Is There Meditation in Kabbalah?
- While meditation can be calming and beneficial to a person’s health, it is not a path to spirituality.
- Spirituality is attained by transforming egoism into bestowal via suitable texts, a teacher, and a group, and it emphasizes connection over solitary practices.
- Suppressing the ego through meditation runs contrary to spiritual attainment. Kabbalah teaches how to navigate the ego instead of suppressing it.
Is There Meditation in Kabbalah? - An Introduction
A lot of people in the Western world associate spirituality with inner peace, tranquility, and methods such as breathing exercises, meditation, and stillness. They believe that by relaxing, sitting quietly, and letting the universe in, or by searching within themselves, they will achieve a higher spiritual state. But is this truly spirituality?
The answer is no, not at all.
While meditation can certainly help a person relax, heal, and feel better, it has nothing to do with spirituality. Relaxation is beneficial, but spirituality is the opposite of our nature. Our natural state is egoistic, a desire to exploit everything and everyone around us for our own benefit. Spirituality is not about finding peace within ourselves but rather about transforming our egoistic nature into one of giving.
Currently, we want to take everything for ourselves. In spirituality, we want to give to the world with all our might. This shift is not about calming down, slowing our desires, or wanting nothing, as some who meditate aim to do. Instead, spirituality is about actively transforming ourselves from selfish receivers to bestowers.
The Trap of Suppressing the Ego
Many people believe that by meditating, they overcome their selfish desires. But in reality, meditation only suppresses the ego temporarily. Meditation does not eliminate the ego. A meditating person reduces their desires, worries less, and consumes less, but this does not mean they have achieved spirituality.
In fact, such a person begins to resemble an animal rather than a spiritually developed human being. Animals live with minimal desires. They do not strive for more than their basic needs. Similarly, a meditating person, by reducing their needs, might feel calm but ultimately declines in their level of development.
However, given the state of the world today with desires running rampant throughout societies, could it not be better if everyone just relaxed and took less from the system? Would that not bring peace to both the individual and the world?
The problem is that this approach is against human evolution and nature’s program. We cannot stop ourselves from growing, evolving, and seeking more. The nature of animals remains the same from birth to death. Humans, by contrast, constantly develop. Our egos expand over time, and this expansion of our egoistic desires is specifically what differentiates us as humans from animals. Trying to suppress this natural development is not only ineffective but also unnatural.
Steering the Ego Instead of Suppressing It
We are not meant to eliminate our ego as it is our very nature. Instead, we are meant to learn how to use it correctly, to navigate it in a direction of giving. The problem is that we do not know how to manage it. The growing ego pushes and pulls us in many different directions, and instead of guiding it properly, we let it rule us. If we knew how to steer it correctly, we could reach a much higher state of existence without the need to suppress or diminish it.
The wisdom of Kabbalah is a method of learning how to take the reins of our ego and navigate it. Doing so involves developing an intention to give above the desire to receive, i.e., an intention similar in form to nature’s very quality of giving. While our desire remains unchanged as a desire to receive, we can change our intention from our inborn intention to receive solely for ourselves to an intention to give unto others and nature.
The Limits of Meditation
Many believe that meditation helps investigate what is inside us, leading to self-discovery and self-improvement. However, meditation is nothing more than temporary relaxation. It helps alleviate stress and tension but does not provide any real, lasting transformation. It does not lead to spirituality.
For thousands of years, people in the East have practiced meditation and described great states of attainment, universality, and oneness. However, what they actually achieve is relaxation and an altered state of perception within the egoistic nature. They do not attain spirituality because spirituality is the opposite of our egoistic world. The spiritual world is hidden from us, not because we are not looking deep enough, but because our very nature prevents us from perceiving it.
Looking Inside Won’t Lead to Spirituality
A person who searches deep within themselves will not find spirituality there. Why? It is because everything inside us is rooted in our egoistic perception of reality. There is nothing new or transcendent inside. There are simply variations of the same self-centered existence.
If we were indeed connected to a universal oneness, we would already perceive it. But we do not. The reality is that we are separate, self-contained beings, disconnected from spirituality. We thus take such a state as our starting point. We recognize the truth that we are not naturally connected to any higher spiritual force as a necessary first step. Then, we can begin to seek a real method for transformation, one that does not suppress the ego but instead directs it toward a much more expansive, eternal, and whole existence that is outside the ego. That is when we need the method of Kabbalah, a method for transforming our intention upon our desire from one of reception to one of giving, and by doing so, discovering the spiritual reality that exists when we equalize our intention with the spiritual quality of giving.
