Not Everything Has A Price

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Why is quality much more important that quantity in spirituality?

Answer: Because the attainment of Godliness is qualitative and not quantitative. In fact there is no quantity; it is all one. There is one desire and one Light and the connection between makes it one. All our work is qualitative.

Thanks to his correction, the created being learns the Creator’s essence and the attitude towards Him within the upper Light. Everything that was initially created within the desire to receive, according the Creator’s desire, was meant to reveal Him to a certain extent. He himself, Atzmuto, is still unattainable, but the Creator has dedicated a part of Himself to the creation. Thus the desire to receive that must be fulfilled to the fullest was created in order to discover the one who created it. We can’t do more than that. Kabbalists imply that there are additional ascents, but we don’t know about that.

So all our attainment is qualitative, and there are no calculations in it. Although we use numbers, we actually count qualitative revelations. Even in our world, if we checked things carefully, we would see that there are only qualitative parameters and not quantitative ones. If we understand that things are not exactly the same, then the quantitative calculations become impossible.

But our discernment and our attainment are weak: In the meantime, we don’t discern qualitative parameters and don’t know how to approach them. Only later, from the whole vessel, will I be able to discover the quality of things and define them accurately since they will all be part of me. In the meantime, we work according to quantity.

Question: So how can we measure quality?

Answer: It’s revealed only in the depth of the desire. But since we have no other choice, we describe it in quantitative terms: “125 degrees,” “6,000 years,” “600,000 souls,” etc. Our egoistic language is all based on quantitative concepts, and the quality doesn’t matter. In the past it was important, but since the Middle Ages and even some time before that, we began to develop only quantitatively while quality has become less important.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/9/12, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar

Related Material:
The Kind Of Persistence Needed On The Path
Rejecting Our Present Selves
Numbers Indicate Quality, Not Quantity

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