In order to receive the Light that reforms, the force that will make us similar to the upper force, the Creator, and that will return us to the source of goodness and abundance so we would become just as good, bestowing, and loving, we have to place ourselves in the right conditions.

How can I prove to myself and prepare myself to make the right request from the upper Light so it would influence me? Only through the environment. I don’t have any opportunity in our world to prove that I want to become bestowing and good unless I organize the right connection with the environment to the best of my ability.

That is why before and during the lesson, especially while reading The Book of Zohar, every one of us must constantly feel that he has an unceasing connection with others, that he is in a net of connection where he loses himself and only feels everyone together. He must try to feel with all his might that he does not have his own “I,” but there is only “WE.” This is called the assembly of the souls of Israel (Knesset Israel)—the unification of all those who aspire to reveal the Creator.

If they unite together in order to reveal Him, that means the broken souls desire to unite together and ascend through their request for unification to Malchut of the world of Atzilut. Malchut of the world of Atzilut takes these desires, which aspire to unite and make mutual efforts to unite, and raises this request to Zeir Anpin. He, in turn, works on this request, corrects them, and then all who participate in it acquire the force of mutual bestowal and begin to feel closer, more connected together. Thus, gradually, step by step, very slowly they reveal the net of connection between them. When this net attains its first realization, we begin to feel that we are on the first degree of the spiritual ladder.

Therefore, while reading The Book of Zohar we must constantly aspire only toward unity among us so inside of it we would reveal the form of our connection called “the Creator.” After all, the Creator is the form of connection among us.
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/17/11, The Zohar

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Question: At the beginning of the lesson on The Book of Zohar, I understand and get inspired by your words about intention. But the moment we start reading The Zohar, I’m beset by a multitude of foreign thoughts, and I fail to re-establish the right intention. What should I do?

Answer: Regret it! A person gradually develops a need to sense the material. Indeed, we are talking about an opportunity to perceive spirituality. Our desires (vessels) are our sensations, yearnings.

If a person doesn’t yet have a desire to discover the upper one, the force of bestowal, on the basis of the lower one, the force of reception, by way of the lower one becoming similar to the upper one in its properties, he or she doesn’t yet get inspired by a constant spiritual quest.

You can’t help it, just regret it as much as you can. And the group has to stimulate the unwavering, right intention during the study.

Only those moments during which a person remembers about the intention are regarded as the study of the Torah (Kabbalah), the Light of which reforms. If one sums up all these moments, he can count how many minutes during his life he studied the Torah…. But whatever reason doesn’t do, time will. Gradually, it will come.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/17/2011, The Zohar

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Question: During the reading of The Zohar, is it enough to aspire only toward unity?

Answer: No, it isn’t. Baal HaSulam writes in “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Item 155, that a person who wants to reveal is eager to attain what he is studying and draws the Light that surrounds his soul onto himself. The Light comes to the degree of his aspiration.

“To strive to attain” means that I try to perform the actions described in the Torah within myself. The Torah is a manual, an instruction (“Torah” derives from Horaa, instruction, and Ohr, Light) for how I should correct myself by drawing the Light that affects me while I study this manual.

While reading this instruction, I try to discern within myself the states that it describes. This text is written in an unusual way, corporeal language talking about the spiritual world, so that under all these concealments, I would find and see what it is trying to tell me, what all my inner properties and desires are about.

I must uncover and learn what they are. I want to apply them in practice. I want the Light, the upper force, to elevate me above my will to receive pleasure so that I may start working with this matter instead of being chained in it, without even feeling and identifying myself with it.

I want to separate myself from it and study it from aside. Then, I can attempt to build one or another form from it, like a child who is making a tower from building blocks. I will be able to watch and examine what is going on with me. At that point, I will have a force that will allow me to work with my still matter. Then, I will acquire forces to work on my vegetative form of the will to receive, followed by the animate, and so on, until I recreate myself as human. To accomplish this task, I have to ascend to the degree of the upper Light.

Yet, this is the way we advance, yearning and desiring to know how to work. This aspiration to know how to find within myself these inner properties and how to work with them is vital. Where it is up to me, I want to be the master of my actions. It is as if I collate my desires and then tell the Creator: “Now, connect, correct them!”

However, I have to bring them to correction, to seemingly connect them, and when the Light comes and corrects them, it does occur. This means that I ask, and the Creator fulfills; I demand, and the Creator carries it out. He and I are partners.

Therefore, it is our duty to try to understand the Torah, The Zohar. However, after the Light has affected me, I also come to a state where I am able to see, feel, and understand all that is being described.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/15/2011, The Zohar

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Question: During the past few weeks of reading The Book of Zohar, I’ve been very focused on the internal, spiritual work. Suddenly, I can’t stay with it even for ten seconds. What can I do when something like this occurs?

