Anshu Bahanda: Welcome to a new episode of Wellness Curated. This is your host, Anshu Bahanda. Welcome to the season, ‘Mystical Practices for Modern Minds.’ Today, we’re going to delve into Jewish mysticism—more specifically, the Kabbalah—and explore how we can incorporate it to enhance well-being in our daily lives. I’m going to start with a little story. So there was a village that had a beautiful garden in the middle of the village. But over time, the garden dried out and started falling apart. It became desolate—the earth cracked, and the stream dried up. And then one day, a little girl started looking after a little patch of the garden. She took a watering can and started watering it. People asked her, ‘What’s the point?’ And she said, ‘Maybe I will inspire other people to do the same.’ And sure enough, more and more people from the village started looking after the garden. And before you knew it, the garden was more beautiful than ever. And they mended the earth. The earth was beautiful. And that is the essence of “Tikkun Olam,” which is a Hebrew phrase that means that the earth was created a particular way and human beings are meant to mend it. That is the essence of the Kabbalah. To help us introduce the Kabbalah, we have two very special guests with us today. We have Dr Hyman M Schipper, who’s a professor and a neurologist, and he has a long-term interest in the interface of contemporary science and the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. We also have Gahl Eden Sasson, who’s an author and a teacher, and he brings together Kabbalah, astrology, and psychology in a very accessible and engaging way. Welcome to the chat, gentlemen, and thank you for taking the time to be here with us today.
Gahl Sasson: Thank you.
Dr Hyman Schipper: Thank you.
AB: So, Dr. Schipper, I’m going to start with you. Let’s start with the basics. Can you explain to me what the Kabbalah is and how it can help us with our well-being?
Dr HS: The Kabbalah is basically Jewish mysticism, and it originated 3,300 years ago when our tradition says that Moses received the Torah on Mount Sinai. And the Torah had two major components. There was a revealed Torah, which then became elaborated on as the Mishnah and the and the Gemara, which is the Talmud. But there was also an esoteric aspect of the Torah, which is the Kabbalah. And the difference is that the revealed Torah was passed on by Moses to the elders and from them to basically the entire nation of Israel. The Kabbalah, on the other hand, was passed on to highly selective individuals and from some Masters of the Kabbalah to their small, usually small numbers of disciples. And this chain has continued, to this day, [be] unbroken, but largely under the radar of general Torah scholarship. There have been episodes, periods, and epochs when some of the Jewish mysticism spread and permeated into the mainstream, such as in the second century with the writing of the Zohar. And then in the 16th century, in the Israeli city of Safed, there was an explosion of kabbalistic knowledge by Isaac Luria and many of his followers. Now, it is anticipated that as we encroach upon what is called the seventh millennium, which is within the next 215 or so years, there’s going to be a tremendous explosion of kabbalistic knowledge throughout the world, commensurate with some tremendous scientific discoveries that will complement the Kabbalah beautifully. And I’m already, I believe, seeing with the advent of quantum mechanics, relativity, and Bohemian mechanics, I am seeing conflation, which I’m publishing on, between ancient Kabbalistic wisdom and the cutting edges of contemporary physics. So this is sort of like a background of what the Kabbalah is. It’s based on certain profound principles. One of them is panentheism. Panentheism is the notion that God is both transcendent of his creation but also imminent within the creation. It’s both. [If it’s] either viewed alone that God is only transcendent or only imminent, which would be pantheism is anathema to orthodox Jewish thinking. Another important concept is that of, which is gaining favour now in many secular circles because of the failure, for example, of materialism to explain consciousness. The Kabbalah is panpsychist in its ontology.
AB: Thank you for explaining it so well. Gahl, I want to ask you. So you combine the Kabbalah with astrology and psychology, and you give us an example of how these different disciplines intersect. Tell me, how do you see it helping well-being?
