Feeling Good, then Better

[Ms Tercy Lonan]

Feeling Good, then Better

Behind all our desires is the search for satisfaction. Kabbalah
explains that life is based on only one desire: to feel good,
regardless of whether that good feeling comes through obtaining
a better job, a new car, a mate, or successful children.
When you begin to feel spirituality, it changes your scale
of desire. You may begin to see that some desires have become
more important and others have become less so. You begin to
weigh your life not according to what you see and know in this
world, what your physical body sees right now, but according to
a much broader scale. You begin to see what favors you and what
does not for generations to come. As a result, you change how
you assess your environment.
When you begin to realize that you are a part of a single soul
and that all of humanity are parts of that soul, too, you begin
to think that it may be in your interest to help them. In short,
Kabbalah reminds you to look at the big picture. 

Ironically, however, the more you want spirituality, the more
you want mundane pleasures, too. A Kabbalist is not a person
without desires for food, sex, money, power, and knowledge. On
the contrary, a Kabbalist is one with stronger mundane desires
than most people experience, but also with a desire for spirituality
that is greater than all his or her mundane desires put together.
This process of intensifying is designed to make you develop
such a strong desire for spirituality that you will be willing to do
anything to attain it, including conceding all desires that are not
for spirituality. But to give up those desires, you must experience
them. This is why Kabbalists explain that the higher your spiritual
degree, the greater your mundane desires, too. Kabbalists progress
by experiencing the greatest worldly pleasures, and then being
given the awareness that there is something that’s even better
and greater than all those pleasures combined.
In spirituality, just as in our world, your desires change as you
grow. The earlier objects of your desire seem like toys compared
to the things you seek now. That search finally leads to the
absolute good—direct contact with the Creator, achieved through
equivalence of form with Him, through being like Him.