It is the experience of standing on that new and higher rung that Rav Kook is trying to capture and convey.
It takes awareness and practice to make real change in the traits that feature on one’s personal spiritual curriculum, but that is exactly what the process of teshuvah is meant to accomplish. Anyone who spends Yom Kippur standing in synagogue remorsefully beating his breast but does not undertake the work required to develop his character will, I regret to inform you, likely be beating the same breast about the same failing just around the same time next year.
The process of teshuvah is real only if it results in a rewiring of your inner life in the places where you are challenged to grow.
The process of teshuvah is real only if it results in a rewiring of your inner life in the places where you are challenged to grow. Do that—complete the teshuvah—and you become a new person with new eyes. I know from my own experience what Rav Kook is describing because I have experienced that step up to a higher level on the ladder where “whole worlds are revealed, in celestial clarity, in the midst of his soul.” As the Rambam put it so well, every one of the inner traits that is tending to the extreme drops a veil over our eyes and our hearts. When we do the work to transform that trait, our limited vision gives way to a wider view. Things that have been there all along are seen in clear outline for the first time. We perceive new worlds right here in the midst of the world we still inhabit.
The fact that it is difficult to describe the changes that come about in inner experience when a person does their personal spiritual work and purifies and elevates their soul does not make it any less true. The higher you go up a mountain, the more clearly you see the features of the land below. Those features were always there, though you were unable to see them from lower vantage points. The higher you climb, the more you are able to see.
One last piece of guidance from Rav Kook. As long as we are alive, there is room to grow and ascend, which means that at every point in our lives, our vision is limited to some extent and therefore we are prone to stumble. This situation could make us despair because no matter how much we come to see the world more clearly, we still do things that call us back to doing teshuvah. We are still far from the peak. Rav Kook reassures us:
[THROUGH A MUSSAR LENS | Alan Morinis ]