Sepher Khasifa - Towards A Reasonable Religion

Sepher Khasifa is a book that I am writing which was inspired by my studies of kabbalah over the past few years. I was going to call it something like 'towards a reasonable religion', because that is actually descriptive of what the book is about, but in the end I decided to go with a title more in the tradition of books on kabbalah such as Sepher Yetzirah.

By 'reasonable religion' I mean a religion or spiritual philosophy which is based on and wholly consistent with reason and logic rather than blind belief and dogma. I know that this is a grand ambition, and I do not claim to have achieved it, but I do think that such a thing is possible and this book is my attempt to outline why I think it is possible, and what my own thoughts on the matter are. It is in a way a book of comparative religion, or of the perennial philosophy, because I have tried to draw on various religious and spiritual tradition and to find within them the seeds of this new approach to spirituality.

In order to get a little bit of feedback before publishing I have decided to publish extracts here on hubpages. I am going to begin with the first chapter - The Crown And The Kingdom - which I will publish here across three hubs.

i would very much like to get feedback and constructive criticism from people in the comments section of this or any of the other pages.

It seems to me that if there is some truth in religion or in any spiritual teaching, then it should be demonstrable. To set apart spirituality as a field of knowledge to which the rules which normally govern our thinking do not apply, and in which we must simply pick up a prepackaged version of the truth, off the shelf as it were, and either take it home or not, seems to me to be a recipe for disaster.

 

To simply accept something as true because that is what you are told is, I would say, rather naïve. Who is it that you trust with your soul? Do you trust in what your parents told you? Well that is all well and good, but what about those who your parents believed and so on back to the origin of the idea? Do you trust them all, these people who you know nothing about? Simply look at all of the worlds religions and the folly is clear – we all know this. Each one claims to hold the truth and that the others are false, and people simply accept that the one they happened to be born into is the one which is right. Three great religions, all claiming that there is only one God, and yet going around acting like they have one each.

 

Is it possible to go beyond this folly – to find a truth in which we can be certain? That is really the driving force behind this book, as well as it’s starting point. In my life I have felt a yearning – a need for some unspecified thing. The world was not enough for me. I felt in some way that I needed religion, that I needed to seek out some spiritual truth. But yet I could not simply suspend my reason, my knowledge, my intellect in order to submit to the dogmas of any particular religion and accept them as truth, without any reason to do so other than my own desire for truth.

 

So I studied various spiritual traditions. I was particularly drawn to all of those esoteric or occult teachings which promised some hidden or secret teaching that was missing from the great religions of the world, which I had always though somewhat lacking in intellectial clarity. I grazed, moving from one to the next without staying too long. I would find some solace here, some wisdom there. But I also found many more things that struck me as absurd, deliberately false, or simply without any solid foundation in reality which I could grasp and hold.

 

Throughout this time I tried my best to remain sceptical. I approached each book that I read and each subject that I studied with a desire to find in it the truth, but also with a healthy scepticism. I wanted to understand, rather than to believe.

 

At times this did indeed seem to be a giant folly. Who was I to be asking these questions, or thinking that I could find the answers to them, after all. But after a time it began to occur to me that perhaps scepticism was not the crippling handicap which it generally seemed to be when it came to all matters of the soul or spirit. In fact it began to occur to me that the exact opposite might be true – that scepticism might be the right and proper starting point for any spiritual path.

 

This is not a new thought which came to me personally. It can already be found in Buddhism, which (although also containing metaphysical beliefs) includes a method of meditation which goes further than even our Descartes went with his philosophy of radical doubt upon which the foundations of science were built – they even manage to doubt their own existence, these Buddhists – the one thing that Descartes couldn’t doubt.

 

And it is also present in Kabbalah, although I would like to point out here that I am in no way expounding a belief in Kabbalah. To do so would go against everything that I am trying to do in this book, and that I have tried to do in my life, which is to do away with the need for blind belief in the first place.

 

The lowest and most earthly of the ten spheres of the tree of life, and so the logical starting point for an study of Kabbalah, is the sphere of Malkuth. According to the book 777 by Aleister Crowley the virtue of Malkuth is scepticism. So it seemed to me on learning this that the teachings of Kabbalah, far from being incompatible with my scpeticism, were in agreement that this was the best way to start.

 

So the question then becomes one of how a person can be both scpetical and spiritual. The answer to this is in two parts – the application of scepticism to abstract philosophy, which in my opinion is the least important part of the equation, and secondly the application of scepticism in your everyday life, which to me is the more important of the two.