Entries in the 'Zohar' Category

Above Place and Time

137The Zohar speaks nothing of corporeal incidents, but of the upper worlds, where there is no sequence of times as it is in corporeality. Spiritual time is elucidated by change of forms and degrees that are above time and place (Zohar for All, “VaYetze,” Item 139).

Question: Kabbalah speaks of states that are above time, space, and motion. Can you explain what it is? What kind of change in forms and degrees are we talking about?

Answer: There is nothing permanent or temporary in the universe. We introduce all this with our sensations, our attitude to what is happening. Only the Creator, the upper force, is absolute.

If we change ourselves relative to Him, then we change time, space, movement, and the world in which we exist. We can only speak about this in relation to the Creator.

Question: Can time end?

Answer: If time by itself does not exist, then how can it end? It exists only in our sensations.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 12/25/22

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First Exercise According to The Book of Zohar

528.03Imagine that you are standing at a crossroads: If you go left, it is for your own sake, and if you go right, it is for the sake of the Creator. How can you choose the correct intention in order to go in the direction of bestowal?

We must yearn for bestowal and try to reach it by all means. Then the Creator will always correct us and teach us how to do it. The main thing is to act together with the friends and look for forms of connection between us that will give us a feeling of coming closer to the Creator.

Let’s create such a unity in which our inner connection will be able to reveal the form of the Creator, His quality, and His character to us. The more we move in this direction day by day, the better we will begin to understand who the Creator is and who we are, what distance separates us, and what we need to do in order to come a little closer to Him.

Every day, every moment when we yearn to connect, we must check whether the form of our connection is becoming more and more true, in mutual bestowal to each other. This is the very first exercise that The Zohar gives us: to connect in a ten and reach such mutual bestowal and mutual connection that approaches the form of the Shechinah.

This does not mean physical distance, but rather a feeling of inner, spiritual closeness.

But we are not required to reach this correct intention ourselves; the main thing is to search for it. The most important thing is the search, the questions, the inner regret that we are not able to come to it. From this, a prayer will be born that will help us reach the desired goal.

The Creator must arrange the desire for us, and He also arranges its fulfillment, the answer to it. We just need to be searching.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/11/23, “Zohar for All. Introduction of The Book of Zohar

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What Is the Difference between the Torah and The Book of Zohar?

137Question: What is the major difference between the Torah and The Book of Zohar?

Answer: It is only in the style, form of presentation, and absoluteness of the Torah. What is written in it is absolute. There are a lot of expressions in The Book of Zohar that can be misinterpreted.

The Zohar is generally incomplete in itself. Initially, it included about thirty volumes. To date only a small part of it has been found, which means, it is incomplete, fragmentary and cannot claim to be like the Torah.

But in terms of the power of its presentation, The Zohar affects us much more than the Torah.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. The Zohar against the Torah” 1/21/12

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A Prayer of Many

95A prayer of many rises before the Creator, and the Creator crowns Himself with that prayer since it rises in several ways. This is because one asks for Hassadim, the other for Gevurot, and a third for Rachamim. And it consists of several sides: the right side, the left, and the middle.

But a prayer of one does not comprise all the sides; it is only on one way. Either one asks for Hassadim or Gevurot or Rachamim.

Hence, a prayer of one is not erected to be received like the prayer of many, as it does not include all three lines like the prayer of many (Zohar for All, “VaYishlach,” Item 45).

In order to come to the common prayer, a prayer for all as one whole, to become one, it is necessary to go through very difficult states of inner scrutiny and to understand that:

1. The spiritual goal is more important than all other goals.

2. It is impossible to reach it alone but only by creating one common yearning from individual yearnings, and then it will be similar to the Creator and the upper light will fill it.

Therefore, only such a request, such a prayer, can be heard, meaning it can cause the corrective action of the upper light.

Reading The Book of Zohar causes us to understand that we must be together because without exiting ourselves it is impossible to reach bestowal, the qualities of the Creator, to exist in the upper world.

It is said: “From the love for the created beings to the love for the Creator.” The Creator gave us the illusion that there are many people around us, and we must destroy this illusion, understand that all this is inside of me, and ask Him to unite the whole world within me.

