Fixing Your Fire [Conceit] - 002 Inner Satisfaction

Water-of-Earth-of-Fire

With the help of Hashem, we have begun to discuss the element of fire in the soul. We began by discussing earth-of-fire, which is when fire of the soul is stabilized. Here we will discuss the “water” aspect within earth-of-fire (water-of-earth-of-fire).

Water is the root of pleasure; when water is applied to earth-of-fire, the “pleasure” aspect can give stability to one’s fire. This is the outline of the concept, and now we will explain this more deeply.

The Three Roots Of Our Movements

The elements of wind, water, and fire are all moving elements, whereas the element of earth is heavy and, by its very nature, non-moving. Movement is rooted in the element of wind, but there are altogether three different kinds of movement.

One kind of movement stems from wind-of-water, and another kind of movement stems from wind-of-fire, and another kind of movement stems from the element of wind itself.

Wind-of-water is a kind of movement that drags a person after it. This was discussed when we learned about the element of water [in the series ‘Fixing Your Water’]. Wind-of-fire is a kind of movement that skips and jumps, similar to the nature of fire, which is jumpy. The element of wind itself is the root of directed movement, where one’s movements are guided and directed to where he needs to get to.

So there are three kinds of movement in the soul. If a person wants to know himself well, he needs to identify how he ‘moves’. Does he mainly move with a sense of direction (wind)? Is he moving because he is being dragged after something pleasurable (water)? Or does he move mainly through jumping and skipping levels (fire)?

All of us contain aspects of these three kinds of movement, but each person has one type of movement that is more dominant. One should try to see which kind of movement is most dominant in his life, which is second-to-most dominant, and which is third-to-most dominant.

What Prevents Us From Moving?

After figuring this out, the next step is to see: to where do we move? Whenever we move, there are always obstacles in our way. One must know what’s preventing him from moving forward.

When movement is stemming from wind in the soul, he is motivated to progress in a certain direction, but when he encounters doubts about which direction to move towards (and there are four directions, as well as above and below, which are altogether six dimensions), he is prevented from moving forward. Doubts can totally stop a person in his track, when a person’s movements mainly stem from wind in his soul. There is opposition within the very four directions of his “wind”.

When a person’s movements mainly stem from wind-of-water, he is being dragged after something new or interesting, which steers away from his original direction and leads him towards a different direction.

Here we will discuss movement that stems from wind-of-fire, which is when one moves in a manner that skips and jumps. This is referring to a person who lacks orderliness (seder) in his life. Besides for this problem, there is a bigger problem that results. Being that the nature of fire is to destroy, a person with a lot of wind-of-fire in his soul will act destructive as he moves forward. He moves upward, like the nature of fire which ascends, but as he moves upward, he ‘destroys’ other points along the way, by disregarding their value.

Besides for the problem of skipping levels, he will ‘destroy’ parts of his life in order to be able to feel like he is going higher. In simpler terms, he misuses the power of bittul (nullification), by dismissing the importance of something, in order to feel like he’s moving forward.

To make this concept simpler, in order for a person to progress and achieve, he needs to nullify his previous achievements, by realizing that it’s not worth much, in comparison to where he has to get to. When it is at its most complete level, it is a nature of total disregard for anything a person has reached until now. It is like when Haman said, “All of this is not worth anything to me.”

When fire in the soul is very dominant, a person has a nature to disregard all previous achievements, in order to ascend higher. A person might think this way either towards himself (“If I don’t grow higher, I’m worthless”), or towards others (“If they don’t grow higher, they’re all worthless”).

When a person uses this very nature a lot in his life, he has a lot of movement. Wind-of-fire enables a person to move a lot; fire-of-fire is even more charged and it can get really unstable.

Nowhere To Land

What happens when a person’s ‘fire’ weakens? He will feel like he cannot ascend at all, for now he has nothing to depend on. All of his movement came from fire in the soul. Since fire destroys, so if fire keeps destroying all of the previous levels one has gained, he will be left with no achievements to look back at, which would have motivated him to want to go higher.

