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What do the Kabbalists say to a person who thinks that God is evil when the person feel pain and good when he feels pleasure..? And reason that if God is good then He should give the person all pleasure all the time at least not suffering but still believe that in the end God is good because we all go to heaven but not at the time he feels pain
Pleasure and pain is how we are steered through life. We always only want the good, the pleasure, this is our nature. Kabbalists would say, “good, now you know what you’re made of.” As well as, “Good, at least you have some attitude towards the Creator.”
Certainly He only does good, so what “bad” is pain and evil in the world, right? Kabbalists define good and bad a bit differently. “Good” meaning, towards the Creator and “bad” as distance. The only “bad” that exists is a force (also the Creator) which pushes a person away from Him, while a person might feel negative sensations, if they are cleaved onto Him, knowing and feeling that it comes from Him and knowing and feeling what the goal of the torment is for, then the pain is actually received in joy since he feels he’s actually coming closer to the Creator by this.
It’s living in two different worlds at once, but it’s how we can feel the existence of the Creator at all. This gap between our desire to receive pleasure and our desire to be like the Creator. We will always be opposite to him in our nature, however if we learn to use our nature for a different purpose then we can clothe His likeness on us and we can sense His thought and purpose. For us creatures, this brings the ultimate fulfillment and how we feel whether it’s good or bad has much less importance since we’re striving only for adhering to Him.
It’s not easy, but this is the path. Experience brings a person to feel the truth in this and that is what will help them continue forward until they can sense it within themselves completely and at that point their “I” stops serving themselves which actually brings the most relief as this “I”, receiving for myself was the sole cause of all my suffering to begin with.
Best of luck,
Chris
The Kabbalah Revealed series was very compelling and I took an online class several years ago. I found the younger teachers like Albert and Peter warm-hearted and generous, but I also found the older non-Jewish teacher and Rav Laitman, very much absorbed in their knowledge, position and identity and found little love, peace or goodwill coming from them. I mean no disrespect, but it was this that caused me to discontinue study. Ultimately, I would assume attainment would make someone more openly loving and willing to lift others up like the younger teachers, so why do the older, more experienced leaders seem to lack this quality?
I understand where you’re coming from, many people have that impression. We’re in a different era and while our teacher comes to us as the last link in the chain of Kabbalists, it’s on us, his students to disseminate the wisdom. The dissemination is less of our teacher and more through the students for many reasons and this is one of them. It’s hard to see through our egoistic eyes, prejudices, and preconceived notions about what a Kabbalist teacher should look and act like. It’s also hard to hear the translation. As much as we’ve translated the live lessons, it’s still more “pleasant” to not have to go through it and it can even be distracting. It’s one of the main reasons we don’t send beginner students directly to the daily morning lessons. A student should first settle within themselves a foundation for the material, be able to orient themselves and know what it is they’re looking for and what their work should be – only at that point can you begin to value the gift we have.
His role is to guide us and help us grasp what Kabbalists have written for us while we work to realize it practically between us. After some experience, you’re able to see through the personality and the characteristics of a person and hold onto that point that longs to be with the Creator. The external appearance or qualities of a person has zero importance. The only value is in the inner intention – “for what”. If this is aimed at bringing the entire world into good connections between us and revealing the benevolent for of nature, fulfilling the purpose of our lives – this is what we cherish and strive to mimic.
Imagine eventually, we’ll have to bring the entire world into ourselves, have it enter our hearts and care for it more than we care for ourselves. Think of all the different kinds of people there are and how repulsive and opposite they are to you. They too are parts of you which you’ll need to embrace. It’s why we start, as Kabbalists say, “from the lightest to the heaviest” – those we we can connect to first are those who have that same aspiration, it’s what helps us rise above all the disturbances and differences between us and find that common goal that unites us.
The only goal of our teacher is to bring the entire world to the complete correction. If this becomes our only goal as well, this is what we will value and everything else is as an obstacle from the Creator to remind us that importance of that goal above everything else is the “fuel” we need to continue going. When you can take this fuel and use it, you rise up to a higher level and can see that the teacher He gave us was exactly what we needed.
There’s another aspect here that’s more complicated to explain in words, but if you are a parent or if you’ve ever been a teacher and eyes are always on you, absorbing everything, you have to make sure you’re not leading them astray or making their path longer or more difficult even by one gram or one inch. He has to be very careful not to give us any incorrect impression for what spirituality is and how to attain it. If he were to be a big cuddly teddy bear, we too would want to be the same and in doing that we would think we’re making some progress towards “love your neighbor” – however this is one of the biggest hurdles as we need to basically un-learn what we think is good for others and re-learn that “good” can only come from the Creator and not from within any forces we might have naturally. If we want to do good to others, we have to ask for good from the Creator for them. On the outside, it could even seem the opposite. We’re not really allowed to understand this in our brains just yet, but the “feeling” of this truth can only be sensed when you yourself experience that fact.
