Question: What we did in the workshop is actually working against the ego. But as time passes the importance of this work seems to fade. How can we constantly see the importance of this group work?

Answer: All our study is based only on the annulment of our ego, to start feeling ourselves as integral, and in this integrality, to give the opportunity for the Creator to be revealed, to express our desire for that, and to be happy that you give Him this opportunity. The next stage is adhesion. This is how our study session and every workshop should end. We can have the workshop for hours and include many more activities, but in the meantime we will focus on this.

On the whole, this is the basic pattern according to which we should behave. It’s needed only in order to feel that we exit ourselves in some way. Then, after we begin to feel the Light that fills everything, the study becomes practical. We begin to see and to feel it inside us in different changes of form. Then we begin to notice it according to the intensity, the direction, the color, the attributes, and the feelings. At this point we have already started the formation of our vessel. But this is the first stage.

Everything that involves the ego is constantly growing, and if we later see that dealing with it is less important, it’s because we don’t deal with it. We will have such workshops together and make them part of our daily study. The time has come for us to include them.
[76510]
From the Vilnius Convention 3/24/12, Workshop 2

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Question: What is our practical work in attaining the love of friends?

Answer: There are two approaches to everything, the approach of Malchut and the approach of Keter, either from a deficiency or from wholeness.

I can approach the love of friends from blows and deficiencies, from feeling despair of attaining anything by myself, having understood that I need partners. I can’t understand anything by myself and I need the friends to help me understand, to give me power, to spur me. The more I know myself, the more I see clearly that I cannot accomplish anything, that I cannot sustain myself, not in my thoughts and not in the right feelings that are necessary for attaining spirituality. There is nothing spiritual in a person except for this point, and this point cannot provide any filling. So I begin to realize that all my abilities, my whole vessel, my capacity, and my power, are revealed only as a result of connecting with others.

After all, what can a single cell do in a person’s body? A person discovers that no spiritual power, neither the power of reason nor will power can be sustained and have a hold in him, because a power can only exist and have a hold in the connection among foreign desires. This revelation leaves him no choice but to look for a connection with others.

It is a very long way, because this is advancing by the way of suffering. But there is another way, the “way of the Torah.” Following the way of the Torah a person knows in advance that he must connect with others; he is told that connection is for his own good, and he is given different examples, just like a child. Imagine that a small child was allowed to do whatever he wanted to, how much suffering and how many blows would this poor child have to experience in order to find the right way in life. It would be absolutely terrible.

But the world is built so that a child is surrounded by people who love him, protect him, care for him, explain things to him, don’t allow him to do bad things, and push him towards the good. Thus the child advances. This is a quick and safe way to grow as a human being, and this is what we wish for our children.

It is the same when it comes to spiritual advancement, we can learn everything from nature. Therefore, there is one way for spiritual advancement, except for learning from bad experiences and bitter mistakes. Instead we can learn from a teacher and from books, from the advice of Kabbalists. If we really accept this advice as a law, as operating instructions, (“Torah” comes from the Hebrew root “instruction”), we can advance relatively easily. Eventually, however, a person advances somewhere in the middle, in the way called Derech Eretz, (Middle Way). The ideal way is not only in following the advice of Kabbalists, and it isn’t only by suffering, but between these two ways.

The group can set an example for a person as to what he should do and how to advance. It empowers him, supports him, and pulls him forward. Many don’t understand this or understand it theoretically, but are unable to implement, listen to, and accept it. The repulsion from others is so strong that it hides their common sense and obliges them to look for different excuses and come up with theories for their reluctance to connect. Yet all the work is done only in the group.
[76619]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/26/12, Writings of Baal HaSulam

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Question: What is the spreading of the attributes of Bina downward, which helps the lower one?

