Question: How do we build a student’s readiness to perceive the wisdom of Kabbalah in the group?

Answer: Through the connection. A person cannot be ready to perceive if he is not connected to the friends. They have to unite by raising the teacher’s greatness in their eyes, thus building the right connection. Someone small can only receive from someone great, from the group, from the teacher, from the Creator, if he lowers his head before them. This is the path up the spiritual ladder.

When the students connect, they create the necessary condition, and become one whole. It is a sign that each one has annulled himself before the others, and considers himself the smallest in the group, ready to bestow upon others. Being connected means to keep all the society’s conditions.

We begin to connect, and after many years go through the hardening of the heart, which is also called “the ten plagues of Egypt.” First we may think, why don’t the plagues begin immediately when they arrive in Egypt? But it isn’t so; first it is nice and pleasant to connect, just like it was nice and pleasant for the children of Israel when they settled in Egypt and received all their nourishment through Joseph who connected everyone to Yesod.

Joseph is Yesod that connects the five phases or the five senses: Hesed, Gevurah, Tifferet, Netzach, and Hod. Rabash used to give the example of a salad that is made of five ingredients: tomatoes, cucumbers, pepper, onion, and parsley. If you cut them all up and mix them, they will create something new, which is the result of the connection between them. It is the same with Yesod; it has nothing of its own, but it is the outcome of the connection, of their attributes. Through it, the children of Israel acquire thickness in Egypt and an increasingly greater desire, but in the meantime, during the “seven years of satiety,” this thickness operates in favor of the connection between them.

It was at the beginning of the exile in Egypt that the sons of Jacob together with Joseph sang “How good and pleasant it is when brothers sit together.” They felt that it is worthwhile to connect since together they succeed; together they are strong. Thus Egypt enslaves us by an egoistic connection.

This is the process until such a great thickness is revealed that it is impossible to do anything with it. Then Moses escapes from Egypt to the desert. He simply couldn’t be together with his ego. During the “seven years of hunger,” we discover that this enslavement, the adhesion to the corporeal values, is not in our favor, but the opposite, it detaches us from the goal. Suddenly I begin to understand where I am and what is happening to me. I look at my “animal” desire that has grown into a giant heavy body, and I see that this “animal” is no longer mine, that I am under its control, under it.

This is called “a new king rose in Egypt who didn’t know Joseph.” It is a good thing, since he shows us the truth, our true state compared to the Creator, and thus he brings us closer to our Father in Heaven.

Then, at the end, there are the ten plagues: We hold on to our unity and these plagues hit us in order to break us apart; they are all aimed against the connection.

If I am ready to rise above the ego, to beat the king of Egypt, I rise above these plagues in order to remain connected and united. It is more important for me than Pharaoh’s afflictions. On the background of the plagues, I ask the Creator to keep us connected since without this connection, we will not be able to leave Egypt; this is all our work.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/26/12, “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy”

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Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot“, Item 107: Hence, after one attains the illumination of the face in such a measure that each sin he had committed, even the deliberate ones, is turned and becomes a Mitzva for him, one rejoices with all the torment and affliction he had ever suffered since the time he was placed in the two discernments of concealment of the face.

…has now become a cause and preparation for keeping a Mitzva and the reception of eternal and wondrous reward for it.

From this we learn that the more I have suffered, the more I am rewarded now. So does that mean that it is worthwhile to suffer in order to receive a greater reward later? That’s what it sounds like in our language, in our egoistic perception. The past is not erased; the correction is in turning it from sorrow to delight. Instead of a vessel that has suffered from darkness, from lack and emptiness, from wars, from diseases, from pains, which mean from lack of filling, we now feel a filling and in it we feel a reward and love.

Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Item 108: This is similar to a well-known tale about a Jew who was a house trustee for a certain landlord. The landlord loved him dearly. Once, the landlord went away, and left his business in the hands of his substitute, who was an anti-Semite.

What did he do? He took the Jew and struck him five times in front of everyone, to thoroughly humiliate him.

This is about the ego and about the point in the heart in a person, about how the ego dominates a person now and beats the “point in the heart” called “Jew” (Yehudi), which stems from the Hebrew root “unity” (Yehud). This point wants to unite with the Creator and suffers because it cannot do so. This means that it receives blows from its ego.

