Accessing the Higher Powers of Manifestation Through Kabbalah

The manifestation process consists of the steps involved in bringing about a condition. You can manifest a new car, a new hairdo, a new waistline, a new flower in your garden. You can manifest more business, a bad cough, a divorce. You can manifest a new pair of shoes, a crying child, an empty stomach. You can manifest a new mate, a new nation, a dirty carpet. You can manifest a balloon, a home in the mountains, a poem. What you manifest is up to you, to a great extent.

The more aligned you are with your spiritual purpose in life, the more powerfully you can manifest. Also, the more deliberately you deny your spiritual purpose, the more powerfully you can manifest. Denying your spiritual purpose draws energy out of goodness. Aligning with your spiritual purpose nurtures goodness and empowers it in the world. You have the choice of your energy source. To the wise, it only makes sense to manifest with the power of goodness, instead of against the power of goodness, because as you diminish goodness your life grows cold, dark, and empty, no matter what you manifest.

The Kabbalah Tree of Life portrays the Divine Manifestation Process, how God manifests existence into form. Each of the 10 Divine Emanations of the Tree conveys a particular type of power that moves the manifestation process forward. The tenth emanation, represented at the base of the Tree, represents the fruit or final stage of the manifestation process, what appears as physical form. The top of the Tree, occupied by the first emanation, called Crown, represents the power of Divine Will that begins the manifestation process.

The power of Divine Will is unstoppable. Divine Will provides human beings with our power of intention. We too can set the manifestation process in motion by intending to make something happen. However, we have been given a certain degree of free will. God Wills only for the highest good. As we dedicate ourselves to leading lives more completely aligned with goodness (as perceived through our hearts in a state of awareness), we access more and more of the infinite power of Divine Will in alignment with our own.

The second emanation of the Tree, called Wisdom, conveys the power of Divine Wisdom. Think of this as the ultimate, absolute level of utter wisdom. Think of it as perfect wisdom. We humans have a certain measure of wisdom ourselves, and the more wisdom we seek, the more we find. Our level of access to divine wisdom guides us in all of our choices. As we will the highest good, we access more of God's perfect wisdom to guide us in our choices, and, ultimately, everything we say, think, feel and do comes down to a choice. Your present condition of life is the manifestation of your choices.

The third emanation, called Understanding, conveys the power of insight. This power enables you to learn what you need to learn to manifest what you want to manifest. Here we get into specific forms. While there are certain universal principles we all must follow to manifest a given condition, like the principle that you reap what you sow, particular manifestation processes require particular knowledge and understanding. For instance, to be an effective salesperson requires knowledge and abilities that differ from, say, painting portraits. There are always shared aspects of knowledge and skill, but there are also unique aspects. Divine Understanding sees into the very core of existence, the Ultimate Truth. The more you align with fulfilling your spiritual purpose in the world, which amounts to doing all the good that you can do, the more you empower your understanding to see deeper into the matters most pertinent to you.

The fourth emanation conveys the power of grace, and it is known as Mercy. It represents God's ultimate gift to you, which is the gift of your existence, including your opportunity to work your way into the limitless light of pure existence. Through this emanation you receive those fortuitous experiences called "luck" in your manifestation process. Things seem to just work out. Gifts, assistance, answers come to you "from out of the blue". This emanation motivates you to be generous, charitable, forgiving, kind. It inspires you to trust in the goodness of whatever happens. It uplifts you with optimism. All of that figures into the manifestation process. This emanation helps you to continue moving forward in the manifestation of what you intend, even when it looks bleak. It gives you some lucky breaks along the way to help you to trust in the unexpected, to believe in the positive possibilities no matter what.

A word about the general structure of the Tree is now in order. The lower emanations operate as supports for the upper emanations in a very important way. For instance, staying centered in the power of the fourth emanation, which is basically your power to trust in things working out the way you want them to, permits you to stay open to the higher powers of understanding, wisdom, and will in manifesting what you want. More on the ways the lower emanations support the higher ones later.

