Get the Point?

In one of my seminars I asked everyone to look around the room and point to beauty. The first interesting result was that everyone pointed to something different. One man pointed to his wife. Another man pointed to a flower. A woman named Bea pointed to a glass menorah (a Hanukkah candelabra) that was sitting on a windowsill. I asked Bea how she saw beauty in that menorah. Did she see beauty with her physical eyes? “Well,” she answered, “the glass is translucent and its delicacy has an ethereal quality. The shape is pleasing to the eye and because it is glass you can see the blue sky through it.” But that was only her intellect giving meaning to the raw data of what she was seeing. Really, her physical eyes could only see glass molded into a nine-pronged shape. It was her soul that saw beauty, and knew that it was beauty.

Another man, named Herb, pointed to a ray of sunlight shining on the white stone floor. “You think that’s beauty?” I asked Herb. “That’s just photons bouncing off minerals. What made you see beauty?”

Beauty is a Divine quality, one of the sefirot. We see it with the eyes of the soul. The incomprehensible is manifest in the comprehensible experience of beauty. Endless divine presence is experienced through the quality of beauty expressed in that finite light ray bouncing off that finite stone floor.

Then I asked the seminar participants to point to the quality of power. Jackie pointed to a painting hanging in the room. We all acknowledged that it was a powerful picture. But how did we know that? It was just canvass with lines and forms painted on it. The eyes of the soul see power. Sometimes we meet a powerful person. We know this person is powerful, because our soul perceives the manifestation of intrinsic power, another one of the sefirot, even if the person is just sitting drinking a cup of tea.

Now close your eyes and picture love. What do you see? Perhaps you picture a mother kissing her baby. Again, what part of you recognizes that as love? Your physical eyes see only a big creature pressing moist lips on the cheek of a little creature. But your soul knows that that is love.

When you see life, beauty, power, love, you are seeing God. This is because God is life, although we can‘t say that life is God, because God is not just life, He is also beauty, power, truth, wisdom, kindness, justice and more. And even if you added them all together, you could not say that God is the sum total of these qualities. God is the whole greater than the parts, before there were any parts. In fact all the parts are simple partial manifestations of divinity.

Learn more about the sefirot in Seeing God: Ten Life-Changing Lessons of the Kabbalah

Leave a Reply