This can be compared to a person who moves to a new apartment and he loses ownership of his first apartment. Had he remained the owner of his first apartment, he can still return to it when he wants. But if he gives away the first apartment, he is no longer the owner, and the new owner can do whatever he wants to the new apartment; he might knock it down, or he might simply refuse to resell it. When his original apartment is destroyed or otherwise inaccessible, he has nowhere to return to if he needs a place.

Fire in the soul is the nature to go higher and move forward, but it can only ascend if the previous level is destroyed. That is what empowers the fire to rise higher. But if a person has too much ‘fire’, he has no previous ground to fall back onto when he needs.

In the previous chapter, we explained the concept of the cycle of spiritual growth, which is called “rotzuy v’shov” (running and returning/retreating), that a person needs some level to fall back onto (shov/retreat), when he loses his desire to grow higher (rotzuy/running/progressing). A person with too much fire-of-wind is missing the “shov” aspect in his “rotzuy v’shov”. His “rotzuy” aspect is built on fire, and the fire has destroyed his previous stage, so there is nothing left for him to return to. The fire has reduced anything he once had into a pile of ash, which is useless to him. The stronger the fire, the greater the destruction of the previous level.

When one inevitably retreats from his level and he finds that he cannot progress higher, where can he go now, if his fire has caused him to disregard everything he had previously? When he finds himself in retreat from progress, or when he goes through a real failure, where can he descend to, if he has nothing to hold onto from his past? All of his growth came through destruction of everything else he had, so he cannot get himself now to suddenly validate his previous level.

If a person does not have that much fire in his soul, the words here will seem strange. But someone with a lot of fire in his soul can identify very well with what we are describing here. Here is a simple example. When a person is very motivated to know all of Shas, and he is really aspiring for this, the fact that he knows one tractate doesn’t mean anything to him anymore. Even if he finished one of the six orders of Mishnayos, it’s meaningless to him now, as he keeps moving to finish all of Shas and know it.

When a person is very aspiring, to the point that his previous achievements feel meaningless to him, he must realize that this is a problem: he has no stability in his spiritual growth. He has nothing to lean on for support when he will need it.

The Way We Build Ourselves

We explained that there are three kinds of movement – water-of-wind, wind-of-wind, and fire-of-wind. There are also three different ways that a person builds himself and grows. Every person, on his own level, wants to grow higher. (Those who are truly growing in a sensible and step-by-step manner are called ‘bnei aliyah’, and they are few).

When a person’s element of earth is his most dominant element, he ‘builds’ himself step after step. When earth is misused, it manifests as laziness and lowliness. But when earth is used properly, it is the power to build oneself higher, step by step.

A person who mainly ‘builds’ himself through the element of water does not seek to build himself up. He seeks things that will pull him and give him satisfaction, so that he can keep connecting to what he is doing, and in that way, he motivates himself to go higher. He ends up being built in this way as well, even though he did not seek to actually ‘build’ himself.

If a person ‘builds’ himself through wind, he has a strong sense of direction in life. He sets a goal for himself and sets out to reach it, knowing that it will be reached at a much later point, but he keeps making sure that he’s moving forwards towards it. He is always moving. Even if he gets stuck and he finds that he can’t progress, he examines himself and sees how far he has come, and to where he has to get to. He will feel that he has still come closer to reaching his goal, and that is how he motivates himself to go forward when he encounters difficulty.

But when a person is mainly using his element of fire, he grows higher only because he destroys his previous levels. He is a very aspiring person, but the problem is that he always disregards what he has achieved until now. He has never learned how to make use of the elements of earth, water, or wind. He will nullify either his own past achievements or of others, which fuels his ‘fire’ that he uses to climb higher.

Unlike the other three elements, which involve building upon the past, the element of fire ignores any past gains and doesn’t consider their existence. If the past has been nullified, there is nothing to grow upon now.

Fixing Fire – Through Water/Pleasure

Understandably, the element of fire can be fixed through making use of the other three elements - wind, water, or earth. We can use any of these three elements to fix fire, but the best option to balance out fire is through water.

Water is the natural opposite of fire, so it has the greatest chance of mitigating fire. (The elements of water and fire are compared to husband and wife, who are of opposite natures, yet they are rectified precisely through being balanced out by the other. The same is true for the ‘couple’ of earth and wind, who are natural opposites, which each have the greatest chance of balancing out each other). So a fire-based person needs to learn how to make use of the element of water.

