Some Thoughts
Until today, the most correct form of society, was certainly a group of students, whose members were all united with a single desire to obey their leader – the sage, the rabbi. That aspiration stemmed from an absolute recognition in the spiritual correctness of the rabbi, and not from his charisma – his special connections with the Creator, or fear from his officers and armies.
The entire religious history of mankind testifies to man’s inability to keep, or demand from others to keep the ten commandments, or even hope that they will ever be kept, without knowing who we got them from. Only the revelation and attainment of the Creator can give us the power to keep the commandments, and only to the extent that a person understands the power, uniqueness and greatness of the Creator.
The degrees in our ability to keep the ten commandments, are in fact, the spiritual degrees of the revelation of the Creator, the attainment of him, the spiritual rise, the rungs of the spiritual ladder, Jacob’s ladder.
Otherwise, if human society breaks the fundamentals of observing commandments, not through the attainment of the Creator, the revelation of Him by creation, it must find a justification for keeping the ten commandments in its everyday life, meaning, life itself must justify the keeping of the commandments.
The generator for the creation of the laws and codes of human society, both civil and criminal, is a distortion of the element of observing commandments. That is why only in the last generation humanity will be able to return to the genuine observing of the laws of nature, that are perfectly compatible with our nature, and bring about genuine correction.
No commandment will be able to make people follow all ten commandments in their genuine form, and it is only the revelation of Godliness that will make everyone keep the commandments willingly.
Baal HaSulam calls that condition (in his Introduction to Talmud Esser Sefirot) of voluntarily observing the word of God's “testimony”, meaning the Creator testifies by His appearance before man, as in a court of law, that that person will no longer be able to err, because the revelation of the power and magnitude of the Creator forces man to willingly and naturally observe all the commandments of the Creator.
The substance we are made of is the egoistic desire to enjoy, and we can only perform what we perceive as beneficial to us. That is why the revelation of the Creator creates in us yet another decision to follow His wish, because it would bring us only good. But if a person goes through the phases of the recognition of the sinfulness of his nature, and he sees that without that coercion, he lives in constant pain and suffering from generation to generation, he is convinced that any decision that comes to him from above, however difficult it may be, ultimately brings only good and is preferred over all his searches and the fictitious freedom he enjoys today.
Then a demand of the Creator awakens in man, to appear before him, as a witness, or in fact as collateral that man will only take the right way from now on, and will not make such bitter mistakes and suffer so from his mistakes.
It turns out that the desire, as we understand it in our lives, in our corporeal understanding, was given to us only in order to understand, once we have discovered all the fictitious and bitter beauty of that freedom, that in fact we are not free at all, because we follow our own egoistic desires, the evil in us, and cannot break free.
If we were to become slaves to altruism, in order for it to control us the way egoism does today, meaning that we would unconsciously swap one slavery with the other, and the Creator would replace one nature with the another, although we want precisely such a passage from one owner to another, we still get from the Creator something of a different quality. He creates in us a mechanism of the three lines in which we use our egoism in another way, for bestowal, after we perform the first restriction, once there is full detachment from any aspiration for pleasure.
A person cannot change his own desires for pleasure, to receive, to satisfy his material, moral and spiritual needs. But to be satisfied for myself or for the Creator is the whole difference between egoism and altruism. Before a person detaches himself from ‘for me’, he cannot understand that that aim was given to him from above. It is not a natural aim, but something that accompanies his desire for pleasure.
And should the Creator add to his desire to receive the aim ‘for Her name’, he will also begin to use his desire to receive pleasure with that new intention.
That transition state of ‘delighting in mercy’, when a person receives from above the strength to refrain from making any selfish calculations produces his spiritual liberation. After that, a person chooses a different use to his desire to receive pleasure – for the Creator. If it were not for that new element, the spiritual state of “delighting in mercy”, man would not feel free in his desire and intention ‘for the Creator’.
But precisely because he comes to that situation of “delighting in mercy”, he can elect his actions completely freely. And if he chooses altruism at this point, it is a decision of free will, and not in order to escape suffering. A person does not sell his freedom of choice and his freedom of will for a painless life, but he willingly and independently chooses freedom.
Each generation passes on to the next, the collective experience that mankind has accumulated, in addition to the scientific and cultural achievements. This human recall goes from generation to generation, just as energy from a rotten seed goes to the young bud. There is only the transference of memory, energy, and reminiscence (Reshimot). All substance is doomed to rot, just as man’s body rots, and all the information goes to the soul that rises. Then, after its entrance into new bodies, it implements that accumulated memory.
What is the difference between transferring information through a seed, when a young couple has children, and the transference of information when the soul of the deceased moves to a new body? After all the parents are still alive, and so are their children. So what souls enter the bodies of those little children?
