Run by Yourself

Q: You tell us to read our books in order to reach our correction. Is that all we have to do? This way it could take a million years before I reach the Upper World!

A: If you study the material correctly, you’ll soon find that many tiny changes happen within you. You’ll find you are being led, that there’s a soul within you, and that something affects it from the outside.

You’ll find that your soul and the Light of the Creator, which affects it, lead you, and not your physical brain. Your mind contains knowledge of the present, whereas the future remains unknown. But even before the future is revealed to you, you want to do more than just fantasize about it; you want to act as if you are in it, as if you have risen to the next degree of awareness.

The surrounding Light that is awakened when man studies Kabbalah correctly, works on the soul and initiates the next spiritual state. That state will then come by itself and replace the present. By making considerable efforts in the study of Kabbalah, a person can accelerate personal changes. That, in fact, is the only freedom of choice we have in this world.

Baal HaSulam writes in the Introduction to The Study of the Ten Sefirot that the Creator rests man’s hand on the good fortune and tells him: “Choose this for yourself.”

So where, then, is the choice? The choice is, in fact, that either we are pushed from behind, which we will feel as pain, or we run forward by ourselves, ahead of the pain. This is our only freedom of choice.

Anything that happens in our world, anything that people do, is all predetermined, because all the characteristics of man and his environment, both internal and external, are predefined by the Creator. Only for people who crave spirituality and only in their personal efforts is there freedom of choice.