아가 1:8의 Chasidut

What results will you see if you only heed the advice provided in these chapters? First of all, your mind will no longer be an open house for every thought that wanders in. Instead, you will always be occupied with holy thoughts, when you wake up in the morning, when you lie down to sleep, and when you go about your day. Also, with God’s help, you will become a man of feeling. Your love and fear of God will not only be theoretical, but you will feel them and be stimulated by them. At your own initiation your soul will increase its ability to feel holy hisragshus of a much greater intensity that it could before. You will be able to choose the extent to which your own hisragshus is stimulated. Your thoughts will be purified and strengthened until even your body will seek its own sanctification. When your mind has been strengthened and accustomed to avodah, you will be able to make your first ventures into the sublime level of avodah of the Tsaddikim and Chassidim called the avodah of thought, albeit at a level suited to your abilities. But when we say that you will reach the level of Chassid and Baal Nefesh, bear in mind that it is only just touching that level. This is as we said at the outset that we only seek to follow on the heels of the holy masters, studying their footprints and learning from their ways.²⁰⁸See Shir haShirim, 1:8, “go follow the tracks of the sheep.” If we can do this, then their holy sefarim are open before us, to delve into their words and go in their way. Now that we are learning them with a revealed soul, we can see more than we ever did before. In general, when the soul is revealed even minimally, our vision is transformed, and we can see things in the Torah, both Written and Oral traditions, that we had never seen before. We can see things in sefarim of Kabbalah and Chassidus that we had never seen before. We can even see that which was hidden from us in this worldly existence, that which we had never seen or dreamed of before.