When Desires Disappear

Question: What differentiates freedom in the spiritual world and the corporeal one?

Answer: Freedom in the corporeal world is freedom from all our egoistic necessities: food, sex, family, knowledge, power, and wealth. We see that more and more, man wishes to be free from these things.

Question: Is that possible? Can a person be free from the desire for sex, for food?

Answer: Food, sex, and family are three types of animate desires of the physical body. I see that today man is trying to free himself from them. Young people aren’t particularly interested in gourmet dishes, they’re satisfied with a quick hot-dog on the go and that’s all.

Sex is a relative notion for them. According to polls, many people don’t even want to burden themselves with it. Family has long ceased to be a necessity, something that society needs, and society even encourages this attitude.

The animate desires are followed by the human desires: wealth, power, fame, and knowledge. Young people are losing the desire for these things too, relatively speaking. Wealth comes and goes. And not only wealth, everything goes somewhere. Now we are undergoing a period of transition that will soon end, and a completely different value system will be presented to us.

Fame and power always go together, but they have long ceased to be the same thing that they once were with the great rulers. Regarding knowledge, science does not feel by any means that it is the summit of humanity’s ideals, of attainment.

Question: Then what remains?

Answer: Nothing. Values are being reassessed such that nothing from the past remains. The next stage is a search: Is there anything of value in our lives?

Our development unfolds at a rate and in a direction such that all the desires are starting to appear empty to us.

From our new level of development, we see that they are not important, that they do not fulfill us, there are no special qualities in them. Suppose I have a great meal and spend the night with someone. With whom? Anyone at all. All of this is losing meaning very quickly.

Remark: Many people think this way, “I want it, I just can’t get it…”

Answer: A person can get anything. But youth today do not want to waste their time attaining it; whereas, in the past, young people would give up their whole lives for it! Decades of hard work, studies, employment, savings, and everything else, for what?! Now they understand that there isn’t anything that is “worth it.”

Why should I study, work, get married, have kids, and create a family? In order to pass it all onto my children, and they will live the same way? And then what? There is no point to any of these actions. Today people are becoming convinced of that.

Question: Then what is the choice, how do I know that I am on the right path?

Answer: Kabbalah says that a person has to rise above these types of desires, the egoistic animate ones (food, sex, and family), and the human desires, which exist in us in addition to our animate degree (wealth, power, fame, and knowledge). When no desires remain and a person gradually becomes convinced that this is not what matters to him, he is faced with the question: What, then, is the meaning of life? What is it for? I do not want to be forced to be in these desires. Then why should I exist?

That’s when he faces the question about the next form of desire: Is there something higher than this? Is there an ideal that makes living worthwhile?
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 7/2/17