To Fight For or Against the Desires You Have to Develop Spiritually
Can we overpower our own desire? Should we or should we not fight our own desires? After all, how can we know what is in store for us in this lifetime? That depends on our degree of spiritual development, which determines everything inside us and what we can and cannot do. The answer is to indeed fight, but just to realize that we cannot do anything by ourselves, and also to study ourselves. That is what we were given our minds for, in addition to our desires.
How Sensations Influence Your Perception of Reality
We attain everything within our Kelim (vessels), our emotions. Our world consists of the overall impressions we receive from our senses, and this is how we perceive reality. If our senses change, or if we add another sense, then our world will change as well. Hence, we expand our world by changing our senses and acquiring new senses, as if rising from world to world on the ladder of worlds. By that we change the reality in which we exist.
Why Bitter Sensations Actually Aid Spiritual Progress
In the spiritual world, things can only exist in pairs: pleasure or the absence of it, true and sweet, false and bitter. The truth is always sweet, and the lie is always bitter, and they always correspond. But that situation doesn’t exist in our world. Falsehood is not bitter, and truth is not sweet. In our world we constantly face tough decisions: to choose the sweet but superficial and false way, or the bitter but sincere way.
How the Mind Is Used to Overcome Desires
We cannot resist the desires that surface in us. Our bodies can only distinguish between bitter and sweet, while our minds know the difference 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.
Why Harmful Things Appear Pleasant
That sort of 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. In that world, the sweet 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 were mixed up to such an extent that falsehood became sweet and truth became bitter.
Why Spiritual Advancement Is Necessary to Experience That Which Is Good for You in A Non-Bitter Way
A person climbs to spirituality via three lines: the right, the left, and the middle line. From the right line he or she receives light; from the left, desire; and in the middle line he or she builds the screen that corrects the desire. Thus, we must constantly move between the lines until we reach the world of Atzilut, where they unite, and the spiritual sweetness of living “for the Creator” merges with the bitterness of living only “for oneself.”
“If Spirituality Seems Unpleasant to You Then You Must Read This” is based on the book, Awakening to Kabbalah: The Guiding Light of Spiritual Fulfillment by Dr. Michael Laitman.
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