While reading The Book of Zohar we must remember that it is only about the connection between us. It all depends on the relationship between the friends, and in this relationship spirituality is revealed. The forms of the connection between us depict the picture of reality, since now too you see these forms of connection.

In any case, you perceive the world according to your Reshimot (reminiscences), and this is where the picture of the world that you imagine stems from. There is no world outside you; there is only what you imagine inside you.

Now you are among people in this world; you were born and developed in our time, but your worldview is also built by your being connected with the whole world. A boy left in the woods who has never seen human beings perceives the world according to the Reshimot in the form of a forest, animals, and other forms of nature since he doesn’t perceive his environment on the human level, but on lower levels, still, vegetative, animate nature.

You, however, perceive reality also on the level of speaking. But in the relations between all these parts of nature: the still, vegetative, animate, and speaking nature, you discover your reality.

All of reality, the whole world, is what is revealed between the shattered parts of the creation. This is why we say that the perception of reality is subjective. If I don’t exist, then there is no world and there is nothing to speak about; Baal HaSulam writes about this in the “Preface to The Book of Zohar.”

So if we want to reach more advanced forms of perception, we have to evoke more advanced forms of connection between us. No wonder that this is what the wisdom of Kabbalah requires: You should develop more advanced and complex connection with others and in them you will discover a higher reality, which is more advanced and more internal. Everything depends only on the levels of the connection.

Now comes the time when all the connections between us are destroyed and we actually see that, and the world obligates us to form new connections. The world doesn’t know yet what types of connection they should be. As we have already heard about it, we have to start fulfilling them. This is what awaits us. This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah talks about: Leave all your imaginary dealings and start dealing with building the correct future society.

Then according to the connection between you, which you want to establish, you will receive help from above, from nature’s forces. The integral nature that is being revealed now will help you, it will influence you, and you will feel to what extent you are adapted to its general advancement, and you will succeed. We can say that nature is the Creator, but it doesn’t matter since it is about laws.

So where can you change anything in order to hasten your development? Now for the first time in history you can hasten the development of humanity. Before you were always dependent on forces that moved you forward. Internally new connections between people were revealed and new social structures appeared: instead of the tribe, there came along the era of slavery, and then the Middle Ages, then capitalism, and now we are advancing towards communism. These are the five social structures.

But what has advanced humanity? It was all about the changes in social structure, the new connection that appeared between people. But now, during the fifth and last era of our development, you cannot discover new connection naturally. You will discover them in a negative way, since you have to complete them. Here everything depends on your conscious advancement. You have to attain it, you have to adapt yourself to nature—this is the process we are in.

So we are actually creating a new social structure, hastening the process that all of humanity will have to go through. This is called being a “kingdom of priests” and a “holy nation,” setting an example and being the conductor. But we are building this in the group, between us, and it is all in the new connection.
[95677]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/17/12, The Zohar

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Question: What do we need to keep in mind so that the group doesn’t turn into a bunch of mockers?

Answer: Each time, we deliberately fall under the influence of the Creator who taunts us and shakes us like babies so much He as if simply “shakes it all out” of us. Today we are so nice and “cute,” ready to love everyone and everything. But tomorrow we will once again be completely opposite. How can we forget that our path is made of ascents and descents? We can’t remember it if we forget about the Creator.

Why is it said: “Israel, the Torah, and the Creator are one”? Israel means “yearning for the Creator.” Hence the remedy for correction: our studies, the group, where all of this gets realized, and the Creator Himself have to be as one, in one place. There are the Creator, the group, and me.

We have to constantly link it all together into one unified whole; there can’t be any other view of the world! In order to focus and properly look at what is happening, I need these three points: the eye, the sight, and the target. Otherwise, I won’t be able to do anything.

Therefore, if we wish to keep the group in the right intention, it is our responsibility to keep in mind that our goal is adhesion with the Creator. Otherwise, what is going to motivate us, our egoism? Today I am willing; tomorrow I am not.

Here the Creator appears as the definer, the first to act, or the one who initiates our actions, who forms the group and everything that is happening to us, who gives us everything. All that we have in our hearts and mind right now, all that we hear and feel, all of it is His doing.

How should we, together, respond to it, based on the fact that we felt something coming from Him? From this moment on, our work begins. This is exactly the moment when all of us clearly felt that it was He who brought us together right now; He connects us all in one desire, one intention, and the same thought. It is He who arranged everything for us, so that we all together started to ascend to and strive for Him.

So how can we rise to Him so that we could consciously fortify among ourselves what He has created? What does it mean: “I now link myself with the group?” I link myself along with the others and the Creator into the common desire, one common goal, and common aspiration. If the effort that each of us exerts links all the others and the Creator together, this is precisely our active response. This is how we must act. If we envision that everything derives from the Creator and know how we should respond to it, then it will be very effective work, a very effective move.
[95564]
From the Novosibirsk Convention 12/8/12, Lesson 4

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Question: What does it mean to delight the Creator?

