Light is the characteristic of bestowal, and the Creator is identified in our perception of the Light . In fact, there is the upper light and something higher, its origin, which may not have the same characteristics, meaning that it is something that is completely disconnected from us.

This is because we feel the Creator with our characteristics, with our sensations, with our Kelim, with our senses; and through these, we judge Him by attributing to Him the appropriate names and characteristics. In fact, we don’t know how He feels outside of our senses nor do we know His image. A person gives names to the Creator according to how he perceives Him.

Feeling the Creator can be diverse, multifaceted, and varied. Light is called the sensation of the Creator, which teaches, corrects, fulfills, and shapes us. It is just the way a child perceives his parents in various forms, as teachers and educators, as protectors and those who are concerned about him.

So the Light is such a perception of the Creator, where in principle we don’t feel Him. But we do sense the power that shapes, corrects, and changes us so that we can feel Him.

In other words, the influence of the Creator on us, which prepares us for feeling the Creator, is called Light. Certainly the Creator and the Light are the same thing. This is because only this one source exists outside of us. Besides Him, only we exist, as only one person. Ultimately, each one of us will begin to perceive everything else as parts of Him without intermediaries.

In any case, we perceive everything like this. At first, we require the Light of the Creator and only after this do we want adherence with Him. This is the right relationship with Him. If you want to attain a state of similarity to Him, to relate to Him as He relates to you, then you must think about how to change and correct yourself. In this case it is possible to approach Him. Then our relationship to the Light will be directed towards being corrected and becoming similar to the Creator with mutual bestowal, like the host and the guest.

In any case, the Light is divided into many different influences on us. It is the Light of reason or the Light of feelings, under whose influence we begin to feel and understand who we are and in what way we are separate from the Creator.

Every understanding is built on our difference from the Creator. Even in our world when I perceive the people around me or a particular state, it isn’t important what, in any case we are feeling the Creator. It seems to us that these are some people or images. We are only feeling the Creator.

So we shouldn’t fool ourselves. When a person is involved with something or someone, especially with friends, he must understand that he is involved with the Creator. “There is none else besides Him.” This is one of the explanations; that there is nothing else besides the person and the Creator. And everything else that seems to exist for us, are fragments of my soul. So the main thing is the relationship with the Creator, since this is the Torah.

The Torah is all of those states that we must go through until full resemblance and equivalence with the Creator. This is all of the Light that we must perceive so that a change will happen within us from our first egoistic characteristic to the full completion of correction.

First we pass through a contraction of the ego; after that its neutralization, and after that, a correction, meaning the use of the ego for the purpose of bestowal. To the degree of these corrections, we perceive the Creator and begin to see that He relates to us like a concerned father who is teaching us.

Specifically, we feel the influence of the study, and this is called “Light.” And when the extent of this influence has itself been realized, then as a result of this, we feel the Creator Himself. And we feel Him differently, in a new way all the time, thanks to those characteristics and observations that are already corrected.
[142476]
From the Convention In Sochi 8/25/14, lesson 2

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Question: We felt a special state when we delved deep into the workshop and lost track of time; time passed and we didn’t even notice it. Does that mean that we drew the Light?

Answer: I don’t want to disappoint you, but this wasn’t the Light. Of course, if you were busy with something else that interested you, you would feel the exact same state. You shouldn’t care whether everything around you disappears or not, it is meaningless.

Do you see yourself inside the friends? Do you feel their movements as your own: their desires, intentions, direction, and changes? Do you feel the same inner sensations that the friend feels because there is one common heart beating inside you? We should try to examine this.

Question: The Creator waits for us to turn to Him. And turning to a friend, bestowing to him, should I expect something in return?

Answer: When you turn to a friend, you turn to the Creator. What do you expect in return? What do you want from Him? Do you want a certain inner connection and adhesion in order to attain the upper root and to discover how you delight Him by that? Everything is already included in such an action, but it should be dressed on specific figures, and in specific clothing.
[142564]
From the Convention In Sochi 8/25/14, Lesson 2

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Question: We have created a weapon so powerful that all of us have the opportunity not only to nullify and dissolve, but also to develop, to grow for the good of the society.

