From Feeling To Reason, From Pleasure To Truth

The world is ruled by one force of bestowal. This force is called the Creator since He created the quality opposite to Himself, the desire to enjoy, in order to raise it to His level. In this way, this desire can bring itself to perfection.

That is why all of our work consists of reaching the quality of bestowal. However, we do not disappear into that, but we change the form of our desire, the initial material, to bestowing. It continues to act with all of its fierce strength and power with which it used to think only of itself before and is revealed as an unclean egoistic system, opposite to bestowal, but now this desire corrects itself and the form of its action. Now, instead of receiving, it desires to bestow.

Such a change happens due to the Light that Reforms. However, until such a change happens inside of the desire to enjoy, it absolutely does not understand what is being talked about here since it is completely located in egoistic qualities, meaning in thoughts and desires for oneself.

The change that it undergoes is truly a new birth, similar to how something develops from a drop of seed in which there is nothing besides internal information about a future person, and in the end, it finally turns into an independent personality which thinks, understands, feels, and answers for its deeds. Where does it all come from? Is it simply out of emptiness? However, in exactly the same way, our own spiritual birth happens.

This process is incomprehensible to us and hidden from us. Until we experience serious changes, we completely do not understand how all of that is being realized on matter, how the Light works, how it changes our qualities, and what is left for us from each of the levels from which we have ascended.

Man becomes confused and does not understand where he really is. It is said that the Creator is the first, and He is also the last. So, where is the human in this? Perhaps he is at least in the middle? There is an initial state of the world of infinity, and there is a final state, the return back to Infinity, and we are on the path somewhere in the middle between the former and the latter.

In addition, what can we add from ourselves to the Creator’s actions, with whom everything begins and ends? We only can speed up our development to show that we want to move toward being similar to the Creator and to not to be pushed from behind by suffering.

The Creator has created a desire to enjoy inside of me that feels the good and the bad in relation to itself, and, now, with the help of these good and bad feelings, He can control me! However, if I am controlled only by my pleasant and unpleasant feelings, then I am acting like an animal. If I want to move forward to that same goal through my own efforts, then I need to feel its importance, to receive the strength for development, acting against my nature.

I must rise above the egoistic perception of good and bad toward the perception of truth and falsehood, and consider them as the good and the bad. These forces must pull me forward, having replaced pleasure and suffering with themselves, by which I am being pushed from behind. This is called the level of a human, not an animal.

That is only possible to achieve by the means of an environment that instills into me such values, such an importance of truth and falsehood that provide the strength for my development. However, in order for that to happen, I must listen to the environment, meaning that all of my work on the attainment of the Creator and toward reaching the goal of creation—to rise from the natural feeling of good and bad toward reason, from the animal level toward the human level, from the perception of pleasure and suffering toward the perception of truth and falsehood—all of that is work with the environment.

My goal is to find an environment that has these goals and values, and to be impressed by it. Thanks to that, I will receive the strength to develop as a human and not as an animal since an animal moves only because it sees a sack of grain in front of it or if it receives blows from behind. However, a human considers pleasure and suffering to be the approaching or distancing of the quality of bestowal, the truth and the falsehood.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/27/12, Shamati #13, “The Eighteenth Prayer”