A question I received: I want very much to rise above myself in order to satisfy the needs of others, but I feel that by doing this I will only fulfill my own egoism. Even when I am doing dissemination, writing to friends about the importance of the goal, or studying, I understand that I am cheating myself. How can we actually do something for the goal and not for ourselves? How can we do something without receiving anything in return?

My Answer: The Surrounding Light shines upon you when you perform these actions – when you study, work on unification in a group, and disseminate. This Light affects you to the degree that you desire to rise above egoism through your actions. Or in other words, the Light shines on you to the degree of your equivalence to it.

This Light gradually corrects your intention from “for yourself” to “for your neighbor (or for the Creator).” Little by little, this Light’s glow affects your desire, starting with the weakest egoistic desire, with an Aviut (thickness) of zero. This stage is called Shoresh. When the Light finishes correcting the intention of the desire with this level of Aviut (thickness), you will immediately feel the revelation of the Upper World or the Creator. But until that happens, there is only one thing to do – continue!

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A question I received: If every person affects the world positively or negatively with his influence, then what determines the general picture?

My Answer: The higher one ascends and develops spiritually, the more power he gains. The greatest power is the power of thought. Ordinary people influence the world with their thoughts, desires, and actions, but the extent of their influence is very small, even though there are six billion people.

The world is not static. One always sees it differently based on one’s changing qualities. When you realize that the world is your individual impression, you recognize that it’s necessary to change yourself, rather than improve the world. You must correct yourself in order for the world to change.

If you do so, then you will discover how the Upper Force affects everything that happens, and this will change your entire model of perception and your interpretation of what you perceive. Will people feel better? Will unemployment and hunger end? Will companies really bring their workers back to work? Yes! We will see this happen with our very own eyes.

Baal HaSulam writes in the article, “The Creator’s Concealment and Revelation,” that nothing changes in our world except the Creator’s revelation or concealment. Therefore, it will help us a great deal to stop viewing this world as a static picture that’s constant before us. We should instead understand that the world depends entirely on our perception, on our qualities and inner conception. We will then begin to correct our flaws, and as a result, to see the will of the Creator in everything that happens.

The science of Kabbalah helps us accomplish this. By definition, it is the method of revealing the Creator to the created beings in this world. In the meantime, this world is the picture that you feel today.

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A question I received: I don’t understand: who else do I have to take into consideration? I feel that I take everyone into consideration, and I’m good to my neighbors and my parents.

My Answer: I see a lot of people who are like you, but this is not enough! If you aren’t going out to kill and rob your neighbors, to steal from and rape them, and you even water their flower pots, then this doesn’t make you truly “considerate”: you’re only doing this because of your egoism. You’re doing it because you know that by treating each other this way, our lives will be nice and comfortable.

Today Nature requires more than this from us. It wants us to really take care of each other. This is something totally different than what we are doing now. You have to worry about and take care of others as if they were your own children. Obviously, this is against our egoistic nature. Yet, we have to get there! A new law of Nature is being revealed and it obligates us to do this.

Imagine you are sent to a country where this law is enforced. Every time you break this law, you are heavily punished. So what do you do in this case? You have no choice – you have to find someone who will teach you this law, give you an explanation, set an example, and grant you the desire and strength to abide by it. You have to find someone who will influence you, making it easier for you to change. If everyone around you will talk about this, then surely, you will also agree to abide by this law. If they set an example of this, you will also begin acting like them, even if you initially didn’t want to.

A person agrees to anything when he is faced with no choice. This law has dropped down on us from above and we are obliged to accept it.

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Questions I received about the levels of development:

Question: Am I correct to understand that a person on the still level of development has not yet revealed his point in the heart? And does the development of the point in the heart follow the same stages: still, vegetative, animate and human?

My Answer: Yes, it’s exactly as you’ve explained.

Question: Is it possible to skip from the still level to the animate level, or from the vegetative level to the speaking level during one’s development?

My Answer: No. The transition is always gradual, according to the established order.

Question: Before we descended into our world, we had no concept or awareness of it. Therefore, when we ascend back up to the collective soul, will we develop a spiritual awareness? And how will this differ from our lack of awareness before we descended?

My Answer: The difference is our recognition of what happens to us and our participation in the process of attaining the Creator, His level of existence.

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The entire healing process occurs through the realization of evil, through feeling the evil with the help of the poison. The symbol of medicine is a snake wrapped around a cup of poison. At first it may seem like this is something that causes the greatest harm to a person and makes him die. But actually, it acts on the contrary – it heals a person.

How is it possible for the same thing be a source of both life and death? The fact is, it is the person who determines how this source will influence him. He is the one to determine whether the drop of poison will be a poisonous or healing for him.

Some people desire to examine human nature and to understand how to cure it. Others use the same examination to learn how to turn poison to medicine. And others yet only use the medicine. However, they must realize that they are ill, at least to some extent! They have to understand what it means to live, what it means to die, what is good and what is evil, and to learn that there is a medicine that allows them to go from one state to another.

A person has to know that there is a “doctor” he can come to, someone he can pay to receive treatment, and that this treatment might be painful. But in a way, he does have to participate in the healing process.

The entire human development occurs under the supervision of the trustworthy, genuine Doctor. Humanity has received the medicine, and it has gone through a process of development. And now is the time for people to participate in this process independently. Why? Because one reaches the degree of “human” by participating in the general system, by building it and desiring for it to be built in order to reveal the system of Adam – the system of souls that are connected to each other through bonds of giving. This makes them similar to the Creator’s quality.

