Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The Path of Pain & the Path of Torah and Mitzvot

In the last chapter we dealt with the force that influences our spiritual development; the development of desires; and the way in which lifes circumstances moves us along the path of greater and greater spiritual height. We spoke about the quality that is the definition of the Upper Worlds, the Spiritual Worlds; the quality that is the definition of the physical worlds and what it is about, the way that we perceive reality that makes the Spiritual Worlds the greater purpose and how it is hidden from us.

We looked at the development of desires. We saw that there were four categories of desires that are considered physical; because of the Thought of Creation, which is to create a humans and bring them to unrestrained pleasure, it must progress by means of what the CREATOR finds delightful.

Drawing 3:1

All the expressions of development in the Universe are expresses from the Thought of Creation through the process of: lack and a filling, or poverty and blessing. We saw that our spiritual needs progressed from simple desires as animal desires for sex, for shelter, food, and family, and when those are filled, we moved unto greater desire, which is a desire for wealth, which is an accumulation of the first desire. When that desire become empty to us, because we are still driven by a spiritual hunger, something that’s pushing us ahead, something that’s pulling us forward, whether it is a feel or a kind of a taste, or something that we must have, and we move towards it, and once we have attain it, we move on to a even greater desire, until we can’t be satisfiedt anymore, this is the force of development moving us on.

From wealth, we move onto fame, power, once we fill those desire, we are moved on by our emptiness into knowledge. Once we find knowledge empty, we find ourselves in a confusing situation in which nothing from this world can satisfy us. It is at that point that a completely new level of development becomes accessible to us.

The Path of Pain & The Path of Torah and Mitzvot

Drawing 3:2

When that special desire enters the heart from the Holy Spirit, which is a quality of the will to “share” give, it changes everything within the human heart. The human heart, when we hear the term “heart” in Kabbalah, it means the sum total of all desires that a person has, this heart is still filled by the desires that come from the physical world. These are still the things from categories one, two, three and four. 

This desire, which is a desire to reach the spiritual, is called “Yisrael,” from two Hebrew words, Yashar, meaning “straight,” and El, meaning “God”, a desire for a direct connection with ABBA YAHVEH. These corporeal, the fleshly desires are called “nations,” “the nations of the world,” in other words, the desires of the physical world. This process is elucidated by the journey of the Children of Yisrael from Egypt to Canaan.

Up until this point, the force of development, the way in which desire moved us, until we came to a point where we actually needed to feel that what is above or beyond the physical world, Love, joy, peace, gentleness, long suffering, meekness, and self control in an unconscious way. But from now on it has to happen in a conscious way because from this point on in the heart there is a spiritual DNA; it is like the embryo of the soul. The soul is a magnetism or combination of desires and it must be filled; the heart must be filled with a desire, for good or bad, it must consumed everything despite these corporeal desires. In other words, all of the selfish desires that we have, have to undergo a transformation, a correction. It is by correcting these desires that the desire to go directly in ABBA YAHVEH can be fulfilled. 

Drawing 3:3

Now why is that? In our original state, at the root of our soul, is selfcentred and that is why we are not connected to the CREATOR as “Father and Son.”  It is the result of eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. These are the only two things that exist in creation: the CREATOR and the creature; in the Garden of Eden man were one with the CREATOR as one unified creature. But, because of the Thought of Creation, which is to create a creature and fill it with delight, that was only the starting point, it was the beginning of the system. This quality of the creature, which is the will to receive, started to expand purposefully, and as a result of the expansion of this quality, of this desire to receive for myself alone, a greater diversity in quality started to grow between the quality of the CREATOR (which is giving), and the quality of the creature (which is selfish reception).

As this egoistic intention expanded, the first man, the whole creature, the collective soul called “Adam ha Rishon” (meaning, the first man) descended through a system of worlds, through 125 steps to greater and greater selfish egoism, until the soul reached a point in which it became separated into what we now called this physicality reality.

