But what does Cabala/Kabbalah fundamentally teach?
To answer this question, we need to go back to the description of the Garden of Eden that originated in the Middle East but would later have a major effect on spiritual, religious, and occult beliefs all over the world. Most people know how this goes. The first man Adam and the first woman Eve lived in a garden paradise that God walked in. Eve was then tempted by a serpent on that one tree that God had explicitly said they could not eat fruit from, and who then tempted Adam to do the same. How we interpret this depends entirely on which tradition you take.
If you take the Christian tradition, the serpent was an evil entity that appealed to the arrogance of humanity by saying that they would be like God if they ate from this tree, actually tricking them into being expelled from paradise and releasing evil into the world.
However, every other tradition argues that the serpent was somehow trying to help Adam and Eve because the God of this world is an evil being that wanted to exploit humanity. One thing that we should always keep in mind is that all of those traditions are adaptations of the same core trees. The two trees in Cabala both represent the Garden of Eden. The tree of life ultimately represents the tree of the same name in this garden. Teh tree of death represents the tree in the middle of the garden that Adam and Eve were nto allowed to eat from, called the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil. So, the Garden of Eden has a significant part to play in occult tradition.
Althought the actual meaning of the tree of life is the tree that Adam and Eve were allowed to eat from in the Garden of Eden, the hidden esoteric meaning is something else. The tree of life is actually the tree of knowledge of good and evil while the tree of death is an inversion of this tree. This might sound confusing but all occult traditions are derived from a path to godhood and Cabala/Kabbalah is no different. Given that the tree of knowledge of good and evil provided knowledge of both good and evil, this is another reason why there are two trees in Cabala/Kabbalah: one for life and one for death.
The tree of life represents the path to heaven while the tree of death represents the path to hell. There are those who think that the tree of death can lead to positive results with enough self-mastery. In many ways, the tree of death is a blueprint of destruction, used by those who practise magick with a ‘k’ at the end, taking after the book of Aleister Crowley.
This is just like using powerful psychological mind-control techniques to manipulate those you want to control or destroy.