The aim of the spiritual quest is to always strive in the direction of your target, never remaining in one place, captive to your desires. A person advances when his mind and heart are focused on the future, desired state.

When you do this, you don’t delude yourself, but advance forward. It’s okay if you haven’t reached the goal yet. What matters is that you don’t weigh yourself down with your current desires and qualities, which cling to your feet trying to stop you. However, you are also not “up in the clouds,” living an illusion of the spiritual world. No one experiences the spiritual world until it becomes their actual reality. This is the correct aim.

Each moment is an opportunity to make an effort toward the target – bestowal. With every step you take, you should feel as though you’re reaching the goal. This way, the work itself becomes your reward. Every time you have an obstacle on your path, you rise above it and enjoy the fact that you are building the form of bestowal above reason. The picture of the spiritual world is made up of your desires; it is formed by the force of bestowal using the contours of your soul.

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A question I received: Do my behavior, actions and attitude to people influence my spiritual development?

My Answer: A person who studies Kabbalah has to behave in whatever way is generally accepted in his society. Don’t try to play games or do anything unnatural, and do not tell your coworkers that you study Kabbalah. If you participate in dissemination, do so in social circles external to your own. The reason for all of this is so others won’t influence you negatively later on.

All the corrections that you can possibly make are not done by you, but by the Surrounding Light that returns one to the Source. This Light influences and mends the only thing that is broken – the soul. By correcting the soul, the Light restores all of its parts.

When looking at Kabbalists who perceive the Upper World, the Upper Dimension, or the Creator, you wouldn’t notice anything special about them, externally. Or vice-versa: how would you try to find a Kabbalist according to his behavior? There are plenty of people who volunteer in hospitals and protect the environment and wildlife – but you won’t find one Kabbalist among them! You also won’t find Kabbalists among those who meditate on mountaintops or practice all sorts of Eastern techniques.

You can only correct that which is broken, and the only thing that is broken is your soul. Your soul is incorporated in all the other souls, and therefore, by incorporating yourself into them correctly, you will be able to correct everything. Anything we do in this world, aside from the things that are necessary for existence, brings no benefit to us and only causes us harm. Therefore, you should only concern yourself with the correction of your soul.

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A question I received: You have said that the goal of human development, the reason we are born, is to reveal the Upper World inside us, to acquire His qualities and love for Him, as well as for the entire universe. Practically speaking, this means we must attain the ability to feel unconditional, infinite Love.

How will humanity be able to come to this end state if every person subconsciously operates by a strict calculation: how to fulfill his own instinctive needs to eat, drink, sleep (don’t worry about sex – it’s just extra work) and protect himself from others? Today a person may even let his own children and family starve, because he perceives even them as external and alien. For the same reason, people (especially youth) do not even fear death, because there is nothing to lose; this is no life. This is not anyone’s fault, but it’s a disaster!

Fear is no longer a motivator. So what can force all of this to change? In theory, the sensation of lack is what motivates a person forward. But how can one strive toward something he doesn’t feel, and therefore has no sensation of lack related to it?

My Answer: You will see that all of a sudden, people will start to feel the desire for spirituality, and will start to behave accordingly. After all, they are puppets, and are now experiencing a sensation of emptiness and lack of purpose. It is all happening according to the Creator’s plan. There is a time and a place for everything. And as for you, the next stage is already beginning to happen!

Our entire lives are a process of gathering the sensations necessary to come to feel the Creator. Therefore, resistance is useless. What we have to do is speed up the process. That is how everything will change. You will then acquire the same impressions, but without the suffering.

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A question I received: When a person crosses the Machsom, where does he sense this attainment?

My Answer: Everything is sensed internally. It is similar to how you sense yourself and this world today. You always feel either suffering or pleasure within. This is also how you will sense spirituality.

The method is very simple. You will learn what pleasure and suffering are, how you currently sense them, and how you can begin to interact with them, enjoy them and gain control over them.

After all, our material is the desire to enjoy, and the Creator is the pleasure that’s revealed inside this desire, along with the Source of the desire. This is why there is nothing besides the Kelim, and why you will sense the spiritual world in the same way that you sense the physical world. Don’t think that spirituality is far away or out in space somewhere. In Kabbalah, you are learning precisely about what is currently taking place inside of you, as well as what will take place in the future.

