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What we're going to do this evening is have a picture show,

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which will give you a kind of feeling

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of the essence of Kabbalah.

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Uh, a little bit about the history,

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a little bit about its principles,

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a little bit about its practices,

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and I'll work my way through that.

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Then after that, we'll have a question session.

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You can fire questions.

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I don't necessarily know all the answers,

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but, uh, we'll see what develops.

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Kabbalah. Um, the Hebrew word means to receive

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or be receptive is much older than most people think.

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A scholars usually dated about, uh, 1250.

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It was only called by that name.

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But really you are talking about the perennial teaching,

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which occurs in all traditions, whether it be Taoism

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or in Sufism, uh, the Zoroastrian traditions.

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And even among the, so-called primitive peoples,

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you have these same archetypal ideas, the origin

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of existence, the purpose of the universe, uh,

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the relationship of human beings to the universe

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and to the Holy One.

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And they come through in various forms

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and Kabbalah is of a particular interest to us in the West

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because it in fact underlies the traditions of, uh, Judaism

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and Christianity and Islam.

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The notion of angels, paradise, all these things come from

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that biblical root.

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However, the teaching, of course,

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is much older than the Bible.

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It goes right back into remote antiquity.

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The story goes according to the old rabbis that when Adam

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and Eve were cast out of Eden,

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and they fell from grace, the Holy One sent the great

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Archangel Raziel, which means the angel,

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of secrets, to give them a book

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Which would allow them to reenter paradise.

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And this book was passed down

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through the various generations,

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and it was almost lost at certain points in prehistory.

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Uh, it was the time of

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Noah when humanity became extremely evil

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and was almost wiped off from the face of the earth.

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And there was one particular time

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where it was said there was only one righteous human being,

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and that was a man called Enoch, Hanoch, which means

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the initiated one.

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And he, in his various processes of meditation, would rise

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Up Through his interior world into the higher worlds.

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And there he would be shown the, uh, angelic worlds

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and the archangelic worlds and the demonic worlds.

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And at one particular point in his development,

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he was taken right through into the seventh heaven.

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He was taken beyond tradition, says the curtain

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beyond which even the archangels could not penetrate.

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And there he was given the secrets of existence,