[1] Very early in life he was taken by his parents to Tudela, Navarre, where his aged father, Samuel Abulafia, instructed him in the Hebrew Bible and Talmud.

He had determined to go to Rome but stopped short in Capua, where during the early 1260s, he devoted himself with passionate zeal to the study of philosophy and The Guide for the Perplexed of Maimonides under the tutelage of a philosopher and physician named Hillel—probably the well-known Hillel ben Samuel of Verona.

On his return to Spain he became subject to visions, and, at the age of thirty-one, in Barcelona, began to study a particular kind of Kabbalah whose most important representative was Barukh Togarmi, and received a revelation with messianic overtones.

Letters of the alphabet, numerals, and vowel-points all assumed mystical meaning to him, and their combinations and permutations, supplementing and explaining one another, possessed an illumining power most effectively disclosed in a deep study of the divine names (especially of the consonants of the Tetragrammaton).

With such auxiliaries, and with the observance of certain rites and ascetic practises, men, he said, may attain the highest aim of existence and become prophets; not in order to work miracles and signs, but to reach the highest degree of perception and be able to penetrate intuitively into the inscrutable nature of the Deity, the riddles of creation, the problems of human life, the purpose of the precepts, and the deeper meaning of the Torah.

He soon left for Castile, where he disseminated his prophetic Kabbalah among figures like Rabbi Moses of Burgos and his most important disciple, Joseph ben Abraham Gikatilla.

The local Jewish congregation in Palermo energetically condemned Abulafia's conduct, and around 1285 addressed the issue to Shlomo ben Aderet of Barcelona, who devoted much of his career to calming the various messianic hysteriae of the day.

Abulafia had to take up the pilgrim's staff anew, and under distressing conditions compiled his Sefer haOt "Book of the Sign" on the little island of Comino, near Malta, between 1285 and 1288.

More influential are his handbooks, teaching how to achieve the prophectic experience: Chayei ha-Olam ha-Ba (1280), Or ha-Sekhel, Sefer ha-Cheshek, and Imrei Shefer (1291).

Of special importance for understanding his messianology are his "prophetic books" written between 1279 (in Patras) and 1288 (in Messina), in which revelations including apocalyptic imagery and scenes are interpreted as pointing to spiritual processes of inner redemption.

As part of his messianic propensity, Abulafia become an intense disseminator of his Kabbalah, orally and in written form, trying to convince both Jews and Christians.

In his first treatises, Get ha-Shemot and Maftei’ach ha-Re'ayon, Abulafia describes a linguistic type of Kabbalah similar to the early writings of Rabbi Joseph Gikatilla.

In his later writings, the founder of prophetic Kabbalah produces a synthesis between Maimonides' Neoaristotelian understanding of prophecy as the result of the transformation of the intellectual influx into a linguistic message and techniques to reach such experiences by means of combinations of letters and their pronunciation, breathing exercises, contemplation of parts of the body, movements of the head and hands, and concentration exercises.

Much less concerned with the theosophy of his contemporary kabbalists, who were interested in theories of ten hypostatic sefirot, some of which he described as worse than the Christian belief in the trinity, Abulafia depicted the supernal realm, especially the cosmic Agent Intellect, in linguistic terms, as speech and letters.

[citation needed] In his writings Abulafia uses Greek, Latin, Italian, Arabic, Tatar, and Basque words for purpose of gematria.

The impact of Abulafia is evident in an anonymous epistle attributed to Maimonides; Rabbi Reuven Tzarfati, a kabbalist active in 14th century Italy; Abraham Shalom, Yohanan Alemanno, Judah Albotini, and Joseph ibn Zagyah; Moses Cordovero and Chaim Vital's influential Shaarei Kedushah; Sabbatai Zevi, Joseph Hamitz, Pinchas Horowitz, and Menahem Mendel of Shklov.

Major contributions to the analysis of Abulafia's thought and that of his school have been made by Gershom Scholem, Chaim Wirszubski, Moshe Idel, and Elliot R. Wolfson.

As the ecstatic Kabbalist continues to practice, combining letters and performing physiological maneuvers, the result is the second experience: weakening of the body, in an ‘absorptive’ manner.

In Sefer haOt, Abulafia describes a similar episode, but from an explicit self-perspective:"I saw a man coming from the west with a great army, the number of the warriors of his camp being twenty-two thousand men […] And when I saw his face in the sight, I was astonished, and my heart trembled within me, and I left my place and I longed for it to call upon the name of God to help me, but that thing evaded my spirit.

Abulafia's subterranean influence is evident in the large number of manuscripts of his major meditation manuals that flourished down to the present day until all his works were finally published in Mea Shearim in Jerusalem during the 1990s.

Hayyim Vital brought Abulafian views into the fourth unpublished part of his Shaarei Kedushah, and the eighteenth-century qabalists of the Beit El Academy in Jerusalem perused Abulafia’s mystical manuals.

The influence of ecstatic Kabbalah is to be seen in isolated groups today, and traces of it can be found in modern literature (e.g., the poetry of Yvan Goll), mainly since the publication of Gershom Scholem’s researches, and subsequently the groundbreaking studies of Moshe Idel.