GS: I mean, I think that first of all, even the term Kabbalah, because in the tradition coming from the Bible, for example, in the Bible there, I think 80 times when the author or the writer stops and explains the meaning of a name. I think the meaning of names is extremely important in the Bible, even though for people who read Hebrew, they say, ‘Of course I know what it means,’ but it kind of puts you into much more focus on the character and what the main theme of that character is. So it helps you navigate the story. And the same thing with Kabbalah. Kabbalah basically means in Hebrew, to accept, to receive, and you can’t receive without accepting. I mean, I can give you a gift, but if you don’t receive it there is no Kabbalah. When I look at Kabbalah, [I look at it] more as… Because I don’t come from a background of religion, I come more from… My family is more in science and more in technology. So for me, I had to always adjust my imagination growing up with that logic, you know. So for me, the idea of Kabbalah really helped me accept myself, accept the flaws of other people so I can receive the good things that they have to offer, so I can even prepare myself to give to the world what I have to offer. Because if you don’t accept yourself, you can’t give. So the whole idea of giving and receiving—it’s so fascinating for me because I see a lot of systems of mythology and systems of mysticism that take that oneness that we talked so much about here. You know, the. Panpsychism basically talks about is that it’s a way to access oneness, to understand that “the One” is everywhere, that you are the same as everyone else. You’re part of this oneness. So the whole concept of accepting yourself and accepting what “the One” gave you in order to share it with other people, I think, is really what the Kabbalah is all about. On the bottom level, it’s really helping you accept yourself. And I think that if you look at the history of Kabbalah, because I came to Kabbalah after I studied psychology, after studying history, I saw it’s fascinating because when I look [at it], because I love history, I looked at when the Kabbalah actually got a big boost, and you’ve heard it a few times already, it’s usually a time that was really terrible for at least the Jewish nation. If you go back all the way to Ma’aseh Merkabah, to the working of the chariots— the origin, maybe of the Kabbalah, we suspect is 586 BCE. And what happened around that time Nebuchadnezzar comes to Jerusalem and destroys the temple. What? How could that be? 500 years we were told that this is where God lives. Nobody can come to God’s place and take him out of there. Oops. Unless God is really everywhere. And here we have Ezekiel sitting there in Tel Aviv, not Tel Aviv that we know, but in Babylon by the rivers, where we sat and cried Bonnie M. songs, if you remember. So he sat there, he basically… Firstly, I really recommend reading the Bible. It’s amazing. But Ezekiel 1 is a fascinating chapter. You see God himself supposedly coming to Ezekiel. Ezekiel doesn’t have to go to Jerusalem, the only thing he needs to do is close his eyes and meditate. So the idea of mysticism is, okay, you had a physical place where you attributed God to. Now it’s gone. Don’t get caught in the cognitive dissonance. Overcome that. That’s precisely what we were talking about until now. There are paradoxes. Some of these paradoxes are cognitive dissonance that you have to overcome. And Kabbalah… What Kabbalah does, at least for me, and I assume for everybody else, is bring us back to oneness. Because living on this planet is a lot of time— yes, no, are you coming? Are you not coming? To be or not to be? You know, everything is kind of divided into two— masculine and feminine. Oh, this is unmasculine, [this is] not feminine. Right, left, Western, Eastern… You know. Come on, everything is split into two. But I understand because a lot of different systems break it into two. So what Kabbalah does, it brings us back to the Dao. How? By telling us that we have to strive to look into oneness. And the oneness can come inside of you. Another time that the Kabbalah got a big kick forward was after the destruction of the Second Temple, then after the Diaspora, even before, when the Jews were forced into ghettos, 11th, 12th century, [they were made to] wear funny hats and have patches on them to identify them. Bang. Kabbalah gets a big boost in Provence and then later in Spain, because people need a way back to “the One.” So I think for me, working with psychology, working with astrology, ultimately, yeah, we have 10 spheres, we have 12 signs, you know, we have two genders, whatever… Whatever you want back is basically manifestation of “the One.”
AB: So, Gahl, you’re saying that the true path to well-being is through oneness.
GS: I don’t think there’s any other way, unfortunately. It is the hardest way, but the most satisfying one. When we die, we go back there for a while, you know, to that oneness. It’s not a place, it’s an essence. And then we come back again, when people talk about the arrival of the Messiah, it’s the same thing.
AB: But Gahl, isn’t our whole purpose in life, to get to that oneness, even while we’re on this planet.
GS: Of course, I think that that’s the endgame. No, because, you know, that’s the whole end game. It’s like a computer game. And every… Even in the ‘Tree of Life,’ you have levels, you know, you have to get to the end game. The end game, you know, is the crown. And the crown leads you to the one, to nothingness, to emptiness, you know. That’s precisely what the mystics have been talking about so long. So that whole concept of ‘I versus you,’ ‘Us versus them,’ ‘human versus nature,’ is false. It just doesn’t. It’s not true. It’s an illusion. It’s a ‘Maya.’
