Question: What can you say about a state in which you wake up in the middle of the night and feel an unbearable pain in your soul and think that it is because you are missing (not doing what you should for the root of your soul) what you were given?

Answer: This is a wonderful way in which the Creator reminds you that He exits.

Question: You helped me understand the main thing in life: to see an actual meaning in bestowal, to break out of the dark shell of the ego, and to take a step toward the abyss of fear.

I lived in thoughts and understanding and easily grasped the wisdom of Kabbalah in my mind, but it is only now that the world is changing, only now is this path directly revealed in my feelings. Nothing is redundant; everything leads only to one thing, to correction.

What should I do so that the restrictions of the ego will not be so painful? The ego is growing immensely and I don’t always manage to build a connection above it, while hell is very dark.

Do you actually undergo such terrible states before every ascent? How do you break it? After all, every time the push is increasingly stronger and there is no way back, while after every ascent there is a sharp fall. How can I ascend above this without injuring those who are close to me? How can I feel it when I am lonely? This is a burning question, and I am sorry if I refer to the corporeal world by it.

Answer: You should dedicate more time to studying and dissemination.
[197599]

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Hanukkah seems like a childish, not very serious holiday. But, in fact, it is the most significant holiday because it speaks about a person’s entry into the spiritual work, his first step, his crossing the border between the material and the spiritual worlds.

In order to cross this border, a person must go against the “Greeks” in him, against his egoism. He defeats these impure, egoistic forces because he stands against them and is not afraid.

Yet, we reveal that we have no strength to stand against the egoistic desire. Where can it come from if we are a complete product of this egoism and all we have is a tiny spark that opposes it.

But if we hold on and don’t back off, then a miracle happens—again and again comes the Upper Light, performs its work, and “conveys the strong into the hands of the weak.” Our desire to bestow is very weak so far, almost imperceptible. However, the miracle happens and help comes from above, giving us the force of bestowal, the altruistic intention, and faith, through which we can win.

The victory comes when a person, on the one hand feels that he is obliged to win this war, but on the other hand has no strength and he reaches despair, having exhausted all his possibilities. We see from history that many Jews left the path of light and adopted the Greek’s approach to life. Only the Maccabees remained, a small handful of the people who started the war.

“The Greeks attacked me,” and at the same time a person feels that he must continue to fight with his last strength, without any hope for success. He can’t give up, because otherwise he will remain enslaved by egoism. Then a miracle happens and he wins this war. The Exodus from Egypt and Hanukkah, the victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks, are all stages of the same war.

This entire war is on the border of the material and the spiritual worlds, between egoistic forces and the forces of bestowal and love. A person sees that between him and the spiritual world is a wall. Only if he can give up his egoistic desires and thoughts, will he begin to feel the spiritual world in this vacant space.

This realization doesn’t come immediately but after a long time and much effort because it is necessary to find new measures and new sensations so that a person will obtain the connection with the spiritual. Then he discovers the “Greeks” that he didn’t see before and realizes that he will have a war with them.

It is a great joy because he finally discovers that he faces a formidable barrier. This barrier is inside the person, in his perception of the world and reality, and in his previous life’s values.

Now he needs to dress into a new person who thinks and sees differently, prefers other values, and acquires completely new feelings, mind, and perception of the world. So begins the Maccabean War with our internal “Greeks.”
[199178]
From the lesson on the topic “Hanukkah by the wisdom of Kabbalah” 12/20/16

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It is written in Isaiah 65:24: “…before they call, I will answer, and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.” This means that before a person opens his mouth or feels an emotion within his heart or a thought within his brain, the Creator arranges everything for him, in the heart, in the brain, and in the mouth. There is nothing that comes from a person himself, but only from the Creator.

The only freedom of choice a person has is to attribute everything to the Creator, to understand that “there is none else beside Him” (Deuteronomy 4:35), that He is the “good and beneficent,” and that everything exists according to this principle only.

A person only needs to come to this realization—that the Creator is the only one who operates within all of reality, all around him, and inside of him, and that we are the result of His actions. All of our work, at every moment in life, is to reach a state in which we merge in our awareness with the higher management.
[198146]

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Question: How is it possible to know if actions are altruistic or not?

Answer: As soon as an altruistic action appears in a person, the Creator is revealed.  If an intention to bestow appears in a person, it immediately reveals the Creator according to the principle of equivalence of form according to the intensity of this intention.
[198301]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 9/18/16

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Question: If working on unity means wanting to feel the desires of the friends as my own, which desires does this refer to? Does it refer to all the desires of the friends or only to their desires regarding the Creator and spirituality?

Answer: Only the desires of the friends regarding spirituality.

Question: Does it mean that I have attained unity if I feel the desires of the friends as my own?

Answer: Yes.

Question: In the Prague convention, I felt immediate hatred toward a friend in the circle because he broke one of the rules of the workshop. It was a very strong feeling. I wanted to erase this person from the face of the earth. I also began to hate others. Why does a Kabbalist have to undergo such emotions along the spiritual path?

Answer: So that you will get to know yourself better.
[197604]

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In our world there is only one teacher, guide, and Rav—the Creator. There is no one else! The Creator, the upper positive force, manages everything and creates the relatively negative egoistic force.

