Why the World Outside Us Is Actually a Part of Us
As we said above, at present we are perceiving a divided reality, sensing a part that belongs to me, and seemingly a part that belongs to others, or that is outside of my personal sphere.
Kabbalah teaches that the force that divides our picture of reality into two parts—internal and external—is the force of the shattering. After the shattering, part of our desires (our outer Kelim, “clothing” and “palace”) were no longer sensed as our own. It is like a person who received an anesthetic to the leg, and while his leg was being amputated, he laughed and talked, behaving as though nothing was happening to him because he felt nothing.
In these parts of the will, “clothing” and “hall,” we actually feel all that is not us, meaning the outside world. Around us are people, processes unfolding, and the entire world when in fact, they are all parts of our own desire.
Reality Is Composed of Three Parts
We are living in a long feature film in which our desires our projected before our eyes, and what determines the image we see each moment in the film is the Reshimot [recollections]. As mentioned in chapter 2, The Reshimot are information bits that define our personal plan of development.
Reality consists of three elements: the light, the power of love and giving (the Creator), the will to receive (the creature), and the Reshimot (the creature’s plan of development). First, the Creator created the creature, meaning a desire to receive pleasure. Then the Creator broke the desire into an inner part (root, soul, body) and an outer part (clothing, palace), and created in it an egoistic sensation of “me vs. the world.”
Within the desire is its development plan, which consists of Reshimot. Each such Reshimo [singular of Reshimot] constitutes a certain state that the creature must experience until it corrects the shattering—equalizes with the qualities of the creator and realizes the purpose of creation.
How the Program of Human Development Works
If we return to the film, what I see now is a realization of the Reshimo that I feel in the five parts of my desire, and there is nothing else but that.
Each moment, new Reshimot awaken in my desire and evoke new impressions in me, which immediately makes me see a different world. My whole life, the whole of reality are Reshimot that pass through me and become realized. The light affects me, my desire, through which the Reshimot begin to traverse in a chain as though in frames on celluloid film.
I feel that it is my life that I am living, but is it really me living it? If look back a few years, will I believe that it was really me? It seems as though some motion picture ran through me. Many people feel that way—that life passes through them as though in a dream, that it was not them doing and experiencing, but some projection, a film that was projected and they were playing their roles in it.
Everything Occurs Inside of Our Desire
The Zohar explains that there is nothing but Reshimot, light, and desire. Each Reshimo that passes divides the desire into two— internal and external. We experience ourselves and something other, which seems to be outside of us—trees, sun, moon, people. We have children, we are at work, there is always us and something other. Why?
The sensation of reality as though it were divided into two allows us to recognize that besides us there is another force—the light, the Creator—which compels us to search for it.
The Zohar speaks of a reality that exists “above” what we feel at the moment, “above” time, space, and motion. This external reality that it describes and which appears to be outside of us is nowhere to be found. It is all within our will. All phenomena, sensations of the past, present, and future are depicted within it. History is merely a process that we picture as something that occurred sometime in the past, when in truth, there is no time at all, no motion, and all places are imaginary. There is only one place where everything occurs—the desire.
The natural course of things, the different parts of our desire (internal and external, me and others) collide with one another. The Book of Zohar assists us in correcting the connection between them, in joining them until they become one and we feel no difference between them. This is the longed-for change in our perception of reality.
Book of Zohar Can Build in Us a Boundless, Correct Perception of Reality
This is how we discover the upper world, also known as “the next world.” It is not that we prepare ourselves here and subsequently reach some other place. Rather, the more we show love toward others instead of hatred, the more we begin to feel what is called “the upper world” or “the next world.” All the worlds are here in the connection between us and what currently seems to be outside of us, remote.
Desires that seem to us as others are divided into several circles with respect to our ego. In the closest circle are family, relatives and friends. In the next circle are people who help us and who benefit us by their existence, such as doctors. Then there are the people that we only want to use, to harm, but to keep them alive. And the farthest are the people that we truly hate and may even be prepared to kill.
Yet, they are all our own desires. When we reconnect them to ourselves, we will become the general soul that the Creator created and will return to the world of Ein Sof.
It is important to stress that the process of correcting the perception of reality is not meant to be carried out artificially. Rather, it is a profound transformation, and to execute it we need The Book of Zohar to help us build that new perception within us, as well as the company of people who will support us in the correction process.
“How Your Perception of Reality Is a Product of Your Desire” is based on the book, Unlocking The Zohar by Dr. Michael Laitman.
