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Kabbalah considers the greatest tool for facilitating personal and global transformation to be the Zohar, written by Rav Shimon Bar Yochai 2000 years ago.
The Zohar (Book of Splendor) is a spiritual text that is in a category of its own. Its power does not depend on understanding or belief. Rather, it is imbued in the Zohar's every word and letter. Simply scanning its pages — allowing your eyes to pass over the words and letters — opens a direct connection to the Creator's Light.
What's more, just being in the presence of a Zohar creates an impenetrable shield of spiritual protection against evil and chaos. As witnessed in this month's update.
The Zohar is a 2000-year-old master key that unlocks all the secrets of the Bible. More importantly, The Zohar also transmits the very awesome spiritual forces that it speaks about. It deals directly with concepts of healing, the origins of the human soul, the presence of unseen influences in our lives and the methodologies for harnessing the hidden spiritual forces in our midst.
For example, this very beautiful passage talks about the power of forgiveness.
Naturally, the Zohar can be extremely difficult to understand, but that makes no difference, because we are not reading it for the wisdom, the information, we are reading it for the connection to the Light. The experience of reading an ordinary book or article is exactly what it seems: We're just reading. But studying and reading The Zohar awakens the very energies we're reading about.
When we study a passage concerning mercy, for example, that aspect of the Creator's Light is awakened in ourselves and even in the world as a whole. We become more merciful, more forgiving, which in turn elicits the quality of mercy from others. When we scan the Zohar's passages dealing with judgment, we gain the power to remove judgments placed upon us, while also erasing our own judgmental tendencies.
Imagine this: You meet a friend for lunch, and she shows you an old photo. It's a picture of a husband and wife taken in a foreign land many years ago. At first, you might be mildly interested in the picture, but the strange clothes, the poor lighting, and your lack of connection to the two people would make it difficult for you to be deeply moved by the photo.
Just to be polite, you might compliment your friend on the antique she's found, and then hand the picture back to her. "But wait!" she might say. "Aren't you totally enthralled by this photograph? Don't you feel a huge surge of emotion when you look at it?"
"Well, no," you'd reply, trying to be patient with your friend.
"Why should I feel anything about it at all? I don't know these two people, so I can't relate to them. I don't know where the picture was taken, so I don't feel connected to it. I really don't know anything about what's happening in this picture. Why should I care about it?"
"Well, suppose I told you that someone devoted a lot of time and effort to finding this photo for you. You see, the people in the picture are your great-great-grandparents, who lived more than a hundred years ago."
At this point there's no doubt your attitude toward the picture would change. It would be the same photo as before, but you'd look at the people in the photo in a whole new way. You'd find any slight resemblance to yourself or to your parents. You'd wonder where these people had lived, how they'd met, how they'd made their living, and perhaps how they died.
Above and beyond questions like this, you would undoubtedly have a strong emotional reaction to the picture. Powerful feelings would suddenly be ignited in your heart, perhaps unlike any you'd ever had before. For the rest of your life, you would always remember this picture and the circumstances under which you first saw it. Yet just a moment earlier, it would have seemed utterly forgettable. There would have appeared to have been no reason to get excited about it.
For most people, the Zohar is much like the photograph I've just described. At first, it can seem remote and even forbidding in its strangeness and complexity. But the purpose of this article is to let you know, simply and directly, that at the deepest level of your soul, there is a profound connection between the Zohar and who you are.
The more you study the Zohar, the better you will grasp what this means. But right now, even if you don't completely understand it, I hope you will let yourself experience the connection with the Zohar that already exists within you. Open yourself to this power, and it will be there for you.
God's Light is like a bottomless well, unlimited in the amount of water it can provide. Our consciousness is like a vessel, a receiving entity that is also boundless. The larger this vessel becomes, the more water we can draw from the well. The higher our level of consciousness, the more Light we receive.
Our task is to open ourselves more and more to the Light by expanding the volume of our spiritual vessel. Toward this end, studying and meditating upon the pages of the Zohar is vitally important. What's more, this should be done not only in translation but in the original language, as well, even if you don't "understand" a single word.
Since the kabbalists teach that simply having the Zohar in your home brings connection with the Creator's Light, reading, meditating, or scanning the pages can be even more powerful—even if you encounter something outside your comprehension.
Once again, the reason for this lies in the fact that the Zohar is much more than just a book of wisdom. The Zohar is an energy source. It's a means of accessing the divine Light that resides in the soul of every human being. Any connection with the Zohar brings Light. The deeper your connection, the greater the revelation of Light will be.
We know you got tired of lugging around all 23 volumes….
SACRED ZOHAR
When Michael Berg first completed the English translation of the Zohar, now over ten years ago, he solved the first part of a major dilemma faced by kabbalists for generations - how to get this wisdom into the minds of people around the world.
When he spearheaded the printing of the Sacred Zohar last year, a special edition, all-23-volumes-condensed into one thick 1,800 page volume (Aramaic only), he solved the second part of a major dilemma faced by kabbalists for generations – how to get this wisdom into the hands of people around the world.
As the Sages of Kabbalah have been saying for 2,000 years, simply possessing this wisdom, the actual pages and letters, has the power to cast a sort of spiritual safety net over you and protect you from danger.
Sounds a little out there, we know. And yet, over the last 40 years, since the Kabbalah Centre first undertook the mission of disseminating this once hidden book, miracle stories big and small have continued to flood through our doors every month.
We invite you to read a few here:
http://www.kabbalah.com/newsletters/2009_06pisces/english/believe.php?cid=nl20090225h
We hope you will consider bringing a Sacred Zohar into your life. Good for the home or office, or both. And we invite you to join our Zohar Project by donating a Sacred Zohar to a local fire department, hospital or any public facility that could use protection and some “good energy.”