Answer: To delight, to bring pleasure to, the Creator, to love the Creator—these are all very beautiful words. But how can we love a force, even if it is eternal and governs everything there is? All these words are told to a person so that he can adjust himself in some way.

We come to love for the Creator only through love for others. In the article, “One Commandment,” there is an instruction: to come to love for the Creator. But how can we be ordered, obliged to love? It is possible when we work on love of another, make a common mass of our yearnings toward each other, build a common connection above our egoism, and cover it with mutual love. It is written: “Love will cover all transgressions.” When we build a collective property of common mutual connection and yearn toward everyone while cultivating love within, then in our internal egoism there arises a completely new structure: mutual adhesion, mutual inclusion.

Love means that I assume all your desires and care for them, thinking solely of how to fulfill them, while you think about mine, and so on. Love means to fulfill desires of another instead of my own, using them for this purpose. If I arrange such conditions within myself, then by doing so I grow a vessel there that works for the sake of bestowal. And this common vessel that all of us are creating together contains our collective component called “love for the Creator.”

We begin to experience not only the common vessel, our attitude towards the others, love for them, bestowing to them, but also we begin sensing what fills me along the way. This sensation is called the Creator, Boreh in Hebrew (“Bo” – come, “Reh” – see). When we create one collective spiritual vessel, the Creator is revealed there as a result.

Hence, the main Mitzva is very simple: “Love your neighbor.” Through love for another, in the vessel that you created, you will feel love for the Creator and, respectively, His love for you.

Question: What is the final goal of this work?

Answer: It is in the fact that you come to a complete likeness and adhesion with Him in our own reformed egoism. This is how you rise to the level of the Creator. This is the final goal of creation. You begin to experience a sensation that you are in total adhesion with Him, but you don’t dissolve in it, because your entire vessel stays with you.

In other words, the sensation of being opposite doesn’t get annihilated since adhesion with the Creator occurs above it; otherwise, mutual annihilation would occur. Hence, we must view our egoism as the matter with the help of which we move forth. We should treat it with respect since it is the reverse image of the Creator. Conversely, our whole world is His reverse image at our level.
[95561]
From the Novosibirsk Convention 12/8/12, Lesson 4

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Question: Do we draw the Creator by actions that are aimed at the revelation of spirituality? In other words, do we raise the actions or do we lower the Creator?

Answer: There are no such terms as “up” or “down” in spirituality in the simple sense of the words. We can divide them according to quality: Up means a higher quality and down means a lower quality.

I want to be connected to the Creator in all my actions; I want to feel how He manages me from the inside, I want to feel that all my thoughts, feelings, and decisions stem from Him. He is inside me, as the hand wearing the glove of the puppet, the puppeteer.

No matter what I do, it is Him, but everything depends on the extent to which I discover that “there is none else besides Him.” Therefore I ask and yearn for it in order to discover Him in me.

But I can do it only when I am with the group, because it is impossible to discover the attributes of bestowal alone. I am an egoist, an individualist, which means that I have to be with a group and to adhere to it.

I am included in a group, connect to the friends, and try to be with them in one desire, one inclination. Through them I ask for all of us, because I cannot ask for myself, since it will be egoism again. I ask for all of humanity—that the Creator will be revealed in us and that we will all feel Him and feel how He operates in us. This is how I want to see what joy and contentment we are bringing Him.

This is fulfilled by the law of “the end result is in the initial thought,” since in spirituality there is no time and no sequential actions. There is a static state, and it is only with regard to us that it is revealed this way, so that we will perceive it gradually.

We must understand the whole formula of creation from the beginning to the end, since otherwise it won’t work. We have to be moderately involved in it, since even our slightest participation is made of the same ten Sefirot according to the law of “the general and the individual are equal.” So we have to feel ourselves deeply, the group, humanity, and the Creator together in one general picture and to complete it.

Question: What is the Creator’s joy?

Answer: The Creator’s joy is the state in which we are all connected, adhered inside Him, enjoying the same wholeness that is actually the Creator Himself.
[95574]
From the Novosibirsk Convention 12/9/12, Lesson 5

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Question: If each of us is making efforts and takes his point outside, at what moment does the adhesion of these points occur between us?

Answer: Be always prepared for duality. If I intentionally seek to measure something, to feel, then, on the one hand, I will be pushed away from this, and on the other hand, I have to build attraction in me. On one hand, I will not understand, and on the other hand, I might understand something. And all this will exist in me in equal proportion. If I work for the group, on the one hand, I have to look at it as something absolute, a unit that is in perfection, in the world of Infinity. Each of the friends is an angel who has completed all his corrections. All the friends are united. There is an ideal in front of me, and the Creator is inside of it.