Answer: Bina spreads downward and changes our attributes by enabling us to feel the Light of Hassadim, bestowal. The influence of Bina provides a person with protection, a shield, like a mother who protects her child. When a baby is in his mother’s arms, no one can harm him thanks to her Light of Hassadim that scares away the forces of impurity, the shells (Klipot.)

Egoistic forces retreat before the Light of Hassadim (Mercy); they are afraid of the mother. After all, she shines with the Light of bestowal that is totally opposite to them, and they cannot understand it and be next to it.

Try to stop a person on the street and tell him that he must love others. Can you imagine the negative response you would encounter because this is a most hateful and repulsive thing for a person? Thus, Bina protects us.

Can you see how the spiritual world guards itself from us, the egoists? If you really want spirituality, please, come and bestow! But if you want to receive spirituality, these two things don’t go together. Spirituality is bestowal.

So, until we are ready, it protects itself from us with a shield. We cannot even get near the spiritual world because it repels us like the two poles on a magnet.

Why should I get near something like that if there is no benefit in it, only losses? How can I get close to something that means death for my ego?

So, by spreading in the lower Partzuf, the mother (Ima) covers all its vessels, thus ensuring that they will remain in holiness. The intention of “in order to receive” cannot be evoked in such a place when the mother protects us this way.

Then, the mother’s beauty is revealed, Hochma, and it becomes attractive, like a woman, a bride, a sister. However, this is when Hochma is revealed within Bina. Bina, itself, isn’t attractive; it only provides protection.
[76316]
From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson, 4/23/12, The Study of the Ten Sefirot

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When we look at this world, we don’t understand the connection between us and the spiritual world. In other words, we don’t understand the connection between the situation we are in now and the real state in which we are in connection and adhesion with the upper force. It all depends on the right definitions, which means our correct interpretation of what we are feeling in our hearts and what we understand in our minds, and in understanding the reality we are in.

If we imagine our reality correctly and constantly try to develop it and to stabilize it as much as we can, to build it and to carefully correct as much as we understand, our work will be more persistent and we will gradually advance in one direction.

This work includes many elements, which eventually make up one state. At the moment they seem to be unrelated to each other, very distant from one another. How can we see the connection between the perception of reality and the love of others? How can we connect our study of the wisdom of Kabbalah with the group? How can we tie the correction of this world with our ascent up the spiritual ladder?

These things seem very different. A person assumes that if they are connected in some way, then it is an indirect connection. So all our work is to stabilize the right picture inside us.

First we have to discover that the current perception of reality is wrong and to see that it is flawed, contrary to, and the opposite of the actual reality and to constantly try to correct and to improve it. This is how a person can see that the two descriptions can coexist in him: the real image of reality and the feeling of this world.

Of course it involves a duality and double vision, but gradually a person gets used to it. This evokes him to change and to improve himself so that the two images will connect and intersect as in a gun sight, and will make up one picture.

This is how we have to work. It isn’t simple because we cannot imagine the spiritual world that is totally made of forces. We are not physical bodies either, but a force or an attribute, or a desire and a mind, qualities and essences.

But we have to at least imagine it within a force field, waves, and directions of a force that are aimed from one end to another. This description, however, is also incorrect, because the spiritual world is made only from qualities and not from physical forces that we imagine. But this will at least be an advanced perception.
[76413]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/26/12, Writings of Baal HaSulam

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Question: What exactly is our work in unity?

Answer: I have to yearn for a connection with the text that we study, to want that everything it says to be fulfilled in my connection with the general vessel, with the whole desire. I want to discover all the phenomena The Zohar talks about in my connection with the group.

The Zohar talks about the still, vegetative, and animate levels of the desire, nothing more. So there, it speaks about the sages, land, trees, animals, and donkeys—everything applies to the four phases of desire. We shouldn’t be distracted from this internal meaning and imagine an external picture.

Even if it “diverts” us, we have to hold on to the internality as hard as we can, and we always keep this struggle inside us with mixed success. The main thing is to try, which means that you are performing corrections and raising the internality over the externality, raising it higher and higher.

