The door of perception into deeper layers of reality is found in Kabbalah. Using Kabbalah, we can open this door of perception and start exploring the complete reality.
Where is the door of perception and how do we open the door of perception?
The reality we currently perceive is only a tiny portion of the entire reality that surrounds us. Our current level of perception—“this world”—is surrounded and created by five higher levels of perception— the five upper worlds Adam Kadmon, Atzilut, Beria, Yetzira, and Assiya. These upper worlds are separated from our world by a barrier. The methodology passed down by Kabbalists, if studied correctly, allows a person to cross the barrier, opening the door of perception separating our world from the upper worlds. We can then attain these higher, more complete levels of perception of reality.
What are the upper worlds?
The word “world” in Hebrew, Olam, derives from the word He’elem, which means concealment. “Living in this world” means “living in this concealment of reality” and there are a sequence of these concealments of reality that branch into this one that we perceive.
Revealed and concealed
Kabbalah speaks about what is revealed and what is concealed. What is revealed is what we currently absorb and perceive, and what is concealed is what is hidden from our perception. Kabbalah is a methodology that opens this door of perception, allowing us to progressively reveal states of perception that are concealed from us until we attain everything there is to attain in the universe. Kabbalah allows us to open the door of perception to a comprehensive picture of reality.
However, if we speak about now, what is revealed to us? What characterizes what we can perceive at the level of “this world”?
What is “this world”?
This world, in Kabbalah, refers to the perception of the world that we have according to the way we receive information through our five senses—sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch—and the way our mind processes this information. This defines our current level of perception of reality, and what Kabbalists call the “lowest point of consciousness of reality.”
What this says is that there is all this information surrounding us, outside us, but all that we know of this information is:
- what we can absorb through our senses, and
- how our mind can process this information.
What we learn from this picture is how limited we are in our perception of the surrounding reality.
Firstly, there’s a limitation to what our senses absorb and allow into us. For instance, we know about a vast array of electromagnetic radiation surrounding us, but we can only hear and see tiny portions of it. For example, the spectrum ranges into megahertz and tetrahertz, however we can only hear between, say 15Hz and 20kHz.
And the limitations don’t stop there. Out of all the information that can make it through the senses we have, how much of that does our mind process? And how does the mind process this information? What is the basis of this processing? Scientists tell us that the average brain processes four-hundred billion bits of information at any given moment, yet we only have awareness of two thousand of those. Not only that, but the way in which our mind processes this information is that it is designed to eliminate all this information and select what is the most self-serving, the most desirable information.
So we can see how at the level of perception called “this world” there are limitations to the information we receive outside us; that we can only ever picture our own reaction to some outside influence and never the outside influence itself. That’s the limitation that is in the design of our senses.
The other limitation is that the image in the mind is based solely on what our desires are, that our desires determine the image our mind creates and our desires impose a further limitation to the information we receive.
So this is how we perceive reality. Why would we ever want to get beyond this? Why would we ever want to aim ourselves at some “upper reality” that we’ve never seen before, and that only a few Kabbalists tell us that it exists?
The question is really this: we have desires and we act upon them. So why would we have a desire for getting beyond our current level of perception if we’ve never seen it before?
Further study:
- What is Kabbalah? - video and article presentation with resources for further study.
- Evolution of Desires (05:44) – video outlining our desires’ evolution in this world, and the development of the desire for the spiritual world.
- Perception of Reality - 25 min Kabbalah lesson given by Anthony Kosinec explaining how our five senses block us from perceiving the true, eternal reality, and how we can use what Kabbalists have discovered, to break through our limitations, and achieve the complete, eternal perception of reality.
Related Material:
- Kabbalah.info - concepts discussed in this article are based on the fundamental principles of Kabbalah as taught at the Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education and Research Institute: www.kabbalah.info