Throughout the generations and in all the peoples, there is an enormous desire to pass the accumulated knowledge to the next generations, to pass on the best, most moral values. The best implementations of that desire are not in the study, not in education, it is implemented in the ‘sacred still’ (the orthodox religious), in the old-fashioned way.
The transference is executed through the ‘spiritual package’, and therefore, the best thing that a person can do in order to pass on the good reminiscence to the next generation – is to correct himself, to improve the qualities of his soul, to make sure it leaves his body in the most corrected form possible.
Therefore we see that man passes his soul to the next generation, and in it he passes all that is necessary, and does not pass anything vitally important through an external system of values, or education, anything that has to do with this world. Genuine transference exists only on the spiritual level, not on the corporeal.
We encounter deformations in the understanding of the terms: humanism and altruism, on a daily basis. To be precise, a misunderstanding of the words of the Bible! The laws of the Creator are all purposeful, aimed at the target. They have to be studied with close relation to the purpose of creation, otherwise, they are misunderstood and even contradict one another.
That is why in every action we do, its justification or criticism is only possible when we can approach it in relation to the purpose of creation, meaning with relation to the aim of the Creator who chooses to act in a certain way. Otherwise we will never be able to assess any phenomenon in the world correctly.
If we are wise enough to convey to our descendants that point of view on the world, on their actions, not by the religious ethics, but creatively and not because of fear of punishment, they will be aware of the existence of the Creator, of nature, and will develop spiritually faster, and will come to the spiritual attainment that we should and indeed can influence providence.
In the 20th century there was a division between the religious and secular society. That division will begin to be narrowed down soon, because the two groups are beginning to come to the understanding of the true path. That path is neither religious nor secular, it is something in-between, a golden path, the path to the Creator.
Absolute egoism is expressed in each nation by self-melioration, high self-esteem, relating to my nation and as a virtuous nation. Perhaps these images lose some of their power over certain periods, but later on, the absence of the basis for exaggerated self-esteem causes aggression, caused by the absence of that esteem.
People keep complaining about depression, suffering, torments, and in fact, lack of joy in their lives. I can recommend, just like that wise man who (when he heard about the crowdedness in the house of his friend) suggested to let the goat in from the yard. After some time he suggested the goat be taken out again.
I recommend to all those in depression: shut your eyes and ears. Stay like that for a few minutes until you feel a strong desire to see and hear, suffer some more, and a little more, and then remove the blindfold and the ear blocks and you will see how beautiful and wondrous this world is!
You can say that basically, the theories of Freud, Marcs, and Einstein are the same search for the Creator, but not in a direct way, but through the contradictions in society, in man, in science. They all searched for something perfect, meaning for the Creator, but they searched below the barrier, in our world, yet with an inner recognition that there is no solution in our world.
The understanding and recognition of the power of the Creator is not just that He is the only reason for everything, that “There is none else beside Him”, but a spiritual aspiration to the upper world, a desire to unite with Him, if He is the only one. Because the understanding that the Creator is unique, compels man to maintain his own uniqueness by equalizing his own attributes with those of the Creator, to unite with Him.
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The differences in the practice of Yoga and other methods, as opposed to Kabbalah, is that all the other methods and religions offer a method for external performance, physical, meaning practical exercises, diets, customs, exercises. Only the wisdom of Kabbalah is not about any external actions, but the whole practice, from beginning to end, concentrates on man’s soul, his thoughts, spiritual aspirations, meaning an internal spiritual practice.
If a person obeys the laws of nature, and at the same time tries to picture the Creator, he always sees the differences between himself, the egoist, and the Creator, the altruist. That proportion creates religions where man is pictured as having opposite attributes to the Creator, the will to receive, which certainly stands against the attributes of the Creator, and thus his spiritual path concentrates on suppressing his own nature and his free will.
Only he who can picture the whole reality as made not from Creator and creation, but only the Creator, will not see the contradictions between himself and the Creator. As a result, his approach, his way to the Creator will focus not on battling his own attributes, but on equally accepting his and the Creator’s attributes.
That person will never base his upbringing on threat, coercion and limitations, although that way enables amazing visual results in a short time, but it will never bring man to a genuine spiritual correction. As soon as conditions will change, everything will collapse in a horrible and distorted manner.
Only a spiritual change that a person performs willingly, gradually, within his soul, as a result of the influence of the group, the teacher (Kabbalist), the close environment that he chooses freely to be in, will make him change. The influence of the group on man is just as effective as he is aware that he must be corrected and hence must accept the group as the supreme influencing factor. To that extent man will also be able to absorb the idea of spiritual ascent from the group, and to that extent he will be able to aspire to the Creator and speed up his spiritual ascent from the path of the ordinary person to that of the chosen few. For such a person there are no limitations, only inner changes.