AB: So exactly what you’re saying about oneness and interconnectedness, wouldn’t that cause like a perspective shift? If everyone believed… If everyone believed this…
GS: Oh my God, that would be amazing.
AB: Wouldn’t it cause a shift in the planet and the world, people’s relationships, the way the countries function, our role in the world, and our purpose in the world?
GS: No, then there will be no country. Why do you need a country? Why do you need a border?
AB: You won’t need laws. You won’t need a country.
GS: No. [And] you won’t have disease. That’s precisely what we’re talking about, is the age of Messiah. It’s not like a Messiah will come and touch us and suddenly we’re all good again. You saw what happened with the Matrix and that, you know, that doesn’t work. What does work is, all of us, are getting into that consciousness, that frame of mind. A lot of Kabbalists say that that’s, that’s the age of the Messiah, when everybody will be enough, close to that oneness to get that final push for us to be looking at things and saying, that thing is me, not because I’m egocentric, I’m a narcissistic and everything is me, [but] because everything shares that same oneness.
AB: Oh, wonderful. So that to you is the real connection between astrology, psychology and Kabbalah, is the fact that it’s all about getting back to the one?
GS: Precisely.
AB: So, Dr. Schipper, I want to ask you about the fact that Kabbalah is often associated with complex symbolism, esoteric concepts. So how can the average person start incorporating Kabbalistic principles in their everyday life for better well being, for a better quality of life?
Dr HS: Well, first, the Kabbalah is extremely complex and there are no shortcuts, really, unfortunately. And there are no quick fixes when it comes to the Kabbalah. It has to be done in a precise and orderly fashion. And the advice I would give is first to familiarise yourself with the appropriate texts. So the first thing to find is to familiarise yourself with the Bible. There are many good texts now, more and more available in other languages other than Hebrew and Aramaic, with which [you can] familiarise yourself with Kabbalistic concepts. And then, most importantly is to link [and] to ground your newfound knowledge of Kabbalah into ethics. It is extremely important that one lives a pure ethical life while considering the Kabbalah or practising the Kabbalah. It is dangerous or certainly disadvantageous to consider the Kabbalah concepts while doing things that are antithetical to the laws of the Torah.
AB: Okay, so in that case, Dr Schipper… I mean, you’re someone who has studied the brain, you know, being a neuroscientist, and you’ve studied Kabbalistic principles as well. So how do you think when one meditates or does mystical practices which are part of the Kabbalah, how does it affect the brain? What areas of the brain do you think get helped by the spiritual exercise? And have you tested it? Have you researched it?
Dr HS: Research, experimental research, can be applied to the scientific aspects of how the brain functions, but is not relevant to understanding, for example, consciousness as it would be studied through the Kabbalah or Advaita Vedanta or something. These are, in my opinion, not material, and therefore they don’t lend themselves to experimentation in the classical sense of the word. And which has led to a very unfortunate situation [in] the last couple of hundred years where there was so much movement towards materialism, logical positivism, that it completely ignored subjectivity to the point where some very prominent philosophers think that consciousness is an epiphenomenon or an illusion. But to answer your question more directly, there are aspects of the brain that are activated during meditative experiences, mystical experiences. So I do see remarkable parallelisms between neuroscience and Kabbalah, except [with] the Kabbalah, we cannot prove it in a laboratory.
AB: Thank you for that. Gahl, I want to ask you as well, about people who are sceptical about spiritual experiences and how it can affect their lives. Can you give us some practical, real world benefits to studying the Kabbalah?
