Instead of holding on to the principle of “there is none else besides Him,” my thought depends on different factors, which I see before me. Instead of looking ahead to see beyond people, beyond the mechanism, beyond all the natural phenomena, and to see just the Creator and myself, I, like a shortsighted person, look at objects that are close to me and see them as the factors my freedom depends on. Just like Don Quixote, I fight windmills, lifeless “scenery.”

As a result, the Creator has to intensify the evil and the sufferings, so that I will have to take a better look at what my life depends on. He does it so that I will not be able to stop this search.

We see this in the example of the state of Israel: Ahmadinejad, the Hamas, threats, missiles, Mubarak instead of Sadat, Mursi instead of Mubarak…the Creator constantly hardens the heart of Pharaoh. Why is that? Because the Jewish People don’t want to see the real reason for what is happening. In the meantime, all the minor reasons were only meant for one thing—to bring Israel to the Creator, so we have to be grateful to them for that. They are merely means.

Accordingly, the people are required to be a bit more clever in order to see who they are dealing with and who is managing the world. The troubles only remind us what the goal is, and it is easy to get rid of them if we turn to the Creator. But we don’t turn to Him in order to receive “rewards,” but in order to correct ourselves, in order to adhere to Him and by that bring Him contentment. Then the current “reminders” will be annulled, and then the “angel of death” will turn into a “holy angel.”

Question: So whom are we working with, with the group or with the external world?

Answer: All of reality, including the external world, including me and the group, are in the Creator. The external world gives me a negative impulse (1), by constantly evoking me to turn to the Creator (2). But I know that I cannot turn to Him directly. First I have to turn to the group, and then together with it to the Creator. Only then will I have a vessel, a desire for it, while nothing will help me if I work individually.

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Preparation to the Lesson

“Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Item 84, Lesson 22

The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpt, Parashat “Naso,” Item 65, Lesson 4

Talmud Eser Sefirot, Vol. 3, Part 8, Question 148 “Answer Seder Siba uMesuvav,” Lesson 53

Writings of Baal HaSulam “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy“

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Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot“: ‘The wicked, in their lives, are called “dead.”’ This is because their death is better than their lives, as the pain and suffering they endure for their sustenance is many times greater than the little pleasure they feel in this life.

If we don’t advance towards attaining the source of life, then life turns into an escape from sufferings. All our thoughts are only about how to avoid evil and unpleasantness. Therefore, we don’t imagine the good as a filling, since we cannot fill ourselves, but simply try to find some peace between the bad moments.

As a result, all the pleasures that we feel don’t last more than a short while, and so we are called “dead” even while we are alive, since we don’t receive a filling from the real source of life upon which all of reality and all of creation stand.

Of course, everyone has his own accounts, and if he sees how much pain and suffering he feels, how much he suffered and what efforts he has made compared to the few moments of pleasure that have made him happy and brought him joy, then he discovers that it wasn’t worth living. This whole life can only be justified as a preparation for the spiritual ascent. But if one examines this life as is, there is no point to it.

Now when we are awarded the Torah and Mitzvot (commandments), we are awarded with the real happy and joyful life by keeping them, as it says: “Taste and see that the Creator is good.” This is what those who have attained it feel. Then we can choose between good and evil. After we receive the Torah, the way, the spiritual principles, we begin to work with the two lines.

This is what the writings mean by: “and you shall choose life so that you and your descendants shall live.” Actually it is a repetition: “and you shall choose life so that you shall live.” But it refers to living by keeping the Torah and the Mitzvot. Then one really lives. “But life without the Torah and the Mitzvot is harder than death.”

This is how a person perceives the difference between life and death: Life means spiritual advancement, and death means lack of advancement. A person gradually understands that advancement means getting closer to love, to bestowal, to self annulment, to rising above one’s ego. Only this is called “life,” without any account of what we feel in our egoistic desires.
[95505]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/11/12, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot” 

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Question: Why do we speak about the end of the consumerist society? Why does the era of consumerism have to come to an end?

Answer: There are two reasons:

1. The first reason is external: We are running out of natural resources.
2. The second reason is internal and it is the main reason: Our desire is changing—the foundation of human nature.