Upon the landlord’s return, the Jew went to him and told him all that had happened to him. His anger was kindled, and he called the substitute and commanded him to promptly give the Jew a thousand coins for every time he had struck him.

The Jew took them and went home. His wife found him crying. She asked him anxiously, “What happened to you with the landlord?” He told her. She asked, “Then why are you crying?” He answered, “I am crying because he only beat me five times. I wish he had beaten me at least ten times, since now I would have had ten thousand coins.”

In the earthy representation of this story, this seems coarse and egoistic, but we understand that the Torah tells us about a person’s internal world. Whoever understands this interprets it correctly.

“A person is a small world,” in which there are two opposite sides: a point in the heart and the heart itself. The heart hates the point in the heart that yearns for unity with the Creator.

The greater the desire to receive that is revealed in us, called the cruel egoistic heart, the more strongly it seizes the point in the heart and doesn’t let it advance. The point in the heart makes different attempts to escape it and to advance, and so it suffers from its domination and from its own slavery, from the tormenting exile. The tension and the struggle between them constantly grow and the point in the heart feels more and more pain since it cannot unite with the Creator.

This creates a vessel and so the filling arrives, which is called “upon the Landlord’s return.” The reward is felt in the same sufferings, in the same empty places that were created during the exile. This means that it isn’t the desire to receive itself that becomes in order to bestow, but the struggle against it
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/25/12, “The Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot”

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Studies (from the California Institute of Technology): “Humans have a tendency to spontaneously synchronize their movements. For example, the footsteps of two friends walking together may synchronize, although neither individual is consciously aware that it is happening. Similarly, the clapping hands of an audience will naturally fall into synch. …

“In a new study, led by cognitive neuroscientists at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), researchers found that body-movement synchronization between two participants increases following a short session of cooperative training, suggesting that our ability to synchronize body movements is a measurable indicator of social interaction. …

“For their study, the team evaluated the hypothesis that synchronous body movement is the basis for more explicit social interaction by measuring the amount of fingertip movement between two participants who were instructed to extend their arms and point their index fingers toward one another. ….

“The participants repeated the task eight times; the first two rounds were called pretraining sessions and the last two were post-training sessions. The four sessions in between were the cooperative training sessions, in which one person—a randomly chosen leader—made a sequence of large finger movements, and the other participant was instructed to follow the movements. In the post-training sessions, finger-movement correlation between the two participants was significantly higher compared to that in the pre-training sessions. In addition, socially and sensorimotor-related brain areas were more synchronized between the brains, but not within the brain, in the post-training sessions. According to the researchers, this experiment, while simple, is novel in that it allows two participants to interact subconsciously while the amount of movement that could potentially disrupt measurement of the neural signal is minimized. …

“‘The most striking outcome of our study is that not only the body-body synchrony but also the brain-brain synchrony between the two participants increased after a short period of social interaction, … This may open new vistas to study the brain-brain interface. It appears that when a cooperative relationship exists, two brains form a loose dynamic system.’ …

“As part of the study, the team also surveyed the subjects to rank certain social personality traits, which they then compared to individual rates of increased body synchrony. For example, they found that the participants who expressed the most social anxiety showed the smallest increase in synchrony after cooperative training, while those who reported low levels of anxiety had the highest increases in synchrony. The researchers plan to further evaluate the nature of the direct causal relationship between synchronous body movement and social bonding. Further studies may explore whether a more complex social interaction, such as singing together or being teamed up in a group game, increases synchronous body movements among the participants.”

My Comment: We are initially set up to full mutual synchronization and we get the greatest pleasure from this if we reach it. In it, we begin to feel the upper controlling power, our cause and the final goal.
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The Book of Zohar, “Naso,” Item 172: “The image of man,” like a man who includes all forms, the three faces, lion, ox, and eagle that are included in mans’ face, on the side of Malchut in him. Since a man includes Zeir Anpin and Malchut.

The form of a man is what we establish in the connection between us, until we have the form of the first man. Everyone’s exertion in the connection forms this new image called Adam HaRishon, “the first man.”

