Question: I can understand how people give in the material world (you can help people voluntarily), but I don’t get how one can bestow in the spiritual world?

Answer: I, on the contrary, do not understand how you can give in the material world. After all, the reason behind of all of your actions is you wanting to feel good; that is not considered bestowal.

In the spiritual world, to bestow means to rise above all egoistic calculations, above one’s ego, one’s own desires. When it happens, a person acquires a new force which he lacks. Such a force makes it possible to bestow without any feedback from one’s desire.

Today, all your actions of giving are based on selfish calculation. We need to preserve peace and ecology, to help sick people because it hurts you to see their suffering or because, God forbid, if tomorrow you get sick, then you, too, can get help. But it’s not called bestowal; it’s an ordinary egoistic calculation.

Nature has made us from the material that needs “fuel,” just as an engine. If you want me to give or do something, you need to “fill me up” because otherwise I can’t make a single movement.

In our life, such actions characterize a person as a giver, a good man with a good heart. But a spiritual test shows that we are all egoists. All I’m doing in this world with my desire to be fulfilled is simply performing actions aimed at filling myself. That’s why I feel the world and us within it in the same manner that we all feel it.

However, in the spiritual world I reveal how I can give to others, that is, to begin to feel the desires of others as my own. I work to fulfill their desires, and I feel everything that is outside of me. Right now here, in the material world, I am feeling everything that’s inside of me, but in the spiritual world, I feel everything that is beyond me, in other people’s desires. This is only possible when the Upper Light creates within me the properties of bestowal!

Therefore, the law “love thy neighbor as thyself” is a condition or a prescription for sensing everything that exists on the outside, meaning, for having spiritual sensations. The material and the spiritual worlds are just two ways of perceiving reality: either through absorption or by coming outside of oneself in bestowal.
[28724]
From Introductory Lesson Series, “Hanukkah” 11/30/10

Related Material:
The Game Of Bestowal
Revolution Invisible To All Others
Bestowal Makes Us Related To The Whole World

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