Question: You said that man is nothing but a sensation and a mind, while whatever is happening around him is beyond his control and he merely observes the result. If so, what does it mean to look for what The Zohar describes within?

Answer: Right now, I am reading or listening to The Zohar. As I go along, I picture all sorts of images in my mind: angels, people, and landscapes.

Why do I perceive this as an external image, instead of responding to it in my feelings and thoughts, immediately switching to seeing it within myself? It’s because I am uncorrected and my will to feel pleasure, my ego, splits my perceptions into internal and external ones. It shows me this flawed picture, whereby everything that The Zohar describes is seemingly happening on the outside, not inside of me.

But on the outside, there is nothing at all. All reality is within me. Why, then, do I experience it as external? It’s because I cannot unify all of reality with myself yet; I don’t view it as my vital part. Why is this so? It’s because I relate to it egoistically, dividing all of its parts into internal ones, which are more important to me, and external ones, which are less important, totally meaningless, or ignored by me. Such is my egoistic, flawed form of perception. What do I do then?

This is what I should be telling myself:

1. The Zohar talks solely about my internal states and properties, and except for what is happening within me right now, there is nothing else. A person is a small world, and everything is in it.
2. Everything I see as taking place on the outside is determined exclusively by my own flawed perception. If I correct myself, I will see everything within instead.

In other words, the discrepancy between what I imagine while reading The Zohar as something happening outside of me and what I would be able to perceive as occurring within me demonstrates my flawed perceptions. Hence, I must strive to seek the correct form of perception inside, pray and plead for it to arise in me.

This is what we call to attain the content. As it is written in Baal HaSulam’s “Introduction to The Study of Ten Sefirot,” Item 155, “Although they do not understand what they are learning, through the yearning and the great desire to understand what they are learning, they awaken upon themselves the Lights that surround their souls.” I aspire to see this image in its authentic form and gradually draw it closer.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/24/2011, The Book of Zohar

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