Baal HaSulam, “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)” (an abbreviated version): The newborn is in a state of complete self-reception without a hint of bestowal.

This was done on purpose so that by self-correction a person will learn to move from the incorrect actions to good deeds. This is how he becomes aware of the gap between the vessels and the Lights, between his state and the Creator’s, and between parts of creation. This is how he sees creation to its full depth.

With the revelation of the spiritual world, we gradually begin to discover how the air becomes “thick,” and the forces, relationships, and actions filled with the details of perception from the higher level, higher dimension, begin to show through it. We don’t feel them now, we don’t grasp them, but we are actually in them. In order to reveal the actions of the upper forces upon us, we have to make great efforts.

If a person wants to know his nature, it is revealed to him as the evil inclination. But if a person isn’t ready to correct himself yet, he doesn’t see his evil nature. Out of billions of people only a few millions can say that their nature is evil. All the others don’t understand what we are talking about: “Yes, of course, we should be kind to each other,” and that’s all.

Therefore, many will not agree with Baal HaSulam who says that that self-love is imprinted in us from the moment we are born. This is why people who observe the Torah and commandments the popular way have complaints to Kabbalists. They don’t feel that they sin at all. They don’t see that all their actions are for their own good. On the contrary, their actions lack any self-criticism or recognition of evil.

We must not awaken this evil. Until a person reaches it on his own as he develops, he should stay at the the still, vegetative, or animate level. The internal shattering reveals the human level, and then he begins to correct himself.

So if we merit the birth of the human within us, then signs of self-love appear from the moment of birth. It turns out that we do everything for ourselves alone and are ready to do everything at the expense of others.

Thereby man distances from the Creator, meaning from the power that controls the world with bestowal. The more he grows, the more he receives from his environment portions of “bestowal upon others”… That is, a person receives a feeling of the importance of bestowal. Although it is contrary to his nature, the environment can influence him. The structure of the spiritual world gives the group, the environment, great powers, even greater than one’s natural strength. At first we were connected as one vessel and the Light dominated us from Above. Therefore, when I discover the separation here below, but I don’t want to connect with others even a little, the environment can show me how it respects the connections and thinks highly of bestowal so I also want the same thing.

The environment influences me more strongly than my egoism. It will win. It can oblige me not to eat, not to drink, to behave in a certain way, and to wear certain clothes. If I could look at myself from the side, I would think: “What an idiot! What is he doing?” But a person simply carries out society’s orders and for him it isn’t nonsense, but very important and respectable things.

Ultimately, a person does everything only because society obliges him to. He even does the essential things in the acceptable way. No one has anything inside but society’s influence.

… he receives from his environment portions of “bestowal upon others” … for reward in this world and in the next world. In the first stage it will already give a person the power to advance.

The environment educates a person and teaches him the accepted norms and ideas. It is enough for an environment to use them, for them to become the truth for a person. After the right treatment, he is ready to obey unquestionably the principles it decided upon. If society wishes, it can do whatever it wants with each of us, and even send us to death. The connections which empower it belong to a higher spiritual level.

As one grows, he will be told how to come to the altruistic intention so as to bring contentment to his Maker. An environment is also needed for that. A person will not want that by himself. You can read endless numbers of books and articles and know all the wisdom of Kabbalah in depth, but without the influence of the environment nothing will change in a person. Nice words? Please, but there won’t be any real internal change behind them.

It’s necessary to work in a group, make efforts, study, build the intention while studying, and participate in common activities, and then a person attracts upon himself the Light. In other words, instead of the bad life, instead of the evil inclination, he receives the good inclination and moves from evil to good.

Then he loses all remnants of self-love and performs all his actions only to bestow, so even the necessity that he receives flows in the direction of bestowal…

This intention permeates one’s entire life.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/8/2011, “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)”

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On each phase of development I receive an “injection” and look for salvation out of helplessness. Hardships purify me, humble my egoistic desire, and bring me to goodness, meaning to the right decision, the right action. But all of it happens under the shower of painful blows, by the path of suffering.

On the other hand, I can use alternative remedies (forces and situations) that allow me to go through the process of correction without waiting for trouble. The difference is in my consciousness, awareness, and determination towards the Creator.

I can either crawl and take blows until they arouse a new desire within me at each given step, or I can generate a need to advance on my own. I keep searching for attractiveness and charm in my aspiration toward the Creator and bestowal.

Let this charm draw me forward with greater strength than the pinches that I get from behind. I will be the one who defines the speed of my development by moving faster than it is defined in the Thought of Creation which spurs me forward. It is said that in this case I am the one who “wakes the dawn, the dawn does not wake me.”

