Flavors of Light: Pleasures & Happiness

The following is a supplemental essay to the first part of "Future Couple". Here's the link to "Future Couple" for reference: http://soullite.blogspot.com/2012/02/future-couple.html


Spiritual light constantly streams into our beings, dispensing her many sweet sensations. Among her many sweets are: pleasure, happiness, awareness, love, amazement, entranced by beauty, confidence, humility, a sense of connection and ability.  Wherever within us the stream of light travels determines what sweet sensations we experience. We receive light, but never shape her. We only expose her manifold latent flavors. Her stream can flow into us on any inner level. She can enter our souls, course onward into our minds, flow downward into our hearts and spread about our bodies or she can flow in the opposite direction from our bodies to our souls. No matter where her stream passes, at each inner location she exposes a very unique flavor - which can be dispensed as sweet thoughts, feelings or bodily delights.


The many sweet flavors dispensed by light are really expressions of the Creator's Infinity and Oneness. When experienced mentally, they are transformed into the sensations of cerebral pleasures and happiness. Rabbi Shalom Dov Ber of Lubavitch (1860-1920) explains at the outset of his teaching, "Make Happy, Be Happy", that when spiritual light streams through our minds' right hemisphere, we experience the pleasure of an intellectual flash. When the stream of light continues onward to our minds' left hemisphere, we experience the happiness of true understanding. 


Since the Creator is all that exists, by default, every taste is a taste of the Creator. The only question is, "Within every taste, which of the intertwined flavors is dominant, the flavor which expresses His Infinity or the flavor which expresses His Oneness?"


The taste of Infinity, with Oneness in the background, is the taste of pleasure. One is pleasured by the vastness of varieties and possibilities. There's a Chassidic teaching that a constant pleasure is not pleasurable. True constant pleasure requires great variety. In contrast, the taste of Oneness, with Infinity in the background, is the taste of happiness. One is brought to happiness by what comes together, i.e. by what finally connects. Imagine, the happiness of a reunion.


The reason why one of these sensations has to be passively in the background while the other is engaged in the foreground is because the two are never separate ~ the Creator's Infinity is Oneness and His Oneness is Infinity. Since in Him, they're both the exact same reality, the taste of one brings along the taste of the other.


In the messianic future, couples will be oriented to fill their lives with shared intellectual pleasures and happiness. In this sense, their prime activity will resemble souls in paradise. Messianic era couples, will strive towards greater and greater shared intellectual attainment into divine knowledge. This is exactly the way souls bliss in paradise.  Couples will become each other's primary study partners. As a couple attains deeper and deeper concepts, the male will primarily sense how the concepts run into the Creator's Infinity. He will expound on the vast reaches of concepts - how they stretch outward into ever greater abstraction. The female will primarily sense how ideas run into the Creator's Oneness. She will explain how ideas closely connect and are really closer to home than previously expected. What was thought to be out there is really right here. In short, he picks up on abstraction and she picks up on connection. In fact, since there's already some messianic light in the air today, couples can already start on this rewarding journey by spending some time together weekly in spiritual study and discussion.


Anything we experience is fragmented. This includes our perception and understanding of the most spiritual topics. Our perceptive faculties can't process the ultimate seamless state underlying our reality. The Creator is non-composite, i.e. perfectly seamless. Since our experiences do not match His seamless state, they should really have nothing to do with Him. So how do we taste flavors representing Infinity or Oneness? 


A possible response is that because the whole creation, spiritual and earthly, is happening inside of Him. Such experiences, which might appear fragmented, truthfully have everything to do with Him. They're not separate from Him.  Rather, they're seamlessly continuous with Him like dream characters are seamlessly continuous with the identity and mind of a dreamer. Only, as such experiences translate into the limitations of human perception, most of their content gets lost. The drop that remains comes across chopped up.  However, being Infinite, there are no boundaries to allow something to be "outside of Him". All's within!


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