A Road Paved With Stumbling Blocks

Question: What is it like under the guidance of a spiritual teacher? Is it like a trip with a tourist guide in London or like dangerous mountain climbing where you cannot take a step to the left or to the right without a guide since you might fall?

Answer: In a tour of London you can listen with half an ear to the tourist guide and at the same time walk around as you like. But is this similar to the spiritual path, which you know nothing about?

You have to enter spirituality. The guide tells you that in order to enter spirituality you have to keep certain conditions, but you say that you don’t accept half of these conditions but keep on following the group. How can that be? Can you climb a mountain if you don’t accept half of the guide’s instructions? You have to be as obedient as a baby and totally annul yourself in the arms of the guide.

Question: But I am not a baby I am an adult! I gained a wealth of experience in my life and I have studied with other teachers before.

Answer: You are even less than a baby! If you don’t listen to the guide’s advice, you are like a grownup with the tiny brain of a baby who doesn’t let others take care of him. There are strict laws here that cannot be changed. You cannot ask for mercy like in court. In court you can still cry and plead for mercy. But here there are no manipulations that will help: There is a law, “He has given a law that cannot be broken.” Choose: Do you accept it or not?

There are many people who climb mountains and there are always those who stumble and fall into the great abyss, back into the domination of the egoistic forces, the Sitra Achra. Only few reach the king’s palace that is on the mountaintop: those who have the patience, which means that they try as hard as they can to follow the guide, against any thoughts they may have and against their own mind.

These are the small differences that determine everything where you encounter the resistance of your mind and cannot overcome its demands and do the opposite compared to what the teacher or Baal HaSulam demand of you. It is because you agree with everything else in your ego, but here you encounter what is against your ego, and it is here that you need to ask for help and to ascend.

These are the points that you encounter and which you cannot overcome. They connect and become a line, a path that brings you to the Lord’s palace. It is impossible to advance any other way. You say: “But I agree to everything else!” It is wonderful that you agree, but everything else has nothing to do with spirituality. Spirituality is only in the points where you don’t agree!

You advance only through the points where you disagree: one point after the next. You have to agree on them, under the influence of the environment, the study, etc. but your agreement doesn’t have to be pragmatic. If you agree to disseminate as the teacher asks because you hope to receive a reward, then it is not working in faith above reason anymore, but for a corporeal reward.

We should be careful in using the points of friction and not making them worthwhile. You cannot agree to disseminate in order to feel that you are great standing before a crown or in order to make money. You have to follow these stumbling points in faith above reasonand then these points will turn into a line.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/13/13, Writings of Baal HaSulam