Daily Kabbalah Reality Check

The Difference Between The Physical And Spiritual Sense Of Reality

What I feel inside, is called this world. Compared to that, everything I feel outside of myself, in others, in the connection between them is called the spiritual world, spirituality. Which means, spirituality is the "outer" feeling. This is the difference between the physical perception of reality and the spiritual perception of reality.

Therefore, if we get out of ourselves and go to the group, we feel spirituality. Within the trait of bestowal that we acquire, we feel spirituality inside of it, the Creator. Where do I discover the Creator? Inside the others' souls. That is why it is said that "and you loved your fellow man as yourself, that is a great rule of the Torah," meaning a rule to discover the Light.

Compared to that, I will never be able to feel within myself more than I feel right now. On the contrary, each time I will only feel myself darker and darker because my desire to receive grew more and more until it turned entirely dark.

Because of this, the inner feeling is called "worldliness," and the outer feeling is called "spirituality."  Therefore, all of the wisdom of Kabbalah, whose goal is to bring man to spirituality, is aimed such that man can acquire the trait of bestowal. The person who does this, begins to feel eternal life, which is not dependent on the physical body, but acquires the desire which is located outside of him, and he exists in this external desire.

From Part 2 of the daily Kabbalah lesson, (minutes 19:48 - 23:38)

The Law Of Equivalence Of Form - From An External Concept Of Reality To An Internal Concept Of Reality

In reality the general law called "the law of equivalence of form" is at work. It is the primary law that works on all of the creatures, in all of creation. Its' source comes from the fact that the Creator - the trait of infinite giving - created the creature totally opposite from him, as a desire to receive delight and pleasure. This situation is described as "a total lack of equivalence of form" between the Creator and the creature, or as an "endless distance" between them. The purpose of the creature is to reach "the equivalence of form" totally and completely to the Creator and His traits - the traits of bestowal and love. Which means the equivalence of form is measured by equivalence or lack of equivalence of traits. But what is equivalence of form?

In fact, in relations between human beings we also function according to the law of equivalence of form. For example, I can sit at work and sense hatred towards my co-worker that is sitting with me at the office, incapable of tolerating him or even not looking at him. By this, I distance him thousands of kilometers from me, although physically he is sitting next to me. However, a mother can be situated thousands of kilometers from her child and sense affinity and love for him, as if he were beside her.

Baal HaSulam says that in order to understand the spirituality we must raise ourselves from our current perception of reality to a different perception of reality.

So for example, we need to move our concepts like time, movement, and space to emotional concepts, at first in a psychological way:

Distance - close is one who I feel close to in my desires

Movement - we "move" one towards the other when we understand each other more and love each other more

Time - the number of actions that I have already done in order to get closer to another.

As soon as we begin to examine in such a way the distances between people, we rise to the emotional level from which we have to then rise to a spiritual level. That is so because  spirituality is the measure in which our opinions or desires are similar, the measure by which we feel that our opinions, our intentions, our cravings are identical. This measure determines the spiritual closeness or distance between us, and not someone that just happens to pass us on the street and can be the opposite in thought and desires to us. Therefore, the extent to which the creature uses his desires to bestow towards the Creator, he approaches Him until all of him wants to bestow to the Creator exactly like the Creator wants to bestow to him.

From Part 3 of the daily Kabbalah lesson, (minute 9:26)