At this point we arrive at the only free choice that is available to us. It is about looking for additional powers to advance besides the Light and the vessel. Where do I get them?

It is clear that if I don’t use alternative powers, my authentic “I” would not even exist. I’ll remain a small beast that evolves only as a result of the blows nature sends its way.

We have all been progressing in this manner until now. Somehow, we think that only the still, vegetative, and animate levels of nature develop in accordance with the laws of nature, but a human being advances independently of it. But why would it be the case? Isn’t evolution still in progress?

Is it really so that as soon as a monkey turned into a human being, it immediately got excluded from the laws of nature? Is it feasible that we are driven forward only by our own intelligence? No. We are intelligent, but we still comply with the laws of nature; we don’t oppose them. Our beloved intelligence comprises nature’s indispensable part.

Modern science discovers the miracles of developmental adaptability and explains interactions between various creatures: insects, birds, fish, and so on. However, we attribute all of it to instincts and at the same time continue to plume ourselves on our intellect. In reality, our brain only implements our instincts in an even more instinctive way. As a result, we destroy ourselves even more. Animals are defended by protective mechanisms, whereas we are deprived of a “safety device” and “go wild.”
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/7/2011, “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)”

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Writings of Rabash, Shlavei HaSulam, “There’s None Secret as the Creator Because There’s None Else Besides Him”
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The Book of Zohar – Selected Chapter “Pekudei (Accounts),” “The Palace of Holy of Holies,” Item 801, Lesson 31
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Talmud Eser Sefirot Part 8, Item 29, Start with: “It turns that those Eser Sefirot that departed to Avi de Nekudim,” Lesson 15
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Writings of Baal HaSulam “The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee),” Lesson 1
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Question: How can we practically unite our sparks at the December convention?

Answer: You should arrive at the convention with the sparks already united. This is what is meant by preparation.

Why am I going to the convention? I am going there to evoke inner unity with others through various external actions, to be included in that spiritual vessel where we are all waiting for the revelation of the Creator. All our preparation is aimed at the unification of those sparks.

All my desires and thoughts are directed at the goal, at the revelation of the spiritual world, the upper degree, eternity and perfection, something great and boundless. I have to select all my hopes and bring them towards unity with others. Only by having united our yearning for the higher degree all together, will we feel the common vessel that is created from these individual impulses and the Light that fills it.

This is the preparation: to arrive at the convention with the desire that is already formed, clarified, and burning inside.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/10/2011, “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)”

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Baal HaSulam, “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)”: There are two types of relationships: with the Creator and man. And both are destined to lead to the goal: adhesion. A person acting altruistically does not feel any difference in his action between love for his neighbor and love for the Creator since everything outside of his body seems to be unreal in his perception.

So, I exist in an imaginary reality surrounded by other people on planet Earth, in the Universe. Why do I imagine reality to be this specific way? Why am I made to perceive it in this specific form? This is because the falsehood of this “image” absolutely corresponds to the way I deform actual reality. The greater the lie, the further I am from the truth.

And then, being in the current state, I acquire a desire to reveal the essence of life, to understand the reason for living and the meaning of my existence. I want to rise above falsehood and see the truth behind it. If so, one day, my reality will need to change.

How do we achieve it? We want to imagine the true state with the desire that has awakened in us. One cannot manage without the advice of Kabbalists here. We are not able to do anything on our own without their help in evaluating our direction. After all, we are submerged in darkness and confusion, and we do not have even a bit of truth, but a spark of newborn desire. However, this new urge represents only a point, not a vector that could have showed us the path. For this reason, we must turn to the corresponding means in order to head in the right direction.

If I imagine the entire world as myself, as a unified whole, it is a proper image. However, I am not able to form this attitude within me on my own. I am not able to imagine that other people, forces, and phenomena of the still, vegetative, and animate nature are parts of my desire because in my perception, they are depicted as something isolated, separate, and sometimes distanced, opposite, and hateful to me.

For this reason, the method that leads to the truth is the group where I must work. Even though I see my friends as absolutely different and opposite, together, we strive toward a corrected, true state. Together, we must work to make the correction and truth into one.

This is where the need comes from for a proper attitude toward the ultimate, true state called the “Creator” or the group. I will attain the truth only on condition that instead of interacting with the so far imaginary Creator, I interact with a real group, and together, we imagine ourselves to be on the highest degree.

