Kabbalah: Arousing Love, The Tool of Meditation - Rabbi Laibl Wolf, Spiritgrow - Josef Kryss Center

The Art of Loving Session 3 - Arousing Love - The Tool of Meditation
A five part series by Rabbi Laibl Wolf, Spiritgrow Josef Kryss Centre, Melbourne, Australia
http://www.spiritgrowjosefkrysscenter.org

Sources: Tanya: Vol. 1, Ch. 45

1. Familial Love -- Capacity for Self-Sacrifice (Mesiras Nefesh)
• While the love known as Ta'avah (desire) is predicated on satisfying a need in life itself, familial love extends even to the point of sacrificing one's life e.g. for a parent or brother or sister or spouse etc.
• This love is a 'reflective spiritual emanation' from Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses) that leverages the 'spiritual genetic inheritances' received through the forefathers (more on archetypes later).

2. How to Arouse Familial Love
• Kabbalah explains that the use of voice and sound has a truly motivating effect even at times beyond thought and contemplation.
• Thought is internal and requires less 'stretching' of the soul, whereas speech and behaviour extend the 'soul' and it needs to be drawn from deeper within. Hence the power of voice to internalize a Kavvanah and to empower it more forcefully.
• Since this emanation of Familial Love is more deeply embedded, it requires more effort, as per voice, to elicit its power.

3. Making Familial Love a Good Habit
• What is a habit? What happens in the prefrontal cortex when repetition of behaviour takes place?
• Therefore, repeating such thought patterns, self-talk and behaviour, engrains the love as a positive habitual response.
• Hence the important of repeating acts of 'self-sacrifice' with those whom we love, by sacrificing one's own time to serve their needs, or 'sacrificing' time allocated to mundane pleasures and instead studying the Torah as a mode of expressing gratitude to HaShem.
• An actual life of service also reinforces Familial Love's truth and its experience washes away any extraneous thoughts channeled by the Yetzer Hara (the emotion expression of the Nefesh Behamis) that might argue that it is merely an illusion. Furthermore, action proves our capacity. Especially so repeated acts of service.

3. The Role of Meditation and Contemplation in Arousing Love
• The love of Ahava Rabba and Ahavat Olam need to be created through intense meditation on the expanse of the universe and its Cosmology and Cosmogony. Ahava Rabba may not even be reached unless there is a 'gift of it from Above'.
• The love of Desire and of Familial Love also require profound meditation to arouse these from the seat of the heart, but these loves are not created anew as with the above two, but are revealed through intense contemplation, these being pre-existent through the spiritual genetic inheritance from the forefathers.
• But the love of Ahavat Olam (and Ahava Rabba) is much more passionate and fiery than the other love forms, because such meditation must also be more profound to actually create a love, than merely to reveal a pre-existent love in potential.
• There are two kinds of meditations for these purposes. One meditation focuses on the gap, the distance, the transcendence, and the other focuses on the closeness, connection, and availability. The former arouses a 'fire-based' love experience, and the latter a 'water-based' love experience. The fire-based love evokes a fiery thirst to bridge the distance, and the water-based love produces equanimity, serenity, and 'spiritual touch'.
• Both forms of meditation can be applied to the creation of love (Ahavat Olam) and to the 'inherited' love of Desire and Familial Love, with the same experiential results. But the meditation has to be more intense to create love than merely reveal a pre-existent love.

Next session will focus on yet another dimension of love -- Love, Compassion and the Spiritual Archetypes.

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