A question I received: In the corrected state, I will love my neighbor as myself. But will his desire in relation to me still remain “not my” desire?

My Answer: We do not erase the differences between us; we preserve all of our desires. It is written, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” not “nullify yourself and disappear.”

“As yourself” implies the depth of each person’s desire which remains between us, our differences and the hatred that we rise above, like over Mount Sinai (Sina means “hatred” in Hebrew). We use our ego, the entire depth of the egoism, in order to turn it into bestowal. If we were to cancel our desires, we would have nothing to rise above.

Therefore, we should not destroy anything about ourselves. Even the worst qualities have to stay. We just add correction to them without creating anything new; we simply use what exists in us initially. Until the World of Infinity, we ascend by the degrees of our egoistic desire, transforming it to bestowal.

We can fall at any given moment, as it is written, “Don’t believe in yourself until your very death (the death of egoism).” If you lose the screen, you will fall back into these desires, since the screen restrains your egoism – all your hatred. However, the hatred remains, and it can burst out at any moment.

Even in our ordinary lives, we see how people unite, and then suddenly and unexpectedly, hatred erupts between them and a war breaks out. This happens because people build connections with each other based on “corrections” that can fall apart at any moment. It is like a “united” Europe, where there are 30 different countries, all being torn apart by mutual oppositions. No matter how much they try to build a “common home,” it can explode and bring them to a third world war in one instant!

Suddenly terrible hatred will be revealed, a kind that they have never experienced before. All of the unification that they are trying to reach right now will serve as fuel for hatred. And all that’s needed for this is one match.

In our spiritual ascent, only the Creator serves as the guarantor of the fact that this will not happen to any of us, provided that we include Him in our union!

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The period of preparation does not mean that we have to prepare to be very patient and wait for this period to pass. It won’t pass unless we do everything in our power for it to be over the very next moment. The right way to “wait” means that at every moment we are ready to put efforts into this, again and again, without ever despairing of it. And at every moment we expect that we will receive a reward now – the force of bestowal, which we demand. We do this over and over again at every moment, without ever getting tired of it.

If we are capable of this, if the states (the entrances and exits) quickly come to replace one another, this is a sign that we really are able to merit a higher, deeper level. The more sins and mistakes we reveal during the preparation period, the more we advance later on when we enter the single and double revelation after the Machsom. That is how we achieve our correction.

During the preparation period, the group has to provide every person with the force of consistency, persistence, confidence and patience, as well as the understanding that we have no choice but to advance in this way. That is how we continue year after year, until we are ready to refuse immediate gratification at every moment and to work even without it. At that point we are worthy of passing the Machsom.

We must have such a great aspiration for the following level that by virtue of our tremendous, passionate, burning desire for bestowal, we are ready to give it up and continue the preparation period. If the Creator wants to give us only this preparation, and we only want to attain bestowal, then we are satisfied with this and we don’t need the Machsom. It is then that we receive it.

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Three questions I received regarding moving through a descent and acquiring the desires of others:

Question: I know you say we must leave a descent as soon as possible. It is true and I agree. But when you are in a descent, people around you notice your lack of energy, for example, in the workplace where you have to be alert and taking calls and you are under management. Are there any tricks for concealing your emotional inner state from people to avoid them influencing you negatively?

My Answer: 1. You should learn how to get out of your descent through spiritual work in a circle of friends and by participating in group activities.

2. People around you see that you are tired, sick, and annoyed when you are in a descent, but they do not understand that this comes from your spiritual states. Don’t worry, in relation to you they are like an animal that only understands your external appearance.

Question: In the preparation to one of your lessons, you mentioned the difference between rapid spiritual advancement and actual inversion of the desires. My question is: How is there advancement without inversion?

My Answer: There is no advancement without inversion, and we have already discussed how to approach it.

Question: You mentioned the following: “However, if you want to bestow to others, you must first acquire all of their desires. You must make everyone’s desires become your desires. You will then transmit Upper Light to these desires, connecting them to the Creator. By doing so, you will be unique, like the Creator.”

How does one accomplish this? How does one acquire all of the desires of others? Above all, how does one transmit Upper Light to these desires?

My Answer: All correction happens only when there is a desire to attract and receive the Upper Light and then see its effect within yourself. We do not feel the Light itself, we only see its effect.

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It causes us great suffering when we find ourselves at the transition point between two states. This happens in order to push us forward or back, as it is written, “Difficult are the Creator’s ways. The righteous will walk them and the sinners will stumble on them.” The sinners fall and lose out two-fold, but later, they realize their great loss and advance once again. However, they lose time and increase their suffering.

This was not arranged because the Creator wanted to punish them and cause them to feel unpleasant sensations in order to push them forward. We should never think that His desires change or that He makes any calculations. Everything happens as a result of one calculation: every level differs from the adjacent one by its desire for bestowal or reception Therefore, in order to ascend to the next level, one must acquire a greater desire to bestow, which is felt as suffering and misery! After all, we have to cancel ourselves out and start feeling our neighbor. We have to give to him instead of ourselves and prefer him over ourselves. This kind of attitude is completely unrealistic to us today.