We have learned to feel ourselves as a single whole. What do we need to add to feel the Creator more clearly? Where must we make an effort besides in the lesson, besides praying for the success of our friends?

Answer: Everything that I feel around me is my soul, it is all me, but, in my perception, all of the people are detached from me by my ego. If I neutralize it, I will stop feeling them as contrary and opposite to me. I will begin to wish for them what I formerly wished for myself, meaning the best. Then, I will be using myself, my ego, in the right way, to correct it.

It is not about having the right attitude toward others, not about love of others; rather, it is to correct my ego within me.

How can I correct it? It is only according to the examples that I see: This one, I don’t love for this reason and that one for other reasons. That one is distorted, this one is repulsive, evil, and so forth. My ego portrays an emotional picture for me of my relationship toward everyone. I criticize everyone, just like everyone else does, for they have something to criticize others about, as it is written, “With his own blemish he stigmatizes [others] as unfit” (Talmud Kiddushin 70a).

I criticize the world that is portrayed to me as terrible, and I see it as getting even worse because the ego is growing. We perceive the world this way, according to how the ego portrays it to us: people fighting, someone kills someone, everything possible. That is how the ego draws a picture of the world for us, not within us, but outside of us so that everything will be perceived more vividly, clearly, and juicily.

In order to correct the ego, a very good indicator has been given to me. I must bring myself to such a state where I see the world as the Garden of Eden (paradise): People love each other, they are only doing good for one another, and they merge into a single whole of mutual love.

In addition, it is the same thing in the still, vegetative, and animate nature. It depends on the internal correction of the person. The world itself doesn’t change; it is permanent. The person is the one who changes and sees the world differently. This is the entire correction.

When you are together, do you perceive a situation like this where you don’t see anything negative in the friends?

At first, one seems lazy to you, another seems dirty and disorganized, and a third is noisy. One annoys everyone with his pomposity and another through his shouting. No one knows his place. That is how you evaluate everyone at first.

Can you now say that these people are closer to you, that you don’t see any distorted faces, any harmful gazes? This is because when you live with someone, you no longer pay attention to his defects and perceive him as some kind of general image. For example, a little child doesn’t see his mother, but knows that there is someone big next to him: This is his mother.

Can you say the same thing about your relationship with the friends? Has some kind of change taken place in them, at least partially? Do you feel, even egoistically, that you can’t imagine your life without them? Do you feel that fragments of you are scattered throughout Russia, as if your body has been torn to pieces and scattered to different locales?

A person’s sensation must be precisely like this, really to such a degree that you will begin to feel each other, experiencing parallel states, and, after that, a single common state of ascent or descent. You even will begin to feel each other’s physiological states: how this one has a stomachache and that one a headache.

There was a time in ancient days when these were the requirements of a doctor. This is because medicine was not based on all kinds of devices, but on the doctor’s feeling the state of the patient because he was a divine doctor. Correction was a profession where one corrected another. So, by feeling him, he had to work together with the Light to convey it to the patient, to help him. This was a completely different medicine.

In this way, it is necessary to scrutinize what we are missing all the time so that the situation of the separate bodies will disappear and everyone will become “like one person with one heart.” They will move in sync. They will understand and feel each other where everyone must optimally be at every moment. This is not Brownian movement; it is not chaotic. Rather, it is internally coordinated because a single Light acts upon and influences everyone.

If we direct ourselves like this, we will raise our sensitivity. Then, we will begin to feel how one force is working within us and is gathering us together to the degree of our sensitivity toward it, to the required degree, by our inner yearning and constant attraction.

This is all of our common work that only can be done collectively. One person can jump, walk, make an effort, but, for him nothing will come of it. Essentially, he is doing everything right, but the proof that he is doing this for the sake of the Creator, is when he carries out these activities together with others, wanting to connect with them.