All the others are participants in this process no matter what role they play. They are sorted only according to the state relative to that teacher—how much they understand Him and carry out His way or the opposite. Only this reflects their state and indicates their level.

I call myself a guide because I try to explain to people how I understand my spiritual teacher and how I understand the teacher, the Creator. I teach people how to find the way to the upper force.

In general, I believe that any person in our world has no other mission than this because the most important thing is to understand how he is associated with the Creator because He manages everything.

Being connected with the Creator is only possible through a group, a ten, with more connections, with greater reciprocity, of dissolving itself in others and drawing inward by absorbing all into itself.

This is the way we should go. And then you will find the teacher, the guide, the friend, and the Rav in one person.
[198852]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 8/7/16

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Question: Did the great Kabbalists or special souls like the Ari and Baal HaSulam each time with every new birth pass through the Machsom (barrier), or did they feel the Upper World and our world from birth?

Answer: Nobody feels the upper world from birth. There is no possibility without effort, without a group, to begin to feel the upper world, the Creator, because we must create a Kli in order to perceive it. Nobody is born a Kabbalist.

We were intentionally created this way so that we could become independent in relative to the Creator. If you get something without conscious effort, it is impossible to achieve anything. It is impossible to begin to understand the inner meaning of the world if we don’t specifically grasp it through contrasts.
[198682]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 9/18/16

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Torah, Deuteronomy, 13:12: And all Israel shall listen and fear, and they shall no longer do any evil such as this in your midst.

When everybody sees that you act in a drastically tough way, they will understand that it is impossible to act differently and will agree specifically with this because the Creator will have already been with you.

And before this, everybody will yell at you and drag you to different directions asking: “Why?! You can’t do it! What’s wrong with you?!”

Take a stone and crush the head of the snake. Then everyone will immediately say: “That’s right!” They will discover what you have actually just done in your correction, in your analysis of this problem, and how you solved it.

This is what “listen and fear” means—fear how bluntly and stubbornly you went and “crushed the head of the snake,” despite all your reasonable arguments that burst from the inside. This is called “faith above reason.”

Everyone around you will curse you saying: “What nonsense!” and you insist on it. Why?! There is no answer. You know just one thing: your teachers acted this way, the Creator demands this from you, and you personally understand it this way, without any interference from the outside.

The way of truth is the toughest, the most unpleasant, and, at the first sight, the most stupid and unreasonable.

After all, the reason comes from the material level, and here we must act from the higher degree.
The upper degree is the faith above reason, that we climb against our mind.
[197838]
From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 7/13/16

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Question: What does a Kabbalist feel when he looks at a letter? What kind of information is carried in it?

Answer: In one of my first books I gave an example of a page from the Prayer Book of Rabbi Shalom Sharabi.

It is possible to see what a Kabbalistic prayer book says, which is how a person can influence the higher management from below so that it will influence him in response. This is a prayer book or instruction manual for the management of the higher system.
[196981]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 7/17/16

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Torah, Deuteronomy 14:3 – 14:6: You shall not eat any abomination. These are the animals that you may eat: ox, lamb, and kid, gazelle, deer, and antelope, ibex, chamois, bison, and giraffe. And every animal that has a split hoof and has a hoof cloven into two hoof sections, [and] chews the cud among the animals that you may eat.

Spiritual correction is based on the action that is called Tzimtzum Bet (Second Restriction). Its essence is that the division of our desires happened in us thanks to the connection of the Upper Light (the quality of bestowal and love) with the lowest quality of a person (to receive for his own pleasure).

They are divided into weak desires, called desires to bestow, although we are not going to bestow anything in them, and the rougher ones called desires to receive.

Tzimtzum Bet states that we can work with other people on the level of small desires because we can help them with these desires, influence them, and relate to them correctly, and big desires we cannot use so those are restricted.

This is represented by the division between Kosher and non-Kosher animals. Kosher, hence, usable, are the desires that have indications that they are fit for bestowal. On the animal level, bull, sheep, goat, deer, etc. symbolize these desires in us.

All of them differ from the other animals on the basis of having cloven hooves, which indicates a clear division between qualities of bestowal and reception. Even if the quality of reception is manifested in them, it is so small that it works for bestowal. Furthermore, these animals constantly regurgitate their cud, which means that they have a closed cycle of food consumption. In our world, this is an external consequence of the Second Restriction.

Torah, Deuteronomy 14:6 – 14:7: And every animal that has a split hoof and has a hoof cloven into two hoof sections, [and] chews the cud among the animals that you may eat. But you shall not eat of those that chew the cud, or of those that have the split hooves: the cloven one, the camel, the hyrax, and the hare, for they chew the cud, but do not have split hooves; they are unclean for you.

If the animal is missing even one of the Kosher components that represents signs of Tzimtzum Bet, it cannot be used for food.

Thus, the Torah speaks about the correction of our egoistic desires and their use with the right intention. A person makes a restriction on his desires and seeks an opportunity to work with them further. Those of them that he can use “in order to bestow” are called Kosher, in other words, suitable for bestowal to others.

In our world, these qualities are represented in a certain way by some animals, fish, birds, and even plants. From everything that surrounds a person, he must select only what he can use with the intention to bestow.
[198239]
From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 7/20/16

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