Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

Attainment Results from the Interaction between the External Essence and Our Senses

We have no attainment or perception whatsoever in any substance as all of our five senses are completely unfit for it. The sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch offer the scrutinizing mind mere abstract forms of “incidents” of the essence, formulating through collaboration with our senses.
– Baal HaSulam, The Study of the Ten Sefirot, Part One, “Inner Reflection,” Chapter 10
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Question: If I have fallen down, what do I need to do in order to move forward?

Answer: When you have fallen, you are first of all sorry about it, and you want to come out of the fallen state, to rise above your nature, which you can no longer bear. You are even justifying this fall and you understand that “There is none else but the Creator.”

And then, gradually, you forget about this and you return to your usual state, thinking that there is nothing scary about that and that all kinds of things happen. And so it goes on until the next blow.

How many blows like this will be needed depends on the extent to which you connect your mind to it and work on your falls with the help of the group. The group must become your store-room, accumulating the whole of your mind at the time when you are completely under the control of your feelings, in order to balance it.

And on the contrary, when you fall under the control of the cold, dry reason, and when you do not even know how to awaken feelings inside of yourself in order to be inspired by spirituality, then you receive the impression in terms of feelings from the group.

But you will never be able to possess both, the feeling and the mind. That is why the connection to the group is so necessary for us; it can compensate for the lacking opposite and in a way connect both of them. Under the condition that you lower yourself in front of the group and are ready to accept its sorrow. Then you can connect the heart and the mind inside of yourself somehow.

Although, in reality, they do not really connect, because you are not yet really connecting to the group, but still it influences you from afar. And this indirect “surrounding” influence allows you to somehow connect the two opposites inside of yourself. And this is already helping you to understand a little bit about what the spiritual is and what the connection of these two poles means, when you feel and understand the spiritual simultaneously at the same one place.

This is an absolutely special feeling, in which there is understanding. Such things are almost non-existent in our world.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/8/11, Shamati

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Question: If the Creator doesn’t exist outside, but is revealed within us, then what is the Surrounding Light? Doesn’t it come from the outside?

Answer: There is Malchut of the world of Infinity. Besides it, there is nothing else.

Once it was full of the Light of Infinity. Then a restriction was placed on, and it assumed a different form once the Light of Infinity left it. Then the same Malchut manifested itself in the form of worlds and souls, meaning its parts. Some of them pertain to external orbits, and others to internal ones.

Similarly, in our world the still, vegetative, and animate levels of nature represent the external part, and the human or speaking level represents the internal one. This determines spiritual development as well: Man is tasked with the intention, while the other parts of nature only carry out actions. Ultimately, Malchut of Infinity arrives at its final state: the end of correction.

Thus, there are many states, but no matter what they may be, they are all permeated with one desire and one Light. What changes, then? The awareness, the intention over the desire. In other words, changes occur only with respect to the creature’s attitude toward the Creator or desire for the Light. Nothing changes except for my attitude, understanding, perception—my acquaintance with the world I live in.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/26/2011, “One Commandment”

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Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

The Entire Reality Is Contained within Man

The Creator has made in our brain a kind of polished mirror that inverts everything seen there, so we will see it outside our brain, in front of our face. Yet, what we see outside us is not a real thing. Nonetheless, we should be so grateful to His Providence for having created that polished mirror in our brains, enabling us to see and perceive everything outside of us.

This is because by that, He has given us the power to perceive everything with clear knowledge and attainment, and measure everything from within and from without.
– Baal HaSulam, “Preface to the Book of Zohar,” Item 34

Even though we see everything as actually being in front of us, every reasonable person knows for certain that all that we see is only within our own brains. So are the souls: Although they see all the images in the Giver, they still have no doubt that all these are only in their own interior, and not at all in the Giver.
– Baal HaSulam, “Preface to the Book of Zohar,” Item 34
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Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

The Entire Reality Is Contained within Man

It is written in The Zohar, (Vayikra, Parashat Tazria, p 40) that all the worlds, upper and lower, are included in man. And also, the whole of reality within those worlds is only for man.
– Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” Item 1

When we see a wide world before us, we don’t see it in reality, but only within ourselves. In other words, there is a sort of a photographic machine in our hindbrain, which portrays everything that appears to us and nothing outside of us.
– Baal HaSulam, “Preface to the Book of Zohar,” Item 34
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Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

Everything Is Preordained

By the very thought to create the souls, His thought completed everything for He does not need an act, as do we. Instantaneously, all the souls and worlds that were destined to be created, emerged filled with all the delight and pleasure and the gentleness He had planned for them in the final perfection that the souls were intended to receive at the end of correction, after the will to receive in the souls has been fully corrected and was turned into pure bestowal, in complete equivalence of form with the Emanator.

This is so because in His Eternalness, past, present, and future are as one. Hence, there was never an issue of a corrupted will to receive separated from the Creator. On the contrary, that equivalence of form, destined to be revealed at the end of correction, appeared instantly in the eternity of the Creator.
– Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” Item 13
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Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

Everything Is Preordained

All the efforts of the Teacher should be directed not at attaching the students to himself, but at making them independent so that they won’t be looking at him at all, but through him would turn to the Creator. A student has to learn to be similar to the Creator, not the Teacher.

Indeed, our entire development is a kind of imitation of the Creator. As much as our properties and actions resemble the Creator, to that same extent we bring contentment to Him.
– Baal HaSulam, “The Meaning of Conception and Birth”
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Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

Everything Is Preordained

The Creator truly resides within the heart of every person of Israel, and that is from His side. Hence, what does one lack? Only to know that. And the knowledge changes, and the knowing completes.
– Baal HaSulam, A Sage’s Fruit, Vol. 1, “Letter No. 32”

All is set ahead of time and each and every soul is already in all its Light, goodness, and eternity. Thanks to the descent into the egoistic body and the return to its root, the soul is rewarded with the complete similarity with the Creator and a real adhesion with Him.
– Baal HaSulam, Letter No. 25
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Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

Everything Is Preordained

The revelation of the Creator does not change one’s actual reality but adds to it the awareness he had not had before.
– Baal HaSulam, The Writings of the Last Generation

There is nothing more natural than attaining contact with one’s Maker for He owns nature. In fact, every creature has contact with his Maker, as it is written, “The whole earth is full of His glory,” but one does not know and does not feel it.

Actually, one who attains contact with Him attains only the awareness. It is as though one has a treasure in his pocket, and he does not know. Along comes another who lets him know what is in his pocket, and this knowledge in particular makes him rich.
– Baal HaSulam, “The Solution”
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