Q: Who are the mentally ill, and what is their part in the world?
A: Mental illness is one of the many corrections that souls must go through. However, not all souls experience that situation; in fact, there is a reciprocal connection among them. Some of them perform this correction for all other souls, just as in our world, a person has need of every trade, but doesn’t have to learn all the trades in order to enjoy their benefits.
There is an extensive system of interrelations and reciprocal connections between people that stems from what occurs on the spiritual level. That phenomenon is called “the inclusion of the souls.” It is a reciprocal bonding and connection between souls.
Q: What makes people who believe in the existence of the Creator relate to mentally ill people or autistics as “men of God,” as if these are people through whom the Creator speaks? Is there any truth to that?
A: The mentally ill do not attain the Creator. They are miserable people who cannot even attain this world, much less the spiritual world. At some point we will find out why the Creator needs them and for what.
Some do, indeed, regard mentally ill people as spiritual, higher, as “men of God.” Those who think that actually yearn for the “switching off” of the mind and skepticism; they actually want fanaticism.
But the path to the Creator does not go “below reason,” without testing the validity of the path. In this way, there is no attainment of the Creator.
The path to the Creator is built in such a way that each lower degree cannot grasp the reason of the Upper Degree, or understand it. That is why we need the help of the Creator. Only when He is revealed, and one can feel Him, can he act against his mind, and thus rise.
When one negates one’s present mind, one receives the next, higher spiritual degree, one that has greater wisdom. That is why Kabbalists go against the mind and above it, and thus become wiser, whereas those who go against the mind and below it grow more foolish and more extreme.
When a person rises, the mind grows. That is why Kabbalists respect the wiser, whereas the masses respect the ignorant. That is why all religions, which go below reason, bow their heads before torments, without exception. They are unaware that the Creator is the One who sends those torments precisely in order to get us going, and not for us to blindly obey and place the torment as a goal. That is how the forces of impurity speak in man, they call upon him to suffer and respect the situation.
Now you can see how different the divine Kabbalah is from manmade religions.
Q: What is insanity? Why are the insane punished?
A: Insanity is a hindrance to health to the point where one’s self-awareness and freedom of choice are denied, and the person becomes totally captive by the will of nature – the Will of the Creator. No one has complete and objective freedom of choice, though we think that there are many degrees of freedom in the choice of every act. But if we examine the behavior of normal people from the side, it will not be clear to us in what way they are normal.
The correction in the existence of mentally ill people is that within the collective soul, Malchut, called “The First Man,” there is a part that must be corrected in such unconscious states. That part of Malchut exists in all of us.
In our world, each trait of the collective soul appears in separate individuals, but in the collective soul of The First Man, all the parts merge and complement one another. That is why the mentally ill correct something for us, and we correct something for them.
Q: Is there a connection between one’s illnesses and one’s spiritual world?
A: Yes, certainly. One’s illnesses, as with every other kind of suffering, is one of the ways to reveal our nothingness, and consequently push us toward the question, “Why am I alive, why do I suffer so, and how can I change it?”
The Upper Light that descends on us heals us from spiritual, as well as from physical, illnesses.
I cannot say, however, that Kabbalists are healthier than others. A Kabbalist who rises in the spiritual degrees begins to include within souls of other people in order to correct them, raise and thus save them. Then, the Kabbalist seemingly collects their illnesses. But that relates only to special Kabbalists.