At the fall of man, the collective soul was shattered into 600,000 parts. Adam began to expand, by producing children, each one of these parts, these children is apart of the original Adam; each one of these sons or unique set off desire, begin to manifest it self. Now, because this is a process, and this is only the half-way point, this broken, shattered aspect of the collective soul in which we experience individual isolation, separation from each other, a kind of antagonism towards each other, a desire to exploit each other, and an experience of the physical world, is the half-way point and it must be corrected in-order for man to return to his original state. In order for man to rise back up through this system of worlds, also called Jacob ladder, back into this state of adhesion with the CREATOR, the Garden of Eden; but it can’t be done all at once, he must experience the seven days of Creation.

Each one of these parts, these human was likewise created from the 613 desires unique to the human race. That is, each individual desire within Adam ha Rishon total 613 desires that must be corrected. It is like dividing a huge treasure and giving a coin to each person knowing that each one will return this coin to the original treasure chest in mint condition. This point in the heart that is placed inside of a human, can be trusted to bring that soul back to its origin and put the treasure back together as a collective once again. That is why we are told that there are two great Commands or Desire, the love for the CREATOR and love for thy brother.

So in this point in the heart of the individual who begins to feel this desire for spirituality, this coin from the treasury of the King, plus the 612 other desires that exist in the heart must be transformed bit by bit to resemble into a greater quantity, the quality of the CREATOR, will reverse the process of eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and evil. MessiYAH YAHushua gave this Kabbalah teaching while He was on earth, pertaining to the lost treasure.

Now the point is, this process of the return of the correction (Tikkun), of the transformation, of the fulfillment of the Thought of Creation, it is going to happen, and all of us, all the pieces of the collective soul are going to rejoin, and are going to ascend from physical selfish perceptions and a world of suffering back into a complete and whole interrelationship with each other in such a way that we will reach the goal of creation, which is adhesion to the CREATOR and the complete filling of the greatest unbounded desire. It is going to happen. But the question is, will it happen consciously, with our agreement, or will we be pushed to it?

You see, there’s one goal, and the goal is assured, but there are two paths to the goal: One path is called “the path of pain” and the other path is called “the path of Torah and Mitzvot.”

The path of pain is the path that we are all already on. It is not even really a path. It is what we see as the slow, grinding, evolution of humanity that we call “history.” It is a kind of clinging to our physical way of perceiving our desire, to the characteristic that we really need to transform. As a result of this non-conscious involvement with the process of development, we find ourselves being pushed by events. We see catastrophes, we see tsunamis, we see wars, we have personal experiences in our lives; experiences of pain, experiences of suffering, that are caused only by the lack of conscious involvement with the process of the development of desires in their correction. This path can go on and on, and on, and it is disastrous. Once the point in the heart appears in a person though, it becomes a conscious involvement, and this is the path of Torah and Mitzvot.

Torah means “instruction by the Light,” and Mitzvot means a transformation of a quality of one of the 612 desires from its egoistic expression to its unselfish expression.

Every event that happens in our lives is really an attempt to fulfill a Mitzva, a desire, a possibility for transformation being given to us. Now, when I say the word Mitzva, I don’t mean like the physical commandments where you are instructed to do a certain thing. There is a list of all these things in the Shulchan Aruch, in the Table of Jewish Law and so on; Do this physical thing now. I’m not saying don’t do the physical thing, but what I mean is that this is an inner correction; it is a correction of our desire. So whether you do these external good deeds, whether it is a religious good deed or whether it is something that we consider to be something nice for somebody else, you can do any external deed and you can be filled with hatred and selfishness. You can’t measure anything by that. We’re talking about one of these 613 desires that’s presented to us as an event in our life.

Our entire lives are planned in such a way by this process of development to present to us every day, the opportunity to take what we first feel as a desire to receive for myself in a given situation, and transform that into its unselfish form to try to understand what the thought of the CREATOR is; the thought behind giving me that situation, because as you remember, the only way that we progress along spiritual is by altering a quality within me, to resemble that quality in spirituality that I want to enter. Therefore, what it is that I want to know according to this new desire, this desire is straight for the CREATOR, is that I want to know the CREATOR; I want to have a direct consciousness off.

I want to feel in my desires, in the tangible things that occur in my life, what is the Thought of the One, of the Upper One, of that Upper Level that gave me this perfect structured situation; that gave me this opportunity, like a birthday present, for me to take it first in its corrupted form, and by analyzing and seeing what it is, feeling what His Thought is behind it, that is a Mitzva; that is Tikkun, that is transformation.