However, there is one big difference in spirituality. Today, I sense my life and my existence inside my small Kli. In fact, it is so small and limited that our lives can’t really be considered real life. Once we expand our Kli, however, we will feel life and existence based upon a new condition: that we want to use our lives as a means to help us pass pleasure on to others, to bestow, to love, and to come out of ourselves. Otherwise, if the Kli remains egoistic, the pleasure is negated within it.

In other words, even now you are filled with Infinite Light. But you neutralize this Light with your egoism, because when the Light of Infinity reaches a desire, it immediately turns off, as though it short-circuits between two opposite ends that have no resistance between them. You have to use your own egoism as that resistance, and then you will feel the pleasure. Otherwise, the pleasure is not sensed and leaves. What we are left with is this minuscule corporeal life, where all we sense is just a spark of Light in order to have something to cling to.

But the pleasure that is ahead of you is billions of times greater. There is no obstacle to getting this pleasure; you only have to expand your Kli. Everything depends on you. All you need is the Kli, but the infinite pleasure is sitting right in front of you.

What does “infinite” mean, and how can the Kli be infinite? When your Kli reaches the size initially intended by the Creator, it will feel unlimited pleasure. This is what an infinite Kli is.

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Spirituality takes the form you build for it out of your own desires. The only thing we receive from Above is an informational record, a Reshimo, but then we have to build the form ourselves. In addition, if we request it, we also receive from Above the strength and the intelligence to implement this.

Some people think that a ready-made world will suddenly come tumbling down on them from Above. But it’s pointless to wait for this to happen. We have to build the spiritual world through our own efforts. We have to draw this world ourselves on the background of the Light.

To the extent I make efforts, I draw the image of the Upper Level and it gradually becomes truer. I do everything in my power, such as imagining various forms. Sometimes I am better at it and sometimes worse, and sometimes I am mistaken. I create them and erase them over and over again until I achieve success.

In the process of this work, I suddenly see that the Upper Level begins to help me! It clothes into me like a hand in a glove, and works there. It helps me like a mother playing with her child, helping him to build a house out of Lego pieces. When I try to do something, and succeed, I suddenly feel that it is the Upper Level that helped me understand the proper way to do something, and that it was not the way that I thought was right.

However, all of this happens by virtue of my efforts, because I try to build something. The Upper Level elicits the beginning of my inner effort, but I am the one who has to continue it. I have to find the “sprout” and begin to work with it. This is the meaning of the verse, “I, the Creator, am the first and the last.”

The way to build the place where the Creator will be revealed is by building a connection with our friends. We thus build the “picture of the Creator” by using our own matter. Without this, He has no image. I project Him onto myself, onto my own desires, onto the part of me that I can make similar to Him.

Then, using this desire as the basis or as a screen, I begin to see a “picture” of Him. It begins to be projected onto this screen, like a photograph dipped into a developing solvent. This picture, which is shown on my screen, is called “Reflected Light.” This is how I receive two spiritual forces: the “screen” and the “Reflected Light.”

But all of this has to come from me. That is why time and a preparation period of about three to five years are required to enter the spiritual world. The time of concealment is when I make attempts to build this picture. And then, the spiritual world becomes revealed…

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A question I received: According to Kabbalah, humanity’s correction takes place over six thousand years. Most of this time has already passed, and there’s just a little over 200 years left.

Why have we begun to use Kabbalah for correction only now, at the very end of the allotted time period? And even now, many people still don’t have any idea about this teaching. It seems that the world will end up reaching correction through great suffering. Why did the Kabbalists begin to put so much effort into teaching and disseminating Kabbalah only in the “final minutes” of correction?

My Answer: It is because the world has only now reached its maturation, as Kabbalah predicted. The reason for this is that the most important aspect of spiritual actions is the preparation, which depends on a person and occurs inside him. This is also why it takes so long. However, the act of correction itself happens quickly because when a person is influenced by the Upper Light and the revelation of the Creator, he changes instantly. Try it for yourself!

Therefore, the remaining 230 years is more than enough. And if we’ll want to, we will be able to reduce this time.

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A question I received: Sometimes in life there are those rare moments when you feel that everything around you is permeated by a special force, enveloping you with kindness and filling the whole world with love. This sensation is the most intense pleasure you have ever felt. And you know there’s a line of people extending across the whole world waiting to feel this pleasurable sensation.

