Question: If I already feel the importance of the Creator, what should I do in order to connect with Him?

Answer: There is a constant struggle in us over who will control: the Creator or Pharaoh, our ego. But if a person already feels the importance of the Creator, there are no doubts. He will do whatever he can in order to constantly reinforce this feeling of importance. Then his desire will focus on the Creator’s work by being free of worrying about himself.

If I think that bestowal is important, I immediately think of different ways to work in order to bestow and have no questions about what I should do. The feeling of importance opens up all the roads and all the means for me.

Before that, the desire to receive held me chained, and I worked only for it. If I discover the importance of the Creator instead of the importance of my ego, I can already work for Him.

Everything is determined by a person’s desire, which is the matter of creation. This desire can work only for what it sees as important. So all our work is to clarify what the most important thing for us is: either an old foolish king under whose domination we were born, or a poor clever child, which means the desire to bestow and the feeling of the Creator’s greatness, which we can develop inside us.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/01/12, Writings of Rabash

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Question: How much do I have to pay the Creator for my correction, as if I pay a surgeon for an operation? What is the work that I have to do?

Answer: All you need to do is to connect; in our world there is nothing but connection. This work is very simple. You pay with your exertion; you have to connect with everyone and love everyone in order to transcend from the love of the created beings to the love of the Creator. Try to attain the greatest rule of the Torah: “Love thy friend as thyself,” the rule that includes everything, and then you will be filled with the Torah, with the Light of Ein Sof (Infinity).

It seems so simple, but this is the hardest thing for us. You can spin around this point for along time, like a dog chasing its tail, and find that it isn’t in your power to achieve connection. You’ll find many excuses; you’ll postpone it until tomorrow and suggest different conditions.

A person doesn’t attain connection by himself; he has to yearn for it and act for it. Suppose I hug you although I don’t feel that I like you. It’s for this reason that I chose you because I feel how much my desire to receive hates this action. Then it’s the gap between the action and the desire that draws the Light and brings me a new desire.

It’s common knowledge that people adopt children and invest so much in them until they begin to love them as if they were their biological children. If a person marries a woman who has a child, he must invest in the child with more efforts than with his own child. This is because if it were my child, he would naturally feel that I am his father, but another child doesn’t see me as his father and I also know that he isn’t my child, and so I have to invest in him many more powers. I’m afraid that he may disrespect me or may hate me because he’s a stranger to me.

But thanks to the fact that I invest in him more than in anything, I begin to love him more than my own child in whom I don’t invest so much. Everything is determined by the efforts made; therefore, there is nothing else you can do but invest your powers.
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From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/31/12, The Study of the Ten Sefirot

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Question: What is Shechina?

Answer: Shechina is all the desires created by the Creator united into one equivalent desire that merges with the Creator in the same kind of bestowal as He is. That is, the desire to enjoy is fully corrected to bestowal.

But in relation to us, Shechina is “in the dust.” The Creator created the desire to enjoy, and brought it to the final correction: the final, third, corrected state already exists. However, we feel like we’re outside of the Shechina, to such an extent that we are hidden by concealment, fog, and deception.

Therefore, we feel as though we don’t belong to that common, corrected desire, and we need to work hard to unite with it. Imagine that everyone is completely corrected but you, and you see the world completely corrupted. Therefore, you must correct your perception and join the rest of the world, the Shechina.

You should ask the Creator to make you equivalent to Him; that is what it means to belong to the Shechina. But how does one ask since it cannot be done artificially? The request comes from the depth of the heart in a way that it cannot be stopped.

Imagine that all the desires of your heart were visible to everyone on a big screen, as if the sensors to a cardiogram were attached to your heart, showing everyone your desires, your thoughts about others, and your dreams about the future. And you were unable to stop this broadcast, and you had no control over your heart. Obviously, you would feel ashamed if you related these desires to yourself. But if you link these desires to the Creator, knowing that He sends them to you, that you have nothing to be ashamed of, then you are not ashamed of the desires waking up in your heart. You only feel ashamed about something that you could have done to correct your heart but haven’t.

And then you start checking that. You see that the Creator sends us different desires, making us think about forgery, theft, murder, violence, about ways to deceive and use everyone. You would see such pictures if your heart were displayed on a screen. But all these thoughts are awakened in you from Above, and you are not the master over them.

