It is extraordinarily difficult to describe the spiritual world with our earthly words and to imagine it within an earthly mind. In essence, it is completely impossible, because we are speaking about a different nature altogether. But let us try.
We must detach from everything we currently see, feel, and understand, and imagine that pleasure exists from bestowal and that this is the only pleasure that can possibly exist. It is felt only in acts of bestowal, in the Creator.
The Creator wanted to create a creation that would highly value the state of the Creator. And therefore, He created creation with the desire to enjoy and implanted the smallest pleasure of all possible pleasures inside it, a spark, a “thin candle.”
This is a deceptive sensation, because in truth it is impossible to feel pleasure within egoistic desire. It is given this spark only to maintain life so that it can somehow exist. And by means of this tiny spark, our entire world lives.
But true pleasure is possible only from acts of bestowal; this is a law of nature. Yet in order to become capable of appreciating this quality, the loftiness of bestowal, we begin, from the black point of creation to build enormous vessels of receiving, like black silhouettes on a white background.
It turns out that we construct the evil, egoistic beginning from a single tiny black point called “the tip of the letter ‘Yod.’” And when we work on this black point, trying with all our strength to turn it toward acts of bestowal, precisely because of this it grows in the opposite direction, in the form of receiving.
We reveal within this tip of the letter “Yod” all the other letters, all the qualities, everything that exists, because in this black point we become completely opposite to the Creator. And therefore, the more we try to resemble the light, the more we become convinced of how opposite we are to it, revealing more and more details. This is how we inscribe all the letters, within which all qualities, spiritual Partzufim, worlds, and all existing connections are contained.
And the main thing is that in every state we build the combination of the right line with the left line, that is, with those desires we revealed thanks to our efforts to attain bestowal. The more we strove to bestow, the more we revealed our egoism, the left line. But despite this, we still attempted to compare those egoistic desires we revealed within ourselves to bestowal; that is, we tried to transfer them into the right line.
By doing so, we drew upon ourselves the light that returns to the source so that it would act upon those black letters that are revealed within us, give them a clearer form, and reveal all the components of the interaction between the light and the desire, the entire TANTA (Taamim–Nekudot–Tagin–Otiyot).
Thus, moving from below upward, from a point sketching out the contours of letters and, within them, the full TANTA—all the sensations from the entry of the light into the vessel and its exit, we ultimately attain the light that is revealed within the desires. We advance in the reverse direction, from below upward.
When the worlds descend from above downward, everything happens in the opposite sequence: first occurs the striking unification (Zivug deHakaa) in the head of the Partzuf, then the TANTA, the entry of the light into the vessel and its exit, and at the very last stage the letters (Otiyot) are formed, and ultimately, we reach the black point that lies at their foundation.
And in exactly the same way we build our path from below upward, only in reverse. By revealing in the right line the extent to which we are capable of resembling the light, we thereby establish balance between the material that is within the letters, their thickness, and the light that is outside the letters, around them.
Those black contours of the letters that we ultimately see against the background of the white light is the middle line that we have arrived at.
In the middle line, two forms of prayer come together. On one hand, the “general prayer,” a request on behalf of many. And on the other hand, it is such a general prayer through which we all integrate into Malchut and clarify the common goal as one person. To the extent that we are able to combine these two components, this prayer will also enter the middle line.
[91114]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/24/12, Rabash, “The Importance of a Prayer of Many”
Related Material:
We Only Need To Ask Correctly
The Left Line Comes From Above And Raises Us Upwards
The Basics Of Working In Three Lines
Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Prayer and Intention, Spiritual Work - No Comments →
Question: When I lift a friend’s spirits, aren’t I adding satisfaction to his will to receive? And must he then somehow return this work to me?
