Question: What can a person do while reading The Book of Zohar in order to stay in contact with the group throughout the day?

Answer: You receive some medicine in the morning, an injection. Suppose I have high blood pressure. I take a pill in the morning so that I will feel good the entire day. The pill does its job because it works on the same level: the still, the vegetative, and the animate.

On the other hand, our spiritual development depends on our efforts. My healing depends on my participation. Why? It is because thanks to the healing, from the animate level I attain the level of man.

So, it isn’t enough to get a “pill” in the morning, for example, half an hour before reading The Book of Zohar, when I am very enthusiastic and moved to tears by the strong emotions. It isn’t enough. I have to organize a daily schedule so that I will be under this influence all the other 23.5 hours.

In our world, the pill has an effect on me for 23.5 hours if I suck on it for half an hour. Gradually, as the digestive juices are extracted, the pill releases all the substances it contains so that they are absorbed by the body for several hours.

We have to do the same. However, a person cannot do that because he is constantly on his level, while here, he has to be between two. Two levels, as it says in The Zohar, are the letters of the upper “Hey” and the lower “Hey.” The upper “Hey” is Bina that operates on me, and I am Malchut, the lower “Hey.” What should be between us? It is the Creator.

So, I have to place the Creator before me, which means that all the awakenings that my Malchut feels, my desire, as a result of receiving half an hour of “infusion,” all its potential preparation for correction, all must be revealed practically during the 23.5 hours. I have to assist it by trying not to detach myself from the goal of “Israel (one who yearns for the Creator), the Torah (the Light that Reforms), and the Creator are one.” For that, I received the injection.

Of course, I can only do it with the help of the group where we are in one thought and thus influence one another. There is no other choice. A person cannot do it by himself. Even if he writes himself a thousand memos and puts them everywhere, he won’t see them. Even if he takes a servant to remind him, he won’t hear him.

It is possible only in the form that is above him, when the force that obliges him to hear, that is, to establish a connection between the two letters of “Hey,” comes to him. You can do that only in the group.

Therefore, mutual guarantee is expressed when you are in this activity, in absorbing the medicine that is already within you. If you swallow it and don’t use it, it is as if you received poison from a snake because every medicine is poison. It isn’t by chance that the symbol of medicine is a snake coiling around a cup of poison.

If you don’t use this means correctly, it becomes the potion of death. Then you will discover it through suffering and not by the Light. This is mechanics, and it must operate this way. There is nothing but the laws of nature here.

This is the root of all the mistakes people make throughout their lives and throughout human history. You could write entire novels about it, but humanity already has no time to read them….
[72163]
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/8/2012, The Zohar

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Question: Is a person really able to kill anyone just for an ounce of pleasure?

Answer: This might look like an exaggeration, but this is really the truth. If we were to put a person in special circumstances where he would not be punished for it and would be sure that he would receive an ounce of pleasure without any undesirable consequences, he would absolutely do it.

Man reaches such level of egoism that he is not able to consider anyone else—this is the way man is made. It says nothing about whether he is a good or a bad person; this is just a natural consequence of our egoistic development.

This is true in regard to every person, but we should not wait to get to this point. If we already see the tendency of evolution and the process as a “wise person” or “a sage who sees the new state that is just now originating does,” it means that we can conjecture how this process will end.

Why should we bring humanity to a point where we begin to consume and heartlessly destroy one another? Even now, after a small blow, we can already understand that we should not act this way and change our behavior like a smart child.
[72147]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #12, 12/16/11

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The power to bestow is the power of connection. Without it, I have no connection in my family or contact with other people or children; I have no connection with human society as a whole. We are simply killing ourselves and our community by failing to use the power of bestowal.

This is why it is now becoming absolutely necessary for us to acquire this power. It simply is a matter of life or death. This is why the crisis has come to show us where we are. We have gotten ourselves into this state on our own. Now we only need to examine and evaluate it to understand what we are lacking. We are lacking the power of bestowal. So how do we get it? It is only by building a good environment.

This environment does not exist in nature. We need to build it artificially so that it will serve as an example, pressure us, and push us, helping us to start giving a little. This society will treat everyone as if it were giving them a warning: “You will not get anything if you do not give. Not only will you not receive anything, you will also lose any respect you now have so that you feel like you are nothing, an absolute zero whom everyone disdains.”

The society will influence you through your children and other people whose opinion you value. It will undermine the feeling of self-worth and self-respect in every person who will not strive toward bestowal by showing how low and corrupt he appears in the eyes of society. Everyone will simply turn away from and not wish to be near him or her.

In this way, we will obligate a person to think about acquiring the power to bestow. Let him learn what it is and let him want to be like it. Then, society will treat him the opposite way: It will respect and value him highly.

We do not have any other choice because we need to learn what it means to bestow. When I come to learn, I am interested in having my environment work with me in these two planes: with a stick against my egoism, punishing me with their disdain, and on the other hand, praising me for bestowing. In this way, my egoism will choose to value the power of bestowal directed against it.

