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296 | A New Light
Thus, at the beginning of your work, you must attain a calm
awareness that the essence of what you lack is a strong and forceful
will, and you must attain a sense of the danger you are in. The
essence of your prayer during your half hour must be to achieve
a forceful and strong, absolute will, so that you will literally not
want to live with any craving for even a single day, so that you will
not be prepared to compromise, so that you will want to be saved
immediately, so that you will feel that you are literally in danger
and that there is no time, that you need to be saved here and now.
That must be the essence of your prayer. Thus, all of the work
of your will is prayer: pleading to receive that will. Your work is
focused on one goal: you yearn, pray and cry out to attain forceful
and whole will.
Remember this well: you receive in accordance with your will!
Only after you attain a strong will in accordance with your level
should you ask for the nullification of your craving: “Master of the
world, have compassion on me and nullify this craving completely,
immediately, right now.”
If you spend your entire half hour praying to attain a strong
will, and at the end of that half hour you dedicate just one minute
to the nullification of the craving, that minute of prayer will be
much stronger than half an hour praying for the nullification of the
craving before you have attained a strong and whole will, because
that would be a half hour of prayer that is not whole, since it is
prayer with a weak will. Therefore, the half hour of the work of the
will must be dedicated to attaining a wholeness of the will. Then
you will attain such a forceful will that a few minutes of prayer will
be multiples of times more effective than your prayer would have
otherwise been.
Therefore, your main focus must be to pray to attain that will.
Then you will express all of your prayers with passion and fire. Most
of all, your work must indeed be work. It is forbidden to dream.
And the ultimate level of wholeness is to feel that if you transgress
the will of Hashem even slightly you are literally dying. When
we truly attain this feeling, we are able to cry out and pray with
Chapter Seven: | 313
Our sages direct us: “Make yourself a teacher” (Avot 1:6). The
Rambam in his commentary on the mishnah explains:
Even if he is not worthy of being your teacher, make him your
teacher until you visualize him teaching. As a result, you will
learn wisdom, because learning by oneself is not comparable
to learning from someone else. Learning by oneself is good,
but learning from someone else will have a longer-lasting
impact and it will be clearer—even if the teacher is merely your
equal in wisdom or even inferior to you.
That is to say, the Rambam states that a person must learn from
a teacher even if the teacher is not as wise as he is. Why? Because 10
when we learn from someone else, we retain that learning for a
long period of time. Thus, when we hear words of encouragement
on a recording, even if we listen to it a few times and do not find
anything new, it has the ability to help us retain the learning—and
that is the most important thing.
Therefore, when you want to do the work of the will and you seek
a way to be inspired, choose a recording on the topic that you want
to work on and listen to it repeatedly. Then, in accordance with
what was said above regarding books, summarize it and categorize
it.
For example, although my disks, The Honor of the Woman
and First Place, are not a substitute for learning In the Garden
of Peace, they encompass all of the central points in that book and
they are good for review. In addition, since the listener is hearing
the speaker himself, that has a different influence than reading from
a book. It is always good to absorb messages in a number of ways:
hearing, reading, writing, summarizing, categorizing, singing, and
more. The main thing is to bring these to the work of the will.
Due to the great kindness of Hashem, Who has had pity on the
final generation, even people who do not have the opportunity
and ability to set aside time to learn quietly from a book can listen
to a disk while driving or at work. And when a person plays a disk
repeatedly, it will influence him. As a result of listening and then
reviewing what he has learned, he comprehends and appreciates the