Group
Student Questions
What is The Pattern of Suffering
A long long time ago, when I used to treat people, the most desperate issue that I met was that it’s a cycle. It's an inescapable cycle. It doesn't matter if you create relief for the time being; it will return, as steadfast as a clock that is not even handled by human force. It means that it's a trap. It felt very much like a trap.
The mechanism of suffering and treatment of suffering is like a convention, like agreeing that the paper I give you has gold stored on the back of it somewhere. It's sort of an agreement that with your rationality you'll be able to give someone a currency of relief. But actually, if there is no appreciation of the higher plan, we're playing in currencies, in a cycle.
The mechanism of Providence relates not to souls but to spirits. It relates to their purpose; it relates to their experience. You can say that for the spirit, going down to share a corporeal life, at best, is inconvenient, suffering put aside.
Think about a higher being that has to take the conditions of a lowly consciousness, as if you were forced to live like a fish. The very existence of being a point within Divinity or within light and needing to go. If we speak about the ability to carry the purpose, it is not our suffering but the suffering of the spirit. This is why what we need to think of is the exile that the spirit, and therefore divinity, is going through because we are so stubborn.
What we call our suffering is a very far echo of what is really happening. Unless we get that, we can never understand the mechanics of it. We're so self-absorbed with how we feel, we don't even put the snorkel outside to see. There is a different world, and it revolves around trying to wake us up. The book of Bereshit is telling us that there was a trial to establish it throughout all humanity. It failed, so it needs to be a sort of model.
Q: When did it fail?
R: It failed in the time of the first generation that came out from Cain and Abel, the 'fallen angels' or the fallen forces. Then in all the generations up to Noah and the deluge. Then even after the deluge, when there was the knowing of the fear, the outcome of that was of humans needing to impose uniformity–not unity, but uniformity–otherwise we're going to go back. The beginning of forcing religion on another person started with the tower of Babel.
Then there was a search for which trend of humanity carries the hope and the memory of being united because of the presence of the will of the higher. And the trait was found in the family of Eber: the ability to listen, to prophesy. From that is the ability to see beyond, ME'EVER, which stems from IVRI or Eber. What was needed for the evolution of humanity was a model that could see beyond and hold the hope for humanity, and maybe one day also hold this technology, of the light that belongs to that hope, this way of life which was distorted so many times. It's a memory of being able to go beyond.
This is why I say that being rational is not intelligent. Because it limits us or forbids us from going beyond ourselves. We need the rational part, but it's not a substitute for a higher intelligence or going beyond. That is what the last generation Kabbalists are trying to tie us back to. It’s the time of the Hebrews. It's not the time of the Israelis; it’s not the time of the Jews. It's time to bring back the presence of divinity so that we will be able to go beyond. This is the meaning of ‘to prophesy’ in Hebrew: to have the language that can express the higher intelligence, or the will of God. Not to impose it but to express it. If it would be expressed, then human consciousness would get it.
Q: Thank you. As you were speaking, the moment that I kept thinking about was in Victor Frankel's book, ‘A Man’s Search for Meaning’ where he's being kicked by a Nazi, and he's able to get a very tall snorkel to be able to see what was trying to happen, and to actually make it happen so much so that you and I are discussing it now.
R: I think that this is the choice. It's very illusive. It can be alive in us now as a feeling, as though we hold something. It will disappear in the next moment. This is why we need to re-establish it at the time when we say surrender, awkward as it may seem to phrase it within ourselves. But we need to be stubborn about it, to be able to see beyond. To see not only for ourselves.