Rabash, “What Is a Ladder that is on the Ground and Its Head Reaches Heaven”: A person should know that the Creator hears his prayer. This means that we have to clearly acknowledge the fact that each of our requests or desires is incorporated in the general system, and all our feelings are a result of the general system. If we make an effort, then it naturally influences the whole system, since everything is connected. But this connection is concealed from us so we have to attain information about it and the feeling that all of reality is connected to one upper system that is called the “Creator” or “There is none else besides Him.”

This system receives all the signals that come from us: both our natural instinctive evolution and the additional influences of society that are above our natural development. Everything is included in the system, and it responds to this appeal: “the Creator hears a person’s prayer.”

And what he sees is that now he is in a worse state than when he didn’t pray to overcome the desire to receive, which is an answer from Above to his prayer. We cannot properly determine when in fact we really are asking from Above and when we receive a response. While it may seem to us that we are praying and asking, it’s not we who are praying and asking. We were simply given such a desire from Above, and we feel how it goes through us. This prayer is not on our account.

So a person shouldn’t say that the Creator doesn’t listen to his prayer. He should rather say that the answer came from Above, and is not what a person prepares, but what is prepared for him from Above, which is for his own good, and he should know that. It is clear from Above when to answer a person and what to give him: which thoughts or desires. He has no freewill here.

Which means that a person should know how far he is from bestowal, and that every part of his body is against it. And a person asks the Creator for something that there is not one part in his body that agrees to what he is asking of the Creator. So how can he ask for that? And then a person sees something new, which he didn’t know before he began to ask from the Creator, that he should be given the power to overcome his body, so that he would be able to act only in favor of the Creator and not for his own sake. A person sees that there is no point in these requests. …and the new recognition that a person attains is that he sees that the body doesn’t agree to pray for the annulment of the desire to receive for its own sake.

So the question is why a person sometimes does want to annul his desire to receive, which means that a person often sees that while he is asking the Creator to give him vessels of bestowal, his whole body rejects it and what he prays for is only lip service, which means empty words. In any case he sees that there are times when he can pray from the bottom of his heart. The answer is that this is already the answer to his prayer, which means that the Creator gives him the power to pray about that from the bottom of his heart. Therefore a person has to be hopeful that the Creator will bring him close to Him.

In the meantime we can’t know when we receive a desire to pray from Above and when we pray out of our own will, below. All this will be revealed later. This is done on purpose, in order to confuse a person and to let him feel disoriented in the egoistic desire, so that he will begin to ask for forces of bestowal, a desire to bestow. It’s only by the force of bestowal, the force against him, that a person can be critical of himself and see the truth.

But if a person has only one force, then it’s either an angel, when it’s only the force of bestowal, or an ordinary animal that belongs to the levels of the still, vegetative, and animate nature and which have only the force of receiving. But it’s when a person is confused and has doubts, when he can’t find himself in these states of confusion, that he is simply torn apart, that he can find the connection between the two parts of creation: the Creator and the created being who is above his limited mind and feelings. He should rise above his request, above the actual prayer, and the answer for it, like Malchut that rises to Keter, which is called a true “prayer.” The Creator is the answer to the prayer, and then the two connect in the full adhesion of a person and the Creator.

And so a person has to be hopeful that the Creator will bring him close to Him. Since we are constantly nourished from Above, we only have to be aware of the bestowal that comes from Above and goes through us and then back up. We have to be grateful for that, to acknowledge the greatness of the goal, that “there is none else besides Him,” and that He is good and benevolent, and to yearn for connection in every situation. If we constantly try to stabilize this in the true form, and not as it seems to us in our concealment and exile, then it will be a true prayer.
[98939]
From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/28/13

Related Material:
Despair And Confidence: The Components Of A Prayer
Asking For Correction Of Our Own Freewill
What Prayers Reach The Creator?

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