Question: To reveal the upper force, we need to come out from within ourselves, from within our egoism. But essentially, we do it for our own sake, in order to receive eternal pleasure. Isn’t this the most egoistic thing that can ever exist?

Answer: That is true! Naturally, all of our actions are purely egoistic. And no matter how much I lie to myself about wanting to connect with others, attain love for my neighbor, all of it is for my personal pleasure.

But something very special happens in the middle, something we do not even realize. When we agitate one another: “Let us unite! Let us sing and dance! Study together!” we evoke the upper force. It influences us and changes us even without our intention. This is called “Segula,” the “miraculous quality” of the upper Light.

And then I suddenly feel: “Really? I truly want to change? Why all of a sudden? What am I, crazy? To bestow? To love for real? Think of others? Then what will happen with me?”

I suddenly begin to feel that thinking of my neighbor has become more important to me. I do not yet exist in this quality, but I begin to want for this to happen. Before I rejected even the thought of this, but then gradually I come to a state when I really want to acquire the quality of bestowal and love for my neighbor.

Why all of a sudden? It’s because the Light influences me. This is called a miracle, which we refer to as: “The Light that comes reforms.” The same Light that created us to only think about ourselves changes us. And this is a miracle referred to as “the miracle of exit out of Egypt.”

When this happens, we feel something change, switch inside us. This changes all my foundations, my attitude towards the world, my view of the world and humanity, and my thoughts of everyone. I suddenly become my absolute opposite.

This is an act of creation, the Creator’s action. We see the actions of the Creator by feeling this inner revolution. And this is why this entire process that we experience is referred to as the Creator’s work. After all, we only evoke this action, and the Creator realizes it.

So do not be afraid, be honest: We really do not want anything but receiving pleasure and only thinking about ourselves, and we are all still egoists on the inside, regardless of the pretty words we use. But the Light comes and changes us due to all our actions in the studies, dissemination, and unity.

Let the Light work!
[36809]
From Lesson 1, Metzoke Dragot Congress 2/24/2011

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Question: There are states that all groups go through, including groups of children. We feel that we have attained a certain level of unity, and then our egoism grows and everything falls apart, and thus we lose confidence. How can we acquire it again?

Answer: This is a good state. We are advancing on the spiritual path together and uniting in order to acquire the spiritual world together. In other words, we unite our egoistic forces intending to break into spirituality and reach the Creator. We think that this is our initiative, that we are leading.

But then we begin revealing hatred, repulsion, and problems among us. That’s because we have to realize that we are incapable of bestowal, that we are egoists who do not wish to unite unless there is a goal standing before us that is clear to our egoism.

When setting out to unite, we talked and thought about spirituality, and studied it at the lessons. That is how we “ruined” ourselves because we attracted Light from there directly into our egoistic breaking, and due to the imbalance, the difference of qualities between the two, the breaking naturally developed. We revealed it.

That is when we have to understand that we have discovered the truth and have ascended from the material level to the level of the breaking. If now, at this level, we will begin uniting with each other by means of the same Light, then we will apply the method of correction and will reveal the spiritual reality inside the corrected Kelim. That is when we start making corrections, whereas until now there was simply nothing for us to correct because we united with our egoism, being happy at how much fun it was.

Every person who reaches the breaking and acts against his egoism must unite with the friends despite the repulsion. This is possible to do only with the help of the upper Light. It separated me from others and now I must feel that it reunites me with them. As soon as it does this in the smallest degree, I will begin to feel the spiritual world. After all, the connection between us is already spirituality.
[36957]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/3/11 on Confidence

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Baal HaSulam, Ohr Bahir: Confidence is faith in yourself. In the psychological sense it is a feeling of endurance. That’s because nothing will endure in the face of desire besides exhaustion or impatience in efforts.

Therefore, a hero feels a powerful force of patience within and does not give up in the face of anything, believing in himself and his strength. But a weak person feels that he does not have the force of patience, and when another person causes him to suffer, he cannot endure and therefore immediately surrenders to him.

Question: What is faith in yourself? It sounds egoistic.

Answer: The text is written in a way that it is deciphered differently below, in our world, and above, in the spiritual world. In our world you are willing to endure if you believe that you are right, if you aspire to the goal, if you really need something, or if you love the people for whom you make efforts, such as your children, relatives, and those close to you. On the other hand, in spirituality everything is done by the force of the Light that influences you.

