If a true desire is to be brought to life, we see that the Light needs to undergo four different phases. We do not count the Root Phase [Endlessness]. This is exactly what happens with every single desire you experience. Before those desires are felt inside us, that exact process occurs as it goes through all the phases of development of Light coming from the Creator until at last, we feel it. It is totally impossible for a desire to appear without the Light first. This is important: Light comes first, then the desire.

1. The Light itself has one single characteristic, one attribute, which is to please, to delight, to give pleasure. The attribute of the Vessel is the exact opposite. It is the perfect will to receive, the desire to experience pleasure. So the Light creates the Vessel, and then fills it completely. But when the Vessel is filled, it not only feels pleasure, but also feels what the Giver is like; it feels the Giver’s attribute of bestowal. This exact experience of feeling who is giving that pleasure causes the next phase of creation to happen.

2. The experience of not only feeling pleasure but also feeling the property of the Giver, bestowal, can be thought of as transference. What is transferred to the Vessel is that very attribute of the Creator. This transference causes the Vessel to now wish to become like the Light. In other words, the Vessel feels this property of the Giver and wants to do what the Light can do, to give without restraint, to be like the Giver. But the Vessel has absolutely nothing to give. It is built for receiving. So in order to come as close as it can to giving, it stops receiving altogether. This stage we call Phase 2 – Phase Bet (Bina).

3. Now we have a serious predicament. The Vessel, which is now empty of Light because it felt the Creator and wishes to be like the Light, refuses to receive. The Light cannot perform what it is supposed to do and the Vessel cannot do what it is supposed to do. If the Vessel had anything to give, it would. But all it can do is the next best thing: refuse to receive any pleasure. This leads directly to the next stage which Kabbalah refers to as Phase 3 – Gimel (Zeir Anpin). The Vessel knows that the goal of the Light is to create and delight it. It also knows that its very existence is based on receiving pleasure, that it must receive a certain portion of the Light or it ceases to exist. In short, receiving is the Vessel’s nature.

How can the Vessel accomplish fulfilling what it needs and at the same time fulfill its desire to be like its Creator? Phase 3, Zeir Anpin (ZA), provides the answer. It is in fact, a mixed phase and the only possible answer to this problem. The Vessel decides it will receive a portion of the Light, but with one rather incredible stipulation. It will only receive Light if it is doing so in order to delight the One who created it. Let’s repeat that. The Vessel knows it must receive and will do so, but only if it can perform its function with the intent of pleasing the Giver.

What actually happens here is very important. The Vessel, the will to receive, now has two different attributes it can compare with each other. It knows what the desire of the Giver feels like, and it knows what its own nature is, receiving. It has the desire to be like its Creator – to bestow—and it has the desire to receive delight. But it also knows that its true nature is one of total and complete reception, something it cannot change. It realizes that it is far more natural for it to receive than to give, for this is exactly how it was created. What has happened here is a discovery. Before, this Vessel had not realized its own nature was the opposite of its Giver, and now it does. This leads to the 4th phase Kabbalah calls Phase Dalet (Malchut).

4. This realization of its own true nature leads the Vessel to a decision that it must do as it was designed and receive all the pleasure the Light brings, all one hundred percent of it. ‘Something special has happened here; an independent decision.’

In the previous three phases, the Vessel was only reacting under the power of the Light. But in the fourth phase, the desire to receive one hundred percent of the Light once more, is a completely independent decision. This is what distinguishes this phase from Phase 1, Phase Aleph (Hochma). In both phases, the Vessel is only receiving but in this last phase, the Vessel now has its own independent desire. This independence is what allows us to call it a “creature” or “the Creation.” In other words, the reception of pleasure was the Vessel’s choice, not the Creator’s.

It can now be called “the creature” because the desire actually came from within itself, not directly from the Light where the Light was simply filling it with no decision on the Vessel’s part. What gave it this distinction is the choice. It can receive or not receive. What decision did it make? It chose to receive, accepting everything once more. Prior to this, it was filled only because it was what the Creator wanted. In other words, the very first independent desire to receive pleasure from the Light has now been born totally within the created being.

This concept is so fundamental to our work!

— #immortalflame #lightafire #passiton

|-cited from ‘Wondrous Wisdom‘ @ kabbalah.info/