The fifth emanation, called Justice or Rigor, transmits the force of justice into the universe. That force is always at work in everyone's life. It expresses itself as the law of reaping what you sow. If you want to reap apples, don't sow watermelons. If you want to reap goodness, don't sow cruelty. Whatever happens to you is a manifestation of justice operating in your life. Divine justice rules the universe as surely as the power of gravity operates here on earth. As you align with the power of true justice you bring about what you really want. When you face adversity, ask yourself the question: "What can I learn and how can I improve to bring about what I want?" Real justice is not about judging yourself or anyone else as bad or wrong. It is more mathematical than that. It is more about engineering. "What am I doing to bring this upon myself and what do I need to do to bring something else upon myself?" The attitude expressed by that question aligns you with the higher power of Divine Justice, which brings greater power into your manifestation process. Emotionally judging yourself, others, or your circumstances as bad or wrong draws the power out of your manifestation process, or it draws the power of goodness out of it.

The sixth emanation is, in a sense, the most important to the manifestation process. It is called Beauty because beauty functions as a channel through which the higher, heavenly powers flow into manifestation. This is the sphere of access. As you dedicate yourself to living a life that contributes to the beauty, goodness, and truth in the world (and in yourself), you access higher powers of justice, grace, wisdom, understanding and intention to carry out the manifestation process for you. The central emanation in the structure of the Tree, beauty conveys the power of love you feel in your heart. The key to your access to bringing higher power into your manifestation process is living a centered, balanced, harmonious life in loving connection with your heart. Whatever your circumstances, if you lose your heart-connection, you lose your power to manifest what you really want. More on this later.

The seventh emanation is called Victory because it represents the Divine Power to overcome any form of opposition. This emanation gives you the power of drive, desire, enthusiasm, courage, motivation, and passion. Ultimately, human beings don't do anything that we really do not want to do. We can't. You have to want to go to work to go to work. You have to want to discipline yourself to discipline yourself. You have to want to decline the directive of a temptation to do so. The ultimate victory in the world is the manifestation of goodness, beauty and truth. As you dedicate yourself to bringing the most of these three sacred elements into the world through the way you live, you feel more and more deeply, strongly motivated to do what it takes to manifest what you want.

The eighth emanation is called Glory. It represents the glory or glowing quality of everything you say, think, feel, and do. In other words, you really never have any privacy in the universe. Everything you say, think, feel, and do is in some way registered, reported on, and that brings upon you the consequences of your choice. At the Divine level, the eighth emanation represents God's Perfect Glory, the radiance of Divine Perfection that we can register and respond to. That Glory leads us from within, guiding us to follow God's Perfect Ways as best we can. As you strive to demonstrate love more consistently in your life, you bring more power into the manifestation of what you intend to bring about and feel the splendor of increasing closeness with God.

The ninth emanation brings us back to the principle of support expressed by the Tree's structure, addressed earlier, and it also connects us with central emanation, the emanation of access to the higher powers. The ninth emanation is called Foundation because it conveys the power of support throughout existence. One of its primary characteristics is stability. On the Tree, a path joins the ninth emanation with the sixth emanation. It is known as the path of temperance. It represents the experiences in your life that test you and strengthen you, tempering you into a more formidable expression of the Divine in the world. Life will shake you up from time to time. There is no getting away from that. Each shake-up gives you the opportunity to wake up to and work free from your weak, unstable reaction patterns. Remember in our discussion of the sixth emanation, that you need to remain centered, balanced and stable to access the higher powers of manifestation? Life requires you to grow more and more stable, so that you grow into a channel of higher and higher power to manifest greater and greater conditions in the world. When life "rocks your world" don't resist it. Welcome it. Anticipate it, for it is inevitable. No matter how much money you make, how respected you are in the community, how good looking you are, how educated you are, what religion you follow, you will be tested to the hilt, given far too much to handle easily, and you will feel at times at the brink of madness, even at the brink of suicide. Your job is to go through those experiences consciously to recognize and free yourself from the fears that come up and disconnect you with your heart. As you do this, you prepare yourself as a vessel for higher power, leading ultimately to the power to manifest miracles.

The tenth and final emanation on the Tree, as has been stated, is the emanation of manifestation. It is called Kingdom. Here is where you reap what you have sown. What you intend comes about by degrees. As Isidore Friedman put it, your life "progressively approximates" your intention for it. You are now living through what you have manifested up to this point. The better you live through your current manifestation, the more power you receive to make your life into a progressive approximation of what you intend to manifest.