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What is an acquired taste? How do we develop our senses and perception of reality? Can we change and invert our inherent tastes and values? Can we acquire attraction toward things previously rejected? Can we find fulfillment and taste in emptiness and deficiencies? How can we invert our values? How can we methodically acquire new spiritual tastes? Where do we perceive spirituality? Through what qualities can we sense spirituality? What does it mean to exist “outside of ourselves?” The spiritual world the Kabbalists discover in five new spiritual senses, tangibly, solidly, and beautifully, is revealed by a process with which you are already familiar. You are familiar with the term “acquired taste,” but did you know that everything is an acquired taste, even a baby’s sight? They start seeing only after a few days as the different forms form into shapes, and then the shapes form recognizable patterns. It is the same in the transition from the mama’s milk to near-flavorless food to food with a bit of salt and spice. Usually, people also get acquainted with alcohol in a way that they drink sugary drinks until they get to the point where they can drink straight tequila or whiskey. Even though it is not a spiritual example, we can learn something from the inversion of values that occurs when some people would call “health nuts” become very interested in food, but in a different way than most are. Most “foodies,” think about how we could discern more and more subtleties of flavor and keep adding to the pleasure of food; such people who place health above all things start looking at food in a totally different way. Instead of enjoying the flavor of the food, they start enjoying the nutrition they are getting from the food. For example, the fast food that would make me drool would be like “biohazard” for them, something they would want to stay far away. At the same time, they would look at an avocado - even without salt - and see the nutrition they can gain from it. They start enjoying only the nourishment and feeling good from the nourishment, while sugar and fried stuff start tasting disgusting to them and make them feel bad if they eat them. Similarly, some people are into fasting. Such people, when feeling a sense of hunger through their hours or even days-long fasting, feel better and better as the fasting and the hunger continue. Here, we can see an inversion of values. There is a higher goal that tastes better than the food tastes. The important thing for us to understand for spiritual work is that there can be such an inversion of values. There are other experiences and other worlds we still do not feel. The Kabbalist, Rabash, who was not a health nut, said after experiencing hard times throughout his life when food was very scarce, “There are many, many flavors in hunger,” meaning that there are as many different varieties of deficiencies and hunger as what we get from satiation and the fulfillment of our desires. Kabbalists do not consider drunkenness and starvation states to aspire to, by the way. Still, from all this, we can learn that there are those states that we are not yet familiar with but still could be great. And one of such states is the spiritual state. Spirituality is characterized by the quality of bestowal when I come out of myself. I used to think that living inside of myself and thinking about myself from morning until night, constantly thinking about my own safety, happiness, and prosperity 24/7, was the best possible state I could be in. Now, it is possible to move into an external state where I am outside of myself mostly. I take care of my basic needs, but I live mostly outside of myself in higher values that are established by the upper force. I exist this way in the quality of bestowal, and for me, this tastes better than what I used to feel was the best taste in the world - which was constantly thinking about my own desire to receive. It is like a party environment where everyone is offering me different drinks and refreshments until I eventually get used to this, even if, to start with, I was not interested in this. So, when one exposes oneself to the wisdom of Kabbalah, even when one hears things one is not really interested in—like the names of Sefirot, spiritual worlds, for example—they gradually start working on the person from the inside. This produces an inner change, an inversion of values, and eventually, the person starts developing in this direction outside of oneself. The words we read in the wisdom of Kabbalah develop the vessels of the person’s soul, which vessels are actually outside one’s self. The person starts feeling that there is a vessel there. In the same way, we feel ourselves and our own vessels now; we will start feeling vessels and reality outside of ourselves. And when the five spiritual senses are complete in their development, we start living them eternally in the upper world. #kabbalahinfo
