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We have no desire for it. We cannot give be
cause
we are made of a will to receive; recep
tion
is our substance, our Matter.
Now, this latter reason is more complex than it may
seem at first. When Kabbalists write that all we want is
to receive, they don’t mean that all we do is receive, but
that this is the underlying motivation behind everything
we do. They phrase it very plainly: If it doesn’t give us
pleasure, we can’t do it. It’s not only that we don’t want
to; we literally can’t. This is because the Creator (Nature)
created us with only a will to receive, because all He wants
is to give. Therefore, we need not change our actions, but
only the underlying motivation behind them.So what is the correct motivation to have in order to correctly ‘receive’ bestowel from the creator. If our matter, our substance, our will to receive is set as is the creators matter, the will to bestow, why would we need to change our underlying motivation? Is there some unique quality in the change of our motivation to receive bestowel?
Maybe when we make some effort and get some small amount of revelation of the Creator we will fall so much in love with Him that it begins to solve our motivation problem. Because it seems like true Love is a form of egoism where the desire gets so extreme it kind of goes haywire and turns altruistic.
Seth, Thank you for your explanation. What comes to mind though is when I feel intense love for my partner and I feel with all my heart I only want to give I feel this is a spiritual experience. Am I not understanding something here? I understand though that it’s a long study process to understand Kabbalah.
Joel
Joel,
There is no reason to say that it is not what you say it is.
In that relationship between you two, you will be able to presence of the Creator between you.
As you study, you will see how even what you feel now opens up more and more and you understand and feel what you are coming into contact more and more.
Seth@KabU
Thank you for your explanation. What comes to mind though is when I feel intense love for my partner and I feel with all my heart I only want to give I feel this is a spiritual experience. Am I not understanding something here? I understand though that it’s a long study process to understand Kabbalah.
Phillip,
We study this in the article the Preface and in others. Â This purpose of creation is for the creation to receive all of the abundance. Â The correction of creation is the process whereby the creation corrects itself so that it can receive all of that abundance.
Prior to the correction, the creation is 100% opposite in qualities from the Creator which means spiritually they are as far apart as east is from west.
After the correction the creation which is the matter called will to receive has changed its form to receive in order to bestow and then its quality, bestowal, is the same quality of the Creator, and they become as one.
Seth@KabU
Thank you, Seth, This is EXACTLY what I am seeking!
“After the correction the creation which is the matter called will to receive has changed its form to receive in order to bestow and then its quality, bestowal, is the same quality of the Creator, and they become as one.”
Sincerely from the Point in My Heart,
Deborah
Hello, my name is Dhara (using my partner Yaniv’s account).
I have a question about the concept of developing a hatred toward egoism, so that it can lead to our liberation from it. Personally, I have some difficulty with the use of the word hatred. Why is it framed like that?
For me, having an ego, and with it, the Inner Critic (technically, the Super Ego, that judges and evaluates my actions and thoughts), is a fact that I wish to feel compassion towards. It exists in me, in everyone, and it has it’s purpose. Hating it will only cause more hate. So, instead I strive for understanding it, hearing it out (so to say) and then choose my actions, instead of reacting to it. Off course this is very hard! I have been working on this for 20 years, with various paths that have now lead me to Kabbalah.
The concept of Reshimot reminds me of the Buddhist concept of Sankara’s, which are bodily sensations that rise up, mostly beyond our awareness. They are like the manifestations of desires that can be observed in the body through Vipassana mediation. Are they the same thing? From what I read in Kabbalah Revealed at page 113-114, I would think they are. The Vipassana approach howerver, is observing, where the Kabbalah approach seems to be hatred (page 115), which I find a doubtfull approach.
I would appreciate your thoughts on this!Dhara,I just saw your question today. I also had some questions and related something to my Vipassana experience. I am glad I am not the only one that has a Vipassana experience and trying to understand this teaching. I have attended 3 Vipassana 10 day retreats in Massachusetts at different times a number of years ago. To this day I meditate every morning. Most mornings I try to do the hour that was recommended when leaving the retreat. I would like to learn about Kabbalah meditations.
Dhara,
There are several things here that need to happen before we can even begin to approach your main question.
The first one is definitions. You don’t like the word hate, the kabbalists use the word hate, what do they mean, what do you mean.
All of the definitions you encounter in the wisdom of kabbalah you will need to learn anew.Second, each person needs to find a path that works for them, there are many paths to the place.
While many similarities can be drawn between all kinds of methods, we do no comparative study.
