The Creator vacates a place for Himself within us, giving us a feeling of coldness. But essentially this is not coldness or distancing. We were in a state of cohesion in our small group. Now the Creator extended this circle, and we feel that we don’t have control over the empty place that is created.

Before we only felt ourselves within our circle where a sense of the convention reigned. And now, after the convention has ended, we feel this empty place that grows more and more every day.

If it keeps on going this way, ultimately all the memories of the past will disappear and we will return again to the beastly state. Why does the Creator do this? So that now, while we are feeling how He is moving away from us and how the feeling of our unity dissolves, we will want to fill this empty place with the Creator. Because we understand that we are not ready to retain and keep the warm feelings that were there with our own powers and that it’s going further and further away. That is how the Creator empties a new place within us where His presence and His control must be felt.

The first thing is that we want to return to a feeling of connection. The second thing is that in order to remain in it, we need the Creator’s control instead of the emptiness that was created.

Our goal is connection, and the means for attaining it is the Creator. And now we need to switch their places, the Creator becomes the goal and the connection becomes the means. So we make a new clarification all the time and implement the opposite.
[112708]
From the Preparation for the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/19/13

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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

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If we felt that something in the convention was missing, it’s only because we were not ready for it yet and now we have to work on it. This means that we have to summon the feeling of the connection between us in order to discover the Creator (the Light) in this connection. Thus both the means (the group) and the Torah (the Light) will bring us to the Creator, according to the rule “Israel, the Torah, and the Creator are one.”

The point is that in ancient Babylon they spoke Aramaic, which since then is parallel to Hebrew. Hebrew and Aramaic stem from the same root and they are two opposite languages. One language conveys the information through the vessels and the other through the Light: Aramaic does it through the vessels, the desires, while Hebrew does it through the fillings. There is nothing other than these two attributes and so these two languages exist in a parallel.

The Babylonian Talmud that everyone studies today is in Aramaic since it’s about correcting the vessels. The whole Talmud is a system of correcting the vessels, the desires, but it’s described as the states of the still, vegetative, and animate nature of these desires. The Torah, however, (which stems from the word Light) is in Hebrew, since it comes from Above. This means that the Talmud comes from below and the Torah from Above.
[113072]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/21/13, “Faith Above Reason”

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Question: How should we work internally with the state where I seem to have two options in which you see either your ego or the right work? What should you do so as not to remain idle?

Answer: Here, we feel the need for mutual guarantee, mutual support, that must exist in a group. It is like a wall that guards the group both from external influences and from negative internal influences of all its members.

This wall—the spirit, the wholeness—is built out of the importance of the goal, of the readiness of all the group members to annul themselves before the idea of a group, like in a family where there is a certain inner basis. There can be anything in it, but there is something that constantly balances it, gives it weight, lowers it to the ground, and doesn’t let it break apart and disintegrate.

This is why a family is made of several generations: grandfathers and grandmothers, parents and children. Once, everyone used to live together. The generations change gradually like spinning wheels, but there are always three generations that support each other and which depend on each other. Now, of course, it all disintegrates. In the group, however, we must adhere to it.

There should be a substantial mass in the group that makes it stable and balanced. It doesn’t pull downward, but simply balances different eruptions and disorder. Therefore, a person who goes through different states must have the inner feeling that the group is stable, massive, and permanent.

This is what we must cultivate and actually establish as our foundation. Anything may happen, but we have our foundations.

My job as a manager is to make all the small groups all over the world into one whole, one unified foundation that will support everyone. Then, different problems and conflicts that the Light will certainly summon in us will serve us correctly only in order to grow.

You can call it mutual guarantee or by any other name, but we must do it. The group is like a hot house, an incubator. As it is said, “My home is my castle.” A person needs to exist in an environment—the root, soul, body, attire, and all.

We must establish all this. The group must talk about that, to think. There must be a feeling that this is my family, my home, where I come and don’t want to leave! That’s the way it should be.
[112790]
From the St. Petersburg Convention “Day Two” 7/13/13, Lesson 3

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Question: If I make an internal movement toward connection with the group and am rejected, from where can I get the strength to rise above this and formulate a request for correction? How can I make an effort to ask the Light to come and correct this?

Answer: There must be an incorporation of wisdom from the group against the ego here.

The idea is that, if friends come to you and call you to come to a Gathering of Friends or to some other shared event, it will be unpleasant for you to decline, and you should go with them. However, in this way, you are moving because of their fuel and not your own fuel. So, there will be bestowal, but it will be very small and passive.

