The Subtle Art Of Spiritual Work

Spiritual correction cannot happen in one limited field of life, in a single atom or a particle. It can happen only between all of them.

That’s why when we speak about unity and correction that happens according to the principles, “Do not do to others what you don’t want for yourself,” or “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” it actually is the method of correction. It transpires gradually, in accordance with the way our desires manifest themselves in us, to the extent of whether or not they can be corrected.

How does each desire become corrected? What does a desire “look like” before it is “fixed”? What makes a desire similar to the Creator when it corrects and how does He manifest Himself in this desire?

Desires to steal, kill, suppress, or take advantage of somebody are palpable and emerge in contact with others. Where our desires are less obvious, such as our relations with still, vegetative, and animate nature, it is very difficult to find the property of mercy. And with one’s peers it is clearly felt and seen.

Therefore the Torah gives very rigid instructions on the sequence of work that we have to do: concrete desires, their order, and combination, the ways they have to be corrected. It’s impossible to correct oneself solely through our relationships with others. We must add still, vegetative, and animate parts of nature, that is, desires that are lower and rougher, desires that are focused not only on people, but that are also oriented towards the world.

As a result, we’ll achieve complete adhesion among all of our desires in all directions and at all times. One has to learn to justify the Creator and others in everything that happens to one. Immediately, one will receive various and multiple reminiscences. The whole history, geography, etc. revives in one’s memory.

When we enter spirituality, there are very interesting pictures spinning when a person starts to fix his relationship with all people, characters, and properties of all times. It is as if one goes through various prior reincarnations and stories and once again deals with one’s attitude toward them, and as if scrubs oneself inside and transforms these stories.

After all, the picture of this world doesn’t really exist: it is drawn in us. All we have to do is fix all of its substrate, as a painter who first applies primer on the canvas, polishes it, then applies a few more layers of primer, and only then begins drawing a picture and building perspectives. It’s a gradual, step-by-step process and a lot of work.

It means that we have to go through all the prior developmental stages and they attain the Creator. In fact, after the descent of a soul from above to below and its subsequent ascent from the bottom up can we comprehend its structure and the way it emerged; however, it happens in the inverse order

Then, one reaches the “parent,” the Creator. One attains Him through the soul that one gradually corrects, thus becoming closer to Him.

This process can be compared with the art of painting. After all, when we return to a canvas many times and each time go deeper into it, we eventually begin comprehending the thought that inspired the artist, until we recognize the Creator’s thought to please the creation. In other words, the painting by itself is bliss, a pleasure; it’s the action that implements His thought in life. This is an example of the way His thought in its clear form can be perceived through the matter that was correctly shaped.

In the end, a person learns all the details of this painting, all His thoughts, the thought of creation that looms through the canvas. That’s how all worlds connect together and make one world: the world of Infinity, the world of the absolute attainment.
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From KabTV’s “The Secrets of the Eternal Book” 8/12/13