Philosophers have debated about human nature. Some believe that man is good by nature, and later corrupted by his social environment. Others assure that man is born evil, and his wickedness unfolds as he grows up. There is something predominantly real beyond either view. Good and evil determine man’s “nature”, and this means — as we have said in other commentaries — that free will shapes what eventually will manifest in what we are and do.

In this sense instruction as education is the key to reveal what we essentially are. If the premise is that we are good and pure since we are born, there must be some kind of journey or destiny that should confirm such premise. A process by which we unfold our intrinsic goodness and purity despite the abrasiveness of hostile and evil surroundings. The journey towards our destiny is the instruction of the traits and qualities we claim to be born with, so we can manifest them as who we are and what we do. We as Jews know that the instruction of the journey as our destiny is the Torah.

In this context we can assimilate the words of our Prophets. We embrace what we recognize as our Essence and true identity, the intrinsically good of Love’s ways and attributes emanated from God’s Love. This in contrast to the traits and ways of what we fabricate as a false belief of what we want to be and do in the material world. Our own version of what we want to be and have against God’s version of us. The choice, obviously, is only ours. The good news about God’s version is that it is the real one, regardless the versions we want to make of us. No matter what we imagine, wish, fantasize or invent about our self, we still are the emanation of God’s Love, no matter what. This means we always have the choice to return to our Essence and true identity. This is the good news that will be always good.

The bad news is the nothingness from which we elaborate ego’s version of what we wish or desire to “be”, “have” and “do”. These are the emanation of nothingness and their results. The “vanity of vanities” king Solomon warned us in his wisdom. Actually it was not from his wisdom but from his experience. He certainly lived intensely the realms of ego’s fantasies and illusions in order to share with us their true nature. Thus we can learn from them and avoid their vain and futile predicament. The Prophet also enters these realms to warn us against living in the falsehood of the masks we carve with our own hands. “Mask is person” the Greeks and Romans used to say referring to the semantics of personality, as the mask we individually make to wear the days of our life. Hence some say that life is a masquerade, the work of our hands, what we make out of it. In this sense we can finally assimilate ego’s role in the drama of life.

“For You have forsaken Your people, the house of Jacob; for they are replenished from the east, and with soothsayers like the Philistines, and they please themselves in the brood of aliens.” (2:6)

The Prophet appeals to God for abandoning His people due to their choice to live the negative fields of ego’s desires, in the materialistic lifestyle typical of peoples from the East in ancient times. Also ego’s obsessive and compulsive illusion of controlling as aspects of life, represented by the Philistines who learned it from the Egyptians. All these fantasies accompanied by demeaning customs and habits alien to our Essence and true identity. We begin to lose touch of what we truly are when we sale our consciousness to something completely alien to our Soul and heart.

“Their land also is full of silver and gold, neither is there any end of their treasures; their land also is full of horses, neither is there any end of their chariots.” (2:7)

We sale our consciousness for silver and gold, the imaginary value given to material possessions. We become trapped in ego’s stubborn illusion that there will never be enough space to store them all. Greed is never satisfied in ego’s domains. Greed quickly becomes lust, for both are made of the same illusion for the same vain purpose. Sensual desires are the aim and end of greed and lust, engendered by envy and coveting as the result of the invention of a false belief or feeling of lack. For this lust we need energy to waste, the horses we buy from Egypt. These are the sensual and sexual drive we take from our vital life force, in order to submit our life exclusively to sensual desires and pleasures. Sex becomes another commodity like the silver and gold we don’t find enough room to store. Thus they become our idols.

“Their land also is full of idols; every one worships the work of his own hands, that which his own fingers have made. And man bows down, and man lowers himself; and You can not bear with them.” (2:8-9)

At this point, once again, we are reminded to be aware of what we store in our mind, thoughts, feelings, emotions, passions and instincts. About what we make out of them, and for what purpose. As we fill them with ego’s fantasies and illusions, they will act accordingly. Then instead of serving us, we become their servants. We lower our discernment, intellect and common sense — the preordained guides for the remaining levels of consciousness — to negative feelings, harmful emotions, destructive passions and instincts out of control. This predicament is defiantly against God’s version of who we are. Hence He does not bear with it, for He does not dwell with iniquity. We do.

“Enter into the rock, and hide your self in the dust, from before the terror of the Lord, and from the glory of His majesty.” (2:10)

We remain trapped in ego’s fantasies and illusions like living in the darkness within a rock. We enter realms absent from the Light the Creator made us. We are absent from our own Light as the dead in the dust. Here again we realize the nothingness of fantasies and illusions we have been living for a very long time, at the expense of the Source of our life. We need God’s Love to live, for He made us with His Love, and we have the audacity to waste it in nothing we can even claim as ours.

We can’t argue that we learn from vanities of vanities and their brief imagined pleasures. After all, we pursue sensual and emotional pleasures we have already fabricated in our imagination, out of ego’s fantasies and illusions. But we certainly learn from the overwhelming emptiness of their aftermath that begs us for more. An example of this is gambling. We fall into the illusion that we have something we can be easily increase. At some point we believe we have it until we lose it completely. The emotion of believing that we have it, followed by the desolation after we lose it.

In the darkness of our emptiness we become afraid to return to the Source of our life. The frustration, loneliness, depression and abandonment of emptiness become our whips. These are the traces of the chariot driving our slavery under ego’s fantasies, now institutionalized as the reigning lifestyles in modern times. The ancient pyramid of Egypt’s Pharaoh still going strong ruling our consciousness. Exploiting each other’s lives to feed the same illusions all share and dream to live and possess. Climbing the pyramid to get to the top. We rather stay slaves than returning to the circle of Love’s ways and attributes, which revere and honor God’s Love, His Glory.

The fear of God replaces the Love of God. We rather chose ego’s illusions, for we better stay with them than fearing God. Our guilt, resentment, remorse and shame become our fear of Him. Exactly as Adam did when he chose ego’s illusions and found himself afraid of God to see him naked. Adam’s choice, which is also our choice, drags us out from the Paradise where we always have belonged. This Paradise is still within us in our Essence and true identity, in the Love of God that is also our Love, waiting to return to His ways and attributes, our true home, the Glory of His Majesty.

Time and again, we have to choose. Either we extend the endless futility of ego’s fantasies and illusions, and their negative consequences, or we say that it’s enough. Certainly it has been quite a long period of deliberated waste. Now it is time to leave falsehood behind and forever, and return to truth. This is the beginning of all beginnings. The first step to awaken into the Messianic Consciousness that leads us to the Final Redemption. This is God’s version of who we are.