In order to be integrated wisely within a group, you must prepare yourself in some way and find within yourself the strength to overcome your ego, just like that, as if you are jumping into a quagmire with your eyes shut, which is very difficult!

There already could be a prayer here to be included in a group. It no longer is considered individualistic but is a group matter because you want to be with them, want to be among them as a force of bestowal together with them. This is already something else.

However, if there is no other choice, then it is desirable that they will come and save you and somehow bring you out from a state of descent and include you among them. However, if you can, try to do this by yourself as much as this is possible because the surrounding Light will illuminate you precisely to the degree of your personal effort.

If they just come after you and it would be unpleasant to refuse, then you will not get any Light. Where is your effort? It is not yours.

The group will advance because it supports a friend, sustains itself, and so forth, whereas for you, no. You will get something general, comprehensive, very distant, but no personal advancement since they included you among them. This is to say, it will be your movement, but it will not be wise, like an embryo in its mother’s womb. They include you among them, and you advance within them together with them, but as an inanimate creature. Therefore, at all costs, it is necessary to try to go outside of yourself into the group.

All the rules of the group are derived from here: To submit yourself toward the friends, to mix with them, to hold onto them, to be useful somehow, to do everything in order to be within the group, not from above and not from below. The main thing is within! Try to be in the center. This is not saying that I am this center of the group. Being in the center means to be protected from yourself within the group.

Question: What is it saying that I made the right effort, a prayer? How would this feel?

Answer: You will get a new perception, a new feeling, and a new understanding of the world order.
[112763]
From the St. Petersburg Convention “Day Two” 7/13/13, Lesson 3

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Question: How can one help a friend correctly if we see that the evil inclination has been aroused in him and he accepts the thoughts that come to him as truths and convinces others of their truth?

Answer: A person found in a group begins to feel within himself all kinds of anti-spiritual inclinations as a result of his good work. We see how suddenly he is changed acutely. Moreover, he justifies his behavior. It is typical for everyone to justify himself.

First of all, you need to connect among you immediately (without him, even though he also wants to share in this), and discuss what to do about him very seriously.

Agree among yourselves as to how you will influence him. He needs to see how we are working to connect, that this is what is important and essential for us, for this is specifically what we are learning, and this is how we do it. About this, there is no argument. This must be so!

If he is opposed or something is not right for him, we simply show him, “You see, this is not our invention. This is what is written in the sources, and we carry out these conditions. Whoever doesn’t carry them out has no place here. Therefore, either stay and gradually be included in the general work, or go.”

It is necessary to show clearly and precisely that only the collective state of the group should determine his behavior, for connection is a general desire of all together, according to a single method for one goal.

It is forbidden in any way to condone such things! He has no right to chill and relax the hands of the others! We must let him understand clearly that we relate negatively to his behavior, but it is necessary to do this gently, gradually approaching vital explanations. We must agree among ourselves to distance from him so that he will see that we continue to connect and support each other, and so forth. If he will not adhere to us it is a sign that his place is not here.

It is necessary to explain to him (with love, you see, we want him to stay), that, to our sorrow, we don’t see the right behavior in him appropriate for the requirements of the spiritual method, therefore, either he surrenders himself to the group, or if not then he will harm it and so for his own good it would be better for him to go.

However, even if he goes, this must be done so that he will have the possibility of returning. For example, it is possible to offer him the option, “You don’t need to come every day. Come when you want to be included in the group.” It could be that he will come once every two weeks, and after that it could be that he will return completely.
[112628]
From the St. Petersburg Convention “Day One” 7/12/13, Lesson 2

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“Faith above reason” means that a person has pushed the limits of the property of bestowal within himself, exiting himself. Faith is called bestowal, the property of Bina, the Light of Hassadim. When I am on any spiritual degree, in any state, I expand my possibility of bestowal and love. This is called “faith,” which begins to predominate, to prevail over the property of receiving, over egoism. Reason is the Light that we receive that fills our egoistic desire. But faith is the property of bestowal, the condition of spiritual advancement.

After the convention in St. Petersburg in 2013, I heard from many people that “now was the first time we felt that we really achieved something.” Indeed, after this convention we first felt unity, and not everyone by himself, but something common, some common mass that linked each other together, closes everyone in itself. In addition, we have found that there is connection between what happens in us and what we study in the primary sources (partly, in The Book of Zohar, partly in the articles of Baal HaSulam and Rabash) about the conditions of connecting a person within the group, the conditions of our unity.

All this has become much closer to us. We seem to have confirmed the correctness of our development. This means that we have received new knowledge. And how can we now go in faith above the acquired reason?

