Comment: As a rule, prophets talk about two options of development: hard and easy….

Answer: Suppose your son is lazy and stubborn. He is smart but has no desire to realize his potential properly. What would you like to see him as in the future?

Comment: A famous soccer player.

Answer: I see. It is the modern dream of a father.

Well, you take him to a soccer school, but he is lazy and does not want to work. He is required to have a daily regimen, exercise regularly, and sleep well at night without any parties. The life of athletes is a hard life indeed; it follows a strict schedule. People sacrifice their best years to become professionals. In this case, the body becomes a machine that is pushed to work at full capacity.

So, your son does not want to practice. What can you do? But you are sure that soccer in particular is his future. Then, you take a belt. Here, the question arises: Whether beating can make him a soccer player? Does this move him in the right direction?

Comment: No, this simply hurts him.

Answer: It means that the belt does not help. But after this “educational work” your son makes a calculation: What should he do? He suffers both from the beating and the training. Where is suffering greater, and where is it lesser? His egoistic desire compares the outcomes, and he decides: If his father makes him suffer more than the coach does, he goes to soccer practice.

On the soccer team, he meets other boys and gradually acquires a taste for the game. If he does not, you continue to punish him until he fulfills your program.

We see from this example that suffering simply takes one closer to realization. How can we manage without it? We are lazy and stubborn, each of us. It is not just about physical activity; we are obstinate in the mind and heart, in perception and sensitivity. Every second, we shrug aside important things, take a smoke break, sleep with our eyes open.

How can we use every moment of our life for spiritual training? To do that, we constantly have to ignite ourselves with our friends’ burning desire. Otherwise, the Creator will inflict blows upon you, and you will come out of your daze because of fear or pain, one or the other. However, you must realize the entire program because without it, you will lack desires.

Consequently, you face only one opportunity: to fulfill the desire of the Creator. You will do it in any case, but you have two options, two paths, leading to this realization. You cannot escape training and awakening; however, you can take the long path of suffering, during which you sleep (although not like a baby). Or, you can take the short path, where you are given a chance to realize yourself quickly by receiving additional desire, additional awakening from the environment. They stir your enthusiasm, and you run to your practice.

It does not matter which way you come to the practice: This is your choice.
[44466]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/31/2011, “The Peace”

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

Love of Others Is the Means to Attain the Love of the Creator

One cannot deceive himself in love of friends and say that he loves them if in fact he doesn’t. Here he can examine whether he truly has love of friends or not. But with love of the Creator, one cannot examine whether his intention truly is “for the Creator” or “for himself.”
– Rabash, Rabash—the Social Writings, “Come unto Pharaoh (2)”

The correction of man’s relationship with his friend is more capable of bringing one to bestowal to the Creator because this relationship is changing and irregular, and the questions about one’s relationship with his friend surround him wherever he may turn. Hence, their cure is much more certain and their aim is closer.

Whereas the work on the correction of man’s relationships with the Creator is fixed and specific, and is not demanding, and one becomes easily accustomed to it, and everything that is done out of habit is no longer useful.
– Baal HaSulam, Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah), Item 14
[44056]

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Question: If the Creator gives me an opportunity to reveal Him every moment, why don’t I succeed in spite of how much I try to achieve this connection?

Answer: It doesn’t matter whether you reach this revelation or not, but every moment the private upper governance works upon you. You have to look within yourself: What does He want from me, why did He give me this state, what do I have to do?

As the result of such searching, perhaps I will be able to reveal what He demands from me and perhaps I won’t. Maybe, He purposely confuses me so that I need Him to reveal what He wants. But I have to have some sort of “end of the rope” that I can grab onto.

It is said: “Do anything, but just don’t leave!” That is, do everything not to lose the hook by which you can hold on to the Creator. Every moment I search for how to find Him concealed somewhere within me. That is why it is called the internal wisdom, “the inner part of the Torah.” You have nothing to look for on the outside, but only inside yourself.

The Creator is within a person, within our desires. Usually, we imagine that we ascend a ladder in space, but this merely shows that we move to higher, greater spiritual states, bestowal. In essence, our entire search is internal.
[44429]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/31/2011, Writings of Rabash

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Question: How can a person reveal his or her role in this life?

