What is Spirituality? What is a Soul?
From today’s daily lesson:
In today’s lesson on Talmud Eser Sefirot (The Study of the Ten Sefirot), Rav Laitman defined “spirituality” and “soul” in relation to a student’s question (19:00).
Student:What’s the difference between the 6,000 years and the 600,000 souls? Does it have the same weight?
Rav Laitman: You think about spirituality as if it’s defined and deterministic like corporeality: “Here is a cup, so I call it ‘a cup,’ and there is a book, so I call it ‘a book’… and ‘a soul is a soul’”…
There is no such thing in spirituality.
Spirituality is only the interweaving of forces and nothing else.
You’re a building engineer and have bricks on the mind (laughter). Ask a person who works with computers if he or she can define what’s inside the computer. Ask this person what matter he/she’s dealing with… It’s evasive. Where is matter within the computer? There’s RAM and different memories being burned, the existence of movements and connections of things creating different forms out of themselves… this is how it is in spirituality.
Spirituality is a multitude of different forces and vectors, connecting among themselves, creating new forms time after time until they reach their initial form—the adhesion of the creature with the Creator. This has been preplanned and already exists in the Rosh (mind), because the end of the action is in its initial thought. Moreover, we need to reach this.
Until we do reach this, all these forces and vectors operate in the billions—an infinity of forms and connections among them.
Where is the soul in this picture? Time after time, consciously and unconsciously, and in each and every one of us, there is a renewal. We live this renewal of these forces; we sense and live in a part of it, and there is a part we don’t sense.
You are a multitude of forces, interconnecting and operating, but what do you perceive out of this magnificent totality? You only perceive a very small, primitive stratum, and this is what you call “I am Gaby,” “I am Michael,” “he is Nesse” and so on. We name and sense ourselves like this.
Internally, however, each and every one of us is a soul. What is the soul? It is the entire Kli (vessel/receptacle) of Infinity and we have to find out how this Kli is adhered to its Creator.
In the meantime, I discover something tiny, false and opposite called “a dream.” The sages who have reached this vision say about it “I have seen an opposite world.”
We don’t feel anything of this great reality. It’s like you have a great big balloon. This balloon is you adhered to the Creator. You only feel a spot on this balloon, and you call this spot yourself, your life and your world. Within this balloon are a constantly renewing interconnection, circulation and revolution of forces. And at each moment, at each second, you can define this as a new soul, a different soul. There is a unique connection between these forces, in their resemblance to their Creator, in their fulfillment and absence of fulfillment. There is no such thing as a defined soul.
You may tell me: “Maybe you’re right, but I read in the book Shaar HaGilgulim (The Gate of Reincarnations) different stories about the soul coming from one person who was a merchant, and later on to another person who was righteous, and then to a third person who was a thief, and a fourth person who was something and someone else…” So is a soul something defined in a person or not? We thus need to understand these stories, because this Hollywood-like storytelling version is far from understanding what is really written there. So for the time being, you can take that in each and every stage there is a change, a new soul. And so it is written “each day a man is a new man.”
Rav Michael Laitman, PhD in the lesson of Talmud Eser Sefirot (The Study of the Ten Sefirot), Volume 6, Part 16 (May 3, 2007): wmv video | mp3 audio (38 min)
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