These are the greatest corrections, which only we can perform as the lowest level of the system. Until now no one could do that, not even the great Kabbalists of the past. We, in our generation, perform this most important work by raising the internality over the externality at the base of the system.
[76319]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/24/12, The Zohar

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When a person begins to stabilize himself with regard to the Creator, he sees that all the reality that he feels is inside him, including the group and all of humanity. All of creation, everything, takes place in his desire to receive. Except for this desire there is only the Creator.

While reading The Zohar, we discover different states that exist in our desire to receive that are more bestowal oriented and are aimed at the Creator.

First, our desires are totally separated and dispersed: all the inanimate, the vegetative, the animate and the human levels of nature. This is how a person perceives reality. But gradually we begin to see that the system is more organized, more integral, and closed. We even feel that it pressures us and that it is totally in mutual connections.

So there are two processes here, one approaching the other. A person discovers and realizes more as he develops. On the other hand, the system itself seems to be more stabilized externally, to be connected with all its parts, and to pressure us so that we will begins to perceive it as unified and closed. This means that at the same time there is both an “awakening from below” and an “awakening from Above.”

There are two ways we can develop, by the “way of the Torah” or “by suffering.” By the Torah, we advance as we hasten ourselves, trying to discover the system as more round and mutually connected, and by that we can understand the upper force, the Upper Providence.

But the system shows us that it is one organic and connected body that pressures us by these connections, making our life more difficult. We have to try to perceive reality only as one system, no matter what, through which the upper force wants to be revealed to us. The Creator is waiting to dress Himself in this system and to fill it according to the equivalence of form.

The Zohar describes very high and advanced states, but when we read about them, we lower them to our level, just like children with their naïve perception of the world. A smart grown-up understands the internal connection between things, what stems from what, and how everything is arranged, while a child looks at the same thing and sees the world differently, by perceiving only a narrow part of reality.

The Zohar too, reveals all of reality to us, but we perceive only a very small part of it. But each time when we try to stabilize our internal world according to what The Zohar tells us, by our efforts and our attempts to discern where all the attributes that are described by The Zohar (the “inanimate,” “vegetative,” “animate” and “speaking) are inside us, we advance.
[76400]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/25/12, The Zohar

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Question: How can we picture to ourselves an ideal state: a general vessel (desire), connection?

Answer: We are all interconnected. When the very first connection is revealed between us, it means that all of us, no matter how many of us there are—billions or millions, reveal 10 Sefirot between ourselves. Such is the structure of the system.

And then, these 10 Sefirot begin to vibrate and generate sounds, as if strings of a guitar. They are in constant movement, in harmonious relationships with one another. Not a single sound is out of tune from the general harmony.

This entire system reveals to us more and more perfect 10 Sefirot. Besides, they become increasingly clearer to us in their various kinds. These various forms that become revealed to us appear because each individual Sefira consists of its own 10 Sefirot.

And when all these inner 10 Sefirot that comprise the 10 main Sefirot also start interacting between themselves, generating the upper harmonies of the main waves, as if in music or voice, they create the entire impression, transmitting inside all information about the vessels and the Light that fulfills them.

Different Lights are essentially impressions inside all these desires, experienced from the connection of singing strings, from the emerging chords. All this music is what revelation is.

Everything is inside the vessel. The sound is felt inside our desires, organs of perception, it doesn’t exist by itself in the air. The music of the Light is always revealed as the inner filling of the letters (the matrixes of desires), existing inside other letters. The Light manifests only inside the vessel, or desire, as a result of its changes.
[76322]
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/24/2012, The Zohar 

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When a person comes to the point when he perceives reality as a certain force field, he begins to attach to it various properties of this world, clarifying how they should change so as to fit into this allegedly spiritual picture. Then it becomes clearer to him that he and everybody else are desires that repulse one another, but must unite.

