The Only Promises That Come True

A question I received: In our material lives we are in a dead-end situation where it's impossible to attain pleasure. But what does the science of Kabbalah promise us?

My Answer: When I sit and study The Book of Zohar, it is called Lo Lishma-an egoistic action. I deceive myself because I plan on fulfilling my egoism through this action, but in return I receive the quality of bestowal.

Why does this action end up bringing us success, unlike any other? It's because by making these actions, I desire to do everything I can to attain bestowal. I look for signs of bestowal along the path, consciously deceiving myself, and I use the Light that brings me correction and draws me closer to Itself.

Removing The Spell That Is Our Life

Our entire life is a spell, a great deceit. The egoistic desire constantly manipulates us, forcing us to work for it. Meanwhile, we are in love with this impure desire of ours and actually desire to be deceived by it.

It lies to us about the end of our path, promising us pleasure and Light when we get there. And along the way it seems like we do receive some kind of pleasure. Even though we don't have anything besides empty promises, we enjoy them. We think about what we are about to gain and start to feel as if we already have it in the present. We receive sparks of pleasure and they give us hope.

However, there is no Light behind these sparks because the Light does not descend beneath the Parsa, the boundary that separates the World of Atzilut. The Light shines for us from there and awakens these sparks, making us feel hopeful that we will receive the Light. And this goes on throughout our entire lives.

Even though we are always disillusioned and never see any Light, just the sparks, we have no other choice but to keep looking for them in order to feel pleasure. We hope to enjoy ourselves by gaining a little more money, fame, power, knowledge, food, and sex. And thus, we are always on the path, with all our hopes aimed at the future. But the moment the Light is supposed to come to the spark, it does not come and everything immediately disappears.

This constitutes the work of the egoistic desire: to attract us with promises of pleasure, making us constantly desire it, always desiring to be on the path, thinking that we are enjoying ourselves. But we never reach the actual pleasure. We only reach disappointment and everything disappears.

In the material world a person's entire life is based on hopes for the future and he supposes that this is happiness. He believes that all kinds of egoistic pleasures are waiting for him up ahead and he tries not to think about the darkness and death that await him.

However, today humanity has developed to a level where it begins to understand that egoistic promises are groundless. But in that case, what are we to do? After all, we can no longer keep living just on hope! We no longer believe in socialism or a beautiful future where everyone will be happy.

As a result, depression and disillusionment are becoming very common; yet, we have to keep living somehow. As a result, people start to lie to themselves even more. They deliberately enter a drunken stupor in order to force themselves to believe. All the mass media channels work for this sake; it is a universal spell that is kept up by society.

This will continue until the lie reaches the breaking point, beyond which it will no longer be possible to keep going.