Light of Wisdom. That’s just a more detailed explanation of the light we call it the Light of Wisdom. When I go against my nature I’m revealing the Light of Mercy because its light that comes from me. Sometimes it can be confusing because we’re saying Light of Mercy is sometimes people can take its old. Is that the light itself? No. That’s just an energy that comes from me that then opens myself up to the miracles.

‏‏I remember vividly you presenting this concept of a prism and how people chase after this different colors that are on the other side of the prism that are coming out of the prism-like relationships and finance, business, career, health, all of these things that when you chase after one, it’s like the other one slip through your fingers. You can’t be focused on all of them at the same time but the mistake that the people make is focusing on or chasing after the colors instead of the white light that those into the prism on the other end which is the Light of the Creator and I felt that was a very powerful concept.

‏‏Right. That is the concept we learn in Kabbalah that the Light of the Creator has all the types of pleasures and fulfillments we’re looking for within it. Instead of chasing each pleasure and each fulfillment by itself, the Kabbalist learn how to live their lives to plug into the Light of the Creator then that light brings all the other pleasures that are included within it to us. If a person’s looking for a soul mate, or a person’s looking for financial security, or person’s looking for health those are technically three different colors that exist all within the color of the light. We say that the color of the light is like a white color and if you refract that color to a prism, you have all the colors of the rainbow which are included in the white color. Everything we’re looking for is included in the Light of the Creator. It behooves us actually when we wake up in the morning, not to chase after our soul mate or chase after our financial success even though we can make the effort and work hard in those areas and to realize if I do my spiritual work of transformation, I connect myself to the totality of the light and then the light guides me and shows me where my soulmate is or where my fulfillment is in my career or what doctor I
need to find to be healthy, so on and so forth.

‏‏When we desire things it’s not a bad thing to desire things to go after pleasures but if the desire is for oneself alone, that’s where things breakdown and they don’t become blessings for us. We are just trying to grab what we can for ourselves and that’s not godlike, that’s not showing the Light of Mercy. If we desire something that’s going to help feed a lot of people for example, then that’s a desire for others, that’s more proactive.

‏‏That’s one way of looking at it. Again, that’s another advance concept. I would never even teach these concepts to beginners. I’m sure you have a huge array of people who are going to listen to our podcast. In the beginning, though the main thing that a person must do is transform their reactive desires, those are the desires for the self alone. Even sharing can have a for-self-alone component. For example, I could share something with you because I’m trying to manipulate you or if you share something with you because I want you to like me, that would still be receiving for the self alone even though it looks like I’m sharing it’s still an action of selfishness because the intention behind it is what determines what the action is. If I’m doing something for myself then that’s a problem. That becomes the desire to receive for the self alone even though it looks like I’m giving.

‏‏If I am giving money to a homeless person on the street and my expectation is that person is going to thank me, that’s not something that is proactive and as giving as if I were to be okay with whatever the person’s reaction.

‏‏Exactly and there are degrees. It’s obviously better than not giving the homeless person anything or let’s say punching the homeless person in the face. All of these are degrees. Giving him something because I want him to say thank you, it’s still good but the fact that I want a thank you diminish the power of my giving. It takes the sharing away and it adds the component of myself, I need something back in return.

‏‏If you were to differentiate for our listeners the kind of prayers that are typical, like I pray for good health, I pray for financial abundance and all of that, almost like you’re putting out wishes and you want the Creator to be a genie to fulfill your wishes versus praying for things like certainty and desire. Maybe you could go into that concept because that was so profound for me. I was wishing for the things to come like the outcomes I was after, the financial abundance, all that sort of stuff. Once I realized I should be praying or I could be praying for the desire inside of myself to create that and to earn that and to pray for more certainty which you described as not being part of this universe or this dimension. I just thought wow, that’s a game-changer.

