Can we overpower our own desire? Our degree of spiritual development determines everything inside us, and what we can and cannot do.
Should I or should I not fight my own desire? After all, how can I tell what is in store for me in this degree? The answer is to indeed fight, but just so as to realize I cannot do anything by myself, and also to study myself. That is what I was given the mind for, in addition to my desires.
In the spiritual world things can only exists in pairs: pleasure or the absence of it, sweet and true, false and bitter. The truth is always sweet and the lie is always bitter, and they always come correspondingly. But that situation doesn’t exist in our world. Falsehood is not bitter and truth is not sweet. Therefore, in our world we constantly face tough decisions: to choose the false, the superficial and the sweet, or the bitter but sincere way.
We cannot resist the desires that surface in us. Our body can only tell between bitter and sweet, and the mind between true and false. But we can indirectly try to realize that what we consider sweet in our world is in fact bad, and then we can feel the bitter in that sweetness. Thus, the intellectual choice helps us change the choice of the body.
For example: a certain man has been smoking since he was very young and enjoys it. He will quit smoking only when he is convinced of the damage it will bring him and then smoking will become bitter for him.
That entanglement was created with the sin of the first man. In the world of Atzilut, there was a direct link between bitter and sweet, and true and false correspondingly. In that world, the bitter indicated truth, altruism, bestowal and greater closeness to the Creator. But after the sin of the first man and the breaking of his soul, sparks from the shattering descended below the world of Atzilut and there was such a mixture created that falsehood became sweet and truth - bitter.
A person climbs to spirituality via three lines: the right, the left and the middle line. From the right line he receives light, from the left – desire, and in the middle line he builds the screen that corrects the desire. Thus, man must constantly move between the lines until he reaches the world of Atzilut, where they unite, and the spiritual sweet, ‘for the Creator,’ merges with the bitter ‘for myself.’