In this state, of course I can be happy that I have become convinced of the correctness of my path: that I have a teacher who does not fool me, that I have dispelled my doubts and solved some problems. But I fell into the desire to receive and got a bit of the Light into these desires. On the one hand, it’s good that I have achieved this, it should be so. We must never doubt that what we receive and what we are in is how it should be, and we got it from the Creator. And now another question arises: How can we go further?

Next, I have to close my eyes to everything that I received and advance to faith above reason: to break through to the next level by the fact that I do not want to look at the gained knowledge or to pay attention to everything that exists in me today as a proof of the correctness of the path. I want to move forward with eyes closed, only for the sake of bestowal. This means that I should not think that I have confirmation of the evidence that I am advancing on the right path or whether I have the inner confidence that I am in the right group with the right teacher or not.

If we go by faith, it’s completely different conditions, the opposite of reason. That is, the property of bestowal is opposite of the property of reception, as is the property of the Creator opposite to the property of the created being. So, the next degree that we have to cover, to which we should ascend, is realized not by our reason and not with our confidence, but on the contrary, when we rise above them.

In other words, now I want to go only to the property of bestowal, paying no attention to anything, despite everything I received at the convention, despite the sensation that gave me confidence, the foundation of life. I am interested only in that, and I want to enter in that.
[112969]
From the Virtual Lesson 7/21/13

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It is necessary to reach the point when all your life is in the friends, together with them in collective unity where there is no difference between us. Our bodies disappear, and there is only the desire that feels the pleasure from connection and is not torn apart. All the parts not only want to unite but have already adhered to each other and dissolved in general unity, having turned into completely uniform, homogeneous material.

All our features and differences disappear in it because we complete each other so much that we turn into one unit, so much so that I do not care whose hands these are, whose feet, whose brain, whose back. Everything is collective as the image of one person. We begin to feel force within this unity that revives this general image that we have built, which is called the human being, Adam. This animating force is called the Creator.

We need to strive to this and live in it all the time. Every moment we need to seek how to strengthen this form where we come to love the Creator through the love of friends. If, for a moment, I leave this search and do not reinforce this state, I fall immediately. I will not feel this right away, but there is no doubt that I fell. It is possible to move only in one direction or another. There are no fixed states in spirituality. Do not think that you can stop and rest. Whether you want it or not in the spiritual world, it is necessary to feel where you are heading every second: to unity together with everyone or in the opposite direction. It is either one or the other.

Trembling fear is required here, which is the First Commandment, and without which you cannot even hope to advance a bit. If some material goal in this world requires me to change direction—to think about the group, the connection to the Creator to help us carry out this material task—then it already is good because it changes my direction.

At least, I am not directed toward a personal interest but at something collective, together with everyone. This already forces us to remember that we need the Creator because without Him, we will not succeed.

If this does not exist, then stronger blows must be sent to us so that we feel our helplessness, the same as the entire world, and we are compelled to recall that only the Creator can help us. No one else can. The main thing is to change direction. As soon as we do this and begin to work in the correct direction of unity, clarifying what and why we need this connection, we immediately change the goal and means.

First, we needed the Creator to succeed in achieving various external goals, and now we understand that external goals were purposefully placed in front of us in order to frighten us and force us to recall the Creator. Thus, we are awakened on the basis of a simple psychological egoism.

For the time being, it is a purely selfish approach, but it teaches us how not to exit “holiness.” After all, there is holiness even in this connection.
[112816]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/18/13, Writings of Rabash

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We should understand that a descent is an indication of the revelation of the illness, the revelation of evil. Evil is when we have no connection with the Creator who is concealed in our environment, in the group of the spiritual commando. Our efforts to return to the previous feeling of unity has to be focused on the Creator and not just on our connection.

The Creator was absent from our intention. We thought that we could simply connect and thus attain everything. We have lost the last link in this chain, the Creator. Now we have to emphasize this most important component according to the formula: “Israel, the Torah, and the Creator,” and realize how important it is since without it there is no mutual guarantee and no covenant; without it nothing can exist!

Now we have the chance to feel the one major component that is missing which sustains everything. This is the reason that we have to gradually lose the feeling of unity and to descend further and further down, only in order to realize how much we need the upper force, which is responsible for our connection and which operates everything. If we think about the Creator, we belong to Him and He takes care of everything and will make sure that we will not exit Holiness.

It says: “For my brothers and my friends I shall speak of peace.” On the one hand, I pray that the Creator should help me with my brothers, and on the other hand, I work with my brothers in order to reveal the Creator, to reach Him and to bring Him contentment. This means that I worry both about the vessel and about the filling.
[112808]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/18/13, Writings of Rabash

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