This Is Not Emptiness, But A New Blank Sheet
Question: Is making an effort to keep the same intention part of our work?
Answer: It is not necessary to really try to “keep” the intention—it can be renewed. New desires and intentions come all the time, and they erase everything before them. And it is a good thing that everything has been erased!
Regardless of anything, it is necessary to come to terms with your descents, confusion, disappointments, and helplessness, with all the states that help erase the previous degree. But the next degree has not yet been attained, and this is why a person finds himself in a state of emptiness.
But we need to understand that this is the way we renew our desires and advance—so that we approach this state constructively.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/3/2011, Writings of Rabash
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One often becomes confused between the beastly perception of “life has its ups and downs” — the mere feeling of an egoistic high vs. low — and the true spiritual ascent and descent that Rav discusses.
The problem may be seen, perhaps, as on the one hand, in the Book of Jonah, Jonah’s being miserable to the point of longing for death, while clearly in spiritual ectasy as he is able to perceive the Creator. So here, thinking even in branch language, we understand there is a difference. Yet we see that King Saul had a depression that kept him from such a state of perception, and he thought to solve it (and apparantly in branch language elsewhere it is solved) through as simple a means as music. Clearly, here, we are fooled by isolated branch language, into believing that a spiritual descent is identical with its beastly parallel.
Could Rav offer any simple idea that one could use as a model for intent, to snap one — the group as a whole — back into the proper flow of the inner reality here?