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Baal HaSulam: Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” Item 8: For example, when two people love each other, you say that they are attached to one another as one body. And when they hate each other, you say that they are as far from one another as the east from the west. But there is no question of nearness or remoteness of location here. Rather, this implies the equivalence of form: when they are equal in form, and each loves what the other loves and hates what the other hates, they love each other and are attached to one another.

And if there is some disparity of form between them and one of them likes something that the other hates, then to the extent that they differ in form, they become distant and hateful of one another. And if, for example, they are opposite in form, and everything that one likes, the other hates, and everything the other hates is liked by the first, they are deemed as remote as the east from the west, meaning from one end to the other.

Question: What kind of love and hate are referred to here?

Answer: It is typical of mutual relations between different people: with a friend, with one’s wife, etc. The more you resemble one another in your desires and thoughts, or the more different you become, to that extent you love or hate one another.

But a person’s intention here is not to reveal the innate physiological feelings and not about the simple natural connection that is based on interests, habits, and understandings. No, we are speaking about two people who work together in order to prepare the “place” for the revelation of the Creator in their connection.

We build this “place” by our general, mutual intentions. Because our desires and thoughts are different and people are different, everyone is set at his “frequency.”

In the past, long waves were used for communication. Then greater accuracy was required, greater intensity, and the ability to penetrate deeper, and so we started using higher frequencies by which it is possible to transmit more information. Before all the fine details were swallowed, but now in the high frequencies it turns out that everyone can be special and we don’t need to be like one another. A creature from another planet wouldn’t notice the differences between us: everyone has arms, legs, eyes, ears, etc. But if we penetrate deeper into a person’s character, into his essence, we discover great differences. Not only is every individual unique, but also he is constantly changing.

So how can we connect to one another?

We connect according to our intentions. I intend to bestow goodness upon you with all my attributes and you intend to bestow goodness upon me with all your attributes, desires, and abilities. Then we are equal, similar, connected. We are not connected in our actual desires but in our intentions that are aimed at mutual bestowal.

I don’t force you to listen to Mozart, although I really enjoy his music, and you don’t force me to listen to Moti Mor, for example, who is your favorite singer. No, I turn off the classical music and dress in you and check what in you matches this frequency, what you like in your analog desire. Ahh, you love Moti Mor. Although I can’t even compare him to Mozart, I still begin to value him, since by that I connect to you and attain the Creator. Thus, suddenly, Moti Mor becomes important to me and I change my desire to your desire. Mozart was a source of pleasure for me on the “animal” level, while Moti Mor becomes an opportunity for me to connect with the other and to build a spiritual vessel.

It is about this that it says, “Make your will His will.” I cannot annul my attraction to Mozart, I have only “restricted” it, “covered” it with a new cover of my attraction to Moti Mor and by that have connected to you. I do the same thing with everyone, equating my desire to the other’s desire. Eventually, I acquire deficiencies from the whole world and connect with everyone.

In fact, I don’t even need to check any further in order to do that, the Light helps me and I connect to the greatness of the other, to his understanding and feeling. This is not an effort but actually easy and wonderful.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/4/13,”Introduction to The Book of Zohar”

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Question: On the whole, our mission is to change our intention from in order to receive to in order to bestow. Can we teach people to do that? Can we turn this into a habit by using pedagogical methods?

Answer: This is actually what integral education is about, about changing our intentions. On the whole, education should deal only with intentions and should leave the desires untouched. Educating means to teach the art of bestowal, which is the art of placing an intention of bestowal on top of every desire

Question: But don’t we cultivate values in the form of different desires in children?

Answer: Children learn only by examples. They perceive and copy everything, including the way they walk and gesture. So education is about setting examples. The children reflect you, so you must first pay attention to yourself.

What is more, by your external examples, you convey and “transmit” your intentions to them. There is simply no other method to convey intentions. There is a connection that is erroneous since it is a connection in words. But external actions are for the benefit of the other; even if they are false and insincere, they still summon a response and a desire to repay goodness.

