45. Eikev: You Need Some Self-Compassion! ~Experience the Infinite Power of Positive Self-compassion

I want to talk about how both sides of the political isle have sadly bastardized the divine selfless experience of compassion into a subhuman political selfish experience of compassion. One side of the isle is accusing the other side’s infinity to liberal compassion as the crutch of eternal enabling, while the second side fires back at the right-wing’s tyrannical lack of compassion as being with the intention to suppress the lower-class. From a spiritual perspective, both are embracing anything but G-d’s beautiful gift of compassion. Our sages of mysticism build their introspective search to understand G-d and G-d’s universe upon the verse (-Genesis 1:27), “And G-d created man in His image; in the image of G-d He created him,” which leads to the teaching (-Tanchumah, Pekudei 3; Avot d’R’ Nosson, Chapter 31), “The human is the microscopic universe,” which logically concludes with (-Job 19:26), “And from my flesh I see G-d,” explained in Chassidism to mean that when I see and understand my inner-makings I see G-d. Thus, let us turn within ourselves to see from hence comes this bastardization of compassion within the macroscopic world. Even more so, let us truly turn introspective and see how we experience compassion within ourselves for ourselves, and understand what Self-compassion is all about. This is the specific human condition that we are going to deal with today, because so many struggle with the divine concept of self-compassion, confusing it with the negative experience from the ‘other-side’ of sitting on the pity-pot and of victimhood. In this lecture we will see that self-compassion is how the soul reaches its greatest heights, and is the very reason why the soul descended into this world. In the soul’s previous perfect environment of heaven the soul couldn’t have tangible self-compassion, and therefore the soul could not enter into the ultimate heights of communion with G-d. This is why the soul left heaven and descended into this world, In order to truly be able to experience self-compassion. However, the gift of self-compassion comes with the slippery challenge of victimhood. The intention of this lecture is to clarify the difference between the two, and to present the meditation and the state of mind that leads to self-compassion. -------- Here is a link to the written notes of this lecture, which will be available until September 15, 2016, after which you can email [email protected] to request them: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4614078/45.%20Eikev%205776%20Parsha%20Class.pdf