We can analyze economic theories, propaganda, and advertising, we can invent different tricks and technologies, like three-dimensional movies, but all that will not help. A person will simply lose interest in it, like a cat that doesn’t care about the TV set it is lying on. Instead, we will simply pay more attention to society, to those around us. All this is because the desire is changing. There is nothing we can do about it, since it is desires that motivate a person.

This, of course, will not happen all at once. Today it is still possible to promote consumerism by different “special offers.” Still, compared to the past, things are changing. The rate of suicide and divorce is rising, and disappointment and despair are spreading. It is in fact the beginning of a new trend. A person, of course, will still need food and other basic necessities, but the problem is not in such things, but in the desires that we are using incorrectly.

One way or another, the desire is changing very slowly. The question is why does it lag behind the parallel external changes? Why do we encounter problems like the crisis if instead we can leap to a new level by a quick change of our desire? Isn’t it better for people to switch from consumerism, to more social activities of their own freewill? Why do they still want to buy like before, although the previous system is collapsing?

The reason is that this is how they will recognize evil, so that the current situation will leave a bad taste. Otherwise, they will find a vessel, the desire, for something else. They have to feel that they are in despair—that the world is full and at the same time that it is empty. If the previous desires simply disappear, a person will not learn a lesson from the past and will not understand the problem.

Therefore, the desire is changing much more slowly than the external conditions. These conditions have to pressure us and gradually evoke the right response.

Then integral education appears, which explains that the desires in excess of the animal level, meaning basic, rational needs, can be met only in the context of human relationships. The current crisis is meant to show a person that he can meet his needs only in a new integral way. By that, his desires are not restricted, but they actually improve, become updated, and rise to a higher qualitative level. Then he will not settle for something transitory and ephemeral, but only for something that is more emotionally meaningful. A person develops, becomes sensitive to, and wants to enjoy other experiences, which are closer to spirituality.

So it is actually in personal relations, in the family and in educating children that the current crisis is revealed most intensively.
[95474]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/13/12, “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy”

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The wisdom of Kabbalah tells us about its research from its discoveries, from what actually happens. Kabbalists discover reality as they change their vessels, their desires, and their perceptions, and therefore, there are no different voices or different opinions.

It is about facts. It is the same in physics and in chemistry—every scientist can repeat a certain experiment or another and find out that under certain conditions a certain natural law works in a certain way. It is the same in Kabbalah; different people observe the same natural phenomena.

In philosophy, however, everyone establishes concepts based on his own assumptions, in fact, claims whatever he feels like. So today it is clear that you cannot count on philosophy.

On the other hand, Kabbalah in the modern integral world reveals itself as a true science. The newest approaches such as quantum physics and nanotechnology are nearing what Kabbalah discovered ages ago.

But ordinary science is facing a great problem. If on one end of the scale philosophers can openly publish their fantasies, we discover scientific data in vessels that are our desires as an unquestionable fact.

We are sure the world is as we see it. But at the same time we don’t take into account our five senses—it is as if they don’t exist, as if they don’t distort the picture of our reality. Science in this world is limited since it is based on the “animal” perception and studies data that come through its five channels.

The wisdom of Kabbalah, however, uses a much more rigid approach. It isn’t based on man with his five corporeal “animal” senses, but rather allows him to open a new sense, that is external to our body, to come out and to rise above one’s self.

This sensory organ is indeed “outside our body”—which means outside our egoistic desires. It is made of a Masach (screen) and Returning Light. In it, a person perceives the external reality and discovers that it is the Light or the Creator.

On the whole, as Kabbalists have discovered, all of reality is made of “Light” and “vessel”—or in other words, of a desire that responds to the filling of the Light. Kabbalists are very accurate in their definitions. They say that we don’t know about what is happening outside our desire. So it is only about the desire itself and its reactions and its impressions. What is it that evokes them? We don’t know—we only study the reactions in the desire and call it “Light.” Thus “Light” is a reaction in the desire and more accurately, a reaction in the “vessel.”

After all, the desire itself is not a vessel yet. A “vessel” is a desire that is corrected by the altruistic intention that is meant to respond to the Light.

This desire has already undergone a “restriction,” acquired a Masach and the Returning Light and is already tuned correctly. Then it discovers an additional response inside it—an impression from the act of bestowal, from the filling. We call the details of this perception “Light.”

