Is There A Good Inclination In A Person?

Question: Can I distinguish an evil inclination and a good inclination within me?

Answer: No. Initially a person has no good desires; we divide them into more egoistic and less egoistic desires.

Question: But doesn’t every person have a point in the heart?

Answer: Right, but first it must be identified. From the point in the heart, a person must gradually grow the good inclination, which is a “desire to bestow,” like bacteria are cultivated in a petri dish.

Question: Are the good deeds in our world where people help each other and even sacrifice their lives for the sake of others relevant here?

Answer: The wisdom of Kabbalah doesn’t talk about the level of this world, about those deeds a person carries out due to compassion, habit, or education.

If you leave a child to grow in a forest, he will not do anything good. Yet, if he is educated in an environment that teaches him to distinguish between good and evil, it will create within him definitions and instincts that he cannot help but carry them out because he feels bad otherwise. In other words, he will do everything from egoistic impulses, including the good deeds.

Suppose that a piece of sausage is lying in front of you. A dog can snatch it from the table and eat it, while I cannot do this, even if I really wanted to, because I have a feeling of shame, self-pride. That is how I was taught; I was given egoistic guidance that I cannot violate. This is called egoism.

We could call this good behavior, education, good impulses, yet there is nothing in them except for an ego that takes on a particular framework and therefore feels bad outside of these frameworks and doesn’t go outside of them. In our world, this is called ethics, but we don’t consider ethics to be correction.

Question: What is a good action in the wisdom of Kabbalah?

Answer: A good action is an action that I carry out with my free choice, with the characteristic of bestowal, with an intention for the sake of bestowal.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 3/12/17