Mind And Feelings In Spiritual Development

Question: Where does a person’s thoughts originate from according to the wisdom of Kabbalah?

Answer: Thoughts are a product of the desire. Desire is the basic matter of man: I seek to fill my emptiness. As a result, thoughts appear to choose how I can fill myself.

Question: Where do the feelings, the emotions, come in?

Answer: There is no reference to such concepts in Kabbalistic sources. There is a desire and there is the mind that helps fulfill the desire. The intention is an additional level above the desire that expresses what exactly a person wants to use it for.

The desire comes first and the mind is secondary because the mind never changes the desire; on the contrary, the desire governs the mind. No matter how many philosophers, writers, poets, art critics, and people engaged in the arts wanted to present this to humanity—our corporeal desire manages everything.

Question: What do different emotions, like joy, humor, etc., mean according to the wisdom of Kabbalah?

Answer: These are all feelings in the desire.

Question: What is the function of the feelings and the mind in a person’s spiritual development?

Answer: The role of the feelings is to show what is happening in a person’s desire and the role of the mind is to be able to work with these desires. But the mind itself doesn’t work on them. It can manage the desire only through the Light that Reforms.

We often see psychologists, and experts in other pseudo-scientific areas in our world who are trying to work with a person’s internal world, with his thoughts and his desires, but they do not succeed.

Being the product of desires, thoughts can help a person manage his internal world, if with the help of his thoughts, he creates in his desire the conditions under which the Surrounding Light begins to impact him.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 8/21/16