It’s not a secret that heroism in our world is the force of egoism. We need envy, a passionate desire, self-love and other stimuli to “light ourselves up” and acquire the ability to endure. Besides, we receive the ability to endure from nature. Some people are able to endure great suffering from birth.

But when a person enters the spiritual world and begins working for the sake of bestowal, this stops playing a role. There are no more strong or weak. Everyone is on the same level and is not assisted by their material nature in any way. In the spiritual world a person needs the force that dresses Lights in him.

Obviously, here too every person differs from others, but he differs by his spiritual purpose, which is determined by the root of his soul. In every other regard he feels weak and powerless. The further a person advances, the weaker he feels, and the more he depends on the Light that reforms.

At first we are all heroes, “real men.” But then we begin to get weaker until we find that we have nothing left. That is how we get “broken,” realize our weakness and thanks to this, understand that we actually do not have to be able to do anything besides look for the forces to persist and endure.

I only have to find the force of faith. Then I will acquire the ability to endure, the force of bestowal operating above knowledge. Let me feel empty inside, let me have nothing worthwhile to work for, let me be completely devoid of energy because my egoism does not push me forward and does not give me forces. Yet, if I receive the force of bestowal from the Light that reforms, then I can already realize it. The degree of my confidence depends on this.

In the material world, the degree of my confidence depends on how much is contained in my receiving Kelim. But in spirituality it is on the contrary: The degree of my confidence depends on how much is contained in my bestowing Kelim.

No one has any “special favor” here and no one exceeds others in power. Every person descends to zero and experiences total emptiness and weakness, and then begins acquiring the force of bestowal that comes from above. But it happens only on the condition that he is merged with the upper one. The receiving desire must always be annulled before the upper one so that the bestowing desire would give a person the force of endurance and confidence.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/3/11 on Confidence

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We are controlled by egoistic desires, vessels of reception, although we do not know what this is. That’s because everything is attained from comparison; the advantage of Light is attained from darkness.

Nevertheless, once we receive a little bit of Light, we begin to feel that there is another form of existence besides vegetating in egoism. There is life in bestowal.

Only the Light creates these desires or Kelim in us, and inside of them this anticipation or weak sensation emerges. Then we begin to form a certain anticipation of bestowal. However, it only surfaces on the condition that a person can correctly place himself before this picture.

Right now this egoistic desire pulls me into its bosom. That is why I have to absorb the importance of the goal from the environment by attracting Light and taking steps toward it in spite of my desire.

After that, obstacles of a different sort are placed before me: I am shown what kind of pleasure is concealed in bestowal. Then I have to be salvaged from another danger: from falling into Klipa, which says, “Let’s enjoy bestowal. Do something for the sake of bestowal. And now do some more, and then some more….” Thus, exceeding the limits of my abilities, I begin to feel egoistic pleasure from bestowal. After all, enormous Lights become revealed to me instead of the thin glow we feel in our world.

That is how I become overtaken by a state that Kabbalistic books call “impurity” or “the fire of hell.” Today our egoism is giving us only a small challenge, not allowing us to come close to bestowal. But later on we will make our way into the worlds of impurity which will have to be corrected to bestowal. There, we will discover a cunning force, a great egoistic desire that opposes the Creator. It tells us, “Bestow, do as the Creator does. There is great pleasure contained in that act.” Will we be able to keep our footing in the face of it?

Right now we are placing a “screen” (Masach) against our receiving desire, whereas later on we will build real screens against the Light, against the pleasure of bestowal rather than reception.
[36819]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/2/11, Writings of Rabash

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Question: Throughout all of history money brought about wars between governments and inside families. So how can it be used to connect people?

Answer: Everything depends on how money is used. If I want to fulfill my egoism, then I need money. But if I want to use my egoism to fulfill others, then I need an anti-egoistic screen, a “covering” for egoism such as money.

Money is an indicator of my power, the force of the screen. Thus, wars aren’t fought because of money, but because of egoism.

Besides, you can’t buy everything with money, although you can buy almost everything. Even in our world there are qualities relating to the root of the soul which cannot be bought, such as a special connection between people or a special aptitude that comes from the root of the soul (such as talent in music, art, or literature).

Qualities that we receive from nature cannot be bought with money. The things we have to add ourselves with our efforts, including the relationships between people and love, are also very difficult to buy.

Sometimes we confuse money with efforts. But it is impossible to simply pay and buy a certain attitude. The things belonging to nature, which we receive from the Creator and have to return to Him, are impossible to conquer egoistically, and our paper money also won’t help here.
[36752]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/1/11, Lesson on Money

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Question: How is money related to spirituality and how does it help us advance?

