THE SHIELD OF THE BELOVED

In this introduction to what is called in Kabbalah “The Divine Mirror” or “The Diamond Within,” I am addressing myself both to the one within who knows, and to the one within who is ignorant.  I will try to speak a language that reaches everyone.  There is nothing new here, it is very simple.

 We begin with a symbol to put these ideas in focus.  The symbol itself is a form of focusing the left side of the brain so we can cross over to the right side and we can get the marriage of ourselves and understand what it is we’re all about and what we’re doing here.

 On the way to forming the symbol called “The Shield of the Beloved” is a very simple symbol in the shape of an hour glass.

 There is a lower pyramid and an upper inverted pyramid and a place of connection between them.  In the Kabbalah, these two pyramids or triangles represent the “lower world” and the “upper world.”

 The lower world is the finite world, the world of matter, the physical, the tangible, the world that is known, the world of Being.  It is where we are when we are born from nowhere to something.

 The upper world is called the “Ein Sof,” the world of the infinite, the unconscious, the world of the spirit, the unknown world, the world of Becoming.

 Now each of these worlds, the lower and the upper, have ten stairs or steps which are the stairs of ascending, of evolution.  (Figure 2).

 The bottom three stairs of the lower pyramid represent the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal and human kingdoms, with their own different rungs and levels.  Most of humanity, almost all, 99.9% of humanity are here on the third step.

 The purpose of being here in this world is to ascend the ten steps of the lower pyramid of being, of learning to be, to the upper pyramid, the pyramid of becoming.

 But, you cannot ascend these steps directly, you must take an “invisible stairway,” a spiraling stairway that is multi-dimensional, not like a ladder that you just walk up, but where you have to turn around and around and swirl and whirl in the air or in the understanding to get from one space of a rung to another. (Figure 3)

 This inner, invisible, multi-dimensional stairway is the channel, the funneling process as it is called in the Kabbalah, the funnel through which ideas, manifestations of the upper world come to the lower world to teach us, to show us this or that, inventions of scientists, and so on.  Everything comes through this, it is the Passage, the birth canal, it is the “ladder of Jacob,” the ladder of earth and heaven: it forms the tubes of communication from the lower world to the upper, from the upper world to the lower.

 But the area where the upper part of the hour-glass unites with the lower part of the hour-glass is a very dangerous sphere, a cross road, a flame: it is very trying and very difficult.  It has been called, “the

dark night of the soul.” (Figure 4)

 It is the revolving door of the Garden of Eden, and if you are unaware for even one minute, it is goodbye for now, and see you next incarnation.

 We sometimes visit this place but can’t get through it, it’s so narrow, if our ego’s too fat with all its extra baggage.  We have to get thin for that.

 Very few dare to try to get through, for this is all unknown to us, we are afraid.  We whirl around in the world of the known, learning how to be, learning the physical primal things, learning how to eat and walk and make love and deal with this world, paying rent, dealing with stuff, with substance.

 To get through that place where the upper meets the lower is to be cooked in the cauldron where the ego gets burned, thought not to ashes, the alchemical “tannoor,” the furnace.  You have to be ”cooked” to pass through there, to absorb that heat and get used to it.

 You need a master’s card, a VISA, to go through there, which means acquiring certain tools and mastering them.  You have to master Visualization through repeated practice, first of all. You have to be able to quickly push the button into the Inspiration world and create, and you must have a realization of the Infinite being of light within you.  If you don’t have that you can’t pass through here.

 You must have total Sanity, you must “walk Sane in the midst of madness” in this world gone off balance almost to the point of no return.  You can’t wait for he or she to love you and kiss you and all that, that’s for lower level of humanity, and we’re talking about ways and means so we can climb and spiral up to that sphere where we came from, which is our source.  Once upon a time we were particles of light that got dropped from above to below.  Somehow, we got the application to where to incarnate and got picked up by a man and woman in union and....phht...it got born.  It forgets once upon a time it was light.  It feels it is trapped in the physical organism, and forgets.

 And that’s the purpose.  The lower triangle is the school of remembering, it’s the cosmic theatre where all the egos come about and all the attractions of the polarities happen.  It is a world of doubt, and we need the Sanity of certainty to pass beyond it.  You can’t pass through if you doubt.

