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Why there is suffering?

The Thought of Creation, to create a creature and fill it with unbound delight, is the design of all events good and bad without exception. It is the seed and ultimate fruit of life already blooming and fulfilled in the highest spiritual world: the thought united with its ultimate outcome beyond time and space. Here, below in our world when we taste some bitter experience we feel it as suffering. We cannot sense it for what it really is -unripe fruit, a necessary stage of growth destined to take us to the only destination. The goal is assured but we choose the speed and the degree of pain or pleasure on our journey. There is but one design directing two forces, pleasure and pain. We are built to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. When we act in this way we are prisoner within our lower nature. Where it goes, we go. Suffering naturally forces a person to ask the deepest questions so that he can find the real answer as to why he suffers, so he can eventually see that the cause of suffering is just his inner dissimilarity of form with the law that guides this world. Being pushed by suffering over thousands of years he will some day come to realize that desiring to be like this law is the only thing worth achieving and the only way to escape pain. It forces the individual and the mass of humanity to move to its next level of development. This is the slow, disastrous, unconscious road of history. In Kabbalah it is called the Path of Pain. If a person wants to become consciously involved in this process, to transform himself and attain an inner nature like that of the law of life, he can get himself ahead of the wave of pain and disaster and accelerate his development completing many lifetimes of progress in a single day, while at the same time becoming freed from slavery to his lower nature. He willingly changes the quality of all his desires from an egoistic aim to an altruistic one. Kabbalists tell us that each soul consists of 620 desires (613+7) The correction of one of these is called a Mitzvah, a good act. This is not a physical act but one of intention. The conscious effort is ours but the actual correction is done by the light, ohr.. With each corrected desire we attains a higher spiritual state of awareness, a greater connection and similarity to the Upper Force, the Creator, eventually reaching the End of Correction called Gmar Tikkun. This is called the Path of Torah (instruction by the Light) or the Path of Kabbalah. To do this we need guidance on how to work with the events of life which are the environment between us and the Creator. It's vital to hear what Kabbalists have to say about how to work with both good and bad states and events ( the right and the left line) and to connect them within our own aim above reason (the middle line) in order to see and enter the beautiful reality hidden behind them. The Article "There is None Else Beside Him" is the first article in the Book Shamati, "I Have Heard" which consists of the transcriptions of the the words of Baal HaSulam recorded by his son Rav Baruch Ashlag. It contains the cornerstone of the methodology of Kabbalah. The light in it can lead us to rise above suffering to experience it and our reality in an entirely different way. To get the most out of the experience. Read the article on your own first, then watch the video lesson commentary by Rav Laitman with the article open before you. Its not important that you understand intellectually what you find in this article. It is far more important to try to reach the level of the author, to sense his experience and feel what he feels, which is actually above the intellect. While you're reading and when you listen, occasionally ask yourself why you're doing this, what it is you want. Remember your aim - to reveal the Creator.

Bnei Baruch Los Angeles - Branch of Bnei Baruch World Academy of Kabbalah Study