Unity does not imply difference and separation, nor the numerous opinions and forces, but the action of one force: the force of unity, one opinion, one idea. If a person suddenly jumps out of unity into his own egoistic calculations, recollections, or thoughts (let’s say thoughts about household worries), the force of unity quickly brings him back.

People feel the common force of unity. It slowly draws them in, corrects, and engulfs them in such a way that later, on the basis of this, they begin to build their lives differently.

We need to understand that the force of unity holds us. It makes us and all of nature alive, up to the egoistic nature of our world, which only feeds off of the quality of bestowal. Otherwise, it could not exist.

By connecting to this force, we basically make ourselves healthy. I know of a lot of cases where a person really received a strengthening force, restoring his health.
[61704]
From Sunday Virtual Lesson Series 11/20/2011

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We are in a very special place, a desert. In fact, this is the same landscape, the same place where people who were willing to exit their ego (their Egypt) and reach a desire directed “straight to the Creator,” to the upper one, passed through.

This desert seems lifeless, but that’s not accurate as we find a land full of life. There is everything here, and people can live in a desert. There are underground waters, special air, animals, and plants here. It only seems to a person that there is nothing here because he is not used to living in a state when he has risen above himself. When he reveals this state, he sees that he doesn’t need anything else, only to rise.

Thus, there is a desert in an egoistic desire, but when we rise above it with our own efforts, we feel that it’s actually a land flowing with milk and honey, which has everything needed. Thereby, the desert turns into the land of Israel where we reveal the upper world.

Because this place is extremely special according to its root and branch, it has to help us. There are no foreign thoughts here, no foreign desires. Let’s try to do that! Everyone has to try to rise above himself internally in the common desire, the same way drops of water join together to become one drop, one whole, and not a set of a few drops. That is the nature of the quality of bestowal. In the same way, we have to feel that here exists just one desire, one thought, one intention.
[61425]
From Lesson 1, Arvut Convention in the Arava Desert 11/18/2011

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Question: After two years of studying, I realize that intention is the main thing on the spiritual path. How do I overcome my unwillingness to become included into the group? It has suddenly pounced on me and won’t let me keep the intention.

Answer: Pay somebody to bring you to the lesson every day. Sign a commitment where you will lose something if you don’t perform certain tasks in the group. If you are capable of building your life only inside the corporeal framework, bind yourself to the group in the same way you are bound to your family or job so that a failure to fulfill obligations will lead to a real loss.

“Marry” the group and provide for it the same way you provide for your wife and children. A person must work on himself. You are waiting until you have a desire to take the spiritual path. Well, you may take your time. Such desire will never appear. On the contrary, it will become even easier to justify your idleness with a sober and realistic approach.

You probably will be sent more sufferings and spite toward this world. One way or another, something will happen. If your desire doesn’t burn now, then wait and see.

The world is going through such stages now that it is much easier for people to rise above everyday life. This is being done on purpose in order to help the spiritually weak layers of society come closer to the upper world. The current crises are required exactly for that purpose, but strong people are being given opportunities to fight their matter during times of material bloom and prosperity.

The spiritual world is built on freedom of choice. If a person doesn’t commit to the group and the group doesn’t commit to him, then he must not be pressured because he is not in the family. He hasn’t taken the burden. Thus, nothing can be done. He is free to make his choice.

What kind of requests can a person who has not bound himself physically to the group make? How can he ask the group to become an elevator raising him to a higher degree? It is silly to complain about a lack of desire. It is better to act physically. Catch a brief moment of bursting desire and sign an agreement with the group, which will obligate you later when desire ceases.

Put yourself into a hopeless position, trick yourself just like a bitter enemy, so as to continue with the path even when you don’t want to. Do you like your boss? Nevertheless, you go to work since you have no choice.

If we don’t work on binding ourselves hard to the group, we won’t be able to build a vessel of mutual guarantee. At the Arava Convention, we achieved an important preparatory step toward the December convention; we gained a common feeling. Now, we must sustain it. We must commit to holding onto this feeling with all our might, bring it to the convention, and with it, light up thousands of participants and the millions of people around the world who are connected to us.

To the degree that each person invests physically into this preparation, he binds himself to the group. It is not accidental that Kabbalists from the groups of Ramchal and the Ari signed customary agreements among themselves. After signing, you cannot escape. You must fulfill the obligation. The same happens in life: You sign an employment contract to receive salary. However, here, instead of money, you will receive a different kind of reward, a higher and more valuable one.