The Role of Connection in Kabbalah
When we apply ourselves to the method of Kabbalah and to making the change of our intention from egoistic to altruistic, we encounter the need for various means. The first means is the texts themselves that describe the wisdom of Kabbalah and which introduce us to its fundamental principles and basic concepts. We then usually encounter a Kabbalist teacher: a person who has achieved that shift in intention, attained spirituality, and who can guide their students in taking the optimal steps to undergo the process of transformation that the method of Kabbalah describes.
The third means for spiritual progress in Kabbalah is a Kabbalistic group. The group serves as a practical tool for developing the quality of bestowal. Instead of meditating alone, Kabbalists work in groups to overcome their egoistic nature, learning to love and to bestow upon others.
The group is a key difference between Kabbalah and meditation in that the work with the group makes us face our ego “head on,” so to speak, instead of suppressing it. The more we advance in Kabbalah, the more we find realistic means for exercising the transformation in intention—from receiving to giving—that Kabbalah describes. Within the group setting, we cannot kid ourselves into thinking that we are somewhat “spiritual” and that we hold “special intentions” and “special connections” to spirituality. Rather, we gain a much clearer mirror to see how we relate to people around us, and we can then apply ourselves to work on our intention to give in a practical setting through our relationship with others in our group.
In other words, instead of detaching from society, in Kabbalah we see the necessity of living as part of a society and we learn how to navigate the desire to receive within complex social relations to add an intention to give and to bestow upon our innate egoistic matter. Doing so leads us to correctly connect with others, and by doing so, discover spirituality precisely through our corrected attitude of giving to others and to society.
Exercising the Intention to Give as Meditation
While we have clarified that in the wisdom of Kabbalah, we do not detach from spirituality in order to sit by ourselves and meditate as a means of attaining spirituality, there are several mentions of meditation in Kabbalistic texts. Such mentions refer to the inner work at the level of applying an intention to give upon our innate desire to receive. Here is one such text by Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam), which lets us clarify the positioning of our thoughts and desires, and how we work with them:
“A thought is an upshot of the desire. A person thinks of what he wants, and does not think of what he does not want. For example, a person never thinks of his dying day. On the contrary, he will always contemplate his eternity, since this is what he wants. Thus, one always thinks of what is desirable for him.
“However, there is a special role to the thought: it intensifies the desire. The desire remains in its place; it does not have the strength to expand and perform its action. Yet, because one thinks and contemplates on a matter, and the desire asks of the thought to provide some counsel and advice to carry out the desire, the desire thus grows, expands and performs its actual work.
It turns out that the thought serves the desire, and the desire is the “self” of the person. Now, there is a great self or a small self. A great self dominates the small selves.
“He who is a small self and has no dominion whatsoever, the advice to magnify the self is through the persisting with the thought of the desire, since the thought grows to the extent that one thinks of it.
“And so, ‘in His law doth he meditate day and night,’ for by persisting in it, it grows into a great self until it becomes the actual ruler.
-Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam),
“A Thought Is an Upshot of the Desire.”
Baal HaSulam explains how desire is primary and thought emerges from our desire. But while desire remains unchanged, thought has a role to intensify and expand the desire by the work of thinking and contemplating on a certain matter. The desire then uses the thought similar to a computer in order to help it calculate how it can achieve its wants and needs. Accordingly, the desire is our “self” and the thought serves our desire.
Kabbalists thus provide us with the means of the Kabbalistic texts, teachers, and a group precisely in order to create an environment by which we can shift from, as Baal HaSulam writes, a “small self” to a “great self.” A “small self” is one in which our desires remain as small corporeal desires for food, sex, family, money, honor, control, and knowledge; and a “great self” is one where we rise above our corporeal desires and discover the eternal and whole spiritual quality of giving through the intention to give.
Working with these means at our disposal, we can “persist with the thought of the desire” of the “great self,” i.e., of the spiritual desire to give, and thus let our thought grow our desire. This “persistence” in thought, the constant renewal of efforts to apply an intention to give upon our innate desire to receive, thus describe “in His law doth he meditate day and night.” That is, we persist in applying ourselves to the altruistic spiritual law and by doing so, we can develop an altruistic-spiritual intention to give upon our desire to receive.
