Many people think about Kabbalah as a very difficult, complicated wisdom whose subject matter is mysterious and indefinable. Open up the main Kabbalist textbook, the Talmud Eser HaSefirot, and you will be confronted with lengthy descriptions of mysterious spiritual essences such as Sefirot, Partzufim, and worlds. Or take a look at Kabbalah's fundamental text—The Book of Zohar, and you will find beautiful, albeit incomprehensible verses, such as "The rose among the thorns," or "That hall has many hidden treasures one upon the other. In that hall there are 50 closed gates that are meant to block access to the Light."
But what is the meaning of all this? If Kabbalah is a wisdom that has been scrutinized for millennia, then there must be a simple, sensible explanation to its content. And in fact—there is.
Until recently, Kabbalists were not eager to give this explanation to just anyone, and had carefully guarded the essence of Kabbalah. Today, however, a new era in Kabbalah has arrived and Kabbalists are openly offering us the simple, straightforward explanation of what Kabbalah is about: learning to implement the spiritual principle of "loving others as you love yourself."
The more one studies the works of Kabbalists, the more one realizes that they only speak about this one thing: how to attain true love for one's neighbor. This thought of "loving thy neighbor" is interwoven throughout every Kabbalistic composition ever written. All the complex terminology, all the diagrams and formulas that fill the books, are explanations of this one principle. The terms and diagrams represent vectors and forces, which in turn express feelings, sensations, desires, and the relationships between all of us.
But in Kabbalah, one does not seek to realize the principle of "love thy neighbor" for its own sake. Rather, this is done for a higher purpose—to feel the Creator, who is defined as Nature’s all-inclusive force of unconditional love. Hence, other people and the love you develop for them are all but a means to attain unity with the Creator—the quality of love.
This is also the reason that in Kabbalah, "loving others" is not just empty words, which we usually say carelessly, and immediately go back to our selfish concerns. Many people and methods also speak about "loving others," but experience shows that relating to other purely by this principle is impossible no matter how hard we try.
This is where the method of Kabbalah differs from all other methods: It gives the average person in our world the ability to develop the quality of absolute love—known as the Creator. Kabbalah teaches a person how to perceive the whole of humanity not as bodies, but as souls, and thus reveal that we are all interconnected. Only the revelation of this interconnection among us really enables people to start loving others.
However, without the exalted purpose of feeling the Creator—the sensation of absolute love, eternal existence, and perfection, one would never feel that he needs to feel the connection to others. But once a person sees that by loving them and bestowing upon them, he will attain a higher spiritual sensation, the Creator, then he begins seeing others in an entirely different way. He sees that the people around him are there for a purpose, that they are a means one has to work with in order to attain the level of the Creator—the level of love and bestowal.
On later stages of spiritual development with the method of Kabbalah, you discover even greater truths: that other people are not just a means to attain the Creator. They are all actually parts of you—precisely the parts of you that allow you to feel spiritual sensations of perfection and eternity.
source: http://www.inner.org
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