Why? It is because the ego was created specifically to separate us, and, through nullifying it, a person directs himself toward the Creator, toward resemblance and equivalence with Him. The ego is a helper that we cannot do without.
[142480]
From the Convention In Sochi 8/25/14, Lesson 2

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Question: Not everyone has the opportunity to come to the convention in Saint Petersburg in September. How can all the friends in the world help each other to connect to it?

Answer: This convention will engage the Sochi group, that is, those friends who were doing dissemination work in Sochi this summer, and in three days, we must go through what they went through.

Clearly, not only those who are coming to Saint Petersburg will participate, but rather all our groups and students from all over the world. So, all of us together as a whole, by internally feeling all that they felt and experienced in Sochi, will absolutely acquire a new level. We are standing before this. We are waiting and expecting from them preparation for realizing the convention in Saint Petersburg.

There is no obligation at all to come physically to the convention. A trip is not at all relevant to this. Distance means nothing. I saw this in the example of our groups in South America who adhere to us without separation through integral connection and are tightly connected with the daily lessons. They simply have no feeling of detachment or of distance.

It is the same thing with the friends in Sochi who wholeheartedly let me go home after a one day visit so that the following night, I could transmit a lesson to everyone. I feel that they also have the same feeling, the same connection, the same fulfillment and satisfaction from the lessons.

So, all of us are mutually connected, and there are no problems for anyone regarding connecting to the convention. Someone who really cannot come to the convention doesn’t need to take the trouble and invest superhuman efforts beyond the limits of his ability. It is preferable to organize mirror conventions in your groups where you keep maximal contact, and I assure you the same intensity of connection and the same enthusiasm. If you are with us, then we are with you as if we are found in a single place.

In general, we want the experience in Sochi to be conveyed to everyone in sensation. Our great world community will be integrated with what they go through and their experiences, so this will be a very good level.

Our friends, men and women, attained a very good and beautiful mutual cooperation and mutual integration there, truly real dedication. We hope that we also will be integrated with them. This is why friends exist.
[142256]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/26/14, Writings of Baal HaSulam

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During spiritual development a person passes through a multitude of stages before reaching despair. From despair he further experiences all kinds of states until he discovers that only the Creator can help him.

If we are in a group, then as it is said, (Isaiah 41:6) “They helped every one his neighbor.” We remind each other that the Creator is the one who is giving us all kinds of exercises and that behind all of these states that happen to us we must discover Him at every moment. But we are confused by forgetting about this between these moments that all of this is coming so that we will ask Him to be revealed. By ourselves we are incapable of discovering the Creator.

About this, Baal HaSulam writes in the article, “There is None Else Beside Him”: And the benefit from the rejections is that through them a person receives a need and a complete desire for the Creator to help him, since he sees that otherwise he is lost.

So we must focus all of our attention on how to discover the Creator in everything that is happening with us. We must check what the Kabbalists recommend for us to do when we are studying, when we are in a group, and when we are disseminating so that all of these activities will be directed towards discovering the Creator in every situation that happens to each of us and with all of us together.

The Creator only helps those people who truly want to get closer to Him. It is impossible for them to stop in the middle of the way and remain in the false situation they are currently in.

If a Reshimo, a desire to approach the Creator, is truly awakened in them, He helps them by placing them in even more complicated situations where it is even more difficult to comprehend, understand, and agree that everything comes from the Creator. Or He lets them relax; everything is okay, everything is wonderful: They study, they advance, they disseminate, everything is going well and they have no lack of anything.

But if the person invests effort in every circumstance and tries to gather additional desires with the help of the group and work with the external public, all of these desires acquired from the friends or from the external world become parts of his soul if he gathers all the desires from them, all of the deficiencies for fulfillment, all of their failures in life. He transforms them into a single desire, a single demand directed towards the Creator. So He organizes all of this for them. And then he cannot justify the Creator and he is so confused that he is not prepared to attribute everything to the Creator only; he thinks that all kinds of other causes and forces may exist.