GS: I think studying anything that makes you think outside of the box and back to that oneness is very, very important. So I don’t know how to, you know, I deal with quite a lot of sceptics because I do astrology, and it tends to attract more women. They come and then they send their husbands, because I’m very pragmatic and practical with my advice, because that’s the kind of advice that I want. And then they come, you know, the guys, and usually they sit with, like, these folded hands. They’re going back, or they’re thinking I don’t know why I’m here. So I’m used to working with these kinds of, you know, you mentioned Jacob. It’s like wrestling with the angel, you know, with these guys. And what I’ve noticed is that everybody is really open to it— it’s just that they have what in Kabbalah they call klipot or shells, you know, like to get to the orange, you have to peel it off. My grandmother from Turkey used to take these shells, these caskets, you can say, and put it with a lot of sugar and make really good treats from it. So you can always do something with the klipot. They’re not always evil. I’m sure you can recycle them or something. But I really think that… First of all, it’s fascinating what Dr Schipper was talking about before because, you know, the idea that when you meditate or when you experience this oneness and when you do work with the, with the parts of the brain that connects you to the oneness, you don’t need so much blood. And for me, it’s almost like you’re living off another source. You know, blood is the material way of running the machine.
AB: Yeah. It’s like the transactional way of functioning.
GS: Yeah, it’s fossil fuel, you know, it’s dirty. It’s dirty energy. It demands going to the bathroom, it demands eating, it demands destroying the earth, blah, blah, blah. When we get to tap into that higher place, that crown, then we don’t need that fossil fuel. We can live over solar, we can live off of other sources of energy. It’s almost like a proof to tell us that we are, as they say, half human, half divine, you know; that we have that essence, that we have 98% monkey, but 2% divine, you know, in a sense. So I don’t… I think that the best way to tell sceptics to do something or to connect to something is just to try to do it and see if it works for them. You know, with Kabbalah, of course, it demands quite a lot of energy to get into. It’s not like something… It’s like a Shaolin temple. You have to sit outside in the rain for a long time before they even let you in to clean the floor. So intellectually speaking, that’s what happens in Kabbalah. It doesn’t mean that they’re going to lock you out, they’re not like that. They’re just going to say, ‘Yeah, come in. But it’s going to take you a few lifetimes to understand what we’re talking about.’ It’s okay. I think that it’s always really important to try. And for me, any kind of path to Kabbalah, of course it goes through the traditional ways of learning it, but to prepare yourself for whatever it is you’re doing, I really recommend meditation. And even if you meditate 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day, that’s your connection. And after that, that’s your plug. You’re getting into the grid, you’re getting into… you’re getting online. And then after that, you can decide which server you want to go to. You know, some people go to yoga, some people go to Daoism, some people go to Kabbalah. Now, the thing about Kabbalah, which is really interesting, think about it. Why Kabbalah? You know, I thought about it a lot. From about the 13th-14th century, something really interesting happened in Europe. A lot of the alchemists of Islam and Christianity are starting to study Kabbalah. They spell it with the Q, they spell it with a C. But why would these people take on the magical system of the underdogs, of the people that we rape and kill and destroy, and they’re supposed to be the losers that have no power? What is it about Kabbalah that drew so many people into it, even though it was forbidden by the Inquisition, by the way? The Inquisition didn’t do anything to Jews who studied Kabbalah. They did it to Jews that converted the new Christians or to Christians who dared to study Kabbalah. That’s where the Inquisition went after. And yet people did it, even if the punishment was to have your family burn in front of you. Why? What is it about Kabbalah? Now think about the word abracadabra, abracadabra, you say in English. Abracadabra means you’re going to make. It basically means I shall create. It’s like your enter [key] on the computer, you know, you write an email, nobody got it. You click send, okay, everybody got it but you can’t retrieve it. That’s what abracadabra is. Abracadabra is— whatever I’m saying, let it now manifest. Because I say a lot of things. I’ll say things God knows. Like my mother used to say, ‘Don’t walk here, I’ll kill you.’ She didn’t really want to kill me, but if she said, ‘Don’t walk there, I’m doing a sponge, like, I’m cleaning the room;’ Abracadabra— I would probably sleep and die. So what is it about Kabbalah that drew so many people? Because what is magic? Magic is something out of nothing, transformation of life. And that’s one of the beautiful things I found in Kabbalah. Because Kabbalah tells you, listen, creation came out of that vacuum, out of that nothingness. How can you get into that space of emptiness with your head, which is basically meditation, in order to create what you want? Again, we were talking here about how God sees us as some form of partner, co-creators. Think about the word— the most popular word on the planet is amen. Amen is something all Jews, Christians and Muslims say at the end of prayer. Already covered by a few billion people. What is amen? Tell me? When I ask people what is amen? And people say, ‘Oh, it means faith.’ Oh yeah, it has the same root as ‘emuna’— faith. But wait, it also means an artist, Oman, a creator. Because what is the most powerful profession on the planet? The same profession as God, creation. So what Kabbalah tells us is it gives us a way to help God create, to become godlike, what they call in Latin Imitatio Dei— imitating God. And that’s what we really have to work on, become more and more like God. Create. Add to the universe. That’s why we’re here, to participate in the story of creation.
