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Question: If the matter of creation is the receiving desire, what does it mean to bestow in order to bestow? Where is the work with desire?
Answer: The truth of the matter is that the receiving desire itself works for the sake of bestowal. It supports a fellow human being, helps him, and performs various actions in relation to him.
In general, to understand bestowal for the sake of bestowal, it is necessary to understand what reception for the sake of bestowal is. It means that I work with my receiving desires so as to use them to raise a fellow human being and perform the actions of bestowal upon him, similar to how Bina works in its AHP.
I include the receiving desires of the other into my own and fill him with everything he requires. And what he requires is infinity. Then with my help his desires reach an infinite magnitude, while the Lights coming to him through me grow to the infinite size of NRNHY. This is how I work receiving in order to bestow: I make sure to give the other everything necessary, utilizing all of my abilities for this purpose and totally ignoring my own benefit.
However, for this I need the upper force that is not in my nature. My inborn nature lets me perform only actions that promise me personal benefit, whereas the actions of bestowal are totally selfless and do not benefit my receiving desires in any way. This is why I can’t perform them unless I receive the strength from the upper dimension, that of bestowal.
Hence, I incorporate the needs of the other into my desires and then through my desires I fulfill him. In general, we are talking about the desires that relate to our interconnection since the spiritual work is performed at the level of the unity of souls where we fill ourselves with the upper lights.
There is another option: not to engage my receiving desires, but only to transfer all the good from myself to the other, to participate in his fulfillment, but not with my own desires. This is pure bestowal. As a rule, these actions precede mutual bestowal. They correct our unification. Thanks to them we annul our egoism in order to rise above it to unity. And unity itself is activated by the direct use of our receiving desires.
In this way, bestowal for the sake of bestowal is an intermediate, small, weak, “poor” state. But we have no choice: We need to undergo it since we thereby clean our desires and rise above our egoistic qualities. Without it, it is impossible to start working with them. First of all, we have to “cleanse them,” meaning to fill them with the Light of Hassadim (Mercy).
[R38899]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/23/2011 on The Principles of Global Education
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Receiving To Bestow
Question: People tend to be impressed by examples. Let’s say a person doesn’t believe that he depends on society and thinks that he can solve everything on his own.
Let’s imagine this situation: a baby is born, placed in a round room where the light constantly on, there is food, but the baby has no other interaction with people or animals. What will happen to him?
Answer: He will not become human. He will just consume food naturally, like an animal, and grow up the same way.
Question: But will he have his own thoughts and fantasies?
Answer: Nothing will happen. Absolutely nothing. All this appears only under the influence of the environment. Whatever environment you place him in, this is what will come out.
Comment: But then he is, in fact, not a man or even an animal.
My Response: Right. Therefore nothing will work outside of the environment. That is, you will get an animal organism that will grow up in this form. If you show him his mother later, he will be scared of her because he will not understand what it is that suddenly appeared alive and even moving. After all, he does not know what it means to be alive and what it means to move.
He has no sense of time, no sense of the surrounding space. Feed him through a tube, and give him nothing else. And then what?
Comment: So he will grow, say, until the age of twenty.
My Response: What difference does it make up to what age? He will remain at the same level—only absorbing food, releasing waste, and nothing else.
Question: Will he have self-awareness? Will he feel like he is living?
Answer: Only at the level he exists at.
Comment: A man is built on desires; desire is lack, desire is deficiency.
My Response: He will have no desires, no inner urges, because there is no surrounding society with which he can realize himself.
Question: So he was born a zero and will die a zero?
Answer: Yes. Absolutely.
Comment: But nature does not treat humans like that.
My Response: Nature, of course, does not do this; but sometimes, if it does, there is a special purpose and reason for this.
Without an environment, no Reshimot will arise in a person, no internal data for implementation, because he will not be able to implement it. One determines the other.
[343060]
From KabTV’s “I Got A Call. Scandalous Experiment” 8/6/10
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Comment: Let’s suppose that a modern person ends up without a computer and all the things they are used to; they would get scared, but at the same time they would realize how strongly dependent they are on all of it.
My Response: No, that is still not most terrifying existence. We once talked about how I wanted to go to the Altai Mountains. So what about a computer? Maybe with a computer if I am going to sit there and write a book. Really what else do you need? A little boat, a fishing rod, rubber boots, and a bucket to go pick mushrooms. For a month? Wonderful!
You cannot even imagine! Alone with yourself, no one else. Nothing. It is pure bliss! You are alone with your thoughts, there is no one around, nothing affects you, and you can dedicate your thoughts to the most cherished, most beautiful, and purest, disconnected from the entire surrounding world. That is great!
I saw my teacher like that when he would disconnect. He would specifically go to Tiberias to be alone. And when I would go there to visit him, I saw a man who looked at me and did not understand who had come, why they had come, or what they wanted from him.
In other words, he could not feel what world he was returned to. He looked at you as if he were disconnected, and slowly, very slowly, he would come back to himself.
Question: But still a Kabbalist cannot exist completely alone?
Response: Sometimes it is necessary.
[343104]
From KabTV’s “I Got A Call. Scandalous Experiment” 8/6/10
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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 117
How Can We Gain Strength for the Work from a State of Helplessness?
How can we who realize that we lack true knowledge, who feel powerless and incapable of acquiring anything from what we read, who see that the door to spirituality is closed before us, how can we find strength to move forward if this work is placed upon us alone and not upon someone else? Where can we draw the strength for the work?
There are two completely different states that we tend to connect as one. The first is a state in which we are completely insignificant and beastly, with no spiritual strength at all. We do not understand anything about the spiritual world nor even about this world. We have no idea what will happen to us or to the world in the next moment. We have no concept of how everything is structured and operates. The more we open our eyes, the more we feel like a small child playing with pebbles on the shore of a vast ocean, just as Newton described his scientific work.
And this is a correct feeling. To some extent, this is what it means to sense the immense forces of nature. This is our reality. We cannot grasp this concept through our own strength.
This state described above is actually a springboard to an active state. Active in what way? In that we can demand strength and we can ask for corrections to be made within us. The previous state is meant to show us that, at our current level, this is truly our reality.
How can we ascend from this? We forget that we truly lack these forces. Why did the Creator make it so that at every step we get stuck and realize that we are nothing? It is so that from this helplessness, we will remember that the Creator exists. We then turn to the Creator, and He arranges everything for us in a way that lets us move forward, to understand, to act, and so on.
Why did the Creator make it this way? It is because this entire process is a means for us to connect to the Creator. It is intended so that we will surrender, so that we will feel a need for the Creator, and through this need, we will acquire the Creator’s attributes.
Ultimately the Creator wants us to become eternal and perfect like Him.
Each time, the Creator shows us weakness, helplessness, despair, ignorance, and a lack of grasp on reality—the exact opposite of His state—so that we will desire to turn to Him and receive the opposite of what we feel. “The opposite of what we feel” means receiving something from the Creator, His qualities and level.
Thus, through contrast, we arrive at a more complete state each time. The deeper we sink into feeling what is bad, the greater the good we can attain in contrast.
This is how all the spiritual levels are built.
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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 116
Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 115
Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 114
Preparation to the Lesson
1st part of the Lesson — Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Matan Torah (Giving of the Torah),” Item 7-9, (12.8.2003)
2nd part of the Lesson — The Right Way to Study the Wisdom of Kabbalah
3rd part of the Lesson — Writings of Baal HaSulam, Shamati 18, “My Soul Shall Weep in Secret – 1”
Selected Highlights