A question I received: What should I do if I have difficulty continuing my studies and it feels like I’m being pushed away?

My Answer: When you feel a burdening of the heart, disappointment, and egoistic complaints, these are feelings you receive from Above. What should you do? Lower your demands: if you’re lying on the ground, you have nowhere left to fall.

And if you decide that you don’t need anything except to be in the state of bestowal, then it will be impossible to throw you out of this state. It’s because you will reject your Malchut (egoistic desires) and cleave to Bina (bestowal).

You are then like an embryo inside a mother’s womb, ready to have the Upper Level do anything It wishes to you! And then the Upper Level begins to develop a greater quality of bestowal inside you, until you are born into the spiritual world.

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A question I received: Why doesn’t the Creator awaken all the souls simultaneously and give everyone equal freedom of choice?

My Answer: Every soul receives freedom of choice according to its root. When each person corrects himself, he will see that he has nothing to complain about and that everyone is equal in the general corrected system of souls.

However, everyone differs by their individual correction; some souls are higher and others are lower. However, all the differences fade when everyone unites in love and mutual bestowal at the end of correction. In the meantime, however, during the process of advancement, there are differences between us, and they are necessary because there would be no movement otherwise.

Creation advances because people build a higher system within. We build our similarity to the Creator, and this can only be done as long as there is a difference among the inner parts, the souls.

The Creator created 613 desires with the help of 613 Lights. This means that right from the start, creation includes a multitude of different qualities. Otherwise, inside our egoistic material, it would be impossible for us to attain bestowal, love, and a feeling that the Creator’s quality is important.

At the end of correction, we will connect all the individual souls or qualities, and we will then reveal one perfect system – the Creator (HaVaYaH). However, the reason we are able to attain this one system is precisely in virtue of all the numerous clarifications that led up to it.

Within this One, there are no longer any differences between the parts of Malchut. The differences were necessary only to comprehend Him and become like Him.

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We all exist as one unified, giant system of souls. If some of the souls advance out of their own free choice, then so does the whole system.

If some parts of the system have received an opportunity to choose freely, but aren’t using it, then they are cut off from actively participating in the system. The system of souls is a living organism where changes are taking place non-stop, depending on how the souls in it rise and descend, realize their freedom of choice or not. They cause changes in all the souls and determine how the entire system will advance to the final, corrected state.

By neglecting to use one’s freedom of choice, a person rejects the Creator’s personal governance over him and shifts to a path of suffering. He then accumulates suffering until reaching a sufficient realization of evil, which makes him worthy of receiving freedom of choice once again, and this time using it.

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All of a person’s thoughts and desires come to him from the Creator. So, if a person wants to come closer to the Creator, this means that the Creator wants this as well and instills this desire into the person’s heart and mind.

If, however, a person doesn’t have a desire for the Creator, this means that the Creator doesn’t want the person either and is sending him desires and thoughts against Him. But nevertheless, along with what a person receives from Above at every moment, he occasionally gets a chance (a point) to see himself from afar. This kind of inquiry is possible even during the period when one is only approaching the spiritual development.

When a person does this, his life turns into dialogue with the Creator: a person thanks the Creator for all the good and bad things that come to him, and the only thing he asks for is to advance. That is how he receives a new mind, new sensations and a new reality.

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A question I received: In our times, does a person have to have spiritual attainment in order to disseminate the science of Kabbalah?

My Answer: Everything depends on what you mean by dissemination. If we disseminate what Baal HaSulam wrote, talk about him, read his articles, study them and talk about how we understand his texts, then of course these are all things we can disseminate.

What does it mean, to disseminate? It means to give people the opportunity to participate in our studies, but more importantly, to connect them with the primary sources. Everything has to be based on the primary sources. Studying the science of Kabbalah means being connected with this material, constantly returning to it and checking how you connect everything written there into one integral method of your correction.

You gradually begin to connect all of this material with your own mind and feelings and to absorb it. When you study, you should desire to place yourself inside this material so your desires and thoughts will take on its form. It’s as if you want to be like a liquid that will fill the contours and forms of this material. You want to place yourself inside these models in order to distance yourself from your egoistic “self,” your way of thinking, and the way in which you now connect your mind and feelings. Instead, you want to receive higher qualities in your mind and feelings and start thinking according to them.

You should be willing to erase everything you have now for the sake of acquiring these qualities. Your desire will remain, but without a form, in order to then take on the form of bestowal. That is when you will be ready to be born in spirituality.

This is what the study of Kabbalah is. The study does not happen in your mind, but in your desires, making them take on new qualities. People don’t study Kabbalah with the mind, but the heart.

We study how to change ourselves and how to make our qualities similar to the Creator’s qualities. We disseminate our lessons in order to enable every person who wishes it to be able to participate in the study together with us. And the more we advance, the more we have to check: how closely are we connected to the primary sources, how much do our thoughts correspond to them, are we diminishing the contradictions between the two, and are we understanding and feeling the material better? But the most important test is to check whether the importance of bestowal is always growing for us.

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Our problem is that when it comes to our spiritual development, we can stand still for a long time before taking the next step forward. It may seem as though we are going through a lot of states, but actually we are just treading over the same spot, shifting from right to left, leaning forward or back, unable to take a step forward by making spirituality be the dominant force in us.

We can’t yet focus all of our strength to actually annul ourselves (our egoism) for the sake of the quality of bestowal, which we have to attain on the next degree. After all, every step we take brings us closer to the quality of bestowal, which begins to reign within us. The question is whether we are ready to make all the necessary preparations: to annul our egoism, to sense the importance of the goal and focus all our thoughts and desires on it, having made a final decision that this is the only thing we need and nothing else.

If a person has a chance to take even one step toward bestowal, the Creator, without hoping for a reward, even while lacking the forces to do this, but simply wishing to cleave to the quality of bestowal in just one point, and to be satisfied with this despite all the great desires he has, then he reaches perfection (Malchut in Bina).

Thus, he enters the state of perfection (the attribute of bestowal) through one point (Tzimzum Bet). All that remains for him to do is just to develop this point. It is written: “Make Me an opening as the eye of a needle and I will deliver you.”

If you hold on to that point of bestowal in spite of all the doubts, questions and disturbances, then the desires that emerge in you (your Reshimot) will pull you deeper and deeper inside, like a thread through the needle’s eye, pulling you into the spiritual attribute of bestowal. Then, through your desires, you will see the Upper World.

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