A question I received: How can I see where I am with regard to the spiritual world?

My Answer: When you are searching, when you want to ascend, advance and reveal the spiritual world, you have to know where you are relative to it. You have to discover this inside your qualities, through the distance or time that separate you from spirituality. It’s like someone who is ill: he has to know the cause of his illness and what stands in the way of him being healthy. In our case, we must come to understand that we need the Light that returns one to the Source.

Then we will quickly understand that contrary to what we once thought, it is impossible to advance individually. You can only advance by being connected with others. Actually, the only way to advance is toward the connection with others. Through this connection, you will reveal the quality of bestowal – the Creator. So, the real difficulty is in how to connect yourself, with others and with the Creator, so you are all together.

Usually, people are able to grasp the benefit of desiring a connection with the Creator, because He is the source of everything that exists. But people are immediately turned off when they learn that there is a condition of loving others, separating them from the Creator.

The unity of souls is the focusing prism. You will be able to see the Creator through this prism by gathering all the souls within you. Otherwise, you won’t be able to obtain the focus needed to reveal the Creator.

You are separated from the Creator by the broken vessel, which is the souls that you must unite. Yet, you also don’t understand that this is your salvation; that this is what will allow you to understand who the Creator is. This is only possible through this focusing prism. It is a system that connects all desires and aspirations toward the Creator. When we connect all of them together, we discover Him within.

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A question I received: You often mention that everyone has to attain the quality of bestowal. But when someone’s giving, it means that someone else is receiving, doesn’t it?

My Answer: Yes, but the person that receives does so in order to give, in order to please the giver with his reception. The balance you speak of remains, but on another level, free of reception.

I am taking from you because my action gives you the opportunity to show your love to me. In that case, my response is not called reception, since I am doing it for your sake.

The spiritual system works according to the principle where you don’t receive anything from anyone; all you can do is give. You give to everyone. You fulfill them and they are pleased to receive from you, because that way they can demonstrate their quality of bestowal to you. When a person receives in this case, he is actually giving. That is to say, he offers others an opportunity to give to him.

In our egoistic world, family members who love one another can establish a similar kind of relationship, where each one indulges the other by acting the way the other one wants.

But that’s still a small, animate level. In the spiritual world, however, such relationships make us similar to the Creator, because we bestow and are able to boundlessly receive from others in a reciprocal relationship.

Then each one of us and all of us together become “conductors” of endless information and energy through the entire creation.

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A question I received: No new system is established in its pure form. In one way or another, it always makes a compromise with the former system, from which it develops. There is simply no other way. Do you agree?

My Answer: Yes and no. We are talking about a completely new level, qualitatively speaking, and therefore it will not develop in the traditional way – egoistically, from smaller to greater. We are talking about a qualitative revolution, which is changing from an attitude of consumption to an attitude of bestowal. People will begin to feel the world by coming out of themselves. They will feel the world beyond themselves. This model is inverse to anything that came before, because it is not built by development on the past.

People will continue to live in the world, along with all of their experiences and culture. However, when people begin to perceive and feel the inner, hidden connections in the world and the inner forms – the forces and souls, then the world will become transparent. The objects and actions of this world will then be seen as inanimate consequences of the Upper Forces, and the Upper Forces, a deeper layer of the world, will be clearly revealed to everyone.

Our current state of crisis is pushing us towards the need to attain this hidden reality, which contains the forces and actions controlling our world. Essentially, the present crisis is but a preparation, making us more able and willing to perceive something cardinally new, due to there not being any other choice.

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Instead of examining our desires from within, we should examine them from above, “under a microscope,” and as quickly as possible. Our objective is correction, and only this “school of desires” will enable us to reach it, or to work for the sake of bestowal.

The entire spiritual world is something we build inside us, by using our desires. We stack them up into a “hill” and then rise on top of it. And we repeat this process again and again. The hill grows, and we grow together with it, becoming more and more giving.

The result is that each of us erects Mount Sinai – the mountain of hatred (in Hebrew, Sina means hatred), in order to rise to its peak and build a king’s castle there, the Creator’s palace. We create all this out of our own, broken, egoistic desires, which are revealed inside us one after another. It is precisely by correcting these desires, and inside them, that a person reveals the reality of the Creator. Or in other words, one builds his work “for the sake of bestowal” from these desires.

