March 24, 2014 at 6:30 am · Filed under Articles, Books
The wisdom of Kabbalah tells us how the Creator’s quality of bestowal creates a desire, out of nothing, a desire to receive pleasure, and how this creature has similarity with the end of its development.
After an initial four phase development the creature realizes its total opposition to its source, end enters a new phase, using a bestowing intention to progress towards the desired similarity.
We learn how the creation receives what pleasure it can in order to bestow, and builds itself to be as similar as possible to its Creator. However, even after all the worlds have been established in the Partzuf, and all the lights that could be received in order to bestow are received in the Partzuf, there still remains one desire that cannot be made to work in the Partzuf—the desire to be like the Creator. This is the desire that the host in Ashlag’s allegory was referring to when he said, “In this case, there has never been born a person who could fulfill your wishes.” This is the most intense desire, the core desire of Stage Four, and at the same time it is utterly unachievable.
So once all the desires were exploited to the maximum, the creation’s (the company) marketing department (surrounding light), reminded the company management—the Rosh (head) of creation—that there was still more light to be received. Now it was the Rosh’s duty to examine this new desire and determine if it could receive this desire with the intention to bestow.
Do You Fall for this Hidden Temptation that Is Impossible To Resist?
For this reason, the Rosh assembled a special board meeting to discuss the fate of this last desire. In this meeting, the argument for not using it was that it was too strong to handle. Indeed, how can one handle a desire to be like one’s parent? If the Partzuf actually received what it wished for in that desire, it would be similar to a child instantly becoming an adult, without the knowledge and experience acquired over the years of growing up. Clearly, this was too complicated and too dangerous a desire to handle.
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March 21, 2014 at 10:10 am · Filed under Articles, Books
In “What Are the Four Developmental Stages of the Primordial Desire in Creation?” we discussed the emergence of the desire to receive in Stage One, and the desire to give in Stage Two, as offshoots of the primordial desire to give in the Root. We also showed how because of its desire to give, the desire to receive was reactivated in Stage Three and maximized in Stage Four. Maximizing the desire to receive caused it to want not merely to enjoy, but to actually become like its progenitor—the Root Stage—and even to have the status of the Root Stage’s primacy. The subsequent realization that this was not (yet) possible induced a sense of inherent inferiority in Stage Four, which induced a restriction—elimination of any sensation of pleasure (light).
Also, because Stage Four’s real desire is for the Root’s primacy, it does not settle for the unbounded pleasure received in Stage One. Instead, it wishes to obtain the nature of the Root, the Thought of Creation, and consequently the Root’s primacy.
Thus, the elimination of pleasure in Stage Four is neither a result of its inability to receive, nor a consequence of the Root’s inability to give. The Root gives incessantly, but the desire to receive does not want to receive something as degrading as charity (as described by Ashlag in “The Giving of the Torah”). for this reason, because Stage Four wishes to acquire the giver’s thought and become like its Creator, its restriction is an offshoot of its decision to not receive unless with the intention to bestow, as this reciprocates the Creator’s desire to bestow.
The Structure of a Partzuf
To achieve that, Stage Four builds a three-part mechanism, called Partzuf (face), to determine if it should receive light, and if so, how much, with the aim to bestow at any given moment opportunity. The top section of the Partzuf is called Rosh (Head). Its task is to determine how much of the abundance (light) is to be received by the desire to receive. The desire to receive itself constitutes the bottom part of the Partzuf, which is called Guf (Body).
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