We can handle this work. We advance toward a common, true state through becoming closer to the desires of our friends where we can unite. Then our external actions of becoming closer will bring us to an inner closeness of a single desire.

Our world is a projection of spiritual forces. We perceive them as physical images and create conditions for the unification of our desires, which merge into one by uniting with common efforts on our common path into a single system. We can really begin with nothing, with corporeal, physical actions, even false ones, but productive. One can manage initially without the intention on a low degree. The first chord may be off-key, but it still counts. This is why no one can say that he was not given the reins to take himself to correction.

This way, the relationship between people is more important than the relationship with the Creator. On one hand, I have a small group that wishes to reveal the message, the method of correction. On the other, I have the vast humanity, subconsciously waiting for unity.

In the end, humanity must receive this method from us in a prepared form with strictly described relationship parameters. However, before the crisis and helplessness manifests the real need for unity between people, there is no reason to reveal the method. This is why Kabbalah is concealed.
[60247]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/9/2011, “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)”

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Question: People don’t understand how strongly they are influenced by the environment. They think that they operate on their own. How can we explain the role of the environment to them?

Answer: According to conventional wisdom, “evil” is simply when we harm one another. So let’s be good to one another and unite, not for the Creator, not selflessly, but so that we will all feel good.

In today’s global world we need a good universal connection. People who have nothing to do with Kabbalah speak about it, including military leaders, pragmatic politicians, scientists, and other experts. They all admit that the present situation leaves us no other choice. In order to have a future, we must unite.

But our egoism doesn’t let us unite. In order to rise above it, we have to introduce a new comprehensive upbringing and teach the laws of the integral world. The facts have caused experts to change their minds, and we will have to change the public’s mind in the same way.

I have to work for the benefit of society, not out of altruism, but because I am part of it. That’s the way it is.

This way it will be accepted by everyone. It all depends on how we present it, on our explanations, which have to be based on unquestionable facts. Instead of single shots, it has to be “massive bombing” with quotations from the articles and sayings of outstanding people who unanimously confirm that it is really so. Eventually we will simply open the stage door for them, and they will play their role and do all the work.

We will have to collect data and the opinions of recognized experts and make their voices sound louder. There are plenty of such materials today, we just need to prepare them and bring them to the general public; the sooner the better.

Even the Chinese are starting to talk about connection because they are discovering their own crisis, which is even worse than the crisis in Europe. Everything changes quickly and unexpectedly. You turn an apple that seems red and delicious and suddenly you see that on the other side it is completely rotten. This is a global, not a private problem.

The summit meetings end with zero results. The leaders are not only helpless, but also unable to say anything. Actually, nobody expects them to say anything meaningful anymore. The summit meetings have become a formal routine, and their decisions are accepted with great fatalism.

The world is in despair, and it is in this period of transition, as long as the despair hasn’t spilled over and turned into uprisings and wars, that we should help the world understand the problem and its solution. This is the best time for dissemination. If we miss this moment, the rotten side of the apple will be revealed with all its bitterness.
[60152]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/8/2011, “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah”

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Writings of Rabash, Selected Excerpts, “What Is Revelation of One Portion Concealed Within Two Portions in the Work”
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According to the laws of interaction between the Light and the vessel, we have to go through the gravest misfortunes on the path toward the goal. And that’s where the science of Kabbalah comes to our rescue, helping us avoid having these blows come down on our animate flesh and instead transferring them to the human level, to the height we should be on.

Today I am receiving blows from three levels: still, vegetative, and animate. They are whipping me along on the human level. Stated differently, I am being pushed from behind by a bad force, evil, suffering. And I can only obtain one means to help me, a yearning, an attraction forward, coming from the wonderful goal that illuminates my path like the sun. In that case, I will still experience suffering, but it will be the sweet suffering of love.

It is easier to bear this kind of sorrow because it is caused by a longing for the good future. I feel disappointed and fall into despair, but I do not run away because I understand that these pains have to reach a specific, total measure (Σ), similar to how penny after penny eventually adds up to a big sum.

I accumulate great pressure within, a great desire to make a leap toward the goal. I need a gap between me today and the corrected me. And this gap has to be felt as suffering, caused by the difference between who I am and who I should be. This is unavoidable. This abyss has to open up inside of me, but there is absolutely no need for it to be created by wars, diseases, and other disasters.

The real correction is just starting now, when humanity is starting to come together, to merge as one man with one heart, either unwillingly, under a torrent of negative forces from behind, or with the help of the Light that flows ahead. It is impossible to describe how these two paths differ. After all, we have to open up Malchut of the world of Infinity, either in the darkness of inconceivable suffering which purifies our egoism, or in the Light that reforms.

