How can I determine whether I advance towards the Creator with the intention of in order to bestow or for some other self-benefit?There are many people who are ready to “die as martyrs,” but how can you tell whether it is the greatest egoism or whether it is truly bestowal and self-sacrifice?
How can I check myself, daily, every moment, whether I am desiring to bestow upon the friends, life, myself, and the Creator or in order to somehow profit from them?
How can I test this? After all, without such examination, I don’t know where I am. It could be that I have been going along for twenty years but I actually went in the opposite direction from the goal: instead of bestowal to receiving. And I could complain that I haven’t reached revelation yet and that I am now powerless. But it could be that I went backward, as it is written, “It is better to sit and do nothing,” than to go in the wrong direction.
The examination is very sharp and simple: I have to yearn for what I hate: It is very simple. If I hate someone and want to feel bestowal towards him, then I have to love him without annulling my hate.
But if I don’t feel hate towards someone, I cannot check in what kind of a relationship we are: whether it is in order to receive or in order to bestow. If I build a relationship with someone, and I begin to think less of him than before, it is a good sign. It is a sign that I discover my ego. And I decide that I continue to reinforce our connection and turn the one I hate in to a loved friend, above my power, against my will, when I oblige myself to love him.
If I don’t succeed in that, I ask for it during the lesson and do all kinds of tricks in order to love him. This is because it is clear to me that the love must ride on top of the previous hate and that these two feelings have to coexist, as the right and left lines. I connect them and build the middle line without annulling either of them: not the right one and not the left one, as it written: “Love covers all sins.”
This means that the sins are necessary, so that above them there will be love. Then I look at our relationship differently. Hate is revealed? Never mind! It is a sign that now love will be revealed!
So I try to feel it and see that it doesn’t work out. I go through ascents and descents and different problems, and it is all in order to need help from Above. Then I cry out to the Creator: “Help!” The Creator is the middle line, Keter, from which the two lines come to me: the right line and the left line. If I am below, in the middle line (in the Sefira of Da’at), I ask and receive help from Him.
This means that these two opposing forces: the bestowal and the receiving, which come from Him, are needed only in order to stabilize me in accordance with Him and to focus me on Him. Thanks to them I feel and understand what Keter is. Actually they are what stabilize my reality.
[68201]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/31/12, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot”
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