ALL CONCEPTUAL entanglements among human beings and all the inner, mental conflicts suffered by each individual result solely from our cloudy concept of the divine. All thoughts, whether practical or theoretical, flow out of the endless divine ocean and return there.
Constantly clarify the mind, so that it be free of the dross of deceptive fantasies, groundless fears, bad habits, and deficiencies. By cleaving in love and full awareness to the source of life, the soul shines from the supernal light, and all feelings, thoughts, and actions are refined. As this fundamental awareness becomes clearer in the recesses of the soul, the sensation and excitement of cleaving to the divine is activated, conducting the entire course of your life.
The essence of faith is an awareness of the vastness of Infinity. Whatever conception of it enters the mind is an absolutely negligible speck in comparison to what should be conceived, and what should be conceived is no less negligible compared to what it really is. One may speak of goodness, of love, of justice, of power, of beauty, of life in all its glory, of faith, of the divine—all of these convey the yearning of the soul’s original nature for what lies beyond everything. All the divine names, whether in Hebrew or any other language, provide merely a tiny, dim spark of the hidden light for which the soul yearns when it says “God.” Every definition of God leads to heresy; definition is spiritual idolatry. Even attributing mind and will to God, even attributing divinity itself, and the name “God”—these, too, are definitions. Were it not for the subtle awareness that all these are just sparkling flashes of that which transcends definition—these, too, would engender heresy.
If consciousness is torn from its source it becomes impoverished, without value. The only remedy for it to shine vibrantly is to be joined to the illumination of faith, which transcends all specific values, thereby establishing all values. Everything attributed to God other than the vastness of Infinity is simply an explanation by which to attain the source of faith. One must draw a distinction between the essence of faith and its explanatory aids, as well as between the various levels of explanation.
From learning and knowing too little, the mind becomes desolate, which leads to much thinking about the essence of God. The deeper one sinks into the stupidity of this mental insolence, the more one imagines that one is approaching the sublime knowledge of God, for which all the world’s great spirits yearn. When this habit persists over many generations, numerous false notions are woven, leading to tragic consequences, until eventually the individual, stumbling in darkness, loses material and spiritual vitality. The greatest impediment to the human spirit results from the fact that the conception of God is fixed in a particular form, due to childish habit and imagination. This is a spark of the defect of idolatry, of which we must always beware.
All the troubles of the world, especially spiritual troubles such as impatience, hopelessness, and despair, derive from the failure to see the grandeur of God clearly. It is natural for each individual creature to be humble in the presence of God, to nullify itself in the presence of the whole—all the more so in the presence of the source of all being, which one senses as infinitely beyond the whole. There is no sadness or depression in this act, but rather delight and a feeling of being uplifted, a sense of inner power. But when is it natural? When the grandeur of God is well portrayed in the soul, with clear awareness, beyond any notion of divine essence.
We avoid studying the true nature of the divine, and as a result, the concept of God has dimmed. The innermost point of the awareness of God has become so faint that the essence of God is conceived only as a stern power from whom you cannot escape, to whom you must suhjugate yourself. If you submit to the service of God on this empty basis, you gradually lose your radiance by constricting your consciousness. The divine splendor is plucked from your soul.
Every sensitive spirit feels compelled to discard such a conception of God. This denial is the heresy that paves the way for the Messiah, when the knowledge of God runs dry throughout the world. The crude complacency of imagining divinity as embodied in words and letters alone puts humanity to shame. Heresy arises as a pained outcry to liberate us from this strange, narrow pit, to raise us from the darkness of letters and platitudes to the light of thought and feeling. Such heresy eventually takes its stand in the center of morality. It has a temporary legitimacy, for it must consume the filthy froth clinging to mindless faith. The real purpose of heresy is to remove the particular forms from the thought of the essence of all life, the root of every single thought. When this condition persists over several generations, heresy inevitably emerges as cultural expression, uprooting the memory of God and all religious institutions. But what type of uprooting is intended by divine providence? Removing the dross that separates us from genuine divine light. On the desolate ruins wrought by heresy, the sublime knowledge of God will build her temple. Utter heresy arises to purify the air of the wicked, insolent filth of thinking about the essence of divinity—an act of peeping that leads to idolatry. In itself this heresy is no better than what it attacks, but it is absolutely opposed to it, and out of the clash of these two opposites, humanity is aided immensely in approaching an enlightened awareness of God, which draws it toward temporal and eternal bliss. Instead of wasting one’s thought trying to break through to the essence of divinity, the mind will be illumined by pure morality and sublime power, which sparkle from the divine light and chart the paths of life.
Pure belief in the oneness of God has been blurred by corporeality. From time to time, this confusion is exposed. Whenever a corporeal aspect falls away, it seems as if faith itself has fallen, but afterward it turns out that, in fact, faith has been clarified. As the human spirit verges on complete clarity of faith, the final subtle shell of corporeality falls away—attributing existence to God. For truly, existence, however we define it, is immeasurably remote from God. The silhouette of this denial resembles heresy but when clarified is actually the highest level of faith. Then the human spirit becomes aware that the divine emanates existence and is itself beyond existence. What appeared to be heresy, now purified, is restored to purest faith. But this denial of existence in God—this return to the source of all being, to the essential vibrancy of all existence—requires exquisite insight. Each day one must trace it back to its authentic purity.
The infinite transcends every particular content of faith.