We need to perform very specialized work under a very specific set of conditions to reveal the influence of the Upper Light upon us. Thus, the absence of any feelings, flavors, or understanding while we study The Zohar doesn’t mean a thing.

You don’t need to feel or understand; you simply need to stay open for the influence of the Light, and let it work on you. The environment has to attune us to the correct desire so that we become eager to be influenced by the Light even if we lack the connection to what we read, taste, or understand.

This is what we call the “miraculous force” (Segula) that is implanted into The Book of Zohar. This hidden mechanism (rather than the stories or words) somehow works on us and moves us forward.

When studying The Zohar we need to “trust the sages,” meaning we need to believe the advice of the Kabbalists. We have to constantly take care of how to align ourselves with the perception of the force that is yet concealed from us.

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The Creator has created the desire to receive pleasure, and he renews it every moment. In other words, each time I feel the desire to acquire new pleasures, this is done by the Creator inside me. He pushes and draws me toward all these pleasures. He evokes all the impulses in me and controls me as if a hand inside a glove, instigating new desires in me at every turn.

When I realize these desires, which are given from the Creator without a thought of Who they come from and the reason for them, I am on the still, vegetative, or animate level. However, when the point in the heart awakens in me, I begin to distinguish that it is the Creator who plays with me as if I were a glove on His hand.

Now, I regard everything that happens from within the point in the heart. I discern that it is He who induces me each and every time to acquire new pleasures. Regarding everything from the point in the heart with this awareness is like regarding things from within Him. This is why the point in the heart, which is the embryo of the soul, is called “part of the Creator from Above.” With this point in the heart, I obtain the opportunity to turn the animal within into man.

How do I do this? I do it by working against the Creator, against my nature, and against His hand in me. I refuse to blindly execute everything that He evokes in me. I stop using the desire that He rouses in me and I check the reason and the purpose for continuing to act in the same direction. Even though He wants it, I discover whether I have any kind of independence here. I discover whether I should awaken mechanically and continue to fulfill that same desire that He evokes in me like a hand in a glove or whether I want to stop acting like this and, from this moment on, to act independently. As it is written, “My sons have defeated Me”.

I continue to do the Creator’s actions, but only under the condition that I participate in them in the same direction, the same thought, and the same intention as the Host. I want to reveal Him in this. I want to be partners with Him in absolutely everything and I attain adhesion with Him through this partnership.

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The Zohar, Chapter “BeHukotai (In My Statutes),” Item 45: “I will never again curse the ground on account of man.” “I will never again,” meaning I will not give addition to the litigants to destroy the world, but only add as much as the world can bear. It is written about that, “then I will [chastise you] more,” meaning add what the world can bear.

This describes how we advance. The whole process consists of Malchut rising to Bina and then descending back from Bina. Then it rises to Bina again, and descends back again. All these movements, these oscillations, are meant to give us sensations.

After all, we cannot feel our reality in Malchut or in Bina; we can only feel it in the connection between them. We feel reality in the coefficient of their connection; that is, in the changes of Malchut’s inclusion into Bina and Bina’s inclusion into Malchut.

More simply, we feel ourselves only under the condition that we move between Malchut and Bina. When the relationships between them change in us, then the variable correlation between Malchut and Bina also changes in us, and it is these changes that we perceive as life.

Conversely, if this correlation ceases to change or becomes still, we would feel this as death. In this state, all the sensations and gradations of qualities vanish. Therefore, on one hand, we feel life in the process of change of Malchut’s inclusion into Bina, and Bina’s inclusion into Malchut, and the unifications between them. On the other hand, this gives us heavy and unpleasant sensations, and the lack of patience. However, this is precisely where we feel life. Therefore, in order to live, we are forced to survive. We are unable to part with life and so we prefer movement.

In spirituality this movement reaches a state within which we reveal the Creator. It is the state, from which life comes to us and provides movement, strength, and the changes in the connections between Malchut and Bina and in the ascents of Malchut into Bina.

When we reveal Who does this, Who creates these changes, and for what purpose all these changes occur in us, we rise above these movements, above the changes in us, and we merge with the Giver of life. Thereby we begin to feel at rest. After all, we then feel that this movement is necessary for creation, and without it creation is unable to feel the Creator.

