Man’s Struggle – The Force Of Love Against The Force Of Self-Love

When the person reaches a point where he wants to rise to bestowal, to step outside of himself, he faces an immense problem - how will he know that he is not lying to himself and is satisfied with being a ‘gentle soul.' Therefore he is brought to a group whose goal is to bestow and connect to the others for the benefit of connecting with the Creator. They are rejected by one another and hate each other, and discover that they cannot connect egoistically, but rather they need to gather around Mount Sinai, around this mountain of hatred.

Those sensations come only to people who have two opposite forces - the ego and the point in the heart. When they want to connect in their points in the heart, they feel the collision and come to despair - how will we succeed in connecting with the others? And if we don't succeed, then we won't realize the goal and reveal the Creator? So they begin to understand that the work on their will to receive needs to be performed by a foreign force, the force of Light, and they begin needing the Light the Reforms. That forms a thrill that doesn't exist in our world.

With us, when our desire to be thin and healthy is stronger than our desire to eat, I am the one who decides what is better for me and I choose between the two. In spirituality, however, we need the Light. We do not prefer one will to receive over another, but rather we want to reach a stage where our will to receive will not receive a thing and bestowal will be the reward.

When the Upper Light comes and performs this action for me, two opposite forces form and each pulls to a different direction. Not toward me - that it is better to be thin than satisfied, but toward two opposite directions - one toward me and one toward the Creator. And then begins a struggle about the importance of the Creator against my own importance. And here as well the Upper Light determines - if we ask it, it operates and makes us feel that stepping out of ourselves will be more important than the force of self-love. And thus, the force of love is gradually revealed in us.

Being Aimed Toward The Light That Reforms Means Yearning For Connection With The Rest Of The Souls

We must yearn to connect with the friends' points in the heart through the Light that Reforms. Only then, and not earlier, will we be able to create a spiritual vessel and feel in its first ten Sefirot the discernments that are described in Kabbalah books. Therefore, during the preparation we gradually advance toward attaining some additional qualities, additional desires or additional discernments, but they do not exist in us, until we begin to feel that we need the Light that Reforms. And we can feel this need only on the condition that we wish to connect with the rest of the souls. We thus need to aim ourselves only toward that Light, because only that Light can correct the breakage, which is the separation between the souls. If I do not yearn to connect with the rest of the souls, with the remaining points in the heart, then I am not aimed toward the Light that Reforms.

Everything Occurs Only In The Desire

What does it mean to be above the will to receive? To construct within the will to receive such an attitude, a style of work, where first and foremost I want to understand what I'm doing, to get familiarized, to measure, and only then perform a certain action. Then I am supposedly above the will to receive and I build an attitude toward it from outside. But this is only a form of expression. I never leave my will to receive; I only treat my matter this way.

The will to receive is everything that the Creator created. The entire wisdom of Kabbalah, all of creation, all of humanity - everything is inside of it. Everything we learn amounts to how to get along with it, and out of this self-study we learn all of creation - why did the Creator operate this way and not another, how can we become similar to Him, be excited by Him, learn His actions from Him, see how opposite I am to Him and more - and this is possible because the will to receive itself was created by the Creator. Thus, we slowly reach unification with Him, adhesion, and "Thou Hast Hemmed Me In Behind and Before."

So we must remember and not forget, to understand and to feel, that all of our work is in the will to receive. And therefore Kabbalah is not mysticism, but a wisdom that speaks about the discernments which the will to receive undergoes - degrees, levels of Aviut (coarseness), opposite forces and the correct integration of the two. This is spiritual mechanics. Therefore there are sketches, charts and formulas which discuss the force of reception and the force of bestowal, and the phenomena that occur at their junction.

It is true that I undergo all those operations and I am excited and impressed by them, and then I allegedly move away from the numbers and vectors, but the correct study is to always connect the two together. Like an investigating doctor who gives a shot or a pill to a patient and knows in advance what he injected him with as well as what the patient is going to feel now. This is how we investigate ourselves.

Therefore the correct way for a person who is only beginning to study Kabbalah, is to be equally impressed by the mental and the emotional study, so that these two approaches - the mind and the heart - will connect within him into one. On one hand, he must be able to feel, as well as understand, from where and why he feels the way he does, what kind of forces or actions make him feel that way, and in which desires he is feeling all of this. And on the other hand he must invite the operation of the Light, the Creator's operation, in a supervised manner and in the right measurements, to be impressed and feel what happens to him as a result of that. This is called being in the "middle line."

The person himself manages the investigation that he is performing on himself and invites the Creator's actions. He reveals within himself the results of the Creator's actions, and feels them in a very tangible way, very internal, but at the same time he does not lose his mind and knows where they are coming from, why, and how to make use of them in the future. This is our work. The Creator wants us to work with the matter He created, and to control it. This is the way in which we arrive at the recognition of the purpose of creation.