It says, “The hearts are attracted by actions,” which means the desires. We can get children to become used to it: At first I didn’t know, I didn’t think, I didn’t want to, but then I was taught and educated and now I cannot be any other way. Our parents taught us different habits in the same way, and these last for life. The body doesn’t understand and doesn’t accept other methods. “A habit becomes a second nature,” both for children and for grownups.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/4/13,”Introduction to The Book of Zohar”

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Baal HaSulam, ‘Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” Item 9: And the only difference between the souls and His essence is that the souls are a part of His essence. This means that the amount of Light that they receive in their Kli, being the will to receive, is already separated from the Creator, as it is predicated on the disparity of form of the will to receive. And this disparity of form made it a part by which they were separated from the “whole” and became a “part.” Thus, the only difference between them is that one is a “whole” and the other is a “part,” as a stone that is carved from a mountain.

Now we are in a space with myriad waves and radiations of different frequencies that cover the whole space from zero to infinity. We perceive these waves with the help of different receivers, which can be tuned to these waves and perceive them. The receiver perceives the wave according to the equivalence with the wave, which means that the receiver creates a certain wave that is a replica of the wave on the outside and then they enter one another and create a resonance, which means that they connect. I perceive this connection and feel whether, for example, it is a radio wave that I can hear or whether it is the range of a television wave that I can see.

Thus, I perceive the “wave” of the general soul, since all of creation is a soul, a spiritual vessel that is totally filled by the Light, by Malchut of Ein Sof (Infinity). When I am external to it, I only have a small “sensor,” a spark that I have received and that I have to develop now in order to perceive wave after wave. Thus I create and develop the “receiver,” and by it, I perceive part of the “whole” that I am in, part of my soul. Generally speaking, all the space of Malchut is my soul, which I am going to acquire. But I discover this gradually to the extent that I develop my “receiver,” my vessels of perception. So it turns out that it is me who separates the part from the whole according to my currently corrected attributes.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/4/13,”Introduction to The Book of Zohar”

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All our work is not to exert ourselves for a payment but to make the work the actual payment. This is our goal, to reach a state in which my exertion, my work, the chance to bestow upon the other and through him upon the Creator, will become the desired payment. In order to reach that I am ready to prepare all the possible means, since my correction depends on that.

Then we will stop feeling the past, the present and the future—time will disappear. It is because time is measured only according to deficiency and fulfillment. But if there is no deficiency and fulfillment, but everything is the same, everything is whole and complete, then I will stop feeling time.

If I don’t feel any difference in fulfillment—not here and not in greater distances, not in other times, and not in the relations between everyone—then, the whole world becomes only one great opportunity for me to exert myself, which is my payment at that point, not before that and not after that, but right now. And then all of reality becomes the simple white Light that fills all of reality.

For me everything is based on my exertion, but in it, I immediately discover bestowal and pleasure as the goal. Thus we rise above time, motion, and space, above the images and manners of this world, and exert ourselves only so that everything in the whole level of Aviut (thickness) is revealed, we will correct ourselves to such a state that we feel no more trouble but only pleasure from what we do.

It is the same in our world; if I enjoy a certain action, I don’t perceive it as painful, as an effort, but simply as a pleasure. Although the body may expend a lot of energy and calories performing this action, I will not feel that I am losing something and that I have to compensate myself for that, but will feel pleasure and fulfillment.

Here everything depends on how well a person understands that he and what is external to him, which means the other, are the same, whether he sees that the whole world belongs to him. Then he will not feel any exertion. It is because all the exertion is only in the relations between me and what is external to me when I have to do something outside myself and give to others in order to receive something from them in return. But if the whole world is one body, then the exertion disappears and so does the passage from me to others and from them to me.

All my fears, anxieties, insecurities, and sufferings disappear because they don’t exist in one body where everything is one. So all our work is to reach this feeling by the environment, by my efforts, by the Light that Reforms, that there is nothing outside myself. In the true perception of the reality there is only one state and one place. This place is called Shechina or Malchut of Ein Sof (Infinity) and the one state is called adhesion.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/4/13, Writings of Baal HaSulam

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Baal HaSulam, “A Sage’s Fruit”: During a common prayer a person is prohibited to separate from the others and to ask for himself, even if he wants to bring pleasure to the Creator, but he is going to do it himself, and not with the others. After all, he who disconnects from society and asks for his own individual soul does not build it, but on the contrary, he damages his soul, by becoming the “proud man, with whom the Creator cannot be together.”

