570. General Attainment and Personal Attainment
There is a difference in seeing between general attainment and personal attainment.
“General attainment” means that one attains the matter in general. For example, when one sees a big city from afar and sees from afar that people are walking about in the city, and sees signs of houses, this is called “general seeing,” meaning that all the details are included in the city.
This means that even though afterward he approaches the city and enters it, and sees each detail separately, such as the beauty of the city, the shape of the houses, the gardens, the towers, and the wealth of the city, that there are many factories and stores filled with abundance and all kinds of merchandise that exist in the world, many banks, and the mentality of the people, good people and bad people, educated and ignorant, the beauty of people, if they are great or small and so forth, but nevertheless, this does not add anything to the general, meaning that from afar he saw a city, and so he does now.
When he is asked, “Where were you?” he replies, “I was in the city,” meaning both from afar and from nearby; it is all the same city.
The benefit of the details is that now he has impressions from what he saw inside the city, which he did not have before. Although when he was outside the city, he knew that there were many details, he still did not have impressions. When he was in the city, he could enjoy all the details that he could not enjoy from the city in general.
It follows that personal attainment is the main pleasure and delight, as it brings him vitality when he comes to know the details. This is not so with the general.
This applies in every single state, whether good or bad, since when he sees a situation that is bad in person, he is impressed by the bad feeling and can correct it, for the bad feeling brings him to reveal hidden forces, which he uses and finds profound tactics to be saved from the bad.
It is the same with a good situation. That is, in general, he knows that he has abundance, yet he does not have the feeling of impression of how much he can enjoy, since he lacks the details about all those things. For this reason, he cannot give praise and gratitude to the Creator as much as he should.
Since man’s greatness depends primarily on one’s attainments, and one does not attain except when he gives praise and gratitude to the extent of the attainment that he has been given, therefore, he must try each time to delve into the details so he can be impressed by the details and be able to give the proper praise and gratitude, and then he will go ever upward.