How to Keep the Love from Cooling Down

The Zohar, Introduction, Article "Two Points," Item 121: This is why the forces of separation are called "locks," since they block the gates of approaching and drive us away from the Creator. But if we overcome them so they do not affect us, cooling His love from our hearts, the locks become doors, the darkness becomes light, and the bitter becomes sweet.

Question: What does it mean, "cooling His love from our hearts"?

Answer: If a person initially prepares himself for the fact that he plans to acquire love for the Creator, meaning for the quality of bestowal to become loved, accepted, and desirable to him so that he will feel the quality of bestowal that comes to him as a great value and reward for all the efforts he made, that means he prepares himself for the right actions.

Then by virtue of the right preparation, he looks differently at all the disturbances that seem to come in order to cool him down, to push him away from love for the Creator, from coming closer to the quality of bestowal. He views them as help because precisely by overcoming them he becomes stronger, more understanding, braver, and more learned, and through the greater understanding, sensations, and strength he ascends to the quality of bestowal.

For example, if I want to be physically strong, then all of my work with weights, jumping, and running is training for me that will enable me to become stronger. Everything depends on the preparation. If I don't desire to be strong, if this does not worry me, then any obstacle that arises on my path will deprive me of the desire to advance. I will circumvent it and not be happy that it has come.

Do I see the obstacles as help sent to me from Above in order to make me grow and raise me to the Creator's level, or not? This depends on my aspiration, preparation, and the support from the environment. This is the only way that we can advance.

Everything depends on the preparation. Before I open up a book, come to the group, start studying or thinking about anything, I have to ask the question, "Why am I doing this? And what should I be thinking about?" The only thing I should think about is how to make a calculation according to the analysis "true versus false" rather than the sensations "sweet versus bitter." Then I immediately try to build my discernments based on the analysis "true versus false." And if that is so, then I at least know that I am not there, that I don't want it, and so on. Yet I nevertheless discern the truth: Who am I right now, and what is happening inside of me and outside of me?

This is necessary! In this regard everything depends on the environment or on the preparation from the surrounding environment. A grain cannot grow unless the environment provides it with everything it needs to grow. By itself it will simply dry up. There has to be an environment that awakens a person and works on him.

Imagine that you are in an environment where everyone aspires to be physically strong. Then you learn from them and together with them participate in all of the training. They jump and lift weights from morning until night! Why? Because that is their goal. And you start doing the same thing whether you want it or not because you receive the importance of the goal from them. You see every obstacle, every weight that you have to lift, every exercise you have to make as an opportunity given to you for growth. That's all. There is no other opportunity.

From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 01/25/11, The Zohar

An Eternal Desire

The condition for receiving the Torah is the need to become as one man with one heart, to enter mutual guarantee. This is talking about a spiritual Kli.

Until we understand this, the states will keep ruling over us because we do not use the group to accelerate them. Every state has to be desirable as a preparation phase for the next state. All the stages are necessary and we shouldn't focus on the states as such, but only on the aspiration forward.

The Kli is evaluated by its desire, where a desire is an aspiration forward, and never for what I already have now. A spiritual vessel is evaluated by its pull to the next state. As soon as that pull disappears, there is no vessel.

Thus, a spiritual vessel exists only in the aspiration and yearning forward. If a person stops, loses this vector, and turns to what he has, then the spiritual world disappears for him. That's because spirituality is not generated by the actual desire, but by its coefficient; not by the speed, but the acceleration.

It's the same in Einstein's theory: A body moving with constant speed is like it is at absolute rest. Only increasing the speed is taken into consideration and felt as a spiritual desire.

This desire can only be common for everyone and it only comes to a person as a result of everyone's influence. Therefore, we have to leave the old approach according to which I exist, to what  I receive inside, and to what  I feel, and realize that my "I" is actually outside of me or above me, by the principle of the screen and Reflected Light.

Only inside of this interconnected net will I reveal the Upper World. All of its 125 levels are degrees of connection and unification of the parts of the common Kli, the pressure of the common field, which is what determines the power of the vessel.

From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 01/25/11, Writings of Rabash