Fixing Your Earth - 015 Inner Order

3-A] Earth-of-Wind-of-Earth: Lazy Movement\A Fear of Ending Something

We have begun to explain that the laziness stemming from our wind-of-earth, which is when a person performs lazily and he lacks the ability to move correctly.

The first kind of this sadness is when it is coming from the earth–of-wind-of-earth. This is when a person doesn’t complete what he does. The real problem here is that, for some reason, has a hard time getting to the endpoint of things.

When this is used on a higher level, a person works hard on himself to reach shleimus\perfection, so he has a hard time getting to the ‘endpoint’ of something, for he knows that he will never reach the perfect level of anything. He is always working to improve on himself and never feels like he can get to the end of perfection, and indeed this is a constructive attitude to have, because it comes from the never-ending aspiration of shleimus.

But here we are discussing a feeling of incapability that stems from one’s nefesh habehaimis (animalistic layer of the soul), in which a person can’t get to the end of things. He will get jumpy and anxious as he is doing something, wishing he can get to the end already, but it’s really his way of saying that he cannot do anything on his own to get to the end of what he’s doing.

This is actually the depth behind the fear of death. It is difficult for a person to deal with the fact that one day his life will come to an end, and people get antsy when they think about death. It is an inability in a person to deal with “the end”.

To give a practical example of this concept, a young boy might be very apprehensive about entering high school, because it’s hard for him to deal with the fact that elementary school is ending. He can’t deal with endings. This shows that a person might develop an inability to deal with endings.

3-B] Water-of-Wind-of-Earth: Lack of Actualization

The next kind of laziness (in wind-of-earth) stems from water-of-wind-of-earth. This is when a person continues to like certain things he was used to when he was a child, even though those things are currently bad for him. He wants to put a stop to certain things he is doing, but he finds that he cannot actualize this aspiration.

This is also an inability to put an end to something, but it is being manifested in the fact that the person is continuously sticking to unhealthy habits, which is a sign that the person can’t pull away from the flow of his “water”.

3-C] Wind-of-Wind-of-Earth: Lack of Control Over Desires

The next kind of laziness comes from the wind-of-wind-of-earth. This is when a person has contradictory desires, and as a result, he is not able to place any limits on what he wants, which breeds its own form of laziness. He loses control over his desires; as soon as runs into a desire, .he becomes anxious, because he lacks a settled mind; he never placed any limitations towards the desires that he wants. It makes him scattered between all his many desires, which results in laziness in overcoming the desire.

3-D] Fire-of-Wind-of-Earth: Total Loss of Control Over Desires

If it gets the point where he feels a total loss of self-control when he encounters a desire, this s a laziness that is coming from the fire aspect of wind-of-earth. It resembles the nature of fire, which sparks and excites; it is when a person gets so anxious that he totally loses control over himself when he encounters a desire.

A person suffers insanity from his many desires, when he never gives order to them. Without giving some inner order to the various kinds of desires going on inside himself, the contradictions between his various desires increase (wind-of-wind-earth), and if this remains unfixed, at a later point, he will crazily run after one of his desires to fulfill it (fire-of-wind-of-earth). He will have a kind of ‘explosion’ towards one of his desires - resembling how a fire can spark and explode.

The Solution To All Kinds of Laziness Stemming From Wind-of-Earth

Now we will go through the solution to these kinds of laziness. The solution we will mention can solve all of the kinds of laziness that stem from wind-of-earth; not only that, but it is a solution which is the key to succeeding in our entire inner approach of Avodas Hashem.

A person has to learn how to give some inner order to everything that’s going on inside himself. There’s a lot going on inside of us; we need to give order to all that’s going on inside ourselves. The Vilna Gaon says that we have 70 forces in our soul!^[1] If we never learn how to give some inner order to our soul, the 70 forces in our soul will clash inside of us and create inner turmoil and confusion.

We can compare this to a house with many items inside it that are stacked up haphazardly. Just like we understand that we need to take all the items in a house and give order to them, so that we can live in a neat and livable house, so must we realize that our soul needs to be given some inner order.

Every person is suffering, to a certain extent, from imbalances of his soul. This is besides for all of the stress we have in our life from our various problems in our life, from our family and children, and from other things that come up in our life. The stress from all of these things can show up on our physical body and make us feel stressed out, and we recognize this kind of anxiety very well. But we are also full of inner anxiety from all that has accumulated on our soul, and thus we need to give ourselves some inner order to our soul’s abilities inside, or else we will implode inside ourselves from all the pressure going on, as a result of the many imbalanced and contradictory abilities of our soul.

Every person contains some imbalance in his soul. A person without a dominant amount of earth will be drawn towards lethargy or sadness, and a person with a lot of wind in his soul will taking on too many things upon himself that are beyond his actual capabilities. It’s like carrying a 50-pound package when you can only carry a 10-pound package.

Here is a common example of what we mean: a person sits down to learn a tractate of Gemara, and he plans on finishing the tractate. He plans to make a siyum on the Masechta he’s learning. Let’s say he is learning Maseches Bava Kamma; he sees that there are 119 pages of Gemara, so he decides that he will learn from the first amud to the last amud, whereupon he will make a siyum when he gets to the end. That is one way how he might approach it; if he does this, he’s taking on too much upon himself, and he won’t be able to get to the end. He will fall apart from the heavy burden upon him, and he will never get to his end goal.

The sensible approach is to split it up. He can decide that he will finish a certain amount of pages of Gemara by a certain amount of time, and he can keep doing this until he eventually covers all of dafim of Gemara. He should break up his plan to finish the Masechta into smaller, realistic goals that he can handle each day. Eventually, the pages of Gemara being learned will add up, and he will be able to get to one day make a siyum. But if his plan is simply that he will learn the Masechta from beginning till end and he has no way of how he will break it up, he is taking on too much, and he will get flustered at trying to reach the end.

This solution – not to take on too much in our Avodas Hashem - is not just a solution that can help a person solve his laziness stemming from wind-of-earth. It is a really a fundamental point which applies to all of one’s Avodas Hashem. It can help a person give structure to his Avodas  Hashem in general: to be aware that we must never take on too many things upon ourselves, and instead we should focus on one realistic goal at a time, which helps us give ourselves some inner order to all that’s going on inside ourselves.

When people never learn how to give some inner order to what’s going on inside themselves, they never reach true bechirah (free will). They never even accessed yet their true free will!

This is the general solution of solving laziness of wind-of-earth. We need to learn how to balance our soul’s abilities^[2], and this will solve all the inner turmoil that is going on inside of us.

In this class, we covered the kinds of laziness which stem from wind-of-earth, and we have laid down the solution to them. In the next class, we will discuss how we fix laziness stemming from fire-of-earth.