The Kabbalists who left writings, books, and textbooks for us are teaching within them some general rules about the right way for people to connect in a Kabbalistic group.

The first condition is nullification of the self. We must nullify ourselves and show this to all the others as if we are proclaiming: “I am ready for everything in order to make a complete zero of myself. Do anything you want with me. In no way do I want to command anyone, to be the leader, to pressure anyone. I want to be a complete zero in a group and am ready to do everything necessary for your benefit.”

The second condition is greatness of the goal. Our advancement depends on the greatness of the goal in our eyes, on the importance of the characteristic of bestowal, love, and unity between us. This must be the most important thing for me and I must show this to everyone. I must speak about this, even if this is not that important to me personally because the friends will return that stimulus to me and we will impress each other. Our obligation is to elevate the group, for it has a lofty goal. I must speak about this with the friends, all the time elevating the importance that the group is everything. This will help me to nullify myself.

The third condition is bestowal to the friends. I must try to give them some gifts. By the word “gifts” I mean bestowal to the friends. I go to the kitchen and wash the dishes, clean, do something for them. I try to serve them, like an adult serves the children, helping them in whatever way possible, to give, to add to every situation in the group. On the other hand, I must feel myself as small, wanting to receive influence, education, and bestowal upon myself.

That is, on the one hand, I am great, I bestow to the friends all the time, exalt the goal in their eyes, and care about them. On the other hand, I am small, ready to receive everything from them that can fulfill only me.

A dual relationship like this regarding the group is very important. The larger the gap between these two polar relationships: I am below – the group above and I am above – the group below, the closer I will be to the goal.

We also need to include some of our particular problems that we need to raise to solve them.

All of this is realized in that I am always concerned for my friends that it will be good, happy, and pleasant so they will have complete confidence of attaining the goal and they  remain with great energy through the connection between us. And this energy must be pumped through the group so that all of us are “cooked” in it, in the good sense of the word. It will warm and throw us around so that we will shake all of the ego out of us and accumulate a completely different force, the power of bestowal and love. That is what we need.
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From the Moscow Virtual Convention “Unity Without Boundaries” Day Two 12/14/13, Lesson 4

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The soul is the one and only vessel (Kli) in which we feel ourselves as a single whole. In the spiritual world nobody feels himself separately because we all feel the unity, feel the sum result of the connection.

In that we lose ourselves individually, each one of us finds himself specifically in total unity, and this is an indescribable feeling. There is no need to fear losing yourself, for we acquire an eternal and perfect existence here and not a miserable, egoistic, temporal, and wasted existence.

And besides this, from the eternal, glorious and infinite world, we see our cocoon and those people who still exist within it, as in a dream, like blind people trying to exploit everyone to their own detriment and not understanding it. Each one wants to pull the blanket over himself and thinks that with this he will get something good, but in the end all of his attempts only bring suffering.

So how is it possible to come out from this cocoon? We do so only by way of the group. In what way is it possible to begin to do something within it? For this a very interesting state is given to us, existence in bodies. Therefore our inner feeling can be both within the cocoon, in our egoistic body, and outside of the cocoon, outside of our body, in an altruistic state.

People who already exist with their feelings outside of the egoistic cocoon still can live physically in our world because our body has no connection to the spiritual world. This is simply some physiological entity, an imaginary component that is portrayed for us as existing, but essentially this entity is completely imaginary and doesn’t exist. Physicists have also already spoken about this, not just Kabbalists; science is gradually approaching this fact.

In other words, the Kabbalists can exist simultaneously in the upper world in a spiritual form and in the material world within the physical body, returning to the material image that appears in our world to leave their impressions for us, to teach their sensations, perceptions, and experience that they received by going out from our world to the upper world. They tell us how they worked in a group, united with it, learned the fundamentals of the states of the group and with its help gradually passed to the upper world.

We must use their advice, recommendations, and instructions to follow after them as after guides that show the way. So we also call them revolutionaries, pioneers, and we go after them. If not for them, we would not know how to organize in a group in a precise form in our world. But even if the group is organized in the right form, this is still not enough.

Besides this, we must be involved in learning about the upper world and about those laws of reciprocal cooperation of bestowal and absolute love that exist there with bestowal above reception with constant overcoming of our evil inclination. On the other hand, we also must be involved in external dissemination in order to bring all the rest of the parts of the one collective soul after us until we attain complete adherence, coming together, connection, until we attain a state like this that will be completely similar to the Creator in all characteristics.
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From the Moscow Virtual Convention “Unity Without Boundaries” Day Two 12/14/13, Lesson 4

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Question: If there are stages in the development of the human ego, are there stages in the development of the group ego?