It’s not easy to overcome this difficult psychological problem. Our ego does not allow us to understand, to remember, to learn, and to adopt the rule that only by coming out of the boundaries of our body will we find the vessel of our soul. And everything that I psychologically see now as my “I” exists only in my fantasy so that I must cancel this thinking, annul myself, and see myself outside of it.

To accept this fact, this worldview, and to live with it, we need the strong support of the environment and studies and hard work in mutual guarantee. Any action of correction starts from this because every time more egoism is added to us, we have to work with this additional load in order to decide that, in spite of it, our vessel is above it.

These messages: “That which is hateful to you, don’t do to others” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself” seem to us simple rules of courtesy, “cultural” behavior, moral homilies. But no, we talk about an internal orientation that must exist in a person if he wants to find his inner part, his soul, and begin to correct it.

That is why the one who prays for himself not only does not advance in spirituality, but also causes great harm to himself because by this he cuts himself off from the others, worsening the breaking. Although it’s clear that negative actions are also inevitable because a person needs to come to the realization of evil before he understands and feels that this is an incorrect attitude.

But we are about to complete this work, and that is why we must understand and constantly reinforce the general opinion that spiritual existence, advancement, and the result of work are only in “We,” not in “me,” but only between us. This where we need to draw all our forces, trying to accustom ourselves to this view and replace ourselves with “We” in order to live inside the soul.
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From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/3/13

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In the News (from The Wall Street Journal): “It has been nearly five years since the collapse of investment firm Bear Stearns, the first of the dominoes to fall in the 2008 financial crisis. It is now abundantly clear there was too much risk-taking and too much borrowing, particularly by big financial companies. The global economy is still suffering the hangover.

“Too much finance can be dangerous to economic health. But too little finance hurts, too. Promising investments are starved. Consumers can’t borrow for homes or education. Growth is slower. …

“As a share of the world economy, the global stock of debt, both private and public, and equity peaked in 2007, plunged and has now recovered to 2000 levels, according to a McKinsey Global Institute database of 183 countries. …

“The social value of finance isn’t to fuel Wall Street’s casinos or make traders and hedge fund partners rich. It is, rather, to deploy the world’s savings in investments that pay off in the future. …

“Rich-country banks have pulled back. European banks increasingly are reluctant to lend across borders. Jitters about the durability of the euro and the stability of national governments have reversed a decade of financial integration. In emerging markets, the growth in stock and bond markets—which had been a welcome sign of economic maturity—has largely stalled.”

My Comment: Everything goes according to the plan of nature to force us to adopt a new attitude towards ourselves, society, and the world as to a single global dependent system.
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Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Book of Zohar,” Item 4: To understand these questions and inquiries, the only tactic is to examine the end of the act, that is, the purpose of Creation. For nothing can be understood in the middle of the process, but only at its end.

This is the rule, only by observing the end of the act can we understand all the details, the phases, the reasons for everything, and the whole process. It’s because only at the end does it become clear how essential every detail is and to what extent all these details had to be arranged one after the other in this order; only at the end do we see that everything is complete. The complete end is possible only when all the details are arranged correctly. But how do we reach the end if we are in the middle of our path?

And it is clear that there is no act without a purpose. We see this today in modern science, where everything does indeed operate according to a cause and effect relationship and according to absolute laws. At least on the level of the still, vegetative, and animate, nature, I discover great wisdom, logic, and common sense; there is nothing redundant, and everything is arranged so that every small detail is connected to all the other endless details. I can thus come to a conclusion regarding the level of the “speaking”: that the corruption I see in it stems from my corrupt personal perception, which doesn’t allow me to see the wonderful order that is also on the level of the “speaking,” but on the contrary, shows me a picture that is opposite from the truth. We actually see corruption and great disorder in human society, but it’s because we are causing it.