I will receive fulfillment and social approval when I bestow. Society will come closer to me and will not offend my big egoism, and it will not shame me.

In other words, we see that in this way, we act above our egoism that has grown and blown out of proportion in every one of us. We can educate a person specifically with the help of egoism through the influence of the environment. This is called integral upbringing because we teach the person to be integral, connected with everyone.

A person begins to appreciate the force of bestowal by virtue of which he acquires the respect and honor of the environment. People envy him for growing so much and being valued so much by his environment. In this way, an egoist begins to value the force of bestowal, to see what can be done with the right environment.

Here, the environment plays the role of an educator, like a father and mother in relation to an infant, like educators and teachers in relation to a child, or like a professor in relation to a student. The big human society acts the same way in relation to every adult.

The way the environment treats a person depends on his or her advancement. Then, thanks to these two forces: reception and bestowal to society, a person acquires an instrument to dig deeper inside themselves, society, and nature. He or she begins to understand what happens in the field of forces, in their own inner psychology, and the inner psychology of nature and society.

This helps a person to begin feeling the way these two forces act in all of reality, the way they operate in a still rock, in plants and animals, inside man, and in the surrounding environment and family—everywhere. He works with these two forces like their owner. In this way, he examines them and learns about everything.

He enters a network that connects all of reality, a network created by the intertwining of these two forces. This is why he understands the entire program of creation, our entire process of development and where it leads.

After all, everything conforms to a certain process. It is only that we do not see it now because we only operate with one force. When a person begins to use both of these forces on his own, it gives him a scientific instrument for research, which he uses to examine everything that happens in nature. In this way, he becomes the true master of his destiny and of everything that happens. All this is done by raising consciousness to a new level.
[72150]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #12, 12/16/11

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In the course of clarifications, a question arises: “What exactly do we need to change in ourselves in order to acquire a greater similarity to nature?” After all, if we come to harmony and balance with it, we’ll feel comfort, fulfillment, and peace. We’ll stop feeling its pressure that is expressed as problems that grow like a snowball, wars, strife and divorces in families, illnesses, epidemics, tsunamis, and other manifestations of natural cataclysms. Thus, what exactly do we need to change in ourselves?

The search for an answer to this question leads us to the investigation of human nature. Man’s inner nature is desire: the desire to live, to feel good, and to enjoy, in other words, a constant search for fulfillment. And a part of these desires is, to a certain extent, empty. Say, I want to rest, and this means that I wish to fulfill the desire for rest, and if I want to eat, then I desire to fill my desire for food.

Usually I have desires for food, sex, family, money, honor, power, and knowledge. These are the basic desires that include in them all the others. Every desire satisfying the needs of my body for food, family, and procreation, as well as the “human” desires in me for wealth, honor, power, and knowledge are divided into many different other desires and their derivatives. And if I have no choice and I understand that through the help of these desires I should unite with other people in order to become similar to the force of nature (the one law), then I will need to correct each of my desires.

Ultimately, all these desires together are called “the will to enjoy” or “the desire to receive pleasure.” Towards what should I direct them in order to correct them? They need to be directed for the benefit of all. And if I only fill myself, such a desire is called “egoistic.” Therefore, I direct each of my desires towards the common good and I accept only that which will go for the benefit of everyone.

It turns out that we don’t have another choice. If we’re all like one family, then I have to take everyone into consideration and think of everyone as one whole. And the law that obliges me to this is also one. That’s why every one of my desires I need to direct towards everyone. And here is where the problem arises: How can this be achieved?

Even if I myself understand it and scientists confirm it (psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists unanimously declare that this is true and that we don’t have another way out), and from my own life experience I see that there is no other method, even then, my nature always believes otherwise. It believes that I first of all need to receive for myself, to provide for my own needs, and not to worry about others. Perhaps I should care for them, but only so that it will make me feel good.

However, this isn’t enough. After all, I don’t feel this way in relation to my family. In a corrected family, I immediately think of all its members as one person and don’t calculate how to make them feel good so that I would feel good from that.

And this law wishes to oblige us to consider everyone as one, the whole world as one single family, so that we will start getting used to it. So what exactly do we need to do for that? Each of us must care about others and all together we have to build a system of a new integral upbringing that will connect us and through various influences and activities will prove that another way does not exist.
[67161]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 4, 1/1/12

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Preparation to the Lesson
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Shamati #20 “Lishma (For Her Name)” 
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The Book of Zohar – Selected Chapter “Beresheet (Genesis),” “Bad Mixtures,” Item 292, Lesson 81
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Talmud Eser Sefirot, Part 7, Item 10, Lesson 5
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Preparations for the European Congress: Writings of Rabash “The Need for Love of Friends,” (To: “And although the commandment,” continue with: “3 there is a special power”)
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