AB: Before the chat, tell us a little bit about how you have married Kabbalah, astrology and psychology?
GS: Oh no, I haven’t married them. They were married way before I was alive. No, no, I mean first of all, astrology and Kabbalah are very linked. You know, when I published my book on Kabbalah, the only feedback I got from Simon and Schuster research was: ‘Where did you come up with the fact that Judaism believes in reincarnation? We can’t find it anywhere.’ And I was so shocked by it that I didn’t even know where to look. Now how do you prove something, how do you know people breathe? How do you prove that? You know, so astrology and the Zohar is full of astrology. They believe that Abraham was the first astrologer, you know. There is actual information about how people came to see him, you know, stood outside his tent and in the Zohar it’s full of astrology. And astrology basically is the old psychology. So even Jung, after studying astrology and helping create psychology, said psychology has much more to learn from her older sister than astrology. Because I think that anybody that wanted to be a psychologist before Freud, became an astrologer, you know, so they’re very, very connected. So unfortunately I can’t take any kind of praise for that.
AB: So do people who practise Kabbalah, and this is a question for both of you, do they necessarily believe in astrology as well?
GS: I don’t think so, but I don’t know, maybe you can answer.
Dr HS: No, I don’t think so. I think, just like magic in general is acknowledged by the Kabbalah to have a reality to it, but it dissuades the average person to engage it directly— magic. Astrology also is mentioned in Kabbalah. I don’t think… The people I know who delve into Kabbalah, I’m not sure how much emphasis they put on the astrological cycles. They may study it, but I’m not sure how much practical significance it has for at least my teachers in Kabbalah.
AB: Dr Schipper, I want to ask you something, something you said earlier. You said there’s a whole process and there’s a system to studying the Kabbalah, is that right? So what I want to ask you is, is there any advice that you can give people if they’re just getting interested in it, which will help them with their well-being? Is there any practice of the Kabbalah that you feel will really help people that everyone should know about?
Dr HS: Well, I think just familiarising oneself with the main concepts would be a very, very good place to start. Either by reading appropriate texts or there’s a lot of online material, [like] people talking about the concepts of the Kabbalah and becoming more familiar with things like interinclusion, interpenetration, enclosement. These are all concepts that you should first know that they exist, [because] most people don’t know that these concepts exist. For example, interinclusion, it’s a term that most people won’t be able to define. But what it is the idea that every single thing in creation has ensconced within it. All of creation. It’s a hologram. But the Kabbalists didn’t know about holography until Dennis Gabor invented the hologram in the middle of the 20th century. And yet for thousands of years they talked about interinclusion, hitkallelut in Hebrew and in the Eastern meditative traditions. To me it’s no different than Indra’s Net, where each jewel of the net has reflected all the jewels of the universe. It’s a concept that you can maybe start to familiarise yourself with, but more importantly is to try to see it in your everyday life. Try to see interinclusion. Try to see that there’s a mini Hyman Schipper in every other person I’ve ever met. And it’s more revealed in people who are close to me, like my spouse and my children who come closer to revelation in the hologram than it is in a stranger and somebody who, like, I’ve never met; that there is a small Hyman Schipper in there somewhere, but I’m not in contact with it. If you’re really motivated to understand the Kabbalah, it is to persevere and not to give up. Because the universe according to the Kabbalah is not neutral. It responds, it talks to you. It’s alive. There’s life, panpsychism, there’s consciousness in absolutely everything. Everything.
AB: Yes. And Gahl, I want to also ask you about your book before we go— Shedding Shadows: The Astrology of 2025. How much did you talk about the Kabbalah in it?
