Our entire difficulty is that when we begin the spiritual path, we desire to act the same way as we acted in our material lives until now where we counted on our own forces and fought for some kind of values. Consciously or unconsciously, all of our calculations were aimed at our own benefit.

The importance of the goal served as the means for attaining it, and it works that way in everything no matter what I search for: rest, money, power, respect, or knowledge. However, I received desires from the environment, become excited by what other people desire, and that is how I was always able to multiply my desires and develop. My own desires did not go beyond the animate body—meaning the desires for food, sex, and family, while my attraction to everything else—for money, power, and knowledge, was adopted only from the external environment, human society.

When a new desire awakens in a person, the desire for the spiritual world, it has to develop by the same paths. But a problem emerges here because when a person enters a society of people who study together with him and he must develop under their influence, then on the outside he only sees the material qualities, such as who is smarter and who learns the material better.

But his desire with which he has to advance, the egoistic “point in the heart,” is “the opposite side of the holy soul.” It has to be developed, and it develops only under the greatness of the goal, the greatness of the Creator.

However, all of these values—the greatness of the goal, the Creator, spirituality, the upper world—are based on the greatness of bestowal instead of reception. And that is where a halt occurs, as it is written, “In the place where the sinners will fall, the righteous will rise and walk forth,” with both the sinners and the righteous living inside one person.

In this regard everything depends on how a person treats his environment. It really begins being a spiritual environment for him only on the condition that he understands that he has to receive from them the impression of the greatness of bestowal, love for the neighbor, meaning a new desire for bestowal, the spiritual desire.

It turns out that a person begins the spiritual path with one single “point in the heart.” This is a very important point, the basis of a person, but it is the “opposite side of the holy soul” and he will never have anything else besides it himself. To this point he has to add all of his other spiritual Kelim until Malchut of the world of Infinity. And he receives all of these desires from the environment because nothing new will develop any longer inside of himself.

The spiritual Kli is received from the environment, and it is called the greatness of the goal, which serves as the spiritual vessel or desire, the place where the person will reveal the Creator, the connection and union with Him.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/16/11

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