Answer: Try to stay with it for fifteen seconds. I don’t have any other advice. There are times, especially when someone is just beginning to study the wisdom of Kabbalah, when a person is unable to work on himself yet. He hasn’t accumulated sufficient experience and doesn’t know how to deceive his ego.

Try to draw something next to a passage from The Zohar, highlight and underline, meaning work with the text, albeit mechanically at times, if you can’t do anything else. Sometimes, a person may be completely disconnected from spirituality. During such states, he can connect to it only by working with the text, processing it purely mechanically, by moving the commas around, breaking it into sub-headings, messing the text up, or organizing it.

No matter what a person is going to do with it, even if it’s just reading the letters, the key is to keep reading it. He should know that he is confusing himself thereby in order to keep reading, and that’s work.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/15/2011, The Zohar

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Question: When I read your books, I feel the revelation of a new world. However, as soon as I shut them, I remember only myself. How can I keep the sensation which I had while reading the books?

Answer: You don’t need to remember anything, but rather to forget, and it’s wonderful that you do! After all, if you do not forget, you act according to what I wrote in the books, according to my mind and feeling. If you read a lot, repeat what you already read, and still forget, you accumulate your inner sensations. You need to do that, and this is your accomplishment.

The more you forget the better. A person has to come out of the lesson and remember nothing because the wisdom of Kabbalah is not like other sciences of our world that require memorizing. When I study at a university, I have to remember some knowledge and then demonstrate it at the exam. In Kabbalah, the exam tests what I have built within myself as a result of what I read and heard.

Therefore, I strongly recommend that everyone has a full set of our books. Read them at home, while commuting on a bus or train, during a lunch break, every time when you have an opportunity to open a book. Through it you connect with the spiritual root.
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From Lesson 8, WE! Convention 4/3/2011

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The text of The Zohar is difficult to read in some places since it seems tasteless, doesn’t excite, amaze, or prompt us to respond. I see that it lulls everybody to sleep. What can be done, if we are separated from the spiritual state and have to connect with it? How else can the method of connection be built?

The state which I have to approach is beyond my feelings and desires. Nevertheless, how can I impel myself to come close to it? A small child looks at a driver with eagerness: A driver appears great for him. A pilot is even greater. A fireman is simply a hero. A child sees examples and wants to follow them. He has a sensation, example, vision, and connection. He can visualize the desirable state in the ego in which he exists. Nature itself forces him to desire this. Then, he moves selfishly, driven by his desire, urge, and aspiration.

We face the concealed world. It is hidden because now I don’t have any desire for it, so much so that I don’t see it and reject it. It isn’t even opposite to me since then I would see it as hateful, disgusting, repelling. But I don’t have even that.

So, how can I get closer to it? It cannot be seen because I don’t have any desires for it or any organs to perceive it. I was given a possibility to read about it, but I hear words and don’t know what they mean. I don’t have in me, in my world, in everything I am familiar with, any comparable phenomena.

If I am told about this concealed world by means of the words of our physical world: “the sun,” “the moon,” “an elder,” “mountains,” “sea,” “hills.” This baffles me even more because I begin to imagine what is happening in our world and not in the spiritual one. As a result, these words distance me even further. What can be done?

Therefore, Kabbalists use the language of Kabbalah. Reading the text written in the language of Kabbalah, you are prone to fewer mistakes because you see that Kabbalists talk about something unknown to you: technical terms that describe desires, clarifications, screens, Lights, degrees, and different numbers. All this is technology telling about something concealed from me. This text is much easier to read: It’s less confusing.

Why was The Book of Zohar hidden throughout centuries? It waited for our time so that people would not become confused and begin to materialize it. Until Baal HaSulam wrote his Sulam commentary on The Book of Zohar, it was very difficult to read it. If the masses started reading it, they would have imagined who knows what.

Even now, there are “teachers” who connect parts of the human body with spiritual activities: the right hand with bestowal, the left with reception. They tie a red string on the left hand, and it means correction for them. They haven’t reached spiritual attainment, and they think it is about what happens in our world. They don’t transfer this into the internal sensations, where we discover spiritual forces.

We must keep reading The Book the Zohar with perseverance and wait for the Lights concealed in the worlds to affect us. And it works! We have no book more powerful in its impact than The Zohar.

It is impossible to connect with the concealed world in another way. You need an adapter, an intermediary. What is this intermediary? You are told about something unknown, and you persist with your friends to aspire to it. Although you still have nowhere to aspire to, but if everybody says that it is important and concealed, you start to be impressed from what is still empty for you and to give it importance. Why? It’s because this is important for your environment.

Although it is not important for the environment either, and they simply work on you, this is sufficient. Then, you can develop a desire for the spiritual world which is opposite to us, and you cannot desire it. Thus, we reach spirituality by virtue of desire without a desire.

