Good Environment – 02.13.11
Posted on February 13th, 2011
Question: How is it that the intelligence which assisted us in growing and advancing over the course of human history only distracts and halts us from it today, at the most vital point when we need to evolve spiritually?
Answer: Intelligence has always serviced your ego, so it was helping you to achieve everything during these thousands of years. However, today, when you have finished evolving on the still, vegetative, and animate levels and must ascend new degrees of evolution at the human level, a completely different approach is required.
The view of life and the world, the whole paradigm have totally changed. Now, you need to relate to all that surrounds you with bestowal that originates from another kind of desire, but your rational mind doesn’t wish to work for bestowal since you don’t have a desire to bestow.
When you receive the desire to bestow, your mind will start working with it, but for now you have only egoistic desire, and your intelligence only serves it. The mind is a device, a computer. It doesn’t care what data it processes, what digits are loaded into it. As long as it receives data from your egoism, the will to receive pleasure, it works accordingly.
What can you do with this? Try to transform your desire rather than your mind. Draw the Light that Reforms into your desire. The Light created this desire, and only it can change it. Then, your mind will start working for the new desire to bestow and advise you as to how to bestow in a better way.
Therefore, intelligence is not the key in studying, as it’s written: “It isn’t the wise one who learns.” Everything is defined by desire. Mind is what you gain while your desire evolves. As to desire, it can be changed only by the upper Light and nothing else, except for the environment that awakes you and inspires to transform your desire, triggering it by “envy, lust, and ambition.” Using such material tools as your earthly desires, it leads you to spiritual aspiration.
[31616]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/3/2011, "The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy"
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Question: If everything that exists in this world is an imprint of the spiritual world based on love, then how can there be murder in our world?
Answer: Everything comes to us from the world of Infinity, from the constant and perfect state, the complete adhesion with the Creator. But in the creature, all these perfect roots manifest in accord with its imperfection, exposing the degree of disparity between us and the upper perfection.
In the upper world, there acts a program which helps you discover yourself and realize what you need to complete so as to rise to the root. There, everything occurs in the most pure, corrected, and perfect form. But in our world, due to the difference between the degrees, the worlds, everything manifests in the opposite form.
We reveal the spiritual action, but see how non-spiritual it is according to our own dissimilarity to the upper degree. This is called: "Everyone judges according to his flaws." I see or perform certain unseemly actions because I myself am corrupted. If I correct myself, I will see that these actions are good.
But didn’t I see yesterday that people were killing each other? Today I observe how they are giving each other presents! At the root, the action remained the same, but I completed myself to the root and, hence, changed my vision. I could see how the egoistic intention got killed in the spiritual world, but instead I see how in our world, real murders occur.
The upper and the lower worlds consist of the same elements, but in the upper world, there is love between them, whereas in the lower one hatred. In the lower world, everything is inverted! Only the details remain, while all the types of connections between them change because in our world, these connections are totally broken, and we are separated by hate, rejection, and neglect. Meanwhile, in the spiritual world, we are all connected and totally committed to each other.
As you and I exist in this world, so do the spiritual you and I exist in the spiritual dimension, only in spirituality we are connected and love each other, while here we are separated and hateful. The difference between the worlds turns into the difference between the way you and I treat each other.
The upper roots establish that something has to happen between us. However, by our correction or lack thereof, we determine what will occur and how: Will we hate and kill or love and embrace each other.
[34925]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbbalah Lesson 2/9/2011, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”
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By descending to our world, the spiritual roots turn into their opposite forms, and egoism of our world carries out the upper commandment of love according to its understanding—it goes to kill. But decide what do you prefer: to remain in the corporeal branches or to ascend to the spiritual root?If you want to rise, work in the group and participate in its game of mutual, brotherly love. Then you will discover that you are unable to love this way, that it is all a lie, and you will ask for correction. The force will come from Above and grant you love and the connection with others.
This connection does not exist at the level of our world, but only at the higher degree. Look at the souls, not the bodies! It is as though there is a computer screen before me on which I can see the corporeal or spiritual actions. If I see with the spiritual eyes, I see love, and if I use my material eyes, murder.
But if someone attacks and wants to kill me, it does not mean that he does it with love: He acts driven by his egoism. That’s why it is said that if someone comes to kill you, you should preempt him and kill him first. By this you correct him since he came to kill you, which means that his egoism is greater than yours. For this reason, by killing him you perform a correction, acting with a smaller egoism than the person who attacked you.
