How The Soul Grows

Dr. Michael LaitmanSpiritual development is in feelings because the material of creation is the desire to enjoy. And we can use the mind only on condition that it helps us to correct desire. Otherwise, it can hurt us.

Therefore, it’s said that “there is none wiser than the experienced.” That is, first you need to go through all kinds of feelings and impressions in your desire to enjoy and then from this you obtain wisdom. We cannot work in the mind with what we have not experienced in our desire, that’s called philosophy, which has no real basis. After all, everything is based on the material of desire.

States are changing every second because, if a state does not change, then time is not moving. Any state changes due to the fact that first we cancel ourselves before the influence of the Light. All the work is done by the Light: The Light is primary. It creates a desire, affects, and changes it. We are only required to accept the action of the Light, let it enter, we express our consent, a request, a prayer, to persuade it to do its work.

It all depends on our state: whether we demand like babies or ask like adults. There are many types of relationships between the Light and a person, or rather, the desire for the Light, asking the Light to influence it and make some action on it.

Why is it necessary that the desire turns to the Light and asks it to act? Because through this, the desire understands what the Light is going to do and agrees with this. It acquires intelligence, the head, and makes itself similar to the Light. It cannot perform the action itself; the action relates to the work of the Creator, but because of this, the desire grows until it becomes equal to the Light. My task is to draw the Light on all the actions that I want done to me, and the Light performs everything.

Every request like this begins from self-annulment: I want that a change to be made in me, but don’t know exactly what. After all, this will be a new state, I cannot recognize it or see in advance. It’s impossible to talk about something that I have not yet reached, so I need self-annulment, and I ask the upper one to make this action on me to save me.

I don’t know what He will do and into what He will turn me, what I will become in a moment. Even if the head and the body change, that is, the thought and action, everything, so that I would not recognize my former self as I was a second ago, to such an extent that I would become an entirely new creation. I don’t care what I will become, it’s most important for me to give myself to the Light so that it would perform its action.

I have to be ready for this and wish more than anything else to want to cut myself off from all of the past so that nothing is left from the past, and I would not see a single old property in myself and even that there would be no transition between the past, present, and future. Only then it means that I am ready for the impact of the Light on me.

It should not come from the desire to escape from the previous state. I am asking to be changed not because I feel bad. I don’t ask to be saved from problems as that would be a selfish request instead of the advancement to the next spiritual level. I ask one thing: Help me become like the Light, to become somewhat similar to it, to become a giver for someone.

All that I can clarify is only in the group with respect to the friends, to humanity. Thus I am preparing myself for the true prayer. I am looking for it because I don’t know what this feeling should be. So, I search, work, study, disseminate, do everything I can. You have to be sensitive to what you are given to advance toward the burst of the true prayer, which leads to the answer to it from above.

Thus I come to self-annulment, the feeling of joy, solidarity, loyalty to the Light, which is called the devotion of the soul. I know that everything it will do to me will be correct. And it is not because I want to run away from troubles and I have no other choice, but on the contrary, I am fine and have no shortage in anything. I lack only one thing: handing myself to the Light and becoming included in the quality of bestowal so that it would rule over me and allow me not to think about myself but to be loyal to that one property.

This is called the correct prayer, the request for the first action of the Light, which is the beginning of the spiritual embryo. After that, a person begins to feel his connection with the Light to the extent that he feels like a drop of spiritual seed that must cancel itself inside the property of bestowal.

This starts a long process of spiritual growth of the embryo that passes in constant self-annulment relative to the Light, which every time passes more properties of bestowal to the embryo. The entire spiritual path, the entire ladder, birth, suckling, and maturity, is the acquisition of additional properties of bestowal over the previous state. Thus the soul grows.
[117039]
From the Preparation for the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/16/13

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