Actually, We Are Already Home!

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What is joy in the work?

Answer: I constantly experience certain obstacles, pricks, and thoughts that are sent to me, and I am still happy receiving them! After all, I am constantly studying myself with this help from the Creator, the Light, who evokes these sensations in me. He seems to be pricking me in one point here, another point there, with a thought, a desire, an attitude, and demonstrates to me what is wrong in me.

Question: But how do we bring the “earned income home,” to our source of existence, unless we know where we are supposed to go? A ship on the sea can navigate by stars, a car on the road by the road signs, but in spirituality, there aren’t any signs. So how do we find our way to it?

Answer: In the instant when you prepare the correct desire within yourself, you will suddenly feel that you already are in the right place! You will suddenly reveal that you don’t need to go anywhere. Just find the right desire and you will see that you are already home.
[42355]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/6/2011, Writings of Rabash

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Desire And You Shall Reveal

Dr. Michael LaitmanWhile reading The Book of Zohar, one has to understand that The Zohar is not supposed to be processed by the mind. And if a person wishes to figure it out by way of the intellect, he will get tangled in every word since no word in The Book of Zohar points to anything familiar to us.

All of them hint at the spiritual states and properties. If a person is in the same spiritual state or world, he reveals what they are talking about. So, he knows what spiritual properties and definitions are being described; he feels, recognizes within himself this inner, spiritual world. After all, a person reveals the spiritual world inside, rather than outside of himself, as he perceives the entire reality only within.

As to someone who doesn’t possess spiritual perception yet, he is simply reading an unusual text. What are we reading The Zohar for then? We do so in order to add to it an aspiration to reach a state when we will understand, feel, recognize, and even experience all the spiritual states and properties The Zohar is telling about. All that I presently read as an incomprehensible story, I wish to experience inside myself and live in it.

We must cultivate this desire in us. In order to see the spiritual world, we only lack a desire, a yearning for it, and not more. Therefore, now, as we read The Zohar, we must, all together, to the best of our ability strive to reveal this hidden world.

Even though we don’t have a special need for it (since we don’t know what we are reading), we are still reading this text together. Hence, from this very same concealed state, we draw upon ourselves the illumination regarded as “the Light that Reforms,” “the Surrounding Light,” which affects us.

It doesn’t reveal the concealed world, but rather it awakens in us the needs, desires, and properties of perception, new sensory organs, after which the revelation occurs. The Light functions so as to create in us the capacity for sensing the concealed. Hence, we yearn for the Surrounding Light to enable us to feel the hidden world.
[42345]
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/6/2011, The Book of Zohar

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Don’t Look For The Painkillers, Go For The Treatment Instead

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Are we going to suffer till the end of correction?

Answer: Suffering is sensing uncorrected areas within. As soon as I start viewing them correctly, I won’t take it as suffering any longer; instead, I will feel immense gratitude to the Light for showing me something I can correct in myself.

Pain is a calling for action. If I have a wound that doesn’t hurt, it is quite dangerous since I will let the disease settle in. But if it does hurt, this illness (not the wound itself) obligates me to start looking for treatment.

Well then, is pain good or bad? It is possible to switch off a certain nerve center in your brain and you will stop feeling pain altogether. If you leg catches fire, you won’t even feel that you are burning. If your arm is stuck in a machine, you won’t notice it. Pain is the help that points out the flaw to us! Hence, we need to view it as the means of correction.
[42366]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/6/2011, Writings of Rabash

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Move Through The Stage Of Concealment Quickly

Dr. Michael LaitmanA beginner is prone to fighting with obstacles and trying to move them out of the way. He is unable to connect to the Creator through these obstacles yet and can’t see that all that is happening in his life comes from Him.

That is why he pushes the obstacles out of the way in his egoism and gets angry at others, while wanting to make a nice, easy life for himself, as it is customary among all those people in the world who don’t yet feel the connection with the Creator. These are the initial steps in our work.

