The great Kabbalist the Ari and his successor Baal HaSulam described the entire structure of the universe. For them, it was a reality they attained and for us, these upper roots exist as if in potential.

When we begin to read the texts of The Study of the Ten Sefirot with the correct intention and correct approach to the study, we invoke the forces that are embedded in these states. They are not embedded in letters and words but precisely in these states. This is how this book influences us.

Therefore, Baal HaSulam compiled a dictionary for each part of The Study of the Ten Sefirot that we must constantly use to remind ourselves of the correct definitions of each Kabbalistic term so that we do not have material images.

Question: Is that why Kabbalah was concealed? Because there was no correct approach to it until the Ari and Baal HaSulam explained it.

Answer: Yes. Before the Ari, Kabbalah was practically concealed. Starting with the Ari, Kabbalists appeared who studied and wrote all kinds of comments on his works. Since that time, Kabbalah is already being heard in the world.

Of course, for 400 – 500 years from the Ari to Baal HaSulam, many things happened. But only Baal HaSulam managed to really disclose the Ari. We will talk more about the way the soul of the Ari appeared in him, seemingly incarnating into him, and therefore he was able to create a commentary on all the works of the Ari.
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From KabTV’s “The Study of the Ten Sefirot” (TES), 8/14/22

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Comment: I have seen how people who study Kabbalah change. They begin to look at the world more broadly, understand its interconnectedness, and treat the world as a laboratory.

My Response: Sure. The paradox is that we are not moving away from the world. On the contrary, we go into the world, we get closer to it. Through wanting to rise up, we approach, if I may say so, the lower, ordinary people; we go out to them. We don’t fly skyward and we don’t go up to some closed abode, nothing like that. on the contrary.

Comment: People who study Kabbalah seem to develop patience. But, sometimes it happens that you can’t stand all sorts of nonsense, ie., when someone starts telling you about aliens. You realize that you don’t want to talk about it, but he tells you: “Can you imagine… .”

How should you respond to it? You don’t want to offend people because this is their understanding. But poking around in this is also impossible.

My Response: I have a simple answer to this: “I’m not interested in it.” That’s all. When it is absolutely provable, then we will talk.

Here are the ancient Egyptians, aliens, flying saucers, Bigfoot, and whatnot, especially on the Internet! So people like to engage in it, it fascinates them and brightens up their lives. You tell them that you need to aspire to something, reveal something, but here it seems to exist around us and now; if I squint a little, I will suddenly see it.

People need all this, and the press supports it. After all, you need to sell something, you need to entertain a person.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. How Сonsciousness Сhanges from Kabbalah” 3/8/13

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Question: In The Study of the Ten Sefirot, Baal HaSulam writes that the authors tried to use all the words of our world to designate and explain some upper roots. What does “upper and lower roots” mean?

Answer: The point is that Kabbalists describe the states that they themselves experienced because they acquired new possibilities of sensation. Therefore, they narrate them in such a way that it is as close as possible to us and we can somehow imagine them.

In fact, it is impossible to imagine these substances and objects, maybe just approximately. There is a desire that is fulfilled with what it desires. This state—desire and fulfillment together—is called the upper world, that is, that which exists as the first phase of creation.
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From KabTV’s “The Study of the Ten Sefirot” (TES), 8/14/22

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We must remember that the entire wisdom of Kabbalah is founded on spiritual matters that do not take up time or space. They are not subject to change or absence and all the changes that are spoken of in this wisdom do not imply that the first form becomes absent and is replaced by a different form. The above change rather implies an additional form, while the first does not move from its place (Baal HaSulam, The Study of the Ten Sefirot).

Question: What is this spiritual reality that has neither time nor space? How can one imagine it practically, not philosophically?

Answer: The Creator created desire. The desire itself is called “place,” and the thing it desires is “fulfillment.”

Fulfillment is the light that fills a desire, which feels itself being empty. And once it is full of light, it feels itself as being perfect.
The entire creation consists of these two substances, the place and the fulfillment.

Question: How should we imagine this? Should we imagine that this happened once upon a time or is happening now?

