Question: Where should my confidence about tomorrow come from: society or the Creator?

Answer: Confidence comes and is revealed only in the connection between people. Material confidence is expressed in the material society, whereas spiritual confidence is revealed in spiritual society.

Spiritual confidence does not mean that I do not need anything. It has a different meaning: I am sure that I won’t lack the forces to bestow to others and the Creator.

My confidence is not aimed at myself, but at the goal. I am sure that the people around me will support me in this according to the principle of mutual guarantee. And what other confidence do I need from them if I am in the spiritual world?
On the other hand, in this world I want to be confident that I will never have a lack of egoistic fulfillment.

Question: Still, I can’t just restrict myself to spiritual confidence. Don’t I also need confidence on the material level?

Answer: While you are in this world, you have to take care of its vital necessities. While being in society, you have to take care of it. No matter how high the society’s spiritual degree may be, as long as the material world has not disappeared from people’s perception, they have to take care of what they need today and tomorrow. They need goods and products, storehouses, and so on.

However, you will do this by the command of a different law. When you ascend up the spiritual levels you will still have to provide for yourself in the material sense because you still haven’t corrected the Kelim in which you cannot make calculations, your “stony heart.”

Therefore, it is important to differentiate between material and spiritual confidence. In corporeality I care for myself, my relatives, and even all of humanity. But spiritual confidence lies higher: It is confidence in the fact that we are able to bestow as much as possible at every moment of our lives.
[36961]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/3/11 on Confidence

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Question: How can we acquire confidence on the material level, including the economic, medical, and social realms?

Answer: These problems can only be solved by bestowal, with the help of the Light. If you want to be healthy and if you want to acquire immunity from the impending problems, then you have to live in a society that has the power of mutual guarantee.

If would seem: What is so special about these friends? What do they have? Bank accounts in Switzerland? Their own companies? A successful business? Or maybe they are all doctors, lawyers, bankers, and big experts in general? The fact is that they are nothing of the sort. But if they have the right, good connection, then you cannot beat them. They have total confidence. They receive such a “charge” from above that no one can use them selfishly or succeed more than them. That’s because they have fulfillment, unlike everyone else. Confidence is expressed only inside unity.

We even see this in our world: What is one person able to do? Even if you bring Schwarzenegger, and even if you have two people, or three, or a thousand, even if you dress them up in metal arms, will you be confident then? Today we do not have confidence in anything, including power. How many weapons can we keep producing? How much means do we have to protect ourselves? In the end, no matter how much we arm ourselves, this does not give us any confidence. The population only feels calmer.

For example, in Israel the people are periodically given out gas masks, although I heard that this time people do not even want to receive them so much. Everyone is already tired of this. People need confidence of a different sort.

What’s the use of having billions in a bank? Today this still means something, but the society of the future will have to take care of itself on different foundations, by the law of bestowal. Total bestowal among all its members will turn material worry about tomorrow into the calling of spiritual laws because people will not have any actual desire for this on the inside. Worry about the vital necessities will become an obligation for a person that is incumbent on him from above, like “observing a commandment.”
[36965]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/3/11 on Confidence

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Baal HaSulam, Ohr Bahir: Confidence is faith in yourself. In the psychological sense it is a feeling of endurance. That’s because nothing will endure in the face of desire besides exhaustion or impatience in efforts.

Therefore, a hero feels a powerful force of patience within and does not give up in the face of anything, believing in himself and his strength. But a weak person feels that he does not have the force of patience, and when another person causes him to suffer, he cannot endure and therefore immediately surrenders to him.

Question: What is faith in yourself? It sounds egoistic.

Answer: The text is written in a way that it is deciphered differently below, in our world, and above, in the spiritual world. In our world you are willing to endure if you believe that you are right, if you aspire to the goal, if you really need something, or if you love the people for whom you make efforts, such as your children, relatives, and those close to you. On the other hand, in spirituality everything is done by the force of the Light that influences you.

It’s not a secret that heroism in our world is the force of egoism. We need envy, a passionate desire, self-love and other stimuli to “light ourselves up” and acquire the ability to endure. Besides, we receive the ability to endure from nature. Some people are able to endure great suffering from birth.

But when a person enters the spiritual world and begins working for the sake of bestowal, this stops playing a role. There are no more strong or weak. Everyone is on the same level and is not assisted by their material nature in any way. In the spiritual world a person needs the force that dresses Lights in him.

Obviously, here too every person differs from others, but he differs by his spiritual purpose, which is determined by the root of his soul. In every other regard he feels weak and powerless. The further a person advances, the weaker he feels, and the more he depends on the Light that reforms.

At first we are all heroes, “real men.” But then we begin to get weaker until we find that we have nothing left. That is how we get “broken,” realize our weakness and thanks to this, understand that we actually do not have to be able to do anything besides look for the forces to persist and endure.

I only have to find the force of faith. Then I will acquire the ability to endure, the force of bestowal operating above knowledge. Let me feel empty inside, let me have nothing worthwhile to work for, let me be completely devoid of energy because my egoism does not push me forward and does not give me forces. Yet, if I receive the force of bestowal from the Light that reforms, then I can already realize it. The degree of my confidence depends on this.

In the material world, the degree of my confidence depends on how much is contained in my receiving Kelim. But in spirituality it is on the contrary: The degree of my confidence depends on how much is contained in my bestowing Kelim.

