Question: You recounted many obstacles that a person meets when he begins to work in the group. One of them is that they can appear as opportunities to a person; they can appear very tempting and attractive, able to improve his life and not interfere with his engagement in spiritual work.

Answer: They all interfere with spiritual work. Otherwise, they are not obstacles. It only seems to you that if something breaks, if something happens, then you have to fix it, and then you can return to spiritual work, but actually it is an obstacle that is specifically against your spiritual work. Each kind!

Question: If a person wants to deal with some of his regular corporeal desires so that they don’t distract him, then would that also be an obstacle?

Answer: As it is written, “If there is no flour, there is no Torah.” We must create all the needed conditions for existence, necessary and sufficient, like in mathematics. This means to conduct a regular life. Today, also, that might not be so simple. Everything depends on what I consider sufficient. for myself

Once I asked Rabash about this, and he gave me a very interesting answer, “The essential level of self-sufficiency is such a degree that you would be happy if there was no need to deal with it.” This means that you would be happy if you didn’t need to eat, drink, sleep, purchase a Chevrolet, or go on vacation to the Caribbean Islands. The essential level is what you really are forced to deal with—forced—and you are not at all happy about it since you must maintain the life of this body in order to rise to the next level. What do you need for that?

If a person’s mind is in the right place, he simply doesn’t pay attention to what is essential to him. Take any musician or writer who “lives” in their work. For any creative person, creativity is everything. He doesn’t need anything else!

It doesn’t matter to him how he looks and what he eats. He “burns” with his work. Thus, when you burn with your work, then there wouldn’t be such a question.
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From the Kharkov Convention “Uniting to Ascend” 8/17/12, Lesson 2

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