Therefore, all the spiritual worlds and degrees are inside us. Everything becomes revealed inside our desires that we correct. This is because the Creator created just one common desire, and we reveal the Creator inside the forms of this desire.

The 125 spiritual degrees are not something outside of us. Their potential is instilled in our Reshimot, and each one of us must personally develop his desires from these Reshimot, work with them, and change the way he uses them. This is how one builds the spiritual world from them.

I was given a desire (matter) and Reshimot (forms). Now I must attract the Upper Light upon myself and thus connect these two components with each other. This way, I unite the Lights, the sparks, and the Kelim (in Hebrew this is called ANAH – Orot, Netzutzim, Kelim). They will then form my soul, and inside it I will feel the spiritual reality. Right now I also perceive the reality inside the soul, but only in its lowest layer, called the “material world.” In order to truly reveal the soul, we must attain the Creator.

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Two questions I received about how to deal with the erroneous ideas and imprints we receive in life:

Question: When people begin to study Kabbalah, they often bring their baggage of erroneous ideas, and they can get lost in the authentic concepts. What is the quickest and best way to sort out this inner mess?

My Answer: We must accept the student the way he is. The only thing that affects spiritual progress is the inspiration received from one’s environment, which is then aimed at the Creator. Besides, we don’t understand the value contained in false methods, as per the law “the rind protects the fruit.” This will be revealed to us at a later time.

We come to Kabbalah burdened with a myriad of misconceptions and stereotypes received in childhood and over the course of our lives. Everything we heard in childhood forms the foundation of “facts” within us. Then, the person is guided by these “facts” and unable to rise above them.

Until he acquires new qualities, which act within him with the same force as those “slogans and facts” that he naively heard and believed in as a child, he will not be able to feel the Upper world. But he is unable to rid himself of the old conceptions on his own, because they need to be replaced by the new – and this can only be done by the Light, which descends from the next degree of attainment.

Question: To what degree does everything we took in as children limit us?

My Answer: When a person receives the spiritual power of bestowal and rises above the corporeal, and begins to see his corporeal self from the side, he is astonished by the incredible amount of utterly baseless stereotypes that he is filled with. These are just things he had once taken on faith. It had entered his childish mind and left a non-erasable imprint, which he couldn’t do anything about.

That is why anyone can come and start studying. And only as time goes by, gradually, i.e. under the influence of the studied material, will he rid himself of false stereotypes and beliefs. The conceptions one had acquired later in his life are easier to part with; it’s the things that he had absorbed in his childhood that are the most difficult. Nevertheless, step by step, man peels himself of all this “rind,” until he begins to use the spiritual fruit when it truly becomes ripe.

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A question I received: What can an average person do in order to speed up society’s advancement toward correction?

My Answer: Today it is becoming obvious that the entire world is a single, shattered vessel. Any person in this world, after hearing the right explanation, will agree with the fact that the world must be connected in a positive manner. Every person will know that this is the only way for him to have a good life.

In other words, it is imperative that we connect at the level of the soul in order to reach correction. The body is just an external shell. This is why today, no one can avoid or wouldn’t want to be included in this process. In every corner of the world, people have heard of the crisis and feel it one way or another.

There are people who feel the general crisis internally as well as externally: they feel that the connection between souls is devoid of internal (non-material) bestowal above the egoistic nature of man. But humanity is still not giving this any thought although they are closer to understanding that they must correct egoism and increasingly utilize each person’s positive forces.

No huge changes have taken place in the world. But now, there is a general understanding that before the crisis, humanity was advancing in complete opposition to spiritual development. The world was striving toward maximum realization of egoism while a few individuals with a point in the heart (Kabbalists) rose above egoism and utilized it for the sake of bestowal. Today, both processes are advancing in the same direction because the whole world is now starting to accept that egoism is evil and must be corrected.

Of course they are thinking of correction on their level. It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that the direction is now the same. Before, there were some who were for egoism, others who were against; now, everyone is against. It is said that if we don’t control it, if we don’t find some sort of regulator, we will feel bad. Everyone is talking of a regulator. Some speak of a regulator at the material level and others of another, a higher kind of regulator.

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In the News (from NewScientist): “Ten things we don’t understand about humans” We belong to a remarkably quirky species. Despite our best efforts, some of our strangest foibles still defy explanation: Blushing, Laughter, Teenagers, Dreams, Altruism, Art, Superstition, Kissing, Nose-picking.

