How the Study of Kabbalah Works On You in a Gradual Way

In truth our present perception of reality is very limited, undeveloped. Our sensors are very unrefined. We cannot feel much of what happens inside our own bodies, such as molecular collisions or the birth of new cells. Therefore, there are many changes that need to take place for us to start feeling anything. Before any feeling is created in us, millions of wheels must revolve inside, entire mechanisms have to perform many corrections before those corrections are felt by us.

The study of the Kabbalah works on various levels of our soul, in attributes of the will to receive what we cannot feel just yet. A person reads but understands nothing, and so feels no reason to continue to study. The person feels this way because the text is working on attributes below the threshold of his or her feelings. It is like a person filling a glass of water and wondering why the bottom part of the glass has to be filled first before he or she can drink off the top. There seems to be no reason to be concerned with the other parts.

For Kabbalah to be Effective a Special Intention Is Needed from You

Our will to receive is corrected through the study of the Kabbalah. The study deals with the different levels of the soul, the vessel and the desire, which are at the bottom of the glass. We don’t touch them, do not drink them, and do not feel their actual taste until they reach the top, where we actually begin to feel them.

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The Shift from Suffering to Spirituality

Kabbalah teaches us that at the beginning the Creator uses pain, and unfulfilled desires in order to turn the person’s attention towards spirituality. Thus one’s reality is full of pain and suffering until one starts to locate the source, and the meaning of it all.

Reality changes because if we strengthen our contact with the Creator, there will no longer be a need for pain, the very same pains that are initiated from above to bring about that contact.

Thus, the external circumstances will change, since we will no longer require the same pains.

How Life’s Torments Build in You a Desire for Spirituality

People do not understand how changes in the world occur or how. But the torments they suffer make them search subconsciously for an upper power and pray to it because there is no one else on whom to rely. That prayer, that earthy still prayer, works. Using the torments, the Creator puts us in a no-win situation and corners us until we actually start looking for an alternative planet to live on. But that planet cannot be found, except in the Creator.

For example, it is interesting to consider why the Creator brought the Jewish people to the corporeal land of Israel, rather then to the spiritual one. The return to Israel was the result of a prayer that was lying in our subconscious and of the pain and suffering we Jews had endured over many years. We prayed for our own place, and we received that place. But if we had truly understood that our sufferings had happened for a certain purpose, then our prayer, the prayer of the unsatisfied mass, would have been aimed differently, and a new solution would have arisen on a different level, a spiritual one.

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How Obstructions on the Path to Spirituality Work in Your Favor

When we are attracted to someone, we are immediately filled with joy, even before we make actual contact with that person. As in corporeal love, so is the case with love for the Creator. But to prevent us from being satisfied with mere attraction, the Creator makes us feel that our situation is a low one, lacking in unity. If the Creator hadn’t done that, we would be satisfied with the pleasures of desiring, without actually attaining anything. The feeling of lowness added to the desire for the Creator forces us to rise to the level of spiritual coupling and enjoy unification with the Creator.

God shakes us up with unpleasant incidents and situations, until there is enough torment to spark a desire for the loved one, a need to create a spiritual coupling.

That is why the soul descends from the upper world to this world and dresses in a body to incarnate in this world, so as to return to the root from which it came and cling to it again.  To correct the body, we need to recognize that obstructions are not what they seem, but rather necessary catalysts to help us connect with the Creator.

It is precisely because we feel the obstructions and try to struggle with them in a heroic battle that we increase our desire for the Creator, so that we can once again be united as we were before the soul was clothed in a body, with the same power and intensity. The adhesion between us and the Creator is strengthened by the very struggles we endure in seeking out that connection.

Giving the Desire for Spirituality Importance Over Your Other Desires

There is always contact between us and the Creator, but for us to be able to feel His love, the Creator places an obstruction before us called the body—the desire for every pleasure possible apart from the Creator. To truly understand the Creator’s love for us, we must gradually uproot the obstructions of the body, thought by thought.

The Creator takes into account everything that is done to us, and when we have experienced the right amount of situations, when we earnestly desire for adhesion with the Creator with all our strength, nonstop, only then comes the moment of adhesion.

Only when we have reached the state of adhesion can we justify what the Creator sends us, from the lowest situations to the highest spiritual acts. Then we realize that everything that happens in life happens because of the Creator’s love and desire to unite with us. That, in turn, creates in us a neveending and unlimited love for the Creator.

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To Fight For or Against the Desires You Have to Develop Spiritually

Can we overpower our own desire? Should we or should we not fight our own desires? After all, how can we know what is in store for us in this lifetime? That depends on our degree of spiritual development, which determines everything inside us and what we can and cannot do. The answer is to indeed fight, but just to realize that we cannot do anything by ourselves, and also to study ourselves. That is what we were given our minds for, in addition to our desires.

How Sensations Influence Your Perception of Reality

We attain everything within our Kelim (vessels), our emotions. Our world consists of the overall impressions we receive from our senses, and this is how we perceive reality. If our senses change, or if we add another sense, then our world will change as well. Hence, we expand our world by changing our senses and acquiring new senses, as if rising from world to world on the ladder of worlds. By that we change the reality in which we exist.

Why Bitter Sensations Actually Aid Spiritual Progress

In the spiritual world, things can only exist in pairs: pleasure or the absence of it, true and sweet, false and bitter. The truth is always sweet, and the lie is always bitter, and they always correspond. But that situation doesn’t exist in our world. Falsehood is not bitter, and truth is not sweet. In our world we constantly face tough decisions: to choose the sweet but superficial and false way, or the bitter but sincere way.

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Genesis, 6:9-11:32
This Week’s Torah Portion | October 19 – October 25, 2014 – Tishrei 25 – Cheshvan 1, 5775

In A Nutshell

The portion, Noah, speaks of sinful people and the Creator, who brings a flood on the world. “Noah was a righteous man, perfect in his generations” (Genesis, 6:9). This is why he was the one chosen to survive the flood.

But he did not survive alone. Rather, he was commanded to build an ark and move into it along with his kin, and pairs of all the animals, and to remain in the ark for forty days and forty nights until the flood stopped.

The Creator made a covenant with Noah and his family that the flood would never return. As a token of the covenant, He placed the rainbow in the sky.

The end of the portion speaks of the tower of Babel, about the people who decided to build a tower whose head reaches the heaven. The Creator decided to confuse their language so they would not understand one another, and then He dispersed them throughout the country.

 Commentary by Dr. Michael Laitman

The portion, Noah, is long, intense, and contains many details and many events compared to other portions. As this portion takes place in the beginning of the Torah, it also marks the beginning of the spiritual path, the most important time in a person’s development.

These initial stages unfold quite quickly, unlike subsequent events, when one begins the actual corrections and corrects one’s qualities meticulously. Later on, the events are far more detailed, as we will see in the future events unfolding in the Torah.

Our development takes place entirely over our egotistical will to receive, which we must turn into bestowal. Today we are still in the midst of a process where the whole of humanity is to begin to work with its ego in the right connection between people. The work against the ego is always a big problem, and appears as waves of a great sea, called Malchut of Ein Sof (Malchut of infinity).

Each time, the ego surfaces more and more, and at first, a person does not know what to do, so the only option is to hide in a box, an ark. It is not merely an escape; it is a correction. A person builds a kind of bubble, the quality of bestowal, and hides in it from all of one’s terrible egotistical qualities, and this is how one advances.

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