Following my previous article on immortality, the response from our readers was very mixed. It ran the gamut, from the expression of great expectations to a complete rejection of any notion that immortality is a possibility or that it is at all viable. Some people made objections on economic grounds. Present retirees, they said, were having enough difficulties sustaining themselves in old age without having to take into consideration the financial resources needed to meet the expenses of any serious or major medical disaster that over a long stretch would assuredly take place.
Furthermore, pointed out readers, with the economic uncertainty and extreme volatility that has broken out in the financial markets, the chances that an individual could realistically plan for and establish financial stability are slim. In addition, government assistance programs for retired people are quickly disappearing. So, what advantage can humankind expect to attain in never-ending life?
Stated others, if no one ever dies and babies continue to come into this world, where would the food needed to feed these growing billions of people come from? And this dilemma does not even include the nightmare of no drinking water. There were also raised questions about what funeral directors and cemetery sales people were to do when this event takes place. Even more damaging to the radical concept of immortality is the overwhelming evidence of cemeteries and hospitals, crimes and prisons. How can one begin to think of considering the far-out idea of immortality when our consciousness does not perceive, nor has it been programmed, to visualize a life of never-ending possibilities? The notion is too revolutionary for the imagination of many: it is too much for them to come to grips with the enormous and profound implications, were the idea of immortality accepted.
The whole idea will first require a revolutionary overhaul of the way our minds perceive things. Presently our daily activities are completely governed by the physical, material environment. Even such matters as predictions, which smack of prophecy, are wholly based on existing, readily acceptable material and information. The weatherman predicts our weather based on existing trends in the weather patterns. No weather forecaster has ever claimed prophetic vision when providing a weather prediction. And obviously, errors and mistakes must inevitably occur, inasmuch as the material world around us is exceedingly illusionary. Weather patterns are changeable and, unfortunately for those who require knowledge of what to expect in the way of weather for the coming day, the weather forecast is frequently inaccurate. This uncertainty in neither limited to, nor exclusive to, the weather.
To comment on the future is to risk saying nothing substantial, or worse, to risk being later proved wrong. We all have 20/20 hindsight. To predict the future, however, requires abilities which most of us simply do not possess. Or do we?
According to science, nature is inherently unpredictable. The science of physics, therefore, has no choice but to pursue a pathway of probabilities.
However, our perspective on physical reality is presently undergoing some very dramatic changes. After the Sin of Adam, we all became subject to the dominion of the physical realm. This illusionary situation has maintained a locked stranglehold of humankind ever since. Only in this 20th century have the misconceptions concerning our material world taken a turn towards being corrected. So, one may attempt to provide some answers and insight to the question raised by my readers, but I’m afraid that the Zohar’s answers might not be clearly understood by those who still cling to archaic conceptions of the physically manifested universe, let alone to include a concept of immortality where there is no hard evidence of its existence.
Before I venture to come to grips with the awesome task of stating the case for the illusory nature of reality and mortality, I would like to bring to the attention of the reader the Grandfather Paradox of science. We laymen should not be concerned about the difficulty in understanding completely the theory behind the paradox. What is important is its conclusion, which defies logic.
Only recently have some mainstream physicists politely admitted that time travel, once the exclusive domain of science fiction, is at least possible in theory. However, the design of a time travel machine is not under consideration for the present. Scientists are having enough problems trying to work out the kinks in time travel theories. The key point at this time is that physicists have found nothing in the laws of physics that would prohibit time travel.
Scientists tell us that if we could travel at the speed of light, time would actually proceed into the past. An astronaut traveling at the speed of light could possibly zoom into deep space and return before he left. Time slows down for a moving object, as measured by an observer considered to be stationary. According to this theory, if one member of a pair of identical twins travels at the speed of light into outer space, when he returns he will find that his clock of aging has been running slower and that his twin brother has aged more than he has. Incredible as this may sound, I can see all of mankind linking up to purchase the ticket to longer life, if not immortality.
