How can you use the physical to connect to the spiritual?
It’s brought down in different sources that the Neshamah goes through great suffering due to the fact that it is brought down to this physical dimension.
The parable that we can think of to understand this is that of the daughter of a king. She’s forced to go and to live the most simple basic life of peasants. All the time she is missing the Palace of her father all the time.
This daughter of the King will treasure anything she will find that comes from the palace. She will take it and try to get the most out of it.
She will try to again get the connection to the experiences that she had when she was in the palace.
When we are privileged to practice Kabbalistic Meditation correctly, it gives comfort to the neshama because this is something that is related to what the Neshama was experiencing when it was in the heavens with Hashem.
When someone has an experience which is very physical, eating chocolate for example, there is a possibility to just enjoy the senses that receive the pleasure.
There is also a way to relate the pleasure back to the source of the pleasure, which is Hashem.
So if you are taking the pleasure and your trying to get the most out of the experience, it can be anything that is related to this world, all the different kinds of pleasures etc. So if we are taking advantage of the experiences that we have in this world to go back to the source of any experience of pleasure, we can experience them in the physical Dimension or we can use it as a springboard to go high to ascend.
This is the goal of all the meditations is to be able to live our everyday life in a way that everything will be related to Hashem.Â
If someone, for example, has pleasure from chocolate, and while he is experiencing that he can be thinking about Hashem.
When we are experiencing only the physical pleasure then only the lowest part of our self which is related with the physical will have the experience of the pleasure.
It is a very high level to be able to do this. The basic level is starting with meditation to remove anything external that is pulling us down from being able to concentrate and connect to Hashem. It is a much harder and much higher level to be able to use the physical to connect to the spiritual.
So the first stage is first to just do a meditation. Then we combine it with prayer...