And along with that, you would see that you had the opportunity to make every picture like the Creator, but you didn’t use it. And now you are ashamed of the fact that you didn’t correct yourself or ask about correction. Perhaps, you didn’t even make an effort to correct anything, or possibly tried and realized that you cannot do it, but didn’t ask the Creator for help.

All of these states which you could have corrected but didn’t, cause a feeling of shame in you now. This is what you feel ashamed of but not about the most terrible pictures that unfolded in your heart and come from Above.

If you try bringing everything that you have in your possession into equivalence with the Creator, then you begin revealing all the details: where it comes from, why, what for, how to ask for help, and how to make it work. But if you have no intention to correct yourself, then you do not even open the package sent to you or realize what comes to you.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/31/12, Shamati #50

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Question: When I want to pass an exam or find a job, I automatically get a passionate “prayer,” a powerful craving for the desired result. Why doesn’t this happen on the path towards the Creator?

Answer: Putting it differently, when will you finally get a real reason for turning to the Creator?

Say, something very unpleasant happened to you. For example, someone has dealt you a serious insult, so much so that you’re ready to disappear on the spot just to prevent others from finding out. At the same time, there’s nothing you can do about it. And it is here in a completely hopeless state that you receive “a gift from above”; you begin to feel that there is none else besides Him and that the Creator sent this to you for a specific purpose; you only need to turn to Him and ask that it wouldn’t be happening.

You turn to Him with this request and suddenly feel shame: “What do I want? To avoid misfortune? Or to be with the Creator? Let the fear and shame remain if only through that I would maintain a connection with Him.”

This is how we move forward: We need the fear, which we cannot handle, coming from our egoistic desires, and then we will truly have a need for the Creator.

Are you ready for that? Do you want this to happen? Without any reservations or concessions?

Question: So there’s no way of escaping disturbances?

Answer: Join a group, and together with the friends you’ll fly forward like a rocket. Because then, instead of shame and other “animal” troubles, you’ll receive other disturbances caused by the inability to love your friends and unite with them. You exert efforts but aren’t able to achieve that.

Either way, disturbances are necessary since you won’t turn to the Creator as long as you see even the tiniest possibility of correcting yourself some other way. Only complete helplessness gives rise to your request to Him. And this means that you need to grow your desire, striving for unity and elevating it above all the others. Then you’ll discover that you can achieve anything except for that. And the gap between the desired and reality will evoke a cry to the Creator.

Question: What exactly needs to happen in a group so that the situation would reach the necessary escalation?

Answer: Exert all possible efforts and obligate the group to influence you. This is precisely what we call “mutual guarantee.”
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/30/12, “The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee)”

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Baal HaSulam: “The Arvut, (Mutual Guarantee)”: And once the whole nation unanimously agreed and said, “We shall do and we shall hear,” each member of Israel became responsible that nothing shall be missing from any other member of the nation. Only then did they become worthy of receiving the Torah, and not before.

We are demanded to correct the general vessel, the desires that now feel that they are detached, foreign, and even opposite to one another. Before, the Light advanced them to connection and to unity, but now, because of the shattering, it separates them, leads them to oppositeness, to quarrels, violence, etc. We need the Light to come and to correct and connect these desires.

We don’t know how to correct them, how to put the parts of the broken vessel together, because we don’t know in advance what the vessel should be like and any assumption we make is only a guess. So what should we do? The point is that we don’t correct anything by ourselves. We ask, demand, and evoke the upper One so that He will perform the correction.

There is no way a person can correct himself. Each time we rise to a higher level, but can a baby be smarter than his mother? So every ascent is accompanied by a request and the upper in response performs the necessary work on it and moves us to the next state.

There is a request on our part and the work on the part of the upper. This is why it is called “God’s work.” It is He who works, and my work is to request.

If we are constantly careful in dividing this work, we save a lot of energy and are not confused. We must make sure that we do that and do not forget about it. We as a rule want to operate on our own, while the actual action on our part is to prepare ourselves for His work, to exert ourselves, and then to discover our helplessness. Baal HaSulam says: “There isn’t a happier state in a person’s work than when he is despaired of his own powers.” A person should understand that only the Creator, the upper Force, can correct him, and that’s the way it is all the time.