This time expansion effect has been confirmed by experiment. Atomic clocks taken on long jet rides have been found to lag five-billionths of a second behind the clocks that are on earth. While the lag in time is minute, nevertheless its presence shows the scientist that jet speed has the effect of slowing down the clock. In outer space, where space capsules maintain a speed closer to the speed of light, the effect is considerably increased.
Established ideas of reality must be reconsidered when a scientist talks about an elastic time that can be shrunk or stretched, as well as of places where time no longer exists. Although such forms of time may appear to be unacceptable to most of us, nevertheless they open the doors to ever more and stranger phenomena, including the stopping of the aging process and the achievement of immortality. Mathematical formulae suggest two-way time travel is possible, which means that, traveling at the speed of light, we could go back in time and return to an age much younger than our present age. What a wonderful thought. However, I can hear you shout out, “Too good to be true!”
Well, the only flaw that presents itself as regards this new idea of time travel has become known as the “Grandfather Paradox” But please remember that whatever science cannot reconcile with the “Grandfather Paradox” does not change or affect the essential underlying truth that two-way time travel is not only possible, but is a reality.
Just what is the Grandfather Paradox? If a time traveler returned to the past just in time to prevent the meeting and subsequent wedding of his grandparents, he would never be born. But had he never been born, he could not have prevented the marriage of his grandparents, nor would he be present to go back in time in the first place. If time travel is possible, how do we avoid this contradiction? However, I would like to reiterate again that this problem facing the scientist does not in any way alter or materially change the scientific conclusion regarding two-way time travel, which does exist and could lead to immortality.
Kabbalistically speaking, this problem has already been dealt with in the Zohar, but I shall refer to this matter later. We must also consider how far back in time the time machine will take the traveler. We have all seen movies like Back To The Future and others in which science fiction impresses the viewer with something we might all hope to achieve and experience. To our sorrow, this idea still remains only a dream. For the present, scientists can only think in terms of the time dilation effect, or the slowing down of time. This idea has already, as I mentioned, been tested.. But to make time march backward, well that’s another matter. There is no chance that we are going back to visit the dinosaurs, this despite the scientific conclusion that in theory there is the absolute possibility of doing so.
Let us continue to explore this phenomenon. The more we become familiar with ideas like immortality, time travel, and restoration or cloning of lost limbs, the more we will acquire heightened awareness and elevation of our consciousness. Furthermore, and possibly more significantly, as we shall learn later, our state of consciousness determines our reality. If we reject the possibilities of, say, immortality, then we forestall its emergence.
Things do get a bit sticky, however, when someone who has gone back in time is in a position to affect someone’s or even his own past. How can someone go back to the past and affect his future in such a way as to prevent his backward journey through time?
To further clarify these bizarre concepts, let us try our hand at this one. Imagine that you are at a spaceship terminal at 4:45 P.M. and board at 5:00 P.M. to fly back in time through the time tunnel. At 4:45 P. M. the spaceship returns from its flight in time for you to see yourself arriving at the terminal. Can you now decide not to take the flight? If you do, how would you be able to see yourself returning from it?
The whole idea is too much for our rational minds to grasp. Try multiplying 9,437,261,519 by 3,897,214. It’s too much for us to handle. Need a calculator, right? Well, who created the calculator if not man? We’re the origin, the grass roots of calculators and computers. Yet, I hear the voices protesting, “It’s impossible.” Well it will remain impossible as long as we believe it’s impossible.
What I’m trying to say is that our minds, beginning at birth and continuing through childhood and sometimes past adolescence, are constantly and completely programmed to think the way they do by our immediate environment. I personally remember my mother’s insistence that I drink a tablespoon of cod liver oil before lunch. My taste buds just hated the oil. However, as a reward, she offered delicious chocolate to follow, thus removing the oil’s awful taste from my mind. This and other habits were formed by the recurrence of “dos and do nots”, “should and should nots.” Programmed to resist new modes of behavior, our minds are settled and very complacent. Any outside stimulation not compatible with our way of thinking is simply treated with resistance or rejected outright. Accountants who once could add large figures and long columns have switched to the calculator and their old feats are now considered to be miracles.