Answer: It is best to imagine that it happened in the past. Just like the Ari wrote: Know that before the emanated beings were emanated and the created beings created, an upper, simple light had filled the entire reality.

What does reality mean? It means a place. Then the Ari explains that it is the desire to feel light as fulfillment. The quality of light is to fill this desire in order to give it pleasure.

All this was happening before the Big Bang, before our corporeal reality appeared.
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From KabTV’s The Study of the Ten Sefirot (TES), 8/14/22

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Question: When you studied Kabbalah, you did not have a group; there was only a teacher. How did you hold on to the importance of the goal in order not to regress in any circumstance?

Answer: It is a different path without a group. It is much more difficult and less effective. After all, I have not advanced at the pace that people who come to us today are advancing. It took me several years to grasp what a beginner grasps in six months or a year.

A person masters the initial stage that one goes through today three times faster than me and those who studied with Rabash. One year for three. What I comprehended in three years, our beginner comprehends in a year.

He gets intensively involved in the work, in understanding, in the system, and in the group. He is drawn into this all, receives explanations, and absorbs material through all the pores. If a person goes through a serious yearly practice with us, then in principle he lays down the foundations for the correction of the soul.

And then it depends on the person. But I believe that at least the first year is a necessary and sufficient condition to become a beginner Kabbalist. After that, if he decides, let him become a Kabbalist, that is, let him start working with himself.

I think that according to the measure of its expansion in the world and how it deepens into us, the preparation period will get shorter. People will start to absorb everything very quickly because it will be perceived through the surrounding ether, through the air.

Such surroundings will be created and such waves will affect us so that everything will seem to be clear! It’s like how children who are born today start playing with phones and computers already from the cradle. What I can’t do is nothing to them.

“How do you know what to do? Did you study somewhere?”

“Why study? Everything is clear anyway.”

That is, their internal logic is built according to what was created by other people in the last generation or a few years before their birth. It will be the same here.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Various Kabbalah” 2/22/13

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The book The Study of the Ten Sefirot (TES) is a commentary by Baal HaSulam on the Ari’s work The Tree of Life (Etz Chaim). It practically explains the entire basis of Kabbalah from beginning to end.

The book of the great Kabbalist of the 16^th century: Ari’s The Tree of Life, of course, is not easy and this is especially so for beginners. But Baal HaSulam wrote a commentary on it, which you can gradually understand and this is where people who come to Kabbalah start during the first few years of study.

TES begins with the words of Ari.

Know that before the emanated beings were emanated and the created beings created, an upper, simple light had filled the entire reality. There was no vacant place, such as empty air and space, but everything was filled with that simple, boundless light. It did not have a quality of Rosh, or Sof, but it was all one, simple light, completely even, called light of Ein Sof (Baal HaSulam, The Study of the Ten Sefirot).

This is about the fact that when there were no created beings as such, there was only one interesting substance called “the upper simple light that fills the entire reality.”

When reading these lines, questions immediately arise: What is a simple light? What kind of reality does it fill? What happened before it filled this reality? What does it represent? What does it mean that there was no free space, but the upper light was filling everything?

Moreover, Ari emphasizes that there was no free place in the form of empty air or empty space and everything was filled with infinite simple light. And, as he writes, there was neither beginning nor end in it, but everything was one simple, completely even light, which is called the light of infinity.
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From KabTV’s “The Study of the Ten Sefirot” (TES), 8/14/22

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Question: Why is it that no method accepts criticism of its so-called guru?

Answer: This is certainly incorrect. After all, we are engaged in the correction of man. Let him do anything he wants, just do no harm. Therefore, there are two very interesting laws in Kabbalah.

The first condition: You can do everything you want except harm the group where you study or slander it because this prevents attracting people who want to join this group.

The second condition: When it seems that the Creator tells you: “You will not succeed—why are you here?” You must stay and check! In general, you are given all the opportunities to intensely and fruitfully study, analyze, prove, ask, and convince.

This method requires a very tedious approach. You must bite into it and start implementing it on yourself together with the people who surround you, and not believe anyone. On the contrary, you must doubt everything.