It isn’t by chance that our mission seems so difficult: to become “as one man in one heart,” to unite completely; how is that possible? These are illusions that can only lead to crisis and disappointment, to an even greater collapse than the one we’ve seen in the USSR for example. It is really so if we use the wrong means, the wrong program. But the method of Kabbalah provides us with a natural plan that is led by nature itself: Your life doesn’t have to be bad, you only need to discover, to identify that you are in a bad state. This is enough so that you will demand a change and you will receive the next state.

Thus our work is simple. If we all gather and work according to the law of mutual guarantee, the mission becomes much easier: We discover the evil and at the same time we discover the good, which means the source and the means for the changes. The tension between these two poles advances us to correction; we summon the Reforming Light and it performs the work. This arrangement repeats time after time.

The real life, the real ascent, will be revealed in the permanent closeness of people, in common circles, in discussions, in impressions, in excitement, and in mutual help. Thus we will discover more deficiencies in us in comparison to the corrected state of the general unity; we will discover the effectiveness of the greatness of the state of mutual bestowal, and we will activate the upper Force that performs the whole work. It says: “He that makes peace in Heaven, will make peace on us.” This is the order of the actions.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/30/12, “The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee)”

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We need to try to turn every lesson of ours into a workshop. In the beginning we describe the central point of the connection between us, of the entire world group, and from within the feeling of this center, this connection, we listen to the lesson, and clarify all the questions. We exist within this unity. From within it, together we raise the prayer of MAN, and all of us together attain the answer of MAD, the Light. This bonds and brings us to the state of revelation.

Everything depends on the preparation, from the search for the common point shared by us all, the Shechina (Divinity). Thus the preparation for the lesson is the most important thing.

According to the order of spiritual work, the day begins in the evening. A person completes the “day” he went through, exits his work, and enters into the bestowal of the upper that begins to change his Kelim (desires), Reshimot (informational genes). And a person needs to prepare himself for this, connect to the property of Bina, bestowal, leaving less of his feelings and mind, acting as if half-asleep.

Thus he prepares himself to changes that occur within his desires, Kelim, that are disclosed specifically in the darkness. In the evening, everything becomes mixed: the good and the bad, the light and the darkness, bestowal and reception. Everything becomes identically gray and undifferentiated. But the person deposits himself in the hands of the upper one and “goes to sleep.” This means that he understands that he needs to completely annul himself now, like a fetus in his mother’s womb, which is called, “secretly sits in the upper.”

Then, despite everything, he can continue and awaken at “midnight”, since he received new Kelim and desires. From the beginning of the evening, he executes corrections, and after the completion of the stage where he doesn’t rule in self-control, he then receives new desires and begins to awaken at the coming of “dawn”. And then comes the new connection, which is called the morning prayer (Schema Kriyat), it produces Light. In this way he begins his new day, new revelation, a new advancement with fresh forces.

It is specifically in this way that we need to prepare ourselves to the morning lesson.
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From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/23/12

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Kabbalists wrote their books for two groups of people: For the group called “the level of the forefathers,” people like them who have attained spirituality and who will be enriched by these texts and connect so that they can perform corrections in the general system, thus preparing our ascent, and they also wrote for “the level of the sons,” which is us, in order to give us something to hold on to by which we can draw the Reforming Light.

We are in the same system, but we cannot evoke its influence upon us by ourselves. In the meantime it influences us by itself, and we advance by sufferings. But if we evoke the Lights, we hasten time and begin to advance more quickly by making the way easier.

How can we do that? According to the advice of Kabbalists, we perform different actions that are similar in quality to this advice. Their attribute is bestowal and so according to the level and the state we are in, we need to express our readiness to bestow. We give each other “presents,” we connect, we speak about it during the lessons, and we clarify the words of the Kabbalists. Then our inclinations, desires, and efforts become adapted to the system that they describe. We want to know what we study; we want it to be revealed in us, and then the Lights come to us; they are still unrevealed, but “surround,” and bring us closer to the revelation.

So all our work, all our life, and all our existence has to be aimed at evoking the Reforming Light. This is called “to study the Torah.” It says: “I have created the evil inclination, I have created the Torah as a spice for it, since the Light hidden in it returns a person to the Source.” We operate according to this formula. We must examine all its components to properly use them to reform every component and the formula as a whole.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/24/12, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot”

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Question: What is the center of the group?

