Question: What is the correlation between connection and dissemination?

Answer: First of all you must strive for connection. Secondly, you must engage in dissemination so that it helps connection because connection is the most important thing.

On the other hand, you cannot unite if you do not disseminate, since together they lead to one goal. You cannot think about yourself without thinking about the world, since you exist so that through you the force of connection will come to the world.

So do not even hope that you will find unity without working with the world. You are obliged to work with it not only to attract people to campuses [Kabbalah classes], but so that they know about the need for connection.

In this way, when they listen to you at least once, they will automatically become included in your message even if they have no knowledge of it. If you have contact with them, that is it, now this field that you have awakened also passes through them.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/28/19, “Questions and Answers”

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Question: Should we pray when there is a reason from the Creator, or should we ourselves look for reasons and initiate prayer in the ten?

Answer: The reason for prayer is your desire to unite.

If you want to get closer and see that there are still great disagreements between you, you involuntarily turn to the Creator so that He will unite you more. The best prayer is when you ask the Creator for unification.

In this case, you really feel how much you lack this and how much strength you receive to realize the unification.

Such contact with the Creator is the most direct and the most reliable because He does not expect anything more from you. As it is written: “How good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together, as well.” Together—”gam yachad” (“together as well” in Hebrew), where “as well” means, as the Kabbalists explain, that “the Creator sits together with them as well.”
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/28/19, “Questions and Answers”

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Question: What can we pray for, and what should we pray for?

Answer: We must pray for everything and turn only to the Creator because He is the source of everything that happens to us. There is nothing that does not come directly from Him.

The Creator is the forcefield that holds us together. We exist in this field, and when we pray, with our desires we arouse the desire of this field and its physical forces, which are still elusive for us because they work for bestowal.

We egoists work for reception, and this field is spiritual; it works for the sake of giving, and thus we do not feel it. But the moment we begin to ask for unification and rise above egoism, we become somewhat similar to the Creator’s field.

Then we influence it, and it affects us. These are the laws of physics. There is nothing supernatural here.
Therefore we can ask for anything, any little thing, from the work of a single cell to the whole organism to interaction with relatives, friends, and the world, with anything and anyone.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/28/19, “Questions and Answers”

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Question: Should the groups of ten be concerned about forming closer connections between tens? And what should they do together?

Answer: I am part of a specific group of ten because I want to reveal the Creator. I do not want to end my life like an animal with my bones rotting in the ground and nothing remaining of me. Once I reveal Him, I uncover a piece of eternity and perfection within myself, and that piece stays with me. That is it. I am already ascending from our world to the upper world, and it is already within me.

Therefore when I am in a group of ten, I strive to reach this level with it in order to attain the Creator so that He would act upon me through the ten, and through it I act upon Him. If I feel I can gain additional force from another group of ten, I encourage my ten to connect with them. In this way, we increase the Creator’s influence on us.

As it is said: “The greater the society, the higher the King.” That is all. But this only applies if I already have a group of ten where I am investing all my effort, and I see that another ten, and another, and yet another could help us. That is why we gather at the congress.

Even if we do not interact between groups of ten every day, we have this opportunity at the congress where we mix with one another. During each lesson at the congress, I sit in a different group of ten. I do not even know with whom or how. This provides tremendous advantages.

I absorb the desires of everyone in a spontaneous group of ten that changes during each lesson. In other words, I experience a variety of different influences, and this helps a lot.

I am speaking personally now about how I am impressed when I listen to various groups of ten, immerse myself in them, and return from the congress with completely different impressions than I had before. Even without sitting among the attendees, I can feel from afar how much this benefits me.

Therefore, integrating each group of ten into other groups is very beneficial. This can be done not only at the congress, but also in everyday life, preferably in your native language. When a group of ten feels that it would like to enhance its internal strength, it can connect with another group while maintaining its cohesion.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/28/19, “Questions and Answers”

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Question: You said that knowledge is what we feel in egoism. Does this mean that faith is what we try to build above it, that is our soul?

Answer: Yes, knowledge is egoism and faith is altruism, the opposite quality when I act not for myself, but for another.