And by beginning to be involved with them, the person suddenly sees that he is not linking everything to the Creator. Likewise, he cannot say that everything that is happening is for the good. So he has a reason to advance, there is an imperative to shout to the Creator to help him so that He will give him the right perception, so that He will be discovered. But this is not because the person is confused. In this case he would be asking from the side of the ego for things to be better and more pleasant for him, for everything to be okay.

On the contrary, he wants to remain confused and have claims against the Creator. By not agreeing with Him, he blames Him for what is happening in the world and cannot bring himself to a state in which he sees that all of the events that are happening in the world, even the most difficult and worst situations, all this is a higher mercy and everything is coming from the good and that does good.

And all the vile and terrible situations only pass over our ego so that we will be distanced from it, and will purify ourselves of it, and then they will all remain in the ego, whereas, we detach ourselves from it and move toward the side of the Creator.

This means that the blows only help us to distance ourselves from the ego and move to the other side. They don’t pass over us, but over our ego and are felt in us to the degree that we adhere to it. But if we rise above it, then the blows remain there, within the ego.

Likewise, through these blows we must understand that this is the Upper Light that is shining more strongly than usual, but it cannot shine within the ego, so within the ego it is felt as the opposite, as darkness. And this darkness in the density of our desire, of the still, vegetative, and animate, and speaking, brings us the feeling of a world full of suffering.

If within this desire on the speaking level we build a group, with its help we can become detached from every egoistic desire. Then we rise like a spaceship and take off towards the Creator.

That is how we detach from all the bad sensations and are very happy about this because we begin to discover that there is none else beside Him and that He is the good that does good, and now we can say that about Him and not blame Him. We see the truth and so we are happy, not that we now feel that things are good for us, but because we can say good things about the Creator.
[142035]
From the Convention In New Jersey “Day Two” 8/9/14, Lesson 4

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 Shamati 1, “There is None Else Besides Him”: A man must always try and cleave to the Creator. Adhesion with the Creator is an indication that everything that happens is coming only from Him, and that He acts and influences me only with the help of the Light; “there is none else beside Him” and He is the “good and beneficent.” I try to discover these two facts and keep adhering to them. I try with all my might and I make sure not to leave either of them.

In everything that happens, I first look inside my mind and see that this comes as an influence on me from the good and benevolent and that “there is none else besides Him.”

In the representation that develops within me of this whole world and of what is within me, this entire system directs me towards that source that presents this representation of our world, this life, and me. It is here He wants me to discover only Him through all this theater, until the theater disappears and only He and I remain in adhesion.

So, we have no other work except to orient ourselves like this at every moment of our lives. And everything else is designed to help in this: studying the wisdom of Kabbalah in order to attract the Light that Reforms and awaken it further so that it will illuminate more strongly. I must be in a group with the friends so that they will frequently remind me about this.

I must be involved with dissemination to show how this one force acts in the world, because I go out to the world, wanting to lead it towards an arrangement where it will be connected into a single whole that is integrally linked with “there is none else beside Him.” All of these activities are designed only so that behind this whole world, behind the friends, behind the study, I will discover the Creator with whom I am in adhesion.

And that is how it always has been. Even now, we are in this state, only it is hidden. This brings me much confusion. This concealment is called Olam (world), from the word, “Olama” (concealment).

We must remove this world, remove this concealment, and then everything that we are feeling now with our senses will disappear, the entire still, vegetative, and animate nature. Everything will become connection between us, between our connected desires. To that degree, we discover the one power, the good and benevolent. Everything ends in a state of “one receives one,” one creature is filled by one Creator. This is the completion of correction.
[142093]
From the Convention In New Jersey “Day Two” 08/09/14, lesson 4

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Baal HaSulam writes in the article, “There is None Else Besides Him”: It is written, “there is none else besides Him.” This means that there is no other force in the world that has the ability to do anything against Him. This is the one and only force that decides and implements everything, and there is nothing outside of Him.