No one has any “special favor” here and no one exceeds others in power. Every person descends to zero and experiences total emptiness and weakness, and then begins acquiring the force of bestowal that comes from above. But it happens only on the condition that he is merged with the upper one. The receiving desire must always be annulled before the upper one so that the bestowing desire would give a person the force of endurance and confidence.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/3/11 on Confidence

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Question: How do I combine and properly arrange the three types of desires that I experience here at the lesson: 1) the artificial desire caused by the need to ask for correction for the environment, 2) the artificial desire to place myself in a field that will influence me, and 3) my actual desire to rid myself of the small corporeal problems that appear big to me?

Answer: We need to believe the sages who say that when a person works systematically and with determination, his efforts accumulate into great wealth. There is no other choice: Just keep making the effort.

The results that will come as a consequence will explain and show you everything. There is no answer for you on the path when you do not feel, understand, or are unable to connect anything. You just need to continue.

Right now, you are unable to connect your relationship with the world and the group with your success and with everything that happens, and you don’t link the Creator and Kabbalah with your desire to rid yourself of problems and suffering. Moreover, Kabbalists do not go around promising that Kabbalah will help you free yourself from problems and suffering.

In reality, we have nothing to say to a person who studies Kabbalah. We can only bring him to the realization of the importance of the goal with the help of the group. He will only see the goal when the Light comes and corrects him.

This is because one cannot see anything pleasant and good for his egoism in the spiritual world with egoistic eyes. You can keep telling yourself that this will help you become free of all problems and that you will acquire the world, but this is not the way to advance.

Connect yourself as much as you can to the environment every moment of your life so that it will influence you as much as possible and you will have to connect to it even more. You will receive strength through that.
[36736]
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/1/2011, “Introduction of The Book of Zohar”

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Question: What is the middle third of Sefira Tifferet and why is it called free?

Answer: It’s as if it doesn’t exist by itself. As Baal HaSulam says, it exists only as the place over which Klipa and holiness fight.

This is the place where a person experiences himself and his independence. It is where he has his inner struggle and doubts: what to identify himself with, the upper or the lower? This is called the middle third of Tifferet, the place of free choice.

Question: What is this part made of? And how does freedom of choice become revealed there if this part is influenced by the upper one or the lower one, depending on whom it identifies itself with? Then where is the independence?

Answer: That is how the place of freedom is arranged for a person from Above. This is not confusion or lack of clarity the way freedom in our world refers to the absence of precise knowledge of what to identify yourself with. Rather, in the middle third of Tifferet it is absolutely clear to me what the quality of bestowal is above and what the quality of reception is below. I am in the middle, and this middle is all of me. That is to say, all of my reality is the middle part of Tifferet.

Wherever I am under the influence of the upper one or the lower one, I feel their influence, meaning I feel them and do not relate this to myself. But in the middle third of Tifferet I reveal the full HaVaYaH, myself. This part contains the full ten Sefirot, the discernments of the entire Partzuf.

If I want to attain the upper one, then I ascend to the upper part, and if I want to attain the lower one, then I descend to the lower part. But who am I? This is the middle part of Tifferet, like a thin layer between the upper and the lower. Yet, in reality it is not thin.

The middle third of Tifferet comes from the fact that in the four phases of the expansion of direct Light, Bina decided that it desires not to receive, but to become similar to the upper one, and to do that it has to attain bestowal. However, it cannot attain bestowal because its matter, the will to enjoy, does not change. In order to make it seemingly bestowing, it has to receive for the sake of bestowal. That is, it uses the Giver’s force of love.

Without the force of the Giver’s love for me, I cannot transform my reception to bestowal to Him. But if I know that He loves me and I plan to receive from Him only for that reason, then I use the force of His love. At first I have to reveal His love, and inside of it to reveal my reception, and then to receive from Him only in order to show Him my love.

From the same field where the second phase (of the four phases of the expansion of direct Light) makes the decision, that is where our notion of the middle third of Tifferet is born, in which creation feels free to make decisions.
[36836]
From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/2/11, The Zohar

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Question: What does it mean to think about unification of the world? Is it unification of spiritual desires, “the points in the hearts,” or all people in general?

Answer: “A person is a small world.” The world, everything I see and feel, is one single reality tied together. The still, vegetative, animate worlds, and the humans I see, all of this is my internal desires and attributes that I am observing within myself.

Try to delve a little bit deeper and you will begin to see how it all works within you and that it is indeed so. After all, this is your internal system. It is as if I am looking at the computer screen and simply view a demonstration, a reflection, a small manifestation of what is occurring within. This is how man is constructed as well.

Hence, we need to exit “this world,” tear away from this super TV set with an enormous, record-number-of-inches widescreen monitor and 3D/stereo display, and get inside our own system: inside the “memory” and “processor,” inside all our programs, everything we have within. And then, you will reach the spiritual, upper world from where everything descends.
[36509]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/27/2011, “Introduction to the Book, Panim Meirot uMasbirot”

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Question: How do we allocate our time correctly? How much time should we devote to family, circulation, and the study?

Answer: It’s impossible to determine an exact amount. Everybody allocates their time according to their possibilities and desire.

History gives us an example of a student who studied for one day. This actually was his name, Bar Bi Yoma (a student for one day). He was a peasant and worked in the fields. It took him three months to journey from his home to Jerusalem to study the Torah for one day, and then he walked back home for another three months. In honor of this person, there is a tradition to study the Torah on one special day of the year.

Everything depends on how much time a person has. Our lessons and programs are available on a TV Channel and the Internet site 24 hours a day; moreover, we have study centers all over the country.

A serious study really bears fruit. And if one has a chance, he or she can listen to our lessons during the commute or when other opportunities present themselves. However, only a course of study can arrange the principles of Kabbalah into an orderly system, and there is no substitute for it.
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From the Introductory Lecture Series 1/4/2011, “What Does the Wisdom of Kabbalah Revolve Around”

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