We are not able yet to provide each other with the constant force of mutual guarantee, and sometimes we enter this condition and then exit it. However, we must try to minimize the state of exit, those moments when we again become preoccupied with the care of ourselves and are drowning in the desire to enjoy. Try to get out of this state quickly, and find support that will help you rise above the worries about yourselves.

Taking care of oneself seems quite fair and justified to us. We feel insecure, uncertain, and unsure about receiving our necessities. However, above that feeling, there should be the force of confidence called the force of faith, the force of bestowal.

Perhaps, a person will find himself in very dangerous, frightening situations. They should not be glossed over. Instead, one must demand the force of covering above them from himself, the group, and the Creator so that there is a void that needs to be filled with the necessities and the things beyond necessity, and a person builds this cover, the screen, above this feeling of lack and emptiness.

He should try to do this as quickly as possible in those situations, in those moments of life when the force of mutual guarantee, protection, disappears. We can show our dedication to the goal in those moments.

We are not responsible for the moments of descent, and you should not regret that you fell, lost confidence and faith in bestowal and mutual guarantee. The Creator builds new voids in us because no single moment is like another.

We must give thanks that, now, above your feelings of insecurity, you can build an even greater connection and bestowal to strengthen these concepts so that they become strong, protective screens for us. The final correction is to fill all the moments of descent, all the voids that open due to the revelation of greater egoism, with the force of mutual guarantee and confidence originating from bestowal, adhesion.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/24/12, Writings of Baal HaSulam

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Three conditions of a prayer are the conditions that enable us to unite with the next degree: GE of the lower with AHP of the upper. They demonstrate the loyalty of the soul that is required and disappointment in one’s own strengths, dedication to the upper One, faith in the greatness of the higher degree, and the feeling of one’s worthlessness that allows one to cancel himself.

This refers to the faith in the greatness of the upper One, which fully depends on the influence of the environment. A person is unable to reach it on his own. The need for the upper One only depends on the environment because a person is not able to develop a need to bestow on his own. This is an abstract goal that contradicts his nature, and this is why it can come only from the environment that rules over him.

Only the environment can give me the strength that will allow me to rise above my body and decide that death is better than a life without the quality of bestowal, without a spiritual sensation, so that I would agree to bestow instead of receiving, no longer wishing to continue living in my egoism. The ability to carry out these three conditions depends on a person’s loyalty to his environment, on the environment’s ability to convince him of these values.

He is unable to develop this attitude on his own, and, even if he mentally and logically understands that the books state that such are the conditions of the spiritual world, he still will be unable to come closer to them. The environment was given the power to influence us in order to help us attain the perfect system, the quality of bestowal, to come out of ourselves and connect with other broken souls.

It is a known fact that when getting into the wrong crowd, a child who was formerly good and well-mannered in a short time becomes a criminal, and he even becomes the worst of them all since he uses the education he has received for the worst. Conversely, a good environment can correct a former offender, even though this is more difficult to do.

What is special about an environment that strives toward a spiritual goal and connection is that the Light from a higher degree helps it. It performs the actual action of lifting us from the plane where we now exist.

We wish to connect in order to become like the higher degree, and this is why we attract the Light that Reforms. Similarity to a higher degree represents a great connection between us, and, when we wish to connect with the purpose of pleasing the Creator, to materialize His desire to reveal Himself to the creatures, our connection receives an unnatural power from the higher degree.

This power depends on our drive to connect despite the fact that we are unable to attain it. In regular life, it is very easy to connect for the sake of an egoistic goal. There is absolute unity and loyalty in a criminal mafia, but we are unable to accomplish it, and, naturally, we will not be able to do it until the Light corrects us.

However, we attract the Light that Reforms with just a single desire to attain this. The group becomes the source of the upper force, which has an indirect effect like the Surrounding Light. This is not yet the Direct Light of a spiritual degree, but, time after time, when the Surrounding Light influences us in response to our attempts to connect, it helps us bit by bit, gradually building our connection.

In this way, through our mutual efforts when we operate from below and the Light operates from above, we finally attain the first contact with Him. This Light robes in our vessel, and we reveal our first spiritual degree.
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From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/23/12, Shamati #209

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Baal HaSulam, Shamati, article 209: “Three Conditions in a Prayer”: There are three conditions in prayer:

1. Believing that He can save him although he has the worst conditions of all his contemporaries, still, “Is the Lord’s hand waxed short” from saving him? If not, then “the Landlord cannot save His vessels.”