‏‏It’s a great point. It’s a great point and let’s put it this way, if I don’t have something it’s because from the universe’s point of view, my vessel, my soul, me, I haven’t earned it yet. If I’m not married and I want to found a true partner, or financial security, or happiness in any way, it’s not because somebody is doing something to me or life’s unfair, or I got myself in a certain predicament and I can’t have that, the only reason I don’t have of certain blessing is because I personally have not earned it. Meaning my vessel can’t hold that energy yet. It’s like saying I’m a 60 watts bulb but I crave 1000 watts of energy. We know 1000 watts cannot enter a 60 watts bulb because 60 watts bulb can’t handle it. All a 60 watts bulb can handle is 60 watts so the life you have is the only life the universe believes you can handle. Now, we say we want 1000 watts but the Creator already knows that if I got those 1000 watts it would actually hurt me even though I think it would help me.

What is prayer to most people? Prayer to most people is praying to God, thinking that God is some kind of force that changes or has altered, or has moods or can be swayed and I pray to God, “God, you should change your way of giving energy to me.” It’s like praying to the 1000 watts of energy and saying, “Hey, 1000 watts. You should come into my dinky, little 60 watts vessel.” And we pray so hard for that 1000 watts to come in when we don’t realize that there’s no point in praying for that energy to come. There’s no point in praying to God for him to change. God is an energy, intelligence that is infinite, and is always giving. It’s like the sun that always shines. If the sun is shining but I’m in a dark room because the curtains are down, it makes no sense to pray to the sun and say, “Hey, come on in.” You have to remove the curtain. In that analogy with us, the curtain is our negativity and our selfishness.

In Kabbalah, we learn we should pray for, what we should ask for is the strength to transform ourselves, the strength to have more certainty, the strength to be more sharing, the strength to break my fears because that’s ultimately what’s blocking us from receiving the blessings we want. Instead of saying, “I pray that those problems goes away.” Don’t pray for the problem to go away. That’s pointless and it won’t work. You should pray to first know what is it about you that causing the problem, first pray for that, and then when you have inkling of what it is about you that’s causing these problems then you should pray for the strengths to transform it and if you can do those things then the universe will help you and then you go for a 60-watt bulb to 1000 watt bulb and you’ll be able to hold 1000 watts of energy.

‏‏Yeah, that’s so profound. Another concept that I want to close the loop on is that certainty is not of this realm or this dimension. What does that mean?

‏‏A lot of time, we have certainty also about the wrong thing, we say, “I’m certain that this deal would go through.” “I’m certain that I’m bidding on a house and there are 10 other people bidding on buying this house. I hope my bid goes through, I have certainty.” “I have certainty this person is my soulmate, I’m dating them, they are not so into me but I have so much certainty. I’m going to use my mind and do Jedi tricks to mind over matter this woman or this guy to fall in love with me.” That’s manipulation and that’s manipulating the universe. What if this person is not good for you? What if this house isn’t good for you? What if this career isn’t good for you? Certainty isn’t about things or manipulating life, certainty in Kabbalah is about something much more powerful, something out of this world. Certainty is I have certainty that everything comes from the creator, I have certainty that everything comes from the creator and is good—because we know, we experience challenges and we think this is bad. You always have to know that it’s for the good.

The third level of certainty is I have certainty it’s from the creator that it’s good for my ultimate good, and number three I have certainty that it’s there to help me change. Every time I experience a challenge in my life, I have to have those three levels of certainty. If something is not going my way, first, this is from the creator, it’s for my ultimate good even though I don’t see it now, and finally, I have certainty that it’s there to show me something I need to change. “Okay, let me look inside myself and see what I need to change. That’s why I’m having this problem to begin with.” Certainty is always just about pushing away the doubts and the fears that cause us to fall, that cause us to do something reactive, that cause us to be negative, and to keep restoring the doubts and the fears with, “I have certainty but everything will be for the good.” You also have to work. You have to work hard and you have to put effort and energy but you need to do so with certainty, not to do so with fears and doubt in the back of your mind.

‏‏Fears, doubts, having regrets, and feeling shame and anger, and there’s a lot of negative emotion, some of them can be useful to us to reveal the lesson that we need to learn from that negative event or what we see to be a negative event but ultimately, we need to distinguish out from the stuff the things that are more ego like pride, lust, and things that are not of the Creator or not godlike and see those as opportunities to grow beyond and expand their vessel.

