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Life and living still feels painful and purposeless. It increasingly seems like I have been inserted into a game that I couldn’t have chosen. The rules of the game are totally hidden from me and it appears that no matter what I do, I will ultimately lose the game. Still I don’t know what winning looks like or what it means. How can I aspire to something I do not know, and cannot perceive or visualize?
1. “A corrected Kli is a desire used with altruistic intentions.” This quote was lifted from one of the recommended texts for week 2. My question is: How is true altruism measured? We often understand altruism as “doing” for others. But I can do things for others from an utterly selfish intention. The more I think about, the more it seems that true altruism is not attainable by human nature (the will to receive).
2. Pg 27 “Attaining the Worlds Beyond”: …all worlds and all created beings except for the Creator, are a single Malchut entity, meaning the root or the original Source of all beings. Malchut eventually fragments into many small parts of itself. The total of the constituent parts of Malchut is known as “Shechina.” (end of quote)
Can you explain this paragraph.
Is Malchut the same as Adam ha Rishon?
Is Malchut referred to as the “root /original Source of all beings?
I always thought that Shechina or Shekhina meant the presence of God/the Creator. Is Shechina as is used in this paragraph the same as the way it is used in parts of the Bible as representing the presence of YHWH?
“feel as if we were suspended in air, without any
support, since the Creator is concealed from our perception.
Without seeing, feeling, hearing, or receiving some sensory
input, we would be engaged in a one-way effort, screaming
into empty space.”The above quotation from Attaining the Worlds Beyond summarizes my inner state quite well.
Just thinking, if oneness with the Creator is the ultimate goal, why did s/he separate us from himself in the first place? Why send us down the 125 steps only to go back up whence we came??
