The topic of love seems to be the simplest and most understandable. But in fact it is the most difficult because it is the central topic in the issue of perceiving the Creator, of coming closer to Him, and in understanding the root of the world.

We confuse the concept of spiritual love with the familiar egoistic love in this world, which we know intuitively how to use. It is like a baby who cries all the time and demands love from the first day of its birth. This is how a person acts until the last day of his life.

We do not treat love in its true, correct form. We think that love is something simple and self-explanatory. This explains why so few people reach spiritual attainment, i.e., altruistic love for the sake of bestowal, universal love, and love for friends through which we reach spiritual love.

The problem is that we do not understand that our entire life and the path of spiritual development is aimed at finding love for the other. This is a great difficulty because naturally we understand love in an egoistic form and perceive everything through self-love. But we do not know what love for the world is or what love for the Creator is, which is the only way to come closer to Him and begin to feel Him.

Everyone can feel in one’s heart how much he neglects love if it is not an egoistic love, but rather love for the world.

The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches us a different attitude to the Creator and to the truth. We think that the main goal is to find out how the worlds cascaded downward and how the Sefirot and spiritual Partzufim were born, and that the better we study the technique of the spiritual world, the more we will advance. But this is completely wrong.

In fact, everything depends on the way we develop a feeling of love for the other in our hearts in order to treat all the inhabitants of this world with love—all people, animals, plants, and inanimate nature, all levels from top to bottom. After all, we can attribute this love to the Creator who created this world and gave it to us so that we could correct ourselves by building the right attitude in ourselves at all four degrees of our will to receive.

First, we need to make a restriction on our will to receive fulfillment and turn it into universal love, love for everything that is outside of us. All this was created by the Creator, and therefore, I am obliged to love all of His creation in order to come closer to Him.

We have nothing to do in our life but to turn hatred or indifference to the entire world into a feeling of closeness and love called universal love.

Only to the extent of such universal love for the other will we begin to feel what it means to love the Creator and become close to Him. Through turning egoism into love, we attain all of the true spiritual reality.

Therefore the topic of love is the most important, central, and deep topic within which we will meet with the Creator. Let’s try to free ourselves from self-love and appreciate our friends. It does not matter if they are close or far away or if they are good or bad, but they are on the same path with us and have a special desire to reach true love.

The Creator has given us this inner, concealed yearning. Let’s start working and unearthing the love hidden in us until we reach universal love; let’s get closer and unite with the entire creation and its inner force, which is the Creator.

This is the central grain of all spiritual work. You can forget the names of the Partzufim AB-SAG and not know what the upper worlds are called, but we will feel this through love; it will be not just memorizing, but true attainment.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/2/23, Love – Selected Excerpts from Zohar for All

Related Material:
Methodology Of Love
Love Is Mutual Inclusion
Is There Love Without A Cause?

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