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Preparation to the Study of The Zohar
In the spiritual world we’ll learn to join contradictions. When we attain the entire picture then black and white, darkness and light will become as one whole.
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The Book of Zohar — Selections, Chapter “VaYaera (And The Lord Appeared),” Item 1
A “human” is the final stage of the desire’s development, which allows for the attainment of the creation in the full scope.
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Article — “The Individual and The Nation,” Lesson 2
If you have been awakened, don’t wait for all of humanity to wake up. Unite with those that are awake and by doing so you’ll help everyone.
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“Beit Shaar HaKavanot,” Item 36, Lesson 12
By properly arranging the order of priorities in the surroundings, I create a straight line that leads straight to the Creator.
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The breaking of the common soul really was a great thing. Through the breaking, the Creator gave us an opportunity to exist and express ourselves. After all, if the parts of the common soul weren’t distanced from one another, we wouldn’t be able to build the Creator’s image and perceive ourselves in relation to others. We would simply dissolve within the Light as it is impossible to distinguish anything within one unified object.

The creation can’t exist within one whole; we can only exist when there is us and something else. Our perception results from the distance between us. We can’t attain anything in absolute light or in complete darkness.

For this reason, the breaking gives us the opportunity to attain and experience existence. Otherwise, if we were to find ourselves in absolute and total darkness, we wouldn’t sense anything and we wouldn’t be able to feel that we exist. This is because all of our senses are based on perception between two opposites, such as sound versus silence or scented versus unscented. If there were “silence” in all of our senses, we couldn’t perceive ourselves.

So, the breaking happened precisely to give the creation the opportunity to exist and perceive itself. This really is a divine patent. We fill the space where the breaking took place. We fill the empty space between the parts that seemingly appear to be distanced from one another with the Light. In reality, however, it was the Creator who disappeared from the single whole in order to give us the opportunity to reach that same unity independently.

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Kabbalists who lived before the author of The Book of Zohar Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (Rashbi) performed corrections in the common system of souls on a higher level. Rashbi’s system is connected to us directly, and for this reason we treat The Book of Zohar as our primary source. By carrying out corrections in the system of broken souls, Kabbalists created special connections in it, preparations for a general correction. They revive this system, bringing Light to it through the channels of connection that they have established within.

Therefore, we can now rise and correct ourselves within this system. By correcting itself, a soul not only changes itself; it also brings about its corrections into all the other souls. Yet, there are certain souls, like the soul of Rashbi, which play a principal role in correction: They complete a specific stage and prepare the foundation for all the corrections that follow.

It seems to us that a corrected soul is some isolated part of the system. However, this is incorrect. The whole system of souls is integral, like a holographic picture, each part contains the whole picture. On the other hand, every part is present in the whole picture as well as in each of its parts. I am part of the system of souls, the whole system is within me, and I am also included in each part of the system.

The soul is not a unit of the whole – it is “dispersed” into the whole system of creation. It penetrates the entire Malchut of the World of Infinity, with its qualities. This holds true for every one of us. When each person supplements everyone else, we get one large sphere of souls, where the system of Rashbi acts in providing correction for it. It is through this system that we receive the Light that corrects and fulfills us.

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A question I received: How can I simultaneously fulfill my desire to receive pleasure, on one hand, and identify myself with the Creator, on the other? One contradicts the other.

My Answer: You should understand that the desire to receive pleasure originates from two qualities: bestowal and reception.

If one exists within only one of the properties, then he is a “slave,” and in this case, he doesn’t even understand his actions. Just like any person “off the street” who simply follows his desires like anyone else does, he believes that they are his own for his entire life until he dies.

The Creator’s desire is being fulfilled at all times until a person reaches the condition under which a new desire, the desire to bestow, emerges among his other common, regular desires. Only after this desire for bestowal appears does creation begin to sense the Creator.

The same thing happens to us; we start to feel that besides our actions there is also Someone who acts from within us. Those two sensations allow me to realize that my desires are, in fact, not mine, but rather, belong to Him, and that it is He who placed His hand on me and makes all sorts of changes within me that I am forced to obediently follow.

At this point, I begin to relate to my current state from two points of view:

1. Recognizing that He acts within me, which is what I call “my nature.”

2. Searching for: What is His intention? What does He want? Why does He do this to me?

In other words, at the end of the first state (Alef), we start sensing Someone who created; we start sensing the root or zero state (Shoresh). At this point, the phase Alef is willing to transform itself into the state Bet (the second state) which is a state of giving, bestowal.

