A question I received: Can I look at my friend in different ways: sometimes as a student, sometimes as a teacher, and sometimes as an equal?

My Answer: You can find all three relationships in any state.

1. If I want to unite with my friend, then I have to see him as a very important person, because only then will I have a desire to unite with him. That is why I have to see him as one of the greatest and most important people in the world, who will enable me to connect to the Creator. He has to be as important to me as the Creator. If the group gives me the strength and opportunity to attain the Upper Goal, then I will view its members as great people, on whom my fate depends. I would be willing to pay anything for them to accept me. I will be ready to lower myself in order to connect to them.
2. However, when I think about making the group stronger, then I look at them from above and think about how I can help them and inspire them. Then I see them as smaller than me. I want to influence them and give them more energy.
3. If we are talking about unity in the group, then everyone is equal. After I valued them as being higher than me, and after I was higher than them, we become equal and unite with each other. This is why we are called friends.

These are also the same relationships that I have with the Creator: He is greater than me, smaller than me, and equal to me.

1. He is great because He gives me the strength and determines all my thoughts and desires.
2. He is smaller than me because He depends on me. I can give to Him, I can make Him feel good, and in this regard He depends on me. So it turns out that He is smaller than me. This dependence is similar to how parents depend on their child.
3. He is equal to me because only equals can attain adhesion – unite with each other I order to receive from each other and bestow to each other.

Therefore, the states don’t change in one’s attitude to the group and to the Creator. The only thing that changes is the way one sees them: one can be big, small or equal, both with regard to a friend and with regard to the Creator. A person must always check how he can supplement each of these three attitudes, in order to advance even more – towards greater unity with friends and the Creator.

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A question I received: In one of the Shamati articles it says that when a person truly screams from the bottom of his heart, the Creator hears his prayer. What does this mean?

My Answer: The Creator created only one thing: desire. All of matter, including rocks, trees, animals, people, and stars, is all the different levels of the desire to exist.

• The inanimate level preserves its structure or qualities;
• The vegetative level, besides self-preservation, desires to develop, absorb beneficial substances, and excrete the harmful ones
• On the animate level, the desire demands to be satisfied, to advance, and to give birth to offspring;
• A human being starts out his development like an animal (and in fact, every level of desire starts developing from the first level – everything comes from the “dust” and returns to it). However, after developing as an animal, a human being starts to feel cramped in the animate state, within the bounds of this world. Then a new desire emerges that summons him to come out of its boundaries.

This new desire becomes the central point, the main desire among the others. Our task is to reveal this desire further and magnify it using the right environment. We have to find out how to fulfill this desire, pinpoint that it is precious – a point in the heart, and then aim it toward the right prayer.

To “pray” means to make this desire most important of all. Then it will influence the Upper System, the Creator, and will receive a response. All the problems of our spiritual growth come from the fact that this growth occurs only under the influence of our desire. Therefore, one has to perform an analysis of what his heart really wants, and direct the most important desire in one’s heart toward the Creator, Bina, the system of one’s spiritual growth.

However, a reaction or response comes only if my desire corresponds to the system’s desire, based on the principle, “Make your desire like His desire in order to make yourself like Him.”

True prayer comes from the bottom of one’s heart, from the most important desire. Each of us has thousands of desires, and this is our problem. We disperse and scatter our efforts on many different goals, and as a result, we do not achieve the most important thing in life. Therefore, our life goes by, but the most important element in it is missing.

We have to focus all our desires on realizing one, most important desire. Let everything else serve it, bring it into focus, and strengthen it. This will in fact be the prayer – the real desire of the heart.

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We came into this world thanks to our parents. But many of our qualities were determined and instilled in us even before we were born. We inherited them from our former states or reincarnations, which we lived through in this world.

As we develop, we accept everything that happens as self-evident. First a person simply perceives himself and the world in which he exists; then come words, cognition, and understanding. Everything unfolds slowly and naturally, and we do not realize how peculiar and unnatural this process really is.

But we deem the entrance into the Upper World as unnatural, even though we reveal it in the same exact manner as we have revealed this world for ourselves! First we receive a desire to be born in the Upper World – “the seed of spiritual semen” (the point in the heart – the embryo of the soul). Then we are led to a place where we can develop our point; this place is called the womb in our world, or a group in the spiritual world.

We are not speaking about people that we encounter and who are our companions, but rather, we are talking about other aspirations to the Creator, similar to my own. By correctly building my attitude to them, I provide myself with the right environment for spiritual growth.

When a person is born into our world, his development occurs forcefully. No one asks for our consent and we are filled with knowledge, impressions, examples of behavior, and definitions of “what is good” and “what is bad” without any freedom of will whatsoever. However, in our spiritual development, the spiritual force that develops us, called “Father and Mother” (Aba ve Ima of the World of Atzilut), requires us to make an independent decision to develop spiritually. We have to decide how to do this, what future state we desire, and what goal we want to reach.

We are required to use our freedom of will, to understand and realize what we are doing and where we are heading. The stages of spiritual growth and formation are similar to physical development, but they are activated by our desire. This is the difference.

Therefore, in our world we are slaves (like animals), whereas in the spiritual world we are free creatures (people, Adam, meaning similar to the Creator). I create the “motherly womb” around me on my own. This is the group in which I become absorbed like a drop of semen. I receive from it everything I need in order to develop, including nourishment, strength, understanding, and examples.

