Question: How can the Upper Light reform me if it is at absolute rest?

Answer: Speaking about the Light coming in and out, I refer to changes within myself. The Light is the phenomena within the vessel (desire). There is no Light without the vessel. Some of these phenomena I call “the Light” and I attribute various changes to them.

Everything is within. Some inner experiences I ascribe to an outside, external cause, while others I attribute to my inner causes, myself. After experiencing changes within, I relate them to either personal actions or the Light that seems to have brought them about without my awareness. These are our definitions.

A child says: “It broke by itself,” as if it weren’t he who broke it. So do we, due to the lack of spiritual awareness and revelation, take responsibility for some events upon ourselves and attribute the other part to some hidden factor.

Question: Is this hidden factor what we call “a miraculous force” (Segula)?

Answer: Segula means that I perform actions but cannot see direct connection between them and their outcomes. For instance, I am told: “If you hit the wall ten times, water will start running from the faucet in the backyard.” I don’t see any logic here; but meanwhile, there is a hidden mechanism in the wall, which responds to my hitting the wall and it turns the water on.

It is really very simple, but I am not aware of this mechanism. So I was told: “This is Segula. If you do this, you will get that.” Hence, I connect one with the other albeit I do understand the cause and effect logic underlying the events. Therefore, Segula is a law, but it’s concealed from me for now. There is nothing supernatural here: I just don’t know how this works.

I enter the group and hear: “Jump so many times, hug the friends so many times, sing this many songs, take part in this many conventions, and you will see the effect.” I have no idea how this is all connected, but Kabbalists gave us recommendations which do work. How they work, we will see later on; and for now, at our level, it is called “Segula,” a hidden law.
[30922]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/27/10, “What is A Big or Small Sin in the Work”

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Rabash, “Which Degree Should One Achieve so He Will Not Have to Reincarnate?”: This is the perfection that Adam HaRishon had prior to the sin. Only after the sin did he decline from his degree and his soul was divided into 600,000 souls.

Question: How does a sin appear?

Answer: A sin appears as a result of the influence of the Upper Light. For example, I want you to find your own mistake, but I want you to do it after you’ve understood its essence and only then corrected it.

My participation in this process is inconspicuous; I remain “behind the scenes.” How unnoticeable can I be? I only serve as an eliciting factor that is not even felt in the matter of your desire, similar to Sefira Keter.

A person experiences sudden weakness or becomes immersed in bizarre thoughts that are given to him from Above, although he thinks that he is the one who produces them. This is his first sin.

Then, he starts to struggle with himself instead of asking the Creator to correct him. This is his second sin. The Creator gives a person choice and balances out his perception by enlightening him; He gives a person “a hint” that there is something else behind it.

However, spiritual systems are built in a way that we are unable to address the Creator directly since our properties are opposite to His, and the law of the equivalence of form doesn’t allow us to do so. That’s why we observe an external system of objects and bodies (this world) which gives us a chance to take the first steps toward the correction.

If I take these steps, apply correct intentions to them, and plead to the Light for help, I manage to connect both worlds and instigate the influence of high souls upon me. Through them, I get help. The souls of the righteous bring me the illumination from Above, start working on me, and raise me up. This is what is called “sin and its correction.”
[25667]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/2/10, “Which Degree Should One Achieve so He Will Not Have to Reincarnate?”

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Insofar as a person hasn’t completed his view of the world with spiritual perception, he keeps running into several problems. First of all, he has difficulty differentiating between corporeality and spirituality.

We reside on the corporeal plane and have to meet certain external conditions. We have to arrange the work in the group, family, and work relationships, as well as interaction between the friends, which we do following the rules of the corporeal world that we accept as part of the upper governance.

We are expected to demonstrate a dual response from the external and internal points of view. However, if we view everything from the “internal” perspective, why do we need to circulate the wisdom of Kabbalah in the first place? To whom I am trying to bring it? Is it to its already corrected parts?

Our image of the world isn’t perfect yet; it will develop in time. It is done so on purpose so that, in the face of the broken reality, a person would have free will amidst two principles: “If I am not for myself, then who is for me?” and “There is none else beside Him.”

Secondly, there are contradictions in the work with the friends. They are either completely corrected, or I have to work with them as with my equals, which implies another type of relationship and expectations.

This duality always accompanies a beginner, and he has to learn to work with it. Thanks to it in particular, by combining the opposites before and after the act, we arrive at the correct analysis and its realization.
[25671]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/2/10, “Which Degree Should One Achieve so He Will Not Have to Reincarnate?”

