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Question: Whenever we speak about asking something from the Creator, it seems like an attempt to escape reality. After all, I don’t see the Creator and I don’t know who He is. If creation is managed by fixed laws, then how can I ask anything from them?

Answer: A request is not just words. When you ask for something, you discover a deficiency, a demand. This deficiency is a force, a “minus,” a negative that draws fulfillment. With this, you turn to the “plus,” to the positive, and draw it, activating the force.

Let go of the corporal picture of the bodies, trees, animals… Erase it, and, behind it, you will discover a void with two forces, a positive one and a negative one. Then, you will be able to activate the negative force intentionally as you choose selectively, and through that you necessarily will activate the positive force that is opposite to it.

You were given a chance to control your negative force. Other people wander in this void having no freewill and no understanding, just like particles that are influenced by different forces. Although you are a particle too, you were given the opportunity to focus your charge in a certain direction. This means that you operate a desire or a prayer, or, in other words, a deficiency or a request.

Although the words confuse us, we must remember that it is about forces. Therefore, it says that everything is attained by the force of prayer. We already know what a prayer is: It is the work in the heart that arranges the desires and directs them so that they can change the current map of forces.

I can change all the forces through my desire that is directed in a certain way. It is great work, real work in the field of forces. There is nothing but that. All the other “attires” are fictitious.

So, the wisdom of Kabbalah tells you that you are a force, a desire, and how you can focus yourself and be an active and even a beneficial force.

Thus, you understand that if you don’t do anything in the field of forces, you remain a zero. However, Kabbalists tell you that this isn’t so. If you were just an “animal,” you would remain a zero, but since you are given different opportunities that you don’t fulfill, then you are not just a “zero,” but a harmful force. Then, you must be “shaken” so that you will understand that.

I repeat, erase the picture of our fictitious world from your imagination, and feel that you are in a world of two forces: a negative one and a positive one, a desire to receive and a desire to bestow. We were given the opportunity to connect the two, and the connection between the “plus” and the “minus” is determined by resistance.

There are different types of resistance: a simple resistor, a cable, and so on. Certain factors create fields, and other factors create linear forces. The spiritual system also is varied and full. Some of the activities are fulfilled by the Surrounding Lights, as in a conduction coil; other Lights sustain the current state and don’t allow the force to burst, like a cable, and there are Lights that reduce the force or those that increase it. In addition, these forces connect in two lines that continue the three lines.

Generally speaking, it is about very complex systems that operate these two forces. To “pray” means to fulfill the opportunity you were given to increase your force. Thus, I change the whole system as if I have another supplier of power. Actually, there is no other supplier, but I use other suppliers like a solar panel that receives the sun’s energy and converts it, aiming at another function, for example, heating water or generating electricity.

So, a prayer or a request is the force that I operate in the system. I don’t simply ask the Creator to give me something. No, I know for sure what force I activate, how exactly I activate it, and what I can get in response. This is indeed an active spiritual act.
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From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/28/13, Writings of Baal HaSulam “A Speech for the Completion of The Zohar”

Related Material:
The Apparent Dead End Is An Exit Upward
We Only Need To Ask Correctly
To Grow From A Capricious Request To A Valid Demand

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Prayer and Intention, Q&A - 1 Comment →

Question: How can we say at any given moment, in spite of any problems, that “There is none else besides Him” and that “He is good and benevolent” if I feel the opposite at the moment? Do I have to combine the feelings with words?

Answer: We begin to work from a state of total uncertainty. We only hear and read that “There is none else besides Him.” This is how the first article in Shamati begins: “It is written: There is none else besides Him.” This is what Kabbalists say! But these are only words for me that have no meaning. So how do I develop them?

I try to turn these words into actions that will impress me. So I find a group in this world that claims that “There is none else besides Him,” and I am incorporated in it so that it will influence me and convince me that indeed there is nothing else but the upper force. At least they speak about what Kabbalists say.

I connect to that group and subdue myself before them, raising my friends above me, so that the principle of “There is none else beside Him” will be heard more loudly and so that I will feel how important it is. I try to be under the impression of this slogan, which in the meantime exists only on paper for me.

But if I work with my friends, I begin to receive the Light that Reforms through them. This Light is in their words, and to the extent that I exert myself in the group and subdue myself before it by serving my friends, the Light changes this slogan. The Light is dressed in these words and brings them to life. I begin to feel the life in the letters that make up the words “There is none else besides Him.”

I begin to feel the letters as live vessels that are full of Light, and then the vessels, my desires, begin to move together with these letters according to the Light that goes through them. It isn’t just a Light, but rather a “formatted” Light that has taken on the form of these letters. It turns out that I am impressed in different ways by the sentence “There is none else besides Him” and begin to see, to understand, and to feel how it’s expressed in different states and manners. I learn to work with it.

The sentence that used to be dead for me, just a written slogan, gradually begins to come to life. Accordingly I try to fulfill it in different states, the good and the bad. I hold on to it especially in the bad states, since in the meantime I am an egoist. If the uniqueness of the Creator, “There is none else besides Him” and “good and benevolent” is revealed to me in unpleasant ways, it means that I am acquiring vessels of bestowal and that I rise above this pain. I advance towards the state of: “Don’t do unto your friend what is hateful for you.” I hate this state and want to rise above it. I don’t think that the Creator has caused me all these troubles, but rather, I attribute them to my ego. Thus I acquire the attribute of Bina, “to bestow in order to bestow.”

Then, in very unpleasant states, I begin to receive pleasant states, which is much more difficult, since I have to rise above them. It’s already faith above reason on the second level, not only above the desire to bestow, but also above the desire to receive. I already work with AHP.

It’s as if I work against the good and the benevolent, which means that I receive both the good and the evil equally, as the same thing. Thus I reach love, about which it says: “Love thy friend as thyself,” and then “Love thy Lord,” the highest level of this state, Keter.

All this work is done in “faith above reason.” The moon stands for Malchut, which “sanctifies” itself in its darkest state, and by that begins to illuminate with the Returning Light. It has nothing of its own, and it doesn’t need anything of its own either. It says to the sun that it wants to be like it. The more the moon becomes like the sun, the more the earth determines all the appearances of the moon, to the extent that Malchut is adapted to Keter.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/24/13, Writings of Rabash

Related Material:
Seeing Revealed Mercies
How Can We Justify The Unjustifiable?
Drawing The Line Between Receiving and Bestowal

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Group Work, Kabbalah Study, Love, My Similarity to the Creator - No Comments →

Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Rabash “Shlavei HaSulam,” “You Stand Today All of You“

The Book of Zohar – Introduction

Talmud Eser Sefirot, Vol. 1, Part 1

Writings of Baal HaSulam “The Peace“, Lesson 13

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