The Creator shattered egoism into many parts so that I could work either from my own egoistic part or for the sake of others. This becomes my altruistic component.

If the Creator had not broken the vessel, I would have no way to achieve the quality of bestowal. To whom would I bestow? Now, however, I am compelled to bestow to someone outside myself. This other person was once part of me. We were all together in one body before the shattering of Adam. Now they are outside of me, which is why I hate and reject them.

But if I work on them as though they were with me in one desire, in one body as a single whole, then I am acting altruistically.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/28/19, “Questions and Answers”

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Question: Sometimes we say we should strive to reveal the Creator and sometimes we should go by faith above reason. Why should we go blindly?

Answer: To go by faith above reason means to walk with the eyes of the Creator, not blindly. You will not see the spiritual world with your egoistic view, you see only if you rise above egoism.

Therefore, the condition is given to go by faith above reason. You just need another sensory organ, and you are being directed to it.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/28/19, “Questions and Answers”

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Preparation to the Lesson

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1st part of the Lesson — Writings of Baal HaSulam, “A Speech for the Completion of The Zohar”

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2nd part of the Lesson — Lesson on the Topic “A Prayer Lishma“

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Selected Highlights

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 13

How Do We Suddenly Realize that We Have an Evil Inclination?

The phrase “the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” means that from the outset we have only one nature: the desire to receive for the sake of receiving. The desire to receive is not nature. It is matter. That is, it is neither good nor evil but merely a desire to enjoy. Divisions into good and evil depend on what exactly we want to enjoy.

The intention to enjoy for oneself is called “evil.” Why should a desire to enjoy be considered evil? It is because the Creator designed a system where the desire to receive for the sake of receiving causes suffering. It takes several years, however, to learn that the desire to receive for its own sake leads to suffering. Generally, it takes thousands of years for the soul to become consciously aware that the desire to receive for oneself is harmful.

In the incarnation where we receive the point in the heart, we start fearing our own thoughts, which constantly act out of self-interest. We sense that such thoughts bring trouble, yet we are clueless as to how we can escape them. How can we stop a thought that naturally operates beyond our control? We see this desire within us and try to uproot it, and in such a way, we realize that “the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” In the wisdom of Kabbalah, this is referred to as a person’s encounter with the serpent.

Only after we observe ourselves from the perspective of the point in the heart, question who we are, and realize that we cannot confront our own desire to receive for the sake of receiving (since our entire being is absorbed in this desire, i.e., we were born to suffer and have only the thought that critiques and analyzes ourselves as support—do we turn to the Creator to release us from this affliction.

This is the correction. We can then understand how complex the situation is. A long time passes before we discover that “the inclination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” However, when we reach this realization, we become willing to impose a restriction on ourselves, the result of which is called “prayer.” The feeling in our heart of wanting to free ourselves from ourselves, which we cannot achieve, leads to this restriction. After the restriction, we live a different life.

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Question: It is said that a person has both a good inclination and an evil one, and he must test whether his body agrees to fulfill a certain commandment. On the spiritual path, the body (our evil inclination) always disagrees with the good inclination. What does it mean to gain its agreement?

Answer: You must make some effort as if you genuinely wish to fulfill the commandment, and feel how much it contradicts the nature of creation. Then step back from this and find the strength to ask the Creator to help you perform the same action.

Question: And if I performed the action and made a mistake?

Answer: Then you made a mistake. This means you can ask the Creator to explain to you that you were wrong, that you performed a bad action, perhaps even a terrible, awful one, against the Creator, but now you’ve realized this and deeply regret it. In such a case, the action is erased, as if it never happened.

Question: In the work of the ten it often happens that some friends agree to take a certain action toward unity while others believe it is incorrect. How can we be guided by the fact that it’s better to act and see if the action was right or not?

Answer: You must carry out everything you believe is necessary in practice. Even if the action was wrong, unproductive, or against the Creator’s will, you will still learn a great deal from it. Therefore, under no circumstances should you hold yourself back; do everything you can.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/13/24, Writings of Rabash “The Act Is What Decides”

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