These steps of the Jacob’s ladder by which we descended from our connection to the complete Reality, down into this separated state, as individual we should desires, these steps off Jacob’s Ladder are also completely encompassed into these 613 Desires, so that the correction of these desires, these transformations, will bring the individual all the way back up the ladder.

Another feature of this, is that each and every level of descent is imprinted in us as a gene. Every point by which a greater and greater degree of the will to receive was added, is remembered by us, like breadcrumbs on a path. This being the first spiritual gene, this point in the heart, our access to ascent, is actually the entry point on a chain of spiritual genetics called “Reshimot,” remembrances, and all of the events that happen in our lives, that bridge us between our unique combination of the 613 transformations, of the will to receive, to the will to bestow that bond us to the CREATOR. Each event is laid out for us in a perfect pattern, so that we have the opportunity to recognize what it is that we need to do.

Now this action of correction and transformation, this Tikkun, these desires, is not done by us; it is done as a result of a desire that we have to make this contact with the CREATOR. As a result of the desire that we have, the work is done by the Holy Spirit and the instructions outline in the Torah.

The Zohar says: “When a person comes to purify or sanctify themselves, they are given helped from Above.” In other words, it is as a result of a gut-level need that used to be a need for those four corporeal desires being transformed into a greater and greater need to know what the quality of bestowal actually is. We can’t reach these ourselves. This work is called “the work of the Holy Spirit,” not because we go out there like a bunch of nice soldiers and do the job that YAHVEH assigned us; it is because the work of transformation, purification, Tikkun, is done on us by the Holy Spirit as a result of an expanded desire. But don’t be confused by the word “Light.” Don’t think of it as a physical thing. Remember that the quality of the Spiritual World is a quality of attributes; it is a quality of intention, feeling-states.

If you want to feel the contrast between your intention and the intention of the Light, the Holy Spirit, then you can’t simply have a desire and have it filled directly by some kind of pleasure the way that we do that in the physical world. In order to feel the difference between our state and the state of the Light, the “my intention” and the intention of the Light, it is necessary to have a sensor, something that can feel the Light. This sensor must be an intention. It is called “a screen.” This is what we referred to as the additional sense, the sixth sense, perception or discernment.

This screen acts as a resonator, a contrast point between the desires that sense that which is given by the Light. Rather than having it just go directly in, it hits this screen and it causes a sensation, a sensation of difference between the intention here and the intention off the Light. This screen, or Masach, is the tool. This is the way in which we can turn the will to receive, which is our matter and the only tool that we have to work with, into something very different. We can begin to feel and receive the Light only according to an intention that matches the intention of the Spiritual World.

Drawing 3:4

What happens when this actually occur, when the feeling in our heart, the intention in the screen, is the same as the intention in the Light. This is called “a corrected desire.” This contrast creates a need in us, the right need, a particular need. It builds a lack in a particular direction. It makes us want to feel what we don’t have, and that is the sensation of the Light, the thought, the intention behind the Light. It moves us in the intended direction of greater and greater correction.

Every time that a desire moves us in transformation, from its corrupted form into its perfected form, a transformation from its will to receive to the will to bestow, this puts us in touch with eternity. It connects us more and more to the Thought behind the entire process. Not only does it do that for this one particular desire, and for one individual, but as a result of the connection, the interconnection in Adam ha Rishon, that part of person number 1, that desire within person number 1, like a hologram, becomes corrected in each one of the other desires and reconnects them to each other.

Drawing 3:5

So, it raises not only the person who does the correction, but their entire world, so that our perception of our reality, the reason that things happen, the Thought behind it, whether or not good and bad things are occurring, this changes. A person can feel the total Righteousness behind the guidance of the entire system, and is no longer fooled by physical ideas of what’s good and evil.

This perception of the love behind the process is really what enlightenment is. Now we see good and bad events surrounding us, things that we want to happen and things that we feel should not happen. This sense that we do something right or we do something wrong, that we make a certain act and we’re punished for it, that there is a good force and a bad force in reality, this is not reality. This is the way that it appears to the will to receive, and enlightenment means that we can see, despite anything that appears to us. What is the real unifying Thought is behind that.