Answer: This comes after the question about the purpose of life: “What do I live for?” This question becomes more and more acute every time, rising above other questions of the heart.

There are many questions (desires) in my heart, and I have to deal with them, organize them in order, and take the highest one so that it is not obscured. I have to go with this particular question, and the rest only support me in reaching the answer to this most important inquiry.

Each person chooses his or her goal for this core question, be it money, honor, power, or knowledge. One would like to become a scientist, another a member of the government, and a third one just dreams of becoming successful and enjoying life. And there are also people who ask about the meaning of life.

However, to find out its meaning, it is necessary to connect with the root from which this life comes. It turns out that this search is higher than regular earthly life. It’s not inside society, but above it where this life descends from. It is impossible to find an answer to this question within human society.

Long time ago, I naively thought that it was possible to approach the solution to this question through science, to understand how this life began, to artificially create vegetative, animate or human life from the still level of nature, to solve the mystery of life: Where does it come from and why does it exists? In the end, I realized that our science does not answer such questions, and my interest in it disappeared at once as though it was something frivolous.

A person should try to clarify his most important question, his highest requirement, and go with it. Then, he will gradually find out how he is pulled toward increasingly more exalted questions. As a result, he will come to the question: “Who is the Creator that has created me? Where do I come from? Who am I? What is my purpose?”

This is the question at the degree of Bina, bestowal, that asks within Malchut. It is explained in The Zohar in the article “Who Created These.” MI (who) is Bina, and ELEH (these) is Malchut. A person has to come to this question: “Who Created These,” meaning “Who created me?” When he attains “Who” (MI), he will know himself. This is ELEH because ELEH becomes clarified only in the unity with MI.

Then, he reaches the name Elokim (God, the name of the Creator made from ELEH and MI) that becomes dressed in Him, as it is written: “May the name of the Creator be upon you.” Thus, he attains everything.
[44432]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/31/2011, Writings of Rabash

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Question: During the studies, sometimes I think about how I can attract the Light, and sometimes I try to understand the inner meaning with all my might. Do I have to try and regulate these states, or should I just accept them as they come?

Answer: We have to study the upper system the way it is explained in “The Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah” (Pticha) and The Study of the Ten Sefirot. Without this, we will not acquire the language of Kabbalah, and we will not have anything in which we can clothe our sensations, to express them in any way, or give them names.

That is why we have to know the definitions. In every science that we begin to study, we first of all learn the definitions and terms in order to understand its language. Having learned the definitions, we can start linking them together and come to know more complex concepts. However, for now, I’m just learning the terms and not the qualities I would be feeling. For now, I’m just playing with them like a child with toy blocks.

Hence, we need to study, and this is study in the mind. Yet, you shouldn’t immerse yourself in it too deeply. This system has to gradually become clearer in a purely mechanical form without your trying to attract your sensations or spirituality into it. Otherwise, these examinations will harm the inner work.

However, after you have learned the system, you have to look into how it can relate to you. That is why when reading The Study of the Ten Sefirot, you are sometimes thinking about your inner states without any connection with the text. But in some states you understand that all this is happening inside you, and you try to look for these states.

Sometimes you even start feeling that with every word you read, something is happening inside you; you already have inner, sensory reactions. Furthermore, you start to react in your sensations just by recognizing familiar words.

This means that the Light is spreading inside you and coming closer and closer to the degree of Malchut, organizing the inner HaVaYaH inside you, taking it to the first spiritual step on which the revelation occurs. That is why you start feeling and reacting to different qualities.

Of course, during the studies, you not only have to look deeply into yourself in an inner search, but also align yourself with how you are connected with the group and how you want to reveal the quality of bestowal between you.

You have to align yourself as follows: me, the group, and the Creator whom I reveal in the connection between us, and that’s what I’m reading about right now. Now you only need to start studying, trying to reveal this common network in which you will reveal the state you are reading about.
[44425]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/31/2011, Writings of Rabash

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The Book of Zohar, Chapter “Truma” (Donation), Item 75: One who wishes to set out to the road should rise while it is still night, watch by observing the hour on the east side, and see in a vision the letters that strike the firmament, one going up, the other going down. This is the sparkling of the letters with which the heaven and earth were created.

Of course, all these phenomena take place within us, within each person, and we have to look for and recognize them inside ourselves. We are talking about the connection between us, its kinds and nature. This is how Kabbalists talk about it. After all, there is nothing else.

