Qabbalah: The Philosophical Writings of Solomon Ben Yehudah Ibn Gebirol - Paperback

The investigation of the antiquity and content, of the Qabbalah and Zoharic writings, has been neglected by the learned, and, has been almost wholly ignored by the writers of this century. To the student of the origin of religions or their philosophy, a study of the Hebrew Qabbalah and of the Zohar is of great value and importance, and has not received the attention it justly merits and demands. The Qabbalistic system, when truly searched for, contemplated, and understood; opens her arms, and from its great height in the Unknown Essence of the Supreme Deity, the Eternal Boundless One, to its depth, in the lowest materialism' of evil; gives an opportunity for the reception, and acquisition of the grandest and noblest ideas, to the highest and most subtile order of religious spiritual thought. The nearest approach that man can make to the unseen, is that inner communion which works silently in his soul but which cannot be expressed in absolute language nor by any words, which is beyond all formulations into word symbolism yet is on the confines of it and the unknown spiritual world. This is conceptualism. We experience these feelings only in our hearts and inner thoughts, that which strikes our consciences as right or wrong comes unbidden to us and without any logical sequence, is like a dream. The more intensely man feels the highest intellectuality, the more thoroughly does his spirit enter into this spiritual communion and the more difficult it is to express to others, these emotions and this undefined consciousness, this converse with another world; formulate them, express them, in words; and we draw them down to a gross, dark and material plane. Silence, meditation, intercommunion with self, this is the nearest approach to the invisible. They are sublimations. Many of our ideas are only negations, the Highest Deity is clothed, as to Its essence and appearance, in darkness to the finite thought. Yet even these negations are affirmations and we only leave the opposition to the negation, a condition to our thoughts, of vagueness and uncertainty. There is a spiritual body and there is a natural body," but this does not take us out of the material-world, a spirit can only be conceived of as something vague, dim, in opposition to matter, yet the inner motor of us, is spirit.