My Comment: These peculiarities are mainly caused by the beginnings of an inner quality we have, which is opposite to our current, egoistic nature. This quality is bestowal and love for others, and it can only be developed under the influence of Kabbalah studies.

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A question I received: I am a student of the virtual Learning Center and I, along with others, am awaiting and very anxious for you to acknowledge this question. In the book, Kabbalah, Science and the Meaning of Life, on page 128, I found the following quote: “Because our caveman would not have the sense that perceives the wall as Matter or as Form in Matter, he would be able to go through walls as if they were air.”

Unless I misunderstood the information, the statement is inherently wrong. Just because one doesn’t know an object doesn’t mean one cannot interact with it. The text mixes concepts from quantum mechanics and the reality of the macro world. The applied logic is not logical. Matter will always be perceived as such, regardless of the form it takes on because our senses are made to perceive matter. In cases where our five senses are not sufficient, matter can be perceived with proper instruments.

Example: when I did my first scuba dive, I was surrounded by a huge number of forms and shapes I never saw before. Yet, my senses were able to register them. Please clarify the above statement.

My Answer: Let’s start from the opposite: there are walls that we do not perceive. Do we stumble upon them or do we go through them without noticing?

Everything exists in us, in our qualities, or in our five senses. If they were different, they would depict a different world to us. The book talks about a “caveman” because besides our qualities, we have also accumulated information and systems that create the “surrounding” illusion.

Until we acquire a quality that is opposite to us – bestowal, we won’t understand the qualities of anti-matter, and we won’t realize that the world is “depicted” inside us.

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Three questions I received on the new generation’s changing traits and values:

Question: In the last few years, psychologists have shown that younger people are much less able to focus their attention and to anticipate and build models for future actions.

My Answer: This is actually a positive phase of their development, because there cannot be anything negative in nature. People have to go through this, since all the positive properties and qualities originate from the negative ones.

Question: People who enjoy books, such as myself, are now being replaced by number-oriented people, who have completely different values and a different kind of perception. Because they are so different from people like me, they often just can’t hear or understand us. How can we communicate with them so they will actually listen to us?

My Answer: If this change is happening, it means that it is precisely these types of people that must start becoming aware of and sensing the spiritual world, rather than the philosophers and other thinkers of the past. Things just might work the opposite of how we expect them to: the awareness, logic, and ability to analyze and synthesize that the great, enlightened thinkers have, could actually be an obstacle that keeps them from entering the new, spiritual world.

Question: Then what type of thinking is preferable?

My Answer: Our thoughts arise as a result of our desires, because desire is the basis of our nature. Therefore, reason appears only according to one’s desire to attain something. If I desire to fulfill myself with something, then my mind develops accordingly. Otherwise, I would not have a mind (or reason).

The more I desire something and the more this desire is aimed at something higher, something new and unknown, the more my mind develops in new ways along with this new desire.

When Kabbalah speaks of reason or the mind, it is not talking about the egoistic kind of reason, which is handed down to us by various philosophers, thinkers and scholars. It is not talking about the kind of reason people are normally proud of, which they consider the human part of man. This kind of reason is not present in man, but in an egoistic creature whose mind works only for satisfying one’s egoistic desires, desires that are aimed at science and cultural values, but not bestowal. All of these desires are based on reception and egoism, but not bestowal.

This is why all the previous cultural and academic values will gradually decline. They will come down from the high pedestal they currently reside on will be considered insufficient. People will use them as a mere base to help them achieve the next, spiritual degree.

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Two questions I received about humanity during the last generation:

Question: How will the new kind of humanity live?

My Answer: The new kind of humanity will be organized according to people’s development, rather than according to orders. Baal HaSulam describes this in the book, “The Last Generation.” In addition, this will only last until humanity completely corrects itself and attains bestowal at the level of the Creator. Then the physical world we see today will vanish.

Question: If a person remains in his corporeal body, then all his desires must also remain, including his animate desires.

My Answer: Every desire has a use. Our desires are not considered egoistic if they are necessary for our existence. When they are used for this purpose, they start to be perceived as spiritual. This is because food, sex and any other desire are the means by which we come to be like the Creator. They are the means by which we are able to become part of the common harmony of nature.

People will reach a state where the purpose of supporting one’s spiritual and corporeal body is to exist in the realm of bestowal and love.

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