Answer: The movement is only forward. There is no other movement, not in nature and not with the person.

So don’t think about the ego and you don’t have to think about the group ego. It’s necessary to yearn only to advance towards group unity. Then in a natural way you will pass this group egoism. Very big problems will appear among you in unifying, in understanding, in general, in how to endure the friend who is next to me, and so forth.

But in any case, the yearning must only be forward. You don’t need to think about “how will we discover our ego as quickly as possible.” You should only think about positive discoveries, not the negative ones.

The fact is that all of Malchut is latent within us, the entire immense ego, the enormous intention for the sake of my beloved self. But we begin to yearn for unity and not in any way for anything else!

When I yearn for the right side all the time, then my ego grows on the left side in a different form parallel to it. And in a manner like this it follows that at the moment I rise to a particular level, immediately a negative intention “for my own sake” appears simultaneously. In the end, I include the negative component within the positive component and thus I create my Kli.

From the positive component I have a “screen” (Masach), and from the negative I have an inner desire that I transform into positive, and in this way I grow all the time.

It’s said: “Everyone who is greater than his friend, his desire is greater.” Therefore my main foundation (1) must be yearning for unity that grows (Σ) all the time. And the ego, that is the intention for myself, will always be secondary (2), and it will not disappear; don’t be concerned about it.

You ask, “How in a group can we discover its entire ego?” You will discover the entire ego of the group when you reach the higher line, the completion of correction. But in spite of it all, you will advance towards this upper line only with the “middle line” in that you always yearn for the right first, only for unity. And the “left line” will inevitably appear in you.

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From the Moscow Virtual Convention “Unity Without Boundaries” Day Two 12/14/13, Lesson 2

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Question: I have no desire to simplify the wisdom of Kabbalah for the framework of distribution to the masses. I want to be involved with a dry methodical science and to pass it on in a form like this. This concerns me very much. With what could this be connected?

Answer: This is due to the fact that you don’t understand how much the wisdom of Kabbalah is a practical science. All of the calculations and sketches are good only when you see clear and precise actions behind them: How humanity will ascend to the level of the Creator, reveal himself to the next world, to the next dimension, for itself.

When this truly will begin to be shown to you practically, and the wisdom of Kabbalah is an absolutely practical science, then you won’t have any contradictions and opposition between it and the work with the masses. This is work, just like taking care of a newborn, when you feed it and clean up after it, feed it and clean up after it all the time. And you do so for many months, until it becomes a small person.

Initially this work seems to you to be miserable, unpleasant, repulsive, and even unnecessary. But this will pass.

To the degree that you yourself enter into the science of Kabbalah, you will feel more and more how much it is impossible to advance forward without attainment, and all this calculation will be empty, it will not replace discovery of the upper world. The upper world can be discovered only when you act in mutual participation with the friends and through them with the Creator, and simultaneously descend with this down to the masses of society.
[123407]
From the Moscow Virtual Convention “Unity Without Boundaries” Day One 12/13/13, Lesson 1

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Our entire problem is in the intention of our actions. A person’s actions are divided into physical and moral aspirations, inner desires that can be expressed in a particular form in his actions. We live in a world that is composed of two components: our inner aspirations and the outer actions. The most important thing is the inner aspirations to which, in general, we don’t attribute much importance.

It is clear that the world around us is directed toward a particular goal, and the form of our advancement doesn’t depend on us at all. We see that all our programs and projects lack value, and we cannot realize them. They disappear somewhere and in their place various other events arrive. You see that we don’t control anything. We make all kinds of revolutions, build something, aspire in a particular direction, but at the end, everything turns out differently and we cannot understand what is happening to us.

The wisdom of Kabbalah says that the world is under the influence of absolute laws that we must know and not just observe, and we must use them in the right way in order to reach the best state possible for us in the field of the application of these laws.

In any case the world will reach the goal. A person, whether he wants to or not, will reach a state that was planned from the start by nature and toward which it has led us for billions of years.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, it is possible to reach this final good state in two ways.

One of them is the way by the forces of nature. This way is unpleasant, bad, pushing us forward through suffering and influences our ego, our instinctive desire, which acts automatically to be in the most comfortable state that we can choose for ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, at each and every moment.

When nature develops us through suffering, it shows us the inferiority, baseness, and vulnerability of this state, and then through this state, we are forced to seek something else. However, the idea is that nature constantly leads us in this form so that we choose the next state according to its goal, and eventually we advance.