2. He no longer has any counsel, he has already done all that he could, but saw no cure to his plight.

3. If He does not help him, he will be better off dead than alive.

These three conditions sum up many other conditions, which a person has to gather inside him in order to reach a true prayer, an outcry. The outcry is the desire in the heart. It is born the moment we reach a desire that is adapted to the revelation of the spiritual world, the revelation of the attribute of bestowal, the moment we are ready for it even though we are on this side of the Machsom (barrier), which means that we expect to get something from this discovery.

It isn’t a pure request yet and it cannot be pure since there is the shattering between the levels.

We always pray in Lo Lishma (not for Her name), for ourselves, and from that we reach Lishma (for Her name), bestowal. It says: “I have labored and I found.” But still, our desire has to be adapted to the level we are about to reach. It is impossible to rise to it without keeping the three conditions.

Suppose I kept two conditions and understand that I have done everything in my power, but there is no salvation. How can I determine that I have done everything in my power? Even if I suddenly decide that it is so, it is only for one brief moment and then the next moment I already begin to search for something else that I can do. After all, how can I be certain that I have tried everything?

So there is the third condition “better off dead than alive.” A person reaches absolute despair and cannot go on this way. Then the third condition seems to increase the second condition by bringing a person to such an extreme level that he cannot wait any longer to check and see what else he can do, but he cries out with a prayer.

If I don’t get what I want then I am better off dead than alive. Then the second condition helps me, since we operate in two systems: the mind and the heart. So I can always say in the mind that I didn’t do enough in the heart. Emotionally I can always admit that I haven’t attained in the mind the necessary examination and clarification of my feelings.

So eventually, all the conditions add up to these three conditions, which add up to one condition: one prayer, raising MAN.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/23/12, Shamati #209

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Question: How can we use the lesson in order to tighten the connection between us? How can we enter the channel that you open and hold one another?

Answer: We have to feel that we are mutually connected to one another. If you don’t feel that we are connected in our hearts a bit more today than we were two days ago, then you haven’t attained anything at the convention. This is the index for the success of the convention. We feel the connection a bit more, the warmth and the closeness among us; we have been through a certain process, we have experienced a certain event that connected us and has created a common understanding, feeling, action, power, investment, and general knowledge of what we had. All this has built a connection and now the feeling of connection has to develop further.

We have to feel this especially during the lessons, since during the lesson we actually develop our connections more deeply, and so I have to keep the way it feels inside me and thus to advance. Step by step, from one lesson to another, from day to day, I have to feel, just as I do now after having grown a bit closer to one another after the convention.

It isn’t felt in the mind and not in the heart, but in the feeling of connection, as we all become closer to one another. A few more such efforts and we will begin to feel different phenomena among us—that something is beginning to move, to shake inside, and this is already the spiritual embryo.

So we should want all our desires and thoughts to be around that and they will be part of our mutual connection. This is called the “center of the group,” the collective feeling that is built by similar actions.

It is impossible to hold conventions everyday; it isn’t good; we would immediately feel that it is useless. But we have to renew our connections during the morning lesson. Of course, there will still be the daily problems, difficulties, and the hardening of the heart as usual. But this is what we have to do: We have to check daily and assess the point of our connection and with it advance forward.

I think that today it should be clearer to everyone than it was before.

Question: Is the morning lesson a group work?

Answer: Yes. We know this from Rabbi Shimon’s students who also came to the morning lesson and discovered the mutual connection between them and wrote about it in The Book of Zohar. First they felt the evil among them, the hatred, a burning fire among them; they couldn’t look at one another or connect to one another. Then they overcame that state and attained the connection: love, unity, mutuality, and described these levels in their book. This is how The Book of Zohar was created.

There is nothing more than that; only the closeness among people when we clarify and discover among us the levels and the types of the connection. This is the spiritual world. If instead of receiving, instead of the desire to gain from one another, we reach bestowal, when everyone wants to give to others, then the corporeal world changes into the spiritual world and there we find the transcendental reality.

We should understand that only in this direction will we discover the sources and understand as described by the Kabbalists.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/23/12, Questions and Answers 

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Preparation to the Lesson

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Writings of Rabash “Article 27”

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The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpt “Aharei-Mot,” Item 174, Lesson 13

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Talmud Eser Sefirot, Volume 3, Part 8, Item 14, Lesson 7

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“Matan Torah (Giving of the Torah)“

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Question: We are speaking about the end of the egoistic development, and in the meantime, I have a feeling that humanity is still very far from reaching the peak of egoism and its recognition…

Answer: Having no choice, I can remain in an unchanging state as long as it doesn’t get any worse. Under the pressure of suffering and problems, I can subdue myself and settle for mundane daily life: go to work, come home, watch TV, close myself in, and not ask for more. I am ready to live like an animal and not ask difficult sophisticated questions till I die.