And if all this is just a microscopic part of what one feels when ascending to the very first spiritual level, then is it even possible to bear that kind of pleasure? I myself have had an experience like this, and I can’t imagine how you can possibly have room for anything more inside your feelings.

My Answer: Of course you won’t be able to bear it! Say you are about to win the lotto with a prize of a million dollars: your heart would just burst, because we are equally impressed by the bad things and the good. You feel good up until a certain point, but once you pass that limit, you have “too much of a good thing” and the experience becomes too intense for you.

This happens because our abilities to feel are very limited and we have to expand them. We have to feel eternity, perfection, boundlessness, and infinity – in every sense and from every perspective. Every person in the world will have to feel the Creator fully and entirely. Every one of us will have to feel all of the Creator’s might and scope, to experience His entire program and inner abilities.

Therefore, all of our work and the sole purpose of our studies and of our life, is to expand our sensitivity to the reception of pleasure. This is why the science of Kabbalah is called Kabbalah, which means “reception.”

One needs only to learn how to do this correctly. Right now we all receive egoistically, and therefore we constantly keep destroying our desire, and it always disappears. Say I enjoyed something for a moment, but then the pleasure disappeared. It may have lasted for several minutes, hours, or even weeks (if the thing I received was really big – such as a new home or an exciting trip). But eventually, everything ends and disappears.

We have to build a Kli or desire that will be eternal and not disappear. The Creator wants just one thing from you: to learn to enjoy, so you will feel pleasure from everything, even from this earthly life. You don’t have to restrict yourself in any way or be a hermit.

The pleasure you will feel will continuously grow and get bigger. To do this, you must only study all of nature (including this world) and discern how you can feel that pleasure.

But this is something we don’t know! It’s a fact that we have lived in this world for many thousands of years, and we still haven’t learned to derive pleasure from it. We only feel more and more miserable with time.

At the end of the day, what does an intelligent person want from life? To enjoy it! And he cannot do so even in this small, earthly life. And he isn’t learning how to, either! He is only making his life worse and worse. But at the end of all our attempts, when we grow completely disillusioned with everything, the science of Kabbalah comes to us and teaches us how to enjoy.

Just think: how much pleasure can you actually take in? You’re like a child who dreams about a carton of ice cream, but in reality he isn’t able to eat more than three servings. So it is with you: you received a small spiritual glow, and you can’t fathom how anything more than that is possible. But the smallest spiritual level is billions of times (or even a billion to the billionth power) greater than what you felt at that unusual moment, when spirituality became slightly revealed to you.

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A question I received: Are you the Messiah? Since no one besides you can explain what’s happening in reality so accurately and wisely, and everything you say is true, this is the conclusion that comes to mind. Who or what is the Messiah according to Kabbalah: an object, an individual, an animal, or an action?

My Answer: The Messiah is the Force of the Creator which pulls us out of our current, limited perception, when we feel only this part of the world, and into the full sensation of the world. Messiah comes from the verb Lishmoh – to pull out.

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There are moments in life when a person is suddenly overtaken by an unusual inspiration. He feels that the world around him is being permeated by some special force, that the air “thickens” around him and is filled with a new essence. He is surrounded by thoughts and intentions that are directed towards him and he feels they govern him. It seems that everything all around is suffused with love.

This happens very rarely, when a person has attracted the Light and it has lifted him onto the hands of the Upper One. From there he sees the same thing as the Upper One. However, he sees it with his own eyes, which have opened up just slightly.

When this happens, the most important thing is to come away from it with a clear impression that “This was the spiritual world to the extent of my limited perception.” In reality, however, it is eternal and its power is a billion times greater for those who ascend to the first, smallest spiritual degree.

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We need to search for similarity to the Creator, to imagine this quality, called “the Creator.” I want to come and see Him. After all, in Hebrew the word “Creator” (Bore) breaks down into two words: “come and see” (Bo-Re).

In essence, we are talking about the Sefirot, which are between Keter and Malchut. Keter, the highest Sefira, is only attained in the end, while Malchut, the lowest Sefira, remains an unformed desire, until we attain the eight Sefirot between them.

We always need to look for equivalence of form with the bestowal of Keter, which we try to imagine. In virtue of this, we pass through the equivalence of form and reveal the knowledge, power, and understanding of what we need to do.

In order to not get confused and to stay in the middle line, we strive for bestowal, which the Creator shows in His regard for us.

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