Any serious tradition arrives with more material than a person can use. Names, exercises, correspondences, rites, diagrams, a reading list that gets longer the more of it you finish. And every item on it is genuinely interesting, which is the problem.
This is a teacher looking at his own students and saying plainly that the size of the tradition is what is defeating them. Not their laziness and not their unworthiness — the sheer number of things there are to do. So the question is worth asking as a practical one about a week. There are a hundred practices. Which do you actually do?
The instruction is given without any softening, and it is framed as a necessity rather than as advice. Students are encouraged to cut their spiritual activities to what can be termed essentials, and there is really no choice as far as this is concerned.1
The reason given is arithmetic rather than moral. One cannot hope to achieve anything of relevance if attention is diverted into too many directions.1 Nothing is said about discipline or seriousness, and nobody is accused of dabbling.
Which is worth noting, because the usual version of this instruction is a rebuke. Here it is a statement about how attention works. It would apply just as much to somebody working extremely hard on nine things at once.
Then the diagnosis, and it names the tradition itself as the difficulty. The problem with Kabbalah, as well as the whole of the Western Mystery Tradition, is that its doctrines cover an extensive domain.1
What a large domain does to a reader is described exactly. These doctrines will keep your attention moving along all sorts of lines, which is not a failure of the material. A rich tradition is supposed to keep offering you the next thing.
And the correction is a single distinction, which is the most portable line here. Eventually you must move away from what is interesting to what is relevant in your life at any moment in time.1 Interesting and relevant are not the same measure. A tradition of this size will supply the first indefinitely, and never mention the second.
The observation about students is unflattering and it is specific. Looking at people interested in the esoteric in general, one finds that they flounder a lot — not actively concerned with the Now, but more involved with what was and what could be.2
Then the picture of what floundering actually consists of. To sit for hours, days and years wondering what should I do? or what should I be actively involved in? is definitely the wrong approach.2
Note the units. Not hours of indecision, which everybody has. Years, spent on the question of what to take up, by people who are reading and thinking the whole time and would never describe themselves as idle.
Before any correction, the motives get stated generously and without irony. Numerous people, perhaps the majority of humanity, want to be better than they are at present.2
The list of what draws people to this material is given in full, and none of it is treated as unworthy. Most of us got involved with Kabbalah and magic because we want to expand our consciousness, grow, and have more authority and power over our lives. More ability, and to function better as human beings on physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual levels.2
And the higher end of it is included in the same breath. Most people venturing into this domain are seeking to realise God, and to affect the world around us for the better. All of us commence this journey with very noble intentions, looking at the wonderful techniques the tradition offers.2 Power over your life and realising God are put in one list. No suggestion is made anywhere that one of them is the respectable version.
The turn comes at a specific moment, and it is described as a collision rather than a decision. Eventually you bump against your own self, and realise the time has arrived when choices must be made.3 Nothing external forces it. You are what you run into.
The alternative is stated with a shrug at the tradition's own size. You must get down to brass tacks or else flounder eternally, trying every single method available — of which there are far too many in any case.3 A teacher inside a tradition saying it contains too many methods is not a small remark.
Which produces the working rule: you have to find what is suitable and relevant to yourself and your needs.3 And a consequence follows that most traditions would not permit. Many of the traditional rites and sacred ceremonies have to be rewritten, to get people personally and actively involved rather than listening to a barrage of words while their minds wander.3 Everybody should apply their energies and participate.
Then the condition under which words are worth anything at all. They are fine only if an inner response is invoked within your own being, through intense focus and meditation on their meanings and intentions. You have to literally feel meanings rather than think them.3
The last move puts the reader's own position on the Tree. Study and practice are the two opposing Pillars — respectively the receptive and the applicative sides of life experience.4
Both are required for the real awakening of truth. Then the question is turned back on the reader with no answer supplied: are you really ready enough to apply knowledge effectively at this juncture? Even if practical activity is urgently required, will your actions be really effective?4
And the recommendation given is not a practice from the syllabus at all. Everyone commencing, whether of the theoretical or practical variety, should start by taking a closer look at the Shadow side of their natures, the Laws pertaining to it, and then attempt to sort and balance their personal natures.4 Before any of the material, the work is on the person who would be doing it. That is the actual first instruction in the whole practical half of this tradition.