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Writings of Rabash, Shlavei HaSulam, “What Does It Mean that the Creation of the World was in Donation”
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The Book of Zohar — Introduction: “Yitro (Jethro),” Item 1, Lesson 1
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Talmud Eser Sefirot 3, Part 8, Item 40, Lesson 23
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Writings of Baal HaSulam “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy,” Lesson 4
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A person has to understand that his attitude to the group is a mirror in which he sees himself, and this mirror doesn’t lie. While working on Kabbalah circulation, we may even yell at each other from time to time. However, the essence of the matter lies in one’s personal attitude to the friends, which demonstrates one’s more or less correct or totally incorrect approach.

Therefore, work with external group externally, and with the inner group internally. This is the order of things.

[30917]

From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/27/10, “What is A Big or Small Sin in the Work”

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Question: How do I channel my thoughts through the group?

Answer: In order for us to glorify the Creator in our eyes, value Him as a Giver in whom everything is contained, and to ask Him to replace our tendency, our intention, from receiving to bestowal, He has to withdraw, to hide. Otherwise, we will always be egoistically enslaved by His magnificence, His eternal nature, and all that it promises us therewith.

Thus, the Creator is concealed, as if He has nothing. This way, you don’t depend on Him while remaining in the separation. Instead, you can receive His bestowal through the group. He intentionally broke the will to receive (desire) into parts, in order to demonstrate to it what hate, envy, lust, and ambition are, that is, how diverse a desire may be. Thereby, the desire is able to comprehend itself by looking at others.

In truth, the desire wants to simply receive, without being aware of multiple properties and the shades that it possesses. Tell a regular person that he is made of pride, envy, hate, and he will not believe you. Why should he? He doesn’t see them within.

This requires a very long, special development, not in terms of human evolution, but rather in terms of effort aimed at obtaining contact with the Light. Only then does a person begin to understand these notions correctly: not in terms of human psychology but in the exalted [spiritual] terms, in reference to the Light.

In such case, a person finds himself in a special group. He measures himself not against the “people from the street” but against a unique society that yearns for the Creator and is already beginning to absorb spiritual values. He measures envy, lust, ambition, and the degree of his egoism relative to them. This is how a person starts studying himself: who and what he is.

The Creator is concealed and can’t appear to a person since in this case, a person would want to be “pretty” in His eyes, in order to be part of such Greatness. He holds my life in His hands, so can I ever ignore Him if He were revealed?

Hence, the Creator replaces Himself with the group. I stand against the friends, in opposition to them, which gives me an ability to relate to them according to spiritual values. After all, these spiritual values are contrary to me since they belong to the friends whom I hate and reject.

This gives me an opportunity to gain an awareness of evil and to start getting to know myself while standing before the spiritual reality. The group, the environment, reveals spiritual details of perception to me, its properties and values. By rejecting the group, I reject them too. Thereby, I discover the truth.

If I continue on the path, study with the friends, and participate in their actions aimed against my egoistic desire, in order to unify internally, then gradually, I begin to value the states we are undergoing together as well the values we are talking about. In the degree of my demand, I receive the Surrounding Light (Ohr Makif) through the group and start bonding with the friends more and more. While doing so, I discover that it is they among whom I reveal the Light, the Creator.

And everything links into one whole; everything becomes one: the Kli (vessel), the Light, and all of the unifying Kelim. In the end, everything comes into one concept, one attainment.
[30932]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/27/10, “What is A Big or Small Sin in the Work”

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The Book of Zohar, Weekly Torah Portion “VaYera,” Selected Excerpts
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Question: What is a “flood” for the group?

Answer: If the group as a whole is unable to overcome its increasing desire, if the friends reach hatred and cannot overcome it, it means they are drowning in the waters of the flood.

When they sense the approaching flood and the forces that overcome them (Gevurot), they must put forth mutual efforts to build an Ark, meaning to express mutual bestowal in order to be saved from every person’s individual egoism and the common hatred. That is exactly how the authors of The Book of Zohar sat down to study, feeling hatred for one another, and then revealed love.

Everything depends on whether or not the friends use the Torah as it was intended, whether they build the Ark, the common Kli of mutual bestowal, unity, and mutual guarantee in which they will be saved from the flood.
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/29/10, Writings of Rabash

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Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

The Essence of the Work in Torah and Mitzvot

By accustoming themselves to keeping Torah and the Mitzvot [actions for the sake of others] in order to bring contentment to their Maker, they gradually depart from the bosom of the natural creation and acquire a second nature, being love of others.
– Baal HaSulam, Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah), Item 13

The Creator gave us Torah and Mitzvot, which we were commanded to do only in order to bestow contentment upon the Creator. Had it not been for the engagement in Torah and Mitzvot Lishma (for Her Name), to bring contentment to the Creator with them, and not to benefit ourselves, there would have been no tactic in the world that could help us invert our nature.
– Baal HaSulam, “A Speech for the Completion of The Zohar”
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