‏‏Any negative attribute that we find about ourselves, we should actually be excited about. A lot of people sometimes get sad or depressed when they find out that they are jealous or they have a lot of guilt, or fear, or shame. Kabbalists say when you recognize something about yourself, this is the most exciting moment of your life actually because you can now uproot the problem. The universe is showing you that you’re insecure, “Wow, it’s amazing that I get to see that I’m insecure. I now want to change that. I want to work on that. I want to go against that and by cleansing that out of my system, I expand my vessel and the light comes in.” It’s actually very exciting to see what’s wrong with us or to see things that we’re ashamed of and we shouldn’t run away from it. We should not be ashamed of it.

‏‏What are the five aspects of the ego that Kabbalah teaches?

‏‏There are many aspects, I would say there are four different levels of ego and the first level has five aspects. What we teach in our classes, the first level of ego is branched out into five which are hatred, pride, anger, control, and judgment. Each one of these we have hundreds of hours of content just dissecting what does it mean to have hatred? What does it mean to have control as a type of ego? And we get into it deeper but they’re all very profound concepts beyond just the surface of what the words sound like.

‏‏Let’s take one of them and I know there’s one that is the root. That’s the one that we need to really focus on and do you want to share what that one is and give some insight into why that’s the root?

‏‏Which one have you heard to be the root? Do you have something in your mind that you would want me to speak about?

‏‏From my recollections from a Kabbalah 1, 2, and 3—I don’t remember which of the series this came from but I believe it was pride.

‏‏You could say that it’s the root. It’s definitely the one that encompasses all of them. Pride is giving my power over to something in the external that defines me. It’s basically every time I need something to feel good, I need something to be happy. Any type of addiction. For example, Pride is I need a certain status, a certain object, a certain relationship to feel whole about myself. This is the thing that determines my happiness. You would look at everything in your life and you would ask yourself, “If I didn’t have this or I didn’t have that would I still be happy, would I still be confident or is my happiness and my confidence based on the fact that I have those things?” To that degree, that’s what pride is and that’s not easy. We realize that actually our happiness is based on a lot of stuff that we have or a title that we’ve been given, or a level of status, or a social media status, or whatever it is.

Ultimately, we need to go through the mental exercise of saying, “If I didn’t have this, could I still be happy? Do I still believe in myself?” And we see that mentally to visualize not having it. Everyone in this world visualizes having things. In Kabbalah, we actually visualize losing things in order to strengthen who we are in the inside. There’s nothing wrong with receiving and having everything. The great Kabbalists, they had everything. They had wealth, they had power, they had success, they had fame but the idea is do you need that to be happy? And that’s always something we need to check in with ourselves every time we receive new levels of fulfillment and success.

‏‏Right, because it’s ultimately something that we see as success or fulfillment may actually be to our detriment and something that we see as a failure or as trauma has wonderful side benefits or future benefits we don’t see yet. The concept of clairvoyance comes in here in seeing a bigger picture.

‏‏Right. As long as we follow the steps that Kabbalah outlines for us, we’ll know how to handle every challenge that literally comes. Every challenge that comes, we’ll know at least to some degree why it’s coming, how do we handle it, and how do we get to its fruit, its optimal outcome in the fastest way. Kabbalah doesn’t prevent us from having challenges. All of us according to our past lives and mistakes we have made, we need to go through certain tests in this life. The free will however is how we react to those tests and how long it takes us to pass those tests. Does it takes me a year to get out of my chaos? Does it take me a month, a day, an hour? We can speed up the process with Kabbalah.

‏‏Great. Could you give a specific example, if you’d like, from your own life of a challenge and how to handle it in a proactive manner in a way that is revealing of light versus the autopilot way?