First man was created from above during the descent of the worlds, and was like a prototype, an angel, because it was created without our exertion. Together with our exertion, it turns from an animal into a man.

We see the same thing in the process of evolution: We have reached the full end of the animal development, and now we need to rise to the next level called the “Human Being.” So the wisdom of Kabbalah is being revealed, and there is a crisis in every aspect of our lives, and there are the right conditions to build the form called the human being by our exertion. It is because it is built only by the connection between everyone with the help of the integral education.

Before there was no such thing; Adam HaRishon was only a first example, like the levels of still, vegetative, and animate nature during the descent from above and the shattering. We have fully developed on the levels of still nature, the vegetative, and the animate. It was the right development in the light form of egoism. Now we need to start to put together the image of man, both inside us and throughout the world.
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From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/24/12, The Zohar

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In life we are accompanied by two opposite desires: the desire to form new relationships and a desire to free ourselves from connections. Only through other people and close relationships with them does a person reveal himself and the outside world. This is why the environment is so important.

Contact with others early in life is digested by a child and later forms his inner world. These contacts become our foundation, the standard of human interactions. Every new relationship that later emerges on our path of life is built and evaluated based on this standard.

Conclusion: If we did not perceive our surroundings, we also would not perceive ourselves. To perceive oneself and to perceive one´s environment are the same thing. Nature or evolution constantly pushes us toward this. Connections grow and reach a qualitative change—the transition from a linear, egoistic, individual development to its integral and global level.

Meanwhile, we find ourselves connected in a net of connections of everyone with everyone. In addition, we reveal that all of nature, every little element of it, is connected through all types of connections with all elements—to the extent of the infinite and complete formation called Creation.
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Question: In India there are these teachings that purposely create a state of chaos in a person’s soul in order to later exit this state to a new level of spirituality.

Answer: We do not create chaos. It comes to us on its own to the same extent that we wish to create a correct example of connection between us. The chaos is within a person because the transition from one level to another is like an overload on a computer.

Thus, this transition is felt as chaos, as it were, like an erasing of everything that came before and the appearance of something new. However, this is not deletion but simply a renewed organization to a new level, introducing a new frequency; suppose, from one cycle of frequency, I go to another the next one, which is more powerful, more broad.

If a person is inclined to connection, to resemble unified nature, then all kinds of new feelings, opinions, and knowledge arise in one, including the necessity to attain greater integration. There is no destruction here. On the contrary, there is the revelation of greater forces, but they are revealed in such a way to give a person a new mission, like a small child, who by resolving it, grows. Therefore, they seem to us as the opposite, scattered, chaotic.

But it is not chaos. All of this appears only so that we will rise to a new level and will see that everything is exactly in an orderly movement. Thus our perception constantly becomes refined.
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From KabTV’s “An Integral World,” 11/26/12

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Question: If we don’t truly adjust ourselves to the integral society correctly in our present stage, then will nature change and correct us?

Answer: It will happen gradually through self-education. This is a learning process similar in children; it is absolutely the same system. Moreover, humanity already has these developments, especially if we are talking about the wisdom of Kabbalah, which fully shows us how we should proceed.

How should a person arrange himself within the environment? He needs to place himself under the influence of the correct environment. Why is one’s free choice specifically in that? Which values should be elevated first? Moreover, they need to be elevated artificially, and then afterward, a person will grasp them and see them as truly basic and necessary.

Then it will be necessary to be included in this society, gradually dissolving within it, but together with this a person doesn’t lose his identity. By the way, we don’t go against our ego. We don’t oppress our ego by any means whatsoever!

We don’t oppress anything in a man. He doesn’t need to get rid of anything within him. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you were educated up until now, what your views are, what attributes you were born with, or the values and opinions that you received during your education process.

You will begin to be integrated into the group, which comprises a mini-society with which you will begin to work on this mutual interaction. The main thing is that it aims for a person to create a new vessel of connection with others, a communication system where he begins to see that he is completely dependent on others.

Question: A person already begins to see this dependency, although in principle it only irritates him.