And what man sees, that there are things in the world that deny the higher household, the reason is that this is His will, in order to confuse the person, giving him a feeling that there are several causes, several forces.

And it is done this way intentionally so that through this confusion, through the dissipation, a person can direct himself precisely towards this force, as it is with a viewfinder. At first, the focus is diffuse so that afterwards it gradually becomes directed precisely. It is the same thing here.

Specifically, if we begin to feel a few forces, a few causes, a few sources for our lives, ultimately we reach a decision that all of this is being done by one force which intends to confuse us from all sides so that we will correct our vision, our perception, and in all kinds of situations happening to us, we will be focused more on it.

The method of the Creator is to confuse us, and precisely through this confusion we must discover Him, in order to understand Him more, to connect with Him more, to break through this blurred vision called, the left rejects and the right adducts.

The Creator acts in two directions: On the one hand, He rejects us, confuses us, gives us all kinds of exercises, as if we are going the wrong way, not towards Him, that this is not Him, and our friends are not our friends, and our teacher is not a teacher, and this is unnecessary. Instead it is the opposite.

All of this is so that we will scrutinize the truth and acquire it. Then it will already be ours and we won’t be confused any more.

Meaning that which the left rejects, confusing us, is considered correction. This means that there are things in the world, all kinds of situations, which to begin with, aim to confuse us, to divert a person from the right way, and by which he is rejected from Sanctity. And from this, to understand Him and get closer to the friends, the study, the understanding, and feeling.

It is precisely from this that we start the right way. We begin to feel and identify the direction of the right way. But our goal is not in this. If, with the help of these rejections, we become wiser, more understanding, and advanced, then in total, we would become wiser and more sophisticated beasts and no more than this. But we don’t need to attain the state in which we are wise and understand what is happening and how the Creator is giving us exercises. No, we must attain His level.

And so the Creator brings us to these confused, very difficult and unpleasant states, to exhaustion, from which there is apparently no possible way out, so that we will truly feel that without Him we have no chance of attaining the goal of creation, the goal of all life, and so that we require Him.

If we make a demand to Him, shout at Him so that He will come and help, so that He will connect us, so that He will correct our perception, so that He will rescue us, then this is a most happy state in His eyes. This is because then He can approach us, carry out these corrections, and we will be together.

This is the goal of all the rejections.
[141888]
From the Convention In New Jersey “Day Two” 8/09/14, Lesson 4

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Convention in Sochi, Lesson 2

Convention in Sochi, Lesson 3

Convention in Sochi, Lesson 4

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Convention in Sochi, Lesson 1

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Question: What do we do when the feeling of unity begins to subside?

Answer: I advise everyone to seriously engage in even greater unity. Moreover, it should be distinctly aimed at creating one single desire directed at connection where the Creator will appear.

You must develop this thought in you, seek it constantly, analyze, collect, process, and refine it. It should constantly churn inside of you and you need to “suck” it like hard candy.

Strive to support each other and treat each other with great sensitivity. Do not distract one another from thinking about spirituality. Reread what Kabbalists write about the conditions of uniting at Mount Sinai in order to “be as one man with one heart.” These are the conditions for revelation of the Creator.

The entire world group stands at the threshold of this event. What is required in order to come to it? Find materials about standing at Mount Sinai and read them, trying not to perceive the language of the sources as religious.

Constantly remain in an increasingly more precise, pointed, common, mutual, and intertwining intention so that all your intentions will connect between you and create one single whole through which the Creator will be revealed. You can achieve this.

Do not confuse this most important goal with going out to the broad public. Going out among the people is meant only to “tighten” you a little more, to give you additional spiritual needs.
[141605]
From the Convention In Sochi “Day Two” 7/14/14, Lesson 6

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