How Obstructions on the Path to Spirituality Work in Your Favor

When we are attracted to someone, we are immediately filled with joy, even before we make actual contact with that person. As in corporeal love, so is the case with love for the Creator. But to prevent us from being satisfied with mere attraction, the Creator makes us feel that our situation is a low one, lacking in unity. If the Creator hadn’t done that, we would be satisfied with the pleasures of desiring, without actually attaining anything. The feeling of lowness added to the desire for the Creator forces us to rise to the level of spiritual coupling and enjoy unification with the Creator.

God shakes us up with unpleasant incidents and situations, until there is enough torment to spark a desire for the loved one, a need to create a spiritual coupling.

That is why the soul descends from the upper world to this world and dresses in a body to incarnate in this world, so as to return to the root from which it came and cling to it again.  To correct the body, we need to recognize that obstructions are not what they seem, but rather necessary catalysts to help us connect with the Creator.

It is precisely because we feel the obstructions and try to struggle with them in a heroic battle that we increase our desire for the Creator, so that we can once again be united as we were before the soul was clothed in a body, with the same power and intensity. The adhesion between us and the Creator is strengthened by the very struggles we endure in seeking out that connection.

Giving the Desire for Spirituality Importance Over Your Other Desires

There is always contact between us and the Creator, but for us to be able to feel His love, the Creator places an obstruction before us called the body—the desire for every pleasure possible apart from the Creator. To truly understand the Creator’s love for us, we must gradually uproot the obstructions of the body, thought by thought.

The Creator takes into account everything that is done to us, and when we have experienced the right amount of situations, when we earnestly desire for adhesion with the Creator with all our strength, nonstop, only then comes the moment of adhesion.

Only when we have reached the state of adhesion can we justify what the Creator sends us, from the lowest situations to the highest spiritual acts. Then we realize that everything that happens in life happens because of the Creator’s love and desire to unite with us. That, in turn, creates in us a neveending and unlimited love for the Creator.

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Why It Is Beneficial to Live in Accord with Nature’s Laws

We do not say anything new in Kabbalah that goes against human logic. All the laws of the natural sciences speak in one form or another about each part of creation striving for the center, for a physical-biological balance (whether an atom, a molecule, an inanimate object, or a living organism). This is the principle of every law of nature, and it is also the principle of Kabbalah, but Kabbalah relates those collective laws of creation to humanity.

The very fact that we are a part of nature necessitates us to be subordinate to it. It is not a question of will, and neither is our very existence in this world. Hence, if a person accepts the laws of nature and keeps them, he or she will feel good, and if not, the opposite.

The collective laws of nature bring us back to a state of balance called the “center of creation.” The minute you begin to want to go back to that center, as the law that returns does, you will feel that you are stepping on a comfortable road, because you agree with the force and keep its laws. On the other hand, if you do not know that law and act according to your own understanding, you will be punished. That is the way nature works—anyone who breaks its laws is punished, including people, who are inseparable parts of nature.

Introducing the Law of Equivalence of Form

We are the only creatures who regularly break the laws of nature because all other creatures work only according to their natural impulses. Those impulses also exist in us, but they are not enough for us to know how to behave in nature, and if we do not acquire this knowledge, we will simply become extinct.

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The Big Question: Does Humanity Have Freedom of Will?

In our world, we are almost completely dependent on nature’s providence. We are compelled to be born; we do not choose our time of birth or our family, our talents, or the people we meet in this life. We enter an environment we never chose.

All my characteristics are predefined: the feelings, the aspirations, and the character. Everyone is born with his or her own Mazal (luck). Moreover, it is said that “there is not a blade of grass below [in our world] that has not an angel above [a force from the upper world] that strikes it and tells it: Grow!” So is there any freedom at all?

Both nature and society evolve according to their own laws, and so do all the changes in the universe and the ever- greater catastrophes that happen, hence there is nothing that depends on us. But if everything in humankind is dictated from above, not only our characteristics and inheritance, but everything outside us, including the forces that lead us to the end of correction, to a predetermined state, what kind of freedom can we talk about or even think about?

Predetermination vs. Free Choice

On the other hand, if we just obey nature’s orders, it is unclear why we were created in the first place, not to mention everything else around us. If everything is predefined and there is no freedom of choice, there seems to be no point to the whole of creation. The goal of creation, however, is not that everything will continue the way it has so far advanced, without any reason, but rather to attain completeness, precisely through our gift of free choice. For that reason it is vitally important that we find where and in what our free choice manifests.

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“The main motivation in the Integral society is the result we obtain, the importance of the goal we pursue, the unity, pleasure that we receive from the work we do, from the result of the process.” –Dr. Michael Laitman, in “Internal Fulfillment Nullifies External Needs.”

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