Upper Forces Or How We Can Change Our Fate

Question: Can you define the term “upper forces?”

Answer: The forces that operate in the upper world are altruistic forces, and the lower forces that operate in our world are egoistic forces and therefore we are all egoistic. The Creator says from the beginning, “I have created the evil inclination…,” which means that if you have any problems or complaints, turn to Me personally, and then He immediately adds, “I have created the Torah as a spice.”

Our world is the embodiment of all the evil that was created in us. The evil force, egoism, is the force that generates thoughts and actions only for its own sake, for its own pleasure, momentarily, which is revealed at the moment on all levels of nature: on the still, vegetative, animate, and the human. Living within ourselves is called evil because such a life is short, flawed; we are always locked on ourselves, on satisfying our immediate needs in order to maintain ourselves in a more or less comfortable state.

Let’s imagine that we have created a machine that operates for some time only in order to maintain its functioning and then to happily die. What is this inefficient, unproductive product of the Creator—a person who thinks only of itself, and, consequently, has negative efficiency?

Initially, there was no intention to create a biological machine, as a man and in general all of nature, to live only in order to multiply in great pain and great trouble. In our current state, all of a human life is a desire to survive somehow, to suffer as little as possible and eventually leave this hard, temporary life, to disintegrate into elementary particles, and to put it simply, to rot. Of course, you can not see any perfection or anything in this the action of the Creator that would speak of it as of something higher, wise, purposeful.

Therefore, we don’t see anything wise about our life, but quite the opposite: from the first moment a person comes into this world he begins to get closer to his death. And if life is so short, there is nothing inherently good. This creation can not be created by an absolutely perfect Creator, and that we live, does not fit into His plan of creation to delight.

We don’t understand how the Creator, who is absolute and perfect, created such a world; what we undergo in life does not fit into His plan of creation to delight His creatures.

The thought of the creation is to bring the created beings contentment so that they should praise the Creator, resemble Him, so that we would attain the same level of perfection and eternity on which He exists. In order to raise us to His level that is totally opposite from the level we are born and live on in this world, we were given the Upper Light, the upper force, and also a manual telling us how to spur, summon, and fulfill that force so that it will gradually change us and raise us to His level of eternity and wholeness.

This level is totally different from the corporeal level that is characterized by the temporary egoistic desire to fill ourselves right now, no matter what will happen later. A true altruistic level is not what we call altruism in our world, but an intention to ascend above our egoism and to acquire a form that is opposite from it.

Therefore it is written: “I have seen an opposite world.” This is what we must attain in our world. In other words, while living in our egoism, we have to begin to change it, to rise above it, and to turn it inside out. But we don’t have the forces, the capabilities, and understanding to do so. We only suffer from our existence inside it.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, if a person suffers, it means that you can already speak to him, because as an egoist he wants to get rid of the suffering, of the ego. If we offer him to help him get rid of what constantly oppresses, beats and humiliates him, he will probably agree. This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah offers us.

Kabbalah was hidden as long as we were not disappointed with egoism and believed that it was somehow possible to live with it and to establish some kind of relations between us. And when we realized that we are advancing to the worst possible state, the wisdom of Kabbalah was revealed. When a person begins to feel that the end of civilization is near, when he no longer believes in a bright future and asks himself about the meaning of life, this is the state for which the wisdom of Kabbalah offers a solution. The solution is to change man’s nature into an opposite nature and thus acquire an absolute eternal happy state instead of the current state, which is finite, miserable, and vicious. This is how we can change our fate.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 3/20/16