An Abulafian Meditation
Friday, June 28, 2013
Taken from
Chaye Olam Haba
"Prepare to meet you God, O Israel!" (Amos 4:12)
Prepare yourself, unify your heart and prepare your body and choose yourself a special place that will not let your voice be heard by any man in this world.
Be one and special and isolate yourself without any other, and sit is a room or in an attic and do not reveal your secret to any man.
And if you can do this in a house that is a little darkened, do it. And it is best and fitting to do this at night.
At the same hour that you prepare yourself to speak with your Creator, be careful to empty your thoughts from all the vanities of this world and request Him to proclaim his courageous victories to you.
And adorn yourself in a tallit and put tefillin upon your head and arms if you can so that you will be in awe and reverence of the Shechina who is present with you at that moment.
And clean yourself and your clothes, and if you can, let them all be white clothes, as all this benefits the intention of awe and love very much.
And if this is at night, light many candles until they make your eyes shine very beautifully. And after this take ink, pen and tablet in your hands.
And this will be a witness that you come to work the work of God your Lord in happiness and an innocent heart.
And begin to combine letters, a few with many, and turn and revolve them speedily until your heart is warmed by their revolutions. And put your heart in their movements and what their revolutions engender.
And when you feel in yourself that your heart has been warmed very much by the combinations and you understand from them new matters that you did not grasp from human transmission and did not know them from yourself by intellectual effort, then you are ready to receive the Shefa.
And the Shefa flows onto you and arouses you to many things one after the other. Prepare your true thought to depict the Name, may His Name be blessed, and his superior angels; depict them in your heart as if they were people, standing or sitting around you and you among them like an emissary that the King and His servants want to deploy and he is ready to hear from one of them the pronouncement of the matter of his mission, if from the King or from one of his servants.
And after you have depicted all of this prepare your mind and heart to understand in your thought the many things that will come to you from within the letters computed in your heart, and study all of them or their parts like a person who is told a parable, a riddle or a dream, or as one persuing a topic in a book of wisdom deeper than he can comprehend.
And solve the matter that you will hear to the best solution and as close as you can get to it.
And judge yourself according to what you will understand from it, and do the same with the other matters in all that they will tell you.
And this will all accrue to you after you throw the tablet and stylus from between your fingers or if they fall by themselves due to the plentitude of your thoughts and the multiplicity of your happiness.
And know that as much as the honorable intellectual abundance will be strong with you, so much so will your external and internal organs weaken, and your whole body will be engulfed in a very strong upheaval.
Till you will think for yourself that in any case you will die at that time, for your soul will separate from your body due to the multitude of joy in its comprehension and knowing what you have known. Till you will choose death over life in your understanding for this death occurs only to the body (Deut. 30:19).
And in this cause the soul will live a resurrection forever and ever. And then you will know that you have arrived at the degree of receiving the abundance.
And if you wish then to honor the honorable and awesome Name and worship him truly in the life of the soul and the body, hide your face more and be afraid of looking at God and "do not come closer, remove your sandals from your feet for the place that you stand upon is holy ground" (Ex. 3:5).
And return to the matters of the body, and rise from there and eat a little and drink a little and smell a pleasing fragrance and return your spirit to its scabbard until the next time. And make your heart happy with its share.
And know that the Lord your God loves you and is the One who teaches man to benefit him, and teaches you knowledge.
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