Thus we advance by the way of trial and error because we don’t know our next state and don’t understand what it must be in comparison to the previous state. We flee from the previous state without aiming for the next state; we move forward unconsciously: The main thing is to hide, to escape from the suffering just as every animal instinctively flees from danger.

This advancement, in any case, brings us to the goal, but by a long and difficult path.

As a result, we are invited to understand the whole chain of events we have been passing through over the course of thousands of years of our evolution.

In this way, we discover a very interesting truth: the need for the change in intention in all of our actions. In other words, our actions can remain as they are. The main thing is to work on changing our intentions, and this is, in fact, talking about a change in myself.

The most difficult thing for the person is to change himself. What do I want from what I am doing, from my life, from every state through which I am passing?

You see that the intention I am now maintaining, either consciously or unconsciously, is only for my own good or for the good of others. In this case, I must change in some way! How can I rise above my nature, change myself, my intention?

The Kabbalists say that this is the main thing, the most important thing for the person. There is no need to do anything else. We try to change our lives, our society, and the wisdom of Kabbalah says that everything changes through a change of intention. If we change our intention, we change everything. If we can control our intentions, we control the entire universe, all the worlds!

Therefore, if, today all of the intentions in all of my actions are only for my own good, I must transform them so that in every activity they will be only for the good of others.

Is this possible? In principle, no. If we look at the reality that surrounds us, we see that everything acts only egoistically. In other words, we and the nature around us—human society, all inanimate objects, plants, animals, and humans—only act for their own benefit, for themselves, and cannot change in any manner.

However, if we continue to act this way, we will cause even greater suffering. And now it is evident in our world at an increasing rate: All kinds of troubles are coming upon us that are becoming more and more threatening.

On the other hand, in each and every generation, there are a number of people (in our generation they are many) who are beginning to understand that they must reach something else, to go out to another level of existence, to another level of intention, to understand what is happening and rise from the level of the activated to the activator.

This desire acts in the subconscious of all of us. Among a part of us, it is revealed less, among another part, more. In other people, it is revealed in various, unique forms. We see the ways in which people come to us, how they find us. You see that we exist in the field of our intention, and they are attracted to it and join our groups.

Many of them disappear after this, returning to their world. Many of them certainly don’t understand why they came as it seems we didn’t explain this to them in a good way and in our lessons and workshops about Kabbalah. Therefore, we must advance and correct ourselves in this also.

However, in a general manner, in our time, there are already many people who aspire to change their intention so that, through the two intentions—for their own good and for the good of others—they can begin to manage their state and the state of the world that surrounds them.

Therefore, even though our first intention is absolute egoism, an intention for our own good, we can correct it. For this, intelligence and control were given to humanity.
[123133]
From the Moscow Virtual Convention “Unity Without Boundaries” Day One 12/13/13, Lesson 1

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Question: How can one not fall for the pride of the friend to whom I nullify myself? And, how do I myself need to relate to this when they praise me so that the praise doesn’t stop spiritual work?

Answer: It is truly possible to destroy a person through praise. For the most part, I relate to my students with a little mockingly, a little derision, and sometimes rudeness. Sometimes, I push some individuals away, holding them at somewhat of a distance, not allowing myself to get close to them, and they to me. There are people who also behave this way toward me or toward other friends.

The entire idea is in the intention: why we do it.

If, in this way, friends begin to be arrogant, then you must solve this problem among you by discussing it in the workshop circles. I very much recommend behaving specifically this way. Everything that accumulates in you that you cannot resolve personally must be introduced in workshops.

You arrange an anonymous discussion there without relating to a specific friend, but you pose the question in such a form that the problem will be clear to everyone. If, after that, the behavior of the friend doesn’t change, return to this in a workshop in another few weeks, and gradually the person will understand what is happening to him.

I don’t see another way to influence a person and explain to him what is impossible to explain directly. We don’t have the right to do this, except through the workshop. This is an amazing opportunity that is given to us in a group. This is why we exist in this world where while we are still in an egoistic state, “for my own sake,” we can negotiate some altruistic interaction, and in such a manner, go forward.
[123131]
From the Moscow Virtual Convention “Unity Without Boundaries” Day One – 12/13/13, Lesson 1

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Question: Do I have to hug the friends as is customary here?

Answer: There was a time when I also very much rejected hugging men. In general I don’t relate to people who express their feelings outwardly. This was very difficult for me. For a long time I didn’t know what to do.

But after that, I pulled myself together and began to think: “Why is this necessary? Where is this leading? Why is there such a huge inner struggle appearing inside me? What if I were really to feel that these were my children or very close relatives?”

