A Transparent World
Question: Do I have to correct the desires that unfold in my relationships with other people today, such as wealth, power, and knowledge?
Answer: No, you don’t. You don’t consider these desires. Why should you? Leave them. After all, they appear in every person individually in a unique combination, while you must correct your attitude to others as a whole, without breaking it into parts.
Treat your desires simplistically. First of all, you must reach the degree of pure bestowal: “What you hate, do not do to your friend,” meaning don’t take pleasure in the suffering of another.
At any rate, whether I am aware of it or not, I always prefer to look down on others. If a person is lower than me, I rejoice, and if I am lower than him or her, I suffer. Thus, my priority is to reach a degree where I stop comparing others to myself. I don’t wish to measure them against what I am.
When I gain such an attitude, the world takes a very different form in my eyes. It is as if I tear off one veil, take one filter off my perception—and open wide a new world. I suddenly get to see others as having no connection to me, to my ego. I eliminate any personal benefit, any interest.
I don’t measure a person by how he or she looks, what they wear, or how they act. I don’t look at them at all. I have neutralized all our relations. The world is full of opportunities. What kind of opportunities? I don’t know just yet. In fact, I don’t need anything. I simply exist along with the others and don’t do anything to them which I, myself, would hate.
It is a very, very transparent, pure spiritual degree since it unfolds above all the material desires of a person. On the outside, it is absolutely undetectable, yet you see the world very differently now.
It is difficult to describe its contours. Are people suffering in your eyes? Are they all righteous, or do you still sort them into good and bad? It is very complicated to explain the inner picture that appears in a person when he or she takes the egoistic filter off.
However, one way or the other, you are faced with a totally different reality, another type of relationship between people. After all, everybody judges by his or her own flaws, whereas you have rid yourself of it and see the world undistorted by the false egoistic mirror.
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From the 5th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/20/2011, “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)”
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