Where The Heart Desires…

Question: How do we ask for the Light to change us if we don’t perceive it?

Answer: It’s true, first you must have the desire, and only then can you turn to the Light.

If I wrote on a piece of paper: “I need to ask the Light!” and read it a hundred times, nothing would happen. This would become a habit; I would keep repeating these words like a broken record and nothing more.

But we are given the opportunity to change our desire with the help of our environment. After all, we exist among other people and not alone.

When I listen to them and watch them through a prism of envy, lust, and honor, all these properties that are part of my desire to receive pleasure, then I want to receive all the good things that they have, and rise even higher than them.

If they want to become thieves, then I want to become the most important, powerful, and successful thief, because they respect this.

When my environment deems it important to attain the property of bestowal, then naturally I will want to succeed in it the most, because this will become important to me.

So I can change my heart’s desire through the environment. And so it is written: “We shall do and we shall hear” because I am able to do such things that as a consequence I will suddenly desire something that was not in me initially, such as bestowing to others, deeming this to be important, somehow egoistically wishing to bestow.

After all, I exist in an egoistic society, and if this society starts convincing me that it is worth it to bestow, naturally I, just like all my friends, will begin to think that it is really worthwhile to bestow.

But at the same time, I think that this will benefit me, that I will become important in their eyes, I will be great, I will attain the Upper World, and the Creator will be mine. So bestowing it is; what matters is for me to profit. This is called Lo Lishma.

When driven by this aspiration, I still want the Light to come to me and change me, it begins to change me, and I suddenly catch a “virus” of some sort; I acquire something I did not have before, something I did not want, and I did not intend to get. I suddenly really begin to think that bestowal is something special, good, and sublime.

Where does this come from? This appears like an illness that you really did not want to have. I seriously begin to think that it is a good thing to think about others instead of thinking about me, without any kind of benefit or reward in it for me.

Naturally, I go through a sequence of changes here. First of all, I think that I should pull away from my egoistic desire to receive pleasure and that this will make me feel better and freer.

Then I begin to think that I should bestow to others, because in this way I will still acquire some kind of superiority, because in the end I will become close to the Creator, and this is also worth something.

And so on, until the Light gradually influences me in such a way that I attain a pure intention called Lishma, exclusively “for the sake of bestowal” without receiving anything in return. And I feel it; I check that I do not receive anything in return.
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From the lesson 11/26/2010, Writings of Rabash