Otherwise, how will you be able to rise and adapt to your teacher and try to be like him? It is from the denial—that he is not right—that you will understand what he is standing on and how he builds himself. This is the only way. After all, everything we have exists based on positive and negative.

If you do not have the opportunity to criticize and be in the state of opposition, how will you be able to build a state of similarity to the group, similarity to the teacher, and similarity to the Creator?

Coming from this point of view, you can see that all other methods are baseless because people who are engaged in them cannot make anything out of themselves. This is because from the beginning they are prohibited to have such a comprehensive, fearless, and critical attitude toward the very teaching, toward the inner movements, toward the friends, the teacher, and even toward the Creator.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Criticism of Kabbalah” 2/20/13

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Comment: In the Ari’s methodology there is not a single word about love, about unification. It is a purely dry language of Sefirot.

My Response: Yes, the Ari says almost nothing about feelings, only about actions. But this is conveyed in the language of Kabbalah, the so-called language of the Sefirot.

Besides this, there is also a second language of Kabbalah, a sensory one, where a person begins to attain the upper world through sensations. There are no barriers, no boundaries, to feelings. He understands that he enters the state of the Creator’s boundless love and dissolves in it.

This was described by Rabash in his articles about the group. When you study them, you should not just come to the class, put a book in front of you and read the names of lights and worlds, but there should be a certain mood in a person.

To do this, he needs to work in a group, to try to unite with his friends, to receive certain desires from them, to reveal these desires, to come to lessons with this, and to study directly the system of lights and screens. Otherwise it will be just a theory, and Kabbalah does not welcome theory.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 8/2/22

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The Creator is the Nature surrounding us and nothing more. Write “Nature” instead of the Creator, but still with a capital letter, so as not to attribute it to something purely mechanistic.

The Creator is the upper degree, the upper light, and the quality of bestowal in relation to us, who represents the quality of reception. That is, everything is based on very simple concepts that are close to each of us.

The only thing is that we are all very confused. After all, the attitude to Kabbalah throughout the centuries has been deliberately confusing and impeding. We are also confused by all kinds of external customs, items, and objects,  as well as the appearance of religious Jews, as if it has anything to do with Kabbalah. In general, all this is so heaped up that it is, of course, very difficult for a person to understand.

I can see how hard it is for my students in different countries of the world who belong to different religions and races. I see what a huge amount of work they are doing internally and will have to do for a long time.

A person brought up in a different religion who belongs to a different race and thinks in a completely different way, with an opposite mentality and a different language, and one must overcome all this. This quality of the soul is necessary for its correction and not that it is in a more favorable or less favorable state relative to others.

This is how we are separated and distant from each other. I see that many of my students from all over the world would really like to be here next to us. Just tell them it is possible and that a thousand people will come here at once. But they have to overcome huge problems within themselves, big internal disagreements.

When a person suppresses something in himself, since the truth has not yet been fully revealed in him, he is in a kind of semi-compromising state: “Well, what can I do? I will not pay attention to this, as if I don’t see it, do not understand it, and do not observe it, as if this is not in me. I will leave this aside.” It is very hard. But that is the way to live.

This is very similar to how Jews live among other nations. Exactly the same feeling: “We are opposite to them, but we want to be like that. Can we or can’t we? How do they treat us and how should we treat them?” All this omission, this kind of special attitude, is exactly what a person who comes to study Kabbalah goes through.

I understand this. There are many problems. The world is still in such a transitional state.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Criticism of Kabbalah” 2/20/13

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Comment: Baal HaSulam writes that the Ari’s book The Tree of Life (Etz Chaim in Hebrew) is identical in its importance to the Torah that was given to us on Mount Sinai.

One can imagine what the Torah means for all humanity. Today, all culture, art, painting, all religions, and all science are based on it. It’s hard to say what life would be like if there were no Torah. Everything is built on this, right up to our relationship.

And the book The Tree of Life was written only 500 years ago and was published literally 200 years ago. But there are still no implications; no one knows about it.

My Response: It should manifest itself in the future. We hope that its consequences will manifest themselves already in our days and will become the basis not only of our culture, but also of the life of all mankind.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 8/2/22

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