Two questions I received about the use of drugs:

Question: What are your views on marijuana? In my opinion, it is an herb, not a drug. Is it wrong as a student of Kabbalah to smoke and relax?

My Answer: Anything is good if it’s used as a medicine, even snake venom. However, if something’s used to disconnect from reality and correction, it’s not good.

Besides this, you have to take addiction into account. Overall, if one aspires to the Upper Goal, then he does not need this.

Question: You mentioned several times that as we progress in the study of Kabbalah, our need for addictive substances such as illegal drugs, and the need to abuse prescription drugs just goes away. I personally have experienced this. Is it the Surrounding Light (Ohr Makif) doing the job or is it our friends helping us?

My Answer: It’s the Light and nothing but the Light!

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In the News (from the BBC): “Depression looms as global crisis” – “WHO figures clearly show that the burden because of depression is likely to increase – so much so that in 2030 this will be the single biggest cause for burden out of all health conditions,” comments Dr. Shekhar Saxena of the Department of Mental Health of the World Health Organization. The scientific concept of “burden” is the measure of years lost of life due to early death or severe disability brought on by a certain illness, in this case depression. Dr. Saxena says depression is much more common than some other diseases that are more widely feared such as HIV-Aids or cancer.

My Comment: I wrote about this many years ago, saying that people will discover that their desires are empty, dark and bottomless. Drugs will no longer be able to quench these desires, and suicide won’t bring people freedom either, since the desires will be felt as eternal and imperishable, as something from which you can never free yourself.

Eventually we’ll be left with one choice: to accept Kabbalah as the method of fulfilling that desire. This method enables people to reach fulfillment by the Creator rather than fulfillment by the things in this world.

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In the News (from MSNBC News): “Antidepressant use doubles in U.S., study finds” Use of antidepressant drugs in the United States doubled between 1996 and 2005, probably because of a mix of factors, researchers reported on Monday. “Significant increases in antidepressant use were evident across all sociodemographic groups examined, except African Americans,” Dr. Mark Olfson of Columbia University in New York and Steven Marcus of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia wrote in the Archives of General Psychiatry.

My Comment: Because people are feeling a new, unearthly desire, which is impossible to fulfill in this world, they are experiencing an incurable state of depression and melancholy that they are trying to suppress with drugs or other addictive substances. However, this desire can instead be fulfilled with the desired pleasure by revealing the Upper World, using the method of fulfilling this new desire, the soul. This method is called the “Wisdom of Kabbalah.” Kabbalah is translated from Hebrew as “reception or fulfillment.”

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