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228 | A New Light
According to the principles, you need to prepare a vessel. How
will you prepare that vessel? Where do we get a vessel from? Only
from Hashem. Cry out to Hashem to give you a complete and
perfect vessel, to prepare all of the vessels that you need at this
very moment. He is all-powerful, and so that is in His power.
According to the principles, you need to pray a great deal. From
where do we receive our words? Hashem opens our lips and gives
us words. He gives us arguments and lines of reasoning with which
to overcome Him, as it were. Cry out to Hashem and ask Him to
help you right at this moment. Speak fervently to Him and with
complete faith—because the quota of prayer is measured not so
much in quantity as it is in quality. “Better a little bit of entreaty
with feeling than a great deal without feeling” (Shulchan Aruch: Orach
Chaim 1:4). In one hour of truly crying out to God with a feeling of
being in terrible danger you can bring about what others will not
bring about even with 100 hours of prayer. Cry out to Hashem to
give you a heart, to give you a sense of true danger, and to help
you utter fervent pleas that will bring you every salvation in a single
hour of prayer.
According to the spiritual principles, you must be someone
termed “wanting,” so that heaven will guide you. But who gives
a person the ability to “want”? That is the Creator, the Master of
will. Plead with Him to give you complete, powerful and strong
will at this very moment, so that heaven will be able to lead you
at this very moment. Hashem is all-powerful. Can’t He give you
complete will? Certainly He wants to do so. He wants to save you.
Only believe in this with complete faith, and cry out to Him with
all your heart.
According to the spiritual principles stated in this chapter, in
order for your prayer to be complete, you need complete faith
that Hashem wants to save you. But who gives that faith? Hashem
Himself. Therefore, cry out to Hashem: “You are all-powerful.
Give me complete faith so that I will believe that You want to save
me spiritually, and that You look forward to saving me spiritually,
at this very moment.”
According to the spiritual principles, we need to wait. Cry out 8
Chapter Six: | 253
is literally his death. To acquire that perception, he must remind
himself vividly that as soon as he opens his eyes, “the eye sees and
the heart desires,” and in such a circumstance he has no free choice,
because the desire of his heart is immediate and instantaneous. That
means that he has given his entire heart to the Sitra Achra (the
“Other Side” of evil), and he has destroyed the goodness in his
life. The goodness in a person’s life is his love and his will. When
he sees and desires an immodest sight, he gives all of his love, all
of his desire, all of his will, all of his yearnings, and all of his pining
for Hashem to the Sitra Achra. Basically, he gives his entire life to
the Sitra Achra. As a result, he loses his faith, his fear of heaven,
all of his awareness, his work of prayer and hitbodedut, all of his
Torah learning, all of the sweetness of prayer and Torah, all of the
sweetness of life, his spouse, his peace at home, his children, his
income. Basically, he loses all of his goodness and all of his life.
Moreover, his heart is filled with evil intent, with base yearnings,
with the fire of lust, with a destructive spirit of foolishness and
madness, and with deceitful images. He forgets everything: he
forgets Hashem, he forgets the Torah, he forgets his family. He
forgets it all, and he only wants to silence the fire of lust burning
within him. That is literally death. He loses his entire life and he is
filled with death.
Man or woman, anyone who is working on any issue must engage
in visualization. For instance, if a person is working on eradicating
his trait of anger, he must visualize his anger as literally being death.
That is because the Zohar states that when a person grows angry
he rips apart his soul. He destroys his holy soul and receives an
evil soul in its place from the Sitra Achra, a soul that is considered
an idol. Therefore, he should visualize that he is destroying his
soul, and that demons and spirits are entering into him. He should
continue visualizing that until he feels that even getting angry once
is literally death, because he is destroying his soul. So too in regard
to evil speech, a person should remind himself that the Gemara
states that evil speech kills three people: the speaker, the listener,
and the subject of the speech. Therefore, he should visualize that
his every word of evil speech is literally his death. In that way, he
can cry out properly.