This positioning of our mind is the makings of Satan/Murphy’s Law. His intent is to keep us from becoming an all-powerful mind/consciousness. We are under his constant attack. Consciously or otherwise, we are at his mercy, and we shall never benefit from that. He has no other intention but to keep us right where we are and then continue a constant and relentless bombardment of thoughts. These thoughts disturb us when we want to go to sleep. When relaxing after a difficult day, we are not permitted the luxury of a quiet mind. The battle is too furious; there is no sign of relief.
This predicament, claims the Zohar, should convince us of our lack of control over our mind, body and destiny. We have failed to recognize our responsibility for what happens to us. We have lost, albeit temporarily, the consciousness that we are God. This occurred when Adam ate from the apple. What? We’re God? That’s impossible. How come we cannot do the things God does? Why do we die? God doesn’t. What about all this chaos in our lives? God doesn’t have the kinds of problems or suffer the irreversible tragedies we do, like the loss of brain cells, a limb or a kidney?
Are we happy 24 hours a day, 7 days a week? Of course not, but God is. If we are God then how come we struggle all our lives to make ends meet? We never have enough. And even if we go through life financially comfortable, what happens after retirement, when old age arrives? Will the money last? And what are the chances that we’ll stay healthy? God has no need for such worries.
And then again when we’re really old and our partner of 50 or 60 years “dies on us,” we are all alone. God doesn’t go through this tragic experience since God is immortal. Are we? Furthermore, God would never have this problem. God doesn’t have a spouse. Lucky God.
Now I hear you saying it: Come on, let’s be reasonable; this is an absolute exercise in futility. What do you take me for—a silly, gullible fool? Stop trying. It won’t get you anywhere. This is thinking fit only for irresponsible, non-serious people or for a dreamer who has just finished a science fiction novel. What, are you blind? Don’t you see the reality of life all around you? Maybe you just refuse to recognize, or have never experienced, the chaos of real life. I think you belong in a mental institution—or that you should just go away. Where do you even come off making these kinds of ridiculous statements? “We are all actually God.” Go away! Don’t bother me with this nonsense. Okay, if you are God, then how come you get sick?
I read and hear your message loud and clear. Everything you are telling me fits exactly with current majority perceptions of reality. Nothing has changed since the creation of man. Why am I even suggesting that we are God? If we were really God, chaos could not nor would not reign supreme as everything about us attests it does right now.
How many times have I said to myself, “Stop this nonsense.”? Many of my dear friends have likewise questioned this statement to others, finding it shocking and revolting. Maybe I should stop and pay attention to what others have to say.
However! I am not alone in this far-out, almost unbelievable, profound declaration. In fact, it’s not my idea at all. It’s an idea that has been around for a long, long time, in fact, for at least 3,500 years. I hear you again. What! And nobody has heard about it except you? Where and how did you receive such a divine inspiration and message? And why were you chosen to be the one to herald this kind of information? Why were you handpicked from many greater sages of our time to be the harbinger of such a statement, “We are all God.”? Furthermore, if indeed “we are all God,” then why do we undergo the kind of chaos that no person has been free of? If we are God, which is obviously impossible, why have we been so helpless in removing wars, holocausts, inquisitions and barbaric tortures in so many countries around the globe? Impossible.
The arguments are well taken. The fact remains that the Talmud, Kabbalah and essentially all sages have clearly stated that our “souls are part of God.” As Rav Ashlag, founder of the Kabbalah Centre stated, or soul is to God like the hewed rock is to its mountain of origin. Now it is a rock, alone by itself. However, the rock contains everything that the mountain does, this despite its separation from the mountain.
Our very essence is Godly. We have the same features, characteristics and powers as God. Yet there is one distinction between God and us. We also combine and identify with the force called Desire to Receive, a characteristic that is excluded from God, inasmuch as God is the genesis, the primal force behind all creation. Therefore, from whom would God receive? And when there is no situation or state of receiving, there can never be a consciousness of a Desire to Receive.
There is only one axiom in Kabbalah. The Lightforce of the Creator is all embracing and inclusive. Consequently there can never arise a condition or environment for a Desire to Receive to emerge in Him. The Creation, ourselves, includes this Desire to Receive, for this was the “Thought Of Creation.” The Creator’s thought to share initiated the resulting unique feature, Desire to Receive, also known by its code name, soul.