I hope this helps. Best of luck.
Chris
Can a person who understands nothing about technical lessons( like sephirot, worlds, tzimtum) enter the spiritual world through the love of friends?
See if you can muster the strength to even ask for strength to go above what you were given. If you’re not able to manage even that, then ask for the strength to ask etc.. You’re given this recognition about your nature and do you want to rise above it or not? If it’s the most important thing then you do it, as Rabash writes when the house is on fire, you’re already concerned about saving your life and not getting in a few more hours of sleep.
As far as blaming yourself for that, just reference my below response to your previous question.
Good luck,
Chris
Hey mrc,
If you look at it from the side of one singular goal for all of nature which is to bring the created being into complete equivalence of form with its Maker, then anything that ever happened in the past, happened due to that one force of development developing towards one goal.
What you do now is also from above – all the thoughts and desires to the most seemingly mindless detail in an instance cut from a moment in the day – they’re all perfectly projected to you, for you, with that ultimate goal in mind. We don’t know what part we play in that role until we begin to attain the thought of creation itself.
As long as you’re beginning to become aware of that goal, all of your inner intention and the question of “for what?” – when you do whatever it is you’re doing, in anything, try to to depict how you understand the Kabbalists advice and lock onto that goal and flow with that program.
~Chris
I don’t see at this point see how the “upper forces” can be assessed as a group since the individual falseness must arise at the same time it views another being (well you gotta be somebody) so the two movements usually cancel each other out as self-consciousness (false self/ show/ identity) is activated. It may work on a level unknown to the “thinking mind” hence the being enters the “group field” and on another level, this influences the false identity though this identity knows nothing of it, a seed is planted so to speak, that awakens the urge to awaken. Most likely they concluded that was the best that could be done, given the worldly pull towards individuality, the walls are so think that penetrating them is nearly impossible since the operating system embedded in modern life depends on having a false sense of self, me and mine, arise in response to outside stimuli so continuously the chance for an opening or glimpse has been closing in tighter and tighter with every passing generation.
Anything the false self is activated to do always involves some benefit to the individual/ false identity as it seeks to keep fear (what it is) at bay and while a safe or comforting space may enable the arising of courage to disassemble this false entity, the process is anything but comforting. It’s easy to see from here that as the whole world dreams of being “safe” they do so to their own detriment.
I wrote this statement a while back and would love it if you might comment back to me on it as I think it sums up perfectly what the real underlying issue is.
“All actions born of fear that arise in response to any perceived threat or calamity without exception only strengthens that which it sought to eliminate.” I might add the word “eventually” here, as the strengthening of what it sought to eliminate might take years, generations even. (The response itself later turns into a calamity of gigantic proportions for example rules put in place to keep one safe end up creating more and more situations in which to be unsafe, they feed off each other, the initial mistake that one could be unsafe sets off a cascade of reactions that tend to snowball.)
This isn’t by mistake, all calamities are actually an attempt by awareness at self correction, but it’s not the event itself that needs to be understood, but the underlying fear/resistance/avoidance/apprehension that seeks to be released. In essence, there’s nothing you can do, but surrender, give up, resist nothing, you have no volition of your own, I am that I am, the pattern was set in motion by ignorance, and only letting all things be, some final and total release of any control over anything you think you might have, a free fall, total and complete trust in God, nothing can happen to you that isn’t supposed to happen to you by design, there is no imperfection, never was.
Well, those are some thoughts that arise here. I’d welcome your response.
Love,
Sandra Anne
Hi Sandra,
I’d love to respond to the core of what you wrote, but there are many places I could go. I’d prefer to narrow it down and approach the real question you have, but there’s a lot there. Do you have something specific you’d like a response on?
You’re saying some very correct things I’m just not sure which way to take it. Let me know!
“All actions born of fear that arise in response to any perceived threat or calamity without exception only strengthens that which it sought to eliminate.” This is the pattern, it runs through lives and worlds, and the only way to end it is to face the fear that created it, feel it, enter it, and thus dissolve it. Since it exists on a level before thought, (thought is in essence “the veil”) promoting ways to access and dissolve this underlying fear might be beneficial.
