If desire or other extraneous thoughts occur to you whilst you are serving G-d or whilst you are studying or praying, pay them no attention but avert your mind from them immediately.
Do not try to transform them by tracing them to their
underlying source and transforming them by elevation: unless you’re a tzaddik
[a holy person], you’re not at a high enough level. Regular folks are bound by
their material desires (the evil pulls of the animal soul).
But do not be downhearted, to be assailed even at such times
when one is supposed to be joyous!
Here’s the solution: draw fresh strength and intensify one’s
determination to serve, study, or pray with concentration and with even greater
joy and gladness.
Recognise: the extraneous thoughts from the kelipah, the
husk of evil forces enclosing the divine soul, are waging war on the divine
soul. It is because the divine soul is doing so well that the kelipah is
exerting itself with all of its resources. Precisely because the divine soul is
exerting itself and mustering all its strength in prayer to vanquish the animal
soul, the kelipah of the animal soul is trying to confuse and topple the divine
soul by introducing extraneous thoughts. This means you’ve got it on the run!
Don’t think the service, the study, the prayer is worthless.
The thoughts are not arising because one is doing something wrong. That would
be the case if we had one soul: then we would have a case of madness,
inconstancy, or hypocrisy. But because we have the divine soul and the animal
soul, the battle is explained. Each wants the prize: total domination of the
person’s mind.
All right thoughts (including the fear, i.e. awe, of G-d)
come from the divine soul, and all thoughts of worldly matters derive from the
animal soul.
You can’t get away from the animal soul: it’s the earthly
garment, the husk, the kelipah that the divine soul is wearing to live a life
on the planet.
Imaging some heathen is trying to distract you from prayer,
chatting with you and trying to engage and confuse you. His intention is not to
acquire knowledge or information but to interfere and distract. If you engage,
he’ll just carry on, asking more and more questions.
The best advice in that case is not to answer him with good
or evil but to act as though one were deaf, simply not hearing what is being
said, and to comply with the verse, “Answer not a fool according to his folly,
lest you, too, become like him.”
In the same way, when extraneous thoughts occur whilst
serving, studying, and praying (i.e. all the time: what else is there to do?),
do not answer, do not engage, do not enter into mental discussions on the best
strategy for countering the extraneous thought, for he who wrestles with a
filthy person is bound to become filthy himself.
Instead: pretend not to hear them; dismiss them; strengthen
the power of concentration on the service, study, or prayer.
If they really are persistent:
Humble yourself before G-d and beg G-d to have compassion and mercy upon you in His abundant mercies, like a father who takes pity on his children. G-d is compassionate with us, because we come from the mind of G-d, the attribute of chokhmah [wisdom], and so rescues us from the turbulent waters, i.e. the thoughts that disturb the soul. One is asking not because one has acted in such a way as to deserve rescuing but for G-d’s sake: because we are His children. Under these circumstances, G-d is guaranteed to respond.
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