And in order to benefit from what is going on here, it will be helpful to come as a child, of course you use your mind, but you come as if you are before a master painter for example and you just soak in how she moves, how she mixes the paints, you are not comparing everything she is doing to how you do it or how someone else did it, try to absorb what you are learning here. Later you can organize it all in your mind and feeligs and compare it with whatever you choose, but you won’t be able to absorb what is going on if you don’t have the right definitions and you are relating it to some other foreign method here and there.Now with all of that said, let’s return to the ARI’s Tree of Life where he begins before time and before space, before the emanated beings were emanated and the created beings created, an upper, simple light filled the entire reality. When it rose upon His simple desire to create the worlds and emanate the emanated beings to bring the perfection of His deeds, His names and appellations to light, the Light of Ein Sof (without end) removed Himself, restricted Himself from the middle point of the eternity (you can ask yourself, how can there be a middle point of eternity, where can it be if there is not yet any space, etc.. these are some of the questions that arise) and in that tiny black point where He removed Himself, that became a desire to want to receive the Light in its full bounty.
That point developed until we reached our life and our universe which is governed by the two same two forces, the unbounded bestowal of the light and the endless receiving of the vessel.If we love someone, we hate to lose them, we don’t like it.
That is natural.
We may be wise and understand why things happen. But if we have feelings, and we are honest, we hate to lose what we love.
Seth@KabU
This was an amazing lesson. After reading the recommended texts I view my struggles very differently than I have before. Since I was a kid I have felt empty and sought for meaning, this led me to years and years of addiction. I’ve always looked at the addiction and the “hole in my heart”, as something wrong, but it was in fact, a reshimo, right? After now being sober for three years, a new kind of emptiness has occurred, and I have been trying to fill it by seeking knowledge about the abstract, using my reasoning mind. This ultimately led me to anxiety and panic attacks, which I interpreted as failure, but I guess this is yet another reshimo?
This is all so exciting! I am very grateful to be here, thank you for your service.Johanna,
We are made of a material body which is a desire to receive.
This is not praised or condemned. It is a part of nature, like all of the rest of nature that seeks food, rest, pleasure, etc.
We have to eat and sleep and be normal healthy material creatures or we will feel bad.
In addition to that a new desire is developing in us for something that cannot be filled by more rest or more food or sex or money. This is the point in our heart which draws us towards something eternal, something spiritual.Learn how to distinguish when your blood sugar is unbalanced and when you are feeling some deeper yearning.
Sometimes when we feel bad, it’s because we need to exert our body or eat something. But there are other times when we need to delve into the texts (videos, our learning materials) to satisfy that endless yearning in our heart.If you can learn where this boundary is in yourself between what is called your material needs and where your spiritual desire begins, you’ll will be able to orient yourself more and more accurately and develop your spiritual desire more correctly and calibrate it to the light that is pressing on it, developing it and eventually filling it.
Happy to have you here,
Seth@KabU
Is it common or natural that I feel anger towards God? That while reading the recommended readings for the second week I was disgusted, unpleased and I felt like some sort of a puppet in God’s game? If the truth is that I do not have free will, my nature is flawed, suffering of any form is somehow okay because God wants it etc. then I feel like a slave and pretty much wish I was not created. I didn’t ask for this or caused myself to be at this level of separation. I do not have a desire to be one with God or ‘to bestow’ necessarily, maybe I’d work for the same goals sometimes like care and bringing people together etc. but I do not wish to glorify God to a point of self hate to then be ‘blessed’ to be God-like.
I don’t get it, I feel angry but I want to know and see what more there is. I know that, as Tony said, we desire to act with no consequence, and I want to free myself of that level of being and instead work with God’s law and respect the rights of all beings God created, all of us as one, but I do not like this idea of becoming God-like and hate myself in order to finally understand God. I think my emotional reaction is coming from a place of seeing religious people abandon their connections to others, show no true care for those around them, or hiding behind religious acts to say they are ‘good’. I mean to some people self hate and self inflicted suffering is their idea of ‘I’m such a great human, God is going to reward me for all my patience’ when clearly someone on the outside can see that they are intentionally suppressing themselves and their ability to make good choices.