 That’s a lot to ask of us primates on this planet, I know, but it’s better to ask that than a raise from your boss.  Here you raise your self, not your salary.

 You must have total Awakening, total Awareness for your cosmic VISA. All these items you must get for yourself: down here you write your own script, you author your self and do the lead acting, the activity of it, always with words in this world of words.

 We talk and talk but some of us learn to acquire the cosmic VISA. Then, we know how to swirl and to whirl and deal with this and that, and if we say  “I love you,” we know what’s going on, we know who is this “I” and who is this “you” and what is this love, and what is this separation between “I” and “you”, etc. etc.

 If we say, “I am hungry,” we know, “I am” is never hungry, the stomach is hungry.  We can make distinctions.  We learn how to transcend the male and female aspects and all the polarities.  Otherwise, there is no entrance, and no exit.  Otherwise, we’re stuck here for millions of years incarnating, coming back and coming back down here where the cooking happens, all the relationships, all the petty things we do, the fathers and daughters and mothers and sons, the states and nations.  If we get caught in the

“cooking”, we may not have the feast of passing through all this. And that passage through: the last supper happens here.

 So, it is that some of us, focused units of consciousness, of light, depending on our inner velocity and voltage and degree of awareness and awakening, get SUCKED UP into the upper pyramid, perhaps unconsciously, accidentally, and we remember for an instant, and then maybe it happens again, we get SUCKED UP into that reservoir of knowledge of becoming until we learn we can do that consciously, with practice, until we ourselves become channels of communication, teachers, artists, inventors, helpers of mankind.

 That means we got used to the heat of the cooking, all the right ingredients, the water boiling just right, the cosmic recipe in the works... and something starts to happen that begins to make sense: we

“crack the cosmic code.”  The ladder, the invisible stairway, gets shorter and shorter as we learn the routes, and the triangles merge, the upper infusing the lower, the lower becoming comfortable with the upper.

 Here is the visibility of it, the center of being and becoming, the Jewel of the Kabbalah, the Shield of the Beloved.

 This is the yin and the yang, the chakra of the heart, the state of total protection: you can walk on water if you want, or become a millionaire, you can overcome great difficulties in this sphere of certainty.

 Until that can happen, you stay down here with the rest of humanity in the lower triangle, in the pyramid of limited time and space, with its arguments, divisions, philosophies and religions, most everyone pretending to know this or be that, always pretending, pretending to communicate, but talking without necessity with words that have no value.

 There’s no use pretending, that won’t generate the voltage you need, the VISA.  Human consciousness is a container of light, and you need the proper voltage and frequency to be sucked up there at will (though you do it every night when you sleep, and when you die:  sleep is the workshop of how to die), merging time and the timeless: that is the Jewel, and that is ALEPH.  (Figure 6)

 The Kabbalah says that Aleph exists in all the letters of the alphabet, and all the letters exist in Aleph.  Only in Aleph is there Unity, the One without a second.  That is why Aleph is constructed with a diagonal line: (Figure 7)

 That oblique line (Vav) means in time and out of time together, as in the Divine Mirror, the invisibility of the upper reflected in the visibility of the lower.  Aleph says we are already there, the upper world and the lower world are the same, as above so below:  We are already enlightened.  Aleph says we have to learn that, because we have forgotten, and we can stand the heat of it if we do not pretend.

 But to ascend in the remembering of that enlightenment, we first have to acknowledge the hiddenness of our “endarkenment.”  Endarkenment is when the light first comes into the body, the cellular organism.  Inside the body all is dark.  You can’t realize the light until you understand the darkness, all that you hide, all that you think nobody sees, the negative side, the shadow.  You have to dare to face that. (as some of you who worked “the Masy Session” in Le Centre du Silence Workshops).  That is endarkenment, which is also enlightenment.  They are one and the same.

 You are a human being, you are a human becoming.  The journey takes you to the edge of nothingness.  Go carefully.  Be well prepared.  And the sadness you meet on your way, remember to enjoy it.

From "The Invisible Stairway: Kabbalistic Meditations of the Hebrew Letters"
By Samuel Ben-Or Avital  Page 276
(c)1982 – 2006 Samuel Avital, Le Centre du Silence, Boulder, Colorado USA