‏‏It’s a good question. If I have to say from my own personal life, I think it was in my early years of teaching and feeling incredibly insecure. I started teaching when I was only 17 years old and I’m sitting in audiences sometimes of 500 plus people who are twice, three times, four times my age and I’m thinking to myself, what are they thinking of me? What do I know? What experience do I have? I had some Kabbalah knowledge and my teachers felt that I was in a good position to share that wisdom. My initial reaction is to look for their approval, to look for the audience’s approval and number rule of public speaking I’ve learned that my teacher taught me, the fear of public speaking comes from the desire to receive something from the crowd. When you’re there to take from the crowd you’re going to be afraid. When you’re there to give to the crowd, you’re going to feel the energy, you’re going to feel the light, and in fact, when you act like the light, it doesn’t matter if you’re 17, if you’re 7 years old, or you’re 70 years old. You plug into the light, the light speaks through you.

What would happen is by me going against my nature to be afraid and my nature to want to receive approval from the crowd and I would meditate on it with focus to transform that need for approval. I saw that wisdom was coming through me, ideas were coming through me, thought was coming through me, and actually what was coming through me that the Creator was giving was everything the audience needed to hear. This 60-year-old guy who’s going through a tough time with his family or this 40-year-old woman who was afraid of never getting married, stuff would come to me that they needed to hear so they forgot about my age, they forgot about my experience, they forgot about everything because they felt the energy. But if I was into myself afraid, insecure, and worry about what they would think I’m technically disconnecting from the light and as a result, the flow stops.

The flow of energy which we call clairvoyance is really just a plug to that endless light. Some people have that gateway open. We’re talking about sidekicks and mediums, some people have a gateway of clairvoyance open however, that’s a very different than the person who does spiritual work to receive divine messages. Even sidekicks can do spiritual work. I know sidekicks who have chaos in their life even though they see things and they feel things because everything they receive is going to have some negativity attached to it unless they are also are doing their own spiritual work by overcoming their reactive nature.

‏‏Each line of the Ana B’Koach prayer which is in my understanding the most powerful prayer in Kabbalah and a way that connects every morning and every evening, has a line dedicated to it that is about clairvoyance. Do you want to say anything about the Ana B’Ko’ach prayer and how does it help you to tap into clairvoyance and into other aspects?

‏‏All the prayers in Kabbalah that utilize the ancient sacred language of Hebrew, which is not really a language, it’s more of a vibration of the energy. It’s there not to do the work for us. For example, just by me doing the Ana B’Ko’ach which is the prayer as you mention, it doesn’t mean that now I bypass my spiritual work and boom! I have clairvoyance, I have sustenance, and I have whatever. It’s more the tools of the prayers of Kabbalists are there to help my consciousness have more strength so that I have the wisdom, the energy that I need to do what the work I need to do to be clairvoyant. For example, the fifth line in the Ana B’Ko’ach is about clairvoyance, yes, but that doesn’t mean that by saying the fifth line, I have clairvoyance. By saying the fifth line I’m gaining whatever wisdom I need or what I need to transform to receive clairvoyance. Every tool is exactly that—a tool. A tool to transform myself. There’s no tool that bypasses my spiritual work and accesses the light directly without my transformation. Everything needs to involve something about me making that positive shift.

‏‏Yeah. You need to earn it.

‏‏Absolutely. Everything in Kabbalah we learned has to be earned, otherwise, you won’t enjoy it, you won’t be able to hold it, and you won’t have the capacity to receive it.

‏‏Yeah. Or they come with side effects like when you win the lottery, you didn’t earn that and the people who win the lottery tend to be worse off years later than if they had not even received that money.

‏‏Right. There are stories and there are cases that share that and it’s important to know it’s not about the punishment of course. It’s about if I pour a gallon of water in an eight-ounce glass, and then have overflow, it’s not going to be fine or pretty but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the water and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with the glass. If the glass can’t hold all of the water, you have chaos. When we’re reactive or when we’re receiving something we haven’t earned, we’re just pouring a gallon of water in an eight-ounce glass that’s the danger of it. It’s not that you don’t deserve it or you shouldn’t have it, you should have it, it’s just you need to know what to do to be able to receive all of it.

‏‏Yes. You need to increase the size of your vessel or increase the wattage of your light bulb so that you can plug into that high wattage energy source.

‏‏You got it.