When the infinite sum of souls emerged, they received the beneficence or essence of God, which was in His original thought to share. And thus we are part of God. We have His essence. We have his power to rule, create and express all the wonderful abilities that we associate with God.
God’s essence is found in all creation, including all of the lower kingdoms: Animal, Vegetable, and Inanimate. It took inquiring man until the 20th century to discover that even the Inanimate Kingdom lives a wonderful, dynamic dance of interacting, interlocking atoms, constantly in motion. The presence of the essence of God is everywhere if you can only find it. The Ari, Rav Isaac Luria, would always walk with his head facing the ground for fear of stepping on a little ant. He wrote much about the need to be careful not to abuse or mistreat anything within our environment, for he knew and felt the presence of the Divine with Creation.
Mankind is the highest of the Four Kingdoms, and is endowed with the closest affinity to the essence of the Deity. What mankind lacked in relationship to our Creator is the same idea as the link-up between cause and effect. However, we are one step away from the Creator. We cannot create other souls. We cannot create something out of nothing. This is what the Creator originally produced: souls (Desires to Receive) from nowhere or nothing. Even the process of cloning animals still originates with existing cells.
We are a creation of two components. The one is the essence of God, or the thought to or Desire to Shareand the other, the Vessel (soul), imbued with the feature characteristic or Desire to Receive. To become God-like we must revert or transform our unique feature of Desire to Receive to that of the God essence, namely into a Desire to Share. With great effort and constant hard work, we can shift to and change to God, with access to all the awesome powers that are already included within ourselves, namely those of the essence of God.
In our familiar world of existence, our God-like features and essence will forever remain concealed. We may perceive on a spiritual, immaterial level the existence of God’s essence and presence.
In the Endless, a realm of no end, beginning, separation or limitation, the union between a God-like feature of Light with a Desire to Share and the created being with a Desire to Receive is eternally brought together as one inseparable unit of circuitry. This magnificent combination continues to this very day and will forever endure. The kabbalists describe this realm as one of endlessness and continuity without differentiation. We too are familiar with the concept “undifferentiated.” However, once we (the souls) were thrust out of the Endless, where it all began, all this changed. Cells are considered undifferentiated until they transform themselves according to the command of the DNA (soul, if you wish) and become, let’s say, part of a heart, and therefore, differentiated.
While the cells individually still resemble their original self, nonetheless, they are classified as being differentiated because they have become limited as to the nature of their location and creativity. There is a major difference, however, there is a distinction between the two. The Endless itself never undergoes change, only moving from one arena to another. Only the additional vessels that emerge from the vessel or the aspect of the original and first Desire to Receive create the appearance and impression that the Light or Lightforce has undergone some change. This phenomenon might be compared with what happens to a light bulb covered by a thin white cover, when we add thicker and thicker white cloth and then proceed to envelope the lamp with varying degrees of color, from lighter to darker shades of cloth. We unconsciously refer to the bulb’s light as becoming dimmer, however, on second thought, reflecting on what has actually taken place, we suddenly realize that the changes we are observing don’t stem from the light bulb, but rather from the illusionary cloth or curtains.
Rav Ashlag cautioned that we are never to assume that the Creator is revealing Himself. When scriptures refer to God, the assumption should be that they are referring to the emanation from God. The Lightforce, appears to undergo changes in this emanation. It becomes denser and denser until this dark world of ours emerged. How all this happened is more fully explained in other works. The notion of different stages of the Lightforce and scriptures were referring merely to the emanation of God, not God Himself.
Therefore, the Endless is not associated with the word for world, in Hebrew, the word olam, which appropriately means covering or concealment. These connotations refer only to the Lightforce’s subsequent emanation, but never to the Creator Himself, or to the Endless, where no concealment takes place. At our level of existence, in addition to the Lightforce concealment, another force, an unadulterated Satanic force known as The Opponent (or Satan) has come into being to co-exist alongside the Lightforce. This is noted in Genesis by the expression of Tree of Knowledge Good and Evil. When the Lightforce is freed from any connection with the dark or Satanic forces, then a pure connection with the Lightforce is made and this state of existence is referred to in Scripture as Tree of Life.
