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Abraham

Abraham came 20 generations after Adam and was the first to
conduct organized Kabbalah studies. He saw the wonders of
human existence and asked questions of the Creator, and thus
discovered the Upper Worlds.
Abraham passed the knowledge and the method he used
to acquire the Upper Worlds to the generations following him.
In this way, Kabbalah was transferred from teacher to students
for many centuries. Each Kabbalist added his unique experience
and personality to this body of accumulated knowledge.
Abraham lived in Mesopotamia (today’s Iraq) and, as all
inhabitants, worshiped the sun, the moon, the stones, and the
trees. But one day he began to wonder, “How was the world
created?” “Why does everything ‘spin’ around us?” and “What
does life mean?” Indeed, there must be some meaning to life,
he thought, a beginning, end, cause and effect. There must be
a force that sets everything in motion! Abraham asked himself
those questions and, eventually, through the picture of our
world, felt and saw the same as Adam did, that he lived in two
worlds at once, the spiritual and the material.
And, yes, these are all the very same questions that have
begun to bring Kabbalah to the fore in today’s society.

Like Kabbalists after him, Abraham wrote about his
discoveries. His book, Sefer Yetzira (The Book of Creation), is
the next important text after HaMalaach Raziel. Unlike longer
Kabbalah books, Sefer Yetzira has only several dozen pages.
Abraham’s purpose in writing his book was not to teach
attainment of the Upper World, but only to mark out a few
principal laws that he discovered about the spiritual world, like
an outline.
Kabbalists consider it a difficult book to study correctly
because it was written for people who lived thousands of years
ago. In those days, souls of people were not as coarse as they
are today. They could understand the text even though it is
written very succinctly. Today we need a much more detailed
text to be able to relate to it. This is why Baal HaSulam wrote his
commentaries on The Book of Zohar and The Tree of Life.
When Abraham discovered spirituality, he immediately
started disseminating his knowledge. This is why it is written
that he would sit at his tent door and invite people in. There,
he taught them what he had learned of the spiritual. Eventually,
these students that Abraham would invite into his tent became
the first study group in the history of Kabbalah.