Correct Approach To Study
Rabbi Baruch Ashlag asserted that two elements are imperative to one's spiritual path. First, one must find an environment that will promote one as safely and as quickly as possible toward "equivalence of form" with one's Maker. Next, one must know how to approach the study of Kabbalah correctly, so that no time is lost. Once we've explained the first element in the previous item, let us now explain the second: Kabbalists throughout the generations believed that during the study, a Light shines on a person's soul, a "Surrounding Light." To receive that Light within the soul, one need only want that Light to permeate one's soul. In other words, one needs to want to experience the states that the Kabbalist who wrote the book is describing. However, this is a complex process, requiring time and considerable effort on the part of the student, since one must reach a state of "prayer," i.e. to formulate a complete desire to discover the Higher Reality. The emphasis in his teachings is not on understanding the material, but on the individual's desire. From the moment a person acquires a complete measure of desire to reach spirituality, the spiritual world opens and one discovers the Upper Worlds described by the author.
In Shamati, essay 209, he mentions three conditions to reach "genuine" prayer, a complete desire for spirituality:
There are three conditions to a prayer: a) To believe that He can help one. b) That one no longer has any other counsel, that one has already done all that one could, but yielded no cure to one's affliction. c) That if He does not help one, one's death is better than one's life. Prayer is a matter of work in the heart. And the more one is lost, the greater is one's prayer.
— Baruch Ashlag, Shamati, page 209
Read more about this topic: Baruch Ashlag
Famous quotes containing the words correct, approach and/or study:
“In correct theology, the Virgin ought not to be represented in bed, for she could not suffer like ordinary women, but her palace at Chartres is not much troubled by theology, and to her, as empress-mother, the pain of child-birth was a pleasure which she wanted her people to share.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?... We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)