Let us hope to meet at the convention prepared and united. Then, we will be able to actually rise and become a Light for the entire world.
[61773]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/20/2011, “The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee)”

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It is really not easy to arrive at the sensation of need of true love. In our world, the only love that exists is love for one’s own self. When I love something, I want to come closer to it, bring it close to me, and fulfill myself with something. In other words, I wish to “get hold of it.” For us “love” is acquisition. “I love” means that I like the fact that it is mine—this is what the desire to receive pleasure says.

Naturally, it brings a good sensation. But we value this quality in man as if it was referring to his good qualities, which is because our entire world is made of “consumers.” We do not love anything in any other way but in our egoistic desires.

Love that Kabbalah speaks of is completely different, and we are not able to understand it well. There is the upper force that does not depend on us and that has existed before we were created, without us, that is, before the Creator had the desire to create the creature. The creature is something that exists outside this upper force, the Creator, and perceives Him.

To perceive Him means to understand, feel, and attain His qualities. To bring the creature to the point of perceiving the Creator, it was necessary to create the creature with the qualities opposite to the Creator’s: in egoistic love. And development must bring the creature to love of the Creator referred to as “love thy neighbor.” After all, no one else exists beside the Creator and the creature.

We must go through this development on our own, that is, we must feel, understand, examine, and evaluate all the details of perceiving the Creator. And at the end, we must change our egoistic love—the desire to enjoy that only allows us to perceive ourselves and encapsulates us within ourselves—to the development of perception of what exists outside of us. This is why the one external to us is called a “neighbor.” And since this perception is given to us by the Creator’s degree, position, it is referred to as the good inclination.

There is nothing beside these two states: either I perceive myself or I perceive the Creator. But this transition is absolutely not clear to us since I am absolutely separated from the second state and am unable to feel it. To help me go from perceiving myself to perceiving Him, the Creator prepared a certain illusion within my egoistic desire, my perception of myself, which gives me the feeling of not being alone.

This is why I feel like I am in an environment that is referred to as my “neighbor” and includes the still, vegetative, and animate world, and the people, that is, different creatures, different parts of creation. And I, a certain regular person, feel how I can use this environment either for my own interests or as an exercise to try to do it for the sake of the environment.

My need to act for the sake of the environment arises when my desire for the Creator awakens. I do not understand this desire yet, I do not know the Creator, and this is why I am given this exercise: Try to treat your neighbor, those who are outside of you, altruistically. This is the place where you will be able to build your love for your neighbor.

When through these exercises you will acquire new qualities and understanding and will perform multiple clarifications, then you will be able to come closer to having a connection with the Creator.
[62041]
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/29/2011, Writings of Rabash

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At the end of our development, we must reach a state of unlimited reception, unlimited revelation of good, eternity, perfection, and power, as well as absolute fulfilment. This is what awaits us ahead if we begin to receive in order to express intentions toward the Creator that are equivalent to those He displays toward us. This is the essence of all our work.

The purpose of the creation of our world, meaning the concealment of the Creator, is for us to try, under these conditions and with the environment that is given to us, to develop such skills of interaction between us that will allow us to switch from reception—theft, bad intentions, rivalry, envy, and hatred—to the feeling of bestowal, love, and rising above oneself.

If a person truly rises above himself, he begins to perceive the Light that fills the world around him, the Creator who is present in this world, the general Light, the general quality of love and bestowal. Then, he disconnects from his animal body and simply “floats” in this huge, endless atmosphere of being filled with love and goodness.

This is the next state that we must ascend to. In no way does this destroy our world. We enter it gradually, feeling it together with our world, and transform in our sensations to the next degree.
[62032]
From the Sunday Virtual Lesson Series 11/6/2011

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Question: It is very hard to find some connection between the words or the letters in The Book of Zohar and the love of friends. How do you do that?

Answer: We’ve already said that we don’t define the word “love” correctly. Love means connection, equivalence of form, equivalence of attributes. It is not the concept of love that we use in our world: I love what belongs to me, and I don’t love what isn’t mine.

We build love, we actually acquire love: Through the efforts that I make, by changing and correcting my attributes, I attain love. It isn’t a love that is typical to my nature and my character, when I love one thing and not another. I naturally love those who are close to me, and not those who are distant because I want to use them in order to fill my ego. We are not speaking about such relationships. Everything that takes place inside our ego has nothing at all to do with the love the wisdom of Kabbalah speaks of.