But after a person has exerted effort in order to enter the group, connect with the teacher and the books, the Light starts affecting him stronger. And even though he doesn’t feel it, he does see how he changes internally. In fact, he starts noticing his connection with the governing force, the cause of all that is going on around, the force that exists somewhere in nature, inside of him, and evokes his desires and thoughts.

There is some inner governing factor in him, and a person begins to establish a connection with it, while trying to understand why He is doing all this, for what purpose, and how he is supposed to respond to it? A person lives for a very long time until he arrives at the sensation that everything around is triggered by some internal causes instilled by the Creator. And then, he understands that he must put quite an effort into the group, dissemination, and studying, in order to pass through this stage of concealment sooner.

And when he no longer forgets that everything comes from the internal force that awakens and guides him through, his work becomes more conscious, precise, and practical. Thereby, he gradually accumulates the necessary desire to reveal Him, who arranges the world around us, so that this hidden connection is finally revealed.

But there is more work after this, which continues till the very end of correction by way of obstacles. The only question is: How quickly will a person begin to recognize and use them as help to achieve a connection, adhesion, with the Creator?

After all, the Light illuminates our uncorrected desire, revealing its deeper and more inner layers with each new degree. This is the only thing that causes us to feel pain. But pain is the symptom of a disease, the unfolding egoism, corruption! Only then do we receive an opportunity to correct and sentence ourselves and the world to a scale of merit.

Therefore, it is necessary to work on oneself in order to justify any states that we start feeling deeper, stronger, and more irritating. The more a person advances, bigger and deeper obstacles are presented to him, and the more powerful the blows are. But at the same time, he begins to understand what is going on, even though the righteous one also falls and becomes a “sinner” so he may rise and become righteous yet again.
[42359]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/6/2011, Writings of Rabash

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Crawling Out Of The Black Hole

Dr. Michael LaitmanKabbalists advise us to practice in our little “game room,” in the “bubble” of this world, until we figure out that nothing works. Who will give us a sensation of it? It is the upper force residing outside of our perception, beyond our world.

That’s what “trips” us. That’s what leads us to failure instead of success. Why? It’s in order to vex, to awaken us. The Creator flirts with us so that we start to want Him even more and develop, to the best of our ability, a real need for bestowal that lies outside of our nature.

While forming this desire to step out of the familiar, egoistic corner, we begin to realize how small and finite it is. It’s similar to a black hole that doesn’t allow the light to break free due to the impassable force of gravity. We, too, reside in a “black hole,” unable to get out. On the other hand, we can cultivate the need to break free, “to desire without a desire.” That, we can do.

How so? That is because if we arrange it correctly, the group binds everyone. This is how it is in daily life. Everywhere I go, all sorts of things are offered to me that I would never choose to want. I’m told that headache pills are what I really need, but what if I feel good, and everything is okay in my life? Then I am told, “How come? You lack the most essential things! Look, your neighbor has already bought them. We have an assortment you won’t believe!”

Indeed, I have never thought of such pleasures, but I am relentlessly pushed to try them and see for myself. In other words, they form a desire in me, aimed at what I have no desire for. So it is, over and over again. Such is the impact of society.

We, too, should create an advertising agency of the spiritual world that would constantly work on us, forming a need for what we don’t need. In this agency, my work should be based on knowing that thereby, by way of external actions, I work on myself.

It doesn’t matter that I want to manipulate myself into buying the spiritual product. I put this desire through the group, through their desires, and it returns to me in an unrecognizable form. As a result, I become inspired and, literally out of necessity, strive toward spiritual fulfillment.

What is passed through the others is no longer mine. My initial message became saturated by the friends’ desire, and now the entire group gets hooked on this lie: “You know, it’s so cool there, in spirituality! Compared to our world, it’s like heaven on earth!”

They brainwash me with messages they don’t believe. They want to sell me a product and make a profit on being the advertisers for it, while I take their words seriously and exert great effort to purchase the spiritual world for myself.
[41149]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/21/2011, Writings of Rabash

 

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