Why Every Action Brings a Person Closer to Spirituality

Every person was created with a complex corporeal body, and what one does in this world affects it. Therefore, what we do in our world is important. Whatever we do with an intention toward the Creator is considered a spiritual act, though the act itself might still be completely “beastly.”

Nevertheless, anything we do inevitably leads us toward the purpose of creation. Even the pains we suffer in life do not come in vain, but are collected, and when the right time comes, they count in our favor. This happens slowly over many years, and we are not a consciously active part of it. To shorten this long path of pain, the Creator gave us the Torah, which directs us to the right goal less painfully.

Kabbalah Is a Method that Speeds Up Your Spiritual Development

Only in recent decades have a growing number of special souls begun to descend to our world, these souls having collected a sufficient amount of pain. These souls took the path of pain, accumulated deficits, and now those pains have turned into a yearning for the wisdom of Kabbalah. In future lives, these souls will delve into the study of Kabbalah more intensely and within a month or two attain fantastic results because they have accumulated a sufficient desire for it in their past lives. If a person has a strong enough desire to study and focuses just on Kabbalah for one purpose only, then in three to five years he or she will enter the spiritual world.

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The Enigma that Is Freedom of Choice

All throughout history philosophers have sought the answer to the question: “Is there freedom of choice?” They tried to define the concept of choice and reached the conclusion that only a limited freedom of choice in society is given to those who have a developed personality.

But among themselves, they understood that freedom of choice is always limited by our inability to control the future, because there is always the possibility that we could be run over by a truck, catch a fatal illness, or go into a coma. Of course, we can ignore such examples of the absence of freedom of choice, but that would not make life any easier. The evolution of genetics hasn’t improved our situation either, but only strengthened the feeling that we are in a closed compartment, surrounded by chains of genes from which we can never escape.

Freedom of Choice through Accelerating Your Development

And then comes the wisdom of Kabbalah, which Kabbalists regard as the last stage of the development of science, and we find that not only are we chained by our biological genes, but we are programmed throughout many lifetimes with a long and consistent chain of Reshimot that is set in the mind, the heart, and the soul throughout all time, and that is what determines our lives.

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Driven by the Desire for Pleasure

We were created in such a way that wherever we go, we look for pleasures and take every chance we can to satisfy our desires. Where do these desires come from, and how do we know how to satisfy them?

At any given moment there are new desires that awaken in us, at all levels of existence: on the physical, human, and spiritual levels. We don’t feel all the physical desires, such as the desire of the cells to develop and the desire of the organs to act. Some of these desires are satisfied naturally, and some require our active participation to be satisfied. As a whole, the desires can be divided into three parts:

• Physical (beastly) desires, which exist in animals as well.
• Human desires, which exist only in human society, such as desires for wealth, honor, and knowledge, and human- spiritual desires, desires for something sublime that are clearly not of our world. Searching for supernatural phe- nomena, religious rituals, and Far Eastern techniques for the improvement of the body and the mind all express such desires.
• Spiritual desires, which aim directly at the unique Creator. The Kabbalah distinguishes the desire for the Creator from all other desires. Our desires for worldly pleasures are called “humankind’s heart” while the desire for the Creator is called “the point in the heart.”

How Desires Originate

The desires form in us as a result of the surfacing of the reshimot, the carriers of the information within us, forcing us to obey their demands. There is a chain of preliminary reshimot imprinted in us, which makes us aware of the desire that they awaken as they surface. We have no choice but to obey these desires, although we do not feel that there is something that we must obey—we simply want. It is as though the reshimot appear out of nowhere in the subconscious even before we detect them, and when they come into our awareness, we feel them as desires. There is only one thing that we want: pleasure.

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A few years ago I had the honor of being interviewed by bestselling author William Simon for an autobiography about my life. We never actually completed the book, but you can read an excerpt here below about how I found my teacher.

Michael and his family were now settled in Israel, living a penthouse lifestyle with a housekeeper, a garden fountain, and many enviable high-tech conveniences. He and Olga had chosen the comfort of Rehovot, twenty miles south of Tel Aviv, where they could hear the sounds of the night and see the galaxies without shrill interferences from city lights or sirens.

After two years of work with F4 Phantom fighter aircraft, Michael could breathe easy—he had completed his required military service. The dental clinic was successfully producing a dependable and attractive income. And he was wealthy enough to own an imported large black Buick sedan. Many people would have put their feet on a desk and said, “I’ve made it.” But not this man. In the silence of Rehovot, Michael was still in distress over the same questions that had kept his life in turmoil for so many years.

Then came a day at the dental clinic in 1978 when a clean-shaven man showed up for an appointment. He arrived at a time when Michael was busy trying to repair one of the clinic’s machines. Chaim Malka had the chiseled bone structure of a European though he was from Morocco. Despite being college-educated, he held a job as a factory maintenance technician.

Read the Full Story at the Times of Israel »

What Are ‘Spiritual’ Genes?

The entire plan of human development is imprinted in each person. It is the engine that pushes us forward and forces us to evolve. We have already succeeded in comprehending that the entire knowledge of the biological body can be obtained in our genes. But the plan for our spiritual development is also embedded in special genes, much deeper than our biological genes. These are our “spiritual genes.”

From the moment a person comes into this world, this plan becomes operative and begins to control his or her life. It dictates a person’s attributes, character, fate, and every movement. But it also allows a person the freedom to choose in many of the situations.

Spiritual Genes are in Everything

This plan exists not only in humans, but also in everything that exists in the universe, dictating the very process called “life.” Unlike other parts of nature, that program is not inflexible in people, but evolves during their lives. The program is a series of consecutive data commands. Each commandment is called a Reshimo, from the Hebrew word roshem (imprint). There is a chain of Reshimot in each of us, from the moment we are born to the moment of our death, containing not only the information from our current life cycle, but from all the incarnations of our soul.

If we read the data in this chain of Reshimot we will be able to go through all the stages of the development of the universe, as in a movie, from the earliest phases of the creation of the universe, the sun, and the stars, through the dinosaur era, and on to the farthest future. The collective law of the universe loses nothing but only changes from state to state.

Kabbalah Lets You Study Your Spiritual Genes

If this chain of Reshimot is our whole plan of operation, from the beginning of our life to its end, and if there is nothing that we can do but to follow the written instructions, it would be interesting to know what is in store for us there, both as a whole and as individuals. But rather than find out the details of our destiny, it would be better to research the Reshimot in the following manner: to learn what purpose nature sets for itself, what collective law the Reshimot are supposed to bring us to, how we can study those Reshimot, and then perhaps make changes, rebuild, and improve things.

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