And in order to unite, they need an additional force that would connect them together. After all, each of them possesses only an opposite force that repels others. But all of them exist in an ocean of Light that is able to perform any change since this is the force of the Creator. However, He acts only as the correct desires become revealed from the part of the created beings.

And if despite their mutual repulsion, these egoistic desires begin to show the slightest, even artificial, aspiration to unite, the force field, the upper Light, the Creator, begins to act upon them. For the meantime, it acts from afar, in accord to a great distance that separates an artificial request from the true one. Yet, it nevertheless affects them and begins to gradually bring them closer to Him.

On one side, the Light acts upon the created beings in order to draw them closer to itself. And from the other, as a result of coming closer, the created beings, in accordance to their inner properties, begin to feel an even greater contradiction with and repulsion from each other. It follows that two opposite sensations manifest here.

On one hand, the Light works and lets us feel an increasingly stronger connection. But at the same time, we feel how we ourselves do not correspond to this connection and don’t want it. However, we need to understand that all these revelations come from the Light itself, and specifically thanks to our coming closer together we now see how opposite to each other we are.

We feel two components in every state: our own egoistic broken nature and the nature of the Light, which penetrates us and holds us together.

The further we advance, the deeper we will reveal our evil nature and the good nature of the Light, until this gap between these two poles turns into a distance between the point of this world and the point of the world of Infinity. The difference between these concepts is what determines the volume of the vessel in which the creature senses the essence of the Creator relative to its opposite nature. The entire might of the Light of Infinity becomes revealed specifically in this vessel.

Until the creature discovers these differences, until the entire difference between the egoistic intention and the bestowing one becomes clarified, the upper Light remains at the first, “still” degree of Nefesh. After all, it acts only according to the desire and the program of the upper one, without the participation of the creature, and thus only the most basic Light of Nefesh de Nefesh manifests here.

When the lower one reveals its entire dissimilarity to the upper one, the revelation of the Creator, which it receives relative to its own qualities, is “620” times greater in its might.
[76410] 
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/26/2012, Writings of Baal HaSulam 

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Now we desire only one thing: We wish that all of creation, meaning us, will not present any obstacles for the manifestation of the upper Light, so it will fill us without any resistance on our part. We want to make such a restriction on ourselves to give Him all the space for His revelation. At the same time we don’t exist, we are just transparent so that one single force would be passing through us and would fill us.

This is the first condition, restriction (Tzimtzum Aleph), from which to begin our meeting with the Creator when for the first time we really feel for real that “There is None Else Beside Him.”

We are transparent; we don’t exist because we have annulled our “I,” our egoism, and so now the Creator can fill everything.
[76353]
From the Vilnius Convention 3/24/12, Workshop 2

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Question: Now as we begin to operate as one global, collective group, does the work of the local groups change?

Answer: We have to judge ourselves severely and calculate things in the clearest, most serious way. We have to learn according to the general upper Providence, the Creator’s actions in the world, to what extent the world needs correction, and how far we are still from fulfilling it by participating in it, by being ready to become the bridge, the pass-through, the adaptor, through which the correction will be made. This should wake us up and give us a real seriousness and responsibility of understanding our role.

It isn’t acceptable to take into account only ourselves and be deluded that everything is fine with us and that we can wait. The account is very serious and even alarming. It is like Baal HaSulam’s warning before the Holocaust. If the people of Israel, (everyone who is called Yashar – El, who yearns directly for the Creator), do not keep the required conditions, it causes the increased external forces and leads to their victory over the internal forces.

Then there are great troubles. The destructive, deadly, evil force, which we actually summoned, begins to rule the world. Therefore, every individual should treat the group very seriously and with great responsibility: every person in relation to the group, each group in relation to other groups to a common global group, and to the world, to the whole world.

We are already in this state, in this time which is the most critical in all of human history, and we will determine how we advance: by Light or by suffering.
[76165]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/24/12, Writings of Rabash

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