An “effort” is defined as anything that the individual does against the desires of the body, irrespective of what action it is. For example, if an individual sleeps in spite of the desires of the body, this is an effort. But the main problem lies in the fact that an individual always anticipates a reward for efforts made. To overcome egoism, one must strive to make an effort without being compensated for it.
Our entire reality has been especially created in order to distract us from perceiving the spiritual worlds. A thousand thoughts constantly distract us from our aim, and the more we try to concentrate, the greater the obstacles we experience.
The only remedy against all these obstacles is the Creator. This is His purpose in creating them—so we will turn to the Creator in search of the path for personal salvation.
The program of creation descends into our world from above downward; the highest level begets the lower one, all the way to our world, where it is born in an individual of our world at a particular moment during one of the individual’s lives. From that moment the process reverses and forces one to grow spiritually, until one reaches the highest level.
Our task is merely to study the levels of spiritual descent from above to below, and to gain the understanding of how to conduct ourselves in our own ascent from below to above. The seemingly unnatural feeling of love towards others like us that the Creator demands of us (not those “close” to us, but those like us, because those close to us are already dearly loved), makes us feel an internal contraction of the “self,” just like any other altruistic feeling or any other denial of egoism will do.
Kabbalah describes all the preceding states of creation, beginning from the state of the existence of only the Creator, to His creation of a general soul—a spiritual being. It then follows the gradual descent of the spiritual worlds from the highest to the lowest level, to the last state of the lowest spiritual realm.
Kabbalah does not describe all the following stages (how an individual of our world apprehends the lowest level of the spiritual realm, and then one’s further ascent from the bottom to the top, to one’s ultimate goal—the return to the original point of creation). This is because the ascent follows the same laws and levels as the descent of the soul, and everyone who seeks to understand must independently experience every stage of spiritual birth, up to the final spiritual level of completion.
In general, whenever we begin to do real work on ourselves, we immediately begin to see the obstacles on our path to the perception of the spiritual.
These obstacles appear as various extraneous thoughts and desires, as the loss of confidence in the correctness of the chosen path, as discouragement in the face of our real desires.
All these obstacles are sent to us to test us from Above. They will determine whether we really possess a thirst for the truth, no matter how contradictory it is to our own egoistic nature, or how distressing it is to give up our own comforts for the sake of the Creator.
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