I am quite certain that the aforementioned was not difficult to comprehend. Now we can also understand why we are in essence “God Himself.” This reality is the sole motivator for any activity or movement. However, the Lightforce can be transferred to the Other Side, as Satan’s many facets are referred to, but our indulgence or excessive involvement with negative consciousness and activity provides greater nourishment to the Satanic forces, and they ultimately make their dominion manifest in the state of mortality or death.
The essence of Satan is the totally expressed Desire to Receive for the Self Alone. Whether he is feeding on the heart of an individual, like a conscious cell or devouring healthy cells, there seems no way to stop Satan until he achieves his ultimate wish, his last pound of flesh or mortality. Mankind has for millennia succumbed to this final scenario of Satan. But now we have learned how to fight back.
Do I still have some of my original questions in the background? I believe that even once we recognize that we are Godlike, we certainly can still believe that the Creator can and does perform miracles and other supernatural feats when the necessity arises, like providing for our retirement and for enough food to keep us going. And maybe for good measure, God will assure us that we will never become sick.
If you recall, at the beginning of this article I raised the problem of whether we can elevate our consciousness into believing that we can strike back and eliminate Satan’s mortality power. Now I am confronting the reader with the additional headache of including within our computerized consciousness the notion that we are God.
This my dear friend, is exactly were Satan has had us. We have been had. Satan is a fraud and a forgery as the Ari, Rabbi Isaac Luria, has so simply stated concerning our co-existing partner in the Tree of Knowledge Corporation. His influence and dominion over every facet of this universe exists only because he is in total control of our minds and consciousness. Were he ever to relinquish and lose this control, no longer would that formidable enemy he pretends to be exist. He is no match for the Lightforce, when confronted face to face.
Our problem lies in the defeatist attitude that we have maintained within our consciousness. The most egotistical of us know that someday and sometime we shall inevitably succumb to all the failures we read or hear about. It is precisely this fear that keeps us alive or afloat. However, a consciousness that we shall forever endure and never lose or win is not present.
Sure it’s not easy. But we are in the Age of Aquarius. This sort of consciousness is long overdue and the time is ripe and now. To achieve the objective is now within reach. Without the consciousness of the people, even a Moses could not achieve what we are going to realize in our lifetime.
The methodology is at hand. A revolution of sorts has already emerged. The information on how to achieve immortality and release the God-like feature within all of us is easily accessible and can be acquired by all who just have a desire to live a life filled with joy and happiness, free of chaos.
However, make no mistake about it. Satan will not rest. He will gather into himself an army of humankind that can and will express the worst form of intolerance and hatred the world has ever experienced. This is his strongest arsenal. Hillel of the Talmud long ago expressed what power hatred has when he declared, “Do not do unto others that which is odious unto you, the rest of religion is but commentary.”
The Talmud could not express in any stronger terms the obstacle that prevents world dominations by mankind from achieving a peaceful and Light-filled world. Temples One and Two, which supported and provided man with the ability to finally overcome Satan and his hordes of destructive forces, were destroyed but for what reason, asks the Talmud? “For the reason of hatred with no rhyme or reason,” concludes the Talmud. Has civilization changed much in the past 2,000 years? The answer is, very little. Time, faces or locations may have changed. Hatred and intolerance has abated little, if at all.
The Zohar and its words, the Kabbalah and its teachings, are changing all of this. The millions of people involved in Kabbalah and all forms of spirituality in general have already left their mark. Satan no longer can turn the clock back.
Let us join the growing army and team that is finally striking back at Satan. He is an illusionary image awaiting the Light to be released. He knows his time has come. He will not take this lying down. However, we know from our everyday experience that no matter how intense the darkness in a room, by merely flipping the switch the Light goes on and darkness disappears, never again to return.
This article originally appeared in Kabbalah Magazine Vol. 2, Issue 5, July/August 1997.