If you want to hug a girl, then this is understandable, innate; natural desires attract you to her. But with the friends, you don’t have desires like this because you don’t feel them as being close to you.

But if you were to find a man who is truly very close to you from an internal aspect, then you would be drawn to him in an absolutely natural way without overcoming any rejections. Therefore everything depends on this: how much is this person close to you.

With a girl, relationships like this come and go; this is our nature. But with a friend, this is different. When you begin to feel that without him  you cannot attain the greatest goal in life for which we have descended into this world and that only he can help you, like with a team who is climbing a mountain, he holds you and pulls you upward, then you relate to him in another way.
[123290]
From the Moscow Virtual Convention “Unity Without Boundaries” Day One12/13/13, Lesson1

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Question: We are going to have an international convention soon in which we will celebrate the publication of The Book of Zohar adapted to the new generation. What does this mean?

Answer: By working with this book we are aware, understand, and feel that we have a source of power that belongs to the upper nature, to the force that manages everything to the smallest detail, to the smallest cell, to the last atom. The Book of Zohar has a special quality that allows us to connect to this force and to be inspired by it. Thus we will be able to understand and feel it and work according to it.

We have no other key or connecting channel, other than The Book of Zohar. All the other Kabbalah books were actually written so that we would approach the main book and use it correctly. So we celebrate the publication of Zohar For All.

We have to understand that we are on the verge of a new era, moving on to a level of a new development. We have to disseminate this book all over the world, and produce many other supplementary materials that will serve to bring people closer to it.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/17/13, Writings of Baal HaSulam

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Question: It is said a thousand enter a room and only some are honored with the discovery of the Creator. Therefore I am overcome by fear, do I have the potential to discover the Reshimot?

On the one hand, I understand that spiritual work is a great benefit and at the same time I cannot be released from the fear. How must one work with this?

Answer: We know that hundreds of millions of people want to be rich, famous, and in control. How many of them attain that goal?

The spiritual goal is compulsory for all. The expression that a thousand enter a room and only one attains the goal belongs to the Kabbalists from the previous generations. In those times it wasn’t required that everyone attain the spiritual worlds and those individuals who merited this acted according to very complex laws. They had to maintain very rigid and difficult conditions in order to enter the upper world.

In our day, every housewife, every simple guy from South America, from Siberia, from Israel, from the United States, and from other regions can attain this without any preparation; the desire simply ignites within them and this is everything. We are entering a state like this where everyone without exception must advance to the goal.

We even turn to those who don’t have this desire, in order to awaken it in them and prevent forward advancement under the influence of suffering because the world is already in a threatening state; we see where everything is advancing. Therefore the condition in which, “a thousand enter and one goes out” is not relevant for us. Today everyone must go out into the spiritual world even those who have not yet entered, not to mention those who are like us.

Today this condition doesn’t work, forget it. The Kabbalists simply reminded us of that to spur us on a little bit, for in spite of it all, one must relate to this very seriously. This is within our power.

The Kabbalists are apparently telling us, act in those frameworks in which you can and then you will succeed. This is saying that you must dedicate all of your spare time to inner work. At least it’s necessary to try to direct our intention to this all the time.
[123214]
From the Moscow Virtual Convention “Unity Without Boundaries” Day One 12/13/13, Lesson 1

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Question: If in my daily life a small desire to direct my intention to bestow to the Creator appears and then quickly disappears, what can I do in order to focus on it? How can I help myself, should I draw something on my hand, or do something else?

Answer: You remind me of those years when I was learning with Rabash. I also drew a symbol on my hand so that I would not forget the intention. When I was sitting behind the steering wheel in the car, the symbol on my hand was constantly flashing before my eyes, as if to remind me that I must think about the intention in order to bestow. This is so unnatural for us such that it cannot appear in a person’s head without some kind of external reminder.

So do everything possible: draw something on your hand, set an alarm clock, and activate some signal on the cell phone so that every five minutes it will remind you about the intention. It’s not important which actions you do, they could be very different. The main thing is not to interrupt them; rather, just simply go back to control the intention.

The moment that you prefer it you will feel a difference between our world and the spiritual world, because only the intention differentiates us from the spiritual world. The moment that some inclination appears within you, you will immediately feel that you are entering into a completely different matrix of sensations; you will begin to feel the world differently. It will suddenly begin to be like in a movie and then an absolutely different picture will appear.
[123125]
From the Moscow Virtual Convention “Unity Without Boundaries” Day One 12.13.13, Lesson 1

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