Fire destroys the previous level, as we explained. But even when a person destroys his past achievements, he can still remember some degree of pleasure he had, when he was at that level. Even if he no longer regards it as an achievement, there’s no denying that he had pleasure then. He can always remember it, if he chooses to. This is because whenever we accomplish something, there’s always a certain mark of pleasure (‘rishimo’) that it leaves on us for the rest of our life.

Compare this to a child who grew up in a certain house and he has moved since then. Even if the house of his childhood is gone, he can recall many fond memories of it. He can remember doing things there he enjoyed. It is no longer here, but the pleasure of the experience remains, at least to some degree.

So the key is to recall the pleasure that one had when he had been at his previous level. Obviously, the pleasure isn’t on the same level anymore as it used to be. But as long as a person enjoyed his previous level when he was on it, there is some mark of pleasure left from it, and the stronger the pleasure, the stronger of mark is left from it. 

(The same is true in the side of evil: when a person enjoyed something that was evil, the mark of it is harder to get rid of, and it is thus more difficult and painful for a person to disconnect from the evil pleasure.)

Knowing How To Retain Pleasure From The Past

To illustrate, Shabbos is called the “source of all blessing” for the entire week. What does this mean? Simply speaking, all of the six days of the week are sustained through the shefa (Heavenly emanations) of Shabbos. But the deeper understanding is because Shabbos is a time of oneg (pleasure). Even after Shabbos is over, there is a mark of pleasure left from it, which can be continued into the rest of the week.

Most people, when exiting one kind of situation, enter another kind of situation, which is completely different than the previous one, seeing no value in whatever was experienced until now. But the deeper way to look at our changes in life is to retain the pleasure from our past experiences. This power to experience is essentially the power of oneg in our soul.

The more a person lives an external and superficial kind of life, if his dominant element is fire, he bases his achievement on destruction of previous stages. The problem is that he will have nothing to hold onto and return to when he finds himself in a stage of non-growth. But if a person lives an inner life, he deeply lives the current level he is at. He has the oneg to connect to whatever stage he is at. Even when he moves to a higher level of achievement, he retains the pleasure of the experience and continues upon it.

When a person doesn’t know how to balance his fire, his fire will burn up even his oneg, and he won’t enjoy anything in his life at all, not even the fact that he has destroyed all his previous levels. If a person reaches this point, it will be his downfall. This is a power that is mainly used when a person is doing teshuvah, where he must disregard the pleasure he had from evil; this is part of the rectification process. But we can also use this power for holiness, by properly integrating the elements of fire and water at once.

On one hand, a person must not be complacent with his current level, thus he must seek to be on a higher level than before. He must use his element of fire and destroy his previous level, by not remaining complacent. But he must not destroy everything of the past. He must be able to hold onto the pleasure he had from his previous level, and continue to grow higher, as he holds onto the pleasure of the previous level.

For example, when a person first gets married, there is a certain pleasure he had. Later on in life, when it’s 20 or 30 years later and he remembers what it was like in the beginning of marriage, he is aware that his life now is very different. He has raised several children, Baruch Hashem, and he even has grandchildren now. He is very far from the beginning of his marriage. What does he remain with from those earlier years? He can remember the pleasure of it.

If we ask a person if he wants to go back to the first year of his marriage, some will answer “Yes”, and some will answer “No”. But any person can remember the pleasure he had then, and he can return to that pleasure whenever he wants. Now his life is different and his situation is very different, but does that mean that nothing remains of the first years of his marriage? He can recall the pleasure of that period in his life, even though the situation now is totally different.

This doesn’t mean that he should wish to go back in time; after all, none of us would want to remain unmarried and have no children. But just because you’re far past that stage now doesn’t mean that the pleasure of that stage is meaningless to you. So you can always return to the pleasure of the previous situation, even though you cannot go back in time.

This is how we integrate the elements of water and fire at once. You can want to go higher from your current level, but you should make sure to recall the pleasure you had in your previous level.

This integration process is mainly meant to be used by one whose main element is fire. If someone’s main element is earth, water, or wind, he needs an entirely different approach than the one described here.