Then the prayer of many will turn into a true prayer of one.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/20/09, The Book of Zohar

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To Incline the World to Good

557The upper expects only a reaction from us. Portions of light come from the upper to the lower (to each of us), and require us to respond correctly. The upper knows exactly what is happening to the lower one, what state the lower one is in, because He forms this state for him.

Of course, the upper one knows what the lower one is ready for. He arranges for him all the external and internal conditions for free choice and leaves to the lowest only one thing incomprehensible and unknown to the lower—the middle third of Tifferet (Klipat Noga). It is in this state that the lower one must form the middle line himself.

If the lower one, in response to the influence of the upper one, correctly builds the middle line, it means that he has been awarded. Then he really inclined himself and the whole world (the whole environment that the upper formed for him at that moment) to good.

Therefore, all that is required of the lower, when he feels a lack (Hisaron), is to turn to the upper and get the component that he lacks from Him in order to incline himself and the whole world to good.

After all, the lowest lacks knowledge, sensation, and then the ability to decide. He must receive all this from the upper.

The upper one leaves him a Klipat Noga so that the lower one wishes to turn to Him and get what he lacks. If the lower one is ready to receive this filing for the Klipat Noga, then he receives it, and this is the additional force of bestowal that he acquires at the current degree, and due to it rises to the next degree.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/10/10, The Book of Zohar “Tzav (Command)”

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The Zohar—Builder of the Soul

49.04By studying The Book of Zohar, each person clarifies for himself exactly what is necessary for his soul.

Therefore, when we are reading The Zohar, each of us receives his own impressions that are different from the others.

The whole narrative of The Zohar must pass through us. But a person develops not under the influence of the narrative itself, but due to the reforming light.

It shines on a person’s desire, on his matter, which contains information genes (Reshimot). This is similar to the work of stem cells, which are the foundations of all human cells.

The light affects our matter, and Reshimot that are characteristic and specific for this soul awaken inside the matter, and, with the help of the light, these Reshimot build out of the matter any structure, a part of the soul.

Each person has his own structure of the soul.
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From from the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/15/09, The Book of Zohar – Selections, Chapter “Noah”

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Tune Yourself to The Zohar

65When you start to read The Zohar, you need to attune yourself to swim along with the flow of the material that the great authors of The Book of Zohar have prepared for us.

They tell us that the only creation is the desire to receive. This desire has two forms of perception of reality, perception of the Creator who created it.

There is a perception inside the desire directly, which is called top – down. Thus, the desire can feel only what we are feeling now within ourselves. This perception is called this world.

And there is another form of perception above the desire, outside of it, when I fill not myself, but supposedly others. This perception is unusual for us because we were not born in it.

It seems strange and alien to us, although the authors of The Book of Zohar say that this perception is natural because it comes from nature, from the Creator, and besides our small world that we feel in ourselves, all the other huge worlds are outside of us.

The Zohar directs us so that we also gain external perception outside our body. Therefore, we must adjust ourselves to the perception of reality that exists not inside, but outside of us in order to see in it what The Zohar indicates.

In whatever forms this book tells us—about events in this world, about fairytale characters like angels, spirits, palaces, no matter how real or unreal it may seem to us—in any case, it always tells us about what is happening in the form of perception outside of us.

Therefore, a person who wants to understand what The Book of the Zohar wants to tell him and what it wants to reveal to him within him, should set himself up in the same direction by striving not to fill himself, but to feel what is really outside of him.

This form of perception, of course, is in us, it only presupposes a person’s attitude to everything as to himself!
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/21/09, The Book of ZoharVaYishlach (And Jacob Sent),” 12/21/09

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Attainment Through Love

549The topic of love seems to be the simplest and most understandable. But in fact it is the most difficult because it is the central topic in the issue of perceiving the Creator, of coming closer to Him, and in understanding the root of the world.

We confuse the concept of spiritual love with the familiar egoistic love in this world, which we know intuitively how to use. It is like a baby who cries all the time and demands love from the first day of its birth. This is how a person acts until the last day of his life.

We do not treat love in its true, correct form. We think that love is something simple and self-explanatory. This explains why so few people reach spiritual attainment, i.e., altruistic love for the sake of bestowal, universal love, and love for friends through which we reach spiritual love.