Answer: Money (Kesef) is a covering (Kisui) over my egoism. It is a force enabling me to cover my egoism, to fulfill it, or to use it for fulfilling others. Money gives me the opportunity to work with my egoism—either for its benefit or against.

Therefore, in the integral world, money has to be used only for the sake of connecting between people. A person has to leave only the necessities of life for himself and give all the excess to the world’s correction.

In the generation of the future, in the corrected world, money will disappear. I will receive everything I need from society, so why would I need money? If the whole world will be corrected and every person’s necessities will be provided for, and in addition no one will need excessive fulfillment, then what is money for? There won’t be any need for it.

It will be necessary to somehow regulate the processes of exchange and transfer from one company to another and between factories in order to provide for the whole world and to attain the corrected, perfect form, but this won’t happen by way of paper money any longer. We will have to somehow measure the connection between us. We will, indeed, assess it by “money,” but it won’t be the same money that is in circulation today, but the degree of one person’s bestowal to another.

If we shift to bestowal, then we also need “money.” However, it acquires the form of a screen which is measured by the unity to which it leads.

“How much did you pay?” The answer is: to the extent of the unity that emerged! In the meantime, today the price I pay is determined by how much I will receive for myself by detaching from others and thereby creating separation between us.
[36749]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/1/11, Lesson on Money

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Question: Can pleasure that one gets from spirituality be egoistic?

Answer: It surely can. Spirituality is love and bestowal. I’m willing to bestow to you and love you if it’s going to benefit me. And if not, then why should I? This is called Klipa (shell), and this is corporeality, not spirituality.

Each one of us is able to love in this way. I love my kids because they are mine. But if they are not mine, I have no regard for them. I can love someone if my well-being depends on them, but if it doesn’t, I don’t need them. In other words, I love and invest because I receive a personal benefit from it. However, this isn’t love and bestowal; this is using others.

Love and bestowal described by the wisdom of Kabbalah has nothing to do with receiving for one’s sake. I simply love in order to benefit the other person. This is even greater than our love for our children because we love our kids instinctively.

I must reach the kind of love of a fellow man that doesn’t benefit my egoism. But if my egoism receives something from this love, it’s not love: I simply love myself and fulfill myself in a round about way. Hence, it is all defined by my intention. But how can I check myself?

I have to rise to the kind of love where I’m only concerned about a fellow human being, not about myself. It’s something we must know because nature will force us to attain this level. According to the program of creation, we must become similar to the Creator. The Creator is good and does good without any regard for Himself. He desires to fulfill us and this is called love.

How can we draw closer to this state? My current intention can only be corrected by the Light that Reforms. It created my egoism and now it can lift me above it, perform a miracle: take me out of Egypt. When I ascend, I begin to correct myself.

This Light can only be sensed by studying the wisdom of Kabbalah. While reading The Book of Zohar, a person begins to notice it acting upon him. The study itself contains a force that transforms him. It is said in this regard: “I created the evil inclination, and I gave the Torah for its correction, the Light that brings one back to the good.” This is why the wisdom of Kabbalah is being revealed in our time and is becoming available to everyone.
[36355]
From a TV program “Ask the Kabbalist” 4/4/2010

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Question: The more efforts we make for the sake of the group’s success, the more we feel how we are working for our own egos….

Answer: You should be happy about that because it is the revelation of evil. Without revealing evil, we won’t reach goodness.

I see that in the end, the only thing I want from my actions for the group’s sake is to extract personal benefit. What next?

The problem is that this “point of epiphany” alone is not enough. You cannot do anything with it. My action has to be aimed; it has to have a vector. Otherwise my inner force remains merely potential, like a muffled engine. It may even be a good engine with a capacity of 200 cc, but so what?

I have to “wind up” my desire and aim it at a specific action. That means I need two points to make up a vector. The mind is what gives this direction to my force. That is why force and reason work well with one another. This is lawful.

So even if I have reached despair in my attitude to the group, this does not yet give me an opportunity to act. Now I have to connect my state with the goal.
I have just felt that I am opposite to myself. Egoism has been revealed in my actions or in one of my actions: I did it for myself and could not aim it at the friends.

First of all I have to remember that there is none else beside Him. The problem is not that I didn’t succeed at it, but that the Creator organized this situation for me, as well as its analysis. It becomes clear that I could not do anything because of my egoism, and that’s because the Creator wished to teach me, to show me that I am ruled by the ego.