Ultimately, we reveal the perfect network of connection between us called Malchut of Infinity and on the way, see it partially, in various forms. Consequently, when we reach the final correction, there are no more forms. Everything is dissolved in the white Light. As it is written, “He and His Name are one.”

However, for the time being, there are all kinds of forms, properties, worlds, and concealments hiding perfection from us, which we reveal once again through the structure of all these worlds. Concealment was created from above downward; from below upward, revelation takes place by the same steps, in the same worlds.

That is why we should try to imagine the entire text in the connection between us: what it talks about and about what forms of connection.
[44443]
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/31/2011, The Zohar

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All that occurs after the four phases of the Light’s expansion in the will to receive is nothing but the creature’s reaction to its discovering the Creator. The entire creation outside of Malchut of the world of Infinity is its impressions of what it finds inside itself, which is regarded as the worlds, expansion from above downward, the breaking, and returning back up, from below upward.

Everything unfolds solely inside Malchut, and beyond this, there is nothing else. The entire reality is made of emotions and feelings, Malchut’s response, until it reaches the final clarification, the “End of Correction.”

The tip of the letter "Yod,” containing the active, abstract force of the Creator, is where His action ends. It results in the following: matter, form clothed in matter, the abstract form, and the essence. Besides that, the upper one, the creative force, doesn’t work on the creature any further. His job was finished once He stamped His name on it.

As to the lower one, it has to find this Name with the help of all other names, meaning its experiences and impressions. Whenever I feel that I exist as a consequence of the act of the upper force, what I experience is the Creator’s name.

This is why He has so many names. The entire Torah is the holy names of the Creator, even Pharaoh and the other wicked such as Bilam and Balak. There is nothing else except for what matter and Light experience together since the Light has imprinted matter with it. When all of this unfolds, it will be the "End of Correction."

This is why in the world of Infinity, where “He and His Name are one,” the Light imprints desire with its entire form, and this is all He can give to Malchut. Further on, Malchut works on its own with the Light that it now contains.

It conceals itself so as not to feel Him, then disappears from Him, connects with Him, and creates all possible combinations with Him regarded as Partzufim. However, all of this is a game it plays by using the screen, the game with the infinite Light that fills it.
[44448]
From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/31/2011, Talmud Eser Sefirot

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Until the Light spreads in the will to receive by the four phases of HaVaYaH, the creative force will not unfold in the creature. Therefore, the authentic desire of pleasure will not be revealed, which otherwise allows the determination of what this creature is, what it wants, and how it responds to the Creator.

Hence, HaVaYaH is regarded as the holy name of the Creator. Why is it holy if a name is always what the created being assigns? This name is holy because only in this form, after all the four phases of the Light’s impact on desire, does the Creator’s property unfold in the creature, which affects and imprints His form in it. This is why it is called the Creator’s name. This imprint, left by the Light within desire, imparts desire with the form of the Light.

The Light as it is has no shape, and there is no way to describe what it is and how it looks. It is something transient and unknown, some kind of abstract form. How, then, can the creature learn anything about it, connect and exchange impressions with it, and form a relationship with it?

For this to take place, the Creator, the very tip of the letter “Yod,” the leading creative force, aims its influence at the matter created by Him “from absence” and starts imprinting Himself in it. Consequently, similar to playdough or clay, this matter starts showing the Light’s stamp. Matter begins to demonstrate to us what the Light is, which cannot reveal itself otherwise.

All world forces are related to the Light. It runs through everything such as electricity, magnets, and nuclear and sub-nuclear reactions. We think that there are a variety of forces in the world, but, essentially, everything is underlain by this single force of Light that we can’t see. We see it only in action, and when the Light’s actions are revealed in matter, it is described as the Creator’s name, the Light’s expression of itself in the matter.

This is a wonder that we are unable to comprehend. How can the Creator’s shape, His very own property, unfold in the matrix of HaVaYaH, its creation? To make this possible, the creature has to undergo all four phases of development. Only at the final, fourth one can it begin to understand and recognize itself.

But how will it recognize itself? It will do so while coming to know the Creator, and that is what the creature is.
[44452]
From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/31/2011, Talmud Eser Sefirot

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