The Torah, “Exodus” (Ki Tissa), 32:2: Aaron said to them, “Remove the golden earrings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring them [those earrings] to me.”

This is saying that all of the internal characteristics and senses of a person that help his advancement: seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching now receive egoistic tendencies and directions. But a person doesn’t understand and doesn’t feel that he is going in an opposite direction.

In that he feels an acute requirement for support, he relies upon what he has on hand, his reason. He doesn’t have anything more than it. There exist desires and their fulfillments. Fulfillment through knowledge and reason is the highest fulfillment after food, sex, family, wealth, and control.

Fulfillment through knowledge gives us a sensation of mastery over something very significant, a feeling of control. Whereas, in spiritual work we must go forward, acquiring a new, higher reasoning that replaces material knowledge with bestowal and love, meaning to advance contrary to reason.

Ascent above reason happens when I see that according to my reasoning, my egoistic understanding, I must specifically make this step, yet I make a completely different calculation, but not against reason, for I don’t go contrary to reason, but rather above reason. It is very important to feel what “above” means. Sometimes we say “contrary to reason,” but we don’t mean nullification of reason but ascent above it.

By nullifying reason and not taking it into account at all, I seemingly nullify it. Whereas here I am found with my former reasoning and to ascend to the next higher reasoning I must do this through a method of increasing faith, increasing bestowal and love, without any egoistic basis, contrary to my internal egoistic call. In this case, for us the basis for advancement becomes the general rule, “And you shall love your friend as yourself.”
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 9/9/13

Related Material:
Moses And Aaron, Faith And Knowledge
Faith And Reason
The Creation Of The Golden Calf

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