When we speak about approaching the Light, the characteristic of bestowal and love, it raises the question about how could we find this, how would we know what this is?
Before us is a very simple laboratory, it is ourselves, severed from each other by our ego and in the same situation as the Light is in regard to substance, that is, in opposition. If I want to understand how to relate to the Light, it is up to me to understand how I relate to every person, to the others, and evidently the same relationships exist between people as between us and the Light.
So, if I ask how can I approach the Light before it pushes me with the help of a stick , I must maintain the condition from the Torah, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Nothing else is required.
Near me are many people with whom I can try to arrange relationships like these, and maybe I can even find people who understand me and we can help each other. We can attain mutual help between us. We can hint to each other how we should approach each other despite the mutual ego that exists between us. So, we learn.
To the degree that we want to approach each other, we will play at being good, nice, bestowing, and loving people. We approach the Light. Through this approach we attract much more of its attention to ourselves.
The increased flow of Light will change me, but no longer negatively. It no longer will awaken new egoistic desires in me. Rather, it will change my characteristics. The right intentions will appear in me. It is clear that I am playing with intentions, bestowal, and love for another that I don’t really have. However, I try doing this mechanically as if I am approaching the Light, and it begins to influence me, begins to awaken in me the right intention. Gradually, this will happen.
As the Light carries out some kind of positive changes in me, so I advance; at the same time, it also will arouse negative characteristics in me, meaning that I will discover additional portions of ego to work on.
Ultimately, it will become clear that I am taking my personal development into my own hands and am no longer left completely formless, blindly controlled by nature. Instead, I control my own advancement.
Despite this, I must understand that all this depends on the environment that I choose, on my attempts to connect with my friends in spiritual work, on building a laboratory of our ourselves to correct human nature together. All of the conditions, all of the laws, that we learn in the wisdom of Kabbalah are derived from this. In principle, this is our entire method.
It is clear that there are many conditions and various additions: how we must change ourselves, how to inspire a friend so he will influence me positively and will draw me forward, what can be done to influence him more, and how we must help each other to rise above our nature.
Our entire approach is the method of yearning for the Light. We don’t need to wait in vain for the Light to effect us, obliging us to do something through its negative influences.
So, we organize groups and students, and try to organize large conventions with specific preparations where it is most important to understand that everything depends on me, on us, on the sum of our intentions. Everything depends upon everyone, men and women who have been learning for some time and those who arrived not long ago but who already have a clear understanding in them that has more or less crystallized that the right intention will bring our substance closer to the higher force.
So, from our own desire, we advance quickly to a state where we begin to feel the Light that influences us; for if I desire it, then I am the first and it is the second, and so to the degree of my advancement toward it, I will feel its influence on myself and will begin to discover it. However, that is only if I have an inclination to approach it according to my characteristics. That is how we work.
Along with this, reality is changed. I begin to feel a discovery of the force of nature within nature—how it acts within the substance of the still, the vegetative, and the animate within us and connects all this into a complete, global whole—and then I begin to understand the entire essence of this. The masses of human beings and all that exists are imbued with a single power within a network of forces, and this is revealed to me according to my intention.
Therefore, we are gathered here in order to try to work seriously among us with one intention, one goal, which is to feel this connection between us, this network of forces that passes through the entire universe, a network that manages and gives life to all that exists, and when we begin to discover it, we begin to discover its laws, the true inner natural laws of all of creation. We begin to learn them.
This helps us to strengthen our intentions even more, to understand better the nature of the Light, the higher power of nature. We can perfect the relationships between us and our relationships with nature, with the Light, more and more. We will see which relationships between us, which desires, skills, and characteristics are most useful and optimal.
In this manner, we will begin to choose new ways for ourselves: how to bestow, how to maneuver within our egoistic characteristics, how to change them gradually, starting with one characteristic, and later changing the rest with the help of the characteristics that we corrected before, and so on. This is to say, we begin to learn an inner, personal, and deep psychology.
The internal integration of the person after he begins to feel all of these characteristics within himself and how he can control them will be discovered between us more and more. And most importantly, we will feel each other clearly, and suddenly will feel how much we are glued together within a single network. Cooperation like this between us will be so strong that, with the right intentions within us, we will connect all our matter, which will absorb and be filled with the characteristics of bestowal and love, with the characteristics of the Light, in the single likeness of Adam (Man).
This is our utmost goal, and the minimal goal is to begin to act this way between us, to resemble the Light as much as we can with all the power available to us. This is enough. If we realize this goal both quantitatively and qualitatively with what we have already accumulated within us, even for a brief moment, if we can discover a little of our equivalence of form with the Light, then we will discover it within us.
There exists only one precise law of physics here, the law of equivalence of form. This is the state that all of us want to reach at our convention. I hope that we will succeed. Everything depends on each one of the participants, those who are already found here today and those who will arrive tomorrow, and will begin our great convention together.
We now are found in a special place. In this city, they often have tried to make various corrections, revolutions, and changes during the course of human history, and I think now it all depends upon us. We want to make an internal revolution within us, to become the bestowers, the lovers, as religions and the laws of nature have required of us and which essentially is the same thing.
I hope that each one will relate responsibly to the task that stands before us, and we will do it.
[112156]
From the Preparatory Lesson St. Petersburg Convention 7/11/13
Related Material:
The New Level Of Conventions
Creating A Resemblance To The Light
What Will Sprout Out Of Us?
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Question: When I come to pray out of total despair, do I need to ask that I will change, or do I need to ask that a friend will advance spiritually?
