A Good Habit: Desire To Bestow
Everybody knows that habit becomes second nature. Let’s say I want to learn some craft and offer myself as an apprentice to a turner or a carpenter. I’m not familiar with the material yet, and I am gradually taught how to work with it. That is, I acquire skills (habits) in the work and start to feel the material: How it behaves in response to what I’m doing with it and how best to work with it.
With the experience, I get an additional feeling from the material I touch. It is when we say that habit becomes my second nature. And the things that were previously unfamiliar, incomprehensible, imperceptible, and indistinguishable to me, I start to feel and recognize better. I even discern the details that I previously did not pay attention to at all and which escaped me.
Clearly, nothing happens without a cause, so why does habit suddenly become my nature? There is always the Light that is working on our matter, our desire to enjoy. According to man’s aspiration, his desire to reach a certain state, the Light works on him and brings him closer to this state, enabling him to understand and feel it.
This is how we have developed throughout our evolution for thousands of years: All due to the habits that were part of our nature. The Light stood behind our every desire and helped to implement it. Desire attracts the Light, man evolves thereby, and in this way we grow.
We see how many times a little child repeats the same action, until he or she finally gets used to it (learns) and stops. Young children seem to do such silly things, but for them it is absolutely necessary, and it is nature that pushes them to it because this is how they are supposed to grow.
We, too, constantly grow on the contrast of opposing states, the ups and downs, a feeling of deficiency and its fulfillment. Such is the path.
We find it hard to believe that even now we are in the world of Infinity! But with the help of the ups and downs that we undergo, we begin to gradually get used to this idea. After all, we see that the world appears as it is depending on which eyes we look at it with. When I wake up in the morning in a good mood, it seems to me that all is well and the whole world is good. And if something spoils my mood, the world immediately turns bad.
And yet at the same time, our properties don’t change; it’s only their balance that shifts slightly. If we start changing our properties, then, as Kabbalists say, we see very different worlds, a different reality.
Everything depends on a person attaining it. But reality itself is the same Light of Infinity, and you see what you can currently draw for yourself on its background. This defines your world: a degree of concealment of the Light of Infinity, in which you’re currently present according to your properties. So, if we want to be similar to this Light and bestow as it does, we can draw the Light that Reforms that will correct us and transform our desire to enjoy. And it will want to exist in the form of bestowal.
These actions will become our habit. But this habit always opposes our desire and requires effort until we will reveal in ourselves such properties in which we will experience the form of bestowal, the form of the Creator. This is called the revelation of the Creator to the created beings.
Everything happens by virtue of habit that becomes second nature. We train ourselves to arouse in ourselves desire with the help the environment and the studies in order to come closer to bestowal from a state very distant from it.
[51881]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/19/2011, Shamati #7
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