Question: How can I not see the greatness of the Creator and feel the Shechina in the dust and at the same time understand that the Creator must be great when I’m in a state of caring only for myself?

Answer: How can these two sensations exist simultaneously? Why not?

You ask how you can have such a state when you look at what is happening inside you and see that, on one hand, you hate the Creator, do not love Him, despise Him, He is nothing for you, and you think only about yourself, but on the other hand you already begin to realize that this is a state of shattering and ruin and that the Creator is great, real, awe‑inspiring and everything else, yet in you it is the opposite.

How can one hold these two sensations inside? Together they build the feeling in us that is called the recognition of evil; it is when I see who He really is and how I perceive Him in the opposite form. This is possible because we receive this sensation by means of the light descending from above, which shines in the form of surrounding light.

It can shine for me even though I am not in equivalence of form with it. Then I see my Kli: how it thinks only about itself, nothing nothing in this life concerns it other than its own self-interest, and I see the light, as it were, opposite this Kli. There the Creator is great, eternal, and perfect, and I do not care. This state, resulting from the two opposite states of the Creator and the creation, is built in me because the surrounding light shines from afar into my egoistic Kli.

In our world you do not encounter such a state; we are not opposite to some phenomenon. I can think that a person is bad, and a moment later that he is good. But when I now think well of him, I can only remember that a second ago I thought otherwise. Yet to think at the same time that he is bad and that in truth he is good ,that does not happen because everything takes place in one Kli, in one awareness.

In relation to the Creator, this does not occur in one awareness, in one Kli, because we are in a process where the Kli has not yet been corrected, and from the Creator the surrounding light comes to us. The result is a state of oppositeness,” two distinct forms (reception and bestowal [reception in me, bestowal in Him]), existing as if on two sides of the Machsom (barrier).

It is only because of the Machsom the surrounding light shines for me and provides this awareness, within which MAN is built. MAN is, essentially, the tension that exists in me between how I relate to myself and how I relate to the Creator, according to what I am and what the Creator actually is. It is the critical examination of these perceptions that generates MAN within me.

This constitutes a request for correction, a desire for my will to receive to be directed to the Creator to the extent that the surrounding light gives me this understanding. The will to receive by itself will never want this, no matter who stands opposite it. It is like Pharaoh, opposite whom the Creator can stand, but he says: “Who is the Creator that I should obey His voice?”

Here there must be an awareness that serves as an intermediary between the two: whether it is a person’s state of Lo Lishma or the group (it does not matter in what form we speak of this) that connects these two sides.
[359522]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/23/26, Rabash, “What Is, ‘Anyone Who Mourns for Jerusalem Is Rewarded with Seeing Its Joy,’ in the Work?”

Related Material:
The Shechina Is the Place of Union Between the Creator and Creation
Raising the Shechina from the Dust
Why the Creator Acts in Concealment

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