The desire to enjoy is a necessary material, because without it, it would be impossible for us to learn to bestow. I can only change the form of my desire, meaning that I can learn to use it for others instead of myself.

Then I will perceive reality differently – not within me, but outside of me. And I will then understand that I was seeing an imaginary world inside me. Something was wrong inside me, making me think that reality divides into me and the world outside of me. But when I correct this imaginary division of the world into its constituent parts and connect them together, incorporating all of the world’s desires, which had seemed foreign to me, or existing outside me, then I acquire one single desire or Kli.

So, it turns out that the problem we are facing is purely psychological, as Baal HaSulam writes in the article “The Science of Kabbalah.” We have to analyze our desires and see how mistaken we are by desiring to exploit others. When you discover that everything around you is your own desires, then you realize: who are you really lying to? It’s as if you are playing with your baby son, trying to confuse and deceive him in order to profit from him.

Well, this is exactly how we behave toward the whole world, which seems foreign due to the force of the breaking. But when the truth is revealed, we will see a different world.

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Where did all these books come from that talk about the influence of the signs of the Zodiac on people’s fate, fortunetelling using a person’s hand, dream interpretation, and all other kinds of spiritual practices and meditations? All of this came to us from Abraham. The book Midrash Raba talks about how he gave these gifts to the sons of his concubines, with each gift matching the personality of the son, and then he sent them off to the East. This is why we see so many different spiritual teachings and beliefs in the world today.

We have to be very careful with these teachings, lest we get confused. After all, it might seem that they speak about working with one’s egoism in a similar way to Kabbalah. The Book of Zohar (Vaera, Items 80 – 90) gives an example of how a sage came to a city where he met many people who seemed to be doing spiritual work and who studied many wise books. But upon a deeper inquiry, he found that these books did not have the Light of Correction.

There are many beautiful methods that originated from Abraham’s method and that speak about love and bestowal. But it is impossible to develop the quality of bestowal within you using them. To do this, one has to work in three lines: one has to work with the left line (one’s egoism), and correctly combine the quality of reception with the quality of bestowal. This produces a third line called Isra-El (straight to the Creator). This approach does not exist anywhere besides Kabbalah.

However, all the Eastern methods came from the “raw” form of Abraham’s method and they all use just the right line, the quality of mercy. Despite all their beautiful words about love, we cannot implement them today, since we now have enormous egoism.

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The hard times are still ahead of us. Let us hope that the world will have time to go through them by way of realization, before they are expressed in matter. In that case, we won’t have to go through the correction in matter, but in our awareness.

One way or another, this will all happen in a few months. What I expected to happen a year ago will still be revealed. There are great cataclysms approaching, and it’s important to make them be expressed through our understanding of the situation, rather than through material suffering that will last a long time and affect us in the flesh.

Instead of all this, people can awaken immediately, understand what is happening, and respond to it maturely. The modern communications systems give us an opportunity to let the masses quickly understand the essence of things and to elicit changes in their consciousness.

In any case, there are great changes coming our way. In the first half of the 20th century, Baal HaSulam already wrote that the whole world is one big family and people have to unite. Even though a Kabbalist is not subjected to time, he nevertheless saw and felt this, but we still don’t.

The world has been able to lie to itself, pretending that it’s not in crisis. But all the money has been burnt up and the cash register is empty. The world’s bankruptcy has gone global. I believe that the upcoming year holds a great deal of work that we will have to do, and people will sincerely start paying attention to the method of changing the world – Kabbalah.

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Every science consists of two actions: analysis and synthesis, or separation into parts and unification. We break something apart when we want to know how it is built, just like a little child breaks a toy. We build accelerators and colliders, trying to penetrate deep within an atom and to disintegrate it into the smallest parts. We think that we will be able to find our root inside.

People put enormous funds into this because they hope that when they get down to the very last particle, from which all matter originated, they will reveal the secret of life and find out where everything came from. As it turns out, this is exactly how we study the Kabbalistic texts. We want to break them up into parts in order to understand every word and the connections between the words, then supplement the explanation with our own words, and then on the contrary, reduce the text in order to make it easier to absorb.

