A question I received: What is the connection between The Book of Zohar and global nature?

My Answer: The Book of Zohar explains how to connect to universal and perfect nature, how to request, demand, and extract this special, unifying force in order for it to affect me. The Book of Zohar is a binding link between me and all of nature; without this link a person in this world has no connection to it.

Now that I discover that nature is global, that the whole world is a global village in which everyone is connected, I further realize that I am dependent on everyone. As I depend on everyone, I then wish to be the same as them, to be among them as a friend treating everyone with goodness and for them to do the same with me. So, how do I obtain this?

In order to achieve this, I need to know how to connect with them. I need guidance, some instruction manual of connection. The guide needs to show me how to establish a connection with a group of people, how to approach and talk to them; the instructions need to expose what they need from me and what I need from them.

This manual of connection, The Book of Zohar, reveals this whole system of connection between a person and nature, so that nature, the Creator, will influence a person and turn him into an integral part of nature.

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We need to perform very specialized work under a very specific set of conditions to reveal the influence of the Upper Light upon us. Thus, the absence of any feelings, flavors, or understanding while we study The Zohar doesn’t mean a thing.

You don’t need to feel or understand; you simply need to stay open for the influence of the Light, and let it work on you. The environment has to attune us to the correct desire so that we become eager to be influenced by the Light even if we lack the connection to what we read, taste, or understand.

This is what we call the “miraculous force” (Segula) that is implanted into The Book of Zohar. This hidden mechanism (rather than the stories or words) somehow works on us and moves us forward.

When studying The Zohar we need to “trust the sages,” meaning we need to believe the advice of the Kabbalists. We have to constantly take care of how to align ourselves with the perception of the force that is yet concealed from us.

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The Creator has created the desire to receive pleasure, and he renews it every moment. In other words, each time I feel the desire to acquire new pleasures, this is done by the Creator inside me. He pushes and draws me toward all these pleasures. He evokes all the impulses in me and controls me as if a hand inside a glove, instigating new desires in me at every turn.

When I realize these desires, which are given from the Creator without a thought of Who they come from and the reason for them, I am on the still, vegetative, or animate level. However, when the point in the heart awakens in me, I begin to distinguish that it is the Creator who plays with me as if I were a glove on His hand.

Now, I regard everything that happens from within the point in the heart. I discern that it is He who induces me each and every time to acquire new pleasures. Regarding everything from the point in the heart with this awareness is like regarding things from within Him. This is why the point in the heart, which is the embryo of the soul, is called “part of the Creator from Above.” With this point in the heart, I obtain the opportunity to turn the animal within into man.

How do I do this? I do it by working against the Creator, against my nature, and against His hand in me. I refuse to blindly execute everything that He evokes in me. I stop using the desire that He rouses in me and I check the reason and the purpose for continuing to act in the same direction. Even though He wants it, I discover whether I have any kind of independence here. I discover whether I should awaken mechanically and continue to fulfill that same desire that He evokes in me like a hand in a glove or whether I want to stop acting like this and, from this moment on, to act independently. As it is written, “My sons have defeated Me”.

I continue to do the Creator’s actions, but only under the condition that I participate in them in the same direction, the same thought, and the same intention as the Host. I want to reveal Him in this. I want to be partners with Him in absolutely everything and I attain adhesion with Him through this partnership.

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The Zohar, Chapter “BeHukotai (In My Statutes),” Item 45: “I will never again curse the ground on account of man.” “I will never again,” meaning I will not give addition to the litigants to destroy the world, but only add as much as the world can bear. It is written about that, “then I will [chastise you] more,” meaning add what the world can bear.

This describes how we advance. The whole process consists of Malchut rising to Bina and then descending back from Bina. Then it rises to Bina again, and descends back again. All these movements, these oscillations, are meant to give us sensations.

After all, we cannot feel our reality in Malchut or in Bina; we can only feel it in the connection between them. We feel reality in the coefficient of their connection; that is, in the changes of Malchut’s inclusion into Bina and Bina’s inclusion into Malchut.

More simply, we feel ourselves only under the condition that we move between Malchut and Bina. When the relationships between them change in us, then the variable correlation between Malchut and Bina also changes in us, and it is these changes that we perceive as life.

Conversely, if this correlation ceases to change or becomes still, we would feel this as death. In this state, all the sensations and gradations of qualities vanish. Therefore, on one hand, we feel life in the process of change of Malchut’s inclusion into Bina, and Bina’s inclusion into Malchut, and the unifications between them. On the other hand, this gives us heavy and unpleasant sensations, and the lack of patience. However, this is precisely where we feel life. Therefore, in order to live, we are forced to survive. We are unable to part with life and so we prefer movement.

In spirituality this movement reaches a state within which we reveal the Creator. It is the state, from which life comes to us and provides movement, strength, and the changes in the connections between Malchut and Bina and in the ascents of Malchut into Bina.

When we reveal Who does this, Who creates these changes, and for what purpose all these changes occur in us, we rise above these movements, above the changes in us, and we merge with the Giver of life. Thereby we begin to feel at rest. After all, we then feel that this movement is necessary for creation, and without it creation is unable to feel the Creator.