When I am in the group and try to work on the connection with the friends, I know that it is all depicted only in my imagination. Actually, there is no group or anything else. Only I exist. All of the external images that I see are only a play of my imagination. My ego, that still dominates me, divides me into internality and externality.

If I corrected myself, I would return to the real picture of reality that actually exists right now, but it is hidden from me by the degrees and the worlds (concealments). I would return to the world of Infinity where there is no “I” and no “others.” Everything is my desire, my vessel, where there is the Creator, the fulfillment, and where there is none else besides Him. This is how I should imagine all of reality.

So, what is love? It is the attainment of the attributes of love and bestowal, bestowal upon others, the love of others. Eventually, it is all about overcoming the lie I am in. That is all.

The infinite reality divided by the force of separation into numerous forms that seem to be outside of me. This was done intentionally. This is a false image of reality. If I work on the basis of this false form that I cannot annul, if I rise above it and reunite Infinity into one whole, then even though the false form remains, I attain the feeling of Infinity that is 620 times stronger in my true sensation, understanding, and awareness.
[62045]
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/29/2011, The Zohar

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The Creator is the force of bestowal that dominates all of reality. The force of bestowal can glow from a distance. No matter who we are and of what matter we are made, its bestowal upon us can make us resemble it: turn us into the ones who bestow.

In order to connect to this force, those who have attained it describe the different revelations of the force of bestowal, the Creator. They tell us about the mechanism of His system of bestowal upon us, and thus we can connect to Him. Indeed, we can never say anything about a person himself. We can speak only about how his actions are revealed to us. Baal HaSulam writes that we never can know the “essence,” but only the actions of the essence.

It is the same with the Creator. It is written: “By Your actions, we will know You.” By His actions, we gradually perceive His correct image. This is because His actions are imprinted within us in different forms. From them we begin to understand, ponder about, clarify, and arrange the Creator’s actions, and then we can create His image. It all stems from our impressions, and this is how we reach recognition.

The revelation, recognition, and understanding that we reach is called “imaginative cognition.” It is imaginative because on one hand, our matter remains the same: the desire to enjoy. There is no other matter. On the other hand, the form that dresses in this matter is the desire to bestow, the attribute of the one Who bestows, His image, by which I am impressed.

In order to be impressed by that image, by the Creator, I am impressed by the group. Thus, I come closer to perceiving Him. Reading The Book of Zohar is special because while we read it, we want to be impressed by the different forms of the Creator’s bestowal that were revealed to those who were able to attain His forms. These forms come to us, but they are hidden, and we don’t feel them, we cannot describe how we sense them. We don’t have a clear feeling of the forms, of their various types, manifestations, or attributes, whereby I would feel any inner changes.

Kabbalists describe all these forms and give us a whole picture as to how this understanding is formed within a person, how it changes and develops in him from a very small form: the point in the heart. Starting from this tiny point, every stage develops first in a negative direction that is opposite to the Creator, and then in a positive direction that resembles Him. Then again, development is in a negative direction, in another attribute that is opposite to the Creator, and then in a positive direction that is like Him. Thus it continues: left, right, left, right. This is how our understanding develops, from the smallest to the greatest.

The states where we are opposite to the Creator are called the “evil inclination,” and the states where we receive attributes like His are called the “good inclination.” In other words, the “inclination,” the desire, remains, but we call it “bad” if it is opposite in form to the Creator, and we call it “good” if we receive attributes that resemble Him.

We are actually talking about ourselves in relation to the attribute of love. This is the Creator’s attitude toward the created beings. So, in every step that we take, we advance from hatred to love, then again from hatred to love. When we feel hatred, in some way, we feel the notion of “Mount Sinai,” a mountain of hatred. Then, when we feel love, we feel the Light that Reforms, the revelation of the Torah.

When we read The Book of Zohar that tells us about all the states, good and bad, the negative forces and the positive ones that operate mutually and equally in order to attain the goal, we have to try and connect to the great Kabbalists who felt all these states and adhered to them. Now, I want to be part of Rabbi Shimon’s group that includes Baal HaSulam, Rabash, and all the great Kabbalists.

This is all one mechanism, one system, the corrected part of the whole vessel of the soul that has been corrected. There, in these desires, are the great souls that feel and have attained the Creator, that have the same attributes that He has. They talk to us about this mechanism just as parents talk to their children. Although the child doesn’t understand everything he is told, he still has to try to.
[62053]
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/29/2011, The Zohar

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Question: Each time after an intensive day, the morning lessons seem to “heal all the wounds,” opening a new page and giving us a new urge.