The problem is that we do not understand that our entire life and the path of spiritual development is aimed at finding love for the other. This is a great difficulty because naturally we understand love in an egoistic form and perceive everything through self-love. But we do not know what love for the world is or what love for the Creator is, which is the only way to come closer to Him and begin to feel Him.

Everyone can feel in one’s heart how much he neglects love if it is not an egoistic love, but rather love for the world.

The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches us a different attitude to the Creator and to the truth. We think that the main goal is to find out how the worlds cascaded downward and how the Sefirot and spiritual Partzufim were born, and that the better we study the technique of the spiritual world, the more we will advance. But this is completely wrong.

In fact, everything depends on the way we develop a feeling of love for the other in our hearts in order to treat all the inhabitants of this world with love—all people, animals, plants, and inanimate nature, all levels from top to bottom. After all, we can attribute this love to the Creator who created this world and gave it to us so that we could correct ourselves by building the right attitude in ourselves at all four degrees of our will to receive.

First, we need to make a restriction on our will to receive fulfillment and turn it into universal love, love for everything that is outside of us. All this was created by the Creator, and therefore, I am obliged to love all of His creation in order to come closer to Him.

We have nothing to do in our life but to turn hatred or indifference to the entire world into a feeling of closeness and love called universal love.

Only to the extent of such universal love for the other will we begin to feel what it means to love the Creator and become close to Him. Through turning egoism into love, we attain all of the true spiritual reality.

Therefore the topic of love is the most important, central, and deep topic within which we will meet with the Creator. Let’s try to free ourselves from self-love and appreciate our friends. It does not matter if they are close or far away or if they are good or bad, but they are on the same path with us and have a special desire to reach true love.

The Creator has given us this inner, concealed yearning. Let’s start working and unearthing the love hidden in us until we reach universal love; let’s get closer and unite with the entire creation and its inner force, which is the Creator.

This is the central grain of all spiritual work. You can forget the names of the Partzufim AB-SAG and not know what the upper worlds are called, but we will feel this through love; it will be not just memorizing, but true attainment.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/2/23, Love – Selected Excerpts from Zohar for All

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The 50th Gate of Bina

165There are many hidden treasures in that palace, one atop the other. Within that palace there are gates that were made for concealing, made to block the lights. They are fifty (Introduction of The Book of Zohar, Chapter “Lock and Key”).

When we study The Book of the Zohar, we must believe that this book is an intermediary between us, the lower ones, and the Creator, the upper one, and all this connection takes place through the group of Rabbi Shimon.

The gates are the conditions with which we have to comply. In order to pass through the gates you need to get closer to them and adjust yourself to certain qualities. Then some of the gates open, some are canceled, and some we need to correct by integrating with them.

After each gate we increasingly reveal the desire to bestow within ourselves, we come closer and closer to the Creator, and we better understand the entire system that connects creation with the Creator. Therefore, with each gate we go through we go further and further into the palace of the Creator.

Behind the last, 50th gate absolutely everything is revealed, the entire Malchut, completely adhered with the upper force.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/1/23, Writings of Baal HaSulam “Introduction to The Book of Zohar

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The Letters of The Book of Zohar Express Connections

526Question: Do the letters that The Zohar talks about express the types of connection between us?

Answer: Of course! Only the connection between us! Without the connection between souls, the authors of The Zohar would not have been able to attain anything. Everything is attained in the network of connections between us.

What do we attain? Forces of bestowal. The totality of these forces of bestowal is called the Creator (Bo-Re, Come and See), which we reveal in the connection between us; it is the quality of bestowal and love.

If we attain this in the form of forces, then this is our desire, a vessel for revealing the light. If we attain an impression in it, the light, then this is the Creator, the light that is revealed in a vessel, in a desire. Other than that, there is nothing.

Everything we read in The Zohar or in all the books of Kabbalists is just the impressions of a person, a Kabbalist, from his attainment of the force of bestowal within his desires, according to the equivalence of qualities. He tells us about his desires, about the force that he attained, about his impression, that he explained in such an external form.

It is possible to express it in music, songs, and beautiful words, or it can be explained in the language of Kabbalah, Talmud, or legends. But ultimately the Kabbalists explain their attainments to us.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/26/11, The Book of Zohar, “Truma (Donation),” “A Persimmon and a Sedan Chair”

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