It is true; this is an instinctive defensive reaction. There is no human being here, but only an animal existence, which 99.99% of the people lead.

But there is another question: How much do I suffer? You are saying that the world is not ready for correction yet. It will never be ready for correction, but will it want to get rid of the sufferings? This is actually what we are talking about. If people have nothing to do, if they have nothing to live on, if they go out to the streets and shatter windows, governments will start wars in response to the riots just to hold on to what is left, to push the problems to a lower priority and to keep the people busy. War is sure way to put everyone in his place. It is a possible future scenario.

But there is also a new deficiency growing here: People are increasingly asking the “ideological” question, which may seem very far from the “animal” question. The question of “What am I living for?” It is being revealed more clearly in humanity. Although the leaders believe that they will be able to keep the masses on the “corporeal” level much longer, it isn’t so.

On the whole, when you look at the world, you see billions of people on the level of the still nature. The world will stay this way, on the level of still nature, but there are also the higher levels of the vegetative, the animate, and the speaking, which are changing. The main part is the level of the speaking, which is the most advanced. It needs to change first, thus pulling all the other levels behind it.

So don’t look at the lower levels and don’t wait for them to do something. They will never do anything but simply follow the shepherd, that’s all. A person needs a thin connecting wire in order to follow someone.

I certainly don’t disrespect them and don’t think lightly of them, since later they will accumulate into one whole and the differences will disappear. Today we can take our body as an example; it is made of different cells that are tied together in different ways and only a tiny part the size of a match head manages them. It is in this part that all the feelings and the understandings and all the plans and memories are revealed. Everything is concentrated in this grain.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/19/12, “Introduction to the Book Panim Meirot uMasbirot”

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The only means for spiritual advancement is working in the group, thanks to which we clarify whether we want to connect with one another. Eventually we discover that we cannot connect and don’t even want to and totally reject the mutual connection.

Our whole nature rebels against such a connection. We are ready to put up with anything except that. There are relationships that we enjoy and we want them, but a connection with the friends, a mutual connection in which every individual serves the general—our heart will never agree to that.

Only such a mutual relationship is called “connection,” in which everyone is like a component in an electric circuit, or in an engine. So in every whole system, every component is part of the system and has to perform his job and keep his obligations to the other parts.

In order to do that, we need to annul the ego. People whose ego isn’t so developed are ready to be with others and it is easy for them to be close, to feel one another, to be friends. However, the more a person develops, the more his ego grows and the more difficult he finds it to connect with others. He doesn’t feel that he has friends at all.

Once, even several decades ago, people felt close to one another, but today everyone is by himself. We don’t even notice how everyone is closed up in his niche. We hide behind the computer screen and call it a relationship. We feel better this way, more comfortable! All of humanity is like that now.

There are different methods to make people connect, which are mainly based on Nazism, fascism, and fundamentalism. These methods are meant to evoke the feeling of solidarity in the masses. To some extent it stops their psychological development and so it is easier to manage them.

But in spiritual development on the other hand, there are two opposing approaches that are integrated. On the one hand, a person has to be very developed, a great individualist. Everyone must feel that he is totally isolated and that he doesn’t belong to anyone else. It is so prominent that it seems as if he doesn’t belong to this world.

On the other hand, we are required to connect so powerfully that everyone should totally annul himself against his desire to annul others. It is the most unrealistic demand that can possibly be in our world, and it is against the trend of human development. After all, as the ego develops people become increasingly more detached from one another. Everyone draws away from others and hides behind his computer, his cell phone, or at home.

Everyone lives in a niche he has created for himself. Suddenly he is required to do the opposite: to leave his niche and connect in his heart and soul. What is more, we have to do this not by being forced, but to want it ourselves! After all, we discover that this unity is the highest value.

There is no advantage in it, but this is where the truth lies. So it is very hard to approach the values of bestowal and love, if internally in our feelings we don’t find a justification for it.

But this is the principle according to which the spiritual world works! In order to acquire these values, which are totally opposite from our current values, we have to recruit the help of the upper force so that it will influence us and change us.

We have to ask for that during the study. After all, we study the actions that take place on a higher level—actions of bestowal, love, and connection—working on the systems of the souls. It isn’t a mechanical system that is emotionless, but a live system in which the mind and the feelings operate according to the law of mutual guarantee.