This is why the space between the levels, which we have to fill with the Light of Bestowal, the Light of Hassadim, rises up between us like a wall that we cannot do anything about. It pushes us away from each other like magnets repelling each other! We cannot come close to the quality of bestowal, since the negative power of the magnet throws us back. So what should we do?

Our only opportunity is to ask the Light for correction, with the help of the group that convinces us that this is necessary. If we have done enough work in the group to reveal the force of unity in it, then as a result we feel a desire and the ability to turn to the Creator. Otherwise we are unable to turn to the Creator on our own. We can only turn to Him and reveal Him by working in the group. There we reveal the force that broke us – and then we turn to this force. It is written, “He who makes peace in the heavens will make peace among us.” He will connect us and together we will rise to a new level, Thus, the same empty space that we discovered and worked on before now turns into a means of revelation for us.

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A question I received: When the entire world reaches its final correction and ascends, merging with the Upper Worlds, then it will turn out that we haven’t yet enjoyed life in this world but have already passed to the Spiritual World?

My Answer: You are worried that you will never get the fame you are entitled to, or the glory, money and power over everything? You are afraid that you will correct yourself and get rid of these desires, ascend to another world where the Creator will meet you, hug you and ask, “Well, tell me what you want?” But you will have nothing left to ask for!

You already don’t want money, glory, power, or anything else. So what do you do then? What do the righteous need? A sip of water and a handful of berries for a week. And this is called the final correction, to which we all aspire?

But don’t worry, the higher a person ascends, the greater his desires become. Today’s material desires relative to the spiritual ones are a billion times less than the desires of an infant relative to an adult. In fact, we are completely cut off from the spiritual world, while an infant lives in the same world with us.

But as the child’s desires grow with age, he already wants to enjoy life as adult – the same way the desires of the soul grow within us. When we cross the barrier separating us from the Upper World and enter the spiritual world, there we find entire layers of impure desires, which we need to correct. By correcting them you rise above them into the Upper World!

How much can you lose here compared to what the system of the spiritual impure worlds can give you? It gives us such huge desires that our universe is nothing compared to them – they comprise all the worlds and not just our world, which is like a small grain of sand next to them.

Therefore, don’t worry, our desires grow all the time. And the greatest desires of this world, all its wealth, fame and power are just worthless minuscule feelings compared to spiritual fulfillment.

Besides, now the world is in such despair and depression that a person doesn’t even desire such minuteness.

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A question I received: It seems like correction has to be an active action, but we are just reading The Zohar and that’s all. What do we have to overcome here?

My Answer: All the corrections are done by the Light, not by you. You only overcome the alien thoughts that impede you from demanding the Creator’s revelation, which is necessary for you to become like Him.

If you were not bothered by alien thoughts while we were reading the chapter about the flood in The Zohar, then you are still not ready to overcome these thoughts. When you become a righteous man, you will feel how “the waters of the flood” are rising up against your righteousness, trying to throw you off the path and engulf you in egoism.

It’s worth your while to stop and think about why these distracting thoughts are not emerging in you. This doesn’t mean that you have to seek them out on purpose now, but if you try to be righteous, you will understand how much of a sinner you still are.

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The Zohar: At the hour when the world was overfilled with the sins of humans and was brought to trial, woe to the righteous who live in that world, for they are the first to answer for the sins of the wicked.

So how was Noah able to escape the flood and not be punished for the sins of his generation? The Creator wanted him to beget the posterity of the world, and that is why He saved him.

There are many wicked people (egoistic desires) in the world (inside man), but they weren’t able to take advantage of Noah’s good desire (the one spiritual desire, the point in the heart). That is why the wicked (bad desires) were cut off from Noah (the correct desire) by the flood and drowned. (These desires died within a person, so he stopped feeling them. For the time being this constitutes his correction, but later on, when he corrects these desires, they will reappear).

Man’s one tiny, correct desire for bestowal, called Noah, was saved by the Creator (by Ohr Makif – the Surrounding Light), taking shelter in the “ark.” (One is granted an additional force, a protective shell made of the quality of bestowal, called ark, a mother’s womb or Bina).

And the court had no power over him, for he had taken shelter in the ark, hidden from all eyes. The court held trial over the egoistic desires, but it had no power over the desire to bestow. This is talking about a person who has acquired a connection of bestowal with the group, took shelter in it, and thus hid from the evil eye, from his egoistic desires that wanted to draw him away from the goal.

It is written: ask for absolution, ask for mercy, and perhaps you shall escape the Creator’s wrath. One cannot escape the Light’s influence. The Light shines and divides one’s desires into those that have the Light in their qualities and those that are against it.

Noah asked for absolution (correction from Above), entered the ark and hid there (in the Creator’s quality of bestowal; he dissolved in it like a drop of semen in a mother’s womb), on the day of the Creator’s wrath (the revelation of the Light of Hochma, which separates desires according to their intention – to receive or bestow). That is why the court had no power to accuse him.

