[Logynn]

Today’s morning lesson described characteristics of bestowal and many ways to check them using analogies from corporeal life. This gave me a question about the composition of the collective corporeal humanity. I am wondering if it is possible to inherit work, or part of a screen, from your family?

My sister and I inherited “good” qualities from one side of my family. They live in a remote place and everyone there is humble and self sacrificing with joy in serving others and great faith and happiness in their spirituality, and they have this in a very unselfconscious way. It’s normal for them. It didn’t take any effort to develop them. My sister and I were not raised there, but we have this temperament anyway, and it’s regarded with curiosity and confusion in the other half of the family which we were raised in.

I thought maybe these are animal characteristics of docility and there isn’t much spiritual use for it since it seemingly limits the amount of inner work you have to do. But that’s not exactly true if you zoom out and look at their genetic lineage instead of their individual paths. The entire region is full of rivers and towns named for barbaric things their ancestors did. They conquered all the people they came through and enslaved the local natives. They had children with their slaves and stole the houses, resources, and culture from those people, and have lived in that spot for hundreds of years since.

So these people seemingly went through a horrific series of revelations of evil and became something with a fraction of the coarseness. And this seemingly shapes the genetic conditions of the next generations.

I understand that “Israel” does a lot of work with the understanding that the rest can “enjoy” from it, like Rav said in yesterday’s lesson. But is there also an element of becoming aware of work that others did for you? I understand what the Kabbalists have done for us. But has the rest of the collective (the animal part, I guess?) also done this work for us? And is there a root and branch structure in the corporeal world also, where a human being might receive a spiritual inheritance in their inner qualities similar to how we receive a physiological inheritance in our outer qualities?

[Logynn]

Is “In Sadness You Will Bear Children” about the temporary necessity of mortality and morbidity, and the sorrow of the lower ones to seemingly create within that apparent paradigm?

And if it is, what is the opening that needs to be made?

[Logynn]

Today we were workshopping Shamati 43 and this last paragraph was both alluring and inscrutable. Could you say anything about what it’s telling us?

“The answer is that these corporeal things extend from their upper roots, meaning from reward and punishment and from private Providence. The only difference is that in spirituality it appears in one place, meaning in one carrier, but one-by-one, meaning in one person but in two states, and in corporeality it is in one time, but in two carriers, meaning at the same time and in two different people.”

[Logynn]

thank you. that is highly applicable.

[Logynn]

In the YouTube video “Toldot Parsha – Bible Secrets Explained” Semion asks Rav why there’s this repetitive problem in the Torah books that the wives can’t bear children. And Rav basically says that when you’ve completed one degree you can’t really see or understand the next degree yet. So you can’t conceive of a desire for it. So before you can move into it you need to get a correction of your current desire, (it sounds like an inspiration of a new one,) in order to work in the next degree. So, the problem was that the wife (the couple as a unit) was already perfectly corrected and fulfilled in the current degree. And she needed to conceive a completely new desire for the next.

This sounds like a big problem on a collective development scale. It made me wonder if men, generally, are “on hold” for crossing the machsom, until women develop a detailed, mature, genuine desire for the next world. But it can’t be, because otherwise the Kabbalists would have started by teaching women first, right? If the matured desire was a prerequisite to cross the machsom?

How should I be thinking of these two concepts inside myself instead? If before I was praying for the ability for the group to become a conduit/pipeline for the light into our world, should I instead be praying for a clearer more corrected and unique desire for the next world?

[Logynn]

I had thought of Ohr Hassidim as somehow from the lower one. Not that it originated there, but that it was a consequence of something in the lower one.

The only way I can describe what I was thinking is with this thing I learned about Lamed the other day. The post said that the word “teach” doesn’t translate perfectly to Hebrew because it implies that just by intending for someone to learn something they learn it. When, in reality the receptivity and readiness of the learner is a big factor. So the Hebrew words surrounding learning as a concept don’t make that implication, I guess

So in my thinking Ohr Hassadim was like this, that it was some kind of side effect of receptivity and readiness of the lower one to accurately sense the presence of Ohr Hochma.

But then I read this in the “Table of Answer for the Meaning of Words” in TES:

5. What is “light of Hochma” (Part 1, Chapter 1, Inner Light, 50)

A light that is extended to the emanated being in the first expansion, which is all the vitality and self of the emanated being.

6. What is “light of Hassadim” (Part 1, Chapter 1, Inner Light, 5)

A light that clothes the light of Hochma, and is extended to the emanated being with the first intensification.

 

This sounds like a completely separate thing. But I wonder what I read that made me think the first thing, and also there is so much said about how simple and “one” the light itself is.

Is Ohr Hassadim just the understanding/apprehension of what the light of Hochma actually is and what it’s doing?

[Author]

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