Chapter 2.4 – The Attributes of the Light

The soul is the only thing that He created; it perceives the sensations of sight, sound, touch, smell and taste, through its filters. Behind the filters of the five senses there is "a computer" and "software". The soul translates what it finds outside it into a language we can relate to: pleasure or pain. Thus, it is at the center of the soul in its innermost point where we feel if something is good or bad.

If the computer operates on the natural software, the program serves up the egoistic definitions of good and bad. If the computer has been reinstalled with an altruistic operating system, then the understanding of good and bad is no longer calculated with regards to the soul itself, but toward something that is outside it – the Creator.

There are two operating systems that the soul can use to evaluate reality:

1. The egoistic form, for itself;

2. The altruistic form, for the Creator;

There is no other reality but the Creator and the creature, the Light (bounty) and the desire (vessel).

At birth, we are naturally programmed to be egoistic. Because of that, in the "back of one's mind" is an egoistic picture called “this world.”

A person feels nothing but the Light. The Light is processed egoistically and reflects insides us as “this world”. if the egoistic processing did not influence us and insert its obstructions in us (as the program that attracts the good and rejects the bad, meaning a program that is concerned only with man’s self-preservation), we would perceive a completely different picture. This would have been projected to the front of the soul, and would show us everything that really exists in spirituality; it would have displayed everything that exists outside us, namely, the Light, the Creator. Otherwise, the picture would have been subjective and would only reflect our internal content out of self-gratifying consideration.

The way to reprogram the computer from egoistic to altruistic is called “the wisdom of Kabbalah.” We can use it to create the real picture of the world without a shred of egoism. We will be able to feel the actual Creation outside us, and come to “equivalence of form”, and unification with the Light. It is a state where there are no partitions between the Light and the soul.

The sensation of the Light is somewhat like the sensation one feels in a state of clinical death. It is a state of partial detachment from the physical body (animate egoism). In that state there is desire to attain the Light.

However, attaining it is impossible until one rids the self of all egoism, both spiritual and physical. Hence, man's work is primarily in the physical body.

It is quite easy to get rid of the spiritual egoism if we know which obstruction the egoism puts into our internal computers. All information enters through five filters, called "the five parts of Malchut", the five zones of the government of the egoism. These five channels transfer the data that comes in from the outside to a form of data the egoism can process, such as, “I feel good,” or “I feel bad". Every channel-filter that the signals go through has its own thickness (coarseness), which differs from person to person.

The more lifetimes the soul experiences, the greater its coarseness. One becomes not only coarser, but also more prepared for correction. However, people who are not developed egoistically do not need that much and settle for little. A greater egoist is one who us ready to be corrected, and feels the necessity for correction and to fill himself with Light more intensively.

Correcting the Program

When one’s coarseness reaches its ultimate intensity, there appears a need to correct one's personal computer program. The coarseness increases over many lifetimes, not only of a person's life, but also of animal and vegetative, and even inanimate nature. Though nature itself rises, too, its ascent depends on man’s situation and happens only when man ascends.

When coarseness reaches its peak, the gap between man’s inner picture and the Light also reaches its peak and an inner switch is turned on inside. This produces the feeling that one can no longer satisfy the self with anything in the present or in the future.

This is the sign that one has stopped looking for something inside, in the back of one’s soul, but now aspires to feel its surrounding reality. Hence, the quest for many forms of discipline and methods until one finds Kabbalah, which is what one has been asking.

Kabbalah is a system that can change these filters. While it will not remove them, it will change their focus from an egoistic intent for receiving pleasures to an altruistic aim to delight. In fact, the only possibility that really exists is to receive in order to bestow, because when it comes to the Creator-creature relationship, the Creator gives and man receives. We have nothing to give the Creator except our willingness to receive pleasures from Him.

We can also use these filters for receiving, in order to please the Light, the Creator. Then the data that comes from the outside will not be distorted or falsified, but will appear before us as it really is outside us. That concludes the design of Creation, which enables mankind to live without any disturbances from his selfish ego, and feel and live in the actual system of Creation. All the pleasures that humanity has experienced thus far and is destined to experience, comprise only one part of 600,000 of the smallest pleasure in the smallest Light (Nefesh).

Even when only one soul completes its correction and receives the full amount of Light, it stands before all souls, looking over everything, before the data enters the system, before the pleasure penetrates all other souls.

One’s coarseness is determined at one’s first life in our world. But Kabbalah can develop and increase it by dozens of times and reduce the number of times one will have to reincarnate. It accelerates the process of one’s ripening for the purpose of attaining the spiritual realm.

Human torments are an external expression of something that is missing. The torments do not vanish, but the Kabbalah replaces the animate-corporeal pains for spiritual pains, ones that come from the absence of spiritual sensation. The qualitative change in the suffering leads to a reconstruction of the internal vessel, the renewal of the soul. The sensation of the Light comes hand in hand with the growing desire to be like the Light, and processes that would have taken generations to complete are completed in only a few years.