raise the sparks

This is evidence of why Fat Tony rocks, even though he's not my pretend boyfriend anymore. I copied and pasted this from a myspace comment he left me yesterday. This was in response to my challenge to him regarding his myspace motto "raise the sparks." I wrote him a message that said, "Do you even know what raise the sparks means??" This is his answer and he swears he didn't cut and paste it from Wikipedia...

"Yes, **** I beleive I do know what the phrase means, and I'm glad you asked. "Raise the sparks" is a rough translation of the Jewish mystic concept : Tikkun Olam. Nowadays people usually use it as a motto for social justice - the idea that all should work together to help out the poor and disenfranchised.

However in an older Kabbalistic sense "raise the sparks" refers to the idea that the cosmos was actually created when God made himself manifest ( the universe being a sort of mirror or infinite algorithm wherby the godhead may come to know itself) in the form of the Sephirot - the ten attributes of God. According to these ancient apocryphal teachings the world was created and at the exact same moment everything went haywire, the Sephirot cracked, God basically went mad and forgot who he was and so little tiny shards of "godness" are trapped everywhere in the world, hidden in people, hidden in everyday objects, scattered through everything- these are the sparks.

The idea is that through proper living, through being kind to others and ourselves and living correctly , each moment we encounter potentially contains a trapped "spark" of God and it is our job to "raise" or release that spark back into the eternal. That's what I think it means."