Of course, there can be another explanation for this phenomenon: We can say that the Creator is good and benevolent and that He includes everything and does everything, but that he has abandoned His creation. Baal HaSulam brings different examinations of this approach in his article “The Peace.” However, if I already respond to what I see in life and use different approaches, I understand better that it’s preferable to look at the end result. By the experience from our studies, we see that nature develops according to a certain goal, and so, Baal HaSulam says that we should first look at the goal of creation since it’s impossible to understand anything half way, but only by looking at the final result.

I know that there are those who cast over their backs the burden of Torah and Mitzvot (plural for Mitzva), saying the Creator has created the whole of reality, then left it alone. Here, Baal HaSulam refers to people who don’t believe that everything was created for man, that man is in the center of creation, and that only from this point can we develop correctly. Everything was created for me—our whole world and all the worlds—and I have to accept this, to reveal it, and to control the situation; “for me” means that I can correct it and use it. This use is called “observing the Mitzvot” which I do by the help of the Light that Reforms or the “Torah.” Thus I reach the goal of creation.

Indeed, without knowledge they have spoken, for it is impossible to comment on our lowliness and nothingness before we decide that we have created ourselves with all our corrupted and loathsome natures. It’s clear that we are not whole, but it’s impossible to decide that the world is lowly if we don’t see how everything in it gradually reveals its wholeness.

The question is: If the Creator is whole, then hasn’t He created evolution in a perfect way from the start? But that can’t be, since there also has to be a reality in the created being. This reality is opposite from the Creator, and so it has to be incorporated of two opposite parts: the attribute of the Creator and the attribute of the created being. The two attributes have to grow in creation and within it face one another; it’s in the middle between the two attributes, building itself of the two forces: the force of bestowal and the force of receiving.

This means that if we don’t understand the goal, we definitely won’t be able to justify creation and will find different justifications, such as: The Creator who is whole is disappointed with us, left us, and is found somewhere in His wholeness. Other versions are that the Creator is not found in these two forces at all, the good force and the evil force, or that there may be many good forces and many evil forces, etc.

One way or the other, it’s clearly impossible to justify what is going on unless a person receives the Torah, which means, unless he reaches the state that he understands that he is in a corrupt system and that it’s that way so that he will become part of it, will correct it by the Light as he draws himself each time more towards operating the system. Then he discovers that everything was created for him and it was impossible to reach the level of the Creator without first correcting the system, or to be more accurate, to install it. In the same way children build themselves through games by collecting and putting their toys together, it’s the same in our work, in the connection of the parts. So we have to play games of connection, unity, and mutual guarantee in order to understand the goal.
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From the 4^th part of Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/28/13, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar“

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Question: There are people who we like more than others; there are friends and enemies. Is it possible to maintain good relationships with everybody in the group?

Answer: First of all, you should uncover corrupt relationships among you. Let’s say, I don’t like someone. I can’t stand him without any idea of why I don’t like him. There is something in him that repels me and I can’t do anything about it. My hatred pours over the edges and I literally “spread poison.”

So, people around should “inadvertently” say good things about this person to me. All of a sudden I hear: “You know, I saw him recently and he told me what a great thing he accomplished! It’s wonderful!”

At first, I will be shocked, but later on under the influence of the common opinion, my evaluation criteria will change. It’s inevitable since those people who I admire and respect relate to him in a good way. Gradually, I start valuing this person and being very polite with him without any traces of hatred.

Let’s pay attention to how our relationship develops. Though we won’t become the best of friends immediately, it’s possible that at least my bias towards this person will change to a cautious and distant respect. My prior attitude to him sharply and strongly “manifests” in me. It changes to a positive approach, thus helping me cope with my prior negative feelings. It happens naturally. My attitude to this person transforms against my will.
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From KabTV’s “Staffing Secrets” 2/8/13

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Baal HaSulam “Igrot,” Letter 28

The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpt, Parashat “Balak,” Item 350, Lesson 17

Talmud Eser Sefirot, Vol 3, Part 10, Item 34, Lesson 14

“Introduction to The Book of Zohar“

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