It is seemingly perplexing, for it speaks of the time before the worlds were created. Thus, which reality exists here, that the upper light should fill?

The thing is that all the worlds and the souls that exist and that are destined to be created with all their incidents until the end of their correction are all included in Ein Sof in their full measure and glory. (Baal HaSulam, Study of the Ten Sefirot, Chapter 1, Part 1, Restriction and Line)

This is about the fact that the upper light, which fills the entire reality, carries absolutely all the information about everything that has been, is, and will be. This gradually manifests before us, and we call it our world.

At the very beginning of creation, everything was flooded with one simple light, i.e., the emanation of the Creator’s complete love for future creations.

In other words, from the side of the Creator there is a thought of creation and absolutely everything is included into it up to the final state of each person.
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From KabTV’s The Study of the Ten Sefirot (TES) 8/14/22

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Question: Why is nighttime the most productive time for mental activity? In principle, Kabbalists always studied at night when the concentration of thoughts is much clearer.

Answer: Firstly, it is physiologically conditioned because a person feels that during that time he has nothing else to do and he can concentrate on some work while everyone else is asleep.

Secondly, at that time, not many stimulating centers are activated in him, and therefore he can more easily concentrate on one thing.

Thirdly, if we are talking about spiritual work, then this is the time when you really need to connect to the spiritual root, root to branch or branch to root. At that time, new desires are created in which a person will continue to acquire an attainment.

Such work begins from midnight onward. Therefore Kabbalah encourages people to get up at twelve o’clock at night and start studying. Twelve at night, midnight, is not half of our night, but a conditional night. If you break the whole night from sunset to the appearance of the first ray of light into twelve parts, then the middle part, the sixth, conditional hour, will be midnight.

The night hour can be forty minutes, fifty minutes, or an hour and twenty minutes. We use mechanical clocks, but in general, in nature, clocks are not mechanical but rather solar and lunar. Therefore the hours are conditional.

Our body works the same way according to its internal conditional clock. The human body works completely differently during sleep in winter and summer. All this is taken into account in Kabbalah. That is, night and midnight are purely astronomical values and not mechanical according to the clock, which ticks no matter where and how.

Comment: But there are different regions.

My Response: Man is connected with nature; he is an integral part of it and cannot be separated from it.

And the regions are indeed different. Therefore there is a problem of how to study. But it is believed that it is still better for us to study together. This is most important.

Baal HaSulam writes that joint study, joint appeal, and joint actions override all other parameters.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Everything Happens at Night” 3/5/13

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How can we develop such sensitivity within us that we will understand that if we hope to build our soul without the help of the Creator, then we are taking a long, circuitous path?

We will feel that we are taking a long path each time, and this will push us to look constantly for ways to shorten it and direct it straight to the Creator. It is this long path that directs us to the Creator because we are always trying to straighten it.

Everything depends on the directness of the heart, whether it is directed straight through the friends to the Creator or not. This determines whether the path will be long or short. Imagine how we twist and turn in our hearts and minds in order to avoid connection with the friends and not to come closer to them as well as to the Creator openly and directly. This means that we are not taking the straight path.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/30/22, “Unless the Lord builds a house, its builders labor in it in vain”

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Question: How is a question formed? Where does it come from? Is the person who asks you a question just an irritant that allows you to give out information?

Answer: Yes.

Question: How should one prepare for this? How can you ask a question correctly?

Answer: The question, in fact, is to cling to me and make me want to lift the person who asks the question up like a child who runs up to an adult and asks to be held in his arms. This is the real question, and all the rest is nonsense.

Comment: I noticed that there are two types of people. The first type is when a person wants to hear from you something specific: “No, I am asking him this!” And there are people who understand and as if follow your flow. You start answering, and the person possibly had another question in addition. But he sees that you are now revealing this topic better, and he supports it rather than standing his ground.

My Response: These are big problems because we have a large number of people who want to hear, who are perhaps tuned in to a completely different wave. Then someone breaks into a general conversation and begins with his personal questions or with something he imagined to lead everyone somewhere to the side.

In this case, I try to react either harshly or not at all because it is important for me to maintain a common spirit so that people continue to ride together and rise. Therefore, if someone asks some questions from the outside, I can cut him off and that is it.

For me, the main thing is that the general flow is observed.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. How to Ask a Kabbalist a Question?” 3/6/13

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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.
[301658]
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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