Question: What is the screen composed of and how it is able to keep the Light from neutralizing the desire?
Answer: The screen is not the desire, but the force of resistance. The screen is felt as a calculation for the work on the desire.
How can I rise above the desire if I am in it? I get special force from the outside (from the environment or from the Light, that is, from some external factor), which allows me to get detached from my desire.
And then I don’t sink within my desire and neither do I identify with it. I am not under its control, when I think only of how to fulfill it, similar to a slave who receives orders from his master and runs out to search for how to attain what his master has demanded. I receive a different kind of force from Above, a different calculation, which happens either by way of great suffering or through intellectual enlightenment.
Before this, I only worried about my desire and wanted to fulfill it, that is, I was a big egoist. This big egoist doesn’t exist any more within its small desire. He is detached from it and from the side examines how it is possible to fulfill it more and more.
But by separating from from egoism for the sake of greater fulfillment, I begin to perform a calculation outside of my ego. A kind of split is created between my ego and myself in making decisions: The mind and my desire are as if split. And then I begin to understand that the desire always enslaves the mind and turns me into its slave.
Many people in the world experience this, for example alcoholics or drug addicts. If something causes obvious damage, a person understands that he has become a slave of his desire, of the vicious habit.
But if I look at my desire from the side (and of course a big and developed ego is required here: both the mind and desire), I begin to be sorry that I constantly obey it. I would like some relief from it, and here the development of man begins.
I begin to reflect if it is at all possible to somehow change my desires, to limit some of them and to increase the others? This is possible via the environment. If the shattering had not occurred and the environment had not emerged, we wouldn’t have any chance to exit our desires. But since I am connected to the environment that awakens me and provides me different values, as a result of this, I gradually change.
I compare them with my values and see that I am interested only in good food, and if the environment talks about music, theatre, and opera, I start feeling ashamed and begin to make calculations that distance me from my desire. At least I begin to criticize it, and thus a problem is created: I am not satisfied with myself any longer, and I am compelled to change to fit the environment.
Thus the influence of the environment brings us to such calculation when we are prepared to completely change—only so that others will respect us. But for now I act purely egoistically, without any screen. For the meantime, it is the egoistic screen. I want to be thin and pretty, thus I limit my food intake. Although this is also not easy, people do it anyway. Everything depends on what is more important to me and what gives me the greatest pleasure: how I look externally or food.
Everything depends on my calculation, when with the help of the environment I can increase the importance of one thing over another. Thus whoever is interested in losing weight or in being rehabilitated from a harmful habit must be included into a suitable society that values life without that habit.
But if you want to acquire the anti-egoistic screen, it is something else. For that you need an environment that makes you feel the importance of bestowal. It should hurt you that you are not able to bestow. You will feel that you are belittled because of it, that you aren’t worth anything and are wasting your life, and that in general, there is no reason to live if you don’t attain the attribute of bestowal.
The influence of the environment needs to be very strong, up to the point where you feel that you would rather die than live like this. And then you will begin to demand, to request, to pray, to perform all kinds of calculations and actions in order to acquire the screen. And when you see that there is no way to attain it, you will begin to ask for the Light that Reforms. This is what will bring you to the recognition of evil.
[63311]
From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/15/2011, TES
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