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.

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Why Every Action Brings a Person Closer to Spirituality

Every person was created with a complex corporeal body, and what one does in this world affects it. Therefore, what we do in our world is important. Whatever we do with an intention toward the Creator is considered a spiritual act, though the act itself might still be completely “beastly.”

Nevertheless, anything we do inevitably leads us toward the purpose of creation. Even the pains we suffer in life do not come in vain, but are collected, and when the right time comes, they count in our favor. This happens slowly over many years, and we are not a consciously active part of it. To shorten this long path of pain, the Creator gave us the Torah, which directs us to the right goal less painfully.

Kabbalah Is a Method that Speeds Up Your Spiritual Development

Only in recent decades have a growing number of special souls begun to descend to our world, these souls having collected a sufficient amount of pain. These souls took the path of pain, accumulated deficits, and now those pains have turned into a yearning for the wisdom of Kabbalah. In future lives, these souls will delve into the study of Kabbalah more intensely and within a month or two attain fantastic results because they have accumulated a sufficient desire for it in their past lives. If a person has a strong enough desire to study and focuses just on Kabbalah for one purpose only, then in three to five years he or she will enter the spiritual world.

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The Enigma that Is Freedom of Choice

All throughout history philosophers have sought the answer to the question: “Is there freedom of choice?” They tried to define the concept of choice and reached the conclusion that only a limited freedom of choice in society is given to those who have a developed personality.

But among themselves, they understood that freedom of choice is always limited by our inability to control the future, because there is always the possibility that we could be run over by a truck, catch a fatal illness, or go into a coma. Of course, we can ignore such examples of the absence of freedom of choice, but that would not make life any easier. The evolution of genetics hasn’t improved our situation either, but only strengthened the feeling that we are in a closed compartment, surrounded by chains of genes from which we can never escape.

Freedom of Choice through Accelerating Your Development

And then comes the wisdom of Kabbalah, which Kabbalists regard as the last stage of the development of science, and we find that not only are we chained by our biological genes, but we are programmed throughout many lifetimes with a long and consistent chain of Reshimot that is set in the mind, the heart, and the soul throughout all time, and that is what determines our lives.

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Driven by the Desire for Pleasure

We were created in such a way that wherever we go, we look for pleasures and take every chance we can to satisfy our desires. Where do these desires come from, and how do we know how to satisfy them?

At any given moment there are new desires that awaken in us, at all levels of existence: on the physical, human, and spiritual levels. We don’t feel all the physical desires, such as the desire of the cells to develop and the desire of the organs to act. Some of these desires are satisfied naturally, and some require our active participation to be satisfied. As a whole, the desires can be divided into three parts:

• Physical (beastly) desires, which exist in animals as well.
• Human desires, which exist only in human society, such as desires for wealth, honor, and knowledge, and human- spiritual desires, desires for something sublime that are clearly not of our world. Searching for supernatural phe- nomena, religious rituals, and Far Eastern techniques for the improvement of the body and the mind all express such desires.
• Spiritual desires, which aim directly at the unique Creator. The Kabbalah distinguishes the desire for the Creator from all other desires. Our desires for worldly pleasures are called “humankind’s heart” while the desire for the Creator is called “the point in the heart.”

How Desires Originate

The desires form in us as a result of the surfacing of the reshimot, the carriers of the information within us, forcing us to obey their demands. There is a chain of preliminary reshimot imprinted in us, which makes us aware of the desire that they awaken as they surface. We have no choice but to obey these desires, although we do not feel that there is something that we must obey—we simply want. It is as though the reshimot appear out of nowhere in the subconscious even before we detect them, and when they come into our awareness, we feel them as desires. There is only one thing that we want: pleasure.

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A few years ago I had the honor of being interviewed by bestselling author William Simon for an autobiography about my life. We never actually completed the book, but you can read an excerpt here below about how I found my teacher.

Michael and his family were now settled in Israel, living a penthouse lifestyle with a housekeeper, a garden fountain, and many enviable high-tech conveniences. He and Olga had chosen the comfort of Rehovot, twenty miles south of Tel Aviv, where they could hear the sounds of the night and see the galaxies without shrill interferences from city lights or sirens.

After two years of work with F4 Phantom fighter aircraft, Michael could breathe easy—he had completed his required military service. The dental clinic was successfully producing a dependable and attractive income. And he was wealthy enough to own an imported large black Buick sedan. Many people would have put their feet on a desk and said, “I’ve made it.” But not this man. In the silence of Rehovot, Michael was still in distress over the same questions that had kept his life in turmoil for so many years.

Then came a day at the dental clinic in 1978 when a clean-shaven man showed up for an appointment. He arrived at a time when Michael was busy trying to repair one of the clinic’s machines. Chaim Malka had the chiseled bone structure of a European though he was from Morocco. Despite being college-educated, he held a job as a factory maintenance technician.

Read the Full Story at the Times of Israel »