You have more practices available than you will ever run, and you want to know which ones.
Start by sorting your list into interesting and relevant, since that is the distinction offered. Interesting is what you want to read about. Relevant is what bears on the thing actually going wrong in your life this month, and a large tradition will supply the first forever without ever mentioning the second.
Then notice whether you are in what-was and what-could-be, because that is the named failure. Sitting for years on what should I be doing is not preparation, and the tell is that the question never resolves however much you read. The instruction is to be actively concerned with the Now, which here means picking something and starting.
Then apply the feeling test to any words you use. A rite, a psalm, a name, a formula — if no inner response is invoked in you, the words are doing nothing, however correct they are. Feel the meanings rather than think them, and rewrite the thing if that is what it takes to get yourself actively involved.
And take the Shadow instruction as the actual first step rather than as a preliminary. What gets recommended to everybody arriving, theoretical or practical, is not an exercise from the tradition. It is sorting and balancing your own nature, and that is offered as the thing to do before the syllabus, not alongside it.
This is a teacher's observation of his own students rather than doctrine, and it should be read at that weight. Nothing here is derived from a text. Nothing here needs to be, either, which is part of why it lands.
Its strength is that it is a criticism of the tradition made from inside it. There are far too many methods in the book is a real admission, and many traditional rites have to be rewritten is a substantial claim about authority coming from somebody who is transmitting those rites.
Tension left open. The instruction is to find what is suitable and relevant to yourself and your needs, and no test is given for what counts as relevant. A person floundering for years among a hundred methods is precisely a person who cannot tell, and telling them to select is not obviously help.
🚩 PRACTITIONER SOURCE. 🚩 The claim about what most of humanity wants is offered with the qualification I am not in a position to speak for every person on this planet and no evidence at all. 🚩 The Shadow recommendation is made here and the material supporting it comes later, so the instruction arrives before its grounds.
Permission to rewrite the rites sits oddly beside the position taken at the start of this body of work. There, the whole point of mekubal is a tradition received — a person who has been given something intact, and who is warranted precisely by not having invented it.
Here the same tradition's ceremonies are to be rewritten by practitioners so as to be more relevant and effective for them. Those two can coexist, and the reconciliation would have to run through a distinction between the doctrine and its delivery.
But nothing states it, and the risk is one the earlier material is very alert to elsewhere. A rite rewritten for personal relevance, by somebody who has just been told the tradition holds far too many methods, is one step from a practice assembled entirely out of preference. That is what the whole authentic Kabbalah framing exists to rule out. The permission is given and the boundary on it is not.
When Nothing's Certain, Go to the Stories You Know You Can Tell — business.
Three separate moments across three decades of one career, and the same move each time. After the debut, uncertain how to follow it, she went back to songwriting. After a public critical drubbing, uncertain whether the work was being taken seriously, back to songwriting. After a pop era that had run its course, uncertain what came next, back to songwriting.
Every crisis gets resolved identically: strip away whatever else was being tried, and return to the skill that was never actually in question. Not the spectacle, not the image, not the genre. The one capability that everything else had been built on top of.
Which supplies the test this page is missing. Find what is suitable and relevant to yourself is the whole instruction here, and it is given to somebody who has already spent years unable to decide. The career case answers it with something checkable: the essential is not the thing that feels most promising, it is the thing you have already come back to after every detour.
And that inverts the method. You do not work out what is essential and then commit to it, which is the deciding problem all over again. You look backwards at your own record and find what you returned to three times without planning to. The one honest difference is that a career has an outside signal — the work exists, it sells, it lands — and a solitary practice has none. That is exactly why the floundering is the default here and not there, and why the test has to be built out of your own history rather than out of anybody's results.
Sharpest implication. The obstacle named is not doubt, laziness or unworthiness. It is that the tradition is too large, and a rich tradition will keep supplying interesting things forever — so the more genuinely good the material is, the more reliably it produces students who never begin.
Generative questions.