Baal HaSulam, Shamati #19 “What Is the Creator Hates the Bodies, in the Work”: One must especially try to have a strong desire to obtain the will to bestow and overcome the will to receive. The meaning of a strong desire is that a strong desire is measured by the proliferation of the in-between rests and the arrests, meaning the cessations between each overcoming.

Sometimes one receives a cessation in the middle, meaning a descent. This descent can be a cessation of a minute, an hour, a day, or a month. Afterwards, one resumes the work of overcoming the will to receive, and the attempts to achieve the will to bestow. A strong desire means that the cessation does not take him a long time and he is immediately reawakened to the work.

It is like a person who wants to break a big rock. He takes a big hammer and hammers many times all day long, but they are weak. In other words, he does not hammer the rock in one swing but brings the big hammer down slowly. After that he complains that this work of breaking the rock is not for him, that it must take a hero to have the ability to break this big rock. He says that he was not born with such great powers to have the ability to break the rock.

However, one who lifts this big hammer and strikes the rock in a big swing, not slowly but with great effort, the rock immediately surrenders to him and breaks down. This is the meaning of, “like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces.”

This is how we test and evaluate our advancement: by watching whether the cessations (interruptions) and breaks between the states, the rises and falls that we go through, shorten, by seeing the pressure and power we are applying towards our advancement becoming stronger. We see if we really jump from one state to another with increasing energy, desire, persistency, and this is a necessity.

This is the criteria that should be used for checking: How much time during a day  have we wasted in empty thoughts and actions not directly connected with the goal of creation, which we made without linking them to the Creator.

It should never happen, because everything is controlled by and comes from a single source and returns back to Him. We are only an intermediary in the middle, which either connects or disconnects the link between the two points: the onset of the action emanating from the Creator and the result of the action that returns us back to Him.

It’s essential to realize that we are positioned in the middle, thus we should always serve as a connection channel through all of creation, which is realized in us. Only we have this special area that is free of the Creator. If we try fulfilling ourselves with His presence, to the extent that He becomes the reason and the final destination for us, it will mean that we return everything there is to the world of Infinity, to the endless Light that fills the entire reality.

We are the reality since everything “happens” inside us. That’s why one can calculate one’s advancement by evaluating how much you try to reduce the gaps between the states and increase the pressure and the strength of one’s exertions.
[125434]
From the Preparation for the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/14/14

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