One way or the other, everything takes place in the desire to receive that develops the ability to work as if outside the Masach and the Returning Light. All the impressions and the outlines, or whatever we may call them, remain in the desire. In the desire we conduct our research; we change it, and according to these changes, discover reality.

I don’t know about anything that is on the outside. I am closed within my vessel until the end of correction. And as to what comes afterward, we don’t speak about it at the moment.
[95395]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/13/12, “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy”

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Question: What does it mean: “to connect with the friends’ sparks?”

Answer: To connect with the friends’ sparks means to connect our desires to the Creator. After all, the friends have come here since there is a spark in their great desire that yearns for spirituality, for equivalence of form and connection with the Creator. I am also here because of that desire; it is what has brought us to the group.

We have to connect in these desires, to connect only by the reasons that have brought us here. Let’s take only the ones that have brought us here out of all the thickness of our desires and discard all the rest like a bag full of liquid garbage, and connect the sparks from which our spiritual vessel will be created.

It will be only its upper part, and everything else is formed from the garbage we have discarded when we have annulled these desires. It isn’t easy to discard them, since we have to annul each of these desires one by one.

When we try to connect and want to love, hate is suddenly revealed in order to show us that there is no natural love in us. In the meantime it seems that you love everyone naturally and that you treat everyone nicely, as is accepted in our world—they don’t work on love and so they don’t discover hate.

In order to reach love, we must first discover the opposite—hate. But we don’t work on hate, we aspire for love, the more you yearn for love and really work on it, the faster you discover that you hate and that you don’t love. You are told the truth from Above.

To discover love means to see the friend as the greatest in our generation, and to look only for the positive attributes in him, to try and feel that his desires are more important than your desires, just like a mother feels towards her child.
[95365]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/12/12, The Zohar 

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Preparation to the Lesson

“Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Item 82, Lesson 21

The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpt, Parashat “Naso,” Item 53, Lesson 3

Talmud Eser Sefirot, Vol. 3, Part 8, Question 148 “Answer Seder Siba uMesuvav,” Lesson 52

The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy

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If I want to focus on the Creator, I have to feel warmth towards the friend, like a warm “crimson sphere,” an attitude through which I carry on the connection with the friend to a connection with the Creator. After all, I love the friend precisely because the Creator is in him.

The Creator shows me who I am through the created beings in this world in the way He is concealed in it. If I can feel love towards this world, it means that I will feel love towards the Creator, towards the One who created this world and is concealed in it.

The question is: “Why is the Creator concealed in the world and not in the Torah?” Because this world is His concealment, and if I use the Light of the Torah, I first open what the Creator conceals in the world and then I discover Him.

The stages by which we advance towards the friend are the stages by which we advance towards the Creator, and there is nothing but that. All this is called the way of love, according to the final goal and according to what we attain along the way. Even on the lowest level we discover hatred and then love in contrast to it, and so it is time after time, on every level—hatred and love.
[95468]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/13/12, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot”

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Preparation to the Lesson

“Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Item 74, Lesson 20

The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpt, Parashat “Naso,” Item 25, Lesson 2

Talmud Eser Sefirot, Vol. 3, Part 8, Question 148, Lesson51

The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Zohar - No Comments →

The corrections take place due to the Light that comes from the teacher. The corruptions come from the environment, from the group. But only if a person tries to be incorporated in the environment, taking part in its life and work, studying and being dedicated to the cause, is he sent corrupt desires.

These special corruptions are not only foolish pride or other primitive desires, but corruptions that can draw the Light of correction upon them. This means that a person has to have defects that are totally opposite from the corrected form. He receives all these desires from the environment.

We are speaking about a person who tries to do everything that he can in order to advance spiritually. Then he receives “red light” (redness) from the group, like from a mother’s womb. The group is a mother for him. He receives the “white light” (whiteness) from the father, from the teacher, and this whiteness is his Sefirot, his attributes.

Now a person already has two lines and he has to work in the “middle line.” It isn’t that he can receive it automatically without doing anything. A person has to make efforts in order to be incorporated in this kind of work. Then to the extent that he annuls himself before the group, the teacher, the study, and the Creator, all these factors begin to operate on him and he attains a new level.
[95362]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/12/12, Writings of Baal HaSulam 

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