He hid inside the quality of bestowal of the Upper One, the Creator. Malchut ascends to Bina and hides there; that’s what it means to be righteous, Hassadim – to ascend above one’s egoism.

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A question I received: If this world is imaginary, does that mean that all our actions in this world have no connection to the goal of creation?

My Answer: No, because you have to function, support yourself, and build your life in our world in order to exist. In order to reach the spiritual world, you must first become disappointed with your corporeal existence. This will make you think about how to perform a spiritual action, and you will then begin to connect your life in this world with spirituality. Your whole existence here will then be directed at developing the soul.

Everything you do in this imaginary world will become spiritual. Consequently this world will disappear, since you will have retrieved everything you need from it for your eternal state. It disappears because it dissolves completely and wholly in the process of assisting the point in the heart.

This constitutes this world’s correction. However, it does not change in and of itself, since it is incapable of acquiring the quality of bestowal directly. Our protein body and physical matter cannot exist for the sake of bestowal. Although all of its components on the inanimate, vegetative, and animate levels give to each other for the sake of leading a common existence, they don’t do this consciously.

However, if I use this whole world in order to exist so I can develop my soul, I will thereby utilize this world in the correct manner and will fully deplete it. The other levels of nature (inanimate, vegetative, and animate) are unconsciously connected to each other with a global and harmonious connection. Meanwhile, human beings use these levels, including their animate selves, in order to perform an action of bestowal in the soul on a higher level. A human being thereby elevates the whole corporeal creation along with himself.

One does not need to correct the inanimate objects, plants, or animals  in nature; they are already corrected. Rather, while existing in the animal body, a human has to use only what is essential for him to live, and to direct everything else to correcting the point in the heart. Then everything on the inanimate, vegetative, animate, and human levels of this world will be in balance with the spiritual level.

It turns out that the inanimate, vegetative, and animate levels are mutually included in each other and are controlled by the Creator, without their personal intention. We humans must also provide our animate bodies with everything necessary for them to exist for the sake of spiritual development. Our animate bodies are already prepared for us to use them in a spiritual form.

We cannot make our bodies bestow, and we cannot change its laws. However, while it exists on the inanimate, vegetative, and animate levels, we can add an intention of using it the right way – for the existence of the body and the development of the soul. That way, it participates in the whole correction. With this kind of attitude on our part, the whole of creation will reach perfection and correction. Consequently, there isn’t a single part of the desire, even in this imaginary world, that does not undergo correction.

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A question I received: When reading Baal HaSulam’s books, you can feel real a cry for spiritual ascent, but we don’t have this cry. Why is that?

My Answer: He cries for it because he knows and sees the real situation. When a mother knows that her child is sick, she cries within, but the child may not feel any pain yet and keep on playing in his crib. He has a fever but has no idea that it may be caused by pneumonia or a virus. The mother knows, but the child doesn’t.

Looking at us, Baal HaSulam cries indeed, but we aren’t terribly concerned. We’re kind of like a person that’s falling off a ten-story building but remains calm. “How’s it going?” Someone asks him as he passes the eight floor. “So far so good,” he answers.

And he’s right – so far so good. Therefore, we must regard the words of Baal HaSulam as seriously as we would a doctor’s opinion; however, not so they would scare us, but to prompt us to correct ourselves. Correction is the only remedy to our illness. And even though the remedy is not simple, it will not only restore our health, it will also help us attain perfection.

The science of Kabbalah is not intended to improve our situation in this world; on the contrary, we will never have peace here. The situations ahead will only get more dangerous until we understand that we must make the necessary corrections. We have entered a new age, one where all of mankind will ascend to a higher level. But there is a force prepared for us called “Mashiach,” which pulls (Moshech) us from the egoistic desire into the desire for bestowal. We must utilize this force.

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For the first time in human history, now in the 21st century we have come to the point where we feel ourselves in opposition to Nature, the Creator. We have come to be connected into one global system of humanity.

Before this, the Light affected each of us individually so that each of us would grow within his own egoism. Today however, we have developed to the point where the Light has connected us together and is causing a different kind of development within us that will correct the connections between us.

Prior to this, we weren’t opposite to Him, even though He is one and there are billions of us. Today we are connected together, but involuntarily and not by our own desire; it is for this reason that we are opposite to the Creator.

We have finished our individual egoistic development and therefore we have lost the desire to develop further. The world has reached a point of presenting unprecedented opportunities, but people have lost interest in them because the desire has become different; the desires are no longer personal desires of an individual to fulfill his own egoism.

Humanity’s  egoism has reached its maximum limit and cannot find any new voids to fill, nor do we feel the need to fill those voids. The Light has stopped developing us and is now pressuring and forcing us to connect correctly with others and to become equivalent to Him (the Creator).

This is a different kind of Light that is aimed at our unification. We have therefore come today to the global crisis, which is the crisis of connection between us due to our non-conformance to the Light, the Creator.

We are experiencing a new phenomenon of the 21st century; one that has never happened before. Today all problems occur on the scale of the common system and the whole of humanity. That’s why we all feel we are all together in one boat.

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