We study about the relations between our desires, which are in mutual bestowal, and we want to resemble them, which means to study them, to connect to them and to enter the same state. Thus, we draw ourselves to this state and spur the influence of the force called the Light that Reforms.

We have to think and study about these upper states, about how our egoistic desires operate loyally in mutual bestowal.
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From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/19/12, The Zohar

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Preparation to the Lesson

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Writings of Baal HaSulam “Igrot,” Letter 18

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The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpt “Aharei-Mot,” Item 162, Lesson 12

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Talmud Eser Sefirot, Part 8

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“Matan Torah (Giving of the Torah),” Item 15

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Baal HaSulam “Introduction to the Book, Panim Meirot uMasbirot,” Item 5: This is so because there will no longer be fear lest one might not sustain one’s merit and trade the wisdom in the market, as no one in the mob will buy it. The wisdom will be so loathsome in their eyes that neither glory nor lust will be obtainable in return for it.

Hence, all who wish to enter may come and enter. Many will roam, and the knowledge will increase among the worthy of it.

For generations, the science of Kabbalah was considered as mysticism, like Tarot cards, blessings and curses, black magic, spirits, devils, and all that the human imagination is capable of producing. For centuries, people believed that these tools allowed one to control the world, to win, to become wealthy, to dominate, etc. So, many people wanted to know, to understand, and to master the supernatural forces that are supposedly hidden there. Everyone dreams of succeeding and excelling over others, that is clear.

That is why the wisdom of Kabbalah was treated accordingly: “Jews possess secret wisdom that gives power…” Freemasons and sects of all kinds; there were plenty of inventions, but Kabbalists hid the truth. Thus no one knew that in reality the essence of Kabbalah is the science of unity between people.

Today, as we better understand what the science of Kabbalah is, humanity is gradually parting with its mystical aura, and as a result no longer needs it. “Why do I need it? To unite?! I was hoping for some trick, fortunetelling, success in trading, the drug for all diseases, miracle-making. But unity between people, keep it to yourself, I don’t need this, even if you pay me.”

So, people reject this wisdom, and here the moment of truth is shown because our egoism actually rejects the science of unity, does not accept it. This is the natural attitude: A person avoids others, disdains the news of unity, hates and despises it as something disgusting. But then he sees that he has no other choice. He will be led towards it by various factors: our dissemination, problems, and understanding that it is possible to get out of the crisis only through unity.

“But how can it be done? Where can we get the forces? What is the order of actions?” It is then that people will reveal the science of Kabbalah as the wisdom of unity in its correct and true form.

The revolution, connected with this science, should happen today, and we must accelerate the pace of development. And general contempt protects Kabbalah so that only those who really want to unite and apply effort, everyone according to his ability, become attached to it. So form the outer circles around Kabbalah.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/20/12, “Introduction to the Book, Panim  Meirot  uMasbirot”

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Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Book Panim Meirot uMasbirot,” p.4: Now you can understand their words (Sanhedrin 98a): “The Son of David comes either in a generation that is all worthy, or all unworthy.” This is very perplexing. Seemingly, as long as there are a few righteous in the generation, they detain the redemption. And if the righteous perish from the land, the Messiah will be able to come?

Question: Does that mean that in a generation of the wicked, the revelation of the Creator will take place as if from the opposite side, from the posterior?

Answer: First He will be revealed to Israel, which means to those who yearn Yashar—El (straight to the Creator). Then gradually it will influence everyone around—the nations of the world in wider circles that are increasingly further from the center. If the people of Israel are like a vessel and they fill themselves, then the abundance will spill over from the vessel to the whole world.

Thus we have to worry about how to fill ourselves with the Light of AB—SAG, with the intention of in order to bestow. When we receive the Light of Hochma dressed in Hassadim, this “style” will pass on to everyone.

A person is suddenly inverted by the Light of AB—SAG in his mind and in his feelings, since the Light of AB belongs to the head and the Light of SAG belongs to the heart. If a person suddenly inverts and discovers the connection, he understands how to tie the mind and the feelings so that they will cooperate.

This is how the Light of AB—SAG operates: it lets us recognize the importance, the new values. If this happens to us, it will be passed on by order. It isn’t by chance that Israel is called Li—Rosh (I have a head). Then according to this place it will spread to other nations through the connecting pipes.

At first they won’t even see where it comes from, but later they will begin to turn to Israel in order to connect with them and among them. As it says: “And they shall all know Me from the smallest to the biggest.”
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/19/12, “Introduction to the Book Panim Meirot uMasbirot”

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