5 Minutes Of Light From The Daily Lesson: Reveal The Collective Desire
Posted on September 27th, 2009
When a person wants to work for the sake of bestowal, his egoism puts up a fight. It takes a lot of different actions to divide a person’s general desire into two camps: that which a person can do for the sake of bestowal, and that which he can’t.
One has to “give gifts” to his egoism in order to make it calm down and understand that it wins out by taking part in your path – bestowal. We can’t just completely cut off our desire to receive pleasure. Rather, we constantly have to awaken this desire in order to receive new desires from it, which we could then correct and thus ascend toward the goal.
This is why it is not enough to simply restrict your egoism. Instead, you have to nourish it: give it gifts, hug it, and tell it, “We are brothers!” We have to be like Jacob who went to meet Esau bearing gifts.
We will still have much more use for the will to enjoy! However, as long as we’re unable to work with it, we have to nourish it and show it that all our spiritual work is for its benefit. After all, it doesn’t know that you are planning to correct yourself for the sake of bestowal.
You have to treat it as a foreign, alien body, which remains uncorrected for now. And you have to nourish it in order to be able to build the middle line. It’s like the mafia, which comes to you the minute you want to open up some great business, and it tells you: “We are allowing you to start your business, but every month you have to give us a part of the profits.”
This is exactly how we have to work with our egoism, but we have to be much more cunning. Every time we lie to it, we extract new parts of desire from it which can be corrected, while assuring the ego that it’s all done for its own good.
We continue nourishing it so it will allows us to work even more, very much like the mafia which is happy about the fact that your business is growing: “Do whatever you want as long as you pay!” This is how we trick our egoism. The desire to receive pleasure is the matter of creation, and we can’t neglect or extinguish it. We have to sustain its life, hoping that one day we can bring it to complete correction.
A question I received: When a politician comes to power in our world, then even if he is motivated by compassionate goals such as a desire to do good for the society, he still can’t avoid getting mixed up in political power struggles and petty troubles that make him forget about the compassionate goals he had. On our spiritual path, how can we make sure that we don’t stray from the goal and fall for the tricks our egoism plays on us?
My Answer: Indeed, when we are doing spiritual work, we have to lie to our egoism. We are standing opposite the Creator whether we want to or not, and He is the one setting up all the forces that come our way, all the disturbances and all our inner discernments.
As soon as you forget about Him and veer off the path leading directly to Him, you start to feel suffering. And this suffering eventually brings you back to the right calculation: that all the forces must unite together into a single aspiration toward the Creator. This is how things work in spirituality, because the Creator controls everything that happens to a person.
The Creator is above and a person with the point in the heart is below, and there is a system of two forces between them: the right line and the left line. You advance from below upwards, toward the goal, which is the middle line. As soon as you deviate away from it in any direction, you start being affected by a force that brings you back, because only being in the middle line allows you to feel unity with the Creator, where unity is balance.
Yet, as soon as you attain balance, you immediately shift to a higher level. Then, the search for balance on that higher level once again forces you to research all the parts of the system and to ask for help from Above. After all, it is only by correcting your matter – your desires, that you ascend above them and perceive the new world in those corrected desires.
All of these forces come from Above in order to help you advance upwards. It’s impossible for anything to get “mixed up” here. The only thing that depends on you is whether to advance toward the goal by the short path or the long path. This is up to you!
When reading a Kabbalistic text, it’s important to understand that it is only talking about spiritual processes that take place inside a person, rather than about different characters and external actions. Everything that is described in a Kabbalistic text is inside a person.
For instance, the entire Torah talks only about how a person discerns different desires and qualities within: which ones belong to bestowal and which – to reception, which are fit for correction and which are unfit for it; and how a person experiences an inner world through these qualities, which is the only world that actually exists. A person then discovers that he perceives our world inside him as well, and there is never anything on the outside.
The way to enter the new world is by expanding your perception of your internal desires and qualities and by taking care to use all of them for the sake of bestowal. This is how one realizes oneself to the fullest.
A person contains all the characters of the Torah – the whole world to the fullest is within him. Kabbalah explains how a person can arrange the entire sum of all his desires within, and thereby reveal a new world.
A question I received: It is becoming increasingly clear that population surplus is a problem not only in the Third World, but also in the developed countries of Europe and North America. There are not enough jobs to go around. What do you think the job market will be like in the future?
My Answer: The crisis is bringing to light the type of production that is excessive. We must come to a state when we produce the essentials for a normal existence, but nothing more. When this happens most of the Earth’s population will be left with nothing to do.
We are already witnessing forced reductions in working hours in all the developed countries, with many companies switching to a four day work week.