‏‏Speaking of chaos, that reminds me of another concept that I learned from you, which is about truth without mercy or truth before mercy creates chaos. I made some pretty significant shifts in my behavior after learning that concept from you. Could you share with our listeners a bit about that?

‏‏Yeah, we can share a little bit. Again, another advance concept that requires a lot of study but I remember the class that we had about it was the idea that so many people are focused on truth. They want the truth. I want to know the truth. I stand up for the truth. So what is truth? For example, if somebody does something wrong the truth is they should be punished, right? Cause and effect, you plant a negative seed you get a negative outcome and the problem with truth is, if we actually lived by truth, that means that everyone needs to pay for what they did. What happened is that the entire world would be destroyed. What actually sustains the world is mercy. How do we know that? Think of ourselves. We’re not perfect. We make so many more mistakes than probably even positive things we do. Technically, we should not even be alive with all the mistakes we make but the reason why we are alive and we are given continued opportunities to transform our nature is because of mercy.

The Creator actually injected mercy into this world to give us time, time to change. I make 10 mistakes, the Creator says no, there’s mercy, some of the 10 negative seed you planted you still will have to experience chaos from those 10 seeds but before the chaos comes, we’re going to give you time to fix it, to uproot it, to change it so you can remove the boomerang effect of those 10 negative actions. Mercy is very powerful. In our lives, we need to think more from mercy and not from truth. We live in a time where we’re expecting everybody to be perfect and we have no tolerance for people’s mistake then that’s a huge problem. People who live by the need for truth which is strict judgment, they actually are going to have that energy come back to them and the Creator will start to treat them with judgment. You make a mistake, you’re going to have to pay for it. You say something negative about somebody, boom! Immediately you get a parking ticket or you get into a car accident. Who wants that? If you want mercy from the universe, you have to treat other people with mercy. Give them the benefit of the doubt, see the good in them, all of the above count.

‏‏Do you have an example from, again, maybe personal experience where you came with the truth without mercy and that created chaos?

‏‏All the time, all the time. Even I’m thinking about someone else who runs a big company and they’re very hard on their employees. They expect and demand perfection which isn’t a problem. We need to train our employees and guide them and coach them but however, you treat them is how the universe will treat you. This person ends up having chaos in other areas of his life because he’s not perfect in, let’s say, his relationships. He’s not perfect in his relationships with his kids. What happens is his getting a lot of chaos with his kids, chaos with his wife because the way he treats his employees, it’s very strict, it’s got to be this way. If it’s wrong, it’s wrong and you need to fix it right away and he’s not giving them mercy, he’s not giving them love, and he says, “That’s how you run a successful business.” Well, that’s fine. Even though you can still even run an even more successful business in a more successful way by implementing mercy as well but the truth is he gets what he gives. That’s the bottom line. Look at your life today, whatever you’re experiencing that’s exactly what you’re giving out, that’s the bottom line. If that’s a nice hallmark idea, that is the universal law of cause and effect.

‏‏Yeah, so true. An example from my life where I was so vehemently vegetarian and sharing with people how bad it was for the environment to eat meat and what kind of cruelty was happening in the meat processing facilities, on the feedlots and everything, and I was coming with the truth but there is no mercy there because I wasn’t thinking about whether they are trying to enjoy their meal or get nutrition out of what they were eating. It’s just I had my own mission to change these people’s minds and I think this happens a lot on Facebook too that people just get so vehemently pro or against a particular topic and they lose sight of the fact that there needs to be mercy injected into their message.

‏‏Exactly. That’s a beautiful example because what if this person needs to eat meat for their soul. What if they’re anemic? What if by not eating meat they’re going to die? What if? And we go even deeper. Animals have souls and it says that for the soul to elevate and go on with its process, it needs to benefit mankind in some way. If this animal needs to benefit mankind, how is he going to do so? Sometimes the animal desire to be eaten in a way that someone has consciousness. They’re not just eating like a glutton but they’re eating with a meditation of I want to help the animal and what that does is it elevates the soul of the animal. How do I know what’s right or wrong? In fact, this person eating meat is helping the animal in some way. We don’t see the big picture. We always get a small picture and then we think, “Well that’s it and now, I’m going to enforce that in the world.” We never see the big picture. That’s a practical thing we need to always remember. We do not see the whole thing and as a result, we have no right to enforce our truth on other people. We have to live our truth and we have to keep refining and learning about what is more truth and always injecting mercy because that’s the quality of the Creator and my job is to act like the Creator, I need to find more ways to inject mercy in my life.

