If we could turn this outbreak of desires into an outbreak of desires for spirituality, then these desires would be the best thing that ever happened to humanity. Since we are currently not doing it, they are the worst thing that ever happened to us.

When the Mishnah sages (first and second centuries CE) declare that “Envy, lust, and honor bring a man out of the world” (Mishnah, Avot 4:21), Kabbalah explains that they don’t mean it in a bad way. On the contrary, it means that if you know how to work with these desires, they will elevate you beyond your present reality, your present world, and let you into the spiritual world.

In the last several years, it has become increasingly evident that human society isn’t becoming more united. Instead, we are showing, and even nurturing, alienation, animosity among nations, among different factions of the same nation, and even among members of the same family. At the same time, globalization is forcing us to increase and tighten our level of cooperation on all the levels we just mentioned. This tension is now culminating, and humanity is on the verge of exploding.

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How the Desire for Spirituality Begins with an Enormous Unclarified Desire

As soon as a spark of spirituality appears in you, even as an impulse that is still hidden from your eyes, you stop being satisfied with your life. You begin to search for something beyond money, honor, sex, food, power, and knowledge and don’t know where to find what you really want. This is the first time you feel that there is something beyond your surroundings in this world. That spark evolves later on to become the desire for contact and adhesion with the Creator.

All throughout this journey, a person is defined by his or her unique desire to cleave to the Creator, differentiating humanity from other life forms. People still have within them the desires of the still, vegetative, and animate degrees, but our specific degree is measured by the intensity of our desire for the Creator.

The Need for Spirituality Is the Final Level of Human Desire to Develop

In his introduction to the book Panim Meirot Umasbirot (Illuminating and Welcoming Face), Baal HaSulam writes that all the desires except the one called “human” are measured by the desired object:

• In the still degree, desires are turned toward food, sex, and family, meaning bodily and beastly pleasures.
• In the vegetative degree, desires are turned toward money and security.
• In the animate degree, desires are turned toward power, control, and respect.
• In the speaking degree, desires are turned toward spirituality. A person’s desires have by now evolved to such an extent that he or she desires something outside the physical world.

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To Change the World a New Level of Consciousness Is Needed

By now it is clear not only for people studying Kabbalah, but for everybody that unless the path the world is on changes, we are heading for disaster. The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches us that we can only change the world by changing ourselves.

In order for the world to change, there has to be a new consciousness among the public, one that is above emotions. There has to be reason as well as emotion in the way we relate to the world. We need reason to relate to good and bad critically and to realize that if we feel bad, it must mean that there is a reason and a purpose for it. The public is stuck in a cycle of merely “feeling bad,” or “feeling good.” It can take hundreds of years before people start asking: “Why is this happening to me?”

Rising Above Feelings of Subjective Good and Bad through Kabbalah

Our goal is to explain where our present state is leading us. As Baal HaSulam wrote, “Religion is not for the good of the people, but for the good of the worker,” meaning that the purpose of religion is not to benefit people, or to benefit the Creator, but to benefit those who are working to be corrected. The entire world was created for that ultimate goal. But if you judge what happens to you only by feelings of “good” or “bad,” you remain in the degrees of still, vegetative, or animate and never advance to the degree of speaking, the degree we need to complete our correction.

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How the Study of Kabbalah Works On You in a Gradual Way

In truth our present perception of reality is very limited, undeveloped. Our sensors are very unrefined. We cannot feel much of what happens inside our own bodies, such as molecular collisions or the birth of new cells. Therefore, there are many changes that need to take place for us to start feeling anything. Before any feeling is created in us, millions of wheels must revolve inside, entire mechanisms have to perform many corrections before those corrections are felt by us.

The study of the Kabbalah works on various levels of our soul, in attributes of the will to receive what we cannot feel just yet. A person reads but understands nothing, and so feels no reason to continue to study. The person feels this way because the text is working on attributes below the threshold of his or her feelings. It is like a person filling a glass of water and wondering why the bottom part of the glass has to be filled first before he or she can drink off the top. There seems to be no reason to be concerned with the other parts.

For Kabbalah to be Effective a Special Intention Is Needed from You

Our will to receive is corrected through the study of the Kabbalah. The study deals with the different levels of the soul, the vessel and the desire, which are at the bottom of the glass. We don’t touch them, do not drink them, and do not feel their actual taste until they reach the top, where we actually begin to feel them.

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The Shift from Suffering to Spirituality

Kabbalah teaches us that at the beginning the Creator uses pain, and unfulfilled desires in order to turn the person’s attention towards spirituality. Thus one’s reality is full of pain and suffering until one starts to locate the source, and the meaning of it all.

Reality changes because if we strengthen our contact with the Creator, there will no longer be a need for pain, the very same pains that are initiated from above to bring about that contact.

Thus, the external circumstances will change, since we will no longer require the same pains.

How Life’s Torments Build in You a Desire for Spirituality

People do not understand how changes in the world occur or how. But the torments they suffer make them search subconsciously for an upper power and pray to it because there is no one else on whom to rely. That prayer, that earthy still prayer, works. Using the torments, the Creator puts us in a no-win situation and corners us until we actually start looking for an alternative planet to live on. But that planet cannot be found, except in the Creator.

For example, it is interesting to consider why the Creator brought the Jewish people to the corporeal land of Israel, rather then to the spiritual one. The return to Israel was the result of a prayer that was lying in our subconscious and of the pain and suffering we Jews had endured over many years. We prayed for our own place, and we received that place. But if we had truly understood that our sufferings had happened for a certain purpose, then our prayer, the prayer of the unsatisfied mass, would have been aimed differently, and a new solution would have arisen on a different level, a spiritual one.

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