This is how I should imagine everything that is outside of me. Then I will have something for which to strive, for unity with friends, to be included in them. I see them as great; I develop envy, jealousy, and the desire to integrate with them.

On the other hand, this group influences me, and I have to see and feel it as it usually happens in this world. In this case, I have to communicate with them as with equals, and perhaps sometimes as a teacher to students, and so does every one of us. I have to excite, organize, and motivate them towards the goal, make comments about shared work, about unity, etc.

Thus, there is a kind of “scissors.” On one hand, I relate to the friends as great, perfect, and connected to each other. On the other hand, I relate to them as those whom I can point out, I can cheer; I have to organize someone whom I can influence.

I must be prepared to treat the group in two ways, and it should not disturb me. In spiritual work duality always emerges. But in any case, one does not cancel the other; there is time for one and for the other. Because of this, you need to learn to bifurcate, to look at things more “slanted,” and then between these two oblique directions, you will find out how to see the higher system.
[95568]
From the Novosibirsk Convention 12/9/12, Lesson 5

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Question: One of our friends from the virtual group was going to come to the congress but at the last minute he returned his ticket. How should we support friends in such groups?

Answer: This should be regarded simply: The Creator wants to show him whether or not he chose the right path. Let him check.

You have to treat him as a friend: There are ascents as well as descents, and they both come from the Creator. You have to truly be helpful and supportive of a friend and the rest is up to him.

It is said that one should be lifted twice. If you see your friend with his “donkey” (egoism) and this “donkey” is weighted down by his load, meaning that the egoistic desire of a friend didn’t withstand the load and fell, then you must help the “donkey” to free himself of this load, to lift him back up, and load him again. If the “donkey” falls again, then you have to repeat this action. However, if he falls for the third time then you can leave him.
[95516]
From the Novosibirsk Convention 12/8/12, Lesson 4

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I hope we will tighten our connections so much that we will reach the level where we really feel one another. Today we have a couple of million people around the world, but many of them we don’t know. If we could see all of those who watch or listen to us…

When we begin to mutually feel one another like a mother feels her child at a distance, and even much greater than that, then there will simply be one permanent worldwide convention.
[95510]
From the Novosibirsk Convention 12/8/12, Lesson 4

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Question: If “there is none else besides Him,” where is the point of applying our efforts and how do we not sink into the temptation to explain the reluctance to make efforts by the fact that everything comes from the Creator? From time to time, this motivation appears in the group.

Answer: This happens because people forget that one half comes from the Creator and the other half from us. From top to bottom, we get everything from the Creator. He shapes our attitudes, thoughts, connections between us, as well as everyone’s character and education, absolutely everything. Now consider what we do with it in order to strive for the Creator because He can be felt only through the connection with the rest of humanity because it’s the same mass in which He is revealed.
[95441]
From the Novosibirsk Convention 12/8/12, Lesson 4

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Question: If love towards friends means to prefer his desire more than mine, what desires are we talking about?

Answer: As Baal HaSulam writes in his article, “The Last Generation,” one needs to be concerned that each person in the world will have his necessities for normal material existence met. And if the friend himself will relate to it like that, he will not need any extras.

And all the rest needs to be directed toward the support of the friend on the spiritual path. So what does it mean that I love the friend? How can I fulfill his desires? If I worried about food for him and anything he needs for his existence, in the other things, I support him spiritually: showing him my awakening and transferring to him the feeling of the greatness of the Creator and the importance on the spiritual path that awakens me and fulfills me in force. I act towards him as toward my child, which I want to attract to a beneficial action, and therefore I show him my interest, the desire, my appreciation. Exactly in the same way, I must show an example to the friend. It means, that I supply him with spiritual nourishment besides the corporeal nourishment, it means, that I love him.

Precisely this attitude, we must develop in our group. To give a friend the feeling of the greatness of the goal and my personal example of the loyalty to it, this is called to love the friend. And by that I prefer his desire above my desire. I take into consideration what he needs, the necessary corporeal means, and all the rest is toward his spiritual development. All this I must supply to him.

I must worry that he will arrange his life in a normal form, to help him find a job, etc. And from a spiritual aspect, I must encourage him with the greatness of the goal. And by that, I prefer his desire above my desire, I am worried for his development, and not mine. If I worry for a friend, this is the best thing for my development. But all of that I do in order to reach the love of God.

One must connect to a whole one: Israel, Oraita, and Kedosh Berach Hu (Israel, the Torah, and the Creator). Otherwise, it turns out that I simply love the friend in a natural egoistical love like for my child.

Precisely this form of work is called “the work of God.” If I relate to a friend in this way, through him I direct myself to the Creator. Love of others is necessary only in order to reach love of God. Through this man reveals the concealment that was made by the Creator, so we will practice in the love of others and reach the love of God.
[95465]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/13/12, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot”

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