Answer: The center of the group is the center of our reality, its utmost spiritual point. Reality doesn’t exist on its own, but exists in regard to the person who attains it. It is only possible to attain reality in the center of the group where I annul my ego and connect with the others equally so that it is stabilized inside me.

At the same time, I change the relationship between us on purpose, sometimes I subdue myself before the friends by seeing them as the greatest in the generation, and other times I rise above them in order to bestow something from myself. Eventually, by looking at the group once from above and once from below, I find an equal attitude towards it. This equality doesn’t exist at first; it is a result of my exertion.

On the one hand, I yearn as much as I can to be above the friends in order to help them, but on the other hand, I place myself below them in order to live and to be the one who receives through them. By these two poles, I suddenly discover what it means to be equal, although I didn’t aim towards this before and didn’t see this point. I see myself in Ein Sof (Infinity) higher than everyone else (+∞), and at the same time in Ein Sof lower than the friends (–∞); suddenly I find the center of the group where everyone is equal and discover that it actually exists. My corporeal life is left behind and only the devotion remains, the mutual guarantee, adhesion with everyone. I feel that I increasingly summon the Reforming Light, the Surrounding Light, which fills the whole “space” of my attributes. By discovering more powers, more support, more care from the outside, I feel that I am being stabilized, and that is the center of the group.

In the center of the group, I really discover the group, the friends, and no matter what they discover, in my reality everything is completely accurate. This is because the world of Ein Sof already exists, and the descent into this world is only meant to build the steps of the ladder of the spiritual revelation, the recognition, the understanding, and the feeling in us. When these steps appear in a person and he begins to climb them, he doesn’t depend on anyone: Everyone is in Gmar Tikkun (the end of correction). I am in front of the place where the Light of Ein Sof exists and everything depends on me, everything and all of reality are in me, and there I discover the truth. But this truth depends on my own investment, on my loyalty to the group, to the teacher, and to the sources, and I need to reveal it in practice.

There is nothing but the center of the group. I discover that it must become the center of the whole world, the place where all the souls assemble, all the corruptions and all the corrections. This is Malchut of Ein Sof with everything it is going to collect and include in it. In other words, when a person devotes himself to Malchut of Ein Sof, Divinity, by wanting to be an inseparable part of it, he becomes Malchut of Ein Sof himself, and by that connects it with the first nine Sefirot, meaning with all the worlds until Ein Sof, and so we advance.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/22/12, “Talk About the Workshop”

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Question: How do we work during a seminar, how do we listen to one another?

Answer: A friend can say things that I might or might not understand. He can say things that I think are great or maybe something foolish. In any case, I now perceive him as a manifestation of a representative of the Creator: The Creator is influencing me through him.

If I am repulsed by my friend’s appearance, expression, the actual meaning of his words, or everything else, I might not perceive him or want him. And this is a wonderful exercise! I need to rise above this! If he is a representative of the Creator, since “There is none else beside Him,” especially at an event like this that we are participating in, then I need to elevate my friend and try to penetrate the spiritual essence through him, which is presenting all of this to me and also presents itself this way. I must rise above myself to a state, where I will perceive everything in it as absolute goodness, absolute bestowal, an absolute spiritual quality—despite anything that I am feeling on the inside, despite the fact that I do not have it.

And it is a very good thing that these two qualities are manifesting in me: my egoistic attitude towards my friend, when everything that I see in him does not take any criticism at all, and on the other hand, on the contrary, when I treat him through faith above reason, as a representative of the Creator, because nothing should come from anyone in the world that might be evil, bad, imperfect. And if it exists in me, then it is mine; I am looking at him with my own eyes.

This is why, if I am able to note these two states in me, then I have already done certain spiritual work. We must put together all the highest and lowest critical states in relation to one another, and we will have a common vessel—Malchut, which is on the bottom and consists only of unpleasant things—and it will keep getting brighter and worse in us, and we will be able to keep rising towards Keter over it. Then we will reach such distance between them, such tension, which will equal the state when the Surrounding Light will turn into Inner Light and shine there. And then we will acquire the first spiritual degree.

What does this do? We raise MAN towards Malchut of the world of Atzilut, which connects us together, and there we establish ourselves for the first time as newborns. And a person cannot be born alone, but only a minimum of ten people.
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