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The Light is Always Revealed

When you are trying to reveal Light, it’s not about the immediate effect that you have with your actions, whether it is with your children, your family, with your friends, career and certainly in your spiritual work. You don’t stay focused on the immediate result of your actions. You know clearly that if you’re investing energy, if you’re investing Light and if your desire is to bring good and share, the Light will be revealed. It might not be today. It might be in five years. It might be in ten years, but that Light will be revealed.

As the kabbalists teach, often the reality of our lives is not that we don’t know, it’s that we sometimes know too much and knowing often does not lead to action or change in our lives.

The founder of The Kabbalah Centre, Rav Yehuda Ashlag, revealed many great secrets, but when he writes about the core of the revelation of his teachings and therefore the core of what Kabbalah is about, the core of what the Kabbalah Centre is about, he boils it down to what he calls in his language ‘One Mitzvah and One Averah’: one positive action or focus that should lead our lives and one negative action to avoid. These are very simple words, but they have within them the secret of life and even the secret of immortality.

The Light of the Creator is a Desire to Share. Sometimes we get confused. We think about God and it means all kinds of different things to different people. What are we talking about? We’re talking about a simple energy that we call a Desire to Share.

Life is also very simple. If we can connect to that Light and energy we bring an endless amount of blessings into our lives. How do we connect to that Light? How do we connect to that simple Desire to Share? Rav Ashlag says you have to follow these two simple rules in life.

The one positive action or focus of our lives is to transform into a person whose singular desire from the moment we wake up in the morning to the moment we go to sleep and in each moment we think about our lives and our purpose in this world is a Desire to Share.

If the focus of my life is to become a person whose desire is consistently growing in the way of a Desire to Share, meaning that wherever I am today in my desire to do good for others and create good in this world, I am on a path to connect with that simple Light and reveal greater and greater blessings in my life. This might sound simple, but this is the most difficult thing in the world to do because we are not simply talking about doing nice actions and being kind with others. We’re talking about a change that occurs within us.

We have to be very careful that we don’t confuse doing actions that are kind with this internal transformation. The simple question is:

How much have I become a person who in my essence is has a greater Desire to Share with others and to share with the world? Is that my singular life focus?

The negative action we work to transform is what the kabbalists call the Desire to Receive for the Self Alone.

Every single one of us has these two sides, the Desire to Share, which is usually smaller and the Desire to Receive for the Self Alone, which is usually larger. If we want to receive the blessings that are meant for us, we have to go through a process of transformation. The beauty of this process is that when we have achieved this complete transformation where the Desire to Share in our essence is great and our Desire to Receive for the Self Alone is greatly diminished, we are completely connected to the Light of the Creator and the blessings that that Light can bring into our life.

This teaching is not only a path towards blessings in our lives, but is also a path towards immortality. What is death? If we understand that the Light of the Creator is simply a Desire to Share – it is also a source of Light, a source of blessing – if we can connect completely to that light, we can connect completely to life, but when we do actions of selfishness or actions springing from a Desire to Receive for the Self Alone, we are taking a step away from that Light of the Creator, from that Light of life.

Unfortunately what happens in most of our lives is that day after day we do enough actions of Desire to Receive for the Self Alone that we are slowly severing our tie to the source of life. When a person has brought about enough of that disconnection they leave the physical world. The body loses its ability to be sustained.

Therefore when we talk about this concept of “One Positive Action and One Negative Action,” it isn’t just a nice spiritual concept. This is at the core of our lives. On the positive side there have been people who have done the very difficult work of transformation and achieved immortality because they have removed every aspect of death from their lives, completely attaching themselves to the Light of the Creator, which is the endless light of life.

The very practical question we should ask ourselves if we understand these concepts the next time we want to act in a selfish way is:

Do I want to cut away one more element of my connection to the Light of the Creator and the Light of life?

Blessings & Light,

Michael Berg