GS: I mean, I think that I see everything in the prism of Kabbalah. So I will definitely mention an example there. The book is more about astrology for next year. And the sub-title basically is all about how our job is to be able to, next year at least, have the atmosphere or the ability to peel off things that we don’t want. It’s almost like we’re going to an open soul surgery next year because of certain things that are happening. Some of the good things, for example, are something we have called the dragon. It’s actually mentioned in Sefer Yetzirah. The dragon is moving into Pisces. Pisces— it’s associated, for example, in the Bible with Joseph and the multicoloured coat. It has to do with mysticism and dreams and interpretation of dreams and really diving deep into imagination. So it’s a very interesting year. But yeah, we first have to finish this one, which is not over yet.
AB: But, Dr Schipper, before we go, I want to ask you something that you referred to earlier during our conversation. You said that science and the Kabbalah very nicely complement each other, and they come together very nicely. Are there times when you find that they’re against each other, that what is said in the Kabbalah and what you believe as a neuroscientist are at odds with each other?
Dr HS: Well, as I alluded to already— prior to the 20th century, there were many, many examples where there’s a collision between Torah concepts as elaborated, let’s say, in the Talmud and scientific principles. But that is changing since the advent of quantum physics and relativity. I already mentioned one example where quantum mechanics is very accepting of the idea of ontic paradox, where things can be both a particle and a wave, for example, and The Kabbalah has been discussing paradoxes of this type for millennia. So I’m not saying there’s a perfect fit. There’s always going to be room for further improvement, but I think we’re heading in that direction. There’s much more conflation between these traditions, scientific and kabbalistic traditions today than there was a hundred years ago. Tremendous.
AB: Fascinating. That was amazing. Sorry, Gahl, you were saying something.
GS: There is a funny story. I don’t remember where it is. Maybe you know where it’s from. Where in Kabbalah they tell us, or in the tradition they tell us that when you’re born as a baby, you know everything there is to know, because you just came out of “The One,” right? But then an angel of God comes to you and the angel of God has a finger of fire and he tells you ‘Shhh…’ and puts his finger on your mouth so that you don’t tell anybody that you know everything. And that’s why we have this little palette here. And if you don’t have a palette, it means you know everything. And you can go ask that person whatever you want to ask because the angel skipped him somehow. But that idea really is… And then I thought, well, I can think about another thing. You know, you’re not allowed to touch a baby in there, in the top of their head because it hasn’t closed, right? That’s a physical manifestation of something much bigger. This is their crown in the tree of life. If you put it, you put it on the body, this is the crown. The baby’s crown is open. It’s receiving complete information. You can’t disturb this highway, this, this like link, this infrastructure of communication. As they get closer, more and more, almost like after the three months, then you can touch them here. But they lost some of their connection. And there is a beautiful story that happened to me when I studied astrology in Mexico. And one day the lady, one of the ladies, came back very distraught. What happened? She just had a baby. She had a baby who’s 1 month, 2 months old. And then she had a toddler who was 3 years old. She comes back and she says something really eerie happened. What happened? We have this monitor in the middle of the night. We hear that the three year old toddler gets up, shakes the cradle of the baby and tells him, “Talk to me of God that I already forgot— ya lo olvidé”, he tells him in Spanish.
AB: Wow.
GS: And I got so many goosebumps when I heard this. And I said, this is the proof of God. That’s it. Because this three year old cannot lie in the middle of the night to wake up, to go to that other kid that has the line still connected to shake him, to wake him up and to tell him to talk about God because he’s a newcomer and I already forgot. I mean, oh my God, I almost cried and I thought, this is for me the biggest revelation of my life. The proof of God. That was for me, the proof of God. Not Descartes, but him.
AB: Amazing. That was such an amazing story. And thank you so much, Gahl. And thank you Dr Schipper. I’ve just enjoyed this episode so much. I learned a little bit about what you’re both thinking, a little bit about the Kabbalah and it’s just fascinating.
Dr HS: Thank you so much for having us. It was a wonderful experience for me.
GS: Thanks a lot for putting us together and creating this triangle of knowledge
AB: To my listeners, I hope this conversation has sparked your interest in the Kabbalah, in learning more about it, and finding peace, balance and well-being in your life. Thank you for being here with us today. Can I please request you to go and subscribe to Wellness Curated on the podcast channels and Wellness Curated by Anshu Bahanda on YouTube? We would like to get you more and more episodes for free and we request you to just subscribe to our channels. Thank you so much. See you next time.