Question: What is the reason for the fact that when we read The Book of Zohar and keep a very tangible intention, it suddenly disappears, and we understand that it has disappeared only once we remember about it?
Answer: That’s obvious! This is given to us so we would demand the sensation. We are unable to keep two thoughts in our mind. What can be better than attuning myself correctly before reading The Book of Zohar, together with the friends, in a circle, and inside of it desiring to reveal what we are reading?
However, what happens is that I attune myself and start reading, and suddenly I become immersed in the text slightly deeper. Then I no longer use it as “Sgula” – the special quality of the Light, wishing to reveal it in the connection between us. Instead, I switch my attention to the text itself, aspiring to understand it and to attain it, the way I read regular books, wishing to find out what they’re talking about. I don’t perceive what is written there as something that happens inside of me, between us, inside of us, but as something that exists outside of me. I immediately shift to the external picture.
After that, all kinds of alien thoughts come to me and I start “traveling” in these fantasies and calculations.
This happens until a person sees that he is unable to come out of this and it deprives him of the right approach where he would literally be able to “latch on by the teeth” in order to hold on to the right attitude to the reading.
What should he do? Eventually he reaches a demand that he needs the sensation – not to get to know the text or hear it, but to enter this picture, to attain it. He wants this to happen, for this picture to become clear to him. Just as he is in this earthly reality now, so he has to find himself inside of that spiritual reality.
Therefore, this entire confusion, all of these states have to bring us to such despair that we will desire only the sensation, while clearly realizing that we are incapable of anything on our own, even of keeping the intention. But nevertheless, we will clearly discern exactly what we do need.
Then, on one hand you understand that there is nothing you could do and there’s no point even in opening up the book. You reach total despair. But on the other hand, you know that you are unable to leave this path because your entire life is in it. And then, you receive it….
This point is truly critical because from it, you can enter the spiritual world. And that is what really happens.
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/24/11, The Zohar
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