Pearls of Torah - 011 The Source of Emotional Problems Today

There are many emotional problems today, because people have a poor sense of self-recognition. A person in this generation often has a split identity crisis. People are looking for all kinds of relief today to their inner anxiety.

One reason why there are so many problems today is because we are in the final generation, thus we have accumulated much from our previous lifetimes. That is one inner reason. But another inner reason is because a person’s soul these days contains sparks of many souls, therefore, a person has a hard time identifying himself – because he is really containing all kinds of souls and he’s not aware of it.

If he would be a bar daas (sensible person), he would understand who his essence is and which parts of himself are not his essence. But when a person doesn’t have this awareness, he views himself as a contradiction, and he cannot come to terms with this discovery about himself.

People today feel like Rivkah when she was pregnant with Yaakov and Esav, and she felt two nations clashing inside her. She could not come to terms with this contradiction, of how two opposites could be contained in herself [until she was told that they were twins]. That’s how many people feel like today: they experience inner turmoil in themselves, and they are unable to deal with their inner contradictions, because they do not understand themselves. People cannot deal with the contradictions in themselves when they find out about it.

It’s not just because people don’t want to work on themselves internally; that’s also true, but in addition to this, it is because people are made up of many different personalities of souls within their own souls, and they cannot deal with the contradictions that this creates in themselves.