The Yearning For Rest

Baal HaSulam, “Matan Torah” (The Giving of the Torah): Now here opens before us a door to understand the source of all the pleasures and pains in our world. Since the Creator is the root of His creations, we feel all that exists in Him and extends to us directly from Him as pleasant and delightful, because our nature is close to our root. And everything that is not in Him, and does not extend to us directly from Him, but contradicts Creation itself, will be against our nature and difficult for us to tolerate.

Thus, we love to rest and hate to move so much, that we do not make a single movement if not for the attainment of rest. That is because our root is immobile but at rest, and no motion exists in Him whatsoever. Therefore, it is against our nature and loathsome to us. By the same token, we love wisdom, strength, and wealth, etc. because all those exist in Him who is our root.

Anyone whose nature is the desire to receive yearns for pleasure. Pleasure is attained only when there is a desire as well as the filling of that desire. If I want something and I don’t have it, I suffer. If I receive what I want, I enjoy.

A state of pleasure is called rest since I do not need anything anymore; I have want I wanted. This is the reason that all of nature aspires for rest, for one unified straight motion, which means as unchanging as possible. This means that I am in a comfortable state. Our desire itself creates such rules of behavior for itself.

If the desire feels a deficiency, it is forced to move according to the deficiency and attain what it lacks. We can see that on all levels of nature.

The uniqueness of our evolution is that we have to change ourselves in order to want to resemble the Creator, which is against our original nature, and to act in order to attain this goal by implementing a special method called the wisdom of Kabbalah.

We cannot receive the energy to perform our actions by ourselves because the oppositeness of our nature cannot fill us in any way. The only thing we can do is to ask the Creator to help us to change ourselves, which means to change our intention to receive to the intention to bestow.

This change takes place as a result of the impact of the upper Light, which comes and affects us and invokes changes in us, making us want to resemble the Creator. But, at the same time, we cannot say which actions the Light performs on us.

We gradually begin to perceive these actions that have attributes of the upper system or the upper Light and can perform these changes in us: instead of thinking about myself, I begin to think about others. This is what the upper Light pushes us toward. We will have to change whether we like it or not.

Today, we see how the world gradually changes and how life becomes so hard to understand, so noisy, and so egoistic. Humanity feels that something is happening to it and that it has to change somehow but it does not understand what is going on. Families are breaking up, there are serious global changes, etc.

All this is happening in order to force us to want to change our attitude to the world, to convince us that we cannot exist in the world within the attribute of receiving anymore because we can only be filled and discover a good way to live through the attribute of bestowal.

All this indicates that the time has come for the wisdom of Kabbalah to be revealed and to become more popular and more accessible because it is actually this wisdom that explains how to do that in an easy, simple, and pleasant way.

Comment: The word “rest” is usually associated with peacefulness, with slow-motion actions, or with motionlessness.

Answer: This is not true. Even according to physics and other exact sciences we know that unchanging motion in the speed of light is a state of rest. Therefore, it is not about our state but about the lack of change in the state; if you do not yearn for anything, you are satisfied.
[211097]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 4/2/17