‏‏If you are eating meat and you eat it with consciousness, with prayer, and with gratitude for the animal, then that elevates the animal’s soul, as you’re saying. I would think as a logical next step that you would want to have that consciousness when you are trying to conceive with your partner.

‏‏Absolutely. Pretty much everything that you start to do needs to have consciousness. Conception for sure, you’re bringing a soul down to the world, whatever the thoughts of the two people are during conception is going to determine what kind of soul you bring to the world and what kind of consciousness that soul will have. A lot of mental issues or health issues can stem from poor consciousness of the parents during intercourse. Let’s say the parents were angry or sometimes you hear the people are thinking about somebody else during intercourse. All that affects the child that brings confusion to the soul of the child. Absolutely.

‏‏Cheating in effect isn’t just the act of cheating on your spouse with another person but even just thinking about desiring and lusting after somebody that you saw earlier that day—you guys went to the beach or whatever—and you’re thinking about that person while you’re making love to your partner, that plants a negative seed.

‏‏Absolutely, because you’re not sharing. Think about it, if God is a sharing force and I’m in the act of intercourse, am I sharing when I’m thinking about somebody else? To that extent, I’m not sharing, I’m actually taking and sex is such a powerful energy that it’s a high level of taking as a result. Everything comes back to cause and effect. It’s not about the Bible or morals and people say adultery is immoral. In Kabbalah, we don’t really go by morals because morals is relative. We go by cause and effect and energy. This is something you’re doing, is this sharing or is this taking? If it’s sharing, you’re mimicking the Light of the Creator and you’ll receive the light. If it’s taking, you’re disconnecting from the light and it’s that simple. There’s no gray area when you’re considering are you a giver, are you taker.

‏‏Kabbalah to me, it feels like an ancient self-help discipline and not just like Bible study but yet the Zohar is like decoding of the Bible and reveals so many different layers to the Bible and to the stories, to the parables and everything that really unlocks something that’s been secret and kept away from the more lower-level consciousness. Do you want to say something about the Bible and the Zohar and how all this relates to what we’ve been discussing so far in relation to these kinds of lessons and the frameworks that we’ve been discussing?

‏‏That’s a great point. Kabbalah is based on the Bible, however, the Kabbalists share that if you try to study the Bible literally, you can’t understand the secrets of life. It’s very coded. The great Sages wrote this encyclopedic set of books so to speak, called the Zohar, which takes literally, every section of the Bible and decodifies its inner secretive meanings of life and you start to learn the nuts and bolts of life—of the why we’re here and what we need to do. Something that you cannot just take at face value when you read the Bible. The Bible is the manual but it does need to be decoded and the Zohar is the force that decodes it. It’s the knowledge and wisdom that dissects the Bible and reveals its energy to us.

‏‏And that was written how many years ago?

‏‏The Bible was 3400 years ago given to mankind via Moises and the Zohar was given in its written form 2000 years ago by Rav Shimon bar Yochai. However, the knowledge of the Zohar which is the Knowledge of Kabbalah existed before that so that the knowledge of the Bible. We’re just talking about those benchmarks of when they were written down physically but the wisdom of the Zohar and Kabbalah existed since the beginning of time and so that the Bible.

‏‏Yeah, awesome. One of the concepts from Kabbalah is the Tree of Life versus the Tree of  Knowledge and can you say a little bit about that?