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Two questions I received about the spiritual meaning of the exodus from Egypt:

Question: Why was the last Egyptian plague – the death of the firstborns?

My Answer: The firstborn is the head of the previous degree. By going through this plague, we disconnect from the previous, egoistic degree of our life in Egypt. This plague afflicts all the firstborns, which means that we destroy everything that connects us to Egypt – all of our egoistic desires, intentions, decisions and plans, including President Obama’s, President Putin’s, the World Bank’s and anyone else’s new economic programs. This is called the death of the firstborns – when, on the highest level, I reject everything I did and thought before and admit that these were all silly actions, incapable of doing any good. That is when a person is ready to come out of Egypt.

Question: What are the vessels that the Jews stole from the Egyptians?

My Answer: The vessels that we carry out from Egypt are despair and emptiness – we recognize that we are unable to fulfill them. What do we come out of Egypt with? We come out with our desire to receive pleasure.

However, we know that the former egoistic method cannot fulfill that desire. And using the same old Kelim, we come to the intention for the sake of bestowal. We only change the method of the desire’s fulfillment. We begin to understand that by bestowing, we can fulfill our desire to receive pleasure, while by receiving, we leave it empty.

When a person crosses the Machsom, this is called the exodus from Egypt. This is when the old method through which he tried to be fulfilled, dies. And the person desires its death – he wants to kill his egoistic desire, because he recognizes that this method of fulfillment is completely inadequate, and he does not wish to use it any longer.

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A question I received: The science of Kabbalah teaches us about the structure of the spiritual worlds, and the feeling a person gets when he reaches the degree of “human.” However, when he attains this degree, he knows all the things that Kabbalists have revealed. Otherwise, they would not have been able to write all of their books. So why study the science of Kabbalah, if one can reach this state on his own?

My Answer: We study the science of Kabbalah in order to reach this faster. Otherwise, we would be like a child in our world who has to begin his life as a prehistoric human, having to rediscover the same laws and go through the same development all over again. We are preparing the world and creating a system of educating our children, so they will be ready for the spiritual world.

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It only seems to us that there is life and death, because this is what our senses feel. In actuality, however, the will to receive is not born and does not die, but only goes through a change of state. A person who strives to leave the desire to receive and to attain the desire to bestow, receives eternal, complete fulfillment. He then feels that he is living an eternal and perfect life. He rejects the earlier form of egoism by the time he barely reaches twenty years of age, instead of forty. Just look at how many young people end their own lives or immerse themselves in drugs, wishing to disconnect from life.

However, if a person breaks loose of his egoism, which brings him despair, disappointment, devastation, and death, and if he acquires new desires – to bestow to others, then he feels an eternal pleasure. The Light doesn’t go away, but fills a person constantly. It vanishes only momentarily, to enable him to receive even greater fulfillment while ascending up the spiritual degrees.

It is as though he feels hunger or an appetite, and then immediate fulfillment. And this movement never ceases. Even when a person feels hungry, he is happy that he will soon be able to fulfill himself. And as soon as he fulfills himself, he immediately reveals the hunger and appetite of a higher degree and is able to receive new fulfillment.

This is the advancement that happens through the eternal Light. One has the Surrounding Light during the hunger and the Inner Light during the fulfillment. Thus, he obtains an eternal, spiritual life, instead of the physical life that ends.

He perceives the death of his material body as absolutely external, since his enormous spiritual desire does not feel any loss. When his body dies, he only connects to new, stronger desires, instead of the perception he had through his body and the material life. This is the recipe for eternal life and salvation from the angel of death.

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In the News: (from Information Age Prayer): Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget.

We use state of the art text to speech synthesizers to voice each prayer at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen.

Choose a religion and a prayer from the menu. It’s only $5 a month, and a prayer for a child is only $2.

My Comment: The wonders of service in the 21st century. Kabbalah defines “prayer” as a person’s desire to correct his egoism to the quality of love and bestowal. This is the one true prayer! And that’s because this is the only thing a person has to do in life. This is the only desire that receives acknowledgment from the Creator. All the others simply don’t reach Him. This fact is easily confirmed simply by looking at the history of humankind.

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A question I received: If love of others is a law, then how can anyone possibly fail to abide by it?

My Answer: A while back I knew a person who didn’t consider radiation a serious health hazard and believed that vodka would cleanse the body of it. So, he exposed himself to radiation a few times, and died soon after. The point is that there are forces in Nature that man doesn’t perceive, but they still affect him.

The science of Kabbalah reveals the whole of reality to man, including all of its laws, which invariably operate and cannot be escaped. We always exist in the same world, under the influence of the same laws, but we reveal them gradually. If we weren’t revealing certain laws now, it would be easy to ignore them and say that we’re doing ok.

Today we are revealing the Upper, Spiritual layer of reality – the unity between the souls and the place where the breaking of the souls occurred. Of course, we are free to ignore this, to pretend that nothing’s happening. But once we run out of food and are afflicted with all kinds of other miseries, people will quickly see that there is no choice but to recognize these things.

The Creator is a universal, active law – the general law of reality, and humanity must discover it. All the parts of humanity are completely interconnected, similar to the human body, where every part cares for every other part. This is the true meaning of love. People’s customary understanding of love is the pleasure that comes from fulfilling oneself, whereas true love is pleasure that’s felt from caring for others’ fulfillment. This is the meaning of being global.

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