Question: People often say that a person,who has been diagnosed with a terminal illness and realizes that he is about to die in a few months begins to think about the meaning of life. Can we say that death motivates a person to clarify the meaning of life?

Answer: Of course. This is why we don’t really understand death but paradoxically feel it a long time before it arrives, a feeling that animals don’t have. They have a premonition of death that is more apparent than in humans, but it is closer to the actual state of death.

If it weren’t for death, people would behave quite differently. In the corporeal world, all calculations are through death. But this is actually a bad thing because a person is attached to his animal body.

The wisdom of Kabbalah, on the other hand, allows us to ascend above our body and to calculate things independently. The moment we exit it and enter the eternal flow of energy, information, and Light, we immediately cease to take the body into account.

In other words, as long as we are alive we have to take care of the body, because we perform certain corrections in this life through it, but taking care of it, practically, should be just that.
[170769]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 111/15

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