When a person wants to work for the sake of bestowal, his egoism puts up a fight. It takes a lot of different actions to divide a person’s general desire into two camps: that which a person can do for the sake of bestowal, and that which he can’t.

One has to “give gifts” to his egoism in order to make it calm down and understand that it wins out by taking part in your path – bestowal. We can’t just completely cut off our desire to receive pleasure. Rather, we constantly have to awaken this desire in order to receive new desires from it, which we could then correct and thus ascend toward the goal.

This is why it is not enough to simply restrict your egoism. Instead, you have to nourish it: give it gifts, hug it, and tell it, “We are brothers!” We have to be like Jacob who went to meet Esau bearing gifts.

We will still have much more use for the will to enjoy! However, as long as we’re unable to work with it, we have to nourish it and show it that all our spiritual work is for its benefit. After all, it doesn’t know that you are planning to correct yourself for the sake of bestowal.

You have to treat it as a foreign, alien body, which remains uncorrected for now. And you have to nourish it in order to be able to build the middle line. It’s like the mafia, which comes to you the minute you want to open up some great business, and it tells you: “We are allowing you to start your business, but every month you have to give us a part of the profits.”

This is exactly how we have to work with our egoism, but we have to be much more cunning. Every time we lie to it, we extract new parts of desire from it which can be corrected, while assuring the ego that it’s all done for its own good.

We continue nourishing it so it will allows us to work even more, very much like the mafia which is happy about the fact that your business is growing: “Do whatever you want as long as you pay!” This is how we trick our egoism. The desire to receive pleasure is the matter of creation, and we can’t neglect or extinguish it. We have to sustain its life, hoping that one day we can bring it to complete correction.

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