Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 230

How Can We Accelerate Our Progress?

The acceleration of spiritual progress is not achieved by making all kinds of efforts. What accelerates progress is remembering to return to contact with the Creator. We must ensure that contacts with the Creator are continuous, with as little empty time as possible between them. We should establish various reminders and think of different means of recollection, things that will suddenly remind us, out of a state of disconnection: “Oh, I forgot again for a few moments,” “Oh, I forgot again.” It is good that we occasionally disconnect from the connection with the Creator, but what is not good is the amount of time it takes us to return to that connection, whether it is a few hours or a few days. This is where we must work.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 229

How Can We Prevent a Friend from Being in Real Danger?

It is advisable to gather the friends who are more or less connected to the matter and agree among yourselves that every half hour you check where each of the friends is. If someone has difficulty and runs away, he should immediately be brought back into the process. Two or three friends with a special ability should speak with the friend who is not in such a good state, awaken him, return him to the group, and support him.

The group is obligated to care for each and every detail within it. Therefore, it is desirable to divide a large group into subgroups of ten people, because in a large group it is difficult to notice who is present and who is not. A small group sits around one table, and then it is possible to see who is there. There must be such an agreement, a written and serious one, so that a person feels that it is binding upon him. This influences a person psychologically.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 228

And During the Lesson, When We Are Occupied with Ourselves, How Can We Think About the Friend Sitting Next to Us?

First of all, if we are unable to think about several things simultaneously, we should not think that this would bring us less success than someone who has a quick mind. There is no connection whatsoever, nor is there any way to measure, compare, or assess who will be more successful, who will be faster, or who will find more convenient ways. That is not how these things are measured. We sit in the lesson and know that we need to think about the study. In The Study of the Ten Sefirot, we learn something new to us, something difficult and complex. We have to connect several things together and remember them. Along with this, we must think about the Creator—I, the Creator, and the actions that I perform or what I am studying, how I yearn to reach the goal, which is adhesion with the Creator at the highest degree called “final correction.”

How can we think about all this while at the same time thinking about the study? Moreover, we must think about many other things, too. In order to reach this, we need to also include the friends in our thoughts, know where they stand in relation to us, and be concerned that they receive more than we do, because we study for their sake. It is understandable that these additional thoughts about love of friends and about the path to unity, which are foreign to our nature, will distract us from engaging in the study and the wisdom. So much is demanded of us that we simply do not know what to do. If we are told simply to study, we will study. If we are told, “Do not study. Open the book and think about the Creator,” we will do that as well. But we are unable to tie all these ends together.

The solution is simply not to tie them together. We should do whatever we are capable of doing together with the study. The main thing is to study, and during the study to demand that all of this be within us. Everything else is already there inside as preparation.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 227

How Can We Be Connected with the Friends and Engage in the Dissemination of the Wisdom of Kabbalah If We Are “Locked” on the Creator All the Time?

One necessitates the existence of the other. We discover that, as we were created, we will not succeed on our own in renewing our connection with the Creator or increasing it in any way. If we sit at home, we will very quickly discover how empty we have become of thoughts. If we come to the group, despite thoughts such as, “Why did I come to a place where there are another hundred people around me? It would have been better to stay at home,” we begin to work. We enter a whirlpool of thoughts, whether foreign or good, and jump into it. This is of utmost benefit.

For example, at times one experiences a good Sabbath. The work is good, many things are discussed in the group, and a special connection is formed. The result of such a Sabbath is a feeling of heaviness. Why? This is due to new desires arriving with no corresponding forces as of yet, but the coarseness increases and the left line begins to rise. It is not yet truly the left line, but nevertheless the appearance of a new desire. Then we feel heaviness, pressure, and the sense of upliftment disappears. After a day or two, if we nevertheless return to the society despite the feeling of heaviness, and we remain constantly within some kind of process, we begin to attain something more mature. That same desire which we felt after the Sabbath as heaviness, making it difficult for us to move forward, becomes connected through study to some illumination, and a kind of new mind and heart begin to form within us.

After several days of study, we feel that precisely in those secondary desires and discernments, which we previously experienced as heaviness and flavorlessness, there emerge new discernments, knowledge, and the acquisition of a certain experience. Eventually we come to a feeling of enjoyment after having experienced both a descent and an ascent. This is called “a new day has passed.” That day could last a week or a month, it does not matter.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 226

How Should We Use the Evil That We Receive from the Creator?

