Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. I promise to answer them. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

The Creator’s Guidance Is Purposeful

By observing nature’s systems, we understand [the purposeful development under the Upper guidance of the Creator or Nature, which is the same] that any beings of the four types: still, vegetative, animate and speaking, as a whole and in particular, are found to be under purposeful guidance, meaning a slow and gradual [necessary] growth by way of cause and effect, as a fruit on a tree, which is guided with favorable guidance to finally become a sweet and fine-looking fruit. [The purpose of man’s development is the same: to reach a state of perfection.]

Go and ask a botanist how many phases the fruit undergoes from the time it becomes visible until it is completely ripe. Not only do its [absolutely all] preceding phases show no evidence of its sweet and fine-looking end, but as if to vex, they show the opposite of the final [correct, perfect] outcome.

The sweeter [more spiritually developed] the fruit is at its end, the more bitter and unsightly it is in the earlier phases of its development. [Since the final state is the corrected original state, then naturally the greater the imperfections revealed in a given creature, the more perfect it is at its final state.]
– Baal HaSulam, “The Essence of Religion and Its Purpose”

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