When the desires of the group become my own and I am ready to outgrow them, then I am born into the Light. Thus, I advance from Aviut 0 to Aviut 1 and become a spiritual embryo. From now on, I can use the force of the Creator to form myself. I proceed to apply my own effort on the path, and gradually I begin to understand how the Creator raises me. With time, I become grown-up and wise like Him, based on the principle, “I will know You from Your actions (by becoming like You).” This is how a person becomes equivalent to the Creator.

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A question I received: What should we do in preparation for the next lesson on The Book of Zohar to make sure we won’t miss anything?

My Answer: Stay connected with what we discussed in today’s lesson; think of it all the time.

The Zohar is a window to the spiritual world; it is a world that is waiting for you and inviting you to reveal it. If you stray from the path leading to it, you will have to find that path all over again and will waste your time and energy.

That’s why you have to try to maintain the impressions from the lessons. Besides, The Book of Zohar pulls anyone studying it into itself.

Those who work on The Zohar at our center know that it draws you in and doesn’t allow you to pull away. It works like a drug: You feel bad if you move too far away from it. That’s how it works.

By simply reading The Book of Zohar and searching for what is written within yourself, by attempting to identify with its spiritual images and constructing the Upper World out of those images, you start to feel a pleasure that develops into a deeply felt need. It engages you. Reading The Book of Zohar creates a certain palette of impressions, a cloud of sensations that don’t look like clear images at first, but are felt as inspirations and impressions rather than knowledge. Later on, however, you start sensing and understanding the position of the right and left lines and how they both combine into the middle line. And you then begin to sense whether this makes you feel good or bad.

Gradually this sensation starts to interlace with the text you read; it begins to appeal to your intellect and the image of the world you construct. The same thing actually happens in our world: Even when I speak of something totally abstract, I check what I’m saying against my desires, since I don’t have anything besides them. Everything happens inside our desires.

Therefore, the impressions we get from reading The Book of Zohar must be sensory. I have to demand that the stream flowing from it will enter directly into my senses. Then my intellect will follow. When all the sensations I receive from The Zohar come to order and I begin to see connections between them, I will start to understand and analyze the correlations between them. We will all have to attain this in the near future.

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A question I received: When reading Baal HaSulam’s books, you can feel real a cry for spiritual ascent, but we don’t have this cry. Why is that?

My Answer: He cries for it because he knows and sees the real situation. When a mother knows that her child is sick, she cries within, but the child may not feel any pain yet and keep on playing in his crib. He has a fever but has no idea that it may be caused by pneumonia or a virus. The mother knows, but the child doesn’t.

Looking at us, Baal HaSulam cries indeed, but we aren’t terribly concerned. We’re kind of like a person that’s falling off a ten-story building but remains calm. “How’s it going?” Someone asks him as he passes the eight floor. “So far so good,” he answers.

And he’s right – so far so good. Therefore, we must regard the words of Baal HaSulam as seriously as we would a doctor’s opinion; however, not so they would scare us, but to prompt us to correct ourselves. Correction is the only remedy to our illness. And even though the remedy is not simple, it will not only restore our health, it will also help us attain perfection.

The science of Kabbalah is not intended to improve our situation in this world; on the contrary, we will never have peace here. The situations ahead will only get more dangerous until we understand that we must make the necessary corrections. We have entered a new age, one where all of mankind will ascend to a higher level. But there is a force prepared for us called “Mashiach,” which pulls (Moshech) us from the egoistic desire into the desire for bestowal. We must utilize this force.

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A question I received: Right now I exist on the negative side of the scale, completely opposite to bestowal. Does that mean that in order to cross to the other side of the scale, I must first pass through the zero point?

My Answer: That is correct. At some point along the path, we have to make a “restriction on our desires” (Tzimtzum Aleph), temporarily stopping the use of the desire to enjoy. Later we will turn it in the opposite direction by attaching a vector of bestowal to it.

For example, say I’ve gained some weight and now I realize that it’s time to get back in shape. So I fast for one whole day and after that I am able to restrict myself to a different eating pattern. Moderating myself is difficult, but if I break off with the past completely, it becomes possible to come back to it in a new way.

The same is true for spiritual progress: In order to ascend to a new degree, I must completely disconnect from my present one. Restriction must always come first, followed by a reassessment. That is how you will be successful. A complete break eliminates the need to suppress yourself; instead you can begins a new life.

This is the process whereby a new state is born between the spiritual degrees, and we must learn from this example.

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Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson
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Shamati #24 “You That Love The Lord Hate Evil”
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“Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” Item 13, Lesson 20
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Article “Introduction to the Book ‘From The Mouth Of A Sage’”
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In the News (from Geek.com): “NASA calms 2012 end of the world fears with website” To dispel the myths and legends, NASA has launched a website which directly responds to some of the doomsday claims surrounding 2012. One of the touted indicators of the world’s end is the fact that the Mayan calendar ends in that year. NASA explains the calendar ends like your kitchen calendar ends on December 31, 2009. That does not mean the world is going to end in 2009. It means you need a new calendar.

My Comment: Actually, the end of the world will come, but it won’t be anything to be sad over because the world will first go through a global correction of egoism and global unification. As a result, everyone in the world will feel the eternal and perfect flow of life, beyond this world.

Kabbalah says that this will happen no later than 2239, but if we correct ourselves sooner, it can happen even earlier.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: The Control Of Our Future Is Beyond Predictions
Laitman.com Post: Don’t Blink Or You’ll Miss The End Of The World!
Laitman.com Post: The Need To Collectively Build The Method Of Correction
Baal HaSulam Article: “Building the Future Society”
Interview with the Future: “In the End of Days”
Video: Heal The World (4:41)

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