Otherwise, you will never reveal the spiritual world, or you will reveal it under the pressure of greater suffering, when overtaken by blows, you will rush to spirituality out of hopelessness, and not because you developed a desire for spirituality together with your friends. This is called development by the path of suffering, and not by the path of Light. Decide what you want!

If you are given an opportunity to move forward with the Light, to awaken it with your desire absorbed from the environment, but you don’t use this opportunity, suffering will befall you because you have to advance in accordance with the plan of creation.

It follows that the only free choice we have is to advance either by means of good or evil. But the fact that we have to advance is beyond all doubt. You have only a possibility to choose between the two paths, like a child who can opt either to become good or to remain bad. The end of the path is decided and known, and the time has been set. Everything was given initially except for your approach.

So now, we are at the point of an extremely critical decision: Do we see medicine in the reading of The Book of Zohar? It is true that I want to sleep, nothing disturbs me, the text doesn’t attract me, and it’s completely tasteless. The Zohar makes me sleepy….

But this is the true state. You are shown that you have no connection with spirituality. Get the desire from your environment now! Each is responsible for providing others with mutual guarantee so that they wake up. Then, out of total awakening, when we wish to wake up everybody, the Surrounding Light will come and make a small change in us. And we will immediately begin to sense what is written in The Zohar.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/6/2011, The Zohar

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Question: Why is it much easier to read those parts of The Zohar where Baal HaSulam explains it using Kabbalistic terms?

Answer: It’s because then it’s clear to us that these are technical definitions and not earthly images. However, everything depends on one’s level of qualification.

If I invite a specialist to fix my computer, I show him the images on my screen and tell him that I don’t like the color shades or display quality, but he doesn’t look at the actual picture. A computer specialist looks at the electric signals, the forces that create this picture inside, at the quantity of the colors installed in the system. He doesn’t care about the picture itself because for him it’s nothing but an external reflection, a symbol for what’s happening inside, which indicates the computer’s proper or improper functioning.

On the other hand, when I show him this picture and ask how to fix it, he explains it to me in technical terms: “Here you need to replace HGT, NHY, reconcile the forces of the right and left lines…” and I don’t understand what he’s talking about either.

We are confused not by The Zohar speaking this way or that, whether it’s the language of legends or the language of Kabbalah, but by our inability to correctly discern the actual picture and realize what it’s talking about. Every word of The Zohar indicates a desire which must be corrected. There is nothing else to it besides that.

The Creator gave rise to desire. This desire must be brought to correction and fulfillment. Until it achieves its correction followed by fulfillment, we’re only talking about this desire. As soon as it becomes corrected and fulfilled, we stop talking about it and begin to discuss the next degree, a deeper desire which follows right after.

This is how we correct desire after desire, layer after layer. This phased approach to the whole power of the desires within us, which we correct step-by-step, one after another, is called Mishpatim—judgments or reincarnations of souls. “Reincarnations of souls” means that I am always undergoing these inner transformations.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/6/2011, The Book of Zohar

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Question: Why does the greatest advancement happen precisely while reading The Book of Zohar, without understanding anything, just by keeping intention?

Answer: The study of Kabbalah does not require any special mental abilities because it is not learned with the mind. On the contrary, people who consider themselves smart, who are good at studying, who grasp things quickly and have a keen mind, usually do not advance very well in Kabbalah. That’s because the mind and the sensation of their mental abilities stops them, carrying them away to the path of the rational study of this science instead of attaining it by being loyal to the group. This is a problem.

I would say that it’s precisely the regular, “average” people who are more successful in spiritual advancement. The brilliant smart-alecs who come to study the science of Kabbalah usually stumble right away. I see that its as if they jump head-first into the deep sea, and “resurface” from there many years later, once the water washes off all of their pride, feeling of superiority, and power.

Let us hope that we belong to those who are successful in attainment rather than those who have a brilliant mind.
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/11/11, The Zohar

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Question: We are looking at the words that are written by Kabbalists and signify a spiritual root. But how can we create an association in our corporeal sensory organs between the words we are accustomed to and the upper reality?

Answer: According to your desire to attain spirituality and your intention, you somewhat correspond to the Light. And in the degree of this correspondence, it starts affecting you, your desire and intention, from afar. It is what we call the “Surrounding Light,” the Light that Reforms.

It illuminates you from a distance since it still cannot come in contact with your desire and intentions, which are not as pure as the Light just yet. But there is still some connection between them since you are striving upward even from your low state.

And the intention emerges if you are connected in a smallest degree with the environment and receive from it the same desire and aspiration to unify together. Only in the degree of mutual inclusion of such intentions, which we are working toward while reading Kabbalistic texts, will you merit an illumination that will begin to affect you.

If you connect your desires and intentions with the others, who aspire to the same unity during the lessons, you draw the Surrounding Light. Now ask yourself: How often do you think about and desire it while you are studying? Otherwise, years will pass by, and you won’t see any results.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/8/2011, Talmud Eser Sefirot

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