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Is the desire to receive help from God, the key to convert our will into one of bestowal? And how so?
Hi Dominique,
Yes, you can say that. Essentially our very nature is egoistic. Just like a PC cannot reprogram itself to run as a Mac, we too cannot just change our own nature. We need help to make that change. This help comes to us from the light. The light is a special force that has the ability to change our nature. All our work boils down to extracting more and more of the light, especially during the Kabbalistic studies, and it does all the rest.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2013/02/sunbathing-in-the-rays-of-the-reforming-light/
Albert @ KabU
What is the significance of the number 600,000 with regards to the shattering of Adam Kadmon’s soul?
Hi Dominique,
600,000 is less of a quantitative number and more of a qualitative number. It represents the strength of the spiritual desire after it has been fully corrected. So essentially all of humanity is included in this number.
Check out this blog post to see how this number is derived: https://laitman.com/2010/09/love-and-hatred-of-600000-souls/
Albert @ KabU
I feel a little confused by this new perception of reality that Kabbalah teaches and which is very different from the world as I imagined it.
Humanity in its evolution has a constantly growing ego in total contradiction with the unreserved gift that is the creator.
My question is how can the ego growing in me bring me closer to the creator, given that there is a total opposition of form?
Thank you
Hi Guy,
You are correct that the growing ego by itself indeed causes further and further disparity of form with the Creator. It’s only by correcting the ego that we come closer to the Creator. And the bigger the ego that we correct, the closer we get to the Creator.
This is why in Kabbalah we don’t work on eradicating the ego, but on correcting it. The more we advance, the more our egoistic desires grow. They turn into a type of mountain that we climb over. The bigger the desires, the higher we can climb, and the higher the spiritual degree that we can attain. On the other hand, if we were to eliminate our egoistic desires, then accordingly, we would only be able to attain a tiny degree of spiritual attainment.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2011/02/the-worse-the-better/
Albert @ KabU
I’m not sure I’d describe our inborn nature as ‘egoistic’. I say this because our inborn nature is vastly greater than our ego at any point in our development. In Jungian terms, the self is far greater than the ego. Our ego is simply what we experience our self as being, and yes, it has ideas of what’s good for itself that never really coincide with our self’s intrinsic self-interest. And even our self-interest doesn’t entirely coincide with what our self is purposed for – procreation for example. Sex is purposed at our species level of existence, for procreation, and our self-interest is subordinated to that. Our sexual desires have nothing to do really with self-interest, but with our species-interest. They capture us so to speak, through their pleasurableness, so that we enjoy them and feel that they’re goods. They are, but not for ourselves as selves, but as selves of our kind which we naturally love. When we love our children, we’re already called upon to include them in our self-interest, and we teach them to do the same, especially if they have siblings. So the principle of self-transcendence is there all the way through, even at the most basic level of socio-biological existence.
I find the idea that the human being’s original state can adequately be described as one equivalent in form with the Creator, experiencing unbounded fulfilment, eternity and perfection, one that doesn’t seem to properly reflect the crucial difference between the creature and the Creator. Creatures are not by their own natures eternal or perfect in the way that the Creator is. Creatures’ natures have to be caused to exist by their Creator’s creativity. They don’t exist intrinsically. The Creator necessarily does naturally exist without having to be caused to. So there seems to be a very big difference between worldly, let’s call it transcendent ecological perfection that naturally emerges in natural worldly conditions, and the state here described as equivalence of form with the Creator, which is described more like having a share in the Creator’s experience of ‘his/her’ Absolutely Perfect Being.
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