In Summary

If one’s main element is fire – and surely if he has a lot of fire-of-fire – he is very aspiring, and he tends to be jumpy in his aspirations. He will act this way both in his physical side of life as well as in his spiritual areas. It is mainly manifest in his spiritual areas.

This kind of person is always destroying his previous levels. Without using water-of-earth-of-fire (the subject of this chapter), his movements are jumpy and with no stability, but even worse than this is that he has nothing to hold onto from before. He has no ‘ground’. 

He has a very difficult time when he finds himself back on a lower level. Those with a lot of earth, water, or wind have an easier time when they fall. But someone with a lot of fire suffers a lot when he falls from his level. He has destroyed all his previous levels, so he has nowhere to fall back onto. However, as we are saying, this suffering can be mitigated if he recalls the pleasure of the previous level. This pleasure can give him vitality in the current situation he’s in.

Proper Ascension

Until now, we explained what a person needs to do when he falls from his level. But now let’s talk about what he has to even as he’s in a period of growth.

If he has a lot of fire in his soul, and he is not balanced, that means he is constantly seeking to go higher and higher – which means that he is constantly destroying his previous levels. What will happen to him?

If he is being truthful about his growth, the destruction takes place within himself. But if he is doing so out of conceit, he is using this power for evil, and he will ‘destroy’ others. In either situation, if there is a very strong fire in the soul, he is always destroying. This will mean that he has nothing to hold onto, even on his current level. Such a person has no place at all to stand on.

In the previous chapter, we discussed the problem of being delusional when it comes to spiritual growth, where a person has no ‘ground’ to return to when he falls. Now we are dealing with a separate issue: even if he is not delusional, and even if his fire is not being used for the purposes of conceit over others, it is still detrimental if his fire is too strong.

This is because the nature of fire is to be destructive. Not only does he disregard his past level; he is disconnected even from his current level.

These are people who ‘destroy’ themselves from within themselves – the power of their own soul is unleashed on them. There are some people who have so much fire in their souls that they are striving for the highest levels of perfection, and although they are being very destructive in essence, their strong amount of fire enables them to shoot very high where they reach their goals. But others do not have so much fire to get to the perfection they aspire for, so they end up unleashing destruction on themselves along the way as they use their fire.

When that happens, the person uses his ‘fire’ so much that he becomes ‘dried up’ inside, and he comes to feel terribly sad, empty, and full of despair. His strong amount of ‘fire’ has caused destruction within himself.

Why Are There ‘Oivdei Hashem’ Who Are Sad?

Practically speaking, this happens very much with people who are “Oivdei Hashem”, those who are very serious when it comes to improving in their service towards Hashem.

We are not speaking about the problem of becoming conceited. We are speaking about the inner fire in the soul that causes a person to ascend very high in his Avodas Hashem, which can indeed aid him to go very high; that there is a danger to it, when it is very high.

This is a kind of person who really strives for perfection and he is actively aiming for it, and he definitely is soaring higher, but just because he is reaching higher levels, that won’t save him from terrible feelings of sadness. He will live his whole life without any simchas hachaim (joy of life).

It doesn’t make sense. Why should he be so sad, when he is clearly reaching higher levels than before, and he grows much more than most people? Why does he keep feeling empty inside himself when he has so much to be happy about?

But as we explained, it is because his own fire has not only destroyed previous levels, but it has destroyed even his current level. So he does not derive any satisfaction at any given point of his life. He has no menuchah (serenity), not on This World, and not on the Next World (but not in the same way that a true Torah scholar has no menuchah on either world).

The way he is fixed, as we said, is to use the element of water. A person needs to be able to derive pleasure from his current level. This doesn’t mean he should be complacent with his current level. He should wish to go higher, but he must realize that for the time being, he is found on the current level he is at, and that being the case, he needs to enjoy it.

Deriving Pleasure From Every Situation

This makes use of opposite abilities in our soul (fire/ascension and water/pleasure) at once. How are we able to do so? It is because our soul, by its very nature, needs pleasure. “Man was not created except to have pleasure.”

On a higher level, the deepest pleasure is to experience the pleasure of knowing Hashem’s existence, and Shabbos Kodesh is a degree of this kind of pleasure. But if a person never gets to that deep pleasure, does that mean he can never know of any pleasure at all? In whatever situation a person is in, he must find how he can get pleasure out of it. There is pleasure to be found in any situation of your life; try to look for it.

