The Zohar says that as humanity approaches the time of the Final Redemption, there will be a battle—not necessarily a battle in the physical sense, but rather a battle over the laws of consciousness; a battle that will test our ability to restrict our Ego.
Crucial to winning this battle is the understanding that no matter how much we read, learn, and study, if we don’t ascend our personal spiritual ladder and hang on by our fingertips because we’re scared of falling, we’re not going to reach the next level of our evolution.
I’ve said this before: no pain, no gain. We have no trouble understanding this concept in the physical world. If we don’t use a limb, it atrophies. Without effort, we don’t get stronger; we grow weaker. But sometimes—and this is just human nature—we figure out how we can take a free ride.
This is why many people take drugs. They want to find themselves in that space where nothing bothers them, where they can walk away from their issues, where they can see it all from someplace else outside their body. This is what drugs are all about: trying to run away, making an escape. And it appears to work…for a time. The only problem with this kind of thinking is that eventually, when the drug users fall back into their body, there’s such a dark, deep hole that they don’t know how to pull themselves back up and out of it.
We know from a spiritual perspective that we can get rid of any addiction in this world, but we have to replace it with something else—something positive and proactive—or we end up with another addiction. Fortunately, for many people, the replacement for negative and destructive addictions is spirituality because they understand that only through spirituality can we cease running from our inner demons and instead begin to face and defeat them.