Thus, everything comes down to how we will experience the abyss separating us from correction. We can overcome the path willingly, by agreeing with it, by building an environment that supports us; or we can ignore the solution as long as possible until the pressure from behind forces us to understand from where, why, and for what the disasters are happening, which we cannot escape no matter how much we try.

A person may need decades to get smarter and reveal the Light. And that is why the science of Kabbalah was given to us. But one way or another, this gap between the Creator and creation, between the receiver and the Giver, has to be felt inside of us to the fullest.
[60295]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/9/11, Writings of Baal HaSulam “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)”

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Baal HaSulam, “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)” (abridged version): Why is all of Israel responsible for one another? At first it seems unjust for the Creator to collect another’s debt from you for his sin. And Rabbi Elazar, son of Rabbi Shimon, says all the people in the world are responsible for one another, and each person brings merit or sin to the whole world with his deeds.

This is exactly what we are observing today: The Greeks have amassed debt and the Germans are reaping the sad results; the French are afraid, the Italians are on the verge, and so on. They are nothing but mutual guarantors who are responsible for one another. But how can that be?

The fact is that parts of a single system are inseparable from one another. It is we who draw a deterministic division between them, but in reality, in an integral, analog system, all the parts simultaneously depend on one another. And this system works only if the input, output, and all the inner processes are in balance.

The system has a multitude of mechanisms inside, which are welded together by a single interconnection. When an incoming impulse arrives, the entire system starts uniting and being corrected until it assimilates the disturbance completely. And then it generates an outgoing signal.

Thus, an analog complex is not just a conductor consisting of a chain of blocks (▢▢), similar to a discrete system. Rather, everything in it is welded together and the outgoing signal won’t arrive until the impulse received at the exit is processed completely, until the entire system assimilates it and lifts itself to a new level.

That is how our body works as well. Recently specialists have been creating more and more systems like this because the whole world is gradually taking on qualities of the general, analog structure. All of nature is a “round,” undivided system, and only man with his “square”, fragmentary perception is subjugated by egoism and does not understand the system’s responses.

As a result, humanity has always created linear systems for itself, until the clock struck and now we are seeing more and more clearly that everything around is interconnected and all parts of the universe interact in integral, analog mechanisms, comprising the single system of nature together.

This integral attitude of nature becomes revealed to us gradually. Each of us grew inside of his egoism and it is only today that we are discovering that we are all in one common, integral system.

We have to understand that the changes can only come from us, when every person realizes that he is an integral part of an integral system. That’s because in this system, the particular and the general are equal. Without this, we won’t find out how to treat nature correctly and will always suffer. We still don’t understand that the contradiction between the analog and discrete approaches elicits a big flaw in nature and brings us enormous troubles.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/01/11, Writings of Baal HaSulam “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)”

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We need to receive from Above the power of faith called “art.” Naturally, we ourselves do not have it. And on this path a person sees how weak he is. It is written that inner work “weakens a person” because he begins to feel that he does not have anything but egoistic desire.

And if he supposedly manages to overcome his egoism, it simply means that a larger egoistic desire has defeated a smaller one. This way, instead of advancing in the direction of spirituality, he is moving in the opposite direction, using an even greater egoism.

Sometimes people are very successful in their studies, they work and study a lot, and you would think that a great force of bestowal is driving them. But this is not the case. This simply is the great force of egoism because they see a greater benefit before them.

We always advance from “Lo Lishma” (for oneself) towards “Lishma” (for the sake of bestowal) and naturally act with the help of our ego. But still, our responsibility is to evaluate our true position and the intentions that drive us.

Gradually, as a person exerts effort in studying, dissemination, and mainly in group work, he reveals how incapable of anything he is. Man realizes his true state when he sees that no matter how much he tries to overcome his ego, putting all his effort into it, he is still incapable of doing anything with himself.

A person spent all his time working for the importance of the goal, but at the end, he lost his strength and realized his evil. He understood that he has nothing but the ego and that his every movement is driven by an egoistic purpose. As a result, he reaches a deep state of despair, described in the following way: “There is no happier moment in a person’s life than the moment when he becomes completely disappointed in his powers and feels absolute helplessness, and thus he becomes ready for a complete prayer.”

And a complete prayer is a request to acquire the power of faith. And then the power of greatness of faith, greatness of the Creator clothes him, and thus a person continues to work, but with another kind of “fuel.”
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/8/2011, Writings of Rabash

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