Gahl Sasson - A Wish Can Change Your Life: How to Use the Ancient Wisdom of Kabbalah to Make Your Dreams Come True

How to Use the Ancient Wisdom of Kabbalah to Make Your Dreams Come true

GAHL SASSON AND STEVE WEINSTEIN

A Fireside Book
Published by Simon & Schuster
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Copyright 2003 by Gahl Sasson and Steve Weinstein

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10 9 8 7 6 5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sasson, Gahl.

A wish can change your life : how to use the ancient wisdom of Kabbalah to make your dreams come true / Gahl Sasson and Steve Weinstein.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. Cabala. 2. Tree of life. 3. Self-actualization (Psychology) I. Weinstein, Steve II. Title.

BF1623.C2S27 2003

13547dc21 2003045438

eISBN 13: 978-0-7432-5365-9

ISBN 13: 978-0-7432-4505-0

For every Tree that was, is, or will be and for their spirit that lives inside us all.

I believe that the key to lasting happiness and peace in the world is inner peace. In that state of mind you can face difficulties with calm and reason, while your inner happiness is unaffected. The virtues of love, kindness and tolerance and the conduct of non-violence are a source of that inner peace. I believe readers who are interested in these themes may find much in this book to encourage them.

His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The proof that wishes come true lies between your fingers. Our own journeys on the Tree of Life gave birth to the writing and publication of this book. While we owe everything to this magical Tree, we also were blessed with inestimable assistance of the human kind.

Thank you to the astute Caroline Sutton and everyone else at Simon & Schuster for delivering our book to the world and changing our lives. Thank you to our agent, Betsy Amster, for believing in our wish. And thank you, thank you to our parents, Naomi and Moshe Sasson and Clare and Charles Weinstein, and to our brothers and sisters as well. Who knows when or why, but something at sometime that you said or did planted the seeds of our happy affinity with the Tree of Light and of all our wishes come true.

An extra special thanks to Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa, Julian Neil, Belinda Casas, Rachel Berkowitz, Sabrina Diaz, and His Holiness the fourteenth Dalai Lama for their enduring support and inspiration. More thanks to Jorge Najera for his irreplaceable teachings on the Kabbalah, and to Alejandra Mora and everyone at the Circulo Dorado in Guadalajara, Mexico. We are tremendously grateful to the master, Joseph Campbell, for paving the way. And to the writing angelsElizabeth Miles, DJamila Salem Fitzgerald, and her peewee lama Ronan Fitzgeraldwe only wish that every author could find sweet souls like you, who crack corny jokes when the sentences read like gobbledygook and then lovingly urge again and again, Keep going.

Finally, we send our infinite gratitude to all the marvelous and courageous warriors of Light who attended the workshops week after week and shared the stories, wisdom, and experiences gleaned from their travels on the Tree. This book does not exist without you.

G.S. and S.W.

CONTENTS

A WISH CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

INTRODUCTION

The Tree of Life at the Center of the Cosmos; How to Use Gods Blueprint to Fulfill Your Every Wish

If you are planting a tree and someone arrives and tells you that the Messiah has come, you should first finish planting your tree and only when you are done go out and see if the Messiah is in fact there.

The Talmud

We travel the Milky Way together, trees and man.

John Muir

Bridging heaven and Earth, I stand, as always, awaiting your embrace. Hug me, climb me, use me; and I will make your wish come true. A tree is all you need. I am the Wish-Fulfilling Tree. The Tree of Life. The Tree of Light.

Trees endure as the ultimate symbols of egalitarianism. They provide the same amount of oxygen, shelter, and shade indiscriminately to rich and poor, sinners and saints, caterpillars and humans. Virtually every culture on every continent has treasured the tree as the centerpiece of its mythologyfrom the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden to the Bodhi Tree of the Buddha; the Dreaming Tree of the Aborigines to the Native American Siouxs belief that the first man on Earth was a tree that learned to walk. Such universal reverence among peoples so diverse and disparate indicates that trees brandish immense power. All these cultures cherished different gods and rituals; they devoted themselves to clashing diets and socioeconomic systems. And yet all these traditions exalted the Tree because each intuitively understood that trees stand for more than shade from the hot Sun. Deep down, every human being recognizes that the Tree is in fact the ultimate tool of creation. The Tree creates oxygen. The Tree creates life.

Kabbalah is a mystical, universal interpretation of the meaning and mechanics of life that has been preserved for thousands of years chiefly through the teachings of Judaic seekers and scholars. This ancient theosophy instructs that God uses the Tree as the everlasting blueprint for the construction of the universe. Everythingyou, your dog, Julia Roberts, the Taj Mahal, and the constellation Geminiemerged from the ten life-giving energy forces vibrating through this magnificent cosmic tree.

What few of us realize is that these primal forces didnt just assemble the universe and then vanish, abandoning us to cope as best we can. They live still and always, available this minute to every human being. In one of most famous lines of the Bible, God said, Let us make man in our image (Genesis 1:25). This sentence promises that humans are nothing less than reflections of God, imbued with a godlike gift and desire to create. In other words, each of us owns the ability to fashion all kinds of stuff seemingly from thin air. All it takes is to retrace the same steps that God took to create the universe. Dust off the master builders template, and you can breathe life into your fondest dream right here and now.

You start by making a wishany wish, from earning more money to finding your true love, from renewed intimacy with your spouse to a bigger house or a smaller waistline. Then you simply follow Gods recipe, surfing the Tree of Life from one archetypal energy to the next. Each chapter of this book will immerse you in one of the ten spheres that make up this Tree of light, the ten archetypal energies inherent in everything and every person. Kabbalists have given each of these ten spheres an official nametranslated here from Hebrewwhich corresponds to the multilayered energy it generates: Crown (will), Wisdom (intuition), Understanding (discipline), Mercy (compassion), Severity (strength or action), Beauty (love), Eternity (relationships), Splendor (communication), Foundation (sexuality and death), and Kingdom (practicality). By devoting one week to each of these singular cosmic forces, you will transform your wish from a dream to a reality.