So what should I do? Why did He want me to feel this? It was so that through it I would realize the importance of the goal, the quality of bestowal, which is opposite to what I have just revealed.

Where will I get this importance? From that very state. After all, there is no Light without a vessel, no sensation that does not include the combination of both the Light and the Kli. What will I compare myself to in order to feel that I am evil? It happens in comparison to how I understand bestowal, imagining that I could have acted better by treating the friends better.

In that case there are already two points! How then, can I now shift form the point of my own insignificance and nastiness to the point of bestowal? What do I lack? I lack force, and this is what I should demand.

But that’s not all. Why should I demand it? Is it in order to make myself feel good, to stop feeling repulsed by myself? After all, my egoism suffers from the recent “revelation.” In that case it would turn out that I am still an egoist, only having gone through a second “twist” and being on the next level of self-love.

Rather, I don’t want all of my work and its result to pursue personal profit. I want to perform an action in which I will reveal pleasure for the Creator. He corrects me and I want this to give Him pleasure.

That is how I try to advance forward a little bit more, and then a little bit more, as much as possible. These are my first attempts, which I must literally “chew up,” “taste” on my tongue, or more precisely, “break up” with my teeth.
[36595]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/28/11, Writings of Rabash

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There is no doubt that our state is the most insignificant one and there is nothing worse than it. There’s nothing to discuss here. This is the reality given to us from Above and no matter what you say, you cannot revoke that fact.

The Creator says, “Yes, I created egoism and this entire world. All of that is true, but this is just the initial point. Quit sitting there and crying. Start acting as you should already! I have prepared all of the means for you, so use them!”

But no one wants to hear about some kind of correction, work, efforts, and changes. Usually we only know how to sit and complain about the fact that we feel bad.

There are two ways out of every state we are in. And in reality our state is not as bad as it seems to us. Rather, it is truly horrible because we do not see what we are losing compared to the world of Infinity, where we have the opportunity to be.

We are not shown that infinite state since otherwise we would leap there egoistically. In order to stop us, this light state is concealed. This enables us to work and develop as normal, using the force of the group, and thus to advance toward bestowal instead of turning into egoistic parasites (Klipa) and chasing only pleasure, not having the strength to refuse it.

There are two paths out of this lowest and worst state. To try to advance on your own, initiating your own development, or if we don’t want this, then there is a machine or a program of nature that pushes us to develop according to the sequence of states that is recorded there: the relationships between the Light and the desire which stand one opposite the other.
[36593]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Leson 2/28/11, “Introduction to the book Panim Meirot uMasbirot”

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I have to change myself in conformity with the upper world. To do this I attract forces from that world through the group and change by means of those forces. Thus I ascend up 125 degrees and reveal the upper world. That is how it opens up to me, becoming more and more apparent.

In the process I am not working on something external, but on what is inside of me. I attract the forces of change to myself rather than applying my forces to something on the outside, the way we do in our world.

This determines my interactions with the environment: I do not want to change it, eliminate anything in it, or conquer it the way I conquer the people around me in this world, controlling them, submitting them to my power, and using them to achieve my own goals. This is especially vivid in our world among politicians.

In spirituality, however, everything is opposite: I work in the environment of friends quietly, often even without having any special discussions. If they were all chosen by the upper force to attain the spiritual world, then by bending down before them, I absorb their forces. These forces accumulate in me and join the point in my heart, and then I change.

This way, my criterion of progress is not the external conquests, but inner changes that manifest as new qualities and sensations, new understanding in relation to the study and the objects described in the science of Kabbalah. It isn’t simple to re-orient yourself and shift to the approach that accords with the spiritual world. It takes a lot of time for a person to reach despair and to discover that there is no other way, to understand that he has to act differently, to begin hearing and realizing what he hears, and to build everything in the right order, placing himself under the influence of the environment.

In essence, this is the most important thing. Whoever has taken these steps and formed the right attitude to the group, has already gone through the first and most dangerous stage of the path without falling prey to his own egoism. It is extremely important to place yourself in front of the environment the right way. Rabash particularly underlines this in his articles.

We can even say that the subsequent steps are easier to make because I already have the right approach and focus. I understand that the Light is primary, that it is the only thing that operates in reality, and we have to give it the opportunity to do so instead of getting in the way with our egoism, as if we have the strength and reason to do anything ourselves. In fact, the only opportunity we have is to naturally bend down our head before the environment and then to receive the forces for change and correction.
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/28/11, Writings of Rabash

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