Here everything is logical and not based on blind faith. After all, I did not want to kill him; he attacked me first in order to murder me. And when it is totally evident, killing a bigger egoism with a smaller one will be a correction. This is my duty, an upper commandment: "Kill the one who comes to kill you."
There are nothing but corrections. Either they occur at the still, vegetative, and animate level while we are neither aware of nor understand them, or they are true corrections while we work with the group at the speaking level.
All murders in our world occur because egoism demands such sacrifices for its correction. But if we want, we can elevate this correction to the spiritual level. We can raise all these actions to a higher level, and then we won’t feel or see any evil in this world.
But this can occur only under the condition that we elevate the entire egoistic desire, which performs these heinous crimes, to a higher level. There, all of its actions will be beautiful, opposite to what we see today. People will suddenly begin to unite, embrace each other, and feel close.
[34911]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbbalah Lesson 2/9/2011, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”
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Humanity has no choice: It will have to reveal its breaking and the need to connect. Back in the 30s Baal HaSulam warned that a catastrophe was approaching, but no one listened to him. I do not want to scare anyone with any prophecies, but we see what kind of state the world is in.
For now we are given time to seriously treat our mission and organize the world’s correction. But if we don’t do this, then all of the world’s suffering will come crashing down upon us, on the people who are capable of making corrections. But if we do not correct the world, then the suffering is transferred to us because what is everyone else guilty of if they don’t have the means to correct themselves? If you don’t hurry up with your correction, then the blow will shift to you.
However, for now you are looking at how they are suffering and you aren’t worried very much. Yet if you don’t even feel their suffering as your own, at least, and don’t correct yourself as if you are suffering as the whole world, then you don’t have a chance to attain correction. Only the group can give you this necessity.
The Book of Zohar has been revealed in our days in order to pull the world out of the abyss it is sliding into. The world is like a car that is riding down a good road, not even suspecting that somewhere behind the bend, the road ends and it will fall of the cliff.
And even the world itself already understands that it is sliding down into an abyss. The problems are mounting like a snowball and everyone is already talking about the fact that the world has lost balance. Yesterday I head that the Minister of the Russian Federation on Emergency Situations said that we are in imbalance with nature, that we have lost balance with it and have to get ready for the consequences. He really was using the words of a real Kabbalist….
We, those who have received a desire for the Creator (Isra-El), are now being given precisely the opportunity to organize the world’s correction and take all of its problems upon us. Without waiting for them to come on their own, we will already have the forces to correct them. We can correct them precisely now, while they are still somewhere in the external world, and we take them upon ourselves.
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/13/11, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”
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Question: How does The Book of Zohar fit into Kabbalah?
Answer: The Book of Zohar is the main book in Kabbalah. We study it every day. I have just finished going over The Zohar in order to simplify its language and replace all of the Aramaic words. We are now translating this book into other languages and soon it will be published.
This book explains the laws by which the spiritual, global world operates. The difference between the spiritual world and the material world is not that spirituality is somewhere up in the sky, beyond all the galaxies. The spiritual world is right here, in the same place, but we do not feel it because it works at a different frequency, so to say.
We are looking at the world through our egoistic senses where each person perceives only what is beneficial to himself. But if we change our senses and attitude to the world and desire to see it as being single, great, and one whole, then we will see the world as an integral system of forces right here and now.
This is the world that The Book of Zohar tells us about. However, this book is written in a way that takes the reader and without him even noticing, leads him into the sensation of the new world. That is why it is such a powerful and unusual book. The Zohar works through our mind and feelings, influencing us from all sides.
From my lecture in Paris on 2/1/11
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While The Light Is Working On Us
When we are faced with something opposite, we perceive such events in the coarsest sensation: The Light is affecting the greatest desire. But when we start pondering what happened and why, we work in the most illuminated desire. Hence, there is a difference between the situation when the Light affects desire (the more opposite they are, the greater the impact is) and how it is perceived, which is based on the law of similarity, the ability to understand each other.
Let’s say somebody yelled at you. You felt insulted to the core; your ego is scorned, and in your lowest desire, you felt how opposite you and your offender are. Then, you engage your mind and start analyzing the situation while somewhat associating, understanding, agreeing, and even assimilating with him.