Initially when I wanted to know what Kabbalah was about I thought it would be more like a science and common sense that got buried. In this world, I can cut an apple, open a shell, swim in the ocean and begin to understand their parts, so why is it that understanding God or his intention is such a complicated thing? Why do I have to ‘correct myself”? God seems selfish to me, and if I were, which I may, accept that those thing written are the truth…I will feel a lot of pain that I am in fact a puppet in a game, maybe it won’t matter to ‘win’ anymore or understand anything. Then I’ll tell myself ‘right and wrong don’t matter, I’ll just praise God because he’s everything and I’m nothing, nothing in reality is real, I don’t matter, and I’ll bask in the things I love about life till I die. I hope I make sense and that this is normal.
Jasmin,
Totally normal and I’m happy for you.
If you are already angry at God, that means that you have a relationship with Him.
Look around, no plant, no animal, and most people are not having such a personal relationship with Him.
Now, let’s not lose the passion that you have, this emotional power, but let’s start to organize some things so that you develop in a more accurate way.
It takes a long time for dust to organize and develop, to be burned and frozen and squashed and stretched before some small particles arrange themselves into the first living cell and then much more time until plants develop and much more time until those pieces keep smashing and burning and earthquakes and fires and ice and time until some particles fit together in new ways and emerges animals and so on and so on until our ancestors climbed down from trees and started making houses and planting crops and then more time until just a few thousand years ago when someone finally said, “Who am I? What is going on here? What is the purpose of my life?”
So first of all, if you got to that point, you’re the vanguard, the tip of the spear of all of creation, so congratulations.
Now, what do we do from here?
Understand who you are and where you came from…there is much more to the story, most importantly what was before the dust and why this whole process, and we will learn about all of that in detail later, but from where we are today, start to understand that it’s not a small task to create a creature and to raise it to become like the creating force itself, to be totally selfless and endlessly loving, actually eternal in its properties.
Imagine you have a dashboard for your life, like a dashboard in a car, that measures your vitals. All the pain in our life is a measure of our distance from where we want to be.
You don’t have free will, you do have free will, these are just words right now.
Start with what is in your hands to do.
Write down in your notebook what you want from life, what you want from this path and understand that you found a place and a method to help you reach your spiritual goals.
If you are angry with God, write that down too. Tell Him why you are angry and what you want Him to show you.
He won’t change from this exercise, He is eternal and only bestowing, but this exercise and prayer in general calibrates us to His frequency.
Good luck and looking forward to hearing about your progress,
Seth@KabUI have had the same experience, when I first studied, that it all seemed very unfairly constructed.
The problem was that the context for all these things is so vast that you have to start somewhere, which means everything is out of context when you first learn about it. Later on the meaning seems to be the exact opposite of what it first seemed to be.
In my experience it was worthwhile to keep learning and I hope you do.
Religion seems to teach us that trying to be like the creator is some kind of “sin” (in lack of a better word) i know Kabbalah is not a religion but the science of spirituality, nevertheless religions incorporate spirituality to a degree. Here Tony says we aim to become like the creator, wouldn’t that be wrong? Or is it that we just aim to be like the creator in order to climb up the ladder but of course we will never be like him? I am a bit confused…
Yasmin,
There are a lot of religions, 1000s and each one has its own beliefs and some of them are very corrupted so we are not talking about them. We are talking about realizing the purpose of our lives.
As you study the sources together, we are learning that there is a force of bestowal, some force, we don’t know what it is yet, but something enlivens all of reality, lights every star, makes every heart beat. And on the other hand, there is all of the rest of reality that receives that life force, grass receives the light to grow, the animal eats the grass, we eat and drink, etc, all of reality is a receiving force, some receive more and some less, but every bit of creation is receiving something from the bestowing force in order to be sustained.
Kabbalists, are very precise. They describe to us our state in this world and why creation is built the way that it is and we will learn about that more later. They tell us that while our material body must receive to sustain itself, in our hearts, we can aim to be giving, like the giving force.
In this is the secret of creation, to transcend time, space and limitation.
Seth@KabU
So basically your life s not your own. How is it determined if, when and why someone is allow to move forward in any area of life? Anything you do would be in vain.
Calvin,
Let’s look at a child who is playing outside with his friends.
Does he feel like a slave? Does he know that his parents are watching over him, protecting him, preparing dinner for him, washing his clothes for him, scheduling the dentist appointment for him, getting the car ready to take him to school?
No.
The child feels free. He doesn’t feel like a slave or that he is being controlled. But that is because his perception is small. But his mom and dad are taking care of everything in his life.
So it is with us. We don’t feel the upper guidance and this is on purpose. Like this we have the opportunity to develop our feelings towards the Creator.
Nothing is in vain. Everything is guided and on purpose and directing us to the good future.
Seth@KabU
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