We must realize the importance of spirituality from darkness, from the absence of its perception. Only in response to such a way of relating to it, does the spiritual world appear from the fog and is born from non-existence. It penetrates into my feelings awareness, and understanding; I am holding it and working with it, but only to the extent of its importance to me. Raising this realization of importance, I “pull” it out from the concealment into the light.

All of this is to ensure that my approach would be altruistic. Otherwise, I can never reveal the spiritual world, since I will always keep aspiring towards it with the intention for the sake of receiving, like towards everything in our world.

So how can I realize the importance of something that I do not see? How do I approach the hidden with the intention for the sake of bestowal? For this, the Kabbalists say the environment is needed, a society of friends. When they exalt the importance of something, even though not even one thread may be connecting me to the object of their praises, in any case I begin to value it.

It is the same in our world, what people around me think and talk about, what is important to them, becomes important to me. This happens to such an extent that I suddenly begin to value what I have never seen and felt. And now I start talking about how important and wonderful it is. Looking at me, many wonder: “Where does such an enthusiasm come from?” And I sometimes catch myself in a sudden reverence toward something I have seen on television and something I heard from others… This happens to everyone. Why? It is due to the common opinion. Society considers something important and it passes on to me.

Why is this the way we have to go into the spiritual? Why has advertising become so widespread in the 20th century right before our common spiritual ascent? It is so that we know to what extent we must use the environment.

For decades we have been convinced that the environment is capable of influencing us and through advertising can raise in our eyes things that do not have even the slightest importance. There is nothing in them except for social prestige. What others praise will be important for me as well. We are constantly being manipulated this way; they jack up the price for something, and the public is ready to pay three times the original price. The mass media, sociologists, and political scientists are doing this job very well and they have created a whole industry of artificial importance.

What’s more, we do not suspect that we are also “calibrated” in all of our internal parameters, qualities, and opinions. We have been “adjusted” and “configured” so that we would look at each thing in a certain way. In reality, I see the world with foreign eyes. And there is nothing that can be done here, I have already been “blinded,” I can no longer come out of this formatting. The same brainwashing is being experience by our children as well.

So what have we gone through the whole of this process for; after all, nothing happens by chance?

It is in order to understand that we are completely dependent on the environment and with its help we can raise the importance of anything. Thus, we know how to raise the importance of the spiritual world in our eyes although we do not see or feel it.

Advertisers show me, say, a small bottle of water and they describe it as if it were holy water. So if we were to study this mechanism, we would be able to do the same thing for our spiritual development. After all, nobody knows what the spiritual world is, nobody sees it, whether it is important or not, how important it is, how beneficial it is for us. We only know one thing, if we l attach importance to it in the circle of our environment, then for everyone it will be elevated to the highest place in our scale of priorities. We will absorb this feeling of importance of the spiritual world from “social advertising” and then it will be easy for us to feel it.
[71877]
From the Arava Convention 2/24/12, Lesson 5

Related Material:
Revealing The Concealment
Blame Advertising
Becoming Acquainted from Behind The Door

Filed under: Conventions, Group Work, Perception | Add Comment →