Answer: Correct. But there is no place to escape it. We need to do something with it, since otherwise we simply will disappear! Even now there is talk about future famine, cold, drought, terrible problems in the economy and finances. People will be thrown out in the street; unemployment will grow. This means that everything is going in the direction of a complete breakdown. It specifically points to that, and we must find between us the correct point of balance.
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From KabTV’s “An Integral World” 11/26/12

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Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Item 101: Thus, as long as one has not attained Providence of the revelation of the face, the abundance of Torah and Mitzvot he has performed makes his concealment of the face much heavier. This is the meaning of, “the Creator hides Himself in the Torah.”

Indeed, all that heaviness he feels through the Torah is only proclamations by which the Holy Torah itself calls him, awakening him to hurry and give the required measure of labor, to promptly endow him with the revelation of the face, as God wills it.

The closer a person gets, the more distant he feels that he is. But he also understands that this distance is given to him on purpose so that he will hurry to complete the necessary sum of his exertion. But a person who doesn’t have the right connection, who doesn’t advance correctly, simply feels the “hardening of the heart” increase, which eventually throws him off track.

We should understand this difference clearly. Both feel the “hardening of the heart,” the one who advances correctly and the one who does not advance correctly. But they interpret it differently and feel their state differently. The one who is advancing correctly is connected to the teacher, to the group, to the Creator, to the study, and doesn’t miss a chance; he is constantly looking for ways to tighten the connection, the mutual guarantee. He understands that only by adhesion to the environment will he be able to discover the Creator inside it.

Thus he feels support. The more he discovers the evil in his attitude towards others, the more it pushes him to connect with them and obligates him to demand from himself and from others to tighten this connection. He envies the success of others who advance and is frustrated when he compares himself to them, but it pushes him to connection and correction.

However, a person who does not advance correctly, which means that he doesn’t look for bestowal and connection with the environment in order to discover the goal of creation in it, but rather aspires for personal success, he cannot receive support from the environment since he hasn’t established this support. Then he feels that this path is not for him. It seems to him that others don’t understand anything, that they are dealing with nonsense, and it is impossible to reach this goal. Eventually he leaves the group.

So we should pay close attention to whether or not we are building the right connection with the environment that must constantly support us. When a person falls, the environment helps him rise, and when he is full of strength, then he has to invest it in the environment, building up “stock” there, thanks to which he will later receive help.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/23/12, “The Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot”

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In the News (from Komsomolskaya Pravda): “The crisis affects everybody. We are all paying the price for rampant consumption in recent years. … Experts compare the global economy with a huge pyramid. Some borrow from others; those borrow from a third. Sooner or later, one of the links in this chain will break, and the whole system will collapse. …

“The economic crisis is spreading. The last large-scale crisis the Great Depression led to the Second World War. At that time, the crisis began with a sudden fall in stock prices. That day went down in the history of the world economy as “Black Tuesday.” What awaits us this time? Is not this an option of the apocalypse?

My Comment: It will be the general restructuring of the attitude towards ourselves, the world, and life and its purpose. The crises are the labor pains of a new stage of our development towards unity and the revelation of the upper world that rules us.
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Question: What is a “union” (Brit) in spiritual work? What should it be, in the direction of what efforts?

Answer: Forging a union is connection and agreement between us, that we will constantly maintain the unity we have achieved and apply joint efforts so as not to disrupt the union.

From where can we take the strength to support it? Only from above, not from anywhere or from anyone else.

You can listen to Kabbalistic songs and read Kabbalah books; it will not help. The Creator, nonetheless, will burden your heart to such an extent that the lessons, meetings, and gatherings will help; nothing will help other than addressing the Creator through all of this.

The burdening of the heart happens due to the addition of egoism, and now you must bring the Light into it. Then, it will become your next degree.

The Light is neither in you nor in those who surround you. You will be able to draw it to yourself only through the environment and, thus, rise. The burdening of the heart is given for this. This is a condition of ascent.

From this moment on, you need to accept this as a law: The left line is a constant weight that affects the feelings, heart, emotions, memory, and various external circumstances, which begin to flash before your eyes, breaking into you.

You need to control yourself all the time because this is the Creator who presents everything to you so that you will ask Him to give you the force to rise above His tricks, as it is written, “Come unto Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart.” If we have a problem, this is Pharaoh (our mutual egoism), and to fight him, we need the Creator.
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From the Novosibirsk Convention 12/9/12, Lesson 6

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