Question: How can a person give up corporeal pleasures if he doesn’t feel any pleasure in the desire to bestow yet?

Answer: We see that humanity is compelled to go through different states. Egoistic development leads people to despair and depression, drugs, alcohol, and suicide.

We live only by virtue of an instinctive, beastly fear of death, given to us to attain the goal. The fear of death is what keeps us and controls us, and if it weren’t for its control, we would have different calculations.

It is intentional that we are enslaved to death so that we’re compelled to go on living in every situation, even the worst. We are ready to give everything for life, although there’s no doubt that life itself isn’t worth it. But we act unconsciously, guided by an instinct instilled in us purposefully so that we advance towards the goal specifically by way of suffering and difficult calculations.

In doing so, we go though states in which there is no justification to go on living. However, the goal of creation forces us to do so. Therefore, the Creator inserted this beastly fear into the desire to receive, which obliges us to struggle for our lives. After all, the notion of  “life” is much higher in our eyes than any suffering.

All this is so that we can survive and through the constant egoistic calculations reach the decision that we shouldn’t wait for death to redeem us from the suffering that we feel in our egoistic desire, but rather switch it for another desire, the desire to bestow. Then bestowal, connection with others, will not seem worse than death and unrealistic.

It’s because we’ve suffered so much in our ego that we can now make the calculation and agree that it’s possible to reach the desire to bestow. It’s the suffering that can help us do that. This is how we advance.

This means that there is a struggle between the different forces within a person. A person himself only has to sum up this struggle, and it is called the life wisdom he acquires at such price.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/2/2012, Shamati #35

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