Now, we all are at the transition stage from Alef to Bet. Completing the transition depends upon the degree to which we feel the Creator who acts within us. From this moment on, we have to realize that all our desires are not really ours. When I feel, “I am thirsty, ” I must immediately realize, “That’s false! It is not me who is thirsty!”

It means that at each level I rise above my desire, and thus connect with the Creator who is present within my desires. I rise above it and make an effort to figure out what He wants of me. Afterwards, we can do whatever we want with our desires, but only after we observe them, perceive them, arrive at this decision, and then proceed further.

I develop the feeling that it is the Creator who initiates my desires in me and I am simply the one who automatically follows them. This stems from my understanding that He is present within me and it is He who instigates my desires and then fulfills them.

“Where am I in this picture?” This is how a person gets to understand his life in all of its complicity and realizes that he cannot be judged or rewarded and that there is neither hell nor paradise for him, nothing at all.

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Malchut, creation, can never attain Keter, the Creator Himself. He is revealed to creation in all the other Sefirot, which separate the Creator and Malchut. In response, Malchut achieves similarity to Him in the Reflected Light in all the Sefirot. These forms of Malchut are called attainments or names of the Creator.

Everything that happens and everything that we sense are manifestations of the Creator who wishes to show Himself to us in this form. Around me, I see inanimate nature, vegetative nature, and animals: the material ones and the spiritual ones. All of these are forms of the Light, which are revealed this way in my desire, in Malchut; these are the forms of the Creator in me. These forms can be a direct reflection in me, which does not demand my similarity to Him. Yet, these reflected forms are not true, which is why our world is so limited and imaginary.

However, when I begin to take on forms that correspond to Him, they will be called by the names of the Creator in me, since they will be similar to His bestowal. However, this is not His bestowal, but mine. If I create a form in me that is similar to His bestowal, and His bestowal clothes into it, then our joint bestowal is called my spiritual degree, our adhesion, or attainment of the Creator.

On my path upward I go through many such names or images of the Creator. All my attainments are names of the Creator.

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It is a known fact that the more we research ancient Biblical literature, the more we realize that its traditional dating is correct. The philosophers that made groundless claims that The Book of Zohar was written in the 11^th century in Spain or even later in the Middle Ages, recently have had to budge and grudgingly concede to what is written in The Zohar itself, which is that it was authored by Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai in the 2^nd century.

One common argument supporting the more recent writing of The Zohar was that the vocabulary used in The Zohar did not appear in the lexicon until much later than the 2^nd century. However, recent research of ancient texts enabled by new technologies sheds light on a wealth of documents written in the ancient language of Aramaic.

In a report of these findings in the University of Chicago News, one of the researchers in this Perepolis Fortification Archive Project at the Oriental Institute, Aramaic scholar Annalisa Azzoni, assistant professor at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, states, “We don’t have many archives of this size. A lot of what’s in these texts is entirely fresh, but this also changes what we already knew. There are words I know were used in later dialects, for example, but I didn’t know they were used at this time or this place, Persia in 500 B.C. For an Aramaicist, this is quite an important discovery.”

I want to believe that in the recent future all misconceptions about Kabbalah will vanish and we will be able to use it to better the world.

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Everything we have done until today was just a game where spiritual forces influenced us from Above, leading us through all the historical phases that we have gone through. These forces caused the development of nations, souls, and civilizations, and they governed us without asking whether we wanted it or not.

However, now we have completed our preparation for correction, and from today on, we must start to carry out the correction. This is why for the first time in history, the science of Kabbalah is becoming revealed to the whole world. It is the method of correction, of revealing the Creator, the Light, the force of correction. It is now becoming revealed because this is the first time that we must lead ourselves to correction.

From now on there are two paths laying before us: the natural path (Beito) and the path where we accelerate our development (Ahishena). If we participate in our own correction, then we will take the good path, but if we don’t desire to carry out the part incumbent upon us, then we will lag behind and will perceive our laziness as suffering.

Then, instead of feeling the Upper Forces as good and helpful to us in our correction, we will feel our own uncorrected desires in the form of various problems. These can range from minor troubles with our families and health to world wars and self-extermination. This is what all the Kabbalists have warned us about, as well as the prophets before them. All the prophets spoke about the age of the Messiah, which has now arrived.

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