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Hi, I suppose my question is one of the internal desires and something I have struggled with for a long time.
I understand the concept of needing to correct our desires, but I struggle to understand what ‘acceptable’ desires are (if there are any) and in what way they need to be corrected. For example, I have a desire to have financial wealth (not as much as I used to desire when I was younger) but enough so that I can be free from having to work, be able to live comfortably, travel and help my friends and family financially, if need be.
Would this be considered something that needs to be corrected? I am guessing so, as the quest for it causes me much stress and worry – how do you begin to look at how you correct a desire like that?
Thank you in advance
Hi Sarah, great question!
Kabbalah only deals with our desire for spirituality. Regarding the desires of our animalistic bodies, Kabbalah does not deal with these things. Our corporeal desires don’t have any relation to spirituality, so each person can arrange these desires however is most comfortable for them (of course within the context of the law and without harming others).
So in practice we don’t work on restricting our corporeal desires, we only work on making the desire for spirituality the most important thing. Then naturally the rest of our desires will fall into place. For example, it’s like with an artist that is so involved in his art, that he fulfills all the rest of his desires out of necessity so he can quickly return to his passion. Same with us, when spirituality is the most important desire, then we will be able to properly relate to all the rest of our corporeal desires in a balanced way.
Albert @ KabU
Hi Lisa,
We learn from the shattering of the system of Adam HaRishon that the only thing that is broken in the ENTIRE system of creation are the proper connections between people. In other words, correction does not mean that there is something wrong with me and I need to fix that thing. Rather each one of us is perfect. The only thing we need to correct is our connection to others.
Just picture all of humanity is part of a single system. Like a 8 billion piece jigsaw puzzle. Each piece of the puzzle (each person) is perfect by itself and does not require any correction. Meaning that we don’t need to recolor any of the pieces or cut off any seemingly excess parts. The only thing we need to do is find where each piece fits relative to all the other pieces.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2014/05/puzzle-adam-harishon/
So when Kabbalists speak about the 613 egoistic desires that need to be corrected, they are not speaking about our corporeal desires. Each and every single one of those egoistic desires are only in the connection between people. This is why Kabbalists write that “love your friend as yourself” is the greatest rule which encompasses all of our spiritual work, all of the 613 desires that we need to correct.
We’ll learn how to do this practically in the more advanced lessons.
Albert @ KabU
Such a powerful and timely lesson. I had been going through my lowest point this week at a job that I love and in a professional that I have worked in for over 30 years.
Recently, everything seemed to be going wrong. I tried to fixed what was happening through my ego and the situation just kept getting worse and worse. I had even thought of just quitting the job completely, but I was still not ready to leave and I couldn’t understand why this was happening TO me.
What I failed to realize was that this “bad” situation wasn’t happening TO me…it was happening FOR me! I was so down that I finally let go of my egotism and asked my Creator to please help me with this situation. I know that only good comes from Him and I needed his strength to help me get through this.
I continued with my Kabbalah lessons and I prayed for the desire to receive with the intention to bestow. I continued my prayers and just listening to this lesson Tony, showed me that God was pushing me away with his left and and guiding me to him with his right! It made so my sense, my internal interpretation changed, and so did my work situation. It felt like a test, a fire that I had to go through so that the Creator could help me to evolve and grow! I love this course and everyone here. Thank you.
I feel this offers yet another sanguine rationalisation of “look on the bright side!”. If we view catastrophic disasters like a tsunami as having a “positive” outcome, because certain wealthy cadres got rich off of rebuilding, for whom is that positive? Does that positivity console the man who lost his family? And as for forest fires — increasingly disastrous, wiping out entire species and destroying entire cities — do we respond to such horrors with neutral indifference because, perhaps, some sort of unforeseen long term result of good might come along decades later? I feel this is the section where I find I’m having the most difficulty. Granted, the problem of evil has troubled theologians since the beginning. But the answer provided here, at least at first viewing, offers a simplistic explanation. Could you imagine consoling someone in a period of extreme grief by saying, “It’s all relative”? How is this different from atheistic systems like Buddhism that teach the world is ultimately immaterial and therefore negligible? Thank you.
As an example, if I may. I work as a Russian and Ukrainian translator. Sometimes, this work requires me to interpret incredibly disturbing news reports, audio captures, and other direct sources from the warzone that describe rape, torture, and wholesale slaughter: no one is spared — men, women, old and young, animals — starved to death, murdered, and so forth. These events distress me terribly, of the seeming increase of inhumanity as well as witnessing the severest impulses towards evil that people are capable of. They weigh on my mind, even if I personally am not directly affected by them.
Hi Anastasia,
We learn from the lesson on the perception of reality that the whole world is a reflection of my own uncorrected state. Meaning that everything that I see, I see it through the lens of my egoistic nature. If my nature is still egoistic and uncorrected, then I see a horrible world in front of me, wars, and all sorts of other atrocities. If I correct my egoistic nature, then I’ll look at the same world, but now I’ll see it as peaceful and perfect.
It’s like I have these dirty glasses through which I see the whole world as dirty. The moment I clean my own glasses, I then look at the same world, but now it’s clean and perfect.
So we don’t need to spin all these things and try to find positives in them, rather if we see something bad in the world, it’s a sign that we’re still not corrected, and that we need to work on our own correction.
We’ll learn more about these things in the upcoming lessons, in the meantime, check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2014/04/in-neutral-gear/
Albert @ KabU
Also, one thing I haven’t come across or at least I don’t recall is where does all this knowledge come from. Was this inate knowledge that people of that era had because of a bicamoral conscious that gave them some inner sight? Was it “divine revelation”. I get the historical background and many of the tools are neat and the goals are great but where did those people get their knowledge? “Divine revelation “?.
I guess my question is how do I know this isn’t the random tought of someone on some drug induced vision quest? Sorry for being direct but I don’t really know how else to ask the question without sounding rude 😊. But seriously, I’m curious.
Hi Yvon,
Kabbalah is a science. The Kabbalists are the scientists of Kabbalah. Everything we know is based on their research. This is similar to how other sciences work. The Kabbalists are those researchers that have performed a certain experiment and reached a certain result: the correction of our nature, the revelation of the Creator, the force of bestowal, etc. So if we are to replicate their experiment, to follow their procedures we should reach the same results.
Albert @ KabU
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