The place where I can understand something opposite to me is considered to be more enlightened, exalted. A reverse order of the Lights and Kelim (vessels) will confuse us until we start sensing how the Light enters and exits us, how it works pertaining to the changes in Aviut (coarseness of desire). But until then, we must treat this phenomenon as a unique property (Segula) for drawing the Light, which is more important than knowledge.
It doesn’t imply that there is no need to exert in understanding what we study and consider intention to be the key. No, intention has to be tied to the mental effort and manifest in its particular way during the studies.
In fact, everything we discuss (such as Aviut, Partzuf, and Light) takes place solely in the intention. Nothing changes except the intention, while everything that takes place below derives from its influence. The structure of the soul, the Kli that we create, and the Light we receive into it, all of this is merely an intention; hence, it has to be connected with all parts of the wisdom as the wisdom of intention.
It doesn’t matter how much you will learn; it is the effort that counts. Therefore, it is not important what topic we are studying. Effort consists of connecting with the content and finding our inner states in it.
Do you contain the Malchut of Infinity? Are you in the final correction? Are you receiving NRNHY (Nefesh, Ruach, Neshama, Haya, Yechida)? Yes you are! Where is it? It is hidden within your inner Partzuf. And that’s what is being discussed.
[35126]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/10/2010, Talmud Eser Sefirot
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Question: What can we do to avoid being satisfied with our external effort?
Answer: If a person knows that only the intention to reach the goal, which he constantly discerns, brings him closer to spirituality, then he doesn’t view action as the key. Intention is the Kli (vessel) where he receives the reward, and therefore, all discernments take place in it. Actions without intention are not taken into account at all.
Perhaps a person pleases the Creator, but with an intention to gratify himself. It is the greatest impure force, a Klipa (shell). The most exalted degree of bestowal is balanced with the biggest Klipa: The action is the same while the intention differs.
On the outside, it doesn’t show, and a person seems to be yearning to bestow. Pharaoh, the desire to feel pleased, obeys the Creator’s orders precisely. A person acts according to his desire and mobilizes all his strength, if only to feel good for one’s own sake. He constantly thinks about the Creator (since it is the source of pleasure) and strives to do his best for this source, but for his own good. This is regarded as Pharaoh, the angel of death.
To avoid this, as in any other case, only a clear vision of the goal and mutual support can help. Without interaction, there is no chance to remain on the path without falling. The current generation is the generation of correction, and its success depends on mutual support: Correction occurs based on mutual guarantee and caring. There is no other source to draw the right energy and direction from.
And it is good because there is always work to do in demanding a closer connection. And if we feel it isn’t authentic but superficial, that is fine too. This course is easier than an individual one despite the fact that everyone depends on all the others. Only the collective yearning toward unity and annulment by each of us in regard to the upper degree (the teacher, the group, and the books) will help guard against complacency.
[35131]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/31/2011, Writings of Rabash
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There are four stages by which the direct Light expands to us from Above downward: the “world-year-soul” and the existence of reality. And everything we have artificially built as an addition to it is needed to attain a higher degree.
We are building this addition to the upper one in the still, vegetative, and animate forms. At the still level, we create various objects; at the vegetative and animate ones, we alter nature; and at the speaking degree, we perform corrections in ourselves. It is all done so that later on, we will connect all this with the correct intention and reach a higher degree.
At that degree, we will feel less numerous than we do at present, meaning more unified and bonded. Today, we experience the world filled with infinite details, the enormous universe, billions of people, and countless products and trash. But when we ascend to the next degree, we will begin to see how the world is contracting, decreasing in the number of details since we are all linking into one man with one heart.
At each degree, we need to add our effort at the still, vegetative, animate, and speaking levels. Look how much we have already done, even in our world: How many plants we had to grow to survive, how much we had to alter in the animate world, and how many cities and what surroundings we built for ourselves at the speaking level.
All of these are corrections, regardless of how these alterations look to us: bad or good. We add them at our degree below. We need all this metal and trash because we lack internal correction. As long as we are internally unreformed, we have to perform external corrections until we reach the state when they will no longer be necessary.
Starting with our generation and forward, we will see that as we evolve, we will be contracting. All our immense activities and enormous enterprises will start to decrease, acquire a more “subtle” forms, and disappear. It’s getting simpler, more compact, yet more powerful, meaning more “spiritual” and less based on matter and more on energy.
[34738]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/7/2011, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”
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