We use evil according to the extent that we are able to understand it. If we wish to make use of something, it means that we take that thing and turn to the Creator with it. This is what is meant by “using” it. We cannot do anything by ourselves. We can do something only if we demand it from the Creator, ask Him for it, and then the Creator carries it out. The Creator cannot act unless we ask, and we cannot obligate the Creator to do anything unless our request is genuine and well examined.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 225

What Is New About This? After All, We Already Had a Connection with the Host Before…

No. From our side, we never had a connection with the Host, nor did we feel Him as we are destined to feel Him. This is because the final correction that the Creator created is at the Creator’s expense, not at the expense of the created being. In Kabbalah, we learn that the expansion of the Light and its departure make the vessel fit for its role. In other words, only then does a deficiency arise, and from that deficiency comes the connection between the created being and the Creator. Before that, there was no connection.

The most the Creator can do is create a desire to receive, fill it, and give it a feeling of shame, so that through all these things it will restrict itself, undergo various incarnations, and spill over to the opposite end. The Creator cannot bring it closer without this process, because then the desire does not develop and we do not draw closer to the Creator. The Creator can do everything except give us the feeling that we ourselves accomplished it. Baal HaSulam illustrates this with a short story:

Two friends meet after twenty years without seeing one another. One has become wealthy and the other has become poor. The wealthy friend takes the poor friend into his home and says, “Everything I have is yours.” They spend time together, enjoy themselves, and everything is wonderful. Indeed, the wealthy friend gives his companion every good thing wholeheartedly. He makes no calculations and is completely willing to place everything before the poor man. After a week, the poor man, who understands that his friend is giving to him exactly as he would give to himself, and even more so, without any calculations, says to him: “There is a problem here. There is only one flaw: it was not I who did this; it was you. And there is nothing you can do to change that fact. There is only one thing you can do if you truly want to do me a favor: give me the opportunity to achieve what you have on my own.” That is what the Creator does for us. When we arrive, we truly arrive at an equal level with Him.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 224

What Is Our Addition?

Our addition is “the self.”

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 223

What Is the True Picture of the Creator?

We never speak about how things appear from the Creator’s side, what He feels, or what He is. We speak about what the created being feels from Him, or about how the created being imagines the Creator’s state, but not about His state outside the created being. At times we think all sorts of things about a friend that do not truly reflect who he is. We speculate about his thoughts, feelings, and troubles, and when we come a little closer to him, we discover that none of it was true. It was all merely a picture we had drawn in our imagination.

There is the matter of knowing something from within ourselves, from imagining that something is one way or another, and there is the true picture. We never see or know the true picture of the Creator. We can only know the Creator through ourselves, what we think about the Creator, how we understand the Creator, and so on. The truest picture that we are capable of attaining, without our vessels distorting what the Creator wishes us to feel from Him, is the state of final correction. The Host wishes to serve a five-course meal, each course perfect in every respect. We receive it and feel the Host’s attitude toward us through it. Beyond that is beyond our ability.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 222

What Is the Difference Between Before and After the Barrier?

Before the barrier, a person passes through two principal and very important stages:

1) Double concealment
2) Single concealment

These two stages provide us with all the vessels and discernments, which we later enlarge in spirituality and upon which we dress additional discernments. The transgressions and mistakes that we make on our spiritual path toward the barrier are the actual vessels that we will use later.

The difference between before and after the barrier is not only in these vessels. The point is that before the barrier, when we are in concealment and the Creator is not revealed, we might sometimes feel something in relation to the Creator. Our sensation of the Creator is that of the surrounding light (Ohr Makif) and not of the inner light (Ohr Pnimi), because we still lack a screen (Masach).

After the barrier, we acquire a screen. The acquisition of the first screen is called crossing the barrier, and afterward additional screens are added. Then, according to the strength of our screen, we can receive inner light, which is a clear and tangible sensation of Godliness.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 221

Does the Creator Bestow Upon Us the State of Final Correction?

The Creator bestows upon us as though we were already in the state of final correction, and indeed we are in the state of final correction. It only seems to us that we are not. In other words, the “as though we were” applies to our perception, not to the state of final correction itself. Final correction is the only state that actually exists, and we deceive ourselves into thinking that we are outside of final correction. This illusion stems from the numbness of our senses. Therefore, we need to correct our senses in order to feel the place in which we already exist.

RABASH compares this to an unconscious person who gradually rises and regains consciousness. This “return to consciousness” consists of the 125 degrees, through which the states gradually become clarified to him, until he reaches the state in which he truly exists. It continues until his awareness and the state in which he exists become one and the same.

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