‏‏Again, another advance concept but the Tree of Life represents the reality where we’re connected to the light. Tree of Knowledge represents the reality when we’re disconnected. We all have a choice at any moment to be either connected or disconnected, we’re either in light or in darkness. Tree of Life is code name for when we’re connected to the light, things are flowing. The light’s speaking to me. I’m acting like the light and the light is acting with me. Tree of Knowledge represent when we’re disconnected, when we’re selfish, we’re reactive, and we’re into ourselves. It may seem like things are okay, but in reality, I’m in darkness and then that darkness will also manifest physically.

‏‏One way that I looked at this when I understood the Tree of Knowledge and Tree of Life is that The Tree of Knowledge is about what’s good, what’s evil, and I was so focused on what’s right and I was losing sight of the mercy or I didn’t even think through about truth with mercy and versus without it and I have this thirst for more, and more, and more knowledge, like I felt so much lack. There are so many secrets I don’t understand about the universe yet and I was able to let that go and focus on just being in the vortex, being in the light of the Creator and getting the fulfillment and being a light for others and not trying to understand everything. Just be connected as you said—plugged in. That was very powerful for me.

‏‏Yeah. Absolutely. It gives you a new purpose, a new mission, and it’s not just like high in the sky. We’re talking practical miracles in this world. We’re not here to just be one with god but have a horrible life. We want to have a good life. The Creator wants us to have a good life in this world.

‏‏Yeah. Including the financial abundance and everything. Do you want to say anything about your past and how you had a lot of abundance and early financial success?

‏‏That’s how I came to Kabbalah in my teenage years, stumbling upon success. Making money in various ways, almost too much money for a person my age and somebody introduced me to Kabbalah. My uncle said, “You need some wisdom to be able to handle the new responsibilities in your life.” As I started to study also, I started to have a lot of chaos with money—made it, lost it, made it, lost it. But what it did is it propelled me to see the power of this wisdom. I started to see that all this good fortune and the chaos was all part of a system and I was not following the system but I saw what the system was finally. Kabbalah gave me the system of how to live life. After that, I was all in. I was learning the wisdom, applying it, seeing miracles and blessings and then good fortune came in many other ways gradually, overtime at the right time.

‏‏And you’ve been teaching for how long?

‏‏I have been teaching now for about 17 years.

‏‏And you look so young. Well, you are young.

‏‏Because I am young and I hope I look young.

‏‏But you look like you’re in your 20s. That’s pretty cool.

‏‏Kabbalah is anti-aging also, it’s what I tell people.

‏‏I believe that. People though, they don’t believe me when I tell them I’m 47. It’s pretty cool.

‏‏Oh, no. You don’t look 47, that’s for sure.

‏‏It’s the secret to the Fountain of Youth is the Tree of Life.

‏‏Exactly.

‏‏Thank you so much, David, for sharing the wisdom of Kabbalah with our listeners, and if there’s one thing that you could recommend for our listener to do it, to take the next step if this appeals to them, if they feel a calling. What would be that next step?

‏‏If you want to learn more about Kabbalah, you can always go to kabbalah.com. Tons of free resources there. Check it out. Sometimes when you’re learning Kabbalah in different modality it can be confusing. The Kabbalah Center really just gives you a step by step approach of how to learn it in a practical way, kabbalah.com is great. The Power Of Kabbalah book is an amazing resource. If you live in Los Angeles and you can come to a live class, that is the greatest experience, as you know, life-changing. I tell people within two or three weeks of a course, your life is changing. Even if you can’t come live you can register and get recordings. But another way people can listen is every week I send out a three minute bit of consciousness, a bit of wisdom about Kabbalah and life via a text message service. Anybody who wants to join they just have to text the word Kabbalah to the number 797979, just send that text and you’ll be added to my list automatically and you’ll get that resource once a week.

‏‏Awesome and if somebody is not living in Los Angeles area but there are other cities that have Kabbalah classes, they can go to kabbalah.com and find if there are classes like in New York City, or in Miami, or wherever their nearest city is.

‏‏Absolutely. That is correct. We have Kabbalah Centers all around the world and classes happening all the time.

‏‏Wonderful. Thank you so much, David, and thank you, listeners. I hope you take a positive proactive action from this and plug into the light. We’ll catch you on the next episode of The Optimized Geek. This is your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

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