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The Hidden Purpose behind Spiritual Concealment Revealed

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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If Spirituality Seems Unpleasant to You Then You Must Read This

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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Noah Parsha – Weekly Torah Portion

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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Why Spirituality Is Something You Can’t Live Without

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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How to Attain Freedom of Choice

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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