| Kabbalah
and Education A Kabbalistic Approach to Spiritual Growth |
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| Kabbalah and Jewish Meditation |
Part
11 As
we have seen, inspiration and integration are two necessary and
complementary requirements of education. Inspiration initiates the learning
process by arousing a passionate desire to grow and change, while
integration forces one to incorporate one's will-to-good into each encounter
of daily life. Teaching can thus be described as the process of stimulating
will, with learning as the process of assimilating it. Each
of these two main categories--inspiration and integration--can be broken
down into three intermediate stages which reflect the process of spiritual
growth as outlined by the Ba'al Shem Tov, the 18th century founder of the
Hassidic movement. The Ba'al Shem Tov taught that any process of spiritual growth--and, in fact, the in-depth experience of any facet of reality--must entail a threefold series of developmental changes, summarized by the three words:
"Submission"
is the humbling of the ego that is an essential element of any honest
appraisal of reality and our relation to it. Unless we neutralize the ego
somehow, it will be sure to interpose its own interests between our higher
self and our attempts at growth and change. "Separation"
is the process by which we identify the positive/good and negative/evil
elements of reality, align ourselves with the good and disassociate from the
evil. Clearly, we cannot hope to accomplish this stage without having first
gone through the preceding one of eliminating the deceptive self-image
derived from the ego. When we isolate the good from the evil, the light from
the darkness, the good begins to shine. Once
we have clearly identified the bad and separated ourselves from it, we can
proceed to "sweeten" it. At this stage, we can return to evaluate
the bad itself in the positive light of the good that had been intermixed
together with it. Our reinforced good allows us to objectively relate to the
bad in order to "sweeten" it. In
the following chapters, we will see how these three stages of spiritual
growth interface with the education process.
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