The rationale is that this will reduce maintenance costs, as workers would be taking less vacations and sick days, while being motivated to work harder.
Let’s remember that it was the Great Depression of 1929 that led to the emergence of the five-day work week. Before that people worked six days a week, 12-14 hours a day.
By reducing work days and hours we’ll be able to provide work to twice as many people.
Question (cont’d): Either way one question still remains – what will one do in his free time? By increasing peoples’ leisure time, will we not disturb the balance with Nature that we must come to? After all, this imbalance is the reason we’re in this crisis.
My Answer: Nature is freeing us not so that we can have a good time, but so that we’ll achieve equilibrium with it by attaining the quality of love and bestowal.
Therefore, we must organize the free time we are given to study the Nature of man and our world, so as to equalize their qualities.
Therein lies the essence of the science of Kabbalah. We must establish national universities and other such education centers, which will serve to educate the people in their increased free time about their likeness to Nature.
We must explain that humanity’s increased free time is part of Nature’s plan, and is specifically intended to help humanity come to the realization of this plan.
Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: What Is Balance In Nature?
Laitman.com Post: We Won’t Need Surplus In The Future Society
Kabbalah Today Article: I Thought I Was Retired, But I Am Now Unemployed
Baal HaSulam Article: “Building the Future Society”
Video: Modern Laws of Global Life – Law of Necessity & Surplus
There are two forces leading us to our goal. One force is our desires and the desires of the environment, which develop us in this world. But the second force does not pertain to this world; it pulls a person toward the unknown and brings him to a special, spiritual environment – a teacher, a group, and Kabbalah books.
If one connects with them properly, then he builds the spiritual world for himself, which is his future world. One’s body remains in the material world, while one’s soul becomes born in the spiritual world. This is the only realm where a person has freedom of choice.
A person is always inside the field of these two opposite forces, and he has to balance them out. However, he shouldn’t try to replace one with the other; one needs his life and the desire to enjoy in this world also.
On the spiritual path, one always finds oneself between two opposite forces. By balancing them within oneself, a person uses his free choice to build his “self” between these two forces. He does this freely and independently.
A person receives everything else from Above: his desires, mind, strength, and examples, but he builds himself on his own. It turns out that he creates a creature out of himself, becoming equivalent to the Creator!
The spiritual world is not in a different dimension or up in the clouds. It is something you find inside your attitude to other people, when you see that your neglect toward them becomes replaced by attentiveness toward them and a feeling that they are important. This happens because you wish to reach spirituality, and you start to see that they are your partners on this path.
You then begin to worry about them and to take care of them just as you would with anyone who is important to you. At first you do this egoistically, but you gradually start to feel that you want to give to them.
That is when the Light begins to work, making you feel that there are qualities inside you that you have to correct. You wish to treat others with love, and you also feel that only the Light can carry out this correction. If you really want this to happen, then the Light will come and correct you.
However, this Light works only inside the connection between people, turning hatred into love and correcting the breaking which once turned love into hatred. Inside this new attitude to others, you begin to reveal the spiritual world that was lost during the breaking. You realize that your connection with others is a connection of souls, of your inner desires, and inside it, you reveal the Creator.
All of this occurs precisely inside this net of desires that bind all of you. They create a vessel (Kli), in which your spiritual life becomes revealed. Meanwhile, the material life turns out to be but a dream, like an imagined world.
Deep inside the connection among people, you reveal the quality of bestowal, and you realize that it is the only thing that exists in the world. Everything else was a fantasy, a concealment of the spiritual world, which was necessary in order for you to reveal it.
The most important thing is to reach a complete desire at every moment. Be like a baby: even though he will want something else the next second, right now, at this moment, he absolutely has to receive the thing he wants. This is very important: to ask and to scream for just one specific thing, and always try to live with a complete desire, taking it to the end.
When it comes to spiritual progress, a complete desire is the guarantee for success! If our desire isn’t complete, then it isn’t perfect, and that means it doesn’t match spirituality, which is perfect and complete on every degree. Therefore, if a person desires spirituality, but is still willing to compromise or give in in some way, then he could stay stranded between the heavens and earth all his life. He will not receive help from Above.
If you are able to feel inspired for just a moment, then try to enter this feeling deeper and develop it “beyond the possible.” These efforts will create your prayer (MAN) for ascension.
Be like a child who always wants to grow bigger than he is today and who always tries to do what he could never do before! He is always doing something for the first time, always adding something new and thereby advancing.
Here is a new song by Arkadi Duchin based on the
Daily Kabbalah Lesson of 09.07.09:
A question I received: How can I check to see if the Light is really correcting me?
My Answer: There are three specific signs indicating that a person is advancing:
Daily Audio Version-MP3
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