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Certainly, a person cannot take on all of life and nullify all his desires at once. But a person needs to get used to thinking about life with a completely different orientation. We are in a world with enticements from morning to night: there are advertisements on the street and on the buses, and everyone tries to convince us of the same basic idea: "If you will only buy this thing, you will feel totally different. This is all you are missing! It's worthwhile to invest a little and put forth the effort of being in overdraft for two months. Go ahead, get into it! Once you have the object, the overdraft won't bother you." But the truth is that a person must close his eyes to the world and believe that "I have within me a greater treasury than the entire world and all its wondrous objects. I have a treasure that can make me calm and happy. Happiness does not reside in things that are external to a person, as our teacher, the Rambam says. The happiness is within; that is where there is true pleasure, joy and peace. But how are these revealed? Only if a person knows he is a soul, which is absolutely perfect, and that the one factor that destroys this joy is the desire for things.
http://bilvavi.net/c...nt/view/194/32/
I think this very much summarizes the intent of this chapter. What we have is so much more than anything we can possibly want.
(BH my mouse is working again on the computer with the Bilvavi bookmark
)
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