Question:
I once heard the Rav say in one of the shiurim that a person is able to hear an “internal voice” in himself, or to use guided imagery, in order to connect to the mind’s intuition. Is this correct? How can this be reconciled with what the Rav has said that it is possible for a person to hear the wrong internal voices?
Answer:
The voice of Hashem, which spoke the Ten Expressions and the Ten Commandments, is still existent today, in its original strength. The Sages also said that every day, a bas kol (Heavenly voice) goes out each day from Har Sinai and announces that people should do teshuvah. This refers to the voice of Hashem. The voice of prophecy, which used to be revealed in the past, is also the voice of Hashem – but it has ceased. Besides for this, though, there is the voice of a Jew’s personal neshamah (Divine soul), which can be heard at all times.
However, since the soul is covered with a body that is coarse and indifferent to the spiritual, the soul’s voice is usually not heard. Even if a person does hear it, the coarseness of the body prevents a person from hearing a totally spiritual sound, and the person will hear a voice that is a mixture of the spiritual and the material, an unclear sound. Therefore, as long as a person has not yet purified his being, hearing the internal voice contains a danger, because it will be an unclear and imprecise sound, and if one follows it, it can trip him on his path.
Many people in our generation have tried to hear the internal voice, through various means, and what they heard was not only unclear, it was mixed [with spiritual and material messages intermixed with each other], which caused them to mislead themselves as well as others, with messages that were an inter-mixture of truth and fantasy together.
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