Please if you might comment on this observation.
Fear is only used as the starting point, something to wake us up towards escaping the fear, this is the natural instinct we’ve followed from the dawn of time – “away from fear”. However, in the last generation, the call to action is different. Instead of running away from the bad, we run towards the good. Meaning, we don’t want to create for ourselves a better world by avoiding all the bad – instead we want to create a better world by striving towards what is good without a calculation for trying to escape whatever blows are before us.
It’s a completely different mindset and attitude humanity will need to adopt. It’s never been the driving force for change yet because we don’t know what good is. Once humanity can grasp even a bit of what the “good” can be – meaning in good connections with one another and considering the entire globe as one family – only then can we work towards the good future instead of a future built on band-aids and insecurity.
~Chris
Yeah, as long as we know what “good” is there is a judgment involved. This is better than that, that’s where we go wrong since we can only know what does arise, for instance, sickness and death are a part of life, and the more we try to avoid this the more we create it, trying to come up with ways to mitigate this fact, we focus on it, but why do we mitigate it in the first place, because we fear it, that’s always the case, we fear what is because we already misunderstand what is, the “veil” of fear clouds our vision, in fact, everything is always the only way it can be, for better or for worse is a story that only we tell. So we are then inundated with propaganda that tells us we need to be “healthy” creating some fear that we are not as we already should be, in fact, however we are must be as it is, this doesn’t mean we can’t improve our health but if we do so based on fearing the alternative, we may actually become even more unhealthy because “health” is already a concept in thinking, (this is desirable and this is not) we are as we think we are. The whole cycle just creates more fear and as we “try” all ways to be “healthy” we, in fact, do the opposite, anything we do out of fear strengthens that which we wish to eliminate. So the cycle is always propelling itself toward increasing that which we ignorantly strive to reduce. To lift the veil, therefore, doesn’t involve feeling better, it means diving deeply into the fact that eventually, we must die, our greatest fear is death when and however that comes but this is already a misunderstanding, from thinking we imagine we are already something that we are not, a person, or an identity subject to life and death, when in fact we were never born therefore can never die. There is nothing that is not God. All hands are Gods, that’s all that ever was or ever will be.
Well, I was reading this:
Indeed, parts of the Zohar may have been composed through automatic writing, a technique in which the mystic would meditate on a divine name, enter a trance, and begin to “write whatever came to his hand.” Such a technique was reportedly used by other thirteenth-century kabbalists.
Matt, Daniel C. (2010-10-11T23:58:59.000). The Essential Kabbalah . HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
And then this:
Near the top of the sefirotic ladder, meditation reaches Binah. She is called Teshuvah, Return. The ego returns to the womb of being. Binah cannot be held in thought. She is called Who, the meditative question, “Who am I?” The questioning yields nothing that can be grasped, but rather, an intuitive flash illuminating and disappearing, as sunbeams play on the surface of water.19
Matt, Daniel C. (2010-10-11T23:58:59.000). The Essential Kabbalah . HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.
Well, I came to these practices before, Ramana Maharshi, a famous Indian sage, his mantra was also to meditate or focus the mind on the question, “Who am I?” and it was after many hours of this that I saw what actually was and what wasn’t. One glimpse is all it takes, after that this writing started to appear, I wrote about ten million words in five years, nonstop writing, the mind figures itself out on the paper. One’s whole life becomes understood in a way that makes perfect sense, in fact, the idea that chaos exists is completely annihilated.
What am I doing here telling you all this? Who knows, I have nothing to do with what appears or what doesn’t, the where or what of anything, take it or leave it, all is divine providence and nothing else. Seen correctly the 1% realm is also God’s, and the only reason for suffering is that we think it’s something else. Thousands of years of misunderstanding have taught us to think in a way that leads to our demise, but if so, then perhaps that’s the way it has to be. What we think we “know” about anything is already a lie. “I am” is all there is and anything you put after that is only fantasy. I think I look for someone with which to have an actual conversation about what is with but I can tell from your answer that you haven’t seen it. So everything that comes from those who haven’t actually made the trip gets watered down and no help ever comes from it, the cycle is doomed to continue even when those who truly want to help things go in another direction are heartfelt about it. Only a radical shift will do it, when the pain of being false supersedes the pain of turning inward, (that’s the real pattern going on in the world, how much pain that requires is anyone’s guess) to face the fear of all fears, that you aren’t what you think you are, and you aren’t where you think you are either. The Truth it turns out as Mark Twain so famously wrote truly is “stranger than fiction.”
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