Seeing spiritual forces and qualities behind and instead of physical faces and bodies
“…The concealed — a spiritual flavor that is hidden from us. The revealed — the taste of corporeality is revealed to us. When we can receive the taste of corporeality in order to bestow, the Creator reveals to us the flavor of the concealed, meaning the flavor that was concealed in spirituality becomes revealed…”
(Rabash, Assorted Notes, 510., Concealed and Revealed”)
In The Matrix, green code rains down a screen, and trained eyes read lives, streets, storms inside it. That is our hint: behind the pixels of this world — behind faces, bodies, hours and kilometers — stand forces and qualities that paint the picture we call “reality.” Kabbalists, the empirical researchers of spirit, put it starkly: “We are like dreamers.” Until we awaken through methodical inner work, we move inside a dream — unaware of the hands that turn the gears.
By default I sit inside an egoistic cocoon, taking in thin, filtered data through five private senses. My mind — brilliant, partial, self-serving — calculates only, “How do I extract more pleasure and flee pain?” From this inner program, a screen is projected: a world confined by time, space, and motion; a panorama of inanimate, vegetative, animate and human forms. But this is a simulation of my qualities, not the thing itself. As Baal HaSulam hints, “There is no perception of reality but through qualities.” Change the qualities — and the world changes.
If so, how do we exit the dream? Not by smashing the screen, but by installing a new intention. We need a practical, purposeful method — and a precise environment inside this very “Matrix” through which we can step out of it. That environment is a small, closed circle of people bound by mutual commitment and mutual complementarity. It is a softened, interactive corner of the simulation, a deliberate gateway assigned by the system of reality itself.
I enter such a group to escape my original egoistic “I” and open to the true, objective perception that belongs to similarity with the single, creating and governing Force. Here I learn to look through, not at. I must train myself to go beyond bodies and faces, beyond temperament and habit, and begin to feel the inner desires and aspirations that the friends project toward our shared human purpose. “By your actions we know You,” says Baal HaSulam; by their actions — when I learn to love and serve them — I begin to know the One whose quality is bestowal.
Spiritual reality stands on the tension of two opposites:
- The Creator’s quality — pure, unconditional love and bestowal, the power that creates and sustains life.
- The spiritual ego — not the small, worldly selfishness, but the root desire to sense and own the Creator’s greatness for oneself.
We were built from that spiritual ego. In this world it descends into cravings for food, sex, family, wealth, power, respect, knowledge — desires that easily exploit others and nature. To enter spirituality we must work with that ego, against the Creator’s quality, like black ink on white parchment — so the form of bestowal emerges by contrast. This world is our launchpad; its rough materials are our first instruments.
Therefore the work begins with what I can actually sense. My corporeal ego immediately criticizes and dismisses the friends by what the eyes see. The practice is to override that reflex, and instead collect from them every inner and outer example that advances us — each spark of yearning, each act of mutual support — and to hold a single intention: to love, serve, and steady one another toward the common goal. “They helped every one his friend,” writes Rabash — this is not poetry but procedure.
As we persist, a second wind arrives. Using the authentic method that draws reforming Light, and pledging unconditional support for one another’s progress, we receive help from Above. The intention shifts; the taste of corporeality is received in order to bestow — and then, as Rabash promises, “the flavor of the concealed becomes revealed.” We begin to sense spiritual forces — left and right, receiving and bestowing — working against each other in us and between us. The laboratory never moves; it is always the relation among us.
There is no private exit from the Matrix. No solitary ladder reaches Heaven. The only road is connection — acquiring the ability to cover my inherent self-aimed intention with the Creator’s Godly intention of love and bestowal. Rabash is unequivocal: “From love of friends to love of the Creator.” And Baal HaSulam adds its systemic echo: “The individual is powerless; the Shechina rests only in a joined assembly.”
Above it all stands a law: the upper system does not calculate with isolated persons, only with a unit — a small group acting as a single healthy cell of one living organism. In such a group I must relate to the others as my own spiritual parts — the assembly pieces of my soul. When the parts behave as the Creator behaves to one another, the soul becomes a vessel capable of revealing Him.
So we practice seeing through the veil. We insist on sensing qualities behind faces, forces behind bodies, yearnings behind words. We hold the friend, not the fault; the direction, not the stumble. And as we do, the code begins to glow; the picture loosens and thins. Through one another — behind the façade — we start to discern the true operators of reality. The dream yields. The concealed turns fragrant and clear. And the world, which was a wall, becomes a window.
“Make for yourself a Rav, buy yourself a friend,” says Rabash — because in that purchase, paid with self-love, we acquire a new vision. And with new vision, we step — together — out of the Matrix.