Gevurah Qlifa | גבורה קליפה
Gevurah is a Sephira of strength, of struggle and battle. It is an energetic sphere, of precise limits that generate power. Its spiritual experience is the vision of power. As the individual ascends the Tree and develops from Tiferet his own center in Gevurah, he undoubtedly acquires and accumulates power. And when one has real power, one seems invincible, and then the illusion of Gevurah comes into play, the illusion of invincibility: the individual believes that the power is his, that it is his own, that it comes from him and his abilities, that it belongs to him, in short, that it belongs to him. Consequently, he is a winner and cannot be defeated.
The worst thing that can be done with power is to try to keep it and use it for personal or sectarian ends. Then one becomes a slave to it, rather than the other way around. Sooner or later the individual will be ousted from that position and will be defeated.
Power is not yours for yourself, it is something given to you to use for something, not for you (for your ego). A good use of power would be to apply it to the attainment of a good end, to render a service to others.
We serve the higher will that governs our lives and the destinies of the world. Our allegiance is to the Divine Power, of which we may be its channels.
Gevurah is also the sphere of judgment and rigor. When in the exercise of its function it applies severity, it does so according to criteria of necessity based on higher Understanding and Wisdom. And if the just limit is lost, an aspect of the Qlifa of Gevurah presents itself: cruelty. He is cruel who is excessively severe, that is, unnecessarily severe.
Another vice is destructiveness. Divinity itself has a destructive aspect, necessary at times to promote evolution and achieve balance, but to destroy for the sake of destroying is an imbalance of that force. This destructiveness can manifest as hatred or anger which are by nature destructive.
Gevurah's virtues, loyalty and courage. The obligations are also along these fighting lines: courage, loyalty, bravery. These qualities hardly need clarification.
The commandment, however, is not so obvious: "Honor your father and your mother".
Father and mother is all that has begotten us and made us what we are. Of course, father and mother are our physical progenitors, but the concept is much broader. Nature, the culture and tradition in which we have imbibed, the universal soul and the womb of our unconscious, all these are our mother. The original impulse that has called us into being, our divine spark, bearer of the seal of God and the key to our destiny, the divine will itself with respect to us, all this is our father. Father and mother are thus the sefirot Chokmah and Binah, which operate on both the cosmic level and the personal level, and in whose archetypes the physical father and mother participate.
Thus, our individuality and our reflective being are erected on a broad collective and cosmic substratum. Every human being has the obligation to individualize himself in front of these contents, sometimes in an opposing relationship, recognizing, however, the unpayable debt he owes to his progenitors, his culture, his tradition, his deep roots, and to honor them accordingly, although that does not mean that we cannot individualize ourselves and change things, following our own path.
In Gevurah the dark or negative side appears by taking the action of placing limits to extreme severity. We can be so severe that we can use severity as a way of life. This is a mistake, since we should not always be severe. Severity is a dimension that we should use only when we need it. If we abuse our severity, we will only engender anger and violence.
For example, when we say no to everything, we overdo it by placing limits that in reality only repress and destroy any possibility of freedom. We must set the necessary limits for our children, but never impose on them a dictatorial state of fear and terror. Discipline yes, terror no. It is preferable to be less strict with the limits, if we know that we have a tendency to impose ourselves by terror. Anger and fear are the extreme components of the dark side of Gevurah.
Anger is the cause of evil in this dimension and the fear of others of our anger is the effect. We cannot terrorize the people around us with a radically severe character. We must set limits for others in the right way. But we must also know how to set limits to our severity. If the positive side of Gevurah is to set limits for others, the negative side of Gevurah is controlled by the positive side of the same dimension. If we manage to impose limits to ourselves (to our anger, and to our severity), then, we will reach a correct dimensional balance in Gevurah. Destruction and hatred are the dark forces of Gevurah. Severity and not repression, discipline and not anger.