So although a person should never be complacent in his current situation, that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t enjoy it. A first grader must try to get to second grade and then to third grade, and he must not wish to be held back, but at the same time, he can enjoy his current grade. So too, in our own soul, we need to learn how to derive pleasure from any situation we are in.

Who Should Use This Solution, and Who Should Not

This solution is meant for someone who has a dominance of fire in his soul. If someone has a lot of water in his soul, that means he easily finds pleasure, and if he uses the solution given here, he will become too much of a pleasure-seeker, which is the opposite kind of problem than the one we are describing. (In the side of holiness, that power becomes endless d’veykus in Hashem, where a person cannot part from this endless pleasure of basking in Hashem’s existence).

So the solution we are saying here should only be used by someone who has a lot of fire in his soul, who is always seeking to grow higher. He must learn how to get pleasure somehow from his current level.

Enjoyment As We Learn Gemara

Here is a simple application of the concept.

A person is learning a sugya of Gemara (with Rashi and Tosafos), and then he comes up with a certain explanation on what he’s learning. Is he deriving any pleasure as he’s learning?

One kind of person mainly learns the Gemara for the purpose of becoming clear in what is written there. This kind of person mainly uses his element of earth, which is the idea of stability and security. Another kind of person learns the Gemara with the intention of getting the general picture of the sugya. He is mainly using his element of wind, which is movement and direction. Another kind of person learns the Gemara mainly to have chiddushim. This kind of person is mainly using fire, which is always renewing itself.

Whichever of these is your main style of learning, though, you need to also learn how enjoy a thought that you say on the Gemara.

(If a person is on a higher level, he enjoys every word of the Gemara he learns, simply because it is the words of our holy Sages. He has great love for the Torah). Even if a person is not on the level of such love for the Torah, he can definitely learn how to enjoy any thought he says on the Gemara (on condition that is truthful). This is besides for trying to get to the truth of what you learn; although that is also essential, you need to simply enjoy the beauty of a true Torah thought.

Sometimes a person is learning the Gemara and he really wants to be clear about the information and to get to the truth, but then he gets depressed as he’s going along, because he’s frustrated. Doesn’t the Torah ‘gladden the heart’? Where is the happiness that Torah is supposed to bring? But it’s because the person does not know how to enjoy the words he is learning.

I don’t mean that you should sit there for 5 minutes in every word you learn and hold onto the enjoyment. But you just need to simply enjoy something truthful about the Gemara that you say.

Seeing The ‘Nekuda Tova’

That concerns the spiritual side of life, but we also need to know how to have pleasure in the physical. When it comes to the physical and external aspects of life, this concept is more delicate, because if you learn how to linger with the joy of physical desires, it will harm you spiritually. So we are not discussing how to enjoy food and other physical desires. (The only time where we find that we are supposed to enjoy food is on Shabbos Kodesh, when we have a mitzvah of Oneg Shabbos).

We are rather speaking about situations of our life that we find unpleasant: let’s try to find pleasure even in those situations.

We have all gone through many situations in our life – some of them were easy and pleasant, and some were difficult. We can easily recall the pleasure we experienced in the good times we remember. But there is another kind of pleasure we can find: in any situation, you can find the ‘nekuda tova’, a positive point, to think about. Don’t just ‘see’ the nekuda tova in every situation – learn how to derive enjoyment from it.

This is general advice for life, but it is especially applicable to one whose main element is fire. One needs to derive enjoyment from both the external side to his life (his various situations that he is placed in), as well as the spiritual side to his life (such as in his Torah learning and times of prayer). If a person has a lot of fire in his soul, he must make sure that he knows how to derive pleasure.

Again, we are not referring to the enjoyment of physical desires, but to learn how to enjoy the various situations of our life.

In Conclusion

Getting used to this trains the soul to derive pleasure from any situation, which provides us with a degree of calmness and satisfaction, at the same time that our inner fire demands that we go higher. Using this advice helps us weaken the fire a bit, providing it with stability so that it doesn’t get out of hand. 

This is how we out the use water-of-earth-of-fire to holiness: to use the power of pleasure as a way to give stability to the element of fire.