If we yearn for bestowal, we have to check ourselves and what our demands are, how pure they are, and that they are without an intention for self-benefit. We have to do it now when we have received an additional desire and have to add the force of the intention and the force of our concentration for the work. We have to try to reach the right request without mixing it with our private requests and with our ego that has now awakened in us with the desire to benefit from the work we have done for the good of our desire to receive.

Everything has to be focused only on bestowal, so that we will not even want to know that we bestow. The reason is that the actual understanding is already our payment and our reward. We want all the payment for the efforts we have made to be aimed at bestowal. Then it will be a true Returning Light.

We have to constantly fear not to receive any reward for our efforts, so that all our intentions and actions, the bestowal upon the group and the environment, and our prayer will all be external to our body. We have to greatly fear that it will not come back to us and to guard ourselves from it. Thus we build a Masach (screen) above ourselves that first protects us from the reward so that it will not come back into our desire to receive.

If we can constantly do that and feel sure that we can keep the covenant on the previous level, not thinking about receiving, we can already begin to do another kind of work and to yearn to increase our bestowal. Thus we work in both directions. On the one hand, we guard the wall that doesn’t let any self-benefit enter our body, our desires. On the other hand, we increase our bestowal outside ourselves.

This is actually the same direction thanks to which the image of the one who bestows is revealed in us. It’s thanks to this guarding that doesn’t allow any self-benefit, guarding above our personal desires, that the desires begin to take on new forms and concern about attaining the goal. We have to guard them very well so they will not receive any response from our work of in order to bestow.

As a result of this work of restricting our desires and expanding the desire to bestow, we begin to form the image of the one who bestows inside us, the image of the Creator. Then we already begin to understand what bestowal is and what altruistic actions are. We begin to acknowledge the force of bestowal as the first, elementary, primary force that revives all of creation.

Then we already have someone to ask, whom to turn to in our prayer. First this sublime image did not exist in us and we used to imagine different things without any real basis. Now, there is already a basis, and the image by which we can understand that “Israel, the Torah, and the Creator are one.” There is already a direction from us to the image of the one who bestows. This is how a person advances.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/17/13, Writings of Rabash

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