9 Blogs in 1
By zevi770 · January 15, 2012
Even the good we do must be only out of obligation to fulfill our mission as G-d’s messengers for then we are humbled in the act of giving and our own ego does not take credit, for if it does many are the people trampled in holy wars.
In the end of the day life is a merry-go-round, it slowly builds up steam, but once you’re rolling, you will easily have more and more positive cycles, leading you ever closer to G-d.
If there is enough style we forget the purpose of life.
Whatever the human desires the mind rationalizes – the key therefore is to desire nothing, hence cease all rationalizations; this includes spiritual positive desires as the famous statement, the road to hell was paved with good intentions, and only desire to fulfill the will of G-d through your Mashpia spiritual mentor (a rabbi/ Rebbetzin schooled in Judaism and Jewish mysticism) for in this the purity of truth will lead you.
G-d’s infinitely brilliant method of teaching is not through teaching but through allowing our own experiences to come up with result which is true so we will never be able to doubt the veracity of truth.
Remember if anyone ever curses you out, unfortunately they must hate themselves infinitely more than they hate you, for to try lowering someone really means “I believe your goodness is so far greater than mine that I will debase myself in order to lower you so my low self image doesn’t feel so negative.”
Existential pain is G-d saying “I love you too much to let you screw up” for the nature of a human is to never resign oneself to pain, and hence it becomes the catalyst to examine, reexamine and finally conceive of a new meaningful life.
A woman came to a class I was giving and shared with me the following beautiful insight “My father told me that in all people there is both good and bad but you see what you want to.”
Understanding the inner world
Our inner world is highly secretive, for you are the feelings you feel about things.
Your feelings though as the Zohar says libah lipumah loi galie your heart reveals not the reason for your feelings.
For example, in the course of my short Rabbinical career I had to deal with someone who told me “I hate you but I don’t know why,” it has taken me a long time to figure out jealousy was the cause of his hatred but he came up with a thousand different excuses for trying to fire me for the simple reason – the mind is a rationalization machine hiding any self perception of negativity and thus the person actually tries to fulfill his desires but doesn’t even know why he wants what he wants.
Sex is another one of those things – many people want it, none really understand why, which I have written about elsewhere and don’t want to go into now.
So all we can do is go to the Tanya, for the Tanya is the first book to unmap or unfurl the complexities of the human psyche in a way we can suddenly say “ahah,” “now I understand myself!”
Let’s begin at the basics:
The Tanya explains that within us there are three souls.
The first one whom we are most familiar with is called the animal soul, and is little different from an animal with the desire to live and certain uniquely human pleasures, such as arrogance, boasting, comedy, sexual desire, desire for other pleasures and a predilection towards laziness and depression – without morality this is who we would be, and this is exactly the image of societies that have no morality.
The second soul is literally God himself, so this soul has only goodness, love, self sacrifice as evidenced by the millions if not tens of minions of Jews who gave up their very life to not part with their belief in God – even if that parting would have been a perfunctionary “kiss the cross” etc. – it is from this soul we are driven to change the world etc.
The third is the rational mind itself, something animals that have no independent rational mind, hence no ability to regulate their behavior and are totally instinctual.
So now we can understand everything!
Within me, I have both instincts for pleasure and instinct for God and helping, to the extent of complete sacrifice for another.
I also have a rational mind that as the ability to decipher between positive and negative, and to order myself around.
In fact when I was in Chile as a Chaplain for the boyscouts a man told me that there is a study about the most successful people which he uses and one of them is that they talk to themselves – so far from being the crazy people, it is the successful people, for they know how to get their animal in the direction of the mind.
Most of use fail to be in charge of ourselves, so basically the animal is continually irritated by the conscience which is like living on a seesaw, feeling good one moment, rotten the next, which is why so many people are unhappy.
So the key to understating ourselves and making ourselves comfortable, is to understand that the body and soul as we will call it, are simply like a schizophrenic that has two voices in their heads.
The first voice is simply an animal saying, I, or, I want, but has no ability to regulate the behavior; note: the millions of drug addicts who literally cannot stop taking drugs and many even kill themselves, because like the cow given heroin, they chew till they forget about all other needs and die forgetting to eat etc.
On the other hand, we have a conscience, which depending on how we look at it, is either the best part of us or the worst part of us, the part leading us towards becoming Godly or the nuisance that is making us feel guilty about our narcissistic or instinctual behavior.
But perhaps more important than understanding that we have two voices, we should understand, we have the ability to control our behavior.