The Kabbalah of Light

Auteur

Catherine Shainberg, Ph.D., is a renowned teacher, healer, psychologist, and dream and imagery expert. She is the lineage holder for the Kabbalah of Light, as transmitted to her by Colette Aboulker-Muscat, revered kabbalist and teacher, whose mother was a Sheshet, and with whom Shainberg spent 10 years of intense study in Jerusalem and an additional 20 years in collaboration. In 1982 she founded the School of Images, dedicated to teaching the techniques of this ancient tradition. The author of Kabbalah and the Power of Dreaming and DreamBirth, she conducts imagery and dreaming workshops internationally and at the nine International Schools of Imagery she created around the world.

Texte du rabat

In this step-by-step guide to kabbalistic practices to connect with your natural inner genius and liberate the light within you, Catherine Shainberg reveals how to tap instantly into the subconscious and receive answers to urgent questions.

Résumé
• Shares 159 short exercises and practices to tap instantly into your subconscious mind and receive answers to your most important questions

• Explains how to dialogue with and understand the imagery and metaphors that arise during these practices

• Offers powerful practices to discover your areas of “stuckness” and quickly clear them, thus releasing past traumas and ancestral patterns and freeing the flow of the imagination for enhanced creativity and joy in life

In this step-by-step guide to kabbalistic practices to connect with your natural inner genius and liberate the light within you, Catherine Shainberg reveals how to tap instantly into the subconscious and receive answers to urgent questions. This method, called the Kabbalah of Light, originated with Rabbi Isaac the Blind of Posquieres (1160-1235) and has been passed down by an ancient kabbalistic family, the Sheshet of Gerona, in an unbroken transmission spanning more than 800 years.

The modern lineage holder of the Kabbalah of Light, Shainberg shares 159 short experiential exercises and practices to help you begin dialoguing with your subconscious through images. The images that pop up during these practices are unexpected and revelatory, and she discusses how to open them to greater understanding. At first, they may show you aspects of yourself you don’t like. But seeing them serves as both a diagnosis and a direct path to transformation. Fast and simple, the practices can help you discover your areas of “stuckness,” release past traumas and ancestral patterns, free the imagination, and open the way to the bliss promised us in the Garden of Eden.

Beginning this fertile dialogue with your inner world leads you to uncover your soul’s purpose and manifest your dreams in this world. Once your inner dream world and outer reality have merged, you will be able to see your superconscious--your soul’s ­blueprint--and experience the ecstatic illumination of a heart-centered life.

Échantillon de lecture
From the Introduction

This book is about the unconscious. Later I will call it the subconscious. There is a reason for this, which I will explain shortly. How is it possible to write a book about something that, if we take its name at face value, is unknowable? As I am writing, I am using words, a conscious language related to the activities of a much more recent brain development called the neo-cortex. But at the same time, many of my body functions are operating sub rosa, unbeknownst to my conscious mind. We have two brains, two different ways of processing our reality. Our more ancient brain is referred to as our reptilian brain. The two brains are like fire and water. Why has the unconscious received such a bad rap? This antagonism is not new. Joseph’s brothers, the Hebrew Bible relates, wanted to kill him because he was a dreamer. The ancient Greeks portrayed Apollo, the sun god, as transpiercing with his arrow of light, the womb-like darkness of the cave of the Pythia, keeper of messages from the unconscious. Thereafter Apollo, the clear light of the conscious mind, ruled over Delphi.

The conscious mind is naturally antagonistic to the unconscious. It prides itself on its precise observation and objectivity. It likes to separate, analyze, categorize. It uses its powerful logical thrust to establish scientific proof of things that it calls “facts.” This chair, this table, the sea are facts of the reality we live in. Facts depend on hypotheses, such as the types of questions we ask ourselves, and the points of view from which we perceive and examine them. Our dearly held certainties may shift and change when new questions and new hypotheses emerge. Ask Albert Einstein if the table is really solid, and he may say that also being pure energy, it is both a solid and not a solid at all. The sea is blue, but the ancient Greeks saw it wine red. Blue was not a “fact” in the time of Homer. The world was geocentric until Copernicus proved otherwise. A scientist will describe the rose as having a stem, thorns, leaves, petals, pistils, coloring and scent, which are different aspects of a totality of experience, which only the unconscious gives access to. The unconscious has no hypotheses, it is a cauldron of swirling experiences. Tap into it, and up pops a dream image. The unconscious deals only in revelation, and revelation, being an experience, is, by definition, true. If I turn a corner and am suddenly faced with a blazing sunset over the ocean, my heart moves not to the “fact” of the sunset, but to the wondrous experience. The conscious mind deals in facts, the unconscious deals in truth.

To get to the truth of what you really want, you’re going to have to tap into the unconscious. The unconscious runs the show, and this is a “fact” verified by many tests conducted by experimental psychologists and researchers. Some researchers go so far as to say that the unconscious runs 95 percent of our body functions. It is a “fact” that our carefully analyzed and agonized choices are mostly decided by the unconscious. Our creative innovations rise up, fully formed from the unconscious, and yet most of us have no clue how to access this great power. Unlike the conscious mind, the unconscious cannot be worked out, analyzed, or pinned down, it can only be received. It will come in whatever form it chooses. Kabbalah, which means receiving, is the science of letting the unconscious speak.

To learn who you are, to discover your hidden motivations, and to speak to your body and cells, you will have to leave behind what you perceive as the safe shores of the conscious mind. Can you trust the unconscious? There lies the rub. Most of us don’t see its value because we confuse our visions with fantasy. But fantasy is the contrary of “true imagination” as William Blake liked to call it. Fantasy is a product of your conscious mind seizing upon your brain’s capacity to make images, and twisting them to suit its purpose. Suppose you desperately want to believe this very handsome man (or woman) who is married to your best friend is really interested in you. You fantasize about the person overcoming many obstacles to come to you, including getting rid of their partner. You visualize the person finally embracing you, and now both of you are riding off into the sunset. This has nothing to do with the truth. Unfortunately, many of the visualizations taught today trade in fantasy. You are told what to see. While that may be entertaining, it is not transformative.

The unconscious is the source of all creativity. How to tap into your creativity, dialogue with your images, and trigger transformation is the subject of this book. There is a methodology to it that is as precise as anything science pertains to be. The Celts’ …