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Preparation to the Study of The Zohar
In the spiritual world we’ll learn to join contradictions. When we attain the entire picture then black and white, darkness and light will become as one whole.
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The Book of Zohar — Selections, Chapter “VaYaera (And The Lord Appeared),” Item 1
A “human” is the final stage of the desire’s development, which allows for the attainment of the creation in the full scope.
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Article — “The Individual and The Nation,” Lesson 2
If you have been awakened, don’t wait for all of humanity to wake up. Unite with those that are awake and by doing so you’ll help everyone.
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“Beit Shaar HaKavanot,” Item 36, Lesson 12
By properly arranging the order of priorities in the surroundings, I create a straight line that leads straight to the Creator.
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Kabbalists who lived before the author of The Book of Zohar Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (Rashbi) performed corrections in the common system of souls on a higher level. Rashbi’s system is connected to us directly, and for this reason we treat The Book of Zohar as our primary source. By carrying out corrections in the system of broken souls, Kabbalists created special connections in it, preparations for a general correction. They revive this system, bringing Light to it through the channels of connection that they have established within.

Therefore, we can now rise and correct ourselves within this system. By correcting itself, a soul not only changes itself; it also brings about its corrections into all the other souls. Yet, there are certain souls, like the soul of Rashbi, which play a principal role in correction: They complete a specific stage and prepare the foundation for all the corrections that follow.

It seems to us that a corrected soul is some isolated part of the system. However, this is incorrect. The whole system of souls is integral, like a holographic picture, each part contains the whole picture. On the other hand, every part is present in the whole picture as well as in each of its parts. I am part of the system of souls, the whole system is within me, and I am also included in each part of the system.

The soul is not a unit of the whole – it is “dispersed” into the whole system of creation. It penetrates the entire Malchut of the World of Infinity, with its qualities. This holds true for every one of us. When each person supplements everyone else, we get one large sphere of souls, where the system of Rashbi acts in providing correction for it. It is through this system that we receive the Light that corrects and fulfills us.

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It is a known fact that the more we research ancient Biblical literature, the more we realize that its traditional dating is correct. The philosophers that made groundless claims that The Book of Zohar was written in the 11^th century in Spain or even later in the Middle Ages, recently have had to budge and grudgingly concede to what is written in The Zohar itself, which is that it was authored by Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai in the 2^nd century.

One common argument supporting the more recent writing of The Zohar was that the vocabulary used in The Zohar did not appear in the lexicon until much later than the 2^nd century. However, recent research of ancient texts enabled by new technologies sheds light on a wealth of documents written in the ancient language of Aramaic.

In a report of these findings in the University of Chicago News, one of the researchers in this Perepolis Fortification Archive Project at the Oriental Institute, Aramaic scholar Annalisa Azzoni, assistant professor at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, states, “We don’t have many archives of this size. A lot of what’s in these texts is entirely fresh, but this also changes what we already knew. There are words I know were used in later dialects, for example, but I didn’t know they were used at this time or this place, Persia in 500 B.C. For an Aramaicist, this is quite an important discovery.”

I want to believe that in the recent future all misconceptions about Kabbalah will vanish and we will be able to use it to better the world.

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The Zohar, Chapter “Pekudei (Accounts),” Item 15: When the Creator said unto Moses, “Make the Tabernacle,” Moses was bewildered; he did not know what to do until the Creator vividly showed him, as it is written, “And see and make them after their pattern, which is being shown to you in the mountain.” “In their pattern” means that the Creator showed Moses everything in its higher, spiritual shape, and each of the spiritual shapes above was making its shape similar to the fictitious shape that was made below, on earth. This is how Moses knew.

This is what our work consists of because the spiritual world doesn’t have a form and we don’t know what Upper Light is by itself. This notion doesn’t exist at all separately from the creation. We can attain and define it only in relation to ourselves and through our sensations. However, our sensations are imaginary because we always feel reactions to an outside influence. We will never find out what actually is happening outside of us because we can’t extract ourselves from our perceiving senses.

It turns out that one can perceive properly only to the extent of the similarity of his properties to the spiritual properties. When the properties of man and the Creator coincide, man reveals the Creator to the extent of that similarity. Initially, we only perceive the imaginary form of this world. Our work consists of rising above it and asking for the Upper spiritual form to clothe in it. Once we have these two forms where one is confined within the other, we will acquire the proper perception of the world.

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Preparation to the Study of The Zohar
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The Book of Zohar — Selections, Chapter “BeHukotai (In My Statutes),” Item 42
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Article — “The Individual and the Nation,” Lesson 1
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“Beit Shaar HaKavanot,” Item 31, Lesson 11
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A question I received: Who is that observer, who sees the Creator’s reality?

My Answer: It is the desire to receive. This desire in the fourth stage (Dalet) of its four-step development has the quality of being able to see itself in a way different from the desire to receive on the inanimate, vegetative, or animate levels. On these levels, the desire feels only itself, and sees all of its inner parts: the inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature, and the human being in this world, from within itself.

The desire to receive, which has developed to the fourth stage, has another part, which is called “the point in the heart” – a “particle of the Creator above” from which it can also observe. This point of observation is new, and from this point, it sees itself as though from the side of the Creator.

It is only necessary to see this point to give it great importance, stamina, and scope. All this is carried out by extracting this point from within oneself and “gluing” it to others.

Those “others” merely exist in one’s imagination. In reality, nothing exists outside of the person. However, this is how we feel as a consequence of the breaking.

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