A question I received: How can a person who experiences the crisis today understand that he is facing a turning point, an opportunity to ascend spiritually, instead of deteriorating into the ever-deepening crisis?

My Answer: All of creation consists of the Light (delight, the energy of bestowal) and the vessel (the desire to be filled with the Light). The Light develops our egoistic desire to its final state, where the desire begins to sense that it’s impossible to be filled with the Light directly. The reason for this is that the pleasure cancels the desire. For example, when you drink out of thirst, you quench the pleasure by fulfilling your desire for water.

The current crisis shows us that our egoistic development has come to an end, and we can’t continue to use the Light in order to serve our egoism. In other words, we are discovering that it is impossible to fill our ego. And while our egoism still pushes us to make further attempts to fill it, our mind understands that it’s futile.

However, we can’t exist without fulfillment, and thus we are forced to follow our ego’s orders, even if we do so against our will. We don’t feel any enthusiasm about it, but we are forced to do it by the influence of our environment. We do it against our will and therefore we feel miserable and depressed. This is also why people fall prey to drugs.

In fact, this leads to a crisis in all aspects of our life. After all, our entire life is based on using the Light to fill the egoistic desire. While the desire was developing under the influence of the Light, we aspired to advance. We felt that we were going to be fulfilled by quenching the next desire. And this lie helped us to evolve.

But as soon as the desire ceased to evolve egoistically, we discovered that it is empty. The Light shows us that it is impossible to be fulfilled this way. This is what we call “crisis.” So, we have to stop misleading ourselves and instead realize that the only way to feel life is by adopting the quality of the Light – the intention to bestow and to love.

Our “earthly” development has ended, and as testimony to this, we see many factories being closed, since there is no need to produce the redundant, useless goods. The size of your yacht and the number of digits in your bank account are not objects of envy anymore.

People just don’t see any real sources of pleasure in the world anymore. At the end of the day, any star – no matter how bright – will dim. And we too are fading, as we fall into the black hole known as the final stage of egoism. This egoism consumes everything, lets nothing out, and has only darkness inside.

The dissemination of the wisdom of Kabbalah is the only thing that will give us the ability to rebuild our nature – “And the darkness will shine like the Light.”

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: This Crisis Is Different Than Anything We Have Seen Before
Laitman.com Post: The Crisis Is One Way to Make Us Accept Nature’s Program and the Method of Correction
Laitman.com Post: Questions from Pharaoh – Our Egoism (Advanced)
Interview: The Reasons behind the Financial Crisis – Michael Laitman’s Talk with Leonid Makaron 11.24.08, Tel Aviv, Israel
Kabbalah Today Article: Spiritual Education
Baal HaSulam Article: “Building the Future Society”

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