Answer: That’s right, throughout the day you do many things, prepare yourselves, and do your internal work so that the next morning we can make a breakthrough.

Question: How can we keep this trend from slowing down before the convention?

Answer: We will not slow down. After all, we’ve become a great global vessel, world Kli, and we have the power to unite and not to lose the deficiency. Besides, we should understand that we have to do only half the work: to create a deficiency, a vessel. The filling will come from Above, the Light that Reforms will do the work. We have to recognize evil, our lack of power, and this will be our greatest accomplishment. At the same time, we need hope, readiness, and confidence that the Surrounding Light will do its job.

So in order to raise a request for correction (MAN), we need two things: a feeling of helplessness and confidence in the power that comes from Above. You believe in Bina, which is called “faith,” “bestowal,” and at the same time you also see that you, meaning Malchut, cannot do anything.

Question: We are riding on a certain wave now. How can we not feel “drunk with success”?

Answer: Everything will be alright. We don’t have to be absolutely sure of ourselves, and at the same time we shouldn’t worry. There are always two opposites that operate here: How can I be worried if I believe in the upper force? I have to worry that we will all connect in one desire. We don’t need anything except for that. Only mutual guarantee will enable us, by the prayer of many, to demand the upper force to be revealed. The more we connect, the more we will reveal its Light.

Question: How can I fine-tune this yearning and not be satisfied with the natural joy from the gathering?

Answer: You cannot avoid the ups and downs. Someone my feel emptiness now, and someone else may be dancing with joy. This is how we complement each other. Thus, the shattering of the vessels manifests: By working on themselves, they connect and actually incorporate into each other.

We have to increase our efforts. The main thing is to reach the prayer of many that will burst out of our unified heart.
[62070]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/29/2011, “The Essence of Religion and Its Purpose”

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Question: We know that a person needs to humble himself and connect with the group through mutual guarantee. But what does one do when he is at home on his own? How does a person act with the correct intention when he is doing mundane things such as eating, cleaning, and so on?

Answer: Be under our influence with our channel of communication turned on.

Question: I am a 70 year-old lady. I have been studying Kabbalah for seven years now. I have some health problems, which make it very difficult for me to be away from home, drive, attend congresses, and so on. I watch you every day during the morning lesson, and since I am retired, I do translations and work with texts most of my time.

However, it bothers me that I cannot be with the group very often. Yet, I have found that many discernments and changes within me are the result of interacting with my own family. I wonder, do you think this is the correct path?

Answer: You are advancing wonderfully; continue, this will give you strength and add years to your life.
[62085]

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There are two paths for attaining the level of “Adam”: the path of suffering and the path of the Light. Being in our world in the lowest state, we suddenly revealed a push that led us to the group, to the general system of uncorrected separate souls.

However, we have all the means: the teacher, the books, and the instructions to begin our correction and become similar to the system of Adam that exists in the world of Atzilut. If we unite and wish to be like Adam in order to bestow to the Creator and thereby become similar to Him, then from this general system of Adam, during our studies we receive the influence of the Surrounding Light or Ohr Makif. It gradually corrects us and connects us into one whole.

It all depends on the extent to which we try to gather into a group, study together from the sources, and strive to attain the goal of creation. These are the means for attaining our higher state. Altogether we must come to the state of Adam.

There are two paths of advancement toward the goal: the path of the Light, when we attract the influence of the Light, and the path of suffering, when we are in the group, but don’t really wish to advance. This creates great problems for us because as years go by, we don’t know what to do with ourselves and why we are not getting anywhere. Due to the fact that we aren’t using the means that are given to us, our advancement becomes slow, difficult, and lengthy. In other words, we advance by the path of suffering.

If we could only rise above ourselves and with clenched teeth strive towards each other, to see that only in this connection between us will we find a happy, perfect future, then we would instantly reveal the Light of correction within us, the Surrounding Light that connects us. In this connection we would instantly sense the upper world.

We lack an attack directed at lowering oneself and elevating the quality of bestowal and love for each other above ourselves. I hope that we will be able to achieve this at our forthcoming convention. We have all the necessary conditions to make it happen.
[61931]
From the Sunday Virtual Lesson Series 11/6/2011

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