A beginner reads the texts in a language that is familiar to him, but somehow, the words just don’t connect into sentences. This happens because Kabbalistic texts are talking about actions that do not pertain to our world and are therefore not recognized by our minds.

Therefore, the work that we have to do with the text lies in dissecting and generalizing it, so in the end, we will give rise to a method that is brief, clear, and simple to use. This method has to connect a person to the primary source.

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A question I received: What should I do if I study Kabbalah using logic and reason?

My Answer: I also used to be this way until I understood that I will never attain anything in this science with my mind. I am the kind of person that loves to study, to understand, to take things apart and put them back together in my mind, and to get down to the essence of the problem. Whenever I would see people who were “lost in emotion,” I would just laugh at them.

However, it later turned out that my mind would not let me enter the spiritual world. Gradually, I came to understand that spirituality is the quality of bestowal, which requires me to change my feelings, desires and attitude. I never used to value human morality, always preferring dry reason and logic. I had a really hard time studying Kabbalah until I finally became completely disillusioned in the reasonable approach and understood that my “head” bears no relation to spirituality.

No matter how deep the studies are, they will never give you the entry pass into the spiritual world. It’s just impossible to understand spirituality with your mind. The path to the spiritual world runs through your feelings and desires, not the intellect. But I had spent my entire life working with my mind!

Until a person grows completely disillusioned in his convictions, he won’t be able to find the path to the concealed world. In addition, no one can intervene in a person’s spiritual development. Otherwise we will repeat the sad experiment of the “progressive” part of humanity, which forces its culture onto the “primitive” nations and thereby exterminates them.

It took me a long time to realize this. But on the bright side, once I did realize it, I was able to thrust the entire force of my mind, all the stubbornness of my common sense, all the intellect I had accumulated over the years – down upon the egoistic desire. And this really helped me, because it is precisely one’s desire that needs to change.

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Bina contains the entire Light of Hochma, but only in order to prefer the Light of Hassadim over it. In other words, it prefers bestowal over fulfillment. What does this mean?

It’s when I don’t want anything except to bestow! Someone gives me a million dollars, but I refuse to take it. They can give me 100 million or a billion, but I’ll still refuse it. This is called preferring Hassadim – bestowal – over reception.

It’s impossible to measure bestowal; it has no bounds. The only way to measure something is when it is inside the desires of reception. If I am able to receive a billion dollars and I want this money, but I prefer bestowal, then this is the measure of my desire to bestow. However, if I don’t have a desire to receive, then I don’t have anything with which to measure the desire to bestow.

These two opposite desires must come together: I need a great desire and a sensation of a great pleasure that I can receive, and at the same time, a screen over the desire. That way, I will prefer bestowal over anything else. But how can we possibly attain this correction?

Only the Light – Ohr Makif – is able to grant us this correction. When I prefer the Light of Hassadim and reject the Light of Hochma, then according to this, I measure the height of the Light of Hassadim, even though it expands outwards. The Light of Hochma, on the other hand, expands vertically, from Above downwards.

In and of itself, Bina has no height. If you want to bestow, go ahead. You shouldn’t care how much you bestow and to whom. But the height of bestowal is measured by the desires of reception, which are opposed to bestowal and can be overcome by it.

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A question I received: Didn’t Abraham know that the Eastern methods and teachings are false? Why, then, did he give them to his sons?

My Answer: The difference between all the teachings and methods is their suggested way of working with and correcting man’s egoistic desire. The Eastern methods are incorrect for our time. However, as long as man’s egoism was small, it was possible to tame it using the Eastern methods. As soon as people’s egoism grew, however, these methods stopped working.

While humanity was egoistically developing throughout thousands of years, we needed these methods as well as the three major religions of the world. The religions are methods of developing the souls during the period of exile, which is an exile from spirituality, when the Upper World is concealed. This period began with the destruction of the Temple and lasted until the era of the Messiah.

When this period comes to an end, religion turns